My oldest, Jenny, is visiting from Fort Carson, Colorado. She came with her kids Robyn and Evan. Unfortunately, her husband, William, is still in Baghdad. It's been hot here. It's been in the 80s. It's true, we are heat wimps. Anything over 70 degrees is getting too warm. Jenny, Robyn, and Evan came over last night with Katie and her son Mike. It was after 7pm but it was still warm. Everyone immediately went around to the back of the house where we had a little swimming pool set up. These pictures are for you, William. We wish you were here. You probably wish that, too.
Here are a couple more pieces from our man in Winchester, Virginia: Joe Bageant. And don't forget that his book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, is now available at all fine book stores. If it isn't, it damn well should be. (Here is my review of Deer Hunting with Jesus.)
The Ants of Gaia It's only the end of the world, so quit bitching
As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it with a little sugar (in the cartoons, ants are always freaks for sugar, right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of their parched little carcasses. I'd guess that it was the lack of water that finally got 'em.
But the most interesting thing in retrospect -- if a jar of dead bugs can be called interesting -- is this: Up until the very end they seemed to be happily and obliviously busy. They constructed an ant society with all of its ant facilities, made more baby ants and did all those things ants do that the proverbial grasshopper is famous for not doing. Obviously Christian predestinationists to the last ant, they met the grasshopper's grim fate by another route, and did not look at all surprised in death.
Now you'd think that the lesson of the ants would be obvious as hell to any non-intoxicated individual with a grade school education. Never mind that many people since Malthus, as my sainted daddy would have put it, "Done drove the point in the ground and broke it clean off." Never mind that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb was a best seller and remains a classic. Never mind that James Lovelock, the nerdish forward thinking Englishman who 99% of Americans never heard of, delivered unto us yet one more time the worst truth in human history, the Gaia Hypothesis. Which is a fancy way of saying we cannot continue to devour our planet forever because it amounts to self-cannibalism.
Lovelock also convincingly argued that, due to the side effects of this species expiration, now acknowledged as global warming, the equator will look like Mars at some point relatively soon, with the surviving 20% of humans now alive, or perhaps in the next generation, living near the North and South Poles.
As to be expected, the few very comfortable elite folks on this earth said of Lovelock: "This guy is full of shit, a nutcase being adored by a bunch of naked tattooed pagans and gloomy intellectual types," both of which number among my favorite kinds of people.
Those pagans who allowed themselves to feel and not just intellectualize about the earth's condition, and those scientists who did not require computer modeling to do simple subtraction, recognized that these are the most challenging of times in human history, "challenging" being a polite term for the fact that that humanity is gonna die off big time, if not sooner, then later. Call it the secular version of The End Times.
Despite what Internet liberals may think, most real working class Americans, and I mean the people who tune up your Prius or press your dry cleaning, haven't given a flying fock about the Iraq war for the last couple of years now. Not until recently, when it became pretty clear we are losing it -- losing being the worst possible thing in a society force fed on sports and the winner-loser mentality which created the uniquely American contemptuous epithet, "a loser." But now as my friend Buddy, who at middle age has been reduced to bagging groceries and "shagging carts" in the parking lot at one of the local Food Lion supermarkets says, "If we ain't losing, we seem to been over there entirely too long to be winnin'. That's for shore."
Buddy the bagboy hasn't the slightest notion of how national politics in any way affects his life. And so when the "Unfair Practices in Credit Cards Act" passes the Senate he will not know that the raising of his minimum payment had nothing to do with some well meaning but totally out of touch Democrats, who've never lived on $8.50 an hour. The paternalistic attempt of the bill's sponsors surely would protect future credit card racket victims. But Buddy and millions like him will be screwed the day it goes into effect by the new higher minimum payments, and he starts getting calls from people with an Indian accent regarding all three of his plastic cards. Sometimes Democrats can be as thankful as any Republican that most working folks don't examine politics too closely.
Meanwhile the Republicans, like the Biblical King Balthazar and his court magicians, are watching in terror the writing on the wall by the mystic hand: "You're finished guys. Too many Halliburton and Diebold concubines hath drank from the golden cup." Thus the Democratic Party leadership headquartered at the Westchester Country Club will claim credit for many victories in the next elections, most of which will be handed them by the blowback of the worst presidency in American history.
But that still leaves a lot of pissed off ordinary and uninformed Americans to placate on the wreckage of our domestic front. So the party of Roosevelt begins to dimly understand that now is the opportunity to re-associate itself with populism. The problem is that Democratic Party "leadership" has no notion of what populism means. First they ignored real working class people, then they forgot they existed.
"Myself and a couple have friends have entered the above into the Modest Mouse video competition. Using green screen footage provided by the band we cut a simple music video. We then degraded the images and printed out each frame sequentially. (all 4133 of them) We then nailed each "shot" of 50-100 posters to various structures and posts. Then using a digital SLR camera with a long exposure we frame by frame shot each poster. Oh, and theres a little video projection (again, frame by frame on the SLR) just to mix it up. There is no compositing, no shortcuts, just lots of blood, sweat and tears, and a huge Kinkos bill!"
I get lots of letters from people in various corners of the nation who are hysterically disturbed by the continuing spectacle of suburban development. But instead of joining in their hand-wringing, I reply by stating my serene conviction that we are at the end of the cycle -- and by that I mean the grand meta-cycle of the suburban project as a whole. It's over. Whatever you see out there now is pretty much what we're going to be stuck with. The remaining things under construction are the last twitchings of a dying organism.
It is not an accident that the housing bubble coincided with the phenomenon of Peak Oil. First of all, the housing bubble should more properly be called the suburban bubble, because most of the activity came in the form of "greenfield" housing subdivisions, and included all the additional crap-o-la accessories required by them -- strip malls, power centers, Outback steak houses, car washes, et cetera. The suburban expansion has been based entirely on cheap-and-abundant supplies of oil. Similarly, it was not an accident that the suburban project faltered briefly in the 1970s, when America's oil production entered its long decline, OPEC seized the moment, and oil prices shot up. Notice that the final suburban blowout occurred after 1990, when the North Sea and Prudhoe Bay oil strikes came into full production, disabling OPEC, and a world oil glut finally drove prices as low as ten dollars a barrel in 1999. That ushered in the climactic phase of suburbia, as represented by things like the standard 4000-square-foot Toll Brother's McMansion and the heyday of the super-gigantic SUV to go with it.
The American public has no idea how over all that is. The bottom is falling out under not only the housing market (as in houses up for sale) but on the whole apparatus for delivering future houses, and the car-oriented crap associated with it. The production home-builders, such as Toll Brothers, Hovanian, Pulte, et cetera are going down and they will not be coming back. There will be a great deal of wishing that they might come back, but they won't. Likewise, the commercial builders of all the various forms of suburban retail will be waiting to "turn the corner." But they will discover that the wall they have hit has no corner. It's just a wall.
GOLDBERG: And you know, but I do think that what Cheney has learned after a lifetime in Washington as a power player, is that the person who holds the secrets has power. And he is using that for what I would say, or probably what he believes to be certainly good ends. A lot of people disagree on that, but he's trying to do best as he can and he sees holding onto power as a tool to do that.
That, of course, is the defining mentality of the Authoritarian Mind, captured in its purest essence by Jonah. Our Leaders are Good and want to protect us. Therefore, we must accept -- and even be grateful -- when they prevent us from knowing what they are doing. The less we know, the more powerful our Leaders are. And that is something we accept and celebrate, for our Leaders are Good and we trust that the more powerful they are, the better we all shall be.
No inferences or interpretations are required to describe Jonah's mentality this way. That is precisely -- expressly -- what he said. And though it is rarely expressed in such explicit form, this is the mindset which, more than anything else, has enabled the rampant lawbreaking and unprecedented secrecy of the last six years.
We do not need open government, do not need to know what our Leaders are doing, must not demand that they act only within the limits of law -- because we place our faith in them, trust in them as warriors for the Good who want only what is best for us. Transparency and oversight diminishes their power, makes them weaker. And we want them to be as powerful as possible. Or, as Jonah so succinctly put it: "the person who holds the secrets has power. And [Cheney] is using that for what I would say. . . to be certainly good ends."
Three months ago I had my small-flash kit together and was just around the corner from making it work. It was a corner that kept receeding. When using old flashes you have to worry about the voltage the flash puts out. Digital cameras, as well as electronic film cameras, only like to see about 6 volts. Anything more can fry their brains. My old Vivitar 283s apparently can put out up to 300 volts. The solution is a safe sync that will cut the voltage down. I was using a Wein safe sync which fit on the hot shoe also providing a PC sync connection. Unfortunately, it wouldn't fire the strobe. B&H Photo was kind enough to replace it. I installed it on the hot shoe of my digital Pentax SLR and it didn't work. Then, when I pulled out the PC sync cord the pin on the cord pulled out and stayed in Wein safe sync. It was at that point I decided to stop screwing around with PC connectors. I then ordered a cheap Chinese radio contolled flash trigger for $25 plus shipping. (Ones that really work are almost $200 each.) It worked at first and then stopped. In searching some forums I found these flash triggers didn't work too well with the Vivitar 285HV and that there was a new model that did. I contacted the eBay seller and he would replace it but I would have to find my receipt and return it. I decided to go to Plan C.
I went off to the Paramount Cord web site and ordered a 18" hot shoe to household male cord and a 12" Vivitar connector to a household female cord. I should have done this from the beginning. They are nice and heavy duty.
By using household electrical connectors you can use any extension cord to connect them. (These are U.S. electrical connectors.) The hot shoe end will usually be on my digital Pentax SLR but it turns out my 1958 Ricoh Diacord has a hot shoe. It's a very sturdy connection. That's a ten foot orange 16 gauge extension cord. I have two of them and if I need more length I can grab one of the extension cords I use for my weed eater. I had 70 feet of cord hooked up and it fired every time. I'm using heavier cord than you probably need to but the heavier gauge will result in less coltage drop and the orange cords are easier to see. I also now have a Lumedyne safe sync that is a little box with female houshold on one side and male household on the other and acts as a voltage regulator. I will just plug it in between the cord on the camera and the extension cord. I was then reading the discussion threads at Strobist and came across Jacobs Photo/Graphics and his power packs for small strobes. I will be getting one of these. He really likes Vivitar 285s and 283s and has a page on using them that gives me a lot of ideas. He also has a page on using Metz 45s as off camera strobes.
Which is cool because I have one of those, too. I hadn't thought of using it off camera, partially because it's a CL-1 that only has one manual setting. No partial manual settings. I did a quick comparison with my flash meter and the Metz puts out a little over 1 1/2 stops of light compared to the Vivitar 285HV. I don't have a Metz to household cord (yet) but it fires fine with the Sonia optical slave.
These little devices sense a spike in light from the strobe connected to the camera and fire the second strobe, or third, or fourth... I originally had a Wein Peanut Slave but it wouldn't fire all the time. I found these made in India Sonia slaves at naive-buyer on eBay. A good man to deal with. These have worked 100% of the time. I might try to get a cheap Metz 45 CT-3 or CT-4. They have 1/2 and 1/4 power settings and are an earlier model with higher voltage but the safe sync will take care of that. Now to start using them. Learning will ensue.
