All Entries in the "Soft News" Category

Colombia court dumps 1920 law banning foreign ‘idiots’

Colombia’s Constitutional Court has dumped a law prohibiting foreign “idiots” and “cretins” from entering the country.

The law was adopted in 1920 and stated that foreign citizens may be turned away if they suffer from certain mental illnesses or infectious diseases, or if they are alcoholics, “idiots” or “cretins.”

“Those who suffer from mental abnormality, including dementia, mania, general paralysis, chronic alcoholism, ataxia, epilepsy; as well as idiots, cretins, and cripples whose injuries impede their work,” will be turned away, the 1920 law said.

The connotations of these words has changed over the 96 years since the law was passed, and over time it has become an explicit form of discrimination.

The court dumped the law because they believe that this discrimination violates principles of equality and human dignity, and because it uses offensive and excluding language.

– Thomas Graham May 24, 2016

Thanks to David Mullings, Colombian Intellectual

Taxpayers Place Economic Sanctions on Treasury Department

(Moline — Money Talks — May 11, 2016)

A cell of angry taxpayers has come up with an innovative way to get back at the Internal Revenue Service. They are instituting economic sanctions on an agency and government that they charge is incompetent and arrogant. The group feels that holding back their taxes due might get someone’s attention.

“These government people spend out tax dollars like they fell from the sky,” said Oral Riche, a longtime taxpayer who has had enough. “They drop bombs on civilians and prop up military dictatorships in the name of the American people.”

Riche told The Horseshoe that he plans to enforce the sanctions by depriving “an out of control monster” from further income taxes. Only when others join the populist movement will it have teeth.

“Right now we are only a small thorn in the side of the evil money machine,” he explained, “but with a few million Americans refusing to pay we will have made our point. They can arrest some of us but not all of us.”

Naming corporate welfare as the most serious issue, Riche pointed to garbage public education, twisted foreign policies and the crumbling of basic infrastructure as the targets of this fiscal protest.

“If you cut off their money they can no longer continue to do these evil things in the name of the country. They win when they keep us scared off terrorists when they are the terrorists,” he whispered. “Greed is greed and we don’t expect that to go away overnight. We just want the feds to stop pissing away our money like drunken submariners on a weekend pass.”

– Attila Diggins

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Shoplifters Anonymous To Convene

(Gunnison, CO — Sticky Fingers Review — May 8,  2016)

Over 3000 members of the burgeoning Shoplifters Anonymous Foundation are expected in Gunnison next week for that organization’s annual convention.

Arriving from points afar such as Key West and Nome the participants will sit through 3 days of strenuous seminars, group therapies and several morning spiritual awakenings. These presentations are meant to toughen up the troops and shed light on the disease of stealing.

The 3000 will then have three hours off each afternoon to hone skills on North Main Street. Merchants, working with the SAF will be able to easily identify potential problem shoppers by the large red diamond painted on each forehead. In addition each recovering crook will display a distinct badge that reads: “I have sticky fingers.”

It is not clear why Gunnison was chosen for the meetings since the city has the nation’s toughest shoplifting laws (Ordinance #611 makes even thinking about stealing a misdemeanor and actual theft punishable by flogging for first time offenders.

Nonetheless the infamous Palmer’s Shindig will begin to arrive Tuesday. The Gunnison Chamber of Commerce urges all merchants and loiterers to extend every Western Slope hospitality during the short stay.

– Small Mouth Bess

Manana Stressing Out Again

(Colorado Small Towns — High and Higher — April 24, 2016)

Manana (Colorado) residents are likely to experience increased stress in 2016 according to postulated statistics arriving in our outbox by the minute. In the minute Colorado burgh, 34% of the town’s reasonable people say they are more likely to fly off the handle or in some cases overreact to daily tension and negative stimuli than in 2014.

A majority ay the town has become a pressure cooker while over 11% report having trouble with rural routines.

Those surveyed as part of a social reach out from Denver singled out summer traffic, dog waste, increased lawn responsibilities, high grocery prices and the gov’ment as the major sources of their befuddlement while another 17% admitted that the strain of baiting hooks, running to town for toilet paper and organizing camping gear could push them over the precipice at any given moment.

In response to this state of emergency someone’s gov’ment is building landing zone front porches on existing structures as Soul Recovery Quadrants. If this fails to remedy the crisis the authorities intend to put the entire town on medication….or was that mediation?

Are We Reasonable Anymore?

(Sicilian-Hibernian Report  —  April 15, 2016)

Due to an apparent crisis of confidence in the American people, the United States Supreme Court, in cooperation with the Surgeon General and the Transportation Safety Administration, has downgraded the American version of the near universally recognized “Reasonable Man” standard to the slightly less rigorous but much better fitting “Barely Above An Idiot” standard.

An embarrassed  United States Supreme Court has determined that because there are so few actual ‘reasonable men’ left in America upon which to draw criteria to implement the ‘reasonable man’ standard, and because the public at large is largely unreasonable, the standard ‘reasonable man’ standard no longer cuts the mustard.

The highest Court in the land has lowered the bar and media reaction has been ecstatic labeling the case the “Call A Spade A Spade” decision.

Quoting from the Summary at the front of the Opinion (because nobody likes to read the whole thing):
“Americans are no longer legally bound to behave like reasonable men even if they are women. From now on, the American people will bear no burden or expectation of acting reasonably, in any situation, any longer, by anyone’s standards. Notwithstanding the foregoing, all immigrants shall continue to be required to be reasonable at all times, temporarily, until we figure out what’s going on.”

Writing for the Court’s majority the late Justice Antonin Scalia had once noted that the Court’s ruling could be seen as a recognition that the nation had become a “continental community of unreasonable nitwits who can no longer grasp the golden ring of reasonable behavior and thought.”

In a stunning development, the ghost of the said Scalia has appeared in front of the Supreme Court building confiding to corporate media nearby that “most Americans wouldn’t know a reasonable man if one soundly slapped them like a wet salmon.”

Meanwhile Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that regardless of the fish reference, Justice Scalia wouldn’t know a reasonable man dressed in black robes or white ones.

*Justice Sotomayor noted for the record that she has no intention of paying any attention to this ruling and she doesn’t expect anyone else to do so either.
*Justice Kennedy disagrees with the decision but believes it is not so bad as to be unreasonable and prefers to ‘get along’ so Justice Kennedy therefore joins in the majority.
*Justice Clarence Thomas added nothing and desires readers to guess at whether he joined the majority or the minority in this decision or possibly just blew this one off.

– Ms. Lina Baquere

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Hinsdale County Bans Cruise Control

(Lake City — Slumgullion Stew — April 1, 2016)

Drivers within the confines of Hinsdale County must refrain from employing cruise control when operating their vehicles according to a quart decision here. County commissioners, alarmed at the incompetent driving this winter, are outlawing procedures that “contribute to mindlessness and poor attentiveness on roads, slick or otherwise”.

The decision was precipitated when one part-time resident ran his pickup into a local tavern, frightening the patrons and destroying an abandoned planter precariously perched on the porch. He was reportedly going 45 miles per hour with the dial set on cruise control.

“There is no need to allow motorists to employ this kind of convenience function in a town where the speed limit is 25,” said one commissioner known to secretly support a return to horse-only travel in town.

Fortunately none of the customers in the noted bar were paying attention to this news story and therefore escaped unscathed. Lake City already has the strictest horn ordinance in the state.

– Uncle Pahgre

“Utah ain’t so bad just so long as you are near the ocean.”

– Earl Macadoo