Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize
It started off as a touring lecture -- with accompanying overhead projections at first, then it became a lavishly illustrated PowerPoint presentation. It then became an Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. Now, Al Gore's climate change lectures have earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. He shares this year's award with the . And he wins the prize in the same week a disputed the authority of nine scientific claims made by the film and required schools to offer guidance about those claims when the movie is shown.
Comments
The next question is of course will this push big Al any closer to running for the White House?
Obama seems to have run out of steam (probably was only ever a realistic Vice-P candidate). And, after Bush Jr, a monkey standing for the Democrats should have no problem, but I just can't see Hilary Clinton getting elected.
I don't think the Nobel Prize is as big a deal in the US as it is in Europe. If Gore is going to run, he'd better declare soon.
Until recently I was in the 'anthropogenic CO2 causes global warming' camp.
I have since changed my mind!
Regards,
Michael
vsuk #1, the Nobel Peace Prize is not esteemed very highly in the US especially since it was awarded to Yassir Arafat who was widely regarded in the US as a terrorist, the opinions of many Europeans and others notwithstanding. BTW, if you are referring to "big Al" having read my posting on WHYS and are not familiar with US media trivia, this was not about how much weight he put on (and lost.) Big Al was a reference to a character played by Alan Sues in the weekly TV comedy show "Laugh-In" which aired in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Big Al" was a TV sports reporter "Sues was one of only a very few primetime television personalities of the late 1960s and early 1970s who was known for exhibiting stereotypically gay-male behavior. On Laugh-In, while never explicitly saying he was gay, he employed exaggerated gestures and was known for acting in an intentionally "over the top" effeminate way, as a stereotype of a homosexual man (or at least as most mainstream audiences of the era imagined gay men to be)."
In the segment "Laugh-In Looks at the News" he'd usually start his monologue by saying "Big Al here", then he'd ring a small bell and say "love that tinkle."
Nobel prizes for other disciplines are held in much higher regard but there are times when even those are taken a dim view of. Those in the know are aware that Watson and Crick were two relatively weak scientists who stole credit for the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule from an American radiologist Rosalind Franklin and won the Nobel Prize for it. The story of how this happened was explained in great detail on the PBS science program "NOVA."
Disdain for international organizations is commonplace in the US. In a completely unrelated subject, it looks as though the Supreme Court of the United States will tell the Bush administration and the UN to go to hell. The legal expert on PBS's program "Washington Week" reported this evening that the Supreme Court will rule on a lawsuit brought by 51 Mexican nationals convicted of murder and on death row in Texas claiming that they were denied the right to contact their embassy for legal assistance prior to their trials, a right guaranteed according to the UN treaty which the US is a party to. The Bush administration has requested that Texas re-examine the cases (President Bush was Governor of Texas before becoming president) but Texas maintains that neither the Federal Government nor the UN can tell it how to run its legal system. Washington Week's legal expert said that based on the questions asked of the attorneys by the Court, it will likely rule in favor of Texas because to do otherwise would usurp the Court itself of some of its power to make decisions, a power it jealously guards. It will be interesting to see how this one comes out. Personally, I'm rooting for Texas. Were it up to me, the US would quit the UN and tell it to leave American territory.