Looking at the kid on the bottle, you think that the campaign helps bring water to those in need – in Sudan, in Haiti in Guatemala, in wherever. And you’d think that if you bought one of these bottles, you would give 10 kids drinking water for half a day, or some other arbitrary amount of time.

The name of the campaign is completely misleading. No water is going to anyone. Buying this one bottle is not giving 10 of anything. Buying this one bottle – mind you, you bought it because you didn’t want to get out of line at a Whole Foods in West Hollywood – will cause a nickel to go to another charity to support indigenous people living on their own land.

Fair enough: Saving rainforest vegetation and natural habitat is inarguably a cause worth looking into. However, it has nothing to do with "drinking 1 and giving 10." Plus, look how much water the kid on the damn bottle is wasting; we could "drink 1, give 400" if he would just use a cup and a straw.

After your anger with the boy and the photographer subsides, you consider that this "Drink 1, Give 10" campaign must have roots elsewhere, in something having something to do with drinking water in deprived nations. Turns out that’s true. Since 2005, around $3.6 million has been raised to support UNICEF programs that provided clean drinking water to kids in Ethiopia, Niger and Mali.

Now that sounds worthwhile. But in the smaller print at the bottom of the page, it gets confusing once again:

Harris, himself says: "The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece."

The bold author and speaker hits a truculent precipice along his secular highway when it comes to the proposed mosque at Ground Zero in Manhattan. Harris says that building the mosque is, indeed, a First Amendment right. However, there is a fundamental problem with tolerance in Islam today and moderate Muslims, above all others, should see that that problem persists and should also understand why building a mosque at Ground Zero, while a right, is in bad taste.

The Bad Taste argument has been proposed by other less-than-conservatives such as Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, who last week wrote, "While no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up at Pearl Harbor would be offensive." (There, in fact, exists a Japanese cultural center just up the road from Pearl Harbor in Honolulu; given, it’s not set on the submerged U.S.S. Arizona.)

Theses points are by no means invalid and therein lies the conundrum; President Barack Obama was not beyond all reason, either, last week.

"I understand the emotions that this issue engenders," said the President. "The Ground Zero is indeed a hallowed ground. But let me be clear. As a citizen and as president I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances."

One thoughtful woman commented on the decision to NPR: "If not allowing gays to marry is unconstitutional, why has it not been brought up until now?" As if, for the last 222 years, since the U.S. Constitution was ratified (or 131 years since California’s current constitution was adopted), through slavery, suffrage, economic hardships and war, the legislative branch of the United States government had nothing better to do than to sit and ponder, "There really aren’t enough show tunes played at weddings; I wonder why that is…"

Others disapproved on a legal basis. Proposition 8 was not unconstitutional, a single federal judge overturning the will of the people in a legal vote, now that is. The problem with this logic is thick and deep. Were the United States to take a vote in 1860, five years before Amendment 13 said, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction," it is likely (based on my vast historical, social and anthropological knowledge) a proposition ensuring slavery for the next 300 years would have found overwhelming support among United States citizens who were allowed to vote.

Judge Walker addressed this, as well, in his decision: That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as "fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."

Regardless, votes and polls are so close, it makes little sense to restrict liberty based on their results. A California Field poll of registered voters last month found 51 percent support legalizing gay marriage with 42 percent opposed. While, according to the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 47 percent of Americans polled favor gay marriage while 50 percent are opposed.

And others repeat, soullessly, their moral objection that marriage is the sacred bond between a man and a woman, that gay marriage will destroy the American family (such an upstanding convention as it is), that children in America will suffer from confusion and will opt for hedonistic sodomy and will cause a run on glitter at every corner craft store in the nation.

In the last ten years, the friendly, ironic form of racism in comedy has lead the way in cautiously brining us closer together while undermining the litigious decades of political correctness that began sometime around "where's the beef?" At a delicate pace, even the backlash against political correctness has become passé – try creating a show called "Politically Incorrect" today and you’ll be met with, "Yes, but what makes it different?"

This begs the question: What is next for political correctness?, which I’ve wondered, inappropriately and aloud at times. While Kimmel and Chris Rock seem to be able to banter comfortably about black and white, Jon Stewart can take the same dry tone with Judaism, Ellen DeGeneres with homosexuality, Ricky Gervais with obesity and the mentally handicapped, and Sarah Silverman with just about anything she can get her greedy, JAP-y, whore-ish mouth on when it isn't replete with Asian cock, none of them seem capable of defining what the next step is in the fight against fear and political correctness.

At times answers sail from the oddest windows and mug you around the most surprising corners. This one came from Thomas "The Moustache" Friedman in today’s New York Times.    The Moustache’s column was on the firing of CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr after she Tweeted her condolences for the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader involved in the founding of Hezbollah.

"Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah," Nasr wrote. She was subsequently dismissed from CNN, a move that proves only that CNN is racist.

Freidman’s moustache noted, and rightly so, that a journalist should lose her job for "misreporting, for misquoting, for fabricating, for plagiarizing, for systemic bias," not for an innocuous text barely mourning the passing of a man whose life was complex enough to warrant defense by numerous American journalists for his stance on women’s rights and his repudiation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Friedman continued:

This week, the Pentagon set out to ask those defending the United States how they would feel to know that the country was totally defenseless. On Wednesday, they began emailing a survey, which contains more than 100 questions seeking views on the impact of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, to around 400,000 active duty and reserve troops.

The survey was evidently approved (in theory, anyway, if not question-by-question) by Sec. Robert Gates and President Barack Obama. Almost immediately, a few concerns have surfaced in light of the survey.

One of those: service men, no matter how thankful we are to them for their service, have never been a dependable compass when it comes to the implementation of policy. As one expert put it on CNN yesterday, those in the military were at first resistant to blacks and women serving on the frontlines, too.

On top of that, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which supports gays and lesbians serving openly, released a statement say that it cannot recommend that lesbian, gay, or bisexual service members fill out the survey – not that it recommended LGB (gonna leave transgender out of this one for hopefully obvious reasons) service members do not fill in hte blanks, but that the organization just couldn’t get behind something that might out gays or lesbians…even though the entire point of the organization is for gays and lesbians to be able to serve openly in the military. Sigh...

"There is no guarantee of privacy and (the Pentagon) has not agreed to provide immunity to service members whose privacy may be inadvertently violated or who inadvertently outs himself or herself," said Aubrey Sarvis, the group's executive director. "If a service member still wishes to participate, he or she should only do so in a manner that does not reveal sexual orientation."

If you’re a member of the military, don’t listen to either of the aforementioned reasons. Fill out the survey. Here’s why: you know Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is an absurd policy, and your answers don’t matter anyway. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed. This survey is the government’s way of placating critics, pretending to take your opinion under consideration simply so that they can later say they did. It’s like asking if you’d appreciate a blow job from Lara Logan; the answer is yes (unless you’re gay, then maybe Anderson Cooper), but that doesn’t mean that that answer won’t meet the e-shredder the moment it leaves your outbox.

As for the actual questions, the Pentagon is keeping the survey secret for now, but Military Times reviewed a draft copy: "[I]f the draft version is any guide, the general tone of the survey questions – developed by the independent research group Westat in cooperation with the Pentagon – leans toward the potential impact that repealing "don't ask, don't tell" might have on unit performance."

With that in mind, here are some possible sample questions for those who did not get the survey to consider:

Ironically, the major behavior change in male soldiers might be attenuation of gayness in the rooms and showers in warzones. They might stop grabbing each other’s asses and balls and calling each other faggot.

Or (shrug) that won’t stop and if that’s the case, if the law is repealed and men on the frontlines continue their usual homosexual/anti-homosexual antics (which are clearly posturing mechanisms to display their toughness), we just might find ourselves in the best possible situation: we are forced to be bone-core honest.

Gays and lesbians in the military would be required to continue to wear the warzone-thick skin they should wear in a freaking warzone anyway, and non-gay and lesbians would lose the pejorative; the same anti-gay comment they would have made with malice ten years ago, would not convey the same spite in an openly gay unit. Were they to make that comment in an openly gay military warzone with openly gay comrades (as I hope they would), morale would not be shattered, feelings would not be hurt, dissention would not descend. Quite the opposite. That kind of honesty and kidding would enmesh our men and women (psychologically, not physically), making them better friends, better soldiers, and a better team.

Maybe, in the end, everyone in the military would become gay. Wouldn’t that be nice. Ignatius thinks so: "The power-crazed leaders of the world would certainly be surprised to find that their military leaders and troops were only masquerading sodomites who were only too eager to meet the masquerading sodomite armies of other nations in order to have dances and balls and learn some foreign dance steps."

Attan lessons, here I come!

Whether brought by the English or the Irish, or based on a French game from the 14th century, baseball has been with America since the beginning and has, like all great "American" loves, been slowly seduced into bed and kept as our own. In recent years, many have questioned the stamp "national pastime," saying baseball is less popular, slower, less characteristically "American" than, say, football. Baseball’s detractors discredit the game’s traditional place in our society, but they do so without warrant.

Baseball is America not because the game was with us in the beginning, but because the game has come to metaphorically define the American Way of Life – or, perhaps more accurately, the way American’s live their lives.

No other sport can claim metaphorical significance the way baseball can. Two weeks ago, a meeting in Hollywood was begun with, "I hear we’re going to hit a long ball today; what’s the first pitch." (We’re not talking soccer field here.) Similar clichés are used every day in business: swing and a miss, real pitchers’ duel, he really dropped the ball, two down in the bottom of the ninth, knocked it out of the park, he went down swinging, he was clutch.

Other sports can claim clichés that have spilled into our lives (third and long; puts up a prayer; putting from the rough), but none is as descriptive and universal as baseball. Even our high school romances are explained using baseball; and although the obscure meaning of the bases changes from generation to generation, a home run will always remain the same, ultimate goal.

(I don’t know if the British have these same wonderfully descriptive clichés revolving around cricket (he hit three wickets in one night?), but I suppose it’s possible.)

While baseball is America because the American zeitgeist is baseball, there is one overlooked cliché that I believe should be more often used in a positive context.

Last weekend, the New York Times published an article about a pair of economists that published a book based on 800 years of economic data. "Their handiwork," says the Times, "is contained in their recent best seller, ‘This Time Is Different,’ a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions."

The book and article extrapolate an interesting point – many of the disastrous decisions were between doing something and doing nothing. Most often, that something proves to be wrong. But, at times, the nothing is just as frowned upon, as in the still cooling case of Alan Greenspan.

Last weekend, I was given a Viagra by one of my former coaches who is about 70 years old and, even in his earlier years, appeared in serious need of help in the bedroom. I had made the assumption soon after arriving at school that he was getting some help downstairs and so I started asking him to hook me up, thinking it would make me into some sort of superman. After nearly 10 years of begging, he bestowed a single pill upon me, advising that I would only need a half and that really the impact for me, at my age, would be gaining the ability to rebound like a seven-footer with a 45-inch…um…vertical.

Overly excited that I had in my possession a video-gameish second life, I only managed to hold on to it for four days before I chomped down on half and headed to Lois Lane’s.

To set the scene, I had never slept with this LL before… And, actually, short of some drunken texts, I had no reason to think she would even be interested. So… Not sure if I believed that Viagra would also give me some pervasive powers of persuasion that previously lay unrealized, dormant but waiting in my hypothalamus… But it didn’t.

A sad ending, I know. However, beyond the pit in my stomach, I gathered a couple key take-aways that I’d like to impart at this time to any concerned or curious comers:

First, a word of advice to anyone who might find himself in this situation – use Viagra on a guaranteed, known, one hundred and however many percent sure thing. Don’t waste it on a girl who might not go all the way, could be boring in bed, or may be interested in something other than making it an all night eff-fest. If you know you only got two tries, do some recon without the heavy artillery.

Secondly, if you are like me, you will learn that, unfortunately, you are in that group that has an adverse reaction to Viagra.

Approximately two hours after downing the pill, I got out of her bed feeling really, really, extremely, uncomfortably, agonizingly, stupid hot and needing to pee something horrible. My bladder issues proved to be the lesser of my concerns as it turned out. I had barely made it through the doorway of the bathroom when the heat I had felt in bed reached nuclear meltdown levels. My knees went out, and so did my lights, as I hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. Potatoes hopped up on Viagra.

Not sure how long I was out, but once I pulled my head through the fog and took stock of things, I realized that I no longer had a bladder issue. But I did have soaked boxers… In the name of cleanliness, I crawled into the shower but, truth be told, I didn’t care about the kidney liquid, I really just needed to let the sweet cold water rain down on me like a thunderstorm on a prairie fire. A prairie fire with a mean hardon.

Eventually, my body worked things out for itself and I toweled off and climbed back into bed with Miss L-squared, who, as best I can tell, was never the wiser.

Thirdly, and I wish my coach had told me this as well, please remember that some things are better left to the imagination.