'Intelligent Design" sounds like something Ikea would do.

This is an interesting article concerning the most dangerous and frightening part of conservatism- the religious Right.

It used to be the case that parents who wanted their child to have a religious education would have to shell out for a private school. Indeed, as most private schools catered to this market, giving your kids better resources and smaller class sizes usually came at the cost of filling their heads with creationist garbage.

In the US this may be reversed. The public schools teach creationism, enough parents will hate this to make secular private schools a profitable niche market.

This has advantages for well-to-do families who believe in evolution. They may now be able to send their kids to private school to launch them higher up the food chain without the worry of having to re-educate them when they got home.

Actually the particularly interesting part of the above linked article is the relation to political correctness and cultural sensitivity. Teaching kids that there was no absolute truth may well have laid the foundations for teaching them something that was absolutely not true.

It's a fight, and if you want to bring up your kids in the secular style you'd better stand by your principles and go into battle for them.

Abnormal behaviour

What we did on that day was not normal.

When most normal, healthy people are informed that a corpse lies deep in the bushland, they will promptly about face and clear the area.

In our case, the fact that a dead man lay beyond the horizon was the very reason we had turned up. We'd come there to bash through scrub looking for him.

We were advised to keep this as impersonal as possible. We were advised not the read the many notes his family had left for him while there was still hope he may be alive. Some of us gave into the voyeuristic temptation and it did none of us any good.

We scoured one section of forest after another to no avail. By the end of the day we were worn out, overheated and thirsty so we decided to take a shortcut back to the command post.

He was no more than twenty metres from the trail, suspended from a tree branch with a noose around his neck.

With no radio communication, the two more experienced crew stood guard over the body while myself and another young 'un headed back to the base to alert others and lead them back. Adrenaline saw us march much faster than we had all day and we had to stop periodically so the cops we had in tow could catch up.

Another crew cut him down from the tree and brought him back to the command post. The man's brother was brought there to identify him. The dozen cops and SES guys standing together, silent and with heads bowed may have prepared him for what he was about to see.

It isn't normal to see this and not be affected by it. One of my team had a weekend without sleep, picturing every other tree he saw with a man in it. Another had been to East Timor in 1999 after the pro-Jakarta Militia had been through, and had seen much worse. I lost a bit of sleep over it and was on edge for the next day.

It isn't normal to see all this and willingly return to the job and the organisation that put us there, and will put us there again in the future. For no money.

That's what we've all done though, and some some of us have been toughened up from the experience.