Hate to break it to the noobs, but Ballmer has ALWAYS been an asshole, I mean like from the first day. He probably punched his mama in the face once he was out. That’s why Gates put him in charge, mistaking sheer arrogance (which he had) as managerial ability (which he absolutely did not have).

He’s been a brutal bastard for as long as he’s been in business, and had the authors talked to anyone that worked at Microsoft in the 90s they’d have known it. Instead, they write the entire article as though this is just recently happening, which is odd as fuck. It makes me wonder who they are trying to convince, and why.

It’s hard to blame acquired wealth when a motherfucker never had an ethic beyond bullying and “fuck you I got mine” anyway.

These modern-day robber barons and self-appointed kings will ignore a “refreshed” Constitution (that eliminates all our remaining rights and anything left stopping them in the courts) just as easily as they ignore this one.

“Refresh” is a nice word for “scrap democracy and install a permanent oligarchy” because those who want to change this Constitution will stop at nothing less.

There’s a reason the Constitution requires what it does to be changed, and it’s actually very easy to amend the Constitution when you have bipartisan support for something: we’ve been doing it all along.

So instead of tossing out the whole thing, ask yourself why proposed amendments – including one that was just overturned this week by the House to take the power of numbering SCOTUS justices away from Congress so that we remain at 19th century numbers – are being blocked right and left. Hint: it’s because they are generally unilateral shit, and an attempt to change the balance of power toward the executive, like this one.

TL;DR: Don’t fuck with the Constitution until you’ve dealt with the overwhelming corruption and lawlessness that is currently making a joke of this one.

For anyone interested, this is the full Meet the Press interview from today referenced by the locked article, and it’s fire. The election steal discussion starts at 3:20.

They have plans to steal the election. It’s a bag of dirty tricks. We made a list of over a hundred different ways that they are going to try to undermine the right to vote and try to steal the election.

He talks about some of these plans. It’s a very brief interview so it’s a superficial discussion, but the people saying “no one is doing anything” are very mistaken, going by what Rep. Raskin has to say.

Locked article, but offered a one-time “Claim my free post.” Tried that, it would not take a disposable email address. “Something’s wrong.” Instead it offered to send me a link so I said sure (same disposable address) and then it sent me a link to INSTALL THEIR APP and nothing else.

Shame, because it looks like a great article. And apparently people like the headline enough to upvote.

But I am not installing a data hoover to read it. Getting my data is the sole benefit to Substack of asking me to install an app to serve me content they are already delivering via web page. There is no other.

This Substack app model is not on you, OP, but it is on you to ensure that when you post content, people can actually read the content. If you want to share content you have to actually test access: go in via a different device or browser where you are not logged in and follow through the entire process you’re asking others to undertake. If they can’t get in through the front door you provide an archive link, or enough of the content where people get the gist (without copying the entire thing). It’s just basic posting courtesy.

Yeah, I’m kinda salty because Raskin is one of my favorite people in the world, and when he talks, it’s usually well worth hearing. For those of you with a subscription, enjoy whatever he said.

Regarding Leon Black, this is the headline The Intercept was referring to, where he violently raped an autistic 16 year old with “a rare form of Down syndrome that has left her ‘developmentally… about 12 years old.’” This is one of three similar physically brutal sexual assaults the article references.

I mention this because Black’s back in the news this week for the same Epstein-related shit: he had a date with the House Oversight Committee for September 3, 2026 to appear and produce his Epstein NDAs, and skipped out on both.

Having spent a lot of time in the files, I have formed the opinion that all of these people who continued friendships with Epstein post-conviction, or were themselves close friends of those who did, like Sinema to Black, are all just fucking amoral trash, not a lick of conscience among them.

The NC betrayal of affection law is entirely regressive. It’s a “let’s see you and them fight” divorce law in the same state that requires (or did at the time) you to be legally separated for a full year prior to divorce. Back when I was there in the 90s I had cheating friends caught up in it with great shock that it would ever be used against them – I guess cheaters are the same everywhere – but inasmuch as it has snagged Sinema and might be the sole form of redress for her actions that she ever faces, I can almost applaud it.

Yeah, he’s a piece of work. And thanks for the links: he has a long and deviant history of abominable behavior. The dude is horrific, literally the epitome of modern-day evil IMO, but he keeps getting a pass somehow because he keeps rich and powerful friends.

But specifically, what he has done to harass and re-victimize the survivors (Virginia Giuffre is not the only one by far; others have gone through this as well) is beyond our own imagination.

I have often wondered whether, had Virginia Giuffre not had to fight this asshole’s vindictive lawsuits, only to be dropped by her own lawyers in the middle of her own ongoing suits because her lawyers were also being sued by him, and then having to fight to get any lawyer at all to represent her, all the while being harassed throughout by various creeps and pervs and actual friends of Epstein (which never stopped) and having her name out front and center of the whole thing . . . had that not happened, would she still be with us? We’ll never know.

For myself, I post these things because people forget the survivors, and the media does not tell the truth of what they endure. So when he blew off his scheduled appointment with the House committee, I wanted to put out a reminder of why he’s invited to appear in the first place.

Of all the people I want to see pulled in before the House committee, and there are many, his name is at the top of the list.

Probably. See page 89, line 10 for one of the six times he abused her (I didn’t look past that point).

Lol wut? “My brain is not especially fucked enough right now so I’d like an extra special DOUBLE helping of corporate machine bullshit today, thank you!”

I think you should take that hit for the team, obviously. If you believe one is required.

This guy knows his fascists. Excellent summary.

This is an archive link to the above-linked New Yorker profile on Alan Dershowitz. There are known problems with the site but it has the content; use at your own discretion.

Massie’s doing this right now as a part of getting a discharge petition passed to circumvent Mike Johnson’s blockade on all things Epstein so that a vote on EFTA II can come to the floor. He also was very careful to do it from the House floor so that the naming itself would not get mired in retaliatory lawsuits.

The linked video in the article is to a short from C-SPAN that covers the minute Massie was allotted on the House floor to read his list of names, which the article does not actually repeat. It’s only a minute and ten seconds, but here’s the transcript:

Mr. Speaker, it’s been a year since the president signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the government continues to withhold over three million files.

That’s why we’ve introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, to bring the fight to the state courts, accountability to the Department of Justice, and closure for survivors.

We want perpetrators of these crimes to be investigated and prosecuted. Men like Jes Staley, Leon Black, Les Wexner, David Copperfield, Lapo Elkann, Tom Pritzker, Glenn Dubin, Frédéric Fekkai, Eduardo Teodorani, Jean-Luc Brunel, conveniently dead by suicide in prison, Daniel Siad, recently discovered dead in Paris, Ramsey Elkholy, and Prince Andrew who committed sex crimes in the United States, too, and women like Lesley Groff, not a victim, who conspired with Epstein to traffic other women.

Perhaps hearing these names will shame the Department of Justice into delivering justice. I yield back.

Not all the names were familiar to me so I looked them up, asking why these names in particular? Massie is indeed naming and shaming, and I think he picked these specific names for a reason, possibly because they are themselves credibly linked to many others. Note also how he calls out Lesley Groff as NOT being a victim, as she has claimed, but as an active participant in the trafficking.

These names are not all, by any stretch, but they are a great start.

EDITED TO ADD: Here’s a Yahoo article that goes into each of the named persons at greater length, for anyone interested.

If nobody does anything, it shows the constitution is worthless. It can’t or won’t be enforced.

That’s 100% a problem with enforcement, not the American Constitution. “Nobody does anything” has nothing to do with the Constitution as written.

The Constitution is great, and has worked very well through even a Civil War and multiple crises. If it weren’t, this robber administration would not be spending so much goddamn time in court trying to tear it all down.

The Constitution is a work of art, and the older I get the more brilliant I think it is. Don’t knock it until you’ve studied it, and the 250 years of history it has already pulled us through.

Maxwell’s family said in a statement that Engelmayer’s ruling was “marked by a tone of sarcasm and disdain that, in our view, undermines the appearance of impartiality and invites scrutiny of the judge’s conduct”.

They must not have read the absolute dog she filed pro se in spite of having a full team of attorneys to do it for her:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.539612/gov.uscourts.nysd.539612.869.0.pdf

You don’t have to be an attorney to read these things: skip the citations and read the text, it’s easy enough.

The “sarcasm and disdain” they’re squealing about is nothing of the sort; if anything it is actually a kindness that neither the filing nor the appellant deserve. He lays out, point by point, exactly what bullshit she laid before the court, and yeah, I imagine it stung them to read him rebuke her points one after another after another.

But that doesn’t change the fact that in this appeal she simply shat out line by line whatever she thought might stick, in a gish gallop of lies and distortions, nor that she did it DIY, appearing pro se despite having a very highly paid team of attorneys to do it for her, so that she could fill it with items that would never pass the smell test for a real attorney.

From a distance, the whole thing – the appeal and resulting family dismay alike – reads like a plea for political attention, and at the end of that rainbow a presidential pardon. Whether it gets that remains to be seen.

Mitchell embarked on a PhD, published in 2024, in which she interviewed people who had met persistent predatory personalities professionally – some clinical, but others not, from fields as wide as HR, social work, family courts, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, church leaders, and academics from different fields.

When I read the article I noticed that they never linked the PhD thesis they quoted from, so I went to find it. Dr. Mitchell has a site, kalmor.com.au, and it has the link to the PhD, as well as to her book and another interesting research paper about coercive control.

There are other things out there worth reading that came up in a search, it’s just a shame the article didn’t link them.

This is amazing. And I can tell you I’d never have figured out #3 or #4; I am only dimly aware of the non-DoJ sources at best. That is excellent. Thank you.

I’m just going to start calling it Lake Release The Fucking Epstein Files Already You Goddamn Pedo Rapist. Anyone with me?

I should add that today there is another Guardian article regarding the now-public transcript of Jes Staley’s closed door interview with the House Oversight Committee on July 24. It mentions two separate email exchanges by quote, and all are easily found via search on the DoJ site, usually in multiples, and of course specific Bates numbers are in the transcript as well. (I prefer text search because if you open all the results you’ll often get the whole long email chain, but with Bates number you at least have that one isolated quote.)

However, in this case almost all of the text search results include the wording, “Confidential Treatment Requested by JPMorgan Chase” somewhere on the document. I’ve spent many hours in the legal cases in the files, and even in cases that are now removed – like the entire probate proceedings in the USVI – I have never seen that before for any other individual or organization. If I venture to guess, that notation is likely a relevant factor in where the other now-absent Jes Staley emails have gone.

EDITED TO ADD: Just for the hell of it, I searched the DoJ site for the text “Confidential Treatment Requested by JPMorgan Chase” exactly as seen on the documents I looked at from the transcript, not even stripping the capitalizations, and it came back with 8602 hits. Many also have a JPM-SDNY Bates number but not all, which tends to suggest that all material related to litigation between SDNY and JPMorgan, or at least whatever JPMorgan provided, has been labeled with that request, but it has little/no prohibitive weight in itself. So for myself, I am back to asking why those specific emails, the contents of which are already public, have been removed from the public-facing DoJ site.

Eh, it’s possible, but very, very unlikely. Given the DoJ’s own claims and how OCR is what they were using to mass redact the files (like all the redacted instances of “don’t” lol) I personally think it’s safe to assume that everything on the DoJ site was, at some point and without exception, OCR’d, even the handwritten materials, and that has been my own experience with it.

In this case I was definitely using text search, but that is the only search available on the DoJ site. I have not had a problem before now with finding anything via text search, not least because when I can’t find it with one string I try another, and another, removing punctuation, etc.

This is the current disclaimer on the site:

Note on Search Functionality: Due to technical limitations and the format of certain materials (e.g., handwritten text), portions of these documents may not be electronically searchable or may produce unreliable search results.

Unfortunately, no. Those are what I was looking for with the Jmail, but even those pointers to the Bates numbers are gone – at least for these particular entries – and Jmail no longer has a link to the actual EFTA files on the DoJ site for these specific emails.

However, the specific sender/receiver is known for each, and the wording is specific enough, so that taken together anyone with text search can take fairly unique strings and get a hit on a non-DoJ archive. The first article is all about Lord Peter Mendelson and references two specific emails, for which I included the Jmail links (see above).

The second article had ten points of evidence from the files, two that I could no longer get from the DoJ site. (I did not bother looking for the birthday book, so I can’t say for sure on any parts of that.) From above:

. . . two are missing from both the DoJ site and strangely also from the Jmail archive: #3: “Peter will be staying at 71st over weekend” from Epstein to Jes Staley, June 2009; and #5: “Petie’s quitting” from Epstein to Jes Staley, May 2010.

For example, “Petie’s quitting” happens a good bit in Jmail (apparently Petie’s a quitter, lol) but we are looking specifically for an Epstein email to Jes Staley: nothing. But we know they were there at some point, because the Graun quoted them.

That’s another slight oddity: more often than not, papers have started including direct links to the DoJ site when quoting very specific documents like an email; these too are not present in the articles.