I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function - that's important, and fine, and I support it.

As we [with Edward Herman] discuss there [in Manufacturing Consent] and elsewhere, recognition of the importance of "manufacturing consent" has become an ever more central theme in the more free societies.

The Pashtuns in particular are kind of trapped. They've never accepted the Durand Line nor has any Afghan government historically accepted it.

Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.

If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.

Somebody puts up some weird thing and somebody else thinks yeah maybe that's the way things work and pretty soon you have some cult going. Its not the fault of the internet, it's the fault of a social and culture system that doesn't educate people properly and in fact on purpose. They don't want to educate people properly.

The US is to an unusual extent a business-run society, where short-term concerns of profit and market share displace rational planning.