The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
The Guardian published an excerpt from the posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the young woman who started the process that took Andrew down as part of her expose of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
There is something so disgusting in her revelations about the smooth and practiced way in which Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell broke down the initial natural resistance that Roberts had to becoming a sexual toy, first to service them, and then to do so for his friends, that it makes you want to puke. I am not going to excerpt the salacious parts but just those where she gives her thoughts on why these things happen, starting with how a sociopath like Epstein is able to identify the vulnerabilities of people and knows how to exploit them, be they young girls or the wealthy, powerful, and intellectual people he wanted to surround himself with.
[Read more…]
(I wrote this post during the time when the blog was down so it is slightly dated but here it is anyway.)
The Jeffrey Epstein fallout continues with Peter Mandelson, a Labour Party bigshot and former UK ambassador to the US, being arrested.
But the big shocker occurred when British police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, King Charles’s brother on “suspicion of misconduct in public office”. What that misconduct consisted of was not made clear (there is no indication as yet of it being part of Epstein story) but there are many possibilities because Andrew is a long-time sleazy grifter who took advantage of his privileged position to enrich himself while also cavorting with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. So there is a lot for the police to look into.
[Read more…]
If there was any doubt that the US and Israel are rogue, lawless states joined at the hip who are determined to create vast amounts of suffering to people all over the globe to advance their narrow personal interests, their joint attack on Iran should put those doubts to rest.
When you put a person like Trump with a child’s mentality in charge of the world’s largest military, and then pair him with a manipulative genocidal leader like Netanyahu, you have a recipe for unleashing mayhem
We do not where this will lead. All we can be sure of is that once mopre, many, many innocent people will suffer and die.
This prolific singer-songwriter, who was behind so many hit songs of my adolescence, many written for other artists, has died.
Here is one of my favorites Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen.
His songs were usually cheerful and upbeat, reflecting a more innocent time in pop culture. Sadly, in the post-Jeffrey Epstein era, this song about teenage love now has creepy connotations.
But I thought that it might momentarily take people’s minds off today’s truly depressing news that Trump and Netanyahu have launched a war with Iran with who knows what consequences.
After a very long break, the Freethoughtblog platform is back and running.
To find out what happened, head over to Pharyngula where PZ Myers describes the whole sordid saga.
I will start making new posts soon.
The Onion‘s satire captures the mindset of police and ICE and CBP and how they work in the aftermath of committing an atrocity.
I follow sporting events only cursorily, just checking the headlines as they appear on the front pages of various news sites. When it comes to the Olympics, for the summer games I check out just the track and field events. For the winter Olympics, I follow them even less but if anyone asks me what my favorite event is, I have no hesitation is answering ‘curling’.
I know almost nothing about this sport other than that one has to send something known as a ‘stone’ down the ice to get as close as possible to a target, with teammates using brooms to help guide the stone to its destination. In addition to looking quaintly weird, what I like most about it is its reputation for having very high standards of sportsmanship, something I value highly.
So I was upset to read that the current games have had a major curling controversy, involving people being accused of cheating by subtly touching the stone with their fingers, which is a major no-no apparently.
You can read the whole complicated controversy here.
Well hell’s bells, who knew the ice could get so hot? The Olympic curling community is still all in a twist about everything that’s gone on in the sport since a row broke out between the Sweden and Canada sides on Friday. “The whole spirit of curling is dead,” Canada’s Marc Kennedy said on Monday night after his team’s 8-2 victory against Czech Republic, which felt like a bold take coming from the man who started this entire farrago by repeatedly telling his Swedish opponent Oskar Eriksson to “fuck off” after Eriksson accused him of making an illegal double‑touch.
…The row has turned out to be the biggest thing to happen to it since it was brought back into the Olympic programme in 1998. The slow-motion footage of Kennedy brushing the stone with his forefinger has gone viral, and the internet is overflowing with sloppy AI skits of Kennedy nudging ice hockey pucks and knocking over figure skaters at the ice rink.
Is nothing sacred anymore?
He has started a new season of shows with an examination of ICE and DHS, starting with a summary of the atrocities committed by ICE and the heroic actions of ordinary Minnesotans who came out in their thousands to protest against ICE actions.
The head of the operation Tom Homan has announced that the ICE actions have ended in Minnesota. Since these people are such liars, we’ll have to wait and see if they actually leave.
One of the popular conspiracies of the right such as by QAnon is that the world is run by a secretive cabal of elites, a subset of whom traffic in girls and young women. What the Epstein files reveal is that while not on such a grand scale, there does seem to have been a cabal consisting of billionaires, tech bros, and intellectuals, almost all of whom are men, who used their dominance in the public sphere to propagate eugenics and master-race science. I want to highlight a link that commenter Dunc provided to an article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science”. The article is well worth reading in full and names names.
Heffernan used to have John Brockman, literary agent to many major writers, as her own agent and for a while he included her in the mailing list for a group known as Edge that comprised these people and this gave her an insight into this group. She describes what she discovered.
It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His mass emails evidently copied in Epstein and a dozen such email blasts made their way to the latest dump of hazmat.
Brockman, my former agent for tech writing, told me Edge was an intellectual salon. Edge.org is indeed intriguingly sprawling, jammed with scholarly idols whose bios have “Booker” and “Nobel” in them. Members of Edge participated in conferences and symposia, and promoted each other’s work. Who was I to say no? Among Edge’s prodigious ranks were Ian McEwan, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.
But if I’d read the member list more closely, I might have hesitated. Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky.
Turns out I didn’t have to worry about meeting these people. Brockman kept me at a distance. As the latest Epstein files reveal, the token female members of Edge were actively excluded from schmoozing and conferences, especially the glittering events known as the Billionaires’ Dinners.
Good policy. Otherwise, we might have struck up conversations with the anxious-looking teenage girls kept out of the photos. We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.
There is a small community of men who, for some reason, seem to want to sire as many children as possible, like the 13th century Genghis Khan who reportedly had so many children that now 16 million men have some of his DNA. Ten other men also reportedly have a huge number of descendants.
Ava Kofman writes about some men who seem to be envious of old Genghis and have started what are essentially baby factories, using surrogates to carry the babies they sire, and taking advantage of the few restrictions on the practice in the US. One of them had over twenty children, the majority of them under three years of age, who were found to show signs of neglect and lack of medical treatment, resulting in him being accused of child trafficking.
[Read more…]