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U.S. Federal Government to Move Offshore

February 3, 2047
NASSAU–In a bid to cut costs and enhance security the House of Representatives voted Tuesday to approve a Senate bill relocating both Congressional bodies to an unnamed offshore banking and tax haven. “The move is sure to result in immediate cost savings to the American people,” notes Senator Janet Rent (D-Calif). “By moving to a tax haven we can cut payroll costs dramatically because we can reduce salaries without reducing take-home pay.”

Following in the footsteps of the Supreme Court’s relocation to Nassau, the Bahamas, the plan calls for Congress to take advantage of offshore banking and corporate secrecy laws to enhance security for top government decision-makers. “Just the way the Court set up blind trusts for each of the justices to protect their identities, we’ll do the same for congresspeople and key staffers,” explains Senator Rent. “My seat will technically be held by the ‘First California Senatorial Seat Trust, IBC’ and, during my term, I’ll act through the Trust’s registered agent as an anonymous, controlling shareholder. If nobody knows who we are nobody can threaten us.”

The plan further calls for establishment of a special, standing committee within the Federal Election Commission to oversee the administration of blind trusts representing candidates for major offices. “The Commission supports this initiative as a way to disincentivize smear campaigning,” notes FEC General Counsel Renee Majeur. “When your opponent is the Democratic Candidate for the Fifth District Trust you’ve got no real way to engage in negative campaigning. All you can talk about are the issues.”

Operating offshore for the past four years, the Supreme Court reports few difficulties and has announced preliminary plans to begin moving Federal appellate courts offshore in the spring. “Being offshore has done wonders for our independence as judges,” reports The Chief Justice Trust, IBC. “There were a few kinks at first, just working out the logistics of communication through the agents for the Trusts, but now we are truly free to offer neutral, disinterested rulings unaffected by improper political pressures.”

Not to be outdone by the legislative and judicial branches, two executive agencies have indicated interest in moving operations offshore, including the Internal Revenue Service, which sees in the move a chance to engage tax-evaders on an equal footing. “They’ve been complaining for years about the use of offshore shells to hide and launder taxable revenues,” notes Senator Rent. “Now [the IRS] will benefit from the same level of secrecy.”

Critics of the offshore migration point reasonably to the threat it poses to public accountability. “Is there really such a thing as accountability when I don’t know the real identity of my elected representative?” asks Democracy First spokesman Manuel Jig. “How will we even know that the same person controls an elected Trust for the whole term? This is the birth of a secret, faceless government, a government no longer of the people.”

Eisner Pummeled by Disney’s Frozen Head

December 18, 2027
LOS ANGELES–Documents released Monday by the Walt Disney Company in the course of its defense against a wrongful death suit brought by the estate of its late Chairman and CEO reveal gruesome details of the executive’s “accidental” death and confirm longtime rumors that the company has, for decades, maintained the frozen head of its founder in hopes that developments in medical science will enable his eventual resurrection. “This was a real double whammy,” exclaims court journalist and veteran Disney-watcher Juan Yell. “I mean, to have all the ‘frozen head’ stuff turn out to be true after all these years, and then to have it so closely linked to Eisner’s mysterious death, all I can say is ‘wow!'”

According to memos produced by the company in response to legal requests by Eisner’s estate, the company had sought to conceal details of the accident both “to maintain sensitivity to [Eisner’s] family” and to “protect valuable trade secrecy RE proprietary attraction applications of certain quantum engineering developments and RE Project Bread.” Transcripts of internal Disney debriefings further reveal that ‘Project Bread’ was code for the company’s efforts to maintain, repair and eventually revive the cryogenically preserved head of Walter E. Disney, while the head itself was known to insiders simply as ‘the Bread.’

AV files released by the company, including footage of the accident itself captured by laboratory security cameras, document a day-long visit by Eisner to the company’s top secret research facility. “There’s some powerful footage in there,” notes a source close to the plaintiff. “From what I’ve seen, Eisner was alone in this room where they keep the head, locked in there really because the security is so tight. He seemed to be looking at the head inside this case when BAM, the head comes shooting out like a rocket and hits him square in the face, knocking him over. Then the head just went ricocheting around the room like some crazy kind of bullet or something. He kept trying to get up and make it to the door, but the head just kept bouncing off the walls and hitting him, again and again and again. It was really brutal.”

Central among the documents are files reportedly covering internal investigations of the accident and linking Eisner’s death to the company’s experimental development of technologies exploiting the bizarre phenomenon of quantum entanglement.

“In these files the company has as much as admitted its culpability,” claims Eisner estate attorney Phineas Bustamente. “The company’s Imagineers apparently developed a technology that permits two objects separated by significant distance to become ‘entangled’ with each other. There were a couple of projects based on this technology. One was an update of Space Mountain where riders in an open field would be ‘entangled’ with a remote coaster and sort of fly around on an invisible ride. The other had something to do with thawing the frozen head by applying heat to a pumpkin with which it was entangled. It appears that negligence by company employees lead the head to become entangled with a prototype roller coaster, transforming it into a deadly projectile.”

While refusing to comment on particular documents, a spokesman for Disney called the suit “irresponsibly speculative” and denied that Eisner’s death was anything but an “unfortunate and tragic accident.”

Contacted about the possibility that his former patient’s death was caused by repeated, high-speed blows by a frozen, quantum-entangled head, Eisner’s personal physician deferred conclusory comment, but remarked that a head, if frozen, could produce injury like that of a “cannonball” and that Eisner’s “multiple, fatal traumas were consistent with such an instrument.”

Linguists Decipher Warning Message in Genome

February 1, 2039
BOSTON–A group of researchers at MIT’s Chomsky Institute announced yesterday independent confirmation of their discovery of a series of messages encoded in apparently dormant or unused sections of the human genome. “We’re able to report replication of our results by at least three independent teams,” explained the team’s project director Klara Tulip. “We hence feel quite confident about the results and felt that they were significant enough to warrant preliminary public release.”

Exploiting evolved, mathematical models derived from iterative analyses of network-available audio, video and text files in more than 200 languages, the team scanned files in the Human Genome Library for patterns consistent with the presence of a “semantic system.” “We were actually using the Genome Library as a control data-set to be sure that our model wasn’t producing false positives,” explains Tulip. “We’d developed a mathematical and algorithmic formulation of a meta-language descriptive of all known human linguistic systems and needed to test it against some non-random data that we assumed had no semantic content. We we’re stunned to find that the genome contains sequences consistent with an implied linguistic system.”

Within days of discovering the presence of “semantic sequences” the team had also isolated a “Rosetta Stone” enabling them to partially decipher and translate a number of passages. “The genome appears to contain a linguistic system of remarkable economy,” notes Tulip. “Like a coded message that includes detailed instructions for how it is to be decoded.”

Though declining to reveal the full results of their analysis, noting that some 97% of the human genome consists of biologically unused sequences with “a statistically significant chance of containing decipherable semantic content,” the team did release translations of a “number of passages of public interest,” including the warning “NOT TO BE REMOVED EXCEPT BY END USER.”

Among other messages, the team isolated at least 42 varied repetitions of the instruction to “[not] fold, spindle, or mutilate” and two apparently inconsistent warranties, one claiming “absence of defect in material or workmanship for 180 days from formulation” and one disavowing “all warranties of fitness for use except as otherwise required.” “Our initial analysis has uncovered a number of repetitions, counter-factuals, and internal-inconsistencies suggesting that these genomic messages are a product of the same evolutionary forces driving reproduction of the non-semantic portions of the genome,” observes Tulip.

Responding to news of the team’s discovery, critics, including a number of prominent linguists and bioinformaticians, characterize the research as a Rorschach Test revealing more about the researchers’ assumptions than about the meaning of human genes. “You have to look closely at their model, at what their meta-linguistic model assumes about the world,” notes Harvard Professor of Statistics Joseph Climb. “If you go into the world with a sufficiently abstract model of ‘language’ you’ll start finding Shakespeare inside rocks and twigs.”

Discounting such criticism as “mathematically unsophisticated,” project leader Tulip points to the astronomical odds against “a chance consistency that would permit our model to identify such a vast pool of semantically significant sequences. Our genome has something to say. The real question is why–what evolutionary purpose could these messages serve?”

Wal-mart Tags Shoppers with Subcutaneous Cookies

November 18, 2009
WALVILLE, ARK.–Responding to public requests from privacy advocates, retailing giant Wal-mart agreed Wednesday to release details concerning a newly-implemented system for tracking shoppers in its Wal-mart and Sam’s Club stores. “We understand that there is some sensitivity surrounding this initiative,” notes Wal-mart spokesman Joel Scent, “And we want to be entirely upfront and open about the program and the ways it will benefit our shopping family. We’ve been testing the system in a few pilot stores–we’ve made no secret about that–and now, with that experience behind us, we’re ready to talk about the program.”

Tested over the past three months in 23 stores across the U.S., the tagging system, known as the In-store Cookie System, or ICS, uses a proprietary combination of electro-magnetic and channeled-particle beams to produce a “persistent, informationally-significant, quantum-molecular structured excitation” just beneath the surface of the skin. “It’s really quite simple,” explains Scent. “The ICS muzzle is positioned with our security cameras at a store’s entrance. As a shopper comes in, the system sends out a series of invisible beams that harmlessly arranges some of the molecules in her forehead. Initially, the molecules are arranged to encode some information, just a unique identifying number, but during the course of the engagement the Cookie might be extended with some additional codes to help us customize and improve the shopping experience.”

Stores making use of ICS are equipped throughout with camera-like Cookie-readers capable of uniquely identifying and tracking shoppers as they move through the store. Shopper’s movements are then translated into a schematic of concatenated three-dimensional vectors and recorded in the ICS database for later analysis. Cookie-readers mounted in shelves, connected wirelessly to the adaptive packaging of some products, enables products to tailor their pitches based on assumptions derived from customers’ shopping trajectories. “It was a little eerie,” notes a shopper in a Chicago pilot store. “I guess it was because I was in the baby aisle first, but everywhere I went all the boxes started having pictures of cute babies on them. I even saw a Pillsbury Doughbaby. And everything seemed to say ‘Safe for your Baby,’ or something like that, in big, bright letters.”

Besides enabling products to tailor their packaging, ICS, used in conjunction with adaptive price tags, enables stores to offer special bargains to shoppers, and even to offer lower prices to shoppers whose trajectories suggest indecision. “The real benefit to shoppers is that the information we gather through ICS will help us offer shopper-specific bargain bundles of related products,” notes Scent. “Say the system sees that a shopper has been looking at boy’s clothing and has also been in automotive fixtures, now, with adaptive packaging, we can add a little coupon on that underwear package for a discount on a Hot Wheels car or something.”

Critics of ICS point to just such customized bargains as one of the system’s many drawbacks. “There’s a reason they call it ‘price discrimination,'” exclaims Coalition for Economic Justice chairman Silas Lift. “Besides being a deep invasion of privacy, Wal-mart’s tag-and-track system will result in the worst sort of red-lining. Those who can buy more will get better prices while those who can’t afford to will simply pay more.”

A number of critics also point to reported inadequacies in the ‘opt-out’ method implemented in the test stores. “To opt-out you’ve got to wear this ridiculous yellow hat that says ‘OPT-OUT’ in big black letters,” notes Anonymous League president June Clever. “It turns out that the test stores kept these hats behind a counter and most shoppers didn’t even know about them. We’ve also heard stories about inadequate supplies of hats. We at the League are advocating a switch to an ‘opt-in’ hat to be worn by shoppers who clearly consent to data collection.”

Wal-mart plans to begin worldwide rollout of ICS early next year, and is in early negotiations to license the system to partner retailers and grocers.