Sunday, April 30, 2006
A Particular Sunday Show
Ben Wattenburg is a sage and sane lefty who has a half hour single guest talking head show, on local PBS station 12, after Fox News Sunday (which was pretty good). This week he has Stanford (I'm sad to say) biology professor Paul Ehrlich on, defending his being spectacularly wrong about nearly everything he's ever written. I, like everyone, know that the most difficult thing to know is the future, but Ehrlich's first famous book, The Population Bomb, couldn't be more wrong if he had tried to make it 100% wrong. Ehrlich is pushing a new book he has written with his wife. We can only hope her ability to think rationally about the future is better than her husbands (but somehow I doubt it). Ehrlich seems to drift between denial of what he has said in the past and steadfastly standing by his dire predictions for the future (which are still uniformly bleak). Except for the seemingly intractable Muslim extremist problem, the future, for me, is so bright I have to wear a welding helmet. Professor Ehrlich is proof that it takes a lot of education to make someone this smart this stupid.
I can't peg his politics--I'm tempted to say lefty but it just could be apolitical loonyness. At least he recognized the idiocy of some environmental extremism.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 10:07 AM 
