I baffled a sociologist at the university today with this piece of news:

Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.

The cornerstone of maintaining the quality of scientific papers is the peer review system. Under this, papers submitted to scientific journals are reviewed anonymously by experts in the field. Conducting reviews is seen as part of the job for academics, who are generally not paid for the work.

Cracks in the system have been obvious for years. Yesterday it emerged that 14 leading researchers in a different field – stem cell research – have written an open letter to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process. They allege that a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.

She was baffled, because yet again we see the flaws of the European education system, which otherwise is so highly praised. The idea behind peer review was to let academics self-manage each other to ensure quality, but since much of the research today is politicized and most people act like monkeys when they're not checked, academics have begun using the system to self-promote political motifs.

This is one problem the whole Western scientific community needs to ponder. But there's a European-specific factor to note here. Most European universities are government-managed. This means that politicians are enforcing quality checks like the peer review system to be certain that tax money actually produces results. This system is now being manipulated and questioned.

America, only introducing similar systems with the GPRA act in '93, has escaped much of this dilemma since about a third of its universities are privately owned, funded by private and philanthropic resources. It also happens that those universities are ranked as the world's best. Do we see a pattern here? The government's quality systems have failed. Private investors are looking for results and seem to have created an academic environment unparalleled by any public system. Yawn, what's new?

Normally in the West we only steal land and people from the third world, but apparently, when our collective imagination dries up, we also steal its myths:

Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

"If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. "That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain."

Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."

In a sense, they're probably right. The West went dead hard progressive after the Second World War, and coincidentally decided that society was going to improve, forever, thanks to liberal democracy. You only need so much research to recognize this to be a load of crap. If Pixtun & Co are right, Westerners have come to the same realization and now attempt to make up for their progressive attitude by adopting apocalypse myths.

Maybe we should regard ideas of global race wars, water worlds, burning planets and world government tyranny as important fantasies, but useless prophecies? Looking at history, this seems to make sense; the Vikings probably didn't actually believe their world one day would be consumed by fire and monsters, but it reminded them of the cyclic nature of societies. After all, the people we stole these Mayan myths from seem to care more about lack of rain than a calendar running out. In fact, if any doom is coming our way, it's collective failure thanks to a few doomsday nutcases stealing all the attention away from real problems, here and now.

So while admittedly it's entertaining to read about religious apocalypses, and convenient to project them unto reality when things don't go your way, you're probably better off worrying about an empty fridge or a late work assignment, than you are obsessing about a world that isn't going to end.

Tonight, let's look at some of the problems a modern civilization faces.

West

Teachers at St Sidwells Primary school, Exeter, Devon, have told parents of pupils goggles can now only be worn by children who have an 'adverse reaction to chemicals in water'.

"Wet plastic is very slippery and frequent, incorrect or unnecessary adjustment or removal of them, by pulling them away from the eyes instead of sliding them over the forehead, can lead to them slipping from the pupil's grasp with the hard plastic causing severe injury."

The school said in a statement: "In the present culture we need to make sure we are legally covered in the event of a problem or injury.

In this cute little story we see two main factors at work:

• The government is blindly dedicated to securing the safety of the public, to the point where it doesn't trust the judgement of its citizens anymore and wants to take responsibility that otherwise would be individual by nature. This means we all have to pay to make all our institutions idiot-proof. Sure, some kids may actually hurt themselves with these goggles, but instead of letting them learn a lesson from that and move on, we end up nannying everyone at the expense of those who just want to control their own lives. In fact, the more the government nannies people, the more impotent they become (Sweden, anyone?!).
• There's a second part to this story, which is cleverly revealed in the statement issued by the school: "In the present culture we need to make sure we are legally covered in the event of a problem or injury." Translation: We're trying to avoid getting sued thanks to bureaucratic safety regulations that wouldn't allow a fly to scare a child, so we're taking the safe path and banning all that is possibly horrible, scary, dangerous and uncertain. A nice recipe for doom, because governments in all Nanny States only end up regulating more and controlling more. At the end of it, we're all robots serving a system we no longer control.

Here's another pack of gems from Nanny Europe:

Banning welcome mats…

Families living in a flat block have been told to remove welcome mats from their porches because they are a health and safety risk.

…and implementing Castro-style block watches

In partnership with regional chapters of the charity group Crimestoppers U.K., multiple local police forces have launched a program called “Too Much Bling? Give Us a Ring.” The object of the program is to encourage people who suspect that a neighbor or acquaintance is living off the proceeds of crime to anonymously provide information about that person to the police…

Not very surprising; I'm sure we'll have to ban pets, stairs, cars, tobacco and kitchen knives soon, because they all cause harm to a lot of people who behave like idiots. A better way would of course be to let people take some individual responsibility and then face the consequences of their actions, to learn what works and what doesn't. But wait, that's offensive, because then who are we going to nanny to feel good? The public are the incentive behind nannying, because they cry out for safety. Don't listen to them, or you end up with a civilization in decline and crowdism as culture.

East

When looking at empires in decline, Russia is a prime example, mirroring many of the European problems with demographic collapse, economic crisis and invasion by radical forces. Sometimes, rotten factors in the social equation only become apparent when the problems have already grown too big:

— Russian authorities seized 2.4 metric tons of heroin in 2006, about three times the seizures in 2002, according to United Nations figures. That's a small fraction of the estimated 60 metric tons that are thought to arrive in Russia from Afghanistan each year.

Russian officials publicly blame America for the plague because almost all the heroin comes from U.S.-dominated Afghanistan , but they won't discuss in detail how drugs move through their country. They've yet to devise a comprehensive plan to address the issue. Trials of high-level traffickers are conducted in secret. Even midlevel police officials usually don't talk, and when they do, it's privately and away from their workplaces.

In Russia , it's much easier to blame a U.S. conspiracy than to bring up the subject of corrupt officials, the Russian mafia and their involvement in the drug trade.

As with most critical problems that push a civilization towards collapse, the Russian health crisis is influenced by external factors like drug import. But it really boils down to a decaying social culture and government/mafia-sponsored corruption. Not all health problems are related to corruption though; the good old vodka remains the miracle of Caucasus:

A new study by an international team of public health researchers documents the devastating impact of alcohol abuse on Russia — showing that drinking caused more than half of deaths among Russians aged 15 to 54 in the turbulent era following the Soviet collapse.

The 52 percent figure compares to estimates that less than 4 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by alcohol abuse, according to the study by Russian, British and French researchers published in Friday's edition of the British medical journal The Lancet.

Professor David Zaridze, head of the Russian Cancer Research Center and lead author of the study, estimated that the increase in alcohol consumption since 1987, the year when then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's restrictions on alcohol sales collapsed, cost the lives of 3 million Russians who would otherwise be alive today. "This loss is similar to that of a war," Zaridze said.

Alcohol took the natural place a Soviet-dominated culture once had in the hearts of the Russian public; Putin may accordingly be right that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the great catastrophes of the 21st Century, but hardly for geopolitical reasons alone. As an interesting side-note, the article actually suggests moderate drinking of alcohol has got a lot of positive health effects, including protection against stroke, Alzheimer's disease and dementia, and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. So, enjoy drinking in healthy amounts.

Yet, of course, corruption and post-Soviet totalitarianism remain key problems in modern day Russia. As a soon-to-be journalist, I would hesitate to migrate to Russia, unless I wished for a sudden "accidental" death:

A local corruption reporter in Russia died of head injuries on Monday in what police said Tuesday was a drunken fall. Colleagues, on the other hand, are sure it was a revenge attack for muckraking journalism.

"I have no doubt that the attack was directly connected to Yaroshenko's writing and is payback for his journalistic work," said Sergei Slepzov, a close friend and colleague of Yaroshenko.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has called for an investigation, suggesting that Yaroshenko was targeted because he had written about corruption in the local law enforcement agencies, government office and the prosecutor's office.

Of course, the police are not interested in continuing the investigation; that might reveal some nasty inside work. So why is this a civilization problem? Well, when the tentacles of government secretly order the death of oppositional and inconvenient critics, it's rendering itself godlike and indisputable. At that point, loyalty to government becomes more important than loyalty to community, culture and truth. And so we breed a nasty Nanny State á la Europe, where we're free to have sex on television but not point out that Europeans are being replaced by third world immigrants to finance out-of-control government spending.