chapotraphouse

No wonder Americans are conspiracy theorists, absolutely nothing can happen in that country without a mass of dodgy secretive weird shit just below the surface. Actually it often makes me less inclined to believe conspiracy theories because America is just like that, if you dig below you will inevitably find evil and corruption, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s connected in any grand plans

altoona cops following up on a boomer's report that a guy's eyebrows look like murderman's eyebrows makes no sense at all

i think you're conflating united healthcare and united health group. witty is the ceo of united health group, which owns united healthcare. witty was thompson's boss throughout.

It also begs the question of why Brian specifically? Why not Witty too? Why not wait till the meeting was over and roblox a whole fucking cabal of CEOs?

uhhh that'd be way too risky, dude

if that's too risky, why did he pull his mask down to flirt with a woman mid-crime lol

What throws me is the eyebrows look totally different. And like his facial structure looks similar but not the same? But who knows maybe they’re just weird camera angles. I’m also kind of stupid, so who knows.

UHC's profits were 17B in 2021 and 21B in 2022. Brian Thompson was getting a salary of only 10M per year from 2021-24. This seems like a pretty low profit:CEO wage ratio, but more analysis is necessary

I wont bother checking right now but you can look at his SEC fillings for what he was doing with his shares if anything. Executives are mostly paid in shares and bonuses not just a salary. In fact this is exactly the point why sometimes social and economic inequality measurements can skew towards liberal apologia since salary very obviously doesn't equal wealth so capitalist societies can have lower wage inequality but higher wealth inequality where most of the money is made through financial instruments not wages.

Brian Thompson is a new start, was never CEO of anything before 2021 (father was a grain elevator worker)

I thought he was already CEO of UHC when he got that drunk driving conviction in 2019

also, do you not consider failing to ditch or destroy the gun and IDs fishy?

I fully accept the reality that truth is often stranger than fiction and a lot of these incongruities might just be the chaos and incoherence of the real world where not everything is so cleanly defined or rationally thought out.

But seriously....I want to know how we got to here and what the mindset was. Why didn't he dispose of the gun? Why the "manifesto" that based on details that are coming out basically reads like a handwritten confession? According to CNN he was found with 8k in cash on him and Mangione made the claim, in court, that it was planted. Now of course he could totally be lying but still...what the fuck? The best explanation I have, right now, is that he was wavering between wanting to ride off into the sunset or step up and fully martyr himself...but all of it is so inconsistent. I don't know what to make of it.

there was some embezzlement thing where Brian defrauded 17M, Steven Hemsley (executive chariman) defrauded 102M, and Witty defrauded a few million. Brian was set to testify soon. Hemsley took home almost all of the money.

Oh fuck this was a shadowrun

there was some embezzlement thing where Brian defrauded 17M, Steven Hemsley (executive chariman) defrauded 102M, and Witty defrauded a few million. Brian was set to testify soon. Hemsley took home almost all of the money.

I've been enjoying concocting farcical conspiracy scenarios in my mind since Luigi was collared. It's not so hard to imagine that he could've fallen down the gladio well. Easy to set him up as a patsy. But that also seems like an enormously risky move that, if you assume the powers that be don't know who the real shooter is, leaves them open to embarrassment. And if they do know who the real shooter is why bother creating a fake one? Seems like a lot of work, that could still backfire on them, when it all would've been forgotten about in a few weeks anyway. And the official line is believable. Promising kid from a rich family runs afoul of the health insurance industry, realizes his life will never be the same again, and decides to kill a guy for it. Escapes one of the most surveilled cities in the world as a result of police incompetence and some good planning on his part. Gets caught because a cop lives in the mind of every American over the age of 45.

Anyway, I assume that Luigi is the guy, partly out of "nothing ever happens" brain and partly out of fear that a sophisticated gladio network could really exist, has existed other places in ways that are provable, but I want to believe it's all paranoid delusion, that the State couldn't really be that powerful, because that's too frightening to contemplate. There's that line you see skeptics trot out all the time with regard to conspiracy adjacent stuff, that conspiracy theorists are just looking to believe in something bigger than themselves that has control, because the random and chaotic nature of life can be too hard to take. I hope that's true of all the gladio shit.

This insider trading case does give me pause, though. Suddenly, with that much money on the line, shit that I would normally think is impossible doesn't sound that farfetched.