This is the 19th instalment of #deanehistory.

Die Hard is the best Christmas film. This truism is well known.

But the phrase “Die Hard” actually has a much longer history.

In the early 1800s, Spain & Portugal fought the Peninsular War against the invading / occupying French. As usual, in any given scrap in the last millennia or so, the British were on board, against the French.
At the Battle of Albuera, quite near the Spanish/Portuguese border, in 1811, a British/ES/PT force fought Napoleon’s Armée du Midi (included some Poles from the Duchy of Warsaw). In sum: heavy losses on both sides, result a score draw. Such conclusions belie the human stories.
Major-General Houghton was a British national hero. Two thirds of his brigade died in the line at Albuera, including Houghton himself. The French were able to enfilade (fire along their longest axis) with a devastating hail of grapeshot & canister (like huge shotguns).
Colonel William Inglis, one of the many Scots to have flourished during Empire, commanded the 57th Regiment of Foot, part of Houghton’s Brigade. He’d joined it as an Ensign & served with it since the American Revolutionary War in 1781.
So we can imagine how it felt to see 57th, his home & his comrades his entire adult life, massacred under him.
Early on, a 4 pound piece of grapeshot lodged in his neck. This isn’t good for you. He refused to leave the field, staying with his Regiment’s colours as the battle raged & his line shrunk back towards him.
As he lay dying (as he & others would have thought), he called out to his beloved men, again & again…

“Die hard, 57th – die hard.”
For he and they would have thought that time was the end of them. All that was left was the question of how they died. (“As if the way one falls down matters!” “When the fall is all that's left, it matters.”)
But surrounding their Colonel, facing their end, the 57th fought ferociously, their concentrated fire repelling the French until they were finally relieved by other British forces.

Inglis became famous for his cry & the 57th became known as “The Die-Hards.”
Inglis could not be operated upon until two days after the battle (imagine the metal lodged in your neck for two days.)
But he ultimately recovered, fought in the Peninsula again, was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath & in retirement was made Colonel of the Regiment in which he’d served for over 30 years.

The true story of Die Hard.

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
.@bellingcat's attempt in their new book, published by
@BloomsburyBooks, to coverup the @OPCW #Douma controversy, promote US and UK gov. war narratives, and whitewash fraudulent conduct within the OPCW, is an exercise in deception through omission @marydejevsky @freddiesayers


1) 2000 words are devoted to the OPCW controversy regarding the alleged chemical weapon attack in #Douma, Syria in 2018 but critical material is omitted from the book. Reading it, one would never know the following:

2) That the controversy started when the original interim report, drafted and agreed by Douma inspection team members, was secretly modified by an unknown OPCW person who had manipulated the findings to suggest an attack had occurred. https://t.co/QtAAyH9WyX… @RobertF40396660


3) This act of attempted deception was only derailed because an inspector discovered the secret changes. The manipulations were reported by @ClarkeMicah
and can be readily observed in documents now available https://t.co/2BUNlD8ZUv….

4) .@bellingcat's book also makes no mention of the @couragefoundation panel, attended by the @opcw's first Director General, Jose Bustani, at which an OPCW official detailed key procedural irregularities and scientific flaws with the Final Douma Report:

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)