For the Honor of Racing on the Cobblestones

I may have been wrong about the "fast and quiet" death of cycling that I predicted. The UCI has seen to that as they have opened a disciplinary case against the French Cycling Federation (FFC) for supporting the owners of the Paris-Nice race in running the race, making it very public indeed. The owners, the Amaury Sports Organization (ASO) own the Tour de France, cycling's marquee event.

This does not bode well for cycling's future. There are riders who have already declined to participate in the Paris-Nice race because they are worried about their Olympic eligibility, which is governed by the UCI. Cycling needs the Tour, and the Tour needs effective, open, and honest doping controls. And these controls need to be run consistently across international boundaries, and this is something that only the UCI can effectively accomplish.

There last time there was not a Tour de France was in 1946, and since 1903 only the two World Wars have prevented the contest from going forward. No one is suggesting the the race will not go forward. UCI is saying that without their support, it should not take place, but the ASO has said all along they will go forward under French authority, even without UCI support and controls.

Already the Tour is going to go forward without marquee names like Levi Leipheimer and defending champion Alberto Contador. There are many other names that cycling needs to have racing, however, if it is going to survive as a major event and not become a sideshow. The UCI wants control, the ASO wants independence, and caught in the middle are the men who just want to ride and compete for the greatest prize in their sport, and one of the greatest athletic accomplishments in the world.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport has offered to mediate the dispute, but both the UCI and ASO have rejected their offer. What they have ignored is the fact that not having the Tour de France is like open wheel racing not running the Indianapolis 500 because Tony George wants exclusive control over the rules of the race, wants them drastically different from the rest of the season, and if the sanctioning body does not agree to it, he will run the race without Penske, or Ganassi, or any other major team.

The UCI and ASO need each other. Cycling needs a marquee event, and you cannot just go out and create history, especially not the kind that comes with over a century of racing across the French countryside. The ASO needs the Tour to be consistent with cycling events the world over, at least in terms of the rules, regulations, and controls. And the sports world needs for the cloud of suspicion and embarrassment that has hovered over the Tour de France for over a decade to lift so that we can trust that our champions truly are figures that we can recognize with a clear conscience.

Slipping Further Away

As rockets continue to fall on Israel, and the Israeli military steps up operations in Gaza, gunmen shot up a school in Jerusalem.

There is no peace in the Middle East, and the ramping up of the attacks as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meets with Olmert and Abbas show just how hollow President Bush's call for peace in the region by the end of his term really is. A timetable cannot be put on a conflict of this magnitude, and Israel cannot be realistically asked to negotiate with a gun to its head.

I was reading a TIME article about the possibility of Israel conducting a full assault on Gaza, getting itself into an Iraq-type quagmire, when an email popped up. A friend of mine who I am not in regular touch with is not only in Israel right now, not only in Jerusalem, but studying at a seminary there. He did not mention the attacks directly, but only said not to worry, that he is OK, and goes to a different school, a neighboring school from the one attacked.

And once again, events so far away hit so close to home for me.

Israel cannot negotiate as rockets keep falling on Sderot and Ashkelon. Abbas has to clean his own house before he can negotiate in good faith. Otherwise, we will merely return to (or continue) the hollow promises of the Arafat decades, where he would say in English what the west wanted to hear, and then turn around in Arabic and say "go get 'em."

I do not know what the answers are. All I know is that, unlike the optimism expressed in the Lincoln quote that peace is not so distant as it has been, I feel like hope and peace are slipping further and further away.

Seatbelts and Sake

Yet another minor child has been found drunk at school. I feel like every day there is a report of a kid in single digit years (in this case 4) drunk. I am of the opinion that the legal drinking age is too high. But I'm talking about lowering it to 18 (you can die for your country but you are not allowed to order a beer?). Or maybe even down to 16 if you are with your parents. But 4? Give me a break. Anyone who gives alcohol to a child should be thrown in prison. And no, I am not talking about the occasional sip during a religious observation or to see what it tastes like at a family dinner at home. But no child should be given their own drink. And no one should have to be told that.

I saw this particular case reported in a video on CNN. I also saw something really good in the video, though. The reporter was interviewing a parent who was sitting in his car while picking up his child from the school. While he was talking, you can see over his shoulder the car door open, the kid get in, reach up and put his seatbelt on. Maybe there is hope for us yet. The drunk 4 year old is the exception. I would like to (and in fact do) think that the kid putting on his seatbelt unprompted is the rule.

1 Down, 1 to Go

"So Clinton lives to run for another seven weeks. But if you believe in the power of numbers, the candidate of inevitability is Barack Obama." - Mark Halperin, "Clinton Wins Big, But Math is Troubling," TIME, March 5, 2008.

The media has gotten everything wrong in this campaign. McCain went from the leader to dead to the leader to faltering to the nominee. Rudy went from the presumptive to the throwaway. Thompson went from the savior to....well he never really became anything. Hillary was the presumptive to the finished to the comeback kid to....the inevitable loser, apparently. Obama was the dark horse to the presumptive to the front runner to....the inevitable winner who just can't quite close the deal.

They have gotten everything wrong, so why should we listen to them now? Welcome to campaign '08. The Daily Show calls it "Indecision '08," and it really is. We were supposed to have this thing wrapped up by Super (Duper) Tuesday. Now we have another SEVEN WEEKS of campaigns and mudslinging for the Democrats, while the Republicans unite around their maverick that they are just not quite ready to trust.

This process is insane. It is too long, too drawn out. In a week, we will count off the 40th anniversary of the 1968 New Hampshire primary, where a sitting President was almost unseated by a candidate within his own party. This year, New Hampshire is two months behind us, and this campaign is 2+ years old. If you want to be President, you are never not running.

Uniters, dividers, Republicans, Democrats, independents. We just cannot make up our minds as to what we want. I have been wondering lately, what could possibly make someone think that they are the right person to lead the nation? What could make a person think that they should be President? What could possibly make someone think that they are qualified?

I'm reminded of one of my law professor's comments about New Yorkers: "I love New Yorkers because they don’t really care who wins. They just want everyone to shut up."

But looking back to that quote that I used to open this post, Maybe we have made a decision as a country, or at least the Democrats have as a party. Or, and I think this is much more likely, everyone has their head in the sand and it is stupid to predict anything until November 5, and by then, we will know who is running for President in 2012, and we get to start the process all over again.

The Old Soldier Fades Away

Brett Favre is retiring.

How much would I have killed to hear those words 10 years ago, when his Packers kept bouncing my Niners from the playoffs? Today, I'm not quite as thrilled to hear it as I would have been in the past. Then, Brett represented the evil successor to the Cowboys of the mid-1990s. Today, he represents everything that is good about football specifically, and sports in general. Playing the game the same way he has his entire life, Favre is a great example for young aspiring football players to look up to.

It was such a great thing to see him doing well and being successful again. Now he can ride off into the sunset. I hope he gives Green Bay a chance to thank him for what he has done. He and they have been waiting a long time for this kind of celebration at Lambeau. And the one that's coming in Canton, five years down the line.

Aaron Rodgers has some ridiculously big shoes to fill. I wish him luck, since he needs all the help he can get.

Enjoy retirement, Brett. You've earned it.

Running Clean (?)

And now, for some thoughts on sports.

I'm torn over the what to think about the Tour de France banning the Astana team from this year's event. On the one hand, this is a totally different team, that just happens to have the same name, as the team that embarrassed the Tour last year. To lump Bruyneel and Leipheimer and Contador in with the likes of Vinokourov is fundamentally unfair to the new edition of the Astana team. It is like the Cleveland Browns today. They are not the Browns of 30 years ago. Those Browns are now the Baltimore Ravens. The new Cleveland Browns are an expansion franchise. Similarly this is an entirely new Astana team.

On the other hand, as a fan, I can see the Tour's perspective with crystal clarity. I was heartbroken when Vino was caught cheating, and the entire team was expelled from the Tour after having embarrassed cycling's biggest event for the second straight year. Bruyneel, Leipheimer, and Contador knew that they were joining a team with such a horrible name recognition when they signed with Astana. It is hard to have sympathy for them when they knew what they were getting into.

Beyond the fate of the Astana team and Contador's inability to defend his Tour title, there is the ongoing conflict between the group that runs the Tour and cycling's governing body. The two-wheeled racers should learn something from their four-wheeled brethren in the United States. The recently ended 10 year war between Champ Car/CART and the IRL seriously hurt open wheel racing and opened the door for NASCAR to jump to the top of American motorsports. An ongoing conflict between cycling's governing body and its marquee event will make the sport die fast and quiet.

If they want to survive, they need to come together. They need to make sure that no team, the "new" Astana or any other, do what the "old" Astana did. Cycling knows it needs to clean up, but it needs to do so fairly. Otherwise, you end up with enduring (and unfair) questions about Lance Armstrong's 7 straight wins, and the horribly embarrassing situation of Floyd Landis, the shamed and disqualified 2006 "winner" who continues to pursue his case before the International Court of Arbitration for Sport.

2 wheels, 4 wheels, on foot, on ice, I just like racing. And cheating in one of the greatest prizes in sports makes me heartsick more than the (fine, for now I'll still call it "alleged") cheating of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. I hope the Tour goes off without a hitch this year. Cycling, sports in general, and the world at large could use it. And so could I.

The 1% Crisis

Don't let the title make you think this is a tiny issue. The Pew Center on the States has come out with a report that has found that more than 1% of the U.S. adult population is in jail or prison. Unbelievable. We have 230 million adults in this country, and over 2.3 million of them are behind bars. And where is the money coming from? We cut taxes, and funding for the arts, and for health care, and for research, and for everything else you can imagine. But we spend money on building more prisons to incarcerate people for longer and longer and longer.

I once had a professor who said that no elected representative was ever voted out of office for being to tough on crime. And what puts people behind bars more than anything? Drugs. Murderers have the lowest recidivism rate of any crime (with the notable exception of serial killers, but they never get out once they are caught anyway). But drug users, who commit an almost victimless crime, will be in and out of prisons for their entire adult life. Why? Because we don't like what they put into their bodies. Heroin was once prescribed to clear the skin. Today, it can get you locked up for years. I wonder how many of that 1% are veterans?

We have the largest prison population in the world. We have the largest per capita prison population. Who joins us in the top 10? Russia and the old Soviet Bloc. Another list that we should feel extremely proud to be on, along with that list that includes China, and Saudi Arabia, and our good friend Iran. I refer, of course, to the list of countries with the death penalty.

What a terrible thought. The politics of imprisonment is a harsh one, indeed.

On Investigations, Bureaucracy, and Coffins

Now that I've finished reposting everything from the past, I can start writing and posting new thoughts.

Views on the Iraq war run the gamut from the likely misquoted "stay for another 100 years" to the gut reaction "pull the troops out now" and everything in between. Something that we can all agree on (I hope, anyway) is that, whether or not we have troops over there, as long as we do, we need to provide them with the proper equipment so that they come home alive, instead of in coffins. So it is disheartening to me to see today's article that the Marines are looking into what caused a delay in getting Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs) to frontline troops in Iraq.

During World War II, countless telegrams were sent by the War Department to families, saying that their sons and brothers and husbands and fathers had died in the service of a greater cause, in the cause of freedom and democracy for all. There were screwups, yes. Planes crashed, intelligence let them down, equipment failed. But the telegrams that came back from Iraq because of an apparent bureaucratic screwup preventing MRAPs from getting to Iraq as quickly as possible are a pill nearly impossible to swallow. If the investigation should determine who is responsible for this tragic failure, they should never be allowed to work in public service again, and if they acted willfully, they should go to jail.

Regardless of whether you believe that the troops should come home immediately or if we need to stay there for a century (neither of these groups include me, by the way), take a peak at history and the last long-term controversial war our country experienced. At the height of both personal and political opposition to the Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy never once voted against an appropriation for the war, even as he campaigned to bring every last soldier home. You never deny anything to the boys on the ground. And as for bringing them home, here is my view. I do not know if we should have ever gone to Iraq. And fortunately, the reality of the world we live in prevents me from having to make such a decision. But they need to be protected, secured, and allowed to do their job, so that they can come home as quickly and safely as possible.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

It is cold in the northeast.

I'm sitting in a writing class at 8:15 on a Friday morning.

I'm supposed to be asleep right now. Fridays are supposed to be my light day, academically speaking. I have one class at 1:40 in the afternoon, so I can sleep in, relax, and then wander over to school for an hour and a half, and then head out into the city with friends.

Three days a week I start at 8:30 in the morning. Wednesday is supposed to be one of those days.

This week, Wednesday was the first day that nature finally decided to show me what "winter" actually means. I grew up where there wasn't a real winter, so this was a new experience for me. I was prepared, though. Heavy coat, check. Waterproofed shoes, check. Gloves, check.

So I wake up early Wednesday morning, fire up my computer, and check my email. Lo and behold, an email from my writing professor saying that, because of the inclement weather, she will not be coming in to class today.

Now keep this in mind: my school is not closed. I still have to go in for my class at 10:15, and I'm already awake. It is not worth going back to sleep, so instead I relax for a while in my apartment. I finally go outside and brave the cold, the wind, and the sleet, and make my way to my contracts class.

At this point, I would like to talk about sleet. Where I grew up, we did not have snow. Maybe once a decade, some snow would fall at the highest point in town, but it would never stick once it hit the ground. There would be hail occasionally, of different sizes, and it was fun to stand on the porch and watch these tiny balls of ice pound onto the sidewalk. Sleet, however, is a horse of a different color. Instead of balls of ice, sleet is frozen rain. And it STINGS. The street I live on has winds that alternate directions from day to day. Wednesday's patterns meant that it was interesting to walk from east to west (towards school), navigating frozen intersections and snowy sidewalks. It also meant that it was painful to walk from west to east (towards my apartment), braving not only the frozen intersections and snowy sidewalks, but doing it all with sleet whipping in and stinging my face and eyes almost shut. I enjoy cold weather, but sleet is something else.

But back to the story. My writing professor tells us that we can make up our class on Friday morning, joining her 8:30 section that day. Meanwhile, another class has scheduled (and rescheduled and rescheduled and rescheduled) a training session for 9:00 Friday morning. A few more back-and-forth emails between my classmates and our writing professor gets the class moved back another half hour to 8, which is why I'm sitting here way too early in the morning.

So today, instead of just a Constitutional law class in the afternoon, I have a writing class at 8 in the morning, a training session at 9, and Con law at 1:40. On top of that, a leak in the roof above the fifth floor makes my fourth floor apartment smell like something between a wet dog and rotting wood thanks to the water that made its way down into my walls.

You've got to love winter in the northeast. At least I'm finally seeing a little bit of what I signed up for when I moved out here.

And fate has granted us a three day weekend to make up for this early morning suffering, so if I brave the weather it will be for something fun instead of to go to class. And it will definitely be after 11 in the morning at the earliest.

And before I sign off, my favorite quote from the semester so far, courtesy of my criminal law professor, talking about different theories of punishment:

"You understand 'eye for an eye' and 'tooth for tooth.' You may not agree with it, but you understand it. But what you get for 50 grams of coke doesn't exactly come from the bible."

To Follow Knowledge Like a Sinking Star, Beyond the Utmost Bound of Human Thought

I have written a few times now about stem cell research and the general one-liners about why it should go forward with federal support. I have alluded to personal stories of why individuals might support it, and how these kind of stories make it difficult for me to see how anyone could oppose the research, stifling the benefits that can be gained. Today, I do not want to make policy arguments. Today, I do not want to speak to global ideals. Today, I do not want to talk about the generations that will follow those alive today. Today I want to talk about my grandfather.

Today is the fifth anniversary of my grandfather's death. He was a brilliant man. He tried to be the best at everything he did, and he usually succeeded. After fleeing Germany with his parents in the early 1930s, my grandfather went from being educated at the best schools in Europe to being apprenticed to an importer in Central America in the middle of the Great Depression. During World War II, he made a deal with the United States embassy to come to this country, join the Army, and become a citizen.

My grandfather served as a soldier in Europe, although he never saw combat. He was about to be shipped to the Pacific when the war ended. After serving in occupied Germany, he came back to the U.S. to attend college on the G.I. Bill. He started school at the University of Oklahoma, and settled into life there. I was raised on stories of my grandfather winning spending money by playing bridge for a penny a point. From an early age, I was shown pictures of an obscure auto race in Oklahoma, and being told that my grandfather had taken the pictures with his most prized possession, a camera that he stretched his means to the breaking point to acquire. That story was usually followed by my father or his siblings talking about my grandfather blinding them with a surprise flash from a giant flashbulb on his camera as they were growing up.

My grandfather graduated with a grade point average higher than many people I know can count. He took the national accounting examination, and won an award for having the highest score in the country. He had been given intelligence tests while in the Army, and again had scores among the highest that had been seen. His scores showed him to have the equivalent of a year of college already completed, even though it is unclear if he even finished high school. He was called back into service for the Korean War, but instead of being sent to Asia, he worked as an auditor for the Army.

After he completed his service, my grandparents started their family. My grandfather was at first in debt to his father in law, and at the end of his life he was more than able to provide for generations of his family. In between, he raised four children, was the founding partner of a division in the Houston office of a major accounting firm, and did the best he could to set an example of how to live a good life.

My grandparents retired to the northwest, and every year my family would visit at Thanksgiving. They lived in a great house on the shores of a lake, with a view that serves as the backdrop for a series of pictures of me and my father during the first decade of my life. Every time we visited, I would spend a day with my grandfather, working on one little project or another. One year, when I was about 12, he decided that we were going to make a box. There was nothing special about the box in and of itself, but it was a huge thing for me. We carefully made the plans on his computer, we picked out, marked, and cut the wood in his workshop, and methodically put the pieces of the box together. Everything was done meticulously, and everything down to the final detail was planned. At the end of the day, we had not quite finished sanding it, but my grandfather presented the finished product to me the next day. I still have the box, and I keep reminders of memorable events from my life in it.

This was the kind of thing he always did. Everything was always so carefully planned and explained. My father tells me a story about how he once wrote some software that would help my grandfather make calculations. Instead of just taking the new tool and taking advantage of the new shortcut, my grandfather needed to have the software explained line by line. He had my father go through the code with him until he understood every single detail. He was never satisfied not understanding anything in his life, and he would never give up learning about something until he was completely comfortable with it.

The next year, we flew back to the northwest for Thanksgiving. I was all ready to work on another project, and could not wait to see what it would be. When we got to the house, however, my parents and grandparents told me and my sister that our grandfather was too old to work with his tools, and that he could not work on that kind of project anymore. Instead, we did other things while we spent time with our grandparents, but it could never be the same as working on that box. Shortly after that, my father started making regular trips to the northwest to help my grandparents move out of that great house and into a condominium, again because my grandfather was "too old" to have such a large house, and it was not safe for him to live there anymore.

What I could not understand at that point, and what my family was shielding me from for a little while longer, was the knowledge that my grandfather was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. This man, who had tested at the top of everything he had ever attempted, who recognized the importance of education and knowledge, was slowly losing his mind, his memory, and his very self.

Over the next few years, the disease progressed. Slowly but surely, the mind disappeared. My grandfather had to be put in a home, as he needed constant care and my grandmother could no longer provide it. My father, his oldest child, took me, his oldest grandchild, to visit him in the home one time. To get there, we took an elevator down to a secure floor. It was secure by needing a simple key code entered to operate the elevator, but it was far too complicated for anyone with Alzheimer's to operate. To this day I have trouble squaring the man who wanted the complex code behind the calculation software explained line by line with the man who could not operate a simple numeric keypad. When we got there, we sat with my grandfather in the cafeteria. We spoke a little, my father introducing us. My grandfather nodded, acknowledging us but not really aware of who we were. He was excited to see us, so much so that the staff had trouble making him eat, but even that was only a small consolation for seeing what was happening to him. It was so hard to see this man who could do anything, and who planned everything so carefully and to the tiniest detail, unable to feed himself or recognize his family.

While this was the hardest thing about my grandfather's condition for me to see, my father had a different perspective. To him, the hardest aspect was that my grandfather lost his own personal set of moral values. Being honest and acting morally was very important to him. When he came to the United States, my grandfather had the opportunity to change his last name to something more "American." He declined, saying he was the latest in a trans-generational series of honest men, and that he would honor their memory by keeping his name and passing it on to his own children and grandchildren. Always honest, always moral, always acting with integrity, my grandfather earned the respect of everyone he ever crossed paths with.

When he first found out the diagnosis, my grandfather decided that he would do anything he could to increase the general body of knowledge on Alzheimer's, and at the same time do everything he could to prolong both his life and his mind. To that end, he took part in drug studies, and did whatever he could to help future generations understand and possibly treat the disease. I do not know if his last conscious thoughts before his mind was too far gone were anger or sadness at his having this disease. I would like to think that he was sad to have it, but happy that he had so many years with his wife, that he had lived to see his children grow up and start their own families.

If we poured $100 billion into Alzheimer's and stem cell research today, we would not have a cure tomorrow. If we had done so six years ago, my grandfather would still not be alive today. The races for cures to all of these diseases, be they Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or any of the myriad of other diseases that stem cell research hold the possibility of cures for, are marathons, not sprints. The answers are not just around the corner, but it is far past time to be asking the questions. I do not understand how anyone who has seen a family member or friend descend into the depths that Alzheimer's subjects even the strongest minds would not want the research to go forward in any way shape or form.

I did not write this to make policy arguments or to call on our elected officials to pass legislation authorizing stem cell research. I wrote this to tell my grandfather's story. He fought the disease that afflicted him and took his mind with everything he had for as long as he could. By staying healthy and taking part in drug trials, he told me that he did not want to be an anonymous person that exists only on the winds whistling through the mountains of the northwest. Instead, he wanted to educate people and fight the disease. I can only hope that his story sparks the conversations that need to be had, and that he would have been proud of the way his story is presented to the world.