President Truman signed the American Employment Act of 1946.
Prime Minister Attlee announced a plan to transfer power to Indians in Indian no later than June, 1948.
The Allied occupation authorities ended kōshō, licensed prostitution, in Japan.
Last edition:
Why are the women not believed?
At some point in the past, due to sex scandals, it became common to demand that we don't doubt the women who claim they were assaulted or abused.
And for good reason.
The rumors about Playboy and things associated with it proved to be true. Rape, suicides, at least one young woman associated with it simply disappearing, a la The Limey, Hugh Hefner's out right perversions,
It's not as if there weren't signs before. They were just ignored. And the rich and powerful played along with it.
Including Bill Cosby, who was a frequent guest at the Playboy Mansion, and who turned out to be into drugging and raping women. It's not as if there weren't rumors.
And there was Harvey Weinstein, about whom the knowledge of his demanding sex from starlets was pretty well known.
Weinstein, by the way, shows up in the Epstein files.
With each of these scandals, once they broke, women came forward after a first few brave ones broke the news. It was emphasized at the time that women needed to believed when they claimed they were raped and abused.
It hasn't worked that way at all with Epstein.
Virginia Giuffre was flat out doubted when she came forward that she was provided to Prince Andrew by Epstein. As time has gone by, it became more obvious that her claims were not lies. Now she's dead, but it took pretty much all the way up to her death for her to be believed. And we now know that Andrew's association with Epstein is worse than at first imagined.
The Epstein files are packed with claims by young women against the rich and powerful. They include allegations of rape, but also murder.
And yet, the accusations are simply disregarded to a very large extent.
It's accepted, now, that Epstein provided young women to the rich and powerful, but the nameless rich and powerful. So far, when direct accusations are made, they're shuffled aside. Former model Carol Alt, for examples, says that while she was dating Epstein (showing some questionable decisions right there) she was groped by Trump while Epstein just stood there.
That accusation has simply gone nowhere.
Why? Alt has no reason to make it up.
Those are, we might note, amongst the less grotesque that are associated with Trump, who is accused by some Epstein victims of outright rape, receiving a handjob from a teenage girl, and witnessing a murder of an infant. All of which are simply totally discounted.
Are they false accusations, or perhaps simply mistaken ones?
They could very well be, but its interesting how they simply aren't taken seriously.
Bill Gates was accused of some things in the Epstein files that he denied and that appeared headed into being forgotten until Melissa Gates somewhat revived them, although she didn't actually say that what he was accused of, he did.
So, do we take all of these claims at face value?
If we don't, why not?
Granted, it's well demonstrated that every claim made by a woman against a man is not true. And some of these claims are outright fantastical. But then, if you'd told me that Bill Cosby drugged women to rape them, I'd have claimed that was fantastical. If you'd told me (even though it was publicly known), that one Playboy Centerfold posted things claiming Hefner was demonic on her apartment walls before killing herself, I'd have thought that fantastical. At one point, if you'd told me that two of the Playboy centerfolds had been 17 years old when they were photographed, I'd thought that impossible. If you'd told me that Prince Andrew was screwing a teenager procured for him by an American john, I'd have thought that fantastical.
If you'd told me some rich Floridan kept an island staffed with what amounted to teenage sex slaves, well I'd have thought that fantastical.
Trump we might note, is hardly free from being in the smoke where there is fire. He has associations with men who have been ephebophiles that go way back. A video recently surfaced of Trump at a 1991 beauty pageant dinner where he was the judge in which the servers were the very young models in very tight bathing suits. That's creepy in the extreme. A 2020 investigation by the Guardian revealed that the competition was used by Elite Model Agency founder John Casablancas and others to engage in sexual relationships with the vulnerable young models and that the competition was part of a broader network, sometimes with connections to Jeffrey Epstein, that placed young contestants in precarious situations with wealthy men.
Trump hasn't been directly accused, however, of raping anyone in association with that.
Be that as it may, former contestants from Miss Teen USA (1997) and Miss USA (2006) have stated that Donald Trump entered the dressing rooms while they were changing. Some were as young as 15 years old
Now, some of the stories in the Epstein files (the murder one in particular) are really wild.
But some well within the realm of believability, which of course doesn't mean they're true. . . or that they should be immediately dismissed.
The corruption of wealth.
One common element of all of this is the absolute corrosion caused by wealth. The singular aspect of Epstein island is that rich and powerful men wanted to go there, and that some of them wanted teenage sex slaves.
This isn't a new phenomenon of any sort.
We just posted on Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands
I'm not saying he was something like an Epstein associate, or that he had the moral depravity of Donald Trump. But noted in his story were two illegitimate children by mistresses. Charles Lindbergh, who went from being an American hero, to disdained, to somewhat of a hero again had children by three German women in the 1950s and 1960s, including two women who were sisters. All told, he had thirteen children, seven of which were illegitimate. Keeping Elon Musk's genetic broadcasting straight is a difficult project at best, and he's now fighting with Ashely St. Clair, his most recent, um, whatever, over their son Romulus. Bill Gates had one known affair. It goes on and on.
And then we have Trump.
What we also have is ephebophilia, which is a primary sexual attraction to mid-to-late adolescents, 15 to 19 years of age. Unlike pedophilia and is not classified as a mental disorder in the DSM. And we have Hebephilia, the attraction to teens below that, which is classified as a mental disorder in the DSM.
Some of these girls are indicated to be pretty freaking young, although I haven't kept track of it. It seems to me that I've seen references to at least one being 13, which is really freaking young and one was apparently 11 years old, which is absolutely horrific. Most seem to be in the late teens, to the extent we know, but the operation of U.S. law is keeping the identify of the girls secret, so we don't really know all that much about them.
We know it was really weird, however.
What we also know is that a respected scientist who studied ephebophilia found that most men of adult years would react to attractive females in that age range. I.e., they'd notice an attractive female in the late teen age range, which is not at all the same as engaging in improper behavior with them. The researcher himself was horrified to find that he did, but it makes some sense. The 18 years of age brightline under U.S. law is somewhat artificially drawn and in fact it'd make sense to draw it higher, perhaps at 20 or 21 as it used to be for most things. Playboy, as noted above, knew this and actually intentionally targeted down towards lower ages before nearly getting in trouble in Europe, which in the 1950s and 1960s had some very strict prohibitions on pornography. Nonetheless more than one Playboy model was 17 years old when photographed, and others were just 18. Eighteen years old is within the ephebophilia age range (and hence a good reason to boost such things up to 21).
We note that first and then go on to note that its been shown that men who have had about eight women sexually being to depress the age downwards. I.e, their sexucal moral fences start to come down. I don't know how this works for women, but it's known there is an effect on them as well, as as the "body count" increases the ability to form attachments decreases.
All this is because our species is naturally monogamous, with some slight collieries that have to do with death. In a non disrupted state of nature we know that a strong bond forms between a couple that has known only each other, and it can be so intense that if ruptured, usually by death, a second one never forms. We also know that a fair number of people are plagued by thoughts of their "first", as that's where the bond biochemically formed and they're incapable of getting over it. What we noted above is that the more biology is ignored in this fashion, the looser the bond becomes. Men that "cheat" tend to keep on cheating, no matter what, and at the eight number, they start to look downwards to younger bodies. With women what seems to occur is that they simply lose the ability to stick with anyone, and as the number becomes higher, the more superficial and temporary their relationship become, even if the relationships form children.
As with a lot of things, as nature is violated, there are consequences.
Part of our natures is that when we were all aboriginal the wolf was always at the door. That formed an instinct towards acquisition. Maybe we could store up enough to last through the winter, when there were winters. When we became more settled due to agriculture, that mean we could store up wealth. Storing up a lot of wealth allowed at some point for people to directly engage in two of the seven deadly sins, gluttony and greed, with greed being the most obvious. In a debased society, allows a person to engage in unrestrained lust as well.
In other words, love of money truly is the root of all evil.
Castrati
In a moral and just society, people would police their own avarice or society would police it for them.
It's pretty clear that we don't live in a moral and just society.
After the horrors of the Weinstein crimes were releveled, there was a period of time in which progressives started creating a moral code that looked a lot like the original Christian moral code. Weird, eh? Anyhow, it's interesting here as it accepted that some sort of societal rebuilding needed to occur.
It does need to occur, but frankly what should be evident is that the curbs are going to have to be built in to take the food off the table. What that means is taxes.
Ever since Ronald Reagan introduced the utterly bogus trickle down economic theory Americans have run around hating taxes and giving tax breaks to the super wealthy. There's something frankly morally wrong with people who obtain vast amounts of wealth and then retain it, as opposed to people who obtain vast amounts and then apply it. Indeed, a lot of people who obtain huge amounts of wealth, like Epstein Island level, seem to apply it to the Seven Deadly Sins, pride: greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.
These people could be helped to avoid this fate, and I'm sincere about that, if they were simply taxed to prohibit it. There's no reasons that people should be billionaires. There's frankly no reason why a person should own more than one home, or at least not very expensive homes.
Of course, if we taxed people to keep them within a range of reason, say no more than $10M in personal wealth, many would scream that they were going to move to . . . wherever. Let them go.
Most wouldn't, frankly. Whatever is wrong with this class of people so that they must keep acquiring is so off base that they'll keep doing what they're doing that generates the wealth no matter what.
I'd note that just the other day Mehmet Oz, government figure, was running around suggesting that people should go to work earlier in life and work longer into life to help address the budget. Helpful suggestions like this are always given by people who are nowhere near retirement or who don't work in dangerous jobs, so the recommendations are pretty much crap. Be that as it may, if the administration can suggest that, and if it can be lead by a guy who is almost 80 and demented, well then we can tax the rich and expect them to like it.
They need to be, so they don't spend their money being destructive.
Hanging around in a cult will make you a weird cultist.
Will take down (Pope) Francis, The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.
Steve Bannon
The Trump administration, and those who surround Trump, are deeply perverted. Which takes us to this:
One of the things a lot of people are now starting to notice about the Trump Administration is how downright weird it is, and how weird many of its central figures are.
It's been lurking there all along, and its more than a little bit of what caused people who were conservatives, but not MAGA, to really feel uneasy, in varying degrees, about hardcore deep MAGA.
Steve Bannon is, in my view, a disheveled creep. Both inside the MAGA movement and outside of it, he seems just filled with hate. Bannon claims to be a Traditionalist Catholic, but he's been married and divorced three times, placing him well outside of what the Church tolerates in this area. And here we see he wanted to "take down" Pope Francis.
Pope Francis was a controversial Pope in the United States. I was not personally a fan of Pope Francis, but he drew more criticism from Americans than he deserved. I really wasn't a fan of his synodality movement, which lingers on, but which I suspect will sort of die a quiet death.
At any rate, what we're finding out as the Epstein files get released is not only did he have a lot of associations with the very rich and powerful, those relationships carried on well past the point where there's any benign explanation for it. Bannon hoping to take down world figures with Epstein's help. Lutnick taking his family to Lolita Island. It just goes on and on.
It's really not possible to believe that all these people didn't know that sex slaves were on the menu. It's hard to believe that most of them didn't know that. More likely, they just didn't care.
Which leads to this:
The Trump admin posted that yesterday, on Valentine's day.
The use of the term "Daddy's Home" is openly perverse. It's a sick joke that has heavy sexual and abusive, and sexcually abusvie overtones and always has. In a lot of contexts, it has a heavy homosexual overtone. All of that is true here. Trump's the "daddy" to a large group of people who seem in that fashion. It's perverse.
Also perverse is Trump's obsession with weight.
On Valentine's Day the Trump Administration posted a cartoon of Gov. J. B. Pritzker mowing down junk food.
Pritzker is a stout guy, but he's one of those stout guys who looks like he's fairly fit. One of the things about weign in American culture is an overarching belief that everyone who is overweight is a slob, which just isn't true.
Now, it's not good to be overweight. 74% of Americans are overweight. Donald Trump is quite overweight.
Indeed, there's something really weird at work here, as Trump looks fat and flaccid. Pritzker looks overweight but fairly fit. Chris Christie, who Trump likes to poke fun of due to his weight, is in between.
A fat guy call other fat guys fat, is pretty weird.
Another example of our Twenty Fifth Law of Human Behavior came out last week in the form of a totally unhinged Congressional rant by Pam Bondi. It was spectacularly weird.
Bondi went from supposedly having some sort of Epstein stuff in her desk to not having anything to being in charge of an agency that redacted a huge amount of stuff. Clearly, the government had a lot of stuff, and every time more of it is revealed, we learn of additional powerful men, some in government, who had connections with the teenage sex slave broker. The Trump Administration has been in full blown panic about it for months and keeps hoping it can order everyone to move on.
What Bondi did was just fly off the handle, actually arguing that we should be paying attention to the Dow Industrial Average rather than raped teenagers.
Bondi is 60 years old but doesn't look it. Like other members of the "family values" party, she's been married twice and divorced twice. All of a sudden her visage is catching up with her age. Stress will do that, and being cruel is stressful.
Bondi wouldn't look at the rape victims. I've long said that the biggest enemy of women achieving full equality in our society is other women.
Well, look at the Dow. . .
New links and the fallen.
I've added a lot of new links in different categories here recently. I never post when I've done that, but I have. I've also been moving links that have been long dormant over to the inactive blog list. Basically, if there haven't been any posts in over five years, I move them over there.
I always wonder why an active blog suddenly stops posting. Sometimes, reading them, I'm pretty sure it's death.
I took two blogs in the military section out. One is the Duffle Blog. It's supposed to be comedic, but it just wasn't very funny, so it came down. The other one was Mandatory Fun Day.
I loved Mandatory Fun Day when I was first made aware of it, but recently it's been off. I suspect I knew what was going on, but the most recently entry confirmed it, that being the one where the blogger notes he's getting out of the military soon. I suspect that he's taking a twenty year retirement. Many members of the military do.
The reason it seemed off, however, is that for some time posts with his wife and children, or even references to them, just flat out stopped. His wife and four daughters had appeared fairly regularly. Commentors on the post on his getting out of the military started asking about them, and then one confirmed what I'd suspected. The couple divorced.
Being a married military couple with children is reputedly hard, due to long deployments. Without anyone saying it, frankly, the situation has gotten worse since the inclusion of women in the military. Cheating by soldiers has always been a problem, and cheating by married people in offices where they were close together has been a problem for a long time. But take people away from their spouse for a year or more and plop them down somewhere where they're working cheek to jowl seven days a week, well. . .
I don't know what happened with Austin Von Letkemann and his wife Katie, but apparently a year or two ago Mrs. Von Letkemann, who had her own creator content (TikTok?) accused him openly of cheating on her and they divorced soon thereafter. I hadn't really followed them personally, but that opened up that content and it's really sad. He's obviously always been a weight lifter, but he's gone form a fairly robust size to huge, which I'll comment on in a moment. She was originally a cute young woman but not what you'd regard as a bombshell and was fairly overweight. They were a cute couple. At some point she started working on her appearance and she's somehow gone to bombshell, of a certain type. Contemporary bombshell, I guess, of the same type that people who think Erika Kirk is a bombshell.
She's also extremely angry and is making it plain she's never marrying again and that she feels really abused to be cheated on as she's now a single mother with four girls. I don't blame her a bit.
Which I suppose makes these comments somewhat inappropriate.
Kate von Letkemann is a really attractive woman. She has the Erika Kirk look, but is genuinely much better looking than Kirk. Therefore this will seem a bit odd.
She was always very pretty, and I suspect when they married, she was extremely pretty But in their early photos she went from cute to pretty. She had auburn hair, and obviously relished her role as a mother of four.
At some point she became a very blond, blond and had a tummy tuck. She's really made up like a doll now.
I wish people didn't do that. Just look yourself.
And that leads me to Lt. Austin Von Letkemann.
Von Letkemann was always up front about suffering from anxiety. Based on his videos, he must suffer from it quite a bit. Some of the stuff he sells on his page would be of such a nature that I'd tend to call for a welfare check if he was a friend of mine. I've wondered for a long time how a serviceman could get away with posting what he' posts, and now he's announced that he's a short timer.
An Army officer who retires as a lieutenant is a very unusual thing.
Anyhow, during the time during which he's been doing is Vlog he's become massive as a weightlifter.
I've known some guys who lifted weights, some weightlifters, and some really big weightlifters over the years. When guys get super huge, they tend to get obsessed with their size, normally, although I know a couple of instances in which this was not true.
Guys getting obsessed with their size is a bit odd, and it's actually not very manly. Quite the opposite, actually.
Perhaps its vanity, but when weight lifting goes from wanting to maintain strength to "look how beautiful I am" it crosses a certain threshold. Perhaps what that threshold is, in both of the instances noted here, is the threshold of nature. A powerfully built man whose within the realm of reason can hold that strength and build for actual use, whether its work, being in the outdoors, or combat. Once you get huge, however, its beyond the practical and into appearance. There are no gyms out in the prairie or in the trenches.
The display of big builds is also really strongly associated with homosexuality. Back in the day when there were book catalogs that came by mail I used to get them and they often had huge selections of books. If you thumbed through them, and they had books on everything, once you go to the ones displaying weightlifters on the cover they were heavily geared toward homosexual men. I suppose that makes some sort of sense. Even where not the vanity level of this class of lifters is a bit much. I once had the unfortunate experience of being a silent listener to a group of them discussing women, and how they avoided those who weren't as beautiful as they were for, um, services. It was an immoral discussion in general, but it was weird in particular.
On Twitter I used to get the feeds of a guy who was an Eastern European agrarian farmer. It was weird, as he was so far beyond the Pale, but somewhat interesting. It devolved into photos of himself and his physique. That may be why I don't get it anymore. That's, um, odd.
Anyhow, if you go back a few years, he was obviously very fit and moderately tattooed and she was pretty and obviously very happy. His t-shirts fit loosely, like most men wear them. Now his t-shirts are tight and he's heavily tatted up, and very big, and she's all dolled up following a tummy tuck.
Sad situation.
None of which explains why I took Mandatory Fun Day down. I basically did as its content had sort of run out It's become more of a commentary on world events, and some of it is pretty good. However, it's also the case that recently a lot of them lead in with a short comment on some cheesecake TikTok tart. Indeed, that's what lead me to suspect that something had happened. A guy living at home with four daughters and a wife probably shouldn't be, and probably isn't, looking at TikTok tarts. You either have to go looking for that, or its just coming up on your feed as you are looking at that. Most wives would resent it and it's not a good thing to role model, in any fashion, to young women. It's not content I need here.
Accidental renaissance.
How darned dumb do you have to be to hand out checks on the Legislative floor?
It wasn't a lot of money, but it was money, and now there's a criminal investigation. I don't think the investigation will go anywhere, but this really doesn't say much for Bextel, who is of course in the carpetbagger class of the far right. The donor explained more of the story, he's a carpetbagger too, with a "oh shucks" type of response. He apparently thought that Bextel wouldn't do something this darned dumb, but then why didn't he just mail the checks rather than have a third party deliver them? That wasn't smart.
I think these really are campaign donations. There's no crime here. But it does reveal a lot about a group of people who railed about traditional politics as they play, well, traditional politics, with a difference. They're pretty heavily carpetbagger backed with much of their money, like many of their candidates, coming from outside of the state.
Related threads:
Last edition:
Lex Anteinternet: Was it a honeytrap?: Never get into an elevator with a Polish blonde” David M. Evans, Consular/Economic Officer, Warsaw, 1964-1967 Cold War era Greek poster warn...
After that, it really occurred to us the question wasn't, was it a honeytrap? The Epstein teenage girl platter was of course a honeytrap.
The question is, who benefited from it?
We've made the classic suggestion, it was espionage. But there are other types of espionage other than the clandestine statecraft type.
Industrial espionage is one.
Now, frankly it looks unlikely to be that, but it's possible. And engaging in spycraft for nations doesn't preclude engaging in it for industry. There are indeed examples of men and women who have done both.
Which takes us to our next item. What if all the effort to stock a Caribbean island with desperate nymphs was simply to advance Epstein himself, much like bootlegging was to advance the bootleggers.
That could have worked in several ways. One was simply a chance to offer teenage girls to men who wanted to screw teenage girls in exchange for something. . . money, connections, or whatever.
But it goes without saying that if a person set that up, blackmailing them would become very easy to do.
Indeed, why wouldn't a person who had reached such a state of moral depravity take the next step and do so? Only for a couple of reasons, really. One is that it might endanger the entire enterprise. The second is that it might backfire and cause you to end up dead.
And while it's unlikely, it's possible just that occured.
Blackmail, whether as a goal, or accidental byproduct, is indeed part and parcel of an operation such as this. Epstein had desperate teenage girls available for sex and rich associates who wanted to screw them. Once they did, he knew that had occured. They had to depend upon his confidence and he upon theirs. The latter was easily acquired as nobody wants to end up like Prince Andrew. The former, however, could very easily have come at a price at any point.
And the need for confidentiality on the part of the guilty is so strong, that the forces that purchased it are still at work. By this point, we know why the entire files aren't being released. When half released, lives are being destroyed. Andrew lost his theoretical crown. Peter Mandelson is now out of the House of Lords. Bill Gates is fighting allegations he deems absurd but which his ex wife Melinda is at least somewhat crediting.
In the end, whatever it is, didn't work out for Epstein twice. The first time it certainly did, he practically got a get out of jail free card. The second time he lost his life, most likely by his own hands. Whatever else is in there people are fighting to keep secret.
Which brings us back to something distressing but frankly necessary.
We're never going to know what happened on Epstein Island and in his homes until all the names are released, accused as well as victim. I know that the victims don't want that, but it's necessary. Their anonymity keeps them subject to blackmail. Once their names are out, and those of the accusers are out, if ever, they're free of the threat that chains them and can tell who violated them.
And as a final note, when the "Me Too" movement broke out it emphasized believing the women who were telling their stories. Now women do lie about crimes, just like men, and women have lied in the past about rape. But here there seems to be a widespread acceptance that the worst stories just aren't true.
Why is that?
I'm not saying they are, but if you'd told me fifteen years ago that there was a man who ran a white slavery ring for the wealthy and had his own island where the rich and powerful frequented and sampled the offerings, I wouldn't have believed that either.
Related posts:
Never get into an elevator with a Polish blonde”
David M. Evans, Consular/Economic Officer, Warsaw, 1964-1967
The British newspaper The Guardian seems to think so, but The Guardian tends towards the salacious.
It would explain, however, a lot.
We speak, of course, of Epstein Island and the ongoing cover-up of what occurred there.
Yes, cover-up. The U.S. government is covering it up.
A honey trap is an age old espionage technique. A country sends somebody, make or female, to have compromising sex with the target. Once he's compromised, he, and it's almost always a he, is really compromised. Sexual sins can be amongst the very worse, even in this libertine age.
The Soviet Union was a master at the honey trap. Max Hastings, in his book on World War Two espionage, details this quite a bit and well known examples abound. While not often put this way, Soviet recruiting in pre World War Two and early Cold War Britain was based on honey traps, with the added element that they wer\e homosexual honey traps. Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time as well as devastating to a person's reputation, but surprisingly common in the "public school" system. The Soviets learned who would be well placed at some point to be a spy, and provided the sexual target to bring the person in.
The more common female honey trap is of course well known, and was also well deployed by the Soviets, as well as other nations.
Maria Butina is a recently example who buddied up to the Trump administration and the National Rifle Association to gather intelligence from Conservative power brokers, although there's no accusation that she employed sex in her efforts.
Fang Fang, as Christine Fang had sex with two US mayors and targeted Democratic politicians in what US officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China.
Why wouldn't the Russians use it?
What we know about Epstein Island at least gives us every reason to question whether or not it was a honey trap. The number of very wealthy and connected men that went through it, from all over the globe, made it somewhat unique, although the wealthy and powerful travel in certain circles and there are likely other places that meet this criteria. What those other places probably didn't have, however, was mid to late teenage girls who were on the dinner menu.
There's utterly no way that the Russians did not know this.
We are told that just because men traveled to the island doesn't mean that they had sex with underage teenage girls. Quite a few men whose names have been exposed denied every doing that, or denied every knowing that this was going on. No doubt, that's true min many instances. Mere wealth is enough to cause some of the wealthy to go to a place. The appearance of wealth attracts the wealthy like shit attracts flies, and I use that analogy intentionally. But that doesn't mean ever single man who went there ended up in bed with a 15 year old.
Having said that, however, it's clear that girls about that age were there for the offering, and that's the next point. A honeytrap isn't a rape of the target, it's an offering that tempts the target. Some men might very well go through a place, particularly perhaps like Bill Clinton did with his wife, and never be tempted, maybe, or even know what's going on. But to not have some clue strains credibility. One thing that's showing up, and thank to the Guardian you can see them, is photos of the young girls. Their faces are blacked out, and in some cases their boobs, but what's interesting is they are of a type. They're thin girls and look like teens, not the heavy chested women of the Playboy magazine type. They look, even in the redacted photographs, just like what they were, thing flat chested girls who should have been in high school.
They look like the girl that Donald Trump drew on Epstein's birth card.
And all the more appropriate for a honeytrap.
If you are attracting the flies in this fashion, you have to have something to attract them to, and something that compromises them. Back in the 1970s illicit sex alone would have done that, but in the 2000s? Maybe not. And on top of it the guests on Epstein Island were flying in and out, although some did that quite a bit. Offer a super model up on the plate might not work for a variety of reasons, one being that the supermodel would probably say no. You aren't going to get any Kate Uptons on Epstein Island.
But you might very well get the desperate and confused. Pretty girls on the economic and domestic edge, whose parents are desperate as well. They'd make ideal entries on the sexual menu. They are like the prostitute who is murdered to set up the Senator in The Godfather, Part II. Girls with nothing who "never existed".
You only have to offer them up to the willing, have a camera around, and voila, the target is compromised.
Today in the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics.
Almost every weekday Catholic holy day I think about posting something like this, and then never do. But on this occasion, I'm going to.
I don't resent the holy days, and indeed, it would be wrong to do so. But, in this very localized post, I don't like the way that the parishes handle scheduling Masses for them, or at least I'm whining about it.
Indeed, as this one follows a Sunday, I was hoping the feast had been transferred so there would by no obligation, but it wasn't.
Catholics are required, under the pain of mortal sin, to attend a Mass for a holy day of obligation, assuming that it's possible to do so. What I think is the case is that sometimes the Church doesn't take into account the daily lives of Catholics, at least here, to make it a bit more easier to fulfill that obligation. Or maybe it figures that it being difficult is part of the point, I'm not sure.
Anyhow, what the situation is, is as follows.
Like a lot of Catholics in this region, I worked on Saturday. I took time out of my work day, however, to go to confession. I went, and then went back to work. The confession schedule at the Church I normally go to makes getting to confession very easy. There's confession on Saturday mornings at 8:00 a.m. On First Saturdays there's a Mass at 9:00 a.m., although I don't attend it. There's confession again at 1:30 p.m. The two other parishes have confessions at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday. One parish has confession on Sunday at 4:00 p.m. and again on Wednesday evenings, and the big across town parish has confession on Thursday evening. So every parish is making it easy to get to confession.
It's easy to get to Sunday Mass as well. One parish starts its vigil Mass at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday. The other two are about 6:00 p.m., I think. Masses resume at the big parish at 8:00 and run them through the day with two of the three concluding with Masses in the evening, with the earliest being 5:15 p.m.
So far, so good.
All the parishes have weekday Masses, which is where this begins to break down in my view.
One parish has a morning Mass at 6:30 a.m., way early. Another one has daily Masses at 9:00 a.m.. Not so early. Another has one at 8:30, but today, on the holy day, that's been moved to 9:00 a.m.
I used to attend daily Mass. . . at noon. The downtown parish, which has a morning Mass at 6:30, had one at noon as well. It was well attended in relative terms. It was also quite short, as the two Priests who conducted the Masses (they now have one) knew that almost everyone there represented foot traffic from downtown.
Okay, so what is the problem?
This is.
I could have made the Mass last night, the vigil Mass. I thought about it.
But I also attended Mass at 8:30 in the morning, and then headed out to look for elk on my one day off. It's not so much that Mass twice in one day is too much, but for people who have a single day off, and that's a lot of people around here, what that effectively does is to devote the entire day to Mass.
There is something charming about that, and I think some people do that very thing. But for a feral person like me, bookending the day that way means that pretty much the rest of the day is lost.
To add to it, while I did bet back in town in time, on this day, like a lot of Sundays in the fall and winter, that would have put me in Mass wearing tiger stripe cargo pants. . . which would look a bit odd.
It might be possible for me to make a 6:30 a.m. Mass, but it would be pretty difficult. I'm usually still downing coffee at 6:30 a.m. and my days are really long. If I did that, particularly because of that location, I'd be at work before 7:30 and therefore be putting in a default 12 hour day with no break, most of the time.
And when I had school age children here at home, it was an absolute impossibility. When we still had a dog here, which we did until quite recently, it would have been as well, as my long suffering spouse, who has the temperament of a grizzly bear if she's awakened early, and who is not Catholic, would have had to been poked awake.
And 6:30, frankly, is absurdly early. Is there a reason this can't be 7:30? A 6:30 Mass will draw people, but it will tend to draw the retired elderly who don't have much else to do at that hour and who have given up sleeping, as the elderly tend to do. I know that, as in spite of my whining here, I'm always up early.
I have, I'll note, attended that Mass when I had no other choice. I frankly was darn near asleep, but it was interesting as I sat right behind two young women who were friends, one of whom was a trad, sort of combining a mochila with a leather skirt, and the other who was wearing street clothes. My guess is that they were on the way to high school or community college, probably the latter.
I'll also note that when I made that 6:30 a.m. Mass it was before they were worried that I might have intestinal cancer and then thyroid cancer. My stomach has never been the same and mornings is generally where that shows it. Enough said.
I'm grateful that there are two parishes with evening Masses I can make, although I with the one that has 5:15 Sunday Masses still had a holy day mass at that time. Now it does not. It's 6:00 holy day Mass is a Spanish Mass, which is also fine, so I suppose the time was moved to accommodate Spanish speaking Catholics on their way home from work.
What I really wish, however, is that one Parish had a noon Mass.
Any Mass after 8:00 on a weekday really isn't very well scheduled to accommodate working people, or students, in this region. When I was a student, I was nearly always at school by 8. I'm nearly always at work by 8, if not 7. By the end of the day, I'm nearly always beat down and just want to crawl home (a coworker who occasionally does the "let's go get a beer" nearly always gets the reply "I just want to go home). I'll make one of the evening Masses, but I'll be pretty worn out by that time.
A noon Mass would be ideal. And not just for me, but for others like me, who work in town. The downtown noon Mass was great, as I could and did walk to it, but I could drive to any of them.
I know, in no small part due Fr. Joseph Krupp's podcast, that Priests are grossly overburdened, so I shouldn't be complaining at all. But I am a bit. Masses at 8:30 or 9:00 can only be attended by people, for the most part, who aren't working, and who don't have children. Masses at 6:30 will probably only be attended by the elderly and the other very early risers, who can accommodate getting something to eat thereafter.
For most working people these just don't work. Noon won't work for everyone either, but it'll work for some who might otherwise have a difficult time going.
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While waiting for Confession to commence on Saturday, I was stunned to find a large crowed of people in the Church. It soon was obvious it was a Baptism, and had just concluded.
Quite of few of the men were wearing hats, with at least one wearing a cowboy hat. This is inside the church.
I've grown used to declining clothing standards, and frankly I'm not exactly that well dressed most Sundays. But wearing hats indoors was something I was taught to never do as a child. In the service it was normally absolutely prohibited. "Is your head cold?" was a question addressed in the form of a snarl by sergeants to enlisted men who forgot to remove their hats.
Now people wear hats indoors all the time. I don't like, and I still don't. I never see Catholics do that inside of a church, if they are men (and for that matter its pretty rare with women), so my presumption is that these were people who were largely unchurched.
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In looking for Mass times, I looked to see what was offered by the by The Ukrainian Catholic Church's mission to Casper. I suspect they don't have a service today, but looking up their information is always a problem. I don't know if its because its a small community and they know what they're doing, and therefore don't feel that they need to publicize it, or if its something else.
The Eastern Rite churches of the Catholic Church are growing, and it'd behoove them to at least make the dates and times of their services known, I'd think. So far they've also been holding services in non Catholic buildings, which I also don't get. I don't know what's up with all of this, if anything at all, but here I wish that they'd make use of one of the Catholic Churches and make it easier to find out when they're holding services.
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It's interesting, at least to me, to note that the word holiday obviously comes from Catholic holy days. Most of the original holidays were in fact holy days and in Catholic countries, that's still very much the case.
This is a Protestant county.
That gives rise to part of the problems noted. The US has a hardcore Protestant Work Ethic pounded into the culture by the Puritans, who got it from Calvin. It's part of the crappiest aspects of Americans culture. It doesn't add a day to our lives, probably shortens them, and makes them a lot less enjoyable.
Calvinism, from which that comes, really has threads of steel throughout the culture. John Calvin was a fun sucker, but he believed in work in a major way. He also believed that being well to do showed that you were probably amongst the elect. The Puritans themselves were big on the marital act, but by the time of the English Civil War prominent Calvinist in England figured that if they were well to do, that was proof enough they were amongst the elect, and so pick up a mistress on the side was okay.
You can see a lot of that in the culture today, particularly amongst those in power. People don't mind the concept of telling you to work harder while the engage in serial polygamy. It's strong in the American Civil Religion and some strains of Evangelicalism as well, where some "faith leaders' who have had morally dubious lives see nothing particularly disturbing about that.
The culture lost a lot in the Reformation.
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Finally, this is not only holy day, it's a feast day. The difficulty of getting to Mass will take away from the feasting aspect of it, as will the fact that in a Puritan Protestant county we're not supposed to be feasting on a Monday. Everyone has to be at work again, bright and early in the morning.
Recorded on this day in 1945:
The Sheridan Press reported on wolves and war brides.
