forfeitures

I first heard about these property seizures maybe ten years ago.  I remember being shocked wondering how is this legal.  It began with drugs but now it includes anything.  If your kid borrows your car and drives down to the corner to buy some weed and gets busted they can take your car, not as evidence, but take your car period.  It is considered something that is used to commit a crime and therefore something to be confiscated and the cops can keep it or sell it in the greater cause of the war on drugs, or just crime, or just because they want a spiffy car to cruise around in,  They don't have to actually charge you to keep your stuff.  It's a local law and some police departments in small towns use it to fund their police departments.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture

One of the many reasons I didn't like Kavenaugh is that he is a fan of this law.  I am no constitutional scholar but it seems to me that isn't there an amendment against the gummint seizing your property?  I think it was originally fueled by the anti drug hysteria.  Gambling is seen by many as good clean fun, and there is always the prostitute with the heart of gold, but there is no friendly neighborhood drug dealer.  Originally the onus was on the drug fiend and all the terrible crimes he might commit, but when these guys were revealed to be plumb pitiful, the onus was on the drug dealers who somehow were seen as the cause rather than the effect of drug addiction.  Remember The first one is free. I'll wager that almost never happened.  The dealers are simply like the bookie and the hooker, just providing a service that some of the public wants.   

I don't believe I've ever had a Home Run pizza.  I bought my first microwave oven because I wanted to eat frozen pizza without the bother of an oven,but then I learned that you can't microwave a pizza.  Actually they later came out with a microwavable pizza but you had to fool with some foil thing and it was a pain in the ass, and it wasn't very good either. 

I think that square or rectangle slice is a Chicago thing, or so I have read somewhere.  There is this whole thing that if you are a true Chicagoan you like your slices square, your hot dog without ketchup (this one I couldn't agree more on), you have to pronounce certain words in a certain way.  It's kind of annoying.

Some cans of worms can indeed be opened by that ancestry thing.  My saliva is just now being tested (will take six to eight weeks), but I went to the page and there was some stuff about my last name.  Intrigued I entered my mother's maiden name, Janvosky, and up popped Jewish Bohemian name.  Jewish?  I have often wondered why we know nothing about the Janovsky side of the family, I've long suspected some kind of rift.  Could it be that my grandfather was shunned by his family because he was fooling around with a shiksa?  The only thing we know about his family is that they ran a clothing store on the west side which didn't seem like anything much before, but now sounds awfully Jewish.

It's been awhile since I read Brave New World.  I remember at the time thinking that while 1984 is a right wing dystopia,  Brave is more like a left wing dystopia. 

Mazel tov.