Bathroom Coffee - Agreed. I mean I can accept that ignorance is a problem in the US but come to think of it, about as much as it might be anywhere in the world. We cannot compare the most well read people in Nepal and Europe to the least in the US. That's be apples and oranges. A more suitable comparison would be to compare people who hold similar positions in their societies. Compare the less well informed people in the US to similarly informed people in Europe or Asia. And likewise, compare those in business, industry, the sciences, government etc - doing well, college degree, stable income, read newspapers etc - in the US to those in other countries. As for proportions of such people in different societies, unless I see some hard numbers, I think we should not make too many assumptions. Pokhara 22 - I don't want to get into a discussion about the merits of the Iraq war, but you cannot use that as a stick to beat the collective intelligence of Americans. While the immediate fallout of the Iraq war has been dismal to put it mildly, it is still too early to judge the long-term effects. Even so, trying to link a specific government policy to the collective intelligence of people is a bit out of whack in my opinion. My objective is not to defend the US here - it is to point out that we should not loose track of rational thought based on a joke.