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Sad, but true: the United States of America, despite its great wealth and a professed belief in modern technology, gives to the rest of the world the distinct impression of being an astonishingly backward nation.

A few random examples will illustrate this assertion:

# The US has failed to adopt the metric system of weights and measures (SI), which is used throughout the rest of the civilised world. The authorities have even made a feature of the fact that the Freedom Tower being built on the World Trade Center site in New York is to be exactly 1776 FEET high.

# The US still uses Fahrenheit for temperatures. Actually this draws attention to its non-scientific attitude whenever it broadcasts weather reports to the rest of the world.

# Businesses in the US also refuse to use metric paper sizes such as A4, continuing to use assorted quarto and foolscap sizes instead.

# People in the US think that the duration of a day somehow lies between the duration of a month and the duration of a year. They thus persist in writing dates in the absurd MMDDYY format, to the confusion of readers in the rest of the world.

# Companies listed on stock exchanges in the US in many cases still use scrip certificates, a highly expensive and inefficient system. The stock exchanges in civilised jurisdictions generally trade shares on an uncertificated basis.

# The belief in fundamentalism is very high in the United States, leading to pressure to teach creationism in schools as though it were a scientific fact. A recent survey found that an astonishing 65.4 per cent of the population still believes in the devil.

# The American public is extremely parochial.

# American citizens are remarkably narrow-minded in relation to nudity, as is evidenced by the Janet Jackson incident further discussed below.

# In some states of the United States judges are elected officials. In more enlightened jurisdictions judges are always appointed officials and they are given tenure. This gives them proper independence from political intervention.

# Hypocrisy prevails. Large sections of the population in the US claim to be pro life when discussing a woman's right to have an abortion. They see nothing inconsistent in favouring the death penalty for certain crimes. The United States is one of the very few civilised countries which still impose this form of punishment.

NIPPLEGATE

More than 500,000 scaredy-cat viewers in the US complained to the authorities when a female nipple was shown on television for a few seconds during

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