Libertarian

Definition: A person who desires complete personal freedom without reconciling himself to the reality that he shares the planet with at least one other person.

Rand Paul, yard waste and broken ribs.

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Salad time.

Be There!!

I found this meetup notification in my inbox this morning:

Alas, I’ll be working late that night on something. But if you’re in the area, consider going. The acoustics could be pretty awesome considering that The Point is essentially the lowest place in the valley surrounded by high riverbanks.

The women’s march in Pittsburgh was permitted for 400. Something like 30000 showed up. If I weren’t going to be pouring over a hot monitor at home, I’d be screaming my head off.

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Harassment and non-consensual sex, ie rape, was not sufficient for Harvey Weinstein. Like most people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (probably dark triad here), he has to destroy the women who spoke up against him. So he hired former Mossad agents to track his victims and make sure they stay quiet.

Ronan Farrow continues his investigative reporting on Weinstein in The New Yorker.

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.

The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.

In some cases, the investigative effort was run through Weinstein’s lawyers, including David Boies, a celebrated attorney who represented Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential-election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies personally signed the contract directing Black Cube to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a Times story about Weinstein’s abuses, while his firm was also representing the Times, including in a libel case.

Boies confirmed that his firm contracted with and paid two of the agencies and that investigators from one of them sent him reports, which were then passed on to Weinstein. He said that he did not select the firms or direct the investigators’ work. He also denied that the work regarding the Times story represented a conflict of interest. Boies said that his firm’s involvement with the investigators was a mistake. “We should not have been contracting with and paying investigators that we did not select and direct,” he told me. “At the time, it seemed a reasonable accommodation for a client, but it was not thought through, and that was my mistake. It was a mistake at the time.”

Ya’ think, David? It wasn’t just a mistake “at the time”. It is always bad. Say, “our firm purposefully engaged in activities that we are ashamed of because they were bad things to do and we knew better than to intimidate these women but we did it anyway because we have bad judgment and we put money ahead of principle”.

I can guarantee you that having targets of sexual assault speak out under any circumstances is difficult. Some never tell anyone for years and years. But these women could have lost their careers whether they complied with Weinstein or not. That makes what was done here especially evil.

My question is, what lengths has Trump gone to in order to shut up his accusers? Or did he just wave his money around and have Roger Stone deliver the message that Trump would destroy them?

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Wall to the office music: