The Unreasonable Man

I sometimes get asked “why do you dislike religion so? What harm are they doing”?

Well…. the answer to that question is: all too often, real, measurable harm. I am not just talking about the obvious and extreme examples, such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Nor am I talking about people quietly believing in non-existing deities - that is of course fully their right. What I am talking about is prompted by the last few days’ newspapers.

First, Robert Latimer has finally been paroled. Finally! My note to the parole authority made a difference, then - with the tens of thousands of other notes they will have received from reasonable people. The only reason this man spent so many years in prison is because of “Christians”. I would do for my child what he did, as I believe everyone with a heart would. Apparently, many Christians do not have hearts.

But the article that prompts me to write this today is that Charles McVety of the sinister “Canada Family Action Coalition” claims to have stopped subsidies for Canadian movies that promote homosexuality (Huh? Do homosexuals actually feel that it needs promoting?) or violence, or contain “sex that does not educate”.

First, the word “family” in these religiously dogmatic groups is objectionable. I have a family too, and it is very important to me, and I don’t need Victorian or bible-inspired morality distortions to make that so. But the fact that this Christian is able, apparently, to affect what Canadian artists make is absurd. he has no right to do this.

Of course he is supported by Christian Conservative MPs. These people have presumably never seen a modern Canadian movie. I have, and I see them all the time, and they are very good. Wait for Young People Fucking, out in your (avant-garde) cinema soon. Imposing religious censorship on movies should be stopped at all cost - it will be to the detriment of these movies, but worse, to the detriment of this great country. (Those are the very words these people use: “this great country”, as though that makes their actions OK).

The government should probably not be promoting art. But as long as it does, it should be all art - not Disney-only art (if that is not a contradiction in terms). I do not want to live in Saudi Arabia or Iran, and I will resist any attempt to make this country even a little more into Saudi Arabia or Iran, with their Morals and Vice committees and religious police running the place and deciding what is and is not allowed.

So yes, religious people like Mr McVety negatively affect the world I live in, and I don’t like it. He is fully entitled to his God Delusion - but he is not entitled to try to have his delusion affect my life. By trying to do so, he has made his brand of “Christianity” the enemy.

Having left here:

I am now back here:

Turning final for YYZ. It is always to get back home, but I preferred the Las Vegas weather.

…sure knows how to make money. No, not just the casinos.

I am at the Westin, off the strip, so it is cheaper.

But not cheap. I am working in my room tonight. A simple dinner (some bruschetta, affordable fish, and some wine) comes to $105. Plus tip. Even though the prices are already high, and all then have 20% small print “service fee” added to them, and then have $2.50 each added as “delivery charge”, you are still expected to tip. Wow.

I am in two different worlds today.

This is the world I left this morning. Including,of course, the ubiquitous and inexplicably voluntary Timmies queue:

So I am in Canada. At Pearson airport, and it is dreary and winter:

And cold and dark.

Click to continue:

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In US Entertainment news, the two democrats are putting me off big time by their populist anti-trade rhetoric. They are trying to out-anti-trade their opponent. Trade is bad, is the implication; foreign trade is even worse because it means “money going to foreigners, not American [read: unionised] workers”.

Very disingenuous. NAFTA has shown itself to be extremely successful and has raised the overall level of wealth in all countries concerned. Obama and Hillary are both putting me off. Either they fail to understand basic economics, or, worse, they are cynically lying for votes, instead fo educating. Either would disqualify them in my eyes.

Senator McCain, on the other hand, is a straight shooter. He is not young or black, but in spite of this and his support for the war, I am liking him more and more.

PC, and I’m a Mac. And I am a Linux box. You all know the ads: insufferably superior Mac, and dumb, plodding, playing-it-by-the-rules PC. Mac is half PC’s age and weight, and twice his coolness, intelligence, stability, and quality. PC is nice enough but he’s kinda dumb. He will never amount to much; he deserves understanding and pity.

Mac is so superior. Of course that can backfire. Four great short parodies on the PC/Mac thing here [link]. Originals, by a copywriter in Vancouver, here. Worth seeing all four.

I use Canon “L” lenses on my 5D camera. See how how quality lenses like these are made here:

Canon Virtual Camera Museum

Click on “Enter” and wait for the videos to start. Fascinating, and you will never ask again why that lens costs $1,000.

…has just crashed on me three times - it crashes for no apparent reason and when crashing, exit completely. Once when trying a different raw import, once when dragging a single folder into another one (again, multiple folders cannot be dragged). Importing my pictures is taking six hours, but with constant restarts that may turn out to be 100 hours.

I can forgive this, I suppose - why would a version 2 work without crashing dead in its tracks?

But some of this Mac application stuff seems illogical. For instance, I import pictures into Aperture, leaving the original files in their original location (this is an option). Now, due to the crashes I mentioned, that left things half finished, I want to remove this entire library and re-import. When I try to remove the library, I am told the images will be deleted. Either that warning is spurious and is worrying me for no reason, or it is impossible to takes files out of Aperture without losing your files. In both cases this would be dumb. I can read, I understand computers - and yet this is not clear. A good question would simply be “all Aperture info will be deleted. Delete original files as well [y/n]?”

OK, so I have spent three hours trying to do a simple thing in Lightroom. In vain. Here’s the issue. I have a collection of directories which I have imported. Main directories are …/2004, 2005, 2006, etc. Under 2007, I have shoot directories like “2007_05_20 Mono” and “2007_05_24 Amsterdam”, and so on.

One of these subdirectories accidentally had six sub-subdirectories which should have been subdirectories of “2007″, not of “2007/2007_04-15 London”. So surely I can drag them (either in finder or in Lightroom) from the 2007_04_5 London subdirectory and drop them onto the “2007″ subdirectory?

No. In Lightroom I cannot find a way to do it. In Finder I tried - and kinda succeeded, even though CUT and PASTE are not available, so you have to COPY and PASTE, which took 30 minutes. But now they are missing in Lightroom. Also, simple things like “mark two directoiries at the same time and then delete them both” are simply not possible in Lightroom: I can mark two or more directories, but then right-clicking on them and selecting “delete” only deletes the last one of the selected directories.

THREE HOURS on a simple file move operation. And I have been using computers for thirty years. And I still cannot do it. My Lightroom file organisation is now a mess.
I am deleting Lightroom. This kind of file management is simply moronic.

I may go back and try Aperture again - but since I have ten times more pictures than my Mac can contain, keeping everything in Aperture’s file warm blanket “let me do it - you don’t need to know where things are kept” management may not be the best option until the iMac comes with a 2 TB drive. I’ll try and let you all know.

Failing that, much as I like the Mac, with this and the colour problems, I may go back to the PC for media management. Which is a shame, because it is just what the Mac was intended for.