Thursday, August 01, 2019

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"

This timeline just keeps getting weirder. Turns out that not only was Epstein a squillionaire with a bad case of the short eye, he was a legit Bond villain:
On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists and an adviser to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it.

It was not a secret. The adviser, for example, said he was told about the plans not only by Mr. Epstein, at a gathering at his Manhattan townhouse, but also by at least one prominent member of the business community. One of the scientists said Mr. Epstein divulged his idea in 2001 at a dinner at the same townhouse; the other recalled Mr. Epstein discussing it with him at a 2006 conference that he hosted in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands.

The idea struck all three as far-fetched and disturbing. There is no indication that it would have been against the law.

Once, at a dinner at Mr. Epstein’s mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Mr. Lanier said he talked to a scientist who told him that Mr. Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe. Mr. Lanier said the scientist identified herself as working at NASA, but he did not remember her name.
It's like A View to a Kill meets The Boys From Brazil and no, the irony of the latter comparison is not lost on me.

It's weird observing the effects on people of reality-distorting accumulations of dough. Sometimes when people get enough money to do any damn thing they want, you get relatively benign results like Oprah Winfrey, and other times you wind up with this sort of Auric Goldfinger does the Neverland Ranch thing.
.