Jussie Smollett Is A Puzzle

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 "groundbreaking" for its positive depiction of a black gay man on television. Smollett reprised his role in subsequent seasons, and directed an episode of the fourth season in 2017. Smollett's character was removed from the final two episodes of season five because of the assault controversy.

In other words, as far as I can tell, his career took a near 20-year hiatus between 1995, when he was 13, and 2012, when he was 30. But throughout his career in the 2010s, he was simply playing himself, a young, gay, African-American entertainer -- but in each of those roles, he was playing someone at least a decade younger than his actual age. In contrast, look at Grace Kelly's career. According to Wikipedia, "Kelly retired from acting at age 26 to marry Rainier, and began her duties as Princess of Monaco."

I recall from a biography that by age 25 or so, she recognized that the time she had to spend with makeup prior to her Hollywood scenes was extending to hours, and she know the clock was ticking, so she changed careers at what she felt was the most appropriate time.

Or look at Frank Sinatra. According to Wikipedia, akthough he reached stardom as a crooner in the early 1940s,

by the early 1950s, his professional career had stalled and he turned to Las Vegas, where he became one of its best known residency performers as part of the Rat Pack. His career was reborn in 1953 with the success of the film From Here to Eternity. . .

If you watch film of his Las Vegas performances from the 1950s, it's plain that he'd destroyed his voice from smoking, but, born in 1915, he was pushing 40 by then anyhow and, like Grace Kelly, realized he needed a career change. The same applies to Marilyn Monroe, who despite her best efforts was unable to remake her professional profile into something like Katharine Hepburn and burned herself out by 36.

The best indication we have is that Smollett felt his prospects at Fox on the Empire show were fading given his advancing age, and in early 2019, he engineered a hate mail hoax to draw attention to himself.

The two brothers involved in the Jussie Smollett attack told police that Smollett was behind creating a racist letter that was sent to the actor on the set of his show, “Empire,” according to two sources with first-hand knowledge of the investigation.

And when that letter did not get a “bigger reaction,” Smollett orchestrated the attack a week later with the two men–Ola and Abel Osundairo, sources said.

. . . Smollett received a letter containing a white powder Jan. 22. The letter was mailed to Chicago’s Cinespace Studios, where the show “Empire” is filmed. The letter prompted a HAZMAT response. CPD says the “white substance” was later determined to be aspirin.

My takeaway is that Smollett as an adult performer had a fairly brief career playing a gay African-American singer-actor that had a built-in short life given his age when he started it. Exactly how he was able to get back into Hollywood after a 20-year gap, and how he was suddenly able to secure so many nominations and awards once he did so, is an intriguing question.

But as with Chris Cuomo, his basic problem was that he'd reached his sell-by date no matter what, was no longer of use, and couldn't reconcile himself to the reality. We're in interesting times.

The Second Time As Farce

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-year-old member of the lower bourgeoisie, had been attacked by multiple white members of the Lumpenproletariat and used his firearm to defend himself from them, which turned the conventional 2020 narrative on its head.

The Smollett case simmered throughout 2019-20, with the state's attorney initially dropping disorderly conduct charges on clear political grounds, with charges restored a year later following public outcry. The case finally came to trial on November 29, with the bizarre circumstances of Smollett's romance with Abel Osundario and the development and rehearsal of the phony MAGA attack. So far, Smollett's testimony has reached the point where we learn his reason for not turning his phone over to police was a text from Don Lemon:

Smollett testified that he’d been in contact with Don Lemon during the early part of the Chicago Police Department’s investigation into the phony attack on him. He testified that one of the reasons he didn’t want to turn over his phone to the police during the investigation was because Don Lemon texted him that the Chicago Police didn’t believe his account of what happened. Lemon has already said that he was in constant contact with Smollett early on in the case and that the story was “personal” to him.

This couldn't be worse for CNN, a leading media enabler of the 2020 panic, which only days ago was forced to fire Chris Cuomo for violations of journalistic ethics. Now Cuomo's colleague Don Lemon has been drawn into the Smollett farce in a way that could compromise him ethically as well -- leaving aside that Lemon is already in legal trouble for putting his hand down his pants, rubbing his private parts, and then shoving his fingers into a man's face.

(I'm not sure how this compares to, say, Chris Cuomo's pinching a former supervisor's buttocks in front of her husband at a party, one of the offenses for which Cuomo was apparently terminated on Saturday.)

The bottom line is that Smollett, a coddled and privileged member of the elite, has become a national laughingstock for a transparent attempt to portray himself as a victim of racial prejudice a la George Floyd, and he's now in the process of dragging Don Lemon, a key moral entrepreneur of the 2020 panic, into the travesty with him -- not to mention Lemon's employer, CNN.

Also in this morning's news is further indication that the public standing of another beneficiary of the 2020 panic, Vice President Harris, is disintegrating.

A staffer for Kamala Harris was mocked after attempting to defend the vice president on social media, seemingly in response to a scathing story by the Washington Post over the weekend which detailed the California Democrat bullying staffers with "soul-destroying criticism."

The day after the report, the VP's Deputy Director for Operations David Gins tweeted a photo of himself staring at a computer screen in an office. "Absolutely love my job. Just thought some of you should know," he wrote.

Elsewhere, after widespread ridicule of the tweet on social medias, it was reported,

SOURCE: VP Kamala Harris' staff were "encouraged to show genuine support publicly and that support would be remembered" the source goes on to say "unfortunately the Gins tweet worked against that mission"

Harris rose to the vice presidency as a result of the 2020 moral panic -- indeed, her presence on the ticket was meant to be part of a promised "great reset" of national priorities in the wake of the hysteria. The emerging problem is that events are challenging the notion that a vice president doesn't need to have serious qualifications for the job -- as the moral panic of 2020 subsides, we're beginning to see the inklings of a constitutional crisis as the morning after sets in.

Even Dan Quayle, even Spiro Agnew, are starting to look good.

The Causes Of The 2020 Moral Panic

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 threaten social order have been described as 'folk devils'.

Recent examples of moral panics given in the discussion include Satanism and the related issue of child sexual abuse in day care centers; HIV/AIDS; and in the 1950s, comic books and switchblades. I think the most severe of these was the panic over day care centers in the 1980s, but as I reflect on it, the 2020 panic was far bigger and had a greater effect. Nobody tried to lock down most of national economies in any previous panic, for instance, and the 2020 panic clearly affected a US presidential election.

In fact, while the wars on drugs or terrorism have been cited as examples of recent moral panics, neither of those resulted in measures like universal social distancing or requiring much of the world to wear surgical masks, especially when these measures had highly questionable efficacy in controlling the disease. The closest example for an equivalent effect on daily life in other panics is the greatly increased security screening of airline passengers, but this came in response to an actual, verifiable threat, especially the 9/11 hijackings, and screening passengers turned out to be an effective strategy that reduced such instances.

In contrast, strategies for reducing the spread of COVID, from travel bans to lockdowns to masking and social distancing to vaccine mandates, have had far less demonstrable effect, to the point that the "war on terror" hardly qualifies as a panic response.

But the 2020 panic was a much more complex phenomenon. It also included the BLM riots, which were such an important component of the general panic that the media and politicians granted rioters specific exemptions from the otherwise universal restrictions on mass gatherings. They were integral, not just serendipitous. But they weren't new. They reprised the urban riots of the 1960s and 1990s, and their treatmernt by the media was the same: they dramatized the grievances of the Lumpenproletariat, the petty criminal class, which in a basic error conflated their specific grievances against law enforcement with more general grievances by racial and ethnic minorites.

The contradiction throughout was that the interests of racial minorites living in ghettos were not the same as those of the petty criminals, who mostly preyed on the people in the ghettos. What was the actual threat to society? Who were the folk devils?

I think the perceived threat was from Donald Trump, though my view has always been that Trump is a talented amateur who perceived underlying trends that had existed since Nixon, and indeed since Reconstruction -- he was continuing the process of refocusing Republicans on their Republican roots, which are abolitionist, pro-civil rights, and anti-segregation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by Republicans against Democrat oppositon. Jim Crow in the south and northern ghettos were the creatures of an alliance between socially prestigious northern capital and southern segregationists.

The threat to society behind the 2020 panic is the continuing departure from the post-Reconstruction, and indeed, post-Martin Luther King social settlement that arose after King's death, whereby the Democrats took credit for the 1964 Civil Rights Act while giving corrupt minority politicians a free hand in the cities. This is the actual conflict, which is reflected even among Republicans with the division between never-Trumpers and Trumpers. Looked at this way, the actual cause of the panic was the continued rise of anti-Jim Crow Republicans, while COVID was the adventitous development.

But if Trump were removed from the scene tomorrow, the same conditions would prevail.

We're In The "Morning After'" Phase Of A Moral Panic

Not every discussion of moral panics recognizes a final, "morning after" stage, but recent panics like the day care child abuse controversy of the 1980s have clearly had one, in which the media, the legal system, and politicians slowly and reluctantly admit that mistakes were made. The resignation of New York Gov Andrew Cuomo, one of the chief moral entrepreneurs of the COVID panic, followed by the firing yesterday of his enabler brother, is an indication that we've reached that phase.

No matter the ostensible reasons for their departure were allegations of groping. These are conveniently vague, and their enforcement is highly selective -- Bill Clinton got away with far worse, as (so far) has President Biden. We may assume that when it becomes convenient to dispose of Dr Fauci -- and we're approachintg that point -- allegatioins will arise as needed.

Speaking of whom, the man himself seems now to be playing for sympathy. In a documentary relased this past October, he weeps about having PTSD from his experience as an AIDS bureaucrat:

Doctors were watching helplessly as patients rapidly deteriorated. Fauci describes the trauma of those cases in a new National Geographic documentary called "Fauci," which is streaming on Disney Plus.

"It was all bad, bad, worse, bad, worse, bad, worse," he says in the film. "It was just so unbelievably frustrating when you're used to being able to fix things and you're just not really fixing anything."

. . . When the an interviewer asks why Fauci is so affected by the memory, he replies: "Post-traumatic stress syndrome — that's what it is."

It must be bad not really fixing anything. What a feeling!

A headline on Drudge this morning is AMERICANS 'NUMB' TO COVID, but if you go to the link, it's actually more restrained: 'Americans seem to have become numb to Delta': Omicron is coming, but older variant is still driving infections

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has dominated the news since its discovery in southern Africa was announced last week, but it is the Delta variant — which has been in the United States for months — that is still unilaterally driving the current increase in infection rates in parts of the country.

The disconnect presents public health officials with a new challenge: warning Americans about a new strain of the coronavirus while reminding them that an older strain is showing clear signs of resurgence.

. . . "All the news is about Omicron,” lamented Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Science Institute, on Twitter. “As if a major 2nd surge with Delta wasn’t happening.”

But isn't this a backhanded way of acknowledging that the media -- one of the main ingredients for a moral panic -- has cried wolf one too many times? If Omicron were in fact the panic-inducing new phase of the Blsck Death it was hyped to be. wouldn't the public -- another key ingredient of a moral panic -- be in a frenzy? Ohmygoodness, now it's worse than ever!! Ohmygoodness!!b Ohmygoodness!! The media would be running film of overwhelmed emergency rooms all over the world, just like they did 18 months ago. Heck, there'd be a new run on toilet paper.

The problem is that the moral entrepreneurs and the media didn't get the reaction they thought they would, and in fact they didn't get it within days. And in turn it's had the unintended side effect of encouraging people to minimize Delta. But now we're starting to get level-headed advice:

"Let's not live in fear because Dr. Fauci is promulgating things that are unscientific just to scare you," [Sen Rand Paul] said. "If you've been vaccinated or if you've had the disease, live your life and ignore this man and let's hope he can be gone as soon as possible."

If Chris Cuomo is gone, we can certainly hope.

Omicron Update

As I'd surmised, the attempts by the public health establishment to incite panic during last holiday weekend over the Omicron variant have gone the way of the boy who cried wolf. The information that's coming out is that the variant had been spreading well before its "discovery" late last month. A Minnesota man contracted and recovered from Omicron by November 24, prior to the South African announcement of its discovery.

About 60 people who attended a holiday party in Oslo November 24 were infected and recovered with mild symptoms.

All of those infected at the party - which hosted employees of South African renewable energy firm Scatec - are currently recovering at home, [public health officer] Ravlo added.

The Olso outbreak - currently the world's largest-known Omicron outbreak - happened after several employees who had recently travelled to Scatec's head office in Cape Town attended the party.

. . . [All] cases are assumed to be the new variant, with the results of more sequencing tests expected soon.

Mr Ravlo said the 'incubation period' of the new variant - the time from infection to first symptoms - appears to be two to four days.

This suggests that Omicron had escaped from South Africa before the South African announcement, and certainly well before President Biden's November 26 travel ban from some African countries. So the current renewal of COVID international travel controls is effectively closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out. And more recently, WHO has announced that despite Omicron being identified in 38 countries, nobody so far has died from it.

No one has died with the new super mutant Omicron Covid variant despite the strain being spotted in 38 countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) has revealed.

. . . The WHO warned it could take weeks to determine how infectious the variant is, whether it causes more severe illness and how effective treatments and vaccines are against it.

As I've said, Omicron poses a double threat to the current public health regime. I think it's increasingly likely that it's turning into an overhyped damp squib, which further damages the credibility of Dr Fauci and his colleagues. On the other hand, while I think this is progressively less likely, if it turns out to be a serious threat, it also damages the prestige of the public health establishment, in that all the "scientific" authority and remedial strategies at its disposal have not defeated the disease.

The other side of the whole coin, though, is that the public has taken this in stride. There have been absolutely no runs on toilet paper or face masks, and the news has continued to focus on other issues like crime, Jussie Smollett, and Ghislaine Maxwell. People are fed up with COVID and have decided to resume their daily lives.

It looks like Omicron will be a rear guard action for the moral entrepreneurs hoping to renew the 2020 moral panic.

Epstein At The Clinton White House

The Ghislaine Maxwell trial is bringing out unrelated material on Epstein's modus operandi, as well as his high-level dupes and cronies. As a longtime Ferdinand Lundberg fan, this provides confirmation and insight for me into how the ruling class actually operates. My guess is that there's a great deal that hasn't come out over Epstein and his ability to manipulate the various economic and legal systems at high level, and much of it may never come to light. I don't think, though, that Epstein is a unique figure; Hunter Biden is a near clone as we speak.

The UK Daily Mail obtained White House visitor logs from the Clinton Presidential Library under a series of FOIA requests. Its story here covers Epstein's visits in some detail.

Epstein, who died in 2019, visited Bill Clinton at the Executive Mansion over the course of three years with the first invitation coming just a month after his inauguration in January 1993.

The logs show the late financier showed up on 14 separate days, even making two visits in a single day on three different occasions.

Epstein was invited by some of Clinton's most senior advisers and aides, including one who later served as Treasury Secretary, according to records.

The documents reveal that the vast majority of Epstein's visits stated that he was going to the West Wing, meaning there was a strong likelihood he was meeting Clinton.

What's at least as important as the visits themselves is how they were arranged and who arranged them.

They show that Epstein's first visit to the Clinton White House was on February 25, 1993 and the person who issued the invitation is listed as 'Rubin'. The location of the visit is listed as 'WW', or West Wing.

The most prominent Rubin in the White House at the time was Robert Rubin, who took up his position as director of the National Economic Council when Clinton took office.

Rubin was so favored by Clinton that he was appointed Treasury Secretary in January 1995.

Robert Rubin was not a bit player. The story makes the point,

Rubin would go on to serve as chair of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an international affairs think tank, between 2007 and 2017.

Epstein was a member of the CFR from 1995 until 2009 and donated $350,000 to the organization, money which it later gave to an organization which fights human trafficking.

Wikipedia says the CFR

is a United States nonprofit think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. It is headquartered in New York City, with an additional office in Massachusetts. Its membership, which numbers 5,103, has included senior politicians, numerous secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, professors, and senior media figures.

There is general consensus across the spectrum that its membership includes the power elite or the lizard people, who are extremely influential in high level policymaking. It's mildly surprising that Epstein would have been a member for 14 years, presumably at Rubin's recommendation. Wikipedia says of membershio in the CFR,

The CFR has two types of membership: life membership; and term membership, which lasts for 5 years and is available only to those between the ages of 30 and 36. . . . A candidate for life membership must be nominated in writing by one Council member and seconded by a minimum of three others.

That Epstein served for well over five years as a member suggests he was a life member, leaving in 2009 presumably after complications arose following his 2008 guilty plea and detention. But prior to that, he appears to have ben a fully fledged lizard person. And in the years immediately following Clinton's leaving office in 2001, he flew on Epstein's Lolita Rxpress multiple times.

Among the unanswered questions arising from the Epstein affair is how Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein's partmer in the Tower Finamcial Ponzi scheme, was jailed for 20 years after its 1991 collapse, while Epstein was never arrested or charged. (A related question is how Epstein in the wake of this case could be vetted for admission to the White House.) Tower Financial was the biggest Ponzi in history before the Bernie Madoff scheme. Another issue is the 2006-2008 case that resulted in a guilty plea to charges of procuring a minor, which included immunity from federal prosecution and an extremely lenient work relase sentence.

Alexander Acosta, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said he negotiated the plea deal because he was told that Epstein "belonged to intelligence", was "above his pay grade" and to "leave it alone". There can be no question that Epstein lived a charmed existence for much of his life.

I have a strong suspicion we'll never know exactly how this happened.

Jeffrey Epstein Was A Transhumanist

I've been following commentary on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and found a data point I hadn't seen before, that Jeffrey Epstein was a transhumanist. This source summarizes that New York Times article:

Transhumanists herald genetic engineering and artificial intelligence as promising ways to improve human performance. They advocate, essentially, for the use of technology — including nanomedicine, robotics, brain-computer integration, and more — that alters typical human physiology in order to better our body and brain.

The usual discussions of transhumanism are far too polite. Among its basic tenets is the idea that in the future, cures will eliminate diseases and conditions that are fatal now but will not be then. Thus it will be possible to freeze the bodies of people who die now, but at some point in the future, not only will medical advances cure the condition that killed the patient, but other future technology will be able to resuscitate the frozen body and bring the patient back to life.

But keeping an entire body frozen may be expensive and for that matter unnecessary, since at some future time, it may be possible to transplant just the frozen head onto a new donor body. So most transhumanists go for the economy solution of freezing just the head, surgically detached after their presumpive death. You can find more about this option at the Cryonics Institute.

According to the link,

Cryonics, the controversial process of freezing a body with the goal of bringing it back to life later, also has a place in transhumanist thinking. Currently, it only works for human embryos. But according to The Times, one unnamed transhumanist said he and Epstein once chatted about cryonics, and Epstein said he'd want his head and penis frozen.

Fringe fans treasure the hilariously ghoulish second-season episode "Momentum Deferred", which "followed the theft of cryogenically-frozen heads by shapeshifters from the parallel universe in their search for a specific head, while the Fringe team attempts to prevent this." This involved the shapeshifters hijacking a truck transporting the frozen heads and casually tossing each head away in their search unitl they find the one in question. "In January 2013, IGN ranked it as the third best episode of the series."

It's unknown if Epstein's head and penis were removed from his body and cryonically frozen following his autopsy. According to the Cryonics Institute,

Damage does occur in the cryonic suspension process, but there are sound reasons to believe that that damage can be limited, especially for patients and their families who are prepared, and can begin the process as soon as possible after clinical death.

Buit if we follow transhumanist logic, even if Epstein's body parts had gotten pretty rank before they were frozen, certainly future technology should be able to reverse this as well. And we can be sure that by then, the statute of limitations on Epstein's crimes (at least in this goaround) will have long since expired by the time they bring him back.

But I'm less concerned about Epstein's own beliefs about transhumanism and cryonics than what it reveals about the acceptability of those beliefs in the circles in which he traveled, and in fact amomg B-list elites generally. A Guardian story reports,

According to the [New York Times], Epstein’s circle included the molecular engineer George Church; Murray Gell-Mann, who proposed the quark; the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks; and the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek.

. . . The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he considered Epstein as an “intellectual impostor”.

“He would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack,” Pinker told the paper. The virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier said Epstein’s ideas did not rise to science that could be subjected to critical analysis.

The scientific community, like Trump and much of New York and Palm Beach society, would sooner forget their association with Epstein.

But they hung out with the guy, took his money, and in some cases his nymphets as well. But transhumanism is socially acceptable among B-listers who haven't even been on the Lolita Express. Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit blogger and law professor with an endowed chair, Yale and Yale Law alum, who's been a regular columnist in the New York Post and USA Today, is a self-described transhumanist. I took up this issue in the first iteration of the Mt Hollywood blog and just as I write now found a link to the controversy at the time:

The blogger John Bruce recently read Glenn Harlan Reynolds' Army of Davids, which promotes transhumanism, and has decided to launch a campaign to have newspapers drop Reynolds on the grounds that he promotes the "transhumanist cult." I exchanged some email with Mr. Bruce trying to bring him up-to-speed, but it had no effect. It seems clear that he is motivated by some personal and partisan agenda I don't full [sic] understand.

My effots were unavailing in any case. Over the years, Reynolds has soft-pedaled his views, and I'm not sure if he still holds them. I was never able to determine whether he has a contract to freeze his own head or other parts on his own death. The problem is that Reynolds is an example of how poorly educated you can be with multiple Ivy degrees and how easy it is to gain a platform with such a poorly formed outlook. Epstein is also an example of how easy it is for even an impostor to con and manipulate our elites.