We are a smart nation, among the brightest in the world.  So what do you expect?  Things to run smoothly?  As one comedian put it:

"A mind is a terrible thing."  


Or as former Vice President and one-time republican candidate for President of the United States Dan Quayle said it:


"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."


George Bush Jr. really admired Dan Quayle with whom he surely spent time in his father's White House.  


But reading arguments from academicians can be just as amusing.  This is from an article in today's N.Y. Times:


“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of anthropology. . . ."  (full article)