One last wildflower stop

 

In leaving Marble Falls on March 29th we headed eastbound for home on FM 1431. Just a few miles later I made one last stop after spotting a bright roadside colony of Indian paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa). As I walked around I discovered a slope where the paintbrushes formed a band above a bunch of bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis).

 

  

 

 

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The claim that racial disparities are proof of racial discrimination has been percolating in academia and the media for a long time. After the George Floyd race riots of 2020, however, it was adopted by America’s most elite institutions, from big law and big business to big finance. Even museums and orchestras took up the cry.

Many thought that STEM—the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—would escape the diversity sledgehammer. They were wrong. The American Medical Association today insists that medicine is characterized by white supremacy. Nature magazine declares that science manifests one of “humankind’s worst excesses”: racism. The Smithsonian Institution announces that “emphasis on the scientific method” and an interest in “cause and effect relationships” are part of totalitarian whiteness.

As a result of this falsehood, we are eviscerating meritocratic and behavioral standards in accordance with what is known as “disparate impact analysis.”

 

That’s from the February 2024 article “Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization,” by Heather Mac Donald, who knows how to tell it like it is. I invite you to read her full article about yet another form of madness into which segments of my beleaguered country have descended.

 

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman