In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Intrigued by the list of Epstein's co-conspirators on page 5 of his 2008 non prosecution agreement , I decided to look them up. The most prominent, whose name came up Thursday in the Maxwell trial, is Sarah Kellen. It appears that there's no good single source on her. The Cut says she is sometimes known as Sarah Kensington . Kellen kept all of the names and numbers of girls who gave Epstein erotic massages and would call around to see who was available to “work” when Epstein was at his Palm Beach mansion. Some of these girls later told Palm Beach detectives that it was Kellen who would show them upstairs when they arrived at the house and set up the massage table for them. One of Epstein’s victims, Sarah Ransome, said that Maxwell and Kellen coached her on how to pleasure him. “It was Ghislaine and Sarah Kellen that showed me how to please Jeffrey,” Ransome said. According to the New York Post , Kellen was Epstein’s personal assistant for at least 10 years and h...

So much is happening, but there's so little news. That applies to the Ghislaine Maxwell trial as much as anything else. In a surprise move yesterday, the prosecution rested its case after less than two weeks, when at the start, the trial was predicted to last as long as six weeks. From the very limited informed commentary I've seen, the consensus appears to be that this is a show trial that's meant to punish Jeffrey Epstein post mortem without, however, touching in any way the very prominent figures from Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Prince Andrew on down who may also have beeen implicated in Epstein's activites. A mention by one of the YouTube commentators on the trial , Robert Gruler, of an episode in Thursday's abbreviated session brings this out. The prosecution called a witness, Tracy Chapell of FedEx, to testify about packages Epstein sent to victims during 2002. During cross-examination, Maxwell's counsel asked the witness to note the signature on the...

The recent history of moral panics shows that they sooner or later work themselves out through the legal system. The McMartin preschool case, the most visible episode of the 1980s Satanic day care panic, lasted seven years but resulted in no convictions, and all charges were dropped in 1990. The putative 2019 MAGA attack on Jussie Smollett took place before the 2020 COVID-BLM panic, but it was nevertheless a background issue throughout 2020 as public and law enforcement outcry over the case's being dropped eventualy resulted in appointment of a special prosecutor. In addition, the most vocal opjection to the anticipated outcome of Smollett's trial came from Black Lives Matter , one of the chief entrepreneurs of the 2020 panic: In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom. . . ....

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is one of those books that, like Coming of Age in Samoa , if elite-school liberal arts majors weren't assigned them as sophomores (I was), they at least knew about them. By the time I graduated, I thought of Burke as something of a dilettante, and my opinion didn't change much after I was assigned A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in grad school. At minimum, founding one's world view on Burke strikes me as building a house on sand, even if it was the thing to do among certain conservatives of the past century. But this is David Brooks. Two years ago but 50 years late, he discovered the Me Decade for himself in The Second Mountain , and last year in The Atlantic he declared the nuclear family a mistake . Somewhere I have some old books by Alan Watts I can send him. But now, of all things, amid the "devastation" of contemporary society that he apparentl...

Here's the biggest thing that's grabbed me about Jussie Smollett. He's 39 years old. In the accounts he's given of himself in the last two days of trial, he seems to spend his time driving around, getting stoned, and working out. You might expect this of a college sophomore, but shouldn't you have more of a life by the time you're 39? Second issue, derived also from his age. According to Wikipedia , he was a child star whose career ended about 1995, when he was 13. But In 2012, Smollett returned to acting with the leading role in Patrik-Ian Polk's LGBT-themed comedy-drama The Skinny . Also that year, he released an EP titled The Poisoned Hearts Club . He later guest-starred in The Mindy Project (2012) and Revenge (2014). In 2014, Smollett was cast as Jamal Lyon—a gay musician struggling to gain the approval of his father Lucious—opposite Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard in the Fox drama series Empire . His role was hailed as "groun...

The case of Jussie Smollett and his putative attack at the hands of two gay Nigerian brothers in whiteface and MAGA hats has turned into a comical data point that illustrates yet again that we're seeing the 2020 moral panic roll itself back. Although the initial alleged attack took place in January 2019, a full year before the arrival of COVID, it was clearly an early attempt to stoke the same passions that would express themselves in 2020's BLM riots: allegations that Trump and his supporters were racists, and violent white racism was systemic in American attitudes. lurking always just beneath the surface. It's starting to look like Kyle Rittenhouse's successful testimony on his own behalf will be the exception that proves the rule: for the defendant to take the stand is normally a very bad idea. But the Rittenhouse case itself is another indication that the 2020 hysteria is subsiding -- a jury was able to sort out the idea that Rittenhouse, a mixed-race naive 17-y...

Convinced that we're now seeing the end stages of a major moral panic, I revisited common discussions of the phenomenon and compared them to what we've been seeing. Wikipedia defines a moral panic as a widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue," usually perpetuated by moral entrepreneurs and the mass media, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers. Citing Stanley Cohen's 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics , Wikipedia goes on to say, According to Cohen, a moral panic occurs when a "condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests."  To Cohen, those who start the panic after fearing a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are 'moral entrepreneurs', while those who supposedly th...