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fiat_lux

@ fiat_lux @lemmy.world

Posts
1
Comments
59
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested and in custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office

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  • That's fair. At the time I thought it might be because they were struggling to deal with both the Andrew situation and the Harry drama simultaneously, while Charles was generally more unpopular than his mother, and likely ill.

    But if they privately found out something that made the Andrew situation untenable, it makes sense that they would try to distance that ASAP. I wonder whether it's something that has been released already or is even worse.

    Charles' statement today on "we support the police", plus letting them search The Lodge, definitely feels like they're leaving him to rot. At least maybe a little.

  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested and in custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office

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  • Where are you hearing that? The charge is misconduct in public office, and while the initial arrest for it has been made based on sharing documents, the penalty itself can have a maximum of life in prison. Life in prison won't happen, but given they've now searched 4 properties, I don't think he's getting away with just a fine either.

  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested and in custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office

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  • Maybe, I'm not so sure. I had thought they knew it was very likely the accusations were true, but they spent a lot of time sidestepping action. If public criticism hadn't been so relentless, they might have been content to sweep it under the rug, as is tradition.

    But I have never kept close track of the royal family, largely because I always assumed they were untouchable.

  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested and in custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office

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  • They probably have to start small, it's unprecedented territory, and they'd want the proper charges to stick. I expect this also opens up the door to evidence gathering for the bigger charges.

  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested and in custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office

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  • I'm not British but I'm also very surprised. I can't help but wonder if they would have dared had he still had his title?

    on his birthday too.

    The cops took the phrase "the icing on the cake" literally, and I think it was an excellent choice.

  • World News @lemmy.world
    fiat_lux @lemmy.world

    Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested and in custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office

    www.bbc.com /news/live/c70kjr9wjw0t

  • U.S. military pushes more weaponry into the Middle East for possible strikes on Iran

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  • Why would a group of countries that includes Iran try to get the US to bomb Iran? Is it perhaps more likely that the country which bombed it 6 months ago, whose leader Trump met with last week, would like it bombed? The country that's a major weapons importer from the US?

  • Epstein files: ‘No one is too wealthy or too powerful to be above the law’; rights experts demand accountability

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  • It's not that I'm not grateful that the UN has published something about this, but when there are 3 separate caveats in the first sentence that "it's totally not us saying this officially!", it emphasizes how useless the UN is at dealing with its blessed founding member. Really disappointing while being in no way surprising.

  • The Epstein saga shows us the impotence of polite 'centrist' media – Greg Jericho

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  • How does fox news relate to this? It's neither mentioned nor one of the sources linked to in the article.

  • US build-up of warships and fighter jets tracked near Iran

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  • To cover up their own internal mess and deep unpopularity, yet again. Nothing boosts politician popularity short-term like a war - it certainly worked for Bush 1 & 2.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • I'm not convinced they know much about Japan either. The akiya banks are notoriously not updated regularly, and the sites which sell them to foreigners even less so. I couldn't find that house in the bank but it appears to be now listed by an agent. Single storey, wooden, 50 years old, in a bit of a flood zone, not even a convenience store or supermarket within a mile's walk.

    It's true Japan has a lot of empty houses, estimates are around 10%. Japan also has a culture of somewhat continuously demolishing / rebuilding houses, which is understandable in an earthquake prone area. That house isn't in the worst state for an akiya, but it clearly needs significant renovations, even before considering understandable earthquake anxiety and newer building standards (E g. steel frames) mean that houses like the one pictured aren't exactly top choices to begin with.

    Also, the inheritance tax is a progressive tax, including a tax free threshold. 55% is the top tier and you need to be talking about literally millions of USD assessed value before that kicks in. Real estate is valued at less than fair market price for inheritance and gift tax purposes too. Even the most conservative internet article commenters in Japan will condemn people for avoiding their inheritance tax obligations.

    Also no, you won't find wolves anymore in Japan, just fucking bears. The last year has been the worst in a while for bear attacks on humans, so I'm not sure the hypothetical deer population explosion is going to be a real concern. The robot wolves are scarecrows and were designed to look like wolves in the hopes of scaring off the bears, according to the link in the post itself.

    The whole thing reads like fiction with grains of "fact" scattered throughout which hopes to avoid scrutiny by being a subject matter too dry and niche to be called out on.

  • The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions.

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  • I have a few issues with substack, but truth be told, I dislike requiring handing over information to multiple services without seeing value upfront - and getting rid of obtrusive pop-ups does not qualify as value. Their willingness to platform Nazis just sealed my unwillingness into a conscious refusal.

    In a similar vein, the corporate relationship adjustments you mentioned are also steps I've taken, but I'm inclined to agree with Naomi Klein's perspective on consumer boycott being insufficient to address systemic problems. The general advice is to change what is within your power, but when you have close to zero power, does that advice then imply that you should try to do nothing or that you simply can affect nothing?

    My substack qualms and the corporate relationship adjustments topics tie in quite nicely with a phrase from your substack that has been bothering me all weekend. It critiques my usual instincts for what to do as first steps, but it also articulates a problem I've struggled with for a while: "Documentation without transformation".

    Now I'm not of the opinion that we've ever truly been able to trust the information we consume as being objective truth, but AI has certainly suddenly increased the scarcity of reliable information.

    The larger issue for me is that transformation is clearly necessary, but the scale of transformation required is so immense that it's not something I've seen happen historically without also incurring immense suffering. This is not to say that the majority of humanity isn't hugely suffering now, just that this kind of systemic change is one of those "this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better" type situations - in an acute way.

    The usual trigger for change at this scale seems to be when realised losses of resource scarcity for too many exceeds the risk of setting what's left on fire.

    So we're left with a situation where there's potentially neither reliable documentation nor positive transformation. This does not spark joy.

    I suppose my questions for you are then:

    • what actions do you think would be sufficient to effect the systemic change necessary?
    • how do you remain optimistic about this whole thing?

    "I don't know" is a totally valid answer to either too, in the spirit of acknowledging honest uncertainty.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • Oh hey. I remember this. I was confused at the time how it seemed to almost come out of left field, and how some of the names ended up on the same letter.

    Now I recognise all those names from the Epstein files, although some were only mentions rather than direct participants.

  • What do you cook when your left arm doesn't work?

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  • Mashed potatoes seems like it would be pretty hard to stir one handed, so credit to you for that. Thinner soups or things you can boil and drain would probably be an easier choice, so you don't have to keep hold of a pot while stirring.

    Things which keep their shape and that you can fry in a large flat pan and use tongs to move about, like the spam, are probably going to be much easier and safer overall though.

    If you can afford one, a mandoline that is heavy or you can fix to a surface is something that will be useful even if your arm improves, they make chopping vegetables fast - but can be risky if you're not paying full attention. I have one similar to this, but the more industrial ones are even sturdier.

    If that isn't an option, pre-cut frozen veg are usually not hugely more expensive than fresh, and are often more nutritious than stuff on the supermarket shelves. Tinned tomatoes or sauces are easy to throw on pasta too, which doesn't need any real stirring - just be sure to only cook smaller pots so they're lighter to deal with. Tinned beans are also great, my go to meal is that plus tinned tomatoes, a bunch of dried herbs/spices, and whatever veg I've got around at the time. You can fry some meat, throw in the rest, let it heat through and you're good to go.

    If you have an oven, a whole cob of corn in-husk is 30 mins. You can throw it in there, walk away, then after 30 take it out of the oven. Just gently tug the silk out from the top, which will now come out easily with no real mess, and you can then pull down the husk to use as a handle while eating.

    Don't write off microwaves either. Washing a few potatoes and nuking them for a few minutes per potato will get you a perfectly good meal base that you can load up with whatever. Microwaves are my go to for the frozen veg to help bulk out anything else I cook too.

    My speciality is not arm-based problems but I've had to change a lot about how I cook for medical reasons, so hopefully some of this is helpful to you too. Good luck and I hope you don't need to adapt for long!

  • 'Later found dead': Dem lawmaker flags explosive Trump allegation in Epstein files

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  • For anyone who doesn't want to click through to rawstory and then Twitter (why does Lieu still use this?), the document in question is EFTA00020517 (redacted version). Trigger warning for both rape and murder although it does not go into significantly more detail than the rawstory link. I think this document was from the batch at least a month ago though.

    It also claims that the coroner ruled the death a suicide even though officers on the scene said there was no way it could have been.

  • The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions.

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  • I haven't got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You've given me a lot to think about. While I don't quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they're salient and framed extremely well.

  • Waymo self-driving cars, powered by AGI — A Guy Instead

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • This snippet at the bottom of the NASDAQ link partially explains why:

    Engineered by Benzinga Neuro, Edited by Pooja Rajkumari

    The GPT-4-based Benzinga Neuro content generation system exploits the extensive Benzinga Ecosystem, including native data, APIs, and more to create comprehensive and timely stories for you.

  • What are we being distracted from?

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  • The Epstein files obviously contain a lot of information about rape and trafficking, which is very understandably and rightly in the spotlight. But what the files also contain is very detailed information about exactly how our laws and financial systems are being actively exploited to maintain the power of a select few. That is something that is much harder to write a quick article about, by design, but we haven't even seen some of these names mentioned in the media:

    • de Rothschild (with a very illustrative diagram in EFTA01114424)
    • Thiel
    • Rockefeller
    • Murdoch
    • von Habsburg

    And those are just individuals, not companies. We haven't heard anything about JP Morgan Chase, Sotheby's, Goldman Sachs... Or even the universities like Harvard.

    You can't usually pull a single short damning quote from an email for them because it's not as simple as the horror of one person raping children, but it lays the foundation of how this horror was allowed to continue at such a large scale by so many people.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • That's fair, the propaganda is intense and I often forget that my upbringing on a strict diet of cynicism is not something others have to experience.