International Fascination of Plants Day

 

As today is International Fascination of Plants Day, it seems appropriate to show a picture of the most recent fasciation I’ve come across. On April 18th in my northwest part of Austin I noticed a four-nerve daisy (Tetraneuris linearifolia) with a flattened, ribbon-like stalk that is a characteristic sign of fasciation. The daisy’s inflorescence, already dried out, seemed flattened as well. Too bad I didn’t find that specimen when the flower head was still fresh.

 

To learn more about fasciation and see other examples I’ve posted,
click the fasciation tag below and then scroll back down through past posts.

 

 

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Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect….

 

So wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710, and variants on that theme have sprung up in the three centuries since then. Here’s one you may have heard: “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on,” which is now better known than the original. You can find others in an article at Quote Investigator.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Sideways icicles

 

A first glance at this picture might make you think I accidentally rotated it 90° to the right. Not so. Check the icicles’ tips and you’ll see the drops of meltwater there are hanging downward. Here’s what happened: the small icicles that had formed normally on tree branches ended up horizontal (or even pointing upward somewhat) after the tree fell over. I’d have thought the force of the impact would knock the icicles off, yet many survived intact. The location was our back yard; the date was February 2nd, coincidentally the second of our three days without electricity and heat—but not without nature photographs.

 

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During the pandemic I called your attention to two programs that the American government put in place to give money to restaurant owners and farmers. The problem was that white people were either barred outright from applying or were put at the bottom of the list of applicants. Naturally white restaurant owners and white farmers pointed out that those programs blatantly violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both of which prohibit discrimination based on race. Judges soon struck down the two programs on those grounds.

Even after those two rulings, it seems “social justice” bureaucrats have no qualms about violating civil rights laws. The most recent example I’ve become aware of is at Florida International University (FIU), where “the Delores Auzenne Fellowship is awarded to minority graduate students who are pursuing graduate degrees in disciplines where minorities are underrepresented.” I’ve put the word minority in italics to point out that “white students need not apply” to receive this fellowship at a public, taxpayer-funded university.

No doubt an FIU student who, but for being white, qualifies for the Deloris Auzenne Fellowship will sue the university. The judge who gets the case will have no choice but to follow the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and to strike down the fellowship’s racist exclusion of white applicants.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Down to around freezing overnight

 

As recently as this past week I was still finding a few flowers on frostweed plants (Verbesina virginica) in Austin. The picture above is from the drizzly morning of December 10th.

The common name for this species comes not from its white flowers but from one of the strangest phenomena in botany. By the time the frost begins settling overnight on the lands where frostweed grows, almost all of these plants have gone to seed. Although each stalk stands there unappealingly as it dries out, the first good freeze can cause it to draw underground water up into its base. Now for the strange trick: the exterior of the part of the stalk near the ground splits open as it extrudes freezing water laterally, and that process produces thin sheets of ice that curl and fold around the broken stalk.

Yesterday morning the temperature in Austin got down to around freezing, so off I went to the stand of frostweed plants in Great Hills Park I’ve been relying on for a decade to produce ice. They didn’t disappoint me. Here are three frostweed ice portraits:

 

 

As always with a familiar subject, I worked to get pictures that look
at least somewhat different from the ones I’ve taken over the years.

 

 

All of these fit that description.

 

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

Draped and dropped

You may have heard that for months now Texas has been enduring a drought. That was obvious at the Willow Trace Pond in far north Austin when I visited on July 21st. The water level had dropped enough to drape algae over little stumps that had been underwater, as had most of the algae. Once the air dried out the algae it lost most of its green coloring, as you see above.

Not draped but dropped, presumably by a child and not by water, was the little toy figurine that I found on the ground near by. I guess the black dots were intended to identify the big cat as a leopard, even if no leopard ever sported such regular spots or wore such a bright yellow coat. The nondescript ground-hugging plant the leopard had bedded down on belongs to the spurge family and is in the genus Chamaesyce or Euphorbia.

 

 

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The other day I came across a post by Wesley Yang entitled “Yes, Things Are Really As Bad As You’ve Heard: a Leftist Schoolteacher Struggles To Say Aloud the Things He Regularly Witnesses That Are So Outlandish They Sound Made Up By Right-Wing Provocateurs.” The craziness described there isn’t encouraging, nor is the reality that the writer Yang was talking about feels the need to remain anonymous. At least the fact that some people are calling out the craziness in their ranks is encouraging.

Here’s the anonymous writer’s penultimate paragraph:

Like I said before, I’m a leftist myself; I have a real and abiding commitment to racial justice in education. Do I like having to make the same points as pundits who want me kicked out of the classroom too? Of course not. But it’s precisely because I think racism and poverty are so rampant in this nation, and our obligation to respond so overwhelming, that I can’t keep pretending these ridiculous DEI schemes aren’t hurting the children we owe so much to. They are. It’s happening, right now.

You’re welcome to check out the full article.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A strange juxtaposition

 

At one point while wandering along Bull Creek on July 12th I looked down and saw this note on the ground. Whoever wrote it had a hard time with the last word, which was apparently supposed to be fulfilling. The little plant adjacent to the note is poison ivy, Toxicodendron radicans, which very few people find fulfilling. Only once before, if I remember right, have I posted a picture of a hand-printed message. It was in 2016, and upon looking back at it now I was surprised to notice that the writer of that earlier message also had a hard time spelling its final word—and only its final word. A weird coincidence, don’t you think?

In 2016 the message was on a light pole and therefore we assume whoever wrote it wanted people to see it. Do you think that was true for this month’s note, too, or had the writer accidentally dropped it and not noticed that it stayed behind on the ground?

 

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CNN reported on June 30th that 85% of US adults who responded to an AP-NORC survey said that things in the country are headed in the wrong direction. It’s something that polls often ask about, but it’s not nearly as useful a question as it could be. That’s because the country is heavily polarized, and many respondents were presumably unhappy with the country’s direction for opposite reasons. Pollsters would do much better to solicit more than just a yes-or-no answer about being content with the country’s direction. For instance, people who say they’re discontent could be asked to tell what specific things about the country’s direction they’re discontent with, and the pollsters could then group the reasons into categories when reporting the results. If the pollsters don’t want to do that much work, they could ask the question in multiple-choice format. Here’s an example:

We’d like to know how you feel about the direction the country is headed in.
Which of these best describes your feelings?

a) The country is headed in a generally good direction.

b) The country is moving a little too far to the left (progressive), politically speaking.

c) The country is moving a lot too far to the left (progressive), politically speaking.

d) The country is moving a little too far to the right (conservative), politically speaking.

e) The country is moving a lot too far to the right (conservative), politically speaking.

f) None of the above is the reason I’m discontent with the country’s direction.

 

What do you think the chances are that polling companies will adopt my approach?

1. The people who run polling companies will swoon at my feet and make me their polling god.
2. I’ll have to live to be 100 before polling companies follow such a good suggestion.
3. Somebody dropped a zero: I’ll have to live to be 1000 before polling companies follow such a good suggestion.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Another Mexican hat anomaly

Eight days ago you saw a Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera) flower head that strangely had four columns instead of the single one that’s the norm. On May 15th the Mexican hats at the Floral Park Drive entrance to Great Hills Park were going strong, so I walked in to give them a closer look. On one flower head I discovered another anomaly: several ray florets were emerging from a place part-way up the column where only disk florets are supposed to grow. For comparison, check out the normally developing Mexican hat below, with ray florets coming out only at the bottom of the column.

 

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To see some impressive wildlife photographs, check out the work of Dave Newman, a British office manager who takes pictures on his lunch break. Avian mavens among you should be especially interested.

  

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Fascination of Plants Day

Today is Fascination of Plants Day. The word fascination is fascinatingly close to fasciation, the strange botanical phenomenon that I’ve shown you various examples of. On May 5th I was photographing some of the many Mexican hats (Ratibida columnifera) that were coming up along the Sierra Nevada fringe of Great Hills Park when I noticed one flower head that lacked the characteristic flattening and spreading that fasciated plants exhibit but that had four central columns instead of the normal one. Whether that’s still fasciation or a different anomaly, I don’t know. I do know it was weird enough to show it to you on Fascination of Plants Day.

In case you’re not familiar with Mexican hats, I’ll add that the ray florets display varying amounts of yellow and brown. Often there’s a mixture of the two. Sometimes one color mostly drives out the other color, as in the middle picture, or entirely excludes it, as below.

 

 

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By now you’ve probably heard about a deranged 18-year-old guy who drove several hours from a little town in New York to Buffalo, the state’s second largest city, to gun down people in a supermarket on May 14th. Most of the victims were black, and that apparently was no coincidence. A long manifesto allegedly written by the shooter soon surfaced, and the document made clear that he hated both blacks and Jews. The killer’s racist and anti-Semitic statements, along with the fact that he is white, almost immediately led some people in the news media to proclaim him, with good reason, a racist and a white supremacist. Among those people in the media were not a few who also somehow concluded that the killer is a Republican or a conservative and a follower of the conservative television network Fox News. How politically convenient—and how inconvenient that those quickly proved to be false accusations.

I couldn’t find the shooter’s manifesto online to check it for myself—it was apparently taken down not long after the incident—but I did find a May 16th Washington Examiner article by Tiana Lowe headlined “The Buffalo shooter was an eco-socialist racist who hated Fox News and Ben Shapiro.” That hardly sounds like your typical Republican or conservative, does it? Here’s a portion of Tiana Lowe’s article:

Hence, a seemingly concerted effort from the corporate media accusing the Buffalo barbarian of being some sort of Tucker Carlson [a Fox News host] acolyte would be baffling if it weren’t so transparently malicious. In the 180-page document purported to be authored by the shooter, he does not mention Carlson once. The sole explicit mention of Fox News is an infographic demarcating top Fox hosts such as Maria Bartiromo and Greg Gutfeld as Jewish. (Rupert Murdoch is decried as a “Christian Zionist” who may have Jewish ancestry,” although it’s never publicly admitted.) Ben Shapiro is mentioned multiple times, including as an example as the “rat” phenotype of Jewish people.

Moreover, the Buffalo shooter is a self-described “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist” who loathes libertarianism and conservatism in particular.

“Ask yourself, truly, what has modern conservatism managed to conserve?” the shooter wrote. “Not a thing has been conserved other than corporate profits and the ever increasing wealth of the 1% that exploit the people for their own benefit. Conservatism is dead. Thank god. Now let us bury it and move on to something of worth.”

Hell, the shooter admits that he’s a socialist, “depending on the definition.”

“Worker ownership of the means of production?” he writes. “It depends on who those workers are, their intentions, who currently owns the means of production, their intentions and who currently owns the state, and their intentions.”

The diatribe implies “those workers” better be white gentiles who worship Mother Earth. Here, crucially, is the shooter on his homicidal obsession with environmentalism.

 

To be continued tomorrow and the next day.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

An uncommon common snapping turtle

Seven years ago today I encountered a common snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, not far
from Bull Creek. What made this common turtle uncommon was the inchworm on its nose.

 

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Here are three passages from David Mamet’s latest book, Recessional.

 

Justice is the application of previously decided and accepted norms of conduct and the rules for their examination and dispute. It is as imperfect as any other institution. But a dispassionate, considerate, supportable, and moral resolution of differences is the goal toward which it aspires.

Social justice is the negation of that ideal. Here “feelings” are insisted upon as superior to process and order. The iconoclasts claim that justice is too slow, that it is biased, and that it is the right of the individual or whatever groups he may form to express grievances long held, and unheard, in whatever mode he elects.

It is the argument of an abusive parent: Yes, I hit her, but you would have hit her too, if you had to put up with the way she behaves.

Social justice means anarchy….

Huey Long said in 1933 that it was the easiest thing in the world to create a Fascist organization; all one had to do was call it an anti-Fascist organization.

But perhaps the greatest lesson of history is that we never learn from history. And that no great crime was ever committed save in the name of progress, or its stablemates historical necessity and redress of past wrongs.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

What I couldn’t see

The cedar sage (Salvia roemeriana) in wooded areas of my neighborhood was out in force by the middle of April. I found plenty of those plants to photograph in Great Hills Park, and then on April 17th I spent time with a group of them on a rocky embankment along Morado Circle. It’s not unusual to see cedar sage flowers that have fallen off, but one really caught my attention—and caught is an apt word. The flower had landed on a leaf and miraculously was standing upright. I assumed the base of the fallen flower had happened to land in a small hole in the leaf, and that accounted for the flower’s apparent defiance of gravity. After taking some pictures of the prodigy I touched it, and only then from the way it swung about did I realize that a strand of spider silk, still invisible to me, had kept the flower from falling over. My 100mm macro lens and camera sensor resolved the strand of silk that my unaided eyes couldn’t see. Now your eyes get to see it. They also get to see some nearby cedar sage buds that had begun opening.

 

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As much as I’ve been the bearer of reassurance in my photographs from nature, I’ve also been the bearer of increasingly dismal social news in my commentaries. For the past decade, and especially since the moral panic of 2020, “wokeism” has rapidly been taking over our institutions. Medicine is no exception. Some professors of medicine have taken to denying biological sex. Medical schools are already plotting to make gender ideology and racist ideology required parts of their curriculum. Faculty and staff who won’t pledge fealty to those delusional and hateful things will risk getting fired, and people who apply to work there but don’t show evidence of sufficiently “woke” fervor won’t get hired in the first place. Medical students will face the same kinds of pressure. You can read the distressing details in John D. Sailer’s article on the website of the National Association of Scholars.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

Doubled

In northwest Austin on April 16th the flower of a southern dewberry vine (Rubus trivialis) caught my attention for two reasons: it was conspicuously pinker than the white I’m used to seeing, and its petals appeared to be doubled. Dewberry is in the rose family, and I’ve heard of doubled roses, so maybe a doubled dewberry’s not as strange as I think. Or maybe it is.

 

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Mark Twain didn’t say “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” Two hundred years before Twain’s death in 1910, Jonathan Swift did write that “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.…” A 2018 article in Science corroborates those two similar thoughts:

Lies spread faster than the truth

There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman