No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

I'm not a nice person.

But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.

Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods; that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.