Prairie agalinis time again

For the past month I’ve been seeing prairie agalinis flowers (Agalinis heterophylla) around central Texas. Above is a portrait from the Riata Trace Pond on September 14th. Four days earlier I’d taken some pictures along the eastern fringe of the Blackland Prairie in Elgin showing how the plant grows:

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Two Tokens of Our Times, or
There’s a Their There*

1) A website offering information about many artists says this about one of them: “Anders Petersen is a Swedish photographer who was born in 1944. Their work was featured in numerous exhibitions at key galleries and museums….” Anders Petersen is a man. One man. His photographs are plural; he isn’t.

2) Last week marked one year since the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To commemorate the anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) quoted the justice’s words:

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for a woman, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

Except the ACLU bowdlerized the quotation: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”

You can find out more about this in an article in The Daily Mail.

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* I’m playing off one of Gertrude Stein’s most often quoted lines: “There is no there there.”

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

White-striped longtail

It wasn’t only bumblebees I saw on the flower spikes of gayfeather (Liatris punctata var. mucronata) at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on September 11th. No indeed. Among other visitors was this white-striped longtail butterfly (Chioides catillus).

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In unrelated sources over the span of just one hour the other day I came across two similar quotations:

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” — Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, 1947.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and all we had to do is separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. — Alexander Sozhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1975.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Paloverde portrayed at different scales

Here are two treatments of paloverde trees (Parkinsonia aculeata) that differ in scale and aesthetics. In Austin it’s common to see a paloverde (Spanish for ‘green tree’) springing up on untended ground, like the sapling above that looked so wispy in the northeast quadrant of Mopac and US 183 on August 22nd. A view at that distance doesn’t reveal the many thorns that grow on these trees; the second picture, from September 14th at the Riata Trace Pond, rectifies that.

The long thorn could symbolize the fact that yesterday we got our booster shots of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine six months to the day after we’d gotten our second shots. I’m happy to say that although our muscles around the injection sites are achy, our arms didn’t turn either of the prominent colors in this closeup.

What I continue to be not at all happy about is the current American administration’s claim to be “following the science” while refusing to follow the science. Back on August 28th I linked to an article in Science that reported the results of a large Israeli study of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. As the article noted: “The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.”

And yet this administration stubbornly denies that proven reality. This régime refuses to accept that people who have acquired protection from COVID-19 by having caught and recovered from the disease should not be subject to vaccine mandates. The people in charge of the government are science deniers.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

More looking up

As you’ve already seen, at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on September 11th I lifted my telephoto zoom lens to photograph a neon skimmer dragonfly. Earlier in our visit I’d lain on a mat on the ground to aim up with my macro lens at something much lower: the jimsonweed flower you see here, Datura wrightii. I rarely convert to black and white, but in this series of pictures I was having trouble getting the sky to look a natural blue. Out of curiosity, I tried monochrome on one frame, as shown below.

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I’ve already read and recommended two books that treat climate change as real but nothing to get hysterical about, as so many activists and politicians have unfortunately done:

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, by Steven E. Koonin.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, by Michael Shellenberger.

Now I’ve become aware of a third book that also treats the subject rationally: False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, by Bjørn Lomborg.

In addition to or instead of reading Lomborg’s book, you can watch a one-hour interview with him about climate change.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Downy before bushy

After I stopped along FM 2769 on September 21st to photograph some flowering Liatris spikes, an adjacent grass caught my attention as well. I thought it might be little bluestem, but it seemed downier than I was accustomed to from that species. Thanks to Floyd Waller for identifying the grass as bushy bluestem, Andropogon glomeratus, which I’m used to seeing in its bushy phase toward the end of the year.

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Here’s a passage from the “Spring” section of Thoreau’s Walden that applies year-round.

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. 

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Tall tunas

This vertical, narrowly cropped, edge-on view of a prickly pear cactus pad (Opuntia engelmannii) makes it seem that the fruits at the top, known as tunas, are standing unusually tall. For whatever reason, I don’t often see spiderwebs on prickly pears, but there’s no missing the silk on this one. Today’s portrait is from September 18th in my hilly part of Austin.

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Here are a couple of paragraphs from “Expanding Your Tribe in the New Age of Conformity,” by Andrew Fox.

[T]he number of ideological activists needed to drive a whole nation into enormously destructive social turmoil and intergroup violence is not very large. The Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 represented a tiny percentage of the overall Russian population. A relative handful of ethnic chauvinist Serbian agitators in post-Tito Yugoslavia managed to incite years of ethnic cleansing campaigns and intercommunal massacres as well as the disintegration of their former state. A cadre of ethnic extremists in Rwanda’s Hutu Power movement were able to infiltrate the military and organize a war of extermination that resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.

An individual’s sense of identity can be molded around many different types of attributes—ethnicity, clan, religion, place of residence or origin, sex, age, language, vocation, family roles, types of illness or disability, preferred style of music, and favored forms of recreation. Yet recent historical experience has illustrated repeatedly—in Germany, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Rwanda, and Syria, to name just a few—that emphasizing ethnicity or race as the primary, overriding source of a citizenry’s identity, fostering resentments based on both historical grievances and exaggerated contemporary outrages, and dividing a populace into Manichean categories of good and evil, of victims and oppressors, can lead to intragroup violence on a sometimes genocidal scale.

That’s what’s been increasingly worrying me for the past year and a half. You’re welcome to read the full article, which appeared in Tablet on September 12.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

What I didn’t see on pickerelweed flowers

I hadn’t seen pickerelweed flowers (Pontederia cordata) since the spring of 2020, so at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on September 11th I photographed some. Six days later, when processing this limited-focus portrait, I discovered a brown insect that I’d not noticed was on the flowers at the time I took the picture.

If you’d like a reminder of how glorious a whole colony of these flowers can look, you’re welcome to glance back at a post from May of last year.

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Why do problems that are easily fixed not get fixed?

As someone with a pretty long name, I’ve been repeatedly forced to deal with something problematic: I’m handed a form to fill out, and the blank where I’m supposed to write my name is too short. On the same form, an adjacent blank for the current date may be four inches long, much more than is needed. And speaking of which, there may be two or even three places on the form where I’m asked to put that same date. As the problem of poorly designed forms has persisted throughout my whole life, it will almost certainly continue long after I’m gone. The question is why. Is there a secret cabal of Unilluminati who control the world and rig it so that designers of forms must come from the bottom quartile of IQs? If you’ve got a better explanation, let’s hear it.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Climbing hempvine on cattails

At the Riata Trace Pond on September 15th I found that several climbing hempvines (Mikania scandens) had indeed twined their way up on the dry leaves of some cattails (Typha domingensis). Below you get a closer look at a flower globe produced by one of the vines. It’s not a coincidence that those flowers somewhat resemble the ones you recently saw on a boneset plant in my yard: both species belong to the Eupatoriae tribe within the very large sunflower family.

 

 

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Lie of the Day

 

Government officials lie so routinely and so blatantly that I can’t claim I need to do diligent research to uncover their lies, any more than I’d deserve credit for noticing that the sky is blue and the sun yellow. Even so, I figured I’d post this lie of the day because it’s a follow-up to my September 18th commentary about the chaos, degradation, and lawlessness at the Texas border in Del Rio.

While watching television news on Tuesday I saw a video clip of Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas declaiming categorically: “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life.” As he said that, the government was busy processing and releasing into the United States thousands of Haitians who had walked across the Rio Grande River illegally a few days earlier. The current administration is letting those illegal immigrants go into the interior of our country by bus and airplane. They’re not being systematically tested for COVID-10 or being required to get vaccinated.

The next day I saw an interview with Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, who said that in the past eight months the number of people who’d illegally come into the country yet were allowed to stay here anyhow was well over half a million.

Have you ever noticed that the sky is blue and the sun is yellow?

 

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Bumblebee on blazing-star

At the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on September 11th I managed to get one picture of a bumblebee on some flowering Liatris punctata var. mucronata, known as gayfeather and blazing-star. Maybe the bee is Bombus pensylvanicus. I’m no great shakes at identifying insect species, but at least I know how to spell Pennsylvania. (I can do Mississippi and Massachusetts, too. Woo hoo!).

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I recommend three articles documenting the scourge of illiberalism that’s unfortunately been proliferating in the United States and other places.

1) “The New Puritans,” by Ann Applebaum, about the very real harms that cancel culture inflicts, from The Atlantic in August 2021.

2) “Academics Are Really, Really Worried About Their Freedom,” by linguistics professor John McWhorter, also in The Atlantic, from September 2020.

3) “How Critical Social Justice ideology fuels antisemitism,” by David Bernstein of The Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, from September 3, 2021.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Low on the prairie for snow-on-the-prairie

I got down low on the prairie
For this snow-on-the-prairie.

Make that Euphorbia bicolor on September 10th in Elgin, some 25 miles east of Austin.

In the same field, slated to soon be part of a quickly growing subdivision,
I noticed some goldenrod plants (Solidago sp.) beginning to put out buds.

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What’s fair?

Of course people disagree about what’s fair in any given situation. One commonly heard claim is that “The rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes.” With that in mind, you may want to check out an article by Adam Michel. Of the many statistics about income and taxes cited in the article for the United States in 2018 based on data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), here are two:

The top 1% or earners (people who made at least $540,000 that year) earned 21% of all the income in the country yet paid 40% of all federal income taxes.

The bottom 50% of earners (people who made no more than $43,600 that year) earned 12% of all the income in the country but paid only 3% of all federal income taxes.

It seems that paying “a fair share” would require the ultra-rich to have their taxes cut roughly in half (21%/40%), while the lower half of the country’s earners would need to have their taxes quadrupled (12%/3%).

As Adam Michel’s article also notes: “Looking at all federal taxes, the Congressional Budget Office shows that the top 1% pay an average federal tax rate of 32%. The data show tax rates decline with income, and the poorest 20% of the population pay an average tax rate of just 1%. The left-leaning Tax Policy Center found similar results.”

Apparently the big disparity in federal tax rates between 32% and 1% isn’t unfair enough for activists to consider it fair.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman