Ramsey...

A former Miss Kentucky who is a teacher in West Virginia has been charged with sending nude pictures to a 15-year-old former student.  Ramsey Bearse was arrested and charged with four felony counts of distributing or displaying obscene matter to a minor.

A criminal complaint says the student's parent informed authorities of lewd pictures sent by Bearse that were found on the teenager's phone.  

I wonder if these nude pictures were available on the internet already. 

Down ...

Economists, historians and your stock broker will all tell you that China's stock market should not have a profound impact on your stocks. The key word here is "should," and this advice may no longer be true.

On Jan. 4, the Shanghai Composite index dropped 7%, forcing Chinese authorities to halt trading in stocks. The selloff sparked selling in markets around the globe, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank as much as 450 points that day. 

The prospect of a significant slowdown in China has serious repercussions for other emerging-market nations.

Obviously, Beijing is aware that it faces some big economic and financial challenges. China's leaders are under pressure to keep their economy going, and the obvious motivation for devaluation is to make exports cheaper. But a weaker yuan could lead to a flow of capital out of China, which would causes the value of the yuan to fall further. 

Would the china market take the world economy all together down? May be 2019 is the year for it.

Mouthpiece...

Showman and ambitious Machiavellian porn lawyer Michael Avenatti has just learned an important lesson. It is easy to sue anyone, even the president of the United States. It is harder to prevail and even harder when, after you lose, the court orders you to pay the fees of opposing attorneys.

Avenatti or his client – adult film star – may have to pay an undetermined amount of money to reimburse President Trump for what it cost the president to defend against their spurious lawsuit.

U.S. District Court Judge S. James Otero reasoned that the president has the same First Amendment right to freedom of speech as his critics. And the judge found that the exercise of that freedom includes the use of “rhetorical hyperbole,” like when the president called Daniels’ allegations a “con job.”

Avenatti is a charismatic critic of the president, more charming than Sen. Elizabeth. Avenatti has been rewarded for his activism with more cable news airtime than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and leaders of many other nations.

Trend...

Everybody has answers to the stock market’s collapse,  800-point loss on the Dow, one of the worst on record.  Apparently that was seemingly obvious – interest rates! trade wars! George Soros!

But if these were so obvious, then why did nobody see the collapse coming? The truth is, “the random walk thesis of how markets move is the best explanation we have.”  Many points out certain forces pushing markets around in fairly obvious ways. 

The world has transitioned from one in which markets are fueled with an IV drip of liquidity from the Federal Reserve and other central banks to one in which fundamentals matter more.  This require withdrawal of all these liquidity, close to 6 trillion Dollars out of the market. This comes from somewhere.

New Labor Department data shows that workers' wages in the U.S. continue to rise. This was followed up by a sell-off of government bonds and has refocused the markets attention towards the near-inevitable 25 basis point hike from the Fed late this month. The consumer-price index release from earlier today indicates that a rate hike it still likely.

When the U.S. dollar is strong compared to many other currencies, imports are less expensive. This is because every American dollar you have will buy more corresponding foreign currency.  However International companies find it problematic as they transfer the money back to the strong US dollars. The revenue becomes less.

The stock market has a big impact on the economy. When the stock market goes down 20% or more, the individuals, companies will feel less valuable and try to control their expansion, activities, and or worse. It is the cycle as investors start fleeing the market. This will end up into recession.

Off...

Mess...

With the stock market that high, unemployment that low 3.7 percent, you can do so much.

Arrogance...

Arrogant people think their time is more important than anybody else’s. Being late means nothing to them. 

Some well-known business leaders have been known to put down others.

 Arrogant people are only concerned about themselves, they’re not really listening to you. Not only are they always on the lookout for someone else to talk to, they interrupt the conversation frequently.

Psychologists say that arrogance is a compensation for insecurities and weaknesses. An arrogant person will rarely say, “I don’t know the answer.

They always tried to one-up everything you say. Arrogant people is so common that the famous Dilbert cartoon strip has a recurring character named “Topper.” 

They seek to minimize those competitors by bad-mouthing them. This simply makes the arrogant person look even smaller. 

Cocky...

Richer...

Murky...

If the intentional events of the past year were scripted as a Bond film, the critics would decide that 007 had stretched credibility too far.

An ex-Russian spy poisoned in a quiet English cathedral town; a US government outflanked by North Korea on nuclear weapons; a Saudi critic murdered by Saudi officials in an Istanbul consulate.

But one recent story goes even further into international thriller territory. It's a chilling tale that has received a fraction of the coverage granted to any of these other big 2018 stories: the disappearance of Meng Hongwei.

Meng was the president of the International Criminal Police Organization, known as Interpol, the planet's cross-border law enforcement cooperation body. In late September, he quietly disappeared in China. There hasn't been much of a public fuss. As the age of liberal values ebbs away, have global norms on human rights been so weakened that even international policemen are no longer safe from state-sponsored kidnap?

Whatever the messy nature of internal Chinese politics, it remains astonishing that the president of the world's law-keeping organization disappear in a manner completely in breach of any concept of natural law. [By Kate Maltby]