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Are you scared? Are you suspicious? Are you freaking terrified? My friend Duncan has family in Hong Kong and is pretty upset. I don’t blame him.

Some people think we can blame fructose for many of our health woes, if not the mystery plague. Of course high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you. That doesn’t mean it’s the one evil food you can cut from your diet and change your life. Remember: moderation, complexity, shades of grey.

For example, when you bring out the word appeasement you’ve usually ended the useful conversation right there. But it does seem that if we’d dethroned Saddam back in ’91 we wouldn’t be in this mess now. Of course, there are a lot of things we could have done to prevent this. What-could-we-have-done is a fun game to play, but it’s useful only to the extent that it can show us what we ought to do now.

In a few years, we’ll begin to see the wisdom of the 1990s welfare reform plan, and whether we should have done something different. We’ve got some data now– but we aren’t sure if fewer people on welfare is really good, or if it means there are a lot of poor people who aren’t getting help.

You can also turn to literature for guidance. Mark Twain is being quoted a lot recently for his rant about war and God. It reminds me a little bit Psalm 137:8-9, which goes like this:

O daugher Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!