We are all of us richer than we think we are.
When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.
Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending.
Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming.
The Western front is the important one in this war - the intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.
I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. - is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.
If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-12 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3. 2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit.
Where was it ever promised us that life on this earth can ever be easy, free from conflict and uncertainty, devoid of anguish and wonder and pain? Those who seek the folly of unrelieved 'happiness'-who fear moods, who shun solitude, who do not know the diginity of occasional depression-can find bliss easily enough: in tranquilizing pills, or in senility. The purpose of life is not to be happy.
Anything can happen with a razor.
As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families.
In a lot of senses, things are definitely changing in my life, and with what's going on around me. But I still feel like the writing process is as intimate as it as before, if not more. Because I need my time more than I had before.