Maroon, orange, pale green

The opening picture a few days ago showed that the flow in the Pedernales River at Milton Reimers Ranch Park on January 14th was reduced enough to have left portions of the river bed dry or largely so. That provided me opportunities for views of algae, like the orange patch above with a maroon sycamore leaf (Platanus occidentalis) in it, or the green algae below that was corrugating and turning pale as it dried out.

 

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Large-scale American government lawlessness every day

 

Footage from FOX News reporter Bill Melugin shows large numbers of single adult men being dropped off by bus, processed, and sent to the airport after crossing the border illegally near Brownsville, Texas.

“These are all single adults being released, almost all of them men. No children, no family units. Single adults are supposed to be expelled from the country,” Melugin reported.

“We followed their taxi cabs… and those migrants were just dropped off at the airport to fly around the country,” he explained. “We talked to a couple of them who said they were going to Atlanta, Houston, and Miami and they had just crossed illegally and paid the cartels $2000 to do so.”

 

It’s been said that crime doesn’t pay, but this story contradicts that adage. The people who enter illegally pay the Mexican cartels, and our government then uses our tax money to pay contractors to transport the illegal entrants to places inside the United States. One cynic described the contractors who transport the illegal entrants as “travel agents” for them.

You can read the full story in a RealClear Politics article and a New York Post article. The first video embedded in the RealClear Politics article reports that last month (December) the border patrol reported 178,840 encounters with people who had illegally crossed the border. That number is slightly more than the total for December 2018, December 2019, and December 2020 combined. What the 178,840 figure does not include are the tens of thousands of illegal entrants who completely evaded the overworked, stressed-out, stretched-thin border patrol in December 2021.

Like I said, lawlessness.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman