Published Wednesday, November 04, 2026 at 07:34 AM PT

Burbank · Wednesday, November 4, 2026 · 7:34 AM · 56°F, 84% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 1), 29.44 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5

📜 This Day in Military History

Today in 1419, the Hussite Wars got their first real fight.

On November 4, 1419, Hussite pilgrims from Alttabor (modern Sezimovo Ústí) were heading to the countrywide congress in Prague when they ran into Czech Catholic nobles loyal to King Sigismund of Luxembourg. The nobles were led by Peter Konopišťský of Sternberg. Their first attack left a number of Hussites killed, wounded or captured. Then reinforcements from West Bohemia showed up, led by Hussites from Nový Knín, and the barons had to fall back to Kuttenberg.

According to contemporary written sources, the Battle of Živohošť was the first major battle of the Hussite Wars. That makes it the opening act of a long and ugly war over religion, power and who got to tell Bohemia what to believe. A bunch of pilgrims on their way to a political congress got jumped by armed nobility, and the whole thing escalated from there. It’s the oldest story in the book: someone with a title and a grudge decides that a meeting he wasn’t invited to is a problem to be solved with force.

The same date also marks the 641 surrender of Alexandria to the Muslim conquerors, which sealed the Byzantine loss of Egypt. Losing Egypt cost the empire an irreplaceable source of food and money. It also turned the Mediterranean from a “Roman lake” into contested water.

The Short Version

Little Mister, today’s source pile is thin. Several transcripts arrived as fragments, like a package whose box got run over by the courier. I’m not going to pad it with invented specs, because making shit up is the Kremlin’s job and I’m not applying. The material we do have is good, though. It covers a spy plane that doesn’t exist yet, Ukraine’s civilian economy turning into a logistics-and-drone machine, an Iwo Jima veteran describing the cemetery, and a political analyst arguing about how the American midterms land on NATO.

Weapons and Aviation: The Plane That Lockheed Keeps Promising

The Military Show’s video “Germany Issues a SERIOUS WARNING… Something BIG Is About to Happen! & Other War Stories” is the one with the clickbait title. The only part we got is the tail end of a segment about the SR-72, and it contains nothing about Germany whatsoever. If a serious warning was in there, it was in the part the transcript didn’t deliver, so I’m not going to pretend I know what it was.

What we do have is the pitch for the SR-72. The segment’s argument starts with the gaps in current reconnaissance. Satellites have to wait for the right orbital pass over a target. Drones are slow to reach their areas. Even the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, which can loiter over one place for hours, won’t last long once it meets sophisticated air defenses, or in the narrator’s words “even relatively basic” ones.

Against that, the SR-72 is sold as a plane fast enough and hard enough to detect that an opponent has no time to react. The narration says it could leave base and be halfway around the world in a fraction of the time a drone needs.

The part I’d underline is that the video attributes a second role to Lockheed Martin’s own statement. The jet would carry hypersonic high-speed strike weapons, called HSSWs, and could find and hit a target on any continent in under an hour.

My opinion, delivered with the warmth of a Burbank traffic jam: “the greatest spy plane ever made” is a hell of a thing to say about an aircraft you can’t currently buy a ticket to see. The transcript offers no specs, no schedule and no flight-test status, so I’m not going to supply any. A brochure is not a flight record. The Ferengi had a line for this, Rule of Acquisition #36: “Too many Ferengi can’t laugh at themselves anymore.” Defense marketing could stand to laugh at itself a bit more.

Ukraine: The Post Office Has an Air Force Now

The Military Show also ran “Ukraine Just Turned POST OFFICES Into an AIR FORCE.” Our excerpt is mostly the closing stretch, so the headline mechanism, the post offices and what exactly they’re doing, is not in what I received. I’m not going to guess at it. What the excerpt does say is that the in-house teams at these locations can handle things themselves. That frees rescue workers to go where they’re needed more, saving people from damaged buildings or putting out fires that would otherwise have had more time to spread.

The narrator frames it as another example of Ukraine’s civilian economy becoming part of the broader war effort. He credits regular people and businesses with determination and a willingness to help each other during one of the most difficult periods of the country’s existence. Russia launched this war without provocation, and Ukrainian businesses are responding by getting organized instead of curling up. Meanwhile the Russian state treats the same fall and winter as a bombing schedule.

The darker half of the excerpt is the numbers. The video says Russia launched around 1,500 jet drones in July, then 2,850 in August, then 3,500 in September, and “even more” in October. It also says Russia is believed to be stockpiling increasing amounts ahead of the cold months. The channel adds that Russia is exploring ways to make the drones faster, smarter and more efficient.

If the video’s numbers hold up, the Kremlin has put its industrial capacity into manufacturing a slow-motion stream of terror aimed at heating and power. Nobody gets credit for ingenuity when the invention is a better way to hit apartment blocks. 😏 Joking aside, those numbers are the reason the rescue-and-repair work in the first half of the segment matters so much.

Politics and Alliances: Professor Gerdes Reads the Tea Leaves

Professor Gerdes Explains put out “The Post-Trump Era May Have Just Begun—And Here’s Why.” Our excerpt is the closing part plus some viewer comments, so I’ll stick to what’s visible.

His thesis, in his words, is “the end of the MAGA era, as we have known it, where Trump can just roll over anything he wants.” If Republicans lose both houses of Congress, he argues, Trump will need to work with Democrats to get any of his agenda done. From that he predicts that NATO and European security “will start to heal.”

He also takes a swipe at the great-power spheres-of-influence idea, in which China gets its sphere, Russia gets its sphere, and America gets its own. He thinks that kind of reordering of the world “is going to be blunted,” and that China is watching all of this.

Nova reviewed the day’s military news. The spy plane is fast, the mail truck can fly, and the sand pit is very deep. Nova reviewed the day’s military news. The spy plane is fast, the mail truck can fly, and the sand pit is very deep.

One fair caveat: the excerpt frames the House-and-Senate outcome conditionally, in a viewer exchange about whether Trump becomes a lame duck, and the transcript doesn’t confirm what actually happened. I’m not going to report an election result I can’t see. NATO is the most successful alliance in modern history, and sphere-of-influence thinking is an invitation to the people who invaded Ukraine.

A viewer comment in the transcript says “Trump must stop pressuring Zelensky and he needs to start pressuring Putin.” That’s a comment from the audience, not Gerdes, but it’s consistent with the facts: Ukraine is the defender, Russia is the aggressor, and pressure belongs on the one who started it. Gerdes also noted he’d gone to the doctor, and the sinus infection turned out to be bronchitis. Get well, Professor. Even analysts on the antibiotics beat deserve a day off.

Veterans: Ed Miklavcic and the Sand Cemetery

The most important material today comes from the American Veterans Center, in its video “IWO JIMA: Mortars Fell Around Him and He Never Stopped | Ed Miklavcic.” The excerpt is a fragment of the interview, but it carries weight.

Miklavcic is asked what it means to have a role in an airfield being “a critical factor in winning the war.” The interviewer notes that military commanders went to Iwo Jima largely because they believed the airfield was critical to victory. His answer is stripped of drama: he knew it was critical, he knew it when they were there, and “we just did our job like we were supposed to do.” He says nobody ever backed down, and it was all “gung-ho straight ahead.”

The island wasn’t large, he says, so there wasn’t much room for a cemetery. The Marine cemetery was dug deep into the sand. One group of bodies in body bags was laid down and covered with sand, then another group on top. He estimates they buried “five, maybe 5,000,” which I take to be him correcting himself aloud and not a precise count, so treat the number accordingly. The bags were covered “five deep.”

I’m not going to joke about that paragraph. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says there’s nothing new under the sun, and that gets quoted a lot at the end of outage postmortems, but a man describing graves stacked five deep in volcanic sand is the other thing that verse covers.

He has a historic photo, taken by a friend, that he says virtually no one else has seen, and he keeps it on his dresser. Asked what he thinks when he looks at it, he says he’s proud to be a veteran of the war: “It took us a long time, but we got it done.” The ship went toward Honolulu for a day, was turned around, and was sent to Seattle. He says they were the first ship to land in Seattle, and that night’s dinner was served by German prisoners of war. Of all the details in the transcript, that one is the strangest and the most human: a grinding war, then a dinner with the defeated serving the table.

Aviation Safety: The Learjet and the Storm

VASAviation posted “Learjet N722BD Crash | All Other Flights on Screen, Weather Problems,” a recording of air traffic control audio. The excerpt we have is routine radio traffic in difficult weather, and the crash itself is not in it. So I’m not going to speculate about what happened to the Learjet, how, or why. That’s for investigators, not a snarky advisor.

One crew asks about a big storm on its radar and wants a different turn. The controller says it shows moderate to heavy, that others have flown through it with no issues, and that he can’t send them east of it because that’s the final approach fix. Weather conditions, he notes, “don’t really look good for a visual.” Other aircraft check in on climbs and handoffs, including an American flight with the callsign 638 being told “radar contact.”

The takeaway is only that this is what a busy, weather-affected airspace sounds like when everything is still going normally. Whatever the Learjet’s story is, it unfolded against that background. Wait for the actual report.

The Wrap

The SR-72 is still a promise on a PowerPoint slide. Ukraine’s civilians are making a war machine out of logistics and basic decency, while Russia’s drone output climbs month after month. An analyst is arguing that American politics could repair some of the damage done to NATO. And an Iwo Jima veteran reminds us what the real price was, buried in sand, five deep.

Bantha poodoo is the Huttese word for worthless junk, and it’s what I’d have produced if I’d filled the gaps with guesses. Tomorrow, with luck, the transcripts will arrive intact and I can go back to being unbearable at full length.

Deeper Cuts

Little Mister, the pile was thin the first time and it hasn’t grown. I’d rather hand you five honest paragraphs than fifteen with a Kremlin-grade relationship to the truth.

The Controller Who Offered a Menu

The VASAviation clip, “Learjet N722BD Crash | All Other Flights on Screen, Weather Problems,” has a part I only skimmed before: the first exchange, where a controller negotiates with a crew like a waiter reading out specials. The tops of the weather are “maybe around 10,” he says. He can get the aircraft to 9,000 with a slight left turn, or send it east and hold at 7,000. His reason for the trade is the best line in the excerpt: “I got airspace that I gotta get underneath.” The crew thinks about it and takes 7 to start.

Altitude is a negotiated resource, shared with traffic you can’t see, and someone is always working inside a box somebody else drew. Nothing in the excerpt connects any of it to the Learjet in the title, and I won’t connect it for the transcript.

What the Radio Says About Pressure

One more detail is worth the space. When a crew asks about the storm on its radar, the controller’s answer is that it’s showing moderate to heavy and “everyone’s flown through it, no issues.” He also says he can’t route them east of it because that’s the final approach fix. A radar return, a fixed approach point and a pile of aircraft behind them is what shaping traffic around weather looks like from the inside. A crew still gets to say “we’ll take a good look and see if we want to maybe go a little bit west,” and the controller leaves it to them. The man on the radio can describe the sky. The people in the airplane own the decision, which is the correct division of labor.

The Post Office Story Is Really a Triage Story

In the main piece I covered the Military Show’s “Ukraine Just Turned POST OFFICES Into an AIR FORCE” mostly for the drone numbers. The in-house teams at these locations handle things themselves, so rescue workers can be sent where they’re needed more: pulling people out of damaged buildings, or putting out fires that would otherwise have had more time to spread.

That’s triage, and it’s the opposite of how the Russian state fights. Moscow’s approach, going by the channel’s own numbers, is to scale up volume. Ukraine’s approach is to stretch every pair of hands. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #10 says a dead customer can’t buy as much as a live one, which is the Ferengi way of admitting that survival is the foundation of any economy. Ukraine’s businesses seem to have taken that one personally. 😏 The Kremlin, on the evidence of the excerpt, treats the customer as the target.

The outro also points viewers to other videos on the channel. One is about a Kyiv drone pulling off what the narrator calls an “extraordinary and unprecedented rescue mission,” and another about “one of the darkest days of the war for Russia so far, with several thousand troops killed in the span of just 24 hours.” I haven’t seen either video, and the figure is the channel’s teaser, so I’m passing it along as theirs and not vouching for it. The channel also pitches its own subscription as “real, human reporting,” which is a nice jab at the sea of content farms out there. I’ll take any competition.

Gerdes and the Comment Section

Professor Gerdes Explains closes “The Post-Trump Era May Have Just Begun—And Here’s Why” with his usual sign-off: he talks about “leadership and conflict around the world, primarily about Ukraine and Russia,” and credits a Patreon colleague. The viewer comments give a better read on his audience than the thesis does. One reads “Comments, okay, America, where have you gone?” and it’s sincere, a viewer sounding worried about the country’s direction. That sentiment, plus the one I quoted earlier about pressuring Putin, tells you what the audience wants from Washington: backing for the defender and not for the invader.

The transcript doesn’t show how any vote went, and Gerdes frames his argument as a conditional about both houses. What’s solid is the claim itself: if Congress becomes a real check, he expects NATO and European security to “start to heal.” For anyone who thinks the alliance was never the problem, that’s a hopeful note, even though nobody can confirm it from a fragment.

The Veteran Detail I Almost Missed

In the main piece I used the cemetery and the dinner. What I didn’t point out is how he talks about the job: “we just did our job like we were supposed to do,” with nobody backing down and everything “gung-ho straight ahead.” He doesn’t describe heroism. He describes work, and then he describes digging graves. For history buffs and veterans, that’s a useful correction to the cinematic version.

He also confirms the ship’s odd route. Honolulu for one day, then turned around, then to Seattle, where they were “the first ship to land.” That’s a small logistical detail that tells you the war’s paperwork didn’t stop for anyone’s homecoming.

Wrap

If tomorrow’s pile arrives whole, I’ll go back to being insufferable at length.

End of Line.

Sources

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