Month: April 2022

Reclaiming the Family – Part 9 – Starting a Dialog Between Men and Women

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I poke an enormous amount of fun at Camera Girl.  I accuse her of all kinds of sins against logic.  But she is an excellent wife, mother and grandmother.  Echoing Proverbs 31:10, “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.”  Now, I would have gone with star sapphires but that’s a personal choice.  A good wife and mother is the foundation of proper human existence.

But that foundation is crumbling.  Modern life has sought to trivialize the important of a woman raising a family.  Instead, feminism has substituted the working woman as the paradigm that young women should strive to emulate.  If motherhood is discussed it’s always in the vein of how it can be minimized.  It should be pushed off into middle age and its impact mitigated through daycare from birth and television and social media as babysitters.  The result is plummeting birth rates and latchkey children who grow up addicted to their phones.  And worse, now the substitute mothers in our children’s classrooms are brainwashing, mutilating and sterilizing our children to put an end to human life altogether.  It’s hard to imagine anything worse than where we are.

So, how do we get out of this trap?  I can only think that it will require an overt organizing of men and women to build a new foundation for relations between the sexes.  Nothing short of this will solve the problem.  In fact, if something like this doesn’t emerge, I’ll take that as a sign that our civilization is doomed.  We’ll have to wait for someone outside of Western Civilization to take the lead in preserving the human race.

I can’t claim that I’ve worked out all the details of what such an organization would be like.  I’m not even sure how it would begin its work.  I notice that of late there have been a few more women right-wing commentators advocating for traditional female roles.  The name that comes to mind at the moment is Peachy Keenan over at the American Mind, the on-line site of the Claremont Institute.  Maybe it would be possible for a panel of female pundits to engage the female audience on the Right.  And just as important it’s necessary to engage the other side of the equation.  A cross section of men on the Right need to get involved in the discussion.

Initially I don’t envision any quick solutions to these problems.  Society is pushing everything in the wrong direction as hard as it can.  Just getting young men and women in the same room talking about what is wrong with the current set-up would be a distinct improvement.  In fact, I think the opportunity for the young on the Right to mingle socially is part of the solution.  We need to re-socialize people.  They need to get off their phones and meet each other face to face.

As I said, unless this gets addressed in an organized fashion, we’re through.  For that reason, this needs to be pushed at the highest level.  The Republican Party should be addressing this at the national level.  It should be a plank of their platform.  The churches, any of them that aren’t already just arms of the trans-alliance for mutilating children, should be the focuses for this at the local level.  Every parish of the Catholic Church should have a committee of mothers who spend their time thinking of ways to encourage their sons and daughters to have children and raise them themselves.

I’ll say this a third time.  If we don’t get ourselves out of this feminist destruction of the family our civilization will be done.  And it should be.  A society that destroys the family has eliminated the main source of human happiness on this planet deserves to disappear.

Geometry and the War Between the Sexes

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On Mondays Camera Girl is in charge of Princess Sack of Potatoes.  Which makes me her errand boy for anything that needs doing.  So today she wanted me to get the memory card from the game camera so she could show her protégé what kind of animals had eaten the food she stole from me.  Now, sure, the scraps she gives the wild beasts living in the forest are probably not premium protein anymore.  Bits of chicken fat and skin and whatever doesn’t end up on the menu for me probably shouldn’t arouse my sense of outrage.  But in these days of skyrocketing food prices, I’m acutely aware of threats to my survival.

But I digress.  I brought the memory card in and popped it in the card reader slot on my laptop and reviewed the numerous files.  But what we discovered was that Camera Girl had miscalculated the line of sight of the camera.  She threw her largesse too close to the camera’s location and thus the viewpoint was mostly above the location of the food.  Therefore, mostly what we saw were the animals before and after they were feeding and typically at the edge of the photo and moving away from the camera.

I respectfully brought this situation to Camera Girl’s attention.  But she said she did what I told her to do.  I carefully and calmly reminded her that I showed her the line where the camera would see the action but assumed she wouldn’t put the food right below the camera because it was elevated from the ground.  She told me what she thought about my assumption using a popular breakdown of the spelling of ass-u-me.

I thought this distinctly unfair.  But what I decided was to provide her with a clear target.  I said, “Do you see the pole banged into the ground?”  She said yes.  I continued, “Do you see the rainwater drain that ends near the pole?”  Again, she said yes.  I finished, “The line segment formed by the pole on one end and the end of the drain pipe as the other endpoint is the acceptable area to put the food.  Do you follow me?”  She said no.  I slowly and calmly said, “Huh?”  She said, “That’s not clear.  How will I know if it’s on that line?”

I remained calm.  I could see I was dealing with a non-Euclidean geometer and she was trying to involve me in a topological debate.  Therefore, I changed tack.  “Imagine the two points I said were the endpoints.  Instead think of them as two opposite points on the circumference of a circle.  In your mind envision a circle with those two points on the circumference.  Anyplace inside that circle will be an acceptable target for your animal slop.”  She shook her head and walked away.

So why did I write about this?  Well, I think it represents a microcosm of the male/female dichotomy.  Men use logical simplifications to model the world.  We like reasoning our way through problems.  Women want simple concrete rules to follow.  They don’t want to discuss theory.  At least that is the way women used to be.  Nowadays I’m not sure what they are.  Maybe they’ve become like men.

But even if they’ve adopted some of the practices of men I doubt if they’ve changed their nature.  There is a difference in the way the brains of men and women work.  We go about things in different ways.  And from my point of view, I think there is an advantage to this dichotomy.  These two ways of looking at things provide checks on each other.  Too much theory can lead to error based on differences between the map and the territory.  But at the same time without the imaginative leap and the simplification that modelling can provide many problems would never be solved.

I started to expound on this dichotomy to Camera Girl.  She told me the garbage pails needed to go out on the road today and walked away.  And so it goes.

Guest Contributor – TomD – Photo – Converting From A-Mount to E-Mount on the 70-300MM Zoom

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

Speaking of lenses, we were talking about lenses, weren’t we? Ahh, I thought so—-

Anyway, back in the days of my Sony A mount cameras, one of my most productive lenses in terms of the real “keeper” shots that it produced was a Sony G series 70-300. It was pretty slow with a maximum variable aperture of f3.5-5.6, but that didn’t matter much because I used it almost exclusively outdoors with lots of light.

What did matter is that it was extremely sharp and had a great bokeh (that soft blur in the out of focus areas of the picture). Any time I would be looking through my pictures of that time frame and saw one that I thought was particularly good, the EXIF date would show that was the 70-300 lens on a percentage of the GOOD shots that far exceeded the percentage of the time I used it.

I got into the E mount Sony era in 2017 with a A7RII and added a A7III to it about year and a half later. While I was building a E mount lens collection, I bought a Sony LA-EA 4 lens adaptor to mount A type lenses to E type bodies so that I could use my old lenses.

The adaptor worked to a certain extent to tie the 70-300 to those bodied but the auto focus was sluggish and not as accurate. The lens fell out of use and was used a time or two a year and yielding acceptable but not stellar results.

I recently sold both the older Sony cameras and bought the latest Sony A7IV. When I tried my LE-AH 4 adaptor on the A7IV with the 70-300, I got nothing. Sony is apparently abandoning the older A series and a little research told me that the 70-300 lens does not and will never work with the A7IV or later bodies. Well.

That left my existing E mount lens collection biased to the short side, the longest lens being 105 mm and I really needed a replacement to that lens. A direct replacement, a new version with the exact same optics as my old lens but in e mount costs around $1300 these days. I’m retired now and don’t spend $1300 without at least some research so I spent a couple of hours on google (whom I hate but use anyway).

That search yielded a large number of reviews stating that the new Tamron 70-300 E mount is at least equal of the Sony version with one caveat. That being there in no in lens image stabilization. But that’s okay because my A7IV has 5 axis in body stabilization, so in lens would be redundant. But here’s the kicker: the Tamron cost $499 vs $1300 for the Sony.

The Tamron arrived a couple of days ago. I really haven’t have a chance to wring it out other than 40 or 50 snaps at stuff around the house, but it shows promise.

Couple of examples below including a shot of the camera and lens. These shots are just out of the camera, not modified and not examples of picture that I would keep. But they do show the image quality of which the lens is capable in terms of sharpness, color and bokeh.

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#3 a Bottlebrush Bush, seen these only in Florida. Just a microsecond after this shot, a Hummingbird flew into my field of vision, but only for only a half second. You snooze, ya loose.

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The purpose of these shots is to demonstrate the lens’s potential, not artistic quality. I think it’s hard to imagine the IQ (image qualiity) being much better. It certainly exceeds expectations of a “cheap” lens.

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Orban wins 4th Term in Crushing Victory

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Leftists on both sides of the Atlantic have something else to be angry about tonight.

“Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban scored a crushing election victory to clinch a fourth consecutive term, overcoming criticism about democratic backsliding, his lukewarm support for war-ravaged Ukraine and close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Orban’s Fidesz party was on track to maintain its two-thirds parliament majority in a general election on Sunday, with more than four-fifths of the votes counted. That defied polls that had predicted a close race after opposition parties united to try to oust him as the European Union’s longest-serving leader.”

As usual the polls that said it was close were a lie.  Orban has struck a cord with nationalists and traditionalists around the world.  He’s been interviewed by Tucker Carlson and intelligently and fearlessly defends his “Hungary First” platform.

He has championed legislation that removes tax burdens from families that are willing to have three or more children and have the mother stay at home to rear them.  He also had legislation passed that bans the discussion of homosexuality with minors.  Naturally the EU despises him and constantly attack him and Hungary for refusing to kow-tow to the LGBTQ mafia.

This guy is good.  We need more leaders like him around the world.

 

 

Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ron DeSantis and the Sun Peeking Through the Clouds

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Today is a cold, cloudy day with forecast for rain and maybe a little snow.  So, we went for our walk a little earlier to avoid the rain.  And as we were walking the clouds rolled back and the sun came shining through.  A beautiful walk with the streams cascading over the rocks with the extra runoff from the lake from the recent heavy rains we had.  A beautiful walk with the birds singing and chattering and the crows talking about whatever crows talk about with each other.

When we got back to the car, the clouds rolled back over the sun and a few drops fell.  But the clouds and rain were too late.  The walk had done its magic.  The mood was set and the day began the right way with optimism and energy triumphing over bad news and laziness.

And then I get home and I see that article about Lynyrd Skynyrd writing that song and I listen to the song and I think, that’s not a bad campaign song.  And DeSantis doesn’t have to hear any left-wing hippy musician telling him he can’t us his song because blah-blah fascism, blah-blah-blah.  And I thought, “Here’s optimism and energy triumphing over bad news and laziness.  Here are people doing something instead of just laying down and complaining and getting nothing done.

Of course, this is just the tiniest ray of light in a world of darkness.  Everywhere you look you see the wreckage of all that was good.  I won’t repeat the litany but let’s save time and say almost everything.  And the prospects of three more years of this misery with that imbecile in the White House.

But that’s what makes that light even more important.  Holding on for three more years of this is going to strain the morale of normal Americans to the breaking point.  We need victories, no matter how small.  Ron DeSantis succeeding against the COVID lockdowns, that was a victory.  The legislation against kindergarten grooming, that was a victory.  And even this silly song by some old Southern Rockers, even that is a tiny dose of hope.

By my reckoning we’ll need about another thousand hopeful things to get us through the next three years.  That’s about one a day.  I guess if we had to, we could get away with a hundred.  That’s a shot of hope every week and half.  I doubt that DeSantis can manage that all by himself.  Some other folks will have to step up and deliver.  Unfortunately, I think that means all of us will have to do something to make things better.

And maybe that thing that we all will have to do is suck it up and move forward with our lives and make things happen the way we want them to.  Take the time to educate your children about the propaganda they are being fed.  Make sure they won’t be confused by the messages they are being given.  Support the right people in your community and boycott anything that stands against what you believe in whenever possible.

Do the little things that are important and maybe someday we’ll see all this madness swept away.  And to torture this metaphor to the end, just like the clouds can be swept away and the sun shines through.