Ridiculous HDR

One of my favorite flickr contacts, tendril , has been doing some ridiculous HDR stuff lately. For those of you outside the know, high dynamic range (HDR) photography is essentially combining multiple exposures to extend the dynamic range of digital camera sensors. Thus, by over and under exposing a shot, you can combine them to get well exposed areas from both the light and dark regions of a scene. The problem is, it's easy to make this look really bad, and flickr is littered with bad attempts. tendril, on the other hand, makes it look like magic. Anyway, check this shot and his other's out, he's rad.

Link to his HDR tagged shots: |<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->|

Not the way you planned...

Here's a good one from the White House Press Briefing today:

"MR. SNOW: I'm sorry, but the President is not the kind of guy who says, tell me what I want to hear. As a matter of fact, you sit in a meeting and you try to do that, you're not going to get very far. What the President wants and demands of his people is -- are their best opinions and their best advice, and that's the way it operates. So --

Q He got a lot of lousy advice, didn't he?

MR. SNOW: Well, he got some advice that -- you know, it's interesting, Bill, you can say about any war that Commanders-in-Chief got lousy advice, because wars never work out quite the way you planned."

Yeah, four years later and no end in sight isn't really what you planned, was it? Oh well, I guess that's just the way it goes!

Welcome back, Tony.

Oh Jeez...

Here's a quote from the reddit comments that really cuts:

"I think you lost your right to "benefit of the doubt" when Bush got re-elected - it was a tacit democratic approval of his actions by (supposedly) the majority of the country.

I think your next president will have to do a lot more than "just change direction" to get people back on-side. One of the worst things about Bush's tenure has been not just his actions, but the fact that from outside the USA a sizeable portion of your population has been right alongside him, cheering him on and constructing apologist excuses for his excesses.

The take-home lesson hasn't been "Bush was an evil man" - it's been "Americans can and will elect brainless vicious egomaniacs, and then often side with them for no better reason than a false understanding of patriotism and a herd mentality".

FWIW I know plenty of very cool Americans, and I'm well aware that there was a determined (but ultimately pretty ineffectual) resistance to many of his policies.

That's a very nuanced position though, and in the cartoon-vision most people think in it just looks like the majority of you were either right alongside him, encouraging and egging him on as he invaded other countries, abducted innocent civilians and tortured people simply because he could... or you were too fat, lazy and apathetic to do anything other than whinge about it on web comments pages.

As I said, I disagree with this unfair perception, but it is the perception you've created for yourselves that you now have to disprove."

Here's a good interchange at today's WHPB (White H...

Here's a good interchange at today's WHPB (White House Press Briefing, natch):

"Q: Does the President risk using the troops when this morning he talked about if this does not go the way he wants, those troops and their families may have to wait longer for them to come home?

MS. PERINO: The President takes great pains not to politicize the troops. But what he was repeating was what the military -- Department of Defense has told him they are going to have to do, since they don't have this money."

Um, ok.

They had writing!

As much as I hate to take things out of context, sometimes it's more fun when you do. Here's Tony Snow responding to the question on why, under the proposed White House rules, there would be no transcript of interviews with senior officials:

"MR. SNOW: No, here's the point, is we've set up a situation in which we think members of Congress and staffers -- this is open to members and staff, who are able to take notes, and we also believe that writing goes back to the inception of Western civilization, and the ability -- I'm not sure that they had recordings or transcripts, but they did have writing. There was writing."

Confessions

I was going to comment on the subject of the recent 911/Pearle terror confession, but this guy said exactly what I would have:

"I believe Mohammed is a terrorist, although I have only the U.S. government's word for it. But let's face it, we picked this guy up four years ago, we've held him in secret detention centers for years, he has no access to counsel, and we've subjected him to who knows what treatment. After all that, I'd confess to shooting the Pope.

If we're going to abandon our ideals of justice in pursuit of the war against terror, we have to accept that confessions we obtain will have limited credibility. Maybe Mohammed did plan 9-11, but I don't believe it because of his confession. I want some real evidence."

Link

Bananas!

This just in:

Chiquita Bananas finance terrorism.

Choose your produce carefully, patriots. And jeez, everyone knows only wusses pay protection money.