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The Supreme Court reigned in state power to seize property and levy fines for criminal offenses Wednesday, unanimously ruling that the Eighth Amendment ban on excessive fines applies to the states.

Civil libertarians expect the ruling will curtail asset forfeitures at the state and local levels, a much-criticized practice through which law enforcement seizes property connected to the commission of a crime. Critics say such seizures are often disproportionate to the criminal offense at issue.

This is a huge win. The ‘war on drugs’ had spawned the pretext of Civil Asset Forfeiture whereby those who were suspected of breaking the law but who could not be prosecuted for lack of evidence would be impoverished by having their assets stripped from them on very specious grounds. Local governments have been using this as a honeypot to pad out their budgets by effectively stealing from people who they temporarily had at their mercy but who were not under the protective umbrella of the politically powerful or well-connected.

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And that’s all he really wanted. So it’s a win for Smollet, no matter what else happens.

A white person who did such a thing, of course, would have been fired and blacklisted.

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Unfortunately, money doesn’t buy votes the way it used to, even for Democrats.

Prediction: Too male, too pale, too stale. Jambalaya will get the nomination.

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You cross the Narrative, the Crust will crush you.

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She would have looked pretty silly if he had decked her for that insult.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that ‘environmental racism’ was a problem.

Well, it’s all CrimeThink.

I’d like to see somebody cut the electrical power to AlGore’s Tennessee mansion and see how long he can survive burning dung for fuel. That would be entertaining.

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An interesting piece, with a number of flaws.

I think the accompanying picture particularly unfortunate. Presumably it’s supposed to illustrate that people in ‘flyover country’ are physically unattractive, but if you add a number of tattoos and a piercing or two it could be any denizen of a Left Coast ‘vibrant’ neighborhood. Middle America has no lock on ugly.

One obvious lacuna is no mention of rich people. Rich people don’t live in the country, they live in cities; and not small cities, either, unless those small cities are right next to big cities. The rich people in Dallas don’t live in Parker or Murphy, they live in Highland Park — and so on around the country. Think about that for a bit.

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A Person of Color behaving badly. What are the odds?

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On today’s show we get deeper into the 2020 Democratic field as crazy Uncle Bernie tosses his hat in the ring. To celebrate, video of a 1985 interview with Bernie has resurfaced in which he celebrates communism and bread lines while complaining about then-President Ronald Reagan. Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to make child care a right, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wants the government to create a new third gender. It’s a woke-off.

The conventional wisdom about political campaigns is that the candidate runs to one side to get the nomination and then runs back toward the middle to do as well as possible in the election. It will be interesting to see, in a field that starts practically on the edge of the world already, how any eventual candidate is going to make it back to the fringe, much less the center.

I don’t think Trump will have anything to worry about, should he choose to run for re-election. Mike Pence could beat any of this crowd.

Steve Sailer takes a victory lap.

You can call it Sailer’s Boast: Whenever there is some remarkably dumb development flabbergasting the respectable pundits, I’ve no doubt explained the entire phenomenon years ago in various Taki’s columns.

Read it.

Last year, they claimed that there were school shootings at “hundreds of schools.” It was “an almost daily occurrence” in the U.S., some said.

This was nonsense. NPR reporters looked into the 235 shootings reported by the U.S. Department of Education and were only able to confirm 11 of them.

Read it.

I remember these. When I was a kid, I was taken to Indianapolis to get some new shoes. Spiegel, famous for its mail-order catalogs, had an actual brick-and-mortar store there, and I got to look at my feet in the new shoes.

Steve Sailer counts ’em up.

The theory of Intersectionality — roughly, that the more categories of Victim you can check, the more Victim Privilege you enjoy — has been immensely influential since about 2013.

And those points can be traded for valuable prizes.

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If you weren’t scared of USB cables before, you should be now. The O.MG cable (or Offensive MG kit) from [MG] hides a backdoor inside the shell of a USB connector. Plug this cable into your computer and you’ll be the victim of remote attacks over WiFi.

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According to a statement, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) plans to terminate $929 million in federal grant funds yet to be paid for the California high-speed rail project initially planned to connect the L.A. Basin to the San Francisco Bay Area.

In addition, the Department announced it is exploring every legal option to obtain the $2.5 billion in federal funds FRA previously granted California for the now-defunct project.

I think this is the first time Washington has asked for its money back from a state transportation boondoggle.

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The push for a border barrier marks President Donald Trump’s fourth declaration of a national emergency–about a third as many as his three immediate predecessors in their two terms.

The number of declared emergencies puts Trump on a par with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Ace of Spades weighs the merits.

Both the left and the right got Covington wrong, and then got Smollet wrong. They just got it wrong in different ways — the left got it wrong by getting it wrong, and the right got it wrong by noticing the left had gotten it wrong.

Alec Baldwin Says Trump’s Tweet Calling Out SNL May Constitute A Threat To His Family

Salon: It’s All Trump’s Fault That We Are Sexless Weirdos Fascinated By Cuckery!!!  The thought of anti-Trumpers unable to have sex just fills me with delight.

Trump golfs third day in a row since declaring national emergency on border  I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was such a thing as a Trump Golf Count. Well, you should have.

Trump must be removed with 25th amendment because he is ‘not well at all mentally’, former White House ethics chief says

Nicolas Maduro attacks Trump’s ‘almost Nazi-style’ speech after US president calls on military to abandon Venezuela leader

Nancy Pelosi defies Trump by leading pro-Nato delegation on Brussels trip  Really? Did he tell her not to go, or something? I’ve not heard anything about that.

Texas Boy Says Adults Called Him ‘Little Hitler’ When He Started Raising Money For The Wall

As Investigations Find No Collusion, Trump Haters Learn Nothing

Lefty Writer Contemplates Writing Trump Book And Making Up Salacious Details  Does that mean, more than they already are?

This Environmental Group Has Sued Trump More Than 100 Times

Newsmax’s Ruddy Hammers MSNBC for Acting Like ‘Trump is a Russian Mole’

CNN FREAKS Over NYT Item: America’s in ‘A Constitutional Crisis’ with ‘Impeachable’ Trump

Cardi B reacts to claims Jussie Smollett played a role in his assault: ‘You gave Donald Trump immunity’  No matter what, it’s Trump’s fault.

Giant statue of Trump as Warhammer warrior revealed at parade in Italy

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That sounds about right.

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The horror! The horror!

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, explains it all to you.

The main reason Amazon as a corporate entity does not pay much in taxes is because the company so vigorously reinvests its profit.  The resulting expensing provisions lower their tax liabilities, in some cases down to zero or near-zero.  That is in fact the kind of incentive our tax system is supposed to create, and does so only imperfectly, noting that many economists have suggested moving to full expensing.

Jeff Bezos has deliberately chosen a business strategy that minimizes nominal profit. That value, rather than being siphoned off by the government, goes toward increasing share value for shareholders. Look at a chart of Amazon’s share price over the last ten years if you don’t believe it. That’s why Jeff is now the Richest Guy In The World;; his wealth is primarily in Amazon stock.

Amazon pays plenty in terms of payroll taxes and also state and local taxes.  Nor should you forget the taxes paid by Amazon’s employees on their wages.  Not only is that direct revenue to various levels of government, but the incidence of those taxes falls somewhat on Amazon, which now must pay higher wages to offset the tax burden faced by their employees.

Remember that the next time that proglodytes lie to you and say that Amazon pays no taxes.

Victor Davis Hanson.

There are not enough racists left to fuel the current insatiable appetite of the anti-racism industry. So both victimizers and victims have to be invented — as we see with the Duke lacrosse lynching, the Virginia fraternity hoax, the Covington-kids invention, and the recent Jussie Smollett fraud.

Read it.

If Senator Elizabeth Warren wins in 2020, the millionaire class warrior will break the glass ceiling as the first fake American Indian to become the President of the United States. But Senator Kamala Harris is outdoing Warren as the first 2020 fake black candidate who actually is black.

Jambalaya is half South Asian, half Jamaican. She has about as much ‘black’ ancestry as Beyoncë.

Read it.

If you ever doubted that government schools run on the batch-process factory model, here’s your proof.

Unionized teachers, like all union members, are more concerned with their pay, benefits, and job security than the quality of their product.

Victor Davis Hanson does some analysis.

The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.

So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed. There are many elements to what in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history, marking the first occasion in which U.S. government bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president.

A fact insufficiently appreciated.

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Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a “reverse location” search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans.

The technique has caught the attention of civil liberties lawyers who worry such warrants — deployed increasingly by police in the Twin Cities and around the country — are a digital dragnet ripe for abuse, and that judges may not realize the technical details or broad scope of the searches they’re authorizing.

We have the technology. Whether we will be allowed to use it has yet to be determined.

Read it.

Well, he’ll have to run against the rest of the Democrat clown-car field first.

Prediction: Too pale, too male, too stale.

Jambalaya Harris will be the nominee; wait and see.

Read it.

Boy, those strict gun bans in Britain sure cut down on the murder rate, didn’t they.

In the newsreader I use (Feedly) I have a ‘category’ called ‘British News’ that contains feeds from the various British newspapers and online publications that tend to have stuff in which I’m interested.

Ordinarily this would be an overwhelming amount of information to work through every day, but I’ve developed a method of filtering that gets rid of all the uninteresting stuff merely by looking at the accompanying photograph (British news sources are pretty conscientious about including at least one photograph in their stories).

1. Skip anything that has a picture of athletes (typically football/soccer players, but also cricket and American football–not the games, but the Colin-Kaepernick-style controversies).
2. Skip anything that has a picture of a member of the Royal Family. (Usually just ginned-up clickbait gossip; the Daily Mail and Express are especially bad about this.)
3. Skip anything that has a picture of a British politician that I recognize. (Theresa May and Jeremy Corbin are the poster children here, but I recognize a somewhat-frightening number of British political players;Diane Abbot proves that the ugly-fat-black-female-diversity-politician disease is starting to infect the Old Country.)
4. Skip anything that has a picture of crowds carrying protest signs in English. (You’d be astonished at the number of ‘demonstrations’ occurring in places that don’t speak English but carry English protest signs; Arabs and Africans are pretty dependable about that.)

This weeds out about 90% of the junk, and the rest is pretty manageable. (I must admit that I’m a sucker for a Trump Derangement story, and The Independent, despite its name, is a fruitful source for those.)

David Cole is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Here’s a puzzler for you…a real brainteaser in the age of leftist “science” (a.k.a. the Golden Age of Unreason): Is actor Antonio Banderas, born and raised in Málaga, Spain, a person of color? See, the great thing about leftist science is that it leaves out the science. Leftists use race to determine who gets a college education (and even who gets into middle school), who gets hired in the public and private sectors, who wins government contracts, and who gets to speak their mind on social media. But the left’s concept of race is fluid. Truth is, there’s absolutely no agreement on whether or not Banderas is a POC. He’s “Hispanic,” to be sure (being Spanish tends to do that to a person). Málaga is just a brisk swim across the Alboran from Morocco. Black-haired greaseballs from Morocco are people of color. Black-haired greaseballs from the other shore are, well, maybe people of color, maybe not. Black-haired greaseballs from Sicily are white, but regarding Spaniards, the matter is up for debate.

The gathering of Pokemon Victim Points is fraught with uncertainty.

Read it.

What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses?

Apparently the psychic benefits are quite formidable.

You hear ex-professors say it all the time and I’ll add to the chorus:  despite nagging precariousness, there’s something profoundly liberating about leaving academe, whereupon you are no longer obliged to give a shit about fashionable thinkers, network at the planet’s most boring parties, or quantify self-worth for scurrilous committees (and whereupon you are free to ignore the latest same-old controversy), for even when you know at the time that the place is toxic, only after you exit (spiritually, not physically) and write an essay or read a novel or complete some other task without considering its relevance to the fascist gods of assessment, or its irrelevance to a gang of cynical senior colleagues, do you realize exactly how insidious and pervasive is the industry’s culture of social control.

John Yoo, who knows more about this stuff than I do.

John is currently a law professor at UC Berkeley, and is famous for pointing out how it’s legal to do stuff that set proglodytes’ hair on fire, such as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ during the Bush administration. He has the usual Harvard/Yale credentials that you would expect.

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An inconvenient scientific fact for the climate alarmist industry is that industrial carbon dioxide turns out to be plant food. The burning of fossil fuels to generate electrical power has not only led to dramatic economic growth, and hence the wealth that buys health and life expectancy. It also has led to a greening of the planet by carbon dioxide, an inert, non-polluting byproduct of combustion.

The fossil-fuel-driven 45 percent increase in CO2 levels since 1900 from a bit less than three percent of one percent of the atmosphere to a bit more than four percent of one percent has increased plant growth by at least 15 percent and perhaps as much as a third.

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The battle-lines between Real Women and Fake Women seem to be firming up.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Coalition of the Fringes is that everyone is willing to buy into the fantasies of their fellow Coalitioners unless and until their own ox starts getting gored, at which juncture the battle for Pokemon Victim Points gets serious. One never knows how the More Victimized Than Thou contest will turn out.

Don Cheadle mocks Donald Trump’s alleged Russia links as he hosts Saturday Night Live for the first time  I’d be more impressed if I’d ever heard of Don Cheadle.

William Hurd on “Face the Nation” says 1,000 Texas farmers could have land seized to build Trump’s border wall  What is it that CNN likes to add — ‘without evidence’?

Alec Baldwin suggests Trump’s latest attack on ‘SNL’ could be ‘a threat to my safety’

CNN Mocks Trump for Eating Omelet During Border Emergency  Scraaaaaaaape that barrel….

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Supports Use Of 25th Amendment To Sink Trump  Because TRUMP.

Tennessee Man Allegedly Pulls Gun On Sam’s Club Customer For Wearing MAGA Hat

Lynching America: Jussie Smollett and the Prejudice of Anti-Trump Hatred

Alec Baldwin Goes Full Snowflake: Trump Tweet ‘A Threat to My Safety?’

Alec Baldwin says Trump’s latest attack on Saturday Night Live is ‘a threat to my safety’

Trump doesn’t understand his base  And apparently some Brit named ‘Musa al-Garbhi’ does. I see. It’s all clear now.

Adam Schiff: Evidence of Trump-Russia collusion evidence ‘in plain sight’, says senior Democrat  So where are the indictments? Eh? Eh?

Morning Joe Insists Trump Is A Putin Puppet, Laments That Public Does Not Trust McCabe  So I wonder what Putin has in mind imposing those sanctions on himself?

Can Trump Handle a Foreign Crisis?  Peggy Noonan reveals that she still doesn’t get Trump. We haven’t had a foreign crisis because foreign leaders don’t dare provoke Trump. Having a reputation for being crazy is valuable.

WashPost’s Capehart: Smollett Story Fit ‘Narrative’ of Trump ‘Menace’  Too good not to be true.

Read it.

‘Lifelong Republicans’ don’t try to run a coup against a Republican President.

People who are reported by the DOJ IG for lying under oath (which is what got him fired) don’t have a ‘sterling’ career.

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This, this is the world that we live in.

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No good show goes uncanceled.

To be fair, The Punisher went all PC/SJW for the second season and people understandably bailed.

UPDATE: Jessica Jones and The Punisher cancelled – what went wrong for Netflix and Marvel?

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Mainly by quoting them? I’m not sure what the basis is for the complaint here.

They’re also racist, anti-Semitic, and congenitally corrupt. Maybe we can add that into the mix somehow.

John C. Wright does a comprehensive list — roughly 200.

I agree with Jim Goad that whenever I hear about a ‘hate crime’ I presume it’s a hoax unless I see solid proof otherwise.

UPDATE: Here’s A List Of Hoax ‘Hate Crimes’ In The Trump Era

Read it.

Good constitutional arguments can be made for and against President Trump’s evocation of emergency powers to address the crisis at our southern border.  But the notion that such a declaration would encourage a future Democratic president to do something similar borders on the comic.  Democrats don’t need encouragement.

Under President Barack Obama, the Constitution was violated more wantonly than a goat at a Taliban bachelor party, and the faithful cheered every violation.

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Apparently this is a Hollywood archetype. We’re all in a 1930s rom-com.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a stock character first classified by Nathan Rabin in a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, a film he described as “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy.” “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” he wrote, “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

You could just as easily call her Tinkerbell: When you wish upon a star/Your dreams come true.

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Nine years ago, Riman, a distinguished professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering, invented an energy-efficient technology that harnesses largely low-temperature, water-based reactions. As a result, he and his team can make things in water that previously were made at temperatures well above those required to thermally decompose plastics.

So far, the revolutionary technology has been used to make more than 30 different materials, including concrete that stores carbon dioxide, the prime greenhouse gas linked to climate change. Other materials include multiple families of composites that incorporate a wide range of metals, polymers and ceramics whose behavior can be processed to resemble wood, bone, seashells and even steel.

Ordinarily, when I see a product described as being ‘eco-friendly’ I ignore it, but in this case I’ll make an exception.

I guess you have to call something ‘eco-friendly’ these days in order to get any attention.

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Most people don’t spend much time thinking about Algeria, but the problems that they are experiencing are much the same as those that other ‘hird World countries are experiencing. Their governmental institutions are sufficiently defective that there is almost no economic opportunity for anyone outside of the golden circle of those who can leech off of government office. Any one with any talent, and certainly anyone who manages to get some sort of education, is faced with the choice of sitting at home and rotting or leaving the country for opportunity in a First World nation. As a result, the homeland never makes any progress.

John C. Wright, SF author, on Heinlein’s view of the future.

What Heinlein failed to predict was that the Crazy Years would simply continue up through 2010, with no sign of slackening. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in the Crazy Years.

We do indeed.

While Heinlein (as far as I know) supplied no rationale for the advent and the recession of the craziness in the Crazy Years, A. E. van Vogt was freer with is speculations: insanity, either of individuals or of peoples, in van Vogt’s stories (and perhaps in the theories of I. B. Korzybski, who discovered or invented General Semantics) is caused by a fracture or disjunction between symbol and object. When your thoughts, and the thing about which you think, do not match up on a cognitive level, that is a falsehood, a false belief. When the emotions associated with the thought do not match to the thing about which you think, that is a false-to-facts association, which can range from merely a mistake to neurosis to psychosis, depending on the severity of the disjunction. You are crazy. If you hate your sister because she reminds you of your mother who beat you, that association is false-to-facts, neurotic. If you hate your sister because you have hallucinated that you are Cinderella, that association is falser-to-facts, more removed from reality, possibly psychotic.

Scott Adams makes this point repeatedly in his Periscope broadcasts, which are well worth watching every day in order to keep one’s mind on an even keel.

Ace of Spades boils it down.

Good morning kids. Start of a new week and the lead story continues to be immigration and border security in the wake of the President’s signing of the CR monstrosity that allowed the government to remain open (G-d forbid it shouldn’t, right?) while providing some funds for the building of the border wall, along with his simultaneous declaration of a national emergency to use his executive authority to appropriate funds from other agencies. Except within the over 1,100-page monstrosity are thousands of tiny time pills that actually prevent even a shovelful of dirt from being dug, adequate funds or not. I don’t know; Trump is boastful as ever that it’s going to get done but frankly, I don’t see how. From a political standpoint, I would have preferred him vetoing the bill and then forcing Congress – Democrats and GOP-e alike – to override him and then letting them take full blame for this. Beyond that, the insanity of our national debt as well as the size and scope of the feral Federal government are travesties in and of themselves, as well as the lifeblood of the very swamp that the President set out to drain.

That pretty much sums it up. The ‘compromise’ funding provision for the Border Wall had, as a number have pointed out, two poison pills: one giving each of the communities along the southern border (almost all of which are Democrat to their core) an effective veto over whether any barrier gets built in their area, and one that effectively requires catch-and-release for any illegal immigrant that can with a straight face claim ‘sponsorship’ of an unaccompanied illegal immigrant child. That very clever Democrat legislators inserted these into the provision in order to render it useless is pretty obvious; that Republicans were either too stupid or too lazy to excise them is also pretty obvious.

The reason that Democrats, for all their flaws, keep winning is because the Republicans keep living down to their reputation as The Stupid Party, at least as reflected in the people that wind up in Washington. Is it any wonder that those who are inclined to vote Republican after a while just throw up their hands and say, ‘Why bother’?

Read it.

Scott Adams has been making this point for some time now: The structure of the modern Democrat party makes it almost impossible for their Presidential nominee to be either white or male, even though that might be there best shot at beating Trump in 2020.