What happens to a nation that’s suffered a great crime? What happens when the wrong can’t be made right?

“We are primates. We evolved in hierarchical primate groups. We can do hierarchy. But we really resent a bullying alpha male. And you see this, boy, do you see this in the Tea Party, where the bullying alpha male is the government. And it harkens back to the American Revolution and liberty, liberty, liberty. You see on the Left, too, where the bully is the corporations and the rich, and we need the government to protect us. So, there it’s the same psychology, only a different villain.”

“Ice instruments have a more detailed sound than wood, say, which absorbs the vibrations from the strings and dampens the sound,” he says.

“Over billions of years this gives Mercury a 1-in-100 chance of crossing the orbit of Venus. There is a further 1-in-500 chance that if Mercury goes nuts, it will also perturb the orbit of Venus or Mars enough for one of them to hit Earth—or miss it by several thousand miles, which would be almost as bad.”