False Debt Scams

Scam Alert

False debt scamming is on the rise, we are told.  Drawing on the plethora of information which is available on-line, false debts are created, which are then often sold to criminal gangs at a fraction of the alleged outstanding debt, and the gangs then go to work.  Often the "tools" used to get people to pay up on the bogus demand include intimidation and threats.  

Here is an article/case-study of one "target" in the United States who fought back. 

On the morning a debt collector threatened to rape his wife, Andrew Therrien was working from home, in a house with green shutters on a cul-de-sac in a small Rhode Island town. Tall and stocky, with a buzz cut and a square, friendly face, Therrien was a salesman for a promotions company. He'd always had an easy rapport with people over the phone, and on that day, in February 2015, he was calling food vendors to talk about grocery store giveaways.

Therrien was interrupted mid-pitch by a call from his wife. She'd gotten a voicemail from an authoritative-sounding man saying Therrien was in some kind of trouble. "I need to verify an address to present you with your formal claim," the man had said. "Andrew Therrien, you are officially notified."

A few minutes later, Therrien's phone buzzed. It was the same guy. He gave his name as Charles Cartwright and said Therrien owed $700 on a payday loan. But Therrien knew he didn't owe anyone anything. Suspecting a scam, he told Cartwright just what he thought of his scare tactics.  Cartwright hung up, then called back, mad. He said he wanted to meet face-to-face to teach Therrien a lesson.

"Come on by, asshole," Therrien says he replied.  "I will," Cartwright said, "and I hope your wife is at home."  That's when he made the rape threat.

It's Mad, Mad, Mad World

The Greatest-Ever Conspiracy Against Humans

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon

Climate change is the biggest scam in the history of the world – a $1.5 trillion-a-year conspiracy against the taxpayer, every cent, penny and centime of which ends in the pockets of the wrong kind of people, none of which goes towards a cause remotely worth funding, all of it a complete and utter waste.

Here is an edited version of a speech on this subject I gave last week to the World Taxpayers’ Associations in Berlin.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen; Guten Abend meine Damen und Herren. May I say how grateful I am to Staffan Wennberg and the World Taxpayers Associations for inviting me to speak in Berlin. This is my first time here since 1978.

I was a schoolboy then. I learned my first German: “Was trinken wir? Schultheiss Bier.” Now I’m grown up and married with children even older than I was then. Yesterday I went on a tour and I couldn’t help noticing there seem to have been one or two changes.

When I last came I have to confess that the Wall was the highlight of my trip. So echt Cold War. So Spy Who Came In From The Cold!   I remember taking the U-bahn underneath the wall, passing through the East German side, and seeing empty grey platforms where the train never stopped, and lurking in the shadows grim looking guards with machine guns.

And you know how they say: “If you’re not a communist by the time you’re 18 then you’re heartless and if you’re not a capitalist by the time you’re 40 then you’re brainless.”?   Well I’m afraid I skipped that first stage and went straight to the second. All it took was that little glimpse of East Germany – a place so horrible that if you tried to escape they would shoot you with machine guns – to give me an abiding preference for free markets. Small Government. And low taxes.

Letter From the UK (About a Long Overdue Death)

The Solar Industry Is Dying. Good Riddance.

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

If you still own shares in solar energy it’s probably a sign that you’ve been in the sun too long: the sector is tanking – and deservedly so – as reality dawns that this is a Potemkin industry, an Enron of a con-trick, whose survival depends not on the energy it generates but on the subsidies it squeezes from the taxpayer.

Consider Exhibit A:  the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the California desert. This $2.2 billion project, heavily backed with federal grants by the Obama administration, is absolutely brilliant at killing birds. According to some estimates it accounts for 28,000 a year (the workers at the plant nickname them “streamers” because they fall from the sky like burning comets), though the company denies this. What it’s not so good at is the job it was designed for: generating electricity.

It has failed to produce sufficient quantities of its exorbitantly expensive power (it charges between $135 and $200 per megawatt hour; the market rate for conventional electricity is $35 per megawatt hour) as required by its contract with PG&E Corp and may have to shut down unless bailed out by the California state authorities.

The Global Warming Industry is a Busted Flush

Global Warming: So Dishonest It Makes Enron Look Like a Paragon of Integrity

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon 
9 February 2015

“Fiddling temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever,” says Christopher Booker, not pulling his punches. And I think he’s right not to do so. If – as Booker, myself, and few others suspect – the guardians of the world’s land-based temperature records have been adjusting the raw data in order to exaggerate “global warming” then this is indeed a crime against the scientific method unparalleled in history. 

 Sure you could make a case that Lysenkoism or  Hitler’s war to discredit “Jewish science” were more evil but these were confined to discrete geographical regions under specific totalitarian regimes. What’s so extraordinary about the manipulations to the global land-based temperature sets is that they affect every one of us, wherever we live.

Whether you’re an elderly couple in mid-Wales who have just had 20 per cent knocked off the value of your retirement cottage by the new wind farm on the hill opposite, or you’re a tribesman in the South East Asian jungle whose virgin forest home has been trashed to make way for a palm oil plantation to grow eco-friendly biofuels, or you’re a scientist in New Zealand who has been hounded out of your job because your research doesn’t fit the “global warming” narrative, or you’re a science teacher in Ohio who is obliged, whether you like it or not, to lecture your charges on the dread perils of climate change, or you’re a Republican senatorial candidate who has been targeted as a “denier” in a green attack dog campaign financed by Tom Steyer, you’re all victims of the same global scam: a scam perpetrated by a tiny handful of individuals whose junk statistical manipulation of the global climate records have transformed routine weather patterns into the world’s biggest and most influential ever science scare story.

Essential Scepticism

Fools Gold

Our father used to tell us that a fool and his money are soon parted.  Every scam that hits the gullible is an old one.  It has been used countless times before.  Everyone who gets caught is either wilfully ignorant or they stupidly believe that this time it will be different. 

Back in the eighties we had in New Zealand a grand scheme of central government's confabulation.  It was decided that economic nirvana would descend upon New Zealand if agricultural production picked up.  It was decided by the wise that what was needed was more bush covered hills being converted into farmland, and we needed more types of cropping and animal husbandry--such as goats and alpacas.  To encourage people to undertake these inevitably risky ventures, the government promised subsidies, cheap credit, minimum prices for agricultural products, tax write-offs and a host of other government supports. 

A speculative agricultural gold rush commenced that rivalled the Kalgoorlie and Otago rushes, mutatis mutandis.  Enterprising individuals began farming government subsidies and hand outs, not agricultural goods.

No Global Warming

The UK Met Office has ever so quietly released data on the internet, without media comment, apparently hoping that no-one would notice.  It shows that there has been no global warming for the last fifteen years according to the 3000 plus temperature stations scattered across the planet.  Meanwhile the shills for global warming continue to pontificate and bloviate away about the imminent doom facing mankind.

The UK Daily Mail has a big spread on the scandal of the oh-so-quiet release: