Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re looking for a new addition to Sony’s A7-series of full-frame mirrorless cameras, you might only have to wait until the coming fall. According to a report from Sony Alpha Rumors, they have heard from one of their sources that the Sony A7III camera is expected to be announced this coming fall.

To be more specific, they have put it between October and November, so we’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for it then. The report also claims that the A7III will be sporting a brand new 24MP sensor and it will also come with a new autofocus system, both of which are apparently based on the Sony A9 which was announced earlier this year.

So if you liked the Sony A9 but didn’t like the price, the Sony A7III could be a good alternative at a presumably lower price tag. However note that only the sensor and AF system are the only borrowed features from the A9, and that the 20fps frame rate will most probably not make its way into the A7III, but if you don’t need to shoot that fast then we guess it shouldn’t be an issue.

In any case take it with a grain of salt for now, but it’s safe to say that many are looking forward to the A7III considering the positive reception of the A7-series in general.

Sony A7III Rumored For This Fall, Will Use The A9’s Autofocus System , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

If gamers have been the long-standing wireless peripheral hold-outs, then Logitech thinks it finally has the answer to cutting the cord. Four years in the making, the Logitech G Powerplay system is the mouse and keyboard maker’s foray into its own wireless charging system. Rather than go for one of the off-the-shelf approaches already in the wild, Logitech developed its … Continue reading

I find myself increasingly encountering the term, “public-private partnership.”

Today, I read two articles centered on this idea, both of which concerned Vice President Mike Pence – and one that concerned Pence’s role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

One article also included a sprinkling of US secretary of [privatized] education, Betsy DeVos.

A major goal of corporate education reform is to deliver public education to private entities (corporations, or even nonprofits, but don’t think that an entity termed “nonprofit” cannot be a handsome money dispenser for those running the nonprofit and doling out contracts). However, the extreme-right-Republican aim does not end with public education but with delivering the operation of the entire American infrastructure to private entities.

In the end, what this entails is having private corporations front money to state and local governments in order to lease back to the public what the public already owns.

Think of Chicago’s parking meter fiasco. From the May 23, 2016, Chicago Sun-Times:

Chicago’s parking-meter system took in $121.7 million last year, while four underground city-owned garages reaped another $34.7 million — with not a penny of that money going to the cash-strapped city government.

Instead, the $156.3 million pot of parking cash went to private investors who control the meters and garages under deals cut by former Mayor Richard M. Daley and rubber-stamped by the City Council. …

Chicago Parking Meters — formed by banking giant Morgan Stanley and other financial partners — paid the city $1.15 billion to manage the meter system and pocket the money fed into it for the next 75 years. …

i the seven years since, the meter company has reported a total of $778.6 million in revenues.

In the public-private partnership, the private entity rakes it in – and the public is thrown into crisis.

But let us return to VP Pence.

On June 08, 2017, Donald Cohen of In the Public Interest published this post about Pence’ canceling a PBS interview “out of the blue.” It just so happens that a failed public-private partnership connected to Pence was hitting the news. As Cohen writes:

On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence cancelled an interview with PBS out of the blue, provoking speculation. …

On Monday, the state of Indiana announced it would take control of a troubled highway construction project, Interstate 69, between Bloomington and Martinsville. The contractor, the Spanish firm Insolux Corsan, is facing bankruptcy and had been missing deadlines for months.

Who brought Insolux Corsan to the state? Pence. As governor, he signed a 35-year public-private partnership with the firm in 2014 to finance, construct, and maintain a section of the highway. Pence said it would provide “better value for taxpayers” than if the state used the traditional — and cheaper — method of public financing. But with only half the project completed and taxpayers left cleaning up the mess, one wonders what he’d say now.

Monday also happened to be the kickoff of a weeklong rollout of the Trump administration’s infrastructure plan, which would rely heavily on public-private partnerships. On PBS, Pence was supposed to talk infrastructure — drawing attention to his failed project wouldn’t have been good for business.

In January 2017, Naomi Klein wrote this Intercept article tying Pence with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina– and with the public-private-partnership concept:

Ten years ago, I published “The Shock Doctrine,” a history of the ways in which crises have been systematically exploited over the last half century to further a radical pro-corporate agenda. The book begins and ends with the response to Hurricane Katrina, because it stands as such a harrowing blueprint for disaster capitalism.

That’s relevant because of the central, if little-recalled role played by the man who is now the U.S. vice president, Mike Pence. At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee. … Under Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices” — 32 policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook. …

The first three items on the RSC list are “automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas,” a reference to the law that required federal contractors to pay a living wage; “make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).”

Another demand called for giving parents vouchers to use at charter schools, a move perfectly in line with the vision held by Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos. …

Even more striking was the company that FEMA paid $5.2 million to perform the crucial role of building a base camp for emergency workers in St. Bernard Parish, a suburb of New Orleans. The camp construction fell behind schedule and was never completed. …

After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. …“Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual work is carried out.”

This corruption and abuse is particularly relevant because of Trump’s stated plan to contract out much of his infrastructure spending to private players in so-called public-private partnerships.

What could be more lucrative than using crisis (or manufacturing crisis, if necessary) and combining that fear-instilling atmosphere with a little front-end cash in order to beef up corporate profits?

That, my friends, is a public-private partnership.

In fact, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)– which actively encourages public-private partnerships, including offering model legislation (see here and here and here and here)– will have stalwart voucher promoter, Betsy DeVos, as a featured speaker at its Denver conference in July 2017.

Heads up, America: The sharks are eyeing your public infrastructure.

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Longer version originally posted 06-11-17 at deutsch29.wordpress.com.

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Want to read about the history of charter schools and vouchers?

School Choice: The End of Public Education?

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A high school teacher in Wall Township, New Jersey, has been suspended after students discovered their pro-Donald Trump quotes and T-shirts had been altered or removed entirely.

On Monday, the Wall Township School District suspended the teacher “pending further disciplinary action,” according to CBS Philadelphia.

Superintendent Cheryl Dye declined to name the teacher, but the Asbury Park Press identified her as Susan Parsons.

The issue came up when junior Grant Berardo opened his yearbook expecting to see himself in the “Trump: Make America Great Again” T-shirt he had worn when posing for his yearbook photo last fall.

The shirt’s presidential message appeared in the school pics he had purchased earlier in the year but had somehow disappeared in the yearbook version.

“He was disappointed,” Grant’s father, Joseph Berardo Jr., told CNN. “This was the first election he has been interested in.” 

Berardo isn’t the only teen Trump fan whose views may have been censored. Junior Wyatt Dobrovich-Fago says his Trump vest was blanked out when it appeared in the yearbook. His sister, Montana, said this Trump quote was removed from her freshman class president photo: 

“I like thinking big. If you are going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.”

Grant’s dad told the New York Post he checked to see if there were any dress-code restrictions before letting his son wear his Trump T-shirt for his school picture.

He noted that one student wore a Reagan-Bush shirt in a group shot, while others posed for their class pictures in shirts promoting the New Jersey Devils and Led Zeppelin.

In previous years, students posed in Barack Obama gear, the told the Post.

The elder Berardo insists he doesn’t see a conspiracy but said the Trump alteration does smack of censorship.

“I don’t think there was a deep-seated plot here, but I think there’s a yearbook committee and a yearbook adviser, and somewhere in the mix someone or several people decided to censor three students,” he told the New York Post. “The fact that the committee found it OK to censor the president’s name or anything that wasn’t offensive is just wrong.”

Wall school board President Allison Connolly told the Asbury Park Press that the board “found the allegations of wrongdoing disturbing and take the charge that students have had their free speech rights infringed upon very seriously.”

Parsons told the New York Post that “we have never made any action against any political party.” When a reporter asked if she knew who altered the images, she said, “I’m going to hang up.”

Meanwhile, Joseph Berardo Jr. is asking the school to add the original photos and quotes back to the yearbooks with a letter from “the administration explaining why they are reissuing the yearbook,” he told CNN.

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What’s to be said about the Public Theater’s production of “Julius Caesar,” which, having dressed the titular dictator in President Donald Trump’s weeds, has fulfilled its most obvious destiny by earning the relentless enmity of Trump’s fan base?

Here’s my offer: What a time to be alive but also mostly dead inside! What a thrill it is to have another dose of that fulminate-of-mercury outrage delivered to our screens. And what a terrific way to highlight two key features of our age ― the extreme uselessness of ever knowing anything and our tendency to expend too much of our spirit in a waste of shame.

Like all the great conservative mavens of “cultural literacy” recommended that we Gen-Xers do in college, I’ve spent many thousands of hours with William Shakespeare and the canon of Western Literature. And that’s fine. The canon is mostly pretty good, except for Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

In particular, I’ve spent more time with “Julius Caesar” than any reasonable person should be required to. But this weekend’s burst of psychopathic indignation over one production of the play was a good reminder of what a futile pursuit that was. America, circa now, is more apt to valorize people who don’t know a single thing about what they’re talking about than it is to reward those who do. Being armed too strong in honesty, I ended up on the losing end of this weekend’s joust over “Julius Caesar.”

So, thanks for nothing, E.D. Hirsch! I’ve really wasted my time. But since it’s my time to waste, let’s make the most of it.

OK. The thing about Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar” is that it’s not actually about Caesar. The main character is a politician named Brutus who, greatly concerned about Caesar’s violations of democratic norms and thoroughly convinced that he alone understands what ails Rome, is seduced into a plot to murder the Roman dictator by conspirators who know that Brutus’ yen for high-mindedness will give them cover for their base ambitions. The play is a “tragedy” because Brutus, a decent man, doesn’t figure out that he’s a fool who has made Rome worse until it’s far too late.

This story is pretty squarely in Shakespeare’s wheelhouse. When he wasn’t writing what many people dismiss as “Tudor propaganda,” he was pretty concerned about how easily an established order could be tipped into chaos. Shakespeare wasn’t too keen on people stepping out of their place. The “Great Chain of Being” didn’t offer much encouragement to populist revolutions. Of course, it would be interesting to know what the Bard might have made of Trump, but I suspect that if the real estate mogul demonstrated a willingness to keep his actors gainfully employed, Shakespeare would have ruffled very few feathers.

Nevertheless, over the weekend, when the Public Theater’s “Julius Caesar” became the latest piece of cultural bric-a-brac to get laundered through the media outrage machine, I found it hilarious and appalling because the outrage only succeeds if you’re aggressively ignorant about the play. A day later, what I’m finding funny is the thought that somewhere in New York right now, there are some liberals, equally ignorant about the play, who will rush to see the Public Theater’s production, salivating at the notion that this version really sticks it to Donald Trump.

They are in for a real surprise, because if anything, “Julius Caesar” aims its daggers at the notion of a high-on-their-own-supply Resistance, flush with the belief that the best solution to all their political problems is the quickest one.

The second scene in Act 3 is going to be especially unsettling for them. That’s the famous scene of competing orations where Brutus first recites a “Stronger Together” speech that could have been penned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook. Supremely confident that his elite standing is sufficient to the task of educating the crowd in the correct course of action, Brutus then leaves them alone with Mark Antony ― and immediately loses them to Antony’s devil-tongued “Make Rome Great Again” incitement to mob violence. For his part, Caesar exits the play as a man more sinned against than sinning.

Rome, meanwhile, descends into violence. The very next thing the mob does, in fact, is murder a poet named Cinna who had nothing at all to do with the assassination of Caesar. Cinna tells the mob that they’ve mistaken him for another man, a conspirator who shares his name, but the crowd decides to murder him anyway, shouting, “Tear him for his bad verses!” and “It’s no matter, his name’s Cinna!”

I feel you, Cinna, wherever you are. What, indeed, is the point of being right about anything?

But Cinna’s murder is pretty fitting to think about in this moment. With all of their future at stake and society in the balance, the whipped-up crowd demonstrates that the only thing that they’re actually good at is tearing to pieces someone completely inconsequential ― someone who just accidentally wandered into their lives, who they would otherwise never have noticed.

That’s what we’re good at now. That’s what has been done to this production of “Julius Caesar.” 

It’s a good thing that such easy targets exist because otherwise we would have to confront bigger problems. For instance, the president is an utterly venal, shameless liar. But he exists because of decades of choices that we all made, together. We really should be doing the hard work of sorting out our own house in a sensible fashion and taking stock of our failings, but you know what’s easier? Utterly destroying the woman who played “Vicki” on the all-but-forgotten show “Suddenly Susan,” for a really epically hack piece of “art.”

Bank of America, which hopefully has figured out how not to accidentally repossess people’s homes, will probably not breathe a discouraging word should some 20 million people lose their health insurance in the next few weeks. But the bank made sure to register its extreme displeasure with the Public Theater, withdrawing the funding from the theater company that I am almost positive it had forgotten proffering in the first place.

You want to be mad that this production presented Caesar in Trumpian fashion? Be my guest. But I have to be honest with you: If you’re going to be angry about it, be angry at the fact that it’s kind of a cheap move on the director’s part. 

Replacing Caesar with a recognizable world leader is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Did you know that the Acting Company partnered with the Guthrie Theatre on a 2012 production of “Julius Caesar” that put an analogue of President Barack Obama in the title role? It’s true. Somehow, liberals forgot they were supposed to be outraged at the sight of the murder, and I’m left to speculate that Psalm 109:8-chanting conservatives loved it and were literally brought to the point of violent sexual ecstasy when Brutus murdered Barry O. in cold blood on the stage.

Dolling Caesar up like Trump is basically a quick-and-dirty, shorthand way to drag an audience into the world of this particular play ― a society on the edge that teeters and breaks thanks to the actions of a few powerful men. And when I say “quick-and-dirty,” I mean that it’s like dropping a damned anvil on the stage. It’s not subtle!

Here’s the rub, though ― maybe it can’t afford to be subtle.

This play is being produced for an audience of affluent theater-going New Yorkers, and they live a life that is, psychologically speaking, about as far away from epochal societal instability as you can get. So you hand them a Trump-Caesar, and it stimulates their liberal, professional-class mores. “This is not normal,” they think as the play begins. “I was born as free as Caesar,” Cassius whispers to Brutus, adding, “So were you.” It’s time for some Roman-style game theory! And total wish fulfillment comes before intermission in the form of Caesar’s murder.

If the production is good enough (and I’ve no idea if the Public Theater’s is), it forces this audience to confront the way everything works out for those anti-Caesar revolutionaries and gives them a moment of unexpected frisson when they realize they’re supposed to see themselves in Brutus’ tragic aspect.

So it’s possible that the way this play is being produced is actually beneficial for its intended audience. Perhaps this production is capable of shaking its particular audience out of their dull and easy way of thinking about the world, putting them in touch with more meaningful ideas.

Now that I think about it, I might actually do “Julius Caesar” this way if I had to produce the play. But I’d be utterly mystified if anyone, hearing about my production, was compelled to attempt to set the Guinness record for Being Mad On The Internet about it. The only thing I can say about such people is that they must lead a pretty blissful existence if this is what gets them worked up.

Besides, you should know that if I really wanted to savage Donald Trump ― if I just wanted to turn him into a punching bag for my own cheap thrills ― I wouldn’t put him in Caesar’s shoes. No, I’d feature him in the title role of “Macbeth” (Ivanka could be Lady Macbeth!) and I’d hire the most pornographically violent fight director that money could buy.

And what would that prove? I have no idea! But I guess that’s the point: LOL, nothing matters.

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