The Doctor Is A Cat

The things you find when you are looking for a laugh! I found an article on the effects of peanut butter on the rotation of the Earth, an image that appeared to be moving on the page when it wasn’t, some other illusions, and a cat with more qualifications, at least in hypnotherapy, than me!

I followed a link on the cat page to discover I can buy any degree, in any subject, that I want from what they call “diploma mills” (see link below).

Dr Kim has a nice ring to it don’t you think?

Suddenly all those stories about doctors leaving things inside patients, therapists having sex with their clients, teachers getting jobs without any qualifications (AND having sex with their students) and paedophiles running childcare centers make sense!

Suddenly I am extremely glad I live in Australia and we do not, as far as I know, recognise qualifications obtained in other countries! This may make it hard for our immigrant doctors and other trained professionals to get a job but it also makes it hard for a cat to get registration as a Doctor of Hypnosis with our hypnotherapy association – I hope!

There are even, according to John Bear (FBI consultant and expert witness for 12 years), two sleazy (but quick to sue so he couldn’t name them) universities specialising in fast, easy to get, doctorates in nuclear engineering safety!

According to Mr Bear: “A huge crime wave is under way and almost no one has noticed.”

He says the media is indifferent to stories about bogus degrees. He cites stories that barely rated a mention in the press including a high school principal with a fake degree, a former senator claiming to have a degree when he didn’t, Croatia’s president having a worthless California doctorate, an Arizona “teacher of the year” with a bogus master’s degree, a prison psychologist in Florida who got away with a fake Ph.D. for eight years, a pediatrician at the University of California-Berkeley student health center with a forged medical degree and, unbelievably, scientists at NASA with fake doctorates!

Makes you wonder how much of what we are being told these days is reliable and how much is coming from people with dodgy credentials!

People are buying fake degrees because they can get higher salaries if they do, they can get more trust and respect with a degree than without one, in some cases they can’t even keep the job they have been doing for years unless they come up with a degree!

Bear says one large Ohio city told a man who had been cutting down dead trees for them for 20 years that, because of new policies, if he did not get a degree within two years, he would lose his job.

It seems people with fake qualifications can get good jobs and keep them (at least until they get found out) because a lot of employers don’t check credentials or don’t care. They don’t check and they don’t care because, at least in part, they know the media won’t make a fuss about them not checking or not caring!

Bear says that: “LaSalle University in Louisiana, shortly before their founder went to prison for mail fraud, listed hundreds of companies they said had accepted and paid for their degrees.”

When Bear checked with these companies he found the claim was true! Some of these companies had confused the bogus LaSalle in Louisiana with the real LaSalle in Philadelphia and others believed the bogus accreditation claims because they were not aware fake accreditation exists.

What this means, as far as I can tell, is that I can go and BUY doctorate degrees that will qualify me to speak as an expert on Global Warming (and anything else I care to write about). If I add pictures of the bogus degrees to this site how are readers supposed to know they are fake?

If Bear’s statement about how fast the number of fake diploma providers are growing is accurate (more established in the past 10 years than in the previous 50 years) my advice to look for the credentials of the people whose information you are thinking about trusting might be a bit of a bum steer!

In one previous entry I laughed off the idea that I should check to see if there really was a Rice University. Now it seems there might be more bogus universities than real ones out there so it’s not a pessimistic or paranoid idea to check after all.

How the hell did I get to such a depressing place when all I went looking for was a laugh?! I never imagined I could ever be less qualified than a CAT!