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This is one of our ongoing, loosely structured community conversations about daily news with thousands of replies. There is no need to read the entire archive for context. If you are new you can skip to the end and join in the discussion of current events as they happen. However, it is always a good idea to spend at least a few minutes reading first to get a feel for the community and the topic before posting.
Not looking good for my main man Les Wexner.
Lots of smoking guns, but giving $200 million and full power of attorney to a two time loser with zero actual qualifications? Yikes.
Riverman, just to continue the discussion from exiled about Epstein and US intelligence, have you seen this from Acosta?
Heād cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epsteinās attorneys because he had ābeen toldā to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. āI was told Epstein ābelonged to intelligenceā and to leave it alone,ā he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)
This was originally reported by Vicky Ward, who has been on the Epstein beat since 2003. Itās hard to imagine why Acosta would say this if it wasnāt true, in view of the fact that he was saying it to people who had the capacity to ask intelligence services whether it is true.
Leaving aside moral objections, whatās not to like for intelligence services about acquiring this sort of kompromat on rich and powerful people? There are rumours that one of the people on camera having sex with a minor is Tony Blair. Maybe thatās a wild rumour, but imagine it is true. What would such images have been worth to US intelligence in the early 2000s? Cast your mind back to that time. Post 9/11, were there any other instances of US intelligence taking the attitude that they were living in a brave new world where the ends justified the means? Hmm.
I donāt think these suggestions are wild conspiracy-mongering because I think they actually simplify the conspiracy. The explanation āAcosta backed off because he was told Epstein was an intelligence assetā is extremely simple and limits the scope of the conspiracy. Otherwise youāre left speculating that Acosta and many of his staffers are in on it, or something. Like whatever you do, youāre left with a conspiracy involving the covering up of the sex trafficking of minors, thatās just a given. Not having a plausible reason why outsiders to the conspiracy were induced to back off makes the conspiracy more complicated, not less.
Ramsey Orta is in solitary confinement. He has been in custody since February 2015, less than a year after he filmed New York police officers kill his friend, Eric Garner, on July 17, 2014.
Ortaās years of incarceration consist of unrelenting torture, a vast conspiracy by officers to exact revenge on the person responsible for exposing the racist brutality of one of their own. Orta does not eat because he says has been poisoned by correctional officers (COs). Court documents back up this claim, revealing an incident in which Orta refused to eat food that, it turned out, was poisoned ā his fellow prisoners who consumed the meal allegedly suffered ānausea, vomiting, pain, dizziness, aches, headaches, stomach/intestinal pains, dehydration, diarrhea, nosebleeds, throwing up blood, diarrhea with blood, and/or an overwhelming sense of illness.ā Writes Jones, āOrta has reported constant abuse and harassment from correctional officers since heās been locked up. He claims heās been threatened, beaten, poisoned. He and Deja [his partner] both live in the constant fear that heāll never return home.ā
Itās as if the world revolves around Epstein. When some of his victims demand justice, he is spared again ā a light sentence, a private wing in a jail, work leave, and not long after his release, a return to glitz and glamor. A mansion on the Upper East Side: some say he bought it from his billionaire friend for $1. The Manhattan DA tries to reduce his sex-offender status (the judge denies the request. She has ānever seen a prosecutorās office do anything like thisā). He keeps nude photos of āyoung-looking womenā in the mansion. āReckless,ā people will say when they are uncovered in a police raid. Yet at some point, the protections he spent such good money on arenāt enough, and he is cast out. His victims, that journalist, were too determined. He is arrested, and the authorities deny him bail. They say he is a flight risk, with fake passports and attempted bribery of possible witnesses and all that wealth.
A poor man is born, and the world conspires to destroy him. Orta hurts his back at the Boysā Club and becomes hooked on Vicodin at age nine. The Boysā Club shuts down; he starts helping the Bloods with petty thefts. At thirteen years old, he is incarcerated at Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, āa facility so notorious for detainee abuse that it was forced to close forever in 2011.ā He and his friend Eric Garner want to get something to eat, and his friend is murdered. Orta films it. He filmed the cops a lot ā it felt like they were always in his neighborhood, always surveilling.
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https://twitter.com/AlanDersh/status/1155962389776351238
https://twitter.com/AlanDersh/status/1155962391944781826
https://twitter.com/AlanDersh/status/1155962393148579840
Was there like a ratio challenge issued over the weekend or some shit?
There was an opinion piece in TheNewYorker
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz , who was criticized for the better part of Monday due to the resurfacing of a 1997 op-ed he wrote (āStatutory Rape Is an Outdated Conceptā), has offered a response on Twitter to former George W. Bush chief White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter : āI stand by the constitutional (not moral) argument I offered in my controversial oped.ā
Before we get to what Painter said, letās delve into the context. It was a New Yorker profile that first drew renewed attention to this 1997 op-ed. Connie Bruck , in āAlan Dershowitz, Devilās Advocate,ā wrote the following about the op-ed, in which Dershowitz made a case for lowering the age of consent to 15:
So basically someone āgotā to Epstein in his cell - no one knows who, how or why - and thatās it? Story over? Is anyone following up on this? Where were there not cameras on him 24-7?
Must have had those police body cams that happen to shut off right when something happens.
The jail wonāt release any info on the incident
Iām of the opinion now that Epstein was the bagman, who was plucked from NY and given his seedyNess was allowed to work for these folks who then paid him large sums off $ to be able to do what they wanted on (his) their Island.
Imo there is no way he was blackmailing these peeps, and that the delay in Justice was to make sure he hadnāt hidden any such material or videos of the members of the club.
Iām also of the opinion that it was a tier system of parties that everyone went to but had different degrees/activities to which they took a part off.
After all whatās a few hundred mil to these folks for their desired hobby, itās nothing, when they pay 100ās mil for Clocks/Art etc.
My working theory is that Epstein was a procurer/service provider for the rich and powerful who wanted to fuck teenagers, but that some intelligence service or other at some point got control of him and tolerated his operation so they could use it as a source of kompromat. So the majority of people who used his services were not blackmailed, it was something resorted to only occasionally, as blackmailing too many people would quickly kill the golden goose. The federal government is not a monolithic entity, so my guess is that SDNY are simply not interested in backing off the way Acosta did. Itās also possible Epstein has outlived his usefulness and is getting thrown to the wolves. Like presumably people would be extremely wary of going anywhere near him after the original prosecution, so his activities were probably scaled way back at the least.
I also think Epsteinās suicide attempt was probably exactly that, a suicide attempt, because Tartaglione is a giant, muscular, scary dude who could kill Epstein with his bare hands pretty quickly. There are plenty of other possibilities though because we donāt really know what happened.
Edit: Although, IDK, on the ground with āmarks on his neckā sounds a lot like someone tried to choke him to death. Who knows.
Edit #2: Also, a high-value child molester sharing a cell with an unconvicted but obviously guilty multiple-murderer who is facing the death penalty if convicted is suspicious in its own right. Lunatic thing to do.
Nice job, Harvard.
Iām going to have to disagree with you on this one, in my own personal opinion blackmail was essential to his accumulation of wealth. See Wexner for example, why else would he have put over a billion dollars under management of an unproven ex trader from Bears? Not only that but sign the assets over with power of attorney over all of his affairs. Shit like that doesnāt happen unless he had major leverage over the guy.
Stolen from Twitter but basically it comes down to if someone is managing $1 billion of your money and you pay them something like $5 million a quarter for their great work nobody bats an eye but if youāre just giving some weirdo $20 million a year it raises a ton of red flags.
kre8tive, hereās something to think about: Epstein is in jail right now and Wexner is a free man. What about that suggests that Epstein had the power in that relationship? Iām suggesting here that the relationship is inverted. Epstein had money and power of attorney from Wexner because he needed those things to do Wexnerās bidding. Gallivanting around the world scooping up underage girls and pimping them out to people is dangerous work. That Epstein was just some schmuck raised up to do that work suggests he was the fall guy, not the mastermind, and the fact that he is in jail now is further evidence of this.
If Epstein was simply running a blackmail operation, word would get out and then people would steer clear of him. Instead he had people enthusiastically flocking to the island, flying on his jets, etc. It doesnāt really work as a theory.
By all accounts Epstein seems really fucking dumb. Really dumb. Like ākeep kiddie porn in your personal safe and make sure itās labeled āyoung girlsāā dumb. Would not be surprised if heās just the bagman.
I think ādumbā is going a bit far, but heās that kind of tech-bro smart where he thinks heās a lot smarter and more insightful than he is. At the Edge Foundationās 2005 Billionaireās Dinner, they asked the question āWhat do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?ā. Here is Epsteinās response, in part:
The great breakthrough will involve a new understanding of time ā¦ that moving through time is not free, and that consciousness itself will be seen to only be a time sensor, adding to the other sensors of light and space.
Just the purest gibberish. It reminds me of the Objectivist gatherings Alan Greenspan used to go to. These are smart people, but not smart enough to know the limits of their own capabilities.
Hereās a little anecdote to prove how smart this guy is
Then there is Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard. Epstein flew up to Kosslynās laboratory in Cambridge this year to witness an experiment that Kosslyn was conducting and Epstein was funding. Namely: Is it true that certain Tibetan monks are capable of holding a distinct mental image in their minds for twenty minutes straight? āWe disproved the thesis,ā says Kosslyn. "Jeff was on his cell phone most of the time ā he actually wanted to short the Tibetan market, because he thought the monk was so stupid.
What makes you think heās smart at all?