All posts by Steve Stern

A Couple of Blooming Mammalarias

Around home, Cactus & Succulents

There are flowers that bloom in gardens
      Under a gardener’s care,
      And their lavish beauties charm me,
      As they flourish in luxury there. 
      There are flowers that blow in the meadows, 
      Kissed by the rain and the dew,
      In a riot of happy blooming,
      And I love their loveliness too.
But the flower that fills me with comfort,
      And makes Life’s meaning sweet,
      Is the flower that blooms in the desert,
      In the midst of sand and heat; 
      Whose roots draw strength and beauty,
      From a land forbidding and wild, 
      Whose face turns bravely skyward,
      Nor pines for lot more mild…To a Desert Flower by Hattie Greene Lockett, American writer, rancher, and clubwoman (whatever the hell a clubwoman is). 

Our results showed that from 4.5 million years ago, the arid regions of Mexico were the locations for abundant cacti speciation. From these lands, cacti have colonized most of the Mexican territories, the southern regions of the United States, as well as the Caribbean. Delil A. Chincoya, Salvador Arias, Felipe Vaca-Paniagua, Patricia Dávila, and Sofía Solórzano, Phylogenomics and Biogeography of the Mammilloid Clade Revealed an Intricate Evolutionary History Arose in the Mexican Plateau

Our garden is in full bloom, or, at least, as full a spring bloom as we are going to get this year. It got warm early, and everybody started growing, stretching, seeking the sun’s warmth, then it got cold, and everybody hunkered down, confused, including me. I left out several plants I had taken from the greenhouse where they had spent the winter, and they were especially unhappy. One, a Pachypodium – a very succulent member of the Oleander family – even committed harakiri.

Even with everything else blooming, like Hattie, the clubwoman from Arizona, I am most fascinated by the small cactuses in pots on a table on our deck.

Cactuses like the Paraodia, below, which grow at about 1,000 feet to 2,500 feet on the eastern slopes of the Andes in northwestern Argentina and southwestern Bolivia.

And Mammalarias, which grow primarily in Mexico but have spread to Central and Southwestern United States, to Colombia, and the Caribbean.

The Met Gala or Anna Wintour Has Big Balls

Americana, Art, Current Affairs,

You can’t speak on Black dandyism, Black art, or Black aesthetics without honoring the Black women who shaped, nurtured, and redefined it all. This year, my intention was to uplift and be surrounded by some of the Black women whose brilliance moves me—artists, thinkers, visionaries who carry history and possibility in everything they do. I’ve invited Lauryn Hill, Regina King, Jordan Casteel, Ming Smith, Adrienne Warren, Danielle Deadwyler, Lorna Simpson, and Radhika Jones to my table this year. Thank you all for your presence, your power, and the gifts you so generously share with the world. I’m deeply grateful to have shared this evening with you. Lewis Hamilton on Instagram

Last Monday evening, Michele and I watched the blue carpet extravaganza of the Met Gala on YouTube. If you are not aware of the Met Gala, it started as a dinner party at which the invitees were expected to donate money to the Costume Department of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The dinner party was a low-key affair for wealthy people who loved and bought haute couture clothing. But everything shifted when Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour took over in 1999. Now, it’s a televised fashion event that brings invite-only famous people together for the price of $75,000 a ticket.

Michele and I got interested in the Met Gala when Lewis Hamilton first got invited to the Gala sometime during the late 20-teens. He and Anna Wintour bonded over clothes and, strangely, for me, at least, over tennis, especially watching Serena Williams at Wimbledon. This year, the theme for the Gala was Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, and Lewis Hamilton was one of the co-chairs.

These are dangerous times to have a political conversation, especially around DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). It is almost impossible to have a nuanced conversation. It is also a time when companies like Boeing and Google have reneged on their DEI commitments under pressure from the Trump Administration (although Apple didn’t). It is a time when a prudent person running a department in a museum that gets money from the Federal Government would not flaunt their DEI cred, but Anna Wintour is not prudent or timid.

The Fighting Oligarchy Tour

No category

A lot of people were ready for this years ago, but it kept getting swept under the rug. More people are listening now than ever before. Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist,

I heard that someone was flying a plane with a banner that said This is Trump country… It sure don’t look like it today. I don’t think this is Trump country. This is our country. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez just before her speech in Folsom, California.

I’m gonna be honest: I did not have Bernie Sanders introducing Clairo at Coachella on my 2025 bingo card. Lexi Williams in msn which – according to itself – is a A general-purpose Web portal from Microsoft that includes news, sports and entertainment as well as the Bing search engine.

Out in the West – and more in the red Republican West of Idaho and Bakersfield than the blue West of the Coast – something is happening that I have never seen in my lifetime: two politicians, neither of whom is currently running for office, are drawing huge crowds on a protest tour. The tour is called “Fighting Oligarchy” and, not surprisingly to me, given the name, one of the politicians is Senator Bernie Sanders. Still, I am somewhat surprised that Bernie is not alone; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is also on the ticket.

Bernie – as he is known to his followers, if followers is the right word – is 83 and clearly will not run again, but AOC as she is known to her followers, is looking at a higher office and just as clearly as Bernie isn’t running, I’m sure AOC is running…for something and this is her introduction to the nation, especially the red parts of it. Running or not, Bernie and AOC are drawing huge crowds in red territory, such as Boise, Salt Lake City, and Bakersfield, but are receiving very little attention in the eastern mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

And this is the problem, the mainstream media is owned and controlled by people who brought us the oligarchy in the first place. Most of them are rich almost beyond comprehension, and they want to stay that way. The Ochs-Sulzberger family holds a controlling interest in The New York Times worth more than $8 billion, with a significant portion of the remaining shares owned by Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire worth about $88 billion. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is worth approximately $5.5 billion.

We – I’m going to go with Democratic Socialists because that’s how Bernie and AOC most identify themselves – Democratic Socialists have a lot of common goals with the Ochs-Sulzberger family, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and even Jeff Bezos, starting with equal rights for everybody, or as the Trump administration has phrased equality, DEI. Still, they differ from them in policies that will cost them money or diminish their power and influence, such as raising the tax rate on the ultra-rich, implementing a minimum wage that people can live on, or expanding Medicare to include everybody. They are not reporting on the Fighting Oligarchy tour because they are The Oligarchy.

I’ve listened to AOC’s speeches at Folsom and Boseman, Montana, and came away energized. Here is a sample of AOC on the stump.

Greenland And Slanting The Truth

Politics

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down, they are truly down. Joseph McCarthy, communist hunter and US senator, circa 1950

I do not think the mainstream press is equipped or capable of covering ideological white nationalists and eugenicists as such, or even capable of noting that this is what they are. it is related to the wide belief that racism is simply a matter of manners. ‪jamelle‬ ‪(at)jamellebouie.net‬ The real jbouie. Columnist for the New York Times Opinion section. Co-host of the Unclear and Present Danger podcast. b-boy-bouiebaisse on TikTok. National program director of the CHUM Group.

When I was a freshman in college, sometime around the end of 1957, we were shown a propaganda movie made by HUAC as part of our orientation package. HUAC stands for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, according to the Harry S. Truman Library, it was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and rebel activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and organizations suspected of having Communist ties. Citizens suspected of having ties to the communist party would be tried in a court of law.

The power that HUAC had, and the fear that power generated, seems absurd now – or it did, six months ago, anyway – but 1957 was a different time. Sometime in the thirties, we – well, some of us anyway – became obsessed with fighting Godless Communism, which was a threat, or a perceived threat anyway, to our national religion, Capitalism. 1957, when I saw the HUAC movie which was required part of Freshman Orientation, was four years after Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, embarrassed himself and the country as the Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, whatever the hell that means, and I thought – as I remember it, we all thought – that the going-after commies hysteria had passed.

As an aside, I knew HUAC was a house committee, and I knew that McCarthy was a Senator, but somehow, over the last 68 years, I’ve connected them in my psyche. But they were not connected, and the December 1954 censure of McCarthy by the Senate did not slow down the craziness of HUAC. End aside.

All that I remember about HUAC’s movie was how ridiculously exaggerated it was, and while I haven’t thought about that movie in years – probably 65 years – I was reminded of it by another ridiculously exaggerated movie that I just saw on FOX. Apparently, it was commissioned by President Trump to promote his Greenland adventure.

I ended up at FOX because I got angry at the reporting of the Wisconsin Supreme Court fight in the New York Times and Washington Post. I’m not angry that we won, I’m very happy about that, it’s my side that won after all. I’m angry at the biased reporting. I want my reporting to be unbiased and neutral (fair and balanced, if you will). Otherwise, I can’t trust it and can’t rely on it.

But, not surprisingly, FOX way outdid the New York Times in terms of craziness. They didn’t bother with the Wisconsin Supreme Court fight, choosing instead to feature the afore mentioned movie (displayed on Trump’s X account to aswage the doubts that this is real).

(The end of this post has been changed as the video that was originally posted here was preventing the post from loading properly).

Happy Spring

No category

Wow, having my hand in a cast – even a u-shaped pseudo-cast? – was more constricting than I expected. And so was the cold weather. But yesterday, I went to my hand doctor, who said my bone was healing faster than expected and removed the cast. When I was young, I used to be a fast healer, but it has been a long time since anybody told me that. It feels liberating.

Next week, I’m going to the eye surgeon for the cataract – s? – removed from my left eye and replaced with a silicon lens. Life is already looking better; at the end of next week, it should be looking better and brighter.