A new hobby

I have a new hobby and it’s one you can enjoy too: randomly plugging famous names into the Epstein files search box.

I have to sadly admit that I’m not in the files. Not a single mention. I am a worthless peon.

After discovering that ego-deflating fact, I, for no reason in particular, tried Martha Stewart.

She came up 211 times!!

Feb. 26, 2014, in an email from someone named Lesley Groff to Jeffrey Epstein: “Martha Stewart is asking if you might have room on your plane to and from the TED conference.”

March 1, 2019, an email with the subject line: “Martha Stewart will advise cannabis grower on products for humans and pets.”

Could the products be for humans on an island? There’s so much left for the imagination here.

Searching for “Pope” yielded 419 results. Most of it seems pretty innocuous but you can find some interesting gems.

Example: an email from Mark Epstein to Jeffrey that starts with, “You’re probably smart enough to get out of town when the pope is here, but you’re in NYC, he will be staying around the corner from you. You should invite him over for an egg cream and exchange stories.”

Oh, the stories they could have told.

And then there’s this mysterious email message from a sender whose name is blacked out: “Should I e mail you the pictures of me and the pope cozying up together so you have something to work towards?”

There’s so much left to the imagination — this is great storytelling.

One result for Neil Gaiman — a promotional email from Kickstarter HQ to jeevacation@gmail.com describing some new fundraisers, including one for Amanda Palmer, Gaiman’s ex-wife.

Yes, there’s a lot of useless crap in the file. The files are loaded with emails that would have looked at home in a spam folder. Feel free to speculate on why we have to wade through all this stuff to get to anything relevant.

My favorite item so far: one mention of Carrot Top. He’s in what appears to be an essay by a comic named Bobby Slayton about appearing on The Gong Show.

So, you see, there are hidden treasures to be found in the files. Happy hunting!

Phrase of the week: “Free air sniff.” This was what was conducted by K-9 Officer IX, aka K-9 IX, during a traffic stop. The sniff found some illegal drugs.

As delightful as the phrase and the name of the dog are, the best part of a decision from an Ohio appellate court is the ruling that you can’t convict someone of operating a vehicle with a hidden compartment used to transport a controlled substance just because the drugs were hidden in the vehicle.

You have to have specially built the hiding place. If you hide the drugs under a rug near the gear shift, you’re fine.

Woke ruling. Will this DEI plague never end?

Yet another group has gone to court and won a ruling that they’ve been the victims of discrimination.

A federal judge has ruled that the state of California can’t indiscriminately impose restrictions on people just because they happen to be ICE agents. They need to be treated equally (i.e. with equity) so they can freely get on with their jobs treating people they don’t like unequally.

In case you missed it, the ruling was about a new state law barring ICE agents from wearing face masks. The judge struck down the law because it only applied to ICE and not all law enforcement.

Feel free to enjoy the irony.