[Irish Times] Almost exactly a year ago, on August 16th, 2018, I visited Jeffrey Epstein at his cavernous Manhattan mansion. The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.
So one of my first thoughts on hearing of Epstein’s suicide was that many prominent men and at least a few women must be breathing sighs of relief that whatever Epstein knew, he has taken it with him.
During our conversation, Epstein made no secret of his own scandalous past ‐ he’d pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution from underage girls and was a registered sex offender ‐ and acknowledged to me that he was a pariah in polite society. At the same time, he seemed unapologetic. His very notoriety, he said, was what made so many people willing to confide in him. Everyone, he suggested, has secrets and, he added, compared with his own, they seemed innocuous. People confided in him without feeling awkward or embarrassed, he claimed.
I’d never met Epstein before. I had contacted him because my colleagues and I had heard a rumour that he was advising Tesla’s embattled chief executive, Elon Musk, who was in trouble after announcing on Twitter that he had lined up the funding to take Tesla private.
#1
I don't believe a word. Why would Epstein converse about these things with James B Stewart of all people ? In his piece about the interview, Stewart describes Epstein as an oversharing, loose lipped lech who keeps steering the dialog toward controversy. Was he talking him into sharing a room with a damsel, hoping to hook a Pulitzer winning NYT writer ? What purpose did such talk serve ? He makes him sound more like John McAfee than the operator Epstein was. And for no reason slanders Elon Musk in the process. Anything can be reported now, that the horse is dead.
#3
dron, James Stewart is a credible source: a low-key, serious journalist who plays it straight and who has a long history of solid, in depth reporting on Wall Street figures (Stewart himself is a former Wall Street, white shoe lawyer).
Stewart does not oversell. His tone is skeptical, neutral, balanced. He characterizes everything clearly and with proper qualifications: "Epstein seemed... my impression ... he claimed, said, stated ..."
Stewart does not assert that Epstein has dirt. He reports Epstein's claims, and merely suggests that these claims line up with "one of my [Stewart's] first thoughts... that many prominent men and at least a ew women must be breathing sighs of relief that whatever Epstein knew, he has taken it with him..."
[TheDrive] Seven personnel from a major nuclear weapons research laboratory died in the mysterious incident at a test site in northwestern Russia.
Rumors and speculation continue to swirl around a radiological accident last week at a missile test site in northwestern Russia even as officials held a memorial service today for those who died in the incident. The Kremlin has now acknowledged that the incident killed at least seven scientists and other personnel from a major state nuclear research laboratory, who were working on a system that included a small nuclear reactor at the time. This same lab is linked to the development of a nuclear-powered cruise missile called Burevestnik and U.S. intelligence officials are reportedly increasingly of the view that one of these weapons, or a test article related to it, exploded in this mishap.
Details remain scarce about Burevestnik and how it works, but the most prominent working theory is that its main propulsion source is a nuclear ramjet. A weapon in this configuration would use rocket motor potentially liquid-fueled, which would explain the source of the explosion in this accident to boost it to the optimal speed for the ramjet to work. After that, air would pass over the nuclear reactor and get heated before passing through an exhaust nozzle at the rear to produce thrust.
This, in principle, would give the weapon virtually unlimited range and a maximum flying time measured in days or weeks.
U.S. President Donald Trump appears to have confirmed that the U.S. Intelligence Community has at least strong suspicions that a Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, or a prototype thereof, was involved in the accident last week. Trump Tweeted about the incident late on Aug. 12, 2019, describing it using the NATO nickname for the weapon, "Skyfall." Previous reports have identified this moniker, but no U.S. or other NATO officials have used it publicly before, suggesting that the social media post followed a formal briefing on the topic.
#3
The US prototyped a nuclear powered cruise missile in the 1950's. Decided it posed a bigger danger to ourselves than the Soviets. No way to safely test it.
[TheHill] Even amid the heated political rhetoric that dominates the news media and social media, resurrected false claims about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., stand out as egregious.
On Friday and Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, all running for their party’s nomination for president, tweeted out statements containing disproven claims or false implications about the incident. The falsity of the narrative has been stated on even leftist platforms such as the WaPo, Slate and Vox.
Posted by: lord garth ||
08/13/2019 02:20 ||
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Link ||
[11134 views]
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#1
Snopes will get right on it around 2040.
Posted by: Dino Protector of the Nebraskans7894 ||
08/13/2019 5:44 Comments ||
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#2
Is it still a Big Lie if it's a bunch of midgets mouthing it?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/13/2019 7:49 Comments ||
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[American Thinker] I like to remind people that the enviros, top to bottom, side to side, are misanthropists; they consider the human race a cancer on the planet. They hope to achieve a planetary wildlife park where the only humans allowed are the park rangers, who belong to their federation of environmental exclusives.
Here’s a good sampling of the attitudes of enviro fanatics, with the proviso that the current human population on planet earth is north of 5 billion and these statements are only a small sample of the larger environmentalist position on population and human habitation of the planet Earth:
David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club: "Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."
Club of Rome: "...the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million people but less than one billion."
Susan Blakemore, a UK Guardian science journalist: "For the planet’s sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we’re doomed."
Paul Ehrlich, professor, Stanford University: "The addition of a temporary sterilant to staple food, or to the water supply. With limited distribution of antidote chemicals, perhaps by lottery".
Bill Gates, Microsoft billionaire, funder of enviro causes: "The world today has 6.8 billion people...that's headed up to about 9 billion. If we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent."
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, architect of the new Germanic masterplan, the 'Great Transformation': "When you imagine that if all these 9 billion people claim all these resources, then the earth will explode."
Jacques Cousteau, mega-celebrity marine biologist, French scientist: "In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day." US Pols Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib; "In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 white people per day."
These doomsday proclamations are contradicted by reality; the quality of life on the planet has actually improved with an increase in population, as well established by studies of economic historian Julian Simon, who makes the case that a critical mass of humans is necessary for progress and creative development, as shown by the last two centuries of tremendous human development and improvements in quality of life across the planet.
Is it possible these enviros are, like most on the left, people who claim to care about the human race but don’t really care about human beings‐and are misanthropic to the core as an ideological mind set‐concerned about an abstraction, the human collective, but unconcerned about real live humans? 'Planned Parenthood' is also doing their part.
#2
Every time I see crap like this, I think that
a) What people really mean is that there should be fewer OTHER people - they will of course be among the anointed survivors.
b)This sort of sentiment should be expressed in their suicide notes
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
08/13/2019 11:54 Comments ||
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#3
we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it - Cousteau
"And yet say it we shall, because we're horrible people."
#4
Bill McKibben offers hope - there is, he says, a better way: An Alternative to Progress | Mother Jones [May/June 2001] Bangladesh, despite all its problems, holds the promise of a kind of self-sufficiency not imagined at the World Bank.
#5
Also, people like Paul Ehrlch never foresaw the green revolution - headed by people like Norman Borlaug(Nobel Peace Price winner). He and his worked helped move countries like India from the verge of starvation to food sufficiency.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
08/13/2019 12:50 Comments ||
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#6
These whackadoos have been to Elberton, GA and saw our guidestones
[Babylon Bee] LEIPZIG‐Kigali the lioness has been hailed as a women's rights advocate after she killed and ate her own cubs.
Planned Parenthood immediately jumped at the opportunity to leverage Kigali's popularity, offering her a job as the organization's mascot.
Kigali will appear in ads encouraging women to have as many abortions as they want and be available to counsel young ladies thinking about getting abortions.
"Imagine how inconvenient those two cubs would be if I'd kept them around---ugh," she said in a speech in front of Planned Parenthood's New York offices, with a lion from a local American zoo translating from her native German. "I'm now free to center my life around myself, having killed those two little unwelcome leeches."
She made it clear that the two cubs she killed weren't actually lions, per se, but just "clumps of cells" since she hadn't subjectively decided they were living beings yet. "As soon as I decided to terminate them, they became nothing more than parasites."
The lioness said she plans on sleeping around with other lions and killing and eating some more cubs, should she get pregnant. "My cubs, my choice."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.