Search This Blog

Monday, December 23, 2019

Photography and Art - Photos Transformed into Oil Paintings & More

While testing various editing (aka post-processing) programs, I found several that offer ways to make photos look like oil paintings or similar artworks.  I wondered if there were programs made specifically for this and found two that worked really well.  One is extremely fast and gives very good, although slightly limited results compared to the other one which is very slow but mimics famous painters/artists of the past.  The fast one allows for batch processing (doing many images at once) after which you can give individual tweaks to a photo.  I was able to convert hundreds in a very short time.  In this one, you can vary the brush size, stroke size, stroke curvature, and several other variables.  You can also make line art which you'll see in the lower images.

The other program only allows you to do one photo at a time - each one can take from about 3 minutes up to 20 minutes or more.  Each one in this program has presets (around 170 of them) which look like a particular famous painter or artist (such as Van Gogh, Monet, LeRoy Neiman, Cezanne, etc.) although you can change settings to make the work have your own style or a mixed style of your own and the well-known artist.  The output size is also much larger.

It should be noted that after I photograph an image, the first thing I do is post-process in Lightroom to adjust lighting, contrast, and color as I shoot in RAW format.  Next, I either go to Photoshop if needed, or Portrait Pro to make sure everything is perfect.  Then I would go to one of these programs for the painterly look.  For example, the photos after Cathy Moriarty were shot in bright sun at around 2 p.m. as it was unplanned.

Because I can't post full-size images here (they would be, perhaps, 30x40 or 40x50) what I can do is post the full image in reduced size along with a tiny cropped part of the image to give you an idea of what the full size would look like.  Some of the styles work better for landscapes and sunsets, others for portraits, some for either.  Below are some examples of images from the programs.


Cathy Moriarty, Actress











 All of the above photos are from the slower program that mimics the master artists with minimal input.  All the photos below are from the fast program that uses sliders to vary the brush strokes.
























Randy Newman filming "I Love LA" video at Venice Beach










Monday, December 9, 2019

Questions to Ask Your Doctor, School, and Friends (and some facts)

I'm sure there are more questions, but this is a good start (feel free to substitute other places for "school" or other people like doctor, nurse, friend, family member, or school if they try to bully you into vaccinating.  Ask them these questions or tell them about some of the other items, as appropriate (if you can think of others, please let me know).  If you like this and find it useful, please feel free to copy any or all of it, share it with friends and family, etc.

"So you are giving multiple vaccines for about 14 different diseases and if someone refuses, they can't attend school (or whatever).  Guess what - there are about 175+ other diseases for which there is no vaccine, some of which are worse than the so-called vaccine-preventable diseases, so how can they let anyone attend school when they can spread those diseases?  Knowing this, how can any parent allow any immune-compromised child to go to school?

How can anyone receiving a live virus vaccine be allowed to attend school within 30-45 days of receiving it as they can shed the disease during that time?

Is the 10% of the population who are non-responders to vaccination allowed to attend schools, daycares. etc., and if so, why?

Is the significant percent of the population whose antibody levels have waned allowed to attend school, daycare, etc. - why?

Is any titre testing being conducted to determine who has adequate antibody levels and therefore safe to attend school, daycare, etc.?

If vaccines are effective why would anyone care if you or your child was by choice unvaccinated if others had chosen to vaccinate - aren't they protected?

If everyone in your office was vaccinated, why would you care if any of your patients/employees weren't vaccinated?

Why has over $4.2 Billion been paid out for vaccine injuries by VICP if they are safe?

Why has the U.S. Supreme Court called vaccines unavoidably unsafe?  Is the U.S. Supreme Court not trustworthy?

Ask your doctor:  What are all of the ingredients in the vaccine and in what quantities?  What are the possible side-effects and what are the signs of a side-effect?     What contaminants have been found in vaccines?

Are you familiar with VAERS and have you reported vaccine adverse reactions to them?

Are you familiar with VICP (National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) and have you told parents and those receiving vaccines about it?

Why have there been almost no comparison studies in the U.S. between vaccinated and unvaccinated people (there were a couple in Europe showing vaccinated children less healthy than unvaccinated)?

Did you know that Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the leading expert on vaccines and the one who wrote the vaccine textbook for doctors, said under oath that he didn't know if vaccines cause autism?  Link to Stanley Plotkin testimony - Go to Part 6, to about the 28 minute mark on that video.  And that Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, an expert witness for vaccines, in a sworn affidavit said that vaccines can cause autism in a certain subset of children?  Sworn Affidavit of Dr. Zimmerman.

Why do drug companies not use an inert placebo to test vaccines for safety?  After all, all drugs are tested that way.  The only reason that makes sense is that they know studies with inert placebos would show they are not safe.

Why do vaccine companies have no liability?  They cannot be sued for vaccine damage.

Why has autism gone from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40 at the same time vaccines increased from around 6 to 69?  And at the same time why have chronic illnesses increased from about 1 in 6 to 1 in 2 children today? (This is from around 1980 to present time.)

Now for some  LOGIC. COMMON SENSE, and STATISTICS:

Those who want mandatory vaccines say that if people stop vaccinating, all those diseases will come back worse than ever.  By age 28, all the childhood vaccines have worn off, and less than half of adults are vaccinated, so where are all the epidemics (pandemics?) and why aren't all the adults dropping dead like flies from all those diseases?

If vaccines are effective, why are most outbreaks happening in vaccinated populations (especially China where 99.5% of the population is vaccinated, and they are having outbreaks, or college campuses where close to 100% are vaccinated)?

Vaccinated individuals may show no symptoms of the disease, but can still spread it without you knowing it, so vaccinated people would be more dangerous than unvaccinated.

If vaccines are safe, why have there been over 600,000 deaths (perhaps more) in VAERS, E.R. visits - over 20 million, Hospitalized - over 6,000,000, Life-Threatening - over 1,100,000, and Disabled - over 820,000.  These numbers are totals for the years 2000 - 2015!  Here's a breakdown of those numbers that I found on VAERS with an explanation of the numbers.

(Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler observed in 1993 that less than 1 percent of doctors report adverse events..... [See DA Kessler, 'Introducing MEDWatch,' [JAMA, June 2, 1993: 2765-2768]")

Here's a chart from the CDC for 2014 Pertussis cases:  This chart remains pretty much the same every year. - notice in the lower right chart that over 5x as many cases reported in those who got the 3+ recommended vaccines compared to those who did not get the vaccine.

The above does not take into account the possible long-term side effects which are unknown as there are no studies available for this.  Did you know that to save one person from getting meningitis, the meningococcal vaccine will have killed three people and injured much more?  More people die and are injured by vaccines than from the diseases they are supposed to prevent (according to statistics from VAERS and CDC). If you look at graphs of diseases from the 1800s to the present, and what year the vaccines were introduced, you'll see that most deaths from diseases were almost gone when the vaccines arrived (deaths were at or near zero).  Check the graph for scarlet fever - there was no vaccine for that, so you can't give vaccines credit for that.  Why aren't people still getting it?  Why do many, if not most, doctors not vaccinate?

For those who say the adjuvants in vaccines are too little to do harm:  In 2016, the EPA published a voluntary health advisory for PFOA and PFOS, warning that exposure to the chemicals at levels above 70 parts per trillion, total, could be dangerous. One part per TRILLION is roughly the equivalent of a single grain of sand in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.  The updated HHS assessment was poised to find that exposure to the chemicals at less than one-sixth of that level could be dangerous for sensitive populations like infants and breastfeeding mothers.  So when you hear the argument that some of the adjuvants in vaccines are too little to do harm, and are usually in parts per BILLION, think again.  Or this: One-quarter of an ounce of urushiol (the oil from poison oak, ivy, sumac) is all that is needed to cause a rash in every person on earth.  Or 1 billionth of a gram per person.

Through clean water, sanitation, hygiene practices, quarantine, nutrition, plumbing, education, vector control, health departments, antibiotics, etc. we have eradicated diseases that used to kill millions. Vaccines had NOTHING to do with it. Just do a little research rather than spew drug company and media rhetoric. MMRW reports, census reports, etc. show that cholera, typhoid, Scarlett fever, plague, Spanish flu, etc., just to name a few, all declined at the same time as the others- magically with no vaccine intervention.

A word about Google (and other search engines) AKA "Google University."  Google directs you to scientists, doctors, whistleblowers, immunologists, virologists, researchers, etc., who are from Harvard, MIT, and on and on. Since most doctors don't even know what's in vaccines, let alone all the side effects possible, haven't gone to VAERS, etc., and probably have had very little if any education about vaccines, other than how to try to force them on people, those of us who do the research do know more about vaccines than most doctors. From what I've heard, most doctors don't even bother to read the insert that comes with the vaccine and don't bother to share that insert with their patients.   They don't know the ingredients or the possible side effects.  You need to find those inserts online and read them before ever getting a vaccine.  How many doctors will tell you what to do in case of an adverse reaction to a vaccine?  Like what medical help to seek,  how to file a report with VAERS and go to VICP within the allotted time period.

The thalidomide disaster is one of the darkest episodes in pharmaceutical research history. The drug was marketed as a mild sleeping pill safe even for pregnant women. However, it caused thousands of babies worldwide to be born with malformed limbs. The damage was revealed in 1962.  Rofecoxib (Vioxx) was introduced by Merck in 1999 as an effective, safer alternative to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the treatment of pain associated with osteoarthritis. It was subsequently found to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and withdrawn from the worldwide market. Merck now faces legal claims from nearly 30,000 people who had cardiovascular events while taking the drug.  And now NSAIDs are in the news daily and kill 47,000 a year.  There have been many others - in fact, properly prescribed prescription medications kill 106,000 every year.  Doctors used to say cigarettes were good for you and did not cause cancer.  Hundreds of thousands died as a result (my father was one of those).  Drugs undergo years of testing against inert placebos.  Vaccines have never been tested against an inert placebo, are not tested over a period of years, only days, by the same drug companies that produced Vioxx and NSAIDs, and all of a sudden everyone forgets the past and trusts them.  They call those of us who are actually informed anti-vaxx, pseudoscientists, conspiracy theorists, etc.   People are not anti-vaxx, they just don't want to be injected with known toxins and poisons.  But now it's getting worse - now they are denying people their freedom through mandatory vaccination.  Who remembers what this country was founded on?  To those of you who think Trump is bad, he doesn't come close to how bad mandatory vaccines (i.e. - forced medicine) are.  Toxins and poisons forcibly injected into healthy people against their will - that sounds like Nazi Germany.  And it's all happening because people believe some of the the biggest liars in the world - the drug companies and the media.