Posts Tagged ‘yellow’
Nothing anomalous
Several self-sown stands of Tinantia anomala, known as widow’s tears and false dayflower, now reside in our back yard. The view above is from April 20th, as is the portrait below of a straggler daisy, Calyptocarpus vialis. A yellow flower head of this species is about a quarter of an inch (6mm) in diameter.
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The website USCourts.gov, reporting on the 1941 Supreme Court case Cox v. New Hampshire, 312 U.S. 569, describes the issue in that case as “whether time, place, and manner restrictions on holding a parade violate the First Amendment.” In its summary of the case’s resolution, the website notes: “A unanimous Supreme Court, via Justice Charles Evans Hughes, held that, although the government cannot regulate the contents of speech, it can place reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech for the public safety. The Court held that the New Hampshire law was not meant to prohibit speech, but simply to regulate it when it took the form of a parade or other form of large gathering.”
With that precedent in mind, yesterday I mailed a letter to the President of Columbia University. I identified myself as a graduate and said how appalled I was by the recent events there. Then I went on as follows:
In Cox v. New Hampshire, 312 U.S. 569 (1941), the U.S. Supreme Court decided 9-0 to uphold the principle that governmental entities may impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place, and manner of people’s speaking. That applies a fortiori to a private institution like you, my alma mater, Columbia University. I am calling on you to adopt a set of reasonable restrictions on demonstrating that include at least the following.
No demonstrator may impede or try to impede any other person from moving freely about the campus. No demonstrator may obstruct any pathway, roadway, sidewalk, gate, doorway, corridor, steps, or other means of access to any part of the campus.
No demonstrator may block access to or shout down a scheduled activity like a class, an exam, a presentation by an invited speaker, or a graduation ceremony.
No demonstrator may wear a mask or anything else that keeps onlookers from seeing the demonstrator’s face. (Anyone who claims to be immuno-compromised may stand outdoors in fresh air 10 feet away from other people.)
No demonstrator may create any sort of encampment or put up a tent or erect any type of structure.
No demonstrator may move closer than 10 feet to a non-demonstrator, nor may a demonstrator follow any non-demonstrator.
No demonstrator may bring, carry or deploy as part of a demonstration an object larger than 18 inches in any dimension. That includes but is not limited to signs, poles, boards, banners, flags, and umbrellas. No sign may be on a stick or pole. No demonstrator may attach a sign or banner to any structure.
No demonstrator may use a bullhorn, loudspeaker, or any other sound-amplification device, nor may a demonstrator use a noisemaker, drum, musical instrument, or any other device that creates sound.
The above rules must be rigorously enforced. A member of the Columbia community—including students, faculty, administrators, staff, and alumni—found to have violated any of the above rules shall receive a warning upon a first offense. Upon again violating any rule, which needn’t be the same rule as before, the violator shall be given a suspension of at least one week. After a third offense, expulsion or termination of employment shall be the penalty. A violator who is not part of the Columbia University community shall be referred to authorities for criminal prosecution on charges of trespass, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, and the like. And of course if any person, whether part of the Columbia community or not, violates a criminal law, University authorities must immediately call in the police.
It took several days to put the letter together. Will it do any good? Probably not, but I felt I had to send it.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Lake Victor
After leaving Lampasas on April 13th we headed for the tiny town of Lake Victor, which we’d never been to before. I figured that was as good a rural spot as any to hunt for wildflowers, and the place didn’t disappoint. As we entered the hamlet, a broad colony of four-nerve daisies (Tetraneuris linearifolia) brought me to a drivestill (the automotive counterpart to a standstill). A closer look revealed that a few prairie verbenas (Glandularia bipinnatifida) had gotten a roothold among the overwhelmingly larger force of four-nerve daisies.
Not far away, bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) took a stronger stand against four-nerve daisies in front of a ramshackle old wooden house. I found an article that gives information about the house and answers the same question we had when we visited Lake Victor and never did see a lake.
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Is there any escape from woke indoctrination? I’ve heard versions of this question from countless doctors, nurses and other medical professionals. Healthcare has been captured by activists pushing divisive and discriminatory ideologies, especially through education and training. One of the most visible manifestations is mandatory “implicit bias training,” which seven states have adopted and at least 25 more are considering. In Michigan, medical professionals will soon be free.
On May 1, my organization will launch a continuing medical education course that fulfills Michigan’s implicit-bias-training mandate. Created by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2021 and updated last year, the mandate requires regular indoctrination for the members of 26 medical fields—not only doctors and nurses, but athletic trainers, acupuncturists, massage therapists, midwives and many others. As many as 400,000 medical professionals are now required to learn about implicit bias every time they apply for or renew a license. Michigan’s mandate is one of the most expansive in the nation.
The authors of this policy no doubt want every medical professional in the state to accept the woke party line on race. But our course goes in a more ethical—and less political—direction. Instead of teaching implicit bias as fact, we’re telling medical professionals the truth—that this training is grounded in falsehood and is a direct threat to the health and well-being of patients.
You can read the rest of Dr. Stanley Goldfarb’s April 26th article “How We’ve Taken the Bias Out of ‘Implicit Bias Training,’” whose subtitle is “Our new course satisfies Michigan’s pernicious mandate by turning woke indoctrination on its head.”
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Butterweed
Packera tampicana (known as butterweed, yellowtop, and Great Plains ragwort) was thriving in the field at the southwest corner of US 183 and McKinney Falls Parkway on March 8. In looking at this picture now, the mix of fallen and still upright stalks of tall plants from last year (perhaps giant ragweed) collectively give me the impression of a dilapidated wire fence.
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Throughout history, much language change has been generated by people who aren’t well educated, which throughout history has meant almost everyone. A speaker makes a mistake, a deviation from what people have been saying, or else coins a new term. Sometimes other people pick up on the mistake or novelty and start saying it too. Voilà: the language has changed. It’s still a mystery why some changes survive and become the new norm, while other changes don’t get carried forward. For example, check out a list of American slang from a century ago and you’ll find familiar as well as unfamiliar expressions.
The other day I wanted to know how railroad freight in the United States has been doing. I found it has held generally steady from 2002 to 2022 (which therefore means a slow per-person decline, given our growing population). The Statista page where I found that information includes a sentence referring at sub-intervals in that two-decade range: “Rail freight volumes in the United States have been genually increasing since 2016, reaching 2.53 trillion tonne-kilometers in 2018.” Did you catch that word, “genually”? The writer meant “generally.”
Not having come across that mistake before, I did a search for it. Google asked if I meant “genuinely.” That clued me in to the fact that people have been using “genually” for “geninely” as well as for “generally.” I did searches for “genually -generally” and “genually -genuinely,” where the minus sign is meant to exclude hits containing the real words and show me only hits with “genually.” After looking through a bunch of hits, my take-away is that “genually” is most often a mistake for “genuinely.”
One last wrinkle is that English has a technical adjective, “genual,” which means ‘of or pertaining to the knee’ (from the Latin cognate for ‘knee,’ genū). That means this nature photographer can genuinely say that the pad he carries around to kneel on keeps him genually safer than he would generally be without it.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Red in three places
Agarita (Berberis trifoliolata) flowers are yellow, but the buds that precede the flowers often have red on them. The stalks leading to the plant’s tripartite leaves may be red, and the leaflets themselves have a tendency to turn from green to red as they age. You see all those kinds of red in today’s picture from February 23rd in my part of Austin.
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Look at the gorgeous nature photographs of Marsel Van Oosten.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
First on first
On February 22nd at Schroeter Neighborhood Park I found my first four-nerve daisy (Tetraneuris linearifolia) of the year. On it was my first butterfly of the year, seemingly a dainty sulphur (Nathalis iole).
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The pitiless power of arithmetic
How many millions of people have entered the United States illegally in the past three years but managed to stay here anyway? Estimates vary, in part because in addition to the millions that border authorities have processed, there are the “known gotaways,” whom officials became aware of but didn’t manage to detain, plus the “unknown gotaways” who escaped detection entirely. According to a February 21st article in the New York Post:
Nearly 7.3 million migrants have illegally crossed the southwest border under President Biden’s watch, a number greater than the population of 36 individual states, a Fox News analysis finds.
That figure comes from US Customs and Border Protection, which has already reported 961,537 border encounters in the current fiscal year, which runs from October through September.
Again, that figure, as large as it is, doesn’t include the unknown gotaways, who likely have numbered several million over the past three years, making the total perhaps 10 million. Advocates of massive illegal immigration into the United States plead humanitarianism: how could a rich country like the United States not open its doors to welcome all those downtrodden, suffering people?
In contrast, people who favor substantial legal immigration point out that the existing legal process gives authorities a chance to vet applicants and try to make sure they aren’t criminals, spies, terrorists, scammers, loafers, or otherwise undesirable.
In reply, advocates in the immigration-no-matter-what group try to cast aspersions on the people wanting to keep undesirable people out. Those advocates say that, as a group, illegal immigrants are no more likely to be criminals than American citizens are. That may or may not be true—it’s hard to know—but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is true.
An article in Social Science Research mentions a 2017 study which states that “the share of the total U.S. adult population with felony records is about 8 percent.” That’s for adults, whereas some substantial fraction of the illegal immigrants over the past three years have been children. Women are also much less likely than men to commit crimes, especially violent crimes, but then a disproportionately large number of illegal immigrants have been single young males, the group with by far the highest crime rate.
Trying to balance all those things, let’s assume a million adult males have been entering and staying in the United States illegally each year for the past three years. If we apply the 8-percent-with-felony-records figure, we come up with 80,000 additional adult males each year who are likely to commit a felony at some point.
Though the percent may be small, our government is allowing another 80,000 eventual criminals per year to stay here. Why would we want to add any criminals to our population, much less the quarter of a million of them that the current administration has allowed since January 2021?
What that means on a human level was brought home to us the other day in Athens, Georgia, with the murder of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley, who had gone out jogging. When she didn’t return, her roommate called the police, who quickly found Laken bludgeoned to death in the woods near where she’d gone jogging. Police soon arrested José Antonio Ibarra and charged him with the murder. Initial reports described him as “not a citizen,” but later accounts said he’s a Venezuelan who “illegally entered the US in 2022 — and was cut loose when there was no space for him in a detention center.” Do you think the family and friends of Laken Riley will take comfort in learning that our current government practices catch-and-release with people who come into the United States illegally, and in being told that those people are no more likely to be criminals than Americans?
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Backlighting comes for pickerelweed
At the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on January 11th I spent some time down low to see what backlighting could do for the yellowing leaves of a little pickerelweed colony (Pontederia cordata).
(If you’re not familiar with the pretty flowers pickerelweed plants produce earlier in the year, have a look.)
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“The Truth About Banned Books: The left claims that progressive books are being censored in public schools. But my research proves the opposite is true.”
When people make claims about how things are, it’s import to examine the evidence to see if it supports the claims. Verification is a key tenet of what’s come to be known as the scientific method.
You’re welcome to read James Fishback’s January 17th article, whose title tells you that the evidence in this case didn’t support the claim about book banning.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Butterflies drawn to Maximilian sunflowers
The aging and not yet quite so aging Maximilian sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani) in Liberty Hill on January 6th were still attracting a slew of insects, like the painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) above and what appears to be a fiery skipper (Hylephila phileus) below. Not till I looked at the second picture on my computer monitor two days later did I make out the tiny spider.
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“The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity,”
by Bret Stephens, in the January 16th New York Times
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Bee-like flies drawn to Maximilian sunflowers
The Maximilian sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani) in Liberty Hill on January 6th were attracting a slew of insects. The good folks at BugGuide identified the insect above as a female syrphid fly, Copestylum avidum, and the one below as a female drone fly, Eristalis stipator. Though many people might mistake the two flies for bees, they aren’t. And while the sunflower—I believe it’s the same one in both pictures—strikes us as being past its prime, the insects obviously didn’t care.
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“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Plenty of websites credit that quotation to Winston Churchill, though the attribution—like so many on the Internet—appears to be incorrect. Nevertheless, the thought the quotation expresses, whoever said it, is an excellent one. It’s pretty common for the people in charge of an institution to implement a policy, only to have that policy fail. I saw many instances of that in education during my decades as a teacher. Sometimes policies that failed and were rightfully abandoned even got brought back years later by people for whom ideology overrides reality.
Periodically checking the results of a policy should be de rigueur, but history shows it often enough isn’t. Even when checking does take place, if evidence proves that a policy has failed, the promoters of the failed policy frequently refuse to admit it. It’s not unusual for them to double down and insist, against the evidence, that the policy is a good one and we should extend it to more people and spend even more money on it.
On the subject of failed policies, an article by Mike Riggs in the February 2024 issue of Reason offers examples of well-meant environmental measures that ended up doing harm. One was the installation of boxes meant to give homes to bats in people’s yard and thereby reduce the number of mosquitoes. It turned out that “in hot months, artificial roosts that are poorly located, too small, darkly painted, or insufficiently ventilated can reach lethal temperatures, killing bat pups.”
Another example was 2020 emissions regulations imposed by the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization. They “had the desired effect of reducing the amount of sulfur that ships released into the air, as well as the undesired effect of simultaneously reducing the volume of sulfur-based clouds, called ‘ship tracks,’ that form along shipping routes and reflect the sun away from the Earth. ‘By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster,’ explained Science reporter Paul Voosen. ‘That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions.'”
To read about the other three examples in the article you can subscribe to Reason, as the online version of the article is available only to subscribers. That said, some of the stories at Reason‘s website are accessible to everyone, so check it out.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Maximilian sunflowers into the new year
It was in Liberty Hill, a fast-growing town three suburbs north of Austin, that I found several stands of Maximilian sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani) still doing their thing on January 6th, eight days before frigid weather finally settled into our area and most of the rest of Texas. Notice the typically asymmetric way in which flower heads open in this species.
And how about the pinwheel effect below?
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I was 17 and living in Vancouver, Canada, when a teenage boy came up to me at school and pointed to my black hijab.
“You’re Muslim?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, a little surprised he knew, since Muslims and women in hijabs weren’t a common sight in Vancouver at the time.
He smiled at me and said, “I’m Jewish! We’re cousins.”
I remember recoiling and scrunching my face in disgust. He was understandably shocked. I’m ashamed of this reaction, but it was involuntary. It’s how my Islamist mother and her extremist Sunni husband raised me….
That’s from Madeleine Rowley’s December 16th article “We Were Taught to Hate Jews,” in which five “apostates, former Islamists, and an almost-terrorist” talk about “how they changed their minds.” You’re welcome to read the article.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Channeling
At the Riata Trace Pond on December 17th I channeled my inner Escher, with the yellow coming from the fallen leaves of a black willow tree, Salix nigra, rather than a goldfish. (To tell the truth, I have occasionally seen goldfish at the opposite end of this pond, but because goldfish are native to China rather than America, I haven’t photographed them. In fact Wikipedia notes that “goldfish released into the wild have become an invasive pest in parts of North America.” Too bad, because they look pretty.)
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“The High Cost of Self-Censorship on Campus: Self-censorship greatly
diminishes the joys and satisfactions of teaching and learning,” by Andrew Hartz
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 