following politics, pursuing holiness
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!
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.
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!
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:
