humor

Since politics has become a year-round hunt with no definable season, this article is offered as a public service for those who want to become political sharpshooters but aren't completely familiar with the vocabulary of this most ancient and ruthlessly brutal of human blood sports. Politics – The art of manipulating people. This definition can be infinitely refined and redefined but those five words are its essence. Democracy – A system of thuggary in which the majority enforces its will on everyone else, as opposed to the original United States, which was a constitutional republic featuring a minimal government empowered to protect the rights of individuals from the thuggary of the majority.

Do you know what month it is? No, just knowing the calendar name of the month isn't enough. You need to know what Month the month is. December, for example, and for real, depending on which calendar you look at, on which website, is, among other things, Hi Neighbor Month, National Stress-free Family Holidays Month, and Learn a Foreign Language Month, the latter of which should not be allowed to spill over into January which is Walk Your Pet Month, the poor critter having already waited for you since last January as it is. Nobody knows who names these Months other than the Month-namers themselves. What is known is that many of these Months are fraught with self-serving special interest social, political and cultural over- and undertones.

Since the Catholic Church scored big with its first Seven Deadly Sins back in Century No. Six they've recently decided to do a sequel (Seven Deadly Sins II?). Predictably, the new Deadlies are a mix of politically correct, socially manipulative and ruling-class-friendly injunctions. And vague. What is "obscenely" rich? What is "social" justice? The church, of course, is full of deadly sins itself, such as pedophilia and power-drunkenness. The Vatican, with all its gold and ivory inlaid art treasures and bejeweled crucifixes and priceless paintings and statuary and such is "obscenely" rich. What they could and should have done was identify real sins that really make real people in the real world worse off, like these:

The folks at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services have devised a new citizenship test for those few illegal immigrants who, for some unknown reason, are actually trying to become lawful citizens. The new questions, the USCIS claims, are calculated to better measure how well newbies understand what it means to be an American rather than how well they can memorize answers. Of course, most libertarians are convinced that most natural born citizens don't know what it really means to be an American either. As a service to all, here are some actual USCIS test questions followed not by the politically correct answers but by the actual realpolitik answers that have been certified as being true based on real-life experience.

Now for the Nervous News at Nine. A bomb scare in Piddlyboro, Vermont. Police, sheriff's department, state troopers, SWAT teams, bomb squads, FBI, BATFE, Homeland Security, National Guard units and the town dogcatcher converged on a "suspicious brown paper bag" left unattended in front of Mother McRaggedy's Second Hand Store on Main Street. Following a six-hour standoff, a $190,000 remote-controlled ordinance-disposal robot was sent in. The bag contained an empty Mad Dog 20/20 wine bottle, left there the night before by Elmer Swilling, the town wino and dogcatcher. Grumbly Freehold, the county's only self-professed libertarian, later questioned why a Middle Eastern terrorist would want to blow up Mother McRaggedy's Second Hand Store in the first place. Or how they ever would have heard of Piddlyboro. Or Vermont.

The folks at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services have devised a new citizenship test for those few illegal immigrants who, for some unknown reason, are actually trying to become lawful citizens. The new questions, the USCIS claims, are calculated to better measure how well newbies understand what it means to be an American rather than how well they can memorize answers. Of course, most libertarians are convinced that most natural born citizens don't know what it really means to be an American either.