[transcript]

36:54 And Farah calls this out in the prior episode, she says this line like, am I ever going to be free of my history of using the guillotine? And no, not really. Everybody sees you as Madame La Guillotine. I think they call her, like, miss Guillotine. At one point in this episode, Uso calls her that.

[transcript]

48:13 Ten, USO has a brief conversation with League militaire engineer Otis about the etymology behind the organizations name and the name of its mysterious commander. Its a rapid fire succession of good research prompts, but the one that stood out from the rest as the most bizarre was Uso's statement, confirmed by Otis that League militaire actually means holy alliance and that it comes from ancient Roman. Id like to explore this claim a bit. Its an odd one. The more info were given, the more confusing the illusion seems to become. Rousseau makes it fairly clear that the name is meant to be a reference to something, but the terms he uses and the things he says about those terms point in different directions. The name of the league militaire is pretty odd overall. The english name combines the english league with the French militaire. The japanese riga sounds like a straightforward japanese pronunciation of league, but in fact, both the english league and the french league are normally rendered as rigu in Japanese. Even the spanish liga is written with a long e. Soundlla is similarly weird. Standard japanese pronunciation of the french militaire is miriteru, as used for the famous military academy Ekoru Miriteru or an Hermes bag available in Miriteru Beiji military beige. The english military would be Miritari after Gundam's league militaire. The only other prominent use of the word miritea that I could find was in the title of a super Famicom game developed by Namco. Released in the United States in December 1993 as metal Marines, and in Japan in November 1994, the japanese version bore the title Militia, written in English but with Furigana showing it was meant to be pronounced militeia, just like the militaire in league militaire. The game is set in a Sci-Fi future world where humanity has established orbiting space colonies around the earth in the aftermath of a terrible war that left much of the planet devastated. One colony garrison commander Zorgeff declared himself to be the emperor, conquered the other space colonies one by one, and then invaded the earth. The player, an officer in a civilian resistance force called the Myritea and leading a force of 16 meters tall mecha, must liberate the people of earth from Zorgefs tyrannical rule. Im guessing that this game was what you might call an unauthorized adaptation of victory Gundam, and that they got the spelling Mirytea for militia directly from victory. Still, this is good evidence for how contemporaneous audiences interpreted the term militeia. Obviously that means militia, so the term as a whole feels just a little bit off in the way that so many names in Gundam have. It's probably meant to capture the way language and pronunciation drift over time. I wonder if in the translation, the anglo french ligue militaire was chosen specifically to capture a similarly uncanny feeling of linguistic discontinuity. Militia actually strikes me as a better fit for the organization anyway, militaire implies a certain professionalism, an organization of soldiers, but the league militaire is, as people keep saying, a civilian resistance movement operating behind enemy lines and outside the formal hierarchy of the federation forces. This becomes a bit clearer when we look at the sorts of real organizations historically known as league militaire, or military league for one. In the early 20th century, the french army officer Emile Drian remembered principally as the first high ranking officer killed at the battle of Verdun, and before that as a writer of epic war fantasy novels in which the glorious armies of France crushed the perfidious Germans and British, was also one of the key figures in the creation of a political pressure group called the League Militaire. The story goes like Drian was a rising star in the french army in the 1880s, when he married the daughter of his patron, the general and minister of war, Georges Boulanger. Boulanger himself had been one of the french commanders responsible for crushing the Paris commune in 1871 and became a major political figure in the latter part of the 1880s. The nature of the movement he led has been characterized as everything from far left to far right, as one of the precursors to fascism, as socialism gone astray, etcetera, into infinity. But it was definitely populist, nationalist and animated by a mixture of anti government resentment and desire for revenge against the hated Germans. In 1889, amid fears that Boulanger was preparing to seize power in a coup d'the, government issued a warrant for his arrest. Boulanger fled Paris rather than defend himself and his boulangist movement collapsed, as did the career prospects of his son in law and protege, Drian. Drian remained in the army for several years and all reports suggest that he was an exceptional officer. But despite the promising start to his career, he found further promotion out of reaching. In 1904, it transpired that the new minister of war had collaborated with masonic lodges throughout France to secretly gather information about the political and religious positions of the members of the officer corps, creating a vast index card record so that republican and masonic officers could be preferred for promotion, while catholic, nationalist or royalist officers were held back. At first this revelation caused a major scandal, but not enough of a scandal to stop them doing it. Instead, the system of political preferment continued out in the open for a further eight years. Unsurprisingly, Driant found himself on the naughty list, partly because of his association with the disgraced Boulanger and partly because he was catholic. When news of the index card affair broke, he resigned his commission. Now a fervent opponent of Freemasonry, Drian got into politics. He started running for office and he formed a series of political leagues, the Anti Masonic League, the Joan of Arc League, and in 1908, he and a group of other former army officers created a league that they called the old army. The old army billed itself as a political pressure group affiliated with no party or broader political ideology, but exclusively focused on the reform and strengthening of the army. Well, no political ideology except strengthening the army, promoting nationalism, reviving old traditionalist values, and purging the country of Freemasonry. In 1910, in response to complaints that the term old army made them seem rather backward and narrow minded, Drian and his comrades changed the organization's name to la Ligue militaire, the military league for maintaining the traditions of the army and the defense of its interests. The league militaire endured for four years, ending with the start of the First World War. Ironically, the main thing it did during that time was to publish its own index of undesirable officers, which is to say, those soldiers that they believed to be affiliated with Freemasonry. At around the same time, but somewhat further east, a bunch of nationalist junior officers in the greek army formed a secret society which was called the League militaire in French or the military league in English. They were as nationalists frustrated by greek impotence and incompetence in a recent disastrous war against the Ottoman Empire and in the geopolitical maneuvering that followed the war. As career soldiers, they were frustrated that their own prospects for promotion were stymied by the rampant nepotism dominating the upper echelons of the armed forces. In 1909, while Druon was getting himself elected to the Chamber of Deputies, this military league went into open revolt. Rather than trying to suppress the military league, the government opted to negotiate. After months of political wrangling, the king agreed to hold new elections and the military league dissolved itself. The elections were held one year after the league went into revolt, and a reformist coalition led by the now famous cretan statesman Elephios Venizelos triumphed. A decade later, and just across the border in Bulgaria, a group of current and former army officers formed their own military league to put pressure on the government of Prime Minister Alexander Stomboliski, whose program of downsizing the army, cultivating good relations with the countrys neighbors, and focusing national resources on economic development really cheesed off the officer corps. Unlike the greek military league, who got what they wanted without spilling any blood, the bulgarian military league conspired to launch a violent coup along with other dissident factions that took the government completely off guard. Stambouliski was caught five days later by allies of the military league and was murdered in quite sickening fashion. Many of the other leaders of his movement were killed as well. Folks, I just don't think that any of these leagues militaire are a very good fit. But what about Rousseau's notion that it actually means holy alliance and comes from ancient Roman? What an odd thing for him to say. At first glance, it seems to confuse more than illuminate. Where in ligue militaire are we meant to find any sense of the sacred, even the reference to ancient Roman? Literally, he says, furui roma no cotaba. The words or the language of old Rome is not as straightforward as it might seem. It's true enough that both league and militaire, or militia, derive from latin terms league from ligare, meaning to bind together, and from which we also get words like ligament, liaison, and alliance militaire from militaris. Yet neither of these latin roots convey any sense of sacred or holy. The classical latin terms for a military alliance don't use ligarettes. When Livy describes how a military alliance of gauls and tiburtes, the people of what is now Tivoli, were defeated at the very gates of Rome in 360 BC, he called them a societate belli, an alliance for war. When Caesar wrote about an alliance of gallic tribes against his invasion, he called it both a societate, an alliance, and a foidus, a confederation. But the term ligua was used rarely in this sense by medieval latin writers. And to add another wrinkle to this shar pei of a problem, Uso doesn't actually say that the league militaire got its name from Latin. He just says it's a word of old Rome. Since Gundam has already played with the flexible nature of terms like Middle Ages, which we now know to be a period in earth history that gave rise to both bicycles and Hitler, old Roman could well mean the modern Italian spoken in Rome today. It could just as easily refer to the people of what we call the byzantine empire, who knew themselves to be roman and mostly spoke greek. Or the connection with holiness, the Shinsei in Shinsei dome might instead suggest that the origin lies in the Shinsei roma te koku, or the Holy Roman Empire. And this would not be entirely without precedent. As listeners soup and Luna pointed out, the name of Bespa officer Pipinidan is a japanese pronunciation of the german term for the descendants of the medieval frankish lord Pepin of Landon. In English, we call them the Pipinids. And the most famous scion of that house was Charlemagne, who was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III and thus became either the first holy roman emperor or a precursor to that position, depending on your opinion about the continuity between the carolingian and autonian empires and how much you want to get into an argument today. For our purposes, let's just agree to call it close enough to bring the Holy Roman Empire, its frankish predecessors and its austrian successors into victorys orbit. As for the connection between the austrian holy roman frankish empires and the League militaire, well, that will have to wait for next week when I start looking at holy alliances and sacred leagues throughout history.

[transcript]

02:41 In his newsletter, LA Times reporter Matt Pierce writes, in the big picture, for a journalist, this is just a different variation of the post hyperlink AI driven business model that Meta and Google are already building towards. 1 in which the world's Internet users park in one spot, look at ads, and are passively served free content via an algorithm. Canada just got there a little earlier than the rest of us. Speaking of the AI future, chip manufacturer NVIDIA's stock plunged mid April, signaling to some a lack of confidence in the future of artificial intelligence technology, or at the very least, that the growth expectations for the corporations producing its technological backing are simply too big to beat. Quote, while companies are investing heavily to build AI powered chatbots, not all of their experiments are boosting revenue and productivity, writes Peter Cohen for Forbes.

[transcript]

12:51 Rosie Greer being the name of the La Rams I

[transcript]

50:45 Neil STRAUSSI made to Live and Die in La and

[transcript]

01:37 fun other than you know, in LA.

[transcript]

01:43 and some of his lovely friends from LA and did 01:49 out with some of our LA folks, Miles and Jack 01:54 It was really great. We got a great LA crew

[transcript]

19:14 La May by Align Hussey.

[transcript]

13:45 LA

[transcript]

02:34 la collègue, 05:30 La tristesse, 06:12 La colère,

[transcript]

02:21 at least everyone in la an idiot, except for a

[transcript]

15:25 LA

[transcript]

20:36 la

[transcript]

14:46 in Hong Kong, Singapore, La,

[transcript]

10:43 réduire la charcuterie et réduire la viande. 08:59 c'est la vie." 14:10 "Pour la ménagère,

[transcript]

22:28 "Adesso è la prima volta con la mia macchina." 22:36 Oder "questa volta è la prima con la mia macchina." Aber irgendjemand von euch