A thread of Roman treasures looted from Constantinople in 1204 by the Venetians. Relics, statues, jeweled icons, the chalices of patriarchs, great treasures from the days of Roman glory.


The chalice of emperor Romanos and an icon containing pieces of the True Cross.

The Shimabara Rebellion by Takato Yamamoto. It is a bold depiction of the Catholic peasant uprising of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1637-8. Tokugawa’s ban on Christianity and crushing oppression led to a revolt led by a 16 year old Catholic samurai, Amakusa Shiro.





Amakusa Shiro and his battle standard with the Eucharist. Catholic peasants and many ronin rallied to his cause.

Russian tanks are getting more orky and more effective. This one has a massive armored house around it, with mine rollers and an EW pod on top to disable attack drones. It would probably take a direct artillery hit or tank shell to take it out. Same energy

People studying primitive Amazonian tribes in the jungle think they are seeing a people unchanged by time, but nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that people such as the Omagua once wore cotton clothes and were farming the land for millennia. So what happened?

Friar Gaspar de Carvajal described an Amazon of vast cities and farms in his 1542 “Account of the Recent Discovery of the Famous Grand River which was Discovered by Great Good Fortune by Captain Francisco de Orellana”. This account of a populous Amazon was considered a fantasy.

A Chinese salvage ship has been caught red-handed trying to tear apart World War 2 shipwrecks for scrap. But why would they desecrate these underwater graveyards which are protected by UN treaties? The reason: Low Background Steel. Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. With the Trinity test, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and later nuclear weapons testing, background radiation levels increased across the world.

On October 25, 1944, Imperial Japanese Navy pilot Yukio Saki executed the first successful kamikaze attack, sinking the US Navy aircraft carrier St. Lo. This thread is about that man, his last mission, and the kamikaze doctrine. In October 1944, following the loss of the Mariana Islands and the order to destroy American carriers, Vice Admiral Takijiro Onichi determined that a desperate measure was required to take out the capital ships of the US Navy: suicide bombers.

“THE GATES OF HELL ARE open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies… “

—The Aeneid, book VI, Virgil

In the Aeneid, Virgil describes the Cave of the Sibyl, an oracle of Apollo.





“A spacious cave, within its farmost part, Was hew’d and fashion’d by laborious art Thro’ the hill’s hollow sides: before the place, A hundred doors a hundred entries grace; As many voices issue, and the sound Of Sybil’s words as many times rebound.”

The great stone circle of Stonehenge was laid down c. 2500 BC by the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain. Within a century, the people who built Stonehenge would be totally wiped out and replaced by metal wielding invaders. One of the those invaders was the Amesbury Archer. In May 2002, Wessex Archaeology excavated the site of a proposed school in Amesbury, Wiltshire. The excavation revealed two graves, since dated to the Early Bronze Age c. 2,300 BC . The first grave contained the Beaker burial of a man believed to be between 35 and 45 years old.

The clay soils of the Amazon rainforest are the most nutrient poor on Earth, except for “terra preta” a dark soil with bone, pottery, manure, compost, and a high-carbon charcoal. These rich soils are anthropogenic, made by a mostly forgotten civilization thousands of years ago.



When Friar Gaspar de Carvajal sailed through the Amazon in 1541 he reported seeing massive towns all along the river and vast cultivated fields. Later explorers in 1561 reported finding few villages and mostly endless jungle. So was there a vast network of agricultural societies?

Many people know of the Herzog film “Aguirre, Wrath of God”, where Klaus Kinski plays the title role as an insane and villainous conquistador. But the true story of the Basque wanderer Lope de Aguirre far exceeds in horror and villainy what could be shown on screen. Of all the vicious and brutal men who came with the Spanish conquistadors, Lope de Aguirre, known as “El Loco” was one of the worst. After being publicly flogged, he vowed revenge against the judge and stalked him for three years before stabbing him through the skull.