Monday
Fortunately, we only have to deal with Mondays once a week. Today was a LONG day, but I think that the fact that from 12:00 until 16:00 took about seven hours to get through might have had something to do with it.

Longest four hours EVER! ::: gesture :::
From the bottoms of the hour until :05 till each hour, I seemed most inclined to attempt inner eyelid studies.

Today’s NPR items come from Talk of the Nation.

  • During the news between the first and second hours, there was a news item about a battle in the U. K. (specifically in England, I think) whether fox hunting with dogs should be outlawed. While fox hunting is a “sport” here in the States, there is one major difference: In the U.S., when the hounds find the fox, they merely chase and trap it, the fox is later freed; in the U. K., the dogs kill the fox. Someone was quoted as saying “Fox hunting [in the U. K.] is cruel to foxes.” This comment, to me, comes squarely under the “No Shit” category.
  • The second hour’s topic was White Collar Crime. The following statistic was given

    “One academic study shows that criminals who stole more that $100,000 (USD) in the savings and loan scandal (in the 1990s) served, on average, a little more than three (3) years in prison. In that same period, burglars who stole about $300, on average, spent, on average, about a year longer behind bars. First time drug offenders served more than five years.”¹

    The overall questions for this segment were whether or not penalties for those convicted of white collar crimes should be different from those of the common criminal and/or is there a double standard? Guests for this segment were:

    • Clifton Leaf, Asst. Managing Editor, Fortune Magazine
    • Henry Pontell, Chair of Criminology, Law & Society, University of California at Irvine
    • Benito Romano, Defense Attorney at Wilke, Farr & Gallagher in New York and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

    They had a caller from Hillsborough, N.C. who asked what percentage of the crimes were commited by minorities and how disparate the sentencing was. Mr. Leaf said that studies showed that 95% of white collar crimes are committed by whites, but blacks who commit frauds often receive more harsh sentences than whites. She then added that she thought that these crimes should be called “white white collar crime,” since the majority of offenders are white. *boggle* Neil Conan, the show’s host, joked that in the next article, she would be given a 15% cut for coining the term; her response “How much?!”

Other than that, the day was rather uneventful. After work, I came home and that’s pretty much the day, in a nutshell.

Peace.

¹ From the Talk of the Nation website, RealAudio