Natural Selection, As It Has Operated In

The Less Sophisticated Of My Forbears Avoided Foreigners At All Costs, For The Very Good Reason That, In Their Circles, Speaking In Tongues Was Commonly A Prelude To Snake Handling. The More Tolerant Among Us Regarded Foreign Languages As A Kind Of Speech Impediment That Could Be Overcome By Willpower.

Call It 'nationalism' When You Affix A Flag To Your Car, And Leave The Word 'patriotism' For Your Efforts To Make This Country A Kinder, More Egalitarian Place, And One That Is Less Dangerous To The Rest Of The World.

We Need To Brace Ourselves For A Struggle Against Terrifying Obstacles...bot H Of Our Own Making And Imposed By The Natural World. And The First Step Is To Recover From The Mass Delusion That Is Positive Thinking.

In A Process That Had Begun In The 1980s And Suddenly Accelerated In The Early 2000s ... [t]he Peaks Of Great Wealth Grew Higher, Rising Up Beyond The Clouds, While The Valleys Of Poverty Sank Lower Into Perpetual Shadow. The Once Broad Plateau Of The Middle Class Eroded Away Into A Narrow Ledge, With The White-knuckled Occupants Holding On For Dear Life.

I Don't Know When The Cult Of Conspicuous Busyness Began, But It Has Swept Up Almost All The Upwardly Mobile, Professional Women I Know. Already, It Is Getting Hard To Recall The Days When, For Example, 'let's Have Lunch' Meant Something Other Than 'i've Got More Important Things To Do Than Talk To You Right Now.