Llano County Rd. 106

 

On April 23rd, after driving southwest from Llano for a while on FM 2323, I headed north on Llano County Rd. 106. That proved a good choice: not only did dense wildflowers continue, but there was one stretch without barbed wire where I could wander freely and compose pictures the way I wanted to. In the top view, the red blanketflowers appear to have been Gaillardia amblyodon, and the white flowers lazy daisies, Aphanostephus skirrhobasis. Notice how different the wildflower mixes can be on adjacent parts of a property; the yellow flowers below were brown bitterweed, Helenium amarum var. badium.

 

  

 

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It’s the viral image that captured the clash between the anti-Israel protesters who stormed Columbia and the campus workers who tried to stop them. As the mob invaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, a facilities worker was photographed pushing a demonstrator against a wall. 

Later, it emerged that the protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $2.3 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five years.

 

You’ve probably seen the photograph, but I’ll bet you haven’t heard or read more. Now you can, in Francesca Block’s revealing May 5th article in The Free Press. The link in the article’s second paragraph reveals a lot of unsavory information about the criminal, whose depredations go back at least as far as 2005. You can also read Francesca Block’s follow-up article in which she interviews two other traumatized Columbia janitors.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prairie bishop and prairie parsley on the prairie

 

While driving south through the Blackland Prairie on FM 973 just north of Manor on April 22nd I pulled over to photograph a great colony of prairie bishop (Bifora americana). The second pictures gives you a closer look at the prairie parsley (Polytaenia texana) rising above the colony as well as the many bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) that were hanging on rather late in the season for them. If the vernacular name snow-on-the-prairie weren’t already taken by Euphorbia bicolor, Bifora americana could just as well be called that.

 

 

 

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A commentary three days ago described how the executive branch of the United States, which the Constitution grants no legislative authority whatsoever, has unlawfully changed the civil rights law called Title IX. Already a lawsuit has been filed to get the illegal power grab rescinded:

 

Today, female college athletes, college students, parents, and state attorneys general filed a blockbuster lawsuit against the Biden administration’s illegal Title IX regulation. The recently announced regulation upends the 1972 Title IX law, which forbids discrimination against women and girls, including by providing males access to girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms and requiring speech codes that indoctrinate young students with gender ideology. The regulation also ends basic due process rights owed every student by limiting individuals accused of sexual harassment from defending themselves.

 

You can read more of that April 29th announcement from Parents Defending Education.

 

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Phlox in and out of focus

 

Behold mixed stands of Drummond’s phlox (Phlox drummondii) and Indian paintbrush (Castilleja indivisa) looking pretty beneath trees along US 183 in Hays County on March 8th. Further down the highway, in northern Gonzales County, the same kind of phlox made a colorfully amorphous background for a flowering old plainsman plant (Hymenopappus artemisiifolius).

 

 

 

 

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Bias is a disposition to believe that something is a certain way even when the evidence doesn’t support that belief. Coleman Hughes offers a good example of bias in his new book The End of Race Politics.

 

It’s an ironic feature of our national discourse that the resonance of Dr. King’s message now depends entirely upon the identity of the messenger rather than the content of the message. In one study, behavioral scientist Michael Bernstein asked people to rate the following quote, squarely in the colorblind tradition, on a racism scale from 1 to 5 (“1” meaning not racist at all and “5” meaning extremely racist):

 
Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.

 
The first group was told that the quote is by Dr. King (which is true) while the second group was told it was by President Trump (which is false). When participants believed it was a King quote, Republicans rated it a “1” and Democrats rated it a “1.3.” In other words, almost nobody saw the quote as racist. But when participants believed it was a Trump quote, Republicans rated it a “1.4” and Democrats rated it a “3.4.”

 

  © 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Crow poison after a long absence

  

Can’t believe it’s been nine years since I showed you the common wildflower with the strange name crow poison, Nothoscordum bivalve. This windy view is from February 22nd along the northern stretch of Burnet Rd., where two dozen or so of these flowers had scattered themselves in a block-long shallow ditch. I’d stopped to photograph a blossoming tree, and a Spanish-speaking guy in a nearby grounds maintenance crew told me about white flowers farther down the street, which turned out to be the crow poison. The Spanish name for the species, by the way, is cebolleta, literally ‘little onion.’ You can probably see the resemblance to onions, which are indeed in the same botanical family, but crow poison lacks the characteristic pungency of onions and garlic.

 

 

 

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Has the United States ever officially been a color-blind society? You could make a plausible case that it hasn’t. For four centuries, it enshrined enslavement and then segregation of African-Americans, pursued the near-extermination and ethnic cleansing of most Native Americans, and subsequently made “white” racial identity central to its immigration policies. Then, in the mid-1960s, in civil rights and immigration, it finally repudiated this racist regime…

 

That’s the beginning of Andrew Sullivan’s February 16th article “Neoracism, Finally on Defense,” whose subtitle is “Coleman Hughes makes a defense of color neutrality in law and politics.” Before long, however, we have this:

 

But almost as soon as the 1964 breakthrough in overcoming racial classifications took hold, it was abandoned. In a perverse echo of the past, sanctioned preferential treatment for blacks slowly began to replace sanctioned preferential treatment for whites. Set-asides, quotas, affirmative action all proliferated, all rooted in the old, crude racial classifications. The notion that affirmative action was a temporary adjustment, to be retired in a couple of decades at most, gradually disappeared. In fact, it was extended to every other racial or sexual minority and to women. Even as women and many blacks and other minorities triumphed in the economy and mainstream culture, they were nonetheless deemed eternal victims of pervasive misogyny and racism.

The more tangible the success for women and minorities, the more abstract the notion of “systemic oppression” became. Critical race theorists argued that color-blindness itself was a form of racism; and that all white people, consciously or unconsciously, could not help but be perpetuators of racial hate, whether they intended to or not. That’s how we arrived at a moment when Jon Stewart decided he’d tackle the subject of racial inequality in America by hosting a show called “The Problem With White People,” and when “The 1619 Project” actually argued that the American Revolution was not driven by a desire to be free from Britain but to retain slavery, which Britain threatened.

The poignancy of Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race Politics, lies therefore in the tenacity of his faith in the spirit of 1964. “Color-blindness” is not the best description of this, because of course we continue to see others’ race, just as we will always see someone’s sex. No, as Hughes explains: “To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and private lives.”

 

You’re welcome to read Andrew Sullivan’s full article, and of course also Coleman Hughes’s new book.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A small white snail shell

 

From time to time I’ve shown how common it is for little land snails in the Austin area to slither their way up plants. Eventually, though, the fate of such snails is to have their shells become sarcophagi littering the ground. At one place in Great Hills Park on February 9th I noticed quite a few of them, one of which I worked at making an artsy—some would say Rembrandtesque—portrait of nestled up against a dry leaf.

 

 

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“This Bay Area school district spent $250,000 on Woke Kindergarten program. Test scores fell even further.” That’s the headline from a February 3rd story in the San Francisco Chronicle, which begins:

 

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.

The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement. 

But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino. 

English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline [emphasis mine] of about 4 percentage points in each category.

 

Later on the article tells us this:

 

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

 

So while poor students learn nothing, leftist ideologues get rich at public expense—apparently illegally, because with federal funds comes a particular obligation to obey federal laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlaws racial discrimination. Last I heard, painting white people in general as racists is racial discrimination.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Two looks at blackfoot daisies in winter

 

Until the first hard freeze finally laid itself down abruptly on central Texas in mid-January, some wildflowers had kept on blooming. Both these views of blackfoot daisies (Melampodium leucanthum) are from January 6th in Liberty Hill, at the same place as the Maximilian sunflowers you saw in a post two weeks ago. The “nerves” or “veins” on the ray florets of blackfoot daisies often appear prominently when seen from below, while from above they typically don’t show up [literally] much.

 

 

This post serves as one day of “floral relief” to all the preceding and still-to-come ice photographs.

 

 

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I just read Simon Winchester’s engaging 2013 American history book The Men Who United the States, with subtitle America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible. Some of those men I (and probably you) knew about, like Lewis and Clark, Samuel F.B. Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. Others were new to me, like geologist and mountaineer Clarence Rivers King, who in addition to many scientific accomplishments exposed the greatest diamond fraud in American history. On the personal side, he was unusual because “the fair-skinned and blue-eyed Clarence King, a Yale-educated geologist and former senior Government official from a good and old family in Newport, met and fell in love that winter [1887–1888] with a young black woman from the banks of the Chattahoochee river in Georgia. She had been born into a slave family. He was 46; she was 28. He was white, and she was black.” He told her his name was James Todd and claimed that he worked as a Pullman porter, which she was bound to interpret as meaning he was black, too, despite his light complexion. King ended up living in a secret common-law marriage with her and having five children. You can read more about that in Simon Winchester’s book and also from a 2010 NPR story.

 

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A white egret flying

 

At the Willow Trace Pond in far north Austin on December 23rd of the now departed year I panned to grab some shots of a white egret, Ardea alba, flying over the pond. Click the picture to enlarge substantially.

 

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What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

 

That’s from Jacob Siegel’s long and detailed Tablet article last March, A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation, which you’re welcome to read.

A common theme in my commentaries has been the way ideologues have been pushing hard to redefine words away from their longstanding and generally understood meanings. Disinformation and misinformation are prime examples: the way ideologues use those two terms now, they often mean any information or claim, even when verifiably true, that contradicts the ideologues’ dogma.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

Peak fluffiness

 

The poverty weed (Baccharis neglecta) around the pond on Discovery Blvd. in the town of Cedar Park had reached peak fluffiness by the time we did some walking there on November 14th. You can see how the breeze was doing the seeds’ bidding.

 

   

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I call your attention to “The Last Line of Defense,” a talk Bari Weiss gave as the Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society on November 10. You can watch a video of the 38-minute speech, or you could read the text of the speech. Here’s one passage:

 

The civilization that feels as natural to us as oxygen? That takes thousands of years, thousands of nudges of progress, thousands of risks, thousands of forgotten sacrifices to build up. But vandals can make quick work of all that. 

Reagan used to say that freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. The same can be said of civilization.

If there can be anything good that has come out of this nightmare that began on October 7 it is this: we have been shaken awake. We know the gravity of the stakes. And they are not theoretical. They are real.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

Among the last

 

Among the last of our wildflowers each calendar year is Ageratina havanensis, known as white mistflower, shrubby boneset, Havana snakeroot, and thoroughwort. The flowers’ white often bears a pale pink tinge, as these in my neighborhood did on November 14th.

 

 

  

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No comment today.

(Of course that’s a paradox because “No comment today” is a comment.)

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

Heath aster

 

In contrast to the many Maximilian sunflowers in the northeast quadrant of Burleson Rd. and McKinney Falls Parkway on November 5th, I noticed only a few heath asters (Symphyotrichum ericoides). Growing low as they do, they retained dewdrops from the fog earlier that morning (whose effects you saw much more obviously on a funnel web).

 

 

  

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After reading the article cited in yesterday’s commentary and looking to see what else Jonathan Sumption has written, I found his article “The death of historical truth,” which begins:

 

A number of intolerant ideologies have swept through the worlds of learning, literature and the visual and performing arts over the past two decades. I am concerned with one of them. Its essential feature is the diversion of academic disciplines to a task for which they are usually ill-suited, namely the reform of modern society so as to redress perceived inequalities, notably of race. In the course of this exercise, some of these disciplines have been discredited and others distorted, generally with little or no factual basis. The study of history is particularly vulnerable. Most historical scholarship involves judicious selection from a vast and usually incomplete body of material. It is possible to create an entirely false narrative without actually lying, by exaggeration and tendentious selection. The major threat to historical integrity comes when the criteria of selection are derived from a modern ideological agenda. We have been witnessing the reshaping of the history of the past four centuries to serve as a weapon in current political disputes. Objectivity and truth have been the main casualties.

 

Later on he writes:

 

Free speech is not a luxury. Ever since the 17th century, the civilisation of mankind has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as an objective truth, independent of human will. It may be only partly knowable, and more or less difficult to identify, but it exists somewhere out there whether we like it or not. We have built our intellectual world by objective study of the available material, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just social constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. They have made possible the phenomenal economic prosperity and intellectual achievement of the last four centuries.

The basic principles of rational discourse on which all this depended are now under challenge. Reason is rejected as arrogant. Feeling and emotion are upheld as suitable substitutes. Freedom is treated as domineering, enlightenment as offensive to the unenlightened. Current campaigns to suppress certain opinions and eliminate debate are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to contradict, for fear of provoking their outrage and abuse. These things are symptoms of the closing of the human mind and the narrowing of our intellectual world. Something in our civilisation has died.

 

You’re welcome to read the full article.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman