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In late 2007, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story for Time magazine calling for a massive national service program to be imposed on American young people. If you’d like to read it, knock yourself out. Someone probably needs to smash it, but the avalanche of propaganda and nationalism you’ll find there was too demoralizing for me to attempt it. The very idea that helping someone in your neighborhood should be called “service to the nation” should be spooky and Orwellian enough, but for many people I guess it isn’t.

One thing I couldn’t get out of my head, even though it’s not by any means the weirdest aspect of the program, is Stengel’s proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of National Service. I think it was this piece of advice that struck me the most: “And don’t appoint a gray bureaucrat to this job; make it someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Bloomberg, who would capture the imagination of the public.”

Translation: the American people, too stupid to engage in government-approved service projects without being prodded by their betters, need a crowd-pleasing Hollywood actor to rouse them to action. Bloomberg, possibly the dullest human being in public life, would be a better choice than Schwarzenegger from my point of view: the American people would barely be able to keep awake through one of his droning appeals.

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Asset forfeitures are known as “in rem” actions, meaning that the government is proceeding against a thing, not the owner of the thing. So the “defendant” in an asset forfeiture action is the thing being forfeited. This legal conceit always results in interesting case names, such as “U.S. v. $29,568.23 in U.S. Currency” or, say, “U.S. v. 1981 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz.” But today’s Ninth Circuit decisions bring a case name that takes the crown.This asset forfeiture involves the King Diamond II, a boat operating out of Hawaii. The Hong Kong company Tai Loong Hong Marine Products (TLH) chartered the King Diamond II to meet up with various fishing boats on the high seas to pick up shark fins and then deliver them to Guatemala. The problem for the King Diamond II and TLH is that it is illegal to harvest shark fins. Indeed, under the Shark Finning Prohibition Act of 2000, any shark fins found aboard a fishing vessel without a corresponding shark carcass are presumed to be the result of illegal harvesting. So when law enforcement boarded the King Diamond II off the coast of Guatemala and found 64, 695 pounds of shark fins with no corresponding carcasses, they detained the boat and seized the fins.

Which brings us to the name of today’s Decision of the Day:

U.S. v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins, 05-56294 (9th Cir., March 17, 2008)

Best part? The Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins won. As Robert Loblaw over at Decision of the Day asks: “what is TLH going to do with 32 tons of shark fins that are five and a half years past their prime?” I’d really like to know if they still have them. I’d hope not.