The Money Kings

Daniel Schulman on X First review of my new book THE MONEY KINGS  111423 AAKnopf is in Schulmandelivers an ambitious and  captivating group portrait of Jewish financial dynasties with profound  legacies Full

Today's selection-- from The Money Kings by Daniel Schulman. In the mid-1800s, Joseph Seligman had risen to become one of New York’s most powerful bankers, if not its most powerful—an American Rothschild:


“Jacob Schiff was on the path to becoming one of the greatest financiers of his generation, but another mogul still towered above him. Joseph Seligman had realized his vision of becoming something like an American Rothschild, a banker whose firm was ubiquitous in major government and industrial transactions and who moved with ease in the elite financial and political circles where few Jews traveled. In New York, he and his brother Jesse numbered among the only Jewish members of the Union League Club, a stuffy clique of businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals formed during the Civil War to promote the northern cause, and Joseph served on various municipal boards and honorary committees. Including the city’s school commission, where he occupied the so-called ‘Jewish seat.’ But unlike Baron Lionel de Rothschild, the head of London’s N.M. Rothschild & Sons who became the first Jew to serve in Parliament, Joseph stopped short of seeking elected office, despite the efforts of New York Republicans who twice tried to draft him to run for mayor. (Jesse was too floated as a mayoral candidate.)


“Perhaps because the nation of his birth conveyed in countless ways that he was inferior and unwanted – that he was not a citizen but an interloper – Joseph strove consciously to blend into the fabric of the country that had welcomed him, and he raised his children to be thoroughly American. William, with his usual flair for making irritating propositions, once approached Joseph with the idea of changing their Jewish surname, pulling a Belmont as it were to distance the family from the religious stigmas holding them back from unreserved acceptance in the gentile world. ‘An excellent idea,’ Joseph deadpanned, ‘but we might as well keep our initial letter, and for you I suggest the name “Schlemiel.”’ Even though he shut William down with a thunderclap of sarcasm, Joseph seemed keenly aware of the social handicaps of their religion. When he wanted to honor Abraham Lincoln by naming his fifth-born son after the president, he opted to give the boy the similar though less Hebraic-sounding name of Alfred Lincoln.


“There were limits to how far Joseph was willing to assimilate, and he drew a line at renouncing or concealing his Jewishness. And he embraced his role as one of the nation’s most prominent Jews (some called him the ‘King of the Jews’) even though he was by no means devout. His interest in religion was largely intellectual. A well-read man who perused the pages of the Greek classics before bed – Horatio Alger, the family tutor, recalled Seligman closing each day ‘ engrossed by business cares in the delightful companionship of the master spirits in the domain of literature and science’-- Joseph enjoyed religious and philosophical debate. On Sundays, when he and Babette entertained at their home on West 34th Street, Joseph liked inviting guests with divergent views to enliven the dinner table conversation. He counted as friends Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent congregationalist minister (and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe), as well as Colonel Robert Ingersoll, a lawyer and popular orator known for his agnostic views. More than once, he hosted both men, strategically planting a provocative topic and sitting back from his place at the head of the table to take in the spirited rhetorical volley that ensued between his guests. 


“Joseph’s beliefs were closer to Ingersoll’s than to Beecher’s, his Judaism more cultural than spiritual, but he remained fiercely loyal to his people, using his political and social influence to garner support for Jewish causes and charities. For years he served as a trustee of Mount Sinai Hospital, originally called the Jew’s Hospital when it was founded in 1852 to treat New York’s Jewish population, who in some cases faced discrimination at the city’s Christian-run wards. And he headed the German Hebrew Benevolent Society, as much a social outfit as a charitable one, which held banquets and galas to raise funds to distribute to various Jewish organizations. Among its charitable activities, the group provided coal to impoverished immigrant families and occasionally furnished them with the means to continue their migration to the lightly populated West and out of overcrowded New York, where the more established and assimilated Jews feared their newly arrived coreligionists – uneducated and penniless and packing into dilapidated Lower East Side tenements – might arise antisemitic sentiments."


Author:  Daniel Schulman
Title: The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America 
Publisher: Knopf
Date: Copyright 2024
page(s): 92-97

Citizen Coke

Today's encore selection -- from Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism by Bartow J. Elmore. Sugar and the 5¢ Coke:
 
"Humans love sugar (sucrose), a disaccharide consisting of one glucose molecule bound to one fructose molecule, and for good reason: it provides in dense, crystalline form the basic primers needed to produce energy in our bodies. Because sugar is such an effective source of energy, humans have evolved a neurochemical regulatory mechanism that stimulates the release of dopamine, a pleasure­ inducing neurotransmitter, when sucrose is consumed. While this psychotropic system helps humans optimize caloric intake, it can also stimulate overindulgence in sugary products when sweet food stuffs are available in abundance. Recently, scientists have even found evi­dence to suggest that sugar may be as addictive as cocaine.

"It is no small wonder, then, that Coke's first customers loved, even craved, a daily dose of Coca-Cola. After all, Pemberton's origi­nal formula called for over 5 pounds of sugar per gallon of syrup. At the turn of the twentieth century, each 6-ounce Coca-Cola serving contained more than four teaspoons of sugar, a concentration that would likely have overloaded consumers' taste buds were it not for the high concentration of acids that helped to balance Coke's flavor profile. (Today, phosphoric acid makes Coca-Cola syrup's pH so low that trucks transporting the concentrated mixture require hazard­ous material placards to be in compliance with federal transporta­tion laws.) Pemberton had come up with the perfect sugar delivery system, one that made people feel good without overwhelming the tongue. As a result, by the mid-1910s, Coke was the single largest industrial consumer of sugar in the world, funneling roughly 100 million pounds annually into customers' bodies. All that sugar cost Coke money, and since its founding, the com­pany had scoured the world, seeking out suppliers that could offer the lowest prices for its most important ingredient.

Drink Coca-Cola, 5 cents

"Without cheap sugar, Coke had no business. The company made its millions selling an inexpensive, nonessential beverage in volume, and it could only turn a profit on bulk sales if it kept raw material costs down, especially for sugar, its most expensive ingredient by far. Customers simply were not willing to pay a premium price for soft drinks. Remarkably, from 1886 to 1950, Coca-Cola maintained a 5-cent price for its beverage. This was due in part to Coke chairman Robert Woodruff's constant vigilance. He insisted that company bottlers and soda jerks maintain this price for Coke, even when operating expenses increased, and he spent millions on advertisements featuring Coke's nickel price in an attempt to ensure local bottler and retailer compliance with his pol­icy. In the 1930s, when Coke began a concerted campaign to sell its beverages in coin-operated vending machines that only accepted 5-cent coins, Woodruff had an added incentive to preserve the nickel policy. Technology dictated that any price increase in Coke would require a jump to 10 cents in order to meet single-coin vending machine requirements, a change, executive Ralph Hayes noted, that would have been 'murderous' to the company."

Citizen Coke The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism
 
author: Bartow J. Elmore  
title: Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism  
publisher: W.W. Norton & Company  
date: Copyright 2015 by Bartow J. Elmore  
page(s): 76-78

The Betrayal of Christianity

The Churches Have Betrayed Christianity

The globalist progressive capture of Christian churches is a key component of this battle.

JUL 29

We have become very used to political betrayal. How many times have allegedly ‘conservative’ politicians and parties betrayed us? How many times have we got used to these people wrapping themselves in the flag when they needed our vote, but governing as Globalists and woke liberal progressives?

More times than can be counted.

Jupplandia is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

These people said they believed in low taxes, then raised them. These people said they believed in their country, then attack its history or attack people who want to make it great again. These people said they would oppose crazy spending packages and reduce debt, then support the crazy spending and raise the debt.

These people lunch with their supposed political rivals, and sneer at their own political base.

We have become very familiar with the polite Establishment Republicans, and the Uniparty Republicans, and elsewhere the alleged conservatives in the UK, Australia, New Zealand or Canada who go along with every Globalist policy and every woke agenda just as enthusiastically as their leftist opponents.

But there are other sources of belief and there are other institutions with influence over the direction of our society, aren’t there? There are the Christian churches, each with a hierarchy of ministers and administrators and Bishops and the like, each with considerable resources to apply. What about them?

Mainstream political conservatism has been betraying us for decades. But how much worse is it when that same betrayal comes from what should be our spiritual leaders, the people who more than any others should gird us for the defense of our values, and inspire us to fight to defend our Christian heritage?

These churches and their clergy, surely, should have been the firmest defenses of our heritage, our identity, our Christian morals and values. The Western world, the core of the western world, was once, after all, known as Christendom.

In previous centuries, when Islamic hordes tried to seize and control the West, Christians of strong belief met them, defied them, and defeated them. France (the Kingdom of the Franks) was saved from Ummayyad Islamic conquest by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. From the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722) to the final culmination of the Reconquista and the fall of the Nasrid Kingdom of Grenada in 1492 to the Christian forces of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the Iberian Christians battled for centuries to save themselves from Islamic rule. At the naval Battle of Lepanto on the 7th October 1571 the Holy League of Catholic states defeated the Ottoman Empire and ensured that western Europe would remain Christian. Earlier than that, the first great Siege of Vienna saw the 100,000 strong army of Suleiman the Magnificent halted by an opposing Christian force only one fifth as large. In 1683 the Ottomans again besieged Vienna, this time for two months, and again were turned back, this time by a Christian Coalition of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the joint command of King of Poland, John III Sobieski.

All these Christian armies were armored in the faith, inspired by Popes, and firm in their understanding that Christianity must defend itself. In those centuries, Christian priests would exhort battle against the enemies of Christ, or join the battle themselves, and would not treat the milder passages of the New Testament or the restrained personal example of Christ as an instruction that they should welcome their conquest by another faith or meekly submit to their own destruction. For century after century, Christianity was confident in its right to defend itself and its duty to preserve Christian lands as Christian, to hand these beliefs AND these portions of the Earth together to the next generation.

They even sought to reclaim that which had been lost, as the Crusaders did….a task that did not initiate conquest, but responded to six centuries of Islamic conquest. The crusader cry of Deus Vult (God Wills It!) first chanted as a rallying cry during the First Crusade in 1096, actually came directly from Pope Urban II in a speech to the Council of Clermont in 1095. Robert the Monk’s eyewitness account says that the Pope’s speech was so powerful and moving that the cry went up independently from several voices, all struck at the same time with these words, and that Pope Urban II replied:

“Unless the Lord God had been present in your spirits, all of you would not have uttered the same cry….Let this then be your war-cry in combats, because this word is given to you by God.”

Today, it would be easier to find a Christian priest who sneered at Deus Vult as a Christian version of Allahu Akbar than it would be to find one prepared to describe it as a phrase given to Christians by God. But look at the difference in context and meaning. The Islamic ‘God is great’ has been delivered by those who have always spread their faith by the sword, whereas the Christian ‘God wills it’ was first invoked by those who had already been attacked for centuriesDeus Vult is about picking up the sword to defend Christians after harm has already been inflicted on them. The priests and Pontiffs of the past understood that difference.

They understood that while there is shame and sin in putting innocents to the sword, there is no shame or sin in using martial skill to defend them, their faith and their land from others. Of course Christians have committed atrocities, and individual Christians have been brutal conquerors or venal priests. But there is still a vast gulf between a faith spread first by threat, and a faith spread first by persuasion, just as there is a difference between striking down anyone who stands in your way or for your sadistic pleasure, and resisting violence with violence in defense of your own.

If our priests had been what they are now when earlier Islamic armies threatened the West, the Christian era would have come to an end an awful lot sooner. In the modern world we face an Islamic conquest of the West that the Christian churches actively support. Whilst their own congregations shrink and die, they offer churches up for Islamic and pagan ceremonies, or they instruct their dwindling almost vanished flocks to treat vast numbers of fighting age men prepared to literally invade the West by boat and dinghy as being little lost sheep and lambs of no possible threat to anyone. Many of the NGOs helping the mass immigration invasion of the West are faith based organisations backed by the churches. Many of the remaining priests still at the pulpit are obsessed with the alleged sanctity and angelic splendor of migrants, while utterly unconcerned about the safety and lives of their actual neighbors.

A church in the UK some time ago gave a typical example of this. It was a minor incident but a symbolic one. Old and beautiful stained glass windows showing traditional Biblical scenes were removed and discarded. In their place went a modern stained glass window created by a woke artist to celebrate migrants. Dinghy invaders, most of whom are fighting age unaccompanied men from dangerous places with different (and often disgusting) cultural values, were depicted as flawless, blameless, perfect people (with an unrealistic number of women and children) just dreaming of safety.

The churches no longer have anything to say that speaks to their people, because they aren’t in the least bit concerned with the people from whom their congregations once came. They are in love with the exotic and the alien, and at war with the familiar and the citizen. Their feet are set upon narcissistic paths of woke virtue signalling, rather than on the path of real virtue and real values.

Nor do they seem to have any significant interest in Christianity. What they seem to do for a living is try to find Christian texts and instructions which, once vigorously deprived of all context and cherry-picked and deliberately misinterpreted, can be used to validate the beliefs and causes they do care about, which are woke ones.

Listening to the modern woke priest or alleged Christian is no different to listening to a Just Stop Oil campaigner or a rabid Donald Trump hater or a George Soros purchased District Attorney. These people are not the clergy of Christ, they are another branch of the clerisy of Wokeness. They are radical left social workers and activists, all the way up to figures like the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury and the (anti) Catholic Pope Francis. The current Pope in particular is a checklist of Globalist and leftist progressive cliches who seems barely aware that the organisation he heads is not the Eu, the UN or the WEF but a church representing 1.2 billion people, many of whom are not woke.

Even sympathetic fellow Globalist progressives struggle to present the current Pope as anything other than their guy in the Vatican. Here’s Wikepedia on the things that Pope Francis really care about:

“He maintains that the Catholic Church should be more sympathetic towards members of the LGBT community…Francis is a critic of unbridled capitalism, consumerism, and overdevelopment, he has made action on climate change a leading focus of his Papacy,,,in international diplomacy, Francis has criticized the rise of white-wing populism….helped to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, negotiated a deal with China to define how much influence the Communist Party has in appointing Chinese bishops, and has supported the cause of refugees…calling on the Western World to significantly increase immigration levels.”

So, a Pope who does deals with Communism, which has persecuted Catholics and Christians in China for a century and still does, and who shares Marxist attitudes to capitalism. A Pope obsessed not with Christian imagery and the Kingdom of Heaven, but with the secular apocalyptic belief system of Climate Change. A Pope who shares the hilarious (but also deeply hypocritical and authoritarian) progressive obsession with an imaginary ‘far-right threat’ and such Globalist dog whistle fictions as ‘dangerous Christian Nationalism’. A Pope who sees millions of traditional Catholics and ordinary white people as a threat. A Pope with an Antifa student understanding of economics, opposed to the very thing that has made the West successful. An Open Borders Pope who sounds like the writer of a Guardian newspaper opinion column.

The list goes on to praise Pope Francis for apologizing for the Church’s role in the “cultural genocide” of indigenous Canadians, an apology based on a complete fiction representing a kind of blood libel against white Canadians of European descent (the ‘native genocide’ scandal was based on allegations of mass graves which have never been found and confirmed but which did result in attacks on Catholics and racism towards white people).

Pope Francis does indeed represent many Christians. Unfortunately he represents the ones who enter a Christian church mainly to destroy it from within or turn it into a semi-Marxist outfit ranting against capitalism and white people. He is the long march through the institutions when that march reaches the final peak in church hierarchies. And his views are exactly the same as the views of any member of the new global elite.

There’s nothing specifically Catholic about him. He might as well be Netflix, or Barack Obama.

And this is fairly typical of ALL the Christian churches and their leaders. Justin Welby, the head of the Anglican Church, might as well be a Labour politician. Most of his thoughts and sermons seem geared towards the exact same things as those given by Pope Francis. Support for open borders, support for migrants and refugees, support for the idea of Christianity not as a serious faith with a 2,000 year old history but as a shoddy modern grab bag of the most asinine ideas available today, a portmanteau of progressive cliches and hypocrisies. Welby has driven traditional minded portions of the Anglican communion away, inspiring a large portion of what was the global Anglican church to break out in open rebellion. Meanwhile, the churches in the UK are empty and the mosques are full.

Or how about the Baptists, who are somewhat bigger in the US than they are in the UK, but likewise seem to mainly consist of representatives who only think of Christianity as a sort of code for wokeness, a traditional language you can translate wokeness into to support woke conclusions. The Baptists have had some very loud voices who have spent every waking moment from 2016 on attacking Donald Trump and attacking Christian evangelicals who support Donald Trump. Just yesterday for instance Baptist News Global published a fairly representative example of Trump Derangement Syndrome, in the form of a hysterical opinion piece by Martin Thielen describing Trump as “the most anti-Jesus President in American history” and “the second most dangerous threat to American Christianity.”

Predictably Thielen sees evangelicals as the only threat bigger than Trump, calling them hypocrites and deriding their branch of socially traditional Christianity as “dangerously toxic”. Even the langfuage he deploys is the language of a woke censor, a progressive authoritarian howling down anyone who isn’t exactly the same as them while claiming to be the champions of empathy and diversity. Laughably, he takes the only branch of Christianity that is growing, and claims that it is responsible for the dying and declining congregations people just like him preside over.

But all this inversion of reality and betrayal of traditional Christians is not expressed as a cogent series of rational points. Thielen doesn’t even bother to construct his article as an essay. It is instead simply an outraged howl showing a total fanatical commitment to every single lie that has ever been issued by the Democrat Party or by Never Trumpers about the object of their loathing. Thiel asks why evangelicals aren’t as offended by Trump as he is. After the tiresome invocation of the pussy grab quote he continues a rhetorical series of increasingly unhinged accusations masquerading as true points. Why aren’t evangelicals offended by:

“By a jury of his peers finding him liable sexual assault? By his rampant sexism? By his lack of character? By his lack of decency? By his endless lies? By his criminality? By his threats to democracy? By his admiration of dictators? By his mocking of disabled persons, POWs and victims of sexual assault? By his frightening language about immigrants being “vermin” and people who are “poisoning our blood”? By his fearmongering? By his hatred? By his chronic anger and rage? By his politics of revenge and retribution? By his racism? By his pathological narcissism? By his lack of any evidence of Christian faith, morals and values.”

It doesn’t occur to Betrayal Christians like Thiel that Real Christians might not see the things he sees, because the things he sees aren’t real. Because they are distortions and lies, or because they take metaphorical comment as real, or because they take comments deliberately at their worst and out of context, or because they refer to accusations that only represent HIS hate and the hate that people like him have towards anyone who challenges them. Fearmongering? That’s wicked and un-Christian…but not when you apply it to Trump in ways that prompt assassination attempts? Not when you decide that everyone evangelical, or MAGA, or white, or Republican, is sub-human?

All this was written after rhetoric like it prompted a fellow lunatic to fire shots at Trump and kill an innocent man in Trump’s audience. But the moderate Christian Thiel still writes this self-blind trash, this stuff which is more directly linked to violence and hate than anything Trump has ever said.

People like Thiel in the allegedly Christian churches, just like people such as Robert Reich in politics, do not see that they are the ones filled with hate, and they are the ones most likely to take authoritarian measures to express that hate.

And they have that blindness because they are NOT Christians themselves. They serve the religion of Woke. They serve Globalist idols. They just do it from with the cover of a claimed Christian identity. It’s no more real than a man putting on a dress and claiming to be a woman. Only its more cynical. Some of those are genuinely tortured by a mental illness. Pretend Christians who spend all their time attacking real Christians and all their energy supporting globalist causes, are more like people who put on the uniform of a nation they wish to betray.

The churches have a thousand Benedict Arnold’s at their head.

Look at another ‘moderate’ Christian like the Jesuit James T. Keane. Keane also hates Donald Trump. He also hates traditional Christians and Christians brave and honest enough to oppose progressive orthodoxy. In 2020 Keane celebrated the excommunication of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in an article in America The Jesuit Review. Keane too shows all the standard prejudices. Vigano, who opposed LGBTQ+ activism and had accused the Pope of being aware of child abuse, was described as a spreader of conspiracy theories (with no attempt to investigate the claims). But the entire article makes it clear that the real crime was writing a supportive letter addressed to Donald Trump. That, today, counts as heresy for Woke Catholics.

Or how about those Christians leaping to defend the Olympic games, tell us that no reference to the Last Supper was intended, and gaslighting us all in defense of an event that deliberately mocked their supposed faith? It’s curious that these are the leading Christians who never speak up when ancient Christian communities in the Middle East are destroyed, who have had nothing to say about Islamic genocides of Christians in history or happening today, who have no thoughts on the kidnap and rape of Christian girls in Nigeria or the grooming of and rape of nominally Christian British children by generations of Muslim rape gangs.

All the things that might have outraged a real Christian a century ago, do not outrage them. Why is that?

All the thing that truly threaten Christian populations do not frighten them. Why is that?

All the things that do outrage real morality and do threaten real Christians are things they tell us to love and understand and praise. Why is that?

The truth is that professional Establishment Christians have been as much on the other side, as professional Establishment conservatives have. Even now they are telling us that anyone who defends us is a racist, a bigot, a far right threat. Even now they are telling us that the enemies they let into our society are actually our friends. Even now they seem caring and compassionate only to people who invade our shores or groom our kids, with no care or compassion left for us. Even now they tell us that we should respect those who offer no respect to us, and protect those who only seem to mean us harm.

Chad Klinger

Cryptos - So Far The CIA Sculpture Which Has Been Unsolvable


By Austin Harvey | Edited By John Kuroski
Published June 9, 2023
Updated June 12, 2023

More than three decades after the installation of Kryptos, three of its four coded messages have been cracked — but one remains a mystery.

Kryptos

TwitterKryptos is a massive copper sculpture comprised of coded messages — but even once they’re deciphered, the sculpture’s true message will be locked behind more puzzles.

In a courtyard outside of the entrance to the Central Intelligence Agency’s New Headquarters Building, there is a mysterious sculpture dubbed “Kryptos.” Installed in 1990 by artist Jim Sanborn, Kryptos is a large, wave-shaped copper sculpture containing 1,800 characters that at first glance seem to be random, jumbled combinations

Random, however, these letters are anything but. Kryptos actually contains four distinct encrypted messages, three of which have been cracked over the course of the three decades since Kryptos was installed. The fourth has yet to be solved.

But even the sections of Kryptos’ message that have been cracked leave many wondering what the purpose of the sculpture is. In recent years, Sanborn has provided several clues as to what Kryptos’ fourth passage could mean, yet no one has been able to successfully solve this tantalizing puzzle.

Who Is Jim Sanborn, The Artist Behind Kryptos?

Herbert James Sanborn, better known as Jim Sanborn, was born in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 14, 1945. In 1969, he graduated from Randolph-Macon College with a double major in art history and sociology, later receiving his Master’s degree in sculpture from Pratt Institute in 1971.

Jim Sanborn

National Museum of Nuclear Science & HistoryArtist Jim Sanborn.

Sanborn’s works have been featured in a number of prominent and prestigious museums, including the High Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Sanborn has also produced work for several institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, most famously, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In 1990, Sanborn presented the CIA with a piece called “Kryptos” — a Greek word for “hidden.” And as its name would suggest, Kryptos’ meaning has remained hidden ever since.

The Puzzling Messages Hidden Within Kryptos

Jim Sanborn wrote the messages in Kryptos himself. These messages are obscured by a series of increasingly elaborate coded messages. At the time, only Sanborn and former CIA Director William H. Webster had the solution to the sculpture’s encrypted messages.

“Everyone wants to know what it says,” Sanborn told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “They’re out there all the time. There are groups of dark-suited people pointing at it and getting down on their knees, trying to figure out what it says. Some take photographs. One guy copied the whole thing down with pencil and paper.”

Sanborn said at the time that a “friend of friend” told him CIA operatives had been growing frustrated with their inability to crack the code, even going so far as to send copies of the message to agents at the National Security Agency (NSA) to try and decipher it using the NSA’s Cray supercomputer.

Kryptos Sculpture

Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty ImagesSanborn expected Kryptos’ fourth passage to be solved within a decade.

According to Sanborn, the sculpture’s message deals with the CIA tradition of secrecy on several levels. It includes a system of ciphers devised by the 16th-century French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère, known as a Vigenère table, among other codes which Sanborn created with the help of retired CIA cryptographer Edward Scheidt.

“He developed something that really stumped them out there,” Sanborn said. “Parts can be deciphered in a matter of weeks or months, but other parts might never be deciphered without the knowledge that Webster has. He has the key to the code, and he can easily figure the whole thing.”

Of course, the difficulty of cracking the codes embedded in Kryptos have only added to the sculpture’s notoriety. And over the years since its introduction, significant chunks of the sculpture’s message have been cracked — though the fourth section’s translation has remained elusive.

Deciphering The Message Of Kryptos

It took about eight years for someone to come forward and say they had solved part of Kryptos’ message. In 1998, CIA physicist David Stein called a meeting to announce that he had solved the first three passages of the sculpture’s puzzling message.

Kryptos Transcript

Karl Wang/University of California San DiegoA transcript of Kryptos’ message.

According to Smithsonian, around 250 people showed up to hear what Stein had found using just “pencil and paper alone.” Around the same time, a computer scientist named Jim Gillogly created computer programs to help crack the code, which is composed of classic ciphers, plus a few odd spelling errors and extra characters Sanborn intentionally left in to throw off codebreakers.

The first passage of Kryptos reads, “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of inqlusion.”

The second passage is a fair bit longer, reading in full:

It was totally invisible Hows that possible? They used the Earths magnetic field X
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location X
Does Langley know about this? They should Its buried out there somewhere X
Who knows the exact location? Only WW This was his last message X
Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north
Seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west X
Layer two

“WW” in this passage is a direct reference to Webster. The third passage, also rather lengthy, includes another reference, this time to Egyptologist Howard Carter, the man who opened King Tutankhamen’s tomb.

It reads:

Slowly desparatly slowly the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed with trembling hands i made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner and then widening the hole a little i inserted the candle and peered in the hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist X

Can you see anything q

The Kryptos Sculpture

TwitterSanborn has provided three clues to help solve Kryptos’ fourth passage, in 2010, 2014, and 2020.

Sanborn has said that the mystery of Kryptos has lasted much longer than he originally expected. Initially, he assumed the first three passages would be solved in the matter of a few years, and the fourth, most difficult passage within a decade. But three decades on, the meaning of the fourth passage is still a mystery, and Sanborn, now in his mid-70s, has had to consider that the mystery may outlive him.

At one point, he even considered auctioning off the solution and donating the money to climate research. Then, in January 2020, Sanborn offered up another clue to try and help potential codebreakers solve the puzzle. He had done the same thing in 2010 and 2014, but the 2020 clue, he said, would be the last.

“NORTHEAST”: The Final Clue To Help Solve Kryptos

Surprisingly, the fourth section of Kryptos is actually the shortest one, coming in at just 97 characters. That hasn’t made it any easier to crack, however. In fact, its brevity “could, in itself, present a decryption challenge,” Edward Scheidt, the cryptographer who helped Sanborn devise the code, told The New York Times.

To further add to the difficulty of Kryptos’ fourth passage, the text in this section also uses what’s known as a masking technique, further obscuring the message. It’s not even entirely clear what masking technique Sanborn and Scheidt used.

Kryptos Sculpture

Wikimedia CommonsSeveral rocks and pieces of wood block the full text of Kryptos in photographs, making it more difficult to decipher.

Sanborn has received countless emails and letters over the years from prospective codebreakers, each hoping that they had finally solved the puzzle, but of course none of them had. As time went on, Sanborn decided to provide a few clues to guide would-be cryptographers.

The first clue came in 2010. It was a single word, “BERLIN,” which makes up the 64th through the 69th positions in the final passage. In 2014, Sanborn revealed the word “CLOCK” occupied spots 70 through 74.

The final clue, at positions 26 through 34, is “NORTHEAST.” In the now three years since Sanborn revealed the clue, the puzzle has still not been solved.

Even if it is, more puzzles await. As Sanborn explained, deciphering the code is only one part of the puzzle.

“They will be able to read what I wrote, but what I wrote is a mystery itself,” Sanborn said. “There are still things they have to discover once it’s deciphered. There are things in there they will never discover the true meaning of. People will always say, ‘What did he mean by that?’ What I wrote out were clues to a larger mystery.”

US Presidential Races Hide The Criminality of the US Empire

The thing I hate about western electoral politics in general and US presidential races in particular is that they take the focus off the depravity of the US-centralized empire itself, and run cover for its criminality.

In the coming months you’re going to be hearing a lot of talk about the two leading presidential candidates and how very very different they are from each other, and how one is clearly much much worse than the other. But in reality the very worst things about both of them will not be their differences — the worst things about them will be the countless ways in which they are both indistinguishably in lockstep with one another.

The Rise of the New No...Hopkins, C. J.Best Price: $3.59Buy New $9.24(as of 09:44 UTC - Details)Donald Trump is not going to end America’s non-existent “democracy” if elected and rule the United States as an iron-fisted dictator, and he’s certainly not going to be some kind of populist hero who leads a revolution against the Deep State. He will govern as your standard evil Republican president who is evil in all the usual ways US presidents are evil, just like he did during his first term. His administration will continue to fill the world with more war machinery, implement more starvation sanctions, back covert operations, uprisings and proxy conflicts, and work to subjugate the global population to the will of the empire, all while perpetuating the poisoning of the earth via ecocidal capitalism, just as all his predecessors have done.

And the same will be true of whatever moronic fantasies Republicans wind up concocting about Kamala Harris between now and November. She’s not going to institute communism or give everyone welfare, implement Sharia law, weaken Israel, take everyone’s guns, subjugate Americans to the “Woke Agenda” and make everyone declare their pronouns and eat bugs, or any of that fuzzbrained nonsense. She will continue to expand US warmongering and tyranny while making the world a sicker, more violent, and more dangerous place for everyone while funneling the wealth of the people and the planet into the bank accounts of the already obscenely rich. Just as Biden has spent his entire term doing, and just as Trump did before him.

The truth is that while everyone’s going to have their attention locked on the differences between Trump and Harris these next few months, by far the most significant and consequential things about each of these candidates are the ways in which they are similar. The policies and agendas either of them will roll out which will kill the most people, negatively impact the most lives and do the most damage to the ecosystem are the areas in which they are in complete agreement, not those relatively small and relatively inconsequential areas in which they differ. You can learn a lot more about the US and its globe-spanning empire by looking at the similarities between presidential administrations than you can by looking at their differences, because that’s where the overwhelming majority of the abusiveness can be found.

But nobody’s going to be watching any of that normalized criminality while the drama of this fake election plays out. More and more emotional hysteria is going to get invested in the outcome of this fraudulent two-handed sock puppet popularity contest between two loyal empire lackeys who are both sworn to advance the interests of the empire no matter which one wins, and the mundane day-to-day murderousness of the empire will continue to tick on unnoticed in the background.

The Hollywood Coin Flip -- 7/26/24

Hollywood Sign Los Angeles California - Panoramic view from behind the sign - Paul Reiffer Professional Landscape Photographer



Today's selection-- from This was Hollywood by Carla Valderrama. How Hollywood became Hollywood:


“Hollywood became the film capital of the world through the flip of a coin. In 1911, director Al Christie was making Westerns in New Jersey and had grown tired of the inappropriate landscape there. He wanted to try filming in California. His producer, David Horsley, favored Florida, thinking it would be cheaper. Christie had a silver dollar. ‘Heads for California and tails for Florida,’ he declared. It was heads. On the train west, the two met a theatrical producer who told them Hollywood was a pretty place. ‘None of us had heard of Hollywood before,’ Christie recalled. 


“Indeed, in the first decade of the 20th century, it was another city, on the other side of the country, that played host to the film industry, still just in its infancy. It was a boomtown, gloriously diverse in its scenic beauty, an Edenic paradise in which to build America's first dream factory. It was Fort Lee, New Jersey. While there were numerous studios in New York and minor film centers in Philadelphia and Chicago, the New Jersey town on the banks of the Hudson River provided something those larger cities couldn't. As narrative-driven motion pictures became a dominant form, it became clear that audiences preferred scenes set outdoors to be shot outdoors instead of on clumsily painted sets. Fort Lee's proximity to the river as well as to steep cliffs, waterfalls, forests, and farmland made it a natural choice. 


“And it was only fitting that the movie business set up shop in the home state of the man who had done more to pioneer film technology than anyone else. Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope was developed at his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, in the early 1890s, where the first motion picture studio in the world was built in December 1892. When Edison unveiled the Kinetoscope, he launched an entertainment revolution, with arcades that played the Kinetoscope films on individual-viewing machines popping up everywhere. Not long after, another revolution began, as newly formed moving picture companies began selling admission to see their products on large screens in theaters. An industry was born. 

Nestor Studios, Hollywood's first movie studio, 1912


“As it grew, so did Edison's stranglehold on the technological patents that made it all possible. In December 1908, eleven film companies, including Edison's, formed a new organization, the Motion Picture Patents Company, known as the Trust. The companies pooled their patents for essential equipment, from projector machines to cameras to sprocket holes on film. Their plan was simple: Prevent anyone outside the Trust from making motion pictures in the United States. And they went to great lengths to make their plan a reality. 


“‘[W]e were shadowed, harassed, threatened and assaulted,’ said Carl Laemmle, founder of the Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). Edison hired detectives to spy on and harass the independent filmmakers who weren't paying royalties to the Trust. Double agents posed as actors or technicians and gathered information on these ‘pirates.’ Once, Laemmle and his cameraman hid all night in a Fort Lee cellar with his camera while sleuths from the Trust scoured the neighborhood. According to Laemmle, ‘[C]ameramen were selected in the early days not for their artistic ability, but for their fistic prowess.’

 

“When surveillance and harassment didn't stop the independent filmmakers, the Trust turned to violence. They hired gangsters to burn down independent studios and destroy their equipment.

‘They found that by shooting holes through the camera, they could stop their use, and that became their favorite method,’ filmmaker Allan Dwan said. 


“Eventually, independent filmmakers hired gangsters of their own. According to Laemmle, today's commonplace industry jargon meant something else entirely on a film set back then. ‘When the present-day director instructs his cameraman to “shoot,” he probably does not realize that a similar order a couple of decades ago may have been taken literally,’ Laemmle explained. ‘A six-shooter was part of a cameraman's equipment in the early days.’


“Independents were now hiring lawyers to beat the Trust in the courts. But all of this was expensive and taking time away from making films. So, many of the independent companies began to search for a new home where they could ply their trade without interference from Edison or the Trust.


“‘That's one of the reasons most of us went to California, and distant places,’ Dwan said.


“If a Trust representative should happen to make the journey west, Southern California had the added benefit of being close to Mexico, where their patents were meaningless.


“Dwan felt secure in California. ‘I had my three cowboys, the Morrison brothers, arm themselves with Winchesters, hire some other cowboys, and station them outside our area of work. So, if anybody appeared carrying any kind of weapon, they were challenged by our people and disarmed.’ One day ‘a sneaky-looking character’ got off the train and asked to see the boss. Dwan suspected he worked for the Trust. They walked to an arroyo, a little stream under a bridge, which was full of tin cans. ‘To impress me, he whipped out a sidearm and fired at one of the tin cans in the arroyo. I immediately whipped mine out and fired,’ Dwan said. ‘He missed his, but I hit mine three times. He turned around towards the depot and ran right into the three Morrison brothers with three Winchester rifles aimed at him, and he decided it was about time to leave town.’ Dwan's company wasn't bothered by the Trust again.


“And then there were Al Christie and David Horsley and their fateful coin flip. Other film companies had established studios in downtown Los Angeles as well as neighboring towns like Glendale, Santa Monica, and Long Beach. D.W. Griffith had even made a film in Hollywood: In Old California (1910). But there were no studios in Hollywood; it was just a small town of God-fearing folk, once described by the Los Angeles Times as a place where ‘the saloon and its kindred evils are unknown.’”

This Was Hollywood Forgotten Stars and Stories
 
author: Carla Valderrama  
title: This Was Hollywood: Forgotten Stars and Stories  
publisher: Running Press Adult  
date:  
page(s): 2-4  

 







- The Demon Of Unrest - The Seeds Of The War Between The States

Today's selection-- from The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson. Though he had stellar credentials, President James Buchanan was a problem for the Democratic Party:

“A Democrat for nearly four decades, Buchanan had always been a problematic candidate in the eyes of the electorate, but this had nothing to do with his political competence. On paper, at least, he had one of the most illustrious records of any politician anywhere. From the age of twenty-three, when he won a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, he had won eleven straight elections, which moved him firmly into the heart of federal politics. James K. Polk made him secretary of state; Franklin Pierce selected him as his vice presidential running mate, though Buchanan declined the opportunity. Buchanan was tall, handsome, blond, and apparently never had to shave. He did have one conspicuous imperfection: a misalignment of his eyes that caused his gaze to diverge in an alarming fashion. To compensate, he would tip his head forward and to the side with one eye focused on his listener, thereby imparting a look of skepticism or keen interest. One Sunday Edmund Ruffin spotted Buchanan on Pennsylvania Avenue in the midst of one of the president's solo walks through Washington. ‘As we first passed,’ Ruffin wrote in his diary, ‘he had one eye shut, (as is his frequent habit,) and with the other he stared at me as if he thought he knew me.’


“Otherwise, Buchanan seemed to be an ideal catch for any woman, but therein lay the problem: He had no particular interest in being caught. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor, a phenomenon American voters could not quite grasp. His one brush with marriage had occurred in 1819 when he became engaged to a young woman named Ann Coleman. She broke it off, complaining that he spent too much time attending to his public activities and not enough to her. Invariably, broken engagements raised public speculation. Coleman fled to Philadelphia both to recover her emotional health and to restore her social standing, but she died soon after her arrival, at twenty-three years of age, her demise attributed to ‘hysterical convulsions.’ Speculation further intensified when it became known that her father would not allow Buchanan to attend the funeral. The mystery of it all gave rise to questions as to whether Coleman might have killed herself or overdosed on some kind of sleep elixir, like laudanum, or had committed that worst of public sins, gotten pregnant out of wedlock, for clearly something had caused her father's callous treatment of Buchanan.

Portrait c. 1850–1868


“Buchanan had remained single ever since. Newspapers called him ‘Aunt Fancy.’ For years when he was in Washington he roomed with a fellow senator, William R. King of Alabama, himself an accomplished politician. The pair was so close both in public and in private that newspapers described them as a married couple, with Buchanan the husband, Senator King his wife. The death of King in 1853 left Buchanan bereft and alone.


“During the 1856 presidential election the Democratic Party wrestled with the problem of his bachelorhood and came up with a solution. Introducing him at the party's 1856 national convention, a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat announced, ‘Ever since James Buchanan was a marrying man, he has been wedded to THE CONSTITUTION, and in Pennsylvania we do not allow bigamy.’ Which prompted some wags to note that this particular wife was rather old. Others likened him to a spinster. Even Polk said that he ‘sometimes acts like an old maid.’ There was something fusty about him. A popular term of the day, ‘old fogey,’ seemed to apply. The press came to refer to him routinely as the ‘Old Public Functionary,’ or OPF for short.


“None of this seemed to bother Buchanan, who on occasion even referred to himself as OPF, but his situation often left him feeling isolated. Upon occupying the White House, he recruited his vivacious niece, Harriet Lane, to come live there as his companion and social hostess, a role she embraced wholeheartedly.


“From the start of his political career Buchanan had demonstrated a pronounced affinity for Southerners and the South, despite having lived his whole life in Pennsylvania, where he owned a three-story, seventeen-room mansion called Wheatland situated on twenty-two acres of plantation-like grounds outside Lancaster. In the political vernacular of the time, this made Buchanan a ‘dough face,’ someone who seems outwardly to be one thing but is actually another. The South returned the affection: In the 1856 presidential election, Buchanan won almost universal support from the slaveholding states, with only Maryland choosing to stray. Four of Buchanan's cabinet members were wealthy Southern planters. A fifth, Navy Secretary Isaac Toucey, was from Connecticut, but he, too, was a doughface, a Northerner who embraced the Southern states' rights doctrine. For Buchanan the cabinet served as more than an advisory body. Without a wife and children he was lonely, as he himself acknowledged; his cabinet members, especially Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, a Georgian who once owned a thousand enslaved Blacks, were his personal companions, his friends, his family. This closeness had the effect of limiting his ability to view the political landscape with any degree of impartiality and caused him to act in ways that skirted the line between mere favoritism and treason. 


“As Senator Seward noted in a letter to his wife, Frances, ‘The White House is abandoned to the seceders. They eat, drink, and sleep with him.’”

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
 
author: Erik Larson