Month: October 2022

Kudos to Sundance for Featuring Neil Oliver Again

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Sundance over at The Conservative Treehouse has been recovering from the hurricane in Florida that blew through his town.  It’s nice to see that he has resumed what appears to be full activity.

And it’s good to see that Neil Oliver has responded to the recent meltdown at 11 Downing St in London with passionate enthusiastic scorn for our elites and their endless plans to permanently subjugate us.  Boy, I wish I could talk like him.  He’s quite eloquent.  And often inspiring.  Not often you hear a conservative quoting Mike Tyson.  But it’s apt.

Neil Oliver, Every Elite Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Face by The People

 

22OCT2022 – OCF Update – Sony Photography

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Politics has been so all consuming lately that I haven’t had a chance to write about anything else.  But in the last month or so there’s been a lot of buzz about Sony’s imminent release of their latest update of the high resolution camera, the A7R V.  When I’m interested in breathless reporting I go to sonyalpharumors.com and listen as Andrea tells us confusing and sometimes inconsistent things about the future.

The Sony A7R cameras are very nice pieces of kit and using them for macro is a very attractive proposition with their 61 megapixel sensors and other high resolution accoutrements.  But 61 megapixels is a little bit more than I think I need.  Plus the price tag is now coming in above $4,000.  And for a man of my limited means that’s beginning to seem high.  Plus I do a sort of mixed landscape, macro, walk-around photography that seems to play to the Sony A7 IV all-around camera sweet spot.  So let’s just say that my interest in the Sony A7 V hullabaloo is more on the academic side.

But what did intrigue me was the talk about AI based autofocus.  And here’s why.  I’ve been hearing and reading from various sides that phone cameras are catching up with dedicated professional cameras.  And the reason given for this is that phone cameras have highly intelligent algorithms that provide very precise autofocus and excellent sharpening and color representation.  And that as we reach the limits of what lenses and mechanical devices can do for optical focusing and image stabilization it will be this advanced artificial intelligence that will render phones as the future of photography.

Now, currently I don’t think things are really all that simple.  In fact I’ve spoken to some photographers who have very good phone cameras and they say that although they get very nice shots from their phones, they wouldn’t put one of these files up against a full frame landscape shot as a source for a large print or even as a basis for a cropped photo.  Apparently there is a bit of surface magic going on that doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny.

But that being said, I am positive that adding a strong algorithm to a very good camera like any of the various Sony A7, A9 or A1 cameras would be a very useful and fruitful step.  For things like birds in flight and sports tracking it would be a step in the right direction.  Just like the eye-AF function was a game changer for good focus, having a program with many times the speed of human reflexes concentrating on evaluating the auto focus and recognizing the changes to the image and anticipating the expected changes to the focus result would improve results greatly.  Even for something like fast moving insect macro photography, having the latest algorithm to optimize the changes in focus point would provide a much higher rate of success in something that has a very short time window.  I could imagine that specialized algorithms might be available for individual subjects like birds in flight or hovering hummingbirds or even butterflies on flowers.

As you can see I’ve let my imagination run away with me but I’m sure there are sports photographers salivating over the idea of an algorithm specifically formulated for football wide receivers running for catches down the side line.  Or how about one specially formulated for NBA stars pretending to be fouled to obtain a penalty shot?

Anyway, I’m intrigued by just what AI may have in store for us in the future.  One thing I hope is that a lot of it might be available as a firmware update to our already very capable cameras.  But honestly I’m not very aware of exactly what capability my camera’s “Bionz-XR image processor has.  It may be a genius or a dolt.  So I’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile my present camera has been doing a splendid job of taking all the pictures I ask of it.  At this point I have no need of an upgrade.  All I ever watch nowadays is the new lens info.  And even that is sort of a reflex.

So I’ll just see where everything goes and enjoy photography for what it is.  Fun.

The Rallying Cry of 2024 – Defund the Deep State

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Let’s face it, the political activism in 2022 is a purely defensive crouch.  Taking back the House and Senate are the equivalent of bringing your arms and hands over your face while you’re on the ground being pummeled.  It’s hardly a 4D chess move.  But if we’re ever going to accomplish anything against the Leviathan in DC, we will need to starve it out.

I think the first step is to cap all federal salaries at $54,132 which is the median US salary and freeze hiring except at the discretion of the President.  Then start punishing the Deep State swamp creatures by making their lives much less fun.  Move the State Department to Baltimore and the FBI to St. Louis and reassign the sensitive jobs to direct appointees of the President.  Then reduce and simplify the income tax so it can be done with sixth grader math and convert 90% of the employees of the IRS into public restroom attendants in the high crime districts of America.

So even this guerilla warfare against the Deep State would be just the warning shots.  Whole agencies will have to be reinvented.  The FBI and the CIA have to be defanged.  In addition to repealing the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts all of the bad actors that staged the coup against Trump must be removed from positions of authority and put in charge of counting paper clips and shredding paper.  And the new work that is determined to be valuable will be given to people who won’t have the power to attack the American people again.  Those powers will be removed from the jobs.

Another priority is to legislate the venue for trials against federal employees to be in areas that don’t house large bureaucracies.  The spectacle of John Durham’s prosecutions all being acquitted proves just what kind of justice you can expect in Washington DC.

Now let’s think of what some of the consequences of this kind of change will be.  First of all, it will impoverish the Greater Washington DC area.  How great is that?  Rents and property values will collapse.  Hobo jungles will spring up in Georgetown and Chevy Chase.  PBS documentarians will be able to interview people like Antony Blinken and Merrick Garland as they huddle around a trash fire cooking their mulligan stew and hear disoriented stories about how they used to be somebody.  And DC will revert to a slightly warmer Newark, New Jersey.

I understand that there are many priorities that vie for a place among what needs to be done to save this country from the disaster that is overtaking us.  But directly attacking and taking the food out of the mouths of truly dangerous people like the deranged bureaucrats that torture us on a daily basis should be right at the top of that list.  In the long run finally getting the budget under control will require paring down the federal bureaucracy so we might as well get some fun out of it too.

And defunding the Deep State does not mean we should neglect to prosecute the bad actors who’ve done so much harm in the last few years.  I just think it will be easier and more effective if we first remove them from power.  Once you’re only earning a third of what you once were you have bigger problems than promulgating new laws on pronouns.  Instead, they’ll be concentrating on making that huge mortgage payment.  That’s the time to drag them into court to answer for their past sins.

Now the problem with all this is that legislators have a very cozy relationship with the bureaucrats.  Attacking them is tantamount to betrayal.  That is why the influx of outsiders like Marjorie Taylor Greene is such a great thing.  These people aren’t beholden to the Deep State.  The problem is they’re a handful in a sea of insiders.  This is why I almost despair of how much still has to be done.  But there’s no reason not to define the problem.  And that’s why I still bang this drum.  Carthago delenda est.

Let’s Play the Best-Case Scenario Game

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All the bad news for the Dems has lifted my heart.  I haven’t let it go to my head.  I know just how bad things are.  But with a light-heart comes a playful mood.  So, I’ll spin some words and try to imagine the best-case scenario we could hope for going forward.  So, play along.

We’ll start out with November 8th.  Based on everything going right for the Republicans the wildest fantasy, the one where only Vermont and New York elect a Democrat Senator, would give us 57 seats in the Senate.  But since it’s not a filibuster proof 60 votes let’s just go along with this outrageous 57 number.  Then let’s say the Republicans win some outlandish number of seats in the House, say 60 seats.  Effectively this shuts down any more of Biden’s legislative agenda and curtails his ability to pick judges for the federal bench and means his cabinet replacements can be tortured and even denied if they’re at all egregious (which they will be).  This also means Mitt Romney and whoever is left of the Senate NeverTrumpers will be forced to shut up for the next wo years.  In fact, old Mitt is up for re-election two years and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him walking back all his anti-Trump talk and begin groveling on his belly asking for Trump’s endorsement for his re-election.  Now that will be fun to watch.

And even with less than 57 senate votes I can see the House sending an impeachment of Biden and his lackies pretty soon after they’ve had a chance to do an investigation into the Hunter laptop.  If it wasn’t such an expensive process, I would like to see a quarterly impeachment come through the Congress until 2024 is complete.  But it could get boring.  After all we don’t have anywhere near enough votes in the Senate to convict the old liar.

Now, with a Republican Congress Joe will try to play rope-a-dope by blaming Congress for tying his hands and refusing to fund all his pet projects.  Basically, we’ll have the same stalemate where continuing resolution funding will be voted in every quarter instead of a yearly budget.  Considering that the Stupid Party is the stupid party this will be a painful process and they will take some damage.  But we’ll go through the next two years with the dance we’re used to seeing playing out.

Let’s assume Biden will try to wag the Ukrainian dog with some kind of false flag operation to try to blame the Russians for some casualties of NATO troops in Poland.  He demands a blank check to go “mano a mano” with Ivan.  Now since this is my happy-happy version let’s assume that somehow our congressional heroes manage to avoid turning themselves into villains in this little passion play.  And assume that the Russians manage to get the Ukrainians to the bargaining table and suddenly the war is over and NATO looks really stupid.

By this point we’re about a year before the 2024 election and Dopey Joe is as toast as any incumbent has been since Jimmy Carter chased that rabbit away from his canoe back in 1980.  Now with the whole country baying for Joe’s blood and the economy still mired in stagflation Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination easily and the election is a landslide in which both the House and the Senate are solidly pro-Trump, filibuster proof and primed to enact a MAGA agenda.

Their first order of business is to close down the southern border tighter than a drum.  Then enforce strictly all the existing laws to prevent illegal aliens from working in the United States.  Then re-organize the intelligence agencies and Justice Department with elimination of the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts as the centerpiece.  And for good measure they can write legislation to forbid the government from locking us in our homes ever again.  Afterwards comes reversing all the green agenda nonsense and establishing a workable energy policy that includes nuclear and fossil fuel components as the main technologies.

After all this good stuff is done, they can tackle the discriminatory practices that the tech companies have been perpetrating against conservatives.  I don’t expect the death penalty to be handed out but confiscation of the platforms sems fitting.  And hopefully in the meantime the Supreme Court will have outlawed affirmative action and declared homosexuality and all its associated activities unprotected by the Constitution.

And after accomplishing all that, Mitch McConnell will be so exhausted that he’ll have to be carted off to the old age home and younger and less crooked leadership can be appointed.  Hopefully the same will be the case for the House leadership although we don’t have to send McCarthy to an old age home.  The back benches will be good enough.

So, there’s my fantasy.  It’s absurd because we’re stuck with the Stupid Party.  They’re too stupid, dishonest and lazy to get anything as monumental as the reformation of the federal government done.  But it’s been a good week and I felt like cheering myself up.  I return you to the apocalypse already in progress.

Real Clear Politics Updates Republican Senate Projection from 52 to 53

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This is a small indicator but currently Real Clear Politics have updated their projection of the post election Senate Republican count as 53 seats.

This lists seat pic-ups in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia and holds in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina.  What I notice is that in several of these races the poll averages favor the Democrat candidates.  This must mean that someone at RCP thinks there is either a problem with the polls artificially favoring the Dems or that the dynamics of the race are rapidly shifting away from them.

A projection like this that basically shows the Republicans running the table seems kind of over optimistic but maybe that’s just my hard knocks pessimism shining through.  So this is a little thing but it got a smile out of me today.

Guest Contributor – NostraDumbass – 21OCT2022 – Me & Democracy

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My apologies to Janis Joplin…

Me and Democracy

Busted flat in “Covid Times”, vaxxin’ is a pain
When I’m feelin’ near as faded as Rmdna genes
Brandon thumbed his nose at me, before he claimed
He wanted to make America as crime-free as New Orleans
I watched as the J6ers were confined in a dirty DC cabana
Joe is so aloof while America sings the blues
EPA is slappin’ fines, soon I’ll be getting mine
This is not the America we knew

Freedoms are just another thing we need to lose
Nothin’, I mean nothin’ is ever going to be free
And feelin’ good was never easy, but now it is gone into the blue
You know feelin’ good was no good for Nancy and Joey B.
Not good enough for AOC and the progressive party

Shut down the Kentucky coal mines, count on solar from the sun
Algore and Kerry have a single goal
Through all kinds of weather, through everything that’s done
Nothings going to keep me from the cold

One day up near Portland, Antifa had it’s way
Lookin to ransack homes and defund the police,
They will trade all of your tomorrows, for their one “new” day
To be Soros’ heros of the brownshirt kind

Freedoms are just another thing we need to lose
Nothin’, I mean nothin’ is ever going to be free
And feelin’ good was never easy, but now it is gone into the blue
You know feelin’ good was no good for Nancy and Joey B.
Not good enough for AOC and the progressive party

La-da-da, la-da-da-da, la-da-da-da-da-da-da
La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, Joey B., yeah
La-da-da-da-da, la-da-da-da-da
La, la-la-la-da-da- Joey B., oh yeah
La-da-da, la-da-da, la,da-da, la,da-da
La-da-da, la-da-da, la-di-da
Hey now, Hey now, Nancy and Joey B.
Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord, lo-da-da, na-na-na, na-na-na, na-na-na
Hey now, Hey now, Nancy and Joey B., yeah

Well, I wanna call it “over”, vote in a different kind of man
but I am called a threat to their democracy
Hey now, Hey now, how about that lunacy, yeah
Lord, a Lord, a Lord, a Lord, a Lord, a Lord, a Lord, a Lord, oh
Hey-hey-hey, Joey B., Lord

20OCT2022 – The Dunwich Complainer

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Very interesting week here at the epicenter of the Great Old Ones’ Realm in New England.  I put out my Re-Elect First Selectman Cthulhu sign up on my lawn next to a slaughtered goat carcass ritually adorned with wheat germ.  I watched the latest feed from my trail cam and noticed that the werewolves have all begun to wear skinny jeans and carry BPA-free water bottles on their belts.  None of them look like they could take down a girl scout in a fair fight.  Without a doubt, these are times that try men’s souls.

This week at the official induction ceremony I was named Deputy Election Reanimator.    Now this a misnomer.  The Reanimator doesn’t really have a deputy since only the primogeniture descendant of Herbert West has the moxy required to bring back the dead, especially during a rush-rush mass ceremony on election night.  My job would probably be more accurately described as Deputy Election De-Reanimator.  You see the reanimation procedure takes place at the graveyard and apparently is not selective by party affiliation.  So, my part is to stand at the gate with the old voting records and stop the Democrat voters from leaving the graveyard.  Or at least to make sure their heads don’t leave the graveyard.  So, in addition to the lists, a sharpie and a flashlight I’ve got a reasonably sharp machete.  This year they modernized my gear by getting me one of those headlights that you can strap to your forehead.  That helps quit a bit.  I don’t have to ask the deceased to hold my lists while I’m fumbling to cut his head off.  Much more dignified and much more ergonomic.

I really hope I’m not asked to help clean up the grave yard on Wednesday morning.  I think the volunteers should handle that.  I mean, I’ve paid my dues and now I’d like to let the system do its thing, if you know what I mean.  Of course, the volunteers do a pretty bad job.  Every election night I see mismatched heads on the reanimated voters.  It’s kind of an embarrassment.  But still, I can’t be expected to do everything around here.  At some point the kids just have to be allowed to sink or swim.  ‘Nuff said.

In the real world I attended the latest meeting of our local Republican Town Committee and was surprised to hear that even in the cobalt blue New England state that Dunwich is embedded in the Stupid Party candidates have a fighting chance of winning for once!  I could tell the rest of the folks there were almost shocked by the situation.  I was quite amused.  Maybe I’ve underestimated the people in this country.  Could there be a limit to their willingness to endure progressive insanity?  Even here?  Well, we’ll see.

I will be working on Election Day in an official capacity which is interesting and annoying at the same time.  I’ll have to figure out if I can bring my laptop and go on-line when I’m on my breaks.  Not being able to follow this election on OCF would be unfortunate.

It should be fairly interesting to be involved in the election.  I’ll finally see how the sausage is made.  I suspect my town is one of the more boring and honest operations.  And maybe the rough stuff happens higher up the ladder in the crooked states that we saw on tv in 2020.  I remember those films in Philadelphia where they threw everyone out around midnight and all the skullduggery occurred behind closed doors and blacked out windows.  It’s kind of sad to know that after all that went on in plain sight that nothing has been done in some of those states to prevent a replay this year.  Well, as I’ve said this is the Day of Reckoning coming up.  We’ll find out where we stand and that is valuable in and of itself.  So, bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.  And where did I put that sharpening stone?