Social media legal ‘experts’ to get Honourary Degrees

Citing the vast quantities of insightful expertise and legal opinion being offered incessantly on social media websites Facebook and Twitter, universities across the world have today announced their decision to confer thousands of Honourary Doctorates in Law to what they’re calling “the true legal geniuses of our time.”

According to Law Faculty Deans worldwide, what is most surprising of all is how these amazing and legally-literate opinions have all been produced after seemingly little to no prior study of the law, at any level.

“When we look back at some of the most popular and controversial legal cases of our time – the O.J Simpson trial, the Oscar Pistorius case, the Michael Jackson hearings, or even back as far as the Jacob Zuma inquiries – what we notice again and again is a wave, a veritable flood of thousands of social media users giving paragraphs-long and technically sound legal insights into these nuanced and complex cases,” said Dean of the Witswaterstrand University Law Faculty, Iona Gavel.

“Who would have known that so many hundreds of people, with little – if any – legal training or university knowledge of the Rome Statute, Constitutional Law, Due Process or even Crimen Injuria would be able to produce such lucid, confident, and not-at-all-pulled-out-their-arses legal commentary?” she said. “Often, at just a single glance at the case in question, they can instantly tell if someone’s guilty. Hell, I wonder why we even have universities or law faculties.”

However, many of the soon-to-be Honourary Doctors of Law are remain humble.

“It’s quite simple [how we did it],” explained mechanic and part-time understudy of famed Civil Law Barrister Judge Judy, Ree Parenjin. “You just look at the facts that they’ve reported in the newspaper and on my twitters, think about it for a few seconds, and the truth of the whole issue becomes immediately clear. Some people have an issue with what we say, but really there are some kinds of justice that are better and faster. Ag, some of these old judges have spent so much time in dusty libraries and boring classrooms reading cold, dull so-called ‘precedents’ that they no longer understand what justice is.“

And now, citizens everywhere are looking forward to the promise of a better, more efficient legal system.

“Oscar Pistorius was obviously guilty,” said Parenjin. “In a brighter future, we won’t have true justice delayed or cheated by pesky appeals processes or irritating subminimum standards of Reasonable Doubt. Oscar, those blerrie rhino poachers in the Kruger [National Park], and even corrupt ministers: they’ll all get the death penalty or life in jail, straight.”

Legal experts can’t wait.

“I look at some of the sentences and legal process changes these guys want, and I have to say I’m excited,” said Gavel. “I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”

Rhodents desperately seek new scapegoats

pic: Flicker.com, Kleinz1

Following yet another April graduation weekend in which thousands of students received their degrees and diplomas despite the majority of them having at some stage walked through the the infamous Drodsty Arch pillars, Rhodes University students have today announced their search for something else to blame their various failures on.

According to Rhodes University student superstition, walking through the wooden pillars underneath the iconic white archway below the Administration building and those flowers they plant twice a year to wow parents is an automatic guarantee that the student will fail and not receive their degree.

“I don’t get it,” said Bachelor of Social Science conferee Dow Ndowen. “We all know that a Rhodes degree can survive endless reckless partying, irresponsible substance abuse, overindulgence in a hectic sport schedule, back-to-back seasons of Breaking Bad and How I Met Your Mother, and even an overdependence on all-night last-minute cramming, but these pillars? No! These used to be the straw that broke the Purple Rat's back.”

Ndowen said that the failure of these pillars to produce, er, failure must be down to a sudden lack of potency.

“Their evil degree-ending magic must have run out,” he said, “because it definitely can’t be due to anything else, say, a student actually being responsible and managing his or her time wisely. In fact, I'm tempted to say that the only reason why any of us are graduating is because of God's personal intervention.”

This is not the first time, however, that traditional superstitions have been brought into question by the Rhodes body, with many students now pointing equally damning fingers at other much-loved scapegoats, the SRC and the statue outside the Great Hall.

“I used to be able to blame the Student Representative Council for everything,” said ex-Rhodes student and unpaid intern Jessica Myers, “but now that I’ve graduated I just can’t blame them anymore. It's like they actually have very little to do with my individual shortcomings, failures and daily gripes, or something. Something must be broken in its inner workings.”

The statue, too, has been called into question.

“I know that I use every possible opportunity to deride women and talk about how I’d totally fuck bitches and smash vagina and just generally squeeze in as much manly, misogynistic charisma into my anecdotes,” said BSC graduate Jeremy Atkinson, “but it might surprise many, many people to know that I’m actually still a virgin.”

According to Rhodes legend, if a virgin graduates, the statue’s sword will fall to the ground.

“I checked it today. The slut bitch still hasn’t dropped her whore sword. It makes no sense - why would someone just make up a baseless, silly superstition that sneers on the very idea of scientific reality?" said an angry Atkinson, addding that "[he]’d still totally bang her though, not in a weird way, like, if she wasn’t made of metal, and maybe wore something nice and tight, china.”

Rhodes students were reported also able to graduate despite the years-long arduous daily mental violence they've suffered because of the uni's name.

"Something is going very, very wrong," said Journalism Honours recipient Noam Thompson. "People say, 'oh, those are all just weak excuses to justify your failures' - but somehow, despite the daily trauma we've all suffered having to go to a place called Rhodes, we've managed to graduate. It's insane."

In light of all this, the SRC has brought the issue to the fore, and has since confirmed that they are hard at work finding other things for students to blame for whatever difficulty or discontentment they may have.

“We’re thinking of following the crowd with this one and blaming the popular things,” said incumbent SRC President Parson de Buk, “and so in future we’ll just do the South African thing and blame Apartheid or the ANC.”

Those offended by this article can contact anyone but us – preferably the ANC. It’s probably their fault.

"Cheat" lawyer receives international recognition

A former Law student is being honoured by several large Law Universities this week, after numerous news articles and reports published in South Africa proved that he was ridiculously overqualified to be a lawyer.

Lwazi Mzozoyana, who was enrolled to read for a Law Degree at Rhodes University in 2005, is to be the recipient of not one but four honourary law degrees, having been praised as “the very definition of brilliance” and “possessing a legal talent and universal public revulsion far beyond his years and legal experience”.

“If we look at his astonishing list of accomplishments – for example, being found guilty of stealing two fellow student’s assignments from a locked submissions box in 2012, cheating on a law of contract exam in 2007, and also being banned from Rhodes until 2022, which, let me add, was previously a lifetime ban,” said Barry Starr, the Dean of the prestigious Law Faculty at Harvard University, “then we can see that, at the tender age of just 33, he’s amassed the kind of widespread contempt and scornful, dismissive public hatred that most lawyers take years to build up.”

“His utter disregard for the laws and rules of both academic institutions and civil society, his disrespect for moral decency, and his brazen attempts to utterly destroy another Zimbabwean student’s reputation and chances of graduation have shown that he is leagues and bounds ahead of even the most absolutely reviled lawyers who defend paedophiles,” explain Starr. “If you add this to the fact that he’s shown no remorse or shame whatsoever, hell, he might even be TOO ridiculously overqualified to practise law.”

The plans to confer these honourary titles and degrees have been met by widespread approval by members of the legal community.

“It’s simply astonishing,” said lawyer of nearly three decades, Sue Primcourt. “It took me years of defending definitely guilty serial murderers, baby-rapers, and underground sex-slave mafiosos to get even half of the spite and derision he got in just years of study.”

However, for Mzozoyana, this is just the beginning. With promise and accolades such as these, it’s only a matter of time before he takes up political aspirations and becomes President.

“If he works hard, puts in the tireless effort and passionate devotion it takes to succeed in the political sphere, then who knows,” said Starr, “Perhaps he could be as much of a thief as Zuma is (allegedly).”

"It was my pleasure" - God to exam candidates

Following the end of another period of university exams and yet another conferral of bachelor's degrees to students, God, our Almighty and Heavenly Father, the Creator and Saviour, took time out of his busy schedule today to receive thanks and praise for letting so many students pass their exams and finally obtain their university qualifications.

"I'm glad they all remembered to thank me. You know, there are many naysayers who doubt me, who say that I never answer prayers and that I leave the world in a ceaseless cycle of misery and suffering while turning naught but a blind eye to the unending horror many hundreds face on a daily basis," said the 6000-year old Best-selling author in a press conference held in front of a burning bush earlier today, "but I think that all these Facebook statuses are proof enough that I'm here and that I do actually do stuff to help when it matters most. I really help out with the more important things in life."

Experts and university professors have since come forward to confirm the Divine Father's majesty and exam-beating power.

"As we all know, the makeup of a University course and the fact that it's broken down into three or four years to spread out the central concepts of the various fields of expertise into a structured and thematic development of knowledge was specifically crafted to be unbeatable without divine intervention," said the Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Prax Marice. "Even our exams are physically impossible to pass. The questions are literally unanswerable, and even if they were, we employ teams of blind monkeys (which we didn't evolve from) to scribble on the answer sheets and make them illegible and unmarkable."

That so many students passed, say professors and course coordinators, is testament to the unknowable and incomparable magnitude of the Holy Trinity's awesome potency.

"I spend hours a week preparing lectures filled with lies and red herrings that are aimed at misleading our students," said Journalism and Media Studies lecturer Cato Stropteros. "Then, to make matters worse, I routinely set tests, quizzes, essays and semesterly evaluations to ensure that each term's horrendous disfigurement of the truth is being fully absorbed. On top of this, each semester has an extensive collection of hundred-page-long Manifestos filled with falsehoods and slander that are branded ‘required reading’. I don't know how God undoes all my hours of hard work, but it gets me every year."

He added that many students had received God's blessings despite having spent hours in the Temple of Lies, known by many Satanists as "The 24-hour Section" or "The Library".

"Some students passed even though they spent sometimes whole nights in these Bible-denying hate-houses," said Stropteros. "Hell, half of them even preferred a diet of caffeine and energy drinks over holy water, wafers and unleaven bread. It just shows you the extent of God's generosity."

And despite mounting criticism that God had done nothing to prevent war and death in Syria, Ebola, or the abhorrent and not-yet-fully-declassified report into the State-sanctioned human rights violations and atrocious allegations of torture and murder by the CIA, and that even Satanists, atheists, Muslims, and Jews had also passed their exams, many have remained thankful, with Universities across the world introducing sweeping changes to their fundamental structure.

"Clearly, the entire concept of a University is utterly pointless and meaningless, so we're just going to change the university year to be just a two-week period of exams," said Marice. "This way, no one will have to sacrifice thousands of rands and hundreds of hours all in the name of becoming unemployed and overqualified."

At the time of going to press, a thousand other deities had not responded to requests for commentary, leading us to assume that they obviously don't exist.

Pic: wikimedia commons, public domain.

Incredible! Young girl gets crippling student loans, broken dreams at just 14!

Most people would wait until their mid-twenties to mount up crippling student debt and a mountain made entirely out of the shards of shattered, pointless dreams – but 14-year-old Thessalonika Arzu-Embry isn’t most people.

Yes, you heard us. At just fourteen, Thessalonika has done what most would only dream of: get a piece of paper that entitles you to a ceaseless job-quest in a market saturated with equal qualifications and desperate graduates and lets you finally be a part of the horrific system of modern indentured servitude that will have you paying off your tuition until you’re lying on your death-bed, signing away your kidneys to a loan-shark.

“It wasn’t easy,” she said to reporters. “It always helps to have your family around you, supporting you every step of the way.”

Social services are now investigating this abuse.

However, despite this incredible news, some doubt the credibility of her degree.

“A degree at fourteen?” said one fellow graduate. “How can that be a real degree? How are we supposed to take you seriously as a critically-thinking member of worldwide academia and intelligentsia if you’ve never been utterly trashed in a bar on a Friday night rehashing the same old tired arguments to people you’ve just met about why Marxism or Socialism isn’t the answer, or about what the relative merits are of a capitalist democracy in today’s ever-changing political atmosphere? It just doesn’t make sense.”

Others agree.

“Oh, Jesus, when I was fourteen I was also a snotty bookworm,” said one guy who reiterated that this wasn’t a rant borne from ugly, embittered cognitive dissonance and jealousy. “I mean, I could easily have gotten a degree too. Just, you know, I was busy. With stuff.”

Even large corporations have added their voice.

“We congratulate the young girl on this fantastic accomplishment,” said food giant McDonalds, “but we also don’t understand it. She is far too young to work in one of our many chains across the country. Why would you want a degree in Psychology?”

However, Thessalonika remains adamant in the face of heated criticism.

“Many people say that the qualification isn’t worth the piece of paper it’s printed on,” she said, wearing her robes and posing for a photograph that would of course go immediately viral, because people can’t believe that fourteen-year-olds are capable of doing anything more than garbled idiocy.

“I totally disagree. It *is* worth the paper it’s printed on.”