We knew it had to come to an end, and finally that end is in sight for Herman Cain. The Cainwreck held strong, for longer than many of us thought possible, but according to a new CNN poll the Hermanitor has lost double digits, falling to third place behidn Mittens and Gingrich: [Read more…]
To understand how pissed off it makes me that Congress can legally trade on inside information and others can’t, I relate this little tale, and it’s true. Mid 90s, pre-Lewinsky, fall of the Soviet Union, peace and prosperity, ahh the innocence lost. The stock market has just started rocking and rolling on what would turn into a parabolic shot into the stratosphere. The firm I worked for has taken a local Texas restaurant chain public, it was a hot IPO, the stock of what we’ll call D&R went up about 20 or 30 % off the open. A year or so later I get a call from a trading client. “Hey, I just heard from one of the head guys, D&R will be bought out by Apple-pie restaurants.”
Now, as a stock jock, I got supposed insider info from excited clients all the time. Almost all of it was bunk, stuff their dumbass friend or some idiot on CNBC told them. I still chuckle thinking of the time a lady who worked at Dell called me and whispered furtively that she knew Dell’s earnings were going to be way better than expected; she was right, except Dell had released those earnings two days before she called! [Read more…]
According to a 60 mins report, when Congress wrote insider trading rules, they exempted themselves. And some of them are reportedly trading their asses off on insider info legally. [Read more…]
If I can get the freakin thing to play, it’s below, if not you’ll have to go to Phil’s place to see it, cuz that’s where I stole it from! Update: hotdang I think it’s working. [Read more…]
Clownary may not be the best word, I’m open to suggestions for the phenomenon where a candidate makes utterly false statements dripping with self-confidence for the error and oozing contempt for the facts. But whatever the term, last night’s GOP debate was disappointing. There were plenty of losing statements, few zingers, and the biggest loser of all had to be CBS news, which could not manage a live stream feed and cut off every decent answer with a timer buzzing or need to go to a 5 minute commercial break. CBS even managed to accidentally send Michelle Bachmann’s campaign an internal email about how they would ‘limit her” in the debate. Epic Fail. [Read more…]
Artist's impression of a planet ejected from the early solar system. CREDIT: Southwest Research Institute
Hot Jupiter’s, possible water worlds or gas dwarfs, even one planet that could have a mantle of diamond, exo-solar planets remind us that the universe can still harbor secrets. In the last decade or two, as the number of strange exo-planetary denizens grew, it became clear that some must have migrated. Moved closer, or shot away, from their primary star. The early history of our own solar system, how the planets formed and ended up in the relatively stable configuration we see today, can be studied with the same techniques developed and refined to model those alien systems. One of the simulations that best explains the familiar worlds we know huddling around the sun comes with an extra planet, or maybe two: [Read more…]
FreeThoughtBlogs was down for the last few hours to facilitate a server transfer. Visitors are growing in number so fast we needed more power to keep up! So that’s a good thing, we are most pleased and grateful. Service could be intermittent today as performance is tweaked. I’m going to use the time to get some reading done, good old-fashioned traditional books. But if anything interesting pops up that could change.
The leading GOP candidates: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Herman Cain. Photo credit AP
That’s what the GOP field boils down to for the fundamentalist base of the Republican Party. Bible thumping dominionists, associated neoconfederate racists, and a handful of reptilian corporate overlords have to choose between a serial adulterer, a flip-flopping heretic, and a controversial hustler. Right now the hustler leads by a hair, but insiders say the heretic is favored by the big money boyz and will thus probably prevail in the end. No one is giving the cheater much of a chance right now: [Read more…]
Justin Callahan was on routine patrol in Afghanistan when he tripped a landmine. Upon regaining consciousness he soon learned the injuries were extensive and permanent, and the war was over for him. But the struggle for his brothers and sisters in arms back in the states was just beginning. [Read more…]
Dwarf Galaxies 9 billion light-years away in near infrared. Image courtesy NASA/ESA
The mighty eye of Hubble has been turned toward the genesis of galaxies and stars and found great big things start out in smaller, dynamic packages. Today the baryonic universe is dominated by elegant spirals like our own Milky Way and massive elliptical galaxies buzzing like a swarm of angry bees in ultra slow-motion. Each with supermassive black holes lurking in their center, some weighing over a billion times the mass of our sun. But Hubble has found it wasn’t always like that: [Read more…]