Wake Forest QB Riley Skinner has made a name for himself as a player who’s cool under pressure. Well, next season ought to really test his composure because there’s allegedly a picture of him in the buff that’s made its way down the tubes of the internet. Thankfully someone put a fig leaf over L’il Riley in the pictures I’ve seen online, but I have no doubt that if there’s a version sans-leaf it will appear soon. Links below to the site carrying the pic. First here’s an excerpt from Chris’s Sports Blog:
The blog With Leather somehow
accrued, um, in-the-buff pictures of Wake Forest QB Riley Skinner and
posted one on their site today. Allegedly, these pictures of Skinner
posing au natural for the camera have been making the rounds on the
Winston-Salem campus. I’m not sure I believe the given explanation for
why these pics are out (Skinner sells them to people) but, regardless,
they do exist. This is good news for students at Maryland, N.C. State,
Florida State and Miami, who will all have the pleasure of heckling
Skinner next season when the Deacs travel to their schools for games…
Update:
CV writes that there had been rumors about this floating around for
days. According to his Wake interns, Skinner sent this photo to a
sorority listserv last week and "it spread like wildfire". I don’t know
what’s more surprising: That anyone would send a naked picture of
themselves to a listserv and not expect it to get out or that CV has
interns.
Link to the With Leather post and picture (warning: language might not be safe for work or kids, although all the kids I know curse more than a drunken sailor).
It ought to be entertaining to see what the kids at Duke do with this. I don’t think Wake plays at Duke this year, but maybe in 09.
Thanks to Esbee for the tip, so-to-speak.
I came across the ad you see to the left on Boing Boing. Gotta love the copywriting: "Has his old man been hitting the coffee again? Nervous father…boyish prank…flaring temper–and BANG! That’s a sequence that happens too often — when a parent is tense, on edge…" Of course Sanka was the answer!
All I can say is real men don’t drink de-caf. My emotionally disturbed children are proof of that.
Well I guess we can call the tanking of the US mortgage and real estate industries a real problem now that 60 Minutes has done a story about it. One part of the story features an interview with a family who signed on the dotted line for an adjustable rate mortgage without consulting an attorney. The reporter, Steve Kroft, asks them why they didn’t view this as a big, risky investment and get professional advice and the reply from the husband was that he was just looking at it as a way to get his family out of an undesirable neighborhood into a good neighborhood. His wife pointed out that they’d told the lending agent they were dealing with that they could only afford a certain amount per month (around $2,400) and the agent went ahead and sold them the ARM anyway. Now they’re trying mightily to keep up but since their house is now worth less than they paid which means there’s about 0% chance to refinance and their monthly payments are more than they can swing they’re in deep doo-doo.
The response that many people often have to stories like this, including myself, is caveat emptor…buyer beware. The problem with this attitude is that modern American society is a very complex place to live, and although real estate is regulated to a certain degree there is still plenty of room for people to unwittingly get screwed. You need look no further than the other end of the mortgage industry to see how the market is almost incomprehensible to even the most sophisticated minds. According to this article in the New York Times the chief executive of credit rating agency Moody’s said that "his agency had made significant mistakes in the rating of structured
finance products, but added that the agency had been deceived by people
who put together the products." Here’s an excerpt:
“In hindsight, it is pretty clear that there was a failure in some
key assumptions that were supporting our analytics and our models,” the
executive, Raymond W. McDaniel Jr., told a panel at the World Economic Forum, where he heard complaints about conflicts of interest and suggestions that large fees had influenced the ratings.He
said that one reason for the failure was that the “information quality”
given to Moody’s, “both the completeness and veracity, was
deteriorating” as the subprime mortgage market grew.In a brief interview later, Mr. McDaniel did not provide any specifics about who had misled the rating agency.
Rating
agencies are paid by the companies they rate, a fact that has been
harshly criticized here and elsewhere. “The issue is the reliability of
the system that generates the ratings,” Jacob A. Frenkel, a former
central banker who is now vice chairman of the American International Group,
said in an interview Friday. If investors are to rely on the ratings
agencies, he said, they “must be compensated by investors.”
My point is that the problem with caveat emptor is that if we rely solely on that kind of "every man for himself" mentality then the free market is much less free. Look at it this way; while many people in the mortgage industry were enriched in the short term many, many more people have been harmed. Thousands of people have lost their jobs, companies have gone out of business and literally millions of homes are going into foreclosure which means that just as many families have lost their piece of the American dream. Who knows how long it will take these industries to recover, and how long it will be before many of these families will be able to buy their own homes.
As with most modern American stories this one has lots of gray areas. In another part of the 60 Minutes story Kroft interviews a young couple who say that they’ve been advised to just walk away from their house and let their credit take the hit now that their monthly mortgage payments are moving up and the value of their house is plummeting. The couple readily admits that they knew exactly what they were doing when they signed on for their ARM. The woman says something like "How does it make any sense to pay $3,200 a month for a 3-bedroom house?" to which Kroft replies with something like "Well you agreed to the terms of the contract." The couple doesn’t want to take the hit to their credit, but they just don’t see the value in overpaying for their house and they don’t think they can refinance now that the house is worth less than the note. Basically these folks gambled and lost, much like the mortgage companies and financiers who created the vehicles that enabled this behavior. Still, basic ethics say that if these folks knowingly took this gamble and can still afford the payments on their house they should pay it.
The thrust of Kroft’s story is that this is essentially a case of good old fashioned greed on all sides of the equation. Really that’s overly simple. I’m sure that there are many people who sold these mortgages that truly felt they were enabling the American dream, and that if things got tight for the borrowers they could always re-finance. I’m also sure that many people took the ARMs because they wanted a better life for themselves and their children and thought that if worse came to worse they could re-finance. Of course there were also lenders who didn’t care about the American dream and just wanted the commission on the sales, no matter who they hurt to get it and there were borrowers who saw a way to game the system and did it.
The result we have to deal with, beyond the short term financial pain we’re currently grappling with, is that there is very little trust left. Investors and borrowers no longer trust the financiers, which means that there’s now sand in the gears of our markets. Without trust on all sides of the equation we’ll have an adversarial marketplace that will inhibit its growth, and that’s bad for everyone. I know that support of government regulation is antithetical for most in the business community, but the reality is that government regulation can enable markets by giving all of the players a sense that they are playing on an even field. Sure there is such a thing as over regulation, but there’s also such a thing as under regulation and we’re seeing the results now. Let’s hope our esteemed leaders find a healthy balance in the near future.
Driving to a lunch meeting today I tuned the car radio to the local public radio station and one of the topics being covered was the upcoming Democratic primary in South Carolina. The show’s host was interviewing an editor of a South Carolina newspaper about poll results showing Obama was ahead of Clinton in the polls, and how Obama was surprisingly popular with women, but that what really showed through was that Obama was popular with young men and women. In other words he owns the young voters. Blah, blah, blah.
What really caught my attention and almost caused me to run off the road was when the host asked about John Edwards. The editor said that Edwards was popular with issues-oriented Democrats, but that not enough of those existed to help him win. Further, he said that the average Democratic voter was more focused on candidates’ images (morals?) than on their stances on specific issues. So even though Edwards was the first candidate to offer any substantive proposals for things like health care reform it wouldn’t do him any good in getting elected.
Sadly I think the editor was right. Average Americans just don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about issues outside their immediate daily lives. It’s not that we’re all stupid it’s just that most of this stuff is boring and we have so much going on in our lives that if we’re given the choice between watching American Idol while sucking down a couple of adult beverages or trying to wrap our brains around some big-picture economic policy I think most of us opt for killing brain cells.
On the other hand maybe more of us would pay attention to these big issues if they were actually communicated to us in ways that are digestible. Perhaps someone could put together a scorecard that says something like, "On health care Obama believes this, Clinton believes that, Edwards this; on raising the minimum wage Obama says this, Clinton that and Edwards this, etc." But no, what we get from our esteemed Fourth Estate is akin to what the sports pages give us in the run up to the Kentucky Derby. "Clinton looks good because exit polls in Vermont showed that left handed feminists with moles on their left buttocks liked her so she ought to do well in parts of Florida." Sounds a lot like "The filly Absurd is going off at 2-1 based on her last run at Aqueduct which has a similar track to the one in tomorrow’s race" doesn’t it?
I’m not the only one who thinks the press has botched their political coverage. Matt Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone:
This 2008 presidential race looked interesting once, a
thrillingly up-for-grabs affair in which real issues and real
ground-up voter anger threatened to wrest control of America’s
politics from the Washington Brahmins who usually puppeteer this
process from afar. And while the end result in Iowa — a
historic and inspirational Obama victory, coupled with a
hilariously satisfying behind-the-woodshed third-place ass-whipping
for status quo gorgon Hillary Clinton — was compelling, the
media has done its best to turn a once-promising race into an
idiotic exchange of Nerf-insults, delivered at rah-rah campaign
events utterly indistinguishable from scholastic pep rallies. "If
there’s policy in this race," one veteran campaign reporter tells
me with a sad laugh, "I haven’t noticed it."And while it’s tempting to blame the candidates, deep in my
black journalist’s heart I know it isn’t all their fault.We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race,
and we turned it into a bag of shit, just in the nick of time.
Actually I think Taibbi should include we average Americans in the blame game. If we demanded better coverage of the issues from our media, if we rewarded smart stories about the issues with our attention then maybe the media would deliver it. Sure we’re all tired after a long days work and yes it’s easier to mindlessly watch crap like American Idol, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t tune in for a half hour of informative television about something that will affect us for the next four years or more.
But it’s a kind of chicken and egg thing isn’t it? You could argue that the reason we aren’t more engaged is because the best the media can offer us is Tim Russert and company, or you could argue that the media would give us more informative programming if we’d show that we’d consume it. Whatever.
Actually we might already have a solution (or two) at our fingertips: Comedy Central. With its "news parodies" The Daily Show and The Colbert Report the network that gave us South Park is also giving us the only television that comes close to covering the issues. By skewering the blowhards on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC and taking the self-centered politicians to the woodshed on a regular basis these shows unwittingly educate us in the process. So I guess my little rant here is really worthless. Just listen to the other Jon and we’ll be OK, because if you don’t we might just end up with another Bush.
Here’s a little Daily Show sample to enjoy over the weekend:
Esbee had what she thought was a rabid raccoon in the lot behind her back yard. Several calls to Animal Control went unanswered and then when she called the police non-emergency line they were able to get hold of Animal Control and have them call her. Long story short they got someone out there to inspect about 3 1/2 hours after the incident and left her wondering if there’s a better way. I suggested a shotgun, which would shock anyone who knows me and really was a joke, but it left me wondering: if you think an animal on or near your property is rabid or is an imminent danger to you, your kids or your goldfish are you within your rights to shoot it? The rabid animal, not the goldfish. Could you be arrested for setting off a firearm within city limits? I’m sure it depends on the laws in each municipality, but just as a concept is it generally okay to shoot an animal that you think is a threat?
Befuddled 