We've just gotten word that Ghislaine Maxwell has been found guilty on five of six charges.  I the Mentor (i.e., the Happy Bachelor) asked the Heir (i.e., Tropical Soulvangelical) whether this puts to rest his fears from yesterday I channeled here into a base share, and what he said was that we can be relieved that the courts are finally starting to go the way of The Rule Of Law.  He reiterates that what he said about a post-voir dire still applies, and that it's too soon to tell whether we can put that idea on the shelf.  But one concern he had was that the defense's efforts to discredit the survivors, and by extension all survivors including those of Weinstein and Cosby, etc., would have been reinforced if Maxwell were acquitted.  Their discrediting efforts involved outright slander that survivors are somehow gold-diggers that are only in it for the money.  The conviction of Maxwell the Heir takes as the jury's rejection of that vile line of thinking, which should be discarded to the dustbin of history.  The next trial the Heir's focusing on is the Crumblies, and whether Kyle Rittenhouse corrupted Ethan Crumbley with the former's acquittal, making it look as if mass murder didn't have legal or moral consequences.  The Crumbley trial the Heir's not sure of the date on, and last check the counselors were debating with the judge as to whether to lower the Crumblies' bond or not.  But let's keep it just people, and let's keep adhering to principle, if not for anything else, the sake of the children.

We're into either the fourth or fifth day of deliberations in the Maxwell trial, depending on which media outlet you ask.  Now that it's gone on this long, the Heir's 90% sure the jury's heading for full acquittal.  This despite the judge's voiced concerns that Omicron might threaten the ability of the trial to properly come to an end at all.  But the Heir will not accept anything less than a conviction of some sort.  So until and unless that happens, the Heir wants a social discussion about whether we need to have a *socially* mandated voir dire after a given trial, the same way there's a *legally* mandated voir dire before the trial.  The two questions the Heir wants asked of jurors in a post-voir dire is a) do you believe in the Rule Of Law, and b) do you believe the survivors.  He's well aware that once a court trial comes to an end, the jurors will return to their private lives, which is perfectly appropriate.  That said, the Heir holds out hope that with respect to the Maxwell trial and the Rittenhouse trial, at least one juror may come forward from either of those trials, and talk to a newspaper, and express regret for either the verdict or how the verdict was socially interpreted.  The jurors in the Maxwell trial were instructed not to listen to media reports about the case while the trial is going on, which means that 90% of what they need to know to make principled moral decisions they were left in the dark on.  So a given juror weeks or months *after* a trial may end up doing personal research on their own to find out what important information was not admitted, and then go to a newspaper, and then say, well if I knew then what I know now after the fact, I would not have voted to acquit.  The Heir encourages jurors to do so, though albeit they need to adhere to instructions and wait *after* the trial is over.  But they need to come forward for the children and their moral development accordingly.  The Heir has comments to say about the state of socialite society after the Maxwell trial, though he's going to need to wait, because that's another topic entirely.

Something's really wrong.  So the Heir thought when we went into what appeared to be the second day of jury deliberations in the Maxwell trial.  However, the deliberations have since adjourned until Monday after the holidays.  The Heir *thinks* he saw in writing that they did just an hour on Wednesday until what appears to be communications between the judge and the jury to agree to postpone till Monday.  So that's a sum of 1 day and 1 hour, as opposed to 2 days going into a third.  The Heir *hopes* it's the former and not the latter, because he saw how the Rittenhouse trial went.  The jury in that case went into a second and possibly a third day of deliberations before declaring an acquittal.  He hasn't seen any meaningful trial analysis (yet) regarding whether Maxwell's going to be acquitted or not.  He's wondering whether he'll find it on INN, but he wants someone with authorization *somewhere* to substantively convince him with factual evidence that length of time of deliberations means nothing in terms of what verdict a given jury will reach in a given trial.  The apparent conventional wisdom is that short deliberations=Guilty, long deliberations=Not Guilty.  That seems really cut and dried, so the Heir's hoping for more fact-based analysis rather than the kind of casting of aspersions he's hearing increasingly on public radio (and sometimes INN).  Now here's the thing.  The Heir has *also* read through the Tampa Bay Times through the Wikipedia entry on Ghislaine Maxwell that if Maxwell is acquitted, she still has to stand trial to answer perjury charges, so it wouldn't necessarily be over.  The Heir doesn't know whether a Guilty verdict in a perjury trial would necessarily provide the kind of justice the survivors seek and so well deserve.  But a Guilty verdict in *either* trial the Heir thinks will go *some* way at least towards a culture of the Rule Of Law, rather than the Rule Of Snowdenocracy as per most of the 2010s, people publicly thumbing their nose with "hah I beat the rap" after a Not Guilty verdict or a pardoning, hence displaying a consciousness of guilt.

 

Chef: "Well, what's the Heir has to say for himself, Mentor?"

 

Heir: "That we are a nation of laws, not Snowdens."

 

Chef: "Well, I'm glad *someone's* jumped right out and said that.  Here are your Doubtfighters (chicken sandwich with spicy barbecue sauce)."

The Heir does not plan in his capacity at the Bland Barns Catering Counter to enforce mask usage on the part of the customers if BBS decides to do a lockdown on the account of Omicron, whose symbol prior to this base share the Heir has never seen and doesn't know what it looks like.  What also doesn't help is what the Heir sees as Covid misinformation coming directly from public radio, so who needs QAnon?  Thankfully since that's audio, it's readily obvious to the Heir when they've been less than honest when they cherry-pick both polls and studies to make both Biden and Omicron look bad or worse.  We already covered the polls bit here on the shares base, but now the Heir's hearing public radio trying to claim that Omicron is somehow invincible against all present vaccines, despite Fauci attesting to the contrary.  The Heir sees that just as bad as if someone tried to claim that Omicron is caused by space lasers.  So we can't be choosing to combat one form of misinformation and let slide another form of misinformation.  As we're winding down what's left of this year, the Heir sees public radio as only having that much time to prove they're truly different from QAnon, otherwise it'll be too late.  If they come back to him all repentant on 1/2 or 1/3, he'll just whisk them away with his hand, because they missed his deadline.

The Heir never thought he'd ever hear Julian Assange's name on audio ever again.  He thought that last year when Bill Barr decided to up the charges against Assange from computer hacking to outright espionage, those of us in need of justice against Assange saw our hopes dashed, because the Ed Snowden progressives would use the espionage charges as cause for martyrdom.  When those particular British courts ruled against our requests for extradition because of the new charges, the Heir saw the Ed Snowdens' fanaticism vindicated.  Though the Heir never gave up on justice with respect to Assange, he since moved onto more national and local cases like the Crumblies and Ghislaine Maxwell, hoping that the country would find justice there they would somehow now *never* find in the Assange case.  That may have all changed, but now the ball's in Merrick Garland's court to decide whether to extradite or not, and whether it's on espionage or computer hacking.  But the Heir sees Merrick Garland's career as Attorney General as a dismal failure, and he's unhopeful that Garland would ever do the right thing in the Assange case.  Let's look at Garland's track record here.  Deciding to defend Trump in the E. Jean Carroll case.  Taking Trump's side in the assaults against protestors in Lafayette Square.  If the Heir doesn't see Merrick Garland as doing the right thing in the Assange case, he thinks Garland should just throw in the towel and hand the job to a more capable AG, maybe someone like Neal Katyal among others.

You remember when the Heir said he's not taking prisoners anymore as of about October 15?  We think we still have that cultural update linked on this shares base, a statement of general indignation.  But the Heir's not limiting his not taking prisoners just to law enforcement and legal cases such as Julian Assange, Ghislaine Maxwell and the Crumblies.  He's taking his stance to his fellow Americans whom he believes will inevitably vote against their (and *his*) economic interests because the anti-Biden media's essentially telling them to, with those dang "polls" whose scientific health is way in doubt.  Sparing specific criticisms about those polls though for the time being, the Heir thinks his fellow Americans shouldn't knock it till they tried it on the social changes bill.  They did oppose Funny Named Care before they supported it, but the Heir thinks that if people don't give the social changes bill a chance, they'll never get that chance again possibly until some distant point in the future when it becomes apparent to the Heir that we will never have truly recovered from the pandemic (regardless of whether the pandemic itself will last or not) until we implement things such as housing reform and green infrastructure.  The Heir and I saw our entire street flooded when Henri hit, and we had to move our opera lit personal limousines to a side street multiple times first thing in the morning, so we're thinking that people who somehow don't believe that the social changes bill will mean anything to them because they're currently having to pay 20 cents more on a jug of milk than they did last year must have never had to deal with things like Henri or Ida or other weather events related to global warming.  You don't have to be a "tree hugging hippie" to know it's for real.  So, people, don't blow it, because you think you have it hard now?  Just wait until the wrong people get in next year, and you'll almost certainly end up with buyer's remorse.

Despite the Arbury verdict, the Heir is still concerned about an emerging phenomenon he calls "Rittenhousing."  That's actively shooting people for the express purpose of arguing self-defense in a trial.  We have no idea why anyone would go to the trouble, because why not stay out of jail to begin with?  What have you got to prove?  But the Heir's looking at the Crumbley case in Michigan, and he wonders if that's a case of Rittenhousing.  It would not surprise him if both the teen and his parents argue self-defense on trial.  They seem to believe that anyone should be able to use any gun in any way they feel like, that being their possible definition of self-defense.  They don't care that the parents hiding out in that one office building may be a demonstration of a guilty conscience.  But the Heir believes the Rittenhouse verdict has given license to any active shooter as long as that shooter argues self-defense, despite the Arbury trial showing what the Heir sees as a common sense refrain in the law as per what self-defense really is and what it isn't.  That refrain the Heir sees as preventing the self-defense argument from becoming a blank check or a get-out-of-free-jail-card, but don't be surprised when the Crumblies argue self-defense in court.  In other Rittenhouse news, the Heir needs to go to the Wikipedia pages on Anthony Huber and Jonathan Rosenbaum to objectively see whether the families have yet to pursue a case against the city of Kenosha and/or seek compensation from the state of Wisconsin.  He hasn't heard anything on audio about it, and he's not going to do a general web search because that'll collide him towards pro-Rittenhouse biases online.