Ted Turner, founder of CNN, pops up in the news every now and again. This past week, he opined on a wide swath of topics, most notably on his dark visions of a future unshackled from government controls of human action, ostensibly to combat “global climate change.” (Most of us call them “seasons.”) Ted proclaimed, “There’s too many people. That’s why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people they’d be using less stuff.” He warned that if we don’t combat global warming now, the results “will be catastrophic... We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 10, not 10, but in 30 or 40 years, and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.” It’s doubtful, however, that Ted’s liver will pass USDA standards.

Soon, Ted turned his attention to Iraq, saying, “[E]ven with our $500-billion military budget, we can’t win in Iraq. We’re being beaten by insurgents who don’t even have any tanks.” On the jihadis’ motives, Ted declared, “I think that they’re patriots and that they don’t like us because we’ve invaded their country and occupied it. I think if the Iraqis were in Washington, DC, we’d be doing the same thing; we’d be bombing them too. Nobody wants to be invaded.” Uh, Ted, most of the insurgents are not Iraqis. Sort of throws a kink in the idea of their being “patriots,” doesn’t it?

Lesson here: Success in business is not necessarily a good indicator of overall intelligence.