• BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    24 hours ago

    Officially, Putin collects a modest salary, though a financier alleged to Congress in 2017 that the Russian president “has accumulated $200 billion of ill-gotten gains” through corruption and criminal activity

    He’s been running Russia for decades, I would highly doubt that his net worth is less than a trillion dollars. He is in that rare atmosphere of wealth that travels ABOVE mere billionaires like Musk. He’s up there with the people that are NOT included in the Forbes list, those who are so wealthy and powerful that Forbes knows not to mention their names in some gauche rich guy competition. That includes certain monarchs, Sheikhs, the Rothschilds, etc. Usually long generational wealth that is so large, there almost isn’t even a category for it. Putin is in THAT club. Musk WISHES he could get in that club.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      23 hours ago

      Valid. Good perspective.

      We still haven’t figured out exactly what Epstein was up to. We don’t know if he was working for Israel, Russia, somebody else, or was a free agent, collecting material.amd selling to any and all buyers. We think about politics, but he was probably selling info to corporate interests as well.

      We know something was up, the smoke is as thick and choking as any political tire fire in recent world history, but we just don’t know the source. Blackmail is the usual assumption, but as far as I know, nothing has ever turned up in the files that indicates any hint of a blackmail plot from either side.

      Perhaps they were just careful? SOMEBODY would have slipped, somewhere in all those years. Perhaps MAGA is keeping them all hidden? Plausible, but MAGA is notorious for being virtuosically incompetent, and they would have accidentally let slip a few clues and hints, or even downright proof.

      So, perhaps Putin was somewhat “forced” to use Epstein in some way, through some currently unknown mechanism, but Putin would have kept him fairly quarantined.

      And Epstein was known to play up his connections to influential people he barely knew, portraying them as close friends, if he thought it would ingratiate himself to a new prospect.

      • borkborkbork@piefed.social
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        15 hours ago

        We don’t know if he was working for Israel, Russia, somebody else, or was a free agent, collecting material.amd selling to any and all buyers.

        I can’t help but feel the CIA is on that list due to the lack of interference from US law enforcement time and time again.

        • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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          14 hours ago

          What if “Epstein Class” is more on the nose than people seem to realize?

          What if what Epstein was actually an expert at was manipulating human behavior, and his role in the world above all was helping suppress the lower classes through economics and psychological operations? To me, some of the stuff in the Epstein files looks like some of the stuff in the MK ultra files. After all, isn’t being able to manipulate the masses what makes all that money so powerfully dangerous?

            • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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              14 hours ago

              There’s a lot of child abuse in the MK Ultra files with the goal seeming to be programming human behavior. They’d abuse kids to try and split their personalities and then bury ideas with in different personalities and that sort of thing, so people would act on trigger words and then not remember when they’d come to. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the files (some are publicly available after being discovered in an accounting wing of the CIA), but as I recall there’s an instance where they use a trigger word to get a child to shoot a blank at their friend and when they come to they don’t remember firing the weapon. It’s extremely fucked up shit, and most of it was covered up and destroyed, so the extent to which it was successful and or continued is relatively unknown, but if you think about how much technology has advanced since the 60-70s and how much data they’ve collected, there are probably experts at this, and I’d imagine they wouldn’t have an official government position, but would be very well connected. Obviously, this is a lot of speculation on my part.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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          14 hours ago

          Exactly, another boss, or another paying customer? He seems to be basically freelance, but could anyone stay freelance with so many lethal clients without having some protector somewhere? Who is that protector? Mossad? CIA?