EdCone.com

Everybody hates NCNB.

So here we have the largest U.S. bank by assets, fresh off an $8.8 billion quarterly loss, which was its biggest ever. And the people in charge of running it have a monstrous credibility gap, largely of their own making. Once again, we’re all on the hook.

Bank accounting sounds boring, but it's really a creative endeavor:

As recently as late 2010, Bank of America still clung to the position that none of the $4.4 billion of goodwill from its 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial Corp. had lost a dollar of value.

There are crooks and gamers in the financial services industry, but it's clear that some of these guys really believed their own bullshit -- and Countrywide reeked long before B of A bought it.

...The character of Harry Potter is an obnoxious error in the Hermione Granger universe, made more obnoxious by his constant presence.

In praise of Joanne Rowling's series and its central character.

Every morning this month long lines of people have lined up for services with food, clothing, and financial assistance.  Emergency assistance funding aims to help families over a short term crisis, but unfortunately, many of the people coming to us are in long term crisis with no income.  For these people, the solution is to find a living wage job.  Such jobs are in very short supply.

From an Urban Ministry press release (full text after the jump).

For some reason I remembered the photo used to illustrate this ridiculous "Iceberg? What Iceberg?" article from 2008.

The rump majority of the City Council sat with stony faces last night as speaker after speaker implored them not to divide Greensboro by ramming through another attempt to reopen the White Street dump to municipal waste.

Then they voted to do it.

At this point, due diligence is barely paid lip service, and consensus building is not even a consideration. 

Wade and Rakestraw can at least claim to be representing their districts, although there's some chance Rakestraw may learn otherwise in November.

But Thompson and Knight were elected to serve the entire city, and it's abundantly clear that they are not doing any such thing.  

What a shame for Greensboro.

A new coalition of outdoors groups is emerging as a potent force in the debate over natural gas drilling. The Sportsmen Alliance for Marcellus Conservation isn't against the process of fracking for gas, but its members want to make sure the rush to cash in on the valuable resource doesn't damage streams, forests, and the various creatures that call those places home.

Conservationists were the first enivonmentalists, and the hook-and-bullet crowd is a logical constituency in this debate.

If HondaJet really wants less than $600K from GSO, and the jobs look good after we've kicked the tires, then we ought to just deliver a sack of small, non-sequential bills to the Ballinger Rd. HQ and be done with it.

99 Blocks covers the curb market story.

The traditional farmers deserve a lot of respect and serious assurances that they will remain a vital part of the market. One reason I like the Craft/Brummitt plan is because I believe they are sincere in honoring the farmers and continuing their central role into the future.

Companies are swimming in cash, but instead of hiring people they're still looking for efficiencies, which makes for a lively business technology market, which drives advertising in that sector, which means we are running flat out this summer.

Good for us, and good for our advertisers, but it's hard to say the Great Recession is truly over when unemployment remains so high (for a lot of people, but not everyone).

Rezoning approved for construction of an apartment building in McAdoo Heights. Probably good news in terms of neighborhood revitalization and also general signs of economic life.

Thnx to the Browntown newsletter for the info.

Hard questions for Thorp and Ross.

I couldn't see Butch Davis hanging onto his job based on what we knew last September, and we know more now than we did then.

Technology is smart but people are wise. Don't ever mistake the ability to uncover a cheap flight and select your own hotel room as a better way to do things. It's the illusion of progress. And as we delve deeper into technology and a self-service culture one has to wonder how often we're trading real expertise for the feeling that we're an expert.

True for more than travel agents.

A few people have mentioned the USAirways mag feature on GSO, thnx to TP for sending along the web version.

Professor Wharton was surprised when I pointed him to this entry at Metafilter -- the blog is essentially a folder of notes for a project he's working on, and he never expected it to draw any attention.

But it's an interesting topic, and, as usual, the Metafilter comments are worth reading.

The burden now falls on the shale industry to restore the public’s confidence. Rather than denying or bemoaning their woes, shale gas producers should be calling for firm but sensible oversight of their activities, both at the state and the federal level. Otherwise, public antagonism may put a big damper on the industry—an outcome that not only producers but also the broader public should want to avoid.

A measured view of fracking, and another.

UPDATE: More here, on a less-measured view of potential gas supplies. Thnx to reader TC for the pointer.

This house believes that the internet is making journalism better, not worse.

Jay Rosen and Nick Carr take up the debate.

Do schadenfreude, payback, and competitive advantage play into coverage of the News Corp. scandal?

Duh. But it's a very big and very real story, and it's still unfolding, so this sort of "deluded dishonest whining victimology" is not the way to address it.

I hate to say he's right, but he's right, although the ice cream and the atmosphere need to be added to the equation when evaluating Yum-Yum.

Lisa and I noticed this phenomenon many years ago, as we began to spend time in each other's hometowns and found ourselves un-wowed by some of the respective local faves.

Of course, some local legends deserve their acclaim -- you've just got to poke around. Which is one reason that I found this post so disappointing.

Not taking no for an answer.

I'd put the odds of her standing up and doing the clink-a-glass-for-silence thing at 35%, and the odds of a full-on Kanye at 25%.

I dropped off a small check at the Urban Ministry this morning for the food bank. I wish it could have been more.The lobby was full, and the need for assistance is high -- and, as I understand it, exacerbated at the privately-supported GUM by cuts in funding to other organizations across the county.

Greenville-Spartanburg is held up as a model for GSO's economic rejuvenation, and South Carolina's business-friendly climate gets its share of props, too.

How big a role has BMW played in the region's success, and how important were incentives to landing the car-maker and fueling its subsequent expansion?

I think the answer to both questions is, Very.

HondaJet isn't BMW, but we certainly need the kind of jobs it brings. If the deal looks like a good one, we should make it.

If you don't like soccer, or women's soccer, don't watch it.

Soccer hating is a staple of US sports media, but even for a lesser light of sports talk, this is pretty bad. Beyond the obvious sexism, it's wrong about the social status of female soccer players (based on my observations as the father of a rising HS senior), although it probably tells us something about Mariotti's own place in the high school pecking order. UPDATE: Deadspin says it was a hoax, not a real post by Mariotti, which is good for Mariotti but doesn't change the fact that these memes exist in sports media.

Weak story on the curb market in this morning's N&R. The deliberations and recommendations of the officially designated committee are pretty much ignored. Mary Rakestraw's scene-setting quote says she had hoped the RFP committee would settle things, but you wouldn't know from the article that the committee was fairly decisive in doing so (and you would have no clue that Rakestraw had attempted to pack the committee before public outcry led to a more open process, or how one-sided the in-fighting has been).

Snowball still rolling. UPDATE Sunday AM: And rolling. Sunday PM: And rolling.

Shafer's take: "Evidence that Murdoch is lying in the ad is inscribed in his parting salutation, 'Sincerely.'"

Meanwhile, the old-media gentleman's agreement on muted cross-coverage appears to be deader than old media.

I got a lot of value out of the Journal's traditional focus on business, and wasn't really looking for another general news outlet, so the Murdoch-era Journal is inherently less interesting to me than the old one.

Johnny n'est pas mort.

Précédemment.

City contracts, crime stats, and a cancer study, all in this week's report from the City Manager.

Interesting chart on this page that relates to the housing-as-piggy-bank discussion.

Does autocomplete make the world look crazy, or show that the world is crazy?

One of the first things I did upon joining Facebook was turn off chat, which I very much do not want as a default option.

Now, years later, chat's back and it won't go away. I turn it off but it doesn't stay off. FB help has not been helpful, and also reopened the chat window when I clicked through to look for a solution.

Urban Ministry needs food and money, now, to meet demand as the Great Recession rolls on. Please help if you can. I will.

Unfair lede in the N&R's print article on this topic (GPV, mercifully), comparing the Urban Ministry to a bank in need of a bailout.

Press release says the doggie statue stolen from the baseball stadium has been found, and media are invited to see it returned at 4PM today.

Any bets on what goes on the front page of tomorrow's N&R?

From the GPD: 

Acting on tips received through Crime Stoppers, Greensboro and High Point Police identified and located the person suspected of last weekend’s theft of the statue of the Grasshoppers’ bat dog, Miss Babe Ruth.

A warrant for arrest has been issued for Andrew Seth Carawan, 25, of 5906 Tall Pine Court, charging him with felony larceny, injury to real property, and felony possession of stolen goods.

“Our primary emphasis was to find the person responsible for this crime, and hold him accountable,” said Lt. J.T. Cranford of the Central Division. “Our other goal was to recover Miss Babe Ruth and return her to the Grasshoppers in as good a shape as possible.” Officers key in the recovery of Miss Babe Ruth were Greensboro’s M. C. Vuncannon and J. L. Cayton, and High Point’s Master Police Officer 3 T.J. Bartley.

I am reminded of a lifesize plaster horse that stood, many years ago, on US 70 between GSO and Burlington, and which was found one morning on the diving board at the Greensboro Country Club. I believe the horse was returned and that it resumed its roadside vigil.

It’s a Republican gerrymander, pure and simple.

I don’t throw the term “gerrymander” around loosely. To me, it has a specific meaning when evaluating the effects of electoral districts on electoral outcomes. If a map makes it likely there will be a significant gap between the number of votes won by a given political party and the number of seats it captures, that’s a partisan gerrymander.

+1 for the Tars Tarkas shout-out.

And locally, we get Skip's Mystery Map.

Broken system.

Is GSO architecture boring?

That wasn't always the case.

Brick is part of the vernacular of the red clay belt, it's how you use it that matters.

Our Bastille Day tradition, since 2003: A few kind words about the French.

A little GSO architectural history, courtesy of Jim Schlosser.

Full disclosure: Dick Levy is my step-second-cousin-once-removed-in-law.

Widespread dismay at TNR's economic illiteracy, including a comment from UNCG's own Andy Brod at the site: "All Galston's done is revealed that he embraces the Keynesian explanation but hates that yucky K-word."

This article in Grantland was confusing. 

A post at a sports site about Jennifer Aniston and her tortured self-esteem might seem confusing in itself, but Grantland reflects its founding editor's pop-culture obsession, and I guess this is a feint at female readers, although with a story about an actress who also appeals to male readers.

That last part is where the confusion starts.

The article argues, in order, that Aniston is not as beautiful as Angelina Jolie, but then again she is hot enough to carry a major magazine spread built around her sexiness, and that she's really more like Barbra Streisand (what the French call jolie laide), and for that matter so is the more beautiful Angelina Jolie, and then there's a paragraph about allegedly-haggy Sarah Jessica Parker and "ugly" actresses, which seems to imply that Jennifer Aniston is not a traditionally attractive woman, and then a paragraph claiming that "Jennifer Aniston gets a kind of public mockery and extreme level of hatred that other less talented, more beautiful actresses don't get. Aniston gets the loud public hatred of people who care inappropriately much about the superficial beauty of talented-at-their-craft actressses," which implies that she is both not so beautiful and beautiful, and then we are told that she's got a shot at being "beautiful into old age." (Also: is there really so much hatred for this woman?)

The point here is not to instigate a hot-or-not debate about Jennifer Aniston, but to point out that an assumption of her conformity to cultural norms of beauty has been a cornerstone of her career, and also to say, WTF, Grantland.

Seems like a case for Deadspin.

Grantland overall, so far: meh. Sometimes fun, often precious and self-satisfied, and please, limit the sidenotes. Early yet, though.

Some thoughts on newspapers and Facebook. The experience of the Bay Area papers was not that surprising, based on what I've seen here.

Thanks to Grant, who provided the link in response to yesterday's post about the Winston-Salem Journal turning to FB for comments.

I guess the real powers that be have explained to their pet politicians that a US government default is not an acceptable option.

Wall Street's house organ is trying to offer the GOP some cover: "The President would get his debt-limit increase, but without Republicans serving as his political wingmen."

It's hard to imagine that anyone outside of DC will buy the convoluted voting game as anything but a roll-over by the Republicans, but as long as the honorables can convince themselves -- and these are people who convince themselves that spray-tans and comb-overs look good -- a deal could get done.

Meanwhile, in the real world, if you want nice things, you have to pay for them. A generation of pretending otherwise is coming to an end. Now we need to agree on which things are nice enough to keep funding. 

Blogging a tweet about Google+.

The Dvorak column is actually worth reading.

Comments at the Winston-Salem Journal now go through Facebook.

"Why? Because we believe it will improve the dialogue and greatly reduce anonymous ugliness online."

A meeting to discuss fracking, including issues around leasing property, July 19, 6:30-8:30 PM, Agriculture Building, Pittsboro.

New York is taking a cautious approach to fracking, although not cautious enough for some opponents; a study shows possible environmental damage from fracking byproducts.

What the Marines have learned since the 2006 counterinsurgency manual came out:

[T]he most effective counterinsurgencies have succeeded through a third way of counterinsurgency, which combines enemy-centric and population-centric methods in recognition that the enemy and population are both critical and are often inter-related.

Alert reader J: "I've had a vacation stop on the N&R for weeks, even though we were only out of town a few days. Got a chance to see the front page today...JR is going to have to change the name of the paper to Doggie Style...Not hurrying to end the vacation stop."

I know it's summertime, and that people like dogs, and I'm friends with the lost dog in question, but really, people use this new internet thing to communicate with each other?

Do tell. Or, better, don't, at least not on A-1.

Binker, meanwhile, beats the dead horse behind that absurd Hagan story.

Super-PACs must disclose their donors. But because of time lags in reporting, months can go by before the identities of million-dollar donors are revealed; some weren’t disclosed until after the 2010 midterm elections. Loopholes can also allow donors to stay hidden, such as when money comes from a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose how it’s funded.

Last month, the campaign-finance watchdog group Center for Responsive Politics found five Super-PACs that attributed a vast majority—and in some cases all—of their funding to affiliated nonprofits that are not required to reveal donors.

Signposts on the road to oligarchy.

Here's an answer to the question I posted the other day about spending financed with home equity:

During the last expansion from 2003 to 2007, according to an analysis by Fed economists, American homeowners took $2.3 trillion in equity out of their homes through cash-out refinancing and home-equity loans, and they spent about $1.3 trillion of it on cars, boats, vacations, flat-screen televisions and shoes for the kids.

...Since 2007, instead of taking $2 trillion out of their house, homeowners have put $1.3 trillion into them.

You think that might be having an impact on consumer spending?

Back in 2009, before he gained his new title, N.C. House Majority Leader Paul Stam was a primary sponsor of House Bill 252, which would have created an independent redistricting commission. Now-Speaker Thom Tillis was a co-sponsor. Sen. Phil Berger, then the minority leader, now the Senate's leader, was a sponsor of the Senate version.

That was then, this is now.

Guilford County gets screwed, hard...and the hits keep on coming:

[T]he Alston plan features bizarrely drawn lines that cobble together disparate geographic areas. The lines appear to be drawn for the purpose of ensuring that incumbents win and creating five seats that heavily favor Democratic candidates. In contrast, the more compact maps proposed by the county GOP, have four seats that are favorable to Democrats and four favorable to Republicans. Alston said last week that he received help for his map from a group of "trusted advisors" whose identity, he said, was "confidential."

The Greeks know they are being lent money just so they can work very hard for lower wages and higher taxes in order to pay it back at great cost. This arrangement is in place because of the second thing the Indignati know well, the fact that the outstanding Greek debt is mainly owned by French and German banks. This is why the Western European governments are especially keen on the ‘bailout’: it’s helping to keep their banks solvent. The Indignati do not find that a compelling reason to embrace a decade or so of abject misery. They want the Greek government to default, and the banks to accept losses for loans they shouldn’t have made in the first place.

Three years into the global project to save the bankers from themselves, and counting.

This isn't very encouraging, either.

John Hart's new book, Iron House, brings a new level of action to his storytelling while working some of the same territory, emotional and geographic, that won him a pair of Edgars. Damaged people with lots of secrets look for answers and redemption as they move across the North Carolina landscape, this time with guns blazing. My favorite by Hart since The King of Lies.

N&R front-pages the greenageddon story.

One commenter at the paper's site complains that this isn't real news, but golf is big business around here, and a lot of people take it seriously.

Certainly it's realer news than the front-paged twaddle in yesterday's edition about Kay Hagan replacing Joe Biden as Obama's 2012 VP, which was sourced to a single blogger, who provided zero evidence for the claim beyond, um, North Carolina will be important in the presidential race, and Kay's alleged awesomeness in beating the ripe-for-defeat Liddy Dole. Works as a one-paragraph brief, embarrassing on A-1.

Anyway, the pain in the local club and golf economy would be a worthwhile article in itself. Start with Starmount's member-poaching policy, look at the fortunes of Forest Oaks, examine the local impact of the McConnell empire, and chase down the story of the missing hole at Greensboro National...

Greensboro native Sar Medoff, now in medical school, writes from Ethiopia, "should we test for a disease/condition that we can't treat?"