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It is notable how atheist/secular lefties will brutally mock the “ridiculous” beliefs of anyone - catholics to Mormons to UFOlogists - but then suddenly go all quiet and respectful when it comes to the “ridiculous” beliefs of Islam

Almost a kind of “two tier sneering”

As an atheist/secular rightie I'm equally happy to mock all ridiculous beliefs.

However we don't have many people spouting Islamic bullshit on this site to ridicule. If we did, there'd be more mockery.

Mocking people behind their back when they're not being ridiculous to you just isn't fun.

As I’ve said before, you are an honourable exception to this rule. You are indeed happy to mock any and every belief

However I don’t really class you as a lefty

I'd be quite shocked if you did.

Well you are quite Woke, but we all have our faults

And now I must crack on with the day. My flat is in turmoil as stage 2 of the Great Refurb unfolds

Later!

You have a one bedroom flat for crying out loud. How can you be in turmoil?

If you had a larger brain then you'd understand that refurbing a smaller flat (lke a one bed flat) is actually harder, in significant ways, than a bigger place

If a bedroom is out of action, you have no nowhere to sleep. If the living room is being done up, where do you put the shifted furniture? You have to block the kitchen...

And so on

I estimate, with some expertise, that the IQ required to grasp this is 113. Oh well, we can always talk about cycling in France

OK let's dismantle this nonsense bit by bit:

a) Do you think that I have always lived in a large house? To use your own quote 'I estimate, with some expertise, that the IQ required to grasp this is 113'.

b) Do you think maybe a bit of decorating is trivial compared to some stuff some of us have done. I have lived with out a staircase for weeks. I have sledge hammered down walls and entirely removed the only bathroom and still lived in a house. But to use your own quote again 'I estimate, with some expertise, that the IQ required to grasp this is 113'.

c) Regarding IQ. You do have a fixation on IQ. I assume some inferiority complex. Generally it is a lot of nonsense you type on it, but if you do want to go down that line in about 1980 I was swapping jobs to move to a large computer company (one of the American giants of the time). For this role you needed to take an IQ test. I don't know my actual score, but to get an interview you had to get or exceed 130. Now I might have gone down hill a lot since then, but if we are going to willy wave I think I am in with a good start, particularly considering some of the irrational stuff you post.

If you were smarter, with an IQ over, say, 102, you'd know by now that I like to provoke you, for almost any reason. Because you reliably reply in this satisfyingly pompous style

This makes me a bit juvenile, but we've all gotta get our kicks

The thing with Epstein that nobody seems to piece together is his money. He was a 2 bit con man who taught in school without a degree than worked a lowish level financial scam that he got out of before the authorities swept in. He could be a millionaire out of it, but then he was suddenly a billionaire.

Initially I presumed he was just a massive conman and we would find out that all these assets weren't actually his, he didn't really have the sort of money he told people and when he did make these donations they were actually other people's money being either siphoned off or using him as a middle man so to keep their name off paperwork.

But it seems like he actually had somehow acquired this vast wealth in his name.

He managed the money for the Victoria's Secret Founder, and presumedly had a deal where he got x% of upside he generated. That's where he got his money from.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the whole "sex with minors" things netted him a lot of inside information too.

No reason he shouldn't have been on a 2/20 type arrangement which would have seen him okay if it was a decent sum of money under mgt.

Indeed: and I think Wexner was worth a couple of billion when Epstein started working for him, and c $10bn at the end. Which rather suggests that Epstein will have picked up a billion or two in fees along the way.

IIRC Epstein was charging over the going rate for money management.

I wonder why super smart successful business people would pay over the going rate? You would think they would have the choice of every money manager going and be able to drive a big discount due to the shear size of capital they have to deploy.

It’s probably more along the lines of having your Private Familly Office. The banks, investment houses etc know the Family Office are representing you and so they want to attract your money so you get the discounts and access to special opportunities but there are many of these houses.

If you are a billionaire you most likely don’t want to be spending all of your time managing these relationships and investment decisions so you hire someone you trust to run the familly office and staff it who you believe knows what they are doing, and they run your finances from investment to trusts to company set ups and farm it all out and watch and report to you so you can relax.

The thing with Epstein that nobody seems to piece together is his money. He was a 2 bit con man who taught in school without a degree than worked a lowish level financial scam that he got out of before the authorities swept in. He could be a millionaire out of it, but then he was suddenly a billionaire.

Initially I presumed he was just a massive conman and we would find out that all these assets weren't actually his, he didn't really have the sort of money he told people and when he did make these donations they were actually other people's money being either siphoned off or using him as a middle man so to keep their name off paperwork.

But it seems like he actually had somehow acquired this vast wealth in his name.

He managed the money for the Victoria's Secret Founder, and presumedly had a deal where he got x% of upside he generated. That's where he got his money from.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the whole "sex with minors" things netted him a lot of inside information too.

No reason he shouldn't have been on a 2/20 type arrangement which would have seen him okay if it was a decent sum of money under mgt.

Indeed: and I think Wexner was worth a couple of billion when Epstein started working for him, and c $10bn at the end. Which rather suggests that Epstein will have picked up a billion or two in fees along the way.

IIRC Epstein was charging over the going rate for money management.

I wonder why super smart successful business people would pay over the going rate? You would think they would have the choice of every money manager going and be able to drive a big discount due to the shear size of capital they have to deploy.

Because they don't want to be just another client of Soros or Marshall or whoever. They want their own money manager, who reports directly to them

.

I'm slightly shocked by this.

47% of Republicans would still support Trump even if he were linked to Epstein's sex activities, according to Leger.
https://x.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1952550402580263100

The prevailing view appears to be that if there was any actual scandal linking Trump and Epstein, it would have been bought up by the Harris campaign last year.

They have had 12 years of digging into everything Trump and the most they have got so far on Trump / Epstein is a birthday card (along with 100s of other famous people) when Epstein was still very much accepted among the rich and famous.

Occum's Razor says if they were willing to go after Trump for things as minor as overstating value to loan for real estate deals if there was anything concrete against him in regards to Epstein it surely would have been deployed by now.

There is, and long has been, more linking Trump and Epstein than the recent Wall Street Journal story about a birthday card. Indeed, the WSJ story would have been a nothingburger if Trump hadn't denied it and sued them for $10 billion. They were good friends for many years. Trump's famous quotation about Epstein ("It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.") has been there since being published in an interview in 2002.

Occam's Razor (or Ockham's Razor) is named after William of Ockham (also spelt Occam).

But that isn't new news. Epstein had befriended all the rich and famous e.g Peter Mandelson was very friendly with as he called him "Petie". My point was if they had something absolute killer, I believe it would have come out.

Of course Trump's reaction to everything is to lie and "I'll sue you". That's what he does to every story that is negative.

My guess is there is probably more embarrassing type stories like the birthday card, but will also highlight just how all these other people were just the same.

The problem is Trump has really leaned into the worst of the conspiracy theories about Epstein, can't deliver what the cult want and is probably on plenty of bits of paper that says he was at an event where Epstein was.

I wonder why Trump blocked the release of the files having made such a big deal about how he was the man to do it?

Or put another way, why make that big deal in the first place if he was never going to follow through?

Course it could be just the usual with him - says things in the moment for the moment. That would be my bet, I think.

Repeat what I said below,

A theory...there is embarrassing but not illegal stuff on file. Trump thought he could just instruct people to delete all mention of him from the files. People have said no to him. But he can't fire them as they might then say why he fired them. And he he has lent into the wildest of the conspiracy theories and perhaps it isn't quite as juicy as you could start to imagine, so he is also going to let down his cult supporters (or they will say he is still covering it all up) i.e. conman made money squeezing rich people after putting them in awkward situations, but there wasn't a global paedo network run by Mossad.

And in true Trump style, when in a hole, lash out, lie, threaten to sue everybody, make a rash decision that will come back to bite him.

That sounds very plausible as does @kinabalu referencing 'saying things in the moment'.

The latter seems likely re his statement about sending the two nuclear subs to Russia. That makes no sense. If they are nuclear missile launching subs they don't need to go. They are ready and waiting to launch where they are now (where ever that may be). If they are nuclear powered hunter killer submarines, it makes a bit more sense, but only in the sense that they can sink Russian ships. I assume several are monitoring Russian ships/fleets anyway around the world so I doubt they need to go off to Russia. I bet he doesn't even know the difference between nuclear powered subs and subs having a nuclear deterrent.

It is notable how atheist/secular lefties will brutally mock the “ridiculous” beliefs of anyone - catholics to Mormons to UFOlogists - but then suddenly go all quiet and respectful when it comes to the “ridiculous” beliefs of Islam

Almost a kind of “two tier sneering”

As an atheist/secular rightie I'm equally happy to mock all ridiculous beliefs.

However we don't have many people spouting Islamic bullshit on this site to ridicule. If we did, there'd be more mockery.

Mocking people behind their back when they're not being ridiculous to you just isn't fun.

As I’ve said before, you are an honourable exception to this rule. You are indeed happy to mock any and every belief

However I don’t really class you as a lefty

I'd be quite shocked if you did.

Well you are quite Woke, but we all have our faults

And now I must crack on with the day. My flat is in turmoil as stage 2 of the Great Refurb unfolds

Later!

You have a one bedroom flat for crying out loud. How can you be in turmoil?

If you had a larger brain then you'd understand that refurbing a smaller flat (lke a one bed flat) is actually harder, in significant ways, than a bigger place

If a bedroom is out of action, you have no nowhere to sleep. If the living room is being done up, where do you put the shifted furniture? You have to block the kitchen...

And so on

I estimate, with some expertise, that the IQ required to grasp this is 113. Oh well, we can always talk about cycling in France

OK let's dismantle this nonsense bit by bit:

a) Do you think that I have always lived in a large house? To use your own quote 'I estimate, with some expertise, that the IQ required to grasp this is 113'.

b) Do you think maybe a bit of decorating is trivial compared to some stuff some of us have done. I have lived with out a staircase for weeks. I have sledge hammered down walls and entirely removed the only bathroom and still lived in a house. But to use your own quote again 'I estimate, with some expertise, that the IQ required to grasp this is 113'.

c) Regarding IQ. You do have a fixation on IQ. I assume some inferiority complex. Generally it is a lot of nonsense you type on it, but if you do want to go down that line in about 1980 I was swapping jobs to move to a large computer company (one of the American giants of the time). For this role you needed to take an IQ test. I don't know my actual score, but to get an interview you had to get or exceed 130. Now I might have gone down hill a lot since then, but if we are going to willy wave I think I am in with a good start, particularly considering some of the irrational stuff you post.

In addition, a Big Brain, like your average builder, will tell you the cheap, quick option is to

1) pack all your stuff and send it to storage.
2) move out to a rental (AirBnB?) for a week
3) get the workmen in with free reign to make a mess, smash stuff up. This will half the time taken or better.
4) get your stuff back.

For added relaxation, at 1) hire a company that does packing for you. You can even get a service where they photograph your stuff and put it back exactly.

And before 4) hire professional cleaners to clean before you move back.