RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/05/d-c-jury-convicts-great-grandma-for-walking-around-the-capitol-for-10-minutes-on-jan-6/

After being strung up on charges by President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), a 71-year-old great-grandmother may be thrown in jail because she walked around the Capitol for a few minutes on Jan. 6, 2021.

Rebecca Lavrenz was convicted on four counts Thursday after just three days of jury deliberation for entering the Capitol on J6. Lavrenz entered the building through an open door around 2:43 p.m., according to the official statement of facts.

Lavrenz told The American Spectator‘s Jack Cashill that she “felt that if those doors [on the east side of the building] opened I was supposed to go through.”

Lavrenz exited the Capitol around 2:53 p.m., just 10 minutes after entering, having briefly spoken to at least one Capitol Police Officer before leaving, according to the statement of facts.

Two FBI agents showed up on April 19, 2021, to Lavrenz’s home in Colorado. Lavrenz told the agents she was in the middle of baking a cake for her son and asked if they could return at a different time, according to The American Spectator. The agents returned one week later for a “consensual interview,” according to the statement of facts.

After months of investigation, agents reportedly told Lavrenz she should be grateful the weaponized agency would only charge the self-described “praying great-grandmother” with four misdemeanor charges for entering a building her tax dollars pay for.

“Glad?” Lavrenz reportedly said. “I shouldn’t be charged with anything.”

Lavrenz was charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a capitol; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol, according to the criminal complaint.

https://quillette.com/2024/04/04/innovation-utilitarianism-conor-mckinley-tesla/

Utilitarianism is currently en vogue. Two of its important contentions are that all lives have equal value and that decisions should be evaluated on how much they raise average well-being (so-called utility). This philosophy underpins many left-wing economic policies because the same amount of money has more value to a poor person than to a rich one. For example, if you take $100 from Jeff Bezos and give it to a starving artist, Bezos won’t even notice but the artist will have ramen for weeks, and average utility will therefore increase. This is probably the rationale behind Bernie Sanders’ claim that the “obscene level of income and wealth inequality in America is a profoundly moral issue that we cannot continue to ignore.” Implicit in this is the assumption that the redistribution of wealth would provide much more benefit to the poor than it would harm the rich.

The problem is that this is only true if we restrict our view to the domestic arena. When inequality is measured on a global scale, most people in the developed world can be considered affluent. If we include foreigners into our utility calculus, we should recommend very different policies: in particular, we should loosen regulations on biotech; we should oppose excessive unionisation; and we should increase the number of highly skilled immigrants we accept.

All these policies promote the most effective foreign aid programme ever discovered: innovation. Figuring out how to do things is expensive, but once we develop that knowledge, it is relatively cheap to distribute. For example, US research institutions and venture capitalists have poured billions into AI research and, as a result, ChatGPT has given every kid with access to the Internet a personal tutor that is an expert in every subject. There is well documented research to show that this effect, known as “catch-up growth,” partially explains why emerging markets grow faster than developed ones. They can just copy what has already worked for us.

Biotech

Developing countries are generally unable to invest large amounts into the research and development of new drugs. But, thanks to innovation in the US, Japan, and Europe, this has not stopped them from accessing vaccines against polio, malaria, smallpox, and COVID-19.

Pharmaceutical companies get lots of bad press for their high profit margins on successful drugs (think of Martin Shkreli). But these criticisms fail to consider the underlying pharmaceutical business model: successful drugs have to pay for all the drugs that never made it to market.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

As Americans we have choices, except when we don’t. When liberty is at risk, we have a duty to ensure that freedom reigns. In his Farewell Address (published in September 1796), George Washington wrote: “The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts – of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” There are times when liberty needs defending.

While Washington, in the same Address, warned against foreign entanglements, he could not have foreseen how the world would shrink. By the dawn of the 20th Century, steamships and later air travel shortened distances across the Atlantic and Pacific, encouraging commerce, trade and tourism. Obligations, embedded in treaties and alliances, extended beyond our borders. By the late 1930s Europe was mired in a second world war, brought about by Hitler’s hatred for Jews and his desire for lebensraum – living space. Over the course of almost six years he and his NAZIs murdered seven million Jews. At its peak, in November 1942, Germany dominated Europe. Apart from the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal, Germany’s occupation extended 2,500 miles, from Brittany east to Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and 2,100 miles from Helsinki south to Athens. As well, they controlled a good part of North Africa.

On December 7, 1941 Japan attacked our naval base at Pearl Harbor. The next day, the U.S. declared war on Japan. In his address to Congress on December 8, President Roosevelt committed the United States: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.”  Three days later, Germany declared war on the United States. Two years later, by early 1944, the momentum of the War, which in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East was in its fifth year, favored the Allies. Even so, some of its costliest battles – the invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima – were still in the future. Millions of soldiers and civilians were yet to die.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/drama-over-trumps-presidential-records-act-defense-in-florida-case/

I will have a lot more to say in the weekend column about Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s dyspeptic response to Judge Aileen Cannon’s order – which I posted about on Tuesday – requiring prosecutors to respond with proposed jury instructions to two factual scenarios she posited. Both involved the 32 felony charges of unlawfully retaining national-defense intelligence in Smith’s Mar-a-Lago indictment against Donald Trump.

As I observed in the post, Smith had to be dumbfounded by Judge Cannon’s order because the two scenarios she laid out seemed to accept some or all of the former president’s Presidential Records Act (PRA) defense. Indeed, the second scenario appears to buy it wholesale — advising the parties to propose jury instructions on the assumptions that (a) a president is deemed to have designated documents as personal records simply by having caused them to be removed from government safekeeping, and (b) that a president’s decision to designate materials as personal records (which he can keep), rather than presidential records (government property that must be archived) is unreviewable by a court or jury. If that’s the law, Trump gets acquitted on the document-retention counts.

The first scenario is better for Smith in that it anticipates that the jury may review a presidential designation of personal (rather than presidential) records by applying the PRA (i.e., reading Congress’s definitions of personal and presidential records). Nevertheless, although Trump could (and probably would) be convicted in this scenario, Smith objects to it because he believes the PRA is irrelevant to the case — the question of whether Trump was in unauthorized possession of the documents is controlled by the Espionage Act’s plain terms and the executive order that governs handling of classified documents (EO 13256, promulgated at the direction of Congress in §3161 of classified-information law). For what it’s worth, I think Smith is substantially correct about that (see, e.g., here and here).

Given Smith’s notorious aggressiveness (which the Supreme Court took note of in unanimously reversing a conviction he’d gotten in United States v. McDonnell), the special counsel’s response to Cannon was sharp and monitory.