Osler's Razor

Yesterday, Mormon Leader L. Tom Perry died at age 92.  He wasn't a "former leader," either-- he was an influential member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which is the governing body of the Church of Latter Day Saints.  As I have discussed here before, I disagree with the Mormons on many issues but deeply respect many of my Mormon friends and students (which comprise interlocking groups), and recognize the influence that faith has in their life.

I find it fascinating-- and admirable-- that Mormons have true elders in such high positions. Not only the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, but the subordinate Quorum of the Seventy (Christians will understand the meaning of those numbers) have members who are 80 and older.  The only other similar body I can think of is the United States Senate, which I have similarly admired.

Certainly, there arguments against older people holding leadership positions.  The principle argument has been that they are resistant to change.  My own experience does not bear that out, however. I have seen-- close up, and at a distance-- people over 80 embrace and lead groups towards change.

At age 80, my grandfather went water-skiing.  More importantly, he endeavored to build his own computer, and did so.  He also led the computerization of his accounting firm, and continued to be a creative leading force in his community.  It made a deep impression on me.

The Bible shows God choosing people who are very old and very young for important positions and roles.  Should we be so different?

Apparently, Baylor Athletic Director Ian McCaw (who has done an incredible job of building up the program) is working at improving the football team's non-conference schedule for the next several years. That's a good thing, given this list of non-conference opponents between now and 2020:

Incarnate Word (I didn't know that was a school, much less a school with a football team)
Duke
Lamar
Rice
Northwestern State (Louisiana)
Liberty
Abilene Christian
UTSA

In their defense, Baylor administrators scheduled these teams years ago, when (let's face it), those teams had a shot at winning! Now as a 2-time Big 12 champ, things are different….

I have this post up at HuffPo: A Church with Open Doors.

In a move that surprised many people (including me), Nebraska became the seventh state in the last decade to get rid of the death penalty (joining New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, New Mexico, and Maryland).

Intriguingly, Nebraska's unicameral legislature overrode the Governor's veto to complete the job. Some of the legislators cited their Christian faith as a reason for their vote against capital punishment.

Much has been made of the fact that Nebraska is a conservative state, and the first one to rid itself of the death penalty since 1973, when North Dakota made that choice.  However, there are other conservative states that don't have the death penalty.  For example, a few years ago I spoke in Alaska on this subject. Alaska has not had the death penalty since statehood began, and there seems to be little movement now towards embracing it. The fact is that for a less-populated state like Nebraska or Alaska, the mechanisms required by capital punishment-- legal and institutional-- are particularly expensive because the penalty is rarely used.

In urging the legislature to sustain his veto, Governor Pete Ricketts cited a 2002 bank robbery/murder. That kind of argument always seems odd to me; after all, the presence of the death penalty didn't deter those murders.

Even though I obviously have a position on this issue, I acknowledge that there are principled arguments on both sides of the question of capital punishment. I do know that American law and opinion is evolving on this issue, and I'm very glad to see that.

As I returned from China a few weeks ago, I got some great news: I was chosen as the Robert and Marion Short Distinguished Chair in Law.

You might think that because St. Thomas Law School is only about 14 years old that there are no great stories yet, but you would be wrong. In fact, the Short Chair itself involves three great stories: That of Robert and Marion Short, who endowed the chair, and those of my two predecessors, Judge Patrick Schiltz and Professor Susan Stabile.

Robert and Marion Short

Bob Short was a remarkable man, as is his widow, Marion.  Bob Short was a lawyer who built a business, a graduate of St. Thomas and Georgetown's Law School.  He and Marion settled in Edina, the town where I live now.  They built up a freight company, branched into hotels and real estate, and later purchased the Minnesota Lakers NBA franchise (which they wisely moved to Los Angeles) and the Washington Senators baseball team (which they moved to Texas, where the team became the Rangers).  After Bob Short's death in 1982, Marion very ably managed the businesses they had created.

Short was an ally and friend of Hubert Humphrey's, which might explain the evident discomfort he seems to have felt when he was seated next to Richard Nixon at a Senators game:

Yesterday I rode my bike down to the park across the street from my church, St. Stephens. My town, Edina, was dedicating a new memorial to those who had died in the nation's wars.  The ceremony was very well done: the politicians kept their speeches short and topical, the band was great, and the right tone (somber) was set. The new monument is sent in a quiet corner under a canopy of trees and close to the banks of Minnehaha Creek.

Edina, in fact, has lost less than 40 men and women in all of the nation's wars.  I was surprised that it wasn't more, but the fact that the population boom here came late in the 20th century probably has something to do with that.  Still, they were remembered, as Boy Scouts stood holding pictures of each one of them as the politicians spoke, and their families sat attentively.

None of them chose the war; they simply chose to serve.

Our last three presidents (Clinton, Bush, and Obama) have involved our soldiers in war, but none of them served on active duty in the military, a sharp break from their predecessors. President Carter, for example, graduated from the Naval Academy and served as a Navy officer. Ronald Reagan joined the Army reserve in 1937, and was called up to active duty in 1942. George H.W. Bush was a genuine war hero, flying 58 missions as a naval aviator. Those three actively avoided protracted wars. Reagan chose not to respond when a Marine barracks was attacked in Beirut in 1983 by a group called "Islamic Jihad," killing 241 American soldiers. While the first President Bush did choose war with Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, he limited that war to the goal of restoring Kuwait, and declined to pursue "regime change."

War, if it is chosen at all, should be chosen rarely.  The reason for that discernment is written on that freshly carved granite in Edina, in the park by the creek-- the creek where we baptize children in the summer, and skate in the winter, and which ceaselessly, gently, wears rocks into pebbles, smooth as night.

Here was IPLawGuy's haiku:

Jimmy and Robert
John Paul Jones, Jason Bonham
Bring back Zeppelin!

And here is his reasoning:

There is a lot to love about Spring. Last night, I cooked in the back yard and left the doors to the house wide open. There are no bugs yet, and the temperature was just right, so why not?

One thing I love that we start to see in May is the sight of a church with its doors wide open to the air and the sun and the people walking by.  Something about that makes my heart sing; it is such a metaphor for what a church should be to the community, but too rarely is.

There have been times that I have been in a church and they have left the doors open even during the worship service.  What I love then are the sounds of it all. There are the city noises, and (at St Stephens) the sound of the creek, and snatches of conversation as people walk by.  I close my eyes, knowing people will assume I am deep in prayer, but I am listening like a spy with his ear pressed to a radio receiver, soaking up the clues to what is happening just beyond those doors...

And this did not change my mind!

So, McDonald's has brought back the Hamburglar, my favorite character. In fact, he showed up in my Crim Law final, which I am grading right now…

Of course, they brought him back as a suburban dad who some find a little creepy. In fact, Fortune magazine described him as "half hot suburban dad, half creepy neighborhood peeping Tom." That doesn't sound good. We should just be glad that McDonald's didn't bring back his brother, the much more dangerous ham-murderer:

After the terrible accident on Amtrak's key Philadelphia-New York corridor recently, there have been some interesting discussions about the future of rail transit in the U.S.A.

China, as many commentators have noted, has built a remarkable network of high-speed trains, which now are used by over 2.5 million people a day. They have the largest system in the world-- in fact, more high-speed lines than every other system combined.

The train I took, from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, was a conventional train, one of 12 a day traveling that route; the high-speed line connecting those cities is now being built.  Still, it was plenty fast, very comfortable, and cheap.

I've always loved trains, and have crossed the continent on both Amtrak and VIA rail in Canada.  I think it is especially worthwhile on crowded corridors like Chicago-Milwaukee, Boston-DC, and Seattle-San Diego.  As a nation, we seem to cycle regularly between considering a broader use of high-speed rail and cutting back on the train service we already have.  Most recently, Congress was voting to cut funds to Amtrak just as the accident near Philadelphia happened.

Should rail play a bigger role in the U.S.?

Christine perfectly captured a central touchstone of my childhood last week:

While most travelled north
to cottages on ski lakes
and summer horse camp

We pulled out our bikes,
swim suits and tennis rackets
The Shores Park awaits.

Because…

So, what do you think this is?

We all have done it-- gone to a lake or a camp or a park in the summer, even if just for an afternoon.  Let's haiku about that this week! Here, I will go first:

No Osler Island,
This. I walk in the night air;
Jungle canopy.

Now it is your turn! Just make if five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third...

While working at the University of Guangzhou, I found myself a little isolated out on "University Island"-- which is literally an island containing the "Mega-University Center" where ten or so schools are located.  It is mostly tall towers and concrete school buildings.

To get a taste of the rest of the city, I found the nearest stop for the Metro (which turned out to be "Mega-University South) and took the train into town.  The Metro is pretty remarkable-- fast trains and frequent, but remarkably crowded.  I quickly learned how important it was to stand in the right place, and when to move into or out of a train. To get to the center of the city, I had to change trains twice.

Both time I took the subway, I noticed the same thing: I was the only person on the train who wasn't Chinese.  It may have been a fluke, of course; certainly there are Europeans and Africans and Australians and North and South Americans doing business there, but they just weren't taking the train, or at least they weren't taking it at the same time I was. Still, for that short moment I thought "Huh! This is what it is like to be a racial minority."

It was a short moment, though.  Just as quickly, a voice in my head, the voice of reason, said "no, it's not." And that second voice was right. The truth was that I could get out of the subway and pretty easily find a church or a pub where most people looked like me. I could jump on a plane and come home, where I can (unfortunately)  go a day without seeing a minority member.  It was in part because of the majority advantages I have had, too, that I was able to go there at all and see a place on the other side of the world. To say "this is what it is like to be a racial minority is about as true as standing in the shower and imagining that now I know what it is like to be a fish.

But still, there was a bit of truth in that moment.  The vulnerability, for one thing, and the way people looked at me as the person who did not fit in.  The sense that I had to do everything just right-- stand in the right spot, not fumble with my ticket (actually a green disk), so that people wouldn't think that people "like me" are incompetent. Perhaps even the repressed desire to hold myself away from the others on the train, so I wouldn't be stared at.

But that is just a bit. Still, a bit more than I had ever had before...

Last week, I got to talk about a familiar topic-- clemency-- in unfamiliar places. I gave a two-hour lecture on the topic at the University of Guangzhou, and also gave a lengthy radio interview to a station in South Korea. The two were unconnected-- the radio station didn't know I was in Asia when they contacted me, so it was just a remarkable coincidence.

You can hear the radio interview here.  Apparently, South Korea is considering introducing the mechanism of clemency into their criminal law system.  How cool is that?

The lecture in China was so fascinating to give.  Before I started, the translator came to me and pointed to a word. "What does this mean?" she asked.  She was pointing to the word "clemency."  I struggled to explain it-- the word and idea are totally alien to the Chinese system.

Starting from scratch to explain it helped me see the idea anew.  It is, in a way, rooted in the American trust in the individual conscience, which is something the Chinese see as remarkable (and perhaps foolish).  Over and over, I had to go back to that basic Constitutional ideal of the individual as a locus of power and holder of rights.  It was a good thing to have to explain; in a way I was teaching myself, too.

The best days go like that.

You know what I love (among many other things)? I love getting to write regularly for the paper I read every day for ten years, the Waco Tribune-Herald. Here is my piece in that paper today: Watching Riots from Waco.

You may not love Cheez Doodles, but you should love this (IPLG's haiku):

Cheetos, Cheez Doodles!
Puffy, orange, delicious!
All over my clothes.

A week ago today, the strangest thing happened: I woke up with the citation to a Bible verse stuck in my head. Not the text of that verse-- I couldn't remember it-- but the citation to the verse: Isaiah 11.

You probably know your Bible better than I do, and recognized that important prophesy of the Messiah:

So, IPLawGuy sent me a link to this story:

FORT EDWARD  The trial of a Glens Falls man who is charged with knocking out his lawyer in a Washington County Jail meeting room was delayed Thursday when he attacked his new lawyer in court in front of nearly a dozen witnesses.

Aaron W. Jabot, 34, was taken back to jail after the incident that left lawyer Fred Rench with a bloody hand injury. Judge John Hall and lawyers debated how to handle the outburst, then the trial continued with Jabot not in the courtroom.

Jabot is on trial on a felony assault charge that stems from an April 29, 2014 attack on lawyer Garfield Raymond in jail. He was in jail at the time for violating parole in a 2007 attempted robbery case. The parole violation had been filed after he allegedly stabbed two people in a Glens Falls bar days after his release from prison.