Curtain.  In a luxurious room, OSAMA , a tall man in mid-East dress, rushes about packing suitcases. He is trailed everywhere by his butler, ZAWAHRI, who ceaselessly attempts to connect his master to a small, creaking, wheeled dialysis machine. A sulky, veiled beauty, NAHID* KLEIN, watches proceedings from the vast plush bed. From outside we hear muted shouting and machine-gun fire.

OSAMA. Seals. Fucking seals! Did we not reach out to the seal-lovers, Zawahri? Didn’t we? So much for your eco-Koran initiative, Z. Where are my good sandals, you titless chicken? Now that your precious infidel seals are shooting at us?

ZAWAHRI. Please, sir… sheikh… leader… monsieur… boss… master… you must take some medicine for your kidneys. Or you will go into a diabetic coma. I beg you, I beg you. You are awkward to carry when unconscious, all due respect….

OSAMA. Nahid Klein, slap him, please. Read more

An instructional video on how Canadian troops make coffee in Afghanistan under combat conditions. Proper.

The latest cartoon in our series exploring creative depictions of the prophet Mohammed. This one's for all of The Propagandist's nerdy colleagues.

The latest installment of our series of satirical cartoons of a certain religious figure we have no intention of offending. He's dead, so I'm pretty sure he can't take offense. But one can never be too careful.

The Propagandist unveils its new cartoon series by our resident satirist that is probably going to get us all beheaded someday. It's all in good fun and for a good cause, yes? Enjoy free speech, all due respect to the Prophet, peace be upon him and all that jazz.

Lyle Neff is a Political Satirist for The Propagandist.

Our intrepid political analysts at The Propagandist waded through reams of WikiLeaks documents and were rewarded with a treasure trove of Taliban documents. The headlines of the internal records alone portray a weakened and demoralized jihadi movement that is struggling just to retain the hearts and minds of its own operatives:

• Bin Laden Requested Jewish Doctor for Kidney Transplant, Thinks Klezmer Music “OK Sometimes”
• Worldwide Caliphate “Probably Unobtainable In Our Lifetime”
• Military Personnel Sometimes Accidentally Killed During Anti-Heretic Operations
• Links Revealed Between Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Janjaweed, Salafist Front, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Shabab, Muslim Brotherhood, Chechen Guerillas, Abu Sayyaf, Lindsay Lohan
• Pakistani Secret Service Completely Useless; Cannot Even Be Trusted By A Trusting Machine On Trusting Tuesday
• Anti-Jihad Forces “Totally Have Nuclear Bombs
• Due To “Fatigue”, Some Prisoners of War Unbeheaded For Weeks
• During Day-Long Kandahar Battle, Operative Prayed To Allah Only 4.25 Times
• Suicide Bombers Were Never Debriefed
• Three Kandahar Girls Taught To Count To Twenty, Still Unblinded
• Holy Crap, Our Jihad’s Been Comprehensively Defeated In Iraq And George Clooney Didn’t Even Notice
• Obama Clearly Zoroastrian
• Some Mosques Not Used For Explosives Storage
• “Thousand Of War Crimes”
• Naomi Klein and George Galloway Appear In Public Unveiled, Drive Cars Without Male Relatives Present, Wear Decadent Frilly Underwear Like Whores
• Martyrdom Reward Quietly Downgraded To 68 Virgins And One Ambiguous Syrian
• Mohammed: “Depict The Crap Out Of Me.” Allah: “Yeah, Boy! It Don’t Matter!”

Lyle Neff is a contributing writer and political satirist for The Propagandist.

American military medical personnel at Guantanamo Bay and human rights activists around the world are concerned over a growing list of rare and unheard of diseases afflicting the detainees. These include:

• Iranian Erectile Dysfunction (IED)
• Bin Laden’s Disease
• Impacted Hamas
• Cancer of the Beard
• Taliban Itch
• Hajj Interruptus
• Beheading Elbow
• Catamite-philia
• Suicide Bombers’ Survival Guilt Disorder
• Glandular Hezbollah
• Al-Zarqawi’s Palsy
• Niqab Burka Hijab (NBH)
• ITLB (Inability To Land Plane
• Mohammedan Depictophobia
• Humane Immunity Virus
• Shi’ite Allergy
• Waziristanism
• Salafist Fronting
• Yemenfluenza

Lyle Neff is a contributing writer for The Propagandist.

The upwelling long-form census gusher is an instructive affair. The solemn army of Economicals, Anthro Department Chairs and Social Scient(ish)ists imploring us to just open up a little…? To better… inform policy?

Yeah, that should make your Spidey-sense tingle. By “inform policy,” the professional long-formeristes mean “pass new laws.” And “more regulations.” Sure, that's what they want. They’re almost all civil servants.

Maybe you’re cool with that. After all, the hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations we have now are all working pretty well, you might think. Well, there’s only one way to settle this, hotshot.

PROPAGANDIST POP QUIZ!

INSTRUCTIONS. Mark (T) for items that are really on the long-form Canuck census and (F) for outrageous made-up intrusions into the smallest crevices of your personal life.

Please provide your answers to these questions in the comments for this article.

(Warning: some quiz answers are in the link above.)

1. Does your home have any loose or missing floor tiles, or any defective plumbing?
2. Do you ever get the feeling you’re being cheated?
3. Estimate the number of New Canadians (or “immigrants”) in your neighbourhood.
4. Available Self-Identified Ethnic Category #46: Canadian. #51: None. #53: Mixed.
5. Did you experience a delay in receiving health care this year?
6. How many Newfies does it take to – all right, all right, this one’s a freebie. (It’s F.)
7. Which member of your household pays the rent or mortgage?
8. Have any members of your household traveled to Haiti, Bolivia or Africa in the past twelve (12) months?
9. How many hours a day do you watch television with your children or other dependents?
10. Have you ever waited for an elevator for over ten minutes out of sheer stubbornness, and the angry conviction that you must get a return on the precious time you’ve invested?
11. Have you or any member of your family experienced malnutrition in the past twelve (12) months?
12. Check this box if you have not made any untrue statements, even if they were true at the time stated. Uncheck the box if not.
13. Do you have any difficulty bending?
14. Are you fucking kidding me?
15. Please specify what these data will be used for. Please be specific, please.

Contributed by Lyle Neff, a Canadian poet and journalist in Vancouver, British Columbia.

When you transform public institutions into bunkers of political correctness and faux diversity, you get a whole new kind of Orwellian dystopia... possibly even more nightmarish than the original. Read on if you dare.

Dear Brittania Preschool Sensitivity Administrators,

We were gratified by your newsletter's kind inclusion of Canadians among the identifiable groups whose exotic – but valid! Completely valid! -- holiday traditions are to be explained to the children this fall. Seeing "Canadian Thanksgiving" nestled in there with Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan and this Iroquois Harvest cannot help but give citizens that warm, unoffended feeling. That said, we have regrettably detected a certain element of non-progressivity in your programme.

Now, consider it understood that other levels of government have shockingly underfunded Brittania; and that therefore your staff of 17 only has a few child hours per week (CHPW) to inculcate all possible cultural understandings into the Callums and Kaylas of modern East End tykehood. Take that as read, friends. You have still shockingly – even offensively – failed to meet Ministry guidelines in this matter of diversity.

As you know or should know, under the "Numbers and Colours" provisions of the Infant Lifestyle Sensitivity Act, only qualified holiday-demonstrating staff at subsidised pre-schools may present materials of a religious nature. And yet we have reliable reports that a Greek-Canadian trainee at your establishment helped contruct a dreamcatcher for a student of Celtic/Italian background! I hope you understand the gravity of the offense this kind of insensitivity may cause. Appreciating diversity, colleagues, doesn't mean we have to be ridiculous.

More seriously, your holiday-expounding protocols show a marked departure from the census demographics of your designated catchment area. Viz., while your action item regarding the prohibition of snacks during pre-school Ramadan is a good one, we strongly suggest the immediate commencement of uninterrupted reading from the Guru Granth Sahib, or Sikh holy book, for however many CHPWs this may take. It may also be a good idea to have the children construct dioramas representing the Towers of Silence, as a large-ish family which follows the prophet Zoroaster has just opened a rather nice restaurant north of Charles Street.

Also, to make your area's children of Wiccan parents (1.2%) feel more included, we suggest that making up something to do with fall's earth spirits would be valid. But please ensure that no cultures are appropriated during any Wiccan unit.

For our next inspection of your practices, we ask that you prepare feedback on our proposal for the upcoming review of holiday-interpretation rules. Viz., we recommend removal of the "giving" portion from the title of the fall gratitude activity celebrated by many in our jurisdiction (or "country.") The policy rationale is that "giving" implies the existence of a deity of a religious nature, and we should instead each fall just give a big old Canadian Thanks.

Sincerely,

Ms. A. Functionary,

Ministry of Caring

Contributed by Lyle Neff, a Canadian poet and journalist in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Her face says Mackenzie, but her toque says Guatemala. She’s got that angular, ill-put-together Scots look. The hat looks itchy. It is itchy. It was made by peasants.

At home she plays Radio One constantly, the volume set between “murmur” and “burble”. She has an under-sink compost bin. You’d think this would stink up a kitchen. It does.Oh man, I know this woman so well. Don’t you?

Behind every government counter you find her. She is an advocate or mediator. Shop steward or liasion officer. An intake, or outreach, worker. Wears that Cowichan sweater. Bitterly opposes the government: your modern civil servant. She works on issues around. A lifelong learner.

Name of Ariadne or Arwen, when it’s not Heather or Jen. She has a bookshelf full of gurus, unless she is Unitarian, in which case she has a bookshelf full of gurus. Sometimes she’s a he: Nadir, or Tyler. On your strata council anyway. Allergic to cigarette smoke.

She/ he studies sociology. Is concerned about pesticides, high-voltage overhead lines, and cellular radiation. She is not superstitious at all, though, nor secular: spiritual but not religious: buys her woven-reed yoga mats at the Unitarian bake sale, because Lululemon is corporate.

You pay her to ensure beer gets poured, bees kept, food cooked, messages delivered and debts collected, in socially beneficial ways. You’ve bought all those Haida masks on her walls. Enjoy.

What are you doing? Tsk, tsk. She doubts it should be allowed. She hates open containers, spitting, patriotism, hockey, rude music. If she has a child or two, she denies it sugar, and sometimes tells the poor babe it has two mothers, or two fathers. Which fiction cannot be made true by any amount of federal benefits.

She, aka he, is the very figure of the Entitlement Class, Canadian version: the rise of which cohort neither Marx nor Engels foresaw. And when you see her at the Farmer’s Market paying a 50% markup on slightly-rotten tomatoes, you may see yet another way in which collectivism is wrong.

Contributed by Lyle Neff, a Canadian poet and journalist in Vancouver, British Columbia notorious for his hotheaded nationalism and elaborate use of profanity.