Pink evening primroses

 

Pink evening primroses (Oenothera speciosa)
south of Smithville on March 5th.
Backlighting’s benefits betide.

 

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And speaking of betide, did you know that worth used to be an English verb which meant ‘be, become, betide’? Wiktionary gives as an example: “Woe worth the man that crosses me,” meaning “May woe come to the man that crosses me.”

In another example, “Well worth thee, me friend,” a modern reader will likely think this is the unrelated worth that means ‘value’ and may misinterpret the sentence as if the friend had performed some worthy deed. In fact the actual meaning is “May good fortune befall you, my friend.”

This worth that English no longer finds worthy of retaining in its vocabulary (except in some dialects) is a cognate of the very-much-alive German verb werden. It’s also a cognate of the Latin verb vertere, which meant ‘to turn’ and by extension ‘to change,’ and which we find in borrowed words like convert, revert and vertex.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman 

 

 

Tansy mustard in a phlox colony

 

On February 17th we drove 80 minutes south to Gonzales. Several miles north of the town, on the east side of US 183, we encountered a good colony of phlox, as depicted two posts back. Erect among the supersaturated red and hot pink phlox phlowers stood scattered tansy mustard plants, Descurainia pinnata, like the one you see here. Its cluster of yellow flowers measured only about an inch across.

 

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Yesterday I became aware of an important February 18th opinion piece by Jonathan Turley in The Hill.
Here’s how it begins:

Last year, the Biden administration caved to public outcry and disbanded its infamous Disinformation Governance Board under its “Disinformation Nanny,” Nina Jankowicz. Yet, as explored in a recent hearing (in which I testified), the Biden administration never told the public about a far larger censorship effort involving an estimated 80 FBI agents secretly targeting citizens and groups for disinformation.

Now it appears that the administration also was partially funding an “index” to warn advertisers to avoid what the index deemed to be dangerous disinformation sites. It turns out that all ten of the “riskiest” sites identified by the Global Disinformation Index are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents.

That sounds like a knockoff of China’s “social credit” system which scores its citizens, based in part on social media monitoring.

 

Our government acts unethically when it contributes public money to an organization that blatantly favors the political viewpoint of the administration in power and stigmatizes opposing political viewpoints. If you lean politically left, just imagine how you’d react if you found out that your government was using your tax dollars to extol right-leaning organizations and discredit your left-leaning views. Our government should not be funding any partisan organizations, period.

I invite you to read Jonathan Turley’s full piece. On the good side, just as I became aware of his article, I also found out that in response to it “The National Endowment for Democracy [Is] To Cut Off Further Support for the Global Disinformation Index.” You can read that follow-up article on Jonathan Turley’s own website.

  

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Phlox is already phloxing

 

Yes, phlox is phloxing now a little south of Austin, as we confirmed with an 80-minute drive down to Gonzales on February 17th—probably the earliest I’ve ever seen these flowers. Fortunately the ice storm almost three weeks earlier seemed not to have had a negative effect there; who knows, maybe the precipitation even helped. Phlox flowers come in various colors; the combination of saturated red and hot pink on a single flower that you see above may be unique (if you’re aware of it in another kind of flower, please let us know).

Below is the densest section of the colony. Of the two yellow flower heads, the one on the left is a Texas dandelion, Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus, and the one on the right is Texas groundsel, Senecio ampullaceus.
(Click to enlarge the panorama.)

 

  

 

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A year and a half ago I linked to an article about Yeonmi Park. Here’s how the Independent Institute describes her:

Born in Hyesan, North Korea, to educated parents, Ms. Park grew up in a society devoted to the worship of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il and uncompromising hatred for any and all critics of his regime. However, after watching a pirated copy of the 1997 film, Titanic, the veil of tyranny began to fall, as she had caught a glimpse of a free world that one day she would yearn to join. In 2003 when she was ten, Ms. Park’s family suffered a crucial blow. After her father, who had been a critic of the regime despite his privileged position as a member of [the] Workers’ Party, was sentenced to hard labor for smuggling, her family faced starvation. After his release on medical leave, the family decided they had to flee from North Korea, but became separated before they could escape together. On March 31, 2007, and at the age of thirteen, Ms. Park and her mother crossed the frozen Yalu River into China, hiding from Chinese government officials who would return them to North Korea. However, they fell into the hands of human traffickers, and when one of the traffickers threatened to report them to the authorities if she didn’t have sex with him, her mother intervened for her safety by offering herself to be raped by the trafficker. Nevertheless, both were sold into sex slavery and Ms. Park was subsequently repeatedly raped. In October 2007, Ms. Park sent word to her father and arranged to smuggle him into China. There, he was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer, and in January 2008, while the family was living in secret, Park’s father died aged 45. The family was unable to formally mourn him, fearing that they would be discovered by Chinese authorities, and they secretly buried his remains in the ground of a nearby mountain. In February 2009 at the age of fifteen, with the help of Chinese and Korean Christian missionaries in the port city of Qingdao they were able to evade the attention of authorities and fled through the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and then by plane to South Korea.

From there Yeonmi Park eventually made it to the United States, where she became and continues to be a great advocate for freedom.

The other night we watched a riveting two-hour interview with her. If you have the time, it’s well worth watching, even if parts of it are unsettling. Turning on the closed captioning (CC) may make it easier to understand certain words and phrases, given Yeonmi Park’s Korean accent.

If you don’t have two hours, you can still watch much shorter clips from the full interview:

Growing Up in Harrowing Conditions in the Oppressive Regime of North Korea (10 minutes)

Escaping North Korea as a Teenager, and Encountering More Horrific Incidents (9 minutes)

Adjusting to America and Enjoying Its Freedom and Opportunity (7 minutes)

Yeonmi Park attended my alma mater, Columbia University, which was once a great institution but has devolved into a hotbed of ideological indoctrination and the suppression of dissident opinions. Yeonmi Park was incredulous, in light of her horrible life in North Korea, when she encountered Woke College Students and Professors Who Claim Victimhood (8 minutes). She contrasts that to her own view that “America is a miracle. It is literally the best country in human history.” She reminds me of my grandmother, who escaped the tyranny of the Soviet dictatorship in the 1920s. When she was in her 80s she once said to me, in her heavy Russian accent, “America is still the best country.”

Hypocritical Elites Who Talk Human Rights But Don’t Practice What They Preach (8 minutes)

  

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

In the pink

 

The last stop on our 12-day trip last fall was Midland, a Texas city we’d never been to. On the morning of October 21st we spent time there at the I-20 Wildlife Preserve, whose website describes it as “one of the few urban playas in the state of Texas, an ecotourism destination, and a science education resource of the Permian Basin.” If you’re not familiar with playa lakes, you can read about them in a Texas Parks and Wildlife article. Along one edge of the lake densely flowering smartweed plants (Persicaria sp.) turned the area pink and made a pleasant contrast with the green of the cattail plants beyond them. Below, a black willow sapling (Salix nigra) had arisen in front of the smartweed colony.

 

 

For those of you interested in the craft of photography,
point 15 in About My Techniques applies to the top image,
and point 20 to the bottom one.

 

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In English-speaking countries increasingly many institutions that once dedicated themselves to the quest for truth have been turning despotic:

The University of Sussex forced Kathleen Stock into exile for challenging the concept of gender identity. Evergreen State College ran out Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, after refusing to protect them from violent student protesters. Portland State did the same to assistant professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian after he dared to question politicized scholarship. MIT canceled a lecture that University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was set to give, citing an op-ed he’d written opposing affirmative action. UC Irvine fired Aaron Kheriaty, a professor of psychiatry and its director of medical ethics, for refusing the Covid vaccine on ethical grounds. Princeton fired Joshua Katz—supposedly over a decades-old offense he had already been punished for—right after he wrote an essay criticizing anti-racism policies.

That’s from a January 7th article by Neeraja Deshpande in The Free Press titled “Will Jordan Peterson Lose His License for Wrongthink?” You can read the full article.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Pink tinges in December before the freeze

 

On December 21, the day before I went hunting for wildflowers hours in advance of a forecast deep freeze, I’d found two species near each other in my neighborhood whose flowers had tinges of pink. The flower head above, no more than an inch in length, is Chaptalia texana. The species epithet in the former scientific name, Chaptalia nutans, means ‘nodding,’ and that’s indeed what these flower heads usually do. The common name, silverpuff, refers to the seed heads, which are a good native substitute for those of the invasive Eurasian dandelion that has conquered the world.

Where silverpuff produces one flower head on each 3-to-12-inch long stalk, Ageratina havanensis grows in the form of a bush as much as 5 feet high with scads of flowers all over it. Below is one scad. Common names for this species are shrubby boneset, thoroughwort, and fragrant mistflower. That last is an allusion to the scent that attracts many insects, though the just-about-at-freezing morning three days earlier may account for my not finding any insects on this bush.

 

  

(Pictures from the Texas panhandle will resume next time.)

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Virginia saltmarsh mallows

 

On the gulf side of Galveston Island State Park on September 19th I sat near the base of some cattails and wildflowers and took a bunch of pictures. At one point a passerby asked me what I was photographing. It seemed pretty obvious to me but I said “wildflowers.” A few minutes later a couple asked me the same question, and I answered the same way. The woman in the couple said she thought what I was photographing looked weedy. There’s no accounting for tastes, is there? The most prominent of the wildflowers I took pictures of there was Virginia saltmarsh mallow, Kosteletzkya pentacarpos or virginica, whose genus name I always have to double-check the spelling of. Below is an artsy portrait showing one of the opening flowers. That it’s reminiscent of a conch befits the oceanside location, don’t you think?

 

  

 

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Much of what we hear about race is superficial. In contrast, consider the thoughtful, nuanced, and sometimes iconoclastic discussion that Kmele Foster, Glenn Loury, and John McWhorter held in July of 2022. You’re welcome to listen to that 53-minute trialogue, “From Racial Reckoning to Race Abolition.”

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A willet won’t will its way into your will, will it?

 

On September 19th we spent time at Galveston Island State Park, where we saw—how could we not?—several kinds of shore birds. I figured the one above in the surf on the gulf side of the park is a kind of sandpiper, and Shannon Westveer confirmed that it’s a willet, Catoptrophorus semipalmatus. The dictionary says the common name mimics the willet’s cry. An hour later—to within 15 seconds—on the bay side of the state park I photographed three roseate spoonbills, Platalea ajaja, doing their bill-in-the-water thing sifting for food: 

 

 

 

 

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I’ve long known that calumny and lies in politics go back centuries, in fact probably as long as politics has existed. The introduction to Alan Dershowitz’s new book, The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth the Consequences, provides a quotation in which Alexander Hamilton called out the practice in 1797:

A principal engine, by which this spirit endeavours to accomplish its purposes is that of calumny. It is essential to its success that the influence of men of upright principles, disposed and able to resist its enterprises, shall be at all events destroyed. Not content with traducing their best efforts for the public good, with misrepresenting their purest motives, with inferring criminality from actions innocent or laudable, the most direct fals[e]hoods are invented and propagated, with undaunted effrontery and unrelenting perseverance. Lies often detected and refuted are still revived and repeated, in the hope that the refutation may have been forgotten or that the frequency and boldness of accusation may supply the place of truth and proof. The most profligate men are encouraged, probably bribed, certainly with patronage if not with money, to become informers and accusers. And when tales, which their characters alone ought to discredit, are refuted by evidence and facts which oblige the patrons of them to abandon their support, they still continue in corroding whispers to wear away the reputations which they could not directly subvert….

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Marsh fleabane

Been a couple of years since I showed you marsh fleabane, Pluchea odorata, so here’s a view of its flowers and then a softer view of its buds at Meadow Lake Park in Round Rock on August 23rd.

  

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At the head of an August 28th article in Quillette, Bo Winegard quotes Sir Henry Hallett Dale:

And science, we should insist, better than any other discipline, can hold up to its students and followers an ideal of patient devotion to the search for objective truth, with vision unclouded by personal or political motive.

The article per se starts out like this:

Although the modern prestige bestowed upon science is laudable, it is not without peril. For as the ideological value of science increases, so too does the threat to its objectivity. Slogans and hashtags can quickly politicize science, and scientists can be tempted to subordinate the pursuit of the truth to moral or political ends as they become aware of their own prodigious social importance. Inconvenient data can be suppressed or hidden and inconvenient research can be quashed. This is especially true when one political tribe or faction enjoys disproportionate influence in academia—its members can disfigure science (often unconsciously) to support their own ideological preferences. This is how science becomes more like propaganda than empiricism, and academia becomes more like a partisan media organization than an impartial institution.

An editorial in Nature Human Behavior provides the most recent indication of just how bad things are becoming. It begins, like so many essays of its kind, by announcing that, “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” When the invocation of a fundamental freedom in one clause is immediately undermined in the next, we should be skeptical of whatever follows.

A little later we find out that

the journal [Nature Human Behavior] will reject articles that might potentially harm (even “inadvertently”) those individuals or groups most vulnerable to “racism, sexism, ableism, or homophobia.” Since it is already standard practice to reject false or poorly argued work, it is safe to assume that these new guidelines have been designed to reject any article deemed to pose a threat to disadvantaged groups, irrespective of whether or not its central claims are true, or at least well-supported. Within a few sentences, we have moved from a banal statement of the obvious to draconian and censorious editorial discretion. Editors will now enjoy unprecedented power to reject articles on the basis of nebulous moral concerns and anticipated harms.

You can read the rest of the article about the sorry state into which science is precipitously falling.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Two species, three prominent colors

 

Plenty of native species have been planted around the pond at the intersection of Gault Lane and Burnet Road. On the morning of July 7th I made this group portrait that includes a pavonia mallow flower (Pavonia lasiopetala), several purple bindweed flowers (Ipomoea cordatotriloba), and a yellowed leaf on the bindweed vine. The cordato in the species name means heart-shaped, and that wavily fits the bright leaf.

 

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I’ve mentioned a few times that a group of people who believe in the traditional purpose of a university—the pursuit of knowledge, whatever facts and truths that may lead to—are busy founding the University of Austin (UATX) right here where I live. An inaugural summer session was held in Dallas, and I invite you to read the talk that Bari Weiss gave to the first class of UATX students. It’s called “The New Founders America Needs.”

  

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Closer looks at mountain pinks

 

A post late last month revealed the largest colony of mountain pinks (Zeltnera beyrichii) I’ve ever seen. In that case the plants came up vertically in a field of caliche. Mountain pinks are also known to emerge horizontally from the faces of cliffs and roadcuts, which is what you see above from Fireoak Dr. on June 24th. Before the huge colony interposed itself last month I’d been planning to show the closeup below, from Hidden Hills Lane in Cedar Park on June 12th. It looks no worse for the delay.

  

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Two days ago I posted an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s pro-free-speech speech to the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union in around 1987. That speech appeared on July 1st in Quillette, which a week earlier had published an article by Colin Wright that also argued for free speech and inquiry and against censorship: “I Got Thrown Off Etsy and PayPal for Expressing My Belief in Biological Reality.” The tag line was “Apparently, selling mugs and shirts that glorify violence against ‘TERFs’ is just fine. But ‘I 💜 J.K. Rowling‘? That‘s hate speech.” Here’s how the article begins:

If readers recognize my byline, it’s because I’ve spent the last few years arguing strenuously for the (apparently controversial) positions that biological sex is real, that there are only two sexes, and that the differences between males and females matter in some policy contexts.

My views are hardly out of the mainstream. Indeed, we are now seeing a pronounced (if belated) pushback against activists who’ve insisted that biological sex is some kind of transphobic mirage. But for several years, those activists have controlled the commanding heights of many universities, NGOs, and even political parties. This is one of the reasons why I left my career as an academic biologist in 2020: I was tired of researching science in a subculture whose gatekeepers demanded that I repudiate basic scientific facts about human beings.

 

I invite you to read the full article in Quillette.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman