November butterflies

We have not yet had a freeze in Austin, and we have some fall flowers after the recent rains. So we still have lots of butterflies. The most common are American snouts, which which I have uploaded photos of before. Here are some other species.

A gulf fritillary, Agraulis vanillae



Another view of the same butterfly



This is a theona checkerspot, Chlosyne theona



A phaon crescent, Phyciodes phaon


Both the phaon and the checkerspot are flitting around in some small white aster flowers.



(click any image to enlarge)

A fine day for a walk

In November of 1960 I was 19 and a university sophomore and I had paid my Texas poll tax and I voted for the first time, and I voted for John Kennedy. The election was a real cliff-hanger. Sometime after midnight, when it seemed reasonably likely that Kennedy had actually won, I went with a friend of mine to a cafe in downtown Austin that was open all night and was a hangout for local politicos. Everyone was in a celebratory mood, and at maybe two in the morning Lyndon Johnson, the new Vice President of the US, walked in and began shaking everyone's hand. He shook mine. I was real happy.

Of course, four years later I was picketing Lyndon Johnson's ranch.

I don't recall a moment of unalloyed pleasure at the results of an American election since that night in 1960. The first couple of years of the Kennedy administration set a high bar, I suppose.

But this morning, once again, I feel happy about an election, probably because George Bush has set a new sort of benchmark--I can't call it a high bar--as the worst president in American history. And I think the election showed the public is coming to realize it. I'm not fooling myself that control of the House and a possible razor-thin control of the Senate will make a huge difference in the direction Bush is going, but it will certainly slow him down.

Texas, naturally, did not join in the nationwide waking-up event, but there were signs of consciousness even here. A Democrat won Tom Delay's old congressional seat. I think that's called sending a message.

And it's a clear, sunny day here in Austin, and I don't feel like sitting in front of a keyboard much longer, so I'm outa here. Later.

Monday at Zilker Park

Here is a miscellany of photos I took in Zilker today, first below Barton Springs, and then in Zilker Gardens.

These gadwalls and the snowy egret were sharing a rock in the middle of Barton Creek below the dam.



Another pair of gadwalls resting on a flat rock by the bank.



Fox squirrel by the creek



Here are two desert firetails (Telebasis salva) on a lily pad in Zilker Gardens. They have just mated, and the female is now in the process of laying eggs. The male is still attached to her head. Odonate sex, like all sex, looks strange. The male attaches behind the female's head, then the female reaches up with the end of her abdomen to fertilize her eggs at the male genitalia. Then she can lay the eggs, which is what's going on here. With some odonates, like these desert firetails, the male remains attached to the female's head while the egg-laying is going on. I am not sure why.



This is another great spreadwing, Archilestes grandis. Zilker Gardens is the only place I seem to find them.


Click any photo to enlarge

Poorly matched photos

It seems odd to put these two photos up in the same post. What they have in common is that I saw both these guys on my walk today along Onion Creek, and that they both let me get very close. The reason I got close to the mestra was that it was cold and hence inactive. I don't know why I was able to approach so close to the vulture. Sometimes they are reluctant to abandon their meal, but this one was not feeding on anything.

Common mestra, Mestra amymone. I mentioned in another post that blogger somehow muted the colors of a previous photo of this same species of butterfly. This one looks a little better.



Black vulture. Vultures are more closely related to storks than to birds of prey. You can kind of see that here.


click photos to enlarge

A few Sunday close-ups

An orange sulphur butterfly, Colias eurytheme, on an unidentified salvia near my house



Two views of a common mestra, Mestra amymone, near Slaughter Creek in South Austin

Partial ventral view of the mestra's wings


Dorsal view



Variegated meadowhawk, Sympetrum corruptum, also near Slaughter Creek


Click photos to enlarge

The speaking of the English in Washington

I am, myself, to the manner born, in the speaking of English, assuming one is willing to grant that my native South Texas dialect deservedly bears same name as the language most commonly spoken in North America and the British Isles. I know that Lyndon Johnson, long ago, and George Bush, more recently, have cast doubt on that assumption, but bear in mind that LB J most likely would have forgotten how to speak English in DC, a very special place, and that George Bush's efforts to sound like a yokel are successful only because of native talent, not his origins.

But in general I have assumed that our current batch of Republican politicians actually are, like me, native English speakers, except for exceptional horrorshow visitants like Henry Kissinger, back again from the realm of the undead. The lesson here is never to assume nothin. Thus we have the Vice President, when asked on Tuesday in a radio interview, "Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" answering, "Well, it's a no-brainer for me."

So what can this mean? Those of us who learned to speak our language at our mother's knee have somehow jumped to the conclusion that he is endorsing a specific form or torture called waterboarding. Indeed, what the hell else could the question have meant, and what the hell else could the answer mean?

Or so would ask your average native speaker.

Ah, but no. Mebbe we native speakers don't speak the language Mr. Cheney does. Tony Snow, the current White House glad-hand to the press, says the vice president "was talking in general terms about a questioning program that is legal to save American lives and he was not referring to water boarding."

So it's not waterboarding, and moreover--according to Snow--the Vice Prez could not say what in fact he was really referring to because of security concerns. The particular nature of the lifesaving "dunk" is, God bless my soul, a State Secret.

But even if it's a secret, let's be logical about this. If he is not referring to waterboarding, or to some some ingenious but as yet unrevealed form of water torture, what other kind of dunk in H20 would the vice president possibly want us to share his faith in the life-preserving properties of? A warm bath? A nice shower with a bar of soap? Oh, boy, the VP would be treading on dangerous ground there, if only because of the justifiably poor image of concentration camp guards giving prisoners a bar of soap and inviting them into a shower room. I don't thing the VP really wants to go there. Not even he. Or let us hope not.

So a very modest application of ordinary logic to the combined statements of the Vice President and Tony Snow can lead to only two possible conclusions, which in this case are not necessarily exclusive, the one being that they are lying, or the other being that they do not actually speak English.

Addendum:
"Stay the course."

Friday cat blogging

Gray enjoying the afternoon sun. It has been a very fine day here in Austin. Gray approves of it.

Tuesday photo miscellany

Today I am afraid I will disappoint those visitors who come to this blog hoping for political diatribes, startling anecdotes, unfair and unbalanced philosophical viewpoints, or simply gossip. Maybe later.

As is usual lately, I've been out taking photographs. Unlike political blogging, nature photography works to keep the cortisol situation outside the danger zone. Here is a photo miscellany from the past few days.

Western ribbon snake, Thamnophis proximus. This species is highly variable. Our central Texas variety usually has a red stripe down the back, as this one does.



Fiery skipper, Hylephila phyleus, on a Palafoxia flower.



Black vulture landing at a vulture roost in the middle of Landa Park in New Braunfels, Texas. The roost is on an island in a small lake fed by Comal Springs, the largest natural spring in the state. It's quite a beautiful setting for a vulture roost. Cormorants and red-tail hawks also like it.



Turkey vulture overhead near Onion Creek



The damselfly that I mentioned in an earlier post, that I could not identify. I am reasonably certain it is a smoky rubyspot, Hetaerina titia. This species is also highly variable in appearance. I took a photo of one in Belize that was much darker.


Click any photo to enlarge

Dragonfly at Hornsby Bend, and another butterfly photo

It was a lovely day today as I walked along the river at Hornsby Bend, and I saw my first red-tailed pennant, a fairly spectacular dragonfly which--as the name implies--has a bright red tail. I also took a couple of photos of a damselfly I can't identify, and maybe I will put up a photo of it if I ever do identify it.

Red-tailed Pennant, Brachymesia furcata



There were thousands of snout butterflies out, mating, hanging around, maybe migrating--I am not sure about that. They have colorful wings, in flight, but normally when they land they keep their wings folded, and they look like dead leaves. I was trying to get pictures of the dead-leaf pose, and just as I snapped the shutter, the butterfly flew away, and I caught it in flight. So here's a rare photo--for me--of an American snout, Libytheana carinenta, in the air.


Click to enlarge

Friday butterfly blogging

A white peacock, Anartia jatrophae, on the banks of the Guadalupe River in New Braunfels, Texas. This is a tropical butterfly, here at the northern end of its normal range, though individuals will occasionally wander much farther northward.


Click to enlarge

Wednesday dragonflies

Two dragonflies near Slaughter Creek in South Austin. The first is another female Blue Dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis



This one is a Flag-tailed Spinyleg, Dromogomphus spoliatus, which has captured a skipper, probably a Southern broken-dash, Wellengrenia otho



Click to enlarge

The Age of Aquarius

I think contemporary Christian Evangelicalism is misconstrued by most of the rest of us as being an aberrant form of historic Christianity. I think that is a mistake. It's hardly Christianity at all, as the world has known it, for good or ill, down through the centuries. To be sure, it arose out of Christianity, but psychologically, it seems be a New Age feel-good cult. These people are hippies gone bad. (And I say this as an old hippie, gone bad in a different direction.)

It's true that the roots of the modern evangelical movement lie in the remnants of 19th century revivalism, the 2nd Great Awakening. The ecstatic conversion experience accompanying the big emotional-breakdown camp meetings became a marker, a sort of test, for authentic salvation (Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin would, of course, all twirl in their graves.) That mid-20th century evangelical religion eventually made it officially so, of course, was in effect to ditch nineteen centuries of Christian theology and belief.

But for all its celebration of ecstatic conversion, 19th century Protestant revivalism had not yet forgotten the great questions of historic Christianity which defined sectarian boundaries within the Christian mainstream; questions of the nature of God and the nature of Christ; the mystery (or more strictly speaking, incoherence) of the Trinity; the intricate Rube Goldberg linkages of grace, works, faith, free-will and predestination; of the nature of the sacraments and of the structure and authority of the church and its hierarchy; and the history, nature and authority of the scriptural canon.

All that is pretty much gone. By and large modern evangelicals know absolutely nothing of any of it, regardless of where the nominal roots of their own lineage lie. Many evangelical sects, but not all, are descended from Calvinist churches, but contemporary evangelical eyes glaze over when predestination is mentioned. Some of the Pentecostal and Holiness groups are descended--historically, but not in any other meaningful way--from Wesleyan anti-Calvinist churches. Most of the current members of these groups have never heard of the controversy between Wesley and the Calvinists, and many of them have never heard of John Wesley.

Sad to say, there are even Catholic evangelicals, who share with their nominally Protestant brethren a total ignorance of Church history and doctrine.

Contemporary Southern Baptists (like other evangelicals) seem to know all about the Rapture, a bizarre doctrine first appearing full-blown in the mind of a 19th century (non-Baptist) preacher named John Darby, but know nothing of the traditional Baptist resolution of questions of theology, soteriology, and hierarchy in the brilliant--and in a way admirable--twin Baptist cop-outs of soul-competency and the priesthood of the believer, which, for all their unorthodoxy, at least have some antecedents in nineteen centuries of Christian mysticism and several centuries of anti-hierarchical radical Protestantism.

So what have the evangelicals replaced historic Christianity with? Well, like cowbird eggs in a magpie's nest, we find the Rapture and allied weird nonsense like dispensationalism and Christian Zionism, indeed a whole bubbling cauldron of crackpot millenarian woolgathering based on obsessive readings of the Apocalypse of St. John; not to mention fundamentalist scriptural idolatry as a sort of enabling background radiation. Lately we also find Republican Kulturkampf politics.

But above all that, the ecstatic conversion experience is firmly established as the feel-good centerpiece of their feel-good religion, to which, to be fair, all the Darbyist gibberish is actually secondary.

And the fact that the warm glow of conversion is now psychologically central to Evangelicalism and has as a practical matter replaced almost the entire baggage of former Christian orthodoxies has drawn vast numbers of the Boomer generation into the evangelical fold, like bees to nectar. And there are lotsa bees out there. (Sadly, they tend to vote, and vote Republican, more due to the cooptationist success of shrewd Republican strategists than to an inherent Republican-ness within Evangelicalism itself.)

Personally I think the cosmic convergence of hysteric frontier immigrant camp-meeting emotional release with New Age if-it-feels-good-it-must-be-true Boomer complacencies has come to fruition. The Age of Aquarius seems to be here.

Curious perspectives from inside the beltway

Following are excerpts from a story by R. Jeffrey Smith in the Oct. 16 Washington Post about two unsuccessful Judiciary Committee amendments to Bush's bill which stripped legal rights from people whom the President declares to be "enemy combatants." The point of Smith's article is that one of the amendments, which he weirdly designates as the "extreme" one--which retained habeas corpus--never stood a chance of passage, whereas the other amendment, being "less extreme" (i.e. it severely curtailed habeas corpus, but did not abolish it outright) might have fared better. He offers little or no proof of this contention other than some vague hearsay. In any case, the amendment which he calls "extreme," that retained habeas corpus as we have known it, was the one that came to the full Senate, and it failed.

But the point of view implicit in the piece really seemed peculiar to me. The whole article was a considerably after-the-fact story postulated on the hypothetical votes of Republican senators who--acccording to Smith's imaginary hindsight--share Smith's own implicit view that the true defenders of civil liberties are those who would destroy the village of our freedoms in order to save it, perhaps leaving a grass hut or two still standing. Quite an odd notion, I think, made even odder by Smith's reversal of the normal meanings of the word "extreme."

I guess you could say his choice of terminology was tendentious, to say the least. Here are some highlights. (Emphasis supplied.)

The news reached Democrats working on the military commissions bill in the Senate cloakroom the morning of Sept. 27. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a sponsor of two amendments giving detainees a right to challenge their detention or treatment in federal court, had decided to bring the more extreme amendment to a vote...
On the detainee bill, Frist had make clear his desire to ensure that no amendment passed, spokeswoman Amy Call said. She said “we were worried about both” of Specter’s amendments. The more extreme version would have deleted the bill’s suspension of habeas corpus rights. The less extreme alternative, which Specter co-sponsored with Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Gordon Smith (R.-N.H.), would have allowed detainees to file a single habeas corpus petition after a year of detention.

So I decided to email Smith about this.

My email:
"Since when is preserving the right of habeas corpus 'extreme?'"

Smith's reply:
"there's nothing extreme about it. it's solely a relative term -- ie compared to the other amendment."

So I wrote back:
"Interesting. Let's say you have a physical object in front of you--say,
a yardstick. Which is the extreme end? Presumably, the end away from
you. Equally relatively, let's say you have two positions on habeas
corpus, abolish it or preserve it. Which is the extreme position?
Presumably, the one opposite your own."

To which he replied:

"let's try another example. you have two amendments in front of you: one would remove any reference to habeas corpus from a bill. another would leave language allowing one habeas petition after one year of incarceration. which is more extreme in political terms?
i repeat: it's solely a relative term -- ie compared to the other amendment."

Here ends the exchange.

I confess myself puzzled by Smith's answers. It would normally be thought disingenuous to call the lesser of two abridgments of our freedom the greater in its extremism. And despite his appeal to the relative in the switching the negative and positive poles of the issue, in his examples, it remains a conundrum in my mind. The only explanation for the wrong-end-of-the-telescope perspective here, that I can come up with, is that Smith sincerely believes that preserving habeas corpus is extreme in the context of an alternative that would partially abolish it--in other words, that Smith is a Republican or has, through inside-the-beltway osmosis, learned to think like one; or that he is profoundly illogical. And perhaps those positions are not all that far from one another.

Friday cat blogging

Gray waiting patiently for his supper

Small pauses on the road to senescence

Having lived in Austin these many years now, I thought it was time to visit the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, a long-standing local attraction which I had never stopped to see. Locals are often the last to visit a local attraction.

I thought it was a nice place, but I may have been positively, and unfairly, influenced as an art critic by the young woman to whom I paid my $3.50 admission. As a somewhat hesitant afterthought, she said "Too bad you're not over 60. You'd be eligible for the Senior Citizen rate." Which would be $2.50. The fact that she considered me a not-quite-60 ticket buyer, but mentioned the over-60 fee just to be safe, gave a pleasant lift to my day--or else was a shrewd public relations move on her part. I am personally convinced she was sincere on account of her reaction when I told her I was 65, which was to eye me suspiciously as if I were trying to bilk the Umlauf Sculpture Garden of a dollar. I was unexpectedly, and vainly, pleased.

Charles Umlauf was a local sculptor who taught for many years in the art department at the University of Texas. His main claim to fame is the incredible number of public art pieces he placed around the state of Texas, mostly very large and perhaps exaggeratedly realistic (except for the absence of sexual organs on the male nudes) statues of and well-muscled athletic-looking bronze men, and lovely bronze women with signature upturned faces. Supposedly one of his models was Farrah Faucett, when she was an art student. The statues I have seen are mostly very pretty to look at, though there is something a little disconcerting about a several-ton bronze woman with Playboy centerfold proportions.

There is (relatively) little of that here. Much of the statuary is smaller, and I'm guessing is unsold preliminary versions of larger pieces, left in his workshop at the time of his death. I know have seen larger versions of some of the smaller statues elsewhere. I'm guessing the Garden showcases some artwork that may have been less appealing to Municipal Art Commission tastes but which may have been what he really preferred to do. I dunno. But at any rate some of the pieces struck me as displaying more whimsy and charm than his stuff I have seen elsewhere. Plus, in one to two cases, an unexpected element of the sinister.

According to their web page, I could have brought my laptop and surfed the web while sitting by the fern-shrouded lovers shown here. I am not sure why this would draw visitors, buy, hey, maybe I am getting old.



I am guessing this is Jesus



This is the most interestingly creepy St. Francis I have ever seen.



Another strangely mixed religious message. This is presumably Jesus, with the dove descending, but the halo (or is it a bishob's mitre?) looks like horns unless you look closely, and the cherub-heralds remind me of a flock of bats. (Apparently Umlauf sold a much larger version of this to an Episcopal Church in San Antonio. I'm surprised.)


Click on any photo to enlarge

Cloudy morning on Onion Creek

Onion Creek is dry in places because of the prolonged drought. There has been no real rain in the watershed of the creek for several months, and the daytime temperatures are still in the 90s. On the plus side, there is not much ragweed this year, and the poison ivy is stunted and burnt-looking.
The developing El Niño event should lead to rain here this fall and winter, but no sign of it yet.
This is how it looks now--well, strictly speaking, how it looked a couple of days ago.

The Lower Falls



Ammonite fossil in Cretaceous limestone. The leaf is about 3 inches long, for scale.



Mystery picnic table, long abandoned



Texas persimmon, Diospyros texana, more commonly called Mexican persimmon hereabouts. Very pretty trees. The small edible fruits are black when ripe.


Click any photo to enlarge

Anecdote of the bull

My wife Kay died in 2002, and both Anna and Eve have expressed interest in Kay's diaries, which are hard to read due to her handwriting--not the best. So I have (very) occasionally been transcribing them. Each year she bought one of these little yearbooks with one blank page for every day of the year, to record her thoughts and the events of her life. Each diary has a good record of January, part of February, and a few entries from March--then nothing until Thanksgiving or Christmas, when she would write about the inevitable outbreak of holiday-season trouble in her large and tumultuous family.

The remainder of each of those years remains a mystery now, with only my hazy and imperfect memory to fill in the gaps.

Anyway, I just ran across this, and readers of my blog who knew Kay might find it interesting, a brief portrait of her as a girl, with maybe a clue of what she would be like as a woman. The entry is from 1989, but she is writing about something much earlier.

If Eve has helped me rediscover my childhood, Anna helped me rediscover my teenage years. She has a yearning to travel that I felt so strongly. "Mom, I just have to go somewhere." she would say, and I can remember saying it in that exact tone of voice with those exact words at exactly the same age. When I said it, at the age of sixteen, my parents, very wisely, found a Church of Christ missionary family, fundamentalists named Mr. and Mrs. Smith who were willing to let me come stay with them on Hacienda Huantepec in the small town of Pabellón, Aguascalientes, in Mexico. I was to teach their children and help with the driving. I had just graduated from high school and I wanted to be on my own so much that I was on the verge of running away.
I took the bus by myself and found the granja [farm], where they lent out their bull for breeding. I'm sure they performed other Christian services, but this was the most popular request. I dutifully drove a large truck with a bellowing bull to remote areas in the state, with Mr. Smith sitting beside me. Mrs. Smith stayed home with the children. It seemed a perfectly normal thing for a sixteen year girl old to be doing. On one occasion, it rained hard and we got stuck in the mud, Mr. Smith put rocks under the rear wheel, the bull bellowed and I gunned it and moved back and forth until I got us out. We moved forward through a rock bed creek after the road ended. We arrived as the sun came out into a place that I have, to this day, not been able to find on a map. The people were there to greet us, lined up in a row with English hymnals in their hand, left by a missionary who had visited them thirty years before. The hymnals were worn and they sang "a Mighty Fortress is our God" in strangely accented English as we walked up the slope with Mr. Smith bringing the bull and me following.

Needless to say, she later went into anthropology.

Kay as a young anthropologist

Three odonates

The first two are damselflies. The great spreadwing and the Comanche dancer belong to different families of damselflies. Unlike most damselflies, spreadwings hold their wings out from their body when at rest.

Great spreadwing, Archilestes grandis



Comanche dancer, Argia barretti



The dragonfly is a a black setwing, Dythemis nigrescens, a mostly Mexican species.


All were photographed at the Zilker botanical gardens in Austin. Click to enlarge any photo.

Friday cat blogging

Gray on a favorite ledge


(click to enlarge)

Yet another (sigh) letter to Senator Cornyn

First a word of explanation. Senator Cornyn is certainly in the running for the worst of the worst in the Senate, with competition only from selected contenders from Oklahoma and Alaska. Maybe Pennsylvania. Well, maybe some others. Senator Cornyn's current mission is to abolish habeas corpus. He is on the Judiciary Committee. Anyway, Senator Cornyn hates to hear from constituents, unless they come bearing major campaign contributions, and so he makes it as hard as possible to send him an email. You have to take a Republican IQ test to send it to him. Really. ("Select the third word in the list from bottom to top.") Generally I don't bother. I know they go unread in his office, and his office rarely replies, so I make a point of putting them up on my blog, whenever I actually do go the trouble of sending him a constituent viewpoint.

In this email, I ask a simple question. And who knows, maybe one of his aides will clarify the Senator's views in the comments here.

=============

Dear Senator Cornyn:

I am glad to see that Tom Sullivan, in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee, turned the proceeding around a little and asked _you_ a question, concerning your defense of the Star Chamber proceedings that have been going on in Guantanamo. He described in some detail the total absence of fairness in the trials: the fact that the detainees had no lawyers, did not speak English, had no ability to cross examine, had no access to the alleged evidence presented by the Government, the total absence of physical evidence, and the seeming absence even of any rules of evidence.

So he asked you, "Now, you call that due process?"

You didn't answer.

Well, I'll ask it again. Do you call that due process?

Sincerely,

Jim McCulloch

What does that mean, "human dignity"?

Since I read the news less than I should (but more than I like) I was unaware until recently that George Bush actually said, in defending his torture proposals, that the concept of human dignity is too vague, and must be discarded. "What does that mean," he said, "outrages upon human dignity?"

When you learn a language, the way you acquire the meaning of words is not by reading a dictionary, but by listening to actual usage.

Thus Mr. Bush could perhaps begin to apprehend the meaning of "human dignity" by referring to the words of his speech writers, which, of course, by convention are considered Mr. Bush's own words, since Mr. Bush actually read them aloud in various venues not so long ago, most notably in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 2004, when he used the phrase no less than ten times. Here are some of Mr. Bush's own words (emphasis supplied.)

"Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have established a global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria."

"Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have joined together to confront the evil of trafficking in human beings."

"Because we believe in human dignity, we should take seriously the protection of life from exploitation under any pretext."

"Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have changed the way we fight poverty, curb corruption, and provide aid..."

"Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have acted to lift the crushing burden of debt that limits the growth of developing economies, and holds millions of people in poverty."

"Because we believe in human dignity, the world must have more effective means to stabilize regions in turmoil, and to halt religious violence and ethnic cleansing."

On April 2, 2005, Mr. Bush spoke of Pope John Paul as follows: "Pope John Paul II was "a faithful servant of God and a champion of human dignity and freedom."

And in June of this year he said, “We’re after the terrorists not only by staying on the hunt, but we’re after them with an ideology of hope, an ideology of life, an ideology that recognizes human rights and human dignity.”

I have also seen a theory--propounded by crackpots on the Internet--that Mr. Bush is suffering from some kind of progressive cognitive disorder, to explain an alleged deterioration in his fluency in public speaking between 1991, when he was pretty sharp in some gubernatorial debates, and now, when...well, he isn't.

So maybe he is simply forgetting his native language. That would be sad, if the problem is neurological, but--and this, I am afraid, is far more likely--it would be chilling, if it is the inevitable consequence of six years of total immersion in doubletalk. Chilling, because it implies he had no more idea what the words meant when he read them 2 years ago, or last year, or in June of this year, than he does today.

Torquemada redivivus

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.
--Washington Post, 9/22/06

It seems the Good Germans have decided to go along with torture after all. Unless some miracle occurs and enough real Americans, as opposed to the Good Germans, are unexpectedly found in the Senate to thwart this unfortunate scheme, our so-called President will be given authority to continue what he seems to have a desperate psychological need for, torturing those he determines to be enemies. I should insert here the standard "first they come for the Jews, then they come for the queers, etc...then they come for you" warning, which of course mutatis mutandis is relevant here, but the eventuality of Democrats eventually being the victim of Disappearances and the thumbscrew is less the issue than the absolute depravity of torture as official government policy, which, regardless of the Orwellian doubletalk the Republicans choose to clothe the decaying corpse of America's honor in, the stench of the indecency cannot be obscured with any words, even those coming from Clever Karl's propaganda mill, regardless of who the designated-to-be-tortured are, or will be.

The enthusiasm of the right-wing in this country for torture as policy seems to me to spring not just from the Bush Administration hysteria-mongering, but from the more fundamental pathology of right-wing extremists--upon which the hysteria-mongering builds--which is a limited-good view of the world. People who think you must struggle against others to have anything, whether it be happiness or money or political power, that there must always be absolute winners and losers, tend to have a harsh and punitive take on the world in general, and are more than ready to embrace policies that assuage their fears by bringing misfortune to others (thereby, given the magical thinking prevailing in such minds, removing or reducing the likelihood of it for themselves.) Torturing their enemies makes them feel safer, regardless of its inherent immorality or its provable ineffectiveness as a means of extracting information.

All the ticking bomb scenarios advanced by torture apologists are stupid, and conceal--not very well--a profound bad faith. The real historical use of torture has always been to intimidate and terrify, not to extract the location of little Nell, kidnapped and tied to the train tracks, before the train comes. Successful interrogation, according to those who have experience in such matters, plays on the values and hopes and fears of the person interrogated as the most useful, and perhaps the only, tools to extract information. Anybody capable of a millisecond of self-reflection, which seems to exclude much of the Republican Base, can see that if you were being tortured you would say whatever it would take to get it to stop. The likelihood of that being the truth depends entirely on the remorse or second-thoughts or sense of guilt of the interrogated, which is far less likely to be operative in the soul of someone who has just been tortured than in the heart of someone who has been treated more intelligently, not to mention decently.

And the dishonor this obscene and duplicitous policy brings to America (which at this point in the Bush Administration a cynic would pronounce as more coals to Newcastle) is a cause of sorrow, if not dispair, for any person who loves what this country has, at its best, stood for, and ought to stand for now. I still hope that the better elements in the American character, which I suspect are still found, however residually, even among the Republican Base, will ultimately move us away from Bush's Holy War, and Bush's Inquisition.

Let us hope.

Summer doesn't want to let go

It's been quite dry for the last 3 months in Austin. All the prickly pear cactus are withered from drought and look as if they might die, though they are in no danger of that. I guess I could provide visuals, but face it, a picture of a shriveled-up cactus lacks universal appeal. Some of the deciduous trees are shedding their leaves early. The flame-leaf sumacs, which (along with a native oak) provide about the only fall color around here, have already turned brown and lost their leaves. On my walks in a Searight Park I see few bicyclists and fewer joggers. After a brief respite, afternoon temperatures are back in the 90s.

The dry weather also seems to have reduced the number of dragonflies. On my walk today I saw only four species, but--and here is the good news, for me at least--I got reasonably good photos of two which I had not gotten decent pictures of before, a band-winged dragonlet and a female blue dasher. (I've gotten lots of good photos of male blue dashers, but this female is a first.)

Female blue dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis



Band winged dragonlet, Erythrodiplax umbrata


click photos to enlarge

Live oaks at Searight Park

I like the light yesterday in the late afternoon under the live oaks at Searight Park in Austin.



click to enlarge

Wednesday wildlife at Hornsby Bend

Hornsby Bend is a bend in the Colorado River near Austin named after an early settler, Rueben Hornsby, who built a log house nearby. It's presently the site of several large sewage treatment ponds, and is a premier place to go birdwatching--but mainly in the winter, when the smelly ponds are full of ducks. There are several miles of trails along the river and in the woods near the sewage ponds.

I went there to take pictures of dragonflies. I didn't see many, but I did get shots of a couple of black saddlebags, plus a butterfly and a snake. And it was a nice day for a walk.


Black Saddlebags (Tramea lacerata)



Another black saddlebags



Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, (Papilio glaucus), on a lantana flower



Eastern Yellowbelly Racer, (Coluber constrictor flaviventris)


(click any photo to enlarge)

The tragic imagination

Five years ago today someone at work told me that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center in New York, and that the Pentagon was on fire. This had little emotional effect on me. My mind was elsewhere.

My wife Kay was in the hospital having been diagnosed with acute leukemia 11 days before. I had just come back to work, and only during the mornings. The rest of the day, and the nights, I was spending at the hospital at Kay's bedside. She had just started chemotherapy. There was still a chance that she could die very quickly from the progression of the disease, before the chemo began to work, assuming it was going to work at all. She could also die from the chemo itself. It was kind of touch and go.

So, as I said, my mind was elsewhere.

I excused myself from work and went to the hospital. Kay had a TV in her room, which was--uncharacteristically--on. The twin towers were burning. There was some confusion as to what was going on in Washington. The TV talkers were frantically excited. The green sticky plastic reclining chair I spent so many nights in was beside her bed and faced the TV set, and I sat down beside her and watched.

It seems like we watched a long time, Kay and I. Days, maybe. Like anyone and everyone else. The only difference was that Kay was dying, although she didn't die that day, or during the next few days--it was 8 1/2 months later--and we were both trying to adjust that that possibility. Actually, possibility was the wrong word--near certainty was more correct. I had been doing some reading, and discovered that the oncologist, whose social skills were inversely proportional to his expertise (which is not as bad as it sounds, social-skillwise, as we were to discover WRT his expertness), had perhaps failed to be convincing in claiming Kay had a 50/50 chance of eventual recovery, because, in her case, those were not the true odds. The odds, in reality, were much, much worse than that.

I guess he thought it would make us feel better to lie, and it would have, had he been a better liar. He would probably have been correct in saying that Kay had a 50/50 chance of surviving the week, and in fact Kay turned out to be in the lucky 50 percent, that week. But we didn't know that in advance.

Anyway, this sudden threat of death, which had come out of nowhere, gave us an odd detachment as we watched people jump out of windows, some of them holding hands. We held hands as we watched. I think we both felt like we had a kind of empathy that other people did not. On the other hand, we felt distant from it, with our own very real worries.

We watched the fall of the towers over and over--like everyone else. But it was not my main focus. It's in the background, for me, in my memory of that day, and the days afterwards.

Though we did talk about it. It wasn't that day itself, but it was very soon after, that Kay began to feel troubled about the talking heads' use of the word tragedy. I remember her saying something to the effect that it's not tragic for America. Not for us. It's only tragic for the people who jumped, and who died in the buildings, and for their families. For people who knew them. Not for the rest of us. You are watching this on TV, for God's sake.

I think she sense an orgy of false emotion being unleashed, or being deliberately stirred up. It was terribly real, and it was also a media event. It was all very confusing. Still is.

In retrospect, I think Kay was wrong, in a certain sense. It has turned out to be America's tragedy, exactly to the extent that genuine feelings of horror and empathy--which legitimately existed in the hearts of those of us who watched only on TV--have been contaminated, polluted in some way by the media, and most of all, of course, by the Bush administration.

Those people have stolen what was a real and terrible catastrophe for 3000 people and their families and friends, and turned it into a different and needless tragedy for all of us. For the world. And they have done it without thought or remorse or shame or regard for the payoff awaiting those who are thoughtless and remorseless that always comes at the end of a classical tragedy. And I fear the play is not over.

And we should remember Katrina, too

George Bush's scheduled grandstanding on this Sept.11 as we approach an important national election appears in stark contrast with his behavior on the same day five years ago, when, after being filmed in a state of paralysis clutching My Pet Goat with that deer-in-the-headlights look he gets when faced with crisis, whether it be a national tragedy or a hostile question in a press conference, he then disappeared for the rest of the day to hide in a hole in Nebraska.

Meanwhile, of course, Mayor Giuliani, a man whose political ideology is nearly as deplorable as George Bush's, showed himself to be a leader and a mensch--everything our so-called president is not. It serves to remind us that there are Republicans who, unlike our so-called president, deserve our respect even if we disagree with them. Let us hope that someday such Republicans take their party back from the Gadarene swine who have taken it over and who, unless stopped, are rushing as fast as they can to their destruction, which would be well-deserved if it did not include, as it unfortunately does, (sorry, the metaphor breaks down here) our own destruction as well.

The depths to which this beyond-belief and beneath-contempt psychopath and his co-conspirators have dragged our country is illustrated by watching a few minutes of Fox News, where the alternative-reality world of the Bush gang finds its truest expression--which I did recently by accident when it was unavoidable without impolitely demanding that my host turn off his tv.

On Fox News America learns, and a good part of America has apparently come to believe, that we are winning the war on terror, that George Bush is a personal friend of the weary and smoke-begrimed fireman Bush draped his arm over in a photo-op when he did show up belatedly at the scene of the tragedy five years ago, and that Democrats are responsible for 911 after all. These are but a few of the many other equally absurd notions that a regular viewer of Fox would imprint on. If you tell the public the world is flat long enough, I would guess that 24 percent would come to believe it, which I believe is the exact percentage of our people who strongly approve of our President. Watching Fox news is like taking LSD without joy or insight. A bad trip.

I mean, anyone with any remaining expectation of a molecule of civilized behavior from the Bush-Cheney-Rove bunch is going to be perpetually pole-axed with astonishment and disbelief at their effrontery. The balls-out cynicism of their using a national tragedy to gain political advantage is still hard to come to terms with.

But they have used it for five years, and plan to use it, as best I can tell, for the next fifty.

And they show every sign of lining up another war-of-convenience, this time against Iran and/or Syria, to take people's mind off the fact that our war in Iraq has turned to shit and the reasons for it have turned out to be fiction--not that watchers of Fox are aware of either fact.

And now, before our very eyes, ABC is turning into Fox News, with a planned 5-hour miniseries which is packaged as a documentary but which is full of events which never, in reality, happened. In the miniseries, Clinton is to blame for 911, having called off our on-the-ground forces at the point they were about to capture bin Laden.

This is complete fantasy, like the weapons of mass destruction. But millions of people who know nothing of actual history and who do not attend closely to the fine-print that might clue them in that the miniseries is no more a documentary than the west wing is, will come away believing it's true, and will, naturally, forget that someone actually did let bin Laden get away when we had forces in place who could have captured him at Tora Bora.

That someone was George Bush. Why would George Bush try to capture his greatest political benefactor, after all?

Some recent dragonfly photos

Roseate skimmer



Another roseate skimmer. Females and young males are dull orange. Males as they get older develop a rosy red color, hence the more-often-than-not non-descriptive name.



A nicely perched red saddlebags


Click any photo to enlarge

Eastern pondhawk eating a damselfly

The damselfly is a powdered dancer. This is at McKinney Falls on Onion Creek near Austin, yesterday.

Click to enlarge.

The terror campaign

George Bush is making speeches around the country saying that the War on Terror is "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century." So here we have our President, a deeply thoughtless man, believing, or pretending to believe, as he reads the teleprompter and nods and smiles when it tells him to do so, that terrorism is a creed, like Communism.

But terrorism is a method, not a belief-system. Mr. Bush does not want to dwell on that fact. If you are an apologist for partisan murder you will quickly realize that you need to find a way to speak of terrorism as the other guy's murders, not your own. If terrorism is someone else's ideology, then by definition your own murders are, well, not terrorism. Thirty thousand+ civilian dead in our Iraq war are, by such definition, something else. (The better estimates are well over a hundred thousand civilian dead, but not even the most committed Neocon denies the 30,000 as a minimum figure. So let's use that.)

The trouble is, at this point it becomes very tricky to even use the word meaningfully. These 30,000 people were innocent of any crime. Some of them were killed by the civil war we have brought them. Some were killed directly by our own military actions. Very few were killed by our soldiers with the outright purpose of murdering civilians to terrify those who remained alive. Thus, by the terrorism-as-method standard rejected by our President, we have certainly killed far fewer civilians for terroristic purposes than Osama did, and, if nothing else, we could be exempted from accusations of terrorism.

But if terrorism is an ideology, our effort to exempt our own butchery, a butchery which springs from Republican ideology, seems, well, arbitrary. Any objective person who accepted Bush's definition but not his frame of reference, would have every reason to consider us far greater terrorists than Osama was, or is. By a factor of ten, at a minimum.

None of this enters into Mr. Bush's head. His motives are simple and his goals are clear. He reads his words. He relies on the public not to closely examine those words. Exactly like the al-Qaida terrorists he derives so much benefit from, Mr. Bush, under the tutelage of Karl Rove, is doing everything he can to further the seepage of fear through our population, and he does so for the simplest of reasons: it benefits the Republican Party, or at least it has up until now.

Every reflexive shudder of horror at the unfathomable wickedness of our adversary becomes a reflexive Republican vote, in Mr. Bush's view. It has worked for five years, and Karl Rove likes to stick with the tried-and-true.

I hope my optimism that the public is finally catching on to this is not premature. When the President and Don Rumsfeld go around the country insulting the 60% of Americans who now have some doubts about the Iraq war, you'd think the effect of this would not be to bring them back in the fold, but to drive them further out of it. We'll see, I guess.

Islamic fascism revisited

I had a nice vacation in a beautiful and media-deficient country, so it took a few days to get my bearings among all the cloud-cuckoo-land absurdities that had popped up, courtesy of the Republican Party, in just two weeks. I somehow had imagined the "Islamo-fascism" meme had died out months ago of its inherent irrationality and stupidity, though a moment's reflection should have warned me that irrationality and stupidity do not guarantee, or even contribute to, laying to rest of wrong and ignorant ideas. Quite the contrary.

So it seems "Islamo-fascism" is back, first in the mouth of our president, false as his grits-and-red-eye-gravy accent and absurd as his mechanical smirk, and then suddenly jabbered wildly by legions of robotic GOP servo-repeaters, spoken as if it were an actual word with a meaning.

For example, when I open up the Austin Chronicle, I find the following in its letters column:

Because we are the last defense from Islamist fascist barbarism, we must unambiguously champion positive American exceptionalism. This is our role as everyday citizens in helping to defeat Islamist fascism. For if we do not proactively defend ourselves and the U.S. is not victorious, humanity will be condemned to genocide, torture, and crushing tyranny.

None of us can remain aloof from these realities...We are in World War III. It has been formally declared against America and the free world by al Qaeda, the Iranian Sharia theocracy, and their devoted SS-like automaton forces. Yes, the Nazis have been reincarnated; only this time they are Islamist fascists.

[The Chronicle editor's] attitudes are representative of the appeasing neo-leftist Michael Moore Democratic Party. Because they lack grounded moral clarity and courage, they are incapable of comprehending the danger humanity faces from Islamist fascism. This allows the Islamists the crucial edge in this great mortal struggle. As a result, the defeatist Democratic Party cannot be allowed to wield political power and control national security. Otherwise, the free world will be in grave existential peril...Reject neo-leftist appeasement. Embrace the noble cause of American victory over Islamist fascism. If not, you become an unwitting useful idiot enabling the genocidal Islamist fascists in their efforts to enslave and tyrannize humanity.

This charmless bit of well-poisoning was not intended as a parody.

And unfortunately you can't ignore it as the isolated abusive rhetoric of a single misguided Republican in a regional alternative newspaper. Google News returns hundreds of recent hits on "islamo-fascism" and its permutations. Those hits I clicked on were just about as foolish as the letter I quoted, though in some cases not as histrionic.

All of them, of course, ignored the profoundly secular corporate-state nature of the actual fascism of history. More importantly, none of the shouters noticed their own uncanny mirror-image duplication of Islamist holy-war rhetoric. Holy war, whether Islamist or Republican, is not a fascist concept. It's a concept that comes to us straight from the 11th century. George Bush has more in common with Urban II than Osama bin Laden does with Mussolini.

(On an upbeat note, I just noticed that at least my spell checker is still sane and reasonable, and continues to mark "islamo-fascism" as a mistake. )