Osler's Razor

Lost love... it is a part of many lives, real and fictional. It may not have been meant to be, or maybe you just messed up. Or perhaps you imagined the whole thing.

Let's haiku about that this week. Here, I will go first:

Sally Brown, doomed
By her love for Linus V.;
Not so Sweet Babboo.

Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 formula, and have some fun!

Late on Tuesday, the House passed the First Step Act, which would make a series of simple and relatively small reforms to the federal prison and re-entry system. According to FAMM, it provides that:

I loved this story about Amy McGrath, who won the Democratic Primary for a US House seat in Kentucky:

Yesterday I was by the ocean.

I love watching shore birds: the ones that fly high, the ones that fly low, the ones that run back and forth plucking bugs out of the sand with long thin beaks as the water goes up and back.

One was soaring, heading away from me. Then it wheeled around sharply, dove, and plucked a fish out of the water. The white bird's action was elegant and smooth and violent; from the fish's perspective it was an abject tragedy. But what a move! To see a fish swimming under the water, to know where it would be in a few second, to time a dive just right, to grab it without drowning, even just to fly!

And yet the bird does not know that this is remarkable. None of us do, when we are the ones flying and diving.

I know where some of these come from...

Amy's was from UVA:





Desiree's was at William and Mary (we were in the same class):



CTL got two degrees, so it could have been Baylor or Penn:



Gavin's was at... well, I was there, and I wasn't giving the speech!



Jill's is universal:



And Kitty's is the one that matters most:

Yesterday, I was driving in Central Pennsylvania with my parents. We started in the old coal town of Shamokin and then went... well, I'm not exactly sure where all we went. Our navigational goal seemed to be getting lost, and we were highly efficient at achieving that goal.

My dad was in the front seat with a passel of maps, and my mom was behind us. My dad seemed to have a few of them unfolded at any given time, but it didn't seem to necessarily correlate to the whole project of navigation (at least in terms of that phrase meaning that you plan how to get from one place to another).

We would be heading down a county road and he would point off suddenly to an even smaller road off to the side. "Go that way!" he would instruct.

"I don't think that looks like the right way," I'd respond, with great understatement. "Why do you think that's the right way?

He would shrug. "It just looks more interesting."

So I would turn around and we would head down County Road YY towards a fading barn under a stand of trees and then, shockingly, a bright white church with a strident steeple pointing towards heaven plopped down starkly against a black mountain. He was right; it was more interesting.

It's a good kind of navigation.

Just to follow up on yesterday's theme:

It's really the only time in life that you wear a flat hat, really.

But it's much more than that, of course. Commencement-- from high school, college, kindergarten, grad school, whatever-- really does feel significant. Let's haiku about that this week. Here, I will go first:

It never looks right
I am not meant to wear hoods
So many bad pics....

Now it is is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable pattern, and have some fun!

When I was a prosecutor, one of the tools we had access to (even back then) was a remarkable financial database at the Treasury Department: the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FINCEN.  Among the documents available at FINCEN were "Suspicious Activity Reports," which banks were required to file when transactions raised certain red flags. Because much of the most serious systemic crime-- from drug trafficking to terrorism-- runs on a flow of money, these are very useful.

In a recent report in the New Yorker,  recent Pulitzer-winner Ronan Farrow reveals something that will in the end be a big deal in the Mueller investigation (if it is true). Apparently, two SARS reports relating to large transactions by Michael Cohen were removed from the FINCEN database. Which... well, that just does not happen at random. Certainly, Mueller could have gotten the same information from other sources (particularly within Cohen's own records or those of the bank), but the removal on its own could be a suspect action.

Who removed them?

That is the question Mueller will want answered (provided that he or the US Attorney for the SDNY did not remove them, which seems a small possibility). And it will be discovered. If the culprit is a political actor trying to remove the documents from view because of their damaging nature to the President, he or she will be prosecuted. This is the clearest example of obstruction of justice one can imagine, short of shooting a witness.

For a prosecutor, this is a big deal, and the prosecutors will be extremely motivated. They care so much because this crime, in particular, strikes at the integrity of the very tools they are supposed to rely on. Don't mess with a worker's tools-- there will be hell to pay.

Yesterday was a long day.

I had a lot of meetings, pretty much straight through from 8:30 in the morning through 7 pm. The last of them was a pleasure, a conference call with Joanne Braxton and Rebecca Parker and other people involved in the Braxton Institute. Still, it had been a long day.

After all that, I headed over to Dick's Sport's Barbers (pictured above) to get a much needed haircut. It was late, and I was the only customer. Lon put the cape over me and got to work.

Outside, people were walking out of the store across the street, carrying a bottle of wine or a long baguette (it is that kind of store). It was warm, finally, and cars drove by with the windows down, going south on France Avenue towards home. Lon isn't much of a talker, so I watched the ball game on the television across from the chair. The Twins were playing St. Louis, a game that doesn't seem to matter much at this point of the season. On the scoreboard behind right field I saw that the Yankees were playing at Washington and imagined that IPLawGuy was at the game, keeping track of what happened on a scorecard.

The St. Louis pitcher had a wicked slider, a pitch that dropped to the ground right before it got to the plate. The Twins batter, Joe Mauer, swung madly at it and missed, staggering a little.

"That's some slider," I said to Lon.

"Yup," he said. He's not much of a talker.

Then there was just the clipping and the next batter walking up, knowing that the pitch was going to dive to the ground and there was nothing he could do about it, and that way out east IPLawGuy was scratching down sacred runes on his scorecard on a humid DC evening.

Winter's over. And that's good.

Wow! Lots of good haiku last week. But Anonymous (can I call you Anon?) was most prolific and enthusiastic with entries like this one:

Oh dear! I can’t stop!
There’s Simon and Garfunkel,
Yummy fish and chips!

Love that surf n turf!
Santa and his reindeer crew,
Sugar and spice, nice!

Am I boring you?
Dynamic duo blather 
Must cease and desist! (Ha)

Of course, Jill Scoggins couldn't be far off the mark, and she wasn't:

I have 3 sisters:
One from birth; one, step; and one
I chose. All are love.

Kindness is not a strong human instinct; it is easily overwhelmed by our desires for retribution, advantage and superiority. No one needs to teach us to be be greedy, but we do need to be taught to be generous.

I don't remember disappointing my mom a lot as a kid. It's not that I was perfect, but rather that she seemed pretty accepting and forgiving. That makes the times I did disappoint her stand out more starkly in my memory.

And how did I disappoint her?

By unkindness, or when I wished a hardship to befall someone else. It was in those moments that she was almost sharp with me, and told me exactly what was wrong with my attitude. 

And what came of it? Even now, decades later, I hear her voice in my head when I have that kind of thought, pushing me back towards a generous spirit (and, of course, sometimes it is not a voice in my head-- it is her actual voice, telling me to get my head on straight!). 

How lucky am I?

This video explains some things I have always wondered about....

Mac n' Cheese
Stockton and Malone
Minneapolis and St. Paul

There are a lot of things that just go in pairs. Let's haiku about that this week. It can be common pairs, unlikely pairs, whatever.

Here, I will go first:

Hey, Ernie and Bert
Who did that portrait you have?
Stunning likenesses.

Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 formula and have some fun!

Here is a chilling claim: That if it can obtain fuel from an outside source, Iran could produce a nuclear bomb within three months, now that it may not be subject to the restrictions of the Iran Nuclear Deal (or whatever it is formally called).

If that happens, two countries will feel directly threatened, and they are an odd pair: Saudi Arabia and Israel. Both, of course, are favorites of President Trump.

What if one or both of them takes action against Iran to prevent nuclear weapons development? Well... maybe nothing. Maybe it ends there.

But the Middle East does not seem to work that way. 

When I was a little kid, there was a TV show called "Lost in Space" that was a space-themed update on Swiss Family Robinson. It featured a robot whose most important function was to wave his arms around and intone "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!"

Because dumb TV shows played a big role in programming my brain, my internal dialogue often features this robot. Lately, that's been true nearly every time I check out the news.

Most recently, our President's decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal in favor of, I guess, no deal at all, has brought the crazy robot back to the front of my mind. Danger, indeed!

Back during the Iraq war, I had a series of discussion/disagreements with IPLawGuy and few others about the validity of the Iraq War. It made no sense to me-- there just did not seem to be a reason that justified the cost of that military adventure. The best thing they could come up with was stable oil prices. That always seemed relatively inconsequential to me (compared to the trillions of dollars and the lives that would be lost).

If nothing else, the conflicts that will come of yesterday's move to step away from the Iran deal seem certain to create instability in the Middle East, which usually means instability in the oil markets-- and often, higher prices.

At the same time, it's not clear what this administration is going to do to limit Iran's nuclear development. It's like quitting your job in a fit of pique without having a new one lined up. 

Or... am I wrong?

Don Blankenship is running as a candidate for US Senate in West Virginia as a Republican in today's Republican primary. He's pretty terrible:



He has a chance to win the primary. President Trump has urged West Virginians to vote for another candidate, despite the fact that Blankenship has tried to tie himself to Trump and his appeal to voters in that state. It looks like Trump's opposition is born of political calculus-- he knows that Blankenship would likely be another Roy Moore (who lost in Alabama), and could lose a winnable race against the incumbent Democrat, Joe Manchin.

And, um, yeah-- this guy really is the next Roy Moore!

There were a lot of great haikus last week, but one has really stuck with me. It is this one from CTL:




Wow! That is a great question, and I think I know what he means. There have been times in my life that I have asked myself exactly that. Now, by the way, is not one of those times. But... I've been there.

You hope for something. You attain it. Then you are doing it, and it just isn't good. I see this often with my students and former students: They have a dream job in mind, they get it, and three or four years in they realize it is not what they want. The good news is, they know what they don't want! That means it is time for a change. That can be hard, especially if you have gotten used to money or status.

But starting over can be a salvation. I've done it; going from being a prosecutor in Detroit to a teacher in Waco was a huge change, in ways I did not expect. But it was worth it.

What you wanted is a wish from a person you no longer are. The person you are now is someone to listen to.