Tag: America

Power Pays

That a convicted paedophile is able to avoid a jail sentence is an utter disgrace especially given pensioners get locked up for non-payment of TV licence fees; Old Etonian Andrew Picard shouldn’t be on the streets, he should be in the clink

Andrew Picard (AKA Andrew Laurence and Andrew Boeckman) was caught with 1,185 indecent images of children as young as eight on his computer. He admitted to possessing videos of a three year old being raped, children being forced to have sex with dogs and sharing indecent images on Skype with an undercover policeman yet he was spared jail and handed a derisory non-custodial sentence late last month.

Eton College, Berkshire and Williams College, Massachusetts educated former USA swimmer Picard – who changed his name from Andrew Boeckman to protect the supposed “good reputation” of his wealthy family during his trial – received a sentence of just 10 months imprisonment suspended for 18 months for ten counts of possessing child pornography in late February and thus, one must ask: “Why wasn’t he locked up?”

Justifying why he spared Picard of Probyn House, Page Street, Westminster jail and why he also decided not to place this privileged pervert and predator on the sex offenders’ register, Judge Peter Ross remarked:

“It has been said that you and your family have suffered deeply as a result of your arrest and public exposure. Your family didn’t deserve that… [Prison] would undo the counseling you have undergone”.

Sallie Bennett-Jenkins QC, defending, added:

“This is a young and very able man who has hopes for the future… He was able to have this opportunity [to seek help] and this was something Andrew sought for himself, by himself”.

In a country where our government actively pursues jail sentences for pensioners refusing to pay their TV licence fees, it is a disgrace that the son of a prominent American lawyer named Philip J. Boeckman manages to avoid prison in spite of the seriousness of his offences. This utterly contemptible decision is something that brings only shame on Britain.

March 12, 2017
Chop the Charitycats

As San Francisco socialite and clothes horse Joy Venturini Bianchi is highlighted to be an American version of her fellow former ‘charitycat’ Lady Meyer, it’s time that charities worldwide were better regulated

In Britain, in 2011, the “Chanel-clad” wife of the former British ambassador to Washington, Lady Meyer, faced criticism after The Telegraph revealed the majority of the income of the charity she was then running was spent on her very own pay. She subsequently ceased to be involved in that organisation in 2016 but now, in San Francisco, a similar scandal has come to light in the form of Helpers Community Inc. (formerly rather crudely known as ‘Helpers of the Mentally Retarded’) and its executive director, a wannabe lookalike of Iris Apfel named Joy Venturini Bianchi.

The so-called charity that “natty” Ms. Venturini Bianchi, a self-proclaimed “divorced philanthropist” runs, it was reported last Friday, must “repay the public tens of thousands of dollars after misleading city officials” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The same paper had previously highlighted that Helpers had paid 78-year old Venturini Bianchi a base salary of £159,149 ($193,828), roughly £82,109 ($100,000) more annually than directors of similarly sized San Francisco non-profits and that supporters had been “disgusted with the way they were using this cause to raise money”.

Ms. Venturini Bianchi stands accused of raising “millions of dollars but failed to adequately distribute [them]” and that she is also attacked for not doing “much to fulfill [her non-profit’s] promise to donors” is, if correct, truly shocking. Just as with Meyer in England, the board of Helpers was composed from “longtime friends” and as state senator Mark Leno pointed out: “It would appear that the board is in need of a serious governance makeover”.

It is time the era of the ‘charitycat’ came to its natural conclusion. In Britain, America and elsewhere, for far too long, wealthy and connected individuals with little-to-no experience have been able to benefit from tax breaks, benefits, salaries and bonuses naïvely given by the public simply by taking over “a cause”. These amateurs should now be banished and running charities should instead become the domain of professionals.

Joy Venturini Bianchi with Iris Apfel

Joy Venturini Bianchi with Sir Elton John

March 12, 2017
Picture of the Week – Spying on Trump

As an image of Barrack Obama spying on Donald Trump in Trump Tower goes viral, we call on America to section the lunatic president

On Sunday, Florida based Michael Hussey, editor of the Pushing Rope blog, shared an amusing image of Donald Trump in his ghastly, over gilded Trump Tower apartment on Instagram. Outside the window –Photoshopped into the picture – is Barrack Obama suckered to the building and peering in with a pair of binoculars.

Though what Mr Hussey shares will certainly amuse many, Trump’s unsubstantiated claims on Twitter about being wiretapped are anything but. Here, again, all we see is evidence of a lunatic in charge of the asylum and now, one can only hope, the powers that will be will finally act: It is time for Donald Trump to be sectioned.

March 7, 2017
Take Me To The Gold Park

Outrageously over-the-top Beverly Hills pad complete with gold accessories galore goes on sale for £80 million; buyers will get a gold Lamborghini, a gold Rolls-Royce and 170 gold coloured bottles of Cristal

Sold last for £7.7 million ($9.8 million, €9.3 million or درهم36 million) in 2012 when it was a 5,926 square foot house, 1175 Hillcrest Road on the Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills, California has been completely redeveloped and renamed ‘Opus’. It now provides 20,500 square foot of accommodation on a 1 acre plot and has gone on for sale for the astonishing sum of £80 million ($100 million, €95 million or درهم367 million).

Now featuring 7 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, it is the ‘extras’ that come with the property that make it newsworthy. Amongst the ‘toys’ thrown in are a gold Lamborghini Aventador and a gold Rolls-Royce Dawn, £1.6 million ($2 million, €1.9 million or درهم7.3 million) of artwork (including three Damien Hirst paintings), 170 bottles of Cirstal champagne and a full-time house manager, whose salary has been pre-paid for two years.

The creation of a developer named Nile Niami, the house also has “electric toilets that do everything for you” – Just what every billionaire truly needs.

Drew Fenton of Hilton & Hyland has the listing.

February 22, 2017
The Sky’s the Limit

Bonhams to offer what they call “the world’s most sought after Cadillac” at auction in Florida; it was originally made for the famed BRO^ADMOOR Hotel resort in El Paso County, Colorado

The BRO^ADMOOR – a name that is unique and copyrighted due to its little raised “A” – in Colorado Springs is a vast hotel at the base of the 9,570 foot tall Cheyenne Mountain, the location of the operations base for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Built in the Italian Renaissance style and featuring 784 guest rooms, the complex has three golf courses, 18 restaurants and a fishing camp and is said to be the place where President George W. Bush decided to quit drinking after waking up with a hangover in the summer of 1986.

The Broadmoor Hotel.

The main hotel building.

The original owners of the hotel, the Penrose family, “wanted their guests to be escorted form the airport to the hotel and to be given tours of the area’s majestic beauty in the finest of luxury” according to the Bonhams catalogue entry on a 1959 Cadillac BRO^ADMOOR Skyview they are set to auction in March. It is the last of around 28 Cadillac limousines made for the hotel from 1937 and was built by the Superior Coach Corp., a now defunct Ohio based manufacturer of yellow school buses and hearses.

251-inches long overall, equipped with power steering, power brakes, a 390 cubic inch V8 engine and dominated by a vast plexi panel ‘Skyview’ roof, the car was designed to accommodate 11 passengers. It remained in service at the hotel until the early 1970s, was then was sold to a Cadillac collector in Branford, Connecticut and subsequently underwent a full restoration at the behest of its current owner.

Bonhams will sell this unusual vehicle at their Amelia Island auction on 9^th March at the Fernandina Beach Club. They have set an estimate of £140,000 to £200,000 ($175,000 to $250,000 or €165,000 to €235,000 or درهم640,000 to درهم915,000) and describe it as “one of the most exclusive Cadillacs ever built”.

February 20, 2017
Trump Gold

Horrific £27.6 million apartment in Trump International Tower is struggling to sell; in this case its not the links to the POTUS that is the cause, it’s simply revoltingly decorated

“Don’t let the opulence distract you”, suggest the many agents marketing what could be quite possibly the gaudiest apartment at One Central Park West – AKA ‘Trump International Hotel and Tower’ – in New York. If they’d been honest, they’d have said something completely different and that would be: “This place is truly horrific”.

Originally priced at £32 million ($40 million, €37.6 million or درهم146.9 million) when first placed on the market in May 2016, apartment #47BC within the 44-floor tower has recently been reduced to £27.6 million ($34.5 million, €32.4 million or درهم126.7 million). The 6,360 square foot, 6 bedroom gold-leafed, marble-floored monstrosity admittedly enjoys “extraordinary views” of Central Park but comes with bathrooms so over-the-top that even Liberace would have blushed.

Trump International Tower itself was originally built between 1968 and 1970 and converted to a mix of hotel and residential space by Donald Trump between 1995 and 1997. The 583-foot tall, Thomas E. Stanley designed building featured in the 2011 comedy crime film Tower Heist and has a 30-foot wide silver globe to the front of it.

Knight Frank and Douglas Elliman are amongst the tribe of agents attempting to sell what they describe as a “Central Park West sprawling gem”. It was last sold in 2008 to an anonymous entity named Daisho Development USA, Inc. They paid $26 million (the equivalent of £23.4 million, $29.3 million, €27.5 million or درهم107.6 million today) for the vast 14-room space.

February 17, 2017
Sex and the Single Zillionaire

Belvedere, CA home of late tech billionaire and author of ‘Sex and the Single Zillionaire’ Thomas Perkins for sale; he entertained amongst others Sophia Loren and Rupert Murdoch there

Thomas Perkins (1932 – 2016) had it all. Born in New York, this Harvard University and MIT graduate made his fortune in Silicon Valley, California when he co-founded Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1972 and invested in amongst others Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Google, Macromedia, Netscape and Segway. He was said to be worth £6.4 billion ($8 billion, €7.4 billion or درهم29.4 billion), was briefly married to famed author Danielle Steel between 1998 and 2002 and wrote a novel of his own, Sex and the Single Zillionaire, in 2006.

Aside from an £8 million ($10 million, €9.3 million or درهم36.6 million) country house in East Sussex, England named Plumpton Place and ‘The Maltese Falcon’ – his 289-foot long, £104.3 million ($130 million, €120.9 million or درهم477.5 million) sailing yacht – Perkins owned a French style residence on Belvedere Island in Marin County, California. He purchased it with his Norwegian first wife, Gerd Thune-Ellefsen, in 1972 and continued to live there after her death in 1994.

Danielle Steel and Tom Perkins remained friends even after their divorce

Steel even hosted a party for Perkins’s novel at her Pacific Heights, San Francisco mansion when it launched in 2006

The tech billionaire’s yacht, The Maltese Falcon, was the largest sailing yacht in the world when it was launched in 1990

Perkins at his English country home, Plumpton Place in East Sussex

The exterior of Perkins’s Belvedere home, 345 Golden Gate Avenue, appears modest

But what is to be found within includes this spectacular ‘Grand Salon’

Extending to 8.885 square foot in total, the house – which was put up for sale last June by Perkins’s children – was built to the designs of architects Julia Morgan and George Kelham in 1928 and features 16th century linenfold wood-paneled walls in a room described as a ‘Grand Salon’. Here, Perkins entertained European royalty, his fellow News Corp board member Rupert Murdoch and the Italian actress Sophia Loren and given the room’s outlook to the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay, these luminaries cannot have failed to have been impressed.

Known simply as 345 Golden Gate Avenue, Perkins’s former home is for sale through Sotheby’s International Realty for £13.2 million ($16.5 million, €15.3 million or درهم60.6 million). It includes a formal dining room seating 18, 6 bedrooms, 7.5 bathrooms, a guest apartment, an outdoor swimming pool and stands on a plot of 0.85 acres.

Prior to his death, in 2014, Perkins attracted controversy when he penned an article for The Wall Street Journal. At the time, he wrote:

“Writing from the epicentre [sic] of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one per cent’, namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one per cent, namely the rich”.

He later apologised for making comparisons to Nazi Germany but subsequently added: “In the Nazi era it was racial demonization, now it’s class demonization”.

February 6, 2017
A Working Rolls

1959 Rolls-Royce estate car owned by late industrial tycoon Orin Smith to be auctioned; it was bizarrely designed to include beds and a loud air horn to “blast” cattle off the highway

Florida based businessman and retired CEO of the Engelhard Corporation Orin Smith (1935 – 2016) was passionate about cars and next month, those with deep pockets will be in with a chance to purchase 58 vehicles from his collection that will be sold, mostly without reserve, by RM Sotheby’s at their annual Amelia Island sale on 10^th and 11^th March.

Amongst the eclectic selection of classic and contemporary cars from the late industrialist’s collection is a 1959 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud I estate car by H. J. Mulliner and Radford. One of just two examples, this immaculate short-wheelbase shooting brake was originally supplied to a Robert L. McCormick of Wichita, Kansas and transported to New York on the Cunard flagship Queen Elizabeth.

McCormick kept the car – which features a luggage space that can accommodate items up to 6-foot long – until 1965 and on selling it to a Palm Beach based judge named Lewis M. Schott, penned the new owner a letter that read:

The Radford conversion is a “complete job”. I will explain to your chauffeur and secretary how it makes into beds, etc, etc.

I’ll explain the 3-way horn switch to your employees. I used the loud horn for “blasting” livestock off the Mexican highways.

Finally, I hope you have as much fun out of the car as I have had. It should go 200,000 miles without work on it… A serious sacroiliac precludes long motor trips for me for a few years, and I’m an unhappy warrior when I think about it.

Sold again in 2007 to Florida Roll-Royce expert Richard Gorman, the shooting brake was then subject to an 18-month renovation. It is now presented in velvet green and a sage with parchment leather interior piped in velvet green and features upgraded air conditioning.

Of the overall collection to be sold on behalf of Smith’s family, Don Rose of RM Sotheby’s remarked:

I had the great pleasure of knowing Orin Smith and found him to be a true gentleman in every sense of the word.

In addition to his impressive gathering of some of the finest Rolls-Royce and Bentley automobiles, Orin displayed an eclectic taste with a keen eye for other icons of style, including sporting machinery from pre-war to the best of the contemporary.

The common thread here is beauty, in both design and engineering; fitting for a man of generous spirit devoted to excellence. Because of those qualities, Orin Smith was beloved to the Amelia Island crowd, which makes the offering of his collection at our Amelia Island venue all the more poignant.

Of the shooting brake itself, the auctioneer adds:

Numerous Rolls-Royce shooting brakes exist, but many of them are crude later conversions. This car is a true and authentic coachbuilt original, created to the exacting specifications of its original owner, and restored to that same high standard – air horns and all. Errant cattle, consider yourselves warned.

February 6, 2017
Quote of the Week – A Moron in the White House

Donald Trump’s presidency was worryingly first predicted in July 1920

In ten days time, on 20^th January 2017, the world will watch in horror as a reality television “star” is sworn in as the 45^th President of the United States of America.

Bizarrely, this was predicted in July 1920 by H. L. Mencken, a journalist known as the ‘Sage of Baltimore’, in a column for the city’s Evening Sun newspaper. He wrote:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre – the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Mencken plainly foresaw the Presidency of Donald Trump and he equally surmised how Twitter would play its part in his rise. America has ditched reason and its chosen deviousness and mediocrity. God help us all.

January 10, 2017
Unlikely Bedfellows

Sarah Palin’s attempt to gain the support of Julian Assange shows that conventional politics have been consigned to history

In a post Wednesday on her Facebook account, batty Sarah Palin did an about turn and apologised to Julian Assange – a man she’d described as “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” in 2010.

In a missive to her followers, the dimmest politician on the planet stated the Wikileaks founder had “exposed the truth” about what Assange had described as “the Obama administration’s attempt to delegitimise Donald Trump”. She went on to claim the fugitive, who remains holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, had shared “important information that finally opened people’s eyes to Democrat candidates and operatives” and concluded: “This would not have been exposed were it not for Julian Assange”.

That Republican firebrand Mrs Palin said such a thing is yet another example of conventional politics being turned on its head. The election of Donald Trump and Brexit in Britain seemed bonkers but that this unhinged woman is seeking out the support of a man who is an evader of justice and a self-appointed crusader of vanity is something one simply could never have made up.

2017 looks set to be the year when the loopy people of the world unite. God help us all.

Sarah Palin’s Facebook post in full:

To Julian Assange: I apologize.

Please watch Sean Hannity’s interview with Julian Assange (Wikileaks).

Exposing the truth re: the Left having been oh-so-guilty of atrocious actions and attitudes of which they’ve falsely accused others. The media collusion that hid what many on the Left have been supporting is shocking. This important information that finally opened people’s eyes to democrat candidates and operatives would not have been exposed were it not for Julian Assange.

I apologize for condemning Assange when he published my infamous (and proven noncontroversial, relatively boring) emails years ago.

As I said at the time of being targeted and my subsequent condemnation, though, the line must be drawn before our troops or innocent lives deserving protection would be put at risk as a result of published emails.

Julian, I apologize.

Sarah Palin

P.S. If you get the chance, catch the movie “Snowden.” That movie and Hannity’s interview tonight are quite enlightening.

January 5, 2017