Another day in paradise
By 
Donald Trump re-tweeted this about the Epstein suicide:
Asking whether Trump “believes” the Clintons murdered Epstein is a meaningless question, because Donald Trump doesn’t have beliefs, at least not in the way that an even minimally psychologically healthy person does. He has desires, impulses, and an instinctual talent for the worst sort of demagoguery. His election as president, and even more so the complete inability of the system to remove him from office, are both compelling evidence that the American political system is in the process of failing in a radical way.
That this thought is literally unthinkable for almost all of our elites does not make it less true.
As to what happened to Epstein, I think it’s overwhelmingly likely he committed suicide because that failing system “decided,” in a diffuse, inchoate way, that it would be best if he committed suicide, and then acted, or more precisely didn’t act, accordingly.
Whether you want to call that a conspiracy turns on whether you agree with whichever sociologist described society as a conspiracy against its own members.
On a related topic, the absurdity of Joe Biden’s status as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination becomes more evident every day:
It seems Joe Biden can’t escape the gaffe curse. The frontrunner to become the Democratic presidential nominee told reporters in Iowa on Saturday that “those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president.” But when they went to Capitol Hill, Biden said, lawmakers were “basically cowering, not wanting to see them. They did not want to face it on camera.” The problem with this tale? The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 dead took place in 2018, more than a year after Biden left the White House.
It looks like Biden repeated the gaffe twice. There is video of Biden telling the same story but with slightly different words at a forum on gun violence. “I watched what happened when the kids from Parkland marched up to, and I met with them and they went off to up on the Hill and I was vice president they went to the Hill … all those congressmen were like, ‘No, I’m not here. I’m not here.’
This happened literally the day after Biden made a couple of similarly disturbing and symptomatic blunders. This is happening several months before the presidential campaign is in full swing, when Biden is relatively rested and unburdened by the demands of a full campaign schedule.
And it’s happening 17 months before he would take the oath of office. (The sort of cognitive deterioration associated with advancing age tends to be exponential not linear, so when an old person is slipping mentally, 17 months is a long time).
In its own way, the possibility that Biden might be the Democratic party’s challenger to Trump is as big an indictment of the political system as Trump’s continuing presidency. Both things represent complete and total failures of a system that seems on the verge of entering a historical death spiral, it it isn’t in one already.