Tour de France fans took matters into their own hands on Saturday as they removed a gang of eco-protesters threatening to disrupt the bicycle race by sitting in the middle of the road to block riders. MailOnline has more.
Eight climate activists from French campaign group Dernière Rénovation (Last Renovation) sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the message “we have 978 days left” to tackle environmental decline tried to stop the race during the 20th stage between Lacapelle-Marival and Rocamadouron on Saturday.
But their attempts to wreak havoc at the stage were thwarted by spectators, who stormed onto the road and dragged them out of the path of the oncoming bikes even before the police arrived on the scene to make arrests.
Striking pictures have emerged of the enraged fans bowling into the road to pull, push and harry the protesters off the tarmac to prevent them from ruining the race.
Started earlier this year, Dernière Rénovation (DR) is a French faction of the international climate activism conglomerate “A22”, which includes the likes of Just Stop Oil – a U.K.-based group which attempted to disrupt the British Formula 1 Grand Prix at Silverstone on July 3rd.
DR employ similar tactics to those used by the likes of Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain, such as gluing themselves to the road to create congestion in large cities or putting themselves in harm’s way to disrupt major events.
The French faction had already hit the cycling competition three times prior to yesterday’s demonstration, and have promised more action – though the Tour De France draws to a close today on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
A statement released by the group today read: “Citizens supporting DR tried to interrupt the Tour de France time trial, during the 20th stage between Lacapelle-Marival and Rocamadour. Today’s action is the fourth in a series of disruptive actions that will continue until there is a credible and effective government commitment to isolate buildings… If nothing is done, the climate crisis will devastate entire swaths of our planet, as its disastrous consequences in our country have already witnessed this summer, and will condemn billions of people to death.”
Worth reading in full.
Meanwhile, people are asking why the British police can’t respond more like the Italians when eco-protestors target famous artworks. While the protestors who glued their hands to John Constable’s The Hay Wain in the National Gallery in London earlier this month were left alone until police arrested them over an hour later, at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence this week a security guard ripped two protestors’ hands from Botticelli’s Primavera where they had been superglued within minutes and dragged them away.
Good to see some spirited pushback against the disruptive eco-loons.
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How many puddling furnaces nave been discovered in the West Indies?
This isn’t about puddling. It’s about passing bundles of scrap iron through a set of rollers with horizontal grooves in order to restore it to usability. This is a known-to-be-working process Cort patented and nobody knows where he got the idea from. Bulstrode conjectures that it must have been used by an illegal scrap iron processing facility which operated in Jamaica until it was forcibly dismantled because of the revolutionary war in North America because this facility employed black slaves who must have been aware of sugar mills crushing sugar cane by employing rollers with vertical grooves. A relative of Cort is known to have sailed from Jamaica to Portsmouth after the illegal facility was dismantled. Therefore, he might have told Cort about the process allegedly employed there. As this might have happened, it must have happend because it would be politically very convenient if it did — usual post-modern speculative crap history.
Technical errors in this description are due to me having absolutely no idea of iron processing.
My understanding is that this process was used commercially on billets of iron produced by melting down scrap in the puddling furnaces. It was only by adding carbon to the scrap mixture during the process that it became suitable for the process you describe, you can’t just put any old scrap iron through the rollers.
It takes extreme lateral thinking to get from grooved rollers for sugar extraction to grooved rollers for straightening the grain in iron to improve its malleability.
Cort’s rolling patent predates his puddling patent. That said, I think there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here which should be sufficient to sink Ms Blunderstrode’s flight of fancy: As far as I can tell, rollers for rolling iron are made of iron themselves. Hence, if the Jamaican facility must have used this particular process because it’s the only viable process for turning scrap metal into something useful, the people working there couldn’t have created these rollers without having them first. The idea that some slave went to the owner of an unprofitable factory and convinced him to order an untried piece of machinery in England based on him having dreamed up the idea of using sugar cane rollers with transposed grooves for iron-rolling seem fanciful, to say the least.
Adding carbon is not allowed, you are trying to make cast iron (3% Carbon), into wrought Iron (substantially 0% Carbon)! Puddling is mixing impure iron with iron oxide, to remove the carbon as CO2! It is very slow to produce wrought iron this way, and requires a great deal of heat and effort. The Iron is not molten at any stage, more like plasticene, and gets more and more solid as the carbon content reduces.
Addition to that from Oliuver Jelf’s paper: It is actually known that Cort’s relative didn’t travel to Portsmouth but the Lancaster. The Princess Royal, a navy ship initially sailing together with the one John Cort travelled on, went to Portsmouth instead of Lancaster due to being leaky, sickly, and short of provisions. Ms Blunderstrode is misquoting (actually misparaphrasing) her sources in this respect (as in pretty much all others, BTW, see link below).
The technicalities are the ONLY important thing in this claim, which of course is complete B..S by this idiot “academic” (a new term describing all woke idiots BTW).
Lets discuss the technicalities for a moment. This “passing bundles of scrap iron through rollers” is the basis of all steel processing today. The “puddling of Iron” process was necessary at the time to purify the iron because there was no way that Iron could be heated sufficiently to purify it at melting point because no one had at that point invented a suitable kind of furnace! Did slaves invent the furnace using mechanical blowing machinery driven by a steam engine, burning coke from coal mines in the UK (none in the USA at that time, they had only just found a little oil, and wood was nothing like hot enough), and had the money to do all this? Then the iron rolling mills, they needed a great deal of energy to drive then, even on a tiny scale, the rolls needed to be made of STEEL, and again very large (although not quite so hot) furnaces were needed to heat the iron scrap (of which very little was available in the USA, because the infrastructure was not available, see puddling above). The bundle of scrap would need to be homoginised first with a steam hammer for the product to be in any way usable.
How these “slave” claims could even be made is beyond belief, none of the above is in any way possible by a blacksmith level of technology. Steel was not available in any quantity until the blast furnace and Bessemer converter were invented, nails and horseshoes were made of wrought iron, which is not as durable or strong as steel. Iron melts at 1539 degrees Centigrade, brilliant white heat. Adding carbon (as in cast iron) reduces melting point to 1147 C at about 3% carbon, but the result is fairly brittle. Slaves, simply not possible for so many reasons, but dollars is the biggest point she misses. None of this is a campfire process!
None of this is anyhow applicable to the situation at hand. A Mr Cort who had a struggling iron processing facility in Portsmouth got a patent for passing bundles of scrap iron through rollers with horizontal/ lateral grooves in 1783 (he also got a puddling patent said to refer to an impractical process a year later).
The claim is that this process was really collectively invented by 76 slaves working on an iron processing facility in Jamaica because they knew about sugar mills will rollers using vertical/ longitudinal grooves and bundles of (scrap) iron were reportedly used as currency in Africa at that time. It is further claimed that Cort engineered the demolition of this facility because it was feared that black supermen would arm themselves with its output and thus, bring down the British empire (no less), had the machinery transported to Portsmouth by a relative and misappropriated it there. That’s a pure flight of fancy by Ms Blunderstone which can – in the best case – only be explained by her accidentally misunderstanding all of the sources she’s referring to because their actual content contradicts every bit of this (see link below).
The less friendly explanation is that this is an intentional forgery based piling loads of babbling about unrelated stuff (like speculative history of African tribes in Africa) on top of loads of more babbling, all carefully infused with the right woke terms, in the hope that no one will ever be able to untangle this mountain of spurious verbosity.
I’m personally convinced that this is rather a case of the latter.
An Iron foundry is not capable of significant wrought iron processing, simply due to the necessary temperature difference. Melting cast iron is easy with a cupola furnace Iron and coke mixed together in the fire). Wrought iron needs to be some 300 degrees hotter to weld into solid material, must have no carbon anywhere near it, and needs very large mechanical input from the mill ot a steam hammer. Very different.
To save someone the hassle of reading through all of this: As far as I could determine, Bulstrode’s paper (I’ve skimmed it but it contains way too much AfroBabbling to actually read it) is a speculation about something which could have happened which doesn’t contradict any known facts which is assumed to be true because it would make a politically correct truth.
Ah. Madey uppy.
How about clappy trappy?
The Doctor has become an Establishment lackey.
Just as in the Star Trek universe Captain Picard has ‘discovered’ that the human/machine hybrids, the Borg, are really victims, so we might expect the Doctor to discover that the Daleks are really the oppressed beings of their creator. If anyone could care.
As for these upcoming academics, they know on which side their bread is buttered.
“… are really the oppressed beings…” forced to carry a sink plunger at all times.
Farce: comedy that entertains by highly exaggerated situations, deliberately use of absurdity and nonsense, the improbable and ludicrous.
Thanks very much, Dr Bulstrode for writing a load of made up old nonsense.
We paid for your PhD. You wasted our money:
‘This paper examines the available evidence relating to the disputed origin of Henry Cort’s iron-rolling process.
The principal primary sources, reproduced in the Appendix, do not support the contention that Cort acquired the process from enslaved black metalworkers at John Reeder’s foundry in Jamaica; nor that the foundry was dismantled and shipped to Portsmouth for Cort’s benefit.
The sources instead suggest that ordinary and widespread ironmaking processes were in use at Reeder’s foundry; that no innovation occurred there; that the chain of events by which Cort is supposed to have heard of the foundry’s activities certainly did not occur; that Reeder’s foundry was destroyed because of the threat of a Franco-Spanish invasion force; and that no part of the foundry was removed from the immediate vicinity of the island, let alone taken to Portsmouth.’
The origin of Henry Cort’s iron-rolling process: assessing the evidence. Oliver Jelf Aug. 2023
Link to the paper:
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rp5ae
No, I’m all for encouraging as many ‘academics’ as possible to spout their nonsense theories. The more inane the theory, the better. It’s the only way I can see of awakening people to the fraud that university has become. It will be painful for students during the process, but in the longer term it will benefit everyone.
Black people: can’t live with them, really can’t live with them.
The non-lady doesn’t look particularly black to me and she also certainly isn’t concerned with real black people, just with creating myths about hypothetical black people of the somewhat distant past.
Ah, she forgot to mention that it was a banana that fell from Newton’s tree
The concern for me is that this person is paid, with our taxes, to produce this bilge, and no doubt “teach” young people. Your tax dollars at work…. I’m beginning to think the Khmer Rouge were onto something.
Dr Jenny BS more like.
It probably believes from its lived experience that Cleopatra was black, Anne Boleyn, and that Black Africans built Stonehenge.
A race grifter with nothing better to do than spread falsehoods is it from a sense of inadequacy – or just gaming the system?
How low have our educational institutions sunk under wokeness?