rodneyj43

You know you're doing the right thing when faux news says you're not!

Strybing Arboretum

Surprisingly enough, there wasn't much wind!

Efke AURA INFRARED 820 - Xtol - (processed @ gammasf.com [gammasf.com] )
(Shot at 200ASA, Metered through the filter)
SEKONIC L-778 DUAL SPOT F METER
B+W 67mm INFRARED BLACK #093 (87C) FILTER
EV4 (+reciprocity compensation): 2min @ f16
1deg backward tilt, 1mm upward shift
Hasselblad Flexbody w/50mm f4 Zeiss Distagon CF T*
Epson PERFECTION V750-M PRO SCANNER
(20111210_EfkeIR820Aura_Eml101001_49991_003)

White Domes Trail, Valley of Fire S.P. near Overton, Nevada.

If you're in the area please try to join us for some wine and cheese to celebrate the closing of my smashingly successful first Exhibit in San Francisco!

@ Gamma B+W:Twitter:Facebook


Artist Statement: 'Do What Thou Wilt' is the title of this show because that's what we Humans do: whatever we will. Humanity evolved its cognition, self-awareness, language, innovation, etc. because it allowed us to survive the harshness of the relentless onslaught of nature and the universe. It allowed us to have a minute amount of control of our surroundings so we could exist for yet another generation. After awhile, after our basic needs were met, our will carried us in many different, more contemplative directions. Yet the more we learned and thought we achieved, the more we realized the full breadth of nature, the sheer precipitous sovereignty of the universe, and the infinitesimal part we play in it. Like ants trying to hold up their hill colony in the inescapable and seemingly obstinate wind and rain. In the end, everything washes into the sea; no matter if that sea is the deep blue waters of the ocean or the dust floating in blackness of interstellar space. Although during that flow, we swim in that river of time, doing what we will. As a consequence, at times we think that we are odds with nature and the universe, that we must rampage against it, control it and tame it, or be another victim of its ceaseless entropy. Of course, and quite paradoxically, nature and the universe is doing the same thing we are: bestowing its will. Nevertheless, the fundamental difference is that we are aware of our will, we have volition.

These photographs attempt to explore these themes of humanity and nature exerting their wills upon and abreast of each other and the beautiful patterns of potentiality that can occur as this happens.

how Jupiter's 4 largest moons look at any given minute!

From the page: "Tue Dec 13, 2011 3:13pm EST

(Reuters) - A British parliamentary committee on Tuesday published a sequence of e-mails which raised questions about the story News Corp's James Murdoch told to House of Commons legislators about what he knew about phone hacking allegations involving the now-defunct News of the World and when he knew it.

In the email sequence, dated Saturday, June 7, 2008, James Murdoch was advised by Colin Myler, then News of the World editor, that the paper's legal position regarding a legal threat from professional soccer union executive Gordon Taylor was "as bad as we feared."

Attached to this message was an email exchange between Myler and Tom Crone, the News of the World's principal in-house lawyer, in which Crone mentioned a "nightmare scenario."

Crone explained that this scenario related to the fact that "several voicemails" on an email addressed to News of the World reporter Ross Hindley were "taken from" a phone used by Joanne Armstrong, a lawyer for the Professional Footballers Association union, which Taylor led.

The email sent to Hindley, which, in a reference to the News of the World's chief reporter, was headed "For Neville", is regarded by investigators and lawyers as one of the first pieces of evidence to reach the public domain demonstrating that phone hacking was a practice which extended beyond a single "rogue" journalist.

Executives of News International, the British newspaper publisher headed by James Murdoch at the time of the e-mail exchange, initially claimed in public statements and testimony to parliament that phone hacking was limited to Clive Goodman, a News of the World journalist who was jailed in 2007 for hacking into the voice mails of aides to members of Britain's Royal Family."

From the page: "To Sum Up

For the past three decades an attack on workers nominal wages has been underway. The consequence has been a decline in wages and income for the 110 million in particularâ€"the core of the U.S. working class. Now that corporate America has driven down their current (nominal) wages, they are intent, through their politicians, to attack those wages that workers agreed to forego and have paid into Social Security, Medicare, and their pensions over the past quarter century. Itâ€s their past wages that Teapublican radicals like Ryan are intent on taking back. Social Security and Medicare is not an entitlement. They are simply wages workers agreed to forego and collect when they retire. Not satisfied with driving down current wages, Ryan and his colleagues in the direct service of corporate interests and the interests of the wealthiest 1 percent are now intent on taking back the deferred wages of the working and middle class in America now as well."

From the page: Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Newt's Kingmaker Murdoch
Mitt Romney has an uphill battle as he gets into the Fox cockpit to contest Newt Gingrich, whose cozy ties with proprietor Rupert Murdoch go back almost two decades.

"I'll be on Fox a lot because you guys matter when it comes to Republican primary voters," Romney tells Neil Cavuto in an interview as polls show him far behind Gingrich among Fox-watching Iowa caucus-goers.

Until he started running for President, the former Speaker was on the Fox payroll, but his shady relationship with Murdoch goes back to the 1990s when he had to return a $4.5 million book advance under pressure after it was disclosed that at the same time he had been meeting with the media mogul on legislative relief for his empire during a whirlwind of ethics violations that eventually led to Gingrich's downfall.

In 1997, the House voted overwhelmingly (395 to 28) to reprimand him with an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in its 208-year history that the body ever disciplined a Speaker for ethical wrongdoing.

Now, with his own empire itself under pressure for ethical lapses, particularly in Great Britain, Murdoch has lost none of his appetite for playing White House kingmaker with Fox lackeys giving Romney a hard time to advance Gingrich's fortunes.

It will be the severest test yet of Romney's blandness as he enters the Fox lion's den to take them on in Murdoch's last hurrah to get a pet poodle of his own into the White House.

Will Romney be able to roar?

Update: Gingrich is champing at the bit to line up a Fox team for the White House, promising to name a fellow contributor John Bolton as Secretary of State.

Bolton, who wants to bomb everybody, would match Newt's hair-trigger temperament perfectly.