Category: Reviews

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A Gift Horse in the Mouth

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Having been gob-smacked by reality many times over the course of the last quarter century I would have thought that I was immune to unbridled exuberance when it comes to political happenings.  But I fully confess that for the last week or so I’ve been ridiculously upbeat whenever I look at the news.  And I get the same story from others I talk to on the Right.

Sure, I know not that much has changed.  And not that much will change even after they cart Joe Biden’s corpse off to the glue factory.  But there’s just something cheerful about knowing that Trump somehow defied all the odds and managed to win back the White House and poked a thumb in the eye of all our worst enemies.

I know it’s ridiculous to say but it’s like that moment in the Return of the King when the Ring sinks below the surface of the molten lava inside Mount Doom and Barad-dur comes crashing down.  And it’s not so much that all things will go well for you but rather that your enemy is annihilated utterly.  You can finally let out an exhausted sigh, drop your weary arms and catch your breath while the Dark Lord and all his engines of destruction and plans crumble to dust before your eyes.  MSNBC and the View are like the orcs and trolls at that moment running randomly for their lives.  So good.

Well, that’s a bit much.  Let’s just say it feels pretty good to see the Democrats in disarray and Trump trolling them for all their worth.  Canada, Greenland, Panama Canal?  Oh, come on!

But it sort of feels that way.  After 2020 I thought I’d never feel enthusiastic about American politics again.  It was obvious that the other side would go to any lengths to rig an election; George Floyd riots, COVID, the sky’s the limit.  But somehow, we get this remarkable moment.  It’s almost like the Universe was saying sorry for abusing us as badly as we’d been.  It was like some cosmic do-over was decided upon and things were going to be corrected after some horrible mistake.  It’s as if the referees looked at the game video and reversed a bad call on the field and the play has been called back and we have another chance to win the game.

Now I know all of this is an exaggeration and really there’s nothing all that extraordinary going on.  After all, the Republicans have won plenty of elections and that never stopped them from screwing things up worse than if they had lost that election in the first place.  Think of Bush after winning 2004.  Think of Bush after winning in 1988.  For all I know Trump and company will screw things up so badly that 2028 will be an extinction event for the Right.

Sure, maybe.  But right now, I am experiencing elation, optimism, enthusiasm and I’m walking around with a smile in my heart.  And that’s in the midst of a cold snap here in Dunwich the likes of which we haven’t seen in a few years.  I can’t say how long it will last or whether Trump’s inauguration will affect it or not.  I only know it’s an unexpected gift and you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09JAN2025 – More Africa

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war pig

Africa could do all the wonderful things the author says they can – IF Africans weren’t in charge. If Africa was still a colonial continent it could all be worked out. The colonial powers would not tolerate genocides as in Rwanda, Darfur, Central African Republic, etc, etc, in the nations they controlled by proxy. In my opinion Cote de Ivory is making a mistake in removing the French military presence. That is, unless they plan a little ethnic cleansing of their own, in which the French would interfere. If that is their aim, it makes sense.

Africa is a continent of headmen. The strongest gangster or despot rules until replaced/deposed. Even displaced Africans show tribal/gang behavior in the US, UK, France and elsewhere. There are bright spots. Botswana, Morocco, Tunisia and a few others. But they are bright spots only in comparison to other African nations. The best adapting and hardest working Africans I have known are Nigerians. Those I have known emphasized work, education and morals to their children. We have a very few in my rural, mostly White county and all I have met were good people. Neither they nor their children have any sorts of criminal dealings and as far as I know, none of their children are delinquents or abuse drugs or alcohol. Those are what Africa needs, but they emigrated to the US to escape tough situations in their home nation. One family’s kids work for the best family pizzeria in the County, which strange enough is owned by a Polish family.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 03JAN2025 – It’s Her Turn … Again

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Even if the Dems run Kamala as a candidate, never underestimate the Republicans ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The best thing the Dems could do is continue to scold the Americans who disappointed them by not jumping on the EV Kamala bus, and voted against them. They have 4 years to bitch and moan about how they were robbed, and it’s all racist. That would make Vance have an easy run by building up a reservoir of resentment among the undecided. All Trump need to do is hold the stated course of deport, reinflate, and drill baby drill. This could swing the pendulum back to the right, the last election was indicative of a tidal shift against the left wing agenda.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 03JAN2025 – It’s Her Turn … Again

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war pig

Hillary has a better chance than Kamala. But I can see the attraction for Kamala for the lefty bigwigs. She will do absolutely as told. Shove your hand up her butt and make her a puppet. She is mixed race so can claim to be Black. She is nominally a female and the left wants a miority woman in the Oval Office so bad they can taste it. Problem is, she is a terrible campaigner. This time around, when she got the marshmallow-soft question about her differences viz Dopey Joe, she froze like a possum in the headlights. She was roadkill. She HAD to know the question was coming, the media lefties would be sure to tell her campaign manager what questions would be asked. She still flopped. At least she doesn’t terrorize young girls and fall down or walk away with an extended hand pointed toward…nobody.
At least not yet. She has three years to practice, but my belief is they’d rather run AOC than Kamala. Some candidate may rise who is charismatic enough to lead the party and win. A lefty version of Trump – all piss and vinegar. But then, maybe not. Maybe the left has gone plumb loco, as Yosemite Sam would say.

An Object Lesson in Civics

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I was getting together with some New York City friends.  We were at a local Chinese restaurant that we have been known to frequent.  Full disclosure, I had the chicken chop suey because the kung pao chicken is too spicy so soon after my Christmas gorge fest.

We eventually got around to talking about Daniel Penny and his surprise acquittal by a New York City jury.  And then we talked about mayor Eric Adams and his trouble with the FBI.  It was agreed that he was being targeted not because he was guilty of the crimes he probably did commit but because he had complained about the outrageous scourge of illegal aliens that the city was being forced to house and feed.

I said I thought that maybe after Trump takes office, he might cut a deal with Adams to have pressure put on the judges and prosecutors persecuting Trump in exchange for a pardon on the charges the FBI has brought against Adams.  Of course, I said this tongue in cheek.  New York Democrats will never stop attacking Trump until he cuts off federal funds to New York.  So, if he helps Adams, it will only be because he wants to make a deal with Adams to deport the New York illegals.

And then we talked about New York City’s future.  Basically, the crime and dysfunction has gotten so bad that even “safe” neighborhoods like Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn were experiencing levels of violent crime never seen before, even in the 1990s.  And outrages like the illegal alien who set a female subway rider on fire and watched impassively as she burned to death.

I asked whether it seemed likely that the disastrous conditions would elicit a powerful reaction to restore law and order and save the city.  The answer I got was no.  They felt there wasn’t the will to fix things.  The elites who sponsored Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams as mayors wouldn’t change course no matter the consequences.  The were intent on enforcing progressive policies regardless of the consequences.  Of course, my friends freely admit that these elites will eventually abandon New York City for safer suburbs once their families are at risk in the city.  And once the people with the money abandon New York City it will begin to look like Philadelphia and Newark and eventually Detroit.  So that was their take.  New York City is in its death spiral.  The crime that the Democrats unleashed after the summer of George Floyd will be the cancer that kills Gotham by the sea.

It’s a funny thing.  Several years ago, I returned home to my old neighborhood.  And it was basically unrecognizable.  The new immigrants there had taken over and made the place their own.  Well, even if it made me a little sad to see my childhood memories thoroughly erased, I could understand that it was the nature of cities like New York.  But knowing that the city would be utterly destroyed is different.  It’s completely unnecessary.  A city full of immigrants from all corners of the earth needs law and order even more than some homogeneous ethnic enclave.  Everyone needs to feel like the law is there to protect them from chaos.  The fact that the progressives have declared law and order racist is proof that they don’t deserve to govern.  But it may take the destruction of every blue city to prove to everyone in this country that fact.  Oh well.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome in 2025

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I’ve been very happy with my Sony A7 IV camera since I bought it a few years ago.  It does everything I need it to do and I’m not sure what would tempt me to trade it in.  So, I haven’t bought any photo gear in quite a while.  But recently a new lens has tempted me.  But it’s a long story (and thus the reason it’s a post). About fourteen years ago I bought the Sony (badged as Carl Zeiss) A-mount 135mm, f\1.8 lens.  It was an extremely extravagant purchase at $1,500 and I couldn’t justify it in use terms because basically it was a very long portrait lens for which I had very rare need.  But after seeing some of the extraordinary results it could produce, I plunked down the cash.  And it was every bit as sharp and contrasty as the critics claimed.  And I managed to find quite a few excuses to drag this big heavy lens with me to places and events where longer and shorter and lighter lenses make better sense.

But not too long after this purchase, Sony, in its infinite cruelty, stopped making A-mount cameras and went mirrorless.  I won’t repeat my long sad story of enduring the e-mount introduction.  But I will mention that Sony salved over the initial problem of having no lenses for their new mirrorless cameras by producing a line of attachments for adapting A-mount lenses to e-mount cameras.  They were designated with the prefix LA-EA and numbered successively 1 through 5.  And with each introduction I dreamed of my e-mount cameras working with my A-mount lenses as if they were native lenses.  Well, that never happened.  Granted they got better.  But even the LA-EA-5 never allowed my A-mount lenses to enjoy the full capability of the camera’s auto-focus or special features like magnified view, in the same way as my e-mount lenses could.

And so, one by one I sold off my A-mount lenses and mostly bought the e-mount equivalent lenses (or just didn’t replace them).  But not the 135mm f\1.8.  By the time the equivalent e-mount lens appeared my A-mount lens was no longer very marketable.  A-mount lenses had a fairly small pool of users and so the market prices sank to fairly low prices.  And when the new lens came out in e-mount they wanted $2,100.  And that seemed a bridge too far for a lens that wasn’t really needed for a major part of my shooting style.

Over the years third party manufacturers have come out with their versions of this lens in the e-mount.  First Sigma, then Samyang and now Viltrox.  Each time I looked at the combination of price savings and quality and I shrugged my shoulders and said meh.  But finally, it’s reached the breaking point.  A review of the Viltrox lens (actually several reviews) claim that it is very slightly better than Sony’s $2,100 version but at about 1/3 the price ($760).  So, I checked the trade in value of my old A-mount lens and finding it to be about $350 I mailed it out and now await my thirty pieces of silver (figuratively) before finishing off the transaction to buy the Viltrox.

Wrapping up the lens gave me a pang of regret.  It was a beautiful piece of kit that had worked flawlessly when attached to the camera it was designed for, the Sony A-850 DSLR.  It wasn’t the lens’s fault that the geniuses at Sony had almost simultaneously with buying the Minolta camera line, relegated all of its products to obsolescence by going mirrorless.  But such is life.

Well onward and upward in 2025.  I will record the arrival of the new lens with photos it produces.  After all that’s the real reason they make these darn things.

View from Campsite 5 at Toroweap

SONY DSC
SONY DSC

Christmas Movie Time

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Here it is two days before Christmas and I’ve already eaten so many cookies that I feel like a drunk in the middle of a four-day bender.  Well, there’s no avoiding the excesses.  Camera Girl is fiendish in her strategies to kill me with food.  She should hide these evil foods somewhere far away.  Instead, she lays them out all over the kitchen where even a man with a will of iron must succumb.  I’ve kept up my exercise regimen as best I can but exercise deals in hundreds of calories while pastries are measured in the thousands.  The pain, the pain.

Yesterday I watched, “It’s a Wonderful Life” in its entirety.  That’s something I haven’t done in at least fifteen years.  Many years ago, I overdosed on it.  I watched it too many times and it became played out.  But yesterday I found it fresh and enjoyable.  Of course, every scene in the movie was extremely familiar down to the slightest word and even gesture of the actors.  But I was able to appreciate just how fine the acting and directing was.  And as highly emotional as the ending of the movie obviously is I wasn’t put off at all by it.  Maybe this American Christmas Carol is fitting for the time and place we live in.  Maybe people are ready to hope for miracles again.  It’s certainly true that we need a few of them.  I’m not going to claim that heaven interceded and put Donald Trump in the White House instead of Kamala Harris.  At best maybe a divine force kept him from intersecting with that bullet that grazed his ear.  I’m afraid that heaven is not going to let us off the hook for the situation we find ourselves in.  But maybe we are being given a chance to straighten things out on our own.  The headaches that will entail are already beginning to emerge.  Well, we’ll leave the future to next year for now.

Today it was time to begin my annual “Christmas Carol” viewing experience.  I chose the George C Scott version.  And it did not disappoint.  Marley’s ghost, the Cratchit Christmas dinner and the final scene in Scrooge’s office provide all the correct notes to ensure my approval.  And as always Tiny Tim is pathetically frail and impossibly uncomplaining.  I noted to Camera Girl at the appropriate moment that Mrs. Cratchit’s railing against Scrooge during the toast moment was pitch perfect.  I could imagine and probably have heard equivalent protest from Camera Girl when some acquaintance of ours overstepped the bounds of propriety according to Camera Girl’s standards.  She does have a highly developed sense of outrage, especially when she decides that I will have to be the one to enforce it.  Women have that propensity.  Bless them.

Well, time is running out.  I’ll have to fit in the Alistair Sim and Reginald Owen versions in tomorrow.  That should be doable but I don’t think I’ll be able to get through “The Holly and Ivy” tomorrow.  Well, that can wait till Christmas Eve morning.  Christmas Eve and Christmas will be full days and I am not sure what my posting will be like.  The quotes and the photos are all pre-scheduled but my patented rants are a daily chore so I’ll have to do the best I can to put together something fitting.  We’ll have to see how that goes.  But Christmas week is here and away we go.

Tom’s World – 19DEC2024 – Incarceration; Retribution or Isolation?

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

Check this link, the subject is about something I can’t remember ever before having seen.
As far as I can remember, I’ve heard of incarceration in the context of the benefit to society, i.e., putting them away so they can’t do more damage. Among reasonable people, there is no dispute as to the truth of that proposition. (Unreasonable people? Who cares, screw ’em)
The link above is about the mass commutation Biden recently issued and how there is a very low chance of recidivism from the individuals freed, therefore not a net negative to society based on the principle of isolation. But the article disagrees with the commutation based on this principle: retribution, some of those people just flat deserved punishment.
The poster boy for this principle is a judge who was receiving $millions in kickbacks from a for-profit-boy’s prison for sentencing boys to that institution and betraying every principle, every person, and the trust (such as it is these days) in the judicial system, all for his personal enrichment.
So the guiding principle behind punishment for crime is now extended from incarceration for isolation from society to also include retribution, or the principle that people who do evil deserve punishment based on society’s perception of right and wrong.