Month: June 2022

Woke Advocacy Groups Paralyzed by — Wokism! Hilarity Ensues

photog Current Events ,

I read most of this article.  It was long and boring and loaded with leftist jargon related to the constant in-fighting and bickering that causes organizations like Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, BLM and many others to spend all their time fighting their management over perceived racial and gender slights instead of doing their work.

That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

This is familiar to anyone who has worked at one of these woke corporations that spends all its time henpecking its employees about diversity, equity and inclusion.  All of the day is spent in meetings with aggrieved groups that want to litigate their grievances with the company instead of doing their work.

But think about how much worse it must be in companies where their stock in trade is leftist outrage like Planned Parenthood.  And what a delicious paradox.  They can’t take advantage of the Biden Administration to inflict even more wokism because they are busy torturing their management about their own grievances.

Here’s a quote from a director of one of these lefty organizations.

“To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are.”  And then, sometime in the summer, the forward momentum stalled, and many of the progressive gains lapsed or were reversed. Instead of fueling a groundswell of public support to reinvigorate the party’s ambitious agenda, most of the foundation-backed organizations that make up the backbone of the party’s ideological infrastructure were still spending their time locked in virtual retreats, Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.  “So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullshit that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver.”  “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops,” the former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies’ time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.”

Ah, the delicious schadenfreude.  Thinking about the executives at these woke companies being harangued and accused of not being woke enough by their protected minorities is hilarious.  That is the Achilles Heel of these companies.  They are filled up with nuts.  And now that they’ve been inspired by the George Floyd revolution they can’t be controlled by their employers.  Hopefully they’ll burn their companies down and then end up unemployed, starving and miserable.

Looking Back to the Future

photog Current Events ,

As the present melts down in the midst of the worst economic debacle in modern American history, I am thinking back to what it felt like during the nightmare that was Jimmy Carter’s “malaise.”  At the time I was a recent college graduate working at a large old-fashioned corporation that was known for its tight-fisted employee pay policy.  But in 1980 this company gave all of its employees an unheard-of thing, a bonus!  And it was an eight percent bonus of all things.  Along with the check was a letter that explained that this one-time largesse was provided because the company was aware that inflation would hammer all of us with much more than that percentage of our salaries.

Being young and naively optimistic I wasn’t worried about the economy.  But at the same time as the economic crisis, the Iran Hostage Crisis was occurring.  And at about the same time as that bonus we heard about the failed rescue attempt that Carter’s military team botched.  Helicopters collided in the desert outside of Tehran and dead American soldiers were left there to be pawed at by the Ayatollah’s henchmen when they reached the site of the crash.  That was the lowest day I had experienced as an American in my short life.  And I remembered thinking, “This can’t go on.  Someone has to fix this.”  And later that year that man appeared, Ronald Reagan and over the course of his presidency it appeared that he fixed a lot of what seemed to be wrong with America under Jimmy Carter.

So here we are more than forty years later and damned if we aren’t in much the same situation we were in back then.  But now it’s so much worse.  The changes we have to make are not incremental.  They’re gargantuan.  Our opponents aren’t misguided but loyal Americans.  They’re traitors and criminals.  And we’re no longer a unified dynamic powerhouse of innovation.  Our industrial base is in ruins.  Our people are at each other’s throats.  And just to top it all off, millions of illegal immigrants are pouring over our borders every year.  It sounds like a lost cause.

But by the same token, it’s only because things are so dire, so dark.  It’s only because people are so desperate that there is the chance to make a radical change.  If a visionary thinker emerges who has thought of a path out of this nightmare we’re trapped in, I believe people will roll the dice and try to save themselves by trying something radical.

What it requires is someone who can communicate simply and convincingly how we get ourselves out of this trap.  Reagan was called the “Great Communicator” because he could help common people visualize the economic and monetary problems we faced with simple images.  This is what the next man who comes along to fix this broken country will have to do.  He will have to communicate to this country what needs to be done and how and why.

So far, I don’t think anyone has come forward with a clear explanation of how we fix things.  We have so many problems that instead of a simple solution it seems like mission impossible.  We have to balance the budget, end illegal immigration, safeguard the elections, defang the Deep State and return the industrial base back to the United States.

But as I said, because things are so bad, I believe this is precisely the time that people will be willing to allow drastic measures to be used in drastic circumstances.  But where is Superman?  Who will step forward and be the hero?  Honestly, I’m not sure there is a hero.  We’re looking for an Augustus.  Someone very smart and very brave and very tough.

But things are so bad that I’ll have to add one other quality that our hero will need.  He’ll need to be very lucky.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

photog Current Events ,

To no one’s surprise Schumer was able to find ten Republicans willing to sign onto gun control.  John Cornyn of Texas, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr of North Carolina, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Rob Portman of Ohio, Mitt Romney of Utah and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania have worked with the Democrats to draft a bill that would allow the Feds to go after gun owners using red flag laws.  But just look at those names.  Every one a loser.  It should be interesting to see if McConnell lets it happen.

Macro Autofocusing with the Sony A7 IV.  Some Tests and Thoughts

photog Camera Reviews, Photography , , , ,

Lately I’ve been changing the way I take macro shots of active insects like bumble bees.  Previously I have used magnification and single AF.  This works well for slow insects.  But not as well for fast moving butterflies and bees.  So talking to someone who does a lot macro he recommended continuous autofocus.  So I tried it.  One problem is that magnified view doesn’t work during continuous AF.  But what I did find was that the keeper rate did improve greatly for fast movers like bumble bees.

And that got me thinking.  A-mount lenses also don’t have magnified view in AF modes.  So it occurred to me that these lenses would also become more accurate in continuous AF macro shots.  So I tried out the Minolta 200mm f\4 macro lens and it worked quite well on larger insects like bumble bees and dragon flies.  Then I tried it on really tiny flies and this was haphazard.  For these I found throwing it into manual focus and using magnified view was the only way to get really tiny critters in perfect focus.

 

And that is limiting with live creatures in the outside environment where every puff of breeze ruins the focus.  So this leads me to think that the 200 macro will be limited to larger insects.  The Sony e-mount 90mm macro will be much better for the really tiny things.  And for slower insects I’ll use magnified view and single AF.  For faster bugs I’ll go with continuous AF and spray and pray I get the perfect shot.