H.G.Wells On Haggling

The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality.... I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking.

But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy.

You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on.... I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail.

Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!

H.G.Wells, Tono-Bungay

Bega On Polygamous Monogamy

a little bit of Monica in my life
a little bit of Erica by my side
a little bit of Rita is all I need
a little bit of Tina is what I see
a little bit of Sandra in the sun
a little bit of Mary all night long
a little bit of Jessica here I am
a little bit of you makes me your man

Audio Sample: Amazon

Yudkowsky On Evil (Overcoming Bias)

When you accurately estimate the Enemy's psychology - when you know what is really in the Enemy's mind - that knowledge won't feel like landing a delicious punch on the opposing side. It won't give you a warm feeling of righteous indignation. It won't make you feel good about yourself. If your estimate makes you feel unbearably sad, you may be seeing the world as it really is. More rarely, an accurate estimate may send shivers of serious horror down your spine, as when dealing with true psychopaths, or neurologically intact people with beliefs that have utterly destroyed their sanity (Scientologists or Jesus Camp).

Eddie Setser On Divine Omnipresence

There were seven Spanish Angels,
At the alter of the Sun.
They were prayin' for the lovers,
In the valley of the gun.

"Seven Spanish Angels"
Audio Sample: Amazon

On Fruit Labelling

Stephen Collins: I'm Willing to Die to Get Rid of Those Little Stickers on Fruit:

We have a national mania for trying to protect ourselves from, well, everything. This one goes too far. Proponents of fruit-labeling will tell me that if such labeling saves even one life, it's worth it. I dispute that. I'm not so sure. Maybe we need to sacrifice someone occasionally on the altar of common f**king sense.

[...] Better to draw lots, sacrifice the occasional consumer, and let the rest go free. They will thank you, the trees will thank you. Makers of little tiny fruit stickers and shrink-wrap will not.

Meganut notices in Food & Wine:

The numbers tell you how the fruit was grown. Conventionally grown fruit has four digits; organically grown fruit has five and starts with a nine; genetically engineered has five numbers and starts with an eight.

Walter Wink On The Myth Of Redemptive Violence

I began to examine the structure of cartoons, and found the same pattern repeated endlessly: an indestructible hero is doggedly opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible villain. Nothing can kill the hero, though for the first three quarters of the comic strip or TV show he (rarely she) suffers grievously and appears hopelessly doomed, until miraculously, the hero breaks free, vanquishes the villain, and restores order until the next episode.

Something about this mythic structure rang familiar. Suddenly I remembered: this cartoon pattern mirrored one of the oldest continually enacted myths in the world, the Babylonian creation story (the Enuma Elish) from around 1250 BCE.

[...]

The biblical myth in Genesis 1 is diametrically opposed to all this (Genesis 1, it should be noted, was developed in Babylon during the Jewish captivity there as a direct rebuttal to the Babylonian myth). The Bible portrays a good God who creates a good creation. Chaos does not resist order. Good is prior to evil. Neither evil nor violence is part of the creation, but enter later, as a result of the first couple’s sin and the connivance of the serpent (Genesis 3). A basically good reality is thus corrupted by free decisions reached by creatures. In this far more complex and subtle explanation of the origins of things, violence emerges for the first time as a problem requiring solution.

[Heavily edited from Wink's Facing the Myth Of Redemptive Violence]