Dragonfly on a stick with cumulus cloud
Behold a red saddlebags dragonfly (Tramea onusta), apparently a female, on the Blackland Prairie in far north Austin on August 1st. I hurriedly found a vantage point that aligned the dragonfly with the cloud. I originally processed the image to be darker, then changed my mind and did this brighter version.
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A currently pending bill in the United States Congress has proved controversial. Supporters signaled their belief by naming the bill the Inflation Reduction Act. Opponents derided the name as Orwellian, claiming that spending $700 billion the country doesn’t have at a time of 9.1% inflation, the highest in 40 years, is hardly likely to reduce inflation. Who’s right? Well, only time will tell (assuming the bill passes, which now seems likely).
And that leads me to a proposal. Last year I described a few amendments I’d like to see added to the American Constitution. (You can see examples here, and here, and here.) The current controversial bill gives me an opening to bring up another of my fantasy amendments. This one would require every person who votes on a bill in Congress to put in writing a statement of the things (including specific numbers) the bill will—or for opponents, will not—accomplish. If, after a specified amount of time, any of the predictions prove false, all members who were wrong would be removed from Congress. It’s a version of “Put your money where your mouth is.” It would also be a de facto form of term limits, given the large number of false promises politicians make. What do you think?
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Mustang grape gall
When it comes to native grapevines, central Texas claims the mustang grape (Vitis mustangensis) as its most common. To the best of my recollection, not till July 12th of this year, while walking along Bull Creek, did I ever find a gall on a mustang grape. Below is a view from the side.
UPDATE: Thanks to a link from Steve Gingold, I can add that the gall midge Ampelomyia vitispomum seems to have instigated this growth on the mustang grape vine.
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While still teaching in the Austin public schools back in the late 1970s I became aware of Marva Collins, a black schoolteacher in Chicago who likewise became disenchanted with public education. She founded her own school and succeeded in educating poor black kids by holding them to high expectations and standards, not putting up with excuses, and loving her students.
I hadn’t thought about Marva Collins for a long time but for some reason she came to mind the other day and I looked to see if she’s still alive. She’s not, having died in 2015.
An article by Carrie-Ann Biondi in the Spring 2019 issue of The Objective Standard includes the following:
After graduating in 1957 from Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia with a degree in secretarial science, Collins sought a job as a secretary. She explained, though, that “none of the private companies wanted to hire a black secretary.” So she took one of the few jobs open to an educated black woman in the 1950s American South: She became a teacher. Collins found that she enjoyed teaching secretarial skills at Monroe County Training School. There, she learned how to teach through trial and error, recalling what best helped her to learn, avoiding the mistakes some of her own teachers made, and taking seriously the feedback she got from the school’s principal. Even so, after two years at that job, she moved to Chicago, holding that it would help her develop independence from her father.
In Chicago, Collins first worked as a medical secretary. She soon fell in love, got married, and, in time, had three children. Finding that she “missed the classroom . . . the excitement of helping students discover the solution to a problem,” Collins applied for a teaching position in the Chicago public school system. Although she had no teaching certificate, because of a teacher shortage she was hired to teach second grade.
Collins’s lack of a teaching degree worked to her advantage—and to that of her students. She trusted her own experience and disregarded the Board of Education’s teaching guide, which prescribed the “look-say” method to teach reading, simplistic Dick-and-Jane books with lots of pictures, and dull workbooks that drilled “skills” without teaching students how to think for themselves. Ignoring all of this, Collins developed teaching methods that truly worked. She used phonics to teach reading, incorporated literary classics and poetry into the curriculum, facilitated in-depth discussions of the readings, had students memorize poetry and write papers for oral delivery, and used positive (rather than punitive) discipline to address misbehavior.
After 14 years in the Chicago public schools, Marva Collins felt so at-odds with what the district as a whole was doing that she resigned and eventually started her own school.
Observers in Collins’s classroom repeatedly were astonished by the high-level curriculum she developed for students ages three to thirteen. She began each year with essays such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and fables such as “The Little Red Hen.” Students soon moved on to poetry, including works by Rudyard Kipling and [Henry] Wadsworth Longfellow. In time, they progressed to Plato’s dialogues. By second and third grade, they were reading William Shakespeare’s plays (Macbeth and Hamlet were student favorites) and reciting Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. With these under their belts, it was not uncommon for students to dive headlong into a seemingly unquenchable reading frenzy. And Collins kept hundreds of books on hand, suggesting just the right one for each student to read next. Each student wrote a report every two weeks about his latest book, presented it to the class, and answered questions raised by the other students. This sparked so much interest in reading that book that students vied to be next on the waiting list.
Marva Collins went to the greatest works that English-language literature had to offer. What a contrast from today’s racial essentialist imperative to jettison anything by “dead white guys.”
In 1981 Cicely Tyson played the title character in the made-for-television movie “The Marva Collins Story,” with Morgan Freeman playing her supportive husband. I was surprised to find the full 112-minute film available to watch for free on YouTube. Check it out the next time you have two hours for an inspiring movie.
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Here’s looking at you, kid
Cicada, Tibicen superba; August 3 in Wells Branch.
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In a commentary yesterday I said I believe people should report things accurately, without exaggeration. Not long after writing that, I came to the section in Alex Epstein’s book Fossil Future called “The ‘Deliberate Overstatement’ Distortion.” He identifies “four forms of deliberate overstatement that dramatically and negatively distort our knowledge system’s assessment of the climate impacts of rising CO2 levels.”
- Punishment of climate catastrophe skepticism.
- Equation of consensus on some climate impact with consensus on massively negative climate impact (the 97 percent fallacy).
- Deliberately overstated report summaries.
- Deliberate overstatement by designated experts for effect.
Those things are similar to what ideologues do in fields other than climate science. For example, some doctors have urged caution about putting children on puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones because those drugs produce serious effects that soon become irreversible. Nevertheless, activists attack those cautious doctors, label them “trans-phobes,” and work to get their articles suppressed and get them fired from their jobs.
Similarly, researchers who recognize that the climate is warming yet urge caution in concluding that a warming climate will necessarily be catastrophic or apocalyptic get labeled “climate deniers.” Activists work to cut off funding to those researchers, to get publications to refuse articles by thm, and to get those researchers fired from their positions.
So I say, as always: let everyone bring forth the facts they’ve found, and let’s do our best to draw conclusions by assessing the unadulterated, unexaggerated evidence. I don’t want to live in a world where we only get to hear one side of an argument, and yet that’s the kind of world I increasingly find myself in. I never thought I’d live to see that in the United States.
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Dobsonfly eggs
After seeing little structures of this sort in 2017, I asked local little critter expert Val Bugh about them. She explained that “the white stuff is a secretion that a female dobsonfly uses to cover her egg masses. Makes them look like bird droppings. The leaf should be over water so the hatchling hellgrammites will drop in.” These two July 12th photographs came from a bank of Bull Creek, as did those from five years ago.
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By temperament and from decades of teaching math I value saying things that are true, and saying them accurately. When my father, who had accumulated a great store of knowledge and wisdom, sometimes exaggerated for rhetorical purposes, I used to think that an accurate statement would better make his point. For example, he was fond of saying “The majority is always wrong,” where I favor “The majority is often wrong” or “The majority isn’t always right.”
And speaking of a majority not being right, I’m most of the way through Alex Epstein’s latest book, Fossil Future. This book is in accord with three others about climate change that I’ve cited approvingly:
- False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, by Bjørn Lomborg. (You can also watch a one-hour interview with him about climate change.)
- Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, by Steven E. Koonin. (You can also read a December 2021 discussion he had on the subject.)
- Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, by Michael Shellenberger. (You can also read an article of his about the ability of nuclear power to greatly reduce carbon emissions.)
Epstein, Lomborg, Koonin, and Shellenberger are among a small group of investigators who stand against the majoritarian claim that we’re headed for a climate apocalypse. And yet all four of the writers I’ve mentioned marshal huge amounts of evidence to make their case. Follow up on any of the links above and you’ll learn about that evidence.
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Carolina comes to Texas
A common vine in central Texas is Cocculus carolinus, known as Carolina snailseed, Carolina moonseed, and Carolina coralbead. Here from July 12th along Bull Creek you get a close look at the vine’s flowers and a somewhat farther-back view of unripe fruit. One website calls the tiny blossoms “insignificant,” but they’re obviously not that to the humble snailseed, which manages to keep propagating itself just fine, thank you. The little fruits turn red as they mature.
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According to one online estimate, Austin in 2022 has 1,028,225 people living inside its city limits, making it the 11th most populous city in the United States. Austin has more people than each of the five least populous states had in the 2020 census:
- Wyoming (581,075)
- Vermont (623,251)
- Alaska (724,357)
- North Dakota (770,026)
- South Dakota (896,581)
Austin approximately ties with the sixth state in the list, Delaware, whose 2022 estimated population is 1.03 million. Whether Austin will pull ahead isn’t clear. Because Austin is continuing to grow, it may well soon surpass Rhode Island, which went from 1,061,509 in the 2020 census to a just slightly higher estimated 1.09 million in 2022.
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Young cattails
While almost everything I saw on July 21st in the Willow Trace Pond in far north Austin was darkened old stumps, some new cattail plants (Typha sp.) had sprung up, and the arcs of their long leaves, both green and pale, caught my photographic fancy. Taking the top picture at 400mm left the lower part of the image pleasantly out of focus and reminiscent of an Impressionist painting. While you and I couldn’t stand on one of those cattail plants without crushing it, that clearly wasn’t the case for the yellow-crowned night heron (Nyctanassia violacea) in the portrait below. Judging by leg color, this apparently wasn’t the same bird I’d photographed 45 minutes earlier beneath some black willow trees.
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At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.
— G. K Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908
I also recently came across a reference to “Chesterton’s fence,” which Wikipedia explains in its article about Chesterton
is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, in the chapter, “The Drift from Domesticity”:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Two takes on giant ragweed
Giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) grows erect, often reaching a height of 10 ft. and occasionally even 15 ft. That makes it a good perch for dragonflies like the one in the top picture. After giant ragweed plants dry out, their stalks may remain upright, as in the dense colony I showed in 2013, or may fall over, like the stalk below whose hollow interior my flash was kind enough to partially illuminate. Both pictures are from along Bull Creek on June 24th.
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If you check out this chart of the 10 most widely spoken languages you’ll see that English is in first place because so many people speak it as a second language. The language that has by far the most native speakers is Mandarin Chinese.
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Two sharpshooters
Call me a sharpshooter for getting this shot of a speckled sharpshooter, Paraulacizes irrorata. The insect’s legs let you imagine that it was running at a good clip along the rosinweed (Silphium radula) stalk it was on near Bull Creek on June 24th; in fact this leafhopper wasn’t hopping at all, and that lack of movement gave me time to take some decent pictures.
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On July 26th the satirical Babylon Bee came out with the
funny four-minute video “Obese Man Insists He’s Just Pregnant.”
Although the pronunciation o-bese leads English speakers to conceive the word’s components that way, actually they’re the Latin elements ob and es-. Ob was a preposition with many meanings, including ‘on account of.’ Es– meant ‘eaten.’ It was the past participle of edere, ‘to eat,’ (think of edible) that was the Latin cognate of native English eat. So a person becomes obese on account of having eaten [too much]—just as etymology fattens our body of knowledge.
© Steven Schwartzman
Clematis drummondii flower and buds
On July 15th in Great Hills Park I sat with some Clematis drummondii
vines and made these close portraits of buds and a flower.
I aimed at a higher angle in the second picture and so won the sky as a background.
Flash and a small aperture made the bright blue seem unnaturally dark but I like the effect.
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Speaking of unnatural, there’s more “Hands up, don’t shoot” in the top picture than in the narrative that has become an article of faith—a false faith—among certain activists. The Clematis at the top hands-down has a greater claim to having its hands up.
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Inland sea oats arc
Look at the characteristically graceful way inland sea oats (Chasmanthum latifolium) forms arcs.
I photographed these green seed heads along Bull Creek on June 24th.
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The latest attempt to redefine a word
In the middle of the 20th century George Orwell, himself a former Communist, pointed out the ways in which authoritarian regimes believe they can control people by redefining words. In 1984, a dystopian novel of the then-future, Orwell went so far as to invent a language that he called newspeak. In that language, for example, people were still allowed to use the adjective free in the sense that a dog is free from fleas but not in the normal sense in which a person has individual liberty.
In previous commentaries I’ve criticized campaigns within the past few years to redefine such basic terms as man, woman, and mother (notoriously recast as a “birthing person”). This week the semantic reformers have targeted the financial term recession. For decades now the predominant rule of thumb for recognizing a recession has been ‘two consecutive quarters of declining growth in the gross national product [GNP].’ Do an online search and you’ll find that definition in dozens of places, including the January 1991 article “Weathering a Weak Economy” in the magazine Black Enterprise. Similarly, a person in a 1989 Congressional hearing had spoken of a recession as “two consecutive quarters of less than zero real growth.” And the 2014 book Understanding National Accounts mentions “the two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP [gross domestic product] that typically denotes a recession.”
The typically in that last quotation concedes some wiggle room in determining whether a given country at a given time has entered a recession. I’m certainly not opposed to nuance. What I am opposed to is the opportunistic mad scramble that we’ve seen in the United States over the past several days by government officials proclaiming that the standard decades-long indicator of a recession was never really the standard decades-long indicator of a recession—just like women were never really the only kind of people who could give birth.
It was almost fun to watch the hypocrisy. For instance, among the choreographed corps of recession-deniers was current White House economic adviser Brian Deese, who on July 26th insisted that “two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession.” Investigators, however, soon turned up a statement Deese himself had made in 2008: “What Senator Clinton has said is that of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”
It wasn’t just government officials who twisted themselves into instant recession-deniers. So did many commenters on television networks, as did newspaper writers, people in charge of social media, and even Wikipedia, which in the past few years has become increasingly biased. As Nellie Bowles reported in the blog Common Sense on July 29th:
The Wikipedia page on “recession” is getting furiously updated. (The crowd-source encyclopedia now contains a note on the “recession” entry that all previous definitions are false: “An outdated version of this article has been widely circulated. Please verify that claims or screenshots you may have seen are consistent with the actual content here.”) The economic historian Phil Magness posted on Facebook about the White House word games with recession and got a warning tagging it as “false information” and adding a “fact check.” Government is inefficient in most ways, but when it comes to coordinating with our social media oligarchs, it’s a well-oiled machine.
You’re welcome to read that full piece as well as a January 28th article by Eric Boehm in Reason entitled “After 2 Consecutive Quarters of Negative Economic Growth, Is America in a Recession?” The subtitle is “Most Americans believe so.”
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 