Pryamid Scheme Sales: Liars and Cheats

Below is a letter written to one of my college professors about some recent job-search woes. I needed to vent my furor over these job predators and help the people who are fooled into working for them, making less money for harder work than the average person in retail. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Dear Dr. XXXXX,

It's been a while since graduation now and finding a job has been harder than I thought it would be. Even getting businesses to sit down and talk with me has been near impossible. I don't know whether to blame the current state of the economy or my own ineptitude, though I've been hearing that XXXXX is having similar problems.

In any case my job woes aren't the main reason I'm contacting you, but rather something I stumbled on during my search. The pyramid scheme. It's something I wanted to bring up because I think discussing this job-trap would be a good addition to the professional seminar. It's something that a lot of writers, especially those interested in PR, are likely to run into.

Most of these jobs pose as lucrative PR or Marketing firms. To name a few by name I found EFG Marketing, PURE Marketing, and Vizion Management (Though there are many, many more). These companies start by saying they're selective firms that only want the most dedicated and driven individuals. They'll contact you the same day or the day after you apply congratulating you and giving you some arbitrary reason why you're exactly what they're looking for. Their websites look professional enough, though they always seriously lack any real information.

They bring you in for an interview, which happens to be with maybe twenty other people (But I thought I was special!) then they proceed to sell you the job through their brainwashing techniques, for lack of a better term. You don't need to sell yourself for the job, you're already perfect, they try to sell you into a commission-based sales job that you don't want so they can promise you the world and abuse you like the replaceable sap you are.

Basically they prey on recent graduates who are new to the job market, don't know any better and have been having a difficult time starting their career. It makes me furious because it's wasted my time and almost my money. They post hundreds of job openings on sites like Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, and Yahoo Hotjobs. Let this be a lesson to me that entry level writing and PR jobs aren't easy to come by and when you see them in droves because some strange company you've never heard of is “opening a new office” you should approach cautiously.

The website Ripoffreport.com has user submitted experiences with pyramid-scheme companies and every job searcher should check it out before applying for a job that may not be what they think it is. Nobody let me know that the job market isn't all sunshine and roses, there are predators out there looking to use struggling, wide-eyed college grads.

Anyway, I hope you've been having a better semester than my last few months. I just wanted to share my mistakes with you with the hope that none of your future students will have to make them.

Sincerely,
XXXXX

McCain's Pennsylvania: The Hate-Land

Things are starting to get pretty bad in my home state of Pennsylvania, and I have to say at times I'm disappointed in both sides of the fight. This election is bringing out the worst in everybody and I wish it would just be over with already. But in the case of McCain, he's created a monster with his negative campaigning. Tying Obama to terrorism with lies and Muslim extremism by emphasizing Senator Obama's middle name. This isn't the only video like this out there, and its by no means even the worst example of belligerant McCain supporters, but since it took place in Pennsylvania which is where I live and where I believe this election will be decided it's the one I chose to include. It's scary really, its like watching people come out of the shells of their normal daily lives to give a brief peek at who they really are deep down inside, and it isn't pretty.

I think Colin Powell put it best when he made his endorsement, what if he was a Muslim? So what? That sort of speaks for itself. All of a sudden Muslims can't be Americans? Another video showed the McCain campaign in a more positive light, where McCain party officials came out to silence anti-Muslim McCain supporters. Unfortunately that's not the case here. This isn't just a fringe of McCain supporters as he wants us to believe, this is an entire string of Pennsylvanians being disrespectful and at times down-right offensive and even racist. It makes my blood boil that people like this can exist in an civilized country, let alone my own country, and even my own state. Worse yet, it's all done under the guise of being a patriotic "Real American" as if it's some kind of free-pass to be a bigotted, ignorant asshole.

Now I understand the context of this video isn't 100% fair. Nobody likes to be confronted by protesters they don't agree with, and some people just don't like protesters in general, but we have a constitutional right to do so. It's kind of funny how a lot of these people are all for the second ammendment but if it was up to them the first, a much more important ammendment, would be done away with. If they were for the moral values they say they are they'd turn the other cheek, but they'd rather create drama. What's worse is they're doing so on camera. These aren't comments they make in private (I'm sure those are far worse), these are comments they're not ashamed to be caught on film saying.

Honestly I don't care if you vote for McCain or Obama. Your judgement and your world view may be completely different than mine. The problem is that demonstrations like this are showing more and more that it's hate fueling some of these votes and not facts or issues and that's what scares me. And as stated the McCain campaign is partially to blame for this even if McCain has tried to tone it down and confront these people, it's too late for that now. I'm seeing shades of the 1960's and honestly that's a decade I really don't feel this country needs to repeat. It's like some of these elderly people put the time of their life and their mentality before the civil rights movement into a deep corner of their pockets, waiting for this day when they could pull it out again. It's gotten to the point where I honestly fear for Barack Obama's life if he wins this election.

Back in the primaries Obama made what he called "his biggest bone-headed move" when he talked about Pennsylvanians clinging to their guns and God at a campaign stop in California. The truth is it may have been a bad political move, but he was absolutely right. Because of people like this, we're the laughing-stock of the civilized world right now, and to go from the most influential country on the planet to one big joke is a travesty. This needs to end. America needs to change.

Stupid People Tricks: Chemtrail Conspiracy Theorists

I never heard of a "chemtrail" until a few weeks ago when some wackos were talking about them on a forum in one of Something Awful's "The Weekend Web" feature. It's a great feature in that it makes me angry and depressed just as much as it's absolutely hilarious because it features not only some of the most insane people that it's a wonder they can access the Internet, but entire forums full of people who agree with them.

I just finished watching a documentary on "chemtrails" which are supposed to be what any normal, sane, person would know as contrails. Instead of just water vapor however they believe these "chemtrails" are are actually planes dumping chemicals into the atmosphere to either effect the weather, experiment with mind control, or just outright poison everybody.

The Discovery Channel documentary tried to be fair to both sides, but it was pretty harsh and did a great job of disproving everything the conspiracy theorists had to say while the theorists themselves only had the shape of the clouds and the number of "chemtrails" to back up their theories.

The shapes of contrails, of course, are dependent on the type of engine, the altitude of the plane, and the fluid-like conditions of our upper atmosphere. How long they last, or if contrails appear at all, all depend on these factors. Basically they were just looking for things that looked different and used that as their evidence. I'm sorry, not all things are uniform in our world. A Ford Model-T and a Lamborghini Diablo are going to operate as differently as an A-10 Warthog and a 747 Airliner. The atmospheric conditions 10,000 feet above the position of an airplane will be different than the conditions that plane is flying through. The conspiracy crowd isn't worried about this though, to them a plane is a plane and they all fly exactly the same way.

The mind control aspect doesn't make any sense because then they'd be mind controlled and they wouldn't be able to come up with these theories but I guess their tinfoil hats protect them. The weather modification thing is at least based in some real science. Contrails are basically artificial cirrus, created by jet engines forming ice crystals in the upper atmosphere thanks to the water vapor their engines leave behind. Cirrus clouds do contribute to global warming, but the problem isn't any worse than what SUVs are causing every day. The poisoning theories are also ridiculous, if the "new world order/Illuminati" existed and wanted to kill you then they would've done it already instead of tolerated you posting their "secrets" on your hideous Angelfire pages.

Conspiracy theorists aren't much different than the radical Christians I've already spoken about. They're both looking to be part of something big, something that makes them feel special and important. Thinking they know something dangerous and that they can be heroes by telling the world about it really has to inflate your ego and make you feel good. It's all a joke though, and the only reason they do it is because they have nothing else in their empty lives to feel good about. I don't want to blame this on the South or Middle America... but let's just say most of the "chemtrail" videos on Youtube have telling southern accents (and even some trailer parks). All these people have to do is cash their welfare checks and come up with dastardly theories about the government that spoon feeds them. To escape brainwashing all they do is brainwash themselves. In any case it's impossible to argue with these people since they can't trust science when they don't trust scientists (also comparable to Evangelicals) so I'll stop ranting now.

I'm glad that I've been born with the capability to use my brain and ignore these modern day superstitions.

I Need to Vent

College campuses have recently been a hot-spot in the media thanks in part to Virginia Tech and other shootings or less drastic phony threats for shootings or bombings. Where there's media attention you're sure to draw wackos wanting to grab some of it for their own selfish purposes. My campus is no different. The week of the Virginia Tech shooting we were invaded by a fundamentalist group of born again Evangelical Christians, or as I like to call them "The Jesus Camp People." To make a long story short they were literally run off of my very liberal campus by a mob of angry students inciting a debate about freedom of speech and delivering the media attention that the group was looking for. To make matters worse that particular day was also the gay and lesbian day of silence and that was one of the issues that the Evangelicals were being very vocal about.

This year we already had one group of Christians with pictures of aborted fetuses that the women's center quickly responded to by standing in front of the images with umbrellas (to block the pictures). The "Repent America" group that showed up last year is scheduled to make a return next week. There's a lot of paranoia and preparation going on on both sides and any way you want to cut it it's an absolutely ridiculous waste of time. They want us to react, that's the reason they're coming. I know they're border-line retarded but I have a hard time believing they think they're going to convert one person to their hypocritical mess of a religious belief system. I don't think I need to spend any time explaining just how extreme and confused these people are. They just want to feel important, they want to feel like they belong to a greater whole and a greater good. Everyone wants to feel wanted and they enjoy the power to band together and bully people who practice things they find offensive or disgusting all the while acting as if they're the group that's being oppressed.

To them colleges are a cesspool of sin and liberalism making them feel as if they're some enlightened moral intellect in a sea of wrong-doing. If they followed what Christianity truly preaches then they wouldn't be harassing people. They're supposed to be in a religion of tolerance and forgiveness but in reality they're hateful bigots who aren't intellectual enough to question themselves. They've used circle logic to make themselves believe everything science has learned is wrong while they live comfortably in the technology driven United States leaching off the gifts of science which they do nothing but complain about. And it's not that they really, truly believe in what they're preaching either. They just want to be part of a group that makes them feel special and more important, especially important on a cosmic level. The belief comes later after they convince themselves with group think that they're the stewards of the undeniable truths of the universe. They have trouble understanding their own bible or text books not written for one of their creationist home-schooling programs so I highly doubt that.

And don't get me wrong, it's not as if atheists are any better. They've turned their hatred of religion and their own special blend of intolerance into a religion of its own. They have their own literature that they live and die by and conventions with buttons and fliers and of course they stage their own protests in front of people who don't give a flying-shit and would like to get on with their daily lives without someone telling them that God is dead every five steps. All they're doing is playing a game, out for group acceptance while getting off because they're part of a group of like minded individuals out offending people that they've all painted with the same brush. Both sides are crusading for a religion even if they don't know it or understand it themselves. They look at the whole world as being one extreme or the other because they lack the will to chose their own philosophies, instead gathering a circle of extremist friends to both form and validate their opinions on the inner workings of the universe. Nobody wins, ever.

If both sides would put this much effort into solving the world's real problems instead of waging a name-calling war like a bunch of elementary school twats then maybe they'd actually be able to help people. Nobody has the answers no matter how hard they want to believe they do. If we all started using a little common sense or at least stopped to listen what the other side has to say once in a while maybe we'd get somewhere. Even though we'd still disagree we can at least learn to respect ideas. Without our own thoughts we're not even human.