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2020 Year in Review (Part 2) If you’ve not yet read Part 1, click here to do so. The whole enchilada can be downloaded as a single PDF here Epilogue 1-Jeffrey Epstein Figure 1. Christmas 2019. Many topics I hit year in and year out. Others are one-off adventures. In 2018 I wrote about how seriously fabricated the Syrian gas attacks were. Addendum: I was right as supported by recent evidenceref 2 but need not say any more. I am pleased to note that Nick Sandman, the kid with the smirk that rocked the world,ref 3 is cleaning up in court. Last year I wrote extensively about Jeff Epstein and Climate Change They were intended to be my final word on the subjects—I was personally done—but I’ve gotta chase the laser pointer one last time. “Ah…ha…ha…ha…stayin’ alive, stayin alive.” I had concluded that Epstein didn’t kill himself (duh) and that he is not dead. Really? Yes. Ya gotta read it. In January even 60 Minutes debunked the suicide story, but the iceberg is still mostly submerged as Jeff is being marketed as an insatiable perv aided by his pimp Gishlane “Gizz” Maxwell. Of course, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew were under the bus together, but there are many, many more at that bus stop waiting for the children. Epstein the Perv is a cover story to distract us from Jeff’s and Gizz’s role in the Mossad and the hundreds if not thousands of powerful pervs entangled in this web of intrigue. Gizz’s father was a legendary Israeli spy while her two sisters are working for Israeli front companies in the tech world. No more rehashing a long, sordid tale of sex, murder, and espionage. I think last year’s write-up did it justice. Well, after having her under surveillance for months—what’s the rush?—the FBI caught Gizz Maxwell in New Hampshire. Her lawyer suggested that Gizz had “hundreds” of “celebrities” and “world figures” on film having “orgies with minors.” Hundreds are wondering how they looked in their first porn film. It is unlikely the authorities will squeeze the dirt out of her. Investigative journalist Whitney Webb says they are charging Gizz with a 1997 crime of little consequence. This is another FBI catch-and-release program. Figure 2. Gizz on the throne with Kevin. The risk of battling this crowd was underscored by Gizz’s relationship with Kevin Spacey. Many Epstein-Spacey photos are floating around, but the photo of Gizz and Spacey on the throne in Buckingham Palace raised some eyebrows. I am sure that it is not the first time Gizz has been spotted on that throne, but the Queen is probably tired of cleaning up after Prince Andrew and his friends. There is a point to this story (although I thought the gizz-throne joke was worth the effort.) Spacey was facing four #metoo-like accusations. No problemo. Three accusers are now dead and the fourth said, “Never mind. I’m good. I’ll show myself out.” Apparently, the cost of taking Kevin to court was oppressive. Now we get to watch the wokies in Hollywood welcome Kevin back into the fold of their hypocrisy.
There is, however, the recent story of Gazillionaire Leon Black, founder of Apollo Global Management. Leon is having trouble explaining why he gave Jeff $50 million. The Attorney General for the US Virgin Islands appears to be determined to pry open the case. It is said “there is panic among many of the rich and famous.” The AG will be dredged up in a fishing trawler’s net before anything bad happens. The U.K. is also probing Barclays’ CEO Jes Staley’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein too, but I brought up Leon because of his ties to Deutsche Bank. Why does this matter? Glad you asked. Very astute of you. There was the 2020 story of Judge Esther Salas who’s husband and son answered a knock on the front door only to be shot, and the son killed, by a guy in a fake FedEx uniform. Authorities soon traced this heinous crime to an “anti-feminist” named Roy Den Hollander. He sounds like a supremacist. Roy Den killed himself before the authorities caught him. Bad break. Shit happens I guess, but the FedEx costume only makes sense if Roy Den didn’t realize he was gonna swallow the muzzle. What the press did not notice was that the judge had just taken on a case having to do with money laundering at Deutsche Bank involving Epstein. Gettin’ a little creepy, eh? Well, ol’ Roy Den may have been a crazy hick, but here’s the “killer”: he worked for several sketchy companies including Kroll Associates Moscow Office where he “managed and upgraded Kroll’s delivery of intelligence and security in the former Soviet Union.”ref 20 Kroll seems to be one of those Blackwater-like intelligence companies with recorded ties to all of the three-letter agencies you can imagine (MI6, FBI, CIA….) as well as Blackwater, the Mossad, the Clintons and Bushes, lots of Rooskies, and even Robert Maxwell, Gizz’s notorious father. Did Judge Salas’s family really get hit because she was a feminist? To close the loop and add the “ooooh” sound effect, Epstein’s private wealth banker dealing millions of dollars through Deutsche Bank and Citibank for over two decades decided that it was time to off himself. Last question: was any of this in the mainstream media? This web of grotesquely sinister activity that surrounds Epstein traces back to the 1920s and Meyer Lansky. It has always been there and will never unravel because the players control the narrative—they control the World.
Epilogue-Climate Change
My second epilogue is about climate change. We are stripping finite resources from a finite planet while inflicting serious beatings on Mother Nature. Three years ago, I would have followed the science and said it was real and serious. Two years I wrote that it was likely real but suggested that I, along with 99.99% of the population, was unqualified to form a well-reasoned opinion. I expressed surprise that more scientists sharing a common ignorance did not share my agnosticism. After serious baiting by colleagues urging me to follow the science, I plowed hundreds of hours into the topic in 2019 and drew some partially educated conclusions. Climate change might be real, but I could not find evidence of a crisis. If you think that you can see actual changes in the climate even if the narrative is true, you are delusional. The annual changes would be profoundly incremental in the worst-case scenario. I also found a highly conflicted climate-industrial complex—$1 trillion per year of conflict—that would vaporize if the plotline fell apart. Well-reasoned scientists are constantly goaded by activists obsessed with keeping the narrative aimed straight at the target even if the facts swerve. The lies fed to the public were atrocious and pervasive. Scientists who dare leave the hive to question the climate change narrative get “canceled” by both their peers and the media. The climate change movement is very cultish.
Alas, you have lost this scientist just as you lost other much more prominent doubters of the climate change narrative that were said not to exist. Wikipedia had a sobering list of the prominent scientists who challenged the narrative—called foul—but that inconvenient truth was removed. I thought I was done with this charlatanical debate, or so I thought. Browsing my notes from 2020, however, showed it took a while to let it go. I documented stories about fires in Siberia that burn every year and fires in both California and Australia easily traced to recent and fundamental changes in land management.ref 4 Let it go, Dave. Let it go. Two events, however, caught my attention this year prompting me to return to the subject one more time.
The first is a book by a well-known life-long environmentalist, formerly one of Time‘s “Heroes of the Environment”, named Michael Shellenberger. A previous book Break Through was said by WIRED to be “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.”ref 6 Well, Michael’s Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All is a mea culpa for his hyperbolic support of the climate crisis movement. (See “Books”.) He does an excellent job of examining the unacceptable costs of mitigation, what economists call “negative externalities.” Michael now says the crisis is hyperbole, easily managed, and does not demand draconian measures. You also get a view of the markedly different world views of environmentalists—folks who want the best solutions to protect the Earth—and the climate change community, which obsesses over CO2 and fossil fuels.
The bigger event was when Michael Moore and his long-time collaborator Jeff Gibbs released their documentary entitled, Planet of the Humans.ref 7 Michael seems to have flipped to right-wing whacko. (Not really. They still militantly criticize the corporate world.) What I am sure started as an investigation of the various lobbies fighting climate change turned into a sobering and complete denunciation of the climate-industrial complex. One clearlysees the rift between the environmentalists and the climate change community again. The Grand Wizard of Climate Change, Bill McKibben, gets gelded, but he was not alone. Various environmental groups like the Sierra Club got taken out by this drive-by shooting as well.
The response was immediate. After Forbes gave a glowing review of his book, Shellenberger’s op-ed in Forbes apologizing for being over the top got yanked within hours (canceled is a better term). That’s odd because last year I described how a globally prominent solar physicist at Hebrew University wrote an editorial for Forbes explaining that the changes we are seeing are all derived from solar cycles. That op-ed got canceled within hours too Market geeks who read Forbes ought to be fact-checking the other articles. The undermining of the documentary came fast and furious. I read a half dozen. The usual tack was that the data in the documentary was old or that Moore and Gibbs forgot to mention something that was never intended to be part of their movie. They were feeble screeds from agenda-driven feeble minds. The Inconvenient Truths are getting a little too inconvenient. If this doesn’t trouble you, it is time for an intervention. Of course, the movie was canceled by Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, because some of the ideas are just too dangerous. YouTube has turned into a neo-Stalinist sack of shit propaganda machine. I can no longer find the ProPublica version either, but, for now, it lives on here. I urge you to watch it soon.
But what will happen to poor Greta Thunberg in the extraordinarily unlikely event that the climate crisis story fades? Not to worry. She is a pro and has already found greener pastures while CNN continues to meet my expectations… Figure 1. Unphotoshopped—I checked—promo for a deep dive into Covid-19 with the experts. Rise of the Cancel Culture
“…when they speak or write as citizens.” Hmmm… I recently listened to an activist professor at Bard College in a discussion of “cancel culture” versus “free speech.” (S)he—from name and physical appearance I sincerely could not ascertain identified gender—opened by saying (s)he didn’t know what cancel culture is and even whether it is real. Really? Seems a little underqualified for the debate. Let me help you out. Cancel culture derives largely from the political left wherein a digital or sometimes real mob decides that your ideas are so repugnant that you should be taken out at the knees. They “cancel” you by going after your job, personal life, and reputation. The stigmatizing causes self-censorship by innocent bystanders. The Mob uses what they proudly call “ratioing”, in which The Mob—the numerator—overwhelms the denominator of one. Admittedly, this is sophisticated thinking coming from a group that claims math is a social construct of dead white men and that 2 + 2 = 4, 5, or whatever number they wish. The Mob is performative, virtue signaling to their peers that they are the most woke. (I suspect that many wokies suffer a deep sense of their own inadequacy and unemployability, which is frustrating after spending $250,000 on an education majoring in something leaves you poorly equipped to enter a largely capitalist society.) With hate mail and death threats as cornerstones of the strategies, the wokies will get you fired if your employer is staffed with total cowards and ensure that you never be employed again in a job that requires some semblance of a reputation. They do not want you to improve or repent. You are a write-off heading for footnote status. There is also a big-game hunting component; a person of influence is clearly bonus points. I experienced this personally, but that must wait until the next section. That narrative underscores why I take the information in this section so personally.
I experienced an attempt at cancelation in 2017 when a multi-year, multi-million-dollar effort by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to unionize our graduate students would have dumped an annualized million-dollar-plus annuity into the AFT coffers. They were going to win big until I picked a fight. They fatally took the bait and lost by a razor-thin margin. Weeks later, when all seemed to have quieted down, seven of the butt-hurt student organizers attacked me with a smear campaign armed with some serious distortions using the Cornell Daily Sun as their conduit. It was ugly and unpleasant, but my colleague in the law school, Professor William Jacobsen, toe tagged them with a withering counter-attack. That three-year-old experience re-enters the plotline below. First, let me bullet a few prominent 2020 cancelations. Mind you, these poor souls had few if any serious blemishes on their records preceding their nouveau crimes against humanity. I also differentiate these Mob-based attacks from their kissing cousins highlighted in “Political Correctness” in which employers wet themselves out of fear The Mob might show up. I’ve intentionally omitted the names of the victims.
As a right-leaning deplorable, I have got to give a hat tip to those on the left or right who can cross the great and widening divide. For the upper crust, legal scholar Jonathan Turley of George Washington University has been on the front lines defending free speech. The examples listed above should scare the bejeesus out of you. There are sleeper cells everywhere. The message of James Damore at Google was simple: “we can get ‘em.” The example of VISA canceling the CEO of Gab shows a company can do it too. Doug Murray has a curious theory that the corporate world is embracing the cancel culture because it distracts us from the nasty shit: “Systemic racism? Guilty as charged. Just don’t look over at those Indonesian sweatshops with slave laborers making sneakers for us.” It is a Cultural Revolution in which no number of social credits can save you from a single discredit. I don’t worry about the skateboarders smashing windows in the long run. They can be dealt with once society decides enough is enough. Embedded neo-Marxists in administrative positions who can rewrite rules are the problem. The left are dishonest bullies. They want compliance; don’t give any.
David Collum is a Betty R. Miller Professor of Organic Chemistry and Department Chair, Associate Editor of Journal of Organic Chemistry, follower of Austrian economics.
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