I lost my business from the looting that occurred on May 30th, 2020 when the Mayor of California ordered the LAPD a stand down mandate during the BLM riots. Scores of opportunists & masked armed looters took advantage, damaging commercial & personal property & engaging in open theft, vandalism, & violent destruction of my property. The total damages were over 1.5 million dollars of designer clothing, sneakers, jewelry, & rare vintage pieces.

The protesters were honoring Melina Abdullah, the lead organizer of Black Lives Matter LA chapter, who led call & response chants of ‘Disrupt White Capitalism.’ a concept she believes is the root cause of police violence in America. Abdullah, who is also a college professor, went on to drop a string of expletives that seemingly foreshadowed what was to come after the rally would end. “F*** the police,” she shouted into the megaphone. “F*** white capitalism. F*** The Grove. F*** 3rd and Fairfax. F*** Beverly Hills.” By nightfall, stores at every shopping district Abdullah mentioned had been vandalized and looted, and several LAPD cruisers in the Fairfax District were set on fire.

By nightfall, stores at every shopping district Abdullah mentioned had been vandalized and looted. Abdullah’s 16-year-old daughter, Thandiwe, also addressed rallygoers. She co-founded the Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard and has been speaking at local protests for several years. In 2018, she was honored by Time Magazine as one of the most influential teens in the country.

“I know you want to cry, I know you want to tear some shit up,” Thandiwe said. “If you want to set some corporations on fire, you know what? I don’t care about Target burning. I don’t care that capitalism burns. I don’t care that white people in their f***ing office buildings are upset. I don’t care that you can’t go nowhere because you’re stuck in f***ing traffic. I don’t care that you can’t get to your job or your doctor’s appointment or to wherever the f*** you want to go.”

None of my property was covered by insurance, so I have shuttered my doors & dissolved my company.

My property was accessible, cases were ripped, displays pulled down, all in honor of a very deliberate call & response record to loot & destroy 'white spaces of affluence', but the problem cannot be reduced to such politics alone …

My question is, what would it look like to just give cash grants to people (or small business owners in my type of position) instead of having nonprofits be a ‘middle man’? 

I’m asking because I’ve seen how grant funds are spent & tracked & have thought about real life changing work through mutual aid initiatives rather than programs & services that aren’t always relevant to the community. Not a super critical analysis, just thoughts …

I hope you agree with my sentiment. I know some that have worked in the nonprofit sector & one of the biggest complaints about nonprofits is that they often do what makes them ‘feel good’ instead of what produces the greatest impact or best outcome. If giving business owners (who lost everything from the looting) money directly without any service is more impactful than a program or service, that is what we should be advocating for.

That being said the funding entity has to be on board with this as well. Most funding sources (public & private) require or desire a "program" because they are largely paternalistic in nature. This causes a cyclical process …

Nonprofits pitch programs & services because that is what funding sources want. Since funding sources want programs & services, nonprofits hire people with that expertise & viewpoint. Its pretty horrible … 

Some people do come together to work on art & stuff like that … the kind of work I specifically am involved in, but I guess that can also be funded directly without strings attached …

I am an individual, resident & business owner of California's 28th congressional district. In 2015 I launched CRUVOIR (2015-2020) a California corporation conducting business as a high-end designer clothing store on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, California

A voxel is a value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space in 3D computer graphics. Voxels, like pixels in a 2D bitmap, do not usually have their position (or coordinates) explicitly stored with their values. Instead, rendering systems deduce a voxel's position based on its proximity to other voxels (i.e., its position in the data structure that makes up a single volumetric image).

Polygons, unlike pixels & voxels, are frequently represented by the coordinates of their vertices (as points). As a result of this distinction, polygons thrive at representing simple 3D structures with a lot of empty or homogeneously filled space, but voxels excel at describing regularly sampled non-homogeneously filled areas.

Voxels are extensively employed in medical & scientific data visualization & analysis. Voxels are used to characterize the resolution of some volumetric displays. A cubic volumetric display, for example, would be able to show 512512512 voxels.

Mari is a freelance voxel artist & 3D designer based in Istanbul

Mad Maraca's Alien Habitats Are Implicitly Articulated in the Intricate Fabric of an Alienated Society

Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, author, film critic & actor. Quentin Tarantino has the Cannes Palme d'Or, two Oscars, & several Oscar nominations. He is on the jury of the most prestigious film festivals of the world, Cannes & Venice. The adjective tarantinoesque is in the Oxford dictionary.

According to Tarantino, he wouldn't be offended at all if one appropriated a sizable portion of his fame. The aesthetic that Tarantino created reflects the spirit of the 90s, powerfully influenced global filmmaking in the early 2000s. Tarantino manages to sit in two chairs. His films are strange & authorial, at the same time, they are very popular & draw full houses. His style can be called art-mainstream.

Tarantino is a cinéphage — a movie eater. He's constantly citing films of his favorite directors. Quick camera pulls & swoops, slow zooming in, shooting from below, shooting from above are among the director's favorite camerawork techniques. 

Tarantino has favorite actors that he constantly shoots, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman. He gave a second life to John Travolta's acting career. Tarantino is an actor. In his youth, Tarantino dreamed of associating his professional career with being an actor in his movies. He appeared mainly in small roles such as Chester Rush in his 1995's Four Rooms. Tarantino chose directing as a career path when he created Reservoir Dogs in 1992 & Pulp Fiction in 1994, the latter made him famous.

Tarantino's films are characterized by a non-linear structure, a division into chapters, ambiguous monologues & dialogues. Tarantino uses a lot of prop blood. The director sees violence as a stylistic device, in life he does not accept violence.

Tarantino is a typical representative of postmodernism. In his movies, he is often quoting other directors' films, uses irony, he depicts the world as chaotic, the structure is complex. Tarantino advertises non-existent brands like Big Kahuna burgers, Red Apple cigarettes. His films are characterized by nonlinear storylines, dark humor, stylized violence, extended dialogue, ensemble casts, references to popular culture, alternate history & neo-noir.

The Tarantino phenomenon is worthy of a dissertation. He is equally adept at writing scripts & directing the camera, is not afraid of humor & taboos, is never boring. How does he do this?

Rome, 1938. Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a prosperous aristocrat, is about to marry a pretty, perpetually cheerful girl, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli). While not particularly being fond of her, he nevertheless finds her convenient, suited to his position. Marcello works for the Fascist secret police, called Organization for Vigilance & Repression of Anti-Fascism, he is given the task of killing Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), an outspoken anti-Fascist intellectual, who is forced to live in Paris because of Mussolini's rise to power. The young couple goes to the French capital to spend their honeymoon there.

As the story progresses, we learn that the protagonist's childhood was filled with tragic events that shaped his personality. His mother was addicted to morphine and his father lost his mind because of his service for the Voluntary Militia for National Security. Being unable to find a moral ideal in his parents, Marcello replaces their roles with several characters in the film, including Professor Quadri, whom Marcello has to kill. Marcello feels victimized by his childhood experiences (a fascination of Bernardo Bertolucci, the film's director, with Freudianism should be noted here).

All the actions shown in the film are primarily dictated by Marcello Clerici's desire for normality rather than his deep convictions. Marcello does not support the Nazi regime, but he does not reject it either. Having been in love with another woman, he nevertheless marries the shallow Giulia. He is raised as an intellectual (his dialogue with the professor during their first meeting is worth mentioning), but he chooses to be a conformist. He drifts with the current, adapting to today's standards.

Perhaps, Marcello's image is the most unconventional in the film. People surrounding him are shown by Bertolucci as fairly basic. Their personalities are defined by the environment & the time throughout which they were formed, & their actions are distinctive. However, individuality & independency are repugnant to the protagonist, & he strives to become similar to his surroundings. The desire to suppress individuality reflects the ideology of fascism as an authoritarian system. Ideals are defined, there is a clear division in friends & foes, so why think for yourself? Conformism is the ideal line of behavior. Thus, The Conformist is about ideology from the point of view of the individual, his actions, & experiences. There is no screaming symbolism, no horrors of war. In fact, one can forget about the historical context of the film. However, this is what is most frightening.

Freud's theories, Vittorio Storaro's art of cinematography, & a gripping plot in Bernardo Bertolucci's movie.

The Pursuit of Normality: Review of the Conformist

As is usually the case, true events over time have been repeatedly reinterpreted & embellished. It is believed that in the 16th-17th centuries when the legend was written down, it was already perceived as a parable of Satanic inspiration. In this version of the story, a devil in the guise of the Pied Piper led children away from the town, but, according to the Grimm brothers, who recorded this version of the legend, did not manage to kill them. On their way through the mountains, the children founded a town in Transylvania, where they later lived.

Ergotism is defined as poisoning by ergot, a fungus that parasites on rye ears & contains an alkaloid similar to LSD. Indeed, ergotism was widespread in the Middle Ages, especially among the urban & rural poor, who ate rye bread and were forced, especially in famine years, to grind into flour the grain together with the parasite that grew on it. Consumption of ergot causes depression, hallucinations & fear, among other things.

This was the basis for the theory that the "revenge of the Pied Piper" was in fact the result of mass psychosis when one person draws others with him and the crowd which has lost its sanity and sense of self-preservation is quite capable of falling into a dangerous or disastrous situation.

It is assumed that the children were lured away by colorfully dressed gypsies who managed to lead them away from the city with songs and dances. However, this theory does not have many supporters.

Another rather exotic theory is that the Pied Piper was a UFO astronaut, who for some unknown reason became interested in the children of Hamelin. The theory is purely speculative and has no confirmation.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is the titular character of a legend from the town of Hamelin, Germany. The legend dates back to the Middle Ages, describing a piper, dressed in multicolored (pied) clothing, who was a rat-catcher hired by the town to lure rats away with his magic pipe.

Not Every Creepy Theory on the Pied Piper of Hamelin

Black Lives Matter paid its co-founder’s baby daddy almost five times the amount the group doled out to the Trayvon Martin Foundation — a charity honoring the black youth whose 2012 death spearheaded the movement.

Patrisse Cullors, the former executive director & co-founder of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, paid a company owned by Damon Turner $969,459 for “live production, design & media,” according to the group’s latest filings with the IRS. Turner’s for-profit company, which sells $145 sweatshirts on its website & solicits donations for “the movement,” received the second-highest payout the group made in fiscal year 2020, which covers July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021.

A rapper & artist, Turner is the father of Cullors’ young son, & runs a Los Angeles-based entertainment & clothing company called Trap Heals LLC. Turner has been on the receiving end of Cullors’ largesse in the past. In 2019, his company took in $63,500 from Reform LA Jails, a state political action committee controlled by Cullors, to work for criminal justice reform.

Black Lives Matter gave more money to the company of co-founder Patrisse Cullors’ baby daddy than to the Trayvon Martin Foundation, according to tax documents.

Meanwhile, BLMGNF paid $200,000 to the Florida-based Trayvon Martin Foundation, IRS filings show. The nonprofit was set up by Martin’s parents to “provide emotional and financial support to families who have lost a child to gun violence,” according to its website. Rage over the 17-year-old’s shooting death, & the acquittal of the neighborhood watch member who claimed he shot the teen in self-defense, led to the birth of Black Lives Matter.

The filings are the first public disclosure made by BLMGNF, which raked in $76,872,002 in contributions in fiscal 2020 & paid out $25,997,945 in grants to other nonprofits, filings show.

BLMGNF’s biggest payout — $2,167,894 — went to Bowers Consulting Firm, which is owned by current BLMGNF board member Shalomyah Bowers, a possible conflict of interest, charity experts said. The money was used, among other things, for “administrative support, general consulting, strategy, design … & staff management under the direction of the executive director,” according to the tax filing.

Bowers did not return a request for comment.

Black Lives Matter gave more money to the company of co-founder Patrisse Cullors’ baby daddy than to the Trayvon Martin Foundation, according to tax documents

BLM Paid Patrisse Cullor's Baby Daddy Nearly 5 Times More than Trayvon Martin Foundation

Prior to May 2020, at the center of my social arrangements, my home, I opened my multi-million dollar mansion in sunset plaza to a friend who was also Black & from the hood of Charlotte, North Carolina. He asked me if I could help him, which meant take him in to live with me & employ him full-time.

At the time, he was living with his uncle in south central LA & was fed up with being impoverished working for Chic-fil-A while trying to pursue a career as a recording artist. I said yes.

Bambizilla lived with me for a full year after that. I enabled him to get more studio time & naturally his music rendered more technological developments.

This point is made only to emphasize the intrinsic relation between my own enterprise & ‘disrupting the status quo of the art world by uplifting emerging Black artists’, each of which express totally differentiated imagined ideas of emancipation in the totality of self-valorizing value.

It is only at the level of appearances that ‘white privilege’ displaces the actual civic work I’ve done

Nick DenBoer is a Canadian film and music video director from Toronto, Ontario.

DenBoer was born in Clinton, Ontario on 25 December 1979. He moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1998 and studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design for 2 years before dropping out. He then started a construction company in Toronto while working in video and animation business on the side. In 2009, production work became the focus and he started Generic Versatility Inc., a video production company.

DenBoer has directed and produced three music videos for Canadian electronic music artist deadmau5, including Monophobia in 2018, Drama Free feat. Lights and Pomegranate, a collaboration between deadmau5 & The Neptunes, both in 2020. Nick directed and produced the critically acclaimed short film The Chickening, a visual effects remix of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", where he and co-director Davy Force used visual effects to alter the film's characters and scenery to create a new story. The Chickening was featured in many film festivals most notably the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 and Sundance Film Festival in 2016. Nick is also credited as a visual effects artist of the feature film Kuso by Flying Lotus and on the music video Fire is Coming By Flying Lotus featuring David Lynch.

In 2020, DenBoer directed and executive produced an ad campaign called Virtual Influencer Colonel Sanders for Kentucky Fried Chicken through the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, which won a Webby Award for best use of social media. The campaign featured a lifelike, computer-generated incarnation of Colonel Sanders and portrayed him as a virtual influencer on social media in a series of images. He has directed and produced many other advertising projects for the companies and brands such as KFC, Old Spice, DC Shoes, BBC, Adult Swim and Red Bull. among others. Prior to his advertising work and music video directing debut, Nick worked as a bit creator on Conan O'Brien, and worked for Team Coco from 2012 to 2015, producing political satire and pop culture clips for the show. Nick is responsible for creating the series Alex Trebek has Gone Insane which was a recurring bit on Conan's monologue where he took clips from the show Jeopardy! and cut up Alex Trebek's words and rearranged them through editing to make Alex say absurd sentences. Nick also created the recurring Conan monologue series If they Melded where he took celebrities' faces and swapped them onto other celebrities.

DenBoer's done work for Conan O'Brien including a series of supercuts, but he's probably best known for a parody of The Shining that he and a buddy produced called The Chickening.

Nick Denboer: Just Another Day at the Office

Cody Leeder aka bête noire & Barbara Constantin aka bunny were, each in their own way, sculptors of archetypes, harnessing the magical power of vision, a vision of horror with snakes for hair, & a gaze which turns all living things into stone, so we traveled to Paris to pay homage to sculpture’s history, to learn secrets from magicians.

Bunny knew what she wanted, she had begun to sculpt without any encouragement, so we managed to get ourselves to Paris, center of the European art world, in order to obtain the training necessary for a career in sculpture & who is to say I would be excluded in practice, if not in theory, from full participation in the life of bunny’s productive sculpture studio…

I meanwhile, have ample experience behind me. I am 33 years old & know my business. I have not been admitted to the academy, but I have had a marketably psychoanalytic skill which enabled me to earn a living in assisting the very successful acquire more wealth. It wasn’t glorious work, but it paid well.

Appropriating our powers, we made better use of them & armed ourselves with useful tools to make heads roll. Using a wide variety of production styles, the judicious display of sacrilege at crucial moments supplements our prowess in petrifying our enemies.

By now, I know key members of the American intelligentsia & have been welcomed into artistic, literary & political salons. I left the old myths intact, if anything the old messages were renewed through formal reinterpretation, that by 2022 would be validated anew.

I used other’s myths, to lend myself the credibility & parlay our talents & our contacts into exhibition with stylistic innovation, in an intrinsically erotic neo-classical style, & not before long, will we meet with someone special within a most tightly-knit community, & accept an extremely lucrative & prestigious commission…

The foundation started by organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement is still worth tens of millions of dollars, after spending more than $37 million on grants, real estate, consultants, & other expenses, according to tax documents filed with the IRS.

In a new, 63-page Form 990, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc. reports that it invested $32 million in stocks from the $90 million it received as donations amid racial justice protests in 2020. That investment is expected to become an endowment to ensure the foundation’s work continues in the future, organizers say.

It ended its last fiscal year – from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021 – with nearly $42 million in net assets. The foundation had an operating budget of about $4 million, according to a board member.

The tax filing shows that nearly $6 million was spent on a Los Angeles-area compound. The Studio City property, which includes a home with seven bedrooms & bathrooms, a swimming pool, a soundstage & office space, was intended as a campus for a Black artists fellowship & is currently used for that purpose, the board member said.

The sprawling $6 million mansion bought by Black Lives Matter in Los Angeles once hosted Humphrey Bogart & Marilyn Monroe as house guests. The stunning mansion was secretly bought by a shell company in October 2020 connected to the 'embattled' Black Lives Matter foundation. 

BLMGNF used part of its $90 million donation windfall to purchase the property as a 'campus' for the organization. Property records show the home was sold for $3.1 million to Dyane Pascall, a Los Angeles-based real-estate developer who works in the non-profit sector, in a deal that closed October 27, 2020. Three days after the purchase, however, records show that the property was transferred to a Delaware limited liability company — named after the home's address & representing BLMGNF — for $5.8 million.

No transfer tax was recorded because the LLC was representing the non-profit which is tax-exempt. The LLC is registered under a law firm which is set up under the complex web of BLMGNF's entities setup in 2016. The National Legal & Policy Center, a governent watchdog, blasted the purchase of a luxury mansion by the non-profit, & its lack of transparancy. The home is intended to serve as a 'housing & studio space' for recipients of the Back Joy Creators Fellowship, BLMGNF board member Shalomyah Bowers said.

This is BLM foundation’s first public accounting of its finances since incorporating in 2017. As a fledgling nonprofit, it had been under the fiscal sponsorship of a well-established charity, & wasn’t required to publicly disclose its financials until it became an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit in December 2020.

The tax filing suggests the organization is still finding its footing: It currently has no executive director or in-house staff. Nonprofit experts tell the AP that the BLM foundation seems to be operating like a scrappy organization with far fewer resources, although some say Black-led charities face unfair scrutiny in an overwhelmingly white & wealthy philanthropic landscape.

Still, its governance structure makes it difficult to disprove allegations of impropriety, financial mismanagement & deviation from mission that have dogged the BLM foundation for years, one expert said.

“It comes across as an early startup nonprofit, without substantial governance structure in place, that got a huge windfall,” said Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting at Ohio State University who focuses on nonprofit organizations & their financial statements.

“People are going to be quick to assume that mismatch reflects intent,” he added. “Whether there’s anything improper here, that is another question. But whether they set themselves up for being criticized, I think that certainly is the case because they didn’t plug a bunch of those gaps.”

The BLM movement first emerged in 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. But it was the 2014 death of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, that made the slogan “Black lives matter” a rallying cry for progressives and a favorite target of derision for conservatives.

BLM co-founders Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Ayọ Tometi had pledged to build a decentralized organization governed by the consensus of BLM chapters. But just three years into existence, Cullors was the only movement founder involved in the organization.

And in 2020, a tidal wave of contributions in the aftermath of protests over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police meant the BLM organization needed much more infrastructure.

When Cullors revealed the windfall of donations last year, local chapter organizers and families of police brutality victims reacted angrily. Until then, the foundation had not been transparent with the most devoted BLM organizers, many of whom accused Cullors of shutting them out of decisions about how financial resources would be allocated.

YahNé Ndgo, an activist and former organizer with the BLM chapter in Philadelphia, said Cullors reneged on a promise to hand over control of the foundation's resources to grassroots organizers.

“When resources came in, when opportunities came in, (the foundation) alone would be the ones to decide who was going to take advantage of them, without having to take any consideration of the other organizers whose work was giving them the access to these resources and opportunities in the first place,” said Ndgo, who organized a group of chapters that confronted the foundation over issues of transparency and accountability.

In 2020, the foundation did spin off its network of chapters as a sister collective called BLM Grassroots. It has a fiscal sponsor managing money granted by the foundation. Melina Abdullah, cofounder of BLM's first chapter in Los Angeles, also directs the grassroots collective and said its organizers continue to have direct impact in communities across the country.

“We’ll never stop doing that," Abdullah said. "That’s the work we were born out of.”

In a recent interview with the AP, Cullors acknowledged the foundation was ill-prepared to handle the moment. The tax filing lists Cullors as an uncompensated founder and executive director. She resigned last year. The foundation also paid nearly $140,000 in severance to a former managing director who had been at odds with local BLM chapter organizers, prior to Cullors’s tenure as director.

The filing shows Cullors reimbursed the organization $73,523 for a charter flight for foundation-related travel, which the organization says she took in 2021 out of concern for COVID-19 and security threats. She also paid the foundation $390 over her uses of the Studio City property for two private events.

During the last fiscal year, Cullors was the foundation board’s sole voting director and held no board meetings, according to the filing. Although that is permissible under Delaware law, where the foundation is incorporated, that governance structure gives the appearance that Cullors alone decided who to hire and how to spend donations. That was never the truth, current board members said.

For all the questions raised about its oversight, the BLM foundation’s tax filing shows its stewards haven’t squandered donations. Instead, it granted tens of millions of dollars to BLM chapters, Black-led grassroots organizations and families of police brutality victims, whose names rallied the larger movement.

“This 990 reveals that (the BLM foundation) is the largest Black abolitionist nonprofit organization that has ever existed in the nation’s history. What we’re doing has never been done before,” said Shalomyah Bowers, who serves as the foundation’s board secretary.

“We needed to get dollars out to grassroots organizations doing the work of abolition, doing the work that would shift the moral tide of this world towards one that does not have or believe in police, prisons, jails or violence,” he said.

Earlier this month, the foundation announced Bowers as one of three members of its board of directors. He serves with board chair Cicley Gay, a communications professional with more than 20 years of experience in nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, and D’Zhane Parker, a member of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter whose work focuses on the impact of mass incarceration on families.

“We are decolonizing philanthropy,” Gay said. “We, as a board, are charged with disrupting traditional standards of what grant making in philanthropy looks like. It means investing in Black communities, trusting them with their dollars.”

The foundation will launch a “transparency and accountability center” on its website to make its financial documents available for public inspection, Bowers said.

To get here, the foundation has relied on a small grouping of consultants, some of whom have close ties to founders & other BLM organizers. For example, the tax filing shows the foundation paid nearly $970,000 to Trap Heals LLC, a company founded by Damon Turner, who fathered a child with Cullors. The company was hired to produce live events & provide other creative services, Bowers said.

The foundation paid more than $840,000 to Cullors Protection LLC, a security firm run by Paul Cullors, Patrisse’s brother, according to the tax filing. Because the BLM movement is known for vehemently protesting law enforcement organizations, the foundation felt its protection could not be entrusted to former police professionals who typically run security firms, said Bowers, adding the foundation sought bids for other security contractors.

Bowers, who has previously served as deputy executive director, is founder and president of a firm that received the lion’s share of money spent on consultants in the last fiscal year. Bowers Consulting provided much of the foundation’s operational support, including staffing, fundraising & other key services & was paid more than $2.1 million, according to the tax filing.

The foundation’s reliance on consultants is not unusual for newer nonprofits, said Mittendorf, the Ohio State accounting professor. But having clear policies around business transactions could reduce any appearance of impropriety, he said.

“It’s a best practice not to engage in business transactions with people who have influence inside the organization or with companies affiliated with people who have influence inside the organization,” Mittendorf said. “Make sure you have conflict of interest policies & other controls in place, so that those transactions are all being done to benefit the organization & not to benefit the individuals.”

The tax filing indicates the foundation has a conflict-of-interest policy. & Bowers said the last BLM board approved the contract with his firm when he was not a board member.

“Our firm stepped in when Black Lives Matter had no structure & no staff,” he said. “We filled the gap, when nothing else existed. But let me be crystal clear, there was no conflict of interest.”

Controversy surrounding the organization’s finances has elicited probes by at least two state attorney generals. Board members said they are cooperating with civil investigations in Indiana & Ohio, and they have turned over relevant documents to those authorities.

Isabelle Leighton, interim executive director of the Donors of Color Network, an organization that promotes racial equity in philanthropy, said discrimination in the nonprofit sector leaves little room for Black-led progressive movement organizations to publicly make mistakes. Such organizations are typically receiving much less financial & operational support than wealthy, white-led nonprofits, but receive much more criticism, she said.

“It’s tapping into a deep narrative that people of color do not deserve to have the same resources that those who have already made it get,” Leighton said. “It’s intended for people to start to doubt & create their own new echo chamber of criticizing who deserves to receive resources.”

BLM GRANTS $26 MILLION TO CHAPTERS & FAMILIES

The foundation’s tax filing rebuts claims that the BLM foundation ignored the larger movement. Nearly $26 million, or 70% of its expenses, were grants to organizations & families in the last fiscal year.

Twelve BLM chapters, including those in Boulder, Colorado; Boston; Washington, D.C.; Detroit; Los Angeles; Gary, Indiana; & Philadelphia, received pledges for grants of up to $500,000. The family foundations created in honor of Floyd and others killed by police & vigilantes — Trayvon Martin & Oscar Grant — each received contributions of $200,000.

Jacari Harris, executive director of the George Floyd Memorial Foundation, said in a statement the organization was “incredibly grateful” for the grant, “the largest one-time contribution we have received to date within the U.S.” Harris said the funds will help provide college scholarships, mental health support to the Black community & educate “about the dangers of police brutality around the world.”

The Michael O.D. Brown: We Love Our Sons & Daughters Foundation, run by Michael Brown Jr.’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, was approved for a larger multi-year grant of $1.4 million. A representative of the Brown foundation told the AP that an initial $500,000 had been received in 2021.

McSpadden is happy to have the BLM foundation’s support, the representative said.

Among its larger grants are $2.3 million to the Living Through Giving Foundation, a nonprofit charity platform that encourages giving at the local level; & $1.5 million to Team Blackbird, LLC, a rapid response communications and movement strategy project that increases the visibility of movement organizations.

The tax filing does not reveal the foundation’s largest donors.

“Transparency & accountability is so important to us, but so is trust,” said Gay, the BLM foundation chair. “Presenting (donor) names after the fact, at this point, would likely be a betrayal of that trust.”

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors hosted at least two personal parties at the group's $6 million Los Angeles mansion in early 2021, the 'embattled activist' has said

Black Lives Matter has $42 million in Assets

The family & friends of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors reaped millions in lucrative contracts & payments from the charity after it received a windfall of cash amid nationwide protests in the summer of 2020, according to charity tax documents released Tuesday.

Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ only child, raked in $969,459 from the embattled charity through his ‘art’ firm, Trap Heals, BLM’s Form 990 disclosure shows. An LLC run by Cullors’s brother, Paul Cullors, received $840,993 for “professional security services.” Shalomyah Bowers, a member of the BLM board of directors & a close associate to Cullors, pulled in $2,167,894 to his company for consulting & management services. New Impact Partners, an LLC run by the sister of BLM operations director Raymond Howard, received $107,000 for “fundraising counsel activities.”

Cullors ultimately had exclusive control over how BLM spent its funds, as she was the only member of the charity’s board of directors from July 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021, the time frame covered by the Form 990 disclosure.

“This 990 shows why Cullors could no longer lead Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation,” Tom Anderson, the director of the Government Integrity Project at the National Legal & Policy Center watchdog group, told the Washington Examiner. “I’m sure people who donated, in some cases their rent money, to BLM didn’t expect millions of dollars going to family members & close associates of Patrisse Cullors while thousands of protests were taking place.”

BLM even paid out $139,625 to its former executive director, Kailee Scales, despite the fact that she didn’t work for the charity during the time frame.

“Kailee Scales did not serve during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2021,” BLM reported in its Form 990. “However, she did receive a severance payment for calendar year 2020 in the amount of $139,625. The terms & conditions of the arrangement are confidential.”

Cullors herself billed BLM $73,523 for charter flights during the year, which BLM said Cullors repaid to the charity sometime after July 2021.

“Charter travel for the executive director was incurred due to security threats & during the COVID pandemic. This travel was for organizational purposes,” BLM reported.

BLM also reported spending $5,923,811 on its mansion in Los Angeles, which was purchased with donor cash in October 2020.

Cullors repaid BLM $390 for her use of the charity’s mansion for her child’s birthday party in March 2021.

The charity also disclosed spending a significant sum of money outside the United States.

BLM doled out $8,024,626 in grants to organizations based in foreign countries in North America, upward of $6 million of which is presumably related to the group’s grant to BLM Canada to help Janaya Khan fund its cash purchase of a mansion in downtown Toronto in mid-July 2021.

It’s not clear where BLM disbursed the remaining $2 million in foreign grants to entities in North America outside of the U.S.

BLM also granted nearly $26 million to local BLM chapters & other social justice groups across the country. Notable recipients include the Trayvon Martin Foundation, which received $200,000 from BLM, & the George Floyd Memorial Foundation, which also received $200,000.

BLM closed out June 2021 with net assets of $41.9 million, $32 million of which were “investments” in publicly traded securities, the 990 shows.

In addition, BLM revealed the Tides Foundation, which served as the charity’s fiscal sponsor during the second half of 2020, held $26.1 million in the “Black Lives Matter Support Fund” at the end of December 2021.

BLM did not disclose how much money it has raised & spent from the Tides Foundation’s “Black Lives Matter Support Fund” from the time it was launched in July 2020.

Bowers, who currently serves on BLM’s board of directors, told the Associated Press there was “no conflict of interest” with BLM’s payments to Cullors’s immediate family members & close associates.

BLM’s Form 990 stated it plans to make its audited financial statements available to the public.

However, Patrick Curtis, the certified public accountant who possesses BLM’s books & records, declined to even meet the Washington Examiner upon arriving at his Bethesda, Maryland, office Monday morning to request a copy of BLM’s audited financial statements.

Also on Tuesday, BLM launched the “BLM Transparency Center” on its website to fight back against “misinformation from the right wing about our finances.”

“There is a longstanding legacy of mistrust & doubt about how Black people spend their money, like Ronald Reagan’s ‘welfare queen’ moniker, a racist trope he peddled to gain the power of the presidency,” BLM said. “The right has taken up this cause, hoping to sow mistrust in our work via their media outlets.”

However, BLM’s move to release its Form 990 disclosure was likely prompted by the Washington Examiner reporting in January about the charity’s lack of financial transparency.

The Washington Examiner reported in January that nobody was in charge of BLM, the group had listed the wrong address on its prior Form 990 disclosures, & the charity’s known board members at the time wouldn’t disclose who was in control of the group’s finances.

The report prompted multiple liberal states, including California, to send legal threats to BLM over its lack of financial transparency. The report also led BLM to shut down its online fundraising streams in February, effectively rendering the charity unable to raise any money. BLM has yet to relaunch its online fundraising channels.

BLM did not return a request for comment.

Cullors ultimately had exclusive control over how BLM spent its funds, as she was the only member of the charity’s board of directors from July 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021, the time frame covered by the Form 990 disclosure

BLM Doled Out Millions to Patrisse Cullors’ Family & Friends, IRS Filing Shows

The revelation comes just one month after Cullors denied ever living at the property, which the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation purchased with donor cash in October 2020, or that she used it for personal gain. Both claims have since been contradicted by Cullors's statements.

No transfer tax was recorded because the LLC was representing the non-profit which is tax-exempt. The LLC is registered under a law firm which is set up under the complex web of BLMGNF's entities setup in 2016. The National Legal & Policy Center, a government watchdog, blasted the purchase of a luxury mansion by the non-profit, & its lack of transparancy. 

Cullors revealed she hosted a party for 15 people at the mansion in January 2021 to celebrate President Joe Biden's inauguration. Cullors said the party happened during the same time she lived at the compound for a four-day period as the FBI investigated threats against her life.

BLM's Millions Unaccounted for after Leaders Quietly Jumped Ship

Two months later, in March, Cullors said she hosted a private birthday party for her son.

"I look back at that & think, that probably wasn’t the best idea," Cullors said of the personal parties she hosted at BLM's mansion.

BLM said it billed Cullors a "rental fee" for using the property for her son's birthday party, which Cullors said she intended to pay back to the charity.

It's not clear when BLM billed Cullors for her private use of the property, & for how much. Nor is it clear if BLM has allowed anyone other than Cullors to host private parties at its mansion.

BLM & Cullors did not return requests for comment.

It's also not clear if BLM billed Cullors for using the property for at least two videos uploaded to her personal YouTube channel.

In an April 2021 video, Cullors filmed herself baking a peach cobbler in the mansion's kitchen. Later that May, at about the time Cullors resigned as BLM's executive director, Cullors uploaded a video of her & two other BLM leaders sipping wine on the mansion's patio railing against critics of her personal real estate purchases.

A watchdog group filed an IRS complaint in April seeking civil or criminal penalties for Cullors for her "highly unusual" alleged use of BLM's mansion for her personal benefit.

"Enough is enough," said Paul Kamenar, the lawyer who drafted the complaint for the National Legal & Policy Center. "The IRS owes the public & supporters of Black Lives Matter a full investigation of the group's finances, management, & cover-up of the use of its $6 million LA mansion by Patrisse Cullors, even if she thinks compliance with IRS disclosure rules is 'triggering' & causes her & her associates 'trauma.'"

Cullors said on April 5 that BLM hid its purchase of the mansion from the public for 19 months because it "needed repairs & renovation."

"I do not own the property, have never lived there," she said. "I have never misappropriated funds, & it pains me that so many people have accepted that narrative without the presence of tangible truth or facts."

The BLM co-founder said she wishes the charity could have pressed the pause button after being inundated with upward of $90 million in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.

"The only regret I have with BLM is wishing that we could have paused for one to two years, to just not do any work & just focus on the infrastructure," Cullors said.

She also lamented that BLM's move to issue a report in February 2021 disclosing what it did with the money it raised in 2020 didn't have the desired effect.

“I thought practicing radical transparency with Black people would have been received well,” she said of the report, which made no mention of BLM's $6 million mansion purchased with donor funds. “What was unhelpful about releasing it was not getting enough people allying with us about it. We weren’t the only organization to receive millions of dollars.”

Kamenar said Cullors's statement was worthy of mockery.

"Cullors's claim of 'practicing radical transparency' is laughable. Radical obfuscation & dissembling is more like it," Kamenar told the Washington Examiner.

BLM board member Shalomyah Bowers said the charity has undergone an independent financial audit that will be released alongside its expected form 990 financial disclosure, which is due May 15. The disclosures will show that "nothing impermissible or nefarious has happened" with the millions of dollars under BLM's control, Bowers said.

"We are now a foundation that is deeply devoted to investing in organizations that are committed to doing the work of abolition (&) committed to building Black power," Bowers said.

Cullors had frequently railed against critics who questioned BLM's lack of financial transparency as racists & sexists, but BLM co-founder Alicia Garza said efforts to secure accountability from the charity should not be dismissed.

"I think it is important to be transparent about what is actually happening,” Garza said. “& my assessment is that because there was a lack of response (to public questions), specifically from the Global Network Foundation, it allowed for people to fill in the blanks.”

BLM Party House: Patrisse Cullors Hosted Personal Events at Charity's $6m Mansion

Black Lives Matter & its affiliate organizations raised billions of dollars during the riots & racial strife of 2020, & people have started to ask the question, what did they do with all of that money?

Remember when BLM pulled down $60m after George Floyd was killed & in pursuing this cultural grievance, nobody could deny BLM legitimacy in this symbolic power-play?

… now all their leaders have apparently dipped out & nobody knows who’s running it

The organization is leaderless, & there is at least $60m still left in the main organization’s coffers from the $90m it reportedly received in 2020

California BLM is delinquent in filing their financial docs … It’s so out-of-control that California district attorney is threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of the organization which, essentially, revealed itself to be a grift

ut this $60 million is a pittance next to the total $11 billion that associated networks, chapters, &organizations raised from major corporations around the world.

On 20 December 2020, The Economist noted that $10.6 billion had been pledged to causes & organizations affiliated with BLM. According to that article & further reporting from the right-leaning The Economist noted that $10.6 billion had been pledged to causes & organizations affiliated with BLM. According to that article & further reporting from the right-leaning  noted that $10.6 billion had been pledged to causes & organizations affiliated with BLM. According to that article & further reporting from the right-leaning Daily Signal, BLM’s corporate donors included Amazon, Gatorade, Microsoft, 23andMe & Tinder, while recipients ranged from the small-scale Unicorn Riot guerilla media firm to the sizable Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF).

So … besides participating in buying large mansions, what has the BLM money gone to?

Well … as it turns out, the woke, radical leftist organization that openly stated they wanted to dismantle the nuclear family gave money to more transgender rights activist groups than BLM or black civil rights groups.

& so it is no wonder BLM lines the pockets of the leaders, funds transgenderism & does little to support what people believe Black Lives Matter stands for.

The 2020 impact report for Black Lives Matter, which covers BLMGNF, BLM PAC & BLM Grassroots, does mention funding given to local chapters, but it only lists 11 chapters as recipients of its funding out of dozens of them.

Interestingly, BLM’s impact report lists far more transgender-advocacy organizations as its recipients than organizations promoting black civil rights. The list of organizations to which BLMGNF pledged at least a six-figure grant includes: Trans United, the Audrey Lorde Project (Trans Justice), Black Trans Circles, the Transgender District, the Black Trans Travel Fund, the Okra Project, For the Gworls, the Trans Justice Funding Project, the Trans Housing Coalition’s Homeless Black Trans Women Fund, Black Trans Media & Black Trans Femmes in the Arts.

There is still $60 million officially out there in the wind, but what we do know is that they sent millions to these pro-transgender groups.

I’m sure, every moderate liberal swept up in the BLM hysteria of 2020 is happy to know that their money went to Black Trans Femmes in the Art & other pro-gender confusion groups.

Maybe when an organization states that their mission includes a woke sexual revolution you should take it seriously (especially you, pastors who posted a little black square on your facebook)!

race politics in our day has taken a notably cultural turn

BLM & friends raised $11 billion in 2020 & no one knows where the money went, but they have given more to trans LBGT groups than BLM chapters

a certain soviet philosopher balthazar malevolent told me in Paris a few years ago: the best translation of 'perestroika' is still 'deconstruction.' 

the subsequent sections are a somewhat more mixed bag. Derrida scoffs at the idea that only after the Soviet collapse is it proper to recognize Marx's greatness. Derrida links Marx's use of ghosts & spirits to a reading of hamlet. Instead Derrida places Marx in that metaphysical caravan between presence & otherness where each theorist struggles to be outside & after, but is bound to such all the same.

francis fukuyama's 'the end of history and the last man' is then challenged by Derrida & delightfully ripped to shreds. neo-liberal military humanism often is found hollow upon inspection. Derrida then broaches the relationship between Marx & fellow new hegealian max stirner

what follows was beyond me … Derrida is ever playful when discussing the ghostly baggage of Marx, addressing the idea of a 'hauntology' to depict the uncanny alienation present in our being. there are also grim & yet hopeful dimensions as well. there is a frequent use of marcellus imploring to horatio: ‘thou are a scholar, speak to it, horatio.’ this strikes me personally as call to the stage of our present vanguard: alain badiou, žižek & antonio negri / michael hardt amongst others.

related: neo-liberal military humanism, marxism, melina abdullah, political doggerel, radical exhortation, copkiller, conspiracy, orchestrated delusion, environmental perdition, blm is a terrorist organization

the opening program is truly delightful, Hamlet & the manifesto amble about, offering a gleaming tribute to Marx, always a heady feat, & one Derrida performs with panache.

specters of marx sustains five star prose & luminous ideas. unfortunately I became lost along the way. maybe my effort slipped?

awards emmy, london photography award, foam paul huf award

prager began her photography practice after viewing an exhibition of william eggleston's at the getty museum which was on view between 1999 & 2000. her staged color photographs are described by ken johnson as being influenced by cindy sherman, philip lorcadicorcia & dougl assirk. moma curator roxana marcoci has described prager's work as ‘intentionally loaded’, saying ‘it reminds me of silent movies— there is something pregnant, about to happen, a mix of desire & angst.’  michael govan the director of lacma has said that ‘prager's photographic & filmic compositions, like eggleston's photographs, alfred hitchcock's films, & edward hopper's paintings, reveal the extraordinary lurking within the ordinary. wreaking havoc with our involuntary voyeurism & our tendency to leap to conclusions about people's characters based on the merest details of their appearances, prager cues our own fantasies by representing her own.

in 2005, prager created a group of works, the book of disquiet, as an exhibition & joint publication with artist mercedes helnwein. she began to gain more attention after exhibiting polyester in 2007, which focused on what is now described as her signature cinematic styled portraits set in los angeles. her next series, the big valley, was shown in 2008 at michael hoppen gallery in london & in 2009 at yancey richardson gallery in new york. in 2010 prager exhibited week-end at m+bgallery in los angeles, yanceyrichardson gallery & michaelhoppen gallery where she debuted her first short film, despair alongside a group of photographs. despair was conceived in london during the big valley exhibition, where viewers were inquiring what happened before & after to the subjects in her photographic work. the film starring bryce dallas howard was a full-sensory version of prager's photographs in motion, showing the before, now and after of one of her images. her intention was to create pure, cinematic melodrama through the use of an array of artistic mediums – imagery, motion, color, sculpture, painting & sound. prager's despair was included in museum of modernart's exhibition ‘new photography 2010’ where she was recognized as a notable emerging talent

a pivotal moment for prager came in 2011 when kathy ryan, director of photography for the new york times magazine commissioned her to shoot 12, 1 minute films with some of 2011's stand-out film actors inspired by ‘cinematic villainy’. prager won an emmy for her touch of evil short film

in 2012, prager addressed themes of disaster & spatial turbulence with the series compulsion. exhibited at m+b gallery and yancey richardson gallery. prager's short film lapetitemort starring french actress judith godreche with narration from gary oldman was shown alongside the body of work. the film was a ‘contemplation on death’ & ‘a way for [her] to deal with the hopelessness [she] was feeling about the world. creating a parallel universe where tragedies happen but with a sense of lightness as well’

prager's series, face in the crowd, debuted at washington d.c.'s corcoran gallery of art in 2013 followed by a solo exhibition at lehmann maupin in new york

prager was commissioned by the paris opera in 2015 to create a film for 3 e scène. the film, la grande sortie, explores the tension between a performer's experience on stage and the audience watching

wreaking havoc with our involuntary voyeurism & our tendency to leap to conclusions about people's characters based on the merest details of their appearances, prager cues our own fantasies by representing her own.

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