Still Cramming

I'm down to two days until my SEE Part 2 test; I think I'll do OK as long as I don't get a brain aneurysm from trying to squeeze in yet-one-more obscure fact about partnership liquidations or IRC Sec 357. Today's agenda is property basis. Woo. hoo.

We spent Thanksgiving with my parents and had a potluck dinner at their clubhouse. Not surprisingly, we were the youngest of the group by a couple decades. In proper Thanksgiving tradition, we ate way too much, then headed over to one of my parents' friend's mother's house (got that?) so we could eat some more. We came back home Thursday night because Debbie had to work the Black Friday cruise sales, which, for the second year in a row, were a complete bust. But next year for sure!!

Meanwhile, the once-proud nation known as these united States spent Thursday night and Friday in what has become an annual orgy of violence and mayhem, featuring fist fights, shootings, pepper spraying's, muggings and other assorted stupidity in order to "save" money on Chinese-made crap that no one really needs. We saved money by staying home and not spending money. What a concept. I'm sure in the tens of thousands of new diagnostic codes in the updated DSM, one of them describes this annual decent into mass insanity.

The internet is still buzzing over UC Davis campus police hosing down protesters with pepper spray. I'm somewhat ambivalent about the whole thing. Of course, I'm ambivalent about the whole Occupy Everything protests in the first place. But one thing is certain; this is a PR nightmare for the college administration and the campus police. In the age of instant, globally-broadcast video from anyone with a cell phone, the people with the guns are going to have to get a lot smarter. First, lose the storm trooper gear. Like the original Star Wars storm troopers, I can't decide if you look menacing or ridiculous. Second, why after weeks of protest did this particular group have to be removed RIGHT NOW?!? Isolate them from all outside assistance and wait. The protesters will eventually have to pee. Maybe even provide bottled water to hurry along the process while making the campus police (dressed in their standard uniforms, of course) look compassionate. If they are dedicated enough to sit in their own urine, keep waiting and handing out bottles of water while reminding them that all it takes for it to be over is to stand up and walk away. They will eventually get bored or hungry or cold or fall asleep or have to take a dump. Most importantly, it would all make for some incredibly boring video.

From a student perspective, college has become a complete waste of time and money for most of them. Kids, with no understanding of what they are signing up for, are being pushed by the so-called adults in their life to take on ruinous amounts of debt while learning nothing that will enable them to earn enough to ever pay it back. In other words, anyone currently in, or recently graduated from, college has every right to be pissed off. I'm not sure how pitching tents on the quad or volunteering to be hosed down with pepper spray fixes that, but it likely feels more satisfying than writing a strongly-worded essay for the college newspaper. Either way, it certainly helps make the case for the protesters when the cops can be counted on to play the part of heartless storm troopers to the students' wide-eyed and virtuous Princess Leia/Luke Skywalker.

Not that any of it matters much in the big pictures. The United States has been in decline since the mid-1970's and no amount of tent pitching or pepper spraying is going to change that.

And now, property basis. w00t.