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Updated: My #OpDeathEaters review of Investigation Discovery’s “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” airing Sun May 31, 2020

Note: I published this review on 31 May 2020. It received substantial attention, including more than 1,300 retweets of my tweet announcing the post. Now, on 7 June 2020, I’m updating the review a little. Adding a table of contents, the #OpDeathEaters goals, links to research on RMS and Bill Gates and others, more stuff, plus some copyediting and proofreading. Thanks! (Note also that today 7 June 2020 it’s reported that the United States Department of InJustice is demanding the United Kingdom hand over Prince Andrew to appear in court over Jeffrey Epstein child trafficking links.)

Table of contents

  • Intro – #OpDeathEaters trending; the common denominator for street executions by cops and child rape by pedosadists is impunity
  • What “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” does sorta right
  • What “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” does wrong
  • Practical and realistic solutions to impunity
  • Recommended reading
  • Epstein survivor Maria Farmer: “2020 is the year when…”

Intro

Today (31 May 2020), #OpDeathEaters trends on Twitter. The three tweets in just a bit below, all regarding the trending, address how the hashtag and Anonymous operation, founded in 2014 by Heather Marsh as a continuation and amalgamation of earlier ops she’d previously initiated (#OpGabon, #OpRohingya, #OpCanary, #OpGTMO, as well as others), pre-dated the Pizzagate and QAnon efforts to drown it out, and like previous waves, gains traction now.

Illustrating academic credibility, here are excerpts from criminology professor Dr Michael Salter’s book published by Routledge in 2016, Crime, Justice and Social Media, discussing #OpDeathEaters’ goals and more than half a decade of ongoing online public research drawn from court pleadings and investigative journalism reports and similar reputable sources, by thousands of accountholders, into child trafficking by the powerful. The #OpDeathEaters Frequently Asked Questions is also a good place to start; it’s from 2014.

https://twitter.com/TheBoobla/status/1267119564271190018

Tonight (31 May 2020), the US cable television channel Investigation Discovery, known for true crime programming, airs at 9 p.m. Eastern a three-hour special called “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” The first third was released on 25 May 2020 online, but the show as a whole premiers tonight. A marketing staffperson from Investigation Discovery gave me advance access to video screener files of the entire special. I watched it early, to review it for you here in this post.

Why do Jeffrey Epstein and the ongoing international child trafficking networks associated with him and many others matter while, during more than 100,000 pandemic deaths here in the United States, this country is on fire like a Seattle cop car photographed yesterday (30 May 2020), pictured below the following stark New York Times front page from 24 May 2020 with a pic superimposed over it of Trump on one of his many golf outings as president. “What better place to make backroom deals, blackmail guests, and contact transnational organized crime assets than in the middle of an empty golf course and resort”, @YourAnonCentral tweeted 7 Sept 2019.

Trump golfing superimposed on the stark Sunday 24 May 2020 New York Times front page with the names of the nearly 100,000 dead from coronavirus
Seattle cop car on fire during protest 30 May 2020

Simply put, Jeffrey Epstein and all the other powerful pedosadists matter presently because (among other reasons) the common problem with both VIPredators raping kids and street executions of black people is impunity: the exemption from punishment or consequences. This tweet from @YourAnonCentral, an account I recommend you follow on Twitter, explains:

You can skip the Investigation Discovery special if you want, unless you want full details on the program, because I’ll tell you my take on what the program does sorta right, what it does wrong, and most importantly, link you to better readings on the topic and practical, realistic solutions for ending impunity. That way tonight you can fill, or support those who are filling, the streets.

Also currently happening (7 June 2020), #opTrumpTweets: twitter users replying to Donald Trump’s tweets, posting #OpDeathEaters information. In other words, lately if you click on one of Trump’s individual tweets, the top reply may well be about evidence of his pedosadism. See this thread from @OpDeathEaters, an account I reckon you might should follow, for more:

What “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” does sorta right

  • The special opens effectively with audio from Jane Doe 3 talking with police: “Jeffrey’s gonna get me. You guys realize that, right? He’s gonna figure this out, and he’s gonna … I’m not safe now. You understand that, right? I’m not safe.” If humanity doesn’t value the lives of children, then logically, we go extinct.
  • The special incorporates many of the photos linking idols with Jeffrey Epstein, which effectively make the clear point of the blackmail power of pedosadist networks. Below, I provide screenshots from the program:
Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton at a table together
Jeffrey Epstein, former US president Bill Clinton
Dirty Dersh (Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz) and Jeffrey Epstein
Fugitive pimp for child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, with scared Elon Musk
Prince Andrew walking in New York City with Jeffrey Epstein
Trump and Melania Knauss, Jeffrey Epstein, and fugitive Ghislaine Maxwell
Donald Trump looks like he’s trying to impress arms-folded Jeffrey Epstein. This was at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in 1992.
Same, years before Trump in the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, in line with his usual garbage, bragging about assault.
  • The special also includes some good to great quotes from various interviewees. I reproduce them below.

Lawyer for Epstein victims, Lisa Bloom: “We are talking about at a minimum hundred of victims, potentially thousands — I believe it was probably thousands of victims. Because I believe those who came forward are just the tip of the iceberg. Most of them are never going to want to come forward.”

Writer Conchita Sarnoff: “The Epstein case goes from Palm Beach to New York to the White House to Buckingham Palace. Where you have politicians [image of Bill Clinton shown], business leaders [image of Bill Gates shown], opinion makers [image of Elon Musk with Ghislaine Maxwell shown], very powerful people implicated [image of Prince Andrew shown] in one way or another — is so expansive, it is a global case. It crosses the political barrier and it is the longest-running child sex trafficking case in US legal history to date.”

Writer Conchita Sarnoff: “What this case has, I think, shown is that we live in a society with two systems of justice: one for the rich, and one for the poor. And Epstein knew this all along.”

TV journalist Diane Dimond: “All these people, from federal prosecutors to politicians to prison officials, say ‘There will be accountability’ — really? I don’t see any indictments. No accountability at all.”

Lawyer for Epstein victims Spencer Kuvin (I believe this is an outtake): “Now that the world is coming to a realization that really what’s, you know, happening by powerful men, by wealthy men, abusing young women and taking advantage of young women.”

Writer Conchita Sarnoff (I believe this is an outtake): “government officials looked the other way; and newspaper editors and networks; and everyone looked the other way, for many years.” She also says (I believe in another outtake) the case implicates “politicians, bankers, heads of universities, heads of think tanks”

  • The special also includes the deposition footage where Jeffrey Epstein is asked about his notoriously “egg-shaped” (or oval-shaped) penis. This is an important fact about Jeffrey Epstein because 1) especially back then, a way of corroborating his victims’ stories, and 2) it’s a weapon for keeping the story in the news. The question-asker during the deposition is lawyer for Epstein victims Spencer Kuvin, who explains in the special that 3) it was a power move by him against Epstein (Eggstein?). “I wanted Epstein to know that despite his wealth, despite his power, and despite who he felt he held influence over, I didn’t care. I didn’t care who he was; he wasn’t going to intimidate me. And I was going to ask him the most personal, embarrassing question I could possibly think of.” and “My hope was, the question alone would get him upset, that he’d slip up, he’d get mad at me. And he essentially pled the fifth to every question that was asked of him.”

Spray #JeffreyEggstein on the White House.

  • The special at least mentions the flight logs (published by Gawker in 2015) for Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane which according to multiple of his associates had secret surveillance equipment installed (for blackmail). Among those on that jet in 2002 and 2003, for a flight to Africa, Bill Clinton (soon after his White House terms ended), entertainers Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey, and from the Obama administration, Obama appointee Gayle Smith.

Finally, given that most investigative journalism doesn’t include victims’ voices much or center them, except as impersonal blocks of hard-to-hear Jane Doe voices on police tapes that then well-dressed WASP-y professional interviewees explain to the camera lenses, “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” presented more from victims, especially Maria Farmer, than I expected.

The audience is shown recorded footage of Epstein victim Chauntae Davis answering a reporter: “Do I feel his death is an appropriate punishment? Absolutely not. It gives nobody justice, and it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.”

Maria Farmer gets airtime to say: “I would love to see justice in the form of every co-conspirator needs to be behind bars. They belong there. They’re criminals.”

There’s more great stuff from Maria Farmer regarding her paintings of Epstein’s network and victims/survivors. I will share much of that at the end of this post.

However, the good aspects of this special, most of which honestly anyone can find with some decent Internet searches, don’t make up for the wrongs.

What “Who killed Jeffrey Epstein?” does wrong

Click through to see more #OpDeathEaters research into Bill Gates
  • Nor does the special touch another ‘tech god,’ Richard M. Stallman aka RMS. Here’s an #OpDeathEaters thread with research into him.
Click through to see many more pedosadism quotes and sources for RMS

The pro-pedosadism payoff of keeping the focus mostly on Jeffrey Epstein as an individual personality is that he becomes a fall guy, and audiences do not look at the ongoing global child trafficking networks. The special fails in this regard, though not as badly as I feared, because it does talk at least some about other individuals, such as Brunel (see below), at least a tiny bit, perhaps a reflection of pressure from interviewees, increasingly sophisticated Internet-attuned audiences, etc. Still, to really keep up with these ongoing global child trafficking networks in a dynamic way as we must, we need a framework for a global commons for public data collaboration, namely GetGee.

There are plenty of other powerful pedosadists the special avoids. Click to this @OpDeathEaters thread and page up or page down to see links to threads investigating particular VIPredators. Today (7 June 2020), @OpDeathEaters tweeted: Despite the fact that Epstein is a far bigger story than media is trying to reduce it to, Epstein is not that big a deal compared to many – Demmink, Kashoggi, Berlusconi, Gaddafi, Bongo, Brunel, so many in Russia and China … networks in every state and industry. #opDeathEaters

Searching twitter for @OpDeathEaters tweets or #OpDeathEaters tweets is another great way to find information on whichever VIPredator. For example, in January, I ridiculed FOX News personality Tucker Carlson for giving airtime to a pseudo-expert warning of the “global tyranny of the metric system,” but I neglected to check for #OpDeathEaters research into Carlson. It’s easy to do. After logging in to twitter (which seems to yield better search results), at https://search.twitter.com just type “tucker carlson from:OpDeathEaters” or “tucker carlson from:OpDeathEatersUS” or “tucker carlson from:YourAnonCentral”. You can also try https://twitter.com/search-advanced or study online how to improve search techniques for social media. Whenever you’re thinking or writing about some celebully or other, it should become a habit to search #OpDeathEaters or from:OpDeathEaters on twitter to see the real story behind the personality.

  • The special uses a great deal of false, soft, go-to-sleep language that normalizes pedosadism. This thread from the @OpDeathEaters twitter account, which you should follow along with the United States-specific @OpDeathEatersUS account, teaches you the basics.
Please click through for much more

For more about how language controls your thoughts and you have a right to change your words and own your thoughts, consult authors George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Heather Marsh, or a good dictionary, particularly etymologies.

Below, examples of offending, false language from “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” Often, the key problem is the false language conflates sex with rape.

  • Forensic pathologist Cyril H. Wecht is given airtime to say “the kinds of crimes that Jeffrey Epstein was charged with — fooling around with 14, 15, 16 year old girls.” Epstein was not “fooling around,” he was raping children.
  • For Jeffrey Epstein’s death circumstances in jail, the special discusses US attorney general William P. Barr saying “I was appalled […] perfect storm of screw-ups.” The special doesn’t explain that “perfect storm of screw-ups” is obvious bullshit meant to evoke sympathy for imaginary kindhearted authorities and their accidental blundering, and further, William P. Barr’s ridiculous focus on William P. Barr’s emotions, limbic system, etc, whether he was or was not appalled or perhaps shocked or would it be startled? No one should give a shit about complicit Barr’s alleged emotional reaction to Epstein’s death circumstances; his dialogue is a ploy to redirect attention toward the feelings of a person in a fancy suit, him. Don’t let these people redirect.
  • Over images of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, the special at one point describes Epstein as being connected with “big name people, famous people,” thus putting some of the most powerful people in the world on par with Kim Kardashian, the Real Housewives of $City, etc. It may have been a mistake of that particular interviewee — from my own appearances in documentaries, sometimes you get one try; the camera’s there for ninety minutes on an afternoon, and in my experience and from reading, filmmakers have way too much power over the final version relative to interviewees — but audiences hearing such language endlessly makes generations forget or fear using or even just reading other words: criminal conspirator. rapist. pedosadist.
  • Epstein “should have been safe there” somebody in the documentary said of MCC jail which locked up Epstein. No. Whether it’s prisons (hear activist Azzurra Crispino discuss prison conditions on Democracy Now!) or psych wards (see Disability Rights Washington’s May 2020 report on the hospital to jail pipeline), nobody who’s not trying to propagandize thinks such lockups are safe. Doesn’t take a genius.
  • TV journalist Ashleigh Banfield says Epstein was “hiding his sexual proclivities” Raping kids is not a sexual proclivity; sex is not an attack. Epstein was covering up his participation in raping and child trafficking in hopes of capturing more prey, escaping reprisals, etc.
  • Someone (I forget who) in the special describes Jean Luc Brunel, owner of the MC2 modeling agency, as a “French modeling scout” rather than accused child trafficker. I would have to watch again, but I believe the special does not say that Brunel actually owns MC2; I believe it uses vague language. More on Brunel.

There are also the completely wrong interviewees. To take just one example, convicted debt collector and Epstein financier partner Steven Hoffenberg says in the special that “The victims are getting zero right now.” Interview others, especially more Epstein victims who if they require more protection to go on camera must therefore be furnished more protection. More on “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” interviewee Steven Hoffenberg:

The sensationalizing throughout the special belongs to entertainment, not education. Spooky tech noir music to get your heart racing plays in the background of “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” as a deep male voice slowly narrates about how an ultra-rich pedo somehow associated with ‘famous people’ ‘fools around’ with young girls and gets away with it. That does not nurture the individual minds and social environments required for the public to impose justice.

Finally, the special completely evades the work of thousands of #OpDeathEaters participants and the op’s founder Heather Marsh, not mentioning it whatsoever, when in fact in February 2018, on an Oxford Union panel about whistleblowing, which that supposed “last bastion of free speech” immediately censored, Marsh told the audience all about Epstein. Before the Miami Herald‘s Epstein reporting months later. Note to the intelligentsia and commentariat, exploiting the unpaid backbone of investigative journalism—the world’s lovely social media sleuths and autodidacts—does not end well, especially since we outnumber and outsmart you. See the suggested reading below for more on Heather Marsh’s censored Oxford Union panel. For now, I’ll just embed the audio of her portion and excerpt from her transcript of what she said on the censored panel about Jeffrey Epstein and the former Oxford Union president and UK prime minister Ted Heath.

Jeffrey Epstein is a man in the United States known to have raped and trafficked dozens or hundreds or who knows how many children. The US Attorney General at the time, Alberto Gonzales, said he would have instructed the US Justice Department to “pursue justice without making a political mess”. Epstein’s little black book contains people like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew. There is only one way to interpret that directive and that is impunity for anyone above a certain social strata or anyone with blackmail on them. The Pentagon, since 2010, has refused to investigate, at that time it was over 1700 cases, of child abuse media they have found on Pentagon computers. The people in the US are finally starting to talk about all the taxpayer funded NDA’s that protect people in congress against reports of rape and sexual assault. California alone has reportedly paid more than $25 million in the last three years to buy criminal impunity for their politicians. In the UK, you have your own child rape inquiry where UK police have spoken many times of investigations which have a strata they can’t go above – where those above that strata are referred to as the Untouchables, protected by the Official Secrets Act and many other layers of secrecy. Your former Oxford Union president and UK Prime Minister, Ted Heath, how many people came forward and said they were his victims as children, but there was never an investigation during his lifetime. So security for them means immunity from criminal prosecution, not just for their actions against so-called enemies but against anyone.

Practical and realistic solutions to impunity

Now, the portion so often left out of corporate edutainment describing a problem: how to solve it.

Yesterday (30 May 2020), protesters in Minneapolis and Atlanta posted on social media images of child soldiers. It is unclear if these kids are with JROTC or white supremacist families or what. But allowing your VIPredators, with all their power over conditioning systems from corporate media megaphones to video games to textbooks, to rape kids, logically leads eventually to this from your neighbors and even your own kids.

OpDeathEaters meme shows child's hands bound with rope begging for help from audience against a black background with the words Your Move. The image also says: You let your militaries torture, murder and sodomize children in 'other countries' because they were The Enemy. You let your police torture, murder and sodomize children from 'other ethnic groups' because it is The Law. Now you find your politicians torture, murder and sodomize children in your neighbourhood because it is Fun for them.
OpDeathEaters meme. Has an anime style image of a child. Mostly, white text on black. What are Death Eaters? Members of a sociopathic society where the societal norms or culture are driven by sadism or sexual sadism disorder. The agony of others is not a side effect of their actions but a goal. Death eaters are distinct from those with an individual personality disorder in that their society's norms, structure and actions are all constructed to feed their sadism.
OpDeathEaters meme. Mostly, red or white, on black. Child's hands bound appealing to the audience for help. The meme says, What is the objective of Operation DeathEaters?  The objective of OpDeathEaters is an internationally linked, independent, victim-led pedosadist inquiry / tribunal which is in no way affiliated with all of the institutions of power which have created and run this industry.

The above three memes from here and created by @SpartaZC / @YourAnonCentral. Same for the two similar memes farther below.

The objective of Operation Death Eaters is an internationally linked, independent, victim-led pedosadist inquiry / tribunal which is in no way affiliated with all of the institutions of power which have created and run this industry. Here are the eighteen long-term goals of #OpDeathEaters. Goal #5: Clearly define possible independent inquiry options for each country and build support for them. 

But what’s an inquiry or tribunal? People might remember the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II. But let’s hold off on tribunals for now, since convictions require public examinations and discussions of evidence, and dive into inquiries, which make those examinations and discussions happen.

To explain what inquires are, let’s start with a very familiar phenomenon that they are not. Remember Obama’s Look forward not back regarding torture by the Bush II administration? That’s when Obama repeatedly explained there would be no prosecutions, and thus only impunity and normalization, for torture. In the United States, something like 1% of people in the country have a security clearance (think top secret; to see the deep state, go to https://www.usajobs.gov/search and filter job openings by required security clearance). These individuals are part of a parallel un-society, where torture is accepted and practiced. Because Obama announced we would have no public inquiry into why the United States “tortured some folks” as he put it, when you’re trying to talk radical politics with salaried liberals at board game night, there’s a good chance that one of them or someone they’re close to has a security clearance for accessing classified information and doesn’t like what you’re saying (and that’s the end of it, if you’re lucky). A person you pass on the sidewalk might be, or might have a family member who is, involved in torturing people (including assisting with the infrastructure for it as a contractor). To date, there’s been no reckoning with this reality as a country because of Obama’s Look forward not back (among other reasons). It’s the same with the pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) in Spain, where that country in 1975-1977 decided to avoid dealing with the legacy of their 1939 to 1975 dictator Francisco Franco. A third example would be in families or small communities where a person who behaves strangely gets labelled / scapegoated as the identified patient with a psychosis diagnosis, but all the (anti)social and other forces (such as pollution) pressuring that person into that strange behavior remain elephants in the room, skeletons in the closet, etc. Street executions, torture, and dictatorships are also, relative to healthy prosocial people, psychoses.

Collectively turning a blind eye — with formal announcements like Look forward not back, pacto del olvido, or a psychiatric diagnosis — is the opposite of an inquiry, whereas an inquiry is the public participating in a hearing and discussion of the evidence, the accusations of wrongdoing. During inquiries, everyone publicly links together the past, present, and future to ask, who were we, that certain things happened (street executions or torture or pedosadism), and what can we do about it now to ensure it never happens again in the future?

There are examples of inquiries, or efforts toward them, on both the small family/community level and for entire countries and planetwide. For instance, in Finland, the Open Dialogue method, under experimentation for implementation in the United States, is getting the best documented results for first episode psychosis (mental health): 85+% of the people helped by Open Dialogue never have a psychotic break again and never need psychiatric drugs. In Open Dialogue, if a person acts bizarrely, say a teenager at a family home, the mental health professionals head over instantly (not: schedule a thousand-dollar appointment for two months later after the patient’s psych ward lockup and the professional’s ski trip). The Open Dialogue practitioners maybe given the teen a benzo for sleep. While he’s sleeping, his family or friends might say to the professionals: “Let me tell you what really happened.” In other words, control the narrative and cover up wrongdoing. The Open Dialogue professionals don’t permit this. No one can begin until everyone can participate. Then, once the person who was in an altered state wakes and is calmer thanks to sleep, everyone gathers to have a small-scale inquiry. What happened? Is the coach at the school abusive? Let’s get that coach present to hear what he says about the accusation of abuse. Is the food at home causing the teenager distress? What can we do differently, together? It’s the same on the country or global level. For example, consider the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which took place as apartheid was formally ending in that country. With varying degrees of success and failure, the South African TRC required human rights violators from both the white supremacist reactionaries and the revolutionary liberation movements to—on live television, on live radio, and with the victims’ families present and participating—confess their crimes in detail (while asking for limited amnesty). Inquiries and their similar cousin, truth and reconciliation commissions, existed prior to the South African TRC, but in studying and discussing how to set up such solutions, the South African TRC is a landmark people often start from.

“Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” didn’t get anywhere remotely close to this, but there’s every reason for us all to now work, in our various little and big ways, to create independent, internationally linked, victim-led inquires and/or tribunals to stop the impunity of street executions by cops, the impunity of torture, and the impunity of the common denominator that catches the most powerful wrongdoers in the net, pedosadism.

Recommended reading

Writer Conchita Sarnoff’s book TrafficKing: The Jeffrey Epstein case

Lawyer Bradley J. Edwards’ book Relentless Pursuit

Heather Marsh: OpDeathEaters Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and Operation Death Eaters long-term goals.

Heather Marsh (2014): The other battle for the Internet

Heather Marsh (2014): Sociopaths, psychopaths, and death eaters

Heather Marsh (2014): How we came to be ruled by death eaters

Heather Marsh (April 2020): The catalyst effect of COVID-19. (See also her glossary.)

Heather Marsh (May 2018): Transcript of whistleblowing panel censored by Oxford Union and her analysis of that censorship. See also my article about the censorship and my contribution to Boing Boing about calling a home of David Shedd, the CIA senior management panelist who demanded the panel disappear.

Heather Marsh’s books in the Binding Chaos series published by Must Read Books

Bound intro and volume one of the South African TRC on my carpet alongside other books you might should read!

I’ve only read some material on the South African TRC but here’s what I’ve found thought provoking and informative so far. The book A Country Unmasked by Alex Boraine, TRC’s deputy chairperson, the documentary Long Night’s Journey Into Day (try Kanopy.com and your public library for access), and the South African TRC official website, including the official TRC report and the online register of reconciliation where members of the public formally apologize, sometimes at length, for turning a blind eye and not doing more to help themselves and others overcome apartheid.

Follow on Twitter: @YourAnonCentral, @OpDeathEaters, @OpDeathEatersUS, @OpGabon, @OpRohingya, @OpCanary, @OpGTMO…and me.

And now, from “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?”, over to Epstein victim—and survivor—Maria Farmer for the mic drop.

Epstein survivor Maria Farmer: “2020 is the year when…”

The Investigation Discovery special concludes with Epstein victim/survivor Maria Farmer talking about her artwork. First she shows her painting of Epstein and his network.

Fugitive and pimp for Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, defined in a painting by Maria Farmer
Dirty Dersh (Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz) defined in a painting by Maria Farmer
Epstein stuck into a UFO, painted by Maria Farmer

Then Maria Farmer shows artworks from her project to paint Epstein victims/survivors.

She explains: “I’m doing a series, drawing all the women, all their portraits. Honoring them, because they’re victims, but they’re also survivors. I’m giving them each a drawing so that they know that they matter. We’re binding together, and there’s strength in numbers, let me tell you something! They’re not getting away with it anymore. 2020 is the year the predators become the prey.”

Creative Commons License

This blog post, Updated: My #OpDeathEaters review of Investigation Discovery’s “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” airing Sun May 31, 2020 by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on a work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2020/05/31/opdeatheaters-review-investigation-discovery-who-killed-jeffrey-epstein/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post otherwise? Please email me: dal@riseup.net.

Bullet points: High quality, somewhat under the radar coronavirus readings, including history, global, and mutual aid

Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so…like this one, which is out on, er, Tuesday! This is Week 14. I’m back on schedule. :)

“It is not your fault, I know, but of those who put it in your head that you are exaggerating and even this testimony may seem just an exaggeration for those who are far from the epidemic, but please, listen to us” — intensive care physician Dr. Daniele Macchini, in translation from Humanitas Gavazzeni hospital in Bergamo, Italy, Friday 6th of March 2020. (Additional attribution information.)

Same day as Dr. Daniele Macchini’s testimony from Italy, “Q: Mr. President, you were shaking a lot of hands today, taking a lot of posed pictures. Are you protecting yourself at all? How are you — how are you staying away from germs? THE PRESIDENT: Not at all. No, not at all. Not at all. […] Q: Have you considered not having campaign rallies? THE PRESIDENT: No, I haven’t. […] Q: Isn’t it a risk if there’s that many people close together? THE PRESIDENT: It doesn’t bother me at all and it doesn’t bother them at all.” Transcript provided by White House of Friday 6th of March 2020 remarks by Donald Trump after tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta Georgia.

A week prior at a rally, Trump said: “[T]he Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs [… The Democrats] have no clue, they don’t have any clue. […] this [disagreeing with him regarding coronavirus] is their new hoax.” Transcript of Trump rally Friday 28 February 2020 in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Analysis using the Flesch-Kincaid scale, developed in 1975 for the US Navy to assess the relative difficulty of understanding training manuals, finds US president and self-proclaimed “very stable genius” Donald Trump speaks at the reading level of a fourth grader, which explains his huge popularity among certain segments. The above image superimposes a picture of Trump yelling “Have you seen my ratings?” upon a photo taken by a nurse, showing the inside of a bodybag-laden truck at an ambulance bay outside a New York City hospital, Sunday 29 March 2020, shared with Buzzfeed by the nurse.

This post provides 10 bullet points that suggest and summarize various readings regarding the novel coronavirus pandemic, plus a bonus eleventh section at the end filled with uplifting material. I recommend further study of any or all of these linked materials, which have flown across my radar in the past few weeks. Whereas on Monday 23 March 2020 I wrote a guide for getting caught up on the pandemic if you’ve been living under a rock or enslaved (imagine someone just getting off a lengthy hiking trip in the middle of this or out of a psych ward), this entry is more a grab bag of important COVID-19 items that are a bit off the beaten track of typical US news readers. In the near future I’d like to write a guide helping US news readers develop a 60-90 minute routine for staying up to date on the pandemic daily by plugging into sources such as local and state public health officials, the World Health Organization, and a steady supply of high quality information from self-governance radicals. Hopefully soon I’ll return to writing more narrative-y blog entries, but as the globe is a bit of a bullet point place these days, I hope you find value in the below and if so, consider sharing this post, supporting me via donation, and/or replacing GovCorps around the world with prosocial ideas and actions. Without further ado:

  • A Monday 23 March 2020 article by Jim Geraghty at the (rightwing but literate) National Review titled “The Comprehensive Timeline of China’s COVID-19 Lies” documents the day-by-day, month-by-month, blow-by-blow of the Chinese government cover-up of the capability of novel coronavirus to transmit from human to human. As best understood to date, the disease jumped from animal to human in late 2019 in Wuhan, China.

  • You should know the story of Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, whistleblower in this pandemic, or “awakener” as some in China call him as a compliment. The Lancet, one of the longest running and most prestigious medical journals in the world, published an obituary (1-page PDF version) for Li Wenliang by freelance journalist Andrew Green on Tuesday 18 February 2020 (corrected Tuesday 25 February 2020). On Friday 7 February 2020, the New York Times interviewed Li days before he died. Briefly: Li worked at Wuhan Central Hospital, where in late 2019 he saw laboratory result reports, being circulated within medical circles, that led him to tell his fellow medical student classmates in a private chat group that “it has been confirmed that they are coronavirus infections, but the exact virus is being subtyped […] tell your family and loved ones to take caution.” He knew that patients were already being treated under quarantine, so he suspected human-to-human transmission was possible and urged caution, though at first he did not want his messages spread further. (Speculation: I’d guess because of the risk from various Chinese authorities, and I’d guess also because at that point Li might have wanted rock solid scientific confirmation of human-to-human transmission, before wider circulation.) The conversation among his fellow doctors was that SARS (i.e. SARS or a SARS-like disease) might come back and that they needed to be careful. Against his wishes, his messages spread more widely on social media, leading Wuhan cops to force him at their station to admit a “misdemeanor” and to promise not to commit further “unlawful acts” like this “spreading rumors.” Seven others also were arrested, but as of a Thursday 23 January 2020 article at Poynter by Cristina Tardáguila and Summer Chen, their identities and fates are unknown (will update if I hear back). Li felt wronged by the cops and as time passed, he came to appreciate, despite the punishment, the value of his warning messages having spread, telling the New York Times later that he “felt very sad seeing so many people losing their loved ones.” He returned from the police station to the Wuhan hospital and, while treating a glaucoma patient, contracted the very virus he had warned of. While he was hospitalized in an intensive care unit, Li spoke out about his experience at the police station, including releasing the document he was made to sign, telling Beijing-based media group Caixin that “I think a healthy society should not have just one voice,” and the New York Times: “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier, I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.” At the time of his death, he was survived by his four-year-old son and wife, who was five months pregnant with their second child.

    Image of Li Wenliang by Anthony Kwan for Getty Images, 2020

    Social media users in China wrote in loud favor of Li Wenliang and against the Chinese authorities, saying on Weibo that, among other things, according to the New York Times, they wrote out of shame and guilt for not standing up to an authoritarian government. Others shared variations of a quote by Chinese writer Murong Xuecun, “He who holds the firewood for the masses is the one who freezes to death in wind and snow,” which the NYT has to explain “was written as a reminder to people that it was in their interest to support those who dared to stand up to authority. Many of those people had frozen to death, figuratively speaking, as fewer people were willing to publicly support these dissenting figures.” Additional sources regarding Li Wenliang: Friday 7 February 2020 article by Zhuang Pinghui in the South China Morning Post; Friday 20 March 2020 article by Helen Davidson at the Guardian; Friday 7 February 2020 article in the New York Times.

  • And regarding the importance of whistleblowers in general, check out this February 2018 panel on whistleblowing at the Oxford Union, which included Heather Marsh, CIA senior management David Shedd, and a Guardian journalist who though employed by one of the world’s biggest newspapers did not write about the Oxford Union censorsing the panel he was on (you read that right, about whistleblowing), although I sure as hell did at Buffalo’s The Public and by contributing to BoingBoing. You can read the panel transcript by Heather who had to whistleblow her own whistleblowing panel, or listen to her 22-minute audio of it below. BTW, the Guardian journadoodle who did not mention, via his salaried job at one of the world’s most important newspapers, the Oxford censorship, then got immediately bribed/rewarded with a paid lecture series at Oxford… a paid lecture series about… yes, about whistleblowing … while I, a devout anti-careerist, essentially have lost 100% of my day job hours due to covid-19 and, while restraining myself from retweeting silly Star Trek photoshops, am writing to you on my blog right here right meow and all these other people with really cool ideas and deeds and artworks and cats are also… okay you get the point, but the tough part might be, not forgetting the point/truth and also following it to all the places where it leads.

    Transcript; Heather’s analysis of the censorship

    And regarding the Chinese and British empires, these 2012-2013 tweets from the orange menace:

    A failing state in debt to Beijing, Russia does much of China’s dirty work. May 2018 at OpenDemocracy.Net: “They put a bag on my head, cuffed my hands behind my back and tortured me with a taser”: anarchist Svyatoslav Rechkalov on torture at the hands of Russian cops. April 2018 at The Russian Reader: Stay Human, How Russia is hunting down anarchists & anti-fascists and torturing them. Coronavirus, shit is getting real.

  • On Monday 30 March 2020, Europe-based journalist Balazs Csekö tweeted the Hungarian parliament had that day passed a bill giving Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán unlimited power and proclaiming: – State of emergency without time limit – No elections – Parliament suspended – Rule by decree – Spreading fake news and rumors: up to 5 years in prison – Leaving quarantine: up to 8 years in prison. On Tuesday 7 April 2020, Andrew Stroehlein, the European media director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted “One week ago, the European Union ceased being a bloc of democracies, as Hungary’s ruler seized unlimited power in his country. Since then, the other EU member states and the European Commission have done nothing about it.” And the same day he tweeted: “There’s an outright dictatorship within the [European Union]. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has seized unlimited power for an indefinite period of time. That the rest of the EU doesn’t care enough to act is a threat to the very EU itself.”

  • Regarding federal legislators flying around and thus spreading the virus or exposing themselves to it, as the Wall Street Journal published an article partially about on Friday 27 March 2020, see this from Heather Marsh in 2012: “We no longer live in a world where one individual has to make a long arduous journey to appear in person to represent their town or region, we need to work to ensure there is no reason why individuals cannot represent themselves in any circumstance” and “There are two underlying concepts which must be universally accepted for representative democracy to function: groups may act as individuals and individuals may act as groups. These two ideas are fundamentally unsound.” If you want more after that, see her 2017 talk (video and transcript) “The evolution of democracy.” For those asking, due to the pandemic, what we should do regarding governance, and demanding short, more practical/pragmatic readings on the topic rather than books, I highly recommend her 2014 “Installing new governance” and you might also read her 2017 “A societal singularity.” Life’s not really about whatever stupid shit Trump said lately, or whether Nancy Pelosi is going to do this or that. Instead look at the more ludicrous things, the federal legislators jumping on planes instead of picking up phones because people are mentally enslaved by these bizarre memes about Ancient Greece city-states or whatever, or the third rail topic of voting elections integrity or even whether voting for faraway celebullies to represent you and the neighbor who completely disagrees with you, and neither of you have or ever will meet the legislator anyway, makes any lick of sense at all (see my post this year on that and Russiagate whistleblower Reality Winner), and maybe then also realize, in order to uproot all of those echoes of long ago thoughts spellbinding billions of humans for millenia, might take more than a two sentence explanation of “well what should we do instead” and you might need to read and experiment and do different things to work toward replacing entrenched broken systems (i.e., us, we all are the broken system!).

  • From the 1936 sci-fi movie Things To Come, based on HG Wells’ writings. This is a demagogue leader from the film yelling at a fourth grade reading level except for “muddle”, which is advanced vocabulary I suppose
  • The 2019-2020 novel coronavirus is deadlier than the 2002-2003 coronavirus SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), but this 2003 unclassified paper on that earlier and related virus, produced by the CIA’s Strategic Assessments Group, may still be of interest for autodidacts and others studying public health systems responding to epidemics/pandemics. The paper is subtitled Lessons From the First Epidemic of the 21st Century: A Collaborative Analysis With Outside Experts. It’s a 17-page PDF: click here for the PDF at the Homeland Security Digital Library (sponsored by US Homeland Security, FEMA, and the US military’s Naval Postgraduate School).

    The unclassified paper describes its scope as follows:

    In June 2003, the CIA’s Strategic Assessments Group (SAG) sponsored an unclassified workshop with experts from various health-related disciplines titled “SARS: Lessons Learned,” held at the National Science Foundation. The group included leading virologists, epidemiologists, public health experts from academia and government, senior officials from WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and authorities in global public health, health communications, and economics. The meeting’s objective was to extract valuable lessons learned to help prepare for future epidemics of new and reemergent infectious diseases. The group reviewed the SARS experience from its medical-scientific, public health, psychosocial and risk communications, economic, and political dimensions. This report conveys the lessons participants found most important for the containment of SARS and for dealing with future epidemics.

    Before going to other bullet points recommending other texts, I excerpt below many of the lessons noted by this 2003 report:

    * SARS has served as a sobering warning about the serious worldwide consequences that can occur at every level—public health, economic, and political—when unanticipated epidemics arise in a highly connected, fast-paced world.

    * The ability to contain the next pandemic or to achieve global eradication of SARS remains uncertain. The disease could reemerge in fall or winter or move from its animal hosts to humans again at any time.

    * Honesty and openness from governments and public health officials is especially important. Without understating the risks or dismissing people’s fears, officials with relevant expert knowledge should advise the public on what measures to follow.

    * Official announcements will need to be bolstered by ongoing public education programs to avoid panic and help motivate first responders to take reasonable risks in treating the sick.

    * [T]he panel warned that the economic impact of an epidemic involving more deaths, plant closures, and population dislocations could be more significant than the modest SARS-related losses

    * Psychological intangibles — fear, risk avoidance, and resilience — are not currently represented in economic models use[d] to gauge the impact of epidemics.

    * The panelists stressed that the US defenses against infectious disease outbreaks depended on the expertise and competence of local public health officials worldwide. [Note by Doug: last chance for smug US intelligentsia to stop rolling eyes whenever anyone brings up international law, universal human rights, the importance of global telecommunications and planetwide collaboration, etc.]

    * The effective application and efficacy of quarantine and isolation proved a pleasant surprise to the public health community. Equally unexpected was the widespread acceptance of the need for these measures by the general public, panelists observed.

    * [P]eople were more prone to comply with quarantine rules when there was no familial or financial hardship involved

    * Continued efforts by local health-care workers in a high-risk environment were facilitated when the workers were reassured their families would be cared for and when the press portrayed them to the public as heroes. Conversely, when these measures were not taken, workers were much less willing to put in the long hours and expose themselves to SARS.

    * While participants lauded the overall rapid and effective mobilization of the international public health community, they did note that [the World Health Organization] was quickly overstretched in early phases of the epidemic, despite supplemental aid by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other organizations. One participant declared that [the World Health Organization] probably could not cope with a second public health-care crisis [simultaneously] on top of SARS [i.e., SARS plus another crisis at the same time]

    * A fearful and confused public, surrounded by speculation, rumor, and exaggerated media reports can lead to genuine panic — facilitating disease transmission and hindering quarantine efforts

    * Participants cited the following reasons for lack of transparency in the case of China […] Fear of upsetting foreign investors and incurring sizable economic losses […] Cultural reticence to reveal information that could be perceived as a weakness.

    * The panelists also affirmed that the experience with SARS had enabled the Chinese Government to gain valuable crisis management experience in areas such as effective inter-governmental actions when forced to shut down parts of Beijing. They commented that with outside support, China could begin addressing some of its major public health problems such as inadequate rural health care, rapidly increasing rates of HIV infection, hazardous animal husbandry and trade practices, and live animal markets which could easily lead to another pandemic

  • 2016 opinion piece in the Washington Post by Ronald A. Klain, Ebola czar at the White House from 2014 to 2015. The title is “Zika is coming, but we’re far from ready” and here are the key passages in my opinion:

    The man who led the effort to wipe out smallpox, Larry Brilliant, often says that the seemingly complex challenge of successful epidemic control can be summarized in one phrase: “early detection, early response.” […] If it seems like the world is being threatened by new infectious diseases with increasing frequency — H1N1 in 2009-2010, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2016, yellow fever on the horizon for 2017 — that’s because it is. These are not random lightning strikes or a string of global bad luck. This growing threat is a result of human activity: human populations encroaching on, and having greater interaction with, habitats where animals spread these viruses; humans living more densely in cities where sickness spreads rapidly; humans traveling globally with increasing reach and speed; humans changing our climate and bringing disease-spreading insects to places where they have not lived previously. From now on, dangerous epidemics are going to be a regular fact of life. We can no longer accept surprise as an excuse for a response that is slow out of the gate.

  • Improve your food storage techniques with the following resources. SaveTheFood.com, derived from Dana Gunders’ work; Seattle Public Utilities 2-page PDF guide on food storage techniques, 9-page PDF on freezer storage, and website section on reducing food waste in general; World Healthiest Foods, where you type a food item into the search box, then check out the “How to select and store” section on the resulting webpage.

  • A Wednesday 25 March 2020 article by David Kaplan at the WTAE ABC affliate in Pittsburgh reports that a public school district in the greater Pittsburgh region has been using AM radio to provide lessons to students.

    Elementary and secondary school teachers record lessons the night before and send them in. Then, 680 AM WISR in Butler broadcasts the lessons. Secondary students get their lessons at 9 a.m. and elementary students at 9:30 a.m.

    “I thought the idea was great. It kind of takes you back in a way to think about the days of fireside chats,” said Hope Hull, the principal at Connoquenessing Elementary School.

    Hull says she thinks this exercise improves listening skills for students. She added that her teachers are excited to put these lessons together.

    Somehow makes me think of this April 30, 1981 Bloom County cartoon by Berkeley Breathed (my favorite cartoonist from newspaper days).

  • The University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine maintains a digital repository/encyclopedia with documents from and texts about the US flu epidemic of 1918-1919. I believe that encyclopedia was the source for some of the images in the Thursday 26 March article in the California Sun by Mike McPhate titled “Photos of the 1918 flu pandemic in California,” which begins: “We’ve been through shutdowns like this before.” Below follows some of the images McPhate’s piece republished. I’m unfortunately just going to copy his descriptions and sourcing information for each image without doublechecking them all myself as I would usually do, since by this hour I’m half falling asleep as I’m standing here typing this very sentence.

    A group in Mill Valley in November, 2018.
    Raymond Coyne/Mill Valley Public Library
    The Oakland Municipal Auditorium is being used as a temporary hospital with volunteer nurses from the American Red Cross tending the sick there during the influenza pandemic of 1918, Oakland, California, 1918. (Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images)
    People lined up for masks in San Francisco, which made their use mandatory.
    California State Library
    Physicians vaccinated each other in San Francisco.
    California State Library
    American Red Cross volunteers prepared masks in Oakland.
    Oakland Public Library

    The University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine’s digital repository/encyclopedia also has city essays that tell the stories of 50 US cities and how each responded to the 1918-1919 flu epidemic. Here’s the Dallas essay, timeline, and gallery. Here’s the Seattle essay, timeline, and gallery. As the saying goes, Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

  • This last of the ten bullet points (before the bonus eleventh), perhaps the most important, consists of mutual aid resources recently compiled/tweeted by @YourAnonCentral, whom you all should be following on Twitter. First, a five-and-a-half minute video by subMedia.tv explaining what mutual aid is:

    Required viewing

    Now, some resources. US-based COVID-19 Mutual Aid and Advocacy Resources, a shared Google Doc. Here’s how to organize a neighborhood pod, for you and your neighbors to help each other. It’s a 4-page shared Google Doc and it includes flyer templates for getting to know your neighbors, and more. This 9-page PDF is a small zine of compiled resources on safety practices for mutual aid food supply and distribution, such as safe delivery and collection protocols, quite useful if, say, you are in the habit, as I am lately in the habit, of delivering boxes containing food and supplies to the grassy outskirts of an apartment complex in view of a particular young woman standing up high on a balcony peering down and observing with untraversable and seemingly infinite physical distance your discombobulated attempts to erect the structure of a normal conversation, like a (Thomas Otway remix of a) Shakespeare scene. Here’s a United States progressive group (yes I know), The Center for Popular Democracy, gathering data for a week of action to demand coronavirus tests if you want to fill that out. Here’s a mutual aid hub map primarily for the United States, linking for instance to the North Texas Democratic Socialists of America’s COVID-19 Mutual Aid Coalition website listing resources and offering a form to fill out to request and/or volunteer help. Also check out MasksForDocs.com. They have one goal: Get personal protective equipment (not just masks, despite their name) into the hands of healthcare workers as quickly as possible. Open, healthy, inclusive, grassroots, free. They’re accepting volunteers, donations, and requests. Bellevue’s nonprofit hospital Overlake, in the Seattle metropolitan area, just received 262 face shields from MasksForDocs.

Okay, we made it! Note please that the above is a shotgun approach (when is the twitter-news not a shotgun approach?), so please read carefully, think for yourself, your mileage may vary, at least one person on those eight million shotgun approach mutual aid resources is probably going to be unfun to hang out with at best (ten-point checklist by CrimethInc for spotting snitches, infiltrators, etc.), and so on. So, the eleventh bonus bullet point is some heartwarming examples of mutual aid, big and small, mostly via @YourAnonCentral on Twitter recently, ending this post. See below, and see you next week!

https://twitter.com/th1an1/status/1246869229711867908
https://twitter.com/FreeJeremyNet/status/1245824079237533696
https://twitter.com/BecHanley1/status/1243864095859838979
https://twitter.com/NCLMutualAid/status/1247218939853246464
https://twitter.com/leytonstone_aid/status/1245405271230500865
https://twitter.com/TeresaB_52/status/1245847698407743488
https://twitter.com/seattlesymphony/status/1245735238719942657

Creative Commons License

This blog post, Bullet points: High quality, somewhat under the radar coronavirus readings, including history, global, and mutual aid, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on a work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2020/04/07/coronavirus-readings-history-global-mutualaid/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post otherwise? Please email me: dal@riseup.net.