They had no need to look south to figure out what being in a us-backed regime is like. They just had to remember what it was like for decades before Fidel reached Havana

He was a man of action He understood since young age the importance of knowing one's terrain He was born In a rural part of Cuba ,Biran.But there is something you must know In the war of Angola he directed the cuban strategy ,not the soviets ,and he did it from Cuba .He knew how to use the terrain in África in his behalf. Sorry for my english i don't have much practice.

Hey I’ve just been listening through this! It’s a stellar podcast!

Napoleon was shocked that when the coalition entered France there was no guerrilla war against the foreign invaders like there was in Spain.

You might be interested in checking out season 2 of the Blowback podcast with Noah Kulwin and Brendan James

It really is! I’m enjoying Season 3 very much as well though! Fascinating stuff, I’m learning a lot!

He also had inside intelligence on the attack, allowing them to ambush them. Kennedy was a good diplomat but a terrible Commander in Chief

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Besides the Caro book on Robert Moses I would maybe look at Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking about some of the inefficiencies of promoting car centered transportation on urban development.

Yes.Is there anything you want to ask me ?

We have access to secret recordings from the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Pretty much every one of Kennedy's cabinet, all older, more experienced men, were shit-talking him behind his back. All of them wanted him to escalate and bomb the island. Despite this, he stood his ground, avoided a potentially disastrous conflict and came out with a favorable conclusion to US interests.

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Yes he is, definitely.

Also did you know Castro had an unparalleled understanding of geography? Let's not forget that.

Oh, so this is just a point now? Its actually more complicated than "blame this guy"?

You're very wrong about the nazis. Their justification for all conflicts of the appeasement were about the people there veing Germans or the territory being rightful 'German' territory. Austria, then Sudetenland, then Danzig. So that is pretty much the "liberator" justification, just liberation by adding them to their country. They even did a false falg ooeration where they pretended Poland was invading them to muddy the waters further

Read 2 books this week reviews copied and pasted

A while back in another of these posts I asked for suggestions about East Germany and someone suggested The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte which I've got round to reading and it was good.

>4/5

>Pretty good. Not very long, 180 pages of main text and another 100 pages for the notes and sources. The first chapter sets out the longer term context and history of the wall and then the book basically covers all of 1989 and the process that led to the end of the Berlin Wall. The book leans heavily and convincingly into the fall of the Berlin Wall. being a total accident, with a lot of focus on the things that seem trivial and the various cockups by the GDR leadership. Has a good mix of points of view, the leadership, foreign journalists, activists etc. Personally I enjoyed the bits about the Polituburo and the leadership with the high level politics the most.

I've just now finished The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power, by Martyn Rady

>4.25/5

>Overall pretty good. 330 pages plus another 70 for sources. First book I've read specifically about the Habsburgs so I can't really compare it to anything else. Goes all the way from the medieval era to the end of WWI. The writing is good and accessible. Good mix of info both personal to the Habsburg's lives as well as their policy and territory. It also has a few chapters on secondary topics like freemasonry in Habsburg lands or scientific exploration. It took me a while to enjoy the book, it didn't do anything wrong but maybe I just wasn't as interested in the medieval stuff or the 16th century. But once I got to the Thirty Years War I thought it got a lot more enjoyable. It also has a good further reading list, which is divided by chapter, so if you really want to learn a lot about the Habsburgs this is probably a good place to start.

Next up will be Fracture: Life and Culture in the West 1918-1938, by Phillip Blom.

It is very unfortunate, but there is a huge amount of misinformation about the Bay of pigs. This began even before the invasion. To some extent, is the nature of compartmentalization of these operations, and the deception that entails, and then part of it is the result of deliberate lying. Most of the stories are very incomplete or completely wrong.

The Taylor Comission’s report on the Bay of Pigs was not fully released until the year 2000. Among other things that came out, it states how the Soviet union knew the exact date and most likely the location in advance. Sources showed that the Soviets got this knowledge on April 9, even before the Cuban exiles themselves have been briefed. I’m not sure how, but the info came from the CIA itself. Wiretap? Cryptography? A spy? I don’t know that the report says how, but that was what Maxwell Taylor’s commission reported.

Like so many things, when more information comes out, it completely changes the entire narrative. The fact that the Soviets knew in advance means that everything written before the year 2000, much of which already was pretty sketchy, is incomplete.

This happens. All the old books stay on the shelves, and the people who wrote those books or got their PhD on this usually aren’t in a rush to correct things.

Yes----BUT-----the same things that affect WHAT science is done also ensure that it must be done correctly. We have drugs for cancer and Sickle Cell Anemia because of good science, not bad politics. We have drugs for erectile dysfunction because of a serendipitous observation in a different clinical study. We have lithium and NiMH battery tech because of good science done 30 years ago. Science is ultimately results-driven and verifiable. Historical narratives often get twisted by politics.

As far as climate science goes, the problem there is more the politics than the history.

And any scientific argument based on history is very weak. Some say evolution is based on history, as in natural history, but fossils aren't history. They are scientific evidence. Evolution has overwhelming scientific evidence behind it.

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Regimes everywhere have a nasty habit of human rights abuses; we don't call them that if they don't.

“The Bay of Pigs. Please discuss.”

I think the US deserves the credit for the cuban victory there. We promised them air support and reinforcement from the marines, and reneged on both so hard that many Cubans in Miami still hold a grudge.

In case you didn’t hear the first time.

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