caesar novus

A good video on the so called pirates of the Mediterranean is posted below, although they were really state sponsored privateers or coastal raiders. In the pursuit of Roman sites on the Italian coast you are constantly encountering lookout towers or hill towns fortified for these "pirates" which came after the pax romana or mare nostrum dissipated. They are actually part of what I suppose you would call client states of Ottoman empire. Let us appreciate what the Romans accomplished, although I am not sure if they allowed non-Romans free passage thru the Med. The pirate name is I think a euphemism for organised warfare (with actual raid investors) that came before and after the Romans, and didn't really vanish until north Africa was colonized again in 1800s.

Interesting how above example shows you can cue up a video to an intermediate point with &t=, which is typically unsupported by forum software. Anyway I throw in vids of maybe only personal appeal with too many words a red flag. First is a translation of an opera aria I had posted earlier. I like how it contains reflections rather than banal narrative. It's remarks on the flighty illogic of love somehow reminds me of a poem Hadrian wrote for his tomb on the elusive fate of souls upon death. Next a couple of go to sleep videos. First is unlike the typical efficient train video, but it reminds me of old fashion trains in Europe. Their progress could be so uncertain that you had cathartic relief when they resumed progress on uneven tracks after being sidelined by an oncoming train or strike or whatever. Maybe sigh that at X hours late, at least we are moving. Journeys typically started or ended in quaint Luxembourg (now a ritzy tax haven?) due to the only discount transatlantic flights connecting there with Iceland. Lastly sleep by the sounds of a rainy lake. I don't know if this does full justice to the 3 dimensional soundscape of a large lake being splattered on a still night. There is pleasing light hiss, punctuated by torrents of throaty downpour here and then there. It can be like an orchestra with different sections rising and falling in dominance, as upper air still pushes clouds around.

In case some hadn't subscribed, the series continues with better resolution on a slave who apparently bought his freedom and extravagantly embellished Rome's wall. Other freed slaves left proud memorials behind such as on the Via Appia.

Here, in this awkward topic fit, is praise of a high quality video course. It used to cost $hundreds https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/rome-and-the-barbarians but now can be found for little as used disks on ebay, or streamed for free from your library. My library streams a rotating selection of "Great Courses" from an app called Kanopy. It's best to access video rather than just audio due to good maps, etc. Anyway the professor is very knowledgeable and engaging even tho a bit stiff and a pirate accent (making everything sound like "rrrr"). I avoided it for a while due to not wanting to dwell on Rome's sad end. But it has a rich focus on Roman ways and comparisons with my barbaric ancestors.

I paste in only the URL, optionally press enter, and wait a few seconds for the picture to emerge with an option to revert to clickable link which I ignore. BTW my opera video above is for fellow opera haters. All the 90% songs we can't stand are at the end of the video, so that leaves 9ish reasonable ones at the front. Sorry for the multiple posts, but I keep thinking this is the last from my "watch later" list.

A bare bones version and a super embellished version of Lou Reed's Rock 'n Roll track: This version features embellishment by cult guitar maestros Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner who only worked briefly with him, then he reverted to less accessible "cool" style. He cultivated an image of unconventional sexuality, but I saw him in a first class line at Rome airport after a concert and he had the most conventionally stylish and stunning girl companion I have ever seen even in rockstar photos.

I don't know which narrative is more truthful, like for example Diocletian's treatment of Christians. One lecture went thru his long proclamation to meticulously give accused Christians a chance to repent and be released. Others demonize him for aggravated ruthlessness. It used to be common for attacks on Roman ethics to be a proxy for attacks on current western culture. But I think that utopian demographic is now redirected onto a coordinated elitist movement for woke-ness, such as pollutes nearly all television in the US now. Maybe I should change my provocative avatar to one of those emperors who were depicted as calm and cogitating which is so admirable to me vs egoistic or threatening like mr. bootikins. I think they had switched over from realism to stereotypical stern propaganda then. However I don't want to appear as a wimpy Marcus A., who mentally fiddled while his demonic son burned with evil. As for music I have no affinity for classical, except I like the tuneup chaos. The internet has allowed me to get tired thru overplay of all my niche interests. Maybe I will revive a music youtube thread here, with Indian santoor music for instance. The Shostakovich episode was memorable since it is so unlikely from my extremely remote and unworldly background. I have an even more surprising personal connection re: Mick Jagger, so with the recent death of a bandmember I am reviewing early Stones concerts on youtube. Not to admire the music so much but the human element becomes tangible. They cultivated an edgy theme sort of like various lookalike contrived Caracalla busts, but I get the background drama trying to tame bandmembers, public image, etc.

Some software (firefox?) keeps urging me to patronize their "VPN" or similar feature to bypass firewalls or regional restrictions imposed for copyright restrictions or whatever. But I haven't been able to even get a local archeo lecture by zoom to work, or at least don't want to grant them requested permissions.

May be some ambiguity on definition of a martyr. I faintly recall a professor characterizing many christian deaths as like modern suicide bombers, that is killed more by their own agency. The Romans might give christians every out to avoid punishment for their "crime", which was refused. Like just go thru motions of traditions without even needing to believe in them, but many christians seemed drawn to being martyred. The professor depicted some Romans dreading having to bring numerous christians to "justice". Digression alert: This reminds me of similarly ambiguous types of suicide. Who is and isn't a kamikaze in the case of admiral Ugaki, who didn't know how to fly. He heard the emperor declare surrender on the radio, so asked the pilots he commanded to fly him as a passenger into an enemy ship. No ships were recorded as attacked that day, and in fact his diary depicts the kamikaze gig as quite safe under his command. This because most of their ramshackle aircraft would leak oil or otherwise fail halfway to a target and glide to a nearby island or friendly ship. P.S. coincidental to your profile. Can you believe Dmitri Shostakovich jr once phoned me with a blur of Russian words? I remembered the words for goodbye "do svidaniya", which he thought was a funny response. Turned out he had met a relative of mine and was skeptical of their claim I had studied russian. I was invited to Maxim's house once later on, and saw him conduct.

Last observation. I thought I would demonstrate how you can investigate a pet hypothesis, so put "doctor" in kathryn's search box. Instead of a tidy list of recent cases I had followed, it randomly dredged up old reports in a wordy forrmat with freakish doctor pilot deaths, such as in jail or by suicide. It would take me forever to page to the newer more data filled stuff. So I fell back to conventional google to check for where this stereotype came from. It dredged up several articles by doctor pilots about how their death rate used to be 4 times higher than other pilots, but not so much any more. They mentioned the classic stereotype of a "doctor killer" favorite airplane (V tailed Bonanza), and even whether it was an "overconfident surgeon" issue. Well the articles blather on and on about factors without hard statistics. The best I found was from old FAA Office of Aviation Medicine "Physician P.I.C. Fatal Flight Accidents" which covers 4x deaths getting worse 1966-70 while non doctors trending for the better https://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/1970s/media/AM71-09.pdf Alternatively I wanted to research frequency of crashes from circling back to the runway in the wrong direction, but I've run out of ideas to set up keywords. Anecdotally it seems you are supposed to turn away from the side of your dead engine, which is counterintuitive since the good engine yaws you the other way. Apparently the good engine overpowers a turn into the dead engine and it is very hard to level out and quit the turn rather than spin and crash. I give up...

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ has absolutely amazing ways to break down global historical crashes, such as by body count or maps or wacky causes. https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/monthly.aspx US gov't tabulation by month. https://aviation-safety.net/statistics/ has much the same, but I land you on a page of re-assuring graphics on almost vanishing death rate for airlines altho small planes have a much worse rate which seems to be increasing over time: Here I will riff a bit on anecdotal impressions I got from months following Kathryns; your's may wildly differ. The easy rupture of fuel tanks can turn a minor crumple crash into a delayed action horror. A rough landing can crimp the exits closed, and if you can't get out eventually that leaking fuel can blowtorch you into a Pompeii like figure. Another good reason to start flight lessons with a no-fuel sailplane. Also you will learn how to unexpectedly land almost anywhere safely if your lift disappears. No more oops my engine quit so we gotta crash; you will be used to spotting potential landing sites with a confident feeling of how far you can glide. Sailplanes do break a lot of backs on rough landings because they have little springiness, so maybe use an extra cushion. A lot of young women are appearing in crashes recently, often as instructors. This seems to be due to a huge demand for airline pilots in the light of mass retirements, and women are an under-tapped demographic. In the US a brief phase of small plane instruction is the norm on the path to becoming an airline pilot, so they are more present to show up in incidents. There are some cases where small stature or body strength or fighting experience could have been an issue. Take the case of a large student freezing up on the controls in a spin. You might think that an instructor could simply beat the students skull with fists or a cabin fire extinguisher to regain control. But it seems that males confide with one another that the cockpit doesn't have room for the windup/backswing to apply much force. You have to go for their throat or eyes (don't try this, I am leaving out details). In some areas spin training is banned because of the hypnotic freezeup issue; I was lucky I did it in a sluggish forgiving aircraft. Oh, here is my completely novel idea for the famous problem of doctor crashes ('another day, another doctor" was the comment on a crash log). It is thought their lack of time to get muscle memory on expensive new aircraft comes to a crunch in unexpected bad weather. But our now easy ability to listen or read transcripts of their radio chat up to the moment of crash gives thought to another factor. They actually have training and certificates for the conditions and unforgiving planes they fly, but I detect they aren't assertive enough under the micromanagement that air traffic control imposes in cloudy weather. Docs are collegial and unused to challenging authority/bosses. The atc has little knowledge of the doctor's snazzy aircraft abilities, but rather airliners and modest little planes. The atc bullies them over mountains and out of airliner ways, when the doc needs to assert noncompliance with legally recognized keywords like "unable". In other words give me the priority I need in this very work-overloaded condition.

Here is the Italian Guide experience with some unique perspectives. Suitable for small screens due to tragically low resolution. Poor audio quality benefits by turning CC on. https://youtu.be/EiDVvxXCmQ8 (less interesting) Or you can just subscribe, and various old items will now and then sprinkle into your recommended list.

That and several other eye popping stories seem to have been removed from the above site. Even some youtube accounts have been hacked in order to delete the story. An amateurish version is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ixX9KOBQIU which depicts a diet pill empire crashing with an unqualified ex Tarzan actor at the controls of the cult church jet. Much data on Katherine's site is factual in the sense that air traffic control conversations with any particular plane is now immediately downloadable, as is their exact flight paths and altitude. This is archived automatically, and no need for any gatekeeper to ask for it. So that is indexed by tailnumber NXXXX, and with the pilot name you can download all sorts of certification info from gov't sites. By cross checking folks can often detect fraud, and check for repeat patterns of misbehavior and accidents. Hmm, someday much the same info may be available for car drivers, for better or worse.

We've often seen coverage of airliner crashes, but what happens almost every daylight hour are small plane crashes. There is a site http://www.kathrynsreport.com/ that tabulates these for US and maybe Canada almost the day it happens. Then it sort of crowdsources amazing info over a week or two, months or years before dry gov't reports are released. The backstories are often extreme and worthy of a TV docudrama. We see patterns unfold, like the doctors who get themselves killed in the first family flight outing in their brand new airplane and new license. Over and over with an unforgiving snazzy plane into sketchy weather. At least they tend to be legal, but another common wildman segment has no license or registration or insurance and kills innocent passengers or folks on the ground. An amazing example of this emerges in the far-down pages of http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2021/06/fuel-exhaustion-piper-pa-22-160-n9227d.html where a ne'er-do-well in debt for a million takes a million life insurance on his girlfriend and kills her but not him on an avoidable forced landing. He had her sell her house to buy the plane of course, and on goes the hollywood ready plot. There are various tricks to navigate, such as the "most read: today" column which hits the major fatal stories, or click on todays date archive to view them all together (probably too new for comments). Sometimes the site hides a lot of stuff for a while probably due to complaints from victim families, but even unkind but informed speculation can be a lifesaver. Sometimes the exact same kind of accident repeats because the gov't reports are waiting years to dot the i's, like parking brakes that don't fully release in a certain bizjet. I can't pick out by eye the most epic story of a church owned bizjet recklessly crashing to make many kids orphans, which is already in process of I think an HBO series.

Those statues are wonderful; I love the signature dispassionate expression. Hopefully they can do a test to ID original stone quarry. I bet many similar finds in other countries went straight to the black market.

Here goes a bunch of mostly thumbnailed videos introducing Roman archeology visitation sites. Find ones you like, then you can hunt videos in more depth. As this can be ungainly to load, I have an alternate list version in perhaps a more fitting location at https://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/19385-list-version-favorite-archeo-tour-videos/. One really remarkable series on youtube that includes Roman sites is https://www.youtube.com/c/ProWalks/videos . Put it on a big screen in 4K and turn on closed captions which has a lot of historical footnotes. See his Hadrian's Villa, Appian Way, Pompeii, Herculeum, etc and feel free to post comments there. I think he gets the low level details right but not the background context, which folks here would know better. There are a bunch of similar, really copycat, channels that I think don't quite measure up. https://www.youtube.com/c/toldinstone/videos has a more scholarly slant, and more channels which I will try to recall and append here. Maybe it would be better to post each good video.

I thought the would-be queen now is the greatest actress who ever lived, Marisa Alassio. You enjoyed a Dutch segment/copy of her with Mario Lanza "seven hills of rome". I lost track of a great article proposing she was the first feminist actress, but in an elegant and more subtle way than later became the norm. She was a close counterpart to Sophia L, but high IQ and EQ.

Oh, I thought Rome was famous for an actual sub Saharan emperor or two, who was technically of another race and wide culture gap. Maybe the case for some generals, but if we are talking only of Berber-ness for a couple of emperors I am less impressed with that as proof of Roman broad mindedness. Today (or for me, a few decades ago) if you travel deep south into Berber speaking areas it seems like you are getting more into a Euro comfort zone than the Arab coast. The Berbers are proud and distant, but are every visitor's favorite companions. Like guides who deign to lead you and feed you rather than engage in the banality of talk, but there is somehow an easy cultural compatibility. In contrast there is a jolting cultural transition for instance entering southern Egypt. Not a negative thing - it is way more friendly and less hard sell to Euro visitors than the coastal north. But now and probably 2000 years ago the sub Sahara would seem a less likely cultural seedbed for a leader of Roman life. The draft of my previous post tried to include map of Berber settlement areas in northern Africa with no luck, maybe png not supported? Anyway I stripped that out, along with accompanying caveats... EDIT: now it works:

Portraits look Berber to me, with past experience of traveling north and south Algeria. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers#Antiquity sez: Smells like another case of trying to diversify historical figures to suite modern tastes, against (admittedly sparse) evidence, like Macedonian Cleopatra was a few years ago.

And another direction to seek are hi-res videos of Roman museums. These typically are not so available or done very well, but are getting increasing acceptance from museum directors. Take for instance the National Museum of Rome, an oddly quiet, cool collection of ancient stuff handy to the central train station. I see a long video with Greek narration that pans too fast, and a too short video below by a travel book writer who misled me by saying Hadrian's Villa wasn't worth visiting. Here is a web site with more virtual tours - I think I will seek one of the Roman subsection of the Vatican museum: https://joyofmuseums.com/museums/europe/italy-museums/rome-museums/national-roman-museum/

Wow, I tried routing prowalk and other videos to my 4k TV with youtube app and it is stunning. Didn't try this earlier because I thought I would have to leave my google password sitting in the TV, but they allow me as anonymous for free. For some reason I can run 4k at double speed that would cause jerkiness on my laptop, which helps for instance on a 6 hour video walk thru Jerusalem. Sitting really close gives great immediacy as if folks might bump into you, altho I have to reduce over vividness with TV settings. Some really good vids to look for are Hadrian's Villa and also the Appian Way. I didn't find great ones, but will post a teaser that lets you imagine how good an Appia Antica one could be if they would just walk or bike continuously without a lot of chit chat:

I think "Corporate" just had their season finale, but about half of their shows really hit the mark with rare insights of looney aspects of being a white collar drone, so seek reruns. This is on Comedy Central channel which just now did the most shameful censoring of their "The Office" reruns. They had been butchering it a bit to allow longer commercials, but now brought cancel culture to bear in bleeping out words like "gay". In the closed captions it shows up as asterisks half the time, along with some other mildly non PC words. I noticed the Paramount Network will resume putting out a couple "The Office" reruns out per week - I hope uncut. We are back in hardcore shutdown with outrageous crimes in my neighborhood due to released prisoners, and mismanaged situations and catch 22s everywhere you look for law abiders, but it is just too tedious to recount. Been watching some Mary Beard about Romans on Youtube. She can be a loose cannon, so best to look for the more focused BBC produced ones.

We are reverting back to lockdown with dire penalties for not wearing masks. I made a rare stroll outside for a swim and increasingly gasped for air in the overheated effort. At the shore there were 3 police overlooking pretty much only me and I nearly fell down and passed out before daring to unmask. Same routine on return. Reminds me of another case of gov't zeal for safety. Large parts of the Fukushima mandatory evacuation was not justifiable based on radiation science, and some large number of elderly died from the disruption. Wiki: "Many deaths are attributed to the evacuation and subsequent long-term displacement caused by mass evacuation that was not neccesary for the most part", "The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration.". Back to a closer example was yesterday's Autopsy tv show with a cautionary tale of Marlon Brando dying from self sequestering himself in a house with hidden black mold. LA media watched outside that same house where his son had killed his daughter's boyfriend. That daughter later killed herself in Tahiti, where the police wanted to grill Marlon if he ever returned to his getaway house (island) there. So superstar Marlon died in agony from a known lung-attacking mold condition at home, maybe due to not getting out for enough swims?

By now, you may have seen announcement of another Istanbul museum converting to a mosque. Another populist/nationalist blow to globalism and Unesco. Instead of posting links to the news stories which have a bunch of intrusive video ads, I will post one of the most interesting youtube video I have seen about the "why" of nationalism. Nationalism brings some crude accountability that may be missing not only in today's globalism but for those from the past who served distant empires. The lack of any nationalist connection at all can not only make war sacrifices seem pointless but promote worse behavior. Atkinson's "The Day of Battle" details WW2 atrocities against Italian women and children by troops from one corner of of the French empire, and other sources claim this continued into Germany. They had no altruistic stake in the war and expected plunder in exchange for their risks. Anyway, a bunch of documents from attics in the US fell into the hands of professor Weber that illuminated early mental development of Hitler. He thought OH NO, I don't want to be known as a Hitler historian, but the documents from Jews who were very early acquaintances of Adolph (then fled to the US) were just too important and newly explanatory of ultra nationalist impulses. I may be misremembering a few things since I first encountered this material, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmDK2VC53XY