In February 2016, Jeffrey Epstein wrote an email to Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, with a sentence that should have made front page of every newspaper in the Western world: “As you probably know, I represent the Rothschilds.” The sentence is in Epstein Files. It is an official document of the United States Department of Justice. And the mainstream press treated it as it would a footnote about the weather in Bermuda.
The name “Rothschild” appears nearly 12,000 times across the 3.8 million pages released in January 2026. Twelve thousand times. By comparison, “Clinton” appears at a significantly lower frequency. But in media ecosystem that Chomsky helped build, repeating name Rothschild in an investigative context is automatically reclassified as conspiratorial delusion. Convenient, when yours is most cited name in largest child sex trafficking scandal in modern history.
Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of Victoria’s Secret and Epstein’s largest known benefactor, testified under oath before House Oversight Committee on February 18, 2026. Asked about the credentials that led him to entrust Epstein with full power of attorney over his finances, he answered plainly: “His personal work for the Rothschild family in France.” He added: “Specifically, I spoke to Élie de Rothschild. He represented their whole family.” Under oath. Before United States Congress. Wexner’s attorney was caught whispering to his client on a hot mic: “I’ll fucking kill you if you answer another question with more than five words.” Desperation has recognizable symptoms. The documents confirm what Wexner revealed.
In October 2015, Southern Trust Company Inc., chaired by Epstein and based in the Virgin Islands, entered into a $25 million contract with Edmond de Rothschild Holding S.A. The subject: “risk analysis” and “application of certain algorithms.” Twenty-five million dollars for a convicted child sex offender to run algorithms for the wealthiest family in Europe. If this were a TV script, no studio would buy it for lack of plausibility. Ariane de Rothschild, CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group since 2023, exchanged emails with Epstein dozens of times per month. The Wall Street Journal confirmed in 2023 that she met with him in person more than a dozen times after his conviction. The bank’s initial defense was to deny any contact. Later, they admitted the meetings took place “as part of her normal duties.” Normal duties apparently include regular meetings with convicted pedophiles.
In 2014, Epstein wrote to Ariane: “The coup in Ukraine should provide many opportunities.” Many. A financial manager convicted of child sexual exploitation discussing geopolitical opportunities with the heiress of a $236 billion banking empire. This should have been front-page news. It became editorial silence. Across the Atlantic, WikiLeaks emails had already exposed the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Lynn Forester de Rothschild. In September 2010, Clinton, then Secretary of State, wrote to Lady de Rothschild apologizing for having pulled Tony Blair away from a private engagement with the Rothschilds in Aspen to attend Middle East negotiations. The phrase is verbatim: “Let me know what penance I owe you.” The Secretary of State of the world’s greatest power asking penance of a private citizen.
Billions of your tax dollars are going to Palantir — and the police state it's helping Trump build could soon be used against you. pic.twitter.com/687NxrwDVv
Iran is not the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Tehran. Blitzing the illegitimate child Israel is guaranteed. Mandelson and the Fat White Duke formerly known as Prince from the Palace to the Tower
‘Revealing’ author explains difference between TMI and the kind of healthy ‘oversharing’ that deepens relationships
By Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
February 19, 2026 9 min read
Leslie K. John.Photo by Grace DuVal
Opening up to others and disclosing something personal is a powerful tool that can build rapport, enhance likeability, and bring people closer together, says Leslie John, a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School.
But too often, people avoid sharing more of themselves out of fear they may say the wrong thing and look foolish, or worse, say too much and make everyone uncomfortable. It’s a caution that carries more risks than we realize, she writes in a new book, “Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing.”
In this conversation edited for clarity and length, John, the James E. Burke Professor of Business Administration at HBS, explains that “exposing your belly” to others, if done at the right time and in a purposeful way, can deepen relationships and build credibility. Most importantly, it’s a skill that can be learned.
What is “revealing” and how does it help us make and keep friends, romantic partners, and colleagues at work?
The key active ingredient is trust. When you reveal something sensitive to someone, that’s a kind of social risk. I’m relinquishing control to the universe, and I’m showing you that I trust you to not make a fool out of me. That is contagious. Because when you show that you trust someone, it causes them to trust you. Tons of studies have shown this.
“When you show that you trust someone, it causes them to trust you. Tons of studies have shown this.”
Saying “You can trust me” doesn’t work. To be trusted, you have to take a risk and show that you trust the other person, and then that will make them trust you. And then once we have trust, that’s the social currency. The basis of all healthy relationships is trust.
You say a common mistake is people share very little, thinking it will minimize the risk of embarrassment or making a bad impression. But that also has risks, more than we realize. Can you explain?
There are a couple of core things. Number one is we don’t even realize the opportunities to share more. We don’t even appreciate them because we’re so good at defaulting to not saying anything that we don’t even think about opening up.
The point isn’t to say everything that comes to mind. We withhold for very good reasons. Sometimes it’s kind to withhold; sometimes we’re busy; sometimes there are status or power imbalances. But it’s still a decision. If we think about them as actual decisions and consider them more, then we will say a lot more of the things that are left unsaid. And when we approach these decisions wisely, all of the research says we’ll be better off for it.
Number two is that when we do think about these decisions, everyone fixates on the risks of revealing.
Suppose your colleague doesn’t give you credit for something that was your idea at work and you’re thinking about saying something. What do you think about? You think, “Oh, they’ll think I’m petty; it’s going to be an awkward conversation; there’s going to be friction.” Everyone stops there.
If you want to make a good decision, you have to think not just about the risks of revealing, but also of the potential benefits. We’re hardwired, in some ways, to be overly fixated on the risks, and so, in my book, I want to correct that.
Where is the line between sharing something that builds rapport and going too far, like discussing your dating adventures with co-workers?
That’s TMI [too much information]. That’s a mistake people sometimes make in acquaintanceships and early friendships. We are exquisitely sensitive to this unspoken rule of reciprocity. You don’t want to be sharing everything, and you don’t want them to. That’s an overshare if you share out of sequence. The goal is they share something, and you reciprocate with something as sensitive or a little bit more, and you go back and forth. But if one person is doing all the sharing, that’s not a functional relationship. And it’s annoying.
You tell the story about how during the interview to join the HBS faculty, you were perhaps a little too “authentic” and thought you had accidentally cost yourself the job.
I share a lot of personal anecdotes in the book looking back at these points in my life where I thought I had overshared, like insulting my prospective colleague who was interviewing me.
It was not strategic. It was a stupid blurt I made when I was nervous, which I sometimes do. In the moment, their faces were shocked and I thought: This is the end. Poof, my job’s gone. But then, three days later, I got a phone call. They said: When you sassed us like that, we thought, you’ll fit right in here. The senior colleague I insulted became one of my closest mentors.
There are studies by Dan Cable and other organizational scholars that show that qualified job candidates who show a bit of themselves, who don’t sound scripted, are more likely to get the job. This isn’t: Tell them your deepest, darkest secrets. The conclusion that I’ve been coming to is that most people stand to gain from sharing a bit more in most situations.
Which kinds of topics do people tend to overshare or under-share?
The things that are the most sensitive to talk about are sex, finances, and health. But context matters so much. Health in a doctor’s office is different than health talking to your boss.
A chronic overshare is gossip, saying negative things about other people behind their backs. It’s not nice, but it is also bad because it erodes trust. We all know people who gossip a lot. Would you tell your secrets to that person? No. You can’t have a close relationship with someone who gossips all the time.
“There are things that we tend to under-share. One is praise — saying that you love certain things about people, about what they do.”
There are things that we tend to under-share. One is praise — saying that you love certain things about people, about what they do. We hold back on this. As an academic, academics are so freaking stingy with praise. And yet praise brings everybody joy and we don’t do it enough. Recently, I’ve been practicing doing this more. So far, I’m loving it.
Another category of under-share is your successes. I don’t mean bragging on LinkedIn, I mean telling a very close friend about a success, say, that you got a promotion. We have a hard time sharing our successes with some of our best friends because we don’t want them to feel bad. But that can backfire, especially if they find out another way. And when they do, that’s bad for your relationship because they may ask themselves, “I wonder why they didn’t tell me that? Hmm. I guess we’re not as close as I thought we were.”
What about work — presumably there are different rules for sharing there?
The workplace is tough because there are strong norms and people worry a lot about oversharing there. One way to think about it in the workplace is a distinction between transparency and vulnerability.
Transparency is — think of it as cognitive openness — sharing the way your brain works to someone.
In a job interview, if you get asked, “What’s your biggest weakness?” don’t do the annoying, eyerolling, “I work too hard.” But you also don’t want to share something that’s really damaging.
Suppose the weakness is you don’t like being put on the spot in meetings? Congratulations, you’re human. How might you respond in a way that shows some openness without getting into vulnerability territory? Well, you could say something like, “The way my mind works is that I like to have two minutes to prep my thoughts before I make a presentation because I find that even after just a moment of reflection, I’m way more organized and articulate.” That’s transparency. It’s more powerful than just saying, “Please give me a heads up for meetings.”
When sharing sensitive thoughts and sharing feelings in the workplace, you need to be very careful about vulnerability. When making these disclosure decisions, situational awareness is key. You have to read the room. And, at any time, if you’re starting to open up, and it doesn’t feel right, you should stop and regroup. Because you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
What should people ask themselves when deciding whether to “overshare”?
I think it starts with knowing your why: What are you trying to achieve with potentially revealing the thing?
It’s often lots of things at once. If I share this edgy joke, I want to have fun; I want to build rapport. Maybe I’m a high-status person at work, and I want people to feel comfortable; I want to be relatable; I want to motivate my employees. Or is it more like, I want all the attention? Figuring out your why requires a kind of brutal honesty with yourself. If you do that, you’ll start to question some of your goals and hone them. In turn, you will make wiser, more intentional, decisions about what to reveal and what not to reveal.
Timing is super important, and that’s another thing to consider.
Revealing wisely is a skill. It’s not something we’re born with or without. The way we get better is by practicing and doing it and reflecting.
Katie Hopkins Just OBLITERATED Imam Mohammed Hijab on Live Camera!
The Holy City just became the front line for the most explosive debate of 2026.
What started as a “calm” street discussion turned into a total inferno when Imam Mohammed Hijab looked into the lens and insisted: “Islam is the ultimate religion of peace and tolerance.” He wasn’t expecting Katie Hopkins to be standing in the front row. In a matter of seconds, Katie dismantled the script. She didn’t offer opinions—she fired back with the cold, hard facts that Westminster and the BBC are too terrified to mention:
“If it’s peace, why are there 109 verses calling for violence against non-believers?”
“Why the global Jihad?”
“Why the grooming gangs that have devastated our British towns?”
“Why the trail of terror left across Europe in your name?”
The Imam was left visibly rattled, fumbling for his words as the crowd began to roar.Katie didn’t just win a debate—she exposed the massive chasm between the “peace” slogans fed to the public and the reality of the texts and current events. This is the raw, no-holds-barred clash that the Home Office is reportedly trying to shadow-ban.
Katie Hopkins just cut through the elite “coexistence” narrative, and the internet is exploding. The “Peace” narrative just collapsed in 2 minutes.
Summary: Getting dressed in the morning seems like a simple sequence, but for those with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the brain may be working overtime just to keep from “getting stuck.” A new study reveals that while people with OCD can perform sequential tasks as well as anyone else, their brains recruit significantly more regions to do so.
Researchers discovered high activity in areas previously unlinked to OCD—such as the middle temporal gyrus and the temporo-occipital junction—suggesting a “compensation” effect. These findings offer exciting new targets for brain stimulation therapies like TMS, which could make treatment more effective for millions.
Key Facts
The Performance Paradox: People with OCD performed sequential cognitive tasks (like naming colors/shapes in a specific order) just as accurately as the control group, but their brain scans showed a much higher “neural cost.”
New Brain Targets:Regions involved in working memory, language processing, and visual object recognition—previously unlinked to OCD—were found to be hyperactive during sequencing.
Abstract Sequencing: The study focused on how we organize complex, multi-step behaviors, which is a core area where OCD symptoms, like repetitive actions, often manifest.
TMS Potential: Repositioning magnetic stimulation (TMS) coils to target these newly identified regions could improve the current 30-40% success rate of the therapy.
Task as Assessment: Researchers hope to use the specific sequencing task as a tool to measure if treatments are working, by seeing if the patient’s brain activity starts to look more like the “control” group.
Source: Brown University
A new study revealed that certain brain regions are more active in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) during cognitively demanding tasks. The findings could help inform new ways in which the condition is treated and assessed.
The study, published in Imaging Neuroscience, was conductedby researchers in the laboratory of Theresa Desrochers, an associate professor of brain science and of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science.
Desrochers studies abstract sequential behavior, which is behavior — such as getting dressed in the morning — that follows a general sequence even though individual steps may vary.
For the study, the team examined potential links between abstract sequencing and OCD, a prevalent psychiatric disorder characterized by repetitive thoughts and associated compulsive actions that cause distress for the diagnosed person.
“We started looking into OCD because symptoms of the condition suggest that patients lose track or get stuck where they are while performing sequences,” said lead study author Hannah Doyle a postdoctoral research associate in Desrochers’ lab.
For the study, researchers asked participants to perform a sequential cognitive task while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, naming the color or shape of an object in a specific order.
Doyle found that while individuals with OCD were able to perform the sequence as well as the control group (people who were not diagnosed with OCD), the MRI scans revealed differences in brain regions connected to motor and cognitive task control, working memory and object recognition.
“Their behavior looked similar, but the brains of the participants with OCD recruited more brain regions than the people in the control group,” Doyle said.
She noted that some of the regions hadn’t previously been linked to OCD. Those regions include the middle temporal gyrus — involved in working memory, semantic memory retrieval and language processing — and an area spanning part of the occipital gyrus and the temporo-occipital junction, which is involved in lower-level visual stimulus processing and object recognition.
Study co-author Nicole McLaughlin, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown and a neuropsychologist at Butler Hospital, said the findings may lead to new treatment targets for OCD, especially when involving transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
TMS is a therapy that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate brain regions implicated in a psychiatric disorder. The procedure was approved as a treatment for OCD by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2018; research has shown TMS leads to improvement in about 30-40% of OCD patients.
According to McLaughlin, the treatment might be even more effective if the newly implicated regions are targeted: “If we reposition coils during TMS treatments to be near these brain regions, we might end up seeing a greater improvement in symptoms,” she said.
The real-life relevance of the cognitive task used in the study was key to the team’s insights.
“A lot of tasks that are used in a clinical setting are static,” said Desrochers. “But as humans, we interact with the world through sequences, where we organize information and make decisions. So we’re asking people to do a task where these different control systems have to interact.”
The sequencing task calls for participants to name the colors or shapes of a series of images in a particular order, such as color, color, shape, shape, requiring the ability to keep track of a sequence while making a categorization decision.
“This task gets us closer to understanding what actually looks different in the brain for folks with OCD when all of these different cognitive control systems are trying to work together,” Desrochers said.
The researchers are testing the possibility of using the sequence task itself as an assessment tool.
“We are planning to use the task between treatments,” McLaughlin said. “If we start to see OCD patients’ brains looking more like control participants when they perform the task, that could help indicate that TMS treatment may be effective for symptom reduction.”
Funding: The research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH131615) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (P20GM130452).
Key Questions Answered:
Q: If people with OCD perform the task just as well, why does the extra brain activity matter?
A: It shows that the brain is essentially “redlining” to stay on track. This extra effort may be what leads to the mental fatigue and distress associated with OCD. It’s like a car needing twice the fuel to travel the same distance as another.
Q: How does this change OCD treatment?
A: Currently, FDA-approved brain stimulation (TMS) only targets specific, well-known areas. This study gives doctors a new map. By targeting the middle temporal gyrus or visual processing centers, they may be able to help the 60% of patients who don’t see results with current methods.
Q: What is “abstract sequential behavior”?
A: It’s the “recipe” for daily life—like the sequence of making coffee or getting ready for work. For someone with OCD, the brain might lose its place in that sequence, leading to the urge to repeat a step over and over.
Editorial Notes:
This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
Journal paper reviewed in full.
Additional context added by our staff.
About this OCD and neuroscience research news
Author: Corrie Pikul Source: Brown University Contact: Corrie Pikul – Brown University Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Poaching in Ireland during the British occupation wasnt just about illegal hunting or fishing. It was about using hunger as a tool of colonial power.
Now long before the Great Famine, the Irish countryside was already a contested landscape. Our rivers were teeming with salmon, and our luscious forrests and hedgerows were alive with hares and birds. But the poorest inhabitants, disenfranchised from their ancestral lands were legally barred from touching any of it.
Under British rule, Ireland’s land was dominated by the Anglo-Irish landlord class, whose property rights extended far beyond soil. They “owned” the rivers and lakes and land on their estates and all the livestock, game and fish contained their. Freshwater fishing rights for salmon, trout, and eels were strictly private. Game laws reserved hares, pheasants, grouse, and deer for landlord sport. What had once been shared resources, governed by custom and necessity, were now enclosed by statute even amid the cycles of famines.
The Night Poaching Act of 1828 was particularly feared. It made it a serious offence to hunt or fish after dark, precisely the time when the poor could act unseen. To be caught at night, armed, or in the company of three others transformed hunger into a criminal conspiracy. Punishments ranged from imprisonment with hard labour to transportation for seven years. A rabbit taken to feed a family could end with exile to Australia.
Informers were despised, yet they were often forced in to it to save their own skins after being caught by the feared gamekeepers. Magistrates were heartless and distrusted. The civil law was really just an extension of landlord power, designed to protect sport for aristcrats rather than starvation.
An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849 shattered whatever fragile balance had existed between breaking poaching laws and desperation. When the potato failed, the grain, cattle, butter, and bacon continued to leave Irish ports in vast quantities, bound for Britain.
When gobshites ask why people didnt “just fish” when the rivers still ran thick with salmon and the lakes teemed with trout and eels.Well fishing meant trespass on landlord property.Being caught meant being shot, prison or transportation or eviction. During the Famine eviction was effectively a death sentence for whole family. And dont forget that man jailed for stealing food could miss a relief distribution.
A family evicted for poaching could be dead within weeks.So wild game like rabbits or hares or birds, anything that could be trapped or shot became food. The ecological impact of famine poaching was real. The desperate hunting of birds and animals during these years is believed to have contributed to the decline of native species such as the Irish Grey Partridge.
Nature itself became another casualty of starvation and law. Contemporary accounts are full of people eating hedgehogs, crows, and rats. Even frying worms for protein. Turnip stealing from fields became widespread, another small crime punished harshly under the law. Please support the Dublin Time Machine Book https://ko-fi.com/buchanandublintimemachine
canisgallicus 