Osprey Returning to Base
Current Wx: Temp: 77.99°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 4.61mphWords: 212
The OM-1 makes capturing birds in flight much easier. The challenges that remain are understanding bird behavior, how to get the right exposure, composition and keeping the bird in the frame. Focus isn't really a problem anymore.
I went back up to the nest this morning. I only stayed about three minutes, because it clearly seems to bother the Osprey.
Dialed in about +.7ev exposure compensation, might have been able to get away with a full stop.
Weather's been mostly lovely here. Had a hot day on Friday and got into the lake. Brought the Tough TG-6 with me, but I can't get the images off of it. It's weird. It seems that it's formatted identically to the XZ-1, which I couldn't read either. I reformatted the XZ-1 in Disk Utility as FAT-32, same as it was before, and the MBP was able to read it and import images. Tried the same thing with the Tough TG-6's card, and no joy. It's a 64GB card, while the XZ-1 is only 16GB so maybe that has something to do with it. There's little chance of filling the card before we get home, so I'll just download the images to the iMac when we get back.
✍️ Reply by emailIt's Not Just Me
06:36 Thursday, 4 July 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 78.04°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 0mph
Words: 76
Skip the MSNBC part if you wish and go to the two veteran officers, now lawyers, as they discuss the grotesque obscenity perpetrated by the Supreme Court. We are in for a world of trouble.
✍️ Reply by emailLives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor
06:57 Thursday, 4 July 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 78.08°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 0mph
Words: 40
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.✍️ Reply by email
Superiority
07:04 Thursday, 4 July 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 78.1°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 1.23mph
Words: 624
I had never heard of James Henry Hammond until I read Erik Larson's The Demon of Unrest. Then he turned up in Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, by Colin Woodard.
Most recently, he was mentioned by Heather Cox Richardson in her June 30 Letters From an American blog post.
Hammond is an especially despicable figure in the dark history of the Confederacy. Apart from being an enslaver, he sexually abused his nieces. We know this because he wrote about it extensively in his diaries.
It's just interesting to me that such a figure would come to my attention with such frequency in a short period of time. Perhaps not so interesting considering that both Unrest and Union deal with the Civil War.
But Hammond's views represent a strain of American thought that has existed since the founding, and which continues today. Hammond was a member of the planter class, the wealthy elite of the South. Like many successful men, he married into it.
Hammond and others openly rejected Jefferson's claim that "all men are created equal." That view lives today.
Equality and democracy threaten the status and the privilege of the elite. FDR's New Deal created a new role for the federal government, to guard the equality and dignity of all Americans, against the predations of the elite, the monied class. Ever since it was created, the wealthy and the elite have been trying to roll it back and tear it down.
Gerrymandering is a cancer on democracy, where politicians choose their voters instead of the reverse. Gerrymandered states turn into political monocultures, where the policy views drift further to the extremes because elections are decided in primaries where only the most motivated voters turn out and reward the candidate who embraces the "purest" views of the radical fringe that turns out in proportionally greater numbers in primaries.
Demagogues thrive at both extremes of our political parties. The kinds of people contemplated by Thomas Paine when he wrote:
“A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some [dictator] may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.”
Democracy is messy. It can be slow to arrive at consensus. It involves compromise and concession. It confounds the impatience and ideological certainty of the extremes. At that makes it a liability they would happily do away with if they could.
If our democracy is to survive, and that is very much an open question as I write this, we must end the plague of gerrymandering. Monocultures make environments vulnerable to disease and parasites, in ecology and politics.
I just bought Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening. I'll read it on Kindle while I'm on vacation. I hope it will offer some comfort. Seems appropriate on Independence Day.
Last night I tried to stream Netflix's new Eddie Murphy Beverly Hills Cop movie. For whatever reason, which I don't know or understand, I was unable to send it to the tiny TV here via AirPlay.
So I chose a movie from my own library. I was looking for something light, but selected Darkest Hour, without giving it much thought. Perhaps I knew subconsciously it was what I needed to see. More so even than a comedy.
✍️ Reply by emailVoice of Reason
09:09 Thursday, 4 July 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 85.12°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 46
The stakes are incalculably high.
✍️ Reply by emailIndependence Day
09:34 Thursday, 4 July 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 86.81°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 38
I can think of no better day to decide. I just donated $1000 to Joe Biden. Can I afford it?
Can I afford not to?
Do what you can. Do your best.
The rest isn't up to you.
✍️ Reply by emailLooking Out the Front Door
Current Wx: Temp: 54.07°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 2.33mphWords: 362
It's 55°F outside on the 4th of July. That's something I love about New York. It's 74°F in Ponte Vedra, which isn't horrible. Of course, the sun isn't even up yet in Ponte Vedra. It's been up for nearly an hour here. High today is only supposed to be in the 70s.
I love it here.
This is the view from the front door. The landscape changes day to day, as farmers work the land and the crops begin to grow, along with the changing angle of the sun and cloud cover. It's a show unlike anything you'll ever see in Suburbia.
The air is crystal clear this morning, after a line of thunderstorms blew through yesterday afternoon. It blew the new grill we bought over and off the porch! The cover makes a great sail. A bent handle and warped side burner cover were the only damage. We've tucked it up close to the house now.
Shot this with the black E-PL7, and the 12-50mm kit zoom. It's an odd lens that earns mixed reviews, which I've mentioned before. But it seems pretty damn sharp to me, especially on a morning like this. This is at 50mm (100mm effective focal length). The images I post here are larger than they appear on the page. Right-click and open them in a new tab to get a larger view. I'll put this one up at Flickr too. [Update: I just looked at this image after posting it, and it's definitely softer exported at the lower resolution. Check out this one at Flickr. I want to be fair to the 12-50mm zoom.]
This is a jpeg, SOOC other than cropping it to 3:2 to get rid of the upper power line. The new house will be higher on the hill, so the power lines will be below my horizon. They'll still be in the frame, but not so obvious as they are against the sky.
Pulled down another 20 feet or so of fence yesterday. About another hundred feet to go. Probably go out and do some after I finish here. Take advantage of a cool morning.
✍️ Reply by emailPost Apocalypse
06:43 Friday, 4 July 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 54.3°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 1.81mph
Words: 774
Kottke posted something yesterday that I wanted to write about. I intended to do it yesterday afternoon after the storm, but I couldn't for some reason. Not sure I can do any better now, but it feels like I have to.
Some might feel that calling the Trump administration "apocalyptic" is hyperbole. Those are the folks who are more or less okay with what's taking place. People who, for one reason or another, were unhappy with the previous regime. And I use regime in the broader context of American government in the New Deal and Great Society era. A regime that, to one degree or another, viewed government as a means of raising the floor for the lower strata in wealth and income.
There are many, many ways where that regime failed, and left people out, or left them behind. And it seems clear that the vision that impelled that direction faded strongly following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Vietnam war, which seized young men from those lower strata and fed them into a meat-grinder for uncertain aims.
Reagan was the first crack in the foundation. It was patched with "triangulation" and neo-liberalism by Clinton and the democrats who embraced American finance, over the needs of middle and lower class Americans in order to hold power. Focusing on social justice issues, and ignoring economic justice.
Gingrich and his "contract on America" began the retreat from legislative norms, wielding power as Speaker Of the House to advance a form of party partisanship that focused on a national agenda and limited the power of committee chairs to address regional priorities.
Bush the Second gave us endless wars for ambiguous goals, fought with "all volunteer" armies, re-toured and re-toured in combat zones, exacting an unspeakable toll and elevating veterans and military service to near-religious status, alienating civilian society from the military.
De-regulation under Reagan, Bush and Clinton sparked growing financial crises, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis. The electorate wanted something different, and, for a little while anyway, it looked like Barrack Obama would deliver that. But America's first Black president also aroused the latent, and not-so-latent, racism that has always existed in America.
Obama tried to govern as a moderate, and therefore failed to deliver on the promise of being something different.
Trump, in hindsight, was something different that America craved.
I think Biden's election had more to do with the chaos of the pandemic than an outright rejection of Trumpism.
But Biden was too old and too wedded to power to be an effective transitional figure for the Democratic Party. Unable to communicate effectively, there was no face to his economic agenda. No powerful figure telling the story of how they were reshaping America.
Add to all that the disruption of misinformation and social media, which may yet prove to be apocalyptic alone, and Trump's second term, in hindsight, seems almost inevitable.
And now the edifice has crumbled.
Yes, as Kottke's post asserts, there is no way we are going to elect our way out of this catastrophe in the mid-terms, or the next presidential election.
We are living in a new America. In the ruins of what once was. And make no mistake, this gets worse before it gets better. Because we now have a national government that is incapable of meeting catastrophic events at national scales, which will be coming more and more frequently. Both natural, and man-made.
Welcome to Thunderdome.
If there is any good news, it is that if it isn't already clear, it soon will be that we are on our own.
Americans will have to look to each other, to their neighbors, to survive. I think that is, in the main, a good thing. It won't always be good, or adequate. We will often fail to meet the moment. Conflict and confrontation may overtake cooperation and collaboration.
We will have to re-learn those social skills that permit small communities to work together. We can't all be partisans in tribal conflicts over supposed "national" policies and issues that are no longer relevant to our day-to-day lives.
But it will be a rocky road before we get there. This is a transitional phase, and there will be wild swings in events. Some heroic, many tragic. But we are going to have to learn how to get along with one another, because we are all in this together and all we have is each other.
We need a new narrative. I don't know what that is yet, and I'm probably too old to help craft it.
✍️ Reply by emailFoundation Set
Current Wx: Temp: 79.02°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 11.27mphWords: 393
Moving along well for now. Footer drains and backfill this week, followed by stacking the basement walls. Weather permitting, we may pour the basement this week.
It was Florida hot this week. The guys would be on site at 0600 and wrapping up around noon. The worst of the heat should be over for now, but that sun is still pretty intense. We'll have a couple of pop-up canopies in there for shade.
There was a pretty good video that dropped last week about using a chilled-water air handler and some of the advantages. It's not a great video in terms of camera work or audio, and the HVAC presenter kept talking to the camera, but the information was solid. I was surprised at the small size of the air handler, but the big takeaway was the value of chilled water as a medium for dehumidification.
Because the heat pump can control the temperature of the water and the air handler has a speed for dehumidification, it can run for a long time without significantly (undesirably) cooling the house, and achieve a great deal of dehumidification, without dumping sensible heat into the house as a result. (You're dumping it outdoors at the condenser.)
I wondered if we might be able to get away from a whole-home dehumidifier entirely, but I suspect that winter may pose some challenges with the heat pump running in heating mode.
We've got another timber frame builder set up for the deck and porch, and they should be able to deliver by this fall. We're meeting with them on Tuesday and hopefully we'll get a reasonable quote soon after.
We're hanging fire on the floor joist info, specifically the size of the duct bay. It's the busiest part of the building season in New York, so communications can get jammed up. I need to get that information to Energy Vanguard so they can design the ductwork.
Mitzi's cabinet guy noticed a discrepancy in the plans, fortunately, so we'll have to move a stub-wall at the entryway over about six inches. That's why subs do shop drawings. It's frustrating because we paid the architect additional money over his quoted price because he supposedly had to correct some dimensions. But he did resolve some other issues, so I guess it evens out.
And the beat goes on...
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