North Korea and China have proposed what sounds like a pretty sensible option that North Korea should end its development of nuclear weapons, the US should stop carrying out hostile military maneuvers on the North Korean border. The US immediately rejected it. Modernization program is a very clear example of how security doesn't matter. There is no gain in security but massive overkill of the adversary's deterrent capacity. The only consequence of it is to elicit the likelihood of a preemptive attack. And a preemptive attack leads to a nuclear winter world.

Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.

Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an important role, both negative and positive, in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deep understanding of the linguistic data. More positively, a formalized theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed.

You have to love that government, but hate the government that might work in your interest and that you could control. That's an interesting propaganda task, but it's been carried out very well.

The government of Israel doesn't like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.

Who wrote the Bible? Current scholarship, to my knowledge, assumes that the material that constitutes the Old Testament was put together from various oral and folk traditions (many of them going far back) in the Hellenistic period. That was one of several currents, of which the collection that formed the New Testament was another.