Ghislaine Maxwell found guilty of sex trafficking

A jury unanimously convicted Jeffrey Epstein’s close associate of all but one count. She faces up to 65 years in prison but a sentencing date has not yet been set.

Maxwell was convicted on five of the six charges she faced. In addition to sex-trafficking, Maxwell was found guilty of conspiracy to entice individuals under the age of 17 to travel in interstate commerce with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity, conspiracy to transport individuals under the age of 17 to travel in interstate commerce with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity; transportation of an individual under the age of 17 with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity; and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of individuals under the age of 18.

Maxwell was found not guilty of one count: enticement of an individual under the age of 17 to travel with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity. Jurors reached their verdict after 40 hours of deliberations over the course of six days.
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The verdict marks a dramatic conclusion to an unexpectedly fast-moving trial: proceedings were originally expected to take at least six weeks. Prosecutors called 24 witnesses over 10 days, and defense attorneys called nine witnesses over two days.

Prosecutors said that Maxwell “preyed on vulnerable young girls, manipulated them and served them up to be sexually abused” by Epstein. There were four accusers in this case: Jane, Kate and Carolyn, who did not use their full names, and Annie Farmer.
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The verdict means jurors agreed that Maxwell had conspired to lure, and shuttle, girls for illicit sexual activity – and that she had conspired to sex-traffick them. They agreed that Maxwell transported Jane for illegal sexual activity. The sex-trafficking count related specifically to Carolyn.

This article traces Maxwell’s life and her rise and fall.

I still do not understand why she did not flee to France when she had the chance. She must have known that she was being targeted for legal action, especially after Epstein killed himself in prison. Since she has French citizenship as well, it would not have been possible to extradite her to the US to face trial, since France does not allow its citizens to be extradited.

The SARS-CoV-2 variant classification scheme

The virus that causes covid-19 is officially called SARS-CoV-2. This website gives the definition of the various elements of this virus.

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 continuously evolve as changes in the genetic code (genetic mutations) occur during replication of the genome. A lineage is a genetically closely related group of virus variants derived from a common ancestor. A variant has one or more mutations that differentiate it from other  variants of the SARS-CoV-2 viruses. As expected, multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been documented in the United States and globally throughout this pandemic. To inform local outbreak investigations and understand national trends, scientists compare genetic differences between viruses to identify variants and how they are related to each other.

Key Definitions:

  • Mutation: A mutation refers to a single change in a virus’s genome (genetic code). Mutations happen frequently, but only sometimes change the characteristics of the virus.
  • Lineage: A lineage is a group of closely related viruses with a common ancestor. SARS-CoV-2 has many lineages; all cause COVID-19.
  • Variant: A variant is a viral genome (genetic code) that may contain one or more mutations. In some cases, a group of variants with similar genetic changes, such as a lineage or group of lineages, may be designated by public health organizations as a Variant of Concern (VOC) or a Variant of Interest (VOI) due to shared attributes and characteristics that may require public health action.

When the Omicron was labeled as a ‘variant of concern’, that label is one of four that is used to classify the nature of the danger the variant poses, which are in increasing order: Variant Being Monitored (VBM), Variant of Interest (VOI), Variant of Concern (VOC), and Variant of High Consequence (VOHC), the last being the most alarming. Delta and Omicron are the only two in the VOC category, while there are ten in the VBM category, including the Alpha and other variants with Greek letter labels that did not get much publicity.

There are none as yet that fall into the VOI nor (thankfully) the VOHC categories. One shudders to think what a VOHC variant would do.

Alex Jones may have disappointed some of his followers

Alex Jones is discovering that his appeals for privacy about what happened at his home on Christmas Eve that resulted in the police being called ind his wife arrested are falling on deaf ears. The Daily Beast has obtained the police report of the incident.

Alex Jones’ wife Erika Wulff Jones allegedly struck the far-right conspiracy theorist “over 20 times” and threatened to hit him in the head with a stone ball, causing him to “fear for his life,” according to police documents reviewed by The Daily Beast.
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Monarch butterflies

I wrote earlier about the amazing migration of the monarch butterfly. This tiny creature does the same trek of thousands of miles each year even though their lifetimes are so short that any given butterfly will do it only once.

This website gives more information.

Some monarch butterflies are able to fly for a migration of 2500 miles. Most of them can find their ways to their ancestors’ winter homes when they go there, and then find their ways back to the places they left in spring. This ability made them seem like the strongest, smartest, and toughest of all butterflies. In much of their range they are also the biggest butterflies, with wingspans up to four inches (10cm).

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Film review: Don’t Look Up (2021)

Netflix has just released a new star-studded dark comedy that sends up the current times in which we live. The film is allegorical, particularly of the Trump era.

The story begins with a graduate student (Jennifer Lawrence) who discovers that a 10 km wide comet is headed straight for the Earth and will collide with it in just over six months, destroying the planet. Along with her advisor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a top government scientist (Rob Morgan) they try to alert the Trump-like president (Meryl Streep) but she, along with her idiot son (Jonah Hill, no prizes for guessing who he is based on) who is her chief-of-staff, does not take the threat seriously enough and instead worries more about her poll numbers and how to use the news to her political advantage. The news media represented the form of a happy-talk TV show with co-anchors (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) also make light of the situation.
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Oh, so now he cares about people’s privacy?

On Christmas Eve, the wife of hate monger and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was arrested by police in their home.

The wife of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was arrested on Christmas Eve on a domestic violence charge the rightwing provocateur said stemmed from a “medication imbalance”.

Sheriff’s deputies booked Erika Wulff Jones into an Austin jail around 8.45pm on Friday. Jail records showed the 43-year-old faced misdemeanor charges of assault causing bodily injury to a family member and resisting arrest, search or transport. By the afternoon of Christmas Day, she had not received a bond.

Alex Jones, an Austin resident and founder of the rightwing media group Infowars, declined to say if he had been injured or to elaborate on what happened beyond that he believed it was related to a recent change of medication.

“It’s a private family matter that happened on Christmas Eve,” Jones said. “I love my wife and care about her and it appears to be some kind of medication imbalance.”

A ‘private family matter’? This is rich from a man who hounded the families of the Sandy Hook massacre, claiming that the whole thing was a staged hoax, and that they were paid ‘crisis actors’. His followers took up this lie and made the lives of those bereaved parents, already traumatized by the murder of their children, a living hell. Now he wants people to respect his privacy?

It would serve him right if those parents returned the favor by making up all manner of bizarre and disgusting scenarios about what happened at his house and spreading it all over social media.

Radiation paradoxes 7: Accelerating frames and the general theory of relativity

(Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

At this point, we need to take a slight detour and examine more closely the role of accelerating frames because that is central to resolving the paradox that started this series if posts, of whether an electric charge falling freely under gravity radiates or not. The discussion up to this point has seemed to privilege inertial frames when it came to discussing the laws of physics. This was because we knew how to transform physical quantities between any two inertial frames, using Galilean transformations for Newtonian motion at low speeds and Lorentz transformations when we needed more accurate results or were dealing with speeds comparable to that of light in the regime of special relativity. But transforming between inertial frames and accelerating ones was another story.

Einstein used the insight that any two masses will fall at the same rate in a gravitational field to argue that the distinction between inertial frames (where the laws of physics such as Maxwell’s equations are supposedly valid) and non-inertial frames (where they are not) should not matter and that we should be able to find transformational relations between them.
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Desmond Tutu represented the best of religion

The indefatigable South African fighter for human rights died today at the age of 90.

His achievements are well known and the many, many obituaries and articles that will be written in the next few days will review them. What I liked best about him was that he used his eminence to speak out boldly, not caring about taking on sacred cows or tribal allegiances. He criticized the ANC after they took power, for which they retaliated by initially not inviting him to nelson Mandela’s funeral. He was one of the earliest major figures to label Israel as an apartheid state. That carried immense weight since who would know better than he what apartheid looked like? That outspokenness did not endear him to the apologists for Israel and it is suggestive that the Guardian article linked to above or the obituary does not even mention that particular stance of his, highly impactful though it was.

On a personal note, my daughter and son-in-law visited South Africa for a college friend’s wedding at which Tutu was to officiate. At an informal lunch, they met him. He was wearing a Morehouse College t-shirt and they said that he was playful and mischievous, joking around. I have a photograph of just the three of them and you can see the wide grin and the twinkle in his eyes. He was clearly someone who was serious about his work but did not take himself too seriously. He is the kind of person that one would enjoy just hanging out with.

Tutu clearly was a religious person, the kind who believes that his faith requires him to fight for justice for all. That is the best kind of religion.

Seeing the universe in its infancy

Yesterday NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was successfully launched into space from French Guiana, using the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket. If all goes well, within the next year we will be seeing images of when the universe was in its infancy.

Here is a quick overview of the telescope.

The launch is just the first stage of a very complex journey in which engineers have said that there are many delicate steps that need to go right and the failure of any one could ruin the mission.The telescope is a truly extraordinary piece of engineering design.

The James Webb – named after a former Nasa administrator – will spend a month on its journey and will then need a further five months to get ready. First, its enormous gold-plated 6.5 metre mirror and its huge, tennis-court-sized sunshield need to unfurl; they were folded origami-style to fit into the nose cone of the Ariane 5. Then its instruments will have to be carefully calibrated. In all, hundreds of release mechanisms need to work perfectly in order for the telescope to succeed.

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