82 years ago nearly all of the men on the first few boats that landed on the beach in Normandy were dead before days end. Sit here with that for a while. Look at them. Really look at them. Look into their eyes. Many of them are boys, they are someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s sweetheart someone’s father. They never came home. And every privilege, every convenience, every freedom and every little thing that you want to bitch about you have because of them and they paid the ultimate price for you to have those freedoms. #dday #FreedomIsNeverFree

Lots of emails and comments from people telling me they’ve had to stop listening to many of their favorite podcasters because of their hyper-fixation with blaming everything on Israel. I’ve been hearing it at BBQs so it’s not a shock. Normies find it off-putting.

New episode! ⚔️ We finally got him. @ConnIggulden joins us on @rock_swords 🗡️📚 Nero. Agrippina. Arnhem. D&D. Gemmell. Why fantasy is harder than #histfic. And the knot that didn't make it into A Dangerous Book for Boys. Don't miss this one. 📺 youtu.be/hbQ8_COlOFA

J-M and I return after an involuntary hiatus to further our discussions of magic in Glorantha in a new episode of Exploring Glorantha. youtube.com/live/Lr0PXGD_oqY… We really enjoyed the discussion and hope you will too! Thanks for your patience! @Iconic_Productn @Chaosium_Inc

Here is a huge positive to modern life that gets no press. I have an old 2009 Toyota, and the AUX port crapped out about a year ago. Went to YouTube. Young, enthusiastic guy explains how to fix it. It is not obvious - involves taking the dashboard apart in a counter-intuitive way, but once you see it, it's a 15 minute fix. There are actually dozens of videos showing how to do this, and they collectively have well over 200k views. Had this happened in 1995, I would have just lived with it. But the combo of the replacement AUX jack available from Amazon and the video of the simple (but not obvious) fix, I fixed it. I HAVE DONE THIS DOZENS OF TIMES. Replaced the control panel of my dishwasher. Replaced the ice maker in the fridge. Fixed a wonky sanding head on my drill press. Mastered a bandsaw technique that I use for my sculpture. On and on and on... I think it is likely no exaggeration to say billions of fixes and skill upgrades have been performed worldwide that would not have been performed if it were not for the instruction freely given peer-to-peer on YouTube. Take a moment to be happy about this. The busted item keeps performing, rather than going to the landfill. The person learning and doing the fix gains a sense of mastery and saves money. It's an unmixed blessing. Stop doomscrolling. Think of what is busted in your house, find the YouTube video on how to fix it, and fix it.

A tremendous loss. A great actor and human being with an outstanding career. A brilliant Watson opposite Jeremy Brett!

Never forget.

According to (assuming accurate inputs) Gemini: You have been alive for approximately 23.40% of the history of the United States. To put that into perspective, you have been present for nearly a quarter of the nation's entire timeline. PS next episode in the queue is Number 77.

Very slowly catching up on episodes. I listened to this one (and several others) last week. Terrific information given with great storytelling and insightful research!

Excellent actual play of @13thAge Glorantha with co-designer @JonathanMTweet . A thoroughly enjoyable play through that nicely shows off the fun of the game and the world! youtu.be/ViwIFd-C15U?si=dnvL…

Amazing set of episodes for this excellent podcast!

Perhaps a useful link.... thehistoryoftheamericans.com…

Doing our best to change this! thehistoryoftheamericans.com…

There is a genre of October 7 commentary that works by constructing a historical arc so compressed and so selective that the conclusion becomes inevitable. A people wronged, hemmed in, their world dismantled across generations. Rage follows. What else would you expect? The history offered in support of this arc is not really history. It begins where it needs to begin, omits what complicates it, and arrives at a destination that was chosen before the argument started. The Arab population of Mandatory Palestine never held sovereignty that was taken from them. There was no state. A significant portion immigrated to the land only in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The land passed from Ottoman to British control, and two national movements competed within that framework. One of them, the Jewish national movement, was not a colonial project arriving from outside. Jewish communities had existed without interruption in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Gaza, Tiberias, the Galilee and elsewhere, through centuries of pre-modern colonial empires, Roman, Byzantine, several Arab Caliphates, the Crusaders, and Ottoman, and long before any of them emerged. The Zionist movement was a national liberation movement of a people with three thousand years of documented connection to that land, rejecting the exile that was imposed on many of them, and building upon a presence that had never left. The other national movement, the Arab Palestinian one, crystallised largely in reaction to Zionism rather than predating it, which is why the sovereign state being projected backwards into history as ancient and continuous is itself part of the inversion, not a foundation for it. Arab leaders, who rarely called themselves Palestinians then and most of whom saw themselves as part of greater Syria, rejected partition in 1937 and again in 1947. That rejection, and the violence that accompanied it across the three decades of the Mandate period, is precisely what this genre of argument leaves out. What does the enforcing are films like "Palestine 36," marketed as historical drama about the bloody Arab Revolt, but functioning as something closer to historical replacement. They strip Jewish indigeneity and continuity from the record, recast a people with millennia of connection to that land as recent colonial arrivals, and present the conflict as a simple story of indigenous resistance to foreign imposition. The purpose is not to inform Western audiences about a complex national conflict. It is to recruit them to a conclusion: that Jews and Israel are an illegitimate implant in the region, that the appropriate remedy is dismantlement, and that what would follow, the imagined state from the river to the sea, would be a tolerant, secular, democratic alternative, where Jews can live in peace under their Arab Palestinian Muslim rulers, not as a national group but as a religious minority. That last part is perhaps the most dishonest element of the entire narrative. The movements driving that agenda in the Middle East are neither democratic nor secular, and whatever secular veneer some of them maintain is precisely that, a veneer. The model being implicitly promised has no precedent among Muslim-majority states in the region, and sits in direct and unacknowledged tension with the political and religious character of the organisations whose cause these films are made to serve, like Hamas. Without all of this, October 7 cannot be made to look like the inevitable product of accumulated injustice. It looks instead like what it was: a brutal, sadistic rampage by Arab Palestinian Islamist terrorist organisations, and the civilians who joined them, to murder, rape, and kidnap Israeli citizens, residents, and foreign nationals. No historical narrative, however artfully constructed, changes what happened that morning. It only changes who the audience is willing to hold responsible for it. This is the genre James represents, and he is far from alone in it. It is not engagement with history. It is the use of a selective version of it to launder a conclusion that was held before the argument began.

Thank you @MatthewHarffy @SA_McKay & @JHillAuthor for the constant & consistent recommendation of David Gemmell’s books. I finally got “Legend” & am well into it (read 200 pages on my flight last night). Was reading Moorcock, Feist and Zelazny in the 80s but missed him. Now fixed

Oops, I made a mistake and Rob might not fit the prompt. I’m calling an audible and subbing in Mark Rein-Hagen

We are delighted to announce our first guest for Brettcon 2026! Kiran Shah MBE, Little Tonga from The Sign of Four, will be taking part in a special panel, photo sessions and autographs. Don't miss your chance to meet the great @littlekiranshah Tickets: tinyurl.com/BRETTCON2026