[NOTE: While this article has been overtaken by recent events, I'm running it anyway because it was eerily prophetic when it was first published. --- Ferdinand]

I keep coming across articles indicating that the fraudulent sacks of shit on Wall Street are trying to value Facebook at $100 billion. The absurdity of this assertion should be painfully obvious to anyone who takes even a cursory look at the numbers. The mathematics are simple enough even for small children to understand.

Let’s look at some key statistics about Facebook:

Users: Over 900 million
2009 Revenue: $777 million
2009 Net Income: Unknown
2011 Revenue: $3.8 billion
2011 Net Income: Unknown
Q1 2012 Revenue: $1 billion
Q1 2012 Net Income: Unknown

Last year Facebook had $3.8 billion in revenue, not profit, just revenue. We don’t know how profitable Facebook is because it’s a private company. Let’s say Facebook’s executive team is absolutely stellar and they have even better margins than Google with 27.5% (Google achieved 25.7% profit margin in 2011). That would mean they earned $1.045 billion in profit, which would imply a P/E ratio of 95.7 and a return of only a little over 1% on your investment. That’s a pretty bad investment which does not even begin to keep pace with inflation.

“But Facebook is a growth investment,” you might say. Maybe so, but how much growth can possibly be expected with 900 million users already, or to put it another way, nearly half of the 2.3 billion total internet users? Sure, the Internet will continue to attract new users and at a rapid rate, but how many of those new users will be from the developing world where they have limited access to the Internet? Clearly, not all users are created equal. Facebook’s bread and butter are the fat, lazy, dumbfuck Americans and other Westerners who stare blankly at their Facebook news feed for hours per day like the people in WALL-E. In reality, nearly everyone in the developed world (except China) is already on Facebook, and a larger and larger proportion of prospective Facebook users are most definitely going to be the kind that only have occasional access through an Internet cafe or perhaps the one computer in the village powered by Ogundo Matumbu riding a bicycle behind the mud hut that serves as the village data center to power it. How much revenue will those kind of users produce? But what the hell, let’s just give them another huge benefit of the doubt and assume each user produces an equal amount of revenue for Facebook. Google’s P/E ratio right now is 18.31 and as discussed above. Giving Facebook a huge benefit of the doubt on their profitability, their implied P/E with a $100 billion valuation is almost 96.

In order to achieve an 18.31 P/E ratio (in line with Google, which I think is a much better company by the way) holding the $100 billion valuation constant, Facebook will need to increase their revenues and hypothetical net income by more than 500% to $19.86 billion and $5.46 billion respectively. I don’t think it’s realistic that Facebook can increase their revenues and net income by 500% within a reasonable period of time, either through growth in users or trough generating significantly more revenue per user. And this is just what’s necessary to justify Facebook’s opening IPO price if you think the company is comparable to Google in its prospects — not provide any appreciation on your initial investment. What about the time value of your money?

Now let’s do some simple middle school math (and by that I mean the kind of math they do in first grade outside the Western world). Let’s round things off to make the numbers easy… if Facebook made $1 billion profit with 900 million users that means each year, each user earns Facebook roughly $1.11 on average. We know that to achieve an 18.31 P/E Facebook would need $5.46 billion in earnings, so we can divide that $1.11 to come up with the number of users required to generate this income target. We come up with 4.92 billion users… or, in other words, more than two times the total number of users estimated to be on the Internet today. Woops, clearly that’s not going to work. Maybe they could double their revenue per user and double their number of users… that would get them just 73% of the way there though… bummer, dudes.

I don’t think Facebook is analogous to Google anyway. Google is an innovator constantly introducing new products and services as well as making improvements to old ones. Google develops new products in-house but also makes intelligent acquisitions such as YouTube. What major acquisitions has Facebook made that have been real grand slams? $1 billion for Instagram? You have got to be kidding me. This reminds one of the dot-com bubble where obscene amounts of venture capital were wasted on such abominations as Pets.com and Boo.com.

I see Facebook as being more analogous to MySpace than to Google. Facebook isn’t an innovator. They’re not branching out into other businesses in a meaningful way. They don’t stay ahead of the curve, they make just the bare minimum of changes necessary to hold their position, along with a lot of superficial cosmetic changes that don’t offer much if any additional functionality. Where the hell is that dislike button, for example? Sometimes the changes they make are for the worse. Rather than being on the cutting edge of new technologies, Facebook simply copies the ideas of others and often so poorly that it leaves a niche for other apps to thrive in. Foursquare is an excellent example. Facebook has a check in feature — what do we need Foursquare for? Why the hell do we need Twitter? Isn’t that just like Facebook with no features except the status message?

Speaking of Facebook’s lack of innovation and need for additional revenues to justify their outlandish $100 billion valuation, you’d think they might have done something obvious, like, I don’t know… perhaps put advertising on the iPad, iPhone and Android apps? You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. You would think that would be a no-brainer. And why exactly are they not working day and night on fixing this? How long can it take to throw some ads in there? With over 100 million “iDevices” in the world along with many others running Android, that seems like a great way to add some additional revenue, don’t you think? I’m sure they will add this eventually, but what does it say about the people running this company that they’ve let this slide for so many years already? Don’t they like making money at Facebook?

While on the topic of Facebook advertising, I would be remiss not to mention Facebook’s abysmally low click through rates (CTRs) and the fact that Twitter crushes Facebook in this arena in yet another of example of how Facebook is behind the curve compared to its peers. This article even claims that Facebook’s CTRs are worse than “regular online banner ads” — how often to you click on those things? Maybe it’s because despite the plethora of information Facebook has on its users, they still do a shitty job of targeting the ads — this has certainly been my experience anyway, I don’t even click on one ad per week and when I do I usually bounce off the site immediately because whatever it was was junk I’m not interested in.

The best part (or the worst part if you’re actually considering buying into this farce) is that Facebook has already paved the way for the next Facebook, whatever it may be, to steal their users in droves. The “Facebook Connect” feature allows developers of other sites and services to offer one click signup and login for Facebook users as well as to export all kinds of personal information and even photographs. Whenever the next Facebook is developed, won’t “Facebook Connect” be a great way to signup for it? It’s only a matter of time. Facebook is not Google, and unless they become Google, they will go the way of MySpace sooner or later.

But of course on Friday, there will be a mass IPO hysteria and all sorts of retards will bid the stock up to ridiculous levels, and yes, Facebook will reach and probably exceed that $100 billion valuation. Then I will wait impatiently for a week or two for people to write some puts. On a long enough timeline, I guarantee you, Facebook is a losing investment and I can’t wait to take the other side of that bet.

UPDATE: Shortly after I finished writing this article I noticed this headline: “GM Doesn’t “Like” Facebook, Drops Ads“. LOL! More good news for Facebook and the schmucks planning to dump their life savings into it!

Cross-posted at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel.

Raul told me a funny story the other day about a conversation he had with his mom recently. She’s a really nice lady, which is strange considering what a depraved misanthrope her son is. Anyway, he happened to refer to someone as a “douchebag,” and his mom cracked up. He apologized for his crudeness, but she said:

No no, it’s just when I was growing up (in the late 50s-early 60s), we used to call people douchebags all the time. Are kids calling people douchebags again?

Amazing. Anyway, that story got me thinking about the modern douchebag and the impact he has had on society. The douchebag and his opposite, the hipster, are the yin and yang of the defining cultural struggle today in the single dude world.

The problem I have is that nowadays people go around calling every dude they don’t like a douchebag, willy nilly. Now if you don’t like someone, that’s PK, but that doesn’t automatically make him a douchebag. He could be an asshole, a retard, a fagbagster, a BBD, or an Uncle Boner. Or he could actually be a douchebag. But make sure he is the thing that you derogatorily call him.

I’ve already called out hipsters for being a bunch of pussy frauds in a previous rant and discussed at length what constitutes a hipster, and generally nowadays there isn’t really much argument about that. Nobody goes around calling people hipsters unless they are wearing their Converse sneakers, plastic rim glasses, and hipster sneers. So what is a douchebag?

For the answer to all douchebag related issues I’d like to refer you to a very inspirational website and a favorite of ours called Hot Chicks with Douchebags. There you can experience the collective expertise of thousands of avid douchebaggers who thrill to nothing more than snapping a great wilderness photo of a 12-point douchebag, with douchestrap facial hair, orange tan, Ed Hardy $300 T-shirt, sideways peace sign, and kissy doucheface. As a Ugandan Shoebill is to African ornithologists, this dude is for douchebaggers.

Looks a lot like Snooki, actually.

Now, while you have to pay for a very expensive trip to Africa to see the shoebill in its natural habitat, for a douchebag, all you usually need to look in the nearest trashy club this weekend. There must be bottle service and a velvet rope in order for these guys to leave their nest, but when you do catch a glimpse, wow, what magnificence!

A rare sighting of a douchebag flock in the wild.

Douchebags are also quite easier to interact with than the Ugandan shoebill or the hipster. While wild birds are skittish and hipsters only will talk to other totally unique people that look exactly like them, the douchebag can be quite sociable. If you run into one at the club, just go up and say, “What’s up, bro. Lot’s of hot chicks in here, damn! Yo dude, you’re huge, where do you work out?” Then they will probably accept you as non-threatening and join you for bottle service, and if you’re really lucky, introduce you to their douchette sister with giant fake boobs and an overly trashy makeup job and slutty shoes that she can’t really walk right in. Then you can live among them like the anthropologists in Papua New Guniea.

Like the Ugandan Shoebill, douchebags have other cousins throughout the world. In Latin America the douchebags are usually very nice dudes and will often accept you as part of the tribe in exchange for some aguardiente and a fist-bump.

In our travels to Eastern Europe, we’ve also come in contact with another subspecies, the Eastern European Mafia Douchebag. They are fatter and balder, with more irritable personalities. The Mafia Douchebag is like a tiger to the regular douchebag housecat. Boris is good at making friends with this type and they certainly can be useful if you’re in a tight spot in a foreign country. But they are quite unpredictable so I suggest you stay away from them unless you’re a pro. Check out Boris’ article on making friends with dangerous people if you want to know how he handles them.

We’ve also described the fagbagster at length in our articles on Asia. With manpurses, expensive t-stirts and sunglasses and extra gay flavor these guys are coming to the West soon. Here’s a shot of that curious hybrid variety of international douchebag.

Like the influenza virus, douchebaggery is in a constant state of evolution, to stay one step ahead of any possible cure developed by Western medicine. The sideways two finger kissyface too worn out? It’s ok, they’ll develop a Shocker-based hand sign instead. The tattoo only covers 80% of his chest? Uh-oh, time to head to the tattoo parlor. Douchebags spare no effort to adapt to today’s modern world.

And if you’re a douchebag reading this, don’t take it the wrong way, man. I like you. Really ,I do. I’ll buy a round of Jagerbombs next time I see you at the club. Dude, you’re huge, what’s your gym routine? Is that your sister over there? Great, please introduce me, bra.

Cross-posted at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel.

In the last several months we have seen a steady stream of warmongering going on between the United States and Iran. I know, regular Americans, you haven’t seen much yet, but I understand how busy you’ve been lately. It’s hard to keep up with international news when it’s football season, I mean, how great was Eli Manning? Then of course there was Valentine’s Day, can’t forget to go buy your overweight girlfriend or wife some stuff to prove your continuing devotion to her. And then of course Whitney Houston died, and even though nobody cared about her before she died, the passing of that crackhead has-been required 24-7 news coverage for a couple weeks. What a tragedy! What a voice! And then of course you had to go to your Oscar parties. Can you believe J-Lo’s nipple was showing? I mean, holy shit, her goddamn NIPPLE!

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been watching in horror as America and Iran have continued to escalate a very testy situation that looks poised to result in open hostilities, which have a chance of drawing Israel, Russia, China, and some Arab countries into the conflict. This war between Iran and the USA has already begun, and the US fired the first shot when they announced sanctions on any banks doing business with Iran’s central bank on December 31, 2011. Since then, this and other developments have caused Iran’s currency to drop precipitously in value. This is one way of waging war in 2012, by attacking a nation’s currency. But economic war is just the first stage.

America is by and large the instigator of this war. Sure, the nutjobs running Iran are assholes and idiots, but those dudes do not want war with America. Why the fuck would they attack a country that could turn their entire nation into a glass factory in 15 minutes? You’d have to be retarded and suicidal. But Iran might feel a little threatened, what with all the threatening that our country is always doing, calling them an evil empire and publicly hoping for regime change, accusing them of crazy assassination plots involving Mexican drug cartels, sanctions and other economic warfare, moving our aircraft carriers into their neighborhood, and organizing joint Israel-American military exercises (canceled due to lack of funds). Look at this map, courtesy of ChrisMartenson.com, of the US military presence around Iran:

If this was a kung fu movie, you'd have to be Bruce Lee to win this fight.

So when Iran says they will strike back if attacked, I don’t really blame them. I also am not surprised that they would like a nuke also, since Israel has hundreds and the US thousands of them. I would prefer that no one had nukes, but to me it seems pretty hypocritical for America to demand that no one else have nukes while they keep enough of a stockpile to destroy the world and kill everyone on the planet hundreds of times over. Also, for the record, America is the only nation that has actually deployed a nuclear weapon.

But watching the news in America, you wouldn’t really ever hear that perspective, because the mainstream media is only telling one side of the story. All they do is dutifully repeat the same lying horseshit that the powers that be tell them to repeat, how Iran is determined to destroy America, and they are all terrorists, and that how saying that Iran will defend itself if attacked is basically the same as declaring war on America.

Look at this bitch warmonger Erin Burnett on CNN:

How about this shit on Fox News? Dan Gillerman pretty much declares war on Iran in this clip. Start at around 1:55.

(4:52) North Korean acquired nuclear weapons out of desperation. Iraq, Iran is seeking them out of aspiration. Aspiration to rule the Arab world, to rule the oil reserves, to destroy civilization as we know it, and to bring back 2,500 years of Persian hegemony over the Arab world.

Nice Freudian slip, asshole.

Ever notice on the mainstream media, when they’re talking about some bullshit Republicrat versus Demopublican issue, they always try to look “fair and balanced,” and they have two talking head assholes yelling over each other about who’s new tax plan is the answer to all our problems? But when the warmongers get going, there’s never any dissenting opinion. Instead, you get evil douchebag Dan Gillerman spewing forth quotes that belong better in some budget remake of 300 about evil 7 foot tall lesbian Persian devils that want nothing else but to plunge the world into another Dark Ages. Where is the fucking rebuttal to that unbelievably irresponsible warmongering from a Israeli politician who has been on the board or a director of several Israeli banks? Nowhere…

Fuck you, mainstream media. You are the enemy of real journalism, and by extension, truth.

War sucks. It’s hard for Americans to understand as war has not come to our shores for a hundred and fifty years, other than Pearl Harbor and 9-11. But real war kills a lot of innocent people, impoverishes many more, and costs you, the American taxpayer lots of money. Money that our country doesn’t have, so they have to take out loan after loan to pay for it, and cosign you, your children, and their children to the loan application. All to enrich the military-industrial-petroleum-government war complex and take people’s minds off the shitty direction that America’s morally bankrupt leaders are taking our financially bankrupt country.

Don’t believe these warmongering assholes, dudes.

Hey you! Yeah you, the less attractive, less friendly girl standing with the really cute girl at the bar I just met and realized I have lots in common with. You know, we’re actually hitting it off! She really smiled as soon as I came up and started talking to y’all and really seemed delighted to meet me.

But now you’re fucking everything up.

I’m trying to talk to your really cute and nice friend who shares my interest in travel and music and books, and you keep interrupting. And then you try to get her to turn away from me to talk to you. Or you drag her off in the middle of our conversation. Why are you being so rude to me? I’ve been nothing but nice to you the whole time, and I’ve ignored your little bitchy comments to me just because I like your friend. If I just met you alone and you talked to me like that, you would have been put in your place a long time ago.

So your really cute, smart friend tells me that she’s been single for a looong time. Like over a year! For such a cute nice girl that seems really weird. Hmmmm, I wonder. She tells me she has trouble meeting guys. Weeeird…

And now you’re being a bitch again. When I tried to take her to the dance floor, she told me, “my friend doesn’t like it when I dance with guys.” We danced anyway, but when we got back to the bar you were waiting there for us looking pissed off, and then you dragged her off again.

Don't be a Cockblock!

It’s like you’re her bodyguard! Every time I try to talk to her, you’re there in the way acting really negative. Help! Where is my wingman? Oh that’s right, you drove him off long ago and now he’s already making out with a new girl. Fuck!! Good for him, though, she looks really cute.

Now when I ask for your friend’s number, you tried to stop her from giving it to me. What the fuck? Why would you do that? Thankfully I got her number anyway, you bitch.

Now what did you do? We made a date to go out for tonight, and then a couple hours later she called and backed out. She sounded so excited to go out when we talked on the phone the first time. What did you say to her? What did you do?!?

Now I see why she’s still single. It’s you. You are the worst friend she could have. You’re single because you’re ugly and mean and negative and you don’t want your friend to be happy. If she had a boyfriend it would just make you feel even worse. So you ruin it for her too.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. You make the world a much worse place to be. Why a girl would want to be friends with someone like you is always a mystery to me. Maybe you grew up together. Maybe you work together and she doesn’t have any other single friends to go out with. Or maybe you’re the uglier, meaner, stupider sister and you don’t want to sit through another wedding day alone. For whatever reason, you’re a blight on your friend’s life. You’re like Arafat turning down peace for his people. You’re like Kim Jong-il and you’ve brainwashed your people into thinking this shit is normal and acceptable. You’re miserable and you’re taking her down with you.

Fuck you, you cockblock!

America today is totally broke. The crushing debt incurred by our federal government on our behalf to enrich themselves and their cronies is now $15 trillion. That’s $133K per taxpayer, so if you’re one of those people like me who works and pays taxes you’re on the hook for a lot. You might want to wait on that new flat screen TV purchase, dude.

The assholes running this country (Republicans, Democrats, it’s all the same, really) have absolutely no qualms spending trillions of other people’s money. They’re not just spending our money, they’re bankrupting our children and our children’s children by consigning them to loans insuring that they will live in debt slavery from the cradle to the grave. The politicians don’t care, they’ll be long gone by then and their children and children’s children will be sitting pretty on the wealth that their parents and grandparents are stealing from you right now.

Make no mistake, as I write this and you read it, if you are American or if you have American dollars in your wallet or bank account the bankers and the politicians are stealing from you. Right now. They do it through inflation, suppressing interest rates, taxation, and borrowing. It’s like a kid who steals out of your wallet for drugs, borrows money from you and never pays you back, and forges your signature as a cosigner for a loan on a private jet. Our government is that kid times a thousand with a healthy sprinkling of war for that particularly American flavor of fraud.

I pay taxes. Plenty of them. Of all the money that I earn, taxes take around 35%. If you’re like me it’s probably a similar number. And what does the American government spend our money on? Let’s do a little game, and figure out how much of our money that they waste. Based on 112 million taxpayers, here’s some of their favorite ways to waste your money:

1. Never-ending and unbelievably expensive wars: For example, the bullshit “War” on Terror has cost us $3.2-4 trillion and counting. At $3.5 trillion, that means that the War on Terror has cost you $31,250. How’s the return on that investment going for ya? One thing is for sure, a lot of people in the military industrial complex and oil industry have made huge profits from this never-ending “war.”
2. Bailouts to Wall Street banker villains: Those assholes go and make super high leveraged bets, make shitloads of free money, and then when they make a bad bet they get the government to give them money to cover their losses. It’s privatized profit and socialized losses for these guys. What a great deal, they make lots of money gambling, and then when they lose the taxpayer buys them more casino chips. How much you ask? 4.76 trillion. That means the Wall Street bailouts cost you $42,500. Don’t worry, your money went to a good cause – lots of fancy cars, boats, helicopters, diamonds for their golddigging wives, vacation homes in the Hamptons, coke, and high-priced hookers.
3. Corporate welfare: This is hard to calculate, as it takes many forms. Many big American corporations pay little to no taxes despite reporting huge profits. For example, last year GE made $14 billion in profits and paid no federal income tax. That’s right, they paid less that you paid in taxes last year. They made $40 billion. Motherfuckers! The taxes they aren’t paying are just charged to the American taxpayer’s tab. The American Scamocracy also gives out free money in the form of 0% and low-interest loans to the big banks and corporations, which forces all interest rates down and makes your investments lose value to inflation. Pork barrel spending on Bridges to Nowhere, scam renewable energy companies, giveaways to the medical industry complex like Obamacare, police riot gear, governmental sponsored spying and torture, and interest payments on debt that have already been incurred in your name costs the U.S. taxpayer trillions and you personally many thousands every year.

The corruption at the heart of today’s New America system is staggering. Just a little reading around (the politics category) will show the terrifying tip of the iceberg of fraud that is the basis of America’s government. I could go on all day about this, but I need to get down to the farmer’s market to get some fresh veggies for the week and pick up some organic yoga chicks. So let me finish up this rant:

America is a scamocracy. The government exists for one reason – to steal money from the majority and give to a minority. This is the history of America, its present, and its future. As Mark Twain observed in 1866, “no man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” He’s still right. The more our government does, the more they steal from us all.

As regular single dudes, there is nothing you and I can do to change the system. The bad guys are strong and we are way too small. Electoral politics is a complete sham. It’s just kabuki theater designed to make us think we have a choice in how this country is run. The only thing we can do is cover our own asses. The single dude covers his ass by acquiring useful skills, buying gold and silver, learning other languages, escaping the corporate prison, and being ready for when the game changes. You must have a Plan B and C. The bad guys are really bad. The only way to survive to plan ahead. Maybe I’ll see you on the beach with a drink in one hand and some hot Eastern European chick on the other arm. We should definitely get together for beers then.

Which dude are you?

Cross-posted at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel.

Welcome to the new America.

Human history has shown us over and over that those in power will do whatever is necessary to maintain control of their subjects. We see this scene regularly all over the world as political leaders (rulers) attempt to control dissent by having police attack protesters, imprisoning political dissenters, censoring anti-government ideas, and launching propaganda campaigns. From Tiananmen Square in China in 1989, to Pinochet massacring people in Chilean soccer stadiums in 1973, to Middle Eastern governments’ brutal crackdowns in Syria, Egypt and other countries in the thrall of the Arab Spring, suppressing populist uprisings have a long history in our world.

Like a scene out of some Middle Eastern dictatorship, the police response to #OccupyOakland is showing that America will respond no differently to the threat of dissent than any other undemocratic, totalitarian regime. America is the same as Libya or Egypt or communist China, and The Powers That Be will do whatever it takes to maintain their iron grip on the political and economic scene.

Let’s check out some YouTube videos. First, watch the cops throw a flashbang grenade right into a crowd of protesters trying to help Marine veteran Scott Olsen who was hit by “nonlethal force” while just standing there at the protest.

Here’s a vid of a chick getting tear-gassed at #OccupyWallStreet last month:

The mainstream media has mobilized to belittle and discredit the OWS movement. They like to alternate between calling them a bunch of privileged, lazy white hippie kids who are just protesting because they think it’s “cool,” a plot by Obama or some other left-wing conspiracy, a plot by Marxists (really, Marxists?), terrorists, a much smaller movement than it is, or just idiots who don’t even know what they want. Here’s a nice conversation between a preselected caller and that fatass drug addict retard shill for the powers that be Rush Limbaugh on October 27:

David in Memphis, I’m glad you waited, sir, welcome to the EIB Network, nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Pleasure to talk to you, Rush. Been trying to get through for years. I’ve got a point about these Wall Street protesters. Their favorite term to use against the Tea Party is terrorists. Well, two can play at that game. They were afraid when the Tea Party came along, Christian militias and Klan rallies were right around the corner, right?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Well, I know a little bit about terrorism, Rush. Ever since 9/11 I’ve made it sort of a hobby to study it.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: When terrorism isn’t fueled by Islam, it’s usually fueled by left-wing student protest movements. If you look at the history, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weather Underground here in America –

RUSH: Baader-Meinhof.

CALLER: Hm-hm. Yeah, when it’s not Islam –

RUSH: It’s all a bunch of spoiled, snot-nosed, leftist rich kids.

CALLER: They’re worried about the violence the Tea Party will perpetuate, yet these kids are clashing with the cops on camera, and nobody is marching experts in front of the media to fret about the violence these kids could perpetuate.

RUSH: Right. Well, in this instance, though, in this instance the media wants a little violence.

CALLER: Well, obviously, yes.

RUSH: They want it, and they want it because they want to be able to say that the violence is anger erupting at Republicans opposing Obama’s jobs bill. The Republicans try to repeal Obama’s health care. That is the optic they’re trying to create, the image they’re trying to perpetuate here.

CALLER: The problem is you always fail to anticipate just how dangerous some of these people can actually be.

RUSH: Well, in what way?

CALLER: Well, you look at the Baader-Meinhof gang, for instance, the people who founded it, one of them was a left-wing journalist who thought West Germany was a capitalist, imperialist system.

RUSH: Oh. Oh, okay. I see what you mean. Yeah.

CALLER: Yeah, she joined with –

RUSH: Well, right now this is a ragtag bunch, most of them who don’t even know why they’re there.

CALLER: Obviously, yeah.

RUSH: But they’re trying to have something made of it. They’re trying to make it look like it’s homegrown, effervescent, spontaneous, and it’s not. This is Astroturfed. This is planned, it is orchestrated, and it’s disappointing actually when you get down to brass tacks. The numbers are quite small. They’re having to show all of these different cities to make it look like there’s any significant size here. Still, this is actually a very, very small bunch of people. I appreciate the call, David. Thanks very much.

What kind of retarded shit is that? Now #OccupyWallStreet are terrorists? Or are they a ragtag bunch who don’t know why they’re there? Or they’re an Astroturfed planned movement by Obama to pass his jobs bill? Which is it, Rush?

Anyone who believes a word that come out of Rush Limbaugh’s swollen whale lips these days is a complete moron. Yet people do, in droves.

Welcome to the New America.

There have been hundreds of arrests all over the country. Check out this Mother Jones interactive map to get an idea of the scope of the protests and ensuing related incidents worldwide. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Welcome to the New America. Sit back and enjoy it, because there’s a lot more coming where that came from. Or if you prefer to not be pepper-sprayed by the banksters’ private security force (aka the police), you might consider moving abroad somewhere warm and quiet with nice, skinny, smart girls to drink tropical smoothies and watch the news with while America descends into a police state. I’ll see you there.

Cross-posted at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel.

One of the main complaints of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the high cost of student debt for higher education. It is a major problem. This year, for the first time in history, the total student debt of the USA exceeded that of credit card debt, and the total amount of student debt will soon be one trillion dollars.

College is unbelievably fucking expensive these days. Look at this list of the top 10 most expensive colleges for 2010-11, from campusgrotto.com:

Are you kidding? 56K for Harvey Mudd College?

What the fuck? Sarah Lawrence College? $59,170? What for? I don’t hear much about alumni from Sarah Lawrence College going on to make a bunch of money as CEO of GE or as some criminal Goldman Sachs superbankster. No, Sarah Lawrence is just another one of many of America’s snooty overpriced liberal arts colleges mainly composed of girls (73% of the school is female) who think they’re sensitive and gifted and special and smart and major in Women’s Studies, Victorian Literature, Environmental Policy or some other equally useless bullshit.

A quick perusal of a list of alumni of Sarah Lawrence on Wikipedia reveals very little in the way of business leaders, political figures other than Rahm Emanuel, any good musician other than Carly Simon, or any A-list actor of today except for Kyra Sedgwick. There’s a couple of sort of well-known authors but nobody major, except for Alice Walker. Really, it’s an unimpressive list, especially from the most expensive college in America.

$59,170 a year buys these girls and their little neutered male counterparts a close 6-1 faculty relationship where they are turned into snobby little Rebecca Watsons or perhaps lesbians (at least while they are there and it is fashionable), all the while reinforcing the lovely American girl entitlement complex that drives me as far away from American women as I can get. Then after they graduate, they have no real marketable skills and have to get jobs completely unrelated to their Theater major with a minor in Transgender Poetry. I wonder how many have to resort to the pole eventually.

Now, many of these kids have  rich parents who just pay cash for their education. I say don’t worry about them, because while tuition may be high, if they want to pay that money that’s their choice. Then they can live off their trust funds and pretend to be writers and live in SoHo apartments that their Daddy pays for since they could never afford a month’s rent on their meager acting revenue.

But the problem is that there is another girl there. Maybe you remember her from high school. Let’s call her Mary. She was the girl who was really smart and nice and actually really cute too, but she wasn’t ho-ing it up at the high school drinking parties and dating one douchebag after another. She was in the school play, and the orchestra, and the student council, and she volunteered for charity after school sometimes.

What a nice girl she was back then. If we hadn’t been too busy drooling over the slutty dressing future gold-digger rich girls at school, she would have made a great high school girlfriend. And today I bet she’s doing great, she was so smart and talented. Where did she go to school again?

Oh right, Sarah Lawrence. But her parents weren’t that rich! She couldn’t really afford it, but everyone says where you go to college will mean the difference between success and failure in life so she did what she had to do to go to a great college, the best liberal arts college in America. Sarah Lawrence College. How did she afford it? Oh, right.

Student loans.

They seemed like such a good deal at the time. The interest rates were so low and you didn’t have to pay them off until after you graduated. So she signed up for them and she got approved even though she had no job or any guarantee of any income after graduation. She was so busy studying for her English and Environmental Studies double major that she couldn’t really get a job, so she just put her groceries on a credit card (it’s funny how that worked – she signed up for a Visa card on campus and they let her list her student loan as income when she applied), and after four years she graduated with $250,000 worth of debt.

That’s when it really started to get tough. She couldn’t get a job in her fields, so after a while, she had to get a job as a secretary to pay her bills. It will take her 25 years to pay off her debt at this rate. She works way too much for low pay and gets hit on by her married bosses all the time who are half as smart as she is.

Poor Mary. What a tragedy. She is one of the many victims of the college debt scam. With the government interfering with the interest rates of loans and subsidizing/guaranteeing college loans, they’ve created a lot of free money in education. With money for college being so cheap, colleges can raise their tuition across the board and create a whole generation of debt slaves. This is the state of higher education in America. Check out the chart for lending per year this decade, adjusted for inflation:

This is adjusted for inflation. Have colleges increased their product this decade?

The college loan crisis is the new subprime housing bubble. And you better believe those scumbags on Wall Street have been buying up, securitizing and leveraging the shit out of these college loans, just like the banks bundled together shitty subprime mortgages and sold them as AAA investments before 2008.

Sorry Mary. They sold you the blue pill. And now your choice of college and to borrow to go there has ruined your life. Soon it will ruin everyone else’s day when the taxpayer has to foot the bill for it – that is, except for the people who got rich off of the American Higher Education Scam.

I hate you hipsters. You make the world a much worse place to be. Every time I go out and I see all you losers sitting there at the bar with your shitty attitudes and bad fashion sense, I just want to grab your Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle and start beating you over the head with it. I know, that will ruin your ironic haircut and that would be such a shame, but at least you can write a shitty emo song about it later.

Hipsterdom is on the rise worldwide. It’s ruining entire countries and making single dude travel destinations like New Orleans much, much worse. France, for instance, is now all hipsters. This movement must be stopped before it spreads everywhere, like genital warts at a West Virginia family reunion.

So what is a hipster? Like pornography was famously described by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, hipsters are difficult to describe, but you know them when you see them. The irony about hipsters’ irony is that they are one of the most conformist segments of society today. They have a uniform:

1. Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers, or even better, “ironic” footwear. See: the stupid hipster chicks who wear vintage dresses with rain boots even though the sky has been clear for days.
2. Ironic facial hair. You motherfuckers have ruined mustaches for everybody. I used to think a mustache was cool and something I’d wear when I was a badass 50-year old, like Burt Reynolds or Billy Dee Williams, but you 28-year old unemployed trust fund hipsters have totally destroyed that with your waxed handlebar mustaches, looking like you just walked off the set of a Coen brothers Western.
3. Skinny jeans. What the fuck is wrong with you dumbasses? I don’t know a single chick who is attracted to guys that show frailty. I know being in shape is totally uncool for you faggots, but why would you highlight what a weak ass pussy you are by looking skinnier than the Olsen twins?
4. Ironic vintage clothing. When I was living in Austin, which today is a world capital of hipsterdom, I’d occasionally go into the vintage stores to try to pick up chicks and was astounded at the prices being paid for stupid vintage clothing. These idiots were paying fifty bucks for an Atari t-shirt or Wonder Woman style shorts and underpants. Hipster girls have the absolute worst bathing suits in the world, outside of the Saudi Arabian burkinis. Newsflash, girls: you look awful in vintage bathing suit bottoms that go up to your mid-waist and show nothing but your pasty white skin and your shitty tattoos.
5. Tattoos. You can’t be a hipster without a tattoo that shows your individuality, just like the other two hundred people in your shitty hipster bar.
6. Stupid hats. People pretty much quit wearing fedoras when Humphrey Bogart made his last movie, until the rise of hipsterism. They are best for covering up the bald spots of 30-something hipster dudes who work at some coffee shop and spend the whole of their day looking down on the “conformists” with real jobs who come in for a little caffeinated pick-me-up.
7. Smoking. Don’t you dumbasses know that smoking is bad for you? I know, I know, you don’t care. There’s no better way to look like you’re totally bored by everything and everyone in the world than to sit around with your self-rolled cancer stick rolling your eyes at every suit that walks by.
8. Shitty haircuts. It is quite an art to get your hair to look like you went on an all night drinking binge and then slept in an alley in your own vomit. Congrats, guys!

Ok, so now we all know what a hipster is and what they look like, let me tell you why I hate them. Hipsters suck. The most obvious characteristic of hipsterism is being too ironic and cool to actually like anything. They define themselves by what they’re not. Just try asking a hipster what they actually like. I was at a hipster bar in the States recently and talked to two separate hipster girls who somehow didn’t realize I wasn’t on their side. After saying a bunch of ignorant shit like, “This is bullshit, that’s conformist” etc., I asked them, “What is cool and not bullshit?” Both of them (two separate conversations) were at a loss to answer this question, and both after thinking for a minute said, “Well, I like to sleep.” So lame.

Hipsters like to pretend they’re individualist and non-conformist, but they’re among the most image-conscious people in the world. Hipsters spend most of their time hanging out in places where everybody else has the same uniform and worrying that they’ll be exposed as the frauds they are. They are terrified of this and I theorize that’s why they’re so unfriendly to outsiders.

Hipsters have no social skills. They cannot relate to anyone outside of their peer group. Just try going up to a hipster girl and saying, “Hi! How are you?” Most often, she will not be able to handle the situation at all. Hipster girls can’t handle just being nice or polite and will mostly likely respond to normal friendly behavior with socially inept stuff like just turning away or saying rude shit for absolutely no reason.

One Saturday night in Austin, Raul and I were hanging out at a hipster bar high on mushrooms and this hipster guy at the bar had the classic “Mom” tattoo. This was how our conversation went (remember that I was on mushrooms):

Charlie: So do you really love your mom, or are you just being ironic?

Hipster: Dude, my mom died, dude.

Charlie: Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that. That’s good though, that you got the tattoo to show how much you love her.

Hipster: What?

So after a while this guy staggered off, and the very next person to come stand there at the bar was a not-so-hot hipster girl with ironic footwear and the exact same tattoo on the same arm! I said to her:

Charlie: Hey, the last guy standing there had the same tattoo as you! Isn’t that funny?

Hipster Chick (with extreme disdain): So?

And with that, she walked over to the other side of the bar to order her drink.

Hipsters pretty much have shitty taste in everything, especially music. It’s in the hipster code that you can’t like anything that is popular. You ask a hipster what their favorite bands are and I guarantee they will say it’s somebody you have never heard of. You know who will say they don’t like the Beatles? Hipsters. What the fuck? The Strokes are the Beatles of hipsterdom. That is as famous of a band as they are allowed to like. I also like the Strokes, but the hipsters worship them.

Fuck you, hipsters. I can’t even imagine what you hipster guys do when you get a woman. Do you cry sensitively after making sweet hipster love for sixty seconds, or do you just start writing your emo song in your head for when she dumps you for being such a pussy? And hipster girls, do you really think your poetry doesn’t suck balls? Get a life and start thinking for yourselves, you losers. And get a haircut while you’re at it. And a job. Fucking hipsters.

Originally published at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel on March 28, 2011.

A Plea to Dudes Worldwide (especially the English):

Please guys, we know it’s fun. I love my guy friends. It’s super fun to hang out with the guys and go out and watch the game or play sports or just get super drunk. But for travel, the big stag trips not only don’t work for what we’re trying to do, they actually make it harder for everyone else. Eastern Europe, courtesy of discount airlines like Ryanair and others, is quickly becoming a huge sausage fest, making it hard for anybody to get laid.

I lived in Prague during the summer of ’07. It’s a beautiful town with a lot to offer culturally, cheap beer and beautiful women. The problem is that ten years ago, the city was crawling with beautiful, friendly, and supposedly easy women and word got out. Then Ryanair started flying huge groups of tourists from the U.K. in for super cheap, and inspired by the stories of easy, beautiful women and cheap beer, the English stag parties started coming like locusts. Today, Prague is one of the worst places in Eastern Europe to meet girls because it’s been completely overrun with the hordes of drunk English dudes. Bars after 11PM in Prague routinely have a 4-to-1 guy-to-girl ratio. If you approach a Czech girl in Prague and try to speak English nowadays you’re likely to get completely shot down with the “I don’t speak English” routine, or simply ignored. To meet Czech girls, I had to learn to speak Czech (which is an super difficult language) and do all sorts of advanced game playing bullshit with these girls just to get a clean slate with them.

Lesson 1: Avoid Prague, the English have ruined it for everybody.

Lesson 2: Don’t be the guy who comes over for just a couple quid on the cheapo airlines with twelve of their best bloke friends and gets super drunk in the bars by 10PM and then starts drunkenly hitting on every hot or not chick he can focus his double vision on, who then goes home a couple of days later and a couple hundred quid poorer and wonders why he didn’t get laid on his trip to Bulgaria.

Large groups are intimidating and unattractive to these girls. Also, like everyone, when you or I hang out with so many guys friends at the bar, it’s pretty much impossible to not get totally fucked up, and being obviously drunk is the best way to NOT get past square one when you meet a girl.

So please guys, pretty please, don’t do this. You’re ruining it for everybody. Especially you English guys. Your stag parties are byFAR the worst offenders. If you’re English, you already have two strikes against you. I don’t know how many strikes you get in cricket, but in baseball that means you have only one more chance. Don’t get me wrong, I love you guys. Whenever I see an English stag party at the pub I always come over and have a drink, everyone is always super friendly, and we often drink a bunch of shots and get hammered before I go on my way, but when you travel and want to meet a girl she’s not going to be into it. Don’t be like the rest of your drunk asshole football fan (DAFF) countrymen. Travel in smaller groups, or if you have to travel in larger groups, split into smaller groups when you go out.

Get it? Stag trips are the easiest way to NOT get laid and ruin it for the rest of us. Please guys, help us all out.

Originally published at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life & Travel on January 2, 2011.

I’m the last guy that ever though he’d write a financial article, but after hanging out with Boris and El Matador over the years, I’ve taken an increasing interest in the subject. These days I never bother going to shitty movies like Avatar because those unimaginative hacks in Hollywood just repackage the same tired story with the same talentless actors over and over. Nowadays, my true entertainment is the slow motion train wreck that is today’s world financial system.

I hope you had the time to read Boris’ article on investing in gold when it came out. Since that article came out on July 8, the price of gold has gone through the roof, from a little over $1,600 to a high of over $1,900 and currently $1833.70 last I checked. I listened to Boris – did you?

Gold is not the only precious metal out there worth looking at as an investment for the single dude. Silver has also been long used as a basis for monetary systems and is much cheaper than gold, at around $42 an ounce. Silver for the most part stayed put during the latest “holy shit” historical rise in the price of gold.

The reason gold is being bid up so high has to do with the world’s growing distrust of the financial system and the growing possibility of extreme or hyper inflation of the US dollar and other major currencies. This is all largely due to the Fed manipulating interest rates to zero and printing money like a crack addict pawning his family’s prized possessions. Gold bugs are seeing gold as a true way to store wealth while boycotting the crooked modern financial system. When the shit hits the fan, as it inevitably will at some point, gold will still hold its value while the US dollar will not be worthy of wiping your ass with.

So why is silver not joining gold on this meteoric rise? The reason is further proof that the “free market” the politicians preach about as the supposed solution to all our problems does not actually exist. Quite simply, the whole silver market is being manipulated by the big bad guys and the price of silver is being artificially held down. There’s some pretty convincing proof in the numbers that the corporate bad guys are in fact holding down the silver price too.

For example, look at the long interest versus short interest in gold and silver. According to the excellent blog, Silver Gold Silver, on the 20th of August the long and short numbers on silver were as follows:

In the large spec side in GOLD we see a long to short ratio of (long 264K, short 64K)of 4:1. For every 4 long contracts the large spec buys, he is short one too.

In the silver arena their ratio is (32.5K long, 11K short) 3:1 long bias

Now lets look at the polar opposite.

In the Commercial side, such as JPM et al. on the GOLD side they are long 160.5K and short 410K. LOL. This ratio of SHORT to long is 2.5:1. FOR EVERY GOLD CONTRACT LONG (WANTING TO GO UP) the MORGUE adds 2.5 shorts to it (wanting to go down). Hummm biased. I wonder if their clients know they are this bias towards the ONLY asset class that has returned 20% profits over the last 10 years. And they are short 2.5:1 on it. Makes sense.

Now in the silver arena, we see nothing different, and the trend continues. The Commercials are long 34.5K and short 75K. For a ratio of SHORT to long of 2.2:1

So what that means is that the big banker guys are shorting gold and silver big time. These guys are not stupid – they know what a bullshit house of cards this economic mess we’ve created for ourselves is. It’s also becoming more and more clear that the paper market for gold and silver has many, many more pieces of paper that purportedly represent gold and silver than gold and silver actually exists. There is enormous fraud in the gold and silver paper markets and some suggest for every real gold ounce, there are twenty or more fraudulent paper gold ounces being traded on the market. This is why Boris and I insist that your long term investment strategy must require physical delivery of your precious metals. Make sure you can hold that shit in your hands.

All of this means that once more people start asking for their actual physical metal instead of paper certificates (like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela just did), there is going to be a real shortage of actual gold and silver to send to these creditors, and the market fraud will be exposed. The real price of physical metals will go up like a rocket ship while the paper values crash and burn. It is only a matter of time before this market melts down like a fat American chick’s extra large bowl of Rocky Road at the Omaha County Fair. Hurry up and finish your corndog honey, your ice cream is melting!

The price of gold seems more difficult for the bad guys to manipulate than silver, perhaps due to higher demand for it as a monetary instrument as compared to silver, which is also an industrial metal. They certainly do do it from time to time by raising margin requirements and creating excess short interest. The problem for them is that much of the rest of the world, such as the Indians and the Chinese, actually know what’s going on and have bought shitloads of gold already. It’s impossible to stop this gold freight train before it smashes into the paper market full tilt. Silver, however, has been easier to manipulate. The relationship between the price of gold and silver historically tends to stay around 16-to-1. It is currently nearly 44-to-1. What gives? Is gold too high or silver too low? I say silver is too low because of the rampant manipulation of the market.

But if they are manipulating the market, why are they doing it? This is a question that I’ve been mulling over lately, and until recently I haven’t been able to come up with an answer that makes any sense. The most reasonable answer I’ve heard from anyone to date is something along the lines of, “the powers that be are aware that the system is going to collapse, and in an attempt to keep the party going as long as possible, they are holding the metals down as much as they can.”

OK, that sounds reasonable, but a little incomplete. If that’s true, they know that the end is coming as well as that there will be an inevitable short squeeze on silver which will crush the big silver shorters like JP Morgan. This scenario also doesn’t account for the personal greed of the individuals who work for these companies. So what else could it be?

Another possibility is due to the fact that silver has lots of industrial applications such as photography, batteries, bearings, medical, solar energy, computers and other high-end electronics to name a few. So maybe the powers that be are expecting a Mad Max type scenario where all industrial production stops or is severely curtailed and the demand for silver drops off. OK, maybe, but that also seems farfetched. Most likely, the world will not immediately descend into cannibalism and Cormac McCarthy style dystopia, therefore it also seems unlikely that JP Morgan is betting the farm on us all riding around in armed convoys with face paint and leather helmets.

I’ve been confused for a while about what would be their game on silver. Enter the silver bears.

The best gossip in this video regarding metals is the allegation that the big silver players are bypassing the dealers and going straight to the mines for their physical silver. Hmm…so why would they do that? Well, maybe they know how fraudulent all these silver “certificates,” ETFs and other paper investments really are. This market, along with the entire derivative market is going down like a Bulgarian chalga slut on a mafia douchebag in his $500,000 Mercedes on their ride around the block outside the club. But if they artificially keep the price down long enough to go down to the mine and get the physical product, when the market blows up, how much will their physical be worth then?

Lots and lots.

So there’s my theory. Those Wall Street firms are pretty much a free for all. The number one goal for each individual one of those motherfuckers is to make as much money as possible and get it safely out of the country and into their foreign safety deposit boxes or offshore bank accounts before the music stops. Joe Asshole at Goldman Sachs isn’t working ninety hour weeks trying to make Goldman money, or his clients money, or America richer. He’s looking out for himself, his little squid family, his coke connection, and his mistresses.

Silver is perhaps the bad guys’ last escape plan. They’re enjoying this one last little buying opportunity before the end comes. How many ounces will buy a private island in Greece after the fiat system collapses, making the Euro and Dollar worth less than the paper they’re printed on?

Never underestimate the greed and lack of concern for humanity on Wall Street. Just follow the money and you’ll understand why everything happens.

Cross-posted at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel.