Who is John Podesta?

[Morty]

One thing I have been wondering and that has kind of been bothering me, is why didn't the PTB just nuke the Wikileaks site and shut it down? Couldn't they disrupt it if they wanted to? Why do they let it survive?

They are legion. Too many of them. Info too decentralised. I think, at a guess.

[edited to remove comment about Assange himself being assassinated and to add:)

Wikileaks were complaining today about coming under a DoS attack and that this coincided with their latest DNC emails release.

[MacCruiskeen]

They had a DOS attack today.

WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks · 5 hours ago

http://WikiLeaks.org was down briefly. That's rare. We're investigating.

Increase our capacity: https://freedom.press/wikileaks

0 Replies 3.285 Retweets 4.525 Likes

https://twitter.com/wikileaks

[Joe Hillshoist]

Life is easier to bear as an unfeeling fictional robot.

But OK, I'll stick with the kitten (unless I replace it with a Thomas Kinkade painting).

[Belligerent Savant]

As I commented earlier on another thread, presidential candidates in today’s world need multi millions of dollars to fund an effective, competitive campaign. Since no one individual can raise such vast funds entirely by themselves, contenders hire political power brokers, corporate lobbyists, bankers and consultants capable of extracting huge financial support from other countries, from conglomerates, from global institutions and from wealthy supporters – all of whom have an agenda and a reason for expecting a return on the same scale. Both parties operate this way.

Podesta is a living product of a corrupted system requiring Machiavellian skill.

Well said.
A campaign simply can not survive without massive infusions of DOLLARS into its war chest, which in turn compromises a given campaign's agenda and renders their words/promises hollow.
The working/middle-classes are simply not considered -- other than as fodder for soundbites and/or "front facing" optics for campaign BRANDING.

Podesta and his ilk --- "beltway insiders", indeed.

[smoking since 1879]

Wild Guess: He played dominoes after a pasta meal with the Podestas, and lost.

Mac, i was drunk last night - thanks for putting me straight

[backtoiam]

Top Definition
cheese pizza
child pornography
Hey wanna go downtown and get some cheese pizza?
#cp #rule 34 #pedo #pedobear #chris hansen
by anon936 June 07, 2010

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... eese+pizza

What are the most disturbing sites on the "dark web"?
The sites where people hire hit men, spy on people's webcams, plan blackmail, etc.

But it would be unproductive to rely on old content alone, and as such I’ll go in to detail as to why another site, TorChan, is one of the most disturbing sites on the dark web.

The website itself is a simple clone of 4chan - innocent enough - and it has its own dissident boards, and a lovely thing called /pa which stands for ‘Personal Army’ where people would post their causes and why you should join their secret group, and, while anonymous, it mostly seemed like bored first world teens trying to be a part of something greater - innocent enough.

However, in the recent past (~2013, three years is recent for the slow moving dark web) the admin of TorChan (Maxwell H[insert rest of name here]) stopped being active on the site. It was passed on to an anonymous user, who has since let it decay into what everyone sane on the deep web despises.

When I first joined the /b/ board (‘random’, for those unacquainted with -chan protocols), I was excited to get into the unique humour such boards usually have, I found all sorts of jokes about pizza being copied and pasted, along with the (at the time) hilarious copypastas of people trying to get bitcoins for free (excuses like “I have to wash my dog” etc.). What I didn’t realise was that the pizza jokes were explicitly Cheese Pizza posts. There were hundreds upon hundreds of posts of people asking for cheese pizza, cooked for 4–16 minutes, or however long they wanted. What made it so disturbing for me was the slow realisation - it took me about half an hour to fully realise - that cheese pizza was not an in joke, but child porn. Links to anonymous email accounts were often provided under a post/request, and the number of minutes cooked was a reference to the age of their victim bracket. Having only really browsed websites on the deep web that told me how to kill people and make bombs (I was a curious teen, what can I say?), being able to see the depth of the child pornography issue really shocked me, and changed the way I viewed the deep web. I suppose in itself, an anonymous image board is not disturbing, but left alone, these things have a tendency to stagnate, and it was a stark reminder that there were other people on the deep web than me, and their reasons for being there went beyond curiosity.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most ... e-dark-web

[Freitag]

have you seen the 8chan pizza thread freitag? i'm still in a state of suspended animation from reading it. i sort of feel sick at my stomach. those boys are on to something. they are doing serious digging.

The Podesta resemblance to the Madeleine McCann suspect sketches was striking, but otherwise I'm not sure anything solid has been found. Lots of creepy stuff though.

[JackRiddler]

.

Well hey, nothing's been shown but a lot of "creepy stuff" has been thrown in, so by the magic of association in the electronic media, we're surely done, right?

Textbook case:

How to turn a real, proven scandal about money and power in the real world into a dismissable hysteria in which Alt-Right kittens project their own fetishes on to strangers, and call it disgusting.

Here are grown men who can probably do sophisticated textual analysis of Star Trek episodes, but have trouble with paintings that are a lot simpler in form and message.

Enjoying yourself boys? Now don't bother with the next part, it's for people who can actually understand shit, mainly MacC.

If the reaction formation model is that Lena Dunham alienates poor rednecks into voting for Trump (which is bullshit in several ways, but anyway), then surely it also applies that this kind of projection of conspiracy merchandisers' own sick fantasies alienates elite edumacateds into clinging to Clinton?

.

[guruilla]

@Mac: You think maybe it was too much of a leap to go straight from dalek to kitten?

You're normally one of the most rigorous posters at RI, but after this last run, I'm afraid you might end up sharing cheetos with Jerky.

There are so many rich avenues of exploration around Podesta et al., and the pizza-code is just one of them, and not an especially fruitful one: as the last 3 pages of this thread amply demonstrate.

Two days ago I threw together a piece, in just a couple of hours, based on all the stuff flying around now (inspired by Fourth Base's on-ground research), and, while it mentions the Pizza-Code-Theory (no breakdown of data would be complete without it), it's a pretty minor piece in the picture ~ so far, for reasons you have been at pains to point out. So why focus on it at all?

Here's the piece anyway, case you didn't see it yet: https://auticulture.wordpress.com/2016/ ... st-hurrah/

Oh, and yes, the Madeleine McCann-Podesta "link" is an actual case of Fonz-jumps-shark at this thread. No arguments there.

But I can't help but thing that think Erik Prince, Alex Jones and Drudge DID NOT stumble upon the next onion layer of this sorted dark network thanks to John Podesta and his weird art collecting brother.

I know exactly what you mean. But: maybe that's partly what they want us to think? Well-poisoning is an art & a science.

[MacCruiskeen]

Hi guruilla, I saw your post and skimmed it yesterday. Didn't want to comment on it until I'd had a chance to read it properly.

Two days ago I threw together a piece, in just a couple of hours, based on all the stuff flying around now

To be honest (and you know I like your writing and your rigour) it did look a bit like that: thrown together in a rush. So I was kind of nonplussed. And then I got stuck (again) in this very sticky web here at RI. You could say, Why waste time refuting obvious nonsense? To which I reply: Too many people are taking that nonsense seriously.*

Apart from that I can't see that we're really disagreeing about much (about anything?) in this particular exchange.

I'm sure many more interesting real things about Podesta et al remain to be discovered or have already been discovered, and that I haven't even read them yet. But it's good to at least clear away the obvious crap first. Trumpites are going apeshit about it, for instance, and it's not good to see people here falling for it too. Y'know: Where's the evidence?

Damn, this whole discussion is spread across too many threads., and I should in any case be dealing with some actual work. I'll try and get back to you tomorrow.

*It's funny to remember that CERN thread, where I was one of only two people (you were the other) who was arguing: "Wait a minute, this almost certainly doesn't show a ritual sacrifice, BUT the explanation we're being offered actually looks much more like a studied (and arrogant) evasion of all the obvious questions." In the case of Podesta too, those questions involve money, privilege, entitlement, class and power.

[backtoiam]

guruilla
Oh, and yes, the Madeleine McCann-Podesta "link" is an actual case of Fonz-jumps-shark at this thread. No arguments there.

I think this is where those guys got that picture from.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... nn-suspect

[MacCruiskeen]

If the reaction formation model is that Lena Dunham alienates poor rednecks into voting for Trump (which is bullshit in several ways, but anyway),

Hang on! I never once used the term "rednecks" (in this context), nor did I say they were necessarily poor. You are projecting.

Anyway, why is it bullshit to say that that video alienates anyone, poor, rich, whitenecked, protofascist, old and frightened, young and insecure, merely overworked and confused, or otherwise? I know that it alienates people, for I am a person and it certainly alienated me. (There's logic for you.) Not into voting Trump - I can't, and I wouldn't if I could - but into disliking Millionaire-Media-Darlings-for-Clinton even more. And that's what she was doing: Selling the Hillary brand (most incompetently) while selling her own brand (ditto). Some ads are just deeply offputting, and so they backfire disastrously. Especially when they're saying, knowingly, superciliously: "Fuck you. I'm woke.Be like ME!"

then surely it also applies that this kind of projection of conspiracy merchandisers' own sick fantasies alienates elite edumacateds into clinging to Clinton?

Certainly. The scam works both ways. When has it ever not? The illusion of a meaningful choice that in fact only offers two kinds of pain. The old Double Bind.

[guruilla]

I can't see that we're really disagreeing about much (about anything?) in this particular exchange.

If I'm disagreeing with anything it's the choice to focus on areas of disagreement rather than agreement and mutual interest, and a shared lack of certainty. Sowing unnecessary and futile disagreement is one primary fruit of perception management, to create division and conflict among people who might otherwise be able to think and work together on these sorts of problems. It works so well because there is a part in each of us (negative identity) that thrives on disagreement, is fortified by it; that part is made especially anxious (& active) by uncertainty, liminality, instability, the collapse of structures, values, and beliefs, exactly as we're seeing 24/7 around this election fiasco (which, from the perspective of perception management is actually a masterpiece).

[Freitag]

Are you guys seriously suggesting that the fabulously wealthy Podesta Brothers took time out from their very busy schedule to fly to Portugal personally and then hang around on the premises of an unclassy hotel in the hope of being able to abduct a child with their own bare hands?

If so, then you are completely mental.

I posted it tongue-in-cheek. It's a funny coincidence, like this:

[Cordelia]

I find their haircuts suspicious and sinister.