Confusion and more confusion No sign of any solution

There's blood and bodies everywhere, someone's ripped this lot to shreds, and there's no smart-aleck pregnant girl.

Monsieur Lapointe may be lazy, even corrupt, but you don't get all that power by being a nice guy.

For 15 straight minutes, I been watching you putting your big fat fuckin' fingers into your disgusting mouth, which is filled with God knows what kind of fuckin' bacteria, and then you take the same big fat fuckin' filthy fingers

The "fix, " as it's called, may be much more difficult for the dominant society than, say, a $50 check or a church trip to paint some graffiti-covered houses, or a suburban family donating a box of clothes they don't even want anymore.

Well, I don't know about you, but I do not want to live in a world where harsh fluorescent lights, endless lines, terrible forms to fill out and disaffected, soulless bureaucrats remind me that I am pretty damn lucky not to work here.

Broken, fallen over on this rock in the middle of March in 2000, typical Irish weather on a Wednesday -- gray, snot, tears everywhere, ridiculously self-pitying.

But, he agreed to do it, even though Daniel Cohn-Bendit's life was not in danger, just because it was a good opportunity to mock the authorities, and to show them that there's nothing more porous than borders -- and that ideas have no borders.

"I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications.

As we go around, we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down, but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is, and then combine those in a real Bayesian way.

This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep.

After another two hours of hiking, the winding trail abruptly ended at a clearing, and before us was a mass of holes that could fit into the size of a football field, and all of them were full of enslaved people laboring.

Now what happened was, in February 2008, Leah and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out for dinner, when Kobe came trotting up to them and he was salivating with saliva.

(Laughter) So you might squick, hearing me talk about sex while you're sitting in a room full of strangers -- that is normal.

So some of the people in some of the tents had dirty clothes and some of the people were in tents that were full of mosquitos that had been exposed to yellow fever.

They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter) So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York.

Reuther's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines, and we see this very clearly in the statistics.

How many times have we designated something a classic, a masterpiece even, while its creator considers it hopelessly unfinished, riddled with difficulties and flaws, in other words, a near win?

The East Germans knew, of course, that they were surrounded by informers, in a totalitarian regime that created mistrust and a state of widespread fear, the most important tools to oppress people in any dictatorship.

For five years, this spot was being ticketed, and it was confusing, and then a citizen found something, they told the city, and within a few weeks the problem was fixed.

The Earth and Mars will have looked pretty much exactly like that -- volcanoes everywhere, evaporating lakes everywhere, minerals, hot springs, and then you see those mounds on the shore of those lakes?

Not because it's monotone and concrete, but because of what it symbolizes: a monster that feeds off the rest of the country, where citizens are soldiers and slaves.

So here I am washing two and a half thousand dead, big, bloody cow bones.

Unlike the Moon -- our dead, rocky companion -- the Earth is alive, pulsing with creative and destructive forces that power its geological metabolism.

No, instead, you would be served probably a lot of porridge, some vegetable -- mostly cabbage -- some cheese, and maybe if you're lucky, the absolute delicacy of that time -- mmm, perfectly cooked fattened dormice.

Now, believe it or not, swimming around sinkholes full of dead things and cave full of bat poop isn't the smartest thing you could be doing with your life, but YOLO.

Well, Mars we thought was initially moon-like: full of craters, arid and a dead world.

Eventually, these microorganisms may force us to reconsider the way we think about our cities, bringing our inanimate concrete jungles to life.

When we raise kids this way, and I'll say we, because Lord knows, in raising my two teenagers, I've had these tendencies myself, our kids end up leading a kind of checklisted childhood.

And in the checklisted childhood, we say we just want them to be happy, but when they come home from school, what we ask about all too often first is their homework and their grades.

You give the vision a name, Bloody Face in Bunker, and call it BFIB for short.

We'd probably want the model to say it's pretty unlikely that someone would post this noise image on the left, and pretty likely that someone would post a selfie like this one on the right.

Her words to me one day were, "Why is my head so full of things to say, but before they reach my mouth, I forget what they are?"

And that's a bit embarrassing, to tell people that capital letters overwhelm you, but we really need introverts to help us do intriguing activism that attracts them rather than puts them off.

George de Mestral -- this is not bugs all over a Birkenstock -- was walking his dog in a field and got covered in burrs, sort of little prickly things, and from that came Velcro.

My father was one of those legions of fathers who, I swear, would rather drive through an alligator-infested swamp than actually ask someone for help getting back to the road.

Or attending board meetings in a T-shirt surrounded by suits, and acronyms are flying around, feeling like a five-year-old as I surreptitiously write them down in my notebook, so I can look them up on Wikipedia when I get home later.

I watch videos that show me how to make DIY love totems for Harry -- for example, a lampshade covered in photos of his face, or a key ring that states the exact time of his birth.

And indeed, unfortunately, if you navigate by needs you get a very unfocused agenda, because in these situations, needs are everywhere, but the capacity to implement change is very limited.

(Laughter) Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I'm panting and sweating, got mud up to my knees, and Miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture.

We're in 17th century Japan on the west coast, and a little, wizened monk is hurrying along, near midnight, to the crest of a small hill.