While child molesters are not known to last long in prisons all around the world, Jeffrey Epstein is fortunate enough to also have powerful ‘ex’ friends who would like to keep his mouth shut, claims an attorney who fought against Epstein in court a decade ago.

Jeffrey Epstein may not live to see his own trial if he is released on bail – or even if he’s put into the general section of a prison, says Spencer Kuvin, an attorney who represented Epstein’s victims over a decade ago.

Kuvin says that recent reports of Epstein sustaining injuries in prison are wrongly classified as attempted suicide and look more like attempted assassination, according to The Sun.

“I do question whether it was a true suicide attempt. I mean how do you choke yourself? It doesn't make any sense,” said Kuvin, referring to undisclosed neck injuries Epstein sustained, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. “There are reports someone came after him but that could just be because he's a pedophile. Those types of individuals don't last long in prison.”

The Daily Mail report notes that it is unclear how Kuvin came to the conclusion that Epstein’s injuries were strangulation marks, as the Bureau never published details of the incident; Kuvin also did not elaborate on how an alleged assassin could have reached Epstein in his cell in the high-security sector of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

The attorney hinted, however, that Epstein has “powerful friends,” who are likely not enthusiastic about the convicted sex-offender speaking their names on trial. Ironically, Epstein has ties to both current US President Donald Trump and former US President Bill Clinton.

“If he goes on trial, everyone he’s been in contact with will ultimately be fair game,” Kuvin said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that no jail will protect you when there’s powerful people that want to reach you. If he’s going to implicate anyone in power that has the ability to reach in and somehow get to him - his life is definitely in jeopardy.”

Kuvin suggested that the Metropolitan would do well to “seal” Epstein in high-security solitary confinement – which, according to The Daily Mail, is exactly what has been done.

Initially put into solitary confinement, Epstein was later transferred into the prison’s general population and almost immediately received death threats, forcing prison authorities to relocate him back to the high-security section.

Two weeks ago, Epstein asked for house arrest, but his bid was denied by a judge after the former financier was shown to be a flight risk. That ruling was appealed last week.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201907301076402764-jeffrey-epsteins-life-may-...

Safe spaces are in vogue at the moment, and not only on the Left. Certain bastions of conservative thought also shy away from topics and personalities to whom their readership might have an aversion. But on occasion, someone otherwise spacey and wrong says something worth noting, and that happened recently with the Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. (You might recall her for having previously stated that she looked forward to “meeting President Trump on a ‘field of love.’”) Williamson tweeted something that’s long overdue for discussion: antidepressant drugs and how they’re “over-prescribed” in America. 

Almost all of us have suffered through a terrible experience—losing a spouse, a home, a career, parents, or, worst of all, children. It is terrible to know that your child is suffering, either emotionally or from physical pain. And to lose that child in death is worst of all. Many are tempted to simply make the pain go away by denying the experience altogether. That makes many of us an easy mark for anyone selling painkillers that let us deny our suffering.

Humane researchers have tried to make this a reality. Drug companies have piggybacked for their own reasons. And some prescribers have joined in.

I lost a husband in the prime of my life; my children lost their father as teenagers. After it happened, I felt a bottomless hole opening, made all the worse by the fact that we had spent so much of our daily lives together, working side by side, homeschooling our children, enjoying pastimes, sharing books we were reading as well as our love of music and art, and, perhaps most of all, talking endlessly about ideas. Suddenly life went silent and felt empty. Not even its practical urgencies could take away this gaping void. Well-meaning friends called on me. Some suggested I get a prescription” to “get over” depression and blot out the sharp edges, to “get on” with life and leave the past behind. I knew they meant well, wanted to help, but it was insulting to suggest that I could forget, that a pill could “fix” all that and make me “feel better.”

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/marianne-williamson-is-...

Read from top.

In 2014, headed towards a Palm Springs golf holiday at the height of a prolonged California drought, President Barack Obama stopped in Fresno on Air Force One with Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein aboard, joined by Governor Jerry Brown.

“Unless and until we do more to combat carbon pollution that causes climate change, this trend is going to get worse,” Obama professed after a motorcade to parched fields west of town. “We’re going to have to stop looking at these disasters as something to wait for. We’ve got to start looking at these disasters as something to prepare for, to anticipate.” The four politicians posed with tractors as props for camera crews, promised help, and then moved airborne to the next event, as farmers took more acreage out of crops. But the long drought was no disaster, just arid California doing its cyclical thing.

This summer, the great Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting, filling vast foothill reservoirs from Shasta to Tehachapi. After another rainy season, the third in a row, most are nearly full, refilling, cleaning, and flushing California’s natural and built water system statewide. This is very good news, especially the replenishment of good groundwater essential to its agriculture. Sound water regulation and allocation is a public imperative. Purity is not only of interest to tree huggers. Keeping wells flowing and groundwater clean have been challenges in California since pioneer days. A hundred years of meeting rising residential demand through colossal water projects and impressive engineering has allowed California to become the world destination and agricultural provider that it is.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/overpopulation-not-clim...

Read from top.

The trend of droughts and floods is only going to increase due to global warming — itself exacerbated by overpopulation and the burning of fossil fuels.. (including the plane of Barak Obama). Our madness is our refusal to see that our sanity is limited to the short term present, like worms eating dirt at one end and shitting it out at the other. And when these worms get flooded, they have to come to the surface where the scorching sun dries them out in a jiffy or the early bird catches them... But as shown in my pictures, it's the ants that will feast most... 

See: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35605

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34763

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/27933

We are more blind than a dead mole-cricket... or a worm (Pictures by Gus Leonisky)

Many people living in public housing have troubled pasts. He first entered housing more than 20 years ago, after a painful intestinal condition made him unable to work.

He said he doesn't have much family and before his health issues, floated from job to job.

"I couldn't breathe in captivity unfortunately and the closest I'm going to have to children or family are my birds," he said.

He admitted he has had run-ins with the law including assault and drug charges from the 1980s and another assault charge just two years ago, after an argument with a neighbour.

He has also clashed with housing officials, receiving two warning letters, including one for threatening an officer — an allegation he denies.

"I've never been aggressive once, I've never ever threatened them," he said.

Mr Gawronski's biggest fear is that his home will be taken away from him. His estate, which sits in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the hands of the right developer.

In recent years, the NSW Government has resorted to selling off ageing inner-city public housing to raise money and build new, modern, housing.

Earlier this year, the Sirius building — a former public housing block in The Rocks — was sold for $150 million. In the nearby waterfront suburb of Millers Point, 189 public housing properties have been sold for a combined $600 million.

The NSW Department of Communities and Justice, responsible for housing, insist there are no plans to sell Mr Gawronski's estate.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-10/the-birdman-versus-the-department...

Read from top.

Run-ins with other tenants or "inspectors" in these public housing, about noises, pets and rubbish, can lead to some of the complainants being sent for mental evaluation... (read at top). This is why many public housing people, always trying to stay clear of trouble, do not make complaints or challenge the establishment that could revoke their freedom any time with frothed-up pretexts...

Pierre's "estate" may be "safe", but the government made noises about selling the other public housing nearby:

The residents of Waterloo, however, will not go quietly. “People are trying to speak up,” says Maryanne Laumua, a Waterloo tenant and key team member of the WeLiveHere2017 project.

One of the ways that residents are speaking up is by making their presence known on Sydney’s skyline. In September 2017, residents in the tallest of Waterloo’s towers, Matavai and Turanga, installed coloured lights in their apartment windows to make a statement: “We live here”. The residents’ efforts are chronicled in a new ABC documentary, There Goes Our Neighbourhood.

Read more:

https://theconversation.com/we-still-live-here-public-housing-tenants-fi...

The question must be finally asked – on the proverbial shrink’s couch if necessary – if America’s deep-seated Russophobia, which has been gnawing away at the nation’s brain since Soviet times, is symptomatic of some deeper psychological disorder. After all, a nation that is loaded to the eyeballs on antidepressants, armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry and bursting at the seams with random violence could never be confused as a model sovereign state. So at the risk of sounding politically incorrect, has the United States of America finally cracked?

Insanity has been described, albeit a bit simplistically, as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Does that not sound remarkably similar to the situation in which Russia now finds itself with regards to the United States? A number of Americans, and not the least educated ones, insist on seeing the distant Motherland as the evil engineer behind every problem to befall their country.

When Black Lives Matters protesters, for example, took to the streets to condemn excessive police force, they were not motivated to action by their own volition, of course, but rather by the invisible hand of Russia; when Instagram carried advertisements for “LGBT-positive sex toys,” that was the dastardly doings of Russian hackers, attempting to “sow discord” from sea to shining sea; and when Hillary Clinton suffered defeat and humiliation against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, it was not because she was the least popular candidate; nor was it because a majority of Americans were dreaming of a wall on the porous Mexican border. Of course not. The reason she lost was because Russia. Period. Full stop. End of story. 

Any person who doubts for a nanosecond the ‘Blame Russia’ narrative is hunted down by the thought police and consigned to the cuckoo’s nest of conspiracy theorists, which are now ranked as potential criminals according to a new FBI protocol. This begs the question as to what will happen to the mainstream media if it is found to be guilty of disseminating a dangerous conspiracy theory. You know, like Russiagate.

Even as the anti-Russia witch hunt was finally laid to rest by the two-year Mueller investigation, many Americans seem to slip further and further away from a safe space known as reality, imagining Russian fingerprints on everything where there are none. Even the perennial problem of American racism, which has been around since at least the days of the African slave trade, is believed to be the dream works of the Kremlin, according to none other than Kamala Harris, a Democratic contender for the highest office in the land.

According to Harris, “Russia exposed America’s Achilles heel” of racism as a way of getting Americans “going at each other.” Now, thanks to such interference in the country’s domestic affairs, the issue of race is a “national security issue,” the leading Democrat warned. 

According to such thick-headed arguments, many decades of US racial tensions – from the Civil Rights era, to the Rodney King riots, to the OJ Simpson murder trial, to the Black Lives Matters marches – are all of little actual consequence. The real problem is Russia flaming racial tensions on social media. It takes a very special kind of mind to believe such nonsense.

Russia, the one-size-fits-all scapegoat, can even be blamed for the apparent suicide of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein inside of a US federal prison. It is not difficult to imagine that Epstein – a wealthy financier who hosted members of the political elite at his private island in the Caribbean, where tales of sexcapades with underage girls are grabbing headlines – was wanted dead by numerous well-connected individuals. Yet apparently that obvious idea never entered the brain cavity of Joe Scarborough, talking head at MSNBC, who peddled a treacherous conspiracy theory shortly after the news of Epstein’s death broke.

“A guy who had information that would have destroyed rich and powerful men’s lives ends up dead in his jail cell. How predictably… Russian,” he tweeted to an avalanche of scorn. Will the FBI be showing up at Scarborough’s home any time soon to ask him a few questions? Somehow I doubt it.

The non-stop anti-Russia campaign, however, which amounts to nothing less than vulgar racism, extends beyond the borders of politics and media into the world of entertainment.

Consider the curious case of David Crosby, from Crosby, Stills and Nash, which, by the way, is not a Washington think-tank devoted to Russia. Mr Crosby, 77, is an iconic singer-songwriter from the drug-infused 1960s counterculture movement. A two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he enjoys well-deserved fame for his musical – as opposed to his political – achievements. So why on Earth is the mainstream media giving this entertainer a large stage to spew his ill-founded opinions on Russia?

“Basically, the Russians take hold of any division in our society – racial prejudice, class war, fear of vaccines, any division that has two sides – and they work it,” Crosby warned in the Daily Beast. “They… say awful stuff about whites, and then they turn around and play white supremacist KKK crazies and say we should ship all blacks back to Africa. They do it with every issue they can. Their plan is to divide us and… render us helpless.”

The article goes on in a similarly insane vein, repeating long-debunked cow bunk as to how Vladimir Putin had “kompromat” on Donald Trump in the form of a “pee tape,” which is why “Trump is so completely under the control of Russia,” and other such gibberish. 

Russians would respond to Crosby by asking why, with all this control they purportedly enjoy over the White House, does Trump continue to expand NATO up to Russia’s welcome mat, while continuing with an aggressive sanctions campaign against Russian companies?

If such unfounded comments prove anything, it is that the full-scale media assault against Russia has worked, and many people are convinced that the Kremlin is awake at night cooking up new schemes to divide Americans against themselves. 

My personal take on all this madness is that the liberals understand they have little chance of unseating Trump in 2020. Their candidates, as well as their platforms, inspire no confidence whatsoever. I would guess they fully comprehend their desperate political state and that is why they continue to push the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory, which ultimately makes them appear ridiculous. Never mind what it is doing to the bilateral relationship between the two nuclear-armed countries.

Indeed, if by some unpredictable fluke of political nature the Democrats do legitimately win in 2020 – and I emphasize the word ‘legitimately’ – I shudder to think what will transpire then between the US and Russia.

@Robert_Bridge

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. Former Editor-in-Chief of The Moscow News, he is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013.