All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
“The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with with words and ideas instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions.”
Karl Popper
As a native inhabitant of New York City and a parochial school inmate with deep family roots in the NYPD, I grew up with the yearly ritual of the St. Patrick’s Day parade with its kilted and bagpipes playing policemen and endless blarney about the religiosity of the City’s inhabitants. But I still think fondly of the ritual. Also March Seventeenth is Camera Girl’s Birthday so she is honorary Irish and celebrates by making corned beef and cabbage for dinner. So a Happy St. Patrick’s Day to any and all Irish and other fans of the day.
Vox reads a lot of stuff. This was a very good choice to link to.
Here’s a direct link to the article itself.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/04/giving-the-boot
Max Boot is one of the most contemptible of the NeverTrumpers. This review of him and his book is also extremely clear about why the NeverTrumpers are anything but conservatives.
The Climate Alarmists are getting scared.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/13/what-are-the-opponents-of-donald-trumps-climate-re/
“On March 5, 58 senior military and national security leaders sent a letter to President Trump denouncing his plan to form a National Security Council panel to take a critical look at the science underpinning climate change claims. Their objections to such a Red Team effort were basically that the “science is settled.”
But if the science is settled, what are they afraid of? Wouldn’t a review of the science come to the same conclusion as the supposed consensus of climate scientists?”
I liked this little dig at the end
“In 1931, after being informed a book had been published titled “100 Authors against Einstein,” Albert Einstein responded, “Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!” As Michael Crichton once said, “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
This one is a pure comedy.
Archibald Beechcroft (played by comedian Shelley Berman) is a misanthropic New Yorker who hates his fellow man because he jostles Archie in the subway, steps on his toes in the elevator and spills coffee on him in the office. When his boss, Mr. Rogers, finds Archie in the bathroom washing up after a particularly aggravating commute and asks him what’s the matter, Archie says people are the matter and they need to disappear and be decimated. Later on, when the office errand boy Henry spills coffee on Archie’s jacket he is fit to be tied. At lunch Henry tries to make amends by holding a seat for Archie and then presents Archie with a book called, “The Mind and the Matter,” which he claims allows people to use willpower to control the world around them. Naturally, Henry spills some more coffee on Archie before he departs but despite himself Archie starts reading the book. And he must be interested in the contents because we see him reading it on the subway even while he is jostled back and forth on the subway car. Later on, we see him reading the book in his apartment and when he finishes, he declares definitively that concentration is the most underrated power in the world. He is convinced that he can change his environment using only his concentration and will power. His first application appears almost immediately. Outside his apartment door the landlady is repetitively and annoyingly knocking on the door and haranguing him that his rent is due and he must pay it now. Archie wishes her out of existence and sure enough, she disappears! Opening the door and finding her indeed gone he declares today the landlady, tomorrow the world.
The next day as he is standing at the top of the subway staircase, being pushed and shoved by everyone hurrying by him, he stops and closes his eyes and concentrates. And when next we see him, he is entering an empty subway station and even though the trains are somehow still running they are empty of people.
He reaches his office building which is also empty and heads up the elevator which is also running without the usual operator. Now he sits down at his desk and fills out the insurance paperwork which is his normal occupation. But of course, there really isn’t much point in filling out insurance forms if there aren’t any people to care. After finishing off the day by flying some paper airplanes across the office he ends up talking to himself in the mirror but unfortunately, his reflection is very dissatisfied with Archie’s current situation. He berates himself for not realizing that no people is even worse than annoying people. His reflection continues this discussion with Archie back at his apartment and after admitting that the present situation is worse Archie informs his reflection that he will populate the world with the only people he can stand, people just like himself.
The next morning, he fights his way through the subway, the street, the building lobby, the elevator and his office. All around him are men and women who all look remarkably like him and are if anything even more misanthropic than himself. After a few hours of this he admits to his reflection that the original situation was better than the all Archibald Beechcroft version of the population.
When next we see Archie, he is sitting at lunchtime at a table and sure enough Henry spills coffee on him. But Archie, while not very much sunnier in his disposition seems reasonably content with the normal annoyances of his normal environment. When Henry asks him what he thought of the book he says it wasn’t believable.
You all know I like the comedies best. Well, this is no exception. It’s a goofy episode but I find it very entertaining. Berman does an excellent job. A.
“It is complete nihilism to propose laying down arms in a world where atom bombs are around. It is very simple: there is no way of achieving peace other than with weapons.”
Karl Popper
Here’s one I took today using my Zeiss 16-35 f4. The subject is a B25 at the US Naval Air Museum onboard NAS Pensacola.
Supposedly, this 16-35 is outclassed by the Sony f2.8 version. Maybe so but after a number of shoots with this lens, it’s hard to understand how the advantage could be more than barely detectable much less sufficient to account for the $1000 difference in price. My Zeiss 16-35 F4 G lens is probably my best lens in sharpness and consistency of results. And I have a couple of multi-thousand dollar Sony G Master lenses to compare it to.
I think that if given the constraint of having to use a single lens, this lens would be it. Several years ago, my ideal lens would have been “taller”, probably centered on around 50mm. But since then, one of my acquaintances has shot a stunningly good body of work using a fixed 25mm Zeiss Batis lens. My next lens will be a prime (fixed) in that range.
Using a short focal length lens in a museum environment has one big disadvantage, short focal length lenses tend to have a large depth of field, i.e., everything tends to be in focus. Good photography dictates isolating the subject but museums are so dense that oftentimes the intended subject is just one of several in the photo view.
Nice little round-up, and a snappy title. Tucker is the Man but is there really ever a reason to go on a show called “Bubba the Love Sponge Show.”?
This book has several faults. One is that the author is an enormous progressive bigot. He allows his sympathies with the progressive areas of the country to shade almost every aspect of the descriptive and critical content of the book. Another fault is that he has subsumed the work of earlier authors and glossed over any ideas that don’t fit his world view. But despite these ugly qualities the book provides a lot of very important information that can be valuable if carefully interpreted.
The thesis of the book is that the foundational cultures that colonized North America along with the remaining older cultures (Native American and Hispanic) account for the regional differences that still determine how people think, live and vote. And that I think is a remarkable fact and taken along with an understanding of the motivations and psychology of these regional groups provides us with a better understanding of why things are happening the way they are and what best to do to influence the outcome of political and social struggles.
The clearest way to start thinking of what this book can tell us is to look at a map that divides most of North America by how it was colonized. https://www.twincities.com/2013/11/16/which-of-this-writers-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/
As a list, the Nations of the title are
What you’ll see is that the original Massachusetts colony has spread into an area that encompasses New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, parts of the surrounding states like Illinois (Yankeedom). And to a slightly smaller degree Washington, Oregon and Northern California were its result (The Left Coast). And the founding of Pennsylvania produced a discernible legacy that extends from the Atlantic in a relatively narrow band through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, then spreads into a larger area that includes virtually all of Iowa, northern Missouri, and large parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and both Dakotas. And in fact, the strip then hooks around to include the majority of non-French eastern Canada. All of this is denoted as the Midlands.
And in a similar way we can also see the results of the Virginia colonies (Tidewater) and the Deep South spread. Because of the intervention of outside factors Virginia was prevented from spreading west, whereas the Carolinas went on to extend their way of life all the way down the Gulf coast to eastern Texas.
New Netherland is the Dutch founding in what is now New York City. It is hemmed in by its neighbors to the North and South but is an extremely densely populated area with enormous commercial and financial clout.
A little less familiar is the origins of the Appalachian region. This area was settled by lowland Scots, northern Britons and the Scots-Irish who fled poverty, oppression and civil strife in their homelands and spread out mostly from the Pennsylvanian, Virginian and Carolinian colonies to find freedom and autonomy in the mountains and forests of Appalachia and later go on to populate a wide band from western Virginia and the Carolinas to Northern Texas. The states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and most of Illinois, Indiana and half of Oklahoma Missouri and Arkansas are the area called on this map Greater Appalachia. More or less directly, the Appalachians, by cutting off access to the west, were responsible for the fact that the Virginia colonies never gained as much widespread power as its neighbors.
In a similar way the book goes to describe the founding and spread of the other “nations.” New France and “El Norte” (the Mexican colonies in the southwest) are the most unfamiliar to most American readers but the information is easily digested and the way that these areas developed is relatively clear.
The Far West is the mountainous and high plains areas between the mid-west and the Left Coast that were populated in the wake of the railroads. This area is defined by its relation to the federal government and its improvement programs.
First Nation describes the area in the north of Canada and Alaska and Greenland that are inhabited by the Inuit and other aboriginal peoples of the region.
In the next installment of this review I’ll discuss how the characteristics and ways of life of these different foundations set them in motion and how they collided with the outside world and each other over the course of several hundred years.
(The second part of this review is found here.)