Nature More Diverse Than We Know

So a scientist thinks that there could be 10 times as many species of plants and animals than we know.  This not only demonstrates the huge creativity of the Creator God, but it also puts the lie to all those ads by such mendacious groups as WWF and their ilk who make claims such as “70% of all animal species have died”- if we don’t even know how many there are now, how can we even guess at such a percentage?

From the ABC

Number of plant and animal species could be 10 times greater, Flinders University professor says

Posted about 2 hours ago

The number of different plant and animal species in the world may be 10 times greater than we think, according to a professor from Flinders University.

An Australian team has written to the journal, Nature, claiming the estimate of 8.7 million species could be just a fraction of the true figure.

Professor Mike Lee, an evolutionary biologist with the South Australian Museum and Flinders University, said it was a “known unknown”.

“Knowing how many different forms of life live on earth is probably one of the most fundamental questions a scientist can ask,” he said.

“Despite 300 years of taxonomy, there’s still vast disagreements and estimates range between 3 million and 100 million.”

Professor Lee said the processes to determine different species used to be quite superficial.

“What we’ve done in the main is look at animals with the naked eye, and sort them into piles, and each pile we think is a new species,” he said.

“But when we look at the piles really, really closely, using genetics, it turns out each pile isn’t really just a homogenous set of individuals.

“They might be very similar, but nonetheless subtly different species.”

Number of species in the world could be up to 90 million

He believes the real number could be closer to 90 million, and that is important for conservation efforts.

“If we thought there was only one African elephant, we might not be concerned that all the elephants in the forest were going extinct, because we might think there’s plenty of the same thing out on the savanna,” Professor Lee said.

“But of course if you know there’s two different species, and the African forest elephant is a unique and irreplaceable genetic and conservation resource, then you’d be really concerned if it’s going extinct.”

Professor Lee said it was not reassuring that there might be more species out there, because they could also be falling extinct without our knowledge.

His letter to Nature was co-written by Paul Oliver from the Australian National University.

Brexit- Fulfilling Bible Prophecy?

Babylon Bee humorously predicted it, and here it is just two days later, the first claim that Brexit fits into Bible prophecy.

Just astoundingly, amazingly bad theology.

 

How the Brexit is Surprisingly Fulfilling Bible Prophecy

Posted on June 24, 2016 by joshuainfantado

Britain’s exit or simply ‘Brexit’ has bitterly divided the country. This controversial political move has just concluded with Britain walking away from the powerful European Union. After 43 years, Britain has finally decided to leave and regain complete sovereignty of their native land.

With this in mind, are we moving closer to the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies? Where will this recent event lead us? Most importantly, what does this mean for us, individual Christians?

 

Full article is here

Stephen McAlpine: Don’t Let Your Church Be A Hanoi Jane

Stephen McAlpine has some solid warnings on the “two-speed church.” Well worth reading.

Don’t Let Your Church be a Hanoi Jane

Once again The Australian newspaper’s Foreign Editor, Greg Sheridan has hit the nail on the head, in an insightful article today, entitledChristian churches drifting too far from the marketplace of ideas.

His opening lines are a cracker:

Australia’s Christian churches are in crisis, on the brink of complete strategic irrelevance. It’s not clear they recognise the mortal depth of their problems.

The churches need a new approach to their interaction with politics and the public debate, and to keeping themselves relevant in a post-Christian Australian society.

I wish I’d said as much myself.  Hey, Ididsay as much myself.  It’s a year ago this week since I wrotemy most read post ever, with dealt with this question exactly. And that post has raised a lot of good conservations in the past twelve months, taking it to a level of debate and push back that I had not envisaged.

Now, as an aside, there was a distinct possibility raised earlier this week that Greg Sheridan was going to ask my opinion on these issues, as he has been reading my articles recently, but I guess he had enough to go on.  But if he had, I guess I would havea)succumbed to hubris and,b)told him what I am about to say now.

And it’s this:

Just as there has been a two-speed-economy here in my home city of Perth during the now, sadly, historical commodities boom, there is a two speed religious economy in Christendom recently, and only one speed will survive our cultural malaise.

The slow speed religious economy is headed for disaster.  And it is made up of two groups; traditionalists and progressives.

The traditionalists have pretty much aligned with the state down the years, and include such behemoths as the Catholic Church. It is this group that Sheridan has in his sights when he memorably states:

The churches cannot recognise and come to grips with their strategic circumstances. They behave as though they still represent a living social consensus.

They remind me of South Vietnam’s government in 1974. It over-estimated its strength and tried to hang on to all of its territory, including the long narrow neck of its north. It did not retreat to its formidable heartland in the south, which would have been vastly more defensible. Had it done so, it might have survived. Instead, the next year, the armoured divisions of North Vietnam invaded and Saigon lost everything.

These lumbering giants are dying the death of a thousand cuts as they fail to realise how much the culture has shifted against them.  As Sheridan points out, less than 10 per cent of Australian Catholics attend Mass on a given week, down from 74 % in 1954.

But for every foolish South Vietnamese general who fails to see the writing on the wall, there is always a treacherous Hanoi Jane on your own side who will dig the knife in a little further, right?

Hollywood pin-up girl Jane Fonda earned the nomenclature “Hanoi Jane” for her support for the communist North Vietnamese as they steamrollered all in their path on the way to victory.

And so the slow-speed-economy church today has the Hanoi Jane of the progressive, post-evangelical churches, along with the pretty-much-moribund Uniting Church and Anglican Church (save for some noble exceptions).

These Hanoi Jane churches are unlike the “vegetable love” of the traditionalists, in that they are onlyminutely slower than the culture.

How much slower? About two seconds slower.  The culture jumps in one direction, be that ethical or whatever, and these Hanoi Janes’ suddenly find voice, scampering around and shouting “Me too! Me too!” to whoever is bored enough to be listening to them.

And all this despite clear evidence that this reactive approach to the cultural zeitgeist has been an abject failure for almost a century!  Hanoi Jane churches would rather die than stand for any gospel convictions. And die they will. History has borne that out.

Read the rest of the article here

Piers Ackerman- Vote Labor in haste, regret at your leisure

Piers Akerman

 

SHOULD Labor leader Bill Shorten win office in 41 days, homosexual marriage will ­become a reality across Australia just 100 days later. 

This has nothing to do with fairness, equality, human rights or any other humbug the homosexual lobby and the Marxists lurking close behind their agenda may wish you to believe.

This is about Labor being pushed to the Left by the Greens, radically altering customary practice, dramatically changing the way children are reared by removing either a male or a female figure from the family unit, and setting the stage for a generation who will forever be robbed of a better shot at life.

For it is the demonstrably evident fact that children raised in stable heterosexual families will, on the best available statistics, be best equipped to deal with the world.

That, as unpalatable as it may seem to those homosexual couples (as sharing, caring and warm and loving as they may be) who have chosen to adopt or create children through IVF or surrogacy, is just how it is.

The consequences of adopting homosexual marriage are not benign. It is not just about having two little Ken dolls or two little Barbies in bridal wear on top of the wedding cake.

Those who would change the Marriage Act to redefine the traditional union of a man and a woman know they are merely stalking horses for massive societal change such as are already being experienced in the US, where, in a giant grab for exaggerated victimhood status, the homosexual and gender-confused lobby have now managed to have President Barack Obama force all state schools to permit children use whichever lavatory they feel fits their sexual orientation — not necessarily their biological and chromo-somal identity.

I doubt whether many young girls will feel pressing need to express their inner manliness by fronting the urinals or even entering the boys’ (should they still be labelled as such) loos, but I suspect there will be a rush of hormonally charged teenage boys anxious to entertain their inner sheila and barge into the lavatories and change rooms traditionally set aside for females.

The new anti-gender laws have already restricted freedom of speech, and they will here, too, as there has already been a ridiculous try-on in Tasmania mounted by transgender activist and Greens candidate Martine Delaney.

Delaney lodged a complaint against the Catholic Archbishop of Tasmania Julian Porteous over a church booklet which carried the unthreatening slogan “don’t mess with marriage” and made the case accepted universally for millennia that marriage should be a “heterosexual union between a man and a woman”. To change the law, it said, would endanger a child’s upbringing.

Earlier this month, Delaney withdrew the charge in the face of the Church’s obvious defence — that it was plainly false to assert there was nothing distinctive about a man and a woman, a father or a mother.

As much as Penny Wong and her partner may delight in calling themselves parents of the children who live with them, neither is a man, neither is a father and neither can provide the male presence under their roof that is the ideal in a true family.

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating famously noted that “two blokes and a cocker spaniel” don’t make a family, and that was Labor’s view until a few years ago.

A more recent Labor PM, Julia Gillard, crossed the floor of the house and sat with then Opposition leader Tony Abb-ott, to vote down a Labor backbencher’s private member’s bill to amend the Marriage Act and permit homosexual couples to marry.

She wasn’t alone. Her treasurer, Wayne Swan, environment minister Tony Burke, trade minister Craig Emerson and former PM Kevin Rudd, joined her in voting down the motion 98-42.

Then the homosexual lobby arced up its campaign.

False statistics about the percentage of homosexuals in the community were flung about (internationally, the agreed number seems to be somewhat less than 2 per cent).

Claims that bullying of gender-muddled children forced some to at least contemplate suicide, if not carry through with their intention, were laid though no statistics bear this out and the statistic which seems most available would ­indicate that the primary focus of anxieties among those who do report bullying is to do with their body image or ethnicity.

This has not stopped those, like Victoria’s socialist Premier Daniel Andrews, or the members of the grotesquely misnamed Safe Schools Coalition, headquartered in the truly ­bizarre Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and ­Society unit at La Trobe University, from supporting the teaching of such skills as “penis tucking” and “breast binding” to prepubescent children.

Shorten, should he be elected, won’t just redefine marriage, he’ll destroy it.

As lesbian Russian author Masha Gessen told the Sydney Writers Festival four years ago “fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there”.

“Because we lie that the ­institution of marriage is not going to change. It’s going to change and it should change.”

Two months ago Labor senator Joe Bullock resigned as a matter of principle over Labor’s stance.

He said he couldn’t remain in a party which proposed to deny its members a conscience vote on the homosexual marriage question.

He made his decision after attending the Labor Party’s ­national conference and finding himself, to the best of his knowledge, the only one to vote against this proposition.

“How can I, in good conscience, recommend to people that they vote for a party which has determined to deny its parliamentarians a conscience vote on the homosexual marriage question? The simple ­answer is that I can’t,” he said.

Australians should ask themselves whether they want this radical change forced on their society when they vote on July 2.

 

Full article

Greens Want To Kill Christianity

I don’t know how any christian can vote for the Greens given  their anti-christian agenda.

From Andrew Bolt:

The Greens are on the road to declaring Christianity illegal:

The party’s LGBTI policy, ­announced by sexuality spokesman Robert Simms and gender identity and intersex spokes­women Janet Rice, also promised the end of religious exemptions in anti-­discrimination law…

Vowing to strip the religious exemption from anti-discrimination laws, Senator Simms said the party wanted to stamp out sexuality and gender identity-based discrimination. “Under current anti-discrimination laws, a gay man can be fired from working at a private school and a transgender person can be turned away from a religious homeless shelter,” he said. “We shouldn’t be giving ­religious organisations a get-out-of-jail-free card and the right to discriminate. Allowing a right to discriminate undermines the effectiveness of these kinds of laws. These exemptions can ruin someone’s life.”

The Greens’ move comes a week after an anti-discrimination complaint against Hobart Archbishop Julian Porteous was dropped. He had been accused of humiliating gay, lesbian and transgender Australians by distributing a booklet on traditional marriage.

And the Greens are meanwhile panicking Labor into restoring a program that effectively demands primary school children consider being gay or of no real gender:

Labor is considering restoring the controversial Safe Schools prog­ram after the Greens promised to roll it out fully….

Labor may reverse changes the Coalition made to the program this year amid an outcry over 11-year-olds being asked to role play as gay teenagers.

Labor’s education spokeswoman, Kate Ellis, told The Australian: “We established the Safe Schools program and we think it does incredibly important work.

“In contrast, the Liberals are cutting the program entirely next year…”

Full article here

Tim Blair: BACKSTABBER FRATERNITY WELCOMES LATEST MEMBER

From Tim Blair:

 

Tim Blair

Wednesday, September 16, 2015 (2:46am)

 

Former Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have complained at great length about how they were undermined and ultimately removed by their challengers – who were, respectively, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd. Interestingly, both now identify with and support the man who undermined and ultimately removed former Prime Minister Tony Abbott: 

image 

image 

Not a word of sympathy from either Rudd or Gillard for the latest leadership victim, presumably due to bitterness over Abbott besting both of them in direct competition. Meanwhile, the first post-spill poll is good news for Malcolm Turnbull and bad news for Bill Shorten

A snap Morgan poll conducted today on who Australian voters think is the better PM found Mr Turnbull is preferred by 70 per cent of voters compared to 24 per cent for Bill Shorten.

The special Snap SMS poll of 1204 voters also found a majority of Labor supporters say Mr Turnbull is the better leader, with 50 per cent supporting him compared to 44 per cent supporting Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. 

That result will please Turnbull, Australia’s third Labor Prime Minister since 2007.

Action on Climate: Stealing From the Poor to Give to the Rich

You never hear from the Greens about how their policies hit the poor and favour the rich.One example of course is that subsidies for roof top solar force up electricity prices for those who cannot use solar power- renters and the poor. But it gets a lot worse as these examples from the US show.

From WUWT:

The Hood Robin Syndrome

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

There’s a new study out, under the imprimatur of the Energy Institute of the Haas School of Business in Berkeley, California, entitledThe Distributional Effects of U.S. Clean Energy Tax Credits.  As the title implies, it looks at who actually profited from the various “green energy” tax credits across the United States. SPOILER ALERT! It wasn’t the poor folks.

How much money are we talking about? Well, the paper says that from 2006 to 2012, the taxpayers have been on the hook for $18 BILLION DOLLARS to fund these subsidies, money that would have otherwise gone into the General Fund.

And just how much money is eighteen billion dollars? Here’s one way to think about eighteen gigabucks, regarding safe, clean drinking water.

Water Wells for Africa reports from their ongoing projects that on average it has cost them about $3.50 per person ($7,000 per well serving 2,000 people) to provide people with clean safe well water. Soeighteen billion dollars is enough money to drill drinking water wells for three-quarters of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants.(Yes, I know that’s a gross simplification, some folks don’t live over a subterranean water table, and so on, but it isstill enough money to drill the two and a half million wells that would be needed.)

So what did we do with this huge amount of money, enough wealth to truly change the lives of the world’s poor?

Well, following the brilliant policies pushed by the Obama Administration and the climate alarmists, we took enough taxpayer money to truly change the lives of the world’s poor folks … and instead, we gave it to the American rich folks.

No kidding! This is not a joke. This is what passes for moral activism in the liberal American universe. Throwing money at the rich is seen as striking a noble blow for POSSIBLY saving the poor from a tenth of a degree of warming by 2100.

Sadly, it’s no joke at all—the whole war on carbon has been a tragedy for the poor. In this case, the result of these misguided tax subsidies, of the type which have been pushed by climate alarmists for years, has been to create a real climate “hockeystick”.

Read the rest here

Why Obama is Wrong

In any sane society the climate change myth would have died long ago, giving rise to real science on climate. In the latest episode of arrogance, President Obama has dedicated his nation to higher electricity prices and reduced economic wealth to solve a non-problem and reduce the earthg’s temperature by at most 0.1 degrees.

If Obama was shown this graph, and had it interpreted proprly for him, he would have found there is zero correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature.

And if has shown this graph, he would have  seen how CO2 emissions and energy usage actually do correlate with human health, wealth and well-being.

 

The climate myth continues despite 18 years of no measurable change in temperature and steady release of CO2 into the atmosphere.

King Canute understood he had no power to control the sea, but our modern day emperors have the pride to believe they can control the weather.

Lyle Shelton honours the one man in Labor who stands for truth

From Lyle Shelton: “Our political class has fallen victim to a culture that has lost its capacity to reason.

How a decision to sit was the biggest stand for truth at Labor’s conference

Labor’s 47th National Conference in Melbourne at the weekend marked the party’s end of tolerance for the natural family as the gold standard for children.

It’s been a slow burn but it is now official. The party’s capitulation to the sexual revolution and Greens’ social policy is complete.

After 2019, any Labor parliamentarian who votes to support marriage as one man and one woman will be automatically expelled from the party.

There is now no room in the party for an aspiring candidate for office who wishes to uphold the definition of marriage that is in the best interest of a child.

As Labor’s president Mark Butler put the motion, the ‘ayes’ were loud and proud.

“All those against?” A solitary “no” which sounded like WA Senator Joe Bullock rang out. I was sitting up in the bleachers so it was hard to tell for sure.

Earlier as Penny Wong, Labor’s lesbian Senate leader, rose to speak she was greeted with a sustained standing ovation.

One man, the former head of the Australia’s largest trade union, Joe de Bruyn, could not bring himself to genuflect before the rainbow regime.

It takes courage not to go with the crowd. It takes even greater courage to do this when the crowd are the people of the party for whom you have given your life.

Someone with an iPhone snapped Joe and put him on Twitter. His decision not to bow was ridiculed with almost 200 re-tweets.

What the mockers will never understand is how much courage that took.

Earlier in the conference, Labor voted to make it their policy to support access to assisted reproductive technology for same-sex attracted people.

Watch now for Australia’s prohibition on commercial surrogacy to begin to be chipped at.

There was no debate about the ethics of denying children their natural mother or father, a necessary by-product of ART.

The irony of all this was hearing on the radio on the drive to work this morning the victims of the forced adoption practices of the 1950s-1970s telling heart-wrenching stories of removal.

Do we seriously think a boy growing up with lesbians will never have an ache in his heart for his dad?

I see how my kids love and relate to their mother. There is a maternal bond that two men cannot fulfil no matter how much the law tries to pretend otherwise.

The Greens and Labor talk a lot about the natural environment for birds and plants.  Labor’s conference said nothing about the natural environment for a baby.

And if you think I am being partisan, I am not. It is a Liberal, Warren Entsch, who is leading the charge to abolish husband and wife from the Marriage Act when Parliament resumes in August.

Our political class has fallen victim to a culture that has lost its capacity to reason.

Labor Leadership holds the rainbow flag

Yes, it is a sad day to see the alternative party of government vote to expel anyone who wants to support marriage as the best environment for a child.

But we must use this seminal moment in Australian politics to wake ourselves up and resolve to re-build a marriage culture.

Doing this will require speaking. It will require challenging the assumptions of our friends who have put a rainbow wash through their Facebook profile.

Ideas have consequences. If bad ideas are the only ones prosecuted in the public square, as was the case at Labor’s conference, then we should not be surprised if viral ideas take root in our culture.

Truth always resonates with ordinary people but it can only resonate if it is spoken.

By remaining in his seat, Joe de Bruyn stood for truth.

We all need to take a leaf out of his book.