Good god, what has the internet begat?
I was poking around the YouTubes and came across a
provocatively titled clip from Bill Maher's show, about the value of a university education in the United States. Maher's not always the most brilliant person in the world, but he's usually funny, so I go in for a cheap laugh. In the video, Maher makes the claim that the sizeable population of unemployed persons with Bachelor's degrees has arisen because they chose easy-to-get liberal arts majors (i.e. bull**** majors). While part of me is inclined to agree, I've got significant anecdotal evidence contrary to the claim, staring me in the face. Specifically, I've been looking for any job, for about a year, that will pay someone with a B.S. in Physics and PoliSci at least $10.00/hour, and a cohort of mine, who got his M.S. in Physics, has been searching for new work for a couple of months now, so that he'll have a job to transition into, when his position at ORNL runs out of funds at the end of summer.
Before my mind does any further deconstruction of Maher's statement, the video draws to a close, and my eyes wander to the related videos. What's the first item in the list?
College Conspiracy (full movie) from user InsideTheMatrix1. Oh dear, it seems I've found a singularity of stupid too strong for my mouse cursor to escape. Nothing for it, then, except to race for the event horizon. *Click*
One second into the hour-long production, and I've already paused the video. The production company credited with the film is The National Inflation Association, which has the tagline, "Preparing Americans for hyperinflation." That sounds so credible, there's absolutely no need for me to look them up! Maybe we'll just have a quick peak at their Wikipedia page, though. What's that? This organization with the duty of preparing us for an economic apocalypse
doesn't have a Wikipedia page and is referenced in only a single article? Hmmm.... To the Googles!
Well, there's the
NIA's homepage. Among other things that you can do there, you can read their
scary report about how you'll be spending 40% of your income on food by 2015, or find a link to their YouTube channel, which contains such gems as
"The Day the Dollar Died", which depicts a panicked run on the grocery stores, after an 850 point drop in the Dow. Are you getting a sense for the apocalyptic rhetoric? The number one commenter on that video certainly does, saying, "buy thousands of bullets. I am buying THOUSANDS of bullets". Oh, but the NIA can save you. You just have to follow their
"100% unbiased" stock advice.
Now, let's backtrack for a second. What was the first Google search result
not directly tied to the inflation.us domain or the NIA's YouTube channel? I'll give you a hint: It's the same as
every result that's not directly tied to the inflation.us domain or the NIA's YouTube channel. Those results are all exposés or forum threads linking to exposés that show the NIA is, in fact, a pump-and-dump scheme! The people at the top of the NIA buy up a bunch of penny-stocks, recommend those stocks to the poor, gullible sods, who believe that rhetoric about the oncoming economic apocalypse, and then proceed to sell off all of those shares, now that they've increased from $0.02/share to $0.08/share. Anyone who doesn't catch on to the scheme quickly enough gets left with a bunch of valueless stock certificates for which they grossly overpaid.
But wait! The rabbit hole goes derper! While other parties have confirmed the NIA's nefarious purpose, the one who's led the charge against them has been a man by the name of Peter Schiff. Peter Schiff was an economic advisor to the Ron Paul campaign in 2008, and guess what! He believes (or at least espouses) the same tale of economic apocalypse that the NIA was exploiting to pump-and-dump penny stocks! Not only that,
but he's willing to give you some financial advice.
I'm drowning in stupid, and I'm still only one bloody second into this
College Conspiracy video. Goddammit.
