Note: In 2021 I’ll publish at least one blog post per week, ideally on Wednesdays. Here’s entry 5 of 52, just something simple and fun.
Last weekend, I departed from Seattle with some friends and went up to Snoqualmie Pass, just an hour’s drive outside the city. There I snowshoed on the easy Gold Creek Pond trail. It was my first time to ever snowshoe. The path started at a trailhead by a street, continued through a valley, and reached the snowed-over Gold Creek Pond. Other paths progressed past the pond, but I didn’t get a chance to check them out. Except for the final pic, I took the following DLSR photos of the snowy surroundings. I had a great time and plan to go again.
Right by the trailhead for Gold Creek Pond path. Some wore masks; others didn’t
A valley the trail passes through
Looking back at Summit East from the frozen-over Gold Creek Pond
Amazing how far you can see, out in Nature
Makes me think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness
Part of Gold Creek Pond wasn’t frozen over
On the shore, a shirtless guy after diving in the icy lake
Note: In 2021 I’ll publish at least one blog post per week, ideally on Wednesdays. Here’s entry 4 of 52.Barely made it this time, on Saturday night!
Note: The second half of my two posts on Biden will come in February.
Note (added Sunday 31 January ’21): Motivations of the diverse r/wallstreetbets members can be found by searching the subreddit. From my readings of it, the community seems to largely share a disparagement of institutional investors, and a disdain for hedge funds shorting and destroying companies (not to mention their impact on the trade economy at large), though they sometimes admire various top dogs in the Wall Street world. To look further into the subreddit’s motivations and/or vibe, you might start by checking out the post histories of its members u/DeepFuckingValue, u/stonksflyingup, and the subreddit’s Ask Me Anything from Friday.My purpose is not to lionize these users, whose numbers are too large to permit easy generalization anyway, but to explain what’s happening and point to further texts that readers interested in the topic might consider digging into.
This past week, many among the now seven million-plus members of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets pushed a hedge fund, Wall Street financier Gabe Plotkin’s Melvin Capital, to close out its short position in the video game retailer Gamestop. With a few billion dollars, Melvin had bet against the beloved yet beleaguered Texas-based store. The subredditors persuaded each other to buy Gamestop stock en masse, boosting the price dramatically and causing Melvin to hemorrhage financial value. Plotkin’s peers on Wall Street then infused Melvin Capital with massive funds to keep it afloat, but the fund still had to flee the Gamestop battle. By then, Melvin had reportedly lost a stunning third of its assets, at the hands of average (apparently mostly U.S.-based) Internet users.
Following the same rules as the hedge funds, the subredditors won this round of the capitalism board game, thanks to their large numbers. Similar situations happen with unions. Corporations band together in cartels, increasing their number and power, to control markets; paid-workers unite in trade unions to (try to) control markets as well. Each side calls the other criminal cheaters, with the illegalities of the rich far outweighing those of the middle class and poor struggling to survive. Governments attempt to intervene as their donors and blackmailers wish, aiming to keep up the ongoing exchange of goods/services without which civilization would have to change paradigm.
Some of the subredditors are expressing surprise that various Wall Streeters aren’t taking their side. r/wallstreetbets has been stanning Dr Michael Burry of Scion Asset Management for a year-plus, presumably a partial result of the investor’s name recognition from the 2015 hit movie The Big Short. They are now realizing he’s dissing them publicly. That was on Tuesday, when in a tweet he soon deleted, Burry tagged the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement arm and wrote of the market battle: “what is going on now – there should be legal and regulatory repercussions. This is unnatural, insane, and dangerous.” Burry owned 1.7 million GameStop shares last September; assuming he hadn’t changed his position, the subredditors, without aiming to benefit him, just gave him a bonanza of nearly a quarter billion dollars, almost 1400% in four months, on paper anyway, and he still called for legal repercussions against them.
It looks quite like Burry can’t abide rubbing elbows with the several million ordinary people on the subreddit, can’t let his class status slip, despite them praising him for months and months and possibly handing him a gigantic windfall. No, Burry wants the rabble hordes arbitrarily blocked from doing what hedge funds like Melvin Capital or his do.
More big names than Burry are troubled that the public beat a hedge fund at the capitalism competition. Others of the ruling class are calling for an investigation into r/wallstreetbets, treating everyday folks playing capitalism like the game it is as a potential crime. Financial apps such as Interactive Brokers abruptly blocked the users’ ability to buy Gamestop shares (and other stocks also involved) and, it appears, Robinhood Markets sold away shares of users who’d bought Gamestop on margin, something reportedly permitted by their one-sided terms of service but in opposition to userbase trust. Like The Daily Show (corporate television) smearing Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2011, the fourth branch has rushed to describe the redditors condescendingly (the audience for the news media are the politicos and intelligenstia of the status quo, not the public). The Biden administration, which as rent deadlines approach has yet to deliver the promised $2000 stimulus cheques, is “monitoring the situation.” But forces as disparate as Republican senator Ted Cruz and Democratic House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been lining up behind the subredditors.
The capitalists’ own propaganda paints them as shrewd alpha males who deserve their yachts and affluenza legal defenses as reward for their (or their parents’) trading skill, yet the moment unions or the public, following the rules, or at least the logic, of the money game, manage to exploit a weakness in the ruling class’s position on the game board, the powerful overturn that board and bring out force. Consider the disproportionate targeting that happens in meatspace. Fancy restaurants place tents and tables on nearby public grass by a sidewalk without significant hassle from the authorities, perhaps mere food safety regulation assessments; homeless people pitching a tent in the same spots will face violent sweeps from security forces. Well-to-do civic associations can shut down streets for parades, stopping vehicles, but Black Lives Matter protesters objecting to street executions by cops will be arrested or worse for doing the same thing, while reactionary legislators in multiple states strive to legalize running over traffic-blocking protestors. Thus, it’s not about who has the best knack for surviving and thriving in a trade civilization, because once the public discovers an effective tactic, the ruling class knocks them back down and then sets the board in position again, acting like everything’s back to normal business hours.
The illogic continues to the economic system as a whole. The dangerous effort of creating humanity in the first place by giving birth does not pay, but building tasers or using them to kill people, including those diagnosed with mental health problems, does pay. Less dramatic examples can be found too. Substitute teachers are paid to bone up on their subjects during certain hours of the day (planning periods) but not during other hours (evenings), and the students aren’t paid to learn. Therapists get paid to help clients overcome addictions, but aren’t paid to work to overcome their own addictions. An economic system is just a board game, often with moneytokens (or other tokens such as indulgences to buy from priests to get into heaven). If the board game doesn’t make sense, there is every reason to start playing a different one.
Fairness, but to what end?
To date, much of the conversation around r/wallstreetbets has focused on the lack of fairness in the financial system. Humans have an innate desire for fair treatment, as observed in experiments on primates, and more simply, as observed in children. Debates over whether $10/hour, $15/hour, $20/hour, or some other rate constitutes fair pay are perennial (why not an arbitrary amount like $50,000.000033785/hour?). For instance, James Joyce’s protagonist Mr Duffy tired of such predictable and myopic talk in the author’s short story “A Painful Case” published more than a century ago in 1914. People have taken for granted that a wage system is it, and got hung up on comparing who gets paid how much, for a very long time. But the understandable call for fairness is simply a starting point. Questioning and ultimately replacing the wage/trade system itself is more important.
Just because a game is fair, doesn’t mean it’s good. Bad games, neutral games, or good games can all be either fair or unfair according to whether the rules are followed, or not, by whichever sides. Like fossil fuel companies, Billionaire A and Billionaire B can compete in the capitalism game to see who can drive humanity extinct most profitably. Their capitalism competition can be played fairly, or unfairly, but either way, we all end up dead. In the hundreds of thousands of years of humanity (not just 2500 years back to ancient Greeks), we have organized the production and distribution of goods/services into multiple different economic systems across multiple different civilizations, with a variety of results. Those experiments wait outside the corporate media spotlight, so fixed as the news spotlight is on mesmerizing everyone with the vastly overemphasized war criminal politicians or those seeking to replace them with saleable identity labels. Further, the emphasis on left brain charts describing the production, circulation, and distribution of goods, from Royal Society fellows like Karl Marx (also a racist), merely scratch the surface of what’s going on with humanity. Underneath, we want not to hoard abstract money-tokens; we want to feel good, get to know each other and ourselves, explore, share, grow, and so on. It is possible to organize production and distribution in ways that respect this.
More detail would take too long for a blog post, so here are some suggested readings for people interested in this topic to pursue. As the trade system continues its slow implosion, and the oncoming effects of global warming increasingly throw lives into disarray, it’s a good time to explore alternatives. It’s not unrealistic; every day, people quit their paid-jobs to go shut down pipelines or reunite with nature or try any other number of outside-the-box ideas. Thus to conclude, the short list of texts involving economics (and the personal relationships and emotions below the surface level of existence described by economics) that readers might find helpful.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels The Dispossessed (1974) and Always Coming Home (1985)
To know what came before, try Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers (1953, seventh edition 1999) and reading canonical economics texts firsthand. Those canonical economics texts can be old and written with archaic language and examples, so check sites such as OpenCulture.com to find secondary sources to help with understanding
Marcus Brancaglione’s Universal Basic Income (2016), translated into English by Marcio Rolim and Fabiana Cecin
Note: In 2021 I’ll publish at least one blog post per week, ideally on Wednesdays. This week, the ideal day is today! Here’s entry 3 of 52.
Note: Since this two-part post is lengthy, have a Table of Contents. If you want to jump straight to the videos of Biden, you want Part 2, which will be published the last week of January 2021.
Part 1
Trump leaves the White House
Inauguration of Joe Biden
Senator Biden encouraged the Patriot Act
Senator Biden sponsored the notorious pro-prison ’94 crime bill
Empire on parade and impunity
Carefully planted distraction stories (Pizzagate and QAnon)
Part 2
Coming next week (toward the end of January 2021)
He seems like a very happy old man looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see! pic.twitter.com/G8gObLhsz9
Environmentalist Greta Thunberg returning Donald Trump’s mockery of her as he leaves office, the target of multiple investigations, some led by criminal prosecutors, others by independent activists, and facing a possible second impeachment
On Wednesday, the Trump administration vacated the White House. Donald Trump’s wide-ranging connections with organized crime families, the Casablancas and Epstein rape networks, and other wrongdoers (the KGB, cocaine rings, and beyond) are all amply documented with 100+ sources from court documents and investigative journalism reports here at Spooky Connections, an open-source, independent research project I pointed readers to in my post last week. The demagogue’s four years atop the executive branch saw many liberals startled at how others around them — sometimes including family and friends — turned eagerly to both reactionary beliefs and a cult of Trump as some sort of extraordinary savior. This after whistleblower Reality Winner sacrificed her freedom to alert the public to Russia’s hacking efforts against U.S. voting infrastructure just days before the 2016 election. While the regime of the corrupt Russian oligarch Vladimir Putin tortured anarchists, encouraged domestic femicide, and pushed propaganda into the U.S., Trump, with his decades of ties to the Russian mob, left the public wondering who really runs the United States.
View of National Guard from Biden’s motorcade for the militarized inauguration. (Source.)
Now that Joe Biden, a longtime Democrat, has assumed the presidency, the cognitive dissonance his supporters once decried Republicans for engaging in is easily seen on social platforms as members of the media, the intelligentsia, the literati, and academics give Biden a pass for his well documented misdeeds. “He’s a good man,” I see on Facebook, while on Twitter, comfortable careerists fave, retweet, and otherwise celebrate the new administration. Knowing better after #MeToo, they ignore not just Biden’s history as a senator — we’ll quickly review two stand-out troubles from those days: his history with the Patriot Act and mass incarceration — but also they ignore his shocking creeping on children, which Part 2 of this post will show via primary source footage from sources such as C-SPAN.
As a senator, the new president was very encouraging of the Patriot Act when assisting its passage a month after 9/11. The bill expanded government surveillance — for instance, empowered by the Patriot Act, the FBI, without needing a warrant, and after getting a mere rubber stamp from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could now force medical providers, libraries, bookstores, universities, ISPs, and others to hand over records on their clients or customers. The bill also placed every non-US person under threat of indefinite detention via secret evidence (secret law is tyranny). During the Senate session when the Patriot Act passed, Biden extolled the bill, and said “Some may say it doesn’t go far enough.” He then proceeded to explain how he would prefer the Patriot Act strengthened.
As for mass incarceration, Biden as a senator sponsored The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, also known simply as the 1994 crime bill. Calling for the law’s reversal, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU wrote in 2019 that “this legislation offered money to states that adopted harsher sentencing laws […] While those grants expired in 2001, similar incentives persist today […] Washington [DC] spends billions annually to support state and local justice systems — with many of those dollars allocated under outdated metrics designed to encourage arrest and incarceration.” Designed to encourage arrest and incarceration. The more prisoners, the more money (prisons are a major part of the US trade economy), leaving prison investors no incentive to remedy the underlying structures facilitating narcotics abuse in the first place. In the mid-nineties, tough-on-crime was a popular stance for politicians. Like today, they presented themselves as heroes saving fearful donors from the scary world outside their gated communities. Such images have of course been upturned repeatedly. Journalist Gary Webb, writing his award-winning Dark Alliance series for the San Jose Mercury News, revealed that money fueling the US-backed covert war against Nicaragua came from profits off Los Angeles’ 1980s crack cocaine epidemic. For a long time, drug running has funded off the books govcorp activitiy, or as KRS-One puts it, “You claim I’m selling crack / But you be doing that.” (Webb was ostracized by his media peers for being outspokenly correct, and unable to get work, he committed suicide.) One journalist writing at Harper’s in 2016 found out, when he interviewed top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, how bluntly the powers that be think about and plan such crimes as drug trafficking:
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.
Ehrlichman’s forthrightness just a few years ago is, I think, an example of what Heather Marsh calls the empire on parade, or the empire’s coming-out in the media. A bit more than a half a century ago, in the era of black and white TV news, such an outright admission of lying and vilification to arrest political opponents, to a random reporter, might have blown up as an astonishing revelation leading perhaps to urgent discussions from the streets all the way up to Congress (see the Church committee in the seventies). Now such admissions/boastings are just a business model, and sociopathy; the authorities do not particularly take pains to hide their cruelties. Indeed, as Trump illustrated, they brag about their vileness openly to applauding audiences. Who could forget Trump bragging on the 2016 campaign trail “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” or outright proposing the continuation of war crimes, the slaughtering of innocents: “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families.”
The empire is able to come out on proud parade like this because too many, especially among the influential commentariat, are repeatedly showing that they will tolerate such behavior, often based on partisan selectivity: Those in the correct political party are allowed to prey on others; I won’t say anything. If presidents and others in power are granted impunity for wrongdoing, in other words, if there are no consequences, if everyone just goes along with it, then they will keep it up. I don’t only mean the current question, whether the Biden administration will pull an Obama (“Look forward not back“) and let Trump escape accountability, as Obama helped the Bush II administration escape accountability. I mean Biden himself, his past and presumably, his ongoing behavior.
Part 2 (coming next week) will review primary source footage of Biden, most of it collected together by conservative commentator Richard Armande Mills in 2017 and posted in a 31-tweet thread, where the now-president fondles kids, strokes their faces, smells their hair, and generally behaves as a predator would. I will find bibliographic data for each of the videos, to make the need to investigate Biden even more undeniable. Until then, I will close out this Part 1 by discussing the distraction stories that are attempts to cloak the wrongdoers from justice by making those who talk about the authorities’ jaw-dropping predation seem like “kooky conspiracy theorists” even when their evidence is straight from C-SPAN. Thankfully, the dam is bursting and, as with Jeffrey Epstein becoming a household name recently, more and more are coming to realize what is happening and the calculated silence of careerists is becoming increasingly a liability when they face the public.
Carefully planted distraction stories
In 2014, I spearheaded a campaign to raisemoney for restitution payments court-ordered for the PayPal 14, young federal defendants singled out because they, like thousands of others, had launched denial of service attacks against payment services (including PayPal) after those international companies blocked donations to Wikileaks following their publication of about a quarter million U.S. State Department cables.
For months and months, activists used the hashtag #PayPal14 to inspire donations and discuss the subject. But then, the very day of the PayPal 14’s sentencing — I reported from the court date in October 2014, the only journalist in attendance — PayPal launched a #PayPal15 [sic] marketing campaign, a ham-fisted effort to deflect attention from the company’s eagerness to have these idealistic young adults prosecuted, which was making their brand look out of touch and vengeful. I bring this example up to show that such duels against activists from the powers that be aren’t “conspiracy theories” or the rantings of unhinged people. It’s prettycommon, and it was surreal, like a Philip K. Dick story, seeing, on my phone outside the courthouse, the corporate attempt to drown out news from my allies and me.
In 2015, Heather Marsh initiated #OpDeathEaters, building on earlier work such as #opGabon; combining the two means this campaign for inquiries/tribunals into pedosadism among the powerful has been ongoing on for about a decade. Multiple academics have amplified or written about #opDeathEaters, bringing credibility to the campaign and its named source. (I wrote about it here myself last year when I was given screener files for the Investigation Discovery special about Jeffery Epstein.) #opDeathEaters relies on trustworthy material including primary source footage, court documents, and investigative journalism. In contrast, the wacky stories of Pizzagate and QAnon — more like bricolage than stories, really — do not have an accessible originator using a real name, nor academic support, nor quality evidence. But like the #PayPal15 campaign, the goofy (to outsiders) Pizzagate and QAnon noise are attempts to protect the wrongdoers by taking attention away from the real story and placing it on unimportant garbage.
Next week, the video clips of Biden, many of which can already be found here or here if you’re curious.
Note: In 2021 I’m going to publish at least one blog post per week, ideally on Wednesdays. Today is a day late, but hey. This is entry 2 of 52.
“Name names! Name names!” That’s what an older gentleman, an autodidact and FDR-style liberal, told me from across the table at a Fort Worth coffeeshop a few years ago, before Jeffrey Epstein became known to average households. I’d been talking about vague criminal forces and their slippery control over our world. He wanted specificity, but it can be hard to remember who did what, each precise molecule of data, when drinking daily from the firehoses of books and social media. For me at least, if I’m not in the process of studying something or preparing a presentation, all that information becomes a blur, a mood or zeitgeist rather than the articulated facts of a rap sheet. Thankfully for both the forgetful and everyone else, the new website SpookyConnections.com delivers dossiers of top wrongdoers the planet over, and the site is steadily adding more and more.
Screenshot of SpookyConnections front page
Their About us page says Spooky Connections is a research project and “an independent international open source investigation to probe transnational organized crime. We operate using open source information from established news outlets and primary sourced documents to graph, map, and document a clear understanding of organised criminal networks and activities.” SpookyConnections.com is also currently linked in the bios of three major old school Anonymous twitter accounts: @YourAnonCentral, @OpDeathEaters, and @OpCanary.
The URL derives from the slang term spook meaning a spy or other espionage agent. While a president enters and leaves office in the space of a few short years — maybe a single term or less — the unelected often spend decades, no matter which party is in power, at agencies such as Central Intelligence, implementing war crimes and then implementing their celebration via propaganda, pulse-pounding TV shows and movies, or other seductive coercion manipulating the emotional responses of populations. This unfortunate truth about the architects of our (un)societies is well documented in books such as Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets, James W. Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable, and Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William Arkin. See also Heather Marsh’s blog post “The intelligence mafia.” Reading these texts remedies an archaic “how a bill becomes a law” view of our governance.
In the boxing ring’s other corner from the spies, the Spooky Connections website mainly consists of two features or areas. First, the profiles. The front page is illustrated with the faces of eleven (at the time of this writing) repulsive VIPs, much like a deck of cards spread out for inspection. Clicking one of them takes you to a page dedicated to exposing that single individual, using reputable sources including investigative journalism reports and court documents.
Let’s take Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev as an example for what the Spooky Connections drill-down on one person looks like.
Screenshot of the beginnings of the Dmitry Rybolovlev dossier
The image above is Spooky Connection’s profile of Russian billionaire and art investor Dmitry Ryboloviev. Below the picture of his displeased face, users can expand the table of contents or a list of his connections to others, family among them. The write-up is straightforward and readable, in the familiar format of an encyclopedia entry. Yet this one is custom-made to focus not on PR fluff but on credible accusations and criminal connections. The text includes subheads for easy reading: Introduction; Murder Allegations; The Maison de L’Amitie – Donald Trump Deal; The My Anna yacht and parties with young girls; Holdings; FC Monaco; Monaco-gate; Citations. This last, Citations, is particularly important so that readers can find the sources for the dossier. The write-ups beneath each subhead reveal plenty of unsavory information on the man. For instance:
Dmitry Rybolovlev remains close to the Kremlin, as evidenced by his friendship with Yuri Troutnev, one of the right arms of Vladimir Putin. [18] Donald Trump Jr., invited in September 2008 to a real estate conference in New York, had explained that “the Russians” now constituted “a rather disproportionate part” of the assets of the Trump family empire. [19]
And also:
during divorce proceedings it was revealed he took a vacation on his yacht off Croatia with “young girls whose passports said they were born in 1988 and 1989 but they looked much younger in photographs that were taken on this occasion,” according to court papers. They partied on his yacht “My Anna,” named after his daughter. [20] According to court proceedings Dmitry Rybolovlev admitted to sleeping with his butler, his assistant, and students which he happily shared with other oligarchs. He said “he appreciated only teenage girls, younger than his own daughter”.
Learning that this is who your rulers are is much like when some children have to confront the grim facts that their caregivers are actually incapable of nurturing them, or do not love them, or are dangerous to them. Usually in such a horrible situation, those kids’ selfhood/personhood diminishes; rather than acknowledge their caregivers, whom they can’t escape and who rule their lives like gods, are ongoing active hazards, it feels safer to blame themselves as not good enough, and withdraw, too afraid to express themselves fully, take big risks, or put themselves out there, choices that might draw attention in a hostile universe. In adulthood, the child then stays on the recliner, tuning in only to the familiar and predictable pabulum of corporate TV programming or ineffective by-the-book solutions, blaming themselves instead of the system and not willing to look their leaders in the eye to pursue answers based on their true natures. Expecting politico predators to arrest themselves isn’t going to work; to get different results, we have to try strategies that are different, such as strengtheningourselves and launching independent, international, victim-led inquiries/tribunals into the trafficking industry, an option I discuss here.
Spooky Connections’ other big feature is the graph. By clicking the button on the side (which consists of three hexagons resembling biological cells clumped together), users can easily access the graph at https://www.spookyconnections.com/graph.
Screenshot of graph view at Spooky Connections
The graph, similar to images from crime shows where police detectives combine clues on the wall to track down a suspect, can tell you quite a bit about these individuals’ relationships. For instance, the way I clicked the tool, shown above, suggests Donald Trump does not access the United States Mafia through Allen Weisselberg (CFO of The Trump Organization), but could through lawyer Roy Cohn. Because Spooky Connections is adding more VIPredators regularly, the tool should become more powerful in time. I’m not sure what the “Play” button is supposed to do; perhaps I am using it incorrectly. Clicking “Graph Commons” at the bottom left takes the user to a Spooky Connections page on graphcommons.com, where the “Play” button supplies various visualization features that I need to experiment with more to understand. In a few places, typos or notices such as “Work in Progress” alert the reader to the unfinished nature of the Spooky Connections website. The site also has a “Support Us” button leading to a donate page on donorbox.
One of Spooky Connections’ huge advantages is its global nature. Especially as international news bureaus have shut down due to lack of funds, corporate newspapers teach audiences that they are to be concerned with the news of their own country, not the news of other countries. (This is because countries are primarily segregated economic markets.) But the VIPredators travel all around the world, do business all around the world, commit crime all around the world. Closing your eyes to what they’re doing in the other 190-odd countries is obviously going to present an incomplete picture. Yet Spooky Connections offers a full view, one that will eventually become the status quo as more and more are accustomed to chatting with and befriending strangers abroad thanks to social media, email lists, etc.
Why clique up with and empower your opponents — I’m thinking of authors wanting to “picked” by corporate publishers, or citizenries silently accepting the crimes of the “lesser evil” in exchange for bread and circuses; in short, remaining infantilized rather than achieving greater and greater autonomy — when a handful of independent researchers can accomplish this and point the way forward?
Note: In 2021 I’m going to publish at least one blog post per week, on Wednesdays. Last year I didn’t quite make it, but this year I will.This is entry 1 of 52.
Note: The off topic photos of salad bowls are here to update readers familiar with the post where I introduced that regular meal of mine. Here’s how the dish is getting made these days.I introduced this salad for my first post of 2020, so I think it’s fitting to bring the bowl back for the beginning of 2021. The images show the salad bowl that was made adjacent to mine a few days ago by someone who really knows what she’s doing; hers was much more visually appealing; my meal, with ingredients strewn together haphazardly, simply disappeared into my happy stomach unphotographed.
Great message for an indoor gym; but, time to step outside
I used to go to the gym regularly and run on the treadmill with a portable MP3 player keeping me company. COVID-19 nixed the gym habit, and rain nixed my little music device. Now I’ve learned to pound pavement hearing the various songs of the outdoors, something I’d wanted to try for a long time—but did not have the strength of self to dare do.
Jogging without headphones places me much more in touch with the environment. Every little sound that comes my way reminds me I’m an animal taking part in a very physical world. It’s like camping, but each and every day. Usually, at least in the WEIRD world (Western Educated Individualistic Rich Democratic), the car and the cubicle lock adults into a zombie state; they forget, for instance, that their vehicle is thousands of pounds of metal hurling down the highway thanks to explosions, and treat the ride as a no-thought-required luxury cruise where they can eat and scroll their phone. Humans: from hunters persistently chasing prey to hunching over glowing screens with backaches and, above all else, predictable, safe, risk-free routines that keep them infantilized. It’s easy to understand how the treadmill fits in here: the runner watches another titillating screen, wears isolating headphones, and times the run on the machine’s complicated computer. Its flashing lights replace the jog in nature with something as scientifically managed, rigorous, and efficient as an assembly line. You don’t even go from a Point A to a Point B.
Since I’ve been running outdoors with no headphones for a month or so, what other differences have I noticed? It’s amazing how much you learn about your surroundings when daily you run around them, any which way, not necessarily sticking to a planned course. Think of all the things that might be going on in your town that you don’t know about. Just today I saw that Seattle, whichever government department it was, placed a sign threatening a shockingly steep $1,500 penalty for anyone dumping waste in a cul-de-sac near me. For years I’ve seen sofas, scrap metal, chairs, and other junk dumped there, and now the story continues with escalating stakes and conflict between the cost-saving polluters and the neatnik authorities. What will happen next? It’s a miniature story right outside my doorstep.
Incomplete salad bowl, so far with spinach, kale, red cabbage, and cucumber
At that cul-de-sac, there’s a somewhat rickety and certainly steep staircase climbing a hill; by the top, a wood fort stands, like one that might stand in a backyard for kids to play in. Whenever I run past it, I wonder what its function is, who built it, what its story is. Once you’re on the other side of the hill, it’s possible to walk a little bit and then take a trail circling around to, from another direction, the base of the staircase. Bigger infrastructure nearby inspires wonder too. I live by the “Low Bridge,” also known as the Spokane bridge, where the Duwamish River empties into Elliott Bay. (So come at me, bro!) When I was in zombie mode in my car, heavy metal blasting, I’d just assume the Spokane bridge was a drawbridge, even though I’d never seen it raise up to let ships through. It has a sidewalk for pedestrians, so nowadays I run across, a friend of the bridge, so to speak, getting to know it a little bit more each time. One day, before I could progress far across the bridge, a guard rail along its sidewalk came down and stopped me in my tracks. Next to me, vehicles were also stopped by a separate guard rail. Then the bridge very slowly swung in horizontal arcs to let the boat through. Finally it arced back together into one piece. Who controls all this? Does the bridge have a mind of its own? There’s a creepy tower by it that I can see from my apartment—perhaps the bridge boss is therein?
Scary tower + 2 bridges
My friends and I joke about this tower, because it looks straight out of some paranoiac novel. A different day, I was running across the bridge and happened to see a man come out of the top of the tower, the little room up there, onto the tower’s balcony area to gaze around the cityscape. I don’t know if he was satisfied or dissatisfied with what he saw, but he quickly vanished back into his lair. What’s his story? He some kind of wizard? What’s the tale of this tower? None of that does the driver typically see or think about, too busy zooming past while stressing over traffic. The treadmill gerbil in the gym definitely doesn’t take in all these unusual experiences either. Think of the multitudes of buildings you drive past routinely, the architectures and plants unobserved, the mysteries of who owns them and what they are doing with that ownership unbeknownst to you. Yet running outside, you feel part of the same highly active, physical world as the buildings (as opposed to a cerebral or deadened world), and might be inspired to research a particular structure you encountered next time you come to a computer.
There are plenty of other fascinating surroundings I’ve checked out since switching to jogging outdoors. To get certain places, it behooves me to run alongside train tracks. The gravel beneath my shoes there is so uneven that in spots, I have to really pay attention, which makes the exercise almost like a hike. These days I know that the trains near my neighborhood are usually the BNSF company’s; when did I ever notice and think about things like that before? I didn’t, just a drone on the unchanging treadmill. I’m grateful for my current newfound ability to run, listening, through grassy parks, down dirt paths following the Duwamish River, as close to the Seattle shipping terminals as their defenses will allow (Hi Homeland Security!), on sidewalk trails to their ends and then continuing alongside long streets leading into downtown, scrutinizing as I pass by the shops and other buildings I never knew were there. It’s like being an adventurous kid, exploring on a bicycle.
Added avocado, sesame seeds, and edamame.
Why didn’t I do this before? Seattle is a gorgeous city with plenty of walkable (and runnable) paths, whereas North Texas, where I’m from, consists of unappealing corporate parks, car dealerships, tract houses, and strip malls. But it’s much more than that. A person has to have a sufficient measure of strength to hurl themselves, panting hard, through the cold pouring rain and dark, down paths that aren’t yet paths. Where no one has planned for someone to run, where the person is creating the trail beneath their sneakers as they go, creating the idea. It requires engagement and participation with the world with all its details—watch your step on the uneven gravel! look that building up when you get home!—instead of withdrawing, giving up, and hiding in bed with unhealthy but comfortable habits, often grandiosely reassuring oneself falsely that one is achieving greatly.
I’d better get to bed. Getting up before dawn to run somewhere that’s just miles from my door, and I’ve never even been there before!
Complete with dressing and quinoa cooked in turmeric, ginger, and coconut milk
p.s. If you like the thoughts in this post, you might enjoy the videos of the vlogger shiey, aka illegal freedom. The artistic videos, a type of travel journal, show off his athletic, even daredevil, exploits exploring urban jungles, particularly restricted areas.
Today is Tuesday 27 October 2020. This year I’ve been trying to post once a week.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report was presented to President Nelson Mandela on 29 October 1998. We’re coming up on an anniversary of that date. Might be worth learning more about the SATRC, then, yes?
Besides the anniversary, another reason the TRC is important is the objective of #OpDeathEaters. That’s to establish an independent, international, victim-led tribunal/inquiry into the pedosadist/trafficking industry. When I was first hearing about #OpDeathEaters, my mind was like, what on earth is an inquiry? I think inquiries have some similarities to truth and reconciliation commissions. Here’s what I wrote about all that on May 31:
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.
Truth and reconciliation commissions are a way forward, but setting them up sounds complicated! So, start at a good beginning.
Vol. 1 Chapter 1, is the Chairperson’s forward. That’s Chairperson Desmond Tutu. I have been reading Volume 1 when able, and I marked two beautiful passages, one paragraph each, that I believe deserve a wider audience in the United States.
Both, paragraph 33 and paragraph 67, are from the Criticisms and Challenges section of Desmond Tutu’s forward. Here’s paragraph 33:
It would have been odd in the extreme if something as radical as this Commission had met with universal approval and acceptance. It would have been even more odd had we been infallible and made no mistakes as we undertook the delicate task of seeking to help heal the wounds of a sorely divided people.
I think multiple USians get really snobby and insist no solutions are possible when they have lost hope or feel too much emotional pain internally. The above passage serves as a balm.
Here’s paragraph 67:
It is to give substance to our cry from the heart that politicians should really stop playing ducks and drakes with our future – for the greatest sadness that we have encountered in the Commission has been the reluctance of white leaders to urge their followers to respond to the remarkable generosity of spirit shown by the victims. This reluctance, indeed this hostility, to the Commission has been like spitting in the face of the victims.
The reluctance of white leaders to urge their followers to respond to the victims’ generosity of spirit continues today.
Readers who want to know more about how to solve systemic injustice can study the South African TRC if they’re unfamiliar with it. Time to develop concepts like inquiries and determine how we might use them in this chewed-up world.
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so…except when I’m not because reasons, pandemics, life, etc. This was going to be a placeholder ‘oops’ post for Week 26, but as usual, I kept typing…
Note added Thurs 2 July: Links for recent articles at NPR and the Economist discussing COVID-19 spreading not by protestors but by parties, and a ProPublica article from July 1: “Internal Messages Reveal Crisis at Houston Hospitals as Coronavirus Cases Surge” Blame those on top, not your neighbor
I have a huge blog post in the works, giving an overview of, and listing resources for, escaping the box of conventional psychiatry. But it’ll have to wait another seven days or so, as I need to sit this workweek out, at least in terms of blogging. Although I’ll keep typing:
For unknown reasons, I’ve felt sad today and late yesterday.
Here in Seattle, the past 48 hours or so, I’ve been thinking, off and on, about Texas, where I’m originally from, probably because of the COVID-19 news there and everywhere. More than 5,000 new cases per day now in Texas. Over the past few months, Texans have told me not to worry about it. Around March or so, I offered to connect a regional hospital in Texas with PPE donors in Dallas; hospital staff declined, saying more PPE wouldn’t be necessary, though I suspect also the (current) neurotypical standard of seeing vulnerability as fault might have been at play. A Texas parent insisted to me that her adult offspring must not think about faraway coronavirus because it’s too stressful: I order you to stop texting these grown-ups about it, Douglas. Texans close to me recently went to gyms and salons and lectured me on their safety and how Trump would get this all fixed. (Except he and his are causing it.) But these are all well-documented, predictable reactions of propagandized humans to pandemics and politicians, just like during other outbreaks, such as this one a century ago.
The solution isn’t to vote for your destroyers but to arrest them, following realistic and practical steps (informed action feels better than anxiety), and thankfully although many of my Texan friends from the past few years have disappeared from my life — I guess they’re too weakened to risk the unpopularity pursuing unusual topics might bring; but, I don’t know for sure, since we no longer talk, typically — skyrocketing follower counts of, and widespread interactions with, goodaccounts show that more and more people globally are taking interest in helping themselves and others each day (instead of just buying and selling every last iota in a self-destructive race to the empty top), so maybe humanity will get somewhere, presently.
I also see many nice little evidentiary pieces of a better world. The neighbor out on his lawn playing his acoustic guitar and smiling, for the first time I’ve ever seen him smile. Customers in the grocery store swaying to the music from the overhead loudspeakers, when they were pretty much never doing that previously. All these little things add up: a reality with time for tasks other than serving powerful employers. Yet the clock is ticking till the unemployment payment boost evaporates on July 25/26/31 (depending).
From the New York Times link above: the United States is exceptionally diseased
So why the fishbowl picture at the start of this post? The past few days I’ve been unfortunately thinking (I’d rather think about something else) that the real core of reactionary Texas ideology is its premise that the individual is not affected by anything but the individual’s own willpower; the individual is not affected by the environment, and to speak of how conditioning or pollution or pandemic might be impacting you, according to the Randroid/Texas vision, is to confess your moocher inability to climb from rags to riches by innovating through the sweat of your He-Man brow, etc. It occurred to me that these increasingly infected Texans are sadly stuck in a small pond, and proudly don’t know it. Like fish in a fishbowl. And unaware of the rising temperatures — they of course think global warming is a hoax, just like Donald Trump calls coronavirus a hoax (and calls global warming a hoax) — and dismissive of any other possible impact from any other possible attribute of their surrounding environment, the Texans swim around their small pond telling each other they will succeed, they will innovate! Meanwhile, all the multinationalcriminalconspiracies destroying the planet/environment, are like a person the fish can’t or just won’t perceive, walking up to their fishbowl, grabbing it, and, while the fish continue to explain their rugged individualism (or so very hairsplitting neoliberalism!) to each other, just throwing the bowl at the wall. The bowl is flying toward the wall, the water is sloshing out, and the medium-size fish is sucking up to the biggest fish (in hopes of paid employment in eating other fish) and insulting the smallest-size fish for protesting, but it doesn’t matter, they’re all about to hit the wall, victims of much they once vaguely sensed and slammed the mental door on (“you shouldn’t think too hard”), or, well, victims of being goldfish I guess (metaphor strain!).
Publishing a couple of our dm responses re Clintons & Obama because we cannot get through all dm's and these questions keep repeating. Tl;dr we are not looking solely for child rapists but for criminal networks supporting them as well. #OpDeathEaterspic.twitter.com/vH0WCmt5kw
I want to type something like, “Please specify the conditions within which, what changes would need to happen so that, you could give your time and assistance not to celebully politicians who have willfully killed many people, but say, to Food Not Bombs, who hasn’t killed anyone and only tries to help?” but I need to do some dishes and then go to bed, I guess, and I’ve never got an answer from anyone to my “what conditions, if any, are required so that you might…” question. It’s basically asking the general public to admit what accommodations we might need to obtain asap, to combat rather than support our extinction. Which things to fix first (maybe these). And we’re pressured to see needing/procuring accommodations as making us less than. But even that “pressured to see” is pointing to an environment, which under rugged individualism, doesn’t exist and/or can have no effect on rags-to-riches High Value Men / Action Figure Superheroes. We’re pressured to see the bad environmental circumstances surrounding us (poverty, mass shootings, no/low access to quality food, anyone could continue) as personal failings, when really, those circumstances aren’t the fault of everyday people, and without talking about them loudly, we won’t ever fix them by convicting those causing them.
I want to power off my laptop and never power it back on. Death tolls getting to me today, and all the bots, and all the humans who have turned themselves into bots (“you shouldn’t care too much”), screaming that masks are a myth, or whatever, at the ER and ICU and other medical professionals on Twitter and in Texas who are asking for help. I should be grateful I’m not there, but it feels in some ways that I still am…
28 June 2020, The Dallas Morning News: We went inside Parkland’s COVID unit during its ‘worst week’ as coronavirus cases spike in North Texas
The critically ill patients in Parkland’s COVID-19 Tactical Care Unit couldn’t wear masks even if they wanted to. They each have a plastic tube jammed down their throats, straight to their lungs […] It’s eerily quiet on this long, open ward and the 30 patients on ventilators seem frozen in place. They’re unconscious, sedated with powerful drugs, in part to prevent them from ripping out the lines that are keeping them alive. […] Not one would hesitate for a nanosecond to trade the invasive plastic tubes for the masks that we, breathing free on the outside, get to wear. Not the 52-year-old man in one bed or his 77-year-old mother a few beds down. Not the man who went on a ventilator Friday night or the one who has been on a machine for more than two months […]
Updates from a Dallas ICU: we are completely full with COVID patients. Our ER is trying to send us 3 more. We are running out of good PPE and having to use shitty backups. The other ICUs are trying to take our AM staffing because they are also full.
Putting our Charge Nurses in staffing with critically ill patients and unable to help the rest of the staff with their equally critical patients. We have 4 patients trying to not code, even though they could at any moment.
I’m trying so hard to not cry at the thought of becoming the next NYC. Please Governor Abbott, tell me where all of these hospital beds are that you seem to think we have?
The best thing we can do besides quarantine is just be smart. Wear a mask when you go out. Wash your hands constantly. Don’t go out to crowded bars or restaurants. Social distancing. It’s just good common sense.
Note also that whistleblower Dr Rick Bright filed on 25 June 2020 an addendum (10-page PDF … it says “second addendum”; what was the first?) to his whistleblower complaint (89-page PDF) about Trump cronies retaliating against him because he “insisted on scientifically-vetted proposals, and […] pushed for a more aggressive agency response to COVID-19″ so they could push ineffective, shit drugs for you to take instead. The addendum documents the authorities on the warpath against his efforts to get his position back and threatening those who might help him do so.
Hopefully, this pandemic will teach people, even in Texas, that far from being a singlehanded titan of industry, each person is just a tiny speck, just one 7.6 billionth of the people alive today (let alone past and future people, as well as nonhuman animals), and imagining a single person as a willpower-y Robinson Crusoe, or belting out that the virus/environment won’t impact you because you think it’s fake, is like trying to section off with floating rope one part of the swimming pool from somebody else in another section peeing. Doesn’t work.
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so. Today’s short-ish post is for Week 25. I planned to just type an “oops” placeholder entry, but if you know me, then you know I can sometimes be a little…longwinded. Week 22 was my #OpDeathEaters review of the recent Investigation Discovery special focused on pedosadist Jeffrey Epstein, and Week 23 was my updating that post. Week 24 was some quick Seattle news. The upcoming longer post I referred tolast week should be up next week. Thanks for your patience!
I know a handful of white, very straight guys around the world who seem identical: roughly late thirties / early forties, recently dumped, fairly high income, lonely apartment, devoted to masculinism, to trade, to downer narcotics that are recreational, decreasingly. Often it feels nothing I ever say successfully combats the propaganda or world to which they are repeatedly exposed. Conversations with them seem like dominance battles; they keep score, and no one just shares.
Briefly, five news links from the past year and a half, to recalibrate readers who, before continuing forward, might need a reminder of the wider perspective outside the masculinist/trade/lonely life:
November 15, 2018: Article in Foreign Policy: In Russia, Feminist Memes Buy Jail Time, but Domestic Abuse Doesn’t
May 21, 2019: NBC News found that during a 5-year period under both the Obama and Trump administrations, within the system of lockup facilities recognized in 2019 by multiple Auschwitz and/or Holocaust survivors as concentration camps (Rene Lichtman; Ruth Bloch; Bernard Marks), ICE has forced thousands of immigrants into solitary confinement (recognized across the planet as a form of torture), not for breaking any rules, but for being physically disabled or gay.
May 31, 2020: My #OpDeathEaters review about Investigation Discovery’s special on Jeffrey Epstein. My review helps explain in practical and realistic terms (what actually are inquiries/tribunals?) how to stop voting for pedosadists and start arresting them.
June 2, 2020 twitter thread by Portland State University instructor Alexander Reid Ross documenting scores of violent, armed reactionary vigilantes carrying out intimidation and attacks against Black Lives Matter protests across the United States.
Today one of the masculinist-ish guys bemoaned to me this week’s efforts to topple the statue, near the White House, of Andrew Jackson, slaveowner. The person did not bemoan anything remotely on the subject of the above five news links. Yet imagine if every time the topic of toppling a slaveowner statue came up for “debate,” the conversation could not begin until first, all concentration camp victims were liberated, all femicides were prevented, all children were protected from pedosadists, all with impunity were convicted, and individuals learned to reject all bigotry.
In the face of torture and femicide and other human rights violations and unlawful killings, relentless cradle to grave propaganda trains too many USians to focus on, and endlessly talk about, rioters breaking Starbucks windows or stealing electronics from big box stores (both just ways of saying Fuck you in light of murders and more), because that tunnel vision means brainwashed USians don’t learn what much of the rest of the planet already knows: massive resistance can be far more powerful than politely giving a quiet speech about how you don’t want to be killed. To take just one example, the 2019-2020 Chileanprotests fight back against austerity and send their legislators fleeing. In other words, in a very practical and realistic move, they kicked their Congress out by force, in real life. Yet if nonstop battle by an oppressed public against powerful criminals with impunity sounds scary and sad — and I agree that it frequently is, and frequently has been throughout human history so far — then in addition, stop voting, start arresting. Practical and realistic? The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which among other things publicly heard applications for limited amnesty from human rights violators) accomplished a great deal, while simultaneously having trouble enforcing subpoenas because the commissioners didn’t have enough power relative to the reactionaries in their region. Still, that the goal of justice never before achieved in full is difficult, and that previous attempts to bring justice have not yet succeeded completely, doesn’t mean quit trying and become a boring complicit and compliant coward; it means, let’s figure out improved inquiries/tribunals — now, little step by little step.
During the pandemic brought to you not by protestors (back people into a corner, what do you expect them to do, die quietly?) — see NPR and the Economist — but by super-spreaders such as Donald Trump, and this month when people are especially discussing and endorsing noncompliance/disobedience with ridiculous and unjust rules against consenting adults putting their various Tab As into their various Slot Bs proudly, while all manner of extreme wild emotions happen, to all those braver than the intelligentsia and the aspirants to the intelligentsia, to all those who read and grow and share and take informed action…
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so. Today’s simple and quick entry is for Week 24. Week 22 was my #OpDeathEaters review of the recent Investigation Discovery special focused on pedosadist Jeffrey Epstein, and Week 23 was my updating that post. Expect a longer post next week.
King County phases
Fools, your biz phases are useless against me! (Star Trek phaser image from here.)
On Monday 15 June 2020, King County (includes Seattle; and, the only county in the country named for Martin Luther King Jr.) applied to the Washington state health department seeking permission to move from Phase 1.5 (aka modified Phase 1) to Phase 2, which are stages of the state government’s (un)safe start plan to re-open the overt trade economy (the economy you see in the newspaper, as opposed to covert trade in weapons drugs and humans, and as opposed to non-trade organizing of goods and services, see below). Phase 2 would mean more people out of their homes transacting business during the pandemic. According to a BizJournals.com article, the Washington state health agency could authorize the King County escalation from Phase 1.5 to Phase 2 as early as Friday 19 June 2020. Here’s King County’s 37-page application.
The application comes the same week as the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — a research institute once used by the White House for coronavirus projections — forecasts more than 200,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States by the first of October. I still think roughly three-quarters of a million or more U.S. residents will die by the end of the year from COVID-19, and (averaging things out somewhat ridiculously) every USian remaining alive on 31 Dec 2020 will know personally at least one person novel coronavirus has killed. To point out that humans are unfortunately regarded as expendable in the face of dolla dolla bill is correct and a good start, yet also incomplete. Living in a trade civilization means just about everyone almost always gets their bar soap, celtic salt, guitar strings, lube, and pretty much everything else from quid pro quos (exchange/trade). As a result, the correct yet incomplete observations about the imbalanced scales (life versus business) can seem a needless attack on those producing or consuming goods and services, that is to say, basically all of us. To help amp up the growing sense among the public that life and interactions are nevertheless more valuable than trade and transactions, requires goals (such as these and these) and inclusive, effectivereplacementsystems to facilitate non–communist sharing planetwide. Instead of getting bogged down in debating which trade economy phase we should watch the authorities re-open upon us, we must expand/strengthen and defend the approval economy for all that for millenia we have already opened. From that approval economy for all post by Heather Marsh in 2013:
The trust networks and reputations which make up an approval economy are part of the daily life of all societies already. The people you invite to eat a dinner you have provided are typically people who have earned your trust and approval. They will usually provide similar benefits to you if they are able, and if they consistently do not they may begin to receive less invitations. We care for grandparents who are unable to reciprocate because we recognize ourselves as part of a continuum of family obligation which cared for us when we were young and will hopefully do so again when we are old. When we ask the identity of an absent group member, their reputation and approval rating is frequently implied in the answer, and sometimes we ask for referrals outright. Even as anonymous participants on some internet sites our input is ranked and voted up and down, contributing to our reputation. Sometimes our internet reputation is already used to introduce us to wider societies providing basic needs, such as couchsurfing.
Approval economies are the natural economies of human society. We separated power from societal approval and exchanged society for trade relationships so long ago most cannot imagine an alternative, but it is still there in the most basic units of society. Economies based on trade relationships with financial systems as tools of coercion and control cannot coexist with peaceful and just societies. Power will be concentrated in able bodied traders and hoarders as long as we continue using trade economies.
West Seattle Bridge
Cracks in the West Seattle Bridge, image from Seattle transportation department March 2020
In the last year I’ve been working some as an educator teaching algebra to middle school kids. Obviously the students asked me, Math sucks will we ever need to know this in real life??? I told them, you know how Seattle has all these bridges? Well, we will need to know graphs and variables and equations to repair them someday…and already that day has arrived.
On 23 March 2020, the West Seattle Bridge, a major piece of infrastructure in this city, was suddenly closed with only a few hours of warning to the public. Well, the portion of the Bridge that spans the Duwamish River and gets you in and out of West Seattle, anyway. The Lower Spokane bridge, also known as the low bridge, right next to the West Seattle Bridge, is showing deterioration too, it was reported last week, and is currently being monitored; the low bridge is closed to regular vehicles (travel permitted only for emergency and other essential vehicles), though it might open to regular vehicles between July 12 and August 1. Around the day the West Seattle Bridge was first closed, the information coming out from the authorities strongly suggested the West Seattle Bridge would remain shut for all of 2020. They also explained the Bridge might reopen in 2021 — or never. Today we learn the Bridge at the earliest will open in 2022.
Wait, where am I getting all this information from? For all your West Seattle Bridge coverage funky needs regarding the basic facts, reported thoroughly and well, I recommend the West Seattle Blog’s tag for the West Seattle Bridge Safety Project, plus adept searching of the West Seattle Blog’s website and twitter. Furthermore, today between 1pm and 2:30pm Pacific, the West Seattle Bridge Community Task Force holds its second meeting online: join (maybe an archive will be available at that join link afterward as well?), or read the 2-page PDF agenda, or simply continue reading this post. You can find information on such upcoming meetings from the West Seattle Blog, among other sources. Check out the Seattle transportation department’s website for the West Seattle High-Rise Bridge Safety Project (including its FAQ), consider signing up for email updates from them, and if you want, see other stuffs.
The Bridge disrepair is dangerous enough that in May 2020, the Seattle transportation department snailmailed Seattle residents near it the following notice (scanned and screenshotted by me):
West Seattle Bridge is maybe falling down, falling down, falling down… according to this May 2020 notice from the Seattle Department of Transportation snailmailed to residents near the structure
The notice says: the Bridge “remains an evolving situation […] properties within the immediate bridge fall zone […] where a potential bridge collapse could pose a life-safety risk.” Not every day that a bridge falls on our heads!
Here are some updates/notes from today’s West Seattle Bridge Community Task Force meeting. Engineers are checking the West Seattle Bridge daily. The Bridge is showing new hairline cracking every week due to its own weight and thermal stressors. As the below flowchart from today’s meeting shows (Seattle transportation department employee Matt Donahue is the lead engineer regarding the Bridge), engineers/whoever are currently trying to figure out if it’s time to repair the bridge or time to replace it. The flowchart indicates that decision should come this summer. Repairing the Bridge would mean the earliest possible opening date would be in 2022; replacing the Bridge (complete with controlled demolition!) would mean the earliest possible opening date would be somewhere between 2024 to 2026. Assuming things go as planned…
Repair or replace flowchart from 17 June 2020 West Seattle Bridge Community Task Force meeting
Donahue also said in today’s West Seattle Bridge Community Task Force meeting that so far, the engineers’ analysis is that the Bridge can be repaired (it’s technically possible to do so), in that those working on the Bridge haven’t yet found anything that would preclude a repair, but the main question is, should the Bridge be repaired or instead replaced. Most frighteningly, Matt Donahue said it remains possible that the Bridge will suffer a “catastrophic failure” (fall on our heads).
In light of the ongoing catastrophic failure possibility, plus the ongoing pandemic and the ongoing overt trade economy implosion, I’m still curious if auto transit across the Duwamish River will actually ever be possible again. Will the West Seattle Bridge ever really re-open? Will an everyday Seattleite like me drive across it ever again? It would be great to see solid information, rather than my intentionally provocative speculation, addressing if brain drain (skilled individuals leaving the United States for countries accessibly offering health care and other basic services) is impacting efforts to repair or replace the Bridge, or what “opportunities” other countries might be evaluating as their governments and corporations ponder the United States’ inability, in various regards, to fix itself. After failed state, does “international rebuilding” come next?
An image of the West Seattle Bridge, by Ellen M. Banner, posted at TheSeattle Times in March 2020
As always, what we aim to do with our economies plural, or with the cracking West Seattle Bridge, is up to us. To widen our perspectives/paradigms and to force-multiply our capabilities for self-governance, I especially encourage readers to check out these twoposts by Heather Marsh and her books, and to follow these Twitter accounts: @YourAnonCentral, @OpDeathEaters, @OpDeathEatersUS. There’s also me, @DouglasLucas on Twitter as well as this blog, my email (DAL@RISEUP.NET), etc. Thanks!
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.
#Anonymous is hitting the U.S. government from all vectors right now. Police departments nationwide are monitoring their cybersecurity and Trump is very agitated about the Epstein case resurfacing after investing so much time and money to kill the story among other things.
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.
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:
What does Epstein have to do with Black Lives Matter? it's a testament to the impunity given to those in power that believe that we are property they can sell & destroy as they please. Their impunity is why they murder black people and traffick children. We can all stop them.
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:
#opTrumpTweets is working. Trump is not afraid of your insults, he is afraid of getting Epsteined by attracting too much attention to his organized crime buddies. https://t.co/nPi6iwPUmm
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, 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.
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
The special shows images of intellectual property oppressor Bill Gates but does not discuss him. Here’s a thread with #OpDeathEaters research on the Microsoft founder.
Bill Gates praised child Jeffrey Epstein’s 'lifestyle' as "intriguing" "A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late" Bill Gates on an evening he spent with Epstein. The daughter was 15. #OpDeathEatershttps://t.co/VJGJzzR6yp
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.
RMS advocated paedosadism and wrote, “I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children" arguing children can consent to their own rape and continued "parents are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing" #OpDeathEatershttps://t.co/ql4frELG3d
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.
The following threads explain #opDeathEaters Long Term Goal 2: Challenge the propaganda and framing of paedosadism and trafficking as isolated 'mental illness','personal life' or 'sex scandals' instead of an industrial,international, organized crime network. pic.twitter.com/oPUHKXflJk
How the organized propaganda of the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was developed with the help of the UK government and the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in the US: The Other Battle For the Internet by Heather Marsh. #OpDeathEatershttps://t.co/s9olRwN9Pd
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:
“ In 2016 Steven Hoffenberg pursued his most pro-Trump effort yet — launching a Super PAC to elect Donald Trump president.” — Wendy Siegelman https://t.co/qz9J0ub8Ql
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.
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
"Conchita Sarnoff, executive director of the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking, claims that publishers refuse to release her book,"
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.
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.
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.”
I'm a Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist originally from Texas. I'm also a substitute teacher in public education. I write about anything and everything, but usually philosophy tied to current events, liberatory mental health, science fiction and fantasy, investigative journalism, technology, justice, and more.
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