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The black nobility is the base of the global crime syndicate that controls this planet. The black nobility or black aristocracy are the aristocratic families that sided with the papacy under Pope Pius IX after the army of the Kingdom of Italy led by the Savoy family entered Rome on September 20, 1870, overthrew the pope . and the Papal States, and took over the Quirinal Palace, and the nobles later ennobled by the Pope prior to the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Any family that produced popes for the Vatican is royalty. Most of the black nobility are Vatican royalty. The black nobility consider themselves sovereign princes. These families earned the title of "black" nobility for their relentless unscrupulousness. They used murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery and all kinds of deception on a large scale, without resisting the achievement of their objectives. The black nobility were the families that financed and created the holy corporation of the Vatican with the aim of imposing world slavery as a necessary institution, with the sole belief that some are born to rule and others to be ruled. The idea that certain families were born to rule as an arbitrary elite, while the vast majority of a given population is condemned to oppression, servitude, or slavery became the theological position of this elite. The "New World Order" is an attempt to take control of society by these fascist families with the purpose of the total slavery of humanity.
The Vatican is an imperial nation and is the largest empire in this world. The Vatican City, or the Holy Vatican Corporation, officially the Vatican City State, is a nation that operates as the largest intelligence network in the world. The Holy See is the "All-Seeing Eye" in society and a corporate entity connected to many other corporations and governments through papal and royal statutes. Archbishops and high-level bishops are the overseers of society within their districts and oversee politics, police, business, and organized crime. The same year that the professor of ecclesiastical law and practical philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt, created the Order of the Illuminati, was the same year that they created the United States as a corporation to run it as their private army and lead I dig the agenda of a "New World Order" for the elites, mainly, thanks to the infiltrated Freemasonry and directed by the Jesuits.
The New World Order is a conspiracy of lineage at the top. They are ancient and evil bloodlines that build and destroy empires for control through an order out of chaos. Royal and noble houses are corporate entities and claim to rule and own land, resources, and people. Landlords have always been the dominant owners of gold and precious metals. They empower and finance bankers and entrepreneurs to work for them through their corporate homes. They authorize and issue the creation of laws, agencies, the military, companies, and universities. They create and run religions and secret societies. They also finance and organize organized crime syndicates as if they were commercial enterprises. Some of the major royal bloodlines include Savoy, Bourbon, Medici, Glücksburg, Wittelsbach, Nassau-Weilberg, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Romanov, Grimaldi, Orleans, Braganza, Habsburg, Hannover, Windsor, Saud, Thani, Khalifa, Alouwite , Zogu, Hohenzollern, Orange-Nassau, Bonaparte and Bernadotte. Many royal bloodlines still rule their nations as heads of state such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Monaco, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, Sweden, Norway, and Luxembourg. The Vatican City State is also a kingdom with the Pope of Rome as its monarch. The Black Nobility are the ancient bloodlines of the Papal States and they own the Holy See and the Vatican. They produced the first popes of Rome and held leadership positions in the Vatican from its inception. The Colonna and Torlonia still hold the hereditary positions of the Assistant Princes to the Papal Throne. The black nobility consider themselves sovereign princes. The Vatican is used as a central point of control and the Holy See is one of the oldest and most criminal corporate entities in existence. The Spanish Catholic Church is immensely rich, it has not suffered the crisis and also enjoys a true tax haven, being free to pay taxes, such as the IBI, works, companies, etc. The vast majority of the assets in their possession and on their accounts are completely opaque. This situation is illegitimate, unfair and presumably illegal, and this occurs with the complicity and consent of the public powers.
The Erlach and Brandi families are Swiss tax advisers who enable corruption, bribery, criminal financing, and money laundering. The Swiss Guard is the one that protects the Vatican City State. The Swiss cantons have been in contract with the Vatican for centuries and Switzerland is basically a papal state with the noble Roman saints claiming partial ownership. The German house of Baden-Zahringen founded Bern, in Switzerland. The House of Savoy ruled the regions of Switzerland for hundreds of years. Some of the most important bloodlines of the Black Nobility are: Massimo, Colonna, Pallavicini, Odescalchi, Ruspoli, Orsini, Aldobrandini, Sforza-Cesarini, Boncompagni-Ludovisi, Chigi-Albani-Della Rovere, Doria-Pamphilj, Rospigliosi, Giustiniani , Torlonia, Corsini, Borghese, Del Drago, Lucchesi-Palli, and Gaetani. The Pecci and Pacelli families are more recent bloodlines of the Black Nobility. The black nobility share ownership over the Holy See, which is a corporate entity based in the Vatican City State that was established as a nation in 1929 under Benito Mussolini, who was put in power by the House of Savoy. The Mussolini and Franco families became nobles after their fascist regimes. The Black Nobility also owns the Knights of Malta, the Jesuits, and the Cosa Nostra. The Black Nobility established branches in southern Italy and married Sicilian-Campanian nobles such as the Lanza di Scalea, Adragna, Sanseverino, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Paterno, Cattaneo, Serena di Lapigio and Rocco di Torrepadula families. Many Italian crime families were Sicilian nobles like the Bonanno and Bellomo families. Both the mafia bosses and the Italian and Spanish nobles call themselves Dons, which is the equivalent of Boos (boss) of crime. The Savoy, Savoy-Aosta, Medici, Borbon-Dos Sicilias, and Borbon-Parma families are members of Italian royalty and are married to various European royal bloodlines and Black Nobility. Most of the monarchs are members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Prince Carlo Massimo has been overseeing the Sovereign Military Order of Malta as President of the Italian Association of SMOM. The Knights of Malta have an undercover operation at the Jesuit School of Foreign Service in Georgetown, run by Joel Hellman. The Jesuits and the Knights of Malta basically run the Defense Department alongside British Crown agents and high-level Freemasons. Prince Carlo de Borbón-Dos Sicilias is a high commander of the Society of Jesus through his Sacred Constantinian Military Order of Saint George. The Jesuits were authorized by Pope Paul III of the Farnese family. The Bourbon-Dos Sicilias and Borbon-Parma families are the continuation of the Farnese family, the name Farnesivs is engraved in the Jesuit headquarters called the Church of Gesu in Rome. The Farnese family lived in a pentagonal fortress called Farnese Villa Caprarola, which is the basis for the design of the American Pentagon. Jesuits are involved in education, politics, banking, science, law, and especially military intelligence. The Italian Bourbons have established residences all over the world, including Florida. Jesuits need to be investigated and banned, they have rightly been expelled from almost every country in the world, but they always end up coming back. In Spain three times, his last return was at the hands of General Franco.
The Holy See is a corporate body that issues laws and bills, such as the Golden Bull, which claims ownership of the Kingdom of England and identifies the emperor as the sovereign of the only legitimate universal empire, directly chosen by God. The Pope claims temporal power or ownership over the Earth and also claims Papal Supremacy or Papal Rule and Papal Infallibility. Infallibility means incapable of being wrong. The Roman Curia or Papal Court is the highest organized council in society and is directly supervised by the two “Assistants of the Prince to the Pontifical Throne”, these two positions are held by the princes of the Colonna and Torlonia families. They work with a higher level princely council of the Italian nobility that works with another council made up of the Roman nobility. The Italian and Austrian nobility are married to each other and work closely together leading the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which is a sovereign entity equivalent to that of a sovereign nation. The Italian Nobility, La Cosa Nostra and the German and Austrian Nobles, run the Jewish Mafia. Royalty and nobles have massive amounts of wealth in private bank accounts in Switzerland. They use the Nazi-founded Bank for International Settlements to steal wealth from central banks through fraudulent tax contracts and then launder and hide the wealth in private bank accounts in Switzerland. The main Italian lineages still active include the Massimo, Colonna, Pallavicini, Torlonia, Aldobrandini, Ruspoli, Orsini, Gaetani-D'Aragona, Borbón-Parma, Odescalchi, Borghese, Adragni, Chigi, Medici, Borromeo, Doria-Pamphilj, Sacchetti, Savoy, Grimaldi and Bourbon. These bloodlines oversee the various specters of society. Outside of this power structure is the Committee of 300 with an inner circle made up of the leading monarchs and princes of Europe and the former Holy Roman Empire with members from Windsor, Spencer, Cecil, Percy, Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Habsburg, Bonaparte, Orleans, Bernadotte, Lagergren, Glucksburg, Hannover, Furstenberg, Austria-East, Hohenberg, Hesse, Nassau-Weilberg, Habsburg-Lorraine, Saxe Coburg and Gotha, Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, Saxony-Meiningen, Braganza, Orange-Nassau, Hohenzollern , Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Liechtenstein, Rothschild, FitzJames, Lobkowicz, Ligne, Merode, Romanov, Thurn and Taxis, Schwarzenberg, Orsini-Rosenberg, Windisch-Graetz, Esterhazy and other families. Many members who do not have noble status on the Committee of 300 are representatives of the royal families.
These families are all enemies of humanity and have conspired to enslave the world for centuries. They authorize and create corporations and billionaires, run religions, states, secret societies, the mafia, and organized crime syndicates. Royal families in Europe are mainly divided into two factions, and this dates back to the Guelph merchants and Ghibelline landowners. All other groups like Bilderberg, CFR, and the Trilateral Commission are lower-level organizations. All roads lead to Rome, which is the basis of its control system. The European Constitutional Monarchies are branches of the corporate empire of Rome. Constitutional Monarchies are ruled by blood-appointed heads of state and serve Rome through the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The Pope claims temporary or physical ownership of the Earth. The Pope claims to be infallible of error. The Pope claims ownership over all souls through the papal doctrine of "Papal Supremacy." The Pope is a leader for the Black Nobility of Italy.
The Jesuits are a military priesthood officially established by Pope Paul III A.K. to Alessandro Farnese of the Farnese family. The Jesuits were officially established under the Papal Bull called Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae, which means Military Regiment of the Church as the continuation of the Templars. The Black Nobles are the true owners and controllers of the Vatican and maintain their control throughout the centuries by installing their relatives as high-level popes and bishops. At present the Torlonia and Colonna families who have the hereditary positions of Prince Assistants to the Papal Throne are those who supervise the pope. In turn Pope Francis supervises all members of the Catholic Church and also supervises the various secret societies that are connected with the Church.
The Jesuits are also a Masonic order and were the continuation of the Templar orders when they were banned. The Roman Catholic Church mocks Christians by performing rituals where they pretend to drink blood and eat human flesh known as the Eucharist, also called Holy Sacrifice. The New Testament did not exist until about 1600 and the Old Testament is even more recent than the new. It was the Vatican and European monarchs who created both the New and the Old Testaments. The last official version of the bible was published in 1777.
The bishops and priests operate as supervisors and the Jesuits function as spies trained in deception and are infiltrated everywhere. The Pope claims temporal power or ownership over the Earth and also claims Papal Supremacy or Papal Rule and Papal Infallibility. Infallibility means incapable of being wrong. Archbishops are the overseers of society within their districts and oversee politics, police, business, and organized crime. The Latin phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum means New Order of Ages (or Ages), or also "New World Order", and is on the US dollar bill and Great Seal of the United States.
The Vatican uses Latin as an official language and for documents. America is named after the Italian Americo Vespucci who worked for the Medici family of Florence and Rome. Vespucci created the term New World for America. The Bank of America was originally called the Bank of Italy and was founded by Amadeo Giannini, who was financed by Italians. Nations were formed as companies or corporations to exploit their citizens as merchandise. Corporations are fraudulent constructions because they are considered a person with rights under the law, and because the owners and controllers of the corporations can disregard responsibility for crimes committed by the corporation. That is fraudulent. Corporations are not people and therefore cannot have rights. Corporations are also monopolies that use subsidiaries to hide their dominance over industry. Private companies cannot compete fairly with corporations. Citizens are also classified as legal persons (companies), robbing them of all their human rights. Corporations shouldn't exist.
Royalty and nobles issue charters establishing representative covert property agents controlled by corporate households or crowns of royalty and nobles. They claim to own foreign governments in this way. Royalty and nobles claim to own the United States as a continuation of the Virginia Company. Roman royalty such as the Hanover, Hesses, Wurttembergs, Hohenzollerns, Glucksburgs, Orange-Nassaus and Saxe-Coburg and Gothas claim a share of ownership over the British Crown. This is why the British royal family has so much German ancestry. The United States is defined as a federal corporation under US code 3002. Section 15. Most of the founding fathers were Freemasons and worked for the British Crown and German royalty. American political families, such as the Bushs, Clintons, Romneys, and Kennedys, take their names from European noble families that still exist. The Von Dem Bussche family are German nobles and relatives of the Bush family. The Clintons and Romneys are also British nobles. The Kennedys are Scottish-Irish nobles and an American political family involved with the Democratic Party. Mars, Walton, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Getty, Hearst, Sackler, Lauder, Sachs, Busche, Johnson, McMahon, Forbes, and Cox are some of the billionaire American families that work with royalty and nobles in Europe. The Mars family is worth about 70 billion and works with the Windsor, Savoy, Thurn and Taxis families. The Waltons are worth around 130 billion and work with German nobles like the Württemberg, Baden, Hohenzollern and Isenberg families. The various Johnson families in the United States are collectively worth tens of billions and serve as agents for the House of Hannover. They own Johnson and Johnson and Fidelity Investments. The Hanovers are powerful royals and merchants who established the Hanseatic League. The Hearst family is worth more than 25 billion and several members were educated at Harvard University of the British Crown. The McMahon family is a billionaire and owner of the WWE and works under the Bonapartes and Savoys as their noble ancestors who were served militarily by the MacMahons during the Second Italian War of Independence. Today there are MacMahons in France with Italian and French titles of nobility. The Lauder family works for the House of Esterhazy in Austria and the House of East in Austria and Italy. The Guggenheims have assets worth hundreds of billions and are married to the House of Stuart. The Getty family are billionaire American oil merchants and are married to the Italian House of Ruspoli. The Forbes family are billionaires and American descendants of Scottish nobles who still exist.
All gang stalking and cult organizations are owned and controlled by members of royalty and nobility. Criminal organizations such as Royalty itself, Royal Institutions, The Company of Jesus, The Black Monks, The Hellfire Club, The Templar Orders, Freemasonry, The Grand Orient of France, The York Rite, The Scottish Rite, Prince Masonry of Prince Hall, Shriners International, The Royal Order of Jesters, The Cabal Society, Chabad, Scientology, Skull & Bones, The Boulé Society, The 5% Nation, The Nation of Islam, Black Israelites, The Ordo Templi Orientis ( OTO), The Temple of Set, The Church of Satan, Rosicrucian, Golden Dawn, Opus Dei, Mormons, Knights of Columbus, The Bohemian Club, Knights of Phintias, Ancient Order of Druids, Wicca, Santeria, Obeah, Voodoo, Sufism , Greek Fraternities and Brotherhoods, New Age and Gnostic Cults, Nazi Cults, KKK, Mafias, Prison Gangs, Biker Gangs and Street Gangs. The Rockefeller family uses their charitable foundations to fund harassment gangs and bribery in the United States, as well as globalization agendas and vaccination programs. The Rockefeller Foundation funded Almighty Vice Lord Nation, which is an organized crime group, and also funded the Tavistock Institute.
Hollywood, the Church of Scientology, and Silicon Valley are military operations like the US DARPA agency and run by European royalty and nobles like the Oettingen-Spielbergs, Schaumburg-Lippes, Anhalts, Hanovers, Windsors, Passi di Preposulos, Ruspolis, Torlonias and Odescalchis. The Ferragamo family is also involved in the management and financing of corruption in Hollywood. The House of Nassau-Weilberg, which is married to the Torlonias, funds human trafficking and human sacrifice in Hollywood. Idols in the entertainment industry are a dangerous cult with leaders who have access to electronic weapons. Most of modern electronics is being broadcast covertly with GENISIS and NEURON bio-piracy software controlled by Kabbalists and Scientologists. European monarchies function as extensions of Rome and run secret societies that infiltrate government agencies and run corporations for monarchs. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is the main military council and works closely with the Orders of St. John administered by Protestant royalty such as the Windsors and the Hohenzollerns. The Order of Malta and the Order of Saint John are Masonic organizations with grand masters and titles for initiation. The royal and noble bloodlines are all working together as a global crime syndicate and part of a modernized Roman corporate empire. They also have several competing factions that create the illusion of division. The British crown and Scottish nobles such as the Bruce, Stewart, Sinclair, Campbell, Montagu, Scott, Hamilton, Percy, Boyle, Bowes-Lyon and Sutherland families administer a large part of Freemasonry. All of these families produced Grand Masters of the Grand Lodge of England. There are thousands of Masonic lodges in Europe and in the United States. Freemasonry must be investigated and outlawed. The Greek-German Royal House of Glucksburg directs the Greek fraternities and brotherhoods and uses initiates as its agents. Glucksburg nobles and Italians run the Boule Society, Boule is a Greek fraternal society for African Americans. Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson have been members of Boule, among many other high-profile, successful, and wealthy blacks, including Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, Al Sharpton, and Thurgood Marshall. The Glucksburg family rules Denmark and Norway and recently ruled Greece. Among its members are the ex-queen Sofía of Spain and Duke Felipe de Edimburgo. Former Greek nobility and royal merchants such as the Mavroleon, Onassis, and Niarchos families are billionaires who have a monopoly in the shipping industry and work with British nobles. The Greek royal family currently lives in London from where many Greek consignment merchants operate. The British Crown authorized and controls universities such as Yale and Harvard which are used to recruit Crown agents through fraternal orders such as Skull & Bones and Book and Snake. Royal and noble families also do undercover business in the City of London Corporation, which dominates global markets. Some of the major London merchant families include the Goldsmith, Stuart, Rothschild, Grosvenor, Sassoon, Barclay, Sutherland, Montagu, Bailey and Guinness families. The Sutherland family created the HSBC bank that has a long history of financial scandals around the world (Emilio Botín, Fernando Alonso, Mohamed VI, Jorge Trías and Jordi Pujol Jr. had accounts at HSBC when it was chaired by Stephen Green, Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint). The Bailey family is co-founder of Janus Henderson through a merger. Janus Henderson manages around 190 billion in assets. The Stuart family owns the Hudson Bay Company and has an alliance with the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach, which is the covert owner of some of the Hudson's Bay Company subsidiaries, which were founded by Bavarian merchants. HBC has approximately $ 12 billion in assets and has had fiscal contracts with the United States through the Organic Law of the District of Columbia of 1871.
The Orange-Nassau family are influential traders through the Netherlands Trading Society and have a large number of shares in Royal Dutch Shell, Philips Electronics and ABN AMRO Bank. The Orange-Nassaus and their Dreyfus agents run the Rand Corporation, which has a contract with the US military. Rand's founder was a Dutch gentleman. The Orange-Nassau family also runs the Loyal Orange Institution in Ireland, which has infiltrated the police, justice and politics. The Luxembourg Nassau-Weilburg family are international bankers connected to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The royal families of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands have shares in the European Investment Bank and all of these royals are recently married to Italian nobles. The Ligne family from Belgium are wealthy diamond and gold merchants. The Belgian Crown and its nobles are stealing wealth from the United States through fraudulent tax contracts established through the Organic Law of the District of Columbia of 1871 and continue to do so through the Bank for International Settlements. The Barons Strange heads the Masonic Order of Oddfellow. The Russell family are the Marquesses of Tavistock and they run the Tavistock Institute, which is an organization involved in mass mind control. The Russell family also co-founded the Yale University and Russell Trust Association, which is named after the New Haven, Connecticut company based on the Skull & Bones secret society.
Skull & Bones is a death cult military complex run by the Bush family from the USA who are like a European royal family in the USA. The Furstenberg family runs the Royal Order of Jesters who wear a jester on their coat of arms. The Clintons work closely with the House of Furstenberg, who have residences in the United States. The Italian Orsini family and the Holy Roman Rosenberg family lead the Rosicrucian Order of alchemists who infiltrate food and drug companies for chemical warfare. The Medici family, who have a statue of Hermes (Mercury) in their palace in Rome, administer the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an alchemical secret society. The Medici were architects of modern banking. The Pierleoni family of Rome and the Spanish House of Bourbon-Anjou run the Kabbalah Society, which uses the Spanish lion for its logo. The Pacelli family of Rome and the Crescenzi family of Italy administer the Wiccan witchcraft cults. The Bavarian Wittelsbach family from Bavaria created the Bavarian Illuminati and administers the Benedictine Monks and is also part of the Jewish Mafia in the United States who are white collar criminals. The Pecci family of Italy also owns the Jewish mafia in the United States through their marriage to the Blumenthal family. The House of Wittelsbach is involved with Zionism, Nazism, Freemasonry, and the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits function as Roman intelligence and infiltrators and use their universities to recruit and train agents for Rome. Jesuit agents dominate leadership positions in the United States military and intelligence and especially in the CIA. The Knights of Columbus are owned by the Casa de Colonna. Christopher Columbus was Pedro Madruga, the Count of Caminha, a relative of the Colonnas who settled in Pontevedra at the time of the Romans. Many Knights of Columbus are police officers, mayors, lawyers, and judges, protecting the Italian mob while targeting free-thinking people. The Knights of Columbus are heavily involved in gang harassment.
Court Jews such as the Rothschild, Warburg, Goldsmith, Oppenheimer, Walton, Sassoon, Kadoorie, Lewis, Javal, Lauder, Sackler and Dreyfus families work through the Roman Curia or royal courtrooms such as Buckingham Palace. The French Rothschilds work for the Black Nobility of Rome and the French House of Orleans. The British Rothschilds work for the British Crown. The Sassoon and Kadoorie families work for the British Crown and oversee banking and business in China and India. The Swiss Rothschilds work for the House of Habsburg and the House of Hesse. The Oppenheimers work for the German House of Wurttemberg and the Cologne Oppenheim branch. the Austrian House of Habsburg granted them titles of nobility. The Warburgs work for the Italian House of Borghese and the German House of Hesse and the House of Hannover. Warburg Pincus had a contract with Unicredit that merged with the Borghese Family's Bank of the Holy Spirit. The Warburgs were Venetian bankers and the Borghese family now hold Venetian titles of nobility. The Warburgs financed the Nazis. The Dreyfus family works for the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau and the French House of Bonaparte. Jewish banking families work for Christian nobles and royalty. These billionaire Jewish bloodlines run many rabbis who run a criminal intelligence network that works with Mossad. The French House of Bonaparte and the Swedish House of Bernadotte control many of the main European companies through their knights of the Order of Seraphim and the Legion of Honor, who are also members of the Round Table of Industrialists of Europe, which it has a great economic influence on the markets. The Wallenbergs run corporations worth hundreds of billions and work for the Swedish House of Bernadotte. The Wallenbergs and the Swedish Crown also work with the Jesuits and the Vatican. The Black Nobility and other royal families have been hiding billions in private banks in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. The royal families of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein own and run their own national and private banks. Austrian and Eastern European royalty and nobles, such as the Habsburgs, Esterhazys and Schonberg, use private banks in Liechtenstein and also own Israeli and Jewish mafias. The Esterhazy family together with the Lucchesi-Palli family run a faction of the Russian mafia through the mob boss Semion Mogilevich from Budapest. The Torlonia family owns the Fucino Bank in Rome and functions as Vatican bankers and treasurers. The Torlonia family of Rome and the Hohenzollern family of Germany are the main owners and controllers of the Bank for International Settlements which was founded and administered by the Nazis during World War II. The Torlonias are architects of fascism and the Hohenzollerns are architects of Nazism.
The East, Rothschild and Hottinger families are some of the leading Swiss bankers. The Romanian Sturdza family also owns a private bank in Switzerland. The Casanova family of Italy and Spain is one of the leading political families in Switzerland. The East and Savoy families run the Bank for International Settlements, which has a contract with most of the major central banks and is embezzling the wealth of nations through fraudulent loans and contracts. The Savoys live in Switzerland and Prince Lorenz of Austria-Este works at the Gutzwiller bank. The Bank for International Settlements must be investigated and closed. The Gutzwiller family is one of the leading banking families in Switzerland, owning its own private bank and managing 35 other Swiss banks. The Swiss Guard is a military body in charge of the security of the Pope and the Holy See. The ceremonial head of the Swiss Guard is the Pope, sovereign of Vatican City. Italian mafias are Rome's enforcers involved in extortion, money laundering, murder and drug trafficking, and they pay their dues to the Sicilian mafia, which in turn pays them to the black nobility. The mafia channels its earnings and tributes to the Black Nobility through the Vatican charitable foundations and then from the Vatican bank they are transferred to the private accounts of the Swiss Bank. The Savoy’s Genovese crime family specializes in extorting Wall Street. The mafia is rigging professional sports for gambling and they also launder their criminal winnings through the casinos. The Torlonia family owns the Kansas City crime family and shares ownership of the Pittsburgh crime family with the Borghese family of Rome and the Rocco di Torrepadula family of Sicily. The French House of Orleans owns the New Orleans crime family and the Franco-British Beaufort family oversees and owns the Dixie Mafia factions along with other British peers who have French ancestry. Cox's billionaire family is involved in multimedia communications and is part of the owners of the Dixie mob, which is involved in tobacco and ginseng sales as well as arms, drug and human trafficking. The Goldsmith and Sassoon families own Pakistani and Hindu human trafficking networks operating in the United Kingdom. The Imperial House of Brazil, Orleans-Braganza and the Belgian House of Ligne are married and have shares in the Brazilian companies AmBev and Belgian Anheuser-Busch InBev. The House of Orleans-Braganza owns Brazilian drug cartels that are also involved in human trafficking. The Sforza family owns the Stidda Mafia clans operating in the Sforza-Visconti territory in Milan and the Sforza and Visconti families have greater control over the Italian Stock Exchange or the Milan Stock Exchange. Milanese billionaire Silvio Berlusconi works for the Sforza and Visconti families and has a monopoly on Italian media and politics. Berlusconi founded the Forza political party in Italy named after the Sforzas. Some northern Italian nobles such as the Visconti, Borromeo, Este, Gonzaga, Valenti, D’Adda, and Passi di Preposulo families are closely related to billionaire families such as the Rothschilds, Agnellis, Benettons, Armanis, and Ferreros. The Sforza and Visconti families own the Seattle crime family with the Gaetani family as partial owners. The Seattle crime family controls billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos through blackmail. In 2017, Microsoft and Amazon employees were caught in a sex trafficking scandal.
The Colonna family owns the Knights of Columbus and also owns the Colombo crime family and partially owns the Chicago Outfit along with the Capponi and Roselli families of the Florence Turk. Al Capone was an agent of the House of Capponi and John Roselli was an agent of the Roselli del Turco family. Roselli also worked for the CIA. Colonna means column like Colombo and Colón. The Knights of Columbus infiltrate police departments and work with the Italian mafia. The Massimo and Gaetani families own and run the Gambino crime family and the Philadelphia crime family. The Massimo-Brancaccio family also owns and runs the Magliana or Roman Mafia and the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, as well as the Graviano de Brancaccio crime family in Palermo, Sicily, which is part of the Corleonisi mafia clan. The Massimo family receives tribute from most of the Italian crime families and even from the Russian mafia and Eastern European mafias. The Massimo de Roccasecca family, who live in London, own the Clerkenwell crime syndicate, also known as the Adams Family or the London A-team and are part owners of the Irish Mafia, including the Rathkeale Rovers. The Borghese family is also the main owner of the Sicilian Mafia and the Mafia Magliana. The Lucchesi-Palli and Pallavicini families own the Lucchese crime family to which the Russian mafia in Brighton Beach pays tribute. The Pallavicini family owns the Armenian mafia that operates in Hollywood and works closely with the Kardashian family. The Romanovs are partial owners of the Russian mafia and have established several residences in the United States. The Giustiniani family oversee the Philadelphia Greek Mafia along with some Greek merchants. Royal and noble families finance organized crime. The Jewish Mafia reorganized into a white collar crime and worked with the black hand of the Italian Mafia. The head of the Jewish mafia in the United States is billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Leon Black is another one of the leading Jewish mobsters in New York. The Jewish Mafia participates in professional sports with white-collar mobsters such as Daniel Gilbert, Robert Kraft, Joshua Harris, Tom Werner, Jerry Reinsdorf, George Kaiser, Peter Guber, Joe Lacob, Mark Cuban, and Micky Arison. The European Union is based on the Treaty of Rome that was signed at the Capitol in Rome. The president of the European Central Bank is Mario Draghi, born in Rome and educated by the Jesuits at the Massimo Institute. Mario Draghi is an undercover relative of the Borghese and Del Drago families. The Erba-Odescalchi family with ancestry from Cernobbio, Italy, runs CERN with the Roman Fabiola Gianotti as CERN Director General that is used to generate pressure in the lower atmosphere in order to oppress society. CERN, HAARP, The Church of Scientology, Chemtrails and electronic devices are being used to covertly oppress society. The US military administers a HAARP electronic harassment system in Puerto Rico that is controlled from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which is under the command of Captain David Culpepper. The CIA and the Italian Mafia have a large criminal operation in Cuba. The CIA and Cosa Nostra work closely to this day.
Islamic royal families were named after European royalty in the 19th and 20th centuries and especially after the First World War. Middle Eastern royalty run the oil industry and use their massive wealth to fund globalist agendas that allow them to rule their nations. The house of Saud is worth at least a billion. The House of Thani and the House of Al Khalifa work with the House of Saud and are also wealthy oil traders. Royals from the Middle East run the Muslim Brotherhood and the Five Percent and the Nation of Islam, which are violent mobs of cult and harassment. These organizations need to be investigated and banned. They also own an Arab mob that is based in New Jersey and Detroit. The royal family of Morocco are wealthy merchants and owners of the Abergil crime family of Israel and Morocco. The House of Bourbon and Spanish nobility such as the Osorio, Fitz James, Alvarez (Alba), Pignatelli, Arteaga, Borja, Zuniga, Ruspoli, and Aragon-Escobar families own the majority of the Mexican and South American drug cartels. The Osorio and Borja families own MS-13. The Borgia and Borja families are also partial owners of the Mongels motorcycle gang. The Bourbons own the Gulf Cartel and the Lating Kings. The Ruspolis are partial owners of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Primeiro Comando da Capital in Sao Paulo, where their Matarazzo cousins reside. The FitzJames and Alvarez families own the Los Zetas Cartel. The Álvarez and Osorio families also own the Bandidos motorcycle gang. The House of Bourbons are the founders and owners of Banco Santander. The King of Spain has the official right to the throne as King of Jerusalem.

Introducing: The Royal Family of Monaco

Prince Rainier III (1923-2005)
Rainier’s mother, Princess Charlotte, was actually illegitimate. Her father Louis II, getting older and with no legitimate children, legitimized her and made her his heir. She never took the throne, and in fact renounced her rights to her son, Rainier, the day before his 21st birthday.
Rainier became the Sovereign Prince of Monaco upon the death of his grandfather in 1949.
During WW2, Rainier served in the Free French Army. During the 40s and 50s he was in a long term relationship with the French film actress Gisele Pascal. Rainier’s sister, Princess Antoinette, wanted her own son to ascend to the throne, and spread rumors that Pascal was infertile. The rumors along with her treatment by the press and public ended their relationship.
After the war Monaco, a country who made its money primarily as a gambling origin, was in crisis as wealthy Europeans found their funds diminished after the war. To restore Monaco’s treasury Rainier decided to promote Monaco as a tax haven, and he personally took control of SBM (the company who owns the Monte Carlo Casino, Opera, and Hostel de Paris) in 1964. Prince Albert still retains a large share of the company and profits from it today.
Marriage:
Everyone knows this one. Rainier married American film star Grace Kelly in 1956.
Their marriage is rumored to have been turbulent. It is said that Grace struggled with adjusting to royal life, regretted ending her film career, and that Rainier had extramarital affairs. Her children have stated that though she was a loving mother, they spent more time with nannies than with their parents.
Grace's dress is iconic, but here you go if you want to revisit some photos from that day.
Rainier smoked up to 60 cigarettes per day, and in the last years of his life his health steadily declined. On March 8th, 2005 he entered the hospital for a lung infection and by the end of the month he was on a ventilator suffering from renal and heart failure. On March 31st he officially announced his son Albert, as regent, and on April 6th he died.
The Constitution
Monaco’s constitution stated that Monaco is a constitutional monarchy ruled by the hereditary princes of the Grimaldi. If the reigning prince were to die without leaving a male heir, Monaco, according to the treaty, would be incorporated into France. In 2002, realizing he had a 43 year old bachelor son, Rainier amended the constitution to allow the crown to pass to his daughters should Albert not marry.
Grace, Princess of Monaco (1929-1982)
Grace was born in Philadelphia to an affluent and influential family. Her father was an Olympian and a Democratic nominee for Mayor of Philadelphia and was appointed by President Roosevelt as National Director of Physical Fitness. Her mother taught physical education at the University of Pennsylvania and coached women’s athletics at Penn.
Her Uncle, George Kelly, was a Pulitzer prize winning dramatist, screenwriter, and director and used his influence to gain Grace admission to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Grace became one of the biggest movie stars of her generation.
In 1955 she was sent to the Cannes Film Festival and invited to appear in photos with Prince Rainier. After a year-long courtship, they were married in 1956.
Grace was not allowed to continue her acting career after her marriage. She instead devoted herself to her role as Princess, become heavily involved with the Red Cross of Monaco and the Rainbow Children Coalition.
On September 13, 1982, Kelly was driving back to Monaco after spending time at her country home. During the drive she had a stroke, lost control of her vehicle, and drove off the mountainside. She died a day later.
An article on their relationship
Prince Albert II (b. 1958)
Prince Albert is one of the wealthiest royals in the world with a net worth at more than $1B. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, studying political science, economics, music, and English literature, and completed his education with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. He toured Europe in 1979 as part of the Amherst College Glee Club.
Albert competed in the bobsleigh for five consecutive Winter Olympics on behalf of Monaco, and was their flag bearer at the 1988, 1994, and 1998 Olympics. He is also a judo black belt.
He became Prince of Monaco when his father died in 2005.
Marriage:
Prior to his marriage his status as a bachelor was a hot topic of discussion. He was known to date well-known fashion models and actresses, however at age 53 had never married. It was rumored that Albert was gay, something he expressed great frustration with in the press. In 2006 he attended the opening ceremony of the Torino Olympics with South African swimmer Charlene Wittstock. They were engaged in 2010, and married in 2011.
There are rumors that Charlene tried to flee the country the day before their wedding. It is reported that the future bride, after discovering Albert may have fathered yet another child during their relationship, attempted to flee as many as three times before their wedding, however was always intercepted at the airport. It is also said she attempted to seek refuge at the South African embassy, and that officials in Monaco ended up hiding her passport so she could not leave the country.
Moreover, during their wedding, Charlene openly cried at parts, and Prince Albert was caught on camera begging her to kiss him. Honestly, she looked pretty miserable the whole time. The palace has denied all of these claims.
During their honeymoon, they stayed in separate hotels
Here's everything you ever needed to know about their wedding
Watch it
Prince Albert is passionate about the environment and an avid sportsman. Prince Albert speaks French, English, German, and Italian. He speaks English with basically no accent thanks to his American mother.
Illegitimate Children
In 2005, the day before Prince Rainier died, Albert publicly acknowledged he had fathered a son out of wedlock. In 2006, he confirmed he had also fathered a daughter. These children were barred from the line of inheritance because of a 2002 constitutional amendment requiring an heir’s parents to be married.
Alexandre (b. 2003)
Alexandre’s mother (Nicole Coste) was a flight attendant for Air France and met Prince Albert when he was a passenger on a flight. He asked for her number, the beginning of a years-long affair. The relationship ended at the insistence of Prince Rainier. Albert visited Alexandre and Nicole often, however when he refused to acknowledge Alexandre publicly, Nicole sold an interview and pictures to the media. Albert was in mourning for his father and made no public comment, but later did acknowledge paternity. Alexandre and Nicole live in France at an estate given to them by Albert.
Jazmin (b. 1992)
Jazmin’s mother, Tamara, met Albert while working as a waitress. Albert knew of Jazmin and visited her, however did not acknowledge her publicly until she was in high school to protect her identity. In 2006 the French magazine Voici published photographs of Jazmin and her mother on a visit to Monaco, outing her as Albert’s daughter. She has attended events with Albert and Charlene, and is listed as a sponsor for her father’s royal foundation.
An interview with Jazmin
Princess Charlene (b. 1978)
Born in Zimbabwe, Charlene’s family relocated to South Africa in 1989. She represented South Africa at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, finished fifth in the 4x100 meter relay.
Albert and Charlene met at the Mare Nostrum swimming competition in Monaco in 2000, however were not seen together until 2006.
Charlene converted to Roman Catholicism for her wedding, and has learned French and Monegasque after her move to Monaco. She is an ambassador for the Special Olympics, patron of the South African Red Cross, and is passionate about sport.
In recent news, she completed “the crossing” water bike challenge, a 180 kilometer water bike race for charity.
An interview with Charlene and Albert on the 1st birthday of their twins
Albert and Charlene have 2 children:
Hereditary Prince Jacques *twin* (b. 2014)
Princess Gabriella *twin* (b. 2014)
Gabriella was born 2 minutes before her brother, however because of the constitution her brother will inherit the throne. They are super sweet together and you see them at events often.
Princess Caroline of Hanover (b. 1957)
Caroline is the eldest child of Rainier and Grace Kelly, however because of the constitution her brother, Albert, sits on the throne of Monaco. She served as de facto first lady of Monaco until the marriage of Albert and Charlene.
Until the birth of her niece and nephew she was heir presumptive to the throne, although she had only held that title since 2005 after the change of the constitution to include female heirs.
Caroline received her French baccalaureat in 1974, and received a degree in Philosophy from Sorbonne University. She is fluent in French, English, Spanish, German, and Italian. Her hobbies include horseback riding, swimming, and skiing.
Marriages:

Marriage 1: Philippe Junot

Married Phillippe, a Parisian banker, in 1978. The couple divorced in 1980 with no children.

Marriage 2: Stefano Casiraghi

Married Stefano in 1983, the sportsman heir to an Italian industrial fortune. The two had to marry in a civil ceremony rather than a religious ceremony because Caroline, a Catholic, was divorced. Caroline was 3 months pregnant at the time of their wedding.
They have three children:

Andrea Casiraghi (1984)

Married to Tatiana Santo Domingo and has 3 children

Charlotte Casiraghi (1986)

Married to French producer Dimitri Rassam and has two children

Pierre Casiraghi (b. 1987)

Married to Beatrice Borromeo and has 2 children

Note: The Casiraghi’s are all very beautiful and very fashionable but I don’t want to go much into them here because they are so far down the line of succession. They’re fun to follow for their fashion if you have the time to check them out.

Marriage 3: Prince Ernst August of Hanover

Married Ernst August, a Prince, in 1999. They have one daughter, Princess Alexandra.
Caroline is thus a Princess twice-over, through her family and through her husband. She and Ernst August have been separated since 2009 however are still legally married, thus she retains the title of Princess Caroline of Hanover.
Read about all of her weddings here
See her speaking in English around 12:00 here
Princess Stephanie (b. 1965)
Stephanie was in the vehicle with her mother when Grace died. She suffered a fracture of the neck.
She has studied classical dance and piano, and competed in gymnastics and horse riding. She interned at Christian Dior and debuted as a model in 1984. She has a swimwear and perfume line, and owns cafes and stores in both Monaco and Barcelona. She also has sold more than 2 million copies of her song, Ouragan, and sold 1.5M copies of her album Besoin. She recorded “In the Closet” with Michael Jackson, however is listed as “mystery girl” in the credits.
Marriages/Relationships:

Marriage 1: Daniel Ducruet

Stephanie married her former body guard, Daniel Ducruet, in 1995. When Rainier learned of their relationship Daniel was not only still his employee, but had a pregnant girlfriend too. Stephanie gave birth to their two children “out of wedlock” because Rainier refused to grant permission for them to marry, however eventually relented. The two divorced a year later after Ducruet was photographed naked with a stripper.
Read more
They have two children:

Louis (b. 1992)

Married Marie Chevallier in 2019

Pauline (b. 1994)

Relationship 2: Jean Raymond Gottlieb

Stephanie and Jean never married, however have a child together. He was Rainier’s Head of Security. She did not identify him on the birth certificate and it was not confirmed that he was Camille’s father until she confirmed it herself on her Instagram.
More about Jean

Marriage 3: Franco Knie

Stephanie met elephant trainer (yeah, you read that right) when she presented him with the award for “best animal tamer” at the Monaco Circus Festival in 1997. Franco, a decade older than Stephanie, was married with two children at the time. Franco left his family for Stephanie, moving her and her three children into his circus caravan in Zurich. Marrying in 2001, their relationship lasted 18 months until their divorce.
An interview with Stephanie in English in 1990
Why is he a Prince and not a King?
From vogue:
It goes back deep into the history of Monaco. Monaco has always been a tiny nation, and, for protection, allied itself with (or, at some points, was flat-out annexed by) big powerful countries, with big powerful rulers—aka kingdoms, or, a nation ruled by a king or queen. So Monaco’s rulers styled themselves as prince and princess. That, by definition, made the nation a principality, or one ruled by prince or princess.
Regardless, Albert actually plays a bigger role in the day to day operations of the country than most of his European peers. Legislative power is divided between the Prince who initiates the laws, and the National Council who votes on them. Executive power is retained by the Prince, and he has full judiciary powers.
Jewels
See their tiara collection
I think the Ocean Tiara, gifted to Charlene for her wedding, is particularly interesting. You either love it or you hate it.
The Grimaldi Curse
What do you think?

Evolution of Casino

Macedonian Mafia

These 'Big Four' Companies Control the World, Yet You've Probably Never Heard of Them

Jae-eun Kwon the Meka support

A Cliff Notes Summary of the First One Out Interviews

If you haven't had time to listen to seven hours of podcast interviews, or you didn't retain everything you heard, here are some key points. I didn't think to do this until just now, so I'll be posting it as a work in progress and updating it throughout the afternoon. That way more people will have a chance to read up before the premiere.
Karishma Patel, 37, Personal Injury Trial Lawyer, Houston, TX -First generation Indian-American Her mom was as a legal assistant, and got her a filing job at her law firm when she was 14. "I didn't have other options. I was basically told I was going to be a lawyer and I didn't disagree."She has watched every season and regularly listens to RHAP. She sits close to the TV to study the inflections on people's faces when something is said to them, so that she can think about what that means. But, her parents and husband don't share her enthusiasm for the show. Asked if it's her dark pleasure she says, "It is completely bright. It is a beautiful pleasure of mine, but it is mine and mine only. I haven't been able to find people to share it with." -Doing the show has caused her conflict. "Not only is it not expected, it's not allowed. It's kind of like being a disobedient Indian girl. You're not supposed to be doing this. What you're supposed to be doing is having babies. But I don't care. I'm a risk taker. I'm here to prove to myself that I don't need to listen to anybody else. I don't need permission from anybody else. This is my journey and I'm going to take it. I hope that people watching out there can see that an Indian woman's value does not come from doing what she's told." -She doesn't currently have children, and she says she has some decisions to make as she enters a crossroads and the next stage of her life. -Her law firm told her they'll replace her if they're able to find someone, and she can have her job back if they don't. "I didn't flinch." -Her strategy is to be non-threatening and play a social game. She doesn't look 37, and she wants to use that youthfulness to be disarming. She wants to build relationships other people believe in. She defines success by other people vouching for her loyalty when they go off and have private conversations with one another. "That means I got 'em, because it's actually the other way around." Asked if she wants to find someone she can trust, "I'm not going to be capable of it. I'm too skeptical for that. I overthink things, so I'm not going to be able to trust somebody the way I want to be trusted... If I do, that's the end of my game."
My take: Oh my God. Poor Karishma. Her story hurts my heart. She reminds me so much of myself in her isolation, her defiance and her deep feelings. I worry that her fear of trusting people could get in the way of her forming genuine bonds. But, there's nothing she can do. Society has made her the way she is. I hope she gets a lot of screen time so she can be a star of her favorite show.
Missy Byrd, 24, Military Veteran/App Developer, Tacoma, Washington -Originally from Georgia. Her family was 'decently poor.' She played basketball for the Air Force Academy because she thought it was her ticket out. -She had a brain tumor. She stopped menstruating for a year and two quarters. "I'm not dating anyone but I have breast milk. I'm a literal cow... I would look down and my shirt would be wet, and I thought, 'Dang you're clumsy. I knew you were clumsy, but you're clumsier today than you were yesterday. But it was - it was - uhh - milk." She had crying fits. She developed a stutter and couldn't look at people. Doctors told her she was just stressed. When her dad died she couldn't process emotions normally. She was about to go to the French version of the Air Force Academy, École de l'air, after graduation but because of her mental instability she was removed from school. The military shipped her to the same Air Force base as Sandra (Fort Lewis.) "I don't want to be there. Super sad. Check into the post office - fuck this. Check into the dorms - hate that." The doctor there found the tumor. She got an MRI and all weekend she believed she might have cancer. Over the next year and a half she eliminated the tumor and the symptoms using vitamins. She enlisted and worked logistics. -She made a list of the things she wanted to do now that she was going to live. "The first thing was go see Beyonce. Beyonce costs way too much money for a normal person to go see, but if you've just almost had a near death experience you go see Beyonce, bro!" She was feet away. She drove across the country. She tried weed. -She had an idea for an app, but didn't even have the computer literacy to use social media. She found a veteran's association and asked if she could intern. "They said, 'No, you should build this out yourself. We want to work for you.' I said, 'No, the fuck you don't. Okay, lemme call my grandma.'" She wrote a grant proposal and won a $1,500 office space in the center of Seattle. "Just to do whatever I want. It was like a laboratory for a child. I had Play-Dough up there. I had a white board... Just mind blowing shit when I could have been dead." -She'd seen every episode of Survivor at least three times. She started watching because her Air Force Academy basketball team was getting decimated, and she related to Foa Foa getting decimated in Survivor: Samoa. She added the show to her list. Josh suggests, "The bugs are eating you because they want some of that magic." -She isn't going to tell people her story until she's in the Final 3. "That's that Final 3 magic." She doesn't want to overly rely on strategy. She doesn't want to win individual challenges. She to build a social game and find ways to relate to everyone.
My take: She's so full of exuberance. There's not a negative bone in her body right now. She's too young and her life experience is too necessarily limited to talk around three years of her life. If she shares her story, the beauty of her perspective will cause everyone to fall in love with her and want her to do well. If she doesn't, people will sense that she's hiding a lot. I think she'll figure that out and course correct within the first day. Since she was at the same Air Force base as Sandra and she was a massive fan, does that suggest she knows her?

Ronnie Bardah, 35, Professional Poker Player, Henderson, Nevada-Born and raised in Brockton, Massachusetts, 20 minutes south of Boston. They were the only Israeli family in town. 50% of the people in Brockton were from Cape Verde, and he considers himself an "honorary Cape Verdian." A couple of his friends were shot and killed at a young age. -He was a good kid and had a good heart, but he was always hustling. In Junior High he was flipping Oatmeal Cakes and Fudge Rounds for a profit. Slinging baseball cards. Both his parents gambled. They were always at the dog tracks or Mohegan Sun. He had his friend make him a fake ID and got stuck with the name Alaja Jones. He went by Al and started playing the casinos. Quit his job at Sears Automotive to play poker full time.-He played Atlantic City, Vegas, then internationally. He had his first big score in 2010 when he took 24th place in the main event for $320,000. Got to keep $150,000 after taxes. "Poker's a hard way to make an easy living. Lots of people try. We risk every day. You have to get to a point when you can manage your bankroll and I've never gone broke in the 16 years I've played." -In one of the most viewed poker hands of all time, he was bluffed out of a million dollar pot by a supermodel on a poker TV show filmed in Monaco. "She made a sick play. She had no idea what she was doing but all the stars were aligned."-He watched Borneo when it aired and got back into it when fellow poker player Anna Khait was on. He calls Jean-Robert, "kinda a lazy guy...He's really good at befriending multi-millionaires." "Anna Khait... is probably the least poker player out of all of us. She played for a couple years." "And then Garrett - He's a very, very smart, smart kid... Self-made millionaire. One of the very, very few." -He only drank water for 7.5 days and lost 25 pounds for his health and to get an idea of the conditions of the show. He thinks he'll thrive in the survival situation. "People like being around me. I like to fucking bust balls and joke." He thinks old school alliances are a good plan, but you have to adapt. He says that like in poker, Survivor players can have every advantage, but they have to really smell it. -He wants Vince out. "There's an Asian Zeke in there. What value does he bring besides ruining people and getting in people's heads? He's a liability in challenges. He looks like a little corn puff. We gotta get him outta here. Sorry to sound so mean but it's the truth."
My take: Ruuuuude. He has no way of knowing how other people on the cast are talking in their interviews, and may assume the trash talk is standard. If he were playing on some seasons it would be. But, in this particular season it sets him apart in an unflattering way, and it seems a part of the tough persona he's built up to escape a scary situation growing up and enter a fantasy career. We'll see whether his tribe thinks he's a straight talking character or a jerk.

Tom Laidlaw, Former NHL Player, Brampton, Ontario, Canada -He was with the New York Rangers for 7 years and the LA Kings for 4. Now he has his own podcast, True Grit Life (truegritlife.com). Does it with a friend, Kevin Allen, who writes for USA Today. Does motivational speaking. -Growing up on a dairy farm outside Toronto there was a pond to water the cows. It froze over in the winters and he'd play hockey because there wasn't much else to do. Went to Northern Michigan University - four year hockey captain, ranked #1 team in the country. Drafted as a 20 year old. "My buddy had a horse farm. We were cleaning horse shit out of the stalls. There were no cell phones back then. This is 1978. My father got a call at our farm house from the New York Rangers at the draft. Back then nobody went to the draft - it was just teams. They said I'd been drafted in the sixth round. He calls the farm house where I'm working. They bring me up. He says, 'Son, you've been drafted by the Rangers.' I said, 'Great. What do I do now?' He says, 'Finish cleaning the shit out of the stalls.'" -When he played intimidation and fighting was strategy. There were guys tougher than him, but he could fight and he could also play. Problem was, he fought a guy once, and from then on the guy wanted to fight him over and over. -Jerry Bruckheimer, big hockey fan, called the NHL and wanted to get some players on the Amazing Race. Tom had kept himself in shape, he had his passport. They ended up asking him about Survivor. He'd watched it before but not for a while. He wasn't so sure he wanted to play a game where you hurt other people, but friends helped him get his head around it. He was very impressed by Christian's toughness in the endurance challenge. To prepare for the show he studied how he reacted to different situations, how to control his heart heart, etc. He wants the mental challenge.
My take: Tom really ticked me off when he spoiled a couple of outcomes of this season. That's a betrayal of the producers, his cast and the viewers. But, if that hadn't happened I would like him. He's an easy-going, charming guy. His life experiences are a bit different than anyone else who's been on the show, which is what you want.
Vince Moua, 27, Admissions Counselor, Merced, CA -His family is Hmong. His parents lived in Vietnam in the destruction left by the war - dead bodies, guns, people who wanted to kill them. They went to refugee camps in Thailand. Then his dad became a Montana farm hand. He met Vince's mom in the US, but she came from the same place. -Vince is from small town Merced, California - the 209. Few people he knew went anywhere but the UC system and community college. He went to Stanford, one of only 7-10 Hmong. He realized the significance someone can bring to people from the same community. He tried to be pre-med but realized "no, not today." The issues of access he cared about came well before people got to the hospital. He ended up going with education. His mom was a teacher, "But when I was growing up she said, 'Yo, if you become a teacher Imma disown yo ass.' To all of us. But, that's always kinda been my jam." -He lived in South Korea for five years. He taught English in a town. Then in Seoul ahed worked with low and middle income students who wanted to study outside of Korea. -He's a Survivor superfan, who even mentions on his Tinder account that he plans to be on Survivor. His parents were worried about him doing TV because he's not out as gay to his extended family. He comes from a clan where his dad is the "top dog" and Vince is "the next top dog." In the Asian American/Pacific Islander community when you come out, it's your family who faces - in a sense - dishonor. For a long time he distanced himself from his family, hoping they'd all be less hurt if they found out and disowned him. He always tried to find friends who would be there for him should his parents not be. A year ago his mom asked him rhetorically if he was gay. "I was try'n to go around it. I was like, 'Gurl, you don't wanna know! Yo ass keeps asking!' But she kept asking, asking. So finally I told her 'Yeah, I am!' and she was crying. My dad was like, 'Oh, my son!'" But, Vince is fine with who he is and wants to show kids like him that "let's hope that it gets better." Now his parents just want him to win. -He'd like to play an old school strategy but "I'm not afraid to cut a bitch." With the tribe he's going to be Homeboy Vince from the 209, but when he talks to the camera he's going to tell people "Don't underestimate your narratives." This past year with Crazy Rich Asians, he wants people to know that there are some Crazy Hood Ass Asians.
My take: What a character. Vince has a clear point of view - Hmong, blue collar, gay - which is unique to him in Survivor lore. Even though double minorities have sometimes had trouble fitting in socially on Survivor I think somehow he's going to pull it off. As unlikely as this sounds I could even see him being a Cochran-esque winner.
Aaron Meredith, 36, Personal Trainer, Warwick, Rhode Island -He's very keyed up at Ponderosa. Rambling so fast it sounds like you're listening to 1.5x. He's read four books so far - Relentless by Tim Grover, Can't Hurt Me by Dave Goggins, Iron Cowboy by James Lawrence, Harry Potter. -He was an engineer at a building insulation plant. He was miserable, too antsy sitting at a desk. Couldn't focus. So, he drove up and down the East Coast popping kettle corn - from Maine to Florida - traveling with carnies. Bartended for a while. He'd played college football and baseball, lifted since high school, and he and his friends wanted to get "huge and jacked and ripped." The owner of the gym suggested he become a personal trainer. He ended up working mostly with middle aged women and it taught him empathy. Now he owns two women's-only fitness studios. He puts supportive women around one another and offers them the positivity to seek self-growth. -He's also a party boat emcee. Lights, DJ, bar, drinks. He's an extremely social person. -He'd first applied at 23 - 6 or 7 times over the years. He was in the mix for Cook Islands and David vs. Goliath. -He's been married 7 years and has a 5 year old son. His son is a huge fan of Survivor. Libby Vincek is his favorite player. Kara Kay was his next favorite. Aaron is already sure Molly will be his son's favorite. "He has a type. He He likes the attractive blondes. He says, 'I like them because they have a nice face.' I like mommy because she has a nice face too." The boy was very concerned about his dad going on the show. He said, "Dad, I don't want anyone to laugh at you and make fun of you." Aaron said he wanted to win. His son said, "But you might not win." When they watch the show he'll always ask, "Do they like him? Do they like her?" If Aaron is portrayed in a negative light he'll have to sit down with his son and talk. He doesn't want to play a deceitful game, but he will, because he doesn't care how he's portrayed.
My take: His story about his son is one of my favorites from all these interviews. I hope he gets to work with Molly. His adrenaline is too high. I hope he calms down a lot when the game starts. But, someone so social and sweet hearted who can win challenges and take themselves to the end has got to be a contender to win.
Chelsea Walker, 27, Digital Content Editor, Los Angeles, CA -Chelsea just took the cast photo and they put her in the third spot from the bottom, a good omen because a weird number of winners have been in that position. "Your girl's number three. I got this!" -She's a Jersey girl. She went to the University of Maryland. "I didn't do Survivor: Maryland or anything." She studied Broadcast Journalism. She knew the generic emails for NBC Universal and emailed random people until someone replied. Now she's been in LA a year. She did coverage of award shows. Now she works at IMDB, where she helps Kevin Smith with his show. She just interviewed people at SXSW. -She's been watching Survivor since she was 8. She's cried in every interview because this means so much to her. She's trying to explain that at the point she starts crying again. "It's been such a dream of mine and To be told no year after year after year - these past six years have been a total mindfuck. I've basically been called every single year. I've been to finals three times. Survivor is my one true love, but the one year they didn't call me I got really pissed off so I tried out for Big Brother. I ended up becoming the alternate and got my key being filmed and all of that crap. But I don't like that show anyway." -In September 2017 she was at a WeHo bar for her friend's birthday when, "Oh shit that's Jeff Probst." Her girlfriends all know she's obsessed, so she pulled the waiter over and asked what that guy was drinking. So, Chelsea sent another one over. "I told my friends, 'Take my credit card. Split the bill, because I can't come back after I do this. As soon as the waiter drops off the drink I'm like, 'Jeff, this one's on me. You can buy me the next one at finals.' And I just walked out of the restaurant... That was a big move!" They didn't call her again that year, but Jeff still remembered when they talked this year. -She's been working out at four different gyms - weights, pilates, yoga. Push ups. Memorized puzzles. Reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, which she keeps in.a Bible sleeve so people will think she's religious. She also carries Harry Potter because she would trust someone who read HP. She wants to keep it cool. Make one on one connections. Eventually find idols - and not tell anyone she has one - and make calculated moves. "I don't want to be a Jacob. No offense."
My take: Hearing this girl cry from joy because she's so happy to be on the show makes me emotional. She's a real go getter. I wish I were that damn fearless. Truly, I wish I were more like her. I hope her pure zest for life comes across on TV and she doesn't get stuck with a purple edit just because of her age and gender. I also hope no one decides to get threatened by her as a competitive girl and vote her off premerge. I think she'll go far. Hope so.
Dean Kowalski, 28, Account Executive, New York, New York -Referring to himself in the third person, "Dean is 28 years old. As we mentioned, he lives in New York and he prides himself on being a well rounded person when it comes to interests, abilities, personalities... If I'm listening to Drake and Lil Wayne, I gotta go home and cry to This Is Us.. I can play basketball but also think about our place in the universe." He likes to tag basketball courts with a peace symbol with a ball on it which he makes using a stencil. -He structures most of his interview with Josh around an Outwit, Outplay, Outlast format, explaining why he excels at each. -He grew up in an affluent suburb. His dream was to play in the NBA. He was 5"9 3/4, so he set his eyes on college basketball as a realistic alternative. In order to get looks from colleges he went to a school 30 minutes away - top five in the country, Nike would fly them around for games and give them free Jordan sneakers. He was one of only 4 white guys in the whole school and the only one on the team. He played with Kyrie Irving, the #1 overall draft pick. "My friend said you look like the Make a Wish Kid who just wants to be on the team for a day." He played at Colombia University, where he was co-captain his senior year despite averaging two minutes a game. He became a teacher, then did sales for a tech startup in New York. He now sells ads for Google. -He's a fan, but far from a superfan. He started watching Brenda's season. (He thinks it was Nicaragua, but it was actually Carmoan.) He works with a superfan who freaked out when they had a meeting at H&R Block with Carolyn Rivera and they went out to Bourbon Street with her. He kept watching for five years and thought he could do well. He hates when people are all talk, so he sent in a tape. For the video he interviewed random strangers on the street, who had never met him or seen the show, and asked them, "Why am I going to win it?" A barber, a construction worker. He's going to tell people he's in marketing, not sales - people have sales.
My take: I'm just not that into him.
Elaine Stott, 41, Factory Worker, Rockholds, NY -When Josh asks her not to touch the table she asks him, "You seen that Bart Simpson commercial, right? Don't touch my Butterfinger? I'm already hungry thinking about it." -"I had a pretty rough way to go growing up." Her single dad raised her and her three brothers. She was the youngest. "I was raised like one of the boys. Know what I mean? Daddy didn't know how to raise no little girl." He worked 16-17 hour days. The kids raised themselves. "When little children make their own decisions, they make poor ones." She was a hellion. -She's originally from Woodbine, Kentucky, Nick Wilson's hometown. Her god sister went to school with him and she knows him through the grapevine. "We rode on different sides of the track. 20 years ago he coulda been my lawyer, because I was on the other side of the law. I'm not bad. I've just done some things." Public intoxication several times. "I come from a dry county. It's like Footloose. We cross the state line to get a beer and when you come back you're in trouble." She stole a newspaper stand once and had to do community service. "I was a little bit mean." -She went to live with her grandpa and cleaned her act up, by which she means that she started smoking a little weed and playing sports - basketball, softball, track. She played softball and judo in college. "I couldn't do nothing real technical. We had Brazilians on the team who could do flying arm bars. But if I got these claws on you and got ya on the ground I'd waller you to death." In casting she put this guy Will in an armbar. She was gonna choke him but didn't know if she should. -When she graduated, her girlfriend was a college Freshman so she went to all the same parties and ballgames for four years. Then she realized she needed a job. Now she drives a Ford truck for a factory. She's been there 15 years. She works 12 hours, 7 days a week. -Growing up her mom "was always in my life in some sense. She'd never miss a birthday. She'd be homeless, but she'd still call." Elaine and her brothers bought her cars, and places to live, and got her jobs. "In a sense I've been mourning the loss of my mom my whole life." Once Elaine was homeless herself and there was snow on the ground. It was cold, and her teacher took her in. Gave her Christmas presents. Made her go to prom. Survivor was a thing they shared, and the teacher was gonna be Elaine's loved one. But within a one year period the woman lost her daughter, her husband, her dog and then had a stroke. Now "she walks like Frankenstein" and can't go. Elaine got Probst to talk to her, and she can't wait to watch. In October Elaine's biological mom went into a coma. She was on life support, but Elaine wouldn't unplug her. Her mom came out of it and seemed to be doing a lot better only to die very suddenly of a heart attack. -Her girlfriend and her girlfriend's two sons are gonna be watching. The 18 year old doesn't know because he can't keep a secret. The 13 year old helped her lose 20 pounds doing crossfit to come out here. She wants the money, but she really wants "some of that soul searching, that life adventure, that life changing - some of that. You know what I mean? Gimme some of that soup! Lemme eat some of that up! I want this show to build me up, because I feel like it can. I sure hope to hell it don't tear me down."
My take: About 12 sobbing emojis in a row. She's my favorite. If she gets voted out premerge I'm going to go into mourning. And how can you not sort of expect that? I am going to be so upset if they just dismiss her because she's older and looks out of shape and sounds country. If that happens, I want another Second Chance season next year.
Elizabeth Biesel, 26, Olympic swimmer, South Kingstown, Rhode Island -Josh says that Elizabeth was outright identified by one of the other contestants because they'd been watching YouTube videos about how to be a better swimmer. Others guessed she was an Olympian based on her rings tattoo. -She's from the Ocean State. They lived a block away from the beach, so they wanted her to take swimming lessons. She was a rambunctious child and swimming was the only way they could calm her energy. She started breaking records when she was 7 or 8. When she was 13 she made her first national team. At 15 she went to the Olympics. She got good early. Women peak around 22-23, and she ended her career at 24. You couldn't make much money doing it. She swam one of the longer, more grueling races, and her body said "no more." She listened to her body and retired. Some athletes lose their love for swimming because they're embittered by losing by 1/100th of a second, or they leave injured. She left on a good note. Still, if she could swim competitively for the rest of her life, she would. Now she doesn't know who she is or what she's going to do with the rest of her life. Every hour of the day used to have a purpose. Now her days are wide open. She can't keep eating 5,000 calories a day. "It's sort of like I'm mourning the death of Elizabeth Biesel the swimmer." -She was a Survivor fan as a kid because Richard Hatch was from Rhode Island. In her area "Every single household that had a television set was watching Survivor." When they asked her if she'd do the show, she felt pure joy. She said absolutely right away. She's excited about the competition of Survivor. No heated Olympic pools. You're stripped down to your core. She's amazed by the scope of the production apparatus. She's not a schemer. She wants to be a challenge beast - not the best woman but the best overall. She'd love to have a Wendell and Dom relationship with another woman. But, she wants to avoid the drama as long as she can.
My take: Could Chelsea be Wendell to her Dom? She's so wholesome. She's just so "Olympics." I love her and everything she represents. I'd love to see her rocket through the swimming competitions, lapping everyone else. Go Elizabeth.

Historical Inaccuracies in the AC Series contd.: Victorian London according to Assassin's Creed: Syndicate

I started this series with UNITY, then went to AC1, AC2, Brotherhood, Revelations, AC3 and Rogue. Black Flag. Now Syndicate.
Syndicate is a game that is hard for me to cover mostly because unlike the case of the earlier games (AC1-UNITY) which I thought at the very least had interesting settings regardless of the choices made by the team in execution, Syndicate in my opinion is fatally weakened by the choice of setting it in Victorian London. My feeling is that if you are to make a game with the AC themes and concept in English history, then London in the Elizabethan-Jacobean eras, or in the period of the Restoration around the time of the Great Fire and the Plague, are far better options. There's also the fact that Victorian London and its culture have influenced a whole number of games and popular movies and as such this leads to overexposure. Whether it's The Order: 1886, Dishonored, Bloodborne in games, and in the movies you have Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Johnny Depp movie From Hell, the LXG movie, and of course the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies, Victorian London is easily the most popular period setting for mainstream movies, TV, and games, and even Harry Potter which is set in modern times has a fantasy world built on a Victorian era boarding school. Overexposure is not a problem if what you are doing is drastically and dramatically different, subversive, and has a new and powerful point of view. Instead, Syndicate is more or less Guy Ritchie's Victorian London.
As such I am going to skim the game and not go into it with too much detail. Syndicate is a steampunk album cover come to life with its grappling hook pistol and other kinds of gadgets. A grappling hook is physically impossible in real life at least in the way games like Batman use it. But where Batman is a superhero, the Assassins are set in historical fiction, the grappling hook in my view ruins the game owing to the historical background, the fact that Victorian London as it existed still survives to a good extent in contemporary London. It also ruins it in terms of aesthetics, the whole appeal of Parkour and climbing in the AC game, absurd and unrealistic as those are, was to get you to interact with architecture in a tactile way. That's gone with the grappling hook.
So let's begin:
MAIN CAMPAIGN
Setting; Victorian London 1868
Sequence 1-3
The beginning has two missions. One deals with a fictional character Rupert Ferris, and the other with the real-life scientist Sir David Brewster. Both are set in the countryside rather than the city. Evie Frye is the one who assassinates Brewster. I am a little disturbed that AC decided to have your heroes attacking and killing a man of science and pass this as heroic. About the only reason given for justifying this is that the real Brewster as in this game was a critic of Darwin and was a proto-creationist. I am not sure you can support scientific freedom and inquiry by using Darwin as a cudgel to get you board with killing someone.
Then they come to London, and meet Henry Green, the nom-de-plume of an Indian dude called Jayadeep Mir (Half Sikh-Half Muslim, which I can tell you is a pretty big stretch). Then we meet Sir Alexander Graham Bell who was in London at this time. He's shown with an accent and they have his nickname Aleck correct. We also meet the real-life Sir Frederick Abberline who is usually shown in a lot of Jack the Ripper murders. He was actually a pioneering cop, and later in life got involved in Monaco shutting down gambling operations while working for the European Pinkerton branch. The weird bumbling and comical portrayal of Abberline in Syndicate seems way off from the real guy and from how cops were in Victorian London. Tough, a little hardened by the poverty and corruption, and certainly quite self-serious.
Sequence 4-6
This part has fictional targets like Pearl Attaway (who I rather like as a character) mixed with John Elliotson (another real-life figure) and then Philip Twopenny (also fictional). Dr. John Elliotson is another man of science and assassination target. The real-life inventor of the stethoscope, and as the game portrays a man who practises the now-discredited pseudoscience of mesmerism and phrenology. The problem is that while phrenology was a racist and terrible contribution to society, it was mainstream and believed in for a considerable time, as was eugenics. And Mesmerism was also believed in at the time by a number of rational folks including Dickens who in his side missions isn't presented this way. Why single out Elliotson? As for Elliotson being a psycho doctor who tortures patients, there's no record of him doing that by himself, and again dodgy medicine in the old days is something that everyone did. Then we meet Florence Nightingale in Evie's mission where she cleans up Jacob's mess. She was in that time and place, and her renders matches her photographs so it's fine.
Sequence 7-10
Maxwell Roth is a fictional British gangster who leads the gang known as the Blighters. He runs his operation from Alhambra which is a real-life music hall and theater. The Alhambra did burn down in a fire but that happened in 1882 and not in 1868. Then we have Jacob Frye attacking and assassinating the real-life James Brudenell, aka Lord Cardigan, notorious for being a commander at the Battle of Balaclava where he led the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Now who exactly is responsible for the blunder that is the Charge, whether it was because of bad orders, incompetence by the messenger, or the failure of the commanders to not request clarity has an entire cottage industry in military historiography dedicated to it. So I am not going to get into that. But some such as George Macdonald Fraser feel that Cardigan got a bad hand and followed bad orders as per his command. On the other hand, Cardigan's personality as a pompous aristocratic stuffed shirt seems accurate, he was emblematic of incompetent military officers who bought the commission but didn't live up to it, and the Crimean War led to reforms that ended this practise. Cardigan wasn't an entirely anti-peasant guy. He was an anti-reform MP but he supported the 1867 Reform Bill which the game doesn't mention (on which more later) for the same reasons many in the Conservative party backed it, i.e. stealing the thunder of the liberals. Jacob Frye also assassinates him in Parliament when in real life he died from an injury after falling from a horse (a rare case of a real-life death having more poetic justice than the fictional actionized one). Assassinating him in Parliament is also a weird choice because there was only one assassination in Parliament historically, that was the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval who got murdered by a disgruntled POW over his handling of the Napoleonic Wars in 1812. Between then and the 1974 IRA Bombings, there was no acts of violence committed in Parliament building.
This final part also allows us to meet Queen Victoria, in her grieving for Albert phase, wearing a black dress and so on. But the missions with her come after the game in some side-missions.
SIDE MISSIONS and DLC - Historical Characters
Unity was the game that had substantive historical content in its side missions where earlier games integrated it in the main title. Syndicate follows that with a series of chained adventures with Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria, and Karl Marx.
- Darwin's adventures don't really have anything to do with the man's evolutionary theories and are basically a bunch of errands and so on. Given creationism's pull in America, I think showing him as a nice decent gentleman was a good way to go but not using those missions to explain and educate some of the basic nuts and bolts about "natural selection" and so on seems a waste, since it's likely a lot of gamers from some parts of America, and other places in the world inspired by America, would get a better education about it from here than in their classrooms. Syndicate is the first game set in a period where photographic records exist and Darwin's look is based on Julia Cameron Mitchell's photographs of the man in the 1860s. So that's fine.
- Charles "Boz" Dickens is shown as a Victorian debunker of ghost-stories. Which he apparently did do as a hobby, being that he was a big international celebrity. What is missing is Dickens' work as a social reformer, which I think would be more fitting for the Assassins to be involved with. Dickens was especially agitating for better work conditions and especially for better treatment of prostitutes and "fallen women" which a number of Victorian authors (including Christina Rossetti) supported. It's kind of weird that Syndicate doesn't have prostitutes when this was a big concern in that era. This also allows me to discuss briefly the Jack the Ripper DLC, where basically the prostitute victims of the Ripper are retconned into undercover Assassins who took the identity of prostitutes. A game where you briefly play the Ripper but are never a participant in the horrible violence of his murders, and nor do we get a detailed look at the crimes he committed. I never understood why you would make a Jack the Ripper story and not show the violence he did as graphically as you can, a waste of a M-Rated Ripper game. The idea of Ripper as an Assassin gone bad is good material and I think that this should have been a plot for a full game, but it's not dealt well there. The way they handled the "identity" of Jack is fine and I am glad they didn't go with William Gull or whoever the hell they come up with every other week. But even then somehow making a dude murdering starving weak malnutrioned women from slums into some internecine secret-society feud is a little distasteful because it tends to shift focus away from the victims to the killer. The Ripper DLC also introduces prostitutes but the bizarre thing is Evie Frye lamenting how Whitechapel has fallen in disrepair when that neighborhood was renowned for being a vast slum for several years by then. Attributing Whitechapel's decline to the Ripper as the DLC implies has it backwards when the Ripper murders actually sparked reform efforts to fix these slum conditions.
- The Queen Victoria missions are again a series of errands. But this one deals with terrorism. The terrorism is shown as Templars and apolitical, but the 1860s was actually the era of Fenian, Irish rebel terrorists. This was a much bigger deal than any of the gang wars that you actually see in Syndicate. The final scene where Evie humbly requests Queen Victoria to give up the Empire is gloriously cheesy and hilarious. I like Queen Vicky's condescending and cold reply, since too many stories make her out to be overly nice, which she was capable of in life certainly but she was definitely out to ensure that the Crown still had a purpose and place in the sun and that's why she allied with Disraeli over Gladstone, Disraeli made her Empress and gave her the title by Parliament.
- Then the big one, Karl Marx. Showing Marx in a game targeting a lot of American consumers and showing him as a guy you could hang out with is something that should be commendable. Only the Marx we see here is a bit of a clown, the database entry is kind of silly and makes jokes about campus brocialists, and the cuddly reformist Marx we see here, while accurate in parts is not entirely truthful either. The missions are again a series of errands, no hint is given to his larger ideas and theories. And again I don't know why you would deal with someone like Marx and not touch on his controversial reputation and ideas. Likewise I think there should be tension between Marx and the Fryes. Jacob Frye is a kind of purposeless anarchist and Evie is a committed secret-society Assassin and both of them are gang leaders whose whole idea was fighting the Templar gangs of Blighters and replacing it with their own gang of street criminals. Going by Marx's writings, the Fryes are lumpenproletariat, the elements of the urban poor who have no revolutionary potential and in times of crisis ally with the ruling class interests and serve as their enforcers, being criminals, miscreants, and so on. We see this in the game where the Fryes ultimately support the British Conservative Party, Benjamin Disraeli and then get knighted by the Queen of England. There's no way Marx would pal around with them. The game never has the Fryes being divided or challenged for their chumminess in allying with both sides of the political divide or how using multiple interests serves the Assassin cause, but to a Communist or a radical this would mark you out as a fixer and an adventurer rather than someone with commitment.
- Then we have this special time anomalies mission where you are transplanted to World War I London and play Jacob's granddaughter Lydia Frye. Unity had this feature too but there it was digression without story or impact to the plot, and here we get a slice of AC History in a discreet mini-campaign. Lydia Frye is a suffragette and we meet Winston Churchill in his time as Minister of Munitions, a position he landed after the disaster of the Gallipoli Expedition and some time in and out of position. It was his comeback tour. Churchill is shown here asking for Lydia Frye's help against Imperial German spies and saboteurs in exchange for help in putting female suffrage on the ballot. Churchill was a famous opponent of female suffrage, but by 1917 he did actually moderate and tried to get the conservatives to back it, so it's not impossible. The portrayal of World War I London allows AC to do a multi-timeline city, so we see the London Bridge and its mechanical drawbridge. We also have anti-air guns and zeppelin air-raids. Zeppellin air-raids definitely did happen but I don't know if was a phenomenon that late. The anti-air guns, model and make, is up for military buffs to check if it's period accurate. I doubt it is. I do like Churchill's introduction in the cutscene, the minute I saw the lighted cigar stub, I knew at once who it was. This sequence is pretty good for what it is, and World War I London doesn't feel like a waste of a period and this is a slice of Churchill's life that is obscure and not really storied, so I don't have a problem with how they handle it.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
- The portrayal of London in SYNDICATE is pretty selective. There are a whole host of stuff missing from the game, the British Museum (Karl Marx's stomping ground), the Crystal Palace (which given that it burned down later, you would think ought to be recreated in a game since that's how any of us will ever get to be there). Recreating a modern city with museums and cultural life, means that a Victorian London game that doesn't recreate the museums that existed at the time and the exhibits within (which still exist in the same places today) means that the fact that I can't visit the National Gallery and see Old Master paintings, go to Victoria and Albert Museum and see Tipu's Tiger automaton, or visit the Elgin Marbles...destroys a lot of the real reasons anyone would pay to play in a recreation of a real city, unlike GTA's fake ones. SYNDICATE remember sold to a lot of people around the world and it's cheaper for them to play this game then visit London by air and as such if you are going to do this period, not doing it in a thorough manner feels like some kind of betrayal. UNITY's Paris had a huge number of crowd NPCs to signify the population growth of the city in the time of the Revolution, but London in the 1860s had a multi-million population, the biggest for any city in the world at that time. As such, Syndicate lacks density and falls short of hsitroy.
- London in the Syndicate era was Post-Sanitation Movement. But it was still pretty grimy and dirty compared to a modern city, and Whitechapel in particular was a slum area. There's none of that we see here in the game. The portrayal of crime and poverty is a little too prettyfied and the lack of detail kind of hurts it. The fact that we have a Thames river in the industrial era that is swimmable without adverse effects by Assassin superheroes on their bodies and skins, is a major letdown in terms of open-world realism.
- As Bob Whitaker, quoted below notes, child labour which we see throughout the game, in story and open world, was illegal by the 1860s, and already reformed out of its existence. The Victorian age also started the whole concept of childhood as a special time of play, which led to Lewis Carroll's Alice books and something which was especially close to Dickens (owing to his own past as a child laborer). The entire class uprising shtick that Jacob Frye keeps voicing and the Assassins trying to fight capital (represented by Templars) overplays a class war angle that was already dialed down by the 1832 Reform Bill and then the 1867 Reform Bill which raised the voting franchise. Throughout this period, wages of workers increased thanks to their own activism and union work, and we don't get any sense of the union activity in the game. Marx wrote Das Kapital Part 1, which mainly deals with industrial accents and it was published in 1867, and we see little of that here. The idea of seeing street gangs like the Rooks, i.e lumpenproletariat, be the agents of anti-capitalist activity doesn't allow room or acknowledgement for the work of unions and other labor agitations in that period.
- It's a common theme in contemporary Victoriana stories to downplay class, imperialism, LGBT and other issues of the time, so Syndicate is no exception. The fact that Jacob and Evie Frye being middle-class non-Londoners fit in immediately in the span of a year, or a couple of months is not believable. Jacob Frye's retro-punk affectations is a little too 90s Cool Britannia in the way it allows him to easily interact and talk with "social superiors" like Pearl Attaway, and especially Benjamin Disraeli, and the Queen. Evie Frye is more believably middle-class and acts like it, but even then there was definitely issues and tensions with unmarried middle-class girls who interact with aristos like Mrs. Disraeli and so on. But with Evie her being a British gangster and so on seems more of a stretch both from a social perspective and a character perspective. I wish the game went into more time and effort on accent and other class stuff, because in a modern setting and especially something like Victorian London, a prototype for modernity as we understand it, blending mechanic can't be simple as it was in the Third Crusade. Like blending in different parts of London should pay attention to costume, hat, beard, and other social details. And accents should be modified according to station and situation. In a time where you have photography, emerging mass media, telegraph, and a modern police, you can't expect me to think that a guy who attacks a bunch of people can disappear into a haystack or sitting on a park bench. We also have Ned Wynert, a transgender character who isn't called that within the game nor does the game address any of the hypocrisy and double standards for which the Victorians were proverbial. The creepy dynamic between Maxwell Roth and Jacob Frye makes homosexuality villainous and doing a Joker-Batman dynamic in Victorian England isn't saying anything.
- Syndicate gives us two Indian characters with Henry Green (Jayadeep Mir) and the real-life Prince Duleep Singh, the deposed Prince of Punjab and political hostage, son of the legendary Raja Ranjit Singh, and who was the figure forced to hand over the Kohinoor diamond to the English crown, by coercion. The portrayal of Prince Duleep wearing Punjabi robes and a turban and his kind of nationalist slant is not accurate. Duleep Singh for a while was noted to have blended in and become a complete English gentleman and for a while was a playboy. And even when he did get serious about making a play for a crown later in his life, it was still Punjab and not Pan-India. The most bizarre thing is the total lack of mention in the main game to the 1857 Uprising or Mutiny. This was the largest anti-colonial rebellion in the 19th Century in any nation and the game talks about the Crimean War many times instead. We also don't get any discussion of Ireland, the activity of the Fenian groups, Irish Home Rule, or for that matter agitations in Jamaica, and British activities in China. London was a global city in this time, and there should be immigrants and expatriates from around the world, from Eastern Europe, from Asia, and from Africa. But the NPCs are mostly white and we don't get any sense of the empire.
- Syndicate is the only AC game with Jewish characters, Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx. He's a conservative MP who converted to Anglicanism for career reasons, he's a radical atheist expatriate who became one of the founders of modernity. Together, they fight crime mostly by allying with Assassin criminals to fight Templar criminals. Kidding aside, England had a thriving British Jewish community in this time, many of them rising out and gaining equality especially in the 1860s, where the anti-semitism that led to the Duke of Wellington forbidding extending franchise and legal rights to Jews, had somewhat receded. The backlash to Oliver Twist's Fagin was sufficient enough that Dickens had to write a positive Jewish character in hiits final book (before his death) Our Mutual Friend. And the British Jewish community were involved with and allied with many liberal and social causes. So I wish we saw more of that. And even then showing Disraeli as a clown entirely dominated by his wife, while Marx is another clown who seems too caught up in itself, seems a bit of a disfavour to them.
CONCLUSION
When I talked about Black Flag, I mentioned that the theme of that game is that the British Empire were bigger plunderers than the pirates was part of the game's conceit in portraying that period. Syndicate never quite gets around to the argument that the British Empire is a bigger crime syndicate than any street gang, and it's sentimental having-it-both-ways approach, palling with Marx and Queen Victoria as if neither costs them anything, ultimately hampers the game of any teeth. The writing is so lacking that to be honest, Syndicate is the only game where I preferred and openly rooted for the villains, namely Starrick, Maxwell Roth, and Attaway, to the heroes. The former are better written, better voiced, and better characterized, and I would totally have preferred a Templar game with this set. Anyone doing a Victorian England game that wishes to discuss its real history, and the reality of the life in that time, needs a strong purpose and a deconstructive view, similar to Alan Moore's From Hell (separate from the bad Johnny Depp movie).
SOURCES

The Making of the English Working Class. E. P. Thompson. Vintage. 1966 reprint.
The Victorians. A. N. Wilson. W. W. Norton and Company. 2004. Reprint.
Eminent Victorians. Lytton Strachey. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eminent_Victorians
Bob Whitaker, History Respawned, also a specialist on Victorian History: - Part 1, Let's Play Commentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibwhQN3wNL4 - Part 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37x75vvVz9M - Part 3, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naGXZIEQpJI - Part 4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu5hnYoRJsE -- Whitaker in this commentary talks about the place of empire, the diversity of London, the importance of Ireland and Fenians, and so on.
For Marx's idea of lumpenproletariat. https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/u.htm

My thoughts on Bethereum after they raised 6000ETH for their pre-sale. Cryptographic Currency markets are very volatile and investment in cryptographic currencies are risky. I suggest that one perform his/her due-diligence in addition to consulting with financial and legal professionals.

First and foremost - Those are MY 2 cents. DISCLAIMER: The following does not constitute financial advice/consultation. Cryptographic Currency markets are very volatile and investment in cryptographic currencies are risky. I suggest that one perform his/her due-diligence in addition to consulting with financial and legal professionals. I’m not a licensed crypto advisor (LCA for short, sounds cool right?) or anything like that, and I’m not affiliated with Bethereum (I wish though #BethereumBugattis). All the info I took for this analysis can be found on their website and on various articles and posts, including ones in this subreddit :)
For those who aren’t familiar, Bethereum combines a popular trend (Cryptographic Token/Currencies a.k.a Crypto) and a popular classic (Bets/wagers). I as someone who is interested in both (but more so into betting, crypto fascinates me and has become more than just a hobby for me but good old betting is my original love) and followed the presale phase that ended last week. To put it in easy terms, Bethereum is a decentralized Blockchain powered social betting platform which assists users who want to place bets with their friends or other players without the need for an external bookmaker “bookie” who would set the odds. It is developed/built on Ether technology and Smart-Contracts; all bets will be placed using the native token called Bether (utility token based on ERC-20). While utilizing Blockchain technology to organize and manage the betting process itself, it appears that their goal is to make the placement of bets & creation of wagers to be quick and easy, so that even people who only bet on occasion to find it easy and intuitive; basically replace the graphs and complicated odd’s spreads with “clicks” and “swipes”. I did my research and decided to share my thoughts and insights with you guys. Hope you’ll like it. For those that don’t, well no hard feelings, if you can spare the time would love constructive criticism which could help me learn and improve. I will go over everything from social media activity to token economics to white –paper.
ICO/TGE Token Specifics: Token Name: Bether (BTHR) Token Platform: Ethereum Token Type: ERC-20 Currency accepted for contributions : Ether Token Price: 1 (one) Ether = 17,500 (seventeen thousand five hundred) Bether BTHR Total Token Supply: 1,000,000,000 (One billion) Hard Cap: 25,000 Ether (6,000 raised during pre-sale, remaining for hardcap : 19,000) Pre-sale: April 2018 (Finished, 6,000 Ether raised)
Allocation of tokens: 60% of tokens will be used for the token sale itself, 3% are for the bounty program, 12% for the long term budget, team & advisors 20% (locked for 72 weeks), 5% for token sale costs.
On their website they also explain how the proceeds from the token sale will be allocated (not many firms include this, at least from what I’ve seen). 25% to development, 20% to operations, 40% to marketing, 8% for partnerships, and 7% for legal. In my opinion Bethereum has a quality and smart financial plan for the token.
Social: Bethereum have quite a large social media presense and a large following as well. They have official accounts on all the usual SM platforms (BitoinTalk, Telegram, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, GitHub[more on that later] in addition to an active Medium blog page. There Telegram group is pretty big ( 56 Thousand) it is active, discussions in the group tend to be about Blockchain, gambling, tech. Group admins seem to have spam and fake users under control as it is un-noticed, overall good interesting crowd in there. Bethereum devs and other team members participate in discussions and answer questions, which is a big +. Twitter account has 20 thousand followers and is active. Their thread’s on BitcoinTalk have tons of discussions going on, mostly bounty related stuff but some dev stuff as well. Overall I think that Bethereum has a solid social media presence and has exponential growth potential, so their marketing power is very strong.
UI: The user-interface (UI) has many options along with a good and accessible design. Has a graphical smart contract builder which is a nice addition. It also hosts a good term with third party developers by a releasing a SDK (Software development kit) and announcing the plan for future support for identities (i.e Civic). The importance of a very good UI is often overlooked, very re-assuring to see that Bethereum has put effort into a great UI.
The idea itself / the concept/ the need for de-centralized betting: Betting or gambling, has historically been an activity that individuals would enjoy together (socially), betting against one another on outcomes of uncertain events (i.e sporting, contest of some kind). With the rise in popularity of betting over time, an industry was born, leading to forms of centralized betting through bookies. The web and mobile device revolution has caused popularity to grow exponentially. The combination of these events have created a situation where the bet-makers needed to place their trust in the centralized bookie/bookmaker; with regards to online betting trust is very important. This creates a very big need for a transparent public open betting ecosystem. The eco system would allow bet placing participants to have access “see” all the important relevant information about each specific bet on a public de-centralized ledger. There,participants can also view all the bets and amounts of money on the Blockchain. Well, considering Bethereum aims to be the future of gambling, the goal is pretty damn high. Bethereum is a social betting platform which allows it’s users to place bets without the need for a bookie. Once a user has created a bet smart contract the platform allows other users in the eco-system to join that bet, and there is no limit on the amount of the bet or amount of participants, so the popular bets will have huge pots. The most interesting thing about its concept is the absence of a bookie. If regular betting always gives the house the winning edge, this time the money stays in the circle of the betters themselves which really sets up the standard in that matter. The social element and the almost flawless security of the blockchain technology creates a unique service which can really go far.
Roadmap and team composition: The most important part in my books. The site looks legit and it seems like we get the full picture along with transparency on the project, along with all the updates and future plans. In regards to progression on the roadmap, they seem to be moving forward and according to plan. Bethereum completed their pre-sale successfully last week and raised 6,000 Ether and they have also released a test-app/ test game (iOS) this week according to their twitter and Telegram. As for the team, checking their bio, linkedin profiles and using google, I was able to get a good idea of the key people behind Bethereum. They have a diverse team, all seem to be quite talented in their respective professions/backgrounds. Their GitHub page is worth visiting if you know about code & dev.
Before you all say to yourselves in your heads “Sounds good, where do I sign?” Please remember that crypto investing is considered to be risky and all potential investors must always proceed with caution and a level head. Conducting your own research and performing your own analysis (or at least study another person’s analysis but make sure that you actually check things). Bottom line is - As for now, Bethereum looks like a promising project. They have covered all the bases, and it appears that their trajectory is in the right direction. I know that Bethereum will be at Consensus NYC AND at the Monaco International Blockchain Forum so keep your eyes and ears open for any important info which could further help the analysis (lurkers! I’m talking to you! Research and analysis conducted as a team is much better!!)

Assassin's Creed Syndicate [1868 AD/CE] - Historical Inaccuracies and Fact-checking the series

I started this series with UNITY, then went to AC1, AC2, Brotherhood, Revelations, AC3, Rogue. Black Flag. Now Syndicate.
Syndicate is a game that is hard for me to cover mostly because unlike the case of the earlier games (AC1-UNITY) which I thought at the very least had interesting settings regardless of the choices made by the team in execution, Syndicate in my opinion is fatally weakened by the choice of setting it in Victorian London. My feeling is that if you are to make a game with the AC themes and concept in English history, then London in the Elizabethan-Jacobean eras, or in the period of the Restoration around the time of the Great Fire and the Plague, are far better options. There's also the fact that Victorian London and its culture have influenced a whole number of games and popular movies and as such this leads to overexposure. Whether it's The Order: 1886, Dishonored, Bloodborne in games, and in the movies you have Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Johnny Depp movie From Hell, the LXG movie, and of course the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies, Victorian London is easily the most popular period setting for mainstream movies, TV, and games, and even Harry Potter which is set in modern times has a fantasy world built on a Victorian era boarding school. Overexposure is not a problem if what you are doing is drastically and dramatically different, subversive, and has a new and powerful point of view. Instead, Syndicate is more or less Guy Ritchie's Victorian London.
As such I am going to skim the game and not go into it with too much detail. Syndicate is a steampunk album cover come to life with its grappling hook pistol and other kinds of gadgets. A grappling hook is physically impossible in real life at least in the way games like Batman use it. But where Batman is a superhero, the Assassins are set in historical fiction, the grappling hook in my view ruins the game owing to the historical background, the fact that Victorian London as it existed still survives to a good extent in contemporary London. It also ruins it in terms of aesthetics, the whole appeal of Parkour and climbing in the AC game, absurd and unrealistic as those are, was to get you to interact with architecture in a tactile way. That's gone with the grappling hook.
So let's begin:
MAIN CAMPAIGN
Setting; Victorian London 1868
Sequence 1-3
The beginning has two missions. One deals with a fictional character Rupert Ferris, and the other with the real-life scientist Sir David Brewster. Both are set in the countryside rather than the city. Evie Frye is the one who assassinates Brewster. I am a little disturbed that AC decided to have your heroes attacking and killing a man of science and pass this as heroic. About the only reason given for justifying this is that the real Brewster as in this game was a critic of Darwin and was a proto-creationist. I am not sure you can support scientific freedom and inquiry by using Darwin as a cudgel to get you board with killing someone.
Then they come to London, and meet Henry Green, the nom-de-plume of an Indian dude called Jayadeep Mir (Half Sikh-Half Muslim, which I can tell you is a pretty big stretch). Then we meet Sir Alexander Graham Bell who was in London at this time. He's shown with an accent and they have his nickname Aleck correct. We also meet the real-life Sir Frederick Abberline who is usually shown in a lot of Jack the Ripper murders. He was actually a pioneering cop, and later in life got involved in Monaco shutting down gambling operations while working for the European Pinkerton branch. The weird bumbling and comical portrayal of Abberline in Syndicate seems way off from the real guy and from how cops were in Victorian London. Tough, a little hardened by the poverty and corruption, and certainly quite self-serious.
Sequence 4-6
This part has fictional targets like Pearl Attaway (who I rather like as a character) mixed with John Elliotson (another real-life figure) and then Philip Twopenny (also fictional). Dr. John Elliotson is another man of science and assassination target. The real-life inventor of the stethoscope, and as the game portrays a man who practises the now-discredited pseudoscience of mesmerism and phrenology. The problem is that while phrenology was a racist and terrible contribution to society, it was mainstream and believed in for a considerable time, as was eugenics. And Mesmerism was also believed in at the time by a number of rational folks including Dickens who in his side missions isn't presented this way. Why single out Elliotson? As for Elliotson being a psycho doctor who tortures patients, there's no record of him doing that by himself, and again dodgy medicine in the old days is something that everyone did. Then we meet Florence Nightingale in Evie's mission where she cleans up Jacob's mess. She was in that time and place, and her renders matches her photographs so it's fine.
Sequence 7-10
Maxwell Roth is a fictional British gangster who leads the gang known as the Blighters. He runs his operation from Alhambra which is a real-life music hall and theater. The Alhambra did burn down in a fire but that happened in 1882 and not in 1868. Then we have Jacob Frye attacking and assassinating the real-life James Brudenell, aka Lord Cardigan, notorious for being a commander at the Battle of Balaclava where he led the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Now who exactly is responsible for the blunder that is the Charge, whether it was because of bad orders, incompetence by the messenger, or the failure of the commanders to not request clarity has an entire cottage industry in military historiography dedicated to it. So I am not going to get into that. But some such as George Macdonald Fraser feel that Cardigan got a bad hand and followed bad orders as per his command. On the other hand, Cardigan's personality as a pompous aristocratic stuffed shirt seems accurate, he was emblematic of incompetent military officers who bought the commission but didn't live up to it, and the Crimean War led to reforms that ended this practise. Cardigan wasn't an entirely anti-peasant guy. He was an anti-reform MP but he supported the 1867 Reform Bill which the game doesn't mention (on which more later) for the same reasons many in the Conservative party backed it, i.e. stealing the thunder of the liberals. Jacob Frye also assassinates him in Parliament when in real life he died from an injury after falling from a horse (a rare case of a real-life death having more poetic justice than the fictional actionized one). Assassinating him in Parliament is also a weird choice because there was only one assassination in Parliament historically, that was the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval who got murdered by a disgruntled POW over his handling of the Napoleonic Wars in 1812. Between then and the 1974 IRA Bombings, there was no acts of violence committed in Parliament building.
This final part also allows us to meet Queen Victoria, in her grieving for Albert phase, wearing a black dress and so on. But the missions with her come after the game in some side-missions.
SIDE MISSIONS and DLC - Historical Characters
Unity was the game that had substantive historical content in its side missions where earlier games integrated it in the main title. Syndicate follows that with a series of chained adventures with Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria, and Karl Marx.
- Darwin's adventures don't really have anything to do with the man's evolutionary theories and are basically a bunch of errands and so on. Given creationism's pull in America, I think showing him as a nice decent gentleman was a good way to go but not using those missions to explain and educate some of the basic nuts and bolts about "natural selection" and so on seems a waste, since it's likely a lot of gamers from some parts of America, and other places in the world inspired by America, would get a better education about it from here than in their classrooms. Syndicate is the first game set in a period where photographic records exist and Darwin's look is based on Julia Cameron Mitchell's photographs of the man in the 1860s. So that's fine.
- Charles "Boz" Dickens is shown as a Victorian debunker of ghost-stories. Which he apparently did do as a hobby, being that he was a big international celebrity. What is missing is Dickens' work as a social reformer, which I think would be more fitting for the Assassins to be involved with. Dickens was especially agitating for better work conditions and especially for better treatment of prostitutes and "fallen women" which a number of Victorian authors (including Christina Rossetti) supported. It's kind of weird that Syndicate doesn't have prostitutes when this was a big concern in that era. This also allows me to discuss briefly the Jack the Ripper DLC, where basically the prostitute victims of the Ripper are retconned into undercover Assassins who took the identity of prostitutes. A game where you briefly play the Ripper but are never a participant in the horrible violence of his murders, and nor do we get a detailed look at the crimes he committed. I never understood why you would make a Jack the Ripper story and not show the violence he did as graphically as you can, a waste of a M-Rated Ripper game. The idea of Ripper as an Assassin gone bad is good material and I think that this should have been a plot for a full game, but it's not dealt well there. The way they handled the "identity" of Jack is fine and I am glad they didn't go with William Gull or whoever the hell they come up with every other week. But even then somehow making a dude murdering starving weak malnutrioned women from slums into some internecine secret-society feud is a little distasteful because it tends to shift focus away from the victims to the killer. The Ripper DLC also introduces prostitutes but the bizarre thing is Evie Frye lamenting how Whitechapel has fallen in disrepair when that neighborhood was renowned for being a vast slum for several years by then. Attributing Whitechapel's decline to the Ripper as the DLC implies has it backwards when the Ripper murders actually sparked reform efforts to fix these slum conditions.
- The Queen Victoria missions are again a series of errands. But this one deals with terrorism. The terrorism is shown as Templars and apolitical, but the 1860s was actually the era of Fenian, Irish rebel terrorists. This was a much bigger deal than any of the gang wars that you actually see in Syndicate. The final scene where Evie humbly requests Queen Victoria to give up the Empire is gloriously cheesy and hilarious. I like Queen Vicky's condescending and cold reply, since too many stories make her out to be overly nice, which she was capable of in life certainly but she was definitely out to ensure that the Crown still had a purpose and place in the sun and that's why she allied with Disraeli over Gladstone, Disraeli made her Empress and gave her the title by Parliament.
- Then the big one, Karl Marx. Showing Marx in a game targeting a lot of American consumers and showing him as a guy you could hang out with is something that should be commendable. Only the Marx we see here is a bit of a clown, the database entry is kind of silly and makes jokes about campus brocialists, and the cuddly reformist Marx we see here, while accurate in parts is not entirely truthful either. The missions are again a series of errands, no hint is given to his larger ideas and theories. And again I don't know why you would deal with someone like Marx and not touch on his controversial reputation and ideas. Likewise I think there should be tension between Marx and the Fryes. Jacob Frye is a kind of purposeless anarchist and Evie is a committed secret-society Assassin and both of them are gang leaders whose whole idea was fighting the Templar gangs of Blighters and replacing it with their own gang of street criminals. Going by Marx's writings, the Fryes are lumpenproletariat, the elements of the urban poor who have no revolutionary potential and in times of crisis ally with the ruling class interests and serve as their enforcers, being criminals, miscreants, and so on. We see this in the game where the Fryes ultimately support the British Conservative Party, Benjamin Disraeli and then get knighted by the Queen of England. There's no way Marx would pal around with them. The game never has the Fryes being divided or challenged for their chumminess in allying with both sides of the political divide or how using multiple interests serves the Assassin cause, but to a Communist or a radical this would mark you out as a fixer and an adventurer rather than someone with commitment.
- Then we have this special time anomalies mission where you are transplanted to World War I London and play Jacob's granddaughter Lydia Frye. Unity had this feature too but there it was digression without story or impact to the plot, and here we get a slice of AC History in a discreet mini-campaign. Lydia Frye is a suffragette and we meet Winston Churchill in his time as Minister of Munitions, a position he landed after the disaster of the Gallipoli Expedition and some time in and out of position. It was his comeback tour. Churchill is shown here asking for Lydia Frye's help against Imperial German spies and saboteurs in exchange for help in putting female suffrage on the ballot. Churchill was a famous opponent of female suffrage, but by 1917 he did actually moderate and tried to get the conservatives to back it, so it's not impossible. The portrayal of World War I London allows AC to do a multi-timeline city, so we see the London Bridge and its mechanical drawbridge. We also have anti-air guns and zeppelin air-raids. Zeppellin air-raids definitely did happen but I don't know if was a phenomenon that late. The anti-air guns, model and make, is up for military buffs to check if it's period accurate. I doubt it is. I do like Churchill's introduction in the cutscene, the minute I saw the lighted cigar stub, I knew at once who it was. This sequence is pretty good for what it is, and World War I London doesn't feel like a waste of a period and this is a slice of Churchill's life that is obscure and not really storied, so I don't have a problem with how they handle it.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
- The portrayal of London in SYNDICATE is pretty selective. There are a whole host of stuff missing from the game, the British Museum (Karl Marx's stomping ground), the Crystal Palace (which given that it burned down later, you would think ought to be recreated in a game since that's how any of us will ever get to be there). Recreating a modern city with museums and cultural life, means that a Victorian London game that doesn't recreate the museums that existed at the time and the exhibits within (which still exist in the same places today) means that the fact that I can't visit the National Gallery and see Old Master paintings, go to Victoria and Albert Museum and see Tipu's Tiger automaton, or visit the Elgin Marbles...destroys a lot of the real reasons anyone would pay to play in a recreation of a real city, unlike GTA's fake ones. SYNDICATE remember sold to a lot of people around the world and it's cheaper for them to play this game then visit London by air and as such if you are going to do this period, not doing it in a thorough manner feels like some kind of betrayal. UNITY's Paris had a huge number of crowd NPCs to signify the population growth of the city in the time of the Revolution, but London in the 1860s had a multi-million population, the biggest for any city in the world at that time. As such, Syndicate lacks density and falls short of hsitroy.
- London in the Syndicate era was Post-Sanitation Movement. But it was still pretty grimy and dirty compared to a modern city, and Whitechapel in particular was a slum area. There's none of that we see here in the game. The portrayal of crime and poverty is a little too prettyfied and the lack of detail kind of hurts it. The fact that we have a Thames river in the industrial era that is swimmable without adverse effects by Assassin superheroes on their bodies and skins, is a major letdown in terms of open-world realism.
- As Bob Whitaker, quoted below notes, child labour which we see throughout the game, in story and open world, was illegal by the 1860s, and already reformed out of its existence. The Victorian age also started the whole concept of childhood as a special time of play, which led to Lewis Carroll's Alice books and something which was especially close to Dickens (owing to his own past as a child laborer). The entire class uprising shtick that Jacob Frye keeps voicing and the Assassins trying to fight capital (represented by Templars) overplays a class war angle that was already dialed down by the 1832 Reform Bill and then the 1867 Reform Bill which raised the voting franchise. Throughout this period, wages of workers increased thanks to their own activism and union work, and we don't get any sense of the union activity in the game. Marx wrote Das Kapital Part 1, which mainly deals with industrial accents and it was published in 1867, and we see little of that here. The idea of seeing street gangs like the Rooks, i.e lumpenproletariat, be the agents of anti-capitalist activity doesn't allow room or acknowledgement for the work of unions and other labor agitations in that period.
- It's a common theme in contemporary Victoriana stories to downplay class, imperialism, LGBT and other issues of the time, so Syndicate is no exception. The fact that Jacob and Evie Frye being middle-class non-Londoners fit in immediately in the span of a year, or a couple of months is not believable. Jacob Frye's retro-punk affectations is a little too 90s Cool Britannia in the way it allows him to easily interact and talk with "social superiors" like Pearl Attaway, and especially Benjamin Disraeli, and the Queen. Evie Frye is more believably middle-class and acts like it, but even then there was definitely issues and tensions with unmarried middle-class girls who interact with aristos like Mrs. Disraeli and so on. But with Evie her being a British gangster and so on seems more of a stretch both from a social perspective and a character perspective. I wish the game went into more time and effort on accent and other class stuff, because in a modern setting and especially something like Victorian London, a prototype for modernity as we understand it, blending mechanic can't be simple as it was in the Third Crusade. Like blending in different parts of London should pay attention to costume, hat, beard, and other social details. And accents should be modified according to station and situation. In a time where you have photography, emerging mass media, telegraph, and a modern police, you can't expect me to think that a guy who attacks a bunch of people can disappear into a haystack or sitting on a park bench. We also have Ned Wynert, a transgender character who isn't called that within the game nor does the game address any of the hypocrisy and double standards for which the Victorians were proverbial. The creepy dynamic between Maxwell Roth and Jacob Frye makes homosexuality villainous and doing a Joker-Batman dynamic in Victorian England isn't saying anything.
- Syndicate gives us two Indian characters with Henry Green (Jayadeep Mir) and the real-life Prince Duleep Singh, the deposed Prince of Punjab and political hostage, son of the legendary Raja Ranjit Singh, and who was the figure forced to hand over the Kohinoor diamond to the English crown, by coercion. The portrayal of Prince Duleep wearing Punjabi robes and a turban and his kind of nationalist slant is not accurate. Duleep Singh for a while was noted to have blended in and become a complete English gentleman and for a while was a playboy. And even when he did get serious about making a play for a crown later in his life, it was still Punjab and not Pan-India. The most bizarre thing is the total lack of mention in the main game to the 1857 Uprising or Mutiny. This was the largest anti-colonial rebellion in the 19th Century in any nation and the game talks about the Crimean War many times instead. We also don't get any discussion of Ireland, the activity of the Fenian groups, Irish Home Rule, or for that matter agitations in Jamaica, and British activities in China. London was a global city in this time, and there should be immigrants and expatriates from around the world, from Eastern Europe, from Asia, and from Africa. But the NPCs are mostly white and we don't get any sense of the empire.
- Syndicate is the only AC game with Jewish characters, Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx. He's a conservative MP who converted to Anglicanism for career reasons, he's a radical atheist expatriate who became one of the founders of modernity. Together, they fight crime mostly by allying with Assassin criminals to fight Templar criminals. Kidding aside, England had a thriving British Jewish community in this time, many of them rising out and gaining equality especially in the 1860s, where the anti-semitism that led to the Duke of Wellington forbidding extending franchise and legal rights to Jews, had somewhat receded. The backlash to Oliver Twist's Fagin was sufficient enough that Dickens had to write a positive Jewish character in hiits final book (before his death) Our Mutual Friend. And the British Jewish community were involved with and allied with many liberal and social causes. So I wish we saw more of that. And even then showing Disraeli as a clown entirely dominated by his wife, while Marx is another clown who seems too caught up in itself, seems a bit of a disfavour to them.
CONCLUSION
When I talked about Black Flag, I mentioned that the theme of that game is that the British Empire were bigger plunderers than the pirates was part of the game's conceit in portraying that period. Syndicate never quite gets around to the argument that the British Empire is a bigger crime syndicate than any street gang, and it's sentimental having-it-both-ways approach, palling with Marx and Queen Victoria as if neither costs them anything, ultimately hampers the game of any teeth. The writing is so lacking that to be honest, Syndicate is the only game where I preferred and openly rooted for the villains, namely Starrick, Maxwell Roth, and Attaway, to the heroes. The former are better written, better voiced, and better characterized, and I would totally have preferred a Templar game with this set. Anyone doing a Victorian England game that wishes to discuss its real history, and the reality of the life in that time, needs a strong purpose and a deconstructive view, similar to Alan Moore's From Hell (separate from the bad Johnny Depp movie).
SOURCES

The Making of the English Working Class. E. P. Thompson. Vintage. 1966 reprint.
The Victorians. A. N. Wilson. W. W. Norton and Company. 2004. Reprint.
Eminent Victorians. Lytton Strachey. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eminent_Victorians
Bob Whitaker, History Respawned, also a specialist on Victorian History: - Part 1, Let's Play Commentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibwhQN3wNL4 - Part 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37x75vvVz9M - Part 3, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naGXZIEQpJI - Part 4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu5hnYoRJsE -- Whitaker in this commentary talks about the place of empire, the diversity of London, the importance of Ireland and Fenians, and so on.
For Marx's idea of lumpenproletariat. https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/u.htm

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