08.30.04
Posted in Rants at 11:36 pm by Thomas
The ACLU has been suing over the Patriot Act and the Justice Department has been busy redacting passages out of the court filings… including a quote from the US Supreme Court.
Now why would they do that? Were the Supreme Court Justices uttering something to endanger the Republic? Was the Justice Department just doing the right thing and protecting ongoing anti-terrorist operations?
Judge for yourself – this is the quote the Justice Department was afraid you would see:
“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”
The way things are going in this country, we can’t be far away from Soviet-style airbrushing of “non-persons” out of official pictures…
Via Antipixel.
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08.29.04
Posted in Rants at 2:05 pm by Thomas
Just in case it is not completely clear yet, the terrorists have definitely won. They kicked off a mind-boggling change in the US, helped along by moronic politicians in this country, that now culminates in mass-jailings of peaceful protesters and “free-spech” zones.
A once-free and proud country has been transformed into a third-world police state where the president can not bear to see people with a diverging opinion.
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08.24.04
Posted in Photography at 2:08 am by Thomas
Some time ago I bought a Kodak Retinette 1A for my wife, but we both kind of neglected the camera until now… it is a beautiful 35mm camera from around 1963 with a great, sharp lens and a very quiet shutter.
Last weekend we took the camera along for a hike along San Francisco’s Crissy Field and the pictures from that trip speak for themselves. Here are two examples I’m very happy with since setting up the speed and apperture without a meter is quite a challenge in the evening light. The pictures were taken on Kodak Supergold 400.
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08.17.04
Posted in Modern Life at 1:40 am by Thomas
Are you sharing any photos on a P2P network? Well, many other people do. Any search on a Gnutella network reveals thousands of photos, and while many of them are of the… ahem… willingly shared nature, there are always private snapshots that somehow make it into some unwitting user’s shared folder – available for all the world to download…
Here is Found Photos, a web project that collects personal images from P2P networks and puts them up in all their glory. Family photos, party shots, travel pictures… it is all there for us to see.
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08.09.04
Posted in Japan at 1:09 am by Thomas
Japan must be one of the countries that has changed the most since World War II… it is almost impossible to imagine what Japan must have looked like only two generations ago while wandering through its modern streets. It now embodies the 21st century more than any other place in the common subconscious of this planet.
It comes as a shock to look back and see how far the Japanese have come. Here are some amazing color and black & white pictures of Japan in the years 1953 and 1954, taken by the members of an US aircrew stationed in the Japanese countryside.
These soldiers spent their free time between missions hiking and biking through neighbouring villages, taking many pictures of what is now Forgotten Japan.
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08.06.04
Posted in PhotoBlog: Found Film at 10:40 pm by Thomas
This Found Film came from a slightly damaged Kodak Duaflex camera I got from eBay. The film is a roll of 620 Ansco Pan film and only the first two pictures were ok, the rest had probably been destroyed when somebody opened the camera without winding up the film.
This is the better of two almost identical shots:
From the car behind the boys I’d guess that this picture was taken in the late 50s or early 60s. Two of the boys seem to wear a school uniform and I would be very interested if anyone can come up with a positive ID for this insignia:
Again, this is a very nice entry for this virtual family album that I seem to be collecting. I’m now really looking forward to the film that will break this series of family pictures…
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08.02.04
Posted in Rants at 12:27 am by Thomas
You know, for a recently liberated country where Democarcy is supposedly now in full swing, there is some remarkably bad news coming out of Iraq.
How about this from a British newspaper, the Sunday Herald:
“BRITISH forces are arresting children in Iraq and handing them to US forces who interrogate and detain them indefinitely in prisons including the notorious Abu Ghraib.”
This just has to stop. Not in a month or a week, no, it has to stop right now.
It is completely indefensible and atrocious that US Forces are locking up Iraqi children in prisons. It should be completely clear by now that there has been a breakdown in civil society, that thanks to certain signals coming from the highest authorities in the Pentagon some soldiers working in these prisons felt encouraged to flush all morals down the toilet.
This is for sure not a place to imprison 12-year-olds.
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