So, we had a real lesson today in the real meaning of Christmas.
The guy we found drilling the lock on our back door when we got back from our family thing helped us put in new locks.
He turned out to be really friendly, and we talked a bit about carbide-tipped drills, and cordless drills, and how locks really work. Lots of fun. One of our cats nearly got out, but I caught the little guy by the tail. (Considering how cold it is out, I think on the whole he's better off with a pulled tail than he would be outside.)
Merry Christmas, everybody.
(And no, he wasn't a locksmith. That'd be wayyyy too mundane.)
Just a reminder, for folks in or about Minnesota: Open party, here, starting around 1PM, running until whenever. For folks who need a place to go, just people who wanna hang out, whatever. Some food provided. Social stuff. No Christmas carols etc., but probably some mulled cider. More explanation of the Bertrand Russell party was given in an older entry.
So, I used to have a game console; the Intellivision. It was a great toy.
The people who did the original product took pride in their work, and as a result, they're now distributing an emulator for it, as well as the original cartridges. This isn't some multi-billion dollar corporation trying to cash in on nostalgia; this is the actual folks who made the machine possible.
In a world where $50 will get you a very visually impressive game that is absolutely no fun at all, like MOO3, $30 will get you fifty games. And they're good. The theme music from Snafu is still stuck in my head sometimes. When I loaded this collection up to try out "Shark! Shark!" again, I still had my carefully tuned shark-dodging reflexes.
Just a reminder to video game enthusiasts: The old games really were fun to play, and they're still available in some cases. It's a little late to buy these for Commercemas, but if you find yourself wishing you had some games which were, well, actually fun to play, this is your best bet.
edit, 3/4/05: I am updating this piece to make sure everything is correct. more information once I'm done.
edit, 3/8/05: The situation is that, predictably enough, I've received some cartooney threats using the word "defamation". Thus far, I have not been informed of any specific factual errors in the piece.
edit, 3/30/05: We have a list of factual errors.
Around this time of year, a lot of people feel their lives are a little empty, a little dreary. But let me tell you, buddy, your problems ain't nothing. It's Christmas season, so a lot of you are maybe thinking of George Bailey, the small-time banker who makes the world better just by being in it, whose bank nearly goes bust, who is saved by an angel. He's not the only Bailey who has a Christmas-time story for you, involving finances, and people going bust.
This is a story of "predatory lending". You may not know what predatory lending is; that's okay, I'll explain. Our story begins with a man who bought a house, and had a $150,000 mortgage on it. Some time later, he refinanced to $180,000. Payments were $1,700 a month; remember that figure, it'll come up later. A while back, he was in a car accident, and spent a few weeks in a coma; somewhere in this, he suffered brain damage, and he is now dependent on Social Security disability money to feed and shelter him. Unfortunately, six-digit medical bills and a long period of inactivity put his house payments solidly past-due. That puts the mortgage into foreclosure; it would cost $192,000 to pay that off. He called the realtor through whom he got the house, James Krystosek. Mr. Krystosek said the house could be saved. Let's see how he went about this. You can read along at home; this case was in Wright County, Minnesota, file number C8-04-2705. (There are a couple of typos, and one factual error, in some of the pleadings. Some of the pleadings, by contrast, contain outright lies.)
First, he set up a meeting with another man, Paul Reese. At this meeting, the victim was induced to sign some "paperwork". One of the pieces of paperwork was an entirely fictitious mortgage for $73,500. No money was disbursed, but now there's a paper trail claiming he owes $73,500. Fictitious loans are a particularly great example of predatory lending.
Next, they do the actual transaction. The structure of the transaction is that they buy his house from him, for $317,500, and pay off his existing mortgage, and give him the money that's left. Then, he buys it back from them for some price. Only, they've got a fake mortgage to pay off; also, they some how end up with $28,000 of closing costs, even though Alpine Realty (the original broker) didn't put up a for-sale sign to publicize the availability of the house. But they still took $17,000 in commissions. All of this is done by Paul Reese, acting with Power of Attorney for a man called Charles D. Bailey. Want to know more about him? You can search the Wright County records for him.
So, to make a long story short, a man with $125,000 of equity in his house ended up with $13,000 of equity in his house, and, and this is important, his house payments went up to $2,500 a month. If there is such a thing as predatory lending, this is it.
That's right. They stole over $100,000 of his money, and increased his payments about 50%.
You can guess what happens next; he can't make the inflated payments any more than he could have made the original ones, Social Security is slow to start paying, and pretty soon, they're trying to have him evicted, using the law firm of Gries and Lenhardt.
edit: it was mortgage satisfaction papers, not loan origination, that were sent. G&L represented, not just defended.
Luckily, for him, they made one mistake: They followed the law (I'm sure it was an accident) closely enough to send him the loan origination papers for the $73,500 fictitious mortgage, which was enough to get him started defending himself. He ends up in court, where they are defended (you guessed it) by the firm of Gries & Lenhardt. When the case is finally settled, the name on all the new paperwork is still Charles D. Bailey. Who's he? We don't know for sure, but he seems to be the one with the authority to issue a new contract for deed for the house.
The story ends sort of happily. The details of the settlement are confidential, but the victim of the story isn't moving anywhere right away. The bad guys, well, they probably have some profit left, but the margin just got a lot narrower, and I'm sure they'll be having some interesting conversations with various regulatory bodies, and possibly the Attorney General's office.
But let's stop for a bit. Just imagine, for a moment, what it must be like to have a life so fucking empty that stealing $100,000 from a guy with brain damage seems like a good idea. Imagine what it must be like to be so desperate for money that you'd take those risks. Try to wrap your head around this for a bit. Try to imagine what it must be like to kick a man when he's down. Wonder, for a moment, what makes it all worth it. A larger house? A second car? A boat? A lakeshore cabin? Are any of these worth taking a man's house from him, taking tens of thousands of dollars of his equity as a cash profit, and laughing as the brain-damaged guy gets put out on the street? This is the essence of predatory lending; find people who are desperate enough to make mistakes, and take advantage of 'em. You end up with a bit of their money. The people running this scam paid about $192,000 to another bank, and ended up, at least briefly, owning a house which someone would have to pay them three hundred thousand dollars to pay off... And of course, if he falls short, they get any money he did pay, and they also get to keep the house!
Note that six other people in the same county got "deals" through these people. It's hard to be sure, but it looks as though the other deals may have been good examples of predatory lending.
All they hear is some indistinct buzzing noises. Whatever has happened to these poor fucks, there is not much in the way of soul left in them. They are empty shells, running from one con to the next. For all we know, the real delay in settling the case was the need to close another similar deal to get the cash to pay off this one. There is very, very, little left in these people that you could recognize as human. How could there be? What person could possibly do such a thing?
As Christmas rolls around, and we sit around talking about those in need, I urge you to remember that there are needs no charity can fill. Whatever these people want, no amount of money will buy it for them. The horror is that they don't know that yet, and they may never learn it. They may just flit around from one con to another, trying to stay ahead of the law, dreading the day when it all comes crashing down. There are people out there going hungry, but we know what to do to help them. At least we can help them.
So... Give some food to charity. Fund a local foodshelf. But give some thought to the question of what can be done for these poor benighted people, whose injuries are deeper than our doctors can heal, whose need for money cannot be met by all the money in the world. If all else fails, pray for them. What else can we do? Perhaps Clarence can come back and save another Bailey's soul from despair.
(Permission is granted to reproduce this article in whole, or to reproduce excerpts if they are accompanied by a URL for the original article.)
So, here's the idea. You have a really sucky TV channel, called Court TV (or perhaps they'd rather we spelled it CourtTV). Here's the idea. Rather than market honestly, they have shills post spam. Lots of spam. They register for a dozen message boards and post identical messages to all of them, asking questions and linking to the coverage on Court TV's page. They don't admit that it's an ad, or that they're posting the same thing everywhere; they pretend to be members of the community, hoping that no one will notice right away that, say, the user "matt81" has never posted anything but links to Court TV.
Okay, that gets us to "spam" and "dishonest".
Here's where it gets funny. Court TV has a BBS system, and on that BBS system, attempts to discuss this are deleted quickly. But, best of all, they have a policy against spam posts just like this. So it's not that they don't know that this is harmful, disruptive, wrong, and bad. It's that they are proud of how they thought of it first, and they don't want anyone doing it to them.
So remember. Court TV == spam. They are bad, dishonest, people. Do not patronize them, do not support them. Instead, make sure that you link to the above page, using likely keywords, and help other people find out the simple truth.
Gather round, readers, and I will tell you the story of a junk faxer, demonstrating once and for all the fine grasp of legal subtleties one learns to expect. I believe these people may actually be the dumbest junk faxers I have ever sued.
Let me tell you about Complex Capital Mortgage.
They sent me two faxes, and they got sued. While the process server was getting around to them, they sent me another fax. Okay, so, they've been served. They are being sued for violating the TCPA. What, then, do they do?
First, they make a harassing call to my house. From their office. Without blocking caller ID. You may think this is a clear winner, but actually, I think it's probably the least stupid thing they did.
Secondly, they answered the complaint. If I'd meant "their lawyer answered the complaint", I would have said that. But in Minnesota, corporations must be represented by counsel. So, their answer doesn't count. Not, that is to say, that it was a coherent or good answer; arguably, we would have been pretty well off with that as their official answer. But having Ike Njaka, an officer of the company, submit the answer did not look very good. It's okay, they did eventually get counsel; when we moved for judgment, they finally hired a lawyer.
Thirdly, they have never responded to some of the discovery in the case. Their reponses, such as they were, were several months late, and contained flat-out lies. (To be fair, we haven't sent them our discovery answers yet; they are sitting around, carefully complete, waiting until we get at least some response from them.)
Fourthly, they are trying to demand some kind of meaningless confidentiality on the settlement, which they think will somehow make them better. Clueless! And not, I think, gonna happen.
Fifthly, they never bothered to let their lawyer know when we scheduled an inspection of the premises, so instead of objecting or doing things legally, they just unlawfully refused to allow us to inspect their faxing hardware.
Anyway, though, that's not the stupid part.
Here's the stupid part.
In April of 2004, six months after being sued, they finally reached some kind of tentative resolution with the fax blaster who sent these faxes for them, and exposed them to this suit.
The resolution they reached was that they would start doing faxing on behalf of this blaster. They would dial every number in approximately 120 local prefixes (that's about 120,000 numbers), looking for fax machines, and then send out faxes in batches of 25-35 thousand at a time.
This, my friends, is well beyond the normal range of stupidity. This is cartoon character logic. "When we send faxes we get sued; we need to send even more faxes to make the money back."
Of course, they invented language to shield them. They wrote a little agreement that says "the moment you violate a law, you cease to be our agent". That's brilliant! I bet no one's ever thought of that one before. Now that the idea is out, of course, we'll see a surge in assassination-for-hire, because when you hire a hit man, you can just make an agreement that, if he violates any laws, he's no longer working as your agent. Brilliant.
But that's not the stupid part. The stupid part is that they actually did it. They went on ahead and started blasting faxes by the thousand.
Not everyone there was an idiot. One employee, for instance, wrote a memo warning that this action would violate federal law, and not just any law, but a law for which the company had already been sued. He observed that Impact Marketing (a.k.a. fax.com) could be out of business within a year, leaving Complex Capital Mortgage with lots of junk fax lawsuits.
Prescient of him. In fact, it's been only six months, and fax.com is gone, the founders fled with their ill-gotten gains. And Complex Capital Mortgage is left holding the bag. The one consolation they can take is that, at least, they were not tricked into this; they went into it, with their eyes open, knowing the risks. Which, I think, is the most amazingly stupid part of all.
Want to hear the end of the story? This case was filed in Ramsey County District Court, and the case number is 62-C5-04-5266. Look for a stipulation to dismiss in the near future, along with a settlement agreement.
Someone asked, after being told that there were too many pharisees at CF, where the pharisees were. This is the response that happened. I'm not sure how much of this had much to do with me... Ironically, when I posted a copy of this at the forum in question, it was trashed quickly, by someone carefully citing several rules which it may or may not have technically broken.
It is not the individual members, but the corporate structure. An institution can have no conscience; the actions of the institution are not the personal actions of the members. Thus, CF has a position on homosexuality. Not all members, or even all staff, agree with that position. But staff are required to uphold policy. So, if policy hurts someone, then no person can say "It is my fault", and no one can repent; the harm continues, because there is no one whose conscience can reflect the harm done by the institution.
The institution has lost the fight. While there may be competent arguments in favor of CF's position on homosexuality, no one has the time or patience to offer them; instead, we are treated to angry outpourings of pure hatred and fear of those different, and discussions showing these for what they are, of course, must be squelched.
CF, as an institution, is failing, because there is no corporate conscience. The individual people who have consciences are obliged to adhere to the rules, no matter the harm done.
Part of this problem is that, quite simply, modern Christendom is split on the question of, say, homosexuality. Any position from "homosexual sex is okay" to "anyone who has experienced temptations towards homosexual sex is necessarily unsaved and cannot be saved" may be found among the staff. (Well, okay, the last is very slightly more extreme than anything I've seen someone outright say. But not much.)
But the issue cannot be confronted, and people are unwilling to accept that there is honest disagreement among Christians about how best to interpret the Bible.
More generally, CF is torn between the clear need for some way to deal with conflicts, and the clear failures of specific attempts. Staff are selected for strength of belief, not for discernment or cool-headedness, so many staff members simply cannot moderate a discussion; they inflame instead. Rigid and carefully defined rules are invented to make sure that any warm body can serve as a moderator.
But do we not know what happens when rigid rules are applied instead of spirit? The letter killeth, but the spirit bringeth life.
CF, as an institution, is a Pharisee. The individual members of staff, approached on their own, are by and large good people. But not all of them are called to moderation, and the attempts to account for those who are not have resulted in a network of legalism, as laws are piled on laws.
If you tell people to give charitably, some will give very little, so you have to tell them how much to give, but then some will give exactly that amount and not a penny more. If you tell people to moderate a discussion, some will encourage flame wars, so you have to give them an exact set of rules for "peaceful discussion", but then some will follow those rules blindly.
Can this be fixed? Maybe. But it must be fixed by adopting Christian principles and ideals.
A Christian community is governed openly. The members of the community are involved in its governance. The leaders are servants, acting on behalf of those they lead; they are not rulers. There should be no special prayer forum for staff to post their segregated prayers in. There should be no private discussions about the faith of members.
Wrongdoing should be confronted privately, then with a couple of witnesses, then brought before the whole group. This is a good technique. It works.
Doing everything in secret does not work.
A Christian community, rather than having detailed and precise rules designed to cover every circumstance, relies on discernment and faith, exiling members, not over a particular failing that they earnestly try to correct, but only for consistently acting in bad faith. How many times shall I forgive my brother? More than seventy times seven.
There are members who have made it clear that they do not accept their duty to their brethren. Don't waste time trying to test whether or not they step exactly on the tripwire an eighth time. It is not useful. Those who will have no part of community, well, let them go.
But... CF will have to become a Christian community, run as Christians are told to run communities, or it will fail, as any institution like that must. It turns out that this Jesus guy wasn't just talking out of His ass. There are reasons we were directed to live certain ways. They work. The alternatives, we are assured, do not.
CF is trying to run a community for Christians using the police state as its model. The staff are specially exempt from some of the rules, and have special privilege. They are exalted above the users. Too many of them see themselves as rulers rather than servants.
That CF works at all is a tribute to the power of the Christian approach to community; even a few people devoted to living and serving as Christ taught can make a community viable far past the point at which it would be otherwise.
But CF works, not because of its rules, but in spite of them. When nyj takes back a warning, not because the rule was not broken, but because he feels it is necessary to show grace, he is showing the triumph of mercy over judgment, and ChristianForums is living up to its name.
It is easy to say that ChristianForums has failed. It has. But... This does not mean it cannot be saved. There is always hope. There is always salvation. At any time, you can turn around and say "no, now I will live the life I was called to". It is always there as an option.
Those of you on staff who have been trying to run a Christian forum, please continue. You may yet save the forum; all things are possible with God.
But please, please, remember that a Christian community does not answer to everyone's expectations about what you "must" do to run a community. We reject worldly wisdom, because we know better. You do not need the ritualized and systematic exercise of force to run a community fairly. Have your discussions of a user's abuses openly and let the user participate, and you will find little difficulty establishing who really needs to be banned for assaults on the community, and who is a welcome participant.
Don't believe me? That's okay. It's a ridiculous claim. It's a ludicrous claim. It is almost, but not quite, as ludicrous as the claim that a Jewish carpenter spoke to His friends three days after He was killed. It is probably about as strange as the claim that bread and wine can become flesh and blood. It is as unbelievable as the notion that turning the other cheek is anything but an invitation to be destroyed.
You have the Bible. You have Galatians. You know what are the fruits of the spirit, and what are the fruits of the flesh. You know which people have striven always to make peace. You know which people have stepped down from staff, or walked away from an argument, in the hopes of making peace, and you know which users (and which staff) delight in causing strife. Make use of this information.
Welcome all who would come and claim the name "Christian", even if you think their theology is wrong. The Mormons posting at ChristianForums have demonstrated conclusively that they are far better Christians than the people whose perpetual attacks on them are so carefully isolated in the unorthodox theology forum. Let people live lives that you would not yourselves live.
If you can spare a few minutes from arguing over what wood, exactly, was used to make the Cross, perhaps you can bear it a little while. The community can yet be saved. Will you trust Jesus, called the Christ, to guide you in this?
(... ??? who even talks like that? Blar. I'm going to come back in an hour and not recognize half the words in this post. ARGH!)
So, I got a call billed to my account "on behalf of Nationwide Connections, Inc.". Listing the phone number 1-800-944-9646, and the web page www.oanweb.com. They claim that we got a 4-minute collect call, on November 7th, at 11:08 AM. We didn't; our caller ID log shows no calls at all on November 7th, not even "OUT OF AREA".
OANWEB ripoffs are apparently not unheard of.
What's interesting is the apparent difficulty of contesting charges. Qwest says they are forwarding this bill "as a service to OAN services inc", but OAN services, who are (from their page) obviously not any kind of long distance company, but rather, a small-time financial scam organization of some sort, are probably just ripping people off by bits and pieces here and there.
I'll see whether I can make any progress on this.