[humorix] Dateline 2006: World Peace Established!

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

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Warning:  humorous content ahead.
To prevent overdosage for the sensitive readers, please
take your discussions to humorix-l@nl.linux.org...
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Dateline 2006: World Peace Established!
Jon Splatz
September 9, 2006

Nuclear warheads sit in deserted silos.  Military bases
gather dust.  Weapons factories and arsenals remain
vacant.  Radar sites monitor empty skies.  World peace has
been established.

But at what cost?  Every single man, woman, and child --
all 6.4 billion humans -- are now sitting behind bars
worldwide because each of us violated some law, some where,
some how.  

What a mess.  For years I predicted a dystopic future where
lawyers run amok: the Lawyerclysm.  Little did I know that
judges, prosecutors, and police officers would instead take
control and make the grab for world domination, paving the
way for the "Legalclysm", a term I just made up.

Now I wish we hadn't killed all the lawyers back in 2002. 
If I had a good defense attorney, I never would have been
convicted of drinking a beer and violating Taliban law.  I
wouldn't be sitting in an Afghanistan prison right now
side-by-side with 4.2 billion other convicts.

We all know how this mess first started.  Some
book-throwing judge decided that a Russian programmer could
be incarcerated in the US for something that was perfectly
legal in Russia.  Then some lawsuit-happy judge decided
that an American could be found guilty of violating
Australian libel laws for something published on a US
website.  

Things went downhill from there.  The oppressive laws of
Afghanistan, North Korea, and Cuba immediately became the
de facto laws of the entire world.  

Drink a beer in Australia?  Go to jail in Afghanistan.

Create anti-circumvention software in Russia?  Go to jail
in California.

Buy a replica Nazi officer's dagger from an eBay auction? 
Go to jail in France.

Publish an "unregistered" political website in Canada?  Go
to jail in Singapore.

Say something negative about Communism in an AOL chat
room?  Go to jail in North Korea.

Smoke a joint in Amsterdam?  Go to jail in Albuequerque.

Have an abortion in the US?  Go to jail in Germany.

Engage in an extra-marrital affair with an intern?  You
don't even want to know what will happen in Afghanistan.

Say something bad about Fidel Castro while working on the
International Space Station?  Get stuffed out the nearest
airlock by special order of the dictator himself.

Connect to the Internet with an unauthorized computer that
doesn't contain "Digital Rights Management" hardware?  Get
the death penalty in California.  And then go to jail in
Afghanistan if you somehow survive.

>From 2001 to 2006, every single person on the planet was
arrested, deported, convicted, and sentenced. 
Semi-intelligent robots were created to man the farms,
power plants, sewers, and handcuff factories.

Unfortunately, these robots all use the Linux operating
system.  If they ran Windows, we could easily cause them to
crash by chanting "C-colon-backslash-C-O-N-backslash-C-O-N".
The human race could then rebel and escape while the robots
reboot. But that won't work with Linux machines having an
estimated uptime of thousands of years.  

We're doomed.

Right now I'm sitting in a prison complex surrounded by 4.2
billion people from around the world convicted of violating
Taliban law. Meanwhile, the rest of the world population is
rotting away in North Korea, Cuba, Australia, Iran, China,
or the United States.

The human race is doomed.

I'm carving this article into the walls of my cell.  Maybe,
just maybe, some future archeologist will discover this
warning and alert his fellow ants, or cockroaches, or
whales, or Venus fly-traps, to the awesome danger of a
runaway legal system.  Maybe the future sentient
inhabitants of this planet will design their laws with some
measure of common sense.

But probably not.  I suspect my English carvings will be
undecipherable by the coming canine civilization (or
whatever evolves next), but at least I'm trying.  

If only I could convert my prison cell's toilet into some
kind of a time travel device and go back into the 20th
Century and warn everybody about the coming Legalclysm...

-
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