JACKASS JOE WILSON

So, here we have, the new spokesperson for the stupid, Jackass Joe Wilson - the new hero for Americans with a median IQ of 80.

He haills from the state of SC, that is,

Stupid Carolina, which also gave us Govenor (I'm out hiking) Sanford.

Is Stupid Carolina a magnet for retards in America? Perhaps Stupid Carolina is the only state that Goobers have left.

Look at this guy, he is fourth generation KKK, mad that intelligent people are leaving racism behind. After all, a racist society is the only way Jackasses and Goobers know how to live. They are lost in a free, intelligent and just world.

They miss the "good ol' days" when any Goober like Jackass Joe Wilson could rise to prominence and still behave like a Jackass.

It is scary that I used to have to drive through Stupid Carolina on the way to Florida.

Now I understand the concept of "flyover states"

TextTards

Texting May Be Taking a Toll

or, no kidding? another sub group of the RETARD DISORDER, this one, TEXTING
or TextTard

By KATIE HAFNER
They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.
Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.
Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.
“That’s one every few minutes,” he said. “Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night. That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”
The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.
“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”
Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”
As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.
“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”
Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm.
“Texting can be an enormous tool,” he said. “It offers companionship and the promise of connectedness. At the same time, texting can make a youngster feel frightened and overly exposed.”
Texting may also be taking a toll on teenagers’ thumbs. Annie Wagner, 15, a ninth-grade honor student in Bethesda, Md., used to text on her tiny LG phone as fast as she typed on a regular keyboard. A few months ago, she noticed a painful cramping in her thumbs. (Lately, she has been using the iPhone she got for her 15th birthday, and she says texting is slower and less painful.)
Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said it was too early to tell whether this kind of stress is damaging. But he added,
“Based on our experiences with computer users, we know intensive repetitive use of the upper extremities can lead to musculoskeletal disorders, so we have some reason to be concerned that too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs.”
Annie said that although her school, like most, forbids cellphone use in class, with the LG phone she could text by putting it under her coat or desk.
Her classmate Ari Kapner said, “You pretend you’re getting something out of your backpack.”
Teachers are often oblivious. “It’s a huge issue, and it’s rampant,” said Deborah Yager, a high school chemistry teacher in Castro Valley, Calif. Ms. Yager recently gave an anonymous survey to 50 of her students; most said they texted during class.
“I can’t tell when it’s happening, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said. “And I’m not going to take the time every day to try to police it.”
Dr. Joffe says parents tend to be far less aware of texting than of, say, video game playing or general computer use, and the unlimited plans often mean that parents stop paying attention to billing details. “I talk to parents in the office now,” he said. “I’m quizzing them, and no one is thinking about this.”
Still, some parents are starting to take measures. Greg Hardesty, a reporter in Lake Forest, Calif., said that late last year his 13-year-old daughter, Reina, racked up 14,528 texts in one month. She would keep the phone on after going to bed, switching it to vibrate and waiting for it to light up and signal an incoming message.
Mr. Hardesty wrote a column about Reina’s texting in his newspaper, The Orange County Register, and in the flurry of attention that followed, her volume soared to about 24,000 messages. Finally, when her grades fell precipitously, her parents confiscated the phone.
Reina’s grades have since improved, and the phone is back in her hands, but her text messages are limited to 5,000 per month — and none between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on weekdays.
Yet she said there was an element of hypocrisy in all this: her mother, too, is hooked on the cellphone she carries in her purse.
“She should understand a little better, because she’s always on her iPhone,” Reina said. “But she’s all like, ‘Oh well, I don’t want you texting.’ ” (Her mother, Manako Ihaya, said she saw Reina’s point.) Professor Turkle can sympathize. “Teens feel they are being punished for behavior in which their parents indulge,” she said. And in what she calls a poignant twist, teenagers still need their parents’ undivided attention.
“Even though they text 3,500 messages a week, when they walk out of their ballet lesson, they’re upset to see their dad in the car on the BlackBerry,” she said. “The fantasy of every adolescent is that the parent is there, waiting, expectant, completely there for them.”

or duh, I wonder why my kid is such a retard, after all, they take after me!

Fuck Twitter

I would like to enter the Great Twitter Debate of 2009 and state:
FUCK TWITTER!

While I am at it,
FUCK FACE BOOK
as well

Guess what> I am a live human being and I actually communicate with other humans live and in person using something called SPEECH
with all it's nuances and creative styles

I don't punch keys like a monkey and think I am actually doing something NOTEWORTHY
like TWITTER-ASSHOLES or TWITTERHOLES for short.

see ya later, I'm going out to lunch with HUMANS and we are going to TALK
the rest of you TwitterHoles can eat lunch at your desk and twitter each other "I am eating a hamburger" like a LOSER

Why Fat Fucks are Stupid Fat Fucks

new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/health/research/01risk.html

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: April 1, 2008
People with a large pot belly in midlife are at increased risk for dementia in their later years, according to a new study, and the bigger the belly the higher the risk.

People should be concerned not only about weight, but about where they carry it,” said Rachel A. Whitmer, the study’s lead author and a research scientist at the research division of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif. “And midlife is not too early to start thinking about it.”
It is well known that fat around the waist, even in people who are not overweight, is a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes, but this is the first finding of an association with dementia.
The study, which appeared online last week in Neurology, measured the sagittal abdominal diameter, or S.A.D. (in laymen’s terms, how far the pot belly sticks out), of 6,583 men and women in their 40s from 1964 to 1973, then looked at their records an average of 36 years later, when they found 1,049 dementia cases.
Compared with those in the lowest one-fifth in S.A.D., those in the highest one-fifth were almost three times as likely to have dementia. Even among people of normal weight, those with an S.A.D. above 9.8 inches — which corresponds roughly to a 40-inch waist — were almost twice as likely to be demented as those with the smallest bellies. The association held after controlling for high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and other variables.

HOPEFULLY MICHAEL VICK WILL BE MURDERED IN PRISON

HERE IS WHY....

Given Reprieve, N.F.L. Star’s Dogs Find Kindness
Garrett Davis for The New York Times
By JULIET MACUR
Published: February 2, 2008
KANAB, Utah — A quick survey of Georgia, a caramel-colored pit bull mix with cropped ears and soulful brown eyes, offers a road map to a difficult life. Her tongue juts from the left side of her mouth because her jaw, once broken, healed at an awkward angle. Her tail zigzags.

Garrett Davis for The New York Times
McKenzie Garcia, a caregiver at the Best Friends sanctuary, with Squeaker.
Scars from puncture wounds on her face, legs and torso reveal that she was a fighter. Her misshapen, dangling teats show that she might have been such a successful, vicious competitor that she was forcibly bred, her new handlers suspect, again and again.
But there is one haunting sign that Georgia might have endured the most abuse of any of the 47 surviving pit bulls seized last April from the property of the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback AND DOG MURDERING MONSTER Michael Vick in connection with an illegal dogfighting ring.
Georgia has no teeth. All 42 of them were pried from her mouth, most likely to make certain she could not harm male dogs during forced breeding.
Her caregivers here at the Best Friends Animal Society sanctuary, the new home for 22 of THE MONSTER Mr. Vick’s former dogs, are less concerned with her physical wounds than her emotional ones. They wonder why she barks incessantly at her doghouse and what makes her roll her toys so obsessively that her nose is rubbed raw.
“I’m worried most about Georgia,” said the Best Friends veterinarian Dr. Frank McMillan, an expert on the emotional health of animals, who edited the textbook “Mental Health and Well-Being in Animals.” “You don’t have the luxury of asking her, or any of these animals: ‘What happened to you in your past life? How can we stop you from hurting?’
“So here we are left with figuring out how to bring joy to her life,” he said of Georgia, known to lick the face of anyone who comes near. “We want to offset the unpleasant memories that dwell in her brain.”
THE MONSTER Mr. Vick, once the highest-paid player in the N.F.L., is serving a 23-month sentence in a federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., for bankrolling his Bad Newz Kennels dogfighting operation and helping execute dogs that were not good fighters. Dogs were electrocuted, hanged, drowned, shot or slammed to the ground, according to court records. Two mass graves with the remains of eight pit bulls were found on Mr. Vick’s property in rural Virginia. HOPEFULLY, MR. VICK WILL BE MURDERED WHILE IN PRISON.
Pit bulls seized from illegal fighting operations are usually euthanized after becoming property of the government. The Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recommended that Mr. Vick’s dogs be euthanized, but many animal rescue organizations urged the prosecutors to let the dogs live.
The government agreed to give them a second chance after Mr. Vick agreed to pay $928,073 for evaluation and care of all the dogs. They were seen by animal experts, who named the dogs, and were eventually dispersed to eight rescue organizations for adoption, rehabilitation or lifetime care in sanctuaries, where they have been neutered. Only one of the Vick dogs was euthanized for aggression against people.
Best Friends, which is caring for more dogs than any other organization, received about $389,000. Many of their dogs are expected to be adopted after they are rehabilitated and matched with the right families. THE MONSTER Vick’s 25 other dogs are in foster care all over the country.
“This is a great opportunity to highlight the fact that the victims in the case are the animals themselves,” said Rebecca J. Huss, a Valparaiso University law professor, animal law expert and court-appointed guardian for Vick’s dogs.
Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pitbulls, or BAD RAP, which helped evaluate the dogs, has 10 in foster care. Donna Reynolds, the group’s executive director, said, “There are dogs that are able to handle and survive the past with a good attitude, then ones that are going to be shut down and not take it anymore.
“Best Friends got the dogs that pretty much aren’t going to do so well,” she added, noting that those dogs included the known fighters and THE MONSTER Mr. Vick’s champion pit bull, Lucas, who, by court order, will live out his days at the sanctuary.

Once Abused, Now Pampered
Life at Best Friends is nothing like it was at THE MONSTROUS CONDITIONS AT THE NOT-HUMAN Mr. Vick’s property on Moonlight Road in Smithfield, Va., where many of the dogs were found chained to buried car axles. They slept on concrete. Their water, if any, was kept in algae-covered bowls. Most were underfed. Some showed recent lacerations.
WHILE THE MONSTER VICK LAUGHED WITH HIS "BUDDIES" ABOUT IT ALL
Here, they live in a 3,700-acre sanctuary that is covered by juniper trees and sagebrush, and surrounded by canyons and red-rock formations. They have food called Canine Caviar, squeaky toys, fluffy beds and four full-time caregivers. The caregiver on the night shift curls up with the dogs for naps.
They are assigned to an area of the sanctuary called Dogtown Heights, what Best Friends calls a gated community. Vick’s dogs have their own building with heated floors, sound-absorbing barriers and skylights. Each has an individual dog run because, for now, the dogs must remain isolated, for safety’s sake.
Little Red is a tiny rust-colored female whose teeth were filed, most likely because she was bait for the Bad Newz fighters. Handlers cannot explain why loud noises make her jumpy.
Cherry, a black-and-white male, has what seems to be chemical burns on his back. His file at Best Friends says he loves car rides and having his backside rubbed. But like many of Mr. Vick’s pit bulls, he is petrified of new situations and new people.
Oscar cowers in the corner of his run when strangers arrive. Shadow runs in circles. Black Bear pants so heavily that he seems on the verge of hyperventilation.
All but one of the Vick dogs at Best Friends wear green collars, signaling that they are good with people. But Meryl, who arrived with a rap sheet, wears a red collar.
She was aggressive toward the veterinary staff at a previous shelter. When Best Friends evaluated her in November, she lunged at a veterinary technician, snapping at him three times. By court order, she must stay at Best Friends forever.
THE MONSTER Mr. Vick paid $18,275 for the lifetime care of each of his dogs here but one.
THINKING THIS WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STOP HIM FROM SERVING TIME IN PRISON, WHERE HOPEFULLY, HE WILL BE MURDERED WITH THE SAME BRUTALITY HE SHOWED THESE DOGS.

Denzel was deemed highly adoptable, so his fee was only $5,000.
The actual cost for personnel and medical staff to care for the dogs, said Best Friends officials, is much higher at the sanctuary, a no-kill, nonprofit facility for 2,000 animals. For example, Denzel needed a blood transfusion to treat a tick-borne virus. Donations must make up the difference.
Bred to Be Friendly
John Garcia, the assistant dog care manager of Dogtown, which houses about 500 dogs, said pit bulls that are withdrawn or aggressive toward humans break his heart because they are bred to be people-friendly. “With most of these dogs, even Meryl, their actions are based on fear,” said Mr. Garcia, who communicates with the dogs in soothing baby talk. “The biggest job we have with these guys is teaching them that it’s O.K. to trust people. It may take months or years, but we’re very stubborn. We won’t give up on them.”
Because the dogs are still adjusting to their surroundings, it is difficult to predict how many of them will become adoptable. They arrived Jan. 2 from Richmond, Va., on a chartered airplane, stressed after eight months in shelters. In initial evaluations last September, many lay flat and looked frightened. Now, many respond to caregivers by wagging their tails and giving sloppy kisses.
“They have improved by light-years,” Mr. Garcia said, adding that it would take patience and a lot of time for these dogs to be happy and safe in an adoptive home.
Caregivers walk the dogs several times a day and spend time in their kennels, praising and caressing them. It is progress when a dog like Cherry does not need to be carried, because he is afraid to walk on a leash. It is monumental when Shadow approaches them instead of retreating.
“We want to get them to understand that being around people isn’t necessarily a bad thing; that we won’t hurt them,” Mr. Garcia said. “The worst thing we could do is push them too hard, too fast.”
Mr. Garcia, an expert in working with aggressive dogs, said getting some of these pit bulls accustomed to other dogs would be the toughest task. Initially, 10 were evaluated as aggressive toward other dogs.
So far, there has been only one fight. Layla was put accidentally into the same dog run as Ray. She immediately attacked, biting his shoulder in a death grip.
One of their main caregivers, Carissa Hendrick, pried Layla’s jaws from Ray. She said it would take a lot of positive reinforcement to teach these dogs to coexist.
There’s just so much we don’t know about them, and that’s frustrating,” Ms. Hendrick said, adding that she wished she could talk to the men involved in THE MONSTER Mr. Vick’s MONSTROUS operation to find out what these dogs have endured. “Oh, Ellen Belly, what happened to you?” AT THE HANDS OF MONSTER VICK AND HIS MONSTROUS FRIENDS.
Ellen arrived at Best Friends overweight, looking more like a sausage than a fighter. She was a breeding dog but had spent time in the ring. One side of her face droops from nerve damage, but she is still affectionate and loves to offer her belly for rubs.
Lucas was Vick’s champion, a 65-pound muscular brown dog with a face mottled with dark scars. He is so friendly and confident that his trainers suspect he was pampered.
“I bet you ate steak every day, didn’t you, Lucas?” the caregiver McKenzie Garcia, who is married to John, said. “I bet they took care of you because you made them money.”
Every Vick dog here has a Personalized Emotional Rehabilitation Plan. Caregivers rate each dog in several categories. How fearful was Little Red today? How confident was Black Bear? How much did Meryl enjoy life?
Recording the dogs’ progress will help Dr. McMillan, the veterinarian, track their well-being. “DogTown,” on the National Geographic Channel, also plans to follow the progress of several of Mr. Vick’s dogs, including Georgia.
“The successful rehab rate for these kinds of dogs is unknown because nobody has ever studied it until now,” Dr. McMillan said. “You might see an incredibly friendly dog, but does that dog’s personality change over several weeks, over several months, after psychological trauma? Are they hard-wired to be aggressive, or can they change? What’s the best way to work with them?”
The plan is to determine how to keep these dogs happy, even if a real home is not in their future.
Coping With Past Trauma
Whether Georgia will find happiness is a big question. Dr. McMillan said she exhibited behavior that might be coping mechanisms for past trauma.
Georgia gnaws on her doghouse. She flipped her bed over so much that her handlers removed it. When toys are around, she often ignores people. Georgia, who was called Jane at Bad Newz Kennels, was sold to THE MONSTER Mr. Vick in 2001 to help start his MONSTROUS dogfighting AND DOG TORTURING business. She is thought to be his oldest dog, but her handlers can only guess that she is about 7. Dogs’ ages are usually estimated by examining their teeth, but she has none.
Having those teeth extracted, Dr. McMillan and other vets said, must have been excruciating.
BUT THE MONSTER VICK DID IT ANYWAY BECAUSE HE ISN'T HUMAN AND ONLY HUMANS COULD UNDERSTAND THE HORROR OF THIS.
Even with medication, dogs are in pain after losing one tooth, which may take more than an hour of digging, prying and leveling to pull.
“These dogs have been beaten and starved and tortured, BY THE MONSTER VICK AND HIS MONSTER FRIENDS and they have every reason not to trust us,” Mr. Garcia said as Georgia crawled onto his lap, melted into him for an afternoon nap and began to snore. “But deep down, they love us and still want to be with us. It is amazing how resilient they are.”

PLEASE GOD, IF YOU ALLOWED THIS TO HAPPEN, THEN ALLOW FOR THE BRUTAL TORTURE AND MURDER OF THE MONSTER MICHAEL VICK IN PRISON.

SHORT TRADERS TRYING TO DESTROY AMERICA

During the past 8 days, the Federal Reserve has delivered an unprecedented 1 1/4% rate cut in the Fed Funds rate. Yesterday, after the additional 1/2% cut, the stock market tanked - and the reason was SHORT-TRADER BILL ACKMAN.

Bill Ackman has massively shorted MBIA and in order to try to increase his already humongous profits, he is willing to destabilize the entire financial system of America by "bad-newsing" the bond insurers every time there is hope of a recovery in the stock market.

If the ultra-greedy Bill Ackman were successful in destroying MBIA in order to enrich himeself personally, one man - Bill Ackman will be richer than his already riches, and 280 million Americans will be devastated when their money market funds are forced to sell into a panic stricken market because the securities held by these money markets have been down graded.

So, here is the math:
1 person, Bill Ackman stands to gain
280,000,000 Americans stand to lose their life savings that they thought they placed in safe money markets

IS THERE ANYONE LEFT IN ANY POSITION OF POWER IN AMERICA WILLING TO HELP 280,000,000 AMERICANS FROM BEING FINANCIALLY RUINED BY ONE MAN WHO IS ALREADY RICH AND WHOSE FATHER WHO WAS ALREADY RICH SENT HIM TO HARVARD AND SET HIM UP IN THE BUSINESS WORLD????

In the following article, the extremely knowledgeable Ben Stein put forth this same view and ended with wondering how Thomas Jefferson would feel aboiut all of this.

So, here we are America, after approximately 230 years, the great country created by noble men like Thomas Jefferson is about to be destroyed by the (long list of expletives deleted) man like Bill Ackman - and all because of the unfathomable greed of one man.


Everybody's Business
Can Their Wish Be the Market’s Command?

By BEN STEIN
Published: January 27, 2008
LONG ago and far away, I was a student of law and of economics at Yale. The economics I found fairly easy, probably because the material was the same as what I heard my two economist-parents discussing around the dinner table all my life. (My parents would literally discuss monetary policy with the meatloaf.)

But the law was a total puzzle. Here would be one case that went for the appellant, but just a circuit away, or maybe even in the same circuit, there would be another case — with identical or almost identical facts — that went for the appellee.
I was puzzled. I sat in the Sterling library reading the cases over and over, but still could not get it. Then, one day, out of the blue, my learned brother-in-law Melvin, who had gone to Harvard Law School, asked me if I knew about “legal realism.” I didn’t, but I soon learned.
“Legal realism” said that the whole common-law system of abiding by past decisions was a fig leaf. What really happened, at the appellate level and probably at the trial level, too, was that judges made up their minds based on their predilections, their biases, which lawyer was their friend, what they had for breakfast that day. (I myself love peach Activia yogurt.)
Then, because a case that reached appeal always had some legal merit on each side, the judges, or their very young clerks, picked whatever precedent they wished to support their bias and pretended that they were bound by that precedent and could not have decided any other way.
The scales fell from my eyes, and I went on to finish law school in fine fettle. It was just all show business and personal bias and what’s in it for the judge. That made law school easy.
Time has passed in a big way. But the lessons of legal realism have always been uppermost in my mind when I think about law or about anything else important: Stated reasons are often not the real reasons.
Because I usually write about finance, I have come to believe in the theory of what I would call “financial realism,” or what might more accurately be called “trader realism.” Under this theory, on which I have an imaginary patent, traders can see masses of data any minute of any day. They can find data to support hitting the “buy” button or the “sell” button. They don’t act on the basis of what seems to them the real economic situation, but on what’s in it for them.
Just as a tiny example, years ago a close friend, now deceased, was a trader in London for a big financial house. As he told it, one day I.B.M. came out with stellar numbers. The boss of the trading floor said, “O.K., the guy who’s getting the prize is the one who can make us money selling I.B.M. short.”
So the traders grabbed for their phones and started to put out any bad thoughts they could dream up about I.B.M. They called journalists, retailers, anyone. They sold huge amounts of I.B.M. short. Soon, they had I.B.M. on the run, made money on their shorts and went to Langan’s to drink champers.
As I see it, this is what traders do all day long — and especially what they’ve been doing since the subprime mess burst upon the scene. They have seized upon a fairly bad situation: a stunning number of defaults and foreclosures in the subprime arena, although just a small part of the total financial picture of the United States. They have then tried — with the collaboration of their advance guards in the press — to make it seem like a total catastrophe so they could make money on their short sales. They sense an opportunity to trick other traders and poor retail slobs like you and me, and they generate data and rumor to support their positions, and to make money.
MORE than that, they trade to support the way they want the market to go. If they are huge traders like some of the major hedge funds, they can sell massively and move the market downward, then suck in other traders who go short, and create a vacuum of fear that sucks down whatever they are selling.
Note what is happening here: They are not figuring out which way the market will go. They are making the market go the direction they want.

I know this because I know traders. They’ve told me that they love to sell into fear because fear is bottomless — you can make money selling all day, while buying eventually slows because enthusiasm has limits. The amount of money available to large professional traders is so large that they can overwhelm the market, at least for a while, anytime they want. And they like to do it when the market least expects it.
To my humble eyes, this is what we have seen recently on world markets. Note that the losses in United States markets alone are on the order of about $2.5 trillion in recent weeks. How can a loss of roughly $100 billion on subprime — with some recoveries sure to come as property is seized and sold — translate into a stock-market loss 25 times that size? The answer is trader realism.
The losses in the stock market since the highs of October 2007 are about 14 percent. This predicts — very roughly — a fall in corporate profits of roughly 14 percent. Yet there has never been a decline of quite that size for even one year in the postwar United States, and never more than two years of declining profits before they regained their previous peak.
In other words, traders are sending stocks down by a fantastically larger amount than is warranted by a recession or the losses in subprime. How and why does it happen? As someone said in the movie: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” It’s just Chinatown in trader-land, where money is made and there is no perspective.
So when you see the market gyrating wildly downward and hear some pundit saying it’s because of this or that data or this paradigm or that ratio, remember trader realism. The traders move the market any way they want, any way they think they can make money, and then they whisper a reason to journalists later in the day. Then the journalists print it or say it on television, and the amateurs believe it. And the traders snicker.
These traders, not economists or securities analysts, can turn the world upside down, make governments tremble, give central bankers colitis and ruin the lives of ordinary men and women saving for their children’s college education or their own retirement. In America today, it is the traders, not the politicians or the generals or the corporate bosses, who have the power.
This is what has become of the America of Thomas Jefferson. Lucky for the traders. Sad for the rest of us.
And one thing’s for sure: With the traders running things, it won’t be a good time for amateurs until the traders cry “Switch!” and the market starts to rise.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.

Tom Cruise - One Crazy Motherf**ker

If there is one movie you see in 2008 it is the Tom Cruise Scientology Indoctrination Video that has been leaked onto the internet.

http://gawker.com/5002269/the-cruise-indoctrination-video-scientology-tried-to-suppress

Yes, we know the Tom Cruise that went "cruisazy" in 2006 and "jumped the couch" on Oprah in 2007, but this video is the first time we get a view into his brainwashed mind, and it is four star frightening!!

Apparently, Tom Cruise believes that the "religion" invented by the pulp science fiction writer, bigamist, liar, cheat, charlatan, drug abuser, L. Ron Hubbard in response to the challenge "if you want to make millions of dollars, invent a religion" - makes him - Tom Cruise - supremely qualified as the ONLY person capable of helping accident victims, uniting cultures, and bringing world peace. And he relays this to the viewer in between insane bursts of grinning and giggling.

If anyone can watch this video and NOT conclude that Tom Cruise is one crazy mother f**ker, then we are more gullible than he is.

THIS VIDEO IS THE FINAL PROOF THAT WE MUST BOYCOTT ALL TOM CRUISE MOVIES AS THE PROCEEDS FROM HIS MOVIES ARE USED TO INDOCTRINATE AND BRAINWASH MORE UNSUSPECTING CONVERTS INTO "RONDROIDS" LIKE HIMSELF