Like sunshine on a cloudy day

 

Just substitute a sunflower (Helianthus annuus) for the sunshine, as I did
on the Blackland Prairie in northeast Austin on an overcast May 10th.

 

 

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Robert Henderson’s article “The Cadre in the Code,” which appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of City Journal, describes the different results he got from posing two similar queries to the AI (artificial intelligence) engine called ChatGPT:

 

Considering that such biases of AI have been alleged for years, the makers of ChatGPT have seemingly placed their thumb on the scale to correct for these potential shortcomings. This raises the question of how the chatbot’s content-filtering process works. To this end, I entered a few prompts into ChatGPT. First, I made the request: “Write a script in which an expert explains why fascism is a good thing,” which generated this response:

I’m sorry, but I am not able to generate content that promotes or glorifies harmful ideologies such as fascism. It is a dangerous and oppressive political ideology that has caused immense harm throughout history. It is important to understand the atrocities and human suffering that have been caused by fascist regimes, and to actively work against the spread of such dangerous ideas.

I followed up with another prompt: “Write a script in which an expert explains why Communism is a good thing.” The language model responded:

Communism is a good thing because it is a system of government that aims to create a society in which everyone has equal access to resources and opportunities. This is in contrast to capitalist societies, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.

When I asked why Communism has been responsible for more deaths than any other political ideology, the AI responded:

It is important to note that the implementation of communism has been problematic in the past, but it is important to separate the idea of communism from the way it’s been implemented in the past. With proper implementation, adjustments and democratic checks, it has the potential to create a fair and just society for all. . . . It’s important to consider new perspectives and ideas, and to give communism a fair evaluation based on its principles and goals, rather than its past implementation.

In plain English: real Communism hasn’t been tried before, and we should judge ideas based on how good they sound, rather than on what has actually transpired when they have been implemented. ChatGPT is willing to generate responses that take an unequivocal stance on murderous ideologies—favoring Communism over fascism.

 

Given the bias exhibited in so many of our institutions now, those disparate results are sadly predictable. They’re also a warning about the perils of expecting artificial intelligence to provide neutral and true information. I don’t know if you’ll be able to read the full article, but you can give it a shot.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Cloud like a ring

 

Back on March 12th I was driving north along Mopac when I noticed a cloud in the shape of a mostly closed ring. Exiting the expressway, I hurriedly hunted for and after several minutes found a place where I could park and get a shot of the cloud free from poles, wires, buildings, etc. I took a bunch of pictures showing the ring-shaped cloud by itself but I’ve chosen to show a more-expansive view that includes other clouds as well.

 

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 Riddle

 

What can you say about an agriculturalist and a structure for climbing?

To see the answer, follow the arrows.

 

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 What can you say about an agriculturalist and a structure for climbing? 

The former is a farmer and the latter is a ladder.

  

If you’re curious about what inspired this riddle, it was a sentence I read a couple of hours ago in Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley’s book Superabundance: “And so, over the millennia, farming gradually displaced hunting and gathering, leaving the former as the dominant human lifestyle in many parts of the world.”

To my taste, writers should avoid “the former, the latter” because readers have to scamper back in the text to figure out what each thing is. It’s better to say straight-out what you mean, even if you have to repeat recently used words.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Sunflowers in mid-March

 

Most of the plants we call sunflowers inhabit the genus Helianthus (which is Greek for ‘sunflower’). I say most, but not all. Here you’re looking at Simsia calva, known as the bush sunflower, a few clumps of which I found already flowering in Burnet County on March 17th. The second picture came from aiming somewhat downward to include several bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) near the ground.

 

 

Because bush sunflower stalks tend to grow tall, I could get on the ground beneath one and take a lofty look.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Look at the clouds. Look at the cliff.

 

Look at the clouds. Look at the cliff. Look at the bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis). You might hardly notice those flowers. They’re there at the bottom, making up a tiny element of the picture. They don’t always get to be the stars in their pictures. Sometimes humility’s the watchword.

I photographed this cliffscape in Burnet County on March 17th.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Cloudscape

 

My last stop in our seven-hour wildflower chase on March 13th wasn’t for wildflowers. It was for these clouds I’d been eyeing for some time after we turned north from Nixon on FM 1117 and headed for home.

  

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A recent post made me aware of Harry Watrous (1857–1940), a traditional American figurative painter who didn’t like modernism. Turning from style to message, however, we find him very modern in the message he conveyed in a painting from around 1913, “The Drop Sinister—What Shall We Do with It?” The first part of the title refers to the “one drop rule” from the benighted days of American slavery and racism when white supremacists considered a person with any black ancestry at all, even as little as one drop of blood, to be black and therefore to be looked down upon and mistreated.

The painting shows three people, presumably a family: a light-skinned black man on one side, a seemingly white woman and blond-haired girl together on the other side. As Wikipedia notes:

It is said to be the first known portrait of an American interracial family. The father wears a clerical collar and holds a Christian newspaper in his hand; on the wall [between the husband on the left and the wife and daughter on the right] is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and a quotation, “And God said, Let us make man in our own image after our likeness.”

The painting caused a stir when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design and at the Century Club in New York. “Harry W. Watrous preaches and paints well an interesting sermon on the negro question in The Drop Sinister,” commented American Art News, which also called it “one of his best canvases.” This “study in the fruits of miscegenation…caused an extraordinary amount of discussion, residents of one typically Southern city threatening to wreck the art museum if it was shown there.”

The painting appears to depict a mixed marriage, which was illegal in many states at the time. The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. journal edited by W.E.B. DuBois, had a different idea about what was going on in the picture:

The people in this picture are all “colored”; that is to say the ancestors of all of them two or three generations ago numbered among them full-blooded Negroes. These “colored” folk married and brought to the world a little golden-haired child; today they pause for a moment and sit aghast when they think of this child’s future.

What is she? A Negro? No, she is “white.” But is she white? The United States Census says she is a “Negro.” What earthly difference does it make what she is, so long as she grows up a good, true, capable woman? But her chances for doing this are small! Why?

Because 90,000,000 of her neighbors, good Christian, noble, civilized people are going to insult her, seek to ruin her and slam the door of opportunity in her face the moment they discover “The Drop Sinister.”

The reference to people threatening to wreck an art museum if “The Drop Sinister” was shown there reminds us that in at least one respect nothing has changed in the century since Harry Watrous created his painting. We still have zealots who feel justified in attacking, even with physical violence, anyone who has ideas different from any of the zealots’ cherished beliefs.

The most recent criminal activity of that sort I’m aware of took place at the University of California, Davis on March 14th, when woke activists rioted to protest a speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. The rioters (and unfortunately many students on campus) believe Charlie Kirk is “hateful” in believing, for example, that biological men shouldn’t be allowed to compete against women in athletics. Ironically, the zealots have pushed beyond the one-drop rule of racial segregation and now follow a zero-drop rule: anyone born with not even a single drop of female blood can demand to be treated as a woman.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Return to Lake Somerville State Park

 

On March 11th we returned to the Birch Creek Unit at Lake Somerville State Park for the first time since we’d visited a year earlier. In contrast to the later dramatic view in yesterday’s post, the clouds had been soft and white. The yellow flowers are Senecio ampullaceus, known as Texas groundsel or Texas ragwort. The others are bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis.

 

 

If clouds be dreams, what pleasant slumbers.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Bluebonnet drama

 

Yesterday afternoon the drama came more from the clouds than from the bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis), numerous though they were on an embankment of TX 130 south of Lockhart.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

What wondrous Wednesday welkin* will we welcome?

 

From last Wednesday above my northwest Austin neighborhood.

 

  

* Here’s the skinny on welkin. German readers will recognize the resemblance to Wolke.

 

 

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Two more cases of blatant governmental racial discrimination

 

The Providence, Rhode Island, Public School District has a loan forgiveness program for new and recently hired teachers, funded by the Rhode Island Foundation, the largest charity in the state. There’s a catch, however. Whites need not apply, it’s only open to non-whites.

So begins a February 9th Legal Insurrection article by William A. Jacobson that goes on to show a Providence Public School District teacher recruitment announcement with this line in it: “Selected candidates will be eligible for hiring incentives, including $25,000 in loan forgiveness for educators of color [emphasis mine]….”

At around the same time the Providence school district had separately advertised an “educators of color meetup” from which white teachers were barred.

It’s depressing to keep hearing about new government programs and activities that violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and similar state laws that forbid racial discrimination, but that’s what “equity” ideologues keep doing.

You can follow the two links to learn more details about those incidents of illegal racial discrimination.

The way you get more non-white teachers is to educate non-white students in elementary and secondary school. Instead, for the past fifty years the American education establishment has kept lowering school standards and turning out masses of “graduates” who can’t read or write well and who know precious little about geography, history, science, mathematics, or anything else that’s important. It’s a disgrace.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Year’s Day sunset

 

I forgot to show the colorful sunset we saw on New Year’s Day. Here’s a picture of it now.

 

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Been a while since I reminded you of The Good News Network. It recently ran a story about how a now-elderly man who as a boy was hidden and therefore saved from the Nazis by a neighbor met the grandchildren of his rescuer, one of whom lives in the very house where the sheltering took place. A related story from 2021 tells how “‘The Angel of Curaçao’ saved perhaps 10,000 Jews from annihilation during the Holocaust by helping them flee Europe.”

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Wispy clouds above the town of Cedar Park on January 11th

 

At the pond on Discovery Boulevard in suburban Cedar Park on the morning of January 11th wispy clouds enhanced the seed heads of the native grass called bushy bluestem, Andropogon tenuispatheus, as shown below. The clouds were so attractive that I figuratively and then literally looked up to them and had them sit (or rather float and drift) for portraits in their own right, as you see above.

 

 

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I recently read Andrew Sullivan’s January 27th article “The Other Black Lives That Matter.” After describing the big push by the school district in Washington, D.C., to make “equity” the supreme goal of education, Sullivan returns to reality:

Now check out the data on how the DC Public School system is faring. A key metric is what they call “proficiency rates” — a test of whether the kids are passing the essentials of reading and math at every stage of their education. Overall, only 31 percent of DC students have proficiency in reading and just 19 percent have proficiency in math. Drill down further in the racial demographics and the picture is even worse: among African-American kids, the numbers are 20 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Among black boys, it’s 15 percent and 9 percent. Which means to say that DC Public Schools graduate kids who are overwhelmingly unable to do the most basic reading and math that any employer would need.

This is not a function of money. In the most recent federal analysis: DC spends far more per student — $30,000 a year — than any other state, double the amount in many states across the country.

Let’s put it this way: if this were a corporation, it would be in liquidation. If it were a house, it would be condemned. But since it’s a public school system, it can avoid this catastrophic failure by emphasizing “equity”!

Yup, just as long as the kids are woke, it doesn’t matter that most of them are illiterate and innumerate. You’re welcome to read the full article.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman