Two interesting clouds

In southeast Austin on April 14th I photographed the oval cloud formation shown above.
Right afterwards I noticed the formation below that reminded me of a feather.

 

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White guilt has influenced many of America’s racial policies toward a paternalism that makes it difficult for blacks to find their true mettle or to develop a faith in their own capacity to run as fast as others. The most vivid examples of this are the many forms of preferential treatment that come under the heading of affirmative action—an escapist racial policy, I believe, that offers entitlements rather than development to blacks. A preference is not a training program; it teaches no skills, instills no values. It only makes a color a passport. But the worst aspect of racial preferences is that they encourage dependency on entitlements rather than on our own initiative, a situation that has already led many blacks to believe that we cannot have fairness without entitlements. Here one falls into Orwellian doublespeak, where preference means equality. At the heart of this confusion, I believe, is an unspoken black doubt about our ability to compete that is covered over by a preoccupation with racial discrimination. Since there are already laws to protect us against discrimination, preferences only impute a certain helplessness to blacks that diminishes our self-esteem. The self-preoccupied form of white guilt that is behind racial preferences always makes us lower so that we can be lifted up.

Recently Pennsylvania State University launched a program that pays black students for improving their grades—a C to C+ average brings $550, and anything higher brings $1,100. Here is the sort of guilty kindness that kills. What kind of self-respect is a black student going to have as he or she reaches out to take $550 for C work when many white students would be embarrassed by so average a performance? What better way to drive home the nail of inferiority? What more Pavlovian system of conditioning blacks to dependency than shelling out cash for grades? Here black students learn to hustle their victimization rather than overcome it, while their patrons escape with the cheapest sort of innocence. Not all preferential treatment is this insidious, but the same dynamic is always at work when skin color brings entitlement.

That’s from Shelby Steele‘s book The Content of Our Character, published in 1990. Elite white guilt, entitlements, and the claims of perpetual victimization have increased massively in the 32 years since then. During the same period, black students’ objective academic performance has on average remained abysmal. If you want to know how abysmal, check out my commentary from last September, which gives the statistics.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

Yet more from Colorado Bend State Park

Here’s a last installment from Colorado Bend State Park on February 9th. The first post you saw from there showed separate views of the pool with green water and the orange-brown rocks in Spicewood Springs Creek. Today’s top photograph combines those features and throws in stark shadows for good measure. The picture below shows that I played around with abstractions. Hardly a surprise.

 What did come as a surprise was a little ice surviving at the base of a tree a few paces away.

 

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Michael Shellenberger’s timely article in Bari Weiss’s Common Sense on March 1st bears the title “The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin,” and the subtitle reads “While we banned plastic straws, Russia drilled and doubled nuclear energy production.” The article explains how Russia ended up in such a strong position and Europe in such a weak one.

How is it possible that European countries, Germany especially, allowed themselves to become so dependent on an authoritarian country over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War? 

Here’s how: These countries are in the grips of a delusional ideology that makes them incapable of understanding the hard realities of energy production. Green ideology insists we don’t need nuclear and that we don’t need fracking. It insists that it’s just a matter of will and money to switch to all-renewables—and fast. It insists that we need “degrowth” of the economy, and that we face looming human “extinction.” (I would know. I myself was once a true believer.)

Michael Shellenberger’s article is short yet provides all the figures needed to justify his claims. Have a look.

 © 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Lichens at Enchanted Rock

Yesterday you heard that on April 12th we visited Enchanted Rock State Natural Area.
How about the red-orange color of the lichens in the abstract view above?
Below, see the way pale gray lichens almost completely covered the rock in the foreground.

And here’s little lichen ring you can slip on your rough imagination’s finger:

For a concise and colorful primer on lichens, check out “Why Lichens Matter.” As for what makes matter matter, the answer is existence. An English-language etymologist would add that matter, which traces back to mater, the Latin word for ‘mother,’ is the universe’s ‘mother stuff.’

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Rain-lilies in autumn

On October 19th I drove to Pease Park for an ecologically oriented walking tour. As soon as I parked I noticed some rain-lilies, Cooperia drummondii, by the edge of the road, and because I was a bit early for the walk I had the chance to get down and make some portraits. Here’s one that shows a colorful flower:

While wandering west of Morado Circle three days later I found fresh rain-lilies still coming up.
The one shown below lacked the magenta that increases as the flower ages.
Click each photograph for greater detail.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Falling into abstraction

On July 25th in Niagara Falls, Ontario, I took many pictures—hardly surprising for one of the world’s natural wonders. Back in Texas a few weeks later I sorted through the photographs, seeing for the first time in detail what I’d managed to capture. In the images for which I’d used a telephoto lens zoomed to its maximum length of 400mm, clouds of spray had often masked details, pushing some of the photographs toward and into abstraction. Pictures like the one below reminded me of seascapes by the English painter J.M.W. Turner.

Notice that unlike the pictures in the introductory Niagara Falls post a few days ago, these are strictly nature photographs and show no people or human elements at all.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Lucifer Falls

I can’t remember if I’d ever heard of Robert H. Treman State Park in the southern part of New York State’s Finger Lakes region before I did research for our summer trip. When we visited on the morning of August 1st I concentrated on the upper (western) end of the park and skipped the lower part, given that we were expected down near New York City later in the day. At Treman we encountered other hikers, but nothing like the crowds we’d run into at Letchworth State Park and Watkins Glen State Park.

The main attraction in the upper section of Treman State Park is the 115-feet-tall Lucifer Falls, shown above as I photographed it at 1/2500 of a second and a focal length of 85mm. Then I switched to my telephoto and zoomed to the maximum 400mm to record details in the falling and splashing water, again at 1/2500 of a second. Notice how sunlight refracting through the spray created pleasing pastel colors. You can use the slightly curved light-colored “bar” in the lower right corner of the second picture to match up to the same feature about a fifth of the way up from the center of the bottom in the first picture.

I also used the maximum 400mm reach of my telephoto to portray a closed lily (perhaps a Canada lily, Lilium canadense) that I noticed leaning out into the gorge. I chose a position that let me line up the lily with the waterfall; apparently the flower reflected a lot more light than the farther-away falls, given the way that the water turned into what looks like a faint cloud floating in darkness.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

White prickly poppy center

Here’s a close and downward look at Argemone albiflora, the white prickly poppy. Notice the crowd of yellow stamens invariably paying homage to the red-topped pistil that rises above them in the center of the flower. This photograph is from Great Hills Park on April 23, 2013, five years ago today. I’d planned to show the picture soon afterward but put the post aside and only recently rediscovered it. Better late than never.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Rainbow Falls

A year ago today we visited Rainbow Falls outside the town of Kerikeri in New Zealand’s Northland. The falls were welcome, coming as they did so early in the trip. That said, we saw more impressive ones later, especially on the South Island.

I’d been away from New Zealand’s giant ferns for 23 months, so the leaf of a large fern adjacent to Rainbow Falls, shown below, appealed to me at least as much as the waterfall and provided a chance for a geometric abstraction.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Frostweed ice: toward abstraction

The extrusion of ice by frostweed (Verbesina virginica) is a great natural phenomenon. Austin’s temperature stayed mostly below freezing from the morning of January 1st, when I went down to Great Hills Park to take my first photographs of the new year, through this morning, when I returned for a second round of frostweed pictures, even more than two days earlier. Frostweed ice offers an opportunity for photographic abstractions, and that’s what you’re seeing here. Unlike the picture you saw last time, which involved flash, today’s images were made by natural light, which necessitated wider apertures that produced a softer feel.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

A different point of view

As you heard last time, late in the afternoon on October 21st we stopped in far northern Arizona at the Navajo Bridge over the Colorado River. I’d never heard of the bridge, which I found out was built way back in 1927-28. Its arch measures 616 ft., its total length 834 ft., and its height above the river 467 ft. In 1995 a new, stronger bridge was inaugurated parallel to the old one, which has remained open for foot and bicycle traffic. It’s a good place for a photographer to walk out to get an unobstructed look at the river and both sides of its canyon, as you see above. More interesting artistically, at least to me, is the abstract view from the middle of the bridge looking mostly down at one side of the gorge and the adjacent part of the river:

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman