A Thai court on Tuesday rejected a U.S. request to extradite a Russian arms dealer who allegedly sold weapons to dictators and warlords around the world, raising the prospect that he could be freed by the weekend.
The unexpected ruling in favor of Viktor Bout was welcomed by Russia. The United States, which had mounted the sting operation that led to his arrest at a Bangkok hotel, said it was “mystified” by the court’s decision.
Bangkok Criminal Court Judge Chittakorn Pattanasiri said Thai prosecutors have 72 hours to indicate whether to appeal, and, if not, Bout will be set free. If an appeal is filed, Bout will be held pending further proceedings.
The 42-year-old Bout, who has denied any wrongdoing, jumped up from his seat upon hearing Tuesday’s ruling and hugged his crying wife. He flashed a victory sign to TV cameras as he was escorted from the courtroom by guards.
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
If you aren’t a natural at deflecting shit tests of all varieties, then you must teach yourself. For those men not blessed with the quickness of mind and aloofness of temperament to handle shit tests like a champ, a system must be devised. I’ve found one. I call it the Agree & Amplify anti-shit test counterinsurgency.
YOU: “Zero. Could you be a dear and hook up my feeding tube?”
***
GIRL: “I didn’t like the way you flirted with that girl at the party tonight.”
YOU: “I know, I’m an incorrigible flirt. Good thing you didn’t see the other ten girls I flirted with. Phew!”
***
GIRL: “You never get me flowers or write me poetry.”
YOU: “You’re right. Just think of my cock as a flower and our fucking as poetry in motion.”
***
GIRL: “I think we should take this slower.”
YOU: “You read my mind! Can I pencil you in next month?”
***
GIRL: [Making it obvious she’s flirting with another guy in your presence.]
YOU: “Hey, if you’re gonna try to make me jealous by flirting in front of me, at least put on a good show. I haven’t seen bad flirting like that since your Mom tried to pick me up.”
***
GIRL: “Buy me a drink.”
YOU: “Sure thing. Would you like my ATM pin number as well?”
***
GIRL: [Calls you back two days after you left her a message.]
YOU: “Only two days later? Wow, you’re slipping. A true player waits a year before calling back.”
***
GIRL: “I really feel we aren’t compatible.”
YOU: “You’re right, we’re *totally* incompatible. I like to wake up at 8:30 and you get up at 8:15. Who can live with that?!”
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
Six months ago, I received an odd phone call from a man named Jake DeSantis at A.I.G. Financial Products—the infamous unit of the doomed insurance company, staffed by expensively educated, highly paid traders, whose financial ineptitude is widely suspected of costing the U.S. taxpayer $182.5 billion and counting. At the time A.I.G. F.P.’s losses were reported, it became known that a handful of traders in this curious unit had sold trillions of dollars of credit-default swaps (essentially unregulated insurance policies) on piles of U.S. subprime mortgages, but its employees hadn’t yet become the leading examples of Wall Street greed. And so this was before Jake DeSantis and his colleagues found themselves suburban-Connecticut outcasts, before their first death threats, before the House of Representatives passed a bill because of them (taxing 90 percent of their large bonuses), before New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced he was going after their paychecks, and before Iowa senator Charles Grassley said that A.I.G.’s leaders should follow the Japanese example and “either do one of two things, resign or go commit suicide.”
DeSantis turned out to be a friend of a friend. He’d called because he didn’t know anyone else “in the media.” As a type he was instantly recognizable: a “quant,” a numbers guy who was allowed to take financial risks because of his superior math skills, but who had no taste for company politics or public exposure. He’d grown up in the Midwest, the son of schoolteachers, and discovered Wall Street as a scholarship student at M.I.T. The previous seven years he’d spent running A.I.G. F.P.’s profitable stock-market-related trades. He wasn’t looking for me to write about him or about A.I.G. F.P. He just wanted to know why the public perception of what had happened inside his unit, and the larger company, was so different from the private perception of the people inside it, who actually knew what had happened. The idea that the employees of A.I.G. F.P. had conspired to maximize their short-term gains at the company’s longer-term expense, for instance. He and the other traders had been required to defer about half of their pay for years, and intertwine their long-term interests with their firm’s. The people who lost the most when A.I.G. F.P. went down were the employees of A.I.G. F.P.: DeSantis himself had just watched more than half of what he’d made over the previous nine years vanish. The incentive system at A.I.G. F.P., created in the mid-1990s, wasn’t the short-term-oriented racket that helped doom the Wall Street investment bank as we knew it. It was the very system that U.S. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, among others, had proposed as a solution to the problem of Wall Street pay.
Even more oddly, the public explanation of A.I.G.’s failure focused on the credit-default swaps sold by traders at A.I.G. F.P., when A.I.G.’s problems were clearly broader. There was the mortgage-insurance unit in North Carolina, United Guaranty, that had taken on all sorts of silly risks in the past two years, lost several billion dollars, and replaced their C.E.O. There were the fund managers at A.I.G., the parent company, who had blown nearly $50 billion on trades in subprime mortgages—that is, they had lost more than A.I.G. F.P., whose losses stood around $45 billion. And there was a pattern: all of this stuff had happened since 2005, after an accounting scandal forced C.E.O. Maurice “Hank” Greenberg to resign. Greenberg, who had headed A.I.G. since 1968, was a bullying, omnipotent ruler—one of those bosses who did not so much build a company as tailor it to his character and render it incapable of being run by anyone else. After he was forced out, Greenberg said, “The new management wanted to prove that they could continue to grow without former management” and so turned a blind eye to all sorts of risks. So how come most of the senior management at A.I.G. was left in place by the U.S. Treasury after the bailout? Why were officials, both public and private, so intent on leading others to believe all the losses at A.I.G. had been caused by a few dozen traders in this fringe unit in London and Connecticut?
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
When I stepped out into the bright sunlight, from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: swooping Cherry Valance and a smoking cigarettes on ride home…
Dallas Winston, the “tougher, colder, meaner” greaser in The Outsiders was a master of Cigarette Game. Especially from a young G’s perspective.
In the opening scenes of The Outsiders Movie, you can see him spit Game at Sherri “Cherry” Valance at the drive in movie theater.
Finally Hollywood gets something right. (These days Hollywood is knuckling under from pressure to have no cigarette smoking in movies. Which makes you wonder how they are ever going to make a movie about me with no smoking.)
He busts the Strike Anywhere Match Move and then let’s the lyrics and Game flow. Listen and learn:
Dallas Winston: Some cute redhead.
Dallas Winston: Are you a real redhead?
Dallas Winston: Are you real?
Dallas Winston: How can I find out
if this is your real red hair?
Dallas Winston: If this is the same red hair
that you have on…these eyebrows, too?
Johnny: Cut it out Dal.
Cherry Valance: Get your feet off my chair
and shut your trap!
Dallas Winston: Who’s gonna make me?
Johnny: I’m gonna get a Coke
Dallas Winston: Who, your boyfriend?
Pony Boy: Leave her alone, Dal
Other Chick: That’s the Greaser who just
got out of jail.
Dallas Winston: Sure, whatever you say, honey
Cherry Valance: Better leave us alone or
I’ll call the cops.
Dallas Winston: You got me scared to death.
What am I gonna do, Pony?
Dallas Winston: This girl is making me shake.
Cherry Valance: Why don’t you be nice and leave us alone?
Dallas Winston: I’m never nice.
Dallas Winston: Can I interest you in
a Coca-Cola or a 7-Up?
Cherry Valance: Get lost, hood!
Dallas Winston: I’m sorry.
Dallas Winston: I didn’t know…I didn’t know you had this problem
of yelling in my face.
A+ Game.
Excellent opening salvo, that to the untrained eye seemed like it didn’t work.
Until, start watching at 7:44 (or hell, you really should watch the whole thing):
The Outsiders part 2
Cherry Valance: I hope I never see Dallas Winston again.
If I do, I’ll probably fall in love with him.
And…Cherry is cooked.
This movie was from back in the days of my youth, when Hollywood actually had Alpha males in movies. Not like all this non-smoker, Forgetting Sarah Marshall sissy, beta crap these days, that is just not believable to your average ex-street hood.
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
It is best done when you have isolated the girl you want to swoop as a prelude to untamed passion and smoldering sexual tension.
Here is Paul Henreid busting The Double Cigarette Light Move on Bette Davis back in the day:
Bette Davis ~ Don’t Let’s Ask For The Moon(Now Voyager 1942)
The move is a great comfort and rapport builder that exudes Romance and Mystery (And I don’t mean that pick up artist that wears goggles and fuzzy top hats either)
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
