I have a friend who suffers a lot. He is not an old guy, but it seems like his body is old before its time. He has the kind of dogged health problems that when one symptom gets better, another infirmity breaks out.

When one procedure is complete, something else needs to be done just to keep him going. And through it all, he maintains a good attitude, though it must wear thin at times. Not being able to do the things he wants to do and needs to do grates on his nerves, as he battles pain and tries to cope with daily activities that most of us take for granted.

Two thousand years ago, a minor Roman bureaucrat by the name of Pontius Pilate asked a question that many in our modern, 21st century society would find very relevant: "What is truth?"

Some time ago, I was checking out at my local market during the winter holiday season. Making the usual conversation with the young man who was ringing up my purchases, I commented on how the weather had cleared up, to which he responded, "I was hoping for more rain."

The hectic Christmas shopping rush that began before Thanksgiving is over. It came and went with the usual hype about its importance for the economy, with gloomy predictions about how "the sky is falling" and the looming economic collapse of the good ol' USA.

The big headline in the Financial Times on Wednesday, October 17, 2007, was "Investors flee US securities." It seems that "[f]oreign investors slashed their holdings of US securities by a record amount as the credit squeeze intensified." Apparently, faith in America as a good investment is diminishing.

The article quotes Alan Ruskin, chief investment strategist for RBS Greenwich Capital, as saying, "The bad news is that [the data] plainly show how vulnerable the dollar is to a continuation of the credit crunch-risk adverse environment."