I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

Internal security means something. It means war against your own population.

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

As far as Bernie Sanders is concerned, he is a decent, honest person, and I supported him. What he means by socialism is New Deal Liberalism. In fact, his actual policies would not have been a great surprise to General Eisenhower. The fact that this is called a "political revolution" is a sign of how far to the right the political spectrum has shifted, mainly in the last 30 years since the neoliberal programs began to be instituted. What he was calling for was a restoration of something like New Deal Liberalism, which is a very good thing.

There is no evolutionary pressure to create minds capable of forming sciences; it just happened. Evolutionary pressure has not led to higher rates of reproduction for people capable of solving scientific problems or creating new scientific ideas. So if, in fact, the science-forming capacities evolved for other reasons, it would not be too surprising if those particular structures that have developed proved to be rather special in their nature, reflecting the contingencies of their evolution or the working of physical law.

The US is also unusual in the enormous scale of religious fundamentalism. The impact on understanding of the world is extraordinary. In national polls almost half of those surveyed have reported that they believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago (or less) and that man shares no common ancestor with the ape. There are similar beliefs about the Second Coming.