As you can imagine, with all the fear and the federal bucks floating around scammers are in fat city.
Editor: I know a few of you noticed that I haven’t been posting because I heard from you. Thanks for your concern that I might have been sick. But a big storm took out our TV and internet for a couple of days. LOL! I have to admit, I wasn’t sure if I wanted it back on! Amazing how many projects around the farm could get done with most access to the world cut off! So, I am way behind in finding stories and posting and will be trying to catch up.
There are way to many stories to post about scammers in this brave new world we live in now, but this one caught my eye at Psychology Today. The title grabbed my attention!
5 Coronavirus Scams That Can Fool Even Smart People
Here are a few examples from the article, but please read it all!
In just the first nine days of April, the Federal Trade Commission reported $7 million lost to scams.
Here’s a current rogue’s gallery of coronascams:
The Stimulus Scam. You’re excitedly waiting for your stimulus check or student-loan forgiveness. You get an email with a government logo. It says you need to apply—Just provide your Social Security Number and date of birth and perhaps a small registration fee. Gotcha.
The CoronaTracking Scam. You heard, correctly, that Apple and Google are creating a corona-tracking app. Then, you get a text claiming to be from the government, perhaps the CDC or WHO, informing you that you’re eligible to get the app free. It says that, to avoid fraud, it needs your Social Security Number and birth date. Gotcha.
[….]
The Product Scam. An email or text offers to sell you sanitizer, masks, etc. By the time you get to the final screen, the shipping cost atop an inflated price makes it exorbitant. But you’ve put in the effort to get that far (commitment bias), so you click “order.” Worse, you click “order” and not only don’t get the product, the scammers use your credit card to buy themselves cool stuff or gift cards for their programmers so the scam can metastasize.
More! Read it all and see if you are one of the smart people who just might have fallen for one of these!
“[ It is] time we call BS on the “scientific-technological elite.””
(Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review)
Daniel Horowitz is one of an increasing number of conservative commentators who are asking questions about the draconian policies that are crippling America based on models and scary numbers of supposed COVID-19 deaths daily reported by our scientific elite.
The political fallout is going to be massive (that is an understatement) if the general public begins to feel duped by politicians who are not letting a crisis go to waste and thus pushing America to the socialist Left.
I suspect books are being written as we speak about the Birx/Fauci effect on the future of American society and governance.
Horowitz: Dr. Birx: ‘We’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality’
Why would our governing elites be so motivated to overstate the impact of COVID-19 and scare people beyond the unprecedented levels of panic that are already pervasive in this country?
Believe it or not, the coronavirus epidemic does not stop deaths from other causes. While the politicians are shutting down other medical care in this country, they fail to recognize that life and even death go on. Many of us have been concerned that they have been conflating deaths due to coronavirus with deaths of those who have coronavirus but ultimately succumb to other illnesses. In their quest to continue this degree of fascism, plus in the motivation of some hospitals to get more federal relief funds, there is every incentive to code as many deaths as possible as related to COVID-19.
Yesterday, Dr. Deborah Birx finally let the secret out during the daily press conference in response to a reporter’s question. “I think in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality,” said Dr. Birx, who along with Dr. Anthony Fauci has become the face of this push for a national lockdown.
“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem. Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.”
“The intent is if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” concluded Birx.
I just snipped a bit of Horowitz’s hypothesis. Read it all here and see what cardiologists are saying.
It was posted a few days ago, and if you saw the reports last evening about how the projections for worst case scenarios just may not be coming true, you too might be smelling a rat!
His name is Idris Abdus-Salaam. Jihad Watch says he is a Muslim. Convert or immigrant is not clear.
As usual, the UK Daily Mailhas pretty good coverage and photos of the poor women who lost their lives. They were already risking their lives by working to provide the truckers America needs so much right now with meals.
And, to lose their lives so violently is sickening.
Idris Abdus-Salaam was shot and killed by police at the scene. No motive for the attack has been reported, although Jihad Watch suggests one. Was he a jihadist? I suspect we will never know.
A truck driver from North Carolina has been identified as the man who fatally stabbed three women and wounded a fourth at a Tennessee truck stop this morning, before a deputy shot and killed him after he refused to drop his knife.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday afternoon identified the suspect in the stabbings at the Pilot Travel Center on Strawberry Plains Pike off Interstate 40 as 33-year-old Idris Abdus-Salaam, from Durham, North Carolina.
The Knox County Sheriff’s Office responded to a call at 7am at the truck stop to find a woman with stab wounds outside the store and a man armed with a knife in the parking lot, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said in a statement.
[….]
Grandmother Joyce Whaley
Authorities found in all four stabbing victims. Three were pronounced dead at the scene from their wounds and the fourth was taken to a hospital for treatment.
The victims include Pilot employees identified by TBI as Joyce Whaley, 57; Patricia Nibbe, 51, and Nettie Spencer, 41.
Investigators were still working to determine a motive for the deadly attack, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Leslie Earhart said.
Continue reading hereto learn more especially about the women who were, yes, slaughtered.
….which means there is a great opportunity for any of you who want to launch your own web-based media either national or more importantly state and local websites and blogs.
I have for years—a dozen actually—been urging all of you to consider writing your own blogs.
There is a crying need for citizen investigative journalists who would follow various government programs as watch dogs.
And, as local newspapers die, you should consider becoming the news outletin your own community, county or state. What are you waiting for!
There may be silver linings to be found with this COVID crisis after all. Small local newspapers are likely to go down, see here at The Hill last week:
Local news outlets struggle to survive coronavirus fallout
Sad (maybe), but if your city or county is like mine, the local newspaper was long ago gobbled up by a Left-leaning mega media company blatantly putting its slant on the local news.
Enough of the nagging, here is what I wanted you to see that should bring a smile to your faces.
From Kurt Schlichter writing at Town Hall (hat tip: Paul):
Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!
We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant too boot.
They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.
It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces.
[….]
The media largely fell for the Imperial College Apocalypse Flu scenario, but then they wanted to. It’s more fun to be chronicling the Fall of Rome than Just Another Day in the Third Century A.D. under Emperor Elagabalus. The doomsayers ended up walking back their zillion dead to a few thousand dead, and the media just sort of ignored it because “Phew! Dodged a bullet!” doesn’t have the same resonance as “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE (and it’s Trump’s fault, not our ChiCom friends’ fault).”
[….]
Our media is garbage, full of clowns and dilettantes with no experience and less common sense. The media is now complaining that the pandemic is hurting its industry badly and that some of the media may go under because of the Woking Pneumonia.
Read it allbecause we all need a good laugh these days!
Georgia man pleads guilty to attempting to attack the White House with explosives
ATLANTA – Hasher Jallal Taheb, who planned an attack on the White House using weapons and explosives, has pleaded guilty to a charge of attempting to destroy, by fire or an explosive, a building owned by or leased to the United States.
“Taheb hatched a dangerous plan that would have resulted in unimaginable injury,” said U.S. Attorney Byung J. “BJay” Pak. “We are grateful to community members who noticed his dangerous evolution and alerted law enforcement. Along with our federal, state and local partners, we will remain vigilant in order to disrupt these types of attacks before they happen.”
“Taheb planned to conduct a terrorist attack on the White House as part of what he claimed was his obligation to engage in jihad,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers.
“And that was just one of the iconic American landmarks he wanted to target. Thanks to a tip from a member of the community and the work of the agents, analysts, and prosecutors responsible for this case, the threat posed by the defendant was neutralized and the defendant has admitted his guilt and will now be held accountable for his crime.”
“This plea is the result of a more than year-long intensive investigation by FBI Atlanta’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, which was because of a tip from the community,” said Chris Hacker, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta. “Our citizens are our most important weapons in fighting terrorism, our eyes and ears in our communities, and why we say to please contact law enforcement if you see or hear something suspicious.”
You have probably seen the news, but just in case….