Black, White and Gray

Today I went to Duke Library to check out John Rawls' "Justice as Fairness". Amusingly, there was a book by Ann Coulter right next to Rawls' masterpiece. I have never seen such a fine example of profundity and ignorance peacefully coexisting side by side.

I came to realize that US is a strange country: She has nurtured an extraordinary number of great scientists, philosophers, thinkers and political activists - Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, Richard Feynman, Martin Luther King Jr., Noam Chomsky - the list is endless. On the other hand, there are crackpots like Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza and Rush Limbaugh. How astonishing it is that a significant proportion of US citizens still dispute Evolution by natural selection and believe that the earth is only ten thousand years old!