Two floral portraits

 

Near the pond on Kulmbacher Dr. on March 30th I made several floral portraits, of which you’re seeing two whose subjects are partly orange. The first shows a pink evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa), with its conspicuous stigma in the form of a cross. The second portrays the male flowers of buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides). Yes, grasses are flowering plants, even if people tend not to think of them that way because their flowers are so small.

 

 

 

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A continuing theme here is the way American education has become rapidly infused with radical ideology rather than an adherence to facts and data. Last month I linked to an article titled “The NIH Sacrifices Scientific Rigor for DEI,” with subtitle “Its First program pushes institutions to hire medical researchers based on their ideological commitment,” and last year I linked to Heather Mac Donald’s article “The Corruption of Medicine.”

Now comes news of yet another barbarity in medical education. An April 2nd Washington Free Beacon article by Aaron Sibarium bore the headline “UCLA Med School Requires Students To Attend Lecture Where Speaker Demands Prayer for ‘Mama Earth,’ Leads Chants of ‘Free Palestine.’ As the article explains:

 

In a mandatory course on “structural racism” for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and demanded that they bow down to “mama earth,” according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as “justice,” began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a “non-secular prayer” to “the ancestors,” instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—”mama earth,” as she described it—with their fists.

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So began a long and looney lecture that shocked some students at the elite medical school and has led to calls for an investigation. Wearing a keffiyeh that covered her entire face, Gray-Garcia, a self-described “poverty scholar,” led the class in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” as faculty and staff looked on in silence….

 

Let me remind you that UCLA is a public institution, meaning that the taxpayers end up funding the required “Structural Racism and Health Equity” course, which of course is itself racist and violates various federal and state laws. You can read the full article about this latest depredation being perpetrated in the name of “equity.“

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman