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Ron Paul Runs Circles Around Obama When it Comes to Understanding Mankind's Need for Freedom In the same way that it takes courage to be an atheist when surrounded by true believers, it takes courage to be a young person today who is politically "atheist" and refrain from worshiping at the altar of Big Government whilst one's friends, one's favorite bands and one's professors exalt the notion that the Iron Fist of government, through green initiatives and wealth-spreading legislation, will save us from ourselves. Clearly, Ron Paul gets it. This is from his column "America's Strength is Freedom, Not Government". Big government has been tried and has failed miserably. What we need now is small government, and freedom. We need the freedom to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps again, as we traditionally do in this country. Edited Jul. 29, 2010 10:58 Surprise, Surprise Astonishingly, 55 per cent of citizens think Mr Obama is a 'socialist' against only 39 per cent who do not share that diagnosis. Don't act so surprised, Mr. Luce. Didn't you know that all the cool kids are socialist. The rest of us are just clod-hopping hillbillies or evil capitalists. Edited Jul. 13, 2010 22:55 Thank-You Letter to Dan Fitzpatrick Last night, he sent out a dispatch with a link to his article Who is Buying Gold...and Why. It frankly discusses the price of gold, government bonds, sovereign debt, socialism and the recession. It's great stuff. Here's a chunk of that letter for you to gnaw on for a minute: But think about this for a sec. This is really a domino effect that starts with government debt. When a government starts borrowing excessive amounts of money, the ultimate impact on the price of money effectively "crowds out" private enterprise. Private industry can't grow as fast. And since private industry generates all the tax revenues that governments feed on, tax revenues drop...which means that governments raise taxes. Higher taxes further impede business growth because more of their profits must be paid in taxes. I told you. Good stuff. So I wrote Dan a little thank-you letter.
Edited May. 13, 2010 09:15 My Letter to the Editor To the editor: In his continued letters, pastor Dale Potter regales us with his and the Bible's opinions on homosexuality. And he makes a case that the United States was founded strictly upon Biblical principles. I think Potter misses the point of the American Revolution, which was a special moment in history not because it was a religious one. It was momentous because it enshrined individual liberty, which is the right to have sex with men or women or both. It's the right to criticize one's government without fear of retribution. It's the right to go to church or to the synagogue or to the mosque, or just to stay home in your sweatpants watching reruns of Dirty Jobs. Observe that Potter is a Christian who claims to have a relationship with the eternal being that created the heavens and the Earth and breathed life into humanity. And further note that Potter spends his time writing to a local newspaper on behalf of his God to bellyache about men having sex together. Surely there are more pressing activities in the pastor's day planner. Somewhere, a woman has lost her husband and needs consoling. Somewhere, a man has a problem with alcohol that is destroying his family. Across the world, children are being sold into slavery; political dissidents are being tortured and killed, while pastor Potter is betraying an astonishing lack of context. Jeremy Browning Edited Apr. 06, 2010 17:44 Climategate and My Email to Steven Novella I disagreed last week with SGU when Novella defended the climate researchers who've been accused of colluding to distort the science of climate research. The "climategate" storm began after many of the researchers emails were made public. I briefly wrote about the issue in my post "Reality Always Wins: Climate Science Edition". Novella contended that there are benign explanations for the emails and that they've been taken out of context, etc. I wrote to Novella today to let him know my thoughts: Steven, Edited Nov. 30, 2009 10:35 Reality Always Wins: Climate Science Edition And you know I've been suspicious of the conclusions and policy recommendations of anthropogenic global warming cheerleaders because of they way they've found it to be a much too convenient tool to denounce capitalism and industry. I've suggested that the (politically motivated) conclusions preceded the research. Today may be the beginning of reality's revenge if this Washington Times editorial can be trusted. Here's a snip: It was announced Thursday afternoon that computer hackers had obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. Those e-mails involved communication among many scientific researchers and policy advocates with similar ideological positions all across the world. Those purported authorities were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global-warming claims. Further interesting reading can be found on the James Delingpole Climategate post at the Telegraph.co.uk blog. Edited Nov. 24, 2009 11:34 Winning and Losing Athletic competition is fiercely emotional. Observe how it affects the fans who aren't even physically involved, can be viewing from screens thousands of miles away and (usually) have much less to lose. Last week, volleyball reminded me what it feels like to have so much to lose. It wasn't a whole lot in the bigger picture, but it felt like everything in the world was at stake during moments of the tie-breaker third match against our rivals in the semis. Although it might be construed as "stressful," it's clearly something different. I live with a lot of stress. Tight deadlines are routine in my line of work and I frequently have thousands of dollars on the line in projects wherein it's not perfectly clear how we'll produce the prints we've been hired to produce. To quote Philip Henslowe from Shakespeare in Love, "Strangely enough, it all turns out well." How? "I don't know. It's a mystery." My job is a lot like that -- only I do know how it all turns out, but looking back, it does seem like a mystery. So stress is a given, but it's not the same as competition. Now, when you have deadlines to meet and you're busy with details and pulling your hair out, that's one thing. But when you lose a bid to a competitor, when you find out a good customer went somewhere else because of a few dollars on a large order and somehow forgot all the freebies you gave out in the past -- when a competitor takes food off my family's table, now that is a gut-ache. It's a painful, throat-knotting experience that feels very much like the volleyball semifinals. And there's a moment when you ask why in the world do you do this to yourself? It's a good question. Ultimately, I answer it with respect to my business by reminding myself that being in a competitive business climate, facing down the very real alternatives of profit and loss, is a proxy for the most basic competition, which is life vs. death. Most of us in America are fortunate enough to be quite removed by several layers of proxies from that basic question. That goes for the related absolutes like to eat or to starve, etc. I don't mean to imply the universe is out to get us in a malevolent sense, only that one can't escape the fact of competition at the most basic level. There are plenty of other times, however, when we might feel those pangs brought about by Us vs. Them and rightly wonder whether a particular conflict is necessary. That moment came in the third game of the semifinal match somewhere around the score of 17-13 in a game to 25 and we were losing. I remember looking back at my brother, who was serving, and then looking down at the floor and for a second, I wished only to be in my woodshop on a nice autumn day watching the router carve a perfect dado and smelling the fresh-cut wood. My very next thought was something close to nausea when I thought that's how politics makes me feel. And right after that, I said to myself, in a way that sounded like a voice-over in a slick documentary about my life perhaps posthumously produced: Politics is a sport, it's no way to run a country. I've been toying around with it in my head for a bit now, wondering whether it may be true or just sounded good at the time. Aspects of that notion seem enlightening, especially when I remember that running a country is only for the benefit of the citizens and politics, while it raises lots of money and kicks up lots of dust, certainly doesn't benefit Joe Citizen most of the time. The other profound connection I see is a kinship with the Founding Fathers who were (I've heard) quite distrustful of power and those who would seek it. And so I come back (as always) to the notion of a country governed mostly by laws that are fair to all, and less by the transient whimsy of the political elite. I do know that if I could articulate the grim view of politics that washed over me at that moment, you and I would have such a laugh at the vanity of those on the political world stage and the ugly contrast between their polished appearance and their vapid ideas. Edited Nov. 24, 2009 01:13 Optimism My wife sent me a piece by Lance Armstrong about his personal battles and it made me smile. Here's one of my favorite quotes: I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day gainst the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. Happy Anniversary to my Wife I racked my brain for weeks about what to get you. Lingerie seemed the obvious "Homer" gift, and I know you need a new printer, but you'll get that anyway. As I thought, I was drawn back to your art -- specifically your eye for art. It is frustrating to watch someone who is so artistic struggle with her camera because it's not being the tool you need it to be, and you're not always able to get the shots you want. I've watched you master quite a bit of it, finding the groove, trying to reign-in the flash and also get that nice blurry background behind your subject. But I keep thinking that this tool could be more... That's when I remembered the noble, old, forgotten 50mm lens. It's the lens you had if you were a photographer on assignment in Vietnam, if you were a 30-something taking a photography class at your local college in the 80s, the lens that was the standby on 35mm SLR Film Camera's for decades. Untold famous photos were undoubtedly shot with a 50mm lens. I fondly remembered my own first lens. A 50mm Vivitar, the lens I learned photography on. What happened to the noble 50mm? I wondered. Nowadays, everyone's camera comes with a zoom lens that goes from fish-eye to telescope, but you never see the 50mm anymore. So I typed in a google search for "the forgotten lens". Voilà! There it was. The very first paragraph on the very first link read: So there you are, the proud parents of a beautiful new baby, and you can hardly contain your excitement as you unwrap that new 35mm camera kit you bought to document your child's early years. Although you've had a point-and-shoot camera for a while, you wanted to step up to a 'real' camera for the kind of quality pictures you see in the popular media and in the camera maker's brochures. You fumble a little as you mount the 28-80 zoom lens and load the film, but pretty soon everything is ready to go. Damn. I was on the right track. I read on and found whole communities of people dedicated to the 50mm lens. And I read about how the popularity of zoom has made zoom lenses standard as a substandard "kit" lens on almost all new cameras. Meanwhile, for most of the masses, the 50mm has been forgotten. What's so great about 50mm. Let me count the ways. First of all, it's the same focal length as your eye, meaning that the perspective you see through a 50mm lens is very close to what you see through your own eyeball -- it's the same zoom ratio. That's why the 50mm is sometimes called the "normal" lens. It's also often called the "prime" lens, which stands for "primary." It got it's name from the way photographers would leave it on their cameras most of the time, as their primary lens. Next, 50mm lenses usually have HUGE apertures. That means that when the lens is "wide open" the amount of light going through it is enormous...almost always bigger than even the best zoom lens. This allows photographers to take pictures using available light, without annoying flashes always bleaching things out. 
The huge aperture has a nice side effect that creates a very narrow depth-of-field, meaning that only a very small area of the photo is in focus and then the background blends into oblivion. This happens because the lens is curved and almost the entire photo is coming through the whole surface of the lens and only part of it can be in perfect focus. On a zoom lens, the aperture cranks way down almost to a pinhole, so the whole photo is coming through the very center of the lens, where it's not curved very much, so the whole photo is in perfect focus. However, we all know the very hallmark of creative photography, especially photography of people, is created using a narrow depth-of-field. And the part where the photo goes out of focus is called the "bokeh." In photography, especially the kind of photography you do, bokeh is king. 
Another great thing about 50mm lenses is that they make you *think* about composition. Since you can't just zoom in and out and compose lazily, you have to decide how to take a photo, put some thought and art into it. Photographers call this, "zooming with your feet." In my travels, I read some great things photographers had said about the 50mm:
I've even heard photographers advise one another, when their photos are getting stale: go grab your 50mm prime and rediscover your craft. And so, I present to you, the noble 50mm in all it's glory. (It's actually the widest aperture 50mm lens you can buy for less than $2,000, and even the 2K versions are only barely wider.) This lens is said to "gobble up light". It opens to a full f/1.4 -- compare that to your current zoom lens' meager f/3.5 And the bokeh is orgasmically described by photographers as simply "creamy." I hope you have fun with this little guy. I hope you can shoot with less flash, creamy bokeh and your natural, artistic eye. Happy 7 Years. I Love you. Here are some photos taken with the 50mm: 
Now I know you're saying, "I hear all this talk about the 50mm, but you got me a 30mm lens." Well, things have changed in the digital world. And digital camera chips are smaller than the piece of film that cameras originally used. And that little square piece of film was the benchmark that cameras have been designed around for decades. But digital camera chips are smaller. The result is that some of the light that enters the lens misses the chip, falling all around it. This causes a "crop factor," which means that your digital camera is "zooming" into the photography that is coming through the lens. This zoom factor is 1.5 on a Nikon and 1.6 on a Canon. So to get the *true* focal length of your lens on a digital camera, you have to multiply the number printed on your lens by your camera's "crop factor." 
So if I had bought you a 50mm lens, it really would have been equivalent to an 80mm lens in old school camera lingo. So I got you a 30mm lens because 30 x 1.6 = 48 -- damn close to 50mm and damn close to "normal," the focal length of the human eye. Edited Sep. 21, 2009 19:02 Obama's Weak Case for More Bureaucracy Here is a well-meaning government official who so fails to grasp the problem in health care that he can present such absurd oversimplifications and suggest that this sort of thing is the real problem -- doctors simply lack the common sense to make obvious medical decisions. President Obama wants us to solve this problem by putting himself and other government officials in charge of rescuing medicine from the medical profession. If medical doctors with a decade of schooling cannot distinguish between good cures and ineffective ones that must be discontinued, then by gosh, we're lucky that the good folks from the government can. Maybe it's just a genetic deficiency I have for being uncool, but I've never been even the least bit seduced by Obama's various siren songs -- his idealism for the sake of idealism, his subtext that if we only wish it, it will come to pass. In that sense, I understand his meteoric rise. It's a great irony that Obama's popularity seems to float on the same myopic disregard for reality that the "alternative" and "progressive" movements in America openly abhor. Those progressive and alternative movements holler, "Who thought we could plunder the earth for decades and get away with it? Who thought we could embrace ever richer and more refined foods without paying the price of a public health crisis? Who thought we could impose our will across the globe without the world eventually turning against us?" "Naive, short-sighted, stimulation-hungry, indelicate, simplistic America," comes the answer. And who thinks the answers to all of America's problems will be swept away by government bureaucracies built one on top of another? Who thinks punishing the rich will elevate the poor? Who thinks inefficiency is a key ingredient for the country's energy supply? Who laps up feelgood nonsense that virtually worships myopia, such as, "If you are hungry, you're not that interested in freedom of the press"? It's the same gyrating throng of groupies who are enabling the leftist Barack Obama to crowd surf across the once fruited plain. Edited Jul. 23, 2009 11:12 Economics 101 IRS "Turning Over Every Rock" to Raise Revenue: Obama Targeting Overseas Assets I have another tip: cut taxes. If you don't believe me, check out the Heritage Foundation's list of Ten Myths about the Bush Tax Cuts. Screen-printing Salmon Run, More Reader Mail + Why I Named My Son After Václav Klaus On top of that, my son was born on June 20 and the last month of my wife's pregnancy was a little rocky with her being sick and feeling like "blah". The result is that I don't really remember much of the last 60 days except for my son's birth, which is burned into my memory. The rest of it is just vague emotions, like "ugh" first thing in the morning. Another "ugh" is that I took some time out of a couple 14-hour days in May to correspond again with Jim C., a reader you'll remember from previous posts. I guess I was thinking that a little non-work-related intellectual stimulation would be a good break from the shop. I was wrong. Our brief exchanges culminated with a few insults from Jim, including the accusation that I'm only a good person because, morally, I'm "running on fumes" from my days as a Christian, that under Objectivism, morality becomes "meaningless or non-sense" and that my moral choices are based solely upon what is expedient. I respect the many people I meet who don't understand Objectivism and admit it. I respect the people who ask, "Doesn't the virtue of selfishness lead to anarchy and every-man-for-himself," and then listen patiently while I explain it to them. Jim clearly hasn't read much Ayn Rand, for he makes the most basic mistakes when speaking about her philosophy. And that's fine. But when he makes specific accusations about my character, it's just too much. People who know me -- Christians and atheists alike -- may have some complaints about me. But no one questions my integrity. I'm honest because I don't believe there's anything to gain by faking reality. I have the word "VIRTUE" inscribed on the inside of my wedding ring and I love this Rand quote about virtue: Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute. I have read and re-read and re-read and I completely understand the following passage, spoken by John Galt in Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. It's about not initiating the use of physical force and why it's such an important ethical principle: Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others. For me, those are words to live by. I consult those principles and others throughout my daily life. Do I strike you, as I struck Jim C. as someone whose standard of value is expediency? But my deeper point here is that bickering about religion vs. atheism is not my primary goal. I am not a "fisher of men" attempting to convert Christians to atheism. Despite Jim's insults, and beyond my desire to express to him (or anyone) my devotion to reason and honest inquiry with regard to the supposed supernatural, my overarching purpose here at captaincool.net is to convert people to recognize the inviolate nature of individual rights and capitalism as the logical political/economic implementation of those rights. I really don't care about your religion, as long as you and your bros leave me alone. Crikey! I just finished writing a few posts back that I don't yearn for any great consensus about very many things. I believe that it's vital for our countrymen to strongly agree on a very small number of crucial principles. So while it may be Jim's moral duty to flog me about my lack of religion, I'm perfectly willing to let him have all the religion he wants, so long as he keeps me out of it. As a matter of fact, I've been known to join hands with Christians in protesting our government's continued disavowal of capitalism and individual rights. I'd rather live in a society of Christian capitalists who enshrine individual liberty than a society of atheist leftists railing against capitalism, objectivity and the industrial revolution. Now, back to my newborn son -- specifically, his namesake. The European Parliament this past February was graced with a speech from a man who dared to promote capitalism while most of the room no doubt held their noses and some even jeered. Václav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, had the courage to stand before the European Parliament and speak the truth: Moreover, it is self evident that one or another institutional arrangement of the European Union is not an objective in itself; but a tool for achieving the real objectives. These are nothing but human freedom and an economic system that would bring prosperity. That system is a market economy. Wow. Imagine the strength of character required to say those things to a gathering of EU politicians. It's like quoting rapper Dr. Dre at a KKK meeting. I've written about Mr. Klaus before and his reasoned skepticism of human-caused global warming as well as his criticism of the attempts to decapitate the world economy in service to the environment. I've been a fan of his for several years. His unrepentant endorsement of freedom is just the thing this world needs. And my baby boy's middle name is Klaus in honor of the spirit of the men such as Václav, to whom we owe our freedom, if not our lives. Edited Jul. 01, 2009 23:28 The Great Orator Falls Down Here's a snip of the closing section: So, I actually think ... pause [FANTASTIC. I'VE LOST EVERYONE, INCLUDING MYSELF] ... there's enormous consensus that has emerged in terms of what we need to do now and, er ... pause [I'M OUTTA HERE. TIME FOR THE USUAL CLOSING BOLLOCKS] ... I'm a great believer in looking forwards than looking backwards. People with conviction aren't afraid to say what they really think about a subject. The joke is on us that our current leaders (on both sides of the aisle) don't have any conviction. While they speak, you can almost hear the gears grinding in their heads: they're desperately trying to work out what a focus group might think of the answer. Obama, sans teleprompter, is no different. The only thing the teleprompter adds is that it has already calculated in the focus group answers and thus adds to his confidence. Edited Apr. 04, 2009 13:06 Atlas Shrugged Tops Amazon Classics List Earlier this year Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel Atlas Shrugged was selling at triple the rate it sold at in the beginning of 2008. Now the novel is soaring to even greater heights, and its trade paperback edition is currently in first place in the Classics category on Amazon.com's best-seller list for sales in the United States. The 50th anniversary mass-market paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged ranks as #2 and the trade paperback Centennial edition ranks as #3. For several weeks Atlas Shrugged has been holding steady in the top 10 best-sellers in the broader United States Literature and Fiction category, and as of the writing of this release, different editions of the novel stand at #3, #5 and #6 in Amazon’s ranking. It makes perfect sense to me. Edited Mar. 19, 2009 10:06 Nothing New Despite Obamania Of course that's what we've got, with Nancy Pelosi (and her buddies in the House) in charge of putting the bill together. I remember when Pelosi -- after the 2006 mid-term elections -- beamed and professed, "We have the power!" She lives in an alternate reality, misunderstands our republic, and behaves like a prospective prom queen who thinks that title actually means you get to be queen of the school. She is that mistaken. And it reflects poorly on Captain Change, President Obama. I think Krauthammer put it best: The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive. Edited Feb. 06, 2009 09:40 |
Ron Paul Runs Circles Around Obama When it Comes to Understanding Mankind's Need for Freedom Thank-You Letter to Dan Fitzpatrick Climategate and My Email to Steven Novella Reality Always Wins: Climate Science Edition Obama's Weak Case for More Bureaucracy Screen-printing Salmon Run, More Reader Mail + Why I Named My Son After Václav Klaus Atlas Shrugged Tops Amazon Classics List To My Wife on Inauguration Day Atheism, Reason and Reader Mail Ooops! Global Warming Scientists Blow it Again Somebody Decides. Why Can't it be You Instead of Uncle Sam? November 5. Feeling Like My Dog Just Died and I Lost My Last Friend More Global Cooling Balance: "Man-made global warming is junk science." Making Sense of the Financial Crisis Where's the Annual 9/11 Tape from Al Qaeda Al-Qaeda in Iraq Shrinks from 12,000 fighters in Mosul to 1,200 HooooRaaaaayyy for Gun Rights!
The Recurring Theme: What Does It Matter? Skeptics, Anti-Scientists & the Walls Around Us Gore's Scary Global Warming Movie Is The Usual B.S. Negative Ten Degrees Fahrenheit Reality: The Ultimate Arbiter + Your Friend |
log (lôg) n. a record of details of a voyage made by a ship's captain or crew