You know, if you watch the news (from any source), you would think the world is a terrible, horrible, hideous, place full or terrible, horrible, hideous people.
The news constantly tells us that economies across the globe all stink, wars and conflicts are everywhere, terror is everywhere, crime is on the rise, homelessness, sexual exploitation, drug use, and mindless violence is rampant, God is dead, the climate is changing (too cold or too hot), AI and the machines will kill us, viral epidemics surround us and on and on and on until you want to hurl (an object or your lunch).
I for one am tired of seeing this depressing nonsense.
I want humor. I want bad puns, funny jokes, harmless pranks, satire, irony. I want goofiness.
Anything but this never-ending litany of rancid scat spewed out by the media.
Give me some humor.
Hard to find.
The humor I manage to find is often funny, but not necessarily in a good way.
As in, oh look, the interest rates for Certificates of Deposit are up. That would be great – if I had any money to put into a CD. Costs are much higher for property taxes, rents, insurance, food, water, energy, transportation and, well, everything costs more – and that’s why I don’t have any blankety-blank money for the blankety-blank CD….
How about this for humor – highway signs are constantly harping at us to “Don’t text and drive” because it is, rightfully so, very dangerous. So, what do all the new cars come equipped with – a giant touchscreen in the center of the dashboard. You know, where you have to lean over and use while driving 70 mph or so. No problem our tech masters tell us – just turn on your microphone and use voice commands. I’m sure no one but the onboard AI is listening.
Right.
How about water? I happen to live in a place where water is pumped out of a aquifer and when it comes up out of the earth the water is crystal clear, pure, and totally safe to drink. Nonetheless, government regulations require the water to be “treated” – so let’s expose it to all kinds of chemicals, you know, to make it “safe” to consume. The smell of chlorine is overbearing and let’s not forget chlorine gas has been used as a weapon. To kill people who breathe the fumes. One of my “favorite” quotes from a government website talking about chlorine is, “The levels of chlorine used for drinking water disinfection are unlikely to cause long-term health effects.” Unlikely. Still possible, just unlikely.
Fudge.
Let’s think about inflation, high interest rates, out-of-control government spending and other bad economic policies of the past that have raised the prices you pay at the grocery store. I find it hideously amusing (in a non-funny way) when I go to the grocery store to buy “luxury” items like basic food, water, juices, toilet paper, etc and then checkout with half a cart full of goodies, pay something like $150 plus and then get handed a receipt by the nice cashier who points out how much money I just saved (hey, look, $2.28). Aaargh.
We have great technology, right? We have computers, algorithms, AI plus well-trained engineers and programmers, right? Explain this then – I’m in the city driving and I come to a stoplight where, not surprisingly, I stop. The light turns green and I drive off, making sure I go the exact posted speed limit. Only to come to the next light (about 100 to 200 yards away) which, if you were intelligent and aware as an engineer, you would think would be synchronized to expedite traffic flow. Nope, it turns red.
In 1844, thanks to Samuel Morse, telegraph poles began to appear in the landscape. Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, more poles (for telephone use) began to appear in 1876. Here we are in 2026 and unless a tornado blew the pole over, such telephone poles are everywhere. Not only that, but metal poles and towers are also everywhere, and I mean freaking everywhere. The landscape looks like the back of a porcupine. Advanced technology at its finest.
How can you explain that there are many gigantic, major, metropolitan areas in the world – places that look like something out of a futuristic movie – and the immense buildings there are not connected to any kind of centralized sewer system. Poo has to be pumped into trucks and driven away to end up in various scattered locations. Get it, “scat-terred?” I apologize for my failings.
Humans have been around (supposedly) for a long, long time. Many scientists will tell you that beings whose anatomy matches now living humans existed as far back as 300,000 years plus, maybe even longer. Confirmed remains have been found to age between 70,000 and 100,000 plus. Whatever, the first “clear” signs of civilization are found around 10,000 BCE when it seems humans figured out agriculture (seriously, it took that long to understand how seeds work?). The first alphabet is dated to around 1800 BCE. Technology and industrial revolutions have changed human lives and allowed many more humans to live comfortably. It is estimated (by experts) that in the year 1000 we had about 275 million humans wandering around. Flash forward to 2026 and we now have 8 billion plus.
If you started to count to a billion right now, you would finish 32 years from now. You would think with all the great technology, and with all the contributions of great intelligent thinkers that have existed throughout time, we all be intelligent, compassionate, wise and virtuous.
You would be wrong if you thought that.
Apparently most humans never got the memo about how to be decent. Is it really that difficult to be kind to everyone? To be nice?
Apparently it is. Moving on…
Food. We must eat, and while gardens are fun and provide food, we still buy food at the store and, of course, we don’t want the food to rot before we eat it, so we make sure sure it has “stuff” added to preserve it. The stuff added may make the food last longer, but it doesn’t make the human eating it last longer. In point of fact, the next time you are at the store, grab a random food item and look at the list of ingredients – most labels read like a Dostoevsky novel (if you don’t know who Dostoevsky is, ask your AI pal). Kind of funny that additives, preservatives and food substitution items may help with the bottom line, but not so much with human health.
Do your own due (diligence) by checking this partial list of “useful” additives:
hydrogenated oils (trans fats)
sodium nitrate
monosodium glutamate
artificial food coloring and dyes
high fructose corn syrup
certain artificial sweeteners
butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT)
potassium bromate
propyl paraben
tert-butylhydroquinone
titanium dioxide
brominated vegetable oil (BVO)
azodicarbonamide (ADA)
propyl gallate
sodim benzoate
carrageenan
xanthan gum
propylene glycol
butane
polysorbate 60
caranuba wax
magnesium sulphate
Hang on, I just puked so give me a sec…
Let’s talk roads. Why is it that it seems like every year or so they have to re-pave, re-finish, and redo the roads because the pavement is falling apart? I thought this was 2026 and our technology was fabulous. Are you telling me you can’t produce a material that will last for more than a year? Asking for a friend.
How about movies and television shows? I remember a time when they actually made movies and television to entertain and amuse you and, sometimes, to even make you think a little. Now every show has a “message” or some kind of “purpose” and somewhere along the line the entertainment value went into the toilet. Not to mention that most new movies are about sex, violence, aliens or some odd mix. Fug.
I am old enough to remember cars that regular humans could actually work on themselves. All you needed were some simple tools. In the last few years cars are now so over-loaded with fancy electronic that even the simplest thing requires you to go to a shop (or back to the dealer) where a qualified quantum mechanic hooks up the vehicle to a fancy computer and hopefully mends your problem, which often turns out to be a part inaccessible to the average human. Oh, and expensive. Fudge.
It’s 2026, right? We have smartphones, artificial intelligence, advanced technology everywhere, incredible cities and really (though I may complain about) fantastic systems for food production and distribution, great water handling and delivery, wonderful waste handling and treatment, nice places to live (for the most part) and many other great things. So why is there so much hate in the world? People following one sort of belief system are quite happy to murder others following a different belief system. Apocalyptic visions of the end of the world show the survival of one group and all others die. The prevailing attitude of almost all belief systems (religious, political, or other) is “I’m correct and good” and anyone who believes differently is “wrong and evil.” Pretty sure you know how that scenario unfolds…
How is it we find humor in the misfortune of others? Videos that show people, often labeled as “stupid,” doing something that results in an accident (a fail) are immensely popular. I myself am guilty of watching these but have stopped because I realized I am simply encouraging more of this sort of bad behavior.
Smartphones were meant to enhance communication between people. Make it easier; more productive. So, what has happened? You go to lunch and all four people at the table are pecking away on their phones. Probably watching stupid people failing.
We want safety in our world. We want to feel safe. So the “powers that be” decided the way to achieve this is to put cameras everywhere – at intersections, in stores, in door bells and so on. And also add in location services (GPS tracking) to every car and smartphone (allegedly you can turn it off). Facial recognition is rampant in many places (you are in the database somewhere). License plate scanning. Genetic ID. Satellite surveillance. AI monitoring. I feel so safe now I’m going to stop talking…
How about email? It is supposed to make communication easier. Instead, you now spend all your time deleting spam, junk, trash. I literally get hundreds of emails a day that fall into those categories. Yes, you can built filters that block certain addresses and track certain key words, but the purveyors of the crap email simply change their sending address and subject text constantly. And if you ever buy something online and sign-up for a newsletter you are told by the company they will never sell your information. But, they never said anything about bartering it, trading, or giving it away – so expect hundreds of span/junk/trash emails Oh, and be advised – you can click the “unsubscribe” button but three things can happen – (1) you actually get unsubscribed; (2) you get unsubscribed from that email server and assigned to another or, worse yet, (3) clicking the unsubscribe button actually unleashes a virus or infection – usually in some form of techno blackmail.
Scratch-off lottery tickets. Yes, I know, about 66% of the sales proceeds are returned in winnings, but always doled out in itty-bitty chunks. Your odds of winning anything really substantial are usually in the range of 1 in 11 million. Seriously, that’s like living in the New York city area where someone opens up the phone book and arbitrarily picks your name. I mean come on, who runs through the streets waving their scratch-off ticket yelling, “I just won $10!”
First it was man-made global warming. Not gender sensitive. Human-made global warming. Or, maybe, it is global cooling. Perhaps anthropomorphic global warming. Except it appears that both warming and cooling can be a problem because, well, apparently the weather shifts based on the season. So, let’s call it climate change. I mean, how can you refute that fact because, damn it, the weather changes! And it’s all due to too much carbon dioxide, cow farts and other things. Forget about all that pesky science stuff like changes n the Earth’s magnetic field, changes in the Earth’s rotational orbit around the Sun, forget about sunspot activity and solar emissions, forget about deep earth processes that are expressed in volcanoes and other natural events, forget about any gravitational impacts of other celestial objects, forget about cyclical changes in atmospheric conditions like cloud generation, wind patterns, ocean currents and such, forget about human intervention in cloud seeding and other such ventures. Nope – it’s only carbon dioxide. You know, the substance every green thing on earth uses to live and, in the process, generates oxygen, which is sort of essential to human life. Sigh.
Humans love a home with a view. So, they build houses next to rivers, creeks, lakes and oceans. Then, when one of those areas invariably floods, they want your money to help them rebuild. Maybe they will be smarter this time and avoid watery areas – how about a nice home on an earthquake fault line, or in an area subject to tornadoes or maybe on a cliff subject to mud slides. FTLOG.
The “powers that be” want more efficient lighting. So, out go incandescent light bulbs and in come compact fluorescent light bulbs – which contain “small” amounts of highly toxic mercury and have to be disposed off at special locations. I am absolutely certain that no one throws their old compact fluorescent light bulbs in the trash, right? To be hauled off to the landfill where they break and mercury leaches into the water supply. Nah, could never happen. Beside, they can just treat it with chlorine !
Many foolish people want to tell you what a wonderful democracy exists in America. Not really – it’s a constitutional republic. Either way, the idea is the people (the electorate) vote in fair and open elections and everyone gets representation.
Yeah, right.
Then riddle me this, Sherlock — in elections for the most important office in the country (the Presidency) we have a system called the Electoral College and how the votes get cast in the 50 states determine which candidate the electors of the College vote for – except the system is full of scat. In 48 of the 50 states it is a winner-take-all for Electoral College votes. In other words, let’s say there are 20 electoral votes up for grabs in a state. Let’s say the number of registered voters in the state is 10 million (10,000,000). Let’s say that Candidate A gets 5,000,0001 votes and Candidate B gets 4,999,999 votes. Guess what – Candidate A gets all twenty (20) Electoral College voters. How is this equal representation? How is this fair? How is this legit? Well, the word I am thinking of rhymes with “legit” if you get my drift…
Let’s talk for just a moment about the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Here is precisely what it says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
A cursory reading of this by an ordinary citizen would lead them to believe that the federal government can make no law that impacts religion, prohibits the freedom of speech or press, et cetera, et cetera.
It’s all wonderful.
It’s not wonderful.
Read the First Amendment text again, carefully. It clearly says “Congress shall make no law…”
Congress is only one of the three branches of government. The Executive and Judiciary are the others and, oh look, every single Department in government falls under the Executive branch and every court in America falls under the Judiciary.
And neither the Executive nor the Judiciary are constrained by the first amendment.
This means that rules, regulations, guidelines and executive actions from the Executive branch can (and often do) abridge the rights mentioned in the First Amendment.
This means that judgments, ruling, decisions and other court-issued verdicts can (and often do) abridge the rights mentioned in the First Amendment.
It’s so ironically funny, I want to cry.
Okay, fine, I’m not going to cry. Curse and moan a little no doubt, but I will spend the rest of the day looking for humor.
Q: What does a veterinarian give an elephant with diarrhea?
A: Plenty of room
I should rest now…