Truth is both an intellectual objective and a cultural value. Yet to defeat the Bad Orange Man, many in the American media have abdicated their commitment to truthfulness. Writing in American Greatness, Roger Kimball argues that the deceitfulness of the mainstream media has seriously damaged the “horizon of shared assumptions” that makes public life possible.
At Least He Paid his Losing Bet
Paul Ehrlich, author of the spectacularly incorrect 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, recently died at 93. Despite his longevity, Ronald Bailey points out in Reason, Ehrlich did not live to see even one of his numerous apocalyptic predictions come true. The world’s population certainly grew, but not merely larger, richer and fatter too. Most famously, Ehrlich once bet economist Julian Simon that the world was approaching economic collapse – but in 1990 had to mail Simon a cheque.
