Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate … - Neal Stephenson

I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible — states of affairs removed from them in space and time — ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.

BOG Container Lines Inc. is the survival into modern times of Bunch of Grapes, which is an extremely old presence in the shipping industry. I mean, it's named after a tavern in Boston from the 1600s that was named after a tavern in London that dates back to at least the 1200s...I'm still waiting for some query results to come back so that we can discover their inevitable connection to the Fuggers. I don't even know why I bother.

Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.