Nothing much happened this lazy Wednesday afternoon as America prepared for the second leg of the second Democratic debate.

Just the country’s most famous paper breaking the most bananas news story you’ll ever read.

No excerpt will do it justice. Suffice it to say: Imagine how creepy you’d need to be for this to not be the creepiest thing you’re known for.

Jeffrey E. Epstein, the wealthy financier and accused sex trafficker, had an unusual dream: He hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch…

On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists and an adviser to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it…

Once, at a dinner at Mr. Epstein’s mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Mr. Lanier said he talked to a scientist who told him that Mr. Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe. Mr. Lanier said the scientist identified herself as working at NASA, but he did not remember her name.

Epstein used to throw dinner parties to which well-educated women would be invited which Lanier thought he was using as a sort of cattle call for prospective mothers. A question I immediately regret contemplating: Was the plan to convince/hire these women to undergo IVF treatment using his sperm or was he hoping for, ah, direct deposit?

Another: Why’d he want this done at the ranch specifically, and why did he have a particular number of women in mind? He was a man of practically unlimited means. If all he wanted was to hire someone to carry his child, he could have done that with as many women as he liked and compensated them for their service without demanding they uproot and move to New Mexico.

Maybe by then he was so used to having underaged girls under his thumb that he needed physical control of prospective surrogate mothers too. Which raises another highly uncomfortable thought: Was this “seed the world” plan limited exclusively to women of age or was he aiming to knock up 15-year-olds?

That might explain why he’d want them secreted away at the ranch, out of public view.

Or possibly John’s right that Epstein really did view this as some sort of perverted science experiment, the ranch serving as his “lab.” The Times story goes on and on about Epstein’s interest, or pseudo-interest, in the science of genetics, replete with cultivating friendships with some of the world’s most eminent scientists by dangling potential investments in their research in exchange for their company. He would allegedly chatter to them about genes as well as regale them with deep thoughts such as that “atoms behaved like investors in a marketplace” or that he hoped to identify “a mysterious particle that might trigger the feeling that someone is watching you.”

Oh, and on occasion how he hoped to have his dick frozen:

One adherent of transhumanism said that he and Mr. Epstein discussed the financier’s interest in cryogenics, an unproven science in which people’s bodies are frozen to be brought back to life in the future. Mr. Epstein told this person that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen.

Given how one of his alleged victims described his equipment, you would think this degenerate would be looking forward to acquiring a new package from his new body:

His pal Alan Dershowitz recalled Epstein once chatting him up about eugenics, which took Dershowitz aback given the idea’s Nazi pedigree. God only knows what other sorts of conversations they had on this topic. “Great squash game, Alan. Oh, listen, I’ve been meaning to ask you for some legal advice: It’d be okay for me to keep a stable of human broodmares to host my seed, right?”

One more extremely dark question in this story of a dark mind at work: What did Epstein have planned for the children born of these unholy couplings at his ranch, specifically his daughters? Was he just hoping to raise a family, or did he have other ideas about how to further purify the gene pool?

It’s going to be a probate nightmare when Epstein dies without a will and his 785 children have to fight over the estate. A reader emailed us this afternoon after the Times story dropped speculating that it was a fabrication concocted to discredit Epstein as a nutcase by people whom he might implicate in his crimes. Eh. The Times claims four separate sources for Epstein’s “sperm ranch” scheme, and as disturbing as the idea is, it’s not the sort of disturbing that would necessarily discredit his memory or veracity. If you want to impeach Epstein on the stand, you’d point to the fact that he’s a convicted sex offender *and* allegedly a serial pedophile *and* a guy who naturally has every reason to lie about others in order to get another sweetheart deal from the feds on the new charges he’s facing. Sperm ranch is just icing on the pervert cake, and that cake is already well baked.