Tight tendril

Steve Schwartzman

Sep 3

Greenbrier (Smilax bona-nox) is a common vine in the woods of Austin. It's admittedly a nuisance to people when its thorns snag our clothing and scratch our skin. Nevertheless, as a nature photographer I've found greenbrier an excellent subject for close views (and occasionally more distant ones). I asked the Texas Flora group about the many pale "starbursts" on the stem in this picture. The first suggestion was a scale infection. A second was trichomes. One website's description of greenbrier's stems said that they occur "infrequently with stellate trichomes." Another website said the stems "are scurfy (i.e., with a scaly crust on the stem surface)." In any case, whatever the starbursts are, they add welcome texture to the portrait. And how about that tightly coiled tendril?

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I spend lots of time looking things up because, by personality and from decades of teaching math, I value accuracy. That's why I include so many links to documents. If you're aware of any facts that I've reported incorrectly, please point me to contradictory evidence. Of course people can disagree about what policies a government should follow, but we have to start from the facts.

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Lawlessness

Just because I haven't mentioned the southern border of the United States for a while doesn't mean that it's not still out of control. It is. The current régime continues to encourage millions of people to come here illegally each year by facilitating their entry into the country and giving them benefits once they're here (like providing free transportation—sometimes by airplane—to wherever they want to go in the United States).

ABC ran an article on August 18 headlined "July border arrests decrease but expected to total a record 2 million by next month." The subhead read "CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] has arrested more migrants so far in 2022 than in all of 2021." And of course that number doesn't include the great many "gotaways," illegal border crossers that authorities observed but were unable to detain for various reasons, mainly having way too few officers to handle the incessant onslaught. As a July 25th New York Post article noted: "More than 500,000 known 'gotaway' immigrants have crossed the border into the US but evaded capture since the start of FY [fiscal year] 2022, according to a new report." Notice the word "known"; it implies that in addition to the half-million that were observed, hundreds of thousands of other illegal border crossers came into the country completely undetected.

Accompanying this lawlessness is the current administration's denial of it. A July 25th New York Post article bore the headline "Don't believe your eyes: WH [White House] claims migrants are not just 'walking' across border." As the article explained:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted on Monday that migrants are not just "walking" across the border — an event captured near daily by press photographers.

The stunning answer came in response to a question by Fox News' Peter Doocy, who asked why potentially unvaccinated migrants continue to arrive in the US but tennis star Novak Djokovic couldn't compete in the US Open, which kicked off in Flushing Meadows, Queens today. "It is not that simple. It's not just that people are walking across the border...."

Karine Jean-Pierre's flippant response was an outright lie. Take the 2 million people that the ABC article mentioned, divide it by 365, and you get an average of over 5000 people "just" walking in illegally every single day. The "Don't believe your eyes" in the Post's headline refers to the fact that anyone can go down to places like Eagle Pass and Del Rio on the Texas border and watch groups of people that cartels have brought close to the border walk up to the Rio Grande River and wade or swim across it to enter the United States illegally. Those groups include dozens and occasionally even hundreds of people at a time. Here's a video. Just because news outlets that favor illegal immigration rarely report on the thousands of people coming in illegally every day, or flat-out say it isn't true, doesn't make reality go away. Those news outlets are reality deniers.

What is undeniable is that "drug overdoses have claimed the lives of over 100,000 people in the United States [this year]," and "Fentanyl was reportedly the cause of two-thirds of them. According to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control], Fentanyl is now the number one cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45. Surpassing suicide, Covid-19, and car accident-related deaths." One person in this country dies of fentanyl poisoning about every 9 minutes. Confounding the problem is that drug dealers are mixing Fentanyl into pills that are made to look like other drugs, for example oxycontin. Especially insidious, drug dealers have recently been putting Fentanyl into colored tablets that look like candy, thereby opening up the possibility that children will unknowingly eat one and die. Drug overdoses and poisonings contributed to making 2021 the second year in a row that life expectancy in the United States went down.

The previous paragraph is relevant to the ones that preceded it because much of the fentanyl in the United States is smuggled across the Mexican border, where agents are so overworked with processing and caring for illegal immigrants that portions of the border now go completely unguarded.

Like I said, lawlessness.