Tom’s World – 09SEP2025 – Drugs

photog Guest Contributors, TomD ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

Truthfully, I went through a phase when I did drugs but that ended well over 40 years ago. I was lucky, not smart, no incredible willpower, just lucky. I apparently didn’t possess whatever gene creates the predilection to addiction and dependency. I could try something and say, “That was kinda cool” and walk away. A lot of people do have that gene and they are the unfortunates that battle dependency their entire lives. Some people, bless them, do possess that gene but also have a strength of character to refuse to succumb to alcohol, or drugs of lord knows what type.

A big problem being there have been some frightening drugs created over the last decades, drugs so horrendously addicting and/or destructive. I’m not certain that that it is possible to 100% solve the problem but, with these, an effort has to be made.

Having know a few of the addictive unfortunates, I have some sympathy and wouldn’t accept any solution that required that addicted users end in a jail cell.

I never dabbled with the supply side but obviously knew people who did and also know there is, and will always be, a percentage of the population that can no more resist the prospect of easy and big money than the users can resist the product.

I have no ideal what the solution could be other than to contain it to whatever extent possible. A lot of lives ruined and this includes especially alcohol. I do know that simply criminalizing every aspect, even strongly, reduces the problem but does not eliminate. Ever heard of Prohibition? That worked well, humm?

You’d think that the flood of fentanyl would act to suppress drug use because if you have to worry that the next dose of your whatever contains a fatal dose of something unexpected.

As far as blowing people away who are part of this plague of Musk level rich narco-terrorism? I’m perfectly okay with that.

They Blowed Up Real Good!

photog Current Events, Trump ,

So everyone in the world has by now seen the US military blowing up a speed boat carrying drugs from Venezuela to the US.

And some of you probably heard that some members of Congress, including some republicans have called this strike, murder.  Okay, I’m really glad that they have gone on the record as being against killing people importing cocaine, heroin and fentanyl into our country to kill our kids.  I think that’s a great way to get these people out of government.  At the very least, the Republicans have given their primary opponents a nice easy commercial to use against them.

I guess if you’re a hopeless libertarian you can justify legalizing hard drugs like fentanyl.  But even the boneheads in government in places like Washington and Oregon have had a change of heart about their decriminalizing opiates.  Their streets are filled with dying addicts murdering each other to get enough money for another fix.  And the spillover from the crime and disease that it has spawned has bankrupted cities like Portland and Seattle and driven all legitimate businesses out of their downtowns.

I would welcome Donald Trump blowing up narcotraficantes wherever and however he can do it.  Boats, planes, trucks, burros, human mules, you name it.  In fact I’d applaud it being featured on a television show called, “They Blowed Up Real Good!”  There could be footage from drones, attack aircraft of various types and even boats and land vehicles.  Just whenever they find a plane, truck or boat loaded with drug substance on its way to American citizens.

And sure, I know these addicts are culpable for their choices but I’ve known people who got started when they were basically kids and once hooked they never had a chance of escaping.  So for the sake of saving a generation of  American kids, I think we should “blow them up real good.”

And for good measure, we should put huge price tags on the heads of the drug kingpins and have their loyald minions sell them out and drag them off to some prison and then finish them off with a shot of fentanyl just like what they sell to kids.

And I realize many people disagree.  They think the war on drugs is a waste of time.  And of course I think they’re allowed their opinions.  But I think they’re wrong.  And making it a real war might be the way to win it.  I’ve always heard that Singapore doesn’t have a drug problem because they use the death penalty for drug traffickers.  Well, I’m sure it’s not as simple as all that and I know that the United States is many orders of magnitude larger than Singapore in both geographical size and population.  But it’s my opinion that destroying the opioid drug industry is a worthwhile goal that would eliminate untold misery and criminality from our country.  And I commend President Trump on his first video of the new season.  Hopefully he can finish off the season with a video of Maduro being hauled off to a Supermax prison in anticipation of his star turn in the death chamber.

Laowa AF FF 180mm f/4.5 CA-Dreamer Macro 1.5X Lens

photog Photography , , , ,

Regular readers of this site who read my photography reviews know that I am a macro-lens junkie of the first echelon.  I have been trying to get Sony to upgrade all their cameras to allow my vintage Minolta 200mm f\4  Macro lens to perform like a lens thirty years younger.

Alas, that will never be.  But in pursuit of a long macro (~ 180-200mm) I have always hoped that Sony or one of the third party manufacturers of lenses like Sigma or Tamron would one day produce an autofocus macro lens in this focal range.  And autofocus is the trick because Laowa, a Chinese manufacturer has come out with macro lenses of various lengths but up until recently, they only made manual focus lenses.

But that has now changed.  I saw this announcement:

Laowa AF FF 180mm f/4.5 CA-Dreamer Macro 1.5x Lens

It says this lens is coming out in a couple of weeks.  And it’s even better than a 1.0X magnification.  It’s a 1.5X.  This is very exciting.  If this lens autofocuses as well as my Sony 90mm macro it will provide a distinct advantage for things like hummingbird photos and dragonflies.

Now this is a big if.  There is no guarantee that Sony will allow the autofocus of their cameras to work exactly as well with third part lenses as with their own.  The only proof of the pudding will be when I have this lens in hand for a week or two of testing.

Now that’s not such a big deal.  The Laowa lenses usually cost less than half of what Sony charges and renting one would even be cheaper still.  So I think I have a plan to play around with this thing in the near future.

This unfortunately feeds into a long standing illness that I suffer from, namely; gear acquisition syndrome (G.A.S.).  It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a flareup of this but apparently I am not cured.

To be continued…

Comment from TomD

I think the reviewer said that autofocus didn’t work at less than 1.5 meter distance. That being a little less than 5′, it won’t be useful for macro work.

I used to do a lot of studio macro work that I was paid for. I sorta specialized in gold and silver coin and numismatic photography. The attached picture was part of a series for an Australian coin distributor. These coins are all by The Perth Mint Perth Aus.

Most of my shots were with a Sony100mm 2.8 and shot with studio lighting.

Australian-group-1m
Australian-group-1m

Bogita!

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

A good friend of the site kindly put me in touch with a published author this week and I had a very edifying and encouraging discussion.  He provided me with the kind of practical advice that I’ve been looking for.  And it’s not that his information differed from some of the things I’ve been reading but rather that he provided reinforcement for some of the things I had been leaning toward but agonizing about.  I will take a page from Camera Girl’s book and as she famously said (and as she claims Nike plagiarized her by saying), “Just do it!”

So, I spent a couple of hours doing a clean up of a copy of the manuscript that I want to send out to a medium sized publishing house that I know is friendly to folks of my political and cultural leanings.  Who knew that em-dashes are not welcome everywhere?  Well potato/puhtatah.  When in Rome do as the Romans do.  Tippecanoe and Tyler too, I guess.

Yes, I’m now on the manic climb of the manic/depressive roller coaster and all things are possible and everything is easy.  Soon I’ll be crashing down into the abyss of hopelessness and despair.  Well …, actually not.  There’s a medicine in actually finishing anything.  The whole “beginning, middle and end” thing is not just a concept.  It’s a part of human nature and there is salvation in typing that last word and hitting the period key. Bang!

So, tomorrow is work and maybe more work.  There are new systems at work that have to be learned and used.  And people to train and all kinds of boring and stupid things to do.  But even that doesn’t daunt me right now.  So, I’m looking ahead to sending the manuscript out in the next few days and then I’ll see if there are any agents that I might want to contact.  For that I’ll have to put together a query letter which sounds like a goofy thing.  It’s a kind of sales pitch to inspire the agent to want to handle your book in discussions with publishers.  I imagine Don Draper of Mad Men standing up at a blackboard pointing at a sketch of something inspirational and gesticulating wildly while saying incredibly persuasive things about my creative genius.

But from what I’ve heard it won’t be Don Draper because most agents, editors, publishers and probably everyone else in the publishing business are all women.  And probably not fun women like Camera Girl who has a great sense of humor (most of the time) but serious and really annoying women who say “they and them” instead of “she and her.”  Well, what can you do?  The world is made up of all kinds of folks and as that famous philosopher Rodney King once asked, “Why can’t we all just get along?”  So, I must do my best to struggle and survive regardless of my instincts and early training.  I will put on my best smile and put my best foot forward and step into the future.  But no matter what, there will be no girl-boss in “The Sniper.”  Bogey cannot be Bogita!

Trump is Onto Something

photog Current Events, Trump , , ,

I was watching some news stories today.  In both cases a white woman was assaulted by a black man.  Now if the ethnicities were reversed and a black woman was assaulted by a white man it would not be less criminal but it would be astonishingly more unlikely.  And the two assaults had very different outcomes.  In the first instance a middle-aged woman working in Chicago was knocked unconscious by a thug who has made a criminal career of doing this exact thing.  In the other case, a dangerously deranged homeless man took a knife and plunged it into a young Ukrainian woman who was sitting in front of him on a light rail train in Charlotte NC.  She died from the attack.

So very different details, but the same cause.  These two women were attacked because in 2020 George Floyd died of a drug overdose and the people of Minnesota decided to export their white guilt to overrun all the Democrat run cities with black rioting.  And during the rioting they forced the police to stand aside while crime was normalized and dysfunction became the rule.  Democrat district attorneys and judges eliminated bail and just let the offenders out of jail almost as quickly as the police brought them in.  They even decriminalized theft (less than a thousand dollars) in places like California.  Slowly some cities have tried to end the madness.  But criminals get used to running amok.  So, levels of crime have never returned to pre-2020 (pre-George Floyd) levels.

So, these two women were attacked because two dangerous repeat-offending criminals were on the streets instead of in prison because, post-George-Floyd, black criminals are not incarcerated as they should be.  And, of course, the largest victims of these repeat offenders are other black people living around them.  But black voters keep returning Democrat politicians to office regardless of how much crime they allow to flourish in their cities.  So, the present tsunami of urban crime continues unabated.

But somebody finally decided to “notice.”  And that somebody is Donald Trump.  As his ICE agents descend on the various Democrat run “sanctuary cities” he has decided to use the National Guard to protect the ICE agents from Antifa and while they’re there he has the soldiers preventing street crime just by their presence.  And of course, when this happens, it’s a revelation to the residents of these cities.  People start walking down streets without fear of being robbed or assaulted and cities feel like they did five years ago.  Even the Democrat mayor of Washington DC was excited by the change in her city.  Shocking!

And according to the pollsters it’s popular with normal people.  So, here’s another 80/20 issue that Trump can beat the blue mayors and governors over the head with; urban crime.  And of course, places like Chicago and Portland are so impossibly blue that no permanent solution is possible.  But blue cities in red states like Atlanta, St. Louis, Kansas City and many others can benefit from a partnership between the governors and the federal government to show these cities what it’s like when crime isn’t tolerated.  Even the most corrupt mayors and city officials will be affected by their operations coming under scrutiny from the Department of Justice.  After all, abandoning Americans to the mercy of street thugs is a form of civil rights violation.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can’t exist in a crime ridden hellhole created by lawlessness that’s sponsored by the local government that’s supposed to be preventing it.

So, Trump is once again attacking every American problem simultaneously and kudos to him for it.  Now how do I get him to clean up Dunwich?  First Selectman Cthulhu is a tough nut to crack.