This case seems to have been mishandled by the Cornell Police Department, the Tompkins County District Attorney, and everyone Jane Doe turned to for help getting justice.

This case has exploded onto the internet, as topics seem to do from time to time. I didn’t want to jump into the fray right away because I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight and my thoughts clear.

I have a few questions. What happened to the dorm mother who was not supposed to let intoxicated women leave the dorm? What happened to the bar that served an underage woman alcohol? What happened to the men who received that group chat text message for “free pu$$y” and did nothing? The Tompkins County District Attorney said that the woman in her original statement did not accuse the men of sexual assault/rape or drugging her. Then what did she say in her statement? I don’t understand what they were investigating if she didn’t accuse them of a crime, or is he lying? Why were 2 men expelled and the other 5 not? What was the difference? If 2 men were expelled for sexual misconduct/rape, why weren’t there any formal charges? Jane Doe asked for her money back because she wanted to drop out of school that semester, but Cornell would not give it back. Why not? Why would Cornell force her to stay in that environment?

It seems to me that if women were valued in our society, then allegations of rape and sexual assault would be promptly and seriously investigated. Women would be encouraged and not discouraged from reporting misconduct/assault. They would be treated with dignity and respect when they did report something, but that’s not what happens in our society. Instead, women are treated like outcasts. They are treated like they are the problem. This has to change. This must change if we are going to get anywhere near an equal society.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has entered the picture. She has appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James to investigate this whole ordeal. I don’t know what will happen, but I promise you that this case will not be swept under the rug. It will now get full law enforcement attention.

Update: NYT has more details on the punishment for the Cornell 7. This is worth a read. It specifically names the seven men who were accused of sexual assault/rape.

Ummm, the more I find out, the more it seems Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten did the absolute least he could have done to close this case two years ago. It appears he didn’t review all the files the Cornell Police handed over. It actually appears that he may have lied when he released a public statement describing Jane Doe’s participation as “voluntary, conscious, and consensual.” I think that he should be fired. The NY Bar needs to look at this license very carefully.

She left her hometown in Tennessee at 18 and moved to Nashville the day after she graduated from high school. There are probably ten thousand similar stories of youngsters who dream of stardom, move to Nashville, and then fail. Dolly Parton did not fail.

She had a string of country music hits, then crossed over to the pop charts in the early 1980s. She became a movie actor. She made television appearances. She built Dollywood, a country-western-themed park, to give back to her community. She didn’t build it in the big cities of Nashville or Memphis; instead, she built it in Pigeon Fork.

Her generosity seemed to know no bounds. She seemed to have a genuine love for humanity. Her Imagination Library has donated over 300 million books to underprivileged children. I am not a country music fan, but I am a big fan of Dolly Parton. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all acted a little bit more like Dolly Parton and a lot less like Donald Trump?

Rebuilding Our Democracy
I’m going to assume that we want to keep our Constitution; if so, it is time to stand up and support it.

The Constitution needs teeth. To start with, are we really going to embrace the idea that all men and women are created equal? This is our foundation. This means no more gerrymandering. This means that everyone’s vote counts. This means it needs to be easier to vote than it is to buy a gun or to buy a beer throughout the United States. We need federal legislation that specifically mandates how we draw voting districts throughout the United States. We cannot leave this to the states. They have proven that they should not have that responsibility. This will likely require a constitutional amendment.

There should be 7 to 14 days of early voting. Election days should be on weekends, or Election Day should be a national holiday so most Americans can get the day off. This should make voting easier. No one should have to stand in line for more than 15 minutes to vote. Right?

We can figure out how many voting machines a district needs and make that happen. (Tarrant County has just decreased the number of voting machines, therefore making it harder to vote, and completely removed all polling places at the University of Texas in Arlington, which has tens of thousands of students. This is wrong and should never be allowed to happen!)

There should be criminal penalties for making Americans stand in line for hours in order to vote. That’s nuts! Every state and every district should have easy mail-in voting.

We need to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. All women should have bodily autonomy. This is a basic right.

We, as voters, have an obligation and a responsibility to do better. We have newspapers, magazines, and the Internet to educate ourselves, yet too often we walk into a voting booth with no idea whom we’re voting for. We don’t know who’s on the ballot. We tell ourselves everybody they are all the same, then close our eyes, make a wish, and hope we voted for the right person.

This is how people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Marsha Blackburn, and Sarah Palin got elected. And no, incompetence isn’t limited to just women. Donald Trump should have never been elected. He was completely unqualified by whatever metric you want to use. George Santos, a Representative from New York, should never have been elected to Congress. He was nothing but a con man. They kicked him out of Congress and sent him to jail.

Oh, and by the way, where is Mitch McConnell? He hasn’t been seen in public in over three months.

As voters, we need to educate ourselves about the issues and the people running for office. We should not look for the perfect candidate; instead, we should look for the candidate who most closely matches our values. Then we need to walk into the voting booth and vote for someone with compassion, someone with understanding, and someone who can learn on the job. We must reject everyone who thinks they have all the answers (Donald Trump), because no one does.

We need to rebuild our institutions. This starts with the Supreme Court. We need to add seats to the Supreme Court to dilute the nonsense that the six conservative Supreme Court members continue to support.

The current Supreme Court seems to be playing a game with the American people. They are delaying decisions and allowing Donald Trump to continue to plow through his agenda, and then later they will tell us whether it’s unconstitutional or not. This is ridiculous. The best example is that they allowed him to tear down the East Wing, and now they’re allowing him to build the ballroom, telling the plaintiffs they don’t have standing because the ballroom hasn’t been built yet.

This is absolute nonsense! We need a Supreme Court that will stand up for the Constitution and the American people. This Supreme Court is doing neither. In addition to the Supreme Court, we need to fix the Centers for Disease Control. Vaccines are safe and very effective. We need to eliminate measles again.

We need to rebuild public trust in our institutions. This means that we MUST hold wrongdoers accountable. Americans who intentionally lie and deceive the American public need to be held accountable. We should start with RFK, Jr.

We have to get social media under control. Hate speech must be outlawed.

We need to rebuild our military. We have broken a proud institution with terrible leadership. Hell, the USS Abraham Lincoln, with its terrible conditions, should be a lesson to all of us. The ship had no safe harbor to resupply. Why? Because Iran had bombed our resupply base in the region. This was completely predictable. We are now trying to use a base in Singapore to resupply our ships in the Persian Gulf. That is a 4,000-mile supply line. Four thousand miles!

Secretary of Defense Hegseth has decimated our military leadership. It will take years to rebuild our military. I’m not talking about restocking weapons. I’m talking about getting 3- and 4-star generals who understand the world and our military.

ICE needs to be dismantled. Currently, they are acting as the lawless branch of the Trump administration, like Brownshirts in Nazi Germany. ICE agents who shot and killed Americans need to be put on trial, and if convicted, they should spend a long time in jail. The leaders of ICE, those who told the agents to break the law, to bend the law, also need to be put on trial. If convicted, they should also spend decades behind bars. This is about breaking up the cult and reinforcing the rule of law.

We need to roll up our sleeves and fix our education system. We need to increase teachers’ pay. We need to rebuild our schools. We need to teach social studies. We need to teach civics. We need to introduce music and art back into the schools. We need to teach American history. This means teaching the good and the bad. From the American Revolution to the Civil Rights Movement, from the Trail of Tears to the American Expansion in the West, American history needs to be more comprehensive.

We need to fund our schools. Teachers shouldn’t have to pass the hat to get basic classroom supplies. As a matter of fact, why are we just doing the basics? Shouldn’t our kids have a first-class education? This means we shouldn’t try to save money on supplies and books for our kids. We need to give our children the textbooks that they need. Those books should be theirs so they can use them as references later.

We need to make state universities $500 to $1,000 a semester, or less. In fact, under the Constitution of the State of North Carolina, Article IX, Section 9, Benefits of public institutions of higher education, “The General Assembly shall provide that the benefits of The University of North Carolina and other public institutions of higher education, as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the State free of expense.”

The federal government needs to subsidize tuition at all colleges and universities: benefits must go to students, not institutions or million-dollar administrator salaries. This places higher education within everyone’s grasp. We need to eliminate these for-profit schools that do little more than empty hardworking Americans’ bank accounts.

We have to fix the American press. We want a free press. We want a press not beholden to any one party or, more importantly, any one class. We need to pass legislation so that no major media outlet is owned by a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate or some billionaire. News outlets need to be independent. They should be not-for-profit. Any media outlet that intentionally lies (proven in a court of law) to the American people should lose its FCC license as well as its right to appear on cable or the Internet.

This is about rebuilding our society. We all have a shared responsibility. This is about living up to our Declaration of Independence and what we said we wanted: a more perfect union.

I don’t want to recreate something from the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, I want to create something new. I want to create a society that works for all Americans. I want to make life better for the rich and the poor. This means standing up for the poor. This means that no American goes hungry. This means universal healthcare so everybody’s covered and nobody goes bankrupt from a medical bill.

We need to love each other. This single act will point us in the right direction. We need to follow Dolly’s example.

I’m a huge Dallas Cowboys fan. I grew up in Dallas during the 1970s. This was back when the Cowboys seemed to win almost everything. I lived through the drought of the 1980s, then embraced Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, and the early-1990s Dallas Cowboys. I scratched my head and wondered when Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson decided to part ways. I thought it was a mistake then, and I still do.

Since those days in the mid-1990s, I have seen the hype machine tell us how great the Dallas Cowboys are in September and October. Then the excuses begin to mount in late October and early November, and by December, despair has set in. I refuse to go through the cycle. Let’s see how the season unfolds. Let’s see how the Dallas Cowboys are playing in late December. Making the playoffs is not enough. We need to make the playoffs and look good. We need to win a playoff game and look like we belong; then I’ll say the Dallas Cowboys are back.

I first published this approximately 15 years ago. I’m old, and so is my blog. Do you remember any of this?

I’ve spent most of today reading and reflecting on my education over the last decade. I don’t remember the first time I heard the word Al Qaeda. I don’t remember the first time I ever heard the name Osama bin Laden. I do remember where I was on September 11, 2001. I had been up most of the night taking care of trauma patients, and I was sleeping in that morning. The phone rang, and it was my mother-in-law. She was the Sentinel. She was always scanning the news. She called to tell us to turn on the TV. She said something terrible happened in New York. I thought she was crazy or misunderstood what she had seen. I handed the phone to my wife, grabbed the remote, and turned on the television. I saw nothing. There was nothing going on. After 5 minutes of flipping news channels, I finally saw it. I don’t know whether I was watching CNN or some other television network but I finally saw it. It’s one of those pictures that you never forget.

I’m sure over the next several days there will be lots of blogs and television shows reflecting on what’s happened in the last 10 (25) years. The New York Times has already started the series on 9/11. (They did a special series at the 10-year anniversary, but I’m not seeing a new series now, the 25th anniversary.) I just want to revisit some of the information and data that we’ve learned over the last 10 years. I’m not going to spend much time talking about the Patriot Act and how it has been abused over the last decade. I’m not going to talk about civil liberties and how Republicans have taken advantage of 9/11. I’m sure that these topics will be adequately covered by many others in the blogosphere.

In my opinion, the key to understanding the failure of 9/11 lies in the arrest and interrogation of Ramzi Yousef. Ramzi Yousef was the mastermind behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Once he was captured, authorities began to see into the mind of a Muslim extremist. Ramzi Yousef was associated with Osama bin Laden. Ramzi Yousef’s uncle was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. After escaping the country in 1993, Ramzi Yousef attempted an assassination of Benazir Bhutto in the summer of 1993. He then attempted to bomb an Israeli embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. These attempts failed. Yousef, a Sunni Muslim, bombed a Shiite holy site in Iran in June of 1994. He then went to Malaysia, where he began plotting the Bojinka plan (also known as the Manila plot). He and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed planned to blow up 12 US airliners as they flew over the Pacific Ocean. As they were preparing their 12 bombs, a fire broke out in Yousef’s apartment. One thing led to another, and authorities found a treasure trove of information in his apartment.

At the very least, authorities had the opportunity to see what one man was capable of doing around the world. The mistake was assuming this was just one man and not a movement. Only a few in the intelligence community understood that he was one of many. It wasn’t until 1998, with the embassy bombings, that many in the United States began to recognize this as a serious threat. For some, it took until 2000, the USS Cole bombing, before they believed that Al Qaeda would stop at nothing.

Ramzi Yousef is currently in a maximum-security prison in Colorado.

How did you first become aware of al-Qaeda, bin Laden, or the fact that we were a serious target? Where were you 10 (25) years ago?

More tomorrow on 9/11 and Al Qaeda.

I find it kind of amusing that a large group of people questions the science of global warming (climate change caused by humans burning hydrocarbons). So I thought the best way to illustrate the craziness of the deniers would be to ask: how do you know oxygen exists? Almost all of us took some biology and chemistry in high school. We did some sort of experiment and, hopefully, didn’t blow up the lab. I think that most of us remember the experiment that we did using a technique called electrolysis. We took water and passed an electric current through it. Hydrogen went into one tube and oxygen into the other. But how do we know that was oxygen? We’ve been told, over and over, that oxygen makes up 21% of our atmosphere. But you can’t see oxygen. You cannot taste it. (More about oxygen here.) How do we know? Well, it is based on the molecular theory.

This is the same line of questioning the deniers use. Yet, the same scientific methods that convinced us that oxygen exists have been used to prove climate change is secondary to man’s burning of fossil fuels.

Climate change. Conservatives have taken this term and run with it. They played on the fact that most Americans know a little bit of science, but not much. Most of us remember that there were many ice ages. The Earth warmed, and the ice receded. The Earth cooled, and ice spread over large continents. So, every time a scientist mentions climate change, conservatives point to this natural cycle. They then ask, “How do we know that the warming trend that we’re seeing now is not part of this natural cycle?” Before I answer, let me add one more thing. One of the final arguments deniers use is that the world is so big, and you and I are pretty small compared to it. How can we, as God-fearing little human beings, have an impact on this great big world of ours? This is probably the deniers’ weakest and simplest argument. There are multiple ways to refute this argument. Let me just say that currently, scientists have tested the air in California and have detected pollutants that were generated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in China. So what happens in one part of the world can affect people thousands of miles away.

How can climatologists point to some of the events that are happening now as evidence of climate change secondary to man’s burning fossil fuels? Well, thankfully, I don’t have to come up with an experiment off the top of my head. Smart people, scientists, have done this for us. A few places in the world don’t change much. In fact, they haven’t changed for thousands of years. One place is Antarctica; the other is Greenland. In these two places, it gets extremely cold. In some places, the ice is several miles thick. NASA explains it like this:

Throughout each year, layers of snow fall over the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Each layer of snow is different in chemistry and texture, summer snow differing from winter snow. Summer brings 24 hours of sunlight to the polar regions, and the top layer of the snow changes in texture—not melting exactly, but changing enough to be different from the snow it covers. The season turns cold and dark again, and more snow falls, forming the next layers of snow. Each layer gives scientists a treasure trove of information about the climate each year. Like marine sediment cores, an ice core provides a vertical timeline of past climates stored in ice sheets and mountain glaciers.

So, by drilling into the ice, we can go back in time and see what the environment was like. What was the composition of the ice 100 years ago… or a thousand years ago? How much methane or carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere? Whatever was in the atmosphere should be trapped in the ice. Scientists have been able to look back over 420,000 years.

Notice how at the end of the graph (the right side) CO2 levels are higher than at any time during the measuring period. This seems to correlate very nicely with the industrial age, which started approximately 150 years ago. Below is another graph. This time focusing on carbon dioxide concentration. Again, towards the end of the graph, on the right, you can see the abrupt increase in carbon dioxide.

This data makes a compelling argument that the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is a new phenomenon. CO2 has not accumulated at this high a level over the last 420,000 years. This data supports the fact that man is having a definite impact on the world around us and that climate change second to man’s burning fossils is really happening. Currently, the leading explanation for this accumulation is the beginning of the industrial age and the burning of carbon fuel at a much higher rate than ever before. The question is whether you are going to believe the scientists or the other guys who are making huge vats of money burning fossil fuels.

Is oxygen real or not?