Category: Satire

The secret to a long life

It’s well known that marriage is an important factor in longevity. But maybe we’ve been interpreting that wrong, or, at least, not optimising.

From the Gerontology Research Group article on the current oldest living person, Italian Emma Morano:

In 1926, Mrs. Morano was married to Giovanni Martinuzzi, a marriage she would rather not talk about… Having separated – but not divorced – from her husband in 1938, Mrs. Morano has lived alone ever since, and accredits this as one of the key secrets to her longevity.

Post-existing climate conditions

According to the NY Times, insurers have been taking advantage of climate-change fears to raise prices for flood insurance. Now that the presidential election has conclusively proved that the greenhouse effect is a Chinese hoax to make Americans look stupid less productive, I think the Congress needs to move beyond minor defensive measures like abandoning the Paris accord, and move instead to aggressively defend Americans’ God-given right to build decadent structures in flood zones: Just as health insurers are now prohibited from inquiring about or taking account of “pre-existing conditions”, flood insurers need to be prohibited from taking account of (hoax) research about “post-existing” (future) climate conditions in determining flood insurance prices. Prices may be based only on past flood records.

This can be combined into a single consumer-rights bill with Mike Pence’s initiative to ban life insurance premiums that discriminate against tobacco users. As Pence wrote in 2000,

Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill… Nine out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer.

What’s all this hysteria for? Smoking is even safer than Russian Roulette. (Five out of six players don’t get shot!)

Political doping

Who would have imagined that elections could be swayed by political-performance-enhancing drugs?

Trump, in full “unshackled” mode, told a crowd of supporters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that Clinton, who has won both presidential debates according to most polls, seemed “pumped up” at the beginning of the second debate last Sunday, but that he thought her energy then waned as the debate went on. So, in Donald Trump’s reality, it of course stands to reason that she was thus “pumped up” on some kind of performance-enhancing drugs, and they should both take drug tests before the third debate.

I dispute the claim that this is fully unshackled. If Trump were fully unshackled, he would demand that Clinton be subjected to a medical gender test, like South African runner Caster Semenya. After all, as Trump has so eloquently put it in the past

Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote.

(“Frankly” is great. He’s giving us the straight dope now, as opposed to the politically correct pabulum that he is otherwise forced to espouse.) She should have to prove, then, that she’s not a man. It clearly wouldn’t be fair to allow Hillary Clinton to run for president as a woman, with all the advantages that women are known to enjoy in presidential campaigns, while actually benefitting from a higher testosterone level than her male opponent.

Imagine if it didn’t come out until after the election that Hillary was doping. What would we do then? Would her victory be annulled? Would she be banned from political competition for four years? If her testosterone levels are too high, would she be forced to take suppressing hormones? Would she be required campaign as a man? Perhaps she’d have to sexually assault a campaign worker, to even things out? The mind boggles.

Misinformed

After viewing Casablanca with friends recently, we were inspired to try variants on Rick’s famous line about why he had come to Casablanca:

A: And what in heaven’s name brought you to England?

B: I came to England for the tolerant open liberal democracy.

A: The tolerant welcoming liberal society? What tolerant welcoming liberal society? We’re in the middle of a xenophobic backlash.

B: I was misinformed.

4 digits of separation

Conspiracy theorists are working overtime to discredit all the women who report having been molested by Donald Trump. (Trump’s near-legendary non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses in all contracts, which pretty much exclude reports from any woman who ever worked for him — and even campaign volunteers — are the only thing keeping the numbers reasonably manageable.) The “pussy” video that kicked this all off was released as part of a joint plot by international Zionists and the gnomes of Zurich. And the woman who was groped while sitting next to Trump on a plane was lying (because supposedly first-class armrests in 1980s planes didn’t go up) and was an agent of the Clinton Foundation, since her telephone number (a convenient excuse for exposing her private information) is identical to one for a staff member at the foundation. Except,

While the article Delauzon’s tweet linked to claims that Leeds shared a phone number with the Clinton Foundation, the two phone numbers differed by several digits.

But obviously the story doesn’t end there. Granted, she was not actually working for the Clinton Foundation. You have to ask yourself, what are the odds that someone who was supposedly not connected at all with that organisation would happen to have a telephone number that was so similar. The question answers itself.

Donald Trump’s prodigious prostate

Let us accept for a moment the claim that Donald Trump’s medical condition is uniformly excellent. You might still expect that random medical test results should be about average for a healthy man. (Not meaning BP or heart rate or god-forbid testosterone, which you would expect to reflect his hyperpowerful masculinity.) I was looking at this report, released a few weeks ago, which included Trump’s test result for PSA (prostate-specific antigen). High levels can be signs of an enlarged prostate, or prostate cancer. But Trump’s doctor reports his level at 0.15. According to this study men over 70 with normal prostate have a median level of 1.9 (it doesn’t seem to depend much on age above 70). If we make the very conservative assumption that the distribution falls off linearly from 1.9 down to 0, we would estimate that less than 1% of men have PSA scores below 0.2.

Maybe Trump has no prostate.

Alternatively, he should really be compared with a younger reference group, because his pact with Mephistopheles and/or regular consumption of the blood of virgins keeps him youthful.