A historical take...

QotD: Moral And Prudent Edition...

"I certainly agree that acting within the law and staying out of jail is a good starting point. But in my view, it doesn’t go far enough." -Prof. Yamane

On the spectrum of "Can, May, Should, Must", people need to spend a lot more time thinking about "Should" and "Must" than "Can" and "May".

.

Archival

Via a commenter in a post at The Online Photographer, I learned that the folks at The Internet Archive are taking extraordinary steps to make sure as much of the content at Digital Photography Review is crawled and archived as possible.

That's a big deal, because DPReview is pretty much the definitive source for digital camera info going back to the days when a single megapixel was considered to be a really big deal.

I have no idea why Amazon, owner of more cloud storage space than almost anybody, decided that it wouldn't be cost-effective to archive the site themselves.

.

Don't Be That Guy

People do not want to be supportive, they want to be performative.

— Kirk Freeman (@KirkFreemanLaw) January 25, 2023

Good Sports

Here's the scene...

Outstanding young men. https://t.co/284Cz83e1Y

— Chris Cypert (@MrChrisCypert) August 10, 2022

Chris Cypert, who is as close to a walking, talking Captain America as you're likely to encounter, is qualified to judge outstandingness of character in young men.

This moment caught our collective attention for just that reason, outstandingness of character on display. It's a much more scarce commodity than we'd prefer, these days.

I'll let Matt Labash explain:

News anchor after news anchor closed their shows with it. The very people who seem to spend 95 percent of their lives amping us up with fear and paranoia, distrust and anger, took a moment to bask in the glorious humanity of this little episode.

I know the feeling. I did too. I wasn’t just moved by Jarvis’s act of generosity, but by Shelton’s breaking down over the damage his errant pitch could’ve caused. As a manly man, I generally discourage public displays of tears. I tend to limit mine to funerals and Celine Dion concerts. And yet, watching someone feel genuinely remorseful for what they did, even if it was only a mistake, was strangely refreshing.

We are unaccustomed to that – we have become unaccustomed to all of this – because public life is no longer populated by people committing quiet acts of heroism and gallantry and graciousness. We have instead become acclimated to boorish jackasses stoking grievance, claiming victimhood, and pinning the blame on others when they should be assuming blame themselves. No names - it would take too much space to list them.

That is why, I think, what would’ve been a throwaway feel-good little league story a few decades ago, feels like a major morality play now.

Can I get an amen?

.

April Fooled?

Here's a tale about an...er, interesting Craigslist interaction.

Not long ago, I got my old computer back from servicing and put it on Craigslist. Immediately I got a message from a nice woman who said she had researched computers and mine was just what she was looking for. One small problem—she lives in the area, she said, but she's on vacation, and could I please accept a cashier's check, deposit it, and then hold the computer for her movers, who would pick it up for her?

She offered $500, and I accepted. I had paid $177 to the Macintosh specialist to check its functions, physically clean it, wipe the hard drive, and install a fresh operating system. So I won't be getting much in the balance. But then, it's old.

At least it sold quickly. Isn't that nice?

And she followed through! That was a pleasant surprise.

When the check arrived, however, I was surprised to find it was not for $500 as we had agreed upon. She had sent me $1,950...

Mike's handling of the thing was interesting and inspiring and you should go and read the whole thing.

Also, I really should start thinking about a new computer.

.

Gun Toting Passerby Saves the Day

As Tom Givens is wont to observe, part of the reason that stories of private citizens using firearms to ward off assailants out in public aren't more common than they already are (and they're more common than most people think already) is that such a relatively small percentage of people carry outside the home* regularly.

Recently in Brownsburg, Indiana, a close-in suburb bordering the northwest corner of Indianapolis, there was just one such incident that made the local news, but which didn't seem to garner national attention.

A dude is sitting in his car at a traffic light (I've sat at that traffic light many times on the way to Brigid's old place) when suddenly a bullet punches through his car and he's hit by flying glass.

This is not a "bad neighborhood"; it's a sleepy suburban bedroom community. This must have been as startlingly out of place as an alligator suddenly falling out of the sky and landing on the hood of his car.

It seems that some dude had gone off his nut and started chasing a couple unarmed guys who were doing groundskeeping work in the cemetery there on the corner. He'd killed one and was chasing the other, firing wildly, when a missed shot hit the passerby's car.

Said passerby pulled out his own blaster and saved the life of the second victim by shooting the crazy guy and ending what could have developed into a regular shooting spree in a residential neighborhood, as the crazy dude had most of a 30-round magazine left.

Passerby wishes to remain anonymous, according to his attorney, Guy Relford.


*There are plenty of stories of private citizens using their firearms to thwart assaults and robberies, but in my observation a solid majority happen in the home or workplace and the gun is retrieved rather than drawn because most people who are legally able to carry guns outside the home don't make the effort or only carry when they "think they'll need one".
.

Information Overload

First, a couple pics.

Actually, I'm doing better today than yesterday, and better yesterday than the day before. This is where adopting a bit of Stoicism comes in handy. Stoicism isn't "don't care about things" or "don't have feelings"; it's about understanding which things you have control over, and controlling those things, and then just letting go of concern over the rest.

There's a lot of stuff going on right now that's outside of your control. Whether it's pandemic stuff or the associated legal or economic stuff, there's bad news aplenty to keep you busy reading all day. You can sit and press F5 on the CDC or DJIA  or $NEWS_SITE and get more info in real time all day while you're sitting at home. Right or Left, TV or Internet, news and editorial sites are a seething roil of panic and/or outrage, bad news and anger.

Here's some advice from a friend, dispensed in an online discussion sparked by that first image up top.

"So I’m spending half my time working right now reassuring people that a lot of what they are experiencing is totally normal. Anxiety prone people are biologically predisposed to be much more attentive to stimuli they find threatening and it feels superficially empowering to compulsively engage information about this crisis. 

But obviously it ultimately just exacerbates the anxiety and distress and then it’s this vicious loop of thinking more information is the answer.  

The information is all the same. You can learn everything you need to know with about ten minutes of reading per day. Everything else is just media doing the media thing. 

Also, the stress is just a background radiation right now so even if you aren’t dwelling on it, you experience it bodily through increased fatigue, restlessness, issues with concentration and short term memory, joint and muscle pain.  

I’m mostly telling my patients to be mindful of the line between being informed and just indulging a compulsion and to try listening to what their body is trying to tell them. Get plenty of rest. Move around. Get fresh air and sunlight. And find things that get you out of your head for a while. And navigating the stress of this while taking on the stress of hundreds of others is exactly as much fun as it sounds." -Michael Tichy, CNP

Ride your bike, play a game, read a book, binge watch that series you've been meaning to catch up on. But don't alternate hitting refresh on some news site or social media page and seething in the comments sections. Take care of yourself and yours and chill.
.

Coincidence and Karma

A couple weeks ago I was driving to the gun store, listening to NPR, like ya do. I'd turned on the car in the middle of an interview on All IN, and it was quickly apparent that the interviewee was a veteran JSOC dude, and it sounded like he was pitching a book.

The interview was interesting enough that I wound up sitting there in the parking lot at Indy Arms for five minutes or so, waiting for the commercial break so I could hear the announcer give the old  "...we have to go to break, but we'll be back with more from..." because I wanted to read this dude's book, whoever he was.

The interviewee turned out to be CSM(R) Tom Satterly, touring to promote his book, All Secure: A Special Operations Soldier's Fight to Survive on the Battlefield and the Homefront. I purchased it the next day on Kindle and finished it in three sittings. Definitely a recommended read.

The coincidence part comes from a Facebook message I got from a friend just a couple days after finishing the book, leading me to this post, and this fundraiser:

Giving Back, LLC is a veteran-founded organization dedicated to providing top quality hunting and outdoor recreational opportunities for our heroes in uniform and their families. I have negotiated a lease for approximately 1000 acres in SW Virginia, however, in the process of getting everything to this point, it has depleted all of my available financial resources. Now it is up to me to provide equipment and management services for the property, and this is where the GoFundMe campaign comes in. I’ve been able to fund everything to date on my own, but this last little hurdle is standing in my way, and one we need to get over in order to make this dream a reality. 

In order for this lease to provide the type of outdoor recreational activities worthwhile for the therapeutic and cognitive rehabilitation we desire to provide, it will require equipment and substantial work to create an atmosphere conducive to supporting such important mental health therapies. These are not simple “feel good” things, or “fun activities” for our heroes, but merely the vessel by which meaningful healing can and does take place. We pride ourselves in being able to accommodate any disability, in conjunction with our partner organizations, in order to include every member of every family participating in an event. 

This property and project will be self-sustaining in terms of funding, if we can get through this next critical phase. This isn’t just a feel good thing to do, but something with real results that we have seen work firsthand, which is why we have partnered with veterans groups and nonprofit organizations to bring all of these resources to our men and women in uniform. After years of dealing with the horrors most of us never have to see, we help our heroes return to a sense of normalcy using proven therapeutic modalities, and by incorporating licensed mental health professionals at every opportunity. 

I am always happy to discuss the details of my plan with donors or potential donors so you understand exactly where each and every penny will be spent. Thank you.

Sean is legit and so is his cause. If you can help a friend, please do.
.

Poor Gremlin!

Oleg's cat is in a bad way. There's a GoFundMe to help. https://t.co/jyEUgPpsX3

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 21, 2019

Helping a friend...

A friend of mine lost his brother over the holidays. His brother, a decorated USMC scout sniper veteran of Fallujah, left behind a wife and child. They're in agriculture in Wyoming and funds are tight at the best of times, so my friend has started a GoFundMe to help them out. You can donate here: Link. Thanks for anything you can do.
.

Trust.

Good post by Bobbi today, worth reading in its entirety.
.

Well, that explains it...

Looking at the sticker on the box, the camera somehow got inventoried as a 1Ds and not a 1Ds Mark II. They're probably scratching their heads over why some woman keeps calling and claiming she owes them $300. As a friend of mine noted, once a bar code is on something, to the average employee it might as well be engraved in stone.

I last spoke with customer service yesterday afternoon about 4:30. They said they'll call back.

Even with the thoroughly mediocre EF 35-135mm f/4-5.6 lens I had laying around, this thing does okay. I can't wait to slap some real glass on it.

.

Doing the Right Thing can be tough...

I've just made the phone call to KEH and now I'm waiting on them to call me back, so I suppose I can tell the story in public now...

"So, I had posted on my blog a couple weeks ago about how I wanted a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens for shooting action stuff and indoor sports and such, but they were too expensive. 

Well, one of my blog readers emailed me and said he had an older non-stabilized Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L lens that he'd sell me for $250. Even these old ones are bringing $600 on eBay, so it was very generous. Because lens is more important than camera, I took him up on the deal. 

I stopped shooting Canon several years back. I still had the Canon 20D in the house, but I'd given it to Bobbi, and it's an APS-C camera, and this lens deserves a full-frame sensor.  On a lark, before shopping for a Canon-to-Sony adaptor, I went to go see how much the oldest Canon full-frame bodies were going for used. KEH Camera Brokers had the EOS 1Ds (state of the art in 2002!) for $299. 

"What the hell," I thought, "Blogorado's coming up and PNC has raised the limit on my card. It might be fun to play with out on the range." 

The box arrived Saturday, and when I opened it up it was like that scene in True Romance where they open Patricia Arquette's suitcase to find a fortune in cocaine instead of dirty laundry. 

KEH had sent, not an EOS 1Ds, but an EOS 1Ds Mark II. This is the next generation of pro-grade Canon from the one I bought. I checked the invoice and the serial number matched, but this was definitely a Mark II, and according to their catalog should have been $625 instead of $299. 

Now I have to call KEH in the morning and see what they want to do. Even though it's going to be a financial kick in the ribs, I'm tempted to ask if they'll let me just put the difference on my charge card. In the meantime, I'm just enjoying holding what was an $8000 pro-grade top-of-the-line camera in 2007."

I sometimes wish my parents hadn't raised me right.
.

Pro Tip...

The Smallest Minority needs our help!

Kevin Baker, author of the blog The Smallest Minority, has had a serious health issue pop up that has him in the hospital and unable to work. His loved ones have set up a GoFundMe to help defray some of the costs since he's exceeded his paid sick time already. I've already kicked in a few bucks.

Please help him if you can. He's a good dude.
.

Vermont Airlift...

In response to the passage of a gun control bill in Vermont that would, among other things, institute magazine capacity limits, RECOIL and Magpul have teamed up to airlift some emergency freedom supplies to the Green Mountain State:

RECOIL and MAGPUL invite the citizens of Vermont to the Statehouse at 2:30pm on Saturday March 31st to receive a free 30-round PMAG standard capacity rifle magazine and show their support for the Second Amendment of the United States. A representative from the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs will be on hand to accept donations that will fuel the legal challenge to the new restrictions.

I am pleased to work with RECOIL, largely because of stuff like this.
.

Charity Gun Raffle...

A member of my extended Blogorado family is having a rough time of it in the medical bills department, so some folks are organizing a gun raffle to help defray expenses. Go check it out.
.

Go, underdogs!

As September draws to a close, so does the annual Kilted to Kick Cancer fundraising competition. As usual, we* have tardily waited to throw the Official VFTP Endorsement to an underdog.

This year it's Team Lonely Mountain. Go to the Kilted to Kick Cancer page and make your donation in their name and we'll see if we can't nudge them in the standings some...


*The editorial "we", which I guess refers to me and maybe Rannie the cat?
.

Get Schooled for Good

As some of you may have heard, my friends at Sand Burr Gun Ranch were burgled last month and lost a large number of handguns to some particularly bold thieves.

Massad Ayoob is putting on a benefit class up in Rochester, Indiana this coming February and all proceeds and fees will go to helping Sand Burr out.

The class is the two-day MAG-20 classroom portion of his MAG-40 class. To reserve a spot in this class, contact Sand Burr Gun Ranch at (574)223-3316. Rochester's a pretty easy drive from Chicagoland or Indianapolis, and not super far from southern Michigan or northwestern Ohio.
.
.