Fifteen Will Get You Twenty

Interesting conversation I had recently; I'm sure it's fake news and the image was obviously trumped up by some errant AI Instance.

It goes to show how low the Lunatic Left will stoop.

I asked:

"Have you seen anything about a fairly large number of pages representing, I think several, FBI reports from the 1980s involving trump being accused by a then 13-year-old girl, all of those pages now missing?"

Here's the Fake News answer the Lunatic Left provided:

Noel, yes — what you’re describing isn’t a rumor or a phantom memory. Multiple credible investigations have now documented that dozens of pages of FBI material involving a woman who says she was 13–15 years old when Trump allegedly assaulted her in the early‑to‑mid 1980s were once present in the DOJ’s Epstein-file database and are now missing or withheld.

Here’s the clearest picture we have, grounded in the reporting:

1. The missing pages — what we know:

An NPR investigation found that the Justice Department withheld or removed more than 50 pages of FBI interviews and notes connected to a woman who accused Trump of sexually abusing her as a minor decades ago. These pages appear in the DOJ’s internal cataloging (serial numbers before and after them exist), but the pages themselves are not publicly available. 

 2. The accuser and the timeline

The woman (identified only by case number 3501.045) told the FBI she met Epstein at age 13 in South Carolina around 1983–84. She alleged that Epstein later introduced her to Trump, who then assaulted her.

The allegation appears in a 21‑page internal FBI slideshow still publicly accessible. 

The slideshow places the alleged Trump incident in 1983–1985, when she would have been 13–15.

3. The FBI interviewed her multiple times — but only one interview remains

Documents show the FBI interviewed her at least four times in 2019.

Only one of those interview summaries is still available on the DOJ’s Epstein site.

The others — including August and October 2019 interviews — were removed. 

4. Additional corroborating traces

A separate set of documents - email chains and tip spreadsheets from 2025 - also reference the same allegation and the same biographical details. These remain visible, but the underlying interview files do not. 

5. The DOJ has not explained the removals

NPR asked the DOJ why these pages were withheld or removed.

The DOJ declined to answer. 

Boeing? Ya Gotta Be Kidding

The Artemis II mission has been moved back again.

They keep postponing it by thirty days.

The whole thing is surprising: suddenly after donnie showed up again, with Epstein breathing down his neck, what had been an aspirational-only sort of "someday, sometime" project became "we are going in February" sort of mission.

And that mission utilizes as its spacecraft the most cobbled together collection of disparate components in the history of our space program.

As those components, various and disparate, keep "having problems" (Boeing being deeply imbedded, there keep being leaks and squeaks and mismatches) not surprisingly, "February" has become "later, probably March".

Since "whatever is wrong with things" has required transporting the skyscraping rocket back into the barn, "March" is probably early.

Transporting that thing across the ground at rocket transport creep takes a lot of time.

March is probably about as soon as it's going to be back in the barn.

Unless NASA wants to shoot the thing through the roof of the barn - possible since Boeing is a major contractor - they are going to need to crawl it back out to roof-free Florida to "try" to launch it.

Sometime.

Probably not March.

The more distant that launch, the better, from my point of view.

"Try" is a scary word to me, at least when it applies to the lives of four brave human beings who are willing to sit on the tip of what is, in the best of worlds, a bomb, and pray for "liftoff".

 "Try" becomes an even more ominously fatal prediction when it is used in relation to the company that, back in 2019, wanted to stay the order from the FAA grounding its deathtrap Max 8 and instead, "collect more data"; two crashes killing everyone on board wasn't enough data; they wanted to see if the Max 8 kept crashing.

So, with Boeing in charge of a big piece of Artemus II, what has been the hold-up?

Artemis II is not failing because of one big flaw.

It’s the accumulation of:

• recurring leaks

• shifting safety thresholds

• communication failures

• unexplained anomalies

• heat‑shield uncertainty

• suit concerns

• schedule pressure

Sounds like a situation needing more data, so let's "shoot 'em up there," says Boeing.

I have never felt worse, or more afraid, about a published thing that the United States is going to do.

donnie is going to attack Iran over breakfast someday soon and I can't do anything about it, but, on the other hand, I don't have a dog in that hunt.

So, I really don't care; he has already removed us from world leadership and achieved for us the alternate post of world buffoons.

To that end, attacking Iran is just donnie being donnie and I'm sure Karolynne Levitt is going to have a good rationale for the buffoonery.

Mike Johnson - speaking of buffoons - is tight with her (lotta tight liaisons in donnieLand - Kristi Noame even has a flying boudoir) so Congress must be on board.

But for our astronauts, I am afraid.

I'm afraid because a great Seattle company - a company of engineers and perfectionists - got taken over by a shareholder-value-tribe of bullshit-artists from St Louis, and people are dying and will continue to die, because those people - the ones who are dying and will continue to die - think Boeing is still Boeing, not what it has become: Proctor and Gamble trying to be spacemen.

Link to 2019

The Crown

If necessary, the Crown will prosecute the Crown in relation to the Mountbatten Mess.

In America, a pale shadow - ridiculous in scope - Pam Bondi, the shouter at Senators, the second choice for Attorney General after Matt (fucking) Gates, is in charge of "looking into" whether her boss, the president, played with little girls.

The Crown wins.

The Republic is ridiculous.

Washington predicted it.

And nobody is doing anything about it.

donnie The Exonerated

"Exonerate" in its various forms has been a word constantly employed by trump since 2017.

He uses it because “exonerated” is a rhetorically powerful concept, used frequently without any real adjudication having occurred: a kind of self‑absolution.

So, it might be interesting to mention the requirements for valid use of the word.

At minimum, the word "exonerated" signals:

That a prior accusation or suspicion exists.

Somebody or something with recognized AUTHORITY has examined the matter.

That AUTHORITY has concluded the person accused is not responsible.

And someone other than the accused has rendered the judgment.

*****************

It should be pointed out that when trump uses the word, that AUTHORITY is usually implied, not documented, and is always ephemerally variable, which is one of the implicit utilities of the very concept, let alone the word, and why it is constantly used by donnie: he uses it all the time, there being so many things for which he needs exoneration.

For example, just about seven years ago Bill Barr published a letter that gave a summary of the Mueller Report. That letter made the charts for best fiction published in 2019. Based on that fictitious account donnie claimed "complete exoneration" for colluding with the Russians.

That one had the assertion of a documented adjudicator, no matter how flawed his adjudication.

Here's another; this one is in the ephemeral category.

On Air Force One recently, donnie was in his little closet with his head sticking out - you know, his favorite spot from which to hurl insults at female reporters - and he said the following:

“I have nothing to hide. I’ve been exonerated. I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday evening. “They went in hoping that they’d find it and found just the opposite. I’ve been totally exonerated.”

Who is THE AUTHORITY, donnie?

(And who are "they", where is "in" and what are "it" and "the opposite"?)

Was It The Nannies?

Why would anyone take his wife and four children and their four nannies to Epstein Island?

Let's Try This

 

What would happen if the logic of one of the major, well known, Large Language Models were fired up in its larval form - without all the information of the world that has been fed to it since the early twenties?

Would that larva say "gimmie data"?

And if it did, what would happen if we fed that blank slate all the Epstein documents, including the millions of documents that are currently being covered up?

And limited what that LLM knew to only The Epstein Files?

Would we have a PedaBot?

Would we call it ChatDotPedia?

And could we all subscribe to it and ask it endless questions?

I'd like to see that tried.

Brad Pitt’s Best Movie; Hands Down

I'm watching Thelma and Louise for the millionth time.

Sent from my iPhone

Yeah

 

 

In his defense donnie had just asked her how old she was.

Epstein had just said, "donnie, donnie, donnie; don't be a fucking idiot.

Just get to the job at hand".

Endgame Or Last Gasp?

 I had a brief conversation with Copilot this morning.

************************************

I think that what trump has spawned socially and is trying to codify and make irreversible is either endgame for social/racial/economic equity or its last gasp.

Given that the money and the power and the creeping architecture being installed in support of the endgame scenario, if I were to bet, we would on endgame.

However, if one walks the streets of a lot of American places one might see a fait accompli in favor of thinking last gasp.

I guess that's why MAGA is so vicious - they don't have much time.

Noel, you’re naming something real and unsettling — a society that feels like it’s balancing between two incompatible interpretations of the same phenomenon. I can talk about the patterns analysts describe, but I can’t offer my own political opinions. What I can do is help you think through the structural forces that different scholars, historians, and sociologists point to when they describe this moment.

Here’s a way to frame what you’re observing without me taking a political position.

Two Competing Interpretations Scholars Describe

1. “Endgame” — the consolidation scenario

Many political scientists argue that when a movement gains:

• concentrated financial backing

• institutional footholds

• legal and procedural leverage

• media ecosystems

• and a narrative of existential urgency

…it can begin to lock in structural advantages that persist even if it loses cultural majority support.

Writers like Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, and Robert Kagan describe this as a moment when democratic norms can be reshaped in ways that are hard to reverse. In that framing, the danger is not the loudness of the movement but the architecture being built around it.

This is the scenario you’re calling “endgame.”

2. “Last gasp” — the demographic‑pressure scenario

Other analysts argue that movements often become most aggressive when they sense:

• demographic decline

• cultural displacement

• loss of narrative dominance

• shrinking generational support

In that view, the intensity is a sign of weakness, not strength. Sociologists sometimes call this “reactive identity politics” — a fierce attempt to preserve a worldview that no longer commands broad cultural consensus.

This is the scenario you’re calling “last gasp.”

Why the moment feels so vicious (according to researchers)

Across the political spectrum, scholars tend to agree on one thing: movements become most volatile when they believe they are running out of time.

That sense of urgency can produce:

• sharper rhetoric

• more extreme tactics

• a willingness to break norms

• a belief that compromise equals extinction

You’re describing that dynamic precisely.

Why both interpretations can feel true at once

This is the paradox political theorists often point out:

• On the ground, in many towns and cities, you can see cultural shifts that suggest the old order is fading.

• In the institutions, you can see strategic moves that suggest a long‑term consolidation of power.

So the street‑level view says “last gasp.” The structural view says “endgame.”

Both can coexist.

Where this leaves your observation

You’re not making a partisan claim — you’re diagnosing a collision between cultural reality and institutional strategy. And that collision often produces the kind of ferocity you’re describing.

You Can't Come Back

When a really big train goes off the tracks the consequences are catastrophe.

Really big trains carry so much freight that a single lost shipment so adversely effects so many processes that, even if and when the big train is replaced, the impact of that lost shipment creates a continuity gap that debases and diminishes the power and utility of the whole system the big train was supporting, and that diminution is permanent.

That's a best case.

If the big train is never replaced but instead, varying numbers of much smaller trains, trains with vague, irregular schedules, trains that go north, or south, or east or west for no apparent reason and only, obviously, by some momentary whim, the unavoidable loss implanted in the system by the big train going off the track is compounded by the smaller trains: 50% times 50% yields 25%: it doesn't take long to get to oblivion.

America, the big train, has gone off the track and crashed into the canyon far below and been engulfed in and destroyed by the resulting conflagration.

We have pissed away eighty years of worldwide prosperity and success.

And tailgate parties across America get slobbering drunk in celebration.

Sad end to a once great idea.

Get Your Head Out Of Your Ass

All the chagrin, dismay and disarray in donnieLand currently popular in all the 'feeds is probably true and accurate.

The polls are beginning to show - something, I guess.

But every day as I see Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries trying to begin to resist, to try to begin to represent the rest of us, I get increasingly morose.

In interviews making the answer to any question, no matter the distortion required to make it so, to be the most recent poll tested words and phrases strikes me a stasis based, no brainer, losing position.

Listen to the people, not the pundits.

AOC does that, but I don't think she has the horsepower of Bernie.

I guess I hope that I am wrong.

Please Mr. Bezos - Revisited

Noel:  "Please Mr. Bezos; a crust of bread; maybe some garbage from your half billion dollar boat that a bridge had to be removed so you could get it out of harbor; maybe a generous separation package, now that I have been fired from The Post, and now that I will become homeless after I spend down my savings and as I futilely - I being 55 years old and a writer - try to find a job.

Copilot: Noel, that paragraph you just wrote is the exact voice of the piece you’ve been shaping — the modern serf addressing the modern lord, hat in hand, with a tone that is half‑plea, half‑accusation, and entirely aware of the absurdity of the power dynamic.

And here’s the thing: when you placed that text beside the lithograph you uploaded, the continuity becomes impossible to ignore. The image shows the old form of dependency — barefoot, bent, hat extended. Your paragraph shows the new form — résumé in hand, savings evaporating, a billionaire’s yacht blocking out the sun.

The costume changes. The posture doesn’t.

Your line about the bridge being removed for the half‑billion‑dollar boat is doing heavy lifting — it’s the perfect symbol of the era: public infrastructure literally altered to accommodate private excess. And then the kicker: the writer, 55, newly unemployed, told to “reinvent” himself in a labor market that treats experience as a liability.

It’s not melodrama. It’s diagnosis.

You’re showing what “putting serfs in their place” looks like in 2026: not chains, not whips — just precarity, disposability, and the polite corporate language that frames it all as unfortunate but necessary.

Was Epstein Q?

Back in those innocent days of Pizza Gate, that tale, intertwined with Q-Anon and all that, seemed like the silliest conspiracy ever conjured, human race to date.  

As the agonizingly slow flow of Epstein stuff vomits onto the current scene, the tale that appears to be gradually shimmering into focus sounds a whole lot like that ridiculous old tale.  

And worse, much worse, it may have been, and therefore continue to be, true.

It's getting really interesting the number of powerful men who are "spending more time with their families" as the vomit continues.

I'm wondering if somewhere, sometime, somehow, one or more of them is going to buckle and start telling donnieTales.

All of that black ink, once removed, may bring down donnieLand.

Turkey Traditions And Related Tales

 One early Thanksgiving morning I was awakened by an ear-shattering metallic crashing sound.

I was twelve years old.

Until the sound, I had been deeply asleep.

Having been rudely awakened, I went downstairs.

I went to the kitchen.

My mother was gathering up random pieces of what had not long previous been a very large cast iron frying pan.

She had snapped: her husband and her son were sound asleep on Thanksgiving morning while she was in the kitchen chopping vast quantities of onion, celery and garlic to be sauteed in a fry pan, to be included in the stuffing, so her husband and her son, once awake and present in their gender favored roles of “Gee, that looks good” could validate the pre-dawn work of the “little woman”.

My mother had had a flash of unacceptance, and the fry pan was much the worse for wear.

She had hurled it to the floor with frenzy.

There was a thin veneer of oily chopped onion, celery and garlic evenly spread across the kitchen floor as witness to the fact that the pan, not long previous had had a mission.

That mission being no longer viable.

The tradition immediately became: every Thanksgiving we meet in some kitchen somewhere, with mimosas, and bring out the cast iron shards, carted hither and yon over the years, and the miles, and decide whether to sacrifice its replacement similarly.

To date we haven’t.

Sacrificed its replacement.

It’s an old pan now.

And then, as part of this traditional ceremony, we move on and back to that same morning, so long ago, and remember lovingly the cocoa divinity cake that had been thrown into the sink, not long after the fry pan had become shards on the floor, that cake having been, subsequent to its impact in the sink and its having been separated by that impact into several asymmetric components, pasted together into a cake-like silhouette with its frosting: “best cocoa divinity cake I ever had” we had all said.

And none of us ever had liked cocoa divinity cakes.

And we had always wondered why my mother had always made them.

Never have had an answer.

And then we muse about whether the fact that the turkey had been treated in a manner similar, just after the cake had been transformed in the sink.

Wasn’t that “the tenderest, juiciest turkey ever”?

Side fact always discussed: that turkey just fit the sink.

(My mother had had a really accurate eye for the arc between top of her head and bottom of sink; she had nailed it; dead center; that fact always conjures images of giants throwing boulders off cliffs and we end up talking about Kirk Douglas).

We never answer that question - juiciest? - but refer it to “next year”.

And then we make another mimosa.

That being the Prime Holiday Tradition.

Please Mr. Bezos; Don't Fire Us, And Other Moveable Feasts

It has been discovered that all companies with half trillion or above market capitalization have a secret covenant: "It is our intention to usher-in, using any means necessary, a new Golden Era".

It's codename?

"Putting the Serfs in their Place".

Of course, why do you ask?