Podcasts about armored

Join us as Robert Balch shares what it was like to be the tip of the spear for the 14th Armored division during WW2. Beginning with a brutal baptism by fire in Gertwiller in November 1944, his platoon advanced as the spearhead column, crossing the German border at Wissembourg and conducting high-stakes scouting missions directly against the Dragon's Teeth of the Siegfried Line. The unit faced severe physical and psychological strain, enduring freezing foxholes during a tense "battle of nerves" near Bitche, before being forced into a chaotic, full-scale tactical withdrawal when hit by a massive German counter-offensive during Operation Nordwind, the last German counter offensive of the war. Robert reflects on their service during the post-war occupation of Germany, members of the platoon fiercely defended the purpose and conduct of the American GI, emphasizing that their resolve was permanently forged by the trauma of combat and the firsthand horrors of liberating concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald. Support the show

On September 13, 1997, six men pulled off one of the biggest heists in American History. The men entered the Dunbar Armored facility in Los Angeles, California, and stole $18.9 million in under an hour. The case remained unsolved for two years, until a witness and a taillight provided the authorities with long-awaited leads.Connect With Us Website: genwhypod.com Instagram: @generationwhypodcast Facebook: facebook.com/thegenerationwhypodcast TikTok: @genwhypod YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thegenerationwhypodcastSupport the Show For special episodes, outtakes, and more from Justin & Aaron, visit: patreon.com/generationwhyAudible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Generation Why ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.Privacy Policy See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Send us Fan MailBack soon with new episodes! Until then, enjoy this bonkers story originally released in December 2021.On October 20, 1974, one of the biggest vault thefts in U.S. history happened here in Chicago. This is the story of the Great Purolator Armored Express Heist.Show some love for the podcast for the cost of a cup of coffee and help offset production costs:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/chicagohistoryAnything purchased through the links below may generate a small commission for this podcast at no cost to you and help offset production costs.Big Steal, The by Tony Marzanohttps://amzn.to/3xPH5xtHEIST: An Inside Look at the World's 100 Greatest Heists, Cons, and Capers (From Burglaries to Bank Jobs and Everything In-Between) by Pete Stegemeyer and Rebecca Pryhttps://amzn.to/3GcprHkLufthansa Heist: Behind The Six-Million-Dollar Cash Haul That Shook The World by Henry Hill and Daniel Simonehttps://amzn.to/3IbRpEKJoin Kindle Unlimited here: https://amzn.to/2WsP1GHWant better sleep? Try the most delicious alternative to melatonin and sleeping pills that helps you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling refreshed. MoonBrew. Use the code below for 15% off.https://moonbrew.co/TOMMYHENRYNeed music for YOUR projects? Audiio has got you covered. Try a free trial here:https://audiio.com/pricing?oid=1&affid=481Looking to get out and explore Chicago? Here are a few ideas:Chicago Movie Tourschicagomovietours.comChicago Detours: Tours For Curious Peoplehttps://chicagodetours.com/Chicago History Podcast Clothing, Mugs, Totes, & More (your purchase helps support the podcast):https://www.teepublic.com/user/chicago-history-podcasthttps://chicago-history-podcast.creator-spring.comChicago History Podcast Art by John K. Schneider (angeleyesartjks AT gmail.com)Chicago History Podcast email: chicagohistorypod AT gmail.comSupport the show

     This week- two films about people driven to extreme measures to try and grab a small bit of happiness.     A Queen is desperate for a child but jealousy overtakes her love. An older woman is pursued by an oversexed king and drives her sister to an extreme. A King is obsessed with his pet and neglects his familial duties. An epic Italian-UK-French co-production recounting stories from Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone- Tale of Tales (Italian title: Il racconto dei racconti)     A criminal mastermind plots his biggest heist yet. A low-level crook obsesses over his ex-wife. A burlesque dancer prepares to escape. A trio of cops bumble around the City of Angels on everyone's trail. An early film from Richard Fleischer who would spend the next three decades making tentpole star vehicles- Armored Car Robbery.     All that plus Craig gets philosophical while Dave and Kevin burn. Join us, won't you?       Episode 475- Armored Tales

Armored Against Demon Invasion (audio) David Eells – 7/15/26 Bundle of Serpents Attacks  John David Feagin - 10/31/2011 (David's notes in red) In the brief dream I had, there was a bundle, like the old-fashioned bundle of wheat that was being passed down from two others in line to me, only this bundle was a bundle of serpents. I could tell that they were very venomous serpents, like sea snakes, cobras, mambas, or coral snakes. They tried to bite my arm and, naturally, I did not like this. I did remember that we are immune to the bites of serpents if we are covered in the Blood of Jesus, so this is where I put my trust. I was no longer so concerned and set them aside. At the time I awoke, this was puzzling to me, but now, after some thought, I believe I understand it more fully. The snakes involved have neurotoxins, which attack the brain, that is, our thoughts. We are strictly warned to take captive our every thought (that is, against the knowledge of God's Word) and this now means much more to me than it ever has before. I am certainly no expert with such things or spiritual warfare, but I do know that demons associated with pornography, bitterness, criticism, faction, etc., are very powerful and deadly. I also know that demons can be transferred by men, and inadvertently opening doors, even with the best of intentions, can invite personal attack. I personally believe this was a warning to be very careful, but it may also be a general warning to others as well, and may be applied to all sorts of demonic or thought influence. If the enemy can truly read our thoughts and insert them, as has been shown in a previous UBM study, then this is particularly devious. It is difficult to reject such thoughts if you think they are your own.  Then, this morning, as a sort of confirmation, I saw the UBM update about the bug detector and casting such thoughts to hell immediately in the name of Jesus. I also noticed that when I was praying, in the Word, and seeking wisdom in such matters, my thoughts were clear, but when my guard was down, my own thoughts and emotions in the matter, no matter how well-intended, were somewhat intoxicating. So, forewarned is forearmed. God bless always in His service.  Be careful of slander and criticism for the purpose of making disciples. It comes only from demons, and those they can use, and it comes for only one reason -- to impart demons and poison minds against someone the devil hates. Demons impersonating aliens to turn the world to the mark of the beast to destroy Christianity. The Word for “heresies” or “parties” in Galatians 5:20 means “a self-willed opinion leading to division”. The word for factions among these works of the flesh means separating followers through selfish ambition. Demons impersonate righteous indignation but are actually criticism or new revelation. {Jas.3:14} But if ye have bitter jealousy and faction in your heart, glory not and lie not against the truth. {15} This wisdom is not [a wisdom] that cometh down from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. {16} For where jealousy and faction are, there is confusion and every vile deed.   Bluffing Demons & Spiritual Authority  Sandy Shaw 11/09/2011 (David's notes in red) The way this dream starts is that I'm walking into this room, and I'm watching a group of men (some I know, some I don't know) who are turning around and leaving the room. I ask the ladies there, “Where are the men going?” (These men are the chosen.)  The women who are there tell me not to worry because they need to go -- they have to go. The Lord wants them to go. When this happens, I feel like all the women are in unity that the men needed to go. (The spiritual catching up to the throne anointing of those who will return as the Man-child reformer ministry.) I then grab Tina's hand and ask, “Don't you feel the winds of change?” She answers, “What?” Then I say, “The change. The winds of change. Don't you feel the winds of change?” (From this point on, everything will change both positively for those who love God and are called according to His purpose and negatively for the wicked; a separation of the wheat from the tares. Tina ended up going factious, the opposite of Sandy.)  Then I go from there to an ancient-looking town square or plaza. People are walking all around. There are archways all around the square leading into different hallways, buildings, or rooms. It looks and feels like it's an ancient city. (Archways were made famous by the ancient Romans, who were the first to apply the technique to a wide range of structures. We are seeing a revival of the iron and clay of Daniel's end-time vision of the 10 toes of the world beast kingdom. There is no dispute that the iron is the seed of the Roman Empire.) As I'm walking slowly through this square, I'm praying. I'm praying continuously because I can feel the presence of evil so strongly there. (Great darkness is about to descend as the principality of the old Roman Empire prepares to take charge and make the covenant with many, as spoken of in Daniel 9:26,27.) As I'm looking at some of the people, they look human, but for a brief moment, I can see certain demons that are controlling them. (As we watch this progressive revelation, the people who belong to the body of the beast become less and less human and more and more demon, just as those who belong to the body of Christ become less and less human and more and more sons of God. Those from among the people of God who do not forsake their evil will go with the wicked. {Rev.22:11} He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still: and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him do righteousness still: and he that is holy, let him be made holy still. In the days before the coming of the Lord, at the end of the tribulation, Jesus will come in and then with His saints. {2Th.1:7} and to you that are afflicted rest with us, at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power in flaming fire, {8} rendering vengeance to them that know not God, and to them that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus: {9} who shall suffer punishment, [even] eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might, {10} when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all them that believed (because our testimony unto you was believed) in that day.) As I'm praying, some man grabs my arm and pulls me into one of the hallways. As he is pulling me into the hallway, I hear someone in the square saying, “We gotta find her. We gotta find her. We have to stop her. Her prayers are reaching the throne of Heaven!” (These voices are the demons speaking through men). (Our prayers do reach the throne when sent by faith, and the demons' plans are thwarted. {Psa.10:17} Jehovah, thou hast heard the desire of the meek: Thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear. {Rom.10:13} for, Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. {Jer.33:3} Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and will show thee great things, and difficult, which thou knowest not.) So the man pulls me into this room, and there are mostly men and a few women there. This room is full of uniforms of all different kinds. The people are trying to figure out which uniform to put on. Some of the uniforms are military. As they are excited about finding the right uniform to wear, they are trying them on. I know in the dream that these people are Christians. (The “Christians” will be worried about how to appear to the world in this dangerous time and what lifestyle to put on besides Christ's. A military uniform indicates a militant lifestyle in dealing with this beast system, which will be disastrous since “they who take the sword will die by the sword”. We must put on the uniform of the new man, who is in the image of Jesus and His actions, according to the knowledge of the Word. {Col.3:9} lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, {10} and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him.)  I tell them that they have it wrong and that the full armor that they need to put on is the full armor of God, not one of these physical uniforms made by man. The people just look at me, not receiving anything I'm saying (as apostate patriotic Christians). A man asks me to sit down and take a look at this uniform. Then this man puts on some kind of uniform with a jacket. The jacket and uniform cover his legs, feet, and everything. There is a hood to the jacket that covers his whole head with a face-covering mask. The material of the jacket is a material I've never felt before. They then pour chemicals over it, resulting in no damage. Then they turn a blowtorch on it, and the torch doesn't burn or damage it. (As a volunteer fireman for Exxon, they gave us shirts that had metal woven into them to reflect heat.  Our government is allying with alien impersonating demons like the galactic federation or alliance in hopes of profiting from their “higher technology.” But these hate Christians and will help to bring about the mark of the beast to be rid of them.) They are really excited about the uniform/jacket and are picking it to be the one they will use. (There is no safety outside of God's will. He sent the curse, and no man can defend from it. {Jer.17:5} Thus saith Jehovah: Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from Jehovah. ... {7} Blessed is the man that trusteth in Jehovah, and whose trust Jehovah is. {8} For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, that spreadeth out its roots by the river, and shall not fear when heat cometh, but its leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.) I tell them again, “No, you have it wrong; it's the full armor of God that you need to put on. There is nothing manmade that will help you. You only need the full armor of God”. I then get up and walk out of there into the long hallway. As I walk down the hallway, it is full of men lining up to put on the uniform they think is going to help them in the battle ahead. {Psa.33:16} There is no king saved by the multitude of a host: A mighty man is not delivered by great strength. {17} A horse is a vain thing for safety; Neither doth he deliver any by his great power. {18} Behold, the eye of Jehovah is upon them that fear him, Upon them that hope in his lovingkindness; {19} To deliver their soul from death, And to keep them alive in famine. {20} Our soul hath waited for Jehovah: He is our help and our shield. ... {Psa.34:7} The angel of Jehovah encampeth round about them that fear him, And delivereth them. {8} Oh taste and see that Jehovah is good: Blessed is the man that taketh refuge in him.) After leaving the “Christians” in their false confidence, I kept walking and went back to the square. The ground in the square has changed: it's all dirt now, and I could see through the dirt. I see under the dirt different piles of bones all over the place. No one knows that those bones are there, and no one sees them either. I'm not quite sure why I'm seeing them. (The hidden bones represent those who are martyred behind the scenes because they are not prepared for the battle by putting on the Lord Jesus Christ, as in Romans 13:12-14. Notice that putting on Jesus IS putting on God's armor or protection. Notice that it is always called the “armor of God” because it is God Himself. {Eph.6:11} Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. {12} For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual [hosts] of wickedness in the heavenly [places]. {13} Wherefore take up the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand.  {14} Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, {15} and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; {16} withal taking up the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil [one]. {17} And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: {18} with all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints. Notice that putting on all of these attributes: truth, righteousness, the Gospel, and salvation are manifestations of the Word, Who is Jesus. Putting on Jesus is putting on God. It is the armor of GOD Himself.) I'm walking through the square again, and I'm praying because I need to get to the other side of the square. (Contrary to popular opinion, we will all have to pass through this time of the revived Roman beast with America at the head.) As I'm walking and praying, the people that I saw with demons controlling them, I now see as full-blown demons, but to the natural eye, they still looked human. (The worldly people will be totally possessed, though they appear to each other as normal, and we are seeing more of this happening now. The D.S. can only be picked out by their leftist demon doctrines.) There was one demon that would walk really fast. So fast that it seemed as if he was flying. This demon went right in front of my face, standing right in front of me but he could not see me. He was really angry and talking with authority, telling the other demons, “We have to find these people who are praying! NOW! NOW, I say! Find them! (Prayer by those who believe in its power will be both destructive to Satan's kingdom and defensive to those who walk in the Lord's Kingdom. {Jas.5:16} Confess therefore your sins one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The supplication of a righteous man availeth much in its working. {17} Elijah was a man of like passions with us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain; and it rained not on the earth for three years and six months. {18} And he prayed again; and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.)  I was standing right in front of him, praying, and the demon had no clue that I was there. (In other words, I was hidden in Christ.) So, I keep walking and when I get to the right-hand corner of the square, I look. I stop, turn around, and I'm looking! I'm watching these people. And the room is not really a room. The way that it feels is completely off, like when you walk into a room, and you can see the light, yet you can see shadows behind things. This was now completely reversed. There was light where shadows would normally be. There were bits and pieces of light. It was completely off, completely out of order. It just didn't feel or look right. (When the light is dark, and the dark is light, it is when good is called evil and evil is called good. This is where demon-possessed society is and has been going. {Isa.5:20} Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! We see this with demon-possessed people now.) After I walked through there, I saw what looked like some kind of old train depot-type thing. I know it's some kind of old transportation system. I'm in this room where there are two big fences with gates -- a cement-type fence. There is a gate, and people are going in and out of the gate. And then there is like a middle part where a lot of people are walking -- a lot of traffic. (To get where they want to go, Christians can't walk where the masses do in their bondage, spiritually speaking. {Mat.7:13} Enter ye in by the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many are they that enter in thereby. {14} For narrow is the gate, and straitened the way, that leadeth unto life, and few are they that find it. We must be conformed by the Word within.) On the other end is the same kind of gate that people are entering this place from somewhere else. When I go there, I'm waiting for Tina, Sam, and my mom. I feel like Tina and Sam went to get my mom wherever she was to bring her here. I knew that it hadn't been very long since I had seen Tina and Sam, but that I hadn't seen my mom in a while. Tina and Sam were getting ready to go through the gate that's on the other side to go to the middle. My mom stopped them and said, “No, we can't go that way. We have to go the other way”. (Sandy said that she felt that if they had gone into the middle, they would have died. This warning was not taken seriously by them and they spiritually died. They did not listen. This is where the people of God need to go from the worldly to the spiritual; there cannot be ‘a halfway', ‘a lukewarm'. This would mean spiritual death to them in this time and a spewing out of the body of Christ. {Rev.3:15} I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. {16} So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.) If you walked all the way around to the end, there was another part that was covered by the fence. They did not walk in the middle part. They had to walk all the way around to where I was. (The path of least resistance, or the shortcut, is the wrong way. The worldly church offers many of these. Just listen to them, and they will show you the quick and easy way to get saved and fly away, but the end is death.) They were almost down to that part, and there was another little gate to walk to the middle. My mom stopped and turned around and told Tina, “Grab Sam. He cannot walk in the middle. There is no middle; he can't walk in the middle”. (None of those who are lukewarm, middle-of-the-road walkers will spiritually survive.) As Sam goes toward the middle, Tina grabs him and they walk all the way around to where I was. I greet them and hug them. (This awakening was temporary.) Then I tell them, “Things are not what they seem to be”. My mom then says, “It's okay, it's okay, because everything that is happening is according to God's will. We just need to stay in constant prayer. {Pro.14:12} There is a way which seemeth right unto a man; But the end thereof are the ways of death. We just need to stay in constant prayer”. (In the days of strong delusion and deception, there's much advanced technology now using AI, CGI, and programming through drugs, mind control and manipulation, etc., we cannot walk according to our carnal mind or senses, or we will stumble. Prayer without ceasing is our command.) So, I'm walking ahead of them. Tina is walking on one side, my mom on the other side, both holding Sam's hand. Sam was not as old as he is now. He looked to be eight or nine years old. (We will have to help guide those Christians who are not yet mature in discernment. God will hear their prayers, too. Samuel is Hebrew for “God heard” or “God's name”. Shem is a variant of Sam, meaning “name”. Shem was the father of the people of the name, as Christians are now. Shem was the father of the Israelites.) Sam was trying not to act afraid when there was the presence of evil all around us. Even amongst all the evil, we knew we were under the protection of the Lord. There was no safe place other than the arms of God. I bent down to talk to Sam in his ear, saying, “It's okay to be afraid; you just fear the Lord. Don't fear anyone else or anything else. Nothing can harm you because they have to go through the Father first. Don't be afraid”. (Fear permits faith to be robbed and the enemies to take advantage of us. It is faith in reverse. {Psa.23:4} Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; Thy rod [of correction] and thy staff [of direction], they comfort me. {5} Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: Thou hast anointed my head with oil; My cup runneth over. (With this anointing of the Holy Spirit, we should give the good confession.) {6} Surely goodness and lovingkindness shall follow me all the days of my life; And I shall dwell in the house of Jehovah for ever.) Then we started walking back to the square. The dirt has changed again. The dirt now seems like it's a mud-like consistency. But to the natural eye, it looks just like dirt. I still see the piles of bones now with the mud going between the fingers, toes, etc. But now I also see something like a circle; it's a tunnel and I can see it at weird angles and kind of far. The things that I'm seeing in these tunnels are body parts with the flesh. I'm seeing arms cut off, legs, face, head, all different kinds of body parts. They look to be freshly cut off from the body because I can still see the blood. The blood is still wet. I can see the nerves on some of these parts still shaking and moving. (The ‘powers that be' have made many underground tunnels connecting cities, where the military and special forces have found remains of countless people who were murdered by satanists. According to other dreams and prophecies I have seen, it is in these tunnels that the saints will be expected to renounce Jesus or die. It behooves us to walk carefully so we fill out both our days and our ministry.)  I'm getting ready to step, and I stop. I put my hand out to stop my mom, Tina, and Sam as I watch the details of the body parts freshly cut off. It was gross. I then asked them if they saw those parts. Tina and my mom saw it; Sam closed his eyes. He didn't want to see it. I then asked, “But it's not there?” My mom said, “Oh, but it is there under the dirt”. We stopped then and there, and we started praying. We were praying in tongues. While we were praying, I told Tina to take my mom and Sam to the outer part of the square, find a place, and begin praying and interceding. And that's what they did. (As with the Nazi persecutions in the death camps of World War 2, many will deny for the sake of soothing their own conscience that these persecutions are happening, but they will be out of sight and out of mind, “under the dirt”.) I was taking very small steps as the Lord was guiding me and telling me to. (Every step in these days will need to be according to the Father's will because of the dangers. {Eph.5:15} Look therefore carefully how ye walk, not as unwise, but as wise; {16} redeeming the time, because the days are evil.) And I was just praying and praying and praying. As I was starting to pray, I saw the people in the square now completely as demons. I no longer saw them as humans. (The righteous will be able to see in the spirit realm those who have been displaced by demons.) As I was walking, I felt as if they were trying to find me, and they were bumping into me, but didn't know they were hitting me. I kept praying more and more. I prayed out loud, and they could hear me but couldn't see me. (Invisibility in the spirit realm makes for peace from the flesh realm.)  That big demon I saw earlier that walked really fast was now there, and there were more demons of his stature and size. They were frantic, upset and mad. One of them said, “Now there are more praying. Do you hear them praying? We have to find them NOW! I'm telling you, their prayers are reaching the throne room of Heaven. Things are going to change. Find them NOW!” There was such an urgency to find us. I walked all the way to the end of the square and I turned around and asked, “Okay, Lord. What is it that You want me to do?” (Truly, “things are going to change.” Walking to the end of the square represents that the saints will go through this beast tribulation and bring the Gospel to the whole world. Watch volume one of Hidden Manna for the End Times.) I don't know where the Lord took the men whom I saw at the beginning of the dream or what had happened, but I just knew that they were coming back. The demons were still looking really hard for the people who were praying. Not just us, but they were looking to stop everyone everywhere from praying. The Lord told me to step a foot back in the square, and I did. When I stepped back in the square, I was speaking the Word out loud. Everything that the Lord was saying to me, I was speaking out loud. The demons could now see me and were in my face, trying to intimidate or scare me. I knew that they could not touch me. They were telling me to shut up, be quiet, that my prayers were dead, and I was doing no good. “Don't you know we can kill you? We can take you out! You are nothing!” Many of them kept saying those things to me over and over. (Demons are full of threats to discourage the prayers and works of God, but most Christians don't recognize them as coming from demons, but feel they are their own thoughts and are defeated. The knowledge of God's Word will enable them to defeat the deceivers. {2Co.10:3} For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh {4} (for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds), {5} casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.) I said to them, “I am nothing, but through Christ Jesus He is everything. He is my all and all. Everything that I need, God is. God is the source. God is the strength. God is the great I AM! One of the demons was so close to my face that I could smell his stench. So close that he was almost touching me. I told him, “You are nothing! You can't do anything other than what my God allows. You are nothing! (God is sovereign over all, but He will allow many things that we allow because He has delegated authority over all the power of the enemies. {Mat.18:18} Verily I say unto you, what things soever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and what things soever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. {19} Again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father who is in heaven. ... {Luk.10:19} Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall in any wise hurt you. {20} Nevertheless in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. I heard a noise behind me, and I turned around and saw all the men who had gone out, and there were more with them coming, and with what looked like Christ in the middle. Everyone was dressed in white. When Christ and all those men came on the scene, some of those demons became smaller and smaller. The ones that were already small were trying to run, but they couldn't go anywhere, as you have seen in cartoons, only this was not a cartoon; they were liquefying before me into a puddle on the floor, and then they were gone. I was backing up as the men were going forward. I went with Tina, Sam, and my mom to this place where I saw a lot more people who were praying and interceding. Then I woke up. (Who are these men whom the demons fear? The Lord is in the Man-child ministry to raise up many in the image of the Lord. These are coming to wreak havoc on the spiritual hosts of wickedness. Hallelujah!)  After I woke up from the dream, I heard the Lord say, “Write this down: “You have all power and authority in the name of Jesus Christ. Understand and know the power of His blood. For you are adopted, therefore you are entitled to everything. Hear Me! Understand Me! Know Me! For then the enemy cannot deceive you for what's ahead.”   The Men Whom the Demons Fear Seven spiritual shepherds who are sent by the Man-child to minister to the seven Churches, which is mentioned in Hidden Manna for the End Times. First, Jesus is coming to be manifested in the Man-child ministry. (Mic.5:2) But thou, Beth-lehem Ephrathah, which art little to be among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting. Obviously, this is Jesus. (3) Therefore will he give them up, until the time that she who travaileth hath brought forth (the man-child body): then the residue of his brethren shall return unto the children of Israel. Jesus left because of rebellion and will return in the Man-child who is born of the travailing woman in Revelation 12. As Jesus fed the former rain woman in a body of flesh, so He will feed the latter rain woman in a corporate body of flesh. (Mic.5:4) And He shall stand, and shall feed [His flock] in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord His God: and they shall abide; for now shall He be great unto the ends of the earth. The Jesus of the former rain was revered by the disciples and feared by His enemies, but because of apostasy, this has not been true for many centuries since because they have had “another Jesus.” The Man-child body and those disciples who follow in His/their steps will restore this, and He shall be “great unto the ends of the earth”. The Man-child's teaching will bring peace to the seven churches that are at war with the beast and harlot. (5) And this [man] shall be [our] peace, When the Assyrian shall come into our land, and shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise against him seven shepherds and eight principal (Hebrew: “princes among”) men. The corporate body of the Man-child is “this man” who brings peace to the corporate woman with his teachings, which enable her to resist the beast invasion. He brings peace because the “Prince of peace” is in his heart. Spiritually speaking, we are the “land” with the “palaces” that the corporate beast is trying to invade. (1Co.3:9) For we are God's fellow-workers: ye are God's husbandry (Greek: “tilled land”), God's building (“palaces”). As we shall see, the beast is a corporate spirit from the abyss (Rev.17:8) that inhabits the body of the wicked (3) and seeks to inhabit the righteous and mark them. Notice that the “Assyrians” are called “him” which shows that they are seen as the corporate body of the beast. Since the Assyrian beast kingdom passed away over 600 years before Christ, they could not have been connected with Jesus or the Man-child. Therefore, God, as usual, was using the beast of that day to represent a particular aspect of the end time beast. As the Assyrian beast did not conquer Jerusalem, so the end time beast will not conquer those spiritually abiding in the New Jerusalem. (Mic.5:5) ...Then shall we raise against him seven shepherds and eight principal (Hebrew: “princes among”) men. The Man-child Jesus raised up twelve apostolic shepherds primarily to restore those of the “twelve-tribes of Israel” who would listen (Mat.10:5; Act.26:7; Jas.1:1; 1Pet.1:1). In exact parallel, the corporate Man-child will raise up “seven” corporate apostolic “shepherds” primarily to restore the “seven churches”. The Man-child's primary job is to feed the unleavened bread of the Word to disciples in order to manifest Christ in them. These will be the new leadership for the seven churches in the last 3 1/2 years. These “seven shepherds” are not sectarian religious leaders but one man in Christ and are inhabited by one “prince of peace”, Jesus, hence “eight princes among men”. In the next chapter of Micah, we will see that even after the Man-child Jesus' 3 ½-year ministry, He promised to be with the shepherds in spirit “unto the consummation of the age,” (Greek: Mat.28:20) hence “eight princes among men”. These princes are sons of the King and have authority over His realm of the seven churches. The seven churches of Revelation are a type of seven different types of Christians in the Church. (Isa.4:1) And seven women (the Church) shall take hold of one man in that day. The “one man” here is Jesus manifested in the Man-child. Then He will be manifested in the seven shepherds and then in the true Church. One of God's solutions to the apostasy in the Church is new leadership. (Isa.1:26) And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counselors as at the beginning. The same type of counselors in the former rain will be given in the latter rain. Here is another confirmation of the Man-child giving His revelation to seven shepherds, who passed it on to the seven churches. When the Man-child Jesus sent His shepherds out, He called them “apostles”, meaning “one sent forth”. In other words, the shepherds were the Man-child's messengers to the churches. As a type of the Man-child, John on the Isle of Patmos was “a partaker with you in the tribulation” (Rev.1:9) when he was caught up to the throne of God and given a revelation of the coming tribulation to give to the seven churches. (4:1) After these things I saw, and behold, a door opened in heaven, and the first voice that I heard, [a voice] as of a trumpet speaking with me, one saying, Come up hither, and I will show thee the things which must come to pass hereafter. (2) Straightway I was in the Spirit: and behold, there was a throne set in heaven, and one sitting upon the throne. Like Jesus, he was given a revelation of the apostasy in the Church and told to send it to the seven churches by the hand of seven angels. (1:11) ...What thou seest, write in a book and send [it] to the seven churches.... (Rev.2:1,8,12,18; 3:1,7,14) To the angel of the church in Ephesus (and so with Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea) write.... “Angel” in these cases is the Greek word angelos meaning “messengers” and is also used of ministers in the New Testament (Example: Luk.4:24,27; 9:52). The equivalent Hebrew word in the Old Testament is translated “messenger” when speaking of priests (Mal.2:7), John the Baptist, and Jesus (Luk.3:1). Since it doesn't make sense that John sent the revelation by angels, he must have sent it by seven minister messengers to the seven churches. This is exactly what Jesus did as Man-child. He shared His revelation with minister messengers, who shared it with the seven churches.

Join us as Robert Balch shares what it was like to be the tip of the spear for the 14th Armored division during WW2. Beginning with a brutal baptism by fire in Gertwiller in November 1944, his platoon advanced as the spearhead column, crossing the German border at Wissembourg and conducting high-stakes scouting missions directly against the Dragon's Teeth of the Siegfried Line. The unit faced severe physical and psychological strain, enduring freezing foxholes during a tense "battle of nerves" near Bitche, before being forced into a chaotic, full-scale tactical withdrawal when hit by a massive German counter-offensive during Operation Nordwind, the last German counter offensive of the war. Robert reflects on their service during the post-war occupation of Germany, members of the platoon fiercely defended the purpose and conduct of the American GI, emphasizing that their resolve was permanently forged by the trauma of combat and the firsthand horrors of liberating concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald. Support the show

We put on the armor of God by resting in Christ's victory and imitating him through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Referências do EpisódioWEBINAR: A CONFIANÇA COMO PORTA DE ENTRADA DO ATACANTEArmored Likho digging a snake pit: inside the covert BusySnake Stealer campaignNew "Bad Epoll" Linux Kernel Flaw Lets Unprivileged Users Gain Root, Hits AndroidCyber Criminal Group TeamPCPRoteiro e apresentação: Carlos CabralEdição de áudio: Paulo Arruzzo Narração de encerramento: Bianca Garcia

Last time we spoke about the battle of Zhongtiao Mountain. On 7 May 1941, Japan launched a three-front assault on the Zhongtiao Mountains, striking multiple axes and using paratroopers to disrupt Chinese command. On the northeastern front, Wu Shimin's 98th Army scored a success at Wangcun, routing about 2,000 attackers. Elsewhere, three-pronged Japanese forces drove south toward Yuanqu with overwhelming artillery, armor, and coordinated movement. During the first night, paratroopers found the Chinese headquarters already disordered: orders were unclear and communications with most units collapsed. By 8 May, the First War Zone could no longer coordinate; armies fought alone. From mid-May into June, Japanese units swept the mountains, manning river crossings to block retreat and eliminating pockets. Surviving Chinese formations escaped or regrouped south of the Yellow River, but the three-year Zhongtiao defensive system was destroyed in about twenty days, sharply worsening Japan's strategic situation in northern China.   #208 Operation Plus: The Road to the Second Battle of Changsha Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, 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 the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia 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 where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. In the autumn of 1939, Japanese forces under General Yasuji Okamura launched a major offensive aimed at capturing Changsha — the gateway to China's interior and one of the most important cities still under Nationalist control. The First Battle of Changsha ended without a decisive Japanese victory. Chinese forces, anchored by the Ninth War Zone under General Xue Yue, managed to repel the advance, inflicting significant casualties and preserving the city. It was a notable achievement at a time when Japanese arms had swept across vast swathes of Chinese territory, and it reverberated through both the Chinese military establishment and the watching international community. Following the Japanese withdrawal, Chiang Kai-shek convened the Second Nanyue Military Conference to carry out a thorough assessment of the battle and to plan for the period of relative calm that would follow. The conference sought to answer several pressing questions: What had worked in the defense? Where had coordination broken down? How could the period of Japanese inactivity be used most productively? Chiang made it clear that this respite was not to be wasted. Commanders of all the major war zones were simultaneously expected to serve as governors of their respective provinces, ensuring unity of military and civilian command. Chiang himself set an example by personally assuming the governorship of Sichuan Province and focusing attention on that province's production and reconstruction efforts. The conference produced broad directives for the reconstruction of war-zone provinces and the intensification of military training. For Hunan, responsibility for implementing these directives fell on the shoulders of General Xue Yue, who had emerged from the First Battle of Changsha with greatly enhanced prestige and authority. The reason Changsha and Hunan more broadly attracted such persistent Japanese attention was geographical and logistical. The Yuehan Railway — running from Yueyang in northern Hunan down through Changsha and south toward Guangzhou — was one of the most important transportation arteries in China. Whoever controlled it could move troops, equipment, and supplies across vast distances with speed and reliability. Opening up the Yuehan line would, in Japanese strategic thinking, effectively connect their forces in Central China with those in South China, allowing for a gradual tightening of the strategic noose around Chiang Kai-shek's wartime capital at Chongqing in Sichuan Province. Hunan was therefore not merely a defensive problem for the Chinese; it was a strategic prize that Japan would inevitably seek to take. Xue Yue, whose headquarters were in Changsha, was well aware of this logic. With the First Battle of Changsha behind him and the province in need of recovery, Xue Yue turned his attention to governance. He was not content to wait passively for the next Japanese offensive. He believed that a province that was economically productive, administratively disciplined, and politically stable would provide a far more durable foundation for military resistance than one that was disorganized and demoralized. At the beginning of his tenure as effective governor of Hunan, Xue conducted a thorough survey of the province's situation and then articulated a philosophical framework for his administration in the form of a "three-character policy," consisting of three guiding principles: "Peace"  (an), "Convenience" (bian), and "Sufficiency" ( zu). In Xue's formulation, "Peace" meant that the population should be able to live, work, and conduct their daily affairs free from fear and disruption. "Convenience" meant that policies should benefit the people, the nation, and the war effort simultaneously — eliminating bureaucratic obstacles and inefficiencies. "Sufficiency" meant achieving adequate levels in all essential areas: enough soldiers, enough food, and enough wisdom in leadership. These seemingly simple principles were elaborated into extensive implementation guidelines. The announcement of this framework immediately sparked debate across Hunan's intellectual and administrative community. Veteran officials and scholars were divided. Some praised the policy as a clear and practical framework for wartime governance. Others dismissed it as hollow wordplay, offering nothing new or substantive. A minority was more sharply critical, warning that if such superficial philosophizing was all Xue could offer, the province would decay into warlordism. Undeterred by the criticism, Xue Yue built upon the three-character framework with a set of "Six Policies" for governing the people of Hunan: "Benefiting the People, Raising the People, Educating the People, Protecting the People, Managing the People, and Utilizing the People." Each of these six principles came with specific implementation targets and performance metrics, designed to be measurable rather than aspirational. This second round of policy announcements generated yet another wave of debate, but Xue pressed forward with implementation regardless. From the beginning of 1940, Xue vigorously pushed for the expansion of agricultural and industrial production across the province. His approach was comprehensive and at times uncompromising. He approved funds for the reconstruction of the Zhongshan Road National Goods Exhibition Hall in Changsha — which had been destroyed in the catastrophic Changsha Fire of 1938 — and by February 1940, 114 shops had reopened there. In March, he approved the "Eight Measures for the Construction of Sheds in Changsha," drafted by the Changsha Municipal Police Bureau, which relaxed housing regulations and helped address the severe shortage of accommodation for the city's residents, who had largely fled or been displaced during the fire and the Japanese offensive. One of the more creative initiatives of this period was the Ninth War Zone's order requiring all troops stationed in Hunan to cultivate a certain amount of farmland in their spare time, growing grain to supplement military rations. Local residents came to refer to the plots tended by soldiers as "soldier's fields" (bing tian). This policy served a dual purpose: it reduced the logistical burden of feeding the garrison forces from civilian stocks while keeping soldiers productively occupied during lulls in fighting. It also served to maintain a degree of goodwill between the military and the rural communities on which any prolonged resistance ultimately depended. One of the most consequential steps Xue Yue took to stabilize Hunan's governance was an aggressive campaign against corruption. On April 15, 1940, he ordered the execution of Tian Weizheng, the county magistrate of Changsha, and Wang Lun, the county magistrate of Xiangtan, both on charges of corruption and abuse of office. The proclamation accompanying the executions was blunt: "This serves as a warning against corruption and establishes the authority of the law in upholding discipline." The message was not lost on officials across the province. In the months that followed, a sweep of investigations led to the punishment of numerous corrupt officials and illegal businessmen. The effect on public confidence in the provincial government was significant. Citizens and soldiers alike perceived that there was now a leadership willing to hold its own accountable — a stark contrast to the corruption and self-dealing that had plagued Chinese provincial governance throughout the war. Xue was also attentive to the ideological dimension of the war effort. On May Fourth Youth Day — itself laden with nationalist significance, commemorating the great student movement of 1919 — Xue attended the provincial capital's sports meet and delivered a speech before thousands of young people entitled "Iron Youth, Iron Spirit, Sacred Labor, Sacred Survival." The speech was aimed at galvanizing the younger generation, connecting their personal futures to the fate of the nation and the resistance against Japan. That same month, in May 1940, the 110th executive meeting of the Hunan Provincial Government revised and approved the "Hunan Province County Heads Performance Evaluation Method," a document that formalized military service and support for the war effort as the primary criterion in the evaluation of local officials' political performance. Throughout 1940, the provincial government and the Ninth War Zone organized a series of training courses for officials, including courses specifically designed for guerrilla cadres, women cadres, and village chiefs — an indication that preparations for sustained, decentralized resistance were underway. Xue himself addressed the cadre training group with a speech on "The Conditions That a Well-Rounded Cadre Should Possess." By the end of 1940, after more than a year of sustained effort, Hunan had broadly recovered to the administrative and economic condition it had enjoyed before the Changsha Fire, when the reformist official Zhang Zhizhong had governed the province. Agriculture, industry, and commerce all showed measurable improvement over their wartime lows. The government's accounts for the year reflected growth across all sectors. This recovery was not merely statistical; it represented a genuine rebuilding of the province's capacity to sustain a prolonged defense. Soldiers were better fed and equipped, local officials were more disciplined, and the civilian population had a functioning, if still imperfect, relationship with the wartime state. Early in 1941, Xue Yue's reputation had grown to the point where local gentry and public figures jointly petitioned for a bustling street in Changsha to be named after his courtesy name — a mark of genuine popular esteem unusual for a military governor in wartime China. While Xue Yue was rebuilding Hunan, events at the geopolitical level were reshaping the strategic environment in ways that would directly precipitate the Second Battle of Changsha. On September 27, 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, formally joining the Axis powers. The pact alarmed the Western democracies and accelerated their support for China. On December 2, 1940, the United States Congress passed a bill approving a one-hundred-million-dollar loan to China. On December 10, 1940, Britain followed suit, approving a ten-million-pound loan. Both measures were explicitly understood — by all parties — as responses to Japanese expansion and Japan's recognition of Wang Jingwei's collaborationist puppet government in Nanjing. For the Japanese military leadership, these loans signaled that the international community was not prepared to accept Japan's fait accompli in China, and that the war of attrition against the Nationalist government could not be allowed to continue indefinitely. The imperative to resolve the "China Incident" — as Japanese officials euphemistically called the war — before the international situation deteriorated further became more urgent than ever. On January 16, 1941, the Japanese Army adopted the "Long-Term Operational Guidance Plan for China." The document acknowledged a painful internal contradiction: Japan could only sustain a protracted war in China, yet it simultaneously demanded a swift resolution to the conflict through strong military pressure. The plan's solution to this contradiction was to intensify operations while "taking note of the international situation" — meaning that military actions should be calibrated to avoid triggering direct American or British intervention. The plan called for large-scale offensive operations in the summer and autumn of 1941. The companion document, the "Annual Plan for Showa 16 (1941)," was more specific. It required Japanese troops stationed in China to conduct a major operation in the summer and autumn of that year with the aim of dealing a heavy blow to the main force of the "Whampoa Military Academy" — the term used by Japanese planners to describe the core of Chiang Kai-shek's professional officer corps, trained at the Whampoa (Huangpu) Military Academy and regarded as the backbone of the Nationalist army. The stated goal was to destroy the Chongqing government's will to continue resistance and thereby force a resolution to the China Incident. Xue Yue himself read translated summaries of both these documents when he traveled to Chongqing to report on his work in early 1941. He returned to Hunan in a reflective, and determined, frame of mind. For much of the period between the two Battles of Changsha, the Japanese Eleventh Army — the primary force facing Xue Yue's Ninth War Zone — had been commanded by General Yasuji Okamura, a seasoned officer with whom Xue had developed a degree of familiarity through combat. By early 1941, it became known that Okamura was to be transferred to the Military Advisory Council at Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo — a prestigious but more removed role. Xue Yue reflected on this change with a mixture of relief and characteristic self-confidence, reasoning that whoever replaced Okamura would be a new adversary to be dealt with on the battlefield, and that there was no reason to lose to him regardless. Korechika Anami received his appointment as commander of the Eleventh Army on February 15, 1941. From the first day of his appointment, he carried a detailed battle map of the three provinces facing his command — Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxi — along with comprehensive intelligence files on both sides' troop dispositions and strengths. He studied these materials constantly, on trains, in waiting rooms, wherever he had a free moment. By the time he formally took up his post on March 10, 1941, he already had a clear operational vision for the coming campaign. Before reaching the front, Anami stopped in Nanjing to meet with General Hata Shunroku, the Commander-in-Chief of the China Expeditionary Army. Hata had himself arrived in China in early 1941, having been summoned by the Emperor before his departure and entrusted with what the Emperor called the sacred mission of resolving the China Incident. The two men talked through the night, their conversation returning repeatedly to the planned summer-autumn offensive. Hata urged Anami to annihilate the main force of the Ninth War Zone in the area south of the Miluo River — to destroy, once and for all, the core of Chiang Kai-shek's best troops. "If this battle is fought well," Hata told him, "the entire war situation in China will undergo a huge change." Anami listened and agreed, though he had his own reasons to want the battle to go well. He had voluntarily relinquished the prominent position of Vice Minister of the Army at General Headquarters in Tokyo to take this field command — a significant personal sacrifice that reflected his deep desire for battlefield achievement. There was a personal dimension to Anami's motivations as well. His second son, a bright and lively boy to whom he was deeply attached, had died in combat in China. Anami carried a photograph of his son wherever he went, and had resolved to transform his grief into a consuming commitment to military excellence, whatever the human cost. At the Eleventh Army's headquarters in Yueyang, Anami found the war game board and operational plans that Okamura had left behind. He did not immediately begin issuing orders. Instead, for weeks he immersed himself in the problem, traveling between divisional headquarters and subordinate commands to gather ground-level perspectives, or sitting alone for hours before the great map, motionless and in deep concentration. His new chief of staff, Kinoshita Isamu, who had come from a divisional unit and was unfamiliar with his commander's temperament, could only keep silent company during these long sessions. When Anami eventually convened his headquarters personnel to explain his operational intentions, he made a pointed critique of the First Battle of Changsha. "The reason why the last battle in Changsha did not achieve great results," he said, "was that the troops were too dispersed and the main direction of attack was not highlighted, so they could not form a strong impact and lethality." He named the new operation "Operation Plus" — a deliberate contrast with what he saw as the subtracted, diluted efforts of the previous campaign. His concept was one of radical concentration: rather than dispersing the attack across multiple fronts in Hubei and Jiangxi while simultaneously advancing on Changsha, Anami proposed pulling the forces from southern Hubei and northern Jiangxi and massing them in front of northern Hunan. The effect on his staff officers when he demonstrated this redeployment on the map was electric; one of them involuntarily exclaimed aloud at the sudden clarity of the advantageous position that mass concentration would create. Anami's personality was, in the judgment of those who worked with him, fundamentally different from Okamura's. A commander's fighting style is shaped by his character, and Anami's character was defined by intensity, focus, and a willingness to commit fully. These traits would shape "Operation Plus" from conception to execution. On June 22, 1941, five and a half million German troops launched Operation Barbarossa — the largest military invasion in history — against the Soviet Union. The news reached the Japanese military establishment with a degree of surprise, since such a momentous operation should, under the terms of the Tripartite Pact, have been communicated in advance. Beyond the procedural slight, German strategists had placed themselves in the position of fighting a two-front war, something Japanese generals found strategically bewildering. The outbreak of the Soviet-German War forced a serious debate within the Japanese General Staff. One faction argued for a "northward advance" — seizing the opportunity to strike the Soviet Union from the east while its military was fully committed in the west. Another faction argued for a "southward advance" — moving into Southeast Asia and the Pacific to secure the oil and raw materials that Japan desperately needed. Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe adopted a wait-and-see compromise, authorizing secret preparations for war in the north known as Operation Kantokuen while continuing to monitor developments. Now it just so happens I released a Patreon/Youtube Members exclusive episode covering Operation Kantokuen the previous month. I highly recommend it, fascinating what if piece of history. For just a teaser I can briefly summarize it: Operation Kantokuen — officially designated "Kwantung Army Special Maneuvers" — was Japan's plan for a large-scale invasion of the Soviet Far East, developed in the summer of 1941 following Germany's launch of Operation Barbarossa. When news of the German invasion reached Tokyo, Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka and senior Kwantung Army officers argued Japan should abandon its neutrality pact with the USSR and strike in coordination with Germany. An Army-Navy compromise on June 24th allowed preparations to proceed so long as they did not interfere with Japan's concurrent southern ambitions. On July 5th, Matsuoka and Major General Shin'ichi Tanaka convinced War Minister Hideki Tojo to back a more ambitious scheme, and the two men then bypassed the War Ministry entirely, securing Emperor Hirohito's personal authorization. The plan was structured in two stages — a buildup and readiness phase followed by an offensive phase — during which the Kwantung Army would await an explicit order to attack. The Army General Staff calculated that any campaign had to conclude by mid-October before Siberian winter conditions made logistics impossible. Their ideal force requirement was 16 to 22 divisions supported by 800,000 tons of shipping, though this assumed the Soviets would first redeploy half their Far Eastern infantry and two-thirds of their armor westward against Germany. The planned order of battle ultimately settled on 24 divisions — 17 committed to the eastern front and 5 concentrated near Mutanchiang. The opening blow was designed to fall on the Primorye (Maritime Province) front. The 1st Area Army, commanding the 3rd and 20th Armies along with elements of the Korea Army, would cross the border south of Lake Khanka to shatter Soviet defensive lines and menace Vladivostok. Simultaneously, the 5th Army would strike south of Iman to cut the Trans-Siberian Railway and isolate the Maritime Province from northern reinforcements. In the north, the 4th Army would hold the Amur River line before pivoting to attack Blagoveshchensk, while two additional reinforced divisions would invade Northern Sakhalin in a land-and-sea pincer. A second phase envisioned capturing Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk, and Sovetskaya Gavan, with amphibious operations considered against Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Kamchatka itself. The operation was to be supported by a massive air assault — between 1,800 and 2,700 aircraft combining Army and Navy aviation — aimed at annihilating the Soviet Far East Air Force in the opening hours, after which Japanese air power would shift to tactical ground support and interdiction of Soviet supply lines. Armored assets included roughly 800–900 tanks, mostly Type 97 Chi-Has and Type 95 Ha-Gos. Kantokuen was also allocated chemical weapons stockpiled in Manchuria and biological agents produced by Unit 731, intended for deployment against Soviet rear areas and supply lines. Despite the scale of planning, the operation was already fatally compromised before it could be launched. Japan's industry and logistics could not sustain a two-front war while remaining bogged down in China. On August 1st, 1941, the United States enacted a total oil embargo that cut off 80% of Japan's fuel supply, and the Dutch East Indies followed. With oil reserves sufficient for only 12–18 months of peacetime consumption, a Siberian offensive that would consume an estimated one to two million barrels per month was no longer tenable. By August 9th, the Army General Staff conceded that seizing the oil-rich territories of Southeast Asia was the overriding strategic priority. The Kantokuen buildup was formally terminated, and Japan turned south — setting the course toward Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War. Now Kantokuen held some practical consequences for the China Expeditionary Army was disruptive. Serious consideration was given to redeploying units of the Eleventh Army away from their positions facing Hunan and northward toward Manchuria, in anticipation of a possible war with the Soviet Union. This threatened to derail Anami's planning entirely. The cloud of uncertainty hung over the Changsha operation for several weeks. Despite the disruption, Anami refused to let the operation be indefinitely deferred. On June 24, 1941 — just two days after Barbarossa began — he formally approved the operational guidance outline for the Changsha offensive and set a planned launch date of September 15. This was an act of deliberate institutional pressure: by formalizing the plan so quickly in the wake of Barbarossa, Anami made it harder for higher authorities to redirect his forces northward without explicitly cancelling a plan already in motion. The gamble worked. The northward deployment option was ultimately shelved, and the Eleventh Army remained in place to conduct its summer-autumn offensive. While Anami and his staff at Yueyang bent over their map of Hunan, so too did Xue Yue and his staff at Changsha. Two nearly identical colored military maps were laid out on large tables in two different command centers — one in Chinese, one in Japanese — showing the same terrain of Hunan, southern Hubei, and western Jiangxi. The Xiang River appeared on both as a green ribbon; Dongting Lake as a blue maple leaf. For those responsible for commanding the impending battle, the war game was the battle, played out in simulation before blood was shed. Xue Yue, his Chief of Staff Wu Yizhi, Chief of Staff Zhao Zili, and the intelligence and operations officers of the Ninth War Zone Command engaged in extensive map exercises throughout the summer of 1941. Wargaming pieces bearing unit designations moved across the terrain as staff officers reported troop strengths, timings, and geographic objectives. The summer heat was intense, and there was nowhere cool in Changsha; Xue and his staff worked in the heat, sweating heavily as they played out scenario after scenario. It was during these sessions that Xue came to believe he had grasped the essential shape of the Japanese plan. Reasoning from the known Japanese strategic posture and the pattern of the first battle, he concluded that the enemy would again advance roughly the same way. His counter-strategy was as follows: in northern Jiangxi and southern Hubei, the war zone would launch pincer attacks on Japanese forces that were not part of the main offensive, targeting the area north of Chongren and Xingan, east of Yichun, Wanzai, Tonggu, and Xiushui, to defeat them in detail. In northern Hunan — the main theater — the war zone would deliberately allow the Japanese to advance, luring their main force south of the Miluo River into the area north of Jinjing, Fulinpu, and Sanjieqiao, and then launch a devastating counterattack to encircle and annihilate them. After a successful counterattack, Xue imagined pursuing the broken Japanese forces all the way back to Yueyang, and beyond — even, in his more expansive moments, recapturing the great cities of Jiujiang and Wuhan, lost in 1938. This was the "lure and annihilate" strategy, and it was not merely a hope — it was the formal operational order issued to the forces of the Ninth War Zone. In August 1941, the Ninth Military Front officially assessed that Japan intended to capture Changsha and obtain supplies, and the lure-and-annihilate plan was formalized accordingly. What Xue Yue did not know — and could not know through his intelligence network alone — was that Anami's operational philosophy was fundamentally different from Okamura's. The critical assumption underlying the lure-and-annihilate plan was that the Japanese would attack in roughly the same dispersed, multi-front pattern as the first battle. Anami's "Operation Plus" invalidated this assumption entirely. By concentrating his forces in front of northern Hunan rather than dispersing them, Anami would strike with an impact Xue's cordon defenses were not designed to absorb. Xue was, unknowingly, planning to fight a replay of the first battle against an opponent who had studied that first battle as a case study in what not to do. Despite this fundamental intelligence gap, the Chinese were not without information. From mid-August 1941 onward, residents of mountain villages and riverside communities in northern Jiangxi and southern Hubei began reporting unusual nighttime activity. Faint sounds of motor engines and the footsteps of large columns moving on main roads were heard after dark. On moonlit nights, fleets of motorboats were seen moving without lights on the rivers, visible only as dark shadows on the water. The local population was puzzled and unsettled: what kind of unit was this, and what were they doing? The answer was that Anami's forces were conducting their pre-offensive assembly under cover of darkness and strict light discipline, moving four divisions totaling approximately 120,000 troops into position for the attack on Hunan. Military and civilian intelligence agents operating in these areas crouched in the bushes, enduring insect bites through long nights, watching and recording everything they witnessed. The information was relayed by human chain, passed from one agent to another across a network stretching back to Changsha, until it was collated and placed on Xue Yue's desk by staff officers from the Ninth War Zone Command's Intelligence Department. Xue studied the reports carefully, comparing them against his map. The evidence of a large Japanese build-up in northern Hunan was unambiguous. But Xue was suspicious of its implications. "Mobilize troops? All the troops are moved to northern Hunan. What about Tongcheng? What about Yueyang? Impossible! Feint? What does that mean? You want me to concentrate my troops in northern Hunan so you can attack from both sides?" His staff officers were similarly uncertain how to read the intelligence. The scale of the Japanese concentration defied the pattern of previous operations, and Xue's trained instincts — calibrated against years of dealing with Okamura — led him to doubt what his intelligence was plainly showing. He concluded, without firm evidence, that the concentration must be a feint or a deception. On August 26, 1941, Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo issued Mainland Order No. 538, which authorized the Commander-in-Chief of the China Expeditionary Army to "temporarily conduct operations beyond the designated operational area in Central China during the summer and autumn." This order provided the formal imperial sanction for the Changsha offensive, lifting any remaining bureaucratic constraints on Anami's operational plan. It represented the final piece of institutional authorization, completing a chain that stretched from Anami's June 24 approval of the operational outline through Hata's advocacy at the China Expeditionary Army level to the formal imprimatur of the Imperial General Headquarters. With Mainland Order No. 538 in hand, the Eleventh Army's final preparations could proceed without ambiguity. The original planned launch date of September 15 would in practice be moved forward, with combat beginning on September 7 — itself a date chosen partly to maximize the advantage of late-summer weather conditions in the Hunan river-crossing terrain. By the time Anami's forces were assembled, the operational force was formidable. Estimating that the enemy facing them comprised fifteen divisions from the Chinese 4th, 37th, 99th, 74th, and 26th Corps, Japanese planners calculated — somewhat optimistically — that two infantry battalions would suffice to handle one enemy division. To provide a margin for error and to ensure decisive striking power, the Eleventh Army committed forty-one infantry battalions distributed across four full divisions and three specialized task forces, supported by twenty-nine artillery battalions. This represented a massive concentration of firepower and manpower along a relatively narrow axis of advance, precisely as Anami had intended. The objective was clearly stated: "to deal a major blow to the Ninth Military Front in order to thwart the enemy's plan for resistance." Japanese senior leadership reiterated at every briefing that the mission was emphatically not territorial — the army was not to occupy Changsha or secure it for long-term administration, and it was not to forage for supplies. The goal was destruction of Chinese combat power. On the Chinese side, the Ninth Military Front had not been idle. Since the Battle of Shanggao in March 1941 — a significant Chinese defensive victory in Jiangxi that had inflicted heavy casualties on Japanese forces attempting to advance into the province — the Ninth Military Front had ordered its troops to cooperate with guerrilla units operating in the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi border region, conducting harassment operations against Japanese logistics and communications. This cooperation served both to maintain offensive pressure and to train the irregular forces that would prove invaluable in a war of attrition. By August 1941, Xue Yue had assembled a force of thirty-five divisions organized into thirteen armies across three army groups, totaling 378,307 troops. The headquarters of the Ninth Military Front remained in Changsha. Xue had also assessed his forces' combat readiness with some confidence: in the summer of 1940, the Ninth War Zone had dispatched one corps from each army group and one division from each corps on summer offensive operations against Japanese positions, explicitly testing their readiness in real combat. Although no major victories had been achieved in those operations, the exercise confirmed that troop morale was high and that combat effectiveness had recovered to the level of the First Battle of Changsha. If anything, Xue thought, after another full year of training, they should be better. 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. Operation Plus, emphasized concentrating forces and creating a decisive breakthrough rather than dispersing attacks across multiple fronts like in earlier battles. On the Chinese side, commander Xue Yue developed a "lure and annihilate" strategy, expecting the Japanese to fight like before; however, Anami's concentrated approach undermined these assumptions, making a Chinese counteroffensive far harder to execute.

In Episode 585 of The Pull Bag join TFG1Mike and we have the return of Jesse Earley as they go back to IDW Publishing to read through and discuss the M.A.S.K. - Mobile Armored Strike Kommand - Riding V.E.N.O.M.'s Trail! They talk about the story, the art, the whole M.A.S.K. concept, the 80's cartoon, and the future of M.A.S.K. with Skybound Entertainment and the Energon Universe. However the focus is definitely on this 12 issue collected edition of the IDW Comics series! As always Make Your Great Escape Into Comics!!!Be Sure You Visit The GeekCast Radio Network for ALL your Podcast NEEDS!USE TFG1Mike's LinkTree to Follow Him!!Use Steve Megatron's LinkTree to Follow Him!!From 2011-2014 we gave you MASKED MAYHEM!Head On Over To Another Comic Review to hear the stuff Mike did 3 Years Ago! TF #1 #2-3, 4, 5, and 6!Matrix Prime on YouTube!Follow TPB on X and you can also Like TPB on Facebook!!TPB Asks You: Will you be checking out the SkyBound Entertainment ENERGON UNIVERSE Comics?TPB Asks You: What was your favorite part of TRANSFORMERS V1 if you've read it?

LA VERNIA — Preliminary investigation has led the La Vernia Police Department to cite wet road conditions as the reason for a rollover accident last Wednesday morning involving an armored vehicle. The accident occurred as thunderstorms rolled through the area in the wake of overnight storms. According to La Vernia police Sgt. Joshua Johnson, a Loomis armored truck was traveling eastbound on U.S. 87 near Wiseman Lane in La Vernia May 27 just after 9 a.m. when the driver braked and the vehicle hydroplaned on the wet highway. The vehicle “left the roadway, entered a ditch, and rolled over,” Johnson... Article Link

Law-enforcement personnel and first responders are on the scene of a single-vehicle rollover accident on U.S. 87 near Wiseman Lane at the southern La Vernia city limits.     Drivers are urged to approach the area with caution.     The rollover occurred just before 9:30 a.m.     Personnel with the Wilson County Sheriff's Office and crews with Bexar County Emergency Services District 12, and others, were working to extricate the vehicle's crew. Continued rainfall from heavy thunderstorms rolling through the area was hampering their efforts.     The weather may have contributed to the crash.     No other vehicles appeared to be... Article Link

Law-enforcement personnel and first responders are on the scene of a single-vehicle rollover accident on U.S. 87 near Wiseman Lane at the southern La Vernia city limits.     Drivers are urged to approach the area with caution.     The rollover occurred just before 9:30 a.m.     Personnel with the Wilson County Sheriff's Office and crews with Bexar County Emergency Services District 12, and others, were working to extricate the vehicle's crew. Continued rainfall from heavy thunderstorms rolling through the area was hampering their efforts.     The weather may have contributed to the crash.     No other vehicles appeared to be... Article Link

We all have gaps in our leadership skills and capabilities that can be tough to spot on our own. But once seen, we cannot unsee these gaps, and we know we must take responsibility for our own growth and development. In this episode, I'm digging into Brené Brown's framework of Armored Leadership versus Daring Leadership from her book Strong Ground, with the hope that you will be able to spot some of your gaps in your leadership habits. I break down the 11 aspects of armored leadership, those self-protective behaviors that feel like safety but actually keep us stuck, and explore what shifts when you choose daring leadership instead: vulnerability, authenticity, and real growth.  We talk about what drives armored leadership in the first place, from scarcity mindset and social conditioning to past trauma, and how those patterns show up in organizational culture without us even realizing it. Then we flip the lens to daring leadership, where leading proactively and strategically rather than reactively becomes possible. We talk about values in leadership, the role of failure, and how building a belonging culture starts with the willingness to be vulnerable as a leader. This is leadership development that meets you where you actually are, for better or worse. This is an invitation to take an honest look at where armor and your need for self-protection are costing you. As I share in the episode, leadership is an act of service, and daring leadership asks you to show up fully, armor down, and lead from a place ot humility, curiosity, and authenticity.  Links Mentioned: Hire Sara to speak: saradean.com/speaking Coach with Sara: https://saradean.com/executive-coaching-services Connect with Sara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saradeanspeaks Watch Shameless Leadership episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@saradeanspeaks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode 291-Drop Your Socks and Grab Your Glocks Also Available OnSearchable Podcast Transcript Gun Lawyer — Episode Transcript Page – 1 – of 14 Gun Lawyer — Episode 291 Transcript SUMMARY KEYWORDS Gun rights, Second Amendment, gerrymandering, New Jersey, federal law, AK-47, AR-15, gun laws, Supreme Court, carry permit, gun dealers, political power, racial discrimination, gun ownership, legal battles. SPEAKERS Speaker 1, Teddy Nappen, Speaker 3, Evan Nappen Speaker 1 00:11 Lawyer, Evan Nappen 00:18 I’m Evan Nappen. Teddy Nappen 00:20 And I’m Teddy Nappen. Evan Nappen 00:22 And welcome to Gun Lawyer. So, Teddy, what’s on your mind today? Teddy Nappen 00:27 Well, I never realized the guy that wrote the Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks, was related to Mel Brooks. I thought it was a common name. Evan Nappen 00:38 What? How is he related to Mel Brooks? Teddy Nappen 00:40 It’s his son, so. Evan Nappen 00:42 Oh, my G-d! Is he gonna make a movie, you know, Young Zombie or something? Teddy Nappen 00:44 Yeah, no, Young Zombie. Evan Nappen 00:46 Or a zombie movie with lots of farts? Page – 2 – of 14 Teddy Nappen 00:52 No. Evan Nappen 00:53 Blazing Zombies, Blazing Zombies. Teddy Nappen 00:55 Yeah! Blazing Zombies, that’s it, kind of like what was it, Abraham Lincoln and the Vampire Abraham Lincoln. Evan Nappen 01:02 Right. I think Blazing Zombies would probably be very popular. Teddy Nappen 01:06 Yeah, I know, right. Let’s see them try to reboot Blazing Saddles. Good luck with that. Evan Nappen 01:12 Well, they could do Blazing. Yeah, but if they did Blazing Zombies, they would never be able to say certain words that they used in Blazing Saddles. Teddy Nappen 01:23 Yeah, like calling the zombies a bunch of leg draggers. Evan Nappen 01:26 Ha, ha, ha, ha. Actually, we’re kind of dealing with a zombie apocalypse with the Democrat party lately. I think they are a bunch of, you know. They don’t have brains. They just try to eat brains. Teddy Nappen 01:48 Yeah. And unfortunately, they keep coming up with new ideas to screw us out of our rights. Evan Nappen 01:55 Right! That’s it. That’s what they do. They send the horde out to eat our rights. They do the horde, and they just try to get everybody on board to sacrifice for their pure unadulterated political power. Like trying to get college athletes to boycott their entire athletic career, over, for example, they’re flipping out over the ending of racial gerrymandering. I mean, it’s kind of unbelievable when you watch them talk about this being, you know, Jim Crow II, when all that is being done is ending racial discrimination, with setting up voting districts. Somehow ending racial discrimination is Jim Crow. Only a Democrat with zombie brains could ever make that argument with a straight face. Teddy Nappen 02:59 Well, it’s also very funny because, if you cut to all of New England, where the breakdown is roughly like 40 to 50% Republican, and there’s no representation for that. And so, they, and it’s all the states are heavily, heavily gerrymandered, like zero representation for Republicans, but oh, that’s fine. It’s only Page – 3 – of 14 when the Republicans say, you know what? You’ve established the rules of engagement, and we will oblige. That’s just how the game is played. Evan Nappen 03:29 Now, you would think that the Democrats would have expert knowledge on Jim Crow, because they’re the ones that started it. The original Jim Crow laws were done by Democrats after the Civil War. And, of course, who opposed the Civil Rights Act? The Democrats. They were the originals. And then for them to get up now and claim how much they want to oppose what they are perceiving as Jim Crow laws are kind of rich. And, of course, it isn’t. It is the actual elimination of the racial discrimination that is in place by way of their gerrymandering, and this is very important to our gun rights, Teddy. Very important to our gun rights. As voting is turned around, so that it actually reflects the voters, as opposed to these bizarre jurisdictions engineered for Democrats just to maintain power, we will see more and more advances in the fight for our gun rights. It is the other side there that constantly is trying to take away our Second Amendment rights. Teddy Nappen 04:52 What always makes me laugh, though, is they always try to say the party switched. They always make that argument. By the way, it’s a completely disproven argument. Like, okay, what time period? Was it under Senator (Robert) Byrd, who was a, what was it? The Grand Wizard? Evan Nappen 05:07 The Grand Wizard of the KKK. Teddy Nappen 05:10 Which, by the way, he was a mentor to Joe Biden throughout his political career. But no one talks about that. Or when Joe Biden, what did Joe Biden say on the stage? Evan Nappen 05:21 Oh, don’t even. Teddy Nappen 05:21 Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. Evan Nappen 05:25 party, Evan Nappen 05:25 The party hasn’t switched. They’re just trying to build a bigger fence with a plantation. They are the ones trying to run a plantation, and that’s what gerrymandering, prior to this Calais Supreme Court case, that’s what it was really about. How does the Democrat maintain their plantations of voter districts, to maintain their power? Page – 4 – of 14 Teddy Nappen 05:50 Yeah, exactly. They put up the creation that Johnson, what was it? We’re going to get these guys voting Democrat for the rest of their lives. They created the giant welfare state. Evan Nappen 06:01 Yeah. And by the way, he didn’t even call them “these guys”. Teddy Nappen 06:05 I know I was trying to, I was paraphrasing. Evan Nappen 06:11 Describing them. Yeah, just their hypocrisy definitely knows no bounds, and this time period now is somewhat encouraging, because a lot of everything that they’ve built on, including taking our gun rights, it’s collapsing all around them. It’s very encouraging to see that. You just saw the primaries go here. Trump with what 34 zero or whatever on his picks, and that helps get us further with the expansion of our Second Amendment rights. This is all a part. Because part of MAGA is the rebirth of the power of the Second Amendment, that is a part of MAGA, guys. You’ve got to know that, and you can see it. We are now in a completely different world than in the Biden era. I mean, Biden was essentially engaging in a clamp down, a clamp down on our rights in every way that he could abuse federal power to do so. And we’re seeing incredible changes in the other direction now. Teddy Nappen 07:29 I’ll give you the highlight of that. We dealt with this, where it was weaponization. They were going after dealers for the most minuscule things with a zero tolerance. And now that’s been eliminated, and it has been helping. Of course, New Jersey picks up the mantle from their new AG. Now they’re going after FFL dealers and demanding records detailing the sales of Glocks, which I could have sworn they already knew about the sales, because every time you purchase. Evan Nappen 08:01 Yeah, this is what is such crap about these subpoenas to all the dealers to turn over their records of the last decade for every Glock sold. New Jersey has a pistol purchase permit system, which is a form of register. So, the State Police already have the computerized registered database of every purchase of a Glock since the computerization of the pistol permit system, which completely covers the decade that they’re requesting. In other words, the only reason for this subpoena is essentially, in my opinion, to harass dealers because the information itself is already at their fingertips. Now, the bigger legal question is, is that something legally they’re allowed to access because New Jersey has Administrative Code provisions that mandate confidentiality on all gun records of purchase acquisition. All that kind of stuff is protected by that confidentiality. So, maybe they themselves thought that trying to just get dealer records, maybe could do an end run over their own Administrative Code, preventing the release of this information. Although there is a provision in the Code that says for law enforcement purposes it can be accessed. But this is a lawsuit, not law enforcement purposes. So, it really is interesting the approach they’re taking. If they’re righteous in the law, in being able to access this data, then they can access it through the database in the appropriate legal manner, if they are qualified. And if not, why are they subpoenaing dealers to turn over information that is already in the possession of the State of New Page – 5 – of 14 Jersey? And these application forms, et cetera, are protected by way of their own Administrative Code provisions, setting out confidentiality. Teddy Nappen 10:20 So, Teddy Nappen 10:21 Yeah, I will say what’s really messed up is I love the AG’s response. So, this was actually from 2A News Team. They asked these questions and the AG responded. Oh no, no. These requests are not seeking information about individual purchasers or any person’s identifying information about their purchases. However, the subpoena says that exact wording. Evan Nappen 10:50 Right. Teddy Nappen 10:51 Documents show sufficient sale or transfer of Glock handguns from you to New Jersey customers. Literally, it’s the first line in the subpoena. Evan Nappen 11:03 Right. And the thing about Glocks. Look, if you own a Glock, you know you better hold on to it. This is the new tactic of the anti-Second Amendment rights movement. To try to ban and restrict Glocks because of a claim that they can be relatively easily converted to fully automatic using what’s called a Glock switch. But mere possession of a Glock switch under federal law is considered a machine gun in and of itself, and these switches are banned in New Jersey as well. The component is already illegal. So, trying to link Glocks to them so that they can further take away one of the most popular self-defense handguns in the world. This is their gambit. This is their gambit now to try to do that. Teddy Nappen 12:10 So, it was also interesting, is pull it was from the article. Out of the 15 FFLs that they subpoenaed, they were roughly, there was 15 of those FFLs were out of the total authorized Glock dealers. So, I’m trying to think the strategy of it. If they’re trying, if these were just the 15, were kind of like where they went after those two gun dealers and forced them to basically have to essentially declare and register every purchase or gun-related material. Are they just going for the small fish to then go after the whole? Kind of like a staff? Teddy Nappen 12:46 Out of curiosity. Could there be a constitutional challenge because there’s a federal firearms license? Could you either make the Supremacy Clause argument or just going with the idea of there shouldn’t be a state license, too? Evan Nappen 12:46 Okay. At a minimum, it’s designed to harass gun dealers. I mean, New Jersey is dedicated to that principle, given the excesses that they go to regarding being a New Jersey retail firearm dealer. I mean Page – 6 – of 14 having an FFL, that’s a federal firearm license. New Jersey also requires for a dealer to have a New Jersey retail dealer firearms license, and the retail dealer firearms license is what is managed by the state of New Jersey. And that’s where you see an incredibly excessive and additional amount of requirements, far beyond what federal law requires, designed to be a legal discouragement to being a dealer. Also, it’s been used in the past as a pretext to raid individuals that had FFLs but did not have a NJ retail dealer license. I’ve had cases on this where individuals that had a federal firearms license for Curio and Relic, collector licenses, the state alleged they were federal firearm licensees and acting as dealers, which they were not. They are collectors. And because they alleged they had a federal license, they needed a New Jersey firearm retail dealer license. They proceeded to conduct raids on the individuals that held Curio and Relic licenses. So, this is one of the risks out there. They were able to purge and merge the federal list to the state list of New Jersey retailers. Evan Nappen 14:31 Well, the problem is that the federal firearm law is expressly not preemptive. It’s designed to be the absolute minimum gun control harassment that exists throughout the entire country. And then states are invited to, you know, this was the philosophy, invited to go wild. So, you have the baseline of the federal law, which has many constitutional questions about it itself, expressly not being preemptive, and the states are left to their own devices to create whatever stricter and stricter and more harassing and more discouraging gun laws that they want to pass. And as long as those laws are somehow upheld constitutionally, they can keep on going. There is no cap. There’s no cap placed on the attack on our rights. It should exist, but doesn’t, except in a few very narrow areas where there is express preemption. Evan Nappen 16:22 One of those places where there is express preemption is Title 18 926 A for interstate transport of your guns. You can transport your guns cased, unloaded, locked, not readily accessible, etc., so that you can go through bad states in your travels. There’s areas of preemption, specifically for carry, like LEOSA, Law Enforcement Officer Safety Act, where retired and active law enforcement can carry, regardless of the state law that might otherwise try to prevent them from doing so. There’s actually preemption for carry. It was the original carry preemption, which a lot of people don’t know was for armored car security. Armored car personnel was actually the first federal carry preemption. And then today we’re pushing to try to get national reciprocity, which is in effect national preemption, mandating that every state recognize every other state’s carry rights to that particular resident in whatever state that resident might be in. But generally across 99% of all the federal gun laws, it is expressly not preemptive. So, this is where the problems come in, because there is no cap on the damage that states can do. Teddy Nappen 17:55 So, it would require an, it would basically either require an act of Congress to amend it to include the preemption. Evan Nappen 18:02 Yes, literally, what would be great is if we finally get a cap. Now, in theory, the cap on bad gun laws is this little thing we call the Second Amendment, and the Second Amendment’s cap was fairly broad. The Page – 7 – of 14 cap, as I recall, it said shall not be infringed. Okay? Shall not be infringed. So, any infringement is arguably a violation of the Second Amendment. Therefore no state or federal government, because we now have it incorporated to the states through the McDonald case, through the 14th Amendment, like many of our other constitutional rights. No state or federal law should infringe on our gun rights. Yet we’re knee deep in battles over various gun laws that are utterly passed with contempt of the Second Amendment, and then we have to go through these fights over it. Teddy Nappen 19:09 Yeah, and it’s definitely. I noticed that whenever it comes to New Jersey, I mean, I know people always talk about state powers, how they, you know, always leave it to the states. However, there are some things that there’s just so much abuse by the states that what they do, I mean, just right now, what they are doing right now is disgusting. Where they’re just harassing these dealers, going after them, wasting the taxpayers dollars. And it’s the level of where, all right, the federal government needs to step in, and I can see everyone’s like, “Oh, don’t allow the feds to get in, but here is the truth. They abuse it so much that there’s just no, there’s no value. Evan Nappen 19:54 Well, frankly, if we simply made the federal law, as it stands right now, as the preemptive. Just passed a law saying federal law preempts state law. Then every state gun law would become mooted out. Done. Invalid. Because only the federal law would apply. And currently under federal law there are no prohibitions on carry. There’s no addressing that in a negative way. Now, they might say, because the federal law doesn’t address it at all, then the states could still try to regulate carry. But then we still have the constitutional Second Amendment with the Bruen decision and such regarding carry. Then if we look at how the impact would be beyond that, well, everything else that these states try to pass, particularly on sale, possession, or on any of that, it would all be preemptively null and void by way of a federal law that they first engineered to just be a minimum to suddenly become the maximum. And that would concentrate our efforts only to having essentially federal fights, which would be pretty good, because instead of the pro-gun movement, those that defend our gun rights, and instead of having them fighting in every jurisdiction, everywhere, every state or county or town that passes some anti-Second Amendment gun rights law that we have to go in and challenge, we would have a preemptive federal law. So, every battle would simply be taking place, for the most part, at the federal law level of preemption, and it would basically gut that entire expenditure of the battle that we constantly have to foot the bill and pay for. It would be an interesting thing to conceptualize, to finally have a federal full preemption. I think it’s workable. Teddy Nappen 22:18 Yeah, and look, I never thought we’d ever see, like, the tax stamp removed for suppressors, and having a chance for it to be removed from the NFA, so anything is possible. We just need to get the right people in, and the right amount of votes. Evan Nappen 22:30 Yeah, it might, it might actually be, but then you’ll have even pro-Second Amendment folks, say, oh, states rights, states’ rights, you know. And they become so focused on so-called states’ rights that we still are losing our rights, because, as you say, Teddy, there’s an abuse by the states of our rights, and Page – 8 – of 14 this could end that abuse. So, when you have an abuse of state power, then the federal government really should come in to stop the abuse by the states. Teddy Nappen 22:53 I think it was in New York, and this might have been years ago. Do you remember they posted the map of who owned firearms? Evan Nappen 23:15 Yeah, it was New York, yeah, right. And then the public record, and then you could, it was searchable when you could find the gun owners. Teddy Nappen 23:25 Of course, a lot of them got robbed and harassed, and everything in that, which is just like, all right, fine. And you know what? When is it going to be enough for states’ powers? When they say everyone wears a yellow armband? It’s a picture of an AR, like states power, states rights. It’s such BS for allowing the abuse that comes down from New Jersey. Where you have the gulag that is the symbol of oppression of a totalitarian regime, and it just pisses me off so much when I hear that argument. I hear the people that make perfect the enemy of good, every time. How long did it take us to lose our rights to these people? Decades. And that’s what it’s going to take to get them back. It’s just disgusting. Evan Nappen 24:12 It is. But we’re in the fight, and we have to keep this fight on. Politically, the big picture is critical in our ability to win and get these changes. As much as all this is aggravating, if you step back, man, I can step back and look from having been practicing gun law for over 40 years. I can look and say we have come a long way. We’ve come a long way. The fact that we can finally have a carry permit in New Jersey is astounding. It’s astounding that we got to that, because that was something that seemed like an impossibility, and yet it got achieved. You can see amazing other advances. Evan Nappen 25:07 Hopefully, shortly, we will see the Supreme Court take a hardware case. We need them to take a hardware case. What I’m talking about is so-called assault firearms or assault weapons, magazines, where there is hardware that’s been banned. Where the constitutionality of the ability to ban hardware finally gets established out of the Supreme Court to end it, to stop it. That’s something that we’ve got to get to, and I think we’re going to see that soon. It is coming. There are so many cases, and they’ve been going up the chain. I think we’re going to see it. I don’t know if it’ll be, you know, this session. We’re getting close, and that’s what we saw, the prediction by even the U.S. Attorney General. The U.S. Attorney General saying they believe that ARs and others, Supreme Court will eventually pronounce they are legal. Teddy Nappen 26:16 I know there’s like, I know there’s rumors, everyone, about the different justices retiring. Imagine if Justice Thomas’s retirement, his last decision that he does, is he legalized and ends the assault firearm bans across the country. Page – 9 – of 14 Evan Nappen 26:31 Oh, that’d be just wonderful. I’d like to see St. Thomas. Teddy Nappen 26:36 Yeah. You know they did the commemorative, like Heller, like revolver, I remember that they. Evan Nappen 26:43 Which I have, I have a commemorative Heller Smith & Wesson .38. Not only was it commemorative and put out by Smith when the Heller decision came down, so it’s actually a Smith & Wesson bonafide commemorative, but I have that, I think I showed it to you, Teddy, it’s signed personally by Dick Heller, who’s a friend. So, I have a signed commemorative of the Heller decision, signed by Dick Heller himself. Teddy Nappen 27:10 Well, the next one I want it to be just, it’ll say the name of the case, and it’s just the Clarence Thomas smile that you see. The GIF area Thomas commemorative AR. Evan Nappen 27:23 And then, of course, the Left would complain that it’s racist because it’s a black rifle. No. You can’t be racist against Thomas, right? I mean, they always talk. Teddy Nappen 27:37 No, no, they say you can, because they say that he’s not black enough. If you know his entire history, the like, his, you could not, you could not live as a like a black American, like his entire thing, like inner city kid, like I think he was a single, like single mom, they like raised, like literally did the like live the entire black experience like it would be a lifetime movie. It would be amazing. Evan Nappen 28:05 He is an amazing man with actually the embodiment of the American dream, in effect. Coming from an absolutely underprivileged, you know, situation where he rose to be one of the greatest Supreme, one of the greatest, for sure, Supreme Court justices. His amazing story about an amazing man. Just great. And they don’t, because just like with gerrymandering, where there are plenty of Republican minority reps out there, it’s not racism at all. It’s the Democrat power grab, and because Judge Thomas is conservative, they refuse to acknowledge the benefit of having such a great man. Teddy Nappen 29:03 Yeah. And he is what Joe Biden would describe as articulate, bright, and clean. Evan Nappen 29:09 Oh G-d. Teddy Nappen 29:13 I love how Biden said that to Obama. I know. Page – 10 – of 14 Evan Nappen 29:16 I mean. He would constantly say these things. And yet they will extrapolate 10 times out to try to paint Trump as racist when Biden was. He bona fide said stuff that was absolutely insane with racism. Stereotypical racism. Teddy Nappen 29:44 Yeah. Evan Nappen 29:45 Yeah, really. I mean, just come on. Insulting and amazing. Well, and let me tell you, Teddy, about our good friends at WeShoot. WeShoot is an indoor range. You and I have shot there, and you love WeShoot, don’t you, Teddy? Teddy Nappen 30:04 I had a great time. Evan Nappen 30:05 We always do, every time. We got our certifications there for our carries, and you can do the same. They’ve got a great pro shop, great trainers, great facility, and it’s really conveniently right off the Parkway in Lakewood, New Jersey. Lakewood, New Jersey. You want to check out the WeShoot website at weshootusa.com. And you should make sure you get on their email list, because WeShoot sends out a lot of great stuff via email. All their great deals and specials and cool events they’re doing and all kinds of fun things. WeShoot is extremely dynamic, and they are always doing something. WeShoot is just super fun. So, if you’re looking for a great range to belong to, a great place to shoot, a great place to hone your skills, get your training, you cannot do any better than WeShoot in Lakewood. Check out weshootusa.com. Evan Nappen 31:18 Let me also mention my book, New Jersey Gun Law. It’s the bible of New Jersey gun law. It is a book used by, well, everybody. If you want to understand New Jersey gun law, you need my book, which is not surprisingly titled New Jersey Gun Law. You can get your copy at EvanNappen.com, EvanNappen.com. When you get the book, you’ll see it is very large. It is over 500 pages. It’s 120 topics, all question and answer. And the greatest thing about my book is that the book itself can be used as a weapon. It’s that big. I’m not advising you to do that, but should you need to, yes, that is a book you don’t want to get hit in the head with. So, check out New Jersey Gun Law at EvanNappen.com. Teddy, I bet you have something else up your sleeve to tell us. Teddy Nappen 32:18 Well, one of the things that did come up, and I just thought, what the heck? This is in the feed of the New York Times. Where are all the AK 47s? Like, where have all the AK 47s gone? I know. Evan Nappen 32:19 I don’t know. Where have they gone? Page – 11 – of 14 Teddy Nappen 32:21 I know. It was a very interesting article, but it was also very strange. Just reading through, I don’t know if you ever heard of Jim Fuller? Evan Nappen 32:47 The Fuller Brush Man? Teddy Nappen 32:49 Apparently, he’s a gunsmith. He makes custom AKs. I’m not too familiar on that, but he was going into details of, like, and they were talking about the collapse of the AK market. Evan Nappen 33:01 Well, there is a downturn, but prices aren’t collapsing. Teddy Nappen 33:06 Yeah, I mean, how much are you going for? Evan Nappen 33:08 One of the Russian AKs going. You know the problem is, what led to the big boom, of course, was when we were importing AKs. We could have them from China and Russia. Although we were getting really cheap ammo, and there was so much of the surplus ammo, the 762 by 39 that it became extremely popular, because you could so reasonably shoot. Then it became so overwhelmingly possible that even American-made guns, like the Ruger Mini 30, for example, were being made in 762 by 39. Then you also had the influx of very reasonable SKSs. I mean, I remember when SKSs were under $100, for an SKS, and then you know the reasonable AKs and all that coming in with cheap ammo. Man, it was great. Then they started to ban the import, the ban of Chinese, ban of Russian, and the cheap ammo dried up. The guns that were coming in, the imports like those were dried up. Teddy Nappen 33:56 Apparently, it was in 1989 under Bush, because the shooter used the Chinese AK. Evan Nappen 34:32 Please remember, it was Bush. It was Bush, the Republican, the neocon, and this is one of the things that you got to always remember. Even though they may have the “R” there, they’re not necessarily a friend of the Second Amendment. Teddy Nappen 34:47 Yeah. And then the article tries to highlight more of like 2014 where the annexation of Crimea, the U.S. put sanctions on Russia. So, there goes all the Russian AKs. Evan Nappen 34:57 Well, not just Russian AKs. I mean, we were getting a lot of great guns, really cool guns from Russia, you know. We’re getting SKSs – originals, beautiful guns. I mean, phenomenal. Russian SKSs are probably the best SKS ever made, machined, gorgeous. Mosin-Nagant rifles, right? They were very Page – 12 – of 14 reasonable, and you know, you want to do the enemy at the gates, man. You got your gun and super strong, tough rifles. You know, a lot of great stuff could come in, and now we don’t see it anymore. And prices have skyrocketed. I mean, if you look at SKS prices today, holy crap. You’d be lucky to find a Chinese SKS that you used to be able to buy for less than $100, one in great shape today for 600 bucks, you know? I mean, easily 600, some even more. I’ve seen Russian SKSs pushing $2,000 a piece at the gun show. I mean, the prices are just unbelievable, because the market has a limitation now to the quantity that’s out there. And by the way, there’s probably only a 10th of the amount of Russian SKSs compared to Chinese SKSs. Even with that, the prices are way up there, and one of the reasons is that the SKSs, for example, are excellent functioning rifles. They’re handy. They function great and are very popular. Evan Nappen 36:36 With AKs, you know, there was that whole growth of it, and we were able to have all that great, cheap ammo. Once you got into an introductory, reasonable AK, then you wanted to up your game with other AKs, and all that. But what’s happened is, with the close out of that, we’ve become more, much, much more AR focused. The AR-15 platform, and everything about it. That’s all, a lot of it is U.S. made, and kind of America’s rifle. I would have to say today that America’s rifle, without a doubt, is the AR-15. Teddy Nappen 37:17 I would also say there’s also just the customization, and I think modularity. Evan Nappen 37:23 Its modularity seems to appeal to a lot of gun folks, because you can add and change and put all kinds of whistles and bells. Teddy Nappen 37:32 That also goes to the tone of American culture versus like the Eastern Bloc of the AK 47. We’re very individualistic, where we will make it so it is something that works for us, versus, you know, the AK 47 is designed, it is designed in that shape or form. You can do some small mods, but generally speaking, you pick up an AK 47 it’s, you know, hold it up to another one, like that’s the level of it. Evan Nappen 37:58 That’s an interesting point, Teddy, about how in those countries they don’t. It’s hard to find a Bubba AK in countries where they make the AKs, isn’t it? They don’t Bubbafi much, do they? But we love to modify, change, and customize, and that’s actually a lot of the fun of it. Let’s face it, it’s fun. It’s fun to add the accessories to fit your needs, make it look cooler, make it function better, make it more appropriate for whatever your needs may be. But then again, the anti-gun rights crowd will suddenly take any given feature and demonize certain features. So, if they are intrinsically evil, that if for some reason you have a telescoping stock on your AR or any other semi-auto, because your stock moves one or two inches back and forth, somehow that is such a huge impact on crime. Teddy Nappen 39:09 Or has a barrel shroud, which they can’t define. Page – 13 – of 14 Evan Nappen 39:12 Oh yeah, well, they try to. Remember. Teddy Nappen 39:15 The shoulder thingy that goes up, you know, the seat belt. Evan Nappen 39:18 The shoulder thingy that goes up is a barrel shroud. Isn’t that interesting? These are the experts that are voting for these laws. They have no clue what they’re even voting for, nor do they care. As long as it’s going against gun owners, they’re for it. They don’t care what it is. Teddy Nappen 39:39 Yeah, and I will say, just from the article, like, they try to, of course, they try to say, oh, Trump’s tariffs is what killed the AK market. There’s like also going from Russia, Ukraine, which they tried to say, you, oh, Poland is one of the key suppliers of Ukraine. No, the United States is one of the key suppliers of military to Ukraine. We’ve, you know, what is it, 40 billion, 80 billion, like crazy amounts, like they’re just still in that. And then again, tariffs are non-inflationary. We’ve known that, we’ve proven it. And I love how they try to say, well, we could get more AKs if we removed tariffs on Poland. Evan Nappen 40:21 Well, you know, it’s pretty bad when the Left media is trying to lure removal of tariffs by saying we could get more AKs in the country. That’s a pretty interesting stretch for them. Teddy Nappen 40:34 I know why they’re doing it. They’re trying to turn gun owners. They’re trying their best to turn gun owners into the debt, which is a ridiculous concept. They’ve demonized them, called them racist, call them everything under the sun. So, good luck trying to convince a gun owner to be considered a Democrat. If they are voting Democrat, you’re voting for your own destruction. I’m sorry. Evan Nappen 40:54 And speaking of destruction of gun owners, that is what GOFUs are. GOFU is our Gun Owner Fuck Ups. Every show we like to highlight the GOFU of the week, and this week’s GOFU is something that is constantly coming my way in the practice of law. And some of you listeners may say, yeah, it’s obvious, but I still have to say it because I keep getting case after case after case. It’s real simple, folks. You need to know your state’s gun laws. Most people understand that they need to know their state’s gun laws, but it doesn’t end there. If you travel out of state, you need to know the state’s gun laws that you’re traveling to. I constantly get cases of individuals that come from other states and end up being criminally charged in New Jersey because New Jersey’s gun laws are nothing like the gun laws of the state they were traveling from. The reverse is true, my friends. The reverse is true. Evan Nappen 42:13 You may have a New Jersey carry permit, but you need to know, if you don’t know, that no other state in America is recognized by New Jersey. No other state’s gun license is recognized by New Jersey. New Jersey has no reciprocity per se. When you travel, there are states where you can carry, because Page – 14 – of 14 despite New Jersey not recognizing their carry license, they’re willing to recognize any lawfully issued state carry. Many of the states, over 70% of the land mass in America, is constitutional carry, where as long as you’re law-abiding, you can carry even without a permit. But you still have to know, because I get calls from New Jersey folks that are getting jammed up in other states, making the mistake that others frequently make coming into New Jersey. Evan Nappen 43:24 So, the GOFU is real simple. Know the gun laws. Know the gun laws of the jurisdiction that you are residing in, and know the gun laws of the jurisdiction that you may be traveling in. It’s critical! I see it every day as a classic of virtually all GOFUs. This is Evan Nappen and Teddy Nappen reminding you that gun laws don’t protect honest citizens from criminals. They protect criminals from honest citizens. Speaker 3 44:05 Gun Lawyer is a CounterThink Media production. The music used in this broadcast was managed by Cosmo Music, New York, New York. Reach us by emailing Evan@gun.lawyer. The information and opinions in this broadcast do not constitute legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney in your state. Downloadable PDF TranscriptGun Lawyer S5 E291_Transcript About The HostEvan Nappen, Esq.Known as “America's Gun Lawyer,” Evan Nappen is above all a tireless defender of justice. Author of eight bestselling books and countless articles on firearms, knives, and weapons history and the law, a certified Firearms Instructor, and avid weapons collector and historian with a vast collection that spans almost five decades — it's no wonder he's become the trusted, go-to expert for local, industry and national media outlets. Regularly called on by radio, television and online news media for his commentary and expertise on breaking news Evan has appeared countless shows including Fox News – Judge Jeanine, CNN – Lou Dobbs, Court TV, Real Talk on WOR, It's Your Call with Lyn Doyle, Tom Gresham's Gun Talk, and Cam & Company/NRA News. As a creative arts consultant, he also lends his weapons law and historical expertise to an elite, discerning cadre of movie and television producers and directors, and novelists. He also provides expert testimony and consultations for defense attorneys across America. Email Evan Your Comments and Questions  talkback@gun.lawyer Join Evan's InnerCircleHere's your chance to join an elite group of the Savviest gun and knife owners in America.  Membership is totally FREE and Strictly CONFIDENTIAL.  Just enter your email to start receiving insider news, tips, and other valuable membership benefits.   Email (required) *First Name *Select list(s) to subscribe toInnerCircle Membership Yes, I would like to receive emails from Gun Lawyer Podcast. (You can unsubscribe anytime)Constant Contact Use. Please leave this field blank.var ajaxurl = "https://gun.lawyer/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php";

What does it mean to armor ourselves in light with righteous living? Welcome to the 167!Connect with usWebsite: https://www.newlifegardner.comFacebook:  https://www.facebook.com/NewLifeGardner/Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/newlifegardner

Sermon, 04/19/2026: Walk This Way...Fully Armored And Steady

It's your Ill-Advised News, the stupid criminals of the day. Support the show and follow us here Twitter, Insta, Apple, Amazon, Spotify and the Edge! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ephesians 6:10–20

News with Sean 4-9-2026 …Kit Kat Bars new being shipped out with Armored Escorts …That Ceasefire isn't going as planned

Luxury vehicle makers have a way of upping the ante, with features that seem more and more unique, opulent and, perhaps, unnecessary.When INFINITI recently unveiled its newest QX65 SUV, it led with the vehicle's unorthodox paint color: dubbed Sunfire Red, this coating is described by the company as “something people will remember.”That's because the rich paint hue, inspired by a "fiery morning sunrise” is said to be “infused with real gold-coated glass flecks.”INFINITI's design team described the requirements of working with this very special paint, noting that INFINITI's supplier must use armored trucks when transporting the gold that's used in the making of Sunfire Red. #Infiniti #LuxuryCars #AutomotiveDesign #CarInnovation #LuxurySUV #CarPaint #AutoIndustry #Manufacturing #AIinManufacturing #FutureOfCars #CarTech #PremiumVehicles #AutomotiveNews #DesignInnovation #CarLovers #LuxuryLifestyle #MadeInUSA #SmartManufacturing #AutoTrends #VehicleDesign

Ephesians 6:10–17

SHOW SCHEDULE JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW 3-26-261920 TROTSKY AND THE ARMORED TRAIN1. John Batchelor and Anatol Lieven discuss how the Middle East conflict impacts the global economy through energy and fertilizer shortages. They explore whether major powers like Moscow and Washington are losing focus on the war in Ukraine due to the escalating crisis in the Persian Gulf. (1)2. Rising oil prices have significantly increased Russian confidence and revenue, providing an extra $150 million daily. However, a potential U.S. ground war in Iran could force a choice between defending Ukraine or the Gulf, potentially allowing China to decisively intervene in either theater. (2)3. Economist John Cochrane warns that government subsidies for high gas prices compound oil shocks into inflation. Comparing current trends to 1979, he argues that price controls lead to shortages, while free-market incentives are necessary to encourage production and efficient consumption. (3)4. Conrad Black notes that while Canadians support regime change in Iran, they view themselves as spectators regarding oil impacts. He emphasizes that closing the Strait of Hormuz constitutes a war on the world, though Canada lacks the naval resources to assist in reopening it. (4)5. This discussion focuses on the unreliability of AI, noting its tendency to "hallucinate" and apologize for errors. Experts suggest the future belongs to those with imagination who can test AI relentlessly, warning of a class divide between AI-savvy workers and those left behind. (5)6. Scientific testing reveals that AI agents can go rogue, potentially compromising private information like bank statements. Despite these risks, participants believe humans maintain an advantage through innovation, as AI merely scrapes existing data rather than creating original, competitive thoughts. (6)7. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman outlines a mission to establish a permanent moon base by the early 2030s. The plan utilizes commercial providers like SpaceX and Blue Origin to secure the "high ground" and prepare for future Mars exploration before China can dominate the region. (7)8. The lunar race intensifies as China plans multiple settlements to achieve solar system hegemony. NASA aims to leap ahead using nuclear electric propulsion and competitive private contracts, focusing on redundancy and safety to ensure a sustained American presence on the lunar surface. (8)9. Josh Ireland examines the violent roots of the Russian Revolution, where founders were executed for "Trotskyism". He explores the personal rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin, two outsiders whose shared passion for Marxist theory transformed into a decades-long conflict that reshaped world history. (9)10. Stalin built power through patience and bureaucratic alliances, while the charismatic Trotsky viewed him as a "gray blur". Trotsky's failure to grasp practical politics was exemplified by his decision to skip Lenin's funeral, allowing Stalin to position himself as the revolution's rightful heir. (10)11. Stalin systematically marginalized Trotsky by suppressing his speeches and removing his allies from the Kremlin. By labeling Trotsky a "gravedigger of the revolution," Stalin used him as a spectre of failure to justify total control and internal purges of his own peers. (11)12. Trotsky's exile in Mexico was defined by a fatalistic awareness that Stalin's assassins would eventually succeed. Despite the protection of his entourage and famous hosts like Diego Rivera, he realized no individual could withstand an empire's mobilized secret police. (12)13. Guest Cliff May defends the war with Iran as a necessary "war of choice" to deter decades of aggression,. He emphasizes preemptive action against gathering threats and discusses Iran's crippled regional proxies,. (13)14. Guest Mary Anastasia O'Grady examines Cuba's desperate plea for private investment amidst an energy crisis. She warns of the regime's history of exploiting investors and argues that progress requires total democratic regime change,. (14)15. Guest Veronique de Rugy analyzes the $300 billion cost of the Iran war, detailing legislative paths like reconciliation to bypass Senate filibusters,. She highlights the risks of rising inflation and massive national debt,. (15)16. Guest Max Meizlish explores Iran's use of "market asymmetry" and information warfare to manipulate global energy prices,. By denying peace progress, Iran spikes oil costs, providing a significant financial boon to Russia,. (16)

Ephesians 6:10–16

Mark Greaney is a best-selling writer of thrillers. He co-authored several Jack Ryan novels with Tom Clancy, and even continued the series for several years following Mr. Clancy's passing. Some of his other titles are Red Metal and Armored, but he is best known to Book Talk listeners as the author of The Gray Man series of books starring the burned CIA operator, Court Gentry. 2026 brings us the 15th installment in the series, The Hard Line.

Ephesians 6:10–15

In the world of three-player arcade beat 'em ups Capcom is king. But which of their games reign supreme? In this episode we're talking about the build-a-mech brawler Armored Warriors! Is Armored Warriors the closest we'll ever get to an Exo Squad arcade game? What is the quarter mile time of a Night Fury Nissan GTR and how much horsepower does it have? Did Rob turn traitor while watching Olympic hockey? How did this game spawn a popular fighting game character? Listener questions asked this week include what was our first arcade machine and when did we buy it, what raster arcade would make an excellent vector, and what arcade or pop culture possession would you save if you could save only one. Join the Podouken Discord and ask your own questions that could be included in a future episode: discord.gg/k5vf2Jz You can also like, comment, and subscribe to our YouTube channel where we post our listener question segments and additional content: https://www.youtube.com/@podoukenpodcast2716.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcastPart Two begins at the edge of the end.After nearly seven weeks of stalemate, tension at Mount Carmel was at a breaking point. Negotiations had stalled. David Koresh claimed he was waiting for a divine sign to finish a manuscript that would reveal God's plan. Federal authorities, running out of patience, approved a tactical endgame.In the early hours of April 19, 1993, the FBI launched its final operation.Armored vehicles breached the compound walls. Tear gas was pumped inside in an effort to force residents out. Sporadic gunfire echoed across the Texas prairie. Then, just after noon, fires ignited in multiple locations within the building. Strong winds pushed the flames fast. Within hours, the Mount Carmel compound was gone.Seventy-six Branch Davidians died, including 25 children. David Koresh was found dead inside.From that moment on, the tragedy became a battleground of narratives.Federal investigations concluded that members of the Branch Davidians set the fires themselves in a coordinated act, citing audio recordings, forensic analysis, and survivor testimony. But critics, survivors, and independent investigators challenged that conclusion. Questions surfaced about the use of tear gas, whether armored vehicles caused structural damage that worsened the blaze, and why firefighters were held back during the critical early minutes.The episode dives deep into the most persistent Waco conspiracy theories: claims of government-started fires, alleged cover-ups, disputed ballistic evidence, and debates over whether the siege violated federal law. It also explores the broader cultural fallout — including how the events at Waco became a rallying cry for anti-government extremism and influenced Timothy McVeigh, who bombed Oklahoma City exactly two years later.Part Two examines the final hours, the unanswered questions, and why Waco remains one of the most debated government operations in U.S. history.

Ephesians 6:10–14

Last time we spoke about General Zhukov's arrival to the Nomohan incident. The Kwantung Army's inexperienced 23rd Division, under General Komatsubara, suffered heavy losses in failed offensives, including Colonel Yamagata's assault and the annihilation of Lieutenant Colonel Azuma's detachment, resulting in around 500 Japanese casualties. Tensions within the Japanese command intensified as Kwantung defied Tokyo's restraint, issuing aggressive orders like 1488 and launching a June 27 air raid on Soviet bases, destroying dozens of aircraft and securing temporary air superiority. This provoked Moscow's fury and rebukes from Emperor Hirohito. On June 1, Georgy Zhukov, a rising Red Army tactician and tank expert, was summoned from Minsk. Arriving June 5, he assessed the 57th Corps as inadequate, relieved Commander Feklenko, and took charge of the redesignated 1st Army Group. Reinforcements included mechanized brigades, tanks, and aircraft. Japanese intelligence misread Soviet supply convoys as retreats, underestimating Zhukov's 12,500 troops against their 15,000. By July, both sides poised for a massive clash, fueled by miscalculations and gekokujo defiance.   #190 Zhukov Unleashes Tanks at Nomohan Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, 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 the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia 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 where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. At 4:00 a.m. on July 1, 15,000 heavily laden Japanese troops began marching to their final assembly and jump-off points. The sun rose at 4:00 a.m. and set at 9:00 p.m. that day, but the Japanese advance went undetected by Soviet/MPR commanders, partly because the June 27 air raid had temporarily cleared Soviet reconnaissance from the skies. On the night of July 1, Komatsubara launched the first phase. The 23rd Division, with the Yasuoka Detachment, converged on Fui Heights, east of the Halha River, about eleven miles north of its confluence with the Holsten. The term "heights" is misleading here; a Japanese infantry colonel described Fui as a "raised pancake" roughly one to one-and-a-half miles across, about thirty to forty feet higher than the surrounding terrain. For reasons not fully explained, the small Soviet force stationed on the heights was withdrawn during the day on July 1, and that night Fui Heights was occupied by Komatsubara's forces almost unopposed. This caused little stir at Zhukov's headquarters. Komatsubara bided his time on July 2.   On the night of July 2–3, the Japanese achieved a brilliant tactical success. A battalion of the 71st Infantry Regiment silently crossed the Halha River on a moonless night and landed unopposed on the west bank opposite Fui Heights. Recent rains had swollen the river to 100–150 yards wide and six feet deep, making crossing difficult for men, horses, or vehicles. Combat engineers swiftly laid a pontoon bridge, completing it by 6:30 a.m. on July 3. The main body of Komatsubara's 71st and 72nd Infantry Regiments (23rd Division) and the 26th Regiment (7th Division) began a slow, arduous crossing. The pontoon bridge, less than eight feet wide, was a bottleneck, allowing only one truck at a time. The attackers could not cross with armored vehicles, but they did bring across their regimental artillery, 18 x 37-mm antitank guns, 12 x 75-mm mountain guns, 8 x 75-mm field guns, and 4 x 120-mm howitzers, disassembled, packed on pack animals, and reassembled on the west bank. The crossing took the entire day, and the Japanese were fortunate to go without interception. The Halha crossing was commanded personally by General Komatsubara and was supported by a small Kwantung Army contingent, including General Yano (deputy chief of staff), Colonel Hattori, and Major Tsuji from the Operations Section. Despite the big air raid having alerted Zhukov, the initial Japanese moves from July 1–3 achieved complete tactical surprise, aided by Tsuji's bold plan. The first indication of the major offensive came when General Yasuoka's tanks attacked predawn on July 3. Yasuoka suspected Soviet troops south of him attempting to retreat across the Halha to the west bank, and he ordered his tanks to attack immediately, with infantry not yet in position. The night's low clouds, no moon, and low visibility—along with a passing thunderstorm lighting the sky—made the scene dramatic. Seventy Japanese tanks roared forward, supported by infantry and artillery, and the Soviet 149th Infantry Regiment found itself overwhelmed. Zhukov, hearing of Yasuoka's assault but unaware that Komatsubara had crossed the Halha, ordered his armor to move northeast to Bain Tsagan to confront the initiative. There, Soviet armor clashed with Japanese forces in a chaotic, largely uncoordinated engagement. The Soviet counterattacks, supported by heavy artillery, halted much of the Japanese momentum, and by late afternoon Japanese infantry had to dig in west of the Halha. The crossing had been accomplished without Soviet reconnaissance detecting it in time, but Zhukov's counterattacks, the limits of Japanese armored mobility across the pontoon, and the heat and exhaustion of the troops constrained the Japanese effort. By the afternoon of July 3, Zhukov's forces were pressing hard, and the Japanese momentum began to stall. Yasuoka's tanks, supported by a lack of infantry and the fatigue and losses suffered by the infantry, could not close the gap to link with Komatsubara's forces. The Type 89 tanks, designed for infantry support, were ill-suited to penetrating Soviet armor, especially when faced with BT-5/BT-7 tanks and strong anti-tank guns. The Type 95 light tanks were faster but lightly armored, and suffered heavily from Soviet fire and air attacks. Infantry on the western bank struggled to catch up with tanks, shot through by Soviet artillery and armor, while the 64th Regiment could not keep pace with the tanks due to the infantry's lack of motorized transport. By late afternoon, Yasuoka's advance stalled far short of the river junction and the Soviet bridge. The infantry dug in to withstand Soviet bombardment, and the Japanese tank regiments withdrew to their jump-off points by nightfall. The Japanese suffered heavy losses in tanks, though some were recovered and repaired; by July 9, KwAHQ decided to withdraw its two tank regiments from the theater. Armor would play no further role in the Nomonhan conflict. The Soviets, by contrast, sustained heavier tank losses but began to replenish with new models. The July offensive, for Kwantung Army, proved a failure. Part of the failure stemmed from a difficult blend of terrain and logistics. Unusually heavy rains in late June had transformed the dirt roads between Hailar and Nomonhan into a mud-filled quagmire. Japanese truck transport, already limited, was so hampered by these conditions that combat effectiveness suffered significantly. Colonel Yamagata's 64th Infantry Regiment, proceeding on foot, could not keep pace with or support General Yasuoka's tanks on July 3–4. Komatsubara's infantry on the west bank of the Halha ran short of ammunition, food, and water. As in the May 28 battle, the main cause of the Kwantung Army's July offensive failure was wholly inadequate military intelligence. Once again, the enemy's strength had been seriously underestimated. Moreover, a troubling realization was dawning at KwAHQ and in the field: the intelligence error was not merely quantitative but qualitative. The Soviets were not only more numerous but also far more potent than anticipated. The attacking Japanese forces initially held a slight numerical edge and enjoyed tactical surprise, but the Red Army fought tenaciously, and the weight of Soviet firepower proved decisive. Japan, hampered by a relative lack of raw materials and industrial capacity, could not match the great powers in the quantitative production of military materiel. Consequently, Japanese military leaders traditionally emphasized the spiritual superiority of Japan's armed forces in doctrine and training, often underestimating the importance of material factors, including firepower. This was especially true of the army that had carried the tactic of the massed bayonet charge into World War II. This "spiritual" combat doctrine arose from necessity; admitting material superiority would have implied defeat. Japan's earlier victories in the Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, the Manchurian incident, and the China War, along with legendary medieval victories over the Mongol hordes, seemed to confirm the transcendent importance of fighting spirit. Only within such a doctrine could the Imperial Japanese Army muster inner strength and confidence to face formidable enemies. This was especially evident against Soviet Russia, whose vast geography, population, and resources loomed large. Yet what of its spirit? The Japanese military dismissed Bolshevism as a base, materialist philosophy utterly lacking spiritual power. Consequently, the Red Army was presumed to have low morale and weak fighting effectiveness. Stalin's purges only reinforced this belief. Kwantung Army's recent experiences at Nomonhan undermined this outlook. Among ordinary soldiers and officers alike, from the 23rd Division Staff to KwAHQ—grim questions formed: Had Soviet materiel and firepower proven superior to Japanese fighting spirit? If not, did the enemy possess a fighting spirit comparable to their own? To some in Kwantung Army, these questions were grotesque and almost unthinkable. To others, the implications were too painful to face. Perhaps May and July's combat results were an aberration caused by the 23rd Division's inexperience. Nevertheless, a belief took hold at KwAHQ that this situation required radical rectification. Zhukov's 1st Army Headquarters, evaluating recent events, was not immune to self-criticism and concern for the future. The enemy's success in transporting nearly 10,000 men across the Halha without detection—despite heightened Soviet alert after the June 27 air raid—revealed a level of carelessness and lack of foresight at Zhukov's level. Zhukov, however, did not fully capitalize on Komatsubara's precarious position on July 4–5. Conversely, Zhukov and his troops reacted calmly in the crisis's early hours. Although surprised and outnumbered, Zhukov immediately recognized that "our trump cards were the armored detachments, and we decided to use them immediately." He acted decisively, and the rapid deployment of armor proved pivotal. Some criticized the uncoordinated and clumsy Soviet assault on Komatsubara's infantry on July 3, but the Japanese were only a few hours' march from the river junction and the Soviet bridge. By hurling tanks at Komatsubara's advance with insufficient infantry support, Mikhail Yakovlev (11th Tank Brigade) and A. L. Lesovoi (7th Mechanized Brigade) incurred heavy losses. Nonetheless, they halted the Japanese southward advance, forcing Komatsubara onto the defensive, from which he never regained momentum. Zhukov did not flinch from heavy casualties to achieve his objectives. He later told General Dwight D. Eisenhower that if the enemy faced a minefield, their infantry attacked as if it did not exist, treating personnel mine losses as equal to those that would have occurred if the Germans defended the area with strong troops rather than minefields. Zhukov admitted losing 120 tanks and armored cars that day—a high price, but necessary to avert defeat. Years later, Zhukov defended his Nomonhan tactics, arguing he knew his armor would suffer heavy losses, but that was the only way to prevent the Japanese from seizing the bridge at the river confluence. Had Komatsubara's forces advanced unchecked for another two or three hours, they might have fought through to the Soviet bridge and linked with the Yasuoka detachment, endangering Zhukov's forces. Zhukov credited Yakovlev, Lesovoi, and their men with stabilizing the crisis through timely and self-sacrificing counterattacks. The armored car battalion of the 8th MPR Cavalry Division also distinguished itself in this action. Zhukov and his tankmen learned valuable lessons in those two days of brutal combat. A key takeaway was the successful use of large tank formations as an independent primary attack force, contrary to then-orthodox doctrine, which saw armor mainly as infantry support and favored integrating armor into every infantry regiment rather than maintaining large, autonomous armored units. The German blitzkrieg demonstrations in Poland and Western Europe soon followed, but, until then, few major armies had absorbed the tank-warfare theories championed by Basil Liddell-Hart and Charles de Gaulle. The Soviet high command's leading proponent of large-scale tank warfare had been Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. His execution in 1937 erased those ideas, and the Red Army subsequently disbanded armored divisions and dispersed tanks among infantry, misapplying battlefield lessons from the Spanish Civil War. Yet Zhukov was learning a different lesson on a different battlefield. The open terrain of eastern Mongolia favored tanks, and Zhukov was a rapid learner. The Russians also learned mundane, but crucial, lessons: Japanese infantry bravely clambering onto their vehicles taught Soviet tank crews to lock hatch lids from the inside. The BT-5 and BT-7 tanks were easily set aflame by primitive hand-thrown firebombs, and rear deck ventilation grills and exhaust manifolds were vulnerable and required shielding. Broadly, the battle suggested to future Red Army commander Zhukov that tank and motorized troops, coordinated with air power and mobile artillery, could decisively conduct rapid operations. Zhukov was not the first to envision combining mobile firepower with air and artillery, but he had rare opportunities to apply this formula in crucial tests. The July offensive confirmed to the Soviets that the Nomonhan incident was far from a border skirmish; it signaled intent for further aggression. Moscow's leadership, informed by Richard Sorge's Tokyo network, perceived Japan's renewed effort to draw Germany into an anti-Soviet alliance as a dangerous possibility. Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov began indicating to Joachim von Ribbentrop and Adolf Hitler that Berlin's stance on the Soviet–Japanese conflict would influence Soviet-German rapprochement considerations. Meanwhile, Moscow decided to reinforce Zhukov. Tens of thousands of troops and machines were ordered to Mongolia, with imports from European Russia. Foreign diplomats traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway reported eastbound trains jammed with personnel and matériel. The buildup faced a major bottleneck at Borzya, the easternmost railhead in the MPR, about 400 miles from the Halha. To prevent a logistics choke, a massive truck transport operation was needed. Thousands of trucks, half-tracks, gun-towing tractors, and other vehicles were organized into a continuous eight-hundred-mile, five-day shuttle run. The Trans-Baikal Military District, under General Shtern, supervised the effort. East of the Halha, many Japanese officers still refused to accept a failure verdict for the July offensive. General Komatsubara did not return to Hailar, instead establishing a temporary divisional HQ at Kanchuerhmiao, where his staff grappled with overcoming Soviet firepower. They concluded that night combat—long a staple of Japanese infantry tactics—could offset Soviet advantages. On July 7 at 9:30 p.m., a thirty-minute Japanese artillery barrage preceded a nighttime assault by elements of the 64th and 72nd Regiments. The Soviet 149th Infantry Regiment and supporting Mongolian cavalry were surprised and forced to fall back toward the Halha before counterattacking. Reinforcements arrived on both sides, and in brutal close-quarters combat the Japanese gained a partial local advantage, but were eventually pushed back; Major I. M. Remizov of the 149th Regiment was killed and later posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union. Since late May, Soviet engineers had built at least seven bridges across the Halha and Holsten Rivers to support operations. By July 7–8, Japanese demolition teams destroyed two Soviet bridges. Komatsubara believed that destroying bridges could disrupt Soviet operations east of the Halha and help secure the border. Night attacks continued from July 8 to July 12 against the Soviet perimeter, with Japanese assaults constricting Zhukov's bridgehead while Soviet artillery and counterattacks relentlessly pressed. Casualties mounted on both sides. The Japanese suffered heavy losses but gained some positions; Soviet artillery, supported by motorized infantry and armor, gradually pushed back the attackers. The biggest problem for Japan remained Soviet artillery superiority and the lack of a commensurate counter-battery capability. Japanese infantry had to withdraw to higher ground at night to avoid daytime exposure to artillery and tanks. On the nights of July 11–12, Yamagata's 64th Regiment and elements of Colonel Sakai Mikio's 72nd Regiment attempted a major assault on the Soviet bridgehead. Despite taking heavy casualties, the Japanese managed to push defenders back to the river on occasion, but Soviet counterattacks, supported by tiresome artillery and armor, prevented a decisive breakthrough. Brigade Commander Yakovlev of the 11th Armored, who led several counterattacks, was killed and later honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union; his gun stands today as a monument at the battlefield. The July 11–12 action marked the high-water mark of the Kwantung Army's attempt to expel Soviet/MPR forces east of the Halha. Komatsubara eventually suspended the costly night attacks; by that night, the 64th Regiment had suffered roughly 80–90 killed and about three times that number wounded. The decision proved controversial, with some arguing that he had not realized how close his forces had come to seizing the bridge. Others argued that broader strategic considerations justified the pause. Throughout the Nomonhan fighting, Soviet artillery superiority, both quantitative and qualitative, became painfully evident. The Soviet guns exacted heavy tolls and repeatedly forced Japanese infantry to withdraw from exposed positions. The Japanese artillery, in contrast, could not match the Red Army's scale. By July 25, Kwantung Army ended its artillery attack, a humiliating setback. Tokyo and Hsinking recognized the futility of achieving a decisive military victory at Nomonhan and shifted toward seeking a diplomatic settlement, even if concessions to the Soviet Union and the MPR were necessary. Kwantung Army, however, opposed negotiations, fearing it would echo the "Changkufeng debacle" and be read by enemies as weakness. Tsuji lamented that Kwantung Army's insistence on framing the second phase as a tie—despite heavy Soviet losses, revealed a reluctance to concede any territory. Differences in outlook and policy between AGS and Kwantung Army—and the central army's inability to impose its will on Manchukuo's field forces—became clear. The military establishment buzzed with stories of gekokujo (the superiority of the superior) within Kwantung Army and its relations with the General Staff. To enforce compliance, AGS ordered General Isogai to Tokyo for briefings, and KwAHQ's leadership occasionally distanced itself from AGS. On July 20, Isogai arrived at General Staff Headquarters and was presented with "Essentials for Settlement of the Nomonhan Incident," a formal document outlining a step-by-step plan for Kwantung Army to maintain its defensive position east of the Halha while diplomatic negotiations proceeded. If negotiations failed, Kwantung Army would withdraw to the boundary claimed by the Soviet Union by winter. Isogai, the most restrained member of the Kwantung Army circle, argued against accepting the Essentials, insisting on preserving Kwantung Army's honor and rejecting a unilateral east-bank withdrawal. A tense exchange followed, but General Nakajima ended the dispute by noting that international boundaries cannot be determined by the army alone. Isogai pledged to report the General Staff's views to his commander and take the Essentials back to KwAHQ for study. Technically, the General Staff's Essentials were not orders; in practice, however, they were treated as such. Kwantung Army tended to view them as suggestions and retained discretion in implementation. AGS hoped the Essentials would mollify Kwantung Army's wounded pride. The August 4 decision to create a 6 Army within Kwantung Army, led by General Ogisu Rippei, further complicated the command structure. Komatsubara's 23rd Division and nearby units were attached to the 6 Army, which also took responsibility for defending west-central Manchukuo, including the Nomonhan area. The 6 Army existed largely on paper, essentially a small headquarters to insulate KwAHQ from battlefield realities. AGS sought a more accountable layer of command between KwAHQ and the combat zone, but General Ueda and KwAHQ resented the move and offered little cooperation. In the final weeks before the last battles, General Ogisu and his small staff had limited influence on Nomonhan. Meanwhile, the European crisis over German demands on Poland intensified, moving into a configuration highly favorable to the Soviet Union. By the first week of August, it became evident in the Kremlin that both Anglo-French powers and the Germans were vying to secure an alliance with Moscow. Stalin knew now that he would likely have a free hand in the coming war in the West. At the same time, Richard Sorge, the Soviet master spy in Tokyo, correctly reported that Japan's top political and military leaders sought to prevent the escalation of the Nomonhan incident into an all-out war. These developments gave the cautious Soviet dictator the confidence to commit the Red Army to large-scale combat operations in eastern Mongolia. In early August, Stalin ordered preparations for a major offensive to clear the Nomonhan area of the "Japanese samurai who had violated the territory of the friendly Outer Mongolian people." The buildup of Zhukov's 1st Army Group accelerated still further. Its July strength was augmented by the 57th and 82nd Infantry Divisions, the 6th Tank Brigade, the 212th Airborne Brigade, numerous smaller infantry, armor, and artillery units, and two Mongolian cavalry divisions. Soviet air power in the area was also greatly strengthened. When this buildup was completed by mid-August, Zhukov commanded an infantry force equivalent to four divisions, supported by two cavalry divisions, 216 artillery pieces, 498 armored vehicles, and 581 aircraft. To bring in the supplies necessary for this force to launch an offensive, General Shtern's Trans-Baikal Military District Headquarters amassed a fleet of more than 4,200 vehicles, which trucked in about 55,000 tons of materiel from the distant railway depot at Borzya. The Japanese intelligence network in Outer Mongolia was weak, a problem that went unremedied throughout the Nomonhan incident. This deficiency, coupled with the curtailment of Kwantung Army's transborder air operations, helps explain why the Japanese remained ignorant of the scope of Zhukov's buildup. They were aware that some reinforcements were flowing eastward across the Trans-Siberian Railway toward the MPR but had no idea of the volume. Then, at the end of July, Kwantung Army Intelligence intercepted part of a Soviet telegraph transmission indicating that preparations were under way for some offensive operation in the middle of August. This caused a stir at KwAHQ. Generals Ueda and Yano suspected that the enemy planned to strike across the Halha River. Ueda's initial reaction was to reinforce the 23rd Division at Nomonhan with the rest of the highly regarded 7th Division. However, the 7th Division was Kwantung Army's sole strategic reserve, and the Operations Section was reluctant to commit it to extreme western Manchukuo, fearing mobilization of Soviet forces in the Maritime Province and a possible attack in the east near Changkufeng. The Kwantung Army commander again ignored his own better judgment and accepted the Operations Section's recommendation. The main strength of the 7th Division remained at its base near Tsitsihar, but another infantry regiment, the 28th, was dispatched to the Nomonhan area, as was an infantry battalion from the Mukden Garrison. Earlier, in mid-July, Kwantung Army had sent Komatsubara 1,160 individual replacements to make up for casualties from earlier fighting. All these reinforcements combined, however, did little more than replace losses: as of July 25, 1,400 killed (including 200 officers) and 3,000 wounded. Kwantung Army directed Komatsubara to dig in, construct fortifications, and adopt a defensive posture. Colonel Numazaki, who commanded the 23rd Division's Engineer Regiment, was unhappy with the defensive line he was ordered to fortify and urged a slight pullback to more easily defensible terrain. Komatsubara, however, refused to retreat from ground his men had bled to take. He and his line officers still nourished hope of a revenge offensive. As a result, the Japanese defensive positions proved to be as weak as Numazaki feared. As Zhukov's 1st Army Group prepared to strike, the effective Japanese strength at Nomonhan was less than 1.5 divisions. Major Tsuji and his colleagues in the Operations Section had little confidence in Kwantung Army's own Intelligence Section, which is part of the reason why Tsuji frequently conducted his own reconnaissance missions. Up to this time it was gospel in the Japanese army that the maximum range for large-scale infantry operations was 125–175 miles from a railway; anything beyond 200 miles from a railway was considered logistically impossible. Since Kwantung Army had only 800 trucks available in all of Manchukuo in 1939, the massive Soviet logistical effort involving more than 4,200 trucks was almost unimaginable to the Japanese. Consequently, the Operations Staff believed it had made the correct defensive deployments if a Soviet attack were to occur, which it doubted. If the enemy did strike at Nomonhan, it was believed that it could not marshal enough strength in that remote region to threaten the reinforced 23rd Division. Furthermore, the 7th Division, based at Tsitsihar on a major rail line, could be transported to any trouble spot on the eastern or western frontier in a few days. KwAHQ advised Komatsubara to maintain a defensive posture and prepare to meet a possible enemy attack around August 14 or 15. At this time, Kwantung Army also maintained a secret organization codenamed Unit 731, officially the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. Unit 731 specialized in biological and chemical warfare, with main facilities and laboratories in Harbin, including a notorious prison-laboratory complex. During the early August lull at Nomonhan, a detachment from Unit 731 infected the Halha River with bacteria of an acute cholera-like strain. There are no reports in Soviet or Japanese accounts that this attempted biological warfare had any effect. In the war's final days, Unit 731 was disbanded, Harbin facilities demolished, and most personnel fled to Japan—but not before they gassed the surviving 150 human subjects and burned their corpses. The unit's commander, Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro, kept his men secret and threatened retaliation against informers. Ishii and his senior colleagues escaped prosecution at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials by trading the results of their experiments to U.S. authorities in exchange for immunity. The Japanese 6th Army exerted some half-hearted effort to construct defensive fortifications, but scarcity of building materials, wood had to be trucked in from far away—helped explain the lack of enthusiasm. More importantly, Japanese doctrine despised static defense and favored offense, so Kwantung Army waited to see how events would unfold. West of the Halha, Zhukov accelerated preparations. Due to tight perimeter security, few Japanese deserters, and a near-absence of civilian presence, Soviet intelligence found it hard to glean depth on Japanese defensive positions. Combat intelligence could only reveal the frontline disposition and closest mortar and artillery emplacements. Aerial reconnaissance showed photographs, but Japanese camouflage and mock-ups limited their usefulness. The new commander of the 149th Mechanized Infantry Regiment personally directed infiltration and intelligence gathering, penetrating Japanese lines on several nights and returning crucial data: Komatsubara's northern and southern flanks were held by Manchukuoan cavalry, and mobile reserves were lacking. With this information, Zhukov crafted a plan of attack. The main Japanese strength was concentrated a few miles east of the Halha, on both banks of the Holsten River. Their infantry lacked mobility and armor, and their flanks were weak. Zhukov decided to split the 1st Army Group into three strike forces: the central force would deliver a frontal assault to pin the main Japanese strength, while the northern and southern forces, carrying the bulk of the armor, would turn the Japanese flanks and drive the enemy into a pocket to be destroyed by the three-pronged effort. The plan depended on tactical surprise and overwhelming force at the points of attack. The offensive was to begin in the latter part of August, pending final approval from Moscow. To ensure tactical surprise, Zhukov and his staff devised an elaborate program of concealment and deception, disinformation. Units and materiel arriving at Tamsag Bulak toward the Halha were moved only at night with lights out. Noting that the Japanese were tapping telephone lines and intercepting radio messages, 1st Army Headquarters sent a series of false messages in an easily decipherable code about defensive preparations and autumn-winter campaigning. Thousands of leaflets titled "What the Infantryman Should Know about Defense" were distributed among troops. About two weeks before the attack, the Soviets brought in sound equipment to simulate tank and aircraft engines and heavy construction noises, staging long, loud performances nightly. At first, the Japanese mistook the sounds for large-scale enemy activity and fired toward the sounds. After a few nights, they realized it was only sound effects, and tried to ignore the "serenade." On the eve of the attack, the actual concentration and staging sounds went largely unnoticed by the Japanese. On August 7–8, Zhukov conducted minor attacks to expand the Halha bridgehead to a depth of two to three miles. These attacks, contained relatively easily by Komatsubara's troops, reinforced Kwantung Army's false sense of confidence. The Japanese military attaché in Moscow misread Soviet press coverage. In early August, the attaché advised that unlike the Changkufeng incident a year earlier, Soviet press was largely ignoring the conflict, implying low morale and a favorable prognosis for the Red Army. Kwantung Army leaders seized on this as confirmation to refrain from any display of restraint or doubt, misplaced confidence. There were, however, portents of danger. Three weeks before the Soviet attack, Colonel Isomura Takesuki, head of Kwantung Army's Intelligence Section, warned of the vulnerability of the 23rd Division's flanks. Tsuji and colleagues dismissed this, and General Kasahara Yukio of AGS also went unheeded. The "desk jockey" General Staff officers commanded little respect at KwAHQ. Around August 10, General Hata Yuzaburo, Komatsubara's successor as chief of the Special Services Agency at Harbin, warned that enemy strength in the Mongolian salient was very great and seriously underestimated at KwAHQ. Yet no decisive action followed before Zhukov's attack. Kwantung Army's inaction and unpreparedness prior to the Soviet offensive appear to reflect faulty intelligence compounded by hubris. But a more nuanced explanation suggests a fatalistic wishful thinking rooted in the Japanese military culture—the belief that their spiritual strength would prevail, leading them to assume enemy strength was not as great as reported, or that victory was inevitable regardless of resources. Meanwhile, in the rational West, the Nazi war machine faced the Polish frontier as Adolf Hitler pressed Stalin for a nonaggression pact. The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact would neutralize the threat of a two-front war for Germany and clear the way for Hitler's invasion of Poland. If the pact was a green light, it signaled in both directions: it would also neutralize the German threat to Russia and clear the way for Zhukov's offensive at Nomonhan. On August 18–19, Hitler pressed Stalin to receive Ribbentrop in Moscow to seal the pact. Thus, reassured in the West, Stalin dared to act boldly against Japan. Zhukov supervised final preparations for his attack. Zhukov held back forward deployments until the last minute. By August 18, he had only four infantry regiments, a machine gun brigade, and Mongolian cavalry east of the Halha. Operational security was extremely tight: a week before the attack, Soviet radio traffic in the area virtually ceased. Only Zhukov and a few key officers worked on the plan, aided by a single typist. Line officers and service chiefs received information on a need-to-know basis. The date for the attack was shared with unit commanders one to four days in advance, depending on seniority. Noncommissioned officers and ordinary soldiers learned of the offensive one day in advance and received specific orders three hours before the attack.   Heavy rain grounded Japanese aerial reconnaissance from August 17 to midday on the 19th, but on August 19 Captain Oizumi Seisho in a Japanese scout plane observed the massing of Soviet forces near the west bank of the Halha. Enemy armor and troops were advancing toward the river in dispersed formations, with no new bridges but pontoon stocks spotted near the river. Oizumi sent a warning to a frontline unit and rushed back to report. The air group dispatched additional recon planes and discovered that the Japanese garrison on Fui Heights, near the northern end of Komatsubara's line, was being encircled by Soviet armor and mechanized infantry—observed by alarmed Japanese officers on and near the heights. These late discoveries on August 19 were not reported to KwAHQ and had no effect on the 6th Army and the 23rd Division's alertness on the eve of the storm. As is common in militaries, a fatal gap persisted between those gathering intelligence and those in a position to act on it. On the night of August 19–20, under cover of darkness, the bulk of the Soviet 1st Army Group crossed the Halha into the expanded Soviet enclave on the east bank.  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. By August, European diplomacy left Moscow confident in a foothold against Germany and Britain, while Sorge's intelligence indicated Japan aimed to avoid a full-blown war. Stalin ordered a major offensive to clear Nomonhan, fueling Zhukov's buildup in eastern Mongolia. Kwantung Army, hampered by limited logistics, weak intelligence, and defensive posture, faced mounting pressure. 

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Sorry!" / X (21) healthbot on X: "Environmentalist claims you can drink a whole quart of glyphosate and “it won't hurt you.” The interviewer calls his bluff and offers him a glass of glyphosate. The interview ends 22 seconds later. https://t.co/fBlSViZJuI" / X (21) healthbot on X: "Environmentalist claims you can drink a whole quart of glyphosate and “it won't hurt you.” The interviewer calls his bluff and offers him a glass of glyphosate. The interview ends 22 seconds later. https://t.co/fBlSViZJuI" / X (21) The Last American Vagabond on X: "#Winning https://t.co/IcQ7RMqX28" / X New Tab U.S. considers building pricey alternative to World Health Organization - The Washington Post Gaza's "Board Of Peace" Seeks To Reimagine The International Order New Bill Supported By White House Bypasses RFK Jr's HHS to Fund GAVI Vaccine Alliance Trump At Davos: Globalism Is Dead. Long Live Globalism. 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He argues the project isn't just “left vs right” or one crisis after another, but a long campaign to break what makes people human — identity, heritage, faith, https://t.co/BA2Cs8uIF7" / X (21) Axiomatic Enemy of the State on X: "https://t.co/UoqY3lgeNw" / X (21) Liam McCollum on X: "BBC News is reporting now that Lord Peter Mandelson was just arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office after the ex-US ambassador had been under investigation over allegations he shared market-sensitive government information with Jeffrey Epstein while a minister. He" / X Police in Britain arrest former ambassador to US Peter Mandelson in probe into Epstein ties | AP News Former Prince Andrew arrested months after losing royal status (21) The Atlantic on X: "The Epstein files reveal that plenty of powerful people tolerated or participated in disgusting, shameful, and even criminal behavior—but they also bolster the case that there never was any grand conspiracy, @GiladEdelman argues. https://t.co/1bOtPSxuvQ" / X Allegations in Epstein files may amount to 'crimes against humanity,' UN experts say | Reuters (21) DD Geopolitics on X: "The Pentagon offered JEFFERY EPSTEIN a $116M "mission-critical" location to operate next to them in “the only property in Arlington other than the Pentagon with the ability to meet the needs of the DOD” and did it through Prince Andrew's aide. In 2015 he was offered the FBI" / X (21) RT on X: "Lolita Express lands at MILITARY bases Ghislaine: ‘Sh*t' https://t.co/hZACO29dZO" / X EFTA01837627.pdf FBI's “Stand Down” Directive to NYPD on Jeffrey Epstein Investigations, and More Jeffrey Epstein hid secret files in storage units across US (21) James Li on X: "James Comer claims that the DOJ had already "investigated" Les Wexner, but in the deposition released yesterday, Wexner clearly states that no one from the FBI or DOJ had ever spoken to him about Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell. Either he's lying, or they are both lying.

Sir Max Hastings describes specialized armored funnies that supported British landings on Sword Beach, noting that while technically successful, heavy traffic and Montgomery's overly ambitious objectives prevented the Allies from capturing Caen on D-Day. 121944 Sir Max Hastings describes specialized armored funnies that supported British landings on Sword Beach, noting that while technically successful, heavy traffic and Montgomery's overly ambitious objectives prevented the Allies from capturing Caen on D-Day. 121944 SWORD BEACH

Pam Bondi. How the female anatomy works. The reason the FAA closed down the airspace in El Paso. An armored truck was robbed on a highway in Italy. A glove was found near Nancy Guthrie's home. Norwegian Olympian apologizes for stealing the limelight from the athlete that won the gold medal in the biathlon. Charlie doesn't understand how to bet on Polymarket. A pizza place has split up tips for the delivery driver and the person making your pie. At a yoga studio in Minneapolis, students scream at instructors demanding they condemn ICE. Rover sounds intergalactic. A teacher is facing 20 years in prison after he started communicating with a girl who just graduated. Rehab Addict. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pam Bondi. How the female anatomy works. The reason the FAA closed down the airspace in El Paso. An armored truck was robbed on a highway in Italy. A glove was found near Nancy Guthrie's home. Norwegian Olympian apologizes for stealing the limelight from the athlete that won the gold medal in the biathlon. Charlie doesn't understand how to bet on Polymarket. A pizza place has split up tips for the delivery driver and the person making your pie. At a yoga studio in Minneapolis, students scream at instructors demanding they condemn ICE. Rover sounds intergalactic. A teacher is facing 20 years in prison after he started communicating with a girl who just graduated. Rehab Addict. 

Its Wednesday Friendsday and the boys are joined by Dennis Medina, a SWAT Operator and owner/founder of Armored Breach!! Check out our sponsors!! American Financing NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.196% for well qualified borrowers. Call 866-890-8585 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Antihero Human Performance Team (promo code "HERO" for 20% off!) https://hp-trt.com/ GhostBed (promo code "ANTIHERO" for 10% off!) https://www.ghostbed.com/pages/antiheroutm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=antihero Elevated Silence (promo code "ANTIHERO15" for 15% off!) https://elevatedsilence.com Venjenz (promo code "ANTIHERO" for 15% off!) https://venjenz.com/ Counter Culture Inc. (promo code "ANTIHERO" for 15% off!) https://countercultureincthreads.com Flatline Fiber Co. (promo code ANTIHERO15 for 15% off!) flatlinefiberco.com Violent Provisions (promo code ANTIHERO for 15% off!!) https://violentprovisions.com/ Goon Tape (promo code antihero15 for 15% off!!) https://goontape.com/ Crave Creatine Gummies (promo code ANTIHERO15 for 15% off!!) https://trycrave.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This week in Episode #723, we chat with comics creator Michael Schwartz about his new comic series, Armored, which is available now! Screenwriter Michael Schwartz (Zombie Town, Gnome Alone) makes his comics debut alongside rising artist Ismael Hernandez in Armored, which recently had their first five issues become available in hardcover via a successful Kickstarter. The series is described this way: "Orphaned teen Andy's parents disappeared mysteriously. Now, he's just been adopted by a quaint family living in the countryside. What could go wrong?" We discuss who the characters are, how this book came to be, and what we can expect from him in the coming months. For more about this excellent comic series and to order your copy, you can go to this link to order issues 1-6! Subscribe to the Major Spoilers Podcast Network Master Feed! Show your thanks to Major Spoilers for this episode by becoming a Major Spoilers Patreon member. It will help ensure Wayne's Comics Podcast continues far into the future!

In Episode 241 of “History of the Second World War,” dive into the explosive opening of Operation Compass — Britain's first major offensive in North Africa during WWII, launched in December 1940 against Italian fortified camps. Witness how British forces, including the 7th Armored and 4th Indian Divisions with their iconic Matilda tanks and devastating artillery, overwhelmed Italian defenses through clever flanking maneuvers and overwhelming firepower — even catching Italians off-guard during breakfast! The episode captures the rapid, almost unstoppable success of the attack, which far exceeded initial objectives, while also hinting at looming logistical challenges that would test British momentum. Contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to advertise on History of the Second World War. History of the Second World War is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pre-WWII US exercises, influenced by Patton and his peers, successfully showcased armored warfare. Patton was eccentric, boring audiences with detailed lectures on Roman generals and claiming to be the reincarnation of Napoleon, which disconnected him from his troops. Montgomery, leading the Third Division, trained his men endlessly and formed a cohesive team before the Dunkirk evacuation, seeing the retreat as a challenge to rebuild. Rommel was given command of the 7th Panzer Division in 1940 and, due to his aggressive success, became known as the commander of the "phantom division," celebrated by Nazi propaganda.

Thu, Nov 20 4:33 PM → 5:54 PM Armed robbery of armored money truck and search for suspects Radio Systems: - Southwest Ohio Quad-County MARCS P25

Italian Defense Strategy and the Geopolitical Situation. Lorenzo Fiori discusses Italy's defense buildup using EU loan deals to acquire new armored vehicles from Germany's Rheinmetall through a joint venture with Leonardo. This modernization is crucial as Italy is strategically situated near the Ukrainian conflict and faces risks from troubled North African countries, particularly potential Russian influence in Libya. Although the military is needed for disaster relief, public opinion often remains against increasing defense expenditures.

Pentecost XXI

You're invited to the official Heart Convictions Harvest party, 90s style.Part three of The October series is sweeter than a pillowcase full of off-brand candy from a church harvest party. Join Nina and her two hometown church homies as they belly laugh over childhood memories. Ones who survived the no-Halloween era armed with only hayrides, bobbing for apples in mysterious cloudy water, and suspiciously enthusiastic puppet ministries. Plus, Nina tells her forbidden trick or treat story. The three hosts lead us into hysterical conversations about childhood in Church, Halloween myths and hometown observations of Newark, Ohio. Does Longaberger basket ring a bell? This episode then transitions into real talk about personal heart convictions on celebrating a holiday that represents evil. So get your favorite Bible Character costume on and join us! Yes,” Loaves & Fishes" as a group costume is totally accFollow Nina Here: https://www.instagram.com/ninapalmertexas/Checkout the new Hopecast website:https://thehopecastnetwork.com/Buy Merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/the-hopecast-network-swag/This show is brought to you by The Hopecast Networkhttps://www.instagram.com/hopecastnetwork/

Knights, jousting, & horse poop, oh my! Ye olde hosts, Lord Tyler Scheid & Sir Markiplier, speaketh the word on sports before time travelling back in time to the medieval era. From cod piece fashion to Sonic the Hedgehog jousting, they cover it all, & just like a battle, you never know what will happen next! Don your armor, grab your favorite polearm, & prepare for battle with this buhurt episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

15.08.2025 pt 1 On our final Friday show before a major format change, Gareth and Ben delivered a whirlwind of sports, politics, and jaw-dropping oddities. They kicked off with news that Fridays will soon be longer and packed with live guests, before diving into Ben's golf plans and a comical look at Donald Trump's armored “Batmobile” golf cart. The sporting lineup was huge — from the Rugby Championship and MTN8 semi-finals to Premier League kick-off and UFC 319's explosive showdown between Drius and Kamzat. The conversation took stranger turns with an outrageous 1970s tale dubbed tape,” mixing disbelief with dark humour, and a sharp discussion about violent taxi versus e-hailing clashes in Soweto. The hosts also unpacked global politics — from New Zealand's criticism of Israel to the UK's royal gossip — while never straying too far from the banter and audience interaction that keep their community hooked. It was a send-off show that had everything: high-stakes sport, political fire, absurd human behaviour, and street-level South African realities — a perfect snapshot of why the live format keeps our audience coming back. The Real Network

Three men sit in federal custody after feds say the perps stole more than $2 million from a Brinks armored truck in an inside job. California wardens bust four nighttime divers near San Pedro and seize 236 spiny lobsters poached out of season. Drew Nelson reports. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Warriors In Their Own Words, veterans of the 3rd Armored Division, Belton Cooper and Bertrand Close, transport us to the Race Across Europe in World War Two. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices