If you found a wallet, would you return it?

Posted on September 14, 2013 by The Old Wolf

Hottest buzz in the travel world: a human error caused United Airlines to offer tickets for $0 for a brief time. Some of the comments are telling.

One Houston woman booked a Christmas trip back to Washington to visit her parents for $5; the return leg was $220, but it was still a cheap ticket. But why wait? She decided to try booking a cheap flight to surprise her parents today. “It was $5 round-trip, no fees, nothing,” she says. “This is nuts.” She checked in right away and printed her boarding pass hoping to increase her chances of being able to use the ticket.

United, to their credit, decided to honor the fares.

One attorney – irony! – who got six tickets to LA for all of $60, said “They took the high road, said, ‘We made a mistake.’ It may cost them some money on the front end, but it saves them potential litigation and bad press.”

The bad behavior of corporations is always good for a public outrage fest or a media frenzy, and there’s no disputing the fact that many businesses, large and small, are out to get as much as they can from the public and their employees as the law will permit. It’s natural, then, that people should see a chance to get their own back when the opportunity presents itself as a well-deserved entitlement, but there’s something fundamentally wrong with this attitude. Taking advantage of an obvious error is no better than finding a wallet on the street, stuffed with cash, and keeping it.

Speaking of lost wallets, it appears that according to one study, honest people outnumber the dishonest by a margin of three to one – but from where I sit, a 25% failure rate is still a pretty dismal showing. You can say all you want about times being tough, but honesty is an absolute: you don’t take, nor do you have a right to, that which is not yours. An Ethiopian cab driver in Las Vegas understood this when he found $200,000 left in his cab and promptly returned it; the owner tipped him $2,000 for his honesty, but I was unsettled by some of the comments from his friends:

“That’s all? How about 10 percent, at least? That’s $20,000. How about 15 or 20 percent? That’s the going rate for tips in Vegas, after all.”

There is no greater reward for honesty than the knowledge in one’s heart that one has done the right thing. Even if the owner of the money had been a thermonuclear cheapskate – had he given the cabbie nothing at all, or $5.00, for example – the fact remains that the money was never the cabdriver’s in the first place, and he had no right to a penny of it; this concept was obviously lost on his friends, who saw an opportunity to profit from someone else’s mistake and were disappointed when it wasn’t as lucrative as they hoped.

So our lawyer friend, who had the good fortune of scoring six – count them, six – free tickets due to United’s error, was not only reveling in his good fortune, he was also dangling the litigation card by implying that if United had failed to honor their error, they would have been sued – and sadly, there’s no question that he is right. In fact, I’m sure he would have happily jumped on the bandwagon for a share of the settlement, or at the very least, the billable hours from his work on the case. United understood this, and decided quickly that it would be cheaper to eat the costs of their error than face a rash of lawsuits and bad publicity – none of which would have been possible without a universal sense (or at least, extrapolating from the wallet study, a 25% sense) that “finders keepers” trumps “thou shalt not steal.”

Justification for dishonesty takes many forms. Conversations with Nigerian scammers have shown that there is a country-wide sense that any money extorted from rich westerners is payback for decades of colonial rape (from the 419eater Ethics page):

Nigeria was a happy and peaceful country until the west came along.
Western companies, such as Halliburton and Shell, bribed their way into the country and proceeded to strip Nigeria of its assets leaving the inhabitants poverty stricken and struggling to survive.
The West is responsible and now it is payback time.

One scammer wrote,

“Ok, I don’t really call it cheating, most times the smart person become victorious. Some body has to pay what we call retribution. From what Africa went through during the Slave trade era, the west took all our resources, manpower, and our cultural and traditional wares… Some body will pay some how what your lineage owed.”

On top of this, there is a culture in Nigeria that esteems those who can make money without working.

On the other hand, sometimes dishonesty is born of countrywide desperation – a perfect example of a society that functions more or less based on the Ferengi “Rules of Acquisition” is Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. An article in the September, 2013 issue of National Geographic paints a vivid picture of a society that is doing its best to survive plunder from within and without:

Despite its status as the capital city of the second largest country in all of Africa, Kinshasa is a marvel of dysfunction. Each of the government ministries has to be, as one U.S. official tactfully puts it, “basically self-financing”—meaning much of the money it has is generated by bribery and extortion. This is especially true of the police, who, says the aid adviser, “are one hundred percent on the take. Every one of them is an officer for one reason: to collect for himself.”

You would be right to expect anarchy from this collision of burgeoning poverty and state failure. But the West’s faith in institutions happens to be irrelevant in this slapdash confluence of metropolis and village. Nor is Kinshasa’s story the familiar African tale of woe, oppression, and no way out. Having first gained independence in 1960 from their Belgian colonizers, who left behind no governing capacity to speak of, and having then been deceived and plundered by the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the Congolese have long since discarded expectations that their civil institutions and elected leaders will perform as promised. The miracle of Kinshasa is that it has not discarded hope along the way. On the contrary: This is a city of frenzied entrepreneurship, where everyone is a salesman of whatever merchandise comes along, an uncertified specialist—self-employed, self-styled—a creator amid chaos, an artist in a shed.

I’ve been to Kinshasa four times, and experienced this first hand.

I brought some computer equipment into the country on behalf of a gentleman who was providing it for his friends. $200.00 “duty” had to be paid before it would be released, and I’m certain that fee was determined arbitrarily by the customs agent on duty for that day, to be shared with my “escort” who facilitated all my dealings while in the country.
When leaving the airport, I was surrounded by people who demanded money for everything and nothing; the sleepy-eyed “official” lady at the gate who asked if I had any Congolese francs; when I said yes, she said, “Give them to me.” Now, there is a government requirement that no Congolese money can be taken out of the country, so she was justified in asking – but the fact that I produced a handful of currency worth only about 50¢ clearly annoyed her, and it was plain that the government would see little, if any, of what she collected. ^[1] Other people, none of whom I knew, simply asked directly: “Give me twenty dollars.”
My above-mentioned escort was a leading member of the Church community I was there interacting with. A rising star among the congregation, he was a trusted advisor to the mission president and a member of Church leadership. He ended up plundering the office safe and throwing away an astonishing opportunity to advance both in his country and in the world… all for a few dollars within easy reach that he thought he was entitled to because he could take them.
On the subject of missionaries, the Church in Congo was obliged to re-supply their missionary apartments after every transfer, because everything that had value was stripped by the departing missionaries, sold on the street, and the funds sent back to waiting families. At the time, the administration was instructed that there was to be no disciplinary action for such things, because this behavior was so deeply-rooted in the culture.

It gets sticky, doesn’t it? When your entire country is based on “catch as catch can,” there seems little hope for breaking out of the cycle. For what it’s worth, I love the Congolese people that I have known, and I wouldn’t presume to judge them; I can’t imagine living in such chaos, nor do I know what I would do in their shoes. But we live in a different society than Nigeria or the DRC; the poorest of the poor in our nation would be considered solidly middle-class by many African cultures.

United Airlines made a mistake, and stood by it; from a strictly ethical point of view they were not obliged to, but from a public-relations point of view they made the best choice possible. It gets them some positive karma (which they sorely need, after the “United Breaks Guitars” debacle) and ends up being cheaper in the long run. But the episode serves to point out that we have a serious breakdown of ethics in our own country, one which will surely cause our nation more collateral damage in the future.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] I am reminded of the attitude of Praetor Garovirus in “Asterix in Switzerland”:

The fruits of abuse

Posted on September 11, 2013 by The Old Wolf

Almost everything I post here is designed to uplift, to interest, and to inspire. In general, I do my best to avoid the depressing, the shocking, or the bizarre. Today I make an exception, but only because there’s an important message behind the event.

The children of Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick published an obituary for their mother in the Reno Gazette-Journal. In contrast to this beautiful tribute, the one published in the RGJ was anything but kind. It has since been removed by the newspaper as they investigate the circumstances surrounding its publication, but here is the text in full:

Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick born Jan 4, 1935 and died alone on Aug. 30, 2013. She is survived by her 6 of 8 children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way possible. While she neglected and abused her small children, she refused to allow anyone else to care or show compassion towards them. When they became adults she stalked and tortured anyone they dared to love. Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.

On behalf of her children whom she so abrasively exposed to her evil and violent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the after-life reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty, and shame that she delivered on her children. Her surviving children will now live the rest of their lives with the peace of knowing their nightmare finally has some form of closure.

Most of us have found peace in helping those who have been exposed to child abuse and hope this message of her final passing can revive our message that abusing children is unforgiveable, shameless, and should not be tolerated in a “humane society”. Our greatest wish now, is to stimulate a national movement that mandates a purposeful and dedicated war against child abuse in the United States of America.

Let’s make a couple of things clear before we go on:

This is the Internet, and hoaxes are as common as mosquitoes in Winnipeg.
The accuracy of the facts surrounding this brutal obituary have not been independently confirmed, neither have they been refuted.
The world is full of people as toxic and abusive as the alleged decedent; if you doubt me, just plug into the domestic violence feed, but be warned – it’s not for the faint of heart.

For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that the events are accurate, that the woman in question was as horrific as stated, and that the family members are using this as a legitimate vehicle to obtain some measure of closure and healing. It is to their credit that instead of becoming monsters in their own right, they have done their best to turn the tide and mitigate the effects of child abuse, transforming their own agony into positive energy for the benefit of others.

Doubtless some will invoke de mortuis nil nisi bonum ^[1] and say that this obituary was heartless and spiteful. Without question, forgiveness is a healing balm; Azim Khamisa and Ples Felix have demonstrated this convincingly by turning tragedy into redemption for thousands of others. Mary Mullaney in the other obituary I referenced above used to say, “Never say mean things about anybody; they are “poor souls to pray for,” and Disney’s Thumper recited his father’s good advice: “if you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.” But no man knows another’s pain, and sometimes peace cannot be obtained without the opportunity to express things that have been long hidden, long suppressed.

Child abuse is much more common that we would like to think. In the context of some personal development work, I’ve heard stories that would curdle your blood, and shared a few of my own. It is only by getting these stories out, where they can be looked at, dealt with, and worked through, that sufferers of abuse can hope to burn that negative energy off and be able to move their lives forward. So, yes – it was an angry and hurt-filled obituary, and I can only hope that through its writing and publication, the children of this woman can find both release and closure. I wish them well.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] “Of the dead say nothing but good.”

A message from myself

Posted on September 10, 2013 by The Old Wolf

Found this in my mailbox the other day. It was from me, to me. Except for the fact that I hadn’t sent myself any spam recently.

At first I wondered if my email had been hacked, but I have a pretty strong password on that account (it’s AGHwqeiraas23894!!abaouUAWU, in case you were wondering) – it looks like Gmail picked it up as a spoofed sender, and no one else has contacted me with foul abuse, so I’m pretty sure that’s not what happened.

But I was curious as to who was sending out this garbage – rubber stamps? Well, not really. What I ended up with is this:

Make Money with Meghan. Sheesh. Another get-rich-quick scam… except the only people who are getting rich are a few top-level bottom feeders (how’s that for a metaphor?)

In order to make money from these scams, you have to be willing to do one thing:

Sell the hope of making money to others, whose job will be to sell the hope of making money to others.

In order to do this, you pay these drones for the privilege of setting you up with one or more websites, and open yourself to a neverending round of upselling, which will cost you far more than you’ll ever make.

There are a few red flags associated with all of these internet scams:

Do a little digging, and you’ll see that many of them trace back to Tim Atkinson And Zak Meftah, a couple of young snake-oil salesmen who have saturated the internet with incarnation after incarnation of their scummy “opportunity”.
If you get onto a website and hit your “back” or “close” buttons, you’ll invariable get one or more of these popups:

I mentioned the one above in an earlier post about work-from-home scams, , but the concept is the same. Some of these websites will offer you discount after discount just for saying “no, thanks” – and even if you take the bait for the low, low price of $9.00 instead of $49.50, or whatever their initial fee is, they’ve got their foot in your door and will likely make up anything they lost from your enrollment on upsells and additional worthless training.

Just type the words [system] scam into Google; invariably the first several pages, or more, will be filled with websites advertising [system], or telling you that [system] is totally bogus and inviting you to sign up with [other system].
In all likelihood you found out about [system] through a dishonest and deceptive spam email, as I did.

All of these money-making schemes are full of sound and fury, and signify nothing. Yes, people are making money – the ones at the top who don’t give a rat’s south-40 about the thousands of people below them who will never see a dime of profit. Remember – these systems are selling nothing but the system itself! They add no value, create no lasting worth, and are designed only to give false hope to countless victims and enrich the ones at the top of the pyramid.

Do you really want to work with people who base their income on fraud and deception? Be smart – stay away from such “opportunities.” There are a few legitimate companies out there, selling legitimate products, who offer their affiliates the chance to make money from a home-based business, but they are few and far between. 99% of the schemes being advertised on the net today are pure jiggery-pokery, and you would do well to avoid them like the plague.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

How the 1% live

Posted on September 10, 2013 by The Old Wolf

I’m currently yanking the chain of an advance fee fraud scammer, much the same way I did over here. This one appears to be operating out of China. I’ll be posting a full report at the end of the game, but in the meantime, Mr. “Zhang Yong” has asked me to do some research for him so he can have a base of operations in the USA after all those “millions” have been transferred into my bank.

Just in case you’re wondering, these chests of money don’t exist.

See? This excellent certificate of deposit shows that I, personally, deposited lots of dollars into a Hong Kong bank.

Anyway, here’s the official request:

I am in receipt of your mail and the words in the contents made me happy that I finally got the right person for my proposal. As you have stated in your email that all monetary assets pertaining to this venture are confidently secure and that you are going to search for a business that will profit both of us. I will so much appreciate if you could start searching for a very nice four bed house with a very big garden located in a quiet environment conducive for learning.

So I did a little research on the net and found this lovely property – a real one – for sale by Sotheby’s:

Only $28,950,000. Wow; a real steal. In addition, if you look closely at the page, you should be able to buy the same property in the Fringe Alternate Universe for about $11,000,000 less:

But seriously, assuming that the “Other Listing” is just an “oops” (I sent the agency a note letting them know that they might want to contact their webmaster, so the page probably won’t look like this for long), I allowed the monthly payment calculator to tell me how much this charming 4-bedroom property would be:

Assuming a $6 million down payment, your monthly charge would only be $157,708.

Cushlamochree. Who the hqiz has this kind of money? And this is only one of countless homes like this all over the place, in cities like New York and Boston and Los Angeles and San Francisco… and they’re selling.

Along with (cxhchhhxxttt paTOO!) Bank of America, we’re part owners of a 6-bedroom home in Central Utah. That monthly payment would just about buy our place every single month… for 30 years. I have a hard time getting my head around that kind of money… and it’s not lost on me that there are people in the world for whom $30,000,000 for a home would be considered petty cash. We just re-watched “Inception,” and I remember chuckling at this little exchange:

Cobb: For this to work, we’d have to buy off the pilots…
Arthur: And we’d have to buy off the flight attendants…
Saito: I bought the airline.
[Everybody turns and stares at him. Saito just shrugs]
Saito: It seemed neater.

Yes, it’s Hollywood – but let’s not kid ourselves – there are people like that out there.

It’s not a very nice world we live in when it comes to social equality; and, all things are relative. A large percentage of the world’s population would look at me and think I live like a potentate.

Our species deserves better, but how to overcome the massive inequality in wealth allocation without resorting to forced redistribution is a puzzlement.

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931

Those who would simply take from the rich and give to the poor ignore this at their peril, but the dangers of social leveling are only part of the problem. When I studied Economics in college – the only class I ever got a “C” in – one of the few concepts that really stuck was that at its base, money represents stored labor. This concept has been pretty much thrown in the trash; in our country, the Fed keeps creating new fiat dollars, and these are promptly snapped up by corporations and individuals who trade in the most complex, esoteric and incomprehensible instruments imaginable, not one of which has anything to do with work. It’s all smoke and mirrors, and as the recent bubbles (dotcom, housing, etc.) have shown, all of that wealth can vanish in a heartbeat.

More important than fixing the financial structure of our society would be fixing what goes on in the hearts of men; this article is a good spotlight on the depths of immorality to which humanity will sink when it comes to the gathering of money and power. One of my favorite quotes from entertainment comes from “Star Trek: First Contact”, when Picard explains to Lily,

“The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century… The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

Please, make it so.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The Marching Morons

Posted on September 1, 2013 by The Old Wolf

Gratefully, I’m not subject to migraines… but things like the image below, seen today at Facebook, really, really push the envelope.

The stupid, it burns.

Based on the number of emails of this nature sent to me by well-meaning but reality-challenged friends and relatives, I am almost driven to despair; countless people like this walk around and vote.

When I see things like this, I’m reminded of the story by C.M. Kornbluth that titles this post, as well as his previous story, “The Little Black Bag”; both have long been among my favorites.

I see posts like this and I have to sit back and ask myself if things like this are spread around just for fun, or if people really believe that

Such tests are “really hard”
Some random cause-effect statement, written by God only knows who, will actually have an effect on their lives.

Sadly, I must conclude that the latter option is closer to the truth. To quote Weird Al Yankovic, in his song “Your Horoscope For Today,”

Now you may find it inconceivable or at the very least a bit unlikely
that the relative position of the planets and the stars could have
a special deep significance or meaning that exclusively applies to only you,
but let me give you my assurance that these forecasts and predictions
are all based on solid, scientific, documented evidence, so you would have
to be some kind of moron not to realize that every single one of them is absolutely true.

As for me,

Gemini
Your birthday party will be ruined once again by your explosive flatulence
Your love life will run into trouble when your fiance hurls a javelin through your chest

Well, if you see it on the internet, it must be right.

Compounding the problem is the fact that when I have pointed my correspondents to places like Snopes, they reply smugly that such websites are written by left-wing pinko radicals, and that surely their Aunt Matilda knows more about such things anyway. I love my friends and family, but sometimes I want to shake them until their teeth rattle.

If I were king of the universe, this book would be required reading for every child who ever hopes to graduate from high school; in fact, in order to graduate, one would have to demonstrate functional understanding of the principles contained therein.

Now, forward this blog post to 20 of your friends within the next 5 minutes, and you’ll get a big surprise. 50 friends, and you’ll win the lottery. If you don’t recommend it to anyone, your pet goldfish will die today.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Stay the hell out of Syria

Posted on August 29, 2013 by The Old Wolf

To whom it may concern in the halls of power:

In 2007, President Obama said the following to the Boston Globe:

“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat.”

I share with you here a comment I made elsewhere, but which bears repeating:

It is very hard to express the depth of my feelings about the escalating situation in Syria without resorting to blasphemy and profanity. I remain astonished at the obtuseness and pig-headedness of my legislators and my executive branch. They claim that the populace is demanding action; instead, the populace is demanding jobs, is demanding food, is demanding universal access to healthcare, is demanding that we stop throwing away money on unwinnable conflicts in countries where we don’t belong, for the sole purpose of enriching the oligarchs who are heavily invested in oil companies, security companies, and the military-industrial complex.

The people want peace and prosperity, not frivolous military actions. Surely nobody wants the people of Syria to suffer from the actions of a brutal tyrant, but as a nation we simply don’t have the resources or the moral mandate to play global cop any longer. There’s too much wrong at home, and we can’t afford for the Fed to print more fiat money to finance the insanity. I am ready to march on Washington with pitchfork and torch, if I thought it would do any good.

Let me be clear:

The United Nations has not passed a resolution supporting military action in Syria. I do not support action in Syria, and neither do most Americans.

There is no legitimacy to the mistaken conception that “action is demanded” in Syria. The only people who are demanding action are the ones who stand to profit from it, either financially or politically. I refuse to support the spending of my tax dollars or the creation of artificial money or the incurring of additional debt for fruitless military pursuits that threaten to drag us into yet another interminable conflict,

Stop this madness. I demand better; I demand responsibility and accountability to the American people to whom you are duty bound to answer. None of you have political capital to spend; your reputations and approval ratings are already in the toilet. For the love of whatever you consider holy, be it gods or humanity – do not pull the chain.