No Prize For The Lies

I can think of no end of groups or organizations that I would hate to have my name positively associated with.  If one (or more) of those groups or organizations decided I was worthy of an award from them, I would most likely decline it.  (I admit that as a poor person, awards that included significant funds would be a LOT more difficult to turn down.)  If the group or organization or even an individual is not something or someone I can respect, then most any award or commendation they might offer will be unworthy of my respect as well.

I doubt I would be considered different in that attitude I describe above.  Most of the folk I routinely interact with could believably make a similar, if not identical, claim. I mean, imagine you were notified that the group NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) wanted to make you their Person Of The Year.  Most folks I know would immediately seek to distance themselves from the group and any activities or statements that could have justifies the award.

Again, that is not a particularly unique identifier for anyone I can think of.  "We" like awards from those we respect and value.  We see it all over.  Actors are ecstatic to get an Academy Award (aka Oscar).  Singers and song writers love their industry - the Recording Academy of the United States presents them with a Grammy.  While an actor might well accept and be grateful for a performance award from the Society of Mississippi Duck Hunters, and while Dale Earnhart Jr might not turn down a superior engineering award from the Rural Michigan Competitive Quilters, as a general rule the awards mean more to us when the award(s) come from subject matter experts and perhaps the most when it is our peers who recognize our particular accomplishments.  I will go out on a limb here and assume that in general, you agree with what I have said so far.  You could go ahead and make similar claims without worry of significant argument from me.

Of all the prizes that a given current day human might be awarded, the Nobel Prizes are among the most desirable.  Now, I experience no reluctance in acknowledging that the Nobel Foundation is made up of humans who, like every other human I know of, are imperfect.  For a given Nobel Prize, I might disagree with the Foundation about who deserves it the most (I am in no danger of having significant opinion on several of the prizes due to my relative ignorance in those fields but where I do know stuff, I opine) but, generally speaking, I agree that the decision to include those who win (as well as several who do not) was well considered and well made.  They have been at it for a while and the Nobel Foundation gets it reasonable if not right, the majority of the time. 

Felon47 is enamored with the prizes awarded by the Nobel Foundation.  I doubt I have shocked anyone with that revelation.  He absolutely begged for the Peace Prize.  He has bombastically bitched about journalists he didn't approve of getting the award.  He has claimed that one of his relatives was a genius who won a Nobel.  Through his actions and his words, he establishes that he considers the Nobel Prizes to be prestigious and highly desirable.

Again, none of what I have said so far should be the least bit controversial.  However, I have been not been able to find a significant connection to the Felon for several of prizes or the fields for which they are given.  In those cases, if I want to discuss them, I must extrapolate.  I have to look at how desirable he appears to perceive awards from the Nobel Foundation to be.  

One of the fields/prizes that Felon47 maintains a quieter relationship with is economics.  However, given his attitude towards the Nobel Prizes that he has mentioned, it is totally reasonable to conclude that he sees the Nobel in Economics as a big damn deal.  I am willing to listen to argument but, fair warning, I can read, I speak English, I have access to the interwebs.  I will add that I have been paying attention since well before he first disgraced the White House with his complete lack of class.  You're gonna need a pretty solid argument.

When Felon47 first started talking his tariff idiocy, several economists who were well known, at least within their field, made statements that directly contradicted the claims he was putting forth.  As it became increasingly clear that the Felon generally only listened to those who said what he wanted to hear, various efforts to gain his attention were made.  One method that would have worked with a sane person was the enlisting of previous Nobel Laureates in Economics to offer their expertise in analyzing his claims/plans.  They planned them.

Trump knows his claims about the tariffs and the rest of the economy are lies.  He knows because multiple award winning economists have told him.  Not all of those economists have won Nobels but some of them had.  Others were possessed of different awards and accomplishments.  They all pointed out the flaws in his claims and plans.  He ignored those experts.  Wait, that probably isn't fair.  He did not ignore the experts.  He denigrated them.  He insulted them.  He maligned them.  He accused them of partisanship.  He did however, ignore their counsel.

Felon47 lies to your face because he can.  He knows better and he knows that me and my ilk know better.  He doesn't care.  He doesn't because there are enough citizens who are apathetic, star struck, stupid, or just willing to endure their own pain as long as a minority or liberal is hurt worse, to gum up the works and ensure he gets away with it long enough to be owed favors by those who are getting even richer by his dismantling of our nation.  But let me reiterate, he knows he is lying.  He knows that because those possessed of an award that he lusts after like it was named Ivanka have told him.  The results of his policies are turning up and they are proving the Nobel Laureates right.  He doesn't care.  He doesn't because he doesn't have to.  He will continue to not care until you force him to.

LoUC

 The Law of Unintended Consequences is HILARIOUS when it is affecting other people.  When I am the target of prosecution, it seems unnecessarily harsh.  Either way, it is a lovely device for teaching how much the Universe actually gives a shit about your intentions, desires or wishes.

Whether it is being used against you (or me) or, it is to your unplanned benefit, it behooves all of us to be able to identify the LoUC whenever we see it.  As I am nothing if not helpful, here is the finest example of the LoUC in quite some time.  

(note: Sardonic smirks and/or outright laughter are among the valid responses.)

https://youtu.be/oiTJ7Pz_59A?si=f6fOqg2R28FDTYss

Epstein, Chomsky, and the Village (Why this is the biggest scandal of our lifetimes.)

 Occasionally, I post stuff from others that I think deserves a wider audience.  It does not technically have to come from a veteran but, that is how it usually shakes out.  Below is a post from and retired Navy vet.  If you should feel the urge to share it with others, use the provided like please so that he benefits from it.

https://substack.com/@williamefoster/note/p-187908190?r=4s8r0d&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

I have been planning to talk about Jeffery Epstein for a while and it kept getting pushed off, partially because of my accident but mainly because the story was so much bigger and more sprawling that I initially believed, at least the parts of the story that I felt folks should be paying more attention to.

It started with Noam Chomsky. When I heard about his connection, I – like many – was devastated. Chomsky is as responsible as any single source can be for my transition from a 21-year Sailor who voted for Reagen to whatever I am today. How could this world-class thinker on morality who I admired so much be risking it all for a few hours with some underage girl?

Then I noticed some things. For instance, Chomsky didn’t meet Epstein until he was 82-years old. Although invited, there is no indication he met him much or spent much time in areas where untoward activities could have occurred. I just didn’t believe that an 80+ year old intellectual who had recently retired from MIT and recently helped his wife of 50 years through her last days (cancer) was chasing young girls.

And that was because I didn’t understand who Jeffery Epstein was and what he did. Because we are a salacious people by nature, the girls get the most attention, but they were a means to an end, not the goal. What Jeffery Epstein was at heart was a connector. He wanted to have the most impressive rolodex in the world, to be known as the person who knew everybody.

In many ways, he seemed an impressive man. He skipped two grades of school. He was an accomplished pianist. He was one of those people who seemed to know a good bit about everything. He was also one of those people who didn’t know ENOUGH about anything. He was fired as a private school teacher and fired (well, encouraged to resign) from Bear Stearns (both jobs he talked his way into). He was charismatic enough that he always had a new opportunity but careless enough that those opportunities usually bit him in the ass eventually.

The girls were at the heart of it. One thing you will find if you read enough testimonies from former friends is that every one of them says something like “and he always seemed surrounded by the most beautiful women.” Those women were part of his game, a part along with the pitter-patter, the fact that he knew everyone, the private jet, they were another way to say “Hey, I’m someone important that you can’t afford to ignore.”

None of this is meant to minimize the horrors that most of these women endured or to say that Epstein’s role as a pimp and a trafficker wasn’t important or deserving of prosecution. I don’t want to minimize anything about that part of it. The name of every client should be released, and everyone involved should be punished for whatever their role was in this scheme. But what I do want to point out is that they are not the whole story. They are not where Epstein made his money. Overall, the girls probably cost him money. But he didn’t care because the girls conveyed the message he wanted to convey, “I’m important and I pull all these women, and I can hook you up with some of them if you are important enough to me.”

Epstein made his money through his friendships. He introduced person A to Person B and hoped person B would introduce him to Person C. Knowing Woody Allen let him get a job for a young kid as a film editing intern for Allen’s company. His very grateful uncle became a client for Epstein.

At its core, Epstein’s operation was elder abuse. That’s what he was looking for: the great white whale, $50 million a year in commissions. He got that from some. We know about Leslie Wexner, the billionaire owner of Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie and Fitch and Bed, Bath and Beyond, among others. He was Epstein’s client for twenty years, even giving him complete power of attorney. He paid Epstein at least $200 million. Wexner eventually fired him, but that relationship opened a thousand other doors among the rich and powerful for Epstein. One was Leon Black, co-founder of Apollo Management who paid Epstein $150 million from 2012 till 2017. They later, in a recurrent pattern, had a falling out.

This was Epstein’s main scam. He invested in property and used his connections in inside trading and access to IPOs and all the usual ways. But his main thing was to know famous people who knew famous people and he could follow that daisy chain until it led him to a rich, old person he could convince to become a client. For instance, the emails are very clear about him procuring a girl for Kimbal Musk (who dated her for months) in an attempt to get closer to Elon Musk. In a rare compliment for Elon, he did seem to sense that something was up and repeatedly rebuffed him.

The main thing that struck me as I read report after report in this world was the utter vacuousness and vapidity of the supposed “elites.” Now, anyone who knows me knows that I already have a pretty dim default view of the people who make up this part of our society. That is, maybe someone can be a billionaire and a great person, but they will have to prove it to me because my initial viewpoint will be dim.

Let’s get back to Chomsky for a minute because I don’t want to seem like I am letting him off. No, I don’t believe he was with young girls or knew much about it. I do believe he was an old person involved in monetary difficulties (because of litigation after his wife’s death) and he ran into a shark who ripped him off. But I also believe he wasn’t as curious as he should have been. And, most disappointingly but backed by his emails, I believe he was willing to overlook at least some degree of Epstein’s crimes.

That is what is most illuminating about the world. A man who became famous for his humanity and for calling out those who financed violence around the world was willing to overlook very real crimes among people who he knew. But the global elite was willing to overlook the thousands of our friends who died of overdoses if Johnson and Johnson’s, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and AmerisourceBergen’s stocks continued to go up. They were willing to support George Bush’s cesspool of an administration and watch millions of Iraqis die as long as Raytheon and Boeing continued to increase. They are willing to support the pro-genocide part of both parties right now. Jamie Dimon is as responsible for the housing crisis as any single figure. How is he doing right now?

That’s almost funny as he remains the chairman of JP Morgan Chase, a powerful bank who Epstein utilized for years. He had over $200 million stored there and would constantly wire his contact there, Jess Staley, for cash transfers to pay women. The bank was required to file suspicious activity reports with the U.S. government but failed to do so. Eventually, in 2012 after Staley left, they dropped Epstein as a client. They eventually paid about $300 million in total to various groups of victims, a rounding error for a bank that makes $50 billion a year in profit, not even .1%.

In Epstein’s emails, the three most common names are Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsch Bank. That’s the story I want. NONE of Epstein’s many crimes could have occurred without major banks turning a blind eye to his activities. There is a current lawsuit with BoA filed by a survivor under the name “Jane Doe.” Courts recently allowed two claims to continue but dismissed four, including the most serious. A similar case against Bank of New York Mellon was dismissed in its entirety. Deutsch Bank eventually paid regulators $150 million in 2020 but didn’t close Epstein’s accounts until after his final arrest and still were giving him large sums of cash for unknown purposes in 2019.

In my mind, that’s the biggest story and what I want the answers to. How many Epstein’s are there? How many fucking assholes are being propped up by banks that simply do not care what they are enabling as long as they get their fees? What new regulations, if any, do we need?

This has gone on enough but I do want to point out one more thing. What a deep dive into the emails will show you is that this is the biggest scandal of our lifetimes by a country mile. Who the clients are is obviously a big part of it and one we all want to know. How the banks helped is another. But there are so many weird little oddities.

- Trump, Trump, Trump, of course. Was Trump “banging” his former assistant Madelaine Westerhout. The emails seem to indicate that he bragged about it but he isn’t a reliable source, obviously, and the emails contain a LOT of unreliable information.

- Epstein gave money to “Friends of the IDF” and other Israeli military charities. How deep were his connections?

- In 2018, he purchased 330 gallons of sulfuric acid! Now, I don’t believe most of the more salacious parts of the emails, murder and cannibalism, but what the hell was this for? It does seem to have a routine use, to lower the PH of water for desalination, but still.

- Leslie Wexner. Dude was involved for 20 years. Can anyone be CEO of a half dozen major companies and make that much money and be blind to what was going on? It stretches credibility to say the least.

- Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem. He is the CEO of Dubai Ports World and is connected to a chilling email that says “I loved the torture video.”

- Salvatore Nuara. We don’t know much. He was a detective in the NYPD who had previously been in trouble with a different escort service and was listed as a contact of Epstein. Certainly some questions here.

There is so much more. There is very little information about whether Epstein did or did not blackmail people. Personally, I don’t believe it. It’s not good business and doesn’t seem to fit him. But maybe he did want the possibility for insurance? His various homes were riddled with cameras and CDs of videos were found after his arrest, none of which we’ve seen.

My main goal here was just to say that there is so much more here than just the salacious aspects and I hope that somehow, someway we get a full accounting of all the people that enabled this barbarity, not just the one dead guy and the one president. It took a village to let this happen and that village needs to be burned down.

ADDENDUM: Things are happening so fast. Ahmed Bin Sulayem lost his position on February 13^th while I was writing this. Brad Karp, whom I didn’t mention by name but was the source of the Woody Allen story, resigned earlier this week. Howard Lutnick may not survive. The owner of the NY Giants is in hot water. It’s a good start.

Constitutional Rights

 "Jizzlane" Maxwell was called to testify in front of congress.  She repeatedly invoked her 5th Amendment right against self incrimination.  

Maxwell is a naturalized citizen of the USA.  She is also a citizen of the UK.  In addition she holds citizenship in France.  

Maxwell was well within her Constitutional rights to refuse to answer Congress’ questions.  I actually have no issues with that.  Such issues as I have are predicated upon the summary denial of Constitutional rights to so many others.

Maxwell was convicted of violating certain well known laws and traditions of the USA.  She was convicted of multiple counts of crimes associated with the trafficking and abuse of minors. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.  She was successfully able to assert her Constitutional rights post conviction, post appeal, post the conviction of her primary partner in crime, post the murder of said partner,

You know who was not able to assert their Constitutional rights?  The folks murdered by ICE/CBP for exercising their Constitutional right to gather, to protest, to observe and record LEO, as well as those who were murdered for attempting to escape the hellholes American and multi-national corporations have turned their home nations into.

Regardless of the flowery words or the best intentions, at the end of the day we are judgedd by our actions.  We actively denied law-abiding citizens and desperate immigrants their rights.  We watched, allowed, and encouraged a convicted child trafficker/abuser to assert her Constitutional rights.  

I’m pretty sure I would rather be forgotten than to be remembered for being on the side of a monster.

English dammit!!

 From time to time I am inspired to revisit my body of published work, or just ideas I had a while back but never completed.  Sometimes I find stuff that is at least somewhat relevant to current events.  The essay below was originally written in 2012.  Things have actually gotten worse.  Jack-booted thugs with official cover will assault and potentially kill you for either actually not speaking "English" or even just looking like you might not speak English. 

We are definitely going in the wrong direction.

English dammit!!

It all started with me on one of my standard rants.  I was bitching (online) about the degradation of the meanings of words by large-scale misuse.  Specifically I was complaining of the misuse of the word "decimation".  Literally, it means to destroy one tenth or, ten percent.  Most of the time that I hear it, it is being used interchangeably with "devastation".  Of course I, and those on my side, argued that words have to mean something or they are useless.  The other team argued that ours is a living language and the common usage of the word was the primary determinant in it's correctness or definition.  While I can understand their point, I was/am not convinced.

I've always loved words.  I was one of the nerdy kids that would read the dictionary for fun.  My little brother and I used to delight in making long, serious-sounding statements that were complete gibberish but that used lots of big, obscure words.  We had to know the correct usage of the words so that we could be sure we were making no sense at all.  (To this day, he still writes/speaks gibberish.  He's a lawyer.)  That fascination with words, and the concurrent high level of specificity in speech, resulted in many folks assuming I had more formal education than I actually have.  (Or maybe it was the lack of specificity in the speech of others that was the driver.)  Overall I would have to say that my early fascination with words has served me well even if it has made me a bit inflexible.

Don't get me wrong, I'm down with the whole living language thing.  I would posit that no semi-serious student of words could be elsewise.  I simply do not consider ignorance of the actual definition of a word as reasonable impetus for growth in my language.  In looking at a dictionary, I have always been fascinated by the origins of the words I use (I don't always remember the origins or etymology but, I'm interested right then.).  It is fairly amazing how many commonly used words are either derived from or stolen outright from languages that do not resemble American English in the least.  French, Greek, Latin, indigenous-American languages, Yiddish, and even Russian are all common contributors of words to our vocabularies.  Those words represent, in my not so humble opinion, reasonable growth in our language.  Technology is another significant and rational inducer of linguistic growth.   If you've ever logged on to the internet using wifi to google something on your laptop or PDA, you know what technology brings to the table.  Slang, which seems to involve a lot of using old words in completely new ways, is another growth contributor that I can live with even if sometimes, it irritates the hell out of me.

Of course, this whole discussion is probably completely superfluous.  I recently heard yet another radio-enabled right-winger calling for people to speak English if they are going to live in this nation.  Given the righteous indignation with which he delivered his call to linguistic arms, I can only assume that he was really, REALLY serious.   I can only assume that he wants to wipe out all the completely foreign words in our language.  He must surely have no tolerance for words which did not exist when this nation was formed.  English and sneezes would surely be codified into law as the only things that could issue forth from a mouth.  I'll just bet that a lot of you hicks and rednecks are in trouble as well because grammar is an important part of the language.  End your sentence with an "at" and that guy wants to cut your tongue out (to be fair, so do I.  That is really irritating).  Misuse further and farther and you will be deported to whichever nation of inferior idiots that will accept your linguistically heretical ass.  It will be great for teachers.  They will finally know what the language will look like in a hundred years, just like it did a hundred years ago minus all those foreign words, and be able to teach it authoritatively.

Or I suppose that the speechifying republican could have been displaying a bit of self disdain instigated by his lack of facility with foreign language.  In any case, all of the calls for a law mandating English as the official language and requiring that business be transacted in that language have a couple or three major flaws that would make any lawyer challenging the law giddy in anticipation of a sure win.  In this country, the majority of us speak a decreasingly regionalized version of American.  That language is similar to English however, no native English speaker would ever confuse the two.  There is no accepted definition of English except perhaps the Oxford English Dictionary in conjunction with The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage.  And of course, no true conservative wants to fund the government agency that would be tasked with enforcing the law and adjudicating such arguments of usage as are sure to arise.

The correct use of words and grammar would have to be a basic tenet of any movement to have an official language declared.  My early appreciation for words has not, to my observation, become more common among the youth of today (or the adults for that matter).  I have heard those calling for others to "speak English" mangling the language horribly even as they issue their call.  I have heard teachers get the usage wrong.  Until you can fix those little problems, until every good Amur'kan actually knows and has an appreciation for their allegedly naturally spoken language, it makes no sense to waste breath trying to force anyone else to do that which we apparently abhor.