With rap music, because it's all so on the street, you get treated like a street cat: "All right, you've been eatin' enough, you're fat, get out of the way now and let somebody else come by. "
The only thing we should prohibit is violence.
The catch-all phrase "the war on terrorism", in all honesty, has no more meaning than if one wants to wage a war against "criminal gangsterism". Terrorism is a tactic. You can't have a war against a tactic. It's deliberately vague and non-definable in order to justify and permit perpetual war anywhere and under any circumstance.
Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.
I lean toward a flat tax. But I want to make it real flat, like ZERO.
People should not be able to vote to take away the rights of others.
When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we, in essence, accept that the state owns our bodies.
Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long.
I served seven years as the chair of the Princeton economics department where I had responsibility for major policy decisions, such as whether to serve bagels or doughnuts at the department coffee hour.
Simple molecules combine to make powerful chemicals. Simple cells combine to make powerful life-forms. Simple electronics combine to make powerful computers. Logically, all things are created by a combination of simpler, less capable components. Therefore, a supreme being must be in our future, not our origin. What if "God" is the consciousness that will be created when enough of us are connected by the Internet?!!
. . . an opportunity to allow the bees in one's bonnet to buzz even more noisily than usual.