Category: Humor

Many officials harbor very little regard for The People they serve. Exhibit A: The madness of Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Dick Tuck, a political prankster who made a satirical run for public office years ago, got less than 10% of the vote. Conceding defeat, he quipped, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

Tuck’s jab at voters was in jest, but it exposed an awkward political truth: While people generally have little respect for today’s elected officials, many officials harbor even less regard for The People they supposedly serve.

Exhibit A: The madness of Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. A multimillionaire coal baron, Manchin is devoted to serving the machinations of profiteering fossil fuel corporations, so he doesn’t even disguise his disdain for “busybodies” (unions, town leaders, nature defenders, farmers, climate activists, et al.) who dare stand up to any god-awful scheme of plunder and pollution the barons dream up.

In the last year, Joe’s been especially PO’d at thousands of commoners who’ve blocked his latest political pipe dream: the 300-mile-long Mountain Valley Pipeline. Pushed by a consortium of huge utilities, it would pump toxic fracked gas through watersheds, towns, farms, etc. in three states for export abroad. “NO!” shouted locals, who spent years exposing the destruction MVP posed, successfully denying permits to build the thing. In short, the people won!

Then, thanks to Big Coal Joe, they lost. Manchin cut a secret dirty deal with top Democrats, including President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass a special federal requirement that the MVP be build — the people be damned. Worse, the cabal agreed to slip it into law without Congress even voting on it.

But hold it — progressives in Congress rallied grassroots people all across the country to rebel against the raw stench of this arrogant, autocratic power play. In October, they forced the lobbyists and lawmakers to pull down their anti-democratic ploy — and they forced Manchin into a Dick Tuck moment, blasting his own constituents as radicals for opposing his pipe dream.

If you sometimes wonder whether Congress is obtuse, narcissistic or just stupid, Manchin is evidence that the answer is yes.

These days, the West Virginia corporate Democrat is mad — in both senses of the word. First, he’s mad at Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Raul Grijalva, Ro Khanna and other gutsy progressive members of the U.S. House. They rose up against their own Party leaders this month to kill Manchin’s corrupt, backdoor effort to force his massive Mountain Valley Pipeline project down the throats of rural and small-town people in his own state. Local people have repeatedly defeated this foul fossil fuel boondoggle, but their senator kept conniving with industry lobbyists and congressional leaders to revive it, trying to stiff the public will.

His latest gambit was to hide the MVP scam in the humongous $850 billion military budget, hoping no one would notice. But Jayapal, Grijalva and a few other progressive leaders did notice… and they had the chutzpa and the votes to strip it out of the Pentagon bill.

This drove the plutocratic senator from being mad (as in angry) to going mad (as in nutty). The defeat of his political scheme, he wailed, was the result of “toxic tribal politics,” adding: “This is why the American people hate politics in in Washington.”

Get a grip, Joe! You’re the one in Washington sneaking around to help the superrich corporate tribe rig government rules to extract more profit from actual toxic contamination of people, whole communities and Mother Nature. You, and your corrupt cohorts, are why millions of Americans hate Washington politics.

Oh, by the way, Senator: If you really think toxic fracked gas pipelines are essential for America’s energy future — why don’t you and your industry funders run some under your neighborhoods for a change?

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, “Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow,” Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots.

He broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried in more than 150 commercial and public stations and on the web.

Latest posts by Jim Hightower (see all)

Pub rock band Oily and the Blanchmange have now played Last Christmas by Wham for the seventh time

Even the jazz-tinged saxophonist Tim Dewberry-Sprocket is getting sick of it.

‘I know it is a classic Christmas song’ bewailed Tim ‘but our singer Sam has now sung it seven times. Seven times in a row. I wish it was a joke, but it isn’t.’

Sam, told us, after singing the song ‘I have an ex, and every time I sing this song, it reminds me of him. If it was a good breakup, and if I missed him, it would make more sense. Sometimes I suppose I like to wallow in self-pity.’

Drummer Norris weighed in ‘When can we play some Iron Maiden? Nothing puts a crowd in the Christmas spirit like a loudly played Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter does it?’

NEW YORK CITY – (Satire News) – The Global Source News Agency reports that weather experts are warning that the Black Sea could become completely dry by 2040.

GSNA reporter Topeka Joplin, said that she spoke with Zoyler Zollicoffer, 43, who is a highly respected meteorologist at Solid State University in San Antonio, who says that due to incessant global warming and catastrophic solar explosions near the Milky Way, the summer heat temps are going to get into the 120s in most of the world’s countries, including the northern countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Pisagovia.

The United Nations is looking to set aside over $26 million to study this weather phenomenon, which has been pegged The Trumpapalooza Global Warming Phenomenon. ■

Elon Musk took to Twitter to call for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci, endorsing a convoluted, right-wing conspiracy theory.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk took to his Twitter account to call for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert, endorsing a convoluted, right-wing conspiracy theory that claims Dr. Fauci financed the COVID-19 pandemic. Musk then proceeded to mock transgender people by adding “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

Gee, the “world’s richest right-wing troll” said what? Now, I realize it’s a really low bar, but I think we’ve finally found someone who actually knows less about pronouns than Herschel Walker. Not to be critical, but a good sign you may have a wee bit too much money on your hands, is when you blow 44 billion dollars, just to call people names.

Oh sure, I’m positive Elon Musk, like any right-wing crusader, gets a real kick out of using his Twitter to “Own the Libs.” OK, I get that, but just who does he suppose is actually buying his friggin’ cars, anyway? I’m pretty sure it isn’t Trump’s toothless, MAGA half-wits who are filling his Tesla showrooms. Hell, if it were, they’d have to tear out all their restrooms, and put in porta-potties.   

Of course, someone with such a big audience as Elon Musk calling for Stalin-like show trials has to be taken seriously. Why if Musk behaves any more sinisterly, he may as well just go ahead and get the plastic surgery to turn up the corners of his mouth. I mean, if Donald Trump can do a “Home Alone” cameo, there’s no reason Elon can’t do one for “Batman.”  

Anyway, at the rate he’s going, the only advertisers that Twitter will have left, will be the MyPillow guy and a few of those fake Viagra sellers. Of course, like any right-wing lunatic, Musk will try and blame it all on the “Deep State.” Well, I got news for Elon. There is no “Deep State,” because if there were, he would have already had a fatal accident in that shiny, new Tesla of his by now.

Johnny Robish is an actor, comedian and political satirist – who is considered one of America’s most trusted sources for fake news.

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Today, let’s whip up a holiday sampler of some short snippets. We start with this anonymously supplied ternary from a C program, which certainly terned my head:

return (accounts == 1 ? 1 : accounts)

If accounts equals 1, return 1, otherwise return accounts. Perfect.

On the other hand, submitter Born 2 Ruby, Forced 2 PHP was hired to work on a Ruby on Rails application, but after starting, discovered that the RoR app was an aspiration and the day to day work was to keep the legacy PHP application from falling over in production. So as it turns out, this submitter should have said “no”, when they said “yes”, much like this code:

function yesorno($in) {
  if($in == 'YES') return 'YES';
  else             return 'NO';
}

And finally, another anonymous submitter sent us this comment they wrote in their code, which I think speaks both for themselves and for anyone who even inherits that code.

// i should have commented this stupid code

MONTECITO, California – (Satire News) – L.A. Watchdog Witnesser reporter Lulu Cul de Sac, reports that thanks to the very popular Netflix documentary, “Harry and Meghan,” Meghan Markle has just become 10 times more popular than her sister-in-law Kate Middleton.

Miss Cul de Sac stated that even the Meghan Markle bobblehead doll has sold over 27 million dolls compared to Kate’s which has only sold 481,903 dolls.

Kate’s husband, Prince William stated that he believes that it is all a hoax and noted that even the hate-spewing, sexual predator Donald Jonathan Erasmus Trump told his only friend, Greg “The Rodent” Gutfeld that Kate should demand a recount and she should also go to court and sue Harry and Meghan for at least $7.4 million.

Meanwhile, Liz Cheney, who hates Trump the Nazi more than porpoises hate sharks, notes that El Estupido Trump needs to move to Russia so he can be with Vlady Putin, his suck buddy.■

Saint Peter was a bit of an upside down personality, according to the author’s drinking buddy, God.

When we got together for coffee one morning, God said, “When I was telling you about crackpot conversions, I somehow forgot to mention Saint Peter, otherwise known as “The Rock.” This was a reference to his rock-hard faith in Jesus.”

“He was also called ‘the fisher of men,’ I seem to recall,” I observed.

“That’s true, but I don’t think he ever fished for men. Or women, either. He’d throw a baited line into the Sea of Galilee and pull out a tilapia or a catfish, then say to his catch, ‘Okay, fishy, put your faith in Jesus.’ Or he’d tell the fish, ‘Lucky you! After you’re filleted and fried, you’ll be going to Heaven.’ Sometimes he would catch and then release a fish so that it could spread the Word of Jesus to other fish.”

“Rather than the Rock, I think he should have been called ‘Off the Rocker.’”

“Especially when he’d take a batch of his fish to a temple and place them on pews so they could listen to the preacher proclaiming the Gospels. Certain temples ended up smelling powerfully of rotten fish. So powerfully that a number of decent Christians gave up their faith because they felt it had gotten a very bad odor.”

“Did you punish Peter? Nowadays he would be put in a home for the mentally compromised — aka loonies.”

“I planned to break all his fishing rods, but he decided that, having done so well with fish, he would try to convert the Romans. Whereupon he traveled to Rome in order to do so. Shortly after his arrival, he approached the Emperor Nero and told him to stop playing his fiddle because, according to Peter, ‘the Word of Christ is much better than your music.’ This was a bad mistake, one that inspired Nero to crucify Saint Peter upside down. Truth to tell, he was upside down already.”

“We know the last words of Jesus on the Cross? What were the last words of Peter on his cross?”

“‘Lord Jesus Christ, I’ll be making my trip to Heaven feet first!’”

At this point, God and I ordered a second cup of coffee. The barista must have heard the tail end of our conversation, because she delivered our coffee, then said, “Here’s your own trip to heaven, guys.”

Part of a series detailing Lawrence Millman’s experiences with his drinking buddy, God. Soon to be gathered together, assuming a publisher is interested, as a mini-memoir entitled “Drinks With God.”

Lawrence Millman is the author of 18 books, including such titles as Last Places, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Hiking to Siberia, At the End of the World, Fungipedia, and — forthcoming — The Last Speaker of Bear. Shop for his books at Thrift Books and other book sellers.

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According to newly revealed secret info, a certain “attack dog congressman” in Washington, D.C. turns into a werewolf at night.

Known by day as a rabid attack dog congressman who makes it look easy to destroy his liberal political enemies, Rep. Jim Jordan transforms at night into a flesh-eating werewolf. This according to a new video tape that provides intimate personal details about the conservative congressman. The tape has not yet been independently verified.

Who it was that released the tape and for what reason remains unclear. But the tape reveals what may sound unbelievable — that this Republican pit bull of Congress becomes a nocturnal werewolf scaring the living daylights out of his Democratic arch-rivals on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

The Ohio Congressman has achieved a sterling reputation of making mincemeat of his opponents while looking disheveled in his customary white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, often with the shirt’s top button unfastened at the neck. He looks like the little kid among adults with his suit jacket taken off while sitting among his colleagues who wear severe funeral-appropriate dark business attire during House committee hearings.

Especially unreal but happens to be the God-honest truth is that Jordan’s suit jacket has its own Twitter account, which says morosely, “all I want is to be worn.” For why Jordan doesn’t wear a jacket, one of those Communist U.S. newspapers suggested it was because he gets overheated when interrogating uncooperative witnesses at Committee hearings, as would be expected if you’re a werewolf with too much fur on your body.

Some people might not be all that shocked that based on his mad-dog daytime appearance, at night he becomes this roving, growling beast submerged in swamps, forests and castles near towns seeking life-sustaining nourishment in the form of human flesh.

In the confidential video tape that was never supposed to see the light of day, Jordan disclosed that his secret life-long ambition was to play himself as a supernatural vampire in a horror movie, arising from the dead at night to drink the blood of the living by biting their necks with long pointed canine teeth. In the tape, Jordan said it was a vampire he always wanted to be and not a werewolf for one simple understandable reason: Werewolves are mortal and get old just like humans while vampires don’t age and are immortal.

“I could have lived forever if fate had gone my way letting me be a vampire,” Jordan lamented in the tape. “But I guess that’s the breaks, or as we say back home in Urbana, Ohio, where I was born, c’est la vie.”

Perhaps inspired by Rep. Jordan’s werewolf alter ego, Herschel Walker, the ex-football star and losing candidate in the recent run-off election for Georgia senator revealed (and I’m not making this up either) his own enlightening thoughts about the werewolf vs. vampire comparison. Walker told reporters, in totally normal comments like anybody aspiring to become a U.S. Senator would say, that he had dreams of becoming a werewolf, particularly because he had just recently found out that a werewolf can kill a vampire, although some negative types might refute that idea.

“Vampires are some cool people, are they not?” asked Walker during one of his campaign stops for Senator, which might explain in part why he was such a deserving candidate for high office. He added, however, that werewolves were more his style in that they have a predilection to eat the flesh of their enemies.

In a brilliant statement that made perfect sense to anybody with half a brain, which leaves out of course the “stupid woke” news media scratching their heads of what exactly he meant, Walker added that “you gotta have a stake, gotta have a thing to kill him in the heart,” presumably meaning by “him” vampires and not your friendly homeowner next-door neighbor Joe Blow, although who really knows for sure even for those with half a brain.

Meanwhile, Jordan, a former wrestling coach, leaves no choke holds barred in delighting in pinning his Democratic foes to the proverbial mat.

In that regard, Jordan stands to become the next chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives since his Republican Party has regained control of that chamber following the results of the November midterm elections.

In this role, he has pledged to investigate officials at the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Dr. Anthony Fauci of Covid-19 fame, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, not to mention the President himself, and anything else that walks on two feet. In the secret tape just released, Jordan says he can’t wait to dig his “teeth” into the investigations, something he has great experience doing as a werewolf.

Whether Jordan’s victims survive the ordeal or not, one thing is for certain. The Congressman will continue to draw ridicule from the half-baked Communist press, who in a too-easy putdown of his being a lackey for former President Donald Trump, call him Trump’s “national champion dog” and the “Mar-a-Lago mutt,” named after Trump’s lavish residence in South Florida.

Members of the media better watch out lampooning this particular hard-charging Congressman for he may come after them in the middle of the night, especially if there’s a full moon above, doing what werewolves have an insatiable need to do.

Eric Green has Donald Trump to thank for a number of his satirical articles. As long as The Donald is around, Eric will continue to have new material to write about him. Eric finds writing satire a welcome escape from the realities of life. When he’s not trying to be satirical, Eric has been a former newspaper reporter, ex-press aide to a U.S. Senator on Capitol Hill, and ex-writer in the federal government. He’s also the author of three mostly humorous books, the one he’s most proud of is called Temporary Insanity, Costa Rica, My Way. For fun, he practices playing Beatles songs on the piano.You can find more about him on LinkedIn.

Latest posts by Eric Green (see all)

Billionaire whiz kid and social media czar Elon Musk will reportedly issue a statement where he claims to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. The assertion by the prominent technocrat is said to be based on an advanced genealogical mapping software he has developed.

According to a Musk insider, who asked not to be named for their protection as well as their family, the Boring tunnel builder has always been fascinated with tracing his lineage to help explain what he called his own “incredible mind and sense of humor.”

“He wasn’t satisfied with the answers he was getting with over-the-counter DNA samplers,” said the source, ”so he employed leading authorities in the field of genetics, chemistry and crime lab investigation as well as hotel maids to assist him to dramatically improve the science of genetic research.”

One of the cutting edge features of the program is said to be its ability to trace specific names from generations of relatives even if they had never submitted biological samples. ”Finding out that he was related to Jesus was just a happy coincidence,” said the confident.

Musk, who’s African American, plans to release supporting data when he publicly introduces the company via his Twitter feed. The ancestral program is expected to be marketed for commercial use through his newly formed entity dubbed ‘X Y See’.

Although Musk will announce his family ties with Jesus, and by inference God, he will not claim to be Jewish. Said the insider, “Musk isn’t about to imply he’s Jewish so as not to alienate a good portion of his own disciples.”

Elon has also reportedly told those close to him that he finds it puzzling that if Jesus was actually Jewish why no one who’s Jewish is named Jesus.

This is a friendly reminder to read our rules.

Memes, social media, hate-speech, and pornography are not allowed.

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Today’s anonymous submitter sends us a pile of code that exists to flummox us. It’s consfuing, weird, and I don’t understand it, even as I understand it. So we’re going to walk through this packet of Python in steps, to see if we can understand what’s going on.

First is this handy helper function, to turn a value into a number:

def to_number(s):
    try:
        if not s:
            return 0
        number = float(s)
        return int(number) if number.is_integer() else number
    except (TypeError, ValueError):
        return s

This doesn’t start too badly. If the value is falsy (None, for example), return 0. If it has a value, though, turn it into a float. If the resulting float doesn’t have a decimal part, convert it into an integer. I’ve got some complaints about a method returning two different types, but I understand the urge.

But then we get to the exception handler. If, for some reason, this conversion fails we return the input. This method shouldn’t be named to_number, it should be named to_number_if_the_input_is_a_number_otherwise_we_return_the_input, because that’s a behavior that’s guaranteed to confuse someone someday.

Okay, I understand that method, so let’s look into another.

@staticmethod
def get_product_property(product_id, property):
    from utils import to_number

    prop = ProductProperty.objects.filter(product_id=product_id, property=property).first()

    value = None if prop is None else prop.value
    if not value:
        return [0, 0] if property.lower() in PROPERTIES_TO_SPLIT else 0

    if property.lower() in PROPERTIES_TO_SPLIT:
        return list(map(to_number, value.split(",")))

    return to_number(value)

One of the first rules in Python: put all your imports in one place, and that place is definitely not at the start of a method. Now, admittedly, this can boost startup times if it’s an expensive module to load, but it also means the first call to this method will take a lot longer.

Okay, so we take a product_id and the property and search the ProductProperty lookup table to find the first match, so we can use the value stored in the DB. Then, we get to something terrible. There is a PROPERTIES_TO_SPLIT constant, containing a list of property IDs. Because sometimes, the data in the database is a list of values as a comma-separated string. Sometimes it isn’t. This is worse than stringly typed data, it’s stringly-multiply-typed data.

But that explains why to_number returns the input on an error- sometimes we pass it an array of numbers.

So now we get to the centerpiece of this sample.

@classmethod
def get_closest_named_product(cls, product):
    from core.products import PRODUCTS
    """
        product = {"interval": (123, 456), "value": (789, )}
        named_products = {
            "some_name": {"interval": (987, 654), "value": (321, )},
            "some_other_name": {"interval": (123, 456), "value": (789, )},
            ...
        }
        -> returns "some_other_name"

        do this by multiplying the product dollar values and finding the named_products
        with a product that's closest to it
    """

    def values_product(item):
        return functools.reduce(operator.mul, itertools.chain(*item.values()))

    product_product = values_product(product)  
    named_products = {
        k: values_product(v)
        for k, v in PRODUCTS.items()
    }  

    def key(item):
        return abs(product_product - item)

    selected_product = min(named_products.values(), key=key)
    product_name = {v: k for k, v in named_products.items()}
    return product_name[selected_product]

This helpfully has a very thorough code sample in the documentation. Well, maybe not helpfully, because I have no idea what’s going on. A product is apparently a combination of an interval and a value, which are dollar values, so I don’t think this is time series data. The way we determine if two products are “close” is based on “multiplying the product dollar values”. Why? I don’t understand what this is for. Maybe the code will make it clearer.

We create a convenience function value_product with does some functools and iterntools magic to flatten a product and multiply all the numbers together.

Then we repeat this for all the products in our PRODUCTS constant, which we imported at the top (again). But wait, a PRODUCTS constant? Yes! There’s a hard-coded list of products in our application code- our application code which queries a database. Well, that’s fantastic.

Then we chuck another convenience function, key in there: just take the absolute value of our product_product‘s difference from the item in question. We use that to (ab)use the min function to search for the minimum difference. Finally, we invert the relationship between keys and values, so that we can lookup the product based on that minimum difference… wait, does this mean that the products in named_products don’t store the whole interval/value pair? I don’t understand. Does this code even work?

Our submitter writes:

Not that anyone seems to care, this code has been in production for 6 years already.

In this case, the code does work, sometimes, but it’s extremely error prone. And the original author knows this. They wrote some unit tests, and commented the unit test for to_number like so:

KEY WEST, Florida – (Satire News) – The Key West city council has just announced that effective immediately anyone who is a member of the Republican party will not be allowed to visit the City in the Middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

According to Papaya Bamboo with Tabloid Today, the mandate was issued because the local citizenry just got fed up with the arrogant, sarcastic, manner that the members of the GOP employ.

One local hair salon owner, Brucey Loudermilk, stated that female customers who are card-carrying GOPettes seem to think that they do not have to tip.

Brucey noted that most of the older blue-haired females also smell highly of compound W, Geritol, and Preparation H.