The United Nations is to convene its general assembly for an emergency session to discuss the Israeli offensive in Gaza, following two days of talks at the organisation's security council.
The head of the UN agency in Gaza running the school that was attacked by Israel forces has rejected claims that Hamas fighters were inside the converted shelter.
Pakistani officials have acknowledged for the first time that the lone surviving suspected gunman from November's attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai attacks is of Pakistani origin.
Police in Turkey have detained three retired generals and dozens of others in raids across the country, as they broadened their investigation into an alleged plot by secularists to overthrow Turkey's government.
Mankind's watershed is the twentieth century. In his millions of years of forward evolutionary process, man today is fast undergoing irreversible genetic changes—rather genetic degenerations and degradation, a backward evolutionary process —that are highly detrimental to his existence, as a species. Man may claim to have developed into a stage of being the most intelligent, ‘progressive’ and free in history and assert that nothing can happen without his knowledge and consent. But the reality is that man has never been as much defenseless against his own genetic and intellectual degenerations and degradations as it is happening today. And the most tragic part of this gruesome development is that it is happening today not only without his knowledge and consent but also happening under his false, suicidal notion that it is the most welcome human ‘advancement’ in his evolutionary process.
Now, coming to the nature of genetic and intellectual degenerations that it is happening to mankind, I may give just an example of the pattern or prototype of it: this development is as much ‘progressive’ or ‘advancing’ in the evolutionary process as is the scientific development of a chicken from being a natural chicken into broiler chicken or of a natural tomato into a hybrid tomato.
Gaia is a living, conscious organism that has been breathing for billions of years. Gaia, evolving to greater self-awareness and through millions of years of the natural evolutionary process, helped bring forth, with nature’s guidance, Homo Sapiens. Continuing the evolutionary process, man has been transforming the planet for the last couple of centuries into a machine (cyber) and biotic/geologic (planet) hybrid. This is a transformation that has been dramatically accelerating in this century.
Today man has now started destroying Gaia on the wholesale. Mankind, lacking true appreciation for life's oneness, is consciously and irrevocably destroying life for immediate "gain." He races to Armageddon, with reckless and willful abandon--seemingly as a victim of forces beyond his control. Machines, worked and later accelerated by market forces, have helped transform Gaia into a global, intertwined and highly interdependent information nexus that has "replaced" physical with virtual space. Machines have also become harbingers of annihilation and Gaia is threatened with massive extinction of life.
Machines as the only fellow beings of Man If we can believe advertisements, what matters to man today most is the personal ownership of machinery: blending machines, cooking machines, driving machines, picture machines, sound machines, tooth-brushing machines, computing machines, machines to kill insects, deliver intimacy, send messages through wires or the naked air, entertainment machines, shooting machines, and many more mechanical extensions of our physical self. Indirect control over even more ambitious machine seems to matter a lot, too: flying machines, bombing machines, heart and lung machines, voting machines, and a great variety of other mechanical creations. On an overview of the whole human history, written and unwritten, it can be seen that, for millions of years and as late as up to the onset of modern machine age, nature and all that are in nature, including humans, animal, plants and other natural environment were the only fellow beings of man. But, with the onset of industrial revolution, colonialism and globalization, the equation drastically changed. Today the only fellow beings of men are machines, which have subsequently acquired such leader status that they have not only made man a “tool” of machines but also have badly polluted, vitiated and are also on the fast track of send packing the once fellow beings of man, namely humans, animals and other natural environment into extinction. For example, today the world has only less than one in a hundredth of animals and plants species that it had at the beginning of modern age. And the momentum of loss of diversity is fast accelerating.
THE WAY OF INDUSTRIALISM is the way of the machine. To the industrial mind, a machine is not merely an instrument for doing work or amusing ourselves or making war; it is an explanation of the world and of life. Because industrialism cannot understand living things except as machines, and can grant them no value that is not utilitarian, it conceives of farming and forestry as forms of mining; it cannot use the land without abusing it. Naturally, the way of industrialism is the way of business which puts profit at the top of all priorities. . Apparently business interests of every industry, for example, pharmaceutical industry, puts profit before our health -- there is no interest in prevention-- under the current system it would simply be bad for business to have a healthy population.
Spiritless, Synthetic Human Beings It is an insult to modern man to describe him as more mechanical than human, more artificial than original, more repeating than anything new or spontaneous. But the reality is that, as part and parcel of a society built solely on modern mechanical sciences and a market bereft of soul, modern man is 99 percent mechanical.
When hammer is the only tool in your hand, then you will see every problem as a nail. When the ‘soulless’ mechanization of modern science is the only tool in the hands of modern man and when man has helplessly become the ‘tool of his own tools’, there in no surprise that SUPRESSION of life – truth - has become the hallmark of the whole modern problem solving process by the market. The greatest problem of modern man’s problem solving process is that today man has not only to depend on this same methodology that created all his problems in the first place, but also to depend on the same type of people, namely, the experts and professionals who helped to create these problems in the first place. To cap it all, the sordid modern dilemma is that, while seeking rescue, modern man is looking towards the most vulnerable rescuer - the present hi-tech market systems. Due to our extreme dependency on machines, we are completely unprepared to deal with them being used against us. People in developed countries live in large population centers and rely on sophisticated technologies, so that there is a possibility of their being vulnerable to a large-scale collapse of interlocking systems of transportation, communication, water supply, and food distribution. As for the grave problems associated with conventional (western) medicine, ultimately, it will collapse upon its own blatant failures. It is worth noting, in this regard, that most civilizations seem to fall because of human-made disasters. What was once an idea of hope and the birth of a new age has so quickly turned into a horrible form of extinction.
Intelligent Machines designed on the lines of corporate intelligence have taken over the universe and enslaved the human race. The words that describe life are few and pathetic. Ever since expert systems were created, we as human beings have become lab rats locked in cages with no light. Our minds have been implanted with ‘chips’ (long mechanized conditioning) that will not allow us do anything humanistic and ensure that ignorance controls our dismal existence. Typical Modern Man is a semi-human "thing" that has lost control over his life and the ability to rationalize. He is completely alone and full of hate. If only our forefathers had stopped their selfish, unconscious, power driven quest for blind mechanization a hundred years ago, we would not be where we are today. The mind-set of industrial culture is conditioned by the cult of scientism. The reductionist view that matter is the only reality has become the cultural "common-sense" view. . Science has become the bible by which truth and reality is verified by a mass culture influenced by years of classroom conditioning. Love, creativity, hope, consciousness, in fact much of the real non-material reality of life and activity has been relegated to insignificance by the cult of science. Materialist science, is a cult. It is a mass social institution and also a linear and compartmentalized method of knowing; only that the knowledge imparted is thus partial and fragile. The cult of scientism and empire has brought us to the brink of the death of the planet and the cult figures have no adequate response
Mechanical (man-made) laws can protect man only so long as he remains strictly mechanical, that is, lifeless – as controllable as any synthetic matter, like computer or plastic with which you can work or mould to any shape. Otherwise all these modern scientific laws and development have only limited role in human life. Therefore mechanization can make ‘good’ progress only by progressively killing life forms. Therefore the present mode of speedy progress is determined by the largest number of life being made lifeless.
It is the shocking peculiarity of our age that today the world cannot change its course even if we consider this as the only way out to save man from the fast impending catastrophes. It is far more ironic that even the present global leader, America, cannot do it, despite the fact that the finest brains there and elsewhere on the planet are thinking just on that lines.
Modern mankind is rotting in its own self-made concentration camp. Human society, as a whole, is unable to act while the society burns. It is truly a sad state of affairs, rotting away the very pillars of all human instincts.
The highly globalized pyramidal market system has its allegiance only to its masterly global juggernaut. Today every business enterprise (and every human enterprise today tends to be commercial), be it in the developed or in the less developed nations, be it a big M.N.C. or a small local enterprise, be it in the name of any particular class, creed, religion or region, be it in food grains production or in education or mass media or any other, all have their lifelines of existence and progress closed linked to their rapport and loyalty--overtly or covertly, as the situations warrant--to the dictates of the global market force that literally exists as the giant globalized pyramidal market systems. Today there are more unwritten laws and other hidden agendas in every market systems than they are there as written or published. One enterprise can cross the line of these hidden practices only at the peril of its own existence. Today every system, including religion, is in the custody of its own money force. If Christ happened to live today, Coco Cola would definitely have, by sponsoring Christianity, bullied him to become its top brand ambassador. Modern man claims to have become independent once the British colonialist left their ‘empire’ without sun-set’, but his independence is meaningless so far has he remains dependent on this highly globalize pyramidal market system. Today man may exhibit some sort of an allegiance or patriotism to his nation, to his religion, to his near and dear human beings, but so far as his business enterprise is concerned, his existence (commercialized in one way or the other) is concerned , that has its allegiance only to make profit, and thus to his enterprise’s global master juggernaut which makes him do this role by hook or by crook through alliance of such global juggernaut like W.T.O. or other global market mafia net works. The first is that globalization is a juggernaut that is out of control, dominated by a corporate world system that is able to shift resources to any part of the globe regardless of national interests. The second is that globalization is destroying the nation-state. Leaders are found worthy or wanting—conveniently – but the forces behind remain intact and permanent, as if they (the mechanized market forces) are above people and democracy. Thus today, we are actually fighting our own follies and weakness. We are fighting an enemy which is not only not a human being but also is much inferior to us in respect of size and strength—even less than one percent to our equivalent. Yet it succeeds by its sheer manipulative strength of blurring our vision, and its capacity in instilling persistent fear psychosis, and in presenting itself as the only super ‘savior’. Our enemy is the myth that, thanks to human weakness for short cut approach, has systematically worked itself to become a giant market mechanical global edifice at the lead. We have allowed industry to subvert the rules of science. We have watched quietly as governments and academics have colluded with industry to hide information critical to the people. We are witnessing the birth of a powerful multi-billion dollar surveillance lobby consisting of an army of special interest groups, hi-linked lawyers, lobbyists and high-tech firms with wares to sell.
Mechanization is a basic de-life or anti-life process Today, the single day that man lives on this planet pollutes it much more than what it used to do during the total period when man lived for tens of thousands of years during the pre-modern era. As this is a highly accelerating process, the one day that man is going to live some ten years later is sure to pollute earth more than what it used to get polluted in a million years before. Millions of years of human life on planet earth did not produce as much pollution as it is producing in a single year now. Now, as the pollution crescendo keeps building up on chain reactions from a million known and unknown varieties and sources, it can be safely concluded that either the planet is aging prematurely due this toxification process or the nature is devising ways to get rid of this erratic, irritant species called modern man, by rendering him sick – both physically and mentally. Mechanization, as the main plank of modern civilizational progress, is slow but sure death for all life forms. Man lived for million years without any mechanical laws. From tribal to urban, and from nature’s law to man-made laws, man’s foray into the world of machine during the last 200 years seems to be much short-lived from all indications. Man means many things to nature, but machine, it is proving to be many things against nature. As there is nothing mechanical in nature, machines have become anti-nature. However, market only helped this anti-nature process by proliferating machinations. Man falls from the Evolutionary Tree: As money replaced love, machine replaced man, and as commodification and isolation of man from nature having become the order of the day, man seems to be at last falling from the vast evolutionary tree. There was a time when men of great mind moved the world and the world too moved with them. And thus we got Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and the like. Today, the world does not however move when men of even greater minds move, but it does move when machines move. And thus we have today what we can call modernism and its latest society, the Global Village, which is none other than the most mechanized society in human history whose only and whose only deities are MACHINES, the moving spirit of which is MONEY.
Today, because man has become such a liability to himself and has became a parasite that even as a single human being, he is unable to perform the role of man, and thus he has become unfit to live in nature.
Today, man is no longer a human being; he is Modern. Modern man no longer is part of nature; he is partly natural and partly mechanical. Man gave birth to machine. Man and machine gave birth to a new man-machine called the modern man. The process of machination continued to the full mechanization of mankind to machine-kind, rendering the age fully mechanical. However no machine can sustain--let alone reproduce--itself. Every machine has an inbuilt program for its own destruction. The modern man-machine is no exception, which as unique species, is on the verge of extinction in this way.
Today man is for his systems, by his systems and of his systems. Thus he can view his very body as only a machine. For example, in the worldview of Cartesian medicine, the body functions like a machine. Disease in the body is seen as a malfunctioning of biological mechanisms, akin to the breakdown of a clock. Practitioners concentrate on small parts, such as genes, individual organs and external invaders. Their role is defined as intervening to repair the malfunctioning of these mechanisms. Patient health, like nature in general in the Cartesian view, is seen as needing to be “managed” by experts. Expertise is found in quantifiable technique and mechanical knowledge, where the same symptoms in different people are treated in the same way.
Science, around which modern systems/machines work, understands only the surface of the verifiable seen or unseen matter, and even that too only very partially. It ignores emotions, feelings, psychological states, forces, powers, and ultimately the spirit's function in the workings of life in the universe. In essence it ignores life in the name of verifiable facts of matter. Thus it misses out on 95-99% of the workings, laws, and principles of existence. A true Science of Life would include all that the scientist currently strives for and all that he could strive for if he incorporated all of these other elements into his equations. If he wishes to have success and knowledge and insight 1000 times beyond his current work, he must embrace all of these subjective elements in his "objective" reality. His current objectivity is the wildest subjective superstition of the surface, i.e. matter only. It can be seen that the current science misses the habits, attitudes, emotions, sensations, intentions, inner forces, will, and other higher mental and spiritual formulations of individual and collective existence when developing its conclusions about how life works. The intricate web of these forces is what enables the movement, patterns, and formulations of life; as opposed to only the measurable verifiable, provable material matter, seen or unseen.
From natural selection-prone evolution to science-directed evolution, science at last, seems to play the role of God. But using science to control reality is as fragile as trying to arrest one’s shadow. Reality is cyclical, multidimensional while science is only linear, single dimensional, hypothetical and momentary like photo or image. Thus science helps us to produce only images or duplications. Science emancipate man the way an air-conditioned room or a cinema comfort him; the moment he is detached from these artificial environment, nature or natural environment becomes a curse to him.
Modern man may be compared to the animals grown in the zoo––by getting synthetically fed, artificially clothed and synthetically housed etc. Like the torturous conditions of animals making mockery of their live natural characteristics, man too ends up a pathetic caricature of his once natural qualities––he was once ‘the crown of all creations.’ In the controlled mechanized society of the wired global village, he has been made the tool of his own tool (expert high-tech systems).
As science bases its principle and success on the imperatives of repeatability and similarity in their controlled circumstances, which simply is not possible in a perpetually evolving state of live natural world, science tries to maintain a controlled environment––mechanical world––to effect repeatability and similarity. Computers work more ‘efficiently’ in air-conditioned rooms. Highly regimented society succeeds mechanically and is fit to be the super technological society like the ‘developed’ world, the home of modern sciences. Science is all laws (equations) made by man. But what is a law? A man-made temporary social device of control. It includes physical and social laws. Ethics are grown-up laws that have stood the test of social time. Laws are modeled on the developments of visible natural patterns. It includes the social an physical patterns. The laws thus framed inevitably have lots of differences––rather drawbacks––from the real natural patterns. In the natural pattern much is not visible to human perception apart from the limitations of human sensory organs in perceiving realities. Thus man-made laws are highly fragile and limited in coping with realities. Every machine–formulae or equation––is basically a trick on nature because it is a copy on nature, a shortcut of the real formulae or equation of nature’s working. But because this man-made equation or machine is unable to copy nature at every step of the nature in the perpetual evolutionary process it simply tries to arrest nature or control nature. To know the workings of life one must include matter, life, mind, and spirit. Anything short of this brings limitation, error, ignorance, falsehood, and even evil. Working from this verifiable, proof-only material surface status creates a negative result for every positive advance, and is a danger to the community of man. Humor, Love, Courage, Truth, Hope and Compassion, are the most powerful tools that man ought to have and which modernism severely lacks
Rosemarie Jackowski
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