There was an international conference going on in Morocco that was a follow up for the Paris conference - to put some teeth in the Paris agreements. But on November 8, 2017 the conferences stopped. The question was, Will we survive? Not a word about it. Even more amazing, the world is looking to China to save them. The US is the wrecking machine that is destroying everything. The world is hoping that China will somehow come to the rescue.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

It's not a free trade agreement. It has virtually nothing to do with free trade... It's a protectionist agreement; it's anti free-trade.

As for climate change, it's by now widely accepted by the scientific community that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which the Earth's climate is being radically modified by human action, creating a very different planet, one that may not be able to sustain organized human life in anything like a form we would want to tolerate.

What's the point of being better than someone else?

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

The internet, since it is publicly created, ought to be publicly controlled.