Varlawend: Mysteries Among the Stars

Love is a lavender scented bubble bath of pure oxytocin overlooking a rustic room dimly lit by smoldering magma and golden ambrosia. It's massaging bed sheets made from french silk pie clouds under a cool night breeze, where it beguiles with hypnotic fae folk lullabies, murmuring me into the transcendent dream gnosis of serenity. It's the cuteness of fluffy kitten puppy dog eyes made manifest physically and abstractly in the very air around me, the nudging grace of divine nature. It thrusts me into ecstatic communion with all, cajoling my entire world into suspending its frivolous wars with an everlasting mutual embrace. It's a steam that thaws my aching heart in even the most bitter tempest, rising up through my chest as if through a heretofore hermetically sealed love potion enduring under the frosty Arctic tundras. Gazing upon its euphoria lifts me nakedly into divine rays of the sun, divulging all my depths to the court of luminosity, presided by all of Nature's Lo...

I'm currently weighing a case I've been considering about the concept of monopolies. It started from this interesting NYTimes article asking the question of whether it makes sense to break up companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon: https://www.nytimes.com/…/is-it-time-to-break-up-google.htm… First, it points to a 10 year shift in the 5 most powerful companies. In 2007, it was Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Citigroup, and Shell Oil. Nowadays, Microsoft is still up there, but the other players are Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. It explains their degree of market share in their respective domains, and points out that they aggressively acquire other companies as well, so their growth doesn't show any signs of languishing. Besides "Natural" monopolies like water/telecommunications/etc., the argument seems to be that other kinds of monopolies, massive consolidations of private power are dangerous. Examples of this can be seen with the 2008 b...