Category: General

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Mass Shootings and Insanity

Saturday, May 6, 2023, a mall in Allen, Texas:  eight dead, including children, and at least seven more injured.  In America we don’t need the headline above to know what happened there.  It is only the latest event in an epidemic, a plague of guns, a monsoon of bullets.

In just the past two weeks there have been mass shootings–defined as events in which at least four people are shot–in Cleveland, Texas (five killed), outside Tulsa, Oklahoma (six killed), and Atlanta, Georgia (one killed, four injured).  It is only spring, but already this year there have been at least 202 mass shootings, more than the number of days so far in 2023.  Last year, there were at least 647 of them.

Shootings are now the top cause of death of children and teens in the greatest nation on earth. Continue reading “Mass Shootings and Insanity”

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Thoughts on an Indictment

The first indictment of Donald Trump has landed.  Certainly there are more to come.  In the meanwhile, the indictment by the New York City grand jury and prosecutor has already created feverish media reactions and the expected bombast from the former U.S. president.  What to make of it all?  These thoughts come to mind.

The Media

In our digital age, the mainstream (traditional) media are also all about attracting eyeballs, most especially our television news programs.  Thus, the coverage to this point–before the indictment charges are even revealed–has been, well, hysterical.  It’s odd, isn’t it?  Trump refers to them as the “Fake News” media, and yet he is able to play them to his advantage like a fiddle.  They cannot get enough of him, his antics and his predicaments.  He is addicted to their attention, and they are happy to provide it. Continue reading “Thoughts on an Indictment”

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Language Habits III (A series of occasional rants)

Language evolves over time.  It can also be trendy.  Here’s the difference: Water carves mountains out of stone over millennia.  Many generations pass by the same local mountain, noticing none of these tiny developments.  This is a mountain evolving.

Water carves out snow lickety split.   Relative to the evolution of language, this is more like word or phrase trendiness.  It comes and goes.  And my gripe is with much of this trendiness.  So here goes Round III. Continue reading “Language Habits III (A series of occasional rants)”

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In the Eye of Concrete Crime

Note to Readers:  The events described here occurred well before I knew I would spend my working career investigating and writing about white-collar crime.  Perhaps these events played a subconscious role in my career arc.  Personal names in this story have been changed to protect privacy.  The photos are stock photos, not from my time on the job.

I will not forget my last summer job during my college years.  Ever have to work a job that appeared to carry the risk of being thrown into the Mississippi River in a pair of concrete boots?

Worker smoothing new concrete on street

I was working for the City of Minneapolis as a “paving test aide.”  Not exactly an evocative title, nor a particularly illuminating one.  Still, it is a rather precise name for the role.  With several other young college men, I was a quality control inspector for materials being used to pave the city’s streets in concrete.  It was a civil service job that paid well.  Most of my young summer colleagues were engineering students at the University of Minnesota.  I was a journalism major, but I had studied enough science in college to pass the civil service examination in chemistry that was required for the job.

It was my third summer in the job at the City’s Paving Test Laboratory.  The first two summers I worked exclusively in the Lab, putting sample concrete cylinders from our various street construction sites under pressure to see how much they could take before they would crack (to ensure the concrete being poured at the jobs met strength standards), and testing samples of rocks and sand from the City’s stockpiles to see that they did not contain too much moisture before being added to the cement and water to make concrete.  Too much moisture in the concrete mix weakens the concrete.  The work was quiet, routine, and relaxed.

I started again in the Lab at the outset of my third year, but about a month in I was transferred to the other wing of the role:  supervising actual construction of streets in the field.  And this is where I ran into trouble. Continue reading “In the Eye of Concrete Crime”

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Affection Harvested in Autumn

He was the scion of one of the wealthiest mercantile families in a small industrial city in the Middle West.  She was the daughter of the descendants of the Irish and German immigrants who had populated the city in the 19th century.  Both received their grammar school educations at St. Benedict Catholic School, 13 years apart.  He went East for his high school education in private schools.  She graduated from the local public high school.

He went on to Yale, where he graduated in 1924 with a degree in engineering and where he was elected to the Torch Society, which honored the 10 outstanding juniors for their achievements.  He was also an exceptional athlete, especially excelling in track and field events, while also playing the offensive end position on two undefeated Yale football teams in 1923 and 1924.  In the latter year he was named to the nation’s All-America football team and voted Yale’s best all-around athlete.

She studied at the local state college for one semester, majoring in English, before dropping out during the Great Depression to work in order to help her large family.  She had wanted to be a writer, and in fact had written a novel during grammar school.

He was handsome and gifted and a sportsman.  She was beautiful and multi-talented and a sportswoman.  He was Anton Hulman, Jr.  She was my mother-to-be, Dorothy Cleary. Continue reading “Affection Harvested in Autumn”

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Will the U.S. Prosecute the Former President for Insurrection and Other Crimes?

No doubt you have noticed the ongoing question of whether and when the U.S. Attorney General, Merrick Garland, will prosecute Donald Trump for alleged crimes he committed in the period leading up to the 2020 election and thereafter.  While the House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol has already publicized evidence of presidential crimes, the Attorney General has been silent on the status of investigations into the former president’s conduct regarding his effort to have the election of President Joe Biden overturned, which led to the insurrection at the nation’s capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.  Meanwhile, according to a poll released this week, almost 60 percent of Americans believe Trump should be prosecuted for crime in connection with the insurrection. Continue reading “Will the U.S. Prosecute the Former President for Insurrection and Other Crimes?”

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Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion

For more than 30 years I taught the sociology of law to both undergraduate and graduate university students.  We considered how American law developed, how it was applied to persons and groups, and with what effects on them and on the broader society.

When discussing the U.S. Supreme Court, I emphasized that the traditional law school approach to its decision-making was wrong.  There, students have been commonly trained that legal reasoning is a learned skill much like that in scientific work.  It is based on principles of deduction, according to which judges make decisions about laws by logically figuring out how the principles established in earlier court decisions–precedents–apply to the current dispute before them.  In this perspective, judicial decision-making–especially in the higher courts with the best trained lawyers–is a matter of technique.  It produces the correct legal answers based on facts and reason, free of bias and personal belief.  Competent practitioners, therefore, should reach the same, right, answers.

Although the American legal establishment placed a lot of faith in this account, and asked the nation to do the same,  it was never a true story.

Of course, if it were, how could the Supreme Court issue so many decisions with 5-4 votes?  More dramatically now, how could it be that today’s Supreme Court appears to be little more than a radical Right redoubt, one on the verge of retracting a basic right finally granted to women by the Court almost 50 years ago? Continue reading “Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion”

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“Are we safe here?” Remembering 9/11 in a College Classroom

It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, sunny and warm, when I reached my faculty office at 7:45 to complete preparations for my first lecture of the new semester.  As always, I was excited for a new year of teaching:  who would my students be, how would they surprise and inform me, how would my teaching evolve as I learned their personalities and levels of engagement.  Having introduced the course and myself to the class at our first meeting a few days earlier, I felt ready for my initial lecture at 9:30 that morning.

It was September 11, 2001, and I was in Boston.  Less than five miles away, planes were leaving Boston Logan International Airport on their routine schedules, many of them heading as usual to New York City.  As they lifted off the runway, these planes would fly low over my son’s new school, where he was in his first week as a high school freshman.

Classical music played on the radio as I focused on reviewing and making small changes to my lecture notes.  I became only vaguely aware at some point that the music had stopped, and that some news–of a crash or an explosion somewhere?–was being reported.  I worked on. Continue reading ““Are we safe here?” Remembering 9/11 in a College Classroom”

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Will Freedom Kill Liberty?

You may recall the now-iconic phrase that emerged during the Tea Party rise in our national politics around the 2010 elections:  “Take your government hands off my Medicare!”   Now there was a valid point to it–Republicans in Congress were threatening to pass a budget that would end “Medicare as we know it.”

But the directive also betrayed a deep confusion about the role of the national government in citizens’ lives, suggesting that a major social safety net program was not a program of government.  Indeed, political science research published in 2010 found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients surveyed denied that they had ever benefitted from a government social program.

Laughable as this level of civic ignorance struck many of us at the time, in fact it poses a significant threat to the stability and security of American society.  If citizens badly misunderstand their basic relationships with government, then they are more vulnerable to the distortions and appeals of demagogues. Continue reading “Will Freedom Kill Liberty?”

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