Monthly Archives: April 2015

Please do not share from these 10 Websites or Facebook Pages

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This is a condensation of an excellent article from DawnsBrain. I’ve summarized the ten here for easy consumption, but her complete article is worth a read.

DBRielly_LovePotionsAndSnakeOil

☛ TL;DR – these websites promote pseudoscientific woo¹, and are dangerous in that they lead people to shun and be afraid of science-based health and medicine. ☚

10) Alex Jones

Mr. Jones uses a ton of hyperbole, conspiracy theories, and a loose connection to reality, to whip up fear and loathing in his audience.

9) The Food Babe

Ms. Hari, the “Food Babe”, parrots Dr. Mercola and cobbles together cherry-picked blurbs from questionable studies and Wikipedia. She uses the term “investigation” to excuse the fact that she often gives medical advice without having any education in the life sciences. She picks the weirdest ingredients to go after.

#8 Eat Clean. Train Mean. Live Green.

Ms. McDonald mixes some common-sense dietary advice with a shot of “detox” and disordered eating, GMO and fluoride fearmongering, and pondering about chemtrails. She even claims that honey is medicine. Proof that even registered dietitians can be wacko.

#7 Dr. Joseph Mercola

Dr. Mercola, by virtue of his credentials and large fanbase, is possibly one of the most dangerous people on Facebook. Because he generates fear around science-based medicine, he discourages people from seeking real help for illness. He also scares people away from vaccinations, fluoride, GMO food, pasteurized dairy, and dental fillings. But you know, buy his line of supplements and all will be well.

#6 Prevention Magazine

Everyone that promotes “natural cures” above all else seems to jump from one cure-all to another. WebMD specifically states that there is insufficient evidence for at least three items on their list.

#5 NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com is arguably the most balls-to-the-wall looniest page on Facebook. They have never met a conspiracy theory they don’t love.

#4 Collective Evolution

All the misinformation, all the time.

#3 MindBodyGreen

The “conversations about health” are decidedly in favor of “natural remedies” that are not supported by scientific research. People who waste their time mucking about with ineffective alternative treatments often die much sooner.

#2 Spirit Science

Most of their posts are harmless new-agey spiritual stuff and kookiness. But sometimes they veer into unsupportable natural remedies and outright pseudoscience.

#1 The Mind Unleashed

They’re a good example of slipping in a bit of bullshit here and there amongst the standard viral Facebook stuff. There’s a theme of immature hippy-style mistrust of any and every authority. What are you rebelling against? What have you got?

Bonus Post

Ernest Hemingway coined the term Crap Detector to refer to the little mechanism that ought to be working inside each person’s brain.

The most certain way to develop this ability to discern truth from baloney is education. In particular, an education in science will help protect you from the charlatans and cranks of the world.

I highly recommend starting with one of the many free online resources, such as Crash Course: Biology, Crash Course: Chemistry, and Crash Course: Anatomy and Physiology.

Bonus 2:

Dawn did not mention him, but I personally would add Mehmet Oz to the list. A sad case of a classically-trained physician who has sold his reputation for a mess of pottage, and in his quest to find natural remedies has devolved into a pitchman for the most ridiculous and worthless products known to man.

Disclaimer: Even with education in the hard sciences, it’s wise to remember that not everything is known that can be known. Aspirin is a direct outgrowth of historical use of willow bark to treat fevers. I have a strong conviction that there are literally countless chemical compounds out in nature that remain to be discovered that can have beneficial effects on human health and disease… but most of them have not been discovered yet.

Heath and wellness is soon to be, if it’s not already, a trillion-dollar industry – and everyone and their dog wants a slice of that pie. Trouble is, most of those dollars will be made selling bullcrap to the ignorant. There are very few exceptions.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

¹ Woo is a term used among skeptical writers to describe pseudoscientific explanations that have certain common characteristics.

Do it yourself: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

About 15 years ago I bought this Braun shaver, and it served me well for at least 15 years. The rechargeable batteries finally wore out, and I wondered if it would be worth trying to replace them myself rather than pay an appliance repairman ten prices for the privilege.

How to open it? I found a totally useless article on eHow (typical of all these crowdsourced answer sites like WikiHow, FixYa, Yahoo! Answers, and so many others – the blind leading the rutting blind) and then figured out how to get the thing open myself. Once you do, getting to the guts is pretty easy – and the little electronic board with the batteries pops right out. Nice German engineering.

I bought a couple of new NiMH rechargeables, and set about replacing them. The beggar was that those batteries were not soldered to the board, the were spot-welded at the contact points… but with some careful work I was able to get them out.

Popped the new batteries in, and the whole board started to smoke and melt.

Crap. I must have put the new batteries in backwards or something. I thought I was doing it right.

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RIP Braun – It’s the component in the front that really lit up – what looks like burning under the left battery is just residue from the original adhesive.

So this particular attempt at DIY didn’t work out so well… but that’s how I learn. Over the last half-century, I’ve assembled enough handyman skills to install a bathroom into a totally unfinished space, and all of that experience came from just jumping in and doing it. I made mistakes along the way, but these days most things go pretty smoothly.

So I had to run out and get a new Braun (I feel very loyal to that brand, I’ve been using good Braun shavers since 1974, the first one bought in Austria) and hopefully this one will last me at least 15 years, by which time I’ll get my grandkids to buy me a new one for Christmas, so I won’t have to try this particular experiment again.

I’m sure there will be others.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

PS: Ah, the luscious smell of burning silicon…

Another INTERPOL Threat

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Another scam from Benin.

NEVER RESPOND TO SILLY EMAILS LIKE THIS. If you are contacted out of the blue by someone who wants you to wire money by Western Union to anywhere in the world, it’s a SCAM. Delete such messages. NEVER SEND MONEY BY WESTERN UNION TO ANYONE UNKNOWN TO YOU.

No, Interpol is not after me. No, I won’t send them any money.

Subject: Urgent Attention,
From: INTERPOL POLICE <interpolgeneralofpoliceforce@gmail.com>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
FBI OFFICE Washington, DC

INTERPOL is the world’s largest international police organization, with 190 ? member countries. Our role is to enable police around the world to work together to make the world a safer place. Our high-tech infrastructure of technical and operational support helps meet the growing challenges of fighting crime in the 21st century.

Urgent Attention,

We have this morning discovered that you have been making foreign legal transactions with Western Unions, Money Grams, Diplomatic Agents and Banks with West African Countries (Benin, Nigeria, Ghana etc.). We went further with the investigations we found out that you don’t have Money Laundering Clearance Certificate, which is a major Federal Offence. You have violated the World Federal Law, which constituted against smuggling of large amount of money and trafficking of drug e.t.c., without having Money Laundering Clearance Certificate before you commenced the transaction. You want to receive such huge amount of money from UPS DHL FEDEX WESTERN UNION AND MONEY GRAM HEAD Quater Benin Republic which is a foreign Delivery. Meanwhile we have stopped the Delivery, not only the ATM CARD was stopped but the total Transaction of the sum of ($10.2million dollars )

Furthermore, be advised that according to the World Wide Law Enforcement Agency together with the FBI rules and regulations, you are to obtain the document from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Benin Republic which is the origin of the fund in question. Also Note that you are to take care of the documentation to be issued to you right away, because due to the content of the document and how importance and secured the document is, you are to take care of the document by sending them the sum of $90.00 US Dollars only to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission Benin Republic for issuing of the document right away and your payment will be release to you. That is the only way the Economic and Financial Crime Commission Benin Republic will issue you the document, because they are going to issue you the Authentic and Original copy of the documents.

Note that your rights are limited; anything you SAY or DO will be used as evidence against you in the court of Law. You have the full rights to remain silent and obey the Law. Don’t think we don’t know you or your address. We will get you arrested if you fail to provide the document or pay for it to be obtained from Benin Republic. The Arrest Warrant can only be withdrawn once the document is obtained. There are three charges against you, which are:

1. Smuggling of a huge amount of money into your country without Money Laundering Clearance Certificate is a violation to Federal Law. 2. Smuggling of a huge amount of money into your country without a proper documentation is a violation 2003 Federal Constitution, otherwise, called illegal transaction. 3. it’s a Conspiracy, a Criminal Attempt and Disobedience to the Federal Law, which will eventually lead you to 5-year imprisonment.

You Should Send The Money Direct To The Country Of Origin Of The Fund In Question:

Country: Benin Republic
State/City: Cotonou
Text Q.: info
Answer: Yes
Amount;;;;;;$90
Receiver Name: FELIS IKE
Sender name: and MTCN is needed;

Once, you make the payment, attach and send to us the copy of the payment slip for verification before sending it to the Economic Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) Benin Republic.

WARNING: Failure to pay for this documentation is a confirmation that you wanted to smuggle the funds into the country which is a federal offense and a gross violation of the Patriot Act and legal action will be taken immediately by arresting and detaining you and if found guilty, you will be jailed As terrorism, drug trafficking and money laundering is a serious problem in our community today. The UNITED STATE INTERPOL world’s largest international police organization will not stop at any length in tracing you down and prosecuting any criminal who indulge in this criminal act.

Sign:General Shawn A. Bray, head of the Central Investigation Bureau UNITED STATE INTERPOL world’s largest international police organization

FBI WEB SITE http://www.fbi.gov/
interpol site http://www.justice.gov/
Supreme Court of United State

Still haven’t figured out what’s up over in Africa; I haven’t gotten a single scam letter from Nigeria in a dog’s age – all of these drones claim to be operating out of Benin, just next door. Whatever the case, it’s still the same scammers running the same tired old scam.

Be careful out there, and protect your loved ones.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The case against lead

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Lead-Poisoning

“Mad as a hatter,” went the expression. Alice’s tea party featured “The Mad Hatter,” whose felting work involved prolonged exposure to mercury vapors, resulting in tremors, pathological shyness and irritability.

We still hear a lot about asbestos – it remains on the radar of most Americans, simply because there’s still a lot of it out there in old buildings, and many times a large abatement project will pop up on the news.

We hear less about lead and lead poisoning, however, since lead-based paint was banned in the US in 1978; before that, many children developed signs of lead poisoning, particularly inner-city kids who would ingest paint flakes that had lead added. Lead was completely eliminated from automotive fuels by 1996.

But it appears that lead is still a serious threat; effects of past exposure may include an increase in crime rates, and current exposure through shooting ranges threatens to continue the negative consequences.

Gathered here are a number of articles which should be read and considered, particularly by anyone who works around ammunition; sportspeople, shooters, law-enforcement officers, reloaders, and the like. It is up to the individual to make their own assessments, but from where I sit, it would not be unreasonable to lay at least partial blame for the seeming descent of our society into madness and uncivility on the pervasiveness of lead in our environment.

Read and judge.

Portrait_of_Clair_Cameron_Patterson

Clair Cameron Patterson. From the Wikipedia article:

Patterson had first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His work on this led to a total re-evaluation of the growth in industrial lead concentrations in the atmosphere and the human body, and his subsequent campaigning was seminal in the banning of tetraethyllead ingasoline, and lead solder in food cans.

Patterson met significant opposition for his views, particularly from people such as Robert A. Kehoe, the principal advocate for the use of tetraethyllead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline. In contrast to the “Precautionary Principle” which assumes that there is potential risk to a substance unless proven otherwise, Kehoe claimed that “in the absence of clear evidence of risk there is no risk of significance.” This later came to be called the Kehoe Paradigm, and is essentially the same cognitive dissonance used by tobacco executives in their fight to convince the world that their product was not harmful.

Bryson-Robert-Kehoe-226x300

Robert A. Kehoe

At The Nation, an article entitled “The Secret History of Lead.”

At The Atlantic, a treatise on how the lead industry convinced the public and the media that parents were to blame rather than the toxic substance that they were profiting from:

The lead industry even claimed that the problem was not with the paint but with the “uneducable Negro and Puerto Rican” parents who “failed” to stop children from placing their fingers and toys in their mouths.

Recently, a four-part investigative series at the Seattle Times: “Lead poisoning is a major threat at America’s shooting ranges, perpetuated by owners who’ve repeatedly violated laws even after workers have fallen painfully ill.”

And lastly, an essay at Mother Jones linking gasoline lead to a rise in violent crime. This article does its best to be balanced and rational rather than sensationalistic, and deserves to be considered.

20150412_214643

One pound of lead. The CDC has set the standard elevated blood lead level for adults to be 10 µg/dl of the whole blood. This means that one pound of lead is sufficient to elevate lead levels of 8,247,134 adults. This stuff is rutting toxic.

There are a lot of unanswered questions, and a lot more research would need to be done over time to gain further insight into these ideas. But one thing is clear – people who work at or around shooting ranges need to be extra, extra careful and consider possible ramifications of their exposure to lead.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The Punt Gun – otherwise known as “dynamite fishing for waterfowl”

Posted on by The Old Wolf

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Matthew Quigley would probably have messed his pants had he been able to see this. Such a contraption seems to put his Sharp’s Buffalo Gun to shame, although it was designed for an entirely different purpose.

These guns were so large and their recoil so powerful that they were generally affixed to small hunting watercraft (punts); the force of the discharge would often drive the punt backwards a considerable distance.

gunboat

Use of a gun of this nature makes the small craft look like a duck-hunting battleship. While the idea is to be able to kill large numbers of waterfowl at once for commercial hunting enterprises, one wonders if a weapon of this nature would not be more likely to atomize its target!

The Wikipedia article indicates that the use of punt guns in large fleets led to depletion of wild game, and that in the early 20th century market hunting was outlawed, making the use of these weapons either illegal or impractical.

The title of this post refers to blast fishing, almost always illegal because it’s unsportsmanlike, dangerous to the environment, and dangerous for those who attempt it.

The above idiots were lucky that they didn’t lose hands, arms, or heads.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

RTFM, and never trust the dealer.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

2007-toyota-prius-5dr-hb-natl-angular-front-exterior-view_100271619_s
Eight years.

Eight years of frustration could have been avoided had I simply taken the trouble to read my 2007 Prius’ Owner’s Manual when I bought the thing.

Now, I love my Prius. I hope it lasts forever because she’s been really good to me. But it has a few annoying quirks, and one of my biggest complaints was that with the smart key system, you touch the driver’s side door and the driver’s side door unlocks – but only that one. (Touching the other doors would unlock all of them, but I wouldn’t generally do that when using the car alone.)

I’d get in, go to work, and then try to get in the back door or the hatchback to get a briefcase or something, and the door was still locked. A first world problem to be sure, but when it’s raining out, it was a major pain to have to get back in the front door, press the “unlock button,” and then be able to open the other doors. Finally my patience had worn thin enough that I decided to see if it could be fixed.

I called the dealership where I bought the car (now 60 miles away), and asked them if this feature could be programmed. The first lady I spoke to said, “Sure, just bring it in.” Wonderful! Then my cynicism meter redlined, and I called a Toyota dealership closer to me. “No,” they said, “no, that function cannot be changed.”

BS Meter

Dang. Whom to trust? I called the first dealership back again, and explained what the other had said. I didn’t want to drive all the way up there only to be told, “Oh, we were wrong.” I got a plate of waffles this time: “Well, we need to have you come up and have the technician hook up his computer and see if your vehicle allows for that function before we’ll know for sure. The diagnostic charge will be $ABunchOfMoney, and if he can change the function, it will be $ALotMore.” Thank you, I appreciate your time. Click.

Good thing I didn’t drive all the way up based on the first “Sure, we can do that.” Now what to do? Once again I put it on the back burner.

About a month later, I decided to do some more searching on the internet, and  I finally discovered this video. Fully half of it is advertising, and the remainder is almost unwatchable, but props to whomever made it because it led me to a solution. The first thing I noticed was that the kid in the video had pulled out the Owner’s Manual. At that point I stopped watching the Cloverfield-style camera work, and went to drag out my own.

Really? You mean, the answer might just be in the Owner’s Manual?

The 2007 Prius has a slightly different manual than the 2008 shown in the video, but sure enough, after a bit of searching I found something in the “Smart Entry and Start System” section; I had to hunt around because the index in the manual was probably written by a drunken lemur pay attention Toyota.

manual

So it turns out that if I held down the “lock” and “panic” button together for about 5 seconds, the car makes a bunch of beeps and the unlocking pattern rotates to the next option in the cycle. Done. Free. Heaven knows how much Dealer A would have charged me, or if they would have even been able to figure it out themselves.

I’ve learned a couple of lessons here.

Lesson 1: If I ever buy a new car, I’ll be sure to Read The Freaking Manual cover-to-cover and take notes. Yesterday as I was happily telling my wife about my triumph, she noted with her usual dry wit that I might even discover other wonderful things if I were to do so with this one. Make it so.

rtfm

Lesson 2: Never trust a car dealership to tell you the absolute truth. Some will outright lie to you, and others just won’t know. Dealer 1 told me that they could fix my problem just to get me in the shop, without even really knowing if the issue was fixable or not. Dealer 2 was ignorant. In the interest of fairness, folks who work in such places are just people; car models change every year, each car has a myriad of different features, and it would be hard for even a top service technician to keep abreast of all of them. Moreover, after 8 years there’s a high probability that the folks working there have only been on the job for a few years and don’t know as much about “older models.” That said, there is a certain expectation of competence when one reaches out to a dealership, so I was left with some residual disappointment that nobody bothered to give me accurate information.

But I’m pleased. A small burr has been removed from under my saddle, and the relief is palpable.

The Old Wolf has spoken.