Tag: villainy

Where your mutual fund money is going (WSJ)

Short version: whores, private jets, and rented dwarves. P. Diddy is running your 401(k).

A Wall Street Affair: This Bachelor Party Gets Lots of Attention Probe Centers on Payments For Fidelity Star’s Bash; Private Jet to South Beach

By SUSANNE CRAIG and JOHN HECHINGER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 18, 2005

Even by Wall Street’s over-the-top standards, the March 2003 bachelor party for Thomas Bruderman, a onetime star trader for Fidelity Investments, was an event to remember.

The festivities began with a trip by private jet from Boston to a small airport outside New York City. There, the revelers picked up some Wall Street traders and at least two women who investigators suspect may have been paid for their attendance, say people familiar with the matter. The partygoers — including the groom-to-be, who was getting ready to marry the daughter of former Tyco International Ltd. boss L. Dennis Kozlowski — then continued to trendy South Beach in Miami. The fun included a stay at the ritzy Delano Hotel for some, a yacht cruise and entertainment by at least one dwarf hired for the occasion.

“Some people are just into lavish dwarf entertainment,” says the 4-foot-2 Danny Black, a part-owner in Shortdwarf.com, an outfit that rents dwarfs for parties starting at $149 an hour. Mr. Black says he spent part of the weekend on the yacht and worked as a waiter on the Friday night at a high-end Miami eatery alongside what he called “regular size” people. “A good time was had by all,” he said, declining to provide further details.

Now I say I say hold I say hold I say HOLD ON HERE.

Making a Federal Queso It

Via robotwisdom, mainly for anarqueso, gordonzola, and the rest of the cheese crew. Your nemesis has been uncovered; the EVIL cheese makers. Also I was obligated to make a dumb joke in the headline so shut up about it already.

Feds charge pair in cheese-making scam

WAYNE PARRY
Associated Press

NEWARK, N.J. – They touted their cheese as better than the rest, and their company was hailed as one of the best small businesses in America.

But a federal court indictment claims the success story of now-defunct cheese maker Suprema Specialties was full of holes. The company’s former chief executive and chief financial officer are accused of participating in a massive scheme with customers and suppliers to claim more than $600 million in non-existent sales.

and they lied about the cheese, too

This heaven gives me migraine

Waiting for my mother at the doctor’s office just now I picked up a magazine called “Organic Style”, thinking “this should be good!”

It does not disappoint. A more descriptive name would be “The magazine for women who need to be so healthy and virtuous and beautiful that they are all hot yoga adepts and Jane Goodall and Susan Sarandon at once”.

Ads for Shell Oil face editorials decrying Arctic drilling. A product sidebar touts a $249 “earth/peace scapulare” that makes a statement in 14k “recycled gold”. There are many, many skin moisturizers and breakfast cereals. One is commanded to indulge everything, always.

The best part was a Dove ad. It was actually an ad for an advertising campaign (!). Dove wishes to celebrate “real beauty” of “women with curves” who are not size 2 models. They laud their own ad campaign, in which they stand firm for real women and unretouched photographs and celebrating… Anyway the women in the ad for the ad are impossibly hot twenty year olds with perfect everything laughing in their underwear. I guess it’s okay to be a size 4 catalog model now, gals! Size 0 is no longer mandatory!

The Theory of the Leisure Suit Class

Living in Newport Beach has always been strange, and has always been getting stranger. Satire fails us, as daily life teems with situations and images that are so outrageously perfect, they seem to have been dreamed up by a particularly unsubtle socialist film maker to hammer in some point. Welcome to Michael Moore’s Real World Newport Beach. Some recent examples:

  • Driving past one of the local high-class night clubs, I see that among the stretch Hummer limos and AMG Mercedes, someone has backed out his $250,000 Lamborghini and is revving and clutch-popping hopelessly, trying to get his thoroughbred Italian supercar to go into first gear. I stop and watch as our hero wrestles with his prancing bull. Finally he achieves traction and hurtles out onto the boulevard in a cloud of tire smoke.
  • At a street corner, a cop is handcuffing a middle-aged Mexican man whose bicycle lies on the ground next to him. Behind them, another middle-aged Mexican man is holding up a sign that says INDULGE YOURSELF LUXURY APTS with an arrow on it, and waving the sign at passing cars.
  • At the local shopping mall, it is Tuesday at 3 pm, and the place is full of young marrieds without employment buying everything that glitters. One thirtyish man in a $2000 suit, sculpted hair and spray-on tan, is saying loudly into his cellphone “Yes. It has to be on a yacht, that’s where we’re making the sale. The presentation is on a yacht, and I don’t know the dress code yet, but you are going to be there.”
  • At Target. A small, nervous man dressed in a $200 Aloha shirt, cargo shorts, and a very shiny pair of Timberland hiking boots is gazing at a barbecue that is eight feet long and costs as much as a used car. His wife comes up behind him and says “Do the utensils match?” and he says “Of course! OF COURSE!”

My mom is sick. It’s just some digestive bug but when someone is 76 it makes me nervous, plus she never gets these. There’s something about the illness or weakness of parents that’s still very psychologically undermining even in adulthood; it shouldn’t happen.

Our here now medical system in these united states

Since I had a visit to the E.R. brought by paramedic ambulance last week, I’m experiencing the classic aftereffect symptom: financial panic. I’m tensed for the blow when the bill arrives, prepared for my insurer to deny everything, ready to fight collection agencies and complain to commissioners and end up paying the whole thing outright on my credit card at 14% interest.

The old joke about bleeding heart liberals is that the difference between a liberal and a conservative is a police report. Good point; no one likes getting their ass kicked, and it doesn’t do much for your progressive values to have the pain and fight-or-flight chemicals running.

I’d add another rule, though. The difference between a conservative and a liberal is a hospital admission. Prosperous middle-class Americans who’ve never been seriously ill and have confidence in their medical plans are fooling themselves. They’re all only one illness away from total financial ruin. The insurer will deny claims, the hospital will press them, a collection agency will buy them, and no one will forgive anything. Welcome to Ayn Rand Memorial Medical Center, folks!

My pharmacist is now required by law to counsel me if the prescription is new. This is a fine idea in theory, since physicians don’t know everything about a drug and don’t take the time to discuss it. In practice, it’s a joke. I go to a 24-hour pharmacy in a drugstore chain and it’s understaffed. With my latest, I waited ten minutes before a rumpled and worried Indian man rushed out and said “It is diuretic. Do you have questions?” and then ran off. This is his usual practice.

When I got home I looked at the bottle and there was a sticker on it saying that I should stay out of direct natural or artificial sunlight. Sure enough, looking up the stuff revealed that it increases sensitivity to the sun and that special attention to sunscreen and protective clothing is strongly advised. What if the clerk hadn’t put the sticker on the thing, or I hadn’t looked? People around here have the hobby of lying in the sun.

Requiring professionals to do something vital and then giving them no time to do it doesn’t work. The invisible hand just punched me in the nuts again.