Author: VD

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it).Frankly, I’m shocked that such a gay-friendly movie was marketed to impressionable young children in the late 70’s. Courtesy of Dr. Read, who, as is his wont, sees it in the context of an ambient supersaturation spectrum. Which, to me, really sounds as if it should be the name of a complete digital collection of The Orb.

It’s not just Derb and me saying that college is a huge scam, even college advisors are beginning to admit it:

I’m an academic advisor in natural sciences at a 4-year state school; day after weary day I advise students with bad grades who have unrealistic expectations and cannot accept the fact that — contrary to what they’ve been told all of their lives — they cannot be a dentist or doctor. Virtually every day I advise one or more students with “D” averages in math, chemistry, and biology who persist in the belief that they will get into medical school; all the while accumulating debt and wasting time. I don’t even really have the hope that one day they will wake up; I forget who said that “most people can’t stand too much reality.”

I also see student after student who has finished one expensive degree and immediately started on another — often requiring 60+ hours to finish. Also, a great many — indeed, most — have no idea what they will do with the degree; indeed, the utility of the degree is a secondary consideration to having the degree itself…. Other than engineering and business degrees, most college BSs and BAs are worthless.

Actually, I’d say that business degrees are worthless too. Nursing and technical two-year degrees, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more worthwhile. Regarding the usual defense that the purpose of college is learning how to learn, a conversation with just about any college student will demonstrate the complete spuriousness of that argument. Over the last seven years, the most pig-ignorant, clueless, and illogical critics from whom I have heard have usually been college students. And the very worst of them are graduate students, whose complete ignorance of the real world is only exceeded by their blind faith in their “education”.

I understand that the HR departments of the world often require an education ticket. But that doesn’t mean that the sheepskin-sellers aren’t scam artists, it just means that the great college scam enjoys external support.

This article might help explain why financial coverage of economic events is so atrocious:

If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.

Obviously, this ace New York Times journalist didn’t learn a thing about economics in covering those events. It’s also a salient lesson in the entitlement mentality that afflicts so much of the American upper middle class.

Yet another argument for breaking the government monopoly on delivering the mail:

Postal workers are refusing to deliver British National Party election leaflets because they object to its “right-wing rubbish”. About 100 workers in the West Country have told union leaders that they will not carry the leaflets, which bear an anti-immigration message.

These postal workers should be fired immediately for attempting to exert political control over the mail. First, the idea of a “conscience clause” when it comes to mail delivery is absurd. They’re being asked to deliver the freaking mail, not commit murder. If they don’t deliver the mail, they are without value and merit no pay. This is political correctness run completely amok; if permitted it could completely destroy the remnants of the British parliamentary system. What are they doing reading the bloody mail in the first place anyhow? Should prudish postal employees also have the right to refuse to deliver love letters of which they don’t approve?

Also, as Daniel Hannan and others have pointed out, the British National Party cannot reasonably be describe as right-wing rubbish. Its sensible attitude towards immigration and the EU notwithstanding, its platform is mostly LEFT-WING rubbish.

Maxim or your lying eyes:

For the first time the US First Lady has made Maxim magazine’s annual top 100 list of “hottest women in the world,” with Michelle Obama making the grade at number 93.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I tend to doubt that Michelle Obama would make the top 100 list of “hottest primates in the world” if she was the only human in the contest. I think it’s probably going a bit too far to describe her as King Kong’s baby sister, but let’s face it, if one were to choose an animal analogy for her features, “gorilla-like” would spring to mind a lot faster than “aquiline”, “doe-eyed”, “vulpine”, or even “porcine”. When people write rapturously about the supposed beauty of the Obamas, it only makes me wonder where they live. Do they dwell in some sort of dank cave or abandoned mine inhabited solely by orcs, trolls, and goblins?

If Maxim feels the need to kiss the posterior of a national leader’s wife, they’d do a lot better to begin with these two.

How would you like your Depression served?

Bilderberg is divided on whether to put into motion, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”

The information takes on added weight when one considers the fact that Estulin’s previous economic forecasts, which were based on leaks from the same sources, have proven deadly accurate. Estulin correctly predicted the housing crash and the 2008 financial meltdown as a result of what his sources inside Bilderberg told him the elite were planning based on what was said at their 2006 meeting in Canada and the 2007 conference in Turkey. Details of the economic agenda were contained in a pre-meeting booklet being handed out to Bilderberg members. On a more specific note, Estulin warns that Bilderberg are fostering a false picture of economic recovery, suckering investors into ploughing their money back into the stock market again only to later unleash another massive downturn which will create “massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” according to a Canada Free Press report.

According to Estulin, Bilderberg is assuming that U.S. unemployment figures will reach around 14% by the end of the year, almost doubling the current official figure of 8.1 per cent.

I vote for short and intense, myself. It’s what the Austrians recommend, albeit without the new world order component. Obama and company are clearly pushing hard for prolonged and agonizing, though, with their mad Japanese scientist efforts to create zombie banks and corporations. But at least we’ve got an interesting prediction from Mr. Estulin regarding 14 percent official unemployment by December. That’s a bit less than I was expecting actually. I can’t say that predicting a push for enactment of the EU ConstitutionLisbon Treaty is exactly stunning, as it’s been obvious that the Irish would be forced to vote again since the day they voted no.

GM plans to use its $27 billion in loansbailouts to import Chinese cars:

On Wednesday, Shanghai Securities News and other Chinese media reported that GM plans to begin exporting vehicles from China to the U.S. within two years, ramping up sales to more than 50,000 by 2014.

Corporations are soulless whores. That’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation. So, it makes no sense whatsoever for the Federal government to hand them money, as their only interest is funneling as much of it as possible to their executives. The important thing is corporatism is NOT capitalism and propping up dying corporate giants is an expressly anticapitalist action that can only harm the economy.

Macroeconomists are capable of calculating what some of the harmful effects of a bankruptcy will be, but what they’re not capable of calculating is what the harmful effects of propping one up will be, or the opportunity cost involved in redirecting the resources required to do so away from where the market forces would otherwise guide them.

So concluded Spacebunny, rightly, in considering the proposed Parental Rights Amendment, the text of which runs thusly:

H.J. Res. 42 Parents’ Rights Constitutional Amendment as introduced by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (MI-02)

Section 1: The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right.

Section 2: Neither the United States nor any state shall infringe upon this right without demonstrating that its governmental interest as applied to the person is of the highest order and not otherwise served.

Section 3: No treaty may be adopted nor shall any source of international law be employed to supersede, modify interpret, or apply to the rights guaranteed by this article.

I think Rep. Hoekstra’s heart is probably in the right place, but has he learned nothing from the abuses of the Interstate Commerce Clause? Trying to pass an amendment like this is nothing but a waste of time, as any time a federal or state agency felt like infringing upon parental rights, they would simply declare that its interest was “of the highest order”. Considering that the courts permitted the Federal government to use Interstate Commerce as an excuse to regulate marijuana grown in California and sold in California, it’s simply not intelligent to leave a loophole large enough to drive an infinite number of state and federal agents through.

As I have previously written, there is no ideology so self-defeating as the feminist ideology which underlies so-called “women’s rights”. Sweden is now putting into practice what I have long expected would be the logically dictated consequence of a right to abortion:

Sweden, which legalized abortion in 1938, has taken its abortion extremism one step further by legalizing “gender based” abortion which allows a mother to decide to abort her baby solely due to his or her sex.

Don’t be surprised when most of the lives being terminated by their mothers on the sole basis of their sex turn out to be female. Only the truly short-sighted could attempt to rationally defend women’s rights, which in addition to systematically lowering the wage rate and making it harder for women to bear and raise children, now expressly include the right to murder a child for the crime of being female.

The West can no longer pretend that its populace has not faced a choice between its secular values and its demographic survival over the last two generations. Its people have had the option of choosing societal survival or the slow and ongoing suicide of women’s rights and equalitarianism. To date, the evidence suggests that the greater part of the populace has opted for the latter. So, don’t be surprised when in the interest of the survival of Western society, the ability to choose between the two is taken away from at least a portion of the population. Indeed, significant progress towards a political structure capable of removing this option from the citizenry has already been made courtesy of the European Union.