Steven Thorpe

Finally, there is the “garage band hedge fund” started by Jamie Mai and Charlie Ledley in 2003 with a Schwab account containing $110,000 and housed in a shed in the back of a friend’s house in Berkeley, Calif. Mr. Ledley believed, Mr. Lewis writes, “that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.” In this case, his contrarian instincts told him, in Mr. Lewis’s words, that “the markets were predisposed to underestimating the likelihood of dramatic change.”

Four and a half years later the American economy was in trouble, and, Mr. Lewis says, the fund run by Mr. Ledley, Mr. Mai and their partner, Ben Hockett, would net more than $80 million.

Continue reading – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/books/15book.html?src=me

RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) – Brazil’s most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer, celebrated his 102nd birthday Tuesday in typical fashion: at work on projects rather than pondering his supercentennial age.

“Turning 102 is crap, and there is nothing to commemorate,” he told AFP.

Niemeyer, who was born in 1907 in Rio de Janeiro, where he still lives, is famed for designing some of Brazil’s most distinctive buildings, among them Rio’s Sambodrome and the nearby Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum, and many of the futuristic edifices of the capital Brasilia.

His inspiration for the domes, curves and sweeping lines that make up his style he has said is “the body of the Brazilian woman.”

Niemeyer has witnessed Brazil’s progression from a chaotic new republic, a 1964-1985 military regime that forced him into exile in Paris, and the increasingly prosperous return to democracy that the country now enjoys.

His conclusion on Tuesday? Brazil is more “egalitarian since a former worker arrived in power,” the former Communist said, referring to Brazil’s current president, former trade union leader and steelworker Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The architect, sitting in his studio overlooking Copacabana beach, explained to AFP that one project he was managing was the renovation of the central avenue of the Sambodrome, where the most famous of Brazil’s glitz-and-flesh Carnival parades are held.

Continue reading – http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091215/en_afp/brazilarchitectureniemeyer_20091215211041

“He is grotesquely overweight. He is childless. He lives in the chilly and undesirable North Pole. He insists on dressing in a bright-red jumpsuit with fur trimmings. He can only ever find employment on one day a year, and, even then, it is night work.

On every accepted level, Santa Claus is a total loser.

Yet this is a man who heads up a brand that commands 98 percent global recognition. Furthermore, he is universally adored.

How does he do it?”

Malcolm Gladwell – http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/gladwell-200912

“As a fiction writer, she’s absurd,” says author and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens, who is arguably the most opinionated Homo sapiens since Rand herself. “But if you’re young and not particularly wanted and not particularly brilliant, reading Atlas Shrugged provides all the feelings of compensation one might need for any period of terrifying inadequacy.”

From “The Bitch is Back” – http://www.gq.com/entertainment/books/200911/ayn-rand-dick-books-fountainhead?currentPage=1

Joe Scarborough remembers the death of John Lennon – continue reading

“So be Patriotic. Go out there and get rich.  Get so obnoxiously rich that when that tax bill comes, your first thought will be to choke on how big a check you have to write.  Your 2nd thought will be “what a great problem to have”, and your 3rd should be a recognition that in paying your taxes you are helping to support millions of Americans that are not as fortunate as you.”

- Mark Cuban

Pat Buchanan, in his October 20th column, discusses the “alienated and radicalized” whites in America.  Based on some of the behavior we are witnessing these days,  his words seem spot on -

“Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993, and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.

They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care, and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on — then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.

They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.

They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

Source – “Alienated & Radicalized” by Pat Buchanan

“Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.”