There's a classic experiment in psychology.

Suppose you're watching a run-away railway car. It's big, it's heavy, it's going fast and out of control. A little way along the track splits, and the car might go right, or it might go left. On the right track a man is working, wearing hearing protection. There's no way you can warn him in time. On the left track a car is stalled with a family inside, mom, dad, two kids. They don't notice the coming disaster, either.

You can't know which way the run-away train is going to go. But which track would you prefer it to go on?

Suppose there's a switch by your hand. You can't tell which way the train is going to go, but if you press the switch, then the train will definitely go right. One man will be killed, but the family will survive.

Whatever choice you might make, most people will choose not to press the switch. They prefer the 50/50 chance of killing an entire family by not doing anything to the certain chance of saving their lives by doing something that will kill a man.

The reason for this is buried in our processing of moral choices. Moral thinking is something we all do instinctively, and in most cases we do it well enough. But under certain circumstances our moral judgment seizes up, like some kind of rickety steam engine that needs a bolt tightened. This is an excellent example of such an instance.

It is doubtful that any of us will ever be in the position that is described by that psychology experiment, right?

Wrong.

Right now tens of millions of parents in America face exactly that kind of a choice. An H1N1 flu epidemic is threatening this country. It is already hospitalizing and killing people around the world. The risk to our children is significant: at least 1 in fifteen of non-immunized children will be hospitalized due to the H1N1 flu. If the epidemic gets bad enough, then the overburdened health care system may well not be able to prevent many deaths.

But there is a certain risk to the vaccine, as well. The risk is tiny for most serious problems, on the order of 1/100,000 or less.

If parents do nothing, they risk a 1 in fifteen chance that their children will become seriously ill. If they get their children immunized, they risk a much lower, less than 1/100,000 chance that their children will become seriously ill.

And yet parents around the country are deciding not to immunize.

They're deciding not to press that switch, gambling a family's life.

In actual fact, these parents are doing worse than gambling their own family's life. Since non-immunized children will get ill and spread the disease, parents who do not immunize their own children are gambling with the lives of everyone else, as well.

But because of the rickety old steam engine that runs our brains, it is hard for them to recognize the immorality of this choice.

Factcheck.org has more detailed information.

It was later than I thought. This morning everything seemed to be going well until I was about 10 yards away from the bus stop, and the bus went by.

I yanked out my cellphone - I use it instead of a watch - and checked the time. Sure enough. The bus was not early.

The bus runs up the street, but instead of going straight downtown it winds back into the next neighborhood. I have a good chance of catching it when it comes back around to a stop about a mile from that corner, so I started jogging. When I was about half-way there, someone called my name, and I get a ride with a neighbor.

Nice guy, give you the shirt off his back, and we haven't talked in a long time so there's a lot to cover. When talk turns to insurance, how much he's paying, how he has to be careful to stay insurable, how his deductible and copays about keep him broke, I say, "with all what we have to deal with, I wonder what they're talking about when they say national health care would eliminate choice."

"You'd be surprised," he says.

Well, I was surprised. I expected someone who isn't having any fun at all with the current health care system to be on the side calling for reform, but apparently not. There weren't any specific problems he meant. "You'd be surprised" is about all it amounts to.

There is a curious kind of cognitive disconnect when people don't trust government to run a health care system, but it's OK for government to send our sons and daughters off to war. On the one hand they raise a ruckus when the census comes around, and then they have no problem with warrantless surveillance. A health care system that bleeds them into poverty - most individual bankruptcies are due to medical bills - is OK, even if insurance company execs make billions and the care they receive is demonstrably inferior to that in any other industrialized country, but even a suggestion of raising taxes and out come the tricorns and the Tetley tea bags.

I'd go to Canada. I'm told their system doesn't work but Canadians aren't going bankrupt over their medical bills, they have a lower infant mortality rates, and longer life expectancies. If that is what it means when something doesn't work I welcome failure.

Problem is, of course, Canadians would love for us to solve our own problems. They're pretty tired of Americans crossing the border to cadge free medical care, cheap medicine, and lower car registration fees. Well, actually, I bet they don't mind the car registrations.

But meanwhile folks here wonder why we're in such a hurry to fix a broken system.

I tell them it's because it's later than they think.

A chuckle on the digital age.

From an emailed editorial I was sent (don't know the original link):

"... Gordon Bell (and fellow Microsoft researcher Jim Gemmell) have written a book called Total Recall, in which they describe the benefits of recording literally everything we do in digital formats, and the process by which we're going down that road. Among the benefits they describe:

• definitive and easily-accessible health records;
• settling who-said-what disputes with your spouse;
• being able to figure out who was at last year's Christmas party; and
• never losing an important written document or photograph.

..."

OK, definitive and easily accessible health records: no one wants those. If "death panels" bothered people, the prospect of the lovely folks at an insurance company telling you, sorry, no, you're not covered for that bypass because we know you ate a Big Mac a week for the past ten years should be a lot worse. (Don't tell me that wouldn't happen. You know it would.) We want plausible deniability.

Settling who-said-what disputes with your spouse by playing back a recording has got to be the single most welcomed idea - by the divorce lawyers association. If that really worked, why wouldn't the spouse play back their own recording and avoid the dispute in the first place?

Christmas parties? If anyone knew you were recording those kinds of details, they wouldn't come to your party, and you wouldn't get invited. Figuring out who was there will be quite easy: not you.

Never losing an important written document or photograph. Yeah, right. Between disk crashes, lost backups, and not knowing where you filed it in those terabytes of indispensable information, good luck.

Why is it that tech mavens seem to have such tenuous contact with the real world?

Sometimes the shiny new present turns out to be not at all what you thought it was.

For reasons unrelated to the inauguration on Tuesday I was listening to classic rock, including The Who. Just before Obama gave his inauguration address, the song "Won't get fooled again" came on. I paused the song and turned on the sound to Obama's speech.

It was a nice job of speechifying, I thought. I enjoyed it when Obama gave Bush and the neo-cons their well deserved and public spanking. I liked Obama's retelling of the American Myth. I took the whole thing to be what it was intended: a spectacle to signal to the Rest of the World that the USA was still in business, and that a new hand was guiding the Ship of State.

Throughout the speech the camera switched from views of Obama at the podium to views of the crowds thronging the Mall. People with hopeful faces. The song I had just been listening to kept swirling through my mind as background to Obama's speech.

When the swearing-in was done with and the nattering nabobs of the media took their turns telling us what we'd just watched, I muted the stream and returned to my music. Next came the great guitar bridge from the song, followed by the last two lines, which sounded disturbingly prophetic: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

I am by nature an optimistic person, but news items like this one from WiReD (which detail how Obama's administration is unlikely to return to principles of accountability, at least as far as the government's ability to spy on citizens without a warrant is concerned) certainly help to sober me up.

When we're about to anoint America's first president of African descent, some folks might call it churlish to suggest that there's still racism in America. Well, here's an article, published last year, which might change their minds. I have nothing to add.

So Ann Coulter's broken her jaw. (Yes, I know that was more than a month ago.)

No one seems to want to say exactly how.

Which isn't to say that folks aren't willing to make wisecracks about it.

What no one mentions is that someone with their jaws wired shut can still talk perfectly well.

So is someone hoping she'll break her hands, next?

Anyway, the funniest comment appeared in Tom Tomorrow's "Year in Review." Go there and admire it for yourself.

Fred Thompson has some thoughts on how Congress is dealing with the current economic crisis.

What he doesn't say is that current mess isn't the first of its type in recent memory.

Those of us who have a memory span that slightly exceeds that of a gerbil with lead poisoning may recall the Savings and Loan scandal, where the Bush (#41) administration and Congress set up the "Resolution Trust Corporation" to bail out S&Ls to the tune of over a trillion bucks.

The names will sound familiar, though. Like John McCain, who was rebuked in the Senate for his role in shielding Charles Keating from the consequences of bad management. And, before people accuse me of partisanship, Cranston, Riegle, DeConcini, and Glenn, all Democrats, got in trouble alongside McCain. I guess that's what made McCain a maverick?

Or Neil Bush (one of Dubyas many brothers), who was accused of skimming money from his failing S&L.

Anyway, the point is, this current mess is not like the Depression. It's more like what happened *before* the Depression. You all remember the Roaring 20s? When that bubble burst and the markets crashed, bankers (gotta love 'em!) said that people would just have to suck up the margin calls and ride out the market. Sound familiar? They didn't want intervention, because they were afraid that might dilute their holdings in gold. Then they discovered that you can't eat gold, and it won't build houses or cars for you...

I'm not suggesting that giving bankers $700 billion with no strings attached was a good idea. The trouble is that Congress has no idea what banks do, and there's no one in the current administration who knows much more. Even Hank, who came to his current post from Goldman Sachs and was arguably one of the many architects of this mess, doesn't really know, a fact to which he testified in congress.

Anyway, while Thompson is fun to listen to, he's just being a sarcastic know-nothing. He knows it. I wonder if everyone else does, too?

An email from a friend: she's going to wear a headscarf, like Muslim women do, pray five times a day, and study the scriptures, all until the end of September. She says she's done similar things with other religions. She believes this will help her understand the perspective of other people.

Now, I'm wondering if she would consider living for a month as an atheist. Since atheists don't have a regimen of ritual it seems that there are no challenges to that life.

But I wondered.

So here's my summary of how an atheist lives (as opposed to someone who just doesn't pay attention). (Why six points? No reason.)

1. Appreciate the people in your life who depend on you, and those on whom you depend. From family to friends to neighbors to colleagues, other people is how you give your life meaning and purpose.
2. Treat your fellow beings with courtesy and respect. Be humble. You will all eventually end up as dust, no matter what you do or what you believe.
3. Attend to your health every day. No supernatural forces will do that for you. Doctors can help, but they're only human. Ultimately you're your own responsibility.
4. Be careful and attentive at all times. There are no supernatural forces that will protect you or others from accident or injury if you make a mistake. Seatbelts or helmets are always a good idea.
5. Life is about change. Take every opportunity to step outside of your comfort zone. Learn things that seem difficult. Don't judge the worth of these efforts by their success, but enjoy them, just so. Live, because this is the only life you've got.
6. Know what you can change, and what must be endured, and learn to tell the difference between the two.

From here we can go on to discuss various things.

We could, for example, discuss if wearing a headscarf, frequent prayer, and studying scriptures (we'll assume she meant the Quran) is sufficient to give one insight into the lives and perspectives of actual members of Islam. Especially given that this project is going to run only three more weeks or so.

Is it possible that any one of the points in my summary is more of a challenge than all three of my friend's challenges put together? She admitted to expecting a certain amount of criticism from people who might be upset with discovering a Muslim in their midst, but is that really a hardship? Many people seem to enjoy taking a position of what they believe is moral superiority where they might evoke expected but undeserved anger from other people.

Or we might wonder why atheists don't have rituals. I suspect that one of the reasons why religions are successful is that they do have rituals. They have rules of behavior that require an effort to engage in, and all members of the religion who subscribe to those rules automatically bond as a result. It's built into the human skull, programmed into our very bones, that shared misery is half the misery, and that we're rewarded for it with social reciprocation.

What do atheists do for social reciprocation? Since we don't get together to discuss our atheism (at least most of us don't, not as such), there is no community of atheists where reciprocation can take place. At best we can share stories about silly stuff we've seen people do in the name of some ancient superstition or other, but that's not much of a ritual. Joe Sixpack gets to do better than that when he visits the pub on Friday nights.

So this might explain why atheists aren't a community akin to proselytizing religions like Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. This isn't to suggest that atheists should start some rituals. There isn't really a need for a community of atheists, because atheists look for community in other ways. Atheists keep the essential nature of human beings in mind. We have religions because our mental and social structures support them. If we wanted to get rid of religions, we'd also have to modify the human mind and human society, to remove the existing supports for religion, and replace them with community forming structures that do not depend on tribalism, ritual, and superstitions.

Until we do, consider the list above. It's at least as challenging as wearing a scarf.

My dad loves to use the word "mainstream media." It's a funny thing, that word. It implies that there's some other sort of media, not "mainstream," which is somehow more salient, more balanced, better informed.

My dad's a smart guy, smarter than me in many ways, but this is one bit where he along with most liberals and conservatives who like to use this word are living in a fantasy land.

Oh, sure, we can point out that the likes of Wolf Blitzer, about as mainstream as they come, has used the platform of the presidential debates to ask over 3,000 questions. Six of them were about global climate change. Some of the other questions that were asked concerned UFOs and Chuck Norris.

I think it doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative or whatever, that's got to look bad.

Consider that, if global climate change is in fact a non-issue, and the next president decides to get all medieval about carbon footprints and the like, we'll be paying a steep price for a scientific boondoggle.

Or, if global climate change is real, and the next president decides to instead indulge in an endless series of studies financed by Mobil Oil, the price will be equally steep, if not steeper. It seems this is the sort of question where we need to know what a future president will do.

Compared to that, Chuck Norris and flashing lights in the sky aren't really in the running, are they?

So how are the non-mainstream media doing?

Well, Weekly World News just interviewed the bat boy...

But that's not who we mean by non-mainstream media. We mean people like the redoubtable Erick Erickson who blogs on RedState.com, right? One of the pioneers of journalism, a true patriot forging into the wilderness of political chaff, to return with morsels of Truth!

Um.

Sorry, I think I got carried away, there. Where was I?

Oh, yes, Erick Erickson. I listened to him talk about Barack Obama this morning. Clinton, he said, was a policy person. Obama, on the other is a Big Idea person. Erickson's words were along the lines of policy would bore Obama and his fans.

Yes, folks, there you have it. Insightful political analysis the way you won't find it in the New York Times.

Incidentally, wasn't the "Big Idea" thing what made Dubya such a great guy? I mean, he can't watch TV and eat pretzels at the same time, but policy bores him, so that makes him alright.

Just a thought.

Sometimes my liberal friends manage to really pick up the wrong end of the stick. So I got this link sent to me, along with the following comments from MoveOn:

"[...]if you're as amazed, saddened, and angered as we are—pass it on to a friend, neighbor, or co-worker and help make sure people all over the country see it."

Who's amazed or angered?

This was the reply from Bush I when questions were asked why it seemed that we were encouraging the Kurds and Shiites to rebel against Sadam but didn't provide any material support when it came to the smackdown. You may remember stories of Iraqi government helicopters strafing Shiite villages and of Kurds fleeing into the highlands on the Turkish side of the border where they froze and starved. Did we abandon our allies in Iraq?

Under Bush I the answer was that it was not expedient to do more, so we didn't do more.

Under Bush II things had changed a little. We'd looked at eight years of Iraq bashing, with the people of Iraq really getting the worst of it, and regime change didn't look likely, and then there was 9/11. We already had a military operation under way in Afghanistan, so...

I'm not saying that Cheney was wrong both times or right both times or right one time and wrong the other or changed his mind or lied or anything of the sort. I'm just pointing out that comparing the situation in 1992 with the situation in 2002 as if the two situations were identical is not smart.

The present facts of course seem to say that this administration was wrong in invading Iraq. I'm thinking that it was not just wrong in hind sight, but also wrong ahead of time. Not because Cheney was right in 1992, but because there were many other reasons besides those he gave not to go to war. Reasons which were ignored (or considered less significant than reasons to go to war) not just by this administration, but by 90% or so of congress, and perhaps even more of this country's population.

So this "saddened and angered" stuff kind of leaves me cold. Liberals are, of course, just as bad as conservatives. Both ends of the spectrum seem to love the easy stabs at the opposition, even when they completely miss the point.

I think pretty soon we'll hear about a naked exhibitionist standing on the steps of town hall and screaming at people not to look because she wants her privacy.

Seriously, it's gotten that silly.

On the one hand we have people lining up to appear on camera as they eat, sleep, and fight with each other, and are generally obnoxious and unlovable. They take their disputes to court TV, and if they happen to make an appearance on COPS, hey, what price fame, right?

On the flip side there's the latest hurrah over Google's Streetview.

The folks at Google simply drove a van around a few selected cities. The van carried a special camera that took panoramic pictures every few feet along the road. These pictures are now available on Google Maps, where you can see what the city looks like at street level.

The camera was never aimed. The van wasn't driven to selected spots. But, out of thousands of pictures, there are a few interesting ones - for certain values of interesting.

• A man apparently trying to climb over a locked gate.
• A number of bikini clad women sunbathing.
• Someone getting a ticket.
• A woman whose thong is showing.

The resultant uproar in some parts of opinion land has been deafening. "Invasion of privacy." "Creepy!" "Spooky!"

You'll forgive me when I say that we're all losing our minds.

I want that van cruising my home town. I want everyone's browsers to be able to access all street light cameras and security cameras around the city, any time they feel like looking. No, I don't mind if the cameras watch me, too.

I'll be sure to smile and wave.

We aren't talking about an Orwellian police state. Google doesn't carry their cameras into peoples' homes. Google doesn't punish you when you attempt to evade their surveillance. Google doesn't use their pictures to force us to obey the people in power.

If anything, Google must make the people in power distinctly uncomfortable. I wouldn't be at all surprised if DHS dispatched some of their Gestapo to Google headquarters to demand that Streetview be dismantled. They'll demand it in the name of security, of course.

We should all remember that information is an enemy of tyranny. Instead of trying to suppress information, we should applaud the people who provide it.

OK, anyone who reads my posts knows that I despise the current administration's scare tactics and their fascist methods. Now I read this:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's internal network security practices are a mess, according to a report by the General Accountability Office. In a report released on Thursday, the GAO said "certain information security controls over the critical internal network reviewed were ineffective..." (GAO: FBI needs a lesson in network security)

See, this is what I'm talking about. These guys don't really mean it. They tell us to be scared, but they aren't scared. They tell us it's a dangerous world, but they don't protect themselves. They subject us to history's single largest bureaucracy and all of the excesses and outrages that go along with that, but they themselves ignore it all.

It's pretty clear. When you're told the barking sound from the basement is a dog, but you find no evidence of dog food or leash or even so much as a turd on the lawn, then you're probably listening to a foley artist.

As David Horowitz will tell you, Republicans have a big tent, big enough to fit many different ideas. He tells you that to contrast his party with the Democrats. The Democrats do not have a big tent, says David.

Well, I like big tents.

Which is why, when Republicans in Utah required voters to be registered with their party to vote in the Republican primaries I promptly registered. Those close minded Democrats didn't require registration, so I didn't bother with them.

Ever since then I've been getting lot's of love from my friends in the GOP. I get to write editorials that start with "as a registered Republican", and people pay attention. I get Republican newsletters and even Republican spam!

So today I received the annual survey from the Republican National Committee. It is full of opportunities to express my opinion on important GOP matters:

1. If Democrats try to gut the USA Patriot Act...

   Pen in hand I got ready to mark Yes, but then I read the rest of the question:

   ...and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?

   Um. Wait. The Patriot Act is that bit of fascist legislation that no one actually read when it was first passed, right? Those of us fighting to retain our freedom from intrusive government were pretty upset about it. So that's bad. We voted out some of those who supported that law, in part because of that support. But what's that about "other important laws"? The Democrats are trying to gut other important laws? Which ones? This is the first time I've heard of that.

   So, no, Republicans shouldn't fight back. They should get behind that effort and push. Aren't we for freedom, and against oppressive government? I know the tent is big enough for a little freedom, at least.

2. Should we stop the Democrats from cutting funding for our intelligence agencies...

   No, that doesn't sound good at all. We need well funded intelligence agencies, otherwise we'll have more disasters like Iraq and Korea. But wait, there's more:

   ...or bringing back Clinton-era restrictions in inter-agency communications?

   It's a funny thing about that Clinton era. It seems to go back about 35 years. I never knew he was in office that long. But I do know why we had those restrictions. One word: Nixon. No, he didn't impose them, but his abuses required them. You know, politically motivated fishing expeditions, targeted IRS audits, warrant less wiretaps. That sort of thing.

   Not that anyone has tried warrant less wiretaps or politically motivated fishing expeditions since then. Right?

   Mind you, the CIA, NSA, and FBI should probably share information where appropriate. Why they're still not doing it, almost 6 years after 9/11, is a mystery, especially since my Big Tent party has been in power all that time, and even created the single largest government bureaucracy ever in the history of the world to do the job.

   OK, one more.

3. Do you support the use of air strikes against any country that offers safe harbor or aid to individuals or organizations committed to further attacks on America?

   Um. No?

   I mean, that sounds like a great idea, except that, you know, we won't be hitting the individuals or organizations who don't like us. Instead we'd be giving them even more reason not to like us, and giving a considerable boost to their recruiting.

   "Look at America," they'll say. "They kill women and children because they happen to be Muslim." Because, you know, it's Muslim countries we're talking about. Not to put too fine a point on it, we're talking about Iran. Anyway, if we do, then people will flock to their cause.

   So. No.

The survey is 23 question long, all along about the same lines. Whoever wrote it was pretty sure of his opinion, and figured no one in the Big Tent could possibly disagree with him. We all see where that lead over the past seven years.

Anyway, I filled it out and sent it in. I'm glad the Big Tent includes me. Otherwise who would set them straight?

When you've put yourself into a bad situation, is it proper to blame someone else for your errors?

Because that's what I think is going on in Congress these days. Because of the way the '06 elections turned out everyone is convinced that they've got to stand up against the war in Iraq.

Even the folks who originally voted for the war.

Hillary Clinton tells everyone who asks that the president lied to us, and that's why she voted for the war.

Well, maybe.

But exactly what would have been different if the president hadn't lied to us?

Wouldn't we still be stuck in Iraq, WMDs safely found and neutralized (if we were lucky), but bedeviled by a culture and a conflict that our leadership seems incapable of understanding, with thousands of our kids in coffins, tens of thousands wearing plastic arms and legs, and who knows how many Iraqis dead or maimed?

From where I'm standing it makes no difference at all. You voted for war, dammit! War isn't a nice, safe prescription for solving problems. If you didn't know that back in 2002, that's not the president's fault. If it's an intelligence failure, its the intelligence of people who were entrusted to make these kinds of decisions which failed. If it was the result of delusion or wishful thinking, it didn't originate in the White House, but in the minds of hundreds of Representatives and Senators most of whom never even served a day in the military, and the vast majority of whom do not have any close family members in harm's way.

Everyone who voted for the war bears full, entire responsibility for all of the misery that has resulted from it, and all of the misery that is sure to result from it in the future.

It's time they started admitting it, starting with, if you please, presidential candidate and Senator from New York Hillary Clinton.

Why are we stuck in this politically correct hole? Do people really believe that the sons and daughters of our privileged citizens are seriously considering the military for a career choice? Especially at this time?

Because they aren't.

You don't need a college degree to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. I know, because my son has already spent a year there. He joined the National Guard to help pay for college. Most of the kids dying or getting maimed over there are in the same boat.

This politically correct bullshit, trying to suggest that they are all highly educated people serving out of sheer patriotism, or because they actually think getting shot at for Burger King wages is a good career path, that's truly stupid.

Yes, I think Kerry really said that: If you don't get an education, then the only job you'll be able to find is signing up with one of those recruiters who are desperately trying to fill their monthly quotas. I also think Kerry is wrong in trying to correct what he said. I've never liked that asstard.

A man should have the guts to stand by his convictions.

Gun violence seems to bring out two kinds of fools.

One kind of fool are the people who use the opportunity to call for more gun control. I am one of those who don't really see any legitimate reason for a private citizen to own fire arms (yes, I'm aware of the 2nd Amendment - are you?), but gun control laws are at best a tool to keep guns out of the hands of sane people - most of whom don't own guns in the first place. As long as people make and sell guns and ammunition someone who wants to badly enough will be able to get his hands on the means to kill a bunch of people for no apparent reason.

Of course, the other kind of fool are the people who use the opportunity to argue about how much better things would have gone if there had been more people in the crowd packing heat. "If armed students had been there, then Gill (the shooter at Dawson College) would not have been able to injure or kill so many people."

Yup, I can just see it. In response to Gill's first few shots, armed students in the vicinity draw their trusty "equalizers" and start blasting away in Gill's general direction. The results would make the evening news a lot more interesting.

Please shoot me. Ann Coulter and I have agreed on something.

Her recent editorial is titled, Terrorists Win: Deodorant Banned from Airplanes.

It's what I've been saying for some time. We are doing exactly what the terrorists want us to do by succumbing to the vague threat of someday being attacked in some unpredictable way. We are surrendering our sanity, and our leadership is aiding and abetting the terrorists by creating rules and restrictions that don't make us any safer.

Mind you, after the headline, it's all downhill for Ann. In addition to her blatant racism (implying Arabs don't use deodorants), her completely fact free writing is all vintage Coulter.

So I guess you don't have to shoot me. Even a stopped clock is right twice in a day.

So in what category would you suppose the USA is worse than former Soviet client states or extremely conservative religious cultures? Visit this graph on the National Geographic website.

When it comes to evolution, folks in the USA are less likely to accept it as correct than folks from most other Western nations. Only Turkey is worse, and the others that are near the bottom of the list are former Soviet client states or countries distinguished by very conservative religious cultures.

However, liberalism vs conservatism isn't a universal predictor. The Netherlands, a country which is notorious in the USA for its liberal drugs policy, has about 1/3 indicating they either don't accept evolution or don't know about it. On the other hand the UK, a country that in many respects echos USAn conservative values, ranks 6th highest as accepting evolution.

Curiously, Japan was included in the list. Since when is that a Western country? Not surprisingly, evolution is accepted by more people in Japan than in all but four Western countries in the list. Which kinda makes me think that the predictor for this result might be effective public education. I bet if you lined up test scores for science and engineering with this chart, they'd be a pretty close match.

LiveScience.com has another article about this situation.

Did Dubya think he was doing the right thing?

Why does it matter if Dubya thought he was doing the right thing? It's possible that Dubya thought he was doing the right thing. So did the Son of Sam serial killer. Whether or not Dubya thought he was doing the right thing misses the crucial point that Dubya and his cronies lied to the world to convince us that we needed to invade Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqis, and almost two thousand American soldiers, have so far died as a consequence, and the killing seems to be far from over.

I don't know how one could calculate the value of human life against the value of political stability in the Middle East, even supposing that stability can be attained by waging war. This calculation is particularly difficult when I take into account the small problem that by political stability we (the USA, certainly, but other countries as well) have meant in the past that the interests of the powerful and wealthy were protected by conserving the current state of affairs. I see no sign that these priorities have changed.

I know that Saddam Hussein and his cronies were very bad people, and perhaps their removal means that they'll have no more opportunities to create misery. However, the war and the way Dubya and his cronies are chosing to fight it have created an endless opportunity for people who as a group are just as awful as Saddam Hussein to come and make at least as many people miserable. I don't believe there is any way for our military to stop them, not because our military can't fight effectively, but because terrorism is not a problem that can be solved by military force.

If everything goes well, then the Iraqi government will remain stable and will eventually, in one or two years, be able to invite the last of our soldiers to leave the country. This was the scenario that Dubya hoped for, back in May 2003, when he declared "Mission Accomplished." Nothing that has happened in Iraq since then has justified that optimism. Instead, it's likely that our military will be stuck there for the next two years, until our position has become politically so unpopular that we're forced to pull out. After that all hell is likely to break loose.

Some of Dubya's fanboys want us to compare Iraq to WWII. "We spent four years fighting Jerry and the Japs," they say. "We lost over 100,000 soldiers in that war. Compared to that, Iraq is a walk in the park!" We're told that German Nazi insurgence during the occupation was just as deadly as the terrorism and insurgence in Iraq, but that's an awfully thin stretch. The postwar insurgence in Germany barely rates a footnote against a backdrop of a country completely devastated by war and at the verge of mass starvation, and was pretty much over by the end of 1946. When they write the history books on Dubya's little war, the terrorists won't be a footnote. (Well, this is the War on Terror, you say. I say, suppose we fought the War on Drugs by handing out free samples of crystal meth?)

Of course, the chicken hawks who were beating the war drums back in 2001, and who have been cheering on the current state of affairs, will then loudly proclaim that it was the liberals who lost the war on terrorism. If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

Father's Day is upon us, and I still don't know what to get my dads.

It's a sorry world, I know. Check the ads for Father's Day, and apparently dads love ties and golf balls. Well, both my dads are retired, so they don't wear ties much anymore, and they don't play golf. The pressure is on.

Kathleen Parker doesn't help. Each year about this time she saddles up her Father's Day clydesdale, a horse about twelve feet tall at the shoulders, to drag a fair dozen strawmen around the block a couple times. To hear her tell it, fathers are an endangered species, and we should all worship the few men who condescend to this most maligned post.

"... the diminution of Father in our culture may be the single stupidest turn in human history yet," she writes in her editorial. That fathers have been diminished in our culture came as a surprise to me. I considered the possibility that this is Parker's personal problem, but then I realized that this drivel was yet another example of the Orwellian poison that conservatives have been spewing for the past few years. It's a remarkably effective technique, and consists of about four steps.

First, you declare a social ill. It doesn't matter if it exists or not, nor if it really is an ill. In Parker's case, she's suggesting that fatherhood and fathers no longer matter in our society. Others will lament the lack of patriotism, the demise of marriage, the loss of our children's innocence, or declining test scores.

Second, trot out the evidence. Typically these are mere bald assertions, but, as does Parker, you might toss out some numbers and imply that they mean something, like "40 percent of children live in homes without their fathers," or "studies show that women file the majority of divorces." Note that actual citations are pretty rare, though you can make your bald assertions sound supportable by adding that "studies show."

Third, leave the reasoning that connects the evidence to your argument to your reader, because if you try to put it in words it'll just sound specious. For example, 40 percent of children live in homes without their fathers is evidence that our society does not value fathers because, um, well we have to assume that there are no fathers in those homes, and that the father's absence is the fault of society, and not of, say, the father's misbehavior, or of the father's demise in some ill-advised military adventure, or perhaps in a traffic accident, or of a family torn apart by the stress of job loss to globalization, etc. (There are lots more like this in Parker's editorial.) Conservatives call this "getting picky." Ronald Reagan blazed the way when his response to a difficult question was, "there you go again."

Fourth, blame it all on liberals. This last step is essential, because by defining as a liberal anyone who does something bad or something silly, you create the dichotomous conclusion that conservatives are those people who don't do bad or silly things. Parker's editorial is clever in that she pretends to stay above the mudslinging of partisanism by hiding her accusations in codewords, like traditional marriage, or old-fashioned masculinity.

And that's all there's to it. Using this technique conservative commentators are currently busy blaming on liberals everything from global warming to ugly children. Even though it appears innocuous at first glance, Parker's editorial on fatherhood is just another example of this Orwellian tidal wave.

It's not that I don't appreciate both my step-dad and my father. Each man worked hard to support his family. Each man, in his way, has passed on to me qualities of which I'm proud. The point is that Parker's assertion that in our liberal society fatherhood no longer matters is just not true. Not only is American society one of the most conservative societies of all first-world nations, but fatherhood is by no means maligned or denigrated.

None of which gets me any closer to finding Father's Day presents for my dads, of course.