sisu

We got him!

It's official. (Flashing light from The Drudge Report)

Alito's in, and Hillary failed to show. Having it both ways or no way?

Update: Hillary just says no.

Sweet bedfellows

How sweet it is to head for bed and find the Baby Cakes already settled in. We don't call him Mr. Cuddles for nothing.

"He has made many mistakes and wishes to apologize for everything"

Manolo alert. The shoes make the man, but Michael Jackson isn't exactly a man's man. Even so, the gloved one never looked lovelier.

"Michael Jackson went shopping in Bahrain on Wednesday disguised as a traditional Arab woman, but if it was an attempt by the pop star to avoid attention, it failed," reports Pakistan's Daily Times [via The Arab Press Summary]:

Jackson has been spending time in the Gulf state as a guest of the royal family since a Californian court acquitted him in June of child molestation. A Reuters photographer saw him in a popular shopping mall in the centre of the capital Manama all in black, with sunglasses, gloves, a veil covering his face and dressed in an abaya, or full-length robe -- but with men’s shoes peeping out below.

Men's shoes? Who knew Michael Jackson wore them? Even so, here's the real story:

Jackson is getting ready to produce his first Islamic anthem after announcing his conversion to Islam.

A weekly Bahraini newspaper has published an article with the title, “Michael Jackson Releases an Islamic Anthem,” in which Michael Jackson mentioned that the time has come for him to confess, in front of God, that he has made many mistakes and wishes to apologize for everything.

Isn't that special? What hath Allah wrought?

"Ah, the beauty of blogging"

Don't try to confuse paranoids with the facts. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar, thrust into the world spotlight thanks to the unanticipated outcome of last week's Palestinian elections, is demanding that Israel change its flag. "Israel must remove the two blue stripes from its national flag . . . The stripes on the flag are symbols of occupation. They signify Israel's borders stretching from the River Euphrates to the River Nile," says the history-challenged terrorist spokesman. In fact, the blue stripes of the Israeli flag are a reference to the Jewish tallit (background in photo), a prayer shawl that "probably resembled the 'abayah,' or blanket, worn by the Bedouins for protection from sun and rain, and which has black stripes at the ends." Like Democrat and Republican partisans, Islamist terrorists are "adept at ignoring facts."

"I seriously believe that behind every cool person, there's a blog they get to bitch their asses off in . . . Ah, the beauty of blogging." writes Sarooha of farah's sowaleef, "The everyday natterings of an exhausted, repressed, and bored 'Saudi' Arabian chick." Stephen Schwartz in his Weekly Standard "Blogging Saudi Arabia: Undermining the Wahhabis, one post at a time" [via The Intelligence Summit News] explains:

ON OCTOBER 21, A new message came out of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the land of Wahhabi Islam, with its commitment to financing jihad, its public beheadings, and its total subordination of women. But rather than the usual extremist preaching, promoting the bloody terrorist acts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq or inciting hate against non-Wahhabi Muslims, Jews, Christians, and others around the world, the message was a call, in imperfect English, for "the first Saudi bloggers meet up." And with it, Saudi Arabia passed a milestone . . .

Men and women blogging together, of course, represents a total flouting of Saudi rules mandating sex segregation. And there can be no turning back. Saudi authorities cannot confiscate all the computers, Blackberrys, and cell phones in the kingdom. Nor can they forbid the use of the English language.

Saudi Blogs inventories more than 80 active sites, 67 of them in English or English and Arabic. Saudi women produce some of the most interesting sites. They are so daring in their freedom of expression that one congressional staffer who reads them regularly expressed complete bewilderment, asking, "How can this happen?" The globalization of American culture obviously has a lot to do with it, since many blog entries are written in the hip-hop, text-message idiom of Western teenagers.

The most startling and thought-provoking Saudi blog is "Farah's Sowaleef," sowaleef meaning "chitchat" . . . Writing in a generally readable mélange of English and occasional Arabic, the author, Farah Aziz, alias "Farooha," reveals herself to be a student at "KSU" -- King Saud University (not Kansas State), the kingdom's oldest university. Farooha is a "spoiled jingoistic" resident of the capital, Riyadh, as well as of Najd, the desert province from which Wahhabi radicalism and the royal house of Saud emerged.

"Blogging has also become a major phenomenon in theocratic Iran," notes Schwartz:

But in Saudi Arabia, the sudden explosion of blogging coincides with evidence of a very real move toward openness in religious thinking, guided by the new king, the octogenarian Abdullah. At a global Islamic summit at the end of 2005, Abdullah proclaimed the need for "moderation that embodies the Islamic concept of tolerance," adding, "I look forward to Muslim inventors and industrialists, to an advanced Muslim technology, and Muslim youth who work for their life just as they work for the Hereafter, without excess or negligence, without any kind of extremism."

That vision sharply conflicts with the obsessions of al Qaeda and Hamas, which exalt death over life. . .

"Saudi Blogs": For all its simplicity, the phrase has a revolutionary ring, like "Continental Congress" or "Polish Solidarity." For now, the Saudi authorities continue to block conventional websites maintained by reformists, like tuwaa.com, while permitting infamous Wahhabi hate sites, like alsaha.com, to operate. But the tyrants are falling behind and losing control of events. The spirits of the pamphleteer Benjamin Franklin and the great communicator Ronald Reagan must be tickled.

To life, to life, l'chaim!

Update:  'Just found this lovely detail from Eric Schwappach at The American Thinker:

The Torah commanded the israelites to dye threads of their tallit with an indigo dye which would represent the blue skies and remind them of God in Heaven.

The Decisive Moment

Baby Cakes sees things we don't as he pauses atop the shower during Crazy Hour maneuvers this afternoon. Henri Cartier-Bresson's "duel without rules" re "the power relationship between recorder and recorded" comes to mind. As Alan Riding wrote the other day in his NYT review of a new Paris exhibition of the father of photojournalism's portraits, "perhaps the duel is over who sets the rules: the photographer decides when to press the shutter, but the subject can decide how much he or she reveals."

We were caught in the crossfur of a Crazy Hour Moment while innocently walking out of the downstairs bathroom this afternoon. At the very moment we made the 90-degree turn towards the kitchen, the Babe's path crossed ours. He was in the middle of a special-ops scramble, his claws engaging our stockinged foot as he rushed down the stairs, made a 180-degree furpin turn at the bottom of the stairs and then dashed into the bathroom and leapt up to the platform above the shower. No harm done, but lots of great photo ops.

We missed Cartier-Bresson's "Decisive Moment" -- or did we? as Baby wound down the Crazy Hour with a seemingly effortless maneuver down the outside wall of the shower to the window sill, top of the toilet and thence to the bathroom floor. What Crazy Hour? I don't know what you are talking about, the Babe seemed to say as he exited in Sane Kitty Mode stage right.

We'd never paid that much attention to Henri Cartier-Bresson, "considered by most to be the father of photojournalism" according to Wikipedia. Most what? Do you have names? Oh, never mind. Wikipedia -- like the Encyclopedia Britannica itself -- must always be taken with at least a grain of salt, but "that said," here's what they say:

In 1952 he published his book, The Decisive Moment. The book featured a portfolio of 126 photos from the East and the West. It also featured a book cover drawn by Henri Matisse. [Cartier-Bresson's] 4,500-word philosophical preface was where the term Decisive Moment was born. He first wrote it in French, taking his text from the 17th-century Cardinal de Retz: "Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif." This translates to "There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment." Henri applied this to his photography style. Henri said: "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."

Sounds good, but what mischief has been made in the name of Cartier-Bresson's thrilling premise?

Astonishingly, this obscene photograph of Attorney General Janet Reno's gunmen accosting Elian Gonzalez was never more than a blip on the MSM media's radar screen.

One picture is more seductive than a thousand words. Michael Yon's photograph of a US soldier cradling a dying Iraqi child in his arms duels with a zillion photos meant to show that George Bush=Hitler. It's up to us viewers to make sure the scales are never allowed to build up on our eyes.

Update: Is one picture of a cat worth a thousand purrs? Master of the Ailurosphere Laurence Simon in the 97th Carnival of the Cats reports, you decide.

You don't suppose Rush Limbaugh reads this blog?

"Rush Limbaugh chalks up the bad beating that liberals have been taking in recent years to a lack of proficiency in the art of argumentation," writes Vasko Kohlmayer -- who defected from Communist Czechoslovakia at the age of 19 -- at The American Thinker:

His contention is that during the fifty or so years of media monopoly they became intellectually indolent and are now unable to counter conservatives who, by contrast, patiently built their intellectual armoury during their long period of minority status.

We said the very thing here months ago, of course:

Leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media -- supposed to be keeping them honest -- have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready.  Enter the bloggers, stage right.

You don't suppose Rush reads this blog? Whatever. Kohlmayer continues:

This is only partially correct. Although it is true that more and more people are becoming adept in articulating conservatism, liberalism’s present day haplessness is not primarily due to a lack of argumentative skills on the part of its advocates. Unfortunately for them, their predicament runs much deeper. Their real and ultimately insurmountable problem is that most of their beliefs and positions are inherently indefensible. For how does one make a case for multiculturalism, abortion, bigger state, socialized healthcare or higher taxes?

It certainly cannot be done by logic or deductive reasoning -- no matter how skillful they may ever become in these -- since the hard truth is that all of the above ultimately lead to bad outcomes.

Whether it's thinkers like Kohlmayer, whose family fled the physical boot of tyranny in distant lands, or those like our friend Neo who fled the psychological boot of Blue-state tyranny amongst her circle of politically correct friends right here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the voices of those who have escaped fear societies -- whether blood drenched or lite -- may be the ones that will lead us out of the darkness.

"Denying reality is making them feel great"

"I was reluctantly coming to a certain distressing conclusion: more often than not, the voices on the left were less credible than those on the right," writes Neo in the latest installment of "A mind is a difficult thing to change," her illuminating series chronicling the sometimes painful journey of a life-long liberal beyond the circle of those who "dance in a ring." The reality shock of 9/11 and the access to information afforded by the internet -- opening up a world of news and opinion beyond the elite Pauline Kael bubble that was her birthright -- were the catalysts:

Like so many people, I was in a state of heightened emotion and awareness after 9/11. I, who had rarely watched cable news on television, was now viewing it many hours each day, and also reading my usual newspapers and periodicals with greater intensity and focus . . .

But when I started reading many other papers as well, I discovered a surprising thing. The Times and the Globe and most of my previous reading sources (the New Yorker, Newsweek) had pretty much agreed with each other. But now some of the papers predicted widely different outcomes, and analyzed the meaning of events differently.

It was as though I were sitting in a court of law as a member of the jury and being asked to decide a case. Before, I had heard only the presentation from one side. Now I heard both sides, and was trying to give both a fair hearing, and to approach my task without prejudice or preconceived notions.

If ever there was a must read, this is it. Besides a riveting personal account, it contains a memory-jogging mini-history of the spinning media ride we've all been on these last four-plus years, a good reality check for fellow travelers still inside the bubble. But in light of recent brain-activity findings that suggest partisans -- both Republicans and Democrats --  hear what they want to hear, we don't hold out much hope for changing many more minds. Jamie Irons [via Neo's comments] of the group blogYARB explains:

The very act of looking at logical contradictions in one's own candidate, while turning off the logical analysis parts of the brain, caused a completely different part of the brain to light up instead. ". . . activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix."

[Blog] trolls are getting a fix from denying reality, enjoying a rush from ignoring the logical contradictions. It follows that arguing logic and facts with such people is not only useless, but self-defeating. They are getting positive brain-shocks from reasserting their illogical statements in the face of contradictory facts. Denying reality is making them feel great.

We were reminded of related findings noted in own post of a couple of years back, What is this thing called love?:

What researchers at University College London have now found is that romantic and maternal love activate many of the same regions of the brain. The implication is that maternal love is the evolutionary basis, the foundation, for romantic love.

"Love leads to a suppression of neural activity associated with critical social assessment of other people and negative emotions . . . The work could provide a neurological explanation for why love makes us blind."

So George W, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary! . . . are mother substitutes? Back to Neo's transformation, it was a questionable Sy Hersh article in The New Yorker insinuating we were losing the war in Afghanistan that finally stripped the scales from her eyes:

I read the entire piece with mounting concern. The Vietnam comparison (although I don't recall it as being overt) was not lost on me. If this piece could be believed, we didn't seem to know what we were doing in Afghanistan.

But could it be believed? I trusted my beloved New Yorker, of course. But I could not escape the perception that there was something very odd about this particular article. Not only was it rather poorly written (something unusual for the magazine, as best I could remember) -- disjointed and disconnected -- but it read like a gossip column . . .

And that wasn't all. I wondered about the point of publishing this piece in the first place. Why did we need to know this so very badly? . . .I didn't see that there was any overriding public purpose in exposing this mission as failed; certainly not enough to justify the breach of security and the possibility of harming our morale and enhancing that of the enemy.

As we wrote our friend in her comments, "If The New Yorker had any sense, it would drop Sy "I certainly can fudge what I say" Hersh and put our own Neo on the payroll for weekly reports from 'the front.'"

"Dammit, Sissy, I really need to read you daily"

Our sweet Tiny girl is looking and feeling 100 per cent just three weeks after she presented her asthmatic distress by refusing to eat a treat. After much waiting and worrying on our part and tests and hospitalization for three nights on her part, she's back doing what she enjoys most, being a cat as she bats her superballs with athletic abandon, whacks her brother -- when he gets too close -- and blesses us early and often with nosebites, shoulder taps and general high spirits morning, noon and night. Sometimes it's a bit early when she and Baby start their relentless breakfast campaigns while we are trying to get a few extra z's, but like the meds and veterinary bills, it's a small price to pay for having her back in our loving arms.

"Dammit, Sissy, I really need to read you daily," emails blogfriend Annie of the most delightful AmbivaBlog in response to our own response to her "Kitty-Talk" blogpost this morning. Naturally, we couldn't agree with her more regarding the need to read our blog daily. In her post she invites her readers to reveal their most intimate whisperings to their feline companions:

Do you give weird nicknames to your cats? What is it about cats? Was T.S. Eliot right: The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter . . .

Sara at Raising Up Sunshine started this. I've often thought about it, but never thought of blogging about it till now. Go over and put your screwy cat nicknames in her comments. I did. It's a lot more fun and strange than most of those lame pop-culture memes about what TV series you watch over and over.

I was wondering: do only women do this? Give their cats lots of weird nicknames, I mean? Is it a mutation of the instinct for baby-talk and babbling language play between mothers and infants that revs up Broca's area in the little brain? I have a whole unique language of nicknames that I speak to each cat, and mothers have told me that they have just such a special language with each of their children. But T.S. Eliot's writing about it suggests that it may not be exclusive to the female gender.

As we told Annie/Amba in her comments, while we're sure it's not just a girl thing, it definitely derives from the mother-and-baby thing:

I think you're right about Broca's area in the little brain, and it's not just for mothers and their babies. I'm thinking of something I read -- and posted about -- that locates pleasurable feelings between mother and child and feelings between new lovers in the same part of the brain:

What is this thing called love?

Addicted to love

"And speaking of love," we added, "my husband [that would be Mr. Tuck] is, in fact, a much sought-after cat whisperer:

Tiny and Baby dissolve in heavy purring, rolling over -- sometimes falling over the side of whatever they are lying on -- and even drooling at the sweet nothings he whispers in their ears.

For full details, head on over to AmbivaBlog.

Update:  As usual, Goomp says it best (in the comments):

Not a girl thing or a boy thing. It's just something that the kitties bring out in us humans. Kittykins, Lucykins, Little Miss Black Ears etc ad infinitum. Purrk the Lurk, Mr. P, Waterbaby, and so it goes.

Purrrrr.

Update: For more blogs you really need to read daily, head on over to Friday Ark #71 at Modulator.

"It's all a silly misunderstanding"

"If your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace, and we want peace." says the President at this morning's press conference in response to a reporter's question about the unexpected Hamas victory in yesterday's Palestinian elections. Hugh Hewitt has highlights.

"Hamas does not believe in terrorism or killing civilians. But Ariel Sharon pressed buttons to make people angry," said Hamas's new "media consultant" Nashat Aqtash with a straight face recently [via Clive Davis, who quips "It's all a silly misunderstanding, you see."]. Same old, same old sandbox message with a slick new finish: Did not, did so . . . It's always the other kid's fault. Tom Gross [also via Clive Davis] summarizes:

Support for Hamas is partly based upon its charity network and anti-corruption credentials. Its vow to eliminate Israel does not appear in its election manifesto, but in interviews and at rallies Hamas officials have repeatedly emphasized that this has not changed. Hamas has placed much emphasis on its image at these elections, as illustrated by the article from The Guardian, attached below. Hamas has paid a spin doctor, Nashat Aqtash, $180,000 to persuade Europeans and Americans that it is not a group of religious fanatics who relish suicide bombings and hate Jews.

For the best and brightest commentary -- with lots of links -- on what it all may mean, check out Pajamas Media. Here's a tasty morsel to whet your appetite:

Patrick Belton of Oxblog, writing from the land where he has been witnessing the electoral process: "It's not clear anyone wanted this, least of all Hamas, who in assuming the administration of the Palestinian national authority's creaking and often bureaucracy single-handed in a moment when its sole lifeline of European and other international support appears threatened, may just have stumbled into the biggest molasses patch the Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah has ever faced. Unlike the Lib Dems of 1985, Hamas did not go to its constituencies to prepare for government. It had prepared for a coalition, or possibly for pristine opposition, but not this.

This should be interesting.

Update:  Pajamas Media hits its stride with "78 Hamas posts and counting."

The inherent corruption of unlimited government

"The reason I became a Republican [was] because I did not want to vote for Democrats. This will be the same reason when I leave the Republican Party," writes Minh-Duc of State of Flux in an eloquent personal Declaration of Independence from a party he says will have left him -- in the Reagan sense of his former party, the Democrats, having left him -- if they elect Ray Blount as House Majority Leader:

I became a Republican long before I became a US citizen, long before I came to the US, long before I was old enough to vote. I was a young boy in Vietnam listening clandestinely to Voice of America (VOA) over a short wave radio . . . There, on that old short wave radio, President Reagan gave the "evil empire" speech. Living in a Soviet vassal state, I already knew that they were evil. The inherent evil of the Soviet Union was obvious. But not a single US President had the moral courage to say [the] thing as it was -- not until Ronald Reagan. I knew then that he would be the greatest US President in my life time.

I came to the US in the last year of [the] Reagan Presidency. That was when I learned that my favorite US President is a Republican. I also learned that he favors limited governement. With the past experience with the government where I came from, limited government is a wonderful idea.

Reagan brought me into the party, Newt Gingrich made me a believer. I was an enthusiastic supporter of the Conservative Revolution. Now I fear that the Revolution is dead.

We quoted Minh-Duc -- alongside Peggy Noonan and Hugh Hewitt -- here the other day in arguing the case for the Republicans to get back to their limited-government roots and reduce the source of corruption by reducing the size of government. As Minh-Duc notes:

The current leadership race for the majority leader will determine if the Republican Party is still the Party of Reagan, and that the Conservative Revolution is still alive. Roy Blunt is cut from the same cloth as Tom Delay. He is an opportunistic politician who speaks of small government but funds big government.

But don't look for the Republican leadership to lose much sleep over the inherent corruption of unlimited government. They've got too much "invested" -- to use Paul Chesser's word in his must-read American Spectator article, "It's Not Just Pork" [via Mark Tapscott] -- in the status quo.

A clamor against special appropriations -- pushed in Congress by House Majority Leader candidates John Shadegg of Arizona and John Boehner of Ohio -- is growing, and certainly promising. But while the focus is on pork, attention should also be paid to two other insidious products of meddlesome government: economic development incentives and eminent domain . . .

"Invest" is the favorite buzzword of politicians -- both Democrat and Republican -- who like to use other people's money to take chances in risky businesses. The results are often as scandalous as anything Abramoff has perpetrated.

As is the Supreme Court-endorsed practice of employing eminent domain to give private property to developers, also in the name of economic development . . .

What it represents is a pervasive attitude throughout government, and extending through both political parties, that there are no rights of the people other than those granted by those in political power. Local and state government, with eminent domain and economic incentives, merely represent the farm system that leads to the big-time pork playground.

Will our Porkbuster allies in Congress, together with a new Supreme Court less inclined to discover new "rights" in a "living Constitution," be able to counter what Patrick Chisholm in the Christian Science Monitor calls the insidious "triumph of the redistributionist left."? Or is it too late? Did the commies, via "Stalin's meme war" -- as  Eric  S. Raymond [via InstaPundit] wrote yesterday -- win our citizens' hearts and minds after all?:

So: we know the Soviets aimed to apply Gramscian subversion as a war weapon against the West, we know they believed themselves to have succeeded in significant ways, and the dominant cultures of the entertainment industry, the press, and academia behave today precisely as we would expect if they had succeeded in those ways (that is, they sneer at traditional values and patriotism and exhibit pervasive left-wing and anti-American bias)

Check out our The Tocquevillians Strike Back for more about Marxist intellectual and politician Antonio Gramsci's role as the father of today's pervasive and debilitating political correctness. As the title of that post suggests, we're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take this any more.

Technorati tags:  Porkbusters, Peggy Noonan, Hugh Hewitt, John Shadegg, John Boehner