Schaeffer Cox is a FREE MAN!

...plus other items

Schaeffer Cox was easily the closest thing to a political prisoner as there is in America, incarcerated for a long time at the Terre Haute CMU, whose case I bugged Kim Strassel about here in October. Before Jan 6, there was Schaeffer Cox. And, according to his blog, he’s now a free man. Read his post here:

Thanks to you, I’m out of prison now. We did it together! The morning they let me go, a guard came to my cell, told me to pack up, shook my hand, told me he knows I’m innocent, then wished me luck in building a new life and walked me out the door.

Just like that – in 5 minutes –  I was standing on the curb outside the prison waiting for a taxi to the airport.

It made me dizzy.  If you’ve ever seen a disoriented goldfish dumped out of a bag into a new fish tank, you know how I felt. The first thing that spooked me was how fast everything was moving. The cars and trucks were zooming at breakneck speed. I was a little embarrassed when I got scared as we were approaching a stoplight. I thought for sure we were going so fast we’d plow into the cars in front of us. But the cab driver pressed the brakes, the tires gripped the pavement, I gripped my  seat, and sure enough we stopped! I caught my breath and tried to hide my emotions from the driver. Clearly this was going to take some getting used to.

This is the best news in weeks, and it’s not close. There was no reason for him to be in a prison for terrorists, at all. He’s got a family to put back together, but he’s free and he gets to go home. Thanks be to God. Marty Gottesfeld and the libertarian grapevine—not so much the Koch machine or the Orange Line mafia, though—deserve a lot of credit for speaking up about his case.

Where the Unsicker Matter Stands

Missouri State Rep. Sarah Unsicker has bowed out of the attorney general’s race, and called on Elad Gross to do the same:

Changes to FARA Enforcement

The DOJ is signaling changes to FARA enforcement, which raises the question of whether it will be enforced with respect to Israel. As a rule, right now, this is just not done. That might be about to change. Most pro-Israel groups operate on the assumption it will not be enforced, so if it were to start being enforced, it would be a big deal. There are probably a fair number of congressional staff who in theory could be prosecuted.

Wirecard Developments

The Wall Street Journal has a story dated today on Jan Marsalek, about how he is suspected of being a Russian spy, something covered here months ago.

Soon after payment-processing giant Wirecard reported in June 2020 thatnearly $2 billion had gone missing from its balance sheet, its chief operating officerJan Marsalekboarded a private jet out of Austria. After a landing in Belarus, he was whisked by car to Moscow, where he got a Russian passport under an assumed name.

Western intelligence and security officials now say they have reached the unsettling conclusion that Marsalek had likely been a Russian agent for nearly a decade.

Marsalek already stands accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. Following multiple international investigations, officials from intelligence, police and judiciary agencies in several countries now say the 43-year-old native of Austria used his defunct payments company to illegally help Russian spy agencies move money to fund covert operations around the world.

Also a prosecutor in Munich just charged their former CFO. From FT:

Munich prosecutors have charged Wirecard’s former chief financial officer with fraud more than three years after the payments company collapsed in one of Germany’s biggest corporate scandals.

Burkhard Ley, who was CFO from 2006 to 2017 and then worked as an external adviser to Wirecard, was on Thursday charged with fraud, breach of trust, accounting and market manipulation.

Ley was arrested in 2020 after the once high-flying payments group crashed into insolvency. He was released in November of that year after spending four months in police custody.

The charges against Ley come as the trial of Wirecard’s former chief executive Markus Braun and two other former executives continues. The trial, which started a year ago, is expected to run until at least next summer.

OpenAI stuff

OpenAI has announced a partnership with German media conglomerate Axel Springer, which owns Politico and Insider. A superweapon becoming allied with a right-of-center German publisher, in other words. Axel Springer has a speech code for its reporters when it comes to criticism of Israel.

Here’s OpenAI’s head of research:

Pope Francis on AI Regulation

His Holiness has called for a binding treaty regulating artificial intelligence in the interest of humanity on his World Day of Peace address. It’s a beautiful and conservative techno-skeptical document that gives voice to concerns on many people’s minds. Worth reading the whole thing.

One minor note about timescales here for non-Catholic readers. This reflects a certain urgency. On the trail to Rome earlier this year I met a woman involved in a few green causes, of Jewish heritage but not observant. She told me she had become interested in St. Francis and was walking because of Laudato Si, Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment. Laudato Si reflects a similar timescale to the other social encyclicals, coming about 40 years after the rise of environmentalism, about the same span of time between the Communist Manifesto and Rerum Novarum. No such lag time in the Holy See speaking out about AI. It is an urgent matter.

Random item for the week

Apropos Hannukah, which ends today, here’s a menorah from the Judaica collection at the North Carolina Museum of Art I saw a few years ago. The online description doesn’t quite match the in-person one I remember. I think I recall it saying it was Galician. The inscription dates it to 1771, one year before the partition of Poland, when they would have become Austrian subjects. The eagle looks Polish, to me, but the suggestion was that after the partition it might have been been replaced with a double eagle. The point here is the mixture of religious and patriotic expression. If you read Pieter Judson’s fairly new history of the Habsburg Empire, you will know the Jews of Galicia tended to be very pro-crown under the Austrians, given that most of their disputes were with the locals.