In the big run-up to Cinco de Mayo (not celebrated in Mexico), we need to keep in mind that it’s not cool to culturally appropriate Mexican food and pinatas until tomorrow.
This Day in History
On this day, 4 May 1929, actor and Dutch resistance activist Audrey Hepburn was born in Belgium.
Her parents, a baroness, and a banker, were both fascists who personally met with Hitler. After her father abandoned them, she and her mother moved to the Netherlands, and her mother’s views changed when the Nazis executed her brother, Otto van Limburg Stirum, in retaliation for resistance activities.
As a child, Hepburn studied ballet and began to perform recitals to raise funds for the resistance. The performances were referred to as “zwarte avonden” (“black evenings”) as organizers blacked out windows while they took place so they could not be observed from outside. Hepburn described how “Guards were posted outside” to warn of approaching Germans, and how audiences “made not a single sound at the end of [her] performance.”
She explained that: “afterward, money was collected and given to the Dutch Underground.” Hepburn was part of the resistance cell of Dr. Hendrik Visser’t Hooft which, according to his daughters, he proudly recalled to them. Hepburn would help deliver copies of his underground anti-fascist newspaper as a courier: “I stuffed them in my woolen socks in my wooden shoes, got on my bike, and delivered them,” she later recounted. Hepburn also told the New York Daily Mirror that her activities included “running around with food” for downed Allied pilots.
As an English speaker, she also relayed messages between downed British pilots and the resistance, and according to her son, her family sheltered a British pilot who had been shot down. Hepburn also pointed out that many Dutch children “did their little bit to help… Many were much more courageous than I was.”
May 1999
In 1999, actor Oliver Reed died in Malta during the production of GLADIATOR.
Reed had consumed 8 pints of beer, 12 shots of rum, half a bottle of whisky, and shots of cognac after challenging sailors from HMS Cumberland to a drinking contest in a pub. He then defeated several sailors in arm wrestling before collapsing…
(From Wikipedia) Reed died from a heart attack during a break from filming Gladiator in Valletta, Malta, on the afternoon of 2 May 1999. According to witnesses, he drank eight pints of German lager, a dozen shots of rum, half a bottle of whisky, and a few shots of Hennessy cognac, in a drinking match against a group of sailors on shore leave from HMS Cumberland at a local pub. His bar bill totaled a little over Lm 270 (almost £450; about US$590). After beating five much younger Royal Navy sailors at arm-wrestling, Reed suddenly collapsed, dying while en route to the hospital in an ambulance. He was 61 years old.
The actor Omid Djalili, who was also in Malta at the time of Reed’s death filming Gladiator, said during an interview in 2016: “He hadn’t had a drink for months before filming started…Everyone said he went the way he wanted, but that’s not true. It was very tragic. He was in an Irish bar and was pressured into a drinking competition. He should have just left, but he didn’t. Having made a number of promises to Ridley Scott prior to filming, including that he would not drink during production, Reed worked around this by only drinking on weekends. Co-star David Hemmings was a long-time friend of Reed’s (they appeared together in the 1964 film The System), and in 2020 Scott stated, “David Hemmings (Cassius) promised to look after him and said to me [upon his death], I’m really sorry, old boy”.
Dutch Trading
Identify the Aircraft
Bullet Points
** The USA is $32 trillion in debt. We shouldn’t be giving money to anyone. Gold is the money of kings. Silver is the money of gentlemen. Barter is the money of peasants. Debt is the money of slaves.
** Norway: in the last year 94% of rape suspects overall were “non-Western-looking:”
Norway: all assault rapes last 5 years have been committed by non-Western immigrants: http://www.scribd.com/doc/76695373/Excerpt-From-Oslo-Police-District-Report-on-Rape
No surprise there.
** Facial reconstruction of Cleopatra.
**** Young Jules sets sail in search of pirates in her latest blog. You can read about her adventure here.
If the DC swamp had to do this, they’d starve.
Some days are like this.
Identify the Aircraft:
Beriev Be-12 Mail
Well, that was fast, Surly. Well done as usual.
It looks Russian. Which I mean, just doesn’t look pretty. Now the Japanese have some sexy looking flying boats. We used to have some sexy looking flying boats.
Dammit. We need some sexy looking flying boats in our inventory.
IMO the Grumman HU-16 Albatross in flight is a beautiful airplane but it’s not a flying boat but rather an amphibian.
https://cgaviationhistory.org/aircraft_/grumman-uf-1g2g-later-hu-16e-albatross/
There is a company in Australia that bought the stuff to start building them again from Grumman and they are getting set up to do it.
Amphibs, yes, and I am looking forward to the new Albatross, though I don’t have any faith in Australia’s government to actually allow them to be finished.
It’s a good dream for every goat flight mech that know…
Oliver Reed – what a legend. Such a brilliant actor and so interesting. It’s a shame the drink took him.
I like the Audrey story.
How do you get out of $32 trillion in debt? How? Is that even possible?
Why is Biden not coming to the King’s coronation. I think that’s rude and so does Trump.
Anyway, thanks for the plug, LL, I must pirate along! ARRR 🏴☠️
Debt :
You default, and then the world decides it probably isn’t worth a conventional and/or nuclear war with probably even still the most powerful nation on Earth to try and get it back, and then there’s a World Depression for God knows how long, and then maybe eventually things might get better again.
Fun times.
Coronation:
It’s a tradition, since the whole damn point of the US was supposed the be No More Kings!, especially English ones. No offense, but the Executive Representative of The People attending a coronation in even the closest allied nation goes against everything this country is supposed to be about.
That being said, I’m surprised Biden isn’t going and kneeling before Charles, like that POS Obama did in Saudi. Maybe he’s afraid his Depends won’t make it through the ceremony.
-Kle.
I think that Pedo Joe has a continence issue in addition to severe dementia.
How do you deal with such debt? Well, you collude with another world power to actively attack and destroy those who own your debt. To the point of making secret orders for secret orders for secret orders so that forces all act at roughly the same time while staging massive no-knock
warrant-less searches and seizures, and you seize all found assets under asset forfeiture.
Just like the king of France and the pope at the time did against the Templars.
Or you invite the lenders to set up in your area, borrow wholescale from them, then kick them out and imprison any who speak against you, just like the kings of England did, what, 3 times against Jewish lenders?
Or you collapse your own government, start up a new one and say that all the previous debts don’t matter because you lead a ‘new’ government in control of a ‘new’ nation. Like the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Spanish and Italian Fascists, the current Cuban government, Venezuela, Argentina, Cambodia, Vietnam, the ChiComs, the Zimbabwe government and (insert pretty much every other modern government in existence today.) Double points if you manage to talk some over-world governmental agency to pay off all the past debts and still ‘loan’ you more (like the World Bank and IMF and the UN have done over and over and over again.)(Funny, when the US finally stops paying them, who is the World Bank and the IMF and the UN going to get all their money from?)
See? It’s not difficult at all to take care of national debts. There’s nothing new under the sun, everything changed and is the same.
x2
Someone knows their history. Good to see.
Makes for interesting times to live through.
Sometimes I wish that they weren’t quite so interesting.
For a moment I thought Jules was going to be sailing up the Potomac in her search for pirates.
Today is also Rhode Island Independence Day, when America actually began, two months before the 4th. Way back when R.I. was a real place, inhabited by Free Men.
If there are history books in the future, I wonder when they will say the US ended? I would say, probably some time in the last 30 years, but there are other candidates, going back at least to the ACW.
-Kle.
I put the actual end of the Free US to the election of FDR. Woodrow Wilson set FDR up to rule by fiat.
Compared to Wilson and FDR, Lincoln was a piker and was going to restore many or all of the state and federal rights after the American Civil War of Southern Independence and Northern Aggression to Free the Organic Agricultural Machines until yet another violent Democrat with a gun killed the aforementioned Lincoln.
Yeah, FDR is another good endpoint candidate.
-Kle.
“Debt is the money of slaves.”
Not quite. Debt is how animals that walk upon their hind legs, and just happen to have the physical appearance of actual human beings, are kept in line.
IOW, “slave” would be a *promotion* from the mental category in which our “elites” currently file us.
Regarding Norway, and how many of those non-ethnic Norwegians are actually punished for any of their crimes?
Yeah. So much for Europe’s crime rate, which is far above what is reported, because it’s illegal to report a lot of crime involving non-ethnic Europeans in Europe.
And long before California, Oregon, Washington and New York started decriminalizing every crime, Europe did it. Hard to have a crime rate if nothing is illegal now, isn’t it?
As for being green and planting next years dinner. Most of us would starve. Raising food is hard work and usually ends in failure . I don’t really keep up with it , but my home grown tomatoes cost about $5 each. They are worth every dime.
After I retired from the Coast Guard I bought a place and tried to do a garden. It was a good thing we didn’t have to live off that, talk about a learning curve!
Always had a garden until I moved up and out, loved the activity, felt it was doing something real (or at least setting it up for God’s nature to run it course), and working in the dirt as an avocation touches something primal. If I do anything where I live a greenhouse or cold frames are a necessity.
Denmark said “no more immigration” a few years back for the same reasons as Norway now faces; they come for the freebies and never assimilate into the culture while wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting and innocent.
Oliver Reed- Like another lost too soon – Philip Seymour Hoffman, Reed had such a screen presence he stole every scene he was ever in…something about the stature and line delivery that made you want to watch and listen. That scene in Gladiator when he’s counseling Maximus after discovering his identity.
That Mail looks awfully like an upgraded Martin PBM Mariner… just sayin…