Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/19/video-of-epsteins-first-suic.html
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Sure strange how law enforcement only ever has one copy of extremely critical pieces of video evidence . Surely Bob Bill Barr wasnt involved with this.
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One of a whole lot of Epstein-related videos that have suddenly “gone missing”, I’m sure.
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Bob or Bill? I mean, they’re both pricks, but Bill is the Barr that we need to not walk into right now.
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Lest anyone think that this level of bumbling incompetence and willful indifference to prisoner welfare is out of the ordinary and that some kind of conspiracy must be necessary to explain how fucked up the handling of this has been, a reminder: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/13/malice-vs-incompetence.html
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Bill Barr assured us that whatever suspicious things that happened in that detention facility can be ascribed solely to the regular incompetence of federal facilities. If Barr says there was no funny business, then we must believe him!
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How the Hell can this not be sone kind of cover up? I’m about as far removed from a conspiracy theorist as can be, but this looks fucking dodgy. I can believe Trump would do something like this because he has no morals at all.
Is there a shred if a chance that someone will ever get to the bottom of this?
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Incompetence like this can only happen if someone had good reason to allow it to.
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It is absolutely possible that this is some kind of high-level cover up. It is also absolutely possible that this is just another example of the kind of criminal incompetence that happens in thousands of detention facilities across the nation every goddamn day but most people never hear about because it’s not usually in the public eye.
Either way, we need to institute the kind of criminal justice reforms that would make the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death an outlier rather than something commonplace.
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Except that’s demonstrably not the case, as the linked piece demonstrates pretty clearly. Hell, you only have to go back a week to find another clear example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/nyregion/nicholas-feliciano-rikers-suicide.html
As Brainspore said above, it’s possible that there was some kind of high-level conspiracy to kill Epstein. Hell, when Clinton, Trump and the royal family all benefit by having this guy go tits up, not much is off the table. But, a high-level conspiracy is most definitely not necessary to explain the jaw-dropping incompetence of the staff.
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Not to sound too conspiracy-theorist here, but what if they killed Epstein and used the incompetence of the prison system to cover it up? How could we tell?
Plus, it is rather messed up that we allow there to be so much incompetence in the prison system that someone could be killed and we have no idea if it was because he was a prisoner or if it was because he could spill his spleen and implicate a whole lot of “important” people?
I am kind of amazed that they didn’t just “accidently” put him in general population and let someone with a life sentence shiv “the chomo” “for being a chomo” and take credit for it.
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Like I said, that’s entirely possible but also entirely unnecessary to explain his death. The system is a mess and has been for a long long time.
There’s a saying “if you want to hide a tree, put it in a forest.” But the flipside is that if you happen to find a tree in a forest there’s no particular reason to conclude that someone intentionally hid it there.
Personally I tend to doubt the “Clinton/Trump/Royal family had Epstein murdered” explanation, if only because Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew have already proven that they can’t pull off a decent conspiracy for shit. If a man couldn’t keep a blowjob under wraps when he still had all the power and resources of the Presidency available to him then why should we assume he could pull off an assassination as a private citizen?
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Don’t you think it’s odd that after all the women and young girls Epstein has assaulted, raped or just plain 'ol had sex with that nary a video tape has surfaced.
Sure, expected but, still odd.
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FTFY
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Yeah, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, this is suspicious, maybe the conspiracy theories have something to them” but then I thought, “On the other hand, the incompetence…”
Or, you know, the whole system is thoroughly incompetent. The whole premise of the conspiracy theories is: “With something this important, they’d be competent.” But that doesn’t work if they’re incompetent - they can’t magically become competent just because they need to be.
Well, the general incompetence of the system means they’d likely be too incompetent to be part of a conspiracy as well. (And you couldn’t count on them behaving predictably enough to allow even an outside conspiracy to insert itself successfully.)
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We can use math!
A formula, something like…
Presumed number of occurrences per day of mind-numbing incompetence that permit a suicide
divided by
Number of prisoners under control of the system on any given day
equals
Expected chance Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide was due to mind-numbing incompetence.
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…and the corner bar is hopefully the one we get to walk into much, much more often…
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To those claiming the incompetence defense to the mountain of dodgy shit that the Epstein case has produced. I would point out that if he were some run of the mill character that no one knew or cared about, the explanation would be plausible if not probable. But everyone involved with the Epstein case was well aware that this situation was one of the biggest events of the 21st century to date, and would have no end of scrutiny applied to every single aspect of it. Therefore they had to know any action that failed the legal obligations they had in the matter had a high probability of becoming a huge public issue.
Imagine you were driving under normal circumstances as a generally bad driver and got t-boned. Pretty standard stuff. Now imagine you were driving with 100 pounds of nitroglycerine that you knew would blow you up in even a small accident and that people were actively out to hit your car, and you got t-boned. The odds it was not due to your incompetence go through the roof.
Standard circumstances = standard incompetence. Extraordinary circumstances = either extraordinary incompetence or another explanation.
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But, that’s just what the numerous examples demonstrate–extraordinary incompetence & indifference to prisoner welfare are the norm, not the exception. Look at that story I posted above about the Rikers guards literally watching as a young man killed himself without stopping it.
As others have pointed out, it’s a combination of individuals who simply don’t care all that much about what happens (even to people like Epstein) and a system designed to further that indifference in a hundred different ways.
Again, there could have been a high-level conspiracy to kill and/or silence Epstein, but the facility’s bumbling isn’t necessarily evidence of it.
