A Modest Proposal on Pressure-Cookers
By Matthew Ung
Now that it has been confirmed that pressure cookers were used in the Boston bombing, Americans will be restricted from owning more than one pressure cooker. The mayor has said “There just is no reason that someone would need more than one small pressure cooker in today’s world”, while the Governor hollered to cheers at a rally, “You don’t need multiple pressure cookers to cook a deer!”
A background check with a fee will be required before you are allowed to purchase one, in an effort to curb “pressure cooker violence.” High capacity pressure cookers will no longer be available to the general public but will still be available to military and law enforcement. Use of pressure cooker ammunition, known by far-right Christian extremists as “electricity,” will be tracked by the Centers for Disease Control as a hazardous substance. This has many (all) states grappling with the effect of lightning in their home states, which for some reason is already criminalized on page 1,657 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Vice President Biden said by Skype conference in an Amsterdam suite, “If someone has the dumb idea of cooking more than their fair share, they are probably one of those people I wouldn’t want to own a pressure cooker of any size… that’s what overpriced restaurants are for!” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, herself a licensed Concealed Pressure Cooker Holder, called them “cosmic weapons of death inspired by AK-47 Glocks.” She was not available to elaborate.
Average citizens will be restricted to low capacity cookers that hold the equivalent of 7 cherry tomatoes, and pressure cookers with more than one handle will require a temporary government permit, so as to mitigate the risk of pressure cookers being carried too far from the home. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled the vote on the “Pressure Cooker Safety Initiative for Women Now” bill for… 5 minutes from now. The bill is shorter than usual, at only 600 pages, due to draconian sequester cuts. Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has offered a compromise to accept only up to 800 pages of legislation on this issue. President Obama at a press conference, flanked by a group of children burned by touching either pressure cookers or a stove, urged a “balanced approach” to this partisan bickering, adding that millionaires and billionaires making over $250,000 should be charged a pressure cooker excise tax. President Obama has since issued an Executive Order, ordering himself to appoint a Burn Czar, who will lead a national discussion on “the pressure cooker culture.”
The Environmental Protection Agency has mandated the sale of all pressure cookers to be stopped until global warming is stopped. Said a spokesman: “Baby seals today face the unimaginable horror of the two-pronged human threat of death by global warming, or death by pressure cookers big enough to hold a baby seal and cook it. Therefore, effective immediately, the EPA has classified the steam from pressure cookers to be a hazardous substance, and will assume in an abundance of caution that all water vapor everywhere and at every moment is from illicit steam cooker abuse.” The Department of Homeland Security has ordered 550 Apache helicopters to help monitor… Pressure cooker things. Secretary of State John Kerry has since refused to return a borrowed pressure cooker from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, while sending 9,000 “military style” pressure cookers to Palestinian leaders for no apparent reason.
Maryland has brought back the death penalty for anyone caught looking at a pressure cooker while simultaneously wearing a T-shirt with an American flag. New York has organized a pressure cooker Buy-Back program, in which pressure cookers can be turned into law enforcement in exchange for $25 gift cards with “Obama for America” logos. In California, those are $25 IOUs. Ironically, a growing number of states have begun to issue $25 in food stamps for surrendered pressure cookers, in the wake of increased hunger from fewer cooking tools. 11 government agencies are independently and redundantly investigating the cause.
The Department of Justice has issued thousands of pre-programmed cell phones to undocumented (as opposed to illegal) immigrants, from which they can call into a hotline and report any illegal (as opposed to undocumented) pressure cooker activity of United States citizens.
Reporting Live from a fundamentally transformed America, I’m Matthew Ung.
