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  • Pouring Out The Libations of HIstory

    Pouring Out The Libations of HIstory
    2026/01/02
    Today we are talking about something older than empires and more stubborn than forgetting. It is the simple act of remembering the people history does not bother to name. Long before textbooks and archives, people poured out libations. Wine, oil, water, a small offering tipped onto the ground to say someone lived, someone mattered, someone was not invisible. We tend to think of that as a strange ancient habit. But the question behind it never went away. Who will remember me. Who will pause long enough to say my name, or at least admit that I was here. History is very good at big stories. Wars, plagues, kings, and generals. It is far less interested in the ordinary people who carried the weight of those stories on their backs. Tonight, we are going to talk about that gap. About what history can do, what it cannot do, and why pouring out the libations of history still matters now.
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    5 分
  • WTF - AI Did NOT Destroy the World... This Year, Anyway

    WTF - AI Did NOT Destroy the World... This Year, Anyway
    2026/01/01
    Good evening and welcome to the *What The Frock* New Year’s Eve special, an annual ritual in which we pause, take stock, raise a glass, and verify that the planet is still here. It is. We checked. Tonight’s episode is titled **AI Did NOT Destroy The World… This Year, Anyway…**, which is both a statement of fact and a quiet expression of surprise. For twelve months we were promised doom by headline, apocalypse by algorithm, and replacement by software. Instead, what we got was confusion at scale, confidence without competence, and machines that talk very smoothly while being spectacularly wrong. In this episode, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod do what they do best. They poke, prod, laugh, and occasionally squint at the future while standing firmly in the present. They talk about artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and the vast and fertile territory in between where most of the trouble still lives. There are stories, there is philosophy, there is champagne, and there is at least one reminder that tools have always been dangerous in the hands of people who stop thinking. So pour yourself something celebratory, or medicinal, or both. The year is ending. The world remains stubbornly intact. And for one more night, we ask the question that matters most. What the frock just happened?
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    1 時間 2 分
  • 41 Cold War Sentinels - USS George C. Marshall SSBN-654

    41 Cold War Sentinels - USS George C. Marshall SSBN-654
    2025/12/31
    The USS George C. Marshall was never built to be admired. She was built to be trusted. Like her namesake, she existed for moments when patience mattered more than drama and restraint mattered more than applause. In the Cold War Navy, that was not a slogan. It was a job description.
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    8 分
  • The Architect of War and Peace

    The Architect of War and Peace
    2025/12/31
    George Catlett Marshall is one of those figures whose importance becomes clearer the longer one studies him and more puzzling the more one tries to summarize him neatly. He does not lend himself to slogans or cinematic shorthand. There is no single moment that captures him, no battlefield pose that defines his legacy. Instead there is a long accumulation of decisions, habits, and silences that, taken together, helped shape the American century. He was the only American to serve as Army Chief of Staff, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense, and he did so without ever behaving as though history owed him attention. That alone should give modern audiences pause.
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    7 分
  • The Fall of the Nagid

    The Fall of the Nagid
    2025/12/30
    Granada in the winter of 1066 was not supposed to end like this. If you had asked a court poet, a tax collector, or a Jewish merchant counting bolts of cloth in the souk, they would have told you that the age was precarious but workable, dangerous but dazzling. Al-Andalus still wore the reputation of refinement like a borrowed robe, a land where Arabic verse sparkled, Jewish scholarship flourished, and Christian kingdoms loomed at a safe distance, for the moment. The brochures had not yet been printed, but the legend was already forming. A Golden Age, people would later call it, a time of convivencia, the sort of word that sounds better the further away one gets from the blood.
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    5 分
  • The Dreadful Tale

    The Dreadful Tale
    2025/12/29
    December 29, 1876, did not begin as a legend. It began as weather, the sort of Lake Erie weather that has always made honest people glance at the window and reconsider their plans. A blizzard rolled in with the hard confidence of something older than railroads, older than schedules, older than the idea that human beings can bargain with nature if they print the timetable in bold type. Snow came in sheets, wind drove it sideways, and the whole landscape around Ashtabula turned into a white blur with sharp edges. The railroad still ran, because that is what railroads did in the nineteenth century. They sold the public speed and certainty, and they sold themselves something even more intoxicating, the belief that steel and ambition could tame the continent.
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    5 分
  • WTF - Auld Lang Syne

    WTF - Auld Lang Syne
    2025/12/28
    There are moments in the modern age when one must pause, stare into the middle distance, and ask a question of profound existential importance. Not questions like “Why are we here?” or “Is there life on other planets?” but the truly unsettling ones. Questions such as, “Why does my phone know what I want before I do?” and “When did Christmas become a logistics problem?”
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    54 分
  • 41 Cold War Sentinels - USS Woodrow Wilson SSBN-624

    41 Cold War Sentinels - USS Woodrow Wilson SSBN-624
    2025/12/28
    The USS Woodrow Wilson belonged to a generation of submarines that were never meant to be seen, remembered, or celebrated in the usual way. She was built to disappear, to wait, and to make catastrophe unnecessary by making it inevitable in theory. As a Lafayette-class fleet ballistic missile submarine, she formed part of the original “Forty-One for Freedom,” the silent backbone of America’s sea-based nuclear deterrent during the most dangerous decades of the Cold War.
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    6 分