Day: July 20, 2009

SLABBED Daily – July 20 with judges still on my mind

As Sop commented on my weekend edition of SLABBED Daily, there are limits to what you can learn from PACER documents.

For example, you can read the citations in a Judge’s orders and opinions but you don’t know if the frame fit the facts or the facts were adjusted to fit the frame.

If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts, a post I wrote for Sop as Promise when I was testing the water on his insurance blog that became SLABBED, explored the function of a cognitive map governing the processing of new information – denying some and inventing other.

Here, ‘cognition’ can be used to refer to the mental models, or belief systems, that people use to perceive, contextualize, simplify, and make sense of otherwise complex problems. Put more simply, cognitive maps are a method we use to structure and store spatial knowledge, allowing the “mind’s eye” to visualize images in order to reduce cognitive load, and enhance recall and learning of information.

We can guess at the cognitive map a judge follows in reaching a decision; but, short of events such as those reported in Oversight panel calls for ousting Judge Joan Benge from Gretna court, we have no way of knowing:

“It is not clear what her reason for making the award was. What is clear is that the award was not based on Judge Benge’s assessment of the evidence in the case.” Continue reading “SLABBED Daily – July 20 with judges still on my mind”

Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into – Kuehn files Motion in limine to exclude Spragins and Tucker

laurel and hardy

Plaintiffs would show that any testimony that may be offered by Defendant’s counsel, H. Scot Spragins or Lawrence J. Tucker, should be prohibited and/or excluded. State Farm previously stated…that “State Farm’s counsel is not the only source of the information Plaintiffs seek. Moreover, any information they possesses [sic] is not relevant or crucial to the central issues in this case, i.e., the actual conduct of the appraisal and the propriety of the award.”

…Of course, if Tucker and Spragins did have pertinent information, they and their law firm would be properly disqualified as counsel. However, based on State Farm’s representations, this Court denied (without prejudice) Plaintiffs’ Motion to Disqualify Counsel. Because Plaintiffs were thus disallowed from taking the testimony of Spragins and Tucker, they cannot now be allowed to come forward and testify in the evidentiary hearing scheduled before this Court on July 22, 2009…

SLABBED first reported the “fine mess” created by Spragins and Tucker Continue reading “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into – Kuehn files Motion in limine to exclude Spragins and Tucker”

My brother Darryl and my brother Darryl – and we’re all in this together: Part Deux Are there limits? Have we already past them?

Forget party politics. The Obama administration is borrowing money only because it is the only option to stave off short term ruin. His predecessor along with congresses controlled at times by both parties spent tax money they did not have like drunken sailors on a bender. Let’s go back in time and visit with Niall Ferguson, author of the Ascent of Money via an interview he gave Vanity Fair in January of this year.

These measures that we’re taking at the moment are preventative measures. They’re really designed to prevent a complete implosion of the economy. That’s why I call this, the “Great Repression,” with an “R,” because we are repressing this problem. But, that’s not the same as a cure. And what we’re going to see will look very disappointing, because we’ll be comparing it to the recovery of the sort that we used to see. In a traditional post-war recession, there would be a shock; the Fed would cut rates; there would be some kind of fiscal stimulus; and the economy would quite quickly recover.

The reason that won’t work this time, and this is the key point, is that the whole U.S. economy became excessively leveraged in the last ten years. The debt burden, as a proportion of G.D.P., is in the region of 355 percent. So, debt is three and a half times the output of the economy. That’s some kind of historic maximum, and those debts aren’t going away.

So we’ve all been bingeing on money that we didn’t have?

That we borrowed. And we borrowed it from abroad, ultimately. This has been financed by borrowing from petrol exporters, and borrowing from Asian central banks, and sovereign wealth funds. But yeah, whether it was the people who refinanced their Continue reading “My brother Darryl and my brother Darryl – and we’re all in this together: Part Deux Are there limits? Have we already past them?”