In a car park somewhere on the rugged Cornish coast, a Ghanian scammer stands shivering and confused. He has been sent here to collect the payment for 10kg of non-existent gold promised to the victim of one of his scams.
The fraudster is expecting to get £234,000 in cash. It’s a massive sum, by far outweighing the costs of the 6,000 mile round trip from the Ghanian capital, Accra.
The problem is that he has been waiting for longer than
Anthony Comstock may be the only man in American history whose lobbying efforts yielded not only the exact federal law he wanted but the privilege of enforcing it to his liking for four decades. Given that Comstock never held elected office and that the highest appointed position he occupied in government was special agent of the Post Office, this was an extraordinary achievement—and a reminder of the ways that zealots have sometimes slipped past the sentries of American democracy to
