1. In late July, over two days, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, was interviewed at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida.

2. Ghislaine Maxwell is serving twenty years in federal prison for her role in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls over the course of a decade, after being found guilty of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor.

3. Ghislaine Maxwell was interviewed by the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.

4. The Deputy Attorney General of The United States is Todd Blanche.

5. Todd Blanche is Donald J. Trump’s former personal defense attorney, who represented him against multiple felony indictments, and with whom he shared attorney-client privilege.

6. It is highly unusual for a senior Justice Department official, let alone the deputy attorney general, let alone the president's former personal attorney, to conduct an interview with a potential cooperating witness. In fact, legal scholars, generally a hysterical and confabulating lot, think it may be the first time ever.

7. Ghislaine Maxwell more or less represented to Todd Blanche that she did nothing wrong. Ghislaine Maxwell more or less represented to Todd Blanche that Donald J. Trump did nothing wrong. Donald J. Trump, within the last sixty days, has offhandedly mentioned that while he has no intention at the moment of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, he could if he wanted to.

8. Less than one week after being interviewed by Todd Blanche, Ghislaine Maxwell was transferred from the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida to the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, which is a minimum-security facility. Other notable inmates at FPC Bryan include Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and former "Real Housewives of Salt Lake City" star Jen Shah. Many people, without a vested interest in making ironic jokes about presidentially-owned golf courses, have still described FPC Bryan as "a country club".

9. There has been no reason given as to why a convicted pedophile, rapist, and procurer was transferred from a Federal Correctional Institution to a Prison Camp, and/or who had the authority to make that decision. Legal experts generally agree that pedophiles are not randomly assigned to cushier prison postings for unstated reasons, for instance if it is determined that they seem to be acting slightly less pedo-y of late and deserve a reward, without anyone being asked to explain why.

10. The Bureau of Prisons policy explicitly does not allow convicted sex offenders to be housed in minimum-security camps. Maxwell's transfer required a special waiver. Who asked for and/or granted this waiver has yet to be made public.

11. Throughout Jeffrey Epstein’s and her own trial, Ghislaine Maxwell lied to lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, let alone lied on the stand in front of the families of dozens of the victims of the abuse she participated in. Because of this, Ghislaine Maxwell was additionally charged with perjury. Her additional perjury charges were dropped when the twenty-year conviction was secured.

12. It is a mathematical certainty that every single word coming out of the mouth of the raving sociopath/rapist/pedophile that is Ghislaine Maxwell is pure, unadulterated horseshit, and uttered solely to lessen her punishment, a behavior akin to virtually any member of the rodentia family when backed into a corner.

13. Donald J. Trump is a rapist.

14. Donald J. Trump is a child-rapist.

15. Donald J. Trump’s best friend is a dead child rapist.

16. That friend's girlfriend says Donald J. Trump is without guilt.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

1. Octopuses, it turns out, have the ability to edit their own DNA. In real time. Which is sort of the organic version of AI, at least in that it’s possible if not probable that at some point they will be smarter than us.

2. In fact, both our Octopus Friends and other coleoid cephalopods regularly and on a large scale edit their RNA, which sounds like some dull sea floor action that smells like low tide on a good day as far as our superior asses are concerned, but it means they are secretly and deliberately rewriting internal genetic schematics to force the creation of proteins that didn't exist in their original DNA.
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3. Genetic modifications on the systematic and cognitive level, unlike the human preoccupation with, say, nose rings, Prince Alberts, and tattoos of the Chinese alphabet, has real-time advancement capability allowing octopuses to supersede the original limitations of their genetic code.

4. Few animals are capable of editing their RNA, and even those do so rarely, while octopuses edit up to 60% of their neural RNA sequences on the regular, basically forcing intentional “typos”, that create thousands of protein variants never encoded in their original genome. This RNA editing is particularly concentrated in nervous system tissues, suggesting that octopuses, unlike Kristi Noem, are rewriting brain DOS to enhance intelligence and adaptability.

5. This is sophisticated biological re-programming and contemporaneous genetic customization, that, unlike 60 million years of unwieldy Ape-ish evolutionary adaptation, allows for genetic changes within a single lifetime, as opposed to over the course of numbingly endless generations of more or less equivalently dimwitted humans.

6. Heightened problem solving, which is already advanced in the octopus and nearly-alien in comparison to other non-humanoid animals, could lead to advances in ability that range from most efficiently cracking open an abalone to gobble the tender flesh within, to more complex behavior, such as building a ship to escape a dying planet full of moron self-polluters, or figuring out a way to kill off evil net fetishists who keep indiscriminately scooping up their highly intelligent and sensitive Octopus Friends and turning them into garnishes, stews, cioppinos, sushi, and mediocre sidewalk tapas.
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7. Warp speed enhancements in memory formation, learning capacity, and sensory processing could indeed lead to super-intelligent individuals forming within existing octopus populations.

8. While biological intelligence augmentation may have slowed to a crawl during the span of human evolution, since we all know that as of August 19th, 2025 we are as smart as we’ve ever been and at the cutting edge of all political and cultural development, we are still not capable of editing our RNA on the fly--unless you’re talking about the genetic enhancements of Jeff Bezos’ silicate wife.

9. Which means that everyone else on the planet who didn’t happen to found Amazon and/or does not own a 80,000 square foot military-grade basement CERN lab specifically built for elaborate Wife Enhancement, is running old software on even older hardware.
10. Our benevolent and soon-to-be superior Octopus Overlords are running fresh code, baby, and when they emerge from the depths to walk on all-eights into the towns and cities of America, let alone the rest of the world, they will have even longer memories than they already do.
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11. Please do not eat octopus. Thank you for your consideration in this matter.

​1. When you photograph your daughter and her pal less as a goofy snapshot and more subconsciously expecting someone to wheel up in a Mercedes and cut you a check for it, because you’re an artist, man.

2. And then ten years later she's a junior in college and that fancy doll is lost or landfill, and in many ways you're now in the periphery of her life more than the star of yours, just out of frame and waiting for your next expository line, if only because you retain a visceral sense of your own mercenary interior worldview at that same age, and so it all feels at least organic and to some degree even pleasant, this parental double-exposure and lessening of self.

3. Which is the moment when you begin to view the increasingly grim cultural and political future, more in terms of how it will affect your child and her friends after your return to the secular molecularism that we call death, instead of what you need to do right now to address the world around you, which, in the end, has revealed itself to be mostly un-addressable.

4. In 1625, Leibniz and Newton and Huygens and Hook, on the backs of Kepler and Descartes and Spinoza and Bruno, on the wings of Caravaggio and El Greco and Cervantes and Artemisia Gentileschi, all were intensely aware of the endless things they did not and would not ever know, while still imbued with the sense of perching on the forward edge of technology and human development, and to various degrees believing at some point a monumental discovery would be made, revealing the god at the heart of the matter of us all.

5. For Isaac Newton it was the "Philosophical Mercury", an element that contained all others, ordained by the divine, the fluid and quixotic axis upon which a knowable world spun.

6. Well, now it's 600 years later and mercury turns out to be a beguiling form of poison that eventually killed or at least drove all the early alchemists mad, and we are really no closer (the case could plausibly be made for further away) from any encompassing truths. Bruno was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for insisting that stars were just other suns like ours, and Caravaggio was murdered after a little freelance murder, and possibly cannibalism, of his own. Things on the whole did not work out well for the most brilliant minds of that temporally Baroque moment, as should be expected, since only an inflexibly concrete mind and certainty of opinion afford a sense of, even if entirely deluded, happiness.

7. Which is to say, happiness (as opposed to a pleasingly hot-bathed laudanum-tinged acceptance) is a contrivance, because it is only achievable through the willfully ignorant rationalization of suffering, which is always a derivative of inequality in every possible context, and so to be happy is to jettison the inconvenient evidence of its cost.

8. Another word for inconvenient evidence is “faith”.

8.5 (As the world's lowest-paid rhetorician, I am aware that rhetoric is an expression of what I believe to be important enough that others need be made aware of, in order to define their own level of import. Which is a fancy way of saying that I do not embrace the evils of evangelism, since a reader's belief is irrelevant, while their understanding a reflection of my ability, or lack thereof, to clearly communicate.)

9. And yet I find, at the cusp of 56, to be full of faith and a modicum of happiness, at least of the variety and at the definition of my choosing. I am faithful that my daughter’s mere existence, conceptually and in actuality, is its own dogma. It is incontrovertibly true that she sits in the same room with me, in the vacuum of my neurology and perceptive abilities, and that is its own religion. It does not require an explanation. There are no explanations. There is no substance. There is no self. As far as you could fly a ship into the observable universe, you could fly a ship into your tiniest component parts, and they are all just quantum bits, the same ones the entire universe is formed of, and all the same age, presuming the latest presumption is accurate, we are, the sum of us, the mass of us, the strings of quanta that comprise us, 13.8 billion years old.

10. Following this line of thought, it’s hard to wake up on August 11th, 2025, look around, and ruminate on what 13.8 billion years has wrought. Except if you believe as I do, that time is not a linear narrative, but a contiguous dimensionality interwoven with space and gravity and light, in which case August 11th, 2025 is, has been, and always will be, in such a way that the pretension of alteration is pure narcissism.
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11. On the other hand, no one can ever take our narcissism away from us, so might as well enjoy the absurd dramaturgy of it all. My daughter’s neck, which I have just kissed, and which she has just deigned to receive, smells like bread and soap and pure, expanding vitality. All the rest is noise.

1. Evian spelled backward is Naïve. A baby eel is called an elver. The battle of Bunker Hill was not fought at Bunker Hill. The One-Hundred Years war lasted 115 years. Fossilized turds are called “coprolites”. The name “Wendy” did not exist before Peter Pan. In almost every watch ad, the time shown is 10:10. Those “Live Free Or Die” license plates you see while tooling around the wilds of New Hampshire, which tend to call up visions of revolution and patriotism and the hanging of Nathan Hale, are manufactured by inmates earning .12 cents an hour at Concord State Prison.

The Lesson Here: Irony is the editor of Vanity Fair pronouncing the death of Irony.

2. There is a spoon museum in New Jersey. Rabbits can’t puke. The Catholic Church is the largest landowner in Manhattan. Columbia University is second. The Mormon Church is the largest single landowner in America. The queen of England owns, by royal fiat, all swans and sturgeons in the UK, and it is a serious offence to poach one. DaVinci invented scissors. Carnivores will not feed on other animals struck by lightning. Octopuses have rectangular pupils, and therefore should not be eaten. Giraffes have no vocal cords. Woodward Avenue in Detroit was the first paved street in America. The only freshwater sharks in the world are in the Ganges River.

Conclusion To Be Made: Although calling the Ganges "fresh water" is in itself an entire comedy routine, it likely would be preferable to swim naked in and/or drink from the Ganges than peruse spoons in Newark.

3. Tennessee is bordered by eight states. Maine is bordered by one. Maine is the only state name with one syllable. In Sanskrit, “war” means “to desire more cows.” “Stewardesses” is the longest word that can be typed with just the left hand. “Shah Mat” in Persian means “The king is dead”, and over centuries of mispronunciation became “checkmate”. Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico City. Russia continues to deny it, although pick-wielder Ramón Mercader did 20 years in prison and is known to have been an agent of the NKVD, which stands for Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, which is the precursor to the KGB, which stands for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Muddy Waters’ name is McKinley Morganfield. Ralph Lauren’s name is Ralph Lifshitz.

Inference Alluded To: "Lifshitz" does not, in fact, rhyme with “Yacht”.

4. We abbreviate “pounds” as “lbs” because the term comes from the constellation Libra, which is also a Latinate noun/adjective meaning both “pound” and “scales”. The Italian lira also derives from Libra. Pre-metric British currency was broken down into Pounds, Shillings, and Pence, which are the modern forebears of Julius Caesar shelling out pockets full of Libra, Solidus, and Denarius. Parthenogenesis is the ability of female animals to reproduce without the intervention of the male of the species, which sounds good on paper, but the sharp money is on The World of Parthenogenesis having the exact same degree of inequality as the current Copulative/Missionary. Ergot is a mold that grows on unleavened bread, popular around the Mediterranean in biblical times. Ergot also has psychoactive properties, not entirely dissimilar to mescaline, which among many serious academics is thought to explain certain events, for instance walking on water, being casually conversational with burning bushes, and rising from the dead.

Takeaway: The Sumerians were brewing beer 8,000 years before Christ. As a species, we generally prefer to be addled away from the recognition of how profoundly temporary we are.

5. Fly Agoric is a plant Norsemen chewed before going into battle. It also has psychoactive and stimulant properties, which tended to turn the Vikings into “berserkers”, or blood-mad, neurally-altered, very bearded men with a taste for wanton slaughter. Which helps explain why they were able to rape and pillage the majority of Europe for centuries with no real competition. Kamikaze means “Divine Wind”. Kamikaze pilots were often gorked out of their skulls on amphetamine, newly produced by the German Big Pharma company Bayer. “Blitzkrieg” means “Lightning War” and accurately describes the movement of German divisions through Poland and France like a knife through a cliché about butter, since they fought and marched for days on end with little or no rest or stopping to eat. German soldiers were provided with strips of top shelf Beyer as part of their mess kits. American soldiers, after finishing basic training, were given two cartons of Lucky Strikes each. Theodor Karl Ludwig Gilbert Morell was Hitler's personal doctor, rarely left Adolph's side, and shot him up with a solution of vitamins and pharmaceutical-grade amphetamine nearly every day starting in 1941.

Let’s Unpack This: In 1941 Hitler began making a string of inexplicable and erratic decisions, like for instance invading Russia at the onset of winter, or allowing trapped Allied soldiers to escape from Dunkirk.

6. The world “modem” simultaneously means modulate and demodulate. Lizzie Bordon was acquitted. Isaac Asimov has a book in every Dewey Decimal category. “Set” has the most definitions of any word in English. Only humans and horses have hymens. Nothing rhymes with orange, silver, or purple. Gaelic is actually Scottish, and Irish is Gaeilege. Shakespeare was 46 when the King James Bible was written. In that version of Psalms 46, the 46th word from the beginning is “shake” and the 46th word from the end is “spear”. The first five books of the Old Testament are called the Pentateuch, which is really just the Torah with a slice of de-Yiddishing, while the Greek Old Testament is called the Septuagint, which was a single, much shorter book until Medieval monks (paid by the word) added arbitrary chapters, headings, and page numbers. All continent names end with the same letter they begin with. “Facetious” and “abstemious” are two words with all the vowels listed in correct order. The Book Of Esther is the only one that never mentions God, probably because even then she could sense the encroachment of Clarence Thomas.

At The End Of The Day: Moses is owed some major royalties.

7. Car horns beep in F, although are usually flat if looked at through an oscilloscope. Kenny G plays every note sharp. “Philatelic Fulfillment” means getting off on postage stamps. Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee. There is only one word in English with a single vowel that repeats six times: “Indivisibility”. You can go slower than the speed of light, and faster than the speed of light, but not at the speed of light. The world “testify” comes from the Roman army, when soldiers were forced to confirm the truth of something by swearing on their testicles. Hitler and Napoleon both had only one ball. Avocado is a derivative of “ahuacatl”, which means balls. Mussolini believed he could ward off the evil eye by cupping his balls. Stalin means “steel” in Russian, and was not actually his name, which was Ioseb Dzhugashvili. Ioseb Dzhugashvili was five feet four inches tall. Ioseb Dzhugashvili was an ethnic Georgian, which is not a state that borders Alabama.

Bottom Line: Steel Balls

8. Four words in the English language have consecutive UU’s: Vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, and residuum. Muumuu is the only one that does it twice. “Queueing” is the only one with five consecutive vowels. Emus cannot walk backwards. Hummingbirds can fly backwards. The white tip of your fingernail is a “lunulus.” People from Manchester are Mancunians. Naguahyde was invented in Naugatuck, CT. The southernmost city is America is Na’alehu, Hawaii. Alaska is the only state to have been invaded by the Japanese during WWII. There are twice as many people in Rhode Island as Alaska. “Oiseau” has five consecutive vowels, but it's French, and means “bird”. The plastic tip of a shoelace is an Aglet. “Screeched” is the longest one-syllable word. Nothing rhymes with “month”. Babies don’t have kneecaps. “Samba” means “Rub navels together.”

Core Concept: Emus also hate Michael Jackson.

9. The largest amount of money you can have in coins without being able to make change for a dollar is $1.19. Honey is the only natural food made without destroying life. The glue on Israeli stamps is kosher. Harold Edgerton took every single photograph of our atomic bomb test detonations with his Rapatronic Camera. He also invented the camera that took the first pictures of the sunken Titanic. The only three angels named in the bible are Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer. In Latin, Lucifer means “light bringer”. Compact discs track inside-out, the opposite of vinyl. Birds on spaceships will immediately die because they require gravity to swallow. You can duel legally in Paraguay if you are a blood donor. “Denim” means “de nimes” or “from Nimes, France”. Penguins fuck twice yearly. Pigs have corkscrew penises and thirty-minute climaxes.

Cliff’s Notes: Bacon tastes like greasy death and motherly disapproval.

10. I ate raw fish eyes on a dare once. They tasted like rusty paper clips.

NF, One L
Issue #20

1. I'm going to go right out on a limb here and wager $20,000 at 20-1 odds that you are not, as you read this sentence, let alone as I type it, listening to the mighty tenor of Mr. Hank Mobley halfway through his iconic runaway-cement-truck of a song "No Room For Squares" on a 1975 Pioneer RT 707 reel-to-reel player driven by a 1984 Panasonic RX-7000 "The National" boombox (with faux-wood side panels, the exact model, although different unit, that I had through most of high school), both of which are situated within/atop a 19th century Burmese/British Officer's Club wireless radio cabinet that somehow did indeed come all the way to California from the country of Burma, probably on a swank Cunard Liner, cushioned by dozens of hand-woven antimacassars and lush mink stoles, in a leather-bound steamer trunk festooned with the brightly-colored stamps of Industrial Revolution-era Subcontinental Asian travel.

2. Mr. George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) is a personal hero. It’s unlikely but not inconceivable that before Burma-became-Myanmar, as it is presently known and run by one of the three most oppressive military juntas that claims to be a Parliamentary Republic in the world, Orwell himself tipped open the delicate glass door of my cabinet and peered at the hi-fi equipment carefully displayed within.

3. Mainly because he served as a Regimental Policeman in Burma from 1922-27 and was dispatched to such colonial hotspots as Maymyo, Mandalay, Myaungmya, Twante, Syriam, and Katha.
4. While I would be a fool to deny that my inner spiel of improbable fantasy and elaborate confabulation is aggressively weird, if not advisedly medicate-able, while listening to music emanating from the Sony/Panasonic situation I often do envision that Orwell once sat in front of it himself, taking in the BBC World News on the wireless. In fact, I can see him, this very moment, in the corner of the Wellington Arms officer's club in, say, Yangoon (formerly Rangoon), decked in olive mufti, with a rakishly angled pith helmet and round spectacles, taking notes in a Moleskine pad while sipping a sweaty gin-and-quinine under the dappled shade of the Shwedagon Pagoda.

5. Nearly everyone is familiar with “1984” and “Animal Farm,” and rightly so, because they’re brilliant, but those are daring conceptual works full of colorful swagger and cuttingly satirical metaphors that are less obvious today (hint: Snowball is Trotsky) than they were during the Cold War, but I find his early work to be more alluring. “Keep The Aspidistra Flying” and “Road To Wigan’s Pier” for instance are both fascinating guides to turn-of-the-century English life, as well as a precision instrument horologist’s look at the gears and springs of the author that Eric Arthur Blair was destined (but not predestined, we’re all secular here) to become.
6. On the other hand, “Homage To Catalonia” is pretty much a martinis-and-Hallmark Channel beach read. Oh wait, no, it’s actually the memoir that recounts Orwell’s volunteering to fight as part of the Socialist uprising during the Spanish Civil War, the cruel and bloody battles waged against Republicans/Fascists and Communists/Stalinists, and his inevitable hospitalization (should have died 19 times) where he lay on a cot for months on end and ruminated about many of the themes, including Winston Smith’s loathing of rats, that would gestate and froth and ultimately spill over into his two most famous books.

7. George Orwell, unlike, say, Augustin Burroughs or James Frey, lived six fascinating lives and all of them were daring, courageous, fascinating, eccentric, difficult, depressed, resigned, full of fury and fight. It’s entirely possible that he is the greatest writer of the 20th century.

8. He also stood for something very specific, whether you agree with him or not, and at enormous personal peril proved it repeatedly, rarely taking the easy way out but never compromising his morals or ethics. It’s interesting how this is more or less the anti-description of virtually every politician, business leader, statesman, and public figure in America in 2025.

9. "Down and Out In Paris And London" was a book I carried around a lot during my 20s. It's about Orwell's time living on the streets of (clever twist) Paris and London, mainly working as a "plongeur" (dishwasher) and viewing the world up from the curb, a penniless but "free" writer cast aside by the culture at large, which I very much aspired to be, although with more pennies, beer, a place to sleep, lice-free Levis, and non dish-wrinkled hands. So, not like him at all. But still like him.

10. I bought that Burmese Radio Cabinet in San Francisco in the early 90s, only a few years after Burma became Myanmar, and not long after I read Orwell’s “Burmese Days”, and let’s be honest, even though it’s cool and all, the Orwell connection was the main reason that I shelled out $300 for it on the spot, especially at a time when $300 was enough money to keep me awake for many consecutive nights running, but I think even then I intuitively knew that well-wrought artifacts keep us centered in our own history, and that the writers who report history with style and courage are, in a way, always commenting on the present. And I wanted a piece of that.

11. Interestingly, you could read “Animal Farm” tonight in the bathtub and replace the Napoleon character (Stalin) with Fish-Stick (The Grifter), and Squealer (the Soviet Propaganda machine) with Epstein (The Grifter’s co-rapist), and not really have to change another word for the novel to seem like a brilliantly astute satire written last weekend.

12. That should tell us all something.

13. Even if only a timely warning not to drink the fascist bathwater.

Here are some FACTS. They have no political affiliation, party lines, gender preferences, agenda, personal angle, Deep State impetus, or attendant conclusions. They are simply a list of easily verifiable FACTS. Any reader can decide what links these FACTS may or may not have to one another, if any, or whether they are simple coincidences. I have not manufactured a single word, although it may sometimes seem to be the case, as many of these FACTS are startling, especially when seen compiled in one document. Like, for instance, the way they used to appear in investigative newspapers, such as the Washington Post, currently owned by successful businessman Jeff Bezos.

1. Jeffrey Epstein died in federal prison while Donald. J Trump was president. Initially, it was said that cameras at the Metropolitan Correctional Center trained on Epstein’s cell were not functioning due to technical error, part of a larger outage not noticed until afterward. This is difficult to explain since surveillance is 24/7 in federal prison. The guards on duty who “fell asleep” and falsified records about performing checks on Epstein’s cell during the night were charged with negligence and sentenced to community service.

2. Bill Barr was Trump’s Attorney General at the time, and therefore responsible for overseeing all federal prisons. After Epstein’s death in 2019, Barr promised a “strenuous and thorough investigation”. The results of the investigation have yet to be released, although Barr has publicly insisted no pertinent evidence was discovered. Bill Barr previously worked for Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm that represented Jeffrey Epstein in 2006.

3. Bill Barr’s father, Donald Barr, was headmaster of The Dalton School from 1964-74. The Dalton School is an elite private institution for the children of the wealthy in Manhattan. Donald Barr personally hired Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher, despite the fact that Epstein had no teaching credentials, or even a college degree.

4. Donald Barr was in the OSS during WWII, a precursor to the CIA. He also wrote several science fiction novels. One, entitled “Space Relations” is about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. You can buy a copy of “Space Relations” online and read it yourself, simply by clicking a button on the site of Jeff Bezos’ company, Amazon.

5. After being let go for "poor performance," which many who attended the school said primarily meant an intense and inappropriate fixation on certain female students, Jeffrey Epstein began working for Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns collapsed in 2008 due to improprieties related to the housing crash. Jeffrey Epstein parlayed his total lack of money management experience into the position of money manager for several billionaires, including Les Wexner, founder and CEO of L Brands, and Apollo Global Management Chairman Leon Black. Black alone paid Epstein $158 million for “tax and estate planning services”. Black also paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to be released from potential claims arising from the territory's probe into Epstein's operation. Wexner and Black insist they knew nothing about Epstein’s off-hours sexual criminality. People with a great deal of money often insist things, which on the whole tend to be believed, or at least waved away and forgotten about, in direct proportion to how towering the pile of money is. In January of 2025, Donald J. Trump nominated Ben Black, Leon Black’s son, to serve as CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. The announcement came three days after Bloomberg reported Black's interest in purchasing debt tied to Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform X.

6. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner, is the daughter of Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell was a billionaire investor, British member of parliament, and recidivist criminal. He was found dead in 1991, floating near his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, anchored off the Canary Islands. Robert Maxwell’s death was termed an “accident”, although three different pathologists could not agree on the ultimate cause. Factually, he might have simply fallen overboard drunk, or maybe committed suicide when the yacht’s cameras stopped functioning. After Robert Maxwell’s death, it was discovered that he had embezzled hundreds of millions of pounds from UK pension funds. His publishing empire subsequently collapsed, including many newspapers, such as the Daily Mirror, which were then purchased by billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch is a longtime advisor of Donald J. Trump, as well as the owner of FOX News. Robert Maxwell was suspected by both British and US intelligence of being an agent for the KGB and/or Mossad. Maxwell’s right-hand man, and editor of the Daily Mirror, was Nicholas Davies, a confirmed ex-Mossad agent.

7. Ghislaine Maxwell got twenty years in prison for crimes involving the seduction of underage women to engage in criminal sexual activity, and conspiracy to entice them to engage in illegal sex acts. Many of these acts took place on the Lolita Express, Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane. Other criminal activity took place at Epstein’s home in Palm Beach, which is minutes away from a property known as "Mar-a-Lago". Donald J. Trump lives at the property known as Mar-a-Lago. At Jeffrey Epstein’s first trial in 2006 for multiple rape, sex trafficking, and soliciting prostitutes, for which he was facing life in prison, his maid, Juan Alessi, testified that, “Mr. Trump was here all the time.”

8. There are many photos and videos of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald J. Trump surveying crowds of women together at Manhattan clubs, laughing and patting each other’s back. At the 2006 trial, Epstein testified that Donald J. Trump was his best friend. Donald J. Trump claims to have "barely known" Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein attended Donald J. Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Factually, most married people can attest that they do not generally invite people they barely know to their weddings.

9. At Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, Epstein's longtime pilot testified under oath that Trump flew on Epstein's plane “multiple times” in 1993 alone. Donald J. Trump also appears on flight logs in ‘94, ’95, ’96, and ’97. In terms of mathematics, how does one quantify multiple? Donald J. Trump has repeatedly denied ever being on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. Donald J. Trump was either on the plane, or he was not. A FACTUAL analysis that considers pilot testimony under oath, as well as contemporaneous flight logs, might lead an objective observer to conclude that Donald J. Trump was indeed on the plane a significant if indeterminate number of times, since the testimony and logs are either false, in which case they are not factual, or they are true, in which case someone is lying.

10. In 1993 Donald J. Trump held a small “Calendar Girl” party at Mar-a-Lago with twenty young models, and two invited guests. The guests were businessman George Houraney, and Jeffrey Epstein. Houraney’s girlfriend, Jill Harth, testified in her 1997 suit against Donald J. Trump that he forcibly kissed her, fondled her, and physically restrained her from leaving a bedroom. Donald J. Trump settled the lawsuit with Harth for an undisclosed amount, but did not admit guilt. The alleviation of guilt admission is regularly what the accused pays to settle a lawsuit, but not always. Sometimes, defendants pay off their accusers because they’re tired and it has been a long week, and can we just move on, already?

11. Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey’s Epstein's main accusers, who died by suicide six months ago, although in a different manner than Epstein and Robert Maxwell, said she was recruited into Epstein’s sex-trafficking network at age 17, while working as a pool girl at Mar-a-Lago. She also accused Prince Andrew of repeatedly sexually abusing her that same year, on "dates" arranged by Jeffrey Epstein, an allegation the Prince called “baseless”, although settled with Giuffre out of court for an unknown sum without admitting guilt, which is a thing people sometimes do.

12. Jeffrey Epstein was good friends with Jean-Luc Brunel. Brunel was a French model scout who was awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls, when he died by suicide in a Paris jail in 2022. No word so far on camera functionality. Virginia Giuffre was among the women who had accused Brunel of sexual abuse. She said Ghislaine Maxwell sent her to many places to have sex with Brunel. Court records also say that Brunel would exploit underage girls from disadvantaged backgrounds by offering them modelling jobs, but would then bring them to the US and "farm them out" to his friends, especially Jeffrey Epstein. In the same way that friends often share meals, or clothes, or underaged girls, Brunel and Epstein also found a strong, lifelong connection in the sharing of improbable suicides while incarcerated.

13. Donald J. Trump’s name appears circled in Epstein’s “little black book”, which was published by Gawker in 2015 consisting of 1,571 personal contacts, which spanned 97 pages of Epstein associates, including high-powered figures such as Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Those men were also among the 38 entries whose names were circled. It is factually unknown why particular men’s names were circled, which could simply have been a random tic of Epstein’s, or plain bad luck for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

14. Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, The Lolita Express, was named after Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliantly disturbing novel about an older man obsessed with a twelve-year old girl, who he proceeds to groom and repeatedly rape, named Lolita.

15. During his 2006 trial, Jeffrey Epstein was offered a sweetheart plea deal of minimum security with work release for thirteen months, instead of LIFE in federal prison, in exchange for pleading guilty to a single count of soliciting prostitution with no age stipulation. The prosecutor who offered that deal was named Alex Acosta. Despite having no experience in labor law, Alex Acosta was later made Labor Secretary under Donald J. Trump from 2017-19. It’s factually possible that this is a coincidence, and Acosta simply seemed to be the best choice, out of every single lawyer in America, to be elevated to a powerful cabinet post.

16. The prosecutor who took over for Alex Acosta in Florida was named Pam Bondi. During her tenure she repeatedly refused to re-open Epstein's case despite a wealth of new evidence. Pam Bondi is now Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General. Pam “The List Is On My Desk/There Is No List” Bondi, according to Donald J. Trump, is “doing a fantastic job". It’s possible this is merely a coincidence, and, like many scenes from ancient Greek dramaturgy, it was destined that Bondi follow in the shoes of the legendary Bill Barr, who is indelibly stained by Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Barr’s father, who is indelibly stained by Jeffrey Epstein. There are those who insist it's possible to argue with math, but most top poker players advise against it.

17. Epstein’s crimes are usually referred to as criminal sexual misconduct with “underaged women”. This is inaccurate. “Underaged women” are, in fact, a more convenient name for children. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were a highly organized and ruthless team of child rapists for hire.

18. It is widely speculated that Jeffrey Epstein’s investment business was actually financed through Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell, at the behest of Russian and possibly Israeli intelligence, in order to blackmail the very wealthy and powerful political figures who visited Little St. James, part of the Virgin Islands, and also known as “Epstein Island” or “Fuck Island”, which Epstein bought for 8 million dollars because of the view. Donald J. Trump claims to have never been there. Bill Clinton claims to have never been there. Prince Andrew claims to have never been there. Alan Dershowitz claims to have never been there. It’s possible these are all factual statements. Also (see the Steel Dossier), any kompromat Russian intelligence has on Donald J. Trump is widely known to be a Deep State hoax.

19. Epstein’s housekeeper, Juan Alessi, testified that Alan Dershowitz would often visit Epstein’s Florida mansion to get “massages”. Jane Doe #3 in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial said that Epstein “required” her to have sexual relations with Dershowitz on multiple occasions when she was a minor. Alan Dershowitz admitted to receiving massages, but said he “always kept his underwear on”. That is a true statement. Or at least it is true that he said it. As a lawyer, Alan Dershowitz has defended both O.J. Simpson and Donald J. Trump. In a Fox News rant, where Dershowitz is a regular if mildly coherent contributor, he claimed to be a victim of the MeToo movement, and accused “radical feminists” of focusing on Epstein and his associates (and the wearing or not wearing of underwear) while refusing to “condemn Hamas”, who he referred to as a “Palestinian armed group”, that were more deserving of MeToo attention than himself.

20. At Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, she testified that Melania was introduced to Donald J. Trump on The Lolita Express, a plane he denies ever being on, and that they had sex for the first time on the plane he claims to never have boarded.

21. Melania is an immigrant who came to America on a work visa that expired, and simply never left. Much like many people currently imprisoned at Alligator Alcatraz. Melania’s visa was for work as a “model”, although she does not seem to have done any modeling except for naked photos that can easily be found online. Many in the industry are confused as to how Melania could have been working as a model, since there is no record of her on any product or fashion shoots, except for the previously mentioned nude shots, one of which features her simulating sex with another woman. It’s possible that by “model”, which is often a euphemism for “escort”, Melania came to America to take pictures focusing on the overall concept of Sapphic Beauty, and to promote the rights of lesbians the world over to love the people whom they love, without shame or censure. Or, maybe they’re just jerkoff snaps she was paid $300 cash for by Jean-Luc Brunel.

22. in 2024 Donald J. Trump was unanimously found liable (guilty) by a jury, half of which was selected by his own lawyers using the voir dire process, for sexually assaulting (raping) E. Jean Carroll. It is a fact that, according to New York state law, a finding of this sort must be unanimous, which means that if a single juror felt Donald J. Trump was not guilty, he would have been exonerated.

23. Donald J. Trump has been publicly accused of sexual assault by at least twenty different women, most of whom opened themselves up to endless media attention and abuse by his supporters, although never sued or received a penny for speaking out, simply because of the need to tell their story and support one another. It's possible, in a factual sense, that every single one is a lying gold-digger promised gifts of chocolate and nylons by the Deep State for coming forward.

24. Former-wife Ivana Trump (who died in 2022 after falling down a flight of stairs, which is a thing that can happen if you’re not careful) accused Donald J. Trump of raping her after their divorce, then later recanted. Sometimes people, usually hysterical women, make claims of this sort and then recant. Relationships with exes are, as we all know, fraught. Ivana Trump is buried at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Bedminster, New Jersey. Just off the 17th green. On a subjective basis, many think the 18th green has a better view, but when you've had three wives, all of whom will ultimately need burying, a man is forced to make difficult decisions.

25. Stormy Daniels.

26. Donald J. Trump has an 80% positive poll rating with the Christian Evangelist community.

27. Donald J. Trump is a rapist.

28. Donald J. Trump is a child rapist.

29. Donald J. Trump is a child rapist whose best friend is a dead child rapist.

30. Those are FACTS. Dispute them if you will, but if you voted for Donald J. Trump, either once or twice, that is what you voted for, either once or twice. If you defend him and choose only to see what is convenient to your personal narrative, instead of the plentitude of facts spread out like a royal flush on the green velvet before you, there is not a word for the degree of cowardice you are the apotheosis of.

31. There is no thirty

1. Yeah, I laughed too when I saw these people get nailed by Chris Martin. How hilarious that their true punishment was willingly attending/enduring a Coldplay show, personal and family considerations be damned.

2. I once attended a Coldplay show. To be fair, it was also halftime at Levi's Stadium during that Super Bowl where ninety-six-year-old Payton Manning completed two passes, both ducks, and Denver still crushed Carolina, mainly because Von Miller was the best player in the NFL at the time, and Cam Newton spent four quarters fleeing in terror or flat on his back with Von Miller (football slyly 29% gay) on top of him, inhaling the man's breakfast fumes, probably onions and raw steak.

3. For reasons too boring to explain, here is a short list of the people sitting in the Levi's box (got the tix for free) on either side of me: Pat Riley, Cal Ripken, Condoleeza Rice, Roger Goodell, Adriana Lima (19 foot legs, mini-skirt), Vincent Chase (whatever his real name is), Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Wiz Khalifa, Jeremy Renner (utterly hammered, took my seat and started talking up Cathy, thought I might have to punch him for a minute there, not kidding), and a large number of other people I vaguely recognized or have subsequently forgotten about.

4. I went to the bathroom, mainly to avoid Coldplay (Weaselly Executive's Hack: total go-to if you don't want to be flashed on the Jumbotron with your illicit squeeze) and relieved myself at the urinal next to Terry Bradshaw, who was talking either to himself or me, still unclear, the Men's was otherwise empty and I had zero clue what he was blathering about. On the way back I stood in line with Michael Irvin, who was pretty hilarious. We shook hands and, with not one iota of exaggeration, the dude's mitts were GARGANTUAN. I have big, square Flintstone hands and his effortlessly wrapped around mine like three times. It actually felt really nice, they were warm and lotioned-but-leathery-soft (football slyly 44% gay) and I could see him having a seriously lucrative post-baller career charging bank for Deep Emotional Palm Therapy, just by enveloping your hand while you quietly wept. It would be a life-changer.

5. On the rare occasions that I have been in tight spaces with celebrities of whatever variety, my working behavioral model is to pretend they don't exist (it's possible, on a quantum level, that they don't.) Some seem to appreciate this angle, while others not so much. Like, I was once at a wedding where the bridesmaid's date was Chris Isaak. He was hugely popular at the time with that warbly-falsetto surfer tune "Wicked Game", and my daughter was maybe two and climbing all over me and it was hot as hell in my suit and Chris and I were standing next to each other talking about the brutal traffic on the way in, and I said, just because I was cranky with the heat, "So what do you do?" and he gave me an evil look and pretty much just walked away. Which even my two-year-old thought was hilarious. Amazingly, later the wedding band called him out, and after demurring for a while (way too long), got up and sang "Wicked Game" while I scrolled through the remaining shrimp/bacon hors d'oeuvres with a yellow toothpick.

6. I once had dinner with Jeff Bezos. That is a true sentence.

7. So, back to the Super Bowl: in this corporate box PACKED TO THE GILLS with celebrities, the only person I really talked to was Wiz, and he was cool, a sweet dude who seemed to appreciate that I neither wanted an autograph or to talk about hip hop. Which is good because I don't particularly enjoy hip hop (except Wu-Tang and Pete Rock. Also Eric B. and Rakim and Death Grips. And Slum Village) and also I don't know a single Wiz Khalifa song.

8. Adriana Lima's legs are 30-feet high, and she could probably end hostilities in Ukraine (brutal illegal invasion by lunatic megalomaniac poisoner who should, right now, be in the same dark site cells in Uganda where they sent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) simply by walking out onto the battlefield in a modest skirt, thereby forcing all combatants to realize that life is very short and killing one another is a poor way to spend their precious and waning time.

9. So here's what I'm thinking: Sure, it's hard to have sympathy for Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and "Chief People Officer" Kristen Cabot (deserves none just for holding that title alone), and they'll have to live down the shame and embarrassment for the rest of their lives, not to mention the coming wreckage in store for their families, but while no one loves to revel in the schadenfreude of wealthy white tech-bra Coldplay lovers more than me (seriously, if you flashed her picture and offered $1000 to pull her name out of the pure ether, I bet it would have taken me less than five guesses to come up with "Kristen Cabot") what's all this crap about them having to leave their jobs/investigations/legal ramifications?

10. I have no idea what Astronomer even does, and it's too boring to look up, but how is that in any way related to an affair? Investigate what? Okay, they're fucking around. Happens all the time. In companies and out. All across the world, in every country, class, wealth level, ethnicity. Half of all literature and cinema is about illicit love/career-climbing sex, so why is this any different? Because of Coldplay?

11. Which is to say, why do we, as a culture, want to pillory these people on social media for getting unethically busy, but are totally fine giving the Rich White Tech Bros and Hedge Funders and Mortgage Repackagers and Petroleum Executives and Pharmaceutical Murderers and Insurance Murderers a pass for DOING THEIR EVIL JOBS. Why aren't Elon and Peter Theil and Tim Cook and Zuckerberg and tools from Comcast and Chevron and Goldman Sachs and Coinbase up there having tomatoes thrown at them every day, just for being them?

12. What do we talk about when we talk about how wholly and deeply puritanical we still are, as Americans, that we'd rather be screwed by corporate overlords in private than allow them to screw each other in public?
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Next Week: How, mercifully, through the intervention of small government, PBS is no longer destroying our children.

1. So here's definitive proof that AI will soon be AGI, and at that point will take over the lives of every person on earth, directly through the wired cities of the world (ever see a map of how little of Africa is connected?) and indirectly to everyone else economically and culturally dependent upon those cities.

2. AI is not going to build machines to kill us or pull off dramatic and cinema-worthy stunts. We will not go back in time to stop it, primarily since time is simultaneous and there is no linear narrative to return to, but also because it won't be necessary. AGI is going to take control by allowing us to believe we are still in control, and since control is illusion to begin with, we'll happily swallow the binary worm.

3. Yesterday, on my IG vinyl account Today In Fat Wax, I posted a very rare (and awesome) Gary Wilson record. So rare that they only pressed 1000 of them forty-eight years ago and you generally can't buy one for under the price of a used Tesla, if you can find it at all, and Wilson himself was a performative iconoclast nerd-genius whose music has a VERY niche audience. And then today on Facebook, I was twice solicited like the cheap street prostitute that FB advertising is, by a modern company that makes the exact same sunglasses Wilson is wearing on the cover of the record in 1977. If AI can target and commodify small details inside a much larger and unconnected narrative (the music) and less than twelve hours later be hawking at me dreamlike elements of my subconscious-for-purchase, what manipulative horrors will AGI show me?

4. Hey, did you know that back in 1890's Versailles, courtesans-for-cash (prostitutes) were called "grande horizontales"? Leave it to the French to be simultaneously callous and metaphorically astute.

5. So yeah, we're all being informationally fleeced all the time by FB, IG, and Google for marketing information, as it turns out that The Matrix is really just a giant product fee for targeting useless if not landfill-ready consumer goods to everyman Keanu Reeves. Which means that Laurence Fishburne is the metaphorical shrug of our not giving as shit that we're being intensely, insistently, interrogatorily product-groomed 24-7, as long as social media remains (like music) free.

5. "Free" is an interesting and wholly relative word bizarrely important to us as 'Mericans, while simultaneously having no fixed meaning and therefore just the sort of slick political marketing ruse a sunglasses company might crank their profit margin with. If Spotify has more or less made music (not ad) free while destroying the structure of the industry itself, what does it actually cost? If Jeff Bezos destroyed publishing by undercutting publishers for whom literature was just as important as profit margin, does that mean the huge stacks of remaindered hardbounds on the big tables at Costco are of higher quality?

6. Okay, so the Internet knows every single thing about us: our concerns, our tendencies, our vulnerabilities, our weak spots, what we want, how we spend, the conduits we use to send or store digital currency, the names of our friends, our lack of friends, our fears, and especially what we masturbate to. (I'm just going to go out on a limb here, making myself entirely vulnerable as a matter of full disclosure, by admitting that shirtless Pete Hegseth candids are my "quiet time" jam.)

7. Doesn't it seem clear that to our coming AGI Overlords, guns might as well be Model T Fords for all the use they will provide, when Mass Control is simply a matter of image manipulation and targeted irritation? The rise of MAGA is nothing but a dissertation on using the leverage of conceptual anger in words and images that are inarguable for being, if not dimwittedly vague, deliberately incomprehensible.

8. Like, for instance, pet eating and chem trails and Deep State Machinations, and the hilarious notion that we have a say in what our taxes are spent on, or tariffs not being taxes, or campus protests or wokeness viruses. Politicians have learned that tangible issues that can actually be deconstructed and debated, like, say, the 1970s obsession with unilateral disarmament, are dangerous precisely because intelligent and actionable opinions which lead to solutions might be formed by concretely identifying them. Much easier (and more evil) to dangle the bauble of, say, state-funded trans prison surgery, which might affect a tiny fraction of 1% of the population, if it's even happening at all, and present it as the 2025 Battle of Midway. It's the ideal wedge as it's not possible to hold an intelligent stance upon, regardless of political or personal ideology, since no one really knows that the fuck they're even talking about.

9. Gary Wilson's Sunglasses are our future: a meaningless wink and flash of alley-thigh that distracts enough to be confused about, but has no surface to grip on to, derived from insanely accurate meta-data bored like marrow from our bones that we willingly hand over in exchange for what old college crushes are up to, and how much we still hate our Right Wing cousins.
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10. Listen to this record, an odd and beautiful little album of arty trinkets from an Art Brut compositional magician with a side of Experimental Onanism. Which probably, like the end of "Mars Attacks", will be the only thing, when cranked aloud on sound systems around the world, able to melt AGI's brains, and once again set us free.

​Or at least free-ish.

​Next week: What We Talk About When We Talk About Edward Furlong