The President kicked off his re-election campaign with a stark warning about his likely opponent in the race. Brendan Hubert Richards III, age 35, will likely win the primary for his party in the next month. The eighty-one-year-old Biden expressed his concerns that his opponent dislikes old people and will likely enact policies that leave anyone older than forty in dire straights. Mr. Richards was formally diagnosed with gerontophobia (the fear of elderly people) by his psychiatrist in his teens. The President highlighted Mr. Richard's negative comments about AARP advertising and persistent lobbying, the smell of nursing homes, retired people taking all the pickleball court times, and his general dislike of the Greatest Generation. The Richards campaign released a proposed policy document highlighting Richards' approach to growing new businesses led by young CEOs, financing and subsidizing daycare programs for working families, reduction of Medicare spending, government financing for youth training programs, and mandatory retirement for government employees at 45. “It's a bunch of malarkey!”, said the president at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The president has planned stops in Florida and Arizona where he will take his message to people his age. Critics of the President believe that he has ephebiphobia (fear of youth), will only appeal to older people, and will likely fail to gain enough traction with youthful voters to win.
The House of Representatives easily passed the Defend Democracy Day Act after negotiations with the US Senate. The President said he will happily sign the bill into law. Defend Democracy Day is colloquially known as “Insurrection Day” and has been informally celebrated throughout the nation since the US Capitol Attack on January 6, 2021. This new federal holiday always occurs on January sixth with a floating Monday if it occurs on a weekend. It is a celebration of the day a treasonous US President and his mindless followers attempted to overturn the will of the American people but were prevented by the brave actions of outnumbered police officers. Unsurprisingly, elected representatives are generally not praised, condemned, or even mentioned. Several big cities have been celebrating the day with celebrations with well-attended parades that include effigies of the guilty US Capitol attackers (the QAnon Shaman is very popular) and President Trump supporters (Rudy Giuliani is also popular) behind bars, Capitol Police heroes, and short reenactments of the attack and defense. In memorial ceremonies, the names of the police officers are read and praised. The names, crimes, and sentences of the attackers are also read, but they are cursed, mocked, and ridiculed relentlessly. Even little kids are permitted to use curse words on this holiday. Common greetings said in jest on this holiday include “Happy Insurrection Day!”, “Treasons Greetings” and “'Tis the season for treason!”
The tourism economy of Venice, Italy has taken another blow from restrictions as overweight American tourists have been banned from visiting. Venice, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been sinking at steady rate for decades, until recently when that rate increased dramatically. Between sea level rise and the subsidence of the city, more frequent and higher levels of flooding continue to plague the city causing damage to cultural heritage sites and soggy footwear. The Venetian mayor's report on subsidence of the city shows a higher rate of measured sinking of the city, which coincides with increases in increasingly large American tourists. The mayor, in a press conference, also pointed to cruise ship companies limiting the number of passengers by weight and the obesity rate of Americans at more than 40% of the population. The MOSE Project (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), an expensive engineering marvel consisting of a series of flood barriers around the Venice lagoon to limit flooding events in Venice, has so far failed to achieve its goals, instead reaching new records for both floodwaters and government corruption scandals. UNESCO has warned Venice that it will be removed from the World Heritage list if the city sinks any lower into the lagoon, the Piazza San Marco remains more wet than dry, and most of the fabulous architecture of the city must be visited in scuba gear. The mayor and the city council moved quickly to ban American tourists with a body mass index (BMI) of more than 30, causing concern and outrage among members of the Institution for the Protection and Conservation of Gondolas and Gondoliers which had recently started advertising wider gondolas for larger tourists.
With more than 40% of Americans considered obese and the challenges of getting anyone to eat less and exercise more (or at all), the US Food and Drug Administration has “thrown in the towel”. Starting in February, Ozempic and other antidiabetic drugs with weight loss side effects will be available free of charge with no doctor visit or prescription needed. In fact, the FDA will hire staff to give away the drugs on street corners next to the drug dealers. Anyone looking even slightly overweight will get a free three-month supply whether they want it or not. Fast food restaurants will be required to provide the drugs with every purchase. The stock price for Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic, reached new highs on the announcement, with other pharmaceutical companies stock prices rising as well. The cost of one year of free weight loss medication dispensing is expected to cost the American taxpayer more than $8 billion over three years. When asked about the negative effects of these free medications, the FDA commissioner responded that deaths from the use of these medications would be much lower than the number that die each year from obesity and its related comorbidities. This “medical investment” is likely to reduce the number of deaths from obesity by at least 250,000 per year, eventually eliminate the estimated $117 billion in costs to society from obesity, and significantly reduce state and federal expenditures for health care under Medicare and Medicaid programs. The FDA is considering proposals from the American Medical Association to offer free weight loss medications through the mail, at grocery stores, and at buffet-style restaurants.
Tom Smith, bank manager at The Big Bank of Wellington in Wellington, Arkansas, accused a toddler of orchestrating a bank robbery on Tuesday. Mr. Smith claims that the toddler pulled a gun on one of his bank tellers, calmly demanded the cash in the drawer, and asked the teller to call the bank manager over. Two armed accomplices inside the bank stood watch as the toddler managed the bank employees. When Mr. Smith arrived at the teller's counter, the toddler shoved the gun in his face and ordered him to open the vault. One of the accomplices then took Mr. Smith to the vault to collect the cash there. The entire robbery took less than four minutes, and the suspects were last seen getting into car outside the bank and fleeing, the toddler struggling with a large bag of cash and the gun. The Wellington police apprehended the older suspects later in the day. Several toddlers matching the description provided by the bank employees were picked up, but all had solid alibis. Two days after the robbery, another toddler suspect was found smoking a cigarette outside The Lonely Kitty, an infamous strip club on the South side. Gerald James “Shorty” McGill, a little person with dwarfism, was taken into custody on suspicion of leading the robbery at the bank. In an unprecedented move, a police lineup was used. Seven toddlers from the city were placed into the lineup with Mr. McGill. The bank manager could not positively identify any of the members of the lineup as the toddler from the robbery. Mr. Gill and the toddlers were released. Several toddlers complained that Mr. McGill was “stinky”, they were hungry, and threw fits about not being able to watch videos on the officer's phone. Detectives are reviewing the surveillance video for more clues.
The medical device maker Brainr has filed a request to begin human trials for its latest break through in mind control technology. The Food and Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, the branch of the FDA responsible for premarket approval of such devices, acknowledged the application and will provide an expedited review. While the FDA did not provide justification for the accelerated process, sources indicate that Brainr is secretly led by the US Central Intelligence Agency under a shadowy Project MKUltra that started in the 1950s. That CIA program involved the original work to develop procedures and drugs for brainwashing and psychological torture. While MKUltra was halted in 1973, related programs continued to operate in the shadows. Brainr received funding in 2021 through In-Q-Tel, which is a venture capital firm funded by Congress and created to support the CIA's intelligence capabilities. Brainr's mind control device uses wetware connections to the brain implanted by a robotic brain surgeon. Those connections run to a small processor planted at the base of the subject's skull. The processor has Wi-Fi and cellular connections for real-time data exchange. Brainr's website lists the capabilities of the device which include direct advertisement injection, onboard sentiment analysis, thought collection, and direct action injection. Brainr has already signed more than twenty advertising agencies for early access to the test group of willing subjects, who have been promised a lot of free stuff. The CIA's use of the technology remains a secret for now, but several leaders in third world nations expressed concerns that their “Yes Men” may become “No Men”.
In the 2023 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court John Roberts discussed technology and its use by the courts, artificial intelligence and its impact on courts, and to specifically complain about printing documents. The year-end report could have been used to address the financial disclosure reforms needed to clearly identify conflicts of interest to the Supreme Court Justices, how political influence is tolerated within the Court, how the religious beliefs of the Supreme Court Justices influence their decisions, or how most Americans no longer trust that the Supreme Court will make the right decisions in matters of importance. Instead, Roberts focused on technology adoption by courts over the years, starting with quill pens and leading up to artificial intelligence. His primary concern in the report was just getting the computer in his office to print his briefs to the printer down the hall. He asked, “Is that too much to ask? I mean it's right there in the hallway. Half the time, it works. Half the time, it doesn't.” Roberts has called the IT group so many times, but they cannot fix it. He also had some choice words for Microsoft specifically. While not directly stated, it is not likely that the Microsoft Corporation will get a fair hearing in the Supreme Court.
The American people decided that 2024 was not looking promising. High inflation, high interest rates, a presidential election with two bad choices, crushing student loan debt, a couple wars underway, and general discontentment everywhere led Americans to decide to just skip it. In a nationwide referendum held in early December, US voters decided to avoid 2024 completely. The United States will start New Year's Day on January 1, 2025, while the rest of the world will stay one year behind. The United Nations held an emergency meeting to protest the United States' cavalier attitude to standard time-keeping. The US State Department received money from Congress to promote 2025 to other nations and attempt to get them to join the US in 2025. The President spoke at length in a televised address about the benefits of skipping 2024 completely, including no US president election or election advertising to worry about (he won), inflation went down, the wars ended, and everyone was happy.
Michael Cohen, long-time legal version of a mob consigliere to former US President and as yet unconvicted criminal Donald Trump, used Google's Bard to get help with his case and plan a vacation, assuming he isn't convicted and needs to serve any time. Bard is the Pepsi to OpenAI's ChatGPT Coke. Cohen was attempting to help his own lawyer with legal research and turned to Bard for assistance. Impressed with the answers he got, he also used Bard to plan a vacation. He made a few legal inquiries to Bard and ended up with some cases that looked legitimate but weren't, which he passed on to his lawyer who didn't bother to check that they were actual cases. Cohen encountered what is known in the AI business as “hallucinations”, which are the imagined hopes and dreams of the AI system based on false data—basically, it lies. So, Cohen ended up with a list cases that didn't exist and a really special vacation to Fargo, North Dakota. The judge in Michael Cohen's case was none too happy to find that the cases were the hallucinations of some computer. The judge suggested Cohen cancel his lovely trip since the case is not going very well.
In a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire, Nikki Haley made a clear and decisive move to capture the Confederate Civil War Reenactor vote. When asked about the cause of the Civil War, she replied with a dubious answer about the disagreement on states' rights in the US federal system and completely forgot to mention that slavery may have been an important part of the “disagreement”. Haley is a former governor of South Carolina, which also happened to be the first state to secede from the United States—you know, for slavery. While she removed the Confederate flag from the state capital, she also praised the flag as a representation of “service and sacrifice and heritage” for Southern slave owners. Sensing an opportunity to win over the Confederate reenactors that she lost for removing the Confederate flag, Haley chose to word her answer in a way to clearly bring back and rally the vital Confederate Civil War Reenactors voting block. The progressive group of reenactors, known as “The Sons of the Confederacy”, emerged from tents on a historic battlefield after receiving news via telegraph of Mrs. Haley's exploits and her town hall answer and wrote a letter to her praising her support for the Confederate States, offering her a “get out the vote” campaign with its members just as soon as the Battle of Gettysburg is concluded, and inviting her to participate in their next battle by portraying General Robert E. Lee. Far-Far-right members of the group, known as the “Real Sons of the Confederacy”, criticized the progressive group for inviting Mrs. Haley, saying she was not white enough or male enough to bring glory and honor to General Lee.