I will never reveal my source.
We were bound and determined to track down Jeffrey Epstein´s place in Stanley, New Mexico. One of my resourceful spies snapped the attached photos.
The road from the front gate to the mansion is maybe 3-4 miles long. The photographer said it was a case of snap-and-go; the forest of surveillance cameras was creepy beyond repair.
"I feared I'd be shot making the photo.
The road passes through a 'village' where all the maintenance people and serfs live. If he never gets out of jail, what of them? He owns their houses."
In case you are recently arrived from mars, Epstein is a billionaire and convicted sex offender. He is currently in jail awaiting trial for sex trafficking. For a peep into his megabucks buddies, click here. You will see a significant segment of the American oligarchy on parade.
Epstein could live anyplace in the world. So, why did he pick Stanley, New Mexico? I have been through Stanley many times. There´s nothing there except the crumbling ruins of a high school -- shades of bombed-out Berlin, WW II -- attended in the 1950s by local denizen and former governor Bruce King.
Nothing there -- and that is exactly the point. This local TV report about Epstein tells what happened in Stanley and why.
Gazing at the photo of Jeff´s castle on the hill, Albert Camus´ commentary on the Marquis de Sade came to mind. I don´t why it did; try as I might, I can´t find any explanation for it.
After all, the Marquis had interesting things to say, e.g., "I can understand killing somebody in a fit of passion. Killing somebody with the cold calculation of a trial -- that is true insanity."
Jeff, to the contrary, has nothing to say worth repeating.
There´s that word again: nothing.
Nothing.
"For Sade, the law of power implies barred gates, castles with seven circumvallations from which it is impossible to escape, and where a society founded on desire and crime functions unimpeded, according to the rules of an implacable system. The most unbridled rebellion, insistence on complete freedom, lead to the total subjection of the majority. For Sade, man's emancipation is consummated in these strongholds of debauchery where a kind of bureaucracy of vice rules over the life and death of the men and women who have committed themselves forever to the hell of their desires. His works abound with descriptions of these privileged places where feudal libertines, to demonstrate to their assembled victims their absolute impotence and servitude, always repeat the Duc de Blangis' speech to the common people of the One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom: You are already dead to the world.
Sade himself also inhabited the tower of Freedom, but in the Bastille. Absolute rebellion took refuge with him in a sordid fortress from which no one, either persecuted or persecutors, could ever escape. To establish his freedom, he had to create absolute necessity. Unlimited freedom of desire implies the negation of others and the suppression of pity. The heart, that ´weak spot of the intellect,´ must be exterminated; the locked room and the system will see to that. The system, which plays a role of capital importance in Sade's fabulous castles, perpetuates a universe of mistrust. It helps to anticipate everything so that no unexpected tenderness or pity occur to upset the plans for complete enjoyment. It is a curious kind of pleasure, no doubt, which obeys the commandment: ´We shall rise every morning at ten o'clock´! But enjoyment must be prevented from degenerating into attachment, it must be put in parentheses and toughened. Objects of enjoyment must also never be allowed to appear as persons. If man is ´an absolutely material species of plant,´ he can only be treated as an object, and as an object for experiment. In Sade's fortress republic, there are only machines and mechanics. The system, which dictates the method of employing the machines, puts everything in its right place. His infamous convents have their rule—significantly copied from that of religious communities. Thus the libertine indulges in public confession. But the process is changed: ´If his conduct is pure, he is censured.´"
-- Albert Camus, The Rebel --