I’ve Been Thinking….

At business breakfasts, why do hotels put out huge bread baskets of rolls and buns when no one in a suit will touch them at that hour in the morning?

What do they do with the untouched food, I wonder.

How does the German government get away with holding onto art stolen by Nazis by saying that all the heirs of the original owners were killed? Sounds like the old joke about the kid who killed his parents and then pleads for mercy as an orphan.

And lawyers know that there are almost always heirs at law; there are companies whose business it is to track them down. Why doesn’t Germany hire search firms and turn over every stone in a bona fide search? And if they cannot find heirs, turn the art over to anyone other than a German institution?

Do you share the secret and embarrassing rush of pride when you see Secretary of State John Kerry, who is well over six feet tall, looking down to shake hands with every uniformly shorter diplomat from another country with whom he is meeting?

Even if we cannot get our foreign policy right, at least we can slam dunk better than those other guys.

Do you find it troubling that a major argument to absolve the Patriots and Tom Brady from guilt is that everyone in the NFL cheats? Did you mother ever tell you that two wrongs don’t make a right? Or thirty-two wrongs?

And if everyone cheats, why is the NFL such an American icon making incredible sums of money? Where is A-Rod when truth needs a champion….

Speaking of sports, I want my $99 back, the fee for watching the non-fight between Mayweather and that short guy whose last name I refuse to try to spell. That Manny guy lied to us, and thinks he is walking away with more money for that evening than I will make in my lifetime.

Ever notice that, in our society, if you do something bad (even a wilful and venal wrong), and then cover it up (a normal human reaction), you get punished more for the cover-up than the thing? Think Martha Stewart, the SEC, the DOJ enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the comments from the NFL that Brady didn’t produce his emails.

If not producing emails helps get you a four game suspension as a Pats quarterback, what do you do with Hillary Clinton?

Of course, she is running for a job with a good deal less power than quarterback as things sit on the Hill, so perhaps she should get a skate….

And speaking of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, did you see the recent Economist screed claiming that huge fines are absurd in most cases because companies must spend such enormously high amounts just investigating their own wrongdoing in numerous foreign lands that piling on more expense is unfair?

Of course, all those expenses fall on the company anyway and thus upon the shareholders, and not on the executives who committed the wrongs or failed to supervise and prevent them. THAT’S unfair.

Do you still wonder why the official title of this blog site is “Law and Other Anomalies”?

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