The KHIT Blog: Might U.S. military veterans take up arms against us?

Sunday, August 11, 2024

Might U.S. military veterans take up arms against us?

U.S. Capitol Jan 6th, 2021, Eric "General E" Braden

"If I don't get elected, it's gonna be a bloodbath for the whole country."—Donald Trump, at a summer 2024 MAGA rally

Consider also (Aug 11th)

As I posted on TwitteX: 86 days to U.S. 2024 National Elections Day. We had better be fully prepared for the scorched-earth Trumpist onslaught that will ensue from Nov 5th all the way to Jan 6, 2025.

Adroitly incited, might these LARP dramatists naively try to go all the way this time? Seditious cosplay militia "civil war?" (A decade ago I would just openly mock them.) Notwithstanding that it would likely be quickly suppressed, a lot of innocent people might well be hurt or killed during the fray.

QUICK UPDATE: After 1 hr nto the above-linked documentary, I am rather aghast. Decide for yourselves.

I am now 78, retired and a bit addled by Parkinson's. I have never owned a firearm of any sort (and, I was never in the military). I think I was in one schoolyard fistfight, in 1962 during my junior year in high school. It was stupid. The empirical extent of my propensity for violence. I am no physical threat to anyone.

Recall my first-wave Boomer path...

Some detail from Democracy Docket apropos of what portends with respect to the upcoming elections. .

MONDAY UPDATE

Finished watching the documentary. Extremely well-done. Honest, balanced, and forthright. Sobering. One hopes that these swaggering, assault rifle-brandishing, Army Surplus outfitted Eric-"General-E"-Bradens types are just loud Constitution & Bible bullhorn bleating poseurs and little else.

One hopes.

Everyone would do well to view this documentary with careful attention.

TUESDAY UPDATE

In the aftermath of the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection, threats to the election certification process have escalated, now with an increasing focus on county-level certification. Since 2020, more than 30 county officials across the country have voted to deny or delay certifying election results in violation of law, often citing false claims of voter fraud or irregularities. Among those officials are avowed 2020 election deniers, individuals who acted as fake presidential electors for Donald Trump and a criminally convicted participant in the January 6th insurrection who was later removed from office in a lawsuit led by CREW.

In this report, CREW identifies 35 rogue election officials across the country who have already refused to certify election results and may be in a position to do so again. The report focuses on the eight states where county officials have unlawfully refused to certify elections since 2020: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The report also identifies the legal remedies available to state and federal authorities, as well as voters, to protect the certification of the 2024 election.

These remedies include emergency court orders to compel compliance with the law, criminal charges to punish and deter misconduct and legal procedures to remove obstructionist officials from their county positions... [112 pg PDF here]

[T]he threat of disruption looms large in this year’s elections. If county officials successfully obstruct certification, it could have a cascading effect on state and federal certification deadlines. It could also lead to mass disenfranchisement of qualified voters.

All hands on deck, people.

UPDATE: PBS NEWSHOUR TONIGHT

Just saw this. Fits with the topic. Here's the report PDF.

BACK TO THE CREW REPORT

III. Federal legal remedies
Because the states administer elections, they are the first lines of defense against county-level certification subversion. But the federal government also has a vital role in enforcing relevant federal statutes and constitutional provisions protecting the right to vote. Thus, if a state is unable or unwilling to take action against rogue county officials who threaten to disenfranchise voters in violation of federal law, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) should intervene. This section discusses some of the federal criminal and civil remedies available to protect against certification abuse at the county level. [pg 106]
OK, yeah, DOJ, blah, blah, blah. Of course. But, what about the courts?

Need one elaborate? Can you minimally say Alito, Thomas, Cannon?

Bush vs Gore?

Hello?

UPDATE

Of course. Bring out the 2nd string Kraken Crew of Trump legal fabulists.

From RollingStone:

Trump and His MAGA Movement Are Actively ‘Hijacking’ Georgia’s Elections
After Trump allies took over the Georgia State Election Board, they quickly pushed through rules cementing his election lies into policy

AFTER COMPLETING THE MAGA takeover of the Georgia State Election Board, Donald Trump’s allies quickly cemented his 2020 election lies into policy, and moved to allow conspiratorial-minded county election officials to refuse to certify election results if they see fit. Even before the election board granted broad powers to county election officials to deny election results and reopened an investigation into minor vote-counting errors in Fulton County in 2020, Trump was publicly praising the work of three Republicans who hold majority power on the board…

It's not yet clear to me where the tipping point will be—i.e., how relatively few yet strategic successes with these maneuvers will suffice to effectively derail the 2024 Presidential election?

PROJECT 2025 ITEM

Google Russell Vought. A bit more here.

Curious crowd, these “Christian” Nationalist peeps.

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

Review in The Atlantic.

In his beguiling poem “Connoisseur of Chaos,” Wallace Stevens recalls a past era when religion was meant to explain everything, “when bishops’ books / Resolved the world.” But, as he reminds us, “we cannot go back to that.” There’s a kind of grace in the dynamic and even provisional nature of the world, he suggests. And in science, too, which seemed, particularly in the first half of the 19th century, to be on the brink of something wonderful—or terrifying, depending on your point of view.

Two new books, Michael Taylor’s Impossible Monsters and Edward Dolnick’s Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, mark the end of the era that Stevens identified. The discovery of prehistoric fossils, largely in Britain, challenged long-held theological and scientific assumptions about nature and humankind’s place in it: that the Bible was to be taken literally; that the world had been made a mere 6,000 years before; that a divine being wrought man in his own image; that humans were the pinnacle of all Creation. As Taylor writes, “Few if any transformations in intellectual history have been more profound.”

Hmmm... add two more to my pile. It had already grown by two currently underway that I've yet to report on.

More to come...

_______

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Sunday, August 11, 2024

Might U.S. military veterans take up arms against us?

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