One of the really great things about living in an enlightened age is the understanding that things happen for a reason. Science allows us to characterize the actions of inanimate things as conforming to a set of physical laws. We thus know, for example, that when released, large, heavy objects will fall toward a source of gravitational attraction, such as the feet of the party who dropped them. In centuries past, when this wasn't understood, people no doubt suffered crushed toes in truly disturbing numbers without ever knowing quite why it was happening.

Science isn't quite as good at explaining why things which have elevated themselves to the posture of being capable of language skills, the operation of microwave ovens and designs upon public office behave as do baboons on drugs so much of the time. To be sure, if science had postulated a fourth law of thermodynamics which said "lawyers expand to fill the available budget," it would have gone a long way toward discrediting the previous three. Science knows when to shut up.

This page is intended for those who feel they can no longer count on science and know full well that God has taken one look at the situation, changed her name and left with no forwarding address. It enumerates the less obvious laws of the universe. At least, it enumerates my collection of them. Your mileage may vary.

Warning: At least one of the following laws is likely to offend almost everyone who reads this page — if they don't, you're not trying hard enough. This page is not intended for young or easily-offended readers; the morally-indignant by choice; anyone who regards him- or herself as having been born more than once; liberals or genetically-accurate reproductions thereof; members of any union of public-sector employees or car salesmen named Stig. You're invited to send us some e-mail with your comments. Note that anything we receive in this context which is even mildly amusing will most likely find its way to our Kudos and Flames page.

As an aside, the etchings which illustrate this page have something to say as well. Place your mouse cursor over one and wait for a moment. This feature may not work for users of some versions of Netscape and Firefox.

political process which requires that its participants be vicious, unprincipled bastards to attain elected office virtually guarantees that they'll be vicious, unprincipled bastards once they occupy it.

large dumb dog will eventually kill any small, wily cat foolish enough to get in its way. This is a reflection only upon the capabilities of the cat.

oliticians who would exchange liberty for security should know that we'll run out of freedom long before the terrorists run out of bombs.

he highest purpose of law is not to punish the guilty, but to protect the innocent. This must include protecting the innocent from the law.

o technology more complex than a rock can be reliably mastered without reading its instructions. That some users of more complex technology get away without doing so from time to time does not invalidate this rule, although it does make it more difficult to convince everyone else of it.

otteries are unquestionably a tax on greed and stupidity, but this does not necessarily make them wrong. Taxing greedy, stupid people is preferable to taxing hardworking, intelligent people, if for no other reason than doing so gives greedy, stupid people an incentive to smarten up.

stopped clock is absolutely correct twice a day, but that doesn't mean it's keeping particularly good time.

n easily understood falsehood is more useful than a complex, impenetrable truth.

aked women are not obscene. Depictions of naked women might be deemed to be obscene, depending upon where you live.

ever ascribe to phantasms, specters or disembodied spirits that which can be explained as the work of extraterrestrials.

very technology embodies within it a point wherein it becomes either too complex to be sustainable or too hard to understand for anyone to want to bother with it. The former can be characterized as the realization that you know all the service people involved by their first names. The latter occurs when you've read the manual at least three times and you still don't know how to switch whatever it's describing on.

ree things are invariably worth what they cost.

f you are opposed to abortion, you should be certain not to have one.

egistered, licensed firearms are no less capable of killing people than are unregistered, unlicensed firearms.

f you're self-employed and successful, you probably have a real bastard for a boss.

ights are like muscles. If you don't exercise them from time to time, they'll atrophy and disappear.

here is no such thing as a "liberal democrat." A democracy — literally, a government by the people — cannot exist in an environment wherein some of the people are compelled to support their fellow citizens. Equal representation by one's government cannot occur in a climate of unequal responsibility to pay for it.

thics and morality are not interchangeable. Ethics are what happens when intelligent people reason through issues of logically-defensible right and wrong. Morality is what happens when unintelligent people find themselves unable to understand what ethics are.

orld War II was caused by politicians who didn't learn anything from World War I.

nyone who feels that the best things come in small packages has never tried to wrap a Porche.

oney is an abstraction for work done. If you obtain money in some way which does not involve your doing work in exchange for it, you are by definition ripping somebody off to get it.

o lock is any more formidable than the door in which it is mounted.

n Internet file server has less intelligence than a hamster. No one who devotes weeks of his or her life to breaking into one can be in any way regarded as an "evil genius." It would be a slight to genuine villains to characterize them as "evil" at all.

yberspace is a subset of real space. Hackers who commit vandalism, robbery, fraud or terrorism in cyberspace are de facto committing these acts in real space, and should be subject to the same real-space punishments for doing so that conventional criminals are.

he only way to ensure the freedom to hold and express good ideas is to ensure the freedom to hold and express all ideas — even the really disgusting ones.

f everyone were suddenly empowered to break those laws with which they did not agree, their society would degenerate into anarchy fifteen minutes later.

here is no more extreme form of selfishness than having children for the purpose of perpetuating yourself.

f values were cheap, everyone would have them.

istory is made by the people who show up.

he difference between mutual funds and Russian roulette is that the long-term odds of surviving Russian roulette are better.

eople who don't have swords are none the less capable of dying on them.

he only ingredient in a weight-loss program scientifically proven to be effective is sweat.

eed and entitlement are not synonymous.

he all-time best way to ensure public interest in and the long-term preservation of a work of expression — such as a book, movie, piece of music or painting — is to attempt to suppress it.

he grey area between "ethical" and "unethical" is similar in size to the one between "pregnant" and "not pregnant." Being "slightly unethical," like being "slightly pregnant," invariably leads to larger things.

n absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence. For example, the observation that no one seems to know who shot JFK does not immediately imply a conspiracy to suppress the truth.

eliberately voting for candidates who have no chance of winning is indistinguishable from staying home.

n the approximately ten thousand years that human beings have gathered together into organized societies, no government has successfully created a single long-term, sustainable job that didn't cost its citizens more than the holder of the job took home in wages.

he phrasing of questions invariably colors the answers they engender.(1)

un control isn't about guns. It's about control.

od created a universe so vast that the most powerful telescopes created by men cannot see to the end of it; so intricate that the greatest minds throughout human history have contributed an understanding of the tiniest fraction of its workings; so perfectly devised that it has functioned flawlessly since the beginning of time. Anyone who claims to understand the will and purpose of such an intellect can be taken no more seriously than a virus commenting upon Shakespeare.

igs may be largely ignorant of the mechanics of flight, but if you push one off a tall building it will make every effort to learn.

he Titanic is not remembered today because she was the most luxurious passenger liner of her day, because she had hand-carved mahogany woodwork with inlaid mother of pearl, a replica of a French sidewalk cafe, a full orchestra, engines capable of generating 106,000 horsepower or capacity for 3000 passengers and crew. She is remembered today because she was built of inferior steel, commanded by an arrogant, inattentive captain and sunk before she reached her first port.

ou cannot be too fit, too rich or too well armed.

t is unwise to employ an accountant who makes more money than the majority of his clients. It is equally unwise to employ a financial planner who makes less.

he purpose of government, as its name should imply, is to govern, rather than to rule. A government which seeks to do otherwise should be an anathema to the citizens of any nation which in times past exiled, beheaded or marginalized its kings, or had the sense not to accede to any in the first place.

very medium of communication from cave painting to the Internet has been first used to convey intellectual or spiritual content, then pornography, then everything else. If the nineteenth-century abolitionists who demanded the suppression of high-speed mechanical printing presses because they were used chiefly to produce erotic books had been successful, you would be reading this from a sheet of parchment now.

rotecting people from the consequences of their bad actions pretty much ensures that they'll be responsible for more bad actions later. Idiots who insist on pursuing cordless bungee jumping will almost certainly die horribly, but they're unlikely to reproduce.

eople who would not even think about driving a 25-year-old car daily board 25-year-old airplanes and cruise around in them five miles above the earth.

ny business that requires you to listen to a machine for more than ninety seconds which tells you that your call is very important to them, rather than providing you with a live human being to talk to, is by definition lying.

ll photographs of sunsets look more or less the same, but the people who take them can invariably tell the difference.

aw is a collection of social bargains. We trade the freedom to enter the homes of other people for the right to deny unwanted intruders access to our homes. We trade the freedom to kill anyone we wish for the assurance that we ourselves will not be murdered. Anyone who chooses to set aside the restrictions of law in so doing absolves him or herself of its protections as well. If an armed intruder breaks into your home, it's reasonable to assume that they do so wearing a target.

overnments typically collect hundreds of times more by taxing cigarettes than they can ever hope to save in health costs by convincing people not to smoke.

he most compelling evidence for there being intelligent life elsewhere in the universe may be that none of it comes here.

ost people cannot comprehend large numbers or long odds. The odds of winning a 6/49 lottery are approximately fourteen million to one. The odds of dying in an airplane crash are about seven million to one. People who think it sufficiently unlikely they'll do the latter that they'll stake their lives on it will nonetheless drop a substantial portion of their pay checks on the former.

n choosing between the lesser of two evils, it's important to keep in mind that the result will be evil even if you choose correctly.

he only possible benefit to a gun registration program is that it will remove from the pockets of potential crime victims whatever it costs to administer the program, and deprive armed criminals of those funds.

nless you insist on travelling more than a hundred miles from your home, a flat earth model and a round earth model are equally workable.

he dinosaurs never saw it coming either.

he best way to survive a bear attack is to run faster than the person beside you.

he good guys have to succeed every time. The bad guys only have to get lucky once.

arge publicly-held corporations typically pay no corporate tax. This occurs because corporate tax is levied upon the profits made by corporations, and the profits of public companies are paid to their stockholders as dividends, resulting in the corporations which earned them having no taxable profits left. These dividends, however, are taxable, typically at a rate higher than that of corporate tax. Anyone who claims that large corporations are getting away with something in this respect is either ignorant of how corporations work or assumes that you are.

he most advantageous thing you can do for someone who is out of work is to give him or her a job. The next most advantageous thing you can do is to spend your money, which will create a demand for goods and services, which will in turn create jobs. The least advantageous thing you can do is to give your money to the government, which will use it to pay civil servants, who will provide the unemployed with forms to fill out.

t's usually a lot easier to get forgiveness than permission.

he Soviet Union and the Western democracies spent the latter half of the twentieth century embroiled in the cold war, during which time the West assailed the Soviet Union with spy planes, secret agents, bugs, propaganda, satellites, espionage, assassinations, coups, the threat of nuclear annihilation and a not-insubstantial amount of artillery. The cold war was won, however, by none of these things, but rather because the West was able to outspend its opponent.

verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

reaking the law makes you guilty of committing a crime. The application of a capable lawyer to your situation may mitigate the penalty for your crime — it will not mitigate your guilt.

here is questionable effecacity in sheep espousing vegetarianism when the local wolves feel otherwise.

he events which characterize the reputed life of Jesus Christ are derived from four accounts, written by four authors of which almost nothing is known. The oldest of the four works is at least a century younger than its principle subject, indicating that it is at best a third-hand account of the events it depicts. The four accounts differ markedly in their details. All are known to have been translated among several languages and substantially copy-edited several centuries after their creation. One of the world's religions — and two thousand years of bloodshed, repression, tyranny and war — are founded upon these accounts, which would constitute insufficient evidence to support the prosecution of a parking ticket in any other context.

f murder were punishable by a large fine, rather than by prison time, there would be electronic devices to detect an approaching murderer at a thousand yards and innumerable police officers hiding behind the bushes and billboards of our nation to operate them, all eager to bag their quotas.

t is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.(2)

nflicting confiscatory levels of taxation upon doctors, entrepreneurs, artists and other successful people who work hard and earn a lot of money won't make them into liberals. It will make them live somewhere else.

ost of us have the bodies of gods. Buddha is a god.

eople who refuse to assist with the work forego the option of complaining about the results.

iscrimination cannot be reversed — it can only redirected.

hould you notice a bomb disposal technician running away, try to keep up.

1. Physicists know this problem as the example of Schroedinger's cat. You can't observe a situation, that is, query it, without in some way affecting the situation and as such the nature of the reply to your query. Politicians, and especially the companies they hire to conduct polls on their behalf, do not understand this as a rule.
2. Frank Herbert wrote this, but it's such a splendid idea that I've included it here.