Posts Tagged → bank
Avoiding payment scams is easy
Last year, some local person took a picture of a check I had written to a local business, and they used that picture to create several fake checks written against my bank account. Because I bank locally with a relatively small bank owned by local people I know and trust, and because I have personal relationships with the bank staff, the forged/fake scam checks were caught right away.
“I looked at that check, and then the next one, and the next one, and just I knew that there was no way that Josh First was writing them. They are ridiculous on their face. I mean…flowers and gourmet cat food? No! No way. I knew that is not Josh. Chainsaws, yes, could be, I could be fooled by that if someone tried it, but gourmet cat food, no, flowers hell no“, said the local bank branch manager with a big smile.
Because the bank manager knows me and my business personally, he was easily able to discern the fake checks from real ones. He saved me a lot of heartache. And so I recommend to you that you use your local banks, that are owned and run by local people. Unlike the big banks like Chase, these local people get to know you, know your face, and are accountable and connected to the community around them.
A month later I got a call from a sweet and very distressed woman in Arizona, who had shipped off five thousand dollars worth of product from her small business based on a check written in my name. No, I assured her, I had nothing to do with it. I had no need for marketing products, and certainly not her particular products. This nice lady and I had a long conversation about how much America has changed in our adulthood, and not for the better. She said the scam had really hurt her financially.
Fast forward almost a year and I recently got a call from a nice young man in Alaska. A check bearing my business name had been used to purchase thirty-five hundred dollars of beauty salon hair and nail products from his friend in Florida, and the proceeds had been sent to Alaska to help him purchase a home there. Only days after he had deposited the check in his account was he informed that the check was bad, and that in fact he did not have the money. His friend in Florida was cheated out of her salon products.
I would say the common thread I have seen across all of these check scams is that the person getting scammed does not really look into the check they have received. For example, why would a buyer of beauty salon products in Florida pay with a check from a business in Pennsylvania that does land and timber work? This obviously makes no sense, and the young man admitted it.
And when I spoke with the nice lady in Arizona last summer, she too admitted that this same issue had given her pause. To which I asked her “Why didn’t you call us with your question before taking the check? We could have easily protected you from committing this mistake.”
Scams are everywhere: Email scams asking for money, phone calls asking for money, malware and phishing scams by email and text (DO NOT CLICK ON THEIR CONTENTS and links), phone calls about getting a low cost mortgage on your penis enlargement, updating your nonexistent home warranty/ extended car warranty/ computer warranty etc etc etc. We are inundated in this garbage.
You have to care about yourself enough to stay on guard and defend your interests. One little mistake can cause you a lot of grief and cost you a lot of money.
The best ways to protect yourself from being victimized are: 1) Ask yourself if this is a service or product I really have? 2) Is this phone call or email a normal way for a real bona fide service provider to communicate? 3) Why is there a company name from far away on this check? And you can always call that company whose name is on the check and ask them if they wrote the check.
Had that happened in the most recent scam, I would have said “I have nothing against dudes who use girl makeup, but I will also say that I am the last man on Planet Earth who would do so, and so there, you have your answer: The check is bad.”
You just gotta ask a question or two if you want to stay out of scam trouble.
Digital currency’s iron slave chains
Oh, the irony of a bank that is now insolvent in part because it illegally gave unsustainable amounts of highly regulated investor money to the domestic terrorist group “Black Lives Matter,” due to the weird political and anti-historic narrative that present day huge cash transfers (so called reparations from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves) are required from all other Americans to American blacks alone, above and beyond the past seventy years of gigantic taxpayer funded welfare programs and affirmative action preferences that ignored merit and rewarded skin color and that have benefited American blacks almost exclusively at enormous financial cost to America.
It is illegal to give away bank assets, or structure investing strategies, if it damages the bank’s ability to fully ensure its fiduciary duty to its shareholders and clients. The sole purpose of a bank or investment firm is to maximize its clients’ financial benefits.
This failure of Silicon Valley Bank has already created a ripple effect in the banking industry that is threatening a whole host of banks, including industry giant Credit Suisse. So it is not just one bank, but many that are being destroyed by Black Lives Matter. Turns out one of the primary reasons so many banks are in big trouble is because they contributed some 73 BILLION DOLLARS to Black Lives Matter and related spin-off organizations. None of these donations were legal, because they put the banks’ balance sheets in jeopardy, but as we know already from the related failure of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fund (which now appears to have been created primarily to launder money and funnel it into the Democrat Party and BLM), illegal massive political donations due to the need to virtue signal is a Big Thing.
What is not ironic but scary about these bank and investment fund failures is the crisis opportunity it is creating for advocates of digital currency. And digital currency means just one thing: Slavery. Slavery through government control of how, when, and where you spend your own money.
Digital currency has nothing to do with convenience. No one really cares about that. I mean, how inconvenient is it really to pull a twenty dollar bill out of your wallet or purse and pay for gas, groceries, or lunch out with a business colleague? Paper money and coin is not only plenty convenient, it is the hallmark of a free person making free market decisions. No one else controls how much of your own money you decide to spend.
On the other hand, digital currency will always be directly controlled by the government. No matter what empty promises are made about digital currency’s privacy, there is only one reason for it to exist, and that is to put government bureaucrats in charge of your own finances. And as soon as you have digital currency, the government can turn it on or turn it off, take it away with the push of a button, or block it from being transferred to a person or business because someone in government does not like what you are trying to buy. Like maybe a gun, or a gasoline powered car, or firewood, or clothing made by a particular manufacturer.
Government control of your spending choices is slavery. You will not be able to make your own decisions. This arrangement is being pushed by the same exact people in government (the current administration) who wanted to monitor every withdrawal and expenditure above $600.00 that you and I make, and who wanted to limit your bank account, and who now have the Internal Revenue Service digging deeply and illegally into every financial decision we make, looking for the smallest of discrepancies to then come down like a ton of bricks upon each of us.
Digital currency is government gone wild, driven by bad people who do not like your freedom. These are people who really truly believe that they know best how you should spend your own money, and they are now trying to use government to set up everything so that you are hemmed in on every side and can only do what these bureaucrats tell you you can do.
It is difficult to tell how many Americans are catching on to this situation. So many Americans wrongly believe that America is too big to fail, even while America is failing right under our feet and under our noses, right in front of our faces. The Silicon Valley Bank failure is bad enough, and its reasons for failing are bad enough. But the ripple effect and bigger outcomes from its failure are really, really bad. Incredibly bad. Much worse than just a handful of banks going insolvent. The use of this growing banking and “financial crisis” to implement digital currency so that we go from being a free people to an enslaved people is the worst part of it.
Say No to digital currency. Say Yes to your freedom to decide how and where and when you will spend your own money. Resist and push back against the evil people who are seeking to take over your life by controlling your financial decisions. Or, don’t resist, and then don’t complain when you find yourself suddenly enslaved to totalitarian government in heavy chains of iron.
And if you are thinking ahead about your own freedom and ability to be self-reliant and independent, then you will be growing a substantial garden, keeping some chickens, and thinking of ways you can participate in a barter system that keeps government hands off of you.
Happy Economy: Consumers & Local Banks vs. The World
The US economy is strong, and it has been strong since a flood of consumer confidence swept in behind a new president who ushered in to a miserable bipartisan vacuum a refreshing cleansing confidence.
Added to that confidence was –and very much is– a renewed pride in America, in being American, and in American-made products. By mid-2017 a sense of 1950s community once lost and now found again birthed a strong antidote to Obama’s “new normal” of slow American decline.
And we can’t just blame Obama. Yes, Obama hates America and did everything he could to destroy our nation from inside and outside. But he was helped significantly by ye olde typical career Republicans who saw money to be made in America’s decline, just as there was money to be made in its growth. But growth is harder, and why work hard if you don’t really have to, they reasoned. Either way, growth or defeat, the big money Republicans bought their many pet congressmen to safeguard their investments and stood by watching as they hit big on a global economy shifting from their American home turf to China, India, the EU, and other undeserving recipients of America’s health.
In fact, America’s veins were opened up and flowing out. Our life force was draining away, and a host of hungry nations were perched around us, like vultures, picking away at the juicy scraps that fell from our Rust Belt homes and boarded up churches. Both Democrats and Republicans were pumping away, pushing our citizens’ energy force, our very national being, into the waiting mouths of so many other nations. And so our American economy had sputtered, dying
That is, until Trump inspired US consumers, and the local banks they work with and rely upon to take what are big steps in their quality of life.
And so like a thing alive, the American economy has powered forward like it has not moved in decades. And why would the economy not be alive? Our collective economy is us, of us, an organic part of us and an extension of us. America has a sense of good health again, and so it follows that our economy is healthy again, too. And it is getting stronger, despite transparent and treasonous attempts to destroy our economy by the Democrat Party and everyone else allied with them, including the governments and industries of China and Russia.
It is sickening that an entire American political party will do everything it can to badmouth, damage or destroy America’s economy simply in order to artificially malign a president they oppose. The cost to America is enormous! Then again, this is the same political party that advocates for illegal invaders over American citizens, for law-breakers and against law-followers, that claims Social Security will be tossed overboard by the other political party and then does everything in its power to give all of our Social Security money to their new chums, the illegal invaders.
So yes, I guess destroying America’s economy and hurting the American citizens standing in the way is to be expected from the Democrat Party and their communications arm, the Mainstream Media.
One discrete sector of the national economy that is changing is the timber industry. When four hundred million (400,000,000 !) middle-income Chinese aspire to own the nice kitchens and hardwood floors that define comfortable life in America, a huge sucking sound can be heard ’round the world as unquantifiable amounts of natural resources are pulled in to that huge nation. And when the Chinese economy began to falter in early 2018, even before the tariff battle, the Chinese domestic demand for American timber dried up. We then learned in late 2018 that the red oak, residual ash, and black walnut that had been bringing us huge export revenue but which were then beginning to stack up in East Coast log yards were not once destined for Chinese factories re-exporting their finished goods back to America. No, those logs and lumber were being used up domestically in China, as China grew its own middle-income population. A population that is now up against the ropes and cannot buy American hardwoods that make pretty kitchens and flooring.
Accordingly the American timber industry is going through a shake-up due to the way timber buyers invested and spent. The fact is that even as they close in China, new cabinet and flooring factories are opening up in several other Asian countries.
And so now on the battlefield it is the confident American consumer and her local bank officers standing strong against the evil political tide that seeks to reverse what has been accomplished, just begun really, since November 2016. It is happy healthy family and local community versus a global colossus hungry for endless cash, endless money, endless wealth, at any cost, and a domestic political party hungry for power at any cost, even the cost of individual liberties and American success.
In this fight I put my money on the American consumer, not just because I think she is a tough and hard working bunch, but because I am an American. I want her– you, me, us — to win this fight.
A rock from the basement of time
Norman McClean wrote his book “A River Runs Through It,” about his childhood in southwest Montana. Growing up hunting and fishing brought him into close contact with unusual examples of natural history in the field, including really neat geological samples.
Those rocks that he found were what his Presbyterian minister father called “rocks from the basement of time.” Meaning that they were very old, from the beginning of the world. McClean effectively connects his reader with the sense that while standing in a trout river in Montana, holding one of these ancient rocks, he was transported, and the reader along with him, into a kind of time machine and also a giant web of life and history.
This phrase “rocks from the basement of time” always stuck with me, as it is so illustrative of how such basic, simple, everyday things in our lives can yet be so important or significant. And inspiring.
Here below is one such rock from the basement of time, but from this northcentral Pennsylvania corner of the world’s basement. 
This large, rounded river cobble was unearthed today in the dirt bank behind the cabin in Pine Creek Valley, about four hundred feet above the Pine Creek riverbed. This rounded river stone started out as a squared chunk of slate hundreds of millions of years ago, and was then gently rounded and sculpted by flowing water, and sediment and rocks being pushed downstream over who knows how long. Its most recent path in its long life had it deposited in the great flood that created Pine Creek as we know it today, 10,000 years ago, after the most recent ice age.
At the end of that last ice age, a huge ice dam in the Finger Lakes region melted and burst, pouring an entire inland sea down through the little creek bed that was then north-flowing Pine Creek. All that water flooding the river channel caused Pine Creek to reverse its flow, and in that process enormous amounts of both shattered rock and rounded riverbottom cobble churned its way south, settling out along the walls of the canyon, eventually far far above, almost impossibly above, the new river channel and bed.
When I think about that raging torrent of mud and rock from a hundred miles upstream, filling up the valley’s river hundreds of feet higher than its usual height, and depositing ancient large river stones far above their natural resting place, I think “Wow.”
And here at my feet is all of that incredible story, told in one pretty much otherwise unremarkable rock from the dirt bank behind the cabin. Which I now look at and think of as being part of the basement of time. And suddenly I feel totally differently about my life and everything in it.
Out of all proportion
If there is one core element to the “new thinking” taking America down, it is victimology.
You know, the idea that everyone is a victim, and some people are special victims and some are especially victimized.
For someone to be a victim, there must be a perpetrator, and political correctness has created all sorts of creative solutions to real and perceived wounds which perpetrators can, or must!, endlessly do to atone. America has been afflicted with this, to the absurd point where illegal aliens crossing our borders in search of better work are “victims” and deserve our taxpayer money and the right to vote themselves a lot more of it.
It is a fair idea that people should be treated fairly. No arguing with that. But what happens when whatever apology, compensation, or other action worth remedying the problem has been completed, and the victim identity remains? This phenomenon is nowhere more clearly evident than in the Middle East, or technically the Near East, where “Palestinian” Arabs have wallowed in artificial and purposefully perpetuated victim status for five decades.
Even their refugee status is inherited, contrary to every other refugee situation around the world. The UN helps maintain this arrangement.
Although there were nearly twice as many refugee Jews ejected from Arab and Muslim nations at the same time, no one talks about them. Islamic imperialism and Arab colonialism are responsible for one of the largest and longest-standing occupations ever on planet Earth, where the farms, homes, and businesses that once belonged to Jews are now the property of supposedly well-intentioned Muslim Arabs. Billions of dollars worth of property and banks were stolen overnight, from one group of people and given to another group that had no claim on it other than they held the knife and gun, and the victim did not.
If someone were looking for victims to feel bad for, the Jews have had that victim experience in spades, not to mention the Armenians (Christians who suffered a none-too-gentle genocide and land-theft at the hands of the Muslim Turks from 1910-1915), Kurds, Tibetans, and, well, never mind that the iconic and fiercely warlike Oglala Sioux ejected the Mandan, Cheyenne, and Pawnee from millions of acres of their historic Happy Hunting Grounds and militarily occupied them for hundreds of years…after all, the American Indians who massacred, tortured, and occupied one another are considered to have engaged in acceptable behavior. Anyhow, I digress…..
The Jews now find themselves fighting for their lives with their backs to the wall, yet once again against Islamic supremacists, Islamic imperialists, and Arab colonists; and those same Jews are now presented with yet another double-standard: Proportionality.
This is the idea that, if someone hits you in the face with the intention of killing you, but fails to do so that first time and is winding up to hit you again and harder this next time, why, you are only supposed to hit them back once and only just as hard as you were first hit. You are not allowed to land a knockout punch, despite having survived an attempted knockout punch.
The EU demands that endless Arab rockets from Gaza onto indigenous Jews, living an unbroken 3,000-year presence in their homeland, be met with…thousands of random rockets from Israel? My God no! Unacceptable!
Obviously, the idea of proportionality is alien to every people that has fought a war, especially a defensive war. War is fought to be won, and dumbing-down and reducing the effectiveness of your response is a foolish and possibly suicidal thing to do.
But Europe and America cater first and foremost to artificial victims, and no matter what, those victims are due every gift, every extra opportunity, every kind gesture in the face of bloody hands, truckloads of taxpayer money despite tremendous waste by the recipients, and so on and so forth. Although this behavior seems suicidal, suicide seems to be the new definition of democracy, in the interest of appeasing the ‘victims’ among us, out of all proportion to whatever happened in the first place.
But to give the supposed victims their due, proportionality must be maintained, and in the Middle East today, Western civilization is expected to fight Islamic aggression, theft, murder, and occupation with both hands tied behind its back. It is apparently the new thing to do.
Three Moves Against Freedom in One Day
Today was an interesting one if you enjoy either your First Amendment or Second Amendment rights.
Facebook deactivated the account of Arab reporter Khaled Abu Toameh, for the simple reason that he writes factual reports about Christians being chased out of Gaza and the West Bank. Facebook is run by a bunch of California L______s, and we all know just how much L______s enjoy suppressing dissent, dialogue, or inconvenient information that might make their policy positions look wrong. Toameh has done nothing wrong himself. No one accuses him of doing anything illegal, unethical, or factually wrong. Instead, he has simply run afoul of the ‘Arab Victim Lobby’.
In other words, Toameh doesn’t believe that Arabs are always victims and that Jews are always bad, and he often writes articles that demonstrate quite the opposite, from sources within the Arab world.
Toameh is a threat to the entire lie being told about Israel and America, and he is also a direct threat to Obama’s policy against Israel. So Facebook steps in to do its part to silence him. So much for the First Amendment at Facebook, which has been deactivating many user accounts for unspecified reasons. It’s never surprising that those users are not L______s.
On the Second Amendment front, today New York governor Cuomo signed into law what must be called a gun-prohibitionist’s dream. And Barack Hussein Obama announced unilateral efforts, known as executive orders, to destroy the Second Amendment. Bypassing Congress has become a favorite trick of this president, and it is sad that the Republicans have no one strong enough to stand up and confront Obama. Oh sure, there are elected officials (“leaders” in title only) who whine about what he is doing. But no one says they are going to tell their constituents to ignore these illegal efforts. I really do believe that the Republican Party is headed to oblivion. It is rotten inside, and it appears to be ready to die, shrivel up, rot, and then slowly grow something else out of its own dirt, many many years from now. A topic for another day, sadly approaching quicker than we know.
So in one day, Obama’s close friends at Facebook take a good hard shot at the First Amendment, while Obama’s chum in New York joins Obama in taking a shot at the Second Amendment.
America is being transformed, no question about it. Not for the better, and enormous gulfs are opening up as a result. Certain states are talking seriously about secession. The Tenth Amendment may come into play as states reassert much of their long-lost authority to an expanding Federal government, but who knows if that will happen in time?
Today was a heavy blow to liberty, and I think I’m going to go read my young son a night-night book, and think about kid things for an hour, take a break, and maybe watch an old movie with my wife. Tomorrow will be filled with more bad news, I am sure, and it will feel nice to take a break from it all.
Have a good night, punkin’.
The Mayans Were Wrong; William Penn Was Right
Today is both the 12-12-12 date that, according to the dyslexic Mayan Calendar, marks the end of the world, and it is also the anniversary of Pennsylvania’s official entry as a State into the United States.
Delaware beat Pennsylvania as the first state in the Union by a day or two, but nevertheless, the Keystone State is as old as America gets.
That day in 1787, who could have imagined that hand-held gadgets and computer screens would today dominate our materially wealthy society, not just injecting but wrapping citizens in their individual cocoon of fantasy and imagination as real as the reality around them? If personal accountability is at the heart of America’s political and entrepreneurial system, these little gaming gadgets are on the periphery, acting more like huge celestial bodies teasing apart the fabric of the universe through tremendous gravitational force than as some sort of glue holding it all together. Subterfuge and pretend have replaced face-to-face and voice contact between humans. Reality is nearly impossible to define.
When William Penn founded Penn’s Woods, Pennsylvania, he envisioned and then successfully implemented a society where individual liberty was the standard, not the rare exception. Hard work, risk taking, and some personal sacrifice could yield tremendous material benefits to those immigrants willing to undertake them. We proud Pennsylvanians now, his spiritual and physical heirs, try to carry on that tradition amidst a strange array of colliding beliefs, allegiances, and competing values. One such competitor are these little gadgets we all use. Yes, they add efficiency. No, they don’t necessarily add value or depth of understanding. It’s one of the reasons that I do not “friend” people who live near me on FaceBook; if you want to be my “friend,” call me, and let’s schedule some time together with a cold beer and some hot food. There is no substitute for face-to-face time with another person who you value.
Another competitor is the fractured belief system that many new Americans bring with them and that many young Americans now embrace. Young people tattooing their bodies with Japanese and Haida Indian religious symbols, to which they have no connection either ethnically or ideologically, is a substantive example. Another example is the actual widespread fear caused by the Mayan prediction that this day ends the world as we know it. If you are paying attention to the Mayans today, maybe you might consider that their cruel society died out long ago, victim to human sacrifice and poor ecological planning.
This casual rootlessness is not good for America, and it does not reflect the greatness we inherited from those brave founders who stood fast and strong in 1787, against a mighty international British empire that indeed could have ended the world as our founders knew it then and there.
Today, the world will not end. Rather, Pennsylvanians and other Americans will go about their business, quietly drawing on a ever diminishing bank account of sorts to carry us through to the next day, the next transaction, the next political race. Our traditional culture is a metaphorical bank account, a repository of the guiding values and achievements of our progenitors, the people who created the roads, bridges, schools, political infrastructure, and businesses which we now use and take for granted every day. Failing to make deposits into this bank account, and yet withdrawing from it daily, will lead the account to become overdrawn, to become empty, to go bankrupt, and to fail.
That, and not the Mayans, is the great threat staring us in the face now.