Collapse of the shiny pretty things

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford on how we're runnin' outta planet ta fuck up.

And then the international think tank said, you know what? It's still not working.

All the green initiatives in the world combined with all your good intentions intermixed with a million heartfelt promises to do better, all the environmental summit agreements and all the solar panels and recycled toothbrushes and spending all those hours sorting plastic from glass and carefully rinsing your mustard bottles?

What's that you say? You've heard it all before? The end is nigh and civilization as we know it is on track for serious collapse, meltdown, infrastructure implosion unless -- and this might be the biggest unless in modern world history -- unless there's a major and they do mean major overhaul of how culture, greed and entitlement operate? Sure you have. So did the Romans

Hence, zombies. Hence, Rick Santorum's sad little existence, his and his followers' blind faith in an angry, self-hating God to save us all from His own creation.

Hence, gruesome end times scenarios, apocalypse porn and a new reality show called "Doomsday Preppers" -- or was that "Doomsday Bunkers"? -- all about numbly misanthropic, unbathed white nutballs in mostly Podunk towns readying themselves for the end of the world by stockpiling canned meat, coddling large firearms and training themselves in hand-to-zombie combat as they feed their twitchy kids stuff they killed with a crossbow in the driveway. Neat.

Here is the question of our day: Does it take a cataclysm? It takes a wake up call so massive and deadly there is nothing else to be done but make ferocious and painful change? Or can it be induced by something more calm and deeply felt, a flip and turn in the soul, an intimate spiritual awakening writ large? What's it going to take? I don't know, either, but whatever it is, it really might require some intense sacrifice on the part of -- whoa, wait a second. Is that the new iPad? Wow. Pretty.

Shorter: smoke it while ya got it before the Earth is all stems and seeds. Enjoy.