Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s just fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate.

I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation; plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.

The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.

We must present a national persona of being irrational and vindictive, because that's going to terrify people. And then, they'll back off. And this is not [Donald] Trump, this is [Bill] Clinton. It's not [Richard] Nixon, you know. We have to be irrational and vindictive, because that's going to frighten people.

[Moral responsibilities] has nothing particular to do with academia, except insofar as those within it tend to be unusually privileged in the respects just mentioned.

Legalizing marijuana would make a lot of sense, I don't think there's a single case of marijuana overdose on record and tens of millions of users. It's much less dangerous than alcohol, for example.

CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it.