A few thoughts on the roots of the Jewish holocaust.
[And thoughts on Stalin's Purges]
[This was in response to a post that I don't think said anything very interesting.]
I'd say Anti-semitism in Europe was mostly upheld by the church until the 20th century. it was a dogma in many sects that the jews as a collective group, a people, betrayed God. And that for God's work to be done the jews will either be converted or destroyed. interpretations of ancient thinkers in a modern context mutated this into a genocidal ideology aspect in various political organisations.
Stalin feared jews too, what with him rounding up the Jewish doctors in the USSR because he feared they'd poison him. And he killed many when the tried the balance out the communist party in his purges, he was suspicious of jews, a prejudice from his youth and from his rivals in communism, such as Trotsky.
The roots of much of the antisemitism with Hitler and Stalin was cultural, based in the church, in the Russia Empire, it was a vast problem, and that didn't fully melt away in the USSR. Stalin's killing of Jews was quite extensive as well, ranging from the 30s to the early 50s when he rounded up doctors. Stalin seems to have prefered to starve his rivals, if he had been more creative then the death camp might have become associated with him more than Hitler.
German national socialist did buy into Tsarist propaganda, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and this fuelled antisemitism to a great degree than it otherwise might have done. Scapegoating the jews was an old practice by then, but new fuel for that fire was found from such fabrications. The hatred and scapegoating of Jews in Russia forced many into the communist party, millions suffered.
The main drive for race conflict was the nationalist propaganda, which pitted people who looked the same against each other in strict loyalty to their great leaders and empires. And those people who were in nations be still had an aspect of individuality, such as traditionalist groups of Jews were targets considered unbritish or Ungerman to many nationalist extremists.
It wasn't the church who called for the genocide of the Jews, not for a long time, but it was the nationalist-racist backdrop that created an extremist view within Christian nations and within a Christian cultural narrative.
So in the posts religion promoted the normality of hating/blaming Jews, more recent nationalism isolated the jews as the enemy within(within Germany, etc.), and when conditions made people vote for extremists, like Hitler, he did what people might have expected. A vast bloodletting.
And Stalin's motivations as far as Atheism does not seem to be correct since there was not an anti-religious stance that existed as a cultural background supporting genocide, nor that of the Jewish people. however, political ideology was key to Lenin's purges, as was the killing of top church officials.
Stalin, who was a gangster for the party, robbing banks to fund the communists, he brought in his old tricks back after he managed to get his hands on some real power. He moved his people into positions of power and when Trotsky was exiled he purged the party over and over, purged the red army too, and broke anyone or anything that got in his way, as he did as a crook before the red revolution of 1917. And creating and maintaining this nation of fear in the 30s was key to his safety in power.
He was still a moderate Christian by some accounts, being raised one, but clearly not a good one at best. His true religion was Himself, he was a communist in name but a narcissist accord to psychological reports, he didn't get off on pain like a psychopath but he seems to have been a sociopath, not dissimilar to Hitler in that respect.
I hope that clarifies things.


[In response to this uninteresting post from Facebook.] 

You do not know you know.

At no point is an agnostic and an atheist in conflict over knowledge, or lack thereof.  The agnostic knows of no god or gods, the atheist doesn't know either, the agnostic might be an atheist or theist, and the oddballs are those who think they're gnostic, or know that god is real.  Yet what is knowledge to them, a half-cocked idea of knowing via experience or faith, or pseudoscience and fallacies.  This isn't knowledge, even if it were true the knowledge or informational claim is false. 

As an atheist, I am saying I act acceptance of the claim, your god because I have not been convinced.  Other atheists may go as far as to say there is no god or gods, but they don't know this as an absolute, and the vast major of that group will not say they need absolutes in this regard because they're always ready to change their minds based on the evidence.  Real evidence, not magical proof claims. 

A theist of any kind will doubt rival gods, calling them false or even demonic, they believe and doubt in gods based on what they accept as true and will often use good arguments when pointing out the errors in a claim, but on when it's rival versions of the divine.  For example, they'll point out the frauds in hundu gurus worship and miracles but then fail to apply the same logic to their specific beliefs.  Even if there is a cross over between the claims made. 

A proclaimed agnostic, one who says they're not theistic nor an atheist is one who is normally atheistic but the label doesn't matter or is seen as too harsh to use for their opinion, often due to them not knowing the definition.  Agnostic as far as Atheism??  If they say that there isn't enough evidence to say god exists but I keep an open mind to knowledge that may appear then they're the same as almost any "militant" atheist.  

The key point here is we do not know, no special proof will do, and what some call "knowledge" is unfalsiable and so not knowledge.  If you nearly die and see a so-called "afterlife", but without knowing how reliable that is you know nothing than you did before such an experience took place. 

At no point is any mainstream Atheist seriously suggesting . . .

A common trait amongst many people is to paint the enemy as these evil doers, horrid humans, but often it is false.  As far as Atheists and sceptics it is false to judge all by whichever troll you've been messed around by online.  Equally, one must not jump to conclusions.  The position of many is to build on ignorance, which is a poor foundation to say the least.  From a position of ignorance and a belief in knowledge, the arrogant form serious opinions, and the validity of which will be, by definition, in error.

In my experience, although it is amusing to me, I have witnessed many nonsensical claims.  Some were trolling, but many are so messed up that they believe in these irrational points.  These range from claims of a political alignment, such as saying all Atheists are big government supporters, even though many are libertarian.  Or that all atheists are liberal, some really really are not liberal.  Some believe that Atheists are communists or fascists or Nazis, etc.  No proof that all are, nor that most are, nor that you, personally, agree with those ideologies.

Some claims are that we Atheists want to ban religion, that we want atheist governments, that churches will be destroyed and bibles burnt.  Of the sum of western Atheists, a small proportion may want to do that, mostly sad cases on the internet, many of whom are after attention and offer anti-intellectual arguments for their extremism.  We Atheists, the average non-believers of any title or stripe, we do not seek such things out.  We don't want religion and government to mingle, we believe we are all better off letting believers live with their choices and not being dictated to by other believers or by those who lack belief in religion and the supernatural.  If you don't break the law then there is no real problem we will have, if you aren't trying to manipulate politics by telling your flock how to vote then we'll respect you are far more.

At the worst, the extreme end of everyday Atheism says you shouldn't be able to have tax free status or that you should earn your status through good deeds.  I would be far happier to see the very rich church do more soup kitchens for the homeless and elderly to earn a tax status, and I would love to see the money grabbing cult leaders get jail time or get hit with a big tax bill.  If you're a good church ad you help people, do good for goddness sake, nothing would change, but televangelists would suffer a tax bill.  This doesn't sound extreme to me.  

Now, one thing I wish to bring up is the repeated claim by believing New Age Spiritualists that I want to put them in camps.  I have never said I want to, I do not want to, no mainstream atheist says as much, and it wouldn't help to deconvert magical thinking pseudoreligious nutcases anyway.  And, for goodness sake can't we have a discussion about the evidence without most believers employing fallacies all the time.  I know experience is important to you, as might be stories from others or holy texts, but religious and spiritual people need to know how untrue their evidence claims are.  You do not know how deceptive you're being.

Lastly, I just want to make clear that most Atheists are moderate, they enjoy sports, entertainment, raising their families, socialising, comunity, and many other things that you probably enjoy.  They just don't buy into the god claim because of the lack of evidence for the claim and many rival claims that are equally as nonfalsiable.  So we don't know you're right, we don't know you're wrong either, but that's true of all other gods and magical beings and superadvanced alien beliefs, you can't prove a negative. 

Ramble about 35mm f1.2 lens for Sony E Mount.

Despite the claim of being F1.2 and metal body, it didn't offer the best results. mediocre when compared to my Kamlan 50mm f1.1 and other wide aperture lenses. in fact, some cheap as hell CCTV lenses do as good of a job.

Don't get me wrong, wide open isn't horrid, but it just isn't good enough. It's soft and needs to be closed in a little to for 2.8 to get fair results, which is similar to results you might get with an F1.4 CCTV lens of the same focal length. The low light performance isn't horrid but I get better results from a F1.4 lens, even though the Neewer lens is sharper than a CCTV lens on a CCTV or C mount adapter to NEX or Sony E mount. So it isn't my cup of tea.

The focus isn't bad, not loose, not hard to turn, aperture ring works well too, smooth turning so great for video. but I'd say you don't get enough light for an f1.2. Since F-stops will differ when we look to T-stops, as I don't have the still to test the T-stop I will just say there is some loss. More loss than a CCTV 25mm f1.4, more than a Kamlan 50mm f1.1. Or so it seemed while testing on various cameras with manual settings and accounting for focal distance. The focus range wasn't too bad, for a 35 it was great for anything at a distance, not unexpected. close up was good.  All this said, maybe I got a bad batch item. Not the first time this has happened with Chinese products.


FOR BOKEH FANS,
Some good bokeh close up but as expected it isn't so good at distance, you'd be better off getting a fast 50mm for that. Which links back to my point on the 50mm Kamlan.
In fact, as far as boke, I have got great results from lenses made for 35mm film cameras, grab an old nikkor or Pentax or Canon FD lens with an f1.2 or f1.4 or f1.8 aperture and adapt it to Sony-E or another system. but light loss due to sensor size means you'll get a darker image than an APS-C specific lens. So using a 50mm Nikkor lens on APS-C is a 1.5 crop factor, meaning it will be portrait more than standard, but bokeh will be very nice.

Technically your 35 isn't a 35, but if you want less than a 75mm equivalent then buy a good 35mm lens.  Good as in f2 if possible, adapt it to sony-e, and it will act as a 50(52mm in effect).  Much better for everyday use than a 50mm that acts as a 75mm due to the crop sensor.  As with A6000, A6300, A5100, and the NEX range, etc.  If you do daytime images then Iso won't be a big issue, if you want natural light then buy a 35mm f1.8 if it's as cheap as the neewer 35mm f1.2, you'll probably get sharper results.  If you're doing low light then the Neewer f1.2 might help, but other factors will help too, like knowing how to light an area, correct use of flash and flash compensation. 

Enough rambling from me. . .    Let's just say if you see it for cheap, buy it.  If not don't think it's a dreamboat of a lens. 

Reflecting on Auschwitz - My thoughts regarding my visit in 2017.

An interest of mine is the history of WW2 and the horrors around it for the average people, I like the thought that we should not forget, that we must prevent future calamity by recalling historical disaster.  In 2017, for the first but I hope not the last time, I visited Auschwitz.  It is something of a new tradition, as my Step-Grandfather visited after WW2 and my Step-Dad wanted to go and he wanted me to go as well.  I imagine that next time I go it will be with my brother as we create the family tradition. 

The visit to the countryside of Poland in the spring is quite pleasant, away from the city where I was staying and out to the main camp, the best known, place of modern historical genocide.  Preserved buildings and streets like a small and very organised town, tourists on their pilgrimage to a mecca for remembrance.  People from across the world, those speaking a dozen languages in separated groups lead by multilingual guides.  Headsets connected to short-range radios, allowing the group to hear, over the sound of other parties, the voice of the tour guide.  The sense of history, the quiet between words, the methodical grinding of those people killed in this place o nearby.  And this was only the first camp.  In the day-trip, our party was to visit Both Auschwitz One, the main camp, and Birkenau, the second camp with the famed train station that is common to the photography of Auschwitz and the Holocaust in general. 

Of those things to note of the first camp, the quiet, the lack of birds, the mumbling of the tourists broken by cold silences and the walking of our boots on the cold floor in these old buildings.  The talking between guests, the tears in the eyes of some and cold wide-eyed expressions from others.  The buildings hold a neutral smell, they look much older than they are, and it's like walking through the castles of England with their bloody histories layered over centuries long past.  Yet this is not ancient history, this is history in the lifetime of my grandparents' generation.  Not a 12th-century affair but a 20th-century horror story, still fresh in the dirt of the land with the ashes of a million souls scattered in the region.  The gas chamber, in one piece, restored from its broken parts by the survivors who turned such places into a lesson from the past.  a watchtower, the train tracks, the fences and barbed wire, the places where the innocent where shot and the place where the guilty Nazis were later hung.  

Birkenau, unlike the town scene, is a camp in a more traditional sense, buildings small and rectangular, many still stand, most are ruins, just the foundations.  The large fences extend around, the main building is the train station building, and there is a carriage on the train tracks. The carriage is the kind of thing that would have carried cattle before WW2, during the Holocaust it carried people for hundreds of miles, for days, for what the victims of the Holocaust believed was relocation.  They had little idea that they were to suffer a fake unworthy of any human being.  They would arrive, be divided up by a Nazi doctor, the workers and those who were too old, too weak, too young, etc.  Those able to work when to the cabins, those others were taken to the showers.  The workers would shower too, and I'm sure that some wondered if they were to be killed or washed when they began to release what the true situation was.

Guard towers, more wire fences, stretching out, able to hold thousands of people at any one time, and in one of the cabins that we were allowed to enter, the room was small but they could fit fifty people inside.  The roof wasn't perfectly connected to the walls, snow and rain would creep in onto those victims of German National Socialism, but there were things worse than that.  The cramped starving people under bottom bunk were fouled upon by those above, there were no toilets, no corner suited to the task, and most, by the end, were waiting for death.  Meaning the floor would have been most foul.  The young and old stuck, waiting, freezing, dying in the night, your warmth next to a corpse not realised until the morning. 

The large area was as quiet as death, no birds, and as we saw the rubble of the gas chambers and asked some questions, the guide noted that the ashes of the dead were scattered throughout the areas of the camp.  We were walking on the powered remains of Holocaust.  The day was dry, the ground was a little soft, the tour guide, who was descended from a survivor, she told us this fact as we stood on a patch of grass next to the remains of one of the gas chambers.  Such moments in the day trip gave pause for thought, a glimpse of a perspective of a universe that views human life in an indifferent manner.  And the only thing that I found unfortunate was the speed of the tour, too quick for my wishes, and the Jehovah's Witnesses, like birds of prey, waiting outside to hand out leaflets to the shocked and emotional.  

EvilBay Bargain Cameras(From China)

Substandard Cameras - An opinion piece

EvilBay should ban many Chinese businesses/accounts. selling 24mp cameras for 30-60 pounds and in reality, they'd 8-12mp effective, it's a total scam. Iso will be low poor, there will no no stabilisation, limited controls over settings, the lens clarity will be mediocre, and if you're lucky you have no standards and think buying new is enough. Maybe the benefit of your bias towards your choices will make you think you got a bargain, but you can get much better video(and audio) and image quality from a mobile or a second-hand camera by a known name.

So why buy what might be called a pro-camera by a Chinese company that literally created a chunky compact and listed it in the DSLR or Mirrorless second of the eBay Digital Camera second?? If you want the same quality as the faux 24MP(really 8MP) Chinese knockoff that tries to look like the homeless cousin of an Olympus, well, why not get an older Olympus or Leica? if it's just for common use a model from 5-8 yrs ago will be cheap enough, look better, and offer all you need. Or, for vlogging, buy any half good compact camera that offers 1080p video quality and image quality doesn't need to be high in the megapixels for it to matter. after all, you cannot see the difference between a 14mp camera and 16 or 18mp camera unless you check the details in depth or if other factors to the camera and sensor have varied too.

An 8-year-old Canon or Nikon DSLR(Digital Single-Lens Reflex) camera will offer you everything you need for fairly good photos, and you can pick from a variety of old and new lenses. And with some older cameras, they're a great cheap option for full frame photography on a budget, or at least good quality images with a fair sized sensor. Unlike the Chinese cameras that get onto ebay, which are very amateurish products that often cost more new than a good cheap camera second hand. And you may see them for 30 pounds if you buy from another person who saw one for 60, they then realised they got screwed on the product and couldn't return it. So the used market on the crappy camera is an option if you buy one.

The Chinese cameras you see on eBay are made to look different to most cameras, they're the ones that don't strictly cross the copyrights of other companies, but those sometimes appear too. A Nikon camera look-a-like with a screw mount for the lens and a battery that barely holds charge. Often the power used in a video will mean you can't use it for vlogging with ease, and the compact Chinese knock-off cameras often run on AA or AAA battery types, meaning you'll need a good set of rechargeables that offer great performance and a battery charger, so now you cost isn't 35 pounds for the compact but 50 including good rechargeable batteries and charger. And some don't accept modern SD(SDHC)cards above 8gig.

So a few drawbacks to a would-be bargain.

Sony Nex-3 - basic review

I have tried out a number of the camera on the Nex range of Sony Cameras, the Nex 3 & 5 are very good for hobbyists, reasonable quality and with adapters, it opens up a word great lenses, old and new.  The nex-3 is 14mp, and let due to sensor size and use of an average lens you get a far greater quality than a good end compact with more megapixels.  even with an old m42 lens, or even a CCTV lens, you can get some great shots.  So you can get these cameras for a very cheap price now, and a vintage lens may work out well for you, myself I've used Pentax lenses and found very good results.  street photography results aren't bad for a camera that's been around for a fair number of years. 

If you go for this camera at the right price, about £50 with cable but no lens then I think you'll get good results.  Alternatively look up the later models in the nex range or for higher end camera look up the A5000(£110 used and without lens) or the A5100(about £300 used and without lens).  Small mirrorless cameras off a sense of the DSLR market minus weight, cost, and options, so settings are streamlined and so will lack features with DSLRs, but you'll get what you need for college or hobby activity. 

I gave the Nex 3 the star rating 5, because it is cheap and effective, and unless you've got the megapixel fever, you'll be fine with the 14mp camera.