Gates Thought Epstein Could Get Him The Nobel Prize

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 Epstein and even complicit, at least insofar as a trip to France was involved:

According to People, Bill and Melinda Gates will continue as co-chairs of their foundation, even as they divide their $130 billion in marital assets, because of their shared ambition for the Nobel Prize. One source told the magazine: “They were really interested in trying to win a Nobel Prize. So one thing that was part of this is, if it gets worse, then it ends that. It seems as if that was on the agenda, and that’s for both of them.”

Bill Gates may have had the prize on his mind in March 2013, when he and Epstein reportedly visited Jagland’s home in Strasbourg, France.

The rendezvous was revealed by Dagens Næringsliv, Norway’s largest business newspaper, in an October 2020 report. At the time of the meeting, Jagland was chair of the committee which awards the Peace Prize, and Gates was a potential candidate for the honor.

The meeting also included members of the International Peace Institute (IPI)—a think tank run by former Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen that Epstein’s secret charity lavished with a $375,000 donation in 2017. (Rød-Larsen resigned from the New York-based IPI last October after it was revealed his group received $650,000 in donations from Epstein, who also provided him with a $130,000 personal loan.)

. . . The Strasbourg meeting may not have been Gates’ only visit abroad with Epstein.

In August 2019, the French news outlet Franceinfo reported on a roster of famous visitors to Epstein’s Parisian apartment, which included Bill and Melinda on at least one occasion, according to the financier’s former butler. A spokesperson for Melinda Gates told The Daily Beast that Melinda has never been to Epstein’s Paris home. >/p> The steady stream of revelations suggests the enormous range of people Epstein corrupted via blackmail or other conflict of interest. As the current crop of stories brings up new figures, one consistent feature seems to be the willingness of media worldwide to treat all these post-2019 resignations is discrete episodes that quietly fade awayu after a few stories in local media.

This new episode also raises questions about just what all those meetings between Epstein, Gates, and other members of a so-called "men's club" involved. They are said to have been frequent, and accounts make it fairly clear that they took place between at least 2011 and 2013 -- but when, exactly, did they stop? And were they just the innocent sessions for Bill to bellyache about Melinda? Donations from the Gates foundation were made, according to the Daily Beast story, to the Epstein-connected IPI well after the 2013 visit:

Not long after the Strasbourg gathering, the Gates Foundation granted IPI millions of dollars; records on the foundation’s website show IPI received a $2.5-million grant in October 2013, $5.5 million in March 2014, and $256,968 in June 2019 and July 2020.

The Gates foundation's connection with Epstein, and Gates's friendship with him, likely extended well beyond what's been revealed so far, in my view. All the denials of this, that, and the other from both Bill's and Melinda's flacks strike me as worth not much.

Melinda is a wronged woman, an innocent party. Right. I keep telling my wife that the divorce came about because Melinda started to think Epstein stole a lot more from the Gates fortune than she's been told, and the divorce is the only way to get the money straightened out by a third party, the court. My wife is starting to agree. But this goes way beyond the Gateses.

The Nymphets Are The Least Of It

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 power of attorney, allowing him full control over Wexner’s billions. The source of most of Epstein’s own fortune, estimated at nearly $600 million at the time of his death, remains mostly unknown, but much of it appears to have come from Wexner himself, including mansions in Ohio and New York that Wexner essentially gifted to Epstein. According to transaction records, it appears that Epstein also used his position as Wexner’s fiduciary to off-load huge chunks of Wexner-owned stock, while skimming millions for himself. (Wexner eventually disavowed Epstein, claiming he stole $46 million from him—a relatively small amount compared to the overall sum Epstein likely earned through the relationship.)

But the Wexner Manhatten mansion alone, which the story and other sources indicate was effectively "gifted" to Epstein, sold at a distress price of $51 million in March. And this leaves out the value of the other real estate Epstein somehow wangled from Wexner, plus an undetermined amount of cash. $46 million is pretty clearly a wildly lowball estimate meant to preserve both Wexner's self-esteem and his public image.

The public figures who've been suddenly named as Epstein cronies, now including Bill Gates, have all scrambled to insist that they only "discussed philanthropy", never went to the island, or whatever. Alan Dershowitz is such another:

Dershowitz admitted to being at the billionaire’s home but noted that he’d never seen an underaged girl at Epstein’s place despite sworn testimony from Epstein’s former butler who claimed that Dershowitz was at the residence at the same time that underaged girls were there. Dershowitz has an easy explanation for that: “Were there young women in another part of the house giving massages while I was around? I have no idea of that!”

Oh, and did Dershowitz ever receive a massage at Epstein’s house? Yep. But Dershowitz claimed that it was from an adult woman and he kept his underwear on.

But in 2003, before Epstein's 2008 first case, Dershowitz told Vanity Fair:

In the Vanity Fair piece, Dershowitz told the magazine, "I'm on my 20th book … The only person outside of my immediate family that I send drafts to is Jeffrey." In 2015, however, he relayed to The American Lawyer that he was an Epstein acquaintance, describing the relationship as "entirely professional."

Another prominent figure who's had to backtrack furiously over Epstein ties is Leon Black. According to the Financial Times,

Over two decades, Mr Black confided in Epstein regarding personal matters, leaned on him as an “architect” of, and “strict taskmaster” for, the private office that managed his investments. The men socialised or held meetings at Epstein’s Caribbean island and his other properties in New York, Paris, Florida and New Mexico.

. . .“Let me be clear, there has never been an allegation by anyone that I engaged in any wrongdoing because I did not,” Mr Black said then. “Any suggestion of blackmail or any other connection to Epstein’s reprehensible conduct is categorically untrue.”

The pair last spoke in 2018, after Epstein sent emails that made what Dechert called “unsubstantiated assertions” about the work he had performed and demanded more cash. Mr Black refused to pay anything more.

It sounds, though, as if Epstein was demanding payments over "unsubstantiated assertions". Er, isn't this blackmail?

The nymphets -- or whatever else -- were just a means to an end. We'll likely never get to the bottom of these relationships, Wexner, Dershowtiz, Black, Gates, and surely many others. But we can be fairly sure there's much beyond what they're willing to say publicly. How much Epstein stole may not be anything like the whole picture, either.

You Know What? Nothing In This Gates Narrative Fits.

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 superior. If it's "consensual", that's not the issue. Naturally office romances occupy a huge gray area. If it's a party office, and there's a general expectation that everyone has to party to get along, that's a "hostile work environment", but you do have to prove that in court.

I'm also lukewarm at best with the Melinda-as-wronged-woman part of the narrative. She had an MBA and had worked at Microsoft for roughly seven years before she married Gates. She presumably had a clear understanding by that time about how executives act, and in fact how their subordinates sometimes act, which probably included knowing how Gates himself acted. She was 30 and no ingenue. (If I were on the marriage tribunal deciding on her annulment, those are questions I'd ask, but dei gratia, that's someone else's problem.)

The difficulty I have with the whole Gates-consensual-affair story as we hear it is that it's not clear if Gates violated any particular Microsoft policy by having it. It was not "sexual harassment" as normally understood. Whether it created a "hostile work environment" is also completely unclear. It was poor judgment 20 years in the past. But Gates nevertheless left the Microsoft board before the investigation was completed. And not only that, he resigned from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway board the same day. Wha? Is everyone else on the Berkshire Hathaway board such a total boy scout, so Gates is the odd man out and has to leave it, too?

Gates's spokespeople are now saying the affair isn't why he left the Microsoft board. This is one of the few things being said about this that I actually believe.

Let's look at the timing here and what else was going on. Here's the word from Microsoft:

“Microsoft received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000,” Microsoft said in a statement. “A committee of the Board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm, to conduct a thorough investigation.

So there was some problem reflecting bad personal judgment, almost certainly not a legal issue in itself nor potentially even a violation of company policy, 20 years in the past, and the Microsoft board sets up a committee and hires an outside law firm for an investigation? How much are all those partners and associates billing? And Gates leaves in the middle of said investigation, eliminating a need for a final report? Yeah, I'll go along with Gates, this had nothing to do with a flippin' consensual affair. Gates was doing that stuff throughout his career, and it was general knowledge.

Er, what else happened in "the latter half of 2019", as the board so delicately put it? Oh, that's right, Epstein was arrested in July and got suicided that August. A lot of stuff came out, much of it probably not public, in conjunmction with those events. And some montbs after that time, during a confidential investigation of something that was likely really serious, not only does our boy Gates leave the Microsoft board, but he leaves the Berkshire Hathaway board as well, the same day, even though there was never any hanky pank at Berkshire Hathaway.

And oh by the way, right about the same time, Melinda, who by all accounts was already thoroughly familiar with Gates's ways but seems to have made her accommodations, suddenly decides to hire a divorce attorney. We may assume this isn't just the divorce-injury-bankruptcy guy down the street, either.

You know what I think? I think Melinda's wondering if the putative $130 billion in the Gates fortune is actually in the bank. That's what I think. I wonder if this has also occurred to Mr Buffett.

More Comes Out On Poor Bill Gates!

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, 49, said in a statement that he was “shocked” that he was included.

Shocked, shocked. The story goes on to suggest, though, that Nikolic had ongoing ties with JPMorgan, presumably via the Morgan executive in the photo. I looked up James E Staley, identified as Jes Staley on Wikipedia, who has had a career peppered with sudden resignations, questions of scandal, and conflict of interest, especially in the 2010s as he became more closely associated with Epstein. According to Wikipedia,

On October 26, 2015, the Daily Mail published an article exposing that Jeffrey Epstein had threatened the UK Parliament [clarification needed] unless it accepted his pick of Jes Staley for the role of CEO of Barclays. The Times stated that Epstein sent emails to the Treasury Select Committee, which were then leaked to the Daily Mail. Freedom of Information requests were subsequently sent to Parliament. The Treasury Select Committee has declined to put the emails into the public domain.

Staley did become CEO of Barclays, but his tenure there has been clouded. Again accourding to Wikipedia,

In February 2020 the FCA announced an investigation into whether Staley was "fit and proper" to lead Barclays, due to concerns over his previous disclosures of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Staley told Bloomberg TV that "The investigation is actually focused on transparency, and whether I was transparent and open with the bank and with the board with respect to my relationship with Jeffrey Epstein." Staley told colleagues that he expects to leave Barclays by the end of 2021 and could step down at the annual meeting in May 2021.

Recent stories stress that Epstein had already pled guilty to felony charges in connection with his activities in 2008, but he was somehow able to rehabilitate himself with at least some of the elite almost immediately -- though it's hard not to surmise that those would have been among the most corruptible. Current stories suggest the photo above with Epstein, Gates, Nikolic, and Staley was in connection with a pitch by Epstein for some kind of philanthropic fund involving JPMorgan and the Gates foundation -- but Staley left Morgan after 30 years in 2013. Was Epstein involved in Staley's career thereafter? Can't rule it out.

But of course, the most interesting guy in that photo at the moment is Gates. According to the Daily Beast, Gates began meeting with Epstein extensively at Epstein's Manhattan mansion in 2011, around the time of the photo.

Bachelor sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein gave Bill Gates advice on ending his marriage with Melinda after the Microsoft co-founder complained about her during a series of meetings at the money manager’s mansion, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Gates used the gatherings at Epstein’s $77 million New York townhouse as an escape from what he told Epstein was a “toxic” marriage, a topic both men found humorous, a person who attended the meetings told The Daily Beast.

. . . The people familiar with the matter said Gates found freedom in Epstein’s lair, where he met a rotating cast of bold-faced names and discussed worldly issues in between rounds of jokes and gossip—a “men’s club” atmosphere that irritated Melinda.

So it sounds as if the photo above could just as easily have been taken in a break from one of the "men's club" sessions involving Staley and Summers as well as Gates. I would bet that a list of other regulars wouldn't be hard to develop. Clearly this relationship has been problematic for Staley, and the potential problem for Gates is reflected in a statement from Gates's spokesperson farther down in the story:

A representative for Bill Gates told The Daily Beast: “Your characterization of his meetings with Epstein and others about philanthropy is inaccurate, including who participated. Similarly, any claim that Gates spoke of his marriage or Melinda in a disparaging manner is false.”

The spokesperson disputed the number of times Epstein and Gates met and said the two men never discussed Epstein getting involved with the foundation.

“Bill never received or solicited personal advice of any kind from Epstein— on marriage or anything else. Bill never complained about Melinda or his marriage to Epstein.” A representative for Melinda did not respond to a request for comment for this report.

The normal excuse for prominent figures like Bill Clinton caught hobnobbing with Epstein is that they "discussed philanthropy", and there was nothing involving underage nymphets. But Gates's attorney-flack takes it one step further -- they didn't even discuss philanthropy, and maybe the meetings didn't even take place, sort of.

Sounds to me as though Bill needs to give Melinda every penny of what she wants. But hey, stay tuned!

What's Happening To Poor Bill Gates?

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 he's so rich he can get away with it.

Just months before the messy divorce hit the news, Gates had already got himself into public hot water:

“I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,” Gates told Technology Review. “You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.”

Many readers on Twitter aren’t ready to completely give up their burgers and steaks just yet. So this led to Gates’ trending on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon as critics chewed him out.

It's certainly possible that his wife, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's PR firm, had been able to keep the guy quiet for a couple of decades, but with the marriage crumbling, he no longer gave a flip. Now Melinda is saying she doesn't just want a divorce, she wants a Catholic annulment. We may assume that if Newt Gingrich was able to get two of them, Melinda can surely get just one.

Last night, my wife and I were watching a TV show from 2013 about Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. It featured a cleaned-up Bill Gates explaining vaccines to the rest of us and mentioning that the Bill and Melinda foundation was doing many good works in the vaccine field. In fact, there were clips in the show of the duo visiting vaccine centers in the Third World, but based on what we now hear, these must have been carefully staged, with the couple doing all they could not to look like they despised each other.

The Bill Gates of 2013 can't reprise that role in 2021. In fact, if he has his own PR flack at all now, he'd probably be told to keep quiet about the flatulent cows from now on as well.

But Melinda is proving not to be a Laurene Powell Jobs either. I would guess that the stories we've been getting about the nude swimming parties and the weekends with his ex-girlfriend are coming from Melinda, or more accurately Melinda's publicist, or maybe even more accurately, Melinda's publicist working closely with her divorce attorney. There was no pre-nup, there were 27 years of marriage with three kids, and Gates is worth somethiong well north of $100 billion. Compared to that, Laurene Powell Jobs is chump change.

What does this do to Gates's standing as a lizard person, which is to say, one of the people who actually run the planet? It's hard to say. It's possible that if he had an Epstein problem, he wasn't taken as seriously as we may have thought, as this sort of thing would presumably have been known among the more influential lizard people -- and after all, nobody's rushing in to rescue Ghislaine Maxwell at this point. There've been no think pieces in the Atlantic on how we shouldn't rush to judgment on Epstein, either, least of all from Alan Dershowitz.

As a lizard person, Gates is suddenly coming off as a phony and a lightweight. My question is how long this was known to the regulars at Davos, though they're largely phonies and lightweights themselves.

Wait: Who's Calling The Shots?

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.

But then, in the wake of the mask relaxation, even the AFT did a 180:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said she is now “pleading” for the full reopening of schools.

“We can and we must reopen schools in the fall for in-person teaching, learning and support. And we must keep them open fully and safely five days a week,” said Weingarten in a speech.

Weingarten’s new advocacy or reopening schools comes just over a week after her teachers union was caught at the center of a scandal for inveigling the Biden CDC in a plot to keep schools closed indefinitely.

It's hard not to think that someone powerful -- someone like, say, Bill Gates -- had his chief gofer make a few calls, to CNN, the White House, the CDC, the AFT -- and justlikethat Biden quit dithering, Walensky saw the light, and everything magically got straightened out with a few public announcements. Well, you might think.

Except Speaker Pelosi said the House will continue to wear masks. The LA County health department, which just the other week had immediately endorsed the prior CDC guidance over wearing masks outdoors, took a very different tack on Thursday:

Masks are still required for anyone entering a business or crowded indoor area in Los Angeles County until further guidance is issued, public health officials said Thursday after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eased its mandate.

. . . But in L.A. County, public health officials say everyone must still adhere to distancing and masking requirements at workplaces until the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health changes its guidelines.

“Until Cal/OSHA changes these requirements, the county cannot be less restrictive,” Ferrer said.

The state agency’s board is set to vote on new workplace safety standards next Thursday, May 20. If approved, businesses where all employees are fully vaccinated would be exempt from physical distancing requirements starting July 31.

In other words, Dr Ferrer is going to slow-walk this through the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy won't make up its mind until at least July 31, even though Gov Newsom himself said things in California will loosen June 15.

It's possible to argue that the Biden-CDC "loosening" is just a carefully thought out head fake by the lizard people like Bill Gates, intended to distract attention from inflation, gas lines, Hamas, and whatever else. That in fact could be. But what's become even more abundantly clear in just the past few days is that the whole mask-and-social-distancing regime is nothing but a politically driven charade. If The Science says they aren't needed, then screw The Science, keep the masks.

I'll have thoughts about Bill Gates tomorrow.

Somewhere Between Incompetence And Dereliction

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 was forced to operate its pipeline manually until it paid the ransom, reportedly $5 million. In the meantime, gasoline and other product distribution was impacted over much of the US.

Here's the first issue. Pipelines are among the industries that are heavily regulated. This is because they're critical. We've just seen what happens when a pipeline goes down. Banks are the same way. If an ATM network were to go down for several days, it would be even more catastrophic, but the pipeline is clearly bad enough. Bank regulators require that banks have comprehensive plans in place, including physical backup facilities, to recover within hours if any such outage were to happen. A bank can be declared insolvent if regulators don't think its backup measures are adequate, and with good reason.

Since the 1980s, public corporations in particular have had to assess the criticality of their business functions, if only to recognize what an outage for x amount of time will cost them -- this includes not just loss of accounts receivable, but secondary costs in terms of lawsuits, loss of reputation, and political fallout. In general, a business subject to external and internal audit should have long since identified the level of outage that would threaten its existence and have plans and physical backup measures in place to recover from any such outage. This would range, depending on the business, from local power outage to civil unreast to hurricane to anything short of the big asteroid hitting the planet.

These measures can be expensive, but the issue is how much more expensive it would be for a bank or public utility to have its system unavailable for days or weeks. This could threaten a company's ability to remain in business, and its board has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to assure it can continue.

As far as I can see, Colonial Pipeline had no such plans in place, or if it did, it didn't have anyone who could implement them. For instance, if the issue was that hackers had locked the system software, there should have been a clean backup copy offsite, and if necessary, a place with a backup system available to download and run the backup software to control the pipeline remotely.

The question isn't just whether the company's managers were incompetent or derelict, the question would be whether the company auditors, both inside and outside, and its regulators were also derelict. Remember that a major impact of the Enron scandal was to destroy the Arthur Andersen audit firm, whose dereliction allowed the scandal.

A secondary question is how the hackers were able to gain access to the computer system that controlled this critical infrastructure. All I can surmise from the information that's been made public is that the hackers were somehow able to lock or disable the operating copy of the system software, but could then either unlock it or provide a clean copy on payment of the ransom.

Someone who wsnts to do this needs both physical and electronic access to the company's computers. Controlling this has been IT Management 101 since the 1970s. The various root or superuser IDs that can change system software are normally carefully controlled and limited. I've read speculation that this was an inside job. Could certainly be, and there should normally be just a few people who'd be the ones to ask. If it were more than a few, the IT director and most of his chain of command should already be on their way out.

Another issue, especially if it were an inside job, is whether drug testing is being done. Pipelines are regulated by the US Department of Transportation, which requires drug testing for employees involved in operations. I've always thought, given my experience in the work environment, that drug testing and alcohol screening would go a long way to solve corporate dysfunction, but maybe because that's the case, it isn't done much, even when it clearly should be.

There really ought to be congressional hearings on this. But then, congress is also stalled somewhere between incompetence and dereliction.