All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
At the end of last summer I had the chance to shoot hummingbirds at a butterfly bush (Buddleia) in my yard. I decided to try using the Sony FE 200-600mm f5.6-6.3 G OSS lens. I usually use my 90mm macro at close quarters but the sound of the shutter clicking does disturb the bird so I decided that distance that the 600mm would allow me to use might avoid this problem. It did and I was able to get some naturalistic shots without the nervous little buggers skittering away.
With the Democrats preparing to install Merrick Garland as the consigliere for the Biden Crime Family it seems an appropriate time to consider exactly what kind of people make up the ranks of the managerial apparatus that runs our government. It is instructive to see how the Justice Department functioned under the Obama regime and compare it to how it attacked the Trump Administration throughout that whole presidency.
During the time Obama was president his Attorney General was able to direct the policy of agencies like the FBI to attack police departments that attempted to prosecute minority offenders such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO regardless of the guilt of the criminals involved. They were also glad to lend a hand in trying to criminalize self-defense as was the case with the Treyvon Martin case in Florida. What seems clear is that Obama’s AG, Eric Holder, had no difficulty directing the agencies working under him to harass people Obama didn’t like and put their thumb on the scale to help even criminals if they were the right color. And even when Obama’s term was almost completely finished the Justice Department was more than willing to begin an unjustified and traitorous witch hunt to hamstring the Trump Administration and delay the President’s ability to take control of the Justice Department. I will add that the spineless behavior of Jeff Sessions went a long way to aiding and abetting the treachery going on in then Swamp by recusing himself from the investigation. But it certainly didn’t look like they weren’t completely prepared to defy any and all attempts to stop them in their actions.
When the phony Russiagate investigation was finally completed Trump was able to bring in Bill Barr as his Attorney General. And from everything I can tell in retrospective Barr is a full-fledged member of the Deep State. His investigation of the Russiagate hoax never went anywhere. One very low-level flunky who was identified as having perjured himself was given a slap on the wrist and returned to the fold. The infamous Durham investigation has produced no indictments and empaneled no grand juries. And based on what Garland has said at his Senate hearing he doesn’t guarantee that any report will ever appear at all. From as much as we could gather from news reports, during the President Trump’s whole term in office the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and the State Department defied his demands for action on almost all of his policy initiatives that involved reining in the Deep State. Even when he directed classified documents to be declassified and released to the public nothing ever happened. And once the travesty of the stolen elections unfolded the Justice Department under Bill Barr did nothing.
How I read this is that these government agencies see themselves as essentially beyond the control of the President of the United States and unless they agree with his agenda, they will use any and all means at their disposal to hamper his actions and avoid control by him.
Going back to when George W Bush was president, I can remember that the Justice Department also came after some of his personnel and used a special prosecutor to harass his Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, Scooter Libby for years. Based on this I have to imagine that these agencies are closely aligned with the world view of the progressive left. As to the question of whether this alignment is ideological or pragmatic, I would guess it varies but probably sometimes it is both.
With the apparatus of the Executive Branch so firmly in the hands of people who refuse to cede power and authority to even the President of the United States it seems to me that if someone wanted to correct this situation it would require drastic measures. I could imagine an Attorney General firing all of the bureau heads and the first few levels of reports to those bureau heads and then attempting to sort through the lower echelons to find employees who would be willing to follow orders. But, if I were he, I’d bring some armed military personnel along with me to watch my back.
Of course, talking about cleaning up the Deep State may be a completely moot discussion. I am not sure there will ever be another Republican president. With the techniques used to fake the 2020 election it seems clear that the Democrats intend to falsify any election outcome that does not show them to have won. Then the only avenue that can be explored is the idea of a state forbidding the Deep State from interfering in its sovereign affairs. And that is a point of view that hasn’t been explored in over a hundred and fifty years.
North Dakota House advances bill barring government from mandating masks
Time will tell.
There is endless merit in a man’s knowing when to have done.
Thomas Carlyle
At the end of last summer I had the chance to shoot hummingbirds at a butterfly bush (Buddleia) in my yard. I decided to try using the Sony FE 200-600mm f5.6-6.3 G OSS lens. I usually use my 90mm macro at close quarters but the sound of the shutter clicking does disturb the bird so I decided that distance that the 600mm would allow me to use might avoid this problem. It did and I was able to get some naturalistic shots without the nervous little buggers skittering away.
On Sunday February 28th 2021 at 3:40 pm on the last day of CPAC, Donald Trump will make his first major public speech since the January 6th rally in Washington D.C. that the Left used as an excuse for his post-term impeachment and the militarization of Capitol Hill into something resembling the Berlin Wall.
I’ve been waiting impatiently for this speech for weeks. I guess if I had been more thoughtful, I would have acknowledged that it was necessary to let the impeachment process and the fallout from all of the dozens of Biden regime executive orders settle first before there would be space in the public eye for a major statement by Donald Trump.
So, in less than a week the only man in generations who was both willing and able to do something significant to improve the lives of normal Americans will have the chance to tell us if he has a plan for the future. I won’t lie and say I’m not anxious that he may decide to pass the torch to the next generation. After all he is already 74 years old and by 2024, he’ll be 78. That’s a lot to expect from a man.
But what I’m hoping he will say is that he wants to build a political and commercial foundation for us. He has some means and he knows other wealthy and powerful men who if they have the ambition and foresight can put together a corporation that supports many different populist and conservative needs.
My ideas for this are very overblown. I envision a corporation that provides unassailable access for conservatives to services that currently are at the whim of progressive attack. People who have done nothing more dangerous than question the progressive dictates on sexual and racial pieties have had their internet businesses shut down or shadow banned. They have been hounded out of their jobs, denied service by banks and payment processors and even arrested by local and federal law enforcement based on selective enforcement of laws that often are completely unconstitutional.
So, you can see, I’ll probably be at least somewhat let down no matter what is said. I feel that at this point it is going to take men of extraordinary vision to take back this country without an actual civil war. An enormous amount of coordination and the willingness to build corporate structures and commercial institutions at great financial risk doesn’t seem probable. But either those things must happen or one of two things will. Either a demagogue will step in and things will go in a different and much darker direction, or the normal people of this country will finally give up and the progressives will turn this into a totalitarian woke state right out of 1984. And I really don’t want either of those options.
But even if President Trump only gives us a tiny part of a plan for our future it will be the first tiny patch of good news we’ve had in months. I’m looking forward to it with great expectation. I would even like it if he reflected on the RINO’s that stabbed him in the back and also pointed to the current flock of conservative leaders and anointed a few of them as the men who will have to carry the ball after his time has passed.
And finally, this speech is the chance for the acknowledged leader of conservative America to address his people specifically. At CPAC the audience isn’t all of America. It’s specifically conservative America and Donald Trump is currently the undisputed leader of that tribe. We voted for him in prodigious numbers. Recent surveys show we would abandon the Republican Party if he started a Patriot Party of his own and we’re looking to him to show us a path forward into a future that doesn’t leave us at the mercy of the progressive left. I hope he has something good for us to hear.
As we settle into the new totalitarian regime the sense of outrage dulls and each new atrocity becomes less shocking because it’s already expected. Biden is telling the Democrat Congress he wants a bill that gives the illegals an eight-year path to citizenship. Then he wants to have D.C. and Puerto Rico declared states. Soon he’ll demand slavery reparations. And after that he’ll want to balance the books by cancelling the 401K and social security accounts of anyone who isn’t black. Well, sure. Are we expecting anything less? They’ve telegraphed this stuff for years. With full control of the Congress and White House the only check on their plans is the Supreme Court and I think we know how that will play out. Even gun grabs and hate speech legislation are on the agenda and now it sounds like they intend to use the FBI as the secret police and arrest people they don’t like by calling them insurrectionists. Good times.
During a get together with some friends we were talking about that teacher in New York City who was fired. Apparently at some kind of group session where people were supposed to talk about personal struggles she tried to talk about her grandparents and their loss of a child during the Holocaust. She was shut down because they let her know the only ones allowed to talk about problems are black and brown people. Then to top it off when they were taking a group picture, she wouldn’t give the Wakanda Salute (put her arms in front of her in the shape of an X). Apparently, this is a gesture used in the Marvel Comics movie Black Panther. I think she felt it was silly or divisive. So, they fired her. I think she had been given an award recently for figuring out a way to improve math test scores in her school.
We were discussing the fact that people are leaving New York in epidemic numbers to get their kids out of the public school system. And obviously with the story about the teacher just mentioned it isn’t hard to imagine that in a very few years they will have driven all the good teachers and most families that care about educating their kids, right out of the system. We debated whether this would have any effect on the city government. I think the opinion was it wouldn’t. At least not until the system crashed and burned beyond repair. And that is a truly amazing result. New York City is estimated to have eight million people living in it. Now, that was before the disruptions from COVID and BLM. If someone told me it had lost a million people, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. But even if there were only six million people living there, I find it shocking to imagine what will happen to the productivity and general behavior of the inhabitants if the school system becomes like what they have in Detroit or Baltimore. That level of illiteracy and dysfunction in a place as hard to keep running as New York will be truly frightening. I wouldn’t be surprised if whole industries just up and move out overnight. Wall Street, the banks, the insurance companies, the advertising companies, even the fashion industry can, and probably will, leave when the city starts becoming like Detroit. As it is the lawlessness of the BLM riots has destroyed the retail stores in uptown and midtown. It’s actually hard to imagine things improving without some serious incentives by the state and federal government.
One of the guys was saying that communities as far away as Florida were seeing school enrollments skyrocketing with New York emigres looking to find schools where their kids would get a decent education. I imagine a similar thing will be going on in other cities similarly affected. Certainly, Minneapolis is experiencing a crime epidemic and I’m sure the parents there are looking for a way to escape. Chicago also sounds like it is melting down. So, the good times are just flowing in Dementia Joe’s America. It’s at least a small comfort that the states that voted overwhelmingly for Biden are taking it on the chin big time. And with the political fall out that the governors of New York and California are suffering lately it is a little less painful to see what the communists are doing to the Former United States.
But here in Free America we don’t give the Wakanda Salute. We don’t watch sports games where people disrespect the National Anthem of Free America. We don’t tell our children that they should be ashamed because their skin happens to be fair. We don’t let teachers fool them about who they are and what is right and wrong. And our pronouns don’t need to be asked. They’re self-evident.
Then the get together devolved into an argument about deciding who were the hottest women on television back in the day. The final match up was between Wrangler Jane on F Troop and Barbara Eden on I Dream of Jeannie. Well, that should be obvious.
Religion in most countries, more or less in every country, is no longer what it was, and should be,—a thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of Man to his invisible Father, the fountain of all Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and revealed in every revelation of these; but for the most part, a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation; a matter, as all others now are, of Expediency and Utility; whereby some smaller quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a far larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. Thus Religion too is Profit, a working for wages; not Reverence, but vulgar Hope or Fear.
Thomas Carlyle
At the end of last summer I had the chance to shoot hummingbirds at a butterfly bush (Buddleia) in my yard. I decided to try using the Sony FE 200-600mm f5.6-6.3 G OSS lens. I usually use my 90mm macro at close quarters but the sound of the shutter clicking does disturb the bird so I decided that distance that the 600mm would allow me to use might avoid this problem. It did and I was able to get some naturalistic shots without the nervous little buggers skittering away.
In the last four days of the “Photo of the Day” I used the original photo and the three progressively more extreme crops of the photo to highlight the question of when is something close enough Below I provide those four photos again and discuss what makes the correct magnification for a photo.
(As an aid for those using small screens you should be able to click on each photo and have it “fit” to your screen in a lightbox display. Then you can close that lightbox and move onto the next photo to repeat that process to get a full view of each photo on your screen.)
The first picture is the whole frame that I shot in the yard. The flower is floating in a background that inclues other flowers some more and some less in focus with the blurred view of the foliage and the ground as the distant background. This gives an effect somewhat akin to an impressionistic painting. The detail of the flower is only slightly visible.
In the first crop of the original I’ve isolated the flower with only some out of focus bright and shadow outlines to be seen behind it. Now it is clear that the flower has a lot of fine structure that includes what look like fuzz and small filaments of some type.
In the second crop of the original the flower fills the screen. Now the flower is seen to be more akin to some kind of burr with separate pistils and covered in spiky filaments and the filaments covered with finer filaments or hairs.
In the third and final crop we get an extreme magnification of the detail of the components of the flower. The surface of the pistils and the structure of the filaments is clear. The quality of the photo is decidedly poor due to pixilation of the image at such extreme magnification.
Okay, so which is the “correct” magnification? And of course there is no correct answer although we may be able to agree that he final crop is is the wrong answer. Cropping to an extreme magnification reveals the limits of the picture file. The number of pixels being used is very small and so a crude image results. This type of photo would only be appropriate for informational purposes such as a scientific paper discussing the structure of the plant.
So what about the first three photos?
Well, the first photo, the full frame originally taken, might appeal to some people because of the composition. The arrangement of the flowers and the background blur might be seen as soothing. So this photo is a viable choice.
The second photo is a little odd. The flower as I said above begins to show its spiky and complex structure while the background still exhibits the creamy softness of the blurred foliage. I sort of like it. There is some tension to the image. I find it interesting.
The third photo is a macro shot. I like macro. I like seeing the complexity of small living things. All the structure and detail interests me. I think this shot is the best magnification for my tatste.
The fourth shot as a mentioned above is technically poor. Maybe it could be used in a cheap monster movie. Now with a higher magnification lens like a 2X or a 3X macro and with the correct lighting and stage a really quality higher magnification image could be made of this plant’s fine structure. But I was in the yard and even the slightest wind would make that photo impossible.
So as you see there is no right answer, only preference or application. What you like or what you need. But just to show I appreciate everyone going through the exercise I’ll provide a survey below. You pick the magnification you think is best.
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.