Space Oddity

Astronaut Chris Hadfield

Falcon 9

I went to the top of Red Mountain and shot tonight's rocket launch from Vandenberg. A two-stage Falcon 9 booster lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California tonight (Dec. 22) at 11:27 p.m. EST (8:27 p.m. local California time, 0427 on Dec. 23 GMT), lofting 10 communications satellites for the commercial Iridium Next constellation.

It was absolutely beautiful, saw all the separations.

I have only processed a couple pictures but look forward to seeing the rest and think I have learned enough to do a better job if I am fortunate enough to shoot it again.

For these pictures I used my Nikon D7200 with my Sigma 150-600mm C lens. I was shooting at iso 2500 which was probably not enough. Manual focus which may not have been the way to go either. In dark sky I pre focussed on the moon. The camera was mounted on my wimberly and tripod.

cosmic halo

Phoenix's tail

Christmas Must Be Tonight (or soon anyway)

Flight of the red winged blackbirds

Laura Nyro

Solstice still life

Monster

Shelved.

methylene deathylene - © Robert Sommers 2017

I am not an economist. I have no idea how the new tax cut will eventually shake out. I have my suspicions, but they won't even buy you a cup of coffee, especially at today's inflated prices. I hope that like a broken clock, the Republicans are right this time and that the net effects will not merely shift more money over to the upper 1% but have positive implications for the rest of us. Time will tell. They certainly took care of their base.

I may not be a number cruncher but I am a cancer survivor. Kidney, bladder and ureter, for a long and protracted period.

And if I may be permitted to vent one last time before everybody gets warm, toasty and christmasy, I want to deliver a piece of coal to Scott Pruitt over at the EPA. Of course, these people really love coal but maybe not where I want them to put it.

The EPA has decided to postpone a ban on three chemicals, methylene chloride and N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP), both ingredients in paint strippers, and trichloroethylene (TCE), used as a spot cleaner in dry-cleaning and as a degreasing agent. The former is estimated to have killed over 56 people since 1980 who were stripping bathtubs, stripping furniture or glueing carpet. Bad shit.

It has been several years since the E.P.A. first declared these applications of the three chemicals to be dangerous. The agency itself has found TCE “carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure” and has reported that it causes developmental and reproductive damage.
“Potential health concerns from exposure to trichloroethylene, based on limited epidemiological data and evidence from animal studies, include decreased fetal growth and birth defects, particularly cardiac birth defects,” agency officials noted in 2013.
Methylene chloride is toxic to the brain and liver, and NMP can harm the reproductive system.

The EPA recently wrote that it was adopting a "commonsense, balanced approach (that) carefully protects both public health and the environment while curbing unnecessary regulatory burdens that stifle economic growth for communities across the country.” I fail to see how this is helping the mission. Screw economic growth when you are getting in bed with death merchants.

The new regulatory plan moved the chemicals from the proposed rule category to “long term action." Which apparently means never to be heard of again.

"All three chemicals have been extensively studied and associated with both illness and death," Daniel Rosenberg, senior attorney at the National Resource Defence Council (NRDC), wrote in his blog. "The next death(s) due to inhalation of methylene chloride will truly be on the hands of Scott Pruitt, Nancy Beck and President Trump."

These three substances were a part of a list of ten that were required to be studied and regulated by the TSCA provision of the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act.

A ban was scheduled to take place the day before President Trump's inauguration but the HSIA, or Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance, successfully lobbied to shelve and then put the ban in a permanent deep freeze.

I am not a religious man and have zero faith in a hereafter. But if I am wrong on that, like maybe I will be wrong on the tax cuts implications for our economy, I hope these there is a special place in hell for these evil, despicable people.

This stuff hits home hard with me. My cancer was attributed to my exposure to benzene and methyl ethyl ketones. I treat this poison very seriously. I wish this administration would as well. Time and again they side with industry as opposed to the health and well being of the American public.

Shit is flying at the EPA. Literally.

*
Postscript  12/21/17- The EPA is shelving the ban on the brain damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos, which was scheduled to go into effect earlier this year, until at least 2022. It is an obvious coincidence that Dow Chemical, the maker of the nerve agent, was actively fighting against the ban and gave our President Trump a million dollar donation at his inauguration.

“Unfortunately for millions of parents and their young children, Scott Pruitt is the head of the EPA,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “If it were someone else it’s quite possible current and future generations of kids would have been spared from being exposed to chlorpyrifos and the neurological deficits it triggers.”

Speed of the sound of loneliness

spearfishing

Let It Rock

Santee Bound

Black Crowned Night Heron

Had a really fun Sunday at the Long Beach Flea Market. Got rid of a whole bunch of stuff I was ready to see leave, saw a bunch of old friends, hung out with Warmboe, made some dough.

Greatest thing for me was selling with my wife again. We started the business together and it hums better in her presence. It clicked.

Miss her presence at the shows. It was fun again. I appreciate her help and company, love her madly.

Ken and I went to Lindo Lake and then Santee Lakes today to continue to work with our newish lenses.  Lots of birds at Lindo, more black crowned night herons than I have ever seen before.

Skateboarders too.

Osprey, Santee Lakes

Very nice day. Beautiful, cool breezes, equipment working well.

Nice place Santee Lakes. Glad more people don't visit.

Dreamt I was in Detroit last night, crossing to Windsor. Was talking to buzz on the phone. "Why don't we split a room in Toronto," I said. Because I am dead.

Obama and Hezbollah

Hassan Nasrallah

As much as I hammer the current administration, it is good to remember that it wasn't too long ago that I was pointing my criticisms at the previous occupant of the oval office.

Politico has a must read, an exceptional article by Josh Meyer; The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook - An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah's billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House's desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

This article reconfirms all the sneaking suspicions I had about the Iran deal. A very thorough piece, I look forward to hearing the reactions and supposed justifications from principals like John Brennan, Ben Rhodes and Wendy Sherman, not to mention Obama himself.

“During the negotiations, early on, they [the Iranians] said listen, we need you to lay off Hezbollah, to tamp down the pressure on them, and the Obama administration acquiesced to that request,” the former CIA officer told POLITICO. “It was a strategic decision to show good faith toward the Iranians in terms of reaching an agreement.”

CIA Director Brennan had long been in favor of a rapprochement with Hezbollah, or a fantasy I should say, about promoting its "moderate" elements, which really sounds like Obamaism in a nutshell.

It is mind boggling to think that our government would turn a blind eye to the skullduggery and machinations of a radical religious terrorist organization that has been responsible for so much killing and mayhem in order to make a nuclear deal with Iran. A group that was occasionally killing us with our own weapons and certainly using our money to do so.

... the Defense Department official, who was at Special Operations Command tracking the money used to provide ragtag Iraqi Shiite militias with sophisticated weapons for use against U.S. troops, including the new and lethal IED known as the “Explosively Formed Penetrator.” The armor-piercing charges were so powerful that they were ripping M1 Abrams tanks in half.

Imagine funding an organization that was complicit in the murder of United States citizens and soldiers. And was apparently a major player in funneling cocaine shipments into the United States from South America.

A short roundup from Wiki alleges Hezbollah responsibility for the following attacks, which does not include more recent involvement in Syria and elsewhere, or any of the drug dealing that the article recounts:

The 1982–1983 Tyre headquarters bombings
The April 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing (by the Islamic Jihad Organization),[201]
The 1983 Beirut barracks bombing (by the Islamic Jihad Organization), that killed 241 U.S. marines, 58 French paratroopers and 6 civilians at the US and French barracks in Beirut[202]
The 1983 Kuwait bombings in collaboration with the Iraqi Dawa Party.[203]
The 1984 United States embassy annex bombing, killing 24.[204]
A spate of attacks on IDF troops and SLA militiamen in southern Lebanon.[66]
Hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985,[202]
The Lebanon hostage crisis from 1982 to 1992.[205]

Since 1990, terror acts and attempts of which Hezbollah has been blamed include the following bombings and attacks against civilians and diplomats:

The 1992 Israeli Embassy attack in Buenos Aires, killing 29, in Argentina.[202] Hezbollah operatives boasted of involvement.[206]
The 1994 AMIA bombing of a Jewish cultural centre, killing 85, in Argentina.[202] Hezbollah claimed responsibility.[206]
The 1994 AC Flight 901 attack, killing 21, in Panama.[207] Hezbollah claimed responsibility.[206]
The 1994 London Israeli Embassy attack, injuring 29, in the United Kingdom.[208]
The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, killing 19 US servicemen.[209]
In 2002, Singapore accused Hezbollah of recruiting Singaporeans in a failed 1990s plot to attack U.S. and Israeli ships in the Singapore Straits.[210]
The 15 January 2008, bombing of a U.S. Embassy vehicle in Beirut.[211]
In 2009, a Hezbollah plot in Egypt was uncovered, where Egyptian authorities arrested 49 men for planning attacks against Israeli and Egyptian targets in the Sinai Peninsula.[212]
The 2012 Burgas bus bombing, killing 6, in Bulgaria. Hezbollah denied responsibility.[213]
Training Shia insurgents against US troops during the Iraq War.[214] 

I wrote repeatedly about Obama turning a blind eye to Iranian, Shia and Hezbollah wrongdoing while simultaneously castigating Israel and the Saudis. Looks like I was probably right. Read the article.

Postscript: Interesting perspective on the Hezbollah question from Israel. A leading General, Nuriel, is doubtful that Obama pulled his punches. Worth reading.

Raptor, San Jacinto

I believe that it is a kingbird of some kind making an entrance stage right.

Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus

Leslie and I have misplaced this album. Borrowed a copy from a friend and played it while we had dinner last night. People talk about the Beatles' Sergeant Peppers and Loves' Forever Changes as being perfect albums. This is another one. I believe that this pressing includes some very jazzy additional stuff. Ed Cassidy was a heck of a jazz drummer, and Randy's stepfather.

Trumpshpeak

Lots of low hanging fruit but little time to write and all is mentioned and critiqued elsewhere, probably a hundred times better.

Just will touch on a couple things. Could the Orange one really be planning a pre christmas dismissal of Robert Mueller as the recent rumor mill suggests?

He has been trying desperately to gin up a biased FBI narrative to give himself cover.

Wouldn't put it past Trump. I thought Nixon set the nadir for Presidential cover and venality but Donald is giving him a real run for the evil crown.

Hope Mueller can put the dots together real quick, before he is destined for the dustbin.

*
The story of the CDC not allowing staffers to use the terms vulnerable, transgender, diversity, entitlement, fetus or science based or evidence based in budget documents is (as has been noted in a thousand columns) right out of Orwell.

But it follows on the heels of some similar Trump administration abominations that received less publicity.

Interior head Ryan Zinke reprimanded the Superintendent of Joshua Tree, David Smith, for mentioning the words Climate Change in a tweet. God forbid that the people on the ground at the Interior or EPA who actually know something about their jobs and our planet share their opinions.

burn © Robert Sommers 2017

And good old Scott Pruitt, bless his heinous soul, hired an outside contractor to scour the ranks for the past year in search of EPA employees who might have the dreaded Trump allergy.

Mr. Blutstein, in an interview, said he was taking aim at “resistance” figures in the federal government, adding that he hoped to discover whether they had done anything that might embarrass them or hurt their cause.
“I wondered if they were emailing critical things about the agency on government time and how frequently they were corresponding about this,” he said. “And did they do anything that would be useful for Republicans.”

Not to be outdone, the EPA has scrubbed the words Climate Change from its website.

Elsewhere, the Department of Health and Human services has recently removed information on LGBT people on its website and dropped questions regarding sexual orientation and gender identity from several surveys.

Orwell had it right. Control the language and it is pretty simple to control the muggles. Where's George Carlin when you need him?

*

not how you should treat a horse's mouth, good way to deal with a horse's ass

Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell both publicly scoffed at the notion of working in a bipartisan manner with Dems on Health Care and the Tax Cut. Now there are soliloquies of maybe working across the aisle on infrastructure. The less important stuff... If I was Schumer or Pelosi I would tell them to go pound sand.

The great thing of course is that they own this tax cut. When people figure out that the ACA mandate language will do in their insurance coverage the people (including the AARP) might just come hunting for scalps. The GOP will own the deficit and the added debt too since nary a single economist or CBO said that the prospective giveaway to the upper class would ever pencil out. Why do we have to go through this drill every time? Remember Clinton and Obama, having to clean up their mess?

Short memories. There is plenty of money floating around right now. Are wages going up? No way. It is a fantasy to expect some great new capital investment in this country. But the rich will certainly get richer.

Another day at the office

Kestrel

My photographer buddy Ken bought the Nikkor 200-500mm zoom lens yesterday. We decided to take it on a shakedown cruise up at the San Jacinto Wildlife Area today. It was a gorgeous day, not too hot, nice breeze, no bugs and lots of birds of all feathers everywhere. Absolutely delightful.

I am not sure how Ken did but it was a pretty crummy day for me, photographically speaking. Great day of living and walking, bad day shooting. Very few keepers.

I fought my equipment all day. It is okay, have had enough good days to not totally sweat the bad ones but I would like to figure out what is going on.

I shot the Nikkor 400mm f 2.8 off my Nikon D810. Shot it with the 1:2 crop between DX and FX.

It seems to be front focussing and I had a lot of soft images. I had it in sport mode on the vr instead of the normal middle #1 position but don't think that would cause my problems.

Hope I don't have to send the lens in for maintenance, can't afford it right now.

I did shoot pretty wide open, that could contribute some softness. I am going to fine tune the lens as soon as I have time.

Next Tuesday I will try again at Lindo Lake and probably go back to using this lens on my d7200, which has a larger buffer and longer reach.

We did see a lot of nice birds today, two immature bald eagles, many kestrels, red shouldered, red tailed hawks, a ferruginous hawk, harriers, shrikes, ibis, willets, avocets, white faced ibis, shovelheads, mallards, coots, egrets, mergansers, a red duck I am yet to identify.

I am happy Ken bought the lens, finally, he has spent a fortune renting them in the past and now I will have my friend and mentor to go on more bird shoots. Hopefully back to the Bosque del Apache one day.

Butcher bird

Did get a picture of a defecating duck, think it's a personal first.

Private Thoughts

Sensei? No thanks.

Logan - taken with Nikon D810 and Nikkor 55mm 1.2 lens, all manual

I got word the other day that Adobe is rolling out its new Auto sensei program:

Using an advanced neural network powered by Adobe Sensei, our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform, the new Auto Settings creates a better photo by analyzing your photo and comparing to tens of thousands of professionally edited photos to create a beautiful, pleasing image.

Is this not ridiculous? Now your photography can be adjusted, tortured and over processed to the group mean. In short, it can now look just as awful and mediocre as everybody else's work. Just let the cloud tell you what looks good. Point it and shoot it, we will do the rest...

My advice to every photographer out there is to forget about automatic settings, auto contrast, auto color, auto white balance, automatic exposure and auto focus. And for god sakes, forget about the cloud and utilizing artificial intelligence. Resist the urge to relinquish a single iota of your own personal creativity and control.

Put the camera back on manual and learn how to shoot pictures. Shoot wide open on occasion and focus manually and discover the actual width of the focal plane and the depth of field. Very simple equation, aperture, shutter speed and sensor or film setting. Blow some shots, make some mistakes but gain some control of your image and workflow.

You will soon discover that not everything can be averaged by a chip and that your eye is actually a better judge of what is good than a stupid algorithm or a consensus from the cloud. Fight the robots and artificial intelligence!  Make your own decisions.

Are Friends Electric?

Welcome to the machine

This week ex Facebook honcho Chamath Palihapitiya was the latest cybermogul to sound the clarion call about the potential darker side of social media.

He said that social media is “eroding the core foundations of how people behave” and that he feels “tremendous guilt” about creating tools that are “ripping apart the social fabric.”

Oh, and by the way you are being programmed.

“You don’t realize it, but you are being programmed … but now you got to decide how much you’re willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence,” he warned the audience. He said he didn’t want to be programmed himself, emphasizing he “doesn’t use this shit” and his kids are not allowed to use “this shit” either—also recommending that everyone take a “hard break” from social media.

“The things that you rely on, the short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created, are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth,” he said. 

This follows a recent similar warning by Sean Parker, Facebook's founding President.

"I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and ... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."
"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'"
"And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments."
"It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."
"The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

I wrote about dopamine feedback loops very recently and actually also mentioned the pernicious little buggers several years ago when we were talking about game design, complulsion loops and intermittent rewards.

I will try and keep this short. We are being reprogrammed by the machinery and it is not just in the arena of social media. We are changing our patterns of behavior, often solely for the benefit of the machine. Walk past or linger too hard in the doorway of a restaurant or establishment and you will be instantly asked by your phone to submit a critique to so and so evaluating your experience. For the good of the team. Do you ever find yourself online reviewing out of some misdirected sense of guilt?

Text somebody and watch your phone suggest specific language in which you might respond to the person you are communicating with. And sometimes you take the bait because it is so much easier than using your own brain. Have you ever found yourself altering sentence structure for brevity because of a Google or Siri suggestion? Do you think it is okay or appropriate to have an artificial intelligence modify your speech or communication patterns? Or expect continual feedback?

Doesn't it seem weird when your Calendar or Linked In asks you to send birthday greetings to a person you have absolutely no personal relationship with? When the machine starts coercing you into unsought or requested relationships?

Mention a far off land in an email or god forbid, phone conversation with a friend and watch as you suddenly get flooded online with travel brochures and hotel deals from the remote archipelago. Because the pipeline operators know everything about you, when, why, who with and how often? Your life is being strained, digital bit by bit. What are the great benefits of this enormous privacy intrusion again? So corporations can sell you stuff? 

I can't leave my office without getting a prompt from Google Maps telling me exactly how far it is to my home doorstep. Thirty eight years, I know. Thanks.

Exactly who needs this shit?

*

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
Philip K. Dick

I don't Facebook or Tweet but I am one of the last remaining dinosaurs still actively blogging. How quaint. I put a lot of photography on Google +. My dopamine drive is probably coursing stronger than most of my peers. I am plainly a whore for hits. Look at my pictures, listen to my music, read my crap.

As any lonely artist will tell you, there is nothing like an audience. Hits and likes are like a drug. Digital heroin. But who says that any of my happy accomplices are actually qualified to critique? How many social media contacts do you ever really get to know, at least in the old sense of the word?

Why am I investing so much time sharing with these people? Is cyber popularity a vacuous charade, does it have a larger utility that I am somehow missing, beyond sheer numbers, the 20 million people that Google says I have interacted with, on some tertiary level, before they pulled the plug on the metric anyway? Is this really the proper forum to get personal affirmation and validation?

Plato and Socrates came up with a term called Thumos or Thymos. Google it. It really has no exact translation in English but is roughly akin to "Spiritedness." It signifies human passion. It is also attributed in the study of human psychology to the human need for recognition. Thumos was one of the twin horses, along with Eros, that drives the chariot of the human psyche around. And Fukuyama coined a term for thymos at its worst, Megalothymia. As in, "stoopid" and excessive need for recognition.

With the immense universe of available social media, shouldn't we consider the downside of these exhaustive feedback loops? Is the Cyberworld taking over your tangible universe, your relations with real flesh and blood?

We need to be careful, be ready to jettison the new toolset before it totally rewires our own limbic systems.

I was listening to some programmers talk the other day and the subject of free sites and content came up. And one of the talking heads mentioned an axiom that was so profound and accurate. If it (the content) is free, than it is invariably the end-user (you) that is actually being sold.

Lazy waters

Beautiful vocals by the late Skip Battin (1934-2003)

Four from me

Ruth Asawa, upside down

Donnie's shell 

Turkey tails, San Juan Island.

Gingko leaves

Tennessee Woman

Careful with that periodic table, Excitable Boy

After fifty years of searching, the scientists have finally proven the existence of excitonium! A little late, I'd say.