Now for the difficult and painful truth. If the scientific understanding that I've presented here about gesture, and embodied cognition is true, it tells us something about our current culture, the state of our leadership and its failings, and the gross deception that arises from the educational system in which you are rewarded and promoted on the basis of how well you can sit idly at desks.

This morning in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a newspaper strongly aligned with a conservative Republican agenda, Paul Greenberg described how Saddam Hussein was responsible for the US invasion of Iraq because he lied or was noncommittal about the presence or absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Iraqi arsenal.

Greenberg offers this tidbit of historic revisionism despite ample evidence that Bush and Cheney were planning war with Iraq even before 9/11/2001. And of course it would be complete idiocy to lay fault on Saddam for the poor planning of the invasion or the mishandling of the occupation, but perhaps that comes next. I'll keep reading to find out if Greenberg's stupidity or willful deception can extend so far.

The following is from Charles Henry Hamm's book, Mind and Hand, 1886:

It is thus that the trained hand comes at last to foresee, as it were, that a false proposition is surely destined to be exploded. The habit of rectitude gives it prescience. It invariably discovers, sooner or later, that a false proposition, when embodied in wood or iron, becomes a conspicuous abortion, involving in disgrace both the designer and the maker. A false proposition in the abstract may be rendered very alluring; a false proposition in the concrete is always hideous. One of the chief effects of manual training is, then, the discovery and development of truth; and truth, in its broadest signification, is merely another name for justice; and justice is the synonym of morality.

And so the truth, long clouded, vigorously denied and ignored is made clear:

People who work with their hands and hearts as well as their heads are made wiser, more intelligent and more humane than those who work with words, concepts and ideas alone. The latter send young men and women into battlefields to test their distorted notions, while failing to acknowledge responsibility for the shameful consequences.