Just an hour ago the Obama Administration apologized for a stupid thing they did recently in firing Shirley Sherrod. Rachel said, "This politically correct fear of offending is so un-American it's one of the great riddles of our time how this could happen in America in the first place."

I like to say, ironically, that I'm the last hippie. It's not funny, since thousands of people from my generation make the same joke. And it's worth admitting that the hippie movement wasn't all positive. It gave birth to lots of very humanized folk, but many of the stupider counter-culturists curled up into their navels and stopped believing in anything but their own fantasies. For people like that, truth meant nothing. But love-bombing and preaching about a New Age was easy enough to do, and often filled their tip jars better than their suburban parents ever did. This may be how the idea that we should never say anything that offends anyone was born. From sheer, self-serving, cowardice.

The internet gave us a two-edged sword. It allowed the Neanderthals to spread ugly rumors like wild-fire. But it also gave the homo sapiens a chance to learn the truth. Reality is no longer being copyrighted, confiscated and impounded. Now it's become a race between the fire starters and the fire stompers.

I've learned that all bloggers are experts about something. But the internet has convinced them they're experts about everything. Truman Capote, were he alive today, would be sneering, "That isn't writing. It's typing".

But apologizing is good. Did the White House under W ever apologize? For anything? To anybody? Why would they? They were never wrong. It was obviously right to murder 100,000 women and children in the Middle East. They were Iraqi, dude.

I sometimes wonder if there aren't a lot more Neanderthals still around than we used to think. Some people feel the unexamined life isn't worth living. And some people never become conscious. That's a pretty big divide.

Someday, if anthropology ever comes out of the closet, we'll understand the differences between people a little more. At the moment, all the tenured guys ever say is, "Everybody's equal. If that's not a good enough answer for you, you're a racist." I think that human subspecies differ in interesting ways, so I guess that makes me a racist. It's time to learn the difference between racial bigotry and racial realism.

I realized long ago that this legal dogma that "everybody's equal" is itself 1) paternalistic and 2) racist. It's paternalistic because it assumes that some people can't handle the truth and must be soothed by a pleasant myth. It's racist because it distorts the nature of races. What could it possibly mean to say that an elephant is "equal" to a zebra? What could it possibly mean to say that each white man is "equal" to each black man? Not only are there no truly identical objects in the universe bigger than molecules, but measurements of anything always results in tiny differences because our very instruments are imperfectly calibrated.

This idea that the public must always be soothed and mollified is insulting to our human dignity. When I go to a dentist, I don't have to be soothed and mollified because my skills at dentistry are inferior to hers. When I hear an African jazz ensemble, I don't have to be soothed and mollified because it seems to me that most black people are better at jazz than most white people. These are just interesting observations, which might differ greatly from one observer to the next, and which people should feel free to compare and contrast. (That's why it's called "free speech".) And out of this chatty froth might slowly evolve actual insights. Insights that we won't have to beg uptight self-censoring anthropologists to legitimize.

If it turned out, for example, that blacks are more musically gifted than whites, this could bring individuals of both races together, not drive them apart. Would it be terrible if white kids got into the habit of seeking out black music teachers? This kind of real, rather than manufactured, multiculturalism could be beneficial to both races.

If the next generation decides that W was one of the studipest presidents we have had, and Obama one of the brightest, will this constitute a setback for white people?

Who, exactly, was damaged by the recent admission in a scientific journal that people who live in the interior of continents are better at running while those who live near the oceans are better at swimming?

What, exactly, are we afraid of here? See from Volume 5 (2010), Issue 3 of the .