Points to Ponder:

Smoking cigars is like falling in love. First, you are attracted by its shape; you stay for its flavor, and you must always remember never, never to let the flame go out!  [Winston Churchill]

Let Children Get Bored Again

Roberts again sides with liberal Supreme Court justices in disagreeing with lower court interpretations

To summarize this situation in sequence courtesy of SCOTUS Blog:

• The Supreme Court had previously ruled 5-4 that the Texas state court needed to revisit the death sentence of an inmate who had been argued had intellectual disabilities which they claimed was not in line with the most recent medical guide on these matters.

• The Texas state court retried the case and again sentenced him to death even after the local district attorney agreed the man was intellectually disabled.

• The case returned to the Supreme Court where the justices were asked to take up the case once again. The claim made was that despite the court's prior rebuke of the Texas lower court that the state basically carbon copied their prior analysis and rubberstamped the same verdict. 

• The local district attorney refused to defend the court decision so the Texas AG office sought to do so.

• The Supreme Court reversed the state court with a second rebuke.

• The Court in reversing the Texas lower court argued that the state court basically ignored their prior rebuke and sent the case back for further proceedings consistent with the opinion rendered by SCOTUS.

• Though he had voted with the minority in 2017, Roberts recognized the scam the state court attempted to pull and wrote a separate opinion concurring with those who voted in the majority last time (sans Kennedy who is retired now) to throw out the death sentence in this case because though he had problems with the prior ruling, it was evident that the lower court here misapplied the prior court ruling from 2017. In short, he was recognizing what is flatly obvious in this case no matter what one thinks of the prior ruling.

• Alito along with Thomas and Gorsuch dissented from the ruling mainly to bitch that the 2017 ruling was not clear enough the first time and to uphold the death penalty sentence. In short, it was a sour grapes dissent from them for not winning on the first go around not an fair accounting of how the Texas lower court thumbed their nose at the Supreme Court's prior ruling in their retrying of the case. In short, Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch were engaging in judicial activism here whereas Roberts (who agreed with their position in principle) was not.

• Kavanaugh did not join either ruling on this one. 

In short, Roberts was right on this where the particulars of this case go after what the Texas lower court did in response to the prior SCOTUS ruling and Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch were wrong.

9-0: SCOTUS Rules That Eighth Amendment’s “Excessive Fines” Clause Applies To The State

I have written on civil asset forfeiture before{1} and it is a major issue with me. I am pleased to see the above unanimous decision of the Supreme Court which will serve as a good foundation for being able to go after civil asset forfeiture abuse at the state level.

Note:

{1} Here is one example from recent years:

Briefly on Civil Asset Forfeiture (circa June 3, 2017)

Points to Ponder:

“We should not have an 'open mind' because that means we grant plausibility to anything, however, we should have a discerning mind." [Mike Mentzer]

Tim Eyman has sponsored a number of good initiatives in Washington state over the years. However, what he did here sullies his reputation as far as I am concerned. The chair stealing is bad enough but lying about it when you are so plainly caught on camera? You are not fooling anyone Timmy boy and your credibility is now shot!

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends. [Shel Silverstein]

Points to Ponder:

"Ninety five percent of what is published on all subjects is hogwash." [Arthur Jones]

Alabama newspaper editor calls for KKK 'to night ride again'

Some parts of Alabama struggle to come into 1970...in 2019!

Points to Ponder:

"Not everything is fit to print. There is to be regard for at least probable factual accuracy, for danger to innocent lives, for human decencies, and even, if cautiously, for nonpartisan considerations of the national interest." [Alexander Bickel]

In perusing some ways to update this website in terms of general theme and other factors, the site may look odd from time to time over the next two weeks. The reason is because I am going to be making changes to this website. There have been site template additions, revisions, etc. throughout the history of this website{1} of course since I settled on a basic outline which I spent no small amount of time on getting the way I wanted it to look.{2} Even then there would be updates from time to time as needed or desired{3} but they were usually additions or omissions to existing structure.{4} In terms of substantial updates, there has been only one since the massive archive tagging project of 2007{5} and one aborted revision attempt in 2008{6} that was ultimately (if memory serves) abandoned and that took place last year. However, even that one did not affect the structure of the website.

The purpose of what is being worked on now will retain some of the more useful elements of the past updates but dramatically alter the appearance of the website. This is being done for at least two reasons:

I have long wanted to change the existing structure appearance as what is there is to my eyes far too dated. However, I have had neither the time nor the requisite knowledge to do it.

The growth of social media since my early Rerum Novarum days has resulted in changes which were not being accounted for in the current structure and a new structure would be needed to better handle that. While I have no intention of starting a new website{7}; at the same time, these realities eventually needed to be faced squarely and I have decided at the present time to do that.

I could probably think of more reasons if I bothered to sit down and do so but what is noted there is sufficient.

So with these notes in mind, this place may become a bit messier before the launch of the new look which I expect will be finalized on or before March 4, 2019.

All things to the contrary notwithstanding.


Notes:

{1} For a recent example, see here.

{2} If memory serves, once I finally got it set up, it took a couple of weeks to get some semblance of a template that I liked.

{3} Though Rerum Novarum has gone through many permutations in its twenty months of existence, major structural adjustments have been rare.[...] Indeed, it is usually only when the previous format no longer succeeds in coping with the expansion of this weblog into various kinds of subject matter that adjustments of this kind are undertaken...

To note a few examples in recent months:
---The disclaimer was revised in April of 2003 in its first paragraph making what was once an ironclad policy into a more general one admitting of exceptions. (And of course the current disclaimer is applicable retroactively in case anyone wondered.) 

...

---At various times searching the archives for particular subject matter (usually to link to a post being written), this writer will find a post in the past where the paragraphs are cluttered or too long. In cases like that, the post will be spread out a bit by making more paragraphs of the original material. (Sometimes moving original material from the body of the text to footnotes.)

---Back in early February of this year, the author of this weblog sought to make the footnoting procedures in the post archives more uniform. This was done by going backwards through the archives and checking for inconsistencies in this area which were corrected...

---A major paradigm shift took place roughly around March of last year when the weblog writer moved to numbers in footnoting and away from astrisk markings. In uniformizing the weblog, this meant changing those notations to the number format that had evolved over the course of time and working backward until everything but roughly the first month or so was altered. (Time constraints preventing that from being tended to at the time.)

---The occasional misspelling being corrected or the occasional phrasing where either (i) a word was found missing or (ii) which read a bit convoluted -usually due to being typed in haste- have of course been corrected as they have been discovered either by this writer or by others. Unlike some weblog personages, this writer never sees a reason to revise previous texts from the archives viz. the arguments advanced. [Excerpts from Rerum Novarum (circa April 12, 2004)]

{4} For example, see footnote one as well as the update from 2017 and and the
four updates from 2018.

{5} See the links located here and here for details.

{6} See the links located here and here for details.

{7} I already did that in 2017 with the Jaded project material. However, for the moment that project is on a defacto haitus.