Guest Post by Simon Black
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.
Man fined almost $7 million for painting his own property
In 2002, the owner of some dilapidated warehouses in New York City decided to make use of the property.
He hired an artist to decorate the warehouses with graffiti, and curate graffiti art from others. Soon it became a bustling art hub, with artists renting out space to do their work.
But after eleven years, the owner decided to demolish the warehouses to make way for luxury apartments.
That’s when the artists sued to protect ‘their’ graffiti.
But the owner of the property went ahead and whitewashed the artwork while the lawsuit was ongoing.
After years of legal battles, the court sided with the artists and demanded the owner pay $6.75 million to the artists whose work he destroyed. And now on appeal, another court affirmed that decision.
Turns out, you don’t have the same property rights when it comes to art.
New York has a Visual Artists Rights Act. It doesn’t matter who owns the art, or the building it’s affixed to. Artists still maintain certain rights to their work, even if it is sold (or they never owned the canvass).
So in New York, you better be careful who you let decorate your property. It may become their property.
Click here to read the full story.
California politicians reinvent the dictionary again
California is at it again, editing language to alter reality.
First San Francisco changed “felon” to “justice involved person.”
Now California will refer to “at risk youth” instead as, “at promise youth.”
Legislation went into effect at the beginning of this year which changed the state’s legal term for children at risk of entering the criminal justice system.
The point is to change the negative connotation of the phrase “at risk”.
Uplifting, right? But these people always fail to understand that changing words doesn’t change reality.
Click here to read the full story.
Indonesian minister wants to manage who people should marry
An Indonesian government minister has suggested a unique way to solve inequality.
Rather than redistributing wealth, rich people simply need to start marrying poor people.
He said that when poor people marry other poor people, it just creates more poverty.
So he suggested issuing a fatwa (a legal opinion in Islamic law) mandating that the rich look for poor spouses, and poor look for rich spouses.
But his opinions aren’t that different than the Bolsheviks in the USA.
This minister simply wants to control people directly, instead of their capital.
But they all believe you are the property of the state, to do with as they please.
Click here to read the full story.
Progessive parking tickets could make rich pay more
Boston Massachusetts tickets drivers as much as $40 for an expired parking meter.
Boston collected over $61 million worth of fines in 2018, the same year it began increasing parking fines. Now some parking tickets run up to $120.
But a new city councillor is concerned that some Boston residents may have to decide between paying a parking ticket, and putting food on the table.
She has introduced rules that would scale the cost of a parking ticket based on the violator’s income.
So rich people will still face huge fines for tiny infractions– maybe even higher than they are currently. But low-income folks will pay lower fines for parking illegally.
The proposal says, “for some a $40 parking ticket is simply the cost to park illegally while for others it is a major financial setback.”
So, as usual, the solution is to redistribute the wealth.
“From each according to his means,” to pay parking tickets, as Karl Marx would say.
Click here to read the full story.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
“at promise youth”
he war a goo boy, he war goin’t collage ….
And GOVERNMENT is STILL the greatest evil ever invented by man.
The United States government gets a pass.
USA = The Promised Land
It’s not the fault of the government that it is infested with LIARS, aka THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
My people have been Republican for 150+ years and they knows this to be true.
https://www.livecountdown.com/?s=senate
Nice sarcasm.
Graffiti art lawsuit-I smell the likes of Jerome Nadler somewhere in that years long clusterfuc*.
I remember back in the 1980s, some kind of lawsuits over a Richard Serra piece called “Tilted Arc” that was in NYC in a plaza in front of a gov. bldg. A giant rusted/black curved steel wall, it annoyed everyone who was forced to walk around it to enter the bldg. It was 120-fucking-feet long!
Whoever purchased the thing [General Services Administration, in an excellent use of tax dollars] was about to remove it because it was universally loathed, when an alarm was raised: the piece could not be removed, the artist claimed, because it was “site specific” and to put it anywhere else would somehow ruin it. It took four years of legal wrangling before the thing finally got taken down. From living in a corner of some government-owned parking lot, the pieces were apparently moved into storage, although at a cost to whom was not mentioned when I looked it up on wiki.. so probably at our eternal cost, as the artist will not allow its installation elsewhere.
Bottom of the Pacific as a reef, would be a great installation site.
Around Detroit they have billboards and run radio advertisements saying that calling a drug addict a drug addict is harmful to them. The proper term apparently is to say that someone is suffering from “opiod use disorder”.
I’m sure that makes some homeless person out on the street feel a lot better while they are shivering in their cardboard box wondering where they will get their next fix.
“Reality avoidance disorder.”
Reality is for people that can’t handle drugs.
Sadly in the American republic the citizen retained the ultimate veto against tyrannical government and their armed minions who perpetrate crimes with asset forfeiture and the end all be all of property tax on your personally owned real property . It is in essence a control of ownership by heavy handed government . Who now claims controlling interest over everything and everybody thru excessive relentless taxation . This reduces the free American property owner to an indentured servant merely maintaining property as long as you dance to the masters tune and produce the tribute demanded or else !
The “THEY” in government have really overplayed their hand and face a citizenry filled with resolve !
FORGET ME NOT
Sounds like you are tired of paying for over-size pensions going to worthless bureaucrats?
Here’s a crazy story about Entitled Artists from the 1990s: our offices at the time were next to the parking lot of some kind of senior complex. One day I happen to see out by their dumpster (far from their main entrance but 30′ from my window) three giant abstract canvases. They were sized something like 7’x9′ or thereabouts. They were clearly “professionally” produced, but the seniors or their administration had apparently tired of them.
Our offices were in an old ex-railroad bldg. with large industrial doors, so I scavenged them. I found a signature and looked up the artist, who was represented by a Boston gallery. Figuring “finders keepers”, I called the gallery to find out what the things might be worth. This was many years ago, so I can’t recall the details of the conversation, but there was a lot of attitude on the part of the dealer and I didn’t get anywhere with my sales attempt. Later in the day, the artist presented herself at our office and demanded the paintings back. She was so pushy and I was so flabbergasted (and the paintings were so unlovable), I just let her leave with them.
I’m really sorry I didn’t just re-purpose the canvas and stretchers. The paintings were a bit too large for any of our spaces, and fairly ugly, but still “valuable” (in the multi-thousands back then, something like $4k-$6k each). It was clear that some sort of unspoken rules of the Art Mafia would not allow these to be sold or purchased except through the artist and her dealer. There wasn’t anything like Craigslist or eBay or Etsy at the time to reach a wide audience, or I would probably have thought of that first.
I thought it was pretty fascinating the way artists might claim to “own” work long after someone has purchased it. I was naive and got an education that day.