Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

America’s Slow-Motion Train Wreck Too Few Can See

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Because of work and sleep timing, I slept through the so-called “debate” between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton last night, and it appears I didn’t miss anything important. I’m not even motivated to look at transcripts as I normally would. After discussing it with Elke and others who did subject themselves to the farce, it’s pointless — every second of time spent on it being a second wasted. And what changes anyway? All it does is just fuel each side to dig in deeper. Admit this and you’ll be better off.

Each of the mainstream, establishment party candidate’s hard core, composed of followers of the company-line herd mentality dictated to them, is entrenched into demonizing the other and thinks their candidate “won” regardless, and already are citing online polls by assorted “media” outlets to support their position (example DT, example HC).

You’ll read Facebook posts and Tweets that illustrate my point perfectly, if you care enough to view them independently of affiliation for either candidate. “My person clearly won!”, is what they all distill to, regardless of their eloquence or crudeness. It’s as obvious and predictable as tides.

Just read any Hillary or Trump supporter’s comments and there it is, plain as day. When you’re outside the problem, it’s easier to see. There’s clarity and enlightenment in this place off to the side of the big social cliques screaming at each other. Looking at the two-party game from the outside this cycle, it’s all clearly propaganda and manipulation for the sake of maintaining superficially different flavors of the corporatist/globalist status quo.

Think I’m daft? Far from it! I’ll gladly change my mind when Goldman Sachs, E-Bay and Cisco each pays me at least $225,000 for a speech (Hillary) or I can open up a bogus university (Trump) or charity (both the Clintons and Trump) through which millions of dollars in favor-cash flow, with no real penalty. Wipe the Saudi oil stains off those blood-money checks before ya cash ’em…

For all his lesser flaws, such as lack of sufficient conservatism socially, the one presidential candidate who is most even-tempered, calm, scandal-free, mentally and physically healthy, and experienced in actual governmental governance, wasn’t included anyway. This had nothing to do with merit, but instead, entirely arbitrary artifices of “polling” thresholds, polls themselves being easily manipulated (as evident in their differences). That alone undermines the credibility of the medium of two-party “debate”, which in reality is anything but.

The “debate” was and will be a media circus of reality-TV titillation pandering to ten-second attention spans, and a vehicle for left-wingnuts and Trump zombies to proclaim their woman’s or man’s (respectively) superiority. “My honest and obvious liar with the fake hair and skin coloring is better than she who twists the truth to her own ends and covers up her lies!”

How sad of a statement it is that we, as a nation, have plummeted our standards of statesmanship, honor, and dignity so far that two slimy con artists are what’s left in the 2016 cycle. A horrid pox on Republicans and Democrats equally and alike!

At least I’ll walk out of the early-voting station with a clearer conscience in having not marked the ballot for either of the two greedy, lying, hotheaded, unstable, sleaze-propagating, elitist-1% train wrecks at the top of the ticket. Furthermore, I will have voted, albeit in futility, for the one and only candidate whose party clearly and consistently has opposed NSA/CIA domestic spying and supported the Constitution as it was written.

Don’t blame me for whatever happens next.

A Challenge for Storm Chasers Who Preach about Carbon Emissions

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Do you chase storms? Do you claim to care about carbon emissions? If the answer is “yes”, then stop chasing.

If you continue to chase, and you remain on the climate-change/carbon-emissions bandwagon, you are behaving in a dishonest, duplicitous, hypocritical, and pretentious manner. Why? Easy: you are proclaiming the need for others (and isn’t it always others?) to curtail their carbon-spewing activities that you perceive as unneeded, while refusing to most fully do so yourself. And that, friend, is the real “inconvenient truth”.

The measure of any principle is the extent of self-sacrifice for it!

You say you recycle, use solar and wind energy, and/or take public transportation sometimes? Well, so do I–all of the above, in fact. But I do not go strutting around like some pompous enviro-peacock, proclaiming my environmental-sustainability, holier-than-thou status with carbon, while simultaneously and deliberately engaging in activities that completely counterbalance my own ideals. Carbon isn’t the reason I recycle, use solar energy, take electricity from a utility that operates wind farms, etc., and I’m not pretending that it is. And be real here: your token, minimal personal carbon savings in other areas are meaningless in the big picture. You’ll never, ever offset a millionth of what China spews in a single year. That’s the sooty, dirty truth. All the excuses in the world don’t change that.

Blather about personal “carbon offsets”, high-efficiency cars, sustainability, and local sourcing is just window dressing–a feel-good exercise in rationalizations to mollify eco-hipster insecurities. In short, it’s all a load of pandering bullcrap. It doesn’t make any real, measurable difference in the world CO2 budget. Therefore, it’s all about principle and not actual personal carbon emission. Since that’s the case, hold yourself to that principle!

I am not talking about necessary driving, such as to and from work, or to purchase food or obtain medical care. Storm chasing is a hobby. As an avid cross-country storm observer of three decades’ experience, who has logged hundreds of thousands of miles guilt-free, I can declare this with certainty: While fun, educational, informative and (on rare occasion) valuable to the warning system through storm reports, my storm chasing is not absolutely necessary. Neither is yours. I am not holding anyone to a higher standard than myself here. As such, my position is rock-solid.

Personally, I have no horse in the climate-change rodeo and refuse to get involved or take a position, either in support or opposition. I follow no herd regarding what to “do about” a warming climate. I stand tall in defiance of those on both the political left and the right who insist I must take a stand. To both, I say: No. I am my own man and you do not dictate what I must think! The overpoliticization and borderline cult status of it all just turns me off. It’s not worth more than this much of my valuable time, and I have other bigger priorities in life.

I just don’t care one way or another about “global warming” and that’s the brutally honest truth. If we warm a lot, we’ll either adapt or die as a civilization. So be it. That’s also the brutally honest truth. If my lack of concern about this issue gives you discomfort–your problem, not mine. I’ll keep chasing and driving a big vehicle because I don’t advocate anything either way regarding carbon emissions.

Nonetheless, I do care about pretension, hypocrisy and false fronts. And that’s exactly what every single storm chaser is doing who also claims to care about carbon emissions while driving thousands of miles per year for an unnecessary activity.

Again, if you chase storms and also claim to care about carbon emissions, then put your money where your mouth is and cease chasing! In the same vein, stop all other travel that is not absolutely necessary, such as vacations away from home. Either that, or stop the hypocrisy and shut up the two-faced moralizing about carbon use.

Your ideals are only as valid as the degree to which they personally apply to you. Are your carbon principles important enough to make your practice match your preaching, and inconvenience yourself?

That’s the hammer of truth (in Latin, Malleus Verum…thanks bc) that I slam down with blunt force upon this issue. Do your value your principles enough to meet my challenge? Or are they as hollow and meaningless as I suspect?

Let the lame excuses come.

Velvet Elvis in the Sky

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Honesty in Weather Photography

Fellow weather and outdoor photographers: I have a simple request. Be real.

An ever-increasing proportion of weather “photos” online are deliberately manipulated so as to be untrue (see earlier rant). This includes high-dynamic-range (HDR) processing, saturation and contrast enhancement well past the real and natural. I cannot and will not promote online, recommend to publishers, nor “like” on Facebook, overprocessed, oversaturated digital art presented as photography. The concept is so simple anybody should be able to grasp: if it’s unnatural, it’s not natural! Duh…

Sad thing is, most such images don’t need to be saturated to the hilt or slammed with HDR contrast-enhancement–the spectacular scenes would stand on their own anyway with minimal HDR or other processing. [Notice I said “minimal”, not “no” processing. Do not overlook that key nuance!]

This isn’t a criticism of making a photo look the closest possible to how it really did. “Photoshopping” for that purpose, or to clean off artifices like dust, scratches, glare spots, vignetting, unnatural granularity, distortions introduced by the equipment or scanner, etc., is making the image more real, not less. Great! Please do such improvements! I also have no problem with drawing out shadows and softening highlights (whether digitally or via filters) to overcome the camera’s innate inability to range light like our eyeballs, thereby rendering the truest possible image.

Therein lies the photographic fitness test. Is that the closest possible to how it looked to your eyeballs and those of other observers very near? If not, you’ve gone too far, or (in rare cases) not far enough.

How do you know you’ve gone too far? If your weather “photo” looks like it could be served at Baskin-Robbins, it’s not natural.

How do I know you’ve gone too far? It’s not hard. Sometimes, I’ve been very close to you, on the same storm. That makes it slam-dunk obvious to me. I’ve seen unreal enhancement of images taken from at or very near my own locations, starting with some well-known images of the 9 June 2005 Hill City tornado and continuing through the 10-11 May 2014 storms in Kansas.

Furthermore, the fact I wasn’t there in other cases is moot. I wasn’t born yesterday, nor did I start shooting the sky last week. Over three decades, I’ve seen hundreds, perhaps over a thousand supercells and even more shelf clouds, in all kinds of light, day and night, and from every angle imaginable. I simply know what’s natural and what’s not. I just do. Maybe you can pull the wool over some weather-ignoramus news editor or BLOGger in New York, Washington, London or San Francisco, who doesn’t know a supercell from a Duracell…but not me. I don’t have the time or interest to be “photographic police”; but I will cold-bust obvious offenders opportunistically from time to time.

Over-enhancement simply is inauthentic–digital art created from a photo, not an actual photograph. Such processing zealotry renders unnatural saturations and color distortions the likes of which would seem better suited for 1970s night-glow disco murals than photography. Alas, the disease is spreading like wildfire.

Before anyone whines, “I’ve got the right to do whatever I wish with my images!”, don’t bother. Yes, you do have that right and I’m not trying to deny it. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression. You even have the right to alter the hell out of a picture, then lie and call it a photograph. Get this: the same First Amendment guarantees my right to call out your lie, if you present that image as actual photography after it’s been soaked with digital food coloring and/or contrast-enhanced to sharpness that makes a surgical knife seem as rough as a grinding wheel.

Besides, I am not talking about rights. I am talking about honesty. Don’t tell me some deeply Photoshopped, HDR-overcompensated image is a photograph, or “what I saw today”, when that is simply not true. If it looks like the atmospheric version of a velvet Elvis, nobody truly saw that, or ever will.

Again, create all the digital art you want. Just don’t mislead and deceive others by calling it a photograph. Such images are digital art, not photography. Label it accordingly, right there and upfront. Otherwise, I reserve the right to go onto comment boards for sites and stories where such images are posted, or contact the editor(s) of the publication or website involved, and blow the cover clean off the ruse.

Want some examples? Here’s what I mean, using my own imagery in order to (for now) benevolently avoid trampling the toddler-fragile egos of the guilty. For now…

The top image of each pair is the photo, rendered as close as I could to the scene seen. The bottom is the overprocessed digital art.