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Uncertainty is more frightening than a sure death.

I think the big deficiency of our education and conditioning is this lack of familiarity with risk and uncertainty. Teachers make their pronouncements as though they are absolute certainties -- because they are passed on down high, presumably from the top educators in the system, and thereby, everybody else is relieved from the responsibility and freedom of thinking for themselves and accepting the consequences of their choices -- as long as they remain safely within the confines of political correctness of thought.

Thus, demagogues (I won't name names) can promise, "Vote for our presidential candidate and the lame will walk, plenty of money will always be everyone's Social Security entitlement, no Americans will ever die in wars, the foolish will not be discriminated from the wise, your jobs will never become obsolete or outsourced, and we won't raise your taxes to pay for all this, etc."

I recall talking to a person wasting away dramatically, for which the doctors had given up and pronounced, "There's 'clinically' nothing wrong with you." Yet this person knew they were wasting away and dying with each day, and each moment. I said, "One of the products that people use to build their bodies up is andro; the Nazis even proved its effectiveness among concentration camp detainees in their program to produce a superior human." Maybe you should try it. Their response, "I'm worried about the long-term side-effects." That person was gone in a matter of weeks.

There are people suffering from mind-numbing migraines that make them feel that death might be preferable; the same for bodily pains -- yet their lives are transformed by aspirin, naproxen, ibuprofen, guaifenesin, steroids, whatever. If they don't have these pain-relievers this moment -- their next might be their long-term prognosis.

There are two "conservatives" at the NY Times: Safire and Brooks. They sure let us down a lot! I'd prefer one solid one! (It's only the very odd column by Safire or Brooks that is of any real use. Brooks did a great one on conservative professors at wacko-leftist colleges. But he followed it up later by urging conservatives to "insist" on gay marriage!)