Stock Twits is a tool for searching stock tweets on twitter. It’s a nifty idea and a fine feat of programming (prefixing a ticker symbol with $ indexes the and adds a chart to the tweet.) Cool. Unfortunately, the tool is only as good as the tweets, and from what I’ve seen the tweets are for twits. Nothing but noise and probably more than a little nefariousness.

I can’t think of a better tool for taking advantage of a bunch of stock twits with the old pump and dump. It goes like this: tweeter-dee builds a following by convincing people he’s a trading guru, tweeter-dee buys stock in a small illiquid company, tweeter-dee tweets about said company, twitter-dumb buys the stock and runs up the price, tweeter-dee sells his stock profiting on the run up,  leaving tweeter-dee holding the tweet.

The strategy is generally illegal, except that there’s a giant loophole. If you tell people you bought the stock, then you’re in the clear. If your twitterers are big enough twits they’ll still fall for it, but of course they will because they’re twitter-dumb and tweeter-dee is their guru coming to take them to the promise land.

How ‘bout someone just donate the sweaters to good will and give the charity money. Who would want one of those 80s sweaters, Cosby or no Cosby?

Will someone please tell Kirk Kerkorian that he’s an old fart. The billionaire turned 91 last Friday and he’s going after Ford. At 91 can he really have big plans for the company, or does he just like fucking with people and buying incredibly big ass shit just to blow peoples minds?

Hording gasoline qualifies as a not so great speculation.

Gas hoarding eyed as cause of Dartmouth apartment fire –SouthCoastToday.com via BoingBoing.net via Consumerist

If you want to lock in gas prices, try buying a futures contract, or you could have just bought a Chrysler.

A new book about Michelangelo has an asking price of $155,000, no original artwork, just one seriously fancy ass book.

Buffett’s big bet –Fortune

Will a collection of hedge funds, carefully selected by experts, return more to investors over the next 10 years than the S&P 500?

That question is now the subject of a bet between Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and Protégé Partners LLC, a New York City money management firm that runs funds of hedge funds - in other words, a firm whose existence rests on its ability to put its clients’ money into the best hedge funds and keep it out of the underperformers.

Wine as commodity –Gaping Void

This is a comic, but the included commentary considering the magnitude of competition in the wine business begs the of whether or not today’s wines will ever be collectible. Collectibles get that way when people don’t think to collect the item when it’s created. Stamp collectible on something and it’s sure to never be.

None of these chairmen comes off well here. Greenspan, “the master of garblements,” fares the worst. His “skill in presenting imprecise, sometimes near-meaningless, conflicting, yet learned-sounding views won him over-the-top adulation for his insights and abilities,” Auerbach writes.

These evasions and deceptions allowed Greenspan to avoid accountability, which is the thrust of Auerbach’s critique. The Fed has 19 decision makers — seven governors in Washington and 12 regional bank presidents. They are accountable to no one.

1. Dick has $1 million. Jane has $1 million. If Dick and Jane both give their $1 million to T. Boone, how many millions will he claim he can turn it into?

2. On his way home from school, Kyle stops to buy a candy bar. It costs 69 cents. How much change should Kyle get back if he pays for the candy with a $1,000,000,000 bill?

…

What the wonder twins would take the form of if they were sent to correct the subprime mortgage crisis –McSweeney’s

Take two of the three stacks of money you find in there. Leave one. That will confuse the insurance guy. He’s not going to know whether it was an inside job or not. If it’s a real theft, why not take all the money? Maybe someone’s sending a message. Then get back to the supply closet and back to the basement of the shoe store. By now, the manager will have locked up. Kelly put some food in the basement refrigerator for you. There’s a cot, too. Oh, and beer. Have one to celebrate.

Broadcom Co-Founder Faces Conspiracy and Drug Charges -NYT

Federal officials unsealed one indictment Thursday alleging co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III of chip maker Broadcom Corp. spiked the drinks of technology executives and customer representatives with ecstasy and maintained a warehouse for ecstasy, cocaine and methamphetamine.

A second indictment unsealed Thursday accuses him of conspiracy, securities fraud and other violations relating to stock options backdating while he was CEO.

What others have to say about it:

Sex, Drugs, and Options Backdating –Portfolio

Juicy tidbits about from indictment of Broadcom founder –Boing Boing

Nicholas indictment also alleges prostitutes, mile-high drug use –LA Times

He had founded the company five years earlier but had sold a majority stake to a pair of venture capital firms in 2005. Now, with the company struggling, Bethanis saw an opportunity to get his company back.

For Bethanis, then 31, regaining control of DirectoryM was partly a matter of pride. Though he still had a 3 percent stake and a seat on the board, the investors had removed him from the CEO post, leaving him with no meaningful management role. In fact, he had started a new company, Interaction Media Group, or IMG, that offered a similar product. Now he wanted to combine the two companies, which he believed would speed IMG’s growth but would cost a bucket of money and pose big risks.

Lord knows I’ve been stuck in this vortex many a time.

Related reading:

Sleeping and Trading –Daily Speculations

Briefly Speaking, from Victor Niederhoffer –Daily Speculations

There are many speculators who have an inclination to trade during night hours. Such behavior exposes one to the possibility of premature death, according to a study of Penev et al "chronic circadian desynchronization…".

Seth Roberts’ fascinating self-experiments –Boing Boing links to Aether

…for a long time Roberts had a problem with his sleep. He woke too early, could not go back to sleep, and then was tired in the morning. He tried different ways to cure this problem until, through a combination of coincidence, experiment and analysis of the data, he discovered an expected correlation: his problem disappeared when he skipped breakfast. He cured his early awakening by not eating until 11 a.m.

The idea that skipping breakfast may reduce early awakening was, wrote Roberts, "a new idea in sleep research." Strangely, Roberts was not hungry in the wee hours when he was troubled by early awakening, which lead him to suspect that it was not discomfort that roused him, but rather some glitch in his sleep cycle caused by anticipation of food.

Mentally Ill, or Just Tired? –Utne Reader

Missing a night’s sleep can cause people’s brains to act like they have a psychiatric illness, according to the New Scientist. The lack of sleep can disrupt the parts of the brain that control people’s emotions and fear. It’s similar to the type of brain disruption associated with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s Not Sleep, But It’ll Do –Utne Reader

The toughest time to fall asleep is often when you really need to. Not getting enough sleep can lead to short-term memory loss, impairing skills needed in high-stress situations. The problem is that high-stress situations can make it very difficult to get to sleep. Scientists at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute think they’ve found a way to help.

When Clocks Go Bad: Neurobehavioural Consequences of Disrupted Circadian Timing –PLoS Genetics

The correct functioning of the endogenous circadian clock enables organisms to anticipate daily environmental changes and temporally modify behavioral and physiological functions appropriately. All organisms maintain a large number of physiological variables (sleep-wake cycle, locomotor activity, temperature regulation, water/food intake, and levels of circulating hormones) under control of the circadian clock. There are well-known consequences of disrupted circadian function outside of the brain; metabolism, reproduction, and even longevity can be adversely affected when the means of determining time of day are altered at a molecular level.

By Jessica Hagy over at Indexed.

This makes a nice lead in for a realization I’ve had about the sub-prime fiasco and the housing markets, adding to what The New Yorker had to say in Home Economics back in March.

A few years ago a lot of economists and financial experts, including Alan Greenspan were warning that sub-prime loans were going to be a problem. They were right in that the mortgage market is now a mess. But they were almost unanimously wrong in their reasoning why. Everyone then thought the nail in the coffin would be variable interest rates, that less qualified home buyers would not be able to afford an increase in interest rates, which may be true, but interest rates haven’t been a problem.

What really happened was quite unexpected both in how it happened and to whom it happened. I don’t believe sub-prime is entirely to blame for the problems we’re seeing now, rather it’s much broader than that. Simply put, people, lots of people, not just poor people, got upside down on their mortgages. This wasn’t just recent home buyers, but long-time home owners. They watched thousands of home shows on cable television, sponsored by big box home improvement centers, telling them how to increase the value of their home and they went out and got second and third mortgages to finance home remodels.

They just had to have granite countertops. Now those same shows are already telling people that those granite countertops, they just spent thousands of dollars to have installed and haven’t even finished paying off yet, are on their way out. Home Depot and HGTV have taken a page from the fashion world and worked to accelerate the interior design cycle.

Home owners falling for this marketing tactic have effectively started over as first-time home buyers. Everyone who could buy a home, bought one, and everyone who had any equity in their home tapped it out to improve their homes and make it worth more. They went from bad bets on dot coms to bad bets on their homes.

Now there’s no one left to sell their homes to. So home prices fall and since no one has any equity everyone is upside down on their mortgages, owing more to the banks than they can get for their home.

The nail in the coffin is the job market. There’s no permanency in jobs any longer. Jobs generally don’t last more than a couple of years. People job hop first and worry about selling their house later. Now they’ve got themselves in a situation were they’ve moved to another city, and their stuck with their old house because they can’t sell it for enough to pay off the mortgage and they don’t have any savings left to pay off the difference since they gave it all to Home Depot, ironically to increase the value of their home.

Yet Another Chance for Rich Dudes to Score Hot Chicks

"Fashion Meets Finance"—the latest match-making event from the minds who brought you the similarly themed "Rich Old Guys With Hot Young Chicks" and "Rich Old Women With Hot Young Dudes" speed dating events—another can’t miss attempt at carefully engineered social Darwinism.

The premise is pretty simple: Throw banker dudes into a room with fashion publicists and Bloomingdales buyers and watch the sparks fly.

The Rich: Recession’s Whiniest Victims -Gawker links to NYT

One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations."

Once expected to succeed Mr. Bouton at the helm of the bank, Mr. Mustier was in charge of all investment banking and trading during the period that a trader, Jérôme Kerviel, accumulated 50 billion euros, or $77.7 billion, in unauthorized bets, which cost Société Générale 4.9 billion euros to unravel in January.

Wall Street’s Graveyard -Portfolio, found on Dealbreaker

Here’s a walk through Wall Street’s graveyard of once powerful banking names.

What’s Behind Wall Street’s Rift Over Fed?

…a rift has developed on Wall Street over whether access to funds from the Federal Reserve is worth the price of increased regulation. Lehman Brothers is reportedly willing to accept the regulation while Goldman Sachs is said to oppose it, and is willing to give up access to the new Fed facility if necessary.

Moody’s Implied Ratings Show MBIA, Ambac Turn to Junk

he team from Moody’s Analytics, which operates separately from Moody’s ratings division, uses credit-default swap prices as an alternative system of grading debt. These so-called implied ratings often differ significantly from Moody’s official grades.

The implied ratings frequently show that swap traders think debt is in more danger of defaulting than Moody’s credit ratings signify. And here’s the kicker: The swaps traders are usually right.

"When I first saw this product, my reaction was, `Goodness gracious, Moody’s has got a product that is basically publicizing where the market disagrees with Moody’s,”’ says David Munves, managing director for credit strategy research at Moody’s Analytics.

The title isn’t very fitting really, should be something more like Moody’s Comes Out of the Closet.

10 Years for Ex-Banker Convicted of Insider Trading

A former Credit Suisse investment banker convicted of insider trading was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a judge who said Wall Street professionals were failing to understand that it was a serious crime to cheat in the markets.

A few weeks ago, we posted an item about an ad executive in Australia named James Hurman who auctioned off his smoking habit, agreeing to pay a steep fine (about $800) for every cigarette he smoked after the auction closed. He wound up selling the contract, he writes, “for NZ $300 [about US $240] to somebody at the agency where I work — someone close enough to know if I owe them!”

People will speculate on anything these days.

Did China’s pandas know the quake was coming?

the pandas at Wolong roused themselves in the minutes before the quake struck and began acting "in a strange manner".

Most of the "evidence" is anecdotal, but it can be compelling. Buffalo were said to have stampeded to the top of a hill just before the Asian tsunami in 2004.

Maybe pandas can detect a market crash coming. If so, I’d get me a panda and be like "Hey panda, what you acting all twitchy like that for? You think it’s time to sell, Mr. Panda?"

This panda over here –> looks kinda worthless to me though.

Graphjam

So fitting.

David Plant

A Brave Army of Heretics

For the last 125 years, however, ever since the views of Leon Walras and other theorists of general equilibrium became encoded in a famous textbook of Alfred Marshall (or, rather, partially encoded), technical economists have viewed the economy as a system in which individuals deal with one another only through the market mechanism, reacting to signals about prices and quantities as if they were determined by some central authority, best thought of as an auctioneer. Individual actors adapt as best they can to market signals which they are powerless to affect, until some sort of balance between supply and demand is achieved. Then things settle down and no individual has any reason to change his behavior, unless some external “shock” to the system occurs.

Prior to sub-prime implosion, the risk management techniques were derived from this same theoretical viewpoint on how people interact with one another in the markets. The theories were misguided and flat-out wrong. Real risk is far more complex. To complex, in fact, for the quants to get a handle on pushing pencils and punching numbers on their geeky HP calculators. So they chose instead to just ignore the risks they could not explain, or write formulas to manage. Misguided, unpracticed, collegiate theories. Same thing that happened to LTCM. They didn’t learn then and they aren’t learning now, because money managers making the same mistakes speculating in China and commodities, which is where they’ve got your pension tucked away, also safe and sound, yeah right.

Source: Culturegraph

How Fairness Is Wired In The Brain

Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is also the seat of emotional reactions.

"The emotional response to unfairness pushes people from extreme inequity and drives them to be fair," Quartz says. This observation, he adds, suggests that "our basic impulse to be fair isn’t a complicated thing that we learn."

This may explain why greedy people generally seem to be associated with the cruel and heartless, or rather the other way ’round, people lacking emotion can be greedy without concern for fairness, as there is less emotional response to unfairness. Think CEOs.

Taste for Quick Boost Tied to Taste for Risk -NYT

Health researchers have identified a surprising new predictor for risky behavior among teenagers and young adults: the energy drink.

Getting Good -Scienceblogs.com

I realized that writing is no different than any other craft or skill. It takes time and effort and the ability to tolerate lots of mistakes. You need to write lots and lots of bad sentences before you can begin to write some good sentences.

My experiment with smart drugs -Authors site

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.

Frankincense lowers anxiety in mice -Boing Boing

In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal, an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression.

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain -NYT

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

Video Games Can Make Us Creative If Spark Is Right -ScienceDaily.com

Video games that energize players and induce a positive mood could also enhance creativity, according to media researchers.

"You need defocused attention for being creative," said S. Shyam Sundar, professor of film, video and media studies at Penn State. "When you have low arousal and are negative, you tend to focus on detail and become more analytical."

Here’s how it’s going to play out. We’re going to see a resurgence of the man purse, because at around $500 a whole lot of people are going to want to carry around mini PCs (sounds better than UMPC), leaving the standard-sized notebook at home on the coffee table, as makers will follow the ASUS lead of building instant-on into the motherboards, thus replacing the far too limiting crackberries for calendaring, etc…

Companies, which make components for mini PCs are about to see a surge in orders. One such is AU Optronics, which says it will sell six million low-cost LCDs this year, half the world market. ASUS, in addition to selling computers, is a seller of components. Also, mini chip makers VIA Technologies and Intel.

He [Rupert Murdoch] also rants about how it’s "ridiculous" that an average of 8.3 editors looks at a typical WSJ story, inevitable expanding it beyond reason. "People don’t have time for it — there’s not a story that you can’t get all the facts in (within) half the space."

Rupert, shut up! You don’t know what you’re talking about. You got to go in there and change something don’t you. It reminds me of a line in National Treasure, "Someone’s got to go to prison Ben." You can’t buy a company and not change it, can you Rupert? The great thing about the WSJ is that it’s writers take the time to get the story right. They don’t just settle a couple crappy quotes and an article biased towards the journalist’s opinions. If the WSJ takes your advice it will just be another crappy paper. We already have too many crappy papers. That’s why people are turning to blogs, because when bloggers are biased at least they generally don’t hide it, disguise it, and try to present it as honest information intended to deceive and manipulate. It’s about getting the truth out and that’s something the Journal has always done better than most of it’s competition. So please don’t fuck up the Journal.

There are these people we like to refer to as bloggers and this medium we refer to as blogs, but all we’ve really done is remove the constraints of the printing process, how often news can be printed, and constraints of delivering a physical printed paper, how often a paper can be distributed. It’s technological advancement no different than moving from the handwritten letter to email, or from the handwritten letter to the wired telephone, to the cordless, to the cell phone. Instead of winding yourself up in the 20′ stretchy cord while you talk, now we can talk to someone who’s not in front of us from virtually anywhere we want, though until recently that still wasn’t true for a long stretch of I-70 through Kansas.

It’s true though that blogs make it easy for people to do incredibly bad reporting, and not really report at all. But I’d also argue that the monopoly held so long by the print medium has allowed reporters to go relatively unchecked, except by those with a similar interest. The worst most common bad reporting technique is getting quotes to bolster the reporters view, while burying the other side of the story. This is so rampant it is just the norm and accepted. Seriously, no one even expects to get an honest, unbiased story out of a paper. Some blogs have done well, because the authors are truth seekers. Readers seek out these authors, whether they be bloggers or print journalists. They just want the truth.

A downside to the expediency of the blogging medium is fact checking, particular those widely read blogs that are expected to publish the latest news immediately and many times throughout the day. The model has become, write a couple paragraphs, add a picture (relevant or not, it doesn’t matter), publish, get feedback, then correct if necessary, but in a day the story will roll off into the archives anyway, so don’t be too concerned with accuracy and corrections. Now though, once something is published on a popular blog, there are hundreds of little sucker blogs waiting in the wings in hopes of having a little bit of the big blogs success. They are like the symbiotic relationship between sharks and the fish that latch on and clean it. Except that when the popular blog does shoddy work, it propagates out all over the world, even now into print media, and talk shows.

So we’ve got this crazy huckster guy out here in Colorado who says he’s got a tape that proves UFOs exist and he’s going to show it today. Well that’s certainly a tantalizing tale. The story goes from the local paper to the blogs and when a popular blog runs with it, then it’s all over the Internet, all day long. No exaggeration, "alien video" is Google’s 13th most searched term today, "Denver alien" hit 38th, "Jeff Peckman" 65th, "Jeff Peckman alien video" 84th, and "alien footage" 90th. Not until late in the day did anyone bother to report the fact that the guy is a huckster selling credit card gizmos that are supposed to put your chi back in order, and not for $10, but a whopping $150 a card! And then I suspect it was probably a commenter who pointed this out and got the record straight, rather than either a blogger or print journalist. Even the slightest bit of due diligence, just a few minutes effort would have made it clear what kind of sham man this guy was.

The funny thing is the guy, no doubt, did not anticipate getting picked up by the blogs and getting media attention worldwide. He’s in Boulder, which next to the Arizona desert, is hotbed for spiritual charlatans. It’s like Miami and penny stock scams. It’s the norm there. Now he’s probably going to be spending time in jail, with all the attention he’s drawn to his scams.

But to do so would not be a fair comparison really, because the glass ceiling is a separate issue, and salaries at that level are so skewed that they don’t really mean anymore to the average man than they do to the average woman. We’re talking about differences of a magnitude of 10,000ish at the average level. Throughout the billionaires and the multimillionaires, regardless of the fact that most of them are men, and the difference may not be so great. Just an unpolished observation.

New York’s Original Kazoo Co. stays true to name

The name of the place says it all: The Original Kazoo Co. And, boy, do its owners mean original.

The same belt and pulley machines that stamped and shaped the world’s first metal kazoos circa 1900 still stamp and shape kazoos today. The machines are still in the same building, making the same ker-thwunk sound as they perforate, fold and shape.

Instead of shipping production off to China Kazoo provides employment for the mentally disabled in the small farming community in which it operates. Kazoo gets it. Kellogg screwed with its Oreo knock off Hydrox cookie and created enough of an uproar to get the company to bring the cookie back.

Crocs are you listening? Greed will get you somewhere, but it aint always gonna be where you wanna go.

Kazoo comic

French police arrest former EADS chief -Guardian

Two judges and the French market regulator, AMF, have been investigating allegations that 17 current and former EADS executives, including Forgeard, exercised stock options when they were party to privileged information about deteriorating profits at Airbus.

Landowners trampled in gas rush -CNN Money

Unsuspecting property owners around the country are getting trampled in an old-fashioned land rush by natural gas companies and speculators trying to lock up long-ignored drilling rights quickly and cheaply.

Dutch insurer’s U.S. unit draws scrutiny from regulators -IHT

Aegon itself, with headquarters in The Hague and subsidiaries throughout Europe, is less eager to talk about exactly how World Financial makes money.

One thing about the unit, based in Duluth, Georgia, that sets it apart from traditional sales forces is structure. As a pyramidlike, multilevel sales organization, World Financial produces the big compensation for its agents not from their sales of products so much as their recruitment of new agents, according to the company’s marketing materials.

More layoffs expected at financial firms -IHT

From Tokyo to London to New York, financial companies have announced plans to shed more than 83,000 jobs since last July as revenue and compensation pools evaporate, according to Bloomberg estimates. The dismissals range from 90 jobs, or 0.1 percent of the total, at HBOS in London to about 9,160 jobs, or 66 percent of the work force, at Bear Stearns in New York, which is being acquired by JPMorgan Chase.

Fed Keeps Watch on Wall St. — From the Inside -Washington Post

New York Fed employees are working inside major investment banks every day, alongside the Securities and Exchange Commission staff members who are the firms’ main regulators. The Fed employees are trying to gather information the central bank can use to make sure the billions of dollars it is lending the investment firms, through a special emergency loan program enacted in March, are not being put at undue risk.

Debt From Beyond the Grave -WSJ MarketBeat

According to a report by Bloomberg, put options that many companies in Russia used to help lure investors back following the 1998 Russian default (which helped trigger the collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management) are now coming back to haunt companies who will be forced to shell out higher interest payments.

“Investors rarely exercised the puts until last year because the interest they received was higher than what they could get on new bonds,” Bloomberg explains.

JP Morgan Will Wait A Couple Weeks Before Ripping Bear Stearns Name From Building -Dealbreaker

"The name generally will go away," says a J.P. Morgan insider. "What kind of brand value does Bear Stearns have at this point, anyway?"

It’s worth noting here that JP Morgan got the whole kit and caboodle that was Bear for less than a third of what James Cayne, former Bear CEO, was worth prior to the collapse.

The Run On Bear Started Earlier Than You Think -Dealbreaker

On December 20th, after Bear recorded its first quarterly loss ever, we reported that money managers were beginning to move business away from Bear Stearns. We called the item "Bear Stearns: Toxic Counterparty?"

The Great Bear Conspiracy -Portfolio

It is tempting to think that there was a conspiracy to bring down Bear Stearns.
Wall Street is a cutthroat place anyway, and Bear was never the most popular. People still remembered how Bear walked away when the rest of Wall Street organized a bailout of the tottering hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998.

Villains steal arrogant businessman’s social security number -Geeks are Sexy

…he tried to prove how effective his service was by widely advertising his Social Security number in all his advertisements. In fact he dared people to steal it. He wanted people to try and steal his identity so his fraud alerts would get set off and he could boast about how super his service was.

So all the villains decided to take him up on his offer and his fraud alerts failed him big time.

There have been at least 87 attempts to steal his identity, including 20 driving license applications. One guy successfully got a $500 loan and now Davis is stuck with repaying it. Unhappy Lifelock customers are now suing him because the fraud alerts didn’t work for them either…

Dumb ass!

Did Roger Stone Take Down Eliot Spitzer? (Ans: Who Knows) -Gawker

It’s hard to tell if he acts like a buffoon because it throws people off the scent or simply because he is a buffoon. The New Yorker sent Jeffrey Toobin to investigate, but all he really uncovered was that Stone is a gross old pervert.

Gawker post links to:

The Dirty Trickster -New Yorker

Miami Velvet is the leading “swingers’ club” in Miami, and Roger Stone took me there to explain the role he may have played in the fall of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York.