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Because it is my birthday,
I hereby present to you a warning.
WHEN I BECOME EMPEROR:
1. I will confine my rule to Canada and the United States. I do not know Mexico well enough to govern it properly, and nothing brings an emperor down like screwing up the provinces. I might consider conquering it and installing a viceroy who knows the nation properly, but overall I think I'll probably leave them be.
2. I will depopulate between ¾ and 7/8 of the state of Texas and deed most of the now-empty part of the state over to the Grucci family and other fireworks developers for testing grounds. I like fireworks and it never hurts to have people who know their way around explosives as your vassals. The Texans who are being displaced will be sent to Alberta to labour in the beef mines. The Texans who are not being displaced will be the sane ones and will have their choice of non-fireworky real estate. I'm the Emperor, I get to decide who the sane ones are.
3. Computer virus writers caught in my empire will be given the choice of cleaning up every last bit of damage their idiot creations have ever done, or the scorpion pit. Of course there will be a scorpion pit. If it was good enough for Havelock Vetinari it's good enough for me.
4. Spammers caught in my empire get every bone in their hands broken. Any money they've made by their schemes will be confiscated to a special account in the imperial treasury reserved for, I don't know, marine mammal rescue or something.
5. One commandment will be added to every religion that operates in my empire whether they like it or not. That commandment will be: Don't Be A Jerk. If a religious variant is predicated upon being a jerk- like, for example, Fred Phelps' freaky-ass brand of religion- it forfeits its right to be called a religion and instead becomes a bunch of people being jerks. Its members will then be made to do highway litter cleanup and dead animal removal until they're too exhausted to be jerks any more. If it's just individual members of an otherwise non-jerky religion who use religion as an excuse to be jerks, or if it's subsets of that religion that encourage being a jerk, well, local roads and municipal parking lots need litter removal too.
6. I or my duly designated representative- and by 'duly designated' I mean 'chosen by me alone'- get to approve all the textbooks. Not state-level boards of education, not county-level boards, not local boards- this one is mine, you understand? All mine. I'm lookin' at you, Quebec and Kansas.
7. We're adding a couple of prizes to the list of Nobel-level accomplishment prizes, at least in my empire. One for civil engineering, to start with. One for maths, too. I mean, why not. Maybe we'll have some separate prizes for the hard sciences (physics, cosmology, astronomy, etc.) vs. the sticky ones (biology, chemistry) so that they don't have to compete with each other. And one for Uncategorized But Still Really Bitchin' Human Accomplishment In General, so that the Peace Prize people don't have to worry too much about who to reward.
8. I don't give a crap who you marry as long as you take it seriously and don't give the Imperial tax service too many headaches. Civil unions all 'round with a mandatory waiting period for dissolution so that you don't think you can get away with getting joined in Vegas and divorced a week later. You wanna call it marriage, you get your religion's blessing. Come to think of it, mandatory waiting period between Declaration of Intent to Join and the actual creation of the union too- yes, this means that if you get engaged, you have to file a paper about it first. I’m the Emperor. Deal.
9. The Public Health Service is gonna be big. Really big. Like, my favourite branch of the civil service kind of big. I want my subjects healthy, even if it means I have to quarantine some of y'all to do it. Do not give me whining about your right to not be vaccinated. They pulled that kind of !*&( in Nigeria when they claimed that the polio vaccine was altered to make Moslems sterile, and the gods-damned disease broke out again all over the place. Even wound up exporting a strain to Indonesia, thank you, you sorry fear-mongering sons of !&(*!&es. Either you get your shots or you get no health care at all. On the other hand, fluoridation of water is to be decided at the community level. I love y'all's teeth, but people whine about that kind of thing, and it's not like tooth decay is particularly transmissible. There will be preventative medicine out the yin-yang, and there will be serious regulation of dietary supplements. My Public Health Service is gonna damn well make sure that everything that's sold on the market is at least as strong and as active as it claims on the label, and no wimpy little 'no health claim is being made' disclaimer is gonna cut it. If you wanna take herbs, that's fine, whatever, but your right to self medicate means bupkis when there's the possibility of fraud or negligence. I'm the Emperor, okay? If it's sold in my realm it's damned well going to WORK.
10. Anybody who wants to go into politics is going to be required to pass certain basic courses in economics, psychology, demographics, thermodynamics, and maths. Also, they're probably going to be made to play through the Civilization family of video games a couple dozen times until they've got the hang of making their little computerized empire dance. We don't exactly have nation simulators to train up on but that'll do for a start.
11. Also, anybody- myself included- who goes into politics has to read and understand the entirety of the Evil Overlord List. That's a fairly basic document and I don't think it's too much to ask.
Yes, I know it should probably say 'Empress', but that just doesn't sound the same. This list is only a start. There may eventually be something in there about me having the right to hunt down people at ad agencies with packs of trained dachshunds, too, but I haven't decided yet.
Oh! And:
#12. I want a riding moose. I don't need it trained for combat or anything. I just want the opportunity, every so often, to ride a moose.
WHEN I BECOME EMPEROR:
1. I will confine my rule to Canada and the United States. I do not know Mexico well enough to govern it properly, and nothing brings an emperor down like screwing up the provinces. I might consider conquering it and installing a viceroy who knows the nation properly, but overall I think I'll probably leave them be.
2. I will depopulate between ¾ and 7/8 of the state of Texas and deed most of the now-empty part of the state over to the Grucci family and other fireworks developers for testing grounds. I like fireworks and it never hurts to have people who know their way around explosives as your vassals. The Texans who are being displaced will be sent to Alberta to labour in the beef mines. The Texans who are not being displaced will be the sane ones and will have their choice of non-fireworky real estate. I'm the Emperor, I get to decide who the sane ones are.
3. Computer virus writers caught in my empire will be given the choice of cleaning up every last bit of damage their idiot creations have ever done, or the scorpion pit. Of course there will be a scorpion pit. If it was good enough for Havelock Vetinari it's good enough for me.
4. Spammers caught in my empire get every bone in their hands broken. Any money they've made by their schemes will be confiscated to a special account in the imperial treasury reserved for, I don't know, marine mammal rescue or something.
5. One commandment will be added to every religion that operates in my empire whether they like it or not. That commandment will be: Don't Be A Jerk. If a religious variant is predicated upon being a jerk- like, for example, Fred Phelps' freaky-ass brand of religion- it forfeits its right to be called a religion and instead becomes a bunch of people being jerks. Its members will then be made to do highway litter cleanup and dead animal removal until they're too exhausted to be jerks any more. If it's just individual members of an otherwise non-jerky religion who use religion as an excuse to be jerks, or if it's subsets of that religion that encourage being a jerk, well, local roads and municipal parking lots need litter removal too.
6. I or my duly designated representative- and by 'duly designated' I mean 'chosen by me alone'- get to approve all the textbooks. Not state-level boards of education, not county-level boards, not local boards- this one is mine, you understand? All mine. I'm lookin' at you, Quebec and Kansas.
7. We're adding a couple of prizes to the list of Nobel-level accomplishment prizes, at least in my empire. One for civil engineering, to start with. One for maths, too. I mean, why not. Maybe we'll have some separate prizes for the hard sciences (physics, cosmology, astronomy, etc.) vs. the sticky ones (biology, chemistry) so that they don't have to compete with each other. And one for Uncategorized But Still Really Bitchin' Human Accomplishment In General, so that the Peace Prize people don't have to worry too much about who to reward.
8. I don't give a crap who you marry as long as you take it seriously and don't give the Imperial tax service too many headaches. Civil unions all 'round with a mandatory waiting period for dissolution so that you don't think you can get away with getting joined in Vegas and divorced a week later. You wanna call it marriage, you get your religion's blessing. Come to think of it, mandatory waiting period between Declaration of Intent to Join and the actual creation of the union too- yes, this means that if you get engaged, you have to file a paper about it first. I’m the Emperor. Deal.
9. The Public Health Service is gonna be big. Really big. Like, my favourite branch of the civil service kind of big. I want my subjects healthy, even if it means I have to quarantine some of y'all to do it. Do not give me whining about your right to not be vaccinated. They pulled that kind of !*&( in Nigeria when they claimed that the polio vaccine was altered to make Moslems sterile, and the gods-damned disease broke out again all over the place. Even wound up exporting a strain to Indonesia, thank you, you sorry fear-mongering sons of !&(*!&es. Either you get your shots or you get no health care at all. On the other hand, fluoridation of water is to be decided at the community level. I love y'all's teeth, but people whine about that kind of thing, and it's not like tooth decay is particularly transmissible. There will be preventative medicine out the yin-yang, and there will be serious regulation of dietary supplements. My Public Health Service is gonna damn well make sure that everything that's sold on the market is at least as strong and as active as it claims on the label, and no wimpy little 'no health claim is being made' disclaimer is gonna cut it. If you wanna take herbs, that's fine, whatever, but your right to self medicate means bupkis when there's the possibility of fraud or negligence. I'm the Emperor, okay? If it's sold in my realm it's damned well going to WORK.
10. Anybody who wants to go into politics is going to be required to pass certain basic courses in economics, psychology, demographics, thermodynamics, and maths. Also, they're probably going to be made to play through the Civilization family of video games a couple dozen times until they've got the hang of making their little computerized empire dance. We don't exactly have nation simulators to train up on but that'll do for a start.
11. Also, anybody- myself included- who goes into politics has to read and understand the entirety of the Evil Overlord List. That's a fairly basic document and I don't think it's too much to ask.
Yes, I know it should probably say 'Empress', but that just doesn't sound the same. This list is only a start. There may eventually be something in there about me having the right to hunt down people at ad agencies with packs of trained dachshunds, too, but I haven't decided yet.
Oh! And:
#12. I want a riding moose. I don't need it trained for combat or anything. I just want the opportunity, every so often, to ride a moose.
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