I didn’t have time to do a write up on this fight, but I didn’t think Sergio Martinez would take him out that quick. I still got to place a little bet on this this one so I got a little extra walking around money, which is all that matters.
Here is a great interview with one of the financial characters I respect the most, Marc Faber.
Watch the whole thing, or start watching at 1:43:
Weesh Interview stiff: You have lived much of your life overseas in Asia?
Marc Faber: Yes.
Weesh Interview stiff: If you were to counsel a 20 year old American today, and say “go pick a country, go live there, go make your fortune there”, where would you tell him to go?
Marc Faber: Well, that depends obviously on preferences. I like Asian Women. Maybe someone else likes Brazilians or Cubans or Russians or Eastern Europeans. I mean there are lots of things to consider…
There is no doubt that George Bush damaged America’s reputation Internationally, as anyone who has travel the world extensively since the 1990’s will tell you.
This year however, I have noticed that the once great “Image” of Americans has also taken a header like Cisco did recently (and I am not talking about that weesh R&B artist, that wack food supply company, or that low-end booze that makes fools jump out of windows either).
I started noticing America’s Image Problem when I went to Barcelona earlier this year. I told the story of a stunningly beautiful Catalan girl who stepped to me in a dope hotel bar. (Side note: I can’t really blame her since I was feeling great and I was wearing a sicker than “foot in mouth” Custom Made Suit).
Anyways, after consummating the relationship in my dope apartment in the Eixample, she started off an interesting conversation:
Fly Catalan Girl: I am surprised you are American.
Michael Mason: (Not really in the mood for conversation, but I decide to bite) Why?
Fly Catalan Girl: Because you seem cool, and you have good style.
Michael Mason: Most American’s that come to Barcelona don’t?
Fly Catalan Girl: No. Most American’s are wankers.
(Side note II: She learned her English while modeling in London. Hence the use of the word “wanker”).
I really thought nothing of the exchange at the time.
Then fast forward to London Fashion week, when I was hanging out with a fly rich daughter of a Colombian mining family. We were taking a leisurely stroll near Wellington Square in Chelsea, puffing on jacks.
Michael Mason: Where have you traveled to in America?
Fly Rich Colombian Girl: NYC, California, DC, Miami Beach, New Orleans, Las Vegas etc (continuing a long list).
Michael Mason: Do you like America?
Fly Rich Colombian Girl: Yes, its nice to visit. But I am am always surprised by how fat the people are. Especially the girls.
This conversation was pretty interesting, as I aways thought that America had pulled one over on the rest of the world making them think our women were tops through our Media and Hollywood Hype Machine. But I didn’t think too much of it, as this fly rich Colombian girl had actually been to America, and thus “pulled the curtain back”, so to speak.
This whole thing really came to a “head”, so to speak, on my recent travels to Riga, Latvia.
I had no less that 5 different girls in Riga, Latvia say to me: “American Girls, they are really fat, yeah?” And only a couple of them had actually been to America.
I was particually brutal when I was hanging out with two fly Latvian girls, 18 and 19 years old, with thin, beautiful Baltic bodies and they said “American Girls, they are really fat, yeah?” and both girls started laughing evilly, wickedly and uncontrollably while sipping on cocktails.
It was then that I realized: America is a joke to the rest of the world.
How did we fall so fast?
The Rest is Up to You…
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn’t to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi’s ‘Griftopia’
In the summer of 2009 I got a call from an acquaintance who worked in the Middle East. He was a young American who worked for something called a sovereign wealth fund, a giant state-owned pile of money that swims around the world in search of things to buy.
Sovereign wealth funds, or SWFs, are huge in the Middle East. Most of the bigger oil-producing states have massive SWFs that act as cash repositories (with holdings often kept in dollars) for the revenues generated by, for instance, state-owned oil companies. Unlike the central banks of most Western countries, whose main function is to accumulate reserves in an attempt to stabilize the domestic currency, most SWFs have a mission to invest aggressively and generate huge long-term returns. Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty times bigger and outside the reach of the SEC or any other major regulatory authority, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what an SWF is.
My buddy was a young guy who’d come up working on the derivatives desk of one of the more dastardly American investment banks. After a few years of that he decided to take a step up morally and flee to the Middle East to go to work advising a bunch of sheiks on how to spend their oil billions.
Aside from the hot weather, it wasn’t such a bad gig. But on one of his trips home, we met in a restaurant and he mentioned that the work had gotten a little, well, weird.
“I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” he said. “They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . .”
I dropped my fork. “The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We didn’t do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn’t you know about this?”
It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.
“We’re shaking up the good ol’ boys,” Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. “Buck up,” she says, “or stay in the truck.”
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Taibbi’s Takedown of ‘Vampire Squid’ Goldman Sachs
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
Former Irish-American, Chicago Bears quaterback Jim McMahon has been in the news recently:
When Jim McMahon played for the Bears, quarterbacks were not protected the way they are today in the NFL.
“Back then, it was just tape an aspirin to your helmet and you go back in,” McMahon told us Friday at the Super Bowl XX Bears reunion. “I’ve worked with some neurosurgeons and it’s a very serious thing, man.
“My memory’s pretty much gone. There are a lot of times when I walk into a room and forget why I walked in there. I’m going through some studies right now and I am going to do a brain scan. It’s unfortunate what the game does to you.”
I have said before that I think the last full football game I have watched was the 1985 Chicago Bears Superbowl win when I was a little cub.
Although I didn’t grow up in Chicago, my grandfather and father lived there, when they traded the mean streets of Belfast, Ireland for the mean streets of Chicago’s Southside.
So, as a young little Baby G, I always liked the Chicago Bears.
Jim McMahon, who played football the way you are supposed to (all heart), was a two-time All-American (1980, 1981) in college, constantly told the NFL establishment to f*ck off, and led the Bears to the Superbowl title.
Winning the Superbowl, however, is not why Jim McMahon makes The G Manifesto Hall of Fame, as plenty of weesh guys have a Superbowl Ring. Jim McMahon, makes The G Manifesto Hall of Fame because of what he did the night before the big game.
A few years back, I was hung over after swooping an Exotic Dancer, and I started flipping around the channels. I stopped on some kind of “re-cap” show of the 1985 football season.
McMahon was talking about the night before the Superbowl how he and a bunch of other Bears were drinking and smoking, and hanging out with the people at a bar in New Orleans.
(Side note: Legend has it that, earlier in the week, at Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar, on of my all-time favorite spots, The Fridge had reportedly sucked down four dozen oysters and a vat of gumbo.)
In the bar, he famously said: “You’ve got to teach your body who’s boss! If you’re feeling down, go out and abuse it again. If you don’t test your body, it will never learn how to respond.”
After a while, a bunch of New England Patriots walked in the bar, got a water or some crap and then headed back to their hotel to make sure they got a good nights sleep before the big game.
Legend also has it, McMahon, then yelled, cigarette and beer in hand, to the Patriots as they were leaving: “You p*ssies, we are going to kick your ass tomorrow!”
And they did. 46-10.
Now that’s G.
The Rest is Up to You…
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
Jim McMahon Chicago Bears Highlights 1985
Chicago Bears-Super Bowl Shuffle (As wack as this is, the Bears are better than 90% of modern day rappers. And at least there is no auto-tune).
