version

Well-known member
They're possibilities like anything else. If it's interesting, I'll take a look at it. I don't need to believe it. One thing I find irritating is that if you talk about this stuff, people assume you believe it. Apparently it's not enough to consider it. You're either wholly committed or think it's bullshit. Reminds me of the political arguments where anyone criticising Trump or Hillary was immediately accused of supporting the other.

I just try not to rule stuff out. Have I seen an alien? No. But all that proves is that, as far as I'm aware, I haven't seen one.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Lastly, I'm sure I read something in the Nick Land thread about Land's belief that capitalism and the internet are somehow *creating* the Great Old Ones, thus making HPL's fiction into an eventual future reality? Reminds me of the way the secret clique of encyclopaedists in 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' by Borges create a fictional world that somehow becomes real and eventually subsumes the real world.
Also the plot of Foucault's Pendulum pretty much as far as I remember it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
personally i keep thinking everybody is extremely overreacting? for example i saw several people wearing face masks today in berlin. reminds me of the silly panic surrounding the millennium bug and the mexican flu.
As far as I understand it the millennium bug WAS a really massive problem that companies spent lots and lots of time and money trying to anticipate and solve, largely successfully. I feel quite sorry for people who worked really hard on dealing with it... and then cos they managed, on the whole, to prevent major problems, were told that they had exaggerated the problems and that all their work had been unnecessary.
Yeah sure there were some people saying that EVERY single electronic device in your home had a clock it in - even things that you would never have guessed - and moreover they also contained a small thermonuclear device which was programmed to go off if the clock ever went back to zero and so you should ensure that your toaster, light switches and even your chairs were either millennium-proofed or (to be safe) you should probably just throw them all away and buy replacements - on pain of death. BUT I think it's pretty inarguable that for companies that used any kinds of records or anything it was a huge problem that really did have to dealt with.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Imagine being the person who started the millennium bug rumour. Probably still gets a kick from it 20 years later. I might start telling people it was me.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Must have been a software engineer or systems manager or the like... someone who a) understood that it was a plausible thing to suggest and b) would be called in to sort it out at a very high wage - with a built in bonus if they somehow managed to prevent it obviously.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, the extent of the Y2K bug may have been exaggerated - or it may not, it's hard to tell - but some things certainly did go wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

They were mostly quite minor but it's not hard to see how bad things could have been if such errors had occurred in life-support machines used in hospitals, computers used in planes or air traffic control, any systems involved with nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons...
 

version

Well-known member
Barclays chief Staley probed over Epstein ties

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s financial regulators are probing links between Barclays Chief Executive Jes Staley and the U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, the bank said on Thursday.

Barclays said its board had looked into media reports on Staley’s relationship with Epstein, and probed the chief executive’s characterisation of it.

The Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority were now investigating, it said, without giving any further details of the probe. The FCA declined to comment.
 

version

Well-known member
I think it was luka who posted something in here a while back about the all-seeing eye/one eye symbolism/trope:

The Talented Mr. Epstein (2003)

Inside, amid the flurry of menservants attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu. This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries.

The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers.
 

luka

Well-known member
going through the rituals of secret societies . . . . I’m in a bloody rage . . . arts and sciences are in the pockets of these societies. It doesn’t make me any happier to know that Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, yourself have used these rituals . . . .

the infernal relations of Hollywood superhumanism to the Satanic reform program . . .

This stuff from McLuhan is the precursor to "secret Masonic symbolism in Jay-Z videos" and so on.

Also a lot of readings of Kubrick films. At this moment in time I lean towards the belief that the prevalence of the one eye symbol does in fact signify something beyond coincidence or playing games with the public.

But that belief wavers.
 

luka

Well-known member
His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole.

Unless by some miracle the truth emerges Epstein is destined to go down of one of the worlds great unsolved mysteries. It's too big, too dark, too deep to fathom. He's like a rupture in reality itself.
 

Leo

Well-known member
too many powerful, moneyed interests who will keep Epstein's story a mystery.

that is perhaps the one conspiracy theory I believe, 100%. that and rod Stewart getting his stomach pumped, and Richard Gere and the gerbil.
 

freakyrixx

Active member
The intelligence coup of the century

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project.
 

version

Well-known member
I dunno how people are falling for it. It's a pretty blatant example of throwing in a bunch of things that have already happened or are likely to in order to dupe people into believing the rest of it. As though some random Canadian guy on Facebook would be in the loop anyway...

:crylarf:
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
My GF joined some local Facebook group that was set up ostensibly to enable people in the neighbourhood to help each other out during the pandemic and tells me it's already just full of fucking idiots banging on endlessly about the virus was "obviously made in a lab in China". Now granted that the Chinese government doesn't really do human rights and other squishy decadent nonsense like that, but it can generally be relied on to do what's best for economic growth and to project an image of national strength abroad. So obviously they're deliberately going to shut down much of the country for weeks on end, right?

I'm reminded of something I saw last year where a woman posted on SM that a few years ago she'd found half of an interesting-looking ceramic bead with an elephant design on it on a beach near her house (and had posted a photo to her IG or whatever at the time), and that she'd just been for a walk along the same beach and had found the other half of the bead, complete with photo to prove it. Of course some cunt immediately reacted with an accusation that she'd had the two halves of the bead all along and had lied about finding them years apart.

So it took about two minutes from the posting of this charming and completely inconsequential story before a "beach bead truther" movement emerged.

If this pandemic gets a lot worse, it'll be a population control conspiracy. If it an effective treatment or vaccine is developed and is used to control it, that'll show it was all for the benefit of Big Pharma. Conspiratorial thinking is the diametric opposite of falsifiability, because both P and ~P can be used to deduce Q, since Q is a foregone conclusion.

I think we, as a culture and a species, are just cognitively broken at this point.
 
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