A new wildflower

   

At Monahans Sandhills State Park on May 13th I noticed a kind of flowering plant that was new to me.

 

 

Closer looks yielded good portraits showing two stages in the transition from buds to flowers. Back home in Austin a week later I learned that the plant was Mentzelia strictissima, known as grassland blazingstar.

 

 

 

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“Robert Houghwout Jackson (February 13, 1892 – October 9, 1954) was an American lawyer, jurist, and politician who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1941 until his death in 1954. He had previously served as United States Solicitor General and United States Attorney General, and is the only person to have held all three of those offices. Jackson was also notable for his work as Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals following World War II.” [Wikipedia]

On April 1, 1940, Robert H. Jackson, then Attorney General of the United States, addressed the Second Annual Conference of United States Attorneys in Washington, D.C. Here’s a part of his prescient speech that’s as vital today as it was 84 years ago:

 

“The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst…. 

“If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clouds at Caprock Canyons State Park

 

As soon as we arrived at Caprock Canyons State Park in north Texas on May 15th, and even before checking in at the visitor center near the entrance, I pulled over to try my hand at some dramatic skyscapes. Clouds partly blocked the sun, but it was still so bright that I underexposed by almost 3 f/stops to keep from blowing out the highlights. That also, of course, made the blue of the sky unusually dark.

 

For the second picture, 35 minutes later, I underexposed half as much,
and for the third, another 21 minutes after that, not at all.

  

 

 

 

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Do fossil fuels cause our planet to warm? Yes. They also make modern life possible, freeing women from hours of labor and empowering us in a million different ways. They’re singularly cost-effective and versatile as an energy source. This is something that the “keep it in the ground” climate activists never acknowledge. Nor do they admit that the promised panacea of renewable energy, like solar and wind, are nowhere near close to replacing fossil fuels and in fact, have their own dark environmental footprint. 

Sometimes, being on the “right side” of environmental issues means looking past some truly terrible practices. For instance, electric vehicles are driving up the demand for cobalt mining which, as Siddharth Kara wrote in his book Cobalt Red, has led to the “utter destruction of the environment of the Congo,” with foreign mining companies dumping toxic substances into the environment and clear-cutting millions of trees. Just as bad, cobalt mines use child slave labor. 

 

That’s from Lucy Biggers’s May 27th article “I Helped Make Standing Rock Go Viral. Now I Regret It,” with subtitle “In my heart of hearts, I always knew environmental issues were more complicated than the way I sold them to my true-believer followers. Finally, I’m admitting it out loud.” You’re welcome to read the full article.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman