Whitebonnets

 

Exploring a huge colony of bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) along US 79 adjacent to the Palm Valley Lutheran Church in Round Rock on April 9th, I discovered a few small groups of whitebonnets in one area. In this “tower” of white you’re looking at two plants. The one in the foreground occupies all but the uppermost fringe of the picture, which shows a portion of another white bluebonnet behind the first one.

 

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From Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley’s 2022 book Superabundance, which is chock full of statistics showing how much the modern world has improved, here are some predictions that environmentalists made half a century ago.

 

• In a speech at the University of Rhode Island on November 16, 1970, Harvard University biology professor and Nobel laureate George Wald predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• In an April 1970 interview with Mademoiselle magazine, Paul Ehrlich claimed, “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• In a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe!,” Ehrlich asserted, “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. . . . [By 1975,] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• In the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness, environmental advocate Denis Hayes mourned, “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• In the same issue, Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, declared, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. . . . By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• In a January 1970 issue of Life magazine, an article titled “Ecology: A Cause Becomes a New Mass Movement” proclaimed, “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution. . . . By 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
• In the February 1970 issue of Time magazine, ecologist Kenneth Watt lamented, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• In the same issue, Watt forecasted, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate . . . that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”
• A Newsweek article published on January 26, 1970, speculated, “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.”
• In a speech at Swarthmore College on April 19, 1970, Watt concluded, “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

 

In case you haven’t noticed, none of those dire predictions came true. All widely (wildly) missed the mark.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Engelmann daisies among the bluebonnets

 

As you heard two posts back, in Williamson County on April 9th we saw lots of the pale variety of winecup. My photographs of them came incidentally after I stopped to photograph a dense colony of bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) that had plenty of Engelmann daisies (Engelmannia peristenia) mixed in.

 

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You may or may not have heard of Riley Gaines. She’s a young champion swimmer who has been speaking out against the unfairness of female athletes having to compete against biological men with enormous physical advantages who claim that they “identify as” women. One such is the swimmer William Thomas, who now goes by the name Lia [three consecutive letters in the middle of William]. Just a few years ago he competed as a man and didn’t do well: he was ranked 462nd in the world for male swimmers. Once he started swimming against women, he broke record after record. You may recall a photograph I linked to last year, in which you can see the big physical difference between him and three female opponents.

Riley Gaines was in the news recently after a conservative campus group invited her to speak to its members at San Francisco State University in California. Here’s the beginning of an April 7th New York Post story about what happened:

Swimmer Riley Gaines says she was “ambushed and physically hit” and forced to barricade for three hours from a mob of trans-rights protesters who stormed her speech about protecting women’s sports.

The 12-time All-American champ — a former competitor of controversial trans swimmer Lia Thomas -— shared alarming footage of cops hustling her to safety late Thursday at San Francisco State University.

“Why are you running!” one of the protesters yells gleefully — before a short-haired activist jumps in front of her to scream abuse.

You’re welcome to read the full story. Two days later the Post ran a follow-up that began like this:

Swimmer Riley Gaines blasted San Francisco State University for praising a “peaceful” protest where she alleges she was attacked by trans-activists after urging that transgender athletes be kept out of women’s sports.

Gaines, 23, threatened legal action against the school for its alleged failure to help her after droves of trans-rights protesters pushed back at Gaines’ controversial Thursday speech.

Video of the chaos shows dozens of protesters berating the former NCAA swimmer and 12-time All-American champ following the speech.

Gaines claims she was punched twice by a transgender woman and was forced to barricade for hours in a classroom.

Following the mayhem, Jamillah Moore, vice president for Student Affairs & Enrollment Management, emailed students thanking them for taking part in the event.

“It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space,” Moore wrote. “I am proud of the moments where we listened and asked insightful questions.”

“I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully,” she added.

Let’s get real here: it took no bravery whatsoever, nor was it peaceful, for a mob of agitators, some clearly hysterical, to scream obscenities at and even physically attack one lone woman. The university bureaucrat who lied about that reminds me of the infamous report on CNN during the moral panic of 2020. As The Hill described it back then:

CNN was ridiculed  for a video caption Wednesday night that read “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting” during a report from national correspondent Omar Jimenez in front of a building engulfed in flames during protests over the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Five will get you one—or is it one will get you five?

 

From the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower center on March 31 comes a flower head of Lindheimera texana, known as Texas yellow star, Texas star, and Lindheimer daisy. The connection to Texas is that normally each flower head in this species has five ray florets, like the five points of the star on the Texas state flag. Whether this flower head had more rays and lost the others, or whether other rays were yet to emerge, I don’t know. If you want to see what these flowers normally look like, you can check out a post from 2012.

 

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As it turns out, it is nearly impossible today not to trigger woke health care.

In January 2023, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), a society of the leading heart surgeons in the nation, held a conference where the outgoing president, Dr. John Calhoon, emphasized merit as the primary indicator of success in the profession.

“Affirmative action is not equal opportunity,” he wrote in a PowerPoint presentation. The “best metric is whether someone does good.”

He also wrote that “defining people by color, gender, religion only tends to ingrain bias and discrimination.” 

This is of course true. Studies by Harvard University professor James Dobbin found that most diversity trainings and workshops have little to no effect on the perceptions of colleagues toward one another. They may even be counterproductive, with some studies reporting greater animosity toward other races out of annoyance at the heavy-handed nature of courses. 

Immediately, medical news outlets called Calhoon a racist, white privileged, and other monikers of derision, but they weren’t the only ones. The Society for Thoracic Surgeons condemned Calhoon’s slide in a statement, describing his talking points as “inconsistent with STS’s core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Mind guards at some surgery clinics also issued their own internal responses, and my organization Color Us United has found a particularly egregious one.

 

That’s the beginning of Kenny Xu’s April 10th article detailing the vicious reactions of people in the medical establishment to Dr. John Calhoon’s assertion that merit is the most important qualification for thoracic surgeons, given that they engage in life-and-death work.

You’re welcome to read the full article.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Return to the St. Peter Lutheran Church Cemetery in Walburg

 

Last April bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) covered parts of the St. Peter Lutheran Church Cemetery in Walburg, about 30 miles north-northeast of Austin. This April 9th we went back and were pleased to find plenty of bluebonnets there again.

Given that the town began as a German settlement in 1881, the oldest tombstones often bear inscriptions in German. The name atop the one below is Katharine Muehlhause. The front of the stone tells us she was born on the 16th of May, 1854, in Waldkappel, Hessen-Kassel, and died on the 26th of March, 1916 (presumably in or near Walburg). The quotation from the New Testament book of John means “I live, and you shall also live.”

 

 

Orange lichens now make it easier to read the inscription on the tombstone of Dorathea Kuhn, née Kissman, who was born on the 24th of November, 1813, and died on the 21st of March, 1906.

 

  

In contrast to that long life of a little over 87 years, compare the short one below: Louise T., daughter of W.H. & S.H. Homeyer and wife of W.J. Cassens. She died on Christmas Day in 1891 at the age of 19. The line at the bottom reads: “She was a kind and affectionate wife — A fond mother and friend to all.” Her son Wessel Cassens had been born two days earlier, so most likely Louise died from complications of childbirth. Her son lived for only half a year and is also buried in the cemetery, which holds the graves of other infants as well. In those days high child mortality was a sad fact of life—or rather death. Fortunately improvements in sanitation and medicine since then have let many more people live longer and healthier lives.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Flower tower power versus mottled

 

From the bed of the North Fork of the San Gabriel River near Tejas Camp in Williamson County on September 12th come these contrasting views of clammyweed, Polanisia dodecandra. The looking-upward view popped the phrase “flower tower power” into my mind, while “mottled” seemed a good word to describe the looking-downward picture with its patches of light and shadow on the ground beneath the flowers.

 

 

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A main theme in my essays for the past year and a half has been that justice requires similar things to get treated in similar ways. If it’s known that person A and person B both committed a certain transgression but only person B gets called out or punished for it, that’s not justice; it’s a double standard. Thirteen months ago I wrote a detailed commentary along those lines regarding the extensive rioting that took place in the United States from mid-2020 through January 2021.

A much less consequential example came to light this week. Sunny Hostin, a co-host on the American television talk show “The View,” accused Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and former American ambassador to the United Nations, of playing down her ethnic Indian heritage by using the first name Nikki. Turns out, however, that Nikki was in fact one of the names on Nikki Haley’s birth certificate. It’s not unusual for a person with multiple given names to prefer one of them, even if it isn’t the first one on the person’s birth certificate or baptismal certificate. For example, the great classical music composer Franz Joseph Haydn went by Joseph, not Franz. The American naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau had been given the birth name David Henry but he eventually changed the order of his two given names and went by Henry. Similarly, Mr. and Mrs. Randhawa named their daughter Nimrata Nikki, and as a girl she chose to go by Nikki.

And now for the pot-calling-the-kettle-black part of the story. Knowing almost nothing about Sunny Hostin, I looked up her biography and found that her mother, Rosa Beza, comes from Puerto Rico, and her father, William Cummings, is American. Mr. and Mrs. Cummings named their daughter Asunción. That’s Spanish for Assumption, a Catholic reference to the Assumption of Mary. It’s easy to see how the -sun- in the Spanish name Asunción could give rise to the English name Sunny. There’s nothing wrong or unusual about that. What is wrong and unusual is for a person who changed Asunción to Sunny to accuse someone else of trying to cover up a foreign background. We call that hypocrisy.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

River primrose again

 

The tallest of all our evening primrose species in central Texas is Oenothera jamesii, known as river primrose. I’d discovered a good colony of it in the bed of the North Fork of the San Gabriel River near Tejas Camp in Williamson County in mid-September of 2021, so on September 12th this year I went back there and wasn’t disappointed, as you see above. And here’s a much closer look at one of the low flowers:

 

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Full house

From May 13th at the Southwest Williamson County Regional Park, look at all the Euphoria kernii beetles that had crammed themselves into the base of a prickly pear cactus flower, Opuntia engelmannii. The beetles did seem to be in a state of euphoria.

 

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 Here’s more about consciousness from philosopher Julian Baggini’s The Ego Trick:

So we have these three facts: thoughts and feelings are real, they are not describable in purely physical terms, but the universe has within it only the physical things described by the equations of physicists. It seems the only way to make sense of this is that mental events emerge from physical ones, without being strictly identical with them. As the neurologist Todd E. Feinberg puts it, “your life is not a pack of cells; your life is what your particular pack of cells collectively do, though I cannot observe such a thing as your life, touch it, put it under a microscope, or keep it on a bottle on a shelf.” Thought and feeling are what matter does, when it is arranged in the remarkably complex ways that brains are. Matter is all that is needed for them to exist, but they are not themselves lumps of matter. In this sense, “I” is a verb dressed as a noun.

The idea that the mental emerges from the physical is a tricky one. It looks to me like a partial description masquerading as an explanation. What I mean is, to say consciousness is an emergent property is not to explain consciousness at all. To do that you’d have to explain how it emerges, and although some claim to have done that, most remain unconvinced. But what does seem to be true is that consciousness does indeed emerge from complex physical events in the brain, even if we don’t know how it does so. Whatever the mechanism, we have thoughts and feelings because we have physical brains that work, not because there’s something else in our heads doing the mental work instead. The evidence for this is simple but overwhelming: damage the brain, and you impair consciousness. Change the chemicals in the brain, and you change consciousness. Stimulate certain parts of the brain, and you get a certain kind of experience. To accept this (as surely we must) but insist that brains aren’t the engines of thought is not impossible, but it is perverse.

(Another passage appeared in a post two weeks ago.)

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stickleaf on a sunny morning

Seems like I almost always have to go into Williamson County to find stickleaf, Mentzelia oligosperma. That was true on May 13th when we visited Northwest Williamson County Regional Park for the first time in years and found stickleaf in several spots there. The plant gets its common name from the fact that its leaves readily cling to clothing and even skin. The second picture shows why.

  

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I spend a fair amount of time looking things up because I strive for accuracy in my commentaries. That’s why I include so many links to documents. If you’re aware of any facts that I’ve reported incorrectly, please point them out. Of course people can disagree about what policies to follow, but we have to start from the facts.

 

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Speaking of illegal immigration into the United States, as I did last time, here are the official 2022 figures for the number of monthly encounters border patrol agents have had with people who illegally entered the country by coming across the border from Mexico:

January: 154,812

February: 165,894

March: 221,303

And for April the number was 234,088, the highest ever recorded. Do you see a trend? While a portion of the people encountered get sent back, many are allowed to remain, and the current administration pays their way to go wherever they choose to go inside our country. The government even sends some of the illegal border-crossers to their destinations on charter flights, though officials have managed to conceal many of those from the public. According to an April 20th New York Post article by Miranda Devine:

 

… in recent weeks “the charters are back with a fury,” says a whistleblower from Avelo Airlines, one of three charter companies raking in millions of taxpayer dollars whisking migrants out of sight.

Staffers are disturbed by the secrecy of the operation, and the prospect that they are participating in a human-trafficking operation, the whistleblower says.

“The charters are not on our paperwork, not on the [air-traffic] breakdown, not on the schedule, not on the flight plan. They’re not listed anywhere”…

Avelo employees have begun openly to discuss concerns that they may be participating in human trafficking, says the whistleblower, especially with so many ­unaccompanied minors on flights.

“We’re trafficking children,” the whistleblower says. “I am not OK with that happening . . .
“The company is saying it’s not true, but people don’t believe that, and everyone wants to leave. People stay for three months and leave.”

 

Title 42, a Covid-era policy that allows authorities to immediately send illegal entrants back across the border without having to entertain their political asylum claims (most of which are really the understandable desire to have a better standard of living), is set to expire on May 23rd—just three days from today. According to the Texas Tribune: “Homeland Security predicts up to 18,000 daily encounters with migrants — more than double the current average — when Title 42 ends.” Now, I’ve long been leery of the phrase “up to,” a staple ploy that advertisers use to make people think the average value of something is larger than it really is. So let’s say that if Title 42 ends, the number of encounters with illegal border-crosses will rise to “only” 15,000 every day rather than 18,000 every day. And let’s say that without Title 42, authorities will have to let 12,000 of those 15,000 new illegal border-crossers remain inside the United States every day. Where will that leave us? Since 12,000 is a daily number, we’ll multiply by 365.25 to estimate the yearly toll. We find that the current administration will be allowing 4,383,000 illegal border-crossers to stay in our country every year. If that continues unabated, then between now and when the current administration’s term ends in January of 2025, something like 11,000,000 illegal entrants will have been allowed to stay in our country. To give you a sense of scale, remember that the country’s largest city, New York, has a little under 9 million people. In other words, the illegal entrants allowed to stay here in just the next two-and-a-half years could be imagined to form the nation’s new largest city, though not a contiguous one. And of course to those 11,000,000 illegal entrants we’ll have to add the presumed one million or two million or three million that made it past overworked and understaffed border authorities altogether—the so-called gotaways.

Some people think that this kind of mass lawlessness is how we should be running our country. I don’t.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Capital variation

From the Latin noun caput, which meant ‘head,’ we get the adjective capital, which originally and literally meant ‘having to do with a head.’ Austin, where I live, is the capital—i.e. head—city of Texas. That’s one kind of metaphor. Another is calling the inflorescence of a plant in the composite botanical family (Asteraceae) a capitulum, or ‘little [flower] head.’ Even within a plant species one flower head can look rather different from another, both in shape and color, just as human heads can. You see that exemplified here with two Texas thistle (Cirsium texanum) flower heads from Northwest Williamson County Regional Park on May 13th.

  

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In yesterday’s commentary I brought up the terrible May 14th mass murder in Buffalo, New York, in which an 18-year-old white supremacist and anti-Semite killed a bunch of supermarket shoppers, most of whom were targeted because they were black. I pointed out that some people in the media immediately claimed that the shooter was inspired by Republicans and conservatives, as well as conservative television news channel Fox News and in particular one of its commenters, Tucker Carlson. I showed you that, unfortunately for the people making those claims, a long manifesto left by the killer made clear he hated conservatives, and especially a Jewish conservative like Ben Shapiro. Nowhere in the manifesto did the killer mention Tucker Carlson.

In case anyone wants to accuse me of “cherry picking” evidence, let me add now that the killer did believe something that Tucker Carlson believes: the declining birth rate among white Americans, coupled with the American government’s allowing—even encouraging—high illegal immigration into the United States from non-European countries, has resulted in a declining ratio of white Americans. A check of the numbers confirms it. According to a Wikipedia article: “As of the 2020 Census, 61.6%, or 204,277,273 people, were white alone. This represented a national white demographic decline from a 72.4% share of the US’s population (white alone) in 2010.” You may look on the decline favorably, unfavorably, or neutrally, but the decrease in the portion of Americans who are white is real.

Now let me make a point about logic, or the lack of it. Just because two people share a certain belief or preference doesn’t mean they share all beliefs and preferences. I shouldn’t need to point out something so basic, but I feel that I have to, given the way some commenters quickly turned to guilt by association. Yes, the Buffalo killer and Tucker Carlson share a belief about the undesirability of unchecked illegal immigration. That doesn’t make Tucker Carlson in any way responsible for the mass shooting in Buffalo—any more than Senator Bernie Sanders and leftist talk-show host Rachel Maddow were responsible for the 2017 incident in which a man who admired those two public figures fired 60 shots at Republican members of Congress—one of whom almost died—who were playing baseball as practice for a game to raise money for charity.

Similarly, just because the Buffalo killer who disapproves of illegal immigration was a white racist and an anti-Semite doesn’t mean that everyone, or even most people, or even more than a smattering of the people who disapprove of illegal immigration, are white supremacists and anti-Semites. Take me, for example. As I revealed in greater detail in a commentary a year ago, I happen to be Jewish, the son of someone who fled the Soviet Union with his family in the 1920s to escape communism and anti-Semitism. I also happen to be married to someone of a different race who’s an immigrant to the United States from the other side of the world. And yet by the “logic” of some people in the media, because I don’t condone illegal immigration I must be a xenophobic anti-Semitic white supremacist. Crazy, isn’t it?

 

To be continued tomorrow.

 

 

  

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ditch diving

A recent post played up the advantage that plants in ditches get from the moisture the soil retains there. That’s how it was in a ditch on Main St. in the rural community of Thorndale on April 10th. The seed columns of anemones (Anemone berlandieri) vary a lot in length, with the one shown here coming from the long end of the range. Spiderworts (Tradescantia sp.) graciously provided the purple in the background. The second portrait shows the ditch-happy spiderworts in their own right.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman