A New Business Pops Up in Nicaragua 

On the trip from the airport in Managua to our house at Rancho Santana, Nestor updated K and me on the local news. The election went off without a hitch, he told us, smiling. Government employees were told to photograph themselves voting for the president. Not that it would have made any difference. The candidates that were going to run against him were put in jail or under house arrest. It is a one-party government now. But there are no demonstrations. The universities are open for business. The streets are open. Business is recovering, although it’s still a fraction of what it was several years ago before the crackdown.

But there is one area of business that is doing very well, he told us. That’s the business of transporting people from countries all over Latin America, the Caribbean, and even the Middle East from the airport to the Mexican-Honduran border, where they sign up with the cartels to be smuggled into the US. “They are coming in by the busloads,” he said. “Every day. They pay $200 to get to the border and then pay the cartels thousands to take them up to the Rio Grande.”

“Why are so many flying into Nicaragua now?” K asked.

“Word has gotten out,” Nestor said. “It’s an easy trip into Nicaragua and from there up through Honduras and to the border.”

“So, how many are coming?” I asked. “And from where?”

“It’s crazy,” he said. “It used to be mostly Central Americans. Now it’s every country from South America. Plus Haiti and Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. There are even people flying in from Europe and the Middle East.”

It’s estimated that about 2.5 million people crossed into the US illegally last year. About two million of them, after reaching US territory, turned themselves in, claiming political asylum. They were booked in by the US immigration service, and then given a court date to adjudicate their claim. Soon after that, they are sent in planes and buses to various undisclosed US locations. (Just in case you are wondering: About 99% of that transportation is done and paid for by the federal government by order of the Biden administration. The totality of all the immigrants that were sent to Martha’s Vineyard and NYC and DC account for less than 1% of the total.)

An Introduction to “Realitivity” 

I’m working on an idea for a book that I will probably never finish. It will exist in the library of two dozen could-be bestsellers that I’ve been working on for years. Like the rest of them, I was excited about this one when it first occurred to me. And after a few months of chewing it over, I’m still liking it.

I’m calling it realitivity. (That’s realitivity, not relativity.) As in keeping it real. It’s based on the law of entropy, which, as you know, says that everything in the universe is programmed to degrade. And that any theory or system not designed with that law in mind is due to fail. One of the fundamental insights of realitivity explains what happens when we apply the law of entropy to human behavior.

Take, for example, the behavior of Frank Abrokwa, the guy that achieved his 15 minutes of fame by assaulting a woman with his feces in the NYC subway. (I mentioned him in my Nov. 2 blog post.)

He is the dictionary definition of repeat offender. (His most recent arrest was his 45th.) And his freedom to continue to serially assault New Yorkers has been due to the city’s catch-and-release policy that has recently been fortified with “cashless bail.”

I was speaking about him with a friend. “Abrokwa is mentally unbalanced,” he said, offering that as a justification for allowing him to be on the streets all these years.

I understand the sentiment. There is a difference between crimes committed purposely and intentionally by people that know they are doing something they shouldn’t be doing, and the same crimes committed by people that are insane. The first are obviously immoral. While the latter, lacking the element of willfulness, are clearly not.

That’s the rub.

I’ve been thinking about this. And here’s some of what I’ve come up with…

Criminal law is not a moral code. It is not established to support some view of morality. (As opposed to, for example, Sharia law.) The primary purpose of criminal law is to protect the public from crime and, in cases where the crime is especially egregious, to give those people affected by the crime (i.e., the victims’ families and, in extreme cases, the public at large, a sense of retribution).

Furthermore, the concept of “not guilty by reason of insanity” is illogical. The determination of guilt should be restricted to one question: “Did the accused commit the crime?” If the accused is judged guilty, he should be subject to incarceration. Tout de suite. And the length of his incarceration should be determined not just by the severity of the crime, but also by the likelihood that he will do it again.

In the case of Mr. Abrokwa, the question of culpability is easily answered. His crime was videotaped. By my logic, he should be incarcerated. No questions asked. Catch-and-release for a repeat offender like him doesn’t work. How long he should be put away should depend upon (1) the severity of the crime, which, as a non-lethal assault, is in the moderate range, and (2) the likelihood of his repeating it, which is very high.

That satisfies the criminal justice issue. But it leaves open the question of human justice. Is it fair to treat two criminals the same way when one committed the crime consciously and purposely and the other one was obviously out of his mind?

The answer is no. It’s not fair.

So, in terms of “punishment,” how do we distinguish between them?

When, as in the case of Mr. Abrokwa, it’s clear that the criminal is crazy, the state should do what it can afford to do to give him some sort of medical or psychological treatment to stabilize his mind. But if and when his mind is deemed stable, he should not be given a “go out and do it again” pass. The length of his sentence should not be shortened. He did the crime, so he should do the time. The human justice obligation is met by treating him during the full term of his sentence.

Those are my thoughts at the moment. What do you think?

Late Wednesday afternoon, one of the Mules asked me if we were still planning to have our book club meeting at the cigar club, as planned. I replied, “Why wouldn’t we?”

He said, “Because of the storm.”

I said, “Oh, that. When is that supposed to hit?”

He said, “Tonight.”

I said, “Well, the cigar club is basically a cement bunker filled with booze. I’m going. So is Frank, the bartender. And Olio, the restaurant down the street, is delivering the food.”

He said, “I’ll be there.”

It was raining when the meeting began at six. And it was raining when it ended at ten. There were apparently gusts of wind here and there, but we never noticed them. When I went to bed, it had stopped raining. I woke around two in the morning and looked outside onto the beach. It was beautiful and calm.

Thursday morning, it was bright and sunny.

This is what happens 9 out of 10 times that we are alerted to an impending hurricane. That’s why it’s difficult for long-term Floridians to put much stock in weather reports, especially urgent ones. And that’s why we get a kick out of coverage like this:

What Are My Thoughts? 

JS, my editor, thought I should write something about the election results. So, I’ve been thinking about what I think and, so far, I don’t have any thoughts worth writing about. But I do have a feeling about the results. On both a state and a federal level, I feel a bit safer about the future than I felt a week ago. With more of a balance in the House (and maybe the Senate), there should be a slightly better chance that Congress will do an overall better job by passing fewer laws and spending less money and generally reducing their power and presence. Okay. Maybe that’s optimistic. Still, as Hem said, isn’t it pretty to think so?

What I Believe: About Gun Control

I think everyone should have the right to own a gun. Or guns. But I also believe in gun control. I can’t, for the life of me, understand the arguments against, at the very least, banning assault weapons.

The best argument in favor of assault weapons is a political and theoretical one. It’s based on the second amendment, which states that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” But the primary rationale for the second amendment was not for protection against robbery or personal assault. It was for protection against tyranny. Our founding fathers had risked their lives defending America from tyranny, in large part with state militias. They recognized that the government they were establishing could one day devolve into tyranny. To prevent that, they wanted citizens to be armed.

So, if that was the intention, and we want to hold fast to the intention, it’s difficult to argue with the right for all Americans not just to be armed, but to be armed to the hilt so they could militia-up and fight governmental tyranny.

But as a pragmatist, I can’t see that playing out in the real world.

Tyranny is a real threat. And we should be on guard against it. I just don’t think the answer is a deluge of automatic weapons.

That’s where my thinking is now. And I would be wasting your reading time if that was all I had to say on the subject. But, in researching assault weapons, I discovered something interesting. It’s something you may not know.

I assumed that assault weapons were responsible for most of the homicides in America. It turns out, that’s not true.

According to FBI data, handguns are the weapons of choice for most killers in this country. In every one of the past 20 years, the overwhelming majority of murders involved handguns. And an NIH study confirmed that, depending on the year, assault rifles accounted for between 2% and 12% of all homicides.

In the chart below, you can see that, in this particular year, automatic handguns and rifles were used in 329 murders, or about 2% of the total.

Conclusion: This is not to say that assault weapons are not a problem. When it comes to mass shootings, they are, indeed, the weapon of choice. Assault weapons are involved in more than 80% of mass killings, according to FBI data. (Interesting: The greatest mass killer in American history must certainly be Charles Cullen – i.e., The Good Nurse. And he didn’t use a weapon of any kind.) Given my thoughts on applying the death penalty to serial killers and mass murderers (see what I said about capital punishment in Tuesday’s issue), logic compels me to favor significant restrictions, including serious psychological screening, for owning assault weapons.

Three Social-Justice Trends Boosting Crime in Major Cities

In big cities across the USA, crime is soaring. Robberies are up. Assaults are up. Carjackings are up. And murders are up.

There are, no doubt, several reasons for this. Here are three:

* Cashless Bail: A solution to a political problem – the problem being that poor people, and in particular people of color, spend time in jail because they can’t afford to pay their bail. To achieve equity, those people are released after booking, without bail, so they don’t have to spend time in jail.

* Reclassification of Crimes: In some cities, many crimes that were previously classified as felonies have been downgraded to misdemeanors. These include various kinds of theft and assault, carjacking, and resisting arrest.

* Woke DAs: In many of these same cities, DAs are being appointed who believe their job is to work towards social justice by declining to prosecute crimes that they deem not to be prosecution worthy.

What has happened in these cities, some speculate, is that the word is out. You can commit all sorts of crimes without worrying about going to jail.

There may be more to this rise in crime, but these three trends are a big part of it. What’s especially vexing is knowing that a very large percentage of the crimes are being committed by repeat offenders.

An example from New York: Frank Abrokwa. On Feb. 21, he was arrested for smearing his feces into a woman’s face as she sat in a subway station. Local newspapers covered it. He was arrested, processed, and released within hours.

The very next day, he was arrested for shoplifting at a hardware store and threatening employees with a screwdriver. Released without bail.

A month earlier, on Feb. 5, he had been arrested for punching a 53-year-old man at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Again, he was released without bail.

A month before that, on Jan. 7, he had been arrested for hitting a stranger on a subway platform. He was released without bail.

Those are just four catch-and-release episodes concerning one man. But Abrokwa’s record is much more impressive than that. He’s been arrested 45 times.

Read the story here.

And watch the video here.

Feeling Low…