Joe Biden's Son Blames "Russian Agents" For Ashley Madison Profile

Last night we heard the best 'excuse' yet if you are caught with an Ashley Madison account, from Dan Loeb - "due diligence." Today, not to be outdone by a married hedge fund manager, Vice-President Joe Biden's son "Hunter" has unleashed his own set of excuses for member ship of the extramarital affairs website, as Breitbart reports  - Biden thinks international agents, possibly Russian, who objected to his board membership with a Ukrainian gas company set up a fake account to discredit him. However, IP mapping suggests otherwise...

As Breitbart reports,

Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s account on the extramarital dating website Ashley Madison was used and likely created on the Georgetown University campus while Biden was teaching there.

Business executive Robert “Hunter” Biden, reportedly an adviser to his father’s political career, told Breitbart News Monday that he suspected his enemies of creating a fake Ashley Madison account for him in order to discredit him. The email address provided for “Robert Biden’s” account matched a personal email address once used by Biden, the vice president’s son confirmed.

Biden thinks international agents, possibly Russian, who objected to his board membership with a Ukrainian gas company set up a fake account to discredit him. A source close to Biden told People Magazine after the first Breitbart story ran that the IP address for the account traces to Jacksonville, Florida.

But account information shows that the profile, which was confirmed by a credit card purchase in 2014, was used at the latitude/longitude point of 38.912682, -77.071704.

That latitude-longitude point just happens to exist on the Georgetown University campus, at an administrative building on Reservoir Road. And Hunter Biden just happened to be teaching there around the time the account was set up.

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Faced with the new information, representatives for Biden said that the vice president’s son would not comment on the story beyond his original statements to Breitbart News denying that the account was his.

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VIDEO: Cop Slams Mom’s Face to the Ground as She Dropped Her Kids Off at School Over Tinted Plate Cover

Tampa, FL — As Liz Vargas was walking her daughter into school on November 5, officer Kevin Fitzpatrick heroically swooped in to protect the citizens of Tampa from Vargas’ tinted license plate cover.

Not having done anything wrong, and upset that she was being harassed in front of her children, Vargas voiced her discontent.

“Then  because I was in my pj’s he called me bummy, and he accused me of illegal drugs, that’s why I got argumentative,” Vargas said of the incident.

Within 34 seconds of his encounter with Vargas, Fitzpatrick grabbed her wrist and had slammed the innocent woman to the ground, face first.

After being brutally assaulted in front of her child by police, Vargas retained attorney Brett Szematowicz.

“At best that could be explained away that he thought there was an officer safety issue with her pointing up at the sky, but he never said he ordered her back in the car, he never said he felt threatened by her actions at any point,” Szematowicz said.

As early as February, Szematowicz said they requested video of the incident from police, but he said they told him there was no tape.

According to WFLA,

The Tampa police department claims it never denied the video existed. In other cases it is common for officers to acknowledge there is video evidence, by writing “video” on criminal report affidavits.  Fitzpatrick put a slash mark through the “evidence box” indicating there was no evidence.  Hegarty isn’t sure why Fitzpatrick didn’t write in “video” but insists no one at T-P-D- denied that the video existed.

But if you watch the video, it becomes quite apparent as to why Fitzpatrick would have claimed it didn’t exist.

After repeated attempts at obtaining the video, it was finally released in July. The video clearly shows a uniformed assailant, Fitzpatrick, assault an innocent woman, Vargas.

Despite this video evidence, however, an internal ‘investigation’ into the incident cleared Fitzpatrick of any wrongdoing. Tampa police claim that Fitzpatrick had no other option to “control Vargas” other than slamming her face-first into the ground.

Szematowicz feels that the investigation is incomplete. “They left out why he was grabbing her in the first place and to us as her criminal defense attorneys that is the most critical part,” he said.

This entire ordeal was over a tinted license plate cover that can be purchased at auto parts stores throughout the state of Florida.

According to Florida Statute 316.605(1), 

“…all letters, numerals, printing, writing, and other identification marks upon the plates regarding the word “Florida,” the registration decal, and the alphanumeric designation shall be clear and distinct and free from defacement, mutilation, grease, and other obscuring matter, so that they will be plainly visible and legible at all times 100 feet from the rear or front.”

Despite the low quality of the video, we can see on the officer’s own dashcam that Vargas’ plate was legible.

The precedent set after failing to hold Fitzpatrick accountable is that police can initiate violence against citizens for no reason, even innocent mothers, in front of their children, and this is “following procedure.”

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The One Chart The Military-Industrial Complex Is Hoping Mean Reverts

While most of the world will be hoping the following chart never (ever) mean-reverts to its previous historically devastating highs, there is one group that is 'banking' on it... The Military-Industrial Complex...

Source: @MaxCRoser

Of course, as Ron Paul recently explained recently, the current enemy of choice is Russia:

"The people have to have the propaganda convert them into someone they hate, so they can hate...so you had to have a Saddam Hussein, an Ayatollah, or somebody else, and right now it’s Russia."

Paul goes on to note that while the Cold War may have fueled the need for American military spending, its end has left Washington without a clear enemy to demonize. The US government is now spreading disinformation about subjects like the Ukraine crisis in order to paint Russia as a villain.

“All of a sudden the Cold War’s over, and there’s a full explanation of what’s going on in Ukraine, and it’s not all the Russians’ fault, I tell you,” Paul said. “But we have to have an enemy to keep on churning this.”

“Could you believe that maybe the military-industrial complex might have something to do with this?” he added. “Because they probably don’t deliberately say well this started a war, but this started some aggravation which ended up in a war much bigger.”

But we give the last word to Dwight Eisenhower...

Nothing has changed in 54 years... in fact it has just got worse.

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The Police: Our Enemies in Blue?

Kristian Williams is not a big fan of the police. His book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, published by the ridiculously badass AK Press breaks it down like this:

“Let’s begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”

Kristian was kind enough to talk to me about why cops are bad.

Thanks for talking to me about your book “Our Enemies in Blue”. Your book is extremely critical of the police. What does the police department of the United States represent to you?

The police are specialists in coercive force.  Their distinguishing characteristic is the combination of surveillance and violence to make people do what people with power want them to do.  That usually gets described in terms enforcing the law, but what I found in my research is that the real distribution of power is a much better indicator of how the police will act in any given situation.  On the whole, they behave in ways that serve the interests of the powerful at the expense of the rest of us.

To me, a police officers main job is to keep things the way they are “supposed to be.” In your opinion, is the job of the police force to stop crime, or to control the working class?

Well, both, but the latter is more important.  In fact, what gets counted as “crime” is generally class-coded.  The disorderly behaviors of poor people get criminalized, while wealthy people see their misdeeds sanctified by the law, or handled as administrative matters, or – when they are considered criminal – met with loose enforcement and light penalties.  So, sleeping under a bridge is a crime, but evicting poor people from their housing is just good business.

 

Of course it’s not just class.  The police also work hard to maintain our society’s racial hierarchy.  Racial profiling affects people of color of all classes, limits their geographic (and therefore social) mobility, and so serves to marginalize them.  And, interestingly, every reputable study has shown that it has no use in terms of fighting crime.  It is purely a matter of preserving white supremacy.

You argue that acts of police brutality and violence are not aberrations, but are in fact the norm. Can you expand on this at all?

I devote an entire chapter to this question in the book, but the short version is that violence is inherent to policing.  They’re trained for it, armed for it, authorized to use it.  Their institutional culture supports it and to some degree their collective self-perception is centered on it. Viewed at the level of the institution, it is a routine aspect of police work, even if the average officer uses violence rather rarely.  The question of how much of that violence is legitimate and how much is abusive is a normative one; it depends on questions of law, policy, ethics, and social expectation.  But the point is, if you institutionalize violence in this way, it is fairly certain that the members of the institution will sometimes exceed the purported limits.  Looked at that way, even the excesses are part of the normal functioning of the institution.

Are there any solutions to this issue? Where do you see things going if this doesn’t change?

In the short term, I think it is worth pursuing reforms that make the police more accountable and that limit their access to violence.  In the long term, I think we need to abolish this institution and find some better means of ensuring public safety.  Since the police are both a product and a protector of social inequality, the abolitionist project requires an entirely different kind of society, one characterized by a radical egalitarianism.  Of course it is impossible at this stage to know exactly what that will look like, and it’s hard to see how we could get there from where we are at present.  That doesn’t make it any less pressing, however.  The only real check on power is popular resistance. Without it, things inevitably get worse.

Check out Our Enemies in Blue here, and see what other books about activism, anarchy and subculture AK Press has for sale here. 

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Fake Goldman Sachs bank found in China

A Goldman Sachs (Shenzhen) Financial Leasing Company was found operating in the country without any connection to the US investment giant.

“We don’t have any connection with the US Goldman Sachs, we just picked the name out, and it’s not intentionally the same,” a woman who answered the company’s listed phone number told AFP.

The company uses the same Chinese characters, gao sheng, as the real Goldman Sachs, and its English font is evocative of the US bank’s.

Bloomberg made a filing with the Shenzhen government that reveals the replica Goldman Sachs has been operating since May 2013.

It’s not the first case of setting up fake banks in China. A 39-year-old man in eastern China’s Shandong Province was arrested this month after starting a fake branch of the China Construction Bank with card readers, passbooks, teller counter and convincing looking logos, the Xinhua news agency reported. The bank was taking deposits but didn’t allow withdrawals.

“It’s notoriously difficult for an overseas claimant to persuade the Chinese courts that there has been trademark infringement. There’s still a practice of whoever registers first wins,” Paul Haswell, a Hong Kong-based partner at law firm Pinsent Masons told Bloomberg.

Basketball legend Michael Jordan lost a case in July against a local sportswear company that used his name in Chinese.

In 2012, Apple paid $60 million to Proview Technology (Shenzhen) that first registered the iPad trademark in China in 2001.

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AP Sues FBI Over Impersonating An AP Reporter With A Fake AP Story

It later came out that the way the FBI used this was an undercover agent

pretended to be an AP reporter

and sent the suspect -- a 15 year old high school kid... -- a "draft" of the article to review. And when the kid opened it, the malware was deployed.

In response to this, FBI director James Comey

defended the practice

, saying that it was legal "under Justice Department and FBI guidelines at the time" and, furthermore, that this bit of deception worked. Comey also said that while guidelines had changed, and such impersonation would require "higher-level approvals," it was still something the FBI could do.

The AP

has now sued the FBI

, along with the Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press (RCFP) over its failure to reveal any more details about this effort following a FOIA request. For reasons that are beyond me, even though it's the AP filing the lawsuit and the AP

writing about

the lawsuit, reporter Michael Biesecker apparently doesn't think its readers can handle the actual filing, so they don't include it (this is bad journalism, folks). However, you can

read the actual lawsuit here

.

In short, the AP made a FOIA request for documents related to this specific case above, as well as "an accounting of the number of times" that the FBI "has impersonated media organizations or generated media-style material" to deliver malware. The FBI said it was working on it, and then bizarrely told the AP that the request was being "closed administratively" because it was being combined with someone else's FOIA request, which left the AP reasonably confused, since they had not initiated that request and had no idea who had.

In a letter from Mr. Hardy dated December 10, 2014, the FBI stated that, even though the request had yet to be fulfilled, the AP Request was unilaterally “being closed administratively,” because the “material responsive to your request will be processed in FOIA 1313504-0 as they share the same information.”

The combining of Mr. Satter’s request with Request No. 1313504-0 occurred despite the fact that Mr. Satter had not filed Request No. 1313504-0 and was given no information about the identity of the requester underlying FOIA Request No. 1313504-0.

When the AP asked the FBI for more info, it was told that "the estimated completion time for large requests is 649 days." And still refused to reveal who had sent in the other FOIA request. The AP filed a formal appeal, and a week ago was told that there was nothing to appeal because the FBI had not completed Request No. 1313504-0 (which, again, the AP had not actually sent in). Hence the lawsuit.

The RCFP FOIA request received a somewhat more standard "no responsive records" response, to which the RCFP pointed out that the FBI was clearly lying, given that the earlier response (to the EFF FOIA, which kicked off this whole thing) showed that there was, in fact, such responsive results (I

know this experience

all too well).

And thus, both organizations are now suing to force the FBI to actually turn over the damn documents. Can't wait to find out all the national security reasons (or will they be redacted) for why the FBI won't respond, and why it combined the AP's FOIA request with some totally unknown party's.

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Chinese Man Jumps From 17th Floor In First Stock Market Casualty



It appears the collapse of China's stock market has officially taken its first victim. While we have heard fromdesperate farmers who lost everything after realizing that making money in stocks is not easier than farmwork, RT reports that a 57-year-old man has allegedly committed suicide in Shenyang, the largest city in Liaoning Province, by jumping off the 17th floor of a building with a black briefcase "full of stock-related materials," local press reported.

As we previously heard from one Chinese farmer,

From the hope-filled exuberance of early June to Yang Cheng's utter hopelessness, "I have lost everything," after he followed the government's 'grand plan' to open the economy and encourage stock market speculation.

Having piled his life savings (plus his relatives' money) into the market, thanks to encouragement from his broker he borrowed $1 million in margin and bet it all on one stock - a local mining company.

Now, after being forced to liquidate by the same risk-encouraging brokerage, he has suffered catastrophic losses... and he is not alone...

"I don't know what to do... I trusted the government too much..." he exclaims, adding "I won't touch stocks again, I have ruined everyone in my family."

And now, as RT reports, it appears the crash has claimed its first victim,

A 57-year-old man has allegedly committed suicide in Shenyang, the largest city in Liaoning Province, by jumping off the 17th floor of a building, possibly in response to a recent stock market crash in China, local press reported.

The building belongs to the city’s Chamber of Commerce and the 17th floor hosts a security exchange center, China.org reported citing a local newspaper. The incident took place Tuesday afternoon at around 2:00 p.m.

According to a witness, a black briefcase ‘full of stock-related materials’ was found on the ground next to the body of the man who was reportedly identified as a local resident.

While authorities are investigating the reason for the dive, it has been suggested that the suicide was connected to the recent stock market crash.

Be careful who you tell about this though...

Last month, Chinese authorities arrested a man who had allegedly been spreading rumors about people jumping off buildings in Beijing because of a stock market crash, China Central Television reported. The 29-year-old man allegedly wrote on social media that “there are people, because of the stock market crash, who have jumped off buildings in Beijing’s Financial Street.”

The post in question disappeared the day after it was created, thought to have been deleted by the state censors. Its author was detained for “disorderly behavior.”

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Who's next?

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