Picture below was taken yesterday in the Florida Panhandle with the temps in the high 60’s. Frankly, I’m as happy as a clam at high tide with this weather.
Guest Contributor – TomD – 02FEB2022 – Photo
Category: Guest Contributors
Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – 30JAN2022 – Photo
The Fat Man rejoices in his survival of the Storm of the Century. He turns to a primal symbol of Man’s Alignment with the Divine. Or something. He’s devilishly hard to make stuff up for. (photog)
Guest Contributor – TomD – 24JAN2022 – COVID
Even in Florida, if I’m in a medical establishment, it’s mask on. At least in the waiting room, once I’m make it back to the examination room I say (truthfully), “I don’t hear well, can we dispense with these?” The Dr will inevitably say “sure!”
But this morning in the waiting room with about 15 others, all dutifully masked, I went into a slow steam. I really wanted to take my mask off and tell the rest, “Don’t you know even the CDC admits that the masks are 100% useless. Why are we being forced to wear them?”
I hate the masks for multiples of reasons, even on others, because I wasn’t kidding, I do have hearing problems. The combination of the USMC, many decades of competitive and recreational shooting plus Deep Purple concerts has dropped my threshold for hearing in the 2 kHz-4 kHz range to 90 dB. Add a mask to that to that and I can’t make out doodly-squat.
Other than medical buildings, there are no masks down here other than the maybe 2% who choose to mask for whatever private reason. I’ve no problem with that, but I hate coerced actions. My sister wore masks before she died a couple of months ago, but that was because chemo had reduced her immune system to junk.
Update:
Chemist –
I feel your pain. I work in a very technical field with technical people. Corporate has dictated masks for all. I get it. They don’t want to get sued. So they enforce the mask rule and dutifully report the number of Covid cases per week at our site.
I recently went on a rant about the uselessness of the mask and that even the CDC admits they are useless.
People in the vicinity of my cube defended the mandate. I pointed out the size of a virus and the mesh size of cloth masks. It fell on deaf ears.
Finally, one senior person stood up and said: “Its worth it if it saves even one life” and the rest agreed.
I doubt masking has saved a single life over the past 2 years around the entire planet.
Even if it has, that’s a crappy way to determine policy.
But I gave up. I sat down. Took off my mask (Yes, we can take off the masks when sitting inside our cubicals) and went back to work.
Guest Contributor – TomD – 21JAN2022 – Photo
The photo above is the Commanding Officer’s quarters at Ft. Pickens, a coastal defense facility on the Gulf of Mexico in continuous operation from 1833 until 1946. It is now a Federal park.
Below is a shot of the latest gun emplacements. This gun is from WWII and defended the coast and harbor from German U Boats but there are also emplacements dating from before and during the Civil War.
Guest Contributor – TomD – 20JAN2022 – Photo
The Quadratic Franchise
Many, many years ago I read an essay by the science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein about civics. He was making the case that democracy was the proposition that a million men were smarter than one man or a few men. And he batted that idea around. His point was that the average man might not be the right decision maker for society. And then he thought of how we could rig things to make democracy better. Now, being an engineer, his first idea was based on the type of tests that would appeal to a technical mind. He imagined the voting booth being equipped with a visual display of some sort that communicated a problem to the voter to solve before being allowed to vote. Heinlein favored solving a quadratic equation as the qualifying test. I can’t remember if it was a multiple-choice question or not but at the time, I saw the sense of it. Pick some minimally difficult standard of intelligence and make it a condition for voting.
But intelligence is not the only criterion for citizenship. Moral fitness may be even more important. You may be smart enough to know something is a bad idea for society but if you think that you’ll personally benefit from it then you might go along with it. So, another way to rig the franchise is disqualify people who have chosen to live antisocially. Currently, most states disqualify felons from voting. That seems a reasonable measure. But I think there are other larger voting blocks that should be looked at. Perhaps civil servants should not be allowed to vote. After all, teachers and prison guards have controlled politics in California and other states like Illinois and New Jersey for decades based on their habit of voting in Democrats to keep their pensions and salaries robust. Maybe anyone on welfare should be taken off the voters’ roll because they’ll vote for the liberal who will keep their gravy train flowing.
Or maybe we should go the other way around. Maybe people’s votes should be weighted according to how much taxes they pay. So, Elon Musk pays on average ten million dollars in taxes a year and I pay fifty thousand so his vote should count for two hundred of mine. And the guy who pays no taxes has no vote or maybe some minimal fraction of a vote.
But of course, the absurdity of this whole discussion is that none of this matters because as Dementia Joe recently pointed out, it’s not who votes but who counts the votes, that counts. Even when unheard of numbers of Americans came out to vote in 2020 the people who rig elections in Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Madison and Phoenix simply ran the photocopy machines ten times as long and manufactured the votes needed to fake the election result they wanted.
We can talk about who the least responsible voters are. My favorite is women because they vote with their emotions and because they’re gullible and easily flattered into thinking their self-interest is equal to the good of the country. But even they will recognize grim reality when it comes in the likeness of a BLM mob. So ultimately trying to fix representative government means absolutely nothing when the ballot box is being stuffed.
I think the attempts to fix this situation and the simultaneous attempt to codify fraud by the Democrats is the biggest struggle going on right now in our country. I don’t want to overblow the criticality of the result because the bad guys never run out of ways to degrade our country. Literally they never quit. But I think the attempt to fix this problem is a fair test of whether there is enough strength left in our system and in our will to turn the country around. If after what happened in 2020, we don’t solve this problem then we’re not going to have the strength to survive the diseases that afflict our country. They will overwhelm the system like a parasitic disease that saps its host’s strength and eventually leads to death.
Heinlein thought about civics and ways that we could improve citizenship. But he also predicted the decay of our society under the influence of progressivism. I think he would have recognized the symptoms we are currently suffering from but he still might have been sad to see it happen to the country he loved.
War Pig’s Feedback
I prefer the government of “Starship Troopers”. I also like the idea he postulated in “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” – that any law passed can be nullified by I believe a 1/3 vote of the People. After all if a law is so poorly written or unnecessary that a full third of your citizens despises it, it is a bad law.
I do NOT trust the form of voting in Sam Clemen’s “The Curious Republic of Gondour”, since we have seen what craziness is professed in western colleges and universities. What was it William F Buckley Jr said;- “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
(Good to hear from you War Pig. All the best.
photog)
Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – 07JAN2022 – Photo
Guest Contributor – TomD – 03JAN2022 – Photo
Guest Contributor – TomD – Sony A7 IV Camera First Impressions
(Editor’s Note – I’ve decided to collect Tom’s observations into a separate post and I’ll update it as they come in. I’m very interested in these observations as I wait for my A7 IV to wend it’s way through the delivery chain. – photog)
The A7IV showed up unexpectedly early last Friday the 24th. Your’s?
Cameras are so complicated these days at configuring one to my preferences is almost like moving to a new house.
Sample below, some of the wife’s yard decoration.
,,,
I haven’t had a chance to wring it out yet. Other than the impression that focus seems to be instant in all circumstances and that the form factor is more comfortable in my hand, I don’t have a lot to report.
To someone who has had a succession of now 8 Sony cameras, the much-ballyhooed new menu system just means that I have to relearn the menu system. The function button above the control wheel thankfully still gives immediate access to 95% of the functions that I use the most. And you also still have 7-8 buttons and controls to which you can assign functions.
I’m looking forward to playing with the face and eye tracking.
…
Still playing with the camera, it will take a while.
Just learned a couple of things, my camera, at least, does much better images with the exposure dial kept to -.7.
Tried several exposure stacking series and found that, in aperture priority, the camera mostly but not always creates the different exposures by varying the ISO. All the other Sonys have always varied only the shutter speed. One series inexplicably varied both ISO and shutter.
Big disappointment: My LA-EA 4 does not function at all with this camera.
On the other hand, the focus on my 90mm f2.8 macro has always been sluggish and hunting on my other cameras but it is instant and responsive on the A7IV. The eye autofocus is unbreakable on my animals around the house
30DEC2021 Update
Here is a a shot of mine wearing a 28-70 f2.8 lens.
Hat Tip to Chemist for this Link. Red States Starting to Coordinate Their Interests
Here’s the beginning of a counterattack against the corporate thugs who carry water for the Marxists. Hitting the banks where it hurts is a very good beginning. They should do the same to the banks that cancel people for free speech. It’s finally good to see some coordination getting started.