I enjoyed Obama’s speech and did not think it was political in any way.  It is disappointing that the Presidency is not respected by politicians. 

*On another note: Does anyone know why we tend to dislike school, especially primary and secondary school?  Is it the teachers?  Is it the content?  Is it the educational system?  Is it the growing pains we experienced?  Is it the other kids?  We are all fairly well educated, yet we don’t seem to appreciate the education that we have received.  Besides the fact that Westerners are fairly spoiled, I wonder if there’s something else.

Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin.

God is sovereign over all finances. Any economic recession—global or personal—is never less than recession-by-divine-design.

When the economy plummets, God has his purposes—perhaps thousands uponthousands of purposes. Some of these purposes he has made known in his Book.

At least 5 of them are:

1. To expose hidden sin and so bring us to repentance and cleansing.
2. To wake us up to the constant and desperate condition of the developing world where there is always and only recession of the worst kind.
3. To relocate the roots of our joy in his grace rather than in our goods—in his mercy rather than our money, in his worth rather than our wealth.
4. To advance his saving mission in the world—the spread of the gospel and the growth of his church—precisely at a time when human resources are least able to support it. This is how he guards his glory.
5. To bring his church to care for its hurting members and to grow in the gift of love.

2 Corinthians 8:1 2 might be the clearest “recession text” in the Bible. Itdescribes the roots of the joy of the Macedonian believers in their”recession.” In their “severe test of affliction” and “extreme poverty,”their abundant joy “overflowed in a wealth of generosity.”

Their generosity didn’t come from prosperity but from God’s grace—and thisgrace rooted in “our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet foryour sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2Corinthians 8:9).

- What Is the Recession For?

Lincoln’s Logic on Slavery Applied to Abortion:

On January 12, 2009 Samantha Heiges, age 23, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for drowning her newborn in Burnsville, Minnesota. If she had arranged for a doctor to kill the child a few weeks earlier she would be a free woman.

What are the differences between this child before and after birth that would justify its protection just after birth but not just before? There are none. This is why Abraham Lincoln’s reasoning about slavery is relevant in ways he could not foresee. He wrote:

You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.

You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.

But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest; you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you. (“Fragments: On Slavery“)

There are no morally relevant differences between white and black or between child-in-the-womb and child-outside-the-womb that would give a right to either to enslave or kill the other.

Global AIDS crisis overblown?  Some dare to say so:

LONDON – As World AIDS Day is marked on Monday, some experts are growing more outspoken in complaining that AIDS is eating up funding at the expense of more pressing health needs.

They argue that the world has entered a post-AIDS era in which the disease’s spread has largely been curbed in much of the world, Africa excepted.

“AIDS is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it’s just one of many terrible humanitarian tragedies,” said Jeremy Shiffman, who studies health spending at Syracuse University.

Roger England of Health Systems Workshop, a think tank based in the Caribbean island of Grenada, goes further. He argues that UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the fight against the disease, has outlived its purpose and should be disbanded.

“The global HIV industry is too big and out of control. We have created a monster with too many vested interests and reputations at stake, … too many relatively well paid HIV staff in affected countries, and too many rock stars with AIDS support as a fashion accessory,” he wrote in the British Medical Journal in May.

Paul de Lay, a director at UNAIDS, disagrees. It’s valid to question AIDS’ place in the world’s priorities, he says, but insists the turnaround is very recent and it would be wrong to think the epidemic is under control.

“We have an epidemic that has caused between 55 million and 60 million infections,” de Lay said. “To suddenly pull the rug out from underneath that would be disastrous.”

U.N. officials roughly estimate that about 33 million people worldwide have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Scientists say infections peaked in the late 1990s and are unlikely to spark big epidemics beyond Africa.

In developed countries, AIDS drugs have turned the once-fatal disease into a manageable illness.

England argues that closing UNAIDS would free up its $200 million annual budget for other health problems such as pneumonia, which kills more children every year than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

“By putting more money into AIDS, we are implicitly saying it’s OK for more kids to die of pneumonia,” England said.

His comments touch on the bigger complaint: that AIDS hogs money and may damage other health programs.

By 2006, AIDS funding accounted for 80 percent of all American aid for health and population issues, according to the Global Health Council.

In Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and elsewhere, donations for HIV projects routinely outstrip the entire national health budgets.

In a 2006 report, Rwandan officials noted a “gross misallocation of resources” in health: $47 million went to HIV, $18 million went to malaria, the country’s biggest killer, and $1 million went to childhood illnesses.

“There needs to be a rational system for how to apportion scarce funds,” said Helen Epstein, an AIDS expert who has consulted for UNICEF, the World Bank, and others.

AIDS advocates say their projects do more than curb the virus; their efforts strengthen other health programs by providing basic health services.

But across Africa, about 1.5 million doctors and nurses are still needed, and hospitals regularly run out of basic medicines.

Experts working on other health problems struggle to attract money and attention when competing with AIDS.

“Diarrhea kills five times as many kids as AIDS,” said John Oldfield, executive vice president of Water Advocates, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that promotes clean water and sanitation.

“Everybody talks about AIDS at cocktail parties,” Oldfield said. “But nobody wants to hear about diarrhea,” he said.

These competing claims on public money are likely to grow louder as the world financial meltdown threatens to deplete health dollars.

“We cannot afford, in this time of crisis, to squander our investments,” Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO’s director-general, said in a recent statement.

Some experts ask whether it makes sense to have UNAIDS, WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank, the Global Fund plus countless other AIDS organizations, all serving the same cause.

“I do not want to see the cause of AIDS harmed,” said Shiffman of Syracuse University. But “For AIDS to crowd out other issues is ethically unjust.”

De Lay argues that the solution is not to reshuffle resources but to boost them.

“To take money away from AIDS and give it to diarrheal diseases or onchocerciasis (river blindness) orleishmaniasis (disfiguring parasites) doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “We’d just be doing a worse job in everything else.”

Don’t Just Throw Money at the World’s Poor:

In recent weeks government officials around the world have put forth several high-profile proposals for pumping huge amounts of money into aid for the world’s poor — the 2.5 billion people who live on less than $2 per day. I believe global economic development ought to be accorded far more attention than it usually gets, given its importance to economic growth and the battles against terrorism, disease, and the drug trade. But the focus on dramatic increases in foreign aid could be an overreach and an ill-advised diversion from other critical approaches to alleviating poverty.

On Jan. 17, the U.N. released a report imploring wealthy countries to double their foreign aid. The goal: to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015. Shortly afterward, Britain proposed a modern-day Marshall Plan for Africa. It also called for a major injection of funds that would come from issuing new government-guaranteed bonds. French President Jacques Chirac, meanwhile, suggested raising aid with new international taxes on such things as financial transactions and aviation fuel. Japan pushed a big recapitalization of the African Development Bank. The Group of Seven asked the International Monetary Fund to sell some of its gold holdings to provide even more assistance. All this occurred even as more than $5 billion was being mobilized on behalf of the tsunami victims in Asia.

EVEN IF THESE IDEAS CAME TO FRUITION, it’s doubtful that these proposals will produce the desired results. The fact is that huge amounts of foreign aid are already in the pipeline. The Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development estimates that its members will have increased their assistance from $58.3 billion in 2002 to $88 billion by next year. The research of Todd Moss of the Center for Global Development in Washington shows that for at least 20 African nations, foreign aid constitutes more than half their public expenditures. And let’s not forget the large and growing antipoverty programs of organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Moreover, most development experts acknowledge the impediments to effective use of aid brought about by poor governance and corruption in many developing countries. Are the donor nations assuming that these obstacles will be miraculously washed away with enough money? Are they also counting on the disappearance of the notorious lack of coordination by aid-giving agencies that leads to enormous waste?

I’m for more aid, to be sure — if it is wisely used. The current frenzy seems more like political one-upmanship among governments than sound policy. It could set unrealistic expectations that result in public disillusionment with development efforts.

It also could draw attention away from alternatives, such as strengthening the engines of economic growth in developing countries, including the private sector, and from ideas, such as those of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who advocates giving poor people clear title to the land and housing they already occupy, so that they can use their assets as collateral for credit.

What is most disturbing is that the calls for aid could undercut efforts to liberalize trade. Poor countries face high tariffs, quotas, or subsidized competition from rich nations in industries such as food processing, textiles, and agriculture. The World Bank estimates that a substantial dismantling of these barriers could be worth $350 billion to the developing world in the next decade and could lift 144 million people out of poverty. Reducing trade barriers would also help consumers in the industrialized nations.

Trade protection in the U.S., Europe, and Japan from agricultural subsidies alone amounts to $1 billion a day. Global trade negotiations are moving at a snail’s pace, and they don’t adequately address some of the most important impediments to development and poverty reduction — such as the provision of cheap medicines. Too little technical assistance is being provided to poor countries to allow them to maneuver effectively through the complex procedures of the World Trade Organization. The question shouldn’t be aid or trade but the relative emphasis given to each. Right now, the scales are becoming dangerously imbalanced.

Blacks Are More Socially Conservative Than Barack Obama

History of Veteran’s Day

The original concept for the celebration was for a day observed with parades and public meetings and a brief suspension of business beginning at 11 a.m.

The United States Congress officially recognized the end of World War I when it passed a concurrent resolution on June 4, 1926, with these words:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.