Politics

Syria: Contacting Senators Blunt and McCaskill and Representative Sam Graves

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

In the shadow of the anniversary of Dr Martin L King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, I have some other words of Dr King I’d like to share with you, from a speech he gave at Ebenezer Baptist Church:

And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

When he spoke these words, he was speaking at a time with the United States was deeply entrenched in the Vietnam conflict. Another statement from that speech is also relevant today as the government of the United States debates on armed conflict with Syria:

In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins.

Please oppose any military intervention in Syria. I’m fearful that most Republican opposition is due merely to the fact that the President is a Democrat, a member of the opposing faction. Military intervention must be opposed because, as Dr King said on April 30, 1967, the United States should not be made out to be the policeman of the world.

Only if Syria poses a credible and viable threat to the United States should we act, and then only against what threat they pose should we act. Until then, no military intervention against Syria should be authorized. Oppose this military intervention.

Thank you.

Debt/Law

How not to communicate with a debt collector

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has recently released letter templates that consumers can allegedly use in their communication with debt collectors. Of the five templates, I’ll discuss herein just one of the templates: the template for disputing a debt and asking a debt collector to prove responsibility or cease communication. According to the template’s documentation, using the template to contact a debt collector means you are saying “This is not my debt”.

The text of the template says this:

I am responding to your contact about collecting a debt. You contacted me by [phone/mail], on [date] and identified the debt as [any information they gave you about the debt]. I do not have any responsibility for the debt you’re trying to collect.

If you have good reason to believe that I am responsible for this debt, mail me the documents that make you believe that. Stop all other communication with me and with this address, and record that I dispute having any obligation for this debt. If you stop your collection of this debt, and forward or return it to another company, please indicate to them that it is disputed. If you report it to a credit bureau (or have already done so), also report that the debt is disputed.

Collection agencies sometimes have difficulty locating debtors. This can lead to cases of mistaken identity, where a person being contacted by a collection agency, or the collections department for a creditor, has the same name but is not the person they are actually trying to find. There is actually an entire industry dedicated to locating debtors known as skiptracing, or “debtor and fugitive recovery”.

Let me provide a bit of my own background in this…

Back in the fall of 2005, Bankers Trust contacted me regarding a delinquent mortgage. The first person who contacted me said simply that he was calling about my mortgage payment, and I told him point blank that I did not have any mortgage, that they had the wrong person. Within a couple weeks, I had a voice mail on my answering machine, again from Bankers Trust, regarding the delinquent mortgage. I called back and left a voice mail, again asserting they had the wrong person.

I definitely learned that they did not listen to me when I was served shortly after New Year’s Day 2006 – Case No. CE52618, Iowa District Court for Polk County, Iowa, in case you’re curious.

After being served, I contacted the Court to find out what I needed to do to ultimately sever myself from that foreclosure action. They told me I needed to file an affidavit with the Court, which also had to be notarized (thankfully there was a Wells Fargo branch a couple blocks from the courthouse). A copy of the affidavit was provided to Bankers Trust’s attorneys, who then filed notice with the Court acknowledging the affidavit and basically saying “yeah, we had the wrong guy”. Given the form was notarized, and the form bore my full name, they didn’t really have any room to maneuver on that.

Oh, I should also mention I had to file the affidavit with the County Recorder. Yeah that was a fun day indeed.

So it is certainly possible that you could be identified for a debt that is not yours, a debt to which you are not a party. So should this happen, should you send a letter saying “I’m not responsible for this debt, and don’t contact me until you can prove that I am”? Umm… no.

Instead what such a letter would do is likely prompt them to think “okay, we found the right person but they’re refusing to pay” and then you’ll be where I was in 2006: having to take time out of your day to file a notarized affidavit with the Court demonstrating that you are not the person in question. How do I know this? Because I lost my cool with Bankers Trust across voice mail the second time they called me about that delinquent mortgage. They had my contact information, so when they filed the foreclosure suit on December 30, 2005, according to Court records, guess who they went after.

What a way to start a new year… Wouldn’t you like to avoid that? Yeah, I thought so.

So how do we avoid that? Well it requires being polite to the collection agency and not losing your cool, over the phone or in writing:

Dear [collection agency name],

I received notice of the attached alleged debt on [date received]. While the name on the debt is [name], and I am a person with that name, I do not believe I am the person who owes this debt. For reference, my full name is [full name]. I trust that you will exercise additional diligence in attempting to locate the person who does owe this debt and that I should not be further contacted on this matter.

Providing your full name – which the debt collector will likely not put on anything they send you – pretty much gives the debt collector a chance to basically say “oops” and leave you alone.

When this letter is sent to the collection agency, attach a photocopy of whatever notice they provided you informing you of the debt. When the collection agency receives the letter, they may or may not do anything with it. But you also may not hear back from them at all because they’ve realized their mistake, fired their skip tracer, hired a new one, and found someone else to bother who may or may not be the actual person they’re seeking.

They may also verify their information, determine, even erroneously, that you are, indeed, the correct person to be contacting, and renew their contact with you. This could happen for numerous reasons, including the account having always been a fraudulent account opened in your name that you never knew existed.

The collection agency might also interpret your letter as a refusal to pay and sue you.

But at least you were polite in the beginning, which will greatly help you if you are sued. Because if you’re polite from the start but sued anyway, they may be less likely to challenge your affidavit. And yes, they can do that.

Debt/Economics

5 Steps for Funding Your Kid’s College Education

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

One thing that I find rather troubling is this persistent idea that parents must pay for their kid’s college education. Recently Nicole Seghetti, a contributing writer on "The Motley Fool", penned an article called "5 Simple Steps for Funding Your Kid’s College". Her list was these items:

  1. Develop your goal
  2. Understand your options
  3. Star saving early
  4. Stay on track
  5. Increase contributions

Again, why this focus on the parents paying or otherwise contributing at all to the kid’s post-secondary education? My parents didn’t contribute much to my education. All they provided was a roof over my head while I was in community college and between semesters at a 4-year institution. Everything else was loans, grants and scholarships.

Add to this the fact that studies have shown that students who pay for their education actually do better, and the question still remains: why this implied obligation that parents pay for their kid’s college education?

Here are my 5 steps for funding your kid’s college education:

  1. Teach them early how to save. Note that this requires you have an understanding of what saving is and a good grasp on financial management concepts.
  2. When legally able, push your kid into getting a job. Tell them as well that they need to keep working while in school.
  3. Set up a savings account and plan with them as to how much of their paycheck they will put away in the bank to save up for school. To help build their desire to save, you could even provide a deal where you match a portion or all of what they deposit to the account. Also emphasize that they need to squirrel away some of their paychecks while in school into this account as well to build up savings for later semesters.
  4. Periodically check-in to ensure they are sticking with their savings plan. Since minors cannot have a bank account solely in their own name, this shouldn’t require anything more than a balance and transaction check. Provide a penalty for withdrawals from the account as well.
  5. Help the student research financial aid options, such as grants, scholarships and loans to help them carry their savings farther.

All of this is with the aim of teaching your children personal financial responsibility instead of you paying for their college for them. If they save up for it themselves and pay for it, they are more likely to take their education more seriously, study something that truly interests them, and come out more successful in the end.

In short, we need to stop advocating this implicit obligation by parents to pay for their kids to go to college and instead teach them how to do it themselves.

Religion

Seeing can be believing

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

I’m sure we’ve all seen this exchange before, now represented by images on Facebook:

Teacher: Can you see God?

Class: No

Teacher: Can you touch God?

Class: No

Teacher: Then there isn’t a God!

Student: [raises hand] Sir, can you see your brain?

Teacher: No

Student: Can you touch your brain?

Teacher: No

Student: Oh okay, so you don’t have a brain!?

This kind of misrepresentation of atheists and atheism is not new. Christians have been doing this for a long time. They come up with half-assed little things like this in an attempt to look smart.

And man is the logic flawed. How so? I could say the same thing right back to the Christian about their heart, their lungs, or any other internal organ. Hell, I could say it about their liver: "Well I guess you don’t have a liver, so go on and drink all you want and be merry. After all, you don’t have a liver to worry about damaging." Imagine saying something like this to teenage girls: "Well since you can’t see or touch your uterus, you must not have one, so you can fuck all you want without having to worry about getting pregnant!"

Seriously…

Now we don’t take it on faith that the brain exists, or the heart, lungs, uterus (in the case of women), or any other internal organ. We can demonstrate that such exists quite readily. Want to directly see or touch your brain? It can happen. Find a surgeon willing to crack open your skull to expose your brain, then wake you and hand you a mirror.

If we could demonstrate that God exists in a similar, unequivocal manner, atheism would not be a valid concept. After all, anyone would be able to see God! His existence could be demonstrated in such a manner that the person denying his existence would be left making the stupid arguments or employing very unsound reasoning to back up their assertions. Just prompt any conspiracy theorist about anything from TWA-800, JFK or 9/11 to… well almost anything else for an idea of the kind of brain-dead assertions people will make merely because neurons are firing and what they’re saying sounds good.

Beyond this no atheist worth his or her salt will say that just because you cannot see a god or touch a god, that god doesn’t exist. Instead an atheist will say that he or she has yet to see convincing evidence that shows definitively that the god claimed to exist actually does exist. On that mark, the Christian has much working against them.

The reason for this is something most Christians are blissfully unaware, but most atheists are very acutely aware: the vast majority of those who are religious had no choice on the matter in any regard, not even on the religion they believe. Instead they were forcefully indoctrinated as children in various ways by parents and other individuals holding authority over them. The power of childhood indoctrination is quite immense.

And they stay religious because of fears of eternal punishment after death, or fear of being ostracized or shunned by everyone they know and love, while finding numerous ways to convince themselves their indoctrination is factual in nature.

Raspberry Pi

Cooling off a Pi

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Like many geeks out there, I’ve got a Raspberry Pi board. And it has been a pain in the ass to keep stable.

Like a lot of people out there, I had the intent of using it as a cheap media center using one of the various XBMC distributions available. I want to get another to use as a NAS. But nothing I ran on it would remain stable for long. Even the various Linux distros that are available didn’t last long before the board crashed.

The sad thing is that the various articles and troubleshooting guides out there kept talking about voltages and voltage drops and taking a multimeter to a couple contact points on the board. My thought reading those was that if the Pi is that sensitive to the electricity going in, then that’s a problem with the board’s design that should be rectified. Yet electrical was the only kind of problem being mentioned, with voltage drops being the most parroted “cause” of the Pi board crashing.

I tried different power supplies. I even bought power cords specifically tailored for the Raspberry Pi. No change. Even changing how it was plugged in didn’t do a damn thing. Even sitting idle the board would crash after a particular period of time. Part of me thought that software could be the culprit, so I would sometimes wait till a new version of a system came out and try again with no change.

Then I started wondering if heat could be the problem. After all, we’re talking 700 MHz chips that don’t have any kind of heat dissipation. I remember even a 66 MHz 486-DX processor having a passive heatsink. Looking at the temperature readings on the board, sure enough, when its readings got up to 48C, the board would crash – no display, no response, and only the single red LED lit. Reports I’ve read show the CPU on the Pi having a maximum operating temperature of 50C, so it’s no surprise it was crashing at 48C.

To help combat this, I purchased a set of copper heatsinks. Those improved the outcome, but not by much. It still could not make it through a 90 minute movie on a USB hard drive without crashing. It came close, but I need it to do better. Active cooling would be necessary.

Now most posts on the Raspberry Pi forum mentioning heatsinks all say you don’t need them, but then most of the threads in question are a year old or more. I got the Model B Pi right when it came out, and it was only recently, using what I’ll be describing herein, that I was able to actually get the bloody thing to remain stable without any issue.

Now I’m not talking about going all-out and water-cooling this thing. That’s overkill.

For the fan part of the active cooling solution, I found an old K6-II heatsink and fan that’d been sitting around unused. It’s a 12V fan, unfortunately, but it’d have to do for now for this experiment. Next was finding the GPIO pinout chart to see where the voltage and ground was. Changing the pins on the Molex connector was easy at that point, but the keyed 3-pin connector wouldn’t fit onto the GPIO without clipping the guides off.

But then, how to mount the board so the fan was overhead… Unfortunately an enclosure I had purchased wouldn’t suffice for this. But I did have a dishwasher cage sitting around and some spare zip ties. The cables for the Pi could fit through the wire of the cage, and I used the zip ties to tie the fan over the board. Yeah it looks strange, but it gets the job done and gave me a proof of concept. And courtesy of how the cage is constructed, I could actually use the cables to suspend the Pi in the middle of the cage…

raspberry1.jpg

raspberry2.jpg

The result: the highest temperature reading observed was around 34C. Without the fans, even with the heatsinks, the temperatures were still in the mid-40s, and still climbing to the crash-inducing 48C, typically in less than 20 minutes. With the fan, I couldn’t get it to crash. Definitely a massive improvement. And this was observed using OpenELEC and Raspbian.

But now I have an idea of the kind of enclosure I want to either buy or build. It’s definitely gonna be something capable of mounting a fan. That or I might leave this the way I have it. After all, I’m not planning to move this one away from the television, and I can demonstrate that this setup works.

At the same time, if you’re experiencing the same issues I have been, where your Pi has been randomly crashing regardless of what you’ve tried, heat could be the issue, in which case getting an active cooling solution on your board would be beneficial.

Debt

Ignore your credit score

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

I am continually amazed at the number of "financial experts" out there who all talk about postponing debt repayments as a means of building wealth. Anyone familiar with accounting and the definition of wealth knows that the fastest way to build wealth is to shed liabilities. After all your total net worth, or total wealth, is assets minus liabilities.

But what amazes me even more with regard to debt repayment, when they actually advocate putting every spare dollar with which you’re comfortable toward it, is the seemingly continual focus on the credit score. It’s as if they focus on paying down debt with the intent of taking out more. No! The idea should be paying down debt with the intent of ridding yourself of it for as long as possible.

I don’t know my credit score. I have no clue as to what 3-digit number has been assigned to my alleged credit worthiness. Nor do I really care at this point. I’m not trying to to get a new credit card or a loan, so I have no need to worry about it. And truthfully I’ve never paid attention to my credit score.

To those who are merely trying to get out of debt, your credit score is worthless and you should not be focusing on it at all. It’s also been my observation that for short-term or revolving liabilities, it isn’t the credit score that determines your credit worthiness, but the contents of the credit report. I attempted to apply for new credit last year as a way of maneuvering debt into better positions to pay it off, and whenever I’ve been denied, it has been due solely to items on my credit report, not because my credit score has not been within a particular range or above some minimum limit.

My credit report is far from clean. And in current times, I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of middle-class and lower-class people. Back in 2008 I was unemployed for a considerable amount of time, debts fell behind and into collections, and now things are better and my wife and I are digging ourselves out of our financial hole however we can. We’ve shed a lot of liabilities over the last 4+ years as a result, starting out at over $40 thousand in total liabilities when the exercise first began.

And the biggest change allowing us to do this is simply not adding to our liabilities where possible. This meant not using our credit cards with the exception of only two or three recurring charges that we pay off every month. Any new liabilities we do take on we plan to pay off in a short time frame.

It was one hell of a change, too.

Prior to being unemployed we frequently used our credit cards, lived beyond our means. Like a lot of households then and, unfortunately, also now, we ran up a lot of debt as a result. Getting laid off and seeing all of that fall into collections showed us the true magnitude of that debt and the hole into which we fell. While I knew of all of the accounts and their balances, including the loans we had along with the credit cards, I guess until it all fell into our laps we weren’t really conscious of it.

And that was the problem. We had lost sight of it, because we naively thought that it wouldn’t become a problem. In the back of my mind I knew it to be an issue, but it wasn’t one that had a lot of priority. And though I had a spreadsheet showing the numbers, I didn’t have the right kind of focus on it because I was, again, naïve about it.

But to think your credit score will show you the true magnitude of your debts is even more naïve. And if all you’re doing is focusing on your credit score, you’re losing sight of what truly matters in your financial picture.

A spreadsheet can help you gain some perspective. When you lay out all of your debts on a spreadsheet, including to whom the debt is owed and the amount that is owed, and use the sum function to add it all up, you see a picture more striking than any yet conceived. Trust me, it was to me.

When I saw that my total debt load in 2009 was about the same as my total annual net income from my previous job (the number after taxes and deduction), it was one hell of a shock. Now most of that debt was initially my car and my student loan, both of which easily made up 2/3 of that total number, but it wasn’t any less of a shock to see the actual amount.

And seeing the total amount of all your debts, secured and unsecured, could be enough to shock you into the admission that you have a financial problem and get you planning to dig out of that hole.

Because digging out of debt requires waking up. You need to ignore your credit score and completely let go of the idea of getting more credit or loans. The only reason to be getting more credit or more loans is to shift liabilities into a better position to pay them off rather than merely adding to your "debt ceiling". In other words, you open one account, shift the debt of an existing account and then close the existing account.

"Oh, but that’s not good for my credit score," I hear you say, as it’s something you’ve read in the numerous articles about getting out of debt. And to that I say "Oh fucking well". Again I have no clue as to what my credit score currently is because I don’t care. At this point, I can’t care.

And if you’re seriously trying to dig yourself out of debt, you cannot care about your credit score either.

Debt/Mortgage

More debt advocacy

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Apparently lost on financial planners and financial commentators is the fact that paying off debt is the only guaranteed way to increase your overall wealth. Everything else is a gamble. The recent idiot to advocate against paying down a mortgage early is Diana Bocco of Yahoo! Homes in her article “Why paying down your mortgage early is a bad idea“.

The only reason paying down your mortgage early is a bad idea is because of its overall effect on the money supply. Remember that, in our monetary system, money comes into existence only through loans, and the total amount of money in circulation is related to the total amount of debt everyone has. Paying down debts shrinks the money supply, and we can’t have that happen, now can we…

And to support her claim, Ms Bocco quotes Barry Habib. Who is Mr Habib? He is the Chief Market Strategist for Residential Finance. In other words, she talked to a mortgage lender on reasons why you shouldn’t pay down your mortgage early. That’s like talking to your local butcher on reasons you should not turn toward vegetarianism… Of course a mortgage lender is going to advocate against you paying down your mortgage early, because they lose a lot of cash in interest when you do so.

But let’s look a the four reasons Ms Bocco says you should not pay off your mortgage early:

1. Prepayment penalties

Did you know that paying your mortgage early could result in a fine? That’s because some lenders “punish” you for getting out of your loan earlier than expected.

If your mortgage comes with a prepayment penalty, then you need to figure that into your payoff plan, plain and simple. But don’t let that deter you from paying off your mortgage early. You will still come out ahead, even if there is a penalty for early payoff. And if you’re in the market for a mortgage, be sure to negotiate against a prepayment penalty. You might have to take a slightly higher interest rate to do so, but it’ll be better for you overall.

2. You need to save for your retirement or your child’s college fund

In addition to ensuring that you’re financially set after retirement, making contributions to retirement plans – like IRAs and 401(k)s – instead of paying off a mortgage early, is smart because the interest they earn is not taxed until you retire, says Walsh. What’s more, borrowers are able to deduct mortgage interest from their income, so when they put extra cash into an IRA or 401(k), it’s a huge tax deduction all around.

One thing no one seems to realize anymore is that retirement accounts are investment accounts. And what is the one disclaimer on all investment accounts? Here’s mine for my 401(k):

Before investing in any mutual fund, please carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. For this and other information, contact Fidelity for a free prospectus or, if available, a summary prospectus. Read it carefully before you invest.

Risk is involved. Returns are not guaranteed. This means that your 401(k) could be a nice nest egg one week, and worth not a lot the next, depending on how things go. Seriously, why do these financial experts and commentators treat retirement accounts like they’re low-risk investments? They are not. They are variable-risk investment accounts, in that the risk you have is based on what investments you have set up as part of your account portfolio. They are not low-risk or no-risk accounts.

As such, again, the only guaranteed way to increase your wealth is to pay off your debts, prioritizing your secured debts (mortgage and car payments) over your unsecured debts (student loans and credit card).

And don’t get me started on this idea the parents need to pay for their kids’ college education. Give me a fucking break…

3. Paying off your mortgage has tax implications

Oh this ought to be good…

It sounds strange that paying off your mortgage early can cost you in the long run, but it certainly can be the case when taxes are involved.

She focuses quite a bit on what is called the Mortgage Recording Tax. But by bringing this up, Ms Bocco is basically playing games of “what if” by saying you could end up paying the mortgage recording fees multiple times:

Well, let’s say that you decide to pay off your mortgage as quickly as possible. Then, you suddenly need a large amount of cash, and decide to access some of your home equity through a cash-out refinance. In this case, the MRT would be due a second time, Reiss explains. That’s because under New York law, the MRT must be paid when a new mortgage is created and recorded on a property (as is the case with a refinance).

What she’s not saying is that the mortgage recording tax is not a universal phenomenon and is also only a recent phenomenon. Only 7 States have a mortgage recording tax. Could the idea spread to all 50 States? Perhaps, especially as State governments become more strapped for cash. But otherwise, bringing this up is nothing but fear-mongering.

So, if you think you might need to access home equity in the near future (to pay for college bills or a home renovation, for example), focus on saving money for that particular purpose instead of paying down your mortgage early, says Reiss.

Okay this is about the only sound piece of advice this article seems to give. Certainly if you have large expenses coming up, then definitely forego accelerating a mortgage pay off to handle those expenses. And try to have savings or other credit available in case of the unexpected. And also make sure you have your insurance paid up as well.

At least they didn’t mention the mortgage tax deduction…

4. You could invest the money elsewhere for a better ROI

And here’s where things go south…

If your investment accounts are non-existent, it might be wise to grow them with the money you would otherwise use to pay off your mortgage early, according to Walsh.

Walsh offers this example to illustrate his point: Let’s say you have a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for $150,000, at 3.5 percent interest. “Your payments over the life of the loan will total $242,484 – with $92,484 of that being interest,” Walsh says.

Any time numbers come into the discussion, dismiss them. For one, these numbers make a lot of assumptions and attempt to woo you into a particular line of thinking based on less than all the facts. For one, how many people would qualify for a 3.5% interest rate on a mortgage? In today’s lending environment, likely not many of us would.

Again, investments do not have a guaranteed ROI. Paying off your mortgage early does, in the form of an accelerated increase in equity in your property and less overall paid during the term of the mortgage note. Then, once you have the mortgage paid off, you’ll have extra money to put into investments. Sure you might lose the benefit of compounding investment profits while you’re paying off your mortgage, but you’ll have the house free and clear and, more importantly, you’ll be significantly wealthier in the end because you won’t have that mortgage liability hanging over your head.

Meaning if, for some reason, you end up losing your job or some other financial emergency comes up, at least you won’t lose your home or ruin your credit for not being able to keep up on a mortgage. Plus if a financial emergency comes up, you can always pull off your accelerated mortgage payoff for a period of time, and you’ll still be coming out ahead in the long run.

Continuing… (emphasis added)

Although those numbers sound scary – investing the money could still make sense, depending on what the returns are. For example, if you invested the $150,000 in mutual funds at 6 percent returns annually, you will end up with $861,523 at the end of 30 years.

Again, this is just a bunch of “what ifs”. What if the stock market tanks again like it did just 5 years ago? In the preceding decade, we’ve had several significant stock market downfalls or crashes (here, here, here, here, here and here), plus the downgrade on the credit rating of the United States in August 2011. That makes the stock market anything but a guaranteed return, so naming any kind of AROI for the stock market is just wishful thinking and not something on which anyone should rely.

As such, people today are shedding debt like nothing. If they take on mortgages or other high-cost or long-term debt, they want to be rid of it as quickly as possible rather than holding onto it and hoping their investments pan out in the long term. It again comes down to guaranteed returns. Paying off your mortgage is a guaranteed return, because you are increasing equity in your home while saving on interest in the long run.

Going back to Barry Habib, who said “there is more to making a good decision than just looking at the financial calculations” for this article, the one thing commonly overlooked is that all financial decisions are the result of calculations. There are tradeoffs to every decision you make. But when you are weighing a guaranteed return against a not-so-guaranteed return on an investment, the decision should be a no-brainer: paying off debt should always take priority over investments. Paying off debt is a guaranteed increase in your net wealth.

It’s amazing how decades ago debt was never seen as a good thing, whereas today it is. Decades ago people would never have held onto a mortgage if they could pay it off. Remember, there is no such thing as good debt, something that in recent years a lot of people have relearned.

But when you consider that in a lot of these cases, the people saying you should do the opposite – prioritize investments over paying off your debts – are people with a financial incentive to advocate that opposite, it’s no wonder why a lot of people are getting a lot of bad financial advice today, in the wake of a stock market crash and financial crisis still fresh in everyone’s minds.

After all, they’re just looking out for their bottom line, so perhaps you should look out for your own as well.

Casey Anthony/Double jeopardy/George Zimmerman/Supreme Court

The finality of acquittals

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

In the wake of the George Zimmerman acquittal, a lot of searches brought people to my blog in their attempt to find information on how to overturn that acquittal. Those searches prompted me to write an article declaring that Zimmerman’s acquittal is final, going on the numerous articles I’ve written about Casey Anthony and how her acquittal is final as well.

But one question came via a search term that has not really been discussed to any great depth: why is a jury’s acquittal final?

To answer this question, we need to look at the concept of “double jeopardy”, which is codified in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, chiefly: “[N]or shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb”.

In the United States, the finality of an acquittal is unconditional, as recognized in virtually every State and in the Federal jurisdiction, and on that we should be pleased. It means that the prosecutor representing a sovereign has only one chance to try a defendant with a crime within the applicable statute of limitations.

The Supreme Court of the United States summarized the double jeopardy doctrine beautifully in the case United States v. Sanges, 144 US 310 (1892). The Supreme Court discussed in their opinion in that case the finality of an acquittal by going through all of the various decisions by the Supreme Courts of various States, almost all of which were of the opinion that the government cannot appeal an acquittal or otherwise seek to overturn or vacate an acquittal.

That case dismissed an acquittal appeal merely for lack of jurisdiction, leaving open to Congress the ability to grant the Executive Branch the ability to appeal acquittals by merely passing a simple statute outlining an appeals procedure. The Court enumerated such several times in their decision in Sanges, noting that the appellate jurisdiction of the appeals courts and the Supreme Court is established and regulated by Congress (see Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution), and that the inability for the United States to appeal an acquittal is merely because such jurisdiction hasn’t been granted to any appellate court to hear such an appeal.

But the Supreme Court squashed completely that idea with regard to the Federal jurisdiction in a subsequent case, United States v. Ball, 163 US 662 (1896), at 671:

As to the defendant who had been acquitted by the verdict duly returned and received, the court could take no other action than to order his discharge. The verdict of acquittal was final, and could not be reviewed, on error or otherwise, without putting him twice in jeopardy, and thereby violating the Constitution. However it may be in England, in this country a verdict of acquittal, although not followed by any judgment, is a bar to a subsequent prosecution for the same offence.

In both cases, again, the Supreme Court relied heavily upon the established jurisprudence in most States in existence at the time, and it is now very heavily settled precedent that an acquittal, lawfully returned by the jury and received by the Court, cannot be appealed by the prosecution, or in any other way sought to be overturned, vacated or challenged. The Supreme Court very plainly states that reviewing an acquittal, the essence of an appeal, violates double jeopardy.

Thus is locked in stone the unconditional finality of an acquittal at a criminal trial.

Double jeopardy/Due process/George Zimmerman

George Zimmerman’s acquittal is final

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 22 Comments

There is an epidemic in this country that needs to be ended. In the aftermath of the Casey Anthony trial, many people went to great lengths to find any way, any construct of law that could be employed to see Casey Anthony re-arrested and re-tried on charges of killing her daughter. I discussed that case at length, including addressing the last arguments that, unfortunately, are still being made, such as the “dual sovereignty” doctrine.

My last article on Casey Anthony was in January 2013. It is the evening of July 13, 2013, as I write this, and George Zimmerman has just been acquitted of culpability in the death of Trayvon Martin by a jury of six women.

Within hours of the verdict being announced, many took to the Internet to begin searching for information on whether Zimmerman’s acquittal can be overturned. The search terms have led people to this blog, namely my article “Overturning a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict“:

  • can a judge overturn a not guilty to guilt
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among others.

Can a judge overturn a not guilty verdict? No. Can a judge reverse a not guilty verdict and enter a guilty verdict against a defendant? Absolutely not. Can a not guilty verdict in a criminal case be overturned or vacated? No.

And we should all be thankful this is the case in the United States, because it is not the case in other countries. An example is Italy and the problems Amanda Knox is having with their justice system.

I’m sure it won’t be long before people insult the Zimmerman jury, and go so far as to insult the jury system itself. In March 2012, I wrote this:

[W]e should avoid denigrating the entire jury system simply because one jury returns a verdict with which there might be public disagreement.

In the Zimmerman trial, it was never in question whether Zimmerman shot Martin. It was never in question that Martin’s death resulted from the gunshot. The question was whether Zimmerman’s actions were justified. As self defense is an affirmative defense or positive defense, that question had to be answered by George Zimmerman through evidence. The prosecution’s job, in this case, was to plug enough holes in Zimmerman’s assertion of self defense that the only result is conviction on some degree of homicide.

And the jury did not buy into the prosecution’s portrayal of Zimmerman, and the facts don’t appear to support it either. How do the facts not support it? Zimmerman was acquitted, plain and simple.

Atlantic Wire contributing writer Philip Bump penned an excellent article on the Zimmerman trial in which he lays out several things about the jury trial many seem to forget:

Your assessment is not less important than that of the jurors, but it is less informed. No matter how much of the trial you watched on CNN, those jurors almost certainly saw more of the evidence than you did. They held documents in their hands. They saw what the witnesses—and Zimmerman—were doing while not on camera. They were excluded from hearing evidence that the judge deemed inappropriate or inadmissible. They have been instructed on the specific components of the law. And, most important, they are the only ones who know what arguments are being used to persuade each other to reach a unanimous decision.

Each of these things is an important part of the process of a criminal trial; I’ll break out why below. But again: While we can watch the trial through the keyhole provided by CNN, we should never convince ourselves that we know better than the people in that room.

He continues by explaining four key points which, again, most people never realize or quickly forget:

  1. Jurors must evaluate the evidence.
  2. Jurors only see evidence that’s admissible.
  3. The jury only worries about what the law says.
  4. Deliberations are much, much harder than they seem.

To be sure the jury’s verdict leaves unanswered a lot of questions, because all of the jury’s deliberations are distilled into a verdict. And on the verdict, the facts that were to be proven are taken at all or nothing. With this trial, again, the entire burden of proof was actually on Zimmerman to prove self defense. The only thing the prosecutor had to demonstrate was that some law was violated.

The prosecutor did overreach by throwing in the murder charge. Murder means that Zimmerman intended to kill Martin. Manslaughter, the lesser charge, means that Martin’s death was a foreseeable result of Zimmerman’s actions, but not Zimmerman’s intent.

Self defense is, again, an affirmative defense. When Zimmerman took on that defense, he, in essence, admitted to manslaughter. The prosecutor tried to go one further and prove murder and the jury didn’t buy it. The prosecutor tried to plug holes in Zimmerman’s assertion of self defense, but the jury didn’t buy it.

The jury acquitted Zimmerman. And that jury’s acquittal can never be overturned, reversed or vacated.

And as the “Petite policy” means that all relevant facts to which the Department of Justice might have a Federal interest have been vindicated with Zimmerman’s trial at the State level, the Federal government’s dual sovereignty will not be exercised on questions that would overlap.

Constitution/Religion

Misrepresenting the Treaty of Tripoli

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Atheists in the United States love to quote the Treaty of Tripoli:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This paragraph appeared in the English version of the treaty ratified by the Senate of the United States in 1797. There is an implication often made in quoting this paragraph, so I’ll squash that implication with this: the government of the United States is a separate sovereign from the the governments of each State.

When the Senate ratified the treaty, the treaty was ratified by the government of the United States. When representatives of the President signed the treaty before it was submitted to the Senate for ratification, it was signed on behalf of the presiding officer of the government of the United States.

The government of the United States is, as the treaty properly stated, not founded on Christianity. There is nothing in the Constitution that even alludes to any possibility of the government of the United States being founded or based on Christianity. But the United States is a federated republic of 50 sovereign States, each with their own government. The statement in Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli does not and cannot apply to the governments of each of those States, or even of just the 15 States that existed in 1797, but only to the government of the United States.

As an example to say the government of the United States is not founded on Christianity is not to also say the government of the Commonwealth of Virginia is not founded on Christianity. They are two separate sovereigns. The statement of the Treaty of Tripoli does not apply to both.

But this misrepresentation and implication is a symptom of a problem we have in the US.

People no longer really have in their minds the fact that there are 50 sovereign States that comprise the United States, or they forget the idea when it is convenient. The States were intended to be superior in all manner except the 17 enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Again, the government of the United States is a federated republic of independent, sovereign States.

Not provinces. Not territories. States.

Even the Fourteenth Amendment cannot apply the statement of Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli to any other State. The only thing the Fourteenth Amendment applies to the States with regard to religion is the protections provided by the First Amendment.