Who was Epstein working for?

Epstein was obviously working for Israeli and US intelligence.  So it's not surprising that the increasingly irrelevant western mainstream media--owned and operated by US intelligence and big money zionists--is now trying to pin it on Russia.  This misinformation reaches an older generation, mostly over 60 now, that refuses to believe anything else for news.

Alon Misrahi gives a great synopsis here.  And here.

If Epstein had any dealings with Russia, and he tried, they related to helping western backed opponents to Putin, one of whom we know Epstein was friends with.  Epstein had to struggle to get a Russian visa.  His friend Mandelson tried but failed to get a Russian visa for him.

Meanwhile, Epstein's friends were all Zionists, mostly with Israeli dual citizenship.  Ehud Barak was one of his best friends.  Alan Dershowitz was another.  Epstein stated he represented the Rothschilds.  He helped to mediate deals for Israel.  Epstein frequently used the word Goyum to refer to anti-Zionists.

Wexner, who made Epstein rich, was an uber Zionist who ran a big Zionist lobbying operation.  Epstein's wife was daughter of Israeli superspy Robert Maxwell.

And during Epstein's career, what did Russia get from it?  Russia has only sunk into pariah status in the west while Israel has become more and more untouchable even by the media even during a historic genocide which continues today.

Epstein's mission was accomplished and handed off to Palantir which keeps track of special people.

Western media is more and more proving itself to be a laughing stock.  And that is good, because they've been doing this kind of misdirection for a long time and I hope others will see that more and more.  Such as the fake 'Russiagate' scandals, and all manner of the like, going back 100 years or more, many of which "Liberals" and even "Conservatives" in most cases still take as inerrant truths.  If Russia were as powerful inside the US as Israel, there'd be laws against such knee jerk Russophobia, people would get kicked out of jobs in government and education, etc.

It may be worthy of note that Epstein's "conviction" for pedophilia is rather thin.  His one and only one conviction, part of a plea deal, was with regards to a 17 year old girl who had been working for him for about a year.  She had consensual sex with Epstein just once and on the eve of her 18th birthday.  She did not want to be involved in his prosecution and has never sued Epstein.  Florida is one of only a few US States that has an age of consent at 18, most states put the age of consent at 16 or 17, and most countries in the world set it between 14 and 16.  

Nothing else like this has ever been established in court.  All of those who have sued Epstein admit to having misrepresented their ages to him (which is not a legal defense, but often serves as a deterrent to successful prosecution so authorities usually look for "easier" cases not involving misrepresentation).  Girls coached other girls to lie to him about their age precisely because Epstein himself did not want to be having sex with underage girls (bad for his business) and he asked their ages.

Now, Epstein himself, actually operating a Mossad Honeypot to initiate and entrap western elites, would likely have been more careful than many of his friends.  Merely operating such a "massage" service for elites with flown in minors would have been highly illegal even if Epstein himself never enjoyed the benefits.  Many others, we might well guess, could have.

But I see Epstein's greatest criminality as more being Zionist spy and kingpin than pedophile.  Zionism is Genocidal, that's an absolute, while Age of Consent is socially relative.  And without all the bogus religious moral-speak, when and if it is devoid of other crimes Prostitution is merely another form of Wage Slavery that reactionary societies, as ours is, have made illegal rather than properly regulate.

I feel that same way as I do about Chomsky toward other Epstein friends who were not part of his sex club, like Woody Allen.  Their greater crime was not being friends with a pedophile, which isn't a crime by itself at all, but being part of a central Zionist influence and control network through which Israel supporters have kept policy on track for some time, at least 1964 or so, and now increasingly speech too. 

In Chomsky's case, further denying that Zionists or the Israel Lobby are important in western politics, US policy being only determined by US military and economic needs, he endlessly intoned.  It all becomes very suspicious now.

He's smart enough to know what he was doing here.  That's how he got "universal" recognition as west's greatest intellectual, even in the New York Times, which did shun him for awhile.  By deflecting away from Zionist networks, dismissing conspiracy theories in general (which tend to tilt more towards Zionists nowadays) including JFK's assassination, as well as heaping ire on many of empire's enemies (such as Gaddafi and Assad).   He ultimately served elite interests, while condemning them at the same time, by steering clear of certain things.  Especially Zionists, by moving the blame to the US military and weapons gifts and sales (needless to say, we should be maximally protesting that, as it is "our" responsibility, he was right about that, but keeping our eyes open is important too).  Chomsky was also very anti-Communist.*

By being friends with Epstein, Chomsky shows us he was part of the club.  And he was allowed to be the West's Leading Intellectual precisely because he was right at the edge of the permitted spectrum of opinion, with many he got ideas from being beyond that edge and who are more suppressed.  No one was necessarily telling Chomsky what to think, but he rose in stature and exposure as he continued to tell a cooperative story, with just enough deflections.  Not surprisingly, Epstein did him many favors.

And so on, for all the Epstein friends.  By being his friend, doors were opened for them, and cameras entertained for Epstein, and tapes sent to Mossad.  Not to mention files accumulated by FBI, including prepared by Confidential Human Sources who concluded Epstein was a Spy working for Israel.

Who is the new Epstein?  Funny you should ask.  Epstein himself was prosecuted, incarcerated, and suicided under his first Administration.  That's how mob rule works.  How did the New Epstein get that position?  Much like the old one, bending over for the right people, especially big money Jewish Zionists like Miriam Adelson, just as Epstein had his Lex Wexner.  There may be some shift in the Means and Methods, but the New Epstein has an even larger circle, which includes his kids.

bernard, the proprietor of the virtual online bar known as Moon of Alabama makes some "clarifications" and "corrections" along the lines of Michael Tracy above in the context of defending Noam Chomsky and blasting his newborn critics.  I agree it is not technically correct to call Epstein a Pedophile and especially not a Convicted Pedophile.  His conviction, for which he served a short prison sentence in which he was notoriously allowed to leave 16 hours a day, was for Soliciting Prostitution from someone under 18 (with a separate count of Soliciting Prostitution, which is something I don't feel should be illegal at all, just regulated).  The girl involved had worked for him since she was 17, giving him massages while he masturbated, but never actually having sex with him.  The actual sex occurred on the eve of her 18th birthday, and it was consensual, and she never wanted to testify against him (though I might also note that it sounds exactly like statutory rape, of which he of course was not convicted, this being a plea deal he accepted).  These offenses were nothing like "pedophilia."  In these individual acts, Epstein was a law breaker, but not a "monster" or "pedophlle."

The monstrosity creeps in in the incredibly large scale of sex trafficking, which nearly everyone believes happened, and included many world leaders (though at various times the FBI said there was "no evidence" of a honeypot for world leaders, and it seems Michael Tracy believes the FBI on this, but others ask why should they should believe the FBI on this when they often don't believe the FBI on a lot of things, and it's reasonable to believe FBI steers clear of anything that smells like CIA or Mossad work, and various people even in the files and elsewhere have said as much).

So, a correct term would be Alleged Sex Trafficker and I see the more punctilious media use similar terminology.  THAT was what Epstein was ultimately charged with in 2019, and which he never stood trial for, by either being shuttled away into permanent hiding somewhere out of touch like Israel by Mossad agents, or suicided.  NOBODY believes he took his own life, though in JFK Assassination style, none of the mainstream media will confess to that, they all parrot that official story.  But surely by 2019, FBI had enough documentation and will (under his onetime-best-friend-now-enemy President Trump) to go with it, and we are seeing much of it right now, so saying Alleged is almost just a formality.  So I'm ok with calling him a Sex Trafficker without the Alleged.  BTW, Epstein could have served life in prison for this.  The same is true for Ghislaine Maxwell, who in many accounts was the key director of this whole operation, finding and coaching girls and testing enjoying them herself.

And Sex Trafficking of underage minors is not a good thing, there being power imbalance and all that, even if it's fairly remote from the immoral grotesquerie of Pedophilia.  But notably, having underage prostitutes is still something bad enough to destroy the reputation of any person with great social stature.  Not all are wrapped in unstainable Teflon as Trump seems to be among his base.  So it's at the perfect level of criminality for a long running Honeypot (which the FBI continues to say there isn't evidence for, and of course they do).

(*Chomsky was opposed to Marxism-Leninism, the defining view of capital C Communism.  This is the declared view of the USSR (of course) and also China, Cuba, and Vietnam.  Chomskyians would prefer to describe his position being opposed to Stalinism, of course it was Stalin who coined the term Marxism-Leninism to describe the principles of the USSR and what he adhered to, by pulling the correct bits of Marx or Lenin for any occasion.  But Communists like Michael Parenti claimed Chomskians opposed really existing revolutions and resistance to empire, while demanding impossible ideals he freely admitted were not achieved in USA.  Chomsky mostly described himself as Anarchist the idea that the state is the mother of all crimes and we'd be better off without states...which happens to be the end goal of Marxism-Leninism as well...but in the meantime we have Communism in a few Countries.  In the forseeable future anarchism is usually either useless violence, useless passivity, or romantic idealism.  I see Chomsky as romantic idealist both with regards to Anarchism and his original conception of Zionism, which certainly could not have been reasonable in hoping for a Palestinian/Jew stateless paradise in Palestine in 1953, and especially one that would arise other than by Marxism-Leninism.  Romantic Idealism is the perfect basis for gatekeeping on the left end of the political spectrum.  Also true of Trotskyism, ISO, and similar movements, who have often served as left gatekeepers keeping as many as possible away from Marxism-Leninism--which basically the revolutionary practices which actually work.  More often than not, Social Democratic states have slipped backwards into Neoliberalism, the dominant economic paradigm of the capitalists states today.  Only Communist states are immune to abusive Finance Capitalism.  All it really takes is running the banking system in the public interest, as China does now, and not abolishing everything private.  Lenin had that vision too, and he famously said the people should control the Commanding Heights.)

The Iranian "Protests"

I was disappointed to discover that my most favorite blogger, Tony Greenstein, has accepted the "protests" in Iran as mostly legitimate and the Iranian government crackdown against it unjustified and terrible.

I have seen accounts of the death and damage caused by these "protests" and concluded they aren't protests at all, riots would be a better term, but perhaps better yet is a terrorist insurgency led, backed, and funded by US and Israel.  I take as my key piece of evidence the Iranian seizure of 50,000 Starlink terminals used by the foreign backed insurgency to communicate with their foreign handlers.  A key way that Iran stopped the terrorism was by blocking Starlink reception, thanks to on the spot help by Russia.

Tony rants against Max Blumenthal (of Grayzone) and David Miller, from whom I've learned these stories, both of whom I esteem highly, now more than Tony himself perhaps (though Tony is indispensable too).  Tony seems to be from an older generation, like David Silverstein (of Tikkun Olam), who still like to criticize the targets of Empire like Russia and Iran as terrible, instead of seeing them correctly as the victims and targets of Empire, and the Really Existing resistance to Empire.  And I wouldn't believe a word said against the Really Existing resistance countries here either, because we're living in an echo chamber of propaganda even from supposedly independent sources.  Nor is it my job to criticize the Really Existing resistance countries--I refrain from doing that knowing full well that it manufactures consent for US war, the most terrible outcome of all, which is why the Western media won't stop doing so, and making more and more exaggerated claims (Tony buys into some earlier ones, which could be close to the truth, but I see them as the predictable response to western backed proxy terrorism).  Finally, even if the Islamic Republic isn't perfect, it's entirely none of my business.  It is to the people in Iran to deal with it and without any foreign interference, which sadly will never happen, and that is the real core of the problem.

Tony even dismisses the Israeli admission that they are deeply involved as braggadocio.  I'd be as inclined to believe it understatement.

ICE

ICE was created by laws enacted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  The laws that many people said had been cooked up in advance, and 9/11 provided the emergency* to get them passed.  ICE was a key part of the new Department of Home Security.  

Previously, INS handled both immigration services and immigration enforcement.  Originally INS had been (most appropriately?) part of Department of Labor, before it became part of the Department of Justice.

So effectively the creation of DHS and ICE was a way of creating a quasi military "security" force devoted to immigration** and get it away from the more broadly focused Department of Justice (DOJ) which might actually be concerned about civil rights, etc.  The FBI is part of the DOJ and has a better reputation for professionalism than ICE.

No less than the American Friends Service Committee calls for the Abolition of ICE on those grounds.

On January 30, 2026 was the congressional move to separate ICE funding (a mind boggling $170 Billion) from the rest of the budget a good strategy for reforming or abolishing ICE, or a strategy for face saving of top Democrats who have in fact long favored big ICE funding increases themselves?  I don't know, I've seen both opinions.

Who are the undocumented immigrants in the US?  They come from any countries which used to be led by Mexico, though recently more Mexicans have been leaving the US than coming to it.  More recently undocumented immigration has been dominated by influx from broken Central American countries, which the US had a large hand in breaking.

When did these immigrants come to the US?  Most undocumented immigrants in the US came here a long time ago.  The undocumented population of the US grew from 3.5 million in 1990 on a steady ramp upwards through the Presidencies of Bill Clinton and GW Bush peaking before the Global Financial Crisis at 12.2 million then slowly falling during the Obama administration (who did record numbers of deporations) to 10.2 million, then gradually rising with an extra boost of Central Americans in 2023 to about 13 million.  I would call this trajectory basically horizontal since 2008, and while buffeted by external events shows no consistent differences between Democrat and Republican Presidents.

The states that most undocumented immigrants go to is also neither Blue nor Red States but both.  California and Illinois and two leading Blue states for undocumented immigrants, as are Red states Texas and Florida.  Hardly any undocumented immigrants go to most states.

(*Count me among those who believe that the 9/11 was not carried out by government agents as 9/11 Truthers assert, but allowed to happen both through the evil designs of necons like Dick Cheney and GW Bush, and the incompetence of appointees like Donald Rumsfeld.  This makes me doubly suspicious of any laws that were inspired by it, like the infamous Patriot Act which is well known to have long been in the works, just like the War in Iraq.)

(**Supposedly devoted to immigration anyway.  They seem to have taken up an unspoken political mission of quashing dissent to the fascist politics of President Trump, operating something like Gestapo or Brown Shirts.)

Is animal predation evil?

This is a kind of utilitarianism I cannot get behind:

https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html

I see this is wrong on many levels, but it's only an extreme version of ideas many people have.

1. Firstly, it's all about the subjective experience (and apparently of herbivorous species only--he hates cats and believe they should be abolished if they can't be reprogrammed).

I have a long overdue essay in the queue which keeps not being finished about how the focus on subjective experience leads us into social destruction, genocide, etc.  (e.g., the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which focuses on the subjective experiences of Zionist Jews, and similarly the philosophy which enabled Nazism is highly subjective...and it focused on eliminating Marxist materialism because that makes nationalists and capitalists feel bad).

2.  Secondly, it's imagining ourselves to be gods, with our best intuitions being ultimate wisdom.  The road to hell is paved with our best intentions.  The road to wisdom begins with realizing we are really very small, and the world that existed before us was grand.  We should never (have) tried to change it very much.

3.  It's a cornucopian view which ignores physical limits like Limits to Growth.

Whatever their immediate prey might feel, animal predators serve an essential function in ecology.  The essential function of keeping things from getting out of balance.  It's a form of negative feedback.

The important thing is not how people or animals feel.  The important thing is continuation vs extinction.

The problem with people is not that they sometimes make animals feel bad.  The problem with people is that their collective activities are driving a global mass extinction.   This is hard to see if you have a small field of vision.  A human society of vegetarians might be slightly better than otherwise (note: Hitler was a vegetarian), but it could still be driving mass extinction through habitat loss, pollution, and climate modification.  Even if those things were slowed down considerably they would still continue.  The solution involves some combination of limiting the human population size and the destructiveness of human technology.

Cats are not driving a global mass extinction, and I doubt they ever have.  Ordinary predation has limits.  It is human technology, including especially agriculture and mining, which lacks those kinds of limits.

Lies about the Talmud

I've stated in general terms the same thing before, but a Reddit poster gives a lengthy rebuttal to some of the common tropes about the Talmud:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/18fz2h2/a_response_to_arguments_containing_false_talmudic/

Where it is claimed the Talmud calls non-jews 'beasts,' the actual term is 'worshipper of stars' (contextually meaning polytheistic idolators).

The passage cited is actually an argument as to why visiting non-jewish graves does not require ritual purification.

Now that's not to say the Talmud is not without good criticism, I've made those before too.  While in fact the Talmud says that to save a non-Jews life is more important that all but 3 things: murder, disallowed sex, and idolatry, it does not in fact call for equality for all people, it calls for fairness to non-jews, and more-than-fairness to Jews.  That's where the supremacism can creep in.  Though it doesn't necessarily have to, I've never experienced any myself, Jews have always been more-than-fair to me personally, and I can see numerous historical examples (eg Jonas Salk).  And hardly any other religion offers equality for all (only such as Unitarian Universalism) anyway.  

But what we've seen with Zionism and Israel is disgusting, and in my mind a complete negation of both the Talmud and the Torah.  Zionists have utterly lost their Judaism in all but name only.  They have become the idolators of death and destruction, genocide, and not just statehood (which would be bad enough, actually, to qualify as an an idolatry, even if it could be done without death and destruction, just merely by the slightest unfairness--which is still against God's rules--and it's obvious this is not humanly possible...hence not surprising the Talmud and Torah both say Jews must wait for the Messiah).  But such is the modern infotainment reality, Zionist Jews can live in their own bubble of lies and be fine with the death, destruction, and genocide Zionism requires in the name of idolatrous statehood.  

I love my hobbies, but I don't murder, steal, lie or do anything unfair to pursue them.  I always try to be as fair as I can be, or more than fair.  Fairness is a good idea in business and banking too.  That's how you get good will.  And that's what the Talmud is supposed to help people learn.  It was fairly successful in that for over a thousand years before the rise of Zionism, which sadly it was unable to stop.

Though the Talmud (seems to?) denounce Jesus (I wonder if in fact it is denouncing Paul, the real inventor of modern Christianity and in my view that denunciation is just about warranted), it seems to me the story of Jesus is a perfectly fitting illustration of both Torah and Talmudic 'values'.  Jesus was quoting Leviticus when he said to love others as yourself.  The New Testament figures were themselves all Jews, including Jesus and Paul, and many of their followers as well.

Warner Bros Discovery

Warner-Bros Discovery is one of the five big Hollywood Studios, has a wealth of classic films, and is the #3 streamer.  It's already as big as any such thing needs to be.  All the previous mergers and acquisitions which produced the present entity led to a decline in production and production quality.  And yet, the Board savors more.  Why?

It's already been at the point where it can collect ever greater monopoly rents.  The board is hoping to merge it to become an even bigger monopolist, which raises the present value of the current monopolies (if nothing else).

IOW, what they're selling is monopoly itself.

This should, of course, be illegal.

And then there's Netflix and Paramount, which ought to be forbidden from buying rival giant companies in the hopes of even greater monopoly than they already have.  Netflix is already the top streamer, who would be buying the #3, and then they'd own all the content other streamers rent from Warner-Bros Discovery.  Paramount would put half of Hollywood under one right-wing family.

For a long time, anti-trust enforcement relied on the bad doctrine that where greater size yielded greater efficiencies, it should be allowed.  We've seen that disproven time and again when resulting companies lose the qualities which originally made them special (like Boeing, who made the most reliable planes).  But restoring proper antitrust enforcement (in which the existing companies like Warner Bros Discover would already seem to be monopolies whose very size limited public choices--an inefficient outcome for consumers) would only be a small part of the de-financialization which needs to occur in the US economy.

Finance needs to be boring, and only then can everything else become exciting again.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/netflix-is-trying-to-buy-warner-bros

AI is the digital asbestos we'll be digging out of our walls for decades

Cory Doctorow at his best, incredible, I couldn't have brought this all together in one essay said any better.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Cory dismisses all the garbage claims and worries, and gets to the heart of it all.  AI is intended to cost middle class thinking and creative jobs, like computer coding, that's why so much is being invested in it.  The plan is to lay lots of those people off,  Then what about them?

Well, if AI delivered what it promised, this might well make consumers happy.  Why pay those people if AI does the job better?  But it won't.  It will make things go bad quickly.

Unlike earlier technologies which empowered people, creating centaurs like a human driving a car with the car doing the muscle work, AI creates reverse-centaurs, where humans are reduced to the function of monitoring the AI that does the "original" thinking.

The problem here is that people don't monitor things very well.  They are much better wired for actually doing things, including the original thinking.  Monitoring AI's thinking, when AI is designed to always choose the next most probable choice which always looks fine on the face of things, is an impossible task for people to do.  Especially the less experienced and less well paid people corporations plan to hire after the mass AI layoffs.  The basic problem is well known already and called automation blindness.

So we'll be left with shitty everything, delivered to us by corporate monopolies that offered us no choice, with mass unemployment and underemployment like never before.  And no easy way back.

Producers AND Consumers must unite to fight this monster.

Maybe after the bubble is popped, some of the developments and capabilities will be useful in limited ways, Cory details this too, but nothing like the investment going into them.  It won't be as simple as the WorldCom bust, which actually left useful fiber in the ground still being used.

I'd encourage people to never abandon real thinking and skills.  I myself continue writing blogs and computer programs the old fashioned way.

Cory also expounds on something relevant to this blog.  Cory says he writes parables and not forecasts.  That's what I do also.  It's like, if we keep doing business as usual, the climate in 2100 will be devastating.  But I don't know if we'll continue to do 'business as usual' by then.  I hope we don't, and at some point people accept the correct ideas, I'm hoping to create some here, and steer away from the greater disaster.  Then suppose 2100 arrives and disaster doesn't happen because of great social changes were made, similar to those I've suggested, to prevent it.  It would seem by then that my prognostications while wrong were useful.  And that is the point.  Not to foresee the future but to help guide it, by helping to illuminate the entire view.