A couple more letters emerge out of the files, these all involve John Brockman. Brockman was the king of scientific publishing; I believe he was the agent for all of Richard Dawkins’ books, and he was the agent for my one book, he was Lawrence Krauss’s agent, etc.\. If you wanted to publish a science book, you had to make the pilgrimage to New York and kiss the feet of John Brockman, who would then negotiate with the publishers to get you a good deal. He had a lot of clout, clout that was invisible to most people.
So when a “rather nasty young woman” criticized Richard Dawkins, he went crying to John Brockman.
> Date: July 4, 2011 5:42:43 PM EDT
> To: John Brockman < [
> Subject: Lawrence
>
> John
–
> 1. I hope you recovered well from your operation.
>
> 2. There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some
kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.
>
> http://skepchick.org/2011/04/lawrence-krauss-defends-a-sex-offender-embarrasses-scientists- everywhere/
>
> There are people on her blog talking about organising a walkout when Lawrence speaks at TAM in Las Vegas. I remember that you told me something of the circumstances of Jeffrey’s arrest, and that his case is not as black as painted. Might you possibly remind of it.
>
> Thanks (and greetings from Jackson Hole, Wyoming)
> Richard
Apparently, Brockman had been making up excuses for Epstein to his clients, and then those clients were echoing those excuses to justify their own ugly behavior. I have no idea what Dawkins thought Brockman could do to help. It was just an incestuous little clique.
This next one is very much inside baseball. I was on Scienceblogs, along with a lot of other very good people, which was founded by Adam Bly, who was also connected to Brockman. Bly got a lot of money from somewhere, I don’t know where, enough to launch a blog networks and a print magazine, but this email suggests to me that one of his sources was Jeffrey Epstein. Now I feel tainted.
The “PR crisis” he’s talking about was PepsiGate. We were all scientists and journalists at ScienceBlogs, except that Bly had suddenly brought a new blog into the network, a great big corporate advertisement for Pepsi disguised as a science blog. It’s true, it was a crisis: several people people yeeted right out of the network, citing ethical issues, and even more of us were yelling at Bly that this was wrong, you can’t do that, it’s blurring the boundary between objective science and shilling for a corporation. It was really, really ugly, and Bly just seemed oblivious to our concerns. (Note also: those of you who remember this event know that it’s also where another blog, ERV, went histrionically pro-Pepsi and lurched into the manosphere. It was a weird time.)
Bly was consulting a convicted pedophile during the whole episode. I suspect said pedophile had provided some degree of seed money for the science magazine, Seed.
From: Adam Bly
Sent: Thur 7/812010 3:18:24 AM
Subject: Thurs.
I’m dealing with a PR crisis at ScienceBlogs (relating to a customer, PepsiCo) and haven’t left my office all day. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like Yet so wanted to give you a heads up in case I’m unable to leave the office again tomorrow.
I have copies of every issue of Seed stored in my house. I guess I won’t feel bad about throwing out the clutter at last.
Dawkins is a gullible mess. Also Brockman did some agent work for another pile of slime, Coyne
Oh. Oh. I mean we all knew about Krauss since 2011, but it did surprise me how many academics, some of whom are still around, were desperate to get some young pussy from Epstein.
Just about everyone publishing popular science had Brockman as an agent, including people who weren’t piles of slime.
Sorry for not knowing, what is ERV? I googled but only got results about energy recovery in heating systems.
ERV, well, special case, a person from Ohio who attracted a lot of attention of the worst kind. Who for a short period of time, was considered a person of values and knowledge.
More names…
The Prince no longer known as Prince has been told by the prime minister to testify for congress about his relationship with Epstein, as he was a public servant at the time.
Somewhat obscured by the Epstein cataclysm, here are other outrages.
“Tulsi Gabbard at Georgia FBI Raid? & TikTok Censored?! | Have I Got News For You US ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=VT10IKHYNhk
I remember ERV from Scienceblogs.
She seemed OK and then went off the rails somehow.
After that she disappeared into…I have no idea and I never cared enough to find out.
@4: In this case ERV = endogenous retrovirus, and the title of a blog run by Abby something-or-other (who knew something about that subject). I recall her writing epically scornful eviscerations of Michael Behe’s nonsense. Then came Elevatorgate and she started writing her own nonsense. All downhill from there.
Abby was really switched on, but attracted the absolute worst of the internet, and man was her blog a sewer at some stage. We had a bit of a connection, but holy crap, she turned full Darth Vader.
Also, I’m wondering why any of this got forwarded to Epstein (and poor Rebecca Watson now has the dubious distinction of being mentioned in the Epstein files). What did Dawkins/Brockman expect him to do about it? Of course, IIRC we found out ~5 years later than Krauss was a creep. Wonder if he’ll show up in any pictures from the infamous Island?
There are Krauss/Pinker/Epstein pics aplenty.
@11: There are pix of Epstein with lots of people — he seems to have liked sucking up to Famous Smart People, who may or may not have known* about his other, um, “hobby”. But which of them appear in situations as blatantly compromising as e.g. the recently-released photo of the upper-class-twit formerly known as Prince?
Depending on the date — post-2008 everyone knew, but may have persuaded themselves that he had turned over a new leaf.
Ah, should have been an asterisk on that footnote @12. Software ate it, I think.
rorschach @11:
“There are Krauss/Pinker/Epstein pics aplenty.”
Those are obviously just coincidences. And they never knew those other people in those photos with them, they might have just gotten them coffee once, that’s all. /S
Rebecca actually made a video joking about how she was in the Epstein files a few months ago, due to Krauss writing to Epstein about her after she criticized the former.
The thing emerging from this latest file dump is how desperate certain academics were to get a bit of teen pussy, and to get into the scene. And how Noam Chomsky was ok with it all.
Fixed that for you, you foul pig.
stevewatson @10:
“What did Dawkins/Brockman expect him to do about it?”
Sorry, perhaps your question was merely rhetorical. But if not, Dawkins OBVIOUSLY considered him a “FIXER”.*
**A fixer is someone who is assigned or contracted to solve problems for others. Use in American English implies that the methods used are of questionable morality and legality.” Mango Mussolini has had many “FIXERS”. Some have even lost their lawyer license. Other crazy ones, like Sidney Powell have survived multiple attempts to remove hers, despite the extreme level of incompetence and very obvious criminality and lying. Are professional lawyer organizations really THAT incompetent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Powell
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/epitome-of-lawfare-that-shouldnt-be-allowed-kraken-lawyer-sidney-powell-again-defeats-disciplinary-effort-by-state-bar-of-texas/
stevewatson: The name was Abbie Smith. When Dawkins (who was probably already going downhill mentally) wrote that “Dear Muslima” travesty and suddenly mobilized a horde of wannabee cyberbullies against one girl (Watson) who’d said “guys, don’t do that,” Abbie jumped wholeheartedly in on Dawkins’ side, and pretty much created what quickly came to be called the Slymepit: post after post on ERV smugly praising everyone who came to trash Watson and everyone who took her side — and there were PLENTY of such people, like over a thousand comments in each thread. I’d call it the worst case of brain-rot resulting from audience-capture I’d ever seen directly.
I’m told she suffered some serious academic-career setbacks as a result of her totally pointless hatemongering; and since then she seems to have taken down most or all of her posts on that subject. She still has more actual science-related stuff up under her name. Once or twice I heard her name come up in connection to some half-assed campaign to bring together grand-old-atheist “thought leaders” to do something or other to counterbalance all the left-wing Political Cancel Correctitude Culture that’s causing all the Deep Rifts or something.
I’d also heard somewhere that Abbie had been sexually assaulted herself, and was treated quite badly when she came forward about it. So maybe that’s where she got her cues about how to deal with other women who came forward with similar claims.
I posted some comments back in 2019 of archive snapshots that corroborated that Ghislaine Maxwell had been on the board of Seed Media between 2007 and 2008 (but as best I can tell, Epstein never was). Checking the timeline, I see that Epstein was indicted in June 2006, and plead guilty in June 2008.
What the fuck was Dawkins doing asking if Epstein wasn’t that bad in 2011?
(That’s weird, “correctitude” didn’t get redlined. Is it officially a real word?)
Answer:
Question:
I’m confused with the style of asking a question when the answer is the previous sentence.
Appreciate the use of ‘yeeted’ but it is a transitive verb and requires a direct object. One cannot yeet; one must yeet something or be yeeted by something.
CD
Director, Foundation for the General Acceptance of the Verb ‘Yeet’
Munchhausen, Nebraska
@21 Raging Bee: Surprised me too.
Merriam-Webster – correctitude: “correctness or propriety of conduct”
Webster’s two examples use the phrase “political correctitude”. Wiktionary has an example from 1921 as a standalone word.
#23 Continental Divide
I was going to make a similar comment about transitive/intransitive. English is a living language and things do change. Yeet is still a youngster word, so perhaps we shouldn’t be helping our fellow boomers try to pass though? :)
Somewhere right now there’s an Epstein’s replacement doing exactly what he did with a whole new set of perverts and pedophiles.
Jeffery is just the one they caught.
@19: Oh, I do recall. This thread has been a trip down Memory Lane for quite a few of us here. I went on vacation (and mostly ignored the internet) for about two weeks in July 2011, and when I came back everyone was shouting at each other, and I was like WTF? Before that the Deep Rifts were about trivial matters like what attitude to take towards religion.
@PZ:
You’ve forgotten that in the 2019 post I just linked to above, you actually cited Blake Stacey tweeting (sigh. . . remember when Twitter was at least vaguely innocuous?) just that.
Stacey was in turn referencing a book — Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein, by James Patterson (& John Connolly with Tim Malloy), 2016, Little, Brown, & Co
There’s really only one line in there, a single parenthetical sentence: “(Sources say that an earlier enterprise, the Seed Media Group, was funded by Jeffrey Epstein in 2005 to the tune of two million dollars.)”
I note that there’s also me quoting an even older comment by Peter Irons (from 2007) saying that he’d heard that “Epstein put up a big wad of cash to set up Seed”. And that was from the Vanity Fair writer (who may be the same as Patterson’s “sources”), whom Irons did not name but might have been Vicky Ward, who wrote the 2003 article about Epstein (and may have toned the article down due to pressure from the — at the time — unindicted Epstein).