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Archive for the ‘Satire’ Category

Why the NSA Whistleblower Is Secretly Jason Bourne

Posted by KrazyMan Knievel On June - 18 - 2013

As you have probably heard, the NSA has been getting awfully friendly with our digital information — and at the center of it is this guy:

The Guardian
Coming soon to a CIA torture cell near you!

That’s Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA who originally exposed the shady surveillance program and will no doubt be played by Matt Damon in the inevitable movie. Then again, what with the short blond hair and the boring first name coupled with an obvious action movie last name, it’s almost as if that’s already happened.

Edward Snowden is … SNOWED IN. In theaters everywhere June 22.

You’re probably skeptical — but comparing the facts, this whole story stinks more than The Bourne Legacy. Sure, Snowden isn’t an international shoot-punching machine, but he arguably caused just as much (if not more) intra-agency chaos as Jason Bourne. He just didn’t snap anybody’s neck while doing it.

For starters, Snowden comes from a mild-mannered background in Nowheresburg, America, just like Jason Bourne. From there, Snowden went on to join the army, just like his Matt Damon doppelganger (Damonganger?).

We can’t confirm that Snowden also killed a man with a rolled-up magazine, but we have to assume so.

However, instead of majoring in murder, Snowden kind of went the opposite way by breaking his legs during training and being discharged. Admittedly, this is somewhat less badass. Regardless, like Jason Bourne, Snowden went from the military right into the CIA. The only difference was that Snowden’s super-secret spy detail involved a lot more sitting and much less trying to kill people on boats in the middle of the ocean.

However, surprisingly enough, both of those jobs apparently involve the same amount of attractive women on tropical islands.

The Daily Caller
Being a wanted man has never seemed like such a viable life choice.

That’s Lindsay Mills — Snowden’s performance artists girlfriend and self-proclaimed “pole-dancing superhero,” which is a comic book we need to read immediately. Mills was living with Snowden in Hawaii while he was working for the NSA and has been waiting there for his return, presumably opening a nice scooter rental shop to pass the time, like Jason Bourne’s island squeeze.

This is one of the only scenes from the Bourne series to not feature throat-punches.

Both men had to go on the run after being marked as traitors — Snowden was virtually disavowed when he exposed a secret government program called PRISM, a name that fits nicely in a filing cabinet next to “Treadstone” and “Blackbriar,” which were the names of the two secret operations from the Bourne films.

So, to recap, we have a corn-fed Captain America-lookin’ guy who makes it through the army and then goes into a secret government operation with a silly-sounding name. He gets a hot girlfriend and lives in an island paradise before ultimately leaking diabolical information about the government to a brown-haired reporter from The Guardian. Man, except for that meeting with The Guardian, that’s pretty much an exact description of the Bourne movies, right?

Oh wait, we almost forgot — Jason Bourne totally meets up with a reporter from The Guardian in The Bourne Ultimatum. Bourne does some recon to figure out if the guy can be trusted and then sets up an elaborate meeting in a public location — just like Snowden did when he met with Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. Snowden learned he could trust the man over any other reporter and staged an elaborate meeting in a hotel, giving Greenwald a series of directions and visual identifier cues so he could single him out from a distance.

The two reporters even look the same.

Vincent Yu / AP
Chins only slow a journalist down.

Now Snowden has been leading the NSA on an international chase, not afraid to make his voice heard despite being in the very literal crosshairs of the American government. At least until he finally decides to take the fight to them and calls John Boehner to reveal that he’s been in Boehner’s office the whole time. And then … some Moby song plays.

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Satire

The 3 Worst Lessons Rocky Movies Taught Us

Posted by KrazyMan Knievel On June - 17 - 2013

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Satire

Slideshow: The Land Of The Free: 10 Ways You KNOW You’re Living In The Greatest Country On Earth

Posted by Cha Cha Brown On June - 17 - 2013

No matter whom you voted for, you support your president. Especially if it’s President Bujar Nishani, kicking ass and transitioning the Albanian economy to a free market model since July 2012.

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Satire

3 Sinister Reasons You’re Addicted To Junk Food

Posted by KrazyMan Knievel On June - 16 - 2013

Everybody wants to eat healthy! Eventually! When we, uh, finally get around to it! Come on, how hard can it really be to give up junk food?

About as easy as kicking heroin, it turns out. The garbage we cram into our bodies is every bit as addictive as any controlled substance, and food companies have been playing us as slobbering addicts for as long as we’ve been alive.

#3. Companies Already Think of You as a Junkie

While nobody ever binges on boiled carrots and Brussels sprouts, potato chips are described as the perfect addictive food — essentially the nutritional equivalent of a speedball. Why? Because they were deliberately designed that way.

When you first pop a chip into your mouth, the coating of salt and fat light up the brain’s pleasure centers like a Christmas tree. The starch in the potato causes the same glucose spike as sugar, but is absorbed into the bloodstream much more quickly. That spike then immediately dips, making you want another potato chip. You can just keep eating them, and because there’s no real substance to them, your stomach never gets full. The reasoning behind the “you can’t eat just one” mantra is pretty much the same reason you can’t be a casual meth user.

Brand X Pictures/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images
If you stare at these too long, “Born Slippy” starts playing subliminally in your head.

The addictive quality of food isn’t something incidental that companies just happen to benefit from — they’re aware of the phenomenon, and they’ve been playing the market in the exact same way drug pushers do. Within Coca-Cola, the 20 percent of customers who drink 80 percent of their product are actually known as “heavy users,” and the company has made it its mission to specifically target them. And the goal has always been to get you more addicted. They’re basically drug-dealing supervillains from a Michael Bay movie, only better written.

Keith Brofsky/Photodisc/Getty Images
The only better racket would be convincing people to pay you for aging.

#2. Most “Healthy Foods” Are Packed With Hidden Crap

Food companies have been dumping sugar into absolutely everything you eat, from yogurt to wheat bread. It’s not only junk food binge eaters that are getting addicted, it’s anyone who doesn’t have their own vegetable patch and private herd of steers.

Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
Resist the urge to name him, it’ll make it that much harder.

Eighty percent of food sold in America has processed sugar, and processed sugar has 56 different names. So even if you’re deliberately trying to avoid processed sugar, odds are you won’t even know you’re buying it unless you write down “galactose” and “rapadura” on some flash cards and quiz yourself like you’re studying for the goddamned MCATs.

Polka Dot Images/Polka Dot/Getty Images
“Let’s just market it as ‘orgasmatol.’”

Even if something doesn’t taste “sweet,” it can still be packed with chemicals that your body will immediately turn into sugar. And taking that junk out makes everything taste like bullshit to us, because our taste buds have been numbed with salt and sugar our entire lives. One journalist described the taste of sugar- and salt-free Kellogg’s cornflakes as like trying to eat his own fillings — and that’s cornflakes, the kind of food that seems like it has barely any sugar to begin with.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images
This is what it looks like to live life on the edge.

But at least you’re avoiding high fructose corn syrup, the most common form of processed sweetener and the bane of anybody nominally interested in wellness, right? Good luck with that — neuroscientists recently observed that exposing lab rats to high fructose corn syrup brought about behavioral changes similar to those produced by addictive drugs like cocaine. Somewhere out there, Mrs. Butterworth is sitting languidly at a mahogany desk, slowly dunking her face into a giant vat of syrup while “Push It to the Limit” blasts at 130 decibels.

#1. There’s a Lot of Money in Convincing You That the Above Isn’t True

We’ve previously discussed how your brain will do everything it can to trick you into thinking you aren’t really addicted to something. Food company executives who depend on your money to pay for their private jets are taking full advantage of this fact.

For example, Fox News recently ran a piece titled “Junk Food Might Not Be Addictive After All.” They interviewed a scientist who discussed a study he had conducted wherein rats were given junk food. After the rats had gorged themselves to a ridiculous weight, the junk food was taken away and replaced with healthy food. Rather than eat the healthy food, the rats chose to starve themselves for two weeks. The rats would even intentionally subject themselves to electric shocks to get to the junk food, even though the healthy food could’ve been eaten without enduring a painful burst of electrocution. You may recognize this as, oh, the textbook definition of addiction.

Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
“I’m not an addict. Not as long as there are plenty of Doritos around.”

However, the scientist concluded the interview by saying that technically the food didn’t have the exact same chemical effect on the rats’ brains as addictive drugs, so the headline became “junk food might not be addictive.” See, market analysts know that once something is generally considered to be “addictive,” people will actively prevent their children from being exposed to it.

And the entire business model of major food companies is to get you chemically dependent on their product from early childhood, so as long as fast food chains and soft drink corporations and the like keep dumping billions of dollars into advertising deals with mass media conglomerates, we’re likely to see this information continue to be downplayed or flat-out ignored for years to come. Might as well go have a Coke and a smile.

Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images
“I’d be a corporate whistle-blower, but the clown and the violet ogre put a bomb in my brain.”