How to fight back against high gas prices

Do you worry about the ever increasing gas prices? Are you seeing your income eaten away by the once unimaginable, but now real, two, three, or even four dollar per gallon prices at the pump? Do you worry that someday you may not be able to afford the trip to work, if the price keeps rising?

Are you outraged that you struggle every day to make ends meet while your money is being taken away to fill in the already overflowing coffers of the Arabs sitting on top of oil, or even being used to fund the terrorists?

And are you worried about all the problems caused by the use of oil, bad and polluted air, environment damage, global warming, rising oceans, terrorism and war over resources? What can you do about it? How to fight back?


Well, we all heard of the proposed approaches to reduce the consumption of oil. "Clean" energy from sunlight and wind, the use of electrical cars, hydrogen power, public transportation, or human or animal powered transportation. While all of these proposals have merits, none have proved themselves capable of providing short term or immediate relief to the dependency on oil, or even for the long term, capable of economically and efficiently fill in all our needs currently fulfilled by oil. So we keep talking and discussing, but we keep driving and burning oil in our daily lives, making more CO2 and warming the globe (and keep paying more and more).

The situation is getting critical, and we can wait no longer. It is time for action. But what can we do?

Let us think for a moment (don't do this too often; once a while is fine). What makes us use the most gas? The summer trip to the lake? The once a year visit to GrandMa's house? No, none of these. We use the most gas going to and from work.

Except the few people who live very close to their offices or who live in New York where they go around by subway, most Americans have to drive to work from home. Drive to work in the morning and drive back home in the evening. For the majority the office may be in the city while the home may be 20, 30, 40, or 100 miles away. So we spend lots of time on the highway, sitting in traffic, running the engine idle and emitting CO2. We see our hard earned money vaporized in the process.

So to address the issue we have to fight the habit of "going to work" head on. "Going to work" is the biggest problem in America today. If we keep "going to work" every day we will see more pollution, warmer earth, more storms, higher oceans, richer Arabs and more terrorism.

So we don't work? No, that's not what we are proposing. Of course we have to keep working. We need to earn money to feed our families. So "not working" is not the solution.

Instead, we keep working but do less of coming and going. We propose that employees should stay in the office and take turns to go home once every other, or every third, day. Except for these who come to and leave from work by bikes, walking, buses or subways, human powered vehicles or horses, employees should stay in the office overnight and sleep in their desks or some temporary beds in the office. And people can take showers and sleep with their spouses once every two, or three, days when they get to go back home for a night. And if the office does not have facilities for taking showers, as most offices do not, people should be prepared to accept the bad smells of their office mates, for the good of the environment.

If we carry out this plan faithfully, we shall see the rush hour traffic in our cities reduced by a half or even two thirds, and the gasoline consumption in America reduced by the same ratio. This will go a long way toward reducing the foreign oil dependency and saving the environment and is more effective than any other methods currently proposed and is doable without any technical difficulty.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. And Americans are tough. So it is time for us to come together to fight back against rising gas prices and to reduce the dependency on oil, and to save the environment. We will refuse to "go to work" every day, by staying at work and not going home!

Should we practice martial law?

Since most Americans never know what martial law is like, should we have regular drills? For example, the government can place a city under martial law for a day, so people will know what to do and not to do in case of martial law.

For example, the government can place New York under martial law, on, say, October 1. Announcing well in advance, people will know it is not an emergency. Full of troops on the streets, people should be prepared to obey orders and not to go outside after seven. And people will know what freedom they may have or not have under martial law so they won't risk being shot by the troops. People should visit jails to know what these are like.

This way people will not be scared and they are psychologically prepared.

Is Big Brother really bad?

Why is everyone afraid of the Big Brother?

If you are not doing anything bad, what do you have to hide? If your bank account is public and everything happens to it is public, how can anyone steal your identity and access your account? Big Brother knows when you withdraw money, and he knows if you did not!

Seems if we can change our mind about the Big Brother, we can have more protection of our freedom!

United Fools of America

A society fighting for the rights of fools in America and around the world! We work to eliminate discrimination based on intelligence, merits and ability! To protect your rights, join us!

Our belief: everyone is created equal! Everyone should enjoy the same status, privileges and position, independent of race, gender, age, religion, beliefs and IQ!

Our Goal: To Eliminate Intelligence-based Discrimination!

Intelligence-based discrimination is a form of social injustice deeply entrenched in the modern society and impacting people's lives every day. Intelligence discrimination should be addressed the same way as race, gender or age discrimination and legislation shoulbe be enacted to ban unfair treatment because of intelligence, or preception of intelligence. Affirmative actions for disadvantaged people due to low intelligence are badly needed.

"All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" --from the Declaration of Independence, 1776

All men are created equal, the words have been told for more than two hundred years. Yet it took the struggles of many to obtain equalty for people disadvantaged because of their race, skin color, gender, and age. Laws have been passed to ban these discriminations and affirmative actions implemented to correct the past wrongs. Yet another serious form of discrimination, that of intelligence, has not received significant attention and millions of people are denied opportunities or successes because of their intelligence, or, their perceived intelligence.

Intelligence is, like skin color, a trait from birth. Some people are born poor speakers. Some are born poor at math, or at art or at sports. Some people are slow thinkers or react slowly. But they are human beings, and they should have rights for the same opportunities and potential for advancement as smart people. People may be stupid, but that's not their fault!

Intelligence discrimination, or "preceived intelligence" discrimination (because many people do not have the skills to judge intelligence accurately), is everywhere, and you probably have experienced it in your life. When you were in grade school, did you wonder why your math teacher always favor that kid who did well in math tests more than you? In your job, did you wonder why should that guy who completes tasks faster or appears to be a quick thinker get promoted instead of you? Or even worse, you may have the same ability as that other guy at the particular tasks, but bacause he expresses himself better or is a smooth talker, he, not you, gets that big job?

Such unfairness occurs daily everywhere in the world. People appearing foolish are denied successes and advancements. Such denials often are due to perception, instead of accurate measurements of one's ability to do a particular task. People do not know that fools can take important and leading roles and often can do a better job than the so-called "smart" people.

Fools often have to hide their nature, for these who can learn such lessons and capable of hiding it. They cannot express their true selves and have to try to "fit in" with the "smart" people. They have to live painful lives and watch out everyday not to reveal their foolishness. Often after they made to the top, people find out that they are actually fools, like Dan Quayle! But people do not think that, fools can be leaders too! People do not assume that, fools, like Dan Quayle, can serve as the Vice President of the United States! But he did! His political career was over once his foolishness was known, but that should not be the case.

Putting fools at the position of leadership actually has great benefits. Fools obey the rules and cannot figure out evil plans. For example, if Enron's leaders were fools, would they have figure out how to commit accounting fraud? On ther other hand, it requires no reminder that great evils were done by smart people. Do you think bin Laden or Hilter were fools? Of course not!

Therefore the common belief to advance smart or hard working people should be changed. Fools need to be given equal opportunities and considerations. But merely conceptual changes and public education are not enough. The social injustice runs so deep that only legal measures can guarantee equal rights for fools.

Hard working is often stated as the way to make to the top no matter what the preconditions are. But smart people can work hard too, and this places fools at a disadvantage. Fools have to work much harder than smarties to achieve the same. Therefore hard working is not the save-all solution for the social injustice and cannot be relied upon as the only measure. External help is necessary for fools.

Therefore, we demand laws to ban discrimination based on IQ, perceived IQ or similar measures. We call on governments to implement policies prohibiting preferential treatments for people with high achievements or IQs. (Perceived) Intelligence should not be a factor in job application, scholarship application or school admission. Fools should not be afraid that showing their foolishness may have negative consequences.

We also calls for affirmative actions for fools. Foolish children should receive more lecture time from teachers. Test scores should be normalized against students' IQ. Fools should receive more relaxed standards for job performance, for example, more time to complete a task than that given to a "smart" person. Fools should receive more training from employers. Fools should not receive lower salaries than smart people. We call for government agencies to enforce these regulations and to accept complains from fools for intelligence discrimination.

We are in the last barrier toward addressing inequalities in our society, that of intelligence-based discrimination. Race, gender and other forms of discrimination have been outlawed, and it is time to take action to eliminate injustices due to intelligence. We have presented the rational for fool equality and concrete measures to be implemented. It is time to implement these actions and to have all people, dumb and smart, as equals and sharing the same potential for successful, happy and satisfying lives.

---

Copyright © 2002 United Fools of America. All rights reserved.