Irreverent, Problemologist
Toronto
Joined May 2011
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Joe Williams retweeted
The Pleiku Campaign that began on October 19, 1965 was not just another series of battles. It was the proving ground for a revolution in how wars are fought, the idea that you could move an entire army by helicopter. And the whole concept was riding on it.
For most of military history, infantry moved at the speed of boots. You could be outrun, outflanked, or simply unable to reach a fight in time. The US Army had a radical answer, build a division around the helicopter. Instead of trucks and roads, you would fly your soldiers directly into battle, leapfrog them over jungle and mountains, resupply them by air, evacuate the wounded by air, and bring artillery in dangling under the aircraft. They called it airmobility.
The unit built to test it was the 1st Cavalry Division, and it arrived in Vietnam in 1965 with hundreds of helicopters, mostly the workhorse that became the symbol of the entire war, the UH-1 Huey. A lot of senior officers were skeptical. Helicopters were fragile, vulnerable to ground fire, dependent on weather. Critics thought the whole idea might get a lot of men killed.
The Central Highlands in October and November 1965 was where they found out. As the North Vietnamese pulled back from Plei Me, the 1st Cavalry was unleashed to hunt them across a huge stretch of wild country that would have been impossible to cover on foot. Helicopters ranged over the hills, dropping scout teams, then rushing in reinforcements the moment they found the enemy. It let a relatively small force punch far above its weight across enormous distances.
It worked, and it changed warfare forever. Air assault, the helicopter borne attack, became a permanent part of how modern armies fight, straight through to today. But the campaign also taught a darker lesson that the whole war would keep teaching. You could own the sky and move like lightning and still not break an enemy who was willing to stand, fight, and bleed. That hard truth was waiting for the 1st Cavalry at the end of the campaign, in a valley called the Ia Drang.
Oxford educated? Yap sound about right.
The creator of the 'Palestine poppy' is an Oxford-educated paediatrician who has written books for Muslim teenagers justifying stoning and warning that homosexuality is 'a test from Allah'.
Abdul Qader Ismail was accused of trying to 'hijack' Remembrance Day after he began selling an enamel pin shaped like a poppy in the colours of the Palestinian flag for £1.78 on eBay. The pin is listed as 'not for profit' with money being donated to Gaza charities.
The Spectator can now reveal that Ismail is an active member of Greens for Palestine and co-sponsored the group's 'Zionism is Racism' policy. He is also the author of a book series titled An Introduction to Challenging Topics for Muslim Teens.
✍️ Noa Hoffman
Article | spectator.com/article/reveal… | @hoffman_noa
Vancouver’s complete descent to the bottom of the barrel is now confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt
Classic! The good old days.
🇨🇦 📺 CANADIAN TV TIME MACHINE — THE SWEATER (1980) 🏒
If you grew up in Canada, chances are you remember this little animated masterpiece! 🇨🇦
In 1980, the National Film Board of Canada released The Sweater, a charming animated short directed by Sheldon Cohen and based on Roch Carrier’s beloved story The Hockey Sweater.
Set in a small Quebec village during the winter of 1946, the story follows a young boy who, like practically every other kid in town, worships the legendary Maurice “Rocket” Richard of the Montreal Canadiens.
But when his mother orders him a new hockey sweater from the Eaton’s catalogue, disaster strikes!
Instead of the glorious red, white and blue of the Montreal Canadiens, he receives something absolutely unthinkable… a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater! 😱🍁
And if that wasn’t bad enough, his mother insists he wear it!
What follows is one of the funniest and most memorable stories in Canadian hockey folklore, complete with an angry young hockey player, an unforgiving referee, and a desperate prayer for a million moths to eat his sweater!
Narrated by Roch Carrier himself, this little film captures something wonderfully Canadian — childhood innocence, small-town winters, hockey rivalries, and the almost religious devotion Canadians once had for their favourite teams.
More than four decades later, The Sweater remains a treasured piece of Canadian culture.
🎬 The Sweater (1980)
National Film Board of Canada
Directed and animated by Sheldon Cohen
Based on The Hockey Sweater by Roch Carrier
Who else remembers watching this Canadian classic growing up? 🏒❤️
#CanadianNostalgia #TheHockeySweater #NFB
💔 Sincere condolences to her and family, thankful for his service and may his memory be a blessing
Patricia Farrell has come forward on Facebook and posted that her son was one of the soldiers who tragically passed away at CFB Wainwright
RIP Shaun Farrell. May this young soldier RIP 😥
Please send prayers to their family in this time of need
Credit: @mauraislive
Joe Williams retweeted
You are a weak twat and a fraction of a man. Save your country, defend French heritage or get out of the way and let the adults fix it the way Napoleon did.
Joe Williams retweeted
The Vikings completed the conquest of England on this day in 1016 at the Battle of Assandun.
Danish forces led by Cnut defeated the Saxon army of Edmund Ironside.
Joe Williams retweeted
We call on France to exercise restraint when dispersing the freedom fighters on the streets of Paris. These brave warriors for justice must receive immediate humanitarian aid, and their safety must be guaranteed in accordance with international law. Failure to comply will leave us no choice but to bring a case before the ICJ, in close cooperation with that renowned champion of human rights, Afghanistan.
Joe Williams retweeted
Capitalism has turned luxuries into everyday items for everyone. Imagine telling a king from 1600s that you can push a button and hot food arrives, you can fly anywhere in the world and talk to anyone on the planet.
Beginning with the remarkable cowardice and moral failings of General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff.
The SAS case is a damning indictment of just how far the standards of senior leadership in the British Armed Forces have fallen.
Lions led by donkeys, indeed
SAS in crisis: sent to hunt Isis in Syria, then arrested for murder
thetimes.com/article/7aa0380…
Joe Williams retweeted
Just so weird when someone living in the UK called Mehdi Hasan makes this argument. His family comes from India. I’m not sure he's thought the argument through to its unpleasant conclusion.
Joe Williams retweeted
The man Robinson Crusoe was based on spent four years alone on an island in the Pacific, lived almost entirely on goat, and ran so fast by the end that the crew who rescued him could not keep up with him across the hills.
Alexander Selkirk was a shoemaker's son from Fife with a temper, sailing with privateers off Chile in 1704 when he decided the ship was rotten and demanded to be put ashore. The captain obliged. The ship sank a few weeks later. Selkirk was twenty-eight, on an island four hundred miles from land, with a musket, a knife, a pound of powder and a Bible.
The island had goats, left by Spanish sailors a century before. When the powder ran out he learned to run them down barefoot on the mountainsides, catching them by the horns and killing them with the knife. He counted five hundred. He ate their meat, drank their milk, made his clothes from their skins, and when he was lame he had already crippled a few kids so he would always have one he could catch.
When Captain Woodes Rogers found him in February 1709 the castaway was dressed in goatskin and had half forgotten English. Rogers wrote that he was in rude health, and watched him go up the slopes after goats faster than the ship's dog. Rogers' crew were rotten with scurvy after months at sea on salt beef and biscuit. Selkirk brought them two or three goats a day until they were well, and the captain made him second mate.
Four years of goat and seal. No bread, no grain, no fruit to speak of. The man came off the island fitter than any sailor in a navy that was losing more men to scurvy than to the Spanish.
Defoe gave the fictional version a parrot and a man Friday. The real one had a knife and a hillside full of meat, and that was enough.
Joe Williams retweeted
On July 27, 1361, the Danish king Valdemar IV landed an army on the Swedish island of Gotland and marched on the rich trading town of Visby.
Standing in his way was a local army of Gotland farmers.
The Danes were professional soldiers and hired mercenaries. The Gotlanders were whoever could be found. When archaeologists studied their bones centuries later, they found teenage boys, old men, and men with old injuries and deformities that would have made fighting hard. Some had badly healed fractures. Some had spinal problems.
They were slaughtered just outside the town walls. A stone cross still stands at the site. Its inscription says that in 1361, the Gotlanders fell into the hands of the Danes before the gates of Visby. It asks the reader to pray for them.
The town's merchants, according to tradition, kept the gates shut while it happened. Visby surrendered and paid the king to leave it alone.
The dead were thrown into mass graves. And here is what makes Visby one of the most important battle sites in Europe.
It was the middle of summer. The bodies were rotting fast. Armor was valuable, but stripping hundreds of decaying corpses was more than anyone was willing to do. So many of them were buried still wearing it.
When archaeologists dug the graves in the early 1900s, they found skulls still inside their chain mail hoods. They found two dozen coats of plates, an early type of body armor made of iron plates riveted inside a fabric or leather covering. Almost none of this armor survives anywhere else. Visby is a big part of how we know what it looked like.
They recovered the remains of around 1,200 people.
The wounds tell the story of the fighting. Arrowheads lodged in skulls. Heads split by blades. And a huge number of cuts to the lower legs, especially the shins. Men were holding shields high to protect their heads and bodies, and the enemy went low.
One skull had been hit so many times that researchers could see the man had kept taking blows after he was already down.
Most battlefields lose their dead to scavengers and time. Visby kept them exactly as they fell, armor and all, because it was too hot to clean up.
Joe Williams retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: Insight reveals SAS soldiers hunting Isis leaders in Syria were arrested for murder and had homes raided — only to be sent back behind enemy lines
Our report on Operation Tanglement ends years of secrecy to expose crisis in UK special forces
thetimes.com/uk/defence/arti…
Joe Williams retweeted
Chris Rock just nailed one of the biggest problems with wokeness.
Helping people who feel marginalized is good. He says so himself. The trouble starts when a good cause becomes an institution.
The first few witches were real. Then you open a witch office. Now there are salaries, budgets and pensions to justify, and the office needs a steady supply of witches to keep existing.
That’s the trap. Once a cause becomes a career, solving the problem means losing your job. So the problem never gets solved. It just keeps getting redefined.
A system built to find wrongdoing will keep finding it, whether it’s there or not.
The madrassas of socialism that produced said economist have fallen so low that, indeed, a podcaster or musician might well have a better grasp of economics than the supposed expert sitting beside him.
