Many and one

 

How could I not show more of the densest and most expansive colony of horsemints (Monarda citriodora) I’ve seen in years? I photographed it on May 28th in between US 183 and the 183A toll road in Leander, where unfortunately construction is already under way on parts of the field. Below is a single horsemint blowing in the breeze that had come up by the time I was finishing my pictures. Call it flower tower power.

 

 

 

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“Disparate impact”

 

One of the most pernicious concepts ever to have grabbed hold of our culture and legal system is the one called “disparate impact.” Here’s how it works. Suppose the legislature passes a law making it illegal for a person to commit a certain act (for example murder, assault, theft, fraud). The law is prima facie neutral, meaning it doesn’t mention anything about the personal characteristics of a would-be violator; the law merely says that any person who violates it can be arrested and prosecuted for breaking that law.

Now suppose that of all the people who do get arrested and prosecuted for breaking that law, people with characteristic X happen to constitute a larger share than people with characteristic X make up of the general population. Believers in “disparate impact” then complain that authorities are going after people with characteristic X, and those believers proceed to call our society X-ist (or systemically X-ist), X-phobic, bigoted, hateful, etc.

The obvious flaw in such claims is that there may be a simple, non-discriminatory reason why people with characteristic X get arrested and prosecuted for breaking a law more than their representation in the population would predict: it’s that people with characteristic X actually break that law more often—sometimes much more often—than their representation in the population would predict. True believers in “disparate impact” conveniently refuse to look at the data, and whenever someone does present the unbiased data they attack that person as an X-ist, an X-phobe, a bigot, a hater, etc.

What’s worse, activists wage campaigns to have the police arrest fewer, and prosecutors prosecute fewer, people with characteristic X who do break the law. In other words, ideologues want more of those criminals turned loose upon society, even if it means more crimes will be committed.

To see the folly of such fact- and consequences-free advocacy, look at the situation where characteristic X is being male. The current United States population is approximately 49.5% male and 50.5% female. For convenience, let’s just say the two sexes are about equally represented in the population. Now suppose the crime in question is murder. According to FBI crime statistics, of the people arrested for murder (or nonnegligent manslaughter) in 2012, 88.7% of them were men and 11.3% were women. According to “disparate impact” ideology, this is an egregious example of anti-male bias because police arrested almost 8 times as many men as women for this crime. But would ideologues insist that police arrest only as many male murderers as female ones? That would be folly, right? But that sort of folly is what “disparate impact” ideology calls for. The reality, of course, is that men commit way more murders than women, so of course we expect the police to arrest way more men than women for committing that crime.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

12 Years

 

Twelve years ago today the first post appeared in Portraits of Wildflowers. The photograph in that post showed a single basket-flower. In contrast, today’s picture includes the densest and most expansive colony of horsemints (Monarda citriodora) I’ve seen in maybe two decades. I photographed it on May 28th in between US 183 and the 183A toll road in Leander. Unfortunately construction is already under way on parts of the field, so 2023 may mark this great colony’s last stand.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

National Prairie Day

 

The first Saturday in June each year is National Prairie Day. In my part of Texas, Pflugerville proved to be ground zero for lush spreads of prairie wildflowers in the spring of 2023, as you’ve already seen in a bunch of recent posts. Here’s a picture showing basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus) abounding on the Blackland Prairie in Pflugerville on May 29th. What a sight!

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

It wasn’t just Inks Lake State Park

 

It wasn’t just Inks Lake State Park that was spectacularly flowerful on March 26th. We found that many places along TX 29 from Liberty Hill in Williamson County all the way to the turnoff for the park also sported wildflower displays better than I’d ever seen on that stretch of highway. Here are two views from TX 29 east of the junction with Park Road 4. The red blanketflowers seem to be Gaillardia amblyodon. The brown-centered yellow flower heads are Coreopsis basalis. The white ones are lazy daisies, Aphanostephus skirrhobasis. The all-yellow flower heads appear to be sleepy daisies, Xanthisma texanum subsp. drummondii.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Ground zero for wildflowers west of Austin

 

If Pflugerville has been ground zero for wildflowers on the prairie east of Austin this spring, Inks Lake State Park an hour west of our home could qualify for the same title in its rocky area. So we confirmed on May 26th when we spent hours out there. Scenes like these two with wildflowers blanketing the ground were common almost everywhere we looked. In the top view, the predominant species was Helenium amarum var. badium, known as brown bitterweed for the dark disk at the center of each flower head’s yellow rays. That species appears in the second view, too, along with the somewhat larger dark-centered yellow flower heads of Coreopsis basalis, known as coreopsis, golden-wave, and goldenmane tickseed. The mostly red flower heads are firewheels, Gaillardia pulchella, which have appeared in many recent posts.

 

 

 

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Here’s another passage from Yeonmi Park’s 2023 book While Time Remains:

 

“America is a racist, imperialist, evil, greedy country that is more responsible than any other for war, injustice, cruelty, inequality, and terror around the world. We will never rest until American capitalism is overturned, the American military and police state are dissolved, and American democracy is exposed as nothing more than a corrupt sham.”

Question: If you had to bet, to whom would you attribute this quote? A North Korean television broadcaster? An Iranian government cleric? A professor at Columbia? A U.S. congressperson? My guess is you’d probably wager as little money as possible on such a bet, because it’s genuinely too hard to know! It could just as easily be an ISIS general as a junior product manager at Twitter. To someone who’s lived 50 percent of her life in each world—half in the anti-American authoritarian dictatorship, and half in the land of the free itself—this has been quite the shock. How did we get to the point where American children and North Korean children are being fed fairly similar propaganda about the United States?

The parallels are doubly shocking when you consider the kinds of people who espouse these views. In North Korea, the people you hear railing against America are underfed teachers, malnourished children, frightened parents, and elites whose livelihoods depend on the Kim crime family. That doesn’t make their hatred and ignorance excusable, but at least it makes some sense. In America, however, the people railing against their own country are often overfed, or obsessed with intentionally limiting the amount of food they eat. Often they will “speak out” against American history, society, capitalism, and democracy on an American social-media platform from their American phone or computer, or on the campus of a world-class American university, or on the street with the permission of American government authorities and the protection of American police officers. North Koreans say such things because if they don’t, they’ll be shot. Americans do it because they think it’s fun, or because they want to acquire power and influence over other people.

It’s no wonder, really, that while millions of people around the world continue to face murder, starvation, rape, torture, and enslavement, many Americans who support “social justice” are primarily concerned with the infinite multiplication of ungrammatical gender pronouns and how much “range” to give chickens before they wind up in supermarkets. It’s easy to laugh at this kind of childish, nonsensical behavior—even I enjoy poking fun at it now and again—but at the end of the day, unfortunately, it’s deadly serious. When a people become untethered from history, when they become unshackled from reality, when they lose the ability to understand cause and effect, they become ripe for exploitation from those who hold real power.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Ground zero

 

W. Pflugerville Parkway at N. Heatherwilde Boulevard in Pflugerville proved to be ground zero this spring for prairie wildflowers, which abounded on all four quadrants of the increasingly busy intersection. Thankfully it wasn’t the wildflowers’ last stand—at least not yet, but all the land around that intersection is highly likely to get developed in the next few years. Consider that when I moved to Austin in 1976, Pflugerville claimed about 700 residents; by the turn of the millennium some 16,000 people lived there, and the current population estimate is 69,000.

While the southeast corner of the intersection already has a convenience store on it (and a convenient place to park it is), the land adjacent to the store is still land; you’ve already seen how densely flowerful it looked on April 29th. The northwest quadrant of the intersection is home to a church, but at least the people in charge have so far let the property around the church go to wildflowers; let’s hope that enlightenment continues. The southwest quadrant of the intersection has also been home to many wildflowers this spring.

By the time of my May 17th visit I’d already taken many photographs in those three quadrants on several earlier stops. This time I finally walked over to the northeast quadrant, which already sports a sign saying a zoning variance has been requested for that property: development can’t be far away. When I got close I happily found that horsemints (Monarda citriodora) were coming into their own on the site; they’re the little towers of flowers. Blooming among and around the horsemints were firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella) and prairie parsley (Polytaenia nuttallii). In addition, some healthy Maximilian sunflower plants (Helianthus maximiliani) bode well for the fall, providing the land hasn’t gotten razed by then.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

Two days later

 

On May 12th, two days after taking the picture you saw last time of a basket-flower colony on the prairie in Pflugerville, I returned to the same property and took many more pictures. In this one firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella) dominated the basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus) and the smaller amount of prairie parsley (Polytaenia nuttallii) and Texas thistles (Cirsium texanum).

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A basket-flower colony

 

On the Blackland Prairie in Pflugerville on May 10th I happily portrayed this happy colony of basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus). Firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella) and Texas thistles (Cirsium texanum) added to the show. Click to enlarge the flowerful panorama.

 

 

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Here’s another passage from Yeonmi Park’s 2023 book While Time Remains:

 

Across two presidential administrations now, the United States has vowed to do something about the Chinese threat: to bring more American manufacturing and business back home; to bolster U.S. defense capabilities; to counter Chinese influence in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East; and to stop the illegal Chinese practices of stealing trade secrets, forcing technology transfers, investing through shell companies, and integrating the use of slave labor into global supply chains. But both the Trump and Biden administrations have fallen far short. The fact is, America’s China policy is not even really made by the American president anymore. It is made by the lobbying and interest groups and oligarchical classes that are dependent on the Chinese market, regardless of the effect on ordinary American workers and consumers.

The only hope for countering the spread of Chinese influence is the United States, but American elites are busy dismantling the sources of American economic and military power to the benefit of the Chinese in order to enrich themselves. If this process continues, there will simply be no hope for preventing a Chinese-dominated future for the world. Having come from North Korea, it is difficult to convey how depressing this all is. The horror of North Korea is Exhibit A of what a more Chinese world would look like: more unspeakable crime, more abject human suffering, more terrifying exploitation of innocent people for the benefit of a communist party cadre. Instead of ending the North Korean nightmare, Chinese hegemony promises only to spread the North Korean experience to more people around the world.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

We’re not done with fields of wildflowers yet

 

Just because it’s been a while since I showed fields filled with wildflowers doesn’t mean we’re done with them for this spring. As bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes have faded, other species have come to the fore. After not having gone on a wildflower quest for a few weeks, on April 29th we headed north and east onto the Blackland Prairie to see what might be going on. We didn’t have to go far. In Pflugerville, about a 12-mile drive from home, we began to see spreads of white here and there that experience has taught me must be Bifora americana, known as prairie bishop’s weed or more simply (and weedlessly) prairie bishop.

I was especially happy to see those spreads of white because development two years ago eliminated the largest expanse of prairie bishop I knew. That had been along Heatherwilde Blvd. at the southern fringe of Pflugerville. The new finds also occurred along Heatherwilde Blvd. about a mile and two miles further north. That second location is at the intersection with Pflugerville Parkway, which is where I took today’s picture. The red-centered flower heads are firewheels, Gaillardia pulchella. The yellow flower heads farthest away are Engelmann daisies, Engelmannia peristenia. The many upright green stalks are budding basket-flower plants, Plectocephalus americanus (formerly Centaurea americana).

Two days later I returned to the first location, a mile south, to document the ways the yellow-orange parasitic plant called dodder (Cuscuta sp.) was vigorously attacking the prairie bishop and various other kinds of wildflowers. In the view below, the yellow flowers in the upper right are greenthread (Thelesperma filifolium), the two yellow ones in the lower right are square-bud primroses (Oenothera berlandieri subsp. berlandieri), and the red-centered flower heads are firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella).

 

 

 

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Imagine asking the following questions and getting the answers shown.

 

What is a quodlibetarian?
— A quodlibetarian is anyone who acts like a quodlibetarian.

What is an agelast?
— An agelast is anyone who claims to be an agelast.

What is an anchorite?
— An anchorite is anyone who behaves like an anchorite.

What is a meliorist?
— A meliorist is anyone who believes what a meliorist believes.

What is a woman?
—A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.

 

Do you see that those “answers” don’t answer the questions? As definitions, those “answers” are circular: they “define” a word by giving you back the same word, so you know no more than you knew before you asked the question. Here are the same questions with proper answers:

 

What is a quodlibetarian?
— A quodlibetarian is a person who enjoys engaging in a subtle or elaborate argument or point of debate.

What is an agelast?
— An agelast is a person who never laughs.

What is an anchorite?
— An anchorite is a person who lives in seclusion, usually for religious reasons.

What is a meliorist?
— A meliorist is a person who believes the world can be improved by human effort.

What is a woman?
—A woman is an adult human female.

 

You’ve most likely never heard anyone ask the first four questions. If you’ve paid attention to current events, you’ve increasingly heard the fifth question not only asked but also replied to with the non-answer that a woman is anyone who claims to be a woman or “identifies as” a woman, rather than the obvious answer that a woman is an adult human female. It’s a sorry state of affairs.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A big colony of pink evening primroses

 

The biggest colony of pink evening primroses (Oenothera speciosa) I’ve seen this year came on April 13th at the intersection of McKinney Falls Parkway and US 183 in southeast Austin. The top picture shows only one dense portion of the colony. Notice that some of the nominally pink flowers were very close to white. (Click to enlarge the panorama.) Mixed among the myriad pink evening primroses in some places were colonies of butterweed (Packera tampicana), whose common name tells you what color those flowers are.

 

 

 

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The other day I came across an April 17th article that pleased the eternal math teacher in me. The headline and sub-head were “End the ‘anti-maths* mindset’ to grow UK’s economy Rishi Sunak says,” and “The UK needs to bring an end to its ‘anti-maths mindset’ to help young people in their careers and grow the economy, Rishi Sunak will say.” Here’s how the article began:

On Monday, the Prime Minister’s plan to get all pupils studying maths will move a step closer, as he announces an expert-led review to ensure all children in England study some form of maths until the age of 18, without making maths A-Level compulsory.

He will use a speech on Monday, to take aim at a “cultural sense that it’s OK to be bad at maths” which he believes is putting children “at a disadvantage” by depriving them of the analytical skills required in the workplace.

The UK continues to be one of the only countries that doesn’t have a requirement for children to study some form of maths up to 18, which makes it one of the least numerate countries in the 38 OECD advanced economies

Over 8 million adults have numeracy skills below those expected of a 9-year-old and around a third of young people fail to pass GCSE maths in the UK, Downing Street says.

Before an audience made up of students, teachers, education experts and business leaders, Mr Sunak is expected to say: “We’ve got to change this anti-maths mindset. We’ve got to start prizing numeracy for what it is – a key skill every bit as essential as reading.

“I won’t sit back and allow this cultural sense that it’s OK to be bad at maths to put our children at a disadvantage.

“My campaign to transform our national approach to maths is not some nice-to-have. It’s about changing how we value maths in this country”.

It’s hard to imagine the current American president, or any American president since Eisenhower and Kennedy following the Sputnik scare, taking such a stance. Let’s hope the British Prime Minister’s plan braves strong headwinds (and Chinese spy balloons) to make its way westward across the Atlantic to my country, which in 2018 ranked behind 37 other countries in math scores, and where, for all the prattling about “underserved minorities,” and the billions of dollars wasted year after year on highly racialized “anti-racist” programs, “only 13 out of 100 Black students in 2018 performed at or above the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] proficient level in math.”

You’re welcome to read the full article.

 

* Americans shorten the word mathematics to math. Britons keep the final -s: maths.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman