ECHOES AND UPDATES

Once again my embarrassment over my blunder is tempered by pride in my subscribers who will not let me get away with anything, for I received a stack of letters on the alleged tigers in Africa. I was in Kruger Park myself in 1981, and watched a leopard devour his prey whose carcass he had hauled up into a tree. The image stayed in my mind, and had I thought about it, I would presumably have realized the difference, but the subconscious of an aging physicist and engineer who knows nothing about zoology can evidently con-fuse a leopard with a tiger.

The ink of last month's issue was not yet dry when The Economist also brought a story on the ozone layer and the Antarc-tic hole in it. Here is their first paragraph:

"Once upon a time, only anoraked environmentalists claimed that industrial chemicals were damaging the ozone layer... But observations reported in 1985 showed that the layer was indeed damaged and that a hole was opening up in the ozone layer above the Antarctic. The results of a subsequent Antarctic foray by American scientists are now making even the most cautious scien-tists take the story seriously."

Only France and Switzerland are significant net exporters of electric power. You are allowed three guesses why.

[Source: Stromthemen, w. Germany.]

Subscribers who read the data and reasoning (not my opinions or plonked-down statements!) of last month's ozone story know that only the first sentence is correct, the other two are quite false. And that, I would say, is a fair measure of the Economist's track record for reliability. Its "Science and Technology" column is extremely well written, and I am deeply impressed every time they discuss a subject I do not understand; but every time they come close to anything that now goes under the name of "environmental," it is the usual fashionable bilge. Much the same goes for their political coverage. They are quite undeservedly known as "conservative," for they are as slanted to the left, inconsistent, and appeasement-bent as any news magazine above the moron line. They are, of course, ten times better than Slime or Newspeak, but what kind of perfume is it that smells ten times better than a cesspool?

Another warning against the vultures who use conservative causes (and right now Oliver North's name) to line their pockets with your cash: I am looking at a mailing from the "Emergency Project to Support Colonel North's Freedom Fight," showing North behind bars, asking "Should he go to jail?" and promising some video tape if you contribute at least $25 to this "Project." This one comes from R.A. Viguerie's mail order kitchen, which is no better than the Americans for Nuclear Power and other such outfits. They cannot be booked for fraud, for in all their pages of extolling North there is not one solitary word promising him a red cent of what they collect from their victims. If you want to send money to the legal defense of North (who has not yet got a pardon from the weakling whose presidency he saved, and who is throwing it away again), send it to Oliver North Legal Assistance Fund, Box 50096, Washington, DC 20004.