Arts and Letters Daily has several good links you might want to look at. Here's a report from the BBC, of all places, on how the dangers of climate change have been oversold.

This one from Foreign Policy is excellent, distinguishing between the reasonably progressive Latin American left (Bachelet) and the archaic populists (Chavez). I think the author is a little too sanguine about the possible future success of the LatAm social democrats, but he's right when he says there's another option that's far worse. On Hugo Chavez:

Chávez is doing much the same in Venezuela. He is leading the fight against the FTAA, which is going nowhere anyway. He is making life increasingly miserable for foreign -- above all American -- companies. He is supporting, one way or the other, left-wing groups and leaders in many neighboring countries. He has established a strategic alliance with Havana that includes the presence of nearly 20,000 Cuban teachers, doctors, and cadres in Venezuela. He is flirting with Iran and Argentina on nuclear-technology issues. Most of all, he is attempting, with some success, to split the hemisphere into two camps: one pro-Chávez, one pro-American.

At the same time, Chávez is driving his country into the ground. A tragicomic symbol of this was the collapse of the highway from Caracas to the Maiquetía airport a few months ago because of lack of maintenance. Venezuela's poverty figures and human development indices have deteriorated since 1999, when Chávez took office. A simple comparison with Mexico -- which has not exactly thrived in recent years -- shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years, Mexico's economy grew by 17.5 percent, while Venezuela's failed to grow at all. From 1997 to 2003, Mexico's per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela's shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan households in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico's inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela's was 16 percent.

Although Chávez does very little for the poor of his own country (among whom he remains popular), he is doing much more for other countries: giving oil away to Cuba and other Caribbean states, buying Argentina's debt, allegedly financing political campaigns in Bolivia and Peru and perhaps Mexico. He also frequently picks fights with Fox and Bush and is buying arms from Spain and Russia. This is about as close to traditional Latin American populism as one can get -- and as far from a modern and socially minded left as one can be.

Here's one from the Wall Street Journal on why Amartya Sen's latest book is rather naive. And here's another, by Natan Sharansky, on why Bush is a dissident. His argument boils down to "Bush is an idealist," but I think he is one.

This is a terrific piece by Frank Furedi in Spiked on pessimism-mongers. And here's Jonah Goldberg in National Review on the Chicken Little crowd. This is Mark Steyn on the same subject.

Slate has an excellent photograph essay on the Feria de Abril in Seville, with particularly good shots taken over the years. Definitely check them out. This is precisely the side of Spain that some Catalans claim is not part of their own culture. Also in the photo department, in case you missed the German gentleman with his enormous pet rabbit, here it is. It's legit.

There's also a very positive review of the new Bruce Springsteen album, which I suppose I will have to buy. Of course I can't stand his politics, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying his music. The album is a collection of lefty "folk" songs either written or arranged or at least sung by Pete Seeger. Pete was such a Commie that when Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Pete followed the Party line and did an album calling on the US to stay out of the war, with some rather pointed references to President Roosevelt. He stopped singing those songs forever on approximately June 23, 1941. I don't think Bruce covers any of them.