It’s tempting to write off the hapless businessmen who fell for this Australian money doubling scheme as naive or gullible. But if you look at the details, it’s pretty clear they were just stupid. And as comedian Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.”

It seems four different business owners were conned out of between $10k and $120k when they fell for what amounts to a cheap magic trick to duplicate currency. The trick made it appear to these rocket scientists that soaking a $100 bill in a chemical bath caused the bill to undergo some sort of monetary mitosis, resulting in two identical $100 bills. Not be be complete buffoons, they did at least have the good sense to have a bank verify the authenticity of the “duplicated” bill to be sure it was not detectable as counterfeit. Yet it never occurred to any of them that soaking an inanimate object and magically getting it to replicate itself was technically dubious.

This is why science education is important. Heck, I think a little common sense would have sufficed.

Should you be contemplating any criminal activity, rule one should be to travel first to Wellford, South Carolina. The reason you ask? Police there are forbidden from chasing you. The mayor has ruled that police chases are resulting in excessive worker’s compensation claims that are an undue financial burden on the town. So no chasing criminals, even on foot.

Mayor Sallie Peake was questioned about the odd policy by a local reporter, where she seemed to reveal that she hadn’t really given this as much thought as her constituents might have hoped. As near as I can tell from her relative incoherence, police are still empowered to stop a crime in progress, as long as it doesn’t involve any sort off chase whatsoever.

Reporter: “Are you telling your officers if they witness a crime – they witness someone commit a crime on someone else and they’re ten yards away – they can’t go stop that person?“
Peake: “Is that in there?“ (referring to policy)
Reporter: “It says no chases whatsoever.“
Peake: “Well, that’s what I said, no chases, didn’t I? I didn’t say nothing about a crime. If you see a crime, this that and the other -“
Reporter: “Well, that’s what a chase is – “
Peake: “Well, I told them no chase on foot, and (the police chief) know exactly what I mean, so you’re trying to twist what I -“
Reporter: “No, I’m not. You said no chases. No chases means no chases.“
Peake: (claps hands) “You got you a story, thank God! You are so sweet! You got you a story on a woman in Wellford! Hallelujah! I’m so proud of you, Mr. Cato!“

I can’t shake this mental image of a thief running out of a liquor store, sprinting 20 feet down the sidewalk and strolling slowly away. Turning occasionally to taunt his would-be pursuers with a rousing chorus of “Na na, na na, boo boo!”

Update: It seems that based on the advice of a local prosecutor who is a personal friend of Peake, the mayor has rescinded her no-chase policy. She went so far as to say officers can now “run, jump, climb trees, tumble, wreck cars, whatever they want to do.” At least it’s refreshing to know the mayor has the emotional development of a six-year old in addition to the reasoning power. (No offense to six-year olds intended)

Just because there’s a statistical correlation doesn’t mean there’s a cause and effect relationship. Nonetheless, researchers in Japan have published a study showing a correlation between your attitude and your ability to lose weight. The result claimed is that excessive optimism is bad for your waistline. Apparently, optimistic people have more trouble sticking to a diet.

Minimally, this trashes the whole fad of visualizing your success and believing you can succeed to make it happen. It seems if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s best to adopt an attitude of doom and imminent failure. Given this postulate, one would expect that Eeyore should be thinner.

Mr. Obama can’t have it both ways. He said during his healthcare speech to Congress that he was going to call out those who spread false information. Turnabout is fair play.

During Thursday’s speech to the United Nations, Obama reiterated some of the things he’s done to restore America’s moral position and international credibility. Specifically, he said:

On my first day in office, I prohibited – without exception or equivocation – the use of torture by the United States of America. I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, and we are doing the hard work of forging a framework to combat extremism within the rule of law. Every nation must know: America will live its values, and we will lead by example.

He did do those things, and I think the message about America living by its values is an important one. One that we desperately need to heed. However, at nearly the same time, the Obama administration made another decision which it has kept pretty low-key. The New York Times buried it on page 23.

The decision was that the administration will continue to hold detainees currently in Guantanamo without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after 9/11, authorizing the president to use force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. There was no word on where they would be held, and presumably he could skate on some very thin ice by still closing Guantanamo Bay and holding them elsewhere, but that would be more than a little disingenuous.

Clearly the moral message of his decision to close the Guantanamo prison was not to get the prisoners out of Cuba, but rather to get them out of Limbo. Treat them as criminals and prosecute them. Treat them as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Or let them go.

I do recognize this is problematic. Many of the prisoners cannot reasonably be prosecuted under U.S. law because the Bush administration collected much of the evidence against them illegally. The cases would fall apart. I too, would hate to see truly guilty people set free based on legal technicalities. Yet our justice system is based on the notion that better 100 guilty people go free than a single innocent man be convicted. (It’s hard to tell that from the percentage of our citizens we currently imprison, but it is our stated principle.)

It seems conceivable that there must be some way to handle these prisoners that are truly guilty. Prosecute them in another country. Pass legislation allowing them to be tried under special rules. Use military tribunals to try them. Something. But continuing to exploit the overly broad post-9/11 powers to detain people indefinitely is not being true to our American values. Congress should move to repeal those powers so that no President has to deal with the temptation to exploit them.

Morality is not viable without courage. It is not tenable without risk. It’s easy to be moral when you feel invulnerable. Maybe the hardest thing to be is a better person than those who would seek to harm you. No one said this would be easy.

In case you don’t look goofy enough riding a Segway, Honda has introduced a self-balancing unicycle of sorts. It’s kinda clever with its fold-out seat and foot rests. In theory you could ride it to work, then carry to your office and stuff it under your desk.

Or in my case, I could just ride it in from the parking lot, which inexplicably seems to get further from the office door every day. I wonder how it handles curbs and winter sidewalk salt?

All of this assuming of course, that your self-esteem quotient is so high that you’d be willing to be seen tooling down the sidewalk with a hand on either butt cheek while precariously perched atop what appears to be a Sesame Street announcement that today is brought to you by the number “8″.

Video of this bad boy in action is available here.

Back in 2003, Natalie Maines and The Dixie Chicks were pretty much run out of town on a rail for saying, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas,” at a concert performance in London. The hew and cry from the Red State soul of country music was that you just didn’t criticize the President on foreign soil, especially during wartime. Rallies were held where Chicks CDs were burned, and for several years after, the band was persona non gratis in the music industry. It was very nearly a career ending statement.

Fast forward to Wednesday, September 23, 2009. Former Alaska governor, 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, and presumed 2012 Presidential candidate Sarah Palin speaks to an investor conference in Hong Kong. During the course of an hour and a half, she rails against Obama’s policies and plans on everything from the economy, healthcare, foreign policy, to even Afghanistan. This sure sounded like criticism of the President. I’ve checked the map twice and I’m pretty sure Hong Kong is considered foreign soil. And this morning’s paper sure made it sound like we were still in a war.

I assume that shortly the right-wing conservatives will start their career ending assault on Palin. I would have thought we’d have heard the klaxon by now, but Hong Kong is farther away than London, so maybe the percolation time is longer. But I’m sure somewhere there’s a Fox News producer rummaging about for a fresh can of Whoop-Ass to open on poor Sarah. After all, it’s the fair and balanced thing to do.

On the one hand, maybe it’s comforting to know that all the political histrionics of the radical right is not really new. Kennedy had a vocal minority who pretty much loathed and feared him, and that worked out okay… right? Oh yeah… never mind.

Please, please, please… let the answer be no… crap. It seems that at least in Britain, men are spending actual time and money having their eyebrows threaded. And no, I didn’t know what that meant either, but the article describes it as:

…a treatment called “threading,” an ancient method of hair removal which originated in India in which a thin twine of cotton thread is rolled over the offending area, plucking the hair from the follicle level.

What fun! Seriously, to anyone who’s undergoing this procedure, isn’t there a football match on somewhere or an empty pub stool you should be sitting on?

Sara Stern, Director of Cosmetic Merchandising at Debenhams department store stated, “Men are recognizing the power of a groomed brow to frame the face and create a sexy James Bond-style arch when raised.”

On the flip side, I recognize that my furry unibrow isn’t maybe my best look. But 8 seconds a week with scissors or a beard trimmer keeps that in check just fine. I’m also smart enough to realize that no girl on the planet will mistake me for Sean Connery if only I had his eyebrows.

To any men of the male persuasion out there thinking that this seems like a good way to up your metrosexual cred, I have this advice. Grow a pair… (of eyebrows).

Some messages you just need to hear straight from the source.

I have often bemoaned the state of science education in our schools, but apparently our kids aren’t learning civics either. The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs wanted to know how prepared its high schoolers were to take up the job of full fledged participant in politics when they turned 18. They commissioned a national research firm to test their state’s students.

The firm randomly selected 10 questions from the pool of 100 questions used to develop the naturalization test for new citizens. This is similar to how the real tests are developed, and someone applying for citizenship must score 6/10 correct to pass. It’s interesting to note that immigrants taking the test pass 92.4% of the time on the first attempt.

Here is the actual test, along with the percentage of high school students who answered the question correctly:

These are not trick questions. Hell, only 6 in 10 knew the Atlantic Ocean was on the east coat! Only 1 in 5 that George Washington was the first President! Out of 1000 students absolutely no one scored 8 or higher. No one! All tolled, only 2.8% of Oklahoma high school students would qualify for citizenship. Even allowing for the 3 point margin of error, that’s a really sad state. And it’s not just Oklahoma. The same test was administered in Arizona where they crushed Oklahoma with 3.5% of their students passing.

In fairness, I would be surprised if the results were much different had they surveyed adults than kids. But that doesn’t make me feel any better. These results are damning not only to the kids, but to us as a society. We can’t reasonably expect people to participate thoughtfully in a form of government they do not understand.

It’s tempting to view this as a failure of the education system, but this is also a failure of parents. You talk to your kids about drugs. You talk to your kids about religion. You talk to your kids about sex. Have you talked to them about politics lately?

While this certainly doesn’t rank up with Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project or the Tea Party Express on the Embarrassed to be an American scale, it’s a far sight higher than Bacon Mania.

The UK based Icon Films has produced a critically acclaimed movie called Creation. It is based on the book, Annie’s Box, by Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson, and it chronicles the struggle of Darwin’s life as he tried to reconcile his deeply held religious beliefs with his scientific discoveries. As a former seminary student, Darwin was well aware of the firestorm that would be created when his work was published. A storm which apparently rages unabated into the 21st century.

The film has met with a fair bit of critical acclaim, and was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival. It premiers later this week in the U.K., and has been sold to countries all over the world… with a notable exception. No film distributor in the good ol’ U.S. of A. has been willing to pick up the title. Ostensibly out of fear of the Christian extremist backlash.

On the one hand, this is no great loss. This is a 19th century period piece. It’s an art house film that likely wouldn’t have even shown up at the 16-screen mega-plex. Yet for that same reason, if everyone just kept their cool, the film would have just flown by under the radar. I doubt I’d have bothered to see it. On the other hand, I’m a little surprised that someone didn’t pick up the film entirely because it would have generated a backlash. That publicity likely would have pushed the film into the mega-plex and have attracted many who otherwise never would have heard of it.

Still, that this is even an issue in America in 2009 is an embarrassment. Granted, companies are free to make decisions they think benefit their business, and not bringing the move here was a business decision. Granted, people are free to think what they want about Darwin, and they are free to ignore evolution, gravity, electromagnetism or any other scientific theories that don’t sit well with them. So I can’t claim there was any great wrong committed here. It’s just embarrassing. Embarrassing that we are not only becoming less tolerant, but we are no longer ashamed of it either.

Thomas Frank wrote an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, usually a bastion of conservative thought. His thesis is that the left needs to reclaim the word “freedom”. Somehow the idea of freedom, originally conceived as freedom by the government, has now been cast by conservatives as freedom from the government.

Watching and listening to the right-wing fringe it does seem as if there is almost a pining for anarchy. That their ideal solution would be the complete removal of government. In a sense, I suppose that would be freedom, for a time. At least it would be until human nature took over and some small group began to oppress the masses through force. Then the oppressors have all the freedom, and the people none. Ironically, exactly what they fear will happen if Obama is left to run amok.

Freedom is about balance. Balancing the needs of the many with the needs of the few. And the government’s role is as the arbiter of that balance point. To argue they have no business adjusting the scale is to completely misunderstand the mechanisms employed to achieve the freedom we all hold so dear.

To value freedom is not a virtue of the left or the right, of conservatives or liberals. This still leaves a lot of room for us to disagree about how the needs of the few/many get balanced. That is the nature of democracy. The balance tips this way and that. But to suggest that the other side is against freedom is disingenuous, simplistic, and just wrong.

It’s gone far enough. I was nonplussed by melting ice caps, dwindling polar bear populations, and flooded coastal cities. But when global warming starts to impact beer production, we have to draw a line.

The quality of hops has been decreasing year on year for decades and is reaching critical levels of low crop yield and acidity. If we don’t act soon, we’ll be drinking hopless beer, which is, well… cereal in a glass.

It’s time to replace all those incandescent bulbs, install solar panels on the roof, trade in the Ram on a Prius, and… oh, who am I kidding? I just need to make room in the basement for a 50-year supply of beer and start stocking up.

One o’ the crew has brought to me attention the fact that t’morrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I’m a wee off me game by not smackin’ ye in the face with it and such. But the cap’n's ne’er wrong, so ye can bet ol’ Chuck’ll be walking the plank fer his insubordination. Let this be a lesson fer ye all. If’n yer gonna go agin’ the cap’n, ye best be sporting a big mug o’rum or at least be handy with yer cutlass.

Be that as it may, ye best be on yer game tomorrow. It’s a special year and all, as our day falls on a Saturday this year. So you’ll be havin’ little choice other than to squeeze yer wench and hoist a little grog.

Ayeeeee… it’ll be day t’ remember. Orrrrr… at least a day those about ye will ne’er forget. Do us proud m’lads. Do us proud.

Apparently you should be on the lookout for airborne swine and maybe an endothermic underworld as well. It seems that Bill O’Reilly now supports a public option for healthcare. Watch the video below. I’m not sure what else to conclude.

I suppose it’s only a matter of time now before Hannity calls O’Reilly a socialist. Although I’m pretty sure that indirectly, O’Reilly has already called himself worse than that. Stay tuned for the spin on what he really meant to say.