End the Madness

Posted on August 12, 2016 by The Old Wolf

Reuters recently reported that an Egyptian Judoka refused to shake hands with his Israeli opponent after a match at the Olympics in Rio.

It’s all the more sad because there were so many supporters on El Shehaby who encouraged him not to participate, because it would “shame Islam;” this is the pinnacle of resistance, resentment, and revenge, the zenith (or nadir, looked at another way) of stupidity. The Olympics is about building bridges, not about being a pettish douche. And this goes for anyone who does such things – El Shahaby is only the teacher in the moment.

In 1969, Bobby Darin wrote:

Now no doubt some folks enjoy doin’ battle
Like presidents and ministers and kings
But let us build them shelves where they can fight among themselves
and leave the people be who like to sing! (Simple Song of Freedom)

I invite all who would perpetuate this psychopathic, internecine conflict of the ages to toddle off into the desert somewhere, far, far away, and blow each other up until there is no one left – a sort of Middle East Hunger Games, if you will – and leave decent people, Arab and Jew alike, to dwell together in the land in harmony as they have at many points in history. Knock down the borders. Don’t call the land Israel. Don’t call it Falastina. Call it “Rainë,” the Quenya word for Peace.

I don’t care who your God is. I don’t care if it’s יְהֹוָה or الله. I’m neither Jewish nor Muslim, but I can tell you this – whoever God may be, he’s probably mighty pissed with both sides of this millennia-long conflict. Stop it. If you don’t, this will be the inevitable result:

This is my opinion, and my opinion only. If you think otherwise, I volunteer you as tribute.

Comments are disabled for this post. If you have other thoughts, post them at your own blog.

In case you forgot, a gorilla is a wild animal

Posted on June 1, 2016 by The Old Wolf

Harambe. Rest in peace.

With all the media frenzy about the tragic death of Harambe the gorilla, people seem to have forgotten two simple facts: gorillas are wild animals, and kids are fast.

I reproduce here with permission the comments of an acquaintance of mine with experience in zoo management:

“They had no choice. [Harambe] was not guarding the child, he was pushing him around and getting more agitated.

This is not like Brookfield in the 90s. That boy was unconscious and not screaming, and the first animal to reach him was a nursing mother. This was a silverback protecting his family; the dynamics are different. In the wild silverbacks will kill babies from other fathers. It would have taken 10 to 30 minutes for a dart to have worked, and in that time you have a seriously pissed off male gorilla with a screaming 4-year-old.¹ The keepers had no choice and they did not shoot him callously.

You can blame the mother but I cannot count how many times [my child] slipped away in the blink of an eye. I do not know that she was not watching the child. A slight distraction with another child is the basis of countless tragedies. The kid was 4 so you cannot blame him. 4-year-olds do not have a true sense of danger or outcome which is why we cannot leave them alone. How many of us found ourselves lost as small children because Mom turned a corner and she thought we were with her? Just to note I got lost at about 4 at Brookfield Zoo while watching the brown bears. It happens, it is a tragedy and zoos will need to reexamine their enclosures. Last week 3 lions were killed because a suicidal guy entered their enclosure.

[An added note:] for all of the upset over this one animal (and I think this is a tragedy) no one is talking about the slaughter of gorillas in the wild from poaching to the bush meat trade it is devastating what is happening to the wild populations. Focus your energy where the real horror lies.”

-Dr. Geralyn M. Mostaccio-Caplan

Compounding the stupidity, police and prosecutors are now considering pressing charges against the parents of the boy who slipped away; clearly there is a shortage of real criminals and real cases to keep them busy.

As Dr. Mostaccio-Caplan mentioned above, kids of this age are fast, clever, adventuresome, and devoid of an awareness of danger. I lost my own two-year-old in a mall after a split-second of inattention, and it was one of the most horrific moments of my life, but he was returned to us safely – hundreds of such instances (normal incidents, not kidnappings or anything crime-related) are repeated daily in a nation of nearly 325 million people. It happens.

Animal-rights activists and child-welfare activists are losing their minds and making media hay out of a tragic but essentially unavoidable situation. Lessons can be learned from this event and improvements made to zoo enclosures, but for the most part everyone needs to chill.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

1 It turns out the child was three, but the difference in this case is irrelevant.

Beware the IRS Impersonation Scam

Posted on February 12, 2016 by The Old Wolf

Rule No. 1: The IRS will never call you to demand immediate payment of taxes. Ever. If anyone on the phone claims to be from the IRS, threatening to have you arrested if you don’t immediately wire money or get a prepaid card, they are criminals and it is a scam.

Scammers have become far more aggressive with this particular gambit of late, and it would be important to be aware of what’s happening. Forewarned is forearmed.

From the IRS website:

IRS-Impersonation Telephone Scam

An aggressive and sophisticated phone scam targeting taxpayers, including recent immigrants, has been making the rounds throughout the country. Callers claim to be employees of the IRS, but are not. These con artists can sound convincing when they call. They use fake names and bogus IRS identification badge numbers. They may know a lot about their targets, and they usually alter the caller ID to make it look like the IRS is calling.

Victims are told they owe money to the IRS and it must be paid promptly through a pre-loaded debit card or wire transfer. If the victim refuses to cooperate, they are then threatened with arrest, deportation or suspension of a business or driver’s license. In many cases, the caller becomes hostile and insulting.

Or, victims may be told they have a refund due to try to trick them into sharing private information.

If the phone isn’t answered, the scammers often leave an “urgent” callback request.

Note that the IRS will never: 1) call to demand immediate payment, nor will the agency call about taxes owed without first having mailed you a bill; 2) demand that you pay taxes without giving you the opportunity to question or appeal the amount they say you owe; 3) require you to use a specific payment method for your taxes, such as a prepaid debit card; 4) ask for credit or debit card numbers over the phone; or 5) threaten to bring in local police or other law-enforcement groups to have you arrested for not paying.

A cousin of mine was targeted by these drones, and despite the scammers themselves most likely being in another country, this was doubly frightening because they had accomplices in place who actually appeared at her door with badges and threatened her on the spot.

If this ever happens to you, let no one in and call the police.

Some even more diabolical scammers were frustrated that their victim wouldn’t pay up and swatted them. This refers to prank 911 calls, or the unholy practice of getting police or a SWAT team to show up at someone else’s house. Not only is this terrifying for the victim, and can result in lasting psychological harm and other logistical difficulties, but it’s a terrible waste of police resources. The scammers, however, don’t care.

Be prepared by knowing that the IRS will never try to force you to pay up with these aggressive tactics. If you’re called like this, hang up immediately and notify the police.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Refugees and the bar fight: a brilliant analysis

Posted on February 9, 2016 by The Old Wolf

Shamefully purloining this essay from Emlyn Pearce, because it deserves to be more widely understood.

So a lot of British people seem to be wondering why refugees don’t stay in their own countries and take up arms to defend themselves (“…like the British did during the Second World War!”). Don’t get me wrong, I find it quite endearing that your Average Joe thinks he and his mates from Tuesday night five-a-side could put together a viable army, but maybe joining a thirteen-year-old civil war is a bit more complicated than an Inbetweeners movie. Let me explain.

Have you ever been in a pub when a group of drunk guys starts going berserk, drinking everyone’s drinks and punching people in the face? The rest of the patrons come together, over-power and restrain the troublemakers; the police are called and they are taken away to face the music. That’s World War II: everyone in the pub is on the same side and there is a clear set of bad guys ruining the 1940s for everyone else (incidentally, there’s also a guy who offers to hold everyone’s coats and money when the fight breaks out, and when it stops he won’t give them back – that guy is Switzerland’s banks).

Now, consider Syria. You’re sitting in the pub with your family having Sunday lunch when suddenly you hear someone at the bar say they’ve been short changed. In response, the bar staff open fire with automatic weapons and kill sixteen people. You’re horrified – in all the years you’ve been coming to this pub, knowing they’ve been short changing people, you never imagined they’d do something like this. You manage to barricade yourself behind an upturned table in the corner, and just when you think things can’t get any worse, a bunch of thugs from the rough pub next door hear there’s some trouble and decide to use the opportunity to take over the pub and make it as lawless as the one they’ve come from (where people have been brawling non-stop for the best part of a decade). There are bullets flying past your little shelter and blood and bodies litter the floor.

Whose side do you join? The bar staff who started the whole thing by killing the people they were supposed to serve, or the thugs from next door who want to hold you all hostage and make you join a death cult? LESSON NUMBER ONE: NOT EVERY WAR HAS A SIDE WORTH JOINING.

So you start your own army, right? This is an excellent idea – well done for taking the initiative! But exactly how do you start an army anyway? First, you find some like-minded people. So you turn to the guy next to you who’s barricaded himself and his family under a table and ask if he has any weapons.
“I’ve got my car keys and a bottle opener from a Christmas cracker,” he says. “The thing is, I was only planning a pub lunch with my family, I didn’t realise we’d get caught up in a gun fight, otherwise I suppose I would have been training and stockpiling guns for years.”
LESSON NUMBER TWO: STARTING AN ARMY IS REALLY, REALLY HARD.

This is tricky. Very tricky. You decide to try and phone the other pubs in the area to ask for help, but they don’t know who you are, and ever since they helped a bunch of patrons in the 80s who ended up flying planes into pubs, they’re pretty reluctant to help random groups they’ve never heard of.

So you just sit it out and wait for everything to blow over, right? After all, you’ve heard of other pub fights where the bar staff were beaten in minutes (The Sphinx & Pharaoh, the Crazy Colonel), but it gradually becomes clear that this one won’t burn out so quickly. You could crawl out and grab a gun, but that leaves your family completely exposed with nobody to defend them. With every minute that passes, the situation gets more terrifying. Maybe you could chisel a pretty cool spear out of a table leg if you had a few weeks, but right now your children are screaming with terror, begging you to stop the banging and the sounds of people screaming, but you can’t. There’s nothing you can do.

Suddenly, across a sea of broken glass and empty shell cases, you see the door to the street swing open. There isn’t even time to think: you grab your children, the most precious things you have in the world, and you run for the exit.

You stumble into the street, where a crowd has gathered to gawp at the carnage through the windows. As you get to the exit they try to push you and your children back into the pub.
“Go back where you came from!” they say. “You’re one of those thugs from the rough pub and you want to bring your violence out here into the street! Shame on you for dragging your children through all that broken glass!”

You manage to get through the crowd to the Queen Elizabeth pub down the road, which you’ve heard is a really safe, family-friendly pub where the staff treat their patrons with respect. But when you get to the Queen Elizabeth, you’re told by a security guard that there’s nowhere to sit because there are too many people already, even though it’s clear that the only reason there’s nowhere to sit is that the people who own the pub haven’t provided enough chairs. There are also loads of coats that have been put on chairs by older people who want to supplement their wine consumption by making youngsters buy them a drink in exchange for somewhere to sit.
Finally, with the help of some sympathetic staff, you find a chair in the corner by the toilets, and you put the kids on the chair while you lean against the wall, exhausted. People start accusing you of ruining the pub for everyone else, even though they were short of chairs long before you arrived. That’s when some guy with a big sweaty face who’s never been in a pub shooting, never feared for his children’s lives, never even seen a gun or a hand grenade, comes up to you and asks why you’re not in the other pub sorting out the massacre you’ve just fled from.
And that’s when you finally break down and cry.

IN TODAY’S EPISODE WE LEARNT…
In Britain, we tend to think of every war as a two-sided battle between good and evil, with an established system on the side of good which is able to organise and direct an army. As a nation, we have no easy frame of reference for wars with many factions, or wars where the government is fighting the people, or civil wars where the enemy is present not just in the air, but on the ground too. Contrary to popular belief, Britain DID produce a flood of refugees during World War II: 3.5 million British refugees fled their homes, but because the war was an international war, with no successful invasion, no enemy boots on the ground and aerial bombardment focused on cities, the vast majority of those refugees went to the British countryside. Had the Germans invaded and started killing Britons on the ground, it’s likely we would have seen an even greater exodus to countries like Australia and Canada than the one we did see: not because fleeing from genocide is cowardly, but because self preservation is deeply ingrained in human nature. Risking your life by crossing a treacherous sea to escape a war that is not of your doing is infinitely more heroic than selling out your principles to fight for a mad dictator or a death cult; and unless you’ve ever fled a tangled civil war yourself, it might be wise to put a little less effort into judgement and a little more into understanding.

Here in the United States, we’re not facing the flood of refugees that Europe seeing, but the understanding is important anyway.

The Old Wolf has shared.

Warren Burger on the Second Amendment

Posted on October 9, 2015 by The Old Wolf

Updated 2/23/2018 after the Pennsylvania school shooting and the Las Vegas Massacre.

Edit Again, after the Uvalde massacre: Sensible and meaningful gun control is more critical now than ever before.

Note: This blog is not a place for debate. If you have a pressing need to prattle the NRA poison, do so on your own website, not here.

An image has resurfaced on Facebook lately highlighting a quote from former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger:

I did a litte digging just to make sure this wasn’t Snopes-worthy, and it turns out that this quote came from a PBS News Hour interview in 1991 and is correctly attributed to Chief Justice Burger.

With two school shootings in two weeks, (Oregon last week, and Arizona yesterday), it seems only right to be asking questions.

An article originally published in Parade magazine in 1990, asks some really good ones (excerpt below), and I submit it here for consideration. At the time of this update, you can still see the full article at Google Books (click the link for page 377):

The Constitution does not mention automobiles or motorboats, but the right to keep and own an automobile is beyond question; equally beyond question is the power of the state to regulate the purchase or the transfer of such a vehicle and the right to license the vehicle and the driver with reasonable standards. In some places, even a bicycle must be registered, as must some household dogs.

If we are to stop this mindless homicidal carnage, is it unreasonable:

to provide that, to acquire a firearm, an application be made reciting age, residence, employment and any prior criminal convictions?
to required that this application lie on the table for 10 days (absent a showing for urgent need) before the license would be issued?
that the transfer of a firearm be made essentially as with that of a motor vehicle?
to have a “ballistic fingerprint” of the firearm made by the manufacturer and filed with the license record so
that, if a bullet is found in a victim’s body, law enforcement might be helped in finding the culprit?

These are the kind of questions the American people must answer if we are to preserve the “domestic tranquillity” promised in the Constitution.

What is clear is that in today’s society, the domestic tranquility is not being preserved, nor are the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. School shootings appear in the news regularly, but less-reported is the daily slaughter in our inner cities and elsewhere, for example the recent murders of a dog walker and a backpacker by three drifters in California. Articles like this surface, are news for a day, and are then forgotten, and nobody seems to care that gang-bangers are killing each other and innocent bystanders with reckless abandon. For the victims of such acts of violence, somehow those inalienable rights are failing to apply, and it must stop.
By Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States (1969-86)
Parade Magazine, January 14, 1990, page 4

The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment can be summarized by two flags that I’ve seen flying in my own neighborhood:

“Molon Lave“

both of which echo the “cold dead hands” sentiment originated by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and popularized by Charlton Heston.

One of my European colleagues asked, at a Facebook discussion of this issue,

You do realize that, seen from abroad, you all seem to have taken leave of your senses?

A libertarian friend of mine responded,

And from an American’s perspective, … you appear to be incredibly vulnerable.

These are the views from the polar opposites. We have to find a middle ground, and we have to stop the carnage. Not to do so is to sacrifice our humanity at the altar of death. With the words of Warren Burger ringing in my ears – and it’s to be remembered that he was a conservative justice, not a liberal one – the questions he asks appear both valid and sane.

My additional thoughts on the subject can be found at Guns are in America’s DNA

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Oregon: A Lawless Waste of Fugitive Malefactors. Well, not really.

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Old Wolf

Here’s John Oliver, one of my favorite mockers-of-social-folly, taking the wind out of the Bail Bond system in the USA:

He mentioned that Oregon has a different landscape to play on, and redditor /u/ThisDerpForSale elaborated on that a bit – I thought it was worth sharing.

John Oliver makes a reference to Oregon doing things differently. I’ll expand on that a little bit.

Oregon is one of only four states that has no commercial bail bondsmen. We did away with them in the 70’s, and a 1978 Oregon Supreme Court decision actually held that bounty hunting is considered kidnapping under Oregon law. So, we’re now a lawless wasteland of fugitives running amok, right? Hardly.

In fact, very few people are held in custody pending trial. The vast majority – charged with minor misdemeanors (shoplifting, graffiti, public drunkenness, etc) or low-level felonies (drug possession, theft). are release on their own recognizance. Most jurisdictions have a pretrial services program as described in Oliver’s piece. These offices, usually part of the county sheriff’s office, assess the risk of the defendant, and, again, in the vast majority of cases, release the defendant on their own recognizance.

If the defendant is being held on a more serious crime, or if they have a history of failing to appear, or for other reasons, then the defendant is held on as statutory bail amount. Because we don’t have commercial bail bondsmen, a defendant can pay 10% of the statutory bail amount directly to the court to be released. So, if your statutory bail amount is $5000, you pay $500, and get out. The court will take 15% for costs, and if you are assessed an indigent defense cost (for a court appointed attorney), that is paid out of bail too. If you have any fines or fees when the case is concluded, that’s also paid out of the money posted. If you jump bail – if you fail to appear in court – or if you violate any of the terms of your release agreement, you may forfeit the full amount of the bail, meaning you will now owe the court the full $5000. That’s fairly rare, though.

But what if you aren’t released on recog, or if you can’t afford your bail, either because you are indigent, or because you’re charged with a crime with a high amount of statutory bail? Well then you can ask for a release hearing before a judge. And because of another Oregon Supreme Court case, the judge must assess whether the statutory bail is unconstitutional as applied to you – which means, basically, whether it is too high for you to ever have any reasonable expectation of paying it. By law, bail in Oregon cannot be set at a level calculated to keep someone in custody – they must have the ability to pay it. If you are charged with a crime or crimes that set $150,000 bail, and you couldn’t possibly put down $15,000, then the judge can reduce the bail to, say , $10,000, as you have a much more reasonable chance of scrimping, begging, and borrowing $1,000.

Bottom line is this – very few people are in jail in Oregon because they can’t pay bail. There are some. But it’s rare. And thank goodness for that.

Very well said, and very well done by Oregon.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Movie Review: Tomorrowland. The best film I’ve seen so far in 2015.

Posted on June 1, 2015 by The Old Wolf

Caution: Mild spoilers ahead. I’ll try not to give too much away.

Here’s a review of “Tomorrowland” by some pretentious soul who holds himself or herself out as a film critic:

“An aggressively optimistic script admonishes the lazy and irresolute and urges humanity to end war and save the environment; the proselytizing burdens an already onerous plot.”

This is exactly the type of person that the film’s conceit addresses: nothing is wrong, all is well in Zion, and those who dare to dream are optimistic fools.

The plot of the movie revolves around a young girl who was taught by her father to feed the wolf inside her that stands for light and goodness, not darkness and evil. She is shown a vision of a future that could be, and encounters people who are dead set against allowing that future to happen. And she has to make some difficult choices along the way.

George Clooney stars, but the characters that swirl around him, notably Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Thomas Robinson, and the ever-curmudgeonly Hugh Laurie, turn in performances that carry the film along in a convincing and delightful manner.

The effects are stellar and imaginative. Not much more can be said.

And the message of the film is one that is desperately needed in the world today. We need more dreamers, people who are willing to step up to the plate and do something about the pressing issues that face our world. We need more Elon Musks, more inventive kids like the ones out there who are figuring out better ways to provide clean water and cheap power to impoverished areas, provide better lighting, clean up the plastic in the oceans, diagnosing diseases quickly and cheaply, and countless other wonderful things.

Instead, our own country is arming police departments like they were SWAT teams, killing people with abandon, taxing the poor in favor of the ultra-wealthy, allowing robber barons to get off scot-free, cutting science, arts and literacy programs in favor of standardized testing and cookie-cutter education, and generally doing everything it can to cut creativity off at the ankles.

The last movies that made me feel this good were The Peaceful Warrior and The Ultimate Gift. We need more messages like this in the world, despite what the self-appointed naysayers preach.

I recommend this movie wholeheartedly. Not a perfect show by any means, but I left the theatre with my heart singing.

Overall rating: Eight out of ten stars.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Every day is April Fool’s in nutrition.

Posted on May 28, 2015 by The Old Wolf

“People who are desperate for reliable information face a bewildering array of diet guidance—salt is bad, salt is good, protein is good, protein is bad, fat is bad, fat is good—that changes like the weather. But science will figure it out, right? Now that we’re calling obesity an epidemic, funding will flow to the best scientists and all of this noise will die down, leaving us with clear answers to the causes and treatments.

Or maybe not.”

From a recent article at io9 by John Bohannon:

I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here’s How.

With a poorly-crafted study that used a small sample and ignored how big the measured results actually were, a team of journalists managed to punk the nutrition-news circuit into publishing their study.

“A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine.”

But it was all a crock of dung. And sadly, I can guarantee that many people will continue to believe the lie, simply because it appeared in journals as “prestigious” as Prevention, regardless of this exposé or any further evidence to the contrary. Like the entire anti-Vax movement, nothing can kill a good excuse for mouth-foaming outrage, not even repeatedly-confirmed facts.

Read the article. It’s worth your time, if you’re interested in having accurate information on which to base your decisions.

A big part of the problem with modern “scientific” studies is the concept of “p-value.” It’s more complex than most people care about, but William Rozeboom wrote, “The use of P values and null hypothesis testing is ‘surely the most bone-headedly misguided procedure ever institutionalized in the rote training of science students.’ “

P value calculations tell you only the probability of seeing a result at least as big as what you saw if there is no real effect. (In other words, the P value calculation assumes the null hypothesis is true.) A small P value — low probability of the data you measured — might mean the null hypothesis is wrong, or it might mean that you just saw some unusual data. You don’t know which. And if there is a real effect, your calculation of a P value is rendered meaningless, because that calculation assumed that there wasn’t a real effect.

(ScienceNews – “P value ban: small step for a journal, giant leap for science”)

And if Randall Munroe pillories something, you have a pretty good idea that there are legitimate questions about its validity.

The takeaway: don’t be excited just because one study says something, and I’ve written about this elsewhere. Look at the study, determine the size of the sample used, and see if you can ferret out how big the measured differences were. There’s a lot more digging you could do, but this is a good place to start.

The Old Wolf has spoken.