Council Of Insanity

BOULDER, CO—A two-year study released Monday by researchers at the Halvorsen Center for Applied Calm has confirmed what many suspected: adults who meditate for 20 minutes a day become measurably calmer, more present and, by every metric the team collected, significantly more insufferable. The study followed 1,100 adults across Boulder County who committed to a daily 20-minute practice. Over two years, participants' self-reported stress fell 31 percent, and their average resting cortisol fell with it. But researchers also measured the people who lived and worked alongside them. Their stress rose 40 percent. "Calm is not destroyed. It is moved," said Dr. Ingrid Halvorsen, 62, who led the study and has meditated for "about nine minutes, once, in 1994." "The meditator gets the calm. Everyone within roughly forty feet gets the rest." The findings build on a real line of research. A 2018 paper in the journal Psychological Science found that yoga and meditati...

GRUBSBURG, OH—Facing what officials described as "an unprecedented volume of questions from men about other people's backs," the Ohio Chiropractic Posture Line, a 24-hour telephone hotline staffed by licensed chiropractors, reported more than 41,000 calls last week, nearly all of them from men who said they could not tell whether what they were looking at was a curvy figure or lumbar hyperlordosis. The line was launched in March by a regional chiropractic association to answer routine questions about posture, desk ergonomics and lower-back pain. According to the association's quarterly call log, routine questions now make up less than one percent of the volume. "Lumbar hyperlordosis is real. It's common. Usually it's anterior pelvic tilt, where the pelvis tips forward and the lower back curves more than it should," said Dr. Dale Hupp, 61, a chiropractor of 34 years who has worked the overnight shift since the line opened. "About fourteen degrees...

HUNTSVILLE, AL—Newly declassified files from Operation Paperclip, the postwar program that brought more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers to the United States, appear to confirm that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing did in fact take place. The files also state, in the same matter-of-fact tone, that the moon it landed on was built in Alabama. The 212-page dossier, released this week under a routine records review, outlines a program known internally as PROJECT KEHRICHT, a German word for "sweepings." According to the documents, between 1959 and 1961 federal sanitation contracts quietly diverted nearly all residential waste from eleven southern states to a restricted compaction facility outside Huntsville. There, the refuse was hydraulically compressed under loads the files list at "approximately 40,000 atmospheres" until it fused into a dense, grey, rock-like aggregate engineers called "lunar fill." "Two thousand miles of compacted waste,"...

MARLOW FALLS, OH—Residents of this quiet Ohio town are reeling after police confirmed Friday that hundreds of people have been found dead at Pleasant Acres Memorial Cemetery, in what officials are calling "the single largest concentration of deceased individuals this department has ever encountered, by a lot." "They're dead. All of them. Every single one," said groundskeeper Walt Hubbard, 71, who made the discovery Thursday morning while mowing what he described as "row after row after row of them." Hubbard, who has worked at the cemetery for 38 years, told reporters he had "always had a feeling" but "never wanted to be the one to say it." According to police, the victims were found in a disturbingly organized fashion: each one sealed in an individual wooden box, buried precisely six feet below the surface, and marked with a stone bearing the victim's full name and the exact dates of their birth and death. "Whoever did this...

ATLANTA—In what officials are calling "the most important public health finding since the invention of the floor," a sweeping new study released Thursday by the National Institute of Respiratory Caution has confirmed that breathing is linked to 100 percent of all recorded deaths. "We followed 11 million people for 40 years, and every single one who died had a history of breathing," said lead researcher Dr. Glenda Ostrowski, speaking from inside a sealed glass booth she has not exited since March. "Every one. No exceptions. Not one person who never breathed has ever died. Frankly, the numbers speak for themselves, and they're saying 'stop.'" According to the report, the average American inhales roughly 22,000 times a day, a figure researchers described as "reckless," "frankly showing off," and "the kind of thing you'd expect from someone who wants to die." Habitual breathers were also found to be 100 percent mor...

DETROIT—Confirming what millions of drivers had long suspected while staring at a $1,400 repair estimate, a coalition of the nation's largest automakers admitted Thursday that it has secretly raised every curb in America by half an inch per year since 1987, "compounding monthly," in a coordinated effort to sell more rims. "Honestly, we thought someone would notice around 1994," said Bradley Voss, Chief Revenue Officer of the Allied Motor Consortium, speaking from a podium reached by a flight of stairs. "Then the curb outside our headquarters passed four feet and nobody said a word. People just started parking very, very slowly. That's when we knew we could keep going." According to internal documents, the program, code-named Operation Tall Boy, began when executives noticed rim sales "flattening" and determined it was cheaper to lift four million miles of concrete than to build a better wheel. Thanks to the compounding schedule, the avera...