“In 2021, on April Fools’ Day, Manistee County, Michigan, took the title on Chelsea Koetter’s home because of a small debt she owed on her 2018 property taxes. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a prank.
Four months after seizing her home, which she shared with her two sons, the government auctioned it off for $106,500. It kept the profit.
All told, Koetter owed the government $3,863.40, which included her initial tax debt as well as penalties, interest, and fees. She does not contest she was obligated to pay that. At issue is whether the county acted lawfully when it pocketed the remaining $102,636 after selling her house, a practice known as home equity theft.
The issue may sound familiar. In 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional after the government seized Uri Rafaeli’s home, then sold it and kept all the proceeds in excess of what he owed. His initial tax debt was $8.41.
The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the issue last year in Tyler v. Hennepin County, ruling unanimously that Hennepin County, Minnesota, violated the Constitution when it seized an elderly woman’s home over a debt, sold it, and kept the profit. “A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, referring to plaintiff Geraldine Tyler, who had fallen $2,300 behind on her property taxes. The total came to $15,000 after penalties, interest, and fees. After the sale, the government kept what was left over—$25,000. The Court said that was illegal.
Instead of complying with a straightforward interpretation of the law, Michigan has attempted to dance around it, passing a byzantine debt collection statute that sends homeowners on a wild goose chase should they want their equity back.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/21/tax-debt-is-no-excuse-for-home-equity-theft/
“Alaska is an energy behemoth with massive reserves of oil, natural gas, and petroleum. It also, oddly, faces a looming natural gas shortage—not good for a state where half of electricity production depends on the stuff. The problem is that most natural gas deposits are far from population centers and pipelines to transport the gas don’t yet exist and may never be built. So, to get gas to Alaskans, you need to transport it by ship. But federal law requires that only U.S.-flagged liquid natural gas (LNG) carriers be used, and there aren’t any.”
…
“A century ago, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (better known as the Jones Act) to prop up the country’s shipping industry. The law “among other things, requires shipping between U.S. ports be conducted by US-flag ships,” according to Cornell Law Schools’s Legal Information Institute. The ships must also be built here. So, to move natural gas from one part of Alaska to another, you need American LNG carriers. And here we find another shortage.
“LNG carriers have not been built in the United States since before 1980, and no LNG carriers are currently registered under the U.S. flag,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in 2015. And while there’s lots of demand for more LNG carriers for the export market, not just for Alaska, “U.S. carriers would cost about two to three times as much as similar carriers built in Korean shipyards and would be more expensive to operate.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection did make an exception to let foreign LNG carriers transport U.S. natural gas to Puerto Rico earlier this year, but only because the gas was first piped to Mexico before being loaded onto ships. Isolated Alaska doesn’t have that option.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/21/archaic-federal-law-keeps-alaskans-from-using-abundant-natural-gas-reserves/
“What we’ve really got here, for the most part, is a bunch of adult men and women trying to engage in private and consensual sexual activity—and the state saying, no, you should go to jail for that.
It’s a gross infringement on privacy and bodily autonomy masquerading as a blow against the baddest of bad guys.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/21/47-sex-workers-and-96-clients-arrested-in-florida-human-trafficking-sting/
“The RUSI team argues that Western sanctions should target the artillery supply chain rather than primarily focusing on blocking advanced tech like microelectronics from reaching Russia.
“It is more difficult to secretly transfer thousands of tons of chromium ore into a country than to smuggle in a few thousand microchips,” the report said; chromium is used in artillery barrel manufacturing.
Endowed with vast natural resources and a huge Soviet-era defense industrial base, Russia is self-sufficient for many of its military needs. But the RUSI team zeroed in on two requirements where Russia depends on imports: Machine tools and raw materials that are essential for casting or refurbishing artillery barrels, and for producing artillery shells.
Until 2022, Russia depended on Western-supplied machine tools, especially advanced computer numerical control, or CNC, automated systems. Sanctions imposed in 2023 slashed imports of Western equipment, but China has been able to fill much of the gap, though “Russian companies have historically preferred Western machine tools over Chinese equivalents, as they are more precise and higher quality,” the report noted. However, China and other nations re-export Western tools to Russia. RUSI identified at least 2,113 companies that supplied Western tools to Russia in 2023 and early 2024, including equipment from Germany, South Korea, Italy, Japan and Taiwan.
Manufacturing artillery barrels is a rigorous task that requires highly specialized manufacturing facilities. Just as US defense manufacturing has consolidated into a few prime contractors who can build jets and ships, only four Russian companies can forge artillery barrels: Zavod No. 9 in Yekaterinburg; Titan-Barrikady in Volgograd; MZ/ SKB in Perm; and the Burevestnik Research Institute in Nizhny Novgorod, according to the report. Each company has its own supply chain of subcontractors, such as factories that make special steel.
As for raw materials, Russia imports about 55% of the high-quality chromium needed to harden gun barrels. It also depends on Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to supply much of the cotton cellulose that is a crucial ingredient in the nitrocellulose used to make explosives. There are three primary manufacturers of artillery ammunition in Russia — NIMI Bakhirev, the Plastmass Plant and KBP Shipunov — which also rely on a web of contractors and suppliers.
Evidence suggests that sanctions on these links in the supply chain can work. For example, Khlopkoprom-Tsellyuloza, a Kazakh company that was a major supplier of cotton cellulose to two Russian propellant factories, slashed its exports when those factories were sanctioned, RUSI pointed out. Indeed, Kazakhstan is now supplying cotton cellulose for NATO ammunition.
Current Western sanctions tend to be too broad and sporadic to cripple Russian defense production. A better approach would be a mixture of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure focused on Russia’s artillery supply chain, concluded the report. “A concerted approach, with additional resources dedicated to enforcement and disruption, will have a greater chance of success.””
https://www.yahoo.com/news/west-trying-starve-wrong-part-112301587.html
The Metamorphosis of Pete Hegseth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLDHkdnV4XM
Keyju Jin: China from within: Myths and realities in a new era
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gDqOqeKARM
“You are Chinese and a characteristic of being Chinese is embracing the Chinese Communist Party.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K1INaqj1Ik
On global public issues, China is taking positions based on what it thinks will benefit it most and hurt the West by propagandisticly appealing to the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNJ93FfWVBY
Why Russia’s Economy is Way Worse than it Looks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2XnM4rl6F4
“A new report on the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump says the agency has been hampered by its dual mission of protecting top political figures and investigating financial and cyber crimes. The agency should consider narrowing its focus to just protection, the report says.
…
Critics of the proposal argue that narrowing the agency’s responsibilities could worsen its existing recruitment and retention problems. And they say the security lapses that allowed a gunman to open fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, had nothing to do with the Secret Service’s crime-fighting work.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/17/secret-service-mission-trump-shooting-00184293