'New York Post' Used As Credential For Oil Spill Expertise

From the New York Post:

A young Long Island genius took her oil-spill fix down to the Gulf yesterday, cornering a BP executive at a cleanup staging area and knocking his socks off during a half-hour powwow.

"Wow, that's very impressive," Dave Golson, BP's operations director for eastern Louisiana, said after hearing Alia Sabur's pitch. "It's something we should give serious consideration."

The paper also notes that the BP exec was prepared to dismiss the young genius, but "after she showed him a Wednesday edition of The Post, which contained a schematic of her proposal, he reconsidered."

I wonder. Do you think future generations will look back at this era as the point in human history where the solutions to our problems became impossibly complex while, simultaneously, the consistent and powerful strain of anti-intellectualism foisted on an already suspicious society in an attempt to discredit ideas which might prove detrimental to the interests of large corporations helped encourage the belief that everyone is an expert and an amateur opinion is just as valid as a trained one, and these two developments finally intersected to create a world where "Tell us: How would you fix the oil spill?"-type polls became the norm? Actually, I don't wonder at all. We've got one or two more generations left and then the ride's over.