18 July 2008

New camcorder: review

This is the review I have written for Amazon about the new little camcorder I bought for my daughter to use.

***

I already have three camcorders of different ages, as well as a video recording function on my SE P990i, and I should like to buy an HD camcorder: I am not a novice.

The Busbi Video Plus Camcorder is a kind of 'Amstrad' camcorder - unadorned with bells and whistles, but extremely easy to use, and represents good value for money. It feels like using a cellphone to record video, but the resulting images are far superior. The control buttons are completely intuitive: we have not yet opened the instruction manual. My wife and my daughter's care worker have also been using the camcorder to make short videos without instruction.

The picture quality is fine and stable, although the picture becomes grainy in poor light. The colours are good. The 2x zoom is useful for framing, although being digital not optical results in some loss of image quality. The sound recording from the internal microphone is impressive.

Linking the camcorder's bundled short USB cable to a digital photoframe, we were able to watch our video clips with ease. Connecting the camcorder's bundled video cable to the television was equally straightforward and satisfactory.

I used the camcorder's USB port and the camcorder's own (presumably flash-loaded) excellent software to download the 11 video clips we have made: amazingly straightforward. The camcorder creates .AVI files, at about 20 MB / minute when set on HQ (high quality). I bought a 2GB flash memory card to support the camcorder's onboard 500 MB. The one clunkiness is that video clips are not automatically saved onto the flash card. Just to complete the process, I intend this weekend to edit and upload onto my YouTube channel a short movie based on some of the clips.

Reservations:
1) There is no lens cover.
2) The monitor screen swivels only around one axis - for example, to record oneself, and not around two axes - useful, for example when filming over the heads of people, or when shooting from close to the floor.

Uncertainties:
1) How long will the batteries last? I shall be happy if they can do a day's tourist filming.
2) How long will the camcorder continue to function? I shall be happy provided it lasts a full 12 months.
3) How robust is the camcorder? After all, most of us have dropped a cellphone at least once

For the time being, we are very happy with the Busbi Video Plus Camcorder. Should things start to go wrong, I shall write another posting to set the record straight. I award it five stars not because it boasts a high specification, but because it is highly functional, easy to use, and at GBP70 (now reduced to GBP65) it represents very good value for money.

16 July 2008

Having visited Auschwitz-Birkenau

One of my sisters recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have never had the courage to visit that grim place, and I respect her for doing so. In response to her visit she found herself asking versions of the primary questions listed below that she was kind enough to e-mail me. I have added some searching, self-reflective supplementary questions because that is my nature. It is not my intention to remove anything from her experience by developing her material in this way. Rather, my purpose is to engage with her material in ways that are relevant to my process. As recorded elsewhere, I am currently active in considering a new non-religious ethical framework for society. It is in this context that my supplementary questions can best be read.

Q1. What is the character of someone who believes that other people are a sub-species and unworthy of life? Are there occasions when I treat someone, or some group of people, with less than the full respect that belongs to humanity?

Q2. What possible ethical framework could permit medical doctors to perform "experiments" on living people, and subsequently kill those people with phenol injections? In what ways do I behave unethically towards people, even if those people live in a different continent? I buy electronic goods that I suspect were manufactured in Chinese sweat-shops; I buy food staples that may have been grown and harvested by poor and oppressed people working the farms and estates of trans-national corporations.

Q3. What did the recipients of second-hand clothes / false limbs/ glasses / suitcases / etc., believe about their provenance? Do I always enquire about the provenance of the clothes I wear and the food I eat?

Q4. How could anyone feel okay about making cloth from the hair, and lampshades from the skin, of people for whom they have contempt, and what kind of person would want to possess objects made from those materials? What will people of the future think about the choices I have been making during my life?

Q5. Why did the Nazi machine go to the lengths of transporting Jewish people from places as far away as Greece and Portugal (taking up to 10 days in freight trains) to Birkenau, only then to murder them?

Q6. How did the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of people who were involved at some level in the premeditated murder of Jewish, Roma, gay and disabled people across Europe, subsequently reconcile themselves with the wickedness in which they had participated, or at least with which they had colluded? How do I reconcile myself with knowledge of the hurt and pain I have caused people during my life?

Q7. Why didn't the Hungarian 'underground resistance' disseminate the news from escapees about what was happening in Birkenau, and thus prevent half a million Jewish people from being transported there in 1944? How guilty am I for allowing people to believe what I have known not to be true.

Q8. To what extent did the UK and US governments keep quiet about Auschwitz-Birkenau? Why do I stand by without complaint and permit the UK government to deport from the UK refugees from strife-torn parts of the world?

Q9. Are the Italian authorities currently dehumanising the Roma people, and thereby moving in the same direction as the Nazis? Is my conscience as squeaky clean as I should like people to believe?

Q10. By what signs could I recognise that the people around me have gone a step too far? Would I be prepared to recognise that a line had been crossed? What would I do about it were I to see it happening?

***

The following poem is widely attributed to Pastor
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.
Original Translation
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.


***

In 2003, American punk rock band NoFX paraphased the poem in the song "Re-gaining Unconsciousness" on the album War on Errorism
First they put away the dealers,
keep our kids safe and off the street.
Then they put away the prostitutes,
keep married men cloistered at home.
Then they shooed away the bums,
then they beat and bashed the queers,
turned away asylum-seekers,
fed us suspicions and fears.
We didn't raise our voice,
we didn't make a fuss.
It's funny there was no one left to notice
when they came for us.
***

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." (frequently misattributed to Edmund Burke.)

***

14:50 Wednesday 16 July 2008, Cafe, Murray Library, Sunderland

My sister visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last weekend. I am filled with tears simply imagining the experience. I wish never to visit the place which is as close to hell as I ever need to hear about. Besides, my credentials go a long way to excusing me the ordeal. As a lifelong pacifist, a Quaker for 25 years and a vegan for nearly 15 years, it would be difficult to mistake where I stand on issues relating to the wickednesses perpetrated in that evil place. On most of the occasions when I have visited Amsterdam I have been in the Anne Frank House, which I have also browsed online. I have visited the holocaust memorials in both Paris (several times) and in Berlin (where I should also like to visit the new memorial to the gay people who were murdered by the Nazi regime). Also in Berlin I have twice visited the harrowing Topography of Terror exhibition next to the Martin Gropius House. In both Sunderland (Crowtree Centre) and Newcastle (a gallery off Pilgrim Street) I have attended holocaust exhibitions. I have not only attended the anti-apartheid demonstration outside the South African Embassy in London when white-skinned people ruled South Africa, but I have also picketed Barclays Bank in Durham for its collusion with the apartheid regime. Perhaps more controversially, I make a point of reading the website of the far right British National Party in order to understand their poison. I have attended anti-racist training workshops, although I have never led any. However, I have led gay-awareness and mental health awareness workshops. My daughter has multiple disabilities, and as one response, I use British Sign Language. During the first five years of my life I was brought up in close proximity to a Jewish family (Marion and David Bernard and their three children) in north-west London. As a counsellor I have examined in detailed, and hold up for ongoing examination, my opinions, attitudes and thoughts. As a Quaker, my beliefs are subject to perpetual examination. Superficially, then, my credentials appear kosher. However, I have written almost nothing about any of this in a way that positions me in relation to other people - I rarely stand up to be counted. I am, in fact, indistinguishable from the narrator or Niemöller's poem. Neither do I do much that makes a practical, positive difference. It is not sufficient that I have a preference for the light of truth and love, and that I reject the darkness of ignorance, fear and hatred. I have lost sight of the fact that it is my duty to be creating light, and my responsibility to be shining as a beacon against the darkness of falsehood and hypocrisy. Compared to the bleak days of the 1930s and 1940s, I live in blessed times. Compared to the darkness that enshrouds the populations of Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea, the UK is "summertime, and the living is easy" ... but I have, for too long, chosen to sit on my hands. My comfortably-won credentials do not, in fact, excuse me from visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first question for me to ask now is whether I am able to stir myself into action before making that grim pilgrimage.