Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I want Milton to know that you are not alone in your fondness for fluffy bunnies.

http://www.the-rabbit-hutch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/english-angora.jpg

Who's Milton? Look, we're not using bunny stretcher or anything like that. It's real bunny. We have our pride, Boink.

Milton is 2 threads down and 2 sheets to the wind. He wants to send op and mjs to the DPRK for training but spares thee for the excellence of thy sentences.

I'm afraid OP and MJS have other commitments at this time. If you read the first story I've linked, you'll know what they're up to. It's not every day you get a business model simply handed to you.

I did my best to pass along another one with my bunny comment.

This should put to rest any illusions that the left is in some way "anti-business". We love our entrepreneurs.

i'm operant paine

president of the prose club for men

blah blah blah

i'm also a prose club client

------------------------------

this is yer pal op
haiku-ing you a fond day of rest
mr milton

Back in the early 1980s, I was living underground. I had done some petty acts of property destruction for the Weatherman, nothing big but enough to promise some serious jail time if caught.

Anyway, I was living in NYC. The rent was cheaper back then but Manhattan was still a bad place to be poor. I would go weeks living on peanut butter sandwiches (and I'm allergic to peanuts) and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Then my luck changed. I got a phone call (at home. We didn't have cell phones in those days) from an old friend named Bill Ayers. Ayers was this rich kid I knew from the movement back in the late 60s and early 1970s. I had no idea what he was up to but he told me he had a job for me.

Not being picky at the time I accepted.

It turns out that there was this promising young biracial Kenyan (his mother was American) that they had brought to the United States and passed off as an American citizen. They had faked a birth certificate in Hawaii so they could pass him as native born. Anyway, he was attending Columbia, and since he wasn't particularly bright, he was having trouble with his writing assignments.

All I had to do was write his terms papers for a few years, and make them good enough for him to get into Columbia Law School.

I knew it was wrong. And I knew that Ayers was tempting me. But I was poor, and, more importantly, hungry. So I spent three years hammering this young Kenyan's thought into the most respectable prose I could manage.

I'm not sure what ever happened to him. But I do know he got into Columbia Law School.

Ayers still owes me 50 bucks, btw. Cheap bastard.

That's heartbreaking, ToT. For every shining success there's at least one worthy soul laboring away in conditions of unrelieved drudgery; dying by bits and pieces in the pyramid schemes of the credentialization industry. The upstream managers harvest them callously, affect a lofty contempt and rub elbows with people who have rubbed elbows with Slavoj Zizek.

I wonder if this is some sort of meta performance. I have to agree with this commenter:

"one name comes to mind - james frey. i don't know that this guy works for a paper mill or not. it's a very compelling story and i'm sure it happens but i'm just not convinced that it's happening in the life of the writer. jaded, i guess."

For someone who has supposedly been doing it for 6 years, a lot of his story seems a bit off. It seems like he did a little bit of paper writing, and a lot of embellishing.

First, he's being paid terribly at $13/page. Secondly it's hard to see how he puts out 5,000 pages per year when the business is so seasonal. There's a limit to how much you can write at the peak times, and even the largest paper mills are going to be running below the capacity for a lot or even most of the year. I don't doubt that you could make a decent living at it, but in this article the pay is way too low and the pages produced way too high.

Finally, it seems odd that he would be writing so far outside of his area of knowledge over the long term. The paper mills that I know of employ a network of mostly grad students and allocate the papers based on area of expertise. Why would you waste all that time researching? As impressed as I am with his tales of virtuoso bullshitting, googling and bullshitting is simply too much work. It's inefficient. A paper mill just outsources it to someone who teaches the topic and can whip off the same paper as fast as they can type, probably less than a quarter of the time. The paper mill can take half of the money, and the TA would still make twice the hourly wage of the independent bullshit artist. As far as I know, every paper mill works on that principle, and it seems odd that one would be allocating pharmacology and accounting to this guy.

If the author were a bit deeper in the game, I think he would have touched on a more interesting issue, which is that we now have a lot of poorly paid TAs moonlighting as paper writers for students in their area of study. I wouldn't doubt that there have been situations where a TA has received a paper that they just finished writing the night before. Full service credentialing, it's the capitalist way.

Had I read this piece fifteen or so years ago, I'd have been kicking myself and feeling like an utter sucker for having spent four years putting out the effort to do my own research and writing. Nowadays, though, I think "d'ahh, fuck it" (which ought to be my official motto these days, as I certainly say it enough) and figure that these dumbasses will work their way up into high positions in government and business where their incompetence, though not "found out" in the normal sense, will still be borne out in the quality of state policy and business decisions, and help speed the collapse of the USA -- and you all know me well enough by now to know that I'm totally rooting for collapse.

Having studied art, mine was not a "regular" kind of college career -- though I did have to do a fair amount of coherent research, writing and critique for subjects like History Of Art And Architecture -- so I like to think that cheating was a little bit tougher. After two or three years, your teachers become familiar with the style and quality of your work, so if one semester you suddenly turn in a final portfolio that's markedly different in style and quality it would tend to raise some red flags.

In the end, though, I'm rather proud that I did all my research, writing and other work myself, even though I wasn't a perfect student (yeah, it's Pollyanna Time). At least I can say it was all mine and that my final GPAs, though not stratospheric, were at least come by honestly -- even inasmuch as my current ethic for dealing with government and corporations these days is to lie, cheat and steal whenever possible.

.

PS: While the CR piece is certainly well-written, my high-school sophomore year English teacher would've totally busted this guy's chops for beginning sentences with "and".

I agree with this.

Finally, it seems odd that he would be writing so far outside of his area of knowledge over the long term.

This passage seems a bit ridiculous.

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more.

FB, yes, well said. There is a lot of dramatic license.

If the author were a bit deeper in the game, I think he would have touched on a more interesting issue, which is that we now have a lot of poorly paid TAs moonlighting as paper writers for students in their area of study. I wouldn't doubt that there have been situations where a TA has received a paper that they just finished writing the night before. Full service credentialing, it's the capitalist way.

That is especially compelling.

I still give him credit for his entrepreneurial spirit, and for setting a cat amongst the puffed pigeons. Good structural critiques are lost on them.

since we're trading tall tales and true
of the lengary past

back in the dirty wee 70's
i for a brief interval
attempted to enter
the underground video game
as producer /writer /director
-- UV as a medium was just then aborning ---

one unrealized scenario
a remake of front page/my gal friday
as a term paper mill
--- then also in its aborning phase ---

the role of "friday " was cast ..in fact
the entire project was intended to entrap
this specimen of thespian glory

after a search of my clippings
i could only find this shot of her circa then
--in a summer theatre musical i think--

http://img.listal.com/image/1240910/500full.jpg

"I wouldn't doubt that there have been situations where a TA has received a paper that they just finished writing the night before. Full service credentialing, it's the capitalist way"

if such an enterprise
doesn't complete the loop as you suggest fb
its likely not bankable
as self susttaining

$66k/year looks meager for a hard slogging academic level ancillary worker by USA standards but since the whole thing is run out of Pyongyang, this guy and op and mjs can live like kings (or Kims) and still have extra time to offer freebies to the Chronicle and put out SMBIVA. You see, they hire platoons of Northerners to do the research and ESL drafts and only polish (or scruff, in op's case) the final result before delivery to the future running dogs of capitalism.

This scheme makes the Anna Chapman sleeper cells look pathetic by comparison. It's the difference between a real commie plot and the commonplace intra-capitalist spy game. Give the DPRK another generation and the USA will crumble from within from sheer incompetence.

Next up: essay questions for aspiring mechanics and construction workers.

Boink, I am humbled. I'm furious too. $66k/year makes me sick with jealousy.

Oh, sure, people will say, I've got the pleasure of seeing comrades doing well by doing good. But you know? As much as I care about my comrades, that money cries to me in the night. I wouldn't have to steal carrots for the bunnies anymore. I could stop selling those thongs with Zizek's horrible phizz embroidered on the crotch piece. It's humiliating and, though it goes without saying, the customers are disgusting people too.

Sounds like these guys do in fact run out Pyongyang in an office right next door to the Warcraft gold sellers.

"Moreover, we will fulfill your paper following all requirements so that even the most demanding professor will certainly assess it with A. Our goal is to save your time, efforts and help you succeed in your academic life.

Interested but afraid of the prices for such qualitative works? Relax! They are much lower than you may even expect. Convince yourself - our paper writing service meets the perfect balance of real quality and low prices for the highest quality custom research papers available!"

http://www.besttermpaper.com/

http://termpaperwriter.org/term_paper

"if such an enterprise
doesn't complete the loop as you suggest fb
its likely not bankable
as self susttaining"

Proposition: over a long enough time period, all guilds degenerate into pyramid schemes

I think he's telling tales outta school w/r/t some of it. But i wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some market for this. Genuine literacy is undervalued these days.

This begs the question, what value is ICSA Labs adding? If it's not a differentiator, and it's not proof of an adequate degree of performance, then I'm not sure that you guys are really all that relevant any more...

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