Soren Molander

“A recent UN survey found that agroecology projects in fifty-seven countries have increased crop yields an average of 80 percent, with some being pushed up to 116 percent. One of the most successful of those is the push-pull system, developed to help Kenyan maize farmers deal with pestilence, invasive parasitic weeds, and poor soil conditions. Without getting too technical, push-pull is an intercropping system in which farmers plant specific plants between rows of corn. Some plants release odors that insects find unpleasant. (They “push” insects away.) Others, like sticky molasses grass, “pull” the insects in, acting as a kind of natural flypaper. Using this simple process, farmers have increased crop yields by 100 to 400 percent.”
― Peter H. Diamandis, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

“Sometimes things that don’t happen are as important in explaining subsequent events as those that do, as Sherlock Holmes said of the dog that failed to bark. In Latin America, there also was a dog that didn’t bark: the large-scale and continuous political violence that was so critical in shaping Western European states and national identity simply didn’t convulse the New World. On the one hand, this was a good thing: Latin America has been a much more peaceful continent than either Europe or Asia. On the other hand, its political institutions developed more slowly as a result, and the older forms of authoritarian government as well as the social inequalities on which they were based persisted for much longer. EXPLOITATION”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

“A little girl came home from school after an early lesson in the evolution of humans. She asked her mother, “Do we come from apes?” The mother paused and said, “Well, in a sense. We arose from monkeys and apes.” The little girl asked, “Well, where do monkeys come from?” The mother thought for a moment and replied, “The Kansas State Board of Education.”
― J. Anderson Thomson, Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith

“In many ways, the system of government, taxation and military organization developed by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the envy of Western Europe.”
― Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World