Mayblog 2022

Operation Unthinkable.

With Nazi tyranny defeated, Winston Churchill commissioned a study into the feasibility of driving Russian tyranny out of Eastern Europe as WW2 drew to a close. Churchill’s generals concluded that ‘Operation Unthinkable’ didn’t look feasible at the time, at least not without massive American support and widespread use of WMDs. Consequently, Eastern Europe seemed condemned to suffer under Russian tyranny for some while.

The Russian system of tyranny derives from the feudalism of the Middle Ages. In the disastrous Russian Revolution, the fiefdoms of the feudal Tzars became the fiefdoms of a middle class led urban political party waving a communist banner. Tyranny and corruption continued as normal under different overlords, democracy never got a look in. Tyranny and corruption meant that Russia, and the satellite states it annexed, never prospered economically despite the huge natural resources and populations available. Far too much became spent on militarism and the state apparatus of repression that maintained the regime. When the Soviet System finally imploded towards the end of the 1980s, Russia missed its chance to join the community of civilised democratic European nations. Instead, the thuggish Vladimir Putin managed to completely recreate feudalism with himself as monarch and dictator and a whole new class of oligarchs and kleptocrats as his henchmen and barons.

Operation Unthinkable now seems distinctly possible. If the free world can remain firm against Putin’s threats, and if it can bear the consequences of comprehensively sanctioning Russia, and if it can keep supplying the heroic Ukrainians with ever better weaponry, then Russia will retreat in defeat.

If you have any psi-skills at all, consider contributing to the ongoing efforts of the free world’s wizards and witches to unseat the Russian tyrant: -

https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

The people of Russia and Belarus may yet depose their dictatorships and the struggle against tyranny in Europe will have finally succeeded after many bloody centuries.

That will just leave China as the world’s main sponsor of tyranny.

I recently found this book on the history of China fascinating: -

China has the world’s oldest more or less continuous civilisation. It has undergone many cataclysmic implosions and changes of regime over the millennia, but it has always rebuilt itself on exactly the same Bronze Age political principles with which it continues to govern itself to this day. In this system, most of the power lies with The Emperor and The Imperial Bureaucracy. Aristocracy did not feature strongly; lords, barons, and rich merchants did not hold much power. The gentry of Chinese society consisted mainly of Mandarins, upward social mobility mainly lay through bureaucratic service.

The system has always depended on a massive effort of information gathering and information control to achieve taxation and regulation, and hence behaviour control.

The Chinese Mandarin or Scribal Class has persisted for thousands of years, and it has always cravenly collaborated  to provide a Bureaucracy to whichever warlord or political manipulator became Emperor of China. The Scribal Class simply morphed into a Party Organization that provided Bureaucratic collaboration to communist emperors and now provides it to post-communist emperors.

The advent of modern electronic information technology has immensely strengthened the hand of the Chinese bureaucratic tyranny. It can now maintain real time surveillance on all its citizen’s movements, contacts, and behaviour, and it eagerly exports this technology to any regime that wants to use it. Cell-phone monitoring and facial recognition technology along with complete state control of the media have provided the Chinese dictatorship with more resources for thought control than George Orwell dreamed of in his seminal and prescient novel ‘1984’.

Information technology itself seems to lead us towards a future where the major conflicts will occur between democracies with relatively free information architectures and tyrannies with  repressive information architectures.

Bosonics.

Plainly, quite a lot of things in Quantum Field Theory do not add up very well. Not only does the whole field of Quantum Chromodynamics concerning quarks and gluons look conceptually tortuous and a mathematical mess, but even Quantum Electrodynamics which concerns electromagnetic and weak forces and particles now comes into question. In particular we currently have calculated results for the mass of the W Boson and the g-2 spin of the Muon that do not match the experimentally measured values.

It rather looks like the calculations have missed the contributions made by the presence of extra particles that we have not yet recognised. Within the 3-dimensional time model under development here at Arcanorium College, the full suite of weak force interacting bosons could consist of: -

The putative X17 Boson may have already appeared in the decay of Beryllium 8.

Mesonics.

In a similar vein, the 3-dimensional time model suggests an additional meson type particle and field intermediating the inter-nucleon forces, this putative ‘Y’ Boson may also play a part. It could if produced, decay into any possible particle-antiparticle pair, rather as the supposed Higgs Boson does, yet unlike the Higgs it would not confer mass on other particles.

Magical Books.

The proofs and the cover designs for the following two titles have arrived: -

Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J Carroll. Classic Edition with upgrades and additions, from publishers Red-Wheel Weisers.

Interview with a Wizard- Ian Blumberg-Enge interviews Peter J Carroll. 365 Questions on magical, esoteric, biographic, scientific, and other topics, with an extended appendix on the hyperspherical universe, from publishers Mandrake of Oxford.

Images and full details will appear here within weeks, as soon as publication occurs.

FSW4-AD 2222. Humans have spread to surrounding star systems. Following squabbles insurrections and skirmishes, humanity has split into 5 ideological factions. The treaty of 2220 established the militarisation of occupied systems only and the de-militarisation of unoccupied systems and space areas. Peace ensued for two years until factions started building transportable fortresses and a technologically advanced alien race began moving into unoccupied systems and space areas and sought to forge alliances with various of the human factions. Conflicts over systems and control space areas then ensued.

SHIP                      DICE                                    COST               

Fortress                  20                                          6                      

Hive                        20                                         4

Battleship                12                                         6

Serpent                  12                                         4

Battlecruiser           10                                         5                                          

Cruiser/Carriers       8                                         4                             

Destroyer                 6                                         3                                                                

Frigate                     4                                          2

Fighter                     4                                         1(Imperials only)

SURFACE UNITS            

Garganaught           8                                        3

Scorpion                8                                        2               

Devastator               6                                       2

Reaper                    4                                       1

1) Turn sequence. Income, Production, Movements & Combats.

2) Income of (5), 4, 3, 2, depending on system size. Income from any home system not occupied by enemy units, income from any other system occupied by own surface units.

3) Production only on systems where a fortress has been planted. Income units can only move across uncontested (connected) pathways of any length. Ships appear in neighbouring uncontested space. Surface unit appear on systems.

4) Movements & Combats.

A) Ships may move from one area of space to an adjacent one. (Imperial Fighters can only move from one area of space to another in Carriers.) If it contains enemy ships, Combat will occur. The attacking side can elect to retreat to the space it came from, and the defending side can elect to retreat to any friendly occupied or unoccupied space at the beginning of any combat round after the first.

B) Ships may fire on surface units in systems adjacent to the space they occupy. Combat occurs at the discretion of the attacking ships.

C)  Ships may convey surface units between any two systems that border the space they occupy. Surface units may only be moved across one space area to another system in a turn. If surface units land on a system occupied by enemy surface units or fortresses Combat occurs.

D) A fortress may land on a system not occupied by enemy forces, and assimilate its carrier.

5) Combat. Risk Protocols. Up to 3Attack dice against 2Defence dice. by combat rounds, highest dice against highest dice, defenders win draws. Casualties at the discretion of each combatant.

6) The number of pieces of each type supplied reflects the limits of units of that type that a civilisation can support.

7) Initial Production Levels. Imperials 24, Aquarians 22, Chaoists 21, Darwinians 22, Soviets 22. No production on first move.

8) Fortresses. All civilisations start with one immobile Fortress on their largest world, and one fortress in a carrier in a space adjacent to the homeworld. Civilisations may purchase additional Fortresses and Carriers to transport them to other systems. A Fortress only becomes operational when landed on a system empty of opposing assets and its Carrier has become assimilated and removed from the display. Fortresses can only defend and only when not in a Carrier. If attacked in a carrier only the carrier defends.

9) Starting Conditions - Humans. 1 Fortress on homeworld, one next to it in space, all Cruisers, Destroyers, and Frigates deployed at will on any space territories adjacent to at least two home systems.

Reapers equal in number to the production values of all home systems on those systems.   

10) Victory Objectives, conquest of as many systems as possible.

ALIENS. Special rules.

2) Income. From any system occupied by a Hive or Scorpion.

3) Production. At any system occupied by a Hive. (If connected)

Mutations: (performed during production phase) Scorpion to Hive cost 2. Scorpion to Serpent cost 1. Serpent to Hive not possible. Free mutations, Hive to Scorpion, Serpent to Scorpion, Hive to Serpent.

9) Starting Conditions. 1 Hive, 8 Serpents, 8 Scorpions, placed on any un-militarised treaty spaces or systems.

ALLIANCES. 2 Player. Aliens pick any two allies but not Imperials, by picking an ideology to back. The Imperials then ally with the other two factions. Aliens then set up and move first. Play order then established by lot and proceeds clockwise or anticlockwise by lot. Allied ships but not surface forces may occupy the same areas.

The following chart shows the ideological relationships of the five factions. The Aliens can pretend to any ideology to select a pair of allies. The Imperials will adjust their ideology to suit the allies they become left with.

                       (Individualist)

                                  l

         Goths               l              Capitalists

                                  l

(Mystical) ---------Imperials ------------(Rationalist)

                                  l                     

         Aquarians       l                 Soviets

                                  l

                         (Collectivist)

Additional optional tournament rules.

Tactical Attack dice bonus. D4+1, D6+2, D8+3, D10+3, D12+4.

Tactical Defence dice bonus. D4+1, D6+2, D8+3, D10+3, D12+4, D20+5.

Psychic Attack Bonus. Throw all attack dice twice, use highest score.

Psychic Defence Bonus. Throw all attack dice twice, use highest score.

Production bonuses. Add 1 or 2 to the income value of any system.

Leader and Character pieces can be added to the game to add these powers to any forces on a system or space area.