The Supreme Court has held that permit requirements must be proportional to the harm they prevent. Chance Weldon argued that Canton's flat per-tree fee ignored the actual ecological value of individual trees — and in 2021, the Sixth Circuit agreed, ruling the fee structure unconstitutional.
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Chance's key legal argument before the Sixth Circuit is a proportionality claim: the Supreme Court has established that permit requirements must be proportional to the harm they seek to prevent. Canton's flat fee — the same rate regardless of whether you're removing a shade tree in a dense neighborhood or a scrubby sapling in a field — ignores that reality. In the fall of 2021, the Sixth Circuit agrees on this narrower ground: the way Canton runs its permit fees is unconstitutional. Chance's clients pay nothing. For Ann Marie Graham Hudak, the ruling is a shock she still struggles to understand. For Chance, it's a breakthrough — he believes this decision will make it far easier to challenge the permit and fee structures of cities across America. 'It's gonna open the door to expand property rights and attack a lot more of these permitting regimes,' he says.
In fall 2021, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Canton's one-size-fits-all tree permit fee structure was unconstitutional.
Rather than appeal to the Supreme Court, Canton Township rewrote its tree law. Developers can now hire an arborist to determine the dollar value of a tree's ecological benefits — and pay that amount instead of the city's flat fee. It's a model other cities may have to follow.
Fei-Fei Li went back to Stanford from Google in 2018 specifically to build a multi-stakeholder governance framework for AI. Her argument: market forces are not societal norms. Just as biology uses IRBs and cars have safety laws, AI needs layered oversight from educators, governments, and the public — not just a few industry titans.
Andrew Santino's personal MCU of political villains is collapsing. He and Bobby speculated that a circulating photo of Mitch McConnell with a Chinese official was AI-generated compositing two separate images.
Mass surveillance is here to stay. The real battle isn't stopping cameras — it's ensuring judges and laws keep that data out of family court and civil disputes, admitting it only for violent crimes and national security. The surveillance economy currently yields more upside than downside, but only if we build the legal guardrails now.
When people cite Scandinavia as proof socialism works, Galloway says they've got it backwards. Northern Europe runs highly competitive free-market economies with more competition in many sectors than the US — they just make sure taxes are actually paid and redistributed. Billionaires and universal healthcare can coexist.
Two percent adjustments to income tax and stamp duty tweaks are deck-chair rearrangements. The UK's competitiveness hinges on four structural levers: currency valuation, energy costs, regulatory burden, and tax rates. Devalue the pound, build 56 nuclear plants, slash red tape, introduce a flat tax — and the country transforms.
Lisbon had one of Europe's worst heroin crises. Then Portugal legalised drugs and redirected all enforcement money into rehabilitation and housing. Crime collapsed. Addiction fell. Then politics moved the money elsewhere, and the problem started creeping back. Chesterton's Fence: you forget why you were spending that money.
Congress passed the Boland Amendment 411 to 0, explicitly banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras. Reagan signed it — then immediately moved the operation deeper underground, essentially responding to a bipartisan prohibition by going more illegal.
The CIA planted mines in Nicaraguan commercial harbors, wrote the Contras' press releases taking credit, and promptly blew up ships from four allied nations. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, Congress erupted, and the Boland Amendments multiplied.
Oliver North was a decorated Marine and devout Catholic with zero covert operations experience. He ran the entire shadow war against Congress — planes, airstrips, arms shipments, shell companies — learning on the job. And by every operational measure, he crushed it.
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