Bloggers bid farewell to Terri Schiavo, rail against religious leaders fighting a Jerusalem gay pride festival, and doubt an international scientific team’s findings that humans are exhausting the world’s natural resources. Terri Schiavo, R.I.P.: Terri Schiavo died today, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed. Her body was quickly brought to the Pinellas County medical examiner’s office; her husband Michael Schiavo hopes an autopsy will show that she had suffered irreversible brain damage.”One more scalp for the Liberals,” declares right-wing diarist Mike from Musings of a Fat Kid. Most bloggers are less combative, though. Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin posts Dylan Thomas’ “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” At Outside the Beltway, political scientist and defense specialist James Joyner arranges an archive of news and opinion on the Schiavo case. “She’s now in the hands of her creator. It seems to me any more political talk should cease for a while,” writes ambivalent Republican Andrew Sullivan. “The moral questions linger, however,” he says. Trying in vain to extract a single, simple stance on the case from Catholic doctrine, Sullivan writes, “We can say, however, that Michael Schiavo’s record is certainly within the scope of the Church’s historical understanding of what the moral obligations toward his wife are.” At keepstumblin, Brooklyn-based Ben doubts the public will be as accepting as Sullivan. “I suspect she will posthumously become the poster child for the cause, her husband will continue to be demonized by these people, and her parents will be portrayed as long suffering (which they are, but not for the reasons they should be) and devout.”Read the latest blog posts on Terri Schiavo here and Slate’s coverage here.Faith against pride: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders met in Jerusalem on Wednesday to protest an upcoming gay pride festival. “They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable,” said Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi. “We can’t permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem,” said Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik. “What, I’m sure you’re asking, has finally brought together the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims who populate Jerusalem, groups who have hated and fought each other for centuries?” asks unrepentant Howard Dean-supporter Dan of this is not my dot com. “Well, thank goodness, it looks like they don’t hate each other nearly as much as they collectively hate queers!” Pointing to the peaceful unity of religions more known for feuding than cooperation, Mike D. from MemeFirst suggests, “Maybe bigotry is the answer to the world’s problems.” At Vegacura, politics-and-baseball blogger John agrees: “Perhaps announcing a Gay Pride Parade in Baghdad is just the thing to bring everyone together peacefully and bring an end to the insurgency in Iraq.” Read more about the conference here.Are 1,300 scientists crying wolf?: A report, released today and backed by more than 1300 scientists from 95 countries, suggests that “the human race is living beyond its means” and that two-thirds of the world’s resources have been “used up.” The comprehensive survey “concludes that human activities threaten the Earth’s ability to sustain future generations.”Most bloggers aren’t buying it. At Liberty Corner, libertarian retiree Thomas Anger pooh-poohs the warnings, linking to another story full of dire, and ultimately inaccurate, estimates. “You’d think they’d have learned this stuff doesn’t fly,” writes former DJ Eric Florack at BitsBlog. “I guess perhaps the problem is it flies too often.” GOP Blogger Mark Noonan rolls his eyes as well: “Just another gloom and doom bit of enviro-whacko nonsense … those of us who are old enough to remember The Population Bomb and Global 2000 know precisely how much stock to put into environmentalist predictions of looming global catastrophe: zero.”“I can’t help but wonder what the motives are of people who make these claims,” writes M.D. Pat Santy at Doctor Sanity. “The first article describes them as ‘scientists’, but that seems to me to be going too far. A better description is ‘true believer’.” Santy admits there are real issues with the way humans relentlessly harvest the planet, but thinks “that reports like the ones described above only try to generate hysteria and circumvent any real discussion and planning that might be done about these issues.”Read more about the survey here and here.
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