Little Brothers in Tibet Watching Every Move Big Brother in China Makes

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Ill be watching you - As if you don't know that's the Police

The flare up in Tibet is already worrisome and saddening, but the Dali Lama, despite the NYTimes strange insistence on hidden political motivation on his part and the similarly strange refusal to take his statements at fair value, seems to be doing his best to keep the peace and allow for some semblance of order in the way forward for Tibet, whatever way forward that might be.

But, reading these articles and seeing the sweeping crackdown by China, makes the stomach drop as you realize this could turn into a lot of violently vicious cycles in a hurry if the guns get going. We'll hit on this subject tonight on Happy Hour, btw, as it matters to all of us in a lot ways -- from the impact on relations with China, business with China, Olympics in China, etc, and mostly of course because it matters to all us as citizens of this world.

Please keep the reports and information coming, Little Brothers in Tibet who are watching every move Big Brother in China is making.

Run Fast, Dream Big

When I was 25 and working at Oppenheimer, my first job on Wall Street, I saw an article about a Reebok 4-minute mile challenge. That is, if you were an amateur athlete and could break a four-minute mile, Reebok would give you a million bucks. Or maybe it was $100,000, whatever.

I used to work out hours a day, every day and since I'd ended my streak of playing hoops every single day for more than a decade right before I'd moved to NYC the year before, I needed a new goal. So I started working on running a four minute mile. I was in the upper 5 minute range -- couldn't remember the last time I'd tried to run a mile for time.

A couple months later and the challenge was a week away...and I'd gotten my time down to about 4:30 or so. That last 30 seconds was gonna be tough.

I didn't make it. And I got a promotion about that same time and I haven't been quite the same obsessive athlete I used to be since.

The reason I bring all this up. How exciting is this kid's story? Imagine if he makes the Olympics out of the blue like this.

Even if he doesn't, you have to admire the kid for following his dreams.

Great Set of Wheels for Olympic Hopeful

By LYNN ZINSER

Sprinter Dallas Robinson, 6 feet 4 inches and 210 pounds, is turning heads with some of the world’s fastest times, despite his limited training and tremendous size.

Dream big, man, dream big.

Horsing Around HGH

Reading this article from the AP by Joseph White as part of my preparation for tonight's show...I found it interesting that National Thoroughbred Racing Association CEO Alexander Waldrop was brought in to testify to the same panel about steroid use among horses in horse racing as David Stern, Roger Goodell and Gene Upshaw, were to talk about steroid use in human sports.

The article talks about how hard it is to test athletes for HGH.

I assume they mean Human Growth Hormone. But as I just Googled "Horse Growth Hormone".  Are you surprised that it's out there?

And you just know there's a lot of use of that kind of HGH among racehorses. And undetectable.

Forget Clemens and McNamee. Let's subpoena Curlin and his trainers.

A circus is a circus, no?

Resentment, Anger, Fists and Bagel Dogs

August 1995 and I came back to the apartment I shared with my UNM basketball teammate, friend, all-WAC first teamer, Marlow White, because I'd forgotten my company cell phone, one of of those big black brick Motorola ones that were the first "handheld" back in the early 1990s. Across the sidewalk lived my teammate, friend, first round draft choice of the Miami Heat, Charles Smith, and a kid who'd sat out that year for something or another.

To be clear at the onset, I was resentful of all of them (not to mention my girl friend at the time who was on scholarship with volleyball team, if I'm to be perfectly honest with myself frankly) for being on scholarship and being from out of state but being able to live rent-free with a per diem on scholarship while I was working 50 hours a week saving up money for school and rent working at a civil engineering firm.

I'd come home as I was wont to do and had bagel dogs with Ranch Style beans, a banana and celery and watched bad talk show TV for lunch. Marlow was coming in to pick up some books or something as I headed out not realizing I'd forgotten that brick.

When I came back, it wasn't in the apartment. I was running very late to get back to the office now, and so I figured I'd just find it later. Ah, but as I headed back out the door, I saw through the glass doors across the sidewalk that our sat-year-out friend was chatting away on my company phone sitting on his lazy boy. He saw me as I stormed towards the door and he hung it up, waving with a hopeful grin on his face. I came in grabbed the brick from his hand and asked him what the hell he was thinking.

"Relax," he told me, cool as ice, given he had five inches and thirty pounds on me, "It's just your company phone. It don't cost you nothing. I just used it to call my aunt in Dallas."

Of course my company checked the records like a hawk given that the charge per minute for local calls were like 10 cents a minute and long distance was on top of that. I'd never made a long distance call on the thing. And told him all of this.

He got defensive and came back with a "don't whine" kind of comment.

I was really late for work at this point and turned to the door, saying, "Man, you'll never steal anything from me again. Seriously."

"Or what?"

I turned back, foolishly like a kid who's resentful and now angered by his team-mate who has that scholarship and guaranteed chance on the team and who just caused him some serious problems at work and is now talking trash, and said, "You'll never steal from me again. Seriously."

He lunged at me and slammed me to the ground, throwing punches to the side of my head with his left fist (he'd always been easy to cover because he so favored his left so). I used the force of the landing to free myself from him and jump back up. He tackled me again and as we both threw punches back and forth as we wrestled on that horribly stiff carpet as Marlow and Charles came back in and broke us up.

I changed shirts and headed straight into the office where they were waiting for me to pick up a package to take to a downtown client. That drive in was a trip -- the adrenaline was still flowing and things moving in slow motion as they do when you've been pushed to the fundamentals of violence like that. My boss, a pretty 30-something divorcee who was very nice but didn't like her job because she didn't have a clear career path, saw me as I tried to sneak in and grab the package and head right back out. She could clearly see that I'd been in a tumble of some sort, as my eye was scratched and puffy.

I told her what had happened, and of course she felt horrible for me and was very nice and even sent me home early with pay before the day was over.

Tensions ran pretty high around the duplex after that, as you can imagine. The summer ended just a couple weeks later and me and UNM Coach, Dave Bliss parted ways...which only increased my resentment of course. I still can't bring myself to watch college basketball. And when I look back at that fight, which I do believe is my last one, though I did get suckerpunched a year later in the gym getting stitches in the lip and everything, I wonder about this quote from Yoda:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

What is it I feared that day, that summer? Resentment and then theft leads to anger too. That doesn't sound quite wise enough for Yoda though, does it? And really, I have to say, there wasn't that much suffering out of that fight either, though neither of us looked or felt better.

And, yes, I lost the fight.

PS.  I feel rusty, writing.

EPSN MNF -- Can't Get Much Worse

I don't really know how to rant about how bad the commentary on ESPN's Monday Night Football was last night.  Did anybody else catch that interview with Steve McNair in which a good 90% of the questions were, "Well, back to Brett Favre, Steve, how do you think it must feel to [fill in blank here]."   

Here's an revelatory idea, Joe Theismann, et al:  Ask Brett about Brett and ask Steve about Steve and the Ravens!   

Sheesh, some heads need to roll at ESPN before they completely blow this MNF franchise to hell.

ESPN Blows It on MNF

I'm gonna write up a whole post about this in the Digital Revolution theme, but for now, let me just say that I watched a few minutes of last night's Pitt vs. Jacksonville game -- you know, the MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL for 2006 version -- and I'm just appalled at how badly ESPN has dropped the ball.  How hard could it be to find some announcers with some sort of clue and some sort of personality in the same vein as Madden and Summerall?  And really, more to the point, how hard could it possibly be to have hyped ESPN's Monday Night Football so that it could capture some of the relevance and momentum of ABC's long, long MNF program.   MNF on ESPN could have legitimized that network like nothing before it ever could.   Fire that producer and get out of the Revolution's way, ESPN.

Back to Boycotting College Sports

When I realized my dream of playing for a nationally-ranked NCAA basketball team, the University of New Mexico Lobos, I was quickly disillusioned and alienated by the evil-doings of my coach, the one and only now-infamous Dave Bliss.   From players who didn't have a pot to piss in suddenly driving brand new Eddie Bauer Ford Explorers to the way that somehow none of the scholarship players, including my poorest teammates, didn't have to work during the summer breaks, but still always had good spending money and clothes and what not to the time two of my teammates who were arrested for burglary or something were punished by having to sit out a meaningless game against someone like Hawaii, I didn't have to look hard or long for the stereotypes about college athletics.

How many of my team-mates graduated?  I'd guess less than 50%, but I wouldn't know for sure, because I essentially got kicked off the team -- and never looked back -- for calling it like I saw it when the Albuquerque Tribune did a feature story on me.  The jist of the story?  Well, the call out on the frong page sorta says it all, "The Dreaded Chant:   When Lobo fans start chanting for the walk-ons to get in the game, it's meant affectionately.  But for Lobo Cody Willard, the chant is the knife in the heart of a proud player who believes he can contribute."   My first high-profile "Flip It" perhaps?  (BTW, I searched on Google archives for this article, but I guess it's not added...yet.)

Anyway, the day I walked up the ramp at the Pit for the last time, I pretty much had decided that I'd be boycotting college athletics in the same way I boycott Woody Allen movies -- the dude married his ex-wife's daughter, a girl whom he helped raise for crying out loud, and I'm not okay with that -- because of my fundamental objections against the tyranny of the NCAA monopoly.   It's not okay that young kids are constantly exploited and lucky to get what is deemed illegal SUVs and clothes by the system that generates hundreds of billions of dollars for itself and its cronies and coaches and publicly-funded schools.

However, my dad and my uncle and my cousins sure do love college sports as most people in this country do (I remember sitting on the bench at UNM and watching the 25,000 wacky fans in the stadium scream horrible things at the refs and wondering how any one who's not actually on the team can possibly care so much as to be so cruel) and I got this forward from my uncle about the bounty that their alma mater (and where I'd paid half the fees to a half-dozen basketball camps as a kid with the money I made working full-time in my pop's animal hospital, contributing to the outsized revenues of the school's basketball program) is receiving from Nike.

Here I'd finally watched a part of a game or two since I caught Vince Young's amazing championship game performance last year, and then this article in the Sports Illustrated College Basketball Blog by Luke Winn reminded me of all that's wrong with the sport and why I'm going to have to put my boycott back on.

Bob Huggins arrived in Manhattan, Kan., in March, and shortly thereafter, big things began to follow. National media attention. A 7-foot-3 high school center from Florida, Jason Bennett. Controversy over wresting rivals.com's No. 1 recruit from the Class of 2007, Michael Beasley, away from Charlotte by hiring 49er assistant Dalonte Hill. But the biggest thing of all -- at least for Kansas State's athletic department -- came last week: a $12.3 million contract with Nike.

Nice bounty for the coach and the school.  How much do the kids who will be the ones constantly on TV wearing those swooshes get?  From the article...

If I'm Nike, I'm keeping a close eye on what happens the weekend of Sept. 23. That's when Beasley -- and a host of other big-time recruits -- will make official visits and get their first look at the K-State campus. Louisville will be in town to face the Wildcats in football, and Huggins and his staff will no doubt be pulling out all the stops.

Ooh, the recruits will be treated to a coach and a staff who will pull out all the stops!  That probably includes some great tours of the campus and some great food and parties.   Give the players on the team anything of value -- besides that education that's measured in value in tens of thousands of dollars (the school makes tens of millions of dollars a year on the basketball team, remember) -- and they get criminalized.   What a great system!

Oh, and if you're a school who wants to do something right by your student athletes?   You could always join one of those other collegiate associations, like the NAIA which has the same damn rules.   

I'm back to boycotting college sports -- because free trade and individual rights are important, and the NCAA oppresses free trade and individual rights.

Best Damn Rehash Ever

Tonight's question:  Who's dominated by group think more -- TV producers or hedge fund managers?

Don't these sports shows always drive you crazy with how conservative these guys always are with their picks.  Tonight I happened to flip to the Best Damn Sports Show Ever and for the first time damn time ever, I actually made it through more than like 30 seconds of the pointless banter since they were doing a Top 50 Best Finishes Countdown.   After they got to the top five, I could pretty much name each of what was going come up.

And #1?  Yeah, REAL shocker that "The Play" kickoff return from Cal v Stanford was.   Not that it's not an absolutely thrilling play, but come on.  It's not like there was some championship on the line or something.  If you're going to put a show together like this, how about shaking it up a little bit?   To copy the same list as every other greatest finishes ever is pretty much pointless.   

PS.  How bad are these "Who's #1" shows on ESPN Classic?  The concept is great, but those stupid jazzy raps are so cheesy it's insulting.  And the only footage they ever show is of interviewed people and photographs of whatever they're talking about.  Hey, producer -- you do realize we watch TV to see video footage?   Thank goodness the content revolution will put these incompetent producers out to pasture once and for all.  Too bad that's still years away.

Cody on RM: The Competition From Cash

The Competition From Cash 07/12/2006 9:26 AM EDT

I got ramblin', I got ramblin' all on my mind Hate to leave my baby, but you treats me so unkind -- Robert Johnson

Monday night I was at dinner with one of my partners. We were talking about his investments, his career and how he (and others) manages his overall portfolio.

Eventually we started talking about his investment in a bunch of high-yield trusts and high-yield preferred stocks that he'd put a bunch of money into a couple years ago, when he'd sold his apartment in New York City for a big gain. He'd grown increasingly leery of the real estate market and rents an apartment in the city now as he still has no interest in real estate.

Most of those high-yield assets are in energy-related vehicles, so we started talking about the blow-off top in commodities and how energy has hung pretty tough during this meltdown. He said he felt like he'd been lucky because he has 20% of his assets in these investments. I said, "Whoa, 20%! Nice job and all, but should you take something off the table?" He answered, "Yeah, I suppose I should, but dammit, Cody, it's hard to walk away from an average of about an 8% yield on these things."

And that's when it hit me, and I pointed out to both of us at once: Hey, you know what? Cash yields more than 5% in some places right now -- 5%!

Now, 5% ain't 8%. But cash is cash, man, and unless the fiat U.S. dollar and the society we've built on it collapse tomorrow, cash is as just about as safe an investment as you can have in this world right now. Those energy trusts and preferreds and other assets and whatnot that yield 8% are decidedly not cash. Every investment in any company comes with fraud risk, options-backdating risk, execution risk and all kinds of other risks.

So my friend turns to me and says, "Hmm, I think I'm going to sell some of that high-yield stuff and park it in some cash."

That is a real-life example of what it means when someone points out that the higher yields of cash are starting to compete for investment dollars. Indeed, my buddy's capital has flowed out of the system from which we finance growth and investment in this capitalistic society. It's now drawing 5% while sitting idle in cash.

In the last couple of years, depending on your starting point, while the yield on cash has been sprinting to 5%, the S&P 500 has been mostly rangebound and essentially flat, yielding capital appreciation and dividends of about 5% or a little more. You don't think investors look at the yield and safety of cash and wonder why they're dealing with all the stresses and risks in the market? They do.

Maybe it all will reverse and maybe the Fed will cut rates because the governors end up deciding they did take things too far after all. Maybe the market will take off in a huge rally, and the returns on stocks will suck everyone back in.

I do think the stock market is a much better place to be in the intermediate and long term than cash. But we can't analyze the attractiveness of stocks in a vacuum. Because there are indeed other asset classes competing for our money. And one of those is safe ol' cash and its 5% yield.

So, for right now I still prefer to be in cash, as I have been for the last couple months, during which time cash has yielded about 1% while the markets have, well, melted down.

The Cody News (June 2, 2006)

NASD Ends Case Against Quattrone

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN Published: June 2, 2006

Frank P. Quattrone, the most prominent banker in Silicon Valley during the 1990's technology boom, won a third major legal battle yesterday as securities industry regulators dropped all charges against him.

I couldn’t find there in the article just how many tens of millions of my tax dollars our fruitless government efforts at bringing criminals (whether that’s Quattrone or not I do not know but there was criminal misdeed done) to justice was wasted. Nothing irritates me more than these prosecutors who waste money and don’t get justice. As Andrew once asked me, and I now ask my assistants: “What business are we in?” (Andrew would tell you it’s the results business).

The Gauls at Home in Erin

By JOHN TAGLIABUE
Published: June 2, 2006

DUBLIN — This snug Irish capital might seem an unlikely destination for young French men and women. The weather would jar anyone from the Côte d'Azur. And the food is basically what the Michelin restaurant guide might consider a form of boiled stew.

Think Europe’s going to cause a World War III anytime soon with that kind of integration? Remind me again why we’re closing our borders to everybody?

Zaha Hadid: A Diva for the Digital Age

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: June 2, 2006

ZAHA HADID has never built anything in New York. But to her followers around the world, that hardly matters. You can admire Renzo Piano's exquisite detailing or Frank Gehry's turbulent forms, but Ms. Hadid is architecture's diva, the most precocious talent in her profession.

Looks cool. I’m goin’.

At Duke, Coach K Avoids a Trap

By HARVEY ARATON
Published: June 2, 2006

Typically a ubiquitous sermonizer on the choices young people make — from college to credit card to car — the Duke men's basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, has virtually gone underground since the charge made by an African-American woman that she was sexually assaulted by three white Duke lacrosse players while dancing at a team party March 13.

I happen to have a little bit different opinion of Mr. K and his reaming hundreds of student athletes for tens of millions of dollars to put into his own pocket. Why is it that Krzyzewski is the one making tens of millions of dollars in endorsements and salary while his students get some sort of BS education. Double entendre fully intended.

Which Bosses Really Care if Shares Rise?

By FLOYD NORRIS
Published: June 2, 2006
Investors should know how much the executive's wealth will rise if the stock goes up, and how much it will fall if the stock goes down.

We’re upset at CEO salaries, but not Krzyzewski's?