People who have not been convicted of a crime are having their DNA added to the FBI criminal database, in large numbers.  From The New Republic.

ICE Is Using Immigration Arrests to Build a Massive DNA Database

The Surveillance State continues.  At the very least there needs to be privacy laws to restrict access and punish misuse of this data.  From Tech Spot.

Dozens of police officers accused of using license plate cameras to track women

From Source New Mexico.

New Mexico plugs record number of abandoned oil and gas wells, thanks to Biden-era funding

A friend from the Bay Area sent me a pic of the City Lights bookstore with banners quoting Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem Pity the Nation.  The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about it:

‘Pity the nation’: San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore displays banners warning against tyranny

The poem and its connection to a similar work by Khalil Gibran is in a posting on The Allen Ginsburg Project blog.

Ferlinghetti (Pity The Nation)

Ran across the little fiesta up the road in Bernalillo.  Lots of these around in this part of the world, being rural / agricultural.

Fiesta de San Lorenzo, Bernalillo, Nuevo Mexico

From Yale Climate Connections.

New Mexico’s clean energy success story

I don’t do any serious investing these days but enjoyed these quotes collected by Cove Street Capital.  My favorite:

… more fiction has been written in Excel than Word

More Summer Reading from the Clean Out Old Clip Files

A good overview on the circulation of vast amounts of capital within the AI world.  From Marcus on AI.

Circular financing ain’t what it used to be

Saw this on Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s SubStack.  A quote from Bob Dylan from 1993.  Are we there yet?

“Technology to wipe out truth is now available. Not everybody can afford it but it’s available. When the cost comes down, look out!”
― Bob Dylan

I’ve travelled to Mexico, usually on vacation, most of my life.  Maybe a dozen times overall.  The warning was always: don’t drink the water and avoid unwashed fruits and vegetables.  Lettuce was usually mentioned.

Today it seems problematic (ahem) lettuce from Mexico is being imported.  I’m not sure what the whole story is here.  Maybe there aren’t enough people left to pick lettuce here in the US after all the ICE raids.  Maybe standards have been loosened (thanks RFK Jr and FDA).  Maybe it’s just old fashioned corruption.  Maybe it’s all of these.  Even the right wing news source NewsNation can’t ignore the massive (we will call it) appearance of corruption here.  And nobody will officially name “Taylor Farms” as the culprit, but it seems to be where all the data points.

Taylor Farms political donations questioned amid cyclosporiasis outbreak