So many of you have asked me about an alleged Al Qaeda plan called “American Hiroshima” - the multiple detonation of nukes smuggled in to the US - that I must respond, even though some very good friends of mine for whom I have high regard have been taken in by the fellow who’s making the claim.

That would be Paul L. Williams, who has been peddling this stuff for a long time. The funniest example is Williams’ claim that “documents captured in Afghanistan show that Al Qaeda had plans to assemble nuclear weapons with fissile material purchased on the black market.” A nuclear scientist friend of mine with all the requisite Pentagon security clearances could not stop laughing when I discussed this with him.

“I’ve seen those documents,” he told me, “and believe it or not, they are copied from an article in a science humor magazine called The Journal of Irreproducible Results. It was entitled “How to Build an Atom Bomb,” and these Al Qaeda-Taliban idiots didn’t know it was a put-on. It’s full of physics jargon and seems impressive - but when the article instructs you to make the shock wave focusing lens out of Playdough, you’ve got to be a retard not to get the gag. Living in an Afghan cave can do that to you.”

When you’re scuba-diving, you’re in another reality. You’re totally in the moment, absorbed and fascinated by a world utterly removed from that above the surface. But the pressure of this world drives gasses you’re breathing like nitrogen into your tissues, and if you return to the surface too quickly, bubbles of nitrogen come out of solution like an opened champagne bottle, into your bloodstream and can blow up your brain.

Returning to “civilization” from an African safari can have similar effects. Immersed in a world utterly removed from the outside, blissfully unaware of any “news” occurring anywhere as you watch a lioness play with her cubs or a lady elephant tease a big bull in heat, causing him to chase after her dragging his 40 pound “fifth leg” in desperation - you need to decompress and slowly return to reality.

I ignored this advice and am suffering the consequences. One day I was in a tent in the Serengeti. The next day I was in London with bubbles of the world’s insanity exploding inside my head.

It’s very easy to get bitten by the African bug, the one that compels you to keep coming back to the most primeval place on our planet. I took this picture in the Serengeti in 1971, I’ve been going back to Africa every chance I got ever since, and by the time you read this I’ll be there again.

Africa has been a lot in the news this week. The G8 forgiving billions in debt by African countries; Little Bobby Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s depraved dictator, bulldozing thousands of poor people’s homes into rubble for not supporting him; President Bush hosting his counterparts from five African countries in the White House.

One of them was Festus Mogae of Botswana. Bush hailed Botswana as an African model of democracy, and you have to give Mogae credit for this. What comes up for me, however, is the war the Botswana government has been waging against the last remaining cultural link humanity has with its original lifestyle, with our ancestors who birthed the human race, the Bushmen.

One of the most provocative, brilliant, fascinating, erudite, yet ultimately silliest books of recent times is Jared Diamond’s best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book is Diamond’s long attempt to answer a question put to him by a primitive tribesman in New Guinea, essentially, “Why do you guys in the West have such prosperity why we are still knee deep in pig poop?”

As a learned and persuasive hard-core environmental determinist, Diamond’s answer is: The West (whose inhabitants are two-digit IQ morons compared to the natural brain power of New Guinea natives) is the most culturally and technologically successful civilization in history because Mesopotamia (where Western Civilization originated) had wild animals and grasses conducive to domestication 9,000 years ago.

See what I mean by silly? For a determinist like Diamond, thought processes are irrelevant to the fate of human societies. He has no appreciation nor understanding of how cultural values and practices drive the success or failure of civilizations. Proof of this is that the word “meme” does not appear once in the book’s 480 pages.

Here are two Chris Cox bottom lines. Bar none, no one Congress is more dedicated to capitalist free market freedom than him; bar none, no one in Congress is smarter.

Now you may reply that being the smartest man in Congress is like being the tallest building in Topeka. But Chris would be the tallest skyscraper in just about any city. That’s why the Senate Banking Committee hearings on his nomination to run the Security & Exchange Commission are going to be so entertaining, a C-Span show you won’t want to miss.

There are a fair number of bright people in the House, and a fair number of really stupid people in the Senate (we’re talking ratios here - there are some amazingly dumb Congressmen and some very bright Senators). The disparity is because it costs so much more to run for a state-wide Senate seat; thus the majority of Senators are millionaires who inherited their money (like Teddy Kennedy), or made it through a particular idiot-savant expertise (like Jon Corzine) which they think makes them an expert on everything.

With few exceptions, every Senator’s ego vastly exceeds their brain-power. Arrogance, power, and stupidity is not a good combination, which is why the Senate is so dysfunctional. They love to prate and pose and pontificate and act so insufferably important in front of television cameras during their hearings. Which is why it’ll be so much fun to watch Chris take them apart.