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Aug 12 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
The drought is bad but sloppy journos are taking licence with dramatic photos. Example 1: Daily Mail - "The river Rhine is pictured with low water ... threatening German industry."
Its a small tributary leading into the Dutch Waal. NB the barge in background on the main river🧵
Yes you could stretch the point, the Waal IS a Rhine feeder river but the dramatic bike is not in the dried up Rhine. Here's the river in winter flood (Dec 18) and an aerial view of the backwater the Mail photo implies is the Rhine. It isn't.
For WWII history buffs - this was one of the two bridges fought over and captured in the Battle of Nijmegen in Sept 1944 as part of Operation #MarketGarden. Here are British troops crossing it.
But back to my subject - drought pictures.
They've done it with the Loire too...
This photo has been shocking everyone - purportedly the Loire dried up. It had 14k likes and really created waves (sorry...)
What they don't say is that actually this is where the river splits into two. This is the lesser branch which normally rejoins the river further down.
Google earth shows there are normally extensive sandbars on that part. It doesn't mean the Loire as a whole has dried up. Here's a view in the other direction - the one that doesn't get so many retweets. That's the main river at the end.
It IS bad, no denying. But...
Here are the two branches in Aug 2018. Lots of sand on the N branch, S branch clearly deeper. Just check everything before jumping to conclusions. Google lens took me straight to Waalbrug - the bridge. Anyone posting or writing articles can easily do that if they want to. IF...
And then this. Apparently unconnected but it isn't.
Check everything that has to to be true because I believe it already".
We all do it. This FT guy blocked the person who showed him his data was wrong. Didn't fit his preconceptions.
And here's the next one. This is crazy.
Armageddon fantasy vs reality
Its bad enough without this deception, why do they need to do it?
h/t
@Werner_A_Kuhn
And the next one. The drought reveals a Roman camp which says @BBCweather "is usually underwater". Well... no. The *lesser part* of it is.
Which is why the tourist photos often show so much grass. Google Earth summer 2020 for comparison

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More from @GilesUdy

Giles Udy Profile picture
Jun 17
Honestly… it ended in 1739. The lordly prelates of the church would have delegated most of their financial affairs to secretaries. Even then bishops were lamenting the suffering of slaves. 🧵
Can we please move on?
Sound bites and ‘laments’ ignore the context & nuance.
Here’s Bishop Fleetwood in 1711. Doesn’t fit the narrative. Slaves were ‘equally the workmanship of God [with slave owners] who thus use [them] cruelly’.
No not every bishop got it but the implication they deliberately mandated capture and transport of slaves is divisive & wrong
The 18thC church was riddled with nepotism, aristocratic appointments ignorance & theological compromise. Society was cruel. Children were still being hanged for theft. Anglicans Wesley & Wilberforce led reform and stirred the moral conscience of the nation. They turned the tide
Read 8 tweets
Giles Udy Profile picture
May 17
And CofE isn’t racist anyway. Individual racism yes, just like bullying (which seems far more common) but ‘institutional’? No.
People need to look past emotions to the stats.
The % of BAME ordinands matches U.K. BAME %. Bishops don’t but there’s a reason... 🧵
@calvinrobinson
It’s quite simple. Say you become a bishop after c30 years. Ordained at c25 yrs old means born 55 years ago c.1967. Left school late 80s
Point 1. What % of immigrants were there in UK in the 60s/80s? NOWHERE NEAR the % today = the pool was smaller.
Point 2: Assuming that these future non-white bishops arrived as kids with immigrant families or were born here how many parents coming to work to build a new life would have supported their children becoming low paid CofE priests rather than getting a good job? Answer: VERY FEW
Read 7 tweets
Giles Udy Profile picture
Apr 4
Once in an isolated town in N Siberia I met an old former zek (gulag inmate). I was introduced as British, whereupon he said how nice it was to finally meet a Brit - because he had been sentenced to 10 years in the mines for being a British spy.
🇷🇺 has long held weird paranoia about Britain. In 1927, after HMG expelled Sov diplomats for spying their charge d’affaires stopped to meet Warsaw Sov Ambassador. A monarchist assassin shot Ambassador. In retaliation Sovs shot over 100 White Russians prisoners…
As British spies
Same Russian town, I remember sitting down to tea with an old lady. All was going well until the conversation changed - as she berated Britain, Churchill, &, it seemed, even me, for not opening up the second front earlier in WW2. Over 60 years earlier.
Read 6 tweets
Giles Udy Profile picture
Jan 30
Ignorant antiracist historians overlook a crucial aspect the 18th century. It was an age when the influence of the Classical world was strong - hence neoclassicism in art & architecture. Roman history & the Latin classics were well known, as was the history of the servile wars 1/ Image
the three terrible uprisings of slaves against the Roman state. People then *knew Roman history* (in 1821 Voltaire wrote praising Spartacus, leader of the 3rd war) & abolitionists greatly feared a repetition. They believed that immediate emancipation 2/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servile_W…
would lead to anarchy. As slaves refused to work, local economies would be wrecked. Famine and bloodshed driven by the thirst for revenge would destroy all hopes of building a stable future society for the freed slaves.
If you are going to tear down statues of people who 3/
Read 5 tweets
Giles Udy Profile picture
Nov 26, 2021
Today 4pm candles will be lit to commemorate the #Holomodor of 1932-33, Stalin's enforced starvation of Ukraine. 5m+ died. In 1932, USSR exported 1.73m tonnes of grain, 1.68m in 1933 when reserves were 1.8m tonnes. Human life counts for little when building the Communist utopia.
As Orwell put it - 'there's something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years ... All people who are morally sound have known since 1931 that the Russian regime stinks.'
But British pro-Soviet enthusiasts denied anything really serious was going on.
The denials by Sidney & Beatrice 'Stalin is no dictator' Webb, Labour heroes, founders of the LSE & New Statesmen were brazen lies - but they were duped. They passed their text to the Sov. Embassy in London for editing 🤦‍♂️This page is from my book about to be reprinted #Holomodor
Read 5 tweets
Giles Udy Profile picture
Sep 18, 2021
And how…
So much of my research mirrors this. One influential speech last year to a group of British Caribbean-origin churches in U.K. inflaming them against the CofE was based on so many sheer inventions, I cannot let it pass. 1/

Ht @G_S_Bhogal Image
Honestly I’d be the last to defend the CofE on so many grounds but Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice Chancellor of the Uni of West Indies, leader of the Caricom reparations campaign, & an eminent knighted historian, accused the CofE of the following serious charges, all untrue: 2/
1. The CofE “was one of the largest slave owners in Barbados”
- At emancipation there were 83,000 slave on Barbados, just 411 on the estate left to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. (Not excusable but context important see no 10 below) 3/
Read 25 tweets

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