Updates, Revisions, and Reconsiderations

Today, we’re re-visiting and updating a few stories Curmie has posted this calendar year.  The First Felon’s antics are too predictably heinous to bother to mention, but his minions are still fair game.

Pete Hegseth.  Back in January, Curmie wrote that “The reason not to confirm Hegseth is that he is spectacularly unqualified for the job.  It’s not all the negatives; it’s the utter absence of any positives.”  Curmie stands by that statement; certainly any competent President, even one stupid enough to have appointed him to begin with, would have fired his ass after the Enola Gay kerfuffle and especially that Signal chat business.  Still, the fact that he remains the perfect storm of arrogance and stupidity seems pretty relevant, too.

The Cortland Standard.  Back in March, Curmie mourned the demise of the daily newspaper in the small city where he went to high school.  A couple months later, on Curmie’s anniversary, as it happens, came the story that the paper had been bought out of bankruptcy and would be back in business on a Tuesday through Saturday schedule, effective May 17.  This matters little to the overwhelming majority of readers of this blog, but it may portend a trend… we can hope.

Sarah Inama.  March was also when Curmie wrote about Ms. Inama, an Idaho middle school teacher who ran afoul of racist morons school administrators for a poster that proclaimed “Everyone is welcome here.”  Yes, really.  She is now in a new district, where administrators rejected the “guidance” of the state Censor in Chief Attorney General, who asserted the poster was political and therefore prohibited; instead, they declared in a memo sent to all staff that “‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ is the law.  It is not a political statement.”  We’ll see how this all plays out.

Melissa Calhoun.  Ms. Calhoun is believed to be the first Florida teacher fired for referring to a student by their preferred name without explicit parental permission.  Curmie described her case, up to that point, in April.  She was, indeed, de facto fired for the offense of having some respect for a student.  She claims she knew the student before the stupid law went into effect and used the offending appellation out of habit, “an unfortunate oversight.”  This may or may not be true, of course.  Over the summer, there seemed to have been a settlement by which Calhoun could keep her teaching credentials for a year of probation, but the district won’t rehire her or even allow her to volunteer for this academic year.  Calhoun is apparently looking for work outside education, and there is speculation that a lawsuit may be forthcoming.

Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.  It’s unlikely we’ll ever get to the truth about what crimes KA-G may or may not have committed years ago.  As Curmie wrote in April, the first round of this ever-evolving brouhaha was about due process, period, the end.  The feds didn’t have a case, but they sent him off to a Salvadorean gulag, anyway.  The Trump administration then dawdled when SCOTUS unanimously demanded his return.  He did eventually arrive back in the US, but was almost immediately under investigation related to that traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022. 

We’re now hearing the feds claim that he was smuggling illegal aliens because he was in MS-13.  Previous attempts to show such gang membership have been laughably inept, but now there are “co-conspirators” ready to testify against him… in exchange for something, no doubt.  Anyway, now the government wants to send him off to Liberia, of all places.  And right now.  Don’t ask why, Gentle Reader, you probably don’t want to try to track the tortured logic.  The chances are pretty good that literally everyone involved in this case on either side has told at least one egregious lie.  But once again, due process is the issue. 

Boy My Greatness.  Back in September, Curmie wrote about the suppression of a student-directed production of Zoe Senese-Grossberg’s play at the University of Central Oklahoma.  The university decided to blame the utterly unwarranted censorship on the theatre department.  Curmie commented, “Gentle Reader, if you believe the decision was de facto made by the theatre department, Curmie has some ocean-front property in Kansas he’s willing to sell to you for cheap.”  No, this level of stupidity could only be perpetrated by administrators. 

UCO juniors Maggie Lawson and Liberty Welch might have been a little staggered by the abrupt (and stupid) cancellation of their play on campus, but it didn’t take them long to recover.  They told their cast that they had the option to leave because trying to produce it on their own was going to be more complicated than a production at school.  Curmie, with decades of experience in such matters, knew exactly what the response would be: “rock on, we want to do it.”

The company started a GoFundMe, hoping for $2000 but expecting “like, $200 and, like, a high five. Like, ‘you go girls!’”  They brought in just short of $10,000.  And they found a venue.  And they opened their show on October 23, two weeks after they were originally scheduled to go up at OCU.  Word is, it went well.  Of course it did.  Those extra barriers just added another layer of incentive.  Curmie is proud of those students, even if he does hope they’ll get the hell out of Oklahoma so they won’t need to go through this crap every time they want to do something more controversial than Harvey or You Can’t Take It with You.

Scams and Things That Smell Like Scams.  Curmie wrote in particular about the barrage of letters pretending to be from an insurance company with which Curmie was already affiliated (they weren’t, of course), and an ad for the UpSide app with an absurdly exaggerated claim.  Well, Curmie heard that same UpSide ad just a couple of days ago, and yes, they’re still making shit up.  He also got another scammy letter about his car insurance… and last week one about his homeowner’s insurance.  At least they’re branching out?

But the commercials for various gambling apps and “you must act now” crap aimed at folks on Medicare are getting annoyingly ubiquitous.  Back in the days when there was a functioning Consumer Protection Bureau, there’d be a chance to get the objectively false claims off the air.  The Trump administration is taking notes for their own next scam.

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.  The good news is that none of the nine universities contacted by the DOE signed on to that absurd document.  Seven, including Curmie’s undergraduate alma mater, rejected it outright; the other two supplied comments but didn’t agree to the terms.  Another trio of universities, including Curmie’s doctoral alma mater, were contacted after the first nine schools had made their decisions.  Exactly how specific things got is unclear—university officials say they were not asked to sign the document, but made it clear they wouldn’t do so, anyway.  It remains to be seen if the Trump administration is willing to listen to what university leaders are saying or if they’ll keep up the blustering and bullying tactics.

The Short-Lived Truce in Palestine.  Last month, Curmie credited Donald Trump for his efforts in bringing about a ceasefire and prisoner exchange in the Mideast.  He did warn that “There is too much animosity, too much destruction, too much history, to be overly optimistic.”  Sometimes Curmie hates being right.  The peace lasted less than a week, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of optimism for the future, although we can but hope that Trump and others will keep trying.  At least the hostages on both sides were released…

New topic next time!

Two Scams Involving Cars and Driving

 

Curmie is trying desperately to think about something other than politics and variations on the theme: the Idiot-in-Chief, urged on by Secretary Brainworm, trying to link Tylenol (by brand name!) to autism; the absurdity of “Escalatorgate” and Little Donny’s obsession with it; plus lots of other diversions so we won’t be talking about the EPSTEIN FILES.  Curmie might come back to some of this, but not today.  So he’s going to talk about a different gaggle of charlatans… well, OK, two gaggles thereof.

After driving the same vehicle for seventeen years, Curmie finally got a new car a little over a month ago.  It happens to be a Nissan, which is relevant here only to the extent of identifying who is not responsible for the slimy tactics described below.

A couple of weeks after buying the new car, Curmie got a letter, pretty much purporting to be from Nissan, proclaiming that they’d been trying to contact me to tell me that my warranty was going to be cancelled unless I called them to confirm.  N.B., “cancelled,” implying this was coverage I already had was in danger of losing.  Curmie got another such letter a couple of days later.  And then there were even more…

Luckily, the stench of scam was pretty obvious.  No, they hadn’t been trying to contact me, or they would have done so.  Nissan has not only my home address, but my email address and cell phone number.  They also, of course, have my VIN number, which two of the letters wanted me to be prepared to tell them.  These epistles stopped just short of claiming to be from Nissan per se; it was implied but never outright stated.  There was, of course, a general “you must act now” feel, and the obligatory ”this is the FINAL ATTEMPT TO CONTACT YOU” bullshit.

Ultimately, Curmie has (so far!) received seven (!) such letters, apparently from at least four different fraudsters (or at least four different numbers to call), all claiming to be the FINAL ATTEMPT to contact me.  (Curmie says “at least four” because the last one was pitched, unopened.)  Only one admitted they wanted to sell me new coverage rather than have me “confirm” an allegedly already existing account.  One version was completely identical to the first one except for a change of deadline date.  Perhaps that first one wasn’t really the final attempt, after all, huh?  Luckily, the villains are as stupid as they are corrupt. 

Exactly how all of these creatures got Curmie’s home address and found out about his purchase is unclear.  The salesman at the local dealership said perhaps they hacked into the DMV, but it’s more likely the DMV cheerfully sold the information: the state has got to make money somehow, and they’re unwilling to make billionaires and oil companies pay taxes at an appropriate rate, so allowing their citizens to be swindled seems an appropriate way to make a few bucks.

The problem is neither new nor limited to one brand of vehicle or one location.  Beloved Spouse is still occasionally getting this crap for a Honda she bought two years ago.  Incidentally, the Honda dealership, the Nissan dealership, and Curmie’s house are in three different counties, so it’s got to be a state-wide (at least) phenomenon.

But here’s the thing: Curmie is a skeptical lad by nature, and even he was almost tempted to call one of those numbers just to find out what was going on.  Partly, that impulse was driven by the perhaps naïve belief that scam artists would have nothing to gain if he was sufficiently cautious on the phone.  Indeed, it wasn’t until he got the second letter—from an apparently different source—that Curmie’s suspicions went from “preponderance of the evidence” to “beyond reasonable doubt.”  Even then, a quick call to the dealership seemed in order. 

It’s unclear how this little exercise in deceit works to the scammers’ benefit if the car owner is cautious.  Still, we can suspect that this kind of shadiness must have the potential to be lucrative or there wouldn’t be so many people trying it, and whereas the victims might not be the sharpest knives in the proverbial drawer, they don’t deserve to be swindled.

Even more instantly identifiable as deceit is the advertising for the UpSide app.  Back when the app was relatively new, Curmie pointed out that you could have a full-time job driving 65 mph with no breaks and still not get the savings the ad promises.  They’ve changed the details of their strategy a little, but the bullshit remains.  The most recent commercial Curmie heard opens with an ominous voice proclaiming that the average American spends $5000 a year on gas.  “That’s crazy,” quoth the narrator.  That’s true, it is crazy: in the sense that you’d be crazy to believe such an outright lie.

Let’s see: the average car gets about 24.4 mpg, and the average person drives about 12,200 miles a year.  That means they’d need almost exactly 500 gallons of gas a year.  The average price of gas nationally is about $3.17 a gallon, but let’s go with the most expensive state, California, where the average cost is $4.65 (these figures are apparently updated daily, so they might not be exact if/when you check, Gentle Reader).  That would mean that even in California you’d be spending about $2325 on gas annually: less than half what the UpSide ad claims.  In Mississippi, the cheapest state for gas, the cost would be about $1350: roughly a third of UpSide’s stat.

The app itself may actually be a good thing: Curmie can find nothing to suggest that it doesn’t, in fact, save the user some money, nor is there evidence of hidden charges or even hassles.  If it’s a scam, it’s difficult to see how the operation works.  But if you’re not trying to fleece someone, why would you go out of your way to act like you are?

Curmie shrugs and moves on.