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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31684 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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New epstein files stash released - search here: https://www.justice.gov/epstein

Trump is mentioned lots of times though some of the more lurid accusations (I was gangbanged by Trump and a bunch of other rich dudes) seem to be non credible. Epstein emailed himself about how he was annoyed that Bill Gates needed medicine from banging underage russian girls - probably fake blackmail. He also got banned from Xbox Live, shared coomer FNAF 4chan threads, talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences, getting advice on silencing a girl trying to expose his friends. For our global-intelligence-conspiracy friends, there are some connections to intelligence agencies.

Mods, remove this if it's a crappy post. It's hard to come up with a through line for this, other than "WOW he knew a lot of people".

It was previously alleged that Epstein wanted to "seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his New Mexico ranch". It looks like there is evidence he did in fact do this. This document appears to be a diary from one of the victims, describing her being used as a surrogate mother, never to see her baby(s) again. Some key quotes:

Close your eyes close your eyes close your eyes. Dont speak she doesnt talk. I cant stop shaking and its been a week. A decision was made but I cant tell Jeffrey. These things happen. Why didnt I close my eyes fast enough. The doctor was different again. I think from Israel. He had kind eyes but didnt speak directly to me. This was different. A shot and those rod like things had a hook and so much pain. Ghislaine said to push all the pain away. I don't understand Blood and water all over the bed and she was right. Like a feeling when your tummy hurts and you have to push She said to close my eyes and put her hands over my eyes but I didnt close them because of these tiny cries. I am so lost. I saw between her fingers this tiny head and body in the doctors hands. It reached its tiny arm up and and had a tiny foot. I closed my eyes and no more

After so many bonding moments with Jeffrey, Ghislaine, their baby inside me with me in the middle she wouldnt even look at me.

Superior gene pool ?!? Why me? Why my hair color and eye color?

I miss the person I was before I was made into what feels as a human incubator

The code used in these is that every other letter is placed on the second line. The document alternately deciphers it on each other page. There's some newspaper clippings that provide some more hints. Some unanswered questions:

  1. Are there two separate births being described here?

  2. Is the first one is actually some kind of partial birth abortion. This may have occurred in 2003 before the ban, given this text in the document "clipping with date, National Geographic, September 2003". The description of the "rod like things" that "had a hook" and the emphasis on page 5 "SHE WAS. Not is." makes me think so.

Also, I see "Maralago" mentioned very cryptically:

They are missing the biggest in my own backyard and so many more! Like Maralago and where I see Mr. Joe and Mrs. Anne.

What did she mean by this?

EDIT: Maralago is mentioned after that clipping about a "Slave Camp," so the implication is that Maralago is a slave camp. There is a reddit thread where some other investigators have dug into this deeper. There are other files that provide more evidence that Trump abused this girl

We all knew Epstein was bad. But we didn't know the depths of his evil. I'm talking of course about cannibal rituals and torture with a magical scimitar that leaves no wounds.

That didn't actually happen of course. Fabulists and crazies can email law enforcement. I think this is the danger of such a big data dump. Some part of it is real in some factual sense. Some other part of it is modern day Satanic Panic. I see on reddit people discussing Trump checking underaged girls for tightness and then auctioning them off. That's horrific. Really vile. And I'm just a little suspicious also as fictional as the magical scimitar.

This is the problem, though. Huge public cases like this draw all the crazies out. And the more plausible crazies get their stories passed around and disseminated as "really truly did happen but The Man is covering it up, this is why the FBI/CIA/take your pick are hiding the real facts of what Trump/Bush/take your pick did!!!!"

We saw it to a milder extent with Kavanaugh (online media uncritically calling him a rapist) and mocking him for losing his cool and being visibly angry during the deposition. It wasn't just three allegations against him (Blasey Ford, Ramirez, Swetnick); every loon and politically revved up activist out there were deluging the FBI and the Senate Judiciary Committee with allegations which he had to answer. So even if it was "All right, Mr Kavanaugh, can you confirm that you were not in Little Nowheresville with sixteen other guys on the night of 15th May 1996 and you all gangraped [Jane Doe #89] and then had a ritual Satanic sacrifice of her unborn child?" he had to provide evidence that no, indeed he wasn't there on that night.

I'm not surprised that there are the likes of "okay so I've been abusing drugs for years but it's true about the magic scimitar" accusers out there with the Epstein case. It doesn't make me more sceptical about some of the allegations, because I was already sceptical about them, but yeah: the likes of 'Katie Johnson' are clearly out there trying to make a buck off this somehow, and making things even worse than they already are. Was every single thing Virginia Giuffre alleged 100% factually true that it all happened that way? I don't know, and we'll never know now, because she's dead and questioning the veracity of this victim is unthinkable.

talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences

Now this is slightly interesting. "at least some of them know what they're doing and are just lying" is a thought that doesn't normally cross my mind not because it's not true, but because it's pointless to speculate about. I just provisionally assume that any given 'anti-racist' is a true believer in universal humanity. But of course they aren't. The "lore" after all, is fairly accessible for someone reasonably intelligent and curious.

I wonder how this looks from inside their own heads. Brave holders of esoteric truths vigilantly guarding the demos from dangerous knowledge?

As a True Believer in Universal Humanity, I hold the following Views on race/genetics/intelligence:

  1. The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist.

  2. There is not, currently, sufficient evidence to refute the null hypothesis.

  3. It is possible that sufficient evidence could exist in the future; however, the existence of such differences, even if proven, would not justify the conclusions drawn by the far right.

  4. If such differences exist, they do not make members of the less-intelligent groups less deserving of human dignity, any more than someone born to a more-intelligent group would become less deserving of human dignity upon suffering a head injury.

  5. The existence of a racial intelligence gap would mean that Nature herself is a racist, and those born with greater intelligence thus bear a disproportionate duty first to alleviate the immediate condition of those thus victimised by Nature, and second to develop and deploy some method of repairing the damage done by nature to those individuals.

This duty is not penance for having been born a member of a privileged group; it is the principle that If You Have The Means At Hand, You Have The Responsibility To Help.

How long in the past do you prolong 'universal humanity'? Is Homo erectus same intelligence as us? Homo habilis? Homo heidelbergensis? Do you assume that evolution stopped at some point?

How long in the past do you prolong 'universal humanity'?

To the first point at which apes became capable of hosting immortal souls made according to Tzelem Elohim; 50,000 years as a lower bound.

Note that the distinction is academic absent the general resurrection of the dead, whether via divine intervention or, per Nikolai Fyodorov, human agency; in either case, the question would be answered by the same changes that made it practically relevant.

It might be a nitpick: resurrection of dead means resurrection of individuals. It's much more probable that we'll get enough-complete genomes for other species of hominids.

Ok. Thanks. What is some archaic population (say, flores hobbits) would have survived somewhere?

In that case, (assuming we have not discovered a method of directly measuring souls) we would have to examine their capabilities to make a determination.

(Some have hypothesised that the Pirahã might be such a population. Sometimes I wonder how Pokó's daughter would have grown up had she been adopted by a Brasilian family.)

The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist

This hypothesis is equivalent to what could be called the "Egalitarian Hypothesis"

The Egalitarian Hypothesis is that genes (technically alleles) which influence intelligence are distributed equally among all racial and ethnic groups.

From this perspective, it is more easy to see that you are unfairly privileging the hypothesis you like. The default hypothesis should be that intelligence is no different from any other measurable human attribute, such as height, eye color, and so on. Given that other human attributes are clearly NOT distributed equally among all racial and ethnic groups, the null hypothesis should be that it's the same for intelligence.

The need for an agreed-upon null hypothesis is one of the common criticism of frequentist statistics by Bayesians...

'Null hypothesis' does not mean 'most likely hypothesis'; it means 'the hypothesis that the thing for which we are looking does not exist.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis

'Null hypothesis' does not mean 'most likely hypothesis';

I agree that's not the definition of "null hypothesis" and I have never claimed otherwise.

Here is a thought experiment to demonstrate my point:

Suppose that a previously unknown species of bird is discovered; 6 members of the new species are exposed to a high dose of radiation, a level that is known to kill roughly half of birds which are exposed. After the radiation exposure, 2 of the six die within a few weeks. There is a debate over whether or not this new species is invulnerable to radiation. There is no special reason to think that this new species is different from any other species of bird, but for some obscure political reason, there are people who insist that this new species is invulnerable to radiation.

Concerning our experiment, what should the null hypothesis be?

The null hypothesis would be that the value of X (in this case, susceptibility to radiation) does not differ between group A (previously known birds) and group B (the previously unknown species).

The null hypothesis would be that the value of X (in this case, susceptibility to radiation) does not differ between group A (previously known birds) and group B (the previously unknown species).

Notice that this does NOT agree with your previous definition of "null hypothesis":

it means 'the hypothesis that the thing for which we are looking does not exist.'

Here, the thing we are looking for is a relationship between (1) exposure to radiation of members of the new bird species; and (2) death.

By your own reasoning, the null hypothesis is that this new bird species is not susceptible to radiation. Yes, this is a silly conclusion but that's the point: There's something very wrong with your reasoning.

The 'thing for which we are looking' is usually 'a difference in variable X between group A and group B.

X can be 'rate of disease progression/recovery' with A and B being patients administered a new medication vs. a placebo.

X can be 'susceptibility to radiation' with A and B being species of bird.

X can be 'biological capacity for intelligence' with A and B being human ethnic groups.

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H0 (null): no difference between populations

H1 (alternative): radiation resistance of the new population > radiation resistance of the reference bird population

This is the typical formulation. Null typically assumes no effect or no difference between the populations being considered.

H0 (null): no difference between populations

H1 (alternative): radiation resistance of the new population > radiation resistance of the reference bird population

This is the typical formulation. Null typically assumes no effect or no difference between the populations being considered.

I tend to agree with you as to this particular example, but consider some of the formulations which have been floating around. Such as the "hypothesis that no relationship exists" Given that we are looking at (1) radiation being administered to the new bird population; and (2) deaths among that population, one could argue that the null hypothesis is that no relation exists between the radiation and the deaths.

I think that your formulation does not necessarily work either. For example, suppose there is an obscure un-contacted tribe of people in some remote rain forest and for whatever reason, the question on the table is whether the male members of the tribe are taller than the female members. Suppose further that we meet (and measure) only 4 members of the tribe -- 2 males and 2 females -- and that both of the males are significantly taller than either female. What's the null hypothesis here? Is it simply "no difference between the populations being considered"?

Yeah but "intelligence is equally distributed among all human races" is a positive hypothesis of it's own, that's why you are effectively doing what he said.

The null hypothesis is indeed one of a set of competing hypotheses, but it’s typically the one that assumes no difference between populations.

If I want to show that two distributions are statistically different then I start with the assumption that they are not and then set out to disprove that.

Similarly, if I believe the populations are not actually significantly different, I believe it’d still be common to set up a null hypothesis that they are not different and then either confirm or reject the alternative hypothesis.

If I want to show that two distributions are statistically different then I start with the assumption that they are not and then set out to disprove that.

And what assumption do you use when you want to show that they are the same? It's just a matter of how you formulate your question.

Yeah but "intelligence is equally distributed among all human races" is a positive hypothesis of it's own

I would tweak that just a bit: "Intelligence is a unique human attribute in that unlike other heritable human attributes, the alleles for intelligence are distributed equally among all races and ethnic groups."

From this perspective, one can see that the "thing we are looking for" is evidence that intelligence is fundamentally different from other heritable human attributes.

In any event, as suggested by another poster, there is a more serious flaw with the argument, which is that we are being presented with an isolated demand for rigor. For example, there are people out there claiming that underachievement of Group X is largely due to historical treatment of Group X. Using the "null hypothesis" argument, this type of claim should fail even harder.

As a matter of technical statistical terminology, the null hypothesis when testing two groups for equality is that the relevant average (usually the mean, but median tests exist) is the same for both groups.

The whole point of frequentist statistics is that the test doesn't care about what you believe or what the results mean, its just a handle you can turn and get a publishable paper out 5% of the time (if the null hypothesis is true) and rather more often (if its false). A null hypothesis and a prior are different things that exist in different paradigms.

As a matter of technical statistical terminology, the null hypothesis when testing two groups for equality is that the relevant average (usually the mean, but median tests exist) is the same for both groups.

In this case we know for a fact the averages are not the same, the debate is over the causes.

In this case we know for a fact the averages are not the same, the debate is over the causes.

By stubbornly insisting the averages are the same and there's just something wrong with measurements which show otherwise, the debate over causes can be avoided. As I said, a defense in depth. It's not happening and if it is it's due to racism and even if it's not, we should take from the able to subsidize the unable.

There's an interesting contrasting series one could draw.

  1. Racial intelligence gaps are probably just real, as seen from all the IQ tests of different racial groups, the distribution of Nobels and technical achievement across the nations
  2. Even if they were not real and the gap in performance is due to culture, then much the same conclusions should be drawn (do not bring in people from low performing cultures - or commit to authoritarian mass-scale re-education and indoctrination programs to get them up to speed)
  3. If there is no biological or cultural effect on intelligence/achievement and it's just racism, then maybe white countries should just accept they're incurably racist since, somehow, their ambient racism field is still suppressing the achievement of POCs despite all these expensive affirmative action and DEI efforts. Perhaps oil and water just don't mix and they should be kept far away to minimize the effect... Or maybe 10x more money and effort needs to be spent on DEI? $1.2 Trillion wasn't enough, what about $20 trillion to sub-saharan Africa? Could the ambient racism field be tapped for power, how is it so effective at inducing dysfunction in blacks, even over long distances, even after great spans of time since whites had any influence? Is the racism field defending itself by getting Trump and other populists installed, is it too deep to root out?
  4. Maybe the only solution is genocide, to get rid of the ambient racism field?

I know this sounds sarcastic and dumb but if you take the premises and run with them under utilitarian human-dignity logic, that's where you end up. If white genocide raises world happiness by destroying the racism field and thus raising more black and brown bodies to high standards of living and achievement, isn't that then good? Revolutionaries in the 1960s debated this, some proposed the necessity of killing white babies to stop them growing up to continue the oppressive racist-capitalist system.

On the other hand, it would be much easier for the people with all the H-bombs and MIRV'd ICBMs to do the genociding... Or a transhumanist fix nowadays, I suppose. What does it even mean to make someone smarter and more capable with a transhumanist fix, is this ego-death, overwriting a personality, overwriting a whole racial group?

The exact mechanics of the racism field deserve much more study. This is an extremely important effect, if it's a real thing. Spooky action at a distance, across vast spans of time, very potent effect! And it seems to only 'work' when white people do it - Ottoman and Algerian slave-raiding and Japanese conquest/genocide doesn't seem to have the same effect white racism has on black and brown communities.

If the ambient racism field is just made up, then those who've been promoting and proposing the theory should be treated very seriously. After all, they would have overseen and promoted the waste of tens trillions of dollars, the misallocation and the miseducation of hundreds of millions based on a lie.

The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist

How does the null hypothesis have a place here and why do you get to decide what it is? We aren’t approving drugs here, we’re just trying to weigh two theories, it’s completely unfair to arbitrarily privilege the one you like more.

How does the null hypothesis have a place here and why do you get to decide what it is? We aren’t approving drugs here, we’re just trying to weigh two theories, it’s completely unfair to arbitrarily privilege the one you like more.

That’s kind of like asking how does algebra have a place here, we’re just trying to solve for a variable in this equation.

A hypothesis test is a method to provide evidence for or against two competing theories using data and the way that they’re commonly constructed is to assume a null hypothesis as being the one where the data are not from significantly different distributions.

A standard hypothesis test is not the only method and its use in science is sometimes over stated but it’s by far the most common approach to address such questions, and that’s just how it’s structured.

It’s kind of Occam in the end. It’s simpler to assume that there’s no difference between how fast this group of monkeys climb trees vs that one. If I wanted to posit that the second group climbs faster, I can collect data and argue that it backs up my assumption, but the null case is null because it makes less assumptions.

It’s kind of Occam in the end. It’s simpler to assume that there’s no difference between how fast this group of monkeys climb trees vs that one.

Sure, sure, but the anti-racist monkey has been sitting at the bottom of its tree for generation upon generation now while increasingly bitter and haggard progressives glare at me like it's my fault it won't climb.

Oh but here come the anti-HBD guys, the biggest internet forum debate jobbers this side of flat-earthers, and today they're saying "null hypothesis" a lot. Like if they play this game about who has to prove their hypothesis well enough, we'll suddenly forget that their monkey is never ever going to climb that fucking tree.

It's been a while since I took a science class, but IIRC every scientific investigation has to have a null hypothesis. Wikipedia says that the definition of "null hypothesis" is the hypothesis that no relationship exists—i. e., intelligence has no correlation with race.

You can set the threshold for rejecting the null hypothesis at any significance level you want. You have to set it quite high (by social science standards) to not reject it in this case, but if you're starting with the conclusion you want, that's what you do.

The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist.

There is not, currently, sufficient evidence to refute the null hypothesis.

When it comes to people in general who hold this position, you know, fine, it's not my business what they believe. But I absolutely do not want to hear from them their own (inevitably far more tenuous) theories regarding racial achievement gaps and the like. They can just sit back and be baffled, and if anyone asks them what to do about it, throw their hands up in the air because they have no idea.

But I absolutely do not want to hear from them their own (inevitably far more tenuous) theories regarding racial achievement gaps and the like. They can just sit back and be baffled, and if anyone asks them what to do about it, throw their hands up in the air because they have no idea.

I think that's an excellent point. If, as another poster stated, the "null hypothesis" is "the hypothesis that no relationship exists," and we are going to apply this kind of analysis, then there is zero basis to look at achievement gaps and blame white racism, "patriarchy" "colonialism," "the legacy of slavery" etc.

You've certainly got your soldiers lined up in an impressive defense in depth. But reality does not care.

If You Have The Means At Hand, You Have The Responsibility To Help.

Rejected. The able are not the proper slaves of the needy.

Alice is 5' 2"/157 cm. Bob is 6' 3"/190 cm.

Expecting Bob to get something off a high shelf for Alice does not make Bob Alice's slave.

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.

But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said.

Rejecting the notion that the more able ought to help the less able is rejecting civilisation itself.

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Rejecting the notion that the more able ought to help the less able is rejecting MARGARET MEAD'S DEFINITION OF civilisation itself.

Alice has a womb and Bob does not, but Bob wants to have a genetically-related child. Since Alice is "more able" than Bob, does she therefore have an obligation to provide Bob with a genetically-related child?

Alice has a womb and Bob does not, but Bob wants to have a genetically-related child. Since Alice is "more able" than Bob, does she therefore have an obligation to provide Bob with a genetically-related child?

No, because the cost to Alice is far greater in that case.

You never said anything about the cost, merely that "the more able ought to help the less able". Now you are putting up guardrails. Fine. Define them. Exactly how "costly" must an action be to make it no longer required for the more able to help the less able?

My point was that Ayn Rand and Peter Singer are both wrong; If Alice needs help, and Bob has the means to assist, I reject both the notion that 'Bob has exactly zero obligation to help' and the notion that 'Bob is obligated to contribute even to the point of self-destruction'.

I have discovered a truly marvelous definition of one person's obligation to their neighbour, which this forum is too narrow to contain. I don't have a *complete answer', but there are some useful heuristics.

For the most part, mind > body > personal possessions > non-personal property (idiosyncratically referred to by Marxists as 'private property').

The genitals and reproductive system ought not be subject to the dictates of the community, provided that everyone involved is a consenting adult.

If you do not live or work in the same place as someone else, in a modern society your obligation to them can usually be discharged by financial support, allowing them to purchase whatever they need from someone else.

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Alice is 5' 2"/157 cm. Bob is 6' 3"/190 cm.

Expecting Bob to get something off a high shelf for Alice does not make Bob Alice's slave.

Sure it does. Bob's got his own things he'd prefer to do. Alice's need is no call on his ability. She can go find a ladder. Or offer Bob something of value.

Rejecting the notion that the more able ought to help the less able is rejecting civilisation itself.

No, it's just rejecting Communism ("From each according to his ability..."). And Margaret Mead, I suppose.

She can go find a ladder. Or offer Bob something of value.

And if there aren't any ladders around, and Alice doesn't have anything Bob wants?

Then I'd say that Alice should perhaps make an agreement with a particularly scarce resource she is statistically overwhelmingly likely to possess, so that she can get all the things on the high shelves she wants in exchange for allowing [a] Bob exclusive access to that particular resource.

In other words, this is why marriage exists.

Genitals and reproductive systems are not a resource, and making women's survival contingent on marriage has often given abusive men the ability to inflict terrible suffering on them.

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I guess she doesn't get what's on the shelf then, unless Bob is feeling magnanimous.

And if 'getting what's on the shelf' is a metaphor for survival? Maintenance of human dignity?

Can you be certain that the precedent that you set won't come back to bite you in the hindquarters?

I would rather live in a world where the sink-or-swim, devil-take-the-hindmost, law-of-the-jungle social-Darwinist mode of organisation is left in the past and remembered as one of humanity's many mistakes, even if it means that if I become extremely wealthy my taxes will support people who are not useful to me.

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In addition to Corvos' point, civilization has also historically required the less able to defer to the more able. It's a two-way street; The able help and do a disproportionate share of the work, and in turn, get status and power, the less able give up status and power in exchange for being provided for.

Modern societies' insistence that you can get one half without the other is partially a sham, and partially the thing that is killing it.

civilization has also historically required the less able to defer to the more able.

People have historically done lots of things that they ought not to have.

The able help and do a disproportionate share of the work, and in turn, get status and power, the less able give up status and power in exchange for being provided for.

Almost, but not quite.

If you have the ability to help someone, and you help them, you deserve appreciation. In extraordinary cases, you deserve prestige. You are not entitled to dominance, and you sure as hell aren't entitled to dominance over the people you helped.

I assume you are familiar with the phrase "with great power comes great responsibility." Do you recognize that it runs the other way as well? With great responsibility, comes great power? If so, what's the difference between power and dominance? If not, why not?

I assume you are familiar with the phrase "with great power comes great respons[i]bility."

I am familiar with that phrase. Part of the responsibility is to not use that power to do bad things. Reducing someone else to a state of subjugation, for no other reason than that you can, is a bad thing.

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It seems to me that a tall man who isn’t allowed to decide when and where and if he fetches things for shorter people is just a step-ladder made of meat.

What if there are 10 Alice’s who genuinely need things fetched down on a constant basis?

What if there’s only one Alice but she abuses him and makes her dislike of him known on a regular basis?

What if Alice and her fellow shorties have subjected Bob to a constant campaign of psychological manipulation since birth explaining that his tallness is a privilege to be used for the benefit of the short, or indeed that his tallness is actively oppressing them by causing shelves to be built which they can’t reach, for which he must repent by serving them in the manner they demand?

In many of these scenarios Bob appeared to be… let’s not call him a slave to avoid the noncentral fallacy, but certainly slavelike. Similar to an indentured servant.

In practice, what seems to happen is that ‘we’ or ‘society’ determine how much labour Bob is required to do for the underprivileged (in our benevolence). In which case Bob is not only their servant but even more so ours.

Civilisation does require this to some degree but the scales have tipped far too far in the last hundred years and the racial version has finally tipped far enough that all of us are Bob and we’re sick of it.

Rejected.

Yeah, I didn't get that either. The moral claim that the strong must help the weak is just that...a claim.

He really is the globalist Forrest Gump. He had a hand in the subprime mortgage crisis? And the development of video game micro transactions? He helped Larry Fink’s son through the drama of knocking up his situationship? He’s acting on behalf of the Rothschilds while funding random far right geneticist bloggers? He may actually have had the most interesting life in his generation.

He helped Larry Fink’s son through the drama of knocking up his situationship?

That there is why Epstein was so popular and trusted, not as in a comment further down where it says he could pass for one of the upper class. He was a fixer, and trusted to do those kinds of jobs. He may have thrown parties and hosted the hoity-toity, but in the end he was one of the professions: socially acceptable to be seen with him on familiar terms, but he's never going to be 'one of us' for the old money (Wexner, for example, was very much 'new money'). I think that might also explain his parties; the right sort of people take it for granted that Jeff will lay on entertainment of the "hot girls who are willing to sleep with you and not make waves later", that's part of the duties of his role as fixer/all round guy who gets it done for you. Hence why after his Florida case there were still high society contacts willing and able to help him rehabilitate his reputation, it wasn't a shock surprise revelation that he was pimping girls. Of course he was, that was all part of what he did as a manager for high worth individuals:

On the evening of December 2nd, 2010, a handful of America's media and entertainment elite—including TV anchors Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos, comedienne Chelsea Handler, and director Woody Allen—convened around the dinner table of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It wasn't just any dining room, but part of a sprawling nine-story townhouse that once housed an entire preparatory school. And it wasn't just any sex offender, but an enigmatic billionaire who had once flown the likes of former President Bill Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak around the world on his own Boeing 727.

...But the uproar over "The Prince and The Perv"—as the British headlines screamed—mysteriously drowned in the Mid-Atlantic. New Yorkers barely batted an eye about the scandal-mongering across the pond. "A jail sentence doesn't matter anymore," says David Patrick Columbia, founder of New York Social Diary. "The only thing that gets you shunned in New York society is poverty."

"In the Midwest, where I am from, he would be a social pariah," says Lorna Brett Howard, a political activist and wife of Irving Post Capital CEO and Aeropostale director John Howard. "What I see here is if you have big money or are famous then you get a pass."

...The conventional wisdom among his friends was that Epstein has been victimized by greedy, morally dubious teenage girls and unscrupulous lawyers. "I've never condoned paying for sex, but if the young lady lied about her age it's her own fault," explained one socialite, who along with hedge-fund manager Wilbur Ross and real-estate magnate Leon Black hobnobbed with Epstein at a Southampton movie screening just two months after his release from "community control" in Florida.

..."No one in café society gives a damn that a 15-year-old girl gives massages," says one frequent charity-benefit guest.

That's always the risk with courtesans, they get greedy and try to extort more money out of their rich clients. That was the view back then. We can even link it to Stormy Daniels, who took her hush money, spent it, then tried to squeeze more blood out of the turnip with her court cases against Trump. That's the kind of expected sex scandal when you pay these kinds of women for sex.

I actually think this is why he and Bannon got along so well, because Bannon has also had a very Forrest Gump kind of life.

I’m going to be honest I don’t care about who had sex with prostitutes. The only interesting things about Epstein to me are, was he an Israeli spy? Was he murdered? Was Ghislaine actually a reddit mod? I basically take for granted that 90% of men would have sex with everything that walks, given the chance, so none of that stuff is revelatory. Especially men that aggressively seek power/wealth/status, as they say, men only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting.

Was Ghislaine actually a reddit mod?

Several /u/Maxwellhill posts were included as evidence against her by the FBI. Not quite confirmation, but as close as we can get barring an actual confession in my opinion.

Really? Do you have a link that's crazy it got (more or less) confirmed.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 9/EFTA01245114.pdf

Especially men that aggressively seek power/wealth/status, as they say, men only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting.

It would be funny if that one thing turned out to be a genuine friendship, and people like Trump, Musk, Chomsky, Bannon never came anywhere close to the prostitutes (much less teenaged prostitutes). Hence Musk's seemingly oblivious plan to bring his wife on the "heli" that we discuss elsewhere in this thread.

For men of that power/wealth/status, people are always looking to get something from you or butter you up to screw you over later—what if Epstein's appeal was that he was a guy who never gave off those vibes? Just a bro who wanted to chill with his homies on his island, watch internet videos, and shoot the shit about things like racial IQ statistics.

I mean damn, look how happy and relaxed Chomsky and Bannon were together in Epstein's presence, like two old best friends reunited after years apart.

That honestly seems to have been Epstein's major talent; he was charming and friendly and even though he was out to make useful friends and connections, he could present him as sincere and interested in you for yourself, not for what you could do for him. As you say, rich people are used to others trying to make use of them, so someone who was "hey Jim, great to see you, tell me what do you think of my newest art piece?" and talk to them on that basis was disarming.

And then once he got the reputation of throwing the parties that you needed to be seen at, of course everyone who was anyone and those on the tier down from that wanted to be on his guest list.

talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences

It's pretty funny that out of all celebrities so far Chomsky has suffered the greatest aura loss among his supporters from the Epstein situation. From getting photographed palling it up together with Bannon to now potentially being redpilled on the racial IQ question. On Reddit last time around there was already a vibe of "that's what upsets me most about one of the most famous and prolific leftist academics featuring prominently in a sex trafficking and underage prostitution scandal: him being friendly with a rightwing political figure."

I checked reddit, and the dominant line is basically "Epstein was an extremely popular socialite, taking photos with him or crossing paths socially doesn’t mean someone fucked underage girls". Certainly. But I can't overlook how carefully that nuance is defended when the figure in question is a progressive. Anti zionists used to flex that no one on "their side" was connected to Epstein. It's the same crowd that insists on interrogating power, thinks they’re anti establishment because they dislike the old elites, whilst being perfectly obedient to the new ones. Skepticism becomes “conspiracy,” inquiry becomes “smearing,” but only when the subject sits on the correct ideological shelf.

This is why I think the whole Epstein Files are massively overhyped. 99% of whatever comes out is (and was always going to be) "this person knew Epstein", and the remaining 1% is "this person went to Epstein's island, but there's no confirmation of them actually committing crimes there." As long as Epstein hired at least one 18+ year old prostitute, then every single person in the files has plausible deniability, even if they straight up admit to having sex with girls at his island.

The Epstein lead died when he did, because he wasn't stupid enough to actually write down the truly incriminating details. The pedos won when whatever shenanigans they pulled to enable his death worked (imo suicide with security guards turning a blind eye and killing the cams ahead of time for him), and they're all going to get away with it.

All the files have is more heat and un-proven allegations for both sides to sling at each other. Scandals without substance.

They had years to censor the incriminating 1%

The Epstein lead died when he did, because he wasn't stupid enough to actually write down the truly incriminating details.

This is just incorrect - there's at least one former ambassador from Mexico who is getting burned by the revelation that he fathered a child with an 11 year old girl in Mexico. But moreover, it wasn't stupidity that lead to him writing down the truly incriminating details. He most likely believed that his connections would allow him to escape any kind of serious punishment, and when he received a sweetheart deal due to "belonging to intelligence" he was proven correct. Even then, there are actually things that he considered too sensitive to put into an email - see the one where he's asked if he has anyone with influence over Assad. I don't even think it counts as stupidity - why bother protecting yourself from the intelligence agencies reading your email when you can just call up the people in charge of those intelligence agencies and ask them to get you out of trouble?

The most disheartening revelation was that Epstein was in communication with, and possibly funded, the hacker known only as “4Chan”

New conspiracy — Epstein did this all for the lolz.

I mean, he's a cross between Lex Luthor and the Joker, and as soon as he died, civilization burst into flames and hasn't stabilized since. If it turns out that we live in a world where a human can be the container holding back a force of chaos and destruction, some of which leaks out through his own acts of evil, then ... I mean, might as well be how reality works, at this point.

Does that increase the odds that top 10 reddit user (maxwell-hill)[https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/] is Ghislane maxewell.

I don’t think there’s any serious doubt at this point. Ghislane was that user.

Someone should correlate the emails sent by Ghislaine to the subjects discussed by MaxwellHill. Eg on Jan 10 when Ghislaine’s email is about x, is the account more likely to post about x? In emails where she is on a flight for 8 hours, is there a lapse in account posting?

Someone should

Maybe someone could even be lazy doing that by prompting Claude to do all the work?

I love imagining that the world's greatest boogey man is talking smack on Call of Duty and bitching about it on 4chan afterward.

The most interesting revelation from the Epstein Files to me is just how incredibly unimpressive all these famous and important people appear in private. Epstein palled around with some of the richest amd most influential people in the world, and all their emails come across like they're written by insecure teenagers bragging about that one time they touched a boob.

I expected better from society's supervillains.

We’re all just human

My head cannon is that the World Wars erased too many of the really talented elites.

I expected better from society's supervillains.

As the saying goes, high school never ends.

Epstein palled around with some of the richest amd most influential people in the world, and all their emails come across like they're written by insecure teenagers bragging about that one time they touched a boob.

To be fair, Elon Musk always comes across that way.

(Trump, of course, touched all the boobs, all the big ones that is, he doesn't bother with those small ones although yes, ladies, they're nice too, but Trump touched the biggest boobs)

I have decided to resign my position effective immediately with BG3 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Larian Studios has quite a lot to answer for, it seems.

talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences

WTF, I love Chomsky now.

Mods, remove this if it's a crappy post. It's hard to come up with a through line for this, other than "WOW he knew a lot of people".

It's fine. While more commentary would be nice, there's no need to say something for the sake of saying something.

Elon Musk previously claimed Epstein tried to get him to go to the island but Elon refused.

However, Elon appears in the Epstein files asking to go to the island. Some back and forth emails to pick a date for the visit, so it looks like he did go there and again rather than refusing to go, he requested to go there himself. Multiple times actually.

Here's Elon in 2012 (reminder, that's after Epstein had been convicted for procuring an underage prostitute) asking when the wildest party would be.

Here's Elon again a year later with some back and forth planning a date for another visit.

He really own goaled himself by pushing the Epstein files. Why did he tweet 'Trump is the Epstein files!' if he's living in a glass house. Even smart guys have their derpy moments I guess.

"how many people will you be for the heli to island"

"Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on =our island? "

smh my head, Elon looking to bring sand to the beach.

Who would have thought Elon the type of nigga to bring his wife on a guy's trip.

I love the "jeevacation@gmail.com" email address and the blank subject line for coordinating their... plans.

Who would have thought Elon the type of nigga to bring his wife on a guy's trip.

Though that would incline towards "Elon was not there for the underage negotiable affection". If he's off on a guy's trip to Lolita Island for the wild parties with the pretty girls, he's not going to bring his missus, as you say. Thus whatever was going on, he may have thought it more like some kind of swingers' thing (was Mrs. Musk agreeable to that? Guess we'll never know) at the most.

Yeah, all else equal, him intending to bring Talulah would be Bayesian evidence he didn't think it would be some high school girl fuckathon.

Thus whatever was going on, he [Elon] may have thought it more like some kind of swingers' thing

Which funnily enough, would actually make him sound like a cuck and more pathetic than if he were just heading over there to bang some teenage girls. If your wife is late-20s Taluleh Riley and you're bringing her to a swingers' event where you think the other WAGs will be the likes of Ghislaine Maxwell, Melinda Gates, Hillary Clinton, Valeria Chomsky, etc. you're not getting a whole lot out of letting your wife get railed by the other men.

I was thinking more along the lines of that rather pathetic (to me, anyway) Resort Island of the Swingers. Uh, did someone post about something like that on here a while back? I know I read some kind of description by a participant, and honestly it sounded to me like way too much work to be fun. Maybe Elon was thinking the same thing was going on with Jeff and his Private Island of Wild Parties for the Select.

Someone should ask her.

Elon doubled down today:

I have never been to any Epstein parties ever and have many times call for the prosecution of those who have committed crimes with Epstein.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2017606707372016039?s=46

I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his “Lolita Express”,

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2017490775324655826?s=46

Are there definite mails showing a past visit or only planning ones (which presumably didn’t pan out)?.

So far I have only seen planning ones. However the planning ones show Musk asking whether he can visit and one of them has Elon asking when the "wildest party" will be, when discussing a date for his visit. So unless I'm missing something here or these documents are fabricated, the idea that it was Epstein taking initiative and Elon always refused seems demonstrably a lie, because we have emails with Elon asking whether he can visit.

At least one site claims the "Girls FTW!" email is fake and does not appear in the release.

Correct, but the one the message you're responding to referenced is real.

One interesting aspect would be how much we can trust the emails on Epstein's account who appear to have been sent from other people.

I think it depends on the technical specifics. If they scraped the data from his computers, then (unless the senders are the technical geeks who gpg-sign their mails) there is no proof that the sender ever wrote that. Epstein was obviously not the person who would be beyond falsifying mails for the purpose of insurance.

If they scraped them from Google (I think they did that), then the odds of him having messed with the mails sink. It might be that anything in the inbox, header and all, is still trivially writable via IMAP though. Ideally, one would want the mail server logs, but I am not sure if Google even keeps hashes of the mails they received. This still leaves the defense "that mail was sent from my mail server, but it was hacked", but with Epstein that seems a bit far-fetched, Epstein was clearly not some uberhacker.

Of course, if Epstein had messed with his inbox, one would expect that we would find things a lot more juicy in there.

This issue came up with the Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden email leaks. While basically no one signs their emails, modern anti-spam technology means nearly all modern emails are signed by the sending server using DKIM. Theoretically, a privacy-conscious email host would regularly rotate their DKIM keys and publicly post their stale ones (i.e. make sure it's trivial to forge old emails), but in practice GMail does not do this and a quick web search finds no one recommending this.

In short, given the full headers, it's possible to cryptographically verify emails really were sent by the user they appear to have been sent by. (Obviously, someone could have gained access to the account who is not the owner of the account or there might be other reasons why the server's signature might not correspond to the human who wrote the email, but those are a lot less likely than the ease of forging an unsigned email.)

Theoretically, a privacy-conscious email host would regularly rotate their DKIM keys and publicly post their stale ones (i.e. make sure it's trivial to forge old emails)

Uh, you mean publicly post their stale public keys so it’s trivial to verify old emails?

No, I meant what I said. There's no difficulty finding the stale public keys. The stale private keys should be published. DKIM can't provide strongly deniable authentication, but publishing the old private keys would give a weak version of it.

Ohh, I see, the point is to make it so that emails leaked after the fact are indistinguishable from forgeries.

...

Why would they need to be infiltrated by NSA agents? They'd hand over emails given a warrant.

...

Okay, but we're talking about noted felon Epstein here. There'd be no difficulty getting a warrant on all his shit.

Formatting fix:

Q: Why would they need to be infiltrated by NSA agents?

A: They'd hand over emails given a warrant.

That’s consistent with Elon never going. Doesn’t seem like they set a date etc

Also consistent with Elon Tryharding. See Path of Exile ghost account etc.

Unless this breaks some obvious threshold where I need to notice I am likely going to ignore anything on Trump. I 100% believe he banged Stormy Daniels for money but none of his ex-wives fit the pedophilia bro type. I do not think there is a huge overlap in guys who bang Daniel’s (big breast) and into underage girls.

For the reason perhaps I should give other people with accusations the benefit of the doubt. Bill Gates though does have pedophile vibes. Even DiCaprio vibes like a guy who would probably go younger if he was allowed to. Trump just seems to have always gone for a different body type.

“He knows a lot of people” It’s weird how a quote from a movie will stick with, but in the movie never been kissed the one baseball player friend of hers who also went back to High School said something like, “If one person says your cool then everyone will go with it”. My view is if you have one famous person vouche for you and then you meet 5 more and handle it well then it’s easy to know 500 famous rich people. You are in the club. It’s much harder to find the first famous friend than number 100.

I have no reason to disbelieve that Trump had sex with the odd 16 or 17 year old. He was a famous libertine in an era when that was much more acceptable. There's no reason to believe he specifically looked for that, of course, and the majority of his mistresses were probably old enough to get plastic surgery on their own.

I cant help but feel that this is purposely daft. I happen to be both into skinny, and fat women. I married a skinny woman, but if I we're a less faithful man, I feel that I would pursue trysts with fat woman exclusively, because that's what's not available at home.

On the Trump note, I agree, nothing here really passes my sniff test, but I also don't believe they would release anything that would actually incriminate him, if it existed in any of the "files"

Ok so you might be non-conventional. I feel like most guys I know always date the same girl. I had one person in my 20 something friend group I would always get in conflict with because we would always want the same girl. Other friends this never occurred because even if the girl was conventionally attractive and I knew that I would have zero interest in her.

I feel like most men do have very strong types. If you are going to pay for sex you are probably going to buy exactly what you want. I guess it’s possible Trump would have sex with someone like 16 year old Britney Spears but I think most people who have pedophile attraction prefer girls who have ballerina style bodies (no chest, fairly-like 90 lb girls).

It would be interesting to know why % of men have true attraction to a wide variety of body types. My gut says it’s very low.

I have the opposite intuition. My feeling is that there are enough people in both the government and media committed to #RESISTing Trump that if they had anything truly concrete that they could use against him it would have come out by now.

It's not about Trump actually having sex with 16 or 17 year olds, it's about spreading the message of guilt by association. He and Epstein were best buds. Epstein arranged underage sex slaves for his rich friends and contacts. Lurid claims of "I was raped by both of them when I was thirteen" just help that along. Nobody (except the dwindling number of people who do care about distinctions like "underage means under 18, not 12 years old" and "did this really happen?") cares if it's true or not, it's just convenient mud to throw.

He's a racist. He's a transphobe. He's a sexist. He's a rapist. He's a paedophile. He's a Nazi. He's a convicted felon (36 FELONIES!!!)

"Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him" is pretty bad in and of itself, making him an accessory through inaction. Conversely, "somehow missed all the red flags about Epstein being a pedophile despite palling around with him" would be pretty damning for Trump's intelligence even if it's ethically exculpatory. So if you establish a sufficient degree of regular association between the two that it has to be one of the two, you have a pretty tight case for Trump either being complicit, or incredibly dumb. Your only way out is to argue that Epstein was so good at covering up his sins that an intelligent man could genuinely hang out with him repeatedly without ever suspecting a thing; and does anyone seriously believe that?

I hate to nitpick but "paedophile" is doing a lot of work blurring things here. If we're talking "under 18 but around 16 at the lowest", then properly it's ephebeophilia and technically it's attraction to young but sexually mature individuals. Paedophilia proper is pre-pubescent children.

But since "minor child" can refer to "this girl was 17" as well as "this girl was 12", then charges about minor children can be weaponised to mean "Trump etc. were raping twelve year olds" and not "Trump and Prince Andrew etc. were having sex with 17 year olds whom they thought were willing or at least paid-for escorts doing a job".

And it's the Trump was raping thirteen year olds version which is the one being used in online spaces, because Orange Man not alone Bad, he is Most Evil of All Evils and MAGA is most evil and we're fighting Nazi fascism and if only this time we scream loud enough, the normies will finally turn on him.

I don't know what age of girl Epstein himself was personally attracted to, he does seem to have liked them very young. But that does not mean that everyone who went to his parties and his island liked them that young. If you know Jeff from his parties where hot nubile young girls hang out and pay attention to the rich men, you don't necessarily know he likes to fuck fourteen year olds, you think he's like you and every other guy who likes hot nubile seventeen to eighteen to twenty year olds. Maybe some of his "special close friends" also share Jeff's interest in fourteen year olds, but that is not going to be common knowledge for the circles he moves in. Only those who need to know will know and will be invited to the island stays where the fourteen year olds are.

So Musk may well have been one of those deemed "don't need to know" and even "not important enough to cultivate, not in the circles I want" which seem to have been established finance and old money, as well as Big Names in science and the arts. Musk may simply not have been a big enough name or the right kind of big name for Epstein. Maybe it was simply personal dislike. Who knows?

Your only way out is to argue that Epstein was so good at covering up his sins that an intelligent man could genuinely hang out with him repeatedly without ever suspecting a thing; and does anyone seriously believe that?

That depends, do you think Noam Chomsky is intelligent or not? 😁

I think you've misunderstood me. I never argued that Trump was himself attracted to underage girls. What I view as pretty likely is that Trump knew that Epstein was in that business, and yet did nothing to report and expose him; not because he was himself interested, but because he didn't care/couldn't be bothered/preferred enjoying the other perks of being pals with Epstein to doing the right thing and getting on Epstein's bad side in the process.

I'm not sure why you went off on the tangent about Musk and what he knew, as I never brought him up. I agree that Musk probably didn't know, but then it's not clear that he ever even got as far as the island. I feel like it would be considerably more difficult to have actually attended one of the "wildest parties", and still not realize that there were sketchy things going on. Wouldn't there be an interaction somewhere along the way of Epstein making it clear what range of girls he had on offer, to let the guest have his pick? And judging by all the leaked material and reports, does Epstein sound like he would couch such an offer in such carefully-guarded terms that an uninformed, intelligent man genuinely couldn't pick up on the scandalous age of some of the options? Maybe I'm picturing this all wrong, but that's where I'm coming from.

And no, I don't especially expect that this will have real consequences for Trump. It's just that it should. If your buddy is an unrepentant rapist then you have to turn him in, it's not enough to politely say "not for me, Jeff, thanks" and keep sleeping with the adult prostitutes he fetches for you. "The President knew about a serial statutory rapist and did fuck-all about it" should be a scandal to rock the nation all on its own, never mind whether he personally partook, and it's very depressing that it isn't (though yes, certainly the muted response is downstream of the boy-crying-wolf dynamics from the Left lobbing spurious accusations at Trump every Tuesday such that when a genuinely outrageous one arises it barely registers).

That depends, do you think Noam Chomsky is intelligent or not? 😁

I think he might very well be morally complicit, in the sense described above ("knew Epstein had unsavory hobbies but couldn't be bothered to do anything about it").

judging by all the leaked material and reports, does Epstein sound like he would couch such an offer in such carefully-guarded terms that an uninformed, intelligent man genuinely couldn't pick up on the scandalous age of some of the options? Maybe I'm picturing this all wrong, but that's where I'm coming from.

I don't really care to defend Trump but surely any fixer is going to propose what's on offer pretty opaquely if anything so specific as a request is ever even made. Stuff like conversations that come off as just idle curiosity:

Epstein: "What do you like in a woman?"

Trump: "I've always been a big fan of the Russians, great people, wonderful people, and so affectionate"

Epstein: "I knew you were a man of good taste, I have a party I'm throwing for some Russian Oligarchs in a few weeks and they're bringing many girls with, would you like to come?"

Trump: "You always throw the best parties Jeff, I'm always telling the staff you throw the best parties. Of course we'll come, I bet you can get a lot more people coming if they know I'll be there."

Epstein: "I think that's true, I'll make sure to invite some more girls who would love to meet a famous television star like you, are there any particular types of Russian girls you like the best so I know who to invite?"

And if Trump goes on to describe prepubertal Russian gymnasts then Epstein goes down that path, but if he starts talking about mature matriarch types Trump needn't ever have been informed of the other offerings.

What I view as pretty likely is that Trump knew that Epstein was in that business, and yet did nothing to report and expose him; not because he was himself interested, but because he didn't care/couldn't be bothered/preferred enjoying the other perks of being pals with Epstein to doing the right thing and getting on Epstein's bad side in the process.

That's the entire point of the whole "Trump and Epstein" publicity, and thanks for putting it so succinctly. It doesn't matter if Trump was himself fucking underage girls, what matters is his morality. He knew and did nothing, hence he is a bad person.

The question of course is, did he know? Did he know about the fifteen year old masseuses? Did he know they were doing more than giving regular massages?

Side A says of course he knew, because Orange Man Bad. Side B says there's room to doubt he knew.

This is what, in the end, it comes down to: not a question of paedophilia or the rest of it, but political mud-slinging. And it all depends on how we gauge the honesty of those involved: is Lawrence Kraus telling the truth or lying here? Should he have known about the fifteen year olds?

Professor Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and author of Quantum Man, has planned scientific conferences with Epstein in St. Thomas and remained close with him throughout his incarceration. "If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge," says Krauss. "Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they're not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people."

As to why I included Musk, because he's been in the comments as well as to "did he know or not?" Ditto with Chomsky, where the more interesting question is "Okay, attempting to hob-nob with the likes of Chomsky was all part of the rehabilitation effort after the Florida court case, but what was Chomsky getting out of it?"

"Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him" is pretty bad in and of itself, making him an accessory through inaction.

No, that is not how being an accessory works in the slightest.

I meant in the moral sense (and, as FttG said, the reputational sense), not in the strict legal sense. I thought describing the alternative scenario as "ethically exculpatory" made this clear and I didn't need to specify both times.

Not in the legal sense, but absolutely in the reputational sense.

Only if you accept the basic guilt-by-contagion premise of the left side of the Culture War.

I disagree. Knowing that an acquaintance of yours is a pederast (or "merely" an ephebophile) and refusing to report him or cut ties with him reflects badly on you, even if it's not legally actionable, and this social convention long predates wokeness.

What crimes does this extend to? There are crimes of a whole range of severity. At what point does it become severe enough that you are obliged to cut ties or report? And what if you have less than 100% confidence that he committed the bad deed?

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Are you really saying that there is no such thing as a moral duty to report or otherwise act upon knowledge of evil deeds committed by others? If you're a passive witness to a murder or rape, and could identify the culprit, it's not at all immoral of you to move on with your life and keep the secret? Really?

When Epstein first got arrested, the investigator reached out broadly to Epstein's social caste for information. Purportedly, the only person to take the call and speak with him was Trump.

My google-fu is failing to find a cite for that; the current doc dump is obviously clogging the search results. But pretend for a second that it's true. In that hypothetical, would you say that such an action would make Trump uniquely righteous?

There's also the line from Trump saying Epstein likes women "on the younger side". It's hard to be sure without hearing the tone, but that seems like a polite, faux-friendly knifing, similar to the comments people like Seth McFarland made about Weinstein before his behavior came fully to light.

Do you think McFarland is more or less "guilty by association" than other celebrities who knew about Weinstein but kept silent?

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None of what you said is about "Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him".

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I do not think there is a huge overlap in guys who bang Daniel’s (big breast) and into underage girls.

I think that Stormy Daniels (and his wives) do put to rest any claim that Trump is an exclusive pedophile.

However, knowing one of his sexual tastes does not rule out the possibility of him having additional sexual tastes. If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?

From an evo-psych PoV, the obviously advantageous path for a man is to fuck any fertile-looking woman his society lets him fuck. Being exclusively into teens or MILFs would really limit reproductive success, especially in monogamous societies where your marriage partner will likely start as a teen and age into a more mature woman later on.

We know that Trump was big time into running Miss contests (and allegedly walking into their dressing room). To my knowledge, he did not run any Mister contests, so it seems plausible to conclude that sexual attraction was one of the things which got him into that. Now, I am very much not into these contests, but it appears to me (starting from the label, a 'Miss' is a woman on the marriage market) that they are rather about young, nubile women than mothers with big breasts. A 16yo selected to appeal to Trump would be much closer to a Miss winner than Stormy Daniels is.

If the allegations were that he had sucked off underage boys, then I would be with you in finding that implausible, bisexuality seems to be relatively rare and there is no indication that Trump likes dicks.

And of course, there is Trump's creepy birthday message to Epstein. It could be about the both of them enjoying hunting federally protected birds on his island, but somehow I doubt it is.

However, knowing one of his sexual tastes does not rule out the possibility of him having additional sexual tastes. If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?

I would at least expect it did cover "decides he'll try steak for a change is not the same as decides he'll try raw roadkill".

Has this been your experience with any other public cheater, that they espouse "variety is the spice of life?" Best I can tell, most everyone has a "type," and they stick to it. The most famous that comes to mind is Tiger Woods, who slept with a large number of women who all vaguely looked like his wife (I was a big fan of the article from a journalist who was not so much upset by the fact that Tiger Woods was a philanderer, but that he did not "sample all the varieties of the world")

Has this been your experience with any other public cheater, that they espouse "variety is the spice of life?" Best I can tell, most everyone has a "type," and they stick to it.

Yeah, that's my general impression as well. I think that given the choice between (1) a 25-year old beauty queen; and (2) a cute 15 year old, Epstein would have taken the second choice and Trump the first.

If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?

We're talking about the guy who's famous for still eating McDonalds all the time even though he's a billionaire TV star WWE HoFer president, right? He does not strike me as a guy starving for novelty or transgression.

Most Miss America winners during Trump's life have been 20+, which seems like a reasonable gauge. If that's what we're using as a proxy score, Trump likes 'em near or past college graduation. And frankly, the difference between 16 and 21 is much bigger than 21 to 26, and that would have been more extreme in decades past.

Trump's pageant was Miss USA, where the winners skew slightly younger, but also haven't been under 20 for a long time. But the reason why Donald Trump, pageant baron, stinks of kiddie-fiddling is that he also owned Miss Teen USA, and bragged about being able to hang out in the girls' changing room because he owned the pageant. A quick look at Miss Teen USA winners shows that there is no paedophilia here - the girls look like the physiologically mature women they are. But it isn't and shouldn't be socially acceptable.

Outside Red America, both feminists and social conservatives think that teen pageants shouldn't be socially acceptable at all, but that boat sailed a long time ago.

A 16yo selected to appeal to Trump would be much closer to a Miss winner than Stormy Daniels is.

Not helped by the fact that age of consent laws vary from country to country, and that there are exceptions where what would be "statutory rape" gets relieved by 'Romeo and Juliet' laws so you don't label a 17 year old who had sex with his 16 year old girlfriend as a sex offender. Also that despite legal ages of consent, the de facto acknowledgement seems to be "teenagers are going to have sex before that age, so teach them about contraception, abortion, and sexual health".

In some US states, it would be legal (if unseemly) for Trump to have sex with a 16 year old.

In some US states, it would be legal (if unseemly) for Trump to have sex with a 16 year old.

Sure, as long as he is not paying for the sex, and has no reason to believe that anyone else is paying her to have sex, either. Epstein's Island is Florida IIRC, and there AoC seems to be 18, so the excuse "I thought Jeff had just invited some teens who just liked to fuck older guys" will not fly.

Also that despite legal ages of consent, the de facto acknowledgement seems to be "teenagers are going to have sex before that age, so teach them about contraception, abortion, and sexual health".

AoC is the age at which you can have sex with anyone without your consent being considered violated. If multiple people of a common age have consensual sex, most legislatures recognize that this is not a problem which needs fixing, no matter if they are 11, 15, 17 or 99. Locking up two 11yo's for statuary rape of each other hardly seems very worthwhile.

If two eleven year olds are having sex it very damn much is a problem. Not a locking them up problem, but "oh shit the dumb kids are gonna contract so many STIs and run the risk of getting pregnant because physically they can get knocked up".

It looks like there's serious dirt on Bill Gates and Elon Musk at least. The funniest possible timeline is if Trump of all people has no credible evidence against him, but like every other elite from the USA on both sides of the political aisle does. So far I've only seen the non-credible witness stuff with regards to Trump, but I understand there are literally millions of files so who knows what will turn up in the coming days.

I'm a hardcore leftist and of course extremely anti-right and anti-Trump, but, yeah, I'm not seeing any new revelations about Trump, here, and so far there don't seem to be substantiated allegations Trump ever did anything sexual with anyone underage. I could think of hundreds of reasons to hate Trump and to consider him a terrible person and a terrible president, but the Epstein stuff is effectively just noise when it comes to him. If there's a bombshell regarding him and Epstein, everyone will know about it immediately.

Bill Gates though does have pedophile vibes.

I think you're probably just suffering from bias due to ideological disagreements with him. While Gates was/is clearly a creep, none of the emails suggest he did anything with any underage people, nor are there any other allegations or pieces of evidence pointing to that. He probably regularly cheated on his wife, and as the emails show he even contracted an STD from a prostitute, but I see no evidence or suggestion (or "vibes") he was a pedophile or did anything like that.

the emails show he even contracted an STD from a prostitute

Of all the things I did not expect to know, or didn't want to know, "Bill Gates the Nerd King was a playa" is very high on the list.

You clearly haven’t seen his sexy photoshoot from 1983.

(The photos weren’t published in Teen Beat as the article claims, but they are genuine.)

Oh, Lord.

Bill? Put your glasses back on, get off the desk, and what are you doing with those floppies?

There's an old story from Mark Cuban about Gates getting a girl he was trying to seduce. I don't remember it well enough to recall a date but Gates married 5 years before Cuban sold Broadcast.com.

Story can be found in this NYPost article here.

“I’m buying these girls drinks and doing shots and everything and they’re like, ‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom’ — I think for real,” a laughing Cuban said. “And then they don’t come back and I’m like, what the f—?"

<james_franco_first_time.jpg> Most reliable bar-going young women.

Common polygyny W. You can think you're a big shot with $3 million (in 2025 dollars) as a 26-27 year-old, but then get mogged by a bigger fish.

https://youtube.com/shorts/x8tLF_qocoE

Cuban says he was around 26, so it was 1984 or 1985, and was thinking he was the king with being 1 million dollars rich. Gates had a net worth $350 million when he was thirty.

Interesting that m00t met Jeffrey Epstein right around the time the political board reopened.

Epstein also cited TRS in reference to B/W IQ gap, greatest ally after all???

I appreciate them making the chart black and white. Very helpful.

On a more serious note, I wonder if there's something off with the transcription, a lot of text is garbled. I wouldn't put it past the FBI to print and scan images.

How confused are you?

My boomer uncle has read a bunch of Unz (even though he doesn’t like him) and Jared Taylor lol. Honestly, though, I think it’s clear that while, after his first conviction, his friends would still mostly see him one on one or in private, his social calendar shrunk considerably and he spent most of the day online in the usual places curious people inhabit.

If he was 10 years younger he’d probably have been here.

SCOTT IS IN THE EPSTEIN FILES

Literally in an email chain named, “Forbidden Research” LMAO

EDIT: Did Epstein fund MIRI? Eliezer Yudkowsky had a Skype with Epstein during a MIRI fundraiser.

...

I mean, I'm fairly certain germline-engineering humans with CRISPR is indeed forbidden.

As for "dangerous", well, two reasons.

  1. CRISPR has a tendency to sometimes misfire and fuck up other stuff than what you intended. When tampering with plants or animals, no big deal, do more than necessary and dispose of the defectives. With humans, more of a big deal.

  2. CRISPR itself can be encoded into inserted genes. This allows for gene drives - super-heritable traits that are always passed on to offspring (because you inherit one allele for the trait, and then that allele itself overwrites its counterpart from the other parent so you now have two copies and will always pass one of them to any child). One of the more obvious uses of this is in pest control: you introduce engineered versions of the pest species that are super-heritably of one sex, causing extinction when it wipes out the other sex. If such a gene drive were introduced to humans, genocide would be necessary to save the species. More generally, attempts to unilaterally alter the human gene pool this way open up a giant squirming can of worms that we'd all rather remain closed.

...

How would you even introduce it in sufficient numbers?

Well, I mean, it does double every generation relative to population growth (because it's passed on to all children, always), so you only need one to kick it off (or a few, to avoid teething problems with the first affected person happening to die childless). Not an imminent threat of extinction, but of course the longer it goes the bigger headache you're going to have uprooting the entire family tree, and you always have the twin problems of "lots of people will object to genocide"/"the necessary social changes to do it anyway over their objection are not especially pleasant and won't necessarily go away".

More imminently, I suppose there are faster-breeding species that we need that could be targetted, although I can't think of a gotcha off-hand (and likely wouldn't share it if I could; while my innate tendency is to be the Oracle, I make some attempt to be the Sage and not dump all my infohazards into public circulation).

He's not talking about CRISPR in human context, but in general, no?

I don't know.

...

It doesn't have to be a hard genocide, but you're still talking about quite a serious invasion of liberty.

Eugenics. "Germline engineering" as per the email, the modern version is polygenic embryo selection as brought to you by competing commercial concerns promising super-babies (super-healthy, we mean, certainly we are not claiming to give you super-IQ Master Race Aryan babies, no no no!)

The Master Race Aryan babies is the boogeyman being invoked here.

...

What’s =ith all the random equality =igns?

There are many email clients that can't deal with "long" lines of text that are more than 80 characters, so if you want to send them portably you can use equal signs to continue a line. I suspect whatever software they're using is incorrectly removing the newline and the first character of the next line instead of the equal sign and the new line.

Could be an artefact of OCR, you get a hell of a lot of similar symbols replacing random letters in older scanned-in versions of text that is then uploaded. If someone was scanning in original emails then running them through some kind of conversion to PDF format, I wouldn't be surprised if such errors crept in.

Ever tried getting Adobe PDF converted to Microsoft Word? Even with all the updates, it's still a pain for this kind of detail.

No, as DenpaEnthusiast alluded to in his reply, it's some email program getting confused and mishandling quoted-printable encoding, part of the Internet email standards. Basically, the original SMTP mail protocol wasn't "8-bit clean", it dodn't allow anything but printable ASCII characters (32-127) in the message body, so if you wanted to send a message with one of the characters in the 128-255 range (like, say, the various accented characters of European languages), you needed to use this "quoted-printable" mechanism to escape the character by representing it by an equals sign followed by the hex representation of the character. Also, equals signs by themselves represented "fake" line breaks, as the original SMTP protocol didn't allow lines longer than 80 characters. The gory details are all in Chapter 6.7 of the standards document RFC 2045.

Today I learned more than I knew yesterday!

Demis Hassabis? Terence Tao? How deep does this go?

Michael Vassar

Michael Vassar has a lot of hits in the database. Epstein even asks for his contact info. Is this where he learned his "techniques"?

EDIT: Okay, he definitely went to the island. Everything makes sense.

It seems like the "non credible accusors" thing is a recurring theme in these files, and might explain why so much of them is still redacted. What are they supposed to do if some anonymous source makes up a horrifying claim about a famous person, with absolutely no evidence? They'll record it, of course, but they can't really prosecute the person unless someone else comes up with actual evidence, or at least is willing to give testimony. Releasing this sort of "anonymous rumor" is just tarnishing someone's reputation for no good reason. So it's redacted.

Yep. I'm reading about how George Bush senior raped a man and participated in cannibalism and torture rituals with a magical sword that leaves no scars. I'm feeling a bit skeptical about some of these.

His sentence structure, paragraphing and grammar is so awful, yet we're led to believe this is Elite Human Capital who legitimately earned billions in finance? This whole thing was deeply sus from the start and only gets more sus.

It’s countersignaling.

In industries such as finance that generally pride themselves on prestige, professionalism, and attention to detail, it’s a flex to write terse emails of varying proofreading quality, as if you’re just that busy or important. It’s long been memed that managing directors will write stuff like:

  • pls do
  • pls check
  • pls fix
  • eta?
  • thx

As entire emails to their more junior employees.

So far, all the biography is consistent with him being at least very good at sales. While intelligence helps, you don't have to be that smart (or good at writing) to be good at sales.

He didn't earn billions, Lex Wexner gave him power of attorney over his wealth for some reason (maybe a scam maybe because both worked for the same goals).

Eh, he could be really good at handling numbers and selling crap by the bushel when it came to speaking and verbal communication, but bad at words for written communication, especially if he was just transcribing 'stream of consciousness' thinking rather than constructing a polished argument. A lot of the tech-side people write dreadfully, and a lot of us humanities types still need to count on our fingers. Hence the eternal war between the two cultures.

Using Paul Fussell's nomenclature, there are two very different classes near the top.

The upper middle are the ones who generally use their brains to pay for their lifestyle. Professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers and so forth.

Above them is the upper class, which as a class does not value education (especially not education in things which allows you to earn a living, like some pleb).

It seems to me that Epstein was really successful at passing as upper class, and that this was how he made money. Some of the filthily rich trusted him with their money not because he was the most brilliant quant in New York, but because they perceived him as one of them.

It seems to me that Epstein was really successful at passing as upper class, and that this was how he made money. Some of the filthily rich trusted him with their money not because he was the most brilliant quant in New York, but because they perceived him as one of them.

FWIW, I think this is why Trump hated the guy. That upper crowd was willing to come to Trump parties and take his money, but they still laughed at him for being "a poor guy's idea of a rich guy". Epstein, OTOH, was some sleezy rando who basically fast talked his way into the club and then rode it on sheer momentum. Seems like the kind of thing that would set Trump off.

Absolutely common in medicine, finance, tech. Less so government but for some people, well look at Trump posting.

When you are at the top of the heap you don't need to angst about making sure you used good grammar and avoided typos, you just vomit out something for everyone else to translate.

Good managers understand their impact on the staff but most people aren't good managers, casual(ish) communication is a thing, and the absolute apex types aren't really interested in being good managers most of the time even if they can be.

It's a meme in medicine because of attendings vomiting out word salad instruction (especially for research) that students pour over like they need the Rosetta Stone.

I do this at work all the time. We have an hour marked for teaching? I'll slowly, calmly, and didactically teach you the pathophys associated with what we got up to today.

Send me an email at 11pm saying you won't be at the hospital tomorrow because of a curricular responsibility? I'm responding with "Sur" at 5am.

Good managers understand their impact on the staff but most people aren't good managers, casual(ish) communication is a thing, and the absolute apex types aren't really interested in being good managers most of the time even if they can be.

After all, that's what your secretary/administrative assistant is for 😁 I've worked jobs where I've been handed something by the boss along the lines of "this is my speech for the big do tomorrow night, turn it into readable and functional prose".

It's a meme in medicine because of attendings vomiting out word salad instruction (especially for research) that students pour over like they need the Rosetta Stone.

Proving your point, it's "pore" not "pour" (blame autocorrect?)

Proving your point, it's "pore" not "pour" (blame autocorrect?)

My grammar is ass. Any time it is not ass, know that I spent far too much time on writing it.

Am I capable of correct grammar? Possibly.

Do I want to? No.

Is this the perk of seniority (at least at work)? Yes.

Does this hopefully further my point given that I ideally have established myself as a reasonably educated and intelligent person in ten years posting here and at our predecessors? Dunno.

PhD Comics: Average Time Spent Composing One Email

OK, but in that case the professor is responding to simple yes/no questions or giving permission/orders. The student is writing a lot because he's nervous about offending his professor, not because he's putting a lot of thought into the ideas. The professor can still write long research papers though.

In this case, they're talking about fairly high-level stuff and giving opinions, but still writing as if they're a 3rd grader who needs ritalin. You can see he does put in effort when he wants to be polite ("I have decided to resign my position effective immediately with BG3 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I have not come to this decision quickly or without a great deal of thought"). But then he writes shit like: "on a different note=C2 , you have encouraged me to look at data , no holds barred. =A0 mortgages. inequalities . opportunities" wtf is this supposed to mean? I mean I know what he's implying, but the way he writes this is just garbage brainrot. Yeah, "look at data," brilliant advice there, I'm sure no one else has ever tried that, glad he could spare his valuable time to write that out, but obviously his time is far too valuable to bother specifying which data or what he's supposed to make of it. That doesn't read to me like a brilliant guy who's pressed for time, it reads like a guy who's drugged out of his mind and barely able to write anything at all, while desparately trying to sound smarter than he really is.

15 years ago this would have triggered me, now on the other side? bhahaahahaha

Wow, don't need any more reinforcement for my low effort posting.

I sometimes work with people near the top of a trillion dollar company and they’re clearly bright but just make the minimal effort to communicate, like it’s better for me to burn time decrypting their ambiguity than for them to write clearly from the start.

I don’t know if it’s some kind of a power move, they really are too busy to communicate any better, or maybe they’re just operating on too little sleep.

I don’t think finance bros give a shit about grammar. But there is also a huge divide between private equity types and public market types. You need stronger soft skills if you interact with non-finance people and need to sell stuff and build out a business like in PE.

It does seem like Epstein was more of a tax guy and/or wealth management guy.

Yeah I've worked in jobs with direct exposure to UHNW guys in text channels. Most of what gets you to that level of financial heft is a combination of drive and going all-in a few times in a row, which means in my experience they can be all over the place in literacy and communication skills. As you leave the pack of the UMC increasingly actual competency/skillset matters less than having the right mix of risk tolerance, luck and stubborness to actually make it through the great filter to hyperrich levels.

Epstein wasn't a finance bro, he was a tax-dodge bro. His entire net worth came from buddying up to billionaires with strategies on how to tax-optimize their personal holdings. Requires a lot less intelligence when your opponent is the federal tax authorities rather than other razor sharp finance types.

Epstein wasn't a tax-dodge bro, he was an underage sex slave and blackmail supplier "bro". The reason he didn't need to spend any effort or time securing his work (see all the "had fun raping kids - jeff, sent from my ipad" emails) was because he knew that if he ever got picked up by the security organisations he'd just make a call to their boss and have the case called off - see Acosta giving him a sweetheart deal because he "belonged to intelligence".

I noticed this too. Maybe he used good grammar and spelling when writing formal documents to his finance associates and used bad grammar with his friends and cronies. Many people who met him described him as bright and charismatic even back in his younger years before he was famous, so I figure that these emails can't possibly capture the full extent of his communication skills.

Watching him write such incoherent slop to Chomsky and then reading his glazing replies is unbearable. Can't piss off the donor. Or turn down his offer to get a ride in his private jet.

Pinker was wrapped up in this too and I read his defense a few years ago and didn't really appreciate where he was coming from and thought he was just trying to distance himself.

The annoying irony is that I could never stand the guy [...]. Friends and colleagues described him to me as a quantitative genius and a scientific sophisticate, and they invited me to salons and coffee klatches at which he held court. But I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante — he would abruptly change the subject ADD style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack, and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data. I think the dislike was mutual—according to a friend, he “voted me off the island,” presumably because he was sick of me trying to keep the conversation on track and correcting him when he shot off his mouth on topics he knew nothing about

Now that I'm much more familiar with Epsteinspew I completely get it.

I'm a Pinker enjoyer, but his saltiness here makes me chuckle. "Jeff didn't dump me, you know. I dumped him. It was a mutual dumping."

Virgin "systematic data" Pinker vs. Chad "intuitions" Epstein.

I think the dislike was mutual—according to a friend, he “voted me off the island”

I would have loved to see the expression on that friend's face when he delivered that line.

I'm not a Pinker admirer to any great degree, but yeah that reads like "Everyone else was dazzled by him, but not me. And because he knew I could see through his bullshit, he dropped me from the invites to the cool parties. Not that I'm bitter about that, or anything!"

His sentence structure, paragraphing and grammar is so awful, yet we're led to believe this is Elite Human Capital who legitimately earned billions in finance? This whole thing was deeply sus from the start and only gets more sus.

Uhhh, no? We are absolutely not supposed to believe that. Are there people who are still clinging on to that?

I’ve even seen people here obtusely sticking to that line against all evidence as recently as a few months ago.

Isn't the official story still that he's just this random finance billionaire who was also a sex trafficker and killed himself in prison... no, the footage cannot be found?

So far as I know the official story is not 'this guy is Mossad/CIA/Illuminati and that's how he has all this money despite being a complete weirdo and allergic to writing properly.'

They're STILL blotting out names on those emails too, it's not a good look.

My understanding is that he had some sort of weird possibly-homosexual relationship with a big NYC rich guy which he parlayed into control of his affairs and used that to accumulate the majority of the money?

That’s Les Wexner. There’s no evidence they were gay, but there’s evidence both were straight (the girls). Those who deny that Epstein worked for Israel can only hold up their hands in confusion as to why a billionaire financier set up Jefffrey Epstein with properties, powers of attorney, a jet and an infinite money glitch. But if you look at what Wexner was doing in the same year he employed Epstein, it was forming the MEGA Group, billionaires who would meet in secret that directed their funds and influence toward pro-Israel causes. Then of course, Ghislaine’s father was an agent of Israel (as per Victor Ostrovsky) whose funeral was attended by “the President, Prime Minister, and six serving and former heads of intelligence” of Israel, with Yitzhak Shamir eulogizing “he has done more for Israel than can today be said.” Epstein may have been working with other intel agencies at the same time, but I personally believe the Israel connection is the most satisfying explanation for his rise and reach.

Epstein wasn't gay, but Wexner could have been closeted*. His mother ran him, he married very late, and wasn't linked with a playboy lifestyle of arm candy before marriage. It wasn't an affair as such, but Epstein seems to have been genuinely charming and Wexner practically made him the majordomo of his wealth, and because Epstein seems to have managed that properly, he was able to use that backing to pretend to have (and really to have) more contacts and wealth of his own than he really did.

Epstein's genuine talent seems to have been in networking. He was able to make connections with the right people at the right time to get him into better and better positions where he was able to get closer to real money, and to make deals that (a) made him rich (not mega-rich, but rich) and (b) when those went sour, there was always somebody higher up and of greater status willing to be his backer and support to protect him.

*This article from 1985, when Wexner was 48, comes as close to flat-out saying it as it can, even though it comes with Wexner's own denial of being gay. There's mentions of girlfriends, but no specific names, and when the interviewer is touring one of Wexner's houses there is no mention at all of a 'lady of the manor' or any long-time companion. Interested in the arts, working in fashion, and the killer phrase "confirmed bachelor". Wexner was clearly more comfortable in the presence of men he trusted, and once Epstein managed to wangle that position of trust, he had it made:

And there is his widowed mother, Bella Wexner, the secretary of the company.

Bella doesn’t like her place and has her seat shifted next Morosky, closer to Les. She wears a white suit, and her black hair is pulled up tightly from high Slavic cheekbones into a bun. She holds herself in a careful way, like a taller Helena Rubinstein, with that instantly acquired czarina majesty some Jewish women take on with age and great fortunes. “This is a woman who was buying dresses 22 years ago and now has a personal net worth of over $100 million,” Wexner says, explaining his mother’s reluctance to talk. Les gave his mother 10 percent of the company. He also gave 10 percent to his younger unmarried sister and to his late father, whom he’d made chairman of the board.

“He was the son at all times,” says his friend Pete Halliday, “early, middle, and late. He always gave the floor to his father.”

…He is half in love with it, half in love with the other worlds that success has led him to. Not only finance, real estate (besides the Gurney house, he owns small chunks of New York), giant schemes, and takeovers, but art and philanthropy. He is on the boards of Sotheby’s and the Whitney, about to leave the American Ballet Theatre’s. However painful it may be for him, Leslie Wexner is inevitably emerging. He has had an apartment in New York for fifteen years, but suddenly he finds himself discovered, written about in “Suzy.” Ann Getty is on the phone before 8 a.m. He has lunch with Liz Rohatyn and her daughter, Nina Griscom. He is courted by women, for he is tender and gentle and a billionaire alone, and by charities, because he gives massively. He puts a trompe l'oeil mural of Fifth Avenue in his office in Columbus, but then he pulls back, flies out, disappears to the little dinners in the little city he says he prefers.

…And they crowd in on him, all the high-school kids from the suburb of Bexley who got the red cars on their sixteenth birthday when he, the only “tuition” student from outside the district, had to run for the streetcar; all the pretty girls who never noticed him but now stand very close and knot their fingers behind their back when they talk to him and look wham into his mournful eyes, trying hard while Bella Wexner watches her 47-year-old bachelor son; the friends from Ohio State; a few fashion V.P.’s shooting their white cuffs as the national business reporters and stock analysts run to the phones.

…It is why he goes to Vail for a single night to look out at the mountain and hold the woman he has had flown in in his arms. It is why he isn’t married, though after knowing him a year, one girlfriend converted to Judaism and actually changed her last name to Cohen (which Wexner insists was not because of him or because of what it would do to his mother if he married a Christian).

… Wexner is what used to be known as a “confirmed bachelor.” He doesn’t feel alone. He doesn’t seem to want a child, and, despite what he says about the perfect woman—Ali MacGraw as she was in Love Story, someone who is “very, very pretty” and not aggressive—he seems to be waiting to achieve some mystical harmony and balance in himself first. “A lot of people think because I am not married I am asexual or homosexual, but I enjoy a relationship with a woman,” he says sometime later, hating to discuss this, known for keeping this part of his life very tucked away. Of course, like his social absence, this increases his mystery and allure. Only Alfred Taubman, among his friends, still constantly tells him to get married, but Wexner, whenever asked, says, “Me and the pope.”

Les insists on his own things in place—the Wexner possessions—and, if he is across the country and knows they are laying a carpet in one of his homes, it bothers him. It’s a deep fussiness—he gets a physical on every birthday, does cardiovascular exercises, puts snow tires on his cars. He has always had a sense of how things should look, from the time he decorated his first room, when he was a boy. “He would have been an interior decorator if he was not in this business. Fashion, fabrics, colors—this is what he likes,” says his friend Rabbi Herbert Friedman.

…“Most people can’t figure Les out,” says Professor Cullman. “He’s the enigmatic but energetic leader. He’s the product of a female-dominated childhood—his mother, assertive, effervescent, bright, and action-oriented. His dad was contemplative and rather shy, uncertain of himself. As a male in a female-dominated household, he became both shy and dominant at the same time. A very unusual combination.”

...Though now Bella Wexner is often in Florida, and they no longer go on buying trips to Europe together, her office in Columbus is right next to his, and she is a force. It was Bella he asked to make the motion at the board for the tender offer for Carter Hawley Hale. Ask Les what is new in his life and he will say, “Mother just gave $3 million to the children’s pediatric hospital in Columbus.” He has not forgotten how she used to come home at night and start all the housework after her day in the store, how everything in his house was always clean and right in its heart.

Paging Dr. Freud, indeed. "The woman he has had flown in" is one hell of an awkward phrase. Does that sound to anyone here more like a description of a girlfriend, or more that of a paid high-class escort who may be more of a geisha/hetaira there for company, conversation, entertainment and some intimacy but not necessarily sex? More to quiet those rumours of "is he gay?"?

The young Robert Maxwell procured weapons for the IDF from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe during the Israeli War of Independence, and the details of precisely what he bought and how he bought it are still not public. That would be sufficient to explain Yitzhak Shamir's presence and remarks.

Athough I assume Robert Maxwell was talking to Mossad regularly, there isn't a good reason to think he was some kind of super-agent that would explain parts of the Epstein story. In addition, he would have been most useful to Mossad for his contacts in the Soviet Bloc, which didn't pass over to Ghislaine, and were a lot less valuable after 1989 anyway. John Major also hinted that Robert Maxwell had been useful to British intelligence during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Conspiracy theory shower thought - Maxwell jumps off the boat at almost exactly the time he ceases to be useful to British and Israeli intelligence.

The dates also fail to line up for a Robert Maxwell-Epstein connection. Ghislaine moves to New York shortly after Robert dies, and starts dating Epstein about two years later, after the Epstein-Wexner connection (which is the key to Epstein's wealth, and therefore to any sane conspiracy theory) is in place.

Robert Maxwell did know Epstein in the 1980's, but only in the vague sense that all elite coethnics know each other. Their business interests didn't overlap except for about 10 months in 1991 when Maxwell tried to expand in the US - Maxwell was active in the UK and Europe whereas Epstein was focussed on the US and the Gulf.

None of this means that Epstein wasn't Mossad, of course. Just that Mossad didn't use the Maxwell family to recruit him.

Mossad helped Maxwell buy newspapers, and Maxwell allowed Mossad to use his wealth to fund operations in Europe, according to Victor Ostrovsky’s book. In that sense he was a super agent, but it would be more correct to say he was a super saiyan, those individuals who inform Mossad about important details around the globe. And that sounds like a very good line of work for someone like Epstein with his suspicious sum of money and suspiciously intricate recording equipment in his home. According to a separate whistleblower, Ben-Menashe, Maxwell tipped off Mossad about Mordechai Vanunu

The young Robert Maxwell procured weapons for the IDF from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe during the Israeli War of Independence, and the details of precisely what he bought and how he bought it are still not public.

Cool. I always wondered how they got enough hardware for an early war and how they were able to win. Where did you learn about this? Is there a good book on this man and/or the events?

One of my favorite stories is that Czechoslovakia was an early supporter of Israel and provided them with quite a few guns. Several of these guns were surplus German guns from WW2, so Israelis were literally fighting for their existence using guns emblazoned with swastikas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_shipments_from_Czechoslovakia_to_Israel

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EDIT: Sorry - I made a wrong turn somewhere.

I think you might have replied to the wrong comment....

Oh, ffs. Thanks!

I think your comment ended up as a reply to something completely different.

The fact that Jeffrey was a channer really does lend a lot of credence to the idea that Ghislaine was a reddit powerjanny.

Ghislaine had mostly moved on with her life after 2008. She was dating the Gateway PC guy and then that younger man and doing her rich woman ocean charity BS project.

The most we know is he met with/talked with moot a few times and looked porn on 4chan. I would be somewhat surprised if he ever posted (words, anyway) or looked at any non-porn boards.

Direct links to 4chan images are not reliable.

There also used to be a bug on 4chan many years ago where two different images posted at the same time by two different users got swapped, due to uploaded image filenames basically just being their upload timestamp in Unix time. Led to some serious WTF moments in threads from time to time.

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