Inbreeding

It is completely illogical that we have borders to restrict people from moving. The result is that people from the same country mostly stay put and breed strange ideas among themselves - often ideas which foreigners are very quick to recognise as silly.

The effect is the same as when people from a small village only marry each other, or when the royal houses of Europe did so. The result is that defects are magnified.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of borders, of course. But they should be used the opposite way round. At birth, every human should be given a passport. After the age of twenty, each human should be prevented from ever again going back to the country where he was born.

That's the only way to make sure we share the rich experiences of all the world's cultures.

Personal Ad

My grandmother, who is not internet savvy, asked me to post the following ad without reading it. I promised to do that. I will just type it:

"Found the meaning of life. Looking for the person who dropped it. Also looking for person who can tell me what to do next in life."

The perfect level

My daughter's company is currently looking for new staff. They have had problems in the past with employees who were too smart and who could not adapt to the common stupidity level of the company. Their new vacancy advertisement lists as first requirement:

* Ability to tell which is the largest island in the Baleares.

The really stupid people will not be able to find the answer. The really smart people will not bother applying for a position which such a silly requirement. And only the ones with the perfect stupidity level remains. Clever, isn't it?

God is a result of evolution

I am sure that there have been societies in the past, where most people had no religion. No such society has survived. This proves that religion is necessary for the survival of society and man.

The only way for creationist to prove that they are right, would be to show up a society without religion, because only in a world created by God, such a society could survive.

Creators' Rights of Intellectual Property

Several hundred years ago, there were no copyright laws. If you got hold of the music to Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, you were free to perform it as much as you wanted without paying him a dime.

This was not so, because no one thought he was worth any money, but because it was difficult to trace where his music was performed, and it was difficult to transfer him money, if you happened to be far away.

It was only in the 19th century that better communications made it easier to trace where a composer's music was performed. Concerts are after all often announced in newspapers. And it became easier to send him the money he deserved through a more developed banking system.

We are now at the beginning of the 21st century, and the situation becomes increasingly more like what it was like in J. S. Bach's times.

If I buy a DVD with the musical Starlight Express, I can watch it as much as I want. Within shortly it will be easy to transfer the entire copy as a disk image to all my friends, who in their turn can transfer it to their friends and so on. It does not really matter if the DVD producer adds copy protection and digital signature. In the end, I can always point a video camera at the screen, just like my eyes and ears do, and record the whole thing. Soon that can be done extremely quickly at very high quality and you will get a file that weighs nothing, takes no space, and which you can send to all your friends. This makes it virtually impossible to control where a piece is performed and enjoyed.

The system is imploding. But then, who in his right mind would prefer to listen to Starlight Express rather than Das Wohltemperierte Klavier?