Also on today’s menu:
Support Nonprofits On Giving Tuesday
SBF And Effective Altruism
Stop The Count!
Joyce Vance, a former United States Attorney who currently serves as a law professor and a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC, says she is cautiously optimistic that Jack Smith, the new special counsel that Attorney-General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee the investigations into former president Donald Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection and the handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago will be able to successfully pull it off without bias.
“Smith is convincingly apolitical,” Vance writes. As a prosecutor in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, he has had to make critical decisions about whether there is enough evidence and whether a defense could overcome the prosecution’s evidence. “The most important tools of the trade are ones that can only be acquired through hands-on experience in the trenches. Smith also spent time at Main Justice in the Public Integrity Section. Those folks work with U.S. Attorneys’ offices nationwide. Their life’s blood is prosecuting corrupt public officials.”
Vance also notes that, just as when Smith worked with the Kosovo war crimes tribunal in The Hague, he is joining an ongoing trial team, so he should be able move quickly forward without having to form an investigative team.
“If you’re the Attorney General, you want a special counsel who is both able and willing to bring charges where appropriate, and has the judgment to decline to bring them if they are not,” Vance writes.
Support Nonprofits On Giving Tuesday
Giving Tuesday, often described as a global day of giving, occurs on the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, which falls on November 29 this year.
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Stop The Count!
Among Donald Trump’s efforts to pull a victory out of his defeat in the 2020 election was his attempt to stop the counting of absentee ballots that would likely benefit the Democrats. Now two Manchester Democrats have asked the Merrimack County Superior Court to prevent New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan from further examining the ballots in the Hillsborough County District 6 representative’s race out of fear that the counting would return the seat to the Republican in the race.
Republican Larry Gagne had been declared the winner of the race on election night, but a recount showed that Democrat Maxine Mosely was the winner. The problem is that the reconciliation revealed “there is insufficient certainty that all ballots cast in that race have been recounted, necessitating further counting,” Scanlan said. He referred the matter to the Ballot Law Commission.
Mosely and Senator Donna Soucy (D-Manchester) filed with the court to seek an expedited hearing before the 4 p.m. scheduled recount on November 21. They argued that only one recount is allowed and that Mosely is the winner.
SBF And Effective Altruism
It seems that everyone is talking about FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. The man who aspired to be the world’s first trillionaire suddenly lost most of his fortune and his company, now in bankruptcy, is under investigation for multiple possible violations of the law. The problems have implications for the entire cryptocurrency market and even the economies of the countries that have adopted crypto.
Still to be determined is whether Bankman-Fried knowingly operated a scam, or whether he really thought what he was doing would benefit mankind under a philosophy known as effective altruism. EA is the belief that the world’s problems can be solved by taking moral actions that maximize the chance of improving the lives of the maximum number of people, based upon calculations of how each act can advance that goal.
In The Intrinsic Perspective, Eric Hoel offers an example of the type of decision EA forces someone to make:
Let’s say you’re walking next to a shallow pond, and in it is a drowning child. You happen to be wearing an expensive suit you borrowed. Do you go into the pond to rescue the child and therefore take the chance on ruining the suit that’s not yours?
In the case of FTX, the leveraging of investments to maximize wealth would enable those profiting from the trades to make massive donations to causes like dealing with housing, climate change — and supporting members of the Democratic Party that would grease the wheels for crypto, blockchains, and NFTs. (Interestingly, now that he is facing poverty and possible criminal charges, Bankman-Fried is blaming the lack of regulatory oversight as part of the problem.)
Giving Tuesday
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