I can earnestly recommend Lord HardThrasher’s series on the Allied bombing campaign in WWII Europe. (He sounds exactly like Mr. Free Market would sound, if Mr. FM could be arsed to do a show about the military.)
He spares nobody, and I mean nobody. (Ignore the occasional anti-Trump digs; he’s just swinging his saber indiscriminately.) He is, of course, especially scornful of the Nazis.
Greatest Living English Historian? I report, you decide.
As any fule kno, I yield to no man for the love of my adopted country. I am an American by choice, and doubleplusproud I am to be that.
However: there are three things peculiar to the U.S. that got up my nose soon after I arrived here, and they have continued to bug the hell out of me ever since.
1) Date format: I know that we can do pretty much anything we want because Murka, but FFS why do we insist on mm/dd/yy (or /yyyy ever since Y2K) when the rest of the world uses dd/mm/yyyy? It makes no sense, forces one to insert an unnecessary comma when writing out the date — e.g. November 19 COMMA 2024, to prevent numbers running into each other — when going with the universal format would just make things easier. For everybody.
2) Gallons: I have no problem with using Imperial weights and measures, because they make things easier for everyday life over the artificial metric system. But why the hell do we have a liquid gallon that is smaller than the Imperial gallon? I was looking at a lovely old car’s specs the other day, and saw that it had a “tiny” 15-gallon fuel tank — and then realized that it was a Jaguar, and they were quoting Imperial gallons (in this case 18 U.S. gallons). I mean, we don’t have a mile that’s shorter than an Imperial mile — we could just go metric for that, don’t get me started — so why a use a smaller gallon measure?
3) Floor numbers: When you step into an elevator / lift in any developed country outside the U.S., you see the selector thus:
…but in the U.S., it’s: 
Why no ground floor? Once again, it’s something we do that nobody else does, and it often leads to confusion when talking to a non-Murkin. FFS, every building has a floor that’s at ground-level, so why not use the “G” and say “ground floor”?
No doubt there are all sorts of sound reasons why we Murkins have gone our own way — and don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with that mindset, e.g.:
…but I do need to wave my hands when such non-conformity makes absolutely no sense at all.
In all three of the above cases.
…about Kamala Harris:
And that’s all before we consider her other qualities.
# MadFellatioSkillz #WillieBrownKnows
Let’s start off with somebody else’s Monday FAFO:
…before turning back to local issues:
…which is kinda my attitude right at the moment.
And speaking of girls on the beach:
So let’s be careful out there in the sun, okay?
Fine, I know he’s the prime contender for the late Sheila Jackson Lee’s title of “Stupidest Person In Congress”, but even for him, this is rich:
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” that it was “hard to find someone better qualified in our history to become president” than Vice President Kamala Harris.
Ummm I can think of half a dozen, and that’s just since 1900. (Okay, since you ask: Taft, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan. Hell, Warren Harding was better-qualified than the DEI VP, never mind the lesser Republicans like the two Bushes.)
And if we go further back in our history… oh, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln… need I go further?
I would suggest that Schiff undergo a lobotomy, but I suspect he already has.
…that would have caused my old Dad’s brow to furrow with amazement:
1.) Bottled water.
“WTF?” Selling ordinary water? In bottles? And charging how much?” That’s not to say he was unfamiliar with the concept — he’d been to France, and after getting the runs from drinking Parisian tap water, he did what the Frogs did and drank Perrier.
But the idea of a society which did have clean and potable water out of the tap (e.g. the U.S. and the U.K.), but still sold bottled water would have been as alien to him as people not being able to drive a stick shift. So:
2.) All auto, all the time.
Back when I were a yoot and my old man was still alive (early 1970s), you couldn’t take your driving test in a car with automatic transmission. Which meant you had to know how to take off on an incline without rolling backwards, as well as being able to row through the gears when parallel parking (another required activity). Once again, he was perfectly comfortable driving his various Mercedes (all auto), he just wouldn’t now be able to understand why almost nobody in the current generation can’t perform so simple an activity. Of course, that’s not all the modern yoot can’t handle:
3.) No manners, no discipline and no beatings.
The lack of manners in today’s society and the indiscipline not just in kids but in everyone would have driven him crazy. Tardiness, ingratitude, disrespect not just for one’s elders but for everyone… all this makes me want to reach for the sjambok. My dad would have been worse. And all this is because children’s (okay, boys’) backsides have somehow become sacred objects that one may no longer use as a disciplinary receptacle for the above whip. As I always say, it’s not the punishment per se but the fear of punishment that keeps youthful psychopaths on the straight and narrow. And all this has disappeared from homes, the schools and the court system because OMG the chiiiiildren! And the children have responded in true Lord Of The Flies fashion, and we are shocked and saddened by all of it because we are morons and can’t understand the root causes of the above.
What a load of bollocks. All of it.