Back toward the light...

If you can read this, you've made it.

Oh, it's gonna be cold and miserable for a couple months yet, but we just passed the darkest day of the year. From here on out, the sun spends a bit more time above the horizon every day. 

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Gorillafritz has thoughts on flashlight usage. (Departments issuing weapon-mounted lights without adequately training officers in how to use them are a blight upon the land. I've heard horror stories of officers directing traffic with their WML. It's only a matter of time before I hear about one using their TLR-1 to check for horizontal gaze nystagmus.)


• Bobbi finds ominous rumblings on the international scene.


• Pragmatic pondering on the problems of pocket poppers.

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Overheard in the Office...

TV [down the hall]: 🎶🎵Merry Merry Merry Christmas🎵🎶 

RX: "Harry Harry Harry Krishna... His brother is Ted Krishna." 

Me: "Their dad is Joe Krishna." 

RX: "He sells used cars."

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Jihadi or Joker?

An interesting long-form piece on how the FBI and NYPD investigate... and maybe groom ...terrorism suspects.

In this case we have a former USMC reserve NCO who got into Boogaloo groups online and converted to Islam and then, well, read the piece for yourself...

Fong focused his energies on a new meme-oriented Instagram page about Islam, which eventually birthed a new chat group on Signal. Fong, the administrator of this new group, called it “Mujahideen in America.” He wanted the group’s discussions to involve Islam, guns, and training.

“We’re going to go over here to talk about self-defense,” Fong, who went by the username asian_ghazi, said, describing what he viewed as topics for the group chat. “Boogaloo stuff, like kind of guerrilla tactics, but mostly for hypothetical scenarios, mostly self-defense, weapons safety, firearms.”

Fong had curated the group’s membership. There was Daniel, a Russian speaker Fong first met in the WhatsApp group that had fractured. There was also James, a teenager and recent convert to Islam who shared Fong’s ironic sense of humor. James had brought someone named Moussa into the group.

Moussa, pushy and boisterous, started to bring up terrorist groups in the chat. Daniel joined in, giving his opinions about Islamist movements in Chechnya and other parts of Russia.

“Their talks about this kind of stuff would be here and there,” Fong said.

Fong didn’t know what to do. Should he kick these guys out? He’d already seen one internet group fall apart. But he struggled to tell if this discussion went beyond harmless intellectual curiosity and debate.

Daniel and Moussa weren’t who they claimed to be. Daniel was working undercover for the NYPD. Moussa was an FBI informant, known in the bureau’s parlance as a “confidential human source.” They’d been tasked to find and secretly investigate potential terrorists online.

When does shitposting cross the line from First Amendment protected bantz and become Providing Material Aid to Terrorists?
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Take A Picture or Make a Picture?

Jim Grey at Down the Road has a good eye for interesting details on cars. Whereas 99% of my car photographs are simple shots of the entire car from a quartering angle at about sedan-driver's-eye height (designers tend to take pains to make this an attractive view, since it's how you see most cars), Jim gets in close for the neat bits of styling.

I think it's pretty artsy, but he's got a good point in his post yesterday about what makes actual art.

I've noted before that I'm probably hindered in my progress as a photographer by being too much of a camera liker.

I should sit down with my Blackfork Guide again. ("Six things that happen in your photograph whether you want them to or not.")

Training B.S. Detector Checklist...

It's weird to run across something I wrote syndicated online someplace when I was searching for something unrelated, but here's a piece I did a few years back on separating the wheat from the chaff when seeking handgun training beyond the basic "here's where the bullet comes out" sort:

"There’s lots of good training available, many different schools of “gun-fu” if you will, and the trick is to not get taken in by the bad stuff. Peter Barrett, another gun writer and friend of mine, once came up with a handy checklist for spotting the charlatans out there. I’ve used it for years, and this column is something of an expansion of that list.

First, give his (or her) social media presence, if any, a critical look-over. Are comments disabled on his YouTube videos? Is the only place to interact with him inside of his own forum where any skepticism or doubtful questions get deleted or flooded by hostile comments from his acolytes? That’s a danger sign.

When looking at his résumé — he does have something like a résumé up, right? — is it just a vague list of who he’s trained, with no mention of who he trained under? The best instructors I know are always out attending classes and trying to learn something new or maybe just looking for new tips or tricks for teaching. I don’t care who an instructor has trained. I want to know who trained him.

Does every technique in the school or class come from within the school or class? Did it all spring straight from the guru’s head? The not-invented-here syndrome can turn an instructor into a self-licking ice cream cone in a hurry. Again, the best instructors I know are constantly and cheerfully stealing good ideas from each other..."

Go RTWT.

A reminder...

Openly carrying a sidearm isn't a "deterrent". It's just letting everyone who sees it know that you have a handgun. They get to decide how deterred that makes them feel.

If Sumdood is willing to go hands-on with a young, fit, athletic cop and rip his Glock out of a Level III duty holster with enough force that it breaks the retention device, why is he going to be "deterred" by some guy who looks like 300 pounds of chewed bubble gum and isn't even aware of his surroundings?

Not deterring anybody.

At this point, sure, why not?

In my email in-box:

Probably because what good is living in a horrible cyberpunk dystopia without people looking like they're living in a horrible cyberpunk dystopia, I guess?

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Re-Fragmentation

Once upon a time, America had three TV networks. It was a fluke of history that lasted maybe a few decades, from the mid-Fifties to the late Eighties and the rise of cable, but for that period of time, we had something very close to a national monoculture. Show up at work in the morning and everybody would have probably seen the same TV shows last night. Further, there were a handful of big national news magazines... monthlies or weeklies ...that everyone read, and blockbuster movies tended to linger a lot longer in theaters in those pre-cable and VHS days, ensuring that most everyone got a chance to see them.

The era of cable and DVDs and the dawn of the internet caused a certain amount of fragmentation, but some coherence came back with the dawn of the big social media sites.

Half everybody was on Facebook and/or Twitter. Increasingly, though, people are fleeing to smaller, also siloed, alternatives that are safe spaces for their particular politics; Web 2.0 versions of Web 1.0 titans like FreeRepublic and Democratic Underground. Even if you're still on the big sites, their algorithms are so finely honed that they can let you silo yourself as effectively as if you'd migrated.

"The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? More than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture."

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The Who-this?

So the US has put together a task force with some of our NATO allies as well as Bahrain and Seychelles to protect shipping in the Red Sea from Houthi attacks. 

"As of Monday, details on what ships will be involved in the force were not available, a Pentagon spokesperson told USNI News Monday following the announcement.

The U.S. Navy has at least three destroyers in the vicinity of the Bab el Mandeb strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden – USS Carney (DDG-64), USS Mason (DDG-87) and USS Thomas Hudner (DDG-116) have all operated in the region. The U.K. Royal Navy guided-missile destroyer HMS Diamond (D34) and the French Navy guided-missile frigate FS Languedoc (653) have operated in the Red Sea as well."

The Houthis, whose slogan is "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Cursed be the Jews, Victory to Islam" are obviously Big Mad about the whole Gaza thing and are almost certainly being egged on by Tehran and Moscow, who are eager to put a stick in the spokes of as many western wheels as possible.

Meanwhile, BP has announced that it will be suspending oil shipping through the Red Sea, which will do nothing good for petrol prices.

On Monday, oil giant BP became the latest company to announce it would be pausing its shipments through the Red Sea. Several shipping companies, including MSC, Maersk, Euronav and the Evergreen Group, have said they are also avoiding the Suez Canal as militants target cargo vessels.

Roughly 10 percent of all maritime oil trade goes through the Red Sea — which connects to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. Without access to the Red Sea route, many ships will have to take the far longer and costlier journey around Africa to reach their destinations.

So the question is whether the west is going to keep shooting down $20k RPVs from Ali's House of Discount Drones with multi-million dollar SM-2 and Sea Viper missiles, or are we going to try a strike using carrier aircraft and cruise missiles to knock out Houthi launch sites and storage facilities. Because in the latter case it would have to be a large enough strike to get them to knock it off for a bit, without being so large as to widen the shooting war(s) going on in the Middle East right now.

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Red (Sea) Alert...

Important line from the latest post at TLP:

"The Biden administration has displayed understandable and otherwise admirable restraint in the face of these continued Houthi provocations. With the war in Gaza still raging, America doesn’t need to see another front opened up in the Middle East. But the Houthis have kept up their attacks on the freedom of the seas—the Navy destroyer USS Carney shot down 14 attack drones just this past weekend, for instance—and transnational container shipping companies Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, and MSC have announced they will keep their ships out of the Red Sea. The problem has slowly snowballed into a significant crisis, one that could find the United States and close allies like Britain and France taking direct military action against the Houthis in the near future."

Note that bit in bold. A tremendous amount of shipping between Europe and Asia transits the Suez Canal. Twelve percent of all global shipping transits the Red Sea. Remember how jammed up things got when the MV Ever Given blocked the canal a few years back?

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Wild & Free

There's a local quasi-feral cat in our 'hood who our neighbor named Copper.

She's been a neighborhood fixture for many years now and had several litters of kittens by numerous feline Lotharios... I remember one notable occasion where I turned the corner on a side street in the neighborhood, only to find Copper and one of her babydaddies, a burly scarred gray & white tom named Thug, taking the advice of McCartney and Lennon right there in the middle of 56th Street and not at all inclined to move for the car.

She's very skittish and it was several years before she was successfully trapped and taken to have her baby-makin' bits deactivated. She still roams the neighborhood, although she's no longer helping populate it.

I was surprised that I was able to get this shot, even with the long 70-200/4L on my 1D Mark III. Normally if you turn and look directly at her, even from several houses down the block, she'll scuttle for cover. I guess having the camera up in front of my face blocked the threatening gaze of a pair of eyeballs.

Bangity.

2,750 rounds. 

Zero malfunctions. 

Still going.

Turn up the Kawaii!

Pentax’s original Q debuted to reviews that were equal parts enthusiastic and bemused. Back in 2011 nobody was really sure how the new field of mirrorless cameras was going to shake out. What, in effect, were these new cameras for?

The original Q offered a lot of “real camera” functionality, but its sensor size made it seem like a fun “play camera”. Its sturdy magnesium shell and eight hundred dollar price tag had it competing with established DSLR systems, but its lens selection was limited to the 01 Standard Prime and the 02 Standard Zoom and a handful of plasticky novelty lenses: the fixed focal length, fixed-aperture trio of the 03 Toy Fisheye, 04 Toy Lens Wide, and 05 Toy Lens Telephoto.

In 2012, Pentax leaned into the fun kawaii aspect of the tiny camera and replaced the Q with the Q10.

Pentax Q10, with Nikon D2X for scale.

While it also sports a 12MP 1/2.3" backside-illuminated CMOS sensor like its predecessor's, Pentax claims some hand-wave-y improvements, as well as faster autofocus. The most important change between the original Q and the Q10 was the price drop. Whereas the earlier camera had been $800 with a fixed-focal length prime lens, the new one was two hundred bucks cheaper and came with the 02 Standard Zoom in the kit.

It accomplished this by replacing the magnesium body of the Q with an entirely polymer outer shell. The new body had a slightly more sculpted top plate and a deeper finger grip that somehow gave it more SLR-like lines.

If you read my earlier review on the Q, all the buttons and controls are in the same place on the newer camera. However you could now get your kawaii little mirrorless Pentax with a hundred different combinations of body and grip colors. It's what attracted me to the camera in the first place; I thought it would be neat if Tamara Keel could get a camera, teal.

The other improvement to the Q lineup in 2012 was the addition of the 06 Telephoto Zoom, a 15-45mm f/2.8 zoom lens that had a field of view on the 1/2.3" sensor equivalent to an 83-249mm lens on a full frame camera...and yet it was about the size of a shot glass.

The Q10 is a fun little camera, and with the addition of the longer zoom, you could now have a reasonable three-lens kit: a standard zoom, a long zoom, and a fast standard prime. Within the limitations of the smaller sensor, the Q series had become a viable, if quirky, alternative to more normal entry-level DSLRs and mirrorless cams.

Q10 with 02 Standard Zoom

Q10 with 02 Standard Zoom, using "blur control" mode to simulate background blur

Q10 with 02 Standard Zoom

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I was there, Gandalf…

It’s true. All of it.

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All God's Children Got the A-Bomb

"The Pentagon's recent report on China's expanding nuclear arsenal highlights growing American concerns about the changing global nuclear landscape. Against the backdrop of increasing Chinese aggression against India, worsening U.S.-China ties, and a longstanding India-Pakistan rivalry, a series of interlocking contests involving multiple nuclear actors has emerged—presenting the United States with a much more challenging nuclear equation than it faced during the Cold War."

The multipolar nuclear world of today is a lot more complicated than the good ol' days of NATO versus the Warsaw Pact.

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Automotif CDLV...

I know that aesthetics are entirely subjective, but to my eyes, the current RZ34 reboot is easily the best-looking Nissan Z-car since the Z32 of the Nineties.

This Black Diamond Metallic '23-'24 was absolutely arresting as it rolled up College Avenue.

The 350Z and 370Z were capable cars, but always struck me as kinda paunchy-looking. This one is nice and taut-looking, yet has just enough stylistic throwbacks to the original gangsta 240Z to give a whiff of nostalgia.

J'approuve.

Photographed with a Canon EOS-1D Mark III & EF 70-200mm f/4L IS.

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Saturday Morning Surfing...

• Really good profile piece on Robert Downey Jr. at Vanity Fair.


• Good news! Mayim Bialik may be smart and a good actress but she was a terrible Jeopardy! host.


• I was not expecting to find a piece on my friend Bob Owens at The Atlantic. I can tell that the writer was doing his best to be fair, but he came into the story front-loaded with way too many biases to see past them.

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Sex On Wheels

I'm busy writing something, so y'all go ahead and ogle this Ferrari F458 for a bit...

Pentax Q10, 12MP

Nikon D800, 36MP