July 6, 2009

BEWARE THE IDES OF JULY (or maybe August . . . or maybe even September)

Every economic indicator shows the U.S. economy is still in trouble; still declining.  The promise of “green shoots” seems false.   And yet, the American people seem strangely calm.  Am I the only one who thinks it’s almost “too quiet”?

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June 22, 2009

“Citizen of the United States”

The following quote is attributed to http://www.supremelaw.org/fedzone11/htm/chapter3.htm and apparently reports a dialogue between a litigant and some “insider” (perhaps a federal judge or prosecutor):

“Why are defendants in federal district court always asked if they are ‘citizens of the United States’?”

He replied without hesitation, “So we can determine jurisdiction.  In many cases the federal court does not have jurisdiction over a citizen unless they testify they are a citizen of the United States — meaning a federal citizen under the 14th Amendment.”

I quickly interjected, “What if the individual denied being a citizen of the United States and claimed to be a sovereign citizen of Oklahoma?”  The attorney bowled me over with, “We don’t get jurisdiction.”

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May 14, 2009

Investigating Argument

According to the A.D. 1992 edition of O’Connor’s Texas Rules Civil Trial, Texas courts recognized kinds of hearings: 1) evidentiary; and 2) argument.  Neither kind of hearing was favored over the other.  However, according to the A.D. 2005 edition of O’Connor’s same book, those two kinds of hearings are still recognized, but “evidentiary hearings are [now] disfavored”.

In other words, the modern court system prefers to reach decisions based on argument hearings wherein litigants advance premises (beliefs) rather than evidentiary hearings where litigants introduce facts (objective truths) into the record.  As a result, someone skilled in the art of argument (like an attorney) could theoretically win in a hearing even when the facts (truth) were against him.  More, it appears that the courts prefer that hearings be decided by argument rather than by factual evidence (truth).

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May 12, 2009

Riding the Debt Tiger

I’m a long ways from being the first to observe that the total American debt has grown to dangerous proportions.  But I may have been the first (July A.D. 2008) to note that the total American debt has now grown so great that it can’t ever be repaid and therefore won’t be repaid.  (“What can’t be paid, won’t be paid.”)  In fact, according to my guesstimates, at least 80% and perhaps 90% of existing debt instruments cannot—and therefore will not—be repaid.

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May 5, 2009

Owing It To Ourselves?

An A.D. 2006 article entitled “The Lost Decade—Per Capita Net Worth and Living Standards,” declared in part that “as citizens of the U.S. we own the national debt.”

Technically, that’s correct.  Whee duh pee-pul do “own” the National Debt.  But 40 years ago, when gov-co was first going hugely into debt, it was borrowing from the American people and justified increasing the national debt by saying it was OK since we “owed it to ourselves”.

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April 27, 2009

Notice Pleading Notes

I’ve been trying to make sense of our legal system for 26 years. So, I was much surprised when I recently learned that “notice pleading” is America’s “dominant form of pleading”. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I’d never even heard the term “notice pleading,” and now I find out that it’s the “dominant form” of pleading. As is often the case, I’m a little humiliated to learn that after a quarter century of studying this legal system, I had no clue to our “dominant form” of pleading.

However, I don’t feel too embarrassed because I’ll bet that you, too, haven’t previously heard of “notice pleading”. In fact, I’ll bet that 99.9% of Americans have not previously heard of “notice pleading”. If I won that bet, it would be evidence that something important might be concealed in the concept of “notice pleading”. After all, how can the “dominant form” of courtroom pleading be “accidentally” unknown to virtually all of the American people unless “the powers that be” were trying to hide something?

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