government slashes taxes

After declaring that the American military shall be out of Afghanistan by the year 2014, the Obama administration announced plans to lower taxes for all Americans. Said the President while shotgunning a mocha latte on his way to a middle-school performance of Inherit The Wind: “We are going to cut these taxes by not renewing the contracts of over half of all service military personnel and by waiting two full calendar years before placing any more orders for tanks, jets, frigates, uniforms, or machine-pistols. We've got so much of this shit just lying around collecting dust, anyway, and, since we spend many times more on so-called defense than all other major world players combined, including Russia, and China, we have built up a bit of breathing room for ourselves. By reducing our war-related expenditures and not paying hundreds of billions of dollars to independent war-related contractors, for example, we can afford to collect hundreds of billions of fewer tax-dollars.”

The decision to draw down the military to numbers capable of protecting the homeland – that being the physical constraints of fair Columbia – has been applauded by administration critics and supporters alike; the decision to spend money rebuilding schools and hospitals here in America rather than rebuilding them in far and dusty lands has been met with joyous praise and loud cries of thanks. “The other parents in my Parent-Teachers-Association and I have been curious to know why nearly 54% of our taxes was being spent on trying to kill sneaky jihads overseas while only a fraction of it was being used to educate young minds in our own backyards,” said concerned housewife and mother-of-one Bridgit Romaine-Staudemeiyer, 28, from Seal Beach, California. “It seems as if our elected leaders are slowly getting their shit together – slowly, mind you, but, we hope, steadily.”

“In our age of information-technology warfare, it doesn't matter how many tanks a country has, or how many sovereign nations its forces occupy,” said Ululandno Iishitakko, a security consultant for Heath & Hearth Industries, a consulting firm bent on creating a peaceful and verdant world in which America's troopers can finally come home and get some rest. “When a pod of starving hackers working out of a filthy basement in some former Soviet-bloc republic can infiltrate Pentagon security and hack a drone flying over a battlefield in al-Anbar province, those selfsame scumbags can shut down the U.S. military's various communications networks at home and abroad, rendering them effectively useless. It's a whole new ball-game, boys and girls.” While entering Marine 1, in which the head of state would fly to Camp David for a series of meetings with leaders from South America's socialist-leaning countries, Mr. Obama said, “We're gonna take the money we've been spending to maintain physical presences in hot-spots around the globe and use some of it to beef up our communications networks here at home, networks that were shoddily constructed by sycophantic security consultants during my predecessor's administration, networks so full of holes that they resemble that good Vermont swiss cheese I love so much. We need to start letting the various peoples of the world figure out their own problems; we need to stop acting like the globe's recess monitors, picking sides and choosing winners. We start healing America again by slashing taxes across the board.” As his helo alighted from the ground with a bone-clattering thwacking sound, the president showed the assembled reporters two fingers on his left hand spread into a V, for victory.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

on the banks of the mighty Yalung – a tourist's look at Grigovia

(This text was smuggled out of Grig at terrible cost and despite a U.S.-led embargo against this fine, upstanding nation. Please, enjoy.)

Come, friends, please come visit Grig, capital of Grigovia. Find love along the tree-lined banks of the serpentine Yalung River; learn to make the spice using fresh czabtyip and cool, clean water; infiltrate a band of roving Yaelong raiders and attempt to puzzle out their speech (if you succeed in deciphering any portion of their language, please share your learnings with MIIG, the Ministry of Internal Information Gathering); hunt the elusive yip-yipt-yend in the verdant Lower Yalung Valley; search for the source of the mighty Yalung River (again, if you succeed in finding the source, please share your learnings with MIIG).

All these things and more you can do in the not-too-big, not-too-small Glorious Republic of Grigovia. We urge you to act before the American capitalist swine invade us to steal our bauxite, and our other rare earth metals. (MIIG puts the likelihood of invasion at nineteen to one in favor of our swift and crushing military defeat.) Spend your hard-earned coins at any of our four modern casinos (all within a two hour train ride from Grig); hit the slopes with ski-mounted girl-bunnies at Yiptlong Mountain Resort, a three-star hotel and ascending-pulley located high up in the world-famous Yiptlong massif. Act now, before our landscape is littered with unexploded ordinance; visit now, before our roads, our fields, our villages, and our cities are sewn with land-mines and bombed into ruin; share, now, in our long and proud traditions before they are pulverized by the jack-boot of forced democratization.

Please come soon, because we need tourist money to improve our antiquated ground defenses (which, according to MIIG, have been rusting away in good order since we declared independence from the loathsome Soviet overlords back in 1992). Times have been tough – our terrain is too mountainous for Yankee to use as a re-fueling stop on his way to carpet-bomb Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore we were not invited into his League of Righteous 9-11 Avengers (the few stinking capitalists we caught poking around amongst the Yaelong are locked safely away in Hramm prison, a lovely building located near the pulsing heart of cosmopolitan Grig, from which they cannot be sprung, not even by the Team of 6 Sea-Lions). Please come – for the romance, for the powdered slopes, for the chase, or just to watch the impending invasion unfold. There is little time to lose, and much joy to gain by visiting the lush hidden valleys and pristine highland plains of Grigovia, today.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit