@ Graham Wilson
"one fool in the 'educated pack' does not undo the general principle that education benefits everyone. "
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That's a fair point. :-)
See my distrust of TED talks as a symptom of my distrust towards all organisations bent on spreading the truth as they see it. Be it TED with Al Gore's skewed data on global warming, or religious organisations with "we know what God thinks, listen to us". Not as my distrust towards general education, to the contrary... if I had to bring one book to a deserted island, it would be Carl Sagan's "Cosmos".
I'm very much aware we're close to another dark age... not a generation or two away, but just one catastrophic event away. For instance, just an "al-Qaeda's detonation of a nuke in some USA or European city" away... I've lived through Croatian independence war, and know exactly how fast people descend into hatred during the crisis. And stay there long after the crisis has passed.
Dubya and bin Laden, unfortunately, aren't exceptions in modern world. That's why the assassination of bin Laden changes little. You've removed one man, but the underlying problems remain the same... European imperialistic drawing of Near/Middle Eastern borders created the problem, USA and Soviet interventions (especially USA, but just because Russians didn't try hard enough) just poured oil on that fire.
If someone has a workable idea how to redraw the borders without causing another war or three, and how to make Westerners meddling with Near/Middle Eastern politics and get the hell out of there... give that man billion dollars, ten Nobel peace prizes and *listen to him*.