“The best way to fool the people was delay passage of lobbyist-packed legislation until the last minute so that nobody really knew what just happened to the wallet/purse or who got a knife in the back,” wrote Honourable Shirupenski on the cover of Terraform Corp’s annual business report in the year 2376, commemorating the end of the last political-based chamber of elected officials.  “From now on, you vote with your Milky Way tokens!”

Shirupenski laughed at the fact that, with the end of the concept of “governments,” all taxes collected by Terraform Corp stayed in the coffers of Terraform Corp, allocated to communities based on sales forecast needs for distribution centers, call centers, training centers, transportation systems, and online/brick-and-mortar shopping centers, rather than on wasteful social needs concocted by legislators keen on getting elected.

Communism, democracy, socialism, republicanism – these political terms had all but vanished from the modern language.

Opposition was alive and well and constantly reborn for every minigeneration, to give Terraform Corp 100% coverage of the solar system’s physical and mental needs.

Shirupenski gave thanks to ancestors and descendants, both natural and artificial, for making this moment complete.

All states of energy in this universe had been given a useful purpose.

The time was now.

Shirupenski pressed a button and disappeared into an adjoining thread of a nearby universe, carrying out a long tradition set by the founders of Terraform Corp many centuries ago.

Using a classic postSkinnerian behavioural model test, we divided a group of preschoolers into those who had the ability to read (group A) and those who didn’t (group B).

From each group, we pulled 29 children, put the two (labeled subgroups A and B) in separate but identical rooms and allowed the children to play with the same set of toys, books, etc.

The remaining children (subgroups labeled A’ and B’) were put together into a supersubgroup labeled C, placed in one room, handed childsafe-plastic Arduino programming guides that resembled reading lesson books and given military-grade tablet computers to play with.

The programming guides provided instructions for accessing interactive versions of themselves on the tablet PCs.

Furthermore, the programming guides included lessons for wirelessly programming the Arduino-based toys in the rooms of subgroups A and B.

By default, the toys had built-in functions for memory games – Simon Sez (repeating lighted button patterns), Concentration (recalling pairs of matching images) and Singalong (humming sets of playful musical tones).

The children in subgroup C were rewarded for writing programs that created games with the toughest learning curves on the toys.  On a side note, some of the children tended to teach the nonreaders how to read in order to increase overall subgroup success.  The few nonparticipating readers and nonreaders were pulled out after three weeks and placed in subgroup E (see below).

The children in subgroups A and B were rewarded for solving the new games the fastest.  The ones who, instead of playing with toys, chose to read and thus solved the riddles that described Arduino programming problems in “plain” word/sentence form, were removed and put in subgroup D that wrote new problems/games for subgroup C to program.  The children in subgroup D were rewarded for the most number of problems that subgroup C chose to program.

A subset of children in all subgroups shied away from toys, books and/or tablet PCs, breaking up into small social groups or going off singly.  They were pulled out after three weeks and put together as subgroup E in a room that was connected to an outdoor playground which included a maze that exited into a tetrahedron-shaped room of mirrors with a hidden microphone connected to a voice-activated parroting system that repeated the last 20 seconds of spoken/sung sounds.

We now have children in subgroup C who speak and act “Arduino” as extensions of themselves.

The children in subgroups A and B speak and act as extensions of subgroup C.

Subgroup D overtly but unknowingly controls subgroups A, B and C.

Subgroup E was observed for potential future preschooler test scenarios.

Due to the nature of the experiment, no control group was set aside, because no proposed outcome had been established ahead of time.  The only assumption was that no physical harm should befall the children.  Longterm mental effects were undefined and not speculated about.

More as it develops in this postmodern preapp programming generation.

We are part of Experiment Set Class Group AG Subgroup 0030, rewarded for the quickest and most profitable contribution of preschoolers to functioning society.

In its monthly meeting this morning, the Committee reiterated it plan to accelerate the Reverse Shock Doctrine recently demonstrated (once again), giving thanks to the team of Naomi Klein and Paul Krugman for their excellent treatises on the subject.

Without Naomi and Paul, such policies would not have the general acceptance they do now.  Ditto Michael Moore and his inspiration for how businesses can make themselves look better against sloppy-looking radical filmmakers.

In entertainment news, China offered full clemency and a safe haven for Rupert Murdoch and spouse, should he and/or they be convicted of crimes against human decency in the West.

James, however, is on his own.

¡Viva la Recuperation!

This opposite sketch is over.

And now, a word from the rest of the universe about a timeless moment not concerning a minor species on Earth…

Do oil spills make you otters and birds feel constipated?

Does acid rain make you conifers go bald?

Well, you’ve come to the right place because we have a cure!

Hidden in a lightly-guarded vault of a secret organisation is an antihuman organism so deadly, seven billion can disappear just like THAT!

How can you get hold of that cure, you ask?

Well, we can’t show you here, of course.  So meet us at [x37v ,35fd764309&##$] in approximately [wls/1294] hours and we’ll show you how to get hold of that cure.

It’s up to you to figure out how, when and where to use it.

Meanwhile, a group of survivalists have has hastily constructed an escape rocket system that launches biodomes and other survival gear ahead of the launch of the survivalists to the Moon, just moments before the antihuman organism cure was released into Earth’s atmosphere.

Stay tuned on your shortwave radios for more exciting chapters on this twist in the history of Earth spreading life into the cosmos!

Or myopia.

You decide.

Ninety years of Chinese Communist rule – millions dead, polluted rivers, suppressed freedoms, pretending to know what or how to rule – the modern success story!

Western nations should be proud they were such great influences…millions dead, polluted rivers, suppressed freedoms, pretending to know what or how to rule…lol…rofl…

Rumour has it that Latinos won’t buy Lenovo computer equipment because they think it is a Chinese misspelling of Lenova, “The No Go.”

Fareed failed the American loyalty test this morning and was sentenced by the Committee to ten more years of believing people care what he has to say in his writing just because they were convinced to make him a bestseller.

Same for the proponents of outliers and black swans.

If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitschin’.
Of course, the American loyalty test, an out-of-date artifact of NCLB (No Child’s Left Behind), a conspiracy of the right, of course, to regress public education and create more compliant, ignorant subjects for King George III, of course, of course, is itself a failure.

My kingdom for a course, curriculum or curricula – agricola, amo, amas, amat, Ricola! Rick, ole’!

Who is King George III, you ask?

Good question.

No relation to the first two Georgian leaders (you know, thousand points of light, no new taxes, mission accomplished, etc.).

Or The One Who Ruled After.

If you can’t trust yourself to know how far you can throw a Democrat or Republican, then what can you do?

Throw ’em all out!

Or, destroy the dysfunctional system and start all over.

Take a walk across the geographical territory you call your country and see how diverse it really is.

And how diversity and openness makes the country strong.

Sure, we’ve got problems, but the problems are perennial and minor in comparison to our everyday solutions.

If we aren’t willing to face criticism for the sake of bettering ourselves, then we never will.

[Figure that last one out on your own time.]

Leadership is an illusion without followers.

Failure is a lesson in disguise.

We have moved our…that is, the Committee has moved its invisible mercenary troops into Norway for their own protection.

[Just who is “they,” “them,” or “their”?]

Who wants to be next?

China, you need some help shoring up your poor internal security problems?

After all, who would sabotage modern technology?

Who wants to know?

The Committee’s goal is to pacify the people with simple diversions of real-life stories about heroes and villains while continuing the purposeful spread of life into the solar system and beyond.

George, gorge, Jorge, puddin’ and pie.

How next shall we entertain your humdrum lives?

Stay tuned to the next revolution of the LP record under the screeching stylus.

When puppets are reduced to states of energy that are easily manipulated at all levels (what is the LHC for, anyway?), they become…

I told the Committee not to put an amateur professional amateur comedian in charge.

Now look what happens.

14,163 days to go…