VOM, Indonesia:

More than 40 Christian leaders were arrested after a video recording of them praying for Muslims was leaked to Islamic organizations. Muslims claim the Christians blasphemed the Koran by placing it on the floor and praying for millions of people that had been deceived by it. The Islamic organizations consider the video's content abusive and have released the video to the media. Among the imprisoned were parents of young children. According to sources in Indonesia, some imprisoned women and the elderly have been released. The Voice of the Martyrs is working to assist families. Pray for those in prison and their families. Ask God to give them boldness and wisdom as they face these difficult challenges.

It seems incongruous to take a video you consider blasphemous to your faith and release it to the media. Does this action not blatantly reveal the true motive behind this attack?

Disastrous disaster relief:

Federal disaster relief denies people the opportunity to live cheaply in exchange for living dangerously. That opportunity is particularly valuable to the poor.

To put this another way, federal disaster relief essentially forces people — most of them poor people --- to buy insurance they'd rather not have. The premiums are hidden in their housing prices, but they are none the less real...

Poor people, more than most, value cheap housing. A policy of disaster relief makes cheap housing hard to find. Therefore a policy of disaster relief is likely to impose a particular burden on the poor. If you want to help poor people, eliminating federal disaster relief is a good place to start.

(Instapundit)

This is truly disgusting. (WMB)

The unraveling continues.

Another dispatch from Michael Yon:

Gunshots ring out at three in the morning as I write these first sentences.
Gunshots, providing muse and meter for this dispatch home to America.
Gunshots, three of them. The war is close.

Looks as if Giuliani is already playing hardball.

Exposing North Korea's hushed and ignored policies of mass starvation. (PJM)

In 1999, while children were starving, Mr. Kim's government treated itself to 40 MiG-21 warplanes purchased from Kazakhstan.

Wikipedia has some skeletal information. Reading between the lines, it looks like the floods simultaneously accentuated and provided cover for gross Government mismanagement.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems sort of counter-productive to throw away a billion perfectly good light bulbs in the name of saving energy.

Reviewing The Children of Hurin. (A&LD)

LVMI warns against subsidized health-care:

I am convinced that deregulation of healthcare would only improve the system. Break the healthcare guilds that exist all the way from medical education through licensing, reduce government interventions, and watch the healthcare system improve at Intel speed. Please do not advocate for a government-run healthcare system, or even its predecessor, universal coverage. Think Walter Reed or the Soviets before going that route.

On August 28th:

489 - Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths defeats Odoacer at the Battle of Isonzo, forcing his way into Italy.
1609 - Henry Hudson discovers Delaware Bay.
1884 - First known photograph of a tornado is made.
1937 - Toyota Motors becomes an independent company.
1974 - Geir Hallgrímsson became Prime Minister of Iceland
2007 - Caedmon's Call releases new album: "Overdressed"

KP of The Christian Mind quotes Luther and N.T. Wright on Death and Resurrection.

Luther's remedy for this [...] temptation is to contemplate death all the more, but to do so at the right time—which is not the time of death. Instead, he exhorts us to "invite death into our presence when it is still at a distance and not on the move"—that is, in our daily lives long before death threatens us. Conversely, Luther counsels Christians to banish thoughts of death at the final hour and to use that time to meditate on life.

MercatorNet interviews a Polish film producer about the spiritual climate of Europe.

Asking yourself about the meaning of life, of the world and of history is what ennobles art. Without these questions, art is just an ephemeral expression of our sensations. I do not believe in art with a capital A which lacks a metaphysical dimension.

Ron Paul interview excerpts. (HT: Instapundit)

VOM, Ethiopia:

• JIMMA - On March 22, two Bible school students were imprisoned on the accusation of attempting to kill an imam. They were released one week later with after paying a fine. A court hearing was scheduled for April 2, 2007.
• BAMBASSE - April 2, the home of evangelist Tolosa Megersa was raided by local Muslims. Six of his cattle and sheep were killed. Five days later, the home of Full Gospel Church leader Lemmu Abdissa, was also raided. All of his property was destroyed, including 4,000 kilograms of grain.

Thank God for the release of the two students. Pray those who have lost property will be encouraged and rest in knowing they have "better and lasting possessions." Hebrews 10: 34-37

The right battle, on the wrong battlefield: Supreme Court upholds Congressional ban on Partial-Birth Abortion.

AU weighs in.

Ron Paul on foreign policy. Yes, I want the book.

It is time for Americans to rethink the interventionist foreign policy that is accepted without question in Washington. It is time to understand the obvious harm that results from our being dragged time and time again into intractable and endless Middle East conflicts, whether in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine. It is definitely time to ask ourselves whether further American lives and tax dollars should be lost trying to remake the Middle East in our image.

Instapundit on taxpayer-funded vacations for congressmen:

Actually, I'd rather we did this about 51 weeks out of the year. It's bound to work out cheaper in the end. . . .

David St. Lawrence reports on the latest storm in Virginia, and shares a bit of rural wisdom:

Country life is far more comfortable when you can apply a bit of technology in the right places.

Peter passed his driving test today. Nice job, bro.

Instapundit has a roundup on the Virginia Tech shooting. And Pajamas Media (with a roundup of their own) links to some cell-phone footage from a student.

I'm scratching my head regarding why the crackdown didn't occur at 7:15, when the first call came in.

UPDATE: VA Tech not the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history after all.

UPDATE II: PJM keeps rounding it up. More here.

Finally: some clear, if secular, thinking on Iraq.

It's going to be a very consistent flow of sequential problems. What the Bush administration basically did by going into Iraq was - the best rationale is really to lay the big bang on the Middle East and set that part of the world down some pathway of change.

And they certainly accomplished that. And the cynic in me says basically the worse Iraq goes, sort of, the better the big bang goes because it's more realistic that Iraq was going to go badly as opposed to well in terms of our expectations and the breakup of Iraq really forces the fights that need to occur in the Middle East now that Saddam is gone and those fights are all going to be tricky. They're going to be overlapping, and there's not going to be an obvious conclusion to it.

Instead, it's going to be a long-drawn out evolutionary process where our sense of winning or losing really hinders our sense of imagination, and in many ways, it retards the dialogue we need to have in this country about what comes next.

(HT: Northern Gleaner)

The discussion continues: Gene Redlin has another post about war and heroics, and I have another comment.

UPDATE: And Garrett has a comment on my comment.

Here's a classic example of the ultimate undoing of evil and darkness - the "kingdom-divided" problem: sectarianism is eating away the Iraqi Insurgency from within.

The good news is that the bad guys are all busy killing each other.

(PJM)

Homeschooling under fire in Germany. (LVMI)