Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment national politics & policies

“The Same Lunatics”

Ross

Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump characterized a subset of federal government employees as “scum.”

While some pearls will no doubt be clutched out there among the Big Government fan base, he’s not wrong.

On Truth Social the president wrote: “I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross.”

This pardon, which readers of This Is Common Sense have certainly heard about before, was a long time coming. Ross Ulbricht had been sentenced for establishing and running The Silk Road, a Dark Web marketplace, way back in 2015.

Interestingly, Trump pardoned Ross, as he put it, in honor of Ross’s mother and friends — chiefly libertarians, specifically in the Libertarian Party. This may be the most significant thing the Libertarian Party has accomplished in years: a man is free.

Then we read the killer sentence: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.” While Trump defined the pardon as a matter of honor, the most important point may be who he is dishonoring.

But of Ross’s plight, Trump wrote, “He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”

Yes, ridiculous. Overkill. The inhabitants of permanent government were trying to send a message: they would not allow commerce outside the scope of their moderation and oversight.

Trump now sends a different message. He knows what his enemies are.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment media and media people national politics & policies

Pardon Me

Dr. Fauci, Anthony Fauci, covid, pardons, Biden, justice

Another round of presidential pardons, anyone?

At Medium, former New York Times science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr., urges President Joe Biden to “preemptively pardon Jack Smith, Robert Mueller, Merrick Garland, Brad Raffensberger, Fani Willis, Letitia James, E. Jean Carroll, Judge Juan Merchan and every judge who has ever issued a ruling that made Donald J. Trump unhappy.”

He says that “President Biden should also pardon himself,” along with “the heads of Operation Warp Speed and the chief executives of Pfizer and Moderna,” and “can’t even imagine how many political journalists . . . also need protecting.”

Is there anyone left?

“While we’re at it,” writes McNeil, “I’d like a pardon too.”

The award-winning journalist had a colorful history at The Times. In 2020, the paper reprimanded him for comments attacking Trump and the head of the Centers for Disease Control over their COVID response, declaring “that his job is to report the facts and not to offer his own opinions.”* 

And we can’t forget the primary focus of McNeil’s essay, titled: “Now Biden Should Pardon Tony Fauci.” Declaring “Dr. Fauci has done nothing wrong,” the reporter decries that “a motivated prosecutor can go after you for anything . . . can break you financially with legal fees just proving your innocence.”

Yes, we know . . . having watched it unfold against Mr. Trump.

McNeil clearly fears that Trump will become a dictator, throwing out the Constitution and the rule of law. Judging from Trump’s first term, I am not so worried. But does even McNeil really believe these pardons could survive his imagined MAGA maelstrom? 

For nearly 40 years, Anthony Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, with primary responsibility for the treatment of contagious illnesses, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. A presidential pardon would be an official admission of his guilt. 

In your own vernacular, Mr. Biden: Don’t! 

Fauci deserves his day in court. And so do we. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Then, in early 2021, McNeil resigned from the newspaper “under pressure” after complaints surfaced about him using the n-word on a student trip to Peru, for which he served as a guide.

Note: Back in 2022, Elon Musk did post on X: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

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crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights

Precogs in the Machine

pre-crime, Philip K. Dick, police, justice

Whether “predictive policing” is good or bad depends on what it means.

If it means using crime patterns to determine which neighborhoods should get more police patrols, that’s reasonable enough. 

But what if it means assuming that certain individuals may commit a crime if left to themselves? And then “preventatively” harassing them?

The Institute for Justice has just won an important victory against predictive policing as practiced by the sheriff’s office of Pasco County, Florida.

The office’s idea was to predict which residents were most likely to commit future crimes. Algorithms — or what IJ attorney Rob Johnson calls a “glorified Excel sheet” — were supposed to perform a function comparable to that of “precogs,” the psychics in the movie Minority Report, who envision future crimes.

To counter the precrime, the sheriff’s office made frequent visits to the homes and haunts of pre-guilty individuals to interrogate them and their families, “sometimes multiple times a week.” Families who objected would get slapped with citations for bogus code violations.

All that’s over with now, we hope. 

In response to IJ’s litigation, the sheriff’s office has admitted violating the due process rights and Fourth Amendment rights of the people they harassed, and it has dropped the program.

Scott Bullock observes that if the policy of harassing people based solely on guesses about what they or associates “might” do had been allowed to stand, such a program could easily have spread to other locales. 

This is much less likely now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Trump’s Libertarian Promise

Ross Ulbricht, drugs, drug war, prison, law, Silk Road

“If you vote for me,” President-elect Donald Trump promised the delegates at the Libertarian Party national convention last May, “on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to time served.”

That is eleven years so far. “We’re going to get him home,” insisted Trump. 

Mr. Ulbricht, a libertarian cause célèbre, was sentenced in 2013 to double life terms, without parole, plus 40 years. 

So, who did he kill? 

At 26 years of age, Ulbricht created the Silk Road online platform, “an anonymous e-commerce website.” Used by some folks, certainly, to trade in drugs and other illegalities.

On a Change.org petition urging presidential clemency (which I’ve signed), his mother explains: “Ross is a first-time offender” and “an Eagle Scout, scientist and peaceful entrepreneur,” who faced only “non-violent charges at trial. He was never prosecuted for causing harm or bodily injury and no victim was named at trial.”

That’s why she and many of us simply cannot stand the idea that now 40-year-old “Ross is condemned to die in prison.”

Dudley Do-Right — no. Trump to the rescue!

Indeed, it was a very smart political move, courting the Libertarian vote both by showing up and, specifically, by pledging to free Ross Ulbricht. Libertarians suddenly had a tangible reason to support Trump.

Will Trump keep his word? “I do think he’s going to free Ross Ulbricht,” Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle told Robby Soave on his “Rising” program.

I think so, too. I sure hope so. It would be refreshing to see the awesome power our Constitution gives the president to pardon crimes and commute sentences used for someone deserving of mercy. 

Rather than someone escaping justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies social media

Morbid Meme Mania

insurance, healthcare, laugh emoji, assassination

Last week’s murder — assassination — of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of Manhattan has inspired something more than a mere resurgence of gallows humor. The proliferation, online, of laughter emoji reactions to the story is unsettling, to say the least. 

Then there are the hardcore “memes” scorning Mr. Thompson’s medical insurance company and mocking his death — what are we supposed to make of it all?

Well, the virtuous response is to condemn the schadenfreude and mean-spiritedness.

But some of the jesting is indeed pointedly funny. 

“All jokes aside,” runs the best of them (from BlueSky, the left’s alternative to X), “it’s really fucked up to see so many people on here celebrating murder. No one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health and no one else.”

Which brings us to the nib of it. 

As the prospective Trump Administration puts its ducks in a row to hit the ground running in January, the “health issue” that RFKj and others have pointed to is the heavily regulated and subsidized food and drug industries, which are making us sick. The question of paying for medical care was supposed to have been solved by “Obamacare” a decade ago, but prices have only risen . . . and resentments along with them. 

The author of that BlueSky tweet and virtually all Democrats today, think the answer to the insanity of our government-regulated “private” health insurance system is full-bore socialized medicine.

Our money-grubbing leaders know that would be a disaster, but they have only kicked the chaos we’ve inherited from the terrible policy choices of yesteryear down the road.

I’m left with nothing funny to say about that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: As this episode was put to bed, the biggest update to the story was the announcement of a suspect, or “person of interest”: Luigi Mangione. Make of that what you will.

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crime and punishment insider corruption

The Pardon We All Saw Coming

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, pardon, Ukraine, China, corruption

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Back in June, after his son was found guilty on gun charges, President Biden said: “I will not pardon him.”

Now he’s saying “I believe in the justice system, but . . .”

Let’s remember the Conspiracy Theory floating around before the election.

Various cynical people, cynics I call them, declared that despite Biden’s pledge not to pardon his son, he was only waiting for the election. After the election, when the action could no longer hurt him or any Biden-substitute candidate, he would then pardon his son.

And so it has come to pass— as of last night.

I guess if you can’t get Al Capone on anything else, you get him on tax evasion. But I don’t care that much about the gun charges or the tax charges against Hunter Biden. I care about the corruption.

I care about the many millions of dollars funneled into the Biden family and the Big Guy, Joe Biden, in consequence of Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling deal-making with firms in Ukraine, Romania, and China. Millions that fell into his lap over the years only because of who his dad is. And what daddy could do — as in fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Biden family corruption.

Riding high, Hunter Biden felt he could get away with anything, including massive tax evasion.

The son can, I take it, no longer be imprisoned for any of the law-breaking we know about. Or even suspect.So maybe, thus unencumbered, Hunter can now take the stand about his father’s role in all the graft and bribery. 

Interestingly, Hunter’s pardon removes his ability to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Because he can’t be incriminated, i.e. criminalized, he can be compelled to testify. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling

A Cheating Culture

Cheating has always been a problem in higher education, but ChatGPT has caused it to metastasize.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the percentage of students at one college who admit cheating has jumped “from 35 percent in 2019 to 65 percent in 2024.” This school is not an outlier.

Teachers can see how bad it’s gotten. One professor emailed a student caught using ChatGPT to write a paper to warn that she would fail the course if she did it again. The student replied with a heartfelt apology but soon did it again. It turned out that the apology itself had been spewed by ChatGPT.

How to combat the trend? 

There are many ways if one is serious about it. Detecting prose that is ChatGPT-spawned is usually not hard. But if students suffer no real costs for cheating, as is often the case, cheating will only remain routine.

“Researchers have long documented that many students cheat at some point in their educational career,” the author of the Chronicle article explains, “and that their motivations are situational rather than character based.”

Talk of motivations is off-point. Students’ actions are “situational”-based in terms of incentives. Students come in a wide range of character, I hazard, each individual’s integrity built up by a long string of past decisions, which were, undoubtedly, influenced by incentives. When strict honesty is not taught and rewarded, and gross dishonesty not condemned and punished (with bad grades or expulsion), then even students with strong character will be tempted to cheat, and weaker students will cheat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment property rights social media too much government

The Squirrel vs. The State

squirrel, government, regulations

“Squirrel!”

In an age of short attention spans and viral memecraft, the latest cultural moment regarding a squirrel could influence more minds about politics than all the quips, speeches and gaffes of Trump and Harris combined.

The news is not hard to understand. “Wild squirrel that was taken in by Mark Longo seven years ago was confiscated after conservation officials received reports of ‘potentially unsafe housing of wildlife,’” is how The Guardian put it on Halloween. 

“An orphaned squirrel that became a social media star called Peanut was euthanized after New York authorities seized the beloved pet after a raid on his caretaker’s home, authorities said,” was Saturday’s Guardian update.

After the six- (or ten-) officer raid and after the execution, the deluge: ire and satire flooded the meme-o-sphere.

Not a few governments enforce laws against taming wild animals. One concern is rabies, though the rabies danger of a squirrel rescued as a baby and raised indoors must be preciously close to ZERO. When individuals own tigers and other predators, the danger is obvious — but certainly P’nut was not such a concern.

This is just the way the modern State operates: bureaucratically, with lumbering indifference to property rights (the squirrel was indeed owned, and housed privately), liberty (sans harm, the case to leave well enough alone is pretty clear), and common sense (Andy Griffith would not have put down the squirrel; he would have told Barney Fife to put down the revolver). 

How ridiculous and cruel government can be!

Maybe the last half dozen of undecided Americans will pull the lever, Tuesday, for less nonsensical government intrusion because of it.

It certainly doesn’t make the meddler class look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: We also mourn the passing of Fred the Raccoon, a fellow rescuee at P’Nut’s Freedom Farm, also confiscated and executed by the State of New York for the same trivial infraction of his owner: not licensed by the State.

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Forever Be Changed

Kamala Harris, power

I’ve discussed Kamala Harris’s support, as district attorney and attorney general in California, for an abusive law enabling the arrest of parents if their children miss “too much” time at school, how the law has been deployed against parents like Cheree Peoples, whose daughter has sickle cell anemia.

I’ve quoted Harris’s words.

Now I will quote more of them. But let’s also listen to those words and observe her demeanor and tone, how Kamala Harris gloats about her use of power.

“As a prosecutor . . . I have a huge stick. So I decided I was gonna start prosecuting parents for truancy. . . . ‘If you don’t go to school, Kamala’s gonna put you and me in jail.’ [laughs] . . . I said [to prosecutors] ‘when you go over there, look really mean.’

“I learned that with the swipe of my pen, I could charge someone with the lowest-level offense. That person could be arrested, they could lose time from work and their family, maybe lose their job. They’d have to come out of their own pocket to help hire a lawyer. . . . Weeks later, I could dismiss the charges. But their life would forever be changed.”

Video of Harris saying such things is part of a political attack ad about why men needn’t be prejudiced against female candidates in order to oppose giving Kamala Harris power over everyone in the country.

In the waning days of the campaign, we could do worse than to share this evidence, her own candid, joyous testimony about herself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Censors Slapped at Start

Kamala Harris, satire, free speech, censorship

Californians may now be allowed to see and laugh at “falsehoods” after all.

The Golden State legislature and Governor Newsom will probably fail in their attempt, made in open violation of the First Amendment, to ban certain parody and satire that communicates what they call “falsehoods.” (California hasn’t yet outlawed political novels.)

The battle isn’t over yet. But a court has issued a preliminary injunction against recently passed legislation, declaring that it “does not pass constitutional scrutiny.”

Cited in the ruling is this excellent insight: “‘Especially as to political speech, counter speech is the tried and true buffer and elixir,’ not speech restriction.”

Further, by “singling out and censoring political speech, California hasn’t saved democracy — it has undermined it. The First Amendment does not brook appeals to ‘enhancing the ability of . . . citizenry to make wise decisions by restricting the flow of information to them.’” Though the judge determined that California has “a valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,” the current legislation “lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”

What could such “narrow tailoring” have consisted of? The repudiated legislation has everything to do with speech that should be unhindered and nothing to do with protecting the electoral process. 

AB2839 and a related law, AB2655, were the rapid response of California’s kingpins to an effective parody video of a “Kamala Harris” “ad.” In it, “Harris” explains that she is a vacuous “deep-state puppet.”

The First Amendment protects the right to utter truth, falsehoods, and the kinds of satirical fictions and parodic exaggerations that everybody but opponents of free speech understand to be fictions and exaggerations.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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