I Was In A Fight Tonight

A bike fight. And I got my ass kicked. Twice. This time they kept track of everyone's distance instead of doing a single elimination for the first round. If you lost you could still go on because the top distances moved on to the second round.

Just my luck, I drew Alan Jacob for my race. My cyclocross and Midnight Century friend, Brian, drew Mike Gaertner. Alan and Mike are animals on the bike so Brian and I knew we were both going to be one and done.

 This is what Alan looks like when he's kicking my ass.

I surprised myself and traveled .45 miles to Alan's .47 so I was pretty happy with the race. Although, to be honest, I think Alan was holding back. Probably conserving his energy, which would be the smart thing to do. In the meantime, the top guys were doing .51 and .53 miles. In the second round, one of the guys left because he wasn't feeling good. The first round results were checked and the next longest distance was me and another guy tied at .45. We did rock-paper-scissors and I won the right to race again. This time against Andy Anderson.

Oh joy.

The second race was brutal. My legs were full of lactic acid and I had just drank a beer. Alan was kind enough to hold on to my front wheel and cheer me on.

"Don't slow down, Hank! He's a triathlete and he's better looking than you!"

Alan would make an awesome coach.

The worst part was when they called thirty seconds. Only halfway done? Please, please hurry and count me down to zero. What a relief when that finally happened. My legs were burning up. Andy not only beat my ass, but he won in the third round, where he beat Alan, and then ended up in the final race where he was topped by David Holden.

This was fun. Kathy says she'll go to the next race and try it out.

The new champion. An exhausted David Holden.

After Twelve Years And Four Months

Some former senior NSA officials wrote an open letter to President Obama. It's a very interesting read.

The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.

We prepared this Memorandum in an effort to ensure that you have a fuller picture as you grapple with what to do about NSA. What follows is just the tip of an iceberg of essential background information – much of it hidden until now – that goes to the core of serious issues now front and center.

What took them so long?

Is Our Senators And Representatives Learning

"NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of US persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons.

NSA is fully committed to transparency with Congress. Our interaction with Congress has been extensive both before and since the media disclosures began last June. We are reviewing Senator Sanders’s letter now, and we will continue to work to ensure that all Members of Congress, including Senator Sanders, have information about NSA’s mission, authorities, and programs to fully inform the discharge of their duties.”

What a relief to learn we are all equal under the law.

It's Good To Be King

Senior United Stated District Judge Jed Rakoff (Southern District of New York) is an expert on white collar crime. In a piece published with The New York Review of Books he points out the lack of criminal prosecutions related to the financial crisis that brought on what we now call the Great Recession. He looks back at Enron, the savings and loan crisis, and other fraudulent activity and wonders.

In striking contrast with these past prosecutions, not a single high-level executive has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis, and given the fact that most of the relevant criminal provisions are governed by a five-year statute of limitations, it appears likely that none will be. It may not be too soon, therefore, to ask why.  

One possibility, already mentioned, is that no fraud was committed. This possibility should not be discounted. Every case is different, and I, for one, have no opinion about whether criminal fraud was committed in any given instance.  

But the stated opinion of those government entities asked to examine the financial crisis overall is not that no fraud was committed. Quite the contrary. For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word “fraud” no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a “systemic breakdown,” not just in accountability, but also in ethical behavior.

Judge Rakoff explains the issue well, but he's looking primarily at possible weakness in our government in not pursuing possible criminal activity on the part of individuals.

Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone magazine writes about a related issue: banks not being prosecuted for laundering money for terrorists and drug cartels.

Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.

A common thread between these two articles is the government's concern that prosecution could harm the world economy. Unfortunately, it makes ripping off the people and laundering money appear to be an acceptable harm.

It's A Trick!

Some years ago Kathy and I received a letter from a niece in which she told the story of her church's mission to Japan. She and her fellow young evangelists would pray in front of temples trying to free the Japanese from Satan's hold, which she explained was pretty strong there. They would also stand around in train stations holding a sign saying, "Free English Lessons". Once she was approached by a someone interested in improving their English speaking skills, she would tell them all about God and the Bible. In English, of course. The person receiving the "lesson", being part of a very polite and inoffensive society as a whole, would politely sit through the "lesson" until they finally had to go. To me that was unusual because if Satan had such a strong hold on the Japanese, why would they tolerate hearing about God and the Bible? Unless of course, Satan had such a strong hold that he didn't mind the chance of losing the one here or there to a young, fervent Baptist. Or perhaps he just enjoyed the irony of a Christian using of a subterfuge.

Anyway. Subterfuge was the first thought that came to mind when I saw this notice on a bulletin board in the building I work in. But I'm sure it's all on the up and up.

Federal Judge Calls It Quits

Last February, Senior Judge Richard Kopf, United States District Court, District of Nebraska, started a blog called Hercules and The Umpire. His posts have been about the role of a federal judge as well as some personal and family matters. I think you can count the number of federal judges who blog on two fingers. If so, it's now down to one.

Judge Kopf is closing out Hercules and The Umpire. On the bright side, he's keeping it alive so you can read it. He shared many issues and concerns--that other judges also have but don't publicly speak about--without compromising anyone and contributed towards increasing the layperson's knowledge of the federal judiciary. It's well worth perusing.