SAN FRANCISCO — If you’ve felt even a passing melancholy this week, you’ve already violated three federal statutes. Here’s how to fix it: file Form S-14 (Section 7) with the Office of Emotional Compliance within 72 hours, pay the $42.50 emotional processing fee, and await approval before crying again.
The new Emotional Tax and Feeling Registration Act took effect Monday, making sadness a scheduled activity that requires advance scheduling and proper licensing.
The appropriations subcommittee on national monuments has formally adopted the first in a series of landmark studies determining exactly when citizens may lawfully occupy the space beneath the Washington Monument’s shadow. The bill, titled the “Monumental Shading Equity Act of 2026,” was introduced by Representative Halloway (R-VI) after discovering that 47% of the American public regularly inhabits what he termed “Unauthorized Shadow Territory.”
According to a 98-page report from the Office of Monumental Oversight, the study determined that 345,000 square feet of federal land currently exists in a state of what the committee chairman described as “regulatory purgatory.” The report found that during solar hour 14:32-14:47, the monument’s shadow falls across a district that “legally belongs to three different zoning departments, a private landscaping trust, and the National Park Service’s lost-and-found department.”
UNITED PRESS — If you want to report on active conflict zones in 2026, you’ll need more than a press pass. You’ll need the newly minted “Grief Competency Certification,” which costs $4,200 and requires a 47-hour online curriculum that includes watching 12 documentary films about “trauma survivors while answering reflective journal prompts.”
“The system was designed to ensure correspondents aren’t ’emotionally compromised’ by the horror of war,” said Dr. Alistair Thorne, the newly appointed Grief Competency Standards Officer for the Department of Battlefield Press Accreditation. “But in practice, it means we can no longer deploy journalists to areas where death is occurring at a ’naturalized’ rate. The certification algorithm now flags anyone who reports seeing 15+ combat fatalities in a 24-hour period as ’emotionally contaminated.’ They’re immediately reassigned to write op-eds about the ‘moral complexity of drone warfare’ from a safe, air-conditioned office in Brussels.”