Those who have been expecting relentless nastiness and intellectual bankruptcy from Obama have been mostly disappointed until recently, just as his most rabid supporters who longed for such excesses have been disappointed . . . until now.

Holdren references the threat that "continuing population growth" poses to human flourishing:

This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.

It is, I suppose, possible to find a "key insight" about population growth in Ehrlich's book that's anodyne enough to qualify as "elementary" and irrefutable. But there's a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over," and that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other "triage" methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

Unless, that is, one of your friends goes on to become the science advisor to the President of the United States.

It is worrisome, but the rest of the Obama administration worries me too . . . not that McCain would have been much less worrisome from my perspective. They are politicians and both parties are mainly populated and supported by wackos obsessed with power, and both have a cavalier attitude to truth and good governance.

But, Holdren may be the monster that has most to do with the things that I care about, so I anticipate the dreary task of commenting on his idiocies many more times.

I am truly puzzled how such people continue to find employment. If they were medical doctors it seems that they would have had their licences stripped. If lawyers would they not have been disbarred? They are clearly incompetent, and mean spirited as well.

Now that we have compulsive regulators back in power can we look forward to some sort of accountability and penalties for malpractice? No, of course not. In some disturbing ways Holdren represents the core of the Democrats, their truest expression. One party is aloof from the tragedies of the world, the other is ecstatic about them. One fiddles while the fires burn, the other is transfixed as if in an ass-trance.