The fall of a royal grifter

The man formerly known as Prince Andrew but in future will be just plain old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, is undoubtedly a grifter, willing to trade on his title and the connections generated by his family connections to fund his greed and lust for a lavish lifestyle. But the public revelations of his association with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his sexual relations with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a young women whom Epstein offered to him and other men, has been too much for the current king who has set about cutting him loose from the family, at least publicly.

The entitled behavior of people like Windsor is usually something that is learned at an early age. It is said that he was the favorite child of the late queen who indulged him and protected him and partially funded his lifestyle, though his greed for even more led him into all manner of shady deals with shady people. Throughout his life, there have been questions about how he and his now ex-wife Sarah Ferguson funded their luxurious lifestyle, which includes the upkeep of the 30-room Royal Lodge described as “a Georgian mansion sitting in 40 hectares of secluded grounds in Windsor Great Park” for which he paid no rent, or in 2014 to buy for £18 million a chalet in Switzerland. On top of this was the lavish lifestyle that he enjoyed.
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Judges order that SNAP payments must continue

Two federal judges have ruled that SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments that assist low-income people to pay for food must continue despite the government shutdown. The program assists 42 million people, about one in eight of the population.

John McConnell, a US district judge in Providence, issued a temporary restraining order in the Rhode Island case at the behest of those plaintiffs. They had argued that the US Department of Agriculture’s suspension of Snap benefits due to kick in on Saturday was unlawful.
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In the Massachusetts case, the US district judge Indira Talwani in Boston gave the administration until Monday to say whether it would partly pay for the benefits for November with contingency money or fund them fully with additional funds.

The Trump administration maintains that the SNAP money will run out by November 1 unless Congress reconvenes and passes new appropriations.
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Jury nullification on the rise

I have written many times before about the practice known as jury nullification, where juries exercise their right to acquit people of violating a law even if they are plainly guilty. Juries do not have to give any reason for their action but the reason juries do this is usually because they feel that the law is unjust or was applied arbitrarily and punitively or that the accused had justifiable reasons for their actions. It was because of juries refusing to convict despite the evidence and the law that we now have basic freedoms like freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, and free exercise of religion. I would strongly recommend reading this post from 2007 where I discuss how important this right of juries is and its history.

There have been other cases recently (see here, here, here, and here) that suggest that grand juries are becoming reluctant to indict people who have been targeted by Trump’s ICE thugs and department of justice. This is significant because usually grand juries proceedings are heavily slanted in favor of the prosecutor and juries tend to go along with whatever they want. There is an old joke that because of the low standard of proof required in grand juries, any prosecutor should be able to get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

The fact that so many are refusing to do so is a good sign.
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Good and bad news in international politics

First the bad news.

In mid-term elections in Argentina, the party of president Javier Milei, a Trump fanboy, won a decisive victory. Trump had blatantly interfered in that election by promising that country a $40 billion bailout package if Milei’s party won and abandoning it if they lost. Typical thuggish threats from him. Unfortunately there are suggestions that this may well have swayed the outcome so Trump will try and repeat it elsewhere.

Milei’s libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), captured nearly 41% of the vote – considerably higher than expected after a miserable spell of corruption scandals and growing economic crisis – compared with his Peronist rivals’ 32%. Argentina’s bonds, stocks and currency, the peso, surged on Monday as Milei celebrated what he called a vindication of his two-year-old “shock therapy” crusade.
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The US president had vowed to jettison his South American ally if, as widely predicted, the radical libertarian fared badly in Sunday’s make-or-break legislative vote. “If he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” Trump declared when Argentina’s shaggy-haired president visited him in Washington earlier this month to plead for economic help.

Milei’s political woes have been building in recent months, with growing public frustration over Argentina’s sluggish economy translating into market jitters and a pasting in Buenos Aires’ provincial election in September. Trump stepped in after that humiliating result, offering a $20bn (£15bn) currency swap deal and a further $20bn in support for an economy he claimed was “dying” – although the US president indicated such “generosity” would evaporate if Milei failed to win big on Sunday.

It is really quite astonishing how Trump can find such sums of money to dispose of seemingly at will.
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The possible real reason that Trump is angry about latest Chinese trade move

Trump is heading off today to attend the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Seoul, South Korea. A lot of attention is being paid to the meeting of Trump with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of that meeting because it will be held in the aftermath of the latest flareup in the tariff war war between the to countries.

I blogged two weeks ago about how China, that usually does not initiate these things, did so in this case by placing restrictions on the export of rare-earth minerals that are vital in high technology. China has a dominant position in this area, since roughly 70 percent of rare earth mining, 90 percent of separation and processing, and 93 percent of magnet manufacturing, takes place in that country.

An enraged Trump immediately announced that he would impose 100% tariffs on all imports from China to the US and that he would also not meet with Xi during the summit. His treasury secretary Scott Bessent immediately tried to downplay fears of a new trade war escalation, saying that the two countries were engaged in trade talks. Trump then later said that the 100% tariffs would only be applied in November and that he would in fact likely meet with Xi after all to negotiate. Most people assumed that this was another case of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) in action, with Trump threatening extreme actions and then backing down.
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Trump preparing military assault on Venezuela

It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump is preparing the ground for a direct military assault on Venezuela. This has been steadily building. There have long been sanctions against that country. Then we had allegations that drug gangs from that country are creating a national security threat to the US, which was used to justify attacks on at least eight small boats in the Caribbean that have killed at least 37 people, on the unsubstantiated claim that they were bringing drugs to the US. Even if true, such attacks would be a flagrant violation of international law. That this was a laughable proposition was made even more unbelievable by the fact that most of the drug flow to the US occurs via the Pacific Ocean, which Venezuela does not share a coast with. But hey, this is the US that doesn’t give a damn about upholding international law unless it is a perceived enemy country that violates it.

It may be that those attacks were an attempt to provoke the Venezuelan government to retaliate in some way so that a full-scale invasion could be justified. This is the standard practice of the US and also Israel. They attack people in their own homes and territories and when those people resist and fight back even in self-defense, they are charged with being terrorists and even harsher attacks follow.

Now we have Trump publicly saying that he has ordered the CIA to conduct covert strikes within the country which suggests that he does not know the meaning of the word covert or that the CIA’s mode of operation is to never acknowledge when and where it is operating. Trump has also ordered its largest aircraft carrier to head towards Venezuela, the clearest sign yet of plans for a potential invasion.
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Publicly admitting to awful thoughts

An Ohio man has been charged with brandishing a gun at an Ohio Wikipedia conference.

An Ohio man is facing criminal charges after he allegedly stormed a stage at a Wikipedia conference in New York City with a gun – as well as a sign declaring himself a “non-offending pedophile” – and threatened to kill himself.

Connor Weston, 27, was reportedly tackled by organizers of WikiConference North America 2025, thwarting tragedy, before police said officers booked him on counts of criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment.

The Dayton resident had evidently paid to attend the four-day conference when he disrupted its opening ceremony at 9am Friday in Manhattan’s Civic Hall. He jumped on to a stage at the venue, pointed a gun at his head and the ceiling, and expressed a desire to take his life while a sign draped around his neck declared him to be an “anti-contact non-offending pedophile”, police and multiple media reports said.
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Friday was apparently not the first time Weston had publicly labeled himself an “anti contact, non offending pedophile”. A social media video circulated in July shows a man providing Weston’s name, age and home town; applying that term to himself; and saying he can “choose not to harm minors … but can’t choose to stop being attracted to them”.
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Vote ‘Yes’ on California referendum on redistricting

Congressional districts for the US House of Representatives are redrawn after every census that takes place every decade. The next census is due in 2030. Each state has its own rules for how to draw the maps but in many states, especially those controlled by Republicans, the lines are drawn in strange ways just so that it gives a big advantage to their party. As a result, the percentage of Republicans who are elected to Congress from each state well exceed the percentage of votes that they get.

But Republicans are jittery that their current razor-thin majority in Congress will be lost in the 2026 mid-term elections, so states like Texas and elsewhere abruptly decided to redraw their maps midway through the decade to give Republicans even more seats. In retaliation, California governor Gavin Newsom decided to do the same thing in California to offset the Texas move. Currently the state’s districts are drawn by an independent commission so as to have fairness.

As a result, on election day November 4th, California voters will vote Proposition 50, a referendum that seeks to do away with the existing congressional district maps and replace it with a new one that favors Democrats but will be in effect only until the next census in 2030 requires the drawing of new maps. The referendum asks voters to essentially take a regressive step and approve a gerrymandered map that favors Democrats.
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How stupid are Republicans?

That question, rhetorical of course, is prompted by the story about the leaked texts by members of the group known as Young Republicans that reveal them saying the most awful things, a story that keeps gaining steam.

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

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Can you tell on sight if someone is sleazy?

The book Nobody’s Girl: Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre has just been released.

She was the young woman who died by suicide in April of this year at the age of 41. Her memoir reveals a horrific life of abuse and exploitation that continued right up to the end. After being sexually abused as a child, starting as a teenager she was sexually abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, passed around to their wealthy and influential friends, including the disgusting Price Andrew, like she was some kind of plaything with whom they could do as they liked. Epstein was a collector of famous people who, having no particular claim to distinction, used his considerable money (the origins of which remain obscure to this day) to buy the friendship of people whom he considered clever, famous , and influential, all this while having a coterie of attractive young single women hanging around his homes.

What is astonishing is that all these people claimed to not have sensed that there was anything amiss. But Emma Brockes, in a review of the book finds these claims of ignorance hard to believe.
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