On the menu today: Well, it’s Groundhog Day, again. Punxsutawney Phil is said to have seen his shadow, predicting six more weeks of winter weather, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s time for a counterstrike against that little critter using former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Speaking of winter weather, the mayors of the Big Apple and the District of Columbia are getting poor reviews for their cities’ response to recent snow and ice storms. Meanwhile, the “Epstein list” — as in 3 million of the U.S. Department of Justice’s files and documents related to the infamous sex trafficker — is finally published. Plus, a very special offer you won’t want to miss. Read on.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Epstein Files, Finally Released
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice published 3 million additional pages in its effort to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the department to publish all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the DOJ’s possession that relate to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein by December 19. You can find and search the files here.
Regarding President Trump, CNN, among other responsible news organizations, were quick to emphasize that “there’s no public evidence that any of the allegations against Trump contained in the new documents were deemed credible by the FBI”:
President Donald Trump is mentioned more than 1,000 times in the three million Jeffrey Epstein documents released Friday, after the president initially resisted the effort. While some of the references are benign, others include newly disclosed unverified sexual assault claims against Trump as well as fresh details about how some of Epstein’s victims described their interactions with the future president.
Most notably, the newly released documents contain a list of unverified assault allegations against Trump compiled by FBI officials last year. There are also FBI notes about a woman who accused Trump in a lawsuit of raping her when she was 13, and an FBI interview with one of Epstein’s victims who stated that Epstein’s accomplice Ghislane Maxwell once “presented her” to Trump at a party.
There’s no public evidence that any of the allegations against Trump contained in the new documents were deemed credible by the FBI, and the Justice Department said on Friday that the allegations against Trump in the documents were false. Trump has long denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein or any allegation of sexual misconduct. . . .
There are those who will argue that releasing all these documents is deeply unfair to famous, wealthy, and powerful men who had friendships with Epstein for a long period of time, but who did not commit any sex crimes alongside him.
From a November 2020 U.S. Department of Justice summary of the long, long investigation into Epstein: “The Palm Beach (Florida) Police Department began investigating Jeffrey Epstein in 2005, after the parents of a 14-year-old girl complained that Epstein had paid her for a massage.”
Perhaps Epstein’s friends and associates didn’t know about that investigation. But by June 30, 2008, they sure as hell should have known that Epstein had “pled guilty to the pending state indictment charging felony solicitation of prostitution and, pursuant to the NPA, to a criminal information charging him with procurement of minors to engage in prostitution.”
We don’t know if a particularly unsavory allegation about billionaire Bill Gates in the latest release of documents is true. But we know that Gates’s friendship with Epstein began in 2011 — three years after the guilty plea! — and continued until at least 2014. If you choose to begin a friendship with a guy who pled guilty to procuring minors to engage in prostitution, you accept the risk of damage to your reputation.
If you found out that one of your friends had pled guilty to “procuring minors to engage in prostitution,” do you think you could or would maintain that friendship? Or do you think you would deliberately lose his number?
Mind you, up until very recently, Bill Gates wanted to be perceived as a trustworthy public authority on matters like climate change, vaccination, early warning systems for detecting communicable diseases, and the allegedly delicious taste of synthetic meat. While hanging around with a predatory creep doesn’t automatically invalidate what Gates says about these other issues, his friendship with Epstein does change the way people look at him, which is why Gates has tried to distance himself from him.
The New York Times collated a good list of public figures who said they had only brief professional interactions with Epstein, whose emails with the late financier suggest a closer and much more personal relationship: Elon Musk, secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick, Goldman Sachs general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, New York real estate mogul Andrew Farkas, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and Steve Tisch, the co-owner of the New York Giants football team.
One that stood out:
A 2013 email exchange with the British billionaire Richard Branson hinted that he, too, had a familiar relationship with Mr. Epstein. “It was really nice seeing you yesterday,” Mr. Branson wrote, adding: “Any time you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!” A Branson representative said the two had a business meeting and stressed that the women were adults and had not attended the meeting.
Oh, he just meant “harem” in the professional sense. Got it.
The world has a lot of people who are true victims of injustice. If you’re a fabulously wealthy, elite man who hung around with Jeffrey Epstein after his guilty plea to “procured minors to engage in prostitution” and you feel like your reputation has been unfairly sullied, you need to grab a handful from one of those big piles of cash you have lying around and use it to wipe your tears.
America’s Big City Mayors, Not Up to Basic Responsibilities
It’s not quite that if you elect a Democrat, you’re signing on for at least one term of poorly run government. But in one big U.S. city after another, highly touted mayors — all progressive Democrats, of course — are proving deeply subpar in delivering services when their cities need them most.
The failures of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson are well-documented. Closer to home for me, Muriel Bowser is in the final year of a twelve-year run as mayor of the District of Columbia, isn’t running for reelection, and apparently is gripped by what the high schoolers used to call “senioritis.”
As you likely know, one week ago, the northeast got hit by a major snow and ice storm. Bowser attended a party at the U.S. Conference of Mayors Thursday, while her city still hadn’t completed the basic duty of plowing the streets.
As the editorial board of the Washington Post summarized:
Many streets remained buried for days. Even busy thoroughfares were limited to single lanes after being plowed, creating traffic nightmares. Even in well-trodden downtown areas, mounds of slippery ice made it difficult for pedestrians to reach crosswalks. There were impassable hurdles for the elderly and people with disabilities. Conditions were so treacherous that many parents kept their kids home even after D.C. schools finally reopened Thursday — five days after the snowfall started. . . .
Making matters worse, the city’s plow tracker failed to provide accurate and complete information.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), in the final year of her third four-year term, promises to review what went wrong. “I’m sure we’re going to learn a lot,” she said.
You’ve been on the job for eleven years. Everyone had hoped you and the city government had learned how to respond to a snowstorm by now. The Washington, D.C., area isn’t Buffalo or Cleveland, but it gets one or two decent snowfalls each winter, and it seems like no one ever learns anything from the last one.
Bowser announced that on Saturday, six days after the snow stopped falling, the city would have five locations where they were giving away salt. “Bring a bucket, a wagon, a box — anything to come pick up salt to address icy and hazardous conditions near your home.” So, a D.C. resident must get a box or bucket, go out over the icy sidewalks, through the minimally plowed roads, collect the salt and then get back to their homes, to spread the salt on their sidewalks, which are covered in several inches of either ice or snow frozen solid. (The ice isn’t melting much, because the daily high temperature around here haven’t been above freezing in ten days.)
Do it yourself, District residents!
As a reminder, as of 2023, the average state spends $8,625 on each resident. The highest state spending per resident is Alaska, at $21,485. The District of Columbia spends $27,143 per resident. It’s not just that the District spends more per person than any state; it spends way more than any other. The amount of money in the gap between Alaska and D.C. — $5,658 — is more than Texas spent per resident, $4,462.
Meanwhile, the 14 New York City residents who froze to death desperately could have used some of that “warmth of collectivism” Zohran Mamdani talked about in his inaugural address.
Mayor Mamdani’s New York has become the city that never sweeps.
Eight-foot-high piles of rat-infested trash are choking the streets around Gracie Mansion — while Hizzoner’s new home has gotten the white-glove shoveling treatment.
Mamdani has meanwhile crowed that he can’t “imagine how it could get better’’ in the city, even as more and more New Yorkers are blasting the lack of “collectivism” in the Big Apple.
The mayor’s Upper East Side neighbors are being forced to trudge through garbage-plagued streets, roaming rodents and mounds of snow tainted with dog pee a full week after Winter Storm Fern.
Blocks away, the sidewalks outside the lefty mayor’s digs on East 88th Street are squeaky clean.
Mamdani infamously yearned to “seize the means of production.” The more a mayor waxes poetic about grandiose dreams of reorganizing society, the less they tend to focus on the nuts-and-bolts of a city government’s actual enumerated duties. (In 2004, as mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom pledged to end chronic homelessness within ten years. He did not achieve that goal. In 2021, as governor, Newsom pledged to end family homelessness in California “within five years.”)
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I enjoyed this op-ed by Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, about his conclusions after being on the “UFO beat” for decades:
What I think is actually going on is a deep, religious-like impulse to believe that there is a godlike, omnipotent intelligence out there who 1. knows we’re here, 2. is monitoring us and is concerned for our well-being and 3. will save us if we’re good. Researchers have found, for example, an inverse relationship between religiosity, meaning and belief in aliens; that is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrials. They also found that people who self-identified as either atheist or agnostic were more likely to report believing in ETIs than those who reported being religious (primarily Christian).
From this research, and my own on the existential function served by belief in aliens, I have come to the conclusion that aliens are sky gods for skeptics, deities for atheists and a secular alternative to replace the rapidly declining religiosity in the West — particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, where, not coincidentally, most UAP sightings are made.