Formally called the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, the order was once considered to be at the center of the black community. During the era of segregation, the lodge was one of the few places where black men and women could socialize, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote. In recent years, however, the Post-Gazette commented that the secret organization has struggled to retain its relevance.
Still, the secret society continues to sponsor educational scholarship programs, youth summer computer literacy camps, parades as well as community service activities throughout the world. The paper wrote , "Lord Clarendon has been holding communication with an illegal society in Dublin for upwards of ten days.
The Grand Orange Lodge, with its secret signs and pass-words , has been plotting with his Excellency during the whole of that period. The Grand Orange Lodge is still around today with clubs in Ireland, as well as others around the world. Orangeism does not foster resentment or intolerance. Condemnation of religious ideology is directed against church doctrine and not against individual adherents or members.
Perhaps one needs to be a member of the altruistic and friendly society known as the Independent Order of Odd Fellows to know for sure when the club first started, but the first written record of the order comes in , however, and it references George IV. Even before he was named Prince Regent of the United Kingdom, George IV, had been a member of the Freemasons, but as the story goes, when he wanted a relative of his to be admitted to the society without having to to endure the lengthy initiation process, the request was emphatically denied.
George IV left the order, declaring he would establish a rival club , according to a history of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows published by the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph in The official website of the order, however, traces the clubs origins all the way back to The Odd Fellows, as they call themselves, are grounded in the ideals of friendship, love and truth.
Their names are published in Yale Rumpus , though what happens behind the closed doors of The Tomb , the windowless meeting space where Bonesmen gather twice a week, is under wraps: Members take an oath of secrecy. Bush and his son, George W. The symbol of Skull and Bones is, appropriately, a skull with two crossbones.
Yale Alumni Magazine points to a popular theory that it represents the year B. The first Bilderberg Meeting was in and held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands, from which the organization gets its name.
Convened by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, it was a gathering of powerful politicians from North America and Europe designed to foster warmer relations between the two continents among fears of growing anti-Americanism in Europe. Journalists are barred from reporting on it. Meeting minutes are not released. Bilderberg attendees are selected by a dedicated international committee. Every year, about people are invited, with about two-thirds coming from Europe and one-third from North America.
The Washington Post reports that while backgrounds in government and politics are the most common, attendees from fields like academia, finance and media have also been included. The level of secrecy surrounding the Bilderberg Meeting have given rise to many rumors, including unproven theories that Bilderberg attendees are behind the creation of the European Union, the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Serbia, reports the New York Times. Conspiracy theorists have painted the group as plotting a new world order.
What happens behind the closed doors of these secret societies has caused debate for centuries. There have been no attempts to monetize the society, although the thriller Dark Web adopted the concept. The Knights Templar, a religious military order during the Crusades founded in in Jerusalem , lived like monks and fought like medieval Green Berets. Their disciplinary code involved hundreds of rules with disobedience punished by flogging or an order to eat meals on the floor with dogs.
While they were founded to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, they also operated a bank and some despised their wealth and influence. French King Philip IV accused the knights of having secret, homoerotic induction ceremonies and worshiping statues - trumped-up charges that led to their demise. Mexican drug cartel Los Caballeros Templarios models itself on the knights, mimicking their medieval approach to discipline and punishment.
Bush were members with fewer than living members at any time. The devil equals death! Death equals death! Hubertus - an aristocratic society of hunters founded in Austria in the s whose members are knighted on behalf of the King of Spain. Gentlemen are dubbed with a sword before donning forest-green capes with embroidered Maltese crosses. What does the cabal actually do? Other than that, Hock said, she'd have to find her own answers.
A few days later, on the train to Uppsala, Schaefer turned to her present again. The cipher's complexity was overwhelming: symbols for Saturn and Venus, Greek letters like pi and gamma, oversize ovals and pentagrams. Only two phrases were left unencoded: "Philipp ," written at the start of the manuscript, and "Copiales 3" at the end. Philipp was traditionally how Germans spelled the name. Copiales looked like a variation of the Latin word for "to copy.
She tried a few times to catalog the symbols, in hopes of figuring out how often each one appeared. This kind of frequency analysis is one of the most basic techniques for deciphering a coded alphabet.
But after 40 or 50 symbols, she'd lose track. After a few months, Schaefer put the cipher on a shelf. Thirteen years later, in January , Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics.
Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. She preferred musty books to new technologies and didn't even have an Internet connection at home.
But this lecture was different. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight , a University of Southern California specialist in machine translation—the use of algorithms to automatically translate one language into another. With his stylish rectangular glasses, mop of prematurely white hair, and wiry surfer's build, he didn't look like a typical quant.
Knight spoke in a near whisper yet with intensity and passion. His projects were endearingly quirky too. He built an algorithm that would translate Dante's Inferno based on the user's choice of meter and rhyme scheme. Soon he hoped to cook up software that could understand the meaning of poems and even generate verses of its own. Knight was part of an extremely small group of machine-translation researchers who treated foreign languages like ciphers—as if Russian, for example, were just a series of cryptological symbols representing English words.
In code-breaking, he explained, the central job is to figure out the set of rules for turning the cipher's text into plain words: which letters should be swapped, when to turn a phrase on its head, when to ignore a word altogether. Establishing that type of rule set, or "key," is the main goal of machine translators too.
Except that the key for translating Russian into English is far more complex. Words have multiple meanings, depending on context. Grammar varies widely from language to language. And there are billions of possible word combinations. But there are ways to make all of this more manageable.
We know the rules and statistics of English: which words go together, which sounds the language employs, and which pairs of letters appear most often.
Q is usually followed by a u , for example, and "quiet" is rarely followed by "bulldozer. That narrows the number of possible keys from billions to merely millions.
The next step is to take a whole lot of educated guesses about what the key might be. But with every pass, it figures out a few words. And those isolated answers inch the algorithm closer and closer to the correct key. The algorithm can also help break codes, Knight told the Uppsala conference—generally, the longer the cipher, the better they perform. Despite his comments at the conference, Knight was hesitant to start the project; alleged ciphers often turned out to be hoaxes.
Unfortunately for Knight, there was a lot of human grunt work to do first. For the next two weeks, he went through the cipher, developing a scheme to transcribe the coded script into easy-to-type, machine-readable text. Next Knight turned to his expectation-maximization algorithm. It generated clusters of letters that behaved alike—appearing in similar contexts. For example, letters with circumflexes were usually preceded by or. There were at least 10 identifiable character clusters that repeated throughout the document.
The only way groups of letters would look and act largely the same was if this was a genuine cipher—one he could break. Knight did a separate frequency analysis to see which of those letters appeared most often.
The results were typical for a Western language. Maybe, Knight thought, the real code was in the Roman alphabet, and all the funny astronomical signs and accented letters were there just to throw the reader off the scent.
Of course, a substitution cipher was only simple if you knew what language it was in. Five times, it compared the entire cryptotext to 80 languages. The results were slow in coming—the algorithm is so computationally intense that each language comparison took five hours.
Finally the computer gave the slightest preference for German. Given the spelling of Philipp , that seemed as good an assumption as any. As long as he could learn some basic rules about the language—which letters appeared in what frequency—the machine would do the rest. He saw that one common cipher letter, , was often followed by a second symbol,. They appeared together 99 times; a frequently came after:.
Knight reviewed common German letter combinations. It was his first major break. During his vacation, as his daughters played on their iPads at night in the hotel room, Knight scribbled in his orange notebook, tinkering with possible solutions to the cipher. So far what he had was a simple substitution code.
But that left scores of cipher symbols with no German equivalent. So one evening Knight shifted his approach. He tried assuming that the manuscript used a more complex code—one that used multiple symbols to stand for a single German letter. Knight put his theory to the test.
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