What You Won't See on the News Today

• 852 million people worldwide were undernourished in 2000-2002. This is more than twice the population of the entire United States. Imagine if everyone you knew in America, and everyone they knew, and everyone they knew, and so on, and so on, were all malnourished, yourself included. Then imagine there were another country exactly the same size with the same problem. Then you would be approaching the magnitude of the problem;

• According to the Hunger Project, 2002 studies indicate that 7.3 million people die every year of hunger-related causes – this amounts to 20,000 people every single day, or 833 people every hour. Imagine if you logged on to CNN right now and read that in the last four hours some 3,000 people were killed, not by a bomb or by a terrorist, but by hunger;

• Undernourishment and deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals cost more than 5 million children their lives every year – about 570 children every hour;

• More than three quarters of all child deaths are caused by neonatal disorders and a handful of treatable infectious diseases, including diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and measles;

• Every year, more than 20 million low birthweight babies are born in the developing world. This means they face increased risk of dying in infancy, of stunted physical and cognitive growth during childhood, of reduced working capacity and earnings as adults and, if female, of giving birth to LBW babies themselves. 54,794 low birthweight babies are born every day in the world, or 2,283 every hour, or 38 every minute;

SUNDAY, JULY 10, 2005

Back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it; and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen."

W.E.B. Du Bois, quoted in 1964, from "A World of Ideas"






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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2005

So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmongers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another. Thomas Merton, "The Root of War Is Fear"








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Riding the Light

The light coming from your computer screen right now will be 372,000 miles away from you in exactly two seconds. That's about the distance to the moon. In about eight minutes, it will be 94 million miles away from you - about the distance to the sun.

SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2005The Past

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old.

Paul Arden

• If you can't solve a problem, it's because you're playing by the rules;
• When it can't be done, do it. If you don't do it, it doesn't exist;
• Getting fired can be a positive career move;
• It's wrong to be right;
• It's right to be wrong;
• The person who doesn't make mistakes is unlikely to make anything;

SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2005

Envy also breeds sloth and laziness. In rejecting the being that God has given them, enviers neglect the responsibility of developing their own gifts. Anyone who has spent years in developing a talent or honing a skill knows the discipline involved. To cultivate seriously our gifts and talents in preparation for a career that matches our potential requires hard work. Envy can prevent us from identifying and actualizing our own God-given potentials, which would bring us the sense of wholeness for which we long.

From "Urgings of the Heart," by Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon





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What If We Had a Candidate for President...

1. Transform the American automobile fleet to hydrogen in the next ten years and create a massive new industry in the process that will raise the standard of living for working class Americans for decades to come;
2. Invest the peoples' money in a project to develop a supersonic jet that will carry 500 passengers from New York to Los Angeles in 60 minutes and create an entire new aviation industry in the process that will lead to massive job growth;
3. Create a new peace corps to get AIDS drugs to every man woman and child on earth to stop the AIDS death toll within the next five years;
4. Pledge to the world to end hunger on the planet so that Africa and the other developing nations can become productive players in the global economy, buying American goods and boosting prosperity here at home;
5. Re-build the great American public education system from the ground up with a $100 billion infusion from more efficient military spending;

Our love for you is so deep that we don't want to share with you how much we love you.