Beautiful! Thank you.

” FLOCK YOU! “

I posted this over at Kim’s place:

Regarding the proliferation of surveillance cameras (SC) people are mentioning that no one has an “assumption of privacy” while out in public I believe this is misdirection and I believe “Targeting” is where the focus should be. Let me ‘splain.

Scenario 1:
Your family is sitting on a blanket at the beach enjoying the sun, sand, and surf and the family 20 feet away is doing the same thing, as well as many other people all over the beach, a public place.

The guy on the next blanket is taking cellphone piks of his family and your family and others are invariably in the background, though possibly blurry due to the distance. Hell, his family may be in the background of the piks you are taking of your family. No harm done, right?

Scenario 2:
A guy on the beach sets up a tripod with an expensive pan-n-zoom Nikon video camera right in front of your family and turns it on and walks off, controlling it remotely from his vehicle in the parking lot. 

Your wife decides to go cool off in the surf and that camera pans and zooms right in close on your wife’s jiggling cakes. Because you are in a public place, no problem, right? 

What is the purpose of the camera in Scenario 1?
The camera owner is taking pictures of HIS family.

What is the purpose of the camera in Scenario 2?
The camera owner is taking pictures of YOUR family.

See the diff?
I’ll add that the 2nd guy is taking your piks without your permission (didn’t even ask) and is doing so without just compensation.

How do you know what he’s going to do with those piks?
Is he going to incriminate you some how?
Use them to blackmail or harass or stalk you?

Over the past few weeks I have seen numerous incidents where law enforcement personnel have used the SC databases for nefarious and criminal purposes.

At dive medics place he argues against the databases but not the cameras.
I on the other hand am against the cameras, without which, no database would be required.

Essentially, you don’t get to intentionally steal my image without prior written consent and agreed upon compensation and terms.

Remember, there are people here in the US that earn thousands of dollars by selling their images, why should you be any different? 

Here is a Golden Light for you.
Just 10 Minutes Of Birdsong In Forest Linked To Stress Relief
Study finds.com 

A new experiment asked college students to sit quietly outdoors for 10 minutes while different sounds played through their headphones, then measured how stressed, emotionally drained, or mentally restored they felt afterward. The results were not subtle. Students reported lower stress and fewer negative feelings after the forest and recorded birdsong condition than after the other three conditions, and the gap registered clearly in a controlled study.
Mental health on college campuses has been deteriorating for years. By 2020, roughly 60% of college students reported experiencing mental health challenges, according to research cited in the study…
Researchers recruited 106 student volunteers from NC State’s College of Natural Resources for the study, published in the journal Environmental Conservation. Most participants identified as female, and the average age was 22.5 years old. Over one roughly two-hour session, each student visited two spots on or near campus, carrying a camp chair, noise-cancelling headphones, and their own cellphone.
One spot was a restored forest along a creek, replanted and re-engineered starting in the early 2000s, with more than 70% tree canopy cover and no view of buildings. Participants faced away from the footpath, toward the trees. The other sat outside the Talley Student Union, a grey, built-up area with more than 70% hard structures and clear sightlines to buildings.
At each spot, participants sat quietly for five minutes to settle in, then listened to one of two 10-minute soundscapes through their headphones: either a birdsong recording from a freshwater marsh at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, featuring Carolina wren, blue-grey gnatcatcher, and white-eyed vireo, or traffic noise recorded near a busy intersection outside Paris. Every student went through all four combinations of location and sound.
After each 10-minute exposure, participants completed a short survey on their phones, rating current stress on a scale from zero to ten, along with questions measuring positive and negative feelings during the past 10 minutes and how restorative the experience felt… Of the four combinations tested, stress ratings ran lowest for the restored forest paired with birdsong, which also produced the fewest negative feelings and the most positive feelings. Traffic noise in the grey space produced the opposite result on every single measure: highest stress, most negative emotions, fewest positive emotions, and lowest sense of mental restoration.

New every day and the steady measure of the relentless march of time – billions of years. Our piece is fleeting.