Podcasts about Axis

Today my guests are Brian Smith and Ed Uszynski. They are the authors of a book called Away Game, and they also are a part of Athletes in Action and organization that helps parents and coaches disciple teens through sports. Click here to get their book!

China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are engaged in “unprecedented” cooperation, and that is empowering Russian aggression in Ukraine and making the regime in Iran more lethal and resilient. Axis security cooperation is iterative and flowing in both directions across the bilateral relationships within the Axis, making its militaries more formidable and eroding the margin of safety for Americans and their partners.What is the latest in Ukraine? How are Axis members supporting Putin's invasion? What role have drones played in Ukraine and the Middle East? How are Moscow and Tehran cooperating, and what are the consequences? What is the status of US and partner air defenses and lessons learned? And what changes are afoot when it comes to US military posture in Europe?Generation Jihad guest host Bradley Bowman, senior director of FDD's Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP), discusses these questions and more with John Hardie, deputy director of FDD's Russia program, and Cameron McMillan, senior research analyst at FDD's CMPP.

Three Big Conversations: Meta settles lawsuits with an $18 billion pledge to make social media safer - 06:08 what Gen Alpha is wearing for the back-to-school season - 18:30 the legacy of the beloved country music singer Dolly Parton - 29:52 Song of the Week: "Loser" by Tame Impala - 00:46 → Click here to read the lyrics (language) → Click here to see the video (language) In Other News: - 39:48 Australia's much-touted social media ban for teenagers is falling apart (paywall) as state authorities find it impossible to outsmart the tech prowess of fifteen-year-olds. Naur! China's big box office winner this week was made on a shoestring budget. The plot is a dream about a cow, or a dream of a cow, or perhaps a cow's dream. The movie was praised for its "craftsmanship." According to data from Eventbrite, events advertising shared hobbies (think mahjong or birdwatching) as "meet cutes," or chances to meet potential romantic partners, increased by 117% over the last year. Fanfiction publishing platform Wattpad, a longtime haven for teens experimenting with fanfiction, updated its content guidelines. Some users were convinced (incorrectly) that Wattpad would no longer host sexually explicit content and fled to another platform called AO3. The Olivia Rodrigo-backed Daisy Chain Festival will take place in Irvine, California, this weekend. The music festival is also a charity benefit and will feature an all-female lineup of musicians, including Doechii, Bikini Kill, Mitski, Katseye, and even the OG female-led festival queen, Sarah McLachlan.

In the explosive finale of Arc 3 Shaddy must look deep within himself to find the true meaning of Axis if he stands any chance of saving the day. Be sure to stick around for the epilogue after the credits roll!   --- GET MORE ROTATING HEROES ACTION ON PATREON ROTATOES! If you enjoyed this episode and need of more space shenanigans in your life, then check out The Rotating Heroes Patreon and be sure to use the code SHADDY50 to get 50% off your first month!Get access to exclusive shows like our behind-the-scenes Arc Barks, and Off Leash: Character Creations before each new campaign starts. You'll also receive instant, ad-free access to the ENTIRE back catalogue of campaigns, listen to the latest Axis episodes as soon as they drop, bonus shows, live streams, exclusive character art, AMAs and much, much more!WANT EVEN MORE ACTUAL PLAY GOODNESS? Then listen to 12 Sided Studios' newest production Oaths & Empires: a dark fantasy D&D adventure featuring Kingdom Come: Deliverance II's Luke Dale and Tom McKay. Set in the Witcher-esk inspired world of the Isle of Veil, journey with our two rookie players as they navigate their very first game. Rotating Heroes is a 12 Sided Studios Production

Meta settles lawsuits with an $18 billion pledge to make social media safer, what Gen Alpha is wearing for the back-to-school season, and the legacy of the beloved country music singer Dolly Parton. Song of the Week: "Loser" by Tame Impala → Click here to read the lyrics (language) → Click here to see the video (language) In Other News: Australia's much-touted social media ban for teenagers is falling apart (paywall) as state authorities find it impossible to outsmart the tech prowess of fifteen-year-olds. Naur! China's big box office winner this week was made on a shoestring budget. The plot is a dream about a cow, or a dream of a cow, or perhaps a cow's dream. The movie was praised for its "craftsmanship." According to data from Eventbrite, events advertising shared hobbies (think mahjong or birdwatching) as "meet cutes," or chances to meet potential romantic partners, increased by 117% over the last year. Fanfiction publishing platform Wattpad, a longtime haven for teens experimenting with fanfiction, updated its content guidelines. Some users were convinced (incorrectly) that Wattpad would no longer host sexually explicit content and fled to another platform called AO3. The Olivia Rodrigo-backed Daisy Chain Festival will take place in Irvine, California, this weekend. The music festival is also a charity benefit and will feature an all-female lineup of musicians, including Doechii, Bikini Kill, Mitski, Katseye, and even the OG female-led festival queen, Sarah McLachlan.  

Summary: Justin shares his detailed experiences hunting on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, exploring its unique terrain, logistics, and the challenges of island hunting. Discover insights into hunting Mouflon sheep and Axis deer, and learn practical tips for hunting in remote, rugged environments. - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Leave a Review of the Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buy our Wild Fish and Game Spices⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Art of Venison Sausage Making⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Takeaways: Unique terrain and geography of Lanai Logistics of hunting on remote islands Experience hunting Mouflon sheep and Axis deer Weather challenges and how they impact hunting trips Importance of preparation and local knowledge Keywords: Hunting, Lanai, Mouflon sheep, Axis deer, Hawaii, backcountry, hunting logistics, island hunting, outdoor adventure, wildlife Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of Axis Live, Brad Onishi and Matthew D. Taylor examine growing efforts to undermine confidence in the 2026 elections, including claims about foreign interference, voter rolls, mail-in voting, and calls from figures on the American right for a national emergency. They discuss how election-denial rhetoric can shift from questioning election integrity to challenging the legitimacy of results, and why the period after the election could be as important as Election Day itself. The second half of the episode focuses on Jake Lang, his increasingly confrontational political spectacles, his Christian supremacist rhetoric, and the larger movement behind him. Following Lang's confrontation with a protester dressed as Spider-Man, Brad, Matt, and writer Kate Burns examine how provocation, confrontation, and claims of persecution can become political content.

Katie M. Kelley is a writer, teacher, a lifelong learner, and a mother to eight in a beautifully blended family. She has been a longtime member of the Coffee + Crumbs writing team as well as the podcast co-host, and is the author of three books: Gluing the Cracks, The Very Best Baseball Game, and her most recent book, Grace Will Be There.

Last time we spoke about the reaction after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. After four years of fighting Japan almost alone, China's Chiang Kai-shek learned of Pearl Harbor with profound relief. Japan's attack, meant to neutralize American naval power, instead galvanized the entire Western world against Tokyo. Within hours, Chiang declared war on the Axis powers, transforming China from an isolated nation to a recognized Allied member. The strategic mathematics were clear to Chiang: America's industrial might would ultimately crush Japan. China simply needed to survive long enough. The United States quickly formalized this partnership, pledging military support through Lend-Lease and elevating Chiang to leadership of Allied forces in the China theater. Yet Pearl Harbor brought catastrophe for Western civilians in China. Americans and Britons, previously protected as neutral foreigners, were suddenly rounded up and interned in camps. For many, decades of presence in China ended in hasty evacuation, leaving behind lives built over generations.   #216 The Battle of Hong Kong Part 1: The Approaching Storm 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. Japan emerged as a significant threat to British interests during the 1920s following the collapse of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. This concern intensified dramatically after Japan's invasion of China, with the ensuing Sino-Japanese War escalating tensions further. British assets in the region came under direct assault, including attacks on Western military and commercial vessels such as HMS Ladybird. Yet despite these provocations, the British Government maintained an inconsistent stance toward Japan, responding with only feeble diplomatic and military countermeasures. This contradiction characterized London's approach: while diplomatic channels remained conciliatory, military planners viewed Japan with genuine apprehension. During the 1930s, Singapore and Malaya represented Britain's most valuable and prosperous holdings in the Far East and consequently received substantial garrison reinforcements. By contrast, Hong Kong was widely acknowledged to be indefensible—a conclusion reached repeatedly by successive military studies. Despite this consensus, the British Government proceeded with the Hong Kong Defence Scheme in 1936, which aimed to transform Hong Kong Island into a fortified redoubt while establishing delaying positions in Kowloon and the New Territories. The Hong Kong Garrison's mandate was straightforward: repel external attacks and prevent enemy use of the harbour and dry dock. The underlying strategy relied on a simple principle: hold Hong Kong Island as an impregnable fortress and await relief from the Royal Navy. Consequently, protecting the harbour became the paramount objective. Japanese strategists were correctly identified as Hong Kong's primary threat, with military planners anticipating attack from the sea rather than overland. To counter such an offensive, the defence scheme incorporated five successive layers of protection: naval mines fitted with indicator nets and anti-submarine booms formed the first barrier; coastal artillery provided the second; beach installations featuring pillboxes, wire entanglements and mines constituted the third; infantry strongpoints positioned on commanding heights guarded against amphibious landings; and finally, a mobile reserve force stood ready to counterattack and eliminate any successful enemy incursion. The 1936 plan also mandated extensive fortification of Kowloon's bottleneck approaches through bunkers, trenches and blocked passages, with a principal defensive line—resembling a miniature Maginot Line—constructed across the mountains immediately north of Kowloon. The garrison structure comprised three infantry battalions plus the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps (HKVDC), a unit approximately regiment-strength equipped with armoured cars, engineers, artillery, anti-aircraft guns and infantry. These forces organized into three brigades: mainland, island, and garrison reserve. The air component was planned to be formidable: a reconnaissance squadron, a fighter-bomber squadron, two torpedo squadrons and a flight of auxiliary spotting aircraft operated by the HKVDC. Naval forces consisted of a modest destroyer contingent, an MTB flotilla, gunboats and patrol vessels. When Japan occupied Guangzhou, Hong Kong found itself effectively encircled. In response, limited conscription was implemented, though restricted to non-Chinese males for HKVDC service. Chinese personnel were largely confined to non-combat positions such as air-raid precautions and medical duties. The expanding Japanese threat prompted a substantial expansion of the Hong Kong Garrison to four regular infantry regiments—two British units (one specializing in medium machine-gun support) and two Indian regiments. Supporting forces included two coastal artillery regiments, a field artillery regiment-plus, and an anti-aircraft regiment. The Royal Navy expanded to include the 2nd MTB flotilla (eight 60-foot, 29-knot motor torpedo boats armed with twin torpedoes and eight Lewis guns each, plus two smaller 55-foot vessels), four shallow-draught river gunboats (HMS Cicala, Tern, Moth and Robin), four aging World War I S-class destroyers (HMS Thracian, Thanet, Scout and Tenedos—the last transferred to Singapore in 1939), HMS Cornflower sloop, and various auxiliary vessels including tugs, boom defence ships and minelayers. The Fleet Air Arm deployed three Supermarine Walruses—single-engine reconnaissance amphibians—at Kai Tak Airport. The Royal Air Force remained the weakest service, equipped with only four Vickers Wildebeest torpedo-bombers and a handful of HKVDC aircraft: one Avro Tutor, two Hornet Moths and two Cadet biplanes. When World War II erupted in Europe, Britain's focus necessarily shifted to national survival, inevitably leaving distant imperial outposts like Hong Kong neglected. Rather than receive reinforcements, Hong Kong actually lost capable personnel; many veteran troops were repatriated to Europe, leaving behind a less proficient garrison. Peacetime duties had proven a poor preparation for combat—officers and men had passed their time socializing rather than maintaining combat readiness. Governor Sir Geoffrey Northcote persistently urged London to adopt a firmer stance against relentless Japanese provocations: aircraft incursions, sinking of junks and fishing vessels, and infiltration by Taiwanese fifth columnists (Japan had colonized Taiwan in 1895). Recognizing the hopelessness of his position, Northcote recommended withdrawal in October 1940, arguing that defending the colony would inevitably result in mass civilian casualties and widespread destruction—a pragmatic assessment given Hong Kong's indefensible state. London categorically rejected this proposal, reasoning that withdrawal would demoralize China, embolden Japan and undermine American confidence in British resolve. Underlying this decision was an additional consideration: the long-standing dispute over Hong Kong's sovereignty. Since Britain acquired Hong Kong in 1841, the prospect of surrendering it, even temporarily, raised fears about reclaiming it afterward. Preserving the appearance of British determination was deemed crucial to demonstrating to Chiang Kai-shek, Nationalist China's leader, that Britain intended to retain the territory. Despite these political calculations, London consistently refused fresh troop deployments. Major-General A. E. Grasett, the China theatre commander, requested reinforcements only to face rejection—London offered only Indian or other colonial forces. Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, appointed British commander in the Far East in 1941, likewise pressed for garrison strengthening, to no avail. The situation shifted dramatically after Grasett, a retired Canadian who had recently left his China post, travelled to Britain via Canada. Upon arriving in Canada, he independently approached his former classmate Major-General Crerar, Chief of the Canadian General Staff, and advocated for reinforcement. Grasett argued persuasively that deploying two or more additional battalions would enable the Hong Kong garrison to withstand an extended siege. When Grasett reached London in early September 1941, he presented this case directly to the British Chiefs of Staff, simultaneously proposing that Canada could provide the extra units. His arguments proved persuasive; the Chiefs of Staff altered course and convinced a reluctant Churchill to reconsider. In light of accelerating Japanese pressure, Britain substantially enlarged the Malaysia/Singapore garrison from nine to 32 battalions and despatched two capital ships—HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse—to the region, reasoning that this show of force would deter Japanese aggression against British Far Eastern interests, including Hong Kong. The original defence strategy envisaged holding Hong Kong Island exclusively while denying the harbour to attackers. A single battalion (the Punjabis) would execute delaying actions across the New Territories, followed by a three-battalion defensive stand on the Gin Drinkers Line. This brief mainland resistance would allow time for demolishing stores, power installations, docks and wharves, clearing food stocks and removing vital matériel before withdrawing to Hong Kong Island for a protracted resistance awaiting relief from Singapore or American forces from the Philippines. The Gin Drinkers Line—styled after the French Maginot Line in miniature—ran approximately 18 kilometres south of the Sino-Hong Kong border. Beginning near Gin Drinkers Bay west of Kowloon, it extended 17 kilometres across the Kowloon Peninsula hills toward its eastern extremity. The strategic expectation was that this line would delay the Japanese assault for three weeks or longer, permitting battalion withdrawal to Hong Kong Island for sustained resistance while mainland forces completed evacuation procedures. The 1937 war plan stipulated that four battalions would be necessary for an effective delaying action and seven for an adequate Gin Drinkers Line defence—figures which excluded the aircraft and naval support essential to success. With only a single army brigade available and virtually no air capability, planners abandoned the mainland defence concept, leaving defensive works incomplete and deteriorating under tropical conditions. Chinese personnel were conspicuously absent from initial war preparations and strategic planning, only being incorporated late in the process. The largest Chinese component was the volunteer contingent serving with the HKVDC. On the regular army side, approximately 150 Chinese recruits were enlisted in mid-1941 for the 5th Anti-Aircraft Regiment. The Hong Kong Chinese Regiment, hastily constituted on 3 November 1941, comprised officers borrowed from British and Indian units alongside 52 Chinese junior NCOs and other ranks with minimal training. A Royal Engineers troop staffed entirely by Chinese soldiers saw service, and some Chinese personnel served with the Royal Navy and Dockyard Defence Corps. Chinese participation increased substantially in auxiliary services—air-raid precautions, auxiliary police, nursing, St John Ambulance and fire brigades. This reluctance to fully integrate Chinese forces likely reflected prevailing attitudes of the era. Pre-war British propaganda had frequently mocked Japanese military capability, portraying officers and soldiers as myopic and incompetent. Japanese combat prowess was systematically underestimated; their victories in China were attributed to facing inferior opposition rather than evidence of genuine military strength. Japanese weaponry was dismissed as inferior to European standards. Consequently, British confidence remained high that the colony could hold indefinitely if adequately reinforced. In September 1941, Hong Kong received heartening news: two additional Canadian battalions would be deployed to the garrison. Brigadier John Maltby promptly revived the pre-war plan for defending the Gin Drinkers Line, developing a strategy centred on three mainland battalions (2nd Royal Scots, 5/7 Rajputs and 2/14 Punjab) supported by HKVDC elements and four artillery troop detachments, while three island battalions (1st Middlesex, Royal Rifles of Canada and Winnipeg Grenadiers) bolstered by the bulk of the HKVDC would hold Hong Kong Island. Command responsibility was divided between two brigades: the Island Brigade (Hong Kong Infantry Brigade) under Brigadier Lawson, a recently arrived Canadian, and the mainland Kowloon Infantry Brigade under Brigadier Wallis. The Canadian regiments arrived on 16 November 1941. Maltby was commissioned into the Indian Army in 1911, and  saw extensive service across multiple campaigns: World War I, the Persian Gulf (1913–14), and the North-West Frontier (1923–24). His early promise earned him selection for accelerated advancement through prestigious staff colleges at Quetta and RAF Andover. By 1937, he was again serving on the North-West Frontier, and by 1939 commanded both the 3rd Jhelum Brigade (later the Calcutta Brigade) and the 19th Infantry Brigade in Deccan. In 1940, posted to China, Maltby orchestrated the closure of the North China Command by withdrawing two infantry battalions from Shanghai. Promoted to major-general as GOC China in August 1941, he had only three months to prepare the colony's defenses, a race against time he could not win.  The Gin Drinkers Line occupied a naturally dominant position atop mountains spanning northern Kowloon's breadth, yet possessed inherent weaknesses that would prove fatal. The line lacked defensive depth and remained vulnerable to flanking manoeuvres, with two sectors representing particular danger: Customs Pass and the gap between Golden Hill and Laichikok Peninsula near Gin Drinkers Bay. Given the extended front, each battalion arranged its forces in a string of platoon positions with gaps covered by daytime fire and nighttime patrols. One company per battalion could be held in reserve within prepared positions guarding the most dangerous sectors. The reserve company of the centre battalion (2/14 Punjab) initially advanced as forward troops, screening demolition operations and delaying the enemy's initial thrust. The hasty decision to establish mainland defences meant that essential support systems—communication networks, artillery registrations, mortar calibrations—remained incomplete when combat commenced. Ammunition shortages compounded the problem. For instance, the 2/14 Punjab conducted only a single 3-inch mortar practice session before the attack; adequate ammunition arrived only in November and totalled a mere 70 rounds per battalion for both training and combat. These mortars were registered for the first time in their battle positions, with combat beginning just 12 hours later. The 2-inch mortar situation was even more desperate: troops received live ammunition only as fighting started, making their baptism of fire an actual combat situation. Transportation deficiencies—trucks and animals in short supply—forced manual ammunition transport across Hong Kong's challenging terrain, imposing severe physical demands on already stretched personnel.   On 6 November 1941, Imperial Japanese Headquarters ordered its Commander-in-Chief in China to prepare plans for capturing Hong Kong. The 23rd Army, part of the China Southern Expeditionary Army Group and commanded by Lt. Gen. Sakai Takashi with Maj. Gen. Kuribayashi Tadamichi serving as Chief of Staff, would form the invasion's backbone. All preparations were to be completed by the end of November 1941. The operation, designated 'Operation C', sought to 'seize Hong Kong within ten days'. Takahashi was the son of a factory worker, and rose through the ranks to become a veteran of China campaigns. He was tasked with capturing Hong Kong using the 38th Division normally assigned to the Southern Expeditionary Army Group. Despite setbacks and humiliation over requests for additional resources—particularly following intelligence reports of tanks (actually Bren carriers) in Hong Kong—Sakai remained determined to succeed. He served as Governor of Hong Kong from 26 December 1941 to 20 February 1942. Kuribayashi, best remembered as the Japanese commander at Iwo Jima, graduated from the Army Academy in 1914 specializing in cavalry. He served as deputy military attaché to Washington and Canada and studied at Harvard University. In December 1941, he held the position of Chief of Staff to the 23rd Army during the Hong Kong operation. Operation C followed a straightforward strategic framework. A blocking force would prevent Chinese interference from the rear, while the main invasion force would spearhead the assault. The 23rd Army, comprising four divisions plus a mixed brigade and two infantry regiments, received the assignment to attack Hong Kong. Of these four divisions, only the 38th played a substantive role in the invasion itself. The attack employed a combined-arms approach. Naval forces would establish a blockade and deliver bombardment while aircraft targeted key installations. Ground forces from the 38th Division—specifically the 228th, 229th, and 230th Regiments—would execute the land invasion using a three-pronged strategy. The right column would sweep westward in a wide arc, clearing Castle Peak Road and targeting the western flank of the Gin Drinkers Line near Laichikok Peninsula. The centre force would press directly through the line's middle, while the left column would cross Tidal Cove (Tolo Harbour) toward Kai Tak Airport and eastward toward Devil Peak, a crucial defensive position. The objective was to annihilate British forces on the mainland and compel Hong Kong's surrender through sustained bombardment. Should British forces resist, the island phase of the campaign would commence. Securing the rear against the Chinese National Army of the 7th Military District and Communist guerrillas fell to the 66th Regiment, normally part of the 51st Division but attached to the 38th for this operation. The 66th would simultaneously occupy and secure rear areas throughout the New Territories and Kowloon while the three assault regiments engaged the main defensive forces. This rearguard operation was organised into columns named after their commanding officers: Kitazawa, Kobayashi, Sato, and Araki. The Japanese selected the narrowest approach between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, targeting the eastern coast near Lyemun Passage where only 410 metres of water separated the mainland from the island. Upon landing, forces would rapidly advance inland to seize the critical junction of Wongneichong Gap, then pivot westward and southward to capture Victoria City and the remainder of Hong Kong. The naval contingent divided into two groups: the Bombardment Group and the Attack Group. Approximately 300 personnel from the Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF) were attached to the invasion force. Air support came from the First Air Brigade under Col. Habu Hideharu, which contributed 56 light bombers and fighters. Their mission was to neutralise the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, thereby securing aerial and maritime superiority for the ground campaign.   On the eve of war, the British garrison numbered 13,981 all ranks, including nursing staff and St John Ambulance personnel. Of these, 8,919 were British and Canadian, with 4,402 Indian and Chinese. The core infantry force comprised 5,422 regular soldiers, complemented by approximately 6,000 additional personnel across artillery, engineering, naval, and Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps (HKVDC) units. By 1941, the Royal Navy had become a shadow of its former self as the once-dominant China Squadron. Of the three World War I destroyers present on 8 December, two had been sent to Singapore—the third undergoing repairs—by 1930. This redeployment stemmed partly from the futility of defending the colony and partly from a commitment by senior US Navy officers: Britain would reinforce Singapore with Hong Kong's fleet in exchange for four American destroyers at Singapore. This American guarantee, however, never materialized. The defensive infrastructure focused primarily on countering a seaborne attack: twenty-nine coastal guns (9.2in., 6in., 4.7in., and 4in. calibres), ten 18- and 2-pounder beach defense guns, and twenty-eight field guns (60-pounder, 6in., 4.5in., and 3.7in. calibres). The Hong Kong Garrison's infantry comprised four regular army battalions—two British and two Indian—bolstered by five HKVDC infantry companies, each averaging 100 men. The 1st Middlesex Regiment, deployed in August 1937, served as a machine-gun battalion equipped with forty-eight Vickers medium machine guns. Having been abroad since 1931, the regiment had deteriorated through protracted garrison service, Hong Kong being among the softest postings available. From September 1939 onward, all regiments—including the 5/7 Rajputs (arrived June 1937) and the 2/14 Punjab—experienced systematic loss of experienced officers and NCOs to other theaters. The Royal Scots proved particularly hard hit, suffering disciplinary problems and an unusually high court-martial rate. Units like the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery suffered critical leadership gaps that went unaddressed. By December 1941, many formations fielded inexperienced replacement troops, significantly undermining combat readiness. The Punjabis exemplified these deficiencies. Stationed in Hong Kong since November 1940, they received their vehicles and mortars only in August 1941—three months before combat. Compounding this, forty percent of their strength consisted of raw recruits arrived just in October. When war erupted, artillery regiments found themselves relying on junior officers in senior roles, with British commanders unfamiliar with Urdu directing Indian troops, a handicap that severely compromised effectiveness. Deficient equipment compounded leadership shortages. Shells dating from 1918 detonated prematurely upon discharge, while ammunition shortages crippled operations. On 8 December, all field guns deployed with merely 100 rounds apiece, with 200 rounds held in reserve for the entire campaign, and coastal guns received only 25 rounds each. Insufficient cross-training meant many infantrymen failed to understand the artillery "clock face" targeting system, causing them to miss their objectives. Malaria devastated European troops, particularly the Royal Scots. Of approximately 770 personnel, at least 180 suffered recurring malarial episodes from the Shing Mun Redoubt area's notoriously endemic conditions. Staff shortages forced nearly every unit to promote junior officers to positions beyond their rank, exacerbating structural weaknesses. Although the Canadians' arrival bolstered the garrison, significant handicaps undermined their effectiveness. Both battalions carried a C-class designation—deemed unfit for foreign service—having spent years in soft garrison postings without rigorous training. The deficit was stark: each Canadian soldier received only thirty-five rifle practice rounds. The two battalions incorporated 115 men with fewer than sixteen weeks' training, while sixty-two of seventy-five recruits joining the Winnipeg Grenadiers in June came directly from a training depot lacking even basic rifles. Twelve percent of the Canadian force remained untrained. Equipment deficiencies proved even more damaging. A standard 1941 Canadian infantry battalion required 102 motor vehicles—including twenty-two Universal Carriers, thirty-seven ¾-ton trucks, thirteen 1-ton trucks, thirty-one bicycles, and twenty-two Boys anti-tank rifles. When the Canadians landed, logistical failures left them with only six Bren carriers, two water tankers, twelve ¾-ton trucks, and a single Boys anti-tank rifle. Although they carried 3in. mortars, neither ammunition nor radios accompanied them. Canada possessed only 300 3-inch mortar bombs in its entire inventory at that time, making any allocation to Hong Kong impossible. A second vessel, the SS Don Jose, was dispatched with replacement vehicles and equipment but never reached Hong Kong before 8 December. The Japanese seized it en route to Manila. Despite these shortcomings, the force departed on 27 October with 1,975 men and arrived on 16 November. Intelligence estimates regarding Japanese available forces varied widely, ranging from two to four divisions. On 6 December evening, Chinese reports confirmed the previous day's arrival of three Japanese divisions at Buji township, located eight miles from the border in what is now Shenzhen. Earlier, around 1 November, a Japanese deserter provided intelligence of significant troop concentrations north of the frontier, including large-calibre artillery indicative of at least divisional strength.   The Hong Kong invasion force comprised three service branches: the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) deployed the 38th Infantry Division, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) committed the Second China Fleet, and the Imperial Japanese Air Force (IJAF) contributed the 1st Air Group. Command of the ground assault rested with Lieutenant-General Sano Tadayoshi of the 38th Division, supported by Major-General Ito Takeo heading the infantry group, while supporting arms including artillery, engineers, armor, and transport fell under Sano's authority. The main assault force consisted of three infantry regiments from the 38th Division, each led by a colonel: the 228th under Doi Teihichi, the 229th under Tanaka Ryosaburo, and the 230th under Shoji Toshishige. The 38th Division itself was a standard 1940s B-class infantry division of approximately 20,000 troops (ranging from 18,000–21,000 depending on operational requirements), organized into three regiments with three battalions each. Reflecting the Japanese army's reliance on animal and human transport, each regiment fielded roughly 3,800 troops supported by some 700 horses. Battalion strength averaged around 1,071 personnel, with companies numbering approximately 180 men. Japanese infantry battalions of this period featured a distinctive organization: rifle platoons consisted of four sections (three equipped with rifles and light machine guns, one with light mortars and rifles), complemented by an additional heavy machine-gun company fielding twelve Type 92 weapons and a troop of light artillery—likely Type 92 70mm infantry guns. The divisional field artillery regiment operated 75mm Type 41 mountain guns organized into three 688-man battalions, each with two troops of two guns. Mountain artillery units, numbering 36 guns total, carried additional personnel (3,400) and animals (1,400) to navigate the terrain complexities of Hong Kong operations. Recognizing the need for overwhelming firepower to compel Hong Kong's surrender, the IJA augmented the invasion force with heavy artillery—15cm and 24cm howitzers commanded by Major-General Kitashima Kineo. News of the Canadian reinforcements arriving in Hong Kong forced a reassessment. Commander-in-Chief Sakai Takashi of the 23rd Army informed his superiors that the original ten-day timeline was unrealistic and requested additional troops. Although most formations were already committed to other operations, Imperial Headquarters eventually authorized two depot regiments from Japan to support the campaign. Intended for second-line duties rather than frontline combat, these units were to be returned promptly after freeing experienced personnel for Hong Kong operations. This arrangement allowed the 19th and 20th mixed brigades—approximately 6,000 men organized in five infantry battalions, a field artillery battalion, and an engineer battalion—to be released for Hong Kong. However, Sakai's request for reinforcements met with disapproval from Imperial Headquarters, and he received an unmistakable message: a swift, decisive campaign was essential. His situation worsened when Japanese agents mistakenly identified British Bren carriers as tanks, forcing Sakai to improvise armor by raiding the 1st Reserve Tank Battalion and tankette units from infantry depot divisions. In attempting to secure additional armor from the 11th Army's 9th Reconnaissance Regiment, Sakai encountered resistance. General Hata Shunroku lodged sustained complaints with senior officials, and Sakai received a sharp rebuke—further requests would not be entertained, and his replacement would follow if necessary. Stung by this loss of face, Sakai abandoned all additional requests and became even more determined to achieve success. Vice-Admiral Niimi Masaichi, commanding the 2nd China Expeditionary Fleet, oversaw the entire naval element, divided into bombardment and attack groups. His flagship, the light cruiser Isuzu, carried Captain Ura Koichi, who simultaneously commanded the bombardment group. This naval force assembled ships from various China Expeditionary Fleet units, particularly from the Canton Special Base Force, 15 Squadron, and 11 Torpedo Boat Division at Guangzhou. Reflecting Niimi's lack of confidence in the army's air support capabilities, the seaplane tender IJN Kamikawa Maru joined the operation on his insistence, providing organic naval aviation against the threat posed by British Wildebeests. Niimi also petitioned for destroyers IJN Wakaba and Yugure to counter the three British destroyers, though this request was denied. The Special Naval Landing Forces (SNLF) were assigned to conduct diversionary attacks south of Hong Kong Island, intended to distract British forces from the main land invasion thrust. The IJAF's 1st Air Brigade, commanded by Colonel Habu Hideharu, centered on the 45th Air Regiment with 34 Kawasaki Ki-32 Type 98 'Mary' light bombers. This composite force drew aircraft and units from airfields across China and Manchuria—Beijing, Shanghai, Taiwan, and Qiqihar—all assembled at Baiyun Aerodrome in Guangzhou on 7 December 1941. Supporting the 1st Air Brigade were the 10th Independent Squadron under Captain Takatsuki Akira with 13 Nakajima Ki-27 Type 97 'Nate' fighters, 3 Mitsubishi Ki-15 Type 97 'Babs' command reconnaissance aircraft from the 18th Independent Reconnaissance Squadron, and the 44th Independent Squadron fielding 6 Tachikawa Ki-36 Type 98 'Ida' observation aircraft. Years before the invasion, the Japanese cultivated an extensive network of agents and sleeper operatives in Hong Kong, methodically gathering intelligence and mapping military installations. This sophisticated network proved remarkably effective: invasion maps carried by IJA officers were actually Hong Kong Government and British military maps, overprinted with Japanese annotations and interpretations. British officers later discovered in captivity that the Peninsula Hotel's regular barber was a Japanese Navy lieutenant-commander who had exploited the intimate setting to extract valuable information about British force dispositions. Intelligence operatives infiltrated every level of Hong Kong society—the garrison tailor and barber both served as spies. This groundwork enabled exceptional accuracy in artillery fire and bombing campaigns. The Japanese further leveraged criminal networks, recruiting gangsters throughout Hong Kong and Guangdong province with money and arms, turning them into irregular auxiliaries supporting the invasion.   On Sunday, 7 December, seven hundred members of the 2nd Royal Scots and Middlesex Regiment marched to St John's Cathedral for the morning service. As Major-General Maltby read a passage from Matthew, his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant I. MacGregor, delivered an urgent message that would change everything. Preparations for conflict had already begun. On 5 December, the HKVDC had mobilized fully, yet Hong Kong's broader population remained unmoved—the Happy Valley racetrack reported record attendance that very day. The contrast was stark: while one institution prepared for war, another celebrated as though nothing threatened. Japanese forces had been positioned advantageously since autumn 1941. The 23rd Army was already stationed west of Guangzhou, with contingents scattered across Foshan Town, Zhuhai, and other locations on the Pearl River delta. Upon orders for war on 1 December, they faced minimal distances to cover. The army regrouped at Humen, Shilong Town, and Guangzhou itself—staging areas for the invasion. The first visible signs arrived on 4–5 December when Japanese forces landed at Mirs Bay; the 228th Regiment moved into its staging area at Buji Town, now part of Shenzhen City. Maltby received these reports and immediately departed the cathedral service to issue urgent stand-to orders. Yet skepticism persisted within military circles. Some dismissed the threat, dismissing such intelligence as "astonishingly erroneous." Meanwhile, the Imperial Japanese Navy massed in the waters beyond Hong Kong's horizon. The Kowloon Infantry Brigade held a stretched defensive line: the 5/7 Rajputs anchored the centre, the 2/14 Punjab the east, and the 2nd Royal Scots the west. Forward positions extended far—C Company, 2/14 Punjab, under Major S. Burns ranged along Castle Peak Road toward Yuen Long. The brigade screen, C Company of the 2/14 Punjab, held Shueng Shui and Taipo Market with four Bren carriers and two armoured cars from the HKVDC, backed by engineers and the 22nd Fortress Company. The Hong Kong Infantry Brigade held Hong Kong Island itself. The Winnipeg Grenadiers occupied Victoria City on the north-west coast, while the Royal Rifles of Canada stretched along the north-east shores from Saukiwan to Lyemun. Brigadier Lawson commanded from his headquarters at Wongneichong Gap in the island's centre. At 0355 hours on 8 December, the code word "Blossom Blossom" was transmitted. Eleven minutes later, Lieutenant-General Sakai ordered the invasion to commence. Fifty minutes after that, at 0445 hours, Major Charles Boxer—a fluent Japanese speaker formerly of the Lincolnshire Regiment—was roused by Radio Tokyo announcing that war was imminent. Governor Young and Major-General Maltby were informed at once. By 0500 hours, the forward demolition points had been blown by Major Gray, OC of C Company 2/14 Punjab, and the HKVDC engineers under Major J. H. Bottomley. At 0645 hours, the garrison received formal notification: Britain and Japan were at war. Seventy-five minutes later, air-raid sirens wailed. Within moments, smoke billowed from Kai Tak Airport as Japanese aircraft destroyed virtually the entire air garrison. The Wildebeests, Walruses, HKVDC biplanes, and several civilian planes were engulfed in flames. Only two Ju-52s of the Eurasia Corporation and one CNAC T-32 Condor escaped destruction—dispersal bays had never been built due to lack of funds. The Japanese then turned to secondary targets, bombing Shamshuipo Camp and the neighbouring police station. The Canadians suffered few large-scale casualties in the initial strikes, though Sergeant Routledge and Signalman Fairley of the signal platoon were wounded—the first Canadian soldiers injured in World War II. Remarkably, Hong Kong Island's theatres, cinemas, and restaurants continued operating as though the island faced no peril. Japanese demolition efforts proved only minor obstacles. Bridges blown were quickly replaced. The invasion proceeded on three fronts: the 230th Regiment advanced westward along the northern route toward Yuen Long and Castle Peak, targeting the northern slope of Tai Mo Mountain. The 228th Regiment drove down the centre, following the Sheung Shui–Taipo–Kowloon road toward Grassy Hill north of the Shing Mun Redoubt. The 229th Regiment, crossing at Sha Tau Kok and by boat at Starling Inlet, proceeded via Taipo toward Tai Shui Hang and Ma On Mountain. Whenever confronted with strongly defended positions, the Japanese bypassed them entirely rather than engage. The first day brought scattered but spirited resistance. Around 1300 hours, the Punjabis inflicted the first serious check, drawing blood from advancing Japanese forces. At 1830 hours, they ambushed and decimated several Japanese platoons south of Taipo market town. The HKVDC's armoured cars and Bren carriers struck similar successes nearby. The 2 Royal Scots' reconnaissance platoon clashed with elements of the 229th Regiment around Yuen Long. Despite these minor victories, Japanese momentum continued. Armed with stolen British maps and guided by fifth columnists, they pushed forward relentlessly. By late afternoon on the 8th, the Punjabis withdrew toward Grassy Hill to avoid being outflanked. The artillerymen of the 12th Battery engaged an IJN destroyer and Japanese forces around Taipo, inflicting heavy casualties. Farther south near Shatin, on the Taipo–Kowloon highway, rapidly advancing Japanese troops surprised the defenders and severed the fuse at an HKVDC demolition point. Their triumph proved momentary; the engineers completed the backup circuit and detonated the bridge, destroying it along with the Japanese soldiers crossing it. By early morning on 9 December, orders came to withdraw all mainland units to the Gin Drinkers Line. The Punjabis, already at Shatin Wai overlooking Tide Cove, held their position under pressure and continuous shelling for the next two days. The HKVDC withdrew to Fotan, a village south of Shatin. Maltby ordered D Company, 5/7 Rajputs, under Captain H. R. Newtons to Smuggler's Ridge to close the gap between the 2 Royal Scots and 2/14 Punjab. HKVDC armoured cars and Bren carriers continued patrols along Castle Peak Road while HMS Cicala, having survived two air attacks, maintained station in Castle Peak Bay. Despite an IJN blockade, the destroyers HMS Thanet and Scout slipped anchor and escaped to Singapore around 2130 hours. The surviving CNAC and Eurasia aircraft took off with high-value evacuees: Dr. Sun Yat-Sen's widow and her two equally renowned sisters—the Soong sisters—along with Chinese Finance Minister H. H. Kung. Also departing was Lieutenant-Colonel H. Owen-Hughes of the HKVDC, who carried orders to coordinate with the Chinese Nationalist Army for a rear-guard attack on Japanese forces to relieve the pressure on Hong Kong. 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. On 8 December 1941, Japan attacked Hong Kong with the 38th Division, supported by naval and air forces. Despite British defenses manned by undertrained, under-equipped troops, Japanese forces advanced rapidly across three fronts. Within hours, the RAF was destroyed, demolitions proved futile, and British units withdrew toward the Gin Drinkers Line facing overwhelming odds.

In this episode: • Trump says the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports will remain in place • Tehran denies reports of extending a 60-day ceasefire • 32 countries condemn Iran over executions of protesters • Israeli families return to Ganim in northern Samaria • The history of Ganim and the 2005 disengagement • Rising tensions in Kusra and clashes involving Israeli settlers • IDF disciplinary action involving soldiers and settlers • U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee's comments about Israeli settlers • Israel and Venezuela restore consular relations after 17 years • Venezuela's shrinking Jewish community • The story of Sergeant William Zev Shaken, a lone soldier from New York • Will's service in the Golani Brigade and his experience fighting in Gaza • His struggle with PTSD after returning to civilian life • His dream of becoming a social worker and helping others • Will's funeral at Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery • The debate over recognition of non-operational military deaths • Israel's growing need for psychological support for veterans • A Torah thought from Rabbi Yosi Madvig on faith, justice and redemption Will's story is a reminder of the sacrifices made by soldiers long after they leave the battlefield. We send our deepest condolences to his family, friends, and brothers-in-arms. If you or someone you know is struggling with trauma or a mental health crisis, please seek immediate help through your local emergency or crisis-support services.  Support Israel Daily News: Your support helps us continue producing independent journalism and reporting from Israel and the region. Sign up for the Israel Weekly News: israeldailynews.org Subscribe to the Israel Daily News Podcast for daily coverage of Israel, the Middle East, politics, security and the stories that matter.  Israel Daily News website: https://israeldailynews.org  YOUTUBE:     / @israeldailynews    Israel Daily News Patreon:   / shannafuld    Support our Wartime News Coverage:  https://www.gofundme.com/f/independen...  Links to all things IDN:  https://linktr.ee/israeldailynews Timestamps  00:00 Trump Keeps Iran Blockade in Place  01:00 Iran Denies Ceasefire Extension  02:00 Israeli Families Return to Ganim  03:00 Rising Tensions in Kusra  04:00 IDF Soldiers & Settler Confrontations  05:00 Huckabee Calls Some Settlers “Israeli Terrorists”  06:00 Gaza Strikes & Regional Tensions  07:00 Israel & Venezuela Restore Consular Relations  08:00 Venezuela's Jewish Community Shrinks  09:00 The Story of Lone Soldier William Zev Shaken  10:00 Will's Service After October 7th  11:00 His Dream to Help Others  12:00 Will's Funeral in Jerusalem  13:00 Shanna's Personal Connection With Will  14:00 Will's Leadership Project  15:00 A Friend Remembers Will  16:00 Will Buried at Mt. Herzl  17:00 His Parents' Heartbreaking Eulogy  18:00 Questions About Military Recognition  19:00 How the Defense Ministry Reviews These Cases  20:00 PTSD & Psychological Trauma Among Soldiers  21:00 The Growing Mental Health Crisis  22:00 Support for Veterans & Trauma Survivors  23:00 Remembering Will Shaken + Torah Thought Begins  24:00 Abraham's Argument With God  25:00 God's Promise of Consolation  26:00 Moses, Action & Divine Protection  27:00 Faith, Confidence & Redemption  28:00 Shabbat Shalom & Sign-Off    #Israel #IsraelNews #IsraelDailyNews #Trump #Iran  #IsraelIran #MiddleEast #IDF #IsraeliSoldiers #IsraelDefenseForces #JudeaAndSamaria #Gaza #IsraelPolitics #GolaniBrigade #LoneSoldier #PTSD #Veterans #Venezuela #JewishCommunity  #IsraelPodcast Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The introduction of additional  tariffs on imported goods last year hit many reenactors across the United States hard in the wallet . Sourcing items from overseas has always been important to many in the hobby but the additional charges proved problematic and also caused many vendors and suppliers to stop shipping to the USA for a period. In this epsiode Chris talks to Hunter who reenacts with the Royal Hungarian Army 9th Light Division - a niche Axis impression . For him being able to source items from Central Europe is vital so he and his group have devised workarounds that maybe useful for others.... For more information on Hunter's group please use the link below  https://www.facebook.com/share/1Ev2zg3vaS/ As ever, a very big thank you to everyone that supports the Podcast via  Patreon - we really couldn't do this without you ! Why not sign up and become one of our growing band of supporters with access to all of our Patreon exclusive content and more for as little as $5 a month.     

Three Big Conversations: Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor debut their new dinosaur movie - 02:32 "that's AI" is the ultimate burn from Gen Alpha - 14:22 how one teacher found a way to get his students reading again. - 29:30 Resource of the Week: Podcast Episode - How to Do What We Do - 00:58 → Click here to listen to our episode on: Educating Humans in the Age of AI (with Professor Jeffrey Bilbro) In Other News: - 43:00 This week in AI: In light of concerns about romantic involvement with chatbots, "ChatGPT for Teens" is being marketed as a homework helper that limits "the emotional and intimate exchanges between young people and AI." Robbie Torney from Common Sense Media argues that we should remain cautious until we have actual evidence that these features have been turned off. This week in dopamine: South Korean websites like "Dopamine Shop" and "FoodNeverComes" allow users to "pay" for clothes or food, and still feel like they're getting "retail therapy," without having to spend any money (because the products aren't real). This week in arson: "Prediction market" Polymarket has enabled users to bet on the outcome of wildfires, which historian Jamie Pietruska rightly labels as a "perverse incentive." This week in fabric: The word "polyester" has become a new way for Gen Z to call something out as low-quality or cheap. But you know what's worse than that? Wool and linen, woven together. This week in fabric, again: An article in Teen Vogue suggests that "poetcore" (aka Dark Academia's "cozier, more relaxed cousin") and "vintage 90s mall fashion" will be some of the biggest fashion trends this semester. On a completely unrelated note, here's The Guardian on how social media has "automated individual taste into oblivion."

In the explosive finale of Arc 3 Shaddy must look deep within himself to find the true meaning of Axis if he stands any chance of saving the day. Be sure to stick around for the epilogue after the credits roll!   --- GET MORE ROTATING HEROES ACTION ON PATREON ROTATOES! If you enjoyed this episode and need of more space shenanigans in your life, then check out The Rotating Heroes Patreon and be sure to use the code SHADDY50 to get 50% off your first month!Get access to exclusive shows like our behind-the-scenes Arc Barks, and Off Leash: Character Creations before each new campaign starts. You'll also receive instant, ad-free access to the ENTIRE back catalogue of campaigns, listen to the latest Axis episodes as soon as they drop, bonus shows, live streams, exclusive character art, AMAs and much, much more!WANT EVEN MORE ACTUAL PLAY GOODNESS? Then listen to 12 Sided Studios' newest production Oaths & Empires: a dark fantasy D&D adventure featuring Kingdom Come: Deliverance II's Luke Dale and Tom McKay. Set in the Witcher-esk inspired world of the Isle of Veil, journey with our two rookie players as they navigate their very first game. Rotating Heroes is a 12 Sided Studios Production

Michael is joined by Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and former National Security Council official, for a strategic tour of the world's most urgent flashpoints. Richard explores the dangerous ripple effects of the Iran conflict across the Middle East, including regional powers hedging toward mutual defense pacts and the strategic costs of an open-ended naval commitment. He also evaluates recent friction in the U.S.–South Korea alliance, the pitfalls of personality-driven diplomacy with North Korea, and how military redeployments to the Middle East have left the U.S. with zero aircraft carriers currently in the Western Pacific. Finally, he and Michael examine the protracted battlefield dynamics in Ukraine, the ambiguity surrounding Washington's endgame with Moscow, and the deepening operational ties within the "Axis of Upheaval"—China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran—urging a coordinated strategy to defend frontline states without falling into regional distractions.

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor debut their new dinosaur movie, "that's AI" is the ultimate burn from Gen Alpha, and how one teacher found a way to get his students reading again.  Resource of the Week: Podcast Episode - How to Do What We Do → Click here to listen to our episode on: Educating Humans in the Age of AI (with Professor Jeffrey Bilbro) In Other News: This week in AI: In light of concerns about romantic involvement with chatbots, "ChatGPT for Teens" is being marketed as a homework helper that limits "the emotional and intimate exchanges between young people and AI." Robbie Torney from Common Sense Media argues that we should remain cautious until we have actual evidence that these features have been turned off. This week in dopamine: South Korean websites like "Dopamine Shop" and "FoodNeverComes" allow users to "pay" for clothes or food, and still feel like they're getting "retail therapy," without having to spend any money (because the products aren't real). This week in arson: "Prediction market" Polymarket has enabled users to bet on the outcome of wildfires, which historian Jamie Pietruska rightly labels as a "perverse incentive." This week in fabric: The word "polyester" has become a new way for Gen Z to call something out as low-quality or cheap. But you know what's worse than that? Wool and linen, woven together. This week in fabric, again: An article in Teen Vogue suggests that "poetcore" (aka Dark Academia's "cozier, more relaxed cousin") and "vintage 90s mall fashion" will be some of the biggest fashion trends this semester. On a completely unrelated note, here's The Guardian on how social media has "automated individual taste into oblivion."

In this bonus episode of the In Focus podcast we have an excerpt from Global Faultlines, the Hindu's international affairs podcast. Yemen is no longer just the site of a devastating civil war. The Houthis have emerged as a powerful regional actor, capable of threatening Saudi Arabia, Israel and one of the world's most important maritime trade routes. In this episode, we examine how the Houthis transformed from a domestic insurgency into a regional military force, how the Gaza war expanded their role, and why Yemen has now become a new front in the Iran war. We look at the Houthis' relationship with Iran, the strategic importance of the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb, the renewed confrontation with Saudi Arabia, and what the escalation means for Yemen's already catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Can Yemen still find a political settlement, or has the rise of the Houthis permanently changed the balance of power in West Asia? Expert: Stanly Johny, International Affairs Editor, The Hindu Research, Editing and Production: Sharmada Venkatasubramanian Camera: Shivaraj S Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monday, August 17, 2026; 8pm: Tonight, Trump bails on America's South Korean allies and effectively sides with the “Axis of Upheaval.” Plus, Congressman Jamie Raskin on Trump's Justice Department takeover and an attorney general who refuses to be independent. And more than 50 years after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace, the striking parallels between Nixon and Donald Trump.   Want more of Chris? Download and follow his podcast, “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes podcast” wherever you get your podcasts.To listen to this show and other MS podcasts without ads, sign up for MS NOW Premium on Apple Podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week, the Axis team pulls back the curtain on how and why we do culture research. That's right, we're sharing all our secrets.

Last time we spoke about the beginning of the Pacific War. In late 1941, the Second Battle of Changsha ended with Chinese forces claiming victory despite suffering nearly 100,000 casualties against roughly 1,670 Japanese losses. Chiang Kai-shek's government launched an aggressive propaganda campaign, flooding international press with fabricated triumph narratives to sustain national morale. Behind closed doors, Chiang was furious at his generals' tactical failures, executing commanders and dismantling units. Meanwhile, geopolitical forces threatened China's survival. Japan's 1939 defeat at Nomonhan crushed hopes for a Soviet alliance against Tokyo. Germany's pact with the Soviet Union left China isolated, while Western powers remained reluctant to commit meaningful support. Britain offered little; the US provided only modest loans. By 1941, facing potential collapse, Chiang desperately searched for allies while Wang Jingwei's Japanese-backed rival government beckoned as an alternative. China's exhausted people endured horror—including a 1941 bombing massacre in Chongqing that killed over 400 trapped civilians. Then Japan unleashed a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.   #215 An Implosion in the East 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 early morning of December 7, 1941, the US Pacific Fleet was anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Two waves of Japanese bomber aircraft, launched from six aircraft carriers, attacked the vessels and their sleeping crews, destroying the battleship Arizona outright and damaging seventeen others, as well as most of the military aircraft parked nearby. Some 2,400 Americans died, and another 1,100 were wounded. Within a day Japanese invasion forces had attacked Siam, Malaya, and the Philippines. Chiang Kai-shek heard the news at one o'clock in the morning and immediately dictated a letter of support to President Roosevelt, pledging commitment to a new "common battle." The news reached Zhou Fohai in Shanghai as well. On December 8 across the international date line from Hawaii he had heard the sounds of firing as the Japanese took over the rest of the city, and then received reports that Japan had declared war on the Western powers. "I heard they'd bombed Honolulu, Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong. From now on, the Pacific becomes a killing ground."   When Japanese carrier planes descended on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, they were executing far more than a tactical strike. They were unleashing the culmination of a strategic vision that had shaped Japanese military planning since the 1920s: the Nanshin-ron, or "Southern Advance" doctrine.    The Nanshin-ron represented a critical strategic choice that emerged from internal Japanese debates during the 1920s and 1930s. Japan faced an inescapable vulnerability: it was an island nation with virtually no natural resources of its own. The nation's population had doubled since the Meiji Restoration, growing to over 70 million by 1941. An industrial economy of tremendous sophistication, capable of producing world-class warships, aircraft, and military equipment, depended entirely on imported raw materials. Oil, rubber, tin, iron ore, bauxite, copper, and manganese all had to be acquired through foreign trade or conquest. This resource dependency was not a luxury problem; it was an existential one. A nation that could not feed itself or fuel its economy was a nation vulnerable to strangulation by enemies who controlled the resources it needed. Japanese strategic thinkers divided into two camps on how to resolve this vulnerability. The Hokushin-ron advocates, primarily within the Army, pushed for expansion northward into Siberia and Mongolia, seeking to conquer Soviet territory and resources. The Soviet Union possessed vast tracts of land, mineral wealth, timber, and agricultural output. From a purely materialist perspective, the Northern Advance made geographic sense—it was contiguous with Manchuria, which Japan had already secured in 1931. Yet by the late 1930s, the Hokushin-ron strategy had suffered a catastrophic blow. In 1938 and 1939, Japanese and Soviet forces clashed at Khalkhin Gol in Mongolia in what the Japanese called the Nomonhan Incident. The battles revealed a terrifying truth: the Soviet Red Army, under General Georgy Zhukov, was far more formidable than Japanese military planners had anticipated. Soviet armor, air power, and coordinated tactics annihilated Japanese forces. Japan suffered over 60,000 casualties while inflicting perhaps 10,000 on the Soviets. The defeat was concealed from the Japanese public, but it was unmistakable to military planners. A direct clash with Soviet power could end catastrophically. The Northern Advance, it became clear, would almost certainly provoke war with a nation capable of destroying the Japanese Army. This strategic defeat tilted the balance decisively toward the Nanshin-ron. If Japan could not safely expand northward, it must expand southward, toward Southeast Asia, the Dutch East Indies, Indochina, and the western Pacific. The appeal of the Nanshin-ron was immediately apparent to the Navy, which had always been more oriented toward maritime commerce and expansion across the ocean. The territories to the south were not militarily formidable. The colonial powers, Britain, the Netherlands, France, were either already defeated in 1940 or distracted by their own desperate struggles leaving Britain fighting alone against Germany. The United States, though potentially a formidable adversary, was not yet at war, and there was a chance, however slender, that a decisive blow against American naval power might convince America to negotiate rather than fight. But beyond strategic opportunity, the Nanshin-ron offered something that the Hokushin-ron did not: it offered resources of staggering abundance. The Dutch East Indies possessed oil reserves that could dwarf Japan's consumption for years. Malaya produced the world's rubber. Thailand offered agricultural bounty and geographic position. Burma's timber and agricultural products could feed Japan's growing empire. The Philippines possessed harbors, airfields, and economic output. These were not marginal additions to Japan's economy—they were transformative. Together, they would convert Japan from a resource-hungry island nation into the master of an imperial domain encompassing hundreds of millions of people and containing most of the strategic materials necessary for sustained industrial warfare. In the last episode I explained the western sanctions and embargoes that drained Japan's military of the resources they required to continue the China War. By 1941, Japan faced a civilization crisis. Japan imported roughly 90 percent of its petroleum, and the bulk of that came from the Dutch East Indies and the United States. Suddenly, the American supply was cut off entirely. Reserves would last perhaps 18 months if Japan's military and industrial consumption continued at existing rates. After that, the military machine would sputter and die. The industrial economy would collapse. Even civilian life would become impossible to sustain. Japan was facing not merely economic inconvenience but literal strangulation by the Western powers.   Yet it would be a mistake to reduce Japanese motivation to just materialism. Japanese military leaders wrapped their conquests in an ideological framework, one that many of them genuinely believed, or wanted to believe, served a higher historical purpose. The concept of the Daitoa Kyoeiken, the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," posited a new regional order in which Japan would play the leading role in liberating Asian peoples from Western colonial domination and creating an Asian-centered political and economic system. This ideology drew on genuine anti-colonial sentiment. For a century, Western powers had dominated Asia, treating Asian peoples and nations as subordinate, colonized territories existing to serve Western economic interests. Japan, which had modernized and Westernized enough to avoid colonization, saw itself as the natural leader of an Asian renaissance—a civilizing force that would restore Asian dignity and independence even as it established Japanese hegemony. Of course, this was propagandistic. Japanese conquest represented a substitution of one imperial master for another, and often a harsher and more brutal one at that. But for understanding Japanese decision-making, the ideology mattered profoundly. It provided Japanese leaders with a moral narrative for conquest. It allowed them to understand themselves as liberators rather than mere conquerors. It provided a rationale for extracting resources from occupied territories and for mobilizing subject populations to support the Japanese war effort. And it resonated with anti-Western sentiment throughout Asia, making Japanese occupation seem, in some quarters, preferable to continued Western colonial rule. The slogan Hakko ichiu—"eight corners under one roof", captured this ideological vision: a unified Asia and eventually world under Japanese guidance. Whether Japanese leaders truly believed this vision or cynically deployed it as propaganda, it shaped how they understood their actions and justified them to their subjects. Now I know this is a podcast dedicated to the century of humiliation, ie: China's experience. But I thought it was necessary just to have one episode explain what Dan Carlin titled "a supernova in the east" and I have titled an implosion in the east. I won't go into depth into the campaigns as some of them have a lot of Chinese involvement and we will be covering them in depth, but rather I will explain the rationale for Japan's numerous invasions following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.   Japan's assault on Malaya began within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, indeed, Japanese troops were already landing on the Kota Bharu beachhead on the Malaysian peninsula before dawn on December 8, 1941 local time. Malaya was one of the world's largest rubber producers, and Singapore, at the tip of the peninsula, was the linchpin of British naval power in the Far East.The Japanese interest in Malaya was straightforward but crucial: rubber. The Japanese military consumed vast quantities of rubber for tires, gaskets, hoses, and countless other applications. American and Dutch rubber supplies were now cut off by embargo. Malaya's rubber plantations represented perhaps the world's richest reservoir of this strategic material. Beyond rubber, Malaya and the surrounding region were major tin producers—essential for alloys and manufacturing. For Japan to conduct prolonged warfare, Malaya was not a luxury target; it was a necessity. Singapore represented something different: a symbol of Western power in Asia and a strategic chokepoint. As the major British naval base in the region, Singapore served as the anchor of British imperial authority across the South China Sea. By seizing Singapore, Japan would not only capture crucial resources and port facilities but would also deliver a psychological blow to the entire edifice of Western dominance in Asia. The fortress city that the British considered nearly impregnable fell within seventy days, a stunning demonstration of Japanese military capability and the vulnerability of overextended Western empires. If Malaya was critical for rubber, the Dutch East Indies was essential for oil. The region, comprising present-day Indonesia, was the world's third-largest oil producer and had reserves that could sustain Japanese military operations for years. This was the jewel of the resource-conquest strategy. Japanese planners had long eyed the East Indies, but direct conquest had seemed risky while Britain and America remained neutral or opposed. With both now at war, the window of opportunity had opened. Japan needed the oil so desperately that when the Dutch East Indies Petroleum Company initially agreed to some Japanese oil purchases before the war, Tokyo was already planning its takeover. The conquest of the Dutch East Indies would provide not just oil but also tin, nickel, bauxite, and other materials essential to an industrial war machine. The islands would also provide air and naval bases from which Japan could defend its new empire and potentially threaten Australia. The Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, which began in late December 1941 and accelerated through January and February 1942, was methodical and comprehensive. Various island groups were targeted systematically: Java, Borneo, Celebes, and the Moluccas. Dutch military forces, though brave, were overwhelmed. By March 1942, Japan had secured the entire archipelago,a stunning logistical and military achievement that delivered vast resources into Japanese hands. Thailand presented a fundamentally different case from Japan's other targets. Rather than conquest, Japan pursued alliance with military strongman Plaek Phibunsongkhram, who had seized power in a 1938 coup as a nationalist ideologue determined to reassert Thai sovereignty and recover territory lost to French colonialism in the nineteenth century. Thailand was the last independent state in mainland Southeast Asia, hemmed in by British-controlled Burma and Malaya to the west, and French Indochina to the east. For a century, Thailand had survived by playing European imperial powers against each other. But by the late 1930s, this strategy was becoming obsolete. Europe was distracted by Hitler's Germany. Colonial powers were weakening. Japanese power was visibly ascending. Phibunsongkhram recognized both danger and opportunity. He could resist Japan and invite invasion, or he could ally with Japan and profit from rising Asian power. Japanese diplomats approached Thailand with sophistication: they offered military alliance and support for Thai territorial expansion at French expense. This addressed Thailand's deepest national wound, the humiliation of nineteenth-century territorial losses to France. The Franco-Thai War of 1940-1941 became transformative. With Japan providing military support, advisors, tanks, aircraft, Thai forces defeated the French for the first time in history. By May 1941, Thailand had recovered 54,000 square kilometers of Cambodian territory and portions of Laos. For Phibunsongkhram, this was extraordinary: he had achieved what Thai leaders could not in a century, reclaiming territory from a Western imperial power. Domestically, his position was dramatically strengthened. The parallel to China's century of humiliation—the foundation of your podcast is striking: Thailand too was reversing colonial diminishment through association with rising Asian power. The Thai-Japanese relationship was unique. Unlike the Philippines, Malaya, or the Dutch East Indies, Thailand would retain nominal independence. Phibunsongkhram remained in power. Japanese occupation was light. Thai forces maintained their own command structure. Most importantly, Thailand's territorial gains from the Franco-Thai War were recognized and secured. Japan valued Thai cooperation more than conquest. Burma, controlled by the British, was the next target in Japan's southwestward advance. Japanese planners had multiple motivations for invading Burma. First, it was strategically positioned on India's eastern frontier, and Japan harbored ambitions of eventually striking toward India and linking up with Germany in the Middle East or at least destabilizing the British position in South Asia. Second, Burma was a significant producer of timber and agricultural products. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the invasion of Burma was meant to cut the Burma Road, the crucial supply line that allowed American aid to reach Nationalist China. The invasion of Burma began in late 1941 and accelerated through early 1942.  The invasion of the Philippines, which began on December 10, 1941, just days after Pearl Harbor, served multiple strategic purposes. Like the assault on Pearl Harbor itself, it was meant to neutralize American military power in the region, in this case, the American garrison under General Douglas MacArthur and the American colonial administration. But the Philippines were also valuable in their own right. The islands sat directly in the path of what Japan envisioned as its defensive perimeter. By controlling the Philippines, Japan would make it extraordinarily difficult for American forces to project power westward into Southeast Asia. The territory would provide naval and air bases critical to defending Japan's new empire. Additionally, the Philippines possessed some agricultural and industrial resources valuable to the war effort, and their conquest delivered a psychological victory, defeating American forces and ending American colonial rule in Asia, which appealed to anti-Western sentiment that Japan tried to cultivate. Beyond Southeast Asia and the Philippines, Japan rapidly invaded Guam and Wake island to extend Japan's defensive perimeter further into the Pacific and eliminate American air and naval bases that could threaten Japanese operations. Guam, seized on December 10, 1941, fell within two days, the American garrison was small and the island's strategic value lay primarily in denying the United States a forward staging ground for any counteroffensive. Wake Island, attacked the same day and finally captured on December 23 after a brief but heroic American defense, served similar purposes: cutting off American reconnaissance and interdicting potential supply lines to the Philippines.  Now I believe that's enough of the implosion in the east, let's get back to the situation in China. After Chiang Kai-shek sent his letter of support to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pledging Chinese commitment to what he termed a new "common battle." he did something most revealing about his mood towards the global war. He played "Ave Maria" on his gramophone, celebrating with an almost spiritual gratitude the implications of what had just transpired in the American Pacific. This moment crystallized the profound difference Pearl Harbor would mean to different members of the emerging Allied coalition. For the United States, the attack was pure shock, a violation of the sanctity of American soil and the complacency of American isolationism. For Britain, it was like the pricking of a large, painful blister—painful but perhaps not entirely unexpected given Japan's regional ambitions. But for China, the relief that surged through the government and the consciousness of the Chinese people surpassed even Britain's response. For four long years, China had fought Japan almost alone, watching as Western nations remained neutral or limited their commitment to rhetorical support and modest material assistance. Now, suddenly, the trajectory of the entire conflict had shifted with breathtaking speed. Chiang's emotional state at this moment could scarcely be contained, and those close to him understood that beneath his carefully maintained Confucian composure burned an intoxicating sensation of vindication. These Western powers who had been so impatient with Chinese strategy, who had mocked the retreats of the Nationalist Army and spoken scornfully of Japanese capabilities, were now themselves in headlong retreat from those very islanders. In Hong Kong, Singapore, and Manila, British and American forces would be fighting desperately for their lives against the Japanese military that China had been contending with for years. Chiang could not have failed to perceive the irony: the Japanese had conquered vast stretches of China through relentless campaigns, yet Westerners had dismissed Chinese resistance as inadequate. Now the Japanese were proving that they posed a formidable challenge to Western military power as well. There was a bitter satisfaction in this vindication, even as Chiang understood that the strategic implications of American entry far outweighed any emotional satisfaction. What was pragmatic and strategically clear to Chiang, however, was far more important than any emotional satisfaction. The United States was now at war, and it was on China's side. This represented the transformation for which Chiang had labored for years, bringing the full weight of American industrial capacity and military might to bear against the Japanese enemy. The diplomatic foundations for this alliance had already been laid in the months preceding Pearl Harbor. Beginning in the spring of 1941, the United States had begun to commit significant resources to supporting China. In April 1941, following the conclusion of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality agreement, which had devastated Chinese morale by suggesting that Japan might attack the Soviet Union rather than move southward, the Roosevelt administration had determined to provide $45 million worth of militarily useful commodities to China as an immediate gesture of support. Then, on May 6, 1941, President Roosevelt had made a more formal commitment by announcing that the munitions provisions of the Lend-Lease Act applied to China, declaring a phrase that captured the strategic logic of American assistance: "defending China is the key to defending America." This declaration represented a significant shift in American policy, elevating China from a regional concern to a central element of American grand strategy in Asia. Subsequently, in July 1941, Roosevelt had sent Owen Lattimore to China to serve as political adviser to the Chinese government, a position that signaled deepening American engagement with Chinese affairs. In August, the administration appointed John Magruder as military attaché and head of the American Military Mission to China (AMMISCA), with the primary responsibility of overseeing the delivery of Lend-Lease material to the Chinese armed forces. On the diplomatic front, Chiang moved with remarkable alacrity. He had already severed relations with Germany on July 2, 1941, the very day after Hitler had formally recognized the Wang Jingwei puppet government in an attempt to appease Japan and encourage it to finally implement the Southern Advance. Now, on December 8, 1941, just one day after the Pearl Harbor attack, Chiang took the decisive step of formally declaring war against the Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan. This declaration transformed China's position from a beleaguered nation fighting a war of survival into a formal member of the Allied coalition. Chiang had seized the opportunity that Pearl Harbor presented to ally China with a genuinely strong power against Japan, a gambit that fundamentally altered the diplomatic weight and international legitimacy of both the Chinese government and the Chinese cause. From a strategic perspective, the Japanese had committed what Chiang and others immediately recognized as a catastrophic blunder. On the operational level, Pearl Harbor was indeed a devastating tactical success, the American Pacific Fleet was crippled, and Japanese forces now enjoyed temporary naval superiority throughout much of the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Yet strategically, Pearl Harbor represented a failure of epic proportions, a miscalculation rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the intangibles of warfare: what motivated the Chinese people and what motivated the Americans. The Chinese had understood, through four years of brutal conflict, that warfare was about more than territorial conquest and resource acquisition. It was about will, about endurance, about the capacity to absorb punishment and continue fighting. The Japanese had learned this lesson imperfectly in China, where despite overwhelming military advantages they had been unable to force a decisive conclusion or compel Chinese surrender. The Americans would teach the Japanese this lesson even more emphatically. The attack on American sailors in Hawaii instantly galvanized the American population to prosecute an unlimited war, with Tokyo itself as the ultimate destination of American counterattack. While Americans would remember the "date that will live in infamy" primarily because of the assault on Pearl Harbor itself, the strategic consequence was that Japanese actions in Hawaii had introduced numerous new adversaries into the Pacific conflict: not only the United States, but also Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. These additions transformed what had been, from the Japanese perspective, a regional conflict with manageable parameters into a global war that Japan could not possibly win through any conceivable means. What made this particularly disastrous for Japan was the context in which the new theater had been opened. Japan was already deeply mired in a quagmire in China—a "malignant quagmire," as one observer would later characterize it, that had consumed vast resources, inflicted enormous casualties, and failed to produce decisive victory. In military strategy, it is sometimes wise to open a new theater in order to attack an enemy from an additional and unexpected direction, thereby dispersing their forces and creating new challenges for them to manage. But opening a new theater that introduces an entirely new, powerful adversary, and doing so when one is already overextended in an existing theater is a prescription for strategic catastrophe. This was precisely what Japan had done at Pearl Harbor. Chiang Kai-shek understood the magnitude of Japan's miscalculation with crystalline clarity. He understood that whatever the military complexities that lay ahead, whatever the challenges of coordinating with Western allies, and whatever the limitations of Western military assistance to China might be, the fundamental equation had changed. The United States would ultimately defeat Japan. The Chinese did not need to defeat Japan by themselves; they merely needed to survive long enough for American industrial and military capacity to grind the Japanese military into defeat. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Chinese and American officials moved swiftly to formalize the alliance and establish the mechanisms of wartime cooperation. Roosevelt asked Chiang Kai-shek to serve as commander in chief of the Allied forces in the China theater, a designation that recognized China's central role in the Pacific War and elevated Chiang's international standing to something he had long sought: a position as an equal partner in the Allied coalition, a seat at the "top table of global decision-making" alongside Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. To support this expanded role and to ensure effective coordination of the military effort, Roosevelt dispatched Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell to China. Stilwell was not chosen randomly; he brought fifteen years of experience in China, a deep familiarity with the country, its military, and its complexities that few American officers possessed. Stilwell was appointed to serve simultaneously as the U.S. government's military representative in China, as chief of staff of the China Theater, and as commander in chief of the American forces in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater. This appointment established the framework for joint Chinese-American military cooperation and represented an American commitment to the Asian theater that, while never receiving the resources devoted to the European theater, nonetheless signified recognition of China's strategic importance. Trust me, going forward we will be having a lot of time dedicated to the hilarious bromance / bro hatred of Vinegar Joe and Peanut.  Yet the formation of an alliance and the establishment of command structures was easier than the practical implementation of military cooperation. The fundamental challenge that would plague Chinese-American relations throughout the war emerged almost immediately: the problem of delivering military assistance to China. Before Pearl Harbor, the United States and China had reached agreement on three major points regarding military assistance. First, the United States would provide training and technical support to assist China in establishing a modern air force. Second, the United States would provide training and equipment for a ground army consisting of thirty divisions. Third, the United States would assist China in constructing railways and highways from Yunnan to Burma, along with the provision of rolling stock and vehicles to support these new transportation routes. These were ambitious plans, reflecting the extent of Chinese need and American willingness to support the Chinese war effort. However, the outbreak of the Pacific War threw American plans into disarray. The fundamental strategic doctrine guiding American policy was the "Europe first" strategy, which meant that the European theater and the defeat of Nazi Germany received priority over the Pacific theater. Additionally, China's geography made it extraordinarily difficult to supply. China could only be reached through supply lines of extraordinary length and complexity, either through the port of Rangoon in Burma and then overland via the treacherous Yunnan-Burma Road, or through the port of Hong Kong, which immediately fell into Japanese hands after Pearl Harbor. The first Sino-American loan agreement had specified that the United States would deliver commodities worth $45 million to China in 1941. However, shipping shortages meant that only $26 million worth of commodities actually left the United States. These commodities were shipped to the transit port of Rangoon, where a massive traffic jam developed as supplies accumulated faster than they could be distributed onward to China. Along the Yunnan-Burma Road, that "much-contested life line" as it came to be known, conditions were chaotic. The road had always been a source of trouble: it was long, extraordinarily difficult to keep in repair, fantastically dangerous to travel, and too narrow to permit much volume of traffic at any one time. Due to mismanagement and pilfering, the commodities that were shipped out of Burma suffered heavy losses in transit, and only one-third of them eventually arrived in Chongqing. Yet the United States had already established one valuable asset in China that could be deployed relatively quickly: an air force nucleus. Just before Pearl Harbor, a group of American aviators had been formally organized in Chongqing who worked on volunteer status for China under the command of Colonel Claire Chennault, an American aviation officer who served as instructor at the Chinese Air Force Cadet School. Some of these men had been flying in China since the Kuomintang first began purchasing American aircraft, having come to demonstrate the aircraft and remaining to pilot and teach. Others had hurried to China after being released from their volunteer service in Spain, where they had gained combat experience during the Spanish Civil War. It was a familiar joke that pilots from both sides of the Spanish conflict were likely to meet and work side by side in China, but political convictions proved immaterial to these professional aviators, they got on well enough with each other, mercenaries of the twentieth century united by their expertise and their willingness to fight. When American traffic on the Burma Road swelled in volume and became chaotic, with cargo lost to pilfering and trucks breaking down from mishandling, the air freight service into Chongqing became increasingly vital to maintaining Chinese military capabilities. The backbone of this organization was American, and it had been in operation for months before the Japanese attack. Halfway down the Burma Road, over the border in Burma, was a plane factory backed by American and Chinese capital, providing some degree of repair and maintenance capacity for the aircraft operating out of China. Recognizing the strategic value of these experienced aviators and the need to formalize and expand their operations, American and Chinese officials moved quickly to incorporate this volunteer group, formally known as the American Volunteer Group or "Flying Tigers," into the U.S. Army Air Force. This transformation of volunteer aviators into official American military personnel represented a commitment to providing air support to Chinese operations, recognizing that air power could compensate to some degree for Chinese numerical disadvantages in ground combat. In Chongqing, it was clear that among the United Nations fighting Japan, America was the only one taking China seriously, the only one prepared to invest significant resources in Chinese military capabilities and the Chinese war effort. Yet Pearl Harbor brought consequences that extended far beyond the strategic and diplomatic spheres. For Western civilians living in China,missionaries, teachers, doctors, businessmen, and journalists, the attack represented a catastrophic change in their status and their fate. Until December 8, 1941, Westerners residing in China had maintained a curious protected status as foreign neutrals, even in areas nominally controlled by the Japanese. This status had provided them with a measure of distance from, and protection against, the grinding reality of the war that had devastated Chinese populations. For a century, Americans had been part of an imperial presence in China, sometimes benevolent, sometimes violent, but always ultimately under Western control. That world came to an abrupt end on December 8, 1941. All across eastern China, Americans and Britons were rounded up and interned. The International Settlement of Shanghai—that remarkable oasis of neutrality that had persisted in the midst of a war-torn city—was now reunified under Japanese control. Thousands of foreigners with Allied nationality were sent to holding camps scattered throughout occupied China. Some, like the eleven-year-old British boy Jim Ballard, would remain imprisoned for the remainder of the war, enduring hunger, cold, and disease in camps like Longhua, which housed approximately 2,000 detainees. Forty years later, as the novelist J. G. Ballard, he would memorialized this experience in his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. For missionaries like Velva Brown, the evacuation process was degrading and final. The missionary staff were permitted to pack no more than three suitcases with their belongings. As they prepared to leave, Japanese and Taiwanese "sightseeing" parties arrived to decide which houses they might want to occupy. The journey home aboard crowded Japanese ships offered no concessions to status or dignity; ambassadors, consuls, merchants, and missionaries alike were given "bed-sized strips of Chinese matting which we spread side by side on the iron floor of the hold," as Brown recorded. The humiliation was compounded by the finality of it all. For many, their decades-long presence in China was ending not in orderly retreat but in hasty evacuation, leaving behind "servants, many of whom had been with us for fifteen or twenty years." Despite these immediate human tragedies, the strategic transformation that Pearl Harbor wrought for China was undeniable. Chiang Kai-shek now embarked on an entirely new sort of life, heavily involved with the leaders and generals of the Western powers. He held diplomatic discussions with the leaders of the United Nations and military planning sessions with Western generals. In these unfamiliar circumstances, he did his best to live up to the Confucian ideal of the gentleman, seldom permitting the mask to slip—though the pressure of these new responsibilities and the intoxicating combination of vindication and anxiety would occasionally prove too much even for his considerable self-control. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, Chiang demonstrated the value he could bring to the new alliance. He visited India and spoke with the leaders of the Indian independence struggle as an ally and friend, as a fellow non-European speaking to others seeking to escape from colonialism and imperial domination. He joined the Allies in their first joint campaign, not in China but in the jungles of neighboring Burma, committing Chinese forces to operations outside China's borders in support of the broader Allied military strategy. Yet the price that Chiang would pay for China's belated entry into the global alliance against the Axis powers would prove to be a heavy one. Chiang desperately needed his new American and British partners, but accepting this alliance would unleash forces within Chinese society that would threaten the very basis of his political control. The complexities of this bargain would become most visible in the four-year struggle between Chiang and General Joseph Warren Stilwell, the American officer who would become simultaneously his chief of staff and the administrator of American military assistance to China. This relationship, shaped by mutual suspicion, different strategic visions, and incompatible political agendas, would define Chinese-American military cooperation during the Pacific War and would have profound implications extending far beyond the battlefields of Asia. 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. Pearl Harbor's shock reverberated through Asia. Japan's assault on Hawaii, combined with invasions of Burma, the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island, inadvertently transformed regional conflict into global war. Chiang Kai-shek, vindicated after four years of isolation fighting Japan, embraced American alliance with profound relief. The U.S. committed military aid, appointed General Stilwell as chief of staff, and recognized China as a co-belligerent. For Chiang, this partnership brought diplomatic status but also internal tensions that would define the Pacific War's final chapter.

The IDF warns that Hamas and Hezbollah are rebuilding a regional “axis of terror” with Iranian assistance, pressuring Israel on two fronts at once; tensions boil over in the West Bank village of Qusra after a contentious IDF evacuation operation”; and Israeli families move back into the former settlement of Ganim, twenty-one years after the 2005 Disengagement. Israel Daily News website: https://israeldailynews.orgYOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@israeldailynewsIsrael Daily News Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/shannafuldSupport our Wartime News Coverage:https://www.gofundme.com/f/independent-journalist-covering-israels-warLinks to all things IDN: https://linktr.ee/israeldailynews

Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of Revolutions Per Movie. Thank you for supporting what we're doing…it means a lot.We were in the process of releasing our recent conversation about John Curry and his band Flyboys this week when we heard from Lisa Fancher about his passing. So we've decided to make this episode of EXPLORING THE AXIS: THE ORAL HISTORY OF FRONTIER RECORDS w/ Lisa Fancher available to everyone. Much love to John, his family, and his bandmates. SHOW NOTES:Welcome to Chapter 3 of Exploring the Axis, where we freak out about the genesis of Lisa's first vinyl release for Frontier Records, the iconic Flyboys S/T 12” EP, an incredible pinnacle of L.A. power-pop-driven punk/garage songwriting.We discuss why the timing was right to release her first record, what the label was originally going to be called, how she first met Flyboys by interviewing them in her parent's living room, why Flyboys won't let their debut 7” be re-issued, how their 2nd 7” Crayon World is considered a classic of the era & how the sleeves came back in the wrong size, telling Slash to fuck off, why the look of Flyboys was different than other bands in the scene, the long journey to get the S/T EP recorded, recording at Leon Russell's recording studio, Disneyland vs. hardcore punk, starting to think about putting out a Circle Jerks LP, JFA covering the Flyboys without credit and more!The Complete Flyboys: frontierrecords-flyboys.bandcamp.com/album/the-complete-flyboys-1978-1980CHAKI: chaki.bandcamp.comREVOLUTIONS PER MOVIE:Host Chris Slusarenko (Eyelids, Guided By Voices, owner of Clinton Street Video rental store) is joined by actors, musicians, comedians, writers & directors who each week pick out their favorite music documentary, musical, music-themed fiction film, or music videos to discuss. Fun, weird, and insightful, Revolutions Per Movie is your deep dive into our life-long obsessions where music and film collide.Revolutions Per Movie releases new episodes every Thursday on any podcast app, and additional, exclusive bonus episodes every Sunday on our Patreon (over 147 bonus episodes are available and counting). If you like the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing it on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!PATREON:The show is also a completely independent affair, so the best way to support it is at patreon.com/revolutionspermovie. By joining, you can get weekly bonus episodes and series such as A Very Opinionated Look At Urgh! A Music War & What Makes The Midnight So Special?, A Devotees Look At New Wave Theater, Exploring The Axis: The Oral History Of Frontier Records With Lisa Fancher, Dips On Chips w/ Jeff McDonald of Redd Kross, physical goods such as a limited edition 7" Flexidisc, and other exclusive goods that I send out to you for supporting the show. It helps the show to keep going and is greatly appreciated! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The weapons flowing through the Axis of Aggressors don't move in one direction—they boomerang. In the second installment of this two-part episode, Generation Jihad's Bill Roggio continues his conversation with Bradley Bowman, senior director of FDD's Center on Military and Political Power, and Ryan Brobst, CMPP deputy director, digging deeper into the mechanics of authoritarian convergence.Bowman and Brobst trace how Iran's Shahed drone became a shared arsenal—copied by China, produced by North Korea, and returned to Tehran in upgraded form after Russia improved it on the battlefields of Ukraine. They break down the munitions crisis draining US and allied stockpiles, explain why North Korea may be in its strongest strategic position in decades, and unpack the "trilateral tango" between Kim Jong-un, Beijing, and Moscow. The conversation closes with a five-line grand strategy for countering the axis—and a sobering warning about what happens if Washington waits for the next crisis to act.For Part One, check out: https://www.fdd.org/podcasts/2026/08/11/china-russia-iran-north-korea-inside-the-axis-of-aggressors/

Three Big Conversations: Back to school season is officially upon us - 11:42 Hoodies are the new T-shirt for Gen Z - 23:31 A store in Nantucket's "No Influencers" sign sparks a debate - 35:26 Song of the Week: "oh yeah?" by Steve Lacy (language) - 1:00 → Click here to read the lyrics In Other News: - 46:10 Spotify will add an "AI Persona" label on AI artists. In addition to flagging AI-generated content for users, these personas will be excluded from the company's algorithmic recommendations. The summer box office has earned $4 billion for the second time since COVID, thanks to hits like Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey, and other blockbusters. Olivia Rodrigo played for a crowd of 1,000 in Brooklyn last week. Tickets were purchased at the box office that day for only $25. Compare this to her ticket prices for The Unraveled Tour (up to $1,100). Some grandparents have taken to unknowingly gifting their grandkids AI-generated slop books, to the consternation of many parents. A new rom-com, One Night Only, imagines a world where Congress has outlawed premarital sex. But for one night a year, the ban is lifted. You can read the content warnings here.

Our Bros come face to face with every Turlett's worst nightmare, a workers union. However it soon becomes clear that their mission may be more closely aligned with the goals of ELF than they first thought.  --- GET MORE ROTATING HEROES ACTION ON PATREON ROTATOES! If you enjoyed this episode and need of more space shenanigans in your life, then check out The Rotating Heroes Patreon and be sure to use the code SHADDY50 to get 50% off your first month!Get access to exclusive shows like our behind-the-scenes Arc Barks, and Off Leash: Character Creations before each new campaign starts. You'll also receive instant, ad-free access to the ENTIRE back catalogue of campaigns, listen to the latest Axis episodes as soon as they drop, bonus shows, live streams, exclusive character art, AMAs and much, much more!WANT EVEN MORE ACTUAL PLAY GOODNESS? Then listen to 12 Sided Studios' newest production Oaths & Empires: a dark fantasy D&D adventure featuring Kingdom Come: Deliverance II's Luke Dale and Tom McKay. Set in the Witcher-esk inspired world of the Isle of Veil, journey with our two rookie players as they navigate their very first game. Rotating Heroes is a 12 Sided Studios Production

Admiral Mark Montgomery: Admiral Mark Montgomery details the growing cyber and hybrid warfare cooperation within the axis of aggressors: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This cooperation often involves criminal actors sharing attack techniques and technology to target critical infrastructure. Montgomery warns of new generation warfare, including terrorist acts, jamming, and disinformation. He specifically points to China's Volt Typhoon program, which has installed malware in US rail, water, and energy systems. Montgomery urges an all-hands-on-deck approach to secure essential systems, as attribution for these ghost-like attacks remains difficult. (8)

Hoodies are the new T-shirt for Gen Z, a store in Nantucket's "No Influencers" sign sparks a debate, and back to school season is officially upon us.   Song of the Week: "oh yeah?" by Steve Lacy (language) → Click here to read the lyrics   In Other News: Spotify will add an "AI Persona" label on AI artists. In addition to flagging AI-generated content for users, these personas will be excluded from the company's algorithmic recommendations. The summer box office has earned $4 billion for the second time since COVID, thanks to hits like Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey, and other blockbusters. Olivia Rodrigo played for a crowd of 1,000 in Brooklyn last week. Tickets were purchased at the box office that day for only $25. Compare this to her ticket prices for The Unraveled Tour (up to $1,100). Some grandparents have taken to unknowingly gifting their grandkids AI-generated slop books, to the consternation of many parents. A new rom-com, One Night Only, imagines a world where Congress has outlawed premarital sex. But for one night a year, the ban is lifted. You can read the content warnings here.

In Episode 497 of The Andrew Parker Show, Andrew examines what he believes could be a historic turning point in the Middle East: the possibility of dismantling Iran's Islamist regime and replacing an axis of terror with what he calls an “axis of peace.”What could a Middle East without Iranian support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis look like? Andrew considers the potential for new relationships among Israel, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and, eventually, a free Iran — opening the door to greater regional stability, economic cooperation and, perhaps, lasting peace.But Andrew argues that realizing that possibility will require decisive American leadership. He questions President Donald Trump's current approach to Iran and warns against trusting a regime he believes has repeatedly demonstrated that it has no intention of honoring lasting agreements.The episode then turns to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the growing hostility Andrew sees toward Israel and Jews in American politics. Drawing from a recent essay by Rabbi Pinchas Allouche, Andrew discusses the importance of confronting antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric with moral clarity, Jewish pride, faith, goodness and resolve.Can the Middle East move from decades of terrorism and conflict toward an entirely different future? And will Americans recognize and confront growing antisemitism at home?Smart, plain talk.Support the showThe Andrew Parker Show - Politics, Israel & The Law.  Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and X. Subscribe to our email list at www.theandrewparkershow.comCopyright © 2026 The Andrew Parker Show - All Rights Reserved. 

Mary Kissel examines North Korea's emergence as a critical military supplier for Russia, providing ballistic missiles and combat troops to aid Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine. This partnership integrates Pyongyang into a broader "axis of tyranny" alongside Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. The discussion highlights the failure of past U.S. diplomatic efforts to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power, which now serves as a warning for current dealings with Iran. Additionally, Kissel addresses the strategic complexities of Ukraine utilizing private technology like Starlink for strikes inside Russian territory and the intractable nature of negotiations with the ideological Iranian regime. (1)

In this week's Axis Live Brad Onishi begins by breaking down a video posted by the US Department of State that showcases Marco Rubio's Christian nationalism and Western civilizationalism. Brad digs below the surface to decode the ways Rubio outlines a common good conservatism that seeks to impose order and virtue through family, church, and state. Brad then welcomes Rev. Adam Hamilton to the show. Hamilton is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Kansas who is attempting to end a 90-year drought of Democratic Senators from Kansas. Rev. Hamilton talks about how he will be a public servant for all Kansans not despite his faith, but because the Jesus he serves is a public servant for all people. Get signed copies of American Caesar at Annie Bloom's: ⁠⁠https://annieblooms.com/⁠⁠ Join us September 16 at Annie Bloom's for the American Caesar book launch!

China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea aren't just aligned in rhetoric—they're actively coordinating to erode American military, economic, and cyber dominance. In this episode, Generation Jihad's Bill Roggio sits down with Bradley Bowman, senior director of FDD's Center on Military and Political Power, and Ryan Brobst, CMPP deputy director, to unpack the real-world mechanics behind this dangerous authoritarian convergence.From joint military exercises and sanctions evasion to weapons transfers and cyber warfare collaboration, Bowman and Brobst break down exactly how members of “the Axis of Aggressors” prop each other up on the world stage—and what it will take for the US to counter a group of nations that no longer play by the old rules of great power competition.

Bruce McCluggage is a Professor of Philosophy at Pikes Peak State College, and a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Are you looking to optimize your skin health from the inside out? In this episode of Beauty Bytes, I am joined by Dr. Mark Tager, a physician, integrative aesthetics educator, and co-founder of the Vagal Nerve Society. Dr. Tager has authored 12 books, including Feed Your Skin Right and Integrative Aesthetics, and brings decades of expertise in personalized nutrition and regenerative medicine. We explore the true meaning of integrative aesthetics, noting that 5 to 10% of your blood flow goes to your skin, making internal nutrition the ultimate foundation for beauty.  We dive deep into the gut-skin connection, exploring how the standard American diet glycates your collagen and why maintaining a healthy microbiome with dietary fiber is essential for producing neurotransmitters. Dr. Tager also breaks down the incredible science of the vagus nerve, explaining its role in the body's inflammatory reflex and how tools like 4-7-8 breathing and the Truvaga transcervical device can calm a "wired and tired" nervous system. Finally, we discuss the "wild west" of peptides, the importance of genetic testing for personalized supplementation, and the psychological hardiness required for a long, passionate life.  Guest Information:Dr. Mark Tager is the CEO of ChangeWell and an expert in integrative aesthetics. You can find his books on Amazon or connect with him on LinkedIn and Instagram at @DRMTager. 

Last time we spoke about the ending of the Second Battle of Changsha. In late September and early October 1941, Chinese commander Chen Cheng planned an operation to retake Yichang, a strategic Yangtze River city whose control was essential for protecting the approach to Chongqing. Japanese forces were pulling back from Changsha, weakened by supply problems and casualties, which created an opportunity for Chen to intensify his campaign. Yichang had been captured by Japan in 1940, a defeat that Chen carried as a personal and political burden. He therefore moved to encircle the Japanese 13th Division inside Yichang and drive it to collapse. Although the Chinese held a clear manpower advantage—fourteen divisions against the encircled Japanese—progress was slowed by stubborn fighting from prepared, entrenched positions. The battle inside the city produced desperate close-quarters combat and heavy casualties, showing how the fate of Yichang and the wider defense of Chongqing were tightly linked.    #214 War hits the Pacific 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.   The guns fell silent on October 9, 1941, as the Ninth War Zone's forces restored their pre-battle positions, marking the end of the Second Battle of Changsha. The balance sheet was grim on both sides, but it was China that bore the heavier cost. The Ninth Military Front suffered 70,672 killed, wounded, or missing. The concurrent Yichang offensive added a further 21,368 casualties to the Sixth Military Front, a force that outnumbered its Japanese opponents ten to one yet still failed to retake the city. By the time the dust settled, the Chinese army had lost nearly 100,000 men across both theatres. The Chinese command was frank, at least in private, about what had gone wrong. The Japanese had moved with a speed that recalled Blitzkrieg, advancing 130 kilometres in eleven days and withdrawing at twelve kilometres a day, catching the defenders perpetually off-balance. The 26th, 37th, 10th, and 74th Corps had been picked apart piecemeal rather than fighting in concert, the original plan to destroy the Japanese south of the Miluo River coming to nothing. Elite formations had paid a disproportionate price: the 74th Corps suffered 14,521 casualties, the 37th Corps 14,015, and the 58th Division alone lost 6,192 of its 11,907 men, nearly its entire fighting strength.   Yet none of this was the story the public would hear. On October 10th, China's National Day, radio stations announced the "Second Great Victory in Northern Hunan", the annihilation of over 40,000 enemy troops. Newspapers rushed out special editions. Congratulatory telegrams flooded in from government ministries and civic organizations. Senior officials seized on the moment: Sun Ke, Premier of the Executive Yuan, declared that the victory "laid the foundation for the counter-offensive and the recapture of Hankou and Guangzhou," while General Bai Chongxi called it "the pivotal moment for us to turn defeat into victory." Chiang Kai-shek, reading through the pages of triumphant commentary produced overnight by his propagandists, was reportedly impressed by their industry, if not convinced by their content. He had not wanted to call it a victory at all, but the political calculus was unavoidable: after four years of war, an exhausted nation needed the psychological sustenance that only "victory" could provide.   The gap between public performance and private reality was nowhere more visible than in the arrival of a twenty-two-member international press delegation on October 13th. Journalists from Britain, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Hong Kong, and major Chinese newspapers were flown to Changsha and carefully guided through selected battlefields, where they inspected mountains of war trophies and heard testimony from soldiers and civilians. They left satisfied, presenting their war souvenirs—swords, binoculars, Japanese military flags—to their audiences back home as proof of Chinese heroism and Japanese defeat. Both China and Japan were claiming victory simultaneously. The only conclusion the foreign press could draw was that one side was lying, and it was not the side that had shown them the evidence.   Chiang Kai-shek's real verdict came at the Third Nanyue Military Conference, held from October 16 to 21. His anger was withering. He condemned his generals for their obsession with defending sprawling outer perimeter lines while leaving city centres barely fortified, a mentality so rigid, he said, that the Japanese could announce the exact time of their advance and withdrawal in advance and still execute it on schedule without interference. "Generals, what a disgrace this is!" On the failure to capture prisoners, only 263 prisoners were claimed across the entire front, of whom only 16 names were actually published, he was almost incredulous: "We can definitely defeat the enemy, capture many enemy prisoners, and seize countless enemy weapons! Even if we cannot capture ten thousand prisoners, we should at least capture a thousand! If not a thousand, then at least a hundred! But now, you don't even have ten!" The conference handed down punishments to match the rhetoric. Liao Lingqi, commander of the shattered 58th Division, was sentenced to death for desertion and shot on October 22nd. His men were so outraged that three regimental commanders resigned in protest; the division was pulled from the order of battle entirely and given three months to rebuild. Li Yutang, commander of the 10th Corps, was dismissed—though the Third Battle of Changsha would begin before his replacement could take post, and he would be reinstated to play a key role in the city's defence.   On the Japanese side, the 11th Army acknowledged 1,670 killed, 5,184 wounded, and 14 missing, far fewer than Chinese claims, though post-war regimental histories suggest the true figure was higher. Lieutenant General Anami, who had championed the operation, found himself stung by the charge that the battle had served mainly as material for Chinese propaganda. On November 23rd, he reportedly reacted with visible displeasure when someone in his headquarters said as much aloud.  Anami's annoyance was easy enough to understand, but the accusation carried a troubling degree of accuracy. The Second Battle of Changsha had yielded no decisive strategic gain and no substantial alteration in the military balance. What it did generate, rather effectively, was a story and by the autumn of 1941, stories were one of the few things China still had in plentiful supply. The most consequential struggles were taking place not along the Miluo River, but in foreign ministries and embassies, in Washington and Moscow, in the messages passing between Chongqing and London, and in the increasingly strained calculations of statesmen trying to determine, amid rapidly changing circumstances, whom to support and for how long.   For Chiang Kai-shek, the challenge was never merely military. It was structural, and had been so from the outset. He had always seen clearly, precisely because he understood China's weakness, that Japan could not be defeated by China alone. The country lacked the industrial base, the logistical reach, and after four years of relentless attrition more and more the manpower needed to force a decisive result on the battlefield. China's survival depended on making its war inseparable from the wars of other powers. Since 1937, Chiang's diplomacy had pursued that single objective: convincing enough great powers that their interests were aligned with China's, and holding that coalition together long enough for Japan to be subdued. That effort turned out to be vastly more difficult than it ought to have been.   The problem started with the international order in which the war emerged. Chiang had hoped to assemble a concert of allies willing to help defend China against Japanese aggression. He was blocked not just by the reluctance of neutral states to aid China, but by the speed with which alliances shifted in the opening years of the Second World War. He had never welcomed the prospect of a general European conflict, correctly fearing that it would push China even further to the margins of world attention. Even so, he recognized that once the lines had hardened between the imperial democracies and fascism, new alignments might become possible. From his perspective, the growing amity between Berlin and Moscow was therefore disastrous. He had been eager to draw the USSR into war against Japan. Instead, the Soviets were now effectively aligned with the Nazis, who were themselves allied with Tokyo.   The world created after Versailles had already enraged many Chinese. After all, the May Fourth demonstrations of 1919 had arisen directly from the settlement reached at the Paris Peace Conference. Yet that older order had at least possessed recognizable anchors, especially the dominance of the two great European empires and the United States. Now those empires were weakening, and no one could say with confidence what the new geopolitical order would be. For all Chiang knew, Germany might emerge as Europe's new dominant power. The early years of the European war produced a bewildering spectacle of diplomatic realignment.   The Nationalist government had previously enjoyed a short-lived flirtation with Nazi Germany. In fact, Hitler's regime continued supplying Chiang with munitions in the first months of China's war against Japan. The Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 had theoretically joined Germany, Italy, and Japan into the Axis, but mutual distrust prevented them from forming anything like a fully coherent alliance. Chiang found it useful to imply to Western powers that he might be pushed into closer alignment with Germany, a particularly disturbing possibility for the USSR, which faced enemies in both Europe and Asia. But eventually the contradictions in German policy toward East Asia became too severe. In April 1938, Germany yielded to Japanese pressure and ended its support for China.   Britain offered little meaningful help. Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937 at the head of a Conservative-led National Government, and was quickly overwhelmed by the deteriorating European situation. If Czechoslovakia was for him a "far-off country of which we know nothing," China's fate was even more distant and obscure to many,  perhaps most  policymakers in London. The Nationalists had more success in cultivating the United States. At the Nine-Power Conference in Brussels in November 1937, the Chinese delegation failed to persuade Washington to impose sanctions on Japan and confront it directly. By the middle of 1938, however, American views were beginning to shift. As Japan pushed deeper into southern China, it became increasingly obvious that the occupied territory would be closed to foreign trade. In December 1938, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau arranged a private American loan of $25 million to China, to be repaid through shipments of tung oil, a varnish product whose real importance lay not in itself, but in what the arrangement signified: a quiet American expression of faith that Chongqing would survive. Chiang also held on to the hope of an even less likely partnership. He had become fiercely anti-Communist during the 1920s, yet in the early years of the anti-Japanese war his greatest hope still rested on Soviet entry into the conflict. Soviet advisers and pilots had aided China from 1937 to 1939, but the USSR never formally declared war on Japan. Still, as Japanese aggression in northern Asia intensified, it remained possible that the Soviets would eventually be drawn in.   Then, as so often happened whenever Chiang tried to impose some control over the course of the war, events beyond China's borders altered the struggle in fundamental ways. While Western attention remained fixed on Europe's darkening horizon, a battle with major consequences for East Asia unfolded on the frontiers of Outer Mongolia, Manchukuo, and the eastern Soviet Union. Throughout much of 1938 and early 1939, one faction within the Japanese Imperial Army sought to pressure the Soviets along their eastern frontier. The USSR appeared vulnerable; Stalin's paranoid purges had executed or exiled many of the Red Army's best officers. In May 1939, fighting broke out near Nomonhan between forces from Soviet-backed Mongolia and Japanese troops from Manchukuo. Within days, both sides had reinforced heavily, until nearly 60,000 Soviet troops faced about 40,000 soldiers from the Kwantung Army. Over the next four months, until mid-September, they fought a major battle ending in a decisive Japanese defeat and establishing the reputation of General Georgi Zhukov, who would later become one of Stalin's most celebrated wartime commanders. The much-derided Soviet Army had fought with formidable effectiveness, and the result was not only a ceasefire but also a nonaggression pact between the two sides, extinguishing, in one stroke, Chiang's hopes for a Chinese-Soviet military alliance. The final blow came after developments in northern Europe. In the Winter War of 1939–1940, the Soviet invasion of Finland led Britain and France to back a motion expelling the USSR from the League of Nations. China, then a member of the League Council, declined to use its veto to block the resolution. Stalin was enraged by Chiang's failure to prevent Soviet expulsion, and mutual suspicion thereafter poisoned relations between the two leaders for the rest of the war against Japan. China would now have to continue without further major Soviet backing.   By the spring of 1940, China's position had become deeply precarious. In March, senior Japanese negotiators sought an agreement with Chiang in Chongqing, while Wang Jingwei was trying to formalize his rival Nationalist government in Nanjing. This effort, known in Chinese as the Tong Operation, and in Japanese as Operation Kiri, led to talks in Hong Kong from March 7 to 10, 1940. Militarily, the Nationalists were in grave danger: the United States remained neutral, and Europe was in chaos. Indeed, that same spring, with France seemingly near collapse, the British government also sent out discreet feelers to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace with Germany. For China, Western assistance was nowhere in sight. The Japanese judged the moment favorable for pressing Chiang toward concessions. Faced with serious danger to his regime, Chiang allowed the door to negotiation to open just slightly.   As a consequence, the Japanese delayed full recognition of Wang Jingwei's new government. Through the summer and autumn of 1940, Tokyo remained uncertain about the defector. Prominent Japanese figures such as Count Arima Yoriyasu of the Privy Council said Wang's conduct demonstrated his untrustworthiness, and Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke continued to express interest in an agreement with Chongqing. Zhou Fohai captured the defectors' frustration, men who believed they had made the highest patriotic sacrifice when he wrote: "Chongqing sees us as collaborators, we see ourselves as heroes. We think only peace can save the country — that's why we think of ourselves as heroes. If we end up classed as heroes, then China and Japan will be at peace. If we end up classed as collaborators, then China and Japan will never be at peace."That formulation conveyed something genuine about the moral dizziness of the period. Most of the defectors were not men devoid of principles; they were men whose principles had carried them to a place that history would find exceptionally hard to pardon.   The "New Fourth Army Incident" brought to a close one of the most consequential years in modern Chinese political history. The battle of ideas unfolding in 1940 was already visible to informed contemporaries. Early in 1941, US Ambassador Nelson Johnson sent Washington a detailed assessment of the Chinese political situation in reply to another report passed along by Major Evans Carlson, an American officer who had made an extensive journey through the Chinese interior. The contrast between the two documents revealed a widening split in American views of China. Carlson, together with his travelling companion, the New Zealander Rewi Alley, had become increasingly sympathetic to the Communists after visiting their territories in 1938 and admiring their discipline. Carlson described the Nationalists as moving toward "fascism," and argued that American aid should be conditioned on Chiang's government being compelled to adopt more "democratic" institutions.   Johnson strongly disagreed. It was "only normal and natural," he wrote, that the Nationalists wanted to retain power, but during the war they had established the National Political Consultative Council, in which multiple parties, including the Communists, were represented. He also noted that the CCP could publish its own newspaper in Chongqing in a way that would have been impossible before the war. One might have expected the Nationalists to use the war as a justification "to extinguish . . . all political opposition," yet instead they had chosen to "muddle along." Johnson further thought that the influence of competing cliques inside the Nationalist Party had been overstated. Chiang Kai-shek, by contrast, had "grown in stature, as he has come to be recognized as the symbol of united resistance to Japanese encroachment"; ultimately, "it is he who makes the final decisions." Johnson did agree with Carlson that Chiang's regime was hesitant to encourage a broad-based popular movement animated by anything beyond anti-Japanese feeling, though he also pointed to Nationalist cooperative programs and county-level reforms. But he rejected the idea that American support should depend on sweeping political transformation. Chiang was committed to continuing the war against Japan, and Washington should back him in that effort. In a notably farsighted passage, Johnson wrote: "It is my view that since the fall of the Manchu dynasty and the collapse of the traditional Chinese concept of government the Chinese people have been feeling their way along toward a new evolving form of government. A definitive form of government has not yet been established and may not be established for decades; it may or may not be in the form of a democracy, but it will be a type of government that will be adapted to the needs of China and its people." The tension between these two American interpretations,  Carlson's idealized belief in the Communists and Johnson's pragmatic support for Chiang was more than a minor bureaucratic dispute. It foreshadowed a debate that would dominate American foreign policy for the next decade, and would still echo when the People's Republic was proclaimed in 1949.   The disastrous experience of 1940 seemed to cast doubt on whether any future for China existed outside the Japanese Empire. As 1941 wore on, another dreadful event shook the exhausted wartime capital. On June 5, Chongqing endured roughly five hours of bombing, driving the population into air-raid shelters. In one tunnel in the Shibati district, the conditions were even worse than usual. The large shelter was supposed to have lights and electric fans, but the generators had never been connected. Inside, the air was dark, hot, and suffocating. Around ten that evening, people began emerging from the tunnel when rumors spread that the Japanese were returning with poison-gas bombs. Air-raid wardens forced people back inside, even as others were still trying to come out. Bodies toppled over one another, and panic spread as people realized they could not breathe. Over the next few hours, hundreds died underground in the darkness. The exact number was never definitively established: the official figure was 461, though a contemporary police report placed it far higher, at 1,527. What rescuers remembered most vividly were the tortured expressions of the dead, people tangled together in each other's arms as they lost consciousness, clothing ripped to shreds by desperate hands clawing at one another, and bodies so drenched in sweat that they looked as though they had been soaked in water. One survivor, Tang Zhengchang, remembered a hand reaching out from a pile of corpses and pleading, "Sir, please help me . . ." The grip on Tang's shorts was so tight that it pulled them off; he escaped the tunnel naked from the waist down. Official descriptions of the disaster were softened. Even so, the tragedy deepened the city's gloom and in a place already saturated with grief, an added layer of darkness mattered a great deal.   Yet events elsewhere would soon offer the National Government a narrow margin of hope. Late in 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt won re-election as president of the United States. "I am not going to send your boys into any foreign wars," he had proclaimed during the campaign against Wendell Willkie. But Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull both understood that Nazi domination of Europe posed a grave challenge to American influence there. And with China's "Open Door" to trade effectively shut by Japanese occupation, it was becoming increasingly clear that strict neutrality might not remain viable. In a 1941 report on China's domestic and foreign situation, Ambassador Johnson noted that during Germany's sweeping victories across Europe in mid-1940, the Chinese had become anxious about whether the Allies would remain committed to their cause. Britain's refusal to surrender, however, together with continuing Soviet goodwill, lifted public morale in China. People now looked toward the United States and Britain for support and felt that "victory" was "virtually theirs."   Then, on June 22, 1941, the world awoke to news that roughly three million German soldiers were advancing into the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the USSR, dramatically overturned the nonaggression that had governed relations between the two major European dictatorships for the previous two years. It transformed the war in Europe entirely. Less obviously, it also transformed the war in Asia. Thanks to intelligence leaks, Chiang Kai-shek had already realized that war between Germany and the USSR was likely. After the neutrality treaty between the USSR and Japan was signed on April 13, 1941, Chiang predicted that the United States would be drawn into the Asian war, and even that Japan might eventually reverse course and strike the Soviet Union. If that happened, China would become the critical Asian ally of both Washington and Moscow. Stalin had been caught off guard by the German assault — largely because he ignored increasingly urgent warnings from senior colleagues receiving intelligence from well-placed spies in Germany and the Comintern, eager to preserve its alliances, now pressed the Chinese Communists to cooperate more closely with the Nationalists. On June 23, 1941, the CCP Central Committee responded with a declaration that it would "persevere in the Anti-Japanese United Front, persevere in Nationalist-Communist cooperation," and would align itself with the British, the Americans, and others resisting the "fascist rulers" of the Axis.   In Chongqing and Yan'an, the German attack on the Soviet Union was interpreted as a hopeful sign that Japan's fortunes might be beginning to turn. In Nanjing, the reaction was different. On June 22, Zhou Fohai recorded in his diary that, although the outcome "cannot be predicted," members of the Nanjing regime "all believe Germany will win and will take Moscow within two months." Zhou speculated that Japan could not easily reconcile its neutrality treaty with the USSR and its membership in the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was supposed to unite the Axis against Soviet expansionism. Still, because Germany had struck first, Japan was under no formal obligation to help. Zhou also continued to view events through a lens he had never abandoned: that of Chinese nationalism. "If Chongqing joins the Allies and they win," he wrote, "then this is good for China." If they lost, it would be disastrous for Chiang Kai-shek; but because Wang Jingwei had established a government in Nanjing under Japanese sponsorship, China now had "a foot in both boats." It was a ruthless calculation, but not a wholly dishonorable one. Zhou was not merely advancing Japanese interests. He was hedging, wagering on multiple futures in the name of a China he believed would endure beyond whatever constellation of powers happened to dominate at the moment. Whether posterity would judge that conduct prudent or collaborative was a question he could neither settle nor live to see resolved to his satisfaction.   The summer of 1941 marked a major geopolitical turning point in the war. Until then, the conflicts in China and Europe had remained separate, if desperate, struggles on the Eurasian continent. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union now forced Japan to decide whether it too would enter war against the USSR. Debate in Tokyo was brief. Although some officials, including Foreign Minister Matsuoka, favored striking north before moving south, both the Kwantung Army and the Navy advised against helping Germany at least until Germany had succeeded in drawing substantial Soviet forces away from Siberia and into Europe. Konoye, once again prime minister, agreed. With the northern option set aside, Japanese leaders turned toward another great power instead: the United States. Japan's failure to gain further decisive momentum in China had fueled demands for broader regional expansion, especially into Southeast Asia, with its abundant oil, rubber, and other strategic resources. From 1940 onward, measures such as the pressure to close the Burma Road made it increasingly obvious that Tokyo had adopted a more aggressive posture in Asia. Unable to subdue China, Japanese policymakers chose instead to escalate the conflict still further.   Japanese political life had become ever more dominated by the unresolved war in China. As early as 1938, military expenditures consumed about 70 percent of the national budget, and that same year a National Mobilization Bill granted the government "total war control" over the zaibatsu, Japan's major industrial conglomerates. By 1940, the New Order was making itself felt throughout everyday life, with campaigns against luxury and extravagant consumption taking on new prominence. In February 1940, a parliamentarian was expelled from the Diet simply for daring to criticize the "holy war" in China. In such an atmosphere, retreat from imperial ambitions became increasingly unthinkable. That figure, 70 percent of the national budget devoted to the military is worth dwelling on, because it reveals something essential about the trap in which Japanese strategists had placed themselves. The war in China had not been won, yet abandoning it would have meant admitting a failure so severe that it would have shaken the ideological and institutional foundations of military supremacy in Japanese politics. The only apparent ways out required pushing further in: more conquest, more extraction, more expansion. The logic was brutally clear, and profoundly destructive.   The Roosevelt administration watched these developments with growing alarm. Though still formally neutral, the United States was already using Lend-Lease to provide major assistance to Britain and the Soviet Union in their struggles against Germany. It now expanded aid to China as well. On February 10, Roosevelt's representative Lauchlin Currie visited Chongqing to inform Chiang Kai-shek that the United States would soon provide $45 million in military equipment. General John Magruder, head of the small AMMISCA mission,  the American Military Mission in China had been sent to Chongqing in September 1941, as part of quiet preparation for possible Chinese entry into an alliance against Japan. The China branch of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, was led by General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, whom Roosevelt had dispatched to China in early 1941.   The Americans repeatedly tried to discourage Japan from moving south into Southeast Asia, but relations only grew more confrontational. Japan occupied the southern part of French Indochina, and in response the United States imposed an oil embargo in July 1941. The consequences were immense. Japan imported around 80 percent of its oil from the United States. Without that supply, its navy, the essential instrument for southern expansion  had reserves for perhaps eighteen months. The real question facing Tokyo, then, was not whether it must act, but how soon. Unable any longer to resist mounting military pressure for war, Konoye resigned on October 16 and was replaced as premier by General Tōjō Hideki. Tokyo accelerated its preparations for conflict with the Western powers. Planned targets included Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines. I should note, if you want to learn about all of this history in more detail, you can go check out the pacific war channel on youtube. I have a chronological series that is just now talking about events like the Japanese invasion of french indochina and the road to pearl harbor.   Throughout the autumn of 1941, increasingly desperate negotiations took place between Japan and the United States. Washington insisted that Japan withdraw from China; Tokyo was equally firm that it would do no such thing. From the Japanese point of view, the demand to leave China was not a serious negotiating position but a demand for national humiliation a call to repudiate four years of war, vast casualties, and the ideological basis of Japanese militarism in a single diplomatic act. In the end, the gulf between the two positions could not be bridged.   While civilian and military leaders in Tokyo argued over the pace at which they should move toward war, few among Japan's rulers doubted that war was coming. At the imperial conference of November 5, it was formally agreed that if no satisfactory diplomatic solution had been reached by December 1, war would follow soon after. Talks in Washington between Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburō, diplomat Kurusu Saburō, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull led nowhere. On November 26, Hull delivered a note repeating the American position that Japan must withdraw from both China and Indochina. On December 1, the imperial conference resolved to go to war; the following day, the date of attack was fixed as December 8, December 7 by American time. In one sense, this was the culmination toward which the entire previous decade had been moving. The war in China had started as a localized conflict, then expanded into a continental one, and was now about to become something larger still: a truly global war, stretching from the North Atlantic to the western Pacific. China's long, lonely resistance would suddenly gain new dimensions and new allies,  though not the ones Chiang had spent four years trying to cultivate, and not under circumstances he would have chosen.   In the early morning of December 7, 1941, the US Pacific Fleet lay anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, its sailors and officers still largely asleep as dawn crept across the Pacific. The attack did not come without warning signs,  American and Japanese diplomats had been locked in increasingly desperate negotiations throughout the autumn, each side hardening its position until no room remained to maneuver. Washington had demanded that Japan withdraw from China, a condition Tokyo viewed not as a serious opening offer but as a demand for national humiliation: a call to repudiate four years of brutal war, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the entire ideological foundation upon which Japanese militarism rested. No agreement was possible on those terms, and both sides privately knew it.   The strike force assembled in secret was formidable. Six aircraft carriers,  the Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku, and Zuikaku had sailed under strict radio silence across the North Pacific, launching their aircraft in two successive waves before the American base had any meaningful chance to respond. The first wave of approximately 183 planes swept in just before 8 a.m., targeting the rows of battleships moored along Battleship Row and the military airfields at Wheeler, Hickam, and Ford Island simultaneously, ensuring that American aircraft could not scramble in time to mount an effective defense. A second wave of roughly 170 planes followed less than an hour later, pressing the attack on damaged ships and harbor installations.   The destruction was staggering. The battleship Arizona suffered a catastrophic magazine explosion after a armor-piercing bomb penetrated her forward decks, killing nearly 1,177 of her crew in minutes, almost half of the total American dead from the entire attack. The Oklahoma capsized after being struck by multiple torpedoes. The West Virginia and California sank at their moorings. In total, seventeen vessels were damaged or destroyed, and the vast majority of military aircraft at the nearby airfields were caught on the ground and obliterated before they could take flight. Around 2,400 Americans were killed and another 1,100 wounded, making it the deadliest single attack on American soil or territory in the nation's history to that point.   Yet the attack was not a complete strategic success for Japan. The US Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers, the vessels that would ultimately decide the naval war in the Pacific happened to be at sea that morning and escaped unharmed. The harbor's fuel storage and repair facilities were also left largely intact, allowing the fleet to reconstitute faster than Japanese planners had anticipated. What Japan achieved in tactical devastation, it partly squandered in strategic miscalculation. The attack ended American neutrality instantly and irrevocably. The following day, President Roosevelt addressed Congress, calling December 7 "a date which will live in infamy," and within hours the United States declared war on Japan. For China, after more than four years of fighting alone, the blow that devastated Pearl Harbor paradoxically carried a thread of desperate hope at last, the great power Chiang Kai-shek had spent years trying to draw into the conflict had arrived, not under circumstances he would have chosen, but arrived nonetheless. 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. After years of fighting, China's situation darkened in 1941 with intense bombing of Chongqing and fears of poison-gas attacks. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June shifted alliances and pressured Japan toward wider war. Japan escalated plans for Southeast Asia, suffered an oil embargo, and negotiations with the United States broke down over withdrawing from China and Indochina. Then the Pearl Harbor attack began the Pacific War.

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Part of what has made Iran so effective in the war with the U.S. is its vast network of allies in the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran-backed Iraqi militias are often referred to as the “Axis of Resistance.”Peter Salisbury, a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, explains the Axis of Resistance and how it's shaping the war.This episode was produced by Henry Larson and Daniel OfmanIt was edited by Sarah Robbins and Michael Levitt.Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show's perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

By 1944, a German defeat seemed inevitable. In August, Romania defected from the Axis and joined the Allies. Within weeks, Bulgaria followed suit, while Finland agreed to an armistice with the USSR. This left Hungary as Germany's sole remaining ally in Europe, and Hungary only stayed loyal because of German military intervention.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have signed a joint defence agreement, saying an attack on one of them would be seen as an attack on all three. The pact was announced at a meeting between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in the Saudi city of Mecca. According to some analysts the new alliance is directed against Iran: others say it is directed against Israel. KAN's Mark Weiss spoke with Ruth Wasserman Lande. (Photo: Reuters)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Dr. Jockers explores the root causes of acne and skin inflammation, revealing how the gut-liver-skin axis plays a major role in skin health. You'll learn why addressing internal imbalances, inflammation, and gut health may be the key to supporting clearer, healthier skin.   Discover the connection between gut dysfunction, endotoxins, nutrient absorption, and common skin issues like acne and rosacea. Dr. Jockers breaks down how factors like stomach acid levels, food choices, and lifestyle habits can influence inflammation throughout the body.   Learn practical strategies to support healthier skin from the inside out, including nutrition, hydration, stress management, and key nutrients that can help reduce inflammation and optimize overall skin health.   In This Episode:  00:00 Endotoxins And Acne 00:15 Welcome And Episode Overview 03:13 Inside Out Acne Causes 05:10 Gut Issues And LPS 07:27 Seven Acne Trigger Foods 10:30 Acne Location Clues 14:41 Hydration And Diet Fixes 17:34 Digestion Skin Care Stress 19:08 Zinc Sunlight Red Light 20:40 Wrap Up And Next Steps   If you're tired of thin, lifeless hair, Hydra Lift Volumizing Shampoo by Pureance can help strengthen and restore your hair's appearance. Formulated with wheat protein to support stronger-looking hair follicles and betaine from sugar beets to help hydrate strands, it helps transform dry, brittle hair into fuller, more resilient locks. Try Hydra Lift risk-free and save 35% on your entire order with code JOCKERS at pureance.com.   Many conventional cleaners contain harsh chemicals that can impact your home and health. Branch Basics makes safer cleaning simple with plant- and mineral-based, fragrance-free, human-safe products that are Made Safe certified. Their products are now available nationwide at Target and target.com. Get 15% off the Premium Starter Kit at branchbasics.com with code DRJOCKERS and make the switch to safer cleaning today.   "Healthy skin starts with healing the gut and supporting the liver."  ~ Dr. Jockers     Subscribe to the podcast on: Apple Podcast Stitcher Spotify PodBean TuneIn Radio     Resources: Visit https://pureance.com and get 35% off with code JOCKERS at checkout. Get 15% off the Premium Starter Kit at branchbasics.com with code DRJOCKERS     Connect with Dr. Jockers: Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/drjockers/ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/DrDavidJockers YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/djockers Website – https://drjockers.com/ If you are interested in being a guest on the show, we would love to hear from you! Please contact us here! - https://drjockers.com/join-us-dr-jockers-functional-nutrition-podcast/ 

0:30 - Rand Paul Votes To Hold Fauci In Contempt: "Seeking The Truth Is Not A Witch Hunt, Accountability Is Not Vengeance" 14:10 - Seattle Storm's Gabby Williams has no issue with trans players in WNBA 32:00 - Over 2,600 US Flight Delays and 76 Cancellations Recorded in July 50:16 - Kevin Sabet is the CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, was a drug policy adviser in the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. He joined Dan Proft to talk about whether or not marijuana use as reached a “high’ point 01:09:38 - Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review and author of Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America. He joined Dan Proft with reaction to the results of the Michigan primary 01:28:48 - Cliff May is President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times. He joined Dan Proft to explain the new “Axis of Aggressors” the US faces now 01:44:00 - Joe Holberg joined Dan Proft to talk about his run for Chicago Mayor. 02:05:56 - Open Mic Friday!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Three Big Conversations: Ariana Grande announces a break from public life - 7:56 history writer and influencer Hank Green faces backlash for using AI tools - 22:08 Spider-Man: Brand New Day has a wild opening weekend - 33:02 Slang of the Week: Larping - 00:58 In Other News: - 47:40 The current owners of Myspace (Tim and Chris Vanderhook) announced that they plan to relaunch the classic social media platform, though they did not say when. Let the record reflect that we are on the edge of our seats. According to the Wall Street Journal, this summer's "hottest drink" is officially a bottle of water. Try some today for $6!Vogue, on the other hand, has argued that the drink of the summer is "banana-milk coffee." And right behind that one: durian-mustard maté. Netflix is getting sued for $105 million for losing an unencrypted copy of Nicolas Cage's WWII film Fortitude. Kind of like we might lose a few subscribers after that obscure fruit-caffeine joke in point three. Finally, Christianity Today agrees with us that Instagram Plus is really just Instagram Minus. So glad our own Jenna Mindel was on the case!

Our Bros come face to face with every Turlett's worst nightmare, a workers union. However it soon becomes clear that their mission may be more closely aligned with the goals of ELF than they first thought.  --- GET MORE ROTATING HEROES ACTION ON PATREON ROTATOES! If you enjoyed this episode and need of more space shenanigans in your life, then check out The Rotating Heroes Patreon and be sure to use the code SHADDY50 to get 50% off your first month!Get access to exclusive shows like our behind-the-scenes Arc Barks, and Off Leash: Character Creations before each new campaign starts. You'll also receive instant, ad-free access to the ENTIRE back catalogue of campaigns, listen to the latest Axis episodes as soon as they drop, bonus shows, live streams, exclusive character art, AMAs and much, much more!WANT EVEN MORE ACTUAL PLAY GOODNESS? Then listen to 12 Sided Studios' newest production Oaths & Empires: a dark fantasy D&D adventure featuring Kingdom Come: Deliverance II's Luke Dale and Tom McKay. Set in the Witcher-esk inspired world of the Isle of Veil, journey with our two rookie players as they navigate their very first game. Rotating Heroes is a 12 Sided Studios Production

Ariana Grande announces a break from public life, history writer and influencer Hank Green faces backlash for using AI tools, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day has a wild opening weekend. Slang of the Week: Larping → Click to see our interview on Educating Humans in the Age of AI (with Professor Jeffrey Bilbro) In Other News: The current owners of Myspace (Tim and Chris Vanderhook) announced that they plan to relaunch the classic social media platform, though they did not say when. Let the record reflect that we are on the edge of our seats. According to the Wall Street Journal, this summer's "hottest drink" is officially a bottle of water. Try some today for $6!Vogue, on the other hand, has argued that the drink of the summer is "banana-milk coffee." And right behind that one: durian-mustard maté. Netflix is getting sued for $105 million for losing an unencrypted copy of Nicolas Cage's WWII film Fortitude. Kind of like we might lose a few subscribers after that obscure fruit-caffeine joke in point three. Finally, Christianity Today agrees with us that Instagram Plus is really just Instagram Minus. So glad our own Jenna Mindel was on the case!

President Trump says the Strait of Hormuz will open soon, but is his purported deal a capitulation that would allow Iran to control a vital waterway? Kate B. Odell interviews Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery about his new book "Axis of Aggressors," and Iran's larger cooperation with China, Russia and North Korea.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2026 delivered one of the busiest years for new avionics introductions in recent memory. In this episode of AEA Amplified sponsored by Blackhawk Aerospace, Avionics News contributor Larry Anglisano discusses the products that stood out, why Garmin's AXIS generated so much attention at the world's greatest aviation celebration, and what innovations from Dynon, uAvionix and others could mean for the future of aircraft upgrades.

In this livestream of Straight White American Jesus (Axis Live), Matthew Taylor and Brad Onishi analyze three stories: 1. The meeting between Bibi Netanyahu and New Apostolic Reformation Leaders like Lance Wallnau 2. The emerging crop of Democratic candidates who are pastors and/or religious leaders 3. With Andrew Whitehead, the new evidence of how Christian nationalism is a predictor for opposition to income equality and a social safety net. https://axismundinetwork.substack.com/https://axismundinetwork.substack.com/

Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of Front Porch Republic and associate professor of English at Grove City College. He is the author of several books, including Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry Into the News, which we'll be discussing today.  

The United States faces the most complex geostrategic threat since 1945: an Axis of Aggressors — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — increasingly aligned across economic, cyber, technology, and military domains to diminish American power. Their most alarming tactic may be to trigger simultaneous major wars to stretch U.S. resources past the breaking point.Bradley Bowman, Elaine Dezenski, and RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery — senior leaders at FDD's Centers on AmericanPower — join Cliff May on Foreign Podicy to discuss their new book: "Axis of Aggressors: Countering the Cooperation of China, Russia, Iran & North Korea" — the result of two years of research, examining the threat and laying out a grand strategy to strengthen America, bolster its allies, and weaken this emerging axis.Learn more about Axis of Aggressors: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/axis-of-aggressors/Order the book: https://www.amazon.com/Axis-Aggressors-Countering-Cooperation-Russia/dp/1968919554/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

Elon Musk says he just wants “secure borders.” But is that really what his politics are about? In this episode of Axis Live, Brad Onishi breaks down Musk's explosive interview with The Economist, where he accused its editor of being a “traitor to the West.” Brad explains why this language signals something much larger than immigration policy: the rise of Western civilizationalism, a political movement uniting Christian nationalists, authoritarian populists, tech elites, and the global far right around a shared vision of who belongs—and who doesn't. The conversation explores Musk's support for Europe's far-right parties, the ideology of “remigration,” the growing alliance between Silicon Valley and Christian nationalism, and why protecting “Western civilization” has become the new rallying cry for anti-democratic movements. Brad also connects these trends to his forthcoming book, American Caesar, showing how religion, technology, and authoritarian politics are converging in the United States and around the world.

Air Date: 7/25/2026 The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on the news from June and July without being overwhelming! Organized around a single idea: the same politics that left America friendless abroad is keeping Americans apart at home. The war with Iran ends and America's word counts for less around the world, so Europe starts building its own software instead of buying ours, NATO war-games its own doubts, and China quietly steadies the world's oil markets, while Taiwan shows that real security comes from connection, not threats. At home, the administration revives the red scare, hands the Justice Department to the president's personal lawyer while judges face death threats, and turns the country's 250th birthday into a fight over who counts as American, and billionaires cash out while everyone argues. And the way back starts small: a psychologist's simple habit for a happier social life, organizers who treat loneliness as a political problem with a political cure, and a Michigan Senate campaign built on talking to people instead of donors. Covering: June–July 2026 Full Show Notes Be part of the show! Leave a voice message, message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Shows + No Ads!) Use our links to shop Bookshop.org and Libro.fm for a non-evil book and audiobook purchasing experience! Join our Discord community! SECTION 1: A SUPERPOWER WITHOUT FRIENDS (00:01:30) #1805 - Trump Giving Iran $300 Billion to End His Own War 1: The Iran Deal, Boy, I Don't Know - Takes by Jamelle Bouie - Air Date 6-18-26 2: J.D. Vance Iran Deal Fall Guy Part 1 - On the Media - Air Date 6-19-26 3: Trump Weakened U.S. Allies While Strengthening Iran Part 1 - UNFTR - Air Date 6-19-26 (00:26:23) #1810 - Post-American Europe: How to Lose Friends and Influence People to Protect Themselves Against You 4: TODAY: Europe Replaces ENTIRE American Software Stack - Google OUT, Microsoft OUT June 9 - House of El - Air Date 6-4-26 5: Would NATO Hold if Russia Tested Article 5? Lessons From a War Game | Berlin Briefing Podcast Part 1 - DW News - Air Date 7-17-26 6: China Quietly Saved the World Last Month Part 1 - Max Fisher - Air Date 7-17-26 (00:54:17) #1799 - The US and China Are Fighting Over Taiwan, Semiconductors, and Africa's Minerals 7: Can There Ever Really Be "one China?" - Vox - Air Date 5-28-26 8: Trump's FAILED Meeting With China's Xi Jinping Was Humiliating - Pod Save the World - Air Date 5-21-26 9: China Will Never Beat Taiwan, Here's Why - Maxinomics - Air Date 3-37-26 SECTION 2: DIVIDED ON PURPOSE (01:23:27) #1809 - Democrats Seek a Blue Wave, Progressives Push Democratic Socialism, GOP Revive the Red Scare 10: The Red Scare Returns Trump Is Calling Us Communists - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 7-8-26 11: Why Dems Like Him Are Crashing Out Right Now with Jeet Heer Part 1 - The Majority Report - Air Dat 7-3-26 12: Unsticking Congress with Maya Kornberg Part 1 - Future Hindsight - Air Date 5-7-26 (01:45:55) #1802 - Department of Injustice: Revenge Prosecutions, Judges Threatened, and Incompetence All the Way Down 13: Trump Eyes Personal Lawyer to Run DOJ Part 1 - The Beat w Ari Melber - Air Date 6-4-26 14: This Federal Judge Ruled Against Trump. Then the Death Threats Rolled in Part 1 - 60 Minutes - Air Date 3-1-26 15: DOJ in Crisis - Stay Tuned with Preet - Air Date 2-10-26 SECTION 3: STRANGERS IN OUR OWN COUNTRY (02:12:09) #1806 - America at 250: The Declaration, the Constitution, and our Crisis of Democracy 16: America's 250th Birthday Must Reckon with Racism, Historian Says - Here & Now Anytime - Air Date 6-19-26 17: Trump 250 Gala Grows More Humiliating as Fox Grapples with Low Turnout - THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent - Air Date 6-26-26 18: The Constitution (Melissa's Version) - Strict Scrutiny - Air Date 5-11-26 (02:37:01) #1807 - What the World Cup Exposes: Identity, Colonialism, and Racism in 2026 19: Pete Hegseth is Trying to Resegregate the Military - Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie - Air Date 6-20-26 20: US Soccer Star Shows MAGA's Racism With Zero Effort - Rick Strom - Air Date 6-23-26 21: Colonial Wars Played On The Pitch - AJ+ - Air Date 6-21-26 (03:07:56) #1804 - Elon Musk, the First Trillionaire, and the Broken System That Made Him 22: Belfast Riots: Why UK Mobs See Racial Violence as 'national Defence' | Amina Shareef | MEE Opinion - Middle East Eye - Air Date 6-18-26 23: 'Billionaire CRISIS': How the Country's Wealthiest Are 'bankrolling' U.S. Politics - MS NOW - Air Date 5-27-26 24: SpaceX IPO: What They're Not Telling Retail Investors - UNFTR Media - Air Date 6-9-26 (03:34:28) #1808 - Billionaires vs. Democracy: They're Not Coming For Your Job, They're Coming For Your Government (And The Entire Economy) 25: The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now Part 1 - Benn Jordan - Air Date 6-28-26 26: The End Of Capitalism Is Here. - Second Thought - Air Date 6-5-26 27: America is Entering a New Socialist Era — and It Might Stick - The Recount - Air Date 6-30-26 SECTION 4: THE WAY BACK TO EACH OTHER (04:03:58) #1800 - How Capitalism Created Loneliness and How To Joyfully Organize Our Way to Community 28: Anthropic Discovers the Axis of Evil, and AIs Loneliness Economy - The AI Fix - Air Date 2-3-26 29: The Political Economy of Love Attention, Affection, & What Capitalism Can't Buy Part 1 - Rev Left Radio - Air Date 1-19-26 30: The Simple Habit for a Happier Social Life Nicholas Epley Part 1 - TEDTalks - Air Date 5-19-26 (04:30:56) #1801 - Counterfeit Populism: Trump, the 2026 Primaries, and the Era That's Ending 31: Why I Left the (White) Left - Signified B Sides - Air Date 6-2-26 32: Hayes: Trump is Chasing Good Press with Bombs - All In with Chris Hayes - Air Date 6-11-26 33: Abdul El-Sayed Thinks the Michigan Senate Race Will Come Down to This One Factor - Slate and Abdul El-Sayed - Air Date 4-30-26   Produced by Jay! Tomlinson Visit us at BestOfTheLeft.com Listen Anywhere! BestOfTheLeft.com/Listen Follow BotL: Bluesky | Mastodon | Threads | X Like at Facebook.com/BestOfTheLeft Contact me directly at Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com

Mary Kissel. Kissel discusses NATO's internal struggles and the need for American leadership to counter a rising axis of Russia, Iran, and China. She notes that Western European nations often prioritize domestic politics over defense, while Eastern European states face more immediate physical threats from Russian aggression. (6)