When you watch without ease
On these blogs where you were raised…

Pasta shapes a-go-go! Via The Rat. I realize I’ve eaten at least five of these in the past week or so…. mmmmm…. pasta shapes…..

Colbert King:

…Mueller recently told Congress that one area of the war on terrorism that causes him great concern is the potential for extremist groups such as al Qaeda to recruit radicalized American Muslim converts. Mueller drew a bead on the American prison system, which he described in written testimony as “fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner’s conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socioeconomic status and placement in the community upon their release.”

That concern is no longer theoretical.

This week brought news that three California men are currently being investigated as part of a possible plot to launch assaults against National Guard facilities this Sept. 11 and against Jewish targets on Yom Kippur. …

Thousands of inmates have converted to Islam; thousands more convert each year. Questions worth asking: How will authorities go about monitoring prison proselytizing? Who gets to decide when an American Muslim inmate is “radicalized”? How will the FBI staunch “recruitment”?

(more)
via Unqualified Offerings, who also has a series of brief posts on Robert Pape’s book on suicide terrorism. Radical Islamic recruitment is the last point touched on in my 2002 Crisis piece on prison reform, here.

And… the Pope:

This first fundamental transformation of violence into love, of death into life, brings other changes in its wake. Bread and wine become his Body and Blood. But it must not stop there, on the contrary, the process of transformation must now gather momentum. The Body and Blood of Christ are given to us so that we ourselves will be transformed in our turn. We are to become the Body of Christ, his own flesh and blood. We all eat the one bread, and this means that we ourselves become one. In this way, adoration, as we said earlier, becomes union. God no longer simply stands before us, as the one who is totally Other. He is within us, and we are in him. His dynamic enters into us and then seeks to spread outwards to others until it fills the world, so that his love can truly become the dominant measure of the world.

mas aqui