{"id":8731,"date":"2015-06-02T07:50:03","date_gmt":"2015-06-02T12:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8731"},"modified":"2015-06-02T07:50:03","modified_gmt":"2015-06-02T12:50:03","slug":"twenty-three-geniuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8731","title":{"rendered":"Twenty-Three Geniuses"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"title\"><a title=\"Twenty-Three Geniuses\" href=\"http:\/\/kunstler.com\/clusterfuck-nation\/twenty-three-geniuses\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Twenty-Three Geniuses<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>If there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to\u00a0<em>The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 Monday feature,\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/06\/01\/us\/the-unrealized-horrors-of-population-explosion.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;module=second-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news\">The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion<\/a><\/em>. The former \u201cnewspaper of record\u201d wants us to assume now that the sky\u2019s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and accompanying video was actually prepared by a staff of 23 journalists. Give the\u00a0<em>Times<\/em>\u00a0another award for rounding up so many credentialed idiots for one job.<\/p>\n<p>Apart from just dumping on Stanford U. biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of\u00a0<em>The Population Bomb<\/em>(1968), this foolish \u201ccrisis report\u201d strenuously overlooks virtually every blossoming fiasco around the world. This must be what comes of viewing the world through your cell phone.<\/p>\n<p>One main contention in the story is that the problem of feeding an exponentially growing population was already solved by the plant scientist Norman Borlaug\u2019s \u201cGreen Revolution,\u201d which gave the world hybridized high-yielding grain crops. Wrong. The \u201cGreen Revolution\u201d was much more about converting fossil fuels into food. What happens to the hypothetically even larger world population when that\u2019s not possible anymore? And did any of the 23 journalists notice that the world now has enormous additional problems with water depletion and soil degradation? Or that reckless genetic modification is now required to keep the grain production stats up?<\/p>\n<p>No, they didn\u2019t notice because the\u00a0<em>Times<\/em>\u00a0is firmly in the camp of techno-narcissism, the belief that the diminishing returns, unanticipated consequences, and over-investments in technology can be \u201csolved\u201d by layering on more technology \u2014 an idea whose first cousin is the wish to solve global over-indebtedness by generating more debt. Anyone seeking to understand why the public conversation about our pressing problems is so dumb, seek no further than this article, which explains it all.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty-Three Geniuses If there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to\u00a0The New York Times\u2019 Monday feature,\u00a0The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former \u201cnewspaper of record\u201d wants us to assume now that the sky\u2019s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and [&hellip;]<\/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":[195,209,1370,449,1921,5975,5976,5977,786],"class_list":["post-8731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-debt","tag-diminishing-returns","tag-green-revolution","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-new-york-times","tag-paul-ehrlich","tag-population-bomb","tag-techno-narcissim","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8731","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=8731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8732,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8731\/revisions\/8732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}