Podcasts about another american

On today's Top News in 10, we cover:    The Vice President makes his debut in Europe.   President Donald Trump met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Legacy media outlets and liberal interest groups have recently claimed that a proposal requiring proof of citizenship disenfranchises women.  Vance slams the Wall Street Journal.  The second American to be released in the latest phase of the hostage deal is coming home. Trump all might run against Kamala Harris in California governor's race.  Links From Today's Show: Keep Up With The Daily Signal Sign up for our email newsletters: https://www.dailysignal.com/email     Subscribe to our other shows:  The Tony Kinnett Cast: https://www.dailysignal.com/the-tony-kinnett-cast  Problematic Women: https://www.dailysignal.com/problematic-women  The Signal Sitdown: https://www.dailysignal.com/the-signal-sitdown    Follow The Daily Signal:  X: https://x.com/DailySignal  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/  Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DailySignal  Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/TheDailySignal    Thanks for making The Daily Signal Podcast your trusted source for the day's top news. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's Top News in 10, we cover: The Vice President makes his debut in Europe. President Donald Trump met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Legacy media outlets and liberal interest groups have recently claimed that a proposal requiring proof of citizenship disenfranchises women.  Vance slams the Wall Street Journal. The second American to […]

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February 12, 2025 ~ Big snow coming our way. Another American released from Russian custody. Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation hearing. Elon Musk grilled on DOGE and the day's biggest headlines.

Today on the podcast, I'm excited to share my conversation with American record holder Weini Kelati. She recently ran 66:09, breaking her own American record in the half marathon at the Houston Half Marathon, where she placed second. Weini is an absolute force in distance running, and I can't wait to see what she does ... more »

Two American tourists who were visiting Germany on vacation last week, were attacked by another American man, known as Troy B. After talking the girls into following him to a secluded loookout spot, he attempted to assault one of the women and when her friend intervened he chucked her down the ravine. Not long after, he did the same to the other woman. One of the tourists was killed in the fall and the other survived the attack after her fall was cushioned by a tree. Troy B. was arrested by German police soon after the attack and will not be extradited to America, instead he will face justice in Germany.(commercial at 8:47)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:American woman who was 'pushed to her death' had been 'promised a romantic view by US 'tourist' | Daily Mail Online

Two people were killed and six others injured at a private school in Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday. The suspected shooter, also found dead at the scene, was identified by officials as a 17-year-old female student at the school. Authorities are now investigating her motive as another American community is reeling from mass gun violence. Amna Nawaz reports. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

This is the afternoon All Local for Saturday, December 14, 2024.

Femicide is a severe and pervasive problem in Mexico. Femicide refers to the killing of women, typically by a man, based on their gender. In recent years, the number of femicides in Mexico has increased, and the issue has become a significant concern for human rights activists, the government, and the international community.The Mexican government has implemented several measures to address femicide, such as creating special prosecutor's offices and emergency phone lines for women in danger. However, many critics argue that these measures are insufficient and that more needs to be done to address the root causes of femicide, including gender-based violence, economic inequality, and the marginalization of women in Mexican society.The high levels of femicide in Mexico have also led to widespread protests and social movements, with many women speaking out against gender-based violence and demanding greater protection and justice for victims. Despite these efforts, femicide continues to be a significant problem in Mexico, and there is still much work to be done to address this critical human rights issue.Now another girl has gone missing. This time a 17 year old American. (commercial at 8:33)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Another American woman, 17-year-old Shelbie Lynn Dwyer, goes missing in Mexico | EL PAÍS Mexico (elpais.com)

Two House committees are condemning Harvard for its recent probation decision. The school decided to punish several student protesters who spoke out against China's human rights violations on their own campus, but not the man who shoved one of them during the incident. Another American law firm is shrinking its China operations. What's driving the major law firm exodus from the country? Days after a round of Chinese war games encircled Taiwan, the United States and Canada are sending warships through the Taiwan Strait. How is Beijing responding? Could there be a potential thaw in a four-year military standoff? India and China have penned a new deal to patrol their contentious frontier. ⭕️ Watch in-depth videos based on Truth & Tradition at Epoch TV

Associated Student Inc. Beach Pride Events is putting on a Y2K-themed trivia night on Tuesday, Sept. 24. This two-hour event takes place in the University Student Union Ballrooms and the top three winning teams will receive a prize for each member. This Thursday, Sept. 26 head to the ASI Beach Kitchen for Sustain U's Pass the Plate event. This event is free but is limited to the first 12 students so RSVP through the Events & Orgs app on your CSULB Single Sign-On. The three major Southern California wildfires saw improvement from last week. The Bridge fire, is 41% contained as of Thursday, Sept. 19. Although this fire destroyed 73 structures and damaged plenty of others, many evacuation orders and warnings are being lifted or updated. The Line fire burning in San Bernardino County has been 51% contained as of last Thursday, although Highway 330 remains closed northbound and most evacuation warnings remain in place. Lastly, the Airport fire in Orange and Riverside County is reportedly 39% contained. These three fires have burned over 117,000 acres of land. Last Saturday, Sept. 21, Pixar Putt opened at the 2ND & PCH outdoor mall. Pixar Putt is a fun character-themed mini golf course with 18 holes related to Pixar movies. Thursday through Saturday after 7 p.m., golfers 18 or older can enjoy Pixar Putt after dark. Walk-ins are welcome, but it is strongly advised to book a tee time at pixarputt.com. Tickets start at $25 per person and have tee times every 30 minutes. Long Beach native, Billie Jean King, will be the first and only solo female athlete to hold a congressional gold medal. King's impact on equity, women's pay and outreach in sports are just some of the reasons she was nominated for the award. The legislation was passed unanimously by the Senate and now awaits President Joe Biden's signature. Last Sunday, Sept. 15 a suspect allegedly pointed a rifle at former President Donald Trump outside of his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Before shots were fired, Secret Service agents were able to spot the possible alleged shooter and shot in his direction causing him to flee. After the suspect fled he was quickly caught on I-95. This is the second assassination attempt against the former president in just over two months. The 76th Emmy Awards were held last Sunday, Sept. 15, and were hosted by the father-son duo Eugene and Dan Levy. This was a record-breaking night. “Shogun” broke the record for most Emmys won by drama series in a single cycle with 18 Emmys total. “The Bear” also broke records by receiving the most Emmys by comedy series in a single cycle, receiving four at the Emmys last Sunday and seven at the Creative Arts Ceremonies. Another American has been detained in Venezuela as the Venezuelan government claims there was an alleged plot against President Nicholás Maduro. Maduro's reelection on July 28 was heavily disputed with many allegations against his government such as tampering with data from local polling locations. Many questions remain regarding these arrests. In Portugal, six people have died due to wildfires in the Aveiro and Viseu areas. Four firefighters and two civilians have passed away due to the fires and over 50 people have sustained injuries. Over 25,000 acres of forest have burned and over a dozen homes have been destroyed. Portugal has called in for help from firefighters in Morocco and Spain to aid them in controlling the blaze. They are also receiving additional support from a water-dropping aircraft coming from Spain, France, Italy, and Greece. Host: Gianna Echeverria Editor: Aidan Swanepoel Producers: El Nicklin, Aidan Swanepoel Like, comment, and follow us on your favorite platform for more content! Apple Podcastshttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/long-beach-current-podcasts/id1488484518 Spotify⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/4HJaqJep02kHeIQy8op1n1⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Overcasthttps://overcast.fm/itunes1488484518/long-beach-current-podcasts

If you've been wondering what the opportunity economy that Cumala Harris keeps talking about is, this is it…

Listen to Don Mihalek from Thursday, September 5th, 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's show begins with breaking news of yet another deadly school shooting. According to law enforcement sources, at least two people are dead and others are injured after a shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. A suspect is in custody. Video from outside the school, which is located in a community about an hour outside of Atlanta, shows several ambulances and a large active police presence.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It couldn’t happen but it did. Now, we have to survive.By ronde, in 3 parts. Listen to the ► podcast at Connected.I thought I was ready when the time to be ready arrived. I wasn’t. I was more ready than most people, but still not ready for what happened.To this day, I don’t know why it happened and apparently there’s nobody left to explain it. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. What was is probably gone for a long, long time, and people like us have to pick up the pieces and get on with trying to live. I’m writing all this down in hopes that if and when things do get back to normal a lot of people will read it and do what all people should have done before.I started getting ready as more of a hobby than actually preparing for when the “shit hits the fan", or “SHTF” as the survivalists called it. There were many scenarios that would cause SHTF, none of which I thought would ever happen. The leading scenarios were about the world, or at least the U S, going from normal to crisis to lawlessness in a matter of weeks or even days in some cases. You had your:1.      "the world economy is going to collapse" people, your2.      "there will be another civil war" people, and your3.      "another country will bomb and then invade the U S" people.I tended to discount these for what, to me at least, were logical reasons.While the economy had gone belly up at least a couple times, the world didn’t descend into chaos. Even though in at least some cases it took years to do so, governments managed to work through the depression and come out healthy.Another American civil war would just be stupid. Civil wars have never worked out well. The group with the most resources always wins, and they usually aren’t very nice to the losers. After most modern civil wars, the leaders on the losing side end up being executed for treason or some other offense. Why would any sane person even think about starting a civil war unless they were absolutely confident they could win?While I supposed it was possible that some other country could launch nukes at the U S, the result would be their own destruction as well. It was also possible some country could load up a million or so soldiers and ship them across the Pacific or the Atlantic with the intention of attacking the big cities on the East or West coast, but it’s very probable they wouldn’t make it. That many ships or planes would be spotted long before they posed any real danger and the U S Air Force and Navy would end the threat before it got started.Right behind these were “artificial intelligence will take over and eliminate the human race” and a global pandemic that kills most of the human population of the world.While these made some decent novels and movies, they weren’t all that realistic. I mean, artificial intelligence isn’t really all that smart. AI can rapidly review data from a multitude of sources, develop conclusions from that data based upon its programmed algorithms, and then take or recommend actions based upon those conclusions and again, its programmed algorithms. It can further examine those actions and determine if they were correct and modify its logical process as needed.At the time it happened, I was a civilian electro-mechanical engineer working on B 1 B flight simulators at Ellsworth AFB and my job required a thorough and current knowledge of that sort of thing because I was writing it into my machine control programs. Everything I'd  read told me even the best artificial intelligence is really good at adapting its programming to different conditions and reporting any conclusions in appropriate language, but in reality is maybe actually as smart as a five-year old. Though the data set used can be enormous, any autonomous decisions are made just as a five-year old would make them – by trial and error.A self-driving car can learn where it is and where it needs to go, but it you want to transfer its “brain” to an aircraft or a robot, that requires a software change and a human has to do that. Artificial Intelligence can read most current languages spoken in the world and can be taught the phonetics to speak them correctly. It can also be taught to generate art, prose and poetry when given appropriate parameters. It can’t just one day decide to become a best selling author or poet and start writing, or begin painting scenes that it visualizes on its own. It needs a human to ask it to do something or to tell it what to do. Yes, there can be some unforeseen consequences, but when all else fails, a human can always “pull the plug” and stop the computer.A global pandemic was possible, but even in the worst pandemics like the plague and Spanish Flu, enough people survived to keep society going. Yes, the disease slowed civilization down, but civilization didn’t die.There were several other causes like natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards and forest fires that could likely happen and cause significant stress on society. The more I thought about those causes, the more sense it made to do some preparation. It wouldn’t hurt and if something did happen, I’d be prepared.It was also a way to get back to quasi-reality from my job. Back then, I spent all my work days immersed in tuning the interactions between computer code and hydraulic servo valves and the response time of hydraulic systems, and I needed something a lot less complex to decompress on the weekends.Location?I started reading about what I would need and decided my best bet was to have a month’s supply of food in my apartment and a shotgun for self-defense. The extra food was easily affordable since I wasn’t married, lived in a two-room apartment, and worked too many hours to actually spend much of my income on anything else. I still had the single-shot shotgun I got as a kid so I could hunt rabbits, squirrels and pheasants on my dad’s farm. I still did that when I had the time.I stored a month’s supply of canned and dried food in my bedroom and bought three boxes of buckshot to go with the box of bird shot I already had. I was all set; until I  read some more and watched some videos.One article I  read asked the question, “What will you do if you’re away from home when the shit hits the fan?” The answer was something called a “get-home bag” and was a small backpack filled with enough to get me from my office to home if there was trouble in the city or on the road.I bought a small backpack and stuffed it with protein bars, six bottles of water, and a first-aid kit. Also in that backpack was a coffee can with a candle and a disposable lighter, but I’d always had those in my car. If you’re stuck alongside the road in a heavy snow like we sometimes get during the South Dakota winters, it’s nice to have a heat source so you don’t freeze to death before the wrecker gets there. I was all set, until I  read some more and watched more videos.The opinion of all the experts on the internet was you should prepare to weather a crisis at home. That’s where your food supply would be and you’d be familiar with the area, but the next question was, “What if you can’t get to your home or if your home isn’t there or if it isn’t safe to go to your home?” The answer, actually three answers, were a “bug-out bag”, a place to “bug-out” to, and to never let my gas tank get lower than three-quarters of a tank so I’d have the gas to “bug-out”. I think that was when my hobby became sort of an obsession. Looking back now, I wish it had become an obsession a lot sooner.Keeping my gas tank filled was something I already did during the winter. It’s not unusual in my area of South Dakota to have a heavy snow that will cause traffic to back up for hours. Having a candle in a coffee can will keep you from freezing to death, but a full tank of gas and a car heater will keep you comfortable.The bug-out bag was easy. It was just a scaled up version of my get-home bag. It was a bigger backpack filled with food for three days and water for a week. Since I might need to make a fire to cook and keep warm, I included a hunting knife, a hatchet, two disposable lighters, and a ferrocerium rod and striker in a metal box full of charred cotton cloth in case the lighters died. If I got wet or just needed some more layers, I had an extra set of clothing, and in case something happened to the clothing, a sewing kit.According to everything I red, it might be that I’d have to fight my way out of something, and to do that, I bought a bigger first-aid kit in case I got hurt and had to fix myself up. Stuck in a pocket in the flap was an unloaded Sig P365 nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol with a hundred rounds of ammo to keep me from getting hurt. Carrying the pistol required me to get a state carry permit, but that was easy. After three visits to a gun range to practice, I spent one Saturday taking a class and then took my application and check for the fee to the local sheriff’s office. A month later, I had my South Dakota carry permit in my wallet.The place to bug-out to was harder. The articles I  read said the place should be pretty isolated because looters would be roaming the countryside looking to take what they didn’t have from people like me who did. Since I lived in an apartment, I’d probably at least have my neighbors begging from me. Montana seemed to be the favored location, but Montana was a five-hour drive from Box Elder, South Dakota where I had my apartment. Besides, I didn’t have enough money to buy even a small place in Montana.Dad’s farm was closer. The six hundred acres where he’d run some cattle and raised hay wasn’t exactly out in the middle of nowhere, but it was a little over twenty miles from the nearest city, that being Rapid City. I figured I’d just build a hideaway cabin to use for hunting and fishing the small river that ran through it. I did both there every year anyway, and with a small cabin, I could stay over a weekend instead of driving back and forth. If I needed it to bug-out, it would be there.I still call the place Dad’s farm, but it’s essentially mine. He willed it to my mother when he passed and her will states that it will go to me when she passes. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it when that happened because the inheritance taxes would be huge, but I liked hunting and fishing there, so I was playing “wait and see”. The land would never drop in value.I was paying the taxes on the place because Mom couldn’t afford to. I didn’t want to continue to pay property taxes on the old house and outbuildings, so I had them torn down. Then I rented the place to a local cattle breeder. His cattle and the small herd of horses he ran there kept the old pastures and fields cropped down and the rent paid the remaining property taxes every year with a little left over to go toward the taxes I’d eventually pay.Provisions.Once I’d decided to build a bug-out place, I started reading and watching videos about what I needed to build. I found people who recommended just a small log cabin, people who built what would have been called a “fall-out shelter” in the 1950’s, people who built basically a full sized and equipped house, and everything in between.I wasn’t all that thrilled about a log cabin after I  read more about the ones you can buy. They would be hard to heat in our frigid South Dakota winters and were pretty expensive since they were intended to be full-time residences. I thought about cutting some of the pine trees on the place and building a cabin myself, but that seemed like a ton of work that would take me a year of weekends to finish. I decided a log cabin was a bad idea.I saw some ads about pre-manufactured shelters that could be installed in a week or so by the manufacturer. I thought that would work out pretty well. I could buy just the steel box and then fit it out however I wanted. They were all underground, so I’d have the benefit of some natural insulation when it was time to heat it. There was only one hitch. I could have bought a three bedroom house in Box Elder for what one would have cost me to buy and install. I decided that was a bad idea too.As I kept reading and watching videos, I discovered there were some ideas about building a bug-out place that seemed to conflict. The main one had to do with the need to keep your bug-out place a secret. If you didn’t and some emergency happened, everybody who hadn’t prepped would come knocking on your door for food, shelter and safety.For this reason, I figured running electricity to whatever I built, like a lot of people did, was stupid. I could live without electricity, and overhead power lines running out through the middle of a farm field would be like a road sign saying, “This way for free food.” The other problem with electricity is electricity has a tendency to stop if there are high winds or sleet. It wouldn’t do any good to have the wiring if there was nothing in the wires.Another thing I thought was pretty short-sighted were the people who said they were prepared to live off the land. I’d hunted and fished for most of my life, and my experience had taught me two things. If you depend upon hunting, fishing, and foraging for food, you’ll probably starve to death. I’d spent a lot of long days in the woods without ever seeing so much as a rabbit let alone a deer. It’s the same with fishing. Some days, you catch several fish. Other days, all you get is a sunburn and some mosquito bites.Foraging for plants is interesting and fun and I’d done it as a Boy Scout, but if that’s your only food source, it won’t take long to pick all the edible plants in your immediate area. Then you’ll have to move to find more and that means giving up the security you spent all that money to build.I figured I needed a place big enough to store a lot of non-perishable food and enough other stuff so I could fend for myself for at least a year. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t hunt and fish. It just meant I wouldn’t go hungry when the deer, rabbits, or fish didn’t cooperate.I liked the idea of an underground bunker for several reasons. If it was underground, I’d get the benefit of the natural insulation of the soil, and at least from a distance, nobody could tell there was a bunker there. Concrete seemed a better alternative than steel. All the ammo bunkers on the base were poured concrete and they’d been there since World War 2.I thought I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get it built. I figured the cost wouldn’t be a problem because it would be just a concrete box with a concrete lid. The problem was who could I trust to build it and not tell anybody else where it was?That Christmas, I went to the assisted living home in Rapid City where my mother was living to take her a Christmas gift. I told her I was going to build some sort of cabin on the farm so I’d have a place to stay when I went hunting or fishing. Bless her heart, she gave me the answer I’d been looking for.“Remember Jeff Hayes from high school? His mother lives here and we talk all the time. He owns a construction company now, and she said he did the same thing except he built his under the ground. I don’t think I’d like living underground, but she saw it and said it’s really nice, considering. You ought to go talk to him and find out how he did it.”I did remember Jeff. He and I had hunted and fished together a lot when we were in high school. We sort of drifted apart when I went to college and he enlisted in the Army. When he got out of the Army, he went to a trade school. We were just different that way. He was very practical and I tended more toward the theoretical.Army Buddy.Jeff grinned when I walked into the building where his office was located.“Well I’ll be damned. Ted Jackson. Figured you’d forgotten all about Lakeview High and everybody you went to school with.”I smiled.“No, I’ve just been really busy. I was visiting my mother and she said I should come talk to you about a project I have in mind.”I told Jeff what I’d been thinking about and asked what he would recommend and why that would be better than what I’d already  read and seen in videos. He smiled.“When I was in Iraq, I talked to a guy from Montana whose dad had been getting ready for the big one for years. He didn’t know what the big one was gonna be, so he tried to cover all the bases. I learned a lot from listening to what his dad built."When I came back, I took a look at how politics and the economy were going and decided maybe he was right. Like you, I  read a lot of books and watched a lot of videos, but I had my military training and combat experience too. A lot of those books and videos didn’t make any sense."I thought about it for a year before I built what I built. I ain’t saying it’s perfect, but it’s good enough. I’m not sure I want to be around if something happens that it isn’t good enough for anyway.”My question was what did Jeff build and how did he build it without a bunch of people knowing. He just smiled again.“I own a construction company, so I have the equipment and skills to build about anything. I also have two guys on my crew who think like I do, and the local ready-mix plant owner and a couple of his crew do too. We got together and each of us built basically the same thing on weekends. The six of us are the only ones who know where and what we have, and we aren’t going to tell anybody else. Since we go way back, I’ll make an exception in your case. You got any idea about what you want?”When I said other than what I’d already told him I wasn’t sure, Jeff opened a drawer in his desk and took out a set of plans. The first page said “Plans for a 1,200 square foot Ranch With Partial Basement”. Jeff flipped past the first two pages and then pushed the plans toward me.“The rest of this is just so anybody finding our plans will think they’re just for a house I built. The basement plan will show you what I built. Since I know you pretty good, if you’ll swear to keep your mouth shut, I’ll talk to the other guys about helping you build one. It would be good to know there’s another of us in the area in case we somehow have to leave our own place.Noah's Ark.We couldn’t start construction until May because the nighttime temperatures were still dropping below freezing and the ground hadn’t yet thawed out. Once we started, it surprised me how quickly things went and how little it cost. In a month and a half of weekend work, I had my bunker. It was out in the middle of a pasture about a mile from the road and was invisible unless you got close enough to see the hatch sitting in the ground. I traded my car for a four-wheel drive pickup so I could get to it in about any kind of weather.It’s an underground bunker twelve feet wide and thirty feet long. It’s all concrete with leak stoppers between the floor and walls and between the walls and ceiling, the s

It couldn’t happen but it did. Now, we have to survive.By ronde, in 3 parts. Listen to the ► podcast at Connected.I thought I was ready when the time to be ready arrived. I wasn’t. I was more ready than most people, but still not ready for what happened.To this day, I don’t know why it happened and apparently there’s nobody left to explain it. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. What was is probably gone for a long, long time, and people like us have to pick up the pieces and get on with trying to live. I’m writing all this down in hopes that if and when things do get back to normal a lot of people will read it and do what all people should have done before.I started getting ready as more of a hobby than actually preparing for when the “shit hits the fan", or “SHTF” as the survivalists called it. There were many scenarios that would cause SHTF, none of which I thought would ever happen. The leading scenarios were about the world, or at least the U S, going from normal to crisis to lawlessness in a matter of weeks or even days in some cases. You had your:1.      "the world economy is going to collapse" people, your2.      "there will be another civil war" people, and your3.      "another country will bomb and then invade the U S" people.I tended to discount these for what, to me at least, were logical reasons.While the economy had gone belly up at least a couple times, the world didn’t descend into chaos. Even though in at least some cases it took years to do so, governments managed to work through the depression and come out healthy.Another American civil war would just be stupid. Civil wars have never worked out well. The group with the most resources always wins, and they usually aren’t very nice to the losers. After most modern civil wars, the leaders on the losing side end up being executed for treason or some other offense. Why would any sane person even think about starting a civil war unless they were absolutely confident they could win?While I supposed it was possible that some other country could launch nukes at the U S, the result would be their own destruction as well. It was also possible some country could load up a million or so soldiers and ship them across the Pacific or the Atlantic with the intention of attacking the big cities on the East or West coast, but it’s very probable they wouldn’t make it. That many ships or planes would be spotted long before they posed any real danger and the U S Air Force and Navy would end the threat before it got started.Right behind these were “artificial intelligence will take over and eliminate the human race” and a global pandemic that kills most of the human population of the world.While these made some decent novels and movies, they weren’t all that realistic. I mean, artificial intelligence isn’t really all that smart. AI can rapidly review data from a multitude of sources, develop conclusions from that data based upon its programmed algorithms, and then take or recommend actions based upon those conclusions and again, its programmed algorithms. It can further examine those actions and determine if they were correct and modify its logical process as needed.At the time it happened, I was a civilian electro-mechanical engineer working on B 1 B flight simulators at Ellsworth AFB and my job required a thorough and current knowledge of that sort of thing because I was writing it into my machine control programs. Everything I'd  read told me even the best artificial intelligence is really good at adapting its programming to different conditions and reporting any conclusions in appropriate language, but in reality is maybe actually as smart as a five-year old. Though the data set used can be enormous, any autonomous decisions are made just as a five-year old would make them – by trial and error.A self-driving car can learn where it is and where it needs to go, but it you want to transfer its “brain” to an aircraft or a robot, that requires a software change and a human has to do that. Artificial Intelligence can read most current languages spoken in the world and can be taught the phonetics to speak them correctly. It can also be taught to generate art, prose and poetry when given appropriate parameters. It can’t just one day decide to become a best selling author or poet and start writing, or begin painting scenes that it visualizes on its own. It needs a human to ask it to do something or to tell it what to do. Yes, there can be some unforeseen consequences, but when all else fails, a human can always “pull the plug” and stop the computer.A global pandemic was possible, but even in the worst pandemics like the plague and Spanish Flu, enough people survived to keep society going. Yes, the disease slowed civilization down, but civilization didn’t die.There were several other causes like natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards and forest fires that could likely happen and cause significant stress on society. The more I thought about those causes, the more sense it made to do some preparation. It wouldn’t hurt and if something did happen, I’d be prepared.It was also a way to get back to quasi-reality from my job. Back then, I spent all my work days immersed in tuning the interactions between computer code and hydraulic servo valves and the response time of hydraulic systems, and I needed something a lot less complex to decompress on the weekends.Location?I started reading about what I would need and decided my best bet was to have a month’s supply of food in my apartment and a shotgun for self-defense. The extra food was easily affordable since I wasn’t married, lived in a two-room apartment, and worked too many hours to actually spend much of my income on anything else. I still had the single-shot shotgun I got as a kid so I could hunt rabbits, squirrels and pheasants on my dad’s farm. I still did that when I had the time.I stored a month’s supply of canned and dried food in my bedroom and bought three boxes of buckshot to go with the box of bird shot I already had. I was all set; until I  read some more and watched some videos.One article I  read asked the question, “What will you do if you’re away from home when the shit hits the fan?” The answer was something called a “get-home bag” and was a small backpack filled with enough to get me from my office to home if there was trouble in the city or on the road.I bought a small backpack and stuffed it with protein bars, six bottles of water, and a first-aid kit. Also in that backpack was a coffee can with a candle and a disposable lighter, but I’d always had those in my car. If you’re stuck alongside the road in a heavy snow like we sometimes get during the South Dakota winters, it’s nice to have a heat source so you don’t freeze to death before the wrecker gets there. I was all set, until I  read some more and watched more videos.The opinion of all the experts on the internet was you should prepare to weather a crisis at home. That’s where your food supply would be and you’d be familiar with the area, but the next question was, “What if you can’t get to your home or if your home isn’t there or if it isn’t safe to go to your home?” The answer, actually three answers, were a “bug-out bag”, a place to “bug-out” to, and to never let my gas tank get lower than three-quarters of a tank so I’d have the gas to “bug-out”. I think that was when my hobby became sort of an obsession. Looking back now, I wish it had become an obsession a lot sooner.Keeping my gas tank filled was something I already did during the winter. It’s not unusual in my area of South Dakota to have a heavy snow that will cause traffic to back up for hours. Having a candle in a coffee can will keep you from freezing to death, but a full tank of gas and a car heater will keep you comfortable.The bug-out bag was easy. It was just a scaled up version of my get-home bag. It was a bigger backpack filled with food for three days and water for a week. Since I might need to make a fire to cook and keep warm, I included a hunting knife, a hatchet, two disposable lighters, and a ferrocerium rod and striker in a metal box full of charred cotton cloth in case the lighters died. If I got wet or just needed some more layers, I had an extra set of clothing, and in case something happened to the clothing, a sewing kit.According to everything I red, it might be that I’d have to fight my way out of something, and to do that, I bought a bigger first-aid kit in case I got hurt and had to fix myself up. Stuck in a pocket in the flap was an unloaded Sig P365 nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol with a hundred rounds of ammo to keep me from getting hurt. Carrying the pistol required me to get a state carry permit, but that was easy. After three visits to a gun range to practice, I spent one Saturday taking a class and then took my application and check for the fee to the local sheriff’s office. A month later, I had my South Dakota carry permit in my wallet.The place to bug-out to was harder. The articles I  read said the place should be pretty isolated because looters would be roaming the countryside looking to take what they didn’t have from people like me who did. Since I lived in an apartment, I’d probably at least have my neighbors begging from me. Montana seemed to be the favored location, but Montana was a five-hour drive from Box Elder, South Dakota where I had my apartment. Besides, I didn’t have enough money to buy even a small place in Montana.Dad’s farm was closer. The six hundred acres where he’d run some cattle and raised hay wasn’t exactly out in the middle of nowhere, but it was a little over twenty miles from the nearest city, that being Rapid City. I figured I’d just build a hideaway cabin to use for hunting and fishing the small river that ran through it. I did both there every year anyway, and with a small cabin, I could stay over a weekend instead of driving back and forth. If I needed it to bug-out, it would be there.I still call the place Dad’s farm, but it’s essentially mine. He willed it to my mother when he passed and her will states that it will go to me when she passes. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it when that happened because the inheritance taxes would be huge, but I liked hunting and fishing there, so I was playing “wait and see”. The land would never drop in value.I was paying the taxes on the place because Mom couldn’t afford to. I didn’t want to continue to pay property taxes on the old house and outbuildings, so I had them torn down. Then I rented the place to a local cattle breeder. His cattle and the small herd of horses he ran there kept the old pastures and fields cropped down and the rent paid the remaining property taxes every year with a little left over to go toward the taxes I’d eventually pay.Provisions.Once I’d decided to build a bug-out place, I started reading and watching videos about what I needed to build. I found people who recommended just a small log cabin, people who built what would have been called a “fall-out shelter” in the 1950’s, people who built basically a full sized and equipped house, and everything in between.I wasn’t all that thrilled about a log cabin after I  read more about the ones you can buy. They would be hard to heat in our frigid South Dakota winters and were pretty expensive since they were intended to be full-time residences. I thought about cutting some of the pine trees on the place and building a cabin myself, but that seemed like a ton of work that would take me a year of weekends to finish. I decided a log cabin was a bad idea.I saw some ads about pre-manufactured shelters that could be installed in a week or so by the manufacturer. I thought that would work out pretty well. I could buy just the steel box and then fit it out however I wanted. They were all underground, so I’d have the benefit of some natural insulation when it was time to heat it. There was only one hitch. I could have bought a three bedroom house in Box Elder for what one would have cost me to buy and install. I decided that was a bad idea too.As I kept reading and watching videos, I discovered there were some ideas about building a bug-out place that seemed to conflict. The main one had to do with the need to keep your bug-out place a secret. If you didn’t and some emergency happened, everybody who hadn’t prepped would come knocking on your door for food, shelter and safety.For this reason, I figured running electricity to whatever I built, like a lot of people did, was stupid. I could live without electricity, and overhead power lines running out through the middle of a farm field would be like a road sign saying, “This way for free food.” The other problem with electricity is electricity has a tendency to stop if there are high winds or sleet. It wouldn’t do any good to have the wiring if there was nothing in the wires.Another thing I thought was pretty short-sighted were the people who said they were prepared to live off the land. I’d hunted and fished for most of my life, and my experience had taught me two things. If you depend upon hunting, fishing, and foraging for food, you’ll probably starve to death. I’d spent a lot of long days in the woods without ever seeing so much as a rabbit let alone a deer. It’s the same with fishing. Some days, you catch several fish. Other days, all you get is a sunburn and some mosquito bites.Foraging for plants is interesting and fun and I’d done it as a Boy Scout, but if that’s your only food source, it won’t take long to pick all the edible plants in your immediate area. Then you’ll have to move to find more and that means giving up the security you spent all that money to build.I figured I needed a place big enough to store a lot of non-perishable food and enough other stuff so I could fend for myself for at least a year. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t hunt and fish. It just meant I wouldn’t go hungry when the deer, rabbits, or fish didn’t cooperate.I liked the idea of an underground bunker for several reasons. If it was underground, I’d get the benefit of the natural insulation of the soil, and at least from a distance, nobody could tell there was a bunker there. Concrete seemed a better alternative than steel. All the ammo bunkers on the base were poured concrete and they’d been there since World War 2.I thought I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get it built. I figured the cost wouldn’t be a problem because it would be just a concrete box with a concrete lid. The problem was who could I trust to build it and not tell anybody else where it was?That Christmas, I went to the assisted living home in Rapid City where my mother was living to take her a Christmas gift. I told her I was going to build some sort of cabin on the farm so I’d have a place to stay when I went hunting or fishing. Bless her heart, she gave me the answer I’d been looking for.“Remember Jeff Hayes from high school? His mother lives here and we talk all the time. He owns a construction company now, and she said he did the same thing except he built his under the ground. I don’t think I’d like living underground, but she saw it and said it’s really nice, considering. You ought to go talk to him and find out how he did it.”I did remember Jeff. He and I had hunted and fished together a lot when we were in high school. We sort of drifted apart when I went to college and he enlisted in the Army. When he got out of the Army, he went to a trade school. We were just different that way. He was very practical and I tended more toward the theoretical.Army Buddy.Jeff grinned when I walked into the building where his office was located.“Well I’ll be damned. Ted Jackson. Figured you’d forgotten all about Lakeview High and everybody you went to school with.”I smiled.“No, I’ve just been really busy. I was visiting my mother and she said I should come talk to you about a project I have in mind.”I told Jeff what I’d been thinking about and asked what he would recommend and why that would be better than what I’d already  read and seen in videos. He smiled.“When I was in Iraq, I talked to a guy from Montana whose dad had been getting ready for the big one for years. He didn’t know what the big one was gonna be, so he tried to cover all the bases. I learned a lot from listening to what his dad built."When I came back, I took a look at how politics and the economy were going and decided maybe he was right. Like you, I  read a lot of books and watched a lot of videos, but I had my military training and combat experience too. A lot of those books and videos didn’t make any sense."I thought about it for a year before I built what I built. I ain’t saying it’s perfect, but it’s good enough. I’m not sure I want to be around if something happens that it isn’t good enough for anyway.”My question was what did Jeff build and how did he build it without a bunch of people knowing. He just smiled again.“I own a construction company, so I have the equipment and skills to build about anything. I also have two guys on my crew who think like I do, and the local ready-mix plant owner and a couple of his crew do too. We got together and each of us built basically the same thing on weekends. The six of us are the only ones who know where and what we have, and we aren’t going to tell anybody else. Since we go way back, I’ll make an exception in your case. You got any idea about what you want?”When I said other than what I’d already told him I wasn’t sure, Jeff opened a drawer in his desk and took out a set of plans. The first page said “Plans for a 1,200 square foot Ranch With Partial Basement”. Jeff flipped past the first two pages and then pushed the plans toward me.“The rest of this is just so anybody finding our plans will think they’re just for a house I built. The basement plan will show you what I built. Since I know you pretty good, if you’ll swear to keep your mouth shut, I’ll talk to the other guys about helping you build one. It would be good to know there’s another of us in the area in case we somehow have to leave our own place.Noah's Ark.We couldn’t start construction until May because the nighttime temperatures were still dropping below freezing and the ground hadn’t yet thawed out. Once we started, it surprised me how quickly things went and how little it cost. In a month and a half of weekend work, I had my bunker. It was out in the middle of a pasture about a mile from the road and was invisible unless you got close enough to see the hatch sitting in the ground. I traded my car for a four-wheel drive pickup so I could get to it in about any kind of weather.It’s an underground bunker twelve feet wide and thirty feet long. It’s all concrete with leak stoppers between the floor and walls and between the walls and ceiling, the s

It couldn’t happen but it did. Now, we have to survive.By ronde, in 3 parts. Listen to the ► podcast at Connected.I thought I was ready when the time to be ready arrived. I wasn’t. I was more ready than most people, but still not ready for what happened.To this day, I don’t know why it happened and apparently there’s nobody left to explain it. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. What was is probably gone for a long, long time, and people like us have to pick up the pieces and get on with trying to live. I’m writing all this down in hopes that if and when things do get back to normal a lot of people will read it and do what all people should have done before.I started getting ready as more of a hobby than actually preparing for when the “shit hits the fan", or “SHTF” as the survivalists called it. There were many scenarios that would cause SHTF, none of which I thought would ever happen. The leading scenarios were about the world, or at least the U S, going from normal to crisis to lawlessness in a matter of weeks or even days in some cases. You had your:1.      "the world economy is going to collapse" people, your2.      "there will be another civil war" people, and your3.      "another country will bomb and then invade the U S" people.I tended to discount these for what, to me at least, were logical reasons.While the economy had gone belly up at least a couple times, the world didn’t descend into chaos. Even though in at least some cases it took years to do so, governments managed to work through the depression and come out healthy.Another American civil war would just be stupid. Civil wars have never worked out well. The group with the most resources always wins, and they usually aren’t very nice to the losers. After most modern civil wars, the leaders on the losing side end up being executed for treason or some other offense. Why would any sane person even think about starting a civil war unless they were absolutely confident they could win?While I supposed it was possible that some other country could launch nukes at the U S, the result would be their own destruction as well. It was also possible some country could load up a million or so soldiers and ship them across the Pacific or the Atlantic with the intention of attacking the big cities on the East or West coast, but it’s very probable they wouldn’t make it. That many ships or planes would be spotted long before they posed any real danger and the U S Air Force and Navy would end the threat before it got started.Right behind these were “artificial intelligence will take over and eliminate the human race” and a global pandemic that kills most of the human population of the world.While these made some decent novels and movies, they weren’t all that realistic. I mean, artificial intelligence isn’t really all that smart. AI can rapidly review data from a multitude of sources, develop conclusions from that data based upon its programmed algorithms, and then take or recommend actions based upon those conclusions and again, its programmed algorithms. It can further examine those actions and determine if they were correct and modify its logical process as needed.At the time it happened, I was a civilian electro-mechanical engineer working on B 1 B flight simulators at Ellsworth AFB and my job required a thorough and current knowledge of that sort of thing because I was writing it into my machine control programs. Everything I'd  read told me even the best artificial intelligence is really good at adapting its programming to different conditions and reporting any conclusions in appropriate language, but in reality is maybe actually as smart as a five-year old. Though the data set used can be enormous, any autonomous decisions are made just as a five-year old would make them – by trial and error.A self-driving car can learn where it is and where it needs to go, but it you want to transfer its “brain” to an aircraft or a robot, that requires a software change and a human has to do that. Artificial Intelligence can read most current languages spoken in the world and can be taught the phonetics to speak them correctly. It can also be taught to generate art, prose and poetry when given appropriate parameters. It can’t just one day decide to become a best selling author or poet and start writing, or begin painting scenes that it visualizes on its own. It needs a human to ask it to do something or to tell it what to do. Yes, there can be some unforeseen consequences, but when all else fails, a human can always “pull the plug” and stop the computer.A global pandemic was possible, but even in the worst pandemics like the plague and Spanish Flu, enough people survived to keep society going. Yes, the disease slowed civilization down, but civilization didn’t die.There were several other causes like natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards and forest fires that could likely happen and cause significant stress on society. The more I thought about those causes, the more sense it made to do some preparation. It wouldn’t hurt and if something did happen, I’d be prepared.It was also a way to get back to quasi-reality from my job. Back then, I spent all my work days immersed in tuning the interactions between computer code and hydraulic servo valves and the response time of hydraulic systems, and I needed something a lot less complex to decompress on the weekends.Location?I started reading about what I would need and decided my best bet was to have a month’s supply of food in my apartment and a shotgun for self-defense. The extra food was easily affordable since I wasn’t married, lived in a two-room apartment, and worked too many hours to actually spend much of my income on anything else. I still had the single-shot shotgun I got as a kid so I could hunt rabbits, squirrels and pheasants on my dad’s farm. I still did that when I had the time.I stored a month’s supply of canned and dried food in my bedroom and bought three boxes of buckshot to go with the box of bird shot I already had. I was all set; until I  read some more and watched some videos.One article I  read asked the question, “What will you do if you’re away from home when the shit hits the fan?” The answer was something called a “get-home bag” and was a small backpack filled with enough to get me from my office to home if there was trouble in the city or on the road.I bought a small backpack and stuffed it with protein bars, six bottles of water, and a first-aid kit. Also in that backpack was a coffee can with a candle and a disposable lighter, but I’d always had those in my car. If you’re stuck alongside the road in a heavy snow like we sometimes get during the South Dakota winters, it’s nice to have a heat source so you don’t freeze to death before the wrecker gets there. I was all set, until I  read some more and watched more videos.The opinion of all the experts on the internet was you should prepare to weather a crisis at home. That’s where your food supply would be and you’d be familiar with the area, but the next question was, “What if you can’t get to your home or if your home isn’t there or if it isn’t safe to go to your home?” The answer, actually three answers, were a “bug-out bag”, a place to “bug-out” to, and to never let my gas tank get lower than three-quarters of a tank so I’d have the gas to “bug-out”. I think that was when my hobby became sort of an obsession. Looking back now, I wish it had become an obsession a lot sooner.Keeping my gas tank filled was something I already did during the winter. It’s not unusual in my area of South Dakota to have a heavy snow that will cause traffic to back up for hours. Having a candle in a coffee can will keep you from freezing to death, but a full tank of gas and a car heater will keep you comfortable.The bug-out bag was easy. It was just a scaled up version of my get-home bag. It was a bigger backpack filled with food for three days and water for a week. Since I might need to make a fire to cook and keep warm, I included a hunting knife, a hatchet, two disposable lighters, and a ferrocerium rod and striker in a metal box full of charred cotton cloth in case the lighters died. If I got wet or just needed some more layers, I had an extra set of clothing, and in case something happened to the clothing, a sewing kit.According to everything I red, it might be that I’d have to fight my way out of something, and to do that, I bought a bigger first-aid kit in case I got hurt and had to fix myself up. Stuck in a pocket in the flap was an unloaded Sig P365 nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol with a hundred rounds of ammo to keep me from getting hurt. Carrying the pistol required me to get a state carry permit, but that was easy. After three visits to a gun range to practice, I spent one Saturday taking a class and then took my application and check for the fee to the local sheriff’s office. A month later, I had my South Dakota carry permit in my wallet.The place to bug-out to was harder. The articles I  read said the place should be pretty isolated because looters would be roaming the countryside looking to take what they didn’t have from people like me who did. Since I lived in an apartment, I’d probably at least have my neighbors begging from me. Montana seemed to be the favored location, but Montana was a five-hour drive from Box Elder, South Dakota where I had my apartment. Besides, I didn’t have enough money to buy even a small place in Montana.Dad’s farm was closer. The six hundred acres where he’d run some cattle and raised hay wasn’t exactly out in the middle of nowhere, but it was a little over twenty miles from the nearest city, that being Rapid City. I figured I’d just build a hideaway cabin to use for hunting and fishing the small river that ran through it. I did both there every year anyway, and with a small cabin, I could stay over a weekend instead of driving back and forth. If I needed it to bug-out, it would be there.I still call the place Dad’s farm, but it’s essentially mine. He willed it to my mother when he passed and her will states that it will go to me when she passes. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it when that happened because the inheritance taxes would be huge, but I liked hunting and fishing there, so I was playing “wait and see”. The land would never drop in value.I was paying the taxes on the place because Mom couldn’t afford to. I didn’t want to continue to pay property taxes on the old house and outbuildings, so I had them torn down. Then I rented the place to a local cattle breeder. His cattle and the small herd of horses he ran there kept the old pastures and fields cropped down and the rent paid the remaining property taxes every year with a little left over to go toward the taxes I’d eventually pay.Provisions.Once I’d decided to build a bug-out place, I started reading and watching videos about what I needed to build. I found people who recommended just a small log cabin, people who built what would have been called a “fall-out shelter” in the 1950’s, people who built basically a full sized and equipped house, and everything in between.I wasn’t all that thrilled about a log cabin after I  read more about the ones you can buy. They would be hard to heat in our frigid South Dakota winters and were pretty expensive since they were intended to be full-time residences. I thought about cutting some of the pine trees on the place and building a cabin myself, but that seemed like a ton of work that would take me a year of weekends to finish. I decided a log cabin was a bad idea.I saw some ads about pre-manufactured shelters that could be installed in a week or so by the manufacturer. I thought that would work out pretty well. I could buy just the steel box and then fit it out however I wanted. They were all underground, so I’d have the benefit of some natural insulation when it was time to heat it. There was only one hitch. I could have bought a three bedroom house in Box Elder for what one would have cost me to buy and install. I decided that was a bad idea too.As I kept reading and watching videos, I discovered there were some ideas about building a bug-out place that seemed to conflict. The main one had to do with the need to keep your bug-out place a secret. If you didn’t and some emergency happened, everybody who hadn’t prepped would come knocking on your door for food, shelter and safety.For this reason, I figured running electricity to whatever I built, like a lot of people did, was stupid. I could live without electricity, and overhead power lines running out through the middle of a farm field would be like a road sign saying, “This way for free food.” The other problem with electricity is electricity has a tendency to stop if there are high winds or sleet. It wouldn’t do any good to have the wiring if there was nothing in the wires.Another thing I thought was pretty short-sighted were the people who said they were prepared to live off the land. I’d hunted and fished for most of my life, and my experience had taught me two things. If you depend upon hunting, fishing, and foraging for food, you’ll probably starve to death. I’d spent a lot of long days in the woods without ever seeing so much as a rabbit let alone a deer. It’s the same with fishing. Some days, you catch several fish. Other days, all you get is a sunburn and some mosquito bites.Foraging for plants is interesting and fun and I’d done it as a Boy Scout, but if that’s your only food source, it won’t take long to pick all the edible plants in your immediate area. Then you’ll have to move to find more and that means giving up the security you spent all that money to build.I figured I needed a place big enough to store a lot of non-perishable food and enough other stuff so I could fend for myself for at least a year. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t hunt and fish. It just meant I wouldn’t go hungry when the deer, rabbits, or fish didn’t cooperate.I liked the idea of an underground bunker for several reasons. If it was underground, I’d get the benefit of the natural insulation of the soil, and at least from a distance, nobody could tell there was a bunker there. Concrete seemed a better alternative than steel. All the ammo bunkers on the base were poured concrete and they’d been there since World War 2.I thought I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get it built. I figured the cost wouldn’t be a problem because it would be just a concrete box with a concrete lid. The problem was who could I trust to build it and not tell anybody else where it was?That Christmas, I went to the assisted living home in Rapid City where my mother was living to take her a Christmas gift. I told her I was going to build some sort of cabin on the farm so I’d have a place to stay when I went hunting or fishing. Bless her heart, she gave me the answer I’d been looking for.“Remember Jeff Hayes from high school? His mother lives here and we talk all the time. He owns a construction company now, and she said he did the same thing except he built his under the ground. I don’t think I’d like living underground, but she saw it and said it’s really nice, considering. You ought to go talk to him and find out how he did it.”I did remember Jeff. He and I had hunted and fished together a lot when we were in high school. We sort of drifted apart when I went to college and he enlisted in the Army. When he got out of the Army, he went to a trade school. We were just different that way. He was very practical and I tended more toward the theoretical.Army Buddy.Jeff grinned when I walked into the building where his office was located.“Well I’ll be damned. Ted Jackson. Figured you’d forgotten all about Lakeview High and everybody you went to school with.”I smiled.“No, I’ve just been really busy. I was visiting my mother and she said I should come talk to you about a project I have in mind.”I told Jeff what I’d been thinking about and asked what he would recommend and why that would be better than what I’d already  read and seen in videos. He smiled.“When I was in Iraq, I talked to a guy from Montana whose dad had been getting ready for the big one for years. He didn’t know what the big one was gonna be, so he tried to cover all the bases. I learned a lot from listening to what his dad built."When I came back, I took a look at how politics and the economy were going and decided maybe he was right. Like you, I  read a lot of books and watched a lot of videos, but I had my military training and combat experience too. A lot of those books and videos didn’t make any sense."I thought about it for a year before I built what I built. I ain’t saying it’s perfect, but it’s good enough. I’m not sure I want to be around if something happens that it isn’t good enough for anyway.”My question was what did Jeff build and how did he build it without a bunch of people knowing. He just smiled again.“I own a construction company, so I have the equipment and skills to build about anything. I also have two guys on my crew who think like I do, and the local ready-mix plant owner and a couple of his crew do too. We got together and each of us built basically the same thing on weekends. The six of us are the only ones who know where and what we have, and we aren’t going to tell anybody else. Since we go way back, I’ll make an exception in your case. You got any idea about what you want?”When I said other than what I’d already told him I wasn’t sure, Jeff opened a drawer in his desk and took out a set of plans. The first page said “Plans for a 1,200 square foot Ranch With Partial Basement”. Jeff flipped past the first two pages and then pushed the plans toward me.“The rest of this is just so anybody finding our plans will think they’re just for a house I built. The basement plan will show you what I built. Since I know you pretty good, if you’ll swear to keep your mouth shut, I’ll talk to the other guys about helping you build one. It would be good to know there’s another of us in the area in case we somehow have to leave our own place.Noah's Ark.We couldn’t start construction until May because the nighttime temperatures were still dropping below freezing and the ground hadn’t yet thawed out. Once we started, it surprised me how quickly things went and how little it cost. In a month and a half of weekend work, I had my bunker. It was out in the middle of a pasture about a mile from the road and was invisible unless you got close enough to see the hatch sitting in the ground. I traded my car for a four-wheel drive pickup so I could get to it in about any kind of weather.It’s an underground bunker twelve feet wide and thirty feet long. It’s all concrete with leak stoppers between the floor and walls and between the walls and ceiling, the s

August this year marks 10 years since the shocking execution of American freelance journalist James Foley at the hands of ISIS amid the war in Syria in 2014. His videotaped decapitation was the first of a spree of ISIS beheadings, including several Americans, which ISIS often used as recruitment propaganda. Jim's killing, almost two years after he had been captured, stunned the world. A month later, ISIS did the same to another American journalist, Time Magazine contributor Steven Joel Sotloff. A month later, an American aid worker, Peter Kassig, was killed in the same way. Another American aid worker, Kayla Mueller, was killed in 2015 while being held captive by ISIS. Jim's mother, Diane Foley, has pushed through the horror of those years by establishing the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation in her son's memory and pressing the U.S. government persistently over a decade to reform its approach to cases of American hostages held abroad. At the time, its policy, as she explains in a recent article published by Just Security, consisted of little more than a slogan: “The United States does not negotiate with terrorists.” Co-hosting this episode is Just Security's Washington Senior Editor, Viola Gienger. On this episode, we're privileged to have Jim Foley's mother, Diane Foley, and Luke Hartig, a member of Just Security's editorial board, who first met Diane when he was a senior director at the National Security Council working on hostage policy and she was advocating for changes in hostage policy. He serves on the Foley Foundation's advisory board. Diane has been a driving force in reforming U.S. policy and practices on the handling of American hostages held abroad. Part of that campaign has been an annual research report that the foundation produces, entitled Bringing Americans Home. It collects and analyzes evidence-based data on hostages currently held in 16 countries to inform the American public, government officials, and lawmakers about how the U.S. government is doing and what else is needed to secure the release of U.S. hostages abroad and reduce the risks of capture in the first place. The latest edition was just released. Show Notes:  Diane M. Foley (@FoleyDi) Luke Hartig (@LukeHartig) Viola Gienger (@ViolaGienger)Paras Shah (@pshah518)Diane's Just Security article “Since James Foley's Death, a `Moral Awakening' in America on Hostages Held Abroad”James W. Foley Legacy FoundationJust Security's Hostages coverageMusic: “Broken” by David Bullard from Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/david-bullard/broken (License code: OSC7K3LCPSGXISVI)

ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 5/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side 1932 BAGHDAD

ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 1/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side 1932 BAGHDAD

ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 2/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side 1925 BAGHDAD

ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 3/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side 1920 BAGHDAD

ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 4/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side 1918 BAGHDAD

ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 6/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side 1963 BAGHDAD

ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 7/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side 1932 BAGHDAD

ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 8/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side 1932 BAGHDAD

Another American killed by illegals. Juneteenth bloodbath goes under-reported. Police gear goes missing across the country. Andy Biggs joins the show. A new Conservative Circus Clown of the Week is named.

A second American has plead guilty to two counts of ammunition possession in the island nation of Turks and Caicos after authorities found two bullets in his luggage. The Virginia man, Tyler Wennrich, became the fifth American since February to be detained and charged under a law in the country that imposes a 12-year minimum jail sentence for possession of ammunition. A Congressional delegation traveled to Turks and Caicos last week and spoke to officials there about the Americans detained by the harsh law. FOX's Gurnal Scott speaks with Dana Marie McNicholl, FOX News national correspondent, gives us the latest on the detentions, fines and what the courts there are saying. Click Here To Follow 'The FOX News Rundown: Evening Edition' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A second American has plead guilty to two counts of ammunition possession in the island nation of Turks and Caicos after authorities found two bullets in his luggage. The Virginia man, Tyler Wennrich, became the fifth American since February to be detained and charged under a law in the country that imposes a 12-year minimum jail sentence for possession of ammunition. A Congressional delegation traveled to Turks and Caicos last week and spoke to officials there about the Americans detained by the harsh law. FOX's Gurnal Scott speaks with Dana Marie McNicholl, FOX News national correspondent, gives us the latest on the detentions, fines and what the courts there are saying. Click Here To Follow 'The FOX News Rundown: Evening Edition' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A second American has plead guilty to two counts of ammunition possession in the island nation of Turks and Caicos after authorities found two bullets in his luggage. The Virginia man, Tyler Wennrich, became the fifth American since February to be detained and charged under a law in the country that imposes a 12-year minimum jail sentence for possession of ammunition. A Congressional delegation traveled to Turks and Caicos last week and spoke to officials there about the Americans detained by the harsh law. FOX's Gurnal Scott speaks with Dana Marie McNicholl, FOX News national correspondent, gives us the latest on the detentions, fines and what the courts there are saying. Click Here To Follow 'The FOX News Rundown: Evening Edition' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Femicide is a severe and pervasive problem in Mexico. Femicide refers to the killing of women, typically by a man, based on their gender. In recent years, the number of femicides in Mexico has increased, and the issue has become a significant concern for human rights activists, the government, and the international community.The Mexican government has implemented several measures to address femicide, such as creating special prosecutor's offices and emergency phone lines for women in danger. However, many critics argue that these measures are insufficient and that more needs to be done to address the root causes of femicide, including gender-based violence, economic inequality, and the marginalization of women in Mexican society.The high levels of femicide in Mexico have also led to widespread protests and social movements, with many women speaking out against gender-based violence and demanding greater protection and justice for victims. Despite these efforts, femicide continues to be a significant problem in Mexico, and there is still much work to be done to address this critical human rights issue.Now another girl has gone missing. This time a 17 year old American.(commercial at 8:42)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Another American woman, 17-year-old Shelbie Lynn Dwyer, goes missing in Mexico | EL PAÍS Mexico (elpais.com)

Trump and Haley sharpen attacks ahead of South Carolina's primary. Another American arrested in Russia. Deadly FL beach collapse. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan in Charleston, SC, has today's World News Roundup.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We examine all the competition at the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships 2024 in Shanghai, China. We discuss the dominant, definitive gold medal wins, dozens of highly memorable performances, and a couple frustrating judge calls.   In the last major international skating competition before the 2024 World Championships, we saw some iconic performances — from many who may be destined for World medals — at the Four Continents Championships in Shanghai, China.  From a stunning season's best from Japan's Yuma Kagiyama to the continued dominance of Piper Gilles & Paul Porrier of Canada, to renewed hope for reigning pairs World Champions, Riku Miura & Ryuchi Kihara, this event felt like a preview for what we're about to see in Montreal this March. Men's Competition Yuma Kagiyama was in a league of his own here. Not that he didn't have incredible competition, but Yuma leveled up his already stellar programs this season and took another step towards what may be his first world title. Both programs saw increased difficulty, and while he had a couple of errors in his free skate, its hard to remember them since there was so much to be excited about. Seeing him at Worlds against Ilia Malinin and reigning World Champ, Shoma Uno, gets more exciting by the day. In silver, the ever-solid (in consistently improving) Shun Sato delivered his quad lutz (twice!) and continued to show why he is always a threat. We want to see him show more emotion and really develop a persona on the ice, but his talent is undeniable.  With his best showing this year, the bronze landed around the neck of the brilliant Junhwan Cha. After a rough start to his season due to injury, we've been seeing consistent improvement and a steady increase in his technical difficulty. Here, both performances brought the drama in the best way, and proved that Junhwan is definitely capable of showing up on the podium at Worlds again this year. The  most popular performances of the entire championship easily belonged to China's Boyang Jin — who delivered two incredible performances to wind up fifth, and was showered with stuffies from a grateful and excited home audience.  Pairs Competition At the top of the podium, this season's superstars — Canada's Deanna Stellato-Dudek & Maxime Deschamps — continued to deliver great performances, with a few unfortunate errors. The quality of so much of their skating is near-unmatched in the discipline right now, though unfortunately they have been plagued by challenges, in the singles elements especially. However, they still handily took the gold and continue to be the favorites going into the World Championships. In second, we saw the return of World Champions Riku Miura & Ryuchi Kihara from Japan. If you have listened to the podcast, you know we love this team — so it's no surprise that we are very excited to see them. As they are still getting back in the swing of competition, this was not their best showing — but still enough to take silver and bring a little of their magic to the ice. The newly crowned US National Champions, Ellie Kim & Danny O'Shea, took the bronze with two flawed but excellent programs that showed off their continuing development as a team. The throws still pose an issue for them, but their excellence in the lifts and improved singles elements have taken them to a new level in their trajectory. Women's Competition This competition saw a huge breakout for Japan's Mone Chiba. After an excellent showing at Japan Nationals, Mone came here and delivered two outstanding programs that were near-flawless. After a rough Grand Prix series, she has found more consistency and delivered the best programs we've seen from her yet. In silver position, South Korea's Chaeyeon Kim gave two solid performances that felt far more confident than what we saw in the Grand Prix Final. It solidifies her as South Korea's top woman competitor going into Worlds. Japan's Rinka Wantanabe landed her first triple axel of the season and earned the bronze in fantastic fashion. In fourth, Ava Marie Ziegler from the United States proved that her decision to skip Nationals for Four Continents may have been a good one since she scored over 200 again. This should solidify her as one the the top U.S. women going into next season — even without her getting a bid for Worlds. Ice Dance Competition Piper Gilles & Paul Poirier continued to dominate this season with two stellar programs, and earned their first Four Continents gold. While having a small twizzles issue in the rhythm dance, their free dance to Wuthering Heights was near flawless and completely captivating.  The silver was won by Laurence Fournier Beaudry & Nickolaj Sorensen, amidst Nik's continued assault investigation.  In the bronze medal position, Christina Carreira & Anthony Ponomarenko delivered a fantastic rhythm dance but did see some small errors creep into their free dance. Another American team, Emilia Zingas & Vadim Kolsnik, gave possibly their best performances of the season and landed solidly in fourth.  In fifth, with possibly our favorite performances in this discipline, the Canadian team of Marie-Jade Lauriault & Romain le Gac received a questionable deduction for an lift they have been performing all season in the rhythm dance, but moved up in the standings with their stellar and inventive free dance to the music of The Corpse Bride.  Follow Scoreography: Website — https://scoreography.show Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/scoreography Threads — https://www.threads.net/@scoreography BlueSky — https://bsky.app/profile/scoreography.show  

Two American tourists who were visiting Germany on vacation last week, were attacked by another American man, known as Troy B. After talking the girls into following him to a secluded loookout spot, he attempted to assault one of the women and when her friend intervened he chucked her down the ravine. Not long after, he did the same to the other woman.One of the tourists was killed in the fall and the other survived the attack after her fall was cushioned by a tree. Troy B. was arrested by German police soon after the attack and will not be extradited to America, instead he will face justice in Germany.(commercial at 7:56)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:American woman who was 'pushed to her death' had been 'promised a romantic view by US 'tourist' | Daily Mail OnlineThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5003294/advertisement

Fears are growing that the conflict in the Middle East will spill over Israel's borders. Congressman Jim Jordan is hoping it'll be third time lucky as he attempts another speaker vote. Only three percent of the US population has gotten their updated Covid-19 vaccines. Another American journalist has been detained and charged in Russia. Plus, Netflix has put its prices up again.To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

Two American tourists who were visiting Germany on vacation last week, were attacked by another American man, known as Troy B. After talking the girls into following him to a secluded loookout spot, he attempted to assault one of the women and when her friend intervened he chucked her down the ravine. Not long after, he did the same to the other woman.One of the tourists was killed in the fall and the other survived the attack after her fall was cushioned by a tree. Troy B. was arrested by German police soon after the attack and will not be extradited to America, instead he will face justice in Germany.(commercial at 8:47)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:American woman who was 'pushed to her death' had been 'promised a romantic view by US 'tourist' | Daily Mail OnlineThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5080327/advertisement

Femicide is a severe and pervasive problem in Mexico. Femicide refers to the killing of women, typically by a man, based on their gender. In recent years, the number of femicides in Mexico has increased, and the issue has become a significant concern for human rights activists, the government, and the international community.The Mexican government has implemented several measures to address femicide, such as creating special prosecutor's offices and emergency phone lines for women in danger. However, many critics argue that these measures are insufficient and that more needs to be done to address the root causes of femicide, including gender-based violence, economic inequality, and the marginalization of women in Mexican society.The high levels of femicide in Mexico have also led to widespread protests and social movements, with many women speaking out against gender-based violence and demanding greater protection and justice for victims. Despite these efforts, femicide continues to be a significant problem in Mexico, and there is still much work to be done to address this critical human rights issue.Now another girl has gone missing. This time a 17 year old American.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Another American woman, 17-year-old Shelbie Lynn Dwyer, goes missing in Mexico | EL PAÍS Mexico (elpais.com)This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5003294/advertisement

Femicide is a severe and pervasive problem in Mexico. Femicide refers to the killing of women, typically by a man, based on their gender. In recent years, the number of femicides in Mexico has increased, and the issue has become a significant concern for human rights activists, the government, and the international community.The Mexican government has implemented several measures to address femicide, such as creating special prosecutor's offices and emergency phone lines for women in danger. However, many critics argue that these measures are insufficient and that more needs to be done to address the root causes of femicide, including gender-based violence, economic inequality, and the marginalization of women in Mexican society.The high levels of femicide in Mexico have also led to widespread protests and social movements, with many women speaking out against gender-based violence and demanding greater protection and justice for victims. Despite these efforts, femicide continues to be a significant problem in Mexico, and there is still much work to be done to address this critical human rights issue.Now another girl has gone missing. This time a 17 year old American.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Another American woman, 17-year-old Shelbie Lynn Dwyer, goes missing in Mexico | EL PAÍS Mexico (elpais.com)This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5080327/advertisement

Last time we spoke about the allied drive to Munda and General Sasaki's major counter offensive. General Wing began the drive upon Munda Point, but General Sasaki predicted many of the routes the Americans would take and ordered his forces to create tedious roadblocks and defensive positions to foil their advances. The allied progress was brutally slow, despite having the enormous advantage in artillery, naval and aerial bombardment support. The Japanese pillboxes were proving to be devastating to the allied infantry, requiring tanks to be brought over to New Georgia. When things began to halt, suddenly General Sasaki performed a counter offensive seeing a daring attack directed at the headquarters of the 43rd division. The attack nearly broke the lines of communications, but luckily the Fijian commandos outperformed the japanese at their own game of night fighting. Lastly the IJN suffered terrible losses to allied aircraft collapsing their reinforcement efforts. This episode is the Mysterious Battle of the Pips Welcome to the Pacific War Podcast Week by Week, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800's until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.  The battles in New Guinea and New Georgia were particularly bloody, in all honesty things had begun to really escalate when you look at it from a numerical point of view. Over on Green Hell, General Savige had just seized Mubo, the Pimple, Green Hill and Observation hill taking them out of Japanese hands. The Japanese had withdrawn to Komiatum while simultaneously trying to defend the Bobdubi ridge area against Brigadier Hammer's 15th brigade. General Savige, still unaware Salamaua was not the main target and in fact was being used as a deception to cover for Lae, continued his offensive, hoping to drive the enemy north of the Francisco River. Over on the other side, General Nakano's 1st battalion of the 80th regiment had managed to  push Companies B and A off their ambush position on the Bench Cut Track. They were forced to withdraw towards Gwaibolom by July 10th. Meanwhile to the south Major Warfe launched an attack along Goodview junction. Captain Wally Meares of C platoon marched up Stephens Track while Captain John Winterflood's B platoon took Walpoles track. Lt Hugh Egan created a blocking position using just 7 men around 800 meters south of Goodview Junction. The platoons went to work advancing down the steep ridges dislodging Japanese from outposts. Captain Meares platoon were continuing along the Stephens track when they suddenly encountered strong resistance from some Japanese who took a position along the Tambu Saddle which is at a junction between Stephens track and the Mule track. After engaging the Japanese, the platoon was forced to bypass them moving along the Mule track towards the Komiatum track where they ran into more Japanese. Meares men killed 13 Japanese on the Mule track before deciding to withdraw back to the Stephens track and dug in. The Japanese had surprised Warfe's men. The forces they were running into were mainly the 1st and 2nd companies of the 66th battalion along with Araki's HQ staff who had been on the run from Mubo to Komiatum. The Japanese tried to press on with a counter attack aimed at Winterflood's B platoon. The Japanese tossed mortar and machine gun fire, but received terrible losses to the commandos, forced to pull back up Walpole track. The next day Warfe ordered Winterflood's platoon to make a frontal assault, but quickly found themselves pinned down by machine gun fire and during the night received a heavy counter attack that forced them to dig in. The Japanese continued to block the way, covering their withdrawal further east, but all the mayhem prompted General Savige to relieve the commandos by tossing up companies C and B of the 2/5th who adopted the name Bennett force as they were led by Captain Cam Bennett. The rest of the 2/5th marched up the Buigap. Meanwhile General Herring was dealing with a supply issue for the 3rd Australian division. The 3rd division was too far from the coast and thus had been relying on supply via airdrops, which we have seen during this series to not be particularly accurate and quite inadequate. The supply problems mounted more when the decision was made to target Lae as such a campaign required building up reserve dumps. Warfe's men were critically low on supplies; the 58/59th had nearly used up all the supplies they received, being brought up via the Missim Track and from airdrops. Getting further and further away from the source of supplies and with declining carrier capacity, Warfe's men were reaching starvation point. Further back, Companies A and C of the 2/6th battalion got drafted the job of moving the supplies from Mubo to Buigap creek. General Herring considered it extremely difficult, but not impossible to maintain further units in the Salamaua area, if they were closer to the coasts. To solve the problem General Herring designated Tambu Bay as a new coastal base for supplies and it would also help as an artillery position. And thus, the 3rd battalion, 162nd regiment of Major Archibald Roosevelt landed at Nassau Bay back on July 12th commencing with their coastal advance. They were accompanied by Brigadier General Ralph Coane's artillery that had landed prior to them. Yet their advance would begin in an extremely confused and chaotic manner. The question of command was at the core of the issue, General Fuller had decided to separate units such as Archibald Roosevelts from the MacKechnie Force, and thus they were now placed under the command of the Coane Force. General Herring was forced to intervene, placing the Coane Force under General Savige. At the same time, Colonel MacKechnie was relieved of his command because Fuller felt that he had favored the Australians over the Americans. To dig depper into this mess, what occurred was General Savige and Colonel MacKechnie were both unaware that two-thirds of the 162nd regiment had been allocated to the Coane Force when General Herring sent the a confusing message to try and clarify things “all units MACK force are under operational control of 3 Aust Div”. Troubles began at Moten ordered Major Roosevelt to advance north, but Roosevelt had also been told by General Fuller that he was not under Australian command. Thus Roosevelt bluntly replied to Moten “For your information I obey no orders except those from my immediate superior”. Then MacKechnie tried to smooth things over with Moten when he was informed of Fuller's position. He apologized for Roosevelt's message, and tried to speak about how great all the Australian/American cooperation was going. Fuller and Herring then tried to clarify the situation by placing the Coane Force under General Savige, but Fuller also decided to dismiss MacKechnie, mostly because he had relinquished command of his men to the Australians and thus had failed to protect American interests. As I say on my personnel channel, often when talking about China's Warlords in the 1920's, this is some kindergarten bullshit. Back to the action at hand, the Coane Force was being aided by a Papuan company who were scouting ahead of the Americans. They managed to confirm that Tambu Bay and the Dot Inlet were occupied and fortified by the Japanese. A platoon of the 5th Sasebo SNLF and the 3rd battalion, 66th regiment were holding a position on Tambu Bay while the remnants of the 3rd battalion, 102nd regiment were on a ridge overlooking the bay, which would later be named Roosevelt Ridge. On July 18th, Roosevelt led the troops with Companies L and I taking the lead, guided by two Papuan platoons. L Company with a Papuan company advanced along an inland track while K Company likewise did so along the coast. K Companies's Papuan guides hit a Japanese outpost south of Boisi on July 18th. On the morning of the 20th, the Papuan platoon managed to kill four Japanese before K Company helped destroy the outpost. By the 20th they seized Boisi and Roosevelt with the others approached the Tambu bay. Roosevelt had Coane's artillery support, they brought up four 25 pounders of the 2/6th Australian field regiment originally placed at Nassau Bay along with 2 batteries of the 218th American field artillery battalion, 8 75mm guns from north Salus, a battery of the 205th American field artillery battalion and 4 105mm guns. Under the cover the artillery they attacked the enemy, but they were met with heavy mortar fire coming from Roosevelt Ridge. Roosevelt Ridge extended westwards from the sea for nearly 2000 yards, forming kind of bulwark that shielded the northern end of Tambu Bay. Thus Tambu Bay could not be secured unless the ridge was taken first. The Australian broadcasting commission correspondent, Peter Hemery described the ridge like this “a piece of old style razer blade jutting into the sea”. According to some Japanese sources they had this to say of it “The area around Boisi had a lay of land most suitable to the arrest of the enemy advancing northward along the coast” General Nakano had also decided to reinforce the ridge with 250 men of the 1st battalion, 115th regiment, but of course this came at the coast of Salamaua's defense. By this point the bulk of the 102nd regiment was at the Malolo-buang coastal area and the bulk of the 115th regiment, the 2nd Maizuru SNLF, two companies of the 5th Sasebo SNLF and the 14th field artillery regiment were at Salamaua, around 150 men in total. On the other side, after the fall of Mubo Brigadier Moten had the men advance north. The Bennet Force took over Goodview Junction; Companies A and D of the 2/5th advanced to Mount Tambu. Mount Tambu was the highest feature along the route between Mubo and Salamaua. It consisted of a series of razorback ridges covered in dense jungle, ideal for camouflage pillboxes. Its area was defended by roughly 700 Japanese from the 2nd and 3rd battalions of the 66th regiment led by Lt Colonel Fukuzo Kimura and Major Sakai Sugiyama. On July 16th, Captain Mick Walter led 60 men of Company A up the steep track leading to the south crest of Mount Tambu. Walter led the men to storm the two forward knolls, taking the Japanese by complete surprise. The two knolls were captured, but during the night the Japanese counterattacked in force. The Japanese crawled up the knolls through some heavy undergrowth before they unleashed mortars and mountain gun fire. Walters men however had captured some Japanese pillboxes upon the two knolls and thus the turn tables. 8 counterattacks were tossed at Walters men, each repulsed with heavy losses, around 39 casualties for the Australians and 350 for the Japanese. The following day, D company came up to help the Australian defenders, bringing much needed mortars. They dug in on a knoll around 300 yards back on the track. Alongside D company also came much needed supplies and an additional platoon to reinforce his men who he deployed on his western flank.  On July 18th, Walter ordered an advance going northwest in an attempt to secure the southern portion of Mount Tambu. The advance was spearheaded by Lance Corporal Jackson who alongside his comrades tossed grenades into a Japanese pillbox. Jackson then stormed inside killing 3 Japanese with this Tommy gun. Alongside Jackson, mortar and mountain gun fire aided Walters men to gain 80 additional yards, securing the southern portion of Mount Tambu. They could advance no further however as it became much more difficult from this position as the Japanese basically were encircling them upon razer back ridge to their north. Walter would write later on “we dug in on the new ground and shortened our perimeter to the narrowing plateau”. For this action the Australians paid with 6 lives, 13 wounded while the Japanese lost 82. At this point Walter had D company with one of his platoon holding the western flank; A company held the northern knoll and two platoons from D company held the eastern knolls. The Japanese had been devastated, losing hundreds of men and allied artillery was becoming a nightmare. Captain Newman's C Company of the 162nd battalion had come to a junction of the Buigap and Bui Eo. From there a reconnaissance patrol found suitable artillery positions northwest of the junction. With the help of native carriers and 80 men of the 2/6th battalion, two guns were hauled over the Buigap track and by July 17th another 4 guns of the American 218th battalion were hauled up from the southern arm of the Bitoi river to Green Hill. From these positions the allies could smash multiple Japanese defensive positions. General Nakano realized Mount Tambu was an essential component of General Muroya's defensive line so he sent the remainder of the 3rd battalion, 66th regiment to reinforce Colonel Araki's men. Then during the early hours of July 19th a large earth tremor startled the Australian defenders. It was the prelude to an assault led by Captain Kunizo Hatsugai's 9th company of the 66th regiment. They had crept up silently managing to get behind the southern knolls then suddenly charged up under the cover of darkness. But the defenders had their guard up and were not taken by surprise. A Bren gunner managed to knock out one of the Japanese raiders machine guns with a lucky hit in the dark. As the Japanese scrambled to try and recover it they were met with fire causing severe casualties. The Japanese surprise attack was a failure, forcing them to withdraw by first light, leaving 21 dead across the knoll. While this raid was occuring, Walters men were also repelling a series of attacks against the Northern Knoll. During these attacks, Walter was injured. Luckily for Walter and his company, they were relieved on the 19th by D Company. Another American unit, C Company of the 1st battalion, 162nd regiment led by Captain Delmar Newman also arrived to take up a position on the southern knolls. Until july 23rd, the Australians limited their actions to patrols. On the 20th, Bennet led a patrol making contact with a strong Japanese position on the Walpole track; Another company led by Morse found a Japanese position in the Goodview area dug within 100 yards of their own. Meanwhile the Japanese also limited their actions to a few patrols proding Mount Tambu for weaknesses.   On July 23rd Moten ordered the 2/5th battalion to attack the remaining Japanese positions on the Tambu Knoll, but it was the most heavily fortified yet. Basically it was like a castle keep, complete with a ravine for a moat, near vertical walls and deep tunnels going through the knoll. Mount Tambu's peak held  10 log reinforce bunkers connected by the tunnels which could shelter half a battalion or so. They also had a chain of weapon pits set up on lower ledges. Later on when investigating the entire system, the allies found weapon pits to be around 4 logs thick, interconnected by crawl trenches. Many of these weapon puts had been carefully sited within the roots of large trees, making them impervious to allied artillery fire. The tunnel entrances were dug into the side of the peak directly behind the defensive positions, allowing the defenders to storm out from their shelters underground within seconds. It was these kind of ingenious defensive works that would be built upon later on in the war to create absolute nightmares for the allies.   Moten had not carried out a thorough reconnaissance of the Japanese positions prior to ordering the attack and thus many of his subordinates elected to make a frontal assault instead of encircling them. D company took the center for the frontal attack while to the left were the 16th platoon led by Sergeant Alvin ‘Hungry' Williams and the 18th platoon led by Lt Bernard Leonads; and A company advanced along a Caffins track heading for the western flank of Mount Tambu to try and cut off the main Japanese supply route going back to Komiatum. 15 minutes before they charged, Australian and American artillery and mortars fired upon Mount Tambu. Two Australian mountain guns fired 90 rounds while the 4 75mm American guns fired 60 per gun from Green hill. D company began their attack around midday, trying to drive a wedge between two lines of pillboxes. Corporal John Smith laid cover fire as Captain Lin Cameron crept forward, getting within 15 yards of the pill boxes on the left side of the track. Cameron counted around 7 pill boxes in two lines of defense going across both sides of the track. The steep slopes on both sides gave little venues of approach, allowing around just a platoon at a time. There was also sharpened bamboo pickets on the left flank, leading Cameron to believe that an attack was expected there.   The Japanese knowingly let two platoons reach their line of forward pillboxes before unleashing hell upon them. The casualties were terrible. As Cameron recounted, “we were within 20 meters of the enemy bunkers before all hell let loose”. One of the men in the forward sections was killed outright, Cameron was wounded, his right elbow was shattered by a machine gun bullet. As he saw his men hesitate, he screamed out “forward! Get stuck into them!” With his right arm now useless and his eyesight dimming, Cameron handed command over to Lt Martin. Despite the horror, the Australians pressed on. Corporal Carey led his depleted platoon forward in a great dash and swept the outer ring of the Japanese pillboxes. On his left were Leonards men who stormed two pillboxes before heavy enfilade fire pinned them down. Then the 17th platoon led by Corporal John Smith charged up Mount Tambu from behind with their bayonets fixed. Smith screamed out “follow me!” as he charged. 3 other men out of the 11 managed to keep up with Smith, but soon Japanese grenades began to rain down on them. The grenades caught them just as they passed a third line of pillboxes. Smith was hit, but he kept charging and when he reached the peak of Mount Tambu with his back to the enemy he screamed “come on boys! come on boys!”. Without additional support and with no indication A company were making progress over on the left flank, the 4 men on the peak were forced to withdraw. The gallant Smith had to be dragged down and would die from severe wounds two days later. Smith was decorated for bravery in Syria in 1941, when he cleared out 3 machine gun nests at a roadblock and despite being wounded during the battle of Wau he still had gas left in the tank for some more.   Scouts had made their way towards the Tambu saddle track and spotted Japanese soldiers, around 125 of them a full company or so. The scouts quickly realized they were outnumbered, thus when the artillery began to open up and Walter's company moved in for the attack across the saddle, no sooner then they started the enemy halted them in their tracks. Walter had no choice but to withdraw around 500 yards south east as the Japanese were too strong. Walter's inability to make progress in the west ultimately ruined the entire attack. Despite the defeat, Companies A and D had done very well against such a heavily fortified position.   Meanwhile, Warfe and his men were marching when they discovered Ambush Knoll had come back under the hands of some Japanese from the 2nd battalion, 66th regiment. On July 15th, Warfes commandos launched an attack, with C Platoon performing a frontal assault along the narrow ridge top track. There were 16 men in the attack and they found themselves face to face with well dug in Japanese. The Japanese were behind a bamboo barricade with some pillboxes scattered about. The platoon got within 50 feet of the main barricade, but the Japanese fire was too much and casualties were mounting quickly. Meanwhile B Platoon was maneuvering around the Japanese eastern flank. At 5:30 B Platoon began attacking the eastern side of the knoll. The men got behind an enemy pillbox covering the track from Orodubi, but the Japanese quickly saw the Australians and began tossing grenades at them. Despite the resistance, B Platoon managed cut off the Japanese supply line to Ambush Knoll. With their supply lines cut the Japanese were forced to withdraw   With Ambush Knoll back under allied control, Brigadier Hammer ordered A company of the 58/59th battalion to depart Gwaibolom and attack Orodubi from its southern flank. Even with the help of the 58/59th company, the commando's yet again failed to dislodge the Japanese. On the night of July 19th, fresh troops of the 1st company, 80th battalion used the light of the full moon to come up the ridge. This became a staging point for them to attack Ambush Knoll, seeing artillery fire beginning in the morning to support their attack. Warfe's commandos were manning the trenches on Ambush Knoll, turning the tables on the Japanese and inflicting heavy casualties upon them. The Japanese were forced to retreat. The next day Warfe reinforced Ambush Knoll with two Vickers guns, which gave the Japanese a nasty surprise when they attacked again. On the 20th, the Japanese opened fire with mortars and artillery before charging the ridge. They managed to get as far as to cut the Australian lines of communication, but were ultimately repealed once again. Over 14 consecutive attacks would be made on the 20th, and even more on the 21st, but it all came to nothing, Warfe's commandos held their ground. Facing such pressure from the Japanese, Hammer still felt the greater weight of their attention was directed at Bobdubi and not towards Tambu, believing it to all be a consequence of Moton's lack of progress. General Savige decided to order Motens 2/6th battalion to take responsibility over Bobdubi ridge. The 2/6th then came across the Japanese rear near the slopes of Ambush Knoll and began harassing them. On the 22nd the Japanese tried yet again to attack Ambush Knoll, but were beaten back firmly, forcing them to finally withdraw to Sugarcane Ridge. By July 23rd, Warfes' exhausted commandos earned a relief by the 2/6th and were sent to relieve A company at Gwaibolom, while A company advanced north. The 2/6th likewise would advance north. But now we are moving away from the troubles of New Guinea and heading back up north to the frigid Aleutians. After the successful seizure of Attu, now Admiral Kinkaid and General Buckner needed to plan the invasion of Kiska. Kiska was the last Japanese bulwark in the Aleutians and held an incredible underground city. There were miles of tunnels, buried ammunition dumps, barracks,  3 hospitals, dental clinics, mess halls, machine shops, warehouses, photo labs, telephone rooms, all shoved and shored with wood. Ventilation pipes connected the maze of caves and tunnels, with Japanese troops wearing great fur lined coats busy at work. The Americans had experienced hell, on Attu, over 2872 Japanese had been killed or committed suicide, just 28 men were captured and it cost 549 american lives, 1148 wounded and nearly another 2000 ill or battered by harsh climate. The American leadership expected Kiska to be another hellscape and did not want to come at it lightly. The 7th division led by Brigadier General Archibald Arnolrd, Buckner's 4th regiment, the 87th Mountain infantry regiment, the 13th Canadian Brigade, consisting of the 6th Canadian division led by Major General George Pearkes, the Canadian Fusiliers regiment, the 1st battalion of Winnipeg grenadiers, the Rocky Mountain rangers regiment and e Regiment de Hull along with the 1st Special Service Force led by Colonel Robert Frederick were to be part of the invasion of Kiska, codenamed Operation Cottage. Unfortunately, the actual invasion will not be happening in this episode, you will actually have to wait  weeks for that one, but I just so happened to have recently done a podcast with a Canadian Military Historian named Brad St.Croix from the Youtube channel OTD Military History, the same gentleman who I interviewed for this series about the battle of Hong Kong. The podcast we recently did was on the Canadian experience of the Pacific War and the battle of Kiska is 1/3rd of it, so if you are, impatient and want to learn some neat stuff about how Canadians had to change their entire military organization and use American equipment for the battle of Kiska, check out my Youtube channel, the Pacific War channel for the full episode.  Now the last time we spoke about Kiska, the Japanese were forced to perform a bit of a miracle to evacuate their boys. After Attu had fallen, Rear Admiral Akiyama Monzo alongside 6000 men were ordered to evacuate Kiska. To try and do this, the Japanese began by sending 13 I-class submarines of the 1st submarine squadron of Rear Admiral Kouda Takeo. Despite these Type C submarines being enormous in size, they could only carry around 150 men per trip, thus it would have took 40 successful journey's to evacuate the entire Kiska garrison. With the US Navy fully decked out with sonar, this was not going to be a walk in the park. The efforts had begun on May 27th and by July, the submarines had managed to get 800 men safely back to Japan, but lost 300 due to american attacks.  Meanwhile Admiral Giffen had a considerable armada to work with consisting of a trio of older battleships; the Mississippi, Idaho and New Mexico, a quintet of cruisers; Louisville, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Fe and Wichita and 9 destroyers. He was ordered to bombard Kiska who already had been smashed with aerial attacks all throughout June and early July. On July 6th, Giffen steamed towards Kiska with 4 cruisers and 4 destroyers and bombarded the island for 22nd minutes causing a handful of casualties. It was not all that impressive, but it convinced Admiral Kawase that the Americans were about to invade Kiska at any moment.Admiral Kawase Shiro realized the futility of the submarine effort and was forced to come up with a new plan. Kawase came up with a bold plan, he was going to wait for a night when a thick fog was occurring and would take a surface fleet to sneak over into the Aleutians to assault enemy warships and evacuate all the remaining men on Kiska in a single go. To be blunt, it was a dumb idea. The American warships were equipped with radar that would pick up any surface ship with ease despite any type of fog, but what was about to occur can only be described as spectacular and bizarre.  Rear Admiral Kimura, the victor of the battle of the bismarck sea, would lead the force and he had at his disposal Destroyer Squadron 1: consisting of Yugumo, Kazagumo, Asagumo, Akigumo, Usugumo, Hibiki (one of my favorite whiskeys), Shimakaze, Samidare, Naganami, Wakaba, Hatsushimo and light cruisers Abukuma and Kiso. In close support of these there was also a covering force consisting of heavy cruisers Nachi, Maya, light cruiser Tama and destroyers Nokaze and Namikaze. The large convoy force departed from Paramushiro on July 7th with Takeo's 1st submarine squadron performing reconnaissance. The covering force departed Paramushiro on July 10th and by July 12th the fleet was around 500 miles south of Kiska. When they took up this assembly position, the sailors were in despair to see the fog was quite low. While it did not matter for warships with radar, Kimura knew full well what allied aircraft could do to his forces if they were not better concealed. Thus he elected to wait until the fog reappaered to cover his force. But the weather did not change, the skies remained clear forcing him to head back on July 15th. Meanwhile on Kiska, Rear Admiral Monzo was frantically ordering his troops to lay out a road from the underground base to the harbor piers to help facilitate the impending evacuation. All of the Japanese on Kiska felt an impending doom placed upon them. If the Americans landed first, it was all but over for them. Luckily, Japanese weather stations reported a dense fog would emerge over Kiska by July 25th, and unlike here in Montreal Canada, I guess these weather reporters are accurate. Kimura once again departed Paramushiro on July 22nd, accompanied by Admiral Kawase aboard cruiser Tama. Yet a few days prior, on July 19th, Admiral Kinkaid had ordered Admiral Giffen to bombard Kiska again. This time Giffen took a two pronged naval attack force consisting of battleships Mississippi and Idaho, cruisers Portland, Wichita, San Francisco, Louisville, Santa Fe and destroyers Abner Read, Farragut, Monaghan, Perry, Aylwin, Bache, Hughes, Morris and Mustin. Giffen's force reached Kiska on July 22nd and his ships smashed the island with 424000 lbs of high explosive shells. Just an hour later, a PBY suddenly detached with her radar 7 radar pips southwest of Attu. The PBY maintained contact for around 6 hours before low fuel forced her to return to base. These radar pips alarmed Admiral Kinkaid which was being reported in conjunction with a massive increase in Japanese radio activity on Kiska. Kinkaid believed a major Japanese fleet had just entered Aleutian waters, most likely a reinforcement convoy. Kinkaid immediately ordered Rear Admirals Giffen and Griffin to intercept the suspected enemy. However, by doing this he had also done something extremely favorable for the Japanese, he had left Kiska Harbor open and unguarded. Kinkaid dispatched a quartet of PT boats to try and provide a makeshift blockade, but the terrible weather forced the smaller vessels to return to port as trying to dash over to Kiska would probably see them all sunk. While this was occurring, Kimura's ships were traveling through the dense fog separately. The fog prevented the Americans from intercepting them initially, and having failed to make contact with the enemy, Kinkaid became nervous the Japanese might escape the blockade and ordered the force to return to Kiska at maximum speed on July 25th. The American ships dutifully turned back while Kinkaid sent the Oiler Pecos out to meet them for refueling. By dusk of the 25th, the American ships were around 90 miles from Kiska, when the fog had all but disappeared showing a cloudless sky. Kimura's vessels seeing their fog betray them, all reunited as a single force, now bearing 400 miles south of the American warships. At precisely 12:43am on July 26th the American warships picked up 7 strong radar pips around 15 miles northeast. It was Mississippi's SG radar that first picked them up, the American destroyers were actually unable to detect any pips on their radar due to the curvature of the ocean's surface at such a distance. The New Mexico, Portland, San Francisco and Wichita began picking up the same radar pips. The radar pips zigzagged across the sea surface, changing direction in much the same way ships attempting to evade detection might. The ships were being detected all at different angles, verifying to the Americans there were physical presences of some kind occupying definite points in space. On top of this, the immobile radar signature of Kiska's volcano at a range of 78 miles appeared clearly the entire time, verifying the validity of the pips moving with a fixed landmark. The radar pips converged 22,000 yards ahead of the Americans forcing them to spring into action. Admiral Giffen called for the entire fleet to turn left to intercept the pips on their southerly heading and in the hopes of foiling a possible torpedo attack. All of the American ships turned their guns to fire salvo's into the night. Great flame lances stabbed into the darkness as destroyers launched volleys of torpedoes and radar plotters frantically calculated salvo corrections. For 67 minutes the Americans tracked the 7 radar pips firing wildly at them. At 1:30am the Mississippi's log recorded zig-zags and a 20 degree course change, but not a single sailor saw an enemy ship. Cruisers San Francisco and Santa Fe registered shell splashes, but never an enemy target.  75 miles over on Kiska, the Japanese were watching a spectacle. From their point of view it was like a night-time light show over the horizon. By 2:22am the radar pips thinned, faded and vanished completely. During the morning surface ships and aircraft fanned out looking for wreckage, ships, floating papers, oil slick, anything to indicate something was even out there! The American warships reported no return fire, it was as if they faced ghosts. With a lack of fuel and ammunition, the US ships began refueling on the 28th and resumed their blockade of Kiska. What famously has become known as the battle of the Pips left the US Navy with a mystery that remains unsolved to this very day. The radar equipment was operating at times where there was a cloudless night with no fog, zero reasons for false radar echoes. An Aleutian crab fishing captain named Captain George Fulton may have solved the mystery in 1991 when he managed to duplicate the radar signatures observed during the battle by using his radar on a natural phenomenon common to the area. He presented his findings to the Alaska War Symposium in 1993 in a letter “I […] duplicated the Battle of the Pips using color radar. Sure enough there were blips on the tube and their density changed from red to orange to yellow and finally to black, providing an exact replication of the Battle of the Pips. What you described fits exactly the […] pattern of dense flocks of mutton birds or dusky shearwaters […] As mutton birds fly they veer left and right. This accounts for the zigzagging that was reported on the radar logs” Captain Fulton further went on to say how these huge flocks continue until they see large schools of fish, such as pollack. When the birds see them they begin landing on the sea surface then dive for their prey. This maneuver causes them to vanish from radar screens entirely. In the 1990s Aleutian fishing crews use this trait to locate large concentration of pollack, identifying the blips by their zigzagging motion and cast their nets accordingly. Were the Japanese saved by shearwater birds? Another answer came from the US Navy who officially stated that atmospheric echoes, a sort of phenomena caused the radar pips, that explanation has been highly contested. Its also been speculated that the American radar pips were 7 IJN submarines running reconnaissance. What we do know is Kimura made it to Kiska on the 28th undetected and unharmed while the US warships were enroute miles back. No American ships were anywhere near Kiska on the 28th. Admiral Kimura pulled the ships into Kiska anchorage and evacuated the entire remaining forces on the island, all 5183 men onto 8 vessels all within 55 minutes. The Japanese soldiers made sure to spend their last moments on the island setting up a plethora of booby traps. Four days later Kimura and Kawase were back in Paramushiro, successfully evacuating Kiska without firing a single shot. The Americans had no idea the evacuation occurred. In the words of one disgruntled American Colonel after the Kiska ordeal ““How I hate those bastards but I've got to give them credit for the most masterly evacuation by any army at any time and I'm not forgetting Dunkirk” I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. The drive to Lae and Salamaua rages on New Guinea as the American Navy in the frigid northern seas fought perhaps a ghost ship army. Or perhaps some pesky birds looking for tasty pollock saved the entire Japanese garrison on the island of Kiska. 

Femicide is a severe and pervasive problem in Mexico. Femicide refers to the killing of women, typically by a man, based on their gender. In recent years, the number of femicides in Mexico has increased, and the issue has become a significant concern for human rights activists, the government, and the international community.The Mexican government has implemented several measures to address femicide, such as creating special prosecutor's offices and emergency phone lines for women in danger. However, many critics argue that these measures are insufficient and that more needs to be done to address the root causes of femicide, including gender-based violence, economic inequality, and the marginalization of women in Mexican society.The high levels of femicide in Mexico have also led to widespread protests and social movements, with many women speaking out against gender-based violence and demanding greater protection and justice for victims. Despite these efforts, femicide continues to be a significant problem in Mexico, and there is still much work to be done to address this critical human rights issue.Now another girl has gone missing. This time a 17 year old American.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Another American woman, 17-year-old Shelbie Lynn Dwyer, goes missing in Mexico | EL PAÍS Mexico (elpais.com)This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5080327/advertisement

Independence is what this nation was founded on. It's the spirit of our national brand. It was what General—then President George Washington–was all about. It's where we started, before our political landscape degraded into the dysfunctional and dangerous two party duopoly we have now.  And in his farewell address in 1796, Washington warned that one of the top risks of letting regional loyalties dominate loyalty to the nation as a whole was that it would lead to factionalism—a division of the country by region—or the development of warring political parties. Washington feared when Americans voted by party loyalty, rather than the common interest of the nation, it would foster what he called a “spirit of revenge”.  Here are his words. He warned: “They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” Hamilton himself said parties were “the most fatal disease” of popular governments They were right then. And they are right now.  Independence is not a new thing. It's an old thing. And essential thing. Maybe THE most essential thing. And the old is new again–because the old is eternal. Independence is eternal.  And we've seen it take many forms in America. From Washington, to Ross Perot, to Jesse Ventura, to Yemi Mobolade. And, in the senate, in 2006.  When a former candidate for vice president from one of the two major parties, left the party–to run for Senate (and win) as an independent. And go it alone–HIS WAY.  He is our guest today. He's Senator Joe Lieberman (@JoeLieberman). He joins host Paul Rieckhoff (@PaulRieckhoff), for another fun and fiery episode of the best independent politics, news and culture show in America.  Every episode of Independent Americans is independent light to contrast the heat of other politics and news shows. It's content for the 49% of Americans that call themselves independent. And delivers the Righteous Media 5 Is: independence, integrity, information, inspiration and impact. Always with a unique focus on national security, foreign affairs and military and vets issues. This is another pod to help you stay vigilant. Because vigilance is the price of democracy. In these trying times especially, Independent Americans is your trusted place for independent news, politics and inspiration.  -Get extra content, connect with guests, events, merch discounts and support this show that speaks truth to power by joining us on Patreon.  -WATCH video of Paul and Joe's conversation. -Check #LookForTheHelpers on Twitter. And share yours.  -Find us on social media or www.IndependentAmericans.us. -Watch Paul on MSNBC's Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace.  -Hear other Righteous pods like The Firefighters Podcast with Rob Serra, Uncle Montel - The OG of Weed and B Dorm.  Independent Americans is powered by Righteous Media. America's next great independent media company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grant Wood (1891-1942) is probably best known for his double portrait depicting a man and woman on a farmstead - that icon of American painting, American Gothic. But his career encompassed so much more, and was marked by an uncanny ability to weave and deconstruct "American values"—whatever those are. In The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Wood builds us a dreamscape in which we can confront the fables and myths of our national identity head-on. And I'm bringing it to you just in time for Independence Day! Today's artwork: Grant Wood, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931). Oil on Masonite. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ______ New episodes every month. Let's keep in touch! Email: artofhistorypod@gmail.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/matta_of_fact Instagram: @artofhistorypodcast TikTok: @artofhistorypod // @matta_of_fact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two American tourists who were visiting Germany on vacation last week, were attacked by another American man, known as Troy B. After talking the girls into following him to a secluded loookout spot, he attempted to assault one of the women and when her friend intervened he chucked her down the ravine. Not long after, he did the same to the other woman. One of the tourists was killed in the fall and the other survived the attack after her fall was cushioned by a tree. Troy B. was arrested by German police soon after the attack and will not be extradited to America, instead he will face justice in Germany.(commercial at 8:47)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:American woman who was 'pushed to her death' had been 'promised a romantic view by US 'tourist' | Daily Mail OnlineThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5080327/advertisement

Ken and Lima respond to whether or not the Saudis could go after another American sports league following the merger of LIV Tour with the PGA Tour. John Feinstein joined the show to react to the merger news.

The second and third largest US bank failures in the nation's history occurred within the past week, and on Monday, President Biden attempted to reassure Americans that despite these failures “the banking system is safe” These institutions with connections to cryptocurrency, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, experienced a run on their deposits. The banks were subsequently shuttered by the Fed and the Treasury Department who believed they posed a systemic risk to the country's financial system. The Wall Street Journal Senior Writer Jon Hilsenrath joins the podcast to explain what was behind these historic bank failures, how the federal government intervention differs from a bailout and how this will impact the stability of the American economy. On Monday, President Biden approved the Willow oil drilling in Alaska. Led by the oil company ConocoPhillips, the project aims to produce over 600 million barrels of oil over a 30-year span. Despite the Biden administration paring down the scale of this project, many environmentalists have voiced their opposition to Willow's approval, arguing that the President is furthering the climate crisis and undermining green energy initiatives. Senior Market Analyst at PRICE Futures Group and FOX Business Contributor Phil Flynn joins the Rundown to discuss what Project Willow will accomplish, how it will help the United States become less reliant on foreign oil supply, and the future of green energy companies in America.   Plus, commentary by former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The city of Monterey Park, California is reeling after a gunman opened fire inside a dance studio Saturday night, killing 10 people and injuring 10 others. Though authorities have not determined a motive, the mass shooting happened on Lunar New Year's Eve in one of the largest Asian American communities in the U.S.Sunday marked 50 years since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision – and nearly seven months since the current Supreme Court overturned it. Morgan Hopkins, the president of All Above All, joins us to discuss the state of abortion access across the country, and the policies we need to protect it.And in headlines: six people were arrested in Atlanta during protests over a controversial police training facility, Ron Klain plans to step down as President Biden's chief of staff, and officials in Peru closed off access to Machu Picchu amid growing political unrest.Show Notes:LAist: Another Mass Shooting Is Distressing. Here Are Some Mental Health Resources For The AAPI Community And All Of Us–  https://tinyurl.com/4zem9cuwAll* Above All: Take Action – https://allaboveall.org/take-action/What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastCrooked Coffee is officially here. Our first blend, What A Morning, is available in medium and dark roasts. Wake up with your own bag at crooked.com/coffeeFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/whataday/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

The people of Monterey Park, California, would normally be celebrating Lunar New Year right now, one of the biggest holidays of the year in a community that is two-thirds Asian. Instead, the city is mourning a terrible loss.Ailsa Chang went to the site of Saturday night's mass shooting in Monterey Park to speak to people there about the tragedy's impact on their community, which is often described as the "first suburban Chinatown" in America.We also hear from Min Zhou, a professor of sociology and Asian American studies at UCLA, about Monterey Park's history and significance as a safe space for Asians and Asian Americans.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

Joy Reid leads The ReidOut tonight with the fact that House Republicans are getting ready to take a sledgehammer to yet another American institution, with the false narrative that the DOJ is unfairly targeting the right. Also in this episode, Rep. Pramila Jayapal joins us on how many Republicans have apparently learned nothing from the election, with the new House majority actively working to take away what is left of women's reproductive rights. Plus, we have learned that George Santos lied about being a star volleyball player at the college he lied about attending, as New York Republicans call for his resignation. Finally, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi joins us to debunk the widely-held belief that Social Security is going bankrupt. It's not. All this and more in this edition of The ReidOut on MSNBC.

Today, the White House announced that WNBA star Brittney Griner has been released from Russian detention and is coming home – in exchange for a notorious arms dealer. We talk about why this deal happened now, and what it means for other American hostages.Read more:More than nine months after she was arrested in Russia, WNBA star Brittney Griner has been freed. Griner is one of the world's best women's basketball players. She's been in Russian custody since February, when authorities detained her at the airport and accused her of carrying vape cartridges containing cannabis oil, which is illegal in Russia. Like many women's basketball players, Grinersupplements her income by playing overseas during the WNBA offseason (Griner's arrest brought attention to pay inequality.)Moscow released the athlete in exchange for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. Known as the “merchant of death,” the infamous criminal is a top prize for Russian officials.For Biden, this is a victory - but it's a bittersweet one. Another American, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, was initially supposed to be a part of this swap, but Russia refused to let him go.