Scientists who rejected Epstein

A lot of attention has been focused on the hundreds of scientists who are mentioned in the files of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’, especially those who became part of his circle of friends. Many of those who are now compromised were well-known and well-funded so why did they not say no? Science magazine has an article about three who were approached and declined. It is interesting to see the extent Epstein would go to recruit scientists who became well-known, either because they gave a TED talk or appeared on TV or wrote popular books. He would first have an intermediary approach them, sometimes repeatedly, and then follow up with personal appeals.

When first approached, cancer researcher David Agus went online and learned something about him, and some of his colleagues also warned him to keep his distance. But he was repeatedly asked by Epstein over a period of seven years and kept putting him off by saying that he was too busy. He said that he did not want to outright say no because of fears of upsetting someone who seemed powerful.
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Terrible jobs numbers

One major measure of the state of the US workforce is the monthly jobs numbers put out on the first Friday of each month by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, giving the number of jobs created in the previous month as well as the unemployment rate. This initial data is based on survey results reported by employers and is thus rough. In the next two months, the numbers are revised based on more thorough collection of data and then after the end of the year, a final report is published

When the report for August 2025 showed terrible numbers, Trump fired the commissioner of the bureau alleging (without evidence of course) that this career professional was cooking the books to make him look bad. Since then the jobs numbers have fluctuated, as they often do, but the report for February that was published on Friday again show a gloomy picture..
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Behind the scenes of Blazing Saddles (1974)

This is a very funny Mel Brooks film, a parody of westerns that was also a biting satire of racism. The plot involves a newly appointed Black sheriff to a small town, who is immediately met with prejudice. Since it is by Brooks, it of course has anachronisms and silliness running all through it.

There are so many clips that could be shown but here are just three that stand out in my mind.

I enjoyed seeing some of the the actors and the people behind the scenes of the film reminisce about it.

Good riddance to Kristi Noem

Kristi Noem has been fired from her cabinet position as head of the department of homeland security, capping a turbulent time that saw her treating the office as one to provide her with all manner of perks like a luxury jet to allow her to jet set all over the place for photo ops where she could strut around in a cowboy hat, and purportedly using it to enable an affair with a White House advisor. Th jet had a private boudoir with a queen size bed, even though she said it was meant to transport detainees out of the country.

The luxury executive jet sought by the DHS for immigrant deportation flights and Cabinet-level travel includes a bedroom with a queen-size bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen televisions, and a bar, according to images of the aircraft obtained by NBC News.
…

Whitehouse asked, “So it is being refurbished. What kind of deportee justifies being flown out of the country in a luxury jet with a bedroom and accommodations like this?”

Even some Republicans were calling for her ouster and that may have been the trigger for Trump to dump her.
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Blog comments policy

I will periodically repost my comments policy for those who recently started visiting this site.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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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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A lapsed atheist’s journey back to faith

Christopher Beha has a long essay titled Losing Faith in Atheism wherein he describes his personal journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back again. As one who had a journey from religious belief to non-belief but have never had any reason to go back, I am always curious about what makes others revert and so I read his essay with interest.

The first part describes how he lost his faith and he describes reading the well-known books by the so-called New Atheists that I am sure many readers would be familiar with, such as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. But he says he could not find anywhere in them an answer to the question “How am I to live?”.

To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

He says that he started reading the modern philosophers, searching for answers. He says that there were two schools of thought that purported to provide answers: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.
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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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