News Flash!

We live in a time of few issues. Everything is going great. But underneath, people are thinking, do we really live in paradise? Isn’t there some issue we should be concerned about somewhere? Or is it just gonna be the cabana boys and ice cream from now on out?

Oh, how the West doth sleep! The answer is here, and it is grim: the Russkies are at it again! You remember when they used to wave their missiles at us. Now those bastards are trying to connect Extra terrestrial carnivores, no doubt to gain allies and wipe us out!

In the old days, we would have found this out from Weekly World News. Sadly, our only source for the secret information that we all need has gone bust – although with this news about the Russkies, I think we know now who was behind closing down our only unbiased source of news! Luckily, the Guardian is filling the gap.

“ET stay home
We should resist the efforts of Russian scientists to contact aliens who could threaten our very existence”

Says ever frowning David Cox.

“… a very different exercise has been undertaken by the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. It depends not on listening for signs of life from outside, but on transmitting powerful radio signals deep into space in the hope that these will be recognised and decoded by alien lifeforms. People have toyed with this idea (now known as "active Seti") since the 19th century, and messages were once sent to supposed inhabitants of the moon. Now, however, Alexander Zaitsev, the chief scientist at the Moscow academy's institute of radio engineering, has been using a 70m-wide radiotelescope at the Evpatoria Deep Space Centre in the Ukraine to project state-of-the-art active-Seti messages to nearby star systems.

The problem is obvious. If we discover alien life ourselves, we can decide what, if anything, to do about it. If, on the other hand, we alert aliens to our own existence, we'll be at their mercy. There's no reason to suppose they'd be friendly. On the contrary, Independence Day may provide us with a more useful model than Close Encounters.”

The bastards! The fucking bastards! Luckily, with the Guardian in on this caper, diplomatic efforts will be used – before, that is, we invade Russia – in order to stop this heinous conspiracy. Never have I felt so grateful to a newspaper ‘of the left’ for publishing one neo con after another in its comments section, for if we had not been told about this, a couple years from now we’d be having to deal with giant jellyfish in flying saucers.

“So far, there's no reason to suppose that, if the Russians manage to discover any alien life, they'll be seeking to marshal its firepower in the new cold war against the west. All the same, there's clearly a danger that they might inadvertently prompt intergalactic annihilation. This may not be as pressing a matter as the perils being faced in Russia by the British Council's plucky staffers. Yet perhaps our formidable foreign secretary should none the less add active Seti to his growing list of concerns.

Many astronomers believe that any active Seti activity should have to be authorised in advance by the world's assembled governments. Isn't it time for Mr Miliband to tell President Putin in no uncertain terms that HMG will accept nothing less? Thereafter, we could all sleep safe in our beds once more.”

Unfortunately, Cox wasn’t able to penetrate the message the nefarious –Vitches of the Moscow Cosmological and Cosmetic center are sending. Luckily, LI’s far flung correspondents have broken through the corridors of sinister silence at great expense, as well as casualties that amount to four secret agents down and ten NKVD/FSB officers. This is the message they are sending! Jeepers, I don’t think the world has been threatened this much since Penguin escaped from prison that last time and threatened to set off the doomsday machine! But as I remember, we called on "Mission Accomplished" Bush - David Cox's favorite superhero - to fix that problem, and man, did he! We might need him again. How the wheel, as Cox might say, doth turn.