Archives for March, 2004
Under Seige
Just noticed this. A comprehensive site of all the Global coverage of the Ad-Scam scandal. Is it just me or does this site look a little biased?
Soularize :: March 2-4 2005 :: Los Angeles
There, the cat’s out of the bad. Site coming soon. Regional locations coming too.
US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide
The Guardian article over simplifies it a little bit but from what I have read, the Clinton administration had no desire to get involved at almost any cost. That being said, the mood of the American people was isolationalist and Congress wouldn’t have supported them. The blame needs to go beyond governments (but not exclude them) and go to the people of the west who didn’t care.
It discovered that the CIA’s national intelligence daily, a secret briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, the then vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of senior officials, included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, said rebels would continue fighting to “stop the genocide, which … is spreading south”.
Three days later the state department’s intelligence briefing for former secretary of state Warren Christopher and other officials noted “genocide and partition” and reported declarations of a “final solution to eliminate all Tutsis”.
However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying “acts of genocide”.
Ms Des Forges said: “They feared this word would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn’t want to act. It was a very pragmatic determination.”
The administration did not want to repeat the fiasco of US intervention in Somalia, where US troops became sucked into fighting. It also felt the US had no interests in Rwanda, a small central African country with no minerals or strategic value.
Sadly the west only value life when it has minerals or strategic value. The Belgiums pulled out when they lost a dozen troops. The Canadian government kept their troops in but they only monitored the slaughter. I agree wth Paul Martin when he called it a national disgrace for Canada. A sad chapter in the history of the world.
Why churches need websites
Was reading AKMA’s excellent post about why churches need websites when I started to wonder what holds churches back. I started poking around the web, looked at GeoCities but didn’t really like what I saw (man did Yahoo! wreck that site), looked at Blogspot, Typepad, and came across Squarespace. It looked intriging and free so I started to fiddle. 30 minutes later I had recreated the Lakeland Church website with no knowledge of html needed. Is it as good as Typepad, not quite (but really, really close) but has a free version that is better for the beginner than Blogspot (and no ads). My point is that any church can do this. Any pastor can do this with nothing more than a Pentium 100 and a dial-up connection. The bar has been lowered so low that there is no have or have-nots, only want or want nots.
The Adventures of Jerry Seinfeld and Superman
Children in Angola tortured as witches
Far from exuding wickedness, the 13-year-old schoolgirl is nervous and shy. Her “101 Dalmatians” cartoon T-shirt is grubby and doesn’t fit. She swings her bare feet beneath her chair in the hyper way that all kids do. And she cries a lot. Especially about the torture.
Last month Helena was accused by her parents of sickening two of her nieces with evil spells. In retaliation, the bewildered girl says, one of her small hands was burned on a red-hot stove. Her meager possessions, including her clothes, were torched. She was choked. And finally, to destroy her reputation in the community, she was beaten in front of a large crowd. Her mother and elder sisters administered these punishments.
“They tell me that if I try to come home they will kill me,” sobbed Helena her tears spattering the floor of the church shelter where she has run for safety. “They say I’m cursed.”
Many children seem to be cursed these days in the impoverished hinterlands of Angola–accused of witchcraft by their families, then systematically abused, abandoned and even killed for imagined acts of witchcraft.
The scale and viciousness of the attacks on so-called criancas feiticeiras, or child witches, confounds even hardened human-rights workers in the war-haunted country, and some said the abuse is one of the most disturbing outbreaks of domestic violence seen in Africa in recent years.
The news article is sickening but here is the link
San Francisco ballpark makes pitch for Wi-Fi fans
Baseball fans bored by the slow pace of a game or wanting more statistics and information will be able to connect computer devices via Wi-Fi at San Francisco Giants home games this year, the team announced Tuesday. The Giants’ ballpark is, after all, called SBC Park, for telecommunications giant SBC Communications.
“We’ve created, if not the largest, one of the largest hot spots in the world,” said Larry Baer, the team’s chief operating officer. “We’re the first professional sports facility to provide people universal Wi-Fi connectivity.”
Nice
Ummm, maybe not.
Heather Champ posted this great picture of a Basset Hound over on her photoblog. I always think I want one and then I remember talking to owners of them who remind me that a rather heavy, short legged, gasious, drooling dog may not be the best house pets. Wonderful picture though.
Saskatchewan Budget Analysis
In the words of Murray Mandryk
Is Ottawa severely short-changing us on health care and other areas of federal-provincial funding as Calvert contends? Or has the federal government provided adequate funding to a province that simply has not “renewed and rejuvenated” its own budget?
Well, the answer to this was actually available even before Goodale — sporting the province’s Western Red Lily — stood up in the House of Commons Tuesday to deliver his budget speech. Frankly, all one really had to do is track four critical numbers in Saskatchewan’s own provincial budgets during the past 12-years of this NDP administration.
The following four critical budget numbers go a long ways to resolving this debate:
- Critical Budget Number One: Transfers from the Government of Canada. Saskatchewan received $1.304 billion from Ottawa in 1992-93; $761 million in 1996-97, and will receive (according to the third-quarter update of the 2003-04 budget) $858 million.
That translates into a 12.7-per-cent increase in the past seven years (despite a decline in population cutting the province’s equalization). However, it’s actually a 34-per-cent decrease from Ottawa over the life of this NDP administration.
- Critical Budget Number Two: Own Source revenues. Excluding the money we received from Ottawa, Saskatchewan pulled in $3.072 billion in 1992-93 (including $2.3 billion from taxation and $396 million from natural resources); $4.743 billion in 1996-97 (including $3.1 billion from taxation and $908 million from natural resources) and will pull in another $5.447 billion in 2003-04 (including $3.4 billion in taxation and $1.1 billion in natural resource revenues).
That translates into a 77-per-cent increase in our own ability to generate revenue since the NDP came to power, largely driven by a 170-per-cent increase in oil and gas wealth and a respectable 48-per-cent increase in tax revenue (despite previous cuts to the provincial sales tax and substantial cuts to income taxes).
- Critical Budget Number Three: Provincial expenditures. Saskatchewan’s overall budget expenditures were $4.968 billion in 1992-93 (including $734 million in debt-servicing costs); $5.096 billion in 1996-97 (including $794 million in debt servicing costs), and; $6.768 billion in 2003-04 (including $620 million in debt servicing costs).
That translates into a 36-per-cent spending increase in 11 years, but — even more telling — a 33-per-cent spending increase in the past seven years since the NDP government abandoned its first-term austerity program. Moreover, when you factor in the lower debt-interest costs and focus just on departmental operating costs, spending has actually increased 43 per cent in the past seven years.
- Critical Budget Number Four: The health budget. Simply put, Saskatchewan Health Department spending of $1.548 billion in 1992-93 increased just 3.9 per cent by 1996-97 to $1.608 billion, but has increased by a whopping 56.8 per cent in the past seven years to $2.522 billion in 2003-04. In fact, increases in provincial health spending have accounted for 54.7 per cent of all the new dollars spent by government in the past seven years.
Conclusion? While federal support to Saskatchewan has rebounded slightly in the past seven years, there is no doubt that this province’s finances were hurt by the cutbacks it endured when then-finance minister and now prime minister Paul Martin was balancing the budget. But an increase in tax revenue and a massive increase in resource revenue should have more than made up for the federal transfer shortfall.
Saskatchewan has a spending problem — not a revenue problem. While the NDP government did successfully curb health-care costs in its first term, it’s failed to get health care under control since.
I hope it is a tough budget this year. I don’t mind less services but I think running deficits like we have been for the last three years isn’t going to help anyone either. I miss Janice McKinnon as finance minister.
Change
It’s been six years today that we buried my mom after she lost a short and brutal fight with brain cancer. Been doing some reflecting lately on how life my life has changed since she died. A lot has happened in the last six years. It was a phase of life and I find myself leaving more and more of that behind. Some of things I am really happy to be leaving behind, other things I find it really hard to let go because it is security and stability when I didn’t have a lot of either.
I have a tendancy to mock my past. Even my recent past, partly because it is mockable and I find it easy to make fun of myself (it really is all about me) but when I look I can see how God had me on a journey. Lately I have felt God very impatient with me, almost disappointed with me in our quiet times. I finally started to realize is that the journey was still ongoing and I was lingering and holding on to things that were holding me back. Maybe because I was scared, maybe because I was nervous, and more than likely a little lonely. During devotions I have been hearing God saying, “Get over yourself” and “Get moving, you aren’t done yet.” I find it disconcerting when other people talk of the Holy Spirit, he sounds much more affirming then when I hear the Spirit, it is often sounds a little sarcastic. Nice but a little flippant.
It kind of affirms what a couple other people have been telling me lately. I am seem to be out of sync in some areas of my life. Holding on to something that I shouldn’t. Posting too much about American politics which they find boring (tough Canadian crowd).
What I hear is that I am stopping and focusing on the wrong things. I need to focus on the things that matter. The things that God called me to do and be. Forget some of the good things that distract me and concentrate on the God things I need to be. Good advice.
That being said, today reminds me of how terrible unfair life is. I think of how hard my mom’s life was and then think back of the joy that we have experienced over the last five years and she missed it all. Life isn’t fair and their isn’t much of a guarantee that it will be there tomorrow.
Organizational life cycles
Phil just told me about a post he put up at Signposts about the life cycles of organizations. It is excellent.
My Wishes
Here is a poem written by Cecilia Zhang, and read by her father, today, on the day that would have been her tenth birthday. This case has saddened all of us. No motive, no clues, just a pointless murder of an innocent child.
If Christianity Is So Great, How Come Christians Keep Imitating The World?
via Scott Williams
Now, this month, comes a new Barna survey loaded with data that suggest the direction of the contemporary church is the wrong one. New Barna data suggest that “born again Christians” have a reputation slightly better than that of prostitutes, but lower than that of lawyers. And Barna, who is often quoted by the “seeker” crowd, for the first time came out with a statement explicitly saying that “seeker” approaches do not attract the unchurched. Instead, he says, the unchurched are seeking God’s presence. “The one thing that the local church can provide that no other social institution does is the tangible, palpable presence of God,” Barna says. “Trying to help people understand who God is, and ushering them into His presence is what we need to be aiming at,” he says.
Every kind of church is NOT OK.
From Alan Creech
Every kind of church is NOT OK. I won’t go off indefinitely on this here, but I’m sort of tired of the hyper “get along” attitude that has crept into some of our conversation. And I don’t mean to say that I like a hyper “don’t get along” attitude either, so please don’t put me in that category. I usually say what I mean, unless I’m holding back so as not to get attacked by those who await such opportunities like a Heron standing on a creek bank. This time I’ll try to say it and be very brief. There ARE forms of church that ARE crippling and harmful to Christians who are part of them - there just are. And some of those are churches that we have generally thought of as OK for a long time. But they’re not. “Well, isn’t there room for this kind and that kind in order to reach everyone?” Well, probably - I would never argue for total homogeneity of expression - that would NOT be my point. I am not simply mad at the “traditional” church because somebody pissed me off or hurt me. Just not.
Charlie Wear posts his thoughts here.
All I’m saying is, okay, criticize, correct, prophesy to, passionately preach to, the church, but be careful about saying that something is “not ok.” I mean, heck, Christ loves his whole church, with all of its screw ups, doesn’t he? Am I making sense…did I miss the point?
Hockey
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Messy Faith: Daring to Live by Grace by A. J. Gregory October 28, 2008
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
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