sisu

The mountain comes to Mohammed

It takes three tugboats to guide the chemical/oil tanker "Mount Rainier," sailing under the flag of Cyprus early morning, into the Chelsea Creek.

We love the layered, foreshortened image above — taken from our front steps — where the turning tanker seems to be squeezed into the tight space — actually a watery expanse of about 1/4 mile — between the McArdle Bridge that runs from Chelsea to East Boston in the foreground and a secondary span of the Mystic River Bridge between Chelsea and Charlestown in the background.

The working waterfront never sleeps.

Twitter: It's not just about Iran and Michael Jackson anymore

 

Michael Jackson's untimely death may have temporarily stolen the spotlight from the crackdown on Iranian protesters in social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, not to mention the cables, and even the major networks, but unlike whiny nanny-staters who keen for handouts, the Iranian freedom fighters picked themselves up and got back in the race. Example: A montage of photographs from the past few weeks of protests in Iran set to the music of MJ's "Beat It." Above, Jacko in his heyday singing PYT (Pretty Young Thing).

"Ask and ye shall receive. Thank you from the bottom of my heart (and pocket book!)," we just direct twittered Michelle Malkin. Unlike the congressional aide we talked to about an hour ago, she's been live twittering the cap-and-trade debate this afternoon and has all the answers. See below for details, but first, re that congressional aid, we spoke earlier with Steven Carlson, energy aide to our Taxachusetts Congressman, Michael E. Capuano. Told him we'd read on Twitter that Cap-and-Trade vote count was 210-210, with 14 undecided. He said he couldn't confirm as his office was not in touch with actual vote. Hmmm. Not following Twitter, then? Couldn't confirm whether Capuano had voted yet or was among the undecided. Double hmmm.

He asked whether we objected to the bill because it didn't go far enough or went too far. Not far enough? Hadn't thought of that but told him we believe 1. Bill is based upon junk science as more and more scientists are coming out to acknowledge the fact and 2. It amounts to the largest tax hike in the nation's history. He duly noted our thoughts and said he would pass them along to his boss. The silent majority, now mobilized at the individual level, becomes the smart mob?

A few tasty tidbits from Michelle Malkin's live tweeting of the final excruciating hours and minutes this afternoon:

YES! Rep. Barton refers to EPA-suppressed Carlin report (my column here if u missed it) …

Barton rocks: Cites Spain's greenjobs boondoggle. Costs 2.2 jobs for every greenjob. "Not a revolutn I want 2 b part of."

Barton closing statement: Facts data inconvenient truths. Waxman closing statement: HOPE! CHANGE! SAVE THE PLANET!

Ed Markey invoking "moral imperative" again. Global warming cult at work.

Sausage history in the making!

This just in re the 14 undecideds, straight from the horse's mouth in a direct tweet from the Divine Miss M herself:

@michellemalkin: Arcuri, Boccieri, Brown (FL), Carney, Dicks, Donnelly, Al Green, Kind, Kirk, Kirkpatrick, Petri, Space, Teague, Tonko

Talk about SOURCES! 'Don't see our guy, Capuano on the list. No doubt he voted early in favor of the highest tax hike in the history of the universe, but his aide didn't want to talk about it.

A little Gingbird told us "just say no" to energy tax increase

Darwin's Starlings on Otmoor, a few miles East of Oxford: "Individuals, but moving in a single entity. And the reason for this behavior? Well, thousands of eyes looking for predators on the roost site. Nothing could escape their gaze, no raptor could surprise this soaring mass of bird flesh … The birds are also maneuvering for position, social position." "Totally awesome must-watch video here. More on how flocks of birds "wheel and swoop in unison," not unlike twitterers and other social network denizens.

"Everyone should call their [sic] congressman this morning and demand a no vote on the unread energy tax increase. The vote is very close," twittered Newt to his 527,564 followers this morning. We'd been meaning to but hadn't gotten around to it. That little Gingbird in our ear did the trick. First we retwittered Mr. Gingrich's message for the benefit of our own exclusive flock of 288 followers, then googled up our Massachusetts 8th District Rep, Michael E. Capuano's DC phone number and gave him — and his energy specialist, Steve Carlson — a call. The woman who answered the phone couldn't have been lovelier. Fat (=well paid) and happy in her job or not too many calls? The Anchoress had a similar experience — "MOST POLITE cong. staff I've ever dealt with" — and is telling her 1182 followers she's "thinking fewer calls coming in." Lori Byrd makes it even easier for her 565 followers with her tweet:

Follow this link, put in ur zip-code, call your Rep, and say "vote no on H.R. 2454", the Cap&Trade leg.

If all of our followers and their followers retweet and make the call, we've got a smart mob self-organizing to pursue a shared goal. Meanwhile, Al Gore twitters his 1,090,925 followers with urgency:

The most important environmental vote of this generation.

Isn't everything he ever thinks, says or does "the most important" in its category? From his website:

According to news reports, the full House of Representatives will vote on the global warming and energy bill on Friday. Make no mistake, this is the most important environmental vote of this generation. If passed this legislation will put us on the road to actually solving the climate crisis, in addition to building a green economy.

Call your Representative: 877-9-REPOWER (877-9-737-6937) and make sure they vote yes.

Mr. Gore is forever saying the debate is over, but the twitterers on this side of the debate have got news for him. As Emily Zanotti twitters:

Watching these Cap & Trade/global warming debates makes one thing very clear: it ain't only the creationists who willingly ignore science.

And as The Anchoress tweets in return:

Boondoggle begets boondoggle. Global Warming a flim-flam begets this flim-flam legislation. Too much power 4 1 party.

And too many words in congressional bills that go unread by power hoarders who vote as they're told, and damn the [unintended?] consequences! Insult to injury from twitterer DarkKnight3565:

Rep. Waxman adds a 300 page amendment to cap-and-trade amendment morning of its signing. Congress now completely broken.

Pass it on.

Update: OneFineJay retweets us with apt comment:

RT @SissyWillis Update: Cap-and-Trade Vote Count: 210-210, 14 Undecided Vote out 210 congressmen in 2010!

We tried calling our rep, Michael Capuano for second time this afta:

@OneFineJay You go, boy!!! Good news?: Got thru easily to my Blue-state MA congressman Capuano this a.m. Now busy signal.

Give 'em hell!

"And his miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of Egypt"

"There is no nuance, no logical approach, no deft explanation that covers near silence and inadequate, tepid condemnation of the meekest sort," Steve Schippert captioned this unspeakable image (Unscreened version — sickening — here) of a young victim of "Iran's Tiananmen Square." For the American president "to decline any mention of possible repercussions on the regime for these acts 'because we don't know how this is going to turn out' is moral cowardice of the highest order."

"He's behaving as though he's the leader of a small, neutral nation instead of Leader of the Free World," Nile Gardiner of Heritage Foundation told Martha MacCallum of Fox News as "Prez condemns violence in Iran but takes 'Wait and See' approach" bannered across the bottom of the screen yesterday.

One picture, 1000 words. Book covers by designer Henry Sen Yee (Photos by Jon Shireman)

"It is the moral equivalence game from the Cold War all over again," writes Lorne Gunter in Canada's National Post, recalling the electrifying effect of President Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech on Soviet dissidents like Natan Sharansky:

Speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, president Reagan urged delegates against taking a moral equivalence stance on nuclear proliferation. When voting later in their convention on whether to support a freeze in the nuclear arms race, it would be too easy, Mr. Reagan said, to "label both sides equally at fault." That would "ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire."

Poo-poohed by "the usual suspects — academics, European leaders, special-interest cause pleaders, foreign policy experts, journalists and other assorted appeasers" — Reagan's declaration "before the entire world," in Sharansky's words, that the Soviet Union was "a totalitarian regime" had "made it impossible," explains Gunter, "for other world leaders, and Soviet leaders themselves, to maintain the facade that Russia and its satellites were as righteous as the West":

"It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations," according to Mr. Sharansky, "and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked … the end of Lenin's 'Great October Bolshevik Revolution' and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution" …

"A president's strong words would be for the Natan Sharanskys of Iran, not the mad mullahs who run the country," Gunter chides the current president's "Weeny diplomacy," Fausta's delicious formulation.

John Shireman's crumpled-paper evocation of violence (above right) called to mind this crumpled wax-paper-on-pie-dough image from our October 2007 post "There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion," where we quoted John Tierney: "The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly … It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus … He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade" of sheeplike belief formation that causes flat-earthers to crowd the cultural ether in every era.

"And his miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of Egypt unto Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and unto all his land …"

                    — Deuteronomy 11: (King James Version)

"Last week on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd reported that administration officials were 'frustrated that they're not getting credit for what's going on in Iran … they think that Cairo speech did help supporters of Mousavi sort of see light at the end of the tunnel in their country,'" writes Mary Katharine Ham, pulling back the curtain on the sausage-making process as the dithering diplomat who is President of the United States — with a 24/7 assist from Mythmaker-in-Chief Rahm Emanuel — gets away once more with having it both ways:

Today, speaking to a group of Washington reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reinforced that argument by declaring that Obama's speech in Cairo "will go down as one of the most significant foreign policy speeches."

"It was equal to what Kennedy's speech was, what Reagan's speech was," he said. "I think he did 20 years worth of work … for advancing America's interests … We are no longer the issue in that region of the world."

Once more with[out] feeling, in the President's own words:

I have made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.

We knew Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a friend of ours. President Obama, you are no Ronald Reagan.

This just in: President Ahmandinejad is accusing Obama of interfering in Iran and demanding an apology for saying he is "appalled and outraged" by the recent violence there.

Update: Maggie's links with a question: "When did the US renounce 'Leadership of the Free world'?"

Who can explain its mystery?

Tiny by palmlight seeing things we don't outside on the terrace early morning.

"I LOVE your analysis of the Tiny/Earl Grey romance and am sure you are right about the 'dashing white boots,'" we emailed friend Carol Ward, a lifelong seeker of feline wisdom and truth:

I was enthralled by your pics of Tiny and Earl. I am fascinated to know what it is between the two of them that makes them not get all territorial with each other.  (Would that Snowball and Tigger, the neighbor's other, outside, cat get along like that, even for a minute.) It seems apparent that Earl is dating "up," while I can only guess that Tiny's head has been turned by the dashing white boots.

No wonder Earl Grey is smitten. What a sweatheart, above popping her head up from the lawn, grown tall through 40 days and 40 nights of intermittent rain.

'Reminds us of "Not just another pretty face," our photographic essay of love among the maples, wherein we contrasted the "pistillate [female] flowers' exquisite refinement" with the "unkempt, seedy appearance" of their staminate [male] suitors and asked the eternal question "What does she SEE in him?"

Update: More lovely faces now boarding Modulator's Friday Ark #249.

Obama: Freedom of speech? Who needs it?

"'Freedom from Fear' (left) and 'Freedom from Want' are two of Norman Rockwell's 'The Four Freedoms' series inspired by FDR's rousing wartime State of the Union address in 1941," we captioned these images from a 2004 post. "Reproduced in four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, the original paintings by America's favorite illustrator toured the United States, raising over $130 million for the war effort. (Norman Rockwell Museum photos)"

"Who would have thunk it? George Bush turns out to be [Actually always was. –ed] the truer proponent of freedom," twitters Fred Thompson. Joshua Muravchik explains:

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. The new president signaled his intent on the eve of his inauguration, when he told editors of the Washington Post that democracy was less important than “freedom from want and freedom from fear."

"'Freedom of Speech' left and 'Freedom to Worship' complete the series," we wrote in 2004. "We remember having reproductions of the illustrations hanging on the walls of our grade-school classrooms in the fifties and thinking even then they seemed quaintly old-fashioned. In today's world, again at war with those who would stomp on our freedoms, we see them with fresh eyes. Because Rockwell's subject matter was usually on the corny side, serious art critics tended to look down upon the artist's accomplishment, but beyond the anecdotal component — much loved by the average American — his compositional and painterly skills were quite remarkable.

Contrast Obama's anemic assertion last January that democracy is less important than "freedom from want and freedom from fear" — not to mention his tepid response to earth-shaking events in Iran and his ongoing "sledging strategy of intimidation" designed to discredit domestic dissent, from Fox News and talk radio on down to us bloggers and anti-statist tea partiers — with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's rousing State of the Union January 6, 1941:

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

As we twittered in response to Fred Thompson's observation above, "How telling Obama left out 2 of FDRs 4 freedoms: freedom of speech & freedom of worship!"

For thy love is better than catnip*

Tiny and her dashing gentleman caller Earl Grey out together clowdering cheek to cheek on the front stoop in the early morning light.

First time we've ever seen our sweet tiny girl so taken with another member of her species, and the feeling is obviously mutual.

Fight or flight? Camera shy and people shy, Earl eyed us with suspicion when he realized a paparazza was in dogged pursuit.

*Blog title is taken — with liberties — from Song of Solomon 1:2 (King James Version): "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine."

Sec Def Gates: "I don't have a clue what it's about"

Late afternoon on the front porch Tiny assumes the sphinx pose that is her birth right.

“This department, I think, is way behind our curve in this and that’s an area where I think we have a lot of room for improvement," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters yesterday in a discussion of the ways new social networking services like Twitter and Facebook have been facilitating transmission of fast-breaking news within and outside of Iran:

And where economic strife combines with modern technology, as it has in Iran, he added, “It makes the control of communications by a government extremely difficult …

"And if you can’t text, then you Twitter. And my guess is in some of these countries that the leadership is kind of like me: I don’t have a clue what it’s about,” Gates said, chuckling.

All eyes and ears, she is ever on the alert for Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns."

Ouch. His predecessor Donald Rumsfeld's words come to mind:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Intellectually incurious talking heads snickered at the time, but our own beloved Rummie's words resonate, and the irony of Secretary Gates's words is doublefold:

1. Even as Gates properly acknowledges that Twitter makes it hard for authoritarian governments to jackboot free cyberspeech, he ignores his boss's "sledging strategy of intimidation" designed to discredit domestic dissent, from Fox News and talk radio on down to us bloggers and anti-statist tea partiers.

2 Chuckling over not having a clue about how the younger generation is keeping in touch is dangerously pathetic.

Fortunately, as BayNewser reports [via The Anchoress], over at the State Department there's a "27-year-old whiz kid whose job is to advise the State Department on how to use social media to promote U.S. interests in the Middle East":

And imagine our further surprise when we learned this young gentleman wasn't one of Barack Obama's social media geniuses, but instead was a Condi Rice pick hired specifically to advise the State Department on young people in the Middle East and how to "counter-radicalize" them.

According to the New York Times, it was Jared Cohen, a member of the Policy Planning Staff, who contacted Twitter on Monday, inquiring about their plan to perform maintenance in what would be the middle of the day, Iran time. Following that contact, Twitter decided to postpone their maintenance so that it would take place in the middle of the night Iran-time, even though that meant it would be the middle of the day U.S. time.

Somewhere we read that Twitter says their decision to defer maintenance was independent of government intervention, and we know that Twitter users bombarded the site with thousands of requests asking that they delay the maintenance downtime. But whether or not a call from the State Department was the determining factor, it's encouraging to know that a Gen Xer like Cohen is on the case:

"Iranian young people are one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East,” Cohen told the New Yorker. “They just don’t know who to gravitate around, so young people gravitate around each other.”

More's the pity that the Leader of the Free World's "Choice is not to choose on Iran."

The price of liberty

Tiny bays at the moon in the midday sun …

"Sooner or later, a society of sheep must create a government of wolves."

                 — Bertrand de Jouvenal

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

                — Edmund Burke

… and goes eyeball-to-eyeball with a Lilac trunk.

"We've always said — whether anyone was listening or not — that the forces of darkness (apologies to wolves, who have their own imperatives, which we totally respect but would always defend our own against) are forever waiting just outside the campfire of civilization to move in for the kill."

                — Sissy Willis

Update: The forces of light now boarding Modulator's Friday Ark #248.

"The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier"

Cast your vote for Google to change their logo for one day in solidarity with the people of Iran yearning to breathe free.

How come Twitter's still getting through while other social networking services have been stifled by Iranian authorities? We'd been meaning to google that but didn't have to. Instead, the answer came to us by way of Iranian twitterer Elzone from Tehran: "Times' Kristof: How Iranian protesters are evading the gov't Twitter shutdown," a classic tale of the American Dream come true. "It is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites," explains Nicholas Kristof:

The protesters’ arsenal, such as those tweets on Twitter.com, depends on the Internet or other communications channels. So the Iranian government is blocking certain Web sites and evicting foreign reporters or keeping them away from the action.

The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. [Or maybe, Mr. Kristof, it's a tribute to the golden door of opportunity the US opened to freedom-seekers fleeing tryranny. – ed] The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong … usage of the consortium’s software has tripled in the last week. It set a record on Wednesday of more than 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people …

Here's how it works:

Mr. Zhou, the son of a Chinese army general, said that he and his colleagues began to develop such software after the 1999 Chinese government crackdown on Falun Gong (which the authorities denounce as a cult). One result was a free software called Freegate, small enough to carry on a flash drive. It takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site.

Freegate amounts to a dissident’s cyberkit. E-mails sent with it can be encrypted. And after a session is complete, a press of a button eliminates any sign that it was used on that computer …

Responding to the growing use of Freegate in Iran, the consortium introduced a Farsi-language version last July — and usage there skyrocketed.

"Noticed green avatars all around in support of #IranElection? See who started this great idea," twitters Mr Tweet himself, answering another question that's been on our mind, even as we've gone from pink to green (Our own avatar, before and after, above).

"If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he should support an 'Internet freedom initiative' pending in Congress," Kristof gently chides the President who "chose not to choose on Iran":

This would include $50 million in the appropriations bill for these censorship-evasion technologies. The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier, and we can help puncture it.

As tayastorm twittered from Tehran this morning, "fight back government's propaganda in twitter! if we lost here we have no other place."

Note: Check out all the latest Iran tweets here. This just in as we write: BBC confirm reformists detained, former Vice-President Abtahi, Mustafa Tajzadeh and Saeed Hajjarian. Our own twitter contributions here.

Update: Luis Gil (elzote), the Iranian who alerted us about the Kristof article, is now following us on Twitter! As Elisson twittered a month back, "How recursive is that?"