I probably bring in less money than most Wall Streeters put up their nostrils in snow in a week or a month or whatever. I never cultivated that habit, one of many. I have pushed to "put the coke back in Coke" on the theory that what 1800s pharmacists were doing around microdosing was not all that bad for some patients. We all get to be patients, some of us practicing as doctors as well, on Looney Tunes Earth.
Speaking of prohibited substances to which the privileged have largely unfettered access (a measure of wealth, in that potlatch sense: do you have the means to host those wild parties?), I was a student of Col. Prouty, Man X in the Oliver Stone movie, JFK, the Donald Sutherland character. Through books and CD ROM and YouTube interviews and so on; I never actually met the guy personally.
Prouty goes on and on in some passages about how NORAD is plenty aware of all small plane traffic over the southern borders it need do nothing about. Leave Arkansas air traffic to Arkansas and so on. His implication being (he says so outright): these small planes are often packed with prohibited substances, continuing a tradition going back to at least Prohibition (when it was more about rum than white powder).
Insert: my curriculum has a portal into cryptography here, in the person of another strong woman, Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the Prohibition Era code cracker who, along with her husband, helped dig the ground where the NSA rests today, conceptually speaking.
Focusing on a physical wall or fence is not necessarily what you'd do if focusing on the real smuggling vectors. A Dymaxion Projection with smuggling vectors traced worldwide would make for some spanking new content in one of those Salon-type online magazines. Nice coffee table content: where it all comes from. A lot comes from Oregon I would imagine.
But once again, given I'm a comprehensivist, a tourist passing through, I'm hardly the resident expert and would not be on the team to make that map. So many pros know the Mena stories and others like them more intimately than I do. If you don't know that Arkansas airport then you're even less well read than I am, so remember that about comprehensivists. I know some virology also, without being a Fauci. What glues it together is pattern matching, a fancy name for analogies. Analog: shapewise similar but size-wise not (that's an oversimplification).
Why am I bringing up JFK and narcotics and spooky underworld stuff ala Col. Fletcher Prouty? If you check back in history, around now they were dumping lots of JFK files into the public domain, much of it documents already well known but with redacted shielding now removed, lifting the veil in some cases. Also, the great wall along or in the Rio Grande was a major focus among the various American countries involved, such as the Republic of Texas (also a part of the Federation you learned about).
As a blogger, doing a journal, like any good Quaker, keeping up with my practice, I allude to current events and share my angle. My angle on borders in general is they're a rather new thing in terms of micro-management, surveillance, gait analysis and so on. We didn't always have these drones and monitoring personnel. Borders were easy to draw and defend on paper, such as by scathing memoranda in diplomatic circles, but most people were without documents. They hadn't made it to middle class status yet.
So the proposal to clamp down on the undocumented and criminalize poverty worldwide, starting with using borders as approximations for the prisons within prisons on the drawing boards, is pretty off the scales radical. Future shock is indeed shocking. We're cattle in our own electrified pens. One cow to the other, over an electric fence: at least it's not open borders, or you could eat my grass (a shared thought balloon).
What has DOGE found in terms of prisons in the permit phase, planning phase, or conceptual art. Is there any truth to the rumor that Mars will be a one way trip for volunteer lifers with no prospects, a prison planet? That sounds like a series on Amazon or Netflix, so apologies if I just inadvertently plagiarized. Sometimes I trespass, my devices not having entirely aligned maps compared to what more local maps show.
Russell Towle is another reason I'm hearkening back to the 1960s, to the Merry Prankster Era, which was well before my time in terms of my not having an adult body yet, when Further was plying the highways and byways, criss-crossing North America, running acid tests. I was twice removed: once in being still in grade school, twice for being in Rome by then. I saw Yellow Submarine (twice, once with my parents) at that little theater in Trastevere that specialized in English language movies. What was it called again? Pasquino. The other one, Archimedes off Piazza Euclide, was within walking distance from my house. So it's not like I was completely disconnected from USA TV culture. I was even a Cub Scout.
Russell Towle was into rhombohedral zonohedra when David Koski and I discovered him online. He kindly helped me over email regarding my having aspect ratios wrong in my rendered POV-Ray output. Thanks to him, my graphics improved. Then suddenly he was gone. The Wolfram people mourned his loss also; he'd helped showcase the powers of Mathematica and Wolfram Language. Now just today I'm reading up on his overlap with Neal Cassady and those folks. As Spock of Leonard Nimoy fame might put it: fascinating, captain.
