Geneva. Switzerland is not perfect, but as countries go, it is hard to find one that is much better.

The more people know about Switzerland, the higher regard they tend to have for it. By almost any measure of human accomplishment, and particularly in creating a most successful country governance model, the Swiss are clearly No. 1 in the world.

Switzerland is a small, landlocked nation without much in the way of natural resources. It has managed to stay out of wars for two centuries and developed a long-term multilingual and multireligious democracy without strife. There is a rule of law with competent and unbiased judges and strong protections for private property.

Switzerland also ranks higher than average among the OECD countries (the 35 most-developed economies in the world) in levels of education and student test scores, and has lower levels of air and water pollution.

Civil liberties are strongly protected, including freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and even the right to own guns. It does not get much better than this.

White House spokesman Tony Snow and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff both were at a meeting I attended this week, attempting to allay fear and anger over the immigration reform bill. 

I have to tell you they were very persuasive.  I am convinced they are both honest, that they are genuinely trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem with good patriotic intentions, that they believe this bill is an unprecedented ("Underline that word three times," said Tony) commitment to secure our southern border, to effect employer enforcement, and replace chain migration with a merit system.

Chertoff and Snow are two decent men arguing from principle and integrity.  Both are smart - Chertoff is very smart.  And both are, with innocent naiveté, being taken to the Destruction of America Cleaners by Teddy Kennedy.

You can't make a deal with the devil.  You'll always get screwed, no matter how many amendments and marvelous provisions you stick into the deal. 

If we could prevent or cure all cancer, what would we die of?

The new year has begun with a war of words over whether cancer is mostly bad luck, as suggested by a new study from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and over whether it's a good way to die, compared with the alternatives, as suggested by Dr Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Cancer is now the leading cause of death in Britain even though it is ever more survivable, with roughly half of people who contract it living long enough to die of something else. But what else? Often another cancer.  Cancer's growing dominance of the mortality tables is not because it's getting worse but because we are avoiding other causes of death and living longer.

It is worth remembering that some scientists and anti-pesticide enviros in the 1960s were convinced that by now lifespans would be much shorter because of cancer caused by pesticides and other chemicals in the environment.

In the 1950s Wilhelm Hueper - a director of the US National Cancer Institute and mentor to Rachel Carson, the environmentalist author of Silent Spring - was so concerned that pesticides were causing cancer that he thought the theory that lung cancer was caused by smoking was a plot by the chemical industry to divert attention from its own culpability: "Cigarette smoking is not a major factor in the causation of lung cancer," he insisted.

In fact it turns out that pollution causes very little cancer and cigarettes cause a lot. But aside from smoking, most cancers are indeed bad luck.