What ho! We have on multiple occasions expressed a certain enthusiasm for the writings of our elusive colleague Racrecir, and we are yet again indebted to him for alerting us to the presence of the item excerpted below, a column by Tim Adams that appeared in last Sunday's Observer:

It's half a century since CP Snow put forward the idea of the 'Two Cultures', the intractable divide between the sciences and the humanities, first in an article in the New Statesman, then in a lecture series at Cambridge and finally in a book. Back then, Snow, who was both a novelist and a physicist, used to employ a test at dinner parties to demonstrate his argument.

'A good many times,' he suggested, 'I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold; it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: have you ever read a work of Shakespeare's?'

Fifty years on, and exponential scientific advance later, it seems unlikely that the response of dinner guests would be much different. I was reminded of Snow's test when reading the new book by Natalie Angier, science editor of the New York Times. Angier's book is called The Canon, and subtitled 'A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science'. It is not a long book and it contains, as the title suggests, a breathless Baedeker of the fundamental scientific knowledge Angier believes is the minimum requirement of an educated person.

In many places, I found myself cringeing all over again. I've read a fair amount of popular science, tried to follow the technical arguments that underpin debates about global warming, say, or bird flu, listened religiously to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, but still I discovered large black holes in my elementary understanding of how our world works. Angier divides her book into basic disciplines - biology, chemistry, geology, physics and so on - and each chapter offers an animated essay on the current established thinking.

The result is the kind of science book you wish someone had placed in front of you at school - full of aphorisms that help everything fall into place. For geology: 'This is what our world is about: there is heat inside and it wants to get out.' For physics: 'Almost everything we've come to understand about the universe we have learned by studying light.' Along the way there are all sorts of facts that stick: 'You would have to fly on a commercial aircraft every day for 18,000 years before your chances of being in a crash exceeded 50 per cent', for example; or, if you imagined the history of our planet as a single 75-year human life span: 'The first ape did not arrive until May or June of the final year... and Neil Armstrong muddied up the Moon at 20 seconds to midnight.'

Why does salt dissolve in water? Why is the sky blue? Is a clone the same as a twin? What does the second law of thermodynamics have to do with what Ms. P. Zoline so memorably called "the heat death of the universe"? Test your scientific knowledge against a panel of celebrity hotshots, including Will Self and Marina Warner, by clicking here.

TANGENTIALLY RELATED SIDEBAR: Enthusiasts of science will be greatly pleased, as we were earlier today, to learn that our boon colleague Quixote (of Acid Test) has consented to lend her own formidable distinction to the distinguished team now blogging at Shakesville.

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. . . has now been succinctly explained by Mr. D. Froomkin of the Washington Post:

The Framers, ever sensitive to the need for checks and balances, recognized the potential for abuse of the pardon power. According to a Judiciary Committee report drafted in the aftermath of the Watergate crisis: "In the [Constitutional] convention George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to 'pardon crimes which were advised by himself' or, before indictment or conviction, 'to stop inquiry and prevent detection.' James Madison responded:

"[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds [to] believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty. . . .

"Madison went on to [say] contrary to his position in the Philadelphia convention, that the President could be suspended when suspected, and his powers would devolve on the Vice President, who could likewise be suspended until impeached and convicted, if he were also suspected."

Our buxom colleague Ms. A. Carol reminds us that there is a single circumstance in which the President's power to pardon does not obtain.

What ho!

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Yr. Mst. Bnvlnt. Dspt. is on a mission of mercy to Crooks & Liars, where for the next week we will be compiling the daily Blog Roundup. Our stalwart colleague Mike F. has left us a large pair of moccasins to fill, but we accept the challenge unflinchingly. Our size-12-and-a-half gunboats are up to the job!

If you see any posts signed by our distant lookalike cousin Sammy Sassendyll, ignore them.

Now get along! Don't just stand there. Everyone else has already left.

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Zemblan patriot J.M. writes that we should perhaps be willing to indulge the wee, gamine Joe Lieberman in his fantasy, at once homicidal and masturbatory, of an air strike on Iran. The sole condition? That Tail-Sniffer Joe agree to straddle the first bomb dropped, Slim Pickens-style, as it hurtles earthward:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman said Sunday the United States should consider a military strike against Iran because of Tehran's involvement in Iraq.

"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Lieberman said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers" . . . .

Lieberman said much of the action could probably be done by air, although he would leave the strategy to the generals in charge. "I want to make clear I'm not talking about a massive ground invasion of Iran," Lieberman said.

"They can't believe that they have immunity for training and equipping people to come in and kill Americans," he said. "We cannot let them get away with it. If we do, they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region and ultimately right here at home."

Sen. Joe Lieberman: the smegma beneath the foreskin of the nuclear warhead.

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We were deeply gratified to read the results of a recent USA Today poll on young-earth creationism --

[Do you think] Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years, [is]:

Definitely true: 39%
Probably true: 27%
Probably false: 16%
Definitely false: 15%
No opinion: 3%
Total true: 66%
Total false: 31%

-- because it indicated to us that President Bush, whose approval ratings continue to hover in the 28-34% range, has been abandoned by a significant portion -- perhaps even 50%! -- of the fundamentalists, Luddites, snake-handlers, and scientific illiterates whom we would normally consider his natural constituency. Despite the demonstrable fickleness of the willfully dim, there are nonetheless quite a few Republican presidential candidates striving to burnish their credentials with same: Messrs. Huckabee, McCain, and Brownback, to name but three, were only too eager to reject science and endorse creationism at the recent GOP debate. We suspected that our learned colleague P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula might have some interesting things to say on the subject, and Mr. Myers did not disappoint, for he speaks with the passion of the scientist, and the precision of the moralist:

[McCain and Brownback] are so convinced that there's a god that loves them and everyone on the planet, that you'd think they'd be a little more anxious to quit causing him pain by blowing up and shooting and running over and neglecting his beloved Iraqis and cherished GIs and treasured Afghans and esteemed Palestinians and highly regarded Jews and admired Sudanese and all those other loved peoples of the planet. This "belief" of theirs would be a little more plausible if they lived like peace meant something.

SIDEBAR: Ars Technica visits the brand-new Creationist Museum in Petersburg, KY, where many conundrums, both scientific and moral, are handily explained away:

There were posters explaining just how coal could be formed in a few weeks as opposed to over millions of years and how rapidly the Biblical flood would cover the earth, drowning all but a handful of living creatures. The flood plays a big part in the museum's attempt to explain away what we see as millions of years of natural processes. There was also an explanation as to why, with only one progenitor family, it wasn't considered incest for Adam and Eve's children to marry each other. Apparently there was less sin back then, and therefore fewer mutations in their DNA. Evidently sin, not two copies of the same recessive trait, gives rise to congenital birth defects.

Sadly, the instructional videos set in the Garden of Eden are no longer on display. The directors of the museum recently learned that the resume of the actor who played Adam also included a number of rather less Biblical roles at an online site called Bedroom Acrobat, where, we understand, there is nary a fig leaf to be seen.

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Courtesy of Zemblan patriot J.D.: After tossing back a few "non-alcoholic beers" with his dawg Tony Blair, the President was stricken with a mysterious "stomach ailment" that forced him to skip a G8 meeting on Africa:

But the president has already recovered from his illness, according to reports. He rejoined the gathering by lunch and prepared for talks in Poland on a missile defense system.

"He feels well enough to continue with his full activities," White House counselor Dan Bartlett told reporters. "He feels terrible about any disruption he may have caused."

The president was already dressed when he began feeling ill in the morning, Bartlett said. The aide said Bush's illness was "probably more viral in nature" and did not appear to be the result of anything he ate at the summit of eight industrialized democracies being held at a luxury resort here.

Bush stayed in bed for several hours to rest and recuperate. He missed one session with African leaders and another with leaders from China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, all developing nations, not G-8 members . . . .

Yesterday, as their time as leaders together came to an end, the dynamic duo of George Bush and Tony Blair shared a laugh over a non-alcoholic beer . . . .

Today Bush's spokesman joked that the president was staying in his room during his illness because he did not want to follow in the footsteps of his father, former U.S. President George H.W. Bush.

Bush's father became ill and collapsed in the international spotlight in January 1992 during a summit in Tokyo. The president called his fainting, which was captured on film and run repeatedly on television, "a little tiny bout of the flu" adding, "That's all there is to it."

A videotape of the elder Bush's collapse at a state dinner showed him toppling unconscious from his chair and vomiting as Barbara Bush rushed to aid him.

In unrelated news, the 26-year-old heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune was dragged out of court "screaming and crying out for her mother when she was ordered back to jail . . . to serve out the remainder of her 45-day sentence for violating probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case." Zemblan patriot H.W. informs us that Mr. Bush is weighing the possibility of a full pardon for Ms. Hilton, because, as a White House spokesperson explained, "the President knows what that shit is like."

(Thanks to Zemblan patriot M.S. for the tip.)

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Memo to Marine Corps: You cannot rape underage girls, even if it helps you make your March recruiting numbers:

Settling a highly publicized case in which two military recruiters were accused of rape, the U.S. Marine Corps has agreed to pay two young women $200,000 and change its recruiting practices in Northern California.

The assaults allegedly occurred in 2004, when the two women were 17-year-old high school students.

They said the Marine recruiters, then-Sgts. Joseph Dunzweiler and Brian Fukushima, raped them in a Ukiah (Mendocino County) recruiting office. The women had expressed interest in joining the Marines.

Barry Vogel, a Ukiah attorney representing the two women, said one was told she had to have sex if she wanted to join the Marines. The other girl, said Vogel, was so drunk she vomited on herself.

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Here's why:

The problem of course, is that Bush has upheld the principles of the conservative movement, and all of these so-called conservatives who are suddenly so disappointed in him had been cheering him on all along while he did all these things they supposedly didn't like. And the thing is, they still haven't repudiated the actual policies - just the outcome.

For example, none of these people are complaining about the fact that he lowered taxes in wartime, an unprecedented policy in all of history. They can complain all they like that he hasn't been "fiscally conservative", but they not only supported his war and his tax cuts, but they refused to so much as question the fact that he ran it in the most expensive way imaginable - not just pseudo-privatizing the functions of the armed services, but actually giving the private companies they outsourced to incentives to overspend and generally waste resources. (And they let him force them to pass the drug-benefit bill with a clause forbidding negotiations to keep prices down.)

I say "pseudo-privatizing" because outsourcing government functions but still paying for them from the tax base isn't real privatization, it's socializing it at a higher price. Actually privatizing the invasion and occupation of Iraq would mean that you told all the people who wanted to invade Iraq to go do it themselves. They could club together and raise an army on their own dime and leave the taxpayer out of it. But they didn't do that - they raided the US treasury instead . . . .

And then there's national security, something they pretend to be the masters of, but they've actually put our national security - from the guardianship of our ports to the actual handling of our troop supports - into the hands of private companies which know no allegiance to the United States of America. One of those companies recently announced it was ceasing to be an American company at all, and moving its headquarters to Dubai, one of the countries that is connected to the 9/11 attacks. Conservatives did complain about the Dubai port deal, but they never seemed to get that the port deal was part and parcel of the conservative economic policies they supported, nor wonder whether it was safe to allow organizations that were not run by those sworn to the United States Constitution to handle our military operations.

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You will perhaps recall the moment roughly two years ago when Mr. Bush and his myrmidons decided that taking credit for the Iraq War was no longer a desirable option, and began spreading blame instead. Democrats had the same intelligence we did! the President lied. Saddam wouldn't allow UN inspectors into the country, so we had no choice but to invade! the President lied again, making an especially strong impression on Mitt Romney, who is still repeating this transparent canard to his constituency of GOP amnesiacs. And of course: Everyone thought Saddam had WMD's! Everyone! The Brits, the Israelis, even the French! -- which does beg the question of why Mr. Bush was unable to secure a UN resolution authorizing his "Shock and Awe Tour" of 2003, but never mind.

Our he-mannish colleague J. Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution has made yet another flabbergasting catch, which suggests that the set of "everyone" who believed in Saddam's mass-destruction capabilities may well have included the Brits, the Israelis, even the French -- but not necessarily the Americans. From an Antiwar.com radio interview with Andrew Cockburn:

COCKBURN: March 26, 1997 was a very important day in the history of Iraq. That's when Madeleine Albright announced that economic sanctions would remain...whether or not Iraq was found to have any more weapons of mass destruction. It didn't matter. We were going to keep sanctions on regardless. And I happen to know -- I found out recently the reason why she said that: which was that Rolf Ekeus, who was then the chief UN weapons inspector, was about to say that Iraq was now free of WMD. Okay? And this is an Antiwar Radio exclusive, I might tell you.

Rolf Ekeus was about to certify that Iraq was now free of WMD. The Clinton administration was panicked -- because if he said that, then economic sanctions would have to be lifted. Then the right wing here would say: ah, Bill Clinton let Saddam get back on his feet! And the Israeli lobby would be up in arms. So the solution was for Madeleine Albright to declare this policy, in which case they knew what would happen. Saddam would say, well, heck, I'm not going to cooperate with the UN anymore if it doesn't matter whether I comply or not, why should I let your inspectors run around the country -- who he well knew, as a lot of other people knew, were heavily infiltrated by the CIA and MI6 -- let all these Western spies run around, if there's nothing in it for me? So therefore I'm stopping cooperating.

And that's why he stopped cooperating. That was a predictable and, you know, looked for result, he stopped cooperating with the UN inspectors, so they pulled out, and [the US] said, oh, we don't know, he's kicked out the UN, we don't know what he's up to! And that really set the stage for 2003.

If you are tempted to imagine that, as a result of Mr. Clinton's deceit, Mr. Bush did not in fact know what Mr. Hussein was "up to," then by all means read Mr. Schwarz's earlier post about Alan Foley of WINPAC (the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center).

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We could not be more delighted to see convicted perjurer and obstructor-of-justice Scooter Libby get what he deserves: 30 months in the can, a $250K fine, and two years' probation after he walks. (Well, we could be more delighted, but only if Judge Reggie Walton had ordered that Libby share his cell with a sex-crazed bear.) However, our delight is scarcely a patch on that of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who we fear has ridden a wave of euphoria well past the three-mile limit of rationality:

As Americans, both Valerie [Plame] and I are grateful that justice has been served, reconfirming that our country remains a nation of laws.

We are also saddened for the pain that Mr. Libby has inflicted on his family, friends, and the nation. Mr. Libby benefited from the best this country had to offer: the finest schools, a lucrative career as a lawyer and many years of service in Republican administrations. That he would knowingly lie, perjure himself and obstruct a legitimate criminal investigation is incomprehensible.

It is our hope that he will now cooperate with Special Counsel Fitzgerald in his efforts to get to the truth. As Mr. Fitzgerald has said, a cloud remains over the Vice President.

Mm hmm. We too nurture a "hope." Our "hope" involves Keira Knightley, Scarlett Johansson, and a jungle gym -- but unlike ex-Amb. Wilson, we have no intention of making ourselves seem foolish by talking about it in public.

At least until we get the jungle gym.

SIDEBAR: From Conor Clarke, a pointed reminder for James Carville and other, even-less-principled professional wailers who are rending their garments and gnashing their teeth over the severity of Mr. Libby's sentence -- you are now mourning in America because of Morning in America:

After all, the man responsible for the rise of firmer, harsher sentencing guidelines was Scooter Libby's former employer, Ronald Reagan, whose state department employed Libby in the early 1980s. In 1984, Reagan signed into law the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which got rid of parole at the federal level, created a federal sentencing commission to stadardise punishments and establish mandatory minimums - a legacy that still lives on today. Federal sentencing guidelines are the reason Libby must serve at least 80% of his sentence. Good behaviour can't overshadow the Reagan legacy.

The reason for these policies was ostensibly to prevent all those soft-hearted liberal judges from letting criminals get away with short prison terms and slaps on the wrist. And when these laws are challenged - usually under the sixth amendment's guarantee of a trial by jury - conservative Republicans have always defended the guidelines (sometimes successfully, sometimes less so) as a federal prerogative.

How quickly things change when the shoe is on the other foot. All of a sudden, Republicans are defending a different prerogative: the presidential pardon. In their editorial on the subject, the National Review says Libby is a "dedicated public servant caught in a crazy political fight that should have never happened, convicted of lying about a crime that the prosecutor can't even prove was committed." The editorial then goes on to argue that "president Bush has the power to end this ridiculous saga right now. He should do so".

No one here contests that Libby is guilty of lying - the new question is simply whether the punishment fits the crime. Well, many on the left have been asking the same of the sentencing guidelines for the past couple of decades. They had better explain, otherwise we'll be left with the impression that they're just like all those soft-hearted liberal judges.

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A million here, a million there -- soon you're talking real money:

Hustler magazine is looking for some scandalous sex in Washington again -- and willing to pay for it.

"Have you had a sexual encounter with a current member of the United States Congress or a high-ranking government official?" read a full-page advertisement taken out by Larry Flynt's pornographic magazine in Sunday's Washington Post.

It offered $1 million for documented evidence of illicit intimate relations with a congressman, senator or other prominent officeholder. A toll-free number and e-mail address were provided.

(Thanks to Zemblan patriot J.M. for the link.)

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Isn't it at least possible he's still dreaming?

A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday . . . .

"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system's economic collapse.

"Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

The item above has a special personal significance for Yr. Mst. Bnvlnt. Dspt. Our own beloved Uncle Charles, scholar, friend, and mentor, fell into a coma in early 1995, midway through Mr. Clinton's first term, and remained in that unfortunate state until Tuesday last, when, during our annual visit to the Zemblan State Hospital for the Indigent and Unwanted, he sat bolt upright in his bed and asked us for a bowl of Maypo.

We immediately whipped out a ball-peen hammer and delivered a solid bop to the old boy's coconut, laying him out for what we hope will be another couple of years at the very least. It was strictly a precautionary measure: Uncle Charles was an American and a patriot, and we could not help but think that if he'd seen what's become of the good old USA during his slumber, he would have blown his brains out.

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