In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Last week's plea deal for the jail guards who were asleep while Epstein hanged himself in his cell has revived interest in whether he was murdered or a suicide. I've already weighed in, it was suicide. But if it was a hit, it would be a potentially explosive development, a scandal with wide-ranging repercussions. What would be the benefit of a move with such a huge downside risk? More than a few people wouls have to be involved, and the chances they'd all keep quiet would be slim. So let's say the initiative for such a conspiracy came from someone with so much to lose that the downside if the conspiracy came to light would be less than the downside if some much bigger secret came out -- a secret that only Epstein could know about, and so big that he had to be eliminated to keep it. So who might that person be, and what might the secret be? The best we know of Epstein's scam from the mid-1990s until his 2008 guilty plea was that he ran a blackmail operation tha...

I've been saying all along that we've been in a moral panic, and I think it's just about run its course. That doesn't mean we won't continue to see local outbreaks of one sort or another, but I think the country in general is George Floyded out. A current late-phase local outbreak stems from an old, pre-panic device, the noose, or as some accounts now put it, the "apparent noose". These have kept popping up over the past several decades, but they're all almost immediately discredited as hoaxes or misunderstandings. This latest noose brouhaha is at an Amazon construction site in Windsor, CT. According to the New York Post , Amazon halted construction at a facility in Windsor, Connecticut for the second time in as many weeks on Wednesday — after an apparent noose was found in the building for the eighth time in recent weeks. Workers found a red rope “with a noose tied at the end” entangled in yellow electrical cables on the 5th floor of th...

One of the first academic postmortems onthe COVID response indicates that masking was ineffective: The first ecological study of mask mandates in U.S. states released by the University of Louisville finds mask mandates were not effective at slowing the spread of coronavirus (Covid-19), meaning they did not work. The results challenge the prevailing wisdom of pandemic policy that continues to dominate corporate media narrative and policy-makers. Damian D. Guerra (Biology at University of Louisville) and Daniel J. Guerra (Biochemistry at VerEvMed, Clarkston) hypothesized that statewide mask mandates and mask use would be “associated with lower COVID-19 case growth rates” in the U.S. However, after calculating total COVID-19 case growth and mask use, the authors of the study entitled “Mask mandate and use efficacy in state-level COVID-19 containment” stated “case growth was not significantly different between mandate and non-mandate states at low or high transmission rates, and ...

All Right Thinking Opinion has suddednly done a complete 180 : Facebook said Wednesday it would no longer ban posts suggesting COVID-19 is man-made amid mounting calls from President Biden and other officials for further investigation into the pandemic’s origins. The announcement marked a reversal for the social media giant. In February, Facebook said it would remove posts claiming the virus was man-made or manufactured "following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization" who had "debunked" the claim. Meanwhile, A professor with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has said that there is a general dismissal of the fact that more than half of all Americans have developed natural immunity to the coronavirus and that it constitutes “one of the biggest failures of our current medical leadership.” Dr. Marty Makary made the comments during a recent interview, noting that “natural immunity works” and it is wrong to ...

Alan Dershowitz's stock as a talking head has been tanking over thed past several years. Its downturn really started when he publishsd a book against impeaching Trump in 2018, at which time he complained “But that is not good enough for some of my old friends on Martha’s Vineyard,” he wrote. “For them, it is enough that what I have said about the Constitution might help Trump. So they are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard.” This fairly unremarkable claim ended up spurring a remarkable four New York Times articles with contributions from eight reporters[.] In the wake of Jeffrey Epstein's 2020 jailhouse death, the run on Dershowitz stock intensified. Via Page Six, Dershowitz — who in the past has been regarded as a close associate of Epstein — has distanced himself from the convicted sex offender. “I haven’t seen him in years,” he told us. “We never had a friendship. I have no personal feelings. He was a client and some...

Several data points in the Ghislaine Maxwell saga have been ignored by nearly all media, US, UK, left, right, and center. This is probably because the whole story is mainly tabloid clickbait to the professionals, while what it says about our elites is better left unmentioned. Maxwell's entry in Wikipedia is written mostly in UK English, and it does reflect a greater interest among UK tabloids at least to get the details right than in the US. Among the first neglected data points is this: Following her personal and professional involvement with Epstein, Maxwell was romantically linked for several years to Ted Waitt, founder of Gateway computers. She attended the wedding of Chelsea Clinton in 2010 as Waitt's guest. Maxwell helped Waitt obtain and renovate a luxury yacht, the Plan B, and used it for travel to France and Croatia before their relationship ended, in late 2010 or early 2011. So given this timing, Maxwell appears to have distanced herself from Epstein som...

The American noir writer Jim Thompson (1901-1977) portrayed better than anyone else the strange bonds that hold people in orbit around pimps, con artists, and other crooks. Glenn Dubin, a New York hedge fund manager and philanthropist, was among those apparently unable to leave Epstein's orbit. He is married to Eva Andersson, a former Miss Sweden who, like Melanie Walker, dated Jeffrey Epstein and then became an MD. Although she married Dubin in 1994, she remained in Epstein's stable of senior women as a key fixer and enabler for the rest of his life. The couple's social, financial, and philanthropic ties to Epstein were intricate. Vanity Fair published in September 2019, One of Epstein’s more puzzling relationships was the one he had with Glenn Dubin, the billionaire hedge fund manager, and his wife, Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, the founder of the Dubin Breast Center of the Tisch Cancer Institute at the Mount Sinai Medical Center. Could one of Manhattan’s most pro...

Melanie Walker is among the small group of close Epstein associates who, like Boris Nikolic, haven't been tainted by him and continue in the financial and philanthropic upper crust. Her current official thumbnail reads: MD clinically specialized in Endovascular Neurosurgery and Vascular Neurology, with post-doctoral studies in computational neuroscience. Formerly: Neurotechnology and brain science adviser to William H Gates III at bgC3; Director, World Bank Group; Deputy Director for Global Development, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Adviser for Macroeconomics and Health, World Health Organization; practitioner in the developing world. Currently: Rockefeller Fellow and Clinical Associate Professor, University of Washington School of Medicine. Author of numerous peer reviewed publications. Member, Executive Board, American Medical Association Foundation. Young Global Leader and co-chair for the Global Future Council on Neurotechnology and Brain Science, World Econom...

According to the New York Post , a Boeing 727 belonging to one of Jeffrey Epstein's companies, which has tail number N908JE, is parked in a long-term storage area at Brunswick Golden Isles Airport in southeastern Georgia. This plane, which was given the nickname Lolita Express, was just one of four helicopters and three planes Epstein owned . Other accounts say it is in derelict condition, with engines and other parts removed. The photo above is from the UK Sun and is purportedly of this plane, but the tail number has been retouched out. According to the Post link, "A record of its last flight shows the plane took off from West Palm Beach, then zig-zagged above Florida before touching down at the Georgia airport more than four years ago." This suggests to me that in spite of Epstein's efforts to rehabilitate his reputation via figures like Bill Gates, his prior lifestyle before his 2008 arrest had become at least in part unsustainable. Removal of the engin...

One thing I find nore and more puzzling is that, at least on the web, there's no single "who's who" of the ever-widening circle of names surrounding Epstein. (If someone knows of such a thing, I'll be very grateful to hear of it.) Today I want to look at one of the few whose association with the guy hasn't resulted in job loss or similar calamity, Boris Nikolic. He's in the far right of the well-known 2011 photo of Gates with Epstein, Larry Summers, and Jes Staley. In the famous photo, Nikolic comes off as a thuggish-looking James Bond villain. That he's named Boris doesn't help. But in other photos, he's housebroken and sincere. Which is it? His current position app;ears to be Managing Direcor of Biomatics Capital, where his thumbnail reads, Dr. Nikolic is a physician and investor who previously served as chief advisor for science and technology to Bill Gates, leading select for-profit and not-for-profit investment acti...

Via The Daily Beast, which broke the story : Gates hoped the well-connected pervert could help him secure the Nobel Peace Prize, one former Gates Foundation employee told The Daily Beast. This person said members of the foundation’s communications team were alerted to Gates’ relationship with Epstein and were told it “was a maneuver to try to get himself a Nobel Peace Prize.” They said the tech mogul had even kept some employees on call on prize day in years past just in case he was awarded the distinction. “We were aware of things that were potential reputational risks for the foundation and the co-chairs, Bill and Melinda,” said the former employee. “Even back then, people knew this guy wasn’t squeaky clean,” the person said, referring to Epstein. Although much of the dirt on Gates and his ties to Epstein seems to come from Melinda's allies (like the quotes above), other information suggests Melinda was copacetic with Gates's effort to get the prize via Epste...

The real question about Jeffrey Epstein has little to do with the Lolita Express, the private island, and the underage girls, although the prosecutions were over the nymphets alone, and the rest has been the focus of the tabloid news. But a much bigger question is how Epstein got his money in the first place, and, since there's a high likelihood that this involved fraud and blackmail, how much he stole, and maybe more important, from whom. One potential early source of money was Les Wexner. This story in The New Republic gives details: The founder and former chairman of L Brands, which includes stores like The Limited and Victoria’s Secret, Wexner was Epstein’s longtime friend and key enabler. A serial liar and cunning manipulator, Epstein sometimes approached women claiming to be a talent scout for Victoria’s Secret. He said he was a money manager for billionaires, but Wexner was his only confirmed client. After meeting Epstein in the mid-1980s, Wexner eventually gave him...

The big current developmemt in the Bill Gates story, as we're expected to believe it, is that Gates left the Microsoft board as a result of a 20 year old consensual affair with a subordinate that ended amicably. There appears to be no disagreement that this affair took place, and Gates's spokespeople acknowledge it. So let's put on the brakes. "Consensual" affairs in the workplace between superior and subordinate are common as dirt. Companies may or may not have policies governing them specifically, but in practice, they're handled on a case by case basis, with the organization usually looking the other way until it's absolutely necessary to take some action, which often as not just involves transferring one or both parties to separate them. A "consensual" affair in and of itself is not "sexual harassment", which strictly speaking is a quid pro quo requirement that the subordinate put out or be subject to adverse action from the sup...

I found the photo above, which is pretty well known, in a current Dsily Mail story . The caption to the photo in that story reads, Bill Gates is pictured at Epstein's Manhattan mansion in 2011, from left: James E. Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers; Epstein; Gates and Boris Nikolic, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's science adviser It goes without saying that each of the men in that photo is deeply compromised. For instance, Boris Nikolic, identifed as the Gates foundation science adviser, seems actually to have been Epstein's man : Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender, signed a will detailing nearly $600 million in assets just two days before he killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell. In the will, he named biotech venture capitalist Boris Nikolic as “successor executor,” the person who would take control of the estate if the two named executors are unable or unwilling to. Nikolic,...

One of the ways the very rich are different from you and me is that they normally hire publicity firms to keep them out of the news, not in it. So why is Bill Gates such a hot topic now? Jeff Bezos, another guy in his league, went through a divorce in 2019 with hardly a blip on the radar. Even Donald Trump's exes kept quiet about the guy (I assume his lawyers put non-disparagement clauses in the settlements, but that's what smart people do). Other lizard people, like Warren Buffett, maintain a carefuily manicured public image. Laurene Powell Jobs is normally just invisible. How are we all of a sudden finding out that Gates, whom everyone thought was just a shy, retiring nerd, was a party animal with an Epstein problem? This may in part be due to a basically unkempt nature -- I was at an industry presentation in the 1990s where he gave a speech with his tie coming out the wrong side of his button-down collar -- but this in turn may have been not so much nerdiness as figuring ...

I'm an Aristotelian, and I look for causes. That Chris Cuomo would visibly press, and even berate, Dr Walensky on CNN over not updatimg the mask guidance Wednesday struck me as important, and I posted about it Thursday. But then, the CDC actually went ahead and revised its mask guidance, saying vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks or observe social distancing indoors. Beyond that, Joe Biden himself endorsed the guidance, announcing, Let me repeat: If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask. But neither President Biden nor Drs Walensky and Fauci are independent actors. Via the New York Times just yesterday, we learn that Biden dithers for weeks over decisions . Dr Walensky took public health advice from the teachers'union, not The Science: The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show....

When I worked in IT, I was in and out of both the security and contingency planning areas between the early 1980s and early 2000s. I was in at the start of both fields, and I followed them through the transition from IBM mainfrane to Unix and Windows networking. In light of my experience, I've had some big questions about the story we've been getting about the Colonial Pipeline hack. On one hand, a corporation is prudent to minimize the amount of public information it releases about its internal operations. On the other, based on what I read, I've got to think that at some point, the Colonial board of directors will need to clean house thoroughly. You don't pay $5 million ransom just like that, after all. The broad outlines of the picture so far are all we've been told: somehow, some freelance Russian hackers were able to disable the company's software that controls its pipeline operations, they demanded a ransom to have the system restored, and the company ...