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Archives
abramoff
One of my New Year wishes came true. The year is starting off right.
G.O.P. Lobbyist Pleads Guilty in Deal With Prosecutors
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Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to three felony counts in Washington today as part of a settlement with federal prosecutors, ending an intense, months-long negotiation over whether the Republican lobbyist would testify against his former colleagues.
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thanks to Huffington Post
Jack Abramoff's "Cesspool of Corruption"
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This is just an initial peek into the sordid world being revealed by Abramoff and two of his key cronies now spilling the beans to federal investigators. But in the bigger picture, what we are witnessing is the death throes of the GOP "revolution" which once promised to restore morality to Washington but instead sank far deeper into the cesspool of corruption.
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Abramoff won't go down alone
After a career of stealing from his clients and corrupting lawmakers, the one-time Republican golden boy is set to destroy the political machine he helped create.
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His head bowed and his pinstripes faded, the former dean of Republican lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, arrived Tuesday at the chambers of federal Judge Ellen Huvelle to confess his sins. Under detailed questioning from the court, he took the blame for a career spent stealing from his Native American clients, hiding from tax collectors and corrupting members of Congress and their staffs. It was a tortured performance played out in hushed tones. By the time Abramoff rose to beg forgiveness from the Almighty, his voice was barely audible from the gallery.
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Winners and Losers
A guide to those whose careers will crash—and those who might benefit—because of Jack Abramoff’s saga of greed.
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Forget the black hat. Everybody in Washington is obsessed with Jack Abramoff’s gangsterlike attire as he came out of the federal courthouse. But the thing that jumps out at me is the figure $20,194,000. If I read the fed’s plea-agreement papers correctly, that’s the amount of cold cash that the Republican lobbyist siphoned from Indian tribes and stashed in his secret accounts.
You may not believe this, but in this city, that is an unheard of amount of money for a lobbyist to haul in—and the number itself signifies a troubling change in the nature of life in the capital of our country.
The denizens of D.C. deal in trillions of dollars. But they are YOUR dollars: tax receipts and federal spending. Lawyers and lobbyists here do well. Still, they haven’t generally been in the same league as money-power types in, say, New York or Los Angeles. This was a city in which official position meant more than a plush vacation home; in which a Ph.D. or J.D. meant more than a BMW. Traditionally, the locals have been more like Vegas blackjack dealers than the greedy people sitting on the other side of the table.
Well, Abramoff jumped the table—and the result will be the biggest influence-peddling scandal to hit Washington in recent times: the Scandal of the Poisoned BlackBerrys, which sent and received e-mails that now will make a gripping saga of greed in action.
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The GOP is in deep trouble
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I've listened to C-SPAN the last couple of days and the people calling in are pissed.
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photography
I found this post at photo.net:
URL for Les Gediman's new website
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Most of these haven't been seen before. All were taken with a Leica IIf RD with a coated f2/50 Summitar. The largest majority of the Italian photos were taken in Florence. Other locations are noted. The period was 1958-59 when I worked at SMA an Italian radar company, now defunct.
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This is where he posted the pictures.
lesgedimanwebsite's photos
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I really should get my f2/50 Summitar repaired.
Sharon may still be alive but he won't be back. All the rules just changed in the Israel/Palestinian conflict.
Operation reduces pressure on PM's brain
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A spokesman for Jerusalem's Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem, said Friday evening that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon remains in serious but stable condition after emerging from surgery - the third operation in two days - aimed at relieving intra-cranial pressure.
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Sharon puts Mideast future in flux
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Love him or hate him, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been an undeniable fact of life in Middle Eastern politics and military affairs for nearly six decades. Bewildered Arabs and Israelis spent Thursday trying to fathom the region without him if a massive stroke forces him to step down.
The Middle East could face heightened instability and bloodshed without the stabilizing leadership of the 77-year-old prime minister, according to some analysts. But others said prospects for peace could be markedly improved with the exit of the self-proclaimed warrior, who was in critical condition after being hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage Wednesday.
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The end of the Sharon era
Once despised by a generation of Israelis, Ariel Sharon became a venerated father figure. His passing leaves the future of the Middle East in even greater doubt.
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Ariel Sharon's critical illness marks the end of an era in Israel's leadership, and the beginning of a new chapter in the Jewish state's history. Throughout a unique military and political career, spanning over six decades, Sharon has been one of the most influential figures on Israel's national security, physical landscape and political map. Alternately viewed as a hero and a villain in his many public capacities, he exits Israel's political stage as an admired father figure, the most popular prime minister Israelis have had in a generation.
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transportation
www.KDF-WAGEN.de
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This brings back memories of the smell of hot engine oil wafting up from the alleged heater vents.
thanks to J-Walk Blog
snoopgate
NBC confirms it's investigating whether Bush spied on CNN's Christiane Amanpour
What it means to John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Bill Clinton if Bush wiretapped CNN's Christiane Amanpour
Why would Bush spy on Christiane Amanpour?
drawings
The Art of the First Fleet
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On 13 May 1787 eleven ships, now commonly referred to as The First Fleet, set sail from Portsmouth to establish a colony in New South Wales, Australia. They reached their destination on 18 January 1788, 18 years after Captain James Cook had first landed on the east coast of Australia at Botany Bay. One of the unplanned but long-lasting outcomes of this event was the large number of outstanding drawings of aboriginal people, the environment and wildlife found on arrival as well as of the early foundation of the colony.
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thanks to The Cartoonist
iran
George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb?
In an extract from his explosive new book, New York Times reporter James Risen reveals the bungles and miscalculations that led to a spectacular intelligence fiasco
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The story dates back to the Clinton administration and February 2000, when one frightened Russian scientist walked Vienna's winter streets. The Russian had good reason to be afraid. He was walking around Vienna with blueprints for a nuclear bomb.
To be precise, he was carrying technical designs for a TBA 480 high-voltage block, otherwise known as a "firing set", for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon. He held in his hands the knowledge needed to create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside a small spherical core. It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.
The Russian, who had defected to the US years earlier, still couldn't believe the orders he had received from CIA headquarters. The CIA had given him the nuclear blueprints and then sent him to Vienna to sell them - or simply give them - to the Iranian representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With the Russian doing its bidding, the CIA appeared to be about to help Iran leapfrog one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to a nuclear weapon. The dangerous irony was not lost on the Russian - the IAEA was an international organisation created to restrict the spread of nuclear technology.
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photography
The Luminous Years: Portraits at Mid-Century by Karl Bissinger
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Photographing the artistic life after World War II in a period full of promise, Karl Bissinger took unexpected portraits of the day's luminaries of high Bohemia—writers, dancers, musicians, painters, journalists, and celebrities for such magazines as Flair, Theatre Arts and Harper's Bazaar. These photographs capture those lost, illustrious years of artistic and literary life in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly in New York, but also in London, Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Assembled together, they offer a collective portrait of a cultural milieu the likes of which may not be seen again.
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Marlon Brando at the time he was appearing on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire, 1948
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when only too much is enough
Here is a new voice that I read regularly: By Neddie Jingo!
Our Harvest Being Gotten In
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As the Psihases saw it, moving into a bigger house was not something to be questioned, but something to be accepted, an axiom of American life.
"Bigger bigger, better better," Georgia Psihas said. "It's just a part of life."
And one that builders understand very well.
In Orlando, workers are busy finishing up the New American Dream Home, the showpiece of the annual national conference of home builders.
It will be 9,506 square feet, a place Alex Hannigan, the builder, calls "an all-about-me home."
It has a guest wing, five fireplaces, three laundries, a hobby room, an elevator, a spa, a home theater, a summer kitchen, a chandelier lift -- not things that the average American can necessarily afford at the moment, Hannigan said.
But, he added, "we figured we'd make this home in keeping with where our country's going."
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thanks to By Neddie Jingo!
Oh Six
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The sheer weight and inertia of American life kept our systems on their feet through 2005, despite a worsening economic climate and some harsh body blows, like the hurricanes that pounded oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico. In a way, some perverse law of sociopolitical physics seemed to concentrate all the year's destructive potential in the devastation of New Orleans, Biloxi, and other Gulf Coast towns -- while the mighty din of motoring and cheeseburger sales roared on elsewhere without pause from Cape Cod to Catalina.
First, a little background briefing on where we are at -- to use some of the bad grammar now normative in American life -- before I make predictions (i.e. guesses) about the year ahead.
You can only introduce so much perversity into an economic system before distortions cripple it. From 2001 through 2005, consumer spending and residential construction had together accounted for 90 percent of the total growth in GDP, while over two-fifths of all private sector jobs created since 2001 were in housing-related sectors, such as construction, real estate and mortgage brokering. Much of the money spent did not really exist except as credit -- incomes as yet unearned, hallucinated liquidity, wished-for wealth, all based on the expectation that house values would continue to rise at 10 to 20 percent a year forever. It became a reckless racket, all predicated on sustaining an economy that had lost its other means for generating wealth -- foremost its infrastructure for making things besides suburban houses.
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photography
London's Industrial Heritage
Warehouse, Gun Wharves, Wapping High St, Wapping (1981)
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thanks to The Cartoonist
global climate change
The Coming Meltdown
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The year 2005 has been the hottest year on record for the planet, hotter than 1998, 2002, 2004, and 2003. More importantly, perhaps, this has been the autumn when the planet has shown more clearly than before just what that extra heat means. Consider just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the last three months:
—Arctic sea ice is melting fast. There was 20 percent less of it than normal this summer, and as Dr. Mark Serreze, one of the researchers from Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told reporters, "the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover." That is particularly bad news because it creates a potent feedback effect: instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is now open blue water that soaks up the sun's heat, amplifying the melting process.
—In the tundra of Siberia, other researchers report that permafrost has begun to melt rapidly, and, as it does, formerly frozen methane—which, like the more prevalent carbon dioxide, acts as a heat-trapping "greenhouse gas"—is escaping into the atmosphere. In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn't freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.
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photography
I have a feeling that I might have linked to this before. If I have it's worth linking to again.
Why Your Camera Does Not Matter
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Why is it that with over 60 years of improvements in cameras, lens sharpness and film grain, resolution and dynamic range that no one has been able to equal what Ansel Adams did back in the 1940s?
Ansel didn't even have Photoshop! How did he do it? Most attempts fall short, some are as good but different like Jack Dykinga, but no one is equal.
Why is it that photographers loaded with the most extraordinary gear who use the internet to get the exact GPS coordinates of Jack's or Ansel's photo locations and hike out there with the image in hand to ensure an exact copy (illegal by US copyright laws and common decency), that they get something that might look similar, but lacks all the impact and emotion of the original they thought they copied?
I'm not kidding. You can read about a bunch of these turkeys here. They used university astronomers to predict the one time in almost two decades that the conditions would match and had 300 of the blind converge at just the right spot. They still didn't get the clouds, snow or shadows right. This makes Ansel cringe. Of course they didn't get anything like what they wanted: compelling photographs come from inspiration, not duplication.
Why is it that even though everyone knows that Photoshop can be used to take any bad image and turn it into a masterpiece, that even after hours of massaging it looks worse than when one started?
Maybe because it's entirely an artist's eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools.
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thanks to Conscientious
Ken has all sorts of interesting stuff on his site. It was some of his nice pictures taken with cheap box cameras that prompted me to include a couple of those in my photography kit.
evolution
Golden Gould Awards for 2005
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Some people might call them idiots, sadly misled, or pig ignorant ... George Bush calls them his Base.
The statements below the fold were taken from chat rooms, e-mails, IM's, and the Talk Origins Feedback Archive. As best I can tell these are all sincere objections to evolutionary biology--that's part of what makes them so funny. In several cases I conversed with the authors enough to establish they probably weren't just kids. The scary thing is, a number of them claimed to have degrees in hard science and one or two said they were teachers.
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10. I know you think you have fossils that proof stuff, but those fossils are all fake, they're made out of tar and stuff, this is fact not theory. They have factories in China mostly making the fossils.
9. If people came from monkeys, why are there still people?
8. If the strata layers were true, the missing links would be the dinosaurs because they came way before other evolutionary stages. But no, we are finding dinosaur bones left and right. We have over 35 kinds of dinosaurs and we have more than one for each. Is that a problem. How long have they been digging now?
7. then perhaps you can explain how A fish crawled out of the sea and evolved into a mammal with lungs without dying before he evolved. You scientists make up something to explain all of your theories without ANY proof. You are fools living a lie. And being as Satan is the father of lies, he is your master. Turn or Burn boys!
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my 35mm kit changes again
I went to the doctor Tuesday and now am suitably medicated and getting better (bronchitis) but still coughing like crazy. I've been trying to take it as easy as I can. That can be dangerous. You know, the thing with devils and idle hands. Living with an Alzheimer's patient doesn't leave time and mind for much picture taking but it does let me think about a photography kit that will give me maximum flexiblity for low cost for when I do have time for picture taking. I thought I had settled on three camera bodies: Leica IIIc, FED 2 (both rangefinders), and a Pentax H1a (SLR). Well, I discovered the Voigtlander Bessaflex available at Cameraquest for a very reasonable $279.
It's a modern SLR with an old lens mount. The M42 lens mount of my old Pentax H1a. It would compliment the H1a very nicely. For one it has TTL metering which would be nice for macro work. There are a number of bills to be paid off between now and delivery so it would be awhile but something to plan for. (For anyone who wants a new mechanical SLR with thousands of excellent and cheap used M42 screw mount lenses avaiable would do well to consider one of these.) Then I logged on to Rangefinder Forum last night and one of my strap customers (scroll down to Gerry M. in Medford, OR, Bessa R2A) had a Zorki 3M for sale at a very low price.
This is not the Zorki 3M I bought. This is one belongs to another strap customer of mine (scroll down a little more on my gallery page). They are like my Leica IIIc on steroids. Many (including myself) think this is the finest of the Russian rangefinders. It has a 1:1 viewfinder and speeds up to 1/1000 and slow speeds without a seperate low speed selector. Beautiful cameras. They weren't made for too many years and are the most expensive of the Russian rangefinders. The usually fetch from $100 and up. More than I can afford. But Gerry only wanted $15.
This is why. He started to take it apart to paint it and then lost interest. Fortunately he taped all the parts down. I contacted Oleg (he rebuilt my Leica IIIc) and he quoted $35 to $40 to put it all back together with a clean, lube, and adjust.
The Zorki has the best viewfinder of all my rangefinders but only for 50mm lenses so this will be my 50mm rangefinder. The FED 2 will remain my 85mm rangefinder and the Leica IIIc will be my 35mm wide angle rangefinder. Three rangefinder bodies and one SLR body is enough so no Bessaflex in my future. I just saved a lot of money!
But wait! There's more!
Yesterday one of my readers, Terry Nelson, offered me a box of old camera gear which I accepted. I inquired as to just what might be in the box and it turns out that there is a Pentax Spotmatic, an Olympus OM-2 and several lenses. It looks like I will have a Bessaflex equivalent (the Spotmatic) for nothing and have some trading gear. The OM2 is so tempting to keep but I really want to keep my kit simple and mechanical. I will have to wait to see just what he has. That which I can't use I will sell or use for trading stock. Something good happens once and awhile.
happy new year
One can hope that this new year will start to bring us back our country. Rove's indictment would help. Fitzgerald may have more indictments. Cheney? Be still my heart! Jack Abramoff may spill his guts and take down the Republican Congressional leadership. And Bush's proudly admitting that he broke the law and spied on American citizens may eventually result in impeachment. The wagons are circling the bastards. Of course the bastards could make things much worse by attacking Iran. Let's hope for the best. Take care.
freedom
The Simulacran Republic
by Joe Bageant
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Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through, simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now, especially in America's heartland. Our national reality is held together by a pale, carbon imprint of the original. The well-off with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics ... politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacran republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and "freedom of choice" within the hologram. America's citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state's culture producing machinery.
We no longer have a country -- just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information. Sure there is flesh within the machine, but its animating force is a viral concept, a meme run amok. Free market capitalism. We got to move them refrigerators, got to sell them color teevees.
Meanwhile the culture generating industry spins our mythology like cotton candy. We all need it to survive, Hollywood myths, imperial myths, melting pot myths, the saluting dick male myths. They keep the machine running. And when the machine is running correctly, it smoothes its own way by terrifying uncooperative people into submission in prisons and torture rooms, where we do not have to look at the corpses on ice and the naked hooded bodies handcuffed to the bars. We are innocent as long as we keep our eyes taped shut. And only with our eyes shut can we keep seeing the hologram. And with duct tape over our mouths, we can recite its slogans with one hand over our heart with the other one resting on the trigger.
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comic strips
Little Nemo was an amazing comic strip. It's hard to believe that it came out 38 years before Dr. Albert Hoffman's famous bicycle ride. I want it but at $120 it's out of my league. Actually the first printing is sold out and a used one is now available on Amazon for $299. A second printing is due in early March. Anyone want to buy me one?
Finding "Little Nemo"
At the legendary comic strip's centennial, Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland" gets the treatment it deserves in a huge, lush new collection.
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Very few people who are still alive have seen Winsor McCay's work the way it was meant to be seen. That's a shame -- he was one of America's first major comic-strip artists, and a century after his peak, his work is still startling. History-minded cartoonists from Art Spiegelman to Vittorio Giardino have composed dozens of homages to McCay; he's easy to pastiche or parody, because his best strips follow the same formula in every episode. Someone falls asleep and has a turbulent, fantastical dream, full of strange exclamations, then wakes up in the last panel, complaining about having eaten something before going to sleep. In "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend," which ran for almost 10 years in the early part of the 20th century, the food in question was specifically Welsh rarebit. (Alan Moore zinged McCay with a sleep-talker's monologue in his 1986 story "Pictopia": "Melted cheese! Melted cheese! Oh, mama, do take care, my sheets will tangle for sure!") As for McCay's work itself, it's been reprinted here and there, although virtually all of it is out of print, except for the odd page or two that inevitably shows up in history-of-comics retrospectives.
But he didn't draw his comic strips to be treated as museum pieces; he drew them to make newspaper readers' eyes bug out of their heads. "Little Nemo in Slumberland" was the peak of McCay's art, and "Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!," edited by Peter Maresca, is the first book to do justice to it, basically because it is freaking gigantic. It's a luxury item -- 120 bucks -- but it delivers: at 16 by 21 inches, it's a coffee-table book bigger than some coffee tables. In other words, it's the size of the New York Herald's tabloid pages, on which "Little Nemo" was originally printed, and its gorgeous color reproduction is designed to look like the pages as they were published, on paper far nicer than newsprint but with the same background tone.
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fascism
The real threat of fascism
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Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: the vast bulk of legislative activity favors the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and US governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the last 25 years.
Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds this steadfast focus on the well-being of big business in other times and places.
The exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism.
Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity. These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. His answer was, "Yes, but we will call it anti-fascism."
By exploring the disturbing parallels between our own time and the era of overt fascism, I am confident that we can avoid the same hideous mistakes. At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect ourselves from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, I believe that North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course.
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thanks to Bad Attitudes
photography
The Thought Project
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Over a period of three months I stopped 150 strangers on the street and asked them what they were thinking the second before I stopped them.
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I was thinking before reaching these lakes if I should take the stairs or if I should use the path leading down to the lakes.
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thanks to Ken Smith
snoopgate
Barron's editorial: Congress should consider impeaching Bush
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This is big. I asked around about Barron's and found out that they're a BIG deal in the business community, every CEO reads them, and they're about as reputable in the eyes of America's top business leaders as the Wall Street Journal, if not more so. As for politics, Barron's doesn't it touch it, and no one thinks Barron's is even vaguely liberal.
Now with that as background, we find Barron's editorializing (entire editorial here) that what Bush did is potentially an impeachable offense. And that Congress needs to review what happened and either pass legislation giving Bush full authority to spy on Americans at will without a search warrant or they should impeach him.
Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.
I really appreciate the option Barron's has presented. Either you're with the Constitution or you're against it. If Congress thinks Bush has the power to do what he did, then pass legislation that explicitly lets him spy on us without any judicial check - stop playing games with this inferred and implied crap. Give him the power directly and let the American people know it (then see what happens). And if you don't want him to have the power, impeach him. But there's no in between. Either be man enough to give the man the power outright or charge him with high crimes against the Constitution.
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thanks to Politics in the Zeros
The Pentagon Breaks the Law
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The National Security Agency story has pushed military spying on anti-war groups off the front pages, and the Pentagon appears to have seized upon administrative error to explain away its slide into domestic spying.
The Department of Defense now says that analysts may not have followed the law and its own guidelines that require the purging of information collected on U.S. persons after 90 days. The law states that if no connection is made between named persons and foreign governments or transnational terrorist organizations or illegal activity, U.S. persons have a right to their privacy and information about them must be deleted.
Thanks to RL, I now know that the database of "suspicious incidents" in the United States first revealed by NBC Nightly News last Tuesday and subject of my blog last week is the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN) database, an intelligence and law enforcement sharing system managed by the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).
What is clear about JPEN is that the military is not inadvertently keeping information on U.S. persons. It is violating the law. And what is more, it even wants to do it more.
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