Podcasts about Genghis Khan

SKIP TO 00:17:40 TO GET TO THE EPISODE Episode 133: The Haunting of OP Rock and The Ghosts of the War in Afghanistan Since the time of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, empires have routinely set up shop in Afghanistan before inevitably collapsing, one after the other. Following 9/11, President Bush declared a “War on Terror” that would launch the United States into 20 years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2009 following President Obama's decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to the country, members of the marines and the army began experiencing strange paranormal occurrences - especially in the Afghan province of Helmand. Perhaps the best illustration of these supernatural happenings is in the story of OP Rock: a military observation post first occupied by the Welsh Guard before being taken over by the Marines. This episode explores the testimony of several soldiers in Afghanistan during the period of 2009 - 2011 and the ghostly lights, apparitions, disembodied voices, and hallucinations they encountered. Thank you very much to all the men and women who agreed to be interviewed for this episode. We appreciate you all so much and we believe you! This episode is sponsored! Buy Manscaped products: https://www.manscaped.com & use code “LETSGETHAUNTED” for 20% off + free shipping. TIME STAMPS 00:00:00 - INTRO & DONORS 00:13:20 - MANSCAPED AD 00:17:40 - PART I: THE HEART OF ASIA 00:38:00 - PART II: AFGHANISTAN IN THE MODERN ERA 01:01:00 - PART III: OP ROCK 02:20:00 - PART IV: KEY INTERVIEW CLIPS 02:47:40 - PART V: THE THEORIES Please reach out to Matt Parks to let him know that you listened to his interview this episode! Matt's Instagram (which he created just to interact with our show) is: @festergibs_00, link: https://instagram.com/festergibs_00?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= Matt's YouTube channel is: https://www.youtube.com/@sirparksalot2461 —— Other Important Stuff: WE ARE STARTING A PATREON!!! STAY TUNED!! http://patreon.com/letsgethaunted Buy Our Merch: https://www.letsgethaunted.com Donate to our stupid show: https://ko-fi.com/dogmomusa Check out the photo dump for this week's episode: https://www.instagram.com/letsgethaunted Send us fan mail: PO BOX 1658 Camarillo, CA 93011 Send us your listener stories: LetsGetHauntedPod@gmail.com —— BACKGROUND MUSIC - “Aftermath” by Kevin MacLeod found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJApqlWZTHo - “Abyss” by Myuu, link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XmKYYm1Elw

The most disruptive and transformative event in the Middle Ages wasn't the Crusades, the Battle of Agincourt, or even the Black Death. It was the Mongol Conquests. Even after his death, Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire grew to become the largest in history—four times the size of Alexander the Great's and stretching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. But the extent to which these conquering invasions and subsequent Mongol rule transformed the diverse landscape of the medieval Near East have been understated in our understanding of the modern world.Today's guest is Nicholas Morton, author of “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Middle East.” We discuss the overlapping connections of religion, architecture, trade, philosophy and ideas that reformed over a century of Mongol rule. Rather than a Euro- or even Mongol-centric perspective, this history uniquely examines the Mongol invasions from the multiple perspectives of the network of peoples of the Near East and travelers from all directions—including famous figures of this era such as Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, and Roger Bacon, who observed and reported on the changing region to their respective cultures—and the impacted peoples of empires—Byzantine, Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks, Ayyubid, Armenian, and more—under the violence of conquest.

Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode we discuss The Analects of Confucius and virtuous living. We cover a wide range of topics including: Confucian virtues The differences between Confucianism and Taoism The value of friendships between the young and their elders How to govern through example in a Confucian way Transmitting the values of ancients to contemporary times Ancient Chinese religions And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode. Mentioned in the show: Desnudo Coffee in Austin Johnathan Bi and David Perell's Girard Lecture series link Hardcore History: Wrath of the Khans Hardcore History: The Death Throes of the Republic Ancient Chinese religions Dolphin birthing center TikTok Books mentioned: The Clouds by Aristophanes Falling Upward by Richard Rohr People mentioned: Rumi (24:35) Richard Rohr (48:26) Johnathan Bi and David Perell (54:00) Graham Hancock (1:14:51) Show Topics: (0:00) Feedback about the Made You Think title – time for a possible rebrand? (1:44) Tangent Fuel Coffee and Desnudo Coffee in Austin (8:18) TikTok SEO's early days and Nat's experience on BookTok (12:40) About Confucius (15:45) Socrates, Confucius, and Buddha lived in the same 100 years (18:12) Confucianism vs. Taoism (20:28) The meaning of Books 10 and 18 in Analects (23:20) Confucianism vs. Stoicism (24:35) Confucius or Rumi? Adil reads quotes from each and Nat and Neil guess the author (31:34) The Golden Rule appearing in Analects - twice! (33:54): How to retain an author's original meaning while translating their work, especially when translating poetry or religious texts (36:35) How The Clouds by Aristophanes contirbuted to Socrates' death (38:00) The meaning of filial piety and how Confucius prescribes mourning for one's parents (42:03) How our society is stratified by age and the difficulties in making friends with people much older (48:26) Falling Upward by Richard Rohr (52:20) The narcissism of small differences and Girard (54:55) Governing through virtue and example (59:15) Genghis Khan breaking up groups with homogenous sets of beliefs – TK LINK Genghis Khan series (1:00:03) Parallels between the decline of the Roman Republic and the US – TK LINK Rome series (1:05:10) Unexpected appearance of the word “God” in the text, ancient Chinese folk religions, matrilineal cultures (1:10:48) Confucius's views on friendship and how to choose your friends (1:11:47) Confucius transmitting values from earlier periods which were abandoned by his contemporaries (1:14:51) Graham Hancock interviews and conspiracies (1:20:15) “The pine and the cypress are the last to lose their leaves” (1:24:00) Final notes and wrap-up If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes and tell a friend. As always, let us know if you have any book recommendations! You can say hi to us on Twitter @TheRealNeilS, @adilmajid, @nateliason and share your thoughts on this episode. You can now support Made You Think using the Value-for-Value feature of Podcasting 2.0. This means you can directly tip the co-hosts in BTC with minimal transaction fees. To get started, simply download a podcast app (like Fountain or Breez) that supports Value-for-Value and send some BTC to your in-app wallet. You can then use that to support shows who have opted-in, including Made You Think! We'll be going with this direct support model moving forward, rather than ads. Thanks for listening. See you next time!

The Survival and Basic Badass Podcast: Genghis Khan Emperor Of All Men Find Out More @ www.preppingbadass.com

Genghis Khan leads his Mongol army into Central Asia. One of his first opponents, is the Muslim Khwarezm Shah Empire. This begins the long, bloody, and brutal Mongol invasion of the Muslim world.

Episode 100!!! AHHHH!!!! Welcome to a fun one guys, because we are trying something new - Mystery Histories! For our 100th episode, Kat and Kaleigh give biographies of famous figures from history without giving their name.  Tune in to play along and to see how long it takes us to figure out who the other is talking about!Let's Chat! Twitter: @TINAHLpodcastEmail: thisisnotahistorylecture@gmail.comRemember to rate us wherever you can!SPOILERS BELOW:Kat covered Genghis KhanKaleigh Covered Marco Polo

In this episode, we discuss the rise of Genghis Khan, and how he united the Mongol tribes and began expanding into China and Central Asia.

This week our story kicks off with the death of pope Gregory IX, nonagenarian impeccable foe of emperor Frederick II. Peace is in the air. Of the 11 cardinals getting together in the dilapidated Septizonium once built by emperor Septimus Severus, half wanted a more conciliatory vicar of Christ, but the other half did not. The very first papal conclave followed as the senator Matteo Orsini locks the cardinals up in horrible conditions. When finally one of them is chosen, he died just 17 days later from the exertions.By now all the cardinals have fled and the church remains without a head for almost 2 years. At the same time the descendants of Genghis Khan descend upon Europe. Jerusalem falls to the Turks, the Latin empire of Constantinople is on its last leg.. Is it time for the emperor and the pope to bury the hatchet and face the real enemies of Christendom…..?Episode webpage with transcript and images can be found here: Episode 88 - A Road to Peace • History of the Germans PodcastThe music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H.545 by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (or some claim it as BWV 1031 Johann Sebastian Bach) performed and arranged by Michel Rondeau under Common Creative Licence 3.0.As always:Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.comFacebook: @HOTGPod Twitter: @germanshistoryInstagram: history_of_the_germansReddit: u/historyofthegermansPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/Historyofthegermans

This week we're joined by author Ryan Uytdewilligen to discuss one of the worst movies ever made.  Join us for The Conqueror We've launched a Patreon, so fans can now support the show and help keep the lights on at ISTYA towers. There are various benefits on offer, and we can assure you that Joe wearing his rubber dungarees isn't one of them. To sign up please visit https://www.patreon.com/istya If you want to contact the show, or simply have a chinwag with the chaps, then follow us on Twitter, join in the conversation on our Reddit page, or you can even contact us on good old email by sending your missives to - show@isawthatyearsago.com

Idaho State Senator and former Marine Ben Adams joins Braxton to discuss Idaho exceptionalism, the heinous crime of sports betting, and tobacco inflation.

Last time we spoke Hong Xiuquan had gathered a rabble of peasants, named them the god worshippers and declared war upon the Qing dynasty. He gave titles to his closest comrades forming the North, South, East, West and Flank Kings who led the great Taiping armies on a march towards the secondary capital of China, Nanjing. Countless cities fell the Taiping and the Qing desperately tried to encircle and quell the menace. But the Taiping never stayed in any given place long enough to be captured and even when they were dealt significant losses, they simply moved on and recruited more and more to their cause. Their armies grew exponentially and so did their conquests until they reached the secondary capital of China, Nanjing. Nanjing was put through a brutal siege and taken, her citizens put to the sword and now the Taiping held a grand capital city.   #26 This episode is The Taiping Rebellion part 3: The Heavenly Kingdom of Tianjing   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War.   14 years after his first vision, Hong Xiuquan alongside an incredible 2 million followers had captured the secondary capital of China, Nanjing. Hong Xiuquan, the heavenly king, Yang Xiuqing the East King and the surviving Taiping leadership had developed their military based on the work of the late Feng Yunshan and their combined experiences from the march from the Thistle Mountains all the way to Nanjing. Much like the military structure the new capital would have 4 families linked to every corporal's family and 25 family units linked under every sergeant. These communities would build the public granaries, chapels for worship and so forth. The sergeants would dwell in chapels, the corporals would take their family and those families under their command to sabbath to worship. Every sabbath day, all senior officers, from generals to captains would visit one of the great churches of the sergeants to pray and work hard obeying the Ten commandments.    By day people would work the land, all serving in some form, whether it was pottery, ironwork, carpentry, masonry, whatever according to their skills. The land under Taiping rule was divided up amongst all with one full share for every man and women aged 16 and older and half a share for children below 16. All of the land was graded according to its productivity and when land was insufficient for the peoples needs, the people were moved to land that was plentiful. Of the products of labor, each corporal saw to it that every family under him had food, but all the rest went to the public treasuries. Sergeants checked the books and tallied the accounts, presenting records to superiors “ for all people on this earth are as the family of the Lord their God on High, and when people of this earth keep nothing for their private use but give all things to God for all to use in common, then in the whole land every place shall have equal shares, and every one be clothed and fed. This was why the Lord God expressly sent the Taiping Heavenly Lord to come down and save the world.”   The public treasuries would give gifts to every family at times of birth, marriage and death according their needs, but never in excess of one thousand copper cash or one hundred catties of grain. Surpluses had to be maintained incase of famine or war. Every family unit with a living male head had to give a soldier to the army, but the Taiping would not take widowers, widows, orphans or childless, nor weak or sick. With births came new families and every 5th family gave a new corporal, and every 25th a new sergeant and so on. All officers and officials, even the highest would be reviewed every 3 years and promoted or demoted according to performance. This was the system pushed out upon Nanjing when it was taken. As you can imagine it was a goliath task to meet these demands, thus the system could not actually be implemented all at once, but they were diligent to starting the listing and recording keeping to establish it. Not everyone flocked eagerly to the Taiping ranks. Many households were reluctant to register their members and hid for weeks, countless fled Nanjing.    The Taiping burnt down countless Taoist and Buddhist architecture, smashed statues and image and stripped or killed priests. Everyone was to conform to the new Taiping religion. Notably though the Chinese Muslims in Nanjing were not attacked and their mosques were allowed to stand. One group in Nanjing that were in a position of particular ambiguity were the catholics who numbered around 200. At least 30 catholics were burned in their homes or cut down in the streets during the early chaos. The Taiping found the catholic survivors in a catholic church, but when pressed they refused to recite Taiping liturgy. The Taiping authorities gave them 3 days to comply, then they burst into the church and destroyed the cross and overturned their altar. 70-80 catholic men had their arms tied behind their backs and were given a trial before a Taiping judge and condemned to death unless they said Taiping prayers. They refused opting for martyrdom, but in the end 25 eventually recited the Taiping prayers and the rest were sent to be vanguard forces in the army. In order to push the movement, the Taiping had to seize the Nanjing printing industry to distribute their sacred texts to all the sergeants for reading and preaching. Back when the Taiping captured Yangzhou in april of 1853 they acquired printing press craftsmen, so they brought them to Nanjing.   Hong Xiuquan makes 3 major strategic decisions, the first was to select Nanjing as the new Taiping Capital now known as Tianjing, the second was to create the printing system to promote the Taiping program and the 3rd was to alter name places in China. Hong Xiuquan proclaimed henceforth the city of Beijing was to be named “Yaoxue- demon's den” and the province of Zhili “criminal's province”. When all the Manchu demons were destroyed, Beijing's name could be restored and Zhili once its people repented for their sins and began worshiping the heavenly father. “The world has long been deluded by these demonic Tartars, and it is imperative that they be soon destroyed. But before we destroy these people, we must first destroy their bases. And before we can destroy the power of their bases, we must first destroy the bases' names.” Emperor Xianfeng by definition was the leader of earthly demons and Hong Xiuquan changed his name that meant “united in glory” to have a dog component added and he also did this to terms referring to Manchu.   The Taiping followers in Nanjing were told the time to end sexual separation had not come yet, any men who forced themselves on women, whether they be veterans or new would be executed. Those who worked as prostitutes would not only be executed, but also their families. Male homosexuality was severly punished, if partner were both aged 13 or older they would be beheaded. If you were under 13 you could be spared unless it was proven you were an active partner. The city of Nanjing was divided similar to what the Taiping did in Wuchang, with blocks for men and those for women and children. Those skilled in specific types of labor lived amongst another, for example carpenters with carpenters tailors with tailors.    Hong Xiuquan had a ceremonial hat made with a fan shaped front, decorated with twin dragons and twin phoenixes. The other kings were allowed to have twin dragons as well but only one phoenix. On the upper part of Hong Xiuquans hat he alone had written “the mountains and river are unified and the heavens are filled with stars”. The 3 surviving kings each had one line embroidered on their hats; for the East king Yang Xiuqing “long phoenix perching in the clouds”, for the north king Wei Changhui “long phoenix perching on the mountain peak” and for the flank king Shi Dakai “lone phoenix perching on the peony”.   Hong Xiuquan had 10,000 people work for 6 months to built him a palace in the former site of the governor generals mansion in the center of the northern side of the main residential city. Within mere days of taking Nanjing, the Qing began counter attacks leading to the gates of Nanjing being reinforced with additional gates built in front or behind the existing ones. Cannon emplacements and palisades for gunners are created en masse. Forward defensive encampments, wooden watch towers as high as 30 or even 40 feet are created. Smaller towns surrounded nanjing are reinforced. Large swathes of area have ditches dug, palisades erected, felled, honeycombed networked of small round holes with straw placed over them and bamboo spikes underneath. Its a regional fortress built with the purpose of overthrowing the Qing.   Now until the capture of Nanjing, the Taiping had been a mobile force whose success for a large part was simply because they would seize a major city and move on before the Qing could get them. The establishment of their Tianjing Capital meant the core of the Taiping movement, its leadership and central army were now in a fixed position. The Qing could finally plan and coordinate large scale action directed at their capital. Interestingly enough, the decision to hunker down in Nanjing is what many scholars regard as the crucial reason for their eventual failure. If they had simply done what they done best and took Nanjing for perhaps a month or so and moved on to Beijing they could have very well toppled the Qing. None the less, the Taiping were in a good position in Nanjing compared to that on Beijing. It is estimated in 1853 Nanjing held 18 million taels of silver, while Beijing was depleted to a possible 3 million. The Nanjing granaries by the end of 1853 totalled 1,270,000 piculs of unhulled rice and 750,000 hulled rice, sufficient to feed the Taiping for many months. An American missionary named E.C Bridgman visited Nanjing in may of 1854 and reported “all the people we saw were well-clad, well fed and well provided for in every way. They all seemed content, and in high spirits as if sure of success”. The surrounding areas continued to supply Nanjing with grain and the Yangtze river continued to serve as its artery of communication and trade.   Now once they had Nanjing the Taiping set out to accomplish their ultimate goal, the final defeat of the Manchu demons in Beijing. But when the Taiping took Nanjing a lot of internal strife began to grow. While Hong Xiuquan was the bonafide religious and political leader to the Taiping, he was never alone and although many of the great figureheads had died, a few large ones remained. Yang Xiuqing the east king, Wei Changhui the north king and Shi Dakai the flank king were the 3 largest leaders alongside Hong Xiuquan. Yang Xiuqing established himself as the highest ideological leader, above that of Wei Changhui and in many aspects above hong Xiuquan. When Xiao Chaogui the West King died, Hong Xiuquan made a proclamation that granted Yang a supervisory power over the 4 other kings, clearly promoting him above the rest. When Xiao Chaogui died, Shi Dakai sort of filled the dead kings space in many ways and when  Nanjing was captured he was the only king constantly occupied in the field, directing and personally leading western campaigns. Hong Xiuquan as the spiritual leader, began to gradually isolate himself within his palace only acting through proclamations. Wei Changhui the north king, acted as the coordinator for the defense of the region around the capital and was responsible for food supplies. This left general administrative supervision in the hands of Yang Xiuqing who also acted as the coordinator of all military campaigns. Now Yang Xiuqing back in the early days of 1851 had coalesced the Taiping when he began in trance-like states to state he was the mouthpiece of God the father. Likewise Xiao Chaogui had these trances where he said he was the mouthpiece of Jesus, hmmmmm. Oh and there was a lot of roleplay in this by the way, when Xiao Chaogui spoke to Hong Xiuquan in a trance state he would refer to him as “younger brother” like wise Yang would refer to him as son. Both Yang and Xiao it seems were in league with another using this unique trance behavior to raise their status. But when Xiao died, there was a lot of confusion, leading Yang to stop messing around for awhile as the voice of god the father. But in december of 1853 Yang once again began to speak publicly as the voice of god. Yang began a campaign where he attempted to humiliate the heavenly king using trances as the voice of god. Yang begins a campaign to humiliate Hong where he uses the voice of god to accuse the Heavenly King of growing to be too harsh and indulgent with his power. That he is harsh to women who serve him and far too indulgent of his 4 year old son. One accusation in particular was that 4 of Hong's palace women were treated so badly that they should be released from Hong's palace and instead should live at Yang's palace. Yang says Hong orders women under him to work in rain or snow and allows his concubines to sneer and scold the other women, oh yes despite all the laws and such Hong and many of the Taiping leaders have concubines. Remember when I said the Taiping rebellion was like a proto marxist one? Yes just like any good marxist they dont live the way they preach, shots fired. Yang continues to argue the women officials are prevented from their duties by the mean concubines and that Hong Xiuquan had even kicked some of them in anger and punished pregnant concubines similarly, something that is a serious crime. You don't kick pregnant women. He follows this up saying in God's voice that the heavenly king should receive 40 blows of the rod for his derelictions. To this Hong publicly prostrated himself to receive said blows, so god would forgive him. Hong's 4 year old son is said to be too self-indulgent and willful because he plays in the rain, and smashes presents given to him…..weird. God states he must stop all of this because it will lead him to abuse the people in the future when he leads.   Yang Xiuqing did not stop at attacking Hong, he also went after two others in particular: the north king Wei Chanhui and marquis Qin Rigang, both men who had been with Hong since the earliest days at Thistle mountain. Wei was an educated man, Qin was a miner who studied military arts and proved himself a formidable strategist. For years both men handled key military assignments for Hong, Qin was regarded as the senior ranking Taiping officer after the surviving kings. Yang began to use the voice of god to humiliate Wei in many ways. Whenever his trances began, Yang's woman attendants would summon Wei at once using drum calls and if Wei was late the women would berate him. Wei was forced to kowtow to Yang when he was in trance and when Yang was in trance he moved by sedan chair while Wei was forced to walk beside it. Yang kept his attendants on Wei's ass also disturbing him. Qin had to endure similar humiliations and was forced to help carry Yangs sedan chair up the palace stairs a few times. To give some more flavor, here is one story about a clash that occurred in december between Yang and Wei.    Yang one day in public suggested that Hong had more than enough embroideries and robes in his palace and should economize for a time instead of getting more. Wei ignored what Yang said and told Hong “You, our second elder brother, are the true Sovereign of all nations of the world, and you are rich in the possession of all within the four seas; although robes and garments are sufficient, it will still be necessary to be constantly engaged in making up more.” Upon hearing this Yang responded “I beseech you, our second elder brother, to pardon this younger brother's crime and permit this younger brother to memorialize straightforwardly. If apparel were insufficient, then it would be necessary to make up more; but if it is said it is sufficient, it will be better to delay the making up of more, and then we can see the second elder brother's virtues of economy and love of man. Why should our younger brother Zheng [the North King] memorialize on the necessity of constantly making up more clothing?” To both of them Hong replied “Brother [Yang Xiu]Qing! You are certainly what the ancients called a bold and outspoken minister. And you, brother Zheng, although you may have a sincere regard for your elder brother, are not so straightforward and open in your statements as our brother Qing; for which he is to be much more commended. Later, in the reign of the Young Monarch, all who are ministers should imitate the example of our brother Qing in speaking straightforwardly as he has done this day; thus will they fulfill their duty as ministers.”   Some of the events I just talked about occur a bit later on, but I wanted to give you the idea that in the background, Yang was humiliating others and doing whatever he could to take more and more power. Now of the 5 kings, 3 survived and the administrative staffs of the former 2 simply were distributed amongst the 3 survivors. But after Nanjing was captured the kings would not be the solo ruling leaders anymore. Additional “princes” were added, they were similar to the kings, just lesser so. They held lesser rank than the kings, but were above the Taiping military rank structure. They come about at different times but there would be the Zhong price: Li Xiucheng, Ying prince: Chen Yucheng, Jun Prince: Lai Wenkwok, Fu Prince: Hong Renda, An Prince: Hong Renfa, Yong Prince: Hong Rengui, Fu Prince: Hong Renfu and the Gan Prince: Hong Rengan, yes our old friend Rengan will come to this story but much later on. It seems Yang orchestrated the creation of these princes and the multiplicity of administrative staffs to make it easier for him to weaken the authority of his most senior rivals.    Yang Xiuqing acting as commander in chief of the Taiping military sent out 4 offensives, 2 towards the north against Beijing and 2 up the Yangtze river into western China. Yang Xiuqings overall plan was to use the northern and western expeditionary forces to create a large pincer to capture the whole of northern and western China. According to Missionary Bridgman “ The Taiping had four armies in the field, carrying on active aggressive operations: 2 of these had gone northwards: they were designed to cooperate and after storming and destroying Peking, to turn westwards and march through Shanxi, Shensi, Kansuh, into Szechuan, where they are expected to meet their other 2 armies, which from Kingsi and the Lake provinces are to move up the great river and along through the regions on its southern bank'.    The northern expedition of around 80,000 men was led by 2 commanders, Li Kaifang and Lin Fengxiang who led the vanguard to take Yangchow on April the 1st. By May the 8th they left Yangchow after receiving reinforcements and advanced towards Ch'u-chou in Anhwei province. As their forces went into Anhwei and Henan province they were bolstered by local bandits, particularly the Nian rebels, who were performing the Nian rebellion simultaneously. Following the same strategy applied to the Hunan campaign and the Yangtze valley, they moved rapidly through Anhwei and Henan without leaving behind garrisons nor supply stations. At first, they did not attempt to take any city that proved to be well defended. However at Huaiqing in Henan at the border of Shanxi, they used their 80,000 strong force to besiege the prefectural city, believing it held rich military supplies.    The siege lasted 2 months, but the Taiping failed to capture it and had to move on. The delay in their march as the result of failing at Huaiqing seems to be a decisive turning point for the northern expedition as a whole. The Taiping suffered terrible losses in both shock troops and officers, while the Qing court in Beijing gained valuable time to prepare against the impending Taiping attacks. The Taiping gradually penetrated Zhili via Shanxi province and reached the suburbs of Tianjin, and it was here another large mistake was made for the second time. The Taiping could have simply marched on Beijing, but yet against chose to attack a secondary target. The northern expeditionary force was tiny compared to that of the entire Taiping army which should have been consolidated and marched upon Beijing. The Taiping were greatly hindered by northern chinas winters, because do remember most of the Taiping were from southern china. The Qing had begun a war of attrition, making sure to take away food stuffs in the path of the northern expedition. The Taiping found it extremely hard to forage and on top of this the Qing even broke dikes in the grand canal to flood the Taiping out.   Emperor Xianfeng also released what would be his greatest weapon, the Mongolian prince Senggelinqin. Prince Seng was from the Horqin left back banner of inner Mongolia and a member of the Borjiqin clan. He was a 26th generation descendant of Qasar brother to Genghis Khan. His name Sengge Rinchen was made up of two tibetan words meaning Lion and Treasure. When he was just a child he was adopted by Sodnamdorji a Jasagh “head of a mongol banner” of the Horqin left back banner and Junwang, second rank prince under the Qing dynasty. He would inherit his adoptive fathers titles during the reign of Emperor Daoguang. It was at the 1853 battle for Tianjin where Prince Seng would earn his fame.    The Taiping expeditionary force had fought its way bitterly from Nanjing to Tianjin, leaving just 80 miles between them and Beijing. Prince Seng rushed to the scene aided greatly by a valuable ally, winter. The winter ravaged the Taiping, many of them had never seen snow in their lives and this forced them to fall upon a village fortification to survive it causing an immediate stalemate. When the weather broke in spring, Prince Seng ordered his troops to build a dirt and stone wall to encircle the entire Taiping army camp from a distance while a crew of 1000 laborers spent a month digging a series of trenches to connect it, via a dry riverbed to the grand canal over 40 miles away. When they broke the dikes, the canal water rushed in flooding the Taiping camp to its rooftops, drowning a considerable amount of the army and forcing their submission. Being a Mongol, Prince Seng and those he commanded preferred the bow and arrow as their chief weapon, something they had overwhelming supremacy over the southern chinese. The Taiping could have overwhelmed Prince Sengs cavalry units, if they had western firearms, but they did not. The Taiping forces were dispersed and destroyed. Lin Fengxiang was captured at Lichen in Zhili province on march 7th of 1855 and Li Kaifang was captured at Fengkuat'un in Shandong on March the 31st of 1855. This was the ultimate end to the north expedition. Had the Taiping marched on Beijing at the rate they were going, it is argued they could have taken down the Qing. Tactical blunders, logistical issues, severe weather and the capability of Qing commanders such as Prince Seng ultimately put an end to the Taiping threat to Beijing, though they were certainly nowhere near defeated.   While the northern expedition was going on there was also a western expedition that left Nanjing on May 19th of 1853, just 11 days after the northern expedition launched from Yangzhou. The objective of the western expedition as conceived by Yang Xiuqing was to follow the Yangtze river and ultimately meet up with the northern expedition in Sichuan province. This would have resulted in a pincer maneuver that could swallow up all of western and northern China. On June 10th the western forces recaptured the vital city of Anqing which had been taken back by Qing forces. They were able to provision up from there and divided the force into several armies to march through the Yangtze valley. One army was commanded by Hu Yiguang who set out north of the Yangtze to conquer Anhwei province. Lai Hanyang took another army south to conquer Jiangxi. A 3rd mobile force led by Zeng Tianyang began to independently attack cities south of the Yangtze.    Hu Yiguang's force got as far as Luzhou, the new capital of Anhwei province at the time. Luzhou was guarded by one of the most capable Qing commanders, Jiang Zhongyuan, a Hunanese native from Xinning. He became the magistrate of Xiushi and Lishui, earning a reputation for being a great scholar and military leader. Zeng Guofan recommended Jiang for a higher office in 1850 to Emperor Xianfeng, but when he was supposed to leave for Beijing his father died and he had to return home to mourn. When the Taiping rebellion began, Jiang was appointed to assist the Grand secretary Sha-Shan-a in quelling the insurrection. Jiang began a campaign of gathering Hunanese volunteers who for the first time fought outside Hunan. It was one of the first waves of local forces led by a gentry class to fight the Taiping menace, something that influenced future Yung-Ying armies. Jiang won a great battle in Guangxi and was promoted to the rank of first class sub prefect. When the Taiping were invading Guilin in 1852, Jiang led his men from his home of Xinning to attack them. He won 3 major battles and managed to lift the Taiping siege of Guilin earning the rank of prefect. After this Jiang thwarted a Taiping naval invasion of Hunan province. He dammed the Xiang river near Suoyi ford and ambushed the Taiping Navy causing massive casualties upon them. It was the battle I mentioned where 10,000 Taiping men and Feng Yunshan perished. He thwarted the Taiping overland invasion of Hunan and besieged the Taiping stronghold of Chenzhou for a month before they fled to attack Changsha, the capital of Hunan. Jiang was one of those who helped defend Changsha earning the promotion of provincial judge of Hubei and then by 1853 assistant commander of the Qing armies in Jiangnan. He then aided in the defense of Nanchang which was besieged from June 22 to september 24th of 1853. For this he was appointed governor of Anhui which is what led him to the battle over Luzhou. When word came that the Taiping sought to attack Luzhou, Jiang rushed over with a small force to try and defend the new capital. He found himself outnumbered and outgunned, especially in siege mining technology that the Taiping had dramatically improved by this point in time. The Taiping took the city by January the 15th and in the process Jiang was wounded and he opted to commit suicide by drowning himself. The Qing lost an important capital city and one of their finest commanders who had proven himself successful at defeating Taiping using local militia forces.    Lai Hanying's army besieged Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi from june to september of 1853, but ultimately failed to take the city. This resulted in Lai losing his command and his army divided in 2 to hit Hubei and Hunan under the leadership of Wei Jun and Shi Zhenxiang. The high point of their campaigns led to the capture of Xiangtan on April 24th of 1854. After a year of taking Nanjing, the Taipings expeditions had run out of momentum. The northern expedition was a failure, the western had gained limited success, but not enough to extend their reach to the upper Yangtze and that of western china. The Taiping riverine forces dominated the Yangtze up into Hunan allowing them to use it for provisioning, logistics and most importantly further recruiting. But the original lightning speed drive of the Taiping had faded and the Qing were beginning to recover from the blitzkrieg. Now the offensives became see-saw's which allowed the Qing more time to recover, reorganize and build up new leadership that could effectively face the Taiping menace. Being a Pacific War specialist, its very much like the situation during the Guadalcanal campaign. Prior to this, the Japanese ran rampant on offensive controlling the when and where actions would occur, but after the horrible loss at Midway and Guadalcanal, the Japanese had gone past their logistical capabilities and lost the initiative, for the rest of the Pacific War the allies controlled the initiative. This is what we call the turning point, and it was here a year after taking Nanjing and losing the window of opportunity to take Beijing that was the Taiping rebellion's turning point. It is not to say they could not win the war, but the initiative was now in the hands of the Qing.   Although the campaign to take Beijing failed and the western campaign only held limited successes near the Yangtze, the Taiping were steadily extending their territory and thus were gaining additional manpower and supplies from the greater Yangtze region. The Taiping were struggling to consolidate their gains to establish better rule. Their offensives were being hampered by both political and religious confusion, often orchestrated by the efforts of Yang Xiuqing. The Taiping structure threatened Chinese traditions and saw backlash particularly from the Gentry class. I would note the gentry and landowner types probably were not the keenist on a group who sought land/wealth redistribution haha. The Taiping were a threat to Chinese social order as much as it was a threat to the Qing rule. Thus the gentry of China began to put their resources together to help the war effort resulting in a large push to the creation of Yung-ying militia groups such as Zeng Guofan's Xiang army. On top of the external actors trying to destroy the Taiping, the Taiping were having a ton of inner conflict as well. A violent and bloody power struggle had emerged destroying the unified political and military command established under Yang Xiuqing.   Now although I spoke about the formation of the new armies, I need to go into it a bit further, especially in regards to Zeng Guofan. While I explained how Zeng Guofan created his force, I did not talk about how this all looked from the Qing dynasties point of few. In late 1852 and early 1853 a number of edicts were made by Emperor Xianfeng leading to the appointment of 43 supervisors of new local corps in the provinces of Hunan, Anhwei, Jiangsu, Zhili, Henan, Shandong, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Guizhou and Fujian. Amongst the appointed was Zeng Guofan. The Qing government sought to have these organized smaller forces led by the gentry class so they could be loyal and relied upon. These forces were set up in each district to contest the Taiping. Zeng Guofan's Xiang army proved themselves to be highly effective, but Zeng Guofan chose to be very cautious when reporting back to the Qing court. This was because his military organizational building was strongly autonomous and could be seen as a threat to the Qing military. There had been numerous local militia groups that shifted from pro-government to banditry. The establishment of these armies was obviously a last resort means, and definitely could be a threat to the dynasty, they were not so unalike to the bandit armies created in the 17th century to fight the Daxi or Dashun armies afterall.    Zeng Guofan did not state exactly what he was doing to the Qing court, in one of his first memorial he simply reported back that he was enlisting men from the countryside to establish a large military corps at its capital to be trained. It looked like Zeng Guofan was building a personal army, one that could be led on campaigns outside its local area. He sent more memorials stating that local corpsmen could not be relied upon in critical moments and that it was better to recruit from these local corpsmen an official militia, whose rations could be paid from public funds. When he was building the Xiang army he was consciously departing from the Qing courts authorization. He realized that local defense corps that had sprung up all over China were useful against local bandits and small raiders, but they were not large nor strong enough to withstand attacks from larger organized armies such as the Taiping. The Taiping were only growing larger, more organized, better armed. They simply could not be stopped by just local corps, what the Qing needed was a mobile army that could be used for offensive campaigns throughout larger areas.   Now the way Zeng Guofan made the Xiang army was based strongly on personal loyalty, the units were recruited, led and paid for by their commander. The commanders were loyal to Zeng Guofan, thus more or less the Xiang army was a personal army at his command. Zeng Guofan also assembled a number of future leaders who would go on to create their own versions of the Xiang army. Such men were Zeng Zongtang and Li Hongzhang of Anhwei province. By the end of the century, Zeng Guofan's example led to most provinces being dominated by regional forces under military organizations over whom the Qing central government had only minimal control. In many ways Zeng Guofan was a symptom of the ailing dynasty, the Qing were gradually losing control and there was emerging a threat to the political and social order in china. Zeng Guofan say the Taiping menace as a threat to traditional chinese society. He made many proclamations stating as such. “The Taiping rebels have stolen the ways of the foreign barbarians when they distort family relations by calling all people brothers and sisters, when they declare that all land belongs to the heavenly king and that all profit also belongs to him. They force scholars to give up the COnfucian classics to read instead the so called teaching of Jesus. They wipe away our moral standards, the very way we conduct ourselves as humans, the classics, and the institutions that have existed in CHina for several thousands of years. This is not only a tragedy for the Qing dynasty but a great tragedy for the whole of “ming-chiao” Chinese tradition and causes confucius and Mencius to weep bitterly in the underworld. How could any educated person remain sitting, hands in sleeves, without doing something about it”.    Zeng Guofan kept bringing up how the Taiping destroyed Buddhist and Taoist temples, that they were angering the gods who would take revenge. To right these terrible wrongs he said he was under Qing orders to advance his troops by land and water, not just to ease the Qing monarchs but also to console Confucious and Mencius, to avenge the slaughter of millions of Chinese. Appealing to the masses, Zeng Guofan began to ask for recruits, financial support and the surrender of any who decided to join the Taiping. Now I said he paid his army handsomely compared to that of the Green standards and such, but a lot of the funds were not under Qing control. The Gentry class were strongly supporting those like Zeng Guofan. Zeng Guofan began to ask and obtain permission from the Qing government to sell certificates of academic degrees, official titles and office appointments to sell to these said Gentry. The sale of all these degrees and titles increased gentry contributions, but also increased their influence and it began to build a new gentry role in leadership.    Another major source of income for the Xiang army was new internal custom taxes introduced in 1853. And although the Qing government permitted this new tax, it held no control or supervision over it. Zeng Guofan and other commanders of regional armies were gaining control over regular provincial taxes and were using them to build their armies. The combined income from the gentry class and regional taxes made men like Zeng Guofan basically warlords. Their forces were not really governmental troops although they were fighting for said government. The other side, the Taiping failed to gain any support from the Gentry class because of their alienating religious and economic beliefs. Fundamentally the Taiping were a revolutionary group breaking the stratum of Chinese society, and a large part of that was the Chinese gentry class.    Now Zeng Guofan began with a army of just a thousand men in 1853, composing 3 battalions. When they began to really clash with the Taiping they were soon 20,000 strong with naval and cavalry units. Later on they would become 120,000 men strong and Zeng Guofan had planned to use them for a long drawn out campaign despite pressure coming from Beijing to smash the rebels. Now the first major engagement between the Xiang army and the Taiping came in early 1854 and the Taiping defeated them. But on May 1st of 1854, the Xiang army defeated the Taiping at Xiangtan forcing them to withdraw. Then in a battle at Yuzhou in Hunan in July, the Xiang army on land and river gained a major victory. This victory gained Zeng Guofan great prestige and demonstrated the effectiveness of his army. The battle cost the Taiping more than half their fleet of boats and thus the loss of control over the central Yangtze river area. It was the first serious setback for the Taiping and it reduced their perimeter of military operations. Following up this victory, the Xiang army entered Hubei province and quickly recaptured Wuchang and Hanyang by october of 1854. Soon Zeng Guofans forces began to penetrate into Hubei and Jiangxi provinces marking the failure and end to the Taiping western expedition.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.  The Northern expedition was a complete bust, the Taiping had lost the opportunity to claim the dragon throne. But the western expedition proved fruitful and gradually the heavenly kingdom was growing, and perhaps it could eclipse the Qing.  

In this episode of The AUXORO Podcast, Dr. James Fallon and Zach discuss what makes the mind of a psychopath, Dr. Fallon's shocking discovery that he himself has the brain of a psychopath, Genghis Khan and other murderous leaders from history, whether or not we have free will, the dark side of Dr. Fallon's  murderous family tree, and the power of spiritual perception.  Guest bio: Dr. James Fallon is a neuroscientist, Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at UC Irvine, and author of the book 'The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey Into The Dark Side Of The Brain' BONUS EPISODES & PREMIUM ACCESS: https://auxoro.supercast.com/ DR. JAMES FALLON LINKSThe Psychopath Inside: https://amzn.to/3BkhJLcBio: https://www.anatomy.uci.edu/james-fallon/Exploring The Mind Of A Killer (TED Talk): https://bit.ly/3Y6xA9W THE AUXORO PODCAST LINKS:Apple: https://apple.co/3B4fYju Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3zaS6sPOvercast: https://bit.ly/3rgw70DYoutube: https://bit.ly/3lTpJdjWebsite: https://www.auxoro.com/ AUXORO SOCIAL LINKS:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/auxoroYouTube: https://bit.ly/3CLjEqFFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/auxoromagNewsletter: https://www.auxoro.com/thesourceYouTube: https://bit.ly/3CLjEqF If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts. It takes less than 60 seconds, helps us appear higher in searches so more people discover the show, and it boosts my ego;) Past Guests On The Auxoro Podcast Include: Aubrey de Grey, Andy Weir, Eben Britton, Eric Jorgenson, Isabelle Boemeke, Houston Arriaga, Jerzy Gregorek, Chris Cooper, Gryffin, Elsa Diaz, Dave Robinson, Meghan Daum, FINNEAS, Chloé Valdary, Coleman Hughes, Maziar Ghaderi, YONAS, Ryan Michler, Ryan Meyer, Gavin Chops, Bren Orton, Zuby, Jason Khalipa, Ed Latimore, Jess Glynne, Noah Kahan, Kid Super, Deryck Whibley, and many more.  

We live in a world that often feels make believe. The line between fantasy and truth has been blurred. We are told one thing, but we know it's not true. We refuse to believe what we know is true because it's inconvenient. We cover up some, bury others, and believe what is most convenient whether it's true or not. Yet, in the midst of this fantastical haze we live in, the Christmas story breaks through and a light shines. You cannot deny it because you can see that light everywhere. It shines in darkness. Jesus was born into the Roman Empire in the year 3 BC. Whatever you believe about Jesus, you cannot deny the reality of His life, any more than Caesar Augustus or Genghis Khan. What you do with Jesus is another story. If I were to write the story of Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Messiah, Savior of the world, it wouldn't be the way the gospel writers told his biography. With nothing but the truth to tell, they told it like it is. It has the makings of a rags to riches story.

Guest Host: Mikkel Hagen Tick...tick...tick...that sound can only mean that it's time to visit the Himalayas (again!) and encounter maybe pop culture's weirdest version of an abominable snow man, in Carl Barks' "the Lost Crown of Genghis Khan!" Join my guest and I as we talk about the story's tonal shift, the history of yeti encounters, Barks' poking fun of the media, and much more!

If you cannot compromise; Challenge!By FinalStand. Listen and subscribe to the podcast at Steamy Stories.Every person is alone. That is the definition of Free-will.In this chapter sex is mention, but not described.Caution: there is a good deal of ‘back-story’ in this chapter.(A Step back in time: that Weekend, between Oneida and Nicole)The weekend… I’d had plenty of relaxing sex over the weekend, bonded with Oneida somewhat while we biked Saturday morning, had sex with Gael, junior of House Bendis (the woman who let me borrow her phone so I could invite Buffy, Helena and Desiree to my little induction ceremony), then had a late afternoon date with Nikita.Escorting Yasmin and her son to the airport for the start of her Havenstone training after dinner was unsettling. The boy, Braulio, seemed worried, Yasmin was glad to see me, really glad to see me then finished if off by commenting that she could tell 'something had changed’. I affirmed her hunch without going into the details. As Yasmin’s mood improved, so did her son’s. I wished her luck. She told me I’d need it more.Late Saturday night I was invited to a party by Libra. Brooke showed up date-less (she WASN’T jumping into a new relationship) so she glommed onto me; us. Marla and Libra had a huge phone fight about her (Marla) not being 21 yet, thus not invited to the party. Felix was there having reconnected with Gene because he had both a glib tongue and an awe-inspiring sexual arsenal.Felix’s attempts to recoup any ground with Brook failed miserably. She had her own bitterness toward Trent, her memory of me handing her panties under an outdoor cafe’s table as a trophy Felix had taken the night before and displayed openly in my office, and my own masculine support to draw strength from.Felix and I did not verbally, or socially, spar. He accepted the verdict of our first contest and, for all his faults, he acknowledged that my victory had worth and obeyed his conscience on the matter. If anything, he was visually more respectful than ever before. I wasn’t his equal; no man and definitely no woman was; yet I was now a competitor he would have to give his very best to defeat.Sunday morning had been just me and Odette. We’d cuddled on the sofa, watched some TV and then I took her to Havenstone for time in the pool. I kept the overly-aggressive Amazons at bay while getting Odette used to the idea of regular exercise; hanging out with Timothy and I required greater endurance than her sedentary youthful stamina provided.An early afternoon invite to a 'pick-up’ basketball game at the community, two-court, outdoor lot with Jason, the bar-back from the Yuppie bar, brought me back in contact with Katy Lee Baker, aka Delivery Girl. Odette tagged along. It also brought me in contact with the local 'wild-life’. A Latin King clique was starting to operate in the area and Jason’s crew were the native inhabitants who took exception to this.We played for about half an hour were everyone learned I was a big, fat liar. I was actually good at basketball, despite my earlier claims at ignorance. The Kings showed up, drove off the younger teens playing on the other court. A few more of those jokers showed up and it was now 'our turn’ to make space.That went over like a shit brick. The Kings outnumbered us a good two-to-one, but Jason wasn’t backing down. I was struggling to convince Jason that discretion was the better part of valor when some of the new Latin King arrivals tried to play with a few of the local ladies who had come down to watch their menfolk pull off their shirts and get sweaty.Poor Odette; she had been in the company of so many powerful, confident and lethal women she’d forgotten she wasn’t one. A King grabbed Katy Lee’s breast. Odette hit the asshole in the stomach, put a shin to his nuts and finished him off with grabbing his head and driving it into her upward moving knee, dropping him like the sack of shit he was. But wait, he had five buddies.Poo was being served up and the electric switch was about to be flipped.“I’ll be back to help in a moment,” I growled to Jason as the gang members jumped Odette. Katy Lee and a slightly older woman rushed to Odette’s aid. The Kings didn’t ignore my approach, peeling off two to 'deal with me’. They really shouldn’t have hit Odette because now I was angry.The feces hit the rotary wind machine. With their last shows of bravado, I lay into the closest bastards. The sixteen year old was hesitantly pulling out his .32 ACP while reconsidering his poor life choices as I hit his buddy so hard he went airborne, two teeth and a fountain of blood coming from the ruin I’d made of his face.Gun guy was next. I clamped my left hand on his right, gun-toting wrist then drove my knee into his elbow. The elbow snapped upward with a sound reminiscent of a car backfiring. His screams drowned out the thud of his gun dropping to the court surface. For the three remaining Latin Kings I was closing with, a terrible social reality came crashing in.Gangs rely on several tools to exert power; a propensity for violence, illegal finances, a fierce reputation, and superior numbers. By the look on my face, they discovered that their numbers didn’t bother me in the least. I knew exactly who they were and didn’t give a damn. My desire to destroy them was motivated by something far stronger than any currency, and I was clearly better at this whole violence thing than they seemed to be.They had their pride and the fidelity with their gang, plus their intimidation tactics were going wrong so fast, they couldn’t process the disaster quickly enough to alter course. These guys were not professional warriors by any stretch of the imagination. 'Warriors’; perhaps. 'Professional’; definitely not. Their ability to rapidly adapt to a changing situation was woefully under-developed.In gang hand-to-hand combat, you bunch up your members, overrun a foe and beat him to the ground. Fighting a practitioner of Brazilian jujutsu, standing close to one another is the LAST thing you want to do. I was a whirlwind of destruction, fed by the understanding that Jason’s bunch needed me back real soon.The asshat who tried to use a knife on me got his hand pinned to the court for his audacity. I repeat, threatening Odette had infuriated me. At center court, Jason had his hands full and then some. The Latin Kings had the edges in both numbers and ferocity. The only other hometown boy holding his own was this thick, solid Puerto Rican guy named Bennie; the rest were in trouble.I started with the four-on-one stomp-down on one of Jason’s friends; I’d missed the guy’s beat down. My inner Amazon was leading the charge. Unlike all my previous encounters, I was intentionally causing pain. I wasn’t trying to drive them off, or render them hors de combat. No, my desire was to strike terror in their hearts, inflicting suffering in order to eradicate my foes’ resolve to fight.Knees snapped, bones broke, faces were stomped into the court and internal organs ruptured. Even my erstwhile allies were aghast at the wickedness with which I treated our enemy.“Ah…Cáel…are you okay?” Jason mumbled when the last King went down. He’d have a shiner on his left eye soon and his lip was split and bleeding. I hadn’t come through unscathed either.Havenstone had seriously upped my pain threshold. Jason wasn’t really asking about my physical well-being anyway. I had to get ahead of this…predicament.“Let’s get this trash off the court,” I commanded. The boys hesitated until Jason picked up one of my semi-conscious victims.“Come on 'Pendejo’, leave and don’t come back,” Jason yanked the man up and began shoving him toward the gate he and his buddies had arrived by. The rest of Jason’s friends joined in and we began cleaning up the place. One gangster decided he was too hurt to be moved. I’d rammed his shoulder into the goalpost, breaking his collarbone. He was crying about the pain he was in.I pulled him up. He was around 1,75m tall and 125 kg. I wrapped my hands around his thick bull neck and slowly raised him up off the ground. His face was reddening, his good hand was trying to break my hold and his legs were flailing about in the open air.[In Spanish] “Pain, Asshole? No, pain is me having to come back here and hunt you and your vermin buddies down,” I seethed.“I don’t live here. These men are not my friends. You touched my girl and I am God Almighty when it comes to defending those of my household. I am not in a gang. I am not a criminal. If you, or your gang, come within a block of this place, I will become Death. Today, there are too many witnesses. This is your reprieve; your moment of grace,” I snarled.“Use it wisely. It will not happen again,” I finished in a fury. I dropped him to his wobbly feet, catching his good hand before he fell over. That act of compassion after my dire threat confused the guy.“Go,” I returned to English. The rest of the Latin Kings walked, stumbled, were dragged from the court.“Who are you again?” Bennie inquired.“Cáel Nyilas,” I grinned. “I’m an Aerospace Engineer working on the feasibility of having hamsters running on their wheels being used to recharge batteries on manned flights to Mars.”“Hamster wrangling has to be one tough profession,” Katy Lee snickered as she and Odette came up.“Come on now,” Jason winced as he licked his lip.“Brawling is about panic, anger and the management of those two forces,” I told them. “I was the only one in this fight in control of himself, so my actions look out of proportions to what really happened.”“They were kicking our asses,” Bennie chuckled.“Not as bad as you guys think,” I consoled them. “None of you guys ran, or curled up in a ball. That allowed me to pick my fights. I clearly have more hand-to-hand combat experience, but none of that would have mattered had you guys freaked out.”There was some truth in what I said. Had they panicked, I would have grabbed Odette and Katy Lee then fled as well. Since they toughed it out, and the Latin Kings exerted virtually no command and control, I was able take on the gang members in small, bite-sized chunks. My training and experience took care of the rest.This also made the somewhat traumatized ballplayers feel proud about the cuts and bruises they’d received. Now they realized they had 'won’ this scuffle, they’d played their parts courageously and had all been instrumental in a successful stratagem. The fact that none of them knew that when the blows were raining in it meant nothing.The women who’d come out to watch the game then witnessed the beat down knew their men had been brave, taken their licks and routed their enemies. Martial ardor, baby! 'Defending’ a woman does not diminish her. It increases her odds of dealing with insults and threats in a positive manner.Women who look down on women who use their pussies to better themselves are being stupid. It is the equivalent of having a complete toolbox and only using the hammer. The women were going to give up some level of sex to reward the men. The men, in turn, had an example of the kind of behavior that would get them what they wanted; defending your ladies equated to feminine reward.That did not mean penetration; life was far more complex. It did mean she would hang around you, talk to you and trust you (most likely more than she should). Guys still had to seal the deal, figure out what she wanted and deliver. That had been the working arrangement between men and women for most of the last 80,000 years.What I didn’t know at the time was that I was being spied upon, that this spy called Buffy; my 'spear and shield’; and Buffy would gather up some Security Detail chicks. Why would SD help? Some morons had tried to murder the Head of House Ishara and that wasn’t something the Amazons would tolerate.That Latin King clique was contemplating revenge. They were about to get schooled by the Grand Mistresses of that brutal and unforgiving Art form. I could never let Odette know. After all, to her they were someone’s sons, brothers and husbands. My chilling rationalization was that, for whatever reason, the Latin Kings had redefined themselves as carnivores, preying on the rest of mankind.They should have studied what nature was really like. Predators had predators of their own. They’d been big, bad caimans, snatching all that came to the water’s edge. In nature, the caiman was careful because jaguars hunted and ate caimans. In the urban jungle, there were things far more dangerous than gang-bangers living in the shadows that jealously guarded their spot as apex predator.Odette and I exited the field. I’d have to catch Katy Lee another time. I was to get the bad news from Ulyssa and her sister about the death in her family. Timothy, Odette and I worked out some more as Odette and I took turns relating the fight to Timothy. He reminded us that the Latin Kings were a powerhouse in the city as well as nationwide. Nicole called at the point I was ready for bed and the rest was family history.(Monday morning)I locked my bike up as normal. When I saw the security guards eyeing me funny, I grew cautious.“Is there a problem?” I asked the woman scanning my ID. She was fearfully hesitant. “Wait, are you worried that I’m pissed about Friday morning?”“We were only doing our jobs, Cáel of Ishara,” she told me.“Oh,” I chuckled. “So that IS what is bothering you.” I smiled at the group. “Of course you were doing your jobs. I would have been surprised if you hadn’t and I’m certainly not angry about what went down. You acted in defense of Havenstone and I never saw it any other way.”That gave them some relief. My next problem.“Has anyone from the Security Detail called about me?” I asked. “I don’t see anyone here to pick me up this morning.”“I’ll call them,” she offered.The answer was that they weren’t expecting me, but I could come down if I desired. That was promising. My ID card worked for the lower levels now. Walking past the Armory was intriguing…in that they barely noticed me. In the prep room for the shooting range there was…nothing. No guns for me to try out, or even look at.I went to the firing range looking for one of my 'friendly’ SD ladies. They were all giving me the cold shoulder. Naomi told me why; Constanza. The SD were very angry with my interference in justice for Constanza versus Pamela. Since Naomi had been there when the entire incident went down, I didn’t laugh in her face. I got coldly furious instead.If I wanted a firearm, I could go to the Armory and check one out, so that’s what I did. The guards there weren’t helpful either. Inside was; well; everything. I called up SD and asked them to send an armorer to help me make some selections. Ten minutes later, the lady had still not arrived. That made me laugh. They were tit-for-tatting the wrong guy. Glasses and ear protection came first.I left the Armory with my weapon of choice for the day, a full bandolier and a crate of ammo. I could see the SD chick’s guarding the Armory eyes bug-out. I grinned and headed for the shooting range. They surreptitiously called somebody. Knowing that, I hurried myself along, passing straight through prep room for the firing line. I was a man on a mission.See, I could be a raging prick when I wanted to be. Those SD babes should have talked with any number of the Amazons who already knew me. I had made it clear; make my life difficult if you wished, but accept whatever payback I could imagine. Respecting House Ishara wasn’t even a question. For pummeling me over Constanza, they were about to get a whole new kind of Righteous Pricking, courtesy of the house they refused to treat with equality.An Amazon finished firing off a clip for her personal defense weapon and was checking her pistol’s slide action.“Excuse me,” I said as I stepped up. She was about to scream something. Most likely 'stop!’ Since I had no intention of complying, I didn’t wait; or stop.For me, I was suddenly wondering what the precise blast radius of a 40 mm grenade was. I pulled the trigger anyway. I swear by Ishara-turned-Ishtar, I hit that target right in the 10 ring. The explosion the grenade caused when it hit the back wall rendered my claims moot. Even with eye and ear protection, I could barely hear anything because of the ringing echo, or see anything because of the dust.The flashing yellow lights and klaxons going off indicated something bad had happened. Bad wasn’t done yet. I walked to the next stand where the Amazon had ducked down while she oriented herself to the threat.“Good morning,” I yelled at her. Then I aimed and prepared to squeeze off my second round.With all the dust in the air, I could barely make out the outline of the target I was shooting at. Accuracy at this point was unnecessary. This bitching toy seemed to kill everything. Third station; third shot and the Amazons were starting to figure out what was going on. Some moron was firing a grenade launcher within an indoor firing range.Before the fourth shot they figured out it was me. Now those bitches had a problem. The lead Amazon tried to get my attention despite my constant attempts to ignore her. I resolved the issue by tapping my six-shot bang-bang and indicating I had two shots left…and I used them. Only when I stopped to reload did the ladies screw up the courage to exhibit some kind of physical resistance.Naomi pulled off my ear protection.“What are you doing?” she shouted at me. She wasn’t being rude. All our ears were ringing.“I’m being left to my own devices, you 'failures’ to every concept of loyalty, respect and faith,” I replied to the entire group.“Constanza called House Ishara an abomination, insane and diseased,” I spat out my hate. “I spared her life when I should have had her stricken from the roles of her house and butchered her like some beast. I showed mercy and this is how the Security Detail responds? Congratulations, you have earned my contempt.”“But why are you using a grenade launcher; indoors?” Naomi struggled to understand.“Oh,” I smirked. “Because I can. I’m superior to all of you here so I can do what I want and you have to suck it up. I am the Head of a First House so none of you have a choice. Every one of you chose to show me no respect and, out of respect for your lack of respect, you get no respect.”They were trying to figure how to work around that when I upped the ante.“I’m also going to direct the other members of House Ishara to come down here at random times and fire off grenades, use flamethrowers, or; how about tear gas; tear gas sounds good.”“That would degrade the readiness of the Security Detail,” the first Amazon protested.“Not my problem. Take your complaints to Elsa or Saint Marie. Make sure to start your complaint with exactly how you behaved toward me; but use the names Beyoncé, Ursula, Katrina, or Messina instead of mine,” I glared. “Now excuse me. I have a box full of high explosives to work through.” And off I went.There were 25 shooting lanes. I had fired off my 22nd grenade when Elsa showed up.“Cáel of Ishara, why are you destroying this training area?” she inquired calmly.“Working through a crate of grenades. I thought that would be obvious,” I joked.“Is there something wrong we should talk about?” Elsa was keeping her anger in check.“Your underlings were chronically disrespectful. Since positive reinforcement failed; being nice to any of your weakling-bullies was counter-productive; I decided to employ the stick treatment,” I met her gaze.“Stop destroying the firing line…please,” Elsa ground out through clenched teeth.“You are right,” I nodded. “I need to take a few of these upstairs to the pure-blood gym. There is a lot more damage I could do there. This place is already a mess.”Desiree’s voice broke the silence. She must have come in with Elsa.“Cáel,” Desiree yawned. “How do you want to resolve this crisis? That doesn’t involve setting off seismic sensors all over New York City, that is?”“Hmmm…fine, every member of the Security Detail is to write a romantic poem then read it aloud to a 'Runner’ while at that 'Runners’ workstation,” I invented a punishment. “Ishara is the Goddess of Love as well as Oaths. It is a fitting tribute to her that romantic verses from the heart be created and spoken aloud.”“It is also fitting that the recipients be 'Runners’, since it will unite them in both their appreciation of love and their anger with me for throwing my weight around like every other Full-Blood who thinks they are better because of some quirk of birth,” I concluded.“It will be done,” Elsa intoned. That part of the matter was settled. Elsa looked at my grenade launcher. An unhappy sigh escaped my lips as I handed it over.“Elsa, I’m coming for weapon’s practice again tomorrow,” I informed her. Now I was going to burn off some time in the pool then get to work, or so I hoped. I hadn’t gotten away with this because I was Cáel Nyilas, or the Head of House Ishara. I got away with it because Elsa didn’t want to see the faces of the Council when she explained what her people had done.The Council members treating me like offal was their business. Other Amazons deciding that they could treat ANY member of the Council that poorly wouldn’t fly; reference to the fate of Leona. Why had SD treated me poorly? Constanza. If they repeated my conversation with Constanza that cost her an eye, the outcome was known by all. Constanza would cease being an Amazon right before she died.I made it to Katrina’s office four minutes before seven only to find Katrina absent while Daphne, Brielle and Pamela were hanging around. Dora and Fabiola followed me in. Everyone made it before the deadline, Katrina last of all. As Katrina began the meeting, Brielle left. Pamela and Katrina ignored one another.My work review was far better than normal. I’d sold Anthrax to a terrorist cell, but it had turned out to be a mislabeled Anthrax antidote instead, so all was good. Daphne was trying to figure out how her glowing report over my efforts had been so misconstrued. My assigned boss for the day was Rosette, one of the senior members of Executive Services.“Katrina, I need a moment of your time; in private,” I requested as the meeting broke up.“As Cáel, or the Head of House Ishara?” she asked.“Neither,” I replied. She waved the others away with Tigger shutting the door. Pamela remained seated. Katrina shot me a look concerning Pamela’s presence.“I don’t control her,” I shrugged. “She hangs around me for her own reasons.” Katrina nodded. I walked to the edge of Katrina’s desk, put my palms on its cool surface. “Katrina, I am the Grandson of Cáel O'Shea, I met Brianna O'Shea earlier this morning, she knows who I am and was brought to town because some genetic research done on me.”“Brianna knows where I work and who I work for, as in you. Pamela said the word 'Protocols’ and Brianna backed off, but I’m sure she wants to see me again. I’ve warned my Dad about what happened and to destroy everything associated with my Mom. By the way, Brianna looks exactly like my Mother did when I was first born; exactly,” I emphasized.Had the situation not been so completely fucked up, I would have treasured the steamrollered look on Katrina’s face.“She is with something called the Illuminati. She doesn’t know about me and House Ishara. When Brianna tried to figure how this Protocol/Truce thing involved me, Pamela stonewalled her,” I added.“Pamela, I can understand Cáel not immediately bringing this to my attention,” Katrina’s cool exterior reasserted itself. “He doesn’t know what’s going on. You do.”“I didn’t feel inclined to do your job for you, Katrina,” Pamela gave a rapier-thin smile. “Besides, you are part of the brain trust that sent him home Friday night cloaked in ignorance, not I.”“Cáel,” Katrina turned back to me. “How did you meet Brianna O'Shea?”“I met a lawyer, screwed her to multiple orgasms in the Women’s room of some bar, met her again plus her lawyer buddies and Sunday night she called me to her downtown office to fuck her into enlightenment; which I did,” I sighed.“She was working on a case involving DNA ownership, which is oddly germane to my current predicament,” I grinned.“Cáel, we need you to report to medical for more testing,” Katrina ordered.“I apologize, but House Ishara does not believe that would be in its best interest so Cáel must decline,” I nodded. “Will there be anything else?”Will battled Will to no outcome. She nodded and I left. Pamela ghosted along behind me. Rosetta intersected my path and off we went. I was given no clue as to my assignment; no surprise. I texted Buffy: 'Nothing new happening. Pick me up at 5:30 Wed. morning.’ That meant there was no new development on the committee to help House Ishara pick 'Runners’.I had played nice. Katrina and Hayden had dodged me on Friday afternoon. This morning, she owed it to me to show some kind of progress. That wasn’t what she offered. I had made a concession, they refused to reciprocate, so now I was free of any obligation to consider their wishes. I wanted more 'Runners’ and come Wednesday morning, I was adding twenty.Working with Rosette (and Pamela) was a triple-barreled experience. Errands were the largest bulk of our time, but the rest was other mundane tasks of the most basic sort. Within the workload were instructions in the craft of being unseen. Executive Services was more than laundry and daycare; it was about not disrupting the lives of clients.A side benefit of that was learning how to move through any group and not be memorable; to not give off the subtle clues that you were an outsider. Not only could a group of executives hold a conversation without an ES person disrupting their trains of thought, people trained to look for threats wouldn’t be tipped off to your presence either. It was peon-craft for beginners.Executive Services personnel weren’t ninja; they were inconsequential. As I had bubbled to Katrina on day one, Executive Services got to go everywhere and learn how everything worked. What I didn’t appreciate was that was how Counter-Intelligence worked too. From what I wedged out of Rosette, Counter-Intelligence had never uncovered a successful internal conspiracy.They had ferreted out multiple peripheral programs meant to gather information on Havenstone, but no Amazon had been critically compromised; which meant several Amazons had been blackmailed yet gone to ES before doing any damage. Rosette appreciated that fanatic devotion, but she’d never hold complete faith in it. Her job was vigilance.(What is really going on?)The third barrel was the real unhappy news. For all their illegal activities, Havenstone was not the Sinaloa Cartel. There were not a global criminal organization that invited international law enforcement scrutiny. So why did they devote so much time and energy to security? They weren’t alone in the shadows of world-wide civilization.At the top of the pile was the Illuminati. They were a hydra controlled by a ruthless, cutthroat conclave; membership uncertain. They were a Darwinian meritocracy until the top tier of leadership, where a group of smaller secret societies and families monopolized the real influence. Their biggest strength, and weakness, was that most of the people in the organization didn’t even know they were part of the Illuminati.After that was a mishmash of groups with different abilities that made rating them difficult. The Condottieri were rather simple; they sold mercenaries and weapons to anyone with the coin with the sideline of promoting conflict by any means necessary. The Nine Clans…that sounded familiar…were assassins in the truest sense of the word.Hashshashin, Ninja, Thuggee, Black Lotus, Coils of the Serpent, Brotherhood of the Wolf, the Black Hand, Cult of the Jaguar and the Ghost Tigers. They were not just murder for hire, but murder to advance their cause. Harmonious existence was bad for business, so they stirred up rivalries and conflict in every corner of the globe.The Egyptian Rite Masons sounded sublime. They weren’t. They may have been a secret order older than the Amazons, claiming descent to the days of Imhotep. The Egyptians were the oldest enemy of the Illuminati. The Egyptian Rite’s goal was a global autocratic government, were the Illuminati wanted a capitalist oligarchy in charge of global commerce; with the Illuminati pulling all the strings. The Egyptian Rite were not restricted to Egypt anymore; membership was open to all races and genders.The Earth and Sky Society were not New Agers. They were the descendants of Genghis Khan and were devoted to the reincarnation of the Greatest World Conqueror of all time. Before tossing them into the rubbish bin of bad ideas, know that Genghis was the largest single genetic contributor (via rape) to the human gene pool since the mystical Eve. To be a member you had to have a genetic link to ole Genghis.The Seven Pillars of Heaven were an ancient Chinese Secret Society out for; you guessed it; World Domination. To be a true member of this group you had to be Pure Han Chinese and a man, or bound to one. Needless to say, Havenstone and the Seven Pillars did not get along. The final bit of information; these groups were what was left of the Great Secret Societies; the survivors.Havenstone’s place in all of this chaos was complicated. By mid-5th century BCE, the Egyptians were aware of the Amazons. The Amazons were not causing problems for the Egyptians, so they parted on decent terms and that was that. By the first century ADE, the political landscape had changed. Amazons had penetrated Roman society and brought Latin houses into their structure.Amazingly, the Egyptians contacted the Amazons again, figured out the Amazons only wanted co-existence so co-existence they got. In the late 4th century, the Amazons returned the favor. The Amazons told the Egyptians something horribly bad was coming across the Eurasian steppes and the Egyptians better batten down the hatches. A few decades later, the Huns were pressing on the Roman Empire’s frontier.What is not generally know is that in the ranks of Hunnish horde were the Sarmatians, successors to the Scythians, who had allied Amazons in their ranks. This gave the Amazons, thus the Egyptians, contacts on both sides of the Roman-Attila conflict. By the mid-5th century the two secret societies parted ways once more.Their relationship had been useful, but not close. From the Amazons viewpoint, it was the equivalent of getting good gossip at the fish market. The Egyptians appreciated the intelligence, but wanted, and didn’t get, military assistance in propping up the Roman Empire. For the Amazons, the fall of the Western Roman Empire was the trigger for a massive Diaspora.A few houses decided to tough it out in Western Europe and its packs of warring Germanic tribes. Others travelled to Egypt and from there, down the Nile to Ethiopia and Central Africa. A third group travelled farther East than ever before, eventually settling in Southern India. Of course, the World never stands still.In the late 8th century, the Illuminati was founded as a mercantile society trying to restructure the shattered Western and Central European economies. It turned out that there was a major pass over the Alps between eastern Italy and southern Germany that was a safe transit region. The Illuminati decided to seize it. The Egyptians popped up, revealed to the infant Illuminati that they didn’t want them to do that, but were ignored.The Egyptians were out to rebuild European civilization, which meant, in their eyes, you didn’t go around butchering those who were restoring law and order. The Egyptians went to the mountain pass and warned the Amazons there what was coming their way. The Illuminati convinced a local Lombard warlord that the pass would be a nice addition to his territory and off he went.Two months later, their bully boy hadn’t returned. Neither had any of his men. Never ones to retreat from failure, the Illuminati sent another force and those guys were never seen again as well. This time the Egyptians showed back up to warn the Illuminati that those people whose land they’d been trying to steal were sick of their meddling and were coming to settle matters.Would the Egyptians help the Illuminati deal with this threat, now that it was out of the mountains? The Egyptians politely declined stating 'better the sitting stone you know than the rolling one that sets things around it on fire’. The Illuminati fled from their first base and that is the reason why they hate the Amazons and Egyptians to this day.Mind you, the Illuminati had no idea who lived in that mountain pass at that time. A few decades after the incident, the Amazons relocated northward. Being good stewards over their lands had given up unwelcome rewards; namely people came to them seeking sanctuary. Amazons can be rather cold-hearted. That does not mean they kill you for knocking on their door.When the number of refugees became too great, the houses voted for migration over slaughter. The Amazons travelled to the Black Forest, dispersing from there, and left the people behind to become known as the Swiss. Everywhere, Europe was tough for the Amazons in the Middle Ages. Heavily male-dominated Germanic cultures in the North, Islamic culture in the South, piracy in between and an epidemic of warfare all around.It was in Sub-Saharan Africa where the Amazons prospered the most. There, migrating populations worked in their favor, as did the style of warfare generally practiced. Perversely, the increase in the East African Arabic slave trade worked in the Amazon’s favor. Not only could they 'liberate’ captured populations; males for breeding and women for recruits; it encouraged local tribes to temporarily ally with the Amazons to fight off the slavers.The Subcontinent turned out to be a mixed bag. In the South, Amazons prospered and grew in numbers and houses. The problem was that they became too strong. Normally they would have spread out, but Eastern India proved more hostile than acceptable and further East looked like a crap-shoot. China didn’t look welcoming at all.So, the Indian Amazons were caught up in a series of wars when Northern powers tried to move South and the Southern lords were in some serious need of aid. The issue was there were multiple players in the shadows pulling the strings. One day, the Egyptians came knocking. The Egyptians knew the Amazons well enough to not try to draft them into their cause.They simply told the Amazons who the key players were and what they were trying to do. Why would they do this? It was obvious. Amazons existed for two reasons; live free and make baby Amazons. Those other asshole Secret Societies were threatening both of those goals. Warfare is doubly hard on a female population and women spending years in combat aren’t making babies.Take into account that during this time period a massive amount of the world’s population lived in India. Add to that the Amazon numbers were respectively tiny (invisible) and Every Secret Society they were fighting didn’t think much of women. A few thousand gurgling last breathes later and two of India’s oldest Secret Societies were gone, or eviscerated.Why had they left the other, Islamic, secret society alone? The Islamic society operated in the populous North, not the jungle-covered South. Why did they leave the Amazons alone? The Amazons exhibited a shocking capacity for violence. The Muslim group was a 'secret’ Secret Society. The Amazons were a 'hidden/don’t fuck with us’ Secret Society.A side effect of the war in India was the creation of another Secret Society; the 9 Clans. They weren’t nine back then, but thanks to the Amazons and Egyptians, this East Asian group picked up the Thuggee and, within a century, the Hashshashin. Things were about to get even more interesting.For the Amazons in India, life existed off the beaten path so it took a year for the Amazons to realize those 'dirty little men’ who had shown up in some western Indian ports were, in fact, Europeans; in a European-built ship. They didn’t know Portuguese, but they knew Latin and with a little bit off effort, they got an updated history of Europe.Amazons had been meeting regularly every thirty years, or so, to choose the next High Priestess and exchange notes. These meeting did not include studies of technological, political, or social improvements. Stealing the twenty-first ship to show up, the Amazons sailed home; Europe, that is. They stopped off in East Africa to spread the good news then, upon landing, went to tell their European sisters that their pilgrimages were no longer a matter of torturous overland travel.They could use nifty ships like these instead. With that came even better news; some Genoese, nut-job, failure of a mathematician had discovered a brand new land and they were going to check it out. The decision was made. The Indians were going back home. Their Europeans sisters were going to 'acquire’ some instructions on how to sail a ship then 'obtain’ some ships and divide them up among the three strongholds.Europe would be heading to the west, Africa would sail around the Cape of Good Hope (not yet named that), back toward Europe to link up their communication network (and in time, bump into Brazil), and India would head east to the South-east Asian archipelago, sailing around the hostile Asian kingdoms. Hopefully, the fleet sailing west and the one heading east would meet one day. Unfortunately, North and South America stood in the way of that dream.The 'little’ hitch in this plan was who those ships belonged to. Nearly half the commerce of Europe at the time was either controlled, or influenced by, the Illuminati. The Amazons were running off with their equipment and profits; whoops. A cherry on top to that 'whoops’ was that the Illuminati were only starting to come out of a bloody war with the Condottieri.The Condottieri had started out as a business venture/strong arm of the Illuminati. In classic Illuminati fashion, the leaders of the Condottieri didn’t know precisely who they were working for. In fact, they thought they were independent. When the Illuminati yanked that leash, it snapped and the blood-letting began.The Illuminati had more money than the Pope and the subtle ability to call upon the kingdoms of the Mediterranean World. What did the Condottieri have? A small cadre of loyal, professional fighting men and the best strategic and tactical minds in the West; the ones the Illuminati had recruited into the Condottieri in the first place. Whoops yet again.The Illuminati had every resource under the Sun. The Condottieri knew they were screwed, but they’d been in fucked up situations before and battled through. They needed to stay alive until the path to victory presented itself. Re-enter the Egyptians and the 9 Clans (still not 9 yet). The Egyptians?The Egyptians made a butt-load of money on the silk and spice trade’s overland routes. The Western Europeans/Illuminati were about to cut them out of that. The Egyptians needed time to reposition themselves. The revolt of the Condottieri was a gift from the Divine and suddenly the mercenaries had funds and ships.The 9 Clans? The Illuminati was a 'Does it All’ organization. If the Illuminati won, who would need assassins? This was class warfare, pure and simple. Even with three-on-one, the Illuminati fought back and fought well. The Amazon predations were not the deciding factor in the war. It wasn’t even their war. Soon enough, the Amazons were buying their own boats and going elsewhere.The Illuminati doesn’t forgive, or forget. For some reason, they took the Amazon thefts personally, despite its negligible impact. Maybe it was that all the other players were regionally invested while the Amazons seemed to be dog-piling them. The fact that Amazons had existed in Europe for nearly 2500 years either didn’t occur to them, or they didn’t care.Flash forward to the start of the 20th century. Through the discrete use of marriage-assassination, land grabs and the basic lawlessness in the Western United States, rural South America, Australia and the islands of Southeast Asia, the Amazons had grown vastly in numbers and economic influence.The Egyptians come knocking once more. Unlike past encounters, they were bringing an offer of alliance. The Illuminati controlled key assets in the British Empire and were using those chokeholds to eliminate their rivals. This was not news to the Amazons. Their holdings in India and the Dutch East Indies had been under pressure of the Illuminati for a century.Ever since the Illuminati nearly ground out the Thuggee (one of the 9 Clans), the Egyptians and Amazons have been constantly harassed. This was not the first warning the Egyptians had brought. The Amazons hadn’t want a war with the Illuminati and they certainly didn’t trust the Egyptians. This time they agreed to go to war though.Why? Two things; totally unrelated. First, the Illuminati and the Seven Pillars of Heaven had agreed to carve up Asia. Amazons lived in Asia and they were no man’s chattel. Secondly, the Women’s Rights movement was in full swing. The Amazons had nothing to do with it. Those were outsider females. What interested the Amazons were the legal ramifications of Women’s Equality.The Amazons were poised for a massive increase in their financial footprint. With the Illuminati out of the way, or at least, preoccupied, they could seize assets and have time to fortify before they could be attacked. Women’s Equality would allow this to take place. Basically, the Amazons were going to exploit the blood, sweat and tears of women to advance their agenda.From all accounts, the only groups that recalled the Amazons last foray into Secret Society politics were the Amazons and Egyptians. Certainly no one had enlightened the Condottieri. They started smacking around some Amazon bases in Europe and unleashed 'Hell on Earth’. With the help of the Egyptians, they got to it in Amazon fashion.A General of the Condottieri and his family were eating at a Naples eatery when five women dresses like nuns walked in and shot up him, his entire family plus some bodyguards. When the response team showed up, they killed them too. A few police were added to the obituary column as the Amazons escaped. Welcome to Amazon warfare.The Condottieri were furious over such a public breach, as well as the losses. They swore a vendetta. The 9 Clans happily informed the Condottieri that a 'War of Extermination’ was the Amazon default setting. The Condottieri were not afraid; not yet. See, there was another secret society called La Solidaridad.Working on intelligence from the Illuminati, La Solidaridad overran an Amazon compound in Argentina. They thought it would be funny to take the survivors as sex slaves. Maybe the Illuminati was experimenting to see just how pissed-off Amazons could get. Maybe La Solidaridad hadn’t read their Homer, especially those parts concerning Ancient World vengeance.It took the Host six months to start things rolling then the carnage began. They made damn sure the men knew they were being hunted by women. They weren’t there to out-macho the men, or make a point. Every night, they attacked the men and their families in the cities and towns. For safeties sake, La Solidaridad retreated to their country estates. Huge mistake.A good number of them had to have hunted at some point in their lives. How they missed being 'flushed out into the open’ was beyond me. Out in the countryside, there was nowhere to hide. Walls meant little because Amazons were incredibly fit and trained to fight at night. Most of the families the Amazons killed. They were the lucky ones. The survivors? By using a new Edison device, they took some home movies of the fates of those men.The Amazon’s favorite tactic was to shove lit sticks of dynamite in the men’s asses then steer them toward the closest river. One guy actually made it. His relief didn’t last long. The Amazons had done something to turn the normally safe caiman population into rabidly aggressive swarmers. Bitches; insanely, sadistic bitches.In eighteen months, La Solidaridad had ceased to exist as an organization and never recovered. The Illuminati used that time wisely to beat down the Egyptians, Earth and Sky, and the 9 Clans, aided by the Seven Pillars. Having concluded their first order of business, the Amazons sent their home movie to the Condottieri.It wasn’t mercy toward the Condottieri. I was psychological warfare. The Amazons needed the Condottieri off-balance so they could go after their real enemy. It seemed the Illuminati had instructed La Solidaridad on how to 'intimidate’ the Amazons; through rape, torture and enslavement. Specifically, it was Cáel O'Shea who set the tragedy in motion; Granddad.Beyond Granddad being impossibly fucking old, he had possessed some seriously out of control animosity where Amazons were concerned. Before the Amazon’s could implement their hunt, the 9 Clans intervened. The Illuminati had been giving them real problems and they saw a way to gain some breathing space. Had the Amazons and 9 Clans been in communication, the World might be a very different place today.Instead, the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne was wacked by the Black Hand, some Serbian numbskulls took the fall and the rest of us got World War I. Oddly enough, this one murder accomplished the goals of the 9 Clans, Amazons, Egyptians and Earth and Sky Society. The British Empire still stood, but was wrecked. China was much worse off than that.Before the Amazons could gain their vengeance, the Egyptians negotiated a cease-fire between groups. The Amazon Council was furious yet unwilling to fight the Illuminati alone. They kept down their bile…and waited. In the post-War period, the Amazon/Illuminati feud ate much of their resources (probably the Egyptian’s intentions all along).A truly dark side of this struggle was the Amazon support for the Nazis. Did the Amazons switch course? Yes, but not for the reasons most people would think. Jews, gypsies, communists and homosexuals going into camps didn’t worry them one bit. What did? Let’s go back in time to those women in the Swiss Alps who headed north.A great many of them went North then East…to places like Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It wasn’t so much a matter of whimsy as one of terrain and population. All the best farmland was in western Germany, the Low Countries and France. That’s where the Germanic peoples settled. Behind them, to the East, were the Slavs.The Slavs had three things the Amazons liked; low population density, weak social hierarchies and crappy land. That meant they could live in relative isolation, not be subject to an all-powerful king and not be inundated with migrating hordes wanting to steal their dank swamps, deep forests and isolate meadows.Sometime in early 1939, right after the Third Reich snatched up Bohemia, some Amazon augur decided to open up Hitler’s Mein Kampf to see what was going on i.e. to see when Hitler would get around to jumping on England; the whole reason the Amazon were supporting him. What she found out was bad, bad, bad! The genocide of a bunch of people they could care less about? Not a problem.Invading the Slavic lands? What? Russia/Soviet Union hadn’t been the big foe in WWI and they certainly were not Germany’s greatest enemy at the moment; Britain was! Drang Nach Osten? That was an undefined migration of Germans back into Slavic lands that ended over 600 years ago? Their Eastern European sisters were in grave danger from a lunatic.The common sense response (for Amazons) was to kill the Hitler. They couldn’t get close, so they took their problem to their old allies, the Egyptians and 9 Clans. Those two saw nothing wrong with the way things were developing. The Amazons swallowed their pride and went to the Illuminati who seemed rather enchanted with the idea of the fascists and communists annihilating one another.They had no way to safely approach the Soviets. Pulling their sister houses out of Eastern Europe was no longer an option; the other Secret Societies would be looking for that and try to figure out where the Amazon home bases were. The Amazons decided to make a fight of it. They were not going to charge panzers with spears.No, they started setting up caches of supplies and weapons in the most inaccessible places imaginable. The hope was that as Nazi Germany was grinding Communist Russia to dust, they could smuggle out their people in the chaos to Sweden then points west. The problem was WW II didn’t work out that way. Great Britain got spanked at Dunkirk and Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxemburg and Norway all surrendered to the Nazi blitzkrieg.Then the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia went under, but the Soviet Union didn’t fall. Much to the Amazon Council’s horror, resistance units began to interact with the local Amazons in an effort to improve their mutual survivability. Tales of mysterious female fighter, appearing to slay their enemies then disappearing into the wilderness filtered to both the Stavka (Russians) and SOE (British).The SOE discovered an answer to the mystery in mid-1942, by way of the fledgling US OSS. The Americans 'found’ three female Army recruits who volunteered for such a mission. A month later, the partisan bands with those agents found the 'Forest Women’ and all the lights came on. Unknown to the public World, the Amazon Council decided that the best hope for their kinswomen was to bring down the Nazis and ride out the Allied conquest.All of that might have been a happily little footnote except for what happened next. Hundreds of Amazons fought; no surprise; yet they didn’t fight alone this time. Men and women of the local populace fought side by side with these lethal warriors. They shared battle plans, food, fire and medical care. That huge cultural barrier created over two and a half millennia began to erode.They bled together and were forced from time to time to place their lives in each other’s hands. They witnessed one another’s courage and sacrifice. They watched them bury their dead, nurture their young and weep at their pain. Whenever things looked darkest, the Amazon would turn to their partisan partners and say with utmost confidence 'we have survived worse; so can you’.The seminal event happened on the night of February 17th, 1944. For two years, the fractured, wounded women that are ever-present wherever there is war began to attach themselves to the Amazon bands. At first they were little more than annoyances. In time, the Amazons tried to turn these women into something 'useful’. Later, a few earned the right to follow the Amazons into battle.On that February night, two ladies were inducted into House Živa. This was hardly the first time outsider women were brought into the Host, but this circumstance was unique; induction in the middle of a war, having proven themselves in battle before their now-sisters. From that action; not the last in that conflict; was born the concept of the 'Runners’.With the end of WWII, the Amazons emerged more powerful than ever. The three strongest groups in the United States were the Egyptians, Illuminati and the Amazons. The Amazons profited the most; having started with the lowest profile and having infiltrated both the government and business sectors during the war effort.Using the Freemasons, the Egyptians reaped great benefit from the US war effort too. Always forward-looking, the Egyptians helped the Amazons as well. Still, not everything was rosy. For the Public World, World War II ended in September of 1945. That was barely a blip in the Secret Societies’ radar. The calamity came on the 10th of December 1949.Using their pawns in the Chinese Communist Party, the Seven Pillars had re-unified China and were back on the world stage. Earth and Sky and the 9 Clans were dealt a setback. A fourth secret society involved in the Chinese struggle was absorbed by the 7 Pillars. The problem was that all the societies were locked in a bitter struggle yet devastated and over-extended.The 9 Clans, fearing the ratcheting up of Cold War intelligence-gathering services by multiple national governments asked for a global truce. The Amazons were dangerously exposed and over-extended. The Illuminati decided this was their time to strike and nothing could deter them. Into this backdrop, came the news to the Amazons that they had serious genetic issues.That led to the First Directive; the recruitment of 'Runners’ as an established program as well as the explosion of what I knew as Executive Services. In a truly bizarre twist, U.S. and Soviet agents found themselves engaged in cat-and-mouse games with European NATO agents. Amazons had penetrated the proto-CIA during the war in an effort to reach their European sisters.In Eastern Europe, many of those partisans went over to the Communists when the Soviets overran their countries and looked favorably upon their erstwhile allies from the War. They couldn’t match the influence that the many of the other secret societies possessed. Instead they pulled upon existing, personal relationships.I worked with a negative result of those days; Desiree, or more accurately, Desiree’s parents. I was also walking with the final resolution of that crisis. The Secret Societies proved they could work just as fast as the UN. In three decades they had resolved nothing and were spending more and more time on damage control.Three events converged. The Illuminati had figured out the full-blooded Amazons were dying out so they knew they could win a game of attrition. The rest of the groups were coming to the conclusion that wiping out the Amazons was the easier course of action. The Amazons had, without a doubt, located the leader of the Illuminati, Cáel O'Shea.O'Shea was in sight of his goal; the extermination of the Amazons; when a lone Amazon got to him first. O'Shea’s death sent titanic shockwaves through the Illuminati. There was a scramble for the top spot, fear over how much the Amazons knew about their inner workings, and how the other secret orders would take this bit of news.The Illuminati recoiled from the event, agreed to a truce and that led to the protocols that kept Brianna from dragging me off; gunshot wounds and all. That had been the state of affairs for the last thirty years. Again, the World had not stood still. China was an economic powerhouse, the EU grew stronger, and wars of political ideology had been replaced by religious-based terrorism.The Amazons were at a critical juncture in their history. The 'New’ Directive was their best chance at staving off extinction and the Houses were fighting it kicking and screaming. The First Directive wasn’t being implemented properly. If nothing changed, the Amazons would be dragged under by the weight of their own bigotry.But wait! There was this idiot with no conception of history getting in the way of Amazon extinction; the decline toward oblivion that six murderous factions were waiting for. In this epic there were no 'friends’, only 'allies of convenience’. The Egyptians weren’t buddies. They simply preferred others to fight their battles for them.The Amazons fit that bill nicely, but if they were dying out, the Egyptians would be more concerned in filling the Amazon void than mourning over the Host’s grave. The Illuminati and Seven Pillars were enemies. Though there was little animosity between the Earth & Sky and the Amazons, the E&S were based on perpetuating the legacy of the World’s greatest rapist.The 9 Clans were the 9 Clans and their business was all about the precise application of death. They had no friends and if they pretended to be your friend, it was only so they could position themselves to kill you. It was only business. They rarely played with debts, obligations and vendettas. Still, if a member of the 9 Clans said they owed you, it was worth the assassin’s weight in Iridium.As a bonus, the 9 Clans were gender-neutral. Outside of the Amazons, they had been using females in their numbers the longest. Because of this, the 9 Clans tried to interact with the Amazon using women from their own ranks, minimizing the sexual tension between the groups. The Condottieri had also began recruiting women into their ranks over the past twenty years.Their leadership was still all-male with the added complications of the unresolved Naples killings and the brutal destruction of La Solidaridad. Also, while the Amazons were not business competitors, they didn’t employ the Condottieri either. All these micro-wars had been very good for the Condottieri, allowing them to build up quite a stable of talent and a huge war chest.If the Amazons recovered, the global map would change. How so? Madi and Rhada weren’t from Cleveland, but from India where unresolved crimes against women were too common. Palli Chandra, the VP of International Finance and Ngozi from my spa

BLOOD AND TREASURE: Season Two is an exciting series on Paramount Plus. It starts with an attack on the Vatican to capture a banner called “The Soul of Genghis Khan.” The group that's attacking are followers of the Great Khan in the current day, who's trying to conquer the world. The heroes, Danny, Lexi and Father Chuck, must try to get the banner before the Great Khan does. In every episode, as they're about to retrieve the banner, the Great Khan sends his ninjas, who kill their informants and frustrate their plans.

7 years of off-screen training has made Ying Ko (aka Lamont Cranston, aka The Shadow) a superhero that New York city desperately needs. Endowed with a nose of bestial proportions and equipped with the ability to turn invisible, as long as no one is looking, nobody can stop him from enslaving the city. But his enemy and equal, Shiwan Khan (heir of Genghis Khan) [yes this movie requires multiple sets of parenthesis], wants to finish what his ancestor started hundreds of year ago... to build a big metal bomb.The Shadow (1994) was recommended by Shaner, host of the excellent podcast What's Shakin With Shaner.Music created by Jack Parsons.We want your recommendations for the pod, which you can submit on Twitter or by email.

In this episode we travel to China to visit what some think is the only man made structure that can be seen from space, spoiler alert, its not. We look at the extremely long history of the Great Wall of China, who built it, why was it built, did it work? We then see how much of an influence it has made on modern popular culture.Civilization (1991- )Battlefield 2:Euro Force (2006)Age of Empires II HD:The Forgotten (2013)Age of Mythology: The Tale of the Dragon (2016)Plants vs Zombies: Great Wall Edition (2012)Temple Run 2 (China edition) (2012)The Simpsons: Tapped Out (2017)Asphalt 8: Airborne (2014)Tekken 2 (1995)8 Realms (1999)Titan Quest (2006)Tomb Raider 2 (1997)Disney Speedstorm (2022)Angry Birds (2009)The Simpsons: Bart vs The World (1991)Double Dragon III : The Sacred Stones (1990)Batman: The Brave and the Bold S1E26 (2009)D.C.'s Legends of Tomorrow S3E9 (2017)Smallville  S9E22 (2010)Justice League Unlimited S3E13 (2006)Justice League S2E25 (2004)Superman S1E3 E7 (1988)Supergirl S6E20 (2021)The Flash S4E12 (2018)The Death of Superman (2018)Lego Aquaman : Rage of Atlantis (2018)Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)Justice League: Star-crossed (2004)Justice League Dark: Apokolips War (2020)Eternals (2021)Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  S6E19 (2018)Sasoke 18 (2007)Futurama S3E3 (2000)Dora The Explorer S4E14 (2006)Bill and Teds Excellent Adventures S1E1 (1990)Murdoch Mysteries S3E2 (2010)The Amazing Race S1E12 (2001) S10 E1&2 (2006)The Love Boat S7E2 (1983)An Idiot Abroad S1E1 (2010)Magnum P.I. S2E1 (2019)Amazing Race: Australia S2E11 (2012)Johnny Bravo S3E11 (2001)Transformers: Robots in Disguise S1E12 (2001)Doctor Who S1S4 (1964) s13e5 (2021) Star Trek: Voyager S5E23 (1999)Doctor Who "Childhood Living" (1979)Doctor Who "Rose" (2005)The Great Wall (2017)The Bucket List (2007)M. Butterfly (1993)Tanguy (2001)Legend of the Drunken Tiger (1990)Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)Transformers: Rise of Extinction (2014)Mulan (1998)The Karate Kid (2010)The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)The Fall (2006)The Sorcerers Apprentice (2010)Hero (2002)Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003)Around the World in 80 Days (2004)Genghis Khan (1965)Overlord (Light Novel Series) (2010)Year of the Tiger (2008)Last Survivor of the Great Wall (2017)Empire of the Dragon (2018)The Wiggles: Top of the Tots (2004)Bob Hope: On The Road To China (1979)The Great Wall Concert (2005)Magic of David Copperfield: China (1986)The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Journey to Radiance (2000)Email: diggingdeeperwiththeancients@gmail.comTwitter: @diggingdeeppodFacebook: @diggingdeeperwiththeancientsInstagram: @diggingdeeperwiththeancientsMusic by audionautix.comDont forget to like, review and share. Help us to keep growing

Tahukah kalian? Ternyata sebelum Genghis Khan, ada satu penguasa besar lain di Mongolia yang sempat menebar teror di Benua Eropa. Namanya adalah Attila, atau yang lebih dikenal sebagai Attila sang Hun. Saking dahsyatnya serangan yang dilakukan Attila ke Eropa, ia sampai-sampai diberi julukan “Scourge of God”, atau Amarah Tuhan. Lantas, mengapa Attila bisa mendapat julukan demikian dan seperti apa kisah hidupnya sehingga ia begitu ditakuti oleh orang-orang Eropa pada masa itu? Inilah risalah Sang Dewa Perang!

It's a Conspiracy! Season 5, Episode 6! Are We All Mongolian?, The Maryland Goat Man, and 10 Forgotten Swear Words. Andrew, Charlie, and Greg get into: Are We All Mongolian?, The Maryland Goat Man, and 10 Forgotten Swear Words.   It's a Conspiracy! is proud to be a part of the Albert Podcast Network: AlbertaPodcastNetwork.com   Links: Are We All Mongolian? Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover, DNA Data Implies We owe it all to superstud Genghis   The Maryland Goat Man Maryland Goatman Cryptidz Page The Goatman–Or His Story, at Least–Still Haunts Prince George's County The Urban Legend In Maryland That Will Keep You Awake At Night   10 Forgotten Swear Words 9 Obscure Swear Words We Should Bring Back 22 INCREDIBLE FORGOTTEN CURSE WORDS FROM WAY BACK IN THE DAY 21 Amazing Forgotten Curse Words We Need To Bring Back   What Are We Drinking? Andrew is drinking Chainsaws for Hands from Town Square Brewing Charlie is drinking Santiago de Cuba Anejo 8-Year Rum Greg is drinking Collective Project Blood Orange Yuzu Vanilla Sparkling Juice  --- Patreon / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook Merch available at OldManDesign.com (We'll get ya sorted) Questions, comments, or feedback? Email the show at itsaconspiracy@protonmail.com

Yohan sudah test DNA dia. Fuhhh.. Kalau kamu ada peluang dan rezeki, why kot kita test dan dapatkan secara scientific secara biology secara geographic asal usul kamu. Best la Yohan sudah test. Interesting video dia di Channel Lagu Dari Langit. Sekali testkan, kamu keturunan Genghis Khan kono atau keturunan penjahat terkenal? Bah Jon dengarkan episode kami cerita tentang Test DNA, dibawakan khas oleh Urang KM Tinggal Jipun @yohantawith dari channel mempromosikan Aomori No1 di Japan, @lagudarilangit dan diterbitkan oleh @nett_naha Out on Spotify! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kinabalupodcast/support

Thanks again for tuning into this week's episode of PitchIt. I sat down with Klavi's Co-Founder & CEO, Bruno Chan.Klavi is a SaaS platform that provides Open Finance (or Open Banking) solutions. The company has a mission of becoming a leader in Open Finance solutions in Brazil.Open finance has the potential to help reshape the financial services market. The impact is felt very differently depending on where you live and what the regulatory appetite is for open finance. Bruno and I talked about his unique background, which included 9 years in China during their fintech boom. We also talk about the biggest potential impact of open banking, whether or not consumers want to control their own data, misplaced anger from the banks, why Klavi is the key, raising capital, and much more.Before you begin the episode, please take a minute to rate the show and provide feedback; I take listener comments very seriously. And don't forget to join us in Miami on December 13 - 14 for Fintech Nexus LatAm. This is LatAm's premier fintech event.Without further ado, I present Klavi's Co-Founder & CEO, Bruno Chan. I hope you enjoy our conversation.Episode Discussion points include:Bruno's journey to KlaviHis nine years in ChinaKlavi is the “key”The status of opening banking in BrazilFinancial inclusionWhy bankers misunderstand open bankingRegulation as an open banking enabler Recommended reading: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight and Genghis Khan by Conn IgguldenRaising CapitalAnd much more…Connect with Bruno on LinkedInConnect with PitchIt: Tweet me @ToddFintech Connect with me on LinkedIn Find previous PitchIt episodes Email me at todd@fintechnexus.com Until next time.

Charlie Classic (IG: @CharlieClassic ) is a comedian and content creator on TikTok, Youtube and Instagram.  He's currently the host of The Shat Show which can only be seen on OnlyFans due to its sexual nature.  He currently has 1.7 million followers on TikTok and had 1 million on Vine before it shut down.  ——————————————————— Michael's Men of Action program is a Master's course dedicated to helping people elevate their social lives by building elite social circles and becoming higher status. Click the link below to learn more: https://m.moamentoring.com/podcast ———————————————————— Become an affiliate for MOA Mentoring: https://www.moamentoring.com/earn Subscribe on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelSartain Listen on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-michael-sartain-podcast/id1579791157 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2faAYwvDD9Bvkpwv6umlPO?si=8Q3ak9HnSlKjuChsTXr6YQ&dl_branch=1 Filmed at Sticky Paws Studios: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UComrBVcqGLDs3Ue-yWAft8w 0:00 Your TikTok, makes me laugh 1:53 You know what would make this video better, boobs 3:24 The mathematics of humor 6:14 ***37 million views 6:44 ***Plug talk 7:33 ***Vape tasted like p*ssy 8:36 Show my butt hole 9:34 Hard time dating 10:08 Ate 2000 mg of gummies 10:55 ***Ruined relationship, female friends 12:54 ***Text me her butt hole 14:21 ***Strippers hate strippers, locker room 15:34 ***I hate Cherry more than world, hunger, and aids 17:14 ***Cherry did not get fired 19:04 *Sleeping with the owner 21:02 ***Strip club Voice 22:52 **Claremont Lounge 24:25 **Shake that butt hole 26:02 ***Strip club DJ for 26 years 28:31 **Girls sync up, blood bucket 31:51 Start a rumor about myself 32:54 *Made up for Hiroshima 34:12 ***A person with no fingers 35:54 In the military/Strip club DJ 37:12 Are you Steve Wonder? 39:09 ***Girls trying to stab each other 40:07 Female friends 42:02 ***Mate copying strategy 43:24 *Kindly Myers 45:09 *Numb to nudity 46:56 ***How do you get all these hot women? 49:42 ***Hate from men 52:07 Comedic formula 54:09 **Save us 57:11 Work on your personality 58:16 Bust a nut 1:01:08 *Don't hate me 1:02:10 Made me hate myself 1:03:04 Vine 1:04:46 ***Sapphire 1:06:04 Fighting over sugar daddy's 1:08:12 Found this kid a kidney 1:09:54 *King Bach 1:12:29 Content getting taken down 1:18:15 *Nashville reaction 1:24:41 Biden 1:26:49 Nickel Back, dad rock 1:29:30 ***Nashville Party 1:32:51 Vegas mansions parties 1:35:00 Dealing with haters 1:37:20 Banned from the Playboy mansion 1:41:30 Kindly question 1:44:18 ***Serial killers 1:45:32 Man on the Train 1:47:40 ***Studying brains 1:51:58 Empathy 1:54:19 Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin 1:58:35 ***Bad person vs Sociopath 2:02:16 *No treatments for sociopathy 2:03:43 Nick Cage 2:07:29 Planning out content 2:09:03 TikTok Question 2:10:51 TikTok idea 2:11:53 **Too raunchy 2:16:16 **Picking the girls' names 2:21:06 Social Media 2:22:47 Come on the podcast 2:24:23 Outro

Last time we spoke the reluctant Lord Elgin took up the job as the new emissary to China. Alongside his french counterpart Baron Gross, both men would overlook their military coalitions expedition in China to force the Qing emperor to abide by their treaty and some new demands. They began with a bombardment and occupation of the grand city of Canton and then Ye Mingchen was hunted down and arrested. Ye was replaced with a puppet named Pih-Kwei who would be nominally controlled by the European forces. Now the coalition would fight their way to Beijing to force an audience with Emperor Xianfeng, but something lied in their way, the famous Taku forts at the mouth of the Bei He River. Could the coalition fight past these legendary forts and strangle Beijing  enough to get their demands met?   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. #21 This episode is Part 3 of the Second Opium War: battles for the Taku Forts At high tide the Taku Forts were surrounded by water, the Bei He River became something like a natural moat. The entrance to the Bei He River was 200 yards in width, forcing the British and French warships into a bottleneck gauntlet with each shore holding 137 pieces of antiquated artillery. When the invaders arrived, the Qing forces quickly went to work creating earthwork walls with sandbags to bolster the defenses. The Qing forces presumed the European gunboats hulls were too deep and thus they would not risk entering the river until it was very high tide to avoid going aground. That presumption was a grave error as Seymour and Rigault were willing to risk it and mounted a surprise attack at 10am on May 20th. Elgin made one last ditch effort to get Tan to surrender peacefully, but Tan did not even bother to respond to Elgins message. Now in a similar fashion to the first opium war, as you might remember a large problem for the Qing was their outdated artillery. Their cannons were usually immobile, unable to aim at all degrees and angles. The Taku Fort cannons were aimed in such a way to hit warships at high tide, but the British-French force was going to attack during low tide. Alongside the Taku Forts cannons another defensive obstacle was a 7 inch thick boom made out of bamboo. The Europeans opened fire unleashed pure hell upon the forts and when the forts unleashed their own volley, literally all of their shots went over the European masts. To add insult to injury, the British sacrificed one of their ships, the Coromandel to ram into the boom which broke with ease. The Coromandal received a nasty gash in her hull, but the job had been done. As pieces of the boom floated away, the rest of the European armada began to steam through the gap while the Qing helplessly fired their cannons straight over their masts. The French ships Mitraille and Fusee alongside the British Cormorant fired upon 2 of the Taku Forts on the left bank while the French Avalance, Dragonne and British Nimrod fired upon the 3 forts on the right. The Chinese manning Gingalls had much better luck than the cannons, though it also came at the price of making the Europeans laugh watching men fall over from firing each shot. However not all was funny as Gingalls could be properly aimed unlike the cannons and managed to kill 5 British and 6 French while wounding another 61. Then tragedy happened when a gunpowder cache in one of the Taku forts accidentally exploded killing 100 Chinese. Alongside the invaders maelstrom of gunfire and the defenders despair at the futility of their cannons many began to panic. Even before many of the British and French forces began to land ashore, countless Qing forces were deserting the earthen parapet en masse. In desperation seeing his men flee, the Qing commander launched 50 fireboats stuffed with straw at the barbarian ships, only to see the fireships crash into the bank at the bend in the river. Not a single fireship was able to cause damage to the invaders. With the last ditch effort a complete failure, the commander of the Taku Forts went to the Temple of the Sea God and slashed his jugular vein with his sword killing himself.  The Viceroy of Zhili province was banished to the desolate border territory with Russia in the north. As he packed his bags, Emperor Xianfeng condemned the Viceroy's mismanagement of the Taku Fort defense as being “without plan or resource”. Elgin after witnessing the victory over the Taku Forts had a really interesting thing to say “Twenty-four determined men with revolvers, and a sufficient number of cartridges, might walk through China from one end to another.”  Back home in Britain Elgin was being praised and was rewarded likewise with carte blanche for all further military actions and negotiations. The new Prime Minister, Lord Derby, haha looks like those grand speeches worked out for him, well he sent Elgin a congratulatory dispatch “giving me latitude to do anything I choose, if only I will finish the affair.” The very same man who condemned British imperialism the year prior was now a warhawk. Lord Malmesbury became the new foreign minister replacing Lord Clarendon. Back in China, the European gunboats made their way up the Bei He River triumphantly towards the next Qing stronghold, Tianjin. Tianjin was around 30 miles away from Beijing. The 3 Plenipotentiaries stayed further behind at the Taku Forts for their own safety as Seymour and Rigault took the lead. As they steamed up the Bei He River, both the Fusee and Cormorant ran aground numerous time, but the Europeans found some very unlikely allies to help, the local Chinese. Turns out a lot of the populace absolutely hated their Manchu overlords and volunteered their tugboats free of charge to help the Europeans. Apparently when the Europeans tried to pay them many refused if it is to be believed.  On June 4th the European armada arrived at Tianjin without any resistance along the way. The Qing defenders at Tianjin morale was so low they were at the point of surrender. There was also a rumor spreading around that Emperor Xianfeng had been overthrown and replaced by a new dynasty who was willing to simply sign a new treaty with the Europeans. Seymour and Rigault advised Elgin he should stay at the Taku Forts for security, but he disregarded this and came up to the war party on May 26th. Elgin wrote in his diary as he made his way up the river. “Through the night watches, when no Chinaman moves, when the junks cast anchor, we laboured on, cutting ruthlessly and recklessly through that glancing and startled river which, until the last few weeks, no stranger keel had ever furrowed. Whose work are we engaged in, when we burst thus with hideous violence and brutal energy into these darkest and most mysterious recesses of the traditions of the past? I wish I could answer that question in a manner satisfactory to myself. At the same time there is certainly not much to regret in the old civilisation which we are thus scattering to the winds. A dense population, timorous and pauperised, such would seem to be its chief product. “ The Plenipotentiaries were quite surprised when they were met outside Tianjin by a detachment of local Qing officials and merchants who came looking for opium. Yes these were those types of middle men folks who were used to bribes and the lucrative business of moving opium. Despite the rumors, Emperor Xianfeng had not been overthrown, but he was willing to negotiate with the Europeans. Emperor Xianfeng sent commissioners to Tianjin in the hope of stopping the European advance to Beijing. Meanwhile with Tianjin not putting up a fight, Elgin wrote in his diary “[I have] complete military command of the capital of China, without having broken off relations with the neutral powers, and without having interrupted, for a single day, our trade at the different ports of the Empire.” The Europeans were treated with the utmost respect and the lavish temple known as the Supreme Felicity was used as headquarters for the Europeans. The Europeans transformed the temple by creating a bowling alley, they used its myriad of altars for washbasins and placed vanity mirrors in front of statues of the gods. This cultural vandalized would be an appetizer for events in the future. Two emissaries were sent by Emperor Xianfeng, both were commissioners, the first was the 74 year old Guiliang, a senior military officer. The other was a 53 year old Mongolian military officer. They met with the Europeans at the Temple of Oceanic Influences southwest of Tianjin. Elgin arrived on June 4th alongside 50 Royal marines and a band from the warship Calcutta to add some muscle.  The first meeting went…terribly. The commissioners had the authority to negotiate, but lacked carte blanche to finalize any deal. Elgin stormed out of the first meeting, completely blowing off this lavish buffet the Qing had set for the party to celebrate the new peace treaty. Elgin was well known to be courtes, but after spending 6 months in China had quickly learnt the only way to get Qing officials to act was to show some bravado. Elgin even wrote to his wife at the time “I have made up my mind, disgusting as the part is to me, to act the role of the ‘uncontrollably fierce barbarian.'” As Elgin stomped his feet walking off he made a threat that he would soon march upon Beijing, even though in truth the Europeans did not have the land forces to do so. Elgin left his brother to continue negotiations, Lord Frederick Bruce. One of Fredericks interpreters, Horatio Lay decided it was a good idea to use some Sturm und Drang and began to literally scream at the Qing commissioners whenever they talked about clauses in the new treaty. Lay even threatened to lay waste to Beijing and would slap the Emperor himself, this guy had some balls. Lay's abuse of the two commissioners became so bad, the men went around his head to speak to Putiatin and the American envoy William Reed. Reed sent a letter to Elgin asking him to help rein in the tyrannical Lay, but Elgin ignored the letter, wow. Putiatin asked Gros whom he knew had grown very close to Elgin, to intercede, but Gros declined to do so as he feared it would alienate his friendship to Elgin. The Qing then resorted to bribery, they tried to give Lay a horse, but Lay did not change his aggressive stance.  The negotiations were taking very long, it was the typical Chinese strategy of procrastination. Elgin was becoming livid and wrote in his diary about Reed and Putiatin “These sneaking scoundrels do what they can to thwart me and then while affecting to support the Chinese act as their own worst enemies.” Elgin also felt British parliament had failed to back him up. Elgin received a letter from the new Foriegn minister Lord Malmesbury on April the 9th, berating him for not concluding the peace treaty in due time. “A Cabinet has been held today and it is our anxious wish to see this Chinese business settled if it can be done without loss of honour and commercial interests as at present enjoyed. Our reputation is sufficiently vindicated at Canton and we do not look at the chance of a war with the Chinese Empire without much apprehension. I trust therefore that you will not engage us in a contest of this sort if you can possibly avoid it.” The negotiations over the terms of the new treaty stretched for 3 weeks and the Qing were rejecting two clauses the British absolutely wanted: free passage throughout China and for a permanent British and French embassy at the Qing imperial court. The two commissioners stated that accepting either of these would cost the men their lives. Gros and Putiatin began arguing that the permanent embassy point was not critical as long as their ministers had access to Beijing in some form. After much arguing the commissioners conceded to the two points and thus the Treaty of Tianjin was formed. The Europeans made sure to add a clause they henceforth they would no longer be called barbarians in official communications and treaties, though it should be noted the term used by the Chinese literally just meant “those who don't speak Chinese”.  The Treaty of Tianjin opened new ports for trade: Tianjin, Hangzhou and Nanjing. It should be noted the Qing were all too happy to toss Nanjing into the treaty as the Taiping were occupying it as their own capital. Perhaps if they were lucky, the Europeans would go to Nanjing, run into some trouble and attack the Taiping for them! Baron Gros raised concerns over the clauses as he argued Britain would have to bear even more military might to enforce the treaty. As Gros pointed out to Elgin, the Confucious principle, a promise made under duress does not need to be kept. Another item on the treaty clauses was the payment of 2 million taels of silver to Britain for the damage to their factories at Canton and another 2 million in general reparation. The French were to receive 2 million taels as well. Now the warnings Gros made concerned Elgin and he was having second thoughts. One major concern was the idea of extracting he enormous sums of money from what seemed to be an Empire on the verge of Bankruptcy. Elgin wrote back to the foreign minister, concerned that extracting the large sums of money would lead to the toppling of the Manchu rule “Everything we saw around us indicated the penury of the Treasury. To despair, by putting forward pecuniary claims which it could satisfy only by measures that would increase its unpopularity and extend the area of rebellion.” Elgin ended by saying the humiliating treaty would be a large beacon for the Taiping Rebels. William Reed recommended legalizing opium as a clause, arguing the tax revenue from it would benefit the Qing Empire. The British wanted a tariff of only 30 taels and the Cohong merchants supported this. Jardine & Matheson & co released a statement “The use of opium is not a curse, but a comfort and benefit to the hard-working Chinese.” Boy you can't get any more gross than that one. The French for their part performed a study of the opium problem in China. Baron Gros found that users who smoked upto 8 pipes per day had a life expectancy of only 6 years. Casual consumers could expect around 20 years after starting to smoke it, many died around the age of 50 or so. Opium addicts were found to be spending 2/3 ‘s of their income to feed their addiction. The Russians and Americans agreed with the French that the opium trade was horrible. The French however have little to nothing to say about another form of trade they took part in with China, the “pig trade”, that being the enslavement of coolies. Now you have to hear this one, this is so symbolic of the event as a whole. The translator for the treaty took forever because he was an opium addict. You just can't make this stuff up folks. The Russians agreed to the terms first on June 18th Putiantian signed off, making Elgin feel betrayed and abandoned because he still had qualms. What was really important to Russia was the border they shared with the Qing, it had been a source of much conflict. Thus Russia settled with a visiting ambassador to Beijing with no permanent status. Christianity received a formal toleration and the Russians got access to 2 more ports on Taiwan and Hainan. Five days later the Americans signed off on a similar agreement to the Russians. Both the Americans and Russians made sure to include the most favored nations clause in their treaties, which meant that whatever further concessions went to the British and French, they too would enjoy them. Thus the 2 nations who brought zero military aid and did basically nothing reaped the same benefits as the 2 nations shouldering everything, ain't that nice? Putiatin sent Elgin and Gros a copy of Russia's treaty urging them not to topple the manchu rule with too many humiliating concessions. Reed made a similar appeal. Gros reached an agreement on june 23rd and did not hesitate to sign the treaty because he did not want to undercut Elgin's negotiators, preferring to let them finish the job. The French also sought much less than Britain from the Chinese. A week after and the British had still not come to an agreement, Gros became impatient and sent Elgin a letter, that if the British did not sign soon the French would simply sail off. The British were stuck on two key issue; to have a permanent ambassador in Beijing and freedom to travel anywhere in China. The Chinese commissioners desperately sought the aid of Gros and Putiatin, indicating to them the Emperor was going to have them killed if they agreed to the two clauses. Elgin threatened to march on Beijing and it seems the commissioners were forced to give in. On June 26th the British Treaty of Tianjin was ratified. The Chinese would pay 5 million in war reparations, Christian missionaries would be allowed to work unhindered throughout China and 11 ports would be opened for trade. Taxes on imported goods would be set on a follow up meeting at Shanghai, and there 5% was agreed upon. Taxables goods would be silk, brocades and of course opium. The taxation agreement basically made opium legal in China, but without bringing the subject up. The Commissioners signed the treaty, but when they got back to Beijing, take a wild guess, the Emperor rejected the humiliating terms. Now Elgin failed to bring up the issue of the opium trade and its official legalization as were his instructions from Clarendon. Elgin probably felt since Clarendon lost his position he no longer had to respect the order. Clarendons successor Lord Malmesbury did not give a similar order. On July 3rd, 400 men and a naval band serenaded Elgin signing the Treaty of Tianjin at the Temple of Oceanic Influences under some paper lanterns. And despite the fact the commissioners, as they said it, were soon to be beheaded, they invited Elgin to a lavish dinner at the temple after the signing. At the dinner one of the commissioners, Hua Shan gave Elgin copies of some famous poetry. The next day, Baron Gross signed the French treaty but cheekily added some new demands that the commissioners were forced to abide by. He demanded the release of all Chinese christians imprisoned for their faith. Gros sent a triumphant report back home stating “Je suis heureux de pouvoir annoncer aujord-hui à Votre Excellence que la Chine s'ouvre enfin au Christianisme, source réelle de toute civilisation, et au commerce et à l'industrie des nations occidentales.” (“I am happy to be able to announce today to Your Excellence that China has at last opened itself to Christianity, the real source of all civilization, and to trade and the manufactures of the nations of the West.)” Back in Britain Elgins triumph was met with mixed reviews, though most were favorable. Elgins private secretary Laurence Oliphant, noted the impressive cost/benefit ratio of the casualties in his 1860 account of the campaign, ‘Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission to China and Japan': “Hostilities with the Empire of China had terminated with a loss to the British arms of about twenty men killed in action...and a treaty had been signed far more intensive in its scope, and more subversive of imperial prejudices than that concluded fifteen years before, after a bloody and expensive war, which had been protracted over a period of two years.” Karl Marx, yes the Karl Marx, was working at the time as the European correspondent of the New York Tribune wrote a letter to his writing partner Friedrich Engels on some thoughts towards the conflict  “The present Anglo-Chinese Treaty which in my opinion was worked out by Palmerston in conjunction with the Petersburg Cabinet and given to Lord Elgin to take with him on his journey is a mockery from beginning to end.” Karl Marx would have a lot more to say about the Taiping Rebellion, which is quite interesting given the rebellion is considered a proto marxist one. Elgin himself was quite depressed over the ordeal, he wrote this in his diary “I have an instinct in me which loves righteousness and hates iniquity and all this keeps me in a perpetual boil. Though I have been forced to act almost brutally I am China's friend in almost all this.” To try and raise the celebration somewhat, Elgin decided to take 5 ships up the Yangtze River as a demonstration of Britain's naval power and to discourage the Chinese from going back on the new treaty. However news of some raids against Canton forced him to pull be short. The new Viceroy of Canton named Huang had incited a rebellion rallying Canton residents to quote “Go forth in your myriads, then, and take vengeance on the enemies of your Sovereign, imbued with public spirit and fertile in expedients.” In July a group of Cantonese got their hands on some artillery and began to shell the British resident at Whampoa. The Cantonese mob followed this up by performing a raid after they heard about the humiliating terms of the treaty of Tianjin. During a short conference in Shanghai, Elgin demanded Viceroy Huang be removed. On top of the Canton problem, the two commissioners, Guiling and Hua Shan had reneged on the treaty clauses about allowing British ambassadors in Beijing. They sent a letter to Elgin stating that had agreed to such clauses under duress and suggested that future British ambassadors visit Beijing from time to time as diplomatic business warranted. They argued that because of large scale xenophobia in Beijing, they feared for the lives of any British dwelling there. Then 4 days later they added another excuse; they said that to allow British ambassadors to live in Beijing would generate fear and a loss of respect for the Qing government. Such further humiliation might very well topple the Manchu and allow the Taiping to take over. Elgin was somewhat swayed by the Taiping excuse and said he would pass their message onto his foreign officer. Elgin was also in a tough position as the fact a rebellion was occurring in Canton made it seem clear that guaranteeing the safety of British ambassadors in Beijing would not be an easy task. The French concurred with Elgin, that to have ambassadors in Beijing would be dangerous now. In the meantime Elgin had set up a 2 month survey of the Yangtze River using 2 gunboats to demonstrate Britains new right of travel throughout China. The idea had been to see if the local Chinese would obey the treaty clauses. Elgins tour wound up going past the Taiping capital of Nanjing and it is alleged a single cannon perched on a Nanjing wall fired upon Elgin's ships. Elgin's reprisal was pretty brutal, he sent a volley knocking out the Taiping cannon then ordered a 99 minute naval bombardment of Nanjing before sailing on. Eglin had planned to finish the trip by meeting with the Emperor and giving him a letter from Queen Victoria, but the worsening of the Canton situation forced him to pull back south. In February of 1859 Cantonese rebels ambushed and massacred 700 British marines around the countryside of Canton. In retaliation, General van Straubenzee, the military commander of 3000 troops in Canton, hunted down the headquarters of the rebels which they found at Shektsing a few miles south of the city and completely annihilated all those there and razed everything to the ground. The destruction of the rebel camp seems to have worked quite well as suddenly the Emperor sent word to ratify the treaty of Tianjin's clauses and had Huang removed from power and demanded the rebels disband. While Elgin dealt with the renewed China problem, his brother Frederick Bruce returned to Britain with the signed Treaty of Tianjin. Lord Malmesbury rewarded Bruce by naming him the first ambassador to China, a post Elgin would have received, but he was too wary of the post given the circumstances now. Elgin left China in March of 1859, taking the chance to link up and meet his brother in Sri Lanka in April as Bruce was on his way back to China. Now Bruce was not lets say, as great as his brother. He had recently been the Lt-governor of Newfoundland, then the Colonial secretary of Hong Kong. In all honestly a lot of his appointments were merely a result of him being Elgin's brother. But Bruce did have working knowledge of Chinese customs. Bruce arrived back at the mouth of the Bei He River on June 18th of 1859 alongside a force of 16 warships. Admiral Seymour had returned to London and was replaced by Rear-admiral James Hope. Unfortunately it seems Hope was even more racist and hated the Chinese more than Seymour. 3 days later the new American ambassador showed up John E Ward aboard a steamer, the Powhatan. The French representative, Anton de Bourbelon brought 2 warships with him as the French fleet had remained close by in Indo-China. Now Emperor Xianfeng wanted above all else to keep the Europeans the hell out of Beijing. The Emperor suggested right away that they ratify the new treaty at Shanghai, but all 3 of the European powers declined this. Many of the Emperors close advisors wanted to resist the foreigners taking up residence in Beijing. Some of these high ranking officials gave orders for 3 large bamboo booms, 3 feet thick to be strung across the Bei He river to block the foreigners advance. It looked like war was back on the menu and in a vain attempt Bruce tried writing a letter to Beijing politely asking the booms be removed. Well Bruce got no reply and this prompted Admiral Hope to ask permission to blow the booms apart. On June 21st, Hope sent captain Willes aboard a steamer to break through the first boom which went successfully, but the other 2 proved unbreakable. The British tried using some gunpowder but it just couldn't do the job, then to add insult to injury during the night the Qing repaired the first boom.  On June 25th Bruce received a letter from the Viceroy of Zhili, Heng Fu. Heng suggested the ambassadors lodge at Beitang, around 8 miles north of Beijing, basically it was a face saving gesture. The British however were armed to the teeth and had just undergone 3 annoying and long years of negotiations and war and had no patience. Bruce told Admiral Hope to attack the booms again. That afternoon Hope took his flagship Plover and attempted ramming the boom, but this time hit ship was stopped cold. The Qing had learnt a lesson from the previous conflict and this time had made the 2nd and 3rd booms out of full sized tree trunks sling together with heavy chains. As the Plover staled and the other European gunships had to stop just before it, all of a sudden the forts portholes were cast aside to reveal a full complement of 40 cannons and they opened fire. The first salvo took the head right off Plovers bow gunner and 3 other sailors fell wounded. For 3 hours Plover was pulverized. Hope unwisely stood on his deck wearing a gold braid basically showing the Chinese he was a high ranking official. A Qing sharpshooter landed a shot hitting Hope in his thigh. Hope fell on deck and was bound up by a surgeon as the Qing retaliated. For a rather surprising change, the Qing cannons, though still immobile were better aimed and managed to blow Hope's second in command and 8 other sailors to pieces, 22 others were wounded. Plovers hull eventually burst sinking the ship into the mud and this would lead to the deaths of countless crew. Hope believe it or not got up and rowed over to another ship, the Opossum and began standing on its deck in plain sight. Because of his thigh wound he had to hold onto a railing to hold himself upright and that said railing was hit by a Qing cannonball. The railing collapsed and Hope fell breaking several ribs, ouch. This prompted him to turn command over to Captain Shadwell. The Qing volleys managed to disable 5 of the invaders frontal gunships prompting Bruce to order 7 more which were 8 miles away to come forward and replace the damaged ones. By the evening, 5 British warships had been immobilized and 2 had run aground and one was a sitting duck for fort cannons.  The fort guns went silent in the early evening and the British officers took it to mean that the forts garrisons had fled like they had in the previous year. The landing parties surged ahead as planned and that was when disaster struck again. It turned out to be a ruse to entice the landing parties to storm the beach. The landing party soon found out to their horror 2 trenches were dug in front of the walls, filled with water and mud and some large iron spikes behind them. That was bad, but immediately when the marines got off their barges the muddy banks seized their feet leaving them helpless as the forts unleashed carnage upon them. Those lucky enough to make it to the trenches found the muddy water was too thick to swim. Many men in despair clambered beside the base of a fort wall to escape the trenches and gunfire. The Qing began setting off fireworks to illuminate the trapped marines as they fired upon them. Although America said it would remain neutral, Commodore Josiah Tattnall aboard the USS Powhatan was trying to get past the booms as well when he ran into the conflict. Tattnal was a veteran of the war of 1812 and like pretty much any American at the time disliked the British. Tattnal received word that Hope had been shot and upon witnessing the horror show he suddenly cast neutrality to the wind. Tattnal was from Georgia, a loyal southerner with a lets say, strong sense of racial pride…yeah we will call it that. Whatever hate he held for the British was cast aside as he suddenly screamed out “blood is thicker than water, I'd be damned if I stood by and watched white men butchered before my eyes!”. Tattnals charge forward hardly turned the tide of battle, it amount mostly to him towing more British marines forward to their horrific death. Some of his men grabbed and operated some British guns firing at the fort while Tattnall personally tended to Hope. A single american died and the breach of neutrality could have caused a catastrophe, but one thing it did do was set a new tone for British-American friendship. As the London times wrote “Whatever may be the result of the fight, England will never forget the day when the deeds and words of kindly Americans sustained and comforted her stricken warriors on the waters of the Bei He.” Around 7pm, as the Qing set off fireworks to illuminate the area, Captain Shadwell with 50 royal marines and French seamen led by the French commander Tricault landed on some muddy flats outside one of the Taku forts. They clamored through knee deep mud as the defenders rained Gingall fire down upon them at short range. The British-Franco force found themselves literally stuck in the mud, unable to use their wall scaling ladders to get over the fort. Shadwell sent word back to his superior that he and his men were pinned down and requested reinforcements to storm the Taku walls. There was no more fighting men available however, he was eventually order to limp back to the ships. The British and French suffered high casualties. Shadwell was wounded, Tricault was dead, and of the 1000 men who took part in the battle around half were killed or wounded, 29 of them officers. Many men dragged themselves or limped through mud to get back to their ships. A lot of these men were veterans of the Crimean war and had never tasted such defeat. One veteran of the battle of Balaclava said he would rather have relived that battle three times over than suffer the Taku Forts again. The gunboats, Lee, Plover and Cormorant were disabled, the Kestrel sank.  Admiral Hope sent a dispatch to the Admiralty showing his shock at how the Qing performed “Had the opposition they expected been that as usual in Chinese warfare, there is little doubt that the place would have been successfully carried at the point of the bayonet.” To try and save face, Bruce reported back to Britain that the sudden military prowess of the Qing forces at the Taku forts was because Russians were helping them. He alleged based on eyewitness testimony that some men in fur hats and European dress had been seen directing operations atop a Taku fort, it was mere bullshit. The real reason for the Qing victory was because of Prince Senggelinqin. Senggelinqin was a mongol cavalry commander that had helped the Qing crush a large army of Taiping rebels. He was a member of the Borjigin clan and the 26th generation descendant of Qasar, a brother to Genghis Khan. He led Qing forces to smash the Taiping during the Northern Expedition in the southern suburbs of Tianjin. When the Second Opium War broke out he was appointed Imperial commissioner in charge of the defense of Tianjin. Seng rejoiced in his well earned victory. He wrote back to the emperor acknowledging the British and French might return with more ships, but asserted confidently he would thrash them again and again “the pride and vainglory of the barbarians, already under severe trial, will immediately disappear. When that happens, China can then enjoy some decades of peace. The barbarians, already somewhat disillusioned and repentant, may lend themselves to persuasion and be brought under control. If they of their own accord should wholeheartedly become obedient, then peace would be secure and permanent.” The Emperor responded with caution “the foreigners may harbor secret designs and hide themselves around nearby islands, waiting for the arrival of more soldiers and ships for a surprise attack in the night or in a storm” Emperor Xianfeng still shared a sense of relief and expressed hope the foreigners needs for Chinese goods would mean that they could sort out their problems in Shanghai and that there would be no need for ambassadors in Beijing nor new treaties. Seng also pointed out during the battle the Americans got involved. “Although the starting of hostilities was by the English barbarians, France and America's cooperation in the melee is also inescapable.” Seng based his claim off intelligence extracted from a Canadian POW named John Powers. John claimed to be a neutral American in an attempt to escape imprisonment. The Chinese did not free him and instead used him as proof the Americans had abandoned neutrality. Seng much like most Chinese at the time were weak on Western Geography and assumed Canada was part of the United States, sad Canadian noises. At one point an American missionary who spoke Chinese tried to explain to Seng the difference between English and French Canada and the United States, Seng described the experience in a letter to the Qing imperial court. “[The missionary] stated that America contained Englishmen and Frenchmen, and when there was fighting, the flag was the only criterion.” Eventually John was released after a month, the Qing simply did not want to add America to a list of growing enemies. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.  The battle for the Taku Fort was an absolute catastrophe resulting in humiliation for the Europeans for once. Prince Seng had a grand victory, perhaps now the foreign barbarians would learn their lesson and stop their war. Or perhaps the Europeans would like their wounds and come right back.  

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This week the guys catch up on Sober October and some Football news! They also get a little historical with some talk about history's most dangerous people and the Salem Witchcraft Trials! Let us know where Atlantis is!!Thanks to our sponsors:Garrett Bell CoachingCrossFit Invigorate Charlie Mike  ApparelEdge Fitness PerformanceOldwood Custom Cabinets Southern Insurance Professionals Thanks for listening and #KeepReaching