Thursday, January 29, 2009

Bring out your dead


Detroit...in happier times.

Can someone tell me something hopeful about this city? I agree it may seem like this reporter is sensationalizing it, but this story actually seems quite measured in its approach to the issue and the particular incident.

The incident was a dead man which stayed in the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandoned building, even though people know he was there for some time.
"Why didn't your friend call the police?"

"He was trespassing and didn't want to get in trouble," the caller replied. As it happens, the caller's friend is an urban explorer who gets thrills rummaging through and photographing the ruins of Detroit. It turns out that this explorer last week was playing hockey with a group of other explorers on the frozen waters that had collected in the basement of the building. None of the men called the police, the explorer said. They, in fact, continued their hockey game.
Later we find, many of the homeless people living in the building just assumed someone else would call the authorities.
A colony of homeless men live in the warehouse. Wednesday morning a few fires were burning inside oil drums. Scott Ruben, 38, huddled under filthy blankets not 20 paces from the elevator shaft.

"Yeah, I seen him," Ruben said. The snow outside howled. The heat from the can warped the landscape of rotting buildings and razor wire.
...
His shack mate, Kenneth Williams, 47, returned at that point with an armload of wood.

"Yeah, he's been down there since last month at least."

I have heard similar stories about New York City and how people just assume someone else will deal with it, even if there is a dead man in their path -- and that from the same person who had interesting stories about Detroit.

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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Gore shivers

An Fairbanks man has unveiled his assessment of Al Gore's warming theories: an ice sculpture of the former vice president shivering.

"(Craig) Compeau unveiled the sculpture — created by a local artist Steve Dean — near the downtown Thrifty Liquor store, where he said it will stay through March or “until it melts.”

The 8 1/2-foot-tall sculpture dominated the corner from its perch on the back of a flatbed truck."

The article gives a little background on Compeau:

"Compeau described himself as a moderate skeptic of those who “rabidly” believe man-made emissions are contributing to a rise in global temperatures. Gore won his Nobel for raising awareness of global warming as one of the greatest challenges facing mankind."

See the link for photos.

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Monday, January 19, 2009

History will show...

NOTE: Sorry I forgot to include the link before. Here it is (and in the story).

Andrew Roberts, a British columnist/historian, gives his big-picture assessment of the Bush legacy, and has no time for journalism's thought process, which starts from its own created myth about Bush's incompetence.
"Films such as Oliver Stone's W, which portray him as a spitting, oafish frat boy who eats with his mouth open and is rude to servants, will be revealed by the diaries and correspondence of those around him to be absurd travesties, of this charming, interesting, beautifully mannered history buff who, were he not the most powerful man in the world, would be a fine person to have as a pal."
Roberts, an author, takes the reader winsomely through the real record, point-by-point and encourages us to step back a little to see what no one wants you to see.

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Friday, January 09, 2009

Post-Post Intelligencer

Could this be the end of a giant Hearst news organization? Could this be a sign of things to come? This would be truly historic if it was true. William Hearst, who began his career by injecting his family fortune into the New York Journal in order to compete with self-made millionaire Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, is not-too-kindly remembered as the man who made the Spanish-American war "his war."

So enraptured was Hearst with sensationalizing the war for his own profit, that he personally traveled to Cuba to help cover the fighting. During one battle, he was known to have ignored his assistant who was wounded as he excitedly wrote his version of the conflict.

What does this have to do with the possibility, as reported in Seattle media, that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer may stop its presses? Only that Hearst established the P-I as first significant paper in Seattle. Hearst's legacy, being started with an inherited fortune, is finally starting to crumble a century later.

For a view of Hearst's other legacy (his castle), take a peek at this site.

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Saturday, January 03, 2009

Why does evil exist?

Sorry for the long absence. I'm afraid the holiday's have taken their toll on my mental productivity.

I was busy looking for a good devotional for use at a church function when I stopped in to read one of R.C. Sproul's latest works on the "Problem of Evil." Naturally, it's a bit too lecturish to use as a devotional, but I thought I could bookmark it by posting it here for your benefit.

Except:
...Though He does not do evil and does not create evil, He does ordain that evil exists. If it does exist, and if God is sovereign, then obviously He must have been able to prevent its existence. If He allowed evil to enter into this universe, it could only be by His sovereign decision. Since His sovereign decisions always follow the perfection of His being, we must conclude that His decision to allow evil to exist is a good decision.

Again, we must be careful here. We must never say that evil is good, or that good is evil. But that is not the same thing as saying, “It is good that there is evil.” Again, I repeat, it is good that there is evil, else evil could not exist...

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