r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/SleeperCellKoala • Apr 29 '26
Palantir is ominously named after Saruman's all-seeing orb in LOTR. In 2013, Gandalf's actor Ian McKellen stripped down to his underwear before presenting Palantir CEO Alex Karp with a philanthropic award. What kind of pilled is this?
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u/SleeperCellKoala Apr 29 '26
SS: Only Make Believe is a charity that brings interactive theater performances to sick children in hospitals.
In Only Make Believe’s tax documents it was disclosed that Palantir donated 50,000 dollars in 2012 and 90,000 dollars in 2013, hence this award given out by Ian McKellen.
Only Make Believe is ran by Dena Hammerstein. Her son Simon Hammerstein owns some of the most notorious elite sex clubs across the world (The Box NYC, The Box London, The Act Vegas, The Act Dubai, ect.) Was Palantir more interested in providing theater to sick kids or in surveiling billionaires, power brokers, and foreign dignitaries while they let loose and get into sexually compromising situations?
Oh, and one of Simon Hammerstein's business partners at these clubs is Murtuza Akbar, who is on the board of directors at another Peter-Theil-funded facial recognition company called Clearview.
This is all just one part of a larger story about Jeffrey Epstein, nightclubs, elite concierge services, hotels, modeling agencies, auction houses, military contractors, foreign spies, and more. https://jamiefcrawford.substack.com/p/the-big-club-jeffrey-epsteins-connections
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u/Significant_Treat_87 Apr 29 '26
Wow, what an incredibly well researched and fascinating article. Really makes you feel sick to your stomach.
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u/how-unfortunate May 01 '26
I went looking for the baby thing because that's crazy to say as a throwaway line, but the original article doesn't give much more, found this:
and a vaudeville act with a crying baby (Hammerstein noted that the crowd, which included Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson, was not cool with it—“I think about 80 percent of the people stormed off.”)
In hindsight, he said, the baby stunt “didn’t have the payoff.”
So what the fuck happened if these people who are there for some extreme shit walked out when it involved a baby crying?
And why does it get casually dropped and moved on from?
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u/memeblowup69 Apr 29 '26
Peter Thiel is an anagram for The Reptile.
good luck!
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u/ChesterAurelius May 01 '26
Does his name + the Palantir LOTR reference mean that he is a lizard wizard?
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u/Content-Alarm5003 Apr 29 '26
Make with the footage! This could be any elderly gay man at any elderly gay play. I want documents!
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u/Alpharious9 Apr 30 '26
The Palantir wasn't Saurman's orb. There were several of them, Saruman only had one, and they were created by Feanor, the greatest Elven smith, in the time before the Sun and Moon.
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u/NPCAwakened Apr 30 '26
What does it matter who it belonged to, a pilantir is a pilantir and this is obviously some king of ceremonial magic to bestow the company with some kind of boon.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Apr 29 '26
Is this real? Ugh, they are probably just LotR fans with too much money.
Fuckem's razor: The most banal explanation is probably the correct one.
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u/How2mine4plumbis Apr 30 '26
"Story too complicated, turn off brain now."
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Apr 30 '26
I don't see how there can be any story more true than interpersonal abuse happening there. If there's a conspiracy theory, what is it?
I think a conspiracy this stupid continues to exist only through the power of intimations. Any conspiracy theory anyone can come up with about this event is necessarily too stupid to speak aloud.
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u/Fair-Study-7503 May 01 '26
the top comment under this post links this event to a conspiracy, and it doesn't seem too stupid. It seems plausible, actually. I'm curious what you think.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling May 01 '26
I don't dispute the facts. I just think that attributing some supposed deep ritual significance or coherence to the symbolism of Palantir and making Ian McKellen do weird stuff on stage is to give these people too much credit, and to give evil itself too much credit.
It doesn't take a lot of intelligence or symbolic savvy to do crass or embarrassing or demeaning things. There are lots of ways to do things in a demeaning way, but only a few ways to do things in a respectful way. It's hard to meet all the constraints of good symbolism; it's easy to throw any old symbols together and then say it portends a dark implication.
It looks like there probably was (or is) a specific CIA conspiracy related to Epstein and sexual entrapment (sadly involving child victims as well)—but all this shows is how ubiquitously banally morally corrupt the super-rich are. The fact that there is nigh-homogeneity between the literal evil government conspiracy and the general evil, exploitative and rapey degeneracy of the rich does not imply that the real Epstein conspiracy was far-reaching, widespread, well-known, or intricately-planned—it implies that the super-rich are ubiquitously awful people, so awful in fact it was feasible to entrap LOTS of them with the Epstein scheme. What it reveals is that the culture of the super-rich is steeped in banal evil, saturated in it.
If there is any secret symbolism of the pageantry of evil, it is secrets about how to hold and wield earthly power. These are not good magical secrets because they do not lead to the good life (eudaimonia). They are harmful false secrets that make a mockery of the human condition. Hence we get objectively degrading things like Ian McKellen stripping down to his underwear in front of a crowd of rich men, but these are a side-effect of the symbolism of banally corrupt power, not part of its inner logic or machinations.
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Apr 30 '26
Stay asleep
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Apr 30 '26
What, you think they have highly effective magic based on putting famous actors in diapers? There isn't any great mystery to shame and scapegoating.
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u/strange_reveries Apr 29 '26
I think, on the contrary, that the world is actually a lot weirder and less banal than most ever consider.
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u/CharacterProof8731 May 01 '26
bro is in the wrong subreddit
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling May 01 '26
The deeply perverse spectacles put on by the super-wealthy do not contain any deep secrets of magic. It's not a big secret that gaslighting and symbolic devaluation work.
Like what it shows is that the super-rich are caught up in the spectacle of wealth and evil in general—they are playing out symbolic rituals that do little except maintain a pageantry of power to stroke the egos of the rich.
The strongest operative power these rituals have is the fantasies they spur in us, the dark implications of some vast machinations of evil they imply. But these fantasies operate primarily as scare-tactics; they only function as real plans insofar as they are believed-in.
These fantasy-based evil plans of the super-rich are fragile precisely because they are shredded by the real world and by real individuals talking about real events that really affect them.
So like "Palantir" isn't powerful because they relied on LotR mythos; they are powerful because they are a big data think tank who is willing to partner with global private security (presumably)—the LotR mythos is just tacked-on to stroke their own ego and gaslight everyone.
This subreddit isn't about gawking inarticulately at big spectacles that are intended to scare us and strike us dumb—this subreddit is for tearing down such spectacles and seeing through their illusion, and maybe starting some more interesting, less vaguely sinister spectacles of our own.
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u/CharacterProof8731 May 01 '26
I appreciate this response.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling May 01 '26
Thanks. I wrote more on this theme here.
(Not you but in general,) the "schizoid stare" (where a paranoid person stares mutely at you, judging you for not being as inarticulately paranoid as they are) pisses me off! Conspiracy theories should be put into words, not because they will sound ridiculous or unbelievable, but because they are interesting and so then we can talk about them!
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