Author Archives: OGHD

The New York Times’ Cartoon of Trump and Netanyahu

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I write now to express my support for the New York Times (a rare enough instance for me) in their publication of a controversial political cartoon, which is widely considered a work of anti-semitism. I won’t re-hash all the to and from over this — there’s plenty to be had elsewhere, as in this link to CNN coverage of the item.  According to CNN:

Portuguese artist António Moreira Antunes has been drawing political cartoons for 45 years. He recently decided to take on the relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and recently re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The result was an image of a Netanyahu as a dog on a leash, Star of David around his neck, held by a blind Trump wearing sunglasses and … Continue reading →

Earnings by Age — Men

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Soo… how’s the old earning power?

I perused a couple of websites to validate the average annual salaries by age, then applied a deflator to adjust the results by age.  This is because a person like me who should nominally earn $50K in 2018 would never ever had made $22K 35 years ago, like the chart implies.

So in the table below, the far left column indicates a person’s age in 2018.  The second column indicates that person’s earnings in 2018.  But to make the chart a bit more relevant, I crudely applied a deflator so that you can see how this ought to track in your own life.  Find your own age from the age groups across the top, in columns 3-9, and then the salaries below … Continue reading →

Approaching Omega — Where the Knowledge Is in 2019

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Just a quick post here — examples abound.

Never has it been more true than now that those who can do so, and those who cannot teach instead.  And one of the problems we face in Western Culture these days is an undeserved elevation of the teaching types to positions of power.  Professorial sorts should almost always be denied positions of power, and that includes power over educational institutions.

The amount of information available on YouTube, WikiPedia, and all around this great big web (and the internet in general for non-web assets) puts academia to shame.  The fact that you have to wade through a lot of nonsense to get to the good sense makes it more an asset than the University.  In University, students are not taught … Continue reading →

The Problem with Yes-Means-Yes Laws

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Even granting every good intent in the world to authors and proponents of yes-means-yes laws, there is a fundamental problem, which is that these are unenforcable contracts, which are on their face, not valid.

Let us take yes-means-yes to a probably absurd end, and say that “yes” means a signed contract, drawn up by a lawyer, for certain acts upon a certain evening, between two adults (the undersigned), with no purpose of deception or evasion.

After that evening, contention arises about what was done and not done and why.  In the first case, a party alleging that a particular contracted act was left undone will have no place to stand, as contracting in the positive for these sorts of things is not by and large legal.  Well, this … Continue reading →

Common Enemies

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This is not about two parties who find that they have a single enemy in common.  It is about a besieged single party who finds that his many enemies are actually only one.

It is a stroke of genius of the modern anticulture to appear on multiple fronts, so that normal society is forced into multiple losing engagements.  The anticulture only appears to divide its forces while forcing the culture to actually divide in response.  That’s smart stuff right there

Much of the anticulture, labelled the left, is concerned with what it calls intersectional politics, which is the buzzword 2.0 version of identity politics.  At any rate, it divides the population as a whole into stripes, which can then be pitted against each other (the identity focus), or … Continue reading →

Un-Spamming WordPress

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Something old, and something new. First the new thing, which like many new things is trivial.  This blog currently has 3,664 comments, all but perhaps 100 are guaranteed to be spam.  Well I had put up a “sticky” post some months ago, which means that it stays at the top of the blog no matter what.  Guess what?  Of the 3,664 posts, 3,231 of them are attached to the sticky post.  A-ha.  Most of these spam-bots simply attack the first post listed on the blog.  So new anti-spam measure #1: create a spam magnet post and make it sticky.  Tell people not to comment on this post.  Periodically, dump all of the comments. The old thing is profound.  Obvious, but profound.  WordPress is not the friendliest environment in … Continue reading →

Phishing for Apples

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I received a scam e-mail which centered on the following text:

“Your Apple lD has been blocked due to too many failed login attempts from other lP location. To unblock your account, Please contact Apple Help Desk at (800) 275-2273 or Click the button below and confirm that you are the valid account owner.”

  • The return address was a nonsense string with no relation to Apple.
  • The grammar issues in the paragraph above were another red flag.
  • Finally, the preview of the mail (what you see before you open it up) displayed an announcement about some “Grand Opening”, but this was not visible in the mail itself (and not at all related to the subject or body of the mail).

Happy Hunting

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Just Passing Through with Gratitude

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I am passing through Virginia once again, on my way to Texas maybe, or perhaps Guam, and eventually back to Japan. Gotta hit Texas in the near fiture no matter what, and then to select a place to live for the next couple of years. Maybe Texas, maybe Virginia. Maybe the moon, as long as it comes with a US zip code.
Things are good. Hectic, frustrating, but exciting and full of good people. I have worked with bad people, years ago. My recent job of the last two years grew increasingly frustrating, but it was populated by good people, which made the thing bearable and even a pleasure in several ways. But job satisfaction, and a feeling of effectiveness were not much among those things by … Continue reading →