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We’re a little long today. Thankfully it is the end of the week.
Whole bunch of global warming stuff.
The first warming piece is from The Nation. This is a first for Pickings. It’s a typical item from the conspiratorial genre of the left and is a perfect illustration of yesterday’s discourse on those angry folks. The theme, by Alex Cockburn, is the global warming debate was cooked up by the nuclear power industry. I’m not kidding. Here’s the pull quote;
The world’s best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man’s physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel.
As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-’90s he’d positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around “the challenge of climate change,” which stepped forward to take Communism’s place in the threatosphere essential to political life.
Pickerhead’s always been willing to credit Al Gore with sincere motives in this debate. But for the crazy left, if you disagree with them, they will find evil.
From a blog from the U. S. Senate, of all places, we learn of many scientists who have become global warming skeptics. Thirteen of them from 9 countries have vignettes in this post. Here’s a sample;
Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears “poppycock.” According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.†“The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything,†Bellamy added. Bellamy’s conversion on global warming did not come without a sacrifice as several environmental groups have ended their association with him because of his views on climate change. The severing of relations came despite Bellamy’s long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported Bellamy “won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns to save Britain’s peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.â€
Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, calls for rational rather than hysteric approachs to global warming inquiry in his new book.
Samizdata with good quote.
May Month post is on cannibalistic communists.
Another organ of the left, the Village Voice, on groups organizing to pressure China over Darfur.
Power Line with some background on testimony of Deputy Attorney General Comey. Washington is truly a cesspool.
Speaking of Washington and cesspools, the Captain has Berger news.
New Editor with a short from a Weekly Standard piece on the 2006 vote.
Don Boudreaux’s bi-monthly Tribune-Review column starts with something that is hard to believe.
The economist Paul Romer notes the astonishing fact that if you thoroughly shuffle a deck of 52 cards, chances are practically 100 percent that the resulting arrangement of cards has never before existed.
Never.
Michael Gerson, formerly a Bush speechwriter, is now writing a column for WaPo. He starts out with the bizarre circumstance of missionaries from Africa working the northern Virginia suburbs for converts.
An epoch-dividing event recently took place in the religion that brought us B.C. and A.D. Too bad hardly anyone noticed.
For years, a dispute has boiled between the American Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion it belongs to, with many in the global south convinced that Episcopalians are following their liberalism into heresy. This month, Archbishop Peter Akinola, shepherd of 18 million fervent Nigerian Anglicans, reached the end of his patience and installed a missionary bishop to America. The installation ceremony included boisterous hymns and Africans dressed in bright robes dancing before the altar — an Anglican worship style more common in Kampala, Uganda, than in Woodbridge.
The American presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, condemned this poaching of souls on her turf as a violation of the “ancient customs of the church.” To which the archbishop replied, in essence: Since when have you American liberals given a fig about the ancient customs of the church?