Losing My Perspicacity, October 31, 2025

Smell ya later, (NotAndrew, you jerk

Author

Julie DiCaro
October 31, 2025

Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks for starting your day with me today.

Today is my favorite day of the year: Halloween (Or Samhain to those who celebrate). And while handing out candy to the neighborhood kids is always fun, I’m mostly looking forward to my annual watching of Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. We started watching this every year because my kids loved it when they were little, but we kept watching it because it’s hilarious and awesome. If you have a favorite Halloween watch, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I want to start today by celebrating the late Virginia Giuffre, whose righteous crusade against Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew is finally bearing fruit. Sadly, Guiffre is not here to see it, having taken her own life in April of this year. I think about how angry I get when I see pro athletes I know have been accused of harming women being celebrated by their fans — I can’t imagine how it must have felt to see the men who caused her so much pain walking away scott free. In her book, Nobody’s Girl, Guiffre recounts being violently raped by a “well-known prime minister.” While she does not name her rapist, Giuffre’s attorney says law enforcement knows his name and the allegations against him. Imagine the rage Giuffre lived with.

But at least some small measure of justice is being served across the pond in the UK, where King Charles is taking steps to strip Prince Andrew, long accused by Giuffre of sexually assaulting her beginning at age 17, of his royal title and his home at Windsor.

Britain’s King Charles took the extraordinary step of starting the process to strip his brother Andrew of his royal titles and evict him from the royal estate in Windsor, in the most dramatic attempt yet to quell the scandal over the disgraced prince’s links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

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Giuffre… died by suicide in April at the age of 41. Andrew has repeatedly denied all allegations against him.

Andrew has said for years that he’s never even met Guiffre, a claim which this picture makes highly dubious.

(By the way, if you haven’t seen Scoop on Netflix, about the infamous interview where Andrew came off like a total creeper, you should watch it ASAP.)

Anyway, Andrew will now be known as Prince of Nothing/Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and he’ll have to vacate his home at Royal Lodge. Good Heavens.

Demand had been growing on the palace to oust the prince from Royal Lodge after he surrendered his use of the title Duke of York earlier this month over new revelations about his friendship with Epstein and renewed sexual abuse allegations by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose posthumous memoir hit bookstores last week.

But the king went even further to punish him for serious lapses of judgment by removing the title of prince that he has held since birth as a child of a monarch, the late Queen Elizabeth II.

It’s the first time since 1919 that a British royal has had their royal title stripped, and last time it happened, it was over Prince Ernest Augustus siding with Germany during WWI. The royals probably should have also gotten King Edward VIII’s title stripped for possibly (but almost definitely) leaking Britain’s war plans to the Nazis. Don’t buy the BS that he abdicated his throne for love of Wallis Simpson.

But I digress! Back to Andrew and our victory lap on behalf of Virginia Giuffre:

Giuffre’s brother declared victory for his sister, who died by suicide in April at the age of 41.

“Today, an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family, brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage,” her brother Skye Roberts said in a statement to the BBC.

Andrew faced a new round of public outrage after emails emerged earlier this month showing he had remained in contact with Epstein longer than he previously admitted.

That news was followed by publication of “Nobody’s Girl,” by Giuffre, who alleged she had sex with Andrew when she was 17. The book detailed three alleged sexual encounters with Andrew, who she said acted as if he believed “having sex with me was his birthright.”

Brava, Virginia.

Now, let’s get those Epstein files released.

Before we get to the news, please take a moment to consider becoming a paying subscriber of Losing My Perspicacity. I spent hours and hours this week live-posting hearings and sharing legal developments on social media, and the only reason I’m able to do that is because of my paid subscribers. Subscriptions start for as little as $1.01 per month, and every single one makes a huge difference in my life. Either way, clicking on the ad below helps me keep the lights on here at beehiiv.

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Today: Federal judge could reinstate SNAP benefits very soon; The Senate votes to rein in Trump’s tariffs (again); AI data centers are ruining everything; and The High Note.

Here we go.

Judge Indira Talwani could restart SNAP

A coalition of states (26, by my count) went flying into federal court on Wednesday, asking district court judge Indira Talwani to save SNAP for more than 42 million Americans, the vast majority of whom are children, disabled, or the working poor.

Here’s part of the original complaint:

Food stamps were introduced in 1939, and SNAP itself was established in 1964. This is the first time the program has been suspended since then. Arguments on a subsequent Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) were heard yesterday.

Here’s part of the States’ Motion for a TRO:

The continued issuance of SNAP benefits is mandatory. Neither a lapse in appropriations nor a government shutdown alters this requirement. Indeed, for years, and as recently as four weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) consistently maintained that SNAP benefits will continue in the event of a shutdown because SNAP is a “core program” of the nutrition safety net.” Yet on October 10, 2025, USDA without explanation changed course and directed state SNAP administrators to refrain from transferring massive state benefits data files to SNAP card vendors, without which SNAP benefits cannot be processed and paid. Then, on October 24, USDA suspended SNAP benefits altogether for November 2025. It provided no explanation for the suspension, or for its refusal to use available resources to fund SNAP.

Following oral arguments on Thursday, Judge Talwani seemed as befuddled by Donald Trump’s refusal to release SNAP funds as everyone else, considering that Congress has set aside funds for this very purpose.

“Right now, Congress has put money in an emergency fund for an emergency, and it’s hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency when there’s no money and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits,” US District Judge Indira Talwani said near the end of a hearing, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the formal name for food stamps.

We don’t know when Judge Talwani will rule, but even if she finds in favor of the States, SNAP benefits for November will be delayed for some time. Please help where you can. Local food pantries are not equipped to meet this moment, and it falls to all of us to support our most vulnerable community members during this time.

The Senate votes against Trump’s tariffs

The Constitution gives Congress the power to levy tariffs, but you’d never know it, given Congress’s cowardly behavior vis-à-vis Donald Trump. Now, the Senate has finally found a backbone. Sort of.

In a series of three votes this week, a slim majority of the GOP-led Senate delivered a rare, bipartisan rebuke of President Trump's use of emergency powers to set tariffs on Canada, Brazil and other countries.

The last of these votes — a measure approved Thursday to roll back global tariffs announced by Trump in April — passed by a margin of 51 to 47. Democrats cleared the measure with support from four Republicans: Susan Collins of Maine, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and Kentucky's Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul.

"The way that the president has imposed the tariffs is leading to nothing but chaos," Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., the lead sponsor of the measure, said ahead of the vote. Kaine said the strategy behind Trump's tariff policy amounted to, "Announce tariffs on everyone, then announce that they may be suspended or delayed while I work out one-on-one deals."

Earlier this week, the same four Republican senators joined Democrats to approve resolutions to terminate tariffs on Brazil and Canada that were announced using emergency powers. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., joined Democrats to terminate the Brazil tariffs, which he argued specifically had no rational basis.

“Great!” you’re probably thinking. “The sooner we get rid of these tariffs, the sooner the cost of just about everything can come down. Right?”

Well…wrong. Although the Senate may have done something kind of right, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will not allow a similar vote to come to the House.

However, the success of this week's resolution votes, which only needed a simple majority to pass, may not go far. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., installed a special rule to block such votes in the House, so they're currently unlikely to reach the floor. Even if they were to somehow pass the House, President Trump would almost certainly veto them

This also means that, if there were a danger of the House voting on Trump’s tariffs, the four GOP Senators who voted with the Democrats would likely revert to siding with Trump.

Great system we have here, no?

AI datacenters are the anti-Christ, part 58,745

Please PLEASE don’t use generative AI. Not only is it putting creatives out of work and making terrible billionaires richer, it’s also destroying the environment and using absurd amounts of power and water.

The AI boom is visible from orbit. Satellite photos of New Carlisle, Indiana, show greenish splotches of farmland transformed into unmistakable industrial parks in less than a year’s time. There are seven rectangular data centers there, with 23 more on the way.

Inside each of these buildings, endless rows of fridge-size containers of computer chips wheeze and grunt as they perform mathematical operations at an unfathomable scale. The buildings belong to Amazon and are being used by Anthropic, a leading AI firm, to train and run its models. According to one estimate, this data-center campus, far from complete, already demands more than 500 megawatts of electricity to power these calculations—as much as hundreds of thousands of American homes. When all the data centers in New Carlisle are built, they will demand more power than two Atlantas.

(emphasis added)

I’m also one of the people whose book was ripped off by Anthropic, and I feel that if you can’t make your product work without stealing content and violating copyrights, perhaps the product shouldn’t exist.

And because I will never let this go, a reminder that Sam Altman’s sister is suing him for sexual abuse. Carry on.

The High Note

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

I promise I will stop posting videos of Jeremy Allen White doing Bruce Springsteen soon, but first, I had to drop this in:

Finally, Prima Ballerina Misty Copeland gave her final performance last week. The effect Copeland, the first Black woman to be named a principal dancer at the American Ballet Company, had on the industry can’t be overstated. Here’s her final bow:

It’s wonderful to see Copeland literally getting her flowers.

Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Watch Hocus Pocus and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Eat handfuls of candy. And have a wonderful weekend.

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