Tree planting and Epstein

4 February 2026

In good news, The Oakist’s spent today planting trees and hedging. I came up with a way to plant the trees in wild grass (it was a 5 in the morning obsession kind of thing). Make a spade-sized square hole, pull out the sod, invert it (then you get a grass free zone plus the grass rots underneath), stick the tree in the middle, cover with some cardboard as a mulch and add a load of organic matter on top. Stick a cane in to stop Stu running over them in his quad and bingo.

Now the shit stuff. From a Practical Anarchy angle, the Epstein files aren’t some shocking glitch in an otherwise decent system. They’re the system working exactly as designed.

Rich men, private jets, politicians, princes, billionaires, intelligence types – all floating above the law like it’s optional. That’s not an accident. That’s what happens when you stack money, power and secrecy in the same room and then tell the rest of us to “trust the authorities”.

Of course they protected each other. That’s what elites do. Always have.

So why isn’t the world losing its mind?

Because most people already kind of know. We’ve been drip-fed scandals for decades. Panama Papers. War crimes. Police cover-ups. Nothing ever really sticks. ICE shootings. You get a headline, a bit of outrage, then everyone goes back to work Monday morning. It becomes background noise. Grim, but normalised.

And the men vs women thing?

Honestly – loads of women aren’t shocked because this is just… familiar. Abuse, coercion, powerful creeps getting away with it – that’s not news, that’s lived experience. A lot of men are only now realising how deep it goes, so it hits them like a betrayal.

From my point of view, the takeaway isn’t gossip about who flew where.

It’s simpler and angrier: Stop expecting systems built by the powerful to police the powerful.

They never will.

Build something else.