Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's JournalThe New Yorker had a nice story about yachting you may enjoy.
The Haves and the Have-Yachts
Luxury ships attract outrage and political scrutiny. The ultra-rich are buying them in record numbers.
By Evan Osnos
The New Yorker, July 18, 2022
In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking.
Excerpt…
For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom.
Excerpt…
Nobody can say precisely how many of Putin’s associates own superyachts—known to professionals as “white boats”—because the white-boat world is notoriously opaque. Owners tend to hide behind shell companies, registered in obscure tax havens, attended by private bankers and lawyers. But, with unusual alacrity, authorities have used subpoenas and police powers to freeze boats suspected of having links to the Russian élite. In Spain, the government detained a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar yacht associated with Sergei Chemezov, the head of the conglomerate Rostec, whose bond with Putin reaches back to their time as K.G.B. officers in East Germany. (As in many cases, the boat is not registered to Chemezov; the official owner is a shell company connected to his stepdaughter, a teacher whose salary is likely about twenty-two hundred dollars a month.) In Germany, authorities impounded the world’s most voluminous yacht, Dilbar, for its ties to the mining-and-telecom tycoon Alisher Usmanov. And in Italy police have grabbed a veritable armada, including a boat owned by one of Russia’s richest men, Alexei Mordashov, and a colossus suspected of belonging to Putin himself, the four-hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot Scheherazade.
Excerpt…
O’Shannassy has come to see big boats as a space where powerful “solar systems” converge and combine. “It is implicit in every interaction that their sharing of information will benefit both parties; it is an obsession with billionaires to do favours for each other. A referral, an introduction, an insight—it all matters,” he wrote in “Superyacht Captain,” a new memoir. A guest told O’Shannassy that, after a lavish display of hospitality, he finally understood the business case for buying a boat. “One deal secured on board will pay it all back many times over,” the guest said, “and it is pretty hard to say no after your kids have been hosted so well for a week.”
Continues…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/the-haves-and-the-have-yachts
Mass Media ignoring 'RFK Believed in Conspiracy' shows corrupt nature of America's Press
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his sister Rory Kennedy told Charlie Rose that their father, the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, believed there was a conspiracy behind the death of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. For the first time in almost 50 years, members of the slain president's family were about their father's thoughts about the assassination.
(ARCHIVE) https://web.archive.org/web/20130114120047/https://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57563645/rfk-jr-dad-believed-warren-commission-shoddy/
The story made news, as it were, for a day or two -- it was on page 8 here in Detroit (try finding it using The Free Press or Detroit News web site search engines) -- and apart from several threads on DU, that's about it as coverage goes. The Charlie Rose interview was part of a program put together by the media and good people in Dallas to celebrate JFK's life.
What bothers me about the media coverage is the constant attack, not on the government's lousy investigation of the assassination and its attendant cover-up, but, rather, the attack on anyone who brings up the subject of conspiracy in the death of the president, even when it's children of attorney general who also was the brother of the slain president.
Check out this condescending piece of opinion from the Dallas Observer:
Not Even Charlie Rose Could Rein in RFK Jr. in Dallas Last Night. Also: Conspiracy Theories!
By Betsy Lewis Sat., Jan. 12 2013 at 11:01 AM
It got weird when he went into a historical lecture about his father's investigation into the JFK assassination. He was speaking about it as if he had been part of it, then cited a book called The Unspeakable by Jim Douglas (sic - actually "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" by James Douglass) as being the best book on the subject, then kept referencing things from the book. He was losing the audience, so he burst out, "My father believed that the Warren Report was a shoddy piece of craftsmanship," to the delighted applause of the mostly Baby Boomer audience.
Whenever Charlie Rose would ask about the family, RFK Jr. would evade the question until he heard either delighted Boomer applause or delighted Boomer laughter. One of his responses to a family question was an unrelated story about World War II. A lady behind me who must have recently Netflixed The Iron Lady kept saying, "Here here!" for the benefit of us unfortunate people around her.
Some of the strangest RFK Jr. outbursts with the biggest applause were:
"We're becoming a national security state!" (applause, "Here here!" ) .
"Corporations want profits!" (applause, "Here here!" ) .
"Corporations are great things, but we'd be nuts to let them run our government!" (applause, "Here here!" ) .
"Nationalism in Africa! The end of colonialism!"
At this point, I don't think anyone knew what the hell he was talking about. It was something about the Kennedy family airlifting President Obama's father out of Kenya to begin a new life in America.
RFK Jr.: "Yes."
CONTINUED...
(OLD) http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/mixmaster/2013/01/charlie_rose_live_the_kennedy.php
(ARCHIVED) https://web.archive.org/web/20130115215556/https://blogs.dallasobserver.com/mixmaster/2013/01/charlie_rose_live_the_kennedy.php
Me, I don't believe any of that stuff was "out there." Why writer Betsy Lewis chooses to believe what the media tell her is true I'll guess lies in allegiance to a pay check.
Likewise for the lack of coverage given the story in the national media, where the same few corporations that swore up and down there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, both in 1990 and 2002, now want no part of "conspiracy talk" during the 50th anniversary observance. So far, as far as I'm aware, the Charlie Rose program has not aired.
What's more telling is what didn't get noted in the nation's corrupt mass media at all: The fact that Attorney General and later Senator Robert F. Kennedy also was assassinated. Some think that was a coincidence, because the mass media told them so. One thing's for certain, the questions still surrounding the deaths of two liberal icons doesn't get discussed at all today in our supposedly "free press."
Above is a 2013 OP from DU:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10022416498
The original links above now go to the Internet Archive Waybac.
FTR: I stand with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Brett Kavanaugh Parties with Matt Gaetz, Sebastian Gorka, the Schlapps, GOP royalty...
Boof Boy
Brett Kavanaugh Raises Ethics Concerns After Attending Holiday Party With Ex-Trump Officials, Hard Righters
By Ken Meyer
Mediate, December 13, 2022
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial ethics came under scrutiny after it was reported that he attended a holiday party with former Donald Trump officials and numerous other prominent right-wing operatives.
Politico Playbook reported on a Christmas party held on Friday at the home of American Conservative Union leader Matt Schlapp and his wife, Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications Mercedes Schlapp. Kavanaugh was at the top of the guest list, among several other prominent names flagged by Politico.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Ginger Gaetz, Sean Spicer, Alex Acosta, Sebastian Gorka, Stephen and Katie Miller, Chad Wolf, Greta Van Susteren and John Coale, Laura Schlapp and Bryan Wells, Brendan Carr, Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY), Erin and Nick Perrine, Erik Prince, Ziad Ojakli, Peter Davidson, Steve Holland and Ben Terris.
Bloomberg noted that Kavanaugh’s attendance lends to concerns about his involvement in partisan activities, especially when the trust in the Supreme Court has been in a continuous decline, according to recent polls. Supreme Court justices are frequently critiqued for attending functions that coincide with their political views.
Continues…
https://www.mediaite.com/news/brett-kavanaugh-raises-ethics-concerns-after-attending-holiday-party-with-ex-trump-officials-hard-righters/
“Beer. I like beer.”
'Merchant of Death' Viktor Bout Sentenced to 25 Years; Trial Ignored His Ties to U.S. & Dick Cheney
DU from 2013…
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1002528054
For some reason my television set isn't talking about this story.
SURPRISE: TRUMP HAD MILLIONS IN UNDISCLOSED DEBT WHILE PRESIDENT, AND HE PROBABLY WOULD A SECOND TIME AROUND TOOWe’re just now finding out that Trump had $19.8 million in previously unreported debt to a company with historical links to North Korea while serving as commander in chief. What else might we not know?
BY BESS LEVIN
Vanity Fair, December 5, 2022
Shortly before being inaugurated in 2017, Donald Trump announced, to the dismay of ethics officials and laypeople who understood just how corrupt it was, that he would not financially divest from the Trump Organization while serving as president. At the time, it was obvious that this was a completely ridiculous setup, and in the intervening years, that assessment proved 1000% correct, as the 45th POTUS lined his pockets with not only taxpayer money but money from foreign governments. Of course, Trump making money, via the for-profit business one of his sons pledged to give him quarterly updates on during his time in office, wasn‘t the only major issue with the arrangement; on the flip side, there was the question of the enormous amount of cash Trump owed to other entities, which by his own admission clocked in at about $400 million at the end of his term. “From a national security perspective, that’s just an outrageous vulnerability,” Larry Pfeiffer, the director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence at George Mason University, told The Washington Post at the time.
Yet the even bigger vulnerability, from the perspective of the United States, was not just that its commander in chief owed a fuck-ton of money to a fuck-ton of people, but that said commander in chief had a long history of never telling the truth about anything. Which is apparently why, despite years of scrutiny—and the many opportunities he had to reveal it—we’re only just now learning that, when he was running for president the first time, and for several months after he took office, Trump owed millions of dollars to a company previously linked to North Korea.
Snip…
Oh, and about 2024: Shortly after Trump announced that he was running for president for a third time, The New York Times reported that Trump had signed a deal with a Saudi real estate company that “intends to build a Trump-branded hotel, villas, and a golf course as part of a $4 billion real estate project in Oman.” (According to the Times, that came after the Trump Organization hosted Saudi-government-backed LIV Golf tournaments at its clubs in New Jersey and Florida, paid for by money originating from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.) “This is yet another example of Trump getting a personal financial benefit in exchange for past or future political power,” Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Times. “The Saudis and Oman government may believe that giving Trump this licensing deal will benefit them in the future, should Trump become president again. This deal could be a way to ensure that they will be in Trump’s good graces.” And speaking of the Trumps, the Saudis, and absurd conflicts of interest, it was just a few short months ago the Times reported that a newly formed private equity firm owned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner received a $2 billion check from the Saudi government, which may or may not have been a thank-you for treating Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman so nicely amidst that whole kidnapping-and-murder-by-bone-saw scandal. Just something to think about!
Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/donald-trump-undisclosed-debt
Granted special access by North Korea.
Checkered patsy, er, past:
Daewoo founder sentenced to 10 years in prison
A Seoul court on Tuesday sentenced the founder and former chairman of collapsed conglomerate Daewoo to 10 years in prison for a range of charges including embezzlement and accounting fraud.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna13043919
Then there’s the hacking, wherein PRNK grabbed all manner of naval warfare shipbuilding data from Daewoo…
North Korea hacked Daewoo Shipbuilding, took warship blueprints: South Korea lawmaker
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/31/north-korea-hacked-daewoo-shipbuilding-took-warship-blueprints-south-korea-lawmaker.html
Other than that, they make a lot of great stuff.
While prez Trump owed North Korea-linked bank $20 million, yet did not report it.
No wonder Dimdonnie said: “We fell in love.” And told the little dictator, “I think your country has tremendous economic potential, unbelievable, unlimited.”
Trump did not disclose $19.8m loan while president, documents show
The loan from Daewoo, a company with ties to North Korea, should have been reported in public financial disclosures
by Maya Yang
The Guardian, December 5, 2022
Donald Trump failed to disclose a $19.8m loan from a company with historical ties to North Korea, while he was the US president, according to a new report.
Documents obtained by the New York attorney general, and reported by Forbes, on Sunday indicate a previously unreported loan owed by Trump to Daewoo, the South Korean conglomerate.
Daewoo was the only South Korean company allowed to operate a business in North Korea during the mid-1990s.
Forbes revealed that Trump’s relationship with Daewoo is at least 25 years old. At one point, Daewoo partnered with Trump on a development project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Trump World Tower.
Trump and Daewoo continued to do business together, including using Trump’s name on six South Korea-based properties from 1999 to 2007, according to the magazine.
Continues…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/05/donald-trump-daewoo-loan-financial-disclosure
I hope I wouldn’t smile if I owed an evil rat $20 million smackers.
Pentagon / Secret Service / DHS Obstructed Justice
They each destroyed communications they had been ordered to protect.
Phones of top Pentagon officials were wiped of Jan. 6 messages
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/02/pentagon-jan-6-phones-wiped/
Secret Service Jan. 6 texts erased despite Congress’ request
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-united-states-government-and-politics-e5b67d9a848b76a3803e9f7e3546bb51
DHS inspector general knew of missing Secret Service texts months earlier than previously known
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/politics/secret-service-missing-texts-january-6-dhs-inspector-general/index.html
Key agencies have deleted text messages from Jan. 6. Are they gone for good?
https://www.grid.news/story/science/2022/08/05/key-agencies-have-deleted-text-messages-from-jan-6-are-they-gone-for-good/
Can the January 6 Committee hold the agencies and their leadership to account?
These erasures of government records seems the kind of thing that would be of interest to Special Counsel Jack Smith.
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