The Epstein 'birthday book'

Those of you who receive my newsletter, Center and Margins, will likely at the beginning of October receive an essay (on the 'Center' side) that overlaps with the material below. But the overlap is not repetition, and may indeed be a sort of parallax.

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On the Epstein matter in general, Trump is simply saying what he deems he has to say. Politically, this is a toughy for him. After all, perhaps even more than immigration/border issues, revulsion about pedophilia and elite conspiracy are what has gotten him where he is. During his first campaign, in 2016, the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton family advisor, were leaked to the public (through Russian efforts) and one circle of theorists decided they were all written in a secret code that when decoded detailed Podesta’s involvement with a child-abuse ring. There is no evidence of this, the ‘code’ was something the theorists made up. This soon led to a bizarre story about the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria where the ring kept the supposed imprisoned children, and to an armed attack on the pizza place in question (which didn't have any basement).

In October 2017, with Trump now in the White House, the anonymous “Q” — not apparently the Star Trek character — began posting on 4Chan, later to 8Chan — spinning an ever wilder theory about a coming Storm. Trump (who was soon passing along the QAnon stuff via his Twitter account) was the hero of the story. He was going to arrest all the high level elite pedos in a mass arrest event: The Storm.

In order to make this made-up stuff seem at all plausible, the QAnon tales had to have a real world exhibit A. Some actual pedophile/elitist conspiracizing that could be held up even to people put off by the blatantly false charges about the pizza place. And Jeffrey Epstein became that Exhibit A. “Admitted, Comet Pizza was not part of it — but Epstein’s Lolita Island is real. Let’s start from there.”

With all of this history, Trump has a hard time disassociating himself in 2025 from the premise that yes, Epstein was an evil person and part of an evil network. The Storm has yet to happen, and anyone who believed in it eight years ago is still waiting. “Open the Epstein files” — means “Start the Storm”!

So this brings us to the question: is Trump going to include himself as one of those who has to be rounded up when The Storm comes? Will he clap the cuffs on himself ? or have someone else do it? I’m guessing “no,” “no,” and “no”. So of course Trump will deny deny and deny some more any facts relating to the real ties between himself and Epstein, and try to get us to move on from it.

The whole thing was largely bullsh*t from the start, but it was his bullsh*t, at the expense originally of the Clinton circle. He was willing to ride that bronco, and it is karmic justice that he is now being thrown by it.

With regard to the publication of the infamous birthday book, in particular, my suspicion is that the Wall Street Journal — Murdoch owned though it is — did NOT put this story out without having the receipts available. Suing them is a bad move, rather like Oscar Wilde suing over the accusation that he was a sodomite. Read up on how that turned out for Wilde.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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