Two takes on bluebonnets

 

Near the pond along Kulmbacher Dr. on March 30th I made the portrait below of a typical bluebonnet, Lupinus texensis. Two days earlier along TX 71 on the way to Muleshoe Bend I’d doubled back after noticing some unusual pink bluebonnets like the one above. The blue in the background comes from the fact that the anomalous flowers were scattered in a much greater number of regularly colored ones.

 

 

 

 

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Scotland, one center of the intellectual Enlightenment that arose in the 1700s, has fallen on hard times. Radical activists have managed to push through a bill that criminalizes any utterance that anyone anywhere in Scotland considers “hateful.” As Joan Smith reported in an April 11th Quillette article:

 

At a moment when trans activists physically disrupt feminist events, and scour social media for posts they can present as transphobic, the scope for trivial and malicious complaints is endless. Opponents of the legislation warned that the Act would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech, not least because a new offence of “stirring up hatred” has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison. The Act has been denounced as a “clype’s charter” (clype being a Scots word meaning a sneak); and that is exactly what it has proved to be, prompting around 8,000 complaints to the police in the first week following the Act’s implementation. 

 

The article gives many more details about the madness that has descended on Scotland.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman