From Ted Butler comes some startling news about the New York Mercantile Exchange. I’ll let Mr. Butler’s words carry the tune: An extraordinary development has occurred at the NYMEX/COMEX. This development is unusual and may be unprecedented. Their Chief Financial Officer/Chief Operating Officer (CFO/COO), Jerome Bailey, has suddenly resigned. Any time a CFO suddenly and [...]

The war on obesity has many bad consequences. This is a terribly misinformed and sick story about people and aging, and what can possibly make us live longer and age better. The answer? Starving yourself toward a grotesque thinness, otherwise known as “calorie restriction.” (Due to the NY Times propensity to not archive articles, I [...]

The Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, Army Office of Information Assurance and Compliance, is shutting down soldiers’ blogs to “protect classified information.” Surely.

Bull! (Not Bull) runs a great piece on the phony new Dow high. While the Dow hit a new high today, not a single of its component stocks did. Interesting, isn’t it? The index is at a new all time high, but 70% of its components are down 20% or more! The Dow Jones Industrial [...]

I have no idea why this most unimportant blurb made it into the news, but…… Asked if the Sarbanes-Oxley rules on corporate executive responsibilities enacted in the aftermath of the Enron scandal need to be “rolled back,” Bush said that more modest modifications could be in the cards. “I think rolled back is the wrong [...]

Forget attacking the SUV drivers – hefty folks use more gas. As American waistlines have expanded since 1960, so has their consumption of gasoline, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Virginia Commonwealth University say. Americans are now pumping 938 million gallons of fuel more annually than they were in 1960 as a [...]

This time it’s not the World Series. “According to an analysis of 2005 crime statistics released today, St. Louis is America’s most-dangerous city with a population of more than 75,000, and Detroit ranks second, as it was the year before.” However, in terms of cities with 500,000+ residents, Detroit wins hands down as the most [...]

“The Iraq war was a mistake.” And: “Finishing the job is better than leaving a mess. And if we can finish the job, the war won’t be remembered as a mistake.” We need to “finish the job” in Iraq (whatever that means) because the Iraq war was a “mistake,” but a “worthy mistake.” Bumbling douchebaggery [...]

A friend wrote me to comment on this post. Essentially, he comments that the John Mellencamp “Our Country-Chevy” commercial portrays “our country” as being made up not of remarkable entrepreneurs, brilliant research scientists, great teachers (and Professors), dedicated scholars, talented artists, and wonderful parents — in addition to the working man — but rather, “our [...]

The endless playing of John Mellencamp’s “Our Country” (the Chevy Silverado commercial) during the world series was enough to make one throw up. I generally love Mellencamp’s music, but this song is so predictable, so pseudo-patriotic, so cheesy, so rife with plastic homage. If you’ve watched the series, you saw the commercial almost every single [...]