No Excuses

Well, maybe a few excuses… light posting today because I was at church this morning, and now I’m trying to find a working sticky post plugin for Wordpress.

While I’m doing that, why not watch this amazing video, “No Excuses For Terror” over at Hot Air? It did my heart good to hear journalists, of all people telling it like it is. Shocking, but true. Enjoy!

House Panel Digs Into Security Leaks

A House panel digs into the security leaks that have led to classified information being published in major newspapers, including the New York Times. The leaks have led to exposure of security programs which have been proven effective, particularly the Swift program which tracked terrorist financing.

A total of 14 witnesses, flanked by their lawyers, came before a phalanx of House subcommittee members.

Taking turns, subcommittee members quoted from thick binders of internal documents and reports, and interrogated the panelists on what they knew and whether they still stood by their actions.

The attorney general and the FBI are conducting criminal investigations.

Okay, I’m making this up. The story is really about Hewlett Packard potentially breaking the law to find out who in their employ was leaking to the media.

But wouldn’t it be nice to see the government care enough about leaks to seriously investigate? And prosecute the leakers? I’m not suggesting that the government break any laws in their investigations as HP may have, just that they get aggressive and catch the leakers. And put them in jail. During the 80s, we spent the big bucks to learn the most minute details, right down to what kind of toilet paper they used in the Kremlin. Now we have a legitimate subject for investigation right in the same building where the investigators work, but they can’t seem to find the culprits. At the very least, aggressive, ongoing investigations would make it more difficult for future leaks. It could potentially scare someone into complying with the security clearance to which they agreed. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.

Echo Prayer Manager

I was going to call this post Godware, as a nod to Christian-based software, but a Google search of that word led to some decidedly odd sites. However you want to categorize it, the Echo Prayer Manager looks like a great addition to your Christian technology toolbox, along with e-Sword and eBible.

The “Readers Digest” version of what it does is allow you to enter your prayer items, and then email or text message you a reminder to pray about it when the day arrives. So if you wanted to pray for an upcoming event, you could enter that with the date, and shazaam! A reminder automagically appears right in your inbox or cell phone. It’s not rocket surgery, it’s actually quite easy to manage. See?

Ben Rugg, the creator of Echo Prayer Manager, wrote this about why he created it:

It’s pretty obvious the Bible calls us to pray for each other. James exhorts us to pray in all circumstances, Paul tells us to pray continually, and Jesus is an example even while he’s on the cross (see James 5:13-18, 1 Thes 5:17, Luke 23:32-34 for starters).

Well I don’t know about you, but I promise a lot of people that I’ll pray for them. And of course what generally happens is that I pray a couple times and then forget. Once I tried making a list of everything I wanted to pray about, but that just overwhelmed me. There were almost a hundred people and issues on the list, and I felt like I could never pray for all of them.

I complained about this to a friend one day and she told me that she sometimes writes people’s names on slips of paper and then puts them in a hat. She pulls one name at a time from the hat and prays for that person. That way she prays for everyone and it’s not overwhelming.

Inspired by that idea, I created this site. It’s a virtual “prayer hat” if you will. Instead of passively waiting for you to grab one prayer at a time, though, Echo actively sends you reminders. You customize it in the way that’s most useful for you — you can get emails or text messages any time throughout the week — and it reminds you to pray for one person or issue at a time.

Echo is a tool to help you pray more diligently. Pray for your coworkers, your friends, your family, your church, your country, your issues. And thank God continually.

You can try it for a month for free, and if you actually use it, it costs $8 per year. Admit it, you spend more than that at McDonalds every month. So, what are you still here for? Go check it out!

New Sidebar Items

Along with the new theme, which I’m still modifying, there are some new sidebar items. The old blogroll has been replaced with RSS feeds from the blogs that used to be on it, so new posts are linked by title. It seemed like a better way of promoting the blogs that I like. At the moment there are three feeds, Christian, Politics and Work. I’ll be fine-tuning the taxonomy of my favorites at some point as I add more blogs. A big hat tip to Amanda at Imago Dei - I was not aware of this Technorati feature until I saw it on her blog, which is listed in my Favorites - Christian category.

If you have any suggestions for additional theme mods, post them in the comments. Additions so far have been the trackback link, navigation in the individual post pages to go to the next or previous post, the dividing horizontal rule between posts, and I forget what else - should have been writing it down as I went through.

I’ll be re-organizing the sidebars soon, as the right sidebar is getting pretty long, but probably not today since we’re about to upgrade the server. That will speed things up considerably!

Here are some of the blogs you’ll be seeing in my Favorites list as they post new items. I’m adding more as I go through my bookmarks, and I really can’t list more at the moment anyway because I’m about clicked out at the moment. I’ll be seeing a surgeon about carpal tunnel in 2 hours.
Favorites - Christian:

1. Matt Jones’ Random Acts of Verbiage
2. Every Thought Captive
3. Reformed Chicks Blabbing
4. Writer’s Blog
5. the evangelical outpost
6. The Anchoress
7. Prophet For Hire
8. Imago Dei
9. Free In Him!
10. News For Christians
11. The High Places
12. Theology and Biblical Studies

Christian Carnival CXLI

A Penitent Blogger is hosting Christian Carnival CXLI. The listings look great - go check it out!

Joke o’ the Day

A U.S. Marine squad was marching north of Fallujah when they came upon an Iraqi terrorist, badly injured and unconscious.

On the opposite side of the road was an American Marine in a similar but less serious state.

The Marine was conscious and alert and as first aid was given to both men, the squad leader asked the injured Marine what had happened.

The Marine reported, “I was heavily armed and moving north along the highway here, and coming south was a heavily armed insurgent. We saw each other and both took cover in the ditches along the road. “I yelled to him that Saddam Hussein is a miserable, lowlife scumbag, and he yelled back that Senator Ted Kennedy is a good-for-nothing, fat, left wing liberal drunk. So I said that Osama Bin Laden dresses and acts like a frigid, mean spirited lesbian!”

He retaliated by yelling, “Oh yeah? Well, so does Mrs. Clinton!”

“And, there we were, in the middle of the road, shaking hands, when the truck hit us.”

(Democrats, replace Kennedy and Clinton with the politicians of your choice…)

Trackback: http://www.pursuingholiness.com/2006/09/28/joke-o-the-day/trackback/
Permalink: http://www.pursuingholiness.com/2006/09/28/joke-o-the-day/

Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger

Link to Pursuing Holiness and track back your latest and greatest here! I’ll be adding trackbacks to the body of the post as time allows.

Linked to Linkfest Haven

Jihadi Du Jour Says:
September 29th, 2006 at 5:32 pm

What would Mohammed Do?

Although you may often hear the question, “what would Jesus do?”, you will never hear anyone ask “What would Mohammed do?” It doesn’t matter what the situation is, the answer is always the same: Mohammed would have your throat slit. OK, that’s ou…

Health Care Choices

First, the bad news - “The Choice: A Longer Life or More Stuff”

The average cost of a family insurance plan that Americans get through their jobs has risen another 7.7 percent this year, to $11,500, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In only seven years, the cost has doubled, while incomes and company revenue, which pay for health insurance, haven’t risen nearly as much.

The article took an unexpected turn, however, when it didn’t reflexively blame insurance companies, greedy doctors, and pharmaceuticals.

There is no question that the American medical system does suffer from a lot of waste, be it insurance industry bureaucracy or expensive procedures that haven’t been proven effective. But the No. 1 cause of the cost increases is still the one you can see at the hospital and in your medicine cabinet — defibrillators, chemotherapy, cholesterol drugs, neonatal care and other treatments that are both expensive and effective.

So the prices have gone up a great deal, and with each new advance in medical technology, the price will continue to go up. My family is an excellent example of the kind of tradeoffs we make. We have health insurance through my husband’s employer. It pays 100% of covered costs - after the $5,050 deductible has been met. In practice, this means that we get no real coverage, but we do enjoy the discounts that Blue Cross has negotiated with our providers. Small things we just “tough out.” Going to the doctor for the flu or anything self-limiting is unheard of. Over the counter medicine and good old fashioned common sense usually do the trick. When we do have to go to the doctor, we ask for samples, and when we need an ongoing prescription, we ask for something cheap. At my request, the doctor discontinued a medicine that even in it’s generic form was $60 a month, in favor of an older drug that did the same thing which cost $4 a month. When something major is wrong, we have it treated and make payments if necessary, so there’s no real lack of health care when it counts - we just don’t baby ourselves.

The bottom line is that it’s all about choices. There are a lot of ways that the average family could adjust their budgets to afford more health care. Just one example:

Fast food consumption now accounts for over 40 percent of an average family’s budget spent on food.

From the NYT article,

Somehow, going to the mall to buy clothes has come to be seen as a vaguely patriotic way to keep the economy humming, and taking out a risky mortgage is considered to be an investment in one’s future. But medical care? That’s just a cost.

The difference is, we have developed the idea that health care is an entitlement instead of a responsibility. I’m not suggesting that we defund health care for the poor and elderly. But as the article points out, the average middle class family that complains about the lack of affordable health care has unreasonable expectations about what health care should cost, and chooses not to make it a budget priority. You get what you pay for.

Germany Just Says No To Dhimmitude

Germany just says no to dhimmitude… for now, anyway. We’ll see how well they stick to it. An opera with cameo appearances by the severed heads of Mohammed, Jesus and Buddha was pre-emptively cancelled for fear of offending Muslims.

Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned “self-censorship out of fear”.

“We must take care that we do not retreat out of a fear of potentially violent radicals,” she said.

As far as the cancellation goes, I’m interested in knowing what would move someone to include those severed heads in this opera in the first place. Probably the same thing that moves someone to spray a crucifix with urine and take a picture of it. They’re morons. However, there’s no law against being stupid in any country I ever heard of, and if they want to showcase the fact that they’re morons and collect a small fee from people even more stupid than themselves who want to watch it, more power to them.

Earlier [Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble] told the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that Muslims in Germany had to accept European norms and values.

So Germany is working to integrate their Islamic immigrant community. Maybe France can take a page from their book. You would think the 30,000 people who had their cars burned last year would demand it. The vastly under-reported Ramadan celebrations in Brussels have provoked the fear, not of civil unrest, looting hospitals being set on fire, but of the dreaded backlash.

The authorities are especially nervous since the Belgian municipal elections are being held on Sunday October 8th. It is likely that the elections will be won by anti-immigrant, “islamophobic” parties.

So the Germans are - for now - taking a stand against dhimmitude, France has predictably surrendered, Belgium is TBD, and the BBC is, along with the AP, working for the other side:

Was the German opera company right to cancel the production? Are the followers of some religions more sensitive than others? Is there a genuine threat to artistic freedom, or was the controversial scene just designed to provoke Muslims and gain publicity?

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