This season's entertainment blockbuster, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, is the whole shooting match: Your chance to shoot Russians (or, if you prefer, innocent civilians), investors' opportunity to score off game maker Activision, and jingoists answering a call to glory on Veterans' Day.

Already hailed as the biggest videogame launch ever (even worldwide), MW2 is shipping out up to 8 million units this week, probably a record. The Street already gave its approval last Friday: Activision's stock rose in anticipation of the game's release. (See GamePro's review here.)

As I pointed out in June, marketers vowed the biggest entertainment-industry launch ever for the game. Call of Duty veterans may be pissed off that MW2 tries too hard to lure first-timers, but that's the war business for you.

Forget film offerings like the next Twilight or James Cameron's Avatar, Reuters says. This is your week to celebrate war. As one analyst says, "This is the one game that could buck the economic trend for the holiday season."

Another psycho doctor: Baruch Goldstein

Psycho psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan clearly didn't learn his lessons while he was specializing in preventive and disaster psychiatry. Or maybe he learned them too well.

The most damning info is laid out in this morning's WashPost, which reports that the Virginia mosque he attended in 2001 featured a hard-line, militaristic imam named Anwar al-Aulaqi, who lectured admiringly about the strategies of an al-Qaeda military leader.

Increasingly, Hasan sounds like another crazy, extremist doctor, Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 praying Muslims and wounded 150 more in a suicidal, homicidal attack at a Hebron mosque in February 1994. Goldstein was a devotee of nut case radical Jew Meir Kahane. See this 2001 article for more on the extremist ultra-Orthodox Jewish movement in America that helped fuel Goldstein.

U.S. extremist Jews continue financing terroristic Jews in Israel. Remember crook lobbyist and ultra-Orthodox Jew Jack Abramoff? As I pointed out in September 2005, he funneled some of his ill-gotten funds to Jewish extremists in Israel who hunt Arab "rats."

No doubt extremist Muslims in the U.S. are doing the same thing for terroristic Muslims overseas. Just something to keep in mind as Hasan's links to radical Muslims are explored.

In any case, one of the clues dug up about Hasan should have disqualified him from treating any soldier: He cared for a bird he owned "by placing it in his mouth and allowing it to eat masticated food," as the NYT notes this morning.

Anyone who has had extensive experience with psychiatrists (as I have) would have seen that as a clue that this guy should have had his doctorate yanked.

Quick roundup in the WSJ Deal Journal by Michael Corkery about Goldman Sachs's great week:

• Lusting after cheapo Fannie Mae housing tax credits so it can offset its taxes and perform its required community-reinvestment duties without creating new affordable housing.

• Scoring swine flu vaccine at a higher rate that Memorial Sloan-fucking-Kettering Cancer Center, for Christ's sake. And getting the vaccine while kids around the nation are told there's no vaccine to be had.

Jeffry Picower, accused of raking in billions from pal Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, was found dead in the bottom of his Palm Beach swimming pool today.

The 67-year-old goniff and philanthropist got more than $2.4 billion from the fraud in just the past six years, according to court documents. Far from being a victim, authorities say, Picower "earned" up to 950 percent a year — not a bad return on Madoff's zero investments. (See the May 12 complaint.)

When he wasn't doing buyout deals, Picower did a lot of good with some of the gelt, through his foundation, which now is supposedly broke. It wasn't immediately known whether Picower's death was an accident, suicide, murder, or just bad karma. He was said to have been suffering from Parkinson's and other maladies.