Taxing Thoughts

People tend to really resent the inevitable. Death, for instance. That tends to get most people down. Then, of course, there is taxes. Taxes, as is generally known, has the capacity to sap every ounce of exuberance from even the most rabid of party animals. Small wonder, given that to be taxed either means that (a) you are being forced to give up some of the what you had earned after spending a precious fraction of an rather limited amount of lifespan working out the rules that govern the quasirandom meanderings of your supervisor so that you can maximize the time you spend not merely working but appearing to be working while twittering how clever you are to 572 of your closest virtual friends or (b) you are really just too knackered to sit up and attempt to locate the TV remote, let alone get out and party until you excessively froth at the mouth like a proper party animal. In fact, most people find that both meanings are simultaneously true: they feel so badgered into submission handing over their hard-earned money that they simply can't stand it anymore and try instead lying down for a while in the attempt to lure someone to come by and take pity on them and tune the TV to something meaningful like a National Geographic Channel special on Taxidea taxus, the critter that some overtaxed taxonomist thought just had to be the American badger.

Governing Actions

Most people are under the somewhat faulty impression that people need governments in order to do things like build schools and roads and national monuments, decide which neighboring countries should be invaded or at least insulted on a regular basis, and making sure that other people don’t rob you blind or go off and get you or your loved ones somewhat dead. However, people also need governments to harness the power of the people and channel it into bickering, sniping, and pointing fingers at each other, all in an effort to make sure nothing in particular is actually accomplished. The last thing people really want is a government that gets so good at doing things that it gets all full of itself, building things for the sake of building things, warring with neighbors just to keep from being bored making up the same old dreary laws every year, or robbing you blind and then making you or your loved ones rather dead as a means of at least accomplishing something before taking another long vacation break.

Cat's Schrödinger

Not long after Schrödinger came up with his famous thought experiment, something similar was suggested by a particularly intelligent pride of theoretical cats, whereby a physicist is placed inside a sealed box with a deadly mechanism that may or may not be activated. The physicist is then thought to exist in an indeterminate state, simultaneously both alive and dead, as long as the box remains sealed—which is all well and good with the theoretical cats, who are content to never open the box and enjoy using it as a really fantastic spot to sharpen their theoretical claws.

I Exist Therefore I Am, I Think.

They say the problem with time travel is that you might create a paradox by killing your grandfather or by stepping on the one crazed prehistoric sea creature to finally get fed up with all that swimming about under the ocean only to have to keep coming up for gulps of precious air, instead deciding that it would be far better to simply stay on land where it could breathe as often as it liked and develop a fondness for recklessly expelling air in contented sighs. However, the real problem with time travel is that if everyone did it, then neither grandfathers nor crazed sea creatures would have even the slightest idea if they were real or not, as they would continually wink in and out of existence as a result of all those people mucking about the time line in search of finding their long-lost loves, asserting their virility by hunting dinosaurs, or just looking for a nice place to sit down and ponder the nature of their existence, if indeed they have one at all.