Silent screams. Night sweats. Quiet desperation. The whispered dread of impending doom. Liberals are suffering all of these anxieties over soon-to-be Justice John Roberts - at least the smart ones are who know the stakes.

Those stakes go far beyond Roe v. Wade. Smart liberals know the entire gigantic edifice of Federal bureaucratic control over our lives, which they have been painstakingly building since the 1930s, has as its foundation one thin reed of six Constitutional words tortured beyond recognition. Invest those words with normal recognizable meaning, and thousands of Federal laws and regulations are defunct.

This is the conservatives’ and the libertarians’ dream, and the liberals’ nightmare. What keeps making the liberals sit bolt upright in bed is knowing there is nothing they can do to prevent their nightmare from coming true.

To understand why, we need to talk about a farmer named Roscoe Filburn from Montgomery County, Ohio, who grew 23 acres of wheat back in the 1930s.

What do you suppose the reaction would be in the American, Chinese, and world press if a Major General in the US Army gave an official briefing at the Pentagon and stated:

“If the Chinese attack Taiwan, we will have to respond with nuclear weapons. We Americans would then have to prepare ourselves for the destruction of all our cities east of Kansas City. Of course, the Chinese will have to accept that hundreds of Chinese cities will be destroyed by us.”

Can you imagine the media feeding frenzy? Can you imagine the reaction at the White House? The general would be instantly cashiered and sent to a mental hospital for psychiatric treatment, while everyone in the Administration made every possible effort to repair the damage.

So why didn’t this happen when a Major General in the Red Chinese People’s Liberation Army - who is also the Deputy Director of the Institute for Strategic Studies at the Chinese National Defense University - said exactly this in reverse on July 15 in Beijing?

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.