BBC News - Police respond to Onion's Capitol hostage spoof
The Onion's fake story follows a standoff in Congress over a spending bill to avert government shutdown.
US police are investigating tweets by a satirical news website about a fake security alert at Washington DC's Capitol building.
The Onion said on its Twitter account that "screams and gunfire" had been heard inside the Capitol. It later said schoolchildren had been taken hostage. ....
The website posted a tweet on Thursday morning which said: "BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building."
It later posted another tweet promoting a spoof news article, headlined Congress Takes Group Of Schoolchildren Hostage.
In one of a series of tweets that followed, it said Congress was demanding a $12tn (£7.7tn) ransom "or all the kids die".
The article - apparently poking fun at recent congressional budget showdowns - featured a mocked-up photo of Republican House Speaker John Boehner holding a gun to a girl's head....
The Onion's posts prompted a blizzard of responses on Twitter.
"@TheOnion You people are despicable", one tweeter wrote.
Another said: "@TheOnion Very poor taste."
For satire to work, half the target audience must be too dense to detect satire. And, there has to be just a tiny bit of plausibility. Where's Mencken when you need him?
fwd: Jesus Christ, Pirate
Things have gotten so bad that anarchists are beginning sound reasonable, or at least wickedly funny. The allusion to Rome is not entirely inappropriate, either.
Lifted from the anarchist blog Center for a Stateless Society.
After reportedly feeding a crowd of five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, Jesus Christ of Nazareth was recently served with formal legal notice from industry trade associations, demanding that he cease and desist from what they charge is an illegal food-sharing operation under the terms of the Miracle Millennium Anti-Replication Act (MMAA).
Miracle-working rabbis like Mr. Christ, and their alleged property rights infringements, have been the center of controversy in recent years. They’re the subject of a public education campaign by the Foodstuffs Producers Association of Galilee and Judea. Loaves and fishes producers argue that unauthorized replication of food, since it deprives them of revenues to which they are entitled, amounts to stealing. Sympathetic rabbis in synagogues throughout Palestine are reading FPAGJ public service announcements, aimed at countering public perceptions that “everybody does it” and “it’s just a little thing,” to their flocks: “Don’t bakers and fishermen deserve to be paid?” Many Torah schools have adopted FPAGJ “anti-foodlifting” curricula.
In related news, the Wine Industry Association of Palestine has complained amid surfacing reports that Jesus, in another alleged act of illegal sharing, also replicated wine at a wedding feast in Cana of Galilee.
Physicians’ licensing boards, likewise, point to alleged eyewitness accounts of Jesus practicing medicine without a license. This unauthorized medical practice, according to widespread reports, has extended to lepers, the lame, the halt, the blind, a man with a palsied hand, a woman with an issue of blood, and assorted victims of demonic possession. The medical industry denounces Jesus’ actions as unfair competition. According to a spokesman for the Galilean Medical Association, “it’s unfair to expect a licensed physician who spent years as an apprentice and who has to cover the overhead from office space to compete with some carpenter who just waves his hands around and heals people for free.”
Although the Embalmers’ Guild has also complained of rumored resurrections of the dead, legal experts say there is no actual statute defining that particular activity as a criminal offense.
On the other side, a small but growing movement of gustatory property opponents takes issue with the “piracy” label. They argue that copying food, as an inherently non-rivalrous activity, isn’t theft; because the newly replicated food is created ex nihilo, nobody else’s stock of food is diminished. Fisherman Simon Bar Jonah of Galilee and his brother Andrew agree. “Instead of trying to suppress competition, the fishing industry should replace its archaic business model. Opportunities are out there for anyone willing to innovate. We haven’t lost a denarius because of Jesus’ food-sharing.”
But authorities aren’t buying it. Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea, recently announced plans to crack down on gustatory property pirates like Jesus. “If you think I’m going to wash my hands of this Jesus guy, God love him, think again. Replicating loaves, fishes and wine is stealing, just the same as a smash-and-grab at Macy’s. This is a big effing deal.”
Strange behavior and earthquakes
The following from All Shook Up: Mapping Earthquake News on Twitter from Virginia to Maine | SocialFlow Blog.
"The proper response to an earthquake? Run, scream, take cover?… no wait, Tweet!
"On Tuesday, the denizens of the East Coast had exactly this choice, and they responded by flooding the interwebz with messages: startled, mundane, humorous, informational. And it happened fast. Seismic waves travel at 3-5 km/s, communication signals in fiber optic cables move at a speed of 200,000 km/s [as this XKCD cartoon brilliantly notes]. Tweets do take time to compose, but significantly less when you’re tweeting “EARTHQUAKE”!
"We thought you’d like to see some of the data behind it. The visualization below replays the spread of earthquake related Tweets across North America, from the moment the epicenter hit Mineral Virginia (1:51PM) on August 23rd through its spread across the East coast and the South."
