This line from the Economist in an article about how ‘green’ policies have become (at least in rhetorical terms) mainstream made me smile:

The shared level of commitment and wonkiness is, in its way, inspiring (though it must be a bit dispiriting for the Green party, which to stay distinctively unelectable has had to move towards a thoroughgoing social-justice agenda funded with tax increases no-one else would touch)

This is a really good graph showing how much the PIIGS economies owe to each other and to Britain, France and Germany. Really scary to see how much of the debt is owed even within Europe.

This Der Spiegel interview with Col. Gaddafi throws up some truly mad lines. Personal favourites include a strange burst of what appears to be sense (or at least a technically accurate statement):

I don’t think that Ahmadinejad means the violent destruction of Israel when he says this. I think he is thinking of a new democratic state structure to replace the current state of Israel — on the territory of what is geographically Palestine. No one is talking about throwing Jews into the sea.

but he quickly runs back to his regular self when talking about Angela Merkel

She is a strong personality. More like a man than a woman. But I have never had a conversation with her

and possibly the most revealing insight ever into somebody’s personality:

SPIEGEL: Where do you get your facts? Do you watch television? Do you read books?
Gadhafi: I get most of them from the Internet. I constantly sit at my computer

…. Gadaffi is basically an internet troll cast as world leader? The more you think about it the more sense it makes….

But people do not easily escape from the idea of progress. We’re drawn to the idea that we are the end point, the pinnacle not only of the hominids but of all animal life. Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.

It’s a moot point really, but interesting nevertheless. And there’s definitely a science-fiction novel in it one imagines.

(Oh, wait. There is.) (Kinda, as it’s about Neanderthal’s rather than Boksops but…)

Christian anti-evolutionism, at that time, wasn’t like modern creationism. It wasn’t joined at the hip to insanities about a six-thousand-year-old Earth. It was a protest – valid enough in its own terms – against quite specious conclusions about the inevitability of human progress drawn from evolutionary thinking. (In the hands of, say, C. S. Lewis, this protest was quite compatible with public acceptance of – and private reservations about – evolution as a fact.) Even young-earthism started out (to stretch the principle of charity a little too far) at least presenting itself as as an alternate hypothesis, which could in principle be accepted even by atheists. (One can idly imagine a planet populated by all the organisms in the fossil record, devastated by a catastrophe in the recent past, leaving a spurious record of succession in the rocks, and with the actual evolution having occurred on another planet or in the deep pre-Cambrian.) But the evidence just didn’t stack up, and the creation/catastrophe argument has moved from claims of hard facts on the table to waffle about ‘presuppositions’ and ‘world-views’, in an involuntary admission of evidential bankruptcy. The creationist style of thought, preeningly self-blinkered and paranoid, has become a watering-can for the tree of crazy. Of course the outright denialist strand of thinking was there all along, but why did it become dominant, and widespread, after the 1960s?

Essentially, MacLeod points to the move away of evolutionary thinking from ‘evolution as a moral force’ to our current ‘amoral’ understanding of evolution as the reason for this change and the blow-back from religious/creationist groups. Its an interesting article anyway so have a look.