BLUE STATE BLUES: Chicago Is Trying to Pay Down Its Debt By Impounding Innocent People’s Cars. “How a uniquely punitive city impound program combined with the drug war and asset forfeiture to deprive people of their vehicles for years at a time.”

More from Reason:

Byrd had run afoul of Chicago’s aggressive vehicle impound program, which seizes cars and fines owners thousands of dollars for dozens of different offenses. The program impounds cars when the owner beats a criminal case or isn’t charged with a crime in the first place. It impounds cars even when the owner isn’t even driving, like when a child is borrowing a parent’s car.

In total, Chicago fined motorists more than $17 million between March 2017 and March of this year for 31 different types of offenses, ranging from DUI to having illegal fireworks in a car to playing music too loud, according to data from the Chicago Administrative Hearings Department. About $10 million of those fines were for driving on a suspended license, and more than $3 million were for drug offenses like the one that resulted in the impoundment of Byrd’s car.

The city says it is simply enforcing nuisance laws and cracking down on scofflaws. But community activists and civil liberties groups say the laws are predatory, burying guilty and innocent owners alike in debt, regardless of their ability to pay or the effect losing a vehicle will have on their lives.

“There’s plenty of reason to be concerned that there’s injustice being done to people who are mostly poor, people who aren’t in a position to fight back,” says Ben Ruddell, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois. “The city has been perpetuating an exploitative system, charging exorbitant fees in a way that it knows is likely to make it so folks never get their cars out of impoundment.”

Officially licensed criminal exploitation of the poor is one of the more ubiquitous hallmarks of a failing state.

SABER RATTLING: Are Putin’s “new” nuclear weapons aimed at the West — or China?

“MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS”: European satellite “Gaia” reveals motions of more than 1 billion stars and shape of the Milky Way.

One might think that the galaxy is completely mapped. But large parts of it are obscured by gas and dust, and it is hard to discern structure from the vantage of the solar system. Gaia is not only expected to clarify the spiral structures of the galaxy today, but because the satellite traces how stars move, astronomers can wind the clock backward and see how the galaxy evolved over the past 13 billion years—a field known as galactic archaeology. With Gaia’s color and brightness information, astronomers can classify the stars by composition and identify the stellar nurseries where different types were born, to understand how chemical elements were forged and distributed.

Gaia isn’t only about the Milky Way. For solar system scientists, the new data set will contain data on 14,000 asteroids. That’s a small fraction of the roughly 750,000 known minor bodies, but Gaia provides orbit information 100 times more accurate than before.

All that data on asteroid orbits might come in handy for planetary defense.

NO REGRETS:  Today would have been Supreme Court Justice William Brennan’s 112th birthday.  He was perhaps the Court’s most liberal Justice.  He also has a claim to be being its most unreflective Justice.  After his retirement, he was asked in an interview whether there were any cases where, in retrospect, he might have voted differently.  Brennan gave a startling response:  “Hell, no,” he replied. “I never thought I was wrong.” 

THE FIRST RULE OF MOB-RULE CLUB IS DON’T TALK ABOUT MOB-RULE CLUB: CUNY law professors refuse to speak about student mob that disrupted scholar’s talk on free speech. More than 20 CUNY instructors decline to comment; students will not be punished.

This sounds like a hostile educational environment to me.

UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE: U.S. Air Force to Ramp Up Commitments to Space Amid Chinese Threat.

Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Air Force secretary Heather Wilson and chief of staff General David Goldfein both identified China’s space innovation and “rapid growth” in military capabilities among their top concerns facing the service in the coming years.

“Some of the work they’re doing in space, it’s very aggressive,” Goldfein said. “We built our space architecture in an era when space was a rather benign domain, so … we’re very focused on taking some bold moves in this budget to increase our ability to defend what we have in space.”

Faster, please.

BIG BUSINESS LOVES BIG GOVERNMENT: Google and Facebook Likely to Benefit From Europe’s Privacy Crackdown. “Big tech companies gain while smaller online ad firms are squeezed under the European Union’s GDPR, which takes effect in May.”

When the European Union’s justice commissioner traveled to California to meet with Google and Facebook last fall, she was expecting to get an earful from executives worried about the Continent’s sweeping new privacy law.

Instead, she realized they already had the situation under control. “They were more relaxed, and I became more nervous,” said the EU official, Věra Jourová. “They have the money, an army of lawyers, an army of technicians and so on.”

Brussels wants its new General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, to stop tech giants and their partners from pressuring consumers to relinquish control of their data in exchange for services. The EU would like to set an example for legislation around the world. But some of the restrictions are having an unintended consequence: reinforcing the duopoly of Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

On May 25, the EU will begin enforcing the new rules, which in many cases require companies to obtain affirmative consent to use European residents’ personal information. The change has sent shudders through the digital-advertising sector, from online publishers to the analytics firms, data brokers and buying platforms that use personal data to aim ads at individuals in real time.

Google and Facebook, however, are leveraging their vast scale and sophistication as they seek consent from the hundreds of millions of European users who visit their services each day. They are applying a relatively strict interpretation of the new law, competitors say—setting an industry standard that is hard for smaller firms to meet.

You don’t say.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A student group at Colorado State University is circulating a petition demanding that TPUSA be “dismantled or removed from campus,” alleging that the conservative group’s actions “directly encourage White Supremacy on campus.”

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: AZ Special Election, Jackson Smeared and Much, Much More. “Republican Debbie Lesko has won the special election to replace Trent Franks, who resigned from office late last year. The ‘story’ on this race–and the story always changes about what a GOP victory or loss means in the era of the resistance– is that anything less than a double digit win by the Republican candidate is some kind of mandate on Trump’s presidential victory. As of right now, the spread is about 6 points, very convenient.”

I’D BE SURPRISED IF HE DIDN’T, TO BE HONEST: Did McCabe issue ‘Stand-Down’ order on FBI Clinton Email Investigation?

TIME TO FIX THE FLAWS IN OBAMA’S DECEITFUL IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL: Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is anything but comprehensive. Here are some more accurate descriptions of his monstrosity: sketchy, incomplete, imprecise and spineless. Frankly, the JCPOA’s spinelessness is multidimensional.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela malaria cases jump by 69 percent.

THE STANDARDS ARE WHATEVER THE STANDARDS NEED TO BE TO KEEP THE STORY ALIVE PAST THE MIDTERMS: Byron York: Is ‘can’t prove untrue’ new standard in Trump probe?

When a political figure is accused of wrongdoing, a conversation begins among journalists, commentators, and public officials. Are the charges true? Can the accusers prove it?

That’s the way it normally works. But now, in the case of the Trump dossier – the allegations compiled by a former British spy hired by the Clinton campaign to gather dirt on presidential candidate Donald Trump – the generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head. Now, the question is: Can the accused prove the charges false? Increasingly, the president’s critics argue that the dossier is legitimate because it has not been proven untrue.

It’s an argument heard at the highest levels of government, academics, and media.

All of whom share an agenda.

NEON LANDING: An MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor makes a night landing on the USS New York. The rotor blades are a light show.

JOURNALISM: Vox rewrites history to make Barbara Bush-hating professor the victim. “Vox’s fundamental problem isn’t that many of its writers are astonishingly ignorant. It’s that they are aggressively dishonest.”

Related: “Don’t shut her up, put her in campaign ads.”

HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE: Why the win for Republicans in Arizona 8 is still good for Democrats.

This is CNN, after all.

REPUBLICAN DEBBIE LESKO wins Arizona special Congressional election.

LABORATORIES OF WELFARE STATISM: Finland’s basic income trial falls flat.

THE DOJ, AND BANK REGULATORS, NEED TO GET ON TOP OF THIS: Bank Threatens Ruger Over NRA Ties.

GOOD LORD: Why some ‘incels’ are celebrating Toronto’s alleged van attacker.

A post on Minassian’s Facebook said the “incel rebellion has already begun” and referred to “Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger.” Rodger was the 22-year-old California man responsible for a deadly rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that left six people dead.

Facebook has confirmed the post was real and was posted publicly on Minassian’s profile before Facebook shut it down.

More, from an interview in the report with New York journalist Aditi Natasha Kini:

Can you tell us, first of all, what is an incel?

It stands for involuntary celibate. So an incel is a cisgendered heterosexual man who hasn’t had sex, not out of choice.

Why has it developed into an online phenomenon?

There is a growing faction of men who have found outlets for their anger against women and dating culture in general online, and that’s been codified into a sort of indoctrination.

Boys who were never taught how to grow up to be men, combined with grievance culture and antisocial media — that’s a deathly combination.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Seems like an argument for legalized prostitution.

CHANGE: Why The Left Is So Threatened by Kanye West and Candace Owen. “This sort of thing and the possibilities it suggests must be staggeringly frightening to the left. If they ever lost the black bloc of voters, or even a significant portion of that monolithic group, the left would have a great deal of trouble winning elections. That is their fear, and it is a valid one. The percentage of voters who are black has hovered around 12 to 13 percent (the higher figure during the Obama years) recently. Those voters vote overwhelmingly Democrat, to the tune of over 90%. But if you look at this chart you’ll see that it wasn’t always that way.”

Just the other day, I remarked: “GOP strategists might profitably look at ways to jam the Democrats’ self-herding mechanisms aimed at keeping voter populations on the plantation, whether for educated suburban whites or poor blacks. Allowing even modest amounts of defection there is disastrous for the Democrats’ narrow coalition.” (Bumped).

CHEATING: How merchants use Facebook to flood Amazon with fake reviews.

Many of these fraudulent reviews originate on Facebook, where sellers seek shoppers on dozens of networks, including Amazon Review Club and Amazon Reviewers Group, to give glowing feedback in exchange for money or other compensation. The practice artificially inflates the ranking of thousands of products, experts say, misleading consumers.

But the ban, sellers and experts say, merely pushed an activity that used to take place openly into dispersed and harder-to-track online communities.

There, an economy of paid reviews has flourished. Merchants pledge to drop reimbursements into a reviewer’s PayPal account within minutes of posting comments for items such as kitchen knives, rain ponchos or shower caddies, often sweetening the deal with a $5 commission or a $10 Amazon gift card. Facebook this month deleted more than a dozen of the groups where sellers and buyers matched after being contacted by The Post. Amazon kicked a five-star seller off its site after an inquiry from The Post.

The kicker? The Post in question is Jeff Bezos’ own Washington Post.