Funerals, Firewalls, and Fundraising via OnlyFans

The American state is currently staging several elegies at once: public rituals professing continuity, administrative practices that rub up against the Constitution, and once‑steady funding streams being reimagined as patronage or Patreon. You can see all three in one week — a senator’s national funeral attended by presidents and foreign leaders, an airport search that ends with legal questions about whether your phone can be wiped under duress, and a 64‑year marmot study advertising subscriptions on OnlyFans.

These are not separate maladies. They are variations on the same theme: institutional authority bending to personality, bureaucracy, and market improvisation. The spectacle of dignitaries gathered under a cathedral dome (and later a horse‑drawn caisson and military flyover) promises grandeur and continuity, while the mechanics of governance quietly migrate to ad hoc practices — warrantless border searches, crowdfunding for basic research, and rumor as foreign‑policy shorthand.

If you squint, the connective tissue is simple: power without stable, publicly accountable apparatus produces improvisation. Sometimes that improvisation looks like ritual; sometimes it looks like coercion; sometimes it looks like a GoFundMe. All of it merits attention, because what we call “the state” is increasingly a collage of ceremonies, exceptions, and market fixes — and the gaps will be where political outcomes are decided.

Lindsey Graham’s funeral was not merely a farewell; it was a gathering of the networks that still run American foreign policy. The Washington National Cathedral hosted hundreds, and the guest list read like a primer on post‑Cold War realpolitik: former President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and international heavyweights such as Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump called Graham “a force in the world and US politics,” and the presence of foreign leaders underscored something obvious: Graham’s life was less about domestic theatre than about the machinery of alliances and warfighting.

There is a duality to this kind of state funeral. On one hand, it cements a legacy — Graham’s long Senate tenure (first elected in 2002, repeatedly re‑elected) and his influence on Iraq, Iran policy, and post‑2022 support for Ukraine are real. On the other, such pageantry masks how fragile the institutions are that he helped shape: parties that trade loyalty for access, foreign policy staffed by personal networks, and the strange modern sport of selfie diplomacy where memorials double as networking hours. See the photo coverage at Al Jazeera and the local return home at Yahoo, which together narrate the arc from national symbolic stage to the county burial ground: Al Jazeera and Yahoo.

Political funerals are often an attempt at rewriting a career into a single, coherent public memory. Graham’s was no exception: tributes emphasized his deal‑making and cross‑aisle reach. But the stronger story is the soft power he cultivated — a web of international friendships and hawkish credibility that outlived him. In the near future, those networks will be assets in nominations, policy fights, and the very real contest over who writes the next chapter of U.S. interventionism.

A Georgia traveler, Samuel Tunick, has been charged with a felony after prosecutors say he used a GrapheneOS “duress password” to wipe his phone during a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encounter. The reported facts are cinematic: Tunick denied consent, asked for counsel, then allegedly entered a secondary passcode that caused the device to flash and effectively reset. That simple technological affordance has now landed in a very messy legal arena — and that mess will be consequential.

The core legal question is deceptively straightforward: how do Fourth Amendment protections apply at ports of entry? CBP asserts it can conduct warrantless searches of travelers’ devices; civil‑liberties advocates and a patchwork of court rulings suggest otherwise, or at least demand stricter limits. The Verge’s reporting captures the ambiguity and stakes here, noting both the government’s claim about child‑abuse material and Tunick’s contention that the search was a pretext aimed at his political activism: The Verge.

There are three practical takeaways. First: technology gives citizens defensive tools — multiple passcodes, encryption, and operating systems with duress features — that will be litigated in the coming years. Second: administrative power at borders tends to expand in practice long before it is reconciled in law. And third: if searches like this are normalized, the border will become a site of informal political vetting, with activists, journalists, and ordinary travelers disproportionately affected. The duress password is a small cipher for a bigger problem: the erosion of procedural safeguards when national security and administrative convenience collide.

“CBP didn’t need a warrant,” the reporting notes — and that sentence should make anyone who cares about civil liberties sit up straight. Because when an exception swallows the rule, it rarely gives anything back.

The UCLA marmot study, running since 1962, has a new funding stream: OnlyFans. Faced with shrinking federal grants, researchers created OnlyMarms, a G‑rated page offering updates and donation options to keep fieldwork, supplies, and data collection alive. The idea sounds grotesque only until you remember that the alternative is handing over decades of continuous ecological data to extinction by budget cuts. Kottke’s write‑up sketches the improvisation: scientists repurposing a platform built for sex work to save a rigorous, long‑term project: Kottke.

This is both charming and ominous. Charming: scholars engaging the public directly, making their work accessible and — yes — monetizable. Ominous: it reveals that public goods are now being shored up by private, often precarious, revenue streams. The story of OnlyMarms is a parable. If basic research requires a subscription model to survive, then the allocation of scientific attention riskily mirrors market demand instead of societal need. What gets funded will increasingly be what performs online, not what advances long‑term knowledge.

There are worse outcomes than creative fundraising. The marmot team stresses that OnlyMarms is a stopgap, not a solution. Still, the image of a field biologist posting behind‑the‑scenes footage for donor tiers captures where we are: institutions that once promised stable, meritocratic support for inquiry are now auditioning for an attention economy. If scientific continuity becomes contingent on clicks, we should expect more improvisations — and more brittle science.

When the center cannot command authority, rumor fills the vacuum. Snopes’ collection of 11 claims about US‑China relations is a useful reminder that the foreign‑policy conversation is frequently conducted on the basis of unverified snapshots, doctored images, and political theater: Snopes. The catalogue ranges from fake photos and bribery allegations to claims about investor behavior and trade data. Taken together, they show how quickly narratives can ossify into perceived fact.

Why this matters beyond petty misinformation: these claims shape diplomatic posture, electoral rhetoric, and market behavior. A doctored image can end up on a politician’s feed; a false allegation can become a talking point in a stump speech; and journalists — pressed for speed — can amplify noise that later proves baseless. Snopes’ archive isn’t mere debunking; it is a map of how uncertainty becomes policy. The piece’s blunt line captures it: “The tense relationship between the U.S. and China is a topic rife with unproven rumors.”

Link this to the other items in the newsletter and a pattern emerges. When authoritative institutions (scientific funding bodies, legal protections at the border, or even sober foreign policy forums) are perceived as unreliable or politicized, citizens and actors seek alternatives. Those alternatives are markets (OnlyMarms), technical workarounds (duress passwords), or rumor mills. None of these substitute for the public legitimacy that stable institutions provide. Absent that legitimacy, the information environment becomes brittle and weaponizable.

Funerals, passwords, subscription pages, and fact‑checks: they are not unrelated curiosities. They are the symptoms of a polity where ceremony attempts to paper over fragility, bureaucratic exceptions outpace constitutional reckonings, and market improvisation substitutes — uneasily — for civic provision. The moral is not melodrama but arithmetic: institutions require funding, rules, and public faith. Remove one, and the others fray.

If you like your politics tidy, there is a grim lesson here. Public rituals (the cathedral, the caisson) make authority legible. Administrative practices (border searches) make power effective. Markets (crowdfunding, OnlyFans) make things possible — temporarily. And misinformation makes narratives sticky. The question for the next few years is which of these becomes primary. My bet: the compromise patchwork grows more elaborate, and the cost — in rights deferred, research interrupted, and truth diluted — will be paid incrementally.

So when someone tells you that institutions are fine because a state funeral looked majestic, or that technology alone will secure privacy at the border, or that the market will simply save science — nod, then ask what happens when spectacle, expedient authority, and subscriptions collide. That is where policy gets decided, often without the public noticing.