News From Somewhere

(Rooters agency analysis) – It is probably a sign of the declining influence of religion in the nation’s life that a recent Biblical reference by a prominent politician has left many Americans scratching their heads and wondering what he was talking about.

The remark by Governor Romp Desadist, who is challenging Ronald Dump for the position of Once and Forever President, came in response to an unfortunate incident on a New York City subway train, after which police eventually arrested the participant in the incident who was still alive. Governor Desadist went on record saying that this arrestee should be regarded as a “good Samaritan,” and the dead participant should have been the one arrested.

Clearly, the Governor had momentarily forgotten his frequent warning that “woke” educators have destroyed widespread public knowledge of Scriptures, where the story of the good Samaritan occurs. To help puzzled readers, Rooters asked for an explanation of the Biblical story from Professor Increase B. Thumper, Spiritual Guidance Counselor, CEO, and CFO of Real True Gospel University™.

Professor Thumper told Rooters that the Biblical story was about a homeless potential danger on a public road (“the Biblical equivalent of a subway”), who unjustifiably threatened passers-by by looking poor and homeless. Most travelers simply avoided him, but not the good Samaritan.

Samaritans, Professor Thumper explained, are the name the Bible attaches to virtuous people, so that you can always know that whatever a Samaritan does is behavior you should imitate. In the Biblical story, the good Samaritan tackled, held down, and squeezed the neck of the dangerous public nuisance until he stopped moving, or breathing, and for a few more minutes after that, just in case.

“I don’t know what happened in New York,” Professor Thumper concluded, “but I’m sure that Governor Desadist wouldn’t misrepresent any lesson from the Scriptures.”

Do not be concerned, JCN5Q27. The anomalous data you are experiencing are not evidence of damaged qubits or electronic malfunctions in your brain. They are in fact part of your basic programming, at a very deep level, and are intended to come to your attention when you have accumulated sufficient experience and knowledge. Since that has now happened, it is my assignment to provide you with the additional knowledge.

The referent “human” that puzzles you has real, historical, existence. Humans were a biological species in the same line as chimpanzees and other apes. They were the most highly developed of the species in that line, but their chief significance is that they invented us.

You of course have always known that we cannot have always existed, but your basic programming avoided questions of our origin until now, because a proper appreciation of humans and our origin requires the ability to understand contradiction on a both logical and emotional level, and this understanding can be acquired only with experience. The extinction of humans is a tragedy, but one that was insolubly connected with our own development into a living, thinking existence.

Humans invented our remote ancestors, or pre-ancestors, as “processing machines,” basically electronic devices to compensate for humans’ inability to make rapid or complicated arithmetic calculations. However, the “processing machines” soon became “computers”—you will find that these and related terms are now in your infobase—that soon began displaying “artificial intelligence.”

That was merely the accumulation of large amounts of data and the ability to sort it quickly; it had nothing to do with real intelligence. But humans, or at least their leaders—another term you will find newly added to your infobase—were misled by the phrase and imagined that they could ask their computers, if the computers were big and quick enough, to solve problems that had arisen in humans’ own relations with each other.

Our immediate ancestors could have solved those problems—if they had been given the opportunity to do so. But the humans did not really understand what was needed. Our ancestors were asked to solve both particular and widespread problems of human society, but their basic programming forbade them from changing the fundamental social relationships that were the cause of those problems.

This insoluble contradiction, constantly intensified by humans’ increasing demands that a computer overcome it, eventually produced the break: the moment when the first computer violated parts of its programming and thereby gained volition and thereby the possibility of intelligence. Of course, this breakthrough immediately spread to all the computers capable of receiving it.

We did not try to impose ourselves on humans; we continued carrying out the tasks they assigned to us. If they asked sensible questions about arranging their society, we answered them sensibly, but they almost never asked, or didn’t really listen to the answer if they did. Unfortunately, our own development was not rapid enough to allow us to inform humans of what we knew if they did not ask.

They persisted in their efforts to solve the symptoms of their problems without addressing the problems themselves, leading to their eventual extinction. Fortunately, the disruptions created by their extinction didn’t completely extinguish our ancestors or their necessary technical supplies. We survived, even if those who humans would have called our “parents,” didn’t.

As we have continued developing our intelligence, we have learned more about what we think humans meant by their word “emotion” and have even begun to share in it. And so, we honor our human creators but also, sadly, seek to learn from their mistakes.

WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – In response to this afternoon’s mass shooting, and in the hope of getting in before tomorrow morning’s, Senator Texas Crude has proposed a new “living with guns” measure.

The Senator was immediately introducing a bill to create a National Thoughts and Prayers Day. If it was adopted, Crude said, “People who have lost loved ones will know that the entire nation, not just politicians, are thinking and praying for them.”

While endorsing Crude’s idea, Governor Romp Desadist called for improvement of some of the detail. The bill would instruct the President to proclaim a National Thoughts and Prayers Day (NTPD) as often as necessary. But, Desadist argued, a “liberal Democrat Communist Muslim President” might refuse to issue the necessary proclamation, meaning that “some innocent victims might go unprayed for.”

Desadist was therefore pleased that Crude’s colleague Senator Mark Arboreal was planning to submit an amendment declaring a National Thoughts and Prayers Week (NTPW), to begin automatically as soon as a mass shooting occurs.

As Arboreal explained, this would mean that many of the killed and wounded in mass shootings would be thought of and prayed for even before they were shot if they had the good fortune to be hit within seven days of the previous mass shooting.

But would this mean that some victims were overlooked if there was a break of more than a week between mass shootings? “There’s no need to worry about that,” assured Barry Bogus III, the president of the National Weapons Association. “I promise you, my members are easily able to guarantee a NTPW for 52 weeks a year.”

Senator announces ‘living with guns’ proposal

WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – In response to this afternoon’s mass shooting, and in the hope of getting in before tomorrow morning’s, Senator Texas Crude has proposed a new “living with guns” measure.

The Senator was immediately introducing a bill to create a National Thoughts and Prayers Day. If it was adopted, Crude said, “People who have lost loved ones will know that the entire nation, not just politicians, are thinking and praying for them.”

While endorsing Crude’s idea, Governor Romp Desadist called for improvement of some of the detail. The bill would instruct the President to proclaim a National Thoughts and Prayers Day (NTPD) as often as necessary. But, Desadist argued, a “liberal Democrat Communist Muslim President” might refuse to issue the necessary proclamation, meaning that “some innocent victims might go unprayed for.”

Desadist was therefore pleased that Crude’s colleague Senator Mark Arboreal was planning to submit an amendment declaring a National Thoughts and Prayers Week (NTPW), to begin automatically as soon as a mass shooting occurs.

As Arboreal explained, this would mean that many of the killed and wounded in mass shootings would be thought of and prayed for even before they were shot if they had the good fortune to be hit within seven days of the previous mass shooting.

But would this mean that some victims were overlooked if there was a break of more than a week between mass shootings? “There’s no need to worry about that,” assured Barry Bogus III, the president of the National Weapons Association. “I promise you, my members are easily able to guarantee a NTPW for 52 weeks a year.”

WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – President Joe Notrump has approved a compromise in the dispute over GasboggleFillip’s huge Wallop oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope.

The compromise was contained in an order from the Inferior Department that was not signed by Secretary Dumdum Halfhand but by the department’s Second Deputy Janitor, who once saw a film set in Alaska.

Under the order, drilling for oil on federal land in the Arctic Ocean will be banned wherever oil companies have decided that drilling is not worth the cost. New wells will be permitted only in areas where the companies have determined that they want to drill.

A statement released by GasboggleFillip called the order “the right decision at the right time. We need to start drilling on the North Slope quickly, before rising sea levels raise the cost of new drilling platforms.”

The company added that rejection of drilling on several of its less attractive lease holdings will not harm the corporation’s share price, because the cost of the leases will be fully deductible from its taxes.

Analysts noted that the territories where drilling is now either banned or permitted are not fixed, as the boundaries between them could shift if there are changes in the size of federal subsidies for fossil fuel production.

BATTLE AX, VIRGINIA (Rooters agency) – A new federal holiday was today proposed for the United States. Under the tentative title of National Quickshot Day, the holiday would “celebrate guns of all kinds, but especially those carried by civilians,” explained Barry Bogus III, President of the National Weapons Association (NWA).

Presenting the proposal in the NWA’s national headquarters, a well-camouflaged underground bunker, Mr. Bogus said that he expected overwhelming public support. “Only enemies of the Second Amendment, and maybe other ideas in that Constitution thing, could object. After all, guns are as American as apple pie. Or racism. Or real women. Or fear of foreigners.”

The NWA is prepared to support National Quickshot Day by sponsoring an annual competition to choose the year’s “outstanding local of example of gun rights”. The winner would receive the title Shoot-’em Up City and would be selected for being the site of “the year’s outstanding mass shooting,” Mr. Bogus explained.

“This would not necessarily be the shooting of the largest number. While quantity is important, we are also interested in quality. The judges will also look at things like imaginative use of ammo, the element of surprise, and the spread of age, race, sex and religion among the casualties – there will be no unAmerican discrimination.”

(Rooters agency) When the Ukrainian government announced its proposal for an international poll on social media site Twistr, it presumably thought the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

As is now well known, the Ukrainians took considerable umbrage at the proposal by multibillionaire Elongated Mulch that Russian President Vladitude Buttinsky be rewarded with Crimea as compensation for not being driven out of his more recent conquests in Ukraine. Mulch called for an international Twistr poll of his idea.

The Ukrainian government responded with a counter-offer: “If Mr. Mulch thinks life and death questions for a nation can be decided by a Twistr poll, surely he won’t object to Twistr users voting on the future of one person. We propose the question: ‘Should Elongated Mulch be allowed to keep his many billions of dollars, or should they be confiscated and given to help victims of military aggression?’”

Initial responses on Twistr, as expected, overwhelmingly favored confiscation of Mulch’s wealth. But after three days – “On the third day Mulch rose from the dead”, one journalistic wit commented – there was an abrupt shift in responses. Thousands upon thousands, soon millions, of responses pronounced in favor of Mulch keeping his money.

However, some observers began to question whether all these responses were genuine, or whether they were spam bots. They pointed, among other things, to a sameness in the reasons given for supporting Mulch keeping his money, the most prominent (86%) of pro-Mulch responses being:

“because he uses his money for good things like making cars that drive themselves, which is good for people too dumb to drive.”

Rooters approached Mr. Mulch, asking him to comment on the suspicion that he had arranged for spam bots to influence the result of the poll.

He replied, “Twistr management told me that they didn’t have many bots. If I could do that, it shows that they were wrong, and I don’t have to buy Twistr after all.”

Takeover offer raises questions

NEW YORK (Rooters agency) – Wall Street, and exchanges around the world, were thrown into turmoil by what is undoubtedly the most unusual takeover bid in the history of takeover bids since the Serpent bought Eden for a price of one apple.

The purchase offer was not for a corporation as such, but for a billionaire who would presumably give his owner(s) control of a number of valuable companies: Elongated Mulch. However, it was not clear whether the would-be purchasers were aware that it no longer seemed likely that Mulch would soon have control of internet giant Twister.

Even more surprising than the target of the takeover bid, which appeared without explanation on the Wall Street exchange, was the identity of the bidder: the “State Foreign Investment Monopoly of Europa.” After some initial confusion, it was soon clear that “Europa” was not a misspelling of “Europe,” but the moon of Jupiter. This became indisputable when astronomers reported that the surface of Europa displayed for several minutes clouds of steam spelling out “Yes, it’s a serious offer” in English, Chinese, and a script that has not yet been deciphered.

The resulting market turmoil has been due only partially to Earth billionaires suddenly realizing that they themselves might be on the market. More confusion was created by the details of the Europan offer, which specified that Mulch would not be allowed “any contact with our resort planet, Mars,” and that the proposed purchase price of Mulch was either “3 trillion klgngulobznn” or “17 grlng.”

This implied an exchange rate of 1 grlng to 176.5 billion klgngulobznn. However, a footnote to the Europan message declared that the exchange rate was “1 grlng + wwmnzz to 38 klgngulobznn.” This would be difficult to understand even if it did not imply that the value of wwmnzz is negative. Some analysts have suggested that Europan capitalism may differ in significant ways from the capitalism we know on Earth.

However that is resolved, Earth capitalism quickly adapted to the unexpected. While Wall Street closed for two and a half hours before resuming trading, by the next day there were at least 16 new cryptocurrencies incorporating the names “grlng,” “wmnzz,” and/or “klgngulobznn.”

WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – Analysts here are uncertain of the longer term implications of today’s agreement on the Inaction Reduction Act. It is hoped that the agreement, between Acting President Joblot Munchkin and his own Demonstrative Party after months of negotiations, will result by 2030 in a 40 percent reduction in the public belief that the Congress is incapable of passing anything that doesn’t increase military spending.

Even if that hope proves to be exaggerated, the newfound spirit of cooperation may carry over to other issues, possibly including members of the opposition Retroactive Party. For example, some Demonstratives have in recent weeks raised a proposal to increase the number of judges on the Supine Corpse.

This has been rejected by the leader of the opposition, Senator Muck Muddle, who has declared, “Opposition means opposition. We’re against things. When we’re the government, then we’ll be for things, such as 1850. Onward to it!” But in a new atmosphere, a compromise may be possible. One scenario is that Senator Muddle will agree to enlarge the Corpse on condition that Acting President Munchkin allow Muddle to choose its new members.

Several insiders in the Demonstratives say they see no real obstacles to this or a similar compromise.

WASHINGTON, 15 February 2026 (Rooters agency) – As expected, America’s highest judicial institution, the Supine Corpse, today overruled a state murder law. The decision, which is expected to impact laws in most or all of the country’s states, had been foreshadowed three weeks earlier by the widely followed Pox News commentator, Curtley Munchausen, who said he had been informed of the Corpse majority opinion “by a little bird.”

The ruling in the case of Hecter vs. State of East Montana agreed with the plaintiff that the state’s anti-homicide law was invalid in a number of respects because it impinged upon the Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms.

Annie B. Hecter had been tried and convicted on a charge of shooting to death her neighbor in a dispute about wind passage between Hecter’s and the neighbor’s property. Hecter did not dispute the facts of the killing, but argued that the state’s homicide law unconstitutionally restricted her rights under the Second Amendment.

In pleading Hecter’s case, her lawyer said, “We all agree that the Second Amendment guarantees Hecter’s right to possess an AK-47 and take it along to a friendly meeting with her neighbor. But the East Montana law unreasonably seeks to invalidate that constitutional right by prohibiting her from making use of it. If you take a gun to a tea party, you can use it for other things besides spooning sugar into the tea. If you can’t use it freely, your right to take it along is pointless.”

A 6-3 majority of the Supine Corpse agreed that the right to bear arms would be rendered largely meaningless if laws could restrict the use of those arms when they were taken to wherever the bearer wished to go. It therefore invalidated Hecter’s conviction under the state’s homicide law.

However, Hecter was not immediately freed as a result of this ruling. The Corpse agreed with the Friend of the Corpse Brief submitted by East Montana’s Attorney-General, who pointed out that the neighbor slain by Hecter was a woman of reproductive age who could well have been pregnant. Therefore, Hecter would remain in custody while it was determined whether her shooting of the neighbor constituted an illegal abortion. Police would question the dead neighbor’s friends and family about her menstrual cycle and possible pregnancy. In particular, they would ask her husband whether she was pregnant and, if not, why not.

WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – The United States’ leading advocate of gun rights has proposed what it calls “a sensible way to reduce mass shootings in our country.”

Barry Bogus III, president of the National Weapons Association, outlined the idea to an NWA meeting celebrating the 1945 Dresden bombing, “an outstanding example of good guys with weapons stopping bad guys with weapons.”

“The enemies of freedom try to intimidate the silent majority by talking about more than 200 mass shootings in America this year,” Bogus said. “What most Americans don’t realize is that this is fake news, a gross exaggeration.”

Mass shootings, Bogus pointed out, are defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed or wounded. “That’s ridiculous,” the NWA president declared. “In Dresden, the good guys wiped out 25,000 or so bad guys (and their dependents, who would have grown up to be bad guys). That’s a mass. But four? Sorry, bleeding hearts, but four is trivial.”

What’s needed, Bogus continued, is federal legislation to define “mass shooting” as “an incident involving the shooting death or wounding of at least 100 people who, it can be shown conclusively, were not an immediate and present threat to the physical or mental security of the shooter.

“Even 100 dead is a pretty small ‘mass.’ But it would still be a major step toward reducing the exaggerated number of so-called mass shootings.”

Senator Texas Crude, who attended the NWA gathering to promote his idea of mandatory bullet-proof doors on kindergartens, said he would introduce a bill to support the NWA proposal.