sisu

"I will not waste a minute listening to the pessimists"

"Yes we have our fears, and who doesn't have fears. But our love for life is stronger," writes Mohammed of Iraq the Model in a New Year's message of hope from the Garden of Eden:

This is the land of the first law in history
I still find my home in Iraq . . . it's still the best place in the world in my eyes
I will not waste a minute listening to the pessimists
Instead, I will add a brick to the house we're building
And I will write a word . . . and pray.

I will pray for the ones who fought for the Iraqi freedom
I will pray for the hundreds of thousands who won't spend the night with their families, staying awake on the front line to keep me safe
I will pray for the ones who gave their lives for the sake of others' wellbeing
I will pray for those who went through all the pains
And never lost hope
I will pray for a free and democratic Iraq
I will pray for the world's peace.

A life-affirming message to give pause to the nihilism of both moral-equivalency post-modernists and medievalist jihadi that David Warren -- blogged here -- calls "the splinter in the heart of our modernity; it rejects everything, it proposes, finally, nothing in its place."

The leader in word-of-mouth research

"The power a small actor can have in the internet age has caught the attention of a company called BuzzMetrics -- self-described on its website as "the leader in word-of-mouth research" -- which has developed software that helps clients determine their public image by analyzing forum posts, blogs and mailing lists," note the folks at RatherBiased.com:

New York Times business correspondent Nat Ives has a thought-provoking article on how the internet has given small, independent critics the power to influence the public image of multi-billion dollar companies.

Previously, critics had to rely on slower and more expensive media like books (Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed being the best example) or newspaper ad campaigns.

Ives lists a few BuzzMetrics clients including French importers wary of American boycotts. The company also has a client in the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which is interested in how the CBS Memogate story went from internet discussion to media fiasco.

The NYT article explains:

They identified small groups of determined detractors of Mr. Rather that had communicated online for years, often through sites like http://ratherbiased.com/news/. When a few critics raised doubts about the documents that Mr. Rather included in his report, the infrastructure was already in place to spread and amplify the questions. Mr. Rather ultimately conceded that he could not authenticate the documents.

Well.  Rather barely conceded anything, but even as CBS drags its feet re publication of a full report, Rather has reluctantly announced his early retirement. What we love about the story?  The Darwinian struggle between predator and prey, where even as bloggers prey on the arrogance of the powers that be, the powers -- fighting for their very survival -- respond by improving their product, in this case tossing the dissembling Rather over the side.

"There's no pleasing people whose chief desirein life is to bitch"

"Blogs are at the forefront of the tsunami recovery effort," reports Speigel Online [via Glenn Reynolds via wireless in the car]:

While traditional media drags awaiting publication, and government hotlines jam or go unanswered, bloggers have hopped into the fray, providing needed information to relatives desperate to find loved ones and those hoping to join the rescue efforts.

One of the best sites out there is the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog set up by students from New Delhi, a Sri Lankan TV producer and Internet junkies in the region.  It offers everything from fascinating tsunami facts to emergency contact numbers to humanitarian relief organizations. Plus it tells you how to donate money from wherever you are.

MeanwhileThe Powers that Were are frantically trying to pin the blame for everything on Bush. As Hindrocket of PowerLine notes:

All across America, newspaper editors have racked their brains trying to think of ways to blame the tsunami on the Bush administration.

Then, too, there was UN undersecretary Jan Egelend's lame and ill-mannered attempt to trash Bush et al with the "stingy" meme  -- we loved Professor Reynolds's take: "Face it, there's no pleasing people whose chief desire in life is to bitch." The MSM picked up  the stingy-Bush theme and tried to run with it, but it won't fadge. Death throes happen.  Hugh Hewitt's got their number. Check out his "Unified Theory of the Old Media Collapse" at The Daily Standard:

By the time the new millennium arrived, legacy media was populated at its elite levels by as homogeneous a group of reporters / producers / commentators as could ever have been assembled from the newsrooms of the old Hearst operation. Big Media had hired itself into a rut -- a self-replicating echo chamber of left and further-left scribblers and talkers and self-reinforcing head nodders who were overwhelmingly anti-Republican, anti-Christian, anti-military, anti-wealth, anti-business, and even anti-middle class. These new journalists had no tolerance for majoritarian points of view, and the gap between the producers of the news and the consumers of the news widened until the credibility gap between the two made Lyndon Johnson's look modest by comparison.

Speaking of Lyndon Johnson, did you catch what his old Attorney General, Ramsey Clarke, is up to? He's joined Uncle Saddam's defense team. Isn't that nice.

Update:  Jack of TigerHawk explains:

Clark's only purpose is to score a propaganda victory against the United States. He cannot help Saddam, but he hopes to discredit the United States in the eyes of the world. This may not be treason under the law, but it is nothing less than treason in spirit.

"What drives the deranged Bush-hating left"

Masaccio's "Expulsion from Paradise" 1427. Fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, Italy

"The old Christian thing was to do good, in the knowledge that we are capable of terrible evil," writes David Warren in what Charles Johnson colorfully describes as "this perceptive column on what drives the deranged Bush-hating left":

But the "new man" believes that he is good in theory, and thus does not recognize the evil in his deeds [Rousseau's "Noble Savage"]. We make a desolation and call it peace.

There you have our post-modernity in a nutshell: an unthinking elision of the moral into the psychological, creating a "nuance" where no nuance exists. And by so doing, the previous translators externalized the evil that Dostoevsky's character had discovered in himself . . . [avoiding] the word "wicked" and usually [putting] the word "spiteful" in its place.

What we see on the streets of Ottawa, instead, is an almost pure fanaticism -- that radical spirit of alienation that ultimately motivatest the Jihadis, too.  This nihilism is the splinter in the heart of our modernity; it rejects everything; it proposes, finally, nothing in its place.  It is the devil himself speaking out of his void, leading finally to the silence of Iago.

And yet the tragedy of these people -- whose fanaticism puts them beyond the pale of give-and-take in party politics, and whose views, should they spread, would take the whole democratic order down with them -- is that they know even less about themselves than they know about the world they condemn. They are angry, but finally they don't know why.

They don't believe in evil, as a category; yet it haunts them externally on every side: "Bush" being only the straw man of the moment. And unlike the actual Mr. Bush, they do not believe in grace, either. They see evil everywhere. They rail, and they rail.

It's the classic tragic vs. utopian view of human nature in its latest manifestation on the canvas of contemporary politics. As we always say, Christian or not, it bears repeating:

We believe deeply that the denial of "life's dark side in ourselves" is the key to what's wrong with the utopianist left world view.

Rising expectations

Sisu's still listed as two separate blogs in the Ecosystem, thus distorting our status, but help is on the way.

"To ensure we start 2005 off right, I'm going to be devoting some effort this week to cleaning up the Ecosystem," writes New Zealand Bear of The Truth Laid Bear:

This will involve a lot of behind-the-scenes work, but I'm also extending out an offer to those poor souls who have something -- anything -- amiss with their entries that they'd like me to personally correct. Consider this an open invitation in the holiday spirit: if you send your request to me this week, I'll do my damndest to make sure it gets taken care of promptly.

Will our listing, which has always had two separate URLs -- one nested within the frameset of the other by virtue of TypePad's structural design -- finally be made whole to give a more accurate reading of our standing in the Ecosystem?

"Not even a dead hare or rabbit"

"I think animals can sense disaster.  They have a sixth sense.  They know when things are happening," a Sri Lankan Wildlife Department official told Reuters:

Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned -- the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast,but they can't find any dead animals.

Giant waves washed floodwaters up to 3km (2 miles) inland at Yala National Park in the ravaged southeast, Sri Lanka's biggest wildlife reserve and home to hundreds of wild elephants and several leopards.

"The strange thing is we haven't recorded any dead animals. No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit."

Mummy always said "Look to the animals," and it's particularly true in the sense we blogged about here yesterday, with reference to contemporary development on floodplains and barrier beaches and other places the ancients had learned to avoid. As we said then, unless you're prepared --like the indomitable Dutch -- to engineer walls against the sea or otherwise construct your edifices for the "100-year storm," you build at your own risk in such places. We Americans have had our own experience and stubborn refusal to listen to Mother Nature's lessons.  We seem to keep building dream cottages on hurricane-prone barrier beaches along the eastern seaboard, for example, and then looking to the Government to bail us out every few years when the inevitable happens.

Big-time bloggers like Tim Blair and Hindrocket of Powerline -- whose wise and witty take on things are daily food for the soul -- snickered the other day at a World Conservation Union scientist's assertion that "What has made this a disaster is that people have started to occupy part of the landscape that they shouldn't have occupied." Admittedly the WCU has a short-sighted, anti-growth agenda, and the rhetoric is overblown, but even so, there is more than a grain of truth in the idea that we should listen to both history and natural history in weighing the risks of where we build and -- another topic all over the blogosphere these last few days -- what kind of warning systems we should fashion to alert us to impending doom in time to do something about it.

Via Lucianne, whose reader Seniorstud commented "Most of them [wild animals] also live outside, are in better shape and run faster."

Waiting around the herd

Tiny and Baby keep their eyes on the prize, Tuck's plate of marinated strips and leftover Christmas Eve veggies (Veggies? Where's the beef?)

Yah.  There it is.

All good things come to those who stalk and wait.

There's nothing like the real thing

"Iranian blogger Parthisan left a comment below urging us to read his translation of a post by Mohammed Ali Abtahi, the former VP of Iran -- renowned for blogging himself -- reporting on the imprisonment and torture of bloggers in Iran," writes an impassioned Jeff Jarvis, imploring the blogosphere to rally to the cause of Iranian bloggers being stomped under the unholy jackboot of the theocratic fear society [former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky's term] that is Iran.  A few excerpts on the mullahs' treatment of native bloggers:

Physical torture, punches and kicks

The classical questions about sexual relationships [to create moral scandals]

The interrogations were managed by a formerly arrested blogger. A few other bloggers who had [given up and] repented before were under less pressure, and were in a way helping the interrogators who had lack of technical knowledge on the subject [of internet and blogs].

"I first discovered the amazing Iranian blogosphere when the government arrested fellow blogger Sina Motallebi," notes Jeff. "I blogged that. Others blogged that. Major media picked up the story. Motallebi got out of jail and then out of Iran, and he has credited the attention his plight got from bloggers":

If what we read here is true, then it is incumbent on us to bring attention to this abuse of those who are doing nothing more than we are doing: excercising our right to free speech. This is citizens' media, and these are our fellow citizens.

There's nothing like the real thing -- the clear and present dangers, physical and psychological, of blogging in a bona fide fear society -- to put one's own petty concerns in perspective. Only yesterday we were emailing/whining to Professor Reynolds re our "fear" of damaging our "blogging reputation" by speaking our mind:

I have felt in the last period of time bullied by certain Christian bloggers looking to intimidate/marginalize those of us who may share many of their moral values but not necessarily their beliefs in a supreme being.

Get over it, girl. Blogging is all about telling it as you see it, and in this blessed country, no one is standing in your way.

Update:  Speaking of the real thing, there's nothing like an InstaLanche, baby.

Hey, baby, it's cold outside

Single-digit temperatures at dawn keep Tiny in the kitchen looking out.

Meanwhile, across the street at Eastern Minerals, freshly cut eastern slope of snow-swathed salt pile catches the rising sun.

Once temps rise to the low double digits, Tiny ventures forth to inspect the little house.

A man for all reasons

A lesson from Glenn Reynolds in amiably agreeing to disagree.  We had been stewing over Hugh Hewitt's embrace of ID and wondering how to blog about it without stepping on big toes.  Take a lesson from InstaPundit:

I LIKE HUGH HEWITT'S BLOG BOOK, and I think Hugh understands a lot about blogs, but I think that "intelligent design" theory is, um, highly unpersuasive.

Nice, friendly but uncompromising in expressing his own views. A man for all reasons. Professor Reynolds links to an elegant explication of why "Intelligent Design," by definition, isn't science by Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings, who notes that "Proving that theories are correct simply isn't how science works":

Proof of the validity of the theory (and there's nothing about that word that should shake our confidence in evolution or any other scientific theory) of evolution does not, and cannot, exist. And that's true not only for evolution, but for gravity, quantum chromodynamics, and any scientific theory that one wants to consider. Proving that theories are correct simply isn't how science works.

How science works is by putting forth theories that are disprovable, not ones that are provable. When all other theories have been disproven, those still standing are the ones adopted by most scientists. ID is not a scientific theory, because it fails the test of being disprovable (or to be more precise, non-falsifiable), right out of the box. If Hugh [Hewitt] doesn't believe this, then let him postulate an experiment that one could perform, even in thought, that would show it to be false. ID simply says, "I'm not smart enough to figure out how this structure could evolve, therefore there must have been a designer." That's not science -- it's simply an invocation of a deus ex machina, whether its proponents are willing to admit it or not. And it doesn't belong in a science classroom, except as an example of what's not science.

Yah. That's what we've been trying to say all this time.