@Andris: Yes, the entire captured stack is removed from the board. And that limits the power of larger stacks just like the high value of a Queen in chess limits her capacity to occupy threatened squares. For example, consider a stack of 3 and a stack of 4 enemy pieces. As long as the 3-stack is “protected” by one or more other pieces, the 4-stack will never attempt to capture it because it would be an obvious loss (the 4-stack would be captured on the next move). The 4-stack can’t even move within the 3-stack’s attack range because the 3-stack would immediately capture the 4-stack for a net win of one piece.
Furthermore, a tall stack is not quite as powerful as it might at first seem. Consider a stack of 8 (tallest). It can move to any square reachable in 8 steps (with one 90-degree turn along the way). However, in order to move to a square reachable in 7 steps, you must “unstack” the top 7 pieces and leave one behind in the original square. To move to a square reachable in 6 steps, you must “unstack” 6 pieces and leave two behind, and so on. Hence, you can’t move an 8-stack, say, 3 spaces over (in one move)*. This means that taller stacks only become more powerful in proportion to the perimeter of their territory (not area), and by virtue of their ability to unstack into less powerful stacks.
Clayton -
*But you can get creative… for example, an entire 8-stack could move like a 4-stack in two moves: on the first move, the top 4 pieces are unstacked and moved to the destination square, on the next move, the remaining 4-stack moves to the destination square.
Add to this ECHELON, CALEA, V-chip, PATRIOT Act, NDAA, millimeter wave scanners, UK camera grid, US drones, Room 641A, REAL ID (now PASS ID) - most of this in the last 20 years and the majority of that since 9/11 - and you begin to wonder if the Alex Jones/David Ickes aren’t so insane after all.
Of course, the TICTU logo bears more than a passing resemblance to the Bohemian Club’s logo. Also note that there is an Alien’s head (the black oblong encircled by the owl’s wings, with the feather-tips being the eyes), as well as the a crescent-moon formed by the black semi-circle enclosed by the owl’s wings. It’s a sick joke but that shows the mentality. It’s all just a joke to these people.
Anyway, I thought these assholes’ logo deserves to be made famous. Hence, it is my new avatar.
I don’t care what anyone says, David Icke is damn close to the mark. I see no reason why Rockwellian libertarianism would not be quite welcome to Ickean audiences…
Prince William, 2nd in line to the throne of England. Born 21/6. 216 = 6 x 6 x 6
Married Catherine Elizabeth Middleton 29/4. 29+4 = 33. Catherine, 9 letters. Elizabeth, 9 letters. Middleton, 9 letters. 999 - flip it upside-down, what do you get?
I really like the tenor of David Icke’s message overall. Even his crazy Lizard stuff is endearing in its own, odd way (packed-out audiences paying $60 a seat seem to agree!) However, Icke has a lot of problems. His reasoning is often fuzzy-headed. This could be made up for with evidence but he usually foregoes evidentiary support. As I am someone who accepts Austrian methodology the synthetic a priori is not a big, bad no-no - I’m happy to infer truth about the world from the “subjective” facts of my own experience. But it requires a certain level of deductive discipline. The saying in my line of work (computer engineering) is, Garbage-In-Garbage-Out.
And he is not always forthcoming with his sources. Icke has been hugely influenced by Theosophy (Blavatsky, the namesake of this thread!), Alice Bailey, etc. No problem here, except that Theosophy itself is basically just a compendium of wacky, fad-beliefs from the late 19th-century. Blavatsky clearly had a big heart and wanted to nudge humanity along in its path of moral progress but, like Icke (pun!), she gave very fuzzy reasoning, little or no evidence and rarely cited her sources.
I found this very gentle and sympathetic expose of Icke on YT.
All in all, he seems to me to be a man who’s trying to make a living selling his own big-hearted view of the world. There’s no crime in that. But a lot of his specific statements about the nature of reality and the particular structure of the modern social order are just mumbo-jumbo. Icke is admirably wrong.
First off, I’m a huge fan of StormCloudsGathering. Here are two vids that explain our trajectory towards the coming war with Iran:
When you combine these videos with the understanding that 9/11 was not an accident - it was The New Pearl Harbor - you realize that the sequence of major world events since 2001 has been almost entirely scripted and is proceeding apace.
In other posts, I have speculated that the US is set to lose this war and I’m sticking by this. I believe that sophisticated contrarian investors like Jim Rogers and Marc Faber, for example, understand this coming shift. I am predicting that the US will be to WW3 what Germany was to WWI - the predestined loser in a rigged war.
Why? There are several reasons.
First and most importantly, US culture has long been a sore-spot with the Elites. It is long past due to be brought to heel. The idea of popular gun ownership, the culture of loud-mouth opinionated bumpkins mocking Very Important People like the European Elites, the idea of “inalienable rights”, including strong property rights, the tiny remnant of common law in American jurisprudence, the whole concept of patriotism (suspicion towards government), and so on and so forth.
Second, much of the US debt is owed to a lot of very powerful people. They want to be repaid. The only portion of the debt that is legitimate on a libertarian analysis is that portion which is held by private investors, not public institutions that purchased it with money stolen from the taxpayers (including the Fed and foreign central banks). But if 2008 is any lesson, the world works in precisely the opposite order. The private holders of bonds are going to get shafted while the foreign institutions will be paid back every last penny. How? Anything is possible during a war and the ensuing treaty negotiations.
Third, the process of political aggregation is out-of-whack and requires “re-balancing”. The process of divide-and-conquer is almost infantile in how it operates. Think of a wealthy father of two sons. Only one son will be the heir. In order to protect himself against his sons and to command their obedience, the father constantly switches his affections from one to the other son, depending on who is most ingratiating and poses the least threat to the father himself. This is literally how the royal elites operate - even in their own households. The expression of this process in the public sphere is merely a reflection of the internal order within their households and within the upper echelons of the social order (the noble and wealthy Elites). An attempt was made to bring about world government in a civilized, polite manner back in 2009 at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. When this failed, the Elites pulled the pin on the grenade. Oil platforms started blowing up, and Arab nations started toppling like dominoes and US warships kept ending up in the Strait of Hormuz and in the Indian Ocean arrayed around Iran.
The United States has long been a threat to the balance-of-power and has needed to be cut down to size. The process was to have begun much earlier but had to wait until 1913 to begin in earnest. Just look at a graph of US military spending (and overall Federal spending)… it’s a bubble if there ever was one.
OK, so what’s going to happen short-term?
My predictions: Gold, short-term (until the election) will continue to rise. Don’t buy right now. After the election, I expect a correction period as all the people nervous about the election (haha!) will realize that the sky is not falling on Nov. 7th. The type of people who “put gold in their portfolio” in the lead-up to an election are also the types who will dump it afterwards. In other words, look for the price of gold to correct immediately after the election. Do your buying in that window.
As soon as the last ballot box closes, real inflation is going to go stratospheric. Food, gas, utilities, it’s all going to the Moon. The Establishment will find some boogey-man or other to blame.
I predicted sometime back - and stand by this prediction - that we will have war within the year after the 2012 election. Unlike the 2001 Afghanistan and 2003 Iraq actions, the pretext hostilities will begin without any warning and will likely be followed by instant military response. In other words, by the time you hear on CNN that Iran has shot at US warships, we will already be over Tehran dropping bombs. I predict an instantaneous and massive callup of reserves. The dominoes will begin falling as Russia and China begin to engage and push back. This will be the trigger for a draft. The markets will basically go berserk. Paper assets will become good for rolling cigarettes, wiping yourself, and so on. Many Americans will welcome the draft as a relief from the economic impossibility of feeding oneself without a job in a near-hyper-inflationary environment.
The eugenics movement got its ass kicked in the 20th century. Like communism, eugenics is an ideology that naturally appeals to collectivists and statists. However, out-and-out eugenics (sterilization/exterimination programs) proved too bitter a pill for the squeamish public to swallow.
Today, the eugenics movement survives in many, less ambitious forms. Family law, for example, owes a lot to the eugenics laws and sterilization orders that began in the early 20th century. While those have gone by the wayside, a lot of the powers that the courts seized during that time simply morphed and survive to this day.
The Alex Jones types think that the eugenics movement is about population reduction. It’s not and never has been. It has always been about reconstitution of the population. And while the academic eugenicists - the ones who have written the position pieces and journal articles on eugenics - have consistently stated that eugenics is about “consciously guiding human evolution” towards “greater intelligence”, “greater health disposition”, “greater athletic prowess” and so on, the fact is that the Elites care about one parameter more than all others combined: servility. Everything else is negotiable.
You’ve read the stuff about Schwarzenegger having Nazi connections (his father was a Nazi and there are photos of Arnold himself wearing a Death’s Head SS emblem, for example). This has always made me deeply curious. Arnold has been promoted way, way beyond his inherent talents. While he was a world class bodybuilder, there were many other contemporaries who were absolutely as good, perhaps better in some ways. Look at Lou Ferrigno, for example, who lost to Arnold at the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition.
So here’s my conspiracy theory. I don’t believe the Nazi party was a wholly endogenous movement within Germany. The conditions for radicalizing the German population were established at Versaille and I believe (but cannot prove) that the rise of the Nazi Party was catalyzed by money from the international Elites. After Nazi Germany had played its role in WWII, all the “good stuff” from the Nazis - including the rocket program (later became NASA), eugenics, etc. - was salvaged and exported.
In particular, we know that the Elites decided to switch from a policy of “negative” eugenics to a policy of “positive” eugenics… trying to alter the reproduction patterns of the population based on positive incentives. The spread of easy-money, single-Mom welfare, for example, is perfectly in line with the actual eugenical program, even though it contradicts the surfacial academic/scientistic eugenics program (breeding smarter people). What matters is that welfare subsidizes the breeding of the servile.
But we also have seen a massive rise in the harping on physical fitness and athleticism. If you were to rank the attributes that the Elites would want to breed in the public, they would be in order: 1) servility/conformity, 2) bullet-proof health (no matter diet, sedentariness, toxin intake, etc.), 3) athleticism (especially hand-eye coordination and small-motor control) 4) technical intelligence (but not social intelligence as this mitigates against #1).
Public policy programs - such as easy-welfare money - can only go so far in promoting these eugenical goals. At some point, some kind of intervention into breeding patterns is necessary. This is where I wonder if Lebensborn itself was salvaged and continues to secretly exist - initially in the bodybuilding movement (for which Mr. Schwarzenegger was an early poster-boy) - and later spreading across the athletic world. I cannot specify precisely how the program would work except to note that sexual laxity has made out-of-wedlock pregnancy fairly painless in many parts of the world where eugenicists have influence. The 2010 movie Salt, for example, contains a suggestion along these lines with Evelyn Salt herself being the daughter of a chess-grandmaster (mother) and champion wrestler (father). No mention is made of her parents being married or any other facts about her parents beyond their exceptional talents.
Anyway, this is more of a conspiracy hypothesis than a conspiracy theory. If anyone is aware of any evidence or writings along these lines, references are very welcome.
Disclaimer: This post isn’t about solutions. I’m just describing the problem.
There is a theme in much of fiction: the “dark side”, dark forces, dark arts, sorcery, etc. This theme is also present in religion. Here is a fairly decent lecture by an SDA preacher on the unsavory history of the Jesuits from day one:
Lest too much credit be given to the Jesuits, I will state outright my view that the Establishment is an impossibly complex logjam of entangled relationships, loyalties, hatreds, symbioses, and so on. I point out the Jesuits only to illustrate the true nature of the Establishment in general. The Jesuit order is one of the most well-organized and most frankly hate-filled organizations on the planet and, of course, in the name of all that is holy and good.
The existence of the dark side is literally true at least in the sense that it is a component of the human psyche, the human soul. The Establishment that has come to dominate the world today is almost wholly an expression of the dark side. The dark side is not merely human foibles - revenge, jealousy, greed, etc. The dark side is a cultivation of human weakness, a carefully calculated exploitation of human weakness.
I think the greatest expression of the dark side is in luring people into self-treachery - preparing them to betray themselves from the day they are born. What is self-treachery? It is willing enslavement, willing cuckoldry, willing despoilation. Once put into the context of the dark side, the obsession of the Establishment with children - educating them, indoctrinating them, manipulating them, abusing them - becomes self-explanatory. To put it in the starkest terms possible, the Establishment sees children as the next generation of willing slaves.
Modern culture encourages a lot of ego-boosting ideas - you have a voice in politics (you don’t), your vote affects the outcome (it doesn’t), you are a peer in the unfolding of science (you’re not), in the study of history (you’re not), everything is new and modern and different than it was 200 years ago (it’s not) and so on. In other words, the Establishment encourages the common man to feel that the era of elitism is long since over. We’re all peers now, merely as a matter of fact.
The reality is that a great deal of history is simply fabricated. A great deal of science is nonsense. All of electoral politics is an idle waste of time. If you are a serious-minded person who reads the news, reads books, and so on, you need to realize that you are being lured into consuming your time in frivolities. “Obama down 3 points on less-than-stellar debate performance.” And you’ll waste an hour reading an article spelling out in excruciating detail every possible eventuality of the election… all of which are equally meaningless to you.
This is culture jamming. The dark side employs the means of war to subjugate and manipulate the population. But it’s the scope of the thing that is its true genius. The human mind measures everything by ratios; in music, you hear whether a pitch is “higher” or “lower” and you hear whether two pitches are harmonious or dissonant… but you do not hear that one pitch is precisely 223.983 cycles per second. So, when the entire baseline of cultural normalcy is pushed down, no one notices that the culture is being debased. The ambition of the Establishment knows no bounds… they manipulate - at one level or another - literally the entire economy. But the manipulation does not stop at the economy. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Art, music, news, media, web content, web apps, and on and on, are all tools of manipulation.
In the lecture linked above on the Jesuits, the lecturer reads a quote regarding the Jesuit plan to take over the adamantly Protestant American South by seeding Catholic families throughout the South and then literally breeding Protestantism out. Is it really so insane? Have you ever wondered why the floodgates of the Southern US border have been thrown open to a flood of illegal immigration by almost exclusively Catholic Mexicans and other South Americans? Have you ever wondered really why the Catholic church is anti-birth control? They don’t give a rat’s ass about non-Catholics. In fact, they’re happy if non-Catholics use birth-control. Where their position matters is in respect to Catholics because they’re the ones that will be told by their priest or whatever that they can’t take birth-control.
Of course, two can play this game and do. Some strains of Protestants are vehemently anti-birth control and conscientiously natalist. I once listeed to a Presbyterian minister deliver a sermon on the judgment God is visiting on Presbyterians for allowing birth-control into their midst, causing a collapse in the church as average family size has shrunk, depleting the ranks of new Presbyterians.
But returning to the point of scope and elitism; Hitler said in Mein Kampf (ghost-written by a Jesuit, by the way):
It is the scope of the dark side that makes it work. It’s just like how a central bank works - by stealing a penny from everyone, day after day, year after year, compounding in interest as it goes, the water level is continually rising and nobody seems to notice because all boats rise with the tide. Yet the differential between the early and later users of new money that redistributes wealth from the later users to the early users is how we are robbed. It wouldn’t work if the central bank just zeroed out the bank accounts of all the billionaires and transferred their funds to the government. Then there would be a massive outcry. It’s the fact that we’re all suffering at the same rate, so that the individual who points it out is the whiner, the complainer, the lazy-bones who just can’t handle the “pace of modern society”. In truth, he is the perceptive individual, the one who has seen that we’re all on hamster wheels running ourselves to death for the benefit of another. Our children are despoiled so that the children of the Elite can fly around in Leerjets and ride around in Rolls Royces paid for on our backs.
Consider the heart-rending case of the Belgian girls killed, starved and raped in dungeons by European elites. “What?” you say, “I never heard of this”. Of course you didn’t. Why did this happen? Is there really a “worldwide Satanic conspiracy”? Yes and no. The sorcerers of the dark side are not a monolith. They hate each other as much as they despise and trample the common man underfoot. But the means they employ are inherently monolithic because it is the same human nature that they are exploiting, one and all.
Returning to the case in Belgium, why did this happen and at that time? Well, the Maastricht Treaty forming the European Union had been signed just a couple years prior and Brussells is its headquarters. How interesting that a sex ring reaching to the pinnacles of power should be discovered - and covered-up by the bluntest means - just a few years afterward? I can give you a good hypothesis of precisely why these girls were abducted, raped and murdered… it was done not to worship Satan but to “seal the deal”. Lavish parties were thrown for very senior people in the respective governments and all kinds of “excesses” were made available to these “VIPs” … illegal drugs, prostitutes and, “Shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone but (whispering) there’s a girl downstairs who would like to meet you… follow me.” Ah, the wonders of hidden video cameras plus drugs, prostitutes and underage girls to manufacture dirt. The same thing has been done in the US - cf the Franklin Scandal.
Are you starting to get the picture? The fact is that we are slaves. We live in a culture of command, punishment and liability. You work because you are told to work, not because you can earn a profit and provide for your own family. The means for protection from exploitation by your fellow man are largely absent, and we stand naked and vulnerable to our superiors. The process of divide-and-conquer has been pushed to an ever-finer level of granularity. Have you ever browsed Internet pornography? Is there anyone who hasn’t? Have you ever wondered why the government is so intensely interested in tracking what websites you visit?
Do you see? The same means by which the dark side is used to yoke politicians to the will of the Establishment are in the works to be applied to you and me as individuals. You think we live in an enlightened era of sexual tolerance? Think again. They can flip a switch and social tolerance of sexual deviancy can be reset to 1472 AD levels overnight. Human nature has not changed one iota since the Dark Ages… human nature is essentially a biological constant. The Establishment understands this and they are happy to encourage the wider public to engage in every imaginable kind of excess. Sure, use drugs. Watch porn. Gamble your money. Meanwhile, they’ll be carefully recording your every act and stashing it in their infinite database in Moab, Utah.
But, remember, everything is new and different now! This is the message put out by the Establishment as a lure. “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” - Virginia Woolf.
This is the dark side. This is how they operate. Deception, misdirection, guilt, shame, extortion, threats, thuggery. All around the world, there are different faces doing the beating, spying and intimidating, but the modus operandi is always exactly the same. It is the dark side. It is a kind of sorcery that evokes an involuntary response within the victim, an involuntary reflex of helplessness and powerlessness that psychologically compels submission, even in the most willful and insolent individual who is subjected to it. And it is so predictable, so automatic a mechanism that an entire machine has been built whose sole purpose is the exploitation of this response in every facet of human life. Drugs, causal sex, dancing, smoking, prostitution… every entertainment or vice which is, in excess, at worst a minor weakness of human nature… every one of these relatively benign behaviors has been converted through the power of the dark side into a hook for manipulation and exploitation.
It is sorcery and it should be taken as seriously as sorcery was once taken. Everything’s new and different, remember? And God is dead, and so is religion. The Vatican is a non-entity and the Jesuits are just a figment of the imagination of paranoid conspiracy theorists. There is neither good nor evil, just a happy, warm, all-embracing mediocre as Democracy ushers the world into The End of History.
Perhaps you have done so, but could you outline why it is that you believe that there is indeed “an establishment”, rather than governments as they present themselves?
Of course there are governments and they are what they present themselves to be (territorial monopolists on the use of legitimate violence, etc.) But the popular view is that “that’s all there is to it.” That’s not all there is to it. Maybe 200 years ago, that was most of the story. The King was King and that was pretty much it. There was still a back-story, though. The back-story was all the intrigues, running family feuds, inter-marriages, infighting, diplomatic courtships and betrayals, and so on.
The orthodox history of the rise of democracy is that the monarchs became obsolete but the stupid morons never figured it out. Ever. One by one, they were toppled by the “natural forces” of democracy, wringing their hands “oh dear!” First France. Then Russia. Then Austria-Hungary. And on and on. Of 22 monarchs at the onset of the 20th century, just 9 were still sitting on a throne by the end of WWII.
Today, we have a “sanitized” view of politics. The superficial apparatus of government is all there is to it. If you speak of “shadowy forces”, you mean that there are these sinister people with the collars of their trenchcoats turned upward tip-toeing around the halls of government power, subverting it to their own ends. But this is based on the backwards/upside-down orthodox history, which is simply not credible. Only if the stupid monarchs and their nobility stupidly stood by whiile they were swept over by a tidal wave of democracy whose innate power vastly exceeded their own could this view be believed.
Governments operate at the behest of their owners. That’s the key. Governments are, in fact, what they appear to be … except that they also happen to be the property of somebody or other. We’re not used to the idea of property that is not itself the creation of government statutes. That’s why it’s so hard to conceive of a government itself as property. But it’s right there in front of your face. She repeatedly says “My government.” Think about that. People say “the Queen is separate from politics”. You bet she is. She’s separate from the politics of her governments (she has 16) like she’s separate from the inner-workings of her Rolls Royces… politics is best left to politicians and mechanicking to mechanics.
When seen in the proper light, you realize that the idea that the “Establishment” is some kind of shadowy, subversive minority among the ranks of government bureaucrats, desperately hiding their dangerous secrets from the co-worker across the aisle is completely wrong-headed. The Establishment are a tiny, shadowy minority that stands entirely above and apart from the political apparatus of government. They can say “our government(s)” because they actually own them.
However, owning governments - or anything that the Elites own, for that matter - is not as simple as plunking down sacks of gold and signing the transfer of title. Control of governments has always been an insanely complicated and entangled business. Colonialism, in particular, has multiplied the complexity. The international power of religious, cultural and ethnic identities further complicates things. The rise of the mercantile class (industrialization/capitalism) has been another complicating factor. I also tend to take a deflationary view of the rise of populist movements (democracy, communism, unionism, etc.) as I believe the Elites have invariably had a hand in fostering these movements as weapons to use against one another more than those movements have actually reflected any “awakening” on the part of the masses or power-shift away from the Elites to the masses.
The United States is best viewed as a rat’s nest of all of these complexities rolled into one, giant ball of string. But the one thing that the US government is most certainly not is “… one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The idea that the President is the most powerful man in the nation - let alone the world - is infantile.
