Why Warren embraces Hillary

It's more than an effort at bipartisanship and consensus-building that causes Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren to embrace Hillary Clinton in his efforts to battle AIDS.

It is the fact that they share a mistaken and dangerous commitment to expensive, extra-constitutional, globe-trotting, international socialist spending policies by the U.S. government in waging that battle.

Days before she appeared at Warren's "Global Summit on AIDS and the Church," Clinton unveiled a $50 billion spending plan to fight AIDS globally. Her proposal would provide health insurance for all HIV patients in the U.S. and promote "evidence-based" prevention programs, which typically means condoms and needle-exchanges rather than emphasizing abstinence from risky sex and drug use.

Asked about his thoughts on Clinton's plan, Warren said the battle against AIDS would require partnership by government, the private sector and the church. The government's main role, he suggested, is in picking up the tab.

Explaining that medications, such as anti-retrovirals used to treat AIDS, cost between $10,000 to $20,000 a year per person, he said: "The church is never going to have that. Churches are poor around the world. But they have the people."

While it's true that churches are poor around the world, especially in the areas hit hardest by AIDS, it is also true their governments aren't wealthy either. But Warren isn't expecting those governments to pick up the tab for his program. He's expecting the U.S. government to do it.

Is the church really too small and too ineffective at taking on this challenge? Is that the way the Bible instructs us to think and act as believers? Don't we serve a God bigger even than the federal government in Washington, D.C.?

“Who isn’t instantly suspicious of a supposed conservative who espouses the Leftist core message, even if it is packaged as “Christian”?” ~ Carbonado bttt

Exactly:

“...I was very impressed with how Chesterton, although writing in 1907, had already diagnosed the pathologies of the left. In fact, his ideas mirror exactly what Polanyi wrote some 50 years later about the “moral inversion” of the left, i.e., the dangerous combination of radical skepticism and an unhinged, ruthless moral perfectionism unbound from tradition.

Chesteron writes of the socialist that although he may have a “large and generous heart,” it is “not a heart in the right place.” And only a human being can have a heart dangerously set in the wrong location. It generally occurs “when a religious scheme is shattered” as a result of their intense skepticism. When this happens, “it is not merely the vices that are let loose.” Rather, “the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.” Just because someone has a moral code, it hardly means that they are moral.

I have written a number of posts on the dynamics of this pathological process, which I thought that Polanyi had been the first to recognize. But Chesterton also writes of how “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” Most every destructive policy put into place by the left can be traced to some Christian virtue gone mad — i.e., feed the hungry, so steal from “the rich” and call it “giving,” or defending abortion on the basis of the sanctity of “liberty,” or encouraging every manner of deviancy under the guise of “tolerance.” They have the bizarre idea that it is “easier to forgive sins” if “there are no sins to forgive” — except for the sin of believing they exist.

Or the leftist might extract and focus upon a single virtue to the exclusion of others, which creates a dangerous imbalance, for example, “a merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity.” John Edwards’ campaign is based almost solely upon this idea, but again, what he calls “charity,” the rest of us call coercion. And boundless charity in the absence of any obligation on the part of the recipient is a recipe for anthropological disaster. ...” More:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1933850/posts?page=9#9

Also see:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1928368/posts?page=14#14

HIV in India and Why Science Lies
Redstate.com ^ | 20 November 2007 | .cnI redruM
http://www.redstate.com/blogs/repair_man_jack/2007/nov/20/hiv_in_india_and_why_science_lies
Posted on 11/20/2007 10:53:21 AM EST by .cnI redruM
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1928368/posts refresh browser

The UN has finally produced an unabashed piece of positive news. There are 6.8 million fewer people in the world suffering from HIV than they had previously estimated.

Revised figures in the latest UNAIDS study slashed an estimate for total infections this time last year to 32.7 million from 39.5 million cases, the number given in the agency’s 2006 report.

“The single biggest reason for the reduction in global HIV prevalence figures in the past year was the recent revision in India after an intensive reassessment of the epidemic in that country,” UNAIDS said in its report.

While I’m glad a lot fewer people are dying of an awful disease, I’m wondering whether this information was known amongst the scientific elite before George W. Bush committed $15B of assets from the American taxpayer to fighting HIV in the 3rd world. Normally, such cynicism would seem out of place, but I’m far from the only big-blue meanie questioning the estimating methodologies employed by UNAIDS.

When cost elements associated with the fight against the disease are costed on a per hospital unit or a per patient basis, inflating the numbers of patients inflates the budgetary requirements submitted to the UN, President Bush and Irish Rock Star Bono for funding. Those of a cynical mind towards such estimates acerbically opine that the desire for money and power is driving the numbers presented for survey to funding sources.

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.” – WaPo (11/19)

Ms. Epstein probably remembers well how badly the advocacy for homeless people fared after Mitch Snyder lied to the media and badly overestimated America’s homeless population and its death rate. She wants to avoid the same sort of backlash with regards to HIV activism and funding. Ms. Epstein is savvy enough to know that powerful leaders don’t fund what reasonable advisors disbelieve.

The UN disputes that the decline is entirely driven by the exposure of methodological legerdemain and error. Dr. Kevin De Cock attributes a portion of the reduction to the good, hard work of UN agencies like his own: the WHO. Not everyone in the field of pandemic medicine shares Dr. De Cock’s view of this being a good news story. Some of his colleagues disagree, and forget to do so respectfully.

“They’ve finally got caught with their pants down,” said Dr. Jim Chin, a clinical professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley. Chin is a former WHO staffer and the author of “The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness.”

He said that it was difficult to tell whether the lowered numbers were evidence that AIDS treatment and prevention strategies were working, or whether the decrease was just due to a natural correction of previous overestimates.

Even with the revised figures, “the numbers are probably still on the high side,” said Daniel Halperin, an AIDS epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. - AP (11/19)

Dr. Halperin makes a telling observation, later on in the AP article cited above. He points out that societal concerns, such as anti-Global Warming advocacy and HIV research fight one another for attention in a compassion trade space. He suggests that HIV-related activities compete against other global threats for attention and for funding. A check to Al Gore’s Global Warming activity could be an economic substitute good for a dollar spent on HIV funding.

“On the one hand, it would be a mistake to radically decrease funding for HIV,” Halperin said. “But on the other hand, why not put more money into family planning or climate change?”

Thus the response that HIV activists give to Dr. Chin and Dr. Halperin is predictable and in line with what Dr, Halperin would probably predict it to be; given the logic of his statement above. HIV not only has to be evil; it has to be worse than Global Warming and Al Qaeda for good measure.

“We are still failing to respond to the crisis,” said Dr. Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance. “The overall prevalence of AIDS may have stabilized, but we are still seeing millions of new infections and it is not time yet to step back from this battle.”

Now given the recent “revisions” in data for UNAIDS and by the US government regarding global temperature ranges, am I cynical for believing that the HIV activists knew good and well that the world had nowhere near 39.5 million HIV sufferers long before this information hit the top of the Drudge Report?

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Headline, 2016: UN Admits Global Warming Hysterics. The hoax heard around the world. 3

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” I guess that’s it in a nutshell..like I needed a confession from these clowns to wise me up. 4

UN Admits AIDS Hysterics
Captain’s Quarters ^ | Nov. 20, 2007 | Ed Morrissey
Posted on 11/20/2007 9:27:36 AM EST by jdm

The United Nations grossly overestimated both the scope and direction of AIDS infections, its scientists will admit later this week. The actual numbers in almost every theater have proven to be much less than UN reports indication, in some places less than half of that asserted. Outside researchers say that their demands for government funding motivated them to essentially lie about the gravity of the situation:

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.
AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.
The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million. ...
“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”

So where did the estimates go awry? They relied too heavily on pregnant women as a leading indicator, not taking into account the obvious fact that pregnant women were more sexually active than others in the population. New studies show that India has less than half of the AIDS cases originally assumed, and even in sub-Saharan Africa, the UN overestimated the epidemic. They will retract previous estimates in Nigeria, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Former WHO AIDS expert James Chin thinks the numbers are still too high. He said 33 million puts the UN in the ballpark, but that his research indicates that the actual number of cases is no more than 25 million. That means that the UN overshot the entire epidemic by almost 40%. They wouldn’t be retracting the 40 million if it hadn’t been for Chin and other researchers like him, who saw the exaggerations for what they were — a mechanism of guilt to force Western nations to pony up more money for UNAIDS.

This kind of scientific work casts new doubt on other issues that the UN champions as well. Their panel on global warming will publish a new position, insisting that the situation is critical and that nations need to act now in economically-crippling ways to curtail emissions. As Scott Ott notes rather trenchantly, they’re basically saying that all of the people who don’t really have AIDS will drown in the rising ocean levels instead of dying from HIV infections.

Why should we trust their scientists on this when they’ve consistently fibbed about AIDS? They have a track record of hysterics and exaggerations for political purposes. They’ve turned themselves into an advocacy group for statist policies, and any UN report on impending disasters should come with a five-pound sack of Morton’s Salt in the future.

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