You may have seen a brilliant xkcd comic that diagrammed the Saturn V moon rocket using labels limited to the thousand most commonly-used words in the English language - e.g., Saturn V is "Up-Goer Five", and thousand is "ten hundred." It is remarkably clear and accurate, and might actually help some little kids or dimwitted adults understand rocket architecture. Well, in furtherance of continuing the meme as a kind of brain-teaser, an Up-Goer Five text editor that warns you whenever you type something not in the thousand most common words has been posted. Now, I know what you're thinking, and I'm thinking the same thing: This is a perfect way to explain basic concepts of grownup society to Republicans - although Tea Party members might need the lexicon reduced to 100 words, and all them would have to be misspelled. So here goes.
Dear Party of Mean and Crazy People,
A long time ago, this place was smaller and was run by guys from across the big water. Those guys were mean to us for a while, not letting us talk where they decided things, but still making us pay them. It wasn't the paying that was the problem, but the not letting us play a part in deciding what to pay. I'm sure there were some who just didn't want to pay anything at all no matter what, and I guess you are like them, but most of the guys who stood up against it didn't like that they couldn't have the same say in what to pay as guys who lived over the big water. Kind of like how you people don't want other people who live in this place today to have the same say in things as you. The guys who stopped the problem back then had said this, in the well-known piece of paper called the Saying of Deciding Stuff Yourself:
Everyone knows that everyone starts life the same, and so their rights are the same: Life, doing what you want with that life, and trying to be happy.
Even though everyone knows about those words, you don't seem to care. You just go around saying it was about not paying stuff, just so you can say it's okay for you to not pay stuff even though you already get a say in it and more than your share of what it buys. In fact, you get more of a say than other people. Most people don't agree with you, but their thinking isn't said as much in the speaking places, papers, and talking boxes because people like you own most of them and fire anyone who doesn't say what they're told to say. That's not like the guys who wrote the Saying of Deciding Stuff Yourself - that's like the guys who were trying to make us pay them without letting us have a say in it. You want all the saying and none of the paying, and want everyone else to have all the paying and none of the saying.
You have a right to think that, but don't lie and say you're on the side of the people who made the Saying. They said everyone should have the same rights, but you want to take away the rights of people who look different from you, talk different from you, use different words to talk to their gods than you do with yours, like different things than you like, want different things than you want, and people who say you're wrong about something. You are the problem - the same problem the Saying was written to deal with when it was from across the big water, but now you're here and still a problem.
And that's just talking about money and rights. You also don't seem to understand stuff about how living things work, where they came from, and what happens when you put some kinds of stuff in the air. There is a whole job people do where they study these things, and they know more about it than anyone else because that's their job. And as time goes on, they know more and more because they learn new stuff. Do you go around telling people who work on cars how to do their job if you're not one of them? How about doctors? Do you think you know more about something because you don't like what it means than all the people who spend their whole lives working on it? Stop being so stupid.
All living things change over time. We know because we can see it happen all the time. The more time that passes, the more change happens. People are different than they were in the past, and more different the more back you go. But the more different they were from today, the more they were like other animals - who are also now different than they were back then. The only reason you say this isn't true is that a book says so that was written a long time ago from stories made up by people way before then who couldn't read, and that is really stupid.
None of the people who wrote that book had the job of learning about living things, because no one knew about that job yet. Now we do know about that job, and the people who work it say people are a hundred times older than you say, and life is about half a hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred years old. If you're not going to use your stupid old book to know how to fix your car, don't try to use it to know about living things, because it would work just as good. Which is to say, it wouldn't. I say again: Stop being stupid.
Then there's all the stuff being put in the air. You know the stuff that comes out the back of a car? Some of that stuff stops hot air from cooling. It just gets hotter and hotter the more of it there is. There are people who have the job of knowing what different stuff in the air does, and they know that that stuff makes the air hotter. That's why it keeps being more hot than ever in so many places all the time. I don't care how much you like your big stupid car that's ten feet wide and makes you feel like a real man because nothing between your legs is big enough to do that. The people who work the air-stuff job say there needs to be less of the car-back stuff in the air or things will get very bad. And things have been getting bad because people aren't cutting back on putting that stuff in the air.
But you say it's not happening, because the people who make the stuff that burns in cars and makes the bad air say it's not bad and causes no problems. These are guys who kill lots of people just to get the stuff in the first place, but I'm sure they would tell the truth about how bad it is to the people who pay them for it. Guess what: They're lying. They're bad people. And so are you if you try to stop people from dealing with the air problem. You would also be very stupid, because even people with lots of money are hurt when their houses next to the big water end up under it, which has already happened in some places. Maybe you're one of those sick, crazy people who wants everything to suck because your stupid old book says that's the way to make your god come and end the world, but the rest of us think that's a bad thing.
The world is what we make it, nothing more and nothing less. Stop being mean to people for telling the truth, stop doing stupid things that hurt people just to make yourself feel big, and start acting with them the way you want other people to act with you. Grow up, and learn to read and think like big boys and big girls so we don't have to use Up-Goer Five to talk to your sorry ass.
3:30 PM PT: I now have a headache from writing in Up Goer Five. Trying to express an intelligent thought using only the 1000 most common words is like trying to breathe through a coffee straw.
