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
  • can george not guilty verdict be overturned
  • can a not guilty verdict be overturned
  • can a judge overturn a jury not guilty verdict
  • overturning a not guilty verdict
  • can the supreme court overturn a not guilty verdict
  • does double jeopardy apply to a not guilty verdict in florida

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.

Due process/Law Enforcement/Police

Educating an LEO

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Recently a person on YouTube named TnOutdoors9 posted a video discussing his recent experience when he was pulled over by police for a broken taillight. Now he also had a weapon with him, being a permitted carrier of a concealed weapon, and did the right thing in informing the officer of the presence of the weapon when retrieving what the officer would need required going near it. Have a listen:

http://www.youtu.be/uu8US6YAcoY

But what I’m drawing attention to isn’t the video, but rather one of the commenters. In the below image, the person to whom I’m referring is 05ROUSHED and I am “brandishwar”. 05ROUSHED is attempting to portray himself as a law enforcement officer, not in the screenshot below but elsewhere in the comments section to the video:

youtubecomment.jpg

His comment:

Apparently you people need to read a law book before blurting out your own opinion on the matter This IS NOT isolating your rights. A police officer has every right to ask for your ccp. And technically in the courts eyes, as soon as the blue lights are on, you are under arrest therefore u have No rights. Stop being ignorant and learn your laws

My response:

Apparently you need to do the same. The Court does not deem you to be under arrest until an officer declares you to be under arrest — and yes, the officer *must* declare it. Further, you have plenty of rights after being arrested — the entirety of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments come into play along with any additional rights declared by State laws and constitutions.

You might want to study up on this topic, as you seem quite deficient on your “knowledge” of it.

In response to my comment, 05ROUSHED decided to send me a PM:

ytpm.png

Text of PM:

“Apparently” you don’t know what you are talking about. A traffic stop in all actuality, is an arrest. You don’t need to be put in cuffs to be under arrest. When you get pulled over, you are under the police officers control, and have been denied your rights. Ask any court official they will say the same. Yes, u do have SOME rights, but not all of them. I’ve oy been a cop for 5 years, and a dispatcher for 7, obviously I don’t know anything at all………

All I can say is that if this guy is or was a cop, I hope I never lived in any of his jurisdictions… But his PM is flat-out wrong. It’s a rather sad state of affairs when I have to educate a law enforcement officer, current or former, on stuff that the officer should know without a second thought. When an officer pulls you over, you are not under arrest, so it is flat-out wrong to say that a traffic stop “is an arrest”.

Here was my reply:

ytpm2.png

Text of reply:

You apparently have forgotten the definition between an arrest and a detention. They are not one in the same.

When you, as an officer on duty, pull over a person for an infraction, such as a traffic violation, you are detaining them, not arresting them.

An arrest requires taking the person into custody with an actual restraint, not merely detaining them for a period of time.

Since I live in Missouri, I’ll quote my State’s laws, namely RSMO 544.180: “An arrest is made by an actual restraint of the person of the defendant, or by his submission to the custody of the officer, under authority of a warrant or otherwise. The officer must inform the defendant by what authority he acts, and must also show the warrant if required.” I doubt the definition differs much in your State and other States.

A citation may result in a future court appearance if the person does not plead guilty to the citation via an alternate option the Court may provide. An arrest requires a future Court appearance unless charges are not filed within the requisite period of time, as an arrest is when an officer takes a person into custody to answer for specific charges before a magistrate.

A detention can be upgraded to an arrest on the officer’s declaration that the person they have detained is under arrest, if the officer as the requisite probable cause to place the person being detained under arrest.

I also do not have “some” rights. I retain all my rights when detained or under arrest. I may have to cooperate with you on some things, but this does not mean I completely forfeit my protection against self-incrimination and my protection against searches. I can refuse to allow you to search my vehicle (Fourth Amendment) and I do not have to answer any question you ask or volunteer any information unless it is pertinent to anything I am required under law to provide upon request (Fifth Amendment).

Now one thing to bear in mind is that an arrest can occur absent restraints, such as when a person voluntarily surrenders. And a lawful detention can also occur with restraints. The handcuffs don’t always mean someone is under arrest. It just means an officer doesn’t want a person using their hands for some justifiable reason.

For more information on police stops and how to best conduct yourself when interacting with law enforcement, I recommend watching the video “10 Rules for Dealing with Police” by the organization Flex Your Rights.

Constitution/Religion/Republican platform

Christians, just say it already!

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Given the conservative backlash arising from the recent Supreme Court rulings regarding gay marriage, I get the vibe that there is something many Christian conservatives are stopping short of full on saying, and I wish they’d stop beating around the bush and just say it already:

Any law, court decision and interpretation of the Constitution must be consistent with the Bible and everything it says to be considered legitimate or valid. Any law, court decision, or interpretation of the Constitution that is not consistent with the Bible cannot be considered valid and will lead to the destruction of American society and the fall of the United States. The Constitution was based on the principles of the Bible, the United States was founded as a Christian nation, the Founders knew what they were doing when they put “under God” in the pledge of allegiance, and any person who believes anything to the contrary is free to leave.

Come on, Christian conservatives, we know this is what you really think, so just say it already. Stop beating around the bush. Who will be the first volunteer?

Debt

Indebtedness necessary for future financial security?

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Let me pose a question: in what universe is taking on debt considered a key to financial security? Quoting Credit.com’s Shelby Bremer recent article, "Millennials Ignore Credit Cards. Should They?":

While this means fewer young people are incurring credit card debt (an average of $2,087 per person, compared to 2007’s $3,073), in the long run, this trend is not without consequences. Though juggling credit card debt with student loan debt and an entry-level salary may be challenging, establishing credit at a young age is arguably crucial to future financial security.

Ms Bremer then goes on to suggest that millennials take on credit cards, but only the "right" kind of credit cards, and establish a credit history.

I argue that credit and credit cards are not necessary for future financial security. Being well-versed in the basics of accounting will do a lot more for helping you maintain financial security than taking on debt or remaining in debt, such as the numerous "experts" who advocate against paying off a mortgage early.

I think that on some level a lot of millennials know that this tremendous borrowing that has occurred over the last 20 years has been contributing to a major economic problem in the United States. A lot of millennials were very receptive to Ron Paul’s message when he was on the campaign trail in 2008 and 2012. He woke up a lot of minds, opened a lot of eyes to the realities of our economy and, more importantly, our monetary system. It also helped that the financial meltdown from 2008 that we are still feeling today Ron Paul and many other economists predicted years before it happened.

Rampant borrowing lends itself to greater fractional reserve banking which fuels inflation in the economy and money supply. Greater inflation means things become more expensive over time. But at the same time, we have an economy that, for at least the last two decades, has been fueled and propped up by debt. That is why recent headlines have said that an increase in interest rates would end a housing "recovery".

Banks and other financial firms need people borrowing money. They need to convince people, especially the younger generations, that borrowing is good, credit is good, and credit cards are necessary for future financial security. It’s all part of the banks trying to promise the world, so long as clients are willing to sign over a part of their future value to the banks.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: debt is slavery. And despite numerous assertions by numerous financial "experts", there is no such thing as good debt.

Millennials avoiding credit cards is not a bad thing. It is when measured against the financial standards established over the last 20 years or so, but it’s never been a bad thing to avoid debt. The borrower is servant to the lender, metaphorically speaking. But when you borrow money from someone, you are committing a portion of your future earnings to someone else. When you borrow money, someone else has a claim to your assets and your future.

Where is the good in that?

Avoiding debt is only bad for your financial future if you intend to be someone constantly borrowing money to prop up a lifestyle you would not be able to afford on your wages alone.

Health care/Politics/Technology

This won’t scale

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

I’m a software engineer. One concept that constantly comes up in software engineering is "scaling". We have to make sure any systems we write are going to be functional over the long term with large amounts of data. How large? Try to imagine how much data a hospital in a major metropolitan area could accumulate over the course of a decade… Yeah we’re talking a ton of data.

If you’re the paranoid conspiracy theory type, try to imagine how much data a government could accumulate on a population over the course of a month if it were really trying. Again, a lot of data.

As such a common criticism of certain systems, especially among the NoSQL crowd when talking about SQL and relational databases, is "this won’t scale" or "this doesn’t scale". When that is said, it means that the system works well on small systems and small amounts of data, but up on the level of Google won’t work well at all.

And when you’re talking about revamping the entirety of the United States health care system to be mostly if not entirely single-payer universal, you need to think on the scale of Google.

This is why I’m continually puzzled when leftists and other supporters of Obamacare point to Sweden as the example Obamacare can live by. Okay let’s look at this.

According to Wikipedia, Sweden’s national population is 9,555,893. That’s just north of 9.5 million. The population of the United States is estimated to be north of 316 million. In other words the United States has more than 33 times the population of Sweden. That’s like comparing your personal financial management system with that of a medium-sized corporation in terms of the number of transactions that have to be managed.

And apparently in Sweden, universal health care is working quite well. But that doesn’t mean that universal health care will work well on the scale of the United States. On the scale of New York City, it might, since the population of the City of New York (2012 estimate: 8,336,697) is slightly less than the entire Kingdom of Sweden.

For something that works on a small scale to also work on the large scale, adjustments must be made. Okay massive adjustments must be made. To get an idea of the kind of adjustments that need to be made, see if you can talk Quicken’s engineers into telling you the functional and systemic differences between what they offer for enterprises (i.e. large corporations on the scale of Google and Microsoft) versus small and medium businesses versus personal and home business use.

But there’s a complication: something that works on the large scale doesn’t work on the small scale. It’s a paradox those of us in the software development field know all too well: adjustments and design decisions made in a system to get it work on a large scale can cripple it on the small scale. In other words, if we could get universal health care to work in the United States, it would not serve as a viable example for Sweden.

Sweden has also had universal health care for decades, and their population over the last 10 years grew by less than 1 million people. As such they’ve had plenty of time to adjust and scale their system to keep it working over the long run by making small adjustments here and there. But the system they have now likely wouldn’t go over well 20 years ago, probably also not even 10 years go.

That is what happens when you try to scale a system up. The problem is that the other universal health care systems around don’t work well on the larger scales, so the United States does not have a good model we can use for a starting point, which is why the United States is trying to make it up as they go along, starting with Obamacare. Problems abound with the health care systems in Canada (2011 census: 33,476,688) and the United Kingdom (2011 census: 63,181,775).

And when you’re talking about scaling up a health care system, especially a universal one, population is what matters.

So perhaps we need to talk to Google to get an idea of how we might be able to scale up universal healthcare from the size of Sweden to the size of China and still have it work. Except, there’s another caveat: not all systems can be scaled up.

This is another concept that escapes a lot of people, not just politicians when talking about healthcare, but software engineers when talking about designing systems and software. There are inherent limitations in every system, and an upper boundary by which it can be scaled up. Google alone accounts for 1% of the entire world’s power consumption. Few companies can get that large. Most never will.

As such universal health care will face increasing costs with increasing scale, and the correlation is not linear. Eventually it will reach a point where it will be too expensive for the economy to handle. Sweden will never reach the size of the United States, so we cannot use them and their small-scale universal health care system as any kind of guide for how the Untied States should model anything.

Instead, health care needs to be managed at the State level at its highest point and the Federal government needs to back out.

Debt/Mortgage

Advocating staying in debt

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 1 Comment

Why do financial advisers seem to constantly advise people to stay in debt?

Recently Adam Hatter wrote a story on Yahoo! Finance detailing how he and his wife paid off a 30 year mortgage in less than 5 years, saving themselves, easily, over a hundred thousand dollars in interest. They went to some of the extremes that are needed to free up income in order to do this, but they are easily much wealthier as a result.

So why has Business Insider writer Mandi Woodruff basically lambasted them for doing this? It comes down to what Hatter did to free up the income they needed to pay off their mortgage: reduced retirement account contributions and suspended contributions to their children’s 529 college fund.

Mandi quoted Greg McBride of Bankrate.com, who said:

They need to be maximizing their financial responsibility by padding their emergency savings, utilizing tax favored retirement options and not pouring every spare nickle into their home, which is an illiquid asset.

Actually the fact that a home is an illiquid asset is the reason to not have any debt against it and to pay off any debt secured by it as quickly as is feasible. Viscous assets, such as real estate, are difficult to convert to cash. This means that if you suddenly find yourself without income, you’ve got a viscous asset against which you owe a ton of money weighing you down.

It seems the fact they suspended contributions to their investment accounts is really the thing killing these financial advisors. Again quoting Greg McBride:

That extra money applied to the mortgage is effectively gone until they sell the house and whether you’re selling or staying there, it’s not a free house once you get the loan paid off. You still have property taxes, maintenance and upkeep, not to mention you’ve really compromised your financial security in the meantime.

Again, that is the biggest reason to get your mortgage paid off quickly. They now have the extra discretionary income to handle issues should they arise. And they are also now far wealthier than most Americans, even those with retirement accounts. I’m likely far wealthier than many of my peers because my wife and I have been doing our best the last 4 years to shed as much of our debt as we can. And if we were to buy a house, we’d likely be paying that mortgage off as quickly as we could, too.

Given what has occurred in the mortgage markets, one word has scared people into paying their mortgages quickly: foreclosure. You see, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve been contributing to retirement and college savings accounts instead of diverting to your mortgage if you lose your income and the bank seizes your home. This is the one thing Ms Woodruff and Mr McBride continually ignore through the entirety of the article.

It may be 10, 20, 30 years for them to realize that, when their kids go to college and they haven’t accumulated enough savings and they have to borrow student loans. And yeah, they don’t have a mortgage, but they sure won’t have as much saved in retirement as they would have liked.

Their overall savings might be lesser because they suspended investment contributions over the course of the 5 years they paid off their mortgage, but, again, they now have the money to shore up their retirement accounts while potentially pursuing other investment opportunities that could have a greater return. They are wealthier now than they were when they bought the house, and they are able to take their now much larger discretionary incomes and try to generate additional wealth with it.

If your mortgage is underwater – meaning you owe more than the estimated market value of your home – then you must accelerate payments against your mortgage. This means making sacrifices. This means eating out less, cutting back on other luxuries, cutting back on retirement contributions, and directing all that extra cash to your mortgage and debts. But even if you’re not, the power of interest calculations means that the sooner you throw any extra money at your mortgage, the better. You needn’t pay it off as quickly as the Hatters did, but I see no reason to not do that either.

One other thing I’m also finding rather intriguing about Woodruff’s and McBride’s points of view is this: they presume investment accounts will only accumulate in value. One need look to only 2008, just 5 years ago, to see just how stupid banking on such an idea can really be. And there are other examples preceding even just that.

All of the events over the last 5 years in the various financial markets have scared people into shedding debt by the truckload. The old advice of keeping debt around while directing extra discretionary money toward investments just doesn’t hold water anymore. Few take it seriously anymore. It might look good on a spreadsheet, but investments are gambles, just as the future is also a gamble.

But the Hatters no longer have to worry about their home being foreclosed because they own it free and clear. Yes there are still property taxes they have to worry about, along with upkeep, but anyone who owns their car knows about these as well. Yes they lose the benefit of the potential of compound interest on investment accounts, but there are a lot of variables involved in the rosy picture Business Insider is attempting to paint, and it’s a gamble few are willing to make.

Plus there’s one other thing Business Insider seems to be overlooking: the hundreds of thousands of dollars they saved by paying off their mortgage early means that they will come out far ahead if they do sell their home than if they maintained their mortgage for nearly the entire term.

But the one thing that must always be kept in mind is this: being in debt means someone else owns a piece of your future. Getting out of debt is the only way to be in complete control of your financial future, even if you gamble a bit with investments.

And how any financial adviser could actually advocate staying in debt and risking additional money on something not guaranteed to provide a return is beyond me.

And before I close this out, a quick note about the college savings accounts: why are people so brainwashed into thinking they must pay for their children to go to college? Studies show that students who pay for their own education do better in the end. As such it’s better to have your children pay their own way through school, even if it means taking on student loans, as they are much more likely to take their education more seriously, meaning they’re more likely to come out ahead in the long run.

Life

Lightning round

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Last night, May 28, some strong to severe thunderstorms rolled through the Kansas City area. There were some heavy lighting strikes with it as well. A strike that occurred close to my apartment sent a surge across our cable line, overloading our cable modem and causing fuses and capacitors inside it to burst – sounding almost like a gunshot – killing it instantly. Rest in peace, SB6141.

The surge did not end at the modem. It continued through the modem and traveled along the Ethernet port and into the router, killing all of the Ethernet jacks on the router, making it wireless only. But it didn’t stop there.

The surge continued along the Ethernet cables plugged into the router to two gigabit switches. One switch is fried. It hisses when plugged in and gets so hot to burn skin. The other one, thankfully, only lost the jack into which the cable connecting it to the router was plugged. The switch was able to register the gigabit signal on another jack, so while one switch is a complete fatality, thankfully the other one still works.

So in all, last night’s lightning strike cost me a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem, the router, and one gigabit switch.

Thankfully when I upgraded all of my networking and Internet equipment last fall, I never got rid of the equipment I was replacing. So today I’m at least up and running, albeit with a downgraded Internet connection – the temporary cable modem is a DOCSIS 2.0 modem – thanks to not getting rid of that equipment. Although the phone call took a bit longer than I thought, Time Warner had me going in about a half an hour – they get a lot of flak, but I’ve never had any issues with their customer service.

And now I’m on the hunt for good surge protection.

The surge protector into which I had everything plugged created interference with the DOCSIS 3.0 modem on its coax line protection. As such, we had the modem plugged directly into the wall instead of going through a surge suppressor, but we initially intended that to be only temporary, until we could find a better suppressor that wouldn’t create the line interference we were experiencing.

So first order of business is finding a good surge protector that does not interfere with DOCSIS 3.0 signals. I know that APC is typically the standard for home and home office protection, so I will likely be looking at their offerings first before shopping around. After I have the better suppression in place is when I will plug up a new DOCSIS 3.0 modem – perhaps I should order two this time around just in case.

Now one thing everyone needs to know is that no surge suppression can protect against a close or direct lightning strike. About 15 years ago, I lived in a house that took a direct lightning strike to its utility box, frying all of the phone jacks on one side of the house – and I do mean frying, as the jacks and cables had scorching on them. But if I’d had my cable modem plugged into some kind of suppression instead of directly into the wall, I might have lost only the modem instead of everything else that went with it.

Lesson learned.

Law Enforcement/Police/Second Amendment

Listen to law enforcement

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Securing your home is about one thing: never leave a potential point of entry without any kind of hindrance to an intruder. It is impossible to make your home 100% secure, meaning someone with enough determination will find a way to break in and cause some mayhem, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get very close to that point. With enough of a hindrance, most people will give up or not even try in the first place.

At the same time, properly securing your home requires the proper mindset. The criminal mindset.

In light of this, a common notion has come up. I’ve encountered it in my profession as a software engineer. It can be summarized as this: criminals make the best security analysts. In casinos it is often stated as “to catch a cheat, hire one”. With securing your home, thankfully you don’t need to go as far as consulting a reformed serial burglar to help you locate the weak points.

Instead you can consult any seasoned law enforcement officer who has responded to numerous cases of burglary and home invasion. They’ve seen how criminals have broken into homes. They’ve seen how criminals commit crimes. They know the criminal mindset quite well. They know the realities of crime and violence, since they’re the once who pick up the pieces every day.

More importantly, they also have an idea of things that do not work.

Yet we leave the most vulnerable members of our society wide open and completely unsecured every weekday of the academic year. We saw this with Columbine in 1999. We saw this with Sandy Hook in 2012. There is nothing different about either situation: individuals hell-bent on creating a massive amount of carnage walked unhindered into a public school and opened fire. They met no resistance of any kind.

In response to Sandy Hook, there were massive calls, still ringing out even today, to “do something”. Yet is anyone looking at the Sandy Hook situation and analyzing it? No. Well not anyone with any political power, at least. Are they talking to law enforcement officers to determine how best to prevent the next tragedy? More like they’re just outright ignoring them.

Instead they were all too busy blaming the NRA and all gun owners for this situation. “If no one owned guns, this wouldn’t have happened!” they were too busy screaming.

Now arguably one thing that would easily stop school shootings from almost ever happening again is by turning all of the public schools into little prisons. In many ways they’re already like that, but I’m talking full security prisons with guard towers manned with guards with rifles, multiple layers of fencing, and the like. But any person who would seriously advocate for such is someone who definitely should not be taken seriously on anything.

After all prisons are more designed to keep people from getting out than getting in.

Schools, on the other hand, need to take the opposite approach. And on this, you can consult law enforcement to look around a school and identify its weak points of entry. After all a person determined on shooting up a school may not always just walk in the front door.

So when it comes to preventing school shootings, why is no one consulting law enforcement? Because most law enforcement officers are not telling lawmakers what the lawmakers want to hear. Indeed a survey by the site PoliceOne which included over 15,000 current and former or retired law enforcement officers, provided some interesting results:

  • 71% of responders say the “assault weapons” ban would not reduce violent crime
  • 95.7% of responders say magazine capacity limits would not reduce violent crime
  • 79.7% of responders say that banning private, non-dealer transfers (closing the so-called “gun show loophole”) would not reduce violent crime
  • 58.8% of responders say that increasing punishments for gun trafficking and “straw purchases” would reduce gun crime
  • 44.8% of responders felt that requiring mental health background checks for gun sales would not reduce instances of mass shootings, while 23.9% were unsure
  • 70% of responders do not support a national gun registration database
  • 91.4% of responders want stiff, mandatory sentences for gun crimes
  • 81.5% of responders believe that gun buyback and surrender programs are not effective in reducing gun violence
  • 91.3% of responders support civilian concealed carry
  • 54.7% of responders rated 5 and 21.7% of responders rated 4 on a scale of 1 to 5 for how important they feel concealed carry is in reducing overall crime
  • 80% of responders feel that, in tragedies like Newtown and Aurora, had an armed citizen responded, there would have been fewer casualties and/or fatalities
  • 76.6% of responders support arming teachers and/or school administrators with annual qualifications
  • Only 4.4% of responders feel the availability/prevalence of guns in the US is the largest cause of gun violence

Remember, this is a survey of law enforcement officers, and they overwhelmingly disagree with the policies being proposed. When the law enforcers are saying the lawmakers are creating bad laws, you’d think the lawmakers would listen to them. But no, the lawmakers think they know what’s best, and if what the law enforcement officers are saying differs from what they want, then law enforcement must not know their stuff right?

And those surveyed overwhelmingly want current laws enforced, with gun crimes carrying stiffer penalties. They don’t feel the new policies will have any effect on crime, but they feel that having more actively armed citizens carrying concealed will reduce crime, and that arming teachers is also the direction to go to prevent mass shootings in schools. These are people who understand crime, know how it plays out in real life, and know the realities of violence in the real world.

Most people don’t have a clue about violence. Instead they have a romanticized view of crime and violence fed to us through television and other forms of entertainment. They are blind to reality, because they don’t want to think about reality. Sam Harris has penned several articles on violence (here, here and here). In his first article, called “The Truth about Violence”, he writes:

In my experience, most people do not want to think about the reality of human violence. I have friends who sleep with their front doors unlocked and who would never consider receiving instruction in self-defense. For them, gun ownership seems like an ugly and uncivilized flirtation with paranoia. Happily, most of these people will never encounter violence in any form. And good luck will make their unconcern seem perfectly justified.

In his “FAQ on Violence” article, he writes:

Many people simply do not want to think about this topic in any detail. I concede that, given the relative safety in which most of us live, this can be a reasonable attitude to adopt. Most people will do just fine walking the streets of London, Paris, or even New York, oblivious to the possibility that they could be physically attacked. Happily, the odds of avoiding violence are in our favor.

And that is the main reason why most people are so clueless about how violence actually plays out. The rate of violent crime in the United States has been steadily declining for the last 20 years, meaning the overall chance of a person becoming a victim of violent crime becomes is also declining every year. But overall chance is not individual chance, and many variables go into determining the individual chance you will be a crime victim.

Yet when it comes to gun crime and school shootings, suddenly the clueless portray themselves as experts. And they ignore the actual experts because they think they have the solution to the problem. Sorry, but that’s not how it works.

Law enforcement is already telling us what they feel will and will not work. And given that they are the ones how have to deal with the violent crime on a daily basis, it’s time we listen to them.