I guess it’s easier and more profitable to put animals down than to actually do the hard work of finding homes for them.

…But now Peta – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – is itself on the receiving end of angry words over its own treatment of animals after it emerged that the organisation put down 96 per cent of the animals handed into its American headquarters. Of 2,216 animals taken to its premises in Norfolk, Virginia, last year, 2,124 were put to sleep – almost six per day. Homes were found for just seven.

The high-profile charity, famous for its “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaigns, has euthanised more than 20,000 pets in the last decade, according to figures it has supplied to Virginia state officials.

But the organisation, which does not run its own animal adoption programme and does not accept animals into its care elsewhere, admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that some treatable and adoptable animals were also among those killed by lethal injection.

…Now critics of the group are accusing it of being more interested in using its $32 million annual budget to fund its campaigns against the fur and meat industries than helping the cats and dogs in its backyard.

Is there any hospital in the entire United States where between 400 and 1,200 people have died as the result of poor care in the span of three years? And then there’s the head of the World Health Organization who calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care. Sure, we’ve got our own problems, no one is denying that, but do we really want to drop one failed system for another? Let’s try something new, instead.

Patients admitted for emergency treatment at an NHS Trust were subjected to “shocking and appalling” care that included untrained receptionists carrying out medical checks and heart monitors being switched off, a report concluded today. The Healthcare Commission, the NHS standards watchdog, said that evidence suggested that as many as 400 deaths at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust could have been prevented and may have been the result of poor care.

That’s at a single hospital. I think a lot of people complaining about health care in the United States are unaware that “roughly 50 cents out of every dollar that you spend on health care now is spent by the government.” We spend more than any other country in the world per capita.

David Gratzer, M.D., a Canadian, believes that Americans have three choices:

I’ve only really found three choices for America. How can we deal with this financial crisis? One: Go back to managed care. Health spending largely pla­teaued in the mid-1990s. Sure, people were upset, but we actually contained costs.

Option number two: socialized medicine. Every other Western country has done it. You want to call it universal health care; you want to call it single-payer; whatever you want to call it. Steffie Wool­handler calls it the “cure.” I don’t.

Option number three: Let’s try something we don’t do a lot of in health care policy in the Unit­ed States: capitalism. Let’s do for health policy what we’ve done in the other five-sixths of the general economy.

He has five ideas for implementing option number three: Make health insurance like every other type of insurance, introduce government policies that foster competition, reform Medicaid, revisit Medicare and reconsider the role of the FDA. Visit the article for details.

Normally this isn’t a blog about blogging or blogging software, but I just upgraded my comment section, so bear with me for one more post on the topic. After implementing the new threaded comments feature, I realized I needed to separate trackbacks from comments, because it just doesn’t look nice to have them all together. I was able to do it without any hassle by following the instructions at the blog below:

Separating Pings from Comments in WordPress 2.7

It’s actually easier than you might think. Well, actually it’s not. But Chris Harrison has done all the dirty work, so all you have to do is follow his instructions:

• Wordpress 2.7 Comment Style Starter #1
• Wordpress 2.7 Comment Style Starter #2
• Stylizing Threaded/Nested Comments in Wordpress 2.7

The only problem I had was with li.bypostauthor not working, but a post by jeremyclark13 on the Wordpress forums gave me the solution: put it at the end, because CSS rules are applied in order of appearance.

Now if I could only figure out why my blog comment form keeps “forgetting” people’s information…

What are the chances that a married person who is faithful to his or her spouse is going to contract AIDS? Pretty much zero. Common sense would therefore tell you that the best way to avoid contracting AIDS would be to abstain from sexual intercourse outside the confines of marriage.

Apparently this is not so obvious to people like Rebecca Hodes, head of policy, communications and research for the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa. WND reports that she “blasted the pope for not advocating wide access to condoms as a means of combating AIDS.” Commenting to the AP, she said, “His opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans.”

WND reports, however, that “a senior Harvard research scientist confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI, who endured heavy criticism for declaring that condom distribution programs worsen the AIDS epidemic in Africa, was actually correct.”

“There is,” Green added, “a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.”

…In Uganda, according to a report in Science magazine, teaching about AIDS and promoting monogamy has led to a dramatic turnaround in the country’s AIDS epidemic.

“Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is preventable if populations are mobilized to avoid risk,” states the report’s summary. “Despite limited resources, Uganda has shown a 70 percent decline in HIV prevalence since the early 1990s, linked to a 60 percent reduction in casual sex. The response in Uganda appears to be distinctively associated with communication about [AIDS] through social networks. Despite substantial condom use and promotion of biomedical approaches, other African countries have shown neither similar behavioral responses nor HIV prevalence declines of the same scale. The Ugandan success is equivalent to a vaccine of 80 percent effectiveness.”

It would appear, then, that it is Ms. Hodes, not the Pope, who is more interested in dogma (in her case that of free sex) than in saving lives. Yet another case of a liberal projecting her own ulterior motives/character flaws onto others.

A recent trip to Greece piqued my interest in the history of Christianity. It also strengthened my conviction that Christianity is true. Some skeptics say that Jesus did not exist. The life and missionary work of Paul of Tarsus prove otherwise. You don’t even have to take into account the miraculous conversion experience where he went from persecutor to proselytizer. Paul’s missionary work started around A.D. 35-36, less than five years or so after Jesus was crucified. If, as some skeptics like to say, Paul was the true founder of Christianity, then surely Peter, one of Jesus’ most beloved disciples, would have rebuked him for changing Jesus’ message or lying about who Jesus was. Seeing as how they travelled together, there was certainly occasion to do so.

Anyway, I was delighted to see that there was a book offered in the Thomas Nelson Book Review club that showed the journeys of Paul in pictures. It is called In the Footsteps of Paul and is filled with beautiful photographs by renowned photographer Ken Duncan. The author/photographer traced Paul’s steps according to the book of Acts and has taken photographs of the modern day places mentioned. It really brings the story alive. The photographs are supplemented with Scripture and quotes from well-known Christians like Billy Graham, Beth Moore and Charles Spurgeon.

It’s not a meaty book that will shed light on doctrines or anything like that. It’s basically a book that you’d put on your coffee table, but with its pictures of Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Athens, Rome and other cities Paul visited on his missionary journeys, it is great for getting a mental image to go along with the narrative provided in Acts. Of course, actually visiting those places in person is even better, but this is the next best thing.

During the campaign, Obama heavily criticized McCain for saying the fundamentals of the economy were sound. Now he’s saying the same thing. What has changed besides the economy getting notably worse?

Former President Clinton recently added his two cents to the debate. He said that scientists engaging in embryonic stem cell research must be careful to use only embryos that “have been placed beyond the pale of being fertilized before their use.” Somebody should tell him that fertilization is what produces an embryo and starts human development. It’s scary that the people we elect to make life and death decisions don’t even understand the issues. How can someone like Clinton be entrusted with the authority to decide whether or not it is permissible to destroy human embryos when he doesn’t even know what an embryo is? I wonder if Obama knows what an embryo is…Probably not.

Steve Chapman points out why this research should horrify even those who are not part of the pro-life movement:

What this mandate means is simple: It may be permissible for scientists to create cloned embryos and kill them. It’s not permissible to create cloned embryos and let them live. Their cells may be used for our benefit, but not for their own.

There lies the reality of embryonic stem cell research: It turns incipient human beings into commodities to be exploited for the sake of people who are safely past that defenseless stage of their lives.

It’s a change that poses risks not just to days-old human embryos. The rest of us may one day reap important medical benefits from this research. But we may lose something even more vital.

Bob recently started a discussion on his blog about the issue of legislating morality after I made a comment on one of his posts that all laws legislate morality. As chance would have it, Joseph Farah has a column on WND today on that very topic. He says it better than I could, so here it is:

It’s time to recognize that all political issues are social issues.

When we use the phrase “social issues,” most people think about abortion, homosexuality, marriage, divorce and other moral concerns.

Many in our society today believe these “social issues” are matters of private concern only – and, thus, have no place in politics.

It’s ridiculous.

The truth is – all political issues are social and moral.

If you care about people not starving, then good economics becomes a social issue.

If you care about young men not dying in needless foreign wars, then national security and defense are social issues.

If you care about saving the lives of millions of fellow Americans, then civil defense should be a social issue.

Please tell me if you can think of any issue – local, state or national – that is not a social issue.

Traffic laws are the result of someone’s idea of morality being imposed on others. Some people believe it is safer to drive at 50 mph than 75. Thus, we have speed limits.

Some people believe second-hand smoke is harmful or, at least, annoying, so we have laws against smoking in public places.

We have mandatory seat-belt laws to protect the lives of people – whether they care about their own life or not.

So, this notion that some laws are based on a sense of morality and others are not is just plain silly.

In fact, it’s even more ironic that many of the very people who claim legislation against abortion is wrong because it imposes someone else’s morality on people who may not agree, use their own sense of right and wrong to impose their morality on others.

Have you ever noticed that?

Barack Obama, for instance, is doing his best to force those of us who believe it is wrong to kill unborn babies to subsidize the practice. He is even attempting to make it lawful to conduct so-called “scientific experimentation” on the cells of unborn human embryos to ensure there is an absolute, unequivocal, unhampered “right” to kill unborn babies at any time and for any reason. In fact, while he was a member of the Illinois state legislature, he fought against providing life-saving, emergency treatment for babies who miraculously, and against all odds, survived abortions. He suggested they should be denied medical treatment, nourishment and, perhaps, even air to breathe.

That’s Barack Obama’s sense of morality. And he is all-too-eager to impose it on helpless babies and those of us who stand in the way of the executioners.

Meanwhile, though, Barack Obama believes very strongly that the tax code should be used as a mechanism of imposing his own ideas about “social justice.” Thus, Barack Obama agrees with me that every issue is a “social issue.” He just has a different worldview – a different sense of morality.

Barack Obama will soon give Al Gore his wish – making so-called “global warming” one of the central operating paradigms of our time. The government will be empowered to control how high you keep your thermostat and how much gasoline you consume because it’s a matter of “saving the planet.”

Now who is it that is imposing their own warped ideas of morality on the rest of us?

Remember, Al Gore has said so-called “global warming” is a “moral issue that affects the survival of human civilization.” As such, there is no aspect of life that will not come under the control of government as part of the fight against this phantom and fraudulent problem.

So, don’t feel ashamed or guilty when someone accuses you of attempting to “legislate morality.” That’s what we do when we pass laws – all laws.

It’s simply a case of whose morality is going to rule the day – God’s or Barack Obama’s.

For someone who says that the question of when life begins is above his pay grade, President Obama certainly seems sure that it isn’t at conception. After all, if the life of a human being begins at conception, as is the scientific consensus, Obama would surely not be able to say something like, “the potential [embryonic stem cell research] offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided.” If embryos are human beings, then there is no way to avoid the so-called “perils,” because the research involves the destruction of embryos. The President says, “As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering.” Wow, so the implication is that those of us who are opposed to the killing of tiny human beings–even if there is a potential benefit to big human beings–don’t believe in caring for each other and working to ease human suffering?

The President also says, “And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.” Obviously, he has left the door open for “therapeutic cloning” where the cloned embryo is simply destroyed before he or she has a chance to mature. Why ban cloning for human reproduction, though? Isn’t this a moral pronouncement? Isn’t the President forcing his moral values on us? Couldn’t proponents of reproductive cloning say exactly what Obama said about embryonic stem cell research, i.e. that “our government has forced…a false choice between sound science and moral values”?

The dirty little secret? There was no ban on embryonic stem cell research, only on federal funding of it. The reason researchers could not get funding for their research was because no private investors were willing to invest in ethically questionable research that has proven to be unfruitful despite all the hype about its potential.