Jeffrey Epstein, shifty and secretive to the end

It turns out that just two days before his death in jail, Jeffery Epstein wrote a will leaving his entire estate of nearly half a billion dollars to a trust. I don’t know anything about trusts except that what I can gather is that they are the product of yet another one of those loopholes inserted into the tax code that benefit the wealthy who can afford to hire tax accountants and lawyers, and that it enables the wealthy to hide their assets and reduce their taxes.
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The Trump administration is consistent in its cruelty

They have announced that they will not be providing the migrant families held in their detention camps with the flu vaccine despite the fact that there children recently died of such infections.

At least three children who were held in detention centers after crossing into the U.S. from Mexico have died in recent months, in part, from the flu, according to a letter to Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., from several doctors urging Congress to investigate health conditions at the centers.

The United States had previously gone almost a decade without any children dying while under U.S. immigration custody.

“I can tell you from personal experience that child deaths are rare events,” Harvard pediatrics professor Dr. Jonathan Winickoff said in an email. Winickoff signed on to the Aug. 1 letter with forensic pathologist Judy Melinek and Johns Hopkins public health professors Dr. Joshua Sharfstein and Dr. Paul Spiegel.
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I have moved to California

Within the last two weeks, I have moved from Cleveland, Ohio to Monterey, California and am now pretty much settled in to my new home.

I drove across the country, a distance of 2,700 miles. Although that looks long, the drive was very pleasant and I managed to spend two days with very old friends in Missouri. The trip was not at all tiring, since I limited myself to about 400 miles or six hours of actual driving time each day. I enjoy driving long distances. It beats the hell out of flying.

For the first couple of days of driving, I listened to all nine Beethoven symphonies in sequence, followed by the Leonora, Egmont and Coriolan overtures, something I have wanted to do for some time. But the other five days of driving I drove in silence, without even the radio. I enjoy the silence of driving alone, allowing my thoughts full freedom to wander where they may.

The weather through the entire trip was also pretty much perfect in that it was cool and it only rained for about ten minutes. The traffic was light to moderate with no construction delays. The speed limits west of Nebraska tended to be 75 mph or 80 mph. Once you got to Wyoming, the scenery is spectacular, with Utah being particularly beautiful. I also made a slight detour to see the famous Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California (that was later named after the participants in the infamous 1846 tragedy who are now remembered as the Donner Party) and the view from the top of 7,000 feet was magnificent, with the Donner Lake far below.

Monterey is very pretty. From my living room, I have a beautiful view of the hills surrounding the area. I cannot see the sea, for which I have to drive about three miles. Locals tell me that the sea view areas, apart from being much more expensive, also tend to be foggy, whereas where I live tends to have clearer days. I will definitely not miss the Cleveland winters. As I get older, the risk of having a bad fall on ice and snow becomes much greater.

The Mooch as truth teller

For the longest time, Anthony Scaramucci (who likes to be called ‘The Mooch’) was a punch line. Although he had supported Demcorats like Barack Obama and later Hillary Clinton, he somehow became a member of the Donald Trump transition team after the 2016 election. He was appointed by Donald Trump on July 21, 2017 as White House Communications Director and was fired just ten days later after he gave an expletive-laden interview where he blasted some members of the Trump administration.
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That sums it up pretty well

Kevin Drum says that all the major religions have objectively been having a bad few decades in comparison with science’s achievements, but that despite that religious extremism is on the rise worldwide.

The last few decades sure have been bad ones for organized religion. Conservative Christians have decided that the sum total of the Bible is about reestablishing the sex and gender mores of the 19th century. Liberal Protestantism is so unassuming that hardly anyone even remembers it exists. The Catholic Church has been responsible for the deaths of millions in Africa thanks to its mindless belief that God hates condoms. Much of Islam has been taken over by the toxic Saudi strain. Israel has turned into an apartheid state. Hindus in India are apparently now dedicated to creating a religiously pure state. And even Buddhists have been acting badly lately.

Meanwhile, science keeps churning out new wonders. Cell phones. The internet. Cures for cancer. Robotic prosthetics. Solar panels on rooftops. Talking computers. Antidepressants. Google Maps. Cheap genome sequencing. Virtual reality. Machine learning. Meatless meat. Missions to Mars. Electric cars. Fiber optics.

None of the points he makes surprised me. But what did was his statement that Israel is now an apartheid state. Not only that, he did not get any pushback for that in the comments, either.

Drum is very much in the mainstream of Democratic establishment politics, someone who favors people like Hillary Clinton and Kamal Harris and does not care much for Elizabeth Warren and especially Bernie Sanders. So his casual throwing in of Israel as an apartheid state, a sentiment that the party establishment definitely does not endorse, and the lack of any defense of Israel by his blog’s readers, is another sign that Israel’s discriminatory policies can no longer be denied or ignored and that the Democratic political establishment is increasingly disconnected from its base.

Will the ‘two sleep’ mode catch on again?

It is generally recommended that people get 7-9 hours of sleep per day but it is not clear that the benefits that accrue from sleep are lost if those hours are not in one block. Like many people, I often wake up very early morning before it is light outside and try to go back to sleep immediately, usually with some success unless something is on my mind that prevents me from falling asleep for some time. I used to think that this pattern of two blocks of sleep per night with a brief break was an aberration and that ‘normal’ sleep should consist of roughly eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
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The strange, strange life and family of Ghislaine Maxwell

Now that Jeffrey Epstein has died, attention has shifted to his close associate and paramour-turned-pimp Ghislaine Maxwell as the best source of information on all the seedy activities that he was involved in. But what do we know about Maxwell, other than she was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the once successful and later disgraced newspaper magnate who died mysteriously at sea?

Dana Kennedy has done a deep dive into Maxwell’s life and it turns out that her entire family and in-laws are at one and the same time talented, highly educated, liked to interact with famous scientists, entrepreneurial, corrupt, and prone to making plenty of money and declaring bankruptcy, getting involved with sex cults and intrigue and espionage, and dying mysterious deaths. If her family story was made into a TV mini-series, it would strike many people as utterly preposterous.

In Kennedy’s words, her family’s closet has more skeletons than a house of horrors. I cannot do justice to all the twists and turns of Maxwell’s story with a few excerpts. Kennedy’s article really has to be read. One noteworthy item is the speculation that she is already collaborating with federal prosecutors.

Preventing another war based on lies

We know that before the US goes to war, it prepares the ground in the media and the public by spreading lies about why war is necessary because otherwise the country may be attacked on its shores by the Greatest Threat to World Peace Since Hitler’s Germany. That has happened over and over again (remember the slogans before the great Iraq adventure such that if we did not fight them in Basra, we would have to fight them in Buffalo?) and despite the lies being subsequently exposed, the public seems to only too willing to buy them.
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Live by the rally, die by the rally

Donald Trump loves his rallies. It seems like the only part of his limited schedule that he really enjoys, probably because he is the center of attention in a crowd of adoring fans, something that a narcissist like him craves. These occasions enable him to recycle well-worn material that he knows will draw a positive response from the crowd. His audience seems to be like Grateful Dead fans who are quite happy to hear the greatest hits over and over again. It enables him to forget for a while any bad news about his lack of accomplishments.
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Gay Republicans think Trump has been wonderful for the LGBTQ community

The Log Cabin Republicans, described as “the nation’s largest collective of LGBTQ conservatives”, has endorsed Donald Trump for 2020. The reasons it gives are risible.

The Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest collective of LGBTQ conservatives, has officially endorsed the re-election of President Donald Trump — after its board of directors voted against endorsing him in 2016 — stating that Trump has advanced LGBTQ rights and helped the GOP move past “culture wars” during his tenure.

In a Washington Post Op-Ed published on Thursday evening, Robert Kabel, chairman of the group, and Jill Homan, its vice president, wrote that “for LGBTQ Republicans, watching the 2016 GOP convention before Donald Trump was like a dream fulfilled” and marked the beginning of Trump removing gay rights “as a wedge issue from the old Republican handbook” and “taking bold actions that benefit the LGBTQ community.”

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