I agree with your final description of his role, a facilitator a fixer. But you don't say for whom and how someone of initially limited resources was able to finance his lifestyle or position. You mention $25m but this was just a small transaction. He was 'set up' by the two Rs, to undertake his role. What he described as 'fun' was organised by Maxwell whilst he majored in the facilitation of ideas and contacts covering the likes of Gate's vaccines, CB programmable money and ESG. In this role he was useful for a myriad of people and organisations who might ordinarily find it more difficult to work together. The 'genius' was the simplicity and openness of the facilitation. No evil mastermind, no obvious controller, just the facilitator and his initial backers.
1. What's surprising about the Profumo Scandal was that Male Buggery was not involved. Are ye not british? What's surprising about Lang et al. is that relatively few girls were involved. Are ye not french?
That said, I always thought of the britain of the 1960s not as confident, but as poor, backward, living off past glories and wishing they could be American. I am surprised that Lang is still kicking around.
2. "Just imagine, for a moment: if the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein appeared at your elbow and invited you to dinner that night with, say, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, would you accept?"
I dunno, why do you think humans go to zoos?
3. What Epstein offered to his rich friends was initiation. Sort of like how you had to put your todger into a dead pig's mouth in order to join The Bullingdon Club or kill someone to join The Gambino Family.
Anyway, the allegations are not that Epstein was conducting intelligence work in the sense of gathering or analyzing information, but rather, acting as an agent of influence, so to speak.
4. "I said above that todays’s ruling class is stupid, superficial and banal. I don’t think many will disagree, nor indeed do we need the Epstein papers to demonstrate it. Yet it hasn’t always been so."
Near as I can tell, 'twas ever thus. Just now they can't so easily hide it. They are stupid because they have power and thus can afford to be stupid, sort of like the schoolyard bully doesn't have to appreciate your witty repartee, because he can simply smash your face in, anytime he feels like it.
"Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!" - Canyonero theme song
5. "The result will not be a change of regimes, because there’s nothing to change to. Rather, we’ll see a continued massive weakening of traditional parties (fewer than a quarter of French people think their political system is working properly, for example.) This means many people not voting, and many more voting in protest for any group that doesn’t seem to be contaminated, but in reality is itself unlikely to be able to govern. It may well be that some countries—Britain and France are the two most obvious— will soon be without an effective government of any kind. "
Who cares? It does not matter that the political class are stupid, compromised, and amoral sociopaths at best, going to full-blown psychopaths. It does not matter that they and their policies are ragingly unpopular and they are forced to resort to ever more transparent wheezes to retain power. It does not matter if an MP wins an election by a handful of votes in a contested election where only 16% of eligible voters turn up to vote, and that candidate won only because he cheated.
What matters is that the orders of the political class continue to have the force of law and they are obeyed.
That is all.
Anyway, britain is well on the way to being a sort of glorified Arab regime. Poor and under political, technocratic, technological and cultural domination by foreign interests in the US and Israel who dictate foreign policy, and leave domestic affairs in the hands of criminal compradors with fancy titles.
Doesn't matter. It suits the people who matter just fine.
That an interesting way to see things to say the least.
And yes, the Jack Lang affair is emblematic of a system where corruption is no longer even necessary. In France (perhaps even more so than in other countries), we have hundreds of people who, being supposedly influential, have managed to trade their power to cause harm for positions at the head of various institutions where they are paid 5 to 10 times the minimum wage to do nothing. Except what they do best: make expense claims and lecture the population on morality. The idea of a major clean-up comes up regularly, but these people are attached to the system like ticks on a dog. So there's little doubt that Lang will quickly be replaced.
But, as Epstein might have been a 'fixer', I'm a little surprised that you don't even consider the possibility that he may have been involved, knowingly or not, in some compromising operations on behalf of one intelligence agency or another… It's still a hypothesis that comes up very often and might have the merit to explain a few things.
Excellent! The Epstein affair matters politically because it crystallizes the narrative of an international ruling class whose interests diverge from those of the public. The details of competing conspiracy theories like Q Anon will be gleefully debunked by the servants of the powerful, whilst Epstein has made their central intuitions an irrefutable orthodoxy among the silent majorities of Western democracies. What’s next, Aurelien?
Given a choice between the Shah of Iran -- one of the nastiest, wickedest chaps I could imagine -- and Bill Gates, I know how I'd prefer to spend an evening, no question.
I subscribe fully to the image of Epstein-as-fixer. During my decades of doing business with the Japanese, the fixer was often both a lubricant and a point of friction. The former to get business going, the latter when he knew too much, and wanted to keep getting a cut for a one-time introduction. Hence, his role has an internal contradiction.
Any fixer worth his salt however knows that while you can send your friends to diaper bars, you can't couple them with underage girls. Good clean fun (or not so clean, as it were), as opposed to criminal stuff. That Epstein didn't know that (and neither did his friends) shows how underdeveloped fixer culture is in the West.
The worse things become, the more they stay the same? I doubt it, and my historic template for this comes from Ibn Khaldun. Who in the 14th century observed that societies always evolve in the same fashion. They civilize; the civilized elite becomes lazy, corrupt, greedy and perverse; "young turks" (not his words) rebel violently and take over power; wash and repeat. It's going to happen here; the 2030s will be interesting.
Your essay takes the perspective of the old one complaining about the younger ones who do things differently and—most of all—without the old one’s advice, some kind of Kulturpessimismus as it is called in Germany. When concluding you write: »The result [of ›Epstein‹] will not be a change of regimes, because there’s nothing to change to.« I agree, but find it necessary to add: That was always the case. Power elites always behaved this way, Epstein is no new minus-level, but just normalcy. Their male libido drives them, and this will, of course, never change, it is male biology. Though a revolutionary change of the elite is a much hoped for scenario from my point of view (as well as Jefferson’s, Mao Zedong’s …), it is a fact of life that after some time, some years, everything will be back to … normalcy. By the way. It seems to me that all the elite types mentioned in the Epstein case are supporters of the Zionists’ genocide in Gaza. Why is that?
"Their male libido drives them, and this will, of course, never change, it is male biology."
No. It is a particular variety of male psychology, nurtured by older participants and a smaller cohort of misguided or weak women. There is nothing inevitable about this. It could be eradicated given the will and opportunity.
I’ll have to ask King David, then. What I know is that Gaza's population is 2.1 million, Hamas casualty figures show 70,000 dead. And Hamas itself, I have read, said 80% of the dead men - combatants, basically.
I also know Israel has let in aid trucks throughout the fighting.
I have read that about 40% of Gaza was destroyed by combat.
I am obviously misled by … someone. The TikTok videos that the Zionist sodateska posted, perhaps. Or the International Court of Justice, that creature of … Hamas. Or may be by all the meticulous research that Ilan Pappe conducted and ducumented? Tell me, David, please.
"Tell me, David, please." I already did. People who commit genocide don't let aid trucks in. They also don't stop combat to allow vaccinations to take place.
The ICJ? All they did was rule that South Africa has standing to bring charges of genocide against Israel. That's it. That's all.
A fluent liar is still just a liar. Produce your evidence from unbiased international sources, of sufficient and adequate food, medical and other necessary supplies being allowed into Gaza since the current resistance action by Hamas.
They do ! The Nazis negotiated with Zionist organizations for food parcels or goods exchange primarily centered on the 1933 Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement
Are you by any chance subscribing to accelerationist views cheering for the coming of the antichrist? LOL, jokes apart (and I repeat: pun intended!), thanks for yet another wednesday of mental sanity. Hopefully, we'll never learn that Aurelièn had been an AI bot all along.
Well, in Mandlestons case, I hope they eventually do, even if just ‘pour encourager les autres’.
“For this and other reasons, I don’t see any evidence that Epstein was a master-spy, at the centre of an organised international web of espionage, human trafficking and corruption, or indeed that such a web existed.” - well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, given your previous record of apologetics?
But incompetence is no proof of innocence in spying circles - more often it is proof of guilt. The facts are that Epstein had very close relations with a number of Israeli government and Mossad persons, including Robert Maxwell, buried as a hero in Israel. “No sane intelligence agency would have employed Epstein for anything important.” The supremably indiscreet and incompetent saga of MacLean, Burgess and Philby give the lie to that. Your institutionilisationism (if I can claim that as a useable word) is showing again in defence of the establishment view.
Apart from these quibbles - fair enough, and in the last paragrap - right on, comrade 🤯
Anneke Lucas talks about ritual abuse and murder by a previous generation of elites, to which she was victim and witness as a child. She tells of an ambitious young musician who can rise with their support - but to gain it, he must participate in their crimes. Putting aside his discomfort he does, and his career takes off.
The idea that Epstein's crimes were motivated by the desire to transgress leaves open an important question: how could such a conspiracy survive? Would many of us have believed that the depravity could be so extreme, that so many elites would be implicated? One would think a conspiracy like this would be a liability. After all, as you say, they hardly bothered to cover their tracks. But maybe it's not a liability at all: maybe it's adaptive. Maybe it's less that powerful people get away with terrible things and more that doing terrible things makes people powerful.
You mention that a previous generation of leaders had the shared experience of war. The extremes of war bring men together, turning strangers into brothers. In many traditional cultures war or rituals inspired by war initiate boys into manhood. These were often violent, sometimes even deadly. I think of a famous photograph of a native brave doing the sun dance, leaning back as ropes pull at hooks in his flesh.
You call Epstein's a techno-fascist cult. As I recall, religions are most compelling when their beliefs and rituals are irrational. Whereas ationality costs nothing, irrationality is a costly signal that binds the individual to the group. I read once about experimental communes in America. The few that did not rapidly fail due to free riding were those that had the most onerous religious practices at their core. The woke likewise adopt irrational practices as costly signals of belonging and reliability. In this context it seems to me that transgression and horror can fill the same role as irrationality.
Our culture has done away with initiation. Our leaders have not been to war. They have undergone no ordeal that gives them a sense of shared experience faith in one another's reliability. As trust erodes with the collapse of social capital we are increasingly isolated from one another. Hannah Arendt characterized power the ability to act in concert. The majority of us have lost our power. (We even claim that power per se, pouvoir - the ability to do - is bad!) In such a society group coherence can be an outsized advantage, more important than intelligence or skill.
Perhaps Epstein was inevitable. Individuals have pushed back time and again, but it seems they just hit a wall. We are many - but they are one. Unless we recover our power with social capital and trust generated through positive rituals and belonging we cannot hope to fill the vacuum that Epstein's mob stepped into. They are not degenerate because they are powerful. They are powerful because they are degenerate.
A few observations concerning the sub species Homo Horibilis.
How to characterize the super-duper rich in this time of high-speed trading and other dubious transactions but as a bunch of zeros?
Christine Keeler, the Anglo-Saxon version “Das Mädchen Rosemarie”, the difference being that Keeler survived.
Throughout the Ancient Regime there was no dearth of monsters, but unlike de Sade, they mostly didn’t feel the urge to publish their criminality for an extra thrill.
Epstein as the archetypal fixer? Sure, with evidently, connections running to the equally dead Maxwell Père and other arachnids like Ehud Barak, plus additional identifiable Mossadniks.
Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels live Devil With A Blue Dress: A blast from the past; don’t know about the sound quality though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKekoNOC7m4
As for the current international jet set, raining down rocket and/or jet fuel on us Proles, Taylor Swift-style, the operative word might be Unaccountable, in ways that make Trump’s boast that he could stand in the middle of Times Square and shoot somebody sound ever more too close for comfort.
I shall ever hereafter think of Sir Alec Douglas-Hume as "an aristocrat of no fixed abilities", ever so polite but utterly dismissive. Thank you for that. You may well be correct as to Epstein's not being an agent of ... pick a country ... but acting as a conduit, an enabler, primarily in his own interest with any actual intelligence passed a by-product. Was he less than the sum of his parts made to seen larger by the well-known names in his orbit? His legacy is to be a cottage industry for the near to medium term. Six million pages takes time to sift. Will the verdict, if there ever is one, find him a shaker of worlds or a footnote?
I agree with your final description of his role, a facilitator a fixer. But you don't say for whom and how someone of initially limited resources was able to finance his lifestyle or position. You mention $25m but this was just a small transaction. He was 'set up' by the two Rs, to undertake his role. What he described as 'fun' was organised by Maxwell whilst he majored in the facilitation of ideas and contacts covering the likes of Gate's vaccines, CB programmable money and ESG. In this role he was useful for a myriad of people and organisations who might ordinarily find it more difficult to work together. The 'genius' was the simplicity and openness of the facilitation. No evil mastermind, no obvious controller, just the facilitator and his initial backers.
It would be terribly naive to downplay this.
Lots to unpack:
1. What's surprising about the Profumo Scandal was that Male Buggery was not involved. Are ye not british? What's surprising about Lang et al. is that relatively few girls were involved. Are ye not french?
That said, I always thought of the britain of the 1960s not as confident, but as poor, backward, living off past glories and wishing they could be American. I am surprised that Lang is still kicking around.
2. "Just imagine, for a moment: if the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein appeared at your elbow and invited you to dinner that night with, say, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, would you accept?"
I dunno, why do you think humans go to zoos?
3. What Epstein offered to his rich friends was initiation. Sort of like how you had to put your todger into a dead pig's mouth in order to join The Bullingdon Club or kill someone to join The Gambino Family.
https://indi.ca/the-epstein-files-are-hazing-you-into-the-pedo-gang/
The difference being, Cameron probably liked it.
Anyway, the allegations are not that Epstein was conducting intelligence work in the sense of gathering or analyzing information, but rather, acting as an agent of influence, so to speak.
4. "I said above that todays’s ruling class is stupid, superficial and banal. I don’t think many will disagree, nor indeed do we need the Epstein papers to demonstrate it. Yet it hasn’t always been so."
Near as I can tell, 'twas ever thus. Just now they can't so easily hide it. They are stupid because they have power and thus can afford to be stupid, sort of like the schoolyard bully doesn't have to appreciate your witty repartee, because he can simply smash your face in, anytime he feels like it.
"Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!" - Canyonero theme song
5. "The result will not be a change of regimes, because there’s nothing to change to. Rather, we’ll see a continued massive weakening of traditional parties (fewer than a quarter of French people think their political system is working properly, for example.) This means many people not voting, and many more voting in protest for any group that doesn’t seem to be contaminated, but in reality is itself unlikely to be able to govern. It may well be that some countries—Britain and France are the two most obvious— will soon be without an effective government of any kind. "
Who cares? It does not matter that the political class are stupid, compromised, and amoral sociopaths at best, going to full-blown psychopaths. It does not matter that they and their policies are ragingly unpopular and they are forced to resort to ever more transparent wheezes to retain power. It does not matter if an MP wins an election by a handful of votes in a contested election where only 16% of eligible voters turn up to vote, and that candidate won only because he cheated.
What matters is that the orders of the political class continue to have the force of law and they are obeyed.
That is all.
Anyway, britain is well on the way to being a sort of glorified Arab regime. Poor and under political, technocratic, technological and cultural domination by foreign interests in the US and Israel who dictate foreign policy, and leave domestic affairs in the hands of criminal compradors with fancy titles.
Doesn't matter. It suits the people who matter just fine.
That an interesting way to see things to say the least.
And yes, the Jack Lang affair is emblematic of a system where corruption is no longer even necessary. In France (perhaps even more so than in other countries), we have hundreds of people who, being supposedly influential, have managed to trade their power to cause harm for positions at the head of various institutions where they are paid 5 to 10 times the minimum wage to do nothing. Except what they do best: make expense claims and lecture the population on morality. The idea of a major clean-up comes up regularly, but these people are attached to the system like ticks on a dog. So there's little doubt that Lang will quickly be replaced.
But, as Epstein might have been a 'fixer', I'm a little surprised that you don't even consider the possibility that he may have been involved, knowingly or not, in some compromising operations on behalf of one intelligence agency or another… It's still a hypothesis that comes up very often and might have the merit to explain a few things.
Interesting. I was teaching at Science's-Po at the time in question. Great students, terrible school.
Excellent! The Epstein affair matters politically because it crystallizes the narrative of an international ruling class whose interests diverge from those of the public. The details of competing conspiracy theories like Q Anon will be gleefully debunked by the servants of the powerful, whilst Epstein has made their central intuitions an irrefutable orthodoxy among the silent majorities of Western democracies. What’s next, Aurelien?
Great to have someone of your calibre delving into this in a way that looks to the big picture. Your conclusions are entirely plausible.
Beautiful and thoughtful, thank you!
Given a choice between the Shah of Iran -- one of the nastiest, wickedest chaps I could imagine -- and Bill Gates, I know how I'd prefer to spend an evening, no question.
I subscribe fully to the image of Epstein-as-fixer. During my decades of doing business with the Japanese, the fixer was often both a lubricant and a point of friction. The former to get business going, the latter when he knew too much, and wanted to keep getting a cut for a one-time introduction. Hence, his role has an internal contradiction.
Any fixer worth his salt however knows that while you can send your friends to diaper bars, you can't couple them with underage girls. Good clean fun (or not so clean, as it were), as opposed to criminal stuff. That Epstein didn't know that (and neither did his friends) shows how underdeveloped fixer culture is in the West.
The worse things become, the more they stay the same? I doubt it, and my historic template for this comes from Ibn Khaldun. Who in the 14th century observed that societies always evolve in the same fashion. They civilize; the civilized elite becomes lazy, corrupt, greedy and perverse; "young turks" (not his words) rebel violently and take over power; wash and repeat. It's going to happen here; the 2030s will be interesting.
Musk not competent? That’s pretty daft.
Well Musk is competent at soaking taxpayers! Your point is well-taken.
Your essay takes the perspective of the old one complaining about the younger ones who do things differently and—most of all—without the old one’s advice, some kind of Kulturpessimismus as it is called in Germany. When concluding you write: »The result [of ›Epstein‹] will not be a change of regimes, because there’s nothing to change to.« I agree, but find it necessary to add: That was always the case. Power elites always behaved this way, Epstein is no new minus-level, but just normalcy. Their male libido drives them, and this will, of course, never change, it is male biology. Though a revolutionary change of the elite is a much hoped for scenario from my point of view (as well as Jefferson’s, Mao Zedong’s …), it is a fact of life that after some time, some years, everything will be back to … normalcy. By the way. It seems to me that all the elite types mentioned in the Epstein case are supporters of the Zionists’ genocide in Gaza. Why is that?
"Their male libido drives them, and this will, of course, never change, it is male biology."
No. It is a particular variety of male psychology, nurtured by older participants and a smaller cohort of misguided or weak women. There is nothing inevitable about this. It could be eradicated given the will and opportunity.
They certainly are not the victims of their libido, I agree. I did not want to declare them innocent. They are responsible for their deeds, of course.
There's a genocide in Gaza?! Really? How do you know?
„David«? The King? He should know.
I’ll have to ask King David, then. What I know is that Gaza's population is 2.1 million, Hamas casualty figures show 70,000 dead. And Hamas itself, I have read, said 80% of the dead men - combatants, basically.
I also know Israel has let in aid trucks throughout the fighting.
I have read that about 40% of Gaza was destroyed by combat.
None of that sounds like a genocide.
So, Jörg, why do you think there was a genocide?
I am obviously misled by … someone. The TikTok videos that the Zionist sodateska posted, perhaps. Or the International Court of Justice, that creature of … Hamas. Or may be by all the meticulous research that Ilan Pappe conducted and ducumented? Tell me, David, please.
"Tell me, David, please." I already did. People who commit genocide don't let aid trucks in. They also don't stop combat to allow vaccinations to take place.
The ICJ? All they did was rule that South Africa has standing to bring charges of genocide against Israel. That's it. That's all.
A fluent liar is still just a liar. Produce your evidence from unbiased international sources, of sufficient and adequate food, medical and other necessary supplies being allowed into Gaza since the current resistance action by Hamas.
They do ! The Nazis negotiated with Zionist organizations for food parcels or goods exchange primarily centered on the 1933 Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement
You seem to know a lot of stuff which has no factual basis. The conclusion must be that you are just a paid-up Hasbarist.
Are you by any chance subscribing to accelerationist views cheering for the coming of the antichrist? LOL, jokes apart (and I repeat: pun intended!), thanks for yet another wednesday of mental sanity. Hopefully, we'll never learn that Aurelièn had been an AI bot all along.
AI bots are known for being consistently conformist, so not consistent enough to be a bot
Great writing. This clears everything up.
“They bang you up in prison for that.”
Well, in Mandlestons case, I hope they eventually do, even if just ‘pour encourager les autres’.
“For this and other reasons, I don’t see any evidence that Epstein was a master-spy, at the centre of an organised international web of espionage, human trafficking and corruption, or indeed that such a web existed.” - well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, given your previous record of apologetics?
But incompetence is no proof of innocence in spying circles - more often it is proof of guilt. The facts are that Epstein had very close relations with a number of Israeli government and Mossad persons, including Robert Maxwell, buried as a hero in Israel. “No sane intelligence agency would have employed Epstein for anything important.” The supremably indiscreet and incompetent saga of MacLean, Burgess and Philby give the lie to that. Your institutionilisationism (if I can claim that as a useable word) is showing again in defence of the establishment view.
Apart from these quibbles - fair enough, and in the last paragrap - right on, comrade 🤯
Maybe Epstein's role was to build trust.
Anneke Lucas talks about ritual abuse and murder by a previous generation of elites, to which she was victim and witness as a child. She tells of an ambitious young musician who can rise with their support - but to gain it, he must participate in their crimes. Putting aside his discomfort he does, and his career takes off.
The idea that Epstein's crimes were motivated by the desire to transgress leaves open an important question: how could such a conspiracy survive? Would many of us have believed that the depravity could be so extreme, that so many elites would be implicated? One would think a conspiracy like this would be a liability. After all, as you say, they hardly bothered to cover their tracks. But maybe it's not a liability at all: maybe it's adaptive. Maybe it's less that powerful people get away with terrible things and more that doing terrible things makes people powerful.
You mention that a previous generation of leaders had the shared experience of war. The extremes of war bring men together, turning strangers into brothers. In many traditional cultures war or rituals inspired by war initiate boys into manhood. These were often violent, sometimes even deadly. I think of a famous photograph of a native brave doing the sun dance, leaning back as ropes pull at hooks in his flesh.
You call Epstein's a techno-fascist cult. As I recall, religions are most compelling when their beliefs and rituals are irrational. Whereas ationality costs nothing, irrationality is a costly signal that binds the individual to the group. I read once about experimental communes in America. The few that did not rapidly fail due to free riding were those that had the most onerous religious practices at their core. The woke likewise adopt irrational practices as costly signals of belonging and reliability. In this context it seems to me that transgression and horror can fill the same role as irrationality.
Our culture has done away with initiation. Our leaders have not been to war. They have undergone no ordeal that gives them a sense of shared experience faith in one another's reliability. As trust erodes with the collapse of social capital we are increasingly isolated from one another. Hannah Arendt characterized power the ability to act in concert. The majority of us have lost our power. (We even claim that power per se, pouvoir - the ability to do - is bad!) In such a society group coherence can be an outsized advantage, more important than intelligence or skill.
Perhaps Epstein was inevitable. Individuals have pushed back time and again, but it seems they just hit a wall. We are many - but they are one. Unless we recover our power with social capital and trust generated through positive rituals and belonging we cannot hope to fill the vacuum that Epstein's mob stepped into. They are not degenerate because they are powerful. They are powerful because they are degenerate.
I love the dress down of it all, which is apt and smell all too real.
On corruption in the US, two nice books:
Zephyr Teachout - Corruption in America From Benjamin Franklins Snuff Box to Citizens United
Joe Bageant - Dear Hunting with Jesus - Dispatches from America's Class War
A few observations concerning the sub species Homo Horibilis.
How to characterize the super-duper rich in this time of high-speed trading and other dubious transactions but as a bunch of zeros?
Christine Keeler, the Anglo-Saxon version “Das Mädchen Rosemarie”, the difference being that Keeler survived.
Throughout the Ancient Regime there was no dearth of monsters, but unlike de Sade, they mostly didn’t feel the urge to publish their criminality for an extra thrill.
Epstein as the archetypal fixer? Sure, with evidently, connections running to the equally dead Maxwell Père and other arachnids like Ehud Barak, plus additional identifiable Mossadniks.
On the lighter side; she even got the gin blossoms right. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/bill-clinton-blue-dress-painting-jeffrey-epstein-1628437
Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels live Devil With A Blue Dress: A blast from the past; don’t know about the sound quality though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKekoNOC7m4
As for the current international jet set, raining down rocket and/or jet fuel on us Proles, Taylor Swift-style, the operative word might be Unaccountable, in ways that make Trump’s boast that he could stand in the middle of Times Square and shoot somebody sound ever more too close for comfort.
+And not just rocket fuel either: https://www.propublica.org/article/spacex-faa-launch-airlines-safety-explosions-florida-caribbean
I shall ever hereafter think of Sir Alec Douglas-Hume as "an aristocrat of no fixed abilities", ever so polite but utterly dismissive. Thank you for that. You may well be correct as to Epstein's not being an agent of ... pick a country ... but acting as a conduit, an enabler, primarily in his own interest with any actual intelligence passed a by-product. Was he less than the sum of his parts made to seen larger by the well-known names in his orbit? His legacy is to be a cottage industry for the near to medium term. Six million pages takes time to sift. Will the verdict, if there ever is one, find him a shaker of worlds or a footnote?