Did you catch it? The similarity of geographical size between Iraq and California is totally irrelevant. There are 150,000 Americans in Iraq and 35 million Americans in California. The chances of an American (soldier) dying in Iraq on any given day are 1.7 / 150,000 or around one in 90,000. The chances of an American (citizen) being murdered in California on any given day are 6.6 / 35,000,000 or around one in 5.3 million. The chances of a soldier dying in Iraq are really almost 60 times higher than being murdered in California.

So why would national news networks like Fox News say just the opposite of the truth? Because they’re pushing a conservative, pro-war political agenda? Because they can’t do elementary school math? Is one really worse than the other?

The fact is, we’re in a (admittedly low-intensity) war, American soldiers are getting killed, the reasons we are in the war are questionable, and most of all, the Bush Administration and the media are seemingly conspiring to make sure the American people don’t take the Dover Test. Or get a “fair and balanced” accounting of “the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous ‘yellow-cake’ uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize.” Or ask questions to ascertain facts. Or think.

Good decisions require two things: facts and clear, logical thinking. These are both the stock-and-trade of science, but in the Real World of non-scientists, both are in short supply. Those of us who care about both have a social responsibility to safeguard their flickering flame through the cold winds of what is literally a current Dark Age.

It’s not just in America that facts and clear, logical thinking are in short supply. In Afghanistan (remember Afghanistan?) they’re back to killing each other with tanks and growing poppies for heroin again. Remember Osama? The guy who killed 3000+ of us? The one we obviously don’t have the highest priority of finding, and don’t stand a chance of apprehending amid the warlord tanks and poppy fields unless we think clearly and focus? Hint: He ain’t in Iraq.

These problems extend outside of Afghanistan throughout the Middle East and beyond. President Bush rightly proclaims that Muslims per se aren’t the threat. “Americans know that these terrorists are hiding behind Islam in order to create fear and chaos and death.” Behind not only Islam but also Arabic (and Persian) culture itself, which has a great and proud intellectual tradition. It is the decay of that intellectual tradition that is allowing radical threats to America and the West to arise. Consider the release this week of the latest volume of the Arab Human Development Report:

• The number of Arab students in the US dropped by 30 percent between 1999 and 2002.

• Public spending on education in Arab countries has declined since 1985, and enrollment in higher education has fallen. Among women, high illiteracy rates persist.

• There are less than 53 circulating newspaper copies per 1,000 Arab citizens, compared with 285 per thousand in developed countries.

• There are 18 computers per 1,000 people in Arab countries, compared with a global average of 78.3 per 1,000.

• Internet access is available to 1.6 percent of the population in Arab countries. Telephone line access in the countries is barely one-fifth that of developed countries.

• Just 4.4 translated books per 1 million people were published between 1980 and 1985. The corresponding rate for Hungary was 519 books per 1 million people, and in Spain, 920 books.

• The number of scientists and engineers working in research and development is 371 per 1 million people, compared with the global rate of 979.

• The production of literary and artistic books in 1996 did not exceed 1,945 books, representing just 0.8 percent of world production. Religious books account for 17 percent of the total.

So what happens when a culture or a region gets in this kind of anti-intellectual mode? You end up with citizens that, I kid you not, panic over rumors of foreigners roaming their city and shaking men’s hands to make their penises disappear. These are the kind of people you can talk into slipping on the latest in explosive vest fashions or taking a whirlwind tour of the World Trade Center at 600 miles per hour. It’s in the U.S. best interests to address this kind of fuzzy math and fuzzy thinking head on, both at home and abroad. We don’t.

See? I can write an editorial without saying the Bush family has ties to the Nazis. And just so you know, let me go on the record as an equal-opportunity President basher. Much of America’s current woes lay squarely on the, er, shoulders of Bill Clinton, who unforgivably did not utter the phrases “I lied” and “I resign” in the very same exhalation of breath. Where’s a mysterious hand-shaking foreigner when you really need one?