Re: "Aliens Cause Global Warming"

I'm late in blogging this nice message from a reader:

I want to thank you for the link to Michael Chricton's Michelin lecture at CalTech, and some of your other links to the story, as well as your article from 2002.

I'd heard of Simon (the emperor has no clothes) before, but not Lomborg. I ordered a copy of his book.

In your article above you wondered how environmentalists earn their keep. At least one company I know (and have consulted for) works as GIS consultants to activist litigants who earn their income by suing the feds, often with direct cooperation from federal employees who don't want to implement the current federal policies regarding natural resources, so; sue for injunction and court costs!

Thanks again, a nice Christmas present; Truth finds friends in strange places!

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 09:34:17 PM
Categorized as Blog Stuff.

Against the Grain Smacks UK Guardian

Christopher Blosser responds to a silly article in The Guardian.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 08:29:31 PM
Categorized as Religious.

Christmas Around the Parish

Earl has a big round-up over at Times Against Humanity.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 08:25:46 PM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff & Religious.

St. Blog's Prayer Network

Vide.

(Thanks, Steven.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 10:15:36 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff & Religious.

CNS Headline Ticker

I've added a CNSNews Headline Ticker to the right-hand column on the main page. Feedback would be appreciated — especially if it causes any problems for your browser.

Also, I pruned almost 50 weblogs from Here a Blog, There a Blog — mostly dead or seldom-updated ones, though some because I just didn't want them there anymore. I plan on adding others soon.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 08:54:54 AM
Categorized as Blog Stuff.

The Map Room

A weblog about maps.

Vide.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 08:39:09 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.

The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami

A weblog with "News and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts", including a list of Relief Organizations Working in the Disaster Area.

Here, a prayer in time of tribulation, from the old Roman Ritual:

Almighty God, do not disdain your people who cry to you in their affliction, but for the glory of your name be pleased to help us who are so sorely troubled. Show us, O Lord, your inexpressible mercy, blot out our transgressions, and graciously deliver us from the condemnation they deserve.

We entreat you, Lord God, grant us, your servants, the enjoyment of lasting health of body and mind; and by the glorious intercession of blessed Mary, ever a Virgin, free us from present sorrow and give us everlasting joy.

Graciously hear us, O Lord, in our tribulation, and turn away the stripes of your wrath which we justly deserve. God, our refuge and our strength and source of all goodness, heed the holy prayers of your Church, and grant that we fully obtain whatever we ask for in faith; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 08:20:41 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff & International & Religious.

"Letter To My Children"

From the Foreward to Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers:

I am sitting in the kitchen of the little house at Medfield, our second farm which is cut off by the ridge and a quarter-mile across the fields from our home place, where you are. I am writing a book. In it I am speaking to you. But I am also speaking to the world. To both I owe an accounting. It is a terrible book. It is terrible in what it tells about men. If anything, it is more terrible in what it tells about the world in which you live. It is about what the world calls the Hiss-Chambers Case, or even more simply, the Hiss Case. It is about a spy case. All the props of an espionage case are there-foreign agents, household traitors, stolen documents, microfilm, furtive meetings, secret hideaways, phony names, an informer, investigations, trials, official justice.

But if the Hiss Case were only this, it would not be worth my writing about or your reading about. It would be another fat folder in the sad files of the police, another crime drama in which the props would be mistaken for the play (as many people have consistently mistaken them). It would not be what alone gave it meaning, what the mass of men and women instinctively sensed it to be, often without quite knowing why. It would not be what, at the very beginning, I was moved to call it: "a tragedy of history."

For it was more than human tragedy. Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial in the trials of Alger Hiss. Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another. At issue was the question whether, in the desperately divided society, there still remained the will to recognize the issues in time to offset the immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts....

The desperately divided society? Gee. I thought everything was hunky dory until George W. Bush the Divisive came along.

Confer.

(Thanks, Ryan.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 08:10:00 AM
Categorized as Speeches and Suchlike.

Steven Kiel

Vide.

(Thanks, Ryan.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 12/30/04 07:52:21 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.