Government earmarks R4 billion to wine and dine citizens before fucking them

Citizens can celebrate today, after the ANC government today announced plans to set aside nearly R4 billion to treat South Africans to a lovely evening out before totally fucking them.

Government, which is already moving into the preliminary phases of the program by making reservations at that gorgeous little Italian place you love you so much, says that they should have wined and dined their first schmuck voter by June 2016 at the latest – and they are sparing no expense.

“Let us be 100% clear – after the dust of elections has settled next year, we’re going to roger those voters nice and proper,” said ANC spokesperson Hum Pandump. “We at Luthuli house just sat down and agreed that the least we could do is take them out for a nice bite to eat at Luigi’s, compliment them on their dress or fancy shirt, maybe hold the door open for them when we arrive, and listen to their problems and complains and fears, before well and truly ass-ramming the life and breathe out of them.”

Government promises it will spare no expense
in the lead up to screwing you.

South Africans are excited.

"Hell, by now I'm sure that most of us are used to just getting totally effed over and hung out to dry without even so much as a cursory 'thanks for your hard-earned tax rands and continuing support and stoicism of our ever-worsening regime of self-serving nepotism'," said one Johannesburg man. "It's just nice to be acknowledged every once in a while: to have them say 'you allow us, year in and year out, to keep doing ridiculous shit that would otherwise have us impeached. Thank you, Mr Voter."

He added that "it's going to be nice to see the government paying for voters to eat fancy dinners.

"It's just a refreshing break from what we're used to, you know?"

And despite mounting concerns by the South African Medical Board of Psychologists that this is just another textbook stage in an ever more abusive relationship, South Africans are pleased.

“I know that I promised I’d never let them back into my life that last time after the incident with service delivery and Eskom, but maybe he’s changed,” said ANC-voting stalwart Jackson Pieterson. “Sure, all my friends are convinced that he just wants me for my money and silent stoicism, but maybe he’s different this time. Maybe all those warnings that he’s just going to hurt me and everyone I know – again – are just silly paranoia.”

Government now swears that it has changed their ways.

“We’re not going to just abandon them after the big, exciting election night,” said ANC Electoral Campaigns Manager Loven Leevue. “We promise that we’ll call them in the morning – just as long as they don’t start up again about how much money we need to repay them.”

"Cheat" lawyer receives international recognition

A former Law student is being honoured by several large Law Universities this week, after numerous news articles and reports published in South Africa proved that he was ridiculously overqualified to be a lawyer.

Lwazi Mzozoyana, who was enrolled to read for a Law Degree at Rhodes University in 2005, is to be the recipient of not one but four honourary law degrees, having been praised as “the very definition of brilliance” and “possessing a legal talent and universal public revulsion far beyond his years and legal experience”.

“If we look at his astonishing list of accomplishments – for example, being found guilty of stealing two fellow student’s assignments from a locked submissions box in 2012, cheating on a law of contract exam in 2007, and also being banned from Rhodes until 2022, which, let me add, was previously a lifetime ban,” said Barry Starr, the Dean of the prestigious Law Faculty at Harvard University, “then we can see that, at the tender age of just 33, he’s amassed the kind of widespread contempt and scornful, dismissive public hatred that most lawyers take years to build up.”

“His utter disregard for the laws and rules of both academic institutions and civil society, his disrespect for moral decency, and his brazen attempts to utterly destroy another Zimbabwean student’s reputation and chances of graduation have shown that he is leagues and bounds ahead of even the most absolutely reviled lawyers who defend paedophiles,” explain Starr. “If you add this to the fact that he’s shown no remorse or shame whatsoever, hell, he might even be TOO ridiculously overqualified to practise law.”

The plans to confer these honourary titles and degrees have been met by widespread approval by members of the legal community.

“It’s simply astonishing,” said lawyer of nearly three decades, Sue Primcourt. “It took me years of defending definitely guilty serial murderers, baby-rapers, and underground sex-slave mafiosos to get even half of the spite and derision he got in just years of study.”

However, for Mzozoyana, this is just the beginning. With promise and accolades such as these, it’s only a matter of time before he takes up political aspirations and becomes President.

“If he works hard, puts in the tireless effort and passionate devotion it takes to succeed in the political sphere, then who knows,” said Starr, “Perhaps he could be as much of a thief as Zuma is (allegedly).”

DVD companies adopt Adam Sandler anti-piracy measures

Taking a firm stance against the worsening global trend of illegally downloading films and series, DVD and CD production companies have today announced their decision to embed all their products with powerful anti-piracy measures, such as Adam Sandler’s Funny People or Jack and Jill.

"When we look at past cases of illegal downloads and internet piracy, we see time and time again how any CD or DVD protected with embedded content made by Adam Sandler is a powerful agent in deterring torrenters from stealing films,” said a spokesperson for Miramax Pictures, Hugh Torrent. “No one downloads them. In fact, the measures are so powerful that they have been known to even instill overwhelming sensations of nausea, vomiting and suicide in those exposed to them.”

"Imagine the scene: you're a pirate. You want to watch the latest Game of Thrones episode, but don't want to support the studio or actors in it. So you just illegally download from some shady site. That awesome theme music plays - we like to lull them into a sense of false security - and then BOOM. Subtle racism and vomit-inducing fart jokes bereft of any talent hits you straight in the brain."

Torrents said the historical evidence was powerful.

“Time and time again, we have seen the potency of footage embedded with this protection software. In the past we have run many, many experiments testing the latest versions of this defence software. Like when we first introduced the advanced content protection software in Spanglish and then slowly started to perfect it into its pirate-viewer-kryptonite forms in Blended and, oh god, Grown Ups 2. Literally no one pirates that last movie. Sure, it was so powerful it physically sickened legitimate viewers in the theatre, but that's the price we pay in the war against torrenters.”

And despite universal outcry from international human rights organisations and activism groups saying that such measures are “an extreme abuse of power” and “a despicably cruel extreme”, movie companies have stood by their decision.

“We’ve tried to scare off pirates with Cease and Desist letters, legal threats, huge fines, jail time, and really stupid anti-piracy adverts, but [illegal downloads] have continued unabated,” he said. “It’s about time we took extreme measures.”

However, the move has been branded “unoriginal copy-catting” by the South African film industry, saying they’ve been doing this for years.

“Piracy has been a huge issue in South Africa for years,” they said. “This is why we routinely protect our CDs and DVDs with content produced by Steve Hofmeyr and Leon Schuster – anti-piracy methods so powerful they’ve been known to make people commit suicide in the most brutal manner possible right in public places."

For those of you wanting to copy-paste this onto their own website without my permission, please study the image below.

Pic (my edit) made of Commons images and Head by Alex Neman. Yes, I know the hand is the wrong way round. Jesus, give me a break.

Santa Claus charged with trespassing, breaking and entering

Tens of thousands of children and parents have been left in shock and the Christmas season has ground to a halt after police announced the arrest of ages-old bringer of seasonal joy and merriment, Santa Clause.

Police now say that the global gift-delivery boy and poster boy for generosity and Coca-Cola has been charged with over four billion counts of trespassing on private property, breaking and entering, and violating international airspace restrictions and travel laws. Mr Claus also faces possible terrorism charges, having left more than eighteen billion million unmarked and suspicious packages in homes across the world.

He also faces charges of operating an animal-powered category five air vehicle without the requisite licences and registration.

“For a number of years now we’ve been issuing warnings to Mr Claus and his band of outlaws, but every December 25th, like clockwork, we see him ignoring us again and again,” said Lead Commissioner of Interpol Harry Dee Tainsbhadi. “This kind of contempt for the law is unacceptable. So this year we set up a sting operation, and we’ve caught him red handed.”

Parents have expressed resounding happiness at the police’s swift action, condemning Santa "The Sick Fuck" Claus as a “criminal” and “maybe even a paedophile, who knows?”

“Santa puts across this image of him being a jolly, friendly chap who hands out gifts to children from his sleigh – doesn’t that sound creepy to you?” said one concerned parent. “And every year, he sneakily breaks into hundreds of houses with sleeping, innocent children in them. Last year we found stockings hanging at the feet of my children’s beds. The sick bastard was that close to them! Who knows what twisted, perverted things he could have tried?”

However, Public and Federal prosecutors say they are having a tough time pinning the charges on the 400-year-old Father of Christmas, saying that his team of personal lawyers have established a very difficult set of alibis and counter arguments in his defence.

“We’re having difficulty proving the facts of the case to the judge,” said Federal Attorney for the State Amica Skewray. “Like how he was able to commit several thousand possible cases of breaking and entering in countries thousands of miles apart in just a few hours, and how he fit his fat arse down so many tiny chimneys.”

In light of these difficulties, the Prosectution has had to let many thousands of charges slide.

“We were forced to drop four billion charges of theft because, but we just can’t prove how one man ate and drank that many mince pies he ate and glasses of milk and sherry.”

Santa Claus and his team of lawyers are now preparing a last-ditch defense saying that he has been framed, and wrongfully arrested.

“It wasn’t our client who went into those houses and left all those presents,” read their statement to the media, which were delighted because a story like this is basically Christmas come early, “but instead thousands of insidious mothers and fathers whose lies to their children might put an innocent man in jail.”

Prosecuters now say they are working on debunking this claim.

“It’s a very flimsy defense,” they said. “I mean, are you honestly expecting me to believe it was actually my mom and dad who wrapped up all those presents and put it under the tree in the dead of night after taking a bite out of the treats we left and leaving sooty bootprints in the fire’s hearth, and not an elderly Gandalf who travels millions of miles from his North Pole home with his team of elves and reindeer to leave gifts under my tree when I’ve been good all year? Yeah, right. Pull the other one. It has jingle bells on it.”

Picture (edited) of Santa Clause by Jonathan G Meath (in Wikimedia Commons CC license 2.0 share-attribute)

Plagiarist unsure how to reword original content

An area journalist is reportedly unsure today, after meeting countless difficulties in rewording a rival website's news content while trying to make it look like his own original work.

“The world of cutting-edge journalism is a competitive and challenging place,” said 32-year-old part-time journalist and most-time “content aggregator” Robin Hartikles. “But nothing is more challenging than sitting there with another website’s content in front of you and a thesaurus in one hand trying to figure out how to balance synonyms with word replacement, phrase alterations and content mixing to make it seem like this is your own, fresh, original story that came solely as a result of your hard work.”

Hartikles explained why, unlike with images or photos on the internet – which are bloody easy to steal or pretend exist in the creative commons – written work still presents a challenge.

“There are so many possibilities, and doing it wrong means you’ll at the very least have to pretend that the source information is to blame,” he said. “What happens when there are specific words or a very specific vocabulary that makes for sentences that cannot be altered for fear of losing all the phrase’s meaning? This is why ‘curation’ or 'aggregation', as we call them in the business, are artforms unlike any other.”

This particular article – a series of photographs and accompanying descriptions pulled directly from a thread on a world renowned source of much free viral content known only as Reddit.com – is proving difficult, said Hartikles.

“What do I do? Do I reorder the words? Do I right-click the word in MS Word and choose from a readily available list of synonyms? Do I find other sources and blend the two to make it seem like this is original thought? It’s such a tough decision. All I can say is thank GOD for all that practice I got with Turn It In and my university essays.”

Whatever his choice, Hartikles is steadfast that he can never stoop to citing original sources.

“Have you ever read an article that says ‘reported The Sunday Times last week’ or ‘according to an article by The City Press,” he asked. “Admitting that I got all my information from another websites’ hard work would make me look like a journalist who is lazy, unethical and unprofessional.”

He added that “citing source material is also so much work”.

“It’s bad enough that I have to jump through more hoops than a trained circus animal to credit photographers for their images,” he explained, adding that by “credit” he meant “neglect to include any and all relevant information that might lead to the original photographer getting any site visits, advertising revenue, or even exposure, that beloved bread and butter of artists everywhere.

Hartikles was quick to refute colleagues claims that he is “a low life scum-sucking bottomfeeder mooching off the sweat and blood of real journlists” saying that he has totally had original thoughts before.

“For example, I came up with the new word that describes the new journalists of the future,” he explained. “A Plag-ournalist.”

Readers wanting to know more about this story can read it in slightly different wording and with my name in tiny letters at the bottom on any other news website in the world, except Buzzfeed, because they've closed down their website.

Pic: Bill Branson, for National Cancer Institute (Creative Commons - public domain)

Buzzfeed apologises for endless stream of shallow, un-lifechanging garbage

Citing the endless stream of failed attempts to “blow your mind”, “change your life”, “make you weep” and other such hyperbolic click-baitery, the chief editor and long-time writer at viral media website and “content aggregator” Buzzfeed has this morning issued a long and heartfelt apology to the internet, people who originally made the content they so brazenly “aggregate”, and the world in general.

“We just want to say we’re so damn sorry,” said editor Plaie Gerize. “Looking back at our long and ugly history of hyperbole, exaggeration and outright lies, we want to wholeheartedly apologise.”

Gerize’s list of apologies was long.

“We’re sorry. We know that Picture Number 8 didn’t blow your mind. We know Number 6 wasn’t perfect, as we said it would be in countless articles,” he said, permanently deleting the entire website in a show of ultimate contrition and sorrow. “Those fabulous snaps of Jennifer Lawrence didn’t prove that she was perfection, and that series of photos that was supposed to restore your faith in humanity was completely inadequate. We're scum. We're cancer. And we’re sorry. We can’t say that enough.”

Pictured: the new Buzzfeed website, with all relevant changes.

His apology extended to all the content that the Buzzfeed team as a whole –regardless of country or origin or format – had produced.

“Even our videos. When they weren’t silly or ham-fistedly trying to send an self-evident life-lesson, they were just totally trivial. Also, time and time again we totally blew down the importance of individual people’s hard work and passion by never using their name and just reducing them to their sex, nationality or even just ‘someone’. We should have given them due respect, even if it is hard to get a click out of you by using someone’s full name.”

He continued.

“We’re also sorry for having outright stolen content from many sites. Sorry, ‘aggregated’. Or maybe ‘curated’? I dunno, which word are we using these days?”

“Furthermore, we’re sorry about contradicting articles that provide you with reasons why each member of your favourite boyband or series is the best one. Like those twenty articles which individually claimed why different members of Friends or One Direction or The Backstreet Boy or whatever were by far the best. I mean, how did we not see how black our souls were, posting these kinds of articles at the same time and having each written by the same author? How could we have been so spineless as to not have an editorial stance on anything?”

“Finally, we’re sorry for using social issues and controversial topics to squeeze a few cheap clicks out of you. Like videos where we show people giving homeless people a pizza or a hundred dollars in a video that probably makes eighteen times that, or with serious issues that don’t deserve to be trivialised in shallow, bullet-point, GIF-heavy listicles.”

Having realised their errors, editors and writers at the website have since vowed to take courses in ethics and journalistic values, and have furthermore vowed to never oversimplify an argument or concept by using cat pictures or images cut from popular culture.

“We realise now that our insatiable hunger to just get that click out of you, to bleed you and other readers for pageviews and time, made us blind,” he said in a long, profound, ten-chapter essay that didn’t contain one picture or numerical bulletpoint. “It turned us into monsters, veritable scum-sucking bottom feeders who lurked on Reddit and subReddit forums and Tumblr pages, copy-pasting and rehashing and resharing old and boring content because we knew that, hell, you’d click whatever old shit we regurgitate.”

The move has been met by widespread praise.

"Their apology was amazing, incredibly. It literally blew my mind and changed my life," said one internet user. "In fact, if there was a list of 10 apologies published on the internet somewhere, this would probably be at number 4."

Those wanting to know more about this story can read this exact same article on The Huffington Post, Upworthy and Elitedaily.

Government doesn't steal R10 million

In a shocking turn of developments yesterday afternoon, the government didn't steal R10 million.

According to eyewitnesses on the scene, the cash was just lying there in an account that official record keepers had totally forgotten about.

"It was earmarked for 'corruption policymaking' or 'education sector development', which was probably why everyone had forgotten it was there," said one man, Ted Manners. 

Since the report, an inquiry has revealed that some 42 MPs and 13 municipality leaders knew about the available millions, but made no discernible move to take it."

Over 55 people knew about this money, and they all didn't touch it," said the inquiry. "As such, this is the greatest step forward in South African politics since '94."

he government has been quick to respond to the matter, saying that it is outraged such a thing could have even been conceived to occur.

"We don't know why or how this happened, but we can assure the people of South Africa that we are doing everything in our power to ensure it doesn't happen again," said government spokesperson Mike Ash.

"We have a very widely-accepted image to uphold, and we want everyone to get the level of governance that they've always voted for."