War

“Do You Hear What I Hear” was actually about the Cuban Missile Crisis – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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“Do You Hear What I Hear” was actually about the Cuban Missile Crisis – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

We often take Christmas carols at face value. But at least one holiday favorite, “Do You Hear What I Hear,” contains more than what first meets the ear.

Written during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the song contains references to the fear of a nuclear attack. Many of the phrases it contains, such as “a star, dancing in the night, with a tail as big as a kite” can be interpreted in two ways: as the bright star of Bethlehem that leads the Magi to the baby Jesus—or as the sight of a nuclear missile in flight. “The star was meant to be a bomb,” the composers’ daughter, Gabrielle Regney, explained to GBH News, the magazine of the Boston public radio station, in 2019.

The Rise of the Taliban

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Afghanistan: The Rise of the Taliban

9/16/21 by NPR

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/128545712
Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510333/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/throughline/2021/09/20210916_throughline_final_mix_afghanistan_2_taliban_wads_lw_91521_-_real.mp3

How did a small group of Islamic students go from local vigilantes to one of the most infamous and enigmatic forces in the world? The Taliban is a name that has haunted the American imagination since 2001. The scenes of the group’s brutality repeatedly played in the Western media, while true, perhaps obscure our ability to see the complex origins of the Taliban and how they impact the lives of Afghans. It’s a shadow that reaches across the vast ancient Afghan homeland, the reputation of the modern state, and throughout global politics. At the end of the US war in Afghanistan we go back to the end of the Soviet Occupation and the start of the Afghan civil war to look at the rise of the Taliban. Their story concludes Throughline’s two-episode investigation on the past, present, and future of the country that was once called “the center of the world.”

The Afghanistan War had to end

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The Afghanistan War had to End ☮️

There was no good way to end the war but it seems like a bandage over a wound, this one had to be ripped off and let the Afghanistan people run the government they are want. Best to do in the summer months, three years until the presidental election.

“It is a 20 year war that had to end.” – President Biden

I am not convinced that the Afghan people really don’t want the Taliban as their leadership. It is hard if not impossible to run a government that lacks popular support. It’s rare that a king or a dictator lasts for long unless they provide a level of services that the public demands. Dictators are often good at one level at providing security and decent public services even as they silence the opposition.

I also doubt that it’s all about religious extremism – people probably weren’t happy with the level of services provided by the previous Afghanistan regime, or the corruption that was previously the norm. People where probably tired of a generation of war and ready for the stabilization of an Afghanistan under the Taliban after America leaves.

The ‘Hiroshima Cover-Up’ & The Journalist Who Exposed The Truth

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The ‘Hiroshima Cover-Up’ & The Journalist Who Exposed The Truth

8/19/20 by NPR

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/111312409
Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/npr-381444908/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/npr/fa/2020/08/20200819_fa_fapodweds-da549908-b651-4c08-b7ca-210e0f707ca5.mp3?awCollectionId=381444908&awEpisodeId=903895214&orgId=1&d=2853&p=381444908&story=903895214&t=podcast&e=903895214&size=45552537&ft=pod&f=381444908

Historian Lesley M.M. Blume’s new book, ‘Fallout,’ tells the story of John Hersey, the young journalist whose on-the-ground reporting in Hiroshima exposed the world to the devastation of nuclear weapons. “Hersey had seen everything from that point, from combat to concentration camps,” Blume says. “But he later said that nothing prepared him for what he saw in Hiroshima.”

Light and happy 😊 podcast for listening 🎧 on the beach 🏖.

NPR

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A Mission to Give Afghans Democracy Became a Bid to Repair America’s Own : NPR

The U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is a story of democracy and its shortcomings. In this piece, Steve Inskeep — host of NPR's Morning Edition, as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First — analyzes how the United States inadvertently took on a mission to democratize Afghanistan, and instead undermined democracy at home, as unpopular wars tend to do.