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An email to multilevel marketeers
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About to head to bed, I receive an email from these folk, Paid Weekly Guarateed. It's a MLM scam, of course, and their website is a "standard" MLM scam website: bright colours, handwriting fonts, a video or two, promises galore, bad clip art, and an absence of actual detail. The sites are getting shoddier in their grammar, though: EVERYONE That Participates "Get's Paid... PERIOD..." Did they think that up themselves, or was it provided to them?
I've had ads for multilevel marketing schemes in my letterbox, and I've seen flyers pinned on notice boards and taped on bus shelters. I once even got dragged along to an Amway party. (That was a bad deal: the hostess responsible invited people to a barbeque at her place, but didn't inform them that it was a recruitment session as well. I think a few friendships were broken in the process.) However, surprisingly enough, I believe I've never actually received a MLM scam by unsolicited mail. While my spam folder is full of 419s and their ilk, I've never got this sort of marketing email from a stranger.
So I thought I'd email them back.
Cultural Competency and Indigenous Education
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There's been a bit of consternation at Larvatus Prodeo over the post Culture Wars: self-fulfilling prophecy time. The gist is that Universities Australia have a new National Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency. "Not something, if you read the key points, I’d have thought should be overly controversial". Yet at the end, we had:
This proposal is no more appropriate than incorporating Marxism, Christianity or any other extraneous topic into all courses.
How did it get from one to the other? I think the process went something like this. Let's think of this post as an exercise in "mental forensics".
Elementary Spam Detection with Django
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I leave my site alone for a few weeks, and take a short holiday in the UK. When I come back, I find 20 spam comments on my blog. I better do something about that. Here's some code I've implemented to fight the problem.
Võ Nguyên Giáp: 100 years old today.
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It's newsworthy. Not many other veterans from the Việt Nam conflict got to score a century. So what would I like to say about him? I'd like to avoid the twin perils of hagiography and defamation. Let's go with a small bullet point history.
Nguyễn Cao Kỳ (1930-2011)
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And so departs a Prime Minister and Vice President of South Việt Nam...
It's ironic that someone so flamboyant and historic in real life got overshadowed by their daughter before death. You've never heard of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên, daughter of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ? Then you've probably never heard of Paris by Night, the Vietnamese language variety show she's been hosting since god knows when. It's very, very big in the "overseas" Vietnamese community. But unless you're a speaker or married to one, it's probably passed your notice. Never mind that - let's talk about the big man himself.