The News Thread
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MTG is at it again:
This is the one who commented that the California Wildfires were the result of Jewish space laser satellites. Is she really this stupid?
Speaking of that word, it was Bill Maher who said on CNN about “how stupid this country is” At the commercial break, the phones at the station were off the hook “How dare he say that!” etc. The host returned to Maher as if he would clarify or backpedal and Maher didn’t take it back!
Say what you will about Bill Maher and I will agree with most of it. But given MTG, the Ted Cruzes, the Matt Gatz and Boeberts of the world and those who voted them in, Maher is not wrong!
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Right-wing news media outlets are reporting that student organizations at Arizona State University are demanding that their administration withdraw Kyle Rittenhouse from the university.
Yeah, Rittenhouse needs the OJ treatment.
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Sadly it doesn’t even matter if he goes to college or not. Rittenhouse will get a free pass through life because he killed a couple of people and the conservatives in this country got off on it. MTG is trying to award him some congressional medal while several other politicians have offered him internships. Fox New, OAN and probably several police departments would likely bend over backwards to give him a job. Simply because he’s a figure that riles up the opposition. He’s basically the ultimate poster boy for the white, conservative male victim complex that has taken over right wing politics.
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Insane beyond words, and Eve isn’t even the innocent in that story either. Seems like they’re going with a poor oppressed woman narrative, which is…well I have no words. I do have words I guess but they may be illegal.
And why is this fucking journo calling her “Ghislaine”. Why this first name bullshit. Would he call Epstein Jeff? Goddamn idiot.
I swear the day must come when all the criminal conspirators in this case get what is coming to them.
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It’s almost as if the class interests of Capitalists do not align with ours.
Well traffickers exist in all strata of society…but the richer you are the more likely you are to get away with it.
That’s kinda my point. Shifty-eyed Bob who works in the local petrol station and happens to molest kids isn’t going to get soft-sell pieces in privately-owned news organs about how he was hard done by, because he’s not part of the right social class. But Robert Moneybags, venture capitalist with a sex island will. The same way the BBC covered for Jimmy Saville, the Catholic Church covered for thousands of priests, but they were willing to throw Ian Watkins and Gary Glitter to the wolves. Class interest, every time.
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It’s almost as if the class interests of Capitalists do not align with ours.
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Interesting quote by Dr. Fauci:
I get it that on one hand, it comes across as very elitist to say that only the medically educated can talk about the virus, and therefore many object to that type of gatekeeping.
Then again, we have some people who barely have a high school diploma to their name saying this and that about covid, challenging veteran doctors and specialists, saying things like “I’ve done my own research.
The same can be applied to the whole global warming/climate change topic.
It’s like what Sagan and Asimov said before. Here is the one by Asimov:
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Then again, we have some people who barely have a high school diploma to their name saying this and that about covid, challenging veteran doctors and specialists, saying things like “I’ve done my own research.
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What else is new?
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I saw this on my feed and it reminded me of a former coworker:
It obviously rings true in the States given the situation of the history, real estate and so on.
Anyway, I had a coworker who owned a small townhouse in Brooklyn. Now the area is being “gentrified” (something like the Brooklyn neighborhood in the old HBO show “Girls”). She tried to sell it and can tell she is being lowballed. She told them “Look. This house is about 5 minutes away from everything: the major highway to Manhattan in this direction, a few shopping malls in that direction, and the subway in that direction.” I don’t know if she sold it or not for top dollar. Oh well…
If people knew back then that the real estate of a neighborhood would shoot up in 20-30 years…
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I had a landlord in Kuala Lumpur who told me he was happy to rent to me as he didn’t want any Indians staying in his apartment.
Funny thing is he was Indian himself. I didn’t venture into the reasons for his self-loathing.
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From the NY Times:
The gun was an early Christmas gift from his parents: a semiautomatic 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun. “My new beauty,” Ethan Crumbley, 15, called it.
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Jussie Smollett testifies at his trial: ‘There was no hoax’
Whether or not it’s a hoax, Juicy Smooyay’s career is pretty much dead.
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The gun the kid used was an early Xmas present…
Also:
Tell me again where Christ said “use the commemoration of my birth to flex violent weapons for personal political gain”?
lol @ all the years Republicans spent on cultural hysteria of society “erasing Christmas and it’s meaning” when they’re doing that fine all on their own https://t.co/TOKE1SmY4C
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 8, 2021
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Yeah, today was a day for high-profile guilty verdicts:
Josh Duggar found guilty in child sex abuse image trial
Jussie Smollett convicted of staging attack, lying to police | AP News
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Good for him… going to CNN
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On Rand Paul singing a different tune:
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Looks like Omicron is ripping through the south of the UK. Highest case count for a single day and anecdotally my brother (double vaxed) has it, Dr Mike has it (triple vaxed) and another of his colleagues (triple vaxed) – who had both escaped previous infection even though they worked shifts in Covid wards. You see the double whammy there because you have 2 doctors who can’t work in a hospital for 10 days although they are dong remote consultation.
I suppose the good news is they are all reporting rather mild cold-like symptoms but I am thinking regardless of general restrictions there will be a lot of people self isolating this Christmas.
Dr Susan Hopkins, the chief medical adviser for the UK Health Security Agency, said the UK was experiencing two Covid epidemics, with cases of Delta largely flat and Omicron doubling every two days. She said the R number – the number of people an infected person typically passes the virus on to – for Omicron was estimated at between three and five.
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And on a related note, lateral flow tests are bollocks. I’ve just had to take one so I can go to a concert tonight. I’ve never taken one before, so I ordered a bunch (must have been lucky, as there were actually some available) and took one this afternoon. Wasn’t too difficult, though it did make me sneeze uncontrollably and drip snot everywhere for the next five minutes. Anyway, I was negative, so that’s fine.
But the venue doesn’t want to see the bit of plastic with the direct result of my test, they want to see an email from the government saying that I’m negative.
So I go on the government web site, tell it I’ve taken a test, and it asks if it was negative. And I answer ……. “yes”. Duh. I mean, what else am I going to say if I want to go out tonight?
And they have no way of knowing if that’s true, or even if I’ve taken the test at all, but they’ve sent me an official email I can show at the venue to say I’m clean.
It’s completely pointless. It’s farcical. I can only assume somebody is making a lot of money out of these tests, otherwise why would they be pushing something so meaningless? Knowing that people can fake their lateral flow results so easily doesn’t make me feel any safer about going into a “restricted” venue at all. Like most government rules, the effect is to limit the freedoms of law-abiding people while giving the less scrupulous an easy way around them.
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Certainly a lot of this stuff relies on good faith to some extent.
But regarding the lateral flow tests, there have been a variety of approaches employed depending on the circumstances.
I know a friend of mine who travelled internationally earlier this year and it was a requirement for them to conduct the test live on video with someone that could verify the result that way.
But when I travelled internationally recently, I just had to complete a test and send a photo of it and get certification that way – and like you say, that could be easily faked if desired by getting someone else to do the test.
Either way though, I think there is value to it regardless of the loopholes, because I think that most people wouldn’t want to game the system in that way.
Take you as an example – I presume that if you had taken the test and got a positive result, you would have been honest about it and would have chosen not to go to the gig so as not to risk spreading covid. I think a lot of people would do the same. Which is obviously a good thing and I think justifies the request for people to self-test.
Does it leave loopholes that could be exploited by someone who really wanted to attend an event regardless of a positive lateral flow result, or people who don’t want to do a test at all? Of course. But I think it’s still worth doing to minimise the risk from the significant number of people that will follow the rules and do the right thing.
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Before Rosa Parks:
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Good to see, paxlovid could make a real difference.
Yeah, but can it deworm a horse?!
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New narrative just dropped. Jesus fucking Christ, we have sure come a long way with this. And now they say covid 19 might have been created by scientists.
Wuhan lab leak ‘now the most likely origin of Covid’, MPs told
Propagating news from the Telegraph is not “working to make this madness better”
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Disgusting:
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A man in Florida
what a surprise
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New narrative just dropped. Jesus fucking Christ, we have sure come a long way with this. And now they say covid 19 might have been created by scientists.
Wuhan lab leak ‘now the most likely origin of Covid’, MPs told
Propagating news from the Telegraph is not “working to make this madness better”
Plus this particular brand of bullshit has been walking around for the last two years. Oh look, she has a book out.
Why is it bullshit? Because lab grown viruses have identifying indicators and, guess what, those haven’t been found.
The reason this particular crap refuses to be flushed is the drive for a better reason than random crap happens. It reflects a fear that, contrary to the line we’ve been told for over 40 years, we are not in complete control of our lives. (It was always total bollocks anyway.)
And a side order of racism.
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Now… even with Kamala as VP, what has the Dems done really for the people of color a year later? I know there is the infrastructure bill, handling COVID, and so many other things… But this should give you a small look at why historically minorities vote Dems and get very little in return and how the Dems take their vote for granted.
One obvious solution, which has been happening slowly but increasing with each election cycle, is to vote persons of color and other minorities into office on a local level, then a state level, and then a national level. Unfortunately, this is only going to work in states that have a large minority population, and states where the ability to vote is not stymied by the underhanded laws pushed through by the GOP legislators. It’s great that Cory Booker (NJ) and Raphael Warnock (GA) are in the Senate; it would be greater if Wilmot Collins (MT) was in there representing the lily-white state of Montana.
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Restrictions are back in my neck of the woods. New Years Eve celebrations are forbidden.
Possible projections of this damned Omicron variant have them scared shitless of the hospitals being overrun.
Might be an overreaction, but I agree with the ‘better safe than sorry’ policy.
Would be nice to have a good year, and soon. These last two have been horrible.
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While it all plays out as Dems v GOP as being the good guys v the bad guys… For people of color it really is deciding between the lesser of the two (maybe evils is a strong word).
Constantly reminded of Malcolm X’s analogy of the fox and the wolf.
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This media host named Charlamagne the God interviews from hip hop stars to politicians. He interviewed Biden when he announced he was running and we got this at the time:
Now in a recent interview with VP Kamala Harris they got into a tense back and forth over Joe Manchin and Biden.
Truth is the Dems have taken the minority vote for granted even in the elections where the minority vote was the determining factor.
Now Manchin’s name is up there, and so is the other Dem Senator Sinema who has been acting very weird and going back in her stance on a lot of the progressive messages she said on her platform when she was running.
It appears that those two Dem Senators who have been holding back progress for the Dems are the proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing.
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More resistance to science from the ignorant:
“It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot,” Sarah Palin said as unvaccinated people across the country continue to die of COVID.
https://t.co/sfHaqOdIzJ— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 20, 2021
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Omicron: That can be arranged.
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Omicron: That can be arranged.
Omicron might have to join the queue.
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Good news, everyone:
Kim Potter found guilty in Daunte Wright shooting
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Good news, everyone:
Kim Potter found guilty in Daunte Wright shooting
It’s a Christmas miracle!!
Seriously, when the jury starting asking the judge questions, I thought this was going to end in a hung jury. Very happy to know I was wrong.
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Seriously, when the jury starting asking the judge questions, I thought this was going to end in a hung jury. Very happy to know I was wrong.
I have the same feeling about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Still saying she will either go free or get a light sentence.
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the jury starting asking the judge questions
maybe this should happen more often. Many judges have grown out of touch and inflexible while on the bench(i.e. the judge in Rittenhouse case).
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A massive drop in omicronn cases today. Hopefully this will continue and it is not a one off.
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Today the number is higher again unfortunately in a lot of countries. Maybe the lull had something to do with people not getting tested on a Sunday or January the 1st
A lot of people are having problems getting tested. Free testing could see you waiting in line for hours, home test kits are typically sold out, and some places are pretty much price gouging. And if you are doing PCR tests, it may take a few days to get the results. With rapid testing, you can find out in about 20-30 minutes.
My mother-in-law had a lot of the symptoms, spoke to her doctor over the phone on Thursday, I think it was. They could only offer her a PCR test at a site the other side of Dublin from where she lives (and she’s about a 45 minute drive from here), so Laura and I tried for three days to book her one via the HSE’s online tool – both in her home county and neighbouring ones. I guess the doctor was able to get her one in her town because she got a text out of the blue the other day. By comparison I had a bad cold in July, spoke to my GP over the phone, got a test that evening.
Moral of the story is she went for the test yesterday and got the all-clear today, thankfully.
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I had to get tested last week (negative!). I went to an urgent care facility near me house. I got there about 10 minutes before they opened and there was a small line of about 20 people. About 10 minutes (maybe less) after they opened the doors, I was tested. I waited in my car for 20 minutes and went back in to get my results. The test cost $50 and was not charged against my insurance.
Christel’s brother and his fiancée went to the same place and they had the same quick experience. They had an appointment booked for the next day and that place was charging $150 for the test.
All the tests, as far as I could tell, were walk-ins. I tried to make an appointment through their app but wasn’t able to.
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PCR tests are free here, thankfully. When I went for mine they had just changed from allowing walk-ins to booking only, but you can at least book online or via your GP.
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Hmmm first time I heard about this from a msm source. Guess when something appears in the NYT quoting a scientist stuff like this might suddenly become OK to say, whereas before it made you a dumbass anti-science conspiracy theorist.
“some scientists warned that the plan could backfire, because too many shots might cause a sort of immune system fatigue, compromising the body’s ability to fight the coronavirus.”
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I saw this yesterday from the non-crank mainstream media BBC, reporting a scientist who seems like he ought to know what he’s talking about:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59865108
Vaccinating everyone on the planet against Covid-19 regularly is not sustainable or affordable, a UK vaccine scientist has said.
Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, who helped develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, said the most at risk should be identified and prioritised instead.
And prioritising the at-risk is something we should have started two years ago, as another scientist is saying in the non-crank mainstream media this week:
There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.
And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”
And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir.
“We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt,” he argues. “All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy.
“We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.”
Rather than imposing blanket lockdowns across the nation, the government should have adopted measures designed to make contacts safe, Woolhouse maintains. “You can see from the UK data that people were reducing their contacts with each other as cases rose and before lockdown was imposed. That, coupled with Covid-safe measures, such as masks and testing, would have been sufficient to control spread.”
Largely voluntary behaviour change worked in Sweden and it should have been allowed to progress in the UK, argues Woolhouse. Instead, we plumped for an enforced national lockdown, in part because, for the first time in history, we could. Enough business is now done online to allow large parts of society to function fairly well – through video conferences and online shopping. “But it was a lazy solution to a novel coronavirus epidemic, as well as a hugely damaging one,” he adds.
However, Woolhouse is at pains to reject the ideas of those who advocated the complete opening up of society, including academics who backed the Barrington Declaration which proposed the Covid-19 virus be allowed to circulate until enough people had been infected to achieve herd immunity.
“This would have led to an epidemic far larger than the one we eventually experienced in 2020,” says Woolhouse. “It also lacked a convincing plan for adequately protecting the more vulnerable members of society, the elderly and those who are immuno-compromised.”
Instead, the country should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable. Well over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain’s care homes. On average, each home got an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus, he calculates. “Much more should have been spent on providing protection for care homes,” says Woolhouse, who also castigates the government for offering nothing more than a letter telling those shielding elderly parents and other vulnerable individuals in their own homes to take precautions.
The nation could have spent several thousand pounds per household on provision of routine testing and in helping to implement Covid-safe measures for those shielding others and that would still have amounted to a small fraction of the £300bn we eventually spent on our pandemic response, he argues. Indeed, Woolhouse is particularly disdainful of the neglect of “shielders”, such as care home workers and informal carers. “These people stood between the vulnerable and the virus but, for most of 2020, they got minimal recognition and received no help.”
Britain spent a fortune on suppressing the virus and will still be servicing the debt incurred for generations to come, he adds. “By contrast, we spent almost nothing on protecting the vulnerable in the community. We should and could have invested in both suppression and protection. We effectively chose just one.”
And Woolhouse is emphatic that further lockdowns are not the way to deal with future waves of Covid-19. “Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. They signify a failure of public health policy,” he states.
Instead, the country needs, very quickly, not to be surprised by new variants and not to respond each one in an ad hoc fashion. “We
should agree a sliding scale of interventions and trigger points for implementing them. With omicron it all feels a bit chaotic. We need better planning and preparation for when the next variant arrives, as it surely will.” -
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“some scientists warned that the plan could backfire, because too many shots might cause a sort of immune system fatigue, compromising the body’s ability to fight the coronavirus.”
I think that quoted bit is nonsense (in the way Lorcan suggests). But yeah, there is a discussion on whether a fourth vaccination would make sense in other countries, as well, especially given that the next round of vaccines may then be tweaked to work better against Omicron. It’s got nothing to do with anti-vaxxer nonsense, Arjan, and suggesting that any questioning of the right way to go about things puts you outside of the mainstream discourse just doesn’t hold up to reality.
As for that Guardian article, David:
And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir.
“We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt,” he argues. “All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy.
This has been extensively discussed here last year, as there was one very well-known virologist, Hendrick Streeck, took that position. It was argued against by others, and very convincingly so. Basically, it just isn’t realistic to protect the people at risk (which are roughly a fourth of the population anyways) if the virus is running wild in the rest of society.
He makes a lot of good points where other specific measures are concerned though. But a lot of this was being discussed at the time.
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Some of these plans don’t take into account that there are a shit ton of selfish shit brains in this world who wail and scream, “Nobody, especially Gubmint, gonna tell me what to do!!!”
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Articles like that come off very click-baity to me. Of course places are looking into potential future vaccine doses and of course some scientists would be questioning if that’s the correct approach. You’re basically describing science right there. We don’t even know what the state of things will look like post Omicron surge. The US is reporting absurd amounts of cases every day. Hell, I was one of those cases and I’m vaccinated, boosted and wear masks when I go places. Still got to me.
Will this Omicron surge help us to reach some level of herd immunity? Will we need annual covid vaccines? Maybe to both, but no one really knows. Let’s let the scientists do the science and they can let us know. This media speculation only helps the media.
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A good amount of what Woolhouse describes would involve far too much actual work and be ideological poison to a “small state” government, which Johnson and co are.
If they did do it? It’d probably be a nice, fat contract for Crapita, with those who need the vaccine having to prove they do via a 50 page form. Doctor’s certification? Are you mad? The government is at war with the GPs.
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Will this Omicron surge help us to reach some level of herd immunity? Will we need annual covid vaccines? Maybe to both, but no one really knows.
This is the key point. So many people are picking this and that up with an agenda one side or another. Nobody likes the answer of ‘we don’t fully know yet’ even though that’s been the truth all the way through.
There are so many variables, evidence from South Africa is suggesting Omicron surges rapidly and then drops off and hopsitalisation is low but South Africa has a hugely different demographic to Europe and North America. Their population, like most ‘developing’ nations, is much younger. So hopefully the same pattern is seen but we can’t it definitely will.
What you are going to find and have found is some measures really didn’t work but also not imposing measures in other cases didn’t either.
The world today doesn’t like to allow nuanced conclusions. That you can’t conclude maybe a 4th dose isn’t needed but also you should wear masks. We all have to fit everything into a freedom or fear category rather than follow what data shows. To be fair to Pollard, whether he is right or wrong, he isn’t playing that part in that snippet advocating a mix of approaches.
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The other thing to consider is that we have only been dealing with COVID-19 for about two years. While we have learned quite a bit in this relatively brief time, there is still so much we don’t know and won’t know for years. While we have already seen people develop “long hauler” effects, we still don’t know what that means in the true long term. As science and technoloy progress, we will learn more quicker, but it will still take time as some things require a longer time frame to get a more complete picture.
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While we have already seen people develop “long hauler” effects, we still don’t know what that means in the true long term.
What’s interesting is that despite a bunch of people yelling about uNdErLyInG cOnDiTiOnS being the true source of COVID deaths, it looks like it’s actually the opposite. The CEO of life insurance company OneAmerica was saying this week that deaths in the working-age population were up 40% in 2021, and he thinks that this shows COVID deaths and deaths from complications of COVID are far greater than are being reported, as well as people dying from otherwise preventable reasons because hospitals are overrun with COVID cases.
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You probably won’t have heard of the band,
You’re right David, I never heard of this band, but I think they have the BEST BAND NAME EVER!!
Sorry about the news, I know how much you enjoy going to live shows and posting photos of yourself there.
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Nice to see that Nigel Farage has is publicly supporting poor Novak Djokovic.
Farage has always been such a strong campaigner for the rights of eastern European migrants
Nigel “The UK should have stricter immigration laws, like Australia” Farage.
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We’re lucky to have him
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And Andy Murray is doing some top quality slicing on Farage, who was all for both Aussie style emigration and deporting East Europeans.
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Most testing sites I’ve been to has been drive up deals and masks are always required. I’ve seen others have people wait outside or in the car until it’s time to be swabbed.
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Queen strips Prince Andrew of military roles and royal patronages
Another blow to the reputation of Pizza Express.
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I’m wondering here if this is another case of the cover-up being more of a problem than the crime.
If we take Guiffre’s account as read, which I am tended to do, it is hard to discern he’s broken any criminal law, she was 17 – the age of consent in the UK is 16. The only other legal avenue is solicitation , if he verbally offered to pay for sex, which seems unlikely as she was groomed by Epstein and Maxwell to be presented to their powerful friends.
This is clearly why they are taking a civil path and that will most likely rip apart the lies of being unable to sweat or Pizza Express. If he just confessed he was presented a pretty young girl who said she wanted to sleep with him and he couldn’t resist it would be less damaging than the shit I expect is incoming.
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It’s all going get rather nasty in court.
And the Queen is very, very annoyed with Andrew.
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I’m wondering here if this is another case of the cover-up being more of a problem than the crime.
If we take Guiffre’s account as read, which I am tended to do, it is hard to discern he’s broken any criminal law, she was 17 – the age of consent in the UK is 16. The only other legal avenue is solicitation , if he verbally offered to pay for sex, which seems unlikely as she was groomed by Epstein and Maxwell to be presented to their powerful friends.
This is clearly why they are taking a civil path and that will most likely rip apart the lies of being unable to sweat or Pizza Express. If he just confessed he was presented a pretty young girl who said she wanted to sleep with him and he couldn’t resist it would be less damaging than the shit I expect is incoming.
I’m not sure if I agree. The allegations are of sexual assault: that she was trafficked for the purposes of having sex with Andrew, that he had sex with her without consent – and despite knowing how old she was and that she was a victim of sex trafficking – and that this took place on multiple occasions (as well as in London the allegations cover incidents in Manhattan and in the US Virgin Islands).
The botched cover-up and attempt to evade the courts is definitely additionally damning behaviour, but the original allegation is pretty fucking rotten. This isn’t just a case of Andrew having had some fling with a young girl.
As far as the civil vs criminal approach goes, I’m no expert in US law but I gather that the standards and burden of proof differ significantly. So with civil proceedings you establish what happened based on a preponderance of the evidence whereas in criminal proceedings you would have to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt. It’s why you can have odd and seeming contradictory outcomes like the OJ Simpson case where he is not found guilty in criminal proceedings but is found to be responsible in the civil litigation.
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Yep, I could see republicanism getting a major boost from this. Plus she’s been funding his legal defence, that won’t be cheap.
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Yep, I could see republicanism getting a major boost from this. Plus she’s been funding his legal defence, that won’t be cheap.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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If it does pass those the most realistic outcome is settlement which happens in over 90% of civil cases and we know from things like the Michael Jackson cases is far from confirming guilt in many eyes.
There has been some interesting legal comment recently on why a purely financial settlement is unlikely in this case. For example here.
For me though the most interesting aspect of this latest development (with the removal of Andrew’s title and status) is the timing of it and how that reflects on the royal family.
Nothing has changed in terms of the facts of the case in the past 24 hours, and the royal family could have made this move at any time in the past after the allegations against Andrew became public. They’ve had plenty of time now. But instead they waited until it was confirmed that the case would go ahead, and only then did they act to diminish his royal status.
To me it shows that it’s a move of pure self-interest from the royal family, designed to insulate themselves from the potentially embarrassing fallout of the legal proceedings. They don’t give a shit about what Andrew actually did or the victim involved, they just want to minimise their own connections to him now that the shit has hit the fan.
