When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in a time when growing up middle-class in America meant there would be jobs for my parents, good schools for me to prepare myself for a career, and, if I worked hard and played by the rules, a chance for me to do anything I wanted.

There's an appeal to the American sense of exceptionalism, that we're morally superior, as way to not be self-critical. I think that's a bit dangerous.

I believe the earth's climate is changing, but I think it's changing for natural variation reasons and I think mankind has been adapting to climate as long as man has walked the earth.

Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

Belize has a tropical climate and is quite affordable and is developing a reputation as an inexpensive Hawaii. If you want to hide away someplace that is extremely low-key, Placencia is perfect. San Pedro is more touristy and modernized.

For all of the hurtling towards climate change, there's also a lot more understanding of it than there was when we were kids. They don't call environmentalists tree huggers any more, so there's hope!