Flower Not So Extinct As Before

It's a flower that has not been seen for 70 years, and I wasn't even looking for it.  Michael Park, UC Berkeley graduate student was, though, and found the flower still living on Mt. Diablo, the Mt Diablo buckwheat, Eriogonum truncatum, which had been thought to have been driven extinct from the environment by non-indigenous invasive grasses. Ertter, the curator of western North American flora at UC Berkeley's Jepson Herbarium and co-author of the 2002 revision of Mary Bowerman's "The Flowering Plants and Ferns of Mount Diablo, California," noted that one priority should be to gather seeds and start cultivating the buckwheat at the UC Botanical Garden. Cultivated specimens conserved by the garden, which is part of the Center for Plant Conservation network, will provide a reserve of seeds in case the species declines further. More detail here.

John Bolton's Nomination

I was not one that was too upset about John Bolton's nomination... I mean, what are we going to get from Bush for the UN anyway? Not much better.

But after having seen a clip of Bolton discussing the UN at a panel where he urged everyone that there isn't really even a thing called the UN, that there is only US interested and when the US wants, international cooperation... um... that's not a good ambassador.

I'm not saying people can't feel that way about the UN, sure... go right ahead. We ought to debate the UN, our national interest, etc. etc, but come on now, it's a bit much to send an ambassador that doesn't believe the institution he's in exists... what kind of diplomat is that?

It's a statement that "we don't believe in diplomacy"... and even if that were true, it's stupid to say that considering we do, in fact, need cooperation in the world. It's a bit daft, that's all.

For Mother

Mennonites Frolicking

Working Together

I do not see eye to eye with many conservative positions... for example, I think there is no defense of the use of abusive interrogation techniques, and I don't care how many episodes of "24" prove me wrong.

But the fact is conservatives and liberals run this counrty together... just FACE IT!

Each partisan hope and prays that they will rule alone forever... it's a pipe dream.

We don't have to meet minds and find compromise on all things, but we have to come to grips with reality, and that is the fact that there are two ideologies that are American... you can't love America and deny that... you can't win by trying to wrest control away from the other half of the brain.

So grow up and start looking for a way to face reality, however much you prefer your fantasies I'm sure you'll find reality better in the end, because you have no other choice, actually.

Love and Logic

The Scientific Method

we would not all agree on what it is... but we should all be able to support the scientific method.

It can be expressed in skepticism, relativism, objectivity, rationalism, even in spiritual and religious terms(!), and perhaps one form of it suits you better than the rest. But one way or another, we should all understand and support the scientific method, which is a specialization of the more broad philosophical method of "open dialog". Honest open dialog.

We ought to universally agree on that.