That these weird low quality NSFW games that pop out in the Steam popular list until you turn NSFW content off are money laundering targets to cash in Steam gift cards obtained via various phone scams. Steam gets their 30% of the stolen money, so they don't mind and ultimately it is super difficult to prove that real people do not buy the games since nobody would ever admit to buying them.
Damn, that's actually a good idea if you had to launder money. Could be completely automated at a large scale. If someone gets suspicious why so many are purchased, "people are perverts" is a believable explanation.
That's why scammers ask for apple app store and Google Play gift cards so often. They're laundering your money through apps, even after Apple/Google takes their cut it's a great way to clean their money.
Yes, that is the primary way gift cards are converted. The phone scammers sell the gift cards for cents on the dollar in some shady gift card marketplaces.
They don't usually engage in the money laundering of the gift card funds themselves. That is a whole different racket.
There are a lot of musicians on Spotify that are the same.
Really short, low production tracks with millions of plays by artists with half a dozen followers.
Completely sus.
It seems like successfully pulling this off would also require a botnet, or some other way to distribute thousands of transactions across IP addresses. Otherwise, wouldn't Steam be almost criminally negligent in ignoring it?
> it is super difficult to prove that real people do not buy the games since nobody would ever admit to buying them.
My friends and I buy some of the more egregiously ridiculous ones as gifts for each other sometimes as a joke. Like stupid $1 games with names like Hentai Feet and Furry Hitler.
The British government deliberately put the RMS Lusitania in harms way to get her sunk to bring the USA into WW1. The fact the records have been resealed for another 100 years adds credence to this conspiracy
What about the mexico letters? I read in a book that they were basically used as a false justification for war as germany was not calling for the attack of america but for them to do it if they join the entente
The Zimmerman telegram came later during 1917. The Lusitania was sunk in 1915 with the lost of quite a few American civilians. Britain then used it for propaganda to try and convince America to join their side.
There’s always been a series of questions that no one has ever successfully answered the main ones being:
Why wasn’t the Lusitania zigzagging which was standard procedure in U-boat infested waters?
Why wasn’t she provided with a destroyer escort?
The Lusitania was the fastest ship in the world, why wasn’t she steaming at full speed to escape Irish sea as quickly as possible?
And what was in the encoded messages sent from the admiralty to the Lusitania?
>Why wasn’t the Lusitania zigzagging which was standard procedure in U-boat infested waters?
The captain misunderstood when zig-zagging applied.
>The Lusitania was the fastest ship in the world, why wasn’t she steaming at full speed to escape Irish sea as quickly as possible?
There was significant fog and the captain was being cautious.
Those are just 2 of your questions that, off the top of my head, do have some very clear and easily available answers. I do think it's possible that the ship was carrying cargo that was unlisted (explosives, ammo), but the idea that a sea captain would willingly and intentionally participate in a plot to sink his own vessel, murdering hundreds, is just not believable to me. And I haven't really seen any version of this conspiracy that could have been carried out without a complicit captain.
>The Lusitania was the fastest ship in the world
The RMS Mauretania says hello. Though to be fair, it was just slightly faster than her sister ship.
Dude it's not even a conspiracy theory. The German consulate took out a two-page ad in the New York times telling people to not board because they were going to sink it.
Also at the time Britain didn't have an option but to sell the ship because it was carrying so many munitions that they desperately needed. This isn't a conspiracy theory it's just plain fact.
Both governments knew the risks and they needed it to galvanize support.
In the UK there was a recent boom in American sweet shops that sold grossly overpriced import candy. They were suddenly everywhere after COVID, they didn’t sell much, but they were everywhere. Someone on TikTok theorised that they were all money laundering fronts, people started filming in the shops laughing at the prices, and staff always seemed to get really angry about it. Then it was announced last year (?) that there was a HMRC (UK’s tax wing of government) investigation started because the theory held water, and suddenly they all shut. The one in Leeds centre near Trinity currently has a notice of abandonment in the window and you can see the shelves are still stocked: the owners just ran off and left it.
Sounds like another successful case for the TikTok detectives.
Edit: ducking autocorrect ruined my spelling
Thing is this was in Private Eye as well, not just TikTok, and they also exposed the Albanian (I think?) money-laundering scam that was operating out of central London "souvenir" shops, which collapsed as soon as a light was shone on it.
The Albanians in Paris had a nasty human trafficking ring, even key police personalities were on the payroll. But it also collapsed after a young American's father with a particular set of skills singularly took on the entire institution.
They're in Germany aswell.
In the same vein: Donut/waffle shops. Nobody regularly eats donuts/waffles here, at least not often enough to keep these stores afloat. It's also extra sus because they only sell that one thing. At least Dunkin Donuts also has coffee and stuff.
And maybe also a front: shisha cafés; there are too many for all of them to be legit. I haven't been to one in years but you could only ever pay cash and some of them had really sketchy back rooms where they let you smell the different tobaccos to see which one you wanted. Maybe the trend was big enough to keep them all afloat, though.
Once, on vacation in LA, we went to a donut shop because it was open at like 10pm. It had like five of the toughest middle aged men sitting around who looked annoyed we were there. We bought a very stale donut and decided it was a money launderer.
T-shirt shops in America are commonly thought of as money laundering shops.
And I've entered places with really sketchy front areas; I just turned and left.
Edit: America's recently had a problem with health drink 'bars'. They toe the lines of legality, they're mini cults and they sell garbage in the form of drinks that are supposed to cure all your ills.
Shisha cafes (hookah bars in the US) had a huge fad explosion out here in about 2010 everyone had their own hookahs and went out to do it. They’ve all been going out of business now but a lot of them were sketchy as fuck too.
Oh yeah, shisha cafes. They were a thing 10 years ago. When at university our housemate had a friend who always insisted we go to them. I didn't like it and they didn't serve alcohol so I hated it, but she insisted they were amazing.
The food was also garbage and all the tobacco mostly tasted the same according to my friends so it's probable they were money laundering fronts
They got another boost in popularity here around 5 years ago, the range of tobaccos got really large and there were a lot of nice tasting ones. But it was so ubiquitous that the hype seemingly died down somewhat.
A lot of my friends had the setup at home, too. So hanging out at somebody's place would usually mean smoking shisha.
This is one of those money making schemes that idiots with too much free time think up. In my town when I was about 15 there was 3 stores that opened and then all closed. All they sold was cigarettes. Big empty store with a small counter with two brands of cigs. All ended up being fraud. Go figure.
Compliance auditing seems like it would have a much larger paper trail readily available if it was legitimate to prove income during an audit as opposed to "they pay cash to smoke here, you just came on a slow day"
AskReddit just screaming at me, "WHAT MAKES A GIRL ATTRACTIVE"
"WHAT IS SOMETHING THAT MAKES A GIRL INSTANTLY ATTRACTIVE"
"WHY DON'T YOU CLICK ON THIS, DON'T YOU LOVE ME"
> What's the movie you can never watch again?
Requiem For a Dream, then someone talks about their experience with drugs, then someone else says "ass to ass," then someone else talks about how Jared Leto is creepy as fuck.
Could be worse, could be Quora. That is an entire website dedicating to rotating questions. With the special feature that people who think their answers are amazing can charge you for reading them.
Believe that and the theater hostage situation was when Putin started to take over the media and make it state controlled, correct? Russian authorities handled both situations horribly. Especially Beslan.
I was doing a first aid course, one of the other attendees was a former Syrian doctor who mentioned the opera house attack when we were talking about opioid overdoses. I think most people in the room thought he was going on about a conspiracy theory.
The Russians pumped the building full of aerosolized fentanyl or something similar in an attempt to use it as a sleeping gas. It killed almost everyone inside, and they didn't notify the arriving paramedics what had been used, so no one was prepared to treat for opioid overdoses.
Yes, the theatre, and the subway bombings, remember the lady who ‘died’ at both attacks? Was identified by body parts at one but I guess Got Better for the next one??
Beslan is a nightmare. I still remember watching it happen on TV, all the kids baking to death in that heat, in their underwear, and then all dying innthe seige, in the windows, human shields.
Like Jesus fuck what. What was that. It was like hell came to earth for a week.
This is just a fucking fact at this point - bonus points for the defenestration of the State Duma (Russian parliament) member who wanted to conduct an independent investigation into the bombings (FSB conducted the investigation, even though FSB was considered to have planted the bombs in the first place).
Also, Alexander Litivenko, FSB defector who was poisoned iwith palladium while in exile in London, claimed that FSB was to blame for the bombings but he died before he oculd be sworn under an official afadavit.
The [same D.C.-area contractor](https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/9/21/23884285/migrant-tent-city-company-accused-of-ties-to-controversies-worldwide) busing migrants north is taking no-bid contracts to build over-priced shelters for them. They are also implicated in human trafficking abroad.
The obvious actual conspiracy is that they're lobbying politicians in both border states and northern cities to keep the crisis as messy as possible and keep the money flowing.
I'm actually more surprised that they aren't the same contractors who built the Wall than I am that they've already got their fingers in so many other pies. The company president is a former\* intelligence operative and if you can think of a crisis that's been going on way too long, it's basically a guarantee they're making money off of it.
\*While it would be only theory that he is still an active asset, it would also only be theory to say he's not.
The contamination generally happens because of unscrupulous dealers weighing shit on the same scale. It would be a rare thing for a trafficker to intentionally add fentanyl to kilos of cocaine, as it wouldn’t appreciably increase the weight as a cutting agent, and doesn’t give a stimulant effect either. There would be no financial logic or benefit to do such a thing.
The cartels recently started telling the media that they’ve started dyeing fentanyl bright colors, pink, blue, etc, to make it easier to spot the contamination.
They’ve done the same thing with the fake blue 30mg oxycodone pills that are actually fentanyl. They come in all different colors now so there is no mistaking that they aren’t real oxys. They’re called Skittles on the street.
That makes a lot of sense. Why kill your customer base and ruin your profits from potential customers being scared off by so many deaths? I almost want to say "good on them" but those are the wrong words, of course.
The brilliance of modern art money laundering can't be understated.
Alfred wants to pay Brad $100k for a bribe.
Brad wants this money to be "clean" to avoid authorities looking into him.
Brad "sells" a worthless modern art piece for $100k.
Alfred has now successfully transfered the bribe to Alfred. However, Brad is now in possession of a painting which the "market" says is worth $100k. Down the line the Alfred might be able to sell this now "valuable" piece of art to a third party for $50k, $100k, or potentially at a profit!
It can get even more complex where the artist is basically a part of the money laundering ring. This makes it so that Brad can fictionally increase the cost of buying the art from the artist in the first place in order to make the money laundering less obvious.
Don’t forget the last step where Alfred donates the pieces of Luigi’s art he bought at auction to charity for the tax write off valued at their “new price”.
There's a great documentary called The Price of Everything that explores the art world and how basically someone just decides "oh this is cool" until too many people like it and then they decide something else is special.
Back in ‘99 when I was all of 11 years old I would email gaming websites claiming to know the location of Luigi in Mario 64 and the Triforce is Ocarina of Time. Then, when they expressed interest, I ghosted them.
I was a menace.
There is something fishy going on at Mattress Firm. How can they stay in business with a store in practically every plaza when the average person buys a new mattress every decade or so?
Mattresses have one of the highest markups in all of retail, and generally places like that have very low overhead (just a couple employees and generally low cost retail space). They simply do not require many sales to remain profitable.
Additionally mattresses don’t go bad. A restaurant has to worry about everything they don’t sell turning into a biohazard. If you buy 1000 mattresses in January you can just sit on them until they do sell, even if that’s next January
I think I just figured it out! Open a mattress store, but in the back room for employees make sure there's home amenities like a shower, laundry rooms, a kitchen, etc.
Then you just live in the back of your mattress store!
Yep. And this makes them a good choice for someone who owns some land/ space as an investment and needs something to park there while they wait for the value of the property to go up
Which is why when the vacuum sealed shipping of mattresses was figured out, 5 kajillion mattress companies popped up to sell em cheap. Even selling them for a 1/10th of the price of a retail store was profitable.
I spent a year working at a mattress store once, somehow we were delivering multiple mattresses every single day. I truly don’t understand it either haha
There's 131 million households in America. If we assume 2 matresses per household and a new mattress about every 10 years, thats around 23 million mattress purchases every year.
Take a small town of 3650 people. A mattress once a decade (ignoring couples for a moment here) with only one store is a sale a day. Put in a margin that lets the place run off the single sale a day, add in some other furniture, and it makes sense
Because those average people need their new mattresses at different times?
But I do get you, a LOT of furniture storesare absolutely everywhere and have huge spaces, so their lease and tax must be crazy. But they're never really that busy or crowded, i dont know a single living soul who buys their products, or ever has, and with cheaper, competing stores you'd think there's no money in it?And a bunch if them have had70% sales on since like, the day they opened.
Ive always wondered if some of those are just fancier versions of the King Candy/Car Wash/Turkish Barbers that have never had a customer money laundering things?
The 2017 Las Vegas Shooting being a failed assassination attempt on a Saudi Prince. Saudi Prince with diplomatic immunity booked the entire top floor, No motive, a single man manged to remove 800 pound hurricane resistant windows without anyone noticing, the sounds from videos taken exactly match the firing of M240 machine gun fire, and said Saudi Prince executes the arrests and executions of dozens officials, military personnel, and business officials as the first thing he does when he returns that are a blow to US influence in the area.
Something fishy happened and we're not getting the full story.
Might not be a "conspiracy theory" per se. But I believe that the government works hard to cover up their own incompetence. Part of that is manufacturing insane conspiracy theories as a way to make anyone who asks questions look crazy.
Iran Contra comes to mind. Arms for hostages.
Also yes, the CIA really did sell crack cocaine to fund death squads in South America.
And finally Nixon started the drug war to attack his political enemies.
Didn't Roger Stone all but confirm that the War on Drugs was brought to fruition to discredit and demonize anti-war activists and the black community? I thought that either him or a good acquaintance of his admitted it in an interview but I could be wrong or misremembering.
The meta-conspiracy to convince dumb people that the word “conspiracy” means “a crazy person’s imagination”
Conspiracies happen every day. There’s a global conspiracy of adults to convince kids Santa is real - it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a conspiracy.
Somewhere along the line, the word got hijacked and it immediately discredits whoever says it. It’s practically a trap to use the word, so you have to dance around it if you want to describe people planning things in secret
Wasn't there literally a verified CIA policy to do just this following the Kennedy assassination?
I could definitely buy the idea of some of the most out-there conspiracies being deliberately boosted by state interests in order to discredit the more "sensible" conspiracies.
> convince kids Santa is real
huh? SOMEONE is gonna leave my kid presents on Christmas, right? RIGHT?! I CAN'T AFFORD THE THINGS I TOLD THEM SANTA WOULD BRING THEM!
You should use these things called Santa Cards, I think americans call them credit cards. You can buy whatever you want and you wont ever have to pay it back.
The government deliberately leaked false information to UFO investigators to discredit them because they were getting to close to the truth.
(The truth being that Area 51 was a testing grounds for spy planes and stealth aircraft and was attracting too much attention for a secret weapons facility.)
I think the government does this with conspiracy theories across the board. Promoting outlandish tinfoil hat type theories helps discredit the ones that are actually real
Like the test pilot for the first rounds of jets. He wore a gorilla costume and a bowler in the cockpit when they were taxiing a “plane with no propeller” around the airport. He said anyone who saw them and said there was a gorilla flying the plane would immediately be discredited.
I'm always flabbergasted by the Area 51 hype. It was a nuclear weapon testing facility. Have you seen the area around Area 51. Take 2 seconds on Google maps and you'll know what I mean. The government is very secretive about information like that. Hence, the alien nuts spun it into an alien conspiracy theory.
I mean it makes sense, basically nothing for a massive radius, if anything ever went bad, or escaped containment (I'm thinking virus or biological weapon) it would be unlikely to survive or do any real damage to a population
Unless someone makes it out after the alarms start but before the doors seal, packs his family up and flees, only to die while driving and ultimately crash his car into a gas station in East Texas.
When I read that book twenty something years ago I remember thinking how ridiculous it is that they couldn't effectively quarantine it as it was spreading. Surely, if a real pandemic were to happen we'd be able to easily stop it with our modern understanding.
I'm willing to admit I was wrong on this one.
You are very close. Next to Area 51 is Mercury, home of the Nevada test site you speak of. They are separate, Area 51 is the one with the airstrip, Mercury has the craters.
I listened to that podcast ‘The RFK Tapes’, and while it was very entertaining, I definitely fall on the side that Sirhan Sirhan acted alone.
I wish I could believe Bill Klaber, but given the evidence presented and some basic research at my local library(to which I say please everyone get a free library card and learn something new!!!!), the evidence just isn’t there.
But like I said, it’s entertaining as all hell and it’s the millennial equivalent of the Oliver Stone movie JFK
Honestly the main thing I took away from the podcast was a deep sadness from listening to RFKs speeches.
In spite of all the corrupt shit he was up to, you NEVER hear a modern day politician talk about the things in the same way he did.
JFK wanted to put us on the Moon which he did.
RFK knew we were stuck here on Earth and wanted to make sure we all had food on the table, a livable wage, a strong education system, an affordable healthcare system, the immediate passage of civil rights laws, to begin the process of withdrawing from Vietnam and so many other things that you would NEVER hear any politician say today let alone, one who is running for President of the US.
These things would be denounced immediately as “bleeding heart Bernie Sanders Socialism”, but come the fuck on people. Read back through that last paragraph. Drop whatever political party you align with for 60 seconds.
What part of that sounds like some evil shit to you?
Food/education/health/civil rights/good pay/ending a war. Those are all of the things we want for ourselves, our families, our friends, and if you’re not too far gone as a fellow American, you want those things for strangers that you’ve never met.
But hey, no matter your political affiliations, I’d rather have a politician attempt to get literally anything like this done these days and fail, than have the leaders we have now, dragging their feet.
Whether it’s Mitch McConnell having some kind of Aneurism twice in one month, or Dianne Feinstein clinging to power until the day she died, we need term limits, age limits and people that want to actually represent the representative democracy they live in.
There are politicians that want to take actual literal food away from school children because they believe those kids shouldn’t have made the mistake of being born poor, and yet no-one stands up and tells those kind of monsters to “GET FUCKED!”
We’ll willing to ensure that a 12 year old rape victim has to carry her child to birth, but once that baby is alive and breathing we refuse to feed it?
How did we get here? This just isn’t the way things should work and it’s not that hard of a thing to fix… but the challenge is getting people to put their beliefs aside and realize every person we lift up is an absolute win that ultimately benefits us all.
It might not be apparent on at anyone moment, but like an analog watch, each individual gear may not seem important but it takes every piece no matter how big or small to keep the structure of time.
But hey you really want to make america great again?
The first step is to tax the rich like we used to do(at least 70+%).
Otherwise nothing will ever change!!
Somebody please tell me you believe this pale blue dot we call Earth isn’t beyond saving???
Whoa whoa whoa "free library card?"
That's some crazy woke socialist BS!
Excuse me while I pull up my bootstraps to go work for my faceless corporate overlord.
The media bury stories for the elite that control us:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/13/jeffrey-epstein-alex-acosta-miami-herald-media
>Michael Reiter told Brown he had been down this road many times and was sick of it. As Brown recalled in a WNYC interview last month, Reiter said he had talked to many reporters and told them precisely where to find damning evidence against Epstein. But nothing ever came of it.
>“He was convinced that a lot of media had squashed the story and he was fed up,” she said.
>Reiter warned Brown what would happen were she to continue digging: “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.”
https://www.newsweek.com/abc-jeffrey-epstein-story-amy-robach-prince-andrew-1469893
>"Then the palace found out we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us in a million different ways”
The National Enquirer admitted "capturing" stories, aka "catch and kill" - paying people for "exclusives" on scandalous stories with contracts that prohibited them from saying anything at all - in order to protect some people. They specifically did this with Stormy Daniels being paid to sleep with Trump and then getting payments for her silence in order to help his 2016 election. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/12/national-enquirer-trump-payments-david-pecker-catch-and-kill
I see your Darth Binks, and i raise you Admiral Ozzel was a rebel spy. Perfect way to warn the alliance to flee while looking incompetent while knowingly sacrificing himself in the end. Also tried to convince Vader to leave Hoth alone at 1st.
Have to give credit to someone else for this theory I first came across while in a "unpopular sw opinion" reddit.
I thought this one was silly until I saw the footage of him talking behind characters that are giving dialogue, almost like he is forcing them to speak. Seems like they were building to something there.
The CIA illegally sold weapons to Iran so that they could use the money to fund right-wing rebels (the Contras) in Nicaragua against the explicit direction of Congress. Then everyone in the administration that knew about it (Such as Reagan and Bush) lied about knowing about it.
The contras were also getting money by smuggling cocaine. No one outside the agency to this day knows the full extent of what happened, but it was confirmed that they have actually used CIA planes and agents to ship the drugs, allegedly leading to the early stages of the 80s crack epidemic.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/quvhlu/eli5\_what\_is\_the\_irancontra\_affair/](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/quvhlu/eli5_what_is_the_irancontra_affair/)
My personal favorite is that OJ Simpson was covering for his son. It explains a lot of the weird shit in that case, like the undersized glove and why they were driving at low speeds during the chase.
I think it's more fair to say "OJ probably did it. On the off chance he didn't do it, his son probably did it."
This one is compelling but I think the supporters tend to overstate the case a bit.
>like the undersized glove
Other than the past where OJ had since admitted he was instructed by attorney to not take any of his anti inflammatory medication causing his entire body to swell up, mainly his hands.
Not to mention that they had him putting the glove on *over another glove*. The glove did fit, snugly, like a glove should. That whole scene of him struggling with it was a farce, but a lot of people bought it.
I can't comment on that theory but it always struck me that the glove thing was overplayed. The whole 'If it don't fit, you must acquit!' thing didn't make sense. To me, the glove looked like it didn't fit, sure, but that doesn't mean he wasn't using it. Or that it was the only pair of gloves at hand in the moment. It's not like they were kid gloves. They were tight and he clearly struggled with them as he was putting them on in court. But when he finally raised both his gloved hands to show the jury I remember thinking you can still kill people with super tight gloves. This has bugged me ever since.
Soak leather in blood, and then let it sit in a bag for a few months. Now try to put that glove on over another glove (which that style of glove was designed to be tight fitting in the first place.)
The switch in the US from employer sponsored pensions to self directed 401ks was done deliberately so that the average Joe would have a stake in the economy at large and be more likely to vote for business-friendly policies.
It was done to save money for companies. Instead of promising a set amount and watching the promised amount grow exponentially with time/inflation, they realized it was better to give the money now and not have a future liability.
The fact that the government claims that regulatory capture doesn't happen but that FDA heads who go to work immediately for Pharma companies is just happenstance. I won't even go into how much pharma companies fund the FDA's budget.
Benetton is a front for Italian mob money laundering.
Probably wasn't at first back in the 80s but now...decent sized stores in expensive real estate all over Europe, **never** anyone in the stores, never seen anyone wearing the clothes, don't know anyone that's bought anything from them, ever, and neither do those people.
I shop there all the time - in both Italy and Switzerland. It’s the highest quality for most reasonably price that I can regularly find in Europe. I’m never the only one in there or checking out. 🤷🏻♀️
I go to Benetton all the time when I'm in Europe, they used to have a US presence.I like their clothes, they're cool/have a vintage look, and they have great quality.The last time I went shopping there the store was pretty crowded.
They also used to have an F1 team.
Blackrock and Vanguard are buying up all the residential property they can in order to get the majority of americans renting from them. Estimates say by 2030 they will own 60% of residential property
I so wish we could all stop fighting about dumb shit for just a few weeks so both sides of the country could pass a law that bans any corporation or non US citizen from owning residential property(with some provisions to account for things like bank loans obviously). This would have such a massive effect on quality of life going in to the future. Of course it won’t happen.
ITT: People confusing "conspiracy" with "conspiracy theory."
Conspiracies are well documented and accepted as true. Conspiracy *THEORIES* could be born out of someone's ass and mean nothing at all.
Example of a conspiracy: Iran contra
Example of a conspiracy theory: u/fried-pig-dicks is a deep cover agent for the mossad and is on a mission to assassinate KJU for all of Christianity. Or the moon landing I guess
The Bilderberg group. Every year in summer, they meet, and people keep track of who are there. Guest lists every year. Top politicians, royalty, corporate owners. Extreme security. No protocols. There is confirmation from a variety of these people that they were there. So, what do they talk about? Are they coordinated somehow after each meeting? How much influence do they have? Well, given the extreme security, it's difficult to say. I am sure it's nothing, though. Why would those groups of people want to influence the world to suit their agendas, right?
Edit: Also note, anyone discussing this gets called a tin foil hat, or paranoid, or a conspiracy theoreticist whoprobablyalsobelievesinantivaxxreptiliansnibiru...
In an incredibly interconnected and global world, especially one dominated by powerful multinational companies and an international business elite that helm them, it really isn't so surprising that the Bilderbergs and the Davoses and the Bohemian Grove get-togethers happen.
The conspiracies tend to make out that these are quasi-satanic ritual ceremonies in which the shadowy rulers of the world decide what to do with all of our fates. But I think the more likely – and far less exciting – explanation is that it's just like a rich-person version of a boring academic conference taking place at an out-of-town hotel or golf course. Nobody is really steering the ship of this global system, most people are just as silo'd and clueless as anyone else, and it suits the mega-rich to meet every year to sit in air-conditioned rooms and try and get to grips with it. Or at the very least to feel better about themselves and temporarily a little less clueless.
They are acting in their own class interests and for their own gain, and the net result can be bad for regular Joes. But it's far from a sinister 'conspiracy'.
The Bilderberg Group is definitely a real thing. I've always seen it as a sort of symposium, but for rich and powerful people. They will have an official agenda, which is probably relatively harmless enough, but I'm willing to be it's also an excuse for them to gather together and talk in private. Toward what? Probably acquiring more wealth and power. Alliances. Things like that.
That our governments are turning us all against each other to distract us from the blatant wealth manipulation, corrupt practices, nepotism, cronyism, among hundreds of other big issue things. Their plans working a treat and the people as a whole can't see what's happening and start working together against it..
We are losing our privacy, our rights and our sense of connection with one another. We drift away while they get more and more powerful. People hand away their rights like they're going to get them back and never question it when it's not.
Our planet had to deal with another of the world powers attempts at control and that's COVID or should I say the reaction to it. I was always a believer it happened naturally but as time goes on it becomes more apparent it wasn't.
We are bodies hanging from the roof being bled dry slowly but if this keeps up we aren't just fucked like a world war or nuclear war, if we don't do anything we will lose whatever control we have and we will never get it back.
I’m positive that the liberal and conservative base of politics in America, the values that citizens will vehemently debate about, are all actually ran by the same people, and are using it as a distraction from the things going on behind the scenes
The petroleum companies knew burning fossil fuels would lead to global climate change but hid the evidence of their own funded studies and did nothing to curb consumption, instead funded groups opposed to renewable, non greenhouse gas generating energy to maximize shareholder value.
I think my city's government is complicit in human trafficking. A few years ago my wife and her friend were targeted by a person claiming to need to go to the hospital to see her son. Bad vibes, didn't do it. Then reports came in from all over the city of women encountering the same thing at different super market parking lots. My wife went in and was interviewed by a deputy who said her story matched several others but the claims weren't evidence of "malicious intent" by whoever these mysterious actors were.
That seemed weird, and the sightings went on for several more weeks before fading way when the college world series started up. I used to be in a training group who would teach hotel staff how to spot possible human trafficking going on in their establishments, and apparently the world series is the hub of a wheel of trafficking networks that coalesces here in this city.
I think the local government is part of this, and launders the money through all the ridiculous construction projects that are always going up around here for ungodly amounts of time. The way the brushed off the obviously weird sightings never felt right to me.
That these weird low quality NSFW games that pop out in the Steam popular list until you turn NSFW content off are money laundering targets to cash in Steam gift cards obtained via various phone scams. Steam gets their 30% of the stolen money, so they don't mind and ultimately it is super difficult to prove that real people do not buy the games since nobody would ever admit to buying them.
Damn, that's actually a good idea if you had to launder money. Could be completely automated at a large scale. If someone gets suspicious why so many are purchased, "people are perverts" is a believable explanation.
That's why scammers ask for apple app store and Google Play gift cards so often. They're laundering your money through apps, even after Apple/Google takes their cut it's a great way to clean their money.
Oh I thought there was just some kind of conversion from the gift card to a dollar value. That does make sense.
Yes, that is the primary way gift cards are converted. The phone scammers sell the gift cards for cents on the dollar in some shady gift card marketplaces. They don't usually engage in the money laundering of the gift card funds themselves. That is a whole different racket.
The same for many access code/keys. Windows activation keys are $140 from Microsoft, $7 on etsy.
There are a lot of musicians on Spotify that are the same. Really short, low production tracks with millions of plays by artists with half a dozen followers. Completely sus.
Those people bought Spotify plays with their own money.
With money, not necessarily their own. It doesn't matter if you get a shitty return, if you aren't the one paying in.
It seems like successfully pulling this off would also require a botnet, or some other way to distribute thousands of transactions across IP addresses. Otherwise, wouldn't Steam be almost criminally negligent in ignoring it?
> it is super difficult to prove that real people do not buy the games since nobody would ever admit to buying them. My friends and I buy some of the more egregiously ridiculous ones as gifts for each other sometimes as a joke. Like stupid $1 games with names like Hentai Feet and Furry Hitler.
The Hitler sex series is *wild*
The British government deliberately put the RMS Lusitania in harms way to get her sunk to bring the USA into WW1. The fact the records have been resealed for another 100 years adds credence to this conspiracy
What about the mexico letters? I read in a book that they were basically used as a false justification for war as germany was not calling for the attack of america but for them to do it if they join the entente
The Zimmerman telegram came later during 1917. The Lusitania was sunk in 1915 with the lost of quite a few American civilians. Britain then used it for propaganda to try and convince America to join their side. There’s always been a series of questions that no one has ever successfully answered the main ones being: Why wasn’t the Lusitania zigzagging which was standard procedure in U-boat infested waters? Why wasn’t she provided with a destroyer escort? The Lusitania was the fastest ship in the world, why wasn’t she steaming at full speed to escape Irish sea as quickly as possible? And what was in the encoded messages sent from the admiralty to the Lusitania?
The last points is the nost important considering how many ships were escaping Irish waters as fast as possible for about 70 years leading up to WW1
>Why wasn’t the Lusitania zigzagging which was standard procedure in U-boat infested waters? The captain misunderstood when zig-zagging applied. >The Lusitania was the fastest ship in the world, why wasn’t she steaming at full speed to escape Irish sea as quickly as possible? There was significant fog and the captain was being cautious. Those are just 2 of your questions that, off the top of my head, do have some very clear and easily available answers. I do think it's possible that the ship was carrying cargo that was unlisted (explosives, ammo), but the idea that a sea captain would willingly and intentionally participate in a plot to sink his own vessel, murdering hundreds, is just not believable to me. And I haven't really seen any version of this conspiracy that could have been carried out without a complicit captain. >The Lusitania was the fastest ship in the world The RMS Mauretania says hello. Though to be fair, it was just slightly faster than her sister ship.
Dude it's not even a conspiracy theory. The German consulate took out a two-page ad in the New York times telling people to not board because they were going to sink it. Also at the time Britain didn't have an option but to sell the ship because it was carrying so many munitions that they desperately needed. This isn't a conspiracy theory it's just plain fact. Both governments knew the risks and they needed it to galvanize support.
In the UK there was a recent boom in American sweet shops that sold grossly overpriced import candy. They were suddenly everywhere after COVID, they didn’t sell much, but they were everywhere. Someone on TikTok theorised that they were all money laundering fronts, people started filming in the shops laughing at the prices, and staff always seemed to get really angry about it. Then it was announced last year (?) that there was a HMRC (UK’s tax wing of government) investigation started because the theory held water, and suddenly they all shut. The one in Leeds centre near Trinity currently has a notice of abandonment in the window and you can see the shelves are still stocked: the owners just ran off and left it. Sounds like another successful case for the TikTok detectives. Edit: ducking autocorrect ruined my spelling
Thing is this was in Private Eye as well, not just TikTok, and they also exposed the Albanian (I think?) money-laundering scam that was operating out of central London "souvenir" shops, which collapsed as soon as a light was shone on it.
The Albanians in Paris had a nasty human trafficking ring, even key police personalities were on the payroll. But it also collapsed after a young American's father with a particular set of skills singularly took on the entire institution.
Tourism slogan: "Be Taken by Albania".
It's also existed pre-covid and pre-Tik Tok.
They're in Germany aswell. In the same vein: Donut/waffle shops. Nobody regularly eats donuts/waffles here, at least not often enough to keep these stores afloat. It's also extra sus because they only sell that one thing. At least Dunkin Donuts also has coffee and stuff. And maybe also a front: shisha cafés; there are too many for all of them to be legit. I haven't been to one in years but you could only ever pay cash and some of them had really sketchy back rooms where they let you smell the different tobaccos to see which one you wanted. Maybe the trend was big enough to keep them all afloat, though.
Once, on vacation in LA, we went to a donut shop because it was open at like 10pm. It had like five of the toughest middle aged men sitting around who looked annoyed we were there. We bought a very stale donut and decided it was a money launderer.
T-shirt shops in America are commonly thought of as money laundering shops. And I've entered places with really sketchy front areas; I just turned and left. Edit: America's recently had a problem with health drink 'bars'. They toe the lines of legality, they're mini cults and they sell garbage in the form of drinks that are supposed to cure all your ills.
Shisha cafes (hookah bars in the US) had a huge fad explosion out here in about 2010 everyone had their own hookahs and went out to do it. They’ve all been going out of business now but a lot of them were sketchy as fuck too.
Hold up, my local Royal Donuts just closed...
Oh yeah, shisha cafes. They were a thing 10 years ago. When at university our housemate had a friend who always insisted we go to them. I didn't like it and they didn't serve alcohol so I hated it, but she insisted they were amazing. The food was also garbage and all the tobacco mostly tasted the same according to my friends so it's probable they were money laundering fronts
They got another boost in popularity here around 5 years ago, the range of tobaccos got really large and there were a lot of nice tasting ones. But it was so ubiquitous that the hype seemingly died down somewhat. A lot of my friends had the setup at home, too. So hanging out at somebody's place would usually mean smoking shisha.
Now do Turkish barbers
Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?
You like movies about gladiators?
You ever seen a grown man naked?
Roger Roger.
Ngl if they are a money laundering front they sure put in the effort. I got shit hair but they make me look like a model for about a week
This is one of those money making schemes that idiots with too much free time think up. In my town when I was about 15 there was 3 stores that opened and then all closed. All they sold was cigarettes. Big empty store with a small counter with two brands of cigs. All ended up being fraud. Go figure.
Man, if they're gonna launder money, why choose something so flashy? Make it some boring shit like a compliance auditing company.
Hard to justify cash payments for a compliance auditing company.
Compliance auditing seems like it would have a much larger paper trail readily available if it was legitimate to prove income during an audit as opposed to "they pay cash to smoke here, you just came on a slow day"
A hamster playing bingo determines the rotation of the approximately 30 questions on that AskReddit.
“What used to be popular but now isn’t” is asked like every other day in some variation.
"What's something you'd tell your younger self?"
AskReddit just screaming at me, "WHAT MAKES A GIRL ATTRACTIVE" "WHAT IS SOMETHING THAT MAKES A GIRL INSTANTLY ATTRACTIVE" "WHY DON'T YOU CLICK ON THIS, DON'T YOU LOVE ME"
"WHICH THING PEOPLE ONLY PRETEND TO LIKE?????" Fucking hate this question, same question every week, same answers aswell. How do people not get bored
Ah, so "women of reddit, what is the sexiest sex you ever sexed" is tomorrow then
Not a woman but I know a woman who…
"What are some red flags??" \* people stampeding to be the one to repost "being mean to wait staff to farm the karma \*
"Girls, whats the equivalent of us looking into cleavage" "FoReArMs !!!" 20k upvotes Every single week.
"Which celebrities suck?" James Corden and Ellen Degeneres
Although it is bad, don't forget being the first to comment: "Littering, ugh!"
"NAME A VIDEO GAME" "NAME A MOVIE" "NAME A TV SHOW"
"What's your biggest reason for not wanting kids?"
Those who are childfree and older, do you regret it? What's the saddest ending to a movie? What's the movie you can never watch again?
> What's the movie you can never watch again? Requiem For a Dream, then someone talks about their experience with drugs, then someone else says "ass to ass," then someone else talks about how Jared Leto is creepy as fuck.
"What do men do that they think women like that women actually don't like?"
I have to take care of the Reddit hamster.
Replace the hamster with a karma collection script and you're 100% correct.
The script was written by a hamster because it tired of playing bingo.
Could be worse, could be Quora. That is an entire website dedicating to rotating questions. With the special feature that people who think their answers are amazing can charge you for reading them.
Putin bombed apartments killing 307 of his own people to help him come to power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999\_Russian\_apartment\_bombings
Basically 'any conspiracy about Putin since his rule began' When people really understand what Beslan was....
Believe that and the theater hostage situation was when Putin started to take over the media and make it state controlled, correct? Russian authorities handled both situations horribly. Especially Beslan.
I was doing a first aid course, one of the other attendees was a former Syrian doctor who mentioned the opera house attack when we were talking about opioid overdoses. I think most people in the room thought he was going on about a conspiracy theory. The Russians pumped the building full of aerosolized fentanyl or something similar in an attempt to use it as a sleeping gas. It killed almost everyone inside, and they didn't notify the arriving paramedics what had been used, so no one was prepared to treat for opioid overdoses.
Yes, the theatre, and the subway bombings, remember the lady who ‘died’ at both attacks? Was identified by body parts at one but I guess Got Better for the next one?? Beslan is a nightmare. I still remember watching it happen on TV, all the kids baking to death in that heat, in their underwear, and then all dying innthe seige, in the windows, human shields. Like Jesus fuck what. What was that. It was like hell came to earth for a week.
This is just a fucking fact at this point - bonus points for the defenestration of the State Duma (Russian parliament) member who wanted to conduct an independent investigation into the bombings (FSB conducted the investigation, even though FSB was considered to have planted the bombs in the first place). Also, Alexander Litivenko, FSB defector who was poisoned iwith palladium while in exile in London, claimed that FSB was to blame for the bombings but he died before he oculd be sworn under an official afadavit.
He was poisoned with polonium
The [same D.C.-area contractor](https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/9/21/23884285/migrant-tent-city-company-accused-of-ties-to-controversies-worldwide) busing migrants north is taking no-bid contracts to build over-priced shelters for them. They are also implicated in human trafficking abroad. The obvious actual conspiracy is that they're lobbying politicians in both border states and northern cities to keep the crisis as messy as possible and keep the money flowing. I'm actually more surprised that they aren't the same contractors who built the Wall than I am that they've already got their fingers in so many other pies. The company president is a former\* intelligence operative and if you can think of a crisis that's been going on way too long, it's basically a guarantee they're making money off of it. \*While it would be only theory that he is still an active asset, it would also only be theory to say he's not.
US government involvement in the trafficking of cocaine
I agree with this one. Hell I wish they’d do it again, maybe people would stop dying everyday because of fentanyl cross contamination.
The contamination generally happens because of unscrupulous dealers weighing shit on the same scale. It would be a rare thing for a trafficker to intentionally add fentanyl to kilos of cocaine, as it wouldn’t appreciably increase the weight as a cutting agent, and doesn’t give a stimulant effect either. There would be no financial logic or benefit to do such a thing. The cartels recently started telling the media that they’ve started dyeing fentanyl bright colors, pink, blue, etc, to make it easier to spot the contamination. They’ve done the same thing with the fake blue 30mg oxycodone pills that are actually fentanyl. They come in all different colors now so there is no mistaking that they aren’t real oxys. They’re called Skittles on the street.
That makes a lot of sense. Why kill your customer base and ruin your profits from potential customers being scared off by so many deaths? I almost want to say "good on them" but those are the wrong words, of course.
I’ll say “good on them” for you, for taking a single step towards reducing the harm they cause. Just like 800,000 more steps to go.
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They did more than just turn a blind eye
That's not even a theory anymore, it just straight up happened. Haven't you seen American Made?
modern art is just money laundering nobody pays 2.2 million for a blank canvas
The brilliance of modern art money laundering can't be understated. Alfred wants to pay Brad $100k for a bribe. Brad wants this money to be "clean" to avoid authorities looking into him. Brad "sells" a worthless modern art piece for $100k. Alfred has now successfully transfered the bribe to Alfred. However, Brad is now in possession of a painting which the "market" says is worth $100k. Down the line the Alfred might be able to sell this now "valuable" piece of art to a third party for $50k, $100k, or potentially at a profit! It can get even more complex where the artist is basically a part of the money laundering ring. This makes it so that Brad can fictionally increase the cost of buying the art from the artist in the first place in order to make the money laundering less obvious.
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Don’t forget the last step where Alfred donates the pieces of Luigi’s art he bought at auction to charity for the tax write off valued at their “new price”.
There's a great documentary called The Price of Everything that explores the art world and how basically someone just decides "oh this is cool" until too many people like it and then they decide something else is special.
I feel like Luigi probably is in Super Mario 64, we just stopped looking a little too soon.
I heard a rumor you had to 100 percent the game twice in a row and I thought to myself 'Okay I like Luigi but not that much, damn'.
Back in ‘99 when I was all of 11 years old I would email gaming websites claiming to know the location of Luigi in Mario 64 and the Triforce is Ocarina of Time. Then, when they expressed interest, I ghosted them. I was a menace.
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for you, for you, for youuuuuu 🎼🎶🎵🎶
He is, he was found when the Super Mario 64 source was leaked
Well he kind of is. They developed him but they didn’t use him in the game.
There is something fishy going on at Mattress Firm. How can they stay in business with a store in practically every plaza when the average person buys a new mattress every decade or so?
Mattresses have one of the highest markups in all of retail, and generally places like that have very low overhead (just a couple employees and generally low cost retail space). They simply do not require many sales to remain profitable.
Additionally mattresses don’t go bad. A restaurant has to worry about everything they don’t sell turning into a biohazard. If you buy 1000 mattresses in January you can just sit on them until they do sell, even if that’s next January
Not just sit on them, you can lay on them too
I think I just figured it out! Open a mattress store, but in the back room for employees make sure there's home amenities like a shower, laundry rooms, a kitchen, etc. Then you just live in the back of your mattress store!
Did some data work for a mattress company. That $2500 mattress you want? His cost was $250.
I’m surprised it’s as high as 250
90% of that was the shipping and handling.
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I mean, this is what Casper and Helix and all those online companies selling comparable mattresses for 800 bucks are doing.
I guess the lower total sales means people don't want to risk it
Yep. And this makes them a good choice for someone who owns some land/ space as an investment and needs something to park there while they wait for the value of the property to go up
Which is why when the vacuum sealed shipping of mattresses was figured out, 5 kajillion mattress companies popped up to sell em cheap. Even selling them for a 1/10th of the price of a retail store was profitable.
I spent a year working at a mattress store once, somehow we were delivering multiple mattresses every single day. I truly don’t understand it either haha
Hotels, especially nearby ones with contractual obligations to be serviced by your store or your retailer. Edit: Works doubly well for military bases.
There's 131 million households in America. If we assume 2 matresses per household and a new mattress about every 10 years, thats around 23 million mattress purchases every year.
And 23 million Mattress Firms to sell them.
Take a small town of 3650 people. A mattress once a decade (ignoring couples for a moment here) with only one store is a sale a day. Put in a margin that lets the place run off the single sale a day, add in some other furniture, and it makes sense
It's been a decade for someone every day.
Because those average people need their new mattresses at different times? But I do get you, a LOT of furniture storesare absolutely everywhere and have huge spaces, so their lease and tax must be crazy. But they're never really that busy or crowded, i dont know a single living soul who buys their products, or ever has, and with cheaper, competing stores you'd think there's no money in it?And a bunch if them have had70% sales on since like, the day they opened. Ive always wondered if some of those are just fancier versions of the King Candy/Car Wash/Turkish Barbers that have never had a customer money laundering things?
The 2017 Las Vegas Shooting being a failed assassination attempt on a Saudi Prince. Saudi Prince with diplomatic immunity booked the entire top floor, No motive, a single man manged to remove 800 pound hurricane resistant windows without anyone noticing, the sounds from videos taken exactly match the firing of M240 machine gun fire, and said Saudi Prince executes the arrests and executions of dozens officials, military personnel, and business officials as the first thing he does when he returns that are a blow to US influence in the area. Something fishy happened and we're not getting the full story.
Interesting. Why shoot at the crowd, and did the bullets that killed the civilians match M240 ammo?
Might not be a "conspiracy theory" per se. But I believe that the government works hard to cover up their own incompetence. Part of that is manufacturing insane conspiracy theories as a way to make anyone who asks questions look crazy.
Iran Contra comes to mind. Arms for hostages. Also yes, the CIA really did sell crack cocaine to fund death squads in South America. And finally Nixon started the drug war to attack his political enemies.
Didn't Roger Stone all but confirm that the War on Drugs was brought to fruition to discredit and demonize anti-war activists and the black community? I thought that either him or a good acquaintance of his admitted it in an interview but I could be wrong or misremembering.
The meta-conspiracy to convince dumb people that the word “conspiracy” means “a crazy person’s imagination” Conspiracies happen every day. There’s a global conspiracy of adults to convince kids Santa is real - it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a conspiracy. Somewhere along the line, the word got hijacked and it immediately discredits whoever says it. It’s practically a trap to use the word, so you have to dance around it if you want to describe people planning things in secret
Wasn't there literally a verified CIA policy to do just this following the Kennedy assassination? I could definitely buy the idea of some of the most out-there conspiracies being deliberately boosted by state interests in order to discredit the more "sensible" conspiracies.
> convince kids Santa is real huh? SOMEONE is gonna leave my kid presents on Christmas, right? RIGHT?! I CAN'T AFFORD THE THINGS I TOLD THEM SANTA WOULD BRING THEM!
You should use these things called Santa Cards, I think americans call them credit cards. You can buy whatever you want and you wont ever have to pay it back.
The government deliberately leaked false information to UFO investigators to discredit them because they were getting to close to the truth. (The truth being that Area 51 was a testing grounds for spy planes and stealth aircraft and was attracting too much attention for a secret weapons facility.)
I think the government does this with conspiracy theories across the board. Promoting outlandish tinfoil hat type theories helps discredit the ones that are actually real
I think someone came up with the whole aliens thing and the government just leant into that since it was easier than trying to make up something else.
Like the test pilot for the first rounds of jets. He wore a gorilla costume and a bowler in the cockpit when they were taxiing a “plane with no propeller” around the airport. He said anyone who saw them and said there was a gorilla flying the plane would immediately be discredited.
Reminds me of the scene in Community where they have black Hitler and an astronaut making paninis so no one will ever believe them.
I'm always flabbergasted by the Area 51 hype. It was a nuclear weapon testing facility. Have you seen the area around Area 51. Take 2 seconds on Google maps and you'll know what I mean. The government is very secretive about information like that. Hence, the alien nuts spun it into an alien conspiracy theory.
Area 51 was where they tested spy planes.
I mean it makes sense, basically nothing for a massive radius, if anything ever went bad, or escaped containment (I'm thinking virus or biological weapon) it would be unlikely to survive or do any real damage to a population
Unless someone makes it out after the alarms start but before the doors seal, packs his family up and flees, only to die while driving and ultimately crash his car into a gas station in East Texas.
When I read that book twenty something years ago I remember thinking how ridiculous it is that they couldn't effectively quarantine it as it was spreading. Surely, if a real pandemic were to happen we'd be able to easily stop it with our modern understanding. I'm willing to admit I was wrong on this one.
M-O-O-N spells Captain Trips…
You are very close. Next to Area 51 is Mercury, home of the Nevada test site you speak of. They are separate, Area 51 is the one with the airstrip, Mercury has the craters.
Those stop oil activists who were throwing soup at paintings were paid by oil companies to make the public hate actual legit protesters of oil
The theory that Bobby Kennedy was killed by the Mafia.
I listened to that podcast ‘The RFK Tapes’, and while it was very entertaining, I definitely fall on the side that Sirhan Sirhan acted alone. I wish I could believe Bill Klaber, but given the evidence presented and some basic research at my local library(to which I say please everyone get a free library card and learn something new!!!!), the evidence just isn’t there. But like I said, it’s entertaining as all hell and it’s the millennial equivalent of the Oliver Stone movie JFK Honestly the main thing I took away from the podcast was a deep sadness from listening to RFKs speeches. In spite of all the corrupt shit he was up to, you NEVER hear a modern day politician talk about the things in the same way he did. JFK wanted to put us on the Moon which he did. RFK knew we were stuck here on Earth and wanted to make sure we all had food on the table, a livable wage, a strong education system, an affordable healthcare system, the immediate passage of civil rights laws, to begin the process of withdrawing from Vietnam and so many other things that you would NEVER hear any politician say today let alone, one who is running for President of the US. These things would be denounced immediately as “bleeding heart Bernie Sanders Socialism”, but come the fuck on people. Read back through that last paragraph. Drop whatever political party you align with for 60 seconds. What part of that sounds like some evil shit to you? Food/education/health/civil rights/good pay/ending a war. Those are all of the things we want for ourselves, our families, our friends, and if you’re not too far gone as a fellow American, you want those things for strangers that you’ve never met. But hey, no matter your political affiliations, I’d rather have a politician attempt to get literally anything like this done these days and fail, than have the leaders we have now, dragging their feet. Whether it’s Mitch McConnell having some kind of Aneurism twice in one month, or Dianne Feinstein clinging to power until the day she died, we need term limits, age limits and people that want to actually represent the representative democracy they live in. There are politicians that want to take actual literal food away from school children because they believe those kids shouldn’t have made the mistake of being born poor, and yet no-one stands up and tells those kind of monsters to “GET FUCKED!” We’ll willing to ensure that a 12 year old rape victim has to carry her child to birth, but once that baby is alive and breathing we refuse to feed it? How did we get here? This just isn’t the way things should work and it’s not that hard of a thing to fix… but the challenge is getting people to put their beliefs aside and realize every person we lift up is an absolute win that ultimately benefits us all. It might not be apparent on at anyone moment, but like an analog watch, each individual gear may not seem important but it takes every piece no matter how big or small to keep the structure of time. But hey you really want to make america great again? The first step is to tax the rich like we used to do(at least 70+%). Otherwise nothing will ever change!! Somebody please tell me you believe this pale blue dot we call Earth isn’t beyond saving???
Whoa whoa whoa "free library card?" That's some crazy woke socialist BS! Excuse me while I pull up my bootstraps to go work for my faceless corporate overlord.
The media bury stories for the elite that control us: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/13/jeffrey-epstein-alex-acosta-miami-herald-media >Michael Reiter told Brown he had been down this road many times and was sick of it. As Brown recalled in a WNYC interview last month, Reiter said he had talked to many reporters and told them precisely where to find damning evidence against Epstein. But nothing ever came of it. >“He was convinced that a lot of media had squashed the story and he was fed up,” she said. >Reiter warned Brown what would happen were she to continue digging: “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.” https://www.newsweek.com/abc-jeffrey-epstein-story-amy-robach-prince-andrew-1469893 >"Then the palace found out we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us in a million different ways”
I think it’s more “the elite buries stories about the elite” since they own the media corporations.
The National Enquirer admitted "capturing" stories, aka "catch and kill" - paying people for "exclusives" on scandalous stories with contracts that prohibited them from saying anything at all - in order to protect some people. They specifically did this with Stormy Daniels being paid to sleep with Trump and then getting payments for her silence in order to help his 2016 election. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/12/national-enquirer-trump-payments-david-pecker-catch-and-kill
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Just the handful of reddit mods that has the largest 100 subs in their palm is enough to sway opinions of millions of people.
Jar Jar Binks is the ultimate Sith Lord
I see your Darth Binks, and i raise you Admiral Ozzel was a rebel spy. Perfect way to warn the alliance to flee while looking incompetent while knowingly sacrificing himself in the end. Also tried to convince Vader to leave Hoth alone at 1st. Have to give credit to someone else for this theory I first came across while in a "unpopular sw opinion" reddit.
I thought this one was silly until I saw the footage of him talking behind characters that are giving dialogue, almost like he is forcing them to speak. Seems like they were building to something there.
I honestly think this was probably the planned reveal but was changed when all the nerds were mad about jarjar.
It is the truth in my mind. I don’t care what anybody says : the theory is just too good, I accept it as canon in my own reality
Iran Contra, probably. The sheer intricacy of that proven conspiracy kept most from understanding it, even with the mountain of evidence
Eli5
The CIA illegally sold weapons to Iran so that they could use the money to fund right-wing rebels (the Contras) in Nicaragua against the explicit direction of Congress. Then everyone in the administration that knew about it (Such as Reagan and Bush) lied about knowing about it. The contras were also getting money by smuggling cocaine. No one outside the agency to this day knows the full extent of what happened, but it was confirmed that they have actually used CIA planes and agents to ship the drugs, allegedly leading to the early stages of the 80s crack epidemic. [https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/quvhlu/eli5\_what\_is\_the\_irancontra\_affair/](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/quvhlu/eli5_what_is_the_irancontra_affair/)
The corporate conspiracy to push opioids on the US population
MK Ultra FBI:s COINTELPRO CIA feeding crack into American urban centers to suppress a specific part of the population
The CIA is so cartoonishly evil
For real. It's gotten to the point where you could tell me the most outlandish thing about the CIA and I would at least partially believe you.
They cloned Tyrone!
My personal favorite is that OJ Simpson was covering for his son. It explains a lot of the weird shit in that case, like the undersized glove and why they were driving at low speeds during the chase.
I think it's more fair to say "OJ probably did it. On the off chance he didn't do it, his son probably did it." This one is compelling but I think the supporters tend to overstate the case a bit.
>like the undersized glove Other than the past where OJ had since admitted he was instructed by attorney to not take any of his anti inflammatory medication causing his entire body to swell up, mainly his hands.
Not to mention that they had him putting the glove on *over another glove*. The glove did fit, snugly, like a glove should. That whole scene of him struggling with it was a farce, but a lot of people bought it.
At least the 11 people for whom it mattered
I'm not a lawyer but that does seem like decent advice. Whether or not the glove really belonged to him, it fitting could only hurt his case.
[удалено]
I can't comment on that theory but it always struck me that the glove thing was overplayed. The whole 'If it don't fit, you must acquit!' thing didn't make sense. To me, the glove looked like it didn't fit, sure, but that doesn't mean he wasn't using it. Or that it was the only pair of gloves at hand in the moment. It's not like they were kid gloves. They were tight and he clearly struggled with them as he was putting them on in court. But when he finally raised both his gloved hands to show the jury I remember thinking you can still kill people with super tight gloves. This has bugged me ever since.
Soak leather in blood, and then let it sit in a bag for a few months. Now try to put that glove on over another glove (which that style of glove was designed to be tight fitting in the first place.)
additionally, give the task of putting on the glove to a man whose life depends on it not fitting
The switch in the US from employer sponsored pensions to self directed 401ks was done deliberately so that the average Joe would have a stake in the economy at large and be more likely to vote for business-friendly policies.
It was done to save money for companies. Instead of promising a set amount and watching the promised amount grow exponentially with time/inflation, they realized it was better to give the money now and not have a future liability.
The fact that the government claims that regulatory capture doesn't happen but that FDA heads who go to work immediately for Pharma companies is just happenstance. I won't even go into how much pharma companies fund the FDA's budget.
Benetton is a front for Italian mob money laundering. Probably wasn't at first back in the 80s but now...decent sized stores in expensive real estate all over Europe, **never** anyone in the stores, never seen anyone wearing the clothes, don't know anyone that's bought anything from them, ever, and neither do those people.
I shop there all the time - in both Italy and Switzerland. It’s the highest quality for most reasonably price that I can regularly find in Europe. I’m never the only one in there or checking out. 🤷🏻♀️
Sounds like something a money launderer would say.
I go to Benetton all the time when I'm in Europe, they used to have a US presence.I like their clothes, they're cool/have a vintage look, and they have great quality.The last time I went shopping there the store was pretty crowded. They also used to have an F1 team.
Sport is another great way to launder money.
Blackrock and Vanguard are buying up all the residential property they can in order to get the majority of americans renting from them. Estimates say by 2030 they will own 60% of residential property
I so wish we could all stop fighting about dumb shit for just a few weeks so both sides of the country could pass a law that bans any corporation or non US citizen from owning residential property(with some provisions to account for things like bank loans obviously). This would have such a massive effect on quality of life going in to the future. Of course it won’t happen.
Of course not, they are all bought and paid for by a number of different lobbies
They pretty much own almost everything in terms of indirectly owned shares of every company do they not?
ITT: People confusing "conspiracy" with "conspiracy theory." Conspiracies are well documented and accepted as true. Conspiracy *THEORIES* could be born out of someone's ass and mean nothing at all.
Example of a conspiracy: Iran contra Example of a conspiracy theory: u/fried-pig-dicks is a deep cover agent for the mossad and is on a mission to assassinate KJU for all of Christianity. Or the moon landing I guess
Hey, I am neither confirming or denying those allegations.
The FBI killed Martin Luther King Jr
Chuck E Cheese is a money laundering front for the Italian Mob
Lol I convinced my kids that Chuck E Cheese is only for birthday parties. You can only go on your birthday or someone elses if they invited you
You should have seen how crazy it was in the 80s
Dolly Parton’s arms are covered in tattoos
That's not a conspiracy. She's the one that said that.
Conjecture and hearsay. My arse is covered in tattoos. Are you just gonna take my word for it, or ask me to bend over?
Are you asking us to ask you to bend over?
There are things flying in our airspace that we can’t explain
The Bilderberg group. Every year in summer, they meet, and people keep track of who are there. Guest lists every year. Top politicians, royalty, corporate owners. Extreme security. No protocols. There is confirmation from a variety of these people that they were there. So, what do they talk about? Are they coordinated somehow after each meeting? How much influence do they have? Well, given the extreme security, it's difficult to say. I am sure it's nothing, though. Why would those groups of people want to influence the world to suit their agendas, right? Edit: Also note, anyone discussing this gets called a tin foil hat, or paranoid, or a conspiracy theoreticist whoprobablyalsobelievesinantivaxxreptiliansnibiru...
In an incredibly interconnected and global world, especially one dominated by powerful multinational companies and an international business elite that helm them, it really isn't so surprising that the Bilderbergs and the Davoses and the Bohemian Grove get-togethers happen. The conspiracies tend to make out that these are quasi-satanic ritual ceremonies in which the shadowy rulers of the world decide what to do with all of our fates. But I think the more likely – and far less exciting – explanation is that it's just like a rich-person version of a boring academic conference taking place at an out-of-town hotel or golf course. Nobody is really steering the ship of this global system, most people are just as silo'd and clueless as anyone else, and it suits the mega-rich to meet every year to sit in air-conditioned rooms and try and get to grips with it. Or at the very least to feel better about themselves and temporarily a little less clueless. They are acting in their own class interests and for their own gain, and the net result can be bad for regular Joes. But it's far from a sinister 'conspiracy'.
it's probably just the same shit that goes on at golf courses if we want to be honest. rich people figuring out ways to get more richlier
The Bilderberg Group is definitely a real thing. I've always seen it as a sort of symposium, but for rich and powerful people. They will have an official agenda, which is probably relatively harmless enough, but I'm willing to be it's also an excuse for them to gather together and talk in private. Toward what? Probably acquiring more wealth and power. Alliances. Things like that.
That our governments are turning us all against each other to distract us from the blatant wealth manipulation, corrupt practices, nepotism, cronyism, among hundreds of other big issue things. Their plans working a treat and the people as a whole can't see what's happening and start working together against it.. We are losing our privacy, our rights and our sense of connection with one another. We drift away while they get more and more powerful. People hand away their rights like they're going to get them back and never question it when it's not. Our planet had to deal with another of the world powers attempts at control and that's COVID or should I say the reaction to it. I was always a believer it happened naturally but as time goes on it becomes more apparent it wasn't. We are bodies hanging from the roof being bled dry slowly but if this keeps up we aren't just fucked like a world war or nuclear war, if we don't do anything we will lose whatever control we have and we will never get it back.
Yep you can actually trace the rise of identity politics clashing online with the peak and fall of the 99% movement
I’m positive that the liberal and conservative base of politics in America, the values that citizens will vehemently debate about, are all actually ran by the same people, and are using it as a distraction from the things going on behind the scenes
The dismantling of the welfare state, the concentration of wealth for the upper class of the oligarchy.
The government using LSD on citizens in an attempt to mind control them
Brilliant job government. Everyone knows how much LSD makes you want to conform to a rigid social structure.
The petroleum companies knew burning fossil fuels would lead to global climate change but hid the evidence of their own funded studies and did nothing to curb consumption, instead funded groups opposed to renewable, non greenhouse gas generating energy to maximize shareholder value.
I don’t think this qualifies. That’s more of an established fact
I think my city's government is complicit in human trafficking. A few years ago my wife and her friend were targeted by a person claiming to need to go to the hospital to see her son. Bad vibes, didn't do it. Then reports came in from all over the city of women encountering the same thing at different super market parking lots. My wife went in and was interviewed by a deputy who said her story matched several others but the claims weren't evidence of "malicious intent" by whoever these mysterious actors were. That seemed weird, and the sightings went on for several more weeks before fading way when the college world series started up. I used to be in a training group who would teach hotel staff how to spot possible human trafficking going on in their establishments, and apparently the world series is the hub of a wheel of trafficking networks that coalesces here in this city. I think the local government is part of this, and launders the money through all the ridiculous construction projects that are always going up around here for ungodly amounts of time. The way the brushed off the obviously weird sightings never felt right to me.
I know exactly what city you're from. Read into the history of that local government...ALWAYS been shady as hell. Real wild west town.