If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S.

While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.

We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid.

In fact, the capitalist class in the '50s was sort of part of a social contract. It was part of the tenor of the times.

If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.