Author Archives: danijel

Camera or lens?

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I keep encountering the conundrum of whether to upgrade camera or lenses first, and there’s occasionally a comparison of a high-end camera paired with a low-cost lens, against a low-end camera paired with a high-end lens, as if that’s a dilemma anyone is actually having.

I had a similar problem lately, when I decided I want to buy the FE 100-400mm GM lens, because I wanted to make a certain profile of pictures with it, but I of course understood that the autofocus on my camera isn’t capable of utilising the lens properly, and there’s our solution: camera and lens need to be seen as a unit that is combined to produce a certain result. This means that you can’t have bottlenecks that limit the effectiveness of the system as a whole, for instance you can’t have only one part of the fast autofocus system, because both camera and lens need to work together.

Also, the realistic conundrum isn’t whether to get the most expensive lens and pair it with the shittiest possible body, or vice versa. Realistically, it looks more like “should I get the 70-200 f/2.8 or 85mm f/1.8 for the portraits”, because “cheap lens” is often a fast prime, and “expensive lens” is often a zoom, where the cheap lens might actually give you better results; also, with the body it’s “do I need faster autofocus for portraits and weddings”, because that’s where the difference in price is today. If you’re shooting macro, you don’t need a body with the best autofocus, you need a great macro lens and, probably, additional lights. So, basically, the answer is to see what you actually need, where the bottlenecks of your process are, and then remove those bottlenecks. Someone else will have different problems to solve, and different money pits to fill. Sometimes the solution is counter-intuitive, for instance getting the expensive new camera body and cheap used lenses of otherwise very high quality, which looks like putting cheap lenses on an expensive camera, but in this case price is not an accurate measure of quality obtained. In any case, the lesson is to avoid formulaic thinking when solving practical problems.

 

Sheep

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That boring sheep from the last article started me on a train of thought, because a piece by Bach crossed my mind, “Sheep may safely graze“. Here are the lyrics:

Sheep can safely graze
where a good shepherd watches over them.

Where rulers are ruling well,
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy.

What a comforting thought that is: the people in charge will do their job well, so that normal people can mind their own business – have jobs and families, have a pint of beer with friends after work, know that if there’s a genuine danger the government will raise the alarm, and it won’t just release a bioweapon and then enforce vaccination with an experimental gene therapy drug intended to reduce their number and fertility, or launch a war against a country that’s deemed to be too independent and successful and it needs to have its wings clipped, and if millions die, even better for the environment; the closer we are to no life on Earth, the closer we are to the goal of zero carbon emissions. How comforting it would be to think that the international groups running the global governments aren’t attacking agriculture in order to reduce the amount of food produced, with the goal of raising the food prices so that all the poor people would starve, and middle class would be reduced to poverty, and only they, the super rich, would remain as the new feudal elite of the world, owning all the real estate and running all the governments.

This is a Christian thought, originating from the epistles of St.Paul, who stated that every form of worldly government exists because God allowed it, basically meaning that the government is installed by God, and people need to obey it because by doing so they obey God. Interestingly, this goes completely against Jesus, who stated that the world is under the power of Satan, the Prince of this world, but I can see how the people in power must have liked the idea that Christianity will robe them in the mantle of Divine authority, and so this notion became the cornerstone of medieval politics.

The Augustinian imagery of civitatis Dei would be a flock of sheep representing the faithful Christian people, with the shepherd representing the Church, and sheep dogs representing the worldly powers that maintain order, guarding against the wolves, the outside evils that threaten. The Holy Spirit permeates the entire society, from the shepherd to the sheep, making them all obedient to the Lord in their respective roles, and traveling safely through this world while Satan roars in frustration beyond the fence in the dark.

There’s also the evangelic image of sheep representing a soul faithful and obedient to God, where sheep are the good entities that need to be able to mind their business of grazing safely while the shepherd and his dog keep guard from wolves and thieves. It’s a nice image, because, again, it makes it sound as if people just need to remain faithful to God and they will be protected.

It also creates the material for the enemies of God, who ridicule the faithful people, because the sheep are not protected because anyone truly cares for them; they are protected because they are useful as a resource, for food and clothing of those who keep them. Essentially, while the sheep think they are being protected, they are merely being kept for the dominant predator who keeps them, and the wolf is just unwanted, weaker competition.

But no, that’s not how things actually work, and the evangelic image is actually misunderstood, or stretched too far, because the metaphoric God’s sheep, the ones obedient to the will of God, don’t feel like sheep grazing on a meadow. They feel like tigers and dragons, like lords of their respective domains, they are the angels and heavenly powers, through whom God’s imperium is distributed, and the fact that they are fully obedient to God in fact means that they also embody the sovereign power that is no longer merely transcendental in God, but invested through them. They can create worlds, cast judgment upon souls and see the judgment being executed, forgive sins, and ease burdens. The sheep of God is the angel with the flaming sword, whose power is such that you would shit yourself on sight.

Those more deserving a comparison with the flock of sheep are those walking the wide and well paved path through life – basically, grazing on a meadow in front of a slaughterhouse, being marked and assigned various uses by their worldly owners. Those on the narrow path leading to salvation can no longer be perceived through this imagery, because they are something else; not the sheep of the world, but not yet truly the sheep of God either; rather, they are God’s sheep in training, passing through various trials and dangers, and if they remain faithful, they get to be trusted with power and authority of God.

And no, they are not calmly grazing. Their alert sight scans the world, and their power glows in their eyes, ready to be released in glorious and terrible ways at any moment, if the will of the Lord flows through them into action. Having survived all the trials Satan invested this world with, and having kept faith throughout, makes such beings incredibly alert, wise, hardened and sharp minded, as their will is honed to cut through all illusion, evil and sin. Their armour is dented and the hilts of their blades are well worn, and their will and love shine like the Sun through and above all clouds, bringing happiness and safety of God’s indomitable power.

The problem

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The problem with science is that people assume it works on data and analysis, while in fact it works on money, and data and analysis are merely PR instruments for obtaining money. Essentially, if you want to get money as a scientist, you need to serve as a mediator that presents the interests of the people with money to the general populace that will accept your arguments as the truth, believing it’s based on facts, evidence and rational analysis, peer reviewed and all that. In reality, the measurements are cooked up, the analysis is cooked up, and there’s almost never any kind of peer review. Yeah, those are the actual facts about the state of science today, which has been so thoroughly compromised by both money and ideology, that I basically can’t trust any of it at this point, and I only pay attention to scientific research if it comes from China and Russia. Everything in the West is a clown show. In the meantime, the “trust the science” people:

Liars and whores

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It’s deep frost on all the roofs here, the temperature is definitely below zero. However, the weather app on my computer shows 4°C. I looked at other sources – yup, they show 4°. I already noticed a pattern there; they always show at least 2° more than the sensor in my car, which is within 0.5° from the sensors reporting the condition on the road, so I know it’s accurate. But, how is that possible? Shouldn’t the meteorologists have the most accurate sensors? They should, normally. However, in the recent decades in the West, this is not how it works.

How it works is that the “higher ups”, the ones holding the wallet from which the scientists are paid, decided that we’re having a global warming, and that’s the scientific truth. Since the scientific truth is already known and should not be disputed, all the measurements should reflect it and show that the global temperatures are indeed rising. The countries and stations that don’t show accurate measurements will have their funding removed. So, we now live in a world where scientific measurements are accurate if they align with politics, and not the physical reality, and political accuracy is rewarded with funds, so that the databases can be filled with politically accurate temperature readings, and those who dare to measure the actual physical reality will be perceived as wildly inaccurate compared to the adjacent measurement spots, and the heads of departments will get demoted and their funding removed.

One will ask how is it possible to spoof temperature readings, and I’ll just laugh. I don’t think they even use thermometers anymore, I think they just use some infrared satellite map and the computer reads out the values based on what somebody told it to read out. Also, all the scientists know what to say in the media when asked about anything. It’s like that joke about the Sunday School, where a nun made a small quiz, and the answer to all four question was Jesus, and she then decided to cheer the kids up a bit and asked “What is it that lives in the trees, has a fuzzy tail and gathers nuts for the winter?” One kid answered “I know the correct answer is Jesus, but to me it sounds a lot like a squirrel.”

The scientists know the correct answer to every question is global warming. No amount of walnuts in a hole in the tree will change this truth, because they know who holds the wallet. They are just like a whore telling her customer he has the biggest cock she ever saw, because a happy customer returns and pays extra.