Category: Current Events

Adapt and Thrive

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Sunday, I head back to the salt mines to dig out that salt.  I get back onto the galley and start rowing that oar.  I return to the mill and push that millstone round and round.  The mind deadening drudgery looms before me like towering wave that will roll over me and drown me in its awful size.  So let it be written, so shall it be done.

But for tonight I’m content.  I got plenty of sleep last night and I only had a couple of hours of lousy work today and even that was tolerable and unavoidable.  So good enough.

What I was thinking about today is that it’s time to move beyond the election and all of that way of thinking.  All of this anxiety over whether Trump will win or Kamala.  Living in a blue state it really hardly matters.  I already live under a woke communist regime.  Really, all that is necessary is to start thinking about what things I can control and what I cannot.  And just looking at things through that lens clarifies  my thinking and removes a lot of the anxiety that comes from depending on “magical” processes.

For instance, I supposedly have to vote for Trump.  Well, I have to vote anyway because there are local races that I can influence the outcome of.  So not voting for Trump would be kind of silly, so I will.  But I don’t imagine I’m making any difference by voting for him.  And whether he wins or not, my life won’t change very much at all, at least not for quite a while.  If Trump wins and a Republican Congress passes legislation that allows Trump to deport the millions of illegal aliens beyond partisan judges’ ability to block him, then eventually after several years I will notice some improvements in my quality of life.  And if he balances the budget and on-shores the jobs that were sent to Asia then I will see America start to revive.  But that’s a long time from now and I have a limited span on this planet.  So, this election is almost an academic exercise in political philosophy.

Instead, what will be interesting and useful is to try and find private endeavors and resources that individuals can utilize and patronize either collectively or individually.  For instance, if I ever finish my never-ending science fiction novel, I might decide to market it and advertise it by starting a go-fund-me page.  Well, even selecting something as ordinary as that is fraught with challenges because many of these crowd-funding companies are either run by or strongly influenced by left-wing zealots who police these sites looking to cancel anyone who doesn’t share their convictions.  So, researching the activities and tendencies of these types of sites is important if you want to avoid a potentially disastrous launch for a creative work like a book.

And the same applies for other commercial or cultural organization.  Especially if Harris is installed in the White House, I’m hoping that various enterprises will spring up to service an audience from our side of the political spectrum who need everything from entertainment, to news, to snacks, to educational services, to dating services, to you name it.  With the government monolithically leftist it will behoove us to become entrepreneurs and connoisseurs with respect to the things that will be unavailable from official sources.  And we’ll have to become very creative at avoiding government interference, which means we’ll have to become adept at camouflage and subterfuge.  And even that secrecy sounds like fun to me.  Belonging to a private club has its own pleasures.

So, as the election date approaches, I have a new attitude about the future and I think it will serve me better than what happened after the last presidential election in 2020.  In fact, it can’t help but be better, no matter who wins.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 26OCT2024 – Fascism

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Dims have been calling Republicans fascists and Hitler for most of my life. The really ironic part is they couldn’t define fascism if their little lives depended on it.

I’ve still got some of my Dad’s West Point Textbooks, mostly dating from the late 30’s to early 40’s. One, “The Governments of the Major Foreign Powers”, p 1941 looks to be what we would now call Political Science, a misnomer if there ever was one. The book spends about 50 pages per country with great detail. It should be required reading at Harvard, etc.

Few people know that Fascism is an offshoot or variation of socialism. It was originated by Benito Mussolini, who, up to that time was a functionary in the Italian Socialist Party. At the time of his takeover of Italy, he was widely applauded and acclaimed by the US left. He did, after all, make the trains run on time.

One of the biggest differences between socialism and fascism is that socialism wanted state ownership of industry whereas fascism was fine with private ownership but required state control. Does that remind you of anything?

 

It seems that it is common today to bandy about the  accusation of  “Fascist” without a clue as to what Facism is.

 

Attached are 3 pages from a 1941 West Point textbook titled, “The Governments of the Major Foreign Powers”. These 3 pages are excerpts from approx 40 pages on the Government of Italy. It should be noted that, since this book was published in 1941, the US had yet to have entered the war.

 

Frankly, after rereading the short chapter on Fascist Doctrine, I can see the origin of quite a bit of the DNA from today’s left.

 

Obviously, the book also covers Nazi Germany.

26OCT2024 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

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Well, another day in captivity.  But there is the possibility I’ll have at least most of Saturday off.  Surfacing and looking around I see that the consensus is growing that Trump is leading Harris in the swing states.  So, of course that means Harris declares him Hitler.  Well, as anyone who’s been on the internet for a few decades knows when you pull the Hitler card you lose.  But it’s always fun to see someone bring back the classics.

Honestly, all of the “drama” in the last week and a half of the election is overblown.  Harris is an unlikable person who comes off as a phony and an emotionally unstable individual.  Really the only question is whether the Democrats have alienated enough of their base to lose so conclusively that normal voter fraud will be insufficient.  And since half the polls are rigged, we’re just going to have to wait until election day (or later) to find out.

Well, I’m fine with that.  I just hope the Democrats are out of snipers.  Trump is doing a rally in Madison Square Garden and there isn’t anywhere to hide on that stage if someone sneaks a gun in.  But let’s assume they’re not stupid enough for a third try.  Honestly, if anything like that happened to Trump at this point, it really would tear this country apart.

Well, anyway, that’s where the election is right now.  In my circles I can tell that the rank-and-file Democrats are very, very nervous.  So, I’m just ignoring all the horse race stuff and shrugging off all the “convincing” arguments about why one or the other of them is going to win.  It’s mostly just whistling past the graveyard.

It turns out the Yankees managed to get into the World Series this year.  Back in the 1990s Camera Girl and I followed them very enthusiastically.  But since Major League baseball started allowing their players to take a knee during the national anthem, I swore off all the sports games.  So, she was watching the game tonight.  Well, she fell asleep and I was writing my post and in the bottom of the tenth down by one run and with two outs the Dodgers get a walk-off grand slam.  Poor Camera Girl.

So tomorrow I plan to enjoy all of this unseasonably warm weather.  I might even try to photograph some of the remaining autumn color that put on such a nice display when I couldn’t shoot it.  I’ll try to find an opportunity to make a few macro focus stacks with the new firmware programming.  Of course, everything is turning to mush after the frosts we had last week.  But who knows with all this heat the bugs and critters might be reawakening.  Now they’re predicting something like eighty-degree weather for Halloween.  That would be something.  But I’ll still be trapped inside so it might as well be Antarctica as far as I’ll be concerned.

Something occurred to me while I was perusing my Complete Shakespeare.  The Honeymooners is sort of a reverse version of “The Taming of the Shrew.”  Basically, Ralph Kramden has set the male sex back about four hundred years.  Over and over again Alice proves him wrong and shows him to be a pathetic loser.  As much as I like the show, it is interesting that the Honeymooners is the template that all modern art uses to describe the relations between men and women.  It’s certainly not a flattering paradigm for us.

You know, maybe it’s time to revive Shakespeare’s play.  We may have reached the inflection point where giving the girl bosses a taste of their own medicine might be the best action.  Even though I’ve never had to beat Camera Girl, I don’t see any reason not to reinstate the rule of thumb.  I’ll have to write at depth about this in a couple of weeks from now.

Well, I’ll leave it there.  Enjoy the day.  I know I will.

Guest Contributor – Nostradumbass – 25OCT2024 – Reaction to “Can Trump Win?”

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sometimes when I drop in, I feel like someone was reincarnated. The following two quotes seem to be appropriate for your discourse:

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right.”

“I don’t like ass kissers, flag wavers, or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn people: Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you: ‘There is no I in team.’ What you should tell them is: ‘Maybe not. But there is an I in independence, individuality, and integrity.’” George Carlin

Could Trump Win?

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The Election Fraud in 2020 changed my outlook on American elections.  What I saw happen that November convinced me that outright theft of the presidency is completely within the scope of the Democratic Party’s purview.  Suffice it to say that I am highly skeptical of Trump’s chances in this election.  I assumed they are low; less than 25%.

But then I watched this:

2WAY is a creation of Mark Halperin who was a talking head on one of the networks, I think ABC.  Sean Spicer was one of Trump’s first press secretaries.  Dan Turrentine is a “Democratic strategist.”  I’ve never heard of him.  Anyway, Halperin hosts these zoom calls with various Democrat and Republican talking heads and a bunch of everyday people who come on to give their two cents but without any screaming or name-calling.  More or less Halperin attempts to be an honest broker who allows both sides to talk about the election without too much spin.

For the last week or two, Halperin has been saying that the inside polls and the early voting data is increasingly good for Donald Trump and bad for Harris.  In this short video both Spicer and Turrentine seem to be agreeing with him.  Now, I hate to get my hopes up because that is a dangerous thing to do, but it’s getting harder to resist.  Well, I’m “all growed up now” so I guess I shouldn’t be scared of working through what’s going on in the real world.

With two weeks left before election day it’s still too early to get too excited about this “trend.”  I think this Friday would be a good place to evaluate where the race and the indicators stand.  What Spicer thought was that if the Democratic campaign thinks things are going south, they will immediately start attacking Trump with anything and everything they’ve got.  Well, that’s interesting.  I’m not sure where you can go after you’ve already called him a despotic, demented, unbalanced danger to the republic.  I guess Harris can approve a commercial where a picture of Trump morphs into Adolph Hitler or Darth Vader.  But I’m interested to see if something like that does surface on my local television station.  Of course, this being New England, that would be preaching to the choir and an awful waste of money.  But perhaps Pennsylvania and Michigan might be bombarded with such stuff.

Look, I’m skeptical as hell.  I’ve been burned before and don’t enjoy getting my hopes up.  But I have to confess that with the fallout from the Biden administration looking like a list of biblical plagues not seen since the time of Moses, it’s hard not to believe that the American voters would rise up and demand the end of the Democrats’ reign.  So, let’s just say that I’m more than a little interested in the increasingly worried statements coming from the Harris campaign behind the scenes.  I’ll review things on Friday and maybe I’ll have more to say at that time.  Now that’s cautious and bland enough.  Isn’t it?

21OCT2024 – OCF Update – Babylonian Captivity

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As previously whined, I am entering an extended period of limited access to the internet and limited time to post.  I will check as circumstance allows but it will be inadequate.  I’ll catch up at night and try to provide content but I predict quantity and quality will suffer.

Apologies from the management.  On with the show!

Focus Bracketing Inside the Sony A7 IV – Part 1

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Well, I couldn’t resist. I went on Sony’s website and found the pages with the firmware update (4.00). But upon reading the instructions I found out that since my firmware was at version 1.01, I had to first update my camera to version 1.05 before updating to version 4.00. The warning said that if I went straight to 4.00 it would cause an error and then I wouldn’t be able to fix the problem. Well, the camera gods are a jealous bunch and defying them is very unwise so along with many a grumble and even a few mumbles I went through the procedure twice.
1.01 to 1.05
1.05 to 4.00
And what do you know? It really worked. The drive menu had new options that included focus bracketing. After following the instructions from a YouTube video, I was able to quickly and easily run a quick bracket on a preserved tarantula spider specimen and send it through my focus stacking program (Affinity Photo) and, voila, edge to edge sharpness.

Now this was just a quick test. I had a kid’s party starting and barely got the files stacked before I had to go referee grandkids for Camera Girl. But it was definitely a proof of concept and I can see how this will work for even some field shots. Definitely usable for macro shots of plants like mushrooms and such and even for resting or sedate creatures like resting dragonflies and such. Of course, butterflies are out of the question. But a little testing is bound to bring up other applications.
So, all in all, this is an amazing surprise from Sony. Kudos to them for hearing my cries in the wilderness. Bravo, gentlemen, bravo.

20OCT2024 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

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Ah, the calm before the storm.  I have this weekend completely off before the next seventeen days of misery and isolation.  So, I’ll enjoy these two days to the hilt and then, “abandon all hope ye who enter here.”  For what it’s worth it seems like Trump is enjoying himself a lot more than Kamala.  Her cackling has diminished and her ranting seems to have replaced it.  From everything I’ve heard she is a truly awful person that makes those around her miserable.  If she loses, I wouldn’t be surprised if her marriage ends and many of her other connections to human society.

The latest “controversy” is that Democrat voters will be using the branding     ,LA      (get it, comma la) on their clothing to get around the restrictions against wearing the candidates’ names or images at the polling place.  So, we’ve reached back to, I guess, kindergarten or at most grammar school in our tactics.  What’s next, will the Democrats be telling “yo mamma” jokes?

Anyway, the weather around Dunwich has been remarkably mellow for this time of year.  I understand we’re expected to have a string of three or four 75-degree days ending on Tuesday.  That’s phenomenal.  But because I’ve gotten used to fall weather, it’s almost too warm for comfort.

I wrote that post about Sony adding focus bracketing to their firmware update for my A7IV camera.  I intended to wait until after my captivity before updating the firmware but it’s killing me to not try it out.  I think I’ll bite the bullet tomorrow morning.  I have this dead luna moth that I found this summer and I’d love to play around with focus stacking it.  Well, we’ll see.  Tomorrow is a busy day.  We have a kid’s birthday party coming up and I’m sure Camera Girl has a laundry list of honey-do’s lined up for me.  And honestly there are several things I should be working on anyway.  So even if I update the camera I may have to wait.

It should be interesting to see how the country changes regardless of who “wins” the election.  I think there’s a growing cohort that realizes that something is very broken with our whole social order.  The fragmentation now extends to a polarization by sex.  Younger women and men are lining up in opposition to each other philosophically.  I really do believe we are seeing the beginning of a permanent split.  Basically, women who have accepted the new template for living for a career will not be having children.  And that means that men will have to find wives who want to have children elsewhere.  I guess mail order overseas brides will become more the rule than the exception and over time the cat ladies will die out.  Well, that’s a solution of sorts.

The “October Viewing” movies has been fun for me but it’s gotten me thinking about what a monster is.  Is it only freakish creatures like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster or can it be a man like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates?  Obviously, the actual humans are scarier because they really exist.  When you hear about the things that Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer did to their victims you understand that inside they truly are monsters.  So maybe creating fairy tale creatures like the movie monsters is a way of distracting ourselves from the true horrors that we don’t want to contemplate.  But our society has grown up and now we prefer to scare ourselves with realistic monsters.  I remember when I read Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon” back in the 1980’s it struck me as an interesting crime story and nothing more.  But when I thought about the way that that the murderer selected his victim families by working in a photo lab that developed family home movies, it chilled me to the core.  If a motivated psychopath could select his victims without any direct connection to him then how could anyone hope to protect his family from this random agent of horrifying destruction?  Basically, you can’t.  Random chance rules all of our lives.  That I found horrifying.  So maybe I should include “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs” in my October Viewings.  Or maybe that would take away some of the fun.  Well, October is waning I better hurry up and make up my mind.  What do you folks think?

Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. But His Name is Sony!

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At this point I considered attaching a video of the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel’s Messiah.  I had been waiting and hoping and praying that Sony would add focus bracketing to my Sony A7 IV camera by a firmware update but had more or less given up.

They did it!  Well, they made the update but I haven’t updated my camera yet.

But I watched the video below and did a quick jig around my house and am now calming down enough to type this post.

Ah hell, let’s add the Hallelujahs!

TomD replied:

Really!!??

I’ve been wanting focus bracketing for years! Years ago, FB was a relatively expensive windows or apple program and you had to shoot with the camera tethered to a computer. What a PIA.

I’m gonna update right now.

It can immediately help with a number of different types of shots I do. Aircraft in a museum for example. Museums are crowded with a constant problem of subject isolation. Far enough out to get the entire plane in the shot and there is a LOT of stuff competing for attention. Close enough with a wide angle and there is the depth of field problem.

photog replied:

I had to do two updates.  First I had to go from version 1.01 to 1.05.  Then 1.05 to 4.00.  But it worked.  I’ll load up the trial macro focus bracket soon.  It’s much easier than the damn tether.

As I Pondered Weak and Weary

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It’s getting close to midnight and I just got home a little while ago.  So, I’ll cudgel my brains for a few minutes and come up with an idea.  Napoleon Bonaparte is the author of the quote of the day (in fact I’ve got a solid month of them together).  And if we look at his era there are some things to think about.  Napoleon came into prominence because a great nation was reduced to chaos by a popular rebellion.  The existing regime foundered and the revolutionary conquerors were totally inept and allowed their movement to spin completely out of control and turn to anarchy.

Well, that’s not where we are now.  But there is a regime running our country that seems to be either unaware of or unconcerned by the impoverishing of the American middle class.  And so far, this regime has suffered essentially no ill effects from this policy.  Our elites and their lackeys are doing great.  Their material condition has never been better.  But I think they underestimate the changes that will occur if the Unted States become Brazil.  I think they assume that things like a stable currency and the personal safety of wealthy people can exist under the conditions they are fostering.  I think if they allow the devolution of the country to continue the way it is currently going that many of the advantages of the American system will quite simply disappear.

I was thinking about Friday’s quote of the day, “Anarchy is the stepping stone to absolute power.”  They are encouraging anarchy.  But they don’t have a way to insulate themselves from the results of anarchy, not in the last resort.  If we continue to slide toward lawlessness, places like Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard will just be places for organized gangs to swoop down on and pillage.  And what happens when the Mexican kidnapping gangs start snatching the children of millionaires and billionaires?  What if they snatch the grandchildren of George Soros?  Will his defund the police prosecutors turn around and beg the cops to go back to doing their jobs?  Well, even if they wanted to, once things slide too far, it would take draconian methods to fix things again.

And that’s where I was going with this discussion.  Basically, if the elites let things go too far, then the result will probably be a strong man.  He probably won’t be as brilliant a general as Napoleon.  But he will have to be quite ruthless.  How something like that ends up is usually not good.  When a democracy or a republic turns into a despotism it doesn’t typically go back again.  How all of that would go for us is not clear to me.  At this point I’m not particularly optimistic to say the least.  The rapid deterioration over the last twenty years has been so bad that I wouldn’t be surprised that a Harris presidency might be the catalyst that initiates the collapse.

Well, that’s a cheery thought here in the depths of the night.  But this is what happens when I have to work too late.  It encourages black moods.  Tomorrow will be better.  I have this whole weekend off before the two weeks of enslavement finally engulfs me on Monday.  Well, good night.