You realize I could go to jail for this. Be a good citizen, a supportive
member of the community and buy the LOCAL newspapers.

-sss#ssssssssdsdddd

An external professor and member of the science board at Santa Fe Institute
has been placed on paid leave by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
after a new report shed new light on the MIT faculty member’s relationship
with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Seth Lloyd, a tenured professor of mechanical engineering who has ties with
the
<https://www.abqjournal.com/1410925/mit-students-protest-prof-with-sfi-ties.html/jn01_jd_19jan_mit2>

MIT Students Against War held a silent protest outside of Professor Seth
Lloyd’s classroom in October. (Courtesy photo)

Santa Fe Institute dating back to 1988, had received $225,000 of the
$850,000 that Epstein foundations had donated to MIT, with all but $100,000
of the total received by the prestigious Cambridge school after Epstein’s
2008 conviction for solicitation of prostitution in Florida.

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Epstein, a billionaire financier who had a fascination for abstract
concepts and young women and girls, had over the years also given $275,000
to SFI, a renowned complexity science research and education center located
on Hyde Park Road. But only $25,000 was donated to SFI after Epstein
pleaded guilty to the Florida charges.

Last month, SFI donated $25,000 to Solace Crisis Treatment Center, a Santa
Fe-based non-profit that works to empower victims of sexual violence and
other trauma.

While MIT has said it would contribute an amount equivalent to the all of
the contributions it received from Epstein to his victims or organizations
that work on behalf of victims of sexual violence, SFI told the Journal
late last year that it
<https://www.abqjournal.com/1410925/mit-students-protest-prof-with-sfi-ties.html/jn01_jd_19jan_mit>

MIT students have staged protests calling for Professor Seth Lloyd and
President Rafael Reif to resign (Courtesy photo)

doesn’t plan to give away any more than the $25,000 it received from
Epstein after his conviction.

Nor does it appear that SFI is taking any action regarding Lloyd, as MIT
did.

“As far as I know, SFI does not have plans to follow suit, though it’s
worth noting that as an external professor, Seth is not actually on our
payroll,” SFI spokeswoman Jenna Marshall wrote in an email to the Journal.

She did not respond to follow up questions she invited the Journal to
submit.

Besides making contributions to SFI, Epstein, who investigators determined
died by suicide in a New York jail in August while awaiting trial on sex
trafficking charges involving dozens of girls, had at least one other tie
to New Mexico. He owned a ranch in southern Santa Fe County that according
to New York Times reporting last year he planned to use as a base to
impregnate women in order to “seed” the human race with his DNA.

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*Student pressure*

MIT has been under pressure from some students and alumni to sever its ties
with Lloyd.

Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, the institute’s research laboratory
that was the beneficiary of most of the contributions Epstein made to the
Cambridge university, was forced to resign in September.

The new MIT report released Jan. 10, conducted by the Goodwin Proctor LLC
and commissioned by the university “to better understand” the extent of
Epstein’s interactions with the school, states that both Ito and Lloyd
deliberately concealed donations from Epstein, something Lloyd denies. He
was placed on leave that same day.

In October, Eleanor Graham, a student in one of Lloyd’s classes, set off a
string of guest columns slanted against Lloyd that appeared in The Tech, a
weekly student newspaper. In it, she wrote that allowing Lloyd to continue
to teach at MIT puts the next generation of scientists in a difficult
position.

“The opportunity to study quantum computation should not be restricted by
how easily you can put aside your moral discomfort regarding a man who
takes money from pedophiles as a supposed act of charity,” wrote Graham,
who ended up dropping the class. “By continuing to teach, by continuing to
be a part of the scientific community, Seth Lloyd is continuing to do harm.”

Later that month, MIT Students Against War staged a silent protest outside
of Lloyd’s classroom, prompting Lloyd to conduct his lecture over a video
link with police officers guarding both the classroom where the students
were and the one in which Lloyd gave his talk.

During Parent’s Weekend last fall, the group printed hundreds of posters
with messages like “Seth Lloyd Must Go” and posted them around campus.

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The group demanded Lloyd’s resignation and pressured MIT President Rafael
Reif to get rid of him. When he at first didn’t take action with Lloyd,
they called for Reif’s resignation and staged protests that were anything
but silent.

Alonso Espinosa-Domínguez, an MIT senior majoring in mathematics, said in
an email to the Journal that Reif told them that all he could do was ask
the provost and Lloyd’s department head to look into options. But it was
Rief who eventually placed Lloyd on leave.

“Which means Reif had more authority than he let on initially,” said
Espinosa-Domínguez, who is also one of the co-founders of MIT Students
Against War.

He says that Reif placed Lloyd on leave pending the department head’s
determination of appropriate action.

“But we do not trust that MIT will not simply decide that the ‘appropriate
action’ is to reinstate him once the media attention dies down, and so we
intend to continue applying pressure,” he said.

Espinosa-Domínguez said that keeping Lloyd on staff at MIT sends the wrong
message.

“People like Seth Lloyd, Joi Ito, and all the other high-profile
scientists, business people, publicists, etc., who over the years continued
to vouch for Epstein, despite all the obvious evidence available of his
multiple sex crimes against women and underage girls and his overall
patriarchal attitude toward women, directly enabled him,” he wrote. “This
is reflective of a broader issue in our society wherein, especially in
elite, male circles, sexual predators and the commodification of women are
widely tolerated and enabled. If MIT were serious about combatting this
grave issue which plagues it, science, and society overall, they would take
the basic step of parting ways with Lloyd.”

*Lloyd’s SFI associations*

Lloyd’s association with SFI started four years after its founding in 1984.

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One of the founders was Murray Gell-Mann, under whom Lloyd studied
applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems while a
postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Gell-Mann, a professor at the University of New Mexico in the 1990s and
early 2000s who died in Santa Fe last year, was friendly with Epstein and
acknowledged Epstein’s financial contributions to SFI in his 1994 book “The
Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.” The New
Times reported he was also a guest of Epstein at dinners and scientific
conferences.

According to the MIT report, Lloyd was introduced to Epstein by his book
agent at a dinner in 2004. Lloyd told investigators that he received his
first contribution from Epstein in 2005 or 2006.

Epstein was first investigated for committing sex crimes with children in
2005 after a parent of a 14-year-old girl contacted police in Palm Beach,
Florida. A probable cause affidavit was filed by police in 2006.

But there was something unusual about that first donation of $60,000.

“In a possible violation of MIT policies and certainly in violation of MIT
norms, Professor Lloyd deposited the gift into a personal bank account and
did not report it to MIT,” the report states.

In a statement Lloyd posted last week on the online publishing platform
medium.com – the same website Lloyd published an apology to Epstein’s
victims in August – Lloyd explained that Epstein offered him a “personal
grant” for his research and told him to set up a nonprofit as a vehicle to
accept the grant. That took a long time, he said, and Epstein ended up
giving him the money as a gift, on which he paid a gift tax. The money was
used to support his scientific research, he said.

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He also said that he wasn’t then aware of any accusations of sexual
misconduct against Epstein.

“At the time that I accepted the 2006 grant (years before his 2008
conviction), my knowledge was that Epstein was a wealthy individual who
liked to support science, and so accepting an unrestricted personal grant
from him for performing scientific research was unproblematic,” he said.

Later, Lloyd visited Epstein’s private island near St. Thomas, where it is
now alleged that Epstein committed many of his sex crimes. A lawsuit
against Epstein’s estate filed last week by the government of the U.S.
Virgin Islands alleges Epstein raped and otherwise sexually abused girls,
some as young as 12 and as recently as 2018, after he lured them to the
island of Little St. James.

The MIT report says Lloyd attended a lunch there with other scientists and
was only there for “a few hours.”

*Visit to Epstein*

Even after Epstein’s conviction, Lloyd continued to carry on a relationship
with Epstein and accept money from him. The Goodwin Proctor report for MIT
says Lloyd made efforts to hide the source of two $50,000 donations in
2012, which were unsolicited, and a $125,000 contribution in 2017.

Those donations came after Lloyd visited Epstein while he was serving his
18-month sentence on the 2008 conviction. This was no jailhouse meeting,
however. It occurred in an office Epstein used while on “work release”
during what has been criticized as an exceptionally light sentence.

Lloyd later explained that in continuing his relationship with Epstein he
felt he could help with his “rehabilitation.”

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The report indicates that Lloyd and Ito fostered a relationship with
Epstein in an effort to obtain funding for their research but they didn’t
want others to know the money was coming from Epstein.

“The fact-finding revealed that, despite Epstein’s criminal record, and his
registration as a sex offender, Professor Lloyd and former Media Lab
Director Ito attempted to cultivate Epstein as a potential source of
research and program funding and drove the efforts to obtain donations from
and through him,” the report states.

This took place while MIT was working “to limit Epstein’s donations, and
affiliation with, MIT.”

“In summary, Professor Lloyd knew that donations from Epstein would be
controversial and that MIT might reject them,” the report states. “We
conclude that, in concert with Epstein, he purposefully decided not to
alert the Institute to Epstein’s criminal record, choosing instead to allow
mid-level administrators to process the donations without any formal
discussion or diligence concerning Epstein. In his interview, Professor
Lloyd acknowledged that he had been ‘professionally remiss’ in not alerting
MIT to Epstein’s criminal record.”

Lloyd’s statement last week characterizes things differently.

“I didn’t hide the fact that Epstein was donating money to MIT. Nor did I
conspire with Epstein to avoid any vetting process,” he wrote. “I actively
inquired about MIT’s proper procedures for accepting donations, and I
followed them to the letter.”

But the Goodwin Proctor report found that one of the 2012 donations listed
Lesley Groff, an assistant to Epstein and now a defendant and
co-conspirator in civil cases against Epstein, was handling the
contribution on the donor’s end.

“The only reasonable inference is that Professor Lloyd did this to obscure
the fact that Epstein was the donor and to hinder any possible due
diligence or vetting by MIT,” the report says.

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This, too, Lloyd denies.

“The accusation that I hid Epstein’s identity from MIT, which is leveled in
the recently released Goodwin Proctor report, is completely false,” he
wrote. “I never hid the identity of Epstein as the donor prior to the
donation being accepted. I facilitated the submission of the donation
approval request to the MIT officers exactly so they could vet it. MIT knew
that the donor was Epstein and fully approved the donation with this
knowledge.”

Lloyd said he wasn’t trying to diminish his mistakes or make excuses for
his lapse of judgment, “which will continue to weigh on my conscience for
the rest of my life.”

Lloyd declined to be interviewed by the Journal. He did alert the Journal
to the statement he posted last week.

“I will not be commenting further at the moment,” he added.



*(Editor’s Note: MIT President Rafael Reif’s name was misspelled in the
original version of this story)*



On Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 7:26 PM <thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Tom –
>
>
>
> Pay wall!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
>
>
> Can you say more?
>
>
>
> N
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Tom Johnson
> *Sent:* Wednesday, January 22, 2020 9:49 AM
> *To:* Friam@redfish. com <friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* [FRIAM] MIT students protest prof with SFI ties » Albuquerque
> Journal
>
>
>
>
> https://www.abqjournal.com/1410925/mit-students-protest-prof-with-sfi-ties.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=santa-fe-headlines
>
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