The mountain pinks I mentioned

Steve Schwartzman

Jul 5

Two posts back I mentioned that on June 28th in my part of town I stopped to check out some mountain pinks, Zeltnera beyrichii, that in previous years had grown horizontally from the face of a low roadcut. I found a few of those plants doing so again this year, one of which you see below. For the svelte portrait of the isolated bud above, I got in as close as my macro lens would focus.

(You've already seen a floralicious mountain pink portrait in a post last week.)

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Yesterday, July 4th, was America's national holiday celebrating independence and freedom. By a happy coincidence, the day also saw a victory for the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment proviso that government may not interfere with a citizen's right to free speech. As The Epoch Times reported:

A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting an injunction that blocks various Biden administration officials and government agencies like the Justice Department and the FBI from working with big tech firms to censor posts on social media.

The injunction came in response to a censorship-by-proxy lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who have accused Biden administration officials and various government agencies of pressuring social media companies to suspend accounts or take down posts.

The judge, Terry A. Doughty, wrote in the July 4 judgment (pdf) that various government agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of State, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are prohibited from taking a range of actions with regards to social media companies.

Specifically, the agencies and their staff members are prohibited from meeting or contacting by phone, email, text message or "engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech," per the injunction.

The agencies are also barred from flagging content on posts on social media platforms and forwarding them to the companies with requests for action such as removing or otherwise suppressing their reach.

Encouraging or otherwise egging on social media companies to change their guidelines for the removal, suppression, or reduction of content that contains protected free speech by the government is also not allowed.

You may be able to read the full article. You can also read a report about this welcome decision in The Washington Examiner. And if you want the judge's full written decision, you can have it.