Osler's Razor

Since we have all been driven inside, a few of us here had a short-story writing confab, where we each wrote a story about a piece of art we knew. This was my contribution. I would like to emphasize that it is a work of fiction, and does not involve me or anyone I know (though the painting is real).

When I was a kid, this was the funniest thing I had ever seen:

Now that everyone is running around building improvised medical ventilators, it's a good time to consider the role of invention in our lives. Pictured above, for example, is a device my dad rigged up for Osler Island to convey things from the dock up to the cabin. 

It can be an informal invention, or something we all know-- go to town with it! Here, I will go first:

Nineteen seventies-
Someone actually invented
Crack cocaine. But who?

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

Certainly, clemency can only be one part of a greater effort. It must be combined with other measures, including a beefing-up of staff to clean and care for the sick, and the better provision of cleaning and medical materials and resources. Just as importantly,  we need to minimize arrests and detentions, and fully utilize the release measures embedded in the First Step Act and other statutes that can allow for release of prisoners. 

I'm devoting Wednesdays on the blog to profiling my intriguing classmates in the Yale Law class of 1990. It has been quite a voyage of discovery!

People often assume that Yale Law is a bastion of liberalism, but the reality is that many influential conservatives (beyond Brett Kavanaugh) come from the school. For some of them, it was pretty easy to see when we were in school, others less so. Over time, too, I have found myself collaborating with some of them on projects where our interests overlap. It is odd, though, that conservatives condemn the school as liberal even while so many of their most successful fellow travelers (including representatives of very different strands of conservatism, such as John Bolton and Pat Robertson) were formed by the place.

Peter Berkowitz is one of those conservative Yale Law grads; he currently serves as the Director of Policy Planning under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Berkowitz came to Yale Law from undergrad at Swarthmore and after obtaining a Masters in Philosophy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1990 he not only got a JD from Yale but a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University (which is pretty impressive-- I can't imagine doing both at the same time).  He went straight from Yale to Harvard, where he taught in the Government Department until 1999.

From there, he transitioned to teaching at George Mason's law school (now named after Justice Scalia), where he taught until 2007.

At that point, he headed west and became a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. From there, he was chosen for his current post at the State Department.

He is a critic of progressive politics and the "social justice agenda," and regularly writes on issues relating to education and political philosophy.

Nice work! If we have to live online, this is the way to do it.

We had this gem from poet Megan Willome:

Dog walk before dawn,
a woman with her dog calls,
"Good morning! Be well!"

And Christine gave us this:

Week in the garden
Talking to my plants; green thumb...
Best isolation.

Susan Stabile (who knows the ways of the woods) offered this:

I don't need too much--
Some sunshine, trees, and some grass.
A long walk soothes me.

And finally we received a long missive from Quang Cao Dai Phat, which included this (translated from the original Vietnamese):

This type of table
Material always makes
Shiny over time.

I'm struggling.

I have connected with the internet via this blog every day since 2006, but I'm not someone who can sustain himself online. I'm an introvert, but I need to be in a society with people I can see and talk to and respond with to something that is funny or sad or thrilling.

As a teacher, I feed off of the energy of my students. I love to look out at the class and see who is engaged, who is upset by a rule or outcome, who is almost asleep. One of my favorite moments in class was when I explained the federal practice of relevant conduct, which allows someone to be sentenced for conduct that they had been acquitted of by a jury. Sara Sommervold threw both hands straight up over her head like Kermit the Frog and said "no!" That's a moment that comes when you see people and feel their mood.

Now I wear a headset like some kind of unlicensed helicopter pilot and speak into the void while glimpsing at tiny, almost indiscernible, moving pictures of my students. I am doing my best. It is not the same.

I'm doing it not just because we must, but because it is the right thing to do for those who are most vulnerable. I get that, and agree with it.

But there is a cost. And that will become more apparent as time goes on.

Churches are dealing with this challenge in a number of ways. Well, not a big number-- maybe two or three ways, actually. Most of them are having some kind of online service, where the minister will be in his office or her pulpit, alone.  Congregants are encouraged to sing along at home. It's kind of depressing. We were asked, after all, to gather in his name.

But, right now, we can't.  That is one of the costs of all this. In the end, I suspect that the social, spiritual, and economic costs of the pandemic will be all intermingled. Churches will close not just because they are no longer economically viable, but because they are no longer spiritually viable-- they will not be able to minister to those in need when that need is greatest. People will die alone, drift from faith, and despair.

Our fight must be against that, too.

In 2015, Bill Gates described what needed to be done to prepare for a likely pandemic. And... we didn't do it. 

With so many indoor activities (movies, museums, shows, restaurants, gyms, bars, stores) closed for Coronavirus season, a lot of people are rediscovering the outdoors. Of course, not every outdoor activity is available-- the picture above was taken on my trip with IPLawGuy to Whistler last week, shortly before it closed for the season-- but no one is closing down the walking paths, the bike trails, or the woods.

So let's haiku about that this week-- the adventurous (alone or in small groups) that can take us into the great outdoors. Here, I will go first:

Lake Harriett calls
Ice is thinning, snow recedes
She invites us near.

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

So, a lot has happened in the last week!  Schools closed, businesses shut down, restaurants locked up, and gyms went quiet. Even churches are dark. It is a very strange time.

So what happens next?

Here are a few thoughts on that:

1) This is going to reshape the retail market, and we are going to lose a lot of stores, big and small. Sure, we can order stuff online, but there is a real loss when local retailers close down. They are often community hubs, the places where we see one another.

2)  The federal government seems committed to a trillion-dollar stimulus package, much of it going to large corporations. I have mixed feelings about this. I see the necessity for a stimulus, but as I argued in 2008-2009, debt matters, too. We already are running a trillion-dollar annual debt under the Trump administration, and doubling that isn't sustainable. There will be long-term and short-term problems. The long-term problem is that debt service will become a more significant part of our federal budget. The short-term problem is that there will be political demands to reduce debt when this crisis fades, and that can come from the military, social security/Medicare/or everything else (Courts, transportation, housing, etc).

3)  The coronavirus itself is the biggest threat. I am starting to see something on my Twitter feed that I have feared: people reporting that people they knew died of Covid-19.  That's a threshold. But how bad it gets from here is the real unknown.

4) Our social networks are going to change, and the longer isolation continues, the more it will change. I predict we are going to see underground societies develop, some of them based on in-person human interaction that is otherwise verboten. And out of those underground societies (online and in person), we may see new forms of art, music, and theater develop. New York will be the epicenter of this-- people there will not be able to stay holed up in small apartments.

For now, the best we can do is watch out for each other and do our jobs the best we can.

I have been devoting Wednesdays (mostly) to profiling my classmates in the Yale Law class of 1990 (you can see a partial recap with links here). It has been a fascinating project; they have gone on to do some remarkable things.

Michael Caglioti was yet another memorable member of the class of 1990. He came to Yale six years after graduating as the valedictorian from Iona College in his hometown of New Rochelle, New York. Then-- and before matriculation at Yale Law-- he received two Masters degrees from Princeton: one in Public Affairs and another in Politics.  At Yale, he served with me as a Senior Editor of the Law Journal, and (unlike me) was also an officer on another journal, the Yale Journal of International Law.

After law school, he moved to DC and joined one of America's leading firms, Arnold and Porter. He became a partner there in 1998, having proven himself working on a variety of international cases for leading corporations. It's the kind of partnership many lawyers dream of and relatively few achieve.

To explain what happened next, I have to reveal something about Michael that never stopped him from making all of this happen: Michael had a severe neuromuscular disease, spinal muscular atrophy. He was never able to walk, and utilized a motorized wheelchair.

That wheelchair, unfortunately, was the source of the undoing of what Michael had worked so hard to achieve. In 2000, just a few years after he made partner, the wheelchair malfunctioned and he was badly hurt (he describes this himself in an essay in the Washington Lawyer, which you can read here).   Because of his injuries, he had to leave the partnership he had earned and incurred over $500,000 in medical expenses.  It sounds like a very sad turning point in his life.

Michael died on January 4, 2018.

Those of you who have followed these profiles know that usually I run a current photo with the profile, and sometimes a video. I couldn't find a picture online of Michael; even the essay he authored was accompanied only by a photo of a wheelchair. In a way that is fitting, I suppose. He was a person defined by his remarkable mind and spirit, and perhaps the memory of that should be enough.

Yesterday, the Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, closed pretty much everything worth going to: restaurants, bars, gyms, theaters, churches, and pretty much every other place that people gather. He was following the lead of others across the country in doing so.

On my way home from work yesterday I stopped at Costco to pick up a few things--olive oil, parmesan cheese--and it was there that I realized that we have reached The Turn where things get real. They were out of chicken in any form. They were out of pretty much everything made of paper. There was no... well, they were out of a lot of stuff.

That was the end of a day that also included teaching my first lecture class on Zoom, where I'm looking at a screen and seeing tiny little pictures of my students. It didn't go great-- I'll be honest. I'm a person who feeds off the mood of my students, who relishes the give-and-take of a courtroom or lively classroom. I need to read a room. Perhaps I will get used to this, but it will be an uphill struggle.

And, of course, I have it good. I have a job where I can at least try to do it well in these circumstances.  The people who are really suffering are the less affluent, especially those in the gig economy. There are going to be deep and enduring tragedies that come out of this, breaks in family trees and sad stories that are alluded to years later.

I suspect that in the coming weeks we are going to have to build new and different social structures. I don't know what that will look like-- after all, one week ago I was out at Whistler skiing with IPLawGuy, never imagining what the next week would hold.

Another good week! I loved this one from my dad:

I am a good host
but I am shutting the door
on new viral guests.

And Christine chimed in with her method:

Social distancing
14 acres,spring gardens
7 yards of mulch.

As did Jill Scoggins, with some great advice:

Distance between us?
If we must. But let us still
act with love's kindness.

It's a strange time.

Our routines, big and small, are disrupted. If you were in school, now you aren't; those who were going to travel won't, and those who were going to not travel must.  There is something scary out there that we cannot see, and we have no leader to tell us hard truths.

You know those days we remember? These are those days.

No March Madness. No college graduation. No church service. No classroom. No good in the frozen vegetable section of the store. No planes, no late night shows, no museums or auto shows or operas. Who are we now?

We are what we can be at our best. We can love one another, sacrifice for others, we can be kind to those we draw near or who cross our path.

It will probably get worse before it gets better, but hopefully we will all be better, too. We don't have  a leader, but we can have many leaders. And I suspect we will.

Is blues the healer? For some people, maybe. But for others, it will be something else. One of the hardest parts of this crisis is that a lot of people are going to be separated from the things they usually count on in times of crisis. There are some, of course, for whom that comfort comes in the moment that they receive the bread and drink the wine, and that will be held away from them. How deep a tragedy is that?

IPLawGuy sent me this fascinating article by Jonathon V. Last, which contrasts politicians who build coalitions (Obama, Reagan) with those who lead movements (Trump, Sanders). Here is the meat of the analysis:

It's hard to disagree with that. Later on, Last also makes a point that I keep conveying to people-- that President Trump won the narrowest of victories, and the idea that he will be difficult to defeat is ludicrous. I'm not saying the Democrats will win the White House-- they have a tendency to mess that up (see 2016)-- just that a decent candidate building a decent coalition should be able to get there.

The reason is rooted in Trump's constant play to his base; that is, the base of his movement. It alienates some people, who seem to be pushed into a Biden coalition.

That said, in my own field of study it is clear that Trump is making a play to African Americans by promoting his efforts-- well, effort (it is pretty much just the First Step Act)-- in reforming criminal justice. Sadly, Biden is vulnerable to that, since he pushed the 100-1 ratio between crack and powder, a raft of mandatory minimums, and tough sanctions on MDMA, among other things. And Biden has no real plan to address criminal justice going forward, other than a softer approach to marijuana, spending lots of money, and variations on "what Obama did"-- and that is no plan at all.

I have been devoting Wednesdays here at the blog to profiling my classmates in the Yale Law School class of 1990. This week we meet Heathcliff.

There were a lot of characters in our class, but few were as memorable as Heathcliff. He was unique in that he had a parent who was formerly incarcerated, which allowed for insights few of the rest of us could offer. He was definitely an out-of-the-box thinker who often had provocative ideas in class. Also, he was a cat. And had a flame-throwing gravy robot.

Heathcliff came to Yale Law fresh out of Yale College, where he lived in Stiles College and wrote for the sports section of the Yale Daily News. At the law school, he was Notes Editor for the Law Journal and active in the Federalist Society.

After law school, Heathcliff clerked on the 3rd Circuit for Judge Stapleton, and then in the Ninth Circuit for Judge Alex Kozinski before a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.  After that, he worked for Independent Counsel Ken Starr in the investigation into President Clinton.

Then things got kind of weird. Heathcliff moved into a house with an old lady, and got obsessed with ham, gorillas, and apes. He was sometimes seen flying a ham sandwich at the end of a string, and worked somewhere in the Bush administration. He seemed to have some kind of business making and marketing "message helmets." After that, we kind of lost track of him.

So if you know what happened, drop a line.