Cooking crack with baking soda professional#

Zlochevsky – at six feet two and 250 pounds, ‘pure mass wrapped in tailored suits and gentlemanly manners’, with ‘a shaved head, a booming laugh, and essentially no neck’ – was Ukraine’s former minister of ecology and natural resources. Other directors included Aleksander Kwaśniewski, a former president of Poland Joseph Cofer Black, who ran counterterrorism for the CIA under Bush and Devon Archer, Biden’s longtime business partner, who brokered their directorships. (Hunter Biden’s ‘tax affairs’ remain under investigation after a money laundering probe came up dry.)īiden calls his presence on the Burisma board ‘an unmistakable fuck-you to Putin’. The appearance of possible corruption seems to have been nearly as good as actual corruption, for which no evidence – in the form of Joe Biden intervening on Burisma’s behalf – has been found. In Biden’s account – ‘most remarkable for its epic banality’, as he puts it, though ‘epic’ is a bit much – Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, was looking for directors who could give the company a sheen of Western best practice in corporate governance so he could attract Western investment and show that the company wouldn’t be ‘hijacked by Russia’.

Cooking crack with baking soda professional#

Bush and the second by Obama counsel for the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner founder of various multinational firms lobbyist etc) and a half-defence of the charge of nepotism: ‘There’s no question that my last name has opened doors, but my qualifications and accomplishments speak for themselves.’ The one professional controversy Biden addresses at length is his place on the board of Burisma. There is the strut of the résumé (an executive job at a Delaware financial firm out of law school board membership of Amtrak and board chairmanship of the World Food Programme USA, appointed to the first by George W. On these and other political matters, Beautiful Things is defensive, unenlightening and mostly dull.

As an October surprise, it was insufficient to tilt the election to Trump. A sideshow about the role of tech giants in filtering online discourse emerged after Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account on the grounds that it was spreading possible Russian disinformation by reporting on the laptop’s contents. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani carped about the ‘Biden crime family’ to anyone who would listen (a diminished roster of mainstream news outlets and a new crop of obscure news channels and fly-by-night podcasts).

A laptop containing Hunter Biden’s texts, emails, photos and videos surfaced at a computer repair shop in Delaware the month before last year’s election. Within weeks Biden had a lock on the Democratic nomination. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives in December 2019 but acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate two months later. The charges against Trump in his first impeachment stemmed from his request that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, investigate whether Joe Biden had interfered on behalf of the gas company Burisma (when he was vice president and Hunter was a member of Burisma’s board), while the Trump administration withheld $391 million of military aid to Ukraine that had been mandated by Congress. In 2019, he writes, ‘“Where’s Hunter?” replaced “Lock her up!”’ as Trump’s ‘go-to hype line’ at his campaign rallies. ‘I became absurdly good at it – guess that 172 on my LSAT counted for something.’ The tension in Biden’s memoir is between the high-achieving politician’s son and the chronic alcoholic and drug addict in and out of rehab over the past two decades.īeautiful Things has three purposes: cashing in on Biden’s celebrity confession, contrition and expiation after his years as an addict and reframing him as a victim of Trump’s smears (or, as he puts it, ‘a president’s unhinged fury’). ‘Cooking crack took practice, but it wasn’t rocket science,’ he writes. ‘More genteel’ is the way Hunter Biden describes his decision to ‘eliminate one layer of drug-world repulsiveness’ by switching from buying crack at homeless encampments in Los Angeles, where he had a gun pointed at his head at least once, to cooking for himself at his $400-a-night cabana at the Chateau Marmont. You’re less likely to get ripped off or have a gun pointed at your head: powder cocaine dealers are easier to find and more reliable. Disregard the occasional splintered jar or finger burn, and the advantages of cooking for yourself are mostly to do with customer service. T o cook crack you need cocaine, water, baking soda, a heat source (microwave, stove, torch, cigarette lighter) and a spoon or a jar of the right thickness.