KEYTLaw's Blog

IRS Seized $107,000 from Man’s Bank Account

The Daily Signal:”14 years ago, McLellan decided to try his hand at the family business and purchased his own store in the heart of the Bible Belt, naming it L&M Convenience Mart. . . . What McLellan didn’t know, though, was that the federal government could come in and take away what he’d worked so hard for.

On a summer day last July, McLellan, who hadn’t yet arrived at the store, received a phone call from one of his employees summoning him to L&M. More than a dozen federal agents had flooded into his business—officers from North Carolina’s Alcohol and Law Enforcement, the local police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and they were asking for him. . . .

The federal agents then showed McLellan paperwork that included deposits to the store’s account at Lumbee Guaranty Bank. The statements showed two deposits made within a 24-hour period totaling $11,400. The statements, they said, indicated he had a history of consistent cash deposits of less than $10,000, which is illegal. Then, the agents told the small business owner something that shook him to his core: The Internal Revenue Service had seized all of the money in L&M’s bank account: $107,702.66.”

Update: See “IRS Refunds $107,000 It Lifted from Business Man.”

Stanford Phds Say Renewable Energy Won’t Work

The A Register: “Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilization: such a thing is impossible. Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. . . . The duo were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal”

The men wrote this conclusion:

“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope . . . Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”

The Law-School Scam

The Atlantic: “For-profit law schools are a capitalist dream of privatized profits and socialized losses. But for their debt-saddled, no-job-prospect graduates, they can be a nightmare. . . . lorida Coastal is one of three law schools owned by the InfiLaw System, a corporate entity created in 2004 by Sterling Partners, a Chicago-based private-equity firm. InfiLaw purchased Florida Coastal in 2004, and then established Arizona Summit Law School (originally known as Phoenix School of Law) in 2005 and Charlotte School of Law in 2006.”

See also “The Canary in the Law School Classroom.”

Self-defense Against Overflying Drones

The Volokh Conspiracy: “Scarcely a week goes by without a story in the news about drones, whether it is a Senator finding a drone peering in her window, or a small town in Colorado discussing whether to offer drone-hunting licenses (in the end they voted not to). The fear that a drone may be watching you is far from unreasonable. Today’s news, for example, is that up to 20 percent of the Border Patrol predator-drone flight hours take place in the US; meanwhile, in Miami where we both live, the police department has a fleet of drones out on patrol. This week’s arrest of a man who took a shotgun to an airborne drone is only one of the most recent warnings that we need better legal rules — and better social norms — about drone overflights, and that we need them now both to prevent harm to people and to prevent wrongful shootdowns

National Weather Service, Post Office & Other Federal Agencies Buying Ammo

Newsmax: “Add the U.S. Postal Service to the list of federal agencies seeking to purchase . . . alarmingly large quantities of ammunition. A little more than a year ago, the Social Security Administration put in a request for 174,000 rounds of “.357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow-point” bullets. Before that, it was the Department of Agriculture requesting 320,000 rounds. More recently, the Department of Homeland Security raised eyebrows with its request for 450 million rounds — at about the same time the FBI separately sought 100 million hollow-point rounds.”