sisu

Cutting through the undergrowth of liesand half truths

Pajamas Media types Juliette Ocheing (left) and Eric Umansky tell it like they see it in their blogs, baldilocks and EricUmansky.com

"Maybe TP is reading too much into that, but if the situation in New Orleans is drawing out tensions, including racial ones, then that's worth exploring, no?," writes Eric Umansky, raising our dander ever so slightly as we took in one of of our favorite daily reads -- Umansky's Slate column, "Today's Papers" -- with those first sips of coffee this morning:

The Los Angeles Times talks to some of the looters, who unlike your average D.C. briefer, were happy to go on the record. "I just took what I need," said "Marie Brown, 36," who grabbed cookies and shampoo from a drugstore. "Everyone you see out here, they're just trying to survive," she said.

We'd heard that some of the moonbats were taking the looters' side, and Umansky finishes up with ambiguous LAT reportage of possible police insensitivity Down Yonder towards a fleeing black woman with babe in arms who may or may not also be a looter. Wanna step outside, sir?  But no, it turns out the estimable Eric is a blogger -- proprietor of EricUmansky.com -- one of Pajamas Media's stable of seekers of wisdom and truth.  A nice place to visit.

Speaking of wisdom and truth -- not to mention sugar and spice and everything nice -- one of our favorite girl bloggers (Vive la difference:  There's nothing sweeter or saucier than conservative girl bloggers -- Just ask Tuck.) shares top billing at Pajamas Media today.  Oh, you kid.  It's baldilocks, aka Juliette Ocheing, former cryptological specialist in German and Russian languages. Her last name comes from an awesome biological Kenyan papa, "an accomplished African journalist." She's a fellow Cotillion Babe and is prone to cutting through the undergrowth of lies and half truths to get to the clearing of truth that makes us free. Another daily read, big time. Her latest post is close to our heart in these trembling, trembling post-Katrina times:

Noah's Wish is an organization which saves and protects our four-legged friends.

You know how we feel about that.  More heartwarming comments from blogpal Teresa of Technicalities responding to our previous post:

If you didn't see it, over at Blackfive, Matt had a post about Keesler AFB which was hit hard. About the first thing they put up on their web site to reassure people is that their pets are doing well in the shelter! I was surprised they were that thoughtful with everything else going on.

Saint Francis is smiling down upon us.

Water, water everywhere

"Stranded cat on top of a fence awaits rescue" from What About Cats.

We've found the focus of our hurricane relief efforts -- one of our longtime "pet" causes -- the Animal Rescue League of Boston. As part of a national network in collaboration with the American Humane Association, ARL Boston dispatched a team of four specialists in two vehicles from their Dedham facility this morning and headed for Nashville, where they will set up a base of operations and then move out from there to wherever they can do the most good in the coming days to deliver disaster relief to displaced animals. They will be joined tomorrow by Chief Operating Officer Nicholas Gilman, who reports:

The team is equipped to handle large and small animal rescue, floodwater and  swiftwater rescue and to assist in transportation of large animals.

We've spoken with ARL Boston's Director of Communications, Tom Adams, who sent along some background material and has promised to keep us posted on the team's progress. They're taking along a digital camera loaned by local WHDH-TV, Channel 7 so we're hoping to get some images to post here in the coming days. Meantime, Tom invites our support:

We welcome donations to help with rescue efforts like our work aiding the animals affected by Hurricane Katrina.  Donations may be made through our web site at www.arlboston.org; by phone to (617) 426-9170, Ext. 138 or by mail to

The Animal Rescue League
P.O. Box 265
Boston, MA  02117

"You realize you've just gone to a new level," notes Tuck. What do you mean?  "You're doing telephone research for your blog." Whatever it takes. Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds and the immediate blogosphere will be blog begging en masse this Thursday. Be sure to check out their blogs for other causes worthy of our support.

Update:  The Ecosystem's N.Z. Bear has created a page to track bloggers who are participating in the blogosphere's "Hurricane Katrina: Blog for Relief Day" Thursday, 9/1:

A day of blogging focused on raising awareness of and funds for relief efforts to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina. See here for more information, and here for the TTLB Katrina topic page.

Participating blogs are invited to enter your blog and your recommended charity into the TTLB database.

"So much bigger than all our fears"

Everything looked not better, but so much worse in the morning after Katrina's assault on the Big Easy as waters flooded the city in the wake of several breaches in the levees. The scope of the devastation was described by the head of FEMA as "catastrophic," and President Bush cut short his vacation to oversee the official response. "This is so much bigger than all of our fears, that we don't know how to tell you yet how big it is, the Mayor was saying at a press conference earlier," Shepard Smith reports from the scene:

That's a city that no longer functions. Priority number one is getting rid of the water. Everybody is being asked to get out of the city. Reconstruction can't begin until they get the water out, and getting the water out, they say conservatively, will take two weeks.

On the economic front, "Katrina's trail through the Gulf of Mexico and its key oil and natural-gas production facilities rattled energy markets," reports the Wall Street Journal, and "though the extent of damage there also won't be known for weeks, the White House signaled its willingness to open the nation's emergency oil stockpile if needed."

What can individual citizens do? "The highways in many cases are impassable, so they're urging people to stay off the roads to allow emergency personnel to get through," reports Rick Leventhal. Local citizens are being asked to mobilize their motorboats and report for duty to help rescue people stranded on rooftops throughout the city.

It's Tocqueville's "civil society" in action, with private individuals coming together in common purpose, and the blogosphere is gearing up to do its part. "Hugh Hewitt is suggesting a day of concerted blogging for hurricane relief efforts," writes Glenn Reynolds:

It's a good idea. How about Thursday, to give people a chance to organize? I'll link blog posts -- and in the meantime, send me suggestions for aid organizations worth mentioning. Put "flood aid" in the subject line.

Send your ideas to [email protected] and/or [email protected] and/or tell us here in the comments and we'll post your suggestions. Hewitt sensibly favors supporting "groups that will be in the region beyond the immediate relief effort," making "loans/grants to people to get houses and businesses repaired." We're thinking of animal relief efforts, natch.

What's our vector, Victor?*

Guess we blogged too soon.  Oh, my, how sweet it is.

*Memorable quotes from Airplane!:

Roger Murdock: We have clearance Clarence.
Captain Oveur: Roger, Roger. What's our vector Victor?
Tower voice: Tower's radio clearance, over.
Captain Oveur: That's Clarence Oveur. Over.
Tower voice: Roger.
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Tower voice: Roger, over.
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Captain Oveur: Huh?

Update:  Thank you, Mr. Johnson, for the nice link.

Pajamas Tedium

Can you say stupid?  We thought this was going to be our big day.  Our lovely Pajamas Media bio was being published.  If it was anything like Evan Coyne Maloney's bio on Saturday, it would be accompanied by much attention.  An InstaLanche, a SimonLanche, but no.  Nothing.  What a foolish little woman. Cute picture, though.

Update: Cutie pie Evan Coyne Maloney soothes the savage breast:

I know it isn't nearly as much traffic, but I hope my link to your Pajamas profile and your site will make up a bit for the lack of links from elsewhere.

By the way, that's a very cool picture in your profile.

Nice to meet you virtually.

This man knows what a woman wants.

She called us Si-Susie

 

The artwork over the sofa -- we picked the sofa colors to match the print rather than the other way around?  Or is it just that those are the colors we love?  At any rate, the white thing flying across the interior landscape had something to do with the artist's cat. The reflections to the right had to do with yesterday morning's early light streaming in the window.

"The name Sisu -- my mother was Finnish, and it's a Finnish word. But it also comes from what my grandmother used to call my sister Susie and me -- she called us Si-Susie," goes the "short and breezy" Pajamas Media profile of ourselves "ellipsed" for readability by Jill Stewart, our PJM contact. But Jill's ellipses are so much more skillful than Maureen Dowd's.  The intent remains intact:

So Sisu comes from that too. In Finnish, the word means spunk and gumption and standing up for yourself. My blog does that. I also talk a lot about culture -- buildings and architecture and exhibitions that I interpret via my own history.

It's a political blog to keep the media's feet to the fire, but also a cultural blog and an opportunity to showcase my photography. I used to be an inveterate newspaper clipper who wrote in the margins of the newspaper and sent comments off to people I had intellectual relationships with. I filed all those clips away. Now I can go back and find them and blog about them,10 years later. I'm pleased I still agree with myself about what the media chooses to say -- and not say.

We love the quotations Jill winnowed out of our telephone interview last week, and while we would never actually use the word "selfish" regarding our own motives -- not because they aren't but because Darwinian "selfishness" is where it's at in our worldview -- we salute Ms. Jill for putting us in a most flattering light. Ain't we got fun?  Thanks, doll.

Kevin Drum Update:  While fellow Pajamas Media blogging associate Evan Coyne Maloney rated lovely links from both Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon on Saturday when the first PJM bio went up, we have to ask, what about Sis? Are we dismissed because, as Kevin Drum asserts, "I imagine that the fundamental viciousness and self aggrandizement inherent in opinion writing turns off a lot of women"? Wicked disappointed here.

Mother Nature always has the last word

Frightening to see those New Orleans folk waiting in line to enter the Superdome. If Katrina is "The Big One," it will all be 30 feet under within 24 hours. You don't want to go there.

"I wanna be the one to walk in the sun"

Natalie Glebova.  Who's that? we wondered this afternoon, noting that this woman we had never heard of was #1 in Technorati's "Top Searches This Hour," beating out two other topics we've flogged here early and often, Intelligent Design and Cindy Sheehan. A lot easier on the eyes than Mother Sheehan.

Even as we were writing this post, another topic we're working on -- Charles Murray on distributional differences between female and male aptitudes --  displaced Mother Sheehan in the #4 spot. The blogging finger types, and having typed, moves on.

Just for fun -- that's what girls wanna have, after all -- we pulled together a few of our favorite themes and published a Natalie Glebova post, "Feminists and Islamicists, sisters under the skin," and what do you know?  Within minutes, there was our post at the top of Technorati's Natalie Glebova "Search" heap.

What does a woman want? Cyndi Lauper kind of said it all:

Some boys take a beautiful girl,
And hide her away from the rest of the world.
I wanna be the one to walk in the sun.
Oh, girls,
They wanna have fu-un.
Oh, girls,
Just wanna have
That's all they really want . . .
Some fun . . .

Every woman prevented by someone else's utopian fantasy from walking in the sun -- from a Miss Universe not allowed to wear her tiara at an official function to a Muslim woman forced to conceal her charms behind the hijab -- knows what she means. We know, we know.  Some Muslim women choose to wear the veil, and that's the point. Choice.

Yes, we have no pajamas

Unimpressed with Grandma's obsession with her standing in the Ecosystem, Baby focusses squarely on such sensible issues as "Where's the beef?" and "May I have that?"

"He is the Anti-Michael Moore: young, patriotic and single-chinned," writes Damian Thompson in The Daily Telegraph re Evan Coyne Maloney, "an undercover documentary filmmaker whose first feature, Indoctrinate U, scheduled for release early next year, will lay bare the hypocrisy of what he calls the most self-righteous people in America -- and possibly cost them millions of dollars":

Despite ticking so many Democrat boxes - Irish name, New Yorker, software designer, gay-friendly, non-churchgoer -- Evan Maloney is a Republican. And he is on a mission to expose through his film what he sees as the astonishingly vicious persecution of conservative students by university professors and administrators.

Music to our ears, and fortunately, he's also a blogger, proprietor of Brain Terminal. We we were going to do a little quoting and linking until we read his ponderous repost policy. Does that represent the wave of the future, with lawyers lurking in the links?  It plumb wore us out. He travels light:  No comments, no trackbacks. Check it out for yourself, and for more on the remarkable Maloney's exploits, click on over to Pajamas Media's profile of the young whippersnapper -- handsome devil, isn't he? -- first in a series on "contributors and bloggers who have joined our effort to gather a vast array of topics, opinions, news and personal passions into one easy-access place." Our own biography is waiting in the wings (be still my foolish heart).

Feminists and Islamicists, sisters under the skin

"'I definitely don't think that the Miss Universe title is any kind of stereotype or sexual stereotype' [said] Natalie Glebova, the 23-year-old Canadian woman who captured the Miss Universe title in Bangkok in May," but Toronto city officials, afraid of incurring the wrath of politically correct, beauty-challenged feminists, weren't so sure.

You've heard of dhimmitude -- the denial of equal rights and dignity to infidels under Sharia law.  Now there's dummitude, the denial of human nature under Canadian law.  First a little background, from David Horowitz's essay "How the Left Undermined America's Security Before 9/11":

Totalitarians and fundamentalists share a conviction that is religious and political at the same time. Their mission is social redemption through the power of the state. Using political and military power they intend to create a "new world" in their own image. This revolutionary transformation encompasses all individuals and requires the control of all aspects of human life.

We blogged about one of our favorite instances of the phenomenon from the Land of Sharia here last year:

The head-covering Islamist hijab -- far from being an honored tradition dating back to the Koran -- was actually a modern invention "inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings," according to Amir Tahiri [via Sarah at Trying to Grok via Right Wing News]. (Michelangelo's Mother of Christ from "Pieta" [left] and "Slinky Knits" two-piece hijab, republished from our post "Life imitates art")

"In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that 'scientific research had shown that women's hair emitted rays that drove men insane,'" and the following year he put his fiat where his mouth was:

To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.

By the mid-1980s a form of hijab never seen in Islam before the 1970s had become standard gear for millions of women all over the world, including Europe and America.

Enter the powers that be in Toronto, nicely illustrating Horowitz's notion that totalitarians -- in this case politically correct Marxist feminists who intimidate milquetoast legislators into enacting laws that try to regulate human nature out of existence -- and Islamicist fundamentalists are sisters under the skin:

Natalie Glebova was set to open a festival last weekend at Nathan Phillips Square in front of [Toronto's] City Hall, but municipal officials told organizers that the recently crowned Torontonian couldn't perform that duty if she wore her sash or her tiara, or if she was introduced by her title.

They said beauty pageants and beauty queens were banned from the square by a bylaw that prohibits activities deemed to be degrading to men or women through sexual stereotyping.

According to The Star, "the objection to Glebova's presence at City Hall was based upon fear of the 'message' her role sends young women; specifically, that one should not seek to gain fame or influence based solely upon one's physical beauty."

"My photograph is about the lack of freedom Arabic women have. I have used hands surrounding her face to show that she is trapped in her own society," wrote Carrie Walker of her photograph, "Behind the chador."

As a Darwinian libertarian, we say dress and let dress. As a woman, we say if you've got it, flaunt it.  Let the woman herself answer the Freudianesque question, "What does a woman want to wear in the public square?" But no. Like Walter Lippmann and Hillary & Company, the totalitarians and fundamentalists of this world know better than we what is best for us. We are mere props in their utopian fantasies, and they will do everything in their power to pu**y [PMF] whip us into line.