Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment international affairs

Chinazi Repression in America

Xi Jinping, China, CCP, spying, police

“A California woman was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 4 on a charge of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government,” reports The Epoch Times. “The woman is accused of surveilling Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s U.S.-based son.”

Foreigners spying on Americans, and on other foreigners on American soil, goes back at least to 1798, when the Adams Administration kicked Constantin François Chassebœuf — that is, Volney, author of The Ruins (1791) — out of the country.

But it’s not just spying. “A Bronx man was convicted of the same charge in May, accused of operating a Chinese undercover police station in New York City for China’s Ministry of Public Security.” The Epoch Times’s article calls it “transnational repression.”

These “police stations” are all over the place. Four years ago, I quoted one source saying that there were at least “54 of these Chinese ‘service stations’ in 30 countries . . . including one in New York City.” While this all technically follows under the rubric of “rendition,” these fake cops don’t usually “arrest” and transport targets as prisoners. Instead, they threaten harm, often to relatives back home. 

The Epoch Times quotes Attorney General Todd Blanche, who says the Department of Justice will keep investigating “as long as the conduct persists.” The AG admits, however, that it’s “hard to catch because once you catch one, there’s a lot of others.”

The problem, Blanche says, is not the lack of existing laws to counter transnational repression, but that there is just so much of it and it is inherently hard to sort out.

But worth the attempt, surely . . . if America is to continue to be the “land of the free” and a refuge for dissidents fleeing totalitarianism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Eighth Amendment rights regulation too much government

Fly the Cruel and Unusual Skies

Alaska, civil asset forfeiture, property, prohibition

Sometimes, cruel punishment is the usual, as in states like the People’s Republic of China. Everybody is a victim there. But entire ethnic or religious groups of people are routinely subjected to even more cruel tyranny than most Chinese people must put with.

If Americans aren’t yet in this situation — not for lack of trying by various local, state, and federal autocrats — one reason is that instances of cruel and unusual punishment can be fought in court. Which is what Ken Jouppi is doing with the help of the Institute for Justice.

What was Jouppi’s alleged crime? He let a passenger bring “visible” containers of beer on board his Cessna 206. Why is this a problem? The number of beer cans was 72, and the destination was a dry village, so you can imagine the horror involved!

The trial court determined intent as Jouppi being “willfully blind” to the contraband, but it may be that he just failed to leap into action when he noticed the beer . . . assuming he did. 

Jouppi was punished 13 years ago, a year after the “crime,” with three days in jail and a $1,500 fine. But that wasn’t good enough for the Alaska government, which tenaciously enforces local alcohol prohibitions — it demanded that Jouppi forfeit his $95,000 airplane. 

“Although that penalty seemed grossly disproportionate,” says Reason magazine, “the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines.” 

Yes, this is a case of civil asset forfeiture, covered here for decades now.

Will the U.S. Supreme Court see reason? Regardless of the outcome, the process has also been the punishment, one that is both cruel and all too usual.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment prohibition regulation

Just Say Uncool

drug war, marijuana, prohibition, culture

Something curious has happened to the young, a new government report suggests: “the number of high school students who use marijuana has decreased by almost half — 44 percent — since states started enacting adult-use legalization.”

I’m quoting an article from September 22. In it, Marijuana Moment editor Tom Angeli repeatedly contrasts the decrease in teen cannabis use with the rise in state legalizations. “The new federal data, released on Monday, shows that 12.9 percent of high school students currently consume cannabis, which is defined as having used it at least once in the past 30 days. That’s down from 23.1 percent in 2011 — the year before the first U.S. states approved recreational marijuana legalization laws.”

Angeli reminds us of a standard argument against marijuana legalization: If marijuana is readily available, kids will increase usage of the ‘pernicious weed.’

Hasn’t happened!

But why?

It may be relevant to note that sexual activity among the young has gone way down. So has testosterone in boys; teen pregnancies are also in decline. 

Meanwhile, teen use of prescription drugs is way up. If your brain function is altered by one or more psychiatric medications, doctor prescribed, perhaps these compete with traditional psychoactive drugs, reducing demand.

Angeli insists, however, that “[p]rior research also suggests that marijuana use by young people has generally fallen in states that legalize it for adults.”

If this turns out to be true, we may have to accept his framing: a significant driver of drug use among young people is The Cool Factor, and legal drugs are not cool; prohibited drugs are. 

For decades, anti-drug activists used celebrities and cartoon characters to convince kids that “drugs aren’t cool.” 

Instead, legalization did the job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture too much government

I Spy vs. They Spy

Flock, surveillance, traffic, police

There is an argument making the rounds: Flock cameras are good because cop cams have proven themselves so useful. More transparency!

Flock cameras, you may remember, are the traffic cameras integrally linked to an artificial intelligence that tracks car license plates (and thus the cars, and drivers) that come within the cameras’ field of vision. 

The company contracts with cities and other governments. To surveil us. 

You know, “to protect us from crime.”

The fear — and I know it, because I fear it — is that this will lead to a total surveillance state where “innocent until proven guilty” has no real meaning. Watched and analyzed, our every action on the roads and sidewalks would potentially become ensnared in Big Brother tyranny.

A somewhat secondary fear is that police and other government workers — or hackers — would be able to access the database/a.i. for reasons of an, uh, extra-legal character.

And that has happened aplenty!

The latest tale comes from Sussex, Wisconsin, where our “public servants” tracked a specific person — Napoleon Jones, a Navy Veteran — after he had recorded a traffic stop that “just didn’t feel right” and had then been arrested and (understandably) filed a complaint.

While it is legal to record a public traffic stop, for some reason cops really don’t like “civilians” to record them.

In the course of reviewing the complaints, Jones’s lawyer discovered that the police had been tracking him through the Flock system.

Before you shout the now common protest of “What the Flock,” remember what we are up against: government workers using the system to defend their own misbehavior.

This is not the transparency we were looking for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights privacy

Goose/Gander/Flock

flock camera, surveillance, privacy, police

The people behind the Flock cameras that I talked about a month ago have not stopped trying to erect a total roadway surveillance state.

Pairing traffic cameras with artificial intelligence, the company behind the cameras provides a complete spy system, tracking drivers’ and automobiles every move. At least, they are trying. They have enough data to cook up a transportation profile on you right now, at least if you drive through the cities and freeways where Flock cameras are pointed at traffic.

The fact that the police with access to Flock’s database cannot keep their hands off the data is just the tip of the goosefeather. 

Musician, technology maven, and YouTuber Benn Jordan decided to test Flock Safety, to see if what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. So he registered as a journalist to attend Flock Forward 2026, the company’s swag-pushing, PowerPoint-heavy convention. But he was rebuffed: no journalists allowed. Not only barred from the convention floor, the good geese at Flock so feared exposure that they had the Hilton he had registered at cancel his reservation!

Using his technological expertise, Mr. Jordan recorded Internet traffic and open-mic conversations as well as — and this is genius — used a.i. face-recognition to answer Juvenal’s challenge, “who will watch the watchers”: he watched, finding policemen, politicians, businessmen and a former Minnesota state senator amongst the gaggle.

We are told that we have no expectation of privacy on public roads. But is a Flock of a.i.-backed cameras the kind of thing we want spying on us, tracking our every move?

While we say that “it’s only a conspiracy if they do it in secret,” what is it when the people who seek to destroy the last vestiges of our privacy demand their own privacy even as they plot against us?

Not good. That’s what.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

Deadly Shenanigans

Covid, conspiracy, cover up, crime

It has been five years since I first wrote about “The Man the Media Missed,” Dr. Peter Daszak. But this British zoologist, crucial in the funneling of U.S. taxpayer funds to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is now feeling heat from U.S. prosecutors. He may get away unsinged, but . . .

As reported here over the weekend, a man has confessed to conspiring to “evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic.” His name is David Morens, and he received two bottles of a Napa Valley red blend wine from Daszak. And a note containing two killer sentences: 

“This is the first of what I hope will be a continued series of expressions of gratitude for your advice, support, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans in my battle against your bosses [sic] boss, his boss, and the ultimate boss on the hill. It takes courage and commitment to do what you’ve done, given your job and the vindictive nature of the Administration.”

The effrontery: In April 2020, funding to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance was cut off. This is apparently the president’s “vindictiveness.” How awful of the administration, seeking vengeance for Daszak’s evading the prohibition on dangerous research . . . and unleashing a deadly virus upon the world! 

Daszak yearned for a more forgiving president, I guess.

For his part, Morens — now facing five years in prison — was more than forgiving, and advised Daszak to hide emails, also complaining that FOIA requests were “dreadful and paranoia inducing.”

Daszak may get away with his crime against humanity, but at least this fact is clear: Morens and his boss Antony Fauci conspired with Peter Daszak to bury the truth of their deadly “shenanigans.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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crime and punishment ideological culture partisanship

The Violence Is Inclusive

worried democrat, radicals, leftists, progressivism, socialism, communism

“I don’t feel safe going,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently shared about her decision to skip the Michigan Democratic Party state convention later this month. 

“I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at.”

It’s a gathering of her own political party! 

“This cannot continue, and the fact of the matter is, we have to be able to be a society where we can have intelligent discourse and debate about ideas without people being threatened,” the attorney general implored, “and certainly without people carrying out those threats.”

When people don’t feel safe, that indicates a failure of our criminal justice system. The attorney general is each state’s highest law enforcement official. So, what does it say when a state AG feels threatened? Afraid to venture out in public?

“Nessel’s declaration,” explains The Times of Israel, “comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel.”

Still, even bitter policy disagreements do not have to metastasize into hate-filled harassment . . . threats of violence . . . or worse.

“Former Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow has also acknowledged antisemitism within the Democratic Party,” the Daily Wire reports, “recounting an incident at the Democratic National Convention in which, she said, an attendee shouted an antisemitic slur at her Jewish husband while he was walking with their five-year-old daughter.”

Michigan’s hotly contested U.S. Senate Primary will end tomorrow. The fear of political violence will not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment Fifth Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Fauci Can’t Lie

Anthony Fauci, Congress, Covid, 5th Amendment

Is there any crime for which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, will be prosecuted?

The multi-millionaire former “public servant” received a full and unconditional pardon “FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in . . .” 

Courtesy of Mr. Biden — or his auto-pen.

“Biden backdated the pardon to 2014, a date nearly six years before the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 emerged,” Newsweek reported a year and a half ago.

Why? Come on, man! Because it “shields Fauci from allegations tied to U.S.-funded gain-of-function research in addition to his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, Fauci is immune from prosecution for 

  1. a decade’s worth of skirting U.S. domestic restrictions, to fund gang-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China; 
  2. for each and every lie he told Senator Rand Paul and others in Congress; and 
  3. for any other fraud — such as using his federal employees to solicit more than a million dollars in cash prizes for him personally.

So when Fauci — formerly known as “the Science” — asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times before Congress (NBC says 106), refusing to answer questions about his past role as a government official, it was illegitimate. Because on those matters, he cannot be incriminated.

“No person,” reads the amendment, “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” There can be no criminal case brought for his past lies.

But the problem for Dr. Fauci is that he can be prosecuted for telling those lies again to Congress. Like at yesterday’s hearing. 

Past lies? You’re pardoned, Doc. 

But Fauci cannot repeat his lies. That would be a new crime. 

And since he wants those falsehoods to stand, he will not speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on Common Sense:

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crime and punishment fraud national politics & policies subsidy

$100 Billion Stolen

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., medicare, fraud, hospice

Last month, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. detailed six billion dollars worth of Medicare fraud, where scamming operations were caught “chasing money from our agencies.” 

Some while willfully neglecting patients.

On Friday, he estimated that the HHS “loses $100,000,000,000 a year to theft.” This was from an interview on the Fly Zone Podcast, widely shared by conservatives on X.

“We shut down 800 hospices,” Kennedy explained. “You know what a hospice is? Where you’re going to die. Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal.” This is the context. Yet, when HHS investigated taxpayer-funded hospices in Los Angeles, “the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we’re paying $6,000 a month.”

The enormity is breath-taking: “We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients.” Some of the scams were more ambitious, involving bribery of patients and worse.

“Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe . . . were getting the patient numbers . . . stealing them from doctors’ offices.” And there were more scams, too, from members of other ethnic groups — remember Minnesota’s Somali fraudsters? 

Tellingly, after closing down the operations, the HHS did not receive “a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooked.”

Folks on the left seem oddly silent. Have you heard any denunciations of, say, greed? Or is that vice only attributable to corporations and “the millionaires and billionaires”?

This should be a non-partisan issue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Regulating Protest

Not Nice About ICE

New Jersey, ICE, protests, immigration

There are both peaceful and violent protesters outside the Newark ICE detention center. But in the last several days the violence has escalated. A cordoned-off special protest area was set up, then repeatedly breached. The city’s mayor has declared a curfew near the site, between nine at night and six in the morning.

The protesters’ complaints against the treatment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees at the Delaney Hall location run along familiar lines. New Jersey’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, says that many of those held in this private facility are in the country legally, not illegally, and all lack adequate council, allowed visitation, and medical access.

Those who are indeed here legally should not be held, of course — they should be released — and the Democratic governor is right to seek remedies for any deplorable conditions that actually exist.

But burning tires and bonfires on the streets outside don’t expedite careful review of detainees’ cases.

Some of the most noticeable protesters, you will not be shocked to learn, wear masks and have become increasingly violent towards the police who are trying to keep the peace, as well as towards the facility and ICE personnel accessing the site.

“We know that people from outside of the state have been interfering in the protests and escalating them,” the governor said at a Saturday press conference. “Five of the six people arrested last night by state police were from outside New Jersey.”

Governor Sherrill urges the protesters to “bring the temperature down.”

And she asks out-of-state activists to leave the issue to New Jersey citizens.

Meanwhile, the governor tries to place much of the blame on an increased ICE presence — rather than just the masked pseudo-revolutionaries — for the decreasing ability to ensure justice is being done in Delaney Hall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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