States Allow Companies To Commit Financial Fraud, Drug Trafficking and more

Excerpt:  "Criminals use U.S. shell companies to commit financial fraud, drug trafficking, even terrorist financing, in part because our states don't require anyone to name the owners of the companies they form,"

I have used Google search and maps to run down where some of the 800 junk/robo calls come from and often they lead to very ordinary looking houses in plain vanilla neighborhoods.  I've had ordinary phone numbers call me from Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Michigan and other places that I have no connection to whatsoever that thanks to caller ID I do not answer.  This report by Reuters explains a whole lot and more.  Watching the video (available at the links at the end of this article) what I found shocking (well as things go really not so surprised after all) was that there has been a deal about this in the U.S. Congress to do something about this that has not made it out of committee in three years.-Ed

At a single address in this sleepy city of 60,000 people, more than 2,000 companies are registered. The building, 2710 Thomes Avenue, isn't a shimmering skyscraper filled with A-list corporations. It's a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn, a few blocks from the State Capitol.

Neighbors say they see little activity there besides regular mail deliveries and a woman who steps outside for smoke breaks. Inside, however, the walls of the main room are covered floor to ceiling with numbered mailboxes labeled as corporate "suites." A bulky copy machine sits in the kitchen. In the living room, a woman in a headset answers calls and sorts bushels of mail.

A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.

Wyoming Corporate Services will help clients create a company, and more: set up a bank account for it; add a lawyer as a corporate director to invoke attorney-client privilege; even appoint stand-in directors and officers as high as CEO. Among its offerings is a variety of shell known as a "shelf" company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity.

"A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy," the company's website boasts. "A person you control... yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!"

Among the entities registered at 2710 Thomes, Reuters found, is a shelf company sheltering real-estate assets controlled by a jailed former prime minister of Ukraine, according to allegations made by a political rival in a federal court in California.

The owner of another shelf company at the address was indicted in April for allegedly helping online-poker operators evade a U.S. ban on Internet gambling. The owner of two other firms there was banned from government contracting in January for selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.

CASTING THE FIRST STONE

All the activity at 2710 Thomes is part of a little-noticed industry in the U.S.: the mass production of paper businesses. Scores of mass incorporators like Wyoming Corporate Services have set up shop. The hotbeds of the industry are three states with a light regulatory touch-Delaware, Wyoming and Nevada.

And nothing will come of this while it goes on as it has been, just like all other nasty goings on that have been brought to light in the past.-Ed

A whole lot more at LINK

A somewhat more brief report at LINK

Universal Serial Bus? Not Really

Over the last couple of years I've accumulated several electronic gadgets that have been available.  In the process, like unwanted insects, I find I have a drawer full of the supposed universal serial bus cables that come packaged with the products. 

If the &^%$#@(!!! things were universal then I would not have a &^%$ drawer full of the snakes!

Keeping my cool I went to the kitchen and got (no not a can of bug spray) a box of those quart size freezer bags and my label maker. I proceeded to separated the snakes according to their respective parental units, packaged them and labeled them according to their function.

I found only two of the cables that could be used interchangeably.  Both are for connecting their device to a computer for uploading/downloading data/images/music or charging their respective lithium batteries.

And it all is no neater than before but at least they do not get all tangled.

The Palin Tongue

I normally leave video clips alone for my 'Video Hunt' blog but this one is too funny to not share here:

Sleepy Time Morning For Driver

It's a sort of WTF moment of "What was he thinking?"


The other morning in Whitchita a 67-year-old radiologist at the V.A. Hospital was driving to work at 7:15 in the morning. At this time of the year it is not that dark at that time of the morning so all things considered most anything in his path would be easy to see. Right?

So there's this 32-year-old man, wearing a brightly colored reflective safety vest, working on the lawn along the street . All nice a secure in the thought that he is easily noticeable to any traffic around him. Right?

NO! on both counts!

The 67-year-old driver in his minivan hits the 32-year-old reflective vest wearer. The victim's body smashed the windshield of the vehicle and landed on the roof of the minivan. Think he noticed? The driver continued to drive on his way .

The driver continued on his way, with the body on the roof of the vehicle, to his home about 3 miles away from the scene.

 Witnesses had called 911, The driver was arrested and booked, charged with failure to stop and render help and try to get help.

video link 

News LINK

And That's When He Shot Her

Snakes also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) can be dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why.

A couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze.

It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants. When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa.

She let out a very loud scream.

The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the sofa.

He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it. About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor.

His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance.

The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.

About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.

The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor who volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch.. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief.

But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa.

The neighbor man, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.

The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.

The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that the snake had bitten him. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat.

By now, the police had arrived.
(Breathe here...)

They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over a little garden snake!

The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.

Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and, as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.

The other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car.

Meanwhile, neighbors saw the burning drapes and called in the fire department. The firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the power, and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire out).

Time passed... Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all was right with their world.

A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring in their plants for the night....

..... And that's when he shot her.

Ice Cream Headache?