What I saw from the top of a dune

 

On May 13th at Monahans Sandhills State Park I climbed to the top of a dune and found myself looking out upon an intriguing landscape. What was that army of flowering shrubs? I had no idea, so I went down for a better look at some of them.

 

 

Here’s a closer look at the dense flowers:

 

 

And closer still:

 

 

Back home a week later I figured out that the plants are Penstemon ambiguus, commonly known as sand penstemon, pink plains penstemon, gilia beardtongue, and other combinations of those words.

  

 

 

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A top adviser at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19 — and used a “secret back channel” to help Dr. Anthony Fauci and a federal grantee that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, evade transparency.

NIH senior adviser Dr. David Morens improperly conducted official government business from his private email account and solicited help from the NIH’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office to dodge records requests, according to emails revealed in a memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which The Post obtained Wednesday.

“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”

 

 

That’s the beginning of Josh Christenson’s May 22nd New York Post article revealing the illegal activities carried out by the National Institute of Health in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when government employees plotted to evade the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA]. You can read the full article about those illicit schemes.

 

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman