Another quality piece from the Economist on a law firm that is cleaning up corporate America (pun intended).

People wonder what such a strategy produces in good times. Martin Bienenstock, one of the co-heads of Weil's restructuring department, retorts that “the notion that our business goes up and down with the economy is cocktail-party myth.” Instead, he says, there are three main forces that determine the level of large corporate bankruptcy work: liquidity in the high-yield market; a big unexpected change (airline deregulation in the 1970s, deflation in the 1990s); and the volume of underwriting and acquisitions on Wall Street (inevitably producing bad deals that become exposed years later).

NYC readers that are around this weekend should put forth as much effort as possible to check out this event.

The Economist jumps on the articles about blogging bandwagon this week. A typical piece that questions if the major news source should or shouldn't blog.

For all the costly and failed efforts by media companies to create and charge for online material, blogging suggests that the web works best as a link to other people—and a way of finding and raiding their content. As InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds says, “the threat to big media is not to its pocketbook but to its self-importance.”

All posts via the laptop in the Burgh...

A culture war has been won by the entertainers according to Bill Bennet and the other crusaders against what they consider to be offensive music.

What's funny is that nobody seems to have told Eminem, or any of the other supposedly objectionable rappers and rockers, that the combat is over and they have triumphed. On "Show," Eminem anticipates all the turmoil he'll cause and all the fits he'll give assorted "haters." But as much as Em loves playing the oppressed underdog, that tag is now ridiculous. He's rich, he's popular, and nobody is complaining about him anymore.

"They've won," says Bennett. "They can't stand to have won, but it's over and they've won. They get to say and do anything and make billions and castigate us in the process."

Maybe it's all a brilliant bit of counter-strategy. Attacking music has never worked in the past. We're about to find out if ignoring it works any better.

Is Bill Simmons, "The Sports Guy", reading my blog? Today he writes...

Finally, every World Cup game involving the United States should have been preceded by a taped announcement from President Bush: "These are not our best athletes! Our best athletes play basketball, baseball and football. Again, these are not our best athletes. If we ever steered guys like Allen Iverson and Randy Moss toward a soccer field, you guys would be dead meat! Hear me? Dead meat!"

Like Whoa...Two record companies are found guilty of price fixing. Think about that the next time you go to purchase a cd.

Two music companies that joined forces to sell recordings of the opera stars known as the Three Tenors illegally fixed prices, an administrative law judge ruled.

The judge ordered subsidiaries of the French corporation Vivendi Universal to stop its anticompetitive practices. The other company, Warner Communications, a unit of AOL Time Warner, reached an accord with the Federal Trade Commission last year.

Goodbye to JC Watts, a man who did this country a service while he was in Congress.

Off to Pittsburgh tomorrow night and a Saturday wedding to boot. After Jason dropped two weeks ago, Joe follows in his footsteps (Joe was the easy money favorite to get married first way back in high school but he some how last the race) making two high schools friends done and done. In the spirt of this trip check out this article on 48 hours in Pittsburgh. Hopefully my 48 hrs will be much more hysterical than this article.

Chicagoans can be snobbish about architecture (even when we know nothing about it), but Pittsburgh won't turn up many noses. It's a wonderful looking city, though mixed in with the gems are a few ugly buildings (mostly new), as there are everywhere.

Dan Lewis, who runs a fantastic sports blog, links to an article by Jacob Sullivan that appeared in USA Today(one of my favorites) about the ridiculous ban on ephedrine by the NFL.

The professional alarmists at Public Citizen count "well over 100 deaths reported to the FDA (among) people using ephedra-containing products" since 1993. It's worth noting that a 2000 New England Journal of Medicine study found that fewer than a third of the "adverse events" supposedly caused by ephedra were "definitely or probably related" to use of the drug.

But let's accept Public Citizen's estimate for the sake of argument. It translates into something like 11 deaths a year. By contrast, in 1999 the federal government's Drug Abuse Warning Network counted 427 deaths involving acetaminophen and 104 involving aspirin. Now that it has addressed the threat posed by decongestants, perhaps the NFL should turn its attention to over-the-counter painkillers.

A great piece by ft.com on why companies that exist only to make profits fail.

Analysts at investment banks struggled to square this circle: they explained how the genius of men such as Ken Lay of Enron and Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom had changed the rules of the competitive game. Stalin's statisticians similarly recorded and applauded the heroic endeavours of individual Soviet workers such as Alexei Stakhanov, the apparently superhuman Siberian miner. They produced a rich tapestry of imaginary feats and bogus figures, like the shareholder value movement 50 years later.

Quote of the week from Atlas Shrugged from a debate on this blog...

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose - because it contains all the others - the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity - to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favour. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."

My good friend Paul Cella shares this view of when the American dominance of soccer will begin on his new and enlightening blog. This is something that I have heard repeated numerous times and as the NBA and the NFL shows, we have the most dominate athletes in the world and last time I checked. We also have the best sprinters in the world and last time I checked, no white person has run the 100 in under 10 seconds from any country. Here is another article that helps further Paul's cause and breaks down The Domination of Sport by Blacks by Jose Antonio, PhD and Chris Street, MS.

To quote Paul:
I risk transgressing political correctness in saying this, but the United States will be perennially successful, even dominant, in international soccer if and when American blacks get interested in it. All the innate qualities, both physical and intellectual, which tend to produce great black athletes in sports like basketball, football and track can be quite readily transferred to excellence in soccer.

To quote Jose and Chris -
Such a huge discrepancy, yet the most common (public) explanation for this phenomenon is that blacks are socialized to excel at these events. Really? You mean to say that out of a country of approximately 260 million, where blacks make up only 12% of the population, in which there are 5-6 times more whites than blacks, that there are no white guys who excel at these activities? Furthermore, you never see an Asian (American or otherwise) competing in the higher echelon of these sports. Nor do you see any Hispanics or Latinos in these events. Granted, socialization may explain, in part, the apparent dominance of blacks in football or basketball, but this explanation is sorely inadequate when it comes to running.

Besides, in a country with over 20% of the world's population, why can't China field a 100m sprinter to compete with black Americans who represent a paltry 0.6% of the world's population. Is there a white or Asian equivalent of Carl Lewis or Michael Johnson out there?

And we might as well quote OJ, the juice, on this subject also -
"We are built a little differently, built for speed—skinny calves, long legs, high asses are all characteristics of blacks. That's why blacks wear long socks. We have skinny calves, and short socks won't stay up. I'll argue with any doctor that physically we're geared to speed, and most sports have something to do with speed."

—OJ Simpson
Time Magazine, 1977

A great discussion on profits by Walter Williams.

"In free and open markets, profits are to be praised -- not scorned, as economic and political charlatans would have us do."