Modernism (personal reality) kills

On the eve of a BBC1 documentary on the life of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, Sir David has criticised the centuries-old idea running through the Judaeo-Christian tradition which assumes God gave the Earth to man to exploit and use in whatever way he saw fit in order to populate the world.

Sir David, 82, said the devastation of the environment has its roots in the first words that God supposedly uttered to humankind, as detailed in Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

"That basic notion, that the world is there for us and if it doesn't actually serve our purposes, it's dispensable, that has produced the devastation of vast areas of the land's surface.

"Of course it's a gross oversimplification, but that's why Darwinism, and the fact of evolution, is of great importance because it is that attitude which has led to the devastation of so much, and we are in the situation that we are in," he told the science journal Nature.

Independent

Just like a scientist: identify the hammer, not the hand that swings it!

The problem is the idea of a personal reality. I am human, therefore I gain the right to believe in my own reality and judge earth accordingly.

From that comes: we're all equal, because I'd hate to admit someone has better judgment skills than I do.

That in turn unravels into "no one can tell me what to do," and because that's bratty, it becomes "I am oppressed by the law / the money / the Gods."

And so we have a huge mass of people united only by "I only wanna do what I wanna do."

France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.

It's a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor, vulnerable states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma of crash, slump and meltdown looks graver.

Exactly 20 years ago, in serial revolutionary rejoicing, they ditched communism to put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed.

The Guardian

Ah, idiots. So resourceful in always finding someone to blame, thus obscuring reality.

They ditched 1968-style socialism in the 1980s because it was convenient.

Now they want to ditch capitalism for 1968-version-2.0-cum-Obama socialism, and are hoping that's the magic bullet.

All these buttons, just gotta press the right one!

Maybe look at the whole of society for a change, and identify where it's gone off course? Well, that brings us to the troubling realization that we're not all kings in our own domain... but it would save us... but it offends us personally, so it's taboo.

More than one society has died of its own taboos.

"Sarkozy gives money to the people who created this crisis, but what about the man in the street?" shouted Antoine Laurent, 20, a history student at the Sorbonne University.

Behind him a group chanted: "Stop the sackings, it's not up to workers to pay for bankers."

The Telegraph

No, dummies... it's not that easy.

You need to build infrastructure.

You're looking at a barren farm and saying "But the farmer got fed!"... yes, because if you're a farmer and you produce 20% of what crop you normally have, you better eat it, because no one else is going to give you anything.

These entitlement brats think we can just hand out cash and there are no consequences. Durrr, that cash has to come from somewhere -- if we just hand it out, we devalue it and so your $500 handout becomes $5 in the "old money." (We saw that happen in Mexico in the 1980s, remember?)

World leaders are in retreat as well. Sarkozy will do nothing radical because we all saw what happened to George W. Bush. Even if what you do is not that bad, the media and the great masses of clueless will fawn and howl and whine and riot until you're out of office, replaced by a panderer.

Behind the plastic smile of Barack Obama, for example, there's a simple Bill Clintonian truth: figure out what the polls say, and give it to them -- the undifferentiated masses -- because you never stay in power by supporting those with a clue.

You stay in power by supporting those who are clueless, and so demand a lot, and you can give it to them and not tell them it's going to be worth $5 tomorrow.

You stay in power, and the economy slowly collapses inward, and the next guy in office needs to deal with it.

But you? You've made the right decision, personally: you got your $25 million career and you can now afford to join the ultra-rich and leave behind your shattered homeland as it careens into third-world status.

Watch the USA and Europe do it.

What's more fascinating is the people who aren't rioting. The engineers at home designing breakaway civilizations. The country folk building hamlets. The hackers conspiring toward a technological new world order that could hide itself in the midst of the decay.

That's tomorrow's story. The fall of the West is yesterday's, in case you don't get the T.S. Eliot News and World Report.