The Humanity Deficit

Re: the Trump/Epstein files and the horrors within – the words of a few authors come to mind.

William Gibson in Count Zero

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Rich Boy 

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. 

Captain Underpants (Trump friend, former law professor, and disgraced human, Alan Dershowitz) called Epstein’s young victims liars, prostitutes, sluts, and druggies. Imagine that. A hit dog’s gonna holler, eh? He did everything except shout out, big and bold,  “I was one of Epstein’s most frequent and loyal customers. I’ve raped countless young teenagers.”

Guffo

He announced that the victims (THE VICTIMS, FFS!!!) could be charged with crimes (like what, you sad, moldy green bean?) AND he's threatening to sue them. That’s obviously not gonna happen because then there’d be discovery and all sorts of nasty things would come crawling out that Alan would really rather leave buried in the dark.

This is an intimidation tactic. We’ve seen it a zillion times before. Remember when the First Hooker was gonna sue Hunter Biden for more than a billion for restating the fact that Epstein introduced her and Pedo? Funny how that suit just vanished, huh? Remember when Pedo dropped his $500 mill lawsuit against his former fixer, Michael Cohen? The discovery process is some scary shit when you’ve got as many ghosts and dead bodies that need to stay buried as they do. Trump’s still trying to fuck that I’m-gonna-sue chicken but the whole world knows the game now. 

So then…Pedowitz? He can fuck ALL the way off. He can go back to whining about not being invited to parties on the Vineyard and being banned by a pierogi vendors at a farmers market in West Tisbury. Of course he threatened to sue. What a pathetic clown.

Drew Sheneman

Back to these billionaire, entitled freaks, John Scalzi (who is NOT a billionaire, entitled freak) asks,

Is one required to become a pedophile when one becomes a billionaire because I gotta tell you right about now the correlation seems pretty high.

There is in fact a relationship between wealth and shit behavior. Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner ran seven studies looking at whether wealth and prestige effect empathy. 

Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused. 

…Piff and his colleagues found that wealthier people are more likely to agree with statements that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally defensible. These attitudes ended up predicting participants’ likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior. (source) 

Bas Van Der Schot

You're shocked. Yeah, me too.

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gives it to.
~ Maurice Baring 

You can't be obscenely, filthy rich without being filthy and obscene. The Trump/Epstein files prove that. Having said all this, I’m with Dottie, I’d quite like to give being a millionaire a go. Ya know, maybe I could just test drive it around the block. A single mill would be fine – I'm not greedy.

I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.
~ Dorothy Parker