Hiding Right in Front of Me

I was relaxing a bit after sunrise, taking my ease before beginning another day of helping A. finish her move. The new house has a great collection of plants around it and the late August sunrise was catching some at their best.

I put the new macro on (a Sigma 105mm f 2.8, for those interested) and started playing. None of these are altered or cropped.

As I composed the last set, I kept thinking I still had sleep in my eyes... the stem of the flower just looked "fuzzy"... didn't seem to be able to focus it, though the rest of the composition looked OK. I shot it and previewed it and realized that there was some serious industry taking place right in front of me.

I reset the lens to as close to 1:1 as I could hold and then shot the critters at work.

A Perfect September Day

Rather like the one seven years ago, where we woke in Crane, Oregon to crowd around the support vans on CycleOregon to attempt to make sense of what we were hearing but had no way of seeing.


There was nothing else to do. We had to absorb what we could and keep riding south, toward Diamond, through one of the most remote parts of the state. It was a long time ago, and yet my mind is quite clear in my memories of the morning, riding through the warm, extremely dry sunsine marveling at the day, and at the same time trying to imagine what was happening 3000 miles away, already aware of several hundred deaths, yet to be filled in on the thousands that were to follow.


Camp set, we took buses and vans to the top of Steens Mountain. There, a radio support truck used its monster mast to pull in signals and again we stood in disbelief, our eyes filled with hundreds of miles of vistas, a herd of pronghorns a few hundred yards away as our ears were filled with the otherworldly story that had unfolded. The juxtaposition was hard to process. It still is today.


I rode today, too. Just a commute. Actually longer than the ride we had to do that day, but it seemed fitting, as it was a good time to reflect.

Misdirection: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Open everything up! Drill everywhere! That'll fix it! If those damned treehuggers and scenery freaks would just stop getting in the way, we'd be paying less for gas next week!

Yeah, right.

The wrongheadedness of this attitude is so deep and so wide that it's hard to get one's arms around it all.

Where to start?

How about with the fact that "Big Oil" already holds perfectly legitimate leases to large tracts of ocean bottom that they have not even begun to tap?

How about a quick follow-up with the knowledge that there are not enough drilling rigs available right now or for the forseeable future to even begin to tap the existing leases, much less any more that might be opened up.

The current president, his old, fragile pretender to the throne, the oil-soaked Republicans on the congressional floors and (of course, and always) the oil lobby are going all out to make the sheep believe that punching more holes in the ground and slurping up all of the available oil will make things all better.

But it can't. Even if every well sunk was a gusher (and they most definitely will not be), that new supply could not even begin to be added to the current flow until the next president is getting close to finishing his next term.

And, what the politicians, the oil lobby and the mainstream press do not want to touch on is the inescapable fact that oil is a finite resource. What we're using now, have used in the past and will use in the future cannot be replaced. When it's gone, it's gone. And it WILL be gone! As a species, we've only been using petroleum products for about a century and a half, and most of that usage has come in the last 50 years. The big secret here is that the entire supply of oil available on the planet is now just about half gone, and we keep using more of it every year.

In case you're not following this to its inevitable conclusion, as a global population, we've got significantly less than 50 years to wean ourselves off of petroleum products.

Alternative energy sources are being treated like amusing little science projects or worse by much of the government, as have initiatives for conservation, and yet these are the only viable long-term solutions available.

As usual, the Washington gang can't see past the next election cycle, and they're more than happy to be sure that the general public doesn't look any further ahead on its own.

In the meantime, the oil companies are more than happy to not drill on what they already can. Even if the infrastructure was in place to do so, it's an open question as to whether they would or not.

Why bother now?

The leases are like huge savings accounts for them with interest rates that go up with every increase in oil prices. When they finally do get around to tapping some more wells, they'll be making even more obscene profits than they already are.

Of course, some of the tracts will be duds. That's a given. There's always the risk of a dry hole. But some won't be. Every dry hole increases the value of the next strike. They CAN win for losing, but the general public loses all around as long as there are no viable alternatives to fossil fuels.

"Nothing Accomplished" Day

Are you ready for it?

Five years ago tomorrow, one of the most ridiculous and erroneous publicity stunts in presidential history was perpetrated on the world.

Any bets on how much coverage this will get in the mainstream media?

After another nearly 4000 US deaths, tens of thousands of US injuries and uncounted and largely ignored numbers of Iraqi casualties (innocent and other), the mess is deeper and wider than it was when The Decider pranced around on the deck of the USS Lincoln. Oh, yeah, and the "US" figures are (to the best of my knowledge) only the DOD numbers. Who knows how many civilian contractors are not counted in those totals?

And I don't mean to de-emphasize the numbers of the Iraqi casualties... there's simply no way to know how many civilians have died as a direct or indirect result of "coalition" policies and actions in that country. It's just a guess on my part, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that more Iraqi non-combatants have died in the last five years than did in any five-year span during Saddam Hussein's reign. He was definitely a bad man, but has our meddling really done that country any good?

Five years ago, victory was proclaimed. It was a farce then and it's even more of one now. The "stay 'til we win" philosophy espoused by the right is nothing more than a guarantee of death and destruction without end.

You cannot win when there are no achievable conditions for victory. That's not the fault of the troops on the ground. There has never been a defined mission for them to accomplish. There was never a strategy for anything after the toppling of the regime, and without that, the forces on the ground are left with nothing but day-to-day tactics to keep themselves alive.

This war cannot be won. It can't really even be ended. It will go on after all Western forces are out of the area.

An American-style democracy cannot be forced on a culture that isn't ready to support it. A civil war can't be avoided when two factions have irrational and irreconcilable differences. Prolonged unrest is simply inevitable. As long as there are Shia and Sunni leaders seeking power and status, there will be bloodshed. American and British troops won't be able to stop it.

Prior to the invasion, a few critics mumbled references to Vietnam and were shouted down loudly. True, it's not exactly the same. Fewer troops are dying, and combat medicine is far more effective. Fortunately, the troops aren't being vilified as they return home, and their mistreatment at the hands of the Department of Defense has been received with appropriate outrage. And, of course, there aren't any jungles in Iraq.

And, again, of course... there's a LOT of oil under Iraq. But this wasn't about oil, was it?

New Lead Photo

Shot Sunday evening, April 20. Our last glimpse of the sun for a while. It was snowing hard the next morning.

Shot at 140mm (210 effective), handheld at 1/160 second, f/8.0, ISO 200. Yes, there's a little camera shake in there, but at this magnification you have to look for it. I just loved the sun streaks turning the fog gold.

A Break From the Gray

Where else can you walk to the edge of your Safeway parking lot and see this?

Steve Jobs, save me from your followers...

Honestly, I don't hate Macs.

I don't hate Linux boxes.

I don't hate XP machines.

Yeah, I pretty much hate Vista in any of its incarnations, but that's another story altogether. Ick.

And, honestly, I'm not a flag-waving fan of Bill and/or Melinda Gates because of what their collective empire has wrought on the computing world, but, you know what? I haven't seen a lot of activity from the Steve Jobs Foundation funding educational or research institutions or other such endeavors directed toward the common good. But then, maybe I'm not listening in the right places.

Preamble complete.

So, while I was at a workshop recently, a bunch of the participants sat down to lunch together. A fellow with trendy glasses, a tie-dye t-shirt, and a ponytail scrounged together out of sparse, salt-and-pepper hair started turning any aspect of the conversation into yet another opportunity to sing the praises of the Mac OS.

I swear, I could have mentioned something about the crispiness of the French fries and he would have found a way to claim that the Mac would have done it better.

I have little patience for evangelists of any denomination... they all act as though they're superior without the facts to back up the claim. You're supposed to take it on faith.

Macists are different from Dunkers (or the rest) in one way, though... they think they've got the statistics to "prove" their point.

But they miss the point, or at least I think this one did. Spewing statistics, he was certain that he could convince us all that Macs are impenetrable and he honestly seemed to think that they'd stay that way.

Macs aren't invulnerable to attacks because they're Macs... they don't get infected because malware writers don't care about them. They don't have enough market share to make the effort of screwing with them worthwhile.

If you turned the equation over, and made Windows the underdog, X users would be the ones visited by legions of frogs and plagues of locusts.

Sure, the Win bunch would still be dealing with BSODs and hung starts, but they'd also be laughing up their sleeves at the gnashing of teeth caused by the equivalent of McAfee and Norton "protection" suites.

Apple-eaters should rejoice in their relative anonymity while they still have it. They'll know they've reached market relevance when their equivalent of Chernobyl is visited upon them.

In the meantime, the business world still runs on Windows. I'm not exactly cheering that fact, but it IS a fact for the moment.

Be careful what you wish for.