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How much more suspicious activity and lucky coincidences would there need to be to convince you (if you're a current denier) that Epstein was murdered/"allowed" to kill himself?
Because from what I see there's a lot of weird things already. The cameras for in front of his cell are down, guards apparently failed to check in on him (apparently both of them fell asleep despite this being their job), his roommate he's supposed to have for suicide watch is moved out earlier that day without replacement, and two staff members get accused of falsifying records only for the charges to get dropped silently two years after over new years.
Now the one camera that was working has footage released from it only for it to be likely edited video that doesn't even provide a meaningful perspective even if it wasn't edited (so why is it changed and had parts removed? Was something incidentally caught on one of the cameras they didn't shut down?) and a full minute missing along with the other smaller possible cuts, a cut that was completely unmentioned in the inspector general's report but suddenly shows up now. With an excuse that the "missing minute" is a standard reset and the recordings aren't operating at that time yet it now appears to exist according to government leakers.
That same day Epstein was also allowed to make an unmonitored call on a line intended for attorneys only to a non-attorney, with the regional director saying "We don't know what happened on that phone. It could have potentially lead to the incident, but we don't - we will never know" which is another oddity. He claimed he was calling his mother ... his mother has been dead almost two decades before then.
Then afterwards, Epstein's own lawyers contested the official finding and hired their own pathologist who said the injuries were more indicative of homicide by strangulation than normal self hanging.
Then of course we have things like Epstein's sweetheart deal maker Alex Acosta being a literal high level member of the government stepping down only a month before the suicide. Was he distancing himself? Cause that's a mighty odd coincidence too to leave right around that time.
And we get told all sorts of things about having files ready for release, only for them to apparently not actually exist like all the files sitting on Pam Bondi's desk. We have leaks of multiple high level politicians (including the current president refusing to release the records who also resigned over the federal government when Epstein died and hired Acosta earlier) with close connections to him. We have intelligence operatives and high level officials trying hard both directly and indirectly as anonymous sources to deny accusations he was working for them which many powerful people are trying to tout as evidence. Which fair, I expect them to deny if it's not true. But also I expect them to lie if it is true.
Like oh really spy agencies, half your job is to be skilled liars and we're just supposed to take your word for it. People can't be this lacking in self-awareness right? So why do so many of the powerful people with connections to Epstein apparently lack this understanding and think it's compelling counter evidence by itself?
Like obviously none of these things in their own are proof by themselves. If they were, we wouldn't be having a discussion like this we would just say "look at the 100% proof it happened". But a lot of truthful things don't have 100% proof. I'm pretty sure OJ Simpson is a murderer despite not having seen it myself and him being found not guilty. I'm pretty sure Casey Anthony killed her daughter. There's a really strong likelihood Micheal Jackson molested some children. Carole Baskin (although a bit weaker of a suspicion) might have been involved in the disappearance of her husband. None of these have hard conclusive evidence, yet none of these are odd to believe.
And just like those examples, there's a whole lot of weird oddities and coincidences and suspicious behavior around Epstein, his death, and the information on him and his connections that it seems pretty reasonable to suspect his supposed suicide wasn't entirely legit. Outside of 100% proof, how much more would be needed before it stops being "just a conspiracy theory"?
There are additional suspicios angles with Epstein murder - specifically that Epsteins associate Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced for 20 years for sexually abusing minors, and so far she is the only one sentenced. In fact even in the official government website there was at least one other person involved in the scheme:
There was another associate who was charged, weirdly enough he also decided to commit suicide https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60443518
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Have you actually read the published report on his death? If you haven't, read it before you start theorizing about how he couldn't possibly have committed suicide. If you have, I'd like to know which parts you find credible and which parts you find incredible, and for you to offer evidence as to why you find those parts incredible. And no, I'm not going to link it, because if you're so interested in saying this you should at least do the work of finding it yourself. It's not that hard.
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He was a psychopath who has been getting away with it his entire life. I don't think it's plausible, at all, that he killed himself. These people are optimistic and never really give up. You could maybe expect a guy like that to kill himself once he's in a supermax with no parole, etc.
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I am a person who tends to resist conspiracy theories - could be described as other in this thread have said as a "nothing-ever-happens" guy. So I'll just go through some of your points and talk about why they don't seem dispositive of much to me.
With respect to the guards, very easy for me to chalk this up to an American prison system that doesn't really care about the well-being of its inmates and is content to hire low-paid grunts to perform thankless security work.
As for the cameras being down, I'm not aware of how extensive that problem was. Were only the cameras in front of his cell down? Was there a more systematic issue throughout the prison? Had this been happening for months, or were the cameras fine until the night of his death? I'm not sure I've seen people come with data about these questions. So I don't have much to do with the cameras being down absent that further context.
It's suspicious for sure. But I guess I find some kind of nightly reset that happens at 11:59 every night plausible. Of course if that is well known, it's also the perfect time to do something nefarious - but the video also isn't even an angle that is very relevant to Epstein's cell and I believe I've read that there were hallways into Epstein's cell that wouldn't require going through this camera angle, so why would it matter anyway.
Epstein claiming he's calling his dead mother sounds like the behavior of somebody going through severe mental anguish that might ultimately lead them to suicide. What would be the reason he claimed he called his mother in the scenario where he had no plans to kill himself? It's some kind of coded signal that means "I'm perfectly well and have no plans hang myself?" Why not just say that directly?
Lawyers gonna lawyer. They can always find an expert witness to defend their side of the case. I don't know how the legal payments work, but could they just be extracting more money from the Epstein estate for as long as they are able to? With respect to the actual facts, I have no idea whether they are more likely to indicate homicide or strangulation.
A little sus, but the essence of what happened here is that a Republican US District Attorney for South Florida was elevated to a cabinet level position by a Republican politician from South Florida.
This doesn't make any sense to me. If he was going to distance himself, why not leave the administration well before Epstein was even arrested again. And it's not a coincidence he left around that time - he left directly because of Epstein's arrest and the public's subsequent heightened awareness of the 2008 sweetheart deal he made.
Very easy for me to chalk this up to Bondi being a populist buffoon who had been either convinced that there definitely was a there there and was confident she would find something, or she might have just wanted to sound really confident and cool on her Fox News hit. I watched that live while at the gym and that's what I thought at the time; it did not give me any impression that files with any new substance would actually be released. She just fucked up because she wanted to deliver something to the part of Trump's base that really cares about this.
The connections to Mossad through Maxwell are somewhat odd. But he seemed to very publicly have these connections, right? His friendship with Maxwell seems to have been no secret, nor are Maxwell's father's connections to Mossad. I'm not claiming anybody that interacted with them knew of these connections (though they probably could have if they were powerful people and did any bit of research on the people they were going to engage in sketchy behavior with), only claiming that Epstein would not exactly be the most subtle Mossad agent of all time. The connections were there in plain sight for anybody with interest to do so to discover.
I don't know how to answer this question. Definitely video footage of people strangling Epstein would convince me. Anybody (prison guards, Alex Acosta) going on record claiming knowledge or evidence of the conspiracy. But it is tough to know exactly would tip the scales short of those things.
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I think it was 3 minutes
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I was struck recently by this article talking about how the underlying anxieties are more or less true in both the conspiracy and non conspiracy versions (powerful financiers getting away with stuff and having undue influence, etc) but here is how it phrased what it called the two notable holes:
I mean, isn’t it a lot easier and less suspicious if he dies earlier? Aside from what I view to be some major logistical problems with a quick three minute in and out strangulation, though I admit I’m not well read in to the nitty-gritty. And:
Epstein literally attempted suicide a few weeks before, and actually did right about when he was denied bail and it became increasingly clear that the best case scenario for him still would involve lengthy amounts of jail time. He’s a billionaire, used to much nicer things, and was not in a nice prison. As far as suicidal logic goes, that seems pretty normal? And incompetence by prison guards is definitely my base expectation. Shit is boring, pay is often bad, and the job doesn’t attract the best.
My hypothetical plan for killing the guy would basically be "contact some organized criminal enterprise that has associates already in said prison, and guards already on the payroll, and arrange for there to be a window where those associates can access the cell just long enough to strangle the guy and leave without being observed."
I assume that targeted hits in prison are an order of magnitude or so more common than hits outside of it (in the U.S.). So we just need means and opportunity.
Ironically putting him in prison allows you MORE control over weird variables, rather than having to arrange for him to be suicided outside of prison, where he has some freedom of movement and can set up countermeasures, AND you will have to do a lot more cleanup of evidence.
This particular facility is better known for several rape settlements (about guards), a beating settlement, and holding El Chapo for a bit. I don’t get the vibe that it’s the kind of jail, due to its nature as higher security, where gangs have the run of it… not to say it isn’t plagued by typical jail management stuff. I looked a bit into the history of the place. There’s a few cases where a guard smuggled in cell phones, various drugs, and lots of other contraband, but one was for two people and was a money making scheme. The other was three guards and the inmates had local gang connections (they are after all criminals from the area in many cases) however the guards didn’t. By all accounts the place was miserable - worse than Rikers said one inmate, with a mountain of lurid corroboration. El Chapo himself allegedly had a mental breakdown after staying there for a just few months. All this combines to me to suggest the normal official outcome is more likely.
Now you’ll never hear me call it impossible. It’s plausible beyond a superficial level. But far from likely. Not likely enough IMO that treating it as a worst case scenario is logical to do. For the guards to escalate to murder of a high profile suspect like that a noticeable amount of money would have to change hands and the feds are pretty good at money tracking, for whatever else they sometimes lack.
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Are you basing this on actual knowledge of the prison system, or your own interpolations based on TV and movies?
Actual knowledge in the sense that I've read about the topic a bit. They exist, and they have extensive influence inside prisons.
I have not been to prison.
The main point I believe is that most prison gangs have a ready supply of guys who are in for life and are thus willing to commit murders if ordered to do so, and if not can still coerce someone to do a murder for them.
Most of said gangs have affiliated orgs outside the prison that can act as points of contact. Since criminals outside prison anticipate going to prison in the future, the outside guys really want to stay in the inside guys' good graces.
If you want somebody who is currently in a prison dead, this is the most straightforward approach I can think of, which avoids having to sneak your own independent contractor in and out without leaving much trace.
As I said in another comment, and would be blindingly obvious if you had read the official report, Epstein wasn't in the general population. He had limited contact with other prisoners. Furthermore, this was more of a jail than a prison, with people moving in and out regularly. Epstein was intentionally segregated from other prisoners for the explicit purpose of protection; this theory doesn't comport with the known facts.
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A soldier with the right equipment can do it in seconds.
What equipment would allow you to kill someone in seconds leaving only the marks left on Epstein? How many seconds are we talking? Getting a garrote on a resisting victim is not trivial unless you have the element of surprise, and strangulation takes a while to set in. Even after someone goes out they are not dead immediately. Whether by blood or air choke, it takes seconds to put someone out but much longer to kill.
Unlike the movies, real life garrotes function by instantly crushing the windpipe, the killer doesn’t need to sit there for three and a half minutes choking the guy out. And controlling a resisting victim is pretty easy when you have three or four people.
You said “a soldier” so I assumed you had some tool in mind that would allow one person to reliably strangle a victim. It does seem plausible that a crushed trachea could keep the air supply cut off after an attacker walks away, though in this case if he was killed he would have been hung afterwards which would have maintained pressure on the blood vessels as well.
Honestly for a single attacker the best tool might have been a taser to subdue him and then they could have just strangled him with the sheets since they have the stage the hanging anyway.
Typically when a soldier uses a garrote, the victim is pushed forward with a knee to the back, while the garrote is pulled backwards with force. This crushes the trachea to the point the airway cannot reopen, and possibly even breaks the neck. It is a useful technique for quietly and quickly removing pickets, and if you want to see a demonstration there are World War II era training films that show the technique. This is consistent with the postmortem analysis that found physical effects that differed from those you would see with a suspension hanging, and were more consistent with a violent strangulation.
Yeah that makes sense in light of the broken bones and cartilage. Apparently those injuries can happen in older individuals from hanging, but I can’t imagine he had much space to get a good drop if he did hang himself, so it still seems pretty suspicious to me.
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A decently strong guy with a bit of Jiu-jistu training could do it, too.
Rear naked choke to render him unconscious, then string him up to actually die of strangulation.
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Maybe they found it easier to kill him when he was trapped in a prison cell unable to escape, than when he was free to move around at will? Contra to the memes, I don't think Hillary Clinton actually has an organization of John Wick style super-assassins at her beck and call ready to hunt down inconvenient witnesses wherever they may hide. Killing someone and making it look like an accident or suicide isn't exactly easy.
Does it even have to look like an accident? Surely there's enough dodgy people on in Epstein's circles where if he was gunned down it's ugly but nobody's overly questioning it.
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At some point, it's not a question of amassing evidence. It's a matter of actually analyzing that evidence, putting it into context, and making reasonable judgements about it.
I'm not an expert on the prison system, and I'm guessing no one else here is either. So I have no idea how common it is for prisoners to commit suicide, especially under extreme cases like Epstein. I also have no idea how common it is for cameras to fail or for guards to fall asleep on the job, or any of the other fuckups. It does seem to have been quite the fuckup, but then I'm also guessing that real-life prison is not like the super-prisons shown in hollywood movies- it seems like a really boring job and I could imagine the guards just constantly falling asleep/messing things up while they're sitting around all day watching nothing happen.
for context, i'm currently staying in a building that's supposed to have 24/7 doorman/security guard at the front door. But if you come in at night it's really not hard to find them asleep and just walk past them. Sometimes in the day, too.
I could be convinced otherwise! I'd just like to see a breakdown from an actual expert, showing what normal conditions are like in prison, and how unlikely it was for things to go wrong like this. I don't want to wade through thousands of hours of camera footage myself because I have better things to do. If that makes me a sheep who can't think for myself, so be it.
I’m not an expert on the prison system. But I know prison guards and they do not consider the lives of pedophiles particularly valuable. They are not murderers themselves, mind, but allowing people who have done bad things to die- whether allowed to kill themselves or murdered- does not seem like something they would object to.
They are also generally quite straightforward that they, personally, totally don’t take bribes but most of their coworkers do.
Prison guards letting him kill himself for a small bribe from his lawyer seems really plausible. So does letting someone else kill him for a small bribe from the Clintons/mossad. Them personally killing him sounds like a bigger conspiracy theory.
Also, a situation where guards are bribed for a few bucks to have access to a prisoner is actually a pretty good way to carry out a hit on someone, since the guards are incentivized the cover it up rather than cop to "yeah I totally let my prisoner get murdered but in my defense I thought they were just going to have a conversation! I would have asked for a lot more than $500 if I had known it was a MURDER!" (I haven't viewed the film, so maybe this scenario is implausible for various reasons.)
I think there's a common misunderstanding of conspiracies that supposes that everyone involved in the conspiracy knows everything. Which I think is dumb. One of the big problems with petty corruption is precisely that it opens the door to things like murder and espionage, even if the corrupt officials would never intentionally get wrapped up in murder and espionage and merely thought they were turning a blind eye to smuggling or petty tax evasion.
Anyway, the very funniest possibility is that Epstein was murdered Hollywood style by a guy with a "certain set of skills" turned vigilante seeking justice under the belief that Epstein was going to be let off with a slap on the wrist again and now the "Deep State" is left holding the bag.
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It’s not unlikely that Epstein was “allowed” to kill himself because his attorneys bribed some jail staff, sure. That isn’t what 99% of people online mean when they say there were suspicious circumstances around his death, though.
If “the powers that be” wanted to kill Epstein to prevent him from talking then
(1) They would have been aware in advance of the huge criminal investigation into him and that charges were being prepared, given that it had already involved interviews with dozens of witnesses, and given that the press (notably the Miami Herald) had been reporting on the renewed attention to the case since late 2018.
(2) They would surely have killed him when he was a private citizen and before he was arrested and locked up in a jail in the middle of NYC. Slip some nerve agent or poison into his tea in Paris or London two months before and he dies of natural causes before charges are quietly dropped due to the primary suspect being deceased, happens all the time.
—
Even if he had information or secrets to trade, Epstein would only have talked if he could make a deal. There was no deal to be made. The public can occasionally accept mobsters getting out of jail free / a sweetheart deal in exchange for ratting on the whole organization because they’re only involved in a bit of extortion, drug dealing and the occasional murder of their own kind. The public (and it was public and media pressure that led to the Epstein prosecution) was never going to accept someone who allegedly molested hundreds of teenage girls getting a year or two in prison (a second time).
Epstein’s lawyers told him he was going to die in prison and it is very plausible he told them that in that case he wanted to do it now. He had no immediate family other than his brother, no children, no wife, was too toxic for anyone else to visit. What awaited him was a life in solitary (if he was lucky), no sex, no travel, no interesting conversation, no power, no money, plus occasionally getting stabbed like Chauvin when getting moved between his cell and the yard when the prison officers looked the other way. He wasn’t religious in a way that would preclude suicide. It is not highly uncommon for those on bail for serious charges to kill themselves.
(2) They would surely have killed him when he was a private citizen and before he was arrested and locked up in a jail in the middle of NYC. Slip some nerve agent or poison into his tea in Paris or London two months before and he dies of natural causes before charges are quietly dropped due to the primary suspect being deceased, happens all the time.
This assumes that 1. Whoever would have had him killed decided to way beforehand and 2. That killing a high profile target like this in public is actually a better and smarter idea than just hanging him in a prison when you have the resources and power to initiate a coverup there easily and 3. That they're perfect geniuses with masterminded well thought out plans instead of just shitty people hastily trying to cover up things as they go "oh shit"
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Not everyone has perfect knowledge of what's going to happen.
Why are his lawyers insisting they don't believe he killed himself? Some self-serving ploy to keep being paid by his estate or what?
Because it’s a smart way of avoiding the insinuation that they helped him kill himself by doing things that are clearly illegal (like bribing prison staff)?
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"If the conspiracy were true, they would have been a lot smarter about it."
Are you challenging the Retard Hypothesis?
Look this tiny highlight from OP: "yo, imma call my mom" when she’s been dead for two decades? How silly! A high-profile international trafficker would construct a good lie, not a stupid lie. And prison staff would be naturally suspicious, and verify that he was actually calling his mother.
I mean what, is everyone involved just hopelessly retarded?
yes
The retard hypothesis is generally true, but when alleging an extraordinarily wide-ranging and complex blackmail scheme that involved half the most powerful people in the world, multiple US presidents, royalty, world leaders, many of the richest people in the world (including the richest at that time) and countless government officials, it’s cheap to then retreat into “they were also so dumb that despite this colossal intelligence operation, they had no idea he was being investigated or going to be arrested, or they did and allowed it to happen, escalating into a media circus that increased attention to the case 100x, then killed him afterwards”.
I get what you’re trying to say, but the evidence is overwhelming.
Take Ms Maxwell: she sat around Burgerstan for a year while Epstein was arrested and dragged through the legal system, all while having citizenship in France—a country that has refused to extradite citizens to the US on this very matter. How irredeemably stupid do you have to be to have citizenship in a sanctuary state and just sit around on your ass anyway waiting to be arrested?
Whatever this cabal may be, it’s not an elite pedophile cabal. It’s at best a retarded pedophile cabal. And probably not even that: it seems more like a 17-and-364 days larping-as-a-pedophile cabal. Alan Dershowitz supposedly even kept his underwear on. Can you imagine the blackmail? It’s probably some washed up widow from Latin America whose husband died in a cartel spat lying about her age as she gives this crusty old prune a massage with all the enthusiasm of doing the dishes after Christmas dinner (while Dershowitz giddily thinks this is the hottest thing ever). Now that is blackmail!
And most of the people involved aren’t even blackmail-able in any sensible way. Take Clinton—his involvement seems to have been after his presidency. The fuck are they gonna do, blackmail someone who isn’t even in a position of political power anymore? And what of Dershowitz. He’s a Jew. Is Israel blackmailing the Jews into being Jewish?
All of this is so, so stupid. The reality is rightoid conspiritards fantasize about being ruled by a pedophile cabal because of their latent ancestral memory of living under the Catholic Church—a continent-ruling boylover cabal that was on a mission to breed the world’s most beautiful race. The plan was okay for a while, until it worked too well and Mewtwo escaped his cage, rather confused and devoid of purpose, but nonetheless extremely powerful. Thus the whole scheme came crashing down, and the Catholic Church is now so degraded it doesn’t even remember its own secrets: they have an American pope wearing an Apple Watch at mass.
This is the power of the retard hypothesis.
Maxwell was the fall guy. She’s a soldier and a patriot and could be relied on to tough out fifteen years in the federal pen for the cause. Unlike Epstein who was a flaky hedonist.
Somehow Benjamin Netanyahu knew about Monica Lewinsky before everyone else and attempted to blackmail Clinton with it.
Being Jewish doesn’t automatically make you a die hard supporter of Israel. Norm Finklestein and Ron Unz are Jewish after all. And even if someone is a die hard supporter of Israel, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to be willing to dangerous illegal things to help Israel without additional incentive.
Maxwell was a rich kid dilettante who wouldn’t even be considered Jewish in Israel (her mother was a Christian gentile) who never displayed any work ethic or fervour in her life unless you consider her the most dedicated Reddit mod of all time.
The reason she didn’t flee to France was probably because she or her lawyers believed that the FBI had put her on a no-exit list and that she’d be arrested when trying to leave even if they weren’t ready to arrest her yet provided she stayed in the country. They probably had, by the way, given her French citizenship was widely known.
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If you know anything about Alan Dershowitz, you know that he does not require any blackmail to be outspoken on Israel. Unless it's your contention, of course, that the man has been blackmailed since the 1970s, because Mossad really thinks that getting Dersh to be outspoken on Israel will move the needle among the public even though absolutely no one at the time would have their views on the matter changed because of fucking Alan Dershowitz.
You are sidestepping my assertion. Blackmail isn’t needed to ensure general support. Blackmail is needed to get people to undertake specific illegal or dangerous acts.
And what, pray tell, are the illegal or dangerous acts that Alan Dershowitz has committed on behalf of Mossad?
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I want to object to this conjunction. This conjoins two wildly different things.
Maybe let me set out a continuum
a. Epstein didn't want to die and (one or more) people made him not be alive x. Epstein wanted to die and (one or more) people removed safeguards that might have otherwise prevented his suicide z. Epstein wanted to die and managed to kill himself despite typical jail safeguards
Obviously we're going to have to draw the line somewhere between a/z on when it actually becomes a conspiracy and no long (as you say) "legit". I'm putting a finger on the scales here, but I think (x) is probably a lot closer to (z) here.
If we want to start moving closer to (a) here, maybe we could say
d. Epstein didn't want to die, but one ore more people convinced him that if he didn't kill himself, they would torture his family forever. They then removed the safeguards and encouraged him to do so.
Or maybe closer to x.
q. Epstein spoke with someone who told him (truthfully? who knows?) that there was no way to beat his charge and that no one would extract him from the justice system. He then formed an intent to die which he carried out.
t. Same as (q) but the someone also got the guards to look the other way.
We can go on and on. Anyway, I really don't like conjoining "Epstein didn't kill himself" with "Epstein had no option and decide to kill himself" and "Epstein killed himself and the guards let him do it". It's a classic motte and bailey.
I'll divulge my object-level feeling here:
From there, I think I'm confident that we should call it a suicide in the broadest sense of "Epstein killed himself". Insofar as you want to get into the conspiracy theory of the last point, eh. It's fine I guess, I don't object, but I don't think it's really much of a conspiracy theory.
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I wonder if I can take this as an opportunity to just start from the top?
I have very little prior investment in Epstein. I had never heard of him before he became famous on the internet - for years literally the only thing I knew about Epstein was that he's the guy who didn't kill himself. "Epstein didn't kill himself" was a meme I saw in a range of places but I didn't know what it meant or its significance. Eventually I did get curious and looked it up, and what I got was basically that Epstein was a rich asshole, that he had social connections to a lot of other rich assholes, that he liked sex with underage girls, and that he was eventually caught, went to prison, and probably killed himself there. There are theories that he didn't kill himself, ranging from those that seem superficially plausible (e.g. a sympathetic guard helped provide tools and opportunity for him to commit suicide) and those that seem a lot more implausible (e.g. a wealthy or influential person organised an assassination to prevent him revealing damaging information), but I did not bother looking into it much more than that. Either suicide and what we might call the motte of EDKH could be true, and either way it's inconsequential. The bailey of a large elite conspiracy to kill Epstein before he can reveal something dramatic sounds so much less likely that it would take significantly more for me to update in that direction.
So the questions I would ask you, as presumably an EDKH-believer, are:
What do you think is likely to have happened?
Why is this important?
As far as I can tell from the outside, the EDKH theory is largely circumstantial - here are a bunch of odd things that happened around Epstein's death, it is implausible that these were all just coincidences, here are some other plausible explanations. There doesn't seem to be any truly solid evidence of foul play; just a lot of things that seem suggestive. Is that much correct?
Right now where I am is more or less, "probably he killed himself, there's an outside chance that some sympathetic guard or other staff member helped him kill himself, anything larger than that gets Basic-Argument-Against-Conspiracy-Theories-ed away, and I don't care very much which of the former two theories is true". So, why should I update in the direction of anything more significant, and more importantly, why does it matter? Why should I care about this?
Well yeah, it is mostly a mix of that and the blatant lying happening in explanation. Like why say it's raw footage when it doesn't appear to be? Why say the files existed only for them to not exist later? Why is Trump now saying everyone is past Epstein and no one cares after his admin promised to release the information before the election?
Maybe they're all just so addicted to lying and coverups that they'd do the opposite of OJ (the joke where they framed a guilty man) and tried to coverup an innocent situation, but come on it's so weird. And like I gave examples for, there's lots of things in life that we don't have 100% proof for but we can still reasonably say "yeah that most likely happened"
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The biggest argument in favor of EDKH, and the reason I endorse a (mild) version of it, is that it was predictive, and already existed prior to its occurring, giving the authorities every opportunity to prevent it. Almost all conspiracies are post-hoc rationalizations that look at the facts and then concoct a theory to retroactively explain the events. But EDKH predicted it ahead of time. Everyone knew that Epstein had dirt on famous and powerful people. We still don't know exactly who, you can't point to any one specific person and say for certain that they went to Epstein's island AND committed crimes while there: anyone who visited might plausibly not have known exactly the details (they might have come expecting sexy 18 year old prostitutes and been shocked and offended when offered an underage one, or Epstein might have known their temperment and offered exclusively legal and willing prostitutes to certain members.) In fact I would be shocked if there wasn't at least one person who physically went to the island and yet committed no crimes there. But there were lots who did, and some of them are probably politicians, and each has a large incentive to want him dead before he can spill the beans. And we knew this and they should have had him on extra super suicide watch as a result. He was one of the most at risk and most important prisoners in the last century. I don't care if they had to have a guard paid to literally sit outside his cell and watch him 24/7, it should have been completely and utterly impossible for him to die via any cause, even a heart attack, without immediate intervention.
The reason I believe EDKH conspiracy is because Epstein is dead, and if there wasn't a conspiracy he should be alive. Now, in a literal sense I think the most likely scenario is that Epstein physically did kill himself with some sort of deal with the powers that be regarding his legacy or heirs or something or other, and then they had the prison warden turn a blind eye. The reason I don't think this falls afoul of the Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories is exception D that scott points out in his article:
I don't think this requires a lot of people to actually be in on it. Possibly as few as three: one politician, one highly ranked prison officer (not necessarily the top, but high enough to pull some strings), and Epstein himself. Politician gives the go ahead wink wink nudge to the officer, officer arranges the schedules, residence, and guard patrols, and temporarily disables a camera, and then Epstein hangs himself with no witnesses in exchange for whatever the politician promised. It's likely that it was a little more involved, there were probably a lot of politicians on his list who gave tacit approval or wink wink nudge nudge when big politician says he'll "handle it". A bunch of guards might have been suspicious about the slightly unusual orders they received. But most of them don't need to be directly involved or have any incriminating details with which to whistleblow, just conspiracy theories of their own. Even the stronger version where Epstein was literally murdered only requires one additional person: the assassin, who has obviously strong incentive not to whistleblow themselves.
This is important because Epstein had important information. I firmly believe that the real Epstein list was in his head. Any physical list is going to be something like "visitors" to the island which is suspicious but not incriminating enough to act on. Without Epstein's testimony we have no way to distinguish stupid people who wanted to have creepy but legal fun with young adult women, sex offenders who had sex with underage girls, and national traitors who had sex with underage girls and then got blackmailed by Epstein into abusing their political power for him. They're all going to get away with it. Even if his death involved no conspiracies at all I still want everyone we can possibly verify as responsible to at minimum lose their jobs, and probably go to jail for criminal negligence. He should not have died and we knew he would anyway, before it happened, and yet it still happened. That's why you should care.
That is a very good point. Think of Seth Rich's death. No one knew the guy until he died, and then retroactively a compelling narrative was made to explain how his death might have been convenient for, and arranged by, powerful people. But for Epstein, the same people who questioned the official narrative, were pointing out how he was going to get whacked to stop him from talking.
An average joe hitting a homerun in baseball or playing a hole in one in golf is unusual but it's going to happen once in a while. But if they call it right before they do it, there's likely more to this story. Is anyone really seriously thinking Prigozhin's death was accidental?
The main question though is whether they have been calling it (wrong) every time before.
I don't think there have been any prominent "calling it" moments like this. The four most similar cases I can think of where someone is/was crying wolf about their assassination and it didn't happen, but if they had died (or do die) there would definitely be retroactive conspiracy theories are Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, And Edward Snowden. So if you're being maximally harsh you could call it 1/5. But none of these have had quite the same level of strength. Everyone believed that Epstein had dirt on prominent politicians that he had not yet spilled, which made getting rid of him quickly a priority. People hate Trump and Musk for public reasons and while killing them would remove them as an annoyance, it wouldn't keep any politicians out of jail. Assange and Snowden already leaked their secrets and assassinating them would just be petty revenge, it wouldn't unleak the secrets. Assassinating any of those four would increase the risk of a politician going to jail, not decrease it as in Epstein's case (conditional on the probability of getting caught being less than the probability of him spilling the beans). Additionally, the U.S. government has never had one of those four in custody in a way that would provide such an easy opportunity to off them. And, while I don't pay a ton of attention, nobody has been warning about the potential for assassination attempts on these four except for Trump, who has in fact been the target of attempted assassinated multiple times (though not necessarily by a conspiracy unless you count stochastic terrorism). So depending on how you categorize it we're either 1/5, 2/5, 2/2, or 1/1. Personally I'd go with 1/1, since Epstein was (as far as I know) unique in circumstance of being in a prison with known incriminating evidence on (probably multiple) politicians.
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Either he was directly assassinated by the intelligence agencies he was working for, so he won't expose the extent of his operation to the public, or was assisted with his suicide for the same reason.
When you see someone destroying evidence, you should assume that said evidence was important by default. But if you want a theory, it's that his clients likely included many powerful and influential people, who need to be punished.
No shit? What else do you expect when authorities refuse to follow up on leads?
Well, I mean, it seems to me that we have a situation where the official account (unaided suicide) is mostly plausible, there's a minimum-EDKH that's plausible and would be hidden (aided suicide), and then there's a maximum-EDKH that's implausible and is unlikely to be successfully hidden (murder by a third party).
The case for it aided suicide or murder are that circumstances around unaided suicide seem kind of weird to observers. That's not a whole lot to build a case on.
At any rate, my position is that unaided suicide is most likely, aided suicide is reasonably possible, and murder is sufficiently unlikely that we can rule it out; and that the difference between unaided and aided suicide is unimportant.
I don't actually see anyone destroying evidence, though. What's the evidence that's missing?
Yeah, but so what? So is his assassination. It was plausible for Imane Khelif to be female, and it was plausible for him to be male. It was plausible for COVID to have natural origin, and it's pkausible for it to have leaked from a lab... Plenty of cases have more than one scenario, and it's ridiculous to assume that in the presence of multiple plausible scenarios, we should side with the one being out forward by our institutions.
Yes it is, unless you can present stronger evidence. The evidence for his suicide is just as circumstantial.
Jeffrey Epstein.
I don't actually think assassination is plausible. At the very least it is less plausible than one of the other explanations - it requires a lot more moving parts, especially since no particular candidates for either ordering or carrying out the assassination seem to have been identified, or had any evidence pointing towards them.
Nor do I think it's ridiculous to say that, in the presence of multiple plausible scenarios, we should assign higher weight to the official story, if only because it is generally more likely for any given official statement to be true than false. I am not naively claiming that governments never lie about things. I'm saying that things the government says are true are usually either true, or in spitting distance of the truth. They are often massaged a bit, but outright lies are unusual. If nothing else, the government saying that something is true is not evidence that it isn't true. The government may not be always right or always truthful, but its hit rate is better than that of speculating internet randos.
The entire case for EDKH is based on the idea that the official explanation is unsatisfactory. But so far I don't really see a convincing reason to think that the official explanation is that unsatisfactory. The official explanation is pretty plausible. I don't assign 100% probability to it - as I said, I could imagine a minimum-plausible-EDKH being true - but nothing stands out that makes it clearly false. There's no smoking gun that makes me reject it.
Bribing guards to either kill him, let an assassin kill him, or assist him with suicide doesn't strike me as a particularly complex mechanism. At least not any more complex than the series of unlikely events that we are asked to write off as coincidences.
Again, what evidence would you expect to be there when authorities are refusing to follow up on leads?
This is only true if you count things like the daily weather report from the NOAA as "official statements". In cases where lying is in the interest of public institutions they have been found to lie deliberately and frequently, and cases where they opt to tell a truth that is inconvenient for them are insanely infrequent (unless you count declassifications that happen decades after a given fact, I suppose).
This is only true if we grant the official explanation the status of null hypothesis. It's absurd to do so, and you haven't even attempted to justify why we should. EDKH is just as plausible, you haven't given any evidence that would falsify, and are demanding that it's proponents do all the work while you sit back and poke holes in it.
Well, that's why you're not paid to investigate these things. Just consider the probabilities involved. If someone came to your house claiming to be from Mossad or Bill Clinton's people or the Royal Family or whoever and told you that they would totally pay you a lot of money if you committed murder on their behalf, what would you do in response? What would the average person do? What would the average person who has no criminal record and has a job in law enforcement do? If you read enough true crime cases you'll learn that finding a hit man among the general public is incredibly difficult in the best of circumstances because the vast, vast majority of the time the guy you meet in a bar who's short on money and has a checkered past inevitably goes straight to the police.
In this case the murderer wouldn't even have the luxury of picking a vetted assassin from among the general public; he'd be relying on two specific people who are members of the law enforcement community to conduct the hit. People who are specifically screened for not having any criminal record, let alone murder. And you're asking them not only to commit a capital crime but commit it in such a way that will fool the medical examiner and require them to stage the scene. And they would be the only two people with access to the target at the time of the death and be the obvious first suspects in any investigation. And this person is a high-profile inmate whose death will be national news. One of these people is a woman (this detail never seems to get mentioned for some reason). And there are two of them.
And if they do accept your offer and successfully kill Epstein, then what? Given that they've never killed anyone before, there's a good chance that they get prosecuted for his murder. Do you really think that someone under indictment for a capital crime is going to keep his mouth shut for your benefit? What reason could they possibly have to keep quiet?
If you're one of the guards in question and someone offers you money to kill Epstein, why would you even believe that they are who they say they are? How much money would this person have to pay you to take on this kind of risk? At the very least, it is guaranteed that you will lose your job in the aftermath and be virtually unemployable at the same salary you were making, so it would have to be enough money to live in New York for another 50 years, and with a high standard of living, at that. Of course, if either of this guards were living the high life with no discernible source of income, that would raise all kinds of red flags (or at least pique the interest of the IRS), so you'd have to keep this money hidden away so it didn't look like you were living beyond your means, working at whatever menial rent-a-cop job you could get. What would make you think that some rando you met in a bar actually has this kind of money? Of course you're going to demand prepayment. After all, once a man commits murder, breach of contract doesn't seem like such a big deal.
If I'm the guy ordering the hit, how to I get this money to him? Write him a check? How easy do you think it is to transfer that kind of dough without raising any red flags among the banking community? Or maybe you think it would be easier to show up with a suitcase full of cash to a bugged hotel room with Federal agents waiting for you in the parking garage. Or maybe NYPD if he happens to go to them instead. Getting someone to commit murder on your behalf is hard. Getting someone to commit a murder that he will immediately be suspected of is harder. Getting two people to do the same? Damn near impossible.
Consider the probabilities here, just for fun. Let's generously assume that 5% of the extremely law-abiding-background-check-passing population would commit such a murder for the right price. The odds are already 95% that your attempt to off Epstein will end with you in handcuffs. Add in a second person (required here) to be in on the plan and the odds of failure are now 99.75%. Add in a generously high 75% chance that they can actually commit the murder without arousing any suspicion, and you're now down to about 6 hundredths of a percentage point likely to succeed. Even if I use the impossibly optimistic assumption of 50/50 all around, you still wind up in prison 7 out of 8 times. And why are you taking such a huge risk? To prevent the theoretical uncorroborated testimony of a guy who is wholly incredible and has nothing to gain by talking. These conspiracy theories make no fucking sense whatsoever.
Prison guards at least seem to believe that bribery is incredibly widespread in the profession and that it does not, on average, put a very high premium on the lives of sex offenders.
I DON’T disagree that finding two guards willing to personally kill someone is a tall order- probably most prisoners would shrink from doing that. Finding two guards willing to accept money for letting someone- especially a pedophilic pimp- die- either at his own hand, or someone else’s- seems like… Tuesday.
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Based on my experiences dealing with prisons & jails:
Bribing a prison guard doesn't take that much money. In my state, quite a few are caught every year smuggling drugs into facilities for paltry amounts of money, and certainly paltry amounts when compared to the pension/benefits they're losing for the rest of their life.
Bribery isn't the only avenue. Intimidation also works. "Oh hey, you have family at [address]. Nice family. How about you take a nap on date/time and make sure you're away from cell block X."
The guards can be in on it to some extent, and they're generally no bigger fan of accused child molesters than the general public. Plus getting other inmates to commit murder isn't impossible. In one facility I'm aware of, several accused child molesters kept ending up as cellmates to a particular accused murderer (who had been molested as a child). Those accused child molesters kept having unfortunate fatal accidents while a large group of other inmates were willing to swear the accused murderer was in the showers, at recreation, etc. The placement of those victims as his cellmates and him being informed of their charges was under the control of the guards.
So someone planning something nefarious doesn't necessarily need a well-paid, skilled hitman. They need to bribe or coerce guards into looking the other way for a few minutes (or just tell them that the guy in the cell is a child molester and he's going to get taken care of). They need an inmate who might have a grudge against child molesters and be willing to commit murder (not hard to find in most jails and prisons--guys have been beaten to death for the wrong rumor that they were a child molester). They need to get that inmate into the cell for a few minutes.
Did that happen to Epstein? I don't know. But it wouldn't require that many moving parts. I think intentionally giving him the opportunity to off himself while he was supposed to be closely watched is more likely, but most prisons & jails are incredibly shoddily-run and capable of being manipulated.
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Those are a lot of good questions. Unfortunately we don’t know the answers to them because the guards all fell asleep and the investigators forgot to ask. :^)
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I admittedly don't know the logistics of killing a man, but enough people get killed by accident in stupid brawls that I have to ask - come on how hard is it to strange someone and wrap some cloth around him afterwards. Are you going to say that it would leave evidence of murder? The evidence was literally already examined by a pathologist claiming it's more indicative of murder, and summarily ignored. Your assumption that any indication of foul play would trigger a proper investigation is completely unfounded.
Yes, I absolutely 100% believe that, and I would like to know what empirical evidence is your belief that this is in any way unlikely based on. From child castration fetishists joining professional medical associations in order to normalize their fetish, to the Community Relations Service twisting people's arms to say that the murder of their children is not about race, I've seen enough brazen conspiracies that have only come out by accident, that the rationalist default idea of "someone would have squealed" looks patently absurd.
Or take something that you might find less controversial: do you think Prigozhin's airplane just so happened to suffer a completely innocent accident? Or do you think these kind of assassinations only happen in countries like Russia? I think both are absurd, but the latter is the more absurd of the two.
You really think that the CIA or the Mossad would have any trouble delivering someone a suitcase full of cash? You think either of them would be questioned by the banking community, of all people?
Step me through why the FBI or NYPD would dare to get in the way of intelligence services. And before you get to that, tell me how would they evem know there's anything to get ij the way of.
I did, it does not come out the way you want.
Keep in mind that the official explanation is that the prison was an absolute clownshow where the cameras were falling apart so frequently that both of the ones aimed at Epstein's cell just so happened to be not working, and both of the guards on duty fell asleep at the same time. Let's generously assume that 95% of guards like that would refuse a suitcase full of money to strangle a pedophile with guaranteed impunity, how many of them do you think would refuse a suitcase full of money for "hey, why don't you lend me your keycard and uniform, and take a day off"?
Your entire argument works on the assumption that the American system would immediately trigger an alarm if any irregularity was found. That assumption is not backed by anything in this reality.
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There are two types of people you will never convince:
I really think that, if Epstein were not apparently connected to intelligence, powerful people in government, and were not Jewish, nearly zero people would argue that he killed himself. There are simply too many "coincidences." But there are people who like the political status quo (or at least despise the upstarts trying to disrupt the status quo), and there are other people who perceive the emphasis on Epstein's Jewishness/Mossad connections as dangerous to themselves (I have sympathy for this second group).
I don't know what to make of the "nothing ever happens" people. I have a friend like this, and I gave up talking to them about anything a long time ago. Any time I bring up some current event, I get some variation of
It's closely related to the "enlightened centrism" meme. These sorts of folks are not "arguing to understand."
I don't know if it's just "nothing ever happens", I'm that guy by temperament, and I can't see Epstein denialism as anything other then pissing on me and telling me it must be raining.
I'm leaning more towards status anxiety as the explanation, as I've never seen the same kind of skepticism from them about establishment approved conspiracy theories.
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I don't have a dog in this fight but this doesn't unsettle me at all.
So. I had a job once that required keeping clocks in sync between all of the computers in a company. For servers we decided clocks could drift only one millisecond, but for desktops we allowed up to 100ms. This required modifications to Windows because Microsoft only imposed one minute clock discipline at the time (only improving on this policy after 2016, which is probably not early enough for whatever piece of shit the jail installed). That means Microsoft allowed Windows computers to be up to one minute off of the real time, which in practice meant any two computers could be almost two minutes apart in their timestamping (e,g, one was a minute slow and one was a minute fast).
You may think computers should be able to keep time without trouble, but nothing can be further from the truth. They suck at it, due to interesting physical properties[1]. They can be slow or fast, and it can vary over the course of the day. Sometimes the drift adds up to tens of minutes a day. Without any correction they drift and drift and could be days or weeks off from the actual current time. It's ugly. The way they correct for this is by coming up with a clever protocol that pings well known atomic clocks over the internet. Though modern solutions can also recruit GPS.[2]
Anyway, watching the time jump forward by a minute on a recording system doesn't strike me as that odd. Especially when it's around midnight, which is when people schedule automated tasks, like "stop writing to 2019-08-09.mov and start writing 2019-08-10.mov", to me this is not at all suspicious.
I don't know for a fact that this is what happened, of course. And I certainly don't know how jailhouse surveillance systems work. But I have had to explain in legal matters why recordings in networked computer systems can have such variation in timestamps. People crinkle their eyebrows when one networked system says this thing precedes this other thing, even though the event with the later timestamp caused the event with the earlier timestamp, use but it's generally the sad truth.
Anyway, I'm open to believing he was murdered. But you're going to have to wake me up when the missing minute is revealed and it shows masked people holding stun guns hopping over the railing. A one-ish minute forward jump in a recording at midnight just doesn't phase this systems engineer at all.
(I'm not going to evaluate the claim that the missing minute exists because anonymous sources may as well be epistemic status: complete fabrication at this point. But also I'd rather not try to imagine how incredibly stupid a jailhouse surveillance system could be)
Basically, computers are made of metal and metal expands and contracts as it heats and cools. Since temperatures around computers and inside of them vary all of the time (especially based on workload) this causes its own internal timekeeping to drift from real time as the distance electricity has to travel varies based on temperature. This varies the number of cycles that happen per second.
It's also not as easy as just check the atomic clock time and set your computer's time to that one. If you find your computer's time is too fast (minutes ahead of real time), you can't fix it by just slamming the clock backwards in time. That fucks a lot of applications up. So they come up with this thing called "slewing", which basically is an adjustment to the computer to count perceived ticks of a clock as less than whole ticks so it catches up. Some time keeping policies will also slew speedup adjustments if the clock is behind, but it's less destructive to application logic to make the clock jump forward, so you see that from time to time in logs as well. E.g. a one minute jump forward is safe, though it makes people crinkle eyebrows if it's in a timestamped video.
I'm all for an explanation like this, but this is not the explanation they have been giving. If it was true and a reasonable excuse, I would expect them to have given it instead of blatantly lying about "raw footage" and showing signs of edits in the metadata.
I doubt anyone knows what the fuck they're talking about either way.
Raw footage doesn't need editing but they probably thought they needed to load it into Adobe Videoshop Pro to glob the recording from the 9th and the recording from the 10th together into a single file.
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I heard that when you examine the metadata it was 3 minutes; not 1
It's also implied that they didn't copy the data files from the DVR, but rather played them on their terminal and used a screen recorder app to create the video file that they ultimately used in what they distributed. Why? Probably they couldn't figure out how to access the raw data file.
So probably they began playing the first day, started recording, then it reached the end and they didn't notice for a few minutes so they just had black screen or desktop background at the end, which they had to trim off.
For the second day they could start and hit record it at the same time and could stop recording when they felt they had enough boring part after the commotion of finding his dead body was over.
This is consistent with my beliefs about how normies working in government would struggle with computers.
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Prisons use commercial grade CCTV systems with multiple redundancies (eg recording backup), alerts for camera or recorder failure, strict maintenance contracts for callout (within x hours; say within 24 hours) and more. Commercial grade Network Video Recorders are dedicated pieces of equipment that include NTP compatibility and high quality internal crystal oscillators for internal timekeeping. Clock fidelity should be tested during the commissioning and maintenance process. The dual recording servers can be setup on 12 hour (or even 13 hour) loops that overlap (eg Server A starts its recording loop at 00:00am and Server B starts its recording loop at 06:00am) preventing 'missing minutes'.
All that said, some systems and technicians are better than others.
tldr; the systems used are designed knowing that one of their major purposes is to provide post-incident forensics and serve as evidence in a court of law.
It's another unlikely coincidence in a string of coincidences.
Thanks for the insight. I'm still cynical enough to believe this is what's advertised on the tin and not stuff that means any of it works well, especially when administered by the human capital involved in prisons.
The fact that it slams at the one minute around midnight is a strong Bayesian update towards system error.
I'm giving allowance for the fact that what's on the tin isn't always what is installed or maintained. My main point is that it is likely that failures in a 'just so' way of the electronic security systems is possible, but unlikely.
Somewhat tangentially, I can't find any evidence that anyone involved in prisons has ever been fired or disciplined for recording issues alone.
On the other hand, major Wall Street firms are routinely disciplined for record keeping failures even if there's no case of fraud or other misconduct being examined.
To me that means shitty record keeping in prisons is actually the norm while on Wall Street it's something firms are constantly anxious about fucking up.
For politically high profile cases I would expect someone, somewhere inside or outside of the prison system would have had a quiet word and said 'this person is important, don't fuck this up'. For all of these unlikely cascading failures to happen? It's very suspicious.
What I'm also saying is that there should be logs kept as standard in western countries for high grade security systems and the whole 'whoopsies everything just happened to not work' doesn't fly. Even making allowance for podunk bad installations, operations and oversight.
Have you never seen a cascading failure caused this way? You see a potentially-serious problem, so you rush to fix it before it bites someone, and whoops, your rushed fix to the problem nobody had encountered yet breaks something else that people continuously rely on. If you're well-prepared then your "fix" just gets caught in testing, but I've never heard of a security installation with two independent redundant camera systems for testing purposes.
It's as simple as giving a briefing and saying 'give extra attention here' in a daily briefing. It's not 'lets change everything'.
They should have said 'who is Epstein bunking with? Is that the right guy? Why don't we put him in with a known element rather than Bubba-three-kills?'
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My bias goes the other way I guess. I've seen so much shit fail at its one fucking job I'm hardly surprised anymore.
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My friend, that's what the sales guy said. And by the way he's the cousin-in-law of the prison super.
Without access to the specification, contracts, logs and maintenance records, there is no real way to know.
Sure. I just think there is far more incompetence at government contractors than your initial post let on.
Yes, you're right there. I've seen it myself.
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Was there a specific use-case for the highly strict clock synchronization?
Also, thanks for the write-up. Computer timekeeping has always been a personal nemesis (NTP sync errors, RTCs failing, random clock drift, time being an hour off randomly due to strange bugs, Windows and Linux not playing nicely on a dual-boot system even when I beg windows to use UTC, there are so many problems) so it’s interesting to read about how complex it is to keep clocks in sync.
It's the underlying magic of Google's Spanner database, allowing it to say fuck the CAP theorem.
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High frequency trading. A single trade goes through many computers. And the even stream can be a fire hose at times. It's helpful for corroboration if the logs all agree on the exact time. Helps you be less embarrassed when regulators ask questions.
It's pretty awful. For awhile a lot of computers had broken clocks too that weren't even possible to discipline. And you can have substantial drift if your computers use different time sources. And maybe your computers will keep your rigorous time but networked appliances won't give a shit.
Every big tech company tends to have a shared internal doc outlining The Way they've handled time that's usually a fascinating archeological adventure.
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