Podcasts about soviet socialist republics

It's Friday, June 13th, A.D. 2025. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com.  I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Adam McManus Christians in former Soviet Central Asian nations increasingly face persecution Formerly part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the five “stan” countries — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — have a mix of ex-Soviet authoritarianism and Islamic nationalism that can be troublesome and even dangerous to Christians, reports International Christian Concern. The region has seen increasing repression of religious minorities during the last few years. Three of these five countries — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan — have seen a sharp rise in the persecution rankings. Even the comparatively less repressive nation of Kyrgyzstan has just this year returned to the Open Doors Top 50 list for the first time in more than a decade.   Kyrgyzstan has used special operations police to raid state-registered Protestant and Catholic churches and threatened to banish the entire Catholic Church from the country.   In rural Kazakhstan, authorities often pressure Christian business owners to pay bribes. Meanwhile, in neighboring Turkmenistan, a network of secret police and Muslim imams are primed and ready to flush out anyone partaking in so-called aberrant religious activity.  In John 15:8, Jesus said, "If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before it hated you" Air India plane crash kills 241 aboard with one survivor An Air India passenger plane carrying 242 passengers and crew crashed in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad at 1:38pm local time, soon after departing for London, reports CBS News. Ramesh Viswashkumar, the sole survivor of the Air India crash, escaped by jumping from the plane, reports India Today.  He was in seat 11A.  Campbell Wilson, Air India's CEO, expressed his condolences. WILSON: “First and most importantly, I would like to express our deep sorrow about this event.” Officials feared numerous casualties on the ground, as the aircraft had crashed into buildings, including the BJ Medical College undergraduate hostel mess, according to a social post on X. Christian leaders have also offered condolences and are vowing to help the families of the dead passengers, reports The Christian Post. Marines prepare for Los Angeles deployment as protests spread across U.S. California will face off with the White House in court today over President Donald Trump's deployment of U.S. troops in Los Angeles after demonstrators again took to the streets in major cities to protest Trump's crackdown on illegal aliens, reports Reuters. According to the Pentagon, 700 U.S. Marines will be on the streets of Los Angeles by Friday to support up to 4,000 National Guard troops in protecting federal property and federal agents, especially as they round up illegal aliens. Trump's decision to dispatch troops to Los Angeles, over the objections of California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, has sparked a national debate about the use of the military on U.S. soil. Carmen Colado, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, spoke out publicly in uniform, condemning her own Commander-in-Chief, reports The Independent. COLADO: “We are not pawns for Donald Trump's agenda. Why now? It's because the military was called upon against the protesters. In our oath to serve, we serve the people of the United States, the Constitution. These constitutional rights are being stripped and just denied. The military will not be pawns to that. “So, I'm calling upon the conscience of military members who served previously and now. We have a duty and moral obligation to say no and resist evil.” In response, patriots have called for Carmen Colado to be dishonorably discharged or court-martialed for publicly criticizing the commander-in-chief's orders. Some argued that her actions constituted a violation of the U.S. military's Uniform Code of Military Justice and called for Article 15 to be invoked against her, which empowers a commanding officer to order nonjudicial punishments less severe than a court-martial. On Instagram, Colado describes herself as the “proud daughter of an illegal immigrant.” House cuts $9.4 billion in funding for NPR, PBS and foreign aid On Thursday, the House of Representatives narrowly voted to cut $9.4 billion in spending already approved by Congress as President Donald Trump's administration looks to follow through on work done by the Department of Government Efficiency when it was overseen by Elon Musk, reports The Associated Press. The package targets foreign aid programs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides money for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. The vote was 214-212. This bill was passed at the request of President Trump, who has criticized PBS and NPR for alleged bias. Michelle Obama: Creating life is the least of what reproductive system does On the latest episode of the podcast “In My Opinion with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson,” the former first lady said creating life is “the least” of what a woman's reproductive system does, reports the New York Post. Listen. MICHELLE OBAMA: “A lot of male lawmakers, a lot of male politicians, a lot of male religious leaders think about the issue of choice as if it's just about the fetus, the baby. But women's reproductive health is about our life. It's about this whole complicated reproductive system -- the least of what it does is produce life.” Sadly, the former first lady despises the truth of Psalm 127:3 which declares, "Children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb is a reward.” Marcus Rogers, a Christian YouTuber, was horrified. ROGERS: “It's called the reproductive system for a reason. I really believe it's just a very demonic, antichrist spirit that these people are just so obsessed with killing babies. There's so many ways that you can prevent getting pregnant by someone you don't want to be pregnant by. There's so many things that you can do to take accountability. But the reality is these people don't want accountability. “They want to sacrifice their babies on the altar of self. They don't want a baby to inconvenience them. But they don't want to live a godly life where you would avoid all of that being a problem if you just got with the person that God has for you in the first place, instead of sleeping around.” Worldview listeners in South Carolina, Texas and Illinois share their hearts I invited Worldview listeners to share what they enjoy about the newscast in 2-6 sentences.  You can share your thoughts -- along with your  full name, city and state -- and send it to adam@theworldview.com Helen Mordente in Blythewood, South Carolina wrote,  “Because we have a small farm and my days are full, I don't listen to the newscast.  I scan the transcript to get the highlights which is all I have time to do.  I trust you as a reliable source of info.” Grace Cox in Duncanville, Texas wrote, “I just started listening this week. I like the stories of the persecuted church. It informs me on how to pray and I think it is important news for Christians to hear. “ And Rene Hernandez in Chicago, Illinois, wrote, “My wife, Adriana, and I, along with our four sons -- Naithan, Neo, Kal-El, and Othniel -- have enjoyed listening to The Worldview in 5 Minutes because you give us the news from a biblical perspective. When we hear about missionaries and those being persecuted in another country, it gives us an opportunity to pray.  It is great to hear the connection with God's Word and the news.” 10 Worldview listeners gave $7,506 to fund our annual budget And finally, toward our midpoint goal of $61,750 to fund half of The Worldview newscast's annual budget by tonight at 12 midnight, 9 listeners stepped up to the plate. Our thanks to Stephanie in Murrieta, California and George in Leesburg, Virginia – both of whom gave $100. We're grateful to God for Peter in Seaside, California and Kevin and Paula in Durham, Kansas – both of whom gave $300 as well as Nathan in Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom who gave $506. And we were touched by the generosity of David and Tylaine in San Antonio who pledged $50/month for 12 months for a gift of $600, Victoria in  Paradise, Pennsylvania who also pledged  $50/month for 12 months for a gift of $600, Sydney in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada who gave $1,000, Roger in Crossville, Tennessee who gave $2,000, and Scooter in Naples, Florida who will match those last two donations with an additional $2,000 gift. Those 10 Worldview listeners gave a total of $7,506   Ready for our new grand total? Drum roll please.  (Drum roll sound effect) $32,071.20 (People clapping sound effect) That means we still need to raise $29,678.80 by midnight tonight, Friday, June 13th to hit the half-way mark, to stay on the air, and fund our 6-member Worldview newscast team for another fiscal year. Remember, if you are one of 6 final people who give a one-time gift of $1,000, Scooter in Naples, Florida will match you with a corresponding $1,000 gift.  Now, if that happens today, we will have raised $12,000. In order to raise the remaining amount, I need to find 15 Worldview listeners who will pledge $50/month for 12 months for a gift of $600. And another 30 listeners to pledge $25/month for 12 months for a gift of $300. Has God placed it on your heart to be one of the Christian patriots to fund this unparalleled newscast which links Scriptures to stories, calls sin sin, and informs you about the persecuted church worldwide? Please, we need your help right now!  Go to TheWorldview.com and click on Give on the top right.   Click on the button that indicates a recurring donation if that's your wish. Let's see what the Lord will do! Close And that's The Worldview on this Friday, June 13th, in the year of our Lord 2025. Subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. Or get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

We're discussing "Law and Ideology" based on the insights from a master observer of both types of totalitarian socialisms on the Left, national socialism -- sometimes called fascism -- and the kind of socialism that the Communists in East Germany and Russia had during the 1900s, during the life of Dr. Thielicke. (USSR meant Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Our return guest today on The Republican Professor Podcast is the former professor of Theology at the University of Hamburg in West Germany, Dr. Helmut Thielicke, Ph.D., D.Theol. (Philosophy and Theology). Professor Thielicke once again joins us through his teaching in his Theological Ethics, Vol. 2: Politics. My copy was purchased at Old Capitol Books (new location) in Monterey, California, across from Nick the Greek restaurant on Alvarado Street (their old location was 559 Tyler, Monterey, CA, across from the Peet's Coffee and was formerly Book Haven for many years), and is a hard copy published in 1969 by Fortress Press and edited by William H. Lazareth. Thielicke died before he was able to come on to The Republican Professor Podcast. We thank Fortress Press for making the book available. Check out their catalogue for a full listing of their very interesting titles, and buy one. Get a copy of this for yourself and following along in our transformative, performative reading of it as we make fair use on his insights, with fresh scholarly commentary from me, and allow it to shape our understanding of American Politics. This is part 8 in a series on The Republican Professor Podcast, an introduction to theological reflection on American government. Here, we broach the topic of the nature and power of "ideology" in Communist eschatology. Our very special guest today is, once again, the esteemed and long-time Professor of Theology at the University of Hamburg, Helmut Thielicke. And I've invited Professor Thielicke to join us today through my performative reading (with my scholarly commentary upon) and fair use of his teaching on this topic in his magisterial "Theological Ethics, Volume 2: Politics." My copy of the book was published in 1969 by Fortress Press. Please buy a copy of the book and follow along with our study of this material. Here's a link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Theological-Ethics-Politics-Helmut-Thielicke/dp/0802817920 Please, please support your brick and mortar used book dealers as well. Professor Thielicke died before we were able to invite him in person as a guest on the podcast. Thanks to Fortress Press, the book is still in print and would be a valuable addition, indeed, to your personal library. Please support the work of Fortress Press and buy the book, and check out the other selections that they carry, as well. The Republican Professor Podcast is a pro-deeply-conversing-on-the-theological-aspects-of-the-nature-of-government podcast. Therefore, welcome Professor Helmut Thielicke ! The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. To financially support this podcast, comment on today's episode, or to make a suggestion for a topic or guest for the podcast or Substack newsletter, send an email to therepublicanprofessor@substack.com . We'd love to hear from you. Warmly, Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. The Republican Professor Podcast The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack https://therepublicanprofessor.substack.com/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/podcast/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/articles/

The Inspectre team return to Cheshire to conclude their terrifying investigation at ‘RAF Hack Green'. As we pick-up Bryony's story - things soon start take a bizarre turn, As events go from strange to even stranger! What other dark secrets does this mysterious bunker hold on-to? The Inspectre team set to find out! Hosted by Tom Barrow, this episode features the help and expertise of psychic medium Jackie Dennison (Rescue Mediums), sceptic Tom Paech and resident historian Eli Lycett. —————————————— **Note - This episode contains historic accounts of suicide. User discretion is advised** www.inspectreparanormal.com Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube —————————————— Book your visit to 'RAF Hack Green' now! https://www.hackgreen.co.uk French Ln, Nantwich, Cheshire, England, CW5 8BL —————————————— Credits Written, presented, edited and produced by Tom Barrow Spiritualist panellist- Jackie Dennison https://www.jackiedennison.com http://www.feathersmediums.co.uk   Sceptic panellist- Tom Paech Historical research conducted and presented by Eli Lycett https://thelocalmythstorian.com   Voice of female ghost- Becca Broster “Inspectre Theme” - written and produced by Matt Davies   —————————————— Additional music Storyblocks: "Watching" - Michael Vignola “Connecting shadows” -  Michael Vignola “Follow me nowhere” “Fear within” - Zoze “Don't lie” - “Autonomous light” - Jason Wayne Brown “Indecisions” - Boris Skalsky “Planet of Cornices” - Jason Wayne Brown “Lightness” - Dawn Macleod "Follow me nowhere" "Crawler" ——————————————- Upbeat: “Floating in empty space” - Braden Deal ——————————————- Public domain: “Soviet National Anthem” by Orchestra of the Ministry of Defence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,  conducted by N. Mikhailov.   Sound effects Freesound: “Geiger Counter” by johnnythesalesman -- https://freesound.org/s/423291/ -- License: Attribution 3.0 “Churchill speech” by wingfisher -- https://freesound.org/s/516918/ -- License: Attribution 3.0 “baby_voice12” by reinsamba -- https://freesound.org/s/46958/ -- License: Attribution 4.0   ——————————————- #Paranormal #Ghosts #Ghost #Haunted #Scary #Spirits #Spooky #cheshire #Hackgreen   Inspectre Paranormal is an independent podcast made by CW9 Productions. ©️CW9 Productions 2024

We're discussing "Science and Ideology" based on the insights from a master observer of both types of totalitarian socialisms on the Left, national socialism -- sometimes called fascism -- and the kind of socialism that the Communists in East Germany and Russia had during the 1900s, during the life of Dr. Thielicke. USSR meant Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Our return guest today on The Republican Professor Podcast is the former professor of Theology at the University of Hamburg in West Germany, Dr. Helmut Thielicke, Ph.D., D.Theol. (Philosophy and Theology). Professor Thielicke once again joins us through his teaching in his Theological Ethics, Vol. 2: Politics. My copy was purchased at Old Capitol Books (new location) in Monterey, California, across from Nick the Greek restaurant on Alvarado Street (their old location was 559 Tyler, Monterey, CA, across from the Peet's Coffee and was formerly Book Haven for many years), and is a hard copy published in 1969 by Fortress Press and edited by William H. Lazareth. Thielicke died before he was able to come on to The Republican Professor Podcast. We thank Fortress Press for making the book available. Check out their catalogue for a full listing of their very interesting titles, and buy one. Get a copy of this for yourself and following along in our transformative, performative reading of it as we make fair use on his insights, with fresh scholarly commentary from me, and allow it to shape our understanding of American Politics. This is part 7 in a series on The Republican Professor Podcast, an introduction to theological reflection on American government. Here, we broach the topic of the nature and power of "ideology" in Communist eschatology. Our very special guest today is, once again, the esteemed and long-time Professor of Theology at the University of Hamburg, Helmut Thielicke. And I've invited Professor Thielicke to join us today through my performative reading (with my scholarly commentary upon) and fair use of his teaching on this topic in his magisterial "Theological Ethics, Volume 2: Politics." My copy of the book was published in 1969 by Fortress Press. Please buy a copy of the book and follow along with our study of this material. Here's a link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Theological-Ethics-Politics-Helmut-Thielicke/dp/0802817920 Please, please support your brick and mortar used book dealers as well. Professor Thielicke died before we were able to invite him in person as a guest on the podcast. Thanks to Fortress Press, the book is still in print and would be a valuable addition, indeed, to your personal library. Please support the work of Fortress Press and buy the book, and check out the other selections that they carry, as well. The Republican Professor Podcast is a pro-deeply-conversing-on-the-theological-aspects-of-the-nature-of-government podcast. Therefore, welcome Professor Helmut Thielicke ! The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. To financially support this podcast, comment on today's episode, or to make a suggestion for a topic or guest for the podcast or Substack newsletter, send an email to therepublicanprofessor@substack.com . We'd love to hear from you. Warmly, Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. The Republican Professor Podcast The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack https://therepublicanprofessor.substack.com/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/podcast/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/articles/

We're discussing "Ideology as Claim to Absoluteness" based on the insights from a master observer of both types of totalitarian socialisms on the Left, national socialism -- sometimes called fascism -- and the kind of socialism that the Communists in East Germany and Russia had during the 1900s, during the life of Dr. Thielicke. USSR meant Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Our return guest today on The Republican Professor Podcast is the former professor of Theology at the University of Hamburg in West Germany, Dr. Helmut Thielicke, Ph.D., D.Theol. (Philosophy and Theology). Professor Thielicke once again joins us through his teaching in his Theological Ethics, Vol. 2: Politics. My copy was purchased at Old Capitol Books (new location) in Monterey, California, across from Nick the Greek restaurant on Alvarado Street (their old location was 559 Tyler, Monterey, CA, across from the Peet's Coffee and was formerly Book Haven for many years), and is a hard copy published in 1969 by Fortress Press and edited by William H. Lazareth. Thielicke died before he was able to come on to The Republican Professor Podcast. We thank Fortress Press for making the book available. Check out their catalogue for a full listing of their very interesting titles, and buy one. Get a copy of this for yourself and following along in our transformative, performative reading of it as we make fair use on his insights, with fresh scholarly commentary from me, and allow it to shape our understanding of American Politics. This is part 6 in a series on The Republican Professor Podcast, an introduction to theological reflection on American government. Here, we broach the topic of the nature and power of "ideology" in Communist eschatology. Our very special guest today is, once again, the esteemed and long-time Professor of Theology at the University of Hamburg, Helmut Thielicke. And I've invited Professor Thielicke to join us today through my performative reading (with my scholarly commentary upon) and fair use of his teaching on this topic in his magisterial "Theological Ethics, Volume 2: Politics." My copy of the book was published in 1969 by Fortress Press. Please buy a copy of the book and follow along with our study of this material. Here's a link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Theological-Ethics-Politics-Helmut-Thielicke/dp/0802817920 Please, please support your brick and mortar used book dealers as well. Professor Thielicke died before we were able to invite him in person as a guest on the podcast. Thanks to Fortress Press, the book is still in print and would be a valuable addition, indeed, to your personal library. Please support the work of Fortress Press and buy the book, and check out the other selections that they carry, as well. The Republican Professor Podcast is a pro-deeply-conversing-on-the-theological-aspects-of-the-nature-of-government podcast. Therefore, welcome Professor Helmut Thielicke ! The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. To financially support this podcast, comment on today's episode, or to make a suggestion for a topic or guest for the podcast or Substack newsletter, send an email to therepublicanprofessor@substack.com . We'd love to hear from you. Warmly, Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. The Republican Professor Podcast The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack https://therepublicanprofessor.substack.com/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/podcast/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/articles/

We're discussing "Ideology as a Means of Rule," based on the insights from a master observer of both types of totalitarian socialisms on the Left, national socialism--sometimes called fascism--and the kind of socialism that the Communists in East Germany and Russia had during the 1900s, during the life of Dr. Thielicke. USSR meant Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Our return guest today on The Republican Professor Podcast is the former professor of Theology at the University of Hamburg in West Germany, Dr. Helmut Thielicke, Ph.D., D.Theol. (Philosophy and Theology). Professor Thielicke once again joins us through his teaching in his Theological Ethics, Vol. 2: Politics. My copy was purchased at Old Capitol Books (new location) in Monterey, California, across from Nick the Greek restaurant on Alvarado Street (their old location was 559 Tyler, Monterey, CA, across from the Peet's Coffee and was formerly Book Haven for many years), and is a hard copy published in 1969 by Fortress Press and edited by William H. Lazareth. Thielicke died before he was able to come on to The Republican Professor Podcast. We thank Fortress Press for making the book available. Check out their catalogue for a full listing of their very interesting titles, and buy one. Get a copy of this for yourself and following along in our transformative, performative reading of it as we make fair use on his insights, with fresh scholarly commentary from me, and allow it to shape our understanding of American Politics. This is part 5 in a series on The Republican Professor Podcast, an introduction to theological reflection on American government. Here, we broach the topic of the nature and power of "ideology" in Communist eschatology. Our very special guest today is, once again, the esteemed and long-time Professor of Theology at the University of Hamburg, Helmut Thielicke. And I've invited Professor Thielicke to join us today through my performative reading (with my scholarly commentary upon) and fair use of his teaching on this topic in his magisterial "Theological Ethics, Volume 2: Politics." My copy of the book was published in 1969 by Fortress Press. Please buy a copy of the book and follow along with our study of this material. Here's a link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Theological-Ethics-Politics-Helmut-Thielicke/dp/0802817920 Please, please support your brick and mortar used book dealers as well. Professor Thielicke died before we were able to invite him in person as a guest on the podcast. Thanks to Fortress Press, the book is still in print and would be a valuable addition, indeed, to your personal library. Please support the work of Fortress Press and buy the book, and check out the other selections that they carry, as well. The Republican Professor Podcast is a pro-deeply-conversing-on-the-theological-aspects-of-the-nature-of-government podcast. Therefore, welcome Professor Helmut Thielicke ! The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. To financially support this podcast, comment on today's episode, or to make a suggestion for a topic or guest for the podcast or Substack newsletter, send an email to therepublicanprofessor@substack.com . We'd love to hear from you. Warmly, Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D. The Republican Professor Podcast The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack https://therepublicanprofessor.substack.com/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/podcast/ https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/articles/

During the summer break, the 15-Minute History podcast team are republishing some of their favorite episodes and discussions. This episode and discussion about Joseph Stalin, originally aired on February 14, 2022. ___ The great revolutionary's body lay in a red coffin as it wound its way through the streets of Moscow toward the House of Trade Unions. Six men carried it, surrounded by a phalanx of guards, through the gathered throng of mourners—some genuine, others paid. Each hoped to succeed Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but only one could, and did. The mustachioed man known to his friends as "Koba" who had spent decades fighting to bring communism to his homeland was now General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he held in his hands the keys to ultimate power in the world's largest state. His rivals, especially Lenin's closest ally Leon Trotsky, were already plotting against him, but the general secretary controlled the Party's political apparatus and had the support of leaders across the country. When Lenin was laid to rest, three men formed an uneasy alliance, a troika, to rule collectively, but Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was determined to rule alone. Join us as we teach you about Joseph Stalin, his life, rise to power, and his lasting effect on our world today.  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/15minutehistory/support

rWotD Episode 2614: Flag of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic Welcome to Random Wiki of the Day, your journey through Wikipedia’s vast and varied content, one random article at a time.The random article for Sunday, 30 June 2024 is Flag of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.The Flag of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was adopted on 25 December 1951. Prior to this, the flag was red with the Cyrillic characters БССР (BSSR) in gold in the top-left corner, surrounded by a gold border. Between 1937 and the adoption of the above flag in the 1940s, the flag was the same, but with a gold hammer and sickle above the Cyrillic characters and no border. Between 1919 and 1937, the flag was red, with the Cyrillic characters ССРБ (SSRB) in the top left-hand corner. In early 1919, a plain red flag was used. The final BSSR flag was used until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A flag based on this Soviet design is used as the national flag of Belarus.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:53 UTC on Sunday, 30 June 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Flag of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm standard Raveena.

This Day in Legal History: Gorbachev at the HelmOn this day in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the new leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics following the death of Konstantin Chernenko. At just 54 years old, Gorbachev was the youngest member of the Politburo and brought a new vision for reform to the stagnant Soviet system.Domestically, he introduced policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) to liberalize the economy and allow greater freedom of expression. These sweeping changes upended decades of repressive Soviet policies and paved the way for democratization.On the international front, Gorbachev pursued arms reduction negotiations with US President Reagan, easing Cold War tensions. In 1987, they signed the historic INF Treaty, eliminating an entire class of nuclear missiles from Europe.Gorbachev's reforms proved too fast and destabilizing for the Soviet system. In 1991, hardline communists attempted a coup against him which failed, hastening the dissolution of the USSR into independent republics by year's end.For helping end the Cold War without bloodshed, Gorbachev was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. His legacy remains complex but he is widely credited with allowing self-determination for Eastern Europe and averting catastrophic conflict.A federal judge in Texas has struck down a rule issued by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that would have expanded the definition of "joint employer" to include many companies that contract or franchise workers. The rule would have treated those companies as employers of the contract or franchise workers, requiring them to bargain with unions representing those workers. The judge agreed with business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the rule was too broad and violated federal labor law. The NLRB chair said they are considering next steps, likely an appeal to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The rule was intended to ensure companies can be held liable for labor violations when they control key working conditions of contract/franchise workers. However, businesses argued it would disrupt franchising and contracting arrangements. The joint employer issue has been contentious, with shifting standards between the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.Judge blocks US labor board rule on contract and franchise workers | ReutersLabor Board's Joint Employer Rule Struck Down in Texas Court (4)A committee of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit argued that a lower court should dismiss the remaining parts of a lawsuit filed by 96-year-old colleague Pauline Newman over her suspension. The judges claim the law governing Newman's suspension for an investigation into her fitness to serve is constitutional, despite her challenges. Newman's attorney plans to respond to the arguments made. Last month, a federal judge dismissed most of Newman's other allegations against the judicial council that suspended her. The council suspended Newman in September 2022 for at least a year amid concerns over her mental competency, which she has defended. The judges argue even if some suspension orders could violate the Fourth Amendment in certain situations, that would not make the governing law unconstitutional overall.By way of brief background, Judge Newman contends that certain elements of what was demanded of her violate the Fourth Amendment as they are unconstitutionally vague under the Due Process Clause. Specifically, in Counts VIII and IX of the complaint, linked in the show notes, Judge Newman argues that the Act's authorization of demands for medical records or examinations without a warrant based on probable cause or constitutional reasonableness violates the Fourth Amendment. However, these claims are likely legally untenable for multiple reasons, including the failure to meet the standards of a facial challenge.US appeals judges argue suspension of 96-year-old colleague is constitutional | ReutersCustomers have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson's subsidiary in Los Angeles federal court. The suit alleges J&J failed to warn consumers that its acne products like Clean & Clear and Neutrogena contain benzene, a cancer-causing chemical. The customers claim they would not have purchased the products if they knew about the benzene and associated cancer risk. This comes days after an independent lab alerted the FDA about high benzene levels in popular acne product brands. The EPA has stated breathing low levels of benzene over a lifetime can increase cancer risk. The suit accuses J&J of ignoring the FDA's 2022 warning to test products for benzene contamination. It seeks to represent a national class and subclasses in several states against J&J's alleged failure to warn.J&J Allegedly Failed to Warn Acne Cream Customers of Cancer RiskA new trial involving a fatal 2018 crash while Tesla's Autopilot was engaged will test the company's defense that drivers must remain attentive and ready to take over at any moment. Lawyers for the plaintiff are citing internal emails and testimony suggesting Tesla knew drivers could become distracted or complacent when using Autopilot. They argue Tesla should have studied how quickly drivers can regain control if Autopilot fails. Testimony indicates Tesla did not research this issue until after the 2018 crash, and only added driver monitoring cameras in 2021. The case could pose a significant challenge to Tesla's stance that Autopilot is safe if drivers follow instructions. It highlights questions about Tesla's knowledge of likely driver behavior and obligation to design safeguards against foreseeable misuse. The outcome may influence other lawsuits Tesla faces over accidents involving its driver assistance systems.Next Autopilot trial to test Tesla's blame-the-driver defense | Reuters Get full access to Minimum Competence - Daily Legal News Podcast at www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Iskolat, a Latvian communist, returns to teach us more about the shrouded history of Latvia, which was a part of the Soviet Union, officially known as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic continuously from 1944 to 1990. In this second and final part we'll be discussing the post-World War II era of building socialism in Latvia and the Baltics at large. We cover the successes of socialist construction, its weaknesses, and ultimately the downfall of soviet system in Latvia in the early 1990s and how that played out. Iskolat also delves into present day realities of Latvia that don't always make international news. www.patreon.com/aesthepodcast Isoklat twitter: twitter.com/iskolat Workers' Struggle (English/Latvian/multilang): https://t.me/StradniekuCina BalticSSRs (Reddit): https://reddit.com/r/BalticSSRs/ Riga History Group (Russian): https://t.me/RigaHistoryGroup… School of Scientific Communism/Ruslan Dzugov Channel (Russian section): https://t.me/rusdzugov Dictatorship of the Proletariat (YT channel of the Russian section of the Political School): https://youtube.com/@user-xk6xj4xm4n Anna Louise Strong's The New Lithuania: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89017381948&seq=5  The Baltic Riddle by Greg Meiksins: https://archive.org/details/TheBalticRiddle   

Iskolat, a Latvian communist, joins to show to teach us about the shrouded history of Latvia, which was a part of the Soviet Union (officially known as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic) continuously from 1944 to 1990. In this first part we'll be discussing the pre-history of the socialist republic by delving into the conditions of what would become Latvia in the early 20th century to the eventual socialist revolution of the early 1940s. When I say the history covered here from the Communist POV is almost impossible to find in English, I am not exaggerating, I hope you find this discussion as informative and enlightening as I have. Isoklat twitter: twitter.com/Iskolat BalticSSRs (Reddit): https://reddit.com/r/BalticSSRs/  Telegram: Workers' Struggle (English/Latvian/multilang): https://t.me/StradniekuCina  Telegram: Riga History Group (Russian): https://t.me/RigaHistoryGroup…  Telegram: School of Scientific Communism/Ruslan Dzugov Channel (Russian section): https://t.me/rusdzugov  Telegram: Dictatorship of the Proletariat (YT channel of the Russian section of the Political School): https://youtube.com/@user-xk6xj4xm4n

PREVIEW OF TODAY'S PARROT TALK. FOR THE FULL EPISODE SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES. The Irish no longer have free speech. In response to the "riots" over immigration, the Prime Minister of Ireland vows to push hate speech legislation.  He promises this new law would allow enforcement agencies to round up and prosecute those guilty of "hate" speech. Mike Parrott predicted Ireland would become a communist country in a research paper he wrote while serving in the Marines.  In his paper he stated that it took Ireland a decade to catch up with other European socialist countries, and that was after the former Catholic country realized it is was one of the last countries to implement socialism.  On this episode of Parrott Talk, Mike reveals how Irish lost their right to free speech. He will also expose how Catholicism was replaced with socialism, and why Ireland will never be the same again.     

Part II- Power Revisited IG Limited Series Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn @womanhood_ir and support our work on Patreon http://patreon.com/womanhoodir BRICS Information Portal Information of BRICS - Russia  ⁠Infographics | Explaining the BRICS expansion⁠ BRICS Expansion: Challenging Western Dominance OPEC and maximum production: What is sustainable? Agreement on the Eastern Section of the Boundary between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China (1991 Sino-Soviet Border Agreement) Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation Between the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation Russia and China Unveil a Pact Against America and the West Russia-China ties enter ‘new era' as Xi meets Putin in Moscow BRICS Expansion Could Help Egypt's Ailing Economy Explainer: Four key benefits for Egypt as a member of BRICS Ethiopia's Membership Of BRICS: Consequences and Prospects How Egypt and Ethiopia joining Brics could help boost China's influence in Africa Brics: por qué la Argentina ingresa al grupo de países de economías emergentes Los pros y contras del ingreso de Argentina a los BRICS

More than 100 million people. That's how many people “communism as an ideology has killed,” says Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “I just want that to sink in. That is an incredible number to try to fathom or … imagine,” Bremberg, a former ambassador, says, adding: And that includes not just [Josef] Stalin and the tens of millions killed under Stalin's brutal regime at the [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics], but also Mao Zedong, the … deadliest mass murderer ever, in terms of his leadership of the Chinese Communist Party that saw the murder of upward, conservatively upward of 60 million people.Bremberg joins today's episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which received The Heritage Foundation's Innovation Prize earlier this year; its China Studies Program; and whether it's possible for the U.S. to move away from or lessen its economic reliance on China. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To give you more of an understanding of Communism and its significance in our world, I talked to Bud Cornwell who retired from the United States Marine Corps (USMC). Mr.Cornwell has his own podcast called The Patriot Cause that is available on Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts. In our Communism related conversation we discuss the key principles and ideas of Communism, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, and China's own form of Communism they have implemented over time. Do Americans know of which 21st century countries around the world are examples of Communist countries? How did Joseph Stalin implement his own version of Communism when Russia was known as Union of Soviet Socialist Republics aka (USSR)? We answer these question and other important questions regarding Communism in this deep dive discussion. Here are resources for you relevant to this discussion: https://thepatriotcause.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Communist-Exposing-Communism-Restoring/dp/1545402159 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-patriot-cause/id1527582609 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nrodyunknown/message

Tucked away in the muddy fields of Moldova is the last of the USSR.

Freedom from - Freedom toJoanne Hagemeyer says, "When you think of freedom, what does that mean to you? Freedom from something or freedom to something? When eastern Germany suddenly found themselves freed from the Soviet Socialist Republic, there was great elation. But now what? They were desperately impoverished, riddled with toxic waste sites, and their economic and political policies were suddenly rendered moot. They were finding they had freedom from, but without help, they had little to no freedom to. Let's talk about what that means for you and me when it comes to sin!"

FULL SHOW NOTES HERE!Join the CanadianGameDevs' Discord | Follow us on Twitter @CanadaGameDevs | Follow us on our hot new TikTok @canadiangamedevs | We also share to Instagram again!OVERVIEW:The boys are back after a brief hiatus: a little older, a little wiser, a little more worn down- but that doesn't stop us from bringing you the latest Canadian gaming news, events, upcoming releases and game impressions.We talk new 2023 release dates for big upcoming Canadian games, Chivalry II's 2023 roadmap FINALLY bringing cross-platform parties to the beloved Monty Pythonsian medieval slapsticker. Phoenix Labs regains their independence, being reborn as a privately held corporation like a phoenix from the ashes of their parent company and more- including Stephan's extreme disappointment in Atomic Hearts, and Steve's folding immediately for the PSVR 2. Enjoy!SEE UPCOMING CANADIAN GAMING EVENTS!Toronto, ON: Toronto Game Expo 2022 (Saturday, March 25, 2023) "A Toronto physical game market with vendors selling retro to current gen videogames."CANADIAN GAMING NEWS:Montréal, QC: Goodbye Volcano High Gets New June Release Date, Story TrailerQuébec, QC: Baldur's Gate 3 Leaves Early Access, Launches on PS5 End of AugustToronto, ON: Get In The Car, Loser! Receives 2nd DLC Chapter The Fate of Another WorldToronto, ON: Chivalry II Receiving Cross-Platform Parties, More Updates in 2023 RoadmapVancouver, BC: Darkest Dungeon 2 Exits Early Access, Launches on Steam in MayVancouver, BC: Phoenix Labs Buys out Parent Company to Become IndependentVancouver, BC: New Original Sci-fi IP Code-Named “Project Hummingbird” Coming from HinterlandCanada: Trio of Canadian Indies Featured in February Nintendo DirectWISHLIST THIS:INFINITE GUITARS by Nikko Nikko (@nikkonikkoLTD) in Vancouver, BC, and published by Humble Bundle. Launching March 30, 2023, Wishlist on Steam. “Fight mechs with metal-crushing rock in Infinite Guitars, a genre-melting Rhythm RPG featuring vibrant anime-inspired art and a blazing original soundtrack. Battle against war machines with electrifying Guitar Solos, and save the planet!”Edge Of Dead: Under A Uranium Sky by Inferno Muse Interactive (@InfernoMuse) in Ottawa, ON. Releasing TBD, Wishlist on Steam and try the Demo! “In this action roguelike game you'll fight your way from a remote mining colony to the inner worlds of an alien infested star system. Choose a crew member, grab a weapon, and prepare for chaos!”Dark Age Dinos by Woolly Walrus Games (@WoollyWalrusInc) in Toronto, ON. Wishlist on Steam, releasing in Early Access TBD. “Dark Age Dinos is a tactical roguelite. Travel alone or with friends through a medieval world of sword wielding dinosaurs. Strategize your way through short adventures where teamwork is the key to success!”MUSIC USED:01:32 - Intro Music by @jakebutineau (Toronto, ON)09:52 - 'Five Spot Stump' from Floor Kids OST by @kidkoala (Montréal, QC)38:58 - 'Spirit of the Times' from Get in the car, Loser! by @OhPoorPup (Seattle, WA) & vocals by Jami Lynne (Tucson, AZ)53:35 - Dark Age Dinos trailer song by Woolly Walrus Games (Toronto, ON)1:16:00 - 'State Anthem of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' by Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov (Russia)1:26:36 - Outro Music by @Composingdan (Toronto, ON)HOSTED BY: @StephanReilly (Halifax, NS) & @StephenLCrane (Owen Sound, ON)PRODUCED BY: Stephan "Bachelor Boy" ReillyPODCAST ART BY: @Poltergust234! (Ko-fi - Alberta)

Darrell Castle talks about the most dangerous powder keg in the world right now and that is the Crimean Peninsula where Russia has its Black Sea Fleet and where Ukraine has desires of reconquest. Transcription / Notes POWDER KEG Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today's Castle Report. This is Friday the 3rd day of March in the year of our Lord 2023. I will be talking about the most dangerous powder keg in the world right now and that is the Crimean Peninsula where Russia has its Black Sea Fleet and where Ukraine has desires of reconquest. Crimea has very important strategic interest to both sides and is therefore a powder keg that could explode in nuclear war. I know that I talk about World War lll and nuclear conflict a lot, but I am not the little boy who cried wolf because there is a real wolf out there right now. Crimea, as Vladimir Putin has said a few times has more than military importance to Russia. Militarily it is home to Sevastopol Naval Base which is Russia's only warm water base, and it provides Russia with a naval route from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and from there into the Persian Gulf. It also has the military significance to Russia of preventing the West from using it to stage intermediate range ballistic missiles as part of its plan to surround Russia. Crimea has spiritual significance to Putin as he has said quite often. It is the location of the Baptism of St. Vladimir who converted to Christianity and then brought the religion of Orthodox Christianity to Ukraine because he was born in Kiev, and then to all of Russia. That was around 987 and at that time there was no Ukraine and Russia because it was just Russia. Without going into the entire history, it is important to note that in 1783 Catherine the Great took Crimea back from the Ottoman Empire where it remained until the death of Stalin in 1954. Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev decided to cede it to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine which became independent after the Soviet fall in 1989 but was then a Russian state so he knew Russia would still control it. In 2014 after the fall of the Pro-Russian government in Ukraine, Russia recaptured Crimea. So, Crimea is important to Russia for reasons I have stated, but it is also important to Ukraine. The capture of Crimea would mark the end of Russia as a great power. It would be a crushing and humiliating defeat that Putin could not possibly survive. Russia would no longer have a presence in the Black Sea and would no longer be a threat to the Ukrainian ports and it would make future Russian attacks much more difficult. It would follow then, that the entire Russian Federation would be weakened to the point of possible disintegration. Undersecretary of state, Victoria Nuland, yes, she's the one from the Nord Stream Report, is now saying that the U.S. is supporting Ukrainian strikes on Crimea, which drew a stern reminder from Moscow that the Crimean Peninsula is a redline the crossing of which will have consequences. Zelensky in a news conference, said that Ukraine is preparing a large operation for the de-occupation of Crimea. I pray that U.S. leaders are unwilling to continue poking the nuclear bear, but evidence is to the contrary. It seems that Vladimir Putin is just as determined to maintain Russia's position as a great power as the West is determined to end it. It is hard for a Westerner to understand what Crimea means to the Russian soul. For example, during the siege of Crimea by the French, British, and Turks in 1854-55, and the Germans and Romanians in 1941-42, the Red Army lost more men than the U.S. has lost in all its wars in its entire history. Here is a comparison that makes Crimea's importance easy to understand. From an unknown Russian, “In the last resort, America would use nuclear weapons to save Hawaii and Pearl Harbor, and if we have to, we should use them to save Crimea.” So, Crimea presents the greatest threat of nuclear catastrophe that humanity has faced.

Carlota Perez is a researcher who has studied hype cycles for much of her career. She's affiliated with the University College London, the University of Sussex, The Tallinn University of Technology in Astonia and has worked with some influential organizations around technology and innovation. As a neo-Schumpeterian, she sees technology as a cornerstone of innovation. Her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is a must-read for anyone who works in an industry that includes any of those four words, including revolutionaries.  Connecticut-based Gartner Research was founded by GideonGartner in 1979. He emigrated to the United States from Tel Aviv at three years old in 1938 and graduated in the 1956 class from MIT, where he got his Master's at the Sloan School of Management. He went on to work at the software company System Development Corporation (SDC), the US military defense industry, and IBM over the next 13 years before starting his first company. After that failed, he moved into analysis work and quickly became known as a top mind in the technology industry analysts. He often bucked the trends to pick winners and made banks, funds, and investors lots of money. He was able to parlay that into founding the Gartner Group in 1979.  Gartner hired senior people in different industry segments to aid in competitive intelligence, industry research, and of course, to help Wall Street. They wrote reports on industries, dove deeply into new technologies, and got to understand what we now call hype cycles in the ensuing decades. They now boast a few billion dollars in revenue per year and serve well over 10,000 customers in more than 100 countries.  Gartner has developed a number of tools to make it easier to take in the types of analysis they create. One is a Magic Quadrant, reports that identify leaders in categories of companies by a vision (or a completeness of vision to be more specific) and the ability to execute, which includes things like go-to-market activities, support, etc. They lump companies into a standard four-box as Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players. There's certainly an observer effect and those they put in the top right of their four box often enjoy added growth as companies want to be with the most visionary and best when picking a tool. Another of Gartner's graphical design patterns to display technology advances is what they call the “hype cycle”. The hype cycle simplifies research from career academics like Perez into five phases.  * The first is the technology trigger, which is when a breakthrough is found and PoCs, or proof-of-concepts begin to emerge in the world that get press interested in the new technology. Sometimes the new technology isn't even usable, but shows promise.  * The second is the Peak of Inflated Expectations, when the press picks up the story and companies are born, capital invested, and a large number of projects around the new techology fail. * The third is the Trough of Disillusionment, where interest falls off after those failures. Some companies suceeded and can show real productivity, and they continue to get investment. * The fourth is the Slope of Enlightenment, where the go-to-market activities of the surviving companies (or even a new generation) begin to have real productivity gains. Every company or IT department now runs a pilot and expectations are lower, but now achievable. * The fifth is the Plateau of Productivity, when those pilots become deployments and purchase orders. The mainstream industries embrace the new technology and case studies prove the promised productivity increases. Provided there's enough market, companies now find success. There are issues with the hype cycle. Not all technologies will follow the cycle. The Gartner approach focuses on financials and productivity rather than true adoption. It involves a lot of guesswork around subjective, synthetical, and often unsystematic research. There's also the ever-resent observer effect. However, more often than not, the hype is seperated from the tech that can give organizations (and sometimes all of humanity) real productivity gains. Further, the term cycle denotes a series of events when it should in fact be cyclical as out of the end of the fifth phase a new cycle is born, or even a set of cycles if industries grow enough to diverge. ChatGPT is all over the news feeds these days, igniting yet another cycle in the cycles of AI hype that have been prevalent since the 1950s. The concept of computer intelligence dates back to the 1942 with Alan Turing and Isaac Asimov with “Runaround” where the three laws of robotics initially emerged from. By 1952 computers could play themselves in checkers and by 1955, Arthur Samuel had written a heuristic learning algorthm he called “temporal-difference learning” to play Chess. Academics around the world worked on similar projects and by 1956 John McCarthy introduced the term “artificial intelligence” when he gathered some of the top minds in the field together for the McCarthy workshop. They tinkered and a generation of researchers began to join them. By 1964, Joseph Weizenbaum's "ELIZA" debuted. ELIZA was a computer program that used early forms of natural language processing to run what they called a “DOCTOR” script that acted as a psychotherapist.  ELIZA was one of a few technologies that triggered the media to pick up AI in the second stage of the hype cycle. Others came into the industry and expectations soared, now predictably followed by dilsillusionment. Weizenbaum wrote a book called Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation in 1976, in response to the critiques and some of the early successes were able to then go to wider markets as the fourth phase of the hype cycle began. ELIZA was seen by people who worked on similar software, including some games, for Apple, Atari, and Commodore.  Still, in the aftermath of ELIZA, the machine translation movement in AI had failed in the eyes of those who funded the attempts because going further required more than some fancy case statements. Another similar movement called connectionism, or mostly node-based artificial neural networks is widely seen as the impetus to deep learning. David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel focused on the idea of convultional neural networks in human vision, which culminated in a 1968 paper called  "Receptive fields and functional architecture of monkey striate cortex.” That built on the original deep learning paper from Frank Rosenblatt of Cornell University called "Principles of Neurodynamics: Perceptrons and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms" in 1962 and work done behind the iron curtain by Alexey Ivakhnenko on learning algorithms in 1967. After early successes, though, connectionism - which when paired with machine learning would be called deep learning when Rina Dechter coined the term in 1986, went through a similar trough of disillusionment that kicked off in 1970. Funding for these projects shot up after the early successes and petered out ofter there wasn't much to show for them. Some had so much promise that former presidents can be seen in old photographs going through the models with the statiticians who were moving into computing. But organizations like DARPA would pull back funding, as seen with their speech recognition projects with Cargegie Mellon University in the early 1970s.  These hype cycles weren't just seen in the United States. The British applied mathemetician James Lighthill wrote a report for the British Science Research Council, which was published in 1973. The paper was called “Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey” and analyzed the progress made based on the amount of money spent on artificial intelligence programs. He found none of the research had resulted in any “major impact” in fields that the academics had undertaken. Much of the work had been done at the University of Edinbourgh and funding was drastically cut, based on his findings, for AI research around the UK. Turing, Von Neumann, McCarthy, and others had either intentially or not, set an expectation that became a check the academic research community just couldn't cash. For example, the New York Times claimed Rosenblatt's perceptron would let the US Navy build computers that could “walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence” in the 1950s - a goal not likely to be achieved in the near future even seventy years later. Funding was cut in the US, the UK, and even in the USSR, or Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic. Yet many persisted. Languages like Lisp had become common in the late 1970s, after engineers like Richard Greenblatt helped to make McCarthy's ideas for computer languages a reality. The MIT AI Lab developed a Lisp Machine Project and as AI work was picked up at other schools like Stanford began to look for ways to buy commercially built computers ideal to be Lisp Machines. After the post-war spending, the idea that AI could become a more commercial endeavor was attractive to many. But after plenty of hype, the Lisp machine market never materialized. The next hype cycle had begun in 1983 when the US Department of Defense pumped a billion dollars into AI, but that spending was cancelled in 1987, just after the collapse of the Lisp machine market. Another AI winter was about to begin. Another trend that began in the 1950s but picked up steam in the 1980s was expert systems. These attempt to emulate the ways that humans make decisions. Some of this work came out of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project, pioneered by Edward Feigenbaum. Some commercial companies took the mantle and after running into barriers with CPUs, by the 1980s those got fast enough. There were inflated expectations after great papers like Richard Karp's “Reducibility among Combinatorial Problems” out of UC Berkeley in 1972. Countries like Japan dumped hundreds of millions of dollars (or yen) into projects like “Fifth Generation Computer Systems” in 1982, a 10 year project to build up massively parallel computing systems. IBM spent around the same amount on their own projects. However, while these types of projects helped to improve computing, they didn't live up to the expectations and by the early 1990s funding was cut following commercial failures. By the mid-2000s, some of the researchers in AI began to use new terms, after generations of artificial intelligence projects led to subsequent AI winters. Yet research continued on, with varying degrees of funding. Organizations like DARPA began to use challenges rather than funding large projects in some cases. Over time, successes were found yet again. Google Translate, Google Image Search, IBM's Watson, AWS options for AI/ML, home voice assistants, and various machine learning projects in the open source world led to the start of yet another AI spring in the early 2010s. New chips have built-in machine learning cores and programming languages have frameworks and new technologies like Jupyter notebooks to help organize and train data sets. By 2006, academic works and open source projects had hit a turning point, this time quietly. The Association of Computer Linguistics was founded in 1962, initially as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). As with the ACM, they have a number of special interest groups that include natural language learning, machine translation, typology, natural language generation, and the list goes on. The 2006 proceedings on the Workshop of Statistical Machine Translation began a series of dozens of workshops attended by hundreds of papers and presenters. The academic work was then able to be consumed by all, inlcuding contributions to achieve English-to-German and Frnech tasks from 2014. Deep learning models spread and become more accessible - democratic if you will. RNNs, CNNs, DNNs, GANs.  Training data sets was still one of the most human intensive and slow aspects of machine learning. GANs, or Generative Adversarial Networks were one of those machine learning frameworks, initially designed by Ian Goodfellow and others in 2014. GANs use zero-sum game techniques from game theory to generate new data sets - a genrative model. This allowed for more unsupervised training of data. Now it was possible to get further, faster with AI.  This brings us into the current hype cycle. ChatGPT was launched in November of 2022 by OpenAI. OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 by Sam Altman (former cofounder of location-based social network app Loopt and former president of Y Combinator) and a cast of veritable all-stars in the startup world that included:  * Reid Hoffman, former Paypal COO, LinkedIn founder and venture capitalist. * Peter Thiel, former cofounder of Paypal and Palantir, as well as one of the top investors in Silicon Valley. * Jessica Livingston, founding partner at Y Combinator. * Greg Brockman, an AI researcher who had worked on projects at MIT and Harvard OpenAI spent the next few years as a non-profit and worked on GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer autoregression models. GPT uses deep learning models to process human text and produce text that's more human than previous models. Not only is it capable of natural language processing but the generative pre-training of models has allowed it to take a lot of unlabeled text so people don't have to hand label weights, thus automated fine tuning of results. OpenAI dumped millions into public betas by 2016 and were ready to build products to take to market by 2019. That's when they switched from a non-profit to a for-profit. Microsoft pumped $1 billion into the company and they released DALL-E to produce generative images, which helped lead to a new generation of applications that could produce artwork on the fly. Then they released ChatGPT towards the end of 2022, which led to more media coverage and prognostication of world-changing technological breakthrough than most other hype cycles for any industry in recent memory. This, with GPT-4 to be released later in 2023. ChatGPT is most interesting through the lens of the hype cycle. There have been plenty of peaks and plateaus and valleys in artificial intelligence over the last 7+ decades. Most have been hyped up in the hallowed halls of academia and defense research. ChatGPT has hit mainstream media. The AI winter following each seems to be based on the reach of audience and depth of expectations. Science fiction continues to conflate expectations. Early prototypes that make it seem as though science fiction will be in our hands in a matter of weeks lead media to conjecture. The reckoning could be substantial. Meanwhile, projects like TinyML - with smaller potential impacts for each use but wider use cases, could become the real benefit to humanity beyond research, when it comes to everyday productivity gains. The moral of this story is as old as time. Control expectations. Undersell and overdeliver. That doesn't lead to massive valuations pumped up by hype cycles. Many CEOs and CFOs know that a jump in profits doesn't always mean the increase will continue. Some intentially slow expectations in their quarterly reports and calls with analysts. Those are the smart ones.

Maybe the title is a little harsh, but is it? A "just transition" edict from Trudeau? Backlash against Ontario trying to innovate health care? Is Jordan Peterson the last man standing for freedom of speech? And more!

In 1922 the USSR consisted of just four Soviet republics – the Russian SFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR and Transcaucasian ...

This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. In this episode, John Peterson provides a brief history and background on the USSR, what it was, and what it achieved—and why it was hated by the capitalist world.  Join the fight for socialism in our lifetime: srev.org/join.  Reading list:  The Revolution Betrayed (Leon Trotsky).  Stalin (Leon Trotsky).  If America Should Go Communist (Leon Trotsky).  The History of the Russian Revolution (Leon Trotsky).  Russia: From Revolution to Counterrevolution (Ted Grant & Alan Woods).

In this episode I speak with Akjemal Magtymova. Akjemal recounts her story growing up in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Turkmenistan, her early career as a young medical doctor practicing right as the USSR collapsed and the health system failed. She speaks about her journey into the international health sector (first with UNFPA and then WHO), that led her to postings in Laos, DPR Korea, India, Yemen, Syria and others. She shares lessons learned from her experience in health diplomacy in the field. I'm especially fascinated by how Akjemal's values shaped her life trajectory, and by her reflections post covid on the values she feels we need today.Instagram: @at.the.coalfaceConnect with Akjemal Magtymova on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/akjemal-magtymova-67457236.Please subscribe to At the Coalface wherever you get your podcasts to receive a new episode every two weeks: Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google PodcastsSupport the show

Roman Firainer was born in the Soviet Socialist Republic in a military family in a small military town. Graduated from a technical school with a degree in engineering, mathematics and programming. Then, due to family circumstances, as well as due to insufficient mental abilities, he left MEPhI. Then the sheer luck began. By acquaintance, without understanding anything about design, he got a job as a designer in a large publishing house. There, somehow, by mistake, he was sent to design courses at London's Saint Martins. Then, through an acquaintance, he got a job at a very large international agency as an art director. After changing several large agencies, he met and began to work in tandem with the best Russian copywriter Yaroslav Orlov. Thanks to intrigue and manipulation, friends were appointed creative directors in an unknown little advertising agency Instinct. Since then, under their leadership, the agency has grown and become one of the most successful in Russia. Roman has a second marriage and 3 children. Now he temporarily lives and works remotely from Cambodia. FIND ROMAN ON SOCIAL MEDIA LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram ================================ SUPPORT & CONNECT: Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/denofrich Twitter: https://twitter.com/denofrich Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/denofrich YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/denofrich Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/den_of_rich/ Hashtag: #denofrich © Copyright 2022 Den of Rich. All rights reserved.

One-hundred episodes! And to celebrate, here is a completely normal weekly episode. The Soviet Union wasn't built in a day, in fact it took five years for the Bolshevik leaders to finally hammer out the details as to the new nation. And that only happened after Lenin and Joseph Stalin clashed over the question of state power, a clash that was only settled by Lenin's declining health.    Bibliography for this episode:    Hosking, Geoffrey Russia and the Russians: A History The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2001 Figes, Orlando A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1917 Penguin Books 1998 Smith, SA Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890-1928 Oxford University Press 2018 Fitzpatrick, Sheila The Russian Revolution, 4th Edition Oxford University Press 2017 Kotkin, Stephen Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928 Penguin Books 2015 Suny, Ronald Grigor The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol III: The Twentieth Century Cambridge University Press 2006   Questions? Comments? Email me at peaceintheirtime@gmail.com

Few leaders have had as profound an effect on their time as Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who died this week at 91.It was not Mr. Gorbachev's intention to liquidate the Soviet empire when he came to power in 1985. But after little more than six tumultuous years, he had lifted the Iron Curtain and presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ending the Cold War.Guest: Serge Schmemann, a member of The New York Times's editorial board.Background reading: Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, Mr. Gorbachev weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, decisively altering the political climate of the world.With the war in Ukraine, Russia's current leader, Vladimir V. Putin, is trying to unravel Mr. Gorbachev's legacy.For more information on today's episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Greetings Podcast listeners! Welcome to History: From One Student to Another and another episode from my series on Stalin's Russia. In this episode, we will look at the policies and views of Stalin toward women. If you remember from Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, women were treated as a whole different class to men and had a specific set of ideals put upon them. But in Stalin's Russia, there were fundamental differences in how he viewed women, as compared with Mussolini and Hitler. In fact, before 1924, the Soviet government had tried to liberate women and establish gender equality as they took steps to weaken the traditional family structure which exploited women. Left-feminist Bolshevik leaders, like Alexandra Kollontai, were the frontrunners in advocating for quality, although Lenin's views remained somewhat conservative. For this episode, I will begin by observing a number of policies of The Soviet Socialist Republic, under both Lenin and Stalin. Later, we will be looking at the roles of women in employment. Over the next couple of months, I will be self-studying Stalin's Russia. New episodes will be released every Tuesday (and on some Fridays)! If you want some more revision material, you can use the link below to access much more revision information on my website: https://www.historyfromonestudenttoanother.com If you have any suggestions or questions, please fill in this Google Form: https://www.historyfromonestudenttoanother.com/feedback Find out how you can support me at: https://www.historyfromonestudenttoanother.com/donate CONTACT ME: Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/from1student2another-hist/message Twitter: https://twitter.com/historyF1S2A Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/from1student2anotherhistory/ Email: robinjww04historypodcast@gmail.com THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST IN MY PODCAST! Please subscribe to be notified about any future releases.

In June of 1973, The leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev arrived in the United States and for ten days even the Watergate investigation stopped as Richard Nixon finished an agreement that called for the prevention of Nuclear War. It read: “The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, hereinafter referred to as the Parties…Guided by the objectives of strengthening world peace and international security; conscious that nuclear war would have devastating consequences for mankind; proceeding from the desire to bring about conditions in which the danger of an outbreak of nuclear war anywhere in the world would be reduced and ultimately eliminated;Proceeding from their obligations under the Charter of the United Nations regarding the maintenance of peace, refraining from the threat or use of force and the avoidance of war, and in conformity with the agreements to which either Party has subscribed…Reaffirming that the development of relations between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is not directed against other countries and their interests… have agreed as follows:Article I. The United States and the Soviet Union agree that an objective of their policies is to remove the danger of nuclear war and of the use of nuclear weapons. Accordingly, the Parties agree that they will act in such a manner as to prevent the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations, as to avoid military confrontations, and as to exclude the outbreak of nuclear war between them and between either of the Parties and other countries.Article II. The Parties agree, in accordance with Article I… to proceed from the premise that each Party will refrain from the threat or use of force against the other Party, against the allies of the other Party and against other countries, in circumstances which may endanger international peace and security. The Parties agree that they will be guided by these considerations in the formulation of their foreign policies and in their actions in the field of international relations.Article III. The Parties undertake to develop their relations with each other and with other countries in a way consistent with the purposes of this Agreement.Article IV. If at any time relations between the Parties or between either Party and other countries appear to involve the risk of a nuclear conflict, or if relations between countries not parties to this Agreement appear to involve the risk of nuclear war between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or between either Party and other countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, acting in accordance with the provisions of this Agreement, shall immediately enter into urgent consultations with each other and make every effort to avert this risk.Article V. Each Party shall be free to inform the Security Council of the United Nations, the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Governments of allied or other countries of the progress and outcome of consultations initiated in accordance with Article IV of this Agreement…” (Courtesy of the website Alpha History)In this episode we follow the two leaders as they work together to create a much safer World, and we see the developing personal friendship between the two men. A friendship that paid dividends for every living thing on planet Earth. This show will leave you wondering just what might have been if the Democrats and the media elites plot to remove the greatest strategist of the age from office had not succeeded. Btw... The guys in the submarine trapped off the Florida Keys were rescued. Just so you know 

Historian, author and Heritage Foundation Distinguished Fellow Lee Edwards joins Tim to talk about the Berlin Wall, the world that created it, the Cold War that fostered it, and the free world that brought it down. This episode was originally released April 1, 2019. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/Encore_-_Belin_Wall.mp3 The Berlin Wall was as much a symbol for communist oppression as it was a barrier created to contain citizens of communist East Germany. At the end of World War II, the allies held two peace conferences in Yalta and Potsdam to determine the postwar map of the world. The key figures at those conferences were Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States. Tensions were already rising between the West and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the USSR. In this context, the allies decided to split Germany into four “allied zones” to weaken the threat of that country re-emerging as a threat to world peace. The Eastern part of the country would be controlled by the Soviet Union, and the western part would fall under the control of the United States, Britain and later France would join. While Berlin is located in the eastern part of Germany, at Yalta and Potsdam, it was determined that as the capitol city, it had such significance that it, too, should be divided. Going forward, West Berlin became a thriving westernized city and enjoyed postwar prosperity, even though it was located deep inside communist East Germany.  East Berlin, on the other hand, remained in dire straits under the tight grip of communism. The Soviets decided to drive the West out of West Berlin. In 1948 they initiated a Soviet blockade of West Berlin to starve the Western Allies out of the city. The U.S. and its allies decided to conduct airlifts of humanitarian aid to West Berliners. Eventually the blockade ended, but tensions continued as the Soviets and the U.S. as super powers engaged in a nuclear arms race for global domination. The threat of World War III was ever-present. By 1958, the Soviets lost large numbers of skilled workers to the West as more and more of East Germans sought freedom in the West. By June 1961, roughly 19,000 people left East Germany through Berlin. On August 12, 1961, roughly 2,400 refugees defected to Berlin in a single day. This was the largest number of people to leave East Germany in one day. That night, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev approved East Germany's plans to stop to flow of refugees by closing its border. In one night, part of the Berlin Wall was built.  This did not defuse tensions but had the opposite effect. While it slowed the flood of refugees going from communism to freedom, it only exacerbated Cold War tensions. This did not stop captive East Germans from trying to escape communist oppression. 171 people died trying to defect, while another 5,000 East Germans found a way to successfully reach freedom in the West. Ronald Reagan's Speech On Friday, June 12th 1987, President Ronald Reagan gave a historic speech of his own at the Berlin Wall. In it, he stepped up his pressure on the Soviet Union, reinforcing his strong positions against the oppression of communism, and then he delivered the now famous line when he called for Soviet leader Mikhail Gobachev to “Tear down this wall.” The Fall November 9, 1989 0 East Berlin's Communist Party announced a change in its travel ban with the West. They said East German citizens were now free to cross the city's borders. Both East and West Berliners descended on the wall and celebrated. Guards opened the checkpoints and 2 million people from both East and West joined together to celebrate. Then they physically started to tear it down. Links The Heritage Foundation A Brief History of the Cold War, by Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding (Amazon)

Karak Chai| Batch no.1  Celebrating all things Theatre, Film, Series and Podcast. I have curated a collection of hidden gems to watch and listen to-- all whilst sipping on your first or fifth Karak Chai. This is batch No.1 of many more to come. I hope you enjoy and do let me know which one was your favourite and also, this is the the first time I am putting this type of episode out. So, please do give me some feedback innit.  The Projects in the episode are as Follows:  Theatre An Adventure by Vinay Patel & Kash Arshad at Octagon Theatre An Adventure follows three decades tale of a couple who meet in post-partition India in 1954, marry and move first to Nairobi then 1970s England.  Cast: Esh Alladi, Saba Shiraz, Daon Broni & Jessica Kaur.  Period Party by Gayathiri Kamalakanthan at Hampstead Theatre with Kali Theatre Period party tells a story of a South Asian non-binary Queer teen. Who through this journey and celebration of a period party is going on a journey of discovering who they are. Concha by Carly Fernandez & Manisha Sondhi at Brixton House Concha is a semi-autobiographical show following our lead who is queer and trans, on discovering they have chlamydia,  and how they must now inform their recent sexual partners. Cast: Carly Fernandez.  10 Nights by Shahid Iqbal Khan & Kash Arshad at Bush Theatre with Tamasha Theatre 10 Nights about our lead character Yasser who decides to take part in itikaf,  which is sleeping and fasting in the mosque for the last ten nights of Ramadan. And how that experiences pushes him to deal with certain things in the past.  Cast: Zaqi Ismail, Safyan Iqbal & Sumayya Si- Tayaeb.  After The End by Dennis Kelly and Lyndsey Turner at Theatre Royal Stratford East After The End tells a tale  about a city under attack from a nuclear blast. As the dust settles, Louise wakes to find herself in a fallout shelter with Mark, the colleague who has saved her life. They have enough water and food to last two weeks. Now they just need to find a way of surviving each other.   Cast: Nick Blood & Amaka Okafor. Our Streets by Beth Kapalia & co at Tara Theatre Our Streets explores through film and live performance, a group of 14-18-year-old women and non-binary people of Wandsworth will take the audience on an adventure through the city, all while never leaving the theatre.  Delving into a variety of themes, including recent events and discussions around women's safety in London, Our Streets will open up the conversation of what Wandsworth could and should look like if we all played a part in designing and imagining our local urban landscapes.  Cast: Hania, Leona, Issy, Charly, Shania, Anousha, Violet, Daniella & Blu.  The Hen-nah Party by Amani Saeed at Richmix The Hen-Nah Party is all of the joy of a henna night without the stress, gender norms, and aunties at the wedding. Featured Artists: Amrit Kaur, Amani Saeed, Sanah Ahsan and Meral Alizada. Rouge by Marion Motin by Rambert Dance Rouge is about finding our real selves: our instinct and nature, rather than our culture. It's about leaving the artificial world to just live, to connect with real bodies and real people Cast: Daniel Davidson, Juan Gil, Liam Francis, Miguel Altunaga, Aishwarya Raut, Simone Damberg Würtz &Guillaume Quéau. Film Stalling it by Jemma Moore & Caroline Ward Stalling It follows five toilet stalls, three bridesmaids, one pregnancy test, one nosey neighbour - zero ideas of what to do next. The 1980's an era of female independence, sexual freedom, experimentation, self expression and style. Sometimes. It's 1988, Sammy, Bethan and Jo are bridesmaids at their best friend's wedding. Their outfits are fabulous, their hair do's are huge, the nuptials have been made and the drinks are now flowing. We join our bridesmaids in the midst of the time honoured female tradition...the joint bathroom break. Cast: Sophie Hopkin, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward & Sacharissa Claxton. Little Sky by Jess X Snow Little Sky follows the journey of SKY, a Chinese-American pop star who returns to the city they were raised in to find their estranged immigrant father. Haunted by their childhood memories, SKY risks their non-binary identity to end the cycle of violence in their family. In the confrontation, SKY discovers something that changes how they feel about the people they love. Cast: Wo Chan, Kyoko Takenaka, Fenton Li, Yiging Zhao, Austin Deng, Bruce Liu & Tao Qiu. How To Raise a Black Boy by Justice Jamal Jones How To Raise a Black Boy follows four boys as they journey through a fantastical world of black boyhood, queer identity, and fraternity in a modern reimagining of the fairy tale genre. Cast: Maiya Blaney, Rodney Chrome, Christian Coston-Payne, Emperor Kaioyus, Eric Payne, Rayceen Pendarvis, Justin Smith, Nicklaus Vallie & Cory Walkers.  Yaha Waha by Sarah Li Yaha Waha follows a South Asian DJ and a performance artist use their platforms to celebrate their heritage. Cast: Almas Badat, Anthony Pius (Bolly Illusion).  Shams by Pauline Beugnies Shams follows Eden, a 30-year-old Belgian woman, works in a cultural center a few thousand kilometers away from her home, in the bustling capital of Cairo. She makes a life-changing encounter with a young woman named Shams. One day, Shams brutally disappears. With the support and friendship of two valiant young Egyptians, Eden starts a fight against her own fears, denials and bias to find Shams. Cast: Claire Beugnies, Amina El Banna, Reem El Maghraby, Zainab Magdy & Alaa Taha. Baba by Adam Ali & Sam Arbor Baba is about an unexpected discovery forces Britannia, a gay Libyan teenager, to question whether to stay or flee his beloved homeland. Cast: Adam Ali, Mudar Abbar, Ahmed Elmusrati, Ali Gadema, Samar Abu Kaf, Elysia Kazinos, Colette Dala Tchantcho & Usaim Younnis.  Beirut Dreams in Color by Michael Collins Beirut Dreams in Color tells the stories of Masrou' Leila, a Lebanese rock band with an outspoken gay singer, and Sarah Hegazy, an Egyptian activist. Both parties have experienced oppression because of their sexual orientation and beliefs. The short documentary shows what it's like for the LGBTQIA+ community to be oppressed and threatened by the governments in the Middle East. The Syed Family Xmas Eve Game Night by Fawzia Mirza & Kausar Mohammad  The Syed Family Xmas Eve Game Night is about Pakistani Muslim woman brings her Puerto Rican girlfriend home for the first time on the family's annual game night.  Cast: Kausar Mohammad, Vico Ortiz, Meera Rohit Kumbhani, Pia Shah & D'Lo.  Meenakhsi Sundareshwar by Vivek Soni & Aarsh Vora  Meenakhsi Sundareshwar is about a couple who are forced to live apart due to a unique job prospect. Follow along as the two newlyweds face the hassles, hiccups - and hilarity - that arise from their long distance marriage. Cast: Sanya Malhotra, Abhimanyu Dasani , Shivkumar Subramaniam, Nivedita Bhargava, Purnendu Bhattacharya, Komal Chhabria, Manoj Mani Mathew, Archana Iyer, Ritika Shrotri, Kalp Shah, Mahesh Pillai, Sonali Sachdev, Varun Shashi Rao, Sukhesh Arora, Khuman Nongyai, Danish Sood & Guneet Wahan Muhafiz by Pradipta Ray & Ashutosh Pathak Muhafiz is set against a backdrop of sectarian violence, can a gay Hindu man find the courage to help a Muslim? Cast: Jaydeep Ashra, Deepak Chunara, Rishabh Dhangra, Prerna Gandhi, Pradeep Kumar, Arfi Lamba, Prince Mahajan, Angel Modi, Kamiesh Rajendra Patil, Rohan Pujari, Sushant Sharma, Mukesh Shukla, Akash Sinha, Shiv Tandan & Neha Vyas.  Series  Delhi Crime by Richie Mehta. Delhi Crime is based on the Nirbhaya case, Delhi Crime follows the Delhi Police investigation into the finding of the men who perpetrated this crime. Cast: Shefali Shetty, Adil Hussain, Denzil Smith,  Rasika Dugal, Rajesh Tailang · Yashaswini Dayama, Aaron Kaplan, Jeff Sagansky, Anurag Arora, Jaya Bhattacharya, Vinod, Sharawat, Gopal Datt, Sidharth Bhardwaj, Swati Bhatia, Gaurav Rana, Amitabh Acharya, Sanjay Bishnoi, Shobhna Bharadwaj, Mridul Sharma & Abhilasha Singh. A Black Lady Sketch Show by Robin Thede. A Black Lady Sketch Show is A half-hour sketch comedy written by and starring Robin Thede. Cast: by Robin Thede, Gabrielle Dennis, Ashley Nicole Black, Quinta Brunson and Skye Townsend. Yearly Departed by Linda Medoza & Amazon Prime Yearly Departed is a comedy special that tackles some of the end of year highlights that people probably want to forget about. There is a 2020 show as well a 2021 instalment. Cast: (2020) Phoebe Robinson featuring Rachel Brosnahan, Tiffany Haddish, Patti Harrison, Natasha Leggero, Sarah Silverman, Christina Aguilera, Natasha Rothwell, and Ziwe. (2021) Yvonne Orji featuring Chelsea Peretti, Jane Fonda, Aparna Nancherla, Alessia Cara, Dulcé Sloan, Megan Stalter & X Mayo. Special by Ryan O'Connel Special follows A young gay man with cerebral palsy branches out from his insular existence in hopes of finally going after the life he wants. Cast: Ryan O'Connell, Jessica Hecht, Punam Patel. Marla Mindelle, Augustus Prew, Patrick Fabian & Max Jenkins. Sort Of by Bilal Baig & Fab Filippo Sort Of follows a gender-fluid millennial who straddles various identities, exposing the identities and labels that are no longer applicable. Cast: Bilal Baig , Gray Powell, Amanda Cordner, Ellora Patnaik, Grace Lynn Kung, Supinder Wraich, Alanna Bale & Kaya Kanashiro. Chernobyl by Craig Mazin Chernobyl is based on a true story where in April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics becomes one of the world's worst man-made catastrophes. Cast: Jared Harris,  Stellan Skarsgård, Paul Ritter, Jessie Buckley, Adam Nagaitis, Con O'Neill, Adrian Rawlins, Sam Troughton, Robert Emms, David Dencik, Nadia Clifford, Douggie McMeekin, Alan Williams, Emily Watson, Paul Ritter, Karl Davues, Michael Socha, Laura Elphinstone & Jan Riccia. Q-Force by Gabe Liedman Q- Force follows handsome secret agent and his team of LGBTQ superspies embark on extraordinary adventures. Cast: Sean Hayes, Matt Rogers, Wanda Sykes, Patti Harrison, Gary Cole, David Harbour & Laurie Metcalf. Honourable Mentions Made in Heaven on Amazon Prime. Four More Shots Please! On Amazon Prime. Podcasts  Las Culturistas by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. Las Culturistas is a pop-culture and comedy podcast co-hosted by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, Honourable Mentions  No Thank You, Please  Brown People We Know  Talk Art Bitten Peach Pod I'm Still Standing The Front Room  Kiki In The Cronx Social: Myself: https://www.instagram.com/chaiwithrai_/  Links: Myself: https://linktr.ee/raimuitfum  Hope you all enjoyed it and Thank you for tuning in. To Subscribe, share, follow my work and everything else is listed above.  

Let's talk about the mass shooting in New York. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Santa Monica is losing their mail service because of their stupid policies. And is there a line between you being fat or others being fatphobic.   Follow me on Twitter @RunninFewl Follow me on Rumble @DumbAssesTalkingPolitics Download or listen to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Podbean, Podcast Addict, Stitcher and Rumble. Show notes and blog can be found on: http://www.dumbassestalkingpolitics.com   Please Subscribe, Like and Comment!    

Prophecy in scripture indicates that these may indeed be the last days, the end times of this world. Could be, don't you think?No man knows the hour, the time, the era when end times will occur, only the FATHER. But it is our duty, says the scripture, to study the signs of the times and to be on the watch, looking for that grand appearance the second time, the return of the savior of the world, the beginning of His reign and the end of all things earthly. A prophecy expert is one David Jeremiah who studies and teaches prophecy, a real expert. Dr. Jeremiah believes that the rapture, the taking away of the real church of Jesus Christ could happen any day, ANY DAY! The signs of the times are right for that to happen. The church of believers will be redeemed, taken out and the great restrainer, the moral restrainer, the Holy Spirit will be removed from this world and as Jeremiah well says, all hell will break loose. Some of that seems to be happening right now, don't you think? Then will rise up the Anti–Christ who will become the leader of the world, a one world dictator and all with the mark of the beast (666) will pay homage and swear allegiance to him and any who don't will be cut off and killed. The rise of the Anti–Christ, say prophecy experts, will usher in the great tribulation, a period of seven years says the Prophet Daniel. There will be relative peace for the first three and one half years, and a treaty with Israel which will guarantee peace and its safety. But at the end of the first three and one half years, the peace treaty will be broken and the war to end all wars, the Armageddon of all conflicts will break out and the Anti–Christ will cause nations to rise up against Israel and in fact against all people of faith. Scary stuff, is it not? But, that's what scripture says, war, violence and killing will occur like has never been seen before in the history of mankind. Prophecy experts believe that real Christians will be gone, delivered, up there with Him even as this incredible slaughter, destruction and barbarism occurs on this earth. The signs of the times seem to indicate that these are the last days. One of the key signs of those barbaric days is lawlessness. The rule of law is replaced by the rule of dictators. And violence. Violence is everywhere. But the main sign is:WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS.Scripture predicts and Jeremiah affirms that Russia will be reborn, reenergized, and play a key role in the military affairs of the last days. We now witness the start of that prophecy with the brutal, barbaric and bestial invasion, slaughter and killing of Ukraine and the Ukrainians. Vladimir Putin is a brutal, barbaric man. He is determined to rebuild the old Russian empire, take back every state and piece of territory which he believes was taken from him and Russia, and as long as he is in power, he will drive the new Russia to retake and rebuild the old USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). The Ukraine war will not end until Ukraine is absolutely subservient to the new Russia. Then, more wars will occur, more invasions, more slaughter and killing of innocent civilians, and eventually, the involvement in these wars of other nations. Russian induced conflicts will spread until the entire world is at war. That then occasions the Third World War, and the last world war, the rapid development of those signs and conditions which lead to the rise of the Anti–Christ and the happening of the tribulation. Prophecy experts say these will be the last wars for they will be NUCLEAR in nature. It only takes one nuclear bomb to trigger the entire world, every country to military action. The nations of Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan and some European countries, along with we Americans, and soon to be if not already Iran have the nuclear bomb and nuclear capabilities. Any one of those nations can unleash one bomb and the world explodes. America is by no means immune as it always has been. In the Second World War, one of the most popular songs was OVER THERE. Americans were energized and motivated to enlist in the military to fight the war over there, the fight with Germany, Japan and Italy. Then came Pearl Harbor in 1941 and we realized that the war over there could very well some day soon be the war over here, right here. It was ironic how that song and others romanticized the war until such time as American body bags began to arrive back in America. War is brutal, vicious, barbaric, evil and the ultimate satanic tool. Russia indicates that America is the ultimate enemy, not Ukraine, not the Baltic States, but THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Russia has the capability of sending ballistic missiles which can reach our shore armed with nuclear warheads and in an instant, some of our great cities and all of its citizens could be totally destroyed never again to return. The modern–day Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin may one day do just that. We Americans are unprepared for this war. We believe naively it won't happen here because death and destruction are always over there. But violence, killing, barbarism, murders, terrorism and war itself will happen in America. IT WILL. It is only a question of when. Our military is strong but many military experts think that the Russian and Chinese militaries are stronger. China and Russia are ready for war. We are not. Americans who understand and fear these possibilities arm themselves. The purchase of all kinds of weapons is at an all time high. Americans have distrust for our governments, our National Guard and the readiness of our Country in a time of war. These Americans are determined to defend themselves, and their families and loved ones and they are ready when, not if, this happens. Putin comes from a KGB background, skilled in the art of torture and killing and really has little regard for human life much like his predecessors Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and especially Stalin and Marx. Tens of millions of human beings were slaughtered at the direction of these men, and Putin, if he retains the power he now has, will do the very same thing. Tens of thousands of innocent human beings, including women and children have already been slaughtered in the Ukraine. And there are many more brutal deaths to come.One bomb, one nuclear bomb, and the world explodes. The end times will in fact happen then and there. Nations will demand vengeance. If Israel is attacked, especially in a nuclear way, the payback destruction that tiny nation can dish out will be nothing like the world has ever seen. Then, say the prophesiers, people will lift up their eyes and pray, plead for the return of the only one who can bring peace to the world, Jesus Christ. They will pray for the rapture, the deliverance from this world, and for justice and vengeance. But that won't come from human hands. VENGEANCE is mine says the Lord. I and only I will repay. These indeed are frightening times, but they are times of incredible opportunity. The witness for the gospel, true revival will have opportunity like never before. The work we do will never be better for we work knowing the night, the black dark night of death and destruction is coming. In the midst of this incredible barbarism and killing, there comes the opportunity for love to reign supreme. These are trying days indeed but days of incredible spiritual opportunity. Take advantage of them my brothers and sisters in the Lord. Count it a blessing that you have been called upon to be an active spiritual participant in:THE END TIMES.

On today's show, Nadja Burkovich was born in the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine shares what it's like to watch the invasion from America. Plus, our weekly updates from Michael Tilley, Becca Martin Brown, Courtney Lanning, and much more.

We hear about Matthew LaPlante's experiences as a reporter in the Iraq war, and also reflect on his experiences in Ukraine, the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova and the "frozen conflict" state of Transnistria.

First - the world woke up on Thursday to a new war in eastern Europe. And even as fierce fighting continues in several parts of Ukraine - with the Russians advancing on multiple fronts - international condemnation has grown steadily louder. We hear from our International Correspondent, Orla Guerin, on how the Russian invasion has hit every part of Ukraine. We also hear from Orla's colleague Sarah Rainsford who spent the day travelling through Eastern Ukraine. We discuss the effects of sanctions on Russia with The BBC's Sergei Goryashko, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Dr Olga Kolokolova - a senior lecturer in finance at Manchester University. Next - there has been a lot of footage doing the rounds on social media claiming to be from the current conflict. But not all of the clips are exactly what they seem. Olga Robinson, a disinformation expert from BBC Monitoring, took at a look at some of the claims going viral online. Lastly, we look at how thirty years ago, Ukraine was one of the 15 constituent parts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, internal boundaries became international borders. That's the point at which The BBC's Matt Davies took up the story with Peter Conradi - Europe Editor of The Sunday Times and author of the book Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War. (IMAGE CREDIT: GETTY)

The world woke up on Thursday to a new war in eastern Europe. And even as fierce fighting continues in several parts of Ukraine - with the Russians advancing on multiple fronts - international condemnation has grown steadily louder. We spoke with Sergei Goryashko - a senior reporter for BBC Russian in Moscow, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Dr Olga Kolokolova - a senior lecturer in finance at Manchester University on this matter. Next, we look at how the US markets ended the day's trading in positive territory. Cary Leahey - Adjunct Professor of Economics at Columbia University explained how the markets fared and why. Lastly, we look at how thirty years ago, Ukraine was one of the 15 constituent parts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, internal boundaries became international borders. That's the point at which The BBC's Matt Davies took up the story with Peter Conradi - Europe Editor of The Sunday Times and author of the book Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War.

The great revolutionary's body lay in a red coffin as it wound its way through the streets of Moscow toward the House of Trade Unions. Six men carried it, surrounded by a phalanx of guards, through the gathered throng of mourners—some genuine, others paid. Each hoped to succeed Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but only one could, and did. The mustachioed man known to his friends as "Koba" who had spent decades fighting to bring communism to his homeland was now General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he held in his hands the keys to ultimate power in the world's largest state. His rivals, especially Lenin's closest ally Leon Trotsky, were already plotting against him, but the general secretary controlled the Party's political apparatus and had the support of leaders across the country. When Lenin was laid to rest, three men formed an uneasy alliance, a troika, to rule collectively, but Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was determined to rule alone. Join us as we teach you about Joseph Stalin, his life, rise to power, and his lasting effect on our world today. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/15minutehistory/support

Photo:  Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: photo from a gulag @Batchelorshow Devin Nunes #Unbound: The complete, 26-minute interview, August 2021 Countdown to Socialism, by Devin Nunes; paperback   https://www.amazon.com/Countdown-Socialism-Devin-Nunes/dp/1641771860/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=devin+nunes&qid=1631483495&s=books&sr=1-1 This pamphlet exposes how the Democratic Party has changed beyond recognition. Once the party of anti-communism and tax-cutting under President Kennedy, it is now dominated by a surging socialist movement and led by a presidential candidate who vows to “transform” America. On a near-daily basis, the Democrats are issuing radical proposals to socialize medicine, industry, and higher education. So how can the Democrats win elections when their agenda is so far to the left of the American people? That's easy―it's because the means of public debate are being manipulated. In this explosive Encounter Broadside, Congressman Devin Nunes exposes the nexus between the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and the social media corporations. These three entities cooperate to blast out the Democrats' message and downplay their extremism while suppressing and censoring conservative points of view. Tens of millions of Americans are only seeing one side of the debate. The information they get from newspapers and social media is not “news”―it's contrived content designed to help one political party and punish its opponents. In the run-up to the most consequential election of our lifetime, read this book to learn how your information is being skewed and regulated to force America onto the path to socialism. About Encounter Broadsides: In the late eighteenth century, pamphlets electrified the colonies and helped to forge American democracy as we know it. Encounter Broadsides seek to revive this medium to make the case for ordered liberty and democratic capitalism in our time. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear.    ..

The capitalist class and its well-paid intellectuals and pundits continue to argue that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 means that socialism and communism are impossible. A stereotyped and negative image of the Soviet Union and socialism has been relentlessly fed to the people of the United States ever since the Russian Revolution, which took place in 1917. It is extremely rare for the establishment to mention any of the truly remarkable achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the full name of the Soviet federation of 15 republics, and the other countries that subsequently set out to build socialism. The triumph of the Russian Revolution nearly a century ago was truly a world-historic event. It was the first time in history that the working class was able to seize and hold power, and to reorganize the economy and society on a socialist basis. It proved that the oppressed, with their own leadership and their own party, could create a new reality.

In April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics becomes one of the world's worst man-made catastrophes.

On 23rd August 1939, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop – the Soviet foreign minister and the German foreign minister – signed the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, otherwise known as the Nazi-Soviet ...

Collapse of the Soviet Union>>> USSR >>> Union of Soviet Socialist Republics>>>StagflationeconomyGorbachav GlasnostPerestroikaChernobylAfghan WarCold WarAugust CoupCommunistCommunist PartyCCCP#History#USSR Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Photo: Uzbek collective farmers watching the first waters of Syr-Darya river enter the sluices of the great Fergana canal which they helped to build. This canal irrigates the huge new cotton growing areas of Central Asia in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). [Of course, massive-scale cotton faming reduced regional water to drought and desertification; another disastrous Soviet central-plannning error.] . CBS Eyes on the World with John Batchelor CBS Audio Network @Batchelorshow Russia and PRC deploy warcraft and troops into Central Asia. Rick Fisher, International Assessment and Strategy Center. @GordonGChang, Gatestone, Newsweek, The Hill GLXXG https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/10/china-and-russia-hold-large-scale-joint-military-drills

This is part 2 of a 2 part episode. Stalin's life was incredible!! good, bad and at many times ugly. From a poor kid to the leader of the USSR. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivised its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Join Jackson and I to talk all things Stalin. Follow Jackson on Instagram @historywithJacksonLinks to all my work is here: https://linktr.ee/HEAPP Podcast socials: Twitter -@historyeapp Instagram - HistoryEmporiumPalsPodcastFacebook Page -@HistoryEmporiumEmail -historyandpals@gmail.com  Support a budding podcaster... Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is part 2 of a 2 part episode. Stalin's life was incredible!! good, bad and at many times ugly. From a poor kid to the leader of the USSR. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivised its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Join Jackson and I to talk all things Stalin. Follow Jackson on Instagram @historywithJacksonLinks to all my work is here: https://linktr.ee/HEAPP Podcast socials: Twitter -@historyeapp Instagram - HistoryEmporiumPalsPodcastFacebook Page -@HistoryEmporiumEmail -historyandpals@gmail.com  Support a budding podcaster... Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is part 2 of a 2 part episode. Stalin's life was incredible!! good, bad and at many times ugly. From a poor kid to the leader of the USSR. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivised its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Join Jackson and I to talk all things Stalin. Follow Jackson on Instagram @historywithJacksonLinks to all my work is here: https://linktr.ee/HEAPP Podcast socials: Twitter -@historyeapp Instagram - HistoryEmporiumPalsPodcastFacebook Page -@HistoryEmporiumEmail -historyandpals@gmail.com  Support a budding podcaster... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is part 1 of a 2 part episode. Stalin's life was incredible!! good, bad and at many times ugly. From a poor kid to the leader of the USSR. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivised its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Join Jackson and I to talk all things Stalin. Follow Jackson on Instagram @historywithJackson The levels are slightly off here, I tried my best to level It out.  Links to all my work is here: https://linktr.ee/HEAPP Podcast socials:  Twitter -@historyeapp Instagram - HistoryEmporiumPalsPodcastFacebook Page -@HistoryEmporiumEmail -historyandpals@gmail.com  Support a budding podcaster... Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is part 1 of a 2 part episode. Stalin's life was incredible!! good, bad and at many times ugly. From a poor kid to the leader of the USSR. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivised its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Join Jackson and I to talk all things Stalin. Follow Jackson on Instagram @historywithJackson The levels are slightly off here, I tried my best to level It out.  Links to all my work is here: https://linktr.ee/HEAPP Podcast socials:  Twitter -@historyeapp Instagram - HistoryEmporiumPalsPodcastFacebook Page -@HistoryEmporiumEmail -historyandpals@gmail.com  Support a budding podcaster... Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is part 1 of a 2 part episode. Stalin's life was incredible!! good, bad and at many times ugly. From a poor kid to the leader of the USSR. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivised its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Join Jackson and I to talk all things Stalin. Follow Jackson on Instagram @historywithJackson The levels are slightly off here, I tried my best to level It out.  Links to all my work is here: https://linktr.ee/HEAPP Podcast socials:  Twitter -@historyeapp Instagram - HistoryEmporiumPalsPodcastFacebook Page -@HistoryEmporiumEmail -historyandpals@gmail.com  Support a budding podcaster... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Soviet Tours is a Berlin-based tour operator focussed on off-the-beaten-path destinations across the globe. Their core area, as the name suggests, lies mainly in and around the former USSR. From the mystic forests of Central Siberia to the austere peaks of the High Caucasus, from the scorching deserts of the Soviet Stans to the windswept steppes of Southern Russia. We talk with the founder of Soviet Tours Gianluca Pardelli. He is a Berlin-based photojournalist, adventurer and travel author who is fascinated by that enigmatic country that was once known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  If you are enjoying the podcast, you can show your support via a monthly donation of $4, £3 or €3 via Patreon, plus you will get the sought after CWC coaster as a thank you and bask in the warm glow of knowing you are helping to preserve Cold War history. Just go to https://coldwarconversations.com/donate/If a financial contribution is not your cup of tea, then you can still help us by leaving written reviews wherever you listen to us as well as sharing us on social media. It really helps us get new guests on the show.I am delighted to welcome Gianluca to our Cold War conversation…Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coldwarpod)

NATO is vitally important; but unless you work there, or at the Atlantic Council, you wouldn't necessarily know that. For those who don't work for NATO or follow it closely, the organization can seem like an indecipherable blob of bureaucracy and acronyms, a mysterious realm of complicated elite politics, or a major strain on national budgets. The Alliance has a strong and active presence on the European continent. But it has become a political punching bag for the Trump administration, and the misunderstandings about NATO, its mission, and its role in today's world run deeper than campaign rally rhetoric. To secure its future, NATO must speak to its future—both in terms of its mission and its audience.   Key Takeaways: 0:00 Intro 1:25 Bridget shares their elevator pitch on why they think that NATO needs to be back in the narrative 4:05 Livia and Bridget talk about the dearth of information about the Alliance among people and why it needs to tell its story and not rely on others talking about it because it might be negative  6:16 Bridget talks about the SNL NATO Cafeteria Cold Open and how people would see the Alliance especially people who knew nothing about it 7:53 Livia also talks how it was a missed opportunities to provide a more complete picture of NATO by the Secretary General Stoltenberg to correct President Trump on negative comments about the Alliance  9:47 Livia and Bridget also talk about the generational divide in their paper and why they think that NATO should learn how to communicate with people about its story  12:06 Livia explains why there is a need for the right information about the Alliance to the young generation  14:06 Livia also talks about why people now don't see military focused public relations campaign as effective since it not the only method of security anymore 15:02 Livia and Bridget explain why NATO should target more on people who are not NATO nerds as their audience to tell its story and learn the modern storytelling methods to use  17:29 Livia and Bridget also explains if NATO really needs to connect with those young audiences with no information about it and why 20:12 Livia talks about the Alliance as being a proactive and adaptive organization as why it should target this audience as opposed to saying that the enemy idea gets people coalescing 21:50 Bridget also talks about why NATO should change its headline of calm and say that it is not as calm as people think, and also the audience it should target  24:18 Livia explains if NATO should really be promoting itself as one of the leaders in managing climate change 26:04 Bridget talks about if NATO deciding to make climate change a major security issue will draw in more young people 28:19 Livia and Bridget explain if getting the story right and having different storytellers that draw in all kinds of different people to tell this story will work for the Alliance  31:34 Livia and Bridget talks about if the campaign to put NATO back in the narrative will serve all allies or if it only applies to the United States  34:29 Bridget and Livia share their thoughts if NATO has the creative bandwidth or people who think differently and agree to go ahead with their recommendation  35:50 Livia explains if NATO's story will have resonance with generations that didn't have the Russians to fear 37:17 Bridget also talks about more young people showing that they care about NATO's issues when they have access to the information  Shows Mentioned: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/nato20-2020/put-nato-back-in-the-narrative/  https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/  The 2019 London Summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was the 30th formal meeting of the heads of state and heads of government of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was held in The Grove, Watford, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, on 3 and 4 December 2019.   https://www.facebook.com/snl/videos/nato-cafeteria-cold-open/2614975025247578/  The Republican Party, sometimes also referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with its main, historic rival, the Democratic Party.   The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a federal socialist state in Northern Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. The European Union is a political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe. Its members have a combined area of 4,233,255.3 km² and an estimated total population of about 447 million. The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization that aims to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a Centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. Quotes Mentioned: “Young Americans in particular are largely unaware of the impact the Alliance has on their daily lives.” “NATO should design a long term, sustainable campaign to tell its story of success, of what the organization is, what it stands for, and why it's relevant today in the 21st century.” “NATO doesn't talk as much as it used to.” “It's better that they're talking about you, don't worry so much about what they say.” “Nothing is guaranteed anymore.” “Climate change is an everybody's problem.” “If NATO is serious about reaching the next generation and reaching everyone, they need to make sure that their staffs reflect the population that is representing.” Guests Social Media Links: Bridget Corna: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bridget-corna-48b324b5/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/bridgetcorna?lang=en  Livia Godaert:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/livia-godaert-b32972114/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/liviagodaert?lang=en 

Socialism, does it work? NO in my opinion. I have several quotes from my sources. here is one of them since I did not give in the podcast. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/socialism.asp: Origins of Socialism I found it to be very honest unlike some site I visited. I touch on sanctuary states, counties, cities, the 2nd amendment. I talk about the former USSR, (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and other failed countries that attempted Socialism. Vladimir Lenin takes front stage in founding the USSR and bringing Socialism to the world.   

Darrell Castle talks about the events of January 6th in Washington, D.C. and tries to answer the questions of what happened, and what are the results. Transcription / Notes WEEKS WHEN DECADES HAPPEN Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today's Castle Report. Today is Friday the 15th day of January in the year 2021 and on this Report, I will be talking about the events of January 6th in Washington DC. What happened, why did it happen, and what is the result? Everyone has an opinion based on his own view, so let's take a look at some of the fallout. Before I begin, I will tell you that the Castle family is doing fine here in Tennessee although we are mired in the depths of winter. For those of us in this part of country winter is not that bad so I have nothing to complain about. I'm happy to say that the family daughter is fine and virus free. She apparently only had some seasonal thing so thank God for that. The title of this report comes from a quote of Vladimir Lenin. The exact quote is “there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.” Mr. Lenin was referring to events in his native Russia at the time of the revolution of October 1917. Feudalism had been the economic system and the status of the Russian people for centuries and then World War l changed everything. It destroyed the royal system across Europe and Russia. In the spring of 1917 revolution took Russia out of the war and overthrew the Czar and ended feudalism. In October of that year a second revolution brought the Bolshevik's of Lenin to power and started the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to replace Imperial Russia.  No more feudalism then, so the government owned the means of production instead of the landowners. The people went from a feudal state in which they had a contractual right to 50% of what they produced, to a state in which they had no right to anything except the scraps from Lenin's table. In the coming decades around 70 million people died as a direct result of the socialist revolution in Russia. Purge after purge, slaughter after slaughter, war after war, for some 65 years. Regarding Lenin's quote, decades did happen that week in October about 6 and one-half decades. Lenin and the communists were not freely elected nor were they elevated on the shoulders of dissatisfied peasants. Instead, they took control of the central government through force and intimidation. There was another socialist revolution going on at almost the same time and that was the National Socialist Revolution in Germany. Adolph Hitler and Rudolph Hess served together in the trenches and as soon as the war was over, they set about trying to affect a coup to overthrow the German government. In 1923 they were sent to prison for 8 years where Hitler dictated his book Mein Kompf or My Battle to Hess. When they were released, they set out to bring about the plans outlined in that book. They won in a supposedly free election, but they had their brownshirt thugs roaming the streets influencing the vote. Once again, the people owned the means of production and once again the people were, in reality, the government. All production in Germany was owned by the National Socialist Government and was directed toward war preparation. Russia was virtually all agricultural before the war, but Germany had been one of the great manufacturing centers of Europe. I can draw some parallels between these two revolutions and the cultural upheavals in America today. Fast forward to the year 2021 and observe how the big lie is still the order of the day. I said those things to remind you of what socialism promises but rarely delivers. I also want to use those examples to point out that all the rhetoric and all the, we will do better than Jefferson and Madison, has happened throughout history and always with disastrous results. Mankind has recorded his time on planet earth for about 6000 years and in that time most of it has been controlled by governments through brute...

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here's what happened on December 30th. Though it lasted less than 70 years, it had an enormous impact on world history: On this day in 1922, the USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was established. The new state was the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism.

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on December 30th. Though it lasted less than 70 years, it had an enormous impact on world history: On this day in 1922, the USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was established. The new state was the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism.

On the 30th December 1922, the USSR – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – was ...

Is socialism compatible with Christianity? Or with individual freedom? What about today's "progressives"? Listen to Zilvinas Silenas, President of the Foundation for Economic Education, and a former resident of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, who also shares his personal experiences growing up in a "socialist utopia". FEE educates young people, ages 16-22, with a variety of educational tools. Learn how we can support FEE in its important mission to save our freedoms for the next generation!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week’s reading is Lenin’s Imperialism in the 21st Century, part 2This is our second and final in a short run of selected chapters from this book.The full book is available online here:https://iboninternational.org/download/lenins-imperialism-in-the-21st-century/Next week we’ll be reading the Conquest of Bread.This week – Chapter 8The Future of Imperialism and Socialismby Prof. Jose Maria Sison• Part I. Marx and Engels in the Era of Free Competition Capitalism – 03:11• Part II. Lenin in the Era of Modern Imperialism and Proletarian Revolution – 09:07• Part III. Modern Revisionism and the Restoration of Capitalism – 18:12• Part IV. Maoist Theory and Practice Against Imperialism and Revisionism – 25:24• Part V. The Future of Imperialism and Socialism – 35:11Acronyms referenced (in alphabetical order)BRICS: Bracil, Russia, India, China and South AfricaCIS: Confederation of Independent StatesCPC: Communist Party of ChinaCPSU: Communist Party of the Soviet UnionGPCR: Great Proletarian Cultural RevolutionNATO: North Atlantic Treaty OrganisationNEP: New Economic PolicyUS: United States (of America)USSR: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Our guest today declares: "Despite the wrongs committed against China in the past, the People's Republic of China must not represent the future, for it is corrupt. Harking back to what Ronald Reagan did to spur the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United States must enunciate that its objective is the peaceful end of the Communist Party of China. China existed for four thousand years before the formation of a communist junta within its borders; China can only achieve greatness combined with liberty and wealth if it frees itself from one-party rule and the despotism this type of government always brings.” America is doomed to collapse under a multi-pronged attack led by the PRC and by statists in our midst. We must return in great haste to the Judeo-Christian principles upon which we were founded, which made us the most prosperous, secure, and generous nation in human history. Don’t miss this crucial history lesson.

This week we're going to touch briefly on a protest in Japan before having a look at Belarus. We'll go over its formation as a modern state, its economy and geopolitical importance before a quick bio of Lukashenko and a look at the current situation. First, to Japan. HOKKAIDO PROTESTS The  GSDF, Japanese Ground Self-Defence Force, or ‘army’ as it would be called in any other country, roused protests in the northern island of Hokkaido, when they conducted training exercises using 3 tanks, 11 armoured trucks, and 32 military vehicles on a public road on the first day of September this year.  Protestors chanted ‘don’t use our road’ .  The protests are unusual for their location; while Japan’s pacific island of Okinawa, where 40% of the island is used by the U.S military has long been the site of protests by local people against the presence of U.S bases due to noise, pollution, and assaults by US Marine Corps members,  Hokkaido, in the far north, is usually known for snow in the winter and hiking in the summer.  However, Hokkaido has been the site of increased cooperation between the US Marine Corps and the GSDF and this January they conducted some of the largest joint exercises in the history of Japanese cooperation with the American military, involving 1600 members from the GSDF and about 2500 US Marines.      The increasing size of the exercises and the cooperation between the GSDF and the Marines is no coincidence.  It comes after years of efforts by both Japanese politicans and the US to push the boundaries of Japan’s post-war constittion which forbids Japan having a standing army.  Recent administrations have tested the limits by using Japanese forces as support for American military operations and increasing the scope and range of cooperation with the Marines.  However, as the Hokkaido protesters show, the militaristic politicians don’t have it all their own way.  Older Japanese have vivid memories of the awful consequences of the last time Japan had a strong military society and several generations have grown up used to a country which put its own prosperity ahead of military expansion and well aware of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo.  The protests in Hokkaido will not be the last we hear of Japan’s large pro-peace constituency.   Now toBELARUS The East-slavic state of Belarus emerged from feudalism under the alternating dominion of Russia and Poland. Various programmes of Polonization or Russification have changed the religion and character of its people over the centuries. HISTORYBelarus as a national identity didn't exist prior to 1917Belarusian as ethnicity  existed, this is correct.Prior to the 1861 abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire the people of what is now Belarus would have identified more with their village and their lord than the national identity of Belarus. As an outcome of WWI and the Russian Civil war the region was split and a portion of the West became part of Poland. The Catholic religious minority is concentrated here.  The remaining part of the country became the Byelorusian Soviet Socialist Republic which was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until its dissolution in 1991.At the same time as the Byelorusian Soviet Socialist Republic was established the Belarusian National Republic was established as a puppet nation of the German empire. This is the origin of the white-red-white flag of the contemporary opposition. This flag was also used by the Nazi occupation administration and its colloaborators during WWII. The Belarusian National Republic was almost immediately side-lined by the Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorusia and to this day carries the auspicious title of longest serving government in exile. The BSSR was occupied by the Nazis in 1941 before being liberated by the Red Army in July of 1944. In 1945 Western Belarus was returned from Polish possession to the BSSR.After WWII Belarus joins what became the United Nations. In 1986 the country suffers greatly from the fallout of the Chernobyl nuclear reaction disaster. In 1990 Belarus beings to declare independence from the USSR and gains this in 1991. Lukashenko was elected in 1994 and remains to this day. More on this to come. Lukashenko wanted to create a union state Belarus-Russia. He bgain this process when Boris Yeltsin was the Russian President. When Vladimir Putin was elected in 2000 the new Russian president put the Union on the backburner.As of 2015 focus on the development of relations of former soviet countries is continued with the development of the EAEUCurrently the Union State exists as predominantly an economic alliance. The two countries generally enjoy a warm economic relationship but this is not always the case. The "Belarus as Russian puppet" narrative is simplistic and untrue.  ECONOMY Belarus  is heavily dependent on Russian energy sources and plays an important role in the export of Russian hydrocarbons to Europe. It “inherited” from the USSR an important section of oil and natural gas pipelines, from which 50% of Russian oil and 30% of Russian natural gas is exported annually to Europe. At the same time, it earns significant revenue from the processing of Russian crude oil, as it has large refineries which produce gasoline and diesel which resell in European countries, ensuring up to 25% of the state budget revenues (8 billion euros a year). In addition, it has received a number of subsidies and loans from Russia, which currently account for 40% of its external debt, while the second largest financier is China (26%). In addition, Russia is the main importer of Belarus products ( e.g. dairy products, tractors, buses), while China is the second largest importer. The key foreign investors in 2019 came from Russia (44,2% of all investments), followed by Britain (19,7%), Cyprus (6,6%), countries in which Russian capital is highly active. In February 2020, US Secretary of State, M. Pompeo, visited Belarus, stating that the USA can meet 100% of the energy needs of Belarus in hydrocarbons. A. Lukashenko declared that the country would cut its Russian hydrocarbon imports to 30-40% of its needs, proceeding to the purchase  of American, and even Saudi oil. It is worth noting that this arrangement was not finalised and may have been announced solely to provide Belarus with some leverage with regards to the state of affairs with Russia. The state-owned companies where workers are on strike, according to the Handelsblatt, accounted for $10 billion out of a GDP of less than $60 billion. Official figures show that roughly 60% of the working people work today in non-public enterprises Belarus is economically tied to Russia and China, but makes overtures to the West to give it leverage with Russia. GEO POLITICS Relations between Belarus and Russia are friendly but this is not always the case. There have been instances of "trade wars" between the two states. Which also shows that Belarus is not a Russian puppet as put forwards by Western media outlets. For instance:Lukashenko on several occasions has undermined Russian plans to deepen the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), e.g. shaking up plans for a common currency. At the last teleconference summit of the EAEU in May 2020, Belarus and Armenia blocked the Russian proposal for “strategic development until 2025”, citing above all, the need for the same prices for hydrocarbons across EAEU territories. The strategic position of Belarus is very important to Russia. Russian hydrocarbons travel through Belarus to Europe.Belarus is also holding back NATO from part of Russia's border. The EU and the USA for years now, view Belarus as a “forbidden fruit”. For this reason, they pressured Lukashenko to “open” the country to the West, to proceed with political and economic “reforms”. They have been pressuring for decades, at times with the “carrot” (See “EU Eastern Partnership), but mainly with the “stick”, financing and training opposition forces, imposing sanctions on the leadership of Belarus, developing and strengthening NATO forces on its borders.  Belarus is also the last country which China's Belt and Road Initiative will pass through before hitting Europe. It stands to reason China has a vested interest in a stable and co-operative Belarus. As far as stability goes there are some real issues in the country: Belarus situation key pointsProtesters:    • On the 9th of August of 2020 there took place elections in Belarus, with Lukashenko winning elections with 80% of the vote, whereas the closest rival Svetlana Tikhanovskaya got 10% percent of votes and the rest came in even further behind.    • Various opposition candidates were barred for participating in this election and jailed or self-exiled.    • Supporters of the opposition claimed election results are fake and called for the international community to recognise Tikhanovskaya as president of belarus. (Wikipedia claims Tikhanovskaya as president elect)     • Subsequently this caused the protests to occur and police were deployed which were meant to cause the protests to dissipate but instead led to growth    • The protesters are made up of petty bourgeoisie (Small business owners) students and some sections of the working class.    • The main figurehead of the protesters, or at least aims to be, is “Svetlana Tikhanovskaya” wife of blogger and businessman Sergei Tikhanovsky (Who was arrested on charges of obstructing elections)    • Other figure heads include:        ◦ Viktar Babaryka: former chairman of the board of belgazprombank who represents the interests of big business men (Also arrested on 18 July on charges of tax evasion and money laundering)        ◦ Valery Tsepkalo: another businessman and founder of Hi-Tech Park who is in favour of privatising industrial enterprise and to integrate belarus into the world system, like joining Belarus to WTO (Who self-exiled since his candidacy was denied)    • All of these oppositionists have in common the goal of opening Belarus to    • The demands of the protesters, in essence, are to apply shock therapy (similar to Yeltsin’s shock therapy in Russia) by enacting widespread privatisation, casualising jobs, removal of price controls and to remove education standards, as well as Belarus to move away from Russia and move towards the west    • The rutherian Belarus flag has become the symbol of the opposition, this was the flag of the Belarus puppet state of the German Empire during WWI and even used by nazi collbaorators during WWII    • Of course some of the opposition and some of the reasons are indeed legitimate grievances against the current regime but overall the opposition stands to benefit western interests more than actually dealing with the problems of the country and grievances of the people Lukashenko:    • Has been in power since 1994 elections    • The shock therapy applied to former soviet countries in the 90s did not get applied to Belarus but instead a slow move towards privatisation is taken. The 1993 constitutional crisis in Russia was a standoff between slow privatisation led by Alexander Rutskoy and shock therapy led by Boris Yelstin    • Even under Lukashenko workers rights have been suffering, with the retirement age raised, enterprises privatised and trade unions suppressed, it is a battle over power between one group of capitalists over another group   • Sections of police and military are loyal to Luklashenko but not total coverage. This leaves open the opportunity for opposition or foreign elements to attempt to get the security bodies to topple the government.    • Lukashenko has been warming up relations to the west, but the west still has interests in removing Lukashenko from power.    • Lukashenko has also been planning to move towards creating a union state of Belarus and Russia, although there are periodic tensions between the 2 countries, so far the plan either is stalled or moving forwards very slowly. Summary    • In summary; Lukashekno is no better than the opposition but the opposition is much worse, with the opposition making vague promises of “free and clean elections”,”freedom and democracy“ and “ending of dictatorship” when actually wanting to open the country to western control and as a buffer against Russia.Meanwhile Lukashenko is slowly privatising the economy and opening up to the west given the difficult economic while workers rights are being eroded regardless if either Lukashenko or the opposition are in power, just one side wants to enact reforms much quicker and much more suddenly. 

This will be a slightly shorter episode this week but I wanted to go over the basics of Dual Puppetting, forming the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet focus tree and tell you the best way to bring the whole of Europe into your benevolent, communist hands.

Can we tell the start of a Fourth Turning by noticing the frequency and intensity of nation-level unforced errors? A look at the Soviet Union during the 1980s, when in retrospect the nation was clearly falling apart, and the unforced errors during that decade that might have been good indicators of what was happening.     https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-notorious-flight-of-mathias-rust-7101888/ “At about this time, Soviet investigators would later tell Rust, radar controllers realized something was terribly wrong, but it was too late for them to act.”   In the 1980s, the Reagan administration released a publication called “Soviet Military Power” which was frankly intended to make the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics look more powerful than it was. In 1989, someone FINALLY put out a response to it, called Soviet Military Power, Annotated” which pointed out that it was frankly a propaganda document. Unfortunately, the annotations were also frankly propaganda. At one point it alludes to Rust's flight as having a lot of lucky coincidences that just happened to embarrass the Soviet Union on Border Guard day. It implies, that is, that Mathias Rust's flight sure looked like an intentional propaganda stunt that must have had direct help from someone who wanted to embarrass the USSR> Anyway, if it was the case that this was anything else, I'm rather confident that Rust would have been “disappeared” a while ago.     Googling us intelligence tracking Mathias Rust leads to a “Secrets of Signals Intelligence During the Cold War” - nothing there, really, that I used here, but it was interesting reading.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Berlin_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Solidarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Round_Table_Agreement   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severomorsk_Disaster https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/11/world/soviet-naval-blast-called-crippling.html   Listing them here for additional clarity and impact.   1979 - Afghanistan 1980 - Solidarity 1983 - KAL 007 1985 - Chernenko dies 1986 - Chernobyl 1987 - Mathias Rust 1989 - Berlin Wall Falls 1991 - August Coup   HBO's miniseries on Chernobyl influenced my views of the Chernobyl disaster by making the causes clear enough to be enthralling cinema. It's a good intro to the disaster, although parts of it are fictionalized. I could not find the cosmonaut cartoon, but saw it at work every day in 1985-1987. There was another cartoon I remember but also couldn't find about Solidarity: Polish &  Soviet leaders discuss the labor union, and assume that it was engineered by reactionary forces in the West. It then shows a small group of people reading from The Communist Manifest: Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! That sixth Star Trek film is The Undiscovered Country, released in December 1991, only a few weeks before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102975/

The death of USSR May explain why Russia wants the UK and the US gone to. Same maybe with the EU, each of which shares the word United in a form. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

One. Two. Three. That’s as long as it took to sear the souls of a dozen young American men, thanks to the craziest, most controversial finish in the history of the Olympics—the 1972 gold-medal basketball contest between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s two superpowers at the time. The U.S. team, whose unbeaten Olympic streak dated back to when Adolf Hitler reigned over the Berlin Games, believed it had won the gold medal that September in Munich—not once, but twice. But it was the third time the final seconds were played that counted. What happened? The head of international basketball—flouting rules he himself had created—trotted onto the court and demanded twice that time be put back on the clock. A referee allowed an illegal substitution and an illegal free-throw shooter for the Soviets while calling a slew of late fouls on the U.S. players. The American players became the only Olympic athletes in the history of the games to refuse their medals. Of course, the 1972 Olympics are remembered primarily for a far graver matter, when eleven Israeli team members were killed by Palestinian terrorists, stunning the world and temporarily stopping the games. One American player, Tommy Burleson, had a gun to his head as the hostages were marched past him before their deaths. In his new book Three Seconds in Munich: The Controversial 1972 Olympic Basketball Final(University of Nebraska Press, 2019), David A. F. Sweet relates the horror of terrorism, the pain of losing the most controversial championship game in sports history to a hated rival, and the consequences of the players’ decision to shun their Olympic medals to this day. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled: No Layups Allowed: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Combative New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One. Two. Three. That’s as long as it took to sear the souls of a dozen young American men, thanks to the craziest, most controversial finish in the history of the Olympics—the 1972 gold-medal basketball contest between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s two superpowers at the time. The U.S. team, whose unbeaten Olympic streak dated back to when Adolf Hitler reigned over the Berlin Games, believed it had won the gold medal that September in Munich—not once, but twice. But it was the third time the final seconds were played that counted. What happened? The head of international basketball—flouting rules he himself had created—trotted onto the court and demanded twice that time be put back on the clock. A referee allowed an illegal substitution and an illegal free-throw shooter for the Soviets while calling a slew of late fouls on the U.S. players. The American players became the only Olympic athletes in the history of the games to refuse their medals. Of course, the 1972 Olympics are remembered primarily for a far graver matter, when eleven Israeli team members were killed by Palestinian terrorists, stunning the world and temporarily stopping the games. One American player, Tommy Burleson, had a gun to his head as the hostages were marched past him before their deaths. In his new book Three Seconds in Munich: The Controversial 1972 Olympic Basketball Final(University of Nebraska Press, 2019), David A. F. Sweet relates the horror of terrorism, the pain of losing the most controversial championship game in sports history to a hated rival, and the consequences of the players’ decision to shun their Olympic medals to this day. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled: No Layups Allowed: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Combative New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One. Two. Three. That’s as long as it took to sear the souls of a dozen young American men, thanks to the craziest, most controversial finish in the history of the Olympics—the 1972 gold-medal basketball contest between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s two superpowers at the time. The U.S. team, whose unbeaten Olympic streak dated back to when Adolf Hitler reigned over the Berlin Games, believed it had won the gold medal that September in Munich—not once, but twice. But it was the third time the final seconds were played that counted. What happened? The head of international basketball—flouting rules he himself had created—trotted onto the court and demanded twice that time be put back on the clock. A referee allowed an illegal substitution and an illegal free-throw shooter for the Soviets while calling a slew of late fouls on the U.S. players. The American players became the only Olympic athletes in the history of the games to refuse their medals. Of course, the 1972 Olympics are remembered primarily for a far graver matter, when eleven Israeli team members were killed by Palestinian terrorists, stunning the world and temporarily stopping the games. One American player, Tommy Burleson, had a gun to his head as the hostages were marched past him before their deaths. In his new book Three Seconds in Munich: The Controversial 1972 Olympic Basketball Final(University of Nebraska Press, 2019), David A. F. Sweet relates the horror of terrorism, the pain of losing the most controversial championship game in sports history to a hated rival, and the consequences of the players’ decision to shun their Olympic medals to this day. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled: No Layups Allowed: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Combative New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics became one of the world's worst man-made catastrophes. In June 2019, the hosts of Welcome To The Party Pal — Brian Sachson and Michael Shields — convened to celebrate and dissect HBO's 5 part miniseries about the disastrous event, Chernobyl. Chernobyl was created and written by Craig Mazin, and directed by Johan Renck. It features an ensemble cast led by Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, and Emily Watson, and this episode of WTTPP digs into the intricacies of this well-crafted and thought provoking series. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"Nadster" Where The C Stands For Executive Producers: Sir Rib-ear Sir Stephen of Oswego James Varga Dame Astrid and Sir Mark Duke and Duchess of Japan and all the Disputed Islands in the Japan Sea Duke Gene of the old Republic of TX Associate Executive Producers: Sir Vility Kristoffer Walker Sir Mark Wilson, Baron of Glasgow 1141 Club Members: Become a member of the 1142 Club, support the show here Title Changes Sir Stephen of Oswego -> Baronet Knights & Dames Anonymous -> Sir Rib-ear James Varga -> Sir Snores Alot Hielko Santema -> Sir Ruward of Marknesse Michael Robinson -> Sir Max Rockatansky, Knight of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Victoria Art By: Darren O'Neill Engineering, Stream Management & Wizardry Mark van Dijk - Systems Master Ryan Bemrose - Program Director End of Show Mixes: - UKPMX - Gx2 -Oh My Bosh - Danny Loos-Secret Agent Paul-Stepford Wives-PlaceBoing- Dave Courbanou - Able Kirby - Jungle Jones - Chris Wilson - Tom Starkweather - Conan Salada - Future Trash - Phantomville Billy Bon3s - Sir Seat Sitter Sign Up for the newsletter Meetups May 25th: Eastern NC May 25th: Pittsburgh May 29th: Tel Aviv May 30th: Charleston SC June 2nd: Sarasota, FL June 6th: Seattle June 7th: Toronto June 8th: Oklahoma City June 9th: Knoxville June 15th: Copenhagen June 20th: SW London July 4th: Seattle July 13th: Atlanta No Agenda Peerage ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 1141.noagendanotes.com New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) archive.noagendanotes.com --No Agenda Player-- RSS Podcast Feed Full Summaries in PDF Get the No Agenda News App for your iPhone and iPad Get the NoAgendDroid app for your Android Phone No Agenda Lite in opus format NoAgendaTorrents.com has an RSS feed or show torrents --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/noagenda/support

Historian, author and Heritage Foundation Distinguished Fellow Lee Edwards joins Tim to talk about the Berlin Wall, the world that created it, the Cold War that fostered it, and the free world that brought it down. https://traffic.libsyn.com/shapingopinion/Berlin_Wall_auphonic.mp3   The Berlin Wall was as much a symbol for communist oppression as it was a barrier created to contain citizens of communist East Germany. At the end of World War II, the allies held two peace conferences in Yalta and Potsdam to determine the postwar map of the world. The key figures at those conferences were Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States. Tensions were already rising between the West and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the USSR. In this context, the allies decided to split Germany into four “allied zones” to weaken the threat of that country re-emerging as a threat to world peace. The Eastern part of the country would be controlled by the Soviet Union, and the western part would fall under the control of the United States, Britain and later France would join. While Berlin is located in the eastern part of Germany, at Yalta and Potsdam, it was determined that as the capitol city, it had such significance that it, too, should be divided. Going forward, West Berlin became a thriving westernized city and enjoyed postwar prosperity, even though it was located deep inside communist East Germany.  East Berlin, on the other hand, remained in dire straits under the tight grip of communism. The Soviets decided to drive the West out of West Berlin. In 1948 they initiated a Soviet blockade of West Berlin to starve the Western Allies out of the city. The U.S. and its allies decided to conduct airlifts of humanitarian aid to West Berliners. Eventually the blockade ended, but tensions continued as the Soviets and the U.S. as super powers engaged in a nuclear arms race for global domination. The threat of World War III was ever-present. By 1958, the Soviets lost large numbers of skilled workers to the West as more and more of East Germans sought freedom in the West. By June 1961, roughly 19,000 people left East Germany through Berlin. On August 12, 1961, roughly 2,400 refugees defected to Berlin in a single day. This was the largest number of people to leave East Germany in one day. That night, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev approved East Germany’s plans to stop to flow of refugees by closing its border. In one night, part of the Berlin Wall was built.  This did not defuse tensions but had the opposite effect. While it slowed the flood of refugees going from communism to freedom, it only exacerbated Cold War tensions. This did not stop captive East Germans from trying to escape communist oppression. 171 people died trying to defect, while another 5,000 East Germans found a way to successfully reach freedom in the West. Ronald Reagan’s Speech On Friday, June 12th 1987, President Ronald Reagan gave a historic speech of his own at the Berlin Wall. In it, he stepped up his pressure on the Soviet Union, reinforcing his strong positions against the oppression of communism, and then he delivered the now famous line when he called for Soviet leader Mikhail Gobachev to “Tear down this wall.” The Fall November 9, 1989 0 East Berlin’s Communist Party announced a change in its travel ban with the West. They said East German citizens were now free to cross the city’s borders. Both East and West Berliners descended on the wall and celebrated. Guards opened the checkpoints and 2 million people from both East and West joined together to celebrate. Then they physically started to tear it down. Links The Heritage Foundation A Brief History of the Cold War, by Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding (Amazon) The Lives of Others (Motion Picture), Amazon Photos: The Berlin Wall Through Time,

The black letter law and articles in this episode are: Judgement in Colvin v. Syrian Arab Republic https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2016cv1423-59 “U.S. Court Orders Syria To Pay $300 Million For Killing Of Journalist Marie Colvin” on NPR, featuring a picture of Colvin and her distinctive eyepatch https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690325322/u-s-court-orders-syria-to-pay-300-million-for-killing-of-journalist-marie-colvin Letelier v. Republic of Chile, 488 F. Supp. 655 (D.D.C 1980) https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/488/665/1400196/ Von Dardel v. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 623 F. Supp. 246 (D.D.C. 1985), brought on behalf of Raoul Wallenburg https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/623/246/1514345/ Von Dardel v. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 736 F. Supp. 1 (D.D.C. 1990), default judgement vacated https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/736/1/1884255/ 28 USC 1605A (a) 1, the Terrorism Exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1605A Settlement with the PLO in the Leon Klinghoffer case https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/01/19/plo-agrees-to-settlement-of-lawsuit-over-achille-lauro-slaying/a3d42bb7-8b48-43a1-a081-1aae3b055318/ State Sponsors of Terrorism List https://www.state.gov/j/ct/list/c14151.htm Flatow v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 999 F. Supp. 1 (D.D.C. 1999) https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/999/1/2267352/ Algiers Accords of 1981 http://www.parstimes.com/history/algiers_accords.pdf Mark Zaid is the managing partner of The Law Offices of Mark Zaid https://markzaid.com/zaid/

The Soviet Union or Union of Soviet Socialist Republic was renamed after the Russian Empire by the second Soviet president, Joseph Stalin in 1924. Until 1953 under Stalin the USSR was the second giant nation after USA. Originally, USSR raised after the October 1917 socialist revolution done by the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin) overthrowing Prime Minister of the provincial gov.which had combined the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks after overthrowing Tsar Nicholus II in the March Russian revolution. Before 1917, Russia was a poorly semi-capitalist state as transformes from feudalism since 1860 when the serfs were freed by the Emancipation of Serfs Act in 1861. Since 1861, the serfs were denied their rights while poverty was increasing. Poverty was accelerated when the Tsarist regime forcefully entered the First World War. Now, the Bolsheviks (socialists) and Mensheviks (white minority, capitalists). ********** So, from 1945 the Soviet Union started to disintegrate due to some reasons but after the death of Pres. Stalin in 1953 the elements agaisnt communism started to appear. The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev into power in 1985 brought the Soviet Union and world socialism into an end. The collapse of USSR left the USA as the only leading capitalist state with ambition of global domination

The Soviet Union or Union of Soviet Socialist Republic was renamed after the Russian Empire by the second Soviet president, Joseph Stalin in 1924. Until 1953 under Stalin the USSR was the second giant nation after USA. Originally, USSR raised after the October 1917 socialist revolution done by the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin) overthrowing Prime Minister of the provincial gov.which had combined the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks after overthrowing Tsar Nicholus II in the March Russian revolution. Before 1917, Russia was a poorly semi-capitalist state as transformes from feudalism since 1860 when the serfs were freed by the Emancipation of Serfs Act in 1861. Since 1861, the serfs were denied their rights while poverty was increasing. Poverty was accelerated when the Tsarist regime forcefully entered the First World War. Now, the Bolsheviks (socialists) and Mensheviks (white minority, capitalists). ********** So, from 1945 the Soviet Union started to disintegrate due to some reasons but after the death of Pres. Stalin in 1953 the elements agaisnt communism started to appear. The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev into power in 1985 brought the Soviet Union and world socialism into an end. The collapse of USSR left the USA as the only leading capitalist state with ambition of global domination

Hi Systems for Success Family! Well we just finished the 2018 midterm elections and it seemed there was more focus and more debate generated by these elections than any I remember in many years.  And some of the conversations and debates around this have made me want to address something in this episode that I think is really important to the future of this country.   I had a conversation with one millennial recently who was really frustrated with some of their friends for thinking they could just not vote and still complain about the way things were going…or that other of their friends could vote for politicians and policies that focused on increased government control, taxes and redistribution of wealth and still expect to see the same abundance for their kids as they experienced.  Then there was a public opinion poll from Harvard's Institute of Politics, that came out right before the elections that said likely voters claimed to favor socialism over capitalism by something like five points, and the majority supported things like single-payer healthcare, federal job guarantees, and free college. According to Harvard's new poll, millennial Americans have grown to distrust capitalism and free enterprise.   There was also a Fox News poll earlier this year that showed an uptick to 36 percent of the people polled who had the view that moving away from capitalism and toward socialism would be a good idea.  The article I read said that Historical surveys from the late 1930s to the late 1940s show that only a tiny fraction of Americans embraced the socialist label.  And now 36 percent are in favor of heading that way?  What’s up with that? Let me be clear, this isn’t about the voting that happened last week.  I think everyone should get out and vote their conscience.  This is not a political commentary podcast and I’m not trying to turn it into that. What I’m talking about here goes way beyond political viewpoints.  I’m talking about a system for success that built this country and I think really built our world…a system for success is now at risk.  Political victories are temporary bandages over what I see as severe national threat posed by the revival of historically discredited systems like socialism as the system for success in societies. Somehow there have been all kinds of purveyors of global capitalism, from free-trade champions like Bill Clinton to way right-wing leaders like Paul Ryan, have failed to persuade young Americans that the free market has been significantly responsible for global income per person increasing tenfold--that the free enterprise system has been responsible for eradicating poverty for hundreds of millions of people around the world, and a massive increase in both the length and quality of life.  Many people, especially it seems in the younger generation, have begun to imagine that a fatally flawed system of having government control of who gets what will create long term success in societies. So in this episode, I want to share with you some thoughts about what I think is the antidote to that flawed system. Let me tell you what I love about the system for success of a free market economy.  I share some of these thoughts in my book, Beyond Business, that will be published the last week of November. So if you want more inspiration on how business shapes our world, you can get that on Amazon soon.   So here’s what I love about the free enterprise and why I think it is the best system to shape healthy societies.  I love that it is a system where money is earned by serving someone else well.  It’s a system where there is a built in incentive to serve someone well enough to make them happy with what you provided. If I paint your house, fix your car, make a certain tool that you need, you give me money. That money is in essence a certificate proving that I served you. With these certificates of service that you have given me, I can then go online and order some new tool I need from Amazon that some other business leader made well enough that others traded their certificates of service for it and were served well enough that they gave it a five star rating. Essentially, Amazon says, “When you place your order, you’re making a claim on something that some other business leader created. You’re asking this other business leader to provide value to you. But first can you prove that you provided value to someone else?” And I say, “Of course I can!” Amazon essentially says, “Prove it.” So I enter my PayPal account linked to my reservoir of certificates of service and prove that I have provided enough value to others to receive the value of this new tool I am buying for myself. Commerce is really an exchange of value. Money is just the symbol of value exchanged. Obviously, some people are more effective at creating value for society than others. Is it magic that they receive more certificates of service (make more money) than others who provide less value? Think about Bill Gates, for example. Why is his income so much more than mine? It’s because millions of people use the software his business created. I'm using the software he created right now as I type this manuscript, because it makes me more productive than just writing it all by hand. The mission of Microsoft is to empower every person on the planet to achieve more. Their mission is not to make money. Their mission is to serve people by helping them achieve more. I pay hundreds of dollars a year to the company Bill Gates started because it empowers me to be more productive. People pay me less than they pay Bill Gates because I haven't provided as much value to as many people as he has.             There are some who would say it is not fair that Bill Gates makes so much, especially compared to others. They would even cheer the government on in trying to take more money from him (and other wealthy people like him) and give it to others. In doing this they are basically announcing to the world that they don't agree with the deliberate decisions of millions of people to give Gates’s company their hard-earned certificates of service. They are negating the decisions of millions of people who felt they were getting more value than they were giving up when they bought the products and services of his company. Instead, they are suggesting that we should use the arbitrary control of government to nullify all of those deliberate, independent decisions and redistribute those certificates of service without regard for the value created. Just as an aside, when you think through this lens, it almost appears that income redistribution is just a government-authorized version of what a robber does. They take what rightfully belongs to one person for the benefit of someone who didn't actually earn it. Free Enterprise Is a Gift to Humanity   Think about the self-perpetuating system of positive regard for humanity that is built in to this free enterprise system of business. There is a built-in incentive to provide value to others before I receive value myself. There is a built-in system to reinforce the positive principle that the greatest servant will become the greatest success. There is a catalytic mechanism to encourage the Golden Rule of doing for others as we would want done for ourselves. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker says, “Commerce, trade and exchange . . . mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism.” That, in a nutshell, means that business makes people want to serve others’ needs. That sounds to me like a real gift to humanity! Now think of the alternative. For the sake of contrast, let’s talk about socialism. A socialist economy can essentially say, “Lonnie, you don’t have to provide value to other people in order to deserve the value that someone else produces. As long as you’re a member of our party, we will take what your fellow man produces and give it to you based on equality or need rather than based on what you produce.” This system has been well proven throughout history not to create sustainable success in relationships or true abundance in society. When it comes to relationships, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident who won the Nobel Prize, said that the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic was a government at war with its own people. The very nature of the socialist system diminishes the dynamics that cause sustainable success in relationships. Peace and prosperity for societies have not resulted from such systems; quite the opposite. Socialism has demonstrated fairly well that if you take away the free enterprise business system of profit for productivity, it is likely that the real wants and needs of people won't be met as effectively. In our generation, some countries that have historically been most deeply entrenched in socialistic and communistic systems are now becoming more capitalistic in their approach to commerce. They simply realize that this creates healthier relationships and stronger societies. China is a great example of this transformation. When I started making regular trips to China a few years ago, I would have never even put “communism” and “capitalism” in the same sentence. Yet now that I have done a lot of business in China over the last three years, I can honestly say that China, while still clearly communistic in government, is one of the most effectively capitalistic in business. I vividly remember getting off a bullet train in Guangzhou, and my Chinese business partner mentioned that this was considered one of the wealthiest cities in all of China. I asked, “How does the Chinese government measure wealth in cities?” I was thinking he would respond with measures like we use in America: per capita income or average household income, but no. He said with great clarity, “In China we measure the wealth of a city based on the number of new businesses that are being started and the success of those businesses in providing value to people in the city based on how much profit they make.” Wow! The Chinese government measures the wealth of a city based on these leading indicators of success rather than lagging indicators like household income. They clearly understand capitalism, maybe even better than some governmental systems in America. The rapid social and economic transformation of China over the last three decades has once again demonstrated the power of capitalism to improve societies.             In general, in a free market society, people who are wealthy have become so by providing substantial value to other people. I’ll provide a few well-recognized and somewhat extreme examples to illustrate this point. Think about the extraordinary value these business leaders have provided to people that has enabled them to earn billions of dollars. Jeff Bezos, through Amazon's efficient shopping and data systems Steve Jobs, through Apple's revolutionary products Mark Zuckerberg, through making people more connected than ever before with Facebook Elon Musk, through developing Paypal to enable simple and secure online money transfers for people around the world and then creating Tesla’s most energy efficient yet powerful luxury cars on the market The Mayo Brothers through developing Mayo Clinic as the number one medical clinic in the world solving health challenges no one else can solve Richard Branson, through his four hundred plus companies that provide products and services that improve the lives of people around the world Branson says, “I've always seen business as a group of people trying to improve other people's lives.” Zuckerberg started simply with a clear passion to help people be more connected. The Mayo brothers didn’t intend to build the number one medical center in the world. They began with a simple radical vision to eliminate disease in humanity. Often, these titans of business begin with an altruistic vision to provide value to society, and society rewards them handsomely when they do.  Do we really mind that these iconic business leaders became very wealthy or that their companies made a lot of money? Do we really wish they had kept their ideas to themselves and not offered to sell them to us for an amount of money that would allow them to continue to make better products and services that we value? Do we begrudge them for making a lot of money? No, because they gave us so much “bang for our buck”! We’re grateful to them! When Steven Jobs died, a cartoonist showed him entering heaven as he was welcomed by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. Is there any doubt that these three people contributed more value to society than they received? Ben Franklin contributed too many inventions and discoveries to name. How could we ever repay Thomas Edison for lighting up the world? How could we ever repay Steven Jobs for putting the world of information in our hands in the form of smartphones? These people gave more value than they received by far. Isn't that a beautiful and virtuous cycle that we would want to see continue, whether on a large scale or happening at your favorite small local restaurant that continually makes better tasting, healthier food served in a great environment that fosters relationships? What these business leaders do with the free enterprise system is truly a blessing to humanity! Profit Perpetuates Customer Satisfaction               Whenever the profit incentive is missing, the probability that people’s wants can be safely ignored is the greatest. This is because the ability of a business to make a profit depends on two simple factors. The first is whether the business is producing a product or service that society values enough to pay what they are asking for it. The second is whether that business is well led enough to use limited resources in a way that is efficient and effective enough to consume less resources than the resources others are willing to give in exchange for it. That’s how profit is earned, and it makes profit dependent upon meeting people’s wants and needs. As I have mentioned, I have spent a lot of time in both the non-profit and the for-profit worlds. I have led boards in both worlds, and I can tell you that in general there is a higher degree of consistency in customer satisfaction in the for-profit world than in the non-profit world. Why is that? I believe it is because in a free market economic system, profit is a built-in catalytic mechanism to constantly encourage service and value creation as of primary importance. Capitalism is compelled by the profit motive to look for and respond to people’s needs and wants. I'm not saying that capitalism or the free market economic system always produces other-centered people or companies. Certainly, greed and corruption can and do enter in to this system just as they do in many other good systems. At the same time, this does seem to be the system that is most closely aligned with the principles of an ideal society where the one who serves others best becomes the greatest success. In a healthy free enterprise system, the pursuit of profit by serving people and the building of what some might call “God's kingdom on earth” are one and the same. No one argues that the free enterprise system is perfect or free from abuses, but I believe it is the system that most effectively promotes the principles of God's ideal society where the greatest servant becomes the greatest leader. So here’s the question.  Since free enterprise has proven to be a system for success that has build a better world wherever it is done well, what can you do to either spread the word or to actually get involved in free enterprise yourself.  Do something that will put some heat around this topic and continue to raise the value and appreciation for free enterprise as a powerful system for success to build a better world.

The Daily Micro Flash Briefing for the 2nd of October, 2018. Acting Presydent Horatio Eden's motion to dismiss the sedition case against him is denied, the Abeldane government is appointed, and the Soviet Socialist Republics of Aarbaro are formed.

It's been 100 years since the Emperor of Russia was overthrown by a group of left wing revolutionaries espousing a radical change in politics and economics, who turned the Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The echoes of 1917 reverberated around the world, and, at the close of 2017, historians did what historians tend to do: look back at what happened and try to encapsulate the global significance of the Bolshevik Revolution. Today's guest, Sheila Fitzpatrick, discusses some of the myriad interpretations that have been given to the 1917 revolutions, judgments about its success and importance, and offers insight into Russia's own subdued attitude toward the centenary.

The Cold War was a period of tension between the capitalist United States of America and the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - and their respective allies - between the period 1945 and 1991. Whilst the conflict never resulted in direct armed conflict between the two Superpowers, it did result in numerous proxy wars and a global struggle for dominance across the face of the globe. Given that both Superpowers had access to large stockpiles of nuclear weaponry, any conflict between them could have resulted in the destruction of the planet, as we know it. Fortunately, that catastrophic eventuality never occurred. In this episode of Versus History, Elliott contends that responsibility for starting the conflict lies with America, whilst Patrick argues that the USSR should shoulder the blame. For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

One hundred years ago, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seized power in a revolution that would change the world. They would establish the world’s first Marxist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a few years later. As the 20th century wore on, the USSR became the United States’s chief military and ideological foe. On this episode of BackStory, Brian, Joanne, and Nathan explore how that distant revolution had an immediate impact in the United States.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

This installment learns of official government and medical documents that testify to the witnessed visual experiences and healings by and for humanity during visitations of the Virgin Mary in Egypt. Also in this episode is the Madonna’s role on humanity as the effects of oppressive cold war governments continued. Suffering and shortages in the Communist Eastern Bloc countries resulted. Change was in the air as “under the radar” results began to swirl. And apparitions of the Virgin Mary apparently had influenced friends and foes alike, as witnessed by changes in the Roman Catholic leadership, the United States of America’s leadership, the people of Poland and the leaders in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All the other Eastern Bloc countries were watching.   The Constant Procession is a book, a personal memoir about the history of the Virgin Mary or the Madonna since she passed on. There will be approximately fifty contiguous installments that run around 7 minutes in length each. They will be published every Tuesday morning beginning in August 2016 and read by me, Nikos Steves. To listen from the beginning I value feedback through the comments section or Better - via email at NikosSteves@gmail.com

On this date in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here are some things you may not have known about the formation of the Soviet Union. On December 30, 1922, the leaders of the Russian Republic, Transcaucasian Republic, Ukrainian Republic and Byelorussian Republic met in the first Congress of Soviets, two days after signing the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR. The main function of the treaty was to centralize the federal government in Moscow. Earlier in 1922, Vladimir Lenin suffered the first of a series of stokes, allowing Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party to fill the power vacuum. Stalin needed a way to consolidate the power of the independent Bolshevik states into a single entity. Lenin died in January 1924 and days later the second Congress of Soviets ratified a new constitution. Stalin began advocating for building communism in the countries the Bolsheviks already controlled rather than spreading the revolution as Leon Trotsky envisioned. Stalin focused on transforming the USSR into an industrial power, at the same time millions of people were being imprisoned in forced labor camps. Millions more died during the famine of 1932-33. High ranking government officials, military and academics were killed in Stalin’s “Great Purge” of the Communist Party. In 1936, a new constitution was written which further centralized power in Moscow. It remained in effect until 1977. Stalin continued to lead the Soviet Union through World War II. He died of a stroke in 1953. Our question, at the height of the Soviet Union, how many republics made up the USSR?   Today is unofficially National Bacon Day and National Bicarbonate of Soda Day. It’s the birthday of writer Rudyard Kipling, who was born in 1865; baseball hall of famer Sandy Koufax, who is 81; and golfer Tiger Woods, who is 41. Because our topic happened before 1960, we’ll spin the wheel to pick a year at random. This week in 1975, the top song in the U.S. was “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers. The No. 1 movie was “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” while the novel “Curtain” by Agatha Christie topped the New York Times Bestsellers list. Before the break we asked: At the height of the Soviet Union, how many republics made up the USSR? The answer is 15.   Thanks for listening to the Trivia Minute, for details on the show and how to support it, visit triviapeople.com We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. Have a great weekend and a happy new year. Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Creation_of_the_USSR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin#Decline_and_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_Joseph_Stalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republics_of_the_Soviet_Union Links Follow us on Twitter, Facebook or our website. Also, if you’re enjoying the show, please consider supporting it through Patreon.com Please rate the show on iTunes by clicking here.

Michael Gross: Okay, to everybody listening to today's Option Seller's Guest Series, we have a very special guest for you today. I am speaking with Dr. Alexander Elder. For those of you who may not be familiar with Dr. Elder, you should be. He is a legend in the trading world. He has two classic books: "At Least Trading for a Living" and "Come into my Trading Room", which I feel should be staples of anybody who's considering becoming a serious trader. Dr. Elder, welcome to the show today! Dr. Elder: Thank you very much! Pleasure being here. Gross: Dr. Elder, we're going to start. Obviously, our readers and listeners here sell options: some of them sell index options; some of them sell stock options. Obviously, here we talk about selling commodities options but I think it might be interesting to a lot of our listeners and readers to hear your story. You have a very interesting story about how you got to this country and how you got started in trading and I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing that. Dr. Elder: Well... I was born. Sometimes people ask me, "Where are you from?" I say, "I was born in a non-existent country. I was born in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic." To make a very long story very short, I early on developed a massive hatred of the Soviet system. And I got involved in politics, which was a dangerous business in the old country. And eventually, I realized I didn't want to go to a Soviet prison so I got a job on a ship and I jumped ship in Africa. I came to the United States. The embassy people – the US embassy people - flew me from Africa to New York. I came to New York with 20 dollars - 18 dollars to my name. And that was my arrival here. I worked. I took all kinds of exams because back in the old country, I went to medical school, actually graduated medical school, and got my MD at a tender age of 22. So I reconfirmed my diplomas here. I did my residency in New York and got a teaching position at Columbia University. So while all of that was going on, I'm generally a very curious person. I want to know about different things, and I found such a thing called the stock market. Well, that just sounded so exciting. I started reading books and I started gambling. I mean, of course, I didn't think of it as gambling at that time but gambling it was. And I had a tiny account, you know - 5000-dollar account. I would run it into the ground, make some more money, open another tiny account, run it into the ground and eventually I learned enough that I stopped running it into the ground. Now, took me years, took me years to overcome that obstacle. And to this day, I'm saying to people that a higher degree of formal education is an obstacle to successful training. The higher your formal education, the more difficult it's going to be for you to learn how to trade - and there's a very good reason for that. But once I figured out the game, once I began trading properly, I realized that there hasn't been a book that properly explained everything I needed. And I wrote a book, I wrote a book that was basically a book I wish I could have bought 5 years earlier. And that was "Trading for a Living". It became a huge best seller, an international best-seller translated into 14 languages and still a best-seller in the US for over 20 years. Just last year 2014, I produced a new edition of this book. The publisher was begging for a new edition for ages and I said, Well, I allocated three months to do a new edition. Well, it took me 18 months instead of three. I really completely rewrote the book. And so that's my book the new "Trading for a Living. That's... As far as for myself, I trade. I trade professionally. I spend a fair bit of time in front of the screen, mostly trading stocks and commodities. And I also love teaching. Whenever a company invites me to speak somewhere and pay for it, I am happy to get on a plane. I just came back from Asia. I was teaching almost a week-long course in Macau near Hong Kong. And then I was teaching a very long course in Tokyo. And this was a very wonderful trip. Made new friends, met some old friends, saw some old friends, and here I am back in Vermont which is I am based these days, far from the avenue crowd, with ten-mile views, in front of the live screen and occasionally talking to people like you. Gross: That's, that's fascinating beginning. You made an excellent point and I wanted to ask you about it. You said that you felt a higher education to becoming a successful trader. Can you explain now a little bit more? Dr. Elder: Yeah. Of course, it will be a pleasure. There are... in nature, in society, in civilization, in anything, there are two types of causation: dynamic causation and stochastic causation /. Dynamic causation is very simple: you have a stem on your desk. You push the stem, that stem moves in the direction, which you push it. Or you lift the stem, you release your fingers and the stem drops on the floor under the force of gravity. That's dynamic causation. If you do A, B will happen. 100%. Stochastic causation is, or some people have something to do with stochastic indicator. Some people call it probabilistic causation - is when an event happens only in a percentage of cases. Like for example, say you come to my house and I say to you, "Let's - we have half an hour before dinner. Let's play a little game. Here have a drawer with clean socks - black socks which I wear everyday and white socks which I wear to the gym. I have 10 pairs of black socks and 4 pairs of white socks. Now, you want to make a money bet and put your hand into the drawer blindly and pull a pair?" And you say, "Yes." And so what are you going to bet on? And of course you will say, "Well, I'm going to bet on black right because there are 10 black pairs therefore white pair." You put your hand without looking. And lo and behold, a white pair comes out. You lost your money. You do it again. And again, a white pair comes out. You lost your money again. And that's what it often happens in trading. What it means is in addition to having an idea of what you're going to buy or sell, you also have to placate that idea with money management because that idea will never be hundred percent. So that's the baseline. Now, you take an educated person, say, a doctor. The way we're trained, if a patient comes to a doctor and he is hurting somewhere, that person deserves a diagnosis. So a doctor will examine this patient, diagnose his problems, and prescribe treatment. Now suppose he cannot diagnose his problem, well he will order more tests. If he still cannot diagnose his problem, he will send him to a consultant. In other words, the patient deserves a diagnosis and the doctor will not stop until the diagnosis is made. A good doctor will not stop. But here's done in the financial markets, you can look at a stock and say, "Is this going up or down? Up or down? Up or down? Hmm ... I don't know." Well, let's pull maybe five more indicators? Ten more indicators? Apply speed lines. Apply Elliott wave. Apply Endelope. Apply. Apply. Apply. I'm going to apply enough tools and feel I have an answer which way the stock will go. And that is a total sack of shit. Because the stock happens to be in a chaotic state and applying more tools is a self-delusional thing. A good trade is supposed to jump off you from the screen. It's clear. And forcing a trade like that is a typical mistake of educated people who feel that if there are more tests and are more indicators, things are going to be hunky dory - which they are. A friend of mine who spent his professional life in Saudi Arabia working for Aramco, this American-Arabian oil company said to me, "If I were to come to my manager and say to him that I can design a pumping station that would work perfectly six times out of ten and four times it would blow up, my manager would lock me out of his office. But this is how I would have to function as a trader. I have to design a system that would work five, six times, blow up four times and I'm going to be ahead of the game at the end of the month. So that's what - that guy was working to overcome his perfectionism but this is why a high degree of education is really a negative, something to be overcome. Just in conclusion, there was a guy he died a few years ago. There was a guy in Chicago named Brian Morrison and he once said, "I have a Ph.D. in Mathematics. I specialize in Cybernetics. But I was able to overcome those disadvantages and make money." Gross: Boy, that's a fascinating observation and I think I agree with you. One of the biggest obstacles of traders is how they have to think about trading. And I think you're book is really focused on that as well - was the psychology of trading is one underestimated part of trading is what it is. Dr. Elder: Yeah. Respecting the randomness of the market, respecting the chaos of the market, and having the humility to say, I don't know this; I don't know that; and I am completely confused here BUT I have a notion of the certain pattern of order. And when that pattern encroaches from the chaos of the market, I'm going to pounce. I'm going to trade. But when there's no such pattern, I'm just going to sit back and wait. Scratch my nugget. Gross: Exactly. Exactly. Dr Alder, you do much of your work with individuals who want to trade for a living, who might even want to trade professionally. Here we… Dr. Elder: Not very much. Not very much. I used to enjoy private consulting. I kind of drifted out of it. I have a, I have a partner - [Name] - who left private consulting so when people come to me, when people come to me they want private consulting, I usually send them to Kelly. I always send them to Kelly 99% of the time. You know, there are things we do and things we get sort of out of good. What I am really focused on in terms of helping people see the way is I run this website together with my friend and business partner Kelly Lavone called Spikes Trade - SpikeTrades.com. And that's where, that's where we have traders competing for the best pick of the week. So we have a whole bunch of people submitting their favorite picks every weekend for the following week and of course... We run it essentially as a - we try to pick somebody real time. We measure their performance and winners receive bonuses. I think we're the only website that pays people for doing their homework. And I find that a lot of fun. So that's the kind of thing I enjoy doing as far as dealing with people. But sitting down with an individual, trying to help him, I'll do it once in a blue moon because it's really not where I am. Gross: So that's SpikeTrade.com? Dr. Elder: Yeah. Gross: Sounds like an excellent resource for anyone listening out there. Dr. Elder you made some great observations about the differences between investors, traders and gamblers. Can you briefly describe those differences based on your observations? Dr. Elder: You know, speaking, speaking about. Let's me speak about gamblers first. I was asked on the phone by a friend of mine earlier this morning. I have a very close friend - he is a dentist - who works like a donkey and makes very good money. And while his wife was alive, she was managing the finances and everything else. And ever since his wife died he was stunned, he was about forty, to manage the money. He showed me his account. I was appalled. This guy is putting quarter million dollars in his retirement fund every year and sometimes more. And the sum loses that money. Last time I saw, he showed me his paper he was in the million-dollar draw down. And I was saying to him, the kid is a gambler. He is not a stock trader. He - and actually he loves this one-week option. He is a gambler. And my friend says yes he just likes pushing the buttons. He likes pushing the buttons. So we were discussing how to take the kids away from the gambling. Gamblers are for the excitement of the game and they don't care about the results. Eventually they would love to have process of course but ultimately they are after the excitement. Not after the results. A trader discovers the patterns of the market, discovers some patterns of order and motion in care of the market. And trades have patterns. I can say that myself primarily a trade and most of my trades last from two days to a couple of weeks. An investor looks for the very long term. And I think at this day and age, investment is becoming - investing is becoming more and more difficult because of all the speeding up. The work has become way too fast and the old notion of stocks for widows and orphans, one decision starts - that's kind of outdated. You really have to be in tune with the swings of the market. Gross: Okay. So when you, when you talk about trading for the short, intermediate, longer term of you, do you have a preference there? Dr. Elder: Um, well I'm not sure what you mean by short, intermediate and long term trading. Gross: I know you're not a big fan of day trading. But you, I mean are your trades usually 1-2 weeks in duration or are you looking at a couple of months or longer? Dr. Elder: No, no, no, no. I would say a couple of weeks would be the far end of the thing. Gross: Okay. Dr. Elder: A few days - from a few days to maybe a couple of weeks and once in a blue moon a day trade. Sometimes when I am in front of the screen and nothing much preoccupies me I just this completely open day in front of me, I'll take a look at the screen. Maybe I'll find a day trade. But you lose from a few days to a couple of weeks. What I think is that I use technical analysis for tactical decision-making. And I find that with technical analysis is like head lights in the car - it lights up a little in front of you but it certainly doesn't light up - doesn't light up all the way home. So if you go with a reasonable speed, you see a bit of a difference ahead of you. And I say that if I can find the deviation in the market and trade against the deviation normal set, that's your last few days. Gross: Okay. Dr Elder, there's a lot of people the general public maybe not so much our listeners but a lot of people, even some financial media advisors consider public commodities a risky asset class and they try to steer their clients clear of it. What are your thoughts on that? Dr. Elder: I think - to start with a summary - I think there is nothing wrong with commodities. There is everything wrong with people who create commodities. The thing with commodities is this: that, well, most - the average lifetime a commodity is created is about three months. Why is it - why? It's because commodities are traded on paper thin margins. A stock trader may buy stocks put half the money down and half the money is margin. It's basically trading at 50% margin. He has to put down 50% of his purchase price. When you trade commodities, you can trade them on a 5% deposit. So some poor guy who has $20,000 dollars, he "invests" that money in a commodity trade and uses $20,000 dollars, he can control $400,000 dollars worth of merchandise. Now if it moves his way, it's magic. He can double his money in a hurry. But you know, if it doesn't go his way, it can actually move a day again. And if he moves a day again, by the time you settle a percentage, he loses half of his margins. His walker gives him a margin call and his trading career is finished. Commodities are wonderful, clean, open, tactical market. There is nothing wrong with commodities. As I said there is everything wrong with commodity traders mainly because they have no conception of leverage and of risk control and there are rules in controlling those risks. In my book, I even have tables which tell you this is how you find out which commodities you can afford to trade and which you cannot afford to trade. Then of course poor beginners crowd into this field not knowing how to control risks, what they can/cannot do. They get blown out. So I usually say to people commodities are not for beginners some stocks. Learn the game. Most important, learn risk management and then, if you're still interested in commodities, come on in. Gross: Dr. Elder are you there? Dr. Elder: Yeah yeah I'm still here. I think I might... Gross: I'm sorry. I thought it cut off. Okay. We've talked about that in our writing as well. And one observation I made early in my career was that people that, I thought was one of the biggest mistakes new commodities traders is they came in and they trade commodities like they trade stocks without understanding that leverage and they can't stay on the market even for the short term swings. So I agree with that a hundred percent. I know a lot of the work you do, you favor technical analysis. Can you comment on the differences and how you see fundamentals playing a role. Can those work together? Do you discard fundamentals? Or how do you regard the fundamental aspect of trading? Dr. Elder: You know, I'm afraid I have a very simple, not to say primitive approach to fundamentals in a sense that I get an idea that some things are important, some things make sense. And that turns me to a certain stock or a sector in the market. And then use technical analysis to sharpen my insights, to find the specific stocks or commodities for that matter to trade. For example, for example - according to The Economist magazine, by the end of the next decade, the world will have a hundred thousand professional drone operators. It's an amazing number. It will be a whole new line of business - whole line of work. And either it's going to be a whole lot of 100 thousand drone operators. I take it as a sign that there will be also a tremendous number of drones flying and being made. So why don't they look at drone companies? And that's pretty much the fundamental - that's the fundamental from the technical analysis from me. Get a bigger year. Get a bigger year. Or for example, a couple of weeks ago, I was teaching this class in Macau. One of my campers - one of my group participants asked me to look at this stock called PBR - Petroleo Brasileiro. It's a Brazilian national oil company. I haven't looked at. I was actually in Brazil a few years ago and somebody asked me in the class what's my favorite pick in the Brazilian market. And PBR was trading at $60 back then. And I said, of course PBR. You know, it was like I - it was a sacrilege to say something like that. It was actually funny. In any case, I look at the chart now, PBR used to be $70 and I suggested shorten that to $60. It's now trading below 5. And again just from reading magazines I know what's happening. Prices of gas dropped. But also there's a huge, huge, huge political scandal in Brazil and apparently PBR was giving money to the governing party for its campaigns. Huge political crisis in the country. And I'm saying to myself, well, the stock was trading at $70, it's now trading below 5. Meanwhile, it's really driven down by the times. Meanwhile, all these oil fields in Brazil, it has the monopoly. Brazil has a ton of oil and PBR is pumping that oil at a cost of $40 per barrel. So they're not making so much money now but they are still making a few bucks. And meanwhile, they own - they basically own the country's oil just the oil. The stock has been driven down by a tank. And now we switch to technical analysis just like a bicycle. But this is basically how it works for me. Fundamental - a very broad fundamental view of either societal trend or technological trend raise an alarm bell for you. Hey, this is interesting! This is interesting. Let's take it into the computer. Let's see how the moving stack up and everything else. Gross: Okay. That's an interesting view and I'll ask you a market question here at the end but before we get to that, we - in our books, in our materials, we occasionally quote you or cite some observations you've made in your studies. Dr. Elder: Thank you. Gross: And one reason for that is that we tend to think that your books cut through a lot of the fluff and useless information available to investors and get right into the core concepts. What really works as a trader, what doesn't. I've noticed personally coming into my trading room that you're a proponent of selling options versus not buying them. Can you elaborate on that? Why do you favor selling options as a strategy? Dr. Elder: You know, when I teach classes, occasionally, let me backtrack. When I teach classes, I often say to people: having met literally over ten thousand traders, investors - traders mostly - I have never met one person - not one - who built an account buying options. Now, all of us have some successful option trades or we buy something. I had a trade once when I - that was before - I bought a, I bought a 3 8 on Friday. It opened on Monday at 13. So all of us got those fantastic stories of success in buying an option. But in all those years, I have never met one individual - not one - who built up an account buying options. At the same time, I have several friends who make a good living year in and year out selling options. I know many successful option sellers. And not a single successful option buyer. I think the person who summarized it best for me was that years ago, this woman came for some classes with me. She was a floor trader at the American Exchange. She was an options specialist. But she was pretty adamant she wanted to get off the floor and learn something about computerized trade. That's how she came in. And she said to me, "Options are a hope business. You can buy hope or you can sell hope. I am a professional. I come to the floor in the morning and look to see what people are hoping for. And then I try that hope and sell it to them. Options are a hope business. If you're going to give me a little hope, you better sell hope, not buy them. Gross: That's probably the greatest observation of option selling I've ever heard. One of the analogies we use is options sellers operate kind of like an insurance company where you're selling collecting premium, premium, premium. Occasionally, you pay out on one. But if you do it like the insurance company does it, it should be a profitable venture in the long term. Dr. Elder: Right. Right. Just price it right. Price it right. I have a friend in Michigan, her name is Bea Buffelin. She is quite a character. She is a mathematician. She is a chess player. She is a psychologist with Ph.D. and she loves selling options. She said to me, "I feel like I am running a roulette on a cruise ship. And all these guys are coming in. They have gold chains and they are loud but they cannot afford a thousand shares of Microsoft. So they buy options from me. And they're having fun and drinking beer. But you know? Four times a year that wheel stops and I sweep off the money. Gross: Sure. So she's operating as kind of a cool business professional and they're doing it for entertainment is what it sounds like. Dr. Elder: They're having fun. They're having fun. Lots of it. Fun is expensive. Gross: Yeah. Dr. Elder: At the very beginning of my career as a trader, this old professional trader in New York said to me, "Successful trading should be a little bit boring. if you entertain, move right back. Something is wrong with this picture. " Gross: Exactly. I think the professionals I've met in this business as well, they approach it as a business. It's not a fun past time. It's a very business-like approach. And they're looking to play the odds. And it's one of the things that you talk about as well. Dr Elder, if you - as far as option-selling as a strategy goes, what would be the top 3 things you would look for if you were identifying an option to sell? Dr. Elder: Well, first of all, let me say right away, I am not an expert on options. I used to promise to myself, next year I am going into and provide options. But to me it's not a hugely complicated other area. I am super comfortable trading short and long stocks and fusions. And learning how to trade options is something I've been putting off year after year and so I certainly don't hold out myself as an expert in options for a moment. Except that I can say with utter confidence that the only way to make money with options is to sell them, not to buy them. Now, as far as selling options, so having said that, I would look for technical patterns. I would look for stocks that are very. And actually I would want to sell cold. I would look for stocks that have crashed and stop crashing to the very bottom. And that's where I would sell those. And then of course I could pull things like Delta because they would want to sell options whose likelihood of going into the money would be minimum. So that's about it. Gross: Okay. As far as getting into commodities - new investor, taking into his first steps into commodities, they want to get diversified form equities... Dr. Elder: I think the person who want to get into commodities has to show at least a couple of years of successful stock trading. If you're successful in stocks for two years, try commodities. Commodities are very, very fast. And it's not a good place to begin. I mean I love trading commodities. I have a position in a hell of a position in commodities going on right now. But it's not a beginner's game. You really have to have a bit of experience to get into. Gross: Okay, good. Alright, I'm going to ask you one question. I don't want to get into too much of a specific trades and things like that. But I would like to ask your opinion on the overall macro picture right now especially as it relates to commodities in general. We've been in some pretty steady downtrends in a lot of markets. Is that something you see continuing in 2016 or what's your take on that. Dr. Elder: Well, I think I want to buy the worst performing market and to short the best performing markets as a general attitude. And what I see in many commodities now is that it has been sold down to - well, in any case, I'm looking for bottoms and those things. Agriculturals, for example. We're supposed to be hit with one of the worst El Ninos in decades. That's not going to be too friendly to commodities so meaning that the growing areas are going to be hit. Shortages are likely to develop. Commodities - agricultural commodities are likely to go up. I'm a contrarian trader. Whenever I see sustained downtrend, my first inclination is to say, whoa, is there a bottom there? And that's of course we get into analysis comes in. Now, looking at more tropical commodities, looking at tropical commodities, we're just now looking at the track of causes. The deep bottom in 2014, stronger now and now still going on. And it still going low lows but will tiny little margins. So that to me is a sign of being completely exhausted. 'Coz it now becomes a question of timing when you will have a and buy. Essentially I am a contrarian trader. And I think as an options seller, you have to be a contrarian trader because you sell hope. Gross: Absolutely. Sure. We always talk about it's a process of not necessarily deciding where the market is not going to go but where it's not going to go. Dr. Elder: Right. Gross: And that's really the gist of the whole thing. Dr. Elder this has been some great information. We really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and knowledge with our listeners and readers. In addition to your books, you mentioned your website, where can traders and investors learn more about your work and what you have to offer. Dr. Elder: Well, I have two websites. One website which has all my books and I run webinars once a month. We just had one two nights ago. It's Elder.com. I got into the internet early enough when short means were available. So I have this Elder.com website. Visit. And then right on that website, you will find a link for Spike Trade, which is really where I live nowadays. That to me is a fantastic and interesting drawing which includes sharp smart traders. And I have this partner whom I have struck a great deal. Two of us are running the service. Essentially it's a community of traders. So that - Come to Elder.com and explore from there. Don't forget SpikeTrade.com. Gross: Excellent. Thank you Dr. Elder. It's been a great interview. We hope to get you back again sometime. Dr. Elder: Thank you very much. Pleasure talking to you. Gross: Likewise. I'm going to stop the recording now and I just want to let you know I do personally appreciate you coming on and really enjoyed talking with you and hopefully we can talk again at some point. Dr. Elder: Intelligent questions call for intelligent answers. Right? Gross: Exactly. Well they were very intelligent answers so I appreciate that. Dr. Elder: Thank you. Thank good care. Gross: Alright, you too. Thank Dr. Elder. Dr. Elder: Thank you, Bye bye. Gross: Bye.

 This episode combines a lot of things that have come up for me since the tragedy and atrocity of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and 370. As a member of the aviation community and, to some extent, the aviation industry these events have all but destroyed me. They have created a great fear and anger in me. Thankfully, the logical aspect of my brain is currently running the show. But, this event goes beyond the present in terms of politics and aviation. This event is or could be compared and contrasted with the tragedy and atrocity of Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner flying along a civilian air corridor and squawking a civilian transponder code, that was shot down by The USS Vincennes, a US Navel vessel operating in conjunction with The Gulf War, on July 3rd 1988. This, in turn, returns me to my stranded ranting and raving about Truman, Stalin, The end of World War II, The Cold War and Charlie Wilson's War. The events that unfolded during the latter stages of World War II and the subsequent power struggle and Cold War between The United States and The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics led to a massive armament of people and countries caught in-between these two struggling nations. And, the rage and arms that these two nations provided during this time are now being used to commit acts of terrible crimes against humanity; the current term for this being terrorism. Everyone wants you to live in fear. To feel anger. To feel hate. But, don't let them do it. Live a life of true liberty. Peruse your happiness. We, as humans, have that right. Don't give it up! I hate to use the quote, but, it seems appropriate... "Give me liberty, or give me death!"  -Patrick Henry And, of course, the paraphrase of Benjamin Franklin: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.   Much love to all, Nicnac   --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nicnacjak/message

As the world focuses its attention on the Olympic Games in Sochi and controversies around the Russian government's apparent hostility toward gay and lesbian rights, a far-reaching drama is playing out in the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine. The Eastern European country, independent since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991, has been gripped by a series of protests that may very well determine its long-term political fate. The Euromaidan was apparently named after the Independence Square in Kiev, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, where a major protest was held on the evening of November 21 of last year. The gathering of 1,000 to 2,000 people was staged in opposition to the abandonment by the Yanukovych government of an Association Agreement with the European Union.[2] Further protests ensued until a particularly violent crackdown by Ukrainian police on November 30. [3] From that point forward, demonstrations intensified and grew larger in number. The protests seemed to take a much more violent turn by mid-January after the Ukrainian Parliament pushed through a sweeping 100 page anti-protest law. [4] The law essentially banned the installation of tents, stages or amplifiers in public places, all critical components of the Euromaidan up to that point. Two and a half months later, the law has been repealed, Yanukovych's Cabinet has been dissolved, and detained protesters granted amnesty on condition of an end to the occupations of government buildings. [5] Nevertheless, the protests continue and demands to end “government corruption” and the resignation of the Russian President remain unrelenting. Complicating the situation is the role of militant fascist groups which appear to be influencing the protest movement, and are reminiscent of Hitler's Brown Shirts and Mussolini's Black Shirts from an earlier era. Foreign governments appear to be influencing the situation as well. Russian President Vladmir Putin's offer of substantial reductions in the cost of Russian natural gas and their willingness to purchase $15 billion in Ukrainian Government Eurobonds could be read as a bribe to keep Ukraine under Russian influence. [6] Meanwhile, Western governments, including those of the US and Canada, are clearly expressing support for government opposition demonstrators. Following harsh crackdowns before and during the G20 protests in 2010, it is hard to imagine the Canadian government behaving much differently if faced by similar demonstrations which have included the occupation of government buildings and the use of molotov cocktails being hurled at police. This week's Global Research News Hour probes some of the less talked about aspects of the Euromaidan with three analysts. University of Winnipeg Associate Professor of History Andriy Zayarnyuk is a Ukrainian national and is a specialist in the field of the Social and Cultural History of 19th and 20th Century Eastern Europe, including the Ukraine and the Soviet Union. He is also the author of the recently released book, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846-1914. He helps provide an overview of the political and cultural background of the current struggle. Eric Draitser is a New York-based geo-political analyst with StopImperialism.org. He discusses the right-wing fascist groups involved with the Euromaidan protests and threats they may pose over and above the opposition movement itself. Finally, Rick Rozoff of Stop NATO returns to provide a thorough examination of the geo-political and geo-strategic context in which the popular uprising is taking place.