Blog News and Comment on Sunday

Quite a week it has been, and plenty of interesting news and comment around.
Climate change and green issues have been very much in the news and media, not least due to the EU proposals that Calvin Jones talks about on his Climate Change Action blog. Calvin also publicises the international day of action planned for December 8th 2007.

Elsewhere there is a lot of comment on the right-conspiracist Great Global Warming Swindle programme broadcast on Channel 4 this week that I blogged about on Thursday and Friday. Zoe Williams reviewed it in the Guardian and their environment correspondent David Adam weighed in with an opinion piece that drew the usual collection of right-conspiracist loons to his comment section.

The actual claims of the programme beyond sensationalism, smear and conspiracism are dealt with by the serious climate science community at RealClimate. George Marshall tackles the documentary at his Climate Denial blog.
Paul Kingsnorth has a humourous take on it with a look at a Channel Four documetary commissioning meeting whilst Socialist Unity Blog went on the attack and seem to have got into a tussle with another of the cultish LM spokespeople, O'Neill. An Irish left take on it comes from Cedar Lounge.

Speaking of Ireland, Cedar Lounge have an interesting piece on the Green surge in the North and all-Ireland implications of the ascendancy of the Greens and Sinn Fein on the left.

Back to TV there is an Adam Curtis documentary on tonight - The Trap, previewed on Lenin's Tomb. Like Durkin's 'documentaries', Curtis' work is polemical and stylish, though from a different angle. Though his angle is perhaps more favourable to a more mainstream left analysis, I am still a little uneasy over the legitimacy and effectiveness of this style of documentary. As shown by Durkin's 'Swindle' this format can just as easily be used against the left, green or progressive view as for it.

I can no longer watch Lost (my article on this continues to get more hits than anything else I have written) until I succumb to the risks of 'BitTorrentitis' or splash out for the DVDs as Sky have pulled the plug on Virgin Media showing it on cable in the UK. The Murdoch Empire have gone to war against the Branson Kingdom and the poor customers have suffered after Sky withdrew its major channels from Virgin Media when they could not reach agreement over pricing. Never mind, apparently it is all a piece of conservative philosophy based on Hobbes, says Seth Michaels on the Guardian's Comment is Free pages.

And finally....the lighter bit at the end, just like the news. Ed over at International Rooksbyism has been to see Hot Fuzz at the cinema.