06 | July | 2023 | Portraits of Wildflowers

Archive for July 6th, 2023

White evolvulus

Somehow in the 12 years of posting here I’ve never shown you a little wildflower called white evolvulus, Evolvulus sericeus. The species name is Latin for ‘silky,’ so it’s not surprising that another vernacular name for this wildflower is silky evolvulus. These flowers, which are neither common nor uncommon, typically grow to between 3/8 and 5/8 of an inch across (9mm to 16mm).

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Michael Shellenberger, a person of the political left since he was a teenager, has become increasingly concerned in the past few years by the illiberal stances that people at that end of the political spectrum are taking. Two weeks ago in London he sat for an 80-minute interview in the Marshall Matters series for The Spectator. The blurb beneath the online video of the interview says: “Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files journalist and founder of Public is in London to discuss the international censorship industrial complex [along the lines of the military industrial complex that outgoing president Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about in 1961]. He explains to Winston [Marshall] how the complex web of government, big tech, intelligence and media collude to suppress speech in the UK, America and beyond.”

We watched the interview the other night and found it both informative and alarming. If your news comes mostly or entirely from “mainstream” outlets, it’s likely you’ll be hearing for the first time about various nefarious things, all of them well documented.

Those of you who don’t want to go through the full 80-minute interview can jump to portions indexed beneath the online posting:

00:00 – Introduction

02:04 – What is the censorship industrial complex?

29:21 – What is behind the censorship industrial complex?

38:30 – Is Michael Shellenberger being censored right now?

47:35 – The state of free speech in the UK, and should governments be able to monitor our online activity?

01:00:56 – Inside the Twitter Files and Michael’s experience of Elon Musk.

I’d originally scheduled this commentary for yesterday but I delayed it a day in favor of the news that on Independence Day an American judge had enjoined the government from engaging in some of the very practices Michael Shellenberger documented in this video.