Dodge Winston's Blotter

Yep! Now that Greece can’t form a pro-austerity government, meaning that it is more than likely that an anti-austerity government will be formed in June, depositors are making a run on their local Greek banks.

Global meltdown coming to a street corner near you.

Dodge

Do you like taking shots? Perhaps you like to toss back a few whiskey shots or some other spirit of choice once in awhile. Well I found a cool shotglass. It’s the Fred and Friends Doomed: ‘Crystal Skull’ Shotglass

I really dig the fact that the skull appears to float in the glass. It wasn’t simply made in the shape of a skull to sit on a counter like any other skull-shaped drinking cup. It floats like some specter of alcohol.

Personally I don’t drink much. But I used to back in the day. Boy did I ever! And the skull shotglass would have been a great addition to my drinking toolkit. When I’m retired I can envision myself with a big beard taking a shot of whiskey as I stand on my cabin’s porch. Until then I’ll settle for a cold glass of water as I take a break from mowing the back lawn. You see I’m a responsible, family man and always will be. The floating skull shotglass doesn’t mesh too well for now. But it will in my golden years.

Dream on!

Dodge

Well the elections for Greece have been completed. Apparently the pro-bailout parties of the New Democracy and Pasok parties were 2 votes short of a majority. Many Greeks were fed up with the austerity program that their leaders and the EU were applying, so much of the populace changed their tune and went with anti-bailout parties to stem the tide of cuts.

In one sense you need to make cuts if revenue is not meeting demand as opposed to borrowing into oblivion which is what we do… borrow until our debt is greater than our revenue. Pathetic. The U.S. will be like Greece someday. No one can bail America out though. What will we do? Start another war? Anyway, Greece ran itself into the ground with their own economic policies. But there are bigger implications with this election. With the growing power of the conservatives and the right-wing parties, Greece could be released from the EU if they decide to not follow the austerity program as outlined. That is what many of the Greeks voted for – anti-austerity as opposed to being anti-EU. I don’t know if Greece can have one without the other so on down the road we just may see Greece leave the fold.

In France, Sarkozy was not reelected. Hollande, a Socialist, was. This is the first time since the 80′s with Francois Mitterrand a Socialist has been elected. Hollande apparently has a “tense” relationship with the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, and it is expected that France will be battling the cash cow, Germany in the future over Greece, bailouts, etc.. So how did Hollande get elected? Well one of the things he wanted was to repeal the retirement age from 62 and back down to 60. So pensions were and are a big deal. When are they not?

As the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) continue to sink in REAL debt the EU will feel more of the pain. Lookout for lawsuits filed in the International Court as well. This is not going to get better. It will get worse. Believe it. Don’t buy into the fake headlines and the political hype. Money talks and bullshit walks.

Dodge

Have you seen the U.S. Debt Clock? It is terrifying. The numbers that we are dealing in are so astronomical that when it comes time to really clamp down on government borrowing/spending, Greece’s austerity deal will look like a skip through the park compared to what we will have to do to satisfy our debtors foreign and domestic.

The site also allows you to assess individual state and other countries debt near the upper left side of the page. There are countries that are way worse off. Fortunately for them they are small compared to us. After all who can afford to bail out America when the sh*t hits the fan?

NO ONE!!!

With hard data in front of me I dread what kind of country my government is leaving for our kids – the future. It is a disgrace. What’s even scarier is that some economists claim that our debt is actually much larger than what is being reported. Is that even possible?!

So what’s the solution? Run for the hills? I wish I could win the lottery. If I did I would cash in a big chunk of my U.S. dollars for foreign currencies and move to a more economically stable country. Then again if all of these debtor nations fall, even to a single knee, the entire globe will suffer.

You best plan for Hell on Earth.

Peace out,

Dodge

I stumbled upon a thread at the Absolute Write forum that was about a cake. Not a normal Happy Birthday cake. A cake that was done in the shape of an African woman. It was to be eaten from the pubic area on up to depict the horrors of female genital mutilation. At the top of the cake was the real head of the artist, Makode aj Linde, a male light-skinned black performance artist in black face, who would scream every time someone took a slice from down below.

Personally I found the video to be powerful. It makes a huge statement in many ways. It expresses the sick nature of female genital mutilation in a way that is… well the video made me cringe. The vid also does something else. There is a racial aspect. Web news sites and blogs are blowing up right now not because of the topic per-say but because every person surrounding the “cake” is white; white women. The event took place in Sweden. Even the Swedish Minister of ‘Culture’ took a piece.

On one hand you have a brutal depiction of female genital mutilation and on the other you have white women eating it up… literally. I suppose if those who participated had declined then they may have been branded racists for not wanting to bring light to such a horrible reality for women of a warmer hue. Since the white folks did participate they will be branded with racial epithets. It seems to be a losing situation all the way around.

As you watch the video the term “tasteless” may arise. It may be “tasteless”. Still it has people all over the world talking about more than one issue – female genital mutilation, racism, feminism, art as a political medium, oppression, etc.. There really is too much going on to get a good grasp upon it all yet there it all is in one scene. The spark is there. The rhetoric will fly. There may even be a job loss or two over this. But one thing that I’ve come to expect while alive on this planet is that there will always be controversy, conflict, and tasteless folks who will seek attention for themselves or their cause by any means necessary.

WARNING! The following video is not for the squeamish.

The Swedish Minister of Culture feeding the female genital mutilation cake “victim” a piece of itself.

On a similar note my books include situations that include sex traffickers, drug dealers, drug users, racial confrontation, psychological and physical abuse, wanton murder, and many other topics of a darker shade that some find uncomfortable. I haven’t been told that my writing is distasteful but I am willing to bet that there are some readers who would find my work unpalatable. That’s life. Without condoning or promoting what the performance artist did sometimes it takes a revolutionary (or a decoupling from evolution) to get an issue out there.

Watching that video made me aghast at the practice of female genital mutilation even though the focus has hit upon racial issues.

Any culture that practices FGM needs to stop. As far as the issues of racism and oppression go… I have no simple answer for that because it isn’t a simplistic problem. Parts of the world function using those very issues as tools for manipulation (especially the media as an industry). Individuals also go through life with racist views and oppressive desires. It seems to be the nature of the beast. The beast being us.

If an individual is attacked by someone of another color that victim may adapt by using old instincts of identifying all people of that same color as dangerous and racist beliefs will rise within even though we as human beings have the intelligence to know that one incident does not mean that an entire race is dangerous. A conflict between extreme, ancient survival techniques and intelligent, logical thinking can occur. That’s just one aspect. There are also others that are just looking to pick on a group no matter what. Can they even be reasoned with? Time will tell.

Once again we can thank the mainstream media and politicians for stirring this pot by how race is represented and played. They make money off of it. They divide us up with it. Many of us buy into it and fall for it.

I live in a city that has an equal amount of black and white. We have plenty of thugs here too (black and white thugs and those that just dress like them) – murder, shootings, car theft, muggings, and other wonderful crimes can occur on a daily basis here. I dread reading the local paper. The news is negative and drives paranoia into the mind. We also have plenty of good folks who are very kind and helpful as well. There is no shortage of good people. Unfortunately the other day a man was yelling the “N” word – nigger. I couldn’t roll up the passenger side window quick enough so that my young son couldn’t hear that word. It didn’t come from a white man. A black man was yelling it. These inciteful words are bandied about like they mean nothing when in fact they hold an incredible amount of meaning. In my mind I was like, “What the fuck?!”

Someday my sons will ask me about racial topics. They’ve already noticed that my skin is lighter than mommy’s (she’s from the Philippines and I’m mostly Caucasian even though my mother is half Irish and half Apache Indian… I still appear as white bread). The kids noticing is no big deal. It’s physical. Kids will notice. They have eyes. But the “N” word will need explaining among other things. It’s hard in the world. And there are those who want to take advantage of that difficulty. I just hope that in the end we can all use our heads before some folks of whatever color utilize media perpetuated reasons to kill people of different races off… oh wait that has been happening across the world forever.

Are we just screwed then? You decide by how you choose to behave.

Dodge

Remember her? This is a pic of Anck-Su-Namun from the movie The Mummy Returns played by Patricia Velasquez. The reason I’m posting this is because I was watching the opening episode for this season’s Celebrity Apprentice and Patricia Velasquez is on it. Her charity is the Wayúu Tayá Foundation.

Mission: To help improve the lives of Latin-American indigenous people while maintaining and respecting their traditions, culture and beliefs.

The reason that resonates with me is because of the books that I write. The antagonist in my Drake Eldorado series was bred upon the anvil of Hell so-to-speak. He aims to globalize the world via a plan that has worked on many other worlds. Through centuries of deception, manipulation, and war the global empire is near completion on our world.

Clearly, beyond my writing, the Wayúu Tayá Foundation aims to help preserve the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of the Wayúu, an indigenous group of over 450,000 people, located in the Guajira Peninsula of northern Colombia and northwest Venezuela.

To fight blatant corporatism, product placement, and brainwashing we must preserve our past. And that is just what the Wayúu Tayá Foundation is doing – preserving the past.

The Peruhai and some of the other native tribes as described in the second Drake Eldorado book, Agenda, didn’t have a foundation to help them preserve their way of life. Many of them were raped, enslaved, killed, seduced by alcoholism and drugs or taken by suicide just like many natives have been in real life. The encroachment of modern man has not been just a benefit; such as with medicine. It has also been a nightmare of temptation and greed brought about by corporate ideology. The old ways have been attacked, made fun of, and trounced upon as “old fashioned”. That’s real marketing at work to make the past seem irrelevant to what should be believed and purchased today. This recipe for disaster continues across the world.

Anyway it’s a worthy cause. The Wayúu Tayá Foundation is something that can help natives reclaim and preserve their identity in a world that is spinning so fast that it all has become a blur.

Check them out!

Dodge

Today on the radio I was listening to the news. It said that some countries were hoping Iran would be barred from making global financial transactions in response to the progression of their nuclear program. This could be accomplished through the organization, SWIFT.

SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative through which the financial world conducts its business operations with speed, certainty and confidence. More than 9,700 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 209 countries trust us every day to exchange millions of standardised financial messages.

The news report said that 80% of the world’s economic transactions go through SWIFT. Therefore Iranian businessmen would need to carry boxes of cash to do any global deals. Online transactions wouldn’t be an option apparently.

Personally I wasn’t even aware of SWIFT. We have the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8, the G20, Central Banks, SWIFT… anyway it’s clear that a global government is on the way. The tools and the institutions are already in place. The next step will be a global tax and then the elimination of currencies.

You think?

I think so.

Dodge