They're just messing with us now. From the Epstein files:
STATEMENT OF MANHATTAN U.S. ATTORNEY ON THE DEATH OF DEFENDANT JEFFREY EPSTEIN
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said: "Earlier this morning, the Manhattan Correctional Center confirmed that Jeffrey Epstein, who faced charges brought by this Office of engaging in the sex trafficking of minors, had been found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead shortly thereafter. Today's events are disturbing..."
I'll say. For one thing, the statement is dated Friday August 9th 2019, and Mr Epstein was not "found unresponsive in his cell" until Saturday August 10th. Had the Mossad wet-work team's flight been delayed? Or was Bill Barr anxious to sign off before he left to weekend in Bermuda?
Nonetheless, we stagger on...
Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone...
We continue to pad cautiously down the tunnels and hollows of the Epstein files, if only because I am curious to discover, in the time that remains on our Civilisational Deathwatch (see right-hand sidebar), who actually is running our world underneath all the exciting distractions about who's two points up in Iowa or which talentless arse is twerking at the Super Bowl.
So herewith a couple of other tunnels and hollows that might be worth prowling around. First up, the current US Commerce Secretary: Howard Lutnick lived next door to Jeffrey Epstein for ten years. So (starting thirty seconds in) Mr Lutnick relates the tale of their first meeting:
That's a very professionally told anecdote. It's almost as if Lutnick has done a Master's degree at the prestigious Wharton School of Anecdotage in Pennsylvania - like a Dame Judi Dench-level masterclass in anecdote. The hand gestures and line readings are perfect - so that, when Epstein emphasises to Lutnick the importance of "the right kind of massage", Miranda Devine instinctively recoils from the ickiness of the image. No wonder Mrs Lutnick wants out of there now. And as he says:
In the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.
Brilliant. So that was 2005, and from that day forth the Lutnicks eschewed any further contact with the "disgusting" Epstein. "So I was never in the room with him socially, for business, or even philanthropy." And, as befits a Grand Master of Anecdotage, Lutnick counts out the three tiers of A-List American Intercourse on his fingers. Then he continues:
That guy was there, I wasn't going. 'Cause he's gross. And so I look back on it as a gift. He gave me a gift.
But fortunately not in the sense that the "Russian girl" gave Bill Gates a gift. If only more of America's business elite had had the integrity to do as Lutnick did!
Er, except that it was all total bollocks. Lutnick stayed in touch with the "gross" guy for over a decade, more or less to just twenty minutes shy of Jeff being found "unresponsive". Whereas Howard was never not unresponsive when it came to "being in the room": in November 2015 Lutnick invited Epstein to be in the room with him at a reception for Hillary Clinton. Philanthropically? How about November 2017, when Epstein was invited to a United Jewish Appeal dinner honouring Lutnick and purchased a table for ten?
Well, that's just that grisly New York thing of business events masquerading as social occasions - although it does testify to the general consensus among the Manhattan elite that having a conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution is no biggie, not when it comes to shooting the breeze with Mrs Clinton.
So what does that leave? Oh, yeah, being in the room with him "socially". December 19th 2012:
Hi Jeff,
We are landing in St. Thomas early Saturday afternoon and planning to head over to St.Bart's/Anguilla on Monday at some point. Where are you located (what is exact location for my captain)?
Does Sunday evening for dinner sound good..?
Howard
To which Jeff replies with his customary terseness and lack of capitalisation:
come sat or sunday lunch?
So Sunday lunch it is.
Lots of people were somewhat vague and evasive about their contacts with Epstein - "Oh, I may have met him once or twice in the last half-century" - only to come a cropper when the decade-long extent of their intimate friendship emerged. The National Security Advisor of Slovakia has had to resign over Epstein. In London, Peter Mandelson has become the first Lord President in half-a-millennium to be expelled from the Privy Council for misleading re the nature of his relationship with Epstein. Even in America, the land where political accountability goes to die, I see that former Senator George Mitchell, Clinton's "peace envoy" to Northern Ireland and Obama's to the Middle East, has had to resign from Maine's Mitchell Institute, which is now looking for a new name.
Yet no one has lied to the American people as explicitly and emphatically and with such dazzling hand choreography (not in the two-girl-special Epstein sense) as Howard Lutnick.
So why is he still Commerce Secretary?
Down another tunnel, this one dripping in melted cheese: Tucker and his guest Ian Carroll have a good analysis of the Epstein files' astonishing amounts of pizza. I can see why parents of young children might have mention of this particular delicacy in their correspondence - "Nathaniel's bringing Jeremiah back after school for a couple of hours. Can you stop and get pizza? Jeremiah won't eat anchovies", etc. It's harder to see why it should figure so prominently in emails between the rich and powerful. In my own archives of this millennium's emails, the word occurs only once - after Ezra Levant and I did a free-speech event in Ottawa and afterwards Laureen Harper, wife of the then prime minister, invited us back for a late pizza at 10 Sussex Drive.
By contrast, despite Epstein having private chefs and living in one of the most bountifully endowed restaurant cities on earth, the word "pizza" occurs in the files 844 times. For purposes of comparison, the word "Putin" occurs 992 times, which was enough to get the world's most prestigious media outlets speculating on whether Epstein was working for Russia. By the same logic, could he not also have been working for Domino's?
From an unnamed sender to Jeffrey a year before he went unresponsive:
See attached
lets go for pizza and grape soda again. No one else can understand.
Tell me, as a foreigner, when one invites a friend to go get pizza in America, is it common to specify the beverage in advance? Would one not leave the selection to whatever one was in the mood for on the night? After all, if one is not obliged to fine-tune the pizza toppings - pepperoni, say, or green peppers - why must one pre-decide between Dr Pepper or Mountain Dew or whatever?
Incidentally, have you heard the phrase "grape soda" since Season Seven of M*A*S*H? Well, as Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They drink grape soda continuously."
Thus Harry Fisch to Jeff on June 3rd 2018:
I forgot about that. What time do you want to get pizza and grape soda tomorrow?
Dr Harry Fisch is the urologist to the stars, Professor of Clinical Urology at Columbia University and, per his publisher Simon & Schuster, America's leading expert in erectile dysfunction. He also likes grape soda. In fact, he recommends copious amounts of it immediately after taking your ED prescription:
After you use them, wash your hands and lets go get pizza and grape soda.
Has anyone in the somnolent "mainstream" media asked Dr Fisch what's with all the grape soda?
Just a couple of months back I had occasion to quote an old telly joke from the Seventies:
So the missus comes back from the park and says, 'I've just been graped.'
I said, 'Don't you mean raped?'
She said, 'No, there was a bunch of them.'
And so there are.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with Mark's column on Keir Starmer and the fifth twink. Our weekend music show welcomed February and grooviness, while Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date got all jazz-handsy. On Sunday we celebrated a song by a Winter Olympian, kinda sorta. Our marquee presentation was Part Twenty-Three of our special twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of my highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone.
If you were too busy this weekend getting grape soda with billionaires, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
