local addict hooked on O2

Despite years of effort dedicated to breaking a lifelong addiction, unemployable local fiend Eroll T. Whitscomb remains hooked on oxygen. “I like inhaling it out here, in the open,” said the subject while standing and breathing deeply in a meadow not far from his home. “To me, it doesn't matter who or how many people tell me I need to quit – by now, my body really and truly needs it. God, once it hits your lungs, it's so good.” Mr. Whitscomb by no means struggles alone, said Dr. Alice R. Ushanginahi, head of addiction studies at the University of Southern Washington, U.S.A. “Every human being alive today is in some form or another addicted to oxygen. In fact, unless a person receives a dose of this chemical every two or three minutes, he or she will experience brain-death, and die.” Compared to food, or water, oxygen is apparently indispensable to a long and healthy life, and inhaling too little of it – due largely to bad posture – quickly causes the oxygen addict to become angry, impatient, and downright boorish. “We've studied countless cases in which individuals ruined social engagements and damaged interpersonal relationships just because their bodies weren't getting enough of the chemical upon which they'd allowed themselves to get hooked,” said Dr. Ushanginahi, who is herself addicted to the chemical. On the street, this drug is known as oh-too. “The most readily available and cheapest way to cure this addiction is, to my knowledge, suicide.” For more information about the addictive nature of oxygen – a free radical that damages the human body and speeds its decay by causing the iron molecules present in the bloodstream to rust – please visit www.urshitoutofluck.com or www.ifurbreathingurbelieving.com

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

Grigovia files suit

At the International criminal court in Den Haag today the Glorious Republic of Grigovia filed suit against both the United States of America (USA) and Israel, alleging that these nations willfully and indiscriminately used chemical weapons against civilians. Basing its lawsuit on sound and verified data (see also here, here, and here) proving that America's Armed Forces used chemical agents in 2004 during its illegal occupation of Iraq, and on proof that in 2009 Israel saturated civilian targets in Gaza with white phosphorus, Grigovia seeks to strengthen the world-wide ban on the use of chemical weapons. Furthermore, the framers of the legal action aim to secure reparations and damages for the tens of thousands of victims of the chemical weapons used by the USA and Israel, mutated and mutilated individuals who suffer the day-to-day effects of this criminal behavior. “The time has come for the silent to be heard, for war criminals to come to justice,” said Grigovian foreign minister Dr. Eiyast Hyuyend. “These crimes would have likely have gone unpunished if America in its insantiy had not just a few weeks ago given the use of chemical weapons as its primary reason for wanting to invade the sovereign nation of Syria. War crimes are not subject to statues of limitation; the architects of the destruction and enslavement of the Iraqi people shall pay for what they have done.” Primary defendants in the case are former U.S. president George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Grigovia is one of but a few nations proud and courageous enough to repeatedly stand up to American and British tyranny. Given the ongoing and blatant disregard for Justice, humanity, and the opinions of mankind displayed by the USA, few people expect America to suddenly start acting honorably.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

$7 a day

Nanjing – On an otherwise nondescript Wednesday morning earlier this year, 13 year-old Chinese national Zhou Fu Shi changed into a set of worn coveralls and headed to work. Earning the equivalent of seventy U.S. cents an hour, and working ten-hour-long days, Miss Zhou makes roughly seven (7) dollars a day fabricating cellphones and other electrical devices for export to markets in the Europe and America. “I used to spend summers working in my grandparent's rice paddies or tending the local communal forests and gardens with friends from school,” Fu Shi said while sprinting to the bathroom during her single, ten- minute-long daily break. “Things were better then, I think. It is hard to remember, even though it was not that long ago, but I think that despite having less physical money in hand, I was creating bonds with the land, with my family, and with the people in my community.” We continued to speak with Miss Zhou on her way home from work until a pair of censors overtook us, demanding to see our passports and grilling us about our involvement with an innocent factory girl. By the time the censors had left (taking many of our yuan with them), our new friend had vanished into an enormous tenement-housing block.

“I don't want to work, but the state forces me to work,” Fu Shi was saying just before the censors' arrival. “I don't want to work because I don't really need to buy anything. I see the new advertisements, I listen to them on the radio and television, but I don't need any of those useless things. And speaking of useless, who is buying all of the mobile telephones that my fellow workers and I are making? A friend of mine has an illegal, uncensored Internet connection, and he and I were looking up prices for the things that we make, and the phone we are making right now costs almost two hundred American dollars. Two hundred dollars? I assembled one hundred models after lunch today, for which I was paid roughly three dollars and fifty cents. Last week, when a friend was blinded at work by corrosive gases, she was fired, and is now very, very poor. Is there any justice in this world? Somewhere, someone is making a lot of money on the backs my factory-sisters and me.”

Upon reading our story, two American politicians – a Senator and a Congressperson, who both asked to remain anonymous – contacted us, saying derisively that the girls in our story should be happy that they have jobs at all, let alone paying jobs, and that they should see those jobs as stepping-stones of opportunity, and not worry so much about how much they might be getting paid right now, or who might be profiting immensely from their hard and continuous labor.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit