Epstein Redux
But just to take a totally different perspective because I like to get on both sides of every issue on the record
Gentle reader,
Since I spun many a theory in my last blast, or stack, or whatever, I wanted to give you my take after it had faced the cold, hard light of day.
We got a problem in this country. The problem is that there are so many goddamn weird conspiracy theories, with such a distinct weirdo culture about them, that most people have gotten the message that if someone sounds like a total crank and they’re speculating to a large degree, one should not trust what that person has to say. But the sad fact is there are some REAL ‘conspiracies’ or ‘cabals’ that don’t necessitate any knowedge on the part of any of their number that they’re actually a part of some conspiracy or cabal. (More on this in a HOT second)
And I should say, while I still am very skeptical (in light of the coroner’s report today) that Epstein killed himself without encouragement and assistance at minimum, you should definitely check here and here for articles about the facility in Manhattan where he was being housed, as they do make his suicide seem a bit more practically plausible. (One of these precedes this case by a couple of years, one has been written since Epstein’s death). One person who had been to MCC and Guantanamo Bay (I believe it was one of the 9/11 guys, whatever his name was) said the conditions at Gitmo were much better. Like — seriously. I never thought I would hear that there was a prison in the US that was probably WORSE than Guantanamo.
THAT is messed up, and reflects a much bigger problem I’m not even trying to get into here. It also makes it seem more plausible he could have found a way to kill himself. At the very least, it tells us that guards not doing checks they’re supposed to do (and, in one case in one of those articles, raping a prisoner instead) and the idea that he was on this constant watch lockdown needs to be dialed down a bit.
HAVING SAID THAT, we also know that a whoooole lot of jailhouse suicides aren’t really suicides, and there are all kinds of strange facts here, and a lot of us might really want to get to the bottom of it, and I just fear that we never will and that it doesn’t matter as much as I thought at first anyway. Let me ‘splain myself.
The way this has been handled makes it almost guaranteed that there won’t be accountability for the billionaire johns that (allegedy… in this case, ‘more than most likely’) that took advantage of Epstein’s services. Maybe some of them will get found out based on evidence that has been gathered. Maybe they won’t. I just have a feeling that the details people (myself included) think they’re hungry for right now don’t make as much of a difference as we might feel they do.
Because look, if you kill a cockroach in your house, do you sit back and go “no more roaches forever?” I mean, I usually do, but, you shouldn’t, because that’s just a fantasy you’re indulging in as you pat yourself on the back for getting rid of the problem. Did you get rid of the problem? You did nawt.
I basically realized I had to make a choice today: keep following this Epstein shit, get on some vigilante DIY surveillance along with whoever was flying those drones around his island, start compiling lists of dates and names and have one of those bulletin boards with string between different index cards indicating links between individuals and cabinet undersecretaries. And for what? The big-picture problem is not the individuals here, even though we reaaaally want them to be. Because this shit is so vile and the things hinted at in the evidence are so intensely bad we want it to just be some bad guys. A cabal that once stopped is stopped for good.
That’s the problem with conspiracy theories, though. It’s never possible for things to be as simple as our story-seeking minds want them to be. There are root causes here. Some we may not be able to change. Some we might. So here are my main takeaways.
Here are the only things that we can truly know in discussing this case.
Human beings are great apes. Incredible apes (said in Trump voice, not how I actually feel). But also, like, big apes. If you go back anywhere between 4 to 10 million years, based on the estimates, if you’re willing to add enough modifiers (e.g. ‘a million times removed’ or whatever) you will find a common ancestor, some barely hominid-looking lady, who gave birth to two kids, one who would go on to be the first human and one who’d go on to be a goddamn bonobo. (OK, I admit I just took a wild swing at that last part, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.)
There is a huge amount of variety in behavior among ape species, and we sometimes seem to be more like the apes that are vicious, selfish assholes than the ones that give each other oral sex all the time (bonobos for sure that time, know this to be fact, read it in a book so it’s gotta be). There is some variation here, a little from columns A thru ZED, (yeah I went there), and we for sure stayed alive on the margins thanks to our super advanced abilities at communication that only a couple other species on earth have been able to develop for themselves. We are built to communicate and to work together, but there are still people that truly just don’t give a fuck about others.
I don’t know why I wrote that last thing. the stupid point is human behavior is incredibly variable and there are a lot of people that want to do bad things of all kinds.
Most people who do bad things eventually get caught, or are at least isolated out of fear of getting caught or whatever, and in a lot of cases it would seem it’s so draining that people eventually WANT to get caught -- a result of stress from the very real expectation that one might get caught.
There is only one way to ALMOST make sure you never get caught, and that’s to hold or to be an indispensable party to the holder(s) of the powers of the state. the nation you live in. If you have enough money, you can not get caught until someone gets super-intrepid over you and breaks news on you. And even then, (as we saw with Epstein’s return after his last arrest) apparently once you’re in the elite club, you’re in. There are all kinds of reports about how he resumed right where he left off in NY social life, saying to people “I’m an offender, not a pedophile, it’s the difference between murder and stealing a bagel,” and that was literally good enough for them. We’re talking the upper crust upper crust.
That’s the conspiracy here. It’s the thing that’s right in front of your face. It’s the fact that, as candidates are pointing out right now, what has been probably the biggest company in the history of the world, Amazon, among others at the tip-top of the mip-mop profit-wise, doesn’t have to pay any income tax. More generally for individuals and families that are wealthy, they have been allowed to keep more and more of it at a rising rate throughout the latter part of the 20th century, and they’ve been allowed to give even more of it to give to their children. Some of their children do go on to (I guess) contribute to society. But some just have a fuckin random several million dollars because who gave them their chromosomes.
A conspiracist might say Amazon sent all their lobbyists to Washington to get a tax break in Trump’s thing specifically for them and then had Bezos and Trump start a war to cover it up. Yeah, maybe. But doesn’t it make a LOT more sense that all the super-profitable companies have a shared interest in that law, and that they didn’t necessarily need to all get together to talk it over? That the pressure from all of them was ‘we don’t want to pay taxes and now you guys got Trump in there, so deliver for us’? Actually, it was. It’s just that they didn’t have to say it for the current gov’t to know it.
It’s simpler than that. Life is unfairly easy for a very small number of people in this world. They skate on serious charges and cases where a poor person wouldn’t, thanks to well-connected and super-talented lawyers that cater to them. They have polluted and ruined our planet, for fuck’s sake, and are not currently working on some chain gang on the moon. There’s no justice there. And if they get caught in something super serious, oh well, they just pay millions in damages, and when you have billions, you can afford millions (learn more in my upcoming series of economics seminars).
This is why I feel like this needs to be the moment where #MeToo and Occupy come together. #MeToo is all about how the power dynamic gets exploited. There are plenty of power dynamics that don’t arise directly out of the way we run our economy, of course. But one that seems like it’s been a sure winner in the cases of all these guys is the money power dynamic. The ability to change someone’s life completely where to you it wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket. (Or in Epstein’s case, the ability to exploit teenage lack of understanding of the worth of money, in which case the bucket stays totally dry).
The same people are the ones that made these insanely risky bets on shitty mortgages and almost sent this country into a great depression, and the fact that we just bailed them out, let them rebrand how subprime is talked about and what other assets it could extend to, and let them start again? Well, this ole feller thinks that means we’re heading for Great Depression II: The Secret of the Ooze.
What’s the one thing in common? No accountability if you have enough money. In a country where people are locked up constantly over total bullshit like having a joint in their pocket and having a tail light out while they’re driving home from a second shift job, for example, there are also apparently these intense bacchanals where all human norms are violated, people are traumatized for life, etc., and a lot of them that were probably looking at trouble are relieved that Epstein died. And because the mega-rich can get whatever outcome they want if they’ve made all the right ‘friends’ in power (I’ve never made a friend by giving them tons of money, but do you) it is going to remain entirely reasonable for someone to argue that either a person that Epstein could have named or several of them got together and figured out this hit.
I’m not denying there are all kinds of red flags if you start looking at it that way. But since I went off on it yesterday, I thought I should come back with a bigger picture perspective.
Oh, one other thing. I keep noticing that I should really proofread these before I send them. I have rambled a lot, have made some glaring errors in punctuation, have left whole sentences unfinished, etc. But the thing is, if I start doing that, if i start taking this too seriously, I will lose all my time to it. I have to just write it quick and hit ‘blastoff!!!!’ which is for real the button you press on substack to publish*…. SO WHAT DOES THIS TELL US ABOUT THE NASA-SUBSTACK CONNECTION??
*No, it isn’t. It actually says “publish & send email.” don’t mind if I do.
SHIT hey guys it’s heath sorry I wasn’t able to let you guys know what went down after my last post came out, but, listen, I didn’t write this one and I’m deeply freaked out… please come help me!!!! S.O.S. dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot.
they read my substack and got some deep learning AI to learn to write pointlessly long sentences the same way I do and they came and got me and said i was in big trouble and now im sharing a cell with this cop from upstate new york who did a quadruple murder. like, yo, this is real - don’t ask me how I managed to slip this in at the end - i won’t be able to hear you because this is something i am writing for you to read later, and it doesn’t work like that. shit.
never mind that - point is, im being held at Guantanamo bay, charged with owning the elite with a dead-on accurate description of their very intentional network of perversion that despite being just my gut instinct, got every single detail correct — the ‘good’ cop when they were questioning me the odds of that were about as long as filling out a perfect bracket during March Madness, so I’m pretty proud of myself for that, but… hmm. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah! I’m in jail and I OH NOOOO WHAT ARE YOU DOING OFFICER TARTAGLIONE NO I DONT WANT TO LEARN HOW DO TO A BACKFLIP OFF A BUNKBED.. OK GOOGLE STOP SPEECH TO TEXT .. SHIT IT DIDN’T HEAR ME… I’LL TRY AGAIN RIGHT AFTER I FINISH SAYING THIS SENTENCE