America has always had a healthy anti-intellectual streak, but making that fringe mainstream is proving disastrous.

To *muse* is to think, and just as to be amoral is to be not moral, to be amused is to be not thinking. Of the media we consume, how much of it is designed to get us thinking, and how much is designed to amuse us?

The mark of the badass is relentless determination in the face of menacing odds.