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Archives
photography
Street Photography
[more]
thanks to RangefinderForum.com
This is one of those sites that has tricky navigation. This is a pdf file and the download is under the little magnifying glass in the upper left of the page. Wave your cursor around and all will be revealed.
iraq
Bombs Aimed at G.I.’s in Iraq Are Increasing
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The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July to the highest monthly total of the war, offering more evidence that the anti-American insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Along with a sharp increase in sectarian attacks, the number of daily strikes against American and Iraqi security forces has doubled since January. The deadliest means of attack, roadside bombs, made up much of that increase. In July, of 2,625 explosive devices, 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they went off. In January, 1,454 bombs exploded or were found.
The bomb statistics — compiled by American military authorities in Baghdad and made available at the request of The New York Times — are part of a growing body of data and intelligence analysis about the violence in Iraq that has produced somber public assessments from military commanders, administration officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels,” said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution. “The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time.”
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Iraqi speaker derails Bush's dreams
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When George Bush met the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, he liked him. During his June trip to Baghdad, Bush sang the praises of Dr. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, who had been elected speaker in late April. "I was impressed by him," said Bush during a press conference. "He's a fellow that had been put in prison by Saddam and, interestingly enough, put in prison by us. And he made a decision to participate in the government. . . . It was interesting to see a person that could have been really bitter talk about the skills he's going to need to bring people together to run the parliament."
But when the Iraqi parliament reconvenes next month, the first item on their agenda will be firing al-Mashhadani. He has put his foot in his mouth too many times. Considering what he's been saying about the United States since his moment with the president, the end of his tenure should come as a relief to the Bush administration. "Who destroyed Iraq? Who plundered Iraq?" exploded al-Mashhadani in a recent interview. "It is none other than the blue jinn whose name is: the American Occupation."
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Iraq > World War II
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The war in Iraq has lasted three days longer than US involvement in World War II.
Germany declared war on the US on December, 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor. The US announced victory in Europe on May 8, 1945. That's one thousand, two hundred and forty-four days.
We've been in Iraq one thousand, two hundred and forty-seven days---and still the Administration has no exit strategy, no plan for victory and no clue what it is doing. In case you'd forgotten, George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard an aircraft carrier over three years ago.
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comics
Shades of my misspent youth.
PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST
[more]
What I just found out is that it was written by Michael O'Donoghue who went on to do National Lampoon and a little TV show called Saturday Night Live. Who knew?
kurdistan
Kurds flee homes as Iran shells Iraq's northern frontier
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Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases.
Scores of Kurds have fled their homes in the northern frontier region after four days of shelling by the Iranian army. Local officials said Turkey had also fired a number of shells into Iraqi territory.
Some displaced families have pitched tents in the valleys behind Qandil Mountain, which straddles Iraq's rugged borders with Turkey and Iran. They told the Guardian yesterday that at least six villages had been abandoned and one person had died following a sustained artillery barrage by Iranian forces that appeared designed to flush out guerrillas linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who have hideouts in Iraq.
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take a deep breath
Dinosaur lungs
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Next time you're cutting up a fresh bird, try looking for the lungs. They're about where you'd expect them to be, but they're nestled up dorsally against the ribs and vertebrae, and they're surprisingly small. If you think about it, the the thorax of a bird is a fairly rigid box, with that large sternal keel up front and short ribs—it's a wonder that they are able to get enough air from those tiny organs with relatively little capability for expanding and contracting the chest.
How they do it is an amazing story. Birds have a radically effective respiratory system that works rather differently than ours, with multiple adaptations working together to improve their ability to take in oxygen. There is also a growing body of evidence that dinosaurs also shared many of these adaptations, tightening their link to birds and also making them potentially even more fierce—they were big, they were active, and their lungs were turbocharged.
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guns or butter? i guess it's guns.
The Money Pit
Can the Pentagon pay for the war and its new toys?
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If you think the invasion of Iraq was poorly planned, take a look at the Pentagon budget.
The appalling extent of the problem is spelled out in the July 28 edition of a little-known online newsletter called Budget Bulletin, published once a month or so by the Senate Budget Committee's Republican staff.
Drawing on the Defense Department's own data, the GOP staffers conclude that, over the coming decade, the military will fall drastically short of the money it needs to buy, operate, and maintain all the weapons systems churning through the pipeline. And though the newsletter doesn't say so explicitly, the main sources of this crisis are clear: the service chiefs' extravagant taste for more, new, complex weapons; the Pentagon managers' failure to set priorities; and Congress' tendency to pile on even more money than the military requests in order to swell the payrolls of local arms manufacturers.
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library hold 'em
I'm afraid my final recommendation of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation : The Conquest of the Middle East is going to have to wait. I had to turn it back in to the library. There were a lot of holds on it and I couldn't renew it. A lot of the books that I have been reading are popular books and are checked out so I put them on hold. (All done from the comfort of my computer.) Some may have a waiting list of only one or two. The longest waiting list was over 90. So I put holds on a bunch of books figuring they will trickle in and I will always have a book to read. This generally works pretty well but sometimes there is a deluge of books or one book is really long. Fisk's book was really long -- over 1,000 pages. It was really hard to turn back in but I still had 200 pages to go. The book is incredible. Now I'm number 10 on the list with 3 holdable copies for The Great War for Civilisation so it won't be too bad. I now have 1491 : New Revelations of the Americas before Colombus back. I had to turn that one back in partially read. The only other book I've had to turn back unread was Zadie Smith's White Teeth but I have that one back now, too. Now I'm faced with a deluge. I have 12 checked out and 1 ready to pick up. It's so hard living in these modern times.
economy
More Housing News: It Ain't Good
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There is a debate among economists regarding what will happen in housing - one side is arguing for a "soft landing" while the other is arguing for a harder landing. A soft landing implies the market retreats with little pain while a hard landing implies a larger number of bankruptcies, foreclosures etc.... I have no idea how many people are lining up on which side.
However, housing related news continues to look, well, pretty bad.
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Home is Where the Sink Hole Is
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But whether the bust is national, as opposed to just regional, may depend as much or more on our Chinese benefactors as on the Fed.
The chain of causation is somewhat perverse: The Fed's recent decision to at least pause in its tightening campaign has put downward pressure on the dollar, which is forcing the People's Bank to buy dollars to protect the "crawling peg" with the renminbi, said dollars then being reinvested in the Treasury market, which drives long-term yields down, which pulls mortage yields down, too.
As long as that particular windfall lasts, the prospects for a soft landing to the national real estate bubble look reasonably good -- that is, as long as the regional real estate busts, plus the overextended state of the American consumer and the mysterious reluctance of U.S. firms to funnel their bloated profits into capital spending, don't tip the national economy over into a recession.
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new computer and display
I spend a lot of time on the computer and use a number of different pieces of software. Some of them, like my Opera browser, are customized quite a bit. Using a piece of software is using a tool. You get used to it. Everything is in a certain place and you reach for it without thinking. That usually ends with a new computer. Nothing is quite where it used to be. You forget to load some software or bring some settings over. You go to do something and then have to stop and load that software or find those settings. It took a few days but now I'm settled into the new machine. I was able to move all my email and browser settings over for Opera which makes me a very happy camper. I took the oportunity to upgrade a few pieces of software. I had a copy of Photoshop 7 so I moved up from 6. I'm giving OpenOffice another chance. I tried it about 3 three years ago. It seems to be working well now. All my Word and Excel files loaded fine into OpenOffice.
It was harder than it needed to be. To make sure all went well I backed up all my data files, email, and appropriate settings on about 28 CDs. But, when I went to restore, my backup program wouldn't restore. I looked into their customer support but it required a bunch of information abour service packs and logs. In a moment of inspiration I decided to go where I had never gone before and went down to Radio Shack and bought a crossover network cable ($11) and plugged my old machine directly into my new machine. It took about 1/2 hour of rummaging through menus and remembering to make folders shared. (I remembered from watching system admins at Boeing about 10 years ago!) I was able to move all my files over the network cable. In the process I had my old and new monitors side by side. I didn't realize how dim my CRT had become. It was definitely a time for a new system.
The biggest surprise was the monitor. This is my first flat panel display. It sure takes up a lot less space! My 19" CRT was actually 18" on the diagonal. (14 1/2" x 10 3/4") The flat panel is an actual 19" so it's actually a little larger. (14 3/4 x 11 7/8) I had two choices in 19" flat panels and I chose the slightly more expensive (an additional $50) Ultrasharp.
One thing that caught my eye when I ordered it was that it could be rotated 90 degrees to vertical. I thought that might have some use. When I was working at Boeing I remember word processors with vertical monitors which made sense working on a vertical page. Little did I suspect.
I got everything set up and turned the monitor to vertical. I don't think it's going to be horizontal much. Everything fits so much better in a vertical monitor. You see more of the web pages. With a 1024x1280 (or would that now be 1280 x 1024) display all the web pages display fine vertically. It got me thinking about monitors shape and orientation. I've noticed a trend to the high aspect ratio screens in some of the new laptops. It didn't seem right. If watching movies is what you do with your computer then that makes sense but a lot of what we do on a computer is vertical such as looking at web pages and word processors. It's great being able to see the entire page in a word processor. The first monitors for home computers were TV sets and that seems to have set the standard for dedicated monitors ever since. Bad choice. Even worse when they mimic the new high aspect ratio horizontal TVs. But everyone seems to go along with it since that's what we're used to. If I want to watch a movie I can easily rotate my monitor back to horizontal. It also easily moves up and down as well as rotates left to right and fore and aft. It's a whole new experience. I highly recommend it.
This is a preview of a coming attraction. That cardboard box is a 26.6"x16.9"x9.2" mockup of the HP B9180 I hope to order in the next couple of weeks if they are available by then. Please, please! The future printer and the current computer are birthday presents from Zoe and Gerry. I'm honored and ecstatic.
I made it to the other side
Just a quick note that I got the new computer up and running. Old software, new software, and all my old email finally loaded. It was a bit of a challenge at times but it was all worth it. More later. Work now.
i hope i'll be back soon
My new computer is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. It's time to start pulling data off my old machine. I hope all goes well in setting up the new computer. This will be my last post on this machine. My next post will be on the Dell.
lebanon
Hersh strikes again. A must read.
WATCHING LEBANON
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
by Seymour M. Hersh
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In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
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Some commentaries on Hersh's commentary:
Israel Kills 38 Civilians on Eve of Ceasefire
Hersh: Israeli Campaign Dress Rehearsal for War on Iran
250 Hizbullah Rockets Slam into northern Israel, Kill 1
by Juan Cole
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Let me say this loud and clear, drawing on Pat Lang. Any US attack on Iran could well lead to the US and British troops in Iraq being cut off from fuel and massacred by enraged Shiites. Shiite irregulars could easily engage in pipeline and fuel convoy sabotage of the sort deployed by the Sunni guerrillas in the north. Without fuel, US troops would be sitting ducks for rocket and mortar attacks that US air power could not hope completely to stop (as the experience of Israel with Hizbullah in Lebanon demonstrates). A pan-Islamic alliance of furious Shiites and Sunni guerrillas might well be the result, spelling the decisive end of Americastan in Iraq. Shiite Iraqis are already at the boiling point over Israel's assault on their coreligionists in Lebanon. An attack on Iran could well push them over the edge. People like Cheney and Bush don't understand people's movements or how they can win. They don't understand the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1978-79. They don't understand that they are playing George III in the eyes of most Middle Eastern Muslims, and that lots of people want to play George Washington.
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Israel's failed 'field test' for a possible US attack on Iran
by Helena Cobban
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If so-- and Hersh makes a good case that this was indeed the reason for the generous diplomatic and military support that the Bushites gave to the Israelis throughout the assault-- then the spectacularly unsuccessful politico-military results of the field test, from the US-Israeli perspective, must have left the Iranian mullahs sleeping much more comfortably in their beds...
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Listening to Sy
by Billmon
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But like the JCS staffer, I also suspect that failure in Lebanon has badly eroded whatever slim chance remained that war could be avoided. I say that at least in part because of Commander Codpiece and his demonstrated tendency to treat any unexpected reversal or failure as a personal rebuke. It's almost as if he can hear the voice in the back of his head saying: "Well, Junior, it looks like you screwed up again." And the only way to make Babs shut up is to reject reality and plunge on into an even deeper disaster -- like trading Sammy Sosa.
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Another couple from Robert Fisk. As an aside, I'm still wading through his The Great War for Civilisation. He is the rare reporter that actually has a fucking clue as to what happened to get us to now. And the rare reporter that has actually been on the ground -- for decades.
Tea and rockets: café society, Beirut-style
This week: A close shave in downtown Beirut and why you'll never find our man in a flak jacket
by Robert Fisk
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In the early hours, motor-cycle riders have been racing down the Corniche outside my home. Petrol is cheap for motor-cycles, and at first I curse the roar of their machines. Then I realise that their insouciance is a form of resistance. In their special way, they are denying the war, refusing to be cowed.
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As the 6am ceasefire takes effect... the real war begins
by Robert Fisk
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The real war in Lebanon begins today. The world may believe - and Israel may believe - that the UN ceasefire due to come into effect at 6am today will mark the beginning of the end of the latest dirty war in Lebanon after up to 1,000 Lebanese civilians and more than 30 Israeli civilians have been killed. But the reality is quite different and will suffer no such self-delusion: the Israeli army, reeling under the Hizbollah's onslaught of the past 24 hours, is now facing the harshest guerrilla war in its history. And it is a war they may well lose.
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The Agonist has had some excellent commentary:
A Government is What a Government Does: Hezbollah Chapter
Imagine
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One of the things that constantly amazes me is the inability of some people to imagine themselves in the shoes of a Hezbollah supporter and to whinge about how Hezbollah doesn't respect Lebanon's authority.
The fact that Hezbollah is not under Lebanese government control is indeed a problem for Lebanon. But then, when Israel invaded, the other Lebanese didn't help the Shia in the occupied territories, did they? And what did the Lebanese army do?
You can't separate these things from history. Other groups may worry about Hezbollah, but Hezbollah knows that they are the only thing defending their people. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time understanding this.
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Israeli/Hezbollah Pre Post Mortem
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Let's deal with the Israelis first. First of all - clearly their intelligence service fell down on the job. They had no idea what they were facing - a dug in series of hardened positions with underground networks supporting them, manned by elite troops. They thought they could use aerial interdiction of supplies, and didn't realize they were fighting a light infantry force that could fight a long time without mechanized resupply.
Second, their army has been corrupted by occupation. Martin van Crevald likes to say that if you fight the weak, you become weak. 30 years of occupation "warfare", of killing weak Palestinian militants and civilians, has made the Israeli army from a battlefield supremacy army based on the German blitzkrieg model, into a force suited for protecting bulldozers and blowing away armed rabble.
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The Twilight of the Decapitation Military
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If it turns out to be both copyable and scaleable, it is indeed a revolution in military affairs. A military with complete air supremacy, artillery and an armored corp, was unable to just bypass light infantry. In blitzkrieg warfare they would have created pockets and then crushed the out of supply pockets. In Lebanon, cutting off light infantry doesn't put it out of supply - but extending yourself in a pocket creation maneuver creates interdictable supply lines that the infantry you just left behind can cut. And your tanks definitely cannot survive without their fuel.
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Pat Lang has become a regular read. He is a retired Colonel who was in Military Intelligence and the Green Berets. An interesting perspective.
Bad Tux on IDF Performance
by Pat Lang
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"I would be very careful about coming to any conclusions about weapons that HA is using based upon IDF sources. The IDF has a natural desire to hype up HA's weaponry as an excuse for their poor performance. It is unlikely, for example, that HA possesses many Kornets. Syria bought around 1,000 Kornets, but the chances they gave HA many of those Kornets is slim -- they need the Kornets as a deterrent against Israeli armor for their own defense. Iran itself does not have Kornets in any great quantity (if at all), they are relying on their Sagger, Spandrel, and TOW clones, which they reverse-engineered or licensed and produce cheaply in their own factories. Iran is very careful about their arms purchases in order to get the best bang for the buck, and if they can make effective weapons locally (and the above-named are plenty effective if deployed in sufficient quantity and provided with upgraded warheads and guidance systems), they do not buy, they build.
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A Lebanese View
by Pat Lang
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Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Foreign Minister said in 1914 that the treaty that protected Belgian neutrality was "a scrap of paper." What he meant was that treaties are observed when they serve the interests of the parties to them.
Israel wants to destroy Hizbullah. It has not done that as yet. Hizbullah is a home-grown Shia force. As "Lubnani" says they will go home if there is peace and wait to fight another day. Hizbullah has not yet been defeated.
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"Conclusions" by GaW
by Pat Lang
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-the leading cause of modern Islamic terrorism is 60 years of bad foreign policy by USA/UK...or to put it more bluntly, when you go into other peoples countries at will to interfere, you only make more people angry at you - I read that Osama founded Al-Qaeda in 1982 because he saw on TV the Israeli devastation of Lebanon. How many new Al- have been created by the last month's events, I wonder. (I am not excusing religious fanaticism, but more than religious differences are required to motivate suicide bombers, there has to be perceived "unjust" action from the other side too
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book recommendation
William Eggleston, 2 1/4
by William Eggleston
Another good Eggleston book. Most of his work is 35mm but he did do some square stuff. Nice stuff. Sno-Isle Libraries didn't have this one and they chose not to buy it but got it for me on an interlibrary loan from Glendale, CA. They did buy Egglestons's 5x7. I'm still waiting for that one. From Amazon:
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Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first color photographer," and certainly the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston.
From 1966 to 1971, Eggleston would occasionally use a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. These are collected and published here for the first time, adding more classic Eggleston images to photography's color canon.
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palestine
hello ... iam still there ..from Gaza with love
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I love the countryside, which has been largely destroyed over the years by the Israeli occupation. My late father’s citrus fruit grove was completely uprooted and destroyed, as well as our nice home, where my mother used to stay 6 months of the year. It was destroyed with many Palestinian farmers fertile agricultural land during the course of the Intifada. This land was a lifeline for many families, who had no alternative income.
Gaza became a big prison for its’ citizens, especially during the last 5 years. We have faced different episodes of violence, but this time is the worst, these atrocities have left one third of the population suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS), as an outcome of going through traumatic experiences of home demolition, killing of family members, being at a site of shelling, assassination, and having the feeling of living in a big prison. The borders are closed most of the times which means we are not allowed in or out of our country, it has been closed completely for more than a month . And there is economic hardship, with high unemployment that reaches to 70%. Most people live under poverty levels in crowded towns, villages and refugee camps where the housing conditions are very limited and lack basic infrastructure.
When Israel launched its latest preplaned incursion into Gaza,under the pretense of the captured soldier release,on 28th of june ,the jet fighters destroyed Gaza’s main power plant. Since that date we don’t have regular electricity.we get 6- 8 hours of electricity each day, ; water is not available most of the time. We are subjected to artillery fire, gunboats and jet fighters shelling day and night. It is worse at night, and especially the sonic booming - when the airplanes break the sound barrier at high speeds and make great explosions. It makes me flinch in the daytime and jump out of my bed during the night. My heart rate goes fast and I hold on tight to my daughter. We need to pacify each other.
When it is dark children are afraid to stay on their own. Many children in Gaza suffer from nightmares and have become bedwetters.
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[more]
Palestinian deaths rise amid fear of worse to come
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Last month was the deadliest in the Gaza Strip for nearly two years, a Palestinian research group said yesterday, as Israel's six-week offensive against militants in the territory led to a surge in killings.
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comics
Wondermark
An Illustrated Jocularity
[more]
Be sure and check out some of his features. Interesting comics commentary.
israel
The De-Zionization of the American Mind
How to Deal with The Lobby
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Americans are constantly told that they have to defend themselves against people who "hate them", but without understanding why they are hated. Is the cause our secular democracy? Our appetite for oil? There are lots of democracies in the world that are far more secular than the United States (Sweden, France...) and lots of places that want to buy oil at the best possible price (China) without arousing any noticeable hatred in the Middle East.
Of course, it is true that, throughout the Third World, Americans and Europeans are often considered arrogant and are not particularly liked. But the level of hatred that leads a large number of people to applaud an event like September 11 is peculiar to the Middle East. Indeed, the main political significance of September 11 did not derive from the number of people killed or even the spectacular achievement of the attackers, but from the fact that the attack was popular in large parts of the Middle East. That much was understood by Americans leaders and infuriated them. Such a level of hatred calls for explanation.
And there can be only one explanation: United States support for Israel. It is indeed Israel that is the main object of hatred, for reasons we shall describe, but since the United States uncritically supports Israel on almost every issue, constantly praises it as "the only democracy in the Middle East" and provides its main financial backing, the result is a "transfer" of hatred.
Why is Israel so hated? The constant stalling of "peace plans" in favor of more settlements and more war aggravates that hatred, but the basic cause lies in the very principles on which that state is build. There are basically two arguments that have justified establishing the State of Israel in Palestine: one is that God gave that land to the Jews, and the other is the Holocaust. The first one is deeply insulting to people who are profoundly religious, like most Arabs, but of another creed. And, for the second, it amounts to making people pay for a crime that they did not commit.
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Fighting Jim Crow in Israel
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"March on Lebanon and also on Gaza with ploughs and salt. Destroy them to the last inhabitant…. Save your people and make bombs, and rain them on villages and towns and houses till they collapse. Kill them, shed their blood, terrify their lives, lest they try again To destroy us…. Whoever scorns a day of bloodshed, He should be scorned. Save your people, and make war." Ilan Shenfeld; Israeli poet, Ynet, July 30, 2006
Ideas have consequences, and the effects of a racist ideology are suffering and destruction. The growing similarity between the debris-strewn Levant and the Gaza Strip are not accidental; they are the predictable results of a world-view which places the value of one people above another. In Israel, there is a two-tiered system of justice; one for Jews and another for non Jews; full-citizenship for Israeli-Jews and “Jim Crow” for Arabs.
Is that acceptable?
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photography
I really enjoy restoring old photographs. Old photographs are little time machines and I consider them to be sacred objects. However, not having a good printer means they can only exist on the web which isn't nearly as satisfying as making a new print of an old photograph. That will change soon with the arrival of a new printer. This book is timely.
DIGITAL RESTORATION: Start to Finish
by Ctein
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In DIGITAL RESTORATION: Start to Finish, I'll teach you how to restore faded and damaged photographic prints, films and glass plates, both B&W and color. In over 110,000 words and 500 illustrations (including over 70 task-oriented "how-to's") I cover digital photo restoration from soup to nuts.
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 [more]
thanks to The Online Photographer
Ctein is interesting. He is a dye transfer printer. Dye transfer printers are god-like beings.
remember iraq?
Inside the Iraqi forces fiasco
The U.S. effort to train Iraqi forces -- and bring our troops home -- is mired in bureaucratic mismanagement, inept recruits and astonishing shortages of equipment.
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Back in March, Marine Maj. William McCollough, the commanding officer of a small team of U.S. military advisors training an Iraqi army battalion in the volatile Anbar province, found out that his team had failed to receive a supply of 40 mm grenades. They were crucial munitions: Since the 15-man team of Marines had arrived in late January in the al-Jazirah region, an insurgent hotbed between Fallujah and Ramadi, the small compound they shared with their Iraqi counterparts had been attacked almost every night. In one of their first major engagements, the Marines simply lined up on the roof of their barracks and poured grenades into a nearby tree line until the enemy fire stopped. For an isolated advisor team living among foreign troops of questionable dependability, a supply of grenades could mean the difference in whether it could stop insurgents from overrunning the perimeter.
The missing supply of grenades was another in a string of shortfalls McCollough's team had experienced since arriving, and the major had had it. He sent a letter to the Marine high command in Iraq, stating that the Iraqi 1st Battalion they were training would have to cease operations due to the lack of logistical support. According to McCollough, a general on the receiving end of the letter "scorched some earth," and his team started to get more of what they needed.
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Fallujah's police force disappears
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Poof!
One day the vaunted Iraqi security forces that we are training to stand up so we can stand down were more than 2,000 strong in Fallujah.
The next day -- poof! Gone with the wind. Hasta la vista baby!
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photography
Lee Pickett Photographs
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The Lee Pickett collection of over 900 photographs documents scenes from Snohomish, King and Chelan Counties in Washington State from the early 1900s to the 1940s. Based in Index, in the heart of the Cascade Mountains, he took thousands of photographs of that region. This includes the towns and people of Index, Gold Bar, Scenic, and Sultan. Local industries, such as the Heybrook Lumber Co. and Index Granite Works, are also depicted. Pickett was perhaps best known for his job as official photographer for the Great Northern Railway Company. A large number of his photographs reflect the program undertaken by the company in the 1920s to improve the line over the Cascade Mountains.
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I.W.W. members at Index, ca. 1923
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thanks to wood s lot
Wobblies, Joe. Real live Wobblies.
ministry of fear
How London's Terror Scare Looks From Beirut
The Real Reason the British Should be Frightened
by Robert Fisk
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When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television. There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house--just as they vibrated across all of Beirut--as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: "Terror Plot". Terror what, I asked myself? And there was my favorite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favorite police force--the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube, taking 30 seconds to fire six bullets into him--had saved the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians from suicide bombers on airliners.
I'm sure our readers will join me in watching how many of the suspects--or "British-born Muslims" as the BBC defined them in its special form of "soft" racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?)--are still in custody in a couple of weeks' time.
And I'm sure it's quite by chance that the lads in blue chose yesterday--with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara's shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak--to save the world. After all, it's scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armored vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day--again quite by chance, of course--that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair's intended invasion of Iraq.
So I sat on the carpet in my living room and watched all these heavily armed chaps at Heathrow protecting the British people from annihilation and then on came President George Bush to tell us that we were all fighting "Islamic fascism". There were more thumps in the darkness across Beirut where an awful lot of people are suffering from terror--although I can assure George W that while the pilots of the aircraft dropping bombs across the city in which I have lived for 30 years may or may not be fascists, they are definitely not Islamic.
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movie recommendation
TransAmerica
Felicity Huffman was robbed. She should have won the Oscar for this. A wonderful movie. From Amazon:
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Felicity Huffman deserves every award she's received for her outstanding performance in Transamerica, a small but rich movie about Bree--formerly Stanley--a pre-operative male-to-female transexual awaiting gender-reassignment surgery who learns she has a wayward teenage son named Toby. When her therapist (Elizabeth Peña, Jacob's Ladder) strongarms Bree into facing her past, she bails Toby (Kevin Zegers, Dawn of the Dead) out of jail and they end up on a road trip across the country. Such a premise could feel forced, but the script and performances make it persuasive and natural. Bree wrestles with discomfort and compassion as she learns about Toby's own troubles, even while her own grow worse when she's forced to ask for help from her hostile parents (the superb Fionnula Flanagan, The Others, and Burt Young, Rocky). Transamerica doesn't push for any great catharsis, but instead slowly peels away the layers of Bree's defenses, laying bare her basic struggle for respect and a chance at happiness. In many ways it's a showy role, but Huffman (Desperate Housewives) keeps her acting simple, direct, and thoroughly compelling.
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that which must not be mentioned
The land of the free - but free speech is a rare commodity
You can say what you like in the US, just as long as you don't ask awkward questions about America's role in the Middle East
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It used to be said that academic rows were vicious because the stakes were so small. That's no longer true in America, where a battle is underway on campuses over what can be said about the Middle East and US foreign policy.
Douglas Giles is a recent casualty. He used to teach a class on world religions at Roosevelt University, Chicago, founded in memory of FDR and his liberal-inclined wife, Eleanor. Last year, Giles was ordered by his head of department, art historian Susan Weininger, not to allow students to ask questions about Palestine and Israel; in fact, nothing was to be mentioned in class, textbooks and examinations that could possibly open Judaism to criticism.
Students, being what they are, did not go along with the ban. A young woman, originally from Pakistan, asked a question about Palestinian rights. Someone complained and Professor Giles was promptly fired.
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art imitation
First Impressionism
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cuba
Cuba's Agricultural Revolution an Example to the World
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To the right lay revolutionary tomatoes and to the left lay revolutionary lettuces, while in the glass in my hand, filled to the brim and frothing with vitality, was the juice from revolutionary mangoes. It was thick, unfiltered and fabulously sweet. It was also organic.
"Yes, it is very good. It's all natural," said Miguel Salcines Lopez, his brow dotted with sweat from the midday sun, as he raised a glassful to his lips. "Growing food in this way is much more interesting. It is much more intelligent."
Almost five decades after the now ailing Fidel Castro and his comrades overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista and seized power in Cuba, another revolution, largely unnoticed by most visitors and tourists, is well under way on this Caribbean island. And Salcines and his small urban farm at Alamar, an eastern suburb of the capital, Havana, are at the center of a social transformation that may turn out to be as important as anything else that has been achieved during Castro's 47 years in power.
Spurred into action by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous effect this had on its subsidized economy, the government of Cuba was forced to take radical steps to feed its people. The solution it chose -- essentially unprecedented both within the developed and undeveloped world -- was to establish a self-sustaining system of agriculture that by necessity was essentially organic.
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This might be an agricultural model to look at as peak oil makes our current agricultural system too expensive.
large format lens line-up
My lens selection for my Burke & James 5x7/4x5 is now complete.
It's a Wollensak 4x5 Series IIIA EX.W.A. f/12.5. This will give me a 35mm equivalent of an 18mm lens on the Burke & James with the 5x7 back and 25mm with the 4x5 back. The shutter works fine except for the B setting sometimes doesn't hold the shutter open. It just may need to be exercised. I usually use the T setting anyway. All other settings sound fine. A CLA wouldn't hurt but is not needed at this time
Most listings for the Extreme Wide Angle claim only 4x5 coverage but I did see one listing that claimed it would cover 5x7 without movements. I mounted it in a piece of cardboard and taped it into a lens board for a quick check. It does appear to cover 5x7. Woo hoo! At f/12.5 it is pretty dim and I couldn't see the corners very well but I will be able to at least do high aspect ratio prints by cropping off the top and bottom for 6x17cm (2 1/4" x 7") panoramics. Some test shots will verify just what it will do. Even better is that I seem to be able to focus the 90mm lens without a recessed lens board. The bellows is pretty much collapsed at this point. I will probably recess it's lens board a little. Not enough to make using a cable release a pain. Here is a chart of my complete large format lens line-up:
I couldn't be happier with these lenses. First of all, this was all done on a very small budget. The most expensive lens was $94 and the least expensive (two of them) was $0. The lens cost averaged out to $43 each. All but the Kodak are like new with beautiful glass. The big Kodak will be fine with a CLA. The ones without shutters are process lenses and are slow, which means a dim image on the ground glass. It will be worthwhile to invest in a BlackJacket focusing cloth. Now to mass produce some lens boards and adaptors for my Packard shutter. And the Kodak will need an extension box for the rear standard to get that 21 plus inches it will need.
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