Gyroscopic Investing

Maddy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 11:46 am You're right, Tyler-- Much of that dark underbelly has been right out there in plain view.

However, what remains largely in the dark is how a ring of pedophiles could effectively come to own and control everything that matters, including Congress, a majority of federal judges, and the heads of virtually every government agency right on down to the local level. IMHO, the stuff that's been out there in plain view is just the tip of the iceberg. It represents the narcissistic flaunting of people for whom being above the law is not enough; they need for everyone to know it.

I totally agree. Call it a conspiracy theory, but there is tons of evidence of this if you look into it. Both sides have been in on it over the last 50+ years. It's about control and narcissism.

Tyler wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 10:31 am

Ad Orientem wrote: ↑Sat Aug 10, 2019 5:16 pm Of course people can conspire. But conspiracies involving high profile murder don't usually remain secrets for long, when they are real.

Know the right people and conspiracies don't need to remain secret. Epstein's pedophile ring ran out in the open for decades.

This is one of those situations where the truth is so unbelievable that gaslighting perfectly rational questioners as conspiracy theorists is part of the coverup strategy. You have a well-connected billionaire who claimed to be in finance but nobody knows where his money actually came from. He owned a private island that includes a creepy temple adorned with pagan statues that contains nothing but a bed. He regularly flew in powerful visitors like Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew on a plane called the "Lolita Express", and he was blatantly trafficking young girls to the point where locals refer to it as "Pedophile Island". He also owned a massive compound in New Mexico where he planned to seed the world with his DNA by impregnating hundreds of women at a time. Authorities had him dead to rights years ago, but the lead prosecutor was informed Epstein belonged to US intelligence. In a negotiated plea deal, he ended up serving only 13 months in "jail" where he was allowed to hire his own private security detail and work from home 12 hours a day, six days a week. He also inexplicably received immunity from further prosecution in the process, and the details of his sentence were kept secret from the victims in the case. Basically, he was a well-known sexual abuse mastermind who absolutely flaunted it but was completely untouchable until only recently.

Just a few years ago, Epstein's protected status as the coordinator of an elite pedophile ring was all just a conspiracy theory. But investigators persisted and now it's all spelled out in legal documents, flight logs, and witness testimony. To me, we're well beyond conspiracy theory here and anyone dismissing the dark, dark underbelly of the situation is living in willful ignorance.

Epstein was an evil man servicing evil men, and his death was the most predictable element of the entire saga. My one hope is that the suspicious circumstances make the spotlight even brighter. The entire system that supported him needs to be pulled up by the roots and burned.

Good Lord!

Maddy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 11:46 amHowever, what remains largely in the dark is how a ring of pedophiles could effectively come to own and control everything that matters, including Congress, a majority of federal judges, and the heads of virtually every government agency right on down to the local level.

Isn't that a bit of hyperbole? At least, I hope it is. The majority of federal judges?

Also, a quibble... Pedophilia is attraction to prepubescent children. That isn't what's been going on here. These were underage in the sense that we don't consider them mature enough to consent, but they weren't really "children", biologically. I'm not defending any of this awful behavior, but we may as well label it correctly.

Maddy, the scale of what you describe is reminiscent of what may or may not have been happening in the Roman Catholic Church for the past few decades. Horrifying.

Xan wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 10:29 pm Also, a quibble... Pedophilia is attraction to prepubescent children. That isn't what's been going on here. These were underage in the sense that we don't consider them mature enough to consent, but they weren't really "children", biologically. I'm not defending any of this awful behavior, but we may as well label it correctly.

Fair enough. To be precise, I've seen reports he targeted girls as young as 12. Call it what you want, but we're not talking about grown women.

Absolutely amazing that this kind of thing could go on for years out in the open. It is impossible that law enforcement in multiple places in the US and around the world could have missed it. Didn't anyone connect missing children reports with appearance of minor girls without passports in NYC, or be at all motivated to do something useful like contacting parents or getting testimony from these girls? It does make you feel like people of female gender don't merit any official consideration. Though I'm not sure if things would have gone differently if the children were male.

Are there credible sources for an official conspiracy theory, as opposed to simple incompetence and laziness, combined with a reluctance to go after someone of apparent great wealth? And, it will be very interesting indeed to get some firm information about which high profile politicians were on this guy's guest list.

WiseOne wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 7:00 am And, it will be very interesting indeed to get some firm information about which high profile politicians were on this guy's guest list.

2000 pages of legal documents from a lawsuit by one of his victims were unsealed 24 hours before he died. A brief summary of names named:

Giuffre said in several depositions that Maxwell and Epstein trafficked her to powerful men for sex. In 2016, she said Maxwell specifically instructed her to serve former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Britain’s Prince Andrew, wealthy financier Glenn Dubin, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, modeling scout Jean-Luc Brunel, and scientist Marvin Minsky. She also says Maxwell and Epstein directed her to have sex with “another prince,” a "foreign president," a well-known prime minister" and the owner of a “large hotel chain.” None of the men named have been charged with a crime and all have denied inappropriate behavior.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-bigge ... -documents

Tyler wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 12:07 am

Xan wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 10:29 pm Also, a quibble... Pedophilia is attraction to prepubescent children. That isn't what's been going on here. These were underage in the sense that we don't consider them mature enough to consent, but they weren't really "children", biologically. I'm not defending any of this awful behavior, but we may as well label it correctly.

Fair enough. To be precise, I've seen reports he targeted girls as young as 12. Call it what you want, but we're not talking about grown women.

I learned the term ephebophilia when we had a problem with a guy on another forum, say, 15 years ago, with a predilection for younger women. Needless to say, we had to let him go. As young as 12: hebephilia.

In any case, wiki says:

However, the term pedophilia is commonly used by the general public to refer to any sexual interest in minors below the legal age of consent, regardless of their level of physical or mental development.[3

-- same link as above

I thought the quote of the day belonged to John McAfee: "I was stunned by Epstein's suicide, though probably not as much as Epstein himself."

One has to wonder (or certainly Ghillaine Maxwell should be wondering) if Maxwell might get "suicided" as well...

PP67 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 1:01 pm I thought the quote of the day belonged to John McAfee: "I was stunned by Epstein's suicide, though probably not as much as Epstein himself."

One has to wonder (or certainly Ghillaine Maxwell should be wondering) if Maxwell might get "suicided" as well...

I believe the technical term is "Arkancided".

Officials said that Epstein had met for many hours each day with his legal team, and that both he and his lawyers had repeatedly assured the prison that he did not want to kill himself and had asked MCC to remove him from the suicide watch. link

I wonder if Epstein had any kind of deadman switch in place.

Xan wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 10:29 pm Pedophilia is attraction to prepubescent children. That isn't what's been going on here. These were underage in the sense that we don't consider them mature enough to consent, but they weren't really "children", biologically. I'm not defending any of this awful behavior, but we may as well label it correctly.

If you look at the pictures that are surfacing, some of these girls were quite child-like in appearance. Some were still in braces.

*Patiently awaiting the deepfakes*

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08- ... otect-your

This is an interesting article, based upon interviews with the girls Epstein recruited, about how he lured them into service. When I think about how naive I was at that age, how oblivious I was to the connection between cause and consequence, how ignorant I was of now obvious dangers, and how generally ignorant I was of how the world works, I cannot fault these kids at all for the choices they made. So while the term "pedophilia" (which focuses upon the man's proclivities) may not fit, the concept of sexual predition toward children certainly does.

Maddy wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 6:24 pm This is an interesting article, based upon interviews with the girls Epstein recruited, about how he lured them into service. When I think about how naive I was at that age, how oblivious I was to the connection between cause and consequence, how ignorant I was of now obvious dangers, and how generally ignorant I was of how the world works, I cannot fault these kids at all for the choices they made.

I can't fault people who get raped at knife point, or the females who get kidnapped and locked in basements. But you can't tell me that these girls didn't know what prostitution was. Jennifer Aroaz says in the article that she was uncomfortable with what she was doing, but nevertheless she did it once or twice a week for over a year. Why? Because he was giving her a bunch of money for doing it, obviously. She knows she could have worked at McDonalds or a grocery store or something like that, but she chose to be a prostitute.

The one that you mentioned earlier, Courtney Wild, says she RECRUITED 70-80 other girls into the child prostitution ring. That's fucking heinous.

Unless I'm missing something... it's all darkness.

Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑Sat Aug 17, 2019 12:39 pm

Maddy wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2019 6:24 pm This is an interesting article, based upon interviews with the girls Epstein recruited, about how he lured them into service. When I think about how naive I was at that age, how oblivious I was to the connection between cause and consequence, how ignorant I was of now obvious dangers, and how generally ignorant I was of how the world works, I cannot fault these kids at all for the choices they made.

I can't fault people who get raped at knife point, or the females who get kidnapped and locked in basements. But you can't tell me that these girls didn't know what prostitution was. Jennifer Aroaz says in the article that she was uncomfortable with what she was doing, but nevertheless she did it once or twice a week for over a year. Why? Because he was giving her a bunch of money for doing it, obviously. She knows she could have worked at McDonalds or a grocery store or something like that, but she chose to be a prostitute.

The one that you mentioned earlier, Courtney Wild, says she RECRUITED 70-80 other girls into the child prostitution ring. That's fucking heinous.

Unless I'm missing something... it's all darkness.

If you are a minor, you cannot legally give consent, that makes it rape. Unless you are legally married while a minor, and some states make an allowance for people of similar age (dating teenagers).

I'm just surmising here, but I suspect these girls' choices might have been different had everything been laid out for them from the beginning. Had that been the case, there wouldn't have been any need for the kind of sophisticated grooming that Epstein and his team had a knack for.

It's easy for me to see how a 14-year-old (especially one with preexisting psychological vulnerabilities) could believe that Epstein was actually interested in her as a person and committed to vaulting her to the pinnacle of success in the modeling or acting industry. To a kid coming from a troubled family, with self-esteem/identity issues and the usual teenage penchant for fantasy-type thinking, it must have been enormously reinforcing to be paid so much positive attention and to be treated as a desirable, adult woman. No doubt it was the role of Ghislaine, the mother figure, to normalize all of this and to convince these girls that what they were being asked to do was part and parcel of being a grown-up woman in the company of oh-so-important people. That message could have been easy to believe given these girls' lack of life experience and the manner in which the modern educational system has groomed children to be both non-thinking conformists and open and receptive to sexuality in whatever wierd form it may come. That would have been enough to cause many young people to get in over their heads, and at that point it's easy to see how they lost control of the situation. There may have been drugging, imprisonment, or even threats of harm. After all, control through the threat of blackmail was Epstein's specialty.

So what was in it for Ghislaine?

This s#$t seriously just makes me sick.

Like, really, I think we all know people like this in the world exist, but the depth and degree of depravity once revealed is just something else. The idea of preying on children like that makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

I know we got an official coroner's report and everything, but...

Despite the above, I do concede that in some cases it's "unfair" when certain people are labeled pedophiles, when what they've done involved, say, a 16 year old.

Technically, that's a ephebophilia... perhaps not as egregious as pedophilia, but still...

ochotona wrote: ↑Sat Aug 17, 2019 1:19 pm If you are a minor, you cannot legally give consent, that makes it rape. Unless you are legally married while a minor, and some states make an allowance for people of similar age (dating teenagers).

No argument there.

Maddy wrote: ↑Sat Aug 17, 2019 2:27 pm There may have been drugging, imprisonment, or even threats of harm. After all, control through the threat of blackmail was Epstein's specialty.

I was just going by what I read in that article.

Smith1776 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 17, 2019 2:45 pm Despite the above, I do concede that in some cases it's "unfair" when certain people are labeled pedophiles, when what they've done involved, say, a 16 year old.

Technically, that's a ephebophilia... perhaps not as egregious as pedophilia, but still...

But still what, exactly? What you are describing (a person over 18 having sex with a person who is 16 years of age) and implying is ephebophilia/pedophilia is quite legal in over half the US. What exactly is wrong with an adult having sex with a 16 year old? Surely you can see that a 16-year old is not the same thing as, say, a 16 month old? Would you call my dad an ephebophile (he starting dating my mom when she had just turned 17 and he was 34...this was in the early 1980s)...or my grandfather (IIRC from what he told me he started dating my grandmother when she was 15 and he was in his mid-20s...this was in the late 1950s)? How about Brigitte Macron (nee Trogneux)...the First Lady of France; apparently she started having sex with Emmanuel Macron when she was 39 and he was 15? What about Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame who suggested twentysomething and thirtysomething men should marry 15 or 16 year old ladies? Are all these people in the same moral category as pedophiles and child molesters?

For that matter, if someone had been a resident of Hawaii and did what Epstein did (had sex with 14 and 15 year old females) and did it before late 2001 he would have been--presuming they did not use drugging/blackmail/threats which was and still is illegal no matter the age of one's partner--perfectly within the law; the state of Hawaii didn't raise its age of consent from 14 to 16 before the end of 2001. Furthermore, had he been in British Columbia (or most of the rest of Canada, come to think of it) and had been a Canadian citizen and did what he did before mid-2008 then he would have been perfectly within the letter of the law as well. Or even if this had taken place in Spain before September 2013 (less than 6 years ago) and the female in question was at least 13 which up until then was 100% legal there. And none of this is even mentioning most of the rest of Europe, or Japan, or South Korea, or Mexico, or Philippines, or what the legal age of consent was before the end of 2007 in New Zealand for when the male partner was under-aged and the female partner was 18 or more (look that last one up and prepare to be rather surprised/shocked).

I certainly don't condone people having sex with young (as in prepubescent) children but I also don't understand this (to my mind's eye) kind of extremist mindset of "have sex with someone who is 18 years and a few seconds old...that's 100% A-OK; have sex with someone who is 17 years, 364 days, and 23.5 hours old and you are an icky disgusting child molesting pedophile/ephebophile scumbag who is the second coming of Albert Fish and Westley Allan Dodd combined and who should just be thrown in jail to rot for the rest of your life and/or put against a wall and shot" either.

I just mean that sexual coercion of an 8 year old is (all other things being equal) pretty much axiomatically worse than someone who is, say, 15.

The Epstein memes are superb.

Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑Wed Nov 06, 2019 6:45 pm The Epstein memes are superb.

I haven’t seen those, but there are some great limericks on twitter.