Osler's Razor

To begin the lecture, I told them that in a way, I was from their future-- a school that had also started from scratch, gotten traction, and was now solidly established and doing great things in a community that needed it.

It turns out I was wrong.

The parent of Savannah Law, John Marshall, has decided to sell the beautiful building and close the school. They are facing two lawsuits-- one of which claims that their plan all along was to finance the building through student loans until the market was right to flip the building. Ouch.

There is a special sadness to it all, too. Savannah is a fascinating and unique city, and (unlike the Twin Cities), this is their own law school. A future where a local, practical school trains the prosecutors and defense attorneys for the local bar is not going to be possible unless the school is saved.  I think that there are too many law schools in the United States, but that does not mean that the small, local ones should uniformly be the ones to fail-- they provide some things big state schools cannot. One of those things is a sense of community that is harder in a bigger, more transitory place. Another is an intimate connection to where they sit, since they don't pretend to belong to the entire nation. 

When I was there, Savannah Law felt like a place with a soul. There are too few of those places left, and it is worth fighting for them.

So... it is kind of mud season here, which means it's not warm enough yet to do much outside, but too warm to ski and skate. Which makes it a good time to drag out Monopoly or Scrabble or Battleship. I love board games, though I have mixed results.

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

Love to play Boggle
Looking for patterns and words
But oh, the racket!

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

In case you were wondering (and I know you were), the line-up is set for next week's Men's Frozen Four here in St. Paul. Here are the combatants:

Ohio State
Minnesota-Duluth
Notre Dame
Michigan

As happens most years, it is an all-Midwestern final. The Eastern teams tried hard and really did their best, I think, but in the end just didn't have the talent or focus to make it through. Princeton, for example, lost after a tragic incident in which one of the player's cravats came off and he tripped and hit his funny bone. That really hurts!  Northeastern went down when three players were penalized simultaneously for "really offensive language," based on some comments that I can't repeat here.

It seems like it will be a great tournament-- and maybe I'll head over there to see one of the games!

On Saturday, I got a haircut. That, unfortunately, was too late for this interview on PBS last Friday, where I was rocking some really super-crazy professor hair:



Earlier that week, I talked about Stormy Daniels' lie detector test here on WCCO:



And finally, I had a piece on Sunday in the Waco Tribune-Herald, about the very interesting things to come in the Mueller investigation...

There was only one haiku last week from a show I knew (and with a point I agreed with, since I liked Fonzi). Jill Scoggins gave us this:

I love Palm Sunday, in a complicated way.  It's a day of such great hope and such great tragedy.

Today I get to give the sermon at a wonderful church, First Covenant here in Minneapolis. I love the people there, and they put up with me about once every four to six months. I very much feel a duty to do something special this morning.

I'm going to talk about influence and power. Jesus entered Jerusalem with his reputation preceding him. People knew about his spellbinding teaching, his healing, and the crowds that were drawn to him. Yet, he entered in humility, riding a donkey.

People expected power, but he sought influence. Power is the ability to make people do what you want, while influence is the ability to convince them to make a choice on their own. Power overwhelms an individual's will; influence transforms what an individual might want.

In writing the sermon, it occurred to me that we have failed in addressing narcotics use in part because we have relied to much on power than on influence. We have tried to deny people their supply rather than influence them to reduce demand. Should we be surprised that this has failed?

Jesus always takes me to interesting places....

It's funny, I suppose, how connected I still am to Waco. It's not a place I ever fully left, and I think that is ok. Tomorrow morning, I have a piece in the Waco Tribune Herald, on the end-game of the Mueller investigation.

One legacy of Waco I am still dealing with.

About 13 years ago, I went to the dentist there. I was in the chair, waiting, as the dentist dealt with the person next to me. As I sat there, I heard the dentist say something terrible about one of my friends-- a colleague at the law school who had gone on to a leadership role at the University. I was mad. I got up and left and did not go back.

That may have been principled, but also kind of stupid. I mean... there were other dentists I could have gone to. And when I finally did go to a dentist here in Minnesota, his hair stood straight up when he looked in my mouth and he announced the need for a series of painful scraping procedures over the course of a few months. Ouch!

So yesterday I was back for some of that action, and remembered what made me so mad so long ago. Time goes fast, but not that fast....

I don't watch television as much as some people, and I am way behind on things that everyone thinks I should watch. I've never seen The Wire, for example, or even a single episode of Breaking Bad. And that is just in the "drug drama" category!

When I do watch a show, though, there often seems to be one character I just loath, though. I'm guessing that is true of a lot of people. So let's haiku about that today! Here, I will go first:

The show is not bad
And that Joey is a hoot
But Phoebe-- ack, bad!

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

A news channel is not really a political story, until it is. And that's what is happening with Fox News, which turns out to be pretty much the only way to get something into President Trump's head. Yesterday, once again, he was actually live-tweeting "Fox and Friends," commenting on things that happened on the show a few minutes after they occurred. It's troubling, sure, that what the President of the United States is doing at 8:45 on a weekday is sitting in front of his favorite TV show for an hour or so, but it seems pretty clear that he does exactly that nearly every day he is in the White House.

Even in my own field, the President's Fox News obsession has had an impact. The last clemency grant by the president went to Kristian Saucier, who had pled his case on Fox. Meanwhile, over 10,000 petitions languish in the system, unconsidered by the President.

A recent dust-up related to the departure from Fox of one of its commentators made headlines. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters was a Fox News military analyst for ten years-- and a very conservative one.  When he quit, he went on quite a tear, saying: 

“In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration...”

The Peters departure had an interesting twist, too-- he praised the reporters for Fox News, while castigating the news anchors and the commentators. I watch Fox now and then, but not enough to see this dichotomy. Does anyone out there have an insight on this?

You may have missed this, but last weekend Clarkson won the NCAA women's hockey championship right here in Minneapolis, defeating the Colgate Lady Grifters 2-1.

This is the third championship since 2014 for Clarkson, a relatively small school in Potsdam, New York, with about 4500 students. They play in division III in every sport except hockey-- and they are really, really good at hockey. Their roster includes a lot of Canadians.

I tried to locate some information about Colgate, too. Other than the questionable claims that the school "was founded in 1991 with a generous grant from the estate of Theodor Geisel," and "counted among its alumni all of the members of the Starland Vocal Band," (see them in the video below) I couldn't find much about Colgate online, though.

The all-Eastern final was unusual, in that since the women's NCAA hockey championship was begun in 2001, it has been won only three times by a team from the East-- and all three times, that champion was Clarkson. Curiously, there have only been three other champions: Minnesota has won 6 times, Minnesota-Duluth has won 5 times, and Wisconsin has won 4 times.

This weekend I will be giving the sermon at First Covenant Church in Minneapolis at 9:30 on Sunday-- please come!

The reading is this, from Luke 19:




There is so much there to work with!  It is the last part that captivates me the most, though-- the teaching, and the threat that represented. Jesus didn't have power, but he had influence... and that, we know, is something deeper and more lasting and more dangerous to the established order than any temporal power can be.

So.... I'm not sure why the type in the post below is so tiny! Every time I try to fix it, it becomes even smaller.

Very strange.

So, there were some good poems last week. I was especially fond of Megan Willome's, which left a lot in the shadows: 




Also, along these lines... confidential to CraigA:

Colgate women lost
Tears freezing on the red line
You did it, Clarkson!

On Friday, I found myself driving on a dangerous road. There was no obvious place to pull over and stop, and suddenly there were wrecks everywhere: a car that had slid under wires, two that had smashed into one another head-on, one in a ravine wrapped around a tree, and another where a boy looked out a broken car window, bleeding from the head, as a man tried to help him.

I slowed to a crawl. My car is a good one, with decent winter tires and all-wheel drive, and still I could feel the tires slipping and adjusting. There was a bit of panic inside of me, rising with each slip. Soon I was barely moving.

The thought came into my head that the car might just start slipping sideways, and I would be helpless. We would drift and slide and fall, unable to correct the course.

It didn't happen. I set my eyes straight ahead, went slowly, kept my hands on the wheel, and we passed through that dangerous area in a few miles. But still...

Is that what happens to some people? A terrible thing-- a great sadness, a mental illness, a catastrophic health failure-- takes hold of them, and then there is no grip, no control.

My dad wrote about a moment like that on his own blog last year. 

Where is God in that moment?

I know that some who survive give God credit for that. We don't know the view of those who died. But I do wonder if that is a moment of free will, or one of divine intervention; and if it is the latter, is that a moment of helplessness in a way?

There has been too much death around lately.

Do you ever take a nap-- not a long one, but just a reasonable 45-minute respite-- and then when you get up you just... can't... get.... going? For whatever reason, coming back from Spring Break has been like that for me. It's just a slog for some reason. 

When I was teaching the first class back of Criminal Law, I was in the middle of explaining something about burglary and for some reason, as I was talking, I began wondering why it always seemed like Phoebe never quite fit in on "Friends."

It's not a pressing issue. I had to shake my head, literally, and re-focus. 

That's what it is like.

I'm pretty sure that I will get my groove back soon; if I don't it could be disastrous!

But, seriously, is anyone out there with me on this Phoebe thing?

There are a lot of reasons that I love living in Minnesota. One of them is that people here just appreciate my kind of hair. Every year, they put together some all-star clips from the (televised and sold-out) high school boys hockey tournament (plus a few thrown in from the girls tournament, which Edina--"the little town from the West side with a dream"-- won this year).

So... enjoy.

So, I got to see the Medievalist on Saturday, when I got back from the ski trip. It was great to catch up with him, and find out what is what down in Waco these days. Plus, his haiku really hit things on the nose:

Climbing to the top,
Breathing the thin, cold, fresh air,
Viewing creation.

Yesterday morning, I was flying out of Jackson Hole on the little plane pictured above. As I sat down, a young woman took the window seat behind me. She edged in past an older lady in her 60's as she moved to her seat, and once they were buckled in they fell into conversation.

Almost immediately, the young woman started asking the older one if she "knew Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior," and whether she "was interested in eternal truth."

The older woman explained that she wasn't a Christian (I got the idea from her answers that she was Jewish). She politely parried each of the points the earnest young woman made... for example, when the younger woman asked "But can I ask you why you don't want to know about eternal life?" the older one explained that she was wary of easy truths about things we can't see.

Frustrated, the younger woman began to just argue with the older one, and insisting that she read either the Book of John or a tract that she had with her. The older woman, though, was clearly better-educated, smarter, and well-read (at one point she quoted Dostoevsky). The younger woman just started to talk over her. It took an unpleasant turn.

The older woman was remarkably patient, but eventually said she just wanted to read her book. The younger one did not accept that, and kept on making statements like "I know that many people don't want to know the truth. I'm going to pray for you."

It was excruciating to witness. As a Christian, I was horrified by what she was doing. Seen plainly, she was de-evangelizing, making a terrible impression for the faith on all around her (and I was not the only one listening in).  She was living the stereotype of Christians as pushy, arrogant, and insulting. I suspect that her performance will become a cautionary story told by some of the people who heard her, when they talked about why they weren't Christian, or what was wrong with the church..

As we left the plane, I asked the young woman if I could talk to her, and we talked about advocacy for a while. More than anything, I tried to tell her the same thing I tell my students: that people don't get argued into anything important; rather, we are transformed by stories. Jesus knew that. When he talked to people who weren't religious "experts" (the Pharisees, for example), he told stories, parables.  There is a deep truth in that. 

Sometimes I listen to music when I ski, even though it means I might not hear IPLawGuy's muffled cries for help from deep in a snowbank. I know what I to ski to-- a song with a good insistent beat and also a glide to it. Here are four of my favorites:

I'm on vacation (there is nothing like adults having Spring Break), so no politics this Thursday. I just can't. In the meantime, maybe y'all can convince IPLawGuy (pictured above) to wear a helmet when we are skiing. He claims that wearing a helmet would "mess up his hair" and that if he had a helmet he couldn't "wear a cool hat like this one from [Walgreen's]." (At least I think his hat was from Walgreen's-- it had that swirly "W" on it).  I rigged him up a helmet out of a trash can lid, but he claimed it "didn't fit right." I guess I need to find a bigger trash can.

Yesterday was a great day on the snow. It was sunny, and you could see the mountains stretching out forever. The hills are steep here, and the snow is deep. I'm still getting my feet right, but by the end of the day I was doing ok.

I know people who are great skiers, but I am not one of them. I'm a pretty good skier who really loves it. And, frankly, on a day like today I would be fine just standing around on top of the mountain looking around.

Luckily for me, I got to do more than that. At the end of the day, as the people thinned out, I found myself heading down. I was under control, but not dawdling. After about 1,000 feet from where I dropped in, there was a ridge before the next part of the downhill. No one was on the downward slope, but there were a few people on the ridge staring over the edge. I decided not to stop.

As I went over the ridge, I found myself in the air. It was only a moment, but it was a great one. I pulled up a little, stayed tight. But there was something in that moment-- there was nothing under me. I was flying. It was thrilling. 

And then I landed. And it was fine-- I didn't crash or pinwheel my arms madly or land on one ski awkwardly (though I am very capable of all of that, probably at the same time). I came back to the earth, and kept on going, thankful. I got to the bottom and found IPLawGuy--who had finished before me-- reading a book.

"How did it go?" he asked.

"Pretty good," I told him. "It was a good day." 

And so it was.

As yesterday's post attests, it has been a not-so-great week thus far.  But, it is Spring Break at UST law, so at least I have a chance for a little escape.

IPLawGuy (pictured above, driving the Barbie Jeep) and I are in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for some skiing. If you haven't heard of Jackson Hole, here are some key facts:

-- "Jackson Hole" is apparently an amorphous term used to refer to almost anything or anyplace in Northwestern Wyoming.

-- At the same time, nothing around here seems to be a "hole." In fact, it's all up above 6,000 feet or so, which is pretty much the opposite of a hole.

-- This seems to be a place for really serious skiers. You know, the kind with their leg in a cast. I'm not sure if that bodes well for us.

-- When we were renting the Barbie Jeep, there was a series of warning signs about the dangers of hitting very large animals. There were actually two different signs warning about hitting moose and elk, respectively. The one about elk featured a drawing of an enormous elk lying in the road, bleeding from the head as a totally smooshed car sits motionless while the driver, apparently dead, slumps over the wheel. So: don't hit an elk. Got it.

-- At the grocery store, everyone else seemed to be in the same boat as we were, meaning that they couldn't remember if the place they rented had a coffee maker or not, and if it did what kind of coffee it took. So we all stood around in the coffee aisle and talked about it for a while....

So, CraigA and I have the same recurring dream, it seems:




While the Waco Friend's take a different turn:

As most of you know, I've spent the last 23 years of my life immersed in narcotics policy in one way or another. I think the way we approach narcotics is incredibly important, for two reasons.

First, hard drugs can and do create real, lasting, and deep tragedies in the lives of people, families, and communities. That has never been more true than it is now, with a literal epidemic of opioid-related deaths.

Second, I know that our approach to fighting narcotics has also created real, lasting and deep tragedies in the lives of people, families and communities. On top of the devastation created by drug use, there is the devastation we have inflicted on one another  in misguided and unsuccessful attempts to address drug use and trafficking.

The cost of these twin debacles are nothing less than destitution, the loss of freedom, and death.

In the course of working on these issues, one thing I have found over and over again is that there are many people out there working on these issues who are better-informed, smarter, and more experienced than I am. I find that out every time I venture out into the world. You know who I found there?

I found a federal judge who has gone into prisons to check up on hundreds of the people he sentenced for drug crimes.

I found another federal judge who made his bones shutting down real kingpins-- international traffickers of heroin. When he issues a sentence, he does so with an intense focus on the harm of the crime yet a recognition of the humanity of all involved.

I found an ER doctor who was so fed up with dealing with overdoses and the parade of people trying to scam him for pills that his outrage went public.

I found a woman convicted of conspiracy and then granted clemency, dedicated to the healing, freedom, and recovery of women who face the wrongs and hardships she did.

I found an academic, a former Scalia clerk, who passed by other possibilities to go on an obscure commission and from there shake up the cruel certitude of drug sentencing.

I found people from the whole range of the political spectrum who knew that the two problems I cared about were real, and who dedicated their work to doing something about it.

So.

Our President says he thinks what we do about drugs is important. And you know what he did?  In a place and time where there are people on the right, left, and center who have experience and passion on this topic, and people dying in a drug epidemic, here is who he has put in charge of the efforts, according to Politico:

-- Kellyanne Conway, who is a pollster. According to Politico, she is "quietly freezing out drug policy professionals and relying instead on political staff to address a lethal crisis claiming about 175 lives a day. The main response so far has been to call for a border wall and to promise a "just say no” campaign."

-- Andrew Giuliani, the 32-year-old son of Rudy Giuliani, who has no background in the area, but his plan to be a professional golfer didn't work out, so you know.... drug policy.

-- Oh, and there was Taylor Weyeneth, a 23-year-old who previously had, um, organized a fraternity golf event.

This is wrong, in a way that should make people angry. I know too many people for whom working on this problem is a vocation. It's why--if you ask them-- they are here on this earth. It is immoral to leave them to the side while golfers preside over what should matter.

An intriguing MIT study came at my yesterday for some reason, and I can't get it out of my head. In a nutshell, it analyzes the net pay of people who drive for Uber and Lyft, and the conclusions reached are pretty disheartening:

-- Median profit for the drivers is $3.37 per hour before taxes
-- Once vehicle expenses are factored in, 30% of the drivers are actually losing money
-- Turnover in the industry is between 50% and 96% a year

As someone who uses these services and has generally been pretty happy with it, I'm disappointed-- my assumption had been that the pay must be decent if so many people are doing it.

My own hunch is that the statistics may be skewed by a large number of people who try it but then decide quickly that it is not for them. Because they are new, they probably are not skilled at maximizing profits. I note that the numbers above are for all drivers, but (like any business) those who are good at it probably do more work and for a longer time period before quitting. That means that if we adjusted the numbers towards profit per total mile driven by all miles driven (as opposed to by all drivers), it might change things for the better.

But... I'm no MIT statistician!

You have them. Sometimes, you remember them. And I think they are important, somehow.

So, let's haiku about dreams this week. You can write about one of yours, someone else's, a crazy or simple one, or even a dream of what might be someday (we're interpreting themes pretty loosely around here lately).
Here, I will go first:

I go up the stairs
In through a beaded curtain
There they are waiting.

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

At the start of the Trump administration, I was really taken by the way the news cycle seemed to speed up-- a lot. I would read the paper at the end of the day, and it seemed like it was from the previous week because so much weird stuff had happened. I figured that eventually things would slow down.

But they haven't.

Yesterday the sitting president wrote that he was disgusted by his Attorney General. And that was not the big story of the day. The big story was that a 29-year-old White House aide resigned. We live in strange times. And when I picked up the paper at the end of the day the lead story was that Jared Kuschner had lost his Top Secret security clearance-- news that seemed like it was from ages ago.

Some of this is intentional, I think. The attack on the Attorney General was just... well, I would call it a "self-inflicted wound," but the President clearly does not think it was any kind of mistake.

It seems as if what they are shooting for is to have a crash every day. I've been to NASCAR races (with IPLawGuy), and a lot of the people are there because of the crashes. They keep things interesting. And my impression is that being interesting--and having people pay attention to him--is very important to Donald Trump.