Word: greeds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dears, those who survived, get together for high-priced reunions or shadow plays of their early luster. But thanks to the miracles of archival scholarship and entrepreneurial greed, you can still hear the Beatles, see the Rolling Stones, in their prime. The third and final Beatles Anthology double album has unpolished gems from the band's last two years together. The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, on video and CD, is a long-lost 1968 concert that Mick Jagger & Co. shared with the Who, Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull and--guess who--John Lennon and his bride Yoko...
...Victims will be just as dead, killed off in the name of greed," he said, comparing the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing to those laid off in the most recent General Motors plant closing...
...essentially pre-technological context of human evolution, impulses such as gluttony, greed, even lust, were often blunted by scarcity. Only amid the material abundance that came with agriculture and grew thereafter could self-indulgence regularly reach grotesque levels. (Sodom and Gomorrah lay in the fertile plains. Their residents sinned amid plenty while Abraham herded his flock in rustic innocence on dryer terrain.) Similarly, anger acquired a new layer of evil with the invention of knives and spears, to say nothing of guns...
Even at the level of pettier sins--lust, greed--we are naturally good at making our actions seem just. How many spouses are lured into infidelity, even desertion, by the conviction that they married the "wrong" person the first time around or that this person has "changed"? These often delusional rationales are (to put it a bit metaphorically) our genes "trying" to get us to do the kinds of things--infidelity, betrayal--that during evolution helped propel them into the next generation. Hence the human dimension of our animal behavior: it feels so rational and right. Lots of animals...
...about the plight of slaves, even though there were none in England to reciprocate his empathy. And consider the flush of compassion we feel upon witnessing, via TV, famine that is a hemisphere away. When moved by such images to donate money or canned goods--the rough opposite of greed and gluttony--we are in some Darwinian sense "misusing" our equipment of reciprocal altruism; the equipment is being "fooled" by electronic technology into (unconsciously) thinking that the victims of famine are right next door and might someday reciprocate. But that doesn't diminish the act. Our capacity to thus distort...