usonian
usonian's JournalWoke up early again.
I am tempted to call this Mount Umlaut, for the two dots above it. 
Enjoy the light show.
Gone fishing yet?
There's a stream nearby. I can tell because there are mayflies attacking my home.
Fish love 'em. Fly tyers try to imitate them.
3/4 inch or so long (including tails)
Coolpix P510, f/3 (I forgot to stop down, so crazy narrow focus) and flash.
Looks drab compared to photos I've seen, but realistic.
Mayflies have a very short life after emerging, hence the genus "ephemerella"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemerellidae
"They have reduced mouthparts because the adults just emerge to mate and then die shortly after."
Reminder: Nice maps of planets this week
Cross-posted to Weather Watchers.
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/
BIG PRINT! YAY!
Reminder: Nice maps of planets this week
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/BIG PRINT! YAY!
Cloudy Day
Pretty good one! This is one reason why I got the 20mm lens.
I just experimented a bit, and this looks very nice in monochrome AND extra-saturated.
Mother Nature gets an A+++++++ today. (and most days, TBH)
If You Want to Leave Twitter Because of Elon Musk, These Are Your Options
From Motherboard
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbqjd/if-you-want-to-leave-twitter-because-of-elon-musk-these-are-your-options
real short:
Mastodon
Discord
Tumblr
Neocities
Forums
Spacehey
Pillowfort
Start Your Own
Newsletters and Zines
Talk to your Friends and Family in Real Life
Bully Pulpit. The real reason Musk bought Twitter?
https://om.co/2022/04/25/why-elon-is-buying-twitter/Bully Pulpit
Om Malik
According to a story published in the New York Times, then-president Theodore Roosevelt said: “I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit!” He had coined the term that would become commonplace over the next century.
…
“Thanks to the Internet and the social web, everyone from companies to governments are acting like media entities and spreading their messages, bypassing the messengers – aka the media outlets. “I have written in the past.
Those with a bully pulpit no longer need a professional class of mediators. A perfect example of that was US President Donald Trump — who was elected and stayed in power through this “direct” pulpit. Despite the professional media’s best efforts to expose him, the President managed to serve out his full term. His power started to wane only after the President got muted on the social platforms. The lesson: social media platforms can take away anyone’s bully pulpit.
Musk is too intelligent to care about politics. After all, politicians are fungible, but billions are forever. Elon’s desire to buy Twitter has nothing to do with free speech and some well-meaning concepts of cleaning up the platform or making the company efficient and innovative. However, all those would be nice.
Instead, buying Twitter ensures that he is never locked out from the platform that gives him the bully pulpit and power. His ability to put together a $46 billion offer for Twitter faster than a short-order cook whips up breakfast is quite impressive and only reinforces my point — the man needs the megaphone to achieve his final goals. …
Musk’s power comes from his millions of followers (including the machine-made followers who have helped spread Musk’s digital musk.) He needs them for the only thing he has to sell: the future. Elon doesn’t need to invent anything — he needs to believe in something and then get people to buy that.
Whether it is electric vehicles, flying and landing rockets, setting up space colonies, humanoids, cryptocurrencies with dog images, doing brain implants, or boring tunnels to travel underground — Musk needs to sell the future loudly, garishly, and without the interference of the malcontent naysayers in media and old industries. It needs extraordinary conviction to get the Germans and the Japanese to buy a Tesla. It needs special chutzpah to get rockets flying and landing.
Musk loves to hunt down naysayers. Does anyone remember how he got into a war of words with The New York Times over Tesla’s Model-S car review? In 2014. He called it a “fake review.” Since then, the naysayers have been met with typhoon-strength tweetstorms.
Fast forward to today — he is not just going to be fighting about a car review, and it is about everything he is backing. He needs his bully pulpit to have enough people believe in his way of thinking so that hundreds of millions flow into his projects and thus enable his vision of the future.
It seems behind every tweet, there is an agenda.
The Atlantic seems to think it's about free speech.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech/629673/
OPINION
Given Elon's somewhat dictatorial management style (he operated his plant during the covid shutdown), I don't think he gives a flying fickle finger of fate about free speech EXCEPT HIS.
A typical attitude these days -- Freedom for my body, not yours, and so on.
Besides, regulators all over the world (EU first) are coming after social media platforms in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of way. He'll get in all kinds of hot water with his imperious attitude.
And isn't that what this is all about?
Owning and controlling EVERYTHING?
/OPINION
By the way, found this today FYI
Free speech seems to be a one-way street for Elon.
Different set of rules for the wealthy, again.
https://www.mediaite.com/tech/lawrence-fossi-speaks-out-on-elon-musk/
‘Extreme Enemy of Free Speech’: Tesla Critic Says Elon Musk Bullied Him Off Twitter in 2018 By Calling His Boss and Threatening to Sue
“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Elon Musk tweeted on April 25, 2022 after the company’s board accepted his offer to buy the platform for $44 billion.
But on July 23, 2018, he was singing – or in this case, ringing – a different tune.
Lawrence Fossi was working as a portfolio manager in Manhattan at the time. That Monday would have been an otherwise unremarkable day at the office, but for a phone call from an irate – and litigious – Elon Musk.
A colleague relayed the billionaire’s message.
“Elon Musk says that you’re a very bad person and you’re writing bad things about him,” Fossi recalled the colleague explaining. “He’s going to have to sue you and he’s going to have to drag our boss into it.”
Fossi was incredulous, but quickly realized this was no office prank. The CEO of Tesla Motors had actually called his office and threatened to make his life miserable by threatening litigation.
His offense?
He criticized Musk online.
What to do when you wake up at 5 a.m.?
Grab the camera!
Mercifully, I got some sleep afterwards.
Moon, Venus and Jupiter showing.
Heavily edited, more art than photography, but what the heck?
I just wanted to capture the moment.
Mars and Saturn are up there, but in the noise.
Hoping to get better at this.
"I'm not getting in that car". --- a campaign slogan?
Just a thought.
I had this image, or something similar, in mind.
From Fullerton Hornet/The Anaheim Colony
https://hornet.fullcoll.edu/how-far-back-into-anaheims-history-does-the-kkk-go/
From the article:
Fortunately, our history does not define who we are. We must not allow ourselves to be bound by the events that lie in the past.
A great slogan as well. Credit to author Abi G Bulus
Artists out there?
(so there is no copyright question)
FB "bans" violence but FB *IS* VIOLENCE
The violence that FB (Meta) does is to truth.
And they get away with it.
I watched the internet grow from the day it changed from a research network to a commercial one.
The ONLY people who could extract a buck were porn sites.
Nobody else could figure a way to make a buck, none of the "geniuses" ... not Larry Page nor Sergey Brin, nor Zuck nor the forgotten internet roadkill. Thank goodness that Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and a few others survive on donations.
MOST TURNED TO ADVERTISING,
and that's the day that quantity trounced quality.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked
Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it
• This article is more than 10 years old
George Monbiot
A MUST READ.
World's shortest pull-quote:
Pervasiveness and repetition act like a battering ram against our minds.
Hey, this is violence.
ZUCK YOU FUCKERBERG and all the ad-driven, now surveillance-driven dystopian monstrosities.
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