Thursday, January 16, 2025

What's the Value of Hunter Biden Art?

....in five days it should all be $0, as his Dragon Eggs will become worthless without a dragon to redeem them.

Ben Kew, "REPORT: Hunter Biden Loses 200 Of His Artworks in California Fires – Claims Value at ‘Millions of Dollars’"
Hunter Biden has reportedly lost hundreds of his treasured artworks in the Los Angeles wildfires.

According to The New York Post, Hunter’s artworks went up in flames as wildfires continued to ravage the city, leaving thousands of properties in its wake.

The report states:
A trove of nearly 200 artworks by Hunter Biden has been destroyed — one of the casualties of the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles, The Post has learned.

The controversial art had been in storage near the Pacific Palisades home of Hunter’s Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris and is valued at “millions of dollars,” a source close to the Biden family said.

Morris, who loaned the first son nearly $5 million to help pay a tax bill and has been financing a documentary on him, lives in a sprawling five-bedroom, six-bathroom home which is among the few houses still intact in the posh neighborhood, The Post can confirm.

A lawyer for Hunter Biden, who is a self-taught artist who turned to painting while in recovery from drug addiction, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Hunter’s ventures into the art world have long raised eyebrows for their sky-high valuations and consequent sales.

His abstract and mixed-media pieces have been sold for prices ranging from $75,000 to $500,000, figures that are more likely due to his family connections than his artistic talent.

In fact, many of his buyers have since been revealed to have been purchased by Democratic donors and other wealthy allies of the Biden family.

The most prominent of these buyers was Morris, who bought 11 works of Hunter’s art for $875,000.

Morris also previously covered $2 million in Hunter’s unpaid tax bills taxes o a $50,000 donation to Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020.

Last month, local landlord Shaun Maguire claimed that Hunter owes him $300,000 in back pay rent and had tried to pay him with artwork made of his own feces.

“Hunter was our tenant in Venice, CA. Didn’t pay rent for over a year. Tried to pay w/ art made from his own feces,” Maguire explained.
“Absolute shit bag,” he added.
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Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Trump: The Ultimate Troll's Troll


A MASTER of creating and exploiting a Reflexive Environment...
A reflexive environment is one where everybody has to talk about a certain thing. That thing is going to be very polarizing, and there are either going to be one, or two, right ways to talk about it. Usually they're going to be diametrically opposed to one another, and that means it's a dialectical weapon.
 
When George Soros famously shorted the the pound sterling in like '92 or whatever, which led to him writing "The Alchemy of Finance" where he said that "Alchemy is not interested in truth like the scientific method, it's interested in operational success." The method he said that they used to do the Alchemy of Finance was reflexivity. The idea is that you start jinning up an idea and make the idea become true because everybody starts talking about it and believing it in a particular way. So "the current thing" takes place in a reflexive environment (often Social Media).

On praising your negotiation "adversaries" (like Kim Jong Il) once an offer has been made: 

h/t - Woodsterman

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Monday, January 13, 2025

Maryland Struggles to Fund It's Bloated State Gov Bureaucracy...

...and will pay outside consultants 20% of all Budget Savings Identified because the State employees are too incompetent to form their own DOGE like team?  I wonder how the Dem politicians in DC would react if Elon were entitled by a Trump-let contract to 20% of all federal budget savings he identified.... 20% of $2 trillion capped at $300b?

Jack Bowman, "Gov. Moore launches Maryland 'modernization' plan, aims for $50 million in savings"
Gov. Wes Moore is directing his administration to scour the state’s spending for waste and inefficiency, with a goal of producing $50 million in savings.

Moore announced the effort, called the Government Modernization Initiative, two days after promising to propose a budget with $2 billion in cuts, an attempt to address a projected $3 billion deficit.

“It’s finding the breakage in the systems and fixing them so we’re not papering it over in more expensive ways later on,” Moore said of the initiative in a Friday announcement.

The initiative is aimed at finding inconsistent or unnecessary spending throughout state government, fixing “things that have long been broken.”

Moore went on to mention inefficiencies including under-utilized state vehicles and inconsistently-priced technology and equipment that, if addressed, could save the state $50 million “this year alone.”

Chief Performance Officer Asma Mirza and the performance cabinet will spearhead the effort. Elisabeth Sachs, a longtime nonprofit and state/local government leader, will also contribute to the project.

Boston Consulting Group will also be brought on to aid in the analysis. In a pay-for-performance contract approved in October, the state will pay the firm, one of the “big three” in strategy consulting, a 20% share of the savings achieved, with a maximum payout of $15 million.

The study will begin this year, with a goal of implementing changes by fiscal year 2026, which begins in July.

“We know the challenges that exist,” Moore said. “It’s created a chance for this team to show what we’re made of, because we will address it, and Maryland will grow.”

Really?  $15 million on outside consultants? No wonder they're $3b in the hole... @@

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Civilization and Its' Discontents...

...I gotta assuage me some white guilt-pride!

What responsibilities do individuals have in supporting and maintaining their civilization?  What sacrifices should we be expected to make for it?

Meden agan!
Perkins Coie
Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit disclosure as to the origins of an investigation.[1]

In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures (ie - 702 NSA dB search), and then passes it on to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer.[2] This practice gained support after the Supreme Court's 2009 Herring v. United States decision.[2]
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Sunday, January 12, 2025

We Cannot Remainheah...

Paul Serran, "Hundreds of Thousands Flood the Streets in Romania to Protest Cancelling of the Presidential Election Over Bogus ‘Russian Influence’ Charge "
Hundreds of thousands of Romanians furious with the current government for the cancellation of the presidential election marched today (12) through the capital Bucharest to demand that the vote should proceed and that outgoing – and by now illegitimate – President Klaus Iohannis should resign.

Reuters reported:
“In a move that polarized voters, Romania’s top court voided the presidential election on Dec. 6, two days before the second round.

The cancellation came after state documents showed frontrunner Calin Georgescu, a critic of NATO, had benefited from an unfair social media campaign likely to have been orchestrated by Russia, accusations Moscow has denied.”
Reuters is lying, here – the documents show no proof whatsoever of Russian involvement, and the ‘campaign’ they object to was proven to have been financed by Romanians.
Watch: 100,000+ take to the streets.

Romania’s top court ordered a re-run of the election. Governing party leaders have agreed – not yet officially – party to hold the two rounds on May 4 and May 18.

Illegitimate President Iohannis, whose term expired on Dec. 21, vows to stay on ‘until his successor is elected’.

Organizers say over 100,000 people were at the protest, but riot police estimated at only around 20,000.
“’Our right to vote was broken’, said Bogdan Danila, a 43-year-old truck driver. ‘In addition, Iohannis was in power for ten years and did nothing for the people, while parties betrayed us, they are all corrupt. We want something else’.

[…] ‘Authorities must say why they cancelled the election, we want to see the evidence’, said Cornelia, 57, an economist wrapped in a Romanian flag who declined to give her last name. ‘At this rate we won’t be voting anymore, they will impose a leader like in the old days’.”

Romanian Presidential Elections Will Be Held AGAIN on May 4th – Globalist Establishment Desperate That Right-Wing Georgescu Still Has the Support of 40% of the Voters
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Who Should You Believe... Your Own Eyes, or the Media Victim Narrative?

What is white guilt-pride? It's believing in things that are both "not true and can't be denied".

from Wikipedia:
Wilfred Reilly is an American political scientist. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Southern Illinois University and a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law.[2] Reilly's research focuses on empirical testing of political claims.
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(D) Politicians Keep Victimizing Victims for Personal Gain

Who will watch the watchdogs?

Ely Bonchie, "Wildfire ActBlue 'Donation' Scandal Explodes, Elizabeth Warren Implicated While Obama Bros Go Berzerk"
Outrage is exploding over a push by numerous Democrats to get people to donate to wildfire "relief funds" facilitated through ActBlue, the party's scandal-ridden fundraising apparatus.

As RedState reported on Saturday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom made the ill-advised move to go on "Pod Save America," a far-left show run by former Barack Obama staffers, while large parts of Los Angeles County still burned. His attempt to pass the buck and paint himself as an innocent bystander amid a laundry list of government failures was bad enough, but then came the plea for donations.

Within hours, Sen. Elizabeth Warren put up a similar donation link, again directing people to ActBlue. At the top of the donation screen sits her campaign logo.

Why exactly are Democrats trying to get people to donate relief funds through a partisan fundraising operation? Especially since that operation skims off 3.95 percent, and that's assuming every single other dime ends up passing through untouched. To put it lightly, that's hardly a benefit of the doubt ActBlue and these Democrat politicians should be receiving. 
But while many suspected these donation links, which require the entry of an email, are being used to build political contact lists, the manipulation may go much deeper than initially expected. According to the DC Reporter, one political laid out how this affects the Super PAC in question, calling it "the most evil **** I have ever seen."
Dark money groups frequently have to get creative to spend the social welfare portion of their programming budget. But money raised for these charities that passes through the (c)(4) allows for money raised elsewhere to go to electioneering ads. “This is prima facia non-political cap space that they are generating,” the veteran strategist strategist told the Reporter.

“Let’s say they raise $6 million in money for the fire that they pass on to these [501(c)(3)s]. The next $4 million that they take in from a major donor can go directly to a super PAC undisclosed without having to take a haircut. This lets a major donor give $4 million undisclosed to a Democrat super PAC. This is like the most evil [****] I have ever seen. Using a (c)(4) to generate dark money cap space on the back of the worst natural disaster in recent California history is such appalling behavior.”
Putting aside whether ActBlue is directly profiting from these fundraising efforts, using donations to wildfire victims to manipulate the Super PAC system for partisan gain is absolutely grotesque. Of course, there's no reason to believe ActBlue isn't also taking its cut, given there's been no proof offered that they aren't.

Then there's the issue of what the charities involved in this actually do. One of them is the "Latino Community Foundation," which is a "frontline immigrant rights" organization. In other words, it's a typical open-border NGO that helps facilitate the illegal immigration crisis. How much money are they going to send to wildfire victims when their mission is completely unrelated to them?

Meanwhile, we've gotten hysterical posts like the one below from "Crooked Media" co-founder and "Pod Save America host Jon Lovett.
For one, Lovett doesn't seem to know what the word "directly" means. If the money is going through ActBlue, then it is, by definition, not going directly to relief organizations, and that brings us to the million-dollar question: Why not just provide links directly to these various charities instead of sending people to ActBlue?

I attempted to get an answer from Jon Favreau, another "Pod Save America" bro.

Are we supposed to believe that former Obama staffers have a special skill for "vetting" relief organizations? And even if that were the case (it's not), it would make far more sense to send people directly to those charities to donate than to run a shell game through ActBlue. Nothing about this scheme makes sense unless you assume the worst, and right now, I see zero reason not to assume the worst.
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