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Archive for 2005
January 9, 2005
LENS-BLOGGING: My biggest Christmas gift was this 12-24 zoom lens for the D70. Sadly, a combination of bad weather and various family duties kept me from doing much with it until today. But just to experiment, I took it with me when I went for a walk on Cherokee Boulevard. As you can see, it’s good for giving your car the long-hood look.
For anyone who’s interested, I put up a gallery of photos over at Exposure Manager. Overall, it seems quite good. I’ve never been a huge fan of wide-angle lenses. Feature photographers like them because they make things look unnatural (the human eye sees things in a manner akin to an 80 or 90mm telephoto lens), and hence “interesting.” And, of course, they’re very useful shooting in cramped quarters. But I really wanted this lens, because I wanted to change my style a bit from my traditional telephoto-intensive approach to something different, and because I’ve been in a number of situations where I wished I had a wider lens. Anyway, it seems quite excellent, and I look forward to giving it a proper workout.
For those with more technical interests, here’s a review by Ken Rockwell, and another by Bjorn Rorslett. And some related earlier posts can be found here and here.
UPDATE: Reader P.J. Swenson emails:
Well, you are going to hate me for this, but giving you a link to this photo/snorkling article will make you travel to this destination. All I ask for is a postcard.
And this is a funny but oh-so-true travel story:
I bought a 28-200G in part on your recommendation, in part because it is a very versatile lens. Now I am going to switch from a d100 to a d70 in part to the DSLR ratings by thom who wrote the articles above, and also because it has a 1/500 flash sync. I highly recommend his books on the d100 and d70.
And when I bought the lens, the adorama seller almost pressured me into buying the d70 at the same time because he said the rebate was expiring at Nikon on the last day of December. It turns out, Nikon extended the 100$ rebate for the d70, and they upped the d100 rebate to $200.
The rebates are good until March 31, so if you wind up buying a camera, or one of several lenses, be sure not to let ’em slide. That’s real money. And here’s an interesting item on wide-angle photography.
ANOTHER UPDATE: David Nishimura emails:
If you haven’t tried it, PTLens is an amazing freeware Photoshop plug-in (works with Elements, too) that will correct the distortion and vignetting so common in digital camera lenses — though it can also be used with digitized images from film cameras. Installation and use is incredibly easy. Won’t work with Macs, however, just Windows and — by command line — Linux.
I haven’t tried it, but I guess I should.
HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW WITH JEFF BEZOS from Wired.
Excerpt:
Do physical bookstores have anything to offer that Amazon doesn’t?
One thing is face-to-face meetings with authors. And what Howard Schultz at Starbucks likes to call a third place, where people go and sit and spend time. We humans are a gregarious species; we like to mingle with other humans.
Read the whole thing, though I’m disappointed that they didn’t ask him about Blue Origin. Meanwhile Ralph Luker offers a reason why some people might avoid Amazon — or patronize it:
It’s a little late for your Christmas shopping, but if you think that you should buy the way you vote, check out BuyBlue.org, which tracks corporate donations to American political parties. Hint: if George Bush wasn’t your choice for president, you may decide to shun Amazon.com in favor of Barnes&Noble or Borders.
I’m rather skeptical of BuyBlue, though.
JON HENKE HAS LOTS MORE on the Armstrong Williams story mentioned below. And I’ll have more still in my TCS column this week.
VARIFRANK WAS UNPROFESSIONAL:
Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro collegues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:
” See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, theres a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier…”
After which he and many of my Euro collegues laughed out loud.
And then they looked at me. I wasn’t laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.
I’m afraid I was “unprofessional”, I let it loose –
“Hmmm, let’s see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster, now what kind of ship would we want?
Something with its own inexhuastible power supply?
Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?
Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it?
Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies?
Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier?
Well “Franz”, us peasants in America call that kind of ship an “Aircraft Carrier”. We have 12 of them. How many do you have?
Heh. (Via M. Simon). You can see a larger version of the photo with caption here. What is it that some people have against people who can, you know, do stuff?
And before geeks email me, I think the 900,000 gallons is for the entire carrier group, as I seem to recall that the carrier itself can produce only about half that much. The point still holds, however.
CHUCK SIMMINS NOTES that George Soros appears to be missing in action on tsunami relief. So are some others you’d expect to be giving. (Via Bill Hobbs). On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that Soros’ foundation did a lot of good work regarding the Ukrainian elections.
VIOLENT STORMS HIT EUROPE: “A fierce winter storm packing hurricane force winds that swept across northern Europe has left at least 13 dead several missing, officials said Sunday.”
Here’s a report from BalticBlog. Photos, video and commentary (in Estonian) here.
MALARIABLOGGING: I’ve been writing about malaria and DDT on InstaPundit since the beginning. So I should mention this column by Nick Kristof in which he calls for a return to DDT:
Mosquitoes kill 20 times more people each year than the tsunami did, and in the long war between humans and mosquitoes it looks as if mosquitoes are winning.
One reason is that the U.S. and other rich countries are siding with the mosquitoes against the world’s poor – by opposing the use of DDT.
“It’s a colossal tragedy,” says Donald Roberts, a professor of tropical public health at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “And it’s embroiled in environmental politics and incompetent bureaucracies.”
Indeed.
PATRICK RUFFINI has come clean on his hidden agenda.
WHAT WOMEN WANT: In Iraq, anyway:
94% of women surveyed want to secure legal rights for women.
84% of women want the right to vote on the final constitution.
Nearly 80% of women believe that their participation in local and national councils should not be limited.
…..
The most unexpected result of the survey is that despite increasing violence, particularly violence against women, 90.6% of Iraqi women reported that they are hopeful about their future.
Interesting stuff.
EVERY WEEK, NEWSWEEK SPAMS ME with press releases about its new stories. I usually ignore them because by the time they’re out they’re already old news to blogosphereans. But this piece, with its combination of blatant bias and factual inaccuracy, seems so typical that it’s worth a comment. Excerpt:
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.
Er, maybe because the Iran-Contra scandal had to do with overthrowing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, rather than the guerrilla war in El Salvador? I mean, I know all those people look alike to the folks at Newsweek, but this is either inexcusable sloppiness, or simply a stretch to try to bring in more stuff that might make it look bad.
The whole piece is like that, and it’s unfortunately typical. I don’t know whether this sort of thing is a good idea or not — I can see arguments both ways — but this story goes out of its way, as usual, to get the digs in before getting around to mentioning the actual arguments.
I guess I should be glad, though: Usually it’s all about Vietnam. At least this story is bringing things 20 years closer to the present.
UPDATE: This article from StrategyPage is, as usual, much more useful and complete than the Newsweek treatment, and suggests that the El Salvador parallel isn’t really apt. And Silent Running offers more corrections. Finally, reader Ron Wright notes this rather different parallel with the El Salvador experience:
Conditions were horrible when Salvadorans went to the polls on March 28, 1982. The country was in the midst of a civil war that would take 75,000 lives. An insurgent army controlled about a third of the nation’s territory. Just before election day, the insurgents stepped up their terror campaign. They attacked the National Palace, staged highway assaults that cut the nation in two and blew up schools that were to be polling places.
Yet voters came out in the hundreds of thousands. In some towns, they had to duck beneath sniper fire to get to the polls. In San Salvador, a bomb went off near a line of people waiting outside a polling station. The people scattered, then the line reformed. “This nation may be falling apart,” one voter told The Christian Science Monitor, “but by voting we may help to hold it together. . . .
The elections achieved something else: They undermined the insurgency. El Salvador wasn’t transformed overnight. But with each succeeding election into the early 90’s, the rebels on the left and the death squads on the right grew weaker, and finally peace was achieved, and the entire hemisphere felt the effects.
As we saw in El Salvador and as Iraqi insurgents understand, elections suck the oxygen from a rebel army. They refute the claim that violence is the best way to change things. Moreover, they produce democratic leaders who are much better equipped to win an insurgency war.
Indeed.
UPDATE: Various lefty emailers, and some lefty bloggers are calling me an idiot for not recognizing that the struggle against communists in El Salvador and the struggle against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were connected. Of course they were, and it’s nice to see people admit that there really was a global struggle against communism, something that wasn’t so readily admitted back in the day. But my point, as should be obvious, is that the Newsweek piece goes out of its way to drag in Iran/Contra, which had nothing to do with the El Salvador “death squads,” which themselves have a rather tenuous relationship, at best, to what’s going on in Iraq, so as to make Bush look bad. If the Newsweek story had offered that perspective, this defense might be worth something. But it didn’t, because its goal was a cheap smear. Bad publicity relating to Iran/Contra has nothing to do with Iraq, except for Newsweek’s effort to tie the two together.
I’ll also note that guerrillas who kill people are called “insurgents” and compared to Minutemen when they’re anti-American, and “death squads” when they’re not. Typical.
The path of the tsunamis tracked the arc of the Muslim world, from Sumatra to Somalia; the most devastated country is the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and the most devastated part of that country is the one province living under the strictures of sharia.
But, as usual, when disaster strikes it’s the Great Satan and his various Little Satans who leap to respond. In the decade before September 11, the US military functioned, more or less exclusively, as a Muslim rapid reaction force – coming to the aid of Kuwaiti Muslims, Bosnian Muslims, Somali Muslims and Albanian Muslims. Since then, with the help of its Anglo-Australian allies, it’s liberated 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That’s not how the West’s anti-war movements see it. I found myself behind a car the other day bearing the bumper sticker, “War Is Costly. Peace Is Priceless” – which is standard progressive generic autopilot boilerplate, that somehow waging war and doing good are mutually exclusive. But you can’t help noticing that when disaster strikes, it’s the warmongers who are also the compassion-mongers. Of the top six donor nations to tsunami relief, four are members of George W. Bush’s reviled “coalition of the willing”.
Not surprising.
DAVID FRUM NOTICES the United Nations’ lack of moral authority, and, for that matter, utility:
The helicopters are taking off and landing now in the tsunami-shattered villages and towns. The sick are being taken for treatment. Clean water is being delivered. Food is arriving. Soon the work of reconstruction will begin.
The countries doing this good work have politely agreed to acknowledge the “coordinating” role of the United Nations. But it is hard to see how precisely the rescue work would be affected if the UN’s officials all stayed in New York – or indeed if the UN did not exist at all.
The UN describes its role in South Asia as one of “assessment” and “coordination.” Even this, however, seems to many to be a role unnecessary to the plot. The Daily Telegraph last week described the frustration of in-country UN officials who found they had nothing to do as the Americans, Australians, Indonesians, and Malaysians flew missions.
It will be the treasury departments of the G-7 missions that make decisions on debt relief, and the World Bank, aid donor nations, private corporations, and of course the local governments themselves that take the lead on long-term reconstruction. And yet we are constantly told that the UN’s involvement is indispensable to the success of the whole undertaking. How can that be? . . .
Nor finally is the UN really quite so hugely popular as supporters such as Ms Short would wish it believed. The Pew Charitable Trusts – the same group that conducts those surveys on anti-Americanism worldwide – reports that the UN carries much more weight in Europe than it does in, say, the Muslim world. Only 35 per cent of Pakistanis express a positive attitude to the UN, as do just 25 per cent of Moroccans, and but 21 per cent of Jordanians.
The UN’s authority is instead one of those ineffable mystical mysteries. The authority’s existence cannot be perceived by the senses and exerts no influence on the events of this world. Even the authority’s most devout hierophants retain the right to disavow that authority at whim, as Ms Short herself disavowed its resolutions on Iraq. . . .
Whence exactly does this moral authority emanate? How did the UN get it? Did it earn it by championing liberty, justice, and other high ideals? That seems a strange thing to say about a body that voted in 2003 to award the chair of its commission on human rights to Mummar Gaddafi’s Libya.
Read the whole thing.
I’LL HAVE A MCSHWARMA, PLEASE.
January 8, 2005
MICHAEL SAVAGE, savaged from the right.
UPDATE: Does Savage have a hidden agenda?
THE SITZPINKLER PHENOMENON is explained as an artifact of German toilet technology. When we lived in Heidelberg, our house had those toilets. I remember thinking that when the Soviets looted Berlin at the end of World War II, and carried off thousands of toilets (as they did), it represented a sort of final revenge on the part of the Germans.
VISITED MY GRANDMOTHER at the rehab home, where we improved her evening by, among other things, bringing fresh barbecue. She’s eaten barbecue at least weekly since some time in the Wilson Administration, and it seems to have done her some good.
UPDATE: Ed Cone emails to ask if it was North Carolina-style barbecue. As if! My grandmother’s health and longevity probably stem from all the healthy lycopene in the tomato-based Alabama/Tennessee-style barbecue she’s consumed.
And, jeez, going to that place is just proof of how well she’s doing. At 90 she’s one of the older folks there (though she’s already found a friend in a feisty 93-year-old woman who, like her, is rehabbing from an orthopedic injury), but she’s in so much better shape, physically and mentally, than most of the people there that it’s amazing. Still, she likes to point out many touching scenes, such as an man who comes three times a day to feed his mostly-paralyzed stroke-victim wife, and who sits holding hands with her in the lounge “like newlyweds,” she says.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Janet Nickell emails: “How about some grandmother blogging? She sounds like a wonderful woman.” She is. I’ll see what I can do.
And I’ll see if I can dig up the picture of her in a swimsuit, on a motorcycle, in Daytona in 1932.
DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: I mentioned a while back that I had given this compact photo printer to my brother for Christmas, but that he hadn’t used it yet. They’re now in the new house, and he reports that they’ve been printing out massive quantities of baby pictures, and that they’re very happy with the quality and ease of use.
ROGER SIMON NOTES TWO VIEWS on bias and reporting.
ARTHUR CHRENKOFF ROUNDS UP STILL MORE DUMB TSUNAMI QUOTES: It’s a tidal wave of idiocy — and, sadly, the U.N. isn’t trying to take a lead role in remedying this wave.
HERE’S AN UPDATE in the case involving Zeyad’s cousin:
FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) — An Army sergeant took the stand and tearfully apologized to his family, commanding officers and subordinates Saturday, a day after being convicted of aggravated assault for ordering his soldiers to throw Iraqis into the Tigris River.
“If I had to go back, I would definitely do something different on those days,” Army Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Perkins said, wiping away tears.
Perkins, 33, was convicted Friday of two counts of aggravated assault, a charge of assault consummated by battery and a charge of obstruction of justice. He was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter in the alleged drowning of one of the men. . . .
Perkins and another soldier were accused of ordering soldiers to push the two Iraqis into the river in Samarra in January 2004. Prosecutors say Zaidoun Hassoun, 19, drowned and his cousin, Marwan Hassoun, climbed out the river.
Marwan Hassoun testified that he tried to save his cousin by grabbing his hand, but the powerful current swept Zaidoun away. Marwan said the body was found in the river nearly two weeks later.
I don’t know whether this verdict is just or not, but at least the matter wasn’t swept under the rug. Directory of earlier posts on this subject here.
UPDATE: The story I link above has been updated, and says that the sentence is 6 months, which seems to me to be very light.
ANOTHER IRANIAN CRACKDOWN ON THE INTERNET: I’m really starting to dislike the mullahs.
Boy, people at CNN do not like Jonathan Klein! Doesn’t he realize it’s hard to be a highly unpopular boss in the Web era, especially at a big media enterprise the press will pay inordinate attention to? Ask Howell Raines. … Expect lots of anti-Klein anecdotes to be leaked to the obvious outlets in the weeks ahead.
I told you that Klein’s selection was a blogger’s full-employment act!
CATS AND DOGS, LIVING TOGETHER: Bill Adams notes that the Los Angeles Times is actually backing Arnold Schwarzenegger on his plan to eliminate gerrymandering.
YEAH, I WAS OFF THE AIR for a while. Hosting Matters was the subject of a DDOS attack that took down InstaPundit and quite a few other blogs. I noted that over at the backup site (which you should bookmark, since the link on this page won’t work if InstaPundit is down), and went to bed. Things seem to be fixed now; no word on where the attack came from or why.