The football season still has two weeks to go and the NBA season is already at the halfway point?
The always interesting Dave Berri posted his wins produced/productivity stats for each NBA player through mid-season yesterday. As usual, the statistics reveal some interesting developments:
This seasonís edition of the Rockets is an entertaining mix of good complementary players who move the ball very well offensively and generally play hard-nosed defense.
But they donít shoot particularly well as a team and the lack of an inside presence defensively hurts the Rockets. Barring a major injury, the Rockets might make it to 45 wins, but my sense is that breaking even (i.e., 41 wins) would be a good performance by this club given its personnel limitations at this point in time.
With the Tracy McGrady contract expiring after this season, look for the Rockets GM Daryl Morey to make a deal for a go-to player either at some point during the remainder of this season or in the off-season. Thus, despite their gritty play so far this season, I would not be surprised if the Rocketsí nucleus looks substantially different going into next season.
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve been traveling to Florence, Italy frequently over the past year to visit my son Andy, who is attending the Angel Academy of Art there. Here is slideshow of photos from that beautiful city with musical accompaniment from Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. Enjoy!
The following are recent photos of the Tournament Course at The Woodlands that I recently took during a brilliant Texas morning in January with my buddies, Jerry Sagehorn and John Stevenson.
The Tournament Course is still known to most Houstonians as “the TPC” from the days when the course was known as the Tournament Players Course at The Woodlands.
Opened as The Woodlands East Course in 1978, the TPC is a wonderful design from the collaboration of Robert Von Hagge and Bruce Devlin from their time together in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
In the mid-1980’s, the Houston Golf Association and the PGA Tour arranged a licensing arrangement with The Woodlands Corporation and The Woodlands Country Club in which the East Course was transformed into a Tournament Players Course with the typical spectator mounds found on such courses. After that, the HGA moved the Houston Open golf tournament to the TPC and, for the following 18 years, the tournament enjoyed its most successful run in its long history. As a result, Shell Oil Corporation decided to become the tournament’s title sponsor, which solidified the Houston Open as one of the top second-tier tournaments on the PGA Tour.
When the HGA decided to move the Houston Open to Redstone in 2002, the license deal with the PGA Tour was terminated and the TPC reverted to The Woodlands Country Club, where it is now one of that club’s three courses and one of the seven courses in The Woodlands. A couple of years ago, the Champions Tour moved its Houston tournament to the TPC, a move that has catapulted that tournament into one of the top Champions Tour events because of the popularity of the TPC among the senior players.
The TPC is a joy to play and one of the best courses in the Houston area. From the men’s tees, it’s a pleasant 6600 yards (131 slope rating; 7000 yards and 138 slope from the tips) and is a great course to walk. It has a wonderful variety of holes, punctuated by the final two holes — 17 (nicknamed “the Devil’s Bathtub”) and 18 – a long par 4 over water – are two of the two finest finishing holes that you will find anywhere.
I love the contrast in the photos between the light brown of the dormant Bermuda grass with the various shades of greens of the trees, winter rye-seeded tee areas and the lightly overseeded greens. Enjoy!
Update: Another slideshow of the course, this time on a cool Autumn morning with the course in full bloom, is here.
The incomparable Nanci Griffith.
In our continuing series of splendidly creative commercials, check out this one for Normís Cheddar (H/T Bill Hesson):
Larry Ribstein points us to the abstract of a new Peter Leeson paper, Ordeals:
For 400 years the most sophisticated persons in Europe decided difficult criminal cases by asking the defendant to thrust his arm into a cauldron of boiling water and fish out a ring. If his arm was unharmed, he was exonerated. If not, he was convicted. Alternatively, a priest dunked the defendant in a pool. Sinking proved his innocence; floating proved his guilt. People called these trials ordeals.
No one alive today believes ordeals were a good way to decide defendants’ guilt. But maybe they should. This paper investigates the law and economics of ordeals. I argue that ordeals accurately assigned accused criminals’ guilt and innocence. They did this by leveraging a medieval superstition called iudicium Dei. According to this superstition, God condemned the guilty and exonerated the innocent through clergy conducted physical tests.
It sure is comforting to know that we sophisticated modern folk no longer believe that such ordeals are a good way to decide the guilt of a defendant.
On the other hand . . .
A frequent topic on this blog is the overcriminalization of American life, particularly in regard to taking business risks that create jobs for communities and wealth for citizens.
One of the most lucid writers on this disturbing trend is William Anderson (prior posts here), an economics professor at Frostburg State in Maryland. In this recent Regulation magazine article for the Cato Institute, Professor Anderson provides an excellent overview of how the federal government has gradually imposed police state-type laws on us that allow prosecutors to target citizens for a criminal case and then rationalize a crime from any number of vague criminal statutes:
The numbers tell a harsh story. In 1980, there were about 1,500 federal prosecutors and approximately 20,000 federal prisoners. Today, there are more than 7,500 U.S. attorneys and more than 200,000 federal prisoners, according to an October 2009 count. About 52 percent of federal prisoners are drug offenders, reflecting the emphasis of the ìWar on Drugs,î and while there is no specific ìwhite collarî crime category, one estimates, using Federal Bureau of Prisons statistics, that about 5 to 10 percent of the federal prison population consists of people convicted of white collar crimes.
The federal criminal code is growing. In the early days of the republic, there were three federal crimes: piracy, treason, and counterfeiting. Today, there are more than 4,000 federal criminal laws and more than 10,000 regulations that prosecutors easily can fold into the criminal statutes. . . .
In surveying this sad state of affairs, Anderson notes one of the perverse incentives driving these dubious prosecutions:
The resulting near-free reign that prosecutors have in federal court is an open invitation to abuse of the law and the legal system. To make matters worse, federal prosecutors enjoy almost total legal immunity and are unlikely to face any sanctions no matter how dishonest or abusive their behavior might be; the rules that apply to everyone else do not apply to U.S. attorneys. [. . .]
The only thing that stands between almost any American and doing a stretch in federal prison is the choice of whom prosecutors will target. This is a serious problem that shows no signs of disappearing.
The fact that one such prosecutor in Massachusetts was even seriously considered by many in that state for a position in the U.S. Senate reflects that citizens still have not grasped the extent of this awful trend in American society.
It makes one wonder what itís going to take for Americans to stand up and put a stop to this?
So, Rice University last week finally decided to pass on the proposed merger with Baylor College of Medicine.
In theory, the deal makes sense. Both are top-notch academic institutions with campuses within a stoneís throw of each other. Each institution would have given the other something that it needs. Baylor would have gotten the financial support of Riceís multi-billion dollar endowment, while Rice would have landed a strong scientific research and clinical care center in one of the nationís leading medical institutions, the Texas Medical Center.
Although Rice President David Leebron supported the merger, large segments of the Rice faculty and alumni opposed the deal, primarily on financial and cultural grounds. Indeed, my sense is that Leebron quit pushing the Rice Board of Trustees to approve the deal when it became apparent that a consensus of Rice constituencies were opposed to the marriage.
And Baylor clearly finds itself in precarious financial condition, not completely of its own doing. After its 54-year teaching hospital relationship with Methodist Hospital soured in 2004, and a subsequent deal with St. Lukeís Episcopal Hospital did not work out, BCM decided on a plan to go it alone and build its own teaching hospital.
However, the ambitious deal has been pretty much a disaster from the start. After floating almost $900 million in bonds to finance construction of the hospital, Baylor announced last year that it was temporarily suspending construction of the hospitalís interior as it works through its financial problems.
Meanwhile, BCM has lost over $300 million since the split with Methodist. Inasmuch as Baylorís endowment is less than a billion, those kinds of losses have placed BCMís financial condition at risk. Already in in technical default on multiple bond covenants, BCM is now facing the prospect of hiring a bondholder-required ìchief implementation officerî to oversee an overall financial reorganization. That would have been avoided if the Rice merger had succeeded.
Thus, Rice certainly had understandable reasons for passing on the deal.
Nevertheless, I wonder ñ did Rice make the right decision?
Despite its financial woes, BCM remains one of the elite medical and research institutions in the U.S. The merger would have undoubtedly brought a substantial increase in research funds in such fields as bioengineering, neurobiology, nano-biotechnology, stem cell biology and gene therapy. Although Rice would have been subsidizing BCMís financial problems in the short term, my sense is that the increase in research resources flowing to Rice over the years would ultimately make that bailout well worth it.
But even more importantly, Rice passed on an opportunity to take a calculated risk that could well have elevated Rice, BCM, the Texas Medical Center and Houston to the forefront of medical and scientific research in the world.
Despite the risks, that kind of upside doesnít come around very often. Failing to realize that is one of the key reasons why Texas has lagged badly behind states such as California and New York in the development of Tier 1 research institutions and all the benefits that such institutions provide to the state and its communities.
Thus, Rice is keeping its chips and betting that it can develop its scientific research just fine without BCM. But if I were to place a bet on which institution is closer to the cutting edge of such research after the next 25 years, Iím still putting my chips on Baylor.
Continuing to fly well beneath the radar screen — probably because lawyers don’t want to talk about it except in hushed tones — is the seven-year prison sentence that former Mayer Brown partner Joseph P. Collins was handed late last week.
As this earlier post explains in detail, Collins was the former outside deal lawyer for Refco, Inc., which unraveled back in 2005 under the weight of public disclosure of a series of insider transactions that were apparently designed to hide millions in liabilities from customers and investors.
As the earlier post notes and as the Memorandum of Law in support of a new trial for Collins explains, whether Collins even knew about the allegedly fraudulent nature of the transactions is highly questionable and whether he hid those transactions from anyone is even more dubious. But that hardly matters in this era of “let’s hammer the white-collar defendant.”
Meanwhile, Collins’ family will be deprived of the presence of their father for seven years.
What is it going to take for this madness to stop? A truly civilized society would find a better way.
Memorandum of Law in Support of New Trial for former Refco, Inc outside counsel, Joseph P. Collins