Ralph Waldo Emerson had Alan Dershowitz’s number

Ralph Waldo Emerson once memorably wrote: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons”, at a time when spoons were often made of silver and thus valuable and the target of thieves. Emerson was likely adapting a sentiment attributed to Samuel Johnson by his biographer James Boswell. The sentiment expressed a warning about those who spoke too much about their own virtues, that it should make their claims to virtue suspect. It is similar to the Shakespearean “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” in Hamlet to signify that one loses credibility by being too insistent.
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Jonathan Pie interviews Prince Andrew

Well, not really. The British royal family would not let faux journalist Pie within a mile of them. What he does is interview a fictitious member of the British royal family (the ‘Duke of Chesterton’) who bears a resemblance to Andrew about his friendship with a known pedophile that involved sexual acts with underage people. It is of course a parody of the disastrous interview that Andrew gave to the BBC about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the charge made by Virginia Giuffre that she was forced to have sex with him.


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The financial finagling of the British Royal family

The scandal surrounding Prince Andrew and his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and the allegation made by Virginia Giuffre that when she was just 17 she was forced by Epstein and his cronies to have sex with Andrew has put the spotlight on the British Royal family in ways that they would rather have avoided.

In particular, this article by Clive Irving, based on a book What the Royal Family Don’t Want You to Know…And What Do You Do? by Norman Baker, a former government minister and long-time Member of Parliament, looks at the lavish lifestyle of ‘The Firm” as they are called and how they hide it, finance it, and avoid taxes, headed by Prince Charles and his own fortune building empire. This may explain why Charles was so quick to put wraps around Andrew and whisk him away from the public eye for fear that the other shenanigans might also come out. What the article reveals is secret indulgence on a massive scale.
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Philanthropy as a license to behave badly

I have had many posts about really awful wealthy people (the Sackler family and Jeffrey Epstein being noted examples) using philanthropy to cover over the stain of their actions and enable them to act like they are pillars of the community. The assumption is that these acts of generosity are after-the-fact attempts at covering up their ill-gotten gains or their evil acts and ingratiating themselves into society.

But Patricia Illingworth, a professor of ethics, writes that the problem is even worse and that the very act of philanthropy may actually give these people a sense that they have the right to behave badly, something she refers to as ‘moral licensing’.
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All the lawyers who enabled Weinstein

We know that serial abusers who are prominent people must have had a large cadre of enablers who either assisted them or looked away and did not raise any alarms. University of Oregon law professor Elizabeth Tippett discusses a new book She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story, and focuses on what the book says about all the lawyers who assisted and enabled him to get away with all the awful things he did.
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The ethics of accepting ‘anonymous’ donations from bad actors

Thanks to a comment by John Morales, I read this article by Kelsey Piper that looks at a possible justification given by MIT for why they went to such lengths to keep the money they got from sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein secret. It is an argument I had not heard before.

The obvious question: What on earth were they thinking? The MIT Media Lab — an interdisciplinary research center affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — was well regarded, well funded, had great publicity, and was attached to one of the world’s best universities. Why would they risk it all to attract donations from someone like Epstein? And how could people write emails like the ones revealed in the New Yorker piece — “jeffrey money, needs to be anonymous” — without realizing they were on the path to disaster?

On Sunday, we got a partial answer via an essay by Larry Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He knew all along that the MIT Media Lab was taking Epstein’s money, he said. He thought it was the right thing to do. So, he says, did the team at the Media Lab.

Their justification is simple: If someone is a bad person, taking their anonymous donations is actually the best thing you can do. The money gets put to a better use, and they don’t get to accumulate prestige or connections from the donation because the public wouldn’t know about it.

This argument isn’t that eccentric. Within philanthropy, it has been seriously raised as a reasonable answer to the challenging question of how organizations should deal with donations from bad actors.

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How to con scientists and skeptics

When I was in graduate school, magician James Randi gave a performance for the university and then he gave another performance to just the physics department and I attended both. They were both fun to watch, especially the second since I was able to see him in action up close. At the end of his physics department show and after he had pulled off a lot of tricks to the amazement of the audience, he said that scientists were the easiest people to fool because they thought they were so smart that they easily fell prey to the most basic of misdirection techniques. There was some embarrassed laughter from the audience of physicists.
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A prime example of why the British royal family is a pestilence

Now that Jeffrey Epstein has died, attention has shifted to the others in his circle, like Ghislaine Maxwell. Of course, the more prominent the person, the greater the interest and one of the most prominent is Prince Andrew whom one of the young girls has accused of being forced by Epstein to have sex with him. He has denied the accusation, even though he continued to be intimate with Epstein even after his conviction for sex abuse and stayed at his home multiple times with young women going in and out.
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The strange, strange life and family of Ghislaine Maxwell

Now that Jeffrey Epstein has died, attention has shifted to his close associate and paramour-turned-pimp Ghislaine Maxwell as the best source of information on all the seedy activities that he was involved in. But what do we know about Maxwell, other than she was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the once successful and later disgraced newspaper magnate who died mysteriously at sea?

Dana Kennedy has done a deep dive into Maxwell’s life and it turns out that her entire family and in-laws are at one and the same time talented, highly educated, liked to interact with famous scientists, entrepreneurial, corrupt, and prone to making plenty of money and declaring bankruptcy, getting involved with sex cults and intrigue and espionage, and dying mysterious deaths. If her family story was made into a TV mini-series, it would strike many people as utterly preposterous.

In Kennedy’s words, her family’s closet has more skeletons than a house of horrors. I cannot do justice to all the twists and turns of Maxwell’s story with a few excerpts. Kennedy’s article really has to be read. One noteworthy item is the speculation that she is already collaborating with federal prosecutors.

You’ll never guess who is a leading thinker and has a great mind!

In checking over the proofs for my forthcoming book, I have also been checking the citations. One of my citations was to a quote from an essay by MIT physicist Seth Lloyd. The quote I used was “Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can’t be proved. They can only be tested again and again until only a fool would refuse to believe them”. It appeared in a compilation of short essays in a 2006 book titled What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty that consisted of contributions from more than 100 people who were asked to write a few paragraphs on the following prompt:

Great minds can guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it. (Diderot called it having the “spirit de divination.”) What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?

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