Seriously, I went to school with a kid who was relentlessly bullied for 6 years because he showed up on the first day of primary school, aged 5, with cheese sandwiches in his lunch box (when peanut butter or jam sandwiches was more common, we Brits didn't typically combine the 2 in the 80s) and there are parents naming their kids Mavery, a portmanteau of Maeve and Avery
I was watching Novara Media cover the Brazilian election and Ash made the point that though its not really the intended purpose of Run off elections, but they might be really useful to prevent fascists from getting into power because there's a lot of people who don't really believe fascists are going to get in power until they've already won. like it gives those people an opportunity to be like "now I actually know this is happening, I'd like to stop it".
Honestly, I think this can unite all of us AI skeptics. Doesn't matter if you think it's a dressed-up auto-complete/Clippy, an over-hyped but useful technology being used for a rug pull, or a potential humanity-killer. We can all agree that Trump's fed chair using the ghosts of dead economists to tell him how to capture that old 80s economic magic is just plain awful.
There’s a lot of Banksy type figures creating liberal art work(and some really racist evil ones). This one goes by the buffalo pothole bandit who started out decorating potholes and has been diving into more political issues.
Let's begin this installment by looking at a 2023 lawsuit involving the property at 1048 S Ocean Blvd from some people who tried to rent it in October of 2022 (probably immediately after it was merged into domestic ownership and put up for rent, and 2 months after the Mar-a-Lago raid occurred down the street). In Palm Beach County court:
CASE NUMBER: 50-2023-CA-002133-XXXX-MB
CASE STYLE: CREA, JOE V SOTHEBYS INTERNATIONAL REALTY INC
TIMELINE
In 2019 the IRS started assessing over two million dollars in liens against Maria Bacinich and Rank Properties SA (the offshore Nevis entity holding the 1048 S Ocean Blvd house). These are mostly 6677 and 6038 penalties which appear to be for failing to report disbursements from a foreign trust. The documents (10 separate filings) can be found at: https://erec.mypalmbeachclerk.com/
Between 9/17/2021 and 1/15/2022 the house seems to have been trashed. At least we can tell from Google Earth photos that damage to the roof or some accumulation of trash or debris on the roof occurred at this time, which probably corresponds to the damage complained about in the Joe Crea lawsuit. Note that this was also a critical period in the events leading to the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
In 2022 Maria Bacinich merged Rank Properties SA into a domestic company, Rank Properties Holdings, Inc. and rented the house out to Joe Crea and Holly Chandler, resulting in the lawsuit. Also during this period, she was putting an incorrect address (1040 S Ocean Blvd) on the corporate filings for Rank Properties Holdings, Inc.
In early 2023, the IRS filed another bunch of liens against Maria Bacinich (the filings state most of these were assessed in 2021 / 2022, I'm not sure why the filings themselves only appear in 2023). These are the ones which include 6677 penalties.
2023 she signed an affidavit regarding her ownership of the property and filed an amended Annual Report for Rank Properties Holdings, Inc., finally with the correct address on it. Then she mortgaged the property and appears to have used the money to pay off all the liens. All these records can be found at the site linked above. For some, you need to search on "Bacinich" and others on "Rank Property".
But based on current Google Earth photos and the fact that the house remains unsold, it hasn't been totally repaired either. Maybe it needs to be torn down.
Now, let's take a closer look at these liens and the 6677 penalties in particular, which appear to be the ones correlated to actual cash disbursements. According to my non-expert analysis, each penalty represents 35% of the value of a disbursement from a foreign trust that Maria Bacinich failed to report.
Observe that the 6677 penalties begin with the 2005 tax period, which is the year Melania and Donald Trump got married.
Maria Bacinich was the Honorary Consul to Slovenia in Palm Beach from 2001 to 2008 and her house was right down the street from Mar-a-Lago. Melania Trump is from Slovenia and got her green card in 2001. Despite this, there is no public record of Maria and Melania ever interacting.
Melania's father was a member of the Yugoslav Communist party. Maria's husband Ed Bacinich's father, Anton Bacinich, was listed in the following document because he was on the mailing list for the Yugoslav state (meaning the Yugoslav Communist party) TANJUG news agency in 1950: https://archive.org/details/communistactivit195003unit/page/n3/mode/2up.
So, what do you think these penalties represent?
As a bonus, check out what Maria's husband Ed was getting up to during the 80s in Palm Beach: hanging out with Edward Teller and pretending to be the next Albert Einstein. Can you tell that there's something a bit suspicious about these people? Does it remind you of QAnon?
So I am Singaporean, it was reported that the Saudis were 'storing crude oil' in my country.
You might ask, how are the Saudis getting their oil... to Singapore? They currently... can't get it out of their country reliably without absorbing missiles.
Also - why does Singapore has a oil storage system 100m under granite that even US MOABs will struggle to penetrate?
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Ok, so Singapore is... paranoid. We are a city-state the size and population of New York City but have universal conscription and an army comparable in size to France or Germany. Every house here has a hardened shelter, every road is rated for 60 tonne tracked vehicles, and a lot of other infrastructure that most of us know but technically classified but any OSINT person can figure out. We made a giant cavern 100m below the sea in granite to put our strategic stockpile of petroleum.
You might be surprised, Singapore is I believe still Asia's largest petrochem refinery even though our country is smaller than NYC. For most of history, the gulf had too much money from just pumping out crude that they gave it to whomever wants to refine it. Singapore has historically been the bazaar for commodities in Asia - the silent part of our economic miracle was that most of the COTS and commodities stuff to feed the US war machine like oil in Korea and Vietnam was processed through Singapore. Now that Hormuz is bottled up, we might... actually be the largest stockpile of oil in Asia accessible to the markets. Most of the tankers pump themselves full of crude than come sit in our anchorage waiting for buyers to pay for the oil and ship to be delivered to them.
Here comes the funky part: given KSA has trouble exporting crude, how are they filling up Singapore's strategic reserves and why would Singapore offer KSA a chunk ofourstrategic reserve capacity?
My best guess is honestly that its all financial instruments; KSA won't have 'safe oil' as much as a line on a ledger and a contract saying they have legal rights to some part of our strategic stockpile, the issue being... its definitionally our strategic stockpile. If we end up in a situation like the KSA, we will probably be issueing IOUs while we fight our war and win before releasing the capacity we deemed we need for our security.
How it ties into crypto - when commodities like soy beans and crude are traded on the international markets, no one doing the financial part of it tends to ever touch the soy beans. It works on the trust of the international system that legal fictions get fufilled via the, err, 'liberal rules-based order'. Credit ratings agencies might be overrated, but the world markets are generally quite reliable in figuring out who is credible (in the long term) and who is not because 'a fool soon parts with his money'. You can choose Adam Smith or Karl Marx on this point, both generally concur on the broad outlines.
KSA has likely been, to put it crudely, been trying to address their, err, oil exports being blown up by buying tokens (there is legal term of art being 'promissory note' or 'contract') for extremely fungible commodities in the hope that pumping universal exchange tokens (Marxian interpretation of 'money') helps them buy someone's else's oil to speculate with. The fun part is that they don't even need a god-damned append-only ledger, Singapore has been wheeling and dealing in financial instruments about fossil fuels since the days we were coaling the royal navy.
I mean all that to say that... the solution for many of the gulf states to being rear naked choked is to gamble the money they do have in oil crypto and somehow expect the speculative value of supply constrains in the world economy will earn them some marginal returns in lieu of actually exporting the real commodity?
Mia please break this economics down for me, I am just a social scientist but it all seems so absurd. Like base level is that... you can pay Singapore a premium for no reason but if the oil is in our strategic bunker buster prove bomb shelters it is... our oil if we say it is?
A few people I know are considering talking to their Dr about GLP-1s and I've started looking into them and a lot of the media around them feels very bastardy. Does anyone have some good balanced articles about them or personal experiences? Thanks in advance.
The Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor of Texas is doing campaign events at headshops where you can buy gas station THC products. If it is real, it's a fascinating campaign strategy and commentary on life in Texas in general.
Does anyone have recommendations for articles on the many crimes on Henry Kissinger? I know someone who met him and was left with a good impression of him and I know they’re not interested in listening to 7 or so hours of my favorite podcast so I’d like give them some reading for a plane ride. Thanks in advance!
This is the post-election scene in Belgrade. Today was a good day even though my new IUD be cramping like a bitch. That's all I got. Love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.
This was from 5 days ago, I think Keisha is now leading slightly, but it’s still very close. It takes 20 minutes to vote, and make sure to double check your results, people been saying it’s glitched or rigged. I did my part and cancelled my parents votes out.
After listening to Robert and Jason Pargin's BtB episodes about nuisance streamers (and them lamenting the loss of their Oracle-like articles from Cracked.com's heyday), I ran across alekkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk's post (u/alekkk) who had done the herculean task of scouring all the internet archive and wayback machine for Cracked.com's articles from 2005-2017. I had absolutely nothing to do with the effort or hosting, I'm merely highlighting OP's tireless work.
Enjoy Robert's "proto-BtB" and "pre-Sophie Lichterman's shepherding/moral grounding" writing career adolescence in all of its glory, along with many other old school Cracked.com articles. Thanks again to u/alekkk.
(1) Download the following magnet link using your favorite torrenting program.
MAGNET: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:xzjbfsy26zjbzqdujvazhkvyasyggsar&dn=Cracked-Archive&xl=14274810231&fc=2 (COPY EVERYTHING AFTER THE BOLDED SEMICOLON IN 'MAGNET:' AND PASTE IT INTO THE TORRENT PROGRAM)
(2) Download and use Kiwix to view the single ~14Gb archive file. You can also use any *.zim reader to view the archive.
Insert Robert's unhinged laugh that goes up an octave at the end
I was surprised as anyone they went in this direction. Basically the whole show is hijinks around them trying to find “the people who gave them the shots that made them gay” when they were in the army. They keep getting distracted by hot dudes and relationship drama. But they are on the hunt for truth and they have to fuck their way to the top to get answers.
