Friday, June 17, 2011

Public considerations of a last will

Basically this is just a supporting document as the public side of my last will and testament. There are some parts that are more effective if revealed in public...

From an analysis of the problem, it is important to note that there are two basic kinds of wills. These days most of them are going to be imminent documents, where the person who is dying is mortally ill and knows it. As medical treatment improves, more and more deaths are for causes known in advance, and even the schedules are becoming increasingly well known. In those cases, the will is just part of wrapping things up for an inevitable outcome.

However, the other type of will is more interesting, and that is the kind I am revising at this time, the will to cover an unexpected death. The fundamental problem there is that the will has to attempt to cover an undetermined number of unexpected cases, and I'm basically required to depend upon my executor and other survivors to figure out what happened and what responses are appropriate and in accord with my wishes. Any such wishes need to be worded in a flexible manner and any 'countermeasures' have to be directed at an unknown target...

What I will say is that one category of unanticipated death involves deliberately hostile actions, and I would even like to believe that I am living my life in a way that may annoy or even anger some bad people, maybe even some people who are evil enough to want to do something about my ongoing annoyances. Insofar as I have any evidence about bad people or concrete threats, that information will therefore be included with my will. It might even give leads to investigators looking into the circumstances of my death. Obviously I can't say anything in public about the details of such precautions and countermeasures, but I will note that I'm a pretty suspicious person and I can easily save a lot of data these days.

There are actually two main problems here. One is how to collect and categorize the data to avoid or minimize false leads. The other is how to cover potentially diabolical attacks, especially ones that are intended to look like accidents and that may have been arranged well in advance... It seems sufficient to say that I have lots of ideas and a pretty good imagination, and I've been thinking about the various possibilities for many years. In fact, some of my ideas even extend into planning beyond the limits of current technologies.