Hegemony is not defined by rivers or conventional borders - it's dominance, it's influence. So we get to decide in our hearts, are we in Iraq to help restore something, or are we there to establish dominance? How can you torture people and say, well, that's just a few bad apples in our culture?

The light that stopped the night felt like forgiveness.

There's a marketing scheme that tells you that pregnancy and child rearing will make you into a moron, that your kids are only happy when you're buying them stuff. It's hard being a parent, but I laugh a lot and smile a lot and really enjoy it. The ratio of laughter to sadness is higher. There's part of me that wants to broadcast that. Parenting only affirmed what I already cared about, and that's good.

There are a lot of people out there who are exactly half extrovert and half introvert and they love to be extroverts as long as they have enough time to go off and figure it all out.

You know how people say they're either like a cat or a dog? I feel like a cat. I just want to be alone. Isn't that weird? It's a lot to take in.

I would push for more production and Steve Miller would say, "Why do you want to have more production when you have real songs? You don't want to cover up the song."

Empires are doomed. They become more diffuse, more broke, demagogues rule, and so I was just pointing out some similarities between past empires and what's going on right now. They all have had to apply more and more harsh rhetoric of superiority and divine right to justify the building of hegemony.