The new year is off to a bizarre start. My last post featured Paul Erlich’s debunked “Population Bomb” theory as an example of a phony crisis. The book was published decades ago, so I was going back in history to make a point. I later learned that Paul Erhlich appeared on 60 Minutes simultaneously with my post. Here he is on the nation’s best known News Show, again spouting that the sky is falling. Too many people doom us at a time of Global Warming.

Winner of multiple Emmys and writer’s guild awards, Scot Peely, conducted the interview. The 60 Minute anchor intently listened while Erhlich told us we faced extinction. Peely, as an example of species extinction, cuts to an interview with a Native American lamenting salmon extinction. Charged with grilling Salmon for our non-meat eaters on Christmas Day, I found no lack of Salmon choices. Just the opposite, plenty of steaks and fillets. Somehow this had something to do with our causing biodiversity loss, dooming us.

Species are always going extinct. Sometimes humans are responsible. If early North American inhabitants hadn’t hunted horses to extinction, they might not have had to wait for Spaniards to reintroduce them. 

The interview highlighted every point I attempted to make in my last post. Propagandists posing as journalists with awards attesting to their abilities continue disproven narratives.

 Wikipedia devotes a whole section to the bet, but this supposed great journalist couldn’t find it? Scott Pelly should have made more effort to provide Erhlichs’s challenging back history. No mention of his humiliating wager loss to Julian Simon.

Of course, Pelly works for CBS, a network that took two years to verify the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Anyone who saw Tucker Carlson’s Tony Bobolinski interview knew this before the ’20 election. Remember, none has come forward to challenge the former Biden partner’s account. Sixty Minutes should interview people like Bobulinski, having something tangible to say rather than exposed doomsayers like Ehrlich.

Putting this crank on a “prestigious” primetime news show tells us all we need to know about which way and how far media leans one way. If you want to find out how far off Erlich and his ilk are from reality, I suggest a book I downloaded a few months ago, “Super Abundance” by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley.

The authors use Time Prices-calculating the hours and minutes needed to acquire goods and services to show a growing abundance of virtually everything. Rather than scarcity leading to our demise, were work out our problems with increasing benefits. A growing number of interconnected minds gives us an ever-expanding ability to resolve issues. Innovation now rules, except in the Erhlich-Peely world.

We see a pattern of divergence from the methods developed during the Age of Reason to tackle problems to arrive at rational solutions in favor of adherence to dogma. We’ve learned from the “Twitter Files” revelations government entities pressured the platform to censor people and ideas at variance with their prevailing narratives. A coerced Twitter can only lead one to believe government players compelled other media to sing the same tunes.

The idea of the 1st Amendment is to ensure the free flow of information. Any collusion between government entities and media to suppress or censor where the government is forbidden to act is one of the nation’s most significant dangers. The country, in general, failed to receive accurate and timely information on the Russian Collusion, Covid, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and so many other things that might have changed history. 

Attractive media mouthpieces spew the government line while claiming to represent a free press. Missouri, in conjunction with Louisiana, has sued over this very problem. The case needs to quickly get a Supreme Court decision to end Government-Media information suppression, or much of our media will continue to mimic Pravda, CCTV, or the Peoples Daily. 

The sudden resurrection of Paul Ehrlich has to do with the imminent publication of his memoir, “Life: A Journey through Science and Politics.” How this book is received will tell us where the media stands. I predict the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Erhlich book reviews will read as if they are reviewing different tomes. Will the book reviews expose Erhlich as “Superabunce co-author Marian L. Tupy as describes him as a “purveyor of “doom porn” or a hero alerting humanity of extinction? In any case, we will soon have further illumination of the national split. 

These two charts reveal our divide and the media’s part :

The tremendous harm in the wake of the strict adherence of elites to their narratives is now adding trillions of dollars to questionable attempts to reverse “climate changes.” Not satisfied with our children’s learning loss, the economic cost from their lockdowns, and the undermining of confidence in our institutions in a wide swath of our population, now they want to dictate exactly how we deal with a possible warming problem. 

Common sense tells us to weigh all ideas to settle on any actions. This approach also gives us early clues if we are going in the wrong direction. Listening to cranks like Erhlich means we’ve learned nothing and are willing to forgo reason.

January 6th, ’21, was an awful day, but I submit the continued joint efforts of government entities and media to suppress information pose a higher long-run threat to our Republic. An informed people is essential to a functioning Democracy. Already we’ve had elections tainted by the suppression of important information. The censoring of information allows dubious agendas such as covid lockdowns and population curtailment to proceed.

I wanted to tackle a different problem at this time, but the sudden resurrection of Paul Erhlich demanded addressing, especially with the continuing release of the “Twitter Files.” Addressing a possible Russian attack on Ukraine through Belarus needs attention. Stay tuned.