Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

Trump was ordered this past Friday to pay 83.3 million dollars in damages to E. Jean Carroll, a woman he was found to have sexually assaulted and has been repeatedly insulting in the years since she came forward with his crime.  Until such time as he actually pays the money and/or expresses contrition there is no immediate cause to celebrate. With all his legal troubles he continues to live a life unimpeded to a great extent by the consequences of his actions, thanks to his daily legal challenges and delays. The interesting accountability to me this past week during the trial was that of his legal team. I don't want to necessarily single out his lead attorney for ridicule, for which she is justly receiving a good deal. Rather I am struck more by the overall sense of surprise seemingly demonstrated, at least in public, by Trump's supporters, that failing to provide a competent legal defense in lieu of playing for the cameras was counterproductive. It feels to me (and I can't...

I spent the first 25 years of my life in PA, NY, and CT and have some experience of wintry weather there. I was blessed with warm clothing and dressed for the weather, never unintentionally experiencing cold in any kind of painful way. (I have spent my lifetime confused as to how folk can live in Buffalo, NY or Fargo, ND where God is doing all God can to tell people not to live there. That is cold.) The rest of my life has been spent primarily in NC. We get some cold weather but nothing too bad. Ice storms are the worst, bringing down power lines on a regular basis. One such ice storm lasted long enough that my family and I were ready to go to a shelter when the power came back on and we had heat again. For some reason politicians use the extreme cold weather as an argument against climate change, and folk who want to believe it do so, even though it is a sign of climate change that our cold storms have gotten more intense. Weather patterns have been shifting long-term with the introdu...

We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday tomorrow.  When I was younger I struggled with naming important holidays, roads, cities, etc. after people who all have feet of clay; it is always disillusioning to learn that George Washington owned slaves, etc. Folk find faults in MLK who, as a human being, had them, and use that to attack the day. As I am older I understand better that for many folk it is a step further than they can take to instead celebrate a Civil Rights holiday explicitly, championing the work of John Lewis, Diane Nash, all the other SNCC leaders, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and all the many many people whose names I do not know that gave their lives and their deaths to helping our citizens and our nation be more free. So we have an MLK day, and I remember the furious battles having that national holiday caused by people who were willing to ascribe all kinds of evil intentions to someone willing to disrupt a culture of first and second class citizens, of th...

I took a year off from academia to work in an investment bank; I liked the math involved but lacked a sense of purpose (other than self-enrichment) and knew that I wouldn't stay. Otherwise I've been in academia non-stop since 1978, with nine years as a student (undergraduate and graduate) and 35 years as an instructor. I'm a tenured full-professor with no desire to work in administration so I'm pretty much stable in my rank. Academia as such (as opposed to reports of academic research) tends to make the news negatively. Recently the president of Harvard resigned because of accusations of plagiarism. (I do not know the details and will not comment on the merits of the accusations.)  Prior to that she had been called to speak before congress with other presidents due to strife on their campuses re the ongoing fighting between Israel and Hamas and how free expression was on that issue. I'm trying to think of academia in the news that was portrayed positively and to be ...