“Tomorrow’s news today!”

NRA headquarters in the “blue states” are coming under fire from mobs of angry protestors demanding gun control legislation. An NRA spokesmen on Fox News declared: “This fits in with what we believe, which is that the American people need their 2nd Amendment rights in order to defend their democratic freedoms.” Asked if this meant that the NRA accepted being fired upon — so far only seven NRA officials have been shot in the sieges — and did not want police protection, the NRA spokesman said that “on the contrary, we believe that the use of more guns is always the answer to any situation, even when it comes to deciding which group of shooters in a firefight has the greater amount of 2nd Amendment rights.”

The Mainway Reality Company has begun sales of homes in its new soon-to-be-beachfront development, Prudhoe Bay Shores, on Alaska’s North Slope. Savvy investors are swooping in to scoop up these half-million to two million dollar properties along what is anticipated to be a vacation destination shoreline in a decade. Each luxury home is accompanied by a large garage for multiple SUVs, and a boathouse and dock for storing and mooring various watercraft. While these properties are some miles inland from the present shoreline of the Arctic Ocean, the president of Mainway Reality is confident of reaping large profits from this venture. “It won’t be long before the sea arrives and these property values skyrocket, this is the next Miami Beach” he predicts. The rush of buyers seems to prove him right, and the planting of palm trees along the streets of Prudhoe Bay Shores continues.

In a case bought (well, brought) by Goldman Sachs, and bolstered by a host of amicus curiae briefs by large banks, The Supreme Court has agreed to review the constitutionality of the 13th Amendment to determine if the present prohibition of reducing a person to slavery because of bankruptcy or a refusal to pay debts, such as underwater mortgages, is unconstitutional. “The property rights of investors are central to our society,” a spokesman for the pro-slavery suit declared, “and the Court should correct the legal error that permits flagrant personal irresponsibility to deny the rightful return-on-investment those investors anticipated.”

A nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania has fallen into a large sinkhole that opened under it following a recent period of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” for the extraction of geologically trapped natural gas under the surrounding area. Because cooling lines to the reactor were severed as it fell, it is overheating and melting its way deeper into the earth. A spokesman for U.S. Outgas, the fracking company, denies responsibility for the disaster, claiming “it was obviously the result of an earthquake, and had nothing to do with our operations.” Seismometers have recorded earth tremors occurring as each of the other forty-six recent sinkholes in Pennsylvania opened up. All were over trapped gas deposits.

The Chinese Communist Party is buying the entire Swiss banking industry for $1.7T, the value of its holdings in US securities. The Chinese government’s purpose is to bolster its citizens’ confidence in itself, as explained by the Minister of Finance. “Now our politburo members can deposit their personal holdings in the Chinese Swiss Bank without fear of being seen as corrupt,” he said. The Swiss bankers have invested their Chinese gains by buying the entire banking industries of Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco and San Marino, and continuing their business as before.

The Greek government enacts a solar energy export tax. “We believe the solar energy Greece receives is an important natural resource that must be used for the benefit of the Greek people,” said the Minister of Finance, “so we are enacting a tax to recover such benefit from the solar energy that is removed from our country.” Hardest hit by this new tax are German and other Northern European tourists, who must now have their tans measured before leaving Greece, by a melanin density optical scanner, which assess their skin darkening and hence their absorbed dose of solar energy as against a standard un-tanned skin tone for their region. Despite initial fears that the new tax would devastate the Greek tourist industry, it has been at success at generating much new revenue, which is applied to Greece’s foreign debt. As one Greek tour guide said, “they may have the banks up there where it is cold and grey, but we have the sun.”

The continuing FBI investigation of e-mail on personal computers linked to possible security leaks from the US State Department and the Pentagon leads to the offices of the New York Times, where it is discovered that the editors and op-ed writers are all secretly reading manuelgarciajr.com to guide them in anticipating the public mood, for purposes of control and in crafting their own editorials that copy those manuelgarciajr.com insights they think they can get credit for. “It’s absurd to think we collude with government to control the public, or that we would be influenced by such an insignificant publication as manuelgarciajr.com,” said a spokesman for the Times. In a related development, drones have been seen circling over Oakland, California, headquarters of manuelgarciajr.com.

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The above is the raw material I submitted as my contribution to the 2013 edition of the blended work of humor published by Swans each New Years. (I modified the last item for this blog). You can enjoy the collected bonbons at:

Infamous Predictions for 2013, by SWANS
http://www.swans.com/library/art18/xxx148.html