Recent Comments:

I may regret the passing of a prominent leader I don't know personally in any way, but to send my condolences would be pretentious, to say the least, no matter how much I might have admired him/her or felt diminished by their loss.  Equally, condemning Pol Pot on his death seems a little pointless, when a little action earlier might have been more useful to his victims.  

Sometimes we condemn people to absolve us of our own guilt at our own inactivity.  Equally we sometimes praise people to bask in their glory.  A more honest honest assessment would be to take responsibility for our own actions and let others take responsibility for theirs.   If people are opposed to Mukasey's  politics, let them oppose his politics.  Taking pleasure in his illness doesn't advance that agenda one bit, and may, indeed damage the political case against him by creating unwarranted political sympathy for him.

In 1945, Eamonn De Valera, the Irish Prime Minister at the time got into a lot of trouble for sending his condolences to the German Ambassador on the death of Hitler.  He did so in compliance with formal diplomatic protocol at the time where one Head of government always sent his condolences on the death of another.  It did not mean, nor was it intended to, any political sympathy whatsoever. He then got on with the business of trying to lead his country out of the devastation of post war Europe caused, in large part, by Hitler.

Diplomatic protocols, like good manners, exist for a reason.  They don't imply you like people or approve of them.  Indeed they can imply a refusal to be dragged down to the level of your opponents when they don't act in the same way.  Taking pleasure in the suffering of others is a characteristic of many who torture. This is usually rationalised as being necessary for some war effort, but the reality is the information gathered through torture is often worse than useless, and those who use it are demhumanized by the process.  

Please don't join them.  You should feel sorry for Mukasey - whilst retaining your right to condemn his politics and the actions of those he facilitated in their folly.

It's actually a two layer image with a layer mask on the second layer.

The first layer was adjusted to lighten and brighten the building on the left with the reflection of the Comcast building in it. The second layer was to darken and deepen the contrast on the sky and the Comcast building itself. I used the layer mask to draw through the second layer to reveal the part of the first layer I wanted to show in the final image which was just the building with the reflection.

I like how it came out but I see a lot more potential in it. I just need to learn what else I can do to make that image 'pop' more before I really do what I want to which is, again, HDR.

I can't blame conservatives for wanting to return to the easy framing of big government liberals versus salt of the earth Reagan conservatives.  Most of the WSJ's readers' heads exploded recently when the Republican president and his party proposed the largest socialist program in the history of the United States after presiding over one of the largest government expansions in U.S. history.  

How quickly these guys forget that they supported a $700 Billion socialist gift to Wall Street (actually in the trillions).  

Now they can return to their regularly scheduled programming: fighting the political battles circa 1980.

I was going to suggest it as a theme but I'm not sure if everyone knows how to do it or would even be interested. Something to think about, I guess.

Anyways...

Will you express sympathy, for example, if somebody finally shoots bin Laden? Did you express sympathy when Pol Pot died or Charley Manson got a life sentence? That would be a noble thing that I can't even imagine happening in my psyche. Any sympathy I expressed for Mukasey would have to come from the same assumptions that led me to sympathize with Pol Pot, Manson, Cheney et al.

All these expressions of sympathy from folks who know what Mukasey and the rest of the Bushies stand for looks to me more like just another extension of celebrity worship: saw him on the TV so he's like one of the family.

I just missed that this summer, though.

This is what it's like behind my parents house in S. Jersey. I just like to walk in and....walk. I've walked it so many times, I know it like the back of my hand now but it still always offers some kind of surprise somewhere.

I like the pics.  More exotic than I'm used to.