Category Archives: Law

New England Farmer Sues Town for ‘Home Equity Theft’ In Federal Court, by Matthew Vadum

Posted on January 25, 2023 | 3 comments

This is blatant theft. From Matthew Vadum at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

After a town in central Massachusetts seized dramatically more than what a farmer owed in property taxes, the farmer is suing the town in federal court for alleged “home equity theft.”

Alan DiPietro in an undated photograph at his alpaca farm in central Massachusetts. (Courtesy Pacific Legal Foundation)

Alpaca farmer Alan DiPietro, an engineer by training who lives outside of Worcester, filed suit (pdf) earlier this month against the town of Bolton, claiming that the seizure constitutes an unlawful taking of his property in violation of the Massachusetts Constitution and the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

When Bolton took DiPietro’s home in December 2021, it had a market value of at least $370,000. The town subtracted his debt of about $60,000 and pocketed the remaining approximately $310,000 in equity.

Massachusetts law permits the government to keep the excess amount. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which is representing DiPietro, calls this home equity theft. Twelve states and the District of Columbia allow local governments and private investors to seize dramatically more than what’s owed from homeowners who fall behind on property tax payments, according to the PLF, which issued a December 2022 report on the practice, The Epoch Times reported.

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon take up the issue of home equity theft in a PLF case.

On Jan. 13, the court agreed to hear Tyler v. Hennepin County, Minnesota, the appeal of a 94-year-old homeowner who’s challenging the constitutionality of laws that allow local governments to take the full value of a home as payment for much smaller property tax debts. The county seized Geraldine Tyler’s condo, valued at $93,000, and sold it for just $40,000. Instead of keeping the $15,000 it was owed, the county retained the full $40,000, amounting to a windfall of $25,000, according to the PLF. A date for the hearing has yet to be determined.

DiPietro had been raising alpacas and marketing their fleece since 2008 in Bolton, a town in the Nashoba Valley region. But by 2014, he needed more land, so he purchased 34 undeveloped acres situated in Bolton and the neighboring town of Stow. He mowed the existing fields and put up fencing and some small structures, unaware that Bolton would claim that the improvements required local permits.

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Posted in Crime, Debt, Government, Law, Tyranny

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What About the Unprovoked U.S. Aggression Against Iraq? By Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on January 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S. has some war criminals of its own. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

Referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an editorial in Saturday’s Washington Post exclaims that Ukraine’s “struggle is also a crucible for Europe and an assault against the most basic precept on which the Western system rests: the impermissibility of unprovoked wars of aggression.”

In a follow-up editorial today, the Post calls for an international tribunal to try Vladimir Putin and his “henchmen” for waging a “war of aggression” against Ukraine. The Post quotes the Nuremberg tribunal: “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

What befuddles me, however, is why the Post doesn’t also condemn President George W. Bush and his “henchmen” for their unprovoked invasion of Iraq and, further, why the Post doesn’t call for a Nuremberg-type tribunal for Bush and his “henchman.” After all, there is no statute of limitations on war crimes of this nature. Is it only Russia, Germany, and other nations that are to be condemned and put on trial for unprovoked wars of aggression? Why should U.S. officials be exempt from the Nuremberg principle?

It is an undisputed fact that Iraq never attacked the United States. The United States was the aggressor in this conflict from the start. Bush and his henchmen were upset that his father, President George H.W. Bush, had not ousted Saddam Hussein from power in the Persian Gulf War. They were intent on correcting what they considered was a grave mistake on the part of the elder Bush.

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Law, Military, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Evil Walks Among Us: Child Trafficking Has Become Big Business in America, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on January 24, 2023 | 2 comments

Give John and Nisha Whitehead credit for writing an article about a subject most people don’t even want to think about. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

It takes a special kind of evil to prostitute and traffick a child for sex, and yet this evil walks among us every minute of every day.

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex.

Hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States alone.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 to 500,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

Child rape has become Big Business in America.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

Like so many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.

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Posted in Crime, Governments, Immigration, Law, Morality

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CDC Aware of Hundreds of Safety Signals for COVID Jab, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Posted on January 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The CDC and FDA have released their data that indicate the Covid vaccines were certainly not safe. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Video Link

Story at-a-glance

  • In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. The CDC refused. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has now forced the release of these data, and they are stunning
  • The CDC’s PRR monitoring has identified several hundred safety signals, including for Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death. In individuals aged 18 and older, there are 770 safety signals for different adverse events, and more than 500 of them have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis
  • In the 12- to 17-year-old age group there are 96 safety signals, and in the 5- to 11-year-old group there are 66, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease and vitiligo
  • The proportions of deaths, which were only provided for the 18-plus age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines
  • The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring, using empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times asked the FDA to release its monitoring results in July 2022 but, like the CDC, the FDA refused, only to admit in December 2022 they’d confirmed the Pfizer shot was linked to pulmonary embolism

In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. PRR1 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.

According to the standard operating procedures2,3 for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is run jointly by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC is required to perform these data mining analyses.

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The Immaculate Possession: Biden Defense is Fast Becoming Unsustainable, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on January 23, 2023 | 1 comment

Are the walls closing in on Joe Biden, as the mainstream media used to love to say about Donald Trump? From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

Below is my column at Fox.com on the most recent discovery of classified documents at one of the homes of President Joe Biden. Despite the latest discovery, allies like Sen. Chris Coons were on Sunday shows repeating his assurance that “there is no there there.” The insistence that the record clearly shows innocent “inadvertence” now borders on willful blindness as inadvertent possession occurs over and over again with documents from both Biden’s time as a senator and as vice president. A decade of inadvertence.

Here is the column:

President Biden seems to attract classified documents the way some people think motor homes attract tornadoes. They just inexplicably happen.

After Biden publicly declared that he has “no regrets” in the discovery of unlawfully stored classified material in various locations, he assured citizens that the special counsel investigation would soon peter out when they find that “there is no there there.”

Well, there turns out to be more there and the “there” is yet another find in a private residence of Joe Biden.

A search of Biden’s home in Wilmington on Friday found six new clearly marked classified documents, bringing the total to roughly 30 classified documents. The latest search came almost three months after the first discovery in a closet in a D.C. office.

Yet, the president and White House still maintain that all of these documents are merely the result of “inadvertent mishandling” and that Biden has no knowledge of their storage over the prior roughly six years. There is a point when “inadvertence” becomes so incredible as to be miraculous.

At the start of this scandal, I questioned the inadvertence claim in light of one simple fact. These classified documents were presumably removed in 2017 and yet they were divided and distributed to different locations. Those locations have now increased to at least four: the closet, garage, library, and the new location at the Wilmington residence. That suggests that they were transferred more than once and sent to different locations for a purpose.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Government, Investigations, Law, Politics

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The 1970s: From Rotting Carcasses Floating in the River to Kayak Races, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on January 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

It doesn’t matter how much money you have if you’re living in a garbage dump. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

If we don’t bother measuring national well-being, the health of the nation’s commons and resources and advances in the public’s interests, then we foolishly call a decade of tremendous advancement “stagflation.”

Correspondent J.D. read The Forgotten History of the 1970s and kindly added a graphic example of the remarkable transformation wrought by the federal Clean Water Act and other environmental regulations mandating the clean-up of the nation’s air and other public “commons”–the nation’s biosphere and resources that we all share as an essential part of the common good and the public trust.

The point of my previous post was to explain that measuring the economy by narrow measures of “growth” and “profits” grossly distorts what’s actually happening and what’s actually valuable–and despite economists’ delusional obsession with “growth” and “profits,” it isn’t “growth” or “profits.”

What’s actually valuable are advances in national well-being and security and the common good. These may be advanced by “growth” and “profits,” but they can also be diminished by “growth” and “profits.”

As Adam Smith took great pains to explain, open-market Capitalism can only function within a moral and ethical social structure. Stripped of moral constraints, “growth” and “profits” become fatal cancers in the economy and society. In and of themselves, “growth” and “profits” have no moral or ethical center; if those benefiting from “growth” and “profits” destroy the public commons and diminish the common good, those costs are ignored.

That’s the problem with proclaiming “markets solve all problems.” They don’t; in fact, left to their no-moral-compass ways, they create horrendous problems for the many subjected to the profiteering of the few, problems that destroy public “commons,” the common good and the public trust.

What better way to foster “growth” and boost “profits” than dump offal and carcasses in the public’s rivers, rather than bear the costs of proper disposal? This is one manifestation of The Tragedy of the Commons, a concept clarified by Garrett Hardin in his seminal 1968 essay of the same name: if a for-profit private enterprise can offload costs of its own production onto the public, that cost savings enables faster growth and higher profits.

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DeSantis Seeks To Make Permanent Protections From COVID Mandates, by Dan M. Berger

Posted on January 20, 2023 | 1 comment

DeSantis is trying to normalize freedom. From Dan M. Berger at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis on Jan.17 said he’d seek to make permanent the state’s pioneering protections against COVID mask and vaccine mandates, and back physicians’ free speech.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in Las Vegas, Nev., on Nov. 19, 2022. (Wade Vandervort/AFP via Getty Images)

Speaking in Panama City Beach, DeSantis said he’d introduce legislation to carry that out in Florida’s upcoming legislative session. Earlier state-mandated measures were temporary and will expire on July 1, he said.

“We want to make sure our state remains the freest state in these United States,” DeSantis said.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo. (York Du/The Epoch Times)

The new legislation—likely to pass since Republicans control both houses of the legislature—will permanently prohibit COVID vaccine passports, COVID vaccine and mask mandates in schools, masking requirements in businesses, and employers hiring or firing based on COVID vaccination status.

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In my lifetime I have witnessed the death of independent medicine and fair trials, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on January 19, 2023 | 1 comment

Independent medicine and fair trials are quests for the truth, a discredited concept shunned by many. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

I often refer to how much of America has been eroded away during my lifetime, so much so that the country  into which I was born no longer exists.  Younger people don’t know what’s been lost as they never experienced the real America.  What is normal to people is what they are born into and grow up with.  The numerous infringements on individual freedom, for example, that exist today as normal and unquestioned would have been impossible in my youth.

Is your doctor in private practice or is he an employee of a HMO or a health care provider such as a hospital’s corporate empire?

Why does it matter?  If he is a corporate employee, he has lost his independence and has to comply, regardless of his judgment, with protocols handed down by the likes of Tony Fauci and Big Pharma as in the restrictions placed on Covid treatment.  Corporate employees were prohibited from saving lives by treating Covid patients with Ivermectin or HCQ.  Those who thought the Hippocratic Oath protected them and ignored the protocols in order to save lives did so at the cost of their jobs and medical licenses.   Doctors in private practice  cannot be fired, but medical boards can still go after them, but it is not as easy.

Over the course of my life I have watched the gradual erosion of medical independence.  It has occurred through a variety of means.  Medicine in the US today is a price controlled business.  Medicare and private insurance companies set the prices doctors are paid for the range of services and treatments.  The prices discriminate against doctors in private practice. There is one set of prices for corporate medical practice and another set with lower prices for doctors in private practice.  The intentional effect is to drive doctors out of private practice.  I have watched it happen to my doctors.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Law, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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This Should Make A Few Doctors Think

Posted on January 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

h/t The Automatic Earth

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Technocratic Dystopia Is Impossible, by Robert Blumen

Posted on January 18, 2023 | 1 comment

It won’t work, for billions of reasons. From Robert Blumen at brownstone.org:

dystopia

In the coming technocratic dystopia, life will be grim for most of us. For those who survive the preliminary depopulation, a technological control grid run by AI and robots will keep tabs on our every movement. You notice that your pantry cube is running a bit low on freeze-dried bug burgers, fake meat, and cockroach milk.

You time your break to fall outside of your three daily hours of wind-powered internet. Forbidden by the World Economic Forum from owning your own car, you flag down a quick ride share from your leased living quarters in a stacked shipping container on the near side of your 15-minute city. After dropping off the seven other people in your ride share, you arrive at the fake meat distribution point, where you wait in a long queue, hoping to trade in a few of your remaining carbon ration credits for more provisions.

You worry that your transaction might be rejected by the central bank digital currency network. After all, there was that one moment where your wrinkled brow showed slight unhappiness. You wonder if the facial recognition AI picked it up during one of your masked Zoom calls.

But for the elites, things will be better than ever. Private jets, cars, ultra wagyu beef tenderloin (for their dogs), and large estates. Life-extension drugs will make them nearly immortal. They will vacation at 5-star hotels, a short limo trip from the Louvre, but without the crowds.

The WEF – an infinite source of technocratic malapropisms – says that you will “own nothing” and be happy (the happiness perhaps will be a drug-induced state as Yuval Hariri suggests). Many independent researchers who have looked into the WEF’s plans have reported similar findings. For example – see James Corbett, Patrick Wood, Whitney Webb 2, Tessa Lena 2, Jay Dyer, and Catherine Austin Fitts. 

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economics, Economy, Governments, History, Law, Liberty, Technology

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