Bookmarks: The Tournament • What to call Dylann Roof? • The secret shopper scam
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In general, I don’t care much for martial arts movies. If Chuck Norris has a hard time dispatching someone who looks like a sumo wrestler, something’s obviously staged.
An exception: a few months ago I saw The Tournament. The fight scenes all struck me as utterly believable.
Kelly Hu‘s not bad, either.
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What to call Dylann Roof?
Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’? – Anthea Butler It’s not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males – Arthur Chu
He murdered nine people.
It seems to me that’s enough to say. We need no more. It will be a doctrine of The William Tell Show to discourage categorizing and characterizing.
Some people aren’t there yet.
Anthea Butler’s point is that it’s appropriate to call Roof a “terrorist.” I’m not inclined to dispute that. But it befuddles me that in her effort to portray mainstream media as racist, she conflates the jihadist murderers with “shooters of color.” They come in all colors. To bolster her point, she links to an article about the Tsarnaev brothers; however, they’re just as white as Roof himself.
The fact is that crimes like this one generally just aren’t perpetrated by black people. The most recent case I can recall is that of Colin Ferguson, who was “of color.” Nobody called him a terrorist, and they did call him mentally ill.
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The Secret Shopper Scam
I’ve been getting a lot of spam lately offering what boil down to “secret shopper” positions. It took me a while to figure out what’s up with this.
The latest is from Kristina Chambers, who claims to be with Pacific Research. Now, Pacific Research is, in all probability, a large, well-established entity. However, they’re not the ones who sent me this e-mail. It came from <guy.bourgain@wanadoo.fr>.
The problem would come when they’d FedEx me a check, purportedly to advance my costs as a “secret shopper.”
I got caught in a similar scam about two years ago via CraigsList.
This firm — a large, completely legitimate mining entity in Minnesota — wanted remote free-lancers to do data entry at home. Issue #1: Go figure. I got linked to the firm’s web page, and what was described to me as their history and business, via e-mail, matched exactly what was said on the site.
They conducted an interview with me via Yahoo! IM chat. It was not a brief interview.
In order to do their work, I was going to need to buy and install quite a chunk of software on my computer. This was to cost $450. They would FedEx me a check to cover that purchase.
They did. It arrived with a return address of some (no doubt wholly legitimate) business in Virginia that I’d never heard of. The check was, somehow, from GEICO. Issue #2: Huh? And it was in excess of $3,000.
Here’s the deal. They were going to tell me the check amount was a mere mistake; that I should deposit it in my account, and wire them back the difference, less a chunk for me to keep for my trouble.
After a few days (I don’t know why it takes that long.), my bank would determine that the check was counterfeit. Anyone can buy security-featured check paper. The scammers would be in possession of their $2,500 or whatever, but I would be left holding the bag for the whole $3,000 — and possibly facing charges for having passed a bad check.
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Reblogged 2021-10-28.
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