All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.
Thomas Carlyle
Several places where I read on-line had praised Vance’s book so I decided to read it. I already knew basically what it was about but I guess I wanted to see what all the excitement was about.
J. D. Vance’s family came originally from Appalachia, specifically Jackson Kentucky. His maternal grandfather and grandmother moved to Middletown Ohio after WW II to let him get work in the steel factory there and his family became part of the boom economy in the industrial Mid-West that followed the war. But as that economic expansion slowly collapsed into the Rust Belt reality of the 1970s and beyond, his family more and more shared in the dislocation and finally the hopelessness of life in that blighted region.
Through the personal history of his family he presents evidence and draws conclusions about what internal and external factors led to the train wreck that is the Rust Belt. And he tries to back up this evidence by including general information on the socio-economic and cultural characteristics of the white working class and specifically Appalachian people in question.
The personal story of his family and the details of their lives is poignant and honest and draws sympathy from anyone who came from a family that is full of complicated people who struggle and succeed and fail and generally make a messy story to tell. It’s about the love and hate and anger and fear and confusion that consumed the first decade and a half of his life. It’s got colorful characters like his grandparents who swear and spit and brandish guns and break down doors if strangers seem to threaten their family. It’s his mother who tried to find a middle-class identity for her small family but was too damaged to even save herself from drugs and broken marriages.
In the final analysis I think that the point the book tries to make is that the people who left Appalachia were so ill-suited to live in the modern world of nuclear families and suburban society that only the post-war boom allowed even the illusion that they had assimilated into the Mid-Western lifestyle. Their people were shorn of the support that multi-generational family units provided to them back in the hills and were surrounded by people who had been raised in and could take of advantage of the community resources that exist in middle America. Vance’s family was always suspicious and angry at the school system and the police and the other government entities that could provide assistance to people in need. Their independence when stripped of the extended family support structure meant isolation and poverty and an endless string of failures that reinforced the sense of hopelessness that eventually led to drug addiction and despair.
I think it’s a pretty interesting story. And I recognize the components that he brings up as existing in the real world. But he does let the powers that be off the hook to a degree that I think is unrealistic. The post-war boom was a result of government policy that encouraged the harnessing of the human capital that had been freed up by the end of World War II. Tens of millions of enlisted men were brought back to this country and it had been so thoroughly transformed that only massive top-down control allowed for the re-integration. Thirty years later there was no similar top-down planning to continue that existence once the earlier generation disappeared from the work place. The corporations were allowed to shift into a globalist mindset and because those Rust Belt workers were inconvenient because they made too much money or weren’t desperate enough to work like Japanese or Chinese workers they were dismissed from the plans of industry.
Vance may slightly touch on this but his thesis is that personal responsibility and family support systems are what saved him. When his mother’s chaotic lifestyle came close to destroying his chance at building a healthy life his grandmother stepped up and provided a stable and supportive home in which he was able to re-apply himself at school and finally prove to himself that it was possible for him escape from the cycle of failure and break through to the normal world.
Okay. His emphasis makes sense based on his experience and world view. I think there is another side to the present crisis and he somewhat touches on this too. Some say he is blaming the victims. I think that overstates it. I think it’s an interesting book. I know it made me reconsider some things in my past. And the anecdotes about his grandparents and that generation of his family are fun to read. His family is somewhat in volved in the Hatfield and McCoy feud interestingly enough. I’m not sure that this book is for everyone but if you are interested in the dynamic that has laid waste to the Rust Belt it might be something for you to read.
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.
Thomas Carlyle
Looking back on my older photography posts I discover that in April I will have had my Sony A7 III camera for three years. I think this is a good time to review what I think about the recent progress that Sony has made and where the A7 III and my photographic needs stand.
First off, the A7 III is a wonderful camera. It produces images that I never could have imagined possible ten years ago when I started using the Sony mirrorless cameras. When I moved from my Sony A-850 DSLR to the NEX mirrorless cameras it was incredibly disappointing. The autofocus didn’t deserve the name. It was manual focus or nothing. The battery life was laughable and the viewfinder was pretty sad. I could get some good results from it, even results indoors that I might not be able to get with my DSLR but frustration was a constant part of the Sony photographic experience. If I knew then how long it would take Sony to reach the A7 III level of capability I probably would have bitten the bullet and moved on to Canon or Nikon. But I didn’t and now finally I am truly pleased with the system. Sure, there are still some quibbles, I wish the LAEA5 adapter would allow me to autofocus my mechanical autofocus A-mount lenses with the A7 III but that is just that, a quibble. If I wanted, I could buy an A7R IV or an A9 and get that functionality but that would be kind of crazy from my point of view. So here I am with a very good digital camera and a chance to compare it to the newer Sony models. After all, the A7 III is a generation before the IV series and a notch down from the professional A9’s and two notches down from the flagship A1. So here are my thoughts.
Back when the Sony A9 first came out I was curious to see what the advantages of such a camera would be. I rented it and gave it a tryout. What I found was that it was a sports camera and the A7 III was not. I know that was what it was touted as but it wasn’t apparent until I had it in hand just how inadequate the A7 III was for things like tracking autofocus or just how inadequate the file buffer was. The A9 was light years ahead of my camera. And even the autofocus I typically used for macro shots of insects and birds was more precise and faster and had additional capability that my camera lacked. For instance, the A7 III can stay in magnified view when focusing repeatedly on a subject that I’m getting ready to capture. But once the shot is taken it returns to unmagnified view. The A9 can stay in magnified view indefinitely for shot after shot. That is a great advantage.
So, the A9 has capability that I do wish I had. But image-wise I think the A7 III files are at least as good as the A9 files. There has been an A9 II update a few years back. I haven’t tried it out. From what I’ve read the improvements are part of the autofocus upgrades and allow for even better sports and wildlife action shooting. I’m sure it’s very capable but once again the sensor hasn’t progressed in terms of high ISO capability. In fact, based on the DXOMARK testing the A7 III still has the highest ISO rating of any full frame camera on the market.
Recently Sony came out with a $6,500 flagship camera, the A-1. From what I understand it is an even more miraculous sports camera than the A9 series. It has a ridiculously large writing buffer and can take thirty shots per second or something obscene like that. But its sensor is not rated to a higher ISO rating. It does have a 50-megapixel sensor. But that also means you get 50+ megabyte file sizes which is starting to get cumbersome. Maybe someday I’ll try it out just for laughs but that price tag is outrageous.
So here I am. Other than my camera not being able to autofocus my two favorite a-mount lenses, the Sony 135mm f1.8 lens and the Minolta 200mm f4 Macro, I really don’t need any of the new cameras. Even the new Sony A7S III really doesn’t interest me. I’m not a videographer and its high ISO numbers surprisingly still don’t match the A7 III. This was a bit of a shocker for me. The A7S series is supposed to have the best low light sensitivity of all the A7 line. But apparently the video improvements are what drove the new model and high ISO was left as is.
If I were a sports and wildlife photographer then the A1 or at least the A9 II would be the cameras I wanted. If I was a purely landscape guy then the A1 or the A7R IV would provide me with the resolution I crave. If I was a videographer and I didn’t want a full-blown video camera I’d be looking at the A7S III. But I’m just a general-purpose photographer that does some landscape and some macro and a little bit of wildlife and no video. So, all of those other cameras are overkill and sometimes inferior for my needs.
For yourself this review might help point you in the direction of which Sony full frame ILC is right for you.
We are no longer instinctively driven to apprehend, and lay to heart, what is Good and Lovely, but rather to inquire, as onlookers, how it is produced, whence it comes, whither it goes. Our favourite Philosophers have no love and no hatred; they stand among us not to do, nor to create anything, but as a sort of Logic mills, to grind out the true causes and effects of all that is done and created.
Thomas Carlyle
To: Former President Donald J. Trump, Senator Josh Hawley, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Rand Paul, Senator Tom Cotton, Governor Ron DeSantis, Governor Kristi Noem, Mr. Mike Pompeo, Mr. Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Tucker Carlson
I am writing this open letter to you powerful and hopefully conservative leaders in the hope that somehow it will find its way to you in the real world. I am not sure that all of you really are on our side and I’m also sure that I’ve left out many conservative leaders that are out there. But if this message gets through to any of you and you actually find my message important then you have more chance of spreading this information to the rest of the conservative leaders than I do.
And my message is that unless you all organize some kind of effective message to the conservative people of this country very soon it will be too late. And that’s not hyperbole. The Left is torturing us in every facet of our existence.
They torture us at work with their various trainings. We get sensitivity training for racial identity, sexual identity, gender identity. We get lectured on equity which is just another name for anti-white discrimination. Now we even get safety training to rat out our friends who say the “wrong” things.
They torture us if we try to watch entertainment. We have to have overpaid steroid users kneeling during the national anthem while the airheaded “sports analysts” tell us how brave they are to do it. Every movie and every tv show and even every commercial trumpets the BLM mantra that America is an abomination saturated with systemic racism. The stupidest people in the world, actors and actresses, line up to preach to us about how evil we are. They’ve even invented a name for it, white privilege.
They torture our children in every school from nursery school all the way through graduate school. And if they don’t toe the line, they won’t get to use their hyper-expensive degrees. They turn them against their parents and ancestors and make them hate the very civilization that created the world that provides all the advantages that everybody takes for granted.
They torture us on-line where they harass and de-platform normal people who want to communicate with the rest of the world. They will not only de-platform you but they will pressure banks and payment processors to boycott your business. They’ll even contact your employer and get you fired from your job. And Silicon Valley acts as a giant echo chamber that gaslights us and even worse, silences us in their search engines and advertising algorithms.
They torture us by making and selectively enforcing laws against us. They’ll celebrate the rioting and murder committed by BLM and Antifa but they’ll prosecute to absurd levels anything that is done by the Right. Now they are ramping up their surveillance and prosecution campaign using the bogeyman of “white supremacist terror.” They punish free speech and they are attempting to invalidate the second amendment by criminalizing guns.
They torture us by encouraging illegal immigration and by exporting all our jobs. And now Silicon Valley has finished the job by killing the retail businesses with Amazon. I won’t even bother to discuss COVID and the horrors they’ve inflicted on us for that.
They’ve made our lives hell but other than President Trump’s term in office you’ve all done nothing. In the last four years there was a glimmer of hope. That’s been extinguished. And most real conservatives living in blue states are close to giving up permanently. I have many friends who were outspoken champions of the Right but after the 2020 election and its aftermath have told me they don’t think there is anyone on the Right that has any fight in them at all. If you tell them that we must form a resistance they say, “Leave me alone, don’t waste my time, let me go and enjoy my life as well as I can.” So, if you hope to do something about taking back this country from the Left you all better sit down together in one room and put together an action plan that includes more than talk.
You want to be the leaders of the Right, so lead! You had better put together a party or corporation to rally the conservatives. It can’t be the Republican party because they are useless. Their “big tent” includes squishes like McConnell and Cheney and countless others who wouldn’t know a conservative principle if it walked up to them and punched them in the nose. And I’m not asking all the Republicans to leave the party. It’s irrelevant. We need an organization that’s just for social conservatives, people who believe in the Bill of Rights, who believe in God and country. A good test is anyone who thinks that the BLM riots were justified doesn’t belong in this group.
Put together an organization and come up with some goals. Speak to us tell us what you plan to do. Give us hope. Give us something to buy into and support that isn’t just us funding your stupid re-election funds! Build something that we can benefit from. Find some billionaires on our side and have them build some platforms for us. Have our own Facebook, our own PayPal and while you’re at it have them open our own bank. You could get 75,000,000 customers and who knows one day you might have your own Google, YouTube and Amazon also. Buy a bunch of expensive lawyers and start suing our enemies in every court in the land. Sue Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal and all the banks and other corporations that have been de-platforming and firing people for absolutely no legal reason at all.
And I’m no business genius. I am aware that it takes business savvy and experience to do this. But if there is no one on our side smart enough to figure out how to monetize 75,000,000 angry consumers then we deserve to lose. Give these people a way to channel their anger and they will be glad to pay a little bit to have an organization of their own.
But you had better do it soon. People can’t hold out forever. They need hope and they want something to believe in. Come up with a plan and put it in front of the Right and they will follow you. Dawdle around and there won’t be anything left. If you are leaders then lead. If you’re not then just put out a statement that there is no hope and you’re outmatched. Then we can decide how to make the best of our lives somewhere else.
