Ocelot II
Ocelot II's JournalI'm not sure that whether he was or wasn't murdered even matters that much any more,
at least as pertains to the way the story is being handled. It's all starting to look like the never-ending speculation over the JFK assassination and all the conspiracy theories that arose almost immediately afterwards when the Warren Commission was created and which concluded that Oswald acted alone. Documents relating to the assassination weren't released until 2017 (with more to come), and in the meantime the conspiracy theories exploded and haven't gone away. There are holes in the explanations of the circumstances surrounding Epstein's death as well, and the more the FBI insists he committed suicide without explaining the holes, the more their explanations will be questioned, and the conspiracy will grow. Of course this doesn't help Trump a bit - MAGA always thought of him as their hero in the fight against the Deep State, but now he is the Deep State.
He might have been murdered, though not necessarily by Trump,
but maybe by someone else who was also in legal jeopardy. Or else by a fellow inmate (people in jail for rape and/or child molestation are so commonly attacked by other inmates or guards that they have to be kept in segregation), though given the particular circumstances that seems unlikely. It's also possible that he really did hang himself. But the fact that there are loose ends, like the guards who were asleep and didn't check on him and falsified records, the video with three minutes missing, fans the conspiracy theory flames. It's going to be one of those things like the Kennedy assassination; there will be doubt forever and the conspiracy will live on. The FBI/DoJ will never be able to make the questions go away, and the harder they try the worse it gets. So the issue now isn't so much whether Epstein killed himself, but why are there so many unanswered questions?
While just having known Epstein isn't *necessarily* evidence
that Trump indulged in the same heinous abuse of minors, and a lot of people knew Epstein in some capacity (Epstein was a social climber who sought out other wealthy, connected people), Trump's relationship with him seems to have been especially close. Epstein had a phone book containing hundreds of names; a reporter tried to call all of them, and it turned out that most were casual acquaintances, business contacts or various suppliers of routine services - nothing skeevy. But Trump had multiple phone numbers, seems to have hung out with or partied with Epstein pretty often, and they were neighbors in Palm Beach. Their relationship fell apart only after Trump screwed Epstein on a real estate deal. It's hard to believe Trump didn't know what Epstein was getting up to for more than 10 years, even if he wasn't also doing it. It's also hard to believe that Trump didn't have it on with girls/women that were supplied by Epstein - possibly underage. (And even if they weren't underage, wasn't Trump married during the entire time he was friends with Epstein? So he's an adulterous sleazebag at minimum - but we knew that.) In any event, how does anyone stay friends with someone who's doing what Epstein was doing. He had to have known.
Years ago, a friend and I got to be casual friends with a man who lived in her apartment building. He was charming, friendly, funny, entertaining to hang out with. So one winter he went on a vacation to Thailand for a few weeks. When he got back he regaled us with stories about the delightful young man he'd met and had a "relationship" with. From the photos it was obvious that the "young man" was just a kid, probably a rent boy who sold himself to American tourists. He didn't deny that the boy was underage but didn't seem to think it was a big deal because that's what went on over there. We were appalled, said so, and refused to have anything more to do with him. That's how you treat people who do shit like that - at a minimum.
The rich have access to the best *available* health care, but if research is defunded,
that available health care might not be good enough any more. Some illnesses and conditions aren't curable yet, even with the best treatment, but scientists have been working on cures for Alzheimer's, some presently incurable cancers and other diseases that even rich people get. Right now Alzheimer's is incurable, and so is glioblastoma, the cancer that killed Ted Kennedy, John McCain and Beau Biden, people with access to the best available health care. Pancreatic cancer is incurable. So are Parkinson's disease and muscular dystrophy. Rich people get those diseases. Cures or at least better treatments could be found if research was supported, but it no longer will be. Maybe scientists in other countries, which are already luring our scientists to their universities and laboratories, will be able to do it, but not the US, not any more.
And the rich will not be safe from the consequences of climate change and extreme weather events, either. Their homes, factories and offices can be submerged, blown away, or burned up. And they have to breathe the same air and drink the same water. The wealthy might not suffer as much as the rest of us, but they will suffer.
I am beginning to think RFKJR's brain worm is actually an alien parasite
that has also infected the brains of everyone in the Trump administration, and obviously Trump himself, along with most MAGA. It's an Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario in which an alien race has taken over the brains of the people in power and some percentage of the population for the sole purpose of destroying the world's most powerful country. Once that's done the aliens can conquer the rest of the world and take the natural resources they need, leaving the remaining humans to die off due to climate change.
I can't think of any other reason why everything they do is so contrary to rational thought, common sense and self-preservation. Even the greed of the oligarchs doesn't explain it, because the wealthy aren't immune from the consequences of this destruction either. Wealth goes only so far when your property is destroyed by once-predictable weather events, or you become ill with a disease or condition that could have been cured by the scientists who left the country because their research was terminated, or treated by the immigrant doctors whose visas were revoked, in hospitals that closed because they were no longer funded or staffed; or when even the ordinary services you once relied on are no longer available because the immigrants who used to provide them have been deported. It's so senseless that it can't be explained by anything other than mass insanity caused by alien brain parasites.
That's not even word salad. In a salad there are chunks of recognizable things.
This is more like word puree. There are words and phrases but the sense behind them is pureed and all you get after the brain-blender stops whirring is a word Slurpee.
Vance, as a simulacrum of a human being, would be no better, but
he won't have Trump's cult following. He has the charisma of cold oatmeal; he's just as mean as Trump but without his show biz flair and talent for getting other people to punch down with him. He won't be the iron-fisted leader of the GOP who can control votes with a phone call. Instead, there will be a power struggle; without Trump the GOP has no leader, and a whole bunch of sorry little pissants like Mike Johnson and Ted Cruz will be fighting for that title like scorpions in a jar. I expect a GOP schism - the Christofascist culture warriors vs. the libertarian techbro greedheads. Vance will try for both factions but neither will want him.
Why doesn't he just set up a carnival side show on the WH lawn?
He's a carnival barker at heart anyhow; he'd be right at home. There could be the usual freak shows - maybe Marge Sporkfoot could show off her bleach-blonde bad-built butch-body, there could an exhibit of moral midgets, there being so many of them; Matt Gaetz' giant forehead; alligators straight out of Gator Gulag (you can an undocumented immigrant to feed them!); conjoined twins Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, a man wearing eye makeup having carnal knowledge of a Louis XIV fauteuil à la reine, the geek Stephen Miller, biting off the heads of anybody who gets too close, a greasy orange fortune teller predicting how America will be Great Again when nobody has food or health care. Step right up!
The only problem with that word is that an asshole has a purpose.
Everyone needs an asshole; you couldn't survive without one. But nobody needs Trump. The best word for him would be one describing something both odious and completely useless. Even "shit" doesn't work because manure is useful. All creatures, even icky, creepy ones - and even parasites - have a purpose within an ecosystem. Maybe the perfect word is just trump. A trump is a being that has no purpose, no use, no reason to exist, and creates only chaos and destruction.
We, as a collection of human beings, are no better than any other collection
of human beings that comprise a country. We are just as capable of cruelty as any other. We've done it before - the taking of land and the genocide of Native people, the abduction and enslavement of African people, Jim Crow laws, all manner of terrible behavior throughout our relatively short history. Our big mistake was gaslighting ourselves into thinking we were above and better than all the other countries who had committed such atrocities. Behold the Manifest Destiny doctrine by which we persuaded ourselves that we had the God-given right to take all that land that belonged to other people and inhabit and develop and farm it and profit from it. During our early years wealth was also derived from the stolen labor of others - not just the wealth of the Southern states, but that of the North, which bought the slave-harvested cotton and turned it into textiles and sold it in Northern cities. Our railroads were built by Asian laborers, not slaves but almost, until we decided we weren't going to allow those people to immigrate any more. We welcomed some immigrants but exploited and discriminated against others. Former slaves were just barely "liberated," but remained oppressed and poor.
All the while, we told ourselves that we were the exceptional country, the good guys, the country that won wars against evil empires. We patted ourselves on the back for defeating the Nazis, but we were so convinced of our superiority and indestructibility that we got sucked into fruitless, pointless, protracted wars in southeast Asia and the Middle East, from which we eventually slunk away while trying to pretend we hadn't been defeated. Have we become a cruel country? Trump made it socially acceptable to be cruel in public, but people will be cruel unless reminded that cruelty is ultimately destructive. Trump just let us take the mask off so we, collectively, could stop pretending to be better than the rest of the world.
With that in mind, those of us who don't think it's cool to be cruel should stop pretending the US was ever all that morally superior in the first place. Our job now is to shove the cruelty back into the closet, and expose the error of people who think being horrible to their fellow citizens and even more horrible to our immigrants will somehow prove the myth of American exceptionalism. We certainly can become better than we are now; Germany recovered from the Nazi regime that caused its near-destruction and became a prosperous democracy. I don't think I'll ever understand what motivates some people to take such pleasure in punching down, but we have to acknowledge the existence of that tendency in others (and maybe sometimes in ourselves) and resist it and keep resisting it. And call out the cruelty, every time.
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