Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.

How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.

That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.

There's not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.

Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.