2434 – Low Expectations II

 Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm f/1.8  4 Responses »
Jun 162013
 

In a comment to “2426 – That’s A Fine Kind O’ Freedom” Juha said that

maybe there is a way of finding a kind of balance between those who spy from the position of power and those who try to live their life in freedom, if people are aware of the danger of technology. But technology is such an abstract thing that it doesn’t easily generate such passion as to make it necessary to change how things are, except perhaps through an individual case in which power has been misused and where you can identify with the victim(s). And thus the capability of people in power to hide information of how they (mis)use power is something to think about. Or vice versa, the capability of ordinary people to reveal how they have been mistreated.

Well, I doubt it. I think no balance is possible, because the very business of spying calls for secrecy, and secrecy is maybe the most powerful enabler of corruption.

So, let’s assume Barack Obama believes his own stories (and I seriously doubt it, but let’s just assume it for a moment), then we still have a powerful organization, capable of spying on everyone, that by definition must operate in total secrecy. If we believe the US (or any) government, there is strict congressional (parliamentary) oversight, but whoever gets to oversee how things get done, is required to keep all findings secret. Thus, even if something unconstitutional were found, even if laws had been broken, nothing would be allowed to be brought to the attention of the general public.

You see the problem? The only power that parliamentary organs could possibly have to effectively control secret services, is the power to take away the shroud of secrecy, where secrecy has been abused for purposes not intended by the law. Without being able to do so, these controlling organs are not controlling at all. You have an almost almighty organization, run by normal people with all the usual egoism, all the usual vices, prone to all the usual corruption, and they are essentially free to abuse their powers, without having to fear punishment. It can’t happen, because it must not happen, because covering them up is the only way a secret services can deal with mistakes. It’s in their DNA.

Now, how many people work for the NSA? How many for the FBI? The CIA? All the other agencies that may have more or less access to my browsing history and your banking data? Wikipedia quotes 40.000 employees for the NSA alone. Do you expect all of them to be honest? Nobody to be under pressure financially? Nobody a target of blackmail? Nobody under emotional stress for having been left by a lover? Nobody who would possibly come to the conclusion, that the risk-free exercise of power could help gathering money or discredit a rival? Really? Nobody?

You can’t balance a system where one part is defined to be undefined for anybody but those who are inside. It’s not possible.

Like in “477 – Low Expectations“, the Song of the Day is “Low Expectations” from Edwyn Collins’ 1994 album “Gorgeous George”. Hear it on YouTube.

2433 – The Flowers

 Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 45 mm f/1.8  3 Responses »
Jun 152013
 

Nice neighbors recently brought us these beautiful flowers as an unexpected present, and also unexpectedly I ended up with the job of taking an image of them. The flowers, not the neighbors :D

If you look carefully, you can see where I have taken the image: on the glass ceramic cooktop in our kitchen. They are lit by indirect natural light and it took me two attempts in Lightroom to get colors and contrasts right. Well, what I consider “right” anyway :)

The Song of the Day is “The Flowers” from Regina Spektor’s 2004 album “Soviet Kitsch”. Hear it on YouTube.

2432 – The Lantern II

 Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 45 mm f/1.8  No Responses »
Jun 142013
 

This is a lantern above the portal to a church in Vienna. I suppose it is not old, at least not that old. Maybe a few hundred years?

Of course it would have been outfitted electrically within the last century, maybe less than that, but it’s hard to tell. Everything is old around here and if things are not, a lot of effort is put into keeping up the illusion :)

The Song of the Day has already been in use in “1029 – The Lantern“. Hey, that was in August 2009, and wow, that’s a long time ago as well :)

“The Lantern” is from the 1967 Rolling Stones album “Their Satanic Majesties Request”. Hear it on YouTube.

2431 – It Don’t Mean A Thing II

 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f/2.0  No Responses »
Jun 132013
 

I’ve been in Vienna over the weekend, not for work though, and on a wall, among graffiti, I found this poster. Most likely it was attached without permission, probably advertising something that could loosely be considered “underground”, maybe even something illegal. I liked the pattern, took the photograph and that was that.

Home again I began wondering what it could mean though. If I print a poster, if I put it up on a wall, I probably expect to deliver a message, at least to those who have enough information to put it in context.

What do we have here? A red poster with what I see as the head of a stylized zebra, framed with a stylized frame, on a background pattern consisting of the letters “DBS”. Obviously that must be the clue.

“DBS” is not a word, most likely in no language spoken (although the same could be frivolously expected of “SMRT” by the ignorant in Slavic languages), therefore I conclude it to be an acronym.

The only question is: what for??? Searching on various acronym lists didn’t reveal anything convincing. I’ve got some chemicals, but none used in drug synthesis or anything else “shady”. One of them is a common ingredient in ice cream.

Data base systems come to mind (certainly to mine), but their appeal in underground youth culture may be low. Internet slang defines it as “Don’t Be Stupid”, “Don’t Be Sad” or “Don’t Be Scared” and I’d add “Don’t Be Silly” to that list, but if that were the case here, I’d expect those phrases to give me at least one hit with that zebra head logo in Google image search. Nothing though, even if filtering for explicit content is disabled. Other sites gave me longer lists, but again I found neither convincing meanings nor hits with the logo. I even extracted the logo in Photoshop, carefully restored the borders and used that as input for Google’s image search. Nothing again.

And that’s it. So far did I get, and therefore, unless you have a good explanation, I declare this poster free of any meaning :)

The Song of the Day is “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”. I’ve already had the Ellington / Armstrong version from “The Great Summit” more than two years ago, but there’s no reason to not hear it once every couple of years. YouTube is your friend and if you don’t already own the record, buying it is a great idea as well.

2430 – Cookin’

 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f/2.0  4 Responses »
Jun 122013
 

Among the things that troubled Stefan Zweig, one of the worst was the helplessness of the average citizen against the decisions of a few select (and definitely not wise) men.

Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, those were the few who decided about the fate of millions, and regardless of who you were and what your merits were, you had no saying when it came to war or peace, life or death.

And it didn’t get better since then. The pretenses have changed, the world has become superficially more democratic, but in the end it’s all the same: we are the ingredients of a soup cooked by other people.

The Song of the Day is “Cookin’” by Clifford Brown. Hear it on YouTube.

2429 – Far Gone Now

 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f/2.0  Comments Off
Jun 112013
 

Jack Vance, one of the great masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy, one of those who defined the genre, an author of high sophistication, one of the most original inventors of intricate worlds, Jack Vance has recently left us.

When I packed my books in Vienna, I found that I had owned German translations of “The Dying Earth”, two of the “Alastor” books and “The Grey Prince” – only I had never read a single one of them. Don’t ask me why.

I’ve really discovered Vance only a few months ago. I read “The Dying Earth”, his early fantasy success, and I loved it, especially the incomparable “Cugel the Clever”. “Lyonesse” captured me for maybe a month and is still vivid in me, and now I’ve just begun reading “Magnus Ridolph”, the complete collection of his early space mystery stories revolving about this detective / adventurer of the same name.

So far I have read only the first, and apart from the fact that mathematicians are still supposed to use slide rules (something that I’ve found in Asimov’s early “Foundation” trilogy as well), it seems still pretty enjoyable, even if it dates from 1948.

The Song of the Day is “Far Gone Now” from the 1990 Vaya Con Dios album “Night Owls”. Hear it on YouTube.

2428 – I’ve Just Seen A Face

 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f/2.0  Comments Off
Jun 102013
 

I’ve been doing these pre-scheduled posts for almost two weeks now, always scheduling for 8pm local time, and I can tell you that I like it. Yes, it takes away spontaneity, it allows me to cheat and to use one day’s images for a series of days (I’m just running such a batch taken on Friday), but it also takes out the stress.

Here is the first of two images taken on a playground in Villach. This was some kind of riding device, what you see is a face, probably a stylized bear.

The Song of the Day is “I’ve Just Seen A Face” from the 1965 Beatles album “Help”. Hear it on YouTube.

2427 – All Along The Watchtower

 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f/2.0  Comments Off
Jun 092013
 

I’ve had a lot of expenses lately, therefore I am not really looking for photo equipment anyway, but even if I were, there seems to be nothing that I desire. Yes, fast lenses like those f0.95 beasts, that have appeared lately, could make for interesting bokeh, only I am not interested in the associated weight. Wider than the 12/2.0, I’ve had that and it does not inspire me these days. Most lenses longer than my cheap 40-150 are either heavy or sub-par at the long end. Really, I currently don’t know what to wish for, and that’s a pleasant state of being :)

No, it’s not a watchtower, it’s not a tower at all, but it gives me the excuse to present you one of the more interesting versions of Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower“. Hear XTC on YouTube.

2426 – That’s A Fine Kind O’ Freedom

 Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm f/1.8  2 Responses »
Jun 082013
 

I am a user of Google services. I don’t rely on them (in the meantime I’ve started to backup my GMail mails locally, my blog has been on my own hosting account for years, only my phone is 100% dependent on Google), but using their services makes my life more convenient. Much more.

The price of this convenience is, that they know pretty much everything about me. I’ve always joked that if Google has not been secretly created and operated by the NSA, it must nevertheless have come as a god-sent to them.

Turns out this was not so far from the truth.

I never had any doubts that American secret services have access to everything on the Internet, even if it’s unlawful by American standards. It’s just too easy to not be done. It’s not only the carriers, not only Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, it’s essentially everything stored by everyone.

What’s next? Microsoft admits that the next X-Box could technically spy on you in your living room, they only say it won’t. Can you believe it?

Do you think the US government will be able to resist the temptation to require from Google a switch, that allows them to turn on the camera and microphone in a certain user’s Glass?

Are you sure that those devices will always indicate recording mode with a visual signal like, for instance, a red light?

Your iPhone? My Android? We know of “silent SMS”, a reality in today’s phones, that allows “lawful interceptors” to make contact with your phone without you being given any indication. Maybe smartphones can be activated remotely as well. Do you know? Would you know? Could you know?

Sometimes literature allows for a reality check. I’ve just finished Stefan Zweig’s autobiography “Die Welt von Gestern” (“The World of Yesterday”). For all who don’t know him, he was the second son of a rich Austro-Jewish entrepreneur, enjoyed an excellent education, early on turned to poetry, and due to his privileged situation was able to follow that way and become the internationally best known, most translated German speaking author. He knew everyone who counted in arts and politics, and his book is extremely interesting as an account of how the two World Wars came to pass, how Europe slid into the first and how its resolution automatically led to the second.

That’s not what’s important here though. I only want to direct your attention to one aspect that currently occupies my mind: how he perceived a progressive loss of freedom, a progressive shift of control from individual people to states and their agents, and he illustrates that for example with the fact that in pre-WWI times he was able to visit England, France, even the US and India, without having a passport, without ever having been searched at a border, without having been required to obtain permits and visa.

I found this astounding, but what really shocked me, was that his description of post-WWI restrictions pretty accurately described my baseline, the status quo that I had known, that I had grown up in, and from where I’ve been able see a progressive tightening of the noose.

Change happens all the time and while we have been evolutionary selected to detect all rapid change, slow change is an entirely different matter. Each time and each generation has a baseline, something they perceive as normal, and I have no doubt, that the generations grown up after the conservative backlash of the late 1970s / early 1980s are much more more tolerant versus governmental abuse than I am, just as I am much more tolerant than Stefan Zweig’s generation was. Small, gradual change may go largely undetected, but literature’s conserving power reveals a disturbing general direction.

The Song of the Day is “That’s A Fine Kind O’ Freedom” from Barbra Streisand’s 1969 album “What About Today?”. Hear it on YouTube.

2425 – Deep Blue

 Olympus M.Zuiko 40-150mm f/4.0-5.6 R  1 Response »
Jun 072013
 

This is one more image made with my cheapest lens, the plastic mount Olympus 40-150 zoom, the only zoom that I still own, the zoom that I bought used for nothing and was already willing to pass on for less.

No way!

I’m in Carinthia now; in fact I have been since Wednesday evening. Weather is much better here. This image for instance was taken yesterday morning, and today it was sunny almost all day as well. I’m off from work for a week now. No fixed plans, we’ll just see what feels good and what the weather allows :)

The Song of the Day is “Deep Blue” from the 2011 Arcade Fire album “The Suburbs”. Hear it on YouTube.

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