Podcasts about Czechoslovakia

In 1938, Europe was once again facing the prospect of a major war. The immediate crisis centred on Czechoslovakia, a new state created at the end of the First World War. It was a country with a substantial industrial base, a significant arms industry and, importantly, a heavily fortified frontier with Germany. Hitler was determined to destroy Czechoslovakia. The German military had drawn up an invasion plan known as Fall Grün, or Case Green. But there was a problem. The German armed forces were not yet ready for the kind of major European war that Hitler seemed to be risking. So what exactly was Case Green? How did the Germans intend to defeat Czechoslovakia, how good were the Czech defences, and how did Hitler's ideas differ from those of his own generals? And perhaps most importantly, what might actually have happened if Britain and France had refused to compromise and Germany had gone to war? Today I'm joined by Robert Forczyk, whose book 'Case Green: The Birth of the Wehrmacht' examines the German plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Case Green is also available on Audible and Spotify.

Saša Michailidis se ptá editorky knihy VISIT Czechoslovakia! Příběhy českých a slovenských cestovatelských plakátů Lindy Kudrnovské a literárního historika Martina Bedřicha. Nová publikace přibližuje historii Československa od roku 1918 až do jeho zániku v roce 1992. Praha, lázně, hory, folklor, architektura, příroda...

Who was behind the gunman that shot Pope John Paul II in 1981? We know the man who pulled the trigger was a Turkish member of the Grey Wolves. We know he planned to flee via the Bulgarian Embassy. We know an Italian nun ensured he didn't get away.  But had someone ordered the assassination? One possible clue is held in the answer to this next question: how did the Soviet Union collapse? We also know three unlikely heroic figures played pivotal roles: a Czechoslovakian playwright, a salt-of-the-earth electrician, and the Polish Pope. Even as the totalitarian Soviet empire cracked down against uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, the voices of people crying out for democratic freedoms, human rights, and equal opportunity became undeniable. In his latest historical narrative, Julian weaves together powerful stories of three people who risked everything to defy an authoritarian power. They exemplify the playwright's ideal of “living in truth,” the electrician's movement known as “Solidarity,” and John Paul II's advice that his people “be not afraid.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daphne Van Horne's "Translations for the Urban Impaired," were reports for Urban Survival in the Space-Age-a-Go-Go World of 2011.  Daphne (of the famous Van Horne Family of New York) reported in to Shadoe and his partner, the late Sam "Dr. Frees" Frees, weekly from around the world. In this episode you'll hear a report from the "Yo Miga-Maga Yacht Club Celebratory Wank" at the Trump-Dubai (a name thought up by the owner himself). Then reports from the "Off the Hinges Urban Lingo Festival" on tour all over India. You'll learn the difference between the words "Totally Dank and Gnarly Dank," the difference beween "Butter Faces and Butter Cutters," "Lucious Donk and Bedonkulus," and terms like "Zuded out of the Frame, and "Collateral Wiz." Then she returns to studios outside of Prague, Czechoslovakia with a body guard trained by Indian Masters. All this and a showcase of the sound of MentalRadio's first appearance in the 21st Century all stitched together for our broadcasts on SiriusXM in 2012. 

Martin from FALCO Holsters joins TFB's Behind the Gun to talk about the company's 1989 founding in a small Slovakian garage, where it got its start making falconry gloves before growing into one of the most recognized custom holster makers in the world. We trace that history back to founder Ivan Kovac, a forestry teacher who started sewing gloves for his students' falconry classes, and talk about how the shop's home in the Štiavnica Mountains still shapes the way FALCO builds holsters today. Martin also gives us a first-hand look at gun culture in Slovakia, a country that spent decades under communist Czechoslovakia and landed on a system with more parallels to the US than most countries in the rather gun-unfriendly European Union. Follow FALCO Holsters: Instagram YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czuchJUdnX4  

Orbis Pictus: World Affairs in the Visual Digital Era by Dr Vendulka Kubalkova https://www.amazon.com/Orbis-Pictus-Affairs-Visual-Digital/dp/B0H3YQ4MMR Drvkubalkova.com The invention of the movable-type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-1400s represents one of the most significant technological advancements in history. The printing press shaped the modern era by revolutionizing how information was shared and preserved, as well as educational practices. Today, society is entering the Digital Era. Students now grow up with the internet and social media. Research shows that younger generations increasingly prefer audio-visual content, while both students and the general public read for recreation less often. This book introduces an innovative educational format we call a videobook. It offers access to about 135 original online videos, featuring animated presentations that provide a comprehensive introduction to contemporary global issues. The videobook covers a wider range of topics than most university-level International Relations courses. Integrating video content improves accessibility and relevance, addressing the limitations of traditional educational resources. The videos also encourage deeper engagement with philosophy and history. Many universities have yet to fully adopt visualization as a teaching tool, which remains a significant limitation in the Digital Era. This project aims to address that gap. This work is designed primarily for university students but remains accessible to a wider audience. Professor Kubálková holds a JUDr. from Charles University, Czechoslovakia, and a Ph.D. in International Politics from Lancaster University, England. She is also a graduate of the Prague Conservatoire. She currently serves as a Professor of International Studies at the University of Miami in Florida. Her previous appointments include academic positions in England, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as fellowships at the University of Munich, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as Assistant Provost for International Studies and Director of the M.A. program in International Administration (MAIA). Since 2016, she has been a Visiting Professor at VSE, University of Economics and Business, Prague. Professor Kubálková is a past President of the International Studies Association South and served for ten years as a trustee of the Social Science Research Foundation Board at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. She co-edited the eight-volume M. E. Sharpe series, “International Relations in a Constructed World,” and was a founding member and co-chair of the ISA section Global International Relations (GIRS). Following years in exile, she received the Jan Masaryk Medal “Pro Amicitia Inter Naciones” for expertise in International Relations and has been inducted into the “Memory of the Nation” of the Czech Republic. Her research, publications, and teaching focus on International Relations theory, Marxism, Constructivism, post-Soviet studies, religion, civilizations, culture in world affairs, non-Western perspectives, pedagogy, and the application of information technology in education. She is the author, among others, of My Path to Global International Relations: An Autobiographical Textbook (2026).

As we celebrate 90 years of shortwave broadcasting abroad from what was then Czechoslovakia, I'll be talking to our devoted listener Murali in Sweden and his family about the significance of DXing in the age of AI. Later, RSI music director Rado Mešša will invite you all to the London concert of Prešov based band IMT SMILE.

“Walking away is actually discipline. It's not failure, it's discipline.” — Laurie SpenglerIn this episode, I speak with Laurie Spengler, Founder and CEO of Courageous Capital Advisors and Founding Partner of Mondiale Impact, about why capital without capacity fails, the danger of treating patient capital as permanent capital, and the path from establishing legal clinics in homeless shelters in Boston to structuring billion-dollar blended finance vehicles.Laurie grew up in New Jersey watching her serial-entrepreneur father fix and grow small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the real economy. After studying political science and economics at Stanford and teaching for a year in Taiwan, she attended Harvard Law School. During this time, while volunteering at the homelessness legal clinic in Boston, she represented a homeless Vietnam veteran. On winning the hearing and a Section 8 voucher for housing access for her client, he turned to her and said "So, Laurie, this is great. Where am I going to sleep tonight?". She then realized that legal rights without physical infrastructure were hollow. She and her classmates then successfully petitioned corporate-track graduates to pledge 1% of their future salaries to fund public interest law positions—her first aligned capital stack.After Harvard, she joined White & Case and was posted to Czechoslovakia just as the Berlin Wall fell. While the market focused on massive sovereign privatizations like the Škoda-Volkswagen deal, she noticed that the SMEs making up the real economy were starved for growth equity.So she founded the Central European Advisory Group in Prague, a dual legal and corporate finance firm built on the thesis that advice and capital must be integrated. She ran it for more than a decade before selling to her management team. She subsequently became CEO of ShoreBank International—later merged and rebranded as Enclude, which she eventually sold to Palladium—building an FCA-regulated broker-dealer business to intermediate capital globally.In 2020, she founded Courageous Capital Advisors to act as a specialized transaction intermediary. The model is built around a single leading question: what is the capital solving for? She operates globally across private equity and debt, structuring a $500 million affordable housing credit fund with Symbiotics, raising holding company loan notes for BRAC, and securing common equity for Southern Bancorp. She was also a core architect of the SDG Loan Fund, a radically simple blended structure where a $25 million MacArthur Foundation guarantee unlocked $111 million in first-loss capital from FMO, mobilizing $1 billion from Allianz—a 40:1 mobilization ratio.Much of our conversation is about why the impact industry is trapped by its own mechanisms. She argues that the industry's focus on deal-by-deal binary decisions blinds allocators to opportunities, and that evaluating risk, volatility, and thematic intersections at the portfolio level could fundamentally expand capital flows.She is clear-eyed about what does not work. When capital terms are dictated purely by allocators, misalignment is inevitable. She refuses to shoehorn a deal into a mismatched structure, treating the willingness to walk away as a necessary discipline. But when aligned correctly, the upside surprises: she points to the exit of Fenix to ENGIE, creating a liquidity event for every single employee, from the security guards to the C-suite.We also get into her governance work with Mondiale Impact. She argues that factoring in long-term ecological and social shifts is not a concession or an ESG liability, but a strict fiduciary duty of care for corporate boards navigating a changing world.What stayed with me is her realism about what it takes to actually move the needle. Thirty years after realizing the gap between a legal right and a physical resource at Rosie's Place, she admits the macro funding gap remains wide open. To close it, she argues, we can no longer rely on the "pull" of the marketplace—we need the "push" of institutional leadership shifting the mandate from whether to allocate for impact, to how.Listen to the full conversation.Audio Chapters: 00:00:00 Intro00:02:20 Welcome & meet Laurie Spengler00:02:28 Rosie's Place and the right to housing00:05:28 The 1% pledge at Harvard Law00:08:00 Growing up with a real-economy entrepreneur00:10:03 When the values became conscious00:10:51 Weekly calls with Dad: "How's your cash?"00:11:49 Why Stanford00:12:55 White & Case and post-Wall Czechoslovakia00:15:40 The overlooked small and mid-sized businesses00:17:16 A pencil and an idea: founding the Prague firm00:19:01 Selling the firm to her own team00:20:47 ShoreBank International and Enclude00:23:01 Capital plus capacity becomes the rule00:24:25 When the money shows up but capacity doesn't00:27:01 Palladium acquires Enclude00:28:49 Founding Courageous Capital and Mundial Impact00:32:26 Courageous Capital today00:36:35 Building a team per deal00:36:55 What are we solving for?00:39:11 What the industry misses by only hearing the buy side00:40:52 Walking away is discipline00:42:16 Aligned capital doesn't have to be blended00:44:22 The SDG Loan Fund: $25M unlocks $1B00:46:16 Radical simplicity00:48:19 Portfolio-level thinking over deal-by-deal00:51:37 Sophistication, or how institutions are wired?00:52:33 Financial inclusion: access vs. usage00:55:23 Digital lending and seeing the end of the chain00:57:25 Gender lens investing00:59:35 Fishing in a new pond01:01:08 Governance as a business imperative01:02:51 The liability objection01:04:30 Carbon without community01:07:21 Coal jobs and the Just Transition01:09:01 Knocking on doors during the pandemic01:10:27 "I am afraid"01:11:32 The biggest obstacle: leadership01:13:19 Plumbing vs. leadership01:15:16 The three As01:16:13 Rapid fire01:20:52 Has the gap closed?01:22:19 Where to find Laurie01:22:54 OutroListen Next: IIX Orange Bonds Lifting MILLIONS of Women in Asia & Africa! | Robert KraybillDiscover More from SRI360°:Explore all episodes of the SRI360° PodcastSign up for the free weekly email update

Today's episode is about after school activities in socialist Slovakia. In the Slovak lesson, you will learn a few sentence connectors so you can sound more sophisticated speaking in Slovak. You will also learn how to say “Come out!” and “I'm coming.” in Slovak.Episode notesIn today's episode, I'm talking about after school activities in socialist Slovakia. In the Slovak lesson, you will learn a few sentence connectors so you can sound more sophisticated. You will also learn how to say “Come out!” and “I'm coming.” in Slovak.Slovak lesson1. Expressing Contrast & ContradictionInstead of using ale (but), try these to show a nuanced counter-argument:Avšak – However / Yet E.g.: Tento plán má svoje výhody, avšak riziká sú vysoké. (This plan has its advantages, but the risks are high.)Napriek tomu – In spite of that / NonethelessNa druhej strane – On the other handHoci / Hocičo – Although / Even thoughZatiaľ čo – While / Whereas (great for direct comparisons)2. Showing Cause & ResultInstead of lebo or pretože (because), use these to establish formal cause-and-effect:V dôsledku toho – As a result of this / ConsequentlyZ tohto dôvodu – For this reasonTým pádom – Consequently / Thereby (slightly more spoken, but highly effective)Vzhľadom na – Given that / Considering (requires a noun phrase)Preto – Therefore3. Adding Information & Structuring ArgumentsInstead of just repeating a (and) or tiež (also), use these to build a structured point:Okrem toho – Furthermore / Besides thatNavyše – Moreover / In additionV prvom rade – In the first place / First and foremostČo sa týka... – As far as ... is concerned / Regarding...Zároveň – At the same time / Simultaneously10 Slovak sentences:1. Avšak (However)Tento víkend sme chceli ísť stanovať do Tatier, avšak predpoveď počasia nám úplne prekazila plány. (We wanted to go camping in the Tatras this weekend; however, the weather forecast completely ruined our plans.)2. Napriek tomu (In spite of that / Nevertheless)Môj brat bol po celom dni v práci unavený, napriek tomu s nami išiel večer do kina. (My brother was tired after a whole day at work; nevertheless, he came to the cinema with us in the evening.)3. Na druhej strane (On the other hand)Dovolenka pri mori je skvelý relax, na druhej strane ma však láka aj turistika na horách.(A vacation by the sea is a great way to relax; on the other hand, hiking in the mountains also tempts me in the summer.)4. Hoci (Although)Hoci sme sa s kamarátmi zo strednej školy nevideli roky, hneď sme si mali čo povedať. (Although I hadn't seen my high school friends for years, we immediately had plenty to talk about.)5. Zatiaľ čo (While / Whereas)Moja sestra miluje varenie nových receptov, zatiaľ čo ja radšej upečiem nejaký koláč. (My sister loves cooking new recipes, while I prefer to bake a cake.)6. Okrem toho (Furthermore / Besides that)Kúpili sme rodičom lístky na concert a okrem toho sme im zarezervovali aj peknú večeru v reštaurácii. (We bought our parents concert tickets; furthermore, we also booked them a nice dinner at a restaurant.)7. Navyše (Moreover / In addition)V nedeľu sme upiekli skvelý domáci chlieb, navyše nám starká priniesla čerstvý med zo záhrady. (On Sunday we baked a great homemade bread; moreover, grandma brought us fresh honey from the garden.)8. V prvom rade (In the first place / First and foremost)Keď plánujeme rodinnú oslavu, musíme v prvom rade vybrať dátum, ktorý vyhovuje naozaj každému. (When planning a family celebration, we must first and foremost pick a date that truly suits everyone.)9. Čo sa týka... (As far as ... is concerned)Čo sa týka mojich koníčkov, najviac si oddýchnem pri čítaní dobrej detektívky alebo pri behu v parku. (As far as my hobbies are concerned, I relax the most while reading a good detective novel or running in the park.)10. Zároveň (At the same time)Výchova detí prináša veľa náročných momentov, no zároveň je to tá najkrajšia životná skúsenosť. (Raising children brings many challenging moments, but at the same time, it is the most beautiful life experience.)11. Poď von! (Come out!)12. Už idem. (I'm coming.)Timestamps00:33 Introduction to the episode02:11 About after school activities in socialist Slovakia12:14 Slovak lesson13:41 Practice sentences21:50 Phrases for today22:29 Final thoughtsIf you have any questions, send it to my email hello@bozenasslovak.com. Check my  Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bozenasslovak/ where I am posting the pictures of what I am talking about on my podcast. Also, check my website  https://www.bozenasslovak.com© All copywrites reserved to Bozena Ondova Hilko LLC

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Now it's your turn to share. A bonus episode to end our Love Stories series where you tell the world how your true love grew. Fiona Smiley Wright got in touch about an extraordinary romance that was hiding right under her nose for most of her life, growing up in Northern Ireland. It wasn't until her parents passed away that Fiona and her three brothers discovered years of love letters between them, while separated by war. Fiona tells Asya the tale of a silver cigarette box that her mother Elizabeth gifted to her father Tom, a surgeon, before he departed for Singapore during World War Two, and how it was crucial in ensuring their love survived. In the summer of 1983, Hana Keplova, a talented singer studying at Prague University, stayed in a family home in England en route to taking part in a choral festival. Over breakfast she meets Andrew Johnston, the twinkly-eyed son of her host family. The two became pen pals and Andrew made a surprise visit to the then-communist state of Czechoslovakia, and kept on coming back. After encounters with secret police and heated debates on long walks in the countryside, the pair slowly fell in love. They married in 1989, the same year the Iron Curtain fell. Hana and Andrew now reflect on their love story together. Dutch maths teachers Bart Zevenhek and Nieky Liesker were both single and disillusioned with love. But on Valentine's Day in 2000, a practical joke set up by their students planted a seed that blossomed into romance. They join us from their forest house in Amsterdam to recount the tale.Soulmates Karo Caran and Victor Tsaran grew up in neighbouring countries, Poland and Ukraine. It wasn't their shared border that brought them together, but their individual hopes of learning how to use a computer. They tell Asya how, in the mid-90s, they met and fell in love on a year-long computer course for blind and visually-impaired students in the US. After returning to their respective homes and posting audio letters on floppy disks to each other, they moved to America together. They've worked at NGOs supporting computer education for blind people and today live and work in the heart of Silicon Valley.Presenter: Asya Fouks Producer: Elena Angelides, Edgar Maddicott and Vibeke Venema Got a story to tell? Send an email to liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or message us via WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784 You can read our privacy notice here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5YD3hBqmw26B8WMHt6GkQxG/lives-less-ordinary-privacy-noticeLives Less Ordinary is a podcast from the BBC World Service that brings you the most incredible true stories from around the world. Each episode a guest shares their most dramatic, moving, personal story. Listen for unbelievable twists, mysteries uncovered, and inspiring journeys - spanning the entire human experience. Step into someone else's life and expect the unexpected.

St Maxim was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1888. At this time all Orthodox Churches had been captured and subjected to the "Unia," by which, though keeping the Orthodox liturgical rites, they were united to the Roman Catholic Church. Many of the Carpatho-Russian people were ignorant of the change and what it meant; others were unhappy with it but, in their subject condition, saw no alternative. Maxim's farmer parents, at great personal sacrifice, obtained an education for him that enabled him to study for the priesthood at the Basilian seminary in Krakow. Here he discerned the un-Orthodox nature of the "Greek Catholic" training there and traveled to Russia, where he became a novice at the Great Lavra of Pochaev and met Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky), who encouraged him in his quest for Orthodoxy. (Archbishop Anthony, after the Russian Revolution, became the first Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad). He entered seminary in Russia in 1905 and was ordained to the Priesthood in 1911.Metropolitan Anthony, knowing the hardships and persecutions that awaited any Orthodox priest in Austro-Hungary, offered to find Maxim a parish in Russia. But Maxim was already aware of the hunger for Orthodoxy among many of the Carpatho-Russian people; several people from his village had travelled to America and while there had attended Orthodox Churches and confessed to Orthodox priests. They begged him to return to his country and establish an Orthodox parish there.   When he returned to his native village of Zhdynia, the polish authorities, seeing him in the riassa, beard and uncut hair of an Orthodox priest, mocked him, saying "Look, Saint Nicholas has come to the Carpathians!" But the people of nearby Hrab sent a delegation asking him to set up an Orthodox parish in their village. This he did, setting up a house-church in the residence that the people gave him. Almost immediately, he and his people began to be harassed and persecuted, first at the instigation of "Greek Catholic" priests, then of the government. His rectory/church was closed, and he and several of his parishioners were repeatedly jailed, sometimes on trumped-up charges of sedition. (The Carpatho-Russian people were always suspected of pro-Russian political sympathies by the Austrian and Polish authorities).   Despite these persecutions, through Fr Maxim's labors a wave of desire for Orthodoxy spread through the region, with many Carpatho-Russians openly identifying themselves as Orthodox. The government issued orders to regional mayors to forbid those who had identified themselves as Orthodox to gather and, in 1913, appointed a special commissioner whose task was to force the people to return to Catholicism.   In 1914, war broke out between Russia and Austro-Hungary. Despite lack of any evidence that Fr Maxim had engaged in pro-Russian political activity — he once said "My only politics is the Gospel" — he was arrested and executed on September 6 by the Papal calendar, August 24 by the Church Calendar. He was denied any form of Church burial, and his father buried him with his own hands.   Following the First World War, Orthodoxy became legal in the new Polish Republic, and a monument was placed over Fr Maxim's grave in his home town of Zhdynia. In 1994, the Orthodox Church of Poland officially glorified St Maxim.

Václav Bartuška is today Czechia's ambassador to the United Kingdom. He first came to public attention as a student leader during the Velvet Revolution. Soon after he was tasked with investigating Czechoslovakia's recently deposed StB secret police, a subject the then journalist covered in a best-selling book. More recently, Bartuška served for nearly two decades as the Czech government's envoy for energy security – and we discussed all of these chapters in his fascinating life at our studios in Prague.

The gag order is lifted. For ten months Ted answered "what have you been flying lately?" with a cheerful bunch of nothing, because he had quietly bet everything, sport pilot privileges included, on getting his FAA medical. If you apply and get denied, there is no crawling back to sport. He applied anyway. This week the curse-word-laden victory text went out: Ted has his medical, he is legal PIC again, and by his own math he'll have "probably 12 ratings in the next 60 days."Same week, same show: Ben formally accepted a charter job flying SIC in a Phenom 300. ("It didn't say Chrysler 300. It said Phenom, right?") He says he feels like the dog that's been chasing the school bus and finally caught it, and the chat has already decided his Piston Peasant shirt must be surrendered for a Turbine Tyrant model.Ted then opens the books on how the medical actually got won: five months of preparation before submitting anything, more records than his AME could upload (they faxed the rest), a cash MRI, a concierge neurologist one block off Rodeo Drive with an F1 replica car out front, a congressional inquiry, and a personally logged bill of $21,000. Disclaimer on disclaimer on disclaimer: that was Ted's very specific situation, not a recipe. Talk to AOPA Medical Services, Wingman Med, a HIMS AME, anybody but us.Also aboard: Mark, officially the fourth host ("the fifth wheel... it's really nice for redundancy"), is off to build airplanes in the Czech Republic, which Brian was reminded has not been called Czechoslovakia for quite some time. Brian pulled the power at 10,500 feet over a very hot Tennessee and glided Lucy all the way home ("the Icarus approach," per the chat). Plus a five-star review titled "New Era of Hangar Talk," sport pilot altitude rules straight from the 700-page MOSAIC reading (61.315: unchanged), and the non-event event on September 19 at McCollum Field (RYY).Tonight's wisdom, via Mike Alpha Golf: luck favors the prepared.Mentioned on the show:Chrysler 300: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_300Phenom 300: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_Phenom_300Raven Career Development: https://ravencareers.com/Ted's video, "first flight after ten months grounded: my faa medical certification story": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCt_6pCuLgoIson Law, The Pilot Lawyers: https://thepilotlawyer.com/AOPA Medical Resources: https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resourcesAOPA MedXpress Simulator: https://wingmanmed.com/medxpress-simulator/Wingman Med: https://wingmanmed.com/Dissolution of Czechoslovakia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_Czechoslovakia

Klara Nahrstedt is a Computer Science Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose research has spent decades asking a deceptively simple question: how can technology make communication between people feel more real?Long before that became her career, Klara grew up in a world where communication itself was restricted.Her mother left Czechoslovakia for Stanford in the late 1960s, expecting the rest of the family would eventually follow. Then the political situation changed and the borders closed. Klara stayed behind and later studied and worked in East Germany.She remembers living in East Berlin, seeing the Berlin Wall, and knowing she could not cross it. When her mother visited, they eventually had to say goodbye at Friedrichstraße. Her mother could leave. Klara could not.Even access to scientific information had limits. Klara recalls Western journals that were available only to Communist Party members. If you were outside that system, certain knowledge could remain out of reach.Then, in January 1990, she left East Germany for the United States. She calls it the best decision she ever made.America felt almost surreal. After growing up with shortages, she saw aisle after aisle of choices in a Philadelphia grocery store. At the University of Pennsylvania, she encountered computers, networks, and robotics systems far beyond what she had previously used.That transition led to a career working on high-speed networks, real-time video, tele-immersion, 3D video, virtual reality, augmented reality, and distributed computing.The challenge is often the same: moving increasingly rich information across networks fast enough that humans do not notice the delay.Later, Klara helped develop tele-immersion systems where dancers at Illinois and Berkeley could appear in the same virtual 3D environment and perform together thousands of miles apart.Today, she is thinking about what comes next.What if a remote student could appear to sit in an empty chair inside a classroom? What if people physically present could meet alongside others rendered into the room through augmented reality? What if the internet could transmit not only video and audio, but touch and even smell?A digitally generated smell still has to travel through the air to your nose. Haptic systems may require responses faster than ordinary operating systems can provide. Virtual reality must update quickly enough that differences between what your eyes see and your body feels do not make you sick.At the center of it all is one of multimedia's hardest questions: what information does a person actually need?If you are looking at one part of a virtual room, why transmit every pixel in the rest of it at full resolution?That is where machine learning becomes useful.But when asked why she has not spent the entire conversation talking about AI, Klara gives a simple answer: AI is a tool.For her, the mistake is starting with whatever technology is fashionable and then searching for a problem to attach it to. She starts with the problem. If machine learning helps, use it. If the problem requires networking, optimization, computer vision, or distributed systems, use those instead.She gives similar advice to students: knowing AI alone is not enough. Become useful across several domains. Study outside your major. Read beyond engineering. Travel. Meet people from different cultures. Learn how other people think.Scientific knowledge matters, but understanding people and knowing how to communicate with them may matter just as much.Klara grew up in a system where borders separated families and access to information could depend on politics. She came to America and found a world overflowing with information, technology, people, and possibility.She has spent much of her career trying to remove another kind of distance.Not the Berlin Wall this time, but the technological distance between one human being and another.

In 2026, Slovak Radio is marking 100 years since broadcasting began in what was then Czechoslovakia. For most of that time—90 years, in fact—broadcasting to audiences abroad has been an essential part of its story. While Radio Prague International is celebrating its 90th anniversary, Radio Slovakia International is marking 33 years since launching its own international service. This program is dedicated to this shared 90th anniversary.

Dr. Gavin Ashenden joins Peter to explore Jesus' prayer for unity in John 17 and why the Catholic Church uniquely preserves the one Church Christ founded through apostolic authority, the Mass, and Petrine headship.  He contrasts this with Protestantism's proliferation of denominations and reflects on his own journey into Catholicism in 2019.   The conversation turns to the upcoming March for Life UK, the Catholic Church's unbroken opposition to abortion from the earliest Christian writings, and Gavin's personal awakening to the scale of terminations in Britain.  They also discuss righteous anger, the muted Christian public witness in the UK, demographic and cultural change, the loss of shared Christian memory, and why only a coherent, unified Church can effectively confront today's ideological pressures.   Gavin Ashenden began life intending to become a lawyer but was instead ordained as an Anglican priest, serving ten years in London parishes. After postgraduate work in the Psychology of Religion, he spent 23 years as a university chaplain and senior lecturer, with a PhD on the Oxford Inklings, teaching literature, psychology, and monotheistic mysticism. In the 1980s he smuggled Bibles and medicine to dissident Christians behind the Iron Curtain, including Catholic seminarians in Czechoslovakia, and endured arrests by Communist security services. He served on the Church of England's General Synod for twenty years, was Chaplain to the Queen for nine years, and presented a BBC Faith and Ethics radio programme for four years. He became a Catholic in 2019 and served as Associate Editor of the Catholic Herald. Influenced by recusant English Catholics, St John Henry Newman, and G.K. Chesterton, he has written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and other outlets, and spoken at conferences across Europe and America. Connect with Gavin...

MENTALRADIO first appeared to the world in 2011, broadcasting a twice weekly, live three hour nationally syndicated radio show from an abandoned airplane hanger in rural Prague, Czechoslovakia. In this showcase you'll hear dizzying moments of the "Vertical Pandemonium Audio Theater" featuring Shadoe Stevens and the late Sam "Dr. Frees" Frees. This is an assault of music, promos, sketches and moments like "betting on Rat Killing Dogs in Victorian England," Daphne Van Horne's "Translations for the Urban Impaired," characters like Guy Goode, Dixon Ticonderoga, why we don't have to worry about Zombies in an Apocalypse, and interview with man who was visited by aliens and grew two inches overnight. This 26 minute highlight was used as a demo and the show spun off a 30 minute version in 2012 on SiriusXM. It's like a half hour in the kitchen, spinning in the mixer, with the dial stuck on Fluffy.

World War 2 did not begin in 1939 by accident. In this Road to WW2 documentary, Craig and Gaurav trace the causes of World War 2 from the Treaty of Versailles to Hitler's rise, Nazi Germany's rearmament, the Munich Agreement, and the collapse of appeasement across World War II Europe. From the wreckage of the Great War, a broken peace settled over the continent. The Treaty of Versailles left Germany humiliated, Italy restless, and the League of Nations too weak to stop what came next. Mussolini's March on Rome, the Locarno Treaties, the Great Depression, and the Nazi seizure of power turned a fragile recovery into a countdown. This episode follows the chain almost nobody stopped: the secret buildup of the Luftwaffe, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground, the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, the Anschluss with Austria, the Sudetenland crisis, and Neville Chamberlain's deal at Munich. Britain and France were not simply naive. They were buying time. Then Hitler broke the promise, swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939, signed the Pact of Steel with Mussolini, and forced London and Paris to guarantee Poland. The next episode covers the invasion that finally started the war in Europe. If you enjoy deep World War 2 history with maps, photographs, and primary-source context, subscribe to the Pacific War Channel, check the Kings and Generals podcast, and join as a member for early access to upcoming battles, including Pearl Harbor and the wider WWII series. Don't forget I have a Youtube Membership: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbp8JMZizR4zak9wpM3Fvrw/join or my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pacificwarchannel where you can get exclusive content like "What if Japan invaded the USSR during WW2?"

From Čapek and Einstein to Protectorate-era hockey and OMD. Dive into the 90-year history of international broadcasting that shaped the image of Czechoslovakia around the world and became the voice of hope, art and political propaganda.

National Bacon lovers day. Entertainment from 2004. Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, Hungary was formed, NFL formed, Holland Prime Minister Lynched, Cooked, Eaten for neglecting his duties. Todays birthdays - Benjamin Harrison, Alan Reed, Jim Reeves, Isaac Hayes, Robert Plant, Phil Lynott, Doug Fieger, Billy Gardell, Fred Durst, Amy Admas, Andrew Garfield. Pyllis Diller died.Intro - God did good - Dianna Corcoran https://www.diannacorcoran.com/I love bacon - The Hungry Food BandSlow motion - Juvinile  Soulja SlimLive like you were dying - Tim McGrawBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent     https://www.50cent.com/Mexican Joe - Jim ReevesTheme from movie Shaft - Isaac HayesSalty Chocolate Balls - Chef from South Park TV showAll of my love - Led ZepplinBoys are back in town - Thin LizzyMy Sharona - The KnackBreak stuff - Limp BizkitExit - Truck stop Betty - Jason Lee Wilson jasonleewilsonHistory & Factoids about today Playlist on SpotifyHistory & Factoids about today webpagecooolmedia.comcountryundergroundradio.comNational Days Puzzles - JulyGrace & Grit Christian Country Radio

The first Vietnamese migrants began arriving in what was then Czechoslovakia nearly seventy years ago. Today, around 10,000 Vietnamese people live in Slovakia, yet their journey toward recognition as an established and valued part of Slovak society has been a long one. One group working to strengthen that recognition is Vietnamske Korene, or Vietnamese Roots. Led largely by members of the second generation, the organization created Vietnam Day—a festival celebrating Vietnamese culture and the ties between Vietnamese and Slovak communities. In this program, we visit this year's festival to meet organizers, participants, and attendees and explore how the event is introducing Vietnamese culture to a wider Slovak audience, building bridges between communities, and bringing together generations of Vietnamese living in Slovakia.

The first Vietnamese migrants began arriving in what was then Czechoslovakia nearly seventy years ago. Today, around 10,000 Vietnamese people live in Slovakia, yet their journey toward recognition as an established and valued part of Slovak society has been a long one. One group working to strengthen that recognition is Vietnamske Korene, or Vietnamese Roots. Led largely by members of the second generation, the organization created Vietnam Day—a festival celebrating Vietnamese culture and the ties between Vietnamese and Slovak communities. In this program, we visit this year's festival to meet organizers, participants, and attendees and explore how the event is introducing Vietnamese culture to a wider Slovak audience, building bridges between communities, and bringing together generations of Vietnamese living in Slovakia.

Something strange is happening. The people who used to be Israel's biggest supporters are starting to turn. Conservative voices, MAGA circles, mainstream media … the narrative is shifting, and most people haven't noticed how fast. Mike Evans has. And he has a name for it: boiling frog syndrome. I sit down with Mike Evans, one of the foremost voices on Israel and the Middle East alive today, to get the real picture on what's happening on the ground. We cover the lawfare being waged against Netanyahu, Iran's collapse after losing its proxy network, and the alarming surge of anti-Semitism showing up in places you wouldn't expect, including inside conservative media. Mike also shares a private conversation with MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, that will genuinely surprise you. He breaks down what Christian Zionism actually is and why it's being deliberately misrepresented. And he tells us about the largest prayer gathering in Israel's history and how you can be part of it. If you want to understand what's really happening in Israel, this is the conversation. In this episode: Why the anti-Israel shift in conservative circles should alarm every believer The lawfare being waged against Netanyahu while he's managing a war What MBS privately told Mike about the Jewish people that stopped him cold The real definition of Christian Zionism and why it's under attack right now How God secretly used Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union to arm Israel in 1948 The global prayer gathering mobilizing 5 million intercessors for Israel Join the global prayer gathering at GlobalPrayerEvent.com. Podcast Episode 2210: What's Really Happening in Israel, with Mike Evans | don't miss this! Listen to more episodes of the Lance Wallnau Show at lancewallnau.com/podcast SUBSCRIBE for conversations that tell you what the media won't LIKE if this gave you a new understanding of what God is doing in Israel COMMENT: What surprised you most in this conversation? SHARE with someone who wants the real story on Israel right now ──────────────────────────────────────── Follow Lance: Website: https://lancewallnau.com Facebook: https://facebook.com/lancewallnau Instagram: https://instagram.com/lancewallnau X: https://x.com/lancewallnau ──────────────────────────────────────── #Israel #Netanyahu #MikeEvans #ChristianZionism #GlobalPrayerEvent #LanceWallnau #MiddleEast #AntiSemitism #Prayer #Iran

As President Donald Trump intensifies his campaign of retribution against his political opponents and unleashes masked federal agents on immigrant communities, many American citizens are asking: What can I do?For answers, we can look to dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism.“Authoritarianism is about stealing your rights and stealing your money,” said Ami Fields-Meyer, co-author with journalist Julia Angwin of “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.”The authors spoke with over 100 dissidents in their research. These include a 73-year-old abortion escort in Virginia, young activists in Egypt who have challenged a dictator, students in Hong Kong defending democracy, and a civil rights lawyer who lost his job in the Trump administration while fighting for fair housing. Together, they offer a modern roadmap for resisting authoritarianism.Authoritarians start by targeting vulnerable groups, then extending to political opponents and the broader population. They say, “It's not me who's taking your money or your rights. This is happening because of somebody else. It's happening because of the trans people. It's happening because of the undocumented people,” Fields-Meyer told me.“The response has to be to expand the circle of who we are committed to.”Fields-Meyer has been a senior policy adviser to then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a strategist to national civil rights organizations and political candidates. His articles on democracy and public policy have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and other outlets.The authors share lessons from global dissidents. Fields-Meyer described how dissidents “repurposed their communities into extraordinarily powerful political forces. The dissident movement that helped bring down communism in Czechoslovakia was a group of theater actors (who) repurposed their theaters into organizing hubs. They stopped printing playbills on their printers and started printing protest leaflets. This is something that we see all over the world.”This includes Fields-Meyer's home community of Brooklyn, where mutual aid groups formed during the Covid-19 pandemic are now using the same texting groups “to protect people from the federal agents who are waiting outside their doors.”Fields-Meyer said that strengthening community helps counter the ways that autocrats seek to divide people. “Authoritarianism is all about saying, ‘Don't believe your lying eyes. You thought that you saw Renee Good shot in the street? No, you didn't. You thought that you saw Alex Pretti shot in the street? No, you didn't,'” said Fields-Meyer.“What we learned from Soviet dissidents is that when lies abound, you can work with other people and be with other people and be emboldened to say, ‘I do see what I see.'”“We need to be able to hold hope and hopelessness at the same time,” said Fields-Meyer. “If we do, history tells us that we're going to win.”

It took a lot to make the composer and critic Virgil Thomson happy. He was famous for savaging new works he didn't like, and the truth is, he didn't like very many new works at all. One exception was Bohuslav Martinů's very first symphony, written in 1942. Thomson said this: "The Martinů Symphony is a beaut. It is wholly lovely and doesn't sound like anything else." The story of how this symphony came to be is as fascinating as the music itself, and it's perfectly in keeping with the relentless curiosity of Martinů as a composer. Martinů, a prolific composer who wrote nearly 400 works, had just arrived in the US in 1941 as a refugee from war-torn Czechoslovakia. He was 51 years old and had never written a symphony before. This delay wasn't a case of crushing self-doubt, as it was for Brahms. It was actually a seeming lack of interest in the symphonic genre, which was not unusual at the time. But in 1942, Martinů sent a letter to Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a friend to the dozens of refugee composers who had arrived from Europe during the early days of World War II. Koussevitzky commissioned Martinů to write a large-scale work, and Martinů responded with his First Symphony -- a perfect welcome to his new home, and to the grand adventure he was setting off on in a country he found intimidating, exciting, and full of opportunity. The result is a piece of remarkable contrast, energy, light, and boisterous hope, given the situation back in his homeland. As the sponsor of this episode, Pere Casan Bonet, put it, the symphony is "a pool of energy that makes me feel optimistic even at my lowest points." We'll start today with a quick overview of Martinů's life and work, since he might not be the most familiar composer to you, and then we'll talk our way through this incredible First Symphony. Martinů has always been one of my favorite "underrated" composers, so it's a thrill to get to talk to you about him today. Join us!

Why would millions of Czechs choose Kofola over Coca-Cola? The answer is much bigger than taste.In this Czech podcast for intermediate learners, you'll discover the surprising history of Kofola—from its secret beginnings in communist Czechoslovakia to becoming one of the country's strongest cultural symbols. Improve your Czech listening while learning authentic vocabulary and fascinating Czech culture.In this episode you'll learn:the history of Kofolaauthentic Czech vocabulary about history and culturewhy Kofola survived communism and Coca-Colathe famous Czech slogan every local knows???? Get the complete transcript to follow the conversation, learn new vocabulary and improve your Czech listening:https://slowczech.com/czech-podcast/???? New to slowczech?Download our FREE Real Czech Starter Kit:https://slowczech.com/kit/pod???????? Ready to speak Czech with confidence?Join our Immersion Program:https://slowczech.com/immersion/pod

One of the most critical parts of a democracy is the right to dissent. But if democratic norms weaken, that right can become harder to exercise. And when authoritarianism creeps into a government, dissent can get dangerous.Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for resisting Apartheid before becoming South Africa's first Black president. Before becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel was jailed for his dissident writing under Communist rule.But there are also dissidents everywhere around us here at home. Protesters demonstrated against ICE in cities across the U.S. last week. And an estimated 8 million people turned up worldwide for “No Kings” protests in March.So, what does it actually take to stand up to a government that's stopped playing by the rules? And when does it make a difference? We speak with the authors of the new book “On Courage: How To Be A Dissident in an Age of Fear.”Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.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

On July 21, we mark 146 years since the birth of Milan Rastislav Štefánik — a remarkable astronomer, aviator, military leader, and diplomat who played a crucial role in the founding of Czechoslovakia. Born in 1880, Štefánik lived a life that bridged science and statecraft, sky and soil, ambition and sacrifice. Today, we speak with renowned Slovak historian Michal Kšiňan, author of the first scientific monograph on Štefánik, “Milan Rastislav Štefánik: The Man Who Talked to the Stars,” to explore story, public image, and some of the myths that still surround this important figure even today. In the 50th episode of Slovak Sound Check, Veronika is joined by Lubna and Seán to reflect on their Slovak-learning journey and look back at episodes 41 to 49, revisiting topics from adjectives and summer plans to useful vocabulary and grammar tips.

CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro - four nice things about Peter Beinart 4:50 Will God punish Israel? Jeremiah, tradition, and belief 13:20 The critical-mass hypothetical: a 49% Hasidic America 22:03 Quebec, Czechoslovakia, South Africa - why not divorce? 41:35 The right of return: "You can cherry-pick anything" 54:24 1948: They were closer to the Holocaust than we are to COVID 63:40 Day one of a one-state solution: the list 79:53 "An agenda dressed up in violins" Claude Says: Peter Beinart - editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, New York Times opinion writer, and author of "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza" - joins Noam Dworman and Dan Naturman for an honest, occasionally heated conversation about the questions underneath the Israel-Palestine debate. Does Jewish tradition teach that Israel's survival depends on its ethics - and does Beinart, an observant Jew, mean that literally? Is there such a thing as demographic critical mass? Why is secession the answer everywhere from Quebec to Czechoslovakia, but one shared state the answer here? Is the Palestinian right of return a sacred principle, a practical question, or - as Noam puts it - "an agenda dressed up in violins"? Plus: South Africa and Mandela, Iran, the Olmert-Abbas offers, what Benny Morris actually wrote about 1948, Robert Jackson's "suicide pact," and what day one of a one-state solution would look like for a gay couple in Tel Aviv. Two people who disagree about almost everything - except the settlements - actually talk to each other. Peter's book: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza https://bit.ly/4ygbHH8 Peter's Substack: The Beinart Notebook https://peterbeinart.substack.com/

Episode 522 debuts on Wednesday, July 15, at 7:00 PM (Eastern Time). Rebroadcasts will take place according to the Crusade Radio Network programming schedule. Our topic is The Letter to the Archbishop of Boston on Father Feeney, Part III.   Father Leonard Feeney and Dr. Fakhri Maluf (later, Brother Francis, M.I.C.M.), ca. 1948. They are standing on either side of the cherished statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague at St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, Mass. This statue was presented to the Center in February of 1948, having been blessed by His Grace, the Archbishop of Prague, Josef Beran. The statue arrived on February 22, the day the very day the Communists took over Czechoslovakia. (Image is digitally upscaled and enhanced.) Reconquest is a militant, engaging, and informative Catholic radio program featuring interviews with interesting guests as well as commentary by your host. It is a radio-journalistic extension of the Crusade of Saint Benedict Center.

CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro - four nice things about Peter Beinart 4:50 Will God punish Israel? Jeremiah, tradition, and belief 13:20 The critical-mass hypothetical: a 49% Hasidic America 22:03 Quebec, Czechoslovakia, South Africa - why not divorce? 41:35 The right of return: "You can cherry-pick anything" 54:24 1948: They were closer to the Holocaust than we are to COVID 63:40 Day one of a one-state solution: the list 79:53 "An agenda dressed up in violins" Claude Says: Peter Beinart - editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, New York Times opinion writer, and author of "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza" - joins Noam Dworman and Dan Naturman for an honest, occasionally heated conversation about the questions underneath the Israel-Palestine debate. Does Jewish tradition teach that Israel's survival depends on its ethics - and does Beinart, an observant Jew, mean that literally? Is there such a thing as demographic critical mass? Why is secession the answer everywhere from Quebec to Czechoslovakia, but one shared state the answer here? Is the Palestinian right of return a sacred principle, a practical question, or - as Noam puts it - "an agenda dressed up in violins"? Plus: South Africa and Mandela, Iran, the Olmert-Abbas offers, what Benny Morris actually wrote about 1948, Robert Jackson's "suicide pact," and what day one of a one-state solution would look like for a gay couple in Tel Aviv. Two people who disagree about almost everything - except the settlements - actually talk to each other. Peter's book: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza https://bit.ly/4ygbHH8 Peter's Substack: The Beinart Notebook https://peterbeinart.substack.com/

Today on the Rarified Heir Podcast we bring you our another interview with a sibling of a former guest. Dinah Dillman Kaufman is our guest this week and she is the sister of guest Pam Dillman from episode number 254. She's also the daughter of actor/writer Bradford Dillman and model/actress Suzy Parker. Dinah was connected to the podcast via a Patreon member just recently and her enthusiasm to talk about her parents was so infectious we had to have her on immediately because it's clear just how much she still connects to her parents even today. Dinah spoke to us about everything from the personal to the pedestrian, the intense to the positively necromantic. Literally. Dinah indulged us gladly in telling us everything about her parents that was fit to print. We spoke about everything from the estate her father grew up on that became a University of California campus as well her mother's life as a stay-at-home mom after becoming one of the best known, most famous and biggest money earners of her era. We spoke about how her mom was a breadwinner in the late fifties which we identified with, we spoke about how Shirley Temple helped get her dad back to the United States after making The Bridge at Remagen in Czechoslovakia & a harrowing story of her own as a little girl that has to be heard to be believed. We also spoke about the station wagon her mother drove the kids in carpool, how her parents met and the first words they said to each other, how she kept her father's diaries after he passed, the actor most fans mistakenly referred to him as and a literal ghost story that somehow connected us. This is the Rarified Heir Podcast and everyone has a story. Take it away Dinah.  

Sport pilots get treated as lesser pilots. This week the crew takes apart why, and why it does not hold up. The restrictions are real. The skill gap is not. After MOSAIC put Cessna 172s and Cherokees within reach of a sport pilot, the training gap closed on its own. It starts with Rich, a sport pilot in Atlanta who walked into a flight school and got told he had "so much less training."Also this week: listener Christopher H. crossed 500 hours and passed his commercial checkride. Tape-machine messages from Luke Johnson, Sierra Squared, and Chris M. From the community: Echo November Whiskey passed the instrument checkride after "5 reschedulings with 3 DPEs." PapaLima logged a 90-day run for the ages. hakan flew his first border crossing, Germany to Austria.Support the show, join the Discord, grab merch, and send us a message at midlifepilotpodcast.com. If you are enjoying the podcast, leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and we will read it on the air.Mentioned on the show:Brian's THE LONG WAY: https://www.makesmallcorrections.com/Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic since 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechoslovakiaLong Way 'Round, Ewan McGregor: https://www.longway.tv/Yes, Long Distance Runaround: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La9Me7alNqAErica's IFR class: https://www.gilbertaviation.com/

The Democratic Socialists of America are taking over NYC and winning elections in other parts of the country. They are becoming the animating force in the Democratic Party, promising greater equity, social justice, and abundance…but what do they REALLY want, and what does history tell us about their movement?-----SPONSOR: Good RanchersJuly is National Grilling Month, and Good Ranchers delivers 100% American meat sourced directly from local farms and ranches. Most grass-fed beef in grocery stores is imported, so choosing Good Ranchers means supporting American ranchers and knowing exactly where your food comes from. Use code NICK for $50 off your first order and free meat for life at https://www.GoodRanchers.com/discount/NICK ----- GET YOUR MERCH HERE: https://shop.nickjfreitas.com/ BECOME A MEMBER OF THE IC: https://NickJFreitas.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nickjfreitas/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NickFreitasVA Twitter: https://twitter.com/NickJFreitas YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Nickjfreitas TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickjfreitas3.000:00:00 - Introduction: Is Democratic Socialism Different?00:00:26 - What Is Communism?00:01:26 - Socialism vs. Communism00:02:38 - What Is Democratic Socialism?00:04:45 - The Core Idea Behind Socialism00:06:24 - Have Socialist Economies Ever Worked?00:08:49 - Soviet Union & The Gulags00:10:23 - Mao's China & The Great Leap Forward00:12:08 - Cuba Under Castro00:13:35 - North Korea00:14:58 - Cambodia Under Pol Pot00:15:53 - East Germany & The Berlin Wall00:17:46 - Poland, Czechoslovakia & Hungary00:19:32 - Albania00:20:35 - Ethiopia, Zimbabwe & Mozambique00:22:47 - Venezuela00:23:57 - Voices From Survivors of Communism00:27:04 - Why Central Planning Leads to Control00:28:27 - Critique of Democratic Socialism00:32:47 - Modern Democratic Socialists00:35:26 - Why People Flee Socialist Countries00:37:15 - Free Markets vs. Socialism00:41:02 - Final Thoughts

Episode 521 debuts on Wednesday, July 8, at 7:00 PM (Eastern Time). Rebroadcasts will take place according to the Crusade Radio Network programming schedule. Our topic is The Letter to the Archbishop of Boston on Father Feeney, Part II. The American Ecclesiastical Review 1952-10: Vol 127 Iss 4 — at archive.org — at archive.org (this is the issue that has the “Letter to the Archbishop of Boston” in it, in Latin and English) Letter from the Holy Office Concerning Fr. Leonard Feeney — by Cardinal F. Marchetti-Selvaggiani at catholicculture.org Mystici Corporis Christi — encyclical of Pope Pius XII, at vatican.va  Iam Vos Omnes — apostolic letter of Pope Pius IX at novusordowatch.org Father Leonard Feeney and Dr. Fakhri Maluf (later, Brother Francis, M.I.C.M.), ca. 1948. They are standing on either side of the cherished statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague at St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, Mass. This statue was presented to the Center in February of 1948, having been blessed by His Grace, the Archbishop of Prague, Josef Beran. The statue arrived on February 22, the day the very day the Communists took over Czechoslovakia. (Image is digitally upscaled and enhanced.) Reconquest is a militant, engaging, and informative Catholic radio program featuring interviews with interesting guests as well as commentary by your host. It is a radio-journalistic extension of the Crusade of Saint Benedict Center.

Tom made it back from socialist Europe during its worst heat wave (yet) and is alive to pod with Liam. The boys talk Tom's trip, communist Czechoslovakia, talk Jalen Brown and the Phillies before planning their own Great American State Fair.  Shoot a message or leave us a voicemail (leave your name and pronouns): 267-371-7218 Find our bonus episodes and Discord on Patreon. Follow us on Bluesky:  Podcast Liam Tom

The World Cup has the entire globe buzzing. So we figured we'd do some world traveling here on the Gimme Three Podcast and celebrate three unforgettable and undeniable international short films. - We begin in France with the 1993 short film Emilie Muller. A gorgeous black-and-white picture that is so great you'll be dying to rewatch it as soon as you finish. Watch Emilie Muller here!- Next we travel to Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) with one of the greatest surrealist filmmakers of all time, Jan Švankmajer and his jaw-dropping (literally) piece, Dimensions of Dialogue. Watch Dimensions of Dialogue here!- Finally, we move to Japan for the beautiful and meditative short film, The House of Small Cubes. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2009, and it was well-deserved. Watch The House of Small Cubes here!Check out these short films and let us know what you think! ❗️SEND US A TEXT MESSAGE ❗️Support the showSign up for our Patreon for exclusive Bonus Content.Follow the podcast on Instagram @gimmethreepodcastYou can  keep up with Bella on Instagram @portraitofacinephile or Letterboxd You can keep up with Nick: on Instagram @nicholasybarra, on Twitter (X) @nicholaspybarra, or on LetterboxdShout out to contributor and producer Sonja Mereu. A special thanks to Anselm Kennedy for creating Gimme Three's theme music. And another special thanks to Zoe Baumann for creating our exceptional cover art.

Devin & James are back in the Den with another trip (and we mean TRIP) around the world with a look at STRANGE INTERNATIONAL WESTERNS. America may have cornered the market on the genre of its own invention, but artists from around the world have always found inspiration in Wild West mythologies, and we have picked out a few of the wildest, weirdest, and downright most bizarre Westerns from around the globe.We start in 1964 Czechoslovakia with Oldrich Lipsky's highly-stylized musical satire on classic cowboys and capitalism, LEMONADE JOE. We couldn't ignore Italy, so next we look at the dreamlike nightmare that is Giulio Questi's Spaghetti Western, DJANGO KILL... IF YOU LIVE, SHOOT!, featuring Tomas Milian. Then we come closer to home with Alejandro Jodorosky's midnight masterpiece from Mexico, EL TOPO. We jump back across the pond to discover an underappreciated 1970 gem from the New German Cinema Movement, Roland Klick's DEADLOCK (co-starring a very sweaty Mario Adorf). Next we jump continents, and decades, for 2007's wild and unwieldy SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO, an ultra pop culture-infused oater from Japanese visionary, Takashi Miike. Finally, we take a ride with Kim Jee-woon's incredible South Korean Kimchi Western, THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD, his 2008 tribute to Sergio Leone set in 1930's Manchuria that feels more like a true Western than a lot of modern Westerns. Saddle up and keep your wits. It's gonna get weird.

Send us Fan MailWhat better way to celebrate the 250th birthday of the U.S., than by discussing a movie from the former Czechoslovakia? I do like to be difficult. But it's time for letter V in our little game, which means that we can pay Valerie a visit. Perhaps a somewhat polarizing film these days, we'll share our thoughts, and you can decide for yourself if you would like to spend time with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)!

"No, let's not do Garfield" we said. "It would be too obvious" we said. "I know, let's do the 1963 avant-garde Czech New Wave film, The Cassandra Cat" said one of us.  "But that one isn't even available on streaming, it's literally just on Youtube. I don't think anyone has seen this!" said another.  Despite this, the GBGBs have decided that the best course of action is to review this obscure Czech film about a cat who wears sunglasses. For the uninitiated, this movie is about an unappreciated school teacher named Robert who lives in a small town in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. A circus comes into town and brings a mysterious acrobat and her bespectacled cat, Mokol, who possesses the power to make people literally change color based on their true nature when his sunglasses are removed. Chaos ensues and it is up to Robert and the schoolchildren to protect the cat from those who wish their true nature to be kept secret.    Thanks for stopping by!

Challenging Archives is a new series of podcasts jointly organized between Review of Democracy and BlinkenOpen Society Archives, based in Budapest. We will invite scholars to discuss about their investigation in this archive. The Blinken Open Society Archives, or the OSA, is a complex archival institution. On one hand, it is a repository of vast collections that document how power operated across the twentieth century. OSA holds 10,000 linear meters ofarchival material, 17,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, and 15 TB of digital records, as well as 150,000 photographs, 6000+ documentary film titles and 22,000 library items. Their catalogue is available online.OSA is not only an archive. It is one of Europe's leading research centers on the history of the Cold War, statesocialism, human rights, and surveillance. The OSA Archivum also provides fellowships for promising researchers that want to investigate the archival funds. Particularly the Visegrad Fellowship supports scholars, engaged artists, journalists, scholars at risk who want to work directly with these materials.Since its start in 2010, the Visegrad Scholarship has been awarded to more than 290 fellows from over 65 countries.In our series, we will invite the Visegrad Fellows that will share us their experience with working with this fascinating archive. In our second episode, we explore the permeability of theIron Curtain. Politically, the divide was real. Yet unofficially, ideas, books and people kept finding small cracks to slip through. This paradox, in turn, led György Péteri to argue that, at least from a cultural perspective, the metaphor of the Iron Curtain should be replaced by that of a Nylon Curtain. In our conversation, we focus on a fascinating storythat started in 1978, when the Czech dissident Julius Tomin sent a letter to Oxford, Harvard, Freiburg and the Freie  Universität Berlin. Within this text, he described the hardships endured by Czech academics. The response came quickly.  Some philosophers responded and decided to travel to Czechoslovakia. They arrived with the intention to teach philosophy. Asthey could not lecture within the university premises, scholars moved instead in private apartments. Visiting academics, including Jacques Derrida, held apartment seminars that became not only space of intellectual academy but alsothe foundation of later dissident networks. As Bethan Winter argues in our podcast, these seminarsbecame much more than acts of symbolic solidarity. Over time, they contributed to the formation of broader dissident and intellectual networks that connected Eastern European opposition circles with Western academics and institutions. She also emphasizes throughout this case that détente was not only negotiated by diplomats and statesmen, but also enacted from below through personal relationships, educational exchanges, and fragile forms of intellectualcooperation.Throughout her Visegrad Fellowship at the OSA Archivumin Budapest, she reconstructed this remarkable story. In our podcast, she discusses her archival findings on the apartmentseminars, particularly a specific folder on Julius Tomin and Zdena Tominova, where she found documents about their police harassment, articles written in support of them, but also articles written by themselves and published in the West. Other broader topics completed her work: fileson Czechoslovak culture⁠, Czechoslovak dissidents, links between Czechoslovakia and the West, which opened broader questions about cultural and intellectual exchanges. Together, these sources illuminate not only the history of the apartment seminars, but also the wider networks through which ideas continued to circulate across Cold War Europe.

On 21 June 1991, the last transport carrying Soviet troops crossed Czechoslovakia's eastern border, bringing to an end the 23-year military presence that followed the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968. Today, we look back on the events that shaped an entire generation with historian Peter Jašek from the National Memory Institute (ÚPN). Together, we trace the story from the invasion and subsequent occupation to the withdrawal of Soviet forces in the wake of the Velvet Revolution. Drawing on archival recordings, we also revisit the memories of key figures from the period, including Michael Kocáb, who served as deputy chairman of the parliamentary commission overseeing the withdrawal of the Central Group of Soviet Forces from Czechoslovakia.

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country's Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026) explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South. David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin.  This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country's Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026) explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South. David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin.  This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/central-asian-studies

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country's Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026) explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South. David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin.  This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country's Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026) explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South. David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin.  This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

In this episode, Greg interviews legendary foreign correspondent Denis Gray about his memoir, Lost Horizons. Denis details his fascinating life story, beginning with his family's escape from communist Czechoslovakia and his father's subsequent intelligence work for the CIA. After graduating from Yale, Gray served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, an intense experience that inspired his transition into journalism with the Associated Press. The next few decades saw Denis covering critical global conflicts, focusing heavily on the Indochina wars. He highlights the extreme challenges of reporting on the Khmer Rouge genocide from the Thai-Cambodian border, noting how a lack of visual media at the time left these historical atrocities largely forgotten by the wider world. Greg and Ed then discuss the immense psychological weight of Gray's memories. Ed expresses a mix of awe and relief, admitting he is glad he never had to face such immense dangers himself. Ultimately, both hosts agree that Gray's career represents a rare, vanishing breed of war correspondence, emphasizing the vital importance of preserving these profound, first-hand historical accounts. For a more visual discussion, see a video of Dennis' book launch and Q&A at the Foreign Correspondent's Club here in Bangkok.  

The year was... Czechoslovakia was dissolved, creating the Czech and Slovak Republics. Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a federal holiday. What was known as the Great Blizzard took place March 12th and 13th of this year. The first World Trade Center bombing took place. The #1 song was I Will Always Love You, by Whitney Houston and if you still haven't gotten it by now...Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd President of the United States.

In this episode, I'm joined by Tanya St-Lawson, a martial artist whose journey spans continents, cultures, and decades of deep personal cultivation. Born in the former Czechoslovakia, Tanya first began training in the martial arts as a teenager after moving to Prague, where she was introduced to Shaolin-style kung fu. What started as an interest in martial arts quickly evolved into a lifelong pursuit of discipline, self-discovery, and embodied practice. Her path has taken her across Europe and into China, studying a wide range of systems and disciplines including Eagle Claw Kung Fu, English Martial Arts, Shaolin Temple arts, stage and screen combat, and bodywork modalities in Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Alongside her martial training, Tanya also served in the British Police from 2006 to 2011 within a Public Protection Unit, working in critical and serious incidents. That experience gave her a unique perspective on conflict, stress, and the role martial arts can play as both a stabilizing force and a practical framework for daily life. In 2009, her martial path took a profound turn when she traveled to the Wudang Mountains of China, where she began transitioning from primarily external systems into the world of internal martial arts and Daoist cultivation. Over multiple extended stays, including six months living and training at the Five Immortals Temple, she immersed herself in the traditions of the Dragon Gate, Chun Yang lineage under Abbot Xing De. Today, Tanya lives in the south of England, where she continues her training while teaching movement, embodiment, internal martial arts, and practical strategies for personal evolution and everyday living. Please enjoy my interview with Tanya St-Lawson! (1) Instagram (1) Tanya St-Lawson – Personal Evolution Unlimited – YouTube