Vashro posted:

Who is number one??

comedyblissoption posted:

there are very obvious co-conspirators not charged of any crime lmao the fbi is only going to pedo island to cover everything up and hold it as blackmail

the bizarre thing is why did the fbi go after epstein in the first place? a rogue group?

Darth Walrus posted:

Lol, they totally picked that suicide method so they could blame OITNB for suicidal ideation, didn't they?

TeenageArchipelago posted:

A genuinely funny aspect of Epstein's death: he still hasn't been frozen, showing yet again that cryogenics is a scam

Ashheap Empire posted:

I've got an Epstein brain theory that OITNB suicide method because they read cases about bodies being found like that in prison. All those cases are actually murders written off as suicides because no one wanted to be bothered to do a real investigation and of course that poo poo wouldn't work.

WampaLord posted:

mastershakeman posted:

I think it was a combo of the excellent reporting from that one Miami herald lady with the sdny office wanting to take down Trump when it was obvious that Mueller wouldn't. The herald reports either inspired them or gave them cover to get aggressive with Epstein without it looking like it was going after Trump directly

Hatebag posted:

Epstein excavated the submarine tunnels under pedo island via seismic kneeling.

Orbis Tertius posted:

the repeated comparisons to bland across multiple outlets is pretty fuckin weird not gonna lie

Orbis Tertius posted:

the repeated comparisons to bland across multiple outlets is pretty fuckin weird not gonna lie

Atrocious Joe posted:

For as much as people keep saying "They are untouchable and can kill epstein with no repurcussions" I think this whole saga shows how many cracks there are in the US ruling apparatus.

You've got the US internal security forces digging up decades old scandals that implicate the vast swathes of the ruling class to attack a president that may lose an election in a year. Both political parties breaking down into just accusing the other of being pedophiles. The media working in lockstep on the story, but rapidly losing its legitimacy among the general public because of it.

I don't think the Epstein story is going to bring down the capitalist ruling class and usher in a revolution. I do think part of the reason it has exploded is because the capitalist order is becoming more unstable and the contradictions are becoming to much for it to handle.

Darth Walrus posted:

Lol, they totally picked that suicide method so they could blame OITNB for suicidal ideation, didn't they?

Atrocious Joe posted:

i think once a comparison is used a certain number of times other writers/editors feel comfortable using it. If they get called out on it, there's already a critical mass of other writing they can point to to defend their decision

how that starts tho is an interesting question. someone get dave weigel to leak the email list or PR firm that convinced the first reporters to use that angle

Grevling posted:

Robin Williams.

AnEdgelord posted:

https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opi...4a93_story.html

Weirdly enough the thing that might keep this story in the news is the sheer amount of consumer demand for more Epstein content

twoday posted:

I will explain the cow. This will take a while.

get ready for some game theory 1/378

quote:

The word Canaanites serves as an ethnic catch-all term covering various indigenous populations—both settled and nomadic-pastoral groups—throughout the regions of the southern Levant or Canaan.[1] It is by far the most frequently used ethnic term in the Bible.[2] In the Book of Joshua, Canaanites are included in a list of nations to exterminate,[3] and later described as a group which the Israelites had annihilated.[4] Biblical scholar Mark Smith notes that archaeological data suggests "that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture... In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature."[5]:13–14[6][7] The name "Canaanites" (כְּנָעַנִיְם kena‘anim, כְּנָעַנִי kena‘anī) is attested, many centuries later, as the endonym of the people later known to the Ancient Greeks from c. 500 BC as Phoenicians,[4] and following the emigration of Canaanite-speakers to Carthage (founded in the 9th century BC), was also used as a self-designation by the Punics (chanani) of North Africa during Late Antiquity.

Exodus 20 posted:

1. And God spake all these words, saying,
2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

quote:

God told Moses what the Israelites were up to back in camp, that they had turned aside quickly out of the way which God commanded them and he was going to destroy them and start a new people from Moses. Moses besought and pleaded that they should be spared (Exodus 32:11-14), and God "repented of the evil which He said He would do unto His people."

Moses went down from the mountain, but upon seeing the calf, he became angry and threw down the two Tablets of Stone, breaking them. Moses burnt the golden calf in a fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on water, and forced the Israelites to drink it.

quote:

During excavations in Carthage, archaeologists discovered the largest sacred site of the city, which came to be called the Tophet, after the Biblical expression used at 2Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 7:31. Digs revealed multiple levels of urns containing the charred remains of animals (used as substitute sacrifices) and young children (1-2 months old), buried under stelae with votive inscriptions. It is estimated that the Tophet contains the remains of over 25,000 children who were sacrificed during just one 200-year period.

quote:

However, some historians have disputed that child sacrifice occurred, suggesting instead that the tophets were resting places for the cremated remains of children that died naturally. Sergio Ribichini has argued that the Tophet was "a child necropolis designed to receive the remains of infants who had died prematurely of sickness or other natural causes, and who for this reason were "offered" to specific deities and buried in a place different from the one reserved for the ordinary dead". The few Carthaginian texts which have survived make no mention of child sacrifice (very few mention religion at all).

quote:

Moloch[a] is the biblical name of a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. The name of this deity is also sometimes spelled Molech, Milcom, or Malcam.

The name Moloch results from a dysphemic vocalisation in the Second Temple period of a theonym based on the root mlk, "king". There are a number of Canaanite gods with names based on this root, which became summarily associated with Moloch, including biblical Malkam (מַלְכָּם‎) "Great King" (KJV Milcom), which appears to refer to a god of the Ammonites, as well as Tyrian Melqart and others.

Rabbinical tradition depicted Moloch as a bronze statue heated with fire into which the victims were thrown. This has been associated with reports by Greco-Roman authors on the child sacrifices in Carthage to Baal Hammon,[1] especially since archaeological excavations since the 1920s have produced evidence for child sacrifice in Carthage as well as inscriptions including the term MLK, either a theonym or a technical term associated with sacrifice.

Christoph posted:

A roundup of who is said to have committed suicide/overdosed in the past but was probably murdered is due.

I'd be interested in background on Chris Cornell's death. Also I have arbitrarily decided Heath Ledger was murdered.

Darth Walrus posted:

So, I'm not intimately familiar with the Sandra Bland story. What is it that makes folks say she was murdered rather than 'just' heavily encouraged to commit suicide?

twoday posted:

they invented the olive

3 posted:

welp wrote a song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD0TeT9a5lQ

download MP3 here

gh0stpinballa posted:

speaking as someone who is frequently depressed nothing makes me wanna live more than the hope i will be the one who blows this loving case wide open

3 posted:

welp wrote a song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD0TeT9a5lQ

download MP3 here

Perry Mason Jar posted:

I think the satanic ritual stuff is a real thing that they fake. That way any time someone gets close they say, "Oh and they're doing these weird, like, satanic rituals?" and everyone stops listening.

puve posted:

twoday posted:

Finally I can post poo poo like this with the firm knowledge that it won't be the craziest thing in the thread. Anyway, none of this is really crazy, it's all well-sourced. But if you want to hop down into the warp-tunnel and skip ahead to Epstein Brain Level 99, read this:

~~~

The Cow on Pedo Island: A Detailed History



~~~

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. THE CANAANITES
2. THE PHOENICIANS
3. THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE
4. THE OLD GODS
5. CHILD SACRIFICE AND THE TOPHET OF CARTHAGE
6. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN?
7. MOLOCH
8. EPSTEIN
9. POSTSCRIPT

~~~

1. THE CANAANITES



So the Canaanites were the inhabitants of the land of Canaan, or the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, the Jordan River valley). It was not a specific term but a catch-all term, and not one that is really used today. Many of the groups living in this area in ancient times were Semitic peoples, and as time went on they branched off into various groups. The two which you might have heard of are the Jews and the Phoenicians (and also Carthaginians).


I will refer to these groups as the Phoenicians.

2. THE PHOENICIANS

The Phoenicians are, I think, one of the most fascinating of the Ancient Mediterranean cultures, and one of the least understood. They did a lot of cool stuff. They invented the alphabet, from which just about all other alphabets are derived (even Sanskrit!).They were the finest seafarers in the world in their day, and circumnavigated Africa in the 6th century BC (something which was recently replicated in a replica Phoenician ship), they invented the olive and set up a vast trade network to sell the oil and thus "lit up the world" by providing one of the first convenient cheap fuels for oil lamps.It's even been speculated that they discovered America more than a 1000 years before the Vikings

They were originally based in the area of Lebanon, and eventually founded Carthage in Tunisia, one of the coolest ancient cities:



The old Phoenician cities in the Levant were eventually conquered, but Carthage flourished in the western Mediterranean as the capital of the Carthaginian Empire. Then the Romans appeared on the scene, and started fighting with everybody. For a long time, the Cartheginians and the Romans were the main two powers in the Western Med and ended up bitter enemies engaged in existential warfare. The Carthaginian Hannibal (whose name contains "Ba'al," remember this) came close to conquering Italy, but didn't. Then Rome conquered Carthage.

3. THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE

I mentioned that we know little about the Phoenicians (and the Carthaginians). There are three reasons for this:

1) They were very secretive. They were super rich, and made this money through having a monopoly on trade goods and trade goods. For instance, to make bronze you need copper and tin, so both were pretty important. Copper is all over the place, but there are very few places in the world where you can mine tin.



While the waters of the Med are pretty calm, the waters in the Atlantic were really dangerous in those times. There were tides, currents, and trade winds which nobody understood. Except the Phoenicians. They were the only Mediterranean civ to go really go beyond Gibraltar. They traded with the Celts of Spain, France, and England, and developed a monopoly on tin, which they sourced from Druids in Cornwall. They went to incredible lengths to maintain their secrets. For instance, once a Roman ship tried to secretly follow some Carthaginian ships beyond Carthage to see where they were going. The Carthaginian captain steered them into a dangerous area filled with rough seas and sharp rocks, causing the Roman ship to sink, as well as his own small fleet. Almost everyone died, but the captain made it back to Carthage. Not only was he reimbursed for the loss of his ships, he was also lauded as a hero and handsomely rewarded, because he maintained the secret that kept their whole empire running. They also lied to everyone in the Mediterranean, telling them that the Atlantic was not navigable and full of sea monsters, so that nobody would even try to go there.

2) They were considered the bad guys by the primary predecessors of Western Civilization. The Romans hated them, and so did Jews (I'll explain why in a second). They were the Other and the Enemy, and they were spoken of almost exclusively in the worst of terms. Almost everything written about them was black propaganda, and not really reliable historical information.

3) Their culture was systematically exterminated. During the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, the Romans grew to despise the Carthaginians. Carthago delende est! or "Carthage must be destroyed!," as you may remember Cato saying in the Roman Senate. He would end every speech he gave this way, no matter what the topic of the speech was. It became ingrained in the Roman psyche that Carthage must be utterly wiped off the face of the earth if they were ever defeated. When the Romans finally invaded Carthage they killed 500,000 people, burned the city down and then went through the ashes tearing apart the rubble so that no building was left standing, and then they went out into the fields and literally salted the earth so that no crops could grow. 50,000 were enslaved and dispersed throughout the Empire. And though they brought writing to much of the world, most all of their own writing was systematically destroyed except for a small handful of books which the Romans copied, such a treatise on olive growing, a text which became the basis of an entire sector of the Roman economy. It was rumored that some Carthaginian leadership escaped to a secret island somewhere, but no evidence of this has been found.

So we have almost nothing left of their culture except some ruins and a book about olives.

4. THE OLD GODS

Their were two reasons everyone hated them - their wealth, and their religion.

The Isrealites were descended from Semitic people in the Levant, and so their ancestors worshiped the same ancient Semitic pantheon of gods and goddesses that was worshiped by the Phoenicians. However, if you are a keen reader of the Bible, you might have noticed that they became monotheistic at some point. At this point the worship of the Old Gods and their likenesses became forbidden.


This is from the ten commandments, as given to Moses by God himself on Mt. Sinai. He was up there alone for a while. My suspicion is he was there for quite some time, probably fasting and getting into some intense trance state. I suspect this because he was gone long enough that when he came back, some of the Isrealites had reverted back to the old Religion and set up a statue of a golden calf and were worshiping it.



Moses didn't like this; neither did God.


So from then on, the Israelites really didn't like the worship of cow statues. In the Bible it became kind of a symbol of the old polytheistic religion of the Levant which was specifically forbidden by God in the ten commandments, and comes up elsewhere in later books.

And even though this old Canaanite religion became symbolic of everything that was wrong and backwards, the Jews and the Canaanites (a.k.a. Phoenicians) weren't enemies because of this. A Phoenician King even helped sponsor Solomon when he was constructing of the first temple in Jerusalem, as they were allies at the time.

The Romans were the ones who really hated the Phoenicians, and the thing that really irked them was another aspect of their religion that developed, and you guessed it, it was...

5. CHILD SACRIFICE AND THE TOPHET OF CARTHAGE




Seems bad! However,


It seems that at some point the ancient Canaanites did practice child sacrifice, and then began substituting the children with animals and other offerings. Remember the story of Abraham? The one that is the basis of the Abrahamic religions of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam, the basis of most of all religious worship on the planet Earth? Well the story of Abraham is about him deciding to kill his child because God told him to, and then being told not to once God told him that he was just kidding and just wanted to see how far he would go. Just a prank, bro!

Abraham lived, according to the Bible, before the Jews were captured by the Egyptians. That is, he was an ancient Canaanite, and this story would have been known to the Jews and other Canaanites long before, and therefore was probably integrated into the Phoenician religion as well, which developed later. The Phoenician tophets have plenty of animals that were used as ritual substitutes for children, and this would seem to indicate that this was also acceptable. This is also what the Jews did in the first Temple period, sacrificing animals instead of kids (see: Leviticus), which would make their animal sacrifice seem like an act of mercy. "Yeah there's blood everywhere, just be happy I didn't do it to your family." Which is a good point, and will keep people allied with the people who sacrifice animals, and keep them in fear of the other bad people out there who might actually sacrifice children. In a way, it's just a giant protection racket that makes everyone follow the faith. "Do what we say, because the alternative is that something horrible will happen to your family.

The evidence of child sacrifice was the conclusion drawn by the first archaeologists who excavated the site in the 1970's, and the reason he thought this was the case was because it is something that is often repeated in Roman tirades about how evil the Carthaginians were, and explaining why Rome should go to war with Carthage. So, it's not the most reliable and objective source. And once something is written in history books by someone who made a major discovery, it takes a Herculean effort from later scholars to overturn it, because by then it's already canon.

Now, this leaves us with two possible interpretations of the Tophet of Carthage:

1) The Phoenicians practiced ritual child sacrifice all the time, they couldn't get enough of it. They were an entire massive culture of just straight up evil motherfuckers murdering children left and right, killing children and harnessing that dark child murder energy as the source of their power, and what keeps their empire going, and what keeps them wealthy and in control of the international economy. That's a bit difficult for me to believe, but not impossible; ancient times were pretty crazy.

This interpretation was pretty much what the Roman Senators were saying all the time as they were banging the drums of war. It's how they got everyone in Rome to despise Carthage, and agree that it must be destroyed. By promoting these ideas and this sentiment they were able to justifiably invade and conquer and obliterate their main political and economic opponent and use the spoils of war to double the size of their Empire. So I'm remiss to trust the Romans on this.

But the thing is we know almost jack poo poo about Phoenician religion because the Romans systematically obliterated them and all traces of their culture that they could get their hands on. And also they became the basis of all of Western Civilization so this bias is fundamentally ingrained in our culture.

2) The alternative interpretation of the Tophet which other archaeologists support is that the Tophet represents a necropolis, and was where the Carthaginians respectfully cremated and kept their dead kids in urns. Keep in mind that at this point in history infants and children had a really high rate of mortality from disease, complications at childbirth, etc. If the kids who died of natural causes aren't in the tophet, then nobody really knows where they are.

In this interpretation, the Romans were actually the bloodthirsty ones. While trying to drum up support for war and expand their empire, they came up with a smear campaign against the Carthaginians based upon their religion. The Roman religion (which they just straight up stole from the Greeks, and changed the names) was also polytheistic, but with very different roots than that of the Carthaginians, and the Senators took advantage of this. At the time of the Punic Wars the Romans mostly buried their dead, and the Carthaginians practiced cremation. They could have also heard of the story of Abraham and twisted it to say, "Look! Their God encourages Child Sacrifice! You can't let them be in charge of anything!" And this story is still the basis of our knowledge of Carthaginian religion because the Romans did an excellent cover-up of whatever the truth was. They built up sentiment and mistrust against the mysterious Middle-Eastern religion of the Carthaginians and then used this as a reason to perpetuate a genocide of a Semitic people for economic gain and the expansion of Empire.

6. WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? HOW THE gently caress IS THIS RELATED TO EPSTEIN, LIKE, AT ALL??

Understanding this history, as well as the way this historical narrative developed and was presented is absolutely essential to understanding everything that has happened since then, because this the story of how the Romans ended up in charge of the Mediterranean, which gave them the resources to build up the Roman Empire and take control of Europe. The destruction of Carthage enabled the rise of the Rome, which in turn determined the fate of Europe, and thus all of Western Civilization for the last two thousand years. Understanding this story is essential if you want to understand the DNA of Western culture. I'll get to Epstein in a minute, I'm at the crux of the argument right now though, so pay attention.

Now, to get to the cow, and move a bit further forward along the timeline of history:

Christianity grew out of Judaism, and incorporated into it all the stories from the Hebrew bible, including the stories of Abraham as well of that of the Golden Calf. The Romans adopted Christianity and spread it through Europe. The empire eventually collapsed, but their ideas did not. While all the books written by the people who invented the alphabet are lost, those of the Romans survived, being carefully copied and studied and repeated for thousands of years, with all the later societies of western Europe being based upon them. The idea that there are still people out there from the Levant who were practicing "The Old Ways" (which included child sacrifice) was politically expedient for Rome during the Punic Wars, but it espoused with such intensity that it never really went away. That idea is still floating around in our society today and continues to shape the trajectory of western Civilization. It warped and changed a bit over time, but the core of it remains. First of all, since the genocide of the Phoenicians was largely written off as a success, and that religion extinguished, the animosity of the original Roman anti-Carthaginian antisemitism was carried over to the other Semites which were encountered in western Europe - The Jews. One way to look at the history of antisemitism in Europe is that it is the story of the descendants of the Romans hating the descendants of the Canaanites. It's a loving ancient conflict which was fought throughout the middle ages, and the 20th century, and continues to be fought by some today.

This has manifested in various ways at various times, but one essential and constantly recurring theme has been human (often child) sacrifice and the worship of a false god (often symbolized as a bull). Somewhat ironically, these ideas are essential to Judiasm as well, but historically they have been used by the Christians of Europe to persecute the Jews.

First, there was the idea of blood libel. Jews were viewed as suspect, practicing an old religion which most people associated with human sacrifice, etc. A well-known example of this would be Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice when Shylock the Jewish Merchant demands a pound of human flesh as repayment for a debt. But often whenever there was a murder in medieval Europe would blame the local Jews for this and a bunch of them would be executed. This is how the Jews ended up being banned from England in the 13th century. Wherever they fled to these rumors would follow them, and the local xenophobes and preachers were often quick to recite the verses in the bible about Abraham and Leviticus, and accuse the Jews of murdering children. Eventually this idea became so widespread that it became the common understanding of people that one (secret) part of the Jewish religion was that they had to murder one Christian baby every year if they wanted to appease their allegedly bloodthirsty Jewish God and be allowed to return to Jerusalem. This imagined payment of Christian child blood to the Jew God is known as blood libel. These stories, in one variation or another, became widespread throughout Europe, the same way everyone reading this knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood. So the Jews were met with the same accusations wherever they went, and stories of Jews eating children were widely believed through the early 20th century. This narrative was exploited by all the local Christians (whose most holy city was what? Oh yeah, Rome), and the Jews were exploited as a scapegoat by the local authorities for economic and political gain (ironically, the concept of the scapegoat also comes from the Hebrew bible. For examples of this, one can think of the Spanish Inquisition or the pogroms in the Russian Empire. These beliefs began fading away first in Western Europe in places like the Dutch Republic, where Jews became an integral part of society, and later in Eastern Europe, paralleling the timeline of the spread of Christianity across Europe but with a delay of about a thousand years. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in 1919 in Russia, and said that the Jews secretly run the world and eat children, which was later recycled by the Nazis. However, even god drat Hitler realized it's hard to make people believe in the 20th century believe that Jews literally sacrifice children, so he slightly modified the idea a bit to describe the Jews as a parasitic minority eating away at the health of the German people. And they bought it.

7. MOLOCH



Besides Christianity in medieval Europe, there were also lots of esoteric religious beliefs based on a mix of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, kabbalah and other Jewish texts, and a bunch of poo poo that people just made up. Think of alchemy, or Rosecrucianism, or Freemasonry. There are a bunch of others. These people dug up a bunch of ancient ideas and reworked them and adjusted them to fit their whims. This is how Moloch emerged as a theme in conspiracy culture. Let's see what wikipedia entry has to say on the matter.


Ok, so Moloch is based on anti-Canaanite stuff from the bible, including the Golden Calf. But it also fits very well with the European bias against Semites, and also is just a loving perfect thing to talk about if you are a good Christian who hates the Jews, because not only does it explain why you think the Jews are backwards and terrible, but you can also refer to the Christian bible for proof of all your claims. Read the wiki article about Moloch if you want to dive into a two thousand year old cesspit of circular arguments about why the Phoenicians actually did sacrifice children. But anyway, the idea of Moloch helped perpetuate the idea of child sacrifice throughout the ages, and still comes up today when people are really pissed off at someone and want to depict them as the worst scum of the earth. This is why people were freaking out about the cow on Epstein's island. It proves he's a Molochian, doesn't it? He had a cow statue, that's the key to all of this!

This is what people actually literally still believe, by the way:

https://twitter.com/ottovonschirekt/status/1158658206387691521?s=20

https://twitter.com/FightRasche/status/1155853574196355170?s=20

I don't believe this myself, because I have an alternative theory to explain the cow that I will get to in a second, but first I will round out every other part of this story, and how it relates to the Epstein Affair.

8. EPSTEIN

Taking all of this into account, we are left with two extreme possibilities which would explain everything that we have read in the past week:

1) There was a ship filled with Carthaginian noblemen which escaped the fall of Carthage, and somehow they not only integrated into Roman society, they managed to take total control of it, along with the rest of the world. They did this in total secrecy for thousands of years, secretly carrying on their sick and depraved religion of child sacrifice through a brutal tradition of blackmail and murder. They have since that time been in control of all aspects of culture and every living human being, and the procession of history has been one massive illusion. Everything you know is a lie, it's all been a hoax perpetrated for centuries and they've managed to cover up all the traces of their misdeeds. We are but the cattle of the worshipers of Moloch.

or

2) This is exactly the same loving story that has been pushed onto the public in Western civilization since Cato was raging in the Senate. It worked for Cato, it worked for the xenophobic English in 1290, it worked for the Spanish Inquisition, it worked for the Tsarists, it worked for the Nazis, and now during the presidency of Donald J. Trump it's working again. All you have to do is make up a story about an evil conspiracy of Jews that want to murder your children, and people will follow you anywhere. There are how many millions of Q supporters now? How many of them literally believe in Moloch? That they were literally sacrificing children for their moon god? poo poo's not real fam, go get some fresh air.

And one could even go so far as to say that it's all made up, it's all a lie, an elaborate psy-op, that the victims are actors, that the murder was a hoax, that it's all just a well thought-out theaterpiece meant to turn your average American against the Mossad and encourage a new era of total mistrust and isolationism.

https://twitter.com/ldrinkh20/status/1161960553465700352?s=20

But I personally think the truth lies in the middle. I think that he was deffo an intelligence asset and loving teenagers and blackmailing people and being blackmailed himself and involved in a bunch of illegal poo poo that he may or may have not had permission to be involved in as an undercover agent. And then something went wrong or too much leaked and they had to pull the plug, either by murdering him or putting him into witness protection. And I don't think we will ever know the truth because there intelligence agencies at play putting out disinformation and double disinformation. But I am also kind of thinking that there were some white supremacist trump supporters in on this who were taking advantage of it to promote the ancient myths of blood libel and Moloch to brainwash a bunch of sheeple for their own purposes. But who the gently caress knows? Maybe it's a CIA pay-op to encourage proletarian revolution because they did an analysis and realized it would be in the best interests to have a a more socialist society in its rivalry with China and cooked this up to overthrow the yoke of the capitalist oligarchy (probably not though). The beauty of this sea of insanity is that you can project whatever you want to upon it, and it's broken so many brains that it will keep people talking for generations. Anyway, thank you for reading about the Phoenicians and the history of antisemitism, I legitimately think that more people should know those bits of history and I am glad that I was able to use the death of Epstein to bring some attention to those matters.

If you want to have some fun, try to imagine what Jeffrey Epstein was thinking when he was reading about Qanon for the past two years.

9. POSTSCRIPT

Oh right, and my theory about the cow. Almost forgot. I think that he bought it after one of the CowParades, because that's exactly what a rich socialite in the 90's would do, and got sick of it in his house at some point. Then he realized that he could keep his bodyguard from bothering him if he forced him to move the cow around just because he wanted some personal space (so that he could molest children).

twoday posted:

Finally I can post poo poo like this with the firm knowledge that it won't be the craziest thing in the thread. Anyway, none of this is really crazy, it's all well-sourced. But if you want to hop down into the warp-tunnel and skip ahead to Epstein Brain Level 99, read this:

~~~

The Cow on Pedo Island: A Detailed History



~~~

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. THE CANAANITES
2. THE PHOENICIANS
3. THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE
4. THE OLD GODS
5. CHILD SACRIFICE AND THE TOPHET OF CARTHAGE
6. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN?
7. MOLOCH
8. EPSTEIN
9. POSTSCRIPT

~~~

1. THE CANAANITES



So the Canaanites were the inhabitants of the land of Canaan, or the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, the Jordan River valley). It was not a specific term but a catch-all term, and not one that is really used today. Many of the groups living in this area in ancient times were Semitic peoples, and as time went on they branched off into various groups. The two which you might have heard of are the Jews and the Phoenicians (and also Carthaginians).


I will refer to these groups as the Phoenicians.

2. THE PHOENICIANS

The Phoenicians are, I think, one of the most fascinating of the Ancient Mediterranean cultures, and one of the least understood. They did a lot of cool stuff. They invented the alphabet, from which just about all other alphabets are derived (even Sanskrit!).They were the finest seafarers in the world in their day, and circumnavigated Africa in the 6th century BC (something which was recently replicated in a replica Phoenician ship), they invented the olive and set up a vast trade network to sell the oil and thus "lit up the world" by providing one of the first convenient cheap fuels for oil lamps.It's even been speculated that they discovered America more than a 1000 years before the Vikings

They were originally based in the area of Lebanon, and eventually founded Carthage in Tunisia, one of the coolest ancient cities:



The old Phoenician cities in the Levant were eventually conquered, but Carthage flourished in the western Mediterranean as the capital of the Carthaginian Empire. Then the Romans appeared on the scene, and started fighting with everybody. For a long time, the Cartheginians and the Romans were the main two powers in the Western Med and ended up bitter enemies engaged in existential warfare. The Carthaginian Hannibal (whose name contains "Ba'al," remember this) came close to conquering Italy, but didn't. Then Rome conquered Carthage.

3. THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE

I mentioned that we know little about the Phoenicians (and the Carthaginians). There are three reasons for this:

1) They were very secretive. They were super rich, and made this money through having a monopoly on trade goods and trade goods. For instance, to make bronze you need copper and tin, so both were pretty important. Copper is all over the place, but there are very few places in the world where you can mine tin.



While the waters of the Med are pretty calm, the waters in the Atlantic were really dangerous in those times. There were tides, currents, and trade winds which nobody understood. Except the Phoenicians. They were the only Mediterranean civ to go really go beyond Gibraltar. They traded with the Celts of Spain, France, and England, and developed a monopoly on tin, which they sourced from Druids in Cornwall. They went to incredible lengths to maintain their secrets. For instance, once a Roman ship tried to secretly follow some Carthaginian ships beyond Carthage to see where they were going. The Carthaginian captain steered them into a dangerous area filled with rough seas and sharp rocks, causing the Roman ship to sink, as well as his own small fleet. Almost everyone died, but the captain made it back to Carthage. Not only was he reimbursed for the loss of his ships, he was also lauded as a hero and handsomely rewarded, because he maintained the secret that kept their whole empire running. They also lied to everyone in the Mediterranean, telling them that the Atlantic was not navigable and full of sea monsters, so that nobody would even try to go there.

2) They were considered the bad guys by the primary predecessors of Western Civilization. The Romans hated them, and so did Jews (I'll explain why in a second). They were the Other and the Enemy, and they were spoken of almost exclusively in the worst of terms. Almost everything written about them was black propaganda, and not really reliable historical information.

3) Their culture was systematically exterminated. During the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, the Romans grew to despise the Carthaginians. Carthago delende est! or "Carthage must be destroyed!," as you may remember Cato saying in the Roman Senate. He would end every speech he gave this way, no matter what the topic of the speech was. It became ingrained in the Roman psyche that Carthage must be utterly wiped off the face of the earth if they were ever defeated. When the Romans finally invaded Carthage they killed 500,000 people, burned the city down and then went through the ashes tearing apart the rubble so that no building was left standing, and then they went out into the fields and literally salted the earth so that no crops could grow. 50,000 were enslaved and dispersed throughout the Empire. And though they brought writing to much of the world, most all of their own writing was systematically destroyed except for a small handful of books which the Romans copied, such a treatise on olive growing, a text which became the basis of an entire sector of the Roman economy. It was rumored that some Carthaginian leadership escaped to a secret island somewhere, but no evidence of this has been found.

So we have almost nothing left of their culture except some ruins and a book about olives.

4. THE OLD GODS

Their were two reasons everyone hated them - their wealth, and their religion.

The Isrealites were descended from Semitic people in the Levant, and so their ancestors worshiped the same ancient Semitic pantheon of gods and goddesses that was worshiped by the Phoenicians. However, if you are a keen reader of the Bible, you might have noticed that they became monotheistic at some point. At this point the worship of the Old Gods and their likenesses became forbidden.


This is from the ten commandments, as given to Moses by God himself on Mt. Sinai. He was up there alone for a while. My suspicion is he was there for quite some time, probably fasting and getting into some intense trance state. I suspect this because he was gone long enough that when he came back, some of the Isrealites had reverted back to the old Religion and set up a statue of a golden calf and were worshiping it.



Moses didn't like this; neither did God.


So from then on, the Israelites really didn't like the worship of cow statues. In the Bible it became kind of a symbol of the old polytheistic religion of the Levant which was specifically forbidden by God in the ten commandments, and comes up elsewhere in later books.

And even though this old Canaanite religion became symbolic of everything that was wrong and backwards, the Jews and the Canaanites (a.k.a. Phoenicians) weren't enemies because of this. A Phoenician King even helped sponsor Solomon when he was constructing of the first temple in Jerusalem, as they were allies at the time.

The Romans were the ones who really hated the Phoenicians, and the thing that really irked them was another aspect of their religion that developed, and you guessed it, it was...

5. CHILD SACRIFICE AND THE TOPHET OF CARTHAGE




Seems bad! However,


It seems that at some point the ancient Canaanites did practice child sacrifice, and then began substituting the children with animals and other offerings. Remember the story of Abraham? The one that is the basis of the Abrahamic religions of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam, the basis of most of all religious worship on the planet Earth? Well the story of Abraham is about him deciding to kill his child because God told him to, and then being told not to once God told him that he was just kidding and just wanted to see how far he would go. Just a prank, bro!

Abraham lived, according to the Bible, before the Jews were captured by the Egyptians. That is, he was an ancient Canaanite, and this story would have been known to the Jews and other Canaanites long before, and therefore was probably integrated into the Phoenician religion as well, which developed later. The Phoenician tophets have plenty of animals that were used as ritual substitutes for children, and this would seem to indicate that this was also acceptable. This is also what the Jews did in the first Temple period, sacrificing animals instead of kids (see: Leviticus), which would make their animal sacrifice seem like an act of mercy. "Yeah there's blood everywhere, just be happy I didn't do it to your family." Which is a good point, and will keep people allied with the people who sacrifice animals, and keep them in fear of the other bad people out there who might actually sacrifice children. In a way, it's just a giant protection racket that makes everyone follow the faith. "Do what we say, because the alternative is that something horrible will happen to your family.

The evidence of child sacrifice was the conclusion drawn by the first archaeologists who excavated the site in the 1970's, and the reason he thought this was the case was because it is something that is often repeated in Roman tirades about how evil the Carthaginians were, and explaining why Rome should go to war with Carthage. So, it's not the most reliable and objective source. And once something is written in history books by someone who made a major discovery, it takes a Herculean effort from later scholars to overturn it, because by then it's already canon.

Now, this leaves us with two possible interpretations of the Tophet of Carthage:

1) The Phoenicians practiced ritual child sacrifice all the time, they couldn't get enough of it. They were an entire massive culture of just straight up evil motherfuckers murdering children left and right, killing children and harnessing that dark child murder energy as the source of their power, and what keeps their empire going, and what keeps them wealthy and in control of the international economy. That's a bit difficult for me to believe, but not impossible; ancient times were pretty crazy.

This interpretation was pretty much what the Roman Senators were saying all the time as they were banging the drums of war. It's how they got everyone in Rome to despise Carthage, and agree that it must be destroyed. By promoting these ideas and this sentiment they were able to justifiably invade and conquer and obliterate their main political and economic opponent and use the spoils of war to double the size of their Empire. So I'm remiss to trust the Romans on this.

But the thing is we know almost jack poo poo about Phoenician religion because the Romans systematically obliterated them and all traces of their culture that they could get their hands on. And also they became the basis of all of Western Civilization so this bias is fundamentally ingrained in our culture.

2) The alternative interpretation of the Tophet which other archaeologists support is that the Tophet represents a necropolis, and was where the Carthaginians respectfully cremated and kept their dead kids in urns. Keep in mind that at this point in history infants and children had a really high rate of mortality from disease, complications at childbirth, etc. If the kids who died of natural causes aren't in the tophet, then nobody really knows where they are.

In this interpretation, the Romans were actually the bloodthirsty ones. While trying to drum up support for war and expand their empire, they came up with a smear campaign against the Carthaginians based upon their religion. The Roman religion (which they just straight up stole from the Greeks, and changed the names) was also polytheistic, but with very different roots than that of the Carthaginians, and the Senators took advantage of this. At the time of the Punic Wars the Romans mostly buried their dead, and the Carthaginians practiced cremation. They could have also heard of the story of Abraham and twisted it to say, "Look! Their God encourages Child Sacrifice! You can't let them be in charge of anything!" And this story is still the basis of our knowledge of Carthaginian religion because the Romans did an excellent cover-up of whatever the truth was. They built up sentiment and mistrust against the mysterious Middle-Eastern religion of the Carthaginians and then used this as a reason to perpetuate a genocide of a Semitic people for economic gain and the expansion of Empire.

6. WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? HOW THE gently caress IS THIS RELATED TO EPSTEIN, LIKE, AT ALL??

Understanding this history, as well as the way this historical narrative developed and was presented is absolutely essential to understanding everything that has happened since then, because this the story of how the Romans ended up in charge of the Mediterranean, which gave them the resources to build up the Roman Empire and take control of Europe. The destruction of Carthage enabled the rise of the Rome, which in turn determined the fate of Europe, and thus all of Western Civilization for the last two thousand years. Understanding this story is essential if you want to understand the DNA of Western culture. I'll get to Epstein in a minute, I'm at the crux of the argument right now though, so pay attention.

Now, to get to the cow, and move a bit further forward along the timeline of history:

Christianity grew out of Judaism, and incorporated into it all the stories from the Hebrew bible, including the stories of Abraham as well of that of the Golden Calf. The Romans adopted Christianity and spread it through Europe. The empire eventually collapsed, but their ideas did not. While all the books written by the people who invented the alphabet are lost, those of the Romans survived, being carefully copied and studied and repeated for thousands of years, with all the later societies of western Europe being based upon them. The idea that there are still people out there from the Levant who were practicing "The Old Ways" (which included child sacrifice) was politically expedient for Rome during the Punic Wars, but it espoused with such intensity that it never really went away. That idea is still floating around in our society today and continues to shape the trajectory of western Civilization. It warped and changed a bit over time, but the core of it remains. First of all, since the genocide of the Phoenicians was largely written off as a success, and that religion extinguished, the animosity of the original Roman anti-Carthaginian antisemitism was carried over to the other Semites which were encountered in western Europe - The Jews. One way to look at the history of antisemitism in Europe is that it is the story of the descendants of the Romans hating the descendants of the Canaanites. It's a loving ancient conflict which was fought throughout the middle ages, and the 20th century, and continues to be fought by some today.

This has manifested in various ways at various times, but one essential and constantly recurring theme has been human (often child) sacrifice and the worship of a false god (often symbolized as a bull). Somewhat ironically, these ideas are essential to Judiasm as well, but historically they have been used by the Christians of Europe to persecute the Jews.

First, there was the idea of blood libel. Jews were viewed as suspect, practicing an old religion which most people associated with human sacrifice, etc. A well-known example of this would be Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice when Shylock the Jewish Merchant demands a pound of human flesh as repayment for a debt. But often whenever there was a murder in medieval Europe would blame the local Jews for this and a bunch of them would be executed. This is how the Jews ended up being banned from England in the 13th century. Wherever they fled to these rumors would follow them, and the local xenophobes and preachers were often quick to recite the verses in the bible about Abraham and Leviticus, and accuse the Jews of murdering children. Eventually this idea became so widespread that it became the common understanding of people that one (secret) part of the Jewish religion was that they had to murder one Christian baby every year if they wanted to appease their allegedly bloodthirsty Jewish God and be allowed to return to Jerusalem. This imagined payment of Christian child blood to the Jew God is known as blood libel. These stories, in one variation or another, became widespread throughout Europe, the same way everyone reading this knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood. So the Jews were met with the same accusations wherever they went, and stories of Jews eating children were widely believed through the early 20th century. This narrative was exploited by all the local Christians (whose most holy city was what? Oh yeah, Rome), and the Jews were exploited as a scapegoat by the local authorities for economic and political gain (ironically, the concept of the scapegoat also comes from the Hebrew bible. For examples of this, one can think of the Spanish Inquisition or the pogroms in the Russian Empire. These beliefs began fading away first in Western Europe in places like the Dutch Republic, where Jews became an integral part of society, and later in Eastern Europe, paralleling the timeline of the spread of Christianity across Europe but with a delay of about a thousand years. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in 1919 in Russia, and said that the Jews secretly run the world and eat children, which was later recycled by the Nazis. However, even god drat Hitler realized it's hard to make people believe in the 20th century believe that Jews literally sacrifice children, so he slightly modified the idea a bit to describe the Jews as a parasitic minority eating away at the health of the German people. And they bought it.

7. MOLOCH



Besides Christianity in medieval Europe, there were also lots of esoteric religious beliefs based on a mix of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, kabbalah and other Jewish texts, and a bunch of poo poo that people just made up. Think of alchemy, or Rosecrucianism, or Freemasonry. There are a bunch of others. These people dug up a bunch of ancient ideas and reworked them and adjusted them to fit their whims. This is how Moloch emerged as a theme in conspiracy culture. Let's see what wikipedia entry has to say on the matter.


Ok, so Moloch is based on anti-Canaanite stuff from the bible, including the Golden Calf. But it also fits very well with the European bias against Semites, and also is just a loving perfect thing to talk about if you are a good Christian who hates the Jews, because not only does it explain why you think the Jews are backwards and terrible, but you can also refer to the Christian bible for proof of all your claims. Read the wiki article about Moloch if you want to dive into a two thousand year old cesspit of circular arguments about why the Phoenicians actually did sacrifice children. But anyway, the idea of Moloch helped perpetuate the idea of child sacrifice throughout the ages, and still comes up today when people are really pissed off at someone and want to depict them as the worst scum of the earth. This is why people were freaking out about the cow on Epstein's island. It proves he's a Molochian, doesn't it? He had a cow statue, that's the key to all of this!

This is what people actually literally still believe, by the way:

https://twitter.com/ottovonschirekt/status/1158658206387691521?s=20

https://twitter.com/FightRasche/status/1155853574196355170?s=20

I don't believe this myself, because I have an alternative theory to explain the cow that I will get to in a second, but first I will round out every other part of this story, and how it relates to the Epstein Affair.

8. EPSTEIN

Taking all of this into account, we are left with two extreme possibilities which would explain everything that we have read in the past week:

1) There was a ship filled with Carthaginian noblemen which escaped the fall of Carthage, and somehow they not only integrated into Roman society, they managed to take total control of it, along with the rest of the world. They did this in total secrecy for thousands of years, secretly carrying on their sick and depraved religion of child sacrifice through a brutal tradition of blackmail and murder. They have since that time been in control of all aspects of culture and every living human being, and the procession of history has been one massive illusion. Everything you know is a lie, it's all been a hoax perpetrated for centuries and they've managed to cover up all the traces of their misdeeds. We are but the cattle of the worshipers of Moloch.

or

2) This is exactly the same loving story that has been pushed onto the public in Western civilization since Cato was raging in the Senate. It worked for Cato, it worked for the xenophobic English in 1290, it worked for the Spanish Inquisition, it worked for the Tsarists, it worked for the Nazis, and now during the presidency of Donald J. Trump it's working again. All you have to do is make up a story about an evil conspiracy of Jews that want to murder your children, and people will follow you anywhere. There are how many millions of Q supporters now? How many of them literally believe in Moloch? That they were literally sacrificing children for their moon god? poo poo's not real fam, go get some fresh air.

And one could even go so far as to say that it's all made up, it's all a lie, an elaborate psy-op, that the victims are actors, that the murder was a hoax, that it's all just a well thought-out theaterpiece meant to turn your average American against the Mossad and encourage a new era of total mistrust and isolationism.

https://twitter.com/ldrinkh20/status/1161960553465700352?s=20

But I personally think the truth lies in the middle. I think that he was deffo an intelligence asset and loving teenagers and blackmailing people and being blackmailed himself and involved in a bunch of illegal poo poo that he may or may have not had permission to be involved in as an undercover agent. And then something went wrong or too much leaked and they had to pull the plug, either by murdering him or putting him into witness protection. And I don't think we will ever know the truth because there intelligence agencies at play putting out disinformation and double disinformation. But I am also kind of thinking that there were some white supremacist trump supporters in on this who were taking advantage of it to promote the ancient myths of blood libel and Moloch to brainwash a bunch of sheeple for their own purposes. But who the gently caress knows? Maybe it's a CIA pay-op to encourage proletarian revolution because they did an analysis and realized it would be in the best interests to have a a more socialist society in its rivalry with China and cooked this up to overthrow the yoke of the capitalist oligarchy (probably not though). The beauty of this sea of insanity is that you can project whatever you want to upon it, and it's broken so many brains that it will keep people talking for generations. Anyway, thank you for reading about the Phoenicians and the history of antisemitism, I legitimately think that more people should know those bits of history and I am glad that I was able to use the death of Epstein to bring some attention to those matters.

If you want to have some fun, try to imagine what Jeffrey Epstein was thinking when he was reading about Qanon for the past two years.

9. POSTSCRIPT

Oh right, and my theory about the cow. Almost forgot. I think that he bought it after one of the CowParades, because that's exactly what a rich socialite in the 90's would do, and got sick of it in his house at some point. Then he realized that he could keep his bodyguard from bothering him if he forced him to move the cow around just because he wanted some personal space (so that he could molest children).

Orbis Tertius posted:

the repeated comparisons to bland across multiple outlets is pretty fuckin weird not gonna lie