From Cameron
Hello people of the world!
It’s been another fun week at TPN HQ. Ray’s been away AGAIN for reasons unexplained. Luckily we had some episodes queued up for you.
So this week on the BS Filter I got to chat instead with Michael Romahn, who has been a supporter of our shows since 2010 (and has a Masters in History, so he’s smarter than both of us combined), about Vaclav Havel and the POWER OF THE POWERLESS. Really fun chat, two hours, could have gone on much longer, look forward to having him on again in the future.
I finished reading the COLOSSUS trilogy and quite enjoyed them. Now I’m back to reading Forsyth’s THE ODESSA FILE. It’s been a few months since I last picked it up and I was totally lost on what had happened in the story, so I had to ask Claude to bring me up to speed. Fascinating to use Claude side-by-side to fact-check the historical claims made in the book about the activities of Nazis in West Germany after the war. I really had no idea how influential they became. For example, this is from Claude:
West Germany’s own government-commissioned Rosenburg study found 90 of the Justice Ministry’s 170 top officials between 1949 and 1973 had been Nazi party members, 34 of those from the SA. By 1957 the ministry’s senior ranks were 77% former Nazis, a higher proportion than under the Third Reich itself. Judiciary-wide, estimates run 68-77% of judges in the 1950s-60s. Result: about 6,650 convictions total against a party membership in the millions, and most of those got light sentences because judges (themselves often former Nazi judges) set the evidentiary bar absurdly high. Hans Globke, Adenauer’s own chief of staff and effectively his top civil servant from 1953 to 1963, had co-authored the official legal commentary on the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1936. This wasn’t a low-level ward committeeman, it was the Chancellery. So the real pattern was both bottom-up (exactly as described) and top-down simultaneously, which is arguably a more damning picture than the one the novel paints.
Have to find a time to talk about that in the Cold War series.
This weekend, Chrissy and I did a two-day wing chun seminar with Master Andrew Cheung, our Grandmaster’s son, and the Chief Instructor for The Global Traditional Wing Chun Kung Fu Federation. That was how we celebrated our 18th anniversary.
Anyway, I hope you are all well and getting in trouble. Don’t let the bastards get you down and remember – you are just the universe experiencing itself. Have some fun while you can.
cheers
Cameron
My Thought For The Day
“Chou En-Lai is said to have replied to President Richard Nixon’s question of how he assessed the French Revolution: ‘It is too soon to judge.’ ”
Excerpt from
The New Russia
Mikhail Gorbachev
Our TikTok of the Week
@tpnhistory Imagine if your last name suddenly ended up becoming the word for emperor for 2,000 years, including in places where you were their enemy. ancientrome juliuscaesar historytok romanrepublic romanempire trump
♬ original sound – Cam & Ray TPN History – Cam & Ray TPN History
This Week’s Episodes
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Life of Caesar · Published 29 June 2026 The God in the Dog Mask – Vespasian #23This episode we’re deep in the Temple of Isis – which turns out to be exactly where Vespasian and Titus had to spend the night before their joint triumph, for reasons both boring and genuinely weird. We also cover Decius Mundus, a man so obsessed with a married woman that he bribed priests to let him dress up as Anubis and have sex with her…. which Josephus drops right after his suspiciously glowing account of Jesus, purely by coincidence. And… |
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Cold War · Published 9 July 2026 Cold War 312: Fatherland or Death (CUBAN REVOLUTION #37)A Belgian munitions ship called La Coubre blows up in Havana Harbour, killing somewhere between 75 and 100 people…. and Castro immediately points the finger at Washington, which is awkward given that the US had already been bombing Cuban sugar fields from Florida. Also at this funeral, Alberto Korda snaps a photo of Che Guevara that will eventually end up on condoms worldwide, and Castro coins the phrase that becomes the revolution’s motto: Patria O Muerte. The diplomats are starting… |
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Renaissance · Published 3 July 2026 The Silence of Marguerite – The Renaissance #242The Beguines were a movement of independent women who lived like nuns, owned property, preached in the vernacular, and answered to no man or church…. which, predictably, the church absolutely could not stand. We work through three of the great Beguine mystics, including Marguerite Porete, who spent 18 months on trial giving the Inquisition the silent finger before being burned alive in Paris in 1310. Her book survived, was read seriously by theologians for centuries, and wasn’t definitively credited to… |
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The Bullshit Filter · Published 10 July 2026 Havel’s Power of the Powerless – BS Filter #148Today we pick apart Václav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” – with guest Michael Romahn – and why going along to get along is exactly how every rotten system keeps itself alive. If you would like to listen to the full episode, sign up and become a supporter of the show! It’s less than the cost of a single coffee a week. The post Havel’s Power of the Powerless – BS Filter #148 appeared first on The BS Filter . |
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QAV Australia · Published 8 July 2026 Gold, Glory, and the Art of the Deal: New Financial Year Results Roundup: QAV AU #927 |
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QAV America · Published 9 July 2026 Guaranteed Returns (FG): QAV America #60This week Cameron does a full Pulled Pork on F&G Annuities and Life (ticker: FG), a Des Moines-based annuities and retirement income company that’s been through four owners in 25 years, had its share price smashed 44% from peak, and is now sitting at a QAV score of 0.862. Tony brings the context on why annuities businesses are genuinely complex to run, the tailwinds from baby boomer retirements, and why the Blackstone connection is both impressive and worth watching. Plus… |