Horst Mahler

A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine Gallery

Medieval English split tally stick ( front and reverse view). The stick is notched and inscribed to record a debt owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover , Hampshire, of a tithe of 20 d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2…

Horst Mahler co-founded the Red Army Faction as a leftist anti-fascist lawyer, then transformed into a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi who greeted his 2009 prison sentence with a raised-arm Hitler salute in the courtroom.

South African Police Service

Farm murder dockets vanish before trial; fewer than fifteen percent of farm-attack cases end in conviction — and the unit specifically created to investigate them was quietly dissolved in 2007.

Lupercalia

Priests called Luperci slaughtered goats, cut strips from the hides, smeared sacrificial blood on two boys' faces, then ran naked through Rome striking every woman they passed. February. Every year.

Pokhran-II

India detonated five nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert over forty-eight hours in May 1998 — and the CIA, with satellites overhead, saw nothing until the shockwaves were measured. Pakistan matched them sixteen days later.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The Chapmans bought a complete set of Goya's 'Disasters of War' etchings — 80 prints of dismembered soldiers — and painted Ronald McDonald and clown faces over the victims' heads. They called it 'rectification.'

Albert Anastasia

Albert Anastasia — boss of Murder Inc. — was shot dead in a Park Sheraton barbershop chair on October 25, 1957, cape still draped over him, his own bodyguard conveniently sent to park the car.

Tally stick

For 700 years, the English Exchequer split hazel sticks to record royal debts — the king kept one half, the creditor the other. In 1834, Parliament burned the old sticks and accidentally set Westminster on fire.

Coronation of Bokassa I and Catherine

Bokassa's 1977 coronation cost $22 million — roughly one-third of the Central African Republic's annual GDP — including a diamond-encrusted crown, 6,000 bottles of Moët, and a throne shaped like a golden eagle.

LIGO

LIGO's mirrors must hold still to one-ten-thousandth the width of a proton. That precision, costing $1.1 billion, caught the first gravitational wave in September 2015 — a collision 1.3 billion years old.