In a moment of crisis, of which there are all too many, Russian military planners may conclude that lacking a deterrent, the only hope of survival is a first strike - which means the end for all of us.

If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.

Democracy, in any rational form, also imposes conditions on majority rule. That's what the Bill of Rights is about, for example.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state...

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components... the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component.

U.S. international and security policy . . . has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call "the Fifth Freedom," understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it's been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it's over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas.