Thursday, August 02, 2012

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/2/2012

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/2/2012A couple returned to their home in Colorado after several months’ absence and discovered that squatters had taken up residence there after purchasing a fraudulent “deed of adverse possession” for the property. The rightful owners, however, learned that they could not evict the squatters, because the latter had declared bankruptcy.

In other news, the U.S. Army is spending $171 million to buy Russian Mi-17 helicopters for the Afghan military. One of the primary reasons the Mi-17 is said to be suitable is that Afghan pilots are more familiar with it than other helicopters.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Gaia, JD, JP, McR, Nick, Nilk, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Squatters? Fraud? What has bankruptcy got to do with getting rid of them?

If the law wont help, they should take the law into their own hands. This is nothing other than outright theft.

Nemesis said...

$171 million dollars on Russian military type helos. Yep! I bet Obama has his paw prints all over that one!

Anonymous said...

Concerning the couple that came back to their home and found that squatters were living in it:

The law bends over backwards to protect people in bankruptcy. This is good as far as it goes, but in this case, it was the responsible couple, the one that actually owned the house and maintained the payments, that suffered. The Mexican couple thought they could obtain a good house in Colorado, with no obligations, for $5000, and expect sympathy because they got taken.

Why is this case of interest to anti-jihadists? Because the government continually seems to separate people from the consequences of their decisions. This "magical" thinking extends to immigration, where the government operates under the delusion that you can import millions of people dedicated to totalitarian, religious government, and that somehow they will change. Or, that you can import millions of people from a society with gang warfare, chronic lawlessness, and ritualized murder, and that somehow magically they will change.

Similarly, the government looks at people's plight, rather than how their own decisions and actions landed them there. In this case, you have a couple scraping by on the margins, but maintaining their payments, displaced by squatters whose only claim is an inability to recover from their decision to trust a crook who promised them something for nothing.

The purpose of government is to encourage civil, responsible behavior by linking actions to consequences. In the case of both immigration and property rights, any attempt to decouple actions from consequences is doomed to failure and disaster.

Anonymous said...

The squatters bought themselves a few months reprieve until their case goes before a bankruptcy judge. After that they can be thrown out.