Archive for June 2024
Yet another pair of Palo Duro Canyon landscapes
Here’s another colorful pair of Palo Duro Canyon landscapes from May 14th.
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If you drive a car much, you’ve probably had the experience of being stopped at a red light, noticing that there was no cross-traffic, and wondering why the red light didn’t turn green so you could go. With that in mind, check out the June 7th article by Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal, “The Smart, Cheap Fix for Slow, Dumb Traffic Lights,” with sub-head “Most cities can’t afford smart traffic signals. Fortunately, data from new cars—and even drivers’ smartphones—can make old-fashioned traffic lights work a lot better.”
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
For Pollinator Week
As this is Pollinator Week, here’s a limited-focus portrait of an American painted lady butterfly
(Vanessa virginiensis) on a basket-flower (Plectocephalus americanus)
at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on June 13th.
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The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees, among other things, that the government won’t prevent Americans from practicing their religion. The same amendment blocks the government from establishing a particular religion—and that’s why a new law in Louisiana must be declared unconstitutional. As the Associated Press reported on June 20:
Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.
The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.
The United States already has plenty of trouble with ideologues trying to force people to say and do things they don’t believe in. This is yet another such attempt. Just as I don’t want the secular religion of DEI (discrimination, exclusion, injustice) pushed on kids in our schools, I don’t want traditional religious precepts pushed on them either.
Lawsuits challenging the Louisiana law are bound to follow soon. I hope courts will quickly overturn it. Similarly, I want courts to recognize DEI for the secular religion it is, and likewise enjoin the people in charge of our public schools from promoting that, too.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Two for the price of one
On May 19th at a Blackland Prairie parcel in Pflugerville I noticed plenty of snails that had climbed both dead and living plants. When I got close to photograph the one shown here I noticed an insect egg on a filament attached to the dead stalk. I take the egg to be from a lacewing.
By getting the camera below the shell and aiming partly upward, I was able to include in the lower third of the frame a white cloud that somewhat mimicked the rounded shape of the shell. Oh, those clever photographers.
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I call to your attention Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s insightful June 4th article in the Free Press, “We Have Been Subverted. The sub-head asks: “What is at stake in our ability to see the threat plainly?” The answer follows immediately: “Nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.”
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Two more impressive formations from Palo Duro Canyon
From May 14th, here are two more impressive formations from Palo Duro Canyon. The one above is
called the Big Cave. In both pictures the size of the trees clues you in to the scale of the formations.
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“Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller has written a shocking wake-up call to the West – The madness that has gripped parts of Western society since Hamas attacked Israel.” You can read her May 25th wake-up call.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Positively a pinwheel
From our yard on June 1st comes this Turk’s cap flower, Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondii. While most of the Turk’s cap flowers along our front walkway had the long stamen column that characterizes members of the hibiscus family, some lacked it, thereby allowing a clear look at what you might well call a pinwheel.
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Today is June 18th, which Americans often write 6/18. Now suppose we take the decimal .618, add 1 to it, and multiply the two numbers: 1.618 x .618 = .999924, which comes very close to the number 1. If we’d started with an extended version of .618, namely .61803398875, had added 1 to it and then multiplied those two numbers, we’d have found that 1.61803398875 x .61803398875 gives a result so close to 1 that any handheld calculator you might use, even a fancy scientific model, would round it to exactly 1. (You can also put 1.61803398875 * .61803398875 into your browser’s URL address field, hit Enter, and see what you get. You might not have known that your browser’s URL address field doubles as a calculator.)
1.61803398875 is a close approximation to the number that people since the ancient Greeks have called the golden ratio or golden mean. Not only does that number have many interesting intrinsic mathematical properties, it also often manifests in nature, about which you can read more.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Two takes on halberdleaf rosemallow flowers
On June 6th around the Arbor Walk Pond halberdleaf rosemallow (Hibiscus laevis) flourished in several places.
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What is a square root?
— A square root is an arithmetic construct.
What is velocity?
— Velocity is a physics construct.
What is a fricative?
— A fricative is a phonetics construct.
What is an isotope?
— An isotope is a chemistry construct.
What is a mode?
— A mode is a statistics construct.
What is auxesis?
— Auxesis is a rhetorical construct.
What is gender?
— Gender is a social construct.
What all those question-and-answer pairs have in common is that a person unfamiliar with each asked-about term still doesn’t know what the term means after reading the “answer.” Let’s give actual answers to the first six questions:
What is a square root?
— In arithmetic, the square root of a number is another number that, when multiplied by itself, equals the first number.
What is velocity?
— In physics, velocity is a measurement of the speed at which, and direction in which, something is moving.
What is a fricative?
— In human speech, a fricative is a sound made when breath passes through a narrow opening between two speech organs.
What is an isotope?
— In chemistry, an isotope is a variant of a chemical element that differs in the number of neutrons present in the nucleus of an atom of that element.
What is a mode?
— In statistics, the mode of a set of discrete numerical data is the number that occurs the most often.
What is auxesis?
— In rhetoric, auxesis is referring to something with a term that exaggerates its importance.
And that brings us to the last question: What is gender? In recent years I’ve heard people say in response to that question, as if reciting a catechism, “Gender is a social construct.” But many of those people never do explain what that socially constructed thing actually is. From the people who do go further, you may hear that gender refers to the behaviors and roles associated with being a woman or man, a girl or a boy. But then if you press further and ask, for example, what they mean by the term woman, you get the non-answer “answer” that a woman is anyone who “identifies” as a woman, and you still don’t know what a woman actually is.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Prairie dog
A month ago today we visited Prairie Dog Town in Lubbock’s Mackenzie Park.
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If you want, you can watch an hour-and-a-quarter discussion between Bari Weiss
and Nellie Bowles about the latter’s new book, Morning After the Revolution.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
The home stretch
The last day of our six-day mini-trip was May 17th. Along TX 36 southeast of Abilene some great clouds graced the way. The wildflowers densely spreading across the bottom of the first picture were brown bitterweed, Helenium amarum var. badium.
(Just because I’m showing these pictures from the last day of the trip now doesn’t mean you won’t still be seeing more scenic views from earlier during our journey. You will.)
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From my interest in the ancient civilizations of the Americas I’d long been aware of Hiram Bingham III, who in 1911 undertook an expedition to Peru. There he ended up going to the all-but-forgotten ruins of the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu, which he then publicized to the outside world.
The other day I learned about one of his seven sons, Hiram Bingham IV. As Wikipedia describes:
“On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler’s forces invaded France and the French government fell. The French signed an armistice with Germany and forced most of France’s large population of foreign refugees to move to internment camps. Many thousands of refugees went to Marseilles to seek visas for the United States and other foreign destinations.
“Anxious to limit immigration into the United States and to maintain good relations with the Vichy government, the U.S. State Department actively discouraged diplomats from helping refugees. In Marseilles, as elsewhere, foreign service staff usually showed little flexibility or compassion towards the desperate refugees. However, American rescue workers soon noticed that ‘Harry’ Bingham was an exception. Bingham personally toured some of the wretched internment camps and sought American aid to improve conditions. He helped many refugees to avoid internment and prepare for emigration and freely issued Nansen passports, a useful form of identity for stateless persons. An American rescue worker, Martha Sharp, organized a group of children to leave southern France for the US in late 1940. She had this to say about Bingham, ‘I am proud that our government is represented in its Foreign Services by a man of your quality,’ she wrote. ‘I feel so deeply about this that I shall take the earliest opportunity to transmit it through the Unitarian Service Committee to the United States State Department, for I believe that such humane and cooperative handling of individuals is what we need most coupled with intelligence and good breeding.’ Bingham also cooperated a great deal with Varian Fry, the most effective rescue worker based in Vichy France during the early years of the war. Bingham worked with Fry on notable cases, including the emigration of Marc Chagall, political theorist Hannah Arendt, novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, and many other distinguished refugees. In the case of Feuchtwanger, Bingham went so far as to help spirit the novelist out of an internment camp and sheltered him in his own house while plans were made to help the refugee walk over the Pyrenees.”
In a May 27th Tablet article by Patrick Henry you can read more about Americans who saved Jews and others during World War II.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Positive and negative
On May 19th in Pflugerville I made a soft pastel portrait of the fluff and seeds of an antelope horns milkweed (Asclepias asperula), as shown below. For some reason I got the idea that the picture would look interesting as a negative, and that’s what you see at the top. You might mistake those dark strands for human hair.
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Last week we watched Peter Robinson interview Douglas Murray for an hour. Cultural analyst Douglas Murray has recently spent one month in Ukraine and six in Israel to report on the continuing wars in both countries. In this interview he tells what he’s witnessed as a war correspondent and also ties those things to Western culture more generally in light of his cautionary 2018 book The Strange Death of Europe. You’ll learn a lot—some of it troubling—from watching the one-hour interview.
You’ll also profit from Douglas Murray’s June 1st presentation in the Netherlands, “The rise of anti-Semitism is a sign of a society in decline.”
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Palo Duro earth
It wasn’t only grand landscapes that I focused on at Palo Duro Canyon
on May 14th. The orange-brown earth at our feet also had its appeal.
The second view lends itself to pareidolia. A shrieking rabbit, anyone? In the third picture
you see subtle traces of the way rainwater had flowed a couple of days before our visit.
In the last view the remnants of the recent flow are more conspicuous.
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Gobbledygook
In commentaries over the past three years I’ve called out the delusions that have swept through the formerly scientific field of medicine. One manifestation of that delusionality is the making up of “genders.” People have catalogued well over a hundred of them, and the number is still growing. Another manifestation of delusionality is that increasingly many people with medical degrees blithely accept such nonsense.
Last week I came across a website called MedicineNet, whose About page tells us: “Founded in 1996, MedicineNet.com is a nationally-recognized, doctor-produced network consisting of more than 70 U.S. board-certified physicians. MedicineNet.com is a trusted source for online health and medical information.”
What brought me to that website was the article “What Are the 72 Other Genders?” The article credits Shaziya Allarakha, MD, as the medical author, and Pallavi Suyog Uttekar, MD, as the medical reviewer. In answer to the question “What is gender identity,” the article proclaims:
In today’s age, one does not need to fit in with regards [sic] to their choices, including their gender identity.
- Gender is no more regarded as a binary concept where one can either be a male or a female.
- It has emerged as a continuum or spectrum where one can identify themselves as any of the gender identities.
The term gender identity means how a person identifies themselves [sic] concerning their gender. It may be regardless of their anatomy or genetics. Thus, a person may identify themselves as male, female, none, both, or some other category independent of their genitals.
The idea is to make everyone feel comfortable in their skin irrespective of what gender they were assigned at birth.
Then the article asserts that “Besides male and female, there are 72 other genders,” which it goes on to list. Here are the first 10:
- Agender: A person who does not identify themselves [sic] with or experience any gender. Agender people are also called null-gender, genderless, gendervoid, or neutral gender.
- Abimegender: Associated with being profound, deep, and infinite. The term abimegender may be used alone or in combination with other genders. [Abîme in French means ‘abyss.’]
- Adamas gender: A gender that is indefinable or indomitable. People identifying with this gender refuse to be categorized in any particular gender identity.
- Aerogender: Also called evaisgender, this gender identity changes according to one’s surroundings.
- Aesthetigender: Also called aesthetgender, it is a type of gender identity derived from aesthetics.
- Affectugender: This is based on the person’s mood swings or fluctuations.
- Agenderflux: A person with this gender identity is mostly agender with brief shifts of belonging to other gender types.
- Alexigender: The person has a fluid gender identity between more than one type of gender although they cannot name the genders they feel fluid in.
- Aliusgender: This gender identity stands apart from existing social gender constructs. It means having a strong specific gender identity that is neither male nor female.
- Amaregender: Having a gender identity that changes depending on the person one is emotionally attached to. [Amare is the Latin and Italian verb meaning ‘to love.’]
What a bunch of gobbledygook—and what a travesty that people with medical degrees are passing these delusions off as if they’re real.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 