There is overlap between that Dialog member list and the Epstein files. I don't have time to go through it right now, but at first glance just skimming the Bluesky list, Larry Summers is in the Epstein files, as is Peter Attia.

I'd bet anything they're not the only ones on both, either. If I get the opportunity I'll look through it later and see if I can spot more.

it has made them more successful than they ever could have dreamed.

Thanks for reading what I wrote; I half didn't expect you to, so thank you for that. That said, I agree with you -- except for this. Today, right now, they are more successful than they could have ever dreamed.

But today isn't forever, and this is not over.

Even if everything comes crashing down, they have made enough money that they can easily shuffle around and ensure their prosperity.

Maybe, maybe not. A thing about groups is that they tend to have weak links, and when one falls multiples fall rapidly thereafter.

Imagine, if you will, a post-Trump legal landscape wherein all those files he tried so hard to hide got wikileaked, many of the ones who are protecting him now have turned their backs and the ones who are left are overruled, and every one of his "deals" as well as those of everyone around him are being picked over with a fine-tooth comb. What will Musk have then? A lot of legal bills, a fading star, and not what he craves the absolute most: attention and plaudits that salve his massive insecurities. The money will bleed out too, but that will happen over time.

Imagine being on the highest of the high mountains like fElon, and then sliding down it foot by foot for the rest of your miserable existence, grabbing at tufts of grass and kicking at rocks to get back up to where you will never be again. These exalted positions will disappear as fast as they appeared, and we don't know how, and we don't know when, but they are not permanent.

And that's only one minor possibility: there are still infinite outcomes here, and far too many involved persons for the perps to control or even foresee.

And this:

Everything we were taught about the importance of morals and it’s relationship to success is a lie.

As written, well yeah. It always was. That's simple disillusionment, if your idea of success is limited to massive wealth. Our own is not, but to be honest the survivor I am with has transformed what I believe about success anyway, as I have watched them grab win after win on a personal level where I honestly thought further progress was doomed. I swear sometimes I think they are a phoenix, rising up from the ashes again and again just because their will to overcome is so immense, but then the days of pure exhaustion and defeat come as well, which is the place your first comment was written from. I am very familiar with it.

Now you've said who the perps are, and today, in this minute, you are absolutely right. Yet the really important question, another one I learned from a survivor, is this: who do YOU want to be? Because in the end, none of the perps matter past their crimes. As far as we are concerned they are over, less than, not worthy. But to your life, you do matter. So do you personally want to be someone who only practices morality for the promised gold at the end of its Johnny-do-good rainbow, or do you want to be a genuinely moral person who is moral wherever they find themselves, doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do and that's just the kind of person you are?

I ask this because, to borrow a metaphor, everyone who is bit by a vampire has the choice of becoming a vampire. Everyone who is abused has the choice of becoming abused. Everyone whose life has been hollowed out by evil has the choice of responding to that by becoming evil themselves.

To me, if you manage to retain your own innate goodness in spite of, and in active battle against, the evil that was done to you, that is no small thing.

And I guess that's what I am asking of you. In your frustration, stop perpetrating the lie that this is all helpless and hopeless and that the only forms of success or justice are the exact ones defined and -- for now, anyway -- withheld by the perpetrators.

This isn’t defeatism, it’s fucking reality.

It's an insane take, and let me tell you why. For as long as there have been people, there have been sexual crimes against children. For as long as there has been organized crime, there has been organized profiteering off the bodies of children. For as long as there have been individuals with power and means, there have also been groups of them satisfying their sexual tastes as a collective, using their combined means to both acquire and protect whatever it is they are into. For every group of people engaged in this, there are many more individuals acting alone to use and trade the bodies of the young for whatever they can get in return. For every girl or boy stolen by a group or even just malevolent individuals, there is another one sold by his or her own parents, and even more individuals and groups standing in line for the chance to buy and trade their flesh.

THAT is fact. THAT is the way of the world. THAT is societal and historical reality, not your tunnel vision of this one time and this one place and this one set of perps and how one corrupt justice department has thus made it all okay for every offender everywhere for all time. That's just willfully helpless bullshit.

And not only that, your view focuses solely on just one sort of justice, when in fact there are all kinds of justice meted out regularly, some by nature and some by people, some deliberately and some by accident, some by strangers and some by victims, and most of which happens in such a way that no one ever expected to see until it was all right there.

As for the legal system offering "justice" to the offenders and their survivors, I don't think it ever could and I don't think it will now. But that doesn't mean I'm going to bury my head up the ass of corrupt government obstruction and lack of political will to address it and mope for the rest of time.

The survivor I live with has had to grapple with even the concept of justice, and as someone who has had the actual facts explained to me I'll tell you something else you don't know: the survivor I know doesn't even believe justice exists. Even if this were a perfect world, and the perpetrators and their agents and proxies who trafficked them in their youth were all brought to trial today, that would not give a single day, a single hour, of their life back. It would not lift a single burden off the backs of those already dead because of what was done to them, nor how those evil, sick and malign acts irrevocably derailed that young life for the worse. Other survivors do believe in legal justice, but even they would be the first to tell you it won't give them their youth or innocence or time spent in self-destruction back.

Legal justice would vindicate many survivors, certainly, but not much else. Why? Because for as long as there have been people, there have been sexual crimes against children, and if you think it is limited in any way by stringent laws, you think wrong. Every society has members among them who do these things, both the people that have a taste for it and the people who sell it to them, every single society since time began, and to think they don't is to believe in some ethno-perfection fantasy, like the Russian who told me one time, "We do not have such things in Russia!" (Yeah, right. Pull the other one, lol.)

So it's not about the law. It's about society, and changing how we, as world citizens, speak and write and think of such things. That has nothing to do with one country's corrupt legal system, but hits much more closely at the source of the problem: society itself willing to turn a blind eye to the most perverted among us. And the perps can't shut that discussion down, no matter how much money and power they have. Look around: they're trying hard, and getting nowhere. Why? Because the discussion itself has changed. And why has the discussion changed? Because we, the citizens of the world, are talking about it and not buying the bullshit. And how has that happened? Because of survivors who wouldn't shut up and the people who refuse to be silenced. It's not about the law at all. That is entirely out of the law's hands.

And as someone now old who has seen a great deal of shit, I will tell you with absolute certainty that this situation will not end the way you expect it to, and if you weren't so enamored of your own tunnel vision you'd already be noting just how bizarre some of the turns are that this situation has already taken. I have a lot of unfortunate personal knowledge of this subject, but even I didn't think we'd be at war with Iran over it. The bulk of the files were released on Friday, January 30: not because they were trying to fulfill the EFTA law, but because people were literally pouring out of their homes in rebellion against ICE and it was the only thing the administration had that was big enough to take back the narrative. Jeffrey Epstein, believed untouchable, died in a jail cell. Trump ran a third time just to stay out of jail. Bill Gates and Les Wexner, both thought to be untouchable because of their immense wealth, have had to personally sit through Congressional interrogations; same for a president and senator/ex-Secretary of State. My personal money is on something entirely unrelated -- DOGE -- coming back to bite them all in the ass by the end of the year. More and more truths are coming out of the woodwork in ways that could not be foreseen and cannot be prevented, though the entire weight and will of the US presidency is behind doing just that. ALL of them are sweating balls. Nothing about this has been what the perpetrators of it wanted it to be.

You didn't see any of that coming. And I know you didn't because no one did. So who are you to insist that nothing will change?

Yet we are all changing it, now, collectively.

Every time an individual makes the effort to know the truth of what has happened, such as what happens in this online community and others like it, we honor and help survivors. Look around you: from Gisele Pelicot to Virginia Giuffre, the entire world is talking about sexual crimes in a different way. And even more importantly, as Mme. Pelicot noted, from the abused to the abuser, "Shame must switch sides." And it is.

Every time we personally and individually hold space for real truth to come out, in whatever way it comes out, instead of trying to fill it with our own uncomfortable and self-indulgent whine about how nothing ever changes because we don't like how the subject has made us feel, we honor survivors.

Maybe you're interested in being part of that, maybe you're not. But don't fool yourself that you are some kind of seer for the ages by whimpering about government inaction: for as long as this has gone on, society has mostly turned a blind eye, and whatever actions were taken against the offenders were taken by the local community of the offender.

So know that whatever happens, it already wasn't what you thought, and it won't be what you think, and secrets once thought safely submerged can and do pop right back up through the most unexpected means. Meanwhile, the real justice -- of allowing the deluge of revealed truth to change our collective beliefs and understanding of what these crimes really are and how they damage all of us -- is already happening all around us.

But you won't see it because you don't want to. You're laser focused on the one tiny little part of the whole thing that the perps and their proxies still control, and insisting it will be that way forever, as though the US legal system is The Good Ship Lollipop waiting right off shore, never to hove into view. If you're wise, you'll take your eyes off that mirage of legal justice. It's the lie the perps in power want you to believe, and right now, it's the lie you're helping to perpetrate by posting that hopeless and helpless shit.

The administration's inner circle is focusing solely on the possibility of recordings because the alternative -- that a person or people in those meetings personally spilled their guts to a couple NYT reporters -- is unimaginable to them.

Or to put it another way, a group of people who uniformly sold their souls for material gain and access to power is resolutely refusing to entertain the possibility that in their midst and under their noses, one of them is a person who also sold the rest of them out for material gain and access to power.

Having read the recent excerpt (gift link) and noting that JD Vance is now saying he will discuss his own 2028 plans after the midterms, I'm sure it's only coincidental that Vance comes out of that reporting smelling somewhat better than the rest.

I'm not saying it wasn't recorded. But if you're in that room and have plans of your own, why would you need to? You can just tell the story yourself.

"He's not even a Democrat,"

Fetterman told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham in an interview Friday.

On Fox News, lol. Let that sink in.

Fetterman's so busy trying to fuck Platner he thinks that Fox News -- MAGA central and 100% invested in decrepit old Collins -- is exactly the place to get the word out to potential Platner voters, and reach the undecided who are already sick of MAGA shit.

It is also possible no other media will let Fetterman speak as if he has anything valid or sane left to say.

Either way, I'm thrilled. The right clearly has no idea where Platner is getting his votes from, any more than Orban's team knew where Magyar was getting his votes from in Hungary last month.

A fake Dem goes on Fox News to tell anyone who will listen that Platner is a fake Dem, lol. I love this for them.

Funny thing about American voting: for all the ways that people insist voting doesn't matter, the one place in America where one vote travels the absolute farthest is in a small town election, and right next to that are county elections, for positions like these.

County sheriffs are often elected, as are county commissioners; who gets elected and who gets appointed depends entirely on applicable state and local law. But even if both of these positions are appointed in Madison County, North Carolina, where this debacle took place, the appointer will almost always be an elected official, like a mayor.

In other words, there is in fact a place where the buck stops in local politics, whether it's with the mayor or the commissioner or the sheriff or all of the above, and everyone who lives there already knows exactly where it does, especially in a back wood county in the hills like this one.

Add the fact that the meeting was already full of angry people, people who cared enough about the whole thing to make the drive into the county seat and attend, only to be shut up once they arrived.

So while they were silenced at this meeting, it's not over. None of them want Flock cameras, and nobody wants to take the time and trouble to come to a goddamn podunk county commission meeting only to be told to shut up and sit down.

Come election season, any neighbors with short memories will absolutely be reminded of this, in the kind of local election where often every single vote counts.

The article quotes a Madison County privacy org directly:

“The Sheriff Office claims they are only using this technology for serious crimes, yet published audit logs tell a different story,” a website called Madison for Privacy says. “Madison County has searched the nationwide database over 1,200 times over just a 60 day period. In a county over only 20,000 residents, its hard to understand what could warrant this many searches.”

Holy shit, they're not wrong. Follow that haveibeenflocked.com link to the Madison County sheriff's office Flock searches, and the accompanying note:

These are some of the searches performed by Madison County NC SO. We have seen a total of 1,216 searches for this agency, performed by 1 person over 62 days between 3/11/2026 and 5/11/2026 (1 user was active in the most recent six months) The most recent import of records for this agency happened on 5/17/2026.

Madison County is southwest of Asheville on the state line between NC and TN, comprised mostly of unincorporated communities, which is a polite way of saying most residents live in the hills, not in the towns. The entire county has a population of roughly 21,000, and the largest town, Mars Hill, has only 2,000 residents. It doesn't get much more rural than this on the East Coast.

So given the population and its distribution, and the fact that the sheriff's office only serves the unincorporated communities because the three towns have their own municipal police, where the fuck does the sheriff's office get cause or even time for what averages out to 600 Flock searches in a month?

But it gets even stranger. I clicked on a few searches, just to see what I could see, and every single one I clicked on with an unredacted reason* was associated with the same two or three other non-local police departments as the source of the information retrieved, two of which were the exact same ones every time: Forest Park Ohio PD, Tifton Georgia PD, and occasionally the Douglas County Nevada SO. There were a couple others, but always at least one of those three. (If you go to the little i next to the other PDs, it tells you, "This audit record appears in [n] different public record files.")

This is true whether I clicked on a homicide, a non-DUI alcohol inquiry, a burglary, a car theft, or a sex offense. No matter what reason I chose, no matter how disparate the crime or the date, one if not all of those three law enforcement agencies came up as the source of the Flock information that inquiry pulled from. And this is the same of every search I clicked on, over and over and over again.

(*The sole exceptions to all this were where the crime itself was redacted, and then the associated source of information was Buncombe County, NC, which neighbors Madison County and could potentially be a valid law enforcement reason to search Flock data.)

And when I selected the Repeat Searches checkbox at the top, defined as "Display filter that hides likely duplicate searches (identical searches within 5 minutes). Does not affect server-side counts or downloads," an even 800 of those 1,216 searches get loaded. So fully two thirds of those searches across two months qualify as duplicates executed within five minutes of each other, to Flock parameters at least. (Or maybe one third, if I'm understanding it wrong; I'm sure someone will be along to correct me shortly.) But that's still a fuckton of duplicates executed within five minutes of each other.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand how it all works on the Flock side, but it almost seems like someone in the Madison County, NC sheriff's office is just sitting on their ass keeping serious tabs on a short list of people living in other places.

Has a gay person ever knocked on your door to convert you?

No, but I imagine it would make a whole lot of Republican secret wishes come true.

Those pearls don't clutch themselves.

trump and OJ were best of friends in the early 90s

I did not remember this, so I looked it up. I had forgotten all about this, but you're right. Thick as thieves back in the day.

I personally always operate under the assumption that if you are telling someone something secret you are telling their partner too

Yeah, that's absolutely true regardless of any other factor.

add to this Epstein operating a honey trap for one or more national security agencies then you have vested interests that would want to shut down any exposure and who have hitman and assassins on speed dial.

Also proven, in my personal opinion, especially in regard to Israel. Epstein had ties to both Mossad and Ehud Barak for years. Also, media doesn't like to talk about it, but Epstein made his money via ongoing and extensive blackmail enabled by his own surveillance systems in NY and on his ranch and private island, and of course there's that "above my pay grade" comment Alex Acosta made in regard to Epstein's non-prosecution in Florida in the early aughts, because "Epstein belonged to intelligence."

So yeah, the links are there. Your hypothesis is not proven, yet it's also anything but disproven, and the files themselves are full of countless things that people said couldn't actually be happening but were, so there it is. I'll keep it in mind going forward.

Also, please know that I didn't downvote you: I really wanted to know. I also didn't say "giant leap," I said "uphill climb" because it's not out of the range of possibility: if anything, the Epstein files prove that he had connections that also had connections that spanned the globe and every stratum of society. I genuinely wanted to understand, and now I do, at least more than I did. Thank you for answering me.