90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, August 21, 2023

Bjorn Lomborg said Friday that politicians were blaming climate change for disasters like the wildfires on Maui to duck “responsibility” for “failures” in addressing them.

Democratic Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii blamed climate change for the deadly wildfire that destroyed many buildings in the town of Lahaina, killing at least 96 people as of Monday, according to the New York Times. The West Maui Land Company accused M. Kaleo Manuel, an official with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), of delaying a response to a request to use water to refill reservoirs used by the Maui Fire Department to fight the wildfire, Hawaii News Now reported.

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“You maybe shouldn’t have a lot of grasses that will just burn a lot. You should adopt better building codes, not what Governor Green did, namely put it on hold because he wants cheaper buildings and you shouldn’t just have one exit road, you should have better firebreaks,” Lomborg told “America Reports” co-anchor John Roberts. “And possibly the most important thing is, you should inform people. You should not have a guy that actually decides not to run the alarm because he worries that people might misunderstand it. Most people weren’t informed.”

“And this is the crucial bit when you talk about climate change: When everybody blames climate, which is a very, very small part of the whole puzzle, you take away responsibility from all these failures,” Lomborg added. “And that’s, of course, what you really need to focus on if you are going to avoid the next fire.”

Herman Andaya, the director of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, resigned Thursday after the agency came under fire for not activating emergency sirens to warn people of the fires. The state reportedly bogged down an effort to improve electric infrastructure that would have addressed overgrown non-native grass, according to the Wall Street Journal, one of a series of decisions that may have worsened the severity of...

Visage à trois #1632

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #1285

Visage à trois #1631

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #1285

The Corrupt DoJ has Charged Trump with a Fake Crime

“It’s like murdering babies!”

So said one lawyer defending the latest federal indictment of President Trump against the charge that it seeks to throw Trump in jail for exercising his First Amendment rights. Many legal experts argue that an indictment for criminal conspiracy cannot just be about First Amendment-protected activity. Others argue that a conspiracy may include all sorts of legally protected activity, like purchasing knives or driving to the scene of a crime, but conspiracy to murder babies is a crime because murder is a crime.

The anti-indictment experts are right. The others miss the point.

First, the legal basics: a standard criminal conspiracy comprises two parts: (1) an agreement among conspirators (2) to accomplish a criminal object. For any conspirator to be liable for a criminal conspiracy, at least one must also (3) commit an “overt act” -- that is, do something -- for the purpose of accomplishing the criminal end. The overt act need not be a crime in itself, and the criminal object need not ever have been accomplished.

You can’t be indicted without specific facts alleged. You can’t be sent to trial on an indictment that just says “you violated such and such federal law.” The indictment must say how. So a conspiracy indictment must do more than merely list a provision of a criminal statute as the object of a conspiracy. It must identify a specific result intended by the conspirators that is a crime.

So if the indictment alleges an agreement to murder babies at the Blackacre nursery, we imagine that a conspirator entered the nursery and murdered the babies. Would he have violated the murder statute? Yes. Is the conspiracy allegation thus sufficient? Yes.

As if by turning a dial, we figure out which act is the one that would push the intended result over the line into a crime. To zero in on exactly what is the alleged criminal object of the conspiracy, we imagine other results and ask the same questions.

Imagine that the conspirators knocked on the door of the Blackacre nursery. Would that have been a crime? No. Can a conspiracy indictment allege only that the conspirators agreed to knock on the door to see if anyone would answer? No. Would it make any difference if the indictment slapped the label of the federal murder statute onto those deficient factual allegations? No.

The criminal end and the alleged agreement have to line up. The indictment cannot be specific on the supposed crime but wishy-washy on the agreement. It cannot say, for example, that the agreement was for “challenging an election” but the criminal end was for “hacking voting machines.”

Now, apply the law to the indictment. What intended result does the Trump indictment allege to have been the criminal object of the Trump conspiracy?

The indictment concedes that lying alone is not a crime. It concedes that neither is contesting election procedures with lawsuits. The indictment instead appears to claim that those things together, combined with urging Vice President Mike Pence to decline temporarily to count electoral votes, is the criminal object of the charged conspiracy. Pence is not alleged to have been part of the charged conspiracy -- so the alleged agreement was among others just to urge Pence to decline to...