Good news: Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty. I think we can also consider this a conviction for Jeffrey Epstein, since there has to be a child rapist to receive delivery from a child trafficker.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime paramour of financier Jeffrey Epstein, was convicted on sex-trafficking charges after a trial that centered on what types of enabling conduct — including befriending young girls and teaching and scheduling them to massage an older man — should be considered criminal.

Maxwell, 60, was accused of recruiting teenage girls to massage Epstein at his homes in Palm Beach, Fla., New York, New Mexico and elsewhere between 1994 and 2004.

Epstein allegedly paid the girls hundreds of dollars in cash for the massages, which involved sexual touching and which he expected three times a day. He died by suicide 28 months ago, while awaiting his own trial.

The jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking of an individual under 18. She was found not guilty of enticement of one individual under 17 with the intent to engage in illegal sexual activity.

Also, though, I must ask what has happened to the BBC? They asked Alan Dershowitz to provide commentary on the verdict.

After Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty Wednesday on five of six sex trafficking counts for her role in procuring young girls for her former boyfriend and serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to abuse, BBC News took to the airwaves to analyze the proceedings. And they brought on Alan Dershowitz, notably named by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre as one of the men (she has also claimed Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her) she said Epstein and Maxwell allegedly forced her to have sex with repeatedly when she was underage. Dershowitz has denied the allegations.

He is currently suing one of Epstein’s victims, so the BBC should have known better — there’s an obvious conflict of interest. Dershowitz should have known better, too, but he’s nothing but a sleazy hack already.

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Another reminder:

Big day of remembrance and reflection for all our heroes of Science and Rationality. pic.twitter.com/eZNX0cnPQp

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) December 30, 2021

Maybe the BBC should convene a round table conversation with Pinker, Krauss, Dawkins, Summers, etc. to sadly discuss the fate of their old friends.

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Belatedly, the BBC says “oops”.

Come on, every news service. Scratch Alan Dershowitz off your invitation lists already, just like all those scientists should have automatically shunned Jeffrey Epstein.

One of Oprah’s greatest crimes was promoting that horrible opportunist, Dr Oz, and turning him into a celebrity quack. Here’s a good expose of how awful Oz is.

Dr. Oz became an Oprah regular, and when The Dr. Oz Show premiered, it took off. He fit in easily among the celebrities in his new social stratum and now counts among his friends everyone from hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio (who did not wish to discuss their relationship with me) to Brooke Shields (who did not respond to a text seeking comment) and Martha Stewart (who said she couldn’t talk owing to her “busy year-end schedule”). And then Dr. Oz seemed to change.

“He’s one of those public figures who really haunt me,” Frank Bruni of the New York Times said. Bruni met Dr. Oz when he wrote about him in 2010 for The New York Times Magazine. Bruni spent weeks observing his subject, work that required him to experience for himself the incongruity of Dr. Oz’s dual existence. One day, he was in an operating room, peering into the open chest cavity of a patient as Dr. Oz stitched around her heart. The next, he was hanging out at a studio as Dr. Oz and his producers discussed a plan to create prop body parts to hand out to the audience at a taping of The Dr. Oz Show.

During the process, Bruni said, “two things came into equally vivid relief: This is a man who is or was a serious doctor. Seriously trained. Seriously talented. Gifted. And with a record of performance in which he contributed an enormous amount to humanity. But at the same time, I’m sitting in on these story meetings where they’re talking about ‘Does cotton or Silly Putty or something else better stand in for testicles?’ I mean, how do you go from A to B? Why does he seem more excited about the fake testicles than the open-heart surgery? The answer is because the latter was the route to fame and riches — and that’s the Faustian bargain.” That observation was not just some convenient mythic device, Bruni said, but his honest conclusion about a subject he’d thought hard about for more than a decade. “I’ve met and profiled very few if any people who so embody the wages of ambition.” In this allegory, the Devil gave the doctor wealth and fame in exchange for his reputation.

“Somewhere, I’m not sure how, he started to sell out — it happens to a lot of people when they get money and success; they want more money and more success. He went from doctor to entertainer to scam artist,” a veteran daytime producer said. “Dr. Oz is dangerous because he believes he’s got some divine power.”

The author’s conclusion is a little worrisome. Oz has a chance of winning, but he’s facing opposition from the far-right MAGA crowd. He may not be nuts enough to win! Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

After TheCrafsMan lifted your mood (I hope), now it’s time to come crashing down. The name of the young woman murdered by the cops has been released to the public.

Her name was Valentina Orellana-Peralta. She was 14 years old, shopping for her quinceañera dress. She was hoping to be an engineer someday.

The linked article also includes a video of the asshole cop in action, which I won’t be including here. The cop rushes in to the store eagerly with his rifle, turns a corner, sees the guy we assume had been attacking people with a bike lock, and pop-pop-pop instantly opens fire. The cops did not take any time to deliberate, to argue, to try to settle the problem relatively peacefully, and there was a whole mob of cops idling around the store who could have easily taken the alleged attacker down by physically jumping on him, or hitting him with their nightsticks. But no, that guy was marked for death from the instant the trigger-happy cop lifted his big gun out of his car.

Lots of people are noticing that.

Many critics of the police have expressed outrage over aspects of the shooting — the speed with which an officer opened fire on Mr. Elena Lopez although he did not have a gun, the fact that police officers did not ensure that the area was clear of bystanders.

“You guys don’t have the ability to just tackle him to the floor?” said Chloe Cheyenne Rogers, an activist who started the Justice for Valentina petition, which has nearly 5,000 signatures. “You can’t use any parts of your training to be able to take that person in a way that doesn’t include your assault rifle?”

The LA PD North Hollywood (@lapdnorthhwddiv) has now deleted their Twitter account. The police chief is calling it “a chaotic incident”. The ass-covering has begun.

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate should have been inscribed on the exit doors of the Phoenix airport. Tremble and weep in horror at this thorough description of the Turning Point USA conference.

‘Twas the weekend before Christmas when Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA hosted a massive, sold-out 4-day conservative youth conference featuring 10,000 teens and young adults screaming for Dennis Prager, the Fox News lineup, January 6-plotting politicians, a dancing James O’Keefe, and former active shooter Kyle Rittenhouse in Phoenix, AZ. AmericaFest was located in the same building where Arizona holds it’s yearly ComicCon and the layout was eerily similar. It featured an exhibitor hall filled with merch booths and meet-n-greets, except instead of getting a picture with Spider-Man one could get a picture with Jack “Pizzagate” Posobiec or accused child trafficker Rep. Matt Gaetz. Instead of buying an overpriced Street Fighter figurine, you could buy an $500 bedazzled gun purse or “invest” in Let’s Go Brandon cryptocurrency. Tickets for this mega conference reached up to $750, with people flying in from all over the country to see their favorite TPUSA-sponsored influencer preaching the benefits of white Christian American hypercapitalism. Hotels in the nearby area offered package deals so the entire downtown area was overrun with 20-somethings in blue and hot pink tailored suits and Trump hats for the entire long weekend.

Hate is as popular as comic books, I guess. You couldn’t pay me to set foot in that hall.

Religion, and more specifically Christian supremacy, was present throughout the weekend. Lining the street leading up to the conference, men with graphic anti-choice signs handed out pamphlets for AbortionNO. Turning Point Faith was a co-sponsor of the conference and had a large booth with free merch advocating for the merging of politics and religion, speeches throughout the weekend often spread a similar message. Creepy fetus dolls were on display and fetal development commercials played in between speakers, followed by “BUY GOLD! BUY SILVER!” Anti-choice activist Abby Johnson was a speaker, hosted panels on “how to fight abortion,” and also had a massive merch booth for her “Pro-Love Ministries.” Johnson has previously advocated for “household voting” where only the husband can vote and said that it would be “smart” for the police to racially profile her biracial son. Give Send Go, the Christian supremacist crowdfunding site that platforms white nationalists and other extremist groups also had a merch and prayer booth while the co-founder Jacob Wells joined a reception across the street with an organization with ties to neo-Nazis (more on that later).

Has white nationalism infected religion, or is religion tainting white nationalism? I can’t tell anymore. They’ve long been entangled, and this is just the emergence of a particularly virulent mutant strain of both.

Similar brochures were given out on “gender identity” but explicit transphobia was an ongoing theme from many of the speakers as well. Charlie Kirk took the stage multiple times during his event and demonizing trans people was one of his most repeated points. Dennis Prager lead the crowd in booing trans athletes and he rejected the term “transphobic” entirely, claiming it’s a “meaningless phrase,” implying that trans men, women, and nonbinary people do not exist at all. The one transgender joke conservatives have was repeated countless times this weekend. Nothing can truly describe the pure hate in the crowd any time trans people were mentioned. There were 10,000 young adults frothing at the mouth and scapegoating a tiny and extremely marginalized community for all of their perceived problems.

How transphobic is Charlie Kirk? This transphobic.

I truly cannot describe how endlessly transphobic this morning has been so far. Charlie Kirk barely let Sarah Palin speak and instead used the hour to demonize trans people in absolutely every disgusting way possible. (cw) pic.twitter.com/kqgNQz4IWp

— AZ Right Wing Watch (@az_rww) December 19, 2021

Horrible as that was, I’m going to have to nominate the Rittenhouse moment as the low point of the event.

Day three of the convention was noticeably the busiest despite being on a Monday. Charlie Kirk endlessly bragged about how the arena, capable of seating up to 10,000 was filled to capacity. Kyle Rittenhouse was going to take the stage and his appearance was the already the topic of conversation all weekend. The day before, in the snack line, I listened to two teenagers who were giddy in excitement over seeing Rittenhouse, talking about his recent appearance on Louder With Crowder. Rep. Lauren Boebert swooned over Rittenhouse during her speech and later appeared in a photo with him backstage. He was billed as “a VERY special guest” alongside Jack Posobiec, Drew Hernandez, and Elijah Schaffer. Before walking out, the three large screens played scenes from Tucker Carlson’s special on Rittenhouse. The crowd stood to attention and cheered as Kyle appeared on screen then booed and laughed when his victims, Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreutz came on, including the graphic images of their death and injuries. The clip of Rittenhouse crying on the stand was met with shouts of “we love you Kyle!” He took the stage to flashes of red, white, and blue filling the room as a Kyle Rittenhouse-themed rap song blasted. The screaming was deafening as they chanted his name. A young teenager behind me couldn’t stop repeating “based, based, based.”

They showed gory images of the dead and wounded…and the audience laughed about it? Jesus. There’s a crop of young men and women I don’t want to ever meet.

Is this America? Or is this Hell?