Welcome, stranger, to the 130th edition of the Skeptics Circle, the blog carnival that is to blog carnivals what the Morris Minor is to Japan.

As a bit of a change, and to make things nice and concise so that you can get straight to the lovely juicy meat of the articles without having to read lots of tedious waffle by me first, I'm going to do a special "quotes" edition. Each quote links to an article containing that quote. For extra fun, you can try guessing what the article is about from the quote!

Due to a chronic lack of interest (no posts submitted, no hosts volunteering), I've decided to bring an end to Praxis. It's been an interesting experiment, but my hunch is that it's too broad a subject area to make a good carnival. If anybody else wants to resurrect it or use the same name feel free to let me know, and I'll update the old page with some links for you.

“How exactly did it come to this?” The gangly, talentless Hollywood film star spread his arms at the end of the table as his pneumatically blonde wife looked on, attempting to do her serious face. The Alt20 summit was in full session, leaders from the world’s top branches of woo in an emergency session to determine what could be done about the failing, er, wooconomy.

“Let’s look at the whole picture,” said the holistic therapist. “We’re facing a...”

“Gaia is angry.”

“Shut up Lovelock.”

“Now she’s angrier.”

The holistician glared. “Yes, well the way I see it we’re facing a lack of confidence that’s rippling through the wooconomy. People have lost faith in capi... I mean alt-med. I blame facts.”

Welcome to this weeks slightly late Carnival of the Liberals! Obama has been in the White House for a month or so, but prisoners are still being abused in Gitmo, U.S. forces are still fighting the War-Formerly-Known-As-The-War-On-Terror, humanity is still farting CO2 from every orifice, and the economy is lower than Dolly Parton's unsupported nipples. On the plus side, Europeans now like America again, although not your plague of hamburger franchises.