Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 301

“The greatest peacetime challenge the world has ever faced”

That would be Ebola, according to the director of the World Health Organization, a plague that is raging out of control, with projections that it will kill 1.4 million people by January.  Right now, the disease is confined to Africa, but surely it won’t stay there. From Julia Belluz, The worst-case scenario for Ebola – [Read More...]

Lateral military enlistments?

The pattern for enlisting in the military is to sign up in your 20′s, then, if you want to make a career of it, keep rising in the ranks until you retire after 20 or 30 years.  The military only hires people, as it were, at entry level positions.  But what if you could enlist [Read More...]

Why Christians in Iraq won’t go back

There are more Biblical sites in Iraq than in any other nation other than Israel:  Eden (maybe), the Tigris & Euphrates rivers, Abraham’s home town of Ur, the city that Jonah evangelized Ninevah, Babylon, the place of the Hebrews’ exile.  And there have been Christians there since the days of the New Testament, with the [Read More...]

Suicide tourism

Tourism is booming in Switzerland, but many visitors aren’t coming back home.  They are suicide tourists, going to the land of legalized euthanasia to end their lives.  And increasingly, they get doctors to finish them off even though they don’t have fatal diseases. From Penny Sarchet, Tourism to Switzerland for assisted suicide is growing, often [Read More...]

We’re bombing Syria

The United States has been bombing ISIL positions in Iraq, but yesterday we took the fight to Syria.  Arab allies joined in the bombing.  ISIL began as a Sunnni rebel group trying to overthrow the Shi’ite dictator in Syria, Bashar al-Assad.  American planes also attacked another terrorist organization there, the Khorasan Group, which was reportedly [Read More...]

Caution: Intense Law & intense Gospel

Sunday was the commemoration of St. Matthew.  In the Gospel lesson, Matthew tells about how Jesus called him, tax collector though he was, and how the Pharisees thought about him: 9 As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And [Read More...]

Great Britain will decentralize its government

In response to the near secession of Scotland from the United Kingdom, the British government is promising to decentralize, giving more power to regional and local governments.  (Not just Scotland but Wales and Northern Ireland already have their own parliaments.  England hasn’t, being content to rule all of the others, but now England itself may [Read More...]

Cell phones the police can’t tap into

You can set up a passcode to protect the information on your cell phone.  But the manufacturers can still unlock that information if given a court order, giving police and other government agencies access to people’s private data.  But Apple has announced that the new operating system for iPhones, iOS 8, will not give the [Read More...]

Even Billy Graham prefers liturgical worship

According to a new biography of Billy Graham–America’s Pastor by Grant Wacker (Harvard University Press)–the Southern Baptist evangelist has said that if he were starting all over again he would be “an evangelical Anglican” because he appreciates the “spiritual beauty in Anglican order.” From Billy Graham: a secret Anglican? | Anglican Ink 2014: Graham told [Read More...]

Alibaba and the 40 Thieves

In China, pretty much everyone buys pretty much everything from the online site Alibaba.  Last week, the company came to the United States, getting listed on the New York Stock Exchange, where it raised over $21 billion, becoming the second-biggest IPO in history.  Alibaba has a market capitalization of nearly $220 billion, making it bigger [Read More...]