October 1, 2012

I do all sorts of chemical photography...

... when the mood strikes.

I develop my own B&W film. The last thing I played with was cyanotypes. I use large format film or I print "negatives" for my contact prints on transparency paper. I have a few 75+ year old cameras that I load with 120 or 4X5 sheet film one way or another.

I also love my Polaroids.

But it's been a long time since I had any kind of darkroom. It's too easy to scan film, make the picture the way I want on the computer, and have it printed at Costco or the locally owned camera store.

I'm probably a horrible environmentalist because the silver used in film is a toxic heavy metal, mining silver is bad, etc., etc., but I like old film cameras. It's some kind of magic.

September 20, 2012

J.K. Rowling is the penultimate example of a welfare success story.

Most people are going to find a way to contribute something to society even if they are never capable of "supporting themselves."

The truth of any human community is that NOBODY ever truly supports themselves, we all build upon one another's accomplishments.

Even a wild man living like an animal in the forest isn't "supporting himself." He is supported by the natural environment, the air he breathes, the water he drinks, the plants and animals he eats.

In a vacuum an individual human dies. We could drop any "successful" person naked on Mars and they'd end up just as freeze dried and dead as anyone else.

Since our status in life is essentially random, because none of us chooses the circumstances of our own birth, everyone deserves those minimal things required to sustain human life, not just food, shelter, and medical care, but education too since humans are intellectual creatures and human societies are an intellectual creation.

September 16, 2012

I couldn't do it. I tried teaching in the city.

It took everything I had to give. I used to sweep my classroom at the end of the day, not because the custodians wouldn't do it, but because the classroom was empty and quiet and I needed to decompress and get my head together before I went out in public, before I got in my car and drove home.

Otherwise I might have been Mr. Road Rage, or Mr. distracted driver replaying all the dramas of the day in my head, no resolution possible.

Our upper classes starve the schools, starve the people, and then when the people become angry and their communities dysfunctional the upper classes blame the people for that hunger and dysfunction, and they propose "solutions" like privatization that will only suck more money and vitality from the communities they are starving.

More money will fix the schools. Pay students from within the community to go to college and become teachers. Make classes smaller, provide free breakfast and lunches, support communities with a generous welfare system and well paying jobs. Make schools a nice place to be, a kind of oasis of safety and sanity in communities that are rough.

We could do it. We could flip our tax system so that property taxes paid for the "common defense" and income taxes paid for education. Wouldn't that work well -- let the guy with the million dollar house pay for useless aircraft carriers. We could raise the minimum wage. We could create good government jobs in places where the private sector has failed the people.

The money people created this problem. It's stupid to pay any attention at all to their proposed solutions.