I am appreciating the intellectual culture here right now. It can get annoying, but it also requires that I use my mind and challenge myself. I hear great ideas from great thinkers, and wonder why they don't get executed. Great minds may disagree on purely intellectual basis, but the most common obstacle seems to be sillier things like ego, personality conflicts, or personal issues. Money and prestige do so much to color people's ideas, without them even being aware of it.

I've been thinking about what drives this need to spray all our food with pesticides. They do work, they kill what they are supposed to kill. But why do we focus on that when there are other controls and why is there so much satisfaction derived from killing something? Aside from money and subsidy structures (the biggest factor), there is something cultural. The need to control.