The Consequences of Dealing with the Enemy

We have suspected for several weeks now that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was not simply an accident, but an act of extreme evil by our nemesis, the Unholy Brotherhood of the Hole Punch. Until now, however, when we discovered the incriminating communications, we had no hard evidence that could link them to the disaster. Daniel's work on transmission lines has paid off again, this time in letting us overhear some communications between top UBHP officials. The exchange was essentially a report from an operative on how the evidence of their involvement in the leak has nearly been destroyed by the subsequent efforts to patch the leak, and that no one will suspect what really happened. We hate to rain on their parade, but we do suspect what really happened, which is essentially this:

Several months ago the UBHP approached top officials at BP with an offer of alliance. BP rejected the unholy alliance and told them, in essence, to get lost. The UBHP responded by infiltrating BP and getting their own personnel to the drilling rig that exploded. They simultaneously changed their approach with BP executives and started trying to woo them with gifts. The gifts worked, and the BP executives finally relented and agreed to a secret discussion. "Edgar" flew in on his private jet and met with them, but, to their credit, the BP executives saw through the overtures and gifts and recognized that the Unholy Brotherhood of the Hole Punch was not someone they wanted to deal with. The meeting ended with "Edgar" being escorted from the room by BP security, all the while vowing to "get even" with BP.

The events immediately preceding the explosion on the drilling rig are the subject of intense scrutiny at the moment, so we won't attempt to cover them other than to mention that the UBHP operatives were in place and performing their mission when the disaster occurred. It is also likely, although the evidence is not all in yet, that they had something to do with the prior damage to the well that precipitated the crisis.

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not observant, which is why we can note that neither the UBHP nor the Parent Corporation has resorted to terrorism before and that we have never found evidence that either one has had a failed secret meeting with company executives in the past. It seems, then, safe to say that if you agree to an audience with "Edgar," you had better be serious about it.

Our operatives have confirmed that the spies used by the UBHP did, in fact, perish in the incident and that their efforts ensured that the well would remain uncapped for over a month. We would like to take a paragraph or two to denounce the irresponsible methods of the Parent Corporation, but that will have to wait for another day. For now it will suffice to say that we are shocked and appalled by the utter indifference to the welfare of the world and its citizens shown by this act of terrorism, and that we will be stepping up our harassment of our enemies. (Incidentally, the overall incident rate has dropped sharply since the incident involving "Viktor" and The Allies. More about that, later). Keep up the good work, and remember to just say "no" to negotiations with the Parent Corporation!

Update on the Great Eggo Famine of 2010

Thanks to some excellent work by our Waffle Department, we are now officially declaring the end of the Great Eggo Famine of 2010 as waffle production is again nearing optimal levels. We are extremely pleased with the way Waffle Department handled the crisis, and we are pleased to report that the number of deaths from this shortage of waffles was 98.3% lower than predicted. We would specifically like to recognize the efforts of Department Chair Gertrude Delaney for her tireless leadership. She personally endured wafflelessness for eight days straight before she collapsed and was taken to an IHOP restaurant to recuperate. We would also be remiss if we did not extend our gratitude to Phineas Smith, whose strategies for rationing of waffles can be blamed for the significantly lower-than-expected death toll. Don't think, however, that because disaster was averted this time that we can be less than vigilant and that our efforts were to no avail. Take our word for it--computer simulations showed that without our intervention this Famine would have been a terrible ordeal indeed.

Safety first?

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not hopeful about the future, but we tend to wonder about certain individuals' place in the future. Take, for instance, these would-be burglars. Either they were planning to do a lot more than take the ATM, or there were ... um ... certain holes in their plans. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not committed to excellence, which is why we hope you won't follow in their footsteps.

Safety first!

We applaud the efforts of the creators of the iPad Steering Wheel Mount for making safety a top concern from the beginning. They aren't waiting for people to be killed by sudden acceleration to point out repeatedly that this is safer than texting while driving, an activity which has been declared illegal by many US states. After all, how bad can it be if it's not that bad? (Okay, so technically the answer is almost as bad, but we won't keep considering the answer to the question). It's safe...r than something dangerous, and that's good enough for me.

How not to mug someone

If you are going to turn to crime, please make sure you don't choose to mug your victims near a school for ninja warriors. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we think it is nothing if not sad that a group of muggers in Australia didn't seem to know this.

Accidental shootings

From time to time we hear of accidental shootings, but at the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not skeptical, which is why we are setting up a panel to investigate such shootings. We expect that they will decrease the number of accidental shootings around the world, and if they don't, don't be surprised if there are some accidental shooting victims from our panel.

Cost sharing

Dog owners in one condo are being asked to approve a plan to test the DNA of all dog residents so that any dogs not cleaning up after themselves can be appropriately punished. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not fair, which is why we understand the motivations for this policy. Unfortunately, we are also nothing if not against discrimination, which is why we feel that passing the entire cost of this program on to the owners of the dogs is not quite right. Shouldn't other residents pay part of the price to keep their residences waste-free? After all, it isn't just dog owners that are hurt when waste isn't cleaned up, and it isn't just non-dog owners that benefit from a cleaner condo.

Who would you trust with your financial information?

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not wary of unscrupulous individuals who are constantly trying to enrich themselves not through hard work but by stealing from others. Because of this wariness (and our outsourced FAQ experiment) we have opted to not outsource. This decision has been controversial--we received three thousand e-mail messages about it within the first three minutes of the announcement. We have openly defended our decision against sometimes harsh criticism, but we have now been validated as the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are setting up an outsourcing center in their jail. The inmates, whose crimes apparently do not prevent them from handling your sensitive information, will perform work for banking firms. If you can't trust an inmate with your information, who can you trust?

Hero of the People? We're not quite sure

Elaine McLuskey may have just become a Hero of the People for her latest invention. Designed to allow conversations even in noisy rooms such as pubs, her speech bubbles are an important addition to anyone's wardrobe. Okay, so maybe not anyone's wardrobe, but certainly anyone who wants to go to a bar looking like a wannabe deep see diver. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not eager to honor world citizens who make important contributions to society, but we cannot always award them the Hero of the People award due to its stringent requirements. Not only must a Hero of the People do something awesome, but he or she must also further the cause of the Board of Dictators through said awesomeness. Unfortunately, Elaine has not yet committed herself to the New Future, so we are unable to award her our highest honor...yet. If you know Elaine, please put your speech bubble on and follow her down to the local pub so you can spend some quality time with her and still get the message across about the GPD!

All he wanted...

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not committed to creating a society wherein everyone can achieve their potential, however vast (or limited) that may be. In order to reach that goal we have a standing policy that responsible world citizens should obey the laws of their respective government entities or contact us about an injustice and at least pretend to obey the law while we resolve the dispute. This policy, however, isn't an absolute law. We also take into account the circumstances. For example, when this Maryland man was walking home and decided he would rather have a ride home he had very limited options. He couldn't call his mother as his cell phone was out of minutes. He couldn't hitch hike as that has gone out of fashion and is likely illegal. The only number he could call on his cell phone was 9-1-1, but he knew that calling 9-1-1 without a good reason is also illegal, so he devised a good reason. He pretended he had been robbed. When police responded and investigated his story they found it lacking and it came out that he had just wanted a ride home. We find it disheartening that this man couldn't get a simple ride home without committing a crime, and as a consequence we are investigating the possibility of instituting a "ride hotline" that will also work with cell phones without minutes and will allow unfortunate walkers a legal alternative to get what they want. Expect details in your GPD newsletter soon!

The GNU Reform: Open Source Healthcare

It has been nearly a year in the making, but at the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not tenacious, which is why we have finally unveiled our plans for an Open Source Healthcare system that will take care of all of our health needs at a fraction of the cost of the current model. This idea had its genesis at a conference we held in Seattle last year, and since then we have been consulting with the best minds in health care to create this plan, which has already been picked up by several high-ranking officials in the Obama administration and several influential members of Congress*.

Everyone knows that the biggest problem with the care system is the out-of-control cost of delivering health care. Why is the cost spiraling out of control? Some blame the insurance companies who, for some reason, want to make a profit. Others blame lawyers who encourage patients to sue their doctors for malpractice and thus require doctors to purchase malpractice insurance and pass the cost of that insurance back on to the consumers (or, more precisely, to the insurance companies backing the consumers). Others blame other harder-to-explain problems for the uncontrollable costs, but whatever your object of blame is, it is clear that the system is too opaque. An individual consumer of health care cannot possibly understand why he or she may be charged a ridiculous amount of money while in a hospital for some Tylenol he could have bought for himself at a fraction of the cost, nor can he or she understand why the insurance companies convince doctors to charge them less, and the list goes on.

The solution which is gaining momentum in influential government circles is to move to a revolutionary Open Source Healthcare system, wherein the empowered groups are not lawyers, doctors, or insurance companies, but individuals. The recent health care reform bill lays the foundation for this change by creating "Alternate Certification Requirements" for medical care providers and "Insurance Class D Licenses" for individuals interested in becoming small insurers. These reforms are, as we said, merely the groundwork for the real reforms. Rather than rely on Universities and medical boards to decide whether a person is fit to be paid to remove an ingrown toenail the individual can now review the potential provider's history and read reviews from prior customers, much as he or she can do on web merchant sites such as eBay and Amazon. Based on a review of this information, or, as is certainly more common in web merchants, a quick glance at the rating of the provider, the individual can choose whether to entrust his or her well-being to the provider. This reform alone will save us millions of dollars by relaxing the burdens of evaluation of providers for medical boards, universities, and hospitals. It will also create more jobs in the medical field as the barriers to entry for doctors are significantly lowered.

This same sort of ratings system will also be used for insurance providers (and individuals with Insurance Class D Licenses). Rather than paying out exorbitant amounts of money to a company who uses your money to offset their own costs of doing business you can choose to give your insurance money to any provider. This will, of course, create some situations in which unruly insurers will take people's money and not provide the services, but negative feedback on their ratings will discourage this sort of behavior and make it difficult for them to make much money off of deceit. In addition, the government has agreed to completely resolve disputes for every consumer of health care up to three times in their lives without asking any questions.

The same system will be used by insurers and providers to rate the individuals seeking health care so that, for example, a provider won't get stuck providing a fourth MRI to an individual who didn't pay for the first three.

Emergency care will be handled differently from regular, preventative care. Because people sometimes need emergency medical attention and won't have time to study the ratings of their alternatives when they need the care each individual will choose his preferred emergency provider beforehand. When the need arises they will call for emergency services from their favorite provider and, assuming they have kept their service subscription active, they will be treated to emergency support.

The beauty of this system is in its simplicity. Rather than using a heavy-handed approach that requires a lot of oversight and regulation, the market simply takes care of health care by itself. Providers who don't do a good job will receive negative feedback, and insurers who charge too much will be replaced by more reasonably-priced alternatives.

We are hoping that these reforms will satisfy the conservatives and the liberals and will create a truly bipartisan effort to solve the problems with the current health care system. There are still some challenges, but with the groundwork laid by the initial bill and the rising levels of support in government circles we are sure that soon the medical world will be rejuvenated beyond our wildest dreams!

*While we know that Congress already passed a reform bill and that we are a little late to get our ideas into it, we also know that in the 1,000+ page bill we were able to insert a lot of provisions that make our plan the next logical step. We just need to wait until people start implementing the bill and then we'll be able to get our plan implemented.

That pesky code

We have been running further analysis on the code and have come to some interesting conclusions. We have hesitated to state them in this public forum for fear of being wrong and losing credibility, but the data have been checked and rechecked, and these are certainly the most likely possibilities. It appears that we were correct in that the Parent Corporation has indeed embedded messages in the text of the Shakespearean play; these messages are almost certainly not just random happenstance. This revelation, however, leaves us with some unsettling possibilities:

1. The Parent Corporation stole the time machine Shakespeare has been using and used it to go back in time to embed these messages in the manuscript before it was published in 1727.
2. The Parent Corporation somehow persuaded Shakespeare when he visited the present time to go back and embed these messages in the manuscript.
3. The Parent Corporation has actually existed for much longer than we had believed, and either Shakespeare was a member of the Parent Corporation's Board of Directors (or somehow affiliated with them) or the influence of the Parent Corporation was such that it was able to force Shakespeare to embed these messages

None of these possibilities are particularly palatable, especially the thought that the Parent Corporation may have been operating much earlier than we had thought. We have our best men searching for more details and trying their best to prove or disprove these possibilities. At the GNU Public Dictatorship, after all, we are nothing if not thorough!

Please get on this right away, Mr. Medvedev

We have been voicing our security concerns about Kirsan Ilyumzhinov's apparent visit with aliens for some time now, but due to less-than-perfect relations between the country in which we live and Russia we haven't been able to get anyone there to investigate the incident, which is why we created an independent commission to answer the question of whether Mr. Ilyumzhinov could have revealed any information which would compromise the safety of world citizens. After all, he is a high-ranking Russian official and might have access to such information. We are pleased that Andre Lebedev, a Russian MP, has now taken this same crusade as his own and is asking Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to formally investigate the incident. Our commission has found no evidence as of yet that the aliens gained any useful information from the alleged encounter, but we would definitely appreciate another investigation to validate our findings.

The Code

Many of you have written in with theories regarding the evil Parent Corporation code that Daniel recently broke, and we would like to take a few minutes to update you on our progress and thank you for your suggestions. First, we would like to recognize a few individuals whose suggestions helped us progress on interpreting the messages:

• Ezekiel Cartwright of Wichita, Kansas, USA for his suggestion that the code might be using a variation of the beloved Fibonacci sequence to hide more important messages. In fact, using an overlay of Pascal's triangle did show us many interesting things, but these messages were encoded in the original Shakespeare, so unless the Parent Corporation captured Shakespeare's alleged time machine and used it to encode these messages in the play... hmm... that's something to investigate.
• Janice Robinson of Lubbock, Texas, USA for her suggestion that the code might be more understood by stripping vowels from the text and using a huge array of varying numbers of columns to find predictions of events that would have been in the future when the play was written but are now part of the past record. We investigated this method and found that we could predict the downfall of the Nazis and have found a passage that possibly predicts that Britney Spears will become President, but we're not sure whether to believe it.
• Gary Weaver of Salisbury, UK for his suggestion that we should look at the entropy of the messages for patterns. We found the message "Hi mom!" encoded in this way, but we don't suppose it is useful.

We are making a great deal of progress on deciphering the code, and hope to be able to use it to subvert the Parent Corporation soon, but we'll keep you posted!