…well…damn…here we go again, I guess

Arizona’s Republican governor on Wednesday signed a bill requiring voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, drawing fierce opposition from voting rights advocates who say it risks affecting 200,000 people.
[…]
The state legislature’s own lawyers say much of the measure is unconstitutional, directly contradicts a recent US supreme court decision and is likely to be thrown out in court. Still, voting rights advocates worry the bill is an attempt to get back in front of the now more conservative supreme court.
[…]
Representative Jake Hoffman, who developed the bill along with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the measure was about eliminating opportunities for fraud, though cases of non-citizens voting are extremely rare.
[…]
In a challenge to Proposition 200 [a provision adopted in a 2004 ballot measure][that requires voters to prove their citizenship when they register] the US supreme court ruled in 2013 that Arizona can adopt its own eligibility criteria for state elections but must accept a federal voter registration form for federal elections. The federal form requires voters to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens, but unlike the state form, it does not require them to provide documentary proof. The state has tried unsuccessfully to get the federal form changed.

The ruling created a class of voters who can vote only for president, US House and US Senate known as “federal-only voters”. There are 31,500 people currently registered that way, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s Office.

…& yes…31,500 > “I just need 11,00 votes”…but as ever the part above the surface isn’t the point

The bill would take effect 90 days after the end of the legislative session, which is likely to fall between the primary and general elections. Affected voters could vote legally in the 2 August primary. They would get notified their registration was at risk of cancellation if they did not prove their citizenship, and they would have until 11 October to fix the issue or miss their chance to vote in the general election.

…although…the possibility they might not have thought this all the way through does exist…which is arguably another of those “as ever” things

Sam Almy, a data analyst who consults for Democratic campaigns, said his analysis of voter registration records found just under 220,000 voters who had not updated their registration since 2004, when Proposition 200 passed. The group skews heavily toward registered Republicans, older people and those who consistently vote.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/30/arizona-voting-rights-citizenship-law

…I mean, it’s hardly a secret they want more hurdles between those who don’t vote republican & a chance to exercise that vote…but if the people they need to make it over those hurdles are staunch republican voters who skew elderly…how should I put this…we know those folks to be tragically easy to confuse…& not fans of believing things it doesn’t suit them to…just sayin’…but then I don’t exactly have a say in how this kind of thing goes

At this point, there’s very little distance between the fringes of the modern Republican Party and the elites who lead it. Superficial differences of affect and emphasis mask shared views and ways of seeing. In fact, members of the Republican elite are very often the fringe figures in question.
[…]
Ginni Thomas is also, notably, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And while Justice Thomas is in no way responsible for the actions of his spouse, it does beggar belief to think he is unaware of her views and actions, including her work to keep Trump in office against the will of the electorate.

But that’s something of a separate issue. What matters here is that we have, in Ginni Thomas, a very high-profile Republican activist who holds, and acts on, fringe, conspiratorial beliefs. And she is not alone.

Like Thomas, former Attorney General William P. Barr is a mainstay of the Republican establishment in Washington, a consummate insider with decades of political and legal experience.[…]But there’s no reason to think that Barr’s traditional credentials somehow preclude fringe beliefs. As it turns out, they don’t.

[…]What Barr describe[d] isn’t a president, but a king. It is a gussied-up version of Trump’s belief that under Article II of the Constitution, he had “the right to do whatever I want as president.” It may not be QAnon, but it still belongs to the fringe.
[…]
You can play this game with any number of prominent Republicans. Leading figures like Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia regularly give voice to conspiracy theories and other wild accusations. Last month, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, released an 11-point agenda that, among other things, denies the existence of transgender people and calls on the government to treat socialism as a “foreign combatant.”

And those Republicans who don’t openly hold fringe views are more than willing to pander to them, such as Senator Ted Cruz’s enthusiastic embrace of “stop the steal” and Senator Josh Hawley’s QAnon dog whistle that Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, is soft on (and sympathetic to) child predators.

For Democrats, and especially for Democratic leadership, the upshot of all of this is that they should give up whatever hope they had that the Republican Party will somehow return to normal, that the fever will break and American politics will snap back to reality. From its base to its leaders, the modern Republican Party is fully in the grip of an authoritarian movement animated by extreme beliefs and fringe conspiracy theories.

Ginni Thomas Is No Outlier [NYT]

…& in the final analysis…I ain’t feeling too positive about them as do?

Even for experts who closely follow the US supreme court, there was something stunning about an emergency decision from the justices on Wednesday.

In an unexpected move, the court decided to throw out new districts for the state legislature in Wisconsin that had been picked by the state supreme court. But what was even more surprising was that the court’s conservative majority seemed to go out of its way to attack the Voting Rights Act, one of the most important civil rights laws designed to prevent discrimination in US elections. “Extra headspinning,” was how Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, described it. “Bizarre,” observed Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine. David Wasserman, a redistricting expert at the non-partisan Cook Political Report, tweeted that the supreme court had entered “uncharted territory”.
[…]
The court’s hostility towards the Voting Rights Act comes at a moment when Republican legislatures across the US are passing a wave of new voting restrictions that many see as thinly veiled efforts to make it harder for Black and Latinx Americans to vote. Voting rights groups have fewer and fewer tools to challenge those restrictions. This is the first redistricting cycle since 1965 that states with a history of voting discrimination don’t have to get their maps pre-approved before they go into effect, under a provision of the Voting Rights Act.

When the supreme court gutted that provision in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed to section 2 as a powerful tool litigants could use to challenge discriminatory voting laws. The court is now making it harder to win cases under that provision.

The court has recently used a docket of emergency cases – called the shadow docket – to issue consequential voting rights rulings for two other cases with little reasoning or briefing – sometimes both. Last month, the court blocked a lower court’s ruling that would have required Alabama to implement an additional Black-majority congressional district. In another shadow docket ruling this month, three of the court’s justices embraced a fringe legal theory that courts cannot second-guess state legislatures on election matters.

“It is a sign that many of the brakes have come off,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the shadow docket. “It’s a sign that the court is increasingly willing to do whatever the court wants to do, procedural constraints and sort of awkward timing notwithstanding.”

…”awkward timing” is maybe a tad euphemistic…but if we’re doing euphemistic language I’d maybe have gone for “propriety be damned” on that timing thing…what with the timing issues about who got to sit on that bench when I believe this effort is well into territory that I think is technically referred to as “taking the fucking piss”

The Wisconsin case arrived at the supreme court after an unusual set of circumstances and was not really set up to be a consequential voting rights dispute. “It is the most disturbing aspect of this,” said Deuel Ross, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who frequently litigates section 2 redistricting cases.

The supreme court had options. It could have granted that request and requested further briefing and oral argument. It could have rejected the request and waited for a full challenge to the new district to work its way through lower courts, where there would have been extensive evidence submitted about whether the additional district was needed.
[…]
“It’s just really a signal that they don’t like the VRA and they wanted to say something about the VRA,” Li said. “It’s not even well hidden now. It’s like they’re gunning for the VRA.

“This is a court that’s not comfortable sorting voters into districts based on race and wants to know why you’re doing that,” he added. “The real question is whether they reformulate the test in a way that makes it practically impossible to ever win a section 2 case or whether there’s some reasonable universe of cases that survives.”

Another reason the Wisconsin decision was so notable was its timing. The supreme court has embraced a general idea recently, called the Purcell principle, that courts should not intervene in election disputes when an election is close.
[…]
That timing raised eyebrows because of a decision written by Justices Kavanaugh and Alito in the Alabama case. Writing in early February, the two conservative justices said it was too close to Alabama’s 24 May election to justify imposing new maps. But in a different redistricting case in North Carolina in early March, Alito wrote a ruling, joined by Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, saying it was not too close to North Carolina’s 17 March primary to overturn maps that were being challenged there.

“The obvious cynical explanation is that when the Purcell principle helps Republicans, apply it. And don’t when it hurts them,” Hasen said.

Ross, the LDF attorney, said the supreme court’s ruling underscored the need to look elsewhere to protect voting rights.

“It’s been a long time since the courts were the saviors of our democracy,” he said. “As the courts become less and less responsive to these kinds of claims, it becomes more important that people are engaged not just at the national level … but what’s happening at the local level of what’s happening at your city council, school commission.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/31/supreme-court-assault-voting-rights-new-low

…the offensiveness of the timing notwithstanding…because while this does have a distinct whiff of “getting in under the wire” about it

“I have decided to support the confirmation of Judge Jackson to be a member of the supreme court,” Collins, a Republican moderate, told the New York Times after meeting the nominee a second time.
[…]
The confirmation was not in doubt. Democrats need only their own 50 votes in the evenly divided Senate to put Jackson on the court, given the casting vote of the vice-president, Kamala Harris. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia, had already confirmed his support.

…not that this particular substitution is going to shift that needle the way clarence thomas’ health could

Jackson will replace Stephen Breyer when he retires this summer. As Breyer is a member of the outmatched liberal group on the court, his replacement will not alter the 6-3 conservative majority.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/30/ketanji-brown-jackson-susan-collins-supreme-court

…call it yet another reminder there’s a reason why the adage is “slow & steady wins the race”…arguably more than one, even…because the overall project here certainly isn’t remotely new

The less new a story is, the less it counts as news. The clue, after all, is in the word itself. If you are in a cellar in Mariupol, you can’t move on; you can probably never move on. But the media have to move on; the “new” in news demands it. This is a real problem. It has always troubled me and I have no clue what the answer is.
[…]
While this is startlingly obvious, the issue of what does and doesn’t make news could hardly be more serious. When the same awful thing happens often enough, it ceases to be unusual enough to merit mention. In this deafening silence surrounding the mundanity of tragedy, all manner of evil is able to proliferate. Domestic violence perpetrated by men against women is an obvious example. So much of it goes on that, for day-to-day reporting of it, you have to check your local press – if you still have any local press to refer to – and read as far as the “news in brief”. If a woman has harmed a man, of course, we will doubtless get to hear more about it. There is sexism in this, but what we might call “newism” is the critical factor.

For a check on the history of the word “news”, I went, as I always do, to the etymologist Susie Dent. (My, how she must regret giving me her number.) She pointed me to etymonline.com:

news (n)
late 14c, “new things”, plural of new (n) “new thing” … after French nouvelles, which was used in Bible translations to render medieval Latin nova “news”, literally “new things”.

So, news has always been about what is new or newsworthy – a word for which, Susie points out, the Oxford English Dictionary has citations dating back to 1596. This carries at least the implication that news should consist of what is worthy of mention, not merely what happens to be topical. Modern dictionary definitions of news and newsworthy tend to refer to them being about what is “interesting” to people, rather than what is “important”.

There is a difference: the former generates more engagement, and therefore sales and clicks, than the latter. Many news organisations do everything they can to mitigate this, but the fight against human nature and our dwindling attention spans is a tough one.

There is a worse category than this, though: the stories that elicit only a shrug, because, awful though they are, someone will merely say: “’Twas ever thus.” I promise you, pick your personal gripe about the state of the world and you will have yourself a good example of this.

Access to legal justice is mine. We have this hard-wired notion in the UK that, if accused of something, we all deserve and would get a fair trial. Yet everyone in the business, by choice or otherwise, knows that justice is only open for all in the sense that the Ritz is open for all – it’s available to you only if you can afford it.
[…]
As long as we can focus on or care about only what is new, the ’twas-ever-thuses will grow. This is where newism, the fetishisation of the new in news, inevitably takes us.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/30/ukraine-war-russia-media-news

…all of which is itself arguably a case of “same shit, different day”.

Law enforcement in the US have killed 249 people this year as of 24 March, averaging about three deaths a day and mirroring the deadly force trends of recent years, according to Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group. The data, experts say, suggests in the nearly two years since George Floyd’s murder, the US has made little progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and that the 2020 promises of systemic reforms have fallen short.

Police have killed roughly 1,100 people each year since 2013. In 2021, officers killed 1,136 people – one of the deadliest years on record, Mapping Police Violence reported. The organization tracks deaths recorded by police, governments and the media, including cases where people were fatally shot, beaten, restrained, and Tasered. The Washington Post has reported similar trends, and found that 2021 broke the record for fatal shootings by officers since the newspaper started its database tracking in 2015.

“The shocking regularity of killings suggests that nothing substantive has really changed to disrupt the nationwide dynamic of police violence,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard, which evaluates departments. “It demonstrates that we’re not doing enough, and if anything, it appears to be getting slightly worse year over year.”

Police killings are proceeding at almost exactly the same pace as previous years. No progress has been made in reducing deadly police violence nationwide. Another ~870 people will be killed by police by year’s end unless there are massive systemic changes. https://t.co/G3YiCYZoEi pic.twitter.com/bvhQvZJKWV

— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) March 26, 2022

There are documented solutions that could reduce killings, said Alex S Vitale, sociology professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on policing. He noted estimates suggesting that 25% to 50% of people killed by police were having a mental health crisis.
[…]
Vitale, author of The End of Policing, pointed to a program in Denver that sends mental health clinicians and paramedics to respond to certain 911 calls, which is now dramatically expanding after a successful pilot. Health experts have responded to thousands of emergency calls since 2020, and have never had to call police for backup, the Denver Post reported.

“While the media has mobilized crime panics to try and shut down talk of reducing our reliance on policing, organizations across the country are doing grassroots work in communities to demand these alternatives,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/30/us-police-killing-people-high-rates

…& let’s face it…this part doesn’t exactly incline me to imagine there are going to be less incidents the cops might be called to attend that could pan out that way

America’s relationship with guns will probably never be peaceful, but as a rash of new pro-gun laws spread across the country some fear it could soon be legal in as many as 25 US states to carry a concealed gun without a permit.

To gun control advocates and law enforcement it’s a dangerous new development in America’s enduring, historic and highly politicized infatuation with personal firearms.
[…]
Over the past month, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana have moved to abolish requirements for a background check and license to carry a handgun in public. Last year, six states – Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, Tennessee, Texas and Utah – enacted permit-less carry measures, according to the Pew Research Center. Many others are expected to follow as gun rights groups – often politically conservative – push similar plans.

Called “constitutional carry” or “permitless carry” by gun rights supporters, permit repeals are a totem in red states offering Republican candidates facing primary season and November elections an opportunity to burnish far-right credentials.

[…]the bills have been criticized by police and gun control advocates, who argue that removing permits poses a safety risk to citizens and law enforcement officers.
[…]
But the momentum toward permitless is unmistakable, as new laws give millions of Americans increasingly unfettered access to firearms even as gun violence rises across the country.
[…]
According to the CDC, more Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2020 than in any other year on record – 45,222. That figure includes a record number of gun murders, as well as a near-record number of gun suicides, which make up 54% of the total.
[…]
And the political context, says [executive director of the Coalition To Stop Gun Violence Josh] Horwitz, is unmistakable. “These laws are a signal from Republican legislatures to say, ‘I’m Trumpian, I’m as far-right as I can go.’ There was a time when many people in the Republican party were supportive of gun rights but they wanted them regulated. That’s gone out the window.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/29/us-constitutional-permitless-carry-gun-laws

…& I don’t know how much stuff has to go out the window before it piles up high enough to hove into view…but surely we must be approaching that point…or I’m standing too close to that proverbial window & it’s lowered my horizons?

When a suicide bomber attacked Kabul International Airport in August last year, the death and destruction was overwhelming: The violence left 183 people dead, including 13 U.S. service members.

This kind of mass casualty event can be particularly daunting for field workers. Hundreds of people need care, the hospitals nearby have limited room, and decisions on who gets care first and who can wait need to be made quickly. Often, the answer isn’t clear, and people disagree.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the innovation arm of the U.S. military — is aiming to answer these thorny questions by outsourcing the decision-making process to artificial intelligence. Through a new program, called In the Moment, it wants to develop technology that would make quick decisions in stressful situations using algorithms and data, arguing that removing human biases may save lives, according to details from the program’s launch this month.

Though the program is in its infancy, it comes as other countries try to update a centuries-old system of medical triage, and as the U.S. military increasingly leans on technology to limit human error in war. But the solution raises red flags among some experts and ethicists who wonder if AI should be involved when lives are at stake.

“AI is great at counting things,” Sally A. Applin, a research fellow and consultant who studies the intersection between people, algorithms and ethics, said in reference to the DARPA program. “But I think it could set a [bad] precedent by which the decision for someone’s life is put in the hands of a machine.”
[…]
The program, which will take roughly 3.5 years to complete, is soliciting private corporations to assist in its goals, a part of most early-stage DARPA research. Agency officials would not say which companies are interested, or how much money will be slated for the program.
[…]
Despite the promise, some ethicists had questions about how DARPA’s program could play out: Would the data sets they use cause some soldiers to get prioritized for care over others? In the heat of the moment, would soldiers simply do whatever the algorithm told them to, even if common sense suggested different? And, if the algorithm plays a role in someone dying, who is to blame?
[…]
Peter Asaro, an AI philosopher at the New School, said military officials will need to decide how much responsibility the algorithm is given in triage decision-making. Leaders, he added, will also need to figure out how ethical situations will be dealt with. For example, he said, if there was a large explosion and civilians were among the people harmed, would they get less priority, even if they are badly hurt?

“That’s a values call,” he said. “That’s something you can tell the machine to prioritize in certain ways, but the machine isn’t gonna figure that out.”

Meanwhile, Applin, an anthropologist focused on AI ethics, said as the program shapes out, it will be important to scan for whether DARPA’s algorithm is perpetuating biased decision-making, as has happened in many cases, such as when algorithms in health care prioritized White patients over Black ones for getting care.

“We know there’s bias in AI; we know that programmers can’t foresee every situation; we know that AI is not social; we know AI is not cultural,” she said. “It can’t think about this stuff.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/29/darpa-artificial-intelligence-battlefield-medical-decisions/

…& when you’re dealing with what some like to call non-trivial problems it’s difficult to predict some consequences…that’s probably why they’re called emergent properties…but I have to hope the people thinking about that AI thing aren’t the ones determining the trajectory of US healthcare

What happened to the medical director, a former Army doctor named Ray Brovont, isn’t an anomaly, some physicians say. It is a growing problem as more emergency departments are staffed by for-profit companies. A laser focus on profits in health care can imperil patients, they say, but when some doctors have questioned the practices, they have been let go. Physicians who remain employed see that speaking out can put their careers on the line.

Today, an estimated 40-plus percent of the country’s hospital emergency departments are overseen by for-profit health care staffing companies owned by private equity firms, academic research, regulatory filings and internal documents show. Two of the largest, according to their websites and news releases, are Envision Healthcare, owned by KKR, and TeamHealth, of the Blackstone Group. EmCare, the health care staffing company that managed Brovont, is part of Envision.
[…]
There’s a reason private equity firms have invested in companies staffing hospital emergency departments, said Richard M. Scheffler, a professor of health economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The money in the hospital is in the ER,” he said. “It is the biggest net generator and a huge profit center for almost all hospitals.” The problem, he said, is that “ER doctors are being told how to practice medicine” by financial managers.
[…]
One bad outcome Brovont [a former military doctor who saw combat in Iraq] hoped to avoid was related to “code blues,” urgent calls to help Overland Park patients whose hearts had stopped beating or who were no longer breathing. After the HCA-owned hospital doubled its capacity to 343 beds and added a separate pediatric emergency room in 2014, the facility’s code blue policy became unsafe for patients, Brovont and his 18 fellow ER doctors concluded. It required an emergency department doctor to attend to code blues elsewhere in the hospital, which meant leaving the emergency room without a physician.

“My physicians were being asked to be in three places at once,” Brovont said.
[…]
In 2015 and 2016, frustrated by the inaction on the code blue policy, Brovont took his and his colleagues’ concerns to Dr. Patrick McHugh, his superior at EmCare. Federal law required Level II trauma centers like Overland Park to make a physician available 24/7 in the emergency department to examine incoming patients, Brovont told McHugh.

Hiring an additional doctor would solve the problem, but that didn’t happen. McHugh acknowledged to Brovont that the decision was financially motivated, court records show, and said in an email to the physicians: “Profits are in everyone’s best interest.”

Continuing to argue for a change in the policy, Brovont sent a memo to management outlining his unit’s fears; he was fired six weeks later, in January 2017. “There is a responsibility as the corporate representative to support the corporation’s objectives,” McHugh told him, according to court filings.

In addition, Brovont was barred from working at nearby hospitals whose emergency departments EmCare oversaw. Because he was an independent contractor for EmCare and not an employee of the hospital, there was no tribunal to which he could petition against his dismissal.
[…]
A spokeswoman for Envision, EmCare’s parent, said in a statement that the company complies “with state laws and operates with high ethical standards that put patients’ health and safety first.”

“Envision clinicians, like all clinicians, exercise their independent judgment to provide quality, compassionate, clinically appropriate care based on their patients’ unique needs,” it said. “The concern raised by Dr. Brovont was related to a hospital policy, not an Envision policy, and predates Envision’s current leadership team.”
[…]
Envision, based in Nashville, Tennessee, says its emergency medicine group partners with more than 540 facilities in 45 states. As the court noted in the Brovont case, the physician who owned the EmCare subsidiaries wasn’t involved with its daily operation.

Thirty-three states have laws preventing nonphysicians from influencing clinical decisions. They require health care to be provided by entities owned by licensed practitioners. California, Kansas, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas are among the states with such laws.

Beginning in the 19th century, states moved to protect patients with such measures. Legislators recognized that although physicians swear a duty to put patients’ interests first, when a for-profit entity enters the picture, a push for revenue may take precedence. Laws can also ban fee-splitting arrangements between medical practitioners and nonlicensed individuals and entities.
[…]
A push for profits can also result in inappropriate and costly admissions to hospitals from emergency departments, which was the basis for a 2017 case against EmCare. After physicians came forward with allegations of Medicare fraud involving EmCare and a hospital chain that had hired it, the Justice Department filed civil suits against both entities. EmCare had admitted Medicare patients unnecessarily to the hospitals whose emergency departments it oversaw, prosecutors said, and received remuneration from the hospital chain for doing so. Medicare pays at least three times more for inpatient admissions than it does for care billed as observation or emergency room visits.

Without admitting the allegations, EmCare agreed to pay $29.8 million in December 2017 to settle the Justice Department’s case. (The hospital chain settled with prosecutors later, paying $260 million without admitting the allegations.) When EmCare settled, Envision, its parent, entered into a corporate integrity agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services. As is typical under such a deal, the HHS inspector general agreed not to seek to exclude Envision from participating in Medicare or other federal health care programs if it changed its practices.

Envision committed to “full compliance with all Federal health care program requirements” and created a compliance program with training on anti-kickback measures. Envision’s corporate integrity agreement expires in December.

…seriously…the use of the phrase corporate integrity in this context smacks mightily of the oxymoronic

How do private equity-backed for-profit health care companies like Envision operate in states barring corporations from practicing medicine? Dr. Gregory J. Byrne, an emergency medicine practitioner in Southlake, Texas, provides a clue.

In recent years, Byrne, 70, has been the owner of up to 300 emergency medicine practices tied to Envision or EmCare in an array of states, a legal filing in the Brovont case shows. Byrne had been hired and paid by EmCare to be the owner, on paper, of the physician practice running the emergency department that Brovont directed at Overland Park.

Until Brovont sued for wrongful termination, however, he said he had neither met nor heard of Byrne. Based on depositions and testimony in the case, Byrne played no role in the department’s oversight, court documents show. McHugh, the EmCare executive, did.

The Missouri appeals judges who ruled with Brovont in his case noted that Byrne had owned hundreds of other EmCare subsidiaries in at least 20 states.

“The exact number of EmCare subsidiaries he owns changes every month,” the ruling said, “and he does not keep track of them or take any management role in any of them. The number does not matter to him because all the profits of the subsidiaries flow to EmCare.”
[…]
Reached by phone, Byrne said: “EmCare is a practice management company. We do not manage medical care — that is a physician responsibility.” He declined to comment further.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctor-fired-er-warns-effect-profit-firms-us-health-care

…& fan though I may be of irony in many forms…the part where the first in line with their hand out when the profits roll in are conspicuous by their absence anytime the term liable gets invoked is frankly a fucking liability…so it’s at least good to know that sometimes you can’t buy your way out of the “held liable” part

Infowars host Alex Jones offered to pay $120,000 per plaintiff to resolve a lawsuit by relatives of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims who said he defamed them by asserting the massacre never happened, according to court filings Tuesday. The offer was quickly rejected by the families.

A Connecticut judge found Jones liable for damages in November, and a trial is planned to determine how much he should pay the families.
[…]
Last week Jones defied a court order to attend a deposition near his home in Austin, Texas, to provide testimony ahead of the trial. Jones said he was ill. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday on a request by the plaintiffs to sanction Jones for not cooperating.

…that would be the time he was too sick to be deposed…but well enough to travel to the studios & record his usual dog & pony show

Lawyers for the families rejected the settlement offer within a few hours, saying in court filings that it was a “transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sandy-hook-families-reject-settlement-offer-infowars-host-alex-jones

…so…though the consistently-disappointed-optimist in me (frequently miscast as a miserable cynic) somehow still would like to entertain the possibility of “a whole new day”

President Biden’s signature ended more than 100 years of failed efforts by the federal government to specifically outlaw lynching.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/us/politics/biden-signs-anti-lynching-bill.html

…I don’t get the feeling that day is today

Amid widespread criticism of his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, former President Donald Trump publicly called on Putin on Tuesday to release any dirt he might have on Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
[…]
Trump was referring to information from a partisan Senate report published just weeks before the 2020 election, which also focused on Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Hunter Biden’s legal team told NBC News in 2020 that Biden had “no interest” in that firm that received the money, so “the claim he was paid $3.5 million was false.”

In October 2020, Putin said he was unaware of any business ties between Biden and Baturina.

Trump reiterated his push for info on Biden in a statement Wednesday afternoon. “In time, Russia may be willing to give that information,” he said.
[…]
Trump’s remarks in Tuesday’s interview come shortly after GOP lawmakers urged President Biden to more forcefully punish Putin for waging war on Ukraine, only to have Trump praise Putin.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-asks-putin-release-info-hunter-biden

…mind you…to hear GCHQ tell it…there’s no guarantee vlad will hear about any of that

Believe it or not, it’s only 36 days since Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked and premeditated attack on Ukraine. It’s been shocking in every sense of the word. But it wasn’t surprising. We’ve seen this strategy before. We saw the intelligence picture building. And we’re now seeing Putin trying to follow through on his plan. But it is failing. And his Plan B has been more barbarity against civilians and cities.

Clearly, he plays by different moral and legal rules. Far too many Ukrainians and Russians have already lost their lives. And beyond this toll, many, many more have had their lives shattered. The UN estimate that in just over a month, more than ten million people have already fled their homes. It’s a humanitarian crisis that need never have happened. And it’s not over yet.

That said, it increasingly looks like Putin has massively misjudged the situation. It’s clear he misjudged the resistance of the Ukrainian people. He underestimated the strength of the coalition his actions would galvanise. He under-played the economic consequences of the sanctions regime. He over-estimated the abilities of his military to secure a rapid victory. We’ve seen Russian soldiers – short of weapons and morale – refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.

And even though we believe Putin’s advisers are afraid to tell him the truth, what’s going on and the extent of these misjudgements must be crystal clear to the regime.

…advisers afraid to speak truth to power…there’s a certain tangerine-tinted sense of déjà vu all over again, there…but…moving on

Russia wrote the hybrid warfare book. State media, on-line media and agents of influence are all used to obfuscate motivations and justify military actions. We’ve seen them use this playbook in Syria and many other theatres. Their aim is to promulgate disinformation. To sow mistrust in the evidence and to amplify false narratives. It’s also to make sure that the real picture of what’s going on doesn’t get exposed inside Russia.

And that’s where the most dangerous disinformation war is being waged. We know Putin’s campaign is beset by problems – low morale, logistical failures and high Russian casualty numbers. Their command and control is in chaos. We’ve seen Putin lie to his own people in an attempt to hide military incompetence.

And all of that means, he seeks brutal control of the media and access to the internet, he seeks the closing down of opposition voices, and he’s making heavy investment in their propaganda and covert agencies.

…& it’s not like the closing down part isn’t working…truth is the first casualty of war & all that

And increasingly, many of those ‘truths’ come from intelligence. It is already a remarkable feature of this conflict just how much intelligence has been so quickly declassified to get ahead of Putin’s actions. 

From the warnings of the war. To the intelligence on false flag operations designed to provide a fake premise to the invasion. And more recently, to the Russian plans to falsely claim Ukrainian use of banned chemical weapons.

On this and many other subjects, deeply secret intelligence is being released to make sure the truth is heard. At this pace and scale, it really is unprecedented.
[…]
Of course, other aspects of this confrontation play out in cyber space.

[…]Whilst some people look for cyber ‘Pearl Harbours’, it was never our understanding that a catastrophic cyber-attack was central to Russian’s use of offensive cyber or to their military doctrine. To think otherwise, misjudges how cyber has an effect in military campaigns.

That’s not to say that we haven’t seen cyber in this conflict. We have – and lots of it.

…& you can click through to that transcript if you fancy hearing about that part…but he had a lot of ground to cover in this speech so he moved on pretty swiftly

Now my third observation of this conflict is the extent to which non-state actors are involved and have a say in its outcome.

Some of this is on the battlefields in Ukraine. It’s clear Russia is using mercenaries and foreign fighters to augment its forces. This includes the Wagner group which has been active in Ukraine since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The group works as a shadow branch of the Russian military, providing implausible deniability for riskier operations.

…I feel like “implausible deniability” is something of a common denominator for a lot of shit I wish had some radically different consequences to the ones it illegitimately enjoys all over the shop…it’s like the drunken asshole equivalent of a “polite fiction”

It’s all making the space very complicated, and in some ways, way beyond the control of Governments. It’s another reminder of the interconnectedness of the World today. And as no single entity holds the whole solution, it highlights a need for global institutions effectively working in coalition.
[…]
We know both Presidents Xi and Putin place great value on their personal relationships. But Xi’s calculus is more nuanced. He’s not publicly condemned the invasion, presumably calculating that it helps him oppose the US. And, with an eye on re-taking Taiwan, China doesn’t want to do anything which may constrain its ability to move in the future.

It’s also the case that China believes Russia will provide additional impetus and support to its digital markets and it’s technology plans. We can see China is seizing the opportunity to purchase cheap hydro-carbons from Russia at the moment, to meet its needs too.

But there are risks to them both (and arguably more for China) in being too closely aligned. Russia understands that long term, China will become increasingly strong militarily and economically. Some of their interests conflict; Russia could be squeezed out of the equation.

And it is equally clear that a China that wants to set the rules of the road – the norms for a new global governance – is not well served by close alliance with a regime that wilfully and illegally ignores them all.
[…]
Now obviously, China is a sophisticated player in cyberspace. It has increasing ambition to project its influence beyond its borders and a proven interest in our commercial secrets.

It also has a competing vision for the future of cyberspace and it’s increasingly influential in the debate around international rules and standards. China’s bringing all elements of state power to control, influence design and dominate technology, if you like, the cyber and the fibre.

As I’ve said previously, without action it is increasingly apparent that the key technologies on which we all rely on for prosperity and security won’t be shaped and controlled by the West in the future.

If we don’t act – with our allies, with our partners and with the private sector – we will see undemocratic values as the default for vast swathes of future tech and the st
[…]
There are many ways for us to do that, but it seems to me that two things are very important.

The first is that we have to find new ways to collaborate and cooperate with partners. For those of us in National Security, that’s about ensuring the health of existing relationships. It’s about securing our alliances, like the Five Eyes, NATO and in this region, ASEAN. And it’s about working with businesses in new and truly collaborative ways. And to do this we need to make sure that our counteroffer – to states who haven’t yet decided which way they should jump – is persuasive and coherent. Too often it’s not.

And the second is that in whatever we do, we must make sure that we stay true to our values, those that have made our systems and democracies so successful and will do so in the future too.

I spoke at the beginning about how against a backdrop of historic shifts, a new global security architecture was emerging. And all of this change will take decades to resolve. But what I can be clear on now is that how we approach these challenges will be as important as what our response is.

https://www.gchq.gov.uk/speech/director-gchq-global-security-amid-russia-invasion-of-ukraine

…& with things being the way they are

Peace Talks May Be Little More Than Russian Tactics, Analysts Say [NYT]

…I’m having a hard time with the possibility that I might end up invoking this

…with bedbugs in the frame

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.
[…]
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?
[…]
Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality. The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below. Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate? [NYT]

…& sure…for all that I’m fairly certain it’s physically impossible for brett stephens not to somehow conspire to grab the wrong end of the stick &/or miss the point somewhere along his way…that interpretation does seem to align with some current maps better than I’m comfortable with

The latest #Ukraine map from @War_Mapper. Unless there are big Ukrainian offensives, I expect there to be little variation to this in the coming days while Russia reorients to the east. This is a major operational shift, with transport, logistics, comms & tactical challenges. https://t.co/3wQRWtVsRn

— Mick Ryan, AM (@WarintheFuture) March 30, 2022

…though I hear more people talking about russia potentially gaining territory in eastern ukraine than I do talk about the possibility the land bridge he’d like to have under his belt might run along the south coast…or how the other shoe to drop where the targeting of civilians is concerned might be more obvious if you were to dust off the many, many articles produced over the last decade or so that might give a clue about why the reactions european electorates have historically had in the face of sudden & sizable influxes of immigrants just might be something vlad might feel confident suggest some other outcomes he’d consider in his interest

Remember, Putin was put into power by a Russian oligarchy made fabulously rich by siphoning off the wealth of the former Soviet Union. Likewise, Trump and the radical right in America have been bankrolled by an American oligarchy – Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer), Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, and other billionaires.

What do these two sets of oligarchs get in return? Strongmen who divert the public’s attention away from the oligarchs’ hijacking of their economies toward cultural fears of being overwhelmed by the “other.” Putin’s MO has been to fuel Russian ethnic pride and nationalism. The Trump-Carlson-radical right’s MO has been to fuel white American nationalism.

In both cases, strongmen and their allies have mythologized a “superior” culture (replete with creation stories of blood ties, motherlands, and religion) supposedly endangered by decadent forces intent on attacking and overwhelming it.
[…]
These tropes have served to distract attention from the systemic economic looting that oligarchs have been undertaking, leaving most people poor and anxious. Which is why the grievances that Putin, Trump, Carlson, and the Republican party use are unremittingly cultural; they are never economic, never about class, and most assuredly not about the predations of the super-rich.

Reduced to basics, today’s oligarchs and strongmen (along with their mouthpieces and lackeys) are trying to justify their wealth and power by attacking liberal values that have shaped the west, beginning with the enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries – the values of tolerance, openness, democracy, self-government, equal rights, and the rule of law. These values are incompatible with a society of oligarchs and strongmen.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/29/putin-trump-tucker-carlson-republican-party

…& given that I’ve lost an hour or so to “technical issues” this morning…I guess that’s about as far as I’m going to get…which is maybe already too far in scrolling terms…but…there’s definitely some other shit we need to not be sleeping on

We’re living in two realities: one in which people have returned to living life as if Covid is over, and the other in which we are approaching record levels of infections, with an estimated 4.26m cases last week. Most of us know people who have Covid, work and education are being disrupted, and the NHS is under severe pressure again due to new patients and sick staff. Admissions with Covid are only 2% below the first Omicron peak two months ago and still rising. While about half are currently admitted primarily for other reasons, numbers are rising in primary Covid admissions too and admissions in over-65s are now 15% higher than their January 2022 peak.

The pandemic has changed, but the idea that it is over is false. Omicron represents a major variant, taking over in the UK in a similar way to Delta last summer and Alpha last winter. The ubiquitous narrative that the pandemic is over exists because most people (including the government) now believe at least one of the three big myths of the Omicron age. We need to move past these myths to firstly anticipate the future, and secondly do something to prepare for it.

The first myth is that coronavirus is now endemic, and just another disease we have to live with. We do, unfortunately, have to live with Covid. But the word “endemic” is commonly used in epidemiology to describe a disease that does not spread out of control in the absence of public health measures – in some sense, it means a predictable disease.
[…]
Next, we have to debunk the myth that coronavirus is evolving to be milder, and each new variant will be milder than the last until it becomes a common cold. New variants of Covid have arisen rapidly over past two years. Each variant of concern has spawned several offshoots – like our current BA.2 wave – but most gamechanging new waves we’ve seen have come from variants that have evolved completely independently from each other. Omicron did not evolve from Delta and Delta did not evolve from Alpha, Beta or Gamma. There has been no progression through successive variants, and no building towards “mildness”.

It is also simply not true that viruses always evolve to become milder. What drives evolution is transmission: variants that infect more people will thrive. Because most Covid transmission happens while people have no or few symptoms, severity is not a driver of evolution but instead a byproduct of whichever mutations improve transmission and how they interact with existing levels of immunity. For Alpha and Delta, this led to greater severity and for Omicron (somewhat) less severity, but this was an evolutionary accident. The next variant could easily be more severe again.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/30/uk-near-record-covid-cases-three-myths-omicron-pandemic

…& lest you be tempted to take the mention of the NHS to mean that’s stuff for the UK to be worried about…here’s something similar sounding out of the NYT

The importance of immune escape has become apparent with Omicron. Prior variants like Delta were only modestly able to sidestep antibodies, but Omicron has many mutations that reduce the ability of antibodies to recognize it. This, coupled with how contagious Omicron is, has enabled it to cause a huge wave of infections.

The fact that the virus developed the ability to infect people who had been vaccinated or previously infected shouldn’t have been a surprise, but how it happened with Omicron certainly was. Evolution often proceeds stepwise, with new successful variants descended from recent successful ones. That’s why six months ago many scientists, including us, thought the next variant would descend from Delta, which was dominant at the time. But evolution defied our expectations, and we got Omicron, which has a huge number of mutations and isn’t descended from Delta. It’s not known exactly how the virus made the big evolutionary jump that led to Omicron, although many scientists (including us) suspect the variant may have emerged from someone who couldn’t fight off the virus well, allowing it time to mutate.

It’s impossible to say whether future variants will have more big Omicron-like jumps or more typical stepwise changes, but we are confident SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve to escape immunity.

We Study Virus Evolution. Here’s Where We Think the Coronavirus Is Going. [NYT]

…so…what can I say aside from looking to tomorrow with a T.G.I.F kinda feeling?

…though I guess I’d argue that ought to be reasons, plural