"But I don't want your hope"

“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’

But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

— Greta Thunberg, 16, to the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland (transcript)

Thunberg continues,

Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.

Either we do that or we don’t.

Facts, precedents, and the courts

“Listening to senators and an appellate judge extol the virtue of adhering to precedent, one would reasonably conclude that most fact patterns are identical, and finding applicable precedent a simple matter of reading the law. If that were true, we could indeed rely on algorithms to mine case law and apply the law.

In reality, however, the facts of a case rarely fit nicely into precedent. In fact, no two cases are exactly alike, and when the facts of a case fit into a particular precedent, there’s not much for lawyers to dispute or judges to decide. Reading any given case gives a clear understanding that a controversy may require a judge to wade through dozens of precedents in making a decision. Not surprisingly, judges applying the same precedents come to conflicting conclusions in the circuit courts; that’s how disputes get to the Supreme Court.”

— From Robert Honig’s letter to the Washington Post, regarding the judicial concept of originalism and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s questioning of Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch. Published March 25, 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/examining-judge-neil-gorsuchs-statements-past-and-present/2017/03/24/b56893de-0f31-11e7-aa57-2ca1b05c41b8_story.html