Trust carefully!

For honest researchers who put their faith in Wikipedia read this: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/wild_and_wacky_wikipedia

Food for thought!

Thomas C Reeves:

As for moral principles, why not just "hook up" with anybody for as long as you feel like it and have as many babies as you want? What's wrong with that?

It is hardly news that Western culture is rapidly embracing secular materialism, a culture in which age-old truths are banished as bigotry and chaos and narcissism abound. The media and the schools are largely responsible. The message that streams into our homes from cables, satellites, antennas, and cell phones declares the joy of doing what feels good, never growing up, owning as much as possible, and declaring the past irrelevant. In schools at all levels political correctness, increasingly enforced by the federal government, preaches "inclusiveness" and "diversity." These are code words for leftist dogmas that seek to foster a society based on colour and sex, and that would banish supernaturalism, destroy the traditional family, dismiss venerable moral standards, and set up a wholly indulgent welfare state.

Given current philosophical/ideological undercurrents and actual policies, who can argue with the above statement?

Distopia.

Is it any wonder that our civilisation is in the process of imploding?

In pop culture, crude sexism, misogyny, homophobia and plain old bad manners are rife.

It is as if the political correctness constricting the surface culture has incubated fetid hatreds underneath, away from the moderating influence of civilised society.

We now have a generation of men brought up with rap music that celebrates violence to women while their own innocent maleness has been treated as a dirty little crime since boyhood.[Miranda Devine]

Are we encouraging the marriage of same sex couples because the different sexes can no longer get along?

Cheeky!

Mr Cool cops it on the cheek:

One loon to another.

Pea in a thimble trick!

The duplicity and mendacity of the current government of Australia:

In GK Chesterton's Father Brown novels the world renowned criminal Flambeau makes a name for himself by forming a successful London dairy company even though he owns no cows, no carts and no milk. Instead, he served his customers by moving the milk bottles outside people's homes to the homes of his customers.

 All very similar to Wayne Swan's crisis budget. Moving money from his year of surplus to his years of non-surplus years before and after. No cows, no milk, no focus on increased production just a bunch of very tricky, very sneaky accounting tricks. Remember their surplus does not pay off the extra $15 billion they will now borrow this year.

Perfect summation!

If this quote doesn't perfectly summarise the Gillard government, then I don't know what does:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
                                                                      H L Mencken

A dying breed.

Courtesy of Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal:

 How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.

Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what. Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.

The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece.

Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.
But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere.
The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.'s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.
Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die