What's Happening? It? (TRIGGERS UPON TRIGGERS)

[General Patton]

Via Jeff's facebook:

That right there is some good stuff.

I lol'd

[Wombaticus Rex]

He was (it was short week) and now it's a month. Which will also be short.

Banning is accomplished through a dropdown menu, I did indeed ban Jerky for a day instead of a week last time. I also didn't even notice.

This 2nd suspension will last until Dec. 8th.

Your Transparently,
Barack H. Obama

[Luther Blissett]

He was (it was short week) and now it's a month. Which will also be short.

Banning is accomplished through a dropdown menu, I did indeed ban Jerky for a day instead of a week last time. I also didn't even notice.

This 2nd suspension will last until Dec. 8th.

Your Transparently,
Barack H. Obama

I lol'd

[American Dream]

How Dangerous Is Fake News?

[OP ED]

Every time I read or hear "fake news" I start to take this stuff more seriously.

[Luther Blissett]

Pizzagate Gunman: ‘I Regret How I Handled the Situation’

The New York Times on Wednesday published the first interview with Edgar M. Welch, the man who fired an assault rifle in D.C. pizzeria as he investigated the patently false claims that the restaurant was the center of a child sex slave ring connected to the Clintons. “I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way,” he told the Times. He recalled wanting to give the pizza shop a “closer look” and said he felt his “heart breaking over the thought of innocent people suffering.” Welch admitted that he found no pedophilia ring at Comet Ping Pong, telling the newspaper, “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” However, he would not outright dismiss the possibility of the Clinton-connected child-sex ring, saying there were simply no children “inside that dwelling.” Asked whether he regrets his actions, Welch said, “I regret how I handled the situation.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/201 ... ation.html

[Joe Hillshoist]

As you well know, in this circumstantial case, three pieces of evidence, taken out of context, prove nothing but your point. However, if you start connecting the countless dots, links and connections there is a big picture that can't be denied.

I deny it.

Well the specifics as discussed here - the only big picture it provides are networks and associations. It doesn't provide any actual evidence about those networks. Unless you think art is evidence, which is a dangerous path to go down. Networks and associations are not unusual given the nature of what we are talking about (power) and given the massive rate of child abuse in society generally there is no reason to assume those networks wouldn't include child abuse perps. They have been shown to include one guy with a thing for (at least (and allegedly)) grooming and assaulting girls then violently raping them as adults (Freud). But think about any network you are part of and the rates of sexual abuse of minors in society (between 20 and 33% depending on the child's sex) and you end up with some disturbing conclusions.

The odds are we all know someone who has abused children. This is sobering and disturbing especially if (like me and some other posters here) you have young kids.

Is Comet Ping Pong the international hub of child trafficking? I doubt it. Do Hilary, the Podestas and Alefantis actually serve up babies with their pizza pies? I don't think so. But does the data compiled from the threads, "David Brock, Invasion 4Chan, the Alt-Right, & Pizzagate", "What's Happening? It?" not to mention many other sources prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that something very sinister is in play? Absolutely.

What left handed thing does it prove is in play?

Lets face it. You've basically said there is essentially nothing to pizzagate.

In that thread you've mentioned the disturbing links between actual potential for abuse and child trafficking started to be seen but only when they started to connect to what we might call the usual subjects we tend to come across at RI (and I don't deny this happens. I know dodgy people and have no doubts some of them would not draw the line at trafficking kids, (as some of you might know I helped a friend escape one of those organised criminal networks decades ago now and it got scary/sketchy at times,) but i'm not gonna murder them over it when I have no proof and a young family.) Those links only really start to emerge the further you get away from the specifics of pizzagate.

[seemslikeadream]

Every time I read or hear "fake news" I start to take this stuff more seriously.

White Terrorism in the White House? Did Trump’s Bannon, Breitbart inspire Pizzeria Shooter?
By Juan Cole | Dec. 6, 2016 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Imagine if they had been Muslims. What if a Muslim publication pushed a false conspiracy theory accusing high American officials and an ordinary American restaurant of being involved in child abuse? and then an unbalanced Muslim went into it and shot off a firearm on the premises? They’d all be in Gitmo before sundown the same day.
On Sunday, a Trump supporter walked into a pizzeria in DC Northwest and allegedly fired a gun inside. Patrons in the restaurant ran for their lives, little children bawling in terror. The alleged perpetrator said he was investigating a child trafficking ring run out of the restaurant, connected to John Podesta and Hillary Clinton (there is no such ring).
Breitbart.com, the American white nationalist version of Der Völkischer Beobachter, is run by its CEO, Steve Bannon. His predecessor, Andrew Breitbart, had started the meme that John Podesta and therefore Hillary Clinton were somehow linked to a pedophilia ring. Bannon had his magazine continue that line.

This year, under Bannon’s editorship, the Breitbart.com twitter account tweeted out a bizarre and patently false conspiracy theory that a neighborhood pizzeria in Washington, D.C., was the site of a child trafficking ring to which Hilary Clinton was connected.

The national news networks are letting Bannon skate on this.
Although it was rumored that incoming National Security Advisor Mike Flynn tweeted out the great Pizzeria Conspiracy, that allegation is apparently incorrect. But the truth is worse.
Flynn tweeted under the hashtag #spiritcooking, which refers to the elaborate conspiracy theory that falsely attempted to tie John Podesta and Hillary Clinton to a satanic ritual.

Here is an informed comment about this tweet:

In early November before election day, Breitbart did articles on people alleging spiritcooking as a satanic ritual in which Hillary Clinton was involved.
Let me repeat. Steve Bannon is the editor of Breitbart. He is responsible for this bilge.
Flynn frequently depends on Breitbart.com, Bannon’s witches brew of fake news and Neonazism, for his information.
Flynn’s son took the position that the pizzeria dark fantasy is true until proven false.

Uh, I don’t think that’s how it works, that people say batshit crazy things and they’re true until conspiracy theorists admit they have been refuted.
Flynn Jr., by the way, is formally on the White House transition team. Yes. (Pence is denying this but Mr. Flynn has a transition email and has been seen at Trump tower per @blakehounshell of Politico.)
I would just like to remind everyone that Bannon and Flynn Sr. will be in the executive branch. Both will have de facto ability to call on the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency (both of which will likely also be headed by the Tinfoil Hat Brigade) to perform tasks they believe relate to national security. In COINTELPRO and more recent incidents, the White House used those agencies against domestic dissidents. There are going to be a hell of a lot of domestic dissidents, folks.
Ed Snowden warned us that the NSA can watch you typing your email messages in real time if it just knows your email address.
The idea that Bannon and Flynn will have that kind of power to spy on ordinary Americans is terrifying. I suggest the owner of that pizzeria get off line and throw away his smart phone. He should also sue the originators of the crazy conspiracy theory, and maybe anyone who defended it, for libel.
This crew of stark raving paranoids is bad enough when they just open their mouths. Worse is the implicit promotion of armed violence against the innocent victims of their conspiracy theories. This tactic is an old National Socialist one. After all, alleging that children are being trafficked by your political enemies is a way of making them appear to be monsters who must be stopped By Any Means Necessary. The firing of an assault rifle on those premises was foreseeable by a prudent person. I’d like to suggest that it is also foreseeable that the lives of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are in similar peril.
So if Bannon had a decent bone in his body, he’d come out right now and apologize for pushing this kind of rank bullshit into the political cybersphere, and would resign beforehand from the White House on the grounds that no one with his wretched values should be allowed to darken the doorstep of so august an edifice.
—–
Related video:
ABC News: “Fake News Prompts Shooting Inside DC Pizzeria”

http://www.juancole.com/2016/12/terrori ... iracy.html

[brekin]

Pizzagate Gunman: ‘I Regret How I Handled the Situation’
The New York Times on Wednesday published the first interview with Edgar M. Welch, the man who fired an assault rifle in D.C. pizzeria as he investigated the patently false claims that the restaurant was the center of a child sex slave ring connected to the Clintons. “I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way,” he told the Times. He recalled wanting to give the pizza shop a “closer look” and said he felt his “heart breaking over the thought of innocent people suffering.” Welch admitted that he found no pedophilia ring at Comet Ping Pong, telling the newspaper, “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” However, he would not outright dismiss the possibility of the Clinton-connected child-sex ring, saying there were simply no children “inside that dwelling.” Asked whether he regrets his actions, Welch said, “I regret how I handled the situation.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/201 ... ation.html

Yes, I saw that quote in another article and loved it: “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” It also talked about how this guy was "addicted to the internet" and took a month long hike or something to break free which was an amazing experience for him. He also seems to tip into the schizotypal zone of religious idolatry and imagery, and some drug use, according to friends and family. As slad's and Joe H's last two posts show I think this was basically a psyop carried out in front of everyone to radicalize some low hanging fruit. The intent may not have been for them to show up with a gun but the intent definitely seemed to capitalize on the shift of peoples front page news now being Infowars and Breitbart. I think with Alex Jones the new Walter Konkrite we will be seeing more of this. Even with some degree of truth to these scenarios it the ramifications could get ugly.

RI might want to become a private forum at some point. Parasitoid wasps dropping in and implanting their larval conspiracy narratives that hatch into incidents could be bad. We've already seen some twinning of content from other parts that gets pretty hysterical and strident here. Suck to be a host to that.

[American Dream]

With Pizzagate, Is Cybersteria The New Normal?

Fruzsina Eordogh


The sign and front entrance of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria are seen on Connecticut Avenue December 5, 2016 in Washington, DC.

Hysteria caused by trolls, online vigilantism and bad cybersleuthing was already on the rise online, and with the fake news industry reaching its peak thanks to Google enormous AdSense network, it’s only a matter of time before someone is killed by it.

This Sunday came uncomfortably close, when 28-year-old North Carolina resident Edgar M. Welch traveled to the popular DC pizzeria Comet Ping Pong with a handgun and an assault rifle to “self-investigate” the validity of the 4chan conspiracy meme and fake news story known as “Pizzagate.”

Welch was so convinced by what he read online, according to the criminal complaint filed on Monday, that he pointed his gun at one employee and fired multiple rounds into Comet Ping Pong’s walls, a computer desk and a door. Welch surrendered to police peacefully after failing to find any evidence of the abused children he believed were trapped in the pizzeria’s secret passages. No one was injured, and Welch’s hearing is tomorrow, Thursday at 9am.

Sunday’s incident was the most violent to befall Comet Ping Pong since 4chan began posting about the pizzeria last month. Prior to Sunday’s incident, the owner and staff told the New York Times they’d received hundreds of death threats via text message and social media. In addition, parents who had liked the Comet Ping Pong Facebook page had pictures of their children taken from their accounts and circulated by Pizzagaters as evidence of Clinton’s child trafficking ring.

For those unfamiliar, Pizzagate originally started on a 4chan troll thread in early November and claims the Clinton’s are running a child exploitation ring out of Comet Ping Pong. The conspiracy meme relies heavily on Wikileaks-leaked Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails about lunch options. That the primary evidence in Pizzagate is emails about pizza, and not missing children or police reports, should signal to most people the level of insincerity behind the meme, but right-wing and fake news sites saw a winner and latched onto the story. Alex Jones on InfoWars and pro-Trump fake news sites were already spreading a similar narrative sans the pizzeria.

As infosec and Twitter personality @SwiftOnSecurity tells it in a tweet on October 30th: "Started off as a 4chan joke, InfoWars nuts thought it was serious, trolls keep up fascade, people think they're serious, big cycle."

Big cycle, indeed.

4chan trolls, enthusiastic Trump supporters and Clinton-haters were quickly joined by concerned parents new to the internet as well as some in the OpDeathEaters movement, an Anonymous op dedicated to uncovering and stopping child sex abuse rings in England. (It should be noted the most influential leadership in OpDeathEaters, like Heather Marsh, did not participate in Pizzagate conspiracy-mongering.) From there, the conspiracy meme circulated heavily on Facebook, reddit, voat and Twitter throughout the month of November both jokingly and with sincere outrage.

This is how some of 4chan’s largest ops start: always in a joking or chaos-oriented manner only to pull in real participants when they hit on a kernel of truth or plunk on an appropriate heart string. This happened with Chanology and joke-protesting Scientology in 2008, 4chan’s first major meat space operation that attracted actual Scientology protestors and critics and spawned the Anonymous we all know today.

It happened again in 2014 with indie game designer Zoe Quinn, when her ex-boyfriend instigated mob harassment in 4chan IRC chat rooms as some sort of vendetta op, that ultimately morphed into GamerGate.

Besides these kinds of accidental social movements, 4chan is consistently trying to deceive the media and the public with fake stories. #Cut4Bieber and #Cut4Zayn are two targeted at teenage girls in prior years, while Operation Lollipop was a year-long con involving 4channers masquerading as Black and Asian feminists in an attempt to discredit them.

Pizzagate is a continuation of this pattern, both of fooling well-meaning people and the media and of ideas being lifted off 4chan and amplified without context or explanation. Sexually abusing a child is the worst evil no sane person can defend and is the kind of crime men will take up arms to fight against, literally.

Unlike OpDeathEaters, however, which works primarily off actual victim testimony, police reports, child psychologists and implicated clergymen and politicians in convicted cases, Pizzagate is most concerned with emails sent to and from Democratic party staff mentioning food items like pizza, pasta, hot dogs, burgers and ice cream and a dinner with performance artist Marina Abramovic. This focus is thanks to 4chan. The Abramovic link was further spread by both Alex Jones and Wikileaks, who appear convinced Abramovic is practicing witchcraft with the Clintons because she once emailed Podesta about dinner and referenced her 1997 work “Spirit Cooking” when asking about an art collector.

Pizzagate also likes bringing up Bill Clinton’s connections to convicted sex offender and pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein -- but stays silent on the actual paper trail that also connects him to Donald Trump. Trump denies knowing Epstein now, but in 2002 he told New York Magazine he’d “known Jeff for 15 years” and called him a “terrific guy” that “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." In 2009 Trump was served with a subpoena for a deposition testifying against Epstein and appeared, along with various family members and staff, in Epstein’s infamous “little black book.” Despite a child rape lawsuit filed this year against both Epstein and Trump, that was dropped right before the election, there is no hysteria over Trump molesting children among the Pizzagate or 4chan crowd. This is purely an anti-Hillary op. If these people were genuine about protecting children, they would be targeting Trump as well.

This isn’t the first time this year a kind of internet hysteria was induced by bad cybersleuthing using shoddy evidence. Just this summer, fans of 19-year-old British YouTuber Marina Joyce became convinced she’d been kidnapped by ISIS and was being forced at gunpoint to make awkward style and beauty videos. Her fans poured over hours of video and genuinely believed she was blinking SOS and whispering “help me.” An associated hashtag trended globally and local police investigated. Joyce was never kidnapped, and that one whisper heard was Joyce’s mother whispering to her daughter to stand up straight “like me” while she was filming her in their garden.

The Marina Joyce conspiracy theories were unusual in that they started on Tumblr and YouTube among young women and not reddit nor 4chan by men, showing this kind of cybersteria is not confined to platforms that are predominantly male.

The first instance of this male-championed cybersteria is, of course, reddit’s 2013 crowd-sourced investigation for the Boston Marathon bomber. A few wrong suspects were named, their family’s harassed with the entire incident dubbed a “racist Where’s Wally.” Reddit site policy was changed as a result.

Psychologists are in agreement the human brain is hardwired to recognize patterns in large amounts of data as a survival mechanism, but in the modern age that pattern recognition brain power idly spits out conspiracies about beauty vloggers and pizzerias. Following a year of Trump slogans like “Lock Her Up” targeted at Hillary Clinton, only for Trump to change his mind and doing nothing to dissipate the emotional contagion train he started, conspiracies about Mrs. Clinton committing horrific crimes were inevitable. Brains trying to cope with such divisive campaign rhetoric went looking for, and created, imaginary horrendous crimes… like Pizzagate.

Google and Facebook have vowed to crack down on fake news sites, but it is unclear what that entails and where the line is drawn. At time of publication, Before It’s News was still connected to Google Adsense while InfoWars was running a story claiming the government was trying to shut down the site.

Government and corporate interference doesn’t address the emotional contagion or vigilante element. Both reddit and 4chan have banned witch-hunting on their sites but that hasn’t stopped vigilantism from occurring on those platforms.

[American Dream]

Alex Jones: ‘Hillary Clinton Has Personally Murdered And Chopped Up And Raped’ Children

[Wombaticus Rex]

We've already seen some twinning of content from other parts that gets pretty hysterical and strident here. Suck to be a host to that.

What does that mean?

[Cordelia]

In case not already posted here or in another thread, 2014 'Washingtonian Magazine' article on Tony Podesta, his lobbyist ex-wife, brokering and their art collection. fwiw.......

The Making and Unmaking of Tony and Heather Podesta’s Power Marriage

The superlobbyists brought glamour and exceptional pride to Washington’s influence industry. Then they landed in divorce court, trying to outlobby each other for control of their powerful brand and all its assets.

By Luke Mullins on August 11, 2014

"After more than a year of preparations, the exhibit was all set.

The Australian Embassy in DC had readied its gallery for the nine-week show, and artist Patricia Piccinini had selected the works she wanted displayed. But two weeks before it was to open, there was a problem. The Washington couple who owned the art was bickering over it.

“If we are no longer able to borrow the Piccinini exhibition for the upcoming show, then we need to know now,” Australia’s cultural attaché said in a frantic e-mail to a manager of the collection this past February. “Grateful for your urgent advice.”

The husband and wife ultimately couldn’t agree to go ahead, according to court records, and the embassy had to cancel the show, making it unlikely collateral damage in the divorce of one of the country’s most powerful Democratic couples: superlobbyists Tony and Heather Podesta.

When they married 11 years ago, the Podestas were the talk of K Street. At 59, Tony was the brother of a former chief of staff to President Clinton, John Podesta, and a legendary political fixer who had turned a two-man lobbying shop into an industrial complex of influence peddling. Twenty-six years his junior, Heather was a 33-year-old congressional staffer, an up-and-comer with a law degree from the University of Virginia. Heather was his second marriage; he was her third.

Together, they blasted to the top of the Democratic food chain in a swirl of air kisses and PAC donations, handing out cash to liberal politicians including Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid and using their clout to help the world’s biggest companies—Walmart, BP, Toyota—advance their interests in Washington. Heather went on to found one of the US’s largest female-owned government-relations firms and become, as the Washington Post put it, “an It Girl in a new generation of young, highly connected, built-for-the-Obama-era lobbyists.”

While other liberals winced at the thought of trading high-minded ideals to shill for corporate America, the Podestas projected pride in their profession. They strutted through smoke-filled rooms with flash and flair—Tony in red Prada shoes, Heather in bright, eye-catching dresses—like public ambassadors for their often vilified industry.

The partnership produced million-dollar returns, but never children. Instead, Tony and Heather Podesta had art. During their 11 years of marriage, the couple bought more than 700 contemporary artworks—sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, photographs by Katy Grannan, Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” portrait of Barack Obama—and built a collection of international acclaim. Then the relationship collapsed. And the Podestas found themselves in divorce court, fighting over one of the most lucrative brand names in DC politics, and all the spoils that came with it.


Tony Podesta (left) and his brother, John, ran a lobbying firm together beginning in the 1980s, before John went on to White House jobs for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Photograph by Tony Powell/Washington Life. Tony and Heather were known for their colorful, conversation-starting fashion statements, such as Tony’s red Prada shoes. Photograph by Kyle Samperton/Washington Life.

Art was the spark.

On their first date in 2001, Tony Podesta brought Heather Miller to his home to pick up his car before they headed to the opera. According to the Post, he walked past one of his sculptures and said, “I don’t know why it is, but I have artworks where the women have no heads.”

The following day, Heather wrote Tony a thank-you note and signed it, “Woman with a head.”

At the time they met, Heather was still grieving the collapse of her second marriage. A friend had thought she could use a blind date and set the college professor’s daughter up with the flamboyant lobbyist.

Over the previous 33 years, Tony had worked for six presidential candidates, from Eugene McCarthy to Bill Clinton. When Ted Kennedy’s campaign for the White House stalled in 1980, cash dried up and staffers were partly paid in donated art. Tony walked away from the campaign with his arms full of pieces by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. His interest in art collecting grew from there.

In 1987, Tony and his brother, John, launched their lobbying firm, known today as the Podesta Group, in the basement of a Capitol Hill rowhouse. Tony scrambled to turn almost two decades of Democratic contacts into clients and revenue. “Sometimes he had two phones going at once,” says John Raffetto, an early employee.

At night, Tony hosted fundraisers for leading Democrats at his home. Guests studied his art as they forked over campaign checks while Podesta’s mother, who had moved to Washington after her husband’s death, cooked her famous pesto sauce. These events—known as the Pesto PAC—could raise $50,000 in a single evening, allowing Tony to strengthen his ties to the Democratic luminaries he feted.

The family brand got the White House’s endorsement in 1993, when John Podesta left the firm to join Clinton’s staff, and with that, Podesta power stretched from K Street to the West Wing. While Tony has always insisted he never asks his brother for political favors, by 2001, the year Heather entered the picture, the Podesta Group was generating more than $7 million in annual lobbying revenue from clients like Philip Morris, Lockheed Martin, and Citigroup, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Heather, meanwhile, talked up her man while working as an attorney for Congressman Robert Matsui, a California Democrat. “She was very quick to drop names, like ‘Oh, Tony and I saw Linda and Tom last night,’ ” says a former Matsui staffer who worked alongside her. “Of course, everybody knew it was Linda and Tom Daschle,” then the Democratic Senate minority leader and his wife.

Although capable and bright, Heather caused friction in Matsui’s office for appearing to want special treatment. Once, her supervisor let her take several days off in the middle of a congressional session, when the staff’s presence is most critical, because she insisted she had an important family event to attend in the States, according to the former colleague. Her supervisor soon learned that she’d been spotted at Dulles Airport waiting to board a flight to Italy, where Podesta owned a vacation home.

“It was very clear that she felt that she should be treated somewhat differently given who she was dating,” the former colleague says. (Through a spokesman, Heather Podesta declined to comment for this story.)

After dating for two years, Tony and Heather were married in April 2003, and Washington’s Democratic elite—House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson—came out for the head-turning occasion. Heather recited her vows in a red silk dress, and popular local chefs Roberto Donna and Kaz Okochi catered the reception.

For a few months afterward, Heather continued to use her maiden name, as she had throughout her two earlier marriages. Tony warned her that if she took his name, people in Washington would identify her as either an ally or an enemy before even meeting her, National Journal reported. “That is so much cooler than being Heather Miller,” she said. “I’m ready to be a Podesta.”'

Continued......

https://www.washingtonian.com/2014/08/1 ... -marriage/

[brekin]

We've already seen some twinning of content from other parts that gets pretty hysterical and strident here. Suck to be a host to that.

What does that mean?

The "What's Happening? It? (TRIGGERS UPON TRIGGERS) Fri Nov 04, 2016 12:15 pm" thread has had 24660 views.
There are a lot of Travis Bickle's out there.
There are going to be a lot more threads like that over the next couple of years.
And most of them are not going to have the intel 100%.
And there are going to be incidents.
Some of those threads may even start first at RI.
I'm just paranoid, about the other less seasoned paranoids.

[seemslikeadream]

What would have happened to this thread if there had been mass casualties at the pizza restaurant?

Would we just move on to a Pizza Crisis Actors thread?

How would people here feel about that?

I think this needs to be addressed.

I know other Clinton hating discussion sites that will ban anyone for bringing this up

We now live in Trump world