Hands up if you're going to die soon

I received a particularly unwelcome leaflet through my front door today. More unwelcome than say, a booklet telling me I'm living in sin and must convert to some crazy cult (ie Mormanism) or my eternal soul will be damned forever (I am an atheist with Buddhist sympathies by the way). This leaflet was encouraging me (if I'm over 50 and therefore likely to be dead within the next 20 years) to make or change my will so that it favours The Institute of Cancer Research (I would link but I don't want to give them any attention).

Essentially, if I was over 50, there is no way I'd leave anything to these murderous assholes if my life depended on it (which it may, ironically). The reason? Well for starters I'm not an evil sadist who thinks it's ok to give an innocent animal, usually a stump-tailed macaque, a debilitating illness to prolong my own life, I'm not a lich after all. For mains, I have Buddhist sympathies which basically means I believe in reincarnation, that all life is equally valuable etc. so killing a monkey is the same as killing a human. And for dessert, well, they can piss right off.

The only thing I would ever leave them is a life-long legacy of crippling debt and a loaded gun so they can research into the percentage chance of a human surviving a self-administered bullet to the head.

What really made me laugh about the whole thing was the complete contradiction in terms the leaflet provided. In the first paragraph, in fact it's the first sentence, it states that failing to create a will will cause unnecassary problems for your family, ie all your possessions and money will go straight to the government rather than to your family who, lets face it, are less likely to spend it on bombing the Middle East.

Then on the third page it's telling you to forget your family and give them your spare five grand or that original Constable you have stashed in the attic for a rainy day. So in summary, they're telling you to look after your family by giving them nothing but a hefty funeral bill.

The real point of this rant, though, is for god's sake don't give anything to cancer research charities. Don't even spend money on the petrol required for a Molotov cocktail to chuck through their window. Ignore them and, hopefully, they'll all go away.

I have seen first hand the horrible effects of cancer research. I used to work for world famous ape rescue centre, Monkey World as the lemur keeper when I was 16. Often when I finished my shift I would go down and chat with my colleagues at the 'stumpy' enclosure. Most of these macaques had been rescued from research laboratories like those run by the numerous cancer research charities and were all in a bad way. They all looked so depressed. They had been chosen for testing for no other reason than that they were not as easy on the eye as say a squirrel monkey is. They had been tested on because they were ugly.

While I accept that cancer is a horrible illness, is it possible to justify taking five lives to save one? I know that my Buddhist outlook makes me think in these terms, but to put it another way: if all of your friends who were not particularly aesthetically pleasing were taken away and given cancer to save one monkey, how would you feel? You wouldn't exactly be jumping for joy that's for sure. Especially if you were one of the ugly friends.