Ben Stein, in a follow-up on a Cramer rant from last year.

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.

Can Their Wish Be the Market’s Command?

The world’s food supply is increasingly dependent on a small and narrowing list of highly engineered breeds: the Holstein, the Large White pig and the Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens. There’s a risk that future diseases could ravage these homogeneous animal populations. Poor countries, which possess much of the world’s vanishing biodiversity, may also be discarding breeds that possess undiscovered genetic advantages. But farmers say they can’t afford to wait for science. And so, on the African savanna, a competition for survival is underway.

A Dying Breed

A disabled American spy satellite is rapidly descending and is likely to plunge to Earth by late February or early March, posing a potential danger from its debris, officials said Saturday.

Officials said that they had no control over the nonfunctioning satellite and that it was unknown where the debris might land.

Stubborn, Unyielding Earth Threatens to Destroy Ailing Neighbor With "Atmospheric" Force Field.

US Spy Satellite, Power Gone, May Hit Earth

A roundup by Sarah Boxer.

With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It's not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It's that the whole culture of linking — composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references — doesn't sit happily in a book. Yes, I'm talking about bloggy writing itself.

Is there really such a thing? A growing stack of books has pondered the effects of blogs and bloggers on culture (We've Got Blog and Against the Machine), on democracy (Republic.com 2.0), on politics (Blogwars), on privacy (The Future of Reputation), on media (Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation and We're All Journalists Now), on professionalism (The Cult of the Amateur), on business (Naked Conversations), and on all of the above (Blog!). But what about the effect of blogs on language?

Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?

Blogs - The New York Review of Books

It's well-known that the Army might not have enough combat troops to conduct sustained counterinsurgency campaigns. Now it seems the problem may soon be about quality as well as quantity (brains as well as boots).

The main reason for the decline in standards is the war in Iraq and its onerous "operations tempo"—soldiers going back for third and fourth tours of duty, with no end in sight. This is well understood among senior officers, and it's a major reason why several Army generals favor a faster withdrawal rate. They worry that fewer young men and women—and now it seems fewer smart young men and women—will sign up if doing so means a guaranteed assignment to Iraq. They worry that, if these trends continue, the Army itself will start to crumble.

So, there's a double spiral in effect. The war keeps more good soldiers from enlisting. The lack of good candidates compels the Army to recruit more bad candidates. The swelling ranks of ill-suited soldiers make it harder to fight these kinds of wars effectively.

Petraeus and officers who think like him are right: We're probably not going to be fighting on the ground, toe-to-toe and tank-to-tank, with the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean armies in the foreseeable future. Yet if the trends continue, our Army might be getting less and less skilled at the "small wars" we're more likely to fight.

So, we're facing two choices. Either we change the way we recruit soldiers (and, by the way, cash bonuses are already about as bountiful as they're going to get), or we change the way we conduct foreign policy—that is, we engage more actively in diplomacy or, if war is unavoidable, we form genuine coalitions to help fight it. Otherwise, unless our most dire and direct interests are at stake, we should forget about fighting at all.

War Stories: Dumb and Dumber

The nasty truth about a new literary heroine.

Scandale Francaise

In a week of financial uncertainty we look behind the headlines to a world that is unexpectedly prosperous and peaceful

Somewhere over the rainbow

It should be clear that Battle of the Bods is innovatively vile. Further, it is virally vile. To watch it is to play along and to start sizing up the women like a frat boy during orientation week. Worse, it is boringly vile. About half of the program finds the female contestants yapping about whose knees are better than whose. Ultimately, upon being ranked fifth by the boys, the most obnoxious of the girls teared up and stomped backstage. Her comrades went to comfort her and cheer her up, with one mentioning the $300 they'd each won. "Three hundred dollars?" came the retort. "That's not a Louis Vuitton purse. That's not even half of a Louis Vuitton purse!" Poor dear. Doesn't she know there's a sale on at Coach?

The spiritual darkness of The Power of Ten, The Moment of Truth, and Battle of the Bods

Philip Ball for Nature, reporting on Researchers Take Step Toward Synthetic Life and Md. Scientists Create Full Chromosome of Synthetic DNA.

Scientists have succeeded in stitching together an entire bacterial genome, creating in the lab the full set of instructions needed to make a living thing. The stage is now set for the creation of the first artificial organism — and it could be achieved within the year.

From the archive:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

Genome stitched together by hand

About Edith Grossman.

On top of a bookcase in the hallway outside her bedroom is a towering stack of books. “Those I’m waiting to read, though not in any order of preference. But after I’ve read a very long one, all I want is a short one.” Grossman is a reader’s reader, happy to have gotten cheap paperbacks from neighborhood stores like the old Shakespeare & Co., Labyrinth Books (now Bookculture), and Papyrus (now Morningside Bookshop). It’s about the content, not covers or first editions. “I like to buy books on the street, too, but I’m wary of it now because of bed bugs.” Her collection has also been fed by the places she traveled to in her youth. She grins large: “My clothes used to fit in an overnight bag. But my books took up trunks and trunks.”

sketches of spanish