{"id":15734,"date":"2015-12-28T15:40:42","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T20:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15734"},"modified":"2015-12-28T15:52:18","modified_gmt":"2015-12-28T20:52:18","slug":"questions-and-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15734","title":{"rendered":"Questions and Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Questions and Answers<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

T<\/span>he really big item in last night\u2019s\u00a060-Minutes<\/em>\u00a0newsbreak was that the latest\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0movie passed the billion dollar profit gate a week after release. That says just about everything you need to know about our floundering society, including the state of the legacy news media.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The cherry on top last week was Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company\u2019s feat landing the first spent stage of its Falcon 9 rocket to be (theoretically) recycled and thus hugely lowering the cost of firing things into space. The media spooged all over itself on that one, since behind this feat stands Mr. Musk\u2019s heroic quest to land humans on Mars. This culture has lost a lot in the past 40 years, but among the least recognized is the loss of its critical faculties. We\u2019ve become a nation of six-year-olds.<\/p>\n

News flash: we\u2019re not going Mars. Notwithstanding the accolades for Ridley Scott\u2019s neatly-rationalized fantasy,\u00a0The Martian<\/em>\u00a0(based on Andy Weir\u2019s novel), any human journey to the red planet would be a one-way trip. Anyway, all that begs the question: why are we so eager to journey to a dead planet with none of the elements necessary for human life when we can\u2019t seem to manage human life on a planet superbly equipped to support us<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Answer: because we are lost in raptures of techno-narcissism. What do I mean by that? We\u2019re convinced that all the unanticipated consequences of our brief techno-industrial orgy can be solved by\u2026 more and better technology! Notice that this narrative is being served up to a society now held hostage to the images on little screens, by skilled people who, more and more, act as though these screens have become the new dwelling place of reality. How psychotic is that?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Questions and Answers The really big item in last night\u2019s\u00a060-Minutes\u00a0newsbreak was that the latest\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0movie passed the billion dollar profit gate a week after release. That says just about everything you need to know about our floundering society, including the state of the legacy news media. The cherry on top last week was Elon Musk\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[5096,449,10162,11271,11165,786,11270,10155],"class_list":["post-15734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-elon-musk","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-mars","tag-space-travel","tag-star-wars","tag-technology","tag-techo-narcism","tag-the-martian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15734"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15736,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15734\/revisions\/15736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}