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PREFACE

i live in the united states of america; land of the free and home of the brave. with purple mountains, freedoms of speech, and i'm told, the envy of the rest ofthe world.

unfortunatly.

in case you don't know: the USA is a crock. we contradict ourselves, fight amongst eachother, and develop new laws every day to make us more equal.

i will offend many people with this article. but from here on out, i'm taking a lesson from Eugine Debbs; this article will be devoid of profanities and should hopefully be about as PC as it gets. that way you cannot avoid my message by avoiding my words.

CASE 1

this case concerns the mentally retarted. specifically a couple i saw on television. they both have down syndrome (or the like; i profess to be no doctor, and it's not really important anyway), and want to have a child.

i will say this before i have to say it again. i have no problem with this whatsoever. i don't care that they can't "cook" anything more complicated than a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich; the fact that they have difficulties tying their own shoes does not effect me.

they both work; the mrs. as a clerk part-time. her husband works as a cashier at burger king (note: i should say worked. this was roughly four years ago).

but let me tell you what they were doing on television. they were lobbying to get in-vitro fertilization performed at a clinic. not only did they want this operation performed, but they wanted taxpayer dollars to pay for it.

if you think this sounds like i'm being expected to help the genetically inferior reproduce, then maybe you can see what angers me so much.

all television is biased. let me restate that better: all media is biased.

i think i can do better still: everyone is biased. we are a predjudice race, and we all take sides. those who deny it are probably liars, or politicians (which usually means the same thing). if you believe you are truly not predjudiced, think about whether or not my statement offended you.

just what i thought.

anyway, this television show was biased like everything else, but what shocked and offended me was that they were biased FOR the surgery.

they wanted me to feel bad that their insurance turned them down.

this was absurd. downright rude. i can barely cope with the fact that insurance money keeps these near-invalid people alive (thus increasing my own rates), but to think they may be using more money to produce an offspring.

more so, i am of the opinion that bringing a child into this world; a child that in all likelyhood will have serious deficiancies (worse than the parents) is outright cruel.

it could be said that "who are you to decide whether or not they can have a child!?" to which my response is simple. I don't have to decide, their own genetic structure is flawed. by act of god or otherwise, they are genetically incapable of having children by themselves. they also lack anything apperantly useful in their genetic structure, and are already a drain on society. i also am expected to PAY for this from my own work, my own pocket.

who am I indeed.

i understand that the media coverage helped, and that she underwent the fertilization procedure.

i also understand that the procedure failed.

CASE 2

allow me to introduce a case that is occuring roughly the time i write this document. it is about arkansas, which if you didn't know, is one of the United State's provinces. We are learned to call them states, although this day and age has them rather homogenised so that the only distinctions left are what "fruit" the province represents.

now our country has a very strict-sounding constitution. one of the elements FORBIDS government intervention in religious matters. either to PROMOTE or RESTRICT the rights based on religion. so long as your religion doesn't deny people their own rights (either the basic-human ones or the constitutional ones), you're free to practice however you like, and the government will stay out of it.

the second element in this problem is that despite this division, we live in a predominately christian country. while this has been the cause of many problems over the years, the part of judeo-christian teachings that is to be brought up is that they believe evolution doesn't exist.

they are also the kind of people who can believe the concentration-camps never happened, william clinton never inhaled, george bush is not a chimpanzee.

ahem.

and this group is attempting to get arkansas to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. i won't even suggest what they might leave out next...

now evolution is a fact. moths and germs do it on a scale we can see within our own lifetimes. and we share so much genetic material with the animals around us,

it is difficult to believe that we are so unlike them.

as a human race we ARE special. i can guarantee that it isn't just medical and scientific advances that are extending our lives. mutation only works if a particular life requires replacement; and the part that's extending is mostly at the end (and very little in the middle- good childbearing years), so the onlyoption left is evolution.

oh yeah, it could also be because "god said so", or he works in mysterious ways,but couldn't he also ``say so'' in an indirect means?

better question:

do you know what the ``young earth'' theory is? it suggests that certain constants of the universe (including and especially the speed of light) were not always constants. moreover, there is evidence to suggest that the speed of light may actually have only gained constanticity (constance? sic.) in the early 1960's. and if that's so, the stars that we see at night that _MUST_ be billions of lightyears away, might not, and infact the universe itself may only be a few million (or even a few thousand!) years old.

this could be excellent ammunition for any learned creationist except that thereis one problem: it doesn't matter.

the question never was if god spun the world in seven days or seven billion years; we know evolution and mutation exists so why don't we want to teach our children about it?

even the possilbity of evolution is important, because it's knowledge. you don't ban knowledge.

even still, knowledge is collection of theoretical extractions. it may be important to note truth from theory, but it's even more important to remember how something becomes untruth - thorough examination and elimination.

if they are able to ban knowledge selectively, they also have the right to ban history selectively.

that's a scary thought (of course, in my opinion), and it isn't a new one:

• catholic church rewriting portions of the bible
• axis forces altering death reports
• africans selling neighboring tribes (as labor) for weapons
• jesus was a jew

of course, with scrutiny and excavation, we have learned that all the above has been lied about (and in some places, still is). but examination can only bring us so far- we don't know the absolute truth anymore. we don't know how the bible was altered, and what the exact death figures are, because history has been changed.

in some cases, it's only dumb luck that has given us the ability to notice that it has changed. the damage can never be repaired. the only protection against a changing history is an unchanging record.

no one will speak of the wars that never happened, or the...

CASE 3

steve ballmer (of microsoft) recently said that free software threatens the american way. he later retracted that and announced he was referring to GNU software.

bill gates (of the same) also stated that GNU software is like pac-man, or like a virus. i'm still not certain if he means it's a fad or what, but he usually doesn't expose his seventh-grade quality communication skills unless he feels something is important.

update: Several seventh-graders have objected to my above comment. therefore, i will retract it now, and state that bill gates has the communication capacity of a donught.

update: Donughts apparently don't like that much either. They've agreed to settle so long as I point out that at least donughts are tasty and bill gates is not.

GNU software represents different things to different people. some think of it as a warehouse of freely-available software, others as providing certain freedoms, and others still whom believe that it takes freedoms away.

simply put, i'm not strictly a GNU advocate. of course, you DID already know that right? GNU software is mostly cheap or free because all GNU software provides the source that was used to build it. it gives the end-user certain freedoms of always being able to use and improve the product. it takes some freedoms away from the developer as they cannot close it up afterwards.

to keep it free, the program in question must also not be absorbed into other works with incompatable licenses; this is the part which many believe hurts microsoft the most. microsoft, the seller of their operating system, their operating environment and most of the core applications may never use GNU software.

they were free to (and did) take the BSD networking layer, but because the BSD license makes no restrictions to keep improvements and "innovations" in the community, microsoft can keep this mostly excellent piece of work to themselves. they didn't write it, but they still charge for it. and every windows user is paying microsoft for something microsoft didn't create. all in the name of innovation!

and even stranger still is that they COULD have done this in the first place. microsoft first had to try it themselves and fail. then try again, and fail again. it wasn't until they admitted (at least to themselves) that this was hard work and that they had better steal it.

CONCLUSION

i've just about had it. i'm looking for a new country to live in. i don't like to lie, and i don't like to be robbed. i don't want to be censored, or threatened. but where can i go?

canada seems to be my best bet so far, but their television has no quality control whatsoever (interesting: i want good TV but no censorship...), and i don't think i could get the hang of hearing the word "aboot"

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