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Archives
terrorism Yet Another Bogus 'Terror' Plot "By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur. "I've seen this movie before. "In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself." People whose jobs depend on finding terrorists will manufacture terrorists if none are to be found. How else can they justify their budgets? Just like militaries need wars to justify their budgets. If there isn't one then it's time to manufacture one.
terrorism Yet Another Bogus 'Terror' Plot "By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur. "I've seen this movie before. "In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself." People whose jobs depend on finding terrorists will manufacture terrorists if none are to be found. How else can they justify their budgets? Just like militaries need wars to justify their budgets. If there isn't one then it's time to manufacture one.
East Germany, Up Close and Personal "I remembered the painting from art class in school: The Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, by Caspar David Friedrich. It seemed legendary to me. On the one hand, I was fascinated by the colors, the pinks, the grays, the greens, and the shimmering blue of the water contrasting with the luminous white chalkstone. On the other hand, I was convinced that although I could always see the painting, I would never be able to contemplate the same scenery in reality. I wondered whether the landscape on the island of Rügen truly resembled the painting. It was a mystery to me. "And then the Berlin Wall came down. It was the spring of 1990, and I was 36 and living in the West Germany city of Essen. I was visiting a friend in Berlin when it all happened, and I decided to take advantage of the opportunity. It must have been May when I traveled to Rügen. I had grown up in the Ruhr region and all I knew about the other half of Germany -- other than Friedrich's painting of the chalk cliffs -- were the images of East Germany I had seen on television. One was of the Palace of the Republic, an image that led me to conclude that the German mentality over there was no different than it was where I lived. In other words, everything was very orderly and tidy. Other than that, I had seen a small slice of East Germany several times while traveling on the transit route between the Marienborn border crossing and West Berlin. I wasn't exactly tempted to see more. "There was only one occasion when I experienced a small fragment of the real East Germany. In 1985, I accompanied the singer Klaus Lage, as his photographer, on a tour through the East, but everything was set up so that there was little time to look around. It would be different the second time. Although my destination was Rügen and its chalk cliffs, the rest of my journey was more or less haphazard. I wanted to allow myself to drift around, to decide spontaneously whether to take a left or a right from the road I was driving on, to take pictures of whatever appealed to me and to spend the night wherever I happened to end up. How would people react, I wondered?"
amerika the beautiful Dirt and family, sea foam and fate "On the back side of the small resort island Caye Caulker, offshore from Belize City, Belize, is a beached two-man sailing vessel which has been lying on its side in the Caribbean sun and winds for fifty years. That was a long time ago, yet the poor Black Carib people who occupy the back side of the caye ("bakkatown," the Black Caribs call it), the ones who wait on the tables of the rich and pilot their fishing boats, still fondly remember the man who once sailed that old wooden boat. "He wah English, a man of da watah an de soul," one old bakka town fisherman recalled to the younger ones, who invariably ask, sometime in the course of their lives, about the old boat resting so prominently there at the end of the sandy road leading to the lagoon. "Today I was fortunate enough to receive a letter from a similar soul, a seafaring man from Nova Scotia. As to the letter writer's question, Why can't media and political figures form genuine sentiment or thought? My suspicion is this: Those who grow up in the childrens' wading pools of America, entranced by their toys and watched over by nanny capitalism in suburbia or Gotham, never glimpse the deep waters, and therefore live out their lives as children, capable only of childish perception. And in dispensing their perceptions as reality from their positions of power, they further infantilize our entire nation. " -- Joe Bageant Read the whole thing.
photography I've been carrying this camera around everywhere I go.
 It's a 1953 dual-format Mamiya-6. It takes 6x6 and 6x4.5 negatives. That's in centimeters. For the metric challenged that comes out to 2 1/4" square and 2 1/4 x 1 5/8". I'm shooting 6x6 now. I've not really been interested in 6x4.5 but I might try it out since this camera can shoot it.
 It folds up into a nice compact package that will fit in a coat pocket. The lens is a 4 element Tessar design. Not the fasted lens in the world, (f3.5) but sharp. The focusing is done by moving the film plane. There is a thumb wheel on the back that is easy to reach for focusing. Really a sweet camera. It was made in 1953 but it uses the latest in sensor technology. The sensor in it now is Fuji Pro 160C color negative film. An even newer sensor is a roll of Kodak Ektar 100 that is ready to load when the current roll of Fuji is done. Ektar 100 came out last year in 35mm and, due to popular demand, was released this spring in 120 roll film. That is one of the great things about these old cameras. The latest technology film gives them capabilities that they never had new. Below are a couple of pictures taken recently. More at my Flickr set: 1953 dual format Mamiya-6. I hope to get some more negatives scanned this weekend.
ecomony
Wishes, Hopes, Fantasies "Something like a week remains before General Motors is reduced to lunch meat on industrial-capital's All-You-Can-Eat buffet spread. The wish is that its deconstructed pieces will re-organize into a "lean, mean machine" for producing "cars that Americans want to buy," and that, by extension, the American Dream of a Happy Motoring economy may be extended a while longer. "This fantasy rests on some assumptions that just don't "pencil out." One is that the broad American car-owning public can continue to buy their cars the usual way, on credit. The biggest emerging new class in America is the "former middle class." Credit kept the remnants of the middle class going for decades after their incomes stopped growing in the 1970s. Now, their incomes have stopped coming in altogether and they are sinking into swamp of entropy already occupied by the tattoo-for-lunch-bunch. Of course, this has plenty of dire sociopolitical implications. "Unfortunately, the big American banks did their biggest volume business in their biggest loans at the very time that that the middle class was on its way to becoming former. Now that the former middle class is arriving at its destination, the banks are so damaged by bad paper that they won't make loans to even the remnant of the remnant of the middle class. In other words, the entire model for financing Happy Motoring is now out-of-order, probably permanently."
astronomy This is just too cool! "The Galileoscope™ is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 by a team of leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators. No matter where you live, with this easy-to-assemble, 50-mm (2-inch) diameter, 25- to 50-power achromatic refractor, you can see the celestial wonders that Galileo Galilei first glimpsed 400 years ago and that still delight stargazers today. These include lunar craters and mountains, four moons circling Jupiter, the phases of Venus, Saturn's rings, and countless stars invisible to the unaided eye. The Galileoscope costs just US$15 each plus shipping for 1 to 99 units, or US$12.50 each plus shipping for 100 or more."
 I ordered a couple for my granddaughter and oldest grandson and a couple for Zoe and me. $15! Check out the images from this telescope. It's really pretty good. Spread the joy of astronomy with a Galileoscope
education Tomgram: William Astore, Educating Ourselves to Oblivion "Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Our students don't perform well in math and science. The high-school dropout rate is too high. Minority students are falling behind. Teachers are depicted as either overpaid drones protected by tenure or underpaid saints at the mercy of deskbound administrators and pushy parents. "Unfortunately, all such headlines collectively fail to address a fundamental question: What is education for? At so many of today's so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer: For a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in today's collapsing job market. "Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life -- 20 years' service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level -- I'm convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It's simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.) "And here's one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job -- if it's merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods -- you've effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it."
mothers
 That's my mom on Mother's Day. Zoe and I just called her and sang Happy Birthday to her. Today is her 89th birthday. She has been in the nursing home for almost a year now and she has lost 60 pounds. Loosing weight like that is a little scary but now she is down to the weight she should be at and is feeling great. She was laughing and joking during our visit. She even got our jokes. She can stop losing weight now. I sat down on the floor so Zoe could take our picture. She was stroking the top of my head. Suddenly I was 4 and she was 28. It's been a long time. Zoe's mom is getting great care at the family care facility she is living in. Nick and Sable, the owners, are really great. Gerry is eating well and doing as well as can be expected. She enjoys seeing us but each week her Alzheimer's progresses and there is less and less of her. It's hard seeing someone slipping away in slow motion.
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