I am also in the Epstein files

To be named in the Epstein files is now a mark of shame, carrying with it a presumption that one is tainted by association with him and may have engaged in some truly odious practices.

(Non Sequitur)

Like the character in the cartoon, I would have thought that there was no way that my name would appear in the Epstein files but I was surprised to find that it actually does. How I discovered this was that there are many scientists and other well known academics mentioned in the news reports about the Epstein files so I went to the department of justice website that has a searchable database of the files released so far to check on names at random. It quickly got boring searching for well-known names, so on a whim I entered my own name and was stunned when it returned that my name was in this file.
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The grooming of Virginia Roberts Giuffre

The Guardian published an excerpt from the posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the young woman who started the process that took Andrew down as part of her expose of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

There is something so disgusting in her revelations about the smooth and practiced way in which Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell broke down the initial natural resistance that Roberts had to becoming a sexual toy, first to service them, and then to do so for his friends, that it makes you want to puke. I am not going to excerpt the salacious parts but just those where she gives her thoughts on why these things happen, starting with how a sociopath like Epstein is able to identify the vulnerabilities of people and knows how to exploit them, be they young girls or the wealthy, powerful, and intellectual people he wanted to surround himself with.
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The arrest of Andrew, the man formerly known as prince

(I wrote this post during the time when the blog was down so it is slightly dated but here it is anyway.)

The Jeffrey Epstein fallout continues with Peter Mandelson, a Labour Party bigshot and former UK ambassador to the US, being arrested.

But the big shocker occurred when British police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, King Charles’s brother on “suspicion of misconduct in public office”. What that misconduct consisted of was not made clear (there is no indication as yet of it being part of Epstein story) but there are many possibilities because Andrew is a long-time sleazy grifter who took advantage of his privileged position to enrich himself while also cavorting with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. So there is a lot for the police to look into.
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The madness of the attack on Iran

If there was any doubt that the US and Israel are rogue, lawless states joined at the hip who are determined to create vast amounts of suffering to people all over the globe to advance their narrow personal interests, their joint attack on Iran should put those doubts to rest.

When you put a person like Trump with a child’s mentality in charge of the world’s largest military, and then pair him with a manipulative genocidal leader like Netanyahu, you have a recipe for unleashing mayhem

We do not where this will lead. All we can be sure of is that once mopre, many, many innocent people will suffer and die.

John Oliver on ICE and DHS

He has started a new season of shows with an examination of ICE and DHS, starting with a summary of the atrocities committed by ICE and the heroic actions of ordinary Minnesotans who came out in their thousands to protest against ICE actions.

The head of the operation Tom Homan has announced that the ICE actions have ended in Minnesota. Since these people are such liars, we’ll have to wait and see if they actually leave.

The billionaires, tech bros, and intellectual enablers of Epstein

One of the popular conspiracies of the right such as by QAnon is that the world is run by a secretive cabal of elites, a subset of whom traffic in girls and young women. What the Epstein files reveal is that while not on such a grand scale, there does seem to have been a cabal consisting of billionaires, tech bros, and intellectuals, almost all of whom are men, who used their dominance in the public sphere to propagate eugenics and master-race science. I want to highlight a link that commenter Dunc provided to an article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science”. The article is well worth reading in full and names names.

Heffernan used to have John Brockman, literary agent to many major writers, as her own agent and for a while he included her in the mailing list for a group known as Edge that comprised these people and this gave her an insight into this group. She describes what she discovered.

It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His mass emails evidently copied in Epstein and a dozen such email blasts made their way to the latest dump of hazmat. 

Brockman, my former agent for tech writing, told me Edge was an intellectual salon. Edge.org is indeed intriguingly sprawling, jammed with scholarly idols whose bios have “Booker” and “Nobel” in them. Members of Edge participated in conferences and symposia, and promoted each other’s work. Who was I to say no? Among Edge’s prodigious ranks were Ian McEwan, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.

But if I’d read the member list more closely, I might have hesitated. Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky. 

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about meeting these people. Brockman kept me at a distance. As the latest Epstein files reveal, the token female members of Edge were actively excluded from schmoozing and conferences, especially the glittering events known as the Billionaires’ Dinners. 

Good policy. Otherwise, we might have struck up conversations with the anxious-looking teenage girls kept out of the photos. We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.

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Barack Obama sets off ET controversy

In an interview where guests were expected to give quick responses, Barack Obama said something that sent believers in extraterrestrial into a frenzy.

In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a speed round of questioning where the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with brief answers.

After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”

He went on: “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

Later, because of the uproar, he issued a statement clarifying what he meant.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

This is eminently reasonable and is what I also think. He would probably have been better served if he had said “They’re possible” rather than “They’re real” but sometimes when speaking off the cuff, one’s choice of words is not always the best.

But you can expect the tin-foil conspiracy theorists to go into overdrive.

Dangerously irresponsible gun owners

I have often railed about the fact that a car is recognized as a dangerous item in the hands of anyone and hence we require an age requirement, training, and certification before people are allowed to use one. And yet people in the US can just walk into some places and with little or no checks can buy a gun, which is equally if not more lethal than a car, with hardly any effort made to ensure that they are competent to use it.

That can result in tragedies like this one.

A Cheshire woman who was shot dead by her “reckless” father while visiting him in the US after a row about Donald Trump was unlawfully killed, a coroner has ruled.

Lucy Harrison, 23, who lived in Warrington and worked as a fashion buyer for Boohoo, was shot in the chest with a semi-automatic handgun by Kris Harrison while staying at his home in Prosper, Texas, on 10 January last year.

Kris Harrison, an alcoholic who had been drinking earlier in the day, pointed the gun at his daughter and pulled the trigger, senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish ruled.
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Meanwhile, over in the UK …

… prime minister Keir Starmer is fighting to keep his job. One trade union has even called for Angela Rayner to replace him as prime minister. The leader of the Scottish Labout party Anas Sarwar has also said he has no confidence in Starmer. If the party loses the Gorton and Denton byelection later this month and fares badly in local elections in May, the pressure on Starmer to quit will increase.

It is not only his appointment of Peter Mandelson to be ambassador to the US despite knowing of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that is causing him problems, it is that he has shown himself to be a leader without any real leadership qualities, and this has resulted in a rapid turnover of people in his administration. The personal gifts of clothes and other items from wealthy people to Starmer, Rayner and other top Labour party officials has led to a sense that they are just like the Tories who were thrown out.

“We came into office promising to be different from the Tories. Keir always took the moral high ground in opposition,” says one Labour MP. “The public expected us to be squeaky clean. Yes, it’s a higher bar than the other lot, but we set it. Now they think we’re all the same.”

The optics of freebiegate were particularly damaging because the row erupted just weeks after the chancellor had announced winter fuel duty would be cut for all but the poorest pensioners.

MPs, already under siege from angry constituents over that decision, were now forced to defend senior ministers from charges of hypocrisy. “It was awful,” says one MP. “They were very publicly enjoying the trappings of power at just the same time they were taking away support from some really vulnerable people.”

Luke Tryl, the executive director of the research organisation More in Common, says the scandal caused a rocky start to the Labour government.

“It played into the public’s frustration at the pervasive sense of ‘one rule for them’ and that politicians are only looking for what they can get out of the job, contradicting Starmer’s mantra of politics [as] service,” he says. “People felt they were electing this government to bring an end to the seeming perma-scandal that marked the end of the last Tory government – and we’ve had people in focus groups saying: ‘Oh, it’s just more of the same.’”

Just yesterday it was announced that Starmer had forced out his cabinet secretary in an apparent effort to repair the image that he is directionless. Antonia Romeo, the person strongly rumored to succeed to the position, has a reputation of being a dynamic person who could upend the staid civil service role but herself has a troubled past when she served as consul-general in the New York office. She too seems to enjoy receiving gifts from wealthy donors and even seeking them out.
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