Fumento! A few years back I stumbled on the book "Small is Beautiful" by E. F. Schumacher in a used book store. It's full of ideas that, I think, are valuable to anybody in engineering - at least I learned a lot from it and what I learned has been very useful to me. Well, only a couple of weeks later they published one of those "point-counterpoint" editorials in the local paper. On the one side of the page was an excerpt from Al Gore's "Earth in the Balance" and on the other side was sort of a rebuttal by this Fumento character. But Fumento didn't exactly address Gore's arguments; instead the main focus of his article was this loony rant against Schumacher and "Small is Beautiful." If you hadn't read the book yourself you'd have thought that Schumacher was a cross between Ned Ludd and Pol Pot. But if you had read "Small is Beautiful," you'd have come away saying, "Wow, this Fumento guy's about the biggest liar I ever read!" First I ever heard of him, but that article fixed his name in my memory. As a lying dirtbag.
You wanna cheap laugh, go check out Fumento's own web site, www.fumento.com, a section of which is devoted to slandering his opponents in the tone of a ragging match on an elementary school playground. What a loser! And then there are articles he himself wrote, which are indescribable and have to be experienced to be believed. Hard to imagine one can actually earn a living grunting out crap like that. The Hudson Institute must be desperate for polemical writers.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net