the fact that they stole their whole shtick from Woody Guthrie and the coal-mining bards. While the alternative nation meows about personal fashion angst, the Appalachian nation still sings about unemployment.

I've realized there are far more efficient and devastating methods of disturbing people than merely sloshing around in the pigpen with obvious, profane, scatological, flat-brained, grade-school offensiveness.

I was exposed to violence while I was still in the womb - my father punched my mother in the stomach while she was pregnant with me.

I still partially suffer from the delusion that if you explain things logically and systematically, most people will abandon their emotional prejudices and respond to logic. But I don't suffer from that delusion as wholeheartedly as I did in the past. So if there's a fundamental difference, it's that I've accepted the fact that most imbeciles will never 'get' me and I shouldn't allow myself to get so upset about it.

Governments throughout the English-speaking sphere are creating and then ratcheting the torque on "hate-speech" laws with frightening eagerness.

You could paper the globe with evidence that there are demonstrable cognitive and physical disparities between what are crudely called human "races." But you could fit all the evidence of innate equality on your pinkie fingernail with room to spare.

Equality is a nice idea, but it's entirely impossible to prove.