I am one of the largest critics of academia, along with Benito.  I think it’s a scam, I think it’s overpriced, yada yada yada.  I also am riding this link a little bit

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_skills/2011/04/new-scholarship-is-the-law-school-scam-blogging-movement-influencing-the-legal-profession.html

Surprisingly, I read it and learned a lot of things I didn’t know.  There is something to be said for scholarship, even if it does move at the speed of global warming (before 1970). 

But moreover academia is necessary because we are a google generation.  I am guilty of this.  I have no idea what the google algorithm is and I assume hits equates directly to truth.  And not only did I go to school when book reports still involved books, I’m an academic myself.  No wonder thousands of Virginian kids were almost taught that blacks fought in droves for the Confederacy.

Now my original rant was based on my gut reaction that the woman responsible for this egregious error was a racist daughter of the Confederacy who masturbated to Gone with the Wind.  Upon further (still extremely limited) review I think she was just stupid.  Based on that, how scary is it that something that is so factually absurd suddenly seems plausible when we type in some keywords and something like that appears?

Michele Bauchmann has stated several times that the Founding Fathers crusaded against slavery.  Now I know she’s racist.  But who knows what motivated this? It could be racism, ignorance and now there is the third option, perhaps she got bored and googled it or more likely one of her interns did. 

The internet makes it harder to completely bury the truth.  It also makes it easier to completely rewrite history.  A degree might not be worth the paper it’s printed on in terms of the market but it does serve a valuable function in society.  History, repeating itself, all that crap.

I’m one of those guys who constantly gets accused of making everything about race.  Everything from healthcare to the judiciary system, employment prospects to school admissions.  I’ve had a lot of discussions over a lot of beers and every now and then I get tired of being the only voice answering the meant-to-be rhetorical question underlying all these conversations “ok, you’ve got a black president, what more could you POSSIBLY want?” I begin to doubt myself, just a little, and then I read about Kyle Bristow’s “White Apocalypse,” a novel which the author insists isn’t a racist fantasy and it renews my resolve to at the very least not give the slight nod white people look for after a borderline statement to see if you’re one of those “reasonable” colored folk.  But here’s what’s interesting.  The racist fantasy is also a revenge fantasy.

The novel supposedly begins with the discovery of a mass grave…filled with white people.  Ancient white people who somehow got to the North American continent before Native Americans presumably by crossing a frozen Atlantic Ocean. Then the Native Americans slaughtered them, millenia pass, and suddenly directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center are being assassinated and self-hating white people are exercising their liberal guilt by dating non-whites.  Ok, so obviously Bristow (who sure as hell is no looker) lost a girlfriend (or more likely crush) to a black guy.  Sexual insecurity has long been a hallmark of racism, particularly American racism.

Read on to find out what makes this book extra special

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So Benito has been trying to recruit an underemployed blogger to join our motley crew, but is failing because obviously none of the candidates want to lose their job. But one of them did pass on a mandatory assignment a senior manager gave to his underlyings before the monthly meeting when they were to pay homage to his greatness. Read “A Letter to Garcia.” Here is the damn link

http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm

I talked to the guy and he said he was hurt that his manager thought so little of them collectively that he would make them read what amounted a treatise on how they were so worthless as to be morally bankrupt human beings. Or at least that’s what he got out of it. You are probably wondering what this has to with Scalia. Getting to that.

My first reaction was this kid is a major loser if his managers have any ability to affect him emotionally. So I read the article…turns out it’s a turn of the (previous) century essay, penned on a lark, a 100 yr-old blog entry that could have been written by Rush Limbaugh. Then I got angry.
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Clarence Thomas is only the second African-American ever to sit on the Supreme Court.  He was nominated by the first President Bush when Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American ever to sit on the Supreme Court, retired.  I do not care for Clarence Thomas.  Neither do 98% of African-Americans – ever since he first caught Reagan’s eye for being willing to perpetuate lies about African-Americans and his systematic destruction of the EEOC.  Twenty years later, he sits alienated and alone on the court, under a self-imposed vow of silence.  After his wife accepted over $700,000 to lobby against President Obama’s groundbreaking Healthcare reform, Thomas stands poised to cast the deciding vote rendering a law unconstitutional, purely on political grounds, that will directly cause the death of hundreds of thousands of the poorest Americans.  Ladies and gentleman I give you Clarence Thomas, the first Student Debtor.

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When your life is in shambles and the road from ruin is uphill and rocky there is a tendency for our brethren to convince themselves that the flatter road with smoother terrain also (might) lead to a safe place.  In other words, once we discover the real villain, we often decide this person is too powerful so we instead decide to pick on the gimpy blind kid who was just minding his own business.  It happens. We’re not perfect. However, sometimes we see two knights in battle, one for us and one against us, and we side with the one against us…not because we are frustrated with our own knight’s performance (which is what we claim) but because we can hurt our own knight more and we yearn to matter, or at least feel like we do. Now THIS is dangerous.

It is becoming somewhat chic for debtors, hipsters and young people to criticize Obama, essentially for not being the biblical messiah.  They use this criticism to justify their lack of participation in the political process and when criticized are quick to tell you how many doors they knocked on in 2008 and what Obama owes them, etc, etc.
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Benito is trying to find an under employed writer for the blog.  He hasn’t as of yet and for what it’s worth I don’t think he will.  Not because there isn’t an army of over-educated under-utilized talent out there but because to experience real under-employment is so violently traumatic that it’s hard not to store away what’s left of your soul and just remain dead on the outside. Even when you do this there is one thing that no matter how jovial a dance-for-the-man performance you put on on the outside you still can’t protect yourself from the knowledge of how you’re regarded by bosses who hold your livelihood in their hands…not to mention friends and family.

At least you have a job. Your job is easy. You went to so and so school for how many years just to become a [blank]. So and so is younger than you and he only has x degree from y school and he’s your manager’s manager’s boss? You better feed his cats while he’s in Hawaii and to hell with the fact that you live 35 miles away. That’s just for starters.

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We all know how I feel about Sarah Palin.  Also random, pointless atrocities are usually Icarus 30’s department.  So I felt no need to comment on the Tuscon Shooting and Sarah Palin’s supposed link.  I know we (and by we I mean I) stretch the premise of this blog to sort of talk about what we want to talk about BUT I actually do not see a link between mass-murder/mass-murder-suicide and student debt.  Sure, kids have no options, there’s no hope, yadda yadda yadda but let’s think about this people.  Anyone who is willing to roll over and take the constant abuse from the for-profit and student-loan industry probably just doesn’t have enough of the will to act, for good or evil, to either perpetrate or try and stop an attack like this.  But then as always…Sarah Palin rears her head and now I have to rant.  The day after the Dr. King holiday no less.

Look, Sarah Palin just got unlucky.  She put up cross-hairs on some congressmen and congresswomen and one of them actually got shot at a bad time for her.  She of course responds by accusing the shooter of being “Left-leaning.” Alright, that’s pretty reprehensible but here’s what REALLY urks me, Palin’s mention of Dr.  King in her most recent garbage memoir.

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It’s been a hell of a two weeks. The shooting in Arizona. The character and fitness failure of a public defender due to excessive student loan debt and somehow the whole OJ thing got stirred up again. Not surprising. I mean if we are going to repeal healthcare and the 14th Amendment while we’re at it why not?

While we’re on the subject of OJ, let this be a lesson to establishment types: if you do something wrong enough, it will eventually come back to bite you in the ass. When planting evidence to circumvent due process becomes the usual path to conviction, complete with dehumanizing racial slurs, eventually there is going to be a colossal fuck up.
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Sigh. I don’t really know how to respond to this. If it weren’t for the fact that Benito and Triforce regularly blog about the plight of a student debtor, I’d say they were experiencing the same type of denial that a graduate six months out feels. But surely, years after the fact, they must have come to accept certain realities…right? Wrong. Here is why they think they will succeed despite the odds and here is why I hope they fail, for their own good.

Sometimes a loss is so horrible that the grieving process, denial, anger, fear, self-pity/bargaining and acceptance literally just starts over from the beginning. Now I hate Elvis Presley. He was a racist son of a stupid bitch who stole music and dance moves from blacks. All he had going for him was his white face. However when he died, some of his fans literally couldn’t take it and so they started seeing his dumbass everywhere. Similarly, Benito sees a way out that’s not there. Mike Triforce suffers from a combination of this and his own ego. They are the death row inmate literally strapped to the chair who can almost hear the governor’s voice in the phone they are sure is ringing, the sound just hasn’t quite hit their ears yet.

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It’s perhaps the biggest cliche of the holidays: the ultimate letdown, going to all the trouble to unwrap a box only to find it contains socks and/or underwear.  These gifts aren’t sexy like electronics (video-games, ipods) big ticket items (3-D TVs, cars) or even useful (gift and gas cards).  Ahhhh, to be young and experience the bliss that is ignorance…and I am not talking about fat men in red suits.

Anyone who can relate to the above has never experienced any of the following scenarios: 1) worn the same pair of underpants/socks for more than four days continuously 2) put on a pair of underwear with elastic so worn-out you had to roll-down the top exposing your own ass-crack just so the draws will say on long enough to pull up your pants  3) put rubber bands around your ankles to keep your legs warm because all you had were short “summer” socks at your disposal 4) combined a pair of long socks with holes with a pair of summer socks for warmth 5) turned a pair of underwear inside out to be re-worn 6) “made” underwear out of a pair of women’s booty shorts 7) mentally checked in the summer wondering if you had underwear before zipping up your fly feeling special because today your socks match 9) wearing a jock strap as underwear 10) crying with gratitude when one receives a gift of socks…and underwear

Happy New Year Folks