Creating the (im)perfect city – the story of Orlando

In March, 2007, National Geographic published a story about a perfectly planned city that didn’t quite turn out perfectly.   It’s a story of a powerful commercial enterprise designing a community from scratch under a figurehead government, combined with input from mega-churches.  It’s the story of Orlando.  It’s also a story…

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Meet a Beggar

I recently visited Chicago with my nine-year old daughter.  We stayed at an old hotel near the city center, just south of the Chicago River.  Though it was a high rent district, one of our neighbors worked as a beggar. When the beggar first approached us on that wide sidewalk…

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Scientists: humans recently evolved rapidly

As reported by Scientific American, Researchers have concluded that only 10,000 years ago, the human transition from living off the land to actively raising crops and domesticated animals was accompanied by an accelerated rate of evolutionary change. The pressure for this change occcurred because populations became highly concentrated compared to hunter/gatherer…

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How the Internet has changed political campaigning

On Bill Moyers' Journal, Bill Moyers discussed this multifaceted issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  This video is well worth watching for many reasons.  The introduction includes a clip of John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to Southern Baptist…

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Huckabee the Pastor “explains” Creation

Mike Huckabee doesn't want to discuss the sermons he gave while he served as an evangelical pastor. Why not? Is he embarrasssed? Tim Grieve of Salon.com's  "War Room" writes about the evolution of Huckabee's "explanation" about how people came to exist on Earth.   In one of Huckabee's early documented sermons he…

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