Day 686
Value-added creative destruction
So, if acting President Trump had ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, he could not be criminally prosecuted for this official act unless he was first impeached, convicted by the US Senate and removed from office [08.06].
Legal formalists holds that whether someone is a legal cause of some harm is a matter of amoral, descriptive fact.
Legal realists would argue that, despite appearances, whether someone is a legal cause of some harm isn’t a factual matter whatsoever. Instead, they hold that it is a moral matter.
US Speaker Johnson is neither a legal formalist nor a legal realist. He is a clown who believes in The Rapture1.
Hypotheticals, retrospectives, counterfactuals and causality. A year ago we explored the democratization of the latter, which allows us to not only consider possibilities contained in data, but those triggered by data2:
Around that time, we extrapolated using a causal model that something very fishy was going on between Z’s ears and in Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. Indeed! More indictments were handed down yesterday. Too bad the world is learning about this unpleasant business today. Anne over at The Atlantic reports that attempts are being made, maybe, to clean up this big, expensive mess involving the head of the President’s Office and his friends.
Where is Oleksiy Reznikov? Who is Andriy Taran?
The Washington Post, incapable of covering the war on its own, runs an excerpt from Yaroslav’s new book, titled “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence.”
Vladimir Putin had counted on the West, headquartered in Washington, D.C., to be wishy-washy3. He and Samuel Charap were not disappointed.
The beano in Davos next week is shaping up nicely.
Mike’s church being suddenly taken to heaven to be with the Lord is referred to theologically as “The Rapture.”
The Ukraine of Why. Do no harm (January 23, 2023)
To Kill a Dragon. The wishy-washy West. What else is the Kremlin counting on? (February 14, 2022)