It wasn’t normal that he rigged his rooms with videographic equipment.
Quite apart from the crimes, it seems that Epstein was himself a pervert. Getting sex tapes of celebs seems exactly like something he'd do. And then we factor in the blackmail angle, which every pimp and madam (it seems) uses as insurance policy, save for the very few who maintain discretion even after arrest. Isn't this what the entire furore over the "Epstein list" and whether it exists or not is about?
more start-ups and entrepreneurship rather than chaebols eating everything
I think that is the way for the economy to survive, instead of emulating Japan which in the 80s was the Coming Economic Global Superpower (remember the movies about Japanese companies buying up America?) but look at where it is today.
I’m just not convinced that these are strictly superior qualities to develop for the specific class of people who are genuine candidates for the Ivy League in 2025.
Yeah, but despite the best efforts of the government, there is not going to be "100% of this year's graduating student body from high school are going to an Ivy". For the vast majority, having a summer job of some sort is beneficial, and for a lot of kids, a 'manual labour' job that Alexander is sneering at is the kind of work they will eventually, in some form, end up doing; if you're going to do a pink collar/lower level white collar job that deals with the public, for instance. If you end up working a lower level government job taking in and processing application forms from 'clients/customers' as the new terminology favours, then by God having worked in retail or some other public-facing job will be a great preparation for how dumb/frustrating/'how on earth did they not fill this in right?' that work can be. It'll also give you an opportunity to learn how to fake the Customer Service Smile when dealing with unreasonable demands from the public and your superiors.
honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed
If you have that particular ability. Not everybody does, and it's not just "oh well that's because it was taught badly in school". Some people can't math, that's the sad fact (I am one).
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
And then we find they can't understand books that are not the "relevant to the youth" ones they read.
Who the hell needs to understand Dickens today? Sure, that's a point. But what do you do when it's a text for the workplace that isn't Dickens but is also not "The Hunger Games"?
This study is even worse than I first thought, because while I had sympathy that American kids of today wouldn't be familiar with 19th century British law terms, then I find they were allowed to look up unfamiliar terms and couldn't even put it together then for the joke about the dinosaur (bolding mine):
This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of 2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English. Before subjects started the reading tests, they were given access to online resources and dictionaries and advised that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. The facilitators also assured the subjects that were free to go at their own pace and did not have to finish reading all seven paragraphs by the end of the exam.
It's even more depressing, because these kids got into college to do an English degree with a poor starting level of English:
The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages” (American College 12). In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon. As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption.
They wanted to study English literature without the ability to even read Dickens. This would be like me trying to do a degree in Mathematics. You'd have more luck teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs, pace Dr. Johnson:
“Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” ― Samuel Johnson
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character.
Especially funny since Kamala mentioned working at McDonalds.
Ms. Harris’s campaign said that she was an employee of the McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 during the summer after her freshman year at Howard University, working the cash register, french-fry station and ice cream machine. It has provided little information beyond that, including how long she worked there. She also mentioned her job at McDonald’s when she ran for president in 2019.
Well, clearly her low-class parent who fetishised manual labour should have emulated the Asians!
Er, wait...
Depends on the Asians, I know the stereotype of Indians/Pakistanis in the British Isles is "own the corner shop" (to the point where a 90s band named themselves that, their big hit) and for Chinese people it's "run the local takeaway".
In the US I suppose it's "Indians and Chinese work in IT, Koreans own the corner shops"?
Y'know, I scrolled down fast and didn't see the author's name on this post, but when I hit this bit:
the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools
I went "Oh! Alexander!" and scrolled back up and whaddya know, I was right!
there's no reason to make him work manual labor because some conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."
It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now. The pure despite and contempt you have for those who make it possible for you to live a comfortable life is astounding. Oh, you don't like the grubby proles who work the cash registers? Don't worry, supermarkets are working fast on self-checkout so now you can do the job of being the grubby prole who works the cash register for free!
Even for those Elite Human Capital who are going to waltz into whatever high-status white-collar job you think most desirable will do better if they have some experience of summer work. Granted, it'll probably be an internship with a company of one of Dad's golf buddies, but some experience of "this is what work looks like" is much better than none. Otherwise you end up hiring people who have all the right qualifications on paper but need to be hand-held every minute of the day since they have no idea what to do on their own (I see plenty of smart people who haven't a clue about "okay this is my first job, how do I sort out my tax?")
You really do want all the low-class (by your metric) people, regardless of colour, to just disappear so you don't have to interact with them, don't you? No more manual labourers. No more people on the tills in shops. No more unsuitables that can be confused with you, the striving wannabe, by the elites you so desperately want to belong to.
many centers of high economic and industrial development
So the East and West Coasts, particularly the West Coast, propped up by cheap serf immigrant labour? Spots throughout the rest of the country like the tech hubs in Texas of Austin and Dallas also doing great? Sure, a lot of the country is sliding into decline, but The Economy is going gangbusters through a mix of the giant tech sector massively outperforming everything else and skewing things that way (if AI works out the way everyone is betting their shirt on it working) and the world is still using the US dollar as currency of choice. Yeah, lower middle-class to middle middle-class you can't buy meat anymore and you're living sixteen to a four bedroom house to make rent, but GDP is booming, the market is sky-high, if you own stocks you're okay, so shut up about the economy, stupid!
I could well see that happening.
Everything has been getting worse everywhere, always, forever.
And yet here we are.
Taking the USA - the 70s made the BLM years look like a tea-party. Insurrection and a new civil war looked way more plausible then, with amateur militias like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army running around shooting and bombing. And yet - that never happened.
Black Lives Matter movement and the Summer of Saint Floyd has fizzled out.
Yeah, globally we're probably due for a recession and a lot of political turmoil and things are going to hurt for a few years, maybe even a decade. See the Winter of Discontent in the 70s, and indeed the 70s in general for the UK - The Specials were not singing Ghost Town at the start of the 80s about a happy, jolly time. The 80s were terrible for Ireland.
But then things will slowly right themselves once more, until we all tilt to the opposite direction once again.
True, but having both parents around is different to "and then dad shook us off like we were dirt on the soles of his shoes and set out for a new fun life with a new fun family". That has got to hurt. Even a distant, neglectful father has to be better than one who made the choice to reject you in favour of someone else (someone better).
Very, very minor kerfuffle (the story seems to have quietly died) about our Arts Council asking questions about religion and sexual orientation on grant applications.
The Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has written to the Arts Council asking for further details on the “nature and content” of questions asked of artists when they were applying for bursary grants earlier this year.
It follows worries raised by a number of artists who contacted the Irish Independent in recent weeks to raise concerns after they were asked about their sexuality and religious orientation, among other personal questions, when they applied for the bursary round in February.
The headline makes it sound like some kind of vaguely sinister data-gathering on deviants and there's nothing in the body of the story to explain why they asked these questions, but if you think about it, it's obvious why. Of course, this is because it's a government body and so has DEI targets to hit, and how will it fill out the paperwork about the percentage of queer trans disabled neurodivergent multiracial Wiccans who were awarded a bursary unless it gathers data in this way?
The same people complaining they were asked if they were gay will be the first to cry "discrimination!" if they don't get a bursary and will go running to the media about how they were refused because they were gay, when it's much more likely the Arts Council wants to give as many grants to gay etc. artists as they can in the name of representation, except they have to find out who is gay etc. first!
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit.
I think it's not his spirit, but rather where else could they go? The Democrats certainly have no signs of welcoming traditional believers aboard, unless they drop all that stuff about abortion/LGBT+ (and male headship for the harder core). What I was mildly surprised by was Kamala Harris failing to reach out on grounds of "I'm Christian too" (yeah, I know: citation needed). She did the usual campaigning in black churches, but no broader appeal to the religious conservatives with stories about "I sang in the church choir as a girl, I attend this church when I'm at home":
Harris, on the other hand, is a rare political figure who may have downplayed her spiritual life in public, given anti-religious sentiments in her native San Francisco Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.
Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother, and she is married to a Reform Jewish husband.
She’s a longtime member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with its pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C., area and in 2022 spoke at the National Baptist Convention.
...In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother’s making sure she was exposed to both Hindu and African American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister, Maya, sang in the choir at 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.
It's probably also complicated by the fact that that is an American Baptist-affiliated church, not a Southern Baptist one, but nevertheless she soft-pedalled on religion, as did Walz (quick, anybody have any idea, without looking it up, what denomination if any he belongs to?)
Whoops, looks like Walz is a souper!
"Tim, who was raised Catholic, became a Lutheran after marrying Gwen. He has called himself a "Minnesota Lutheran" and identified Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as his family's parish."
Is England a better place where nobody cares about the Legend of King Arthur anymore?
From "That Hideous Strength":
“It all began,” he said, “when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it — it will do as well as another. And then gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting.”
“What haunting?” asked Camilla.
“How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney — and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites?
But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.”
…“So that, meanwhile, is England,” said Mother Dimble. “Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?”
Oookay. I don't know what the hell the mistress thought was going to happen, and I don't know why the hell the guy agreed to introduce his mistress to his wife. Clearly he was not thinking with his brain there.
It's the attitude that drugs do no harm, the only harm is them being illegal. Similar to the push about the harm that adults having sex with kids isn't from the sex, it's from the social stigma around it which teaches the child to be ashamed and that they were harmed.
The people who push that attitude want to fuck kids without consequences. The people who want to push that "it's the illegal status that does the harm" around drugs also want no consequences from what they want to do.
But there will always be consequences. Being a druggie didn't make the 'friend' a chill, kind, guy. It made him paranoid and violent (on top of whatever crazy he has going on).
Oh, yeah. "He's not like that with me" up to the minute he is like that.
I don't get it, I genuinely don't. "Love" must be one hell of a drug, to hollow your brain out like that.
Also, in a lot of these situations and that class, the guy doesn't give a damn about if the woman gets knocked up or what. If she wants babies, fine. If she doesn't want babies, fine. It's her job to ensure she doesn't get pregnant. So it's perfectly plausible he'd threaten to kill the baby because it isn't his baby to him in any meaningful way. (The only use of "my client is a father of three children" to the likes of those scumbags is so their lawyers can plead them off in court).
Had experience a couple of years back with a family member who tried suicide, and despite their protestations, it was one of the "cry for help" types rather than genuine "will kill myself for sure". They certainly intended to die, but the method they picked wasn't 100% fatal (indeed, looking it up, it wouldn't have been fatal at all but they didn't know that).
So yeah, people can try and kill themselves and even be serious about it, but not so serious as to pick a really working method. I think Epstein was the kind of guy who would try and use a suicide attempt to bargain his way out of things, he just mis-timed it and it turned out it worked.
I remain impressed by how you manage to drag abortion in to any discussion whatsoever. Nobody was talking about 19th century attitudes to the personhood of the foetus, but there you went!
He got off the hook in 2008 and pled not guilty here. I don't see why he wouldn't at least fight the charges.
He got off once. He'd used up all his favours. It was likely the truth was going to come out about how he'd been lying all along, and the entire house of cards had collapsed.
The good times were over. There was no way he was rebuilding from this. And he was a guy who had spent his entire adult life re-inventing himself so he could clamber up to the circles of the rich and powerful. Now he had a future of jail time, then going back to being poor and obscure. Just being depressed and despairing for a short time, suicide in that time could have seemed the best option. Yeah, if he had lived till the next day, he might well have changed his mind about trying to kill himself - but he didn't live.
Or he's just really fed-up with people winking and nudging that he was fucking 14 and 15 year olds. I can see him being defensive about "so I hung out with him, so what? So did a lot of people back then, there were a lot of people in those social circles" and "yeah there were girls at those parties, there's always girls at those parties, attractive young women like rich and powerful men, why are you making such a big deal out of this?".
Trump is not somebody to sit back coolly and take a rational approach to this kind of constant dripping of irritation and reporters and others harassing him about Epstein. Particularly after the E. Jean Carroll case where he wasn't convicted of rape but the judge then came out and said "yeah you can say it was rape". People really are out to get him, even if he is being paranoid.
No, that can't be it, because there's one alleged victim who has been trawling the story around for years (and failing in all the law suits) that Trump and Epstein raped her when she was 12/13:
A federal lawsuit filed in California in April 2016 against Epstein and Donald Trump by a California woman alleged that the two men sexually assaulted her at a series of parties at Epstein's Manhattan residence in 1994, when she was 13 years old.
It may well be that there is no convenient little list or black book of clients that can be produced, and any records available are tangled up in "yeah but if you go ahead and say X was an Epstein client they will immediately drag you into court" so that the promised Big Reveal can't be made after all.
The trouble with high-profile cases like these is that there are then a lot of people happy to come forward with claims from "back in the day" which can't be substantiated (but they can peddle them to the media for nice sums of money):
On October 25, 2016, allegations were made by two men stating that Trump had attended and partaken in sex parties filled with underage minor females as young as 15 years old who were induced with promises of career advancement. Illegal drugs were also alleged to have been provided to the minors.
One man was identified as model and actor Andy Lucchesi, while the other was identified as a fashion photographer who spoke on condition of anonymity. Both men claim to have been acquaintances of Trump during that decade, which one described as his "Trump days".
Lucchesi, for his part, claimed that he saw Trump engage in sexual activity with the girls but did not witness him taking illicit drugs. Regarding the age of the girls, Lucchesi said he himself never specifically asked about their ages, only remarking of the attendees "a lot of girls, [aged] 14, look 24."
That part seems like careful legal advice about skating past any direct accusations and then counter-accusations of libel - after all, you never said X knowingly fucked a 14 year old when she could convincingly pass for 20, now did you? But it's sufficiently juicy a claim for the paper to run with the story.
On a cursory reading, it seems to be more that it was Epstein who liked them very young, and the other girls were recruited around ages 14-16 or so by other girls or by Maxwell and then groomed into being the party favours by promises of modelling careers and the like, with threats then if they tried leaving.
Reading the link, it looks like McCaffery wasn't dinged just over the inappropriate emails, but there were accusations of corruption as well. Maybe they couldn't prove the corruption stuff, so the emails were their version of "Al Capone was convicted for tax evasion".
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