Remembering PRESTAGS

dinner

usual big wok of stir fried vegetables with some honey and peanut butter. plus stir fried chicken from previous night - garlic, ginger, little chilli, pepper & soy sauce.

Very unconventional carbohydrate though - boiled potato.

Israel Folau - A Christian Man Of Courage

He puts so many to shame.

He is a free man. 

He kneels to God. Not to marxist anti-family baby murdering ideology.

All lives matter. Unborn babies' lives matter. Old people's lives matter.

Smut

Painting the nude was always considered the great challenge. Medieval artists preferred St Sebastian whereas from the Enlightenment onwards, girls and women were preferred. In the age of photography, making the art is easy. Escaping the censors is the challenge. I expect you all to enjoy this post censorship photo of a lone tree in a grassy field with storm clouds above.

Toby also requests an entry in the right-hand margin. This rainbow over the ocean is his proposal.

The true horror of wargames in storage!

No maps! No hexes! No counters or the week, or counters of any kind! Just fading memories and half forgotten glories. I imagine the time when we are sitting in the warm chair of the retirement village rocking back and forwards saying "I really must go and get those games out of storage", but by then one of our daughters will have trashed them!

No safe space without wargames! The is my safe space with a set up game, a crucifix, a chainsaw and a magazine on the war on ISIS. Perfect!

However, what of all those games in the attic? What if I break my back today while hugging the drummer during the kiss of peace? I'll never manage to reach them. I decided to take action. They all came down!

Here is $5000 invested to my retirement. Note the important Ottoman that Spetz introduced me to, so I can have wargames at hand and a footstool too! My wife may a preferred a trip to France, but these do not require a passport or a lengthy travel. But first, I must have piles.

Because they absolutely must be in order! For that I need brain food.

Note how I check my email throughout lest Spetz gets out of his warm chair and plays a turn. In the presence of absence I find solace.

Beautiful! Note how the magazines are getting thicker every few years. From a few year ago, they even have spines. I appear to have lost none (which is a bit amazing), except for the BORING Civil War ones that I give to a friend to have his daughters dispose of in 15 years.

Now I can relax and think of ways that the good King Phillipe might have used a chainsaw if he had one next to his crucifix!

Deary me, I look like my father!

Great moments in Phallic Portraiture

I am having a Roman Total War revival this Autumn (with the astonishing lack of turns, including from friends who surrender early in ATG, like on the first turn!) Playing on Very Hard makes it a challenging game. I am enjoying my Phalanxes again as they just push everything else off the battlefield. However, when they are not pushing, there are times in the back ranks for other pursuits.

Could be quite a bang

I am bemused by the look of St Peter Julian's church in Haymarket. I am a bit of a regular there as sitting staring at a screen rarely improves you dignity, but balancing your life does. I have never seen anything quite so overt for the Chinese New Year. I would be a bit more comfortable if there were subtitles so I knew what the characters hanging on the lecterns say. Perhaps Anne can help.

It took me while to work out what the red things were on the right and left. They are firecrackers!!! If they go after after communion, we are all getting blown to kingdom come!

This Morning In Canberra

Even Sharper

Not Really Macro.

There are never any insects around when you want them.

I was mucking around trying to get close ups with my 18-200 mm. Not bad shots, but not macro.

A reason I got a macro lens - jumping spiders

Looking at great photos of diminutive Australian jumping spiders was one of the things that made me hanker after a macro lens.

I see them outside every now and again. Today, there was one just outside the backdoor, and BBQ preparations had to be delayed while I scrambled to dig out camera, flash and tripod. Macro lens was already on D90 and slapped on the little SB400 flash. Tripod proved next to useless in the situation - spider was on the wall beyond the railing so there was no way to get the tripid close enough. Tried using it as a monopod but that made getting the angle hard. Resorted to hand held. I reckon the end of the lens was 2-3 inches away from the spider.

Hand held worked out OK, though it was very hard to find an angle where I could get most of the little fellow in focus, even shooting at f32 the depth of field was quite shallow. The orientation of shots is unchanged - so if the spider is facing down, that is the way he was on the wall too. Some minor exposure adjustment, sharpening. Some are cropped.

First shot is uncropped to give a sense of just how small the spider is - he is sitting adjacent to the mortar between the bricks.

a crop of the same shot

nice one of the big front eyes, as shot, then as cropped

 

cropped

Adventures in exposure

of digital sensors

I had occasion to have to walk to Kingston to get passport photos taken.

I took the camera with me, and took a few opportunistic shots on the way and return.

I played with shutter speed at the bridge over the creek, where there is a mini rapid as the water runs over steps.

SHUTTER SPEED First - fast shutter speed - brief exposure - freezing movement.

on the way back, supported by the bridge railing a slow shutter speed - long exposure

a crop of each shows the different effects - the fast shutter reveals individual water droplets, while the slow shutter speed makes a creamy image.

while waiting for the prints, I mucked around with the contrasty scene of the cafes. Red square is where the focus point was, rough red circle is where I pointed the camera first to get a light reading, and locked that reading in.

Matrix metering - camera is making a compromise based on all the light coming in. light sampling at the focus point - balanced over all

matrix metering again but I think with different metering point - in tree shadow - brighter over all

centre-weighted - camera uses light around chosen point but still takes account of the whole scene

first metering in the centre (running of memory, might even have been metering in the light?) - camera takes account of bright areas and reduces exposure

then centre weighted metering in the darker tree area before focusing on the centre - trees well exposed but not a white out in the light

then spot metering - the camera uses information from just that spot to calculate the overall exposure

first in centre - not bad balance but shadows are dark,

then metering in the tree shadow - trees exposed but white out elsewhere

Orb Spider

self explanatory. Orb Spider with bee (I think) wrapped up in silk, at front of house. Most with macro lens, most cropped a bit with sharpening.

 

U.N.I.

Yesterday late afternoon I went for a quiet stroll and I saw a U.N.I.

I was enjoying a nice cool breeze which had come in as relief from our heat wave. I walked along the bay with one of my older cameras (I've turned into a Thygo, and I think all the cameras need a share of usage. It justifies the constant new purchases). It was also very grey and I want to test my new camera on something more colourful.

I saw a U.N.I.

What is a U.N.I.?

It is not bees or beehives. One of my neighbours keeps bees on his roof.

It is not pelicans, or a pair of pelicans.

It is not a travelling Italian street food truck.

It is not a man with a travel BBQ preparing dinner on the shore.

It is not a lonely boat on the mud flats.

It is not a strange artifice of light caused by the setting sun behind the Bushell's coffee factory.

It is not a one-legged seagull. Have you noticed that there is always at least one one-legged seagull.

No, a U.N.I is something else.

An U.N.I is an Unidentified Naked Idiot.

I saw this clown shouting in the water with his beer can and making lude gestures at his small thing. He had a small crowd of onlookers.

I just wanted a nice quiet walk.

the last 'macro' adventures of 2016 ...

that sounded dramatic didn't it. when in fact it just happened that these pics were taken on 31 December 2016, downloaded and mildly post-processed on 1 January 2017 and uploaded to this blog on the same day. Nikon D3300, Nikkor 85mm f3.5 micro, Nikon DB600 flash.

Started with a mudwasp under the laundry window ledge - an accidental subject, as I noticed it fly under the ledge. He/she was not a cooperative subject and wouldn't stay still, and if I tried to get closer flew off. Hard to get and keep focus hand held. 

Then I noticed a fly on the laundry window frame. he/she was much more cooperative, and I did get to the minimum focus distance to get the maximum macro. Focus was assisted by being able to lean on the wall,

All shots taken with external flash and with aperture very small (ie f26-f32 - narrow lens opening to get maximum depth of field to try to get the whole insect in focus). These are what I think were the best ones. 

MUD  WASP

as close as I could get with 85mm

 

crop to get balance of detail and noise. If I zoomed in more digitally it starts to look poor - suspect I couldn't hold still enough and have actually not focussed on the wasp's head but the mud nest / back leg.

As an aside, I couldn't find a pic of this compact black wasp to try to get an ID on (but I'm sure someone has described it ...). The mud wasp that does come up in searches is slim and with yellow bits -  http://www.ozanimals.com/Insect/Mud-Dauber-Wasp/Sceliphron/sp.html

The little mud construction probably contains paralysed spiders.

 

FLY

For scale, context - fly on side of wound out window. Frame is 1.5 inches (38mm) thick, so the fly is maybe 12mm long.

 

pre-crop jpeg, processed from RAW tweaking exposure, sharpness

 

crop of above image (less than 100%). It is not the blowfly Lucilia cuprina but something else. - I think it is Calliphora augur - the lesser brown blowfly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calliphora_augur 

.

true macro shot - as close as I could get, so no cropping but 1:1 reproduction in the image frame. The fly flew away after this - I obviously got too close - front of the lens is maybe 1-2 inches away from the fly. Processed for exposure (reduced -1.0 EV, or 1 'stop')

I am pretty happy with this shot, though the framing is flawed. 

 

And the images give the joy of the splendour of creation - Benedicamus Domino !!

Exposure and high contrast scenes

From a discussion I was having with Paul, I played around a little with high contrast scenes. He has some images where the straight out of camera jpeg has not brought up the detail in a dark area (eg a dark statue) against a strong back lit background.

On Nikon dSLRs, a setting called 'active D lighting' became available for application in shooting (as opposed to post processing, whether in camera or on downloaded files).

So, I was taking some shots of the fowls with the D40x - it doesn't have ADL option for shooting but it can be applied in camera after the shot. A couple are below, and it shows how powerful this (software) application is, and also illustrates the problems that any photographic medium has in capturing a whole scene the way our eyes see it, or more accurately as our brains post-process the incoming light to 'pull up' shadow detail.

So, below  a couple of comparison shots - / + ADL. I suspect that in Paul's Lumix FZ1000 there is a setting analagous to ADL, probably with different levels of application. [He might have to resort to reading the manual >:-o).

OK, the examples

but

The photo medium can only capture the light that is there. If you take the film medium, the sensitivity to light is uniform across the film negative - and adjusting exposure will affect the whole area uniformly. That is, a whole exposure adjustment can only be applied uniformly to the whole exposure - if the qualitative and quantitative difference in amount of light between to parts of a scene is too great, the physics per se doesn't allow for getting both parts perfectly exposed for detail.

But our brains do this all the time - segements of our field of view get post-processed to enable us to see both the full lit and the shadow with acuity. Computers can, thanks to clever programmers like Python, detect the contrast areas and locally adjust the exposure. In the old film days, you could do this in the dark room with simple physical tricks such as waving a piece of paper over an overexposed area as the negative was being processed ie between the light coming through the negative and the photographic paper being exposed to get the print.

 

 

Another way of getting at this is where you 'tell' the camera to 'meter' the light to inform the exposure it will apply - shutter speed, aperture (and with digital, ISO). The standard default is 'matrix' or 'averaged' metering - the light meter / software tries to balance all of the incoming light. Then there is 'centre weighted' - the light meter / software takes more account of the area where the light level is read (typically the focus point - I guess face recognition will have some priority - my dSLRs don't have it or I don't turn it on). Then there is 'spot' metering - the light meter / software meters just on the small focus area. Spot allows a small subject to be exposed 'correctly' even if the surrounding scene is very dark or very bright. But, as above, the metering is a physical adjustment affecting the amount of light hitting the sensor or film, not a software interpretation of the incoming light.

Yet another way is 'exposure compensation' - often has a dedicated button with a +/- decal on it - you can dial in how many 'stops' (more precisely electron volts, EV) more or less than the camera's meter thinks the 'correct' exposure is - how much light gets let in. Generally goes in 1/3 EV steps - eg +0.3, +0.7 etc.

On my cameras, choosing metering area and exposure compensation are NOT available in the AUTO modes - needs to be in Manual (I rarely use, except for moon shots), Aperture priority (I use most - set the 'f stop' - how wide open is the lens, how much light gets let in, also affects depth of field), Shutter priority (how long the shutter is open, I use when I want to ensure a fast shutter to freeze motion and/or avoid effects of camera shake), Program mode (I don't use this much but its a bit like A and S).

And having mentioned moon shots, this is a classic example of needing to balance a really bright object in a really dark background - if you don't meter on the moon you generally just get a 'white out'.

So, the moral of this story is:

BBQ and the induction to ATGE

Maurice and Dino came to visit and we had BBQ, with Thygo's usual penchant for kangaroo sausages and rissoles, in addition to beef and lamb. (Not sure if Python was taken with the roo?) A nice evening, and a few pics.

We had a little adventure retrieving one of the chickens from the neighbour's yard but that was successful.

ATGE - then Python inducted Thygo to Advanced Tactics Gold Edition ...

Thygo is now addicted to this game, even though he is scrambling to learn the mechanics before the AI overwhelms him.

Screen shots from several turns ago (while the future of the Thygonian empire seemed bright)

 

Ad hoc curry

So thygo did a big stir fry on Sunday. Throwing in garlic, ginger, chilli (all out of a bottle), a range of vegies, chicken, sesame seeds, honey, peanut butter, soy sauce, curry powder.

Tasted pretty good I have to say.

Hunter-Gatherer, opportunist photographer

So Gumtree provided new opportunities for Thygo the Unsteady to indulge his inner Hunter-Gatherer today.

With the 2 household thing, it has become apparent that it is worth having some things replicated in each place.

So I found this excellent condition 16 inch bike to reside at one place or the other for Carl. It was $50 - a bargain I think. I will re-add its training wheels, and make a few adjustments. It is very light too - probably lighter than the (light) 16 inch bike that was originally Patrick's. (There is a huge variation in weight in retail bikes - some are unbelievably heavy for such small things).

 

 

And another thing that will be needed is an additional bed(s). I picked this one up for free. Made a few running repairs and it looks pretty good and solid. Mattress seems in good nick too - certainly adequate for lightweight boys. I assembled it to make sure everything was there - all good. I did have a NFI moment as I could remember how to load staples into the spring operated staple gun. And uncharacteristically Dr Google couldn't find me that particular staple gun. But eventually I worked it out, and I was able to staple all the supported boards back onto the hessian straps that they were supposed to be attached to.

 

and just after photographing the Diamondback, a cockatoo shot past - so I got off 2 shots and the second one was passably in focus:

original size

 

cropped

all pics taken with legacy Nikon D40x and 18-135mm (old technology also acquired at hunter-gatherer rates on gumtree and ebay respectively).

Boy weekend

Be careful what you wish for!

After all my whinging about friends who could not find their bum with both hands, I suddenly found myself on an impromptu boys weekend three weekends ago.

My son had bought tickets to go on a dance weekend some time ago and became despondent a week before when the adult who was going to sign him in suddenly pulled out. Parenting alarm goes off and I say "Sign in? Why?" and am told that children under the age of 18 require a guardian. (He is 18 in Feb, so close, but no banana.)

"Well, if you need a guardian, that is supposed to be me," I retort, and am astonished when he was not opposed to the idea. (Normally, any suggestion that I would be involved in any part of his life gets an immediate,  unambiguous refusal. So if he was willing, I had the leave, and was pining to take the caravan on a tour!

The location was Pyalong, way down in southern Victoria. (See the sheep being herded on the right - we were in the middle of rural Australia.) It turned out to be about am 11 hour drive (as I take it slow with a caravan - about 80 km so others can overtake - and regular breaks). The trip down was great, as I could listen to the Third Test against South Africa all the way - we actually won that one to which made it more enjoyable - without anyone changing the channel or trying to involve me in inane conversation. (My son's ticket included a bus ride, so that would be more fun for both of us.)

Unfortunately, when I had 45 minutes to go, my son calls me to say his mate's ride had not showed up and he was stuck in Melbourne. Pyalong is about 90 minutes north of Melbourne, but I WAS NOT TAKING A VAN INTO THURSDAY PEAK HOUR. I called his friend and said "Catch a train as far North as you can!"

That turned out to be Epping North, so I added 30 minutes south and 60 minutes north to the trip and picked up a softly spoken young man with long hair. (Men with long hair understand each other's feelings and look after each other against the insensitive, heartless,. uninspiring short haired men.) Anyway, I reach Pyalong at dusk and had the joy of setting up a van in the cold and dark.

I must say, when the van was set up, I was ready to sell the house, retire from work and live happily ever after. It is so comfortable, simple and has everything you need and none of the things you don't.

But if I was going to be at a music festival for a 4 days weekend, I was going to take in some music, so headed out to explore.

The place was arranged along a creek with accommodation on the slopes with flagged roads and a village down by the creek. I was annoyed to find all the spots gone on "Warp Drive" and "Astral Street", but did OK on "Doofhard Road". (Doof is a generic adjective that describes the music, people, outfits, accessories and dancing at the event.)

The village was a lot of fun. Very hippy. They had weird art (dog and neon sign that Paul would approve of shown), lots of shops with important accessories, like feathers and beads. They had a new age place where you could perform activities under the sign of water, earth, fire and air. (I meant to do one of these, but did not get time.) And lots of fast food. I was particularly impressed to see the Pyalong Cricket and Netball club running a near non-stop sausage sizzle. I read later that the Primary School made a bit of money leasing equipment to the organisers.

Interspersed amongst the stalls were small music venues. The music was universally Psycho-Trance, or "Doof Music" to the locals. That was the only downside of the weekend to me. I was hope for soulful songs about love, betrayal and the insensitivity of society to the aspirations of the young. Unfortunately, Doof has no words (Oh, Doof is a noun and an adverb too. It is often an ejaculation, but I am not sure what it means in that context.), and involves electronic "acid-jazz" style sounds that build to a crescendo and then fall away sharply leaving a loud drum beat, often the double beat of a human heart. Each time the beat emerges from the sound, the audience cheers and begins dancing with their hands in the air for about a minute until the beat dies away and they just move slowly until the next crescendo.

The DJs (what they are called, despite no obvious use of disks - all thumbnail drives I think) as largely composing live. I was not there long enough to really work out what made a good DJ and an average one. I noticed that two stands always had big crowds and the rest were lucky to have 6 revellers. I asked a few of the locals and was told "It is doof, man!"

For me, the highlight of the weekend were the young people. They were very accepting of me, provided I wore my hair loose, and chatty. The standard outfit was multi-coloured, wool ponchos, but there were a huge range of variations in the minority. Many young women dressed in cabaret styles, and a few were effectively topless. (No photos as that would be make me a dirty old man.) Some guys dressed in "movie outfits" - I saw a few fantasy vampires, demon warriors and ghostly beings. Most had doof sticks. When you are doofing, you hold a stick with a totem attached, often with flashing LED lights. There were a couple of requisite phalluses, eagles, hands, cartoons of favourite DJs, but one woman did a brilliant, multicoloured crushed paper floral arrangement in the shape of a fan - it would have taken her hours.

Dancing was a 24 hour activity. The above photo as taken a 6:45am, so most of the crowd had petered out. I doofed a bit, but also sat in my awesome caravan, read some S&T and a sci-fi novel and caught up on some Zzzzz. At the end, I had ticked a bucket list item. You see, I grew up about 80 km south of Woodstock, and when I grew up everyone was talking of it and I always wondered what it would have been like. Now I know, but would have liked some lyrics all the same.

Oh: Sex, drugs and rock and roll. I think there was lots of the former. The village had police on patrol, so the only "drug use" I witnessed was Nitrous Oxide. (Some groups seemed to spend the whole weekend doing that. They offered it to me, but drug use is not on my bucket list.) And rock-and-roll: Zilch in the musical sense.

Spelling and originality were optional!

 

Idling Away A Sunday Afternoon

open passionfruit flower

obviously it opens during the day ... 

D90, 18-55, on-board flash

Don Quixote returns

Here are some pics with my new-ish (2nd hand) lenses.

55-300mm howling at the moon (300mm on Nikon D3300) (on tripod, image sharpened a little, exposure adjusted +0.3, cropped). pretty happy with the sharpness and detail.

85mm micro (=macro) on Nikon D3300 of plum trees starting to bloom (on tripod with some flash) no cropping, tried for close but also with maximum depth of field - around f22. About 4 inches away. quite happy with sharpness. photographing little flowers even in a light breeze is interesting ...

I will have to see how it goes handheld with insects or spiders. Hoverflies make great subjects but I have to find them ... 

North meets south by turn 21

This is an interesting game. By turn 21, one of my northern fighters is about to rebase at a southern base. (He flashed off for the camera. New stealth technology)

Otherwise this is an interesting struggle with several fronts that will be most entertaining this weekend. However, I am worried about my ally's profligacy. That big red number can only mean yet another victory parade in New Jerusalem followed up by a banquet and dancing for the senior officers.

My generals are still on a diet of porridge, except the one in intensive care who is hooked up to life support.

The Coming Censorship

While the dumbed down masses are distracted with idiotic news stories about the colour of a dress, or Harrison Ford's latest crash landing, the Obama Administration has sought to commence regulation of the internet. Last week at the initiation of President "Drone Killer" Obama the FCC voted to regulate the internet like a 1930s era public utility, using Orwellian sounding "net neutrality" regulations.

Make no mistake about this, once the US government establishes a foothold into managing how Internet service providers run their networks they will next be deciding which content goes first, second, third, or not at all. Censorship. And of course where regulations go, taxes follow, so you can throw in an internet tax as well.

In a world when freedom of expression has been eroded by a corporate media which is essentially owned my a small number of commercial interests, and where other basic freedoms are being eroded by so-called "emergency powers" to fight a war against terrorists (of our own creating), the last bastion of genuine freedom of expression is the internet and the on-line alternative media. Needless to say, the Wall Street controlled political thugs wants to plug this gap in their control of information.

But there is some hope. House Representative Mrs Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has introduced a bill to block the FCC from imposing its 332-page “Net Neutrality” Internet takeover plan, which in a further Orwellian twist, has still not even been released to the public over a week after its adoption.

The bill, entitled the Internet Freedom Act (H.R.1212), would not only stop the FCC from “reclassifying broadband Internet access service as a telecommunications service and from imposing certain regulations on providers of such service,” but would also prevent the agency from imposing similar rules unless authorized by Congress. Blackburn said "the Obama administration will stop at nothing in their efforts to control the Internet”and “there is nothing ‘free and open’ about this heavy-handed approach.” Absolutely correct. Good on her.

Given that the US Congress is so beholden to Wall Street and the 1% I am not optimistic that Blackburn's bill will pass, however it is good to know a few politicians are not asleep at the wheel and are prepared to stand up for freedom of expression.

 

What is Extremism?

The following was in the news on Sunday:

"(Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will invite allies to a Feb. 18 security summit in Washington to try and prevent violent extremism, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Sunday after meeting his European counterparts in Paris.

The gathering of justice and interior chiefs came as France mourned 17 victims of Islamist gunmen this week in the worst assault on its homeland security in decades.

"We will bring together all of our allies to discuss ways in which we can counteract this violent extremism that exists around the world," Holder told reporters."

When President Obama says that there will be a world forum on combating "extremism" I worry. The reason is that Obama's definition of an extremist is very different to that of most fair minded people. And this is coming from the President of a nation that has supported more brutal dictatorships and bombed more civilians than any extremist group has. Not to mention America's own track record of murdering unborn children, and the export of a vulture corporatism that pillages the third world.

Over the last several years various US government agencies and documents have described groups or viewpoints that the US Government regards as "extremist" or "potential terrorist". There are now at least 72 categories and this says a great deal about the "big brother' mentality in the US and the terrible decline in genuine American values of liberty and freedom. Below is the list and all of the categories are links to US source documents.

This list should terrify all rational and fair people because it covers a very large percentage of the population and includes just about everyone that I know and respect. The common theme is 'independent thought' and 'scepticism of government'. If this makes people an extremist or potential terrorist then our society is in real trouble. If this is what our society has become, we have more to fear from our own governments than from extremists.

1. Those that talk about “individual liberties”

2. Those that advocate for states’ rights

3. Those that want “to make the world a better place”

4. “The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule”

5. Those that are interested in “defeating the Communists”

6. Those that believe “that the interests of one’s own nation are separate from the interests of other nations or the common interest of all nations”

7. Anyone that holds a “political ideology that considers the state to be unnecessary, harmful,or undesirable”

8. Anyone that possesses an “intolerance toward other religions”

9. Those that “take action to fight against the exploitation of the environment and/or animals”

10. “Anti-Gay”

11. “Anti-Immigrant”

12. “Anti-Muslim”

13. “The Patriot Movement”

14. “Opposition to equal rights for gays and lesbians”

15. Members of the Family Research Council

16. Members of the American Family Association

17. Those that believe that Mexico, Canada and the United States “are secretly planning to merge into a European Union-like entity that will be known as the ‘North American Union’”

18. Members of the American Border Patrol/American Patrol

19. Members of the Federation for American Immigration Reform

20. Members of the Tennessee Freedom Coalition

21. Members of the Christian Action Network

22. Anyone that is “opposed to the New World Order”

23. Anyone that is engaged in “conspiracy theorizing”

24. Anyone that is opposed to Agenda 21

25. Anyone that is concerned about FEMA camps

26. Anyone that “fears impending gun control or weapons confiscations”

27. The militia movement

28. The sovereign citizen movement

29. Those that “don’t think they should have to pay taxes”

30. Anyone that “complains about bias”

31. Anyone that “believes in government conspiracies to the point of paranoia”

32. Anyone that “is frustrated with mainstream ideologies”

33. Anyone that “visits extremist websites/blogs”

34. Anyone that “establishes website/blog to display extremist views”

35. Anyone that “attends rallies for extremist causes”

36. Anyone that “exhibits extreme religious intolerance”

37. Anyone that “is personally connected with a grievance”

38. Anyone that “suddenly acquires weapons”

39. Anyone that “organizes protests inspired by extremist ideology”

40. “Militia or unorganized militia”

41. “General right-wing extremist”

42. Citizens that have “bumper stickers” that are patriotic or anti-U.N.

43. Those that refer to an “Army of God”

44. Those that are “fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”

45. Those that are “anti-global”

46. Those that are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”

47. Those that are “reverent of individual liberty”

48. Those that “believe in conspiracy theories”

49. Those that have “a belief that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack”

50. Those that possess “a belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism”

51. Those that would “impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists)”

52. Those that would “insert religion into the political sphere”

53. Anyone that would “seek to politicize religion”

54. Those that have “supported political movements for autonomy”

55. Anyone that is “anti-abortion”

56. Anyone that is “anti-Catholic”

57. Anyone that is “anti-nuclear”

58. “Rightwing extremists”

59. “Returning veterans”

60. Those concerned about “illegal immigration”

61. Those that “believe in the right to bear arms”

62. Anyone that is engaged in “ammunition stockpiling”

63. Anyone that exhibits “fear of Communist regimes”

64. “Anti-abortion activists”

65. Those that are against illegal immigration

66. Those that talk about “the New World Order” in a “derogatory” manner

67. Those that have a negative view of the United Nations

68. Those that are opposed “to the collection of federal income taxes”

69. Those that supported former presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and Bob Barr

70. Those that display the Gadsden Flag (“Don’t Tread On Me”)

71. Those that believe in “end times” prophecies

72. Evangelical Christians

I regard myself as a moderate and compassionate person, and someone who reads widely and takes an interest in world affairs. I like to think I am an objective thinker, and I certainly don't derive all of my information from the mainstream media. I have highlighted above all of the categories which apply to me and apparently I am an extremist x 20! There are other categories that do not apply to me but are groups I do not have issues with, eg.  returning veterans and evangelical Christians. This is absurd. All of my friends are also extremists by these definitions, as are all of my work colleagues notwithstanding a very diverse range of opinions and belief systems in my workplace.

Ever since 911 the response of our governments has been to attack civil liberties and to turn the apparatus of the state against its own citizens. Not to mention several wars, including the invasion of a country based upon lies. We are now spied upon in multiple ways by our own government and any form of independent behaviour or thinking is suspect. The tragedy of events like the Paris murders is that governments will use the event to devise yet further ways to turn the state on its own citizens without actually doing anything significant to combat terrorism.

I find it particularly ironic that the Gadsden Flag is regarded as a sign of extremism or potential terrorism. This flag derives from 1775 and was an American Independence flag in the War of Independence against the British. The flag is bright yellow, emblazoned with a fierce rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike, with thirteen rattles which symbolise the 13 colonies, and sporting the motto "Don't Tread on Me." The flag also evokes a statement made by Benjamin Franklin in 1751, when he made a reference to the rattlesnake in a satirical commentary published in his Pennsylvanis Gazette. It had been the policy of Britain to send convicted criminals to America, so Franklin suggested that they thank the British by sending rattlesnakes to England.

The flag is and has been for over 200 years a symbol of liberty and resistence to tyranny. It says everything about America today if it is now regarded as a symbol of extremism.

I - proudly - display a Gadsden Flag in my office, which has additional meaning for a lawyer who fights for client rights.

Pens and Swords

We all hope there will be even more cartoons than ever before. This was my favourite: