Even as midprice hotels began losing business this past summer, luxury hotels continued to fill their rooms. Companies treated the hotels as perks for top executives and quality locations for high-level business meetings. And many leisure travelers considered a stay at a top hotel – even for a couple of days – to be worth the cost.
Times have changed.
Since mid-September, almost in parallel with the stock market turmoil, demand for high-end hotel rooms has plummeted. Patrick Ford, president of Lodging Econometrics, said that U.S. luxury hotel-room revenue rates “slowed in mid-September and really ratcheted downward during October.”
Revenue per available room, the standard measure of performance, dropped 14 percent at upscale and luxury hotels in the week ending Oct. 18 over the comparable week last year, according to Smith Travel Research. For hotels in general, the decline was about 8 percent.
I was at the Bellagio in Las Vegas for the first time last week (I typically stay at Wynn or THE HOTEL). I had to say there because I was invited to a meeting of Democratic heavyweights there. Bill Maher guest speaker. Chilled with Maher a Spearmint Rhino for a little too.
Bottom rooms were like $159 a night (of course I didn’t stay in the “bottom room” and it was pro-bono, but that is neither Google Stock nor Body Rock).
Super cheap. Motel-like prices.
The Rest is Up to You…
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA Your favorite International Playboy’s, favorite International Playboy
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
The time is 20:20 hrs on 4th September 2006, and Vincent Alexis Michaels is sitting at his computer, working overtime at the bank he has been employed at for over 5 years, in Montreal. Vincent is suspected of murdering his wife 11 years ago. Vincent is also a poker player and convicted sex offender.
What Mr. Michaels doesn’t know is that for the last 2 years, every time he has communicated with other people, using anything electronic, his emissions and communications have been intercepted by a group of 16 men based in Scotland. Landline calls, cell phone calls, emails, faxes, sms text messages, message board posts and internet browsing activity have been intercepted by a system known under a classified name.
Tonight is a date with justice. Tonight is a date where the Professional has planned everything so perfectly that not a piece of dust or a strand of hair is out of place. The Professional goes by the name David, and enters the building where Mr. Michaels works. David is equipped with an H&K Mark .23 Socom pistol with a knights armament corp sound suppressor and 3 lasers: 1 red, 1 green, 1 blue, to form a triangle of primary colours. David also has digital police scanners attached to his waist utility belt, and a PMR radio connected to Skype via Bluetooth, Wifi, and Wimax.
Skype is connected to an automated dialer, voice recognition equipment and signal analyzer. Power to the building will be dropped if a voice match against the target is confirmed.
David is wearing night vision goggles he bought from Utah over the internet. He has intercepted everything Vincent has done electronically for 2 years. He has planned this using 10 cycled anonymous proxies. David has viewed Google & Yahoo Maps, Google Earth, examined the electoral roll, and hacked into the RCMP’s database of criminal and sex offenders. Vincent doesn’t know his vehicle is tracked daily.
A mysterious man called Dr. David Webb, PhD, supplied the hitman with a laser reading device only possessed by the US Government. The device beams a laser at windows, and converts the internal air-pressure in a room, and the various bounces of sound off of that window, into a digital signal, and then converts it to analog sound, at the user’s request.
It takes David 8 flights of stairs to get up to the floor Vincent is on. Nobody can monitor the stairs, unlike the elevator, which can be monitored electronically.
“Pedro El Negro, Black Peter” “Peter has a list of all the bad kids” – “They receive a little donkey on their window sill, a little burro”. – Collateral
While preparing equipment and running a structured list through his mind, David listens to progressive house music and DJ sets such as Kenneth Thomas, Roger Liland, Perry O’Neil, Kasey Taylor and John Digweed. The beats match his work: no error, no room for mistake or a fade to black. This is not something you read in a book. Tonight he is listening to Abstract Habits (G Pal’s Bad Habit Remix) by Plastique Vision. Later he will listen to Space Drift by Undersky.
Undersky – Space Drift
David no longer feels emotion about a target. He has grown used to hearing about men all over the United States and Canada who hurt, abuse, torture or abandon their kids, men who murder their wives, or bank workers who give mortgages to people who they know can never pay it back. David is taking out the trash, the dregs of a deadbeat society. You become immune to emotion when emotion gets you killed. You become immune to emotion when your accuracy suffers because of it. David is a professional. He takes care of business, he gets the job done first time every time, and he does it with the aide of technology and a group of helpers who are so disconnected that even the CSE (Canadian Security Establishment) could not link any of them together.
Although being a hitman requires dedication, fitness, determination, and sometimes a rather cold, calculated attitude, David has other interests including computers, technology, mathematics and electronics. David is on a level of his own, and makes “Leon”, from the 1994 film of the same name, look like a joke. Jason Bourne wishes he could be David, even on a good day. Jack Bauer pales into insignificance compared to David.
It is now 20:43 hours and David has entered the building by using lockpicks to get in a door in a back alley. Prior to this, David had shown up in central Montreal, dressed in a flawless Versace suit and attended a corporate event. Near the middle of the event David went to the mens toilets and got changed and left through a window. He picked up his equipment at a classified location near abandoned warehouses.
David is wearing a Uniden BCD396T apco 25 ready digital police scanner and a Uniden two-way radio with a 20 mile range. The two-way radio is connected to an automatic voice sensor inside his vehicle, which houses it’s own Uniden Base Scanner, this time a BCD996T. He is monitoring Montreal’s response and SWAT team frequencies. David has a black Nomex lightweight balaclava in his utility belt, which he bought from Blackhawk Products in Virginia. On the right side of his belt is his silenced, tri-laser aimed pistol, a Mark .23 Socom, with Knights Armanent Corp Suppressor. On the left side on his belt he has silent flashbangs – flashbangs with no noise, just a magnesium burst, which effectively turns on all the retinal receptors at the back of your eye for a full 5 seconds, and makes your vision appear “paused”.
The building where the ‘dedos’ (target) lives, is almost entirely vacant, and David uses training he learned while at the French Special Police training facility outside of Paris, to avoid direct visual contact with anyone else.
Vincent is working on floor 4 in the “Investments and Savings” division. As David reaches floor 4, transmissions enter his earphones from his walkie-talkie: he is to take out the target without uttering a single word to him. Usually David has a question or some interrogation to carry out. Not this time. This is a mission of justice, revenge, punishment, and for David, absolute glory in taking out the trash of society. Vincent’s wife’s skull was found in 2004 by a rancher moving cattle. She had been missing since 1997. His wives’ family are connected to this contract, but he has no direct contact with them, too risky, too emotional. Vincent had also recently been found in possession of child pornography and showed no remorse whatsoever. A group from Illinois, which calls itself APMF – which stands for Anti-Paedophile Mercenary Force – took notice of Canadian news reports which linked Vincent to the people who own and run Limewire: the famous P2P program, which allows child porn on it’s network.
At 20:50 hours, David is at the start of the long line down the hall of floor 4. “PBX 139 to PBX 142, Target is in room 17.” David is wearing black military assault boots, black body overalls covered by a flightsuit. David puts on his balaclava, and night vision goggles, and attaches the suppressor to his weapon. As he begins to step down the hallway, everything goes into slow motion for David. He watches himself from above, behind, and to the side and at an angle from his own body.
“PBX 142 to PBX 139, cut power to building”. 3 seconds later the entire building is in darkness. He flips down his nightvision goggles and preps the holders on his silent flashbangs. As he approaches the door he moves at an angle and to the other side of it. He touches a switch and 3 military grade lasers come on in a triangular shape, and triad of colours: red, green and blue. All lasers have a 50 mile+ range in the darkness of night. David takes out a silent flash. The wooden beige coloured door is not locked but is closed over. He opens it so a space of about 10 inches and stops immediately.
“PBX 122 to PBX 142, Target in centre of room 17”. David has a sniper placed over a mile away in a building at the same height, who is armed with a Cheytac Intervention .408 calibre sniper rifle. The sniper is an ex-Navy Seal.
“Who’s there….hello….who’s there”. Vincent doesn’t understand why a door has opened and nobody came in. David then tears off the purple ripple-strip (better than a pin, which makes noise) from the silent flashbang and then throws it underarm into the computers at the centre of the room. He closes the door over, almost completely, for 2 seconds as it goes off. He then enters the room sticking closely to the wall, a pattern taught by the FBI-HRT (Federal Bureau of Investigation – Hostage Rescue Team). Through night vision he can see Vincent rubbing his eyes behind a computer in the centre of the room, and the lasers from his associate are coming into the window and dazzling him. David brings up the weapon to eye height, and then aims Vincent’s head. Two silenced rounds go off – a double tap. And Vincent falls to the ground.
“PBX 122 to PBX 142, couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Check target for memory sticks at computer.”
“Confirmed, Sandisk 16gb Cruzer Micro memory stick on desk, will retrieve.”
David then switches off his lasers, and leaves the building as quick as possible.
When David returns to his home in Scotland, he finds £400,000 in his bank account, and a letter from a contractor. The memory stick contained 25,000 images of child abuse. “Your next target will be given to you within 4 weeks”. “Here is a picture of the woman that Vincent murdered.” David looks at a photograph. “And the family who hired you to do this indirectly, if Vincent had got away with this murder, how angry would they be, how fucking furious do you think they would get, if the police couldn’t get justice?” David burns the letter and photograph.
The date stamp on the letter read “Fort Meade, Maryland”, which is where the NSA is based. The NSA’s new “Cyterix” program is part of a mission to rid America, Canada and Mexico of sex offenders who harm, abuse, and hurt children.
David has reached the Zenith of his career at 24: a hitman taking out the trash, and doing it in a way which makes the movies look lame.
Block the Vote: Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast
Allegations of voter fraud are only the latest rationale the GOP has used to disenfranchise voters — especially blacks, Hispanics and others who traditionally support Democrats. “The Republicans have a long history of erecting barriers to discourage Americans from voting,” says Donna Brazile, chair of the Voting Rights Institute for the Democratic National Committee. “Now they’re trying to spook Americans with the ghost of voter fraud. It’s very effective — but it’s ironic that the only way they maintain power is by using fear to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to vote.” The recently enacted barriers thrown up to deter voters include:
1. Obstructing Voter-Registration Drives
Since 2004, the Bush administration and more than a dozen states have taken steps to impede voter registration. Among the worst offenders is Florida, where the Republican-dominated legislature created hefty fines — up to $5,000 per violation — for groups that fail to meet deadlines for turning in voter-application forms. Facing potentially huge penalties for trivial administrative errors, the League of Women Voters abandoned its voter-registration drives in Florida. A court order eventually forced the legislature to reduce the maximum penalty to $1,000. But even so, said former League president Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the reduced fines “create an unfair tax on democracy.” The state has also failed to uphold a federal law requiring that low-income voters be offered an opportunity to register when they apply for food stamps or other public assistance. As a result, the annual number of such registrations has plummeted from more than 120,000 in the Clinton years to barely 10,000 today.
2. Demanding “Perfect Matches”
Under the Help America Vote Act, some states now reject first-time registrants whose data does not correspond to information in other government databases. Spurred by HAVA, almost every state must now attempt to make some kind of match — and four states, including the swing states of Iowa and Florida, require what is known as a “perfect match.” Under this rigid framework, new registrants can lose the right to vote if the information on their voter-registration forms — Social Security number, street address and precisely spelled name, right down to a hyphen — fails to exactly match data listed in other government records.
There are many legitimate reasons, of course, why a voter’s information might vary. Indeed, a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that as many as 20 percent of discrepancies between voter records and driver’s licenses in New York City are simply typing mistakes made by government clerks when they transcribe data. But under the new rules, those mistakes are costing citizens the right to vote. In California, a Republican secretary of state blocked 43 percent of all new voters in Los Angeles from registering in early 2006 — many because of the state’s failure to produce a tight match. In Florida, GOP officials created “match” rules that rejected more than 15,000 new registrants in 2006 and 2007 — nearly three-fourths of them Hispanic and black voters. Given the big registration drives this year, the number could be five times higher by November.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA Your favorite International Playboy’s, favorite International Playboy
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
Blocking the vote Rachel Maddow Robert F. Kennedy Jr
Prop. K in San Francisco calls for legal prostitution
Proposition K would effectively decriminalize prostitution in the city by barring the Police Department from investigating and prosecuting it. The measure is being alternately hailed as a human rights landmark or a misguided venture that will turn San Francisco into a playground for sex tourists and pimps.
Proposition K
What it does: Would decriminalize prostitution in San Francisco, deny funds for the First Offender Prostitution Program commonly known as “john school,” and forbid the city from using state or federal funds that involve racial profiling to identify human trafficking victims.
Supporters: Erotic Service Providers Union, San Francisco Democratic Party, Harvey Milk Democratic Club, La Raza Centro Legal.
Argument in support: Will improve safety for sex workers, reduce sexually transmitted diseases and save the city millions of dollars spent annually on prosecuting prostitution while still requiring enforcement of laws against sexual assault, coercion and other crimes.
Opponents: Mayor Gavin Newsom, District Attorney Kamala Harris, Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club
I don’t really understand these kind “Props” that well, but if it really Legalizes Prostitution and protects the girls, then I am all for it.
Think of how dope San Francisco will be. We will be mixing up some serious Cioppino. Either way I am headed there early November.
Come on Gavin!
The Rest is Up to You…
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA Your favorite International Playboy’s, favorite International Playboy
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
What’s love got to do with it Tina Turner (Grammy’s 1985)
We asked Anda Rowland, owner of Anderson & Sheppard, which recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, what the outlook is for the Row’s traditional tailoring firms.
“We are still getting new customers and many enquiries, but it has to be said that London is not really in the mood to spend and people are traveling [to London] less,” Rowland tells Luxist. “Luckily, despite the turn away from ‘bling’ spending, there has been a renewed interest in goods that have an underlying value, which is perceived as more solid and easier to understand and to explain to the customer. There is a shift from the ‘Because I’m worth it’ attitude towards one questioning ‘Was it worth it?'”
Asked about the influx of money from emerging markets, “Speaking for Anderson & Sheppard, we have not seen a growth in customers from Russia or from the UAE,” she replies. “We have had more press interest, but it has not filtered through to visits yet. China and India are growing markets [for us] due, perhaps, to a historical familiarity with the history and tradition of Savile Row.” As for the future, “I have heard from the other tailors that they believe that their trips abroad will be more and more important over the next couple of years,” Rowland says. “They feel that customers will be traveling far less and that overseas service will help them to keep the workshops busy and running efficiently.”
Summing up, Rowland, who inherited the business a few years back from her father, is optimistic. “As a relative newcomer to this industry where most houses are at least 100 years old, I am reassured by the reaction of most tailors who say that their firms have seen it all several times before,” she tells us. “I can imagine that for many of the big designer brands that are much younger, it is harder to be as quietly confident as we are on Savile Row.”
With the falling pound, it is time to pick up some more Savile Row Suits.
Worth their weight in Gold in a Down Economy. A flight to quality if you will.
The Rest is Up to You…
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA Your favorite International Playboy’s, favorite International Playboy
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
