Some Quotes

Happy birthday, Monsieur Arouet.

aka: Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet  21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778

French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity—especially the Roman Catholic Church—as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, and scientific expositions. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and was at constant risk from the strict censorship laws of the Catholic French monarchy. His polemics witheringly satirized intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

Today's Qult45 Item

The guy is this weird shit that we're going to spend decades scraping off the bottom of our shoes.

Trump's White House blocked government websites aimed at helping Americans vote, fighting human trafficking, easing homelessness, and stopping fraud, federal records show

• Federal agencies asked the Trump White House to approve dozens of new ".gov" websites.
• But Trump officials rejected many of them, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
• In contrast, the Biden White House has approved almost all such website requests.

Donald Trump's White House blocked dozens of federal agencies from creating new government websites aimed at aiding homeless people, fighting human trafficking, and helping people vote, according to records obtained by Insider through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The requests for new websites came from agencies small and large at a time when Trump had grown openly hostile toward his own administration, often deriding the federal government's executive branch as an out-of-control "deep state" conspiring to undermine him.

The Department of Defense, Department of Labor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Central Intelligence Agency, and Environmental Protection Agency are among the more than two-dozen agencies that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rebuffed.

Proposed websites that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rejected include HumanTrafficking.gov (Department of State); ReportFraud.gov (Federal Trade Commission); Telehealth.gov (Department of Health and Human Services), FindShelters.gov (Department of Housing and Urban Development), and FiscalData.gov (Department of the Treasury), according to federal records.

Such custom ".gov" website domains enhance government agencies' ability to effectively provide and market services to an American public that's all but universally connected to the internet.

Without them, agencies can still create new sections on their primary websites, but with long and unmemorable subdomain names replete with slashes and hyphens — not exactly prime fodder for a billboard or public service announcement.

The documents obtained by Insider listed no reasons for why the Office of Management and Budget rejected or accepted an agency's ".gov" website domain request.

Neither did the Office of Management and Budget, whose spokesperson, Isabel Aldunate, declined to answer Insider's questions.

Representatives for Trump, who this week officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign, did not reply to several messages.

Today's Calming Influence

Scott Galloway, NYU Sterns School of Business:

As societies become wealthier and more educated, the reliance on a super being, and church attendance goes down, but they still look for idols.

Into that void have stepped technology leaders because technology is the closest thing we have to magic.

Our new Jesus was Steve Jobs, and now Elon Musk has taken on that mantle. And, every ridiculously mean, non-sensical, irrational move he makes is somehow seen as chess, not checkers - we're just not privy to his genius yet.

Christiane Amanpour

On Wolves And Loners

We know now that the Alpha Male exists only among animals in captivity. And this either escapes the notice of all these MAGA macho pussies, or (prob'ly more accurately) they choose to remain ignorant of it.

And here comes the editors at NYT, making the case that all these Lone Wolf assholes are alone only in that they have no real social interaction and are easily conditioned to carry out "instructions" they're absolutely sure are coming from a legit authority.

Stochastic Terrorism is alive and well, and prob'ly quite a bit more specific and organized than we've been giving it credit for being - which would seem to require us to strip away some of the cover provided by the word "Stochastic".

(pay wall)

There Are No Lone Wolves

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This editorial is the third in a series, “The Danger Within,” urging readers to understand the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions. Read more about the series in a note from Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times Opinion editor.

Sometime in May 2020, Payton Gendron, a 16-year-old in upstate New York, was browsing the website 4chan when he came across a GIF.

It was taken from a livestream recording made the previous year by a gunman as he killed 51 people and wounded more than 40 others at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The killer had written a manifesto explaining that he was motivated by the fear of great replacement theory, the racist belief that secretive forces are importing nonwhite people to dilute countries’ white majorities.

Seeing the video and the manifesto “started my real research into the problems with immigration and foreigners in our white lands — without his livestream I would likely have no idea about the real problems the West is facing,” Mr. Gendron wrote in his own manifesto, posted on the internet shortly before, officials say, he drove to a Tops grocery store in Buffalo and carried out a massacre of his own that left 10 Black people dead.

The authorities say Mr. Gendron’s attack in May mimicked the massacre in Christchurch not just in its motivation but also in tactics. He reduced his caloric intake and cataloged his diet to prepare physically, as the Christchurch killer did. He practiced shooting. He wrote slogans on his rifle, as the Christchurch gunman did. He livestreamed his attack with a GoPro camera attached to his helmet, with the idea of inspiring other attacks by fellow extremists. Mr. Gendron’s screed ran to 180 pages, with 23 percent of those pages copied word-for-word from the Christchurch killer’s manifesto, according to an investigative report on the attacks released last month by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.

On the day of the shooting, State Senator James Sanders echoed the horrified response of many: “Although this is probably a lone-wolf incident, this is not the first mass shooting we have seen, and sadly it will not be the last,” he said.

It’s unfortunate that the term “lone wolf” has come into such casual use in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. It aims to describe a person — nearly always a man — who is radicalized to violence but unconnected to an organized terrorist group like Al Qaeda. But it is wrong to think about violent white supremacists as isolated actors.

There are formal white supremacist organizations going by names like Atomwaffen Division (Canada, Germany, Italy, Britain, United States), Honor and Nation (France), the All-Polish Youth (Poland). But while the majority of adherents to the white supremacist cause aren’t directly affiliated with these groups, they describe themselves as part of a global movement of like-minded people, some of whom commit acts of leaderless violence in the hopes of winning more adherents and destabilizing society.

The atomized nature of the global white extremist movement has also obscured the public’s understanding of the nature of their cause and led to policy prescriptions that aren’t enough to address the scope of the threat. Thoughts and prayers alone will not solve the problem, nor will better mental health care, important though all those things are. One missing piece of any solution is acknowledging that right-wing extremist violence in the United States is part of a global phenomenon and should be treated that way.

There has been a steady rise in political violence in the United States in the years since Donald Trump became president. Threats against sitting members of Congress have skyrocketed. The husband of the speaker of the House was assaulted in his home by a man wielding a hammer. This year, venues from school board meetings to libraries have been the sites of physical clashes. The majority of the political violence in the past few years has come from right-wing extremists, experts say.

The country cannot accept violence as a method of mediating its political disagreements. There are steps the United States should take now, including cracking down on illegal right-wing paramilitary groups and weeding extremists out of positions of power in law enforcement and the military. Extremists succeed when they have access to power — be that positions of power, the sympathy of those in power or a voice in the national conversation. They should be denied all three.

Violent right-wing extremists harbor a variety of beliefs, from a loathing of the government to explicit white supremacy. During his time in office and in the years since, Mr. Trump and his political allies have not only encouraged political violence, through their silence or otherwise, they have also helped bring explicitly white supremacist ideas like the “great replacement” into mainstream politics and popular culture. “This extremism isn’t going to go away or moderate until the people who have normalized it realize their culpability in the things that it inspires,” Oren Segal, the vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview.

The Danger Within

A series on the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions.

• INTRODUCTION America Can Stop Violent Extremism
• PART IAmerica Can Have Democracy or Political Violence. Not Both.
• PART IIExtremists in Uniform Put the Nation at Risk
• PART IIIThere Are No Lone Wolves

White supremacy has been part of the story of this country since its earliest days, but the modern notion of replacement is a foreign import. It was outlined in 2012 by Renaud Camus, a French author who has written that immigrants with high birthrates are a threat to white European society. He built on the ideas of another Frenchman, Jean Raspail, who wrote the 1973 book “The Camp of the Saints,” which imagined a flotilla of immigrants who overthrow French society.

The book is a touchstone in white supremacist circles and is popular with some prominent Republicans. Stephen Miller, a senior official in the Trump administration, once recommended the book to the staff of Breitbart when he was a Senate aide, according to emails obtained by the A.D.L. A former Iowa congressman known for defending white supremacy, Steve King, has said that everyone should read it.

The idea of hostile replacement by immigrants has gained currency and some acceptance around the world, even after inspiring mass killers in New Zealand and Buffalo, Norway and South Carolina. Extremists driven to murder are a tiny fraction of those who subscribe to racist ideologies, but the mainstreaming of their ideas can make the turn to violence easier for some.

That’s why it is alarming to see the great replacement idea espoused by political leaders around the globe, including Jordan Bardella, who this month was confirmed as the successor to Marine Le Pen as head of France’s leading far-right party. It has been cited approvingly by Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary and darling of some American conservatives. Tucker Carlson of Fox News talks about it often. An alarming poll by The Associated Press-NORC this year found that about one in three American adults believes that “a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” Last year a poll found that 61 percent of French people believe that, too.

That the great replacement theory has gone mainstream is a victory for white supremacists and their cause. “White power activists in the 1990s thought that political action on their cause was not possible — that the door to that was closed. That’s not true anymore,” said Kathleen Belew, a professor at Northwestern and author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”

One of the best ways to counter a global ideology of violent extremism in a country that also wants to protect civil liberties is to create problems for extremists — to work to make them less popular and less capable, notes Daniel Byman in his new book, “Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism.”

Domestic law enforcement agencies in the United States already have effective tools to target organized extremist groups, including wiretaps and undercover informants. They also don’t face language and cultural barriers that they may have had focusing on jihadis. A pervasive problem, though, is the political will to turn the power of the state against white supremacists. Too often, extremism researchers point out, there’s a reluctance in white-majority nations to see white extremists as threatening as nonwhite foreigners.

The United States is also newer to thinking about this white extremism as a transnational problem. “European intelligence officials have long expressed frustration that their U.S. counterparts have not answered their requests for legal assistance and information,” Mr. Byman wrote.

The Biden administration has at least started to heed the warnings of more than a decade’s worth of intelligence reports suggesting that domestic extremism is a problem with a global reach. The National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism, released last year, noted that “aspects of the domestic terrorism threat we face in the United States, and in particular those related to racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, have an international dimension.”

The strategy laid out some good ideas about solutions to the threat, such as wider and deeper information sharing between the U.S. government and foreign nations about extremist groups and their networks, their finances and their movements. It directed the State Department to leverage public diplomacy to raise awareness about the threat and help counter extremist propaganda and disinformation. The strategy also noted that the cross-border nature of extremist networks makes it possible to collect intelligence (mainly by intercepting communications) of people outside the country. The tip that helps thwart the next attack by white supremacists inside the United States could very well come from overseas.

The strategy also raised the possibility of designating some foreign right-wing extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations or “specially designated global terrorists,” which would make it illegal for Americans to support or receive training from them. But such an approach isn’t a panacea and carries serious risks — it could hamper efforts to de-radicalize extremists, for instance — and runs counter to a lesson of the war on terrorism, which was that not all extremist groups posed an equal danger to the homeland.

It is encouraging that this strategy is in place, but it needs more attention and urgency, from lawmakers and from the American public, to be successful. Congressional oversight committees will hold annual hearings to see whether the United States is making progress on this strategy, but so far it is not clear how effective it has been.

Another approach tried in about a dozen countries around the world is de-radicalization programs, which encourage extremists to either change their minds or at the very least reject violence. The German and British governments in addition to the United States have had some success with de-radicalization programs aimed at white supremacists. In Germany, EXIT-Deutschland works with neo-Nazis. In Britain, a program called Prevent that originally focused on jihadists has now been reoriented to white supremacists, though there are complaints that the net of problematic right-wing views is being cast too widely.

As with all these approaches, one of the precarious aspects of the domestic fight against far-right and white supremacist extremists is that the government’s response must try to avoid alienating people who believe in things like expansive gun rights or strict limits on immigration yet eschew violence. Often, they are the only credible messengers who can reach the deeply radicalized and talk them back from a more violence course.

This tension is evident around efforts by social media companies to crack down on extremist content. When mainstream companies like Facebook ban content, it can push people who are interested in extremist or offensive material to lesser-known platforms, like 4chan, where moderation is less aggressive and moderators have fewer resources.

There is hope, however, that better automatic monitoring of content and enforcement of platforms’ terms of service, which take freedom of expression concerns into account, can push extremist material to the fringes. The massacre in Buffalo, for instance, was livestreamed on the platform Twitch. About two minutes after the first shots were fired, the stream was taken offline. As social media experts told The Times, that was “the best that could reasonably be expected.”

The quick response and the scrubbing of subsequent copies of the video and the manifesto from the internet was made possible in part by groups like the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which was founded by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube in 2017 and now includes more than a dozen platforms.

The consortium can flag extremist content like videos of shootings and tag it in a way that other platforms can search for and remove copies that pop up on their services. In the nine weeks after the Buffalo shooting, Meta automatically removed around one million pieces of content related to the attacks.

Of course, the automated tools aren’t perfect. The New York attorney general’s office found videos of the shooting or links to them on Reddit, Instagram and Twitter, and links to the manifesto on Rumble, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Tech companies can and should invest more money and resources in content moderation at scale, but that alone will not purge the internet of extremism — especially when the networks for sharing it cross international borders, span continents and come in countless languages.

Recognizing that violent white supremacy is a global problem should help the United States and its allies develop more cooperative, international solutions. Success will be difficult to measure; the ideology may never disappear, but levels of violence can be reduced. Most important, if lawmakers and ordinary Americans make a concerted effort to drive extremist rhetoric out of mainstream politics, the influence of these groups will again fade.

Today's Eternal Sadness

Some fuckin' jerk with an AR-15.

5 dead and at least 18 wounded or injured.

"Conservatives" flap their gums, and they "pray", and they fill the room with worthless balloon juice, but we all know they'll never ever stand up and do one fuckin' thing that might stop the next asshole before he acts on his impulse - an impulse that's probably there all along, but one that is encouraged - if not outright propagated - by the kind of hateful rhetoric we hear from the wingnuts pretty much all day every day.

(live updates)

Police provide update on mass shooting at Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub that left 5 dead

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- Five people are dead and multiple others are injured after a shooting at a Colorado Springs gay nightclub.

According to CSPD, officers responded to reports of an active shooting at Club Q in the 3400 block of N. Academy Blvd. at 11:57 p.m. Officers from all four patrol divisions in the city responded to the shooting.

At the scene, Lt. Castro with CSPD said officers immediately located the suspect inside the bar. That suspect has since been taken to a hospital for medical attention and is in custody. It's unclear what those injuries are, however, Lt. Castro said this shooting did not involve officers.

According to police, five people are dead and at least 18 others are injured in the shooting. The victims were taken to hospitals around the city.

The Colorado Springs Fire Department said they triaged the scene. This was treated as a mass casualty event response, something CSFD said firefighters are trained for.

At this time, CSPD said most individuals not injured in the shooting have been reunited with their loved ones. The department is working with hospitals to notify families and loved ones of the injured and deceased.

CSPD said N. Academy Blvd. is closed in both directions between N. Carefree Cir. and Village Seven Rd. while law enforcement works in the area. There isn't a timeline for how long this investigation will take but people are asked to avoid the area into Sunday morning.

If you are searching for a loved one who might've been at Club Q Saturday night, you're asked to contact the Colorado Springs Police Department at 719-444-7000.

Anyone who has video of the shooting or was a witness not already interviewed at the scene, please contact the police. All vehicles at the scene at the time of the shooting are to remain at the scene, according to CSPD.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is on the scene and helping with the investigation. Officers are with victims at the hospital.

Club Q's released the following statement on its official Facebook page:

• Club Q is devastated by the senseless attack on our community.
• Our prays and thoughts are with all the victims and their families and friends.
• We thank the quick reactions of heroic customers that subdued the gunman and ended this hate attack.Club Q

KRDO asked police if they believe this attack was a hate crime. CSPD said it's too early in the investigation to determine a motive.

According to Club Q's website, Saturday night had a drag show earlier in the night and was set to stay open until 2 a.m.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group, a mass shooting is defined as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed.

KRDO spoke with a man who was at Club Q roughly ten minutes before shots were fired. He was able to connect with one of his friends who was shot at the hospital. According to him, his friend said the shooter came into the nightclub and began firing. The friend said the suspect was wearing a mask and a vest of some sort.

He also said he lost friends in the shooting.

Today's Tweet

We'll just have to wait-n-see what happens with Elmo's attempts to rescue a company from his own fucked up management decisions.

full quote is "Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.”

it translates to:

"Do not listen to those who say the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness." pic.twitter.com/K77VU6eUrB

— shauna (@goldengateblond) November 20, 2022

BTW - this is great use of one of Ayn Rand's favorite quotes. I wonder if the clear-eyed pragmatic "free speech absolutists" are even aware of this little truth nugget.

But if they are, then I'm betting they either don't care, or they'll rationalize it away, or just ignore the contradiction - which was another of Ms Rand's pet peeves.

But that's another story.

Scarlet, the Patron Saint of Fiddle-Dee-Dee, says we don't wanna think about that today.

Feeling Bummed Out

AG Garland appointing a special counsel may add to our highly angst-ey discomfort, but this is what we've got to work with - unless somebody has another justice system in their pocket, thinking we can make a quick change over and be on our way again.

So it's frustrating and scary, and makes everything feel squishy and uncertain. And there's definitely something to be said about being all anal-retentive, trying to make sure nobody can call you biased and political, but it doesn't matter what the truth is - Republicans are going to slam it, and say it's biased and political anyway you cut it.

So just get after it, and get it done the best you can.

Glenn Kirschner, doing his Droopy Dog thing, commiserating with the doomsayers, while trying to reassure us all that justice is coming. (and I think it is)

On Appearances

Merrick Garland gets slammed for being a Caspar Milquetoast kinda guy, and that's certainly how he seems to show up.

I'm thinking the guy is no wimp, and I could certainly be wrong, but I'm fairly sure Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols would back me up - if they weren't dead because of Mr Garland's meticulous i-dotting and t-crossing that is.

Once upon a time, I was street racing on Speer Boulevard in Denver, having a pretty good night, when this beat down old '63 Falcon pulled up along side of me, and wanted to have a go. I nodded - very sure I could shut this turkey down.

The light turned green, and yes, as you may anticipated, that crappy-lookin' Flacon blew my doors off.

That crummy little Ford - with the crumpled left rear quarter panel, and the mismatched doors, and the partial grey primer paint scheme - that was what we called a "sleeper".

Merrick Garland vs Foghorn Leghorn

Today In Justice

So Elizabeth Holmes is going for an extended stay at the Grey Bar Hotel. Not because she fucked over part of the healthcare system and put patients lives at risk - and sent private detectives after at least one of the witnesses against her - but because she bilked rich people out of some of their investment capital, making "the smart guys" look bad. And we just can't have that.

In the end, the particulars matter slightly less than the fact that it appears she'll be pulling a good long stretch of hard time. I just really wish we'd attach more weight to the part about hurting real people and less about the fucking money.

(pay wall)

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to more than 11 years in prison

The former Theranos CEO was convicted on four counts of fraud early this year

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison Friday for misleading investors regarding her blood-testing start-up.

The entrepreneur — who started Theranos as a Stanford University dropout and grew it into a company with a peak valuation of $9 billion — was convicted in January of misleading investors that her technology could run hundreds of tests from just a few drops of blood. In reality, the company was relying on technology from other companies to run the tests.

She was convicted of four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud after a four-month-long trial that featured testimony and tales of billionaire investors, former U.S. officials’ endorsement and patients who had used the company’s technology. Holmes also took the stand over the course of seven days in emotional testimony defending her actions as being in good faith and denying that she was aware of the fraud.

On Friday, Federal District Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced her to prison beginning on April 27.

“The tragedy of the case is that Ms. Holmes is brilliant,” the judge said in a lengthy statement. She fought herself into a male-dominated world and people gravitated toward her vision and drive, he said.

“She made it, she got into that world.” But the venture capital world also doesn’t condone fraud, he said.

The sentencing is the conclusion of the years-long saga of Holmes, during which she was once hailed as a hero for female entrepreneurs before a dramatic fall to become the notorious founder of a crumpled company. Now the subject of an HBO documentary, a Hulu TV series, a best-selling book and multiple podcasts, Holmes has become one of the most famous tech start-up CEOs, as well as a cautionary tale for how badly an ambitious start-up can spin out of control.

“The message to Silicon Valley and other entrepreneurs is have a dream, invest in it, but be honest with investors about where you are, and don’t commit fraud,” said Jason Linder, a former federal prosecutor, who is now a partner at corporate law firm Mayer Brown and has been following the case.

Holmes spoke before the judge handed down her sentence. She cried as she read from notes, breaking the staid composure she had held throughout the day and through most previous court appearances.

“I take responsibility for Theranos,” she said. “I regret my failings with every cell in my body.”

After her sentence was read, she stood up and was embraced by her family, burying her face in their shoulders. She then quickly left the court room as journalists and her supporters stood quietly before filing out.

Later, she and her partner left the court building through a side entrance, dodging a large group of photographers and TV camera people who had assembled outside the main door. She jumped in a black SUV, which quickly drove off.

Since Theranos crumbled, Holmes has kept a low profile. She lives in Silicon Valley with her partner and son, and has been volunteering at a crisis line for sexual assault survivors. She is pregnant with their second child.

Holmes started the company in 2003 when she was just 19 years old with the promise to develop technology that would eliminate the need for drawing tubes and tubes of blood to run diagnostic tests. She quickly drew in investors, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from prominent businesspeople and political figures including Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and others. Holmes also attracted big-name statesmen such as Henry Kissinger and Jim Mattis to her board of directors.

Federal prosecutors were asking the judge to sentence her to 15 years in prison, as well as require restitution of about $800 million to pay back investors and business partners.

She leased space in a famed Silicon Valley office park and hired hundreds of employees. After her start-up went public with its ambitions roughly a decade ago, Holmes soared to fame. She was one of the few young female founders in a competitive tech world that still often features White, male CEOs.

The media took notice, putting her on the covers of magazines including, Forbes, Fortune and Inc. as well as speaking at conferences and giving a TEDMED Talk. She inked deals with Walgreens and Safeway to put her technology — a small blood-testing machine, known as the Edison, that purported to use “nanotainers” that needed just a finger prick’s worth of blood to test for everything from cholesterol to herpes.

But internally, it was a different story, according to testimony at her trial last year. Theranos’s proprietary technology could in reality run only about a dozen tests, and witnesses said it didn’t always do those reliably.

During the trial, former employees testified about growing concern within the company about how quickly Theranos was pushing to use the technology on patients. Former Walgreens and Safeway executives said they didn’t realize Theranos was using other company’s traditional machines to process blood tests. And former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who served on the company’s board, said he would have had a different view of the company if he had known the limitations of the Theranos blood-testing device.

“It would have tempered my enthusiasm significantly,” he said in court.

A Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 revealed that Theranos was relying on traditional lab testing machines and typical blood draws to run many of its tests.

Regulators started investigating the company, and Theranos went on the defensive. Holmes’s empire and public image began to crumble.

A federal regulator of laboratories found deficiencies at the company’s lab that “pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” Holmes was eventually barred from owning or operating a medical lab for at least two years. And in 2018, she was charged with massive fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which she paid a hefty fine to settle. She left Theranos that year and the company shuttered soon after.

Holmes was originally charged with her former business and romantic partner Sunny Balwani. He was convicted on 12 counts in a separate trial this summer, and is scheduled to be sentenced in December.

Prosecutor Jeff Schenk told the court during the hearing Friday that a 15-year sentence was in line with guidelines for Holmes’s crimes.

“When faced with the choice of allowing Theranos to fail, Ms. Holmes made the choice to defraud her investors,” he said.

Schenk argued that because Holmes had not apologized for the fraud or admitted wrongdoing, the court should give her a serious sentence that would act as a strong deterrent to committing new crimes.

The judge asked if any victims wanted to speak. Alex Shultz, father of Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz, stood up and said that Holmes hired a private investigator to follow his son when Theranos suspected Tyler Shultz had spoken to media about the company.

Perspective: Elizabeth Holmes used every trope in the book

“It was a grueling experience to go through, I feel like my family home was desecrated by Elizabeth and the lawyers,” he said.

Holmes’s defense lawyers asked the judge to sentence her to 18 months in prison, or home confinement plus community service hours.

Holmes’s defense lawyer, Kevin Downey, said in court she never cashed out when she had the chance and was deprived of her support network during much of the time she was running Theranos.

Holmes testified on the stand for more than 20 hours during the trial last year, speaking publicly for one of the first times in years and drawing a crowd of reporters and members of the public to see her in person. She told the jury that she was always acting in good faith — trying to create and sustain a technology that would help people.

Holmes admitted on the stand during her trial that Theranos was running blood tests on modified third-party machines without telling its business partners and that she added the logos of two pharmaceutical companies to studies that the company sent to investors. She said she did not intentionally mean to deceive them.

“They weren’t interested in today or tomorrow or next month,” she said. “They were interested in what kind of change we could make.”

Balwani, Holmes’s former partner, was charged together with Holmes before his case was later severed when Holmes alleged he had abused her for years. Balwani has denied the allegations.

More than 100 people wrote letters in support of Holmes for her sentencing memo, including former employees, investors and even New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who said he met Holmes years before she was charged.

“In the years since, I’ve always been struck by the way our conversations focused on her desires to make a positive impact on the world,” he wrote.

Holmes’s partner Evans also wrote to the judge, seeking to describe a different Holmes than had been portrayed in the media. He extolled her “willingness to sacrifice herself for the greater good is something I greatly admire in her.”

He also wrote that “earlier this year, while pregnant, she decided she wanted to swim the Golden Gate Bridge,” something that concerned Evans.

“Rain or shine she practiced, and her determination was overpowering the odds against her,” he wrote. “Two weeks before the event she made the cut off time, swimming the breaststroke. I was wrong, you would think by now I would learn to not discount her perseverance.”

COVID-19 Update

Almost Twice as Many Republicans Died From COVID Before the Midterms Than Democrats

The authors of a new study can’t say if this impacted the midterms, but say that it’s “plausible given just how stark the differences in vaccination rates have been, among Democrats and Republicans.”

 By Matthew Gault

COVID-19 is killing more Republicans than Democrats, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study, titled Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic, used voter registration and death records to answer a question: is there a link between political affiliation and rates of COVID related death in the U.S.?

The short answer is yes. “In 2018 and the early parts of 2020, excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats are similar, and centered around zero,” the study said. “Both groups experienced a similar large spike in excess deaths in the winter of 2020-2021. However, in the summer of 2021—after vaccines were widely available—the Republican excess death rate rose to nearly double that of Democrats, and this gap widened further in the winter of 2021.”

The study attributes this to the vaccine uptake disparity between Republicans and Democrats, which has been widely documented as more Republicans refused to take the vaccine; the most vocal anti-vax voices were Republican politicians and some conservative news outlets: “The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available,” the study notes.

Is it possible that anti-vax Republicans dying from COVID affected the midterms? “If Republicans are dying in increased numbers relative to their Democratic colleagues in a political climate where there are so many close electoral contests, could that have been the decider in a particular particular race?” Jason L. Schwartz, an associate professor of Health Policy at the School of Public Health at Yale and one of the authors of the study, told Motherboard. “Our study can't answer that. But it certainly seems plausible given just how stark the differences in vaccination rates have been, among Democrats and Republicans.”

Philip Bump at the Washington Post looked at this same data and posits that COVID deaths did not affect the midterms and suggests that even asking the question is a “grotesque effort to score political points.” However, with so many House races still too close to call and voting margins razor-thin in many important races, it is worth trying to understand if COVID-19 and vaccine rates had any effect on the races.

Schwartz said that he and his colleagues wanted to look at something that hadn’t been carefully studied before. “Could we actually drill down at the level of individuals—in this case of individual death rates—and see whether or not politicization could be linked to mortality,” he said. “So far, it looks like there really is a signal here, particularly linked to the availability of vaccines.”

Schwartz and his colleagues started with voter registration data in Florida and Ohio from 2017. Then they looked at data from Datavent, an organization that provides privacy-preserving information linked to data from the Social Security Administration. The researchers connected all this data to information from funeral homes, newspapers and other resources to build a database of annual U.S. deaths.

The research discovered that excess deaths between Democrats and Republicans remained steady in the early part of the pandemic then began to separate after vaccines were widely available. Schwartz said the reasons why were beyond the remit of the study, but speculated that early COVID prevention measures were government-driven while the vaccine required someone to make a personal choice.

“If you think about the pre-vaccine period…those were times where a lot of measures in place to mitigate the virus were top-down government policy. “Schools closing, football games played in empty stadiums, or restrictions on large indoor gatherings. There were absolutely political divides about those policies,” he said. “But in some cases they were harder for the individual to avoid…once vaccines were on the scene, that really did shift things into that individual choice domain.”

The excess death rate difference isn’t small. “In the summer of 2021—after vaccines were widely available—the Republican excess death rate rose to nearly double that of Democrats, and this gap widened further in the winter of 2021,” the study said. This rose to a 153% difference after all adults could take the vaccine in Florida and Ohio.

This data is part of an early study and doesn’t paint the whole picture. “Our study has several limitations. First, our mortality data, while detailed and recent, only includes approximately 80 percent of deaths in the US. However, excess death patterns in our data are similar to those in other reliable sources,” the study said. “Second, because we did not have information on an individual’s vaccination status, analyses of the association between vaccination rates and excess deaths relied on county-level vaccination rates. Third, our study is based on data from the only states where we could obtain voter registration information (Florida and Ohio); hence, our results may not generalize to other states.”

The pandemic also isn’t over. The vaccines have stopped a lot of people from getting COVID, but vaccine rates in deep red parts of the U.S. are still low. “If these differences in vaccination by political party affiliation persist, then the higher excess death rate among Republicans is likely to continue through the subsequent stages of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the study said.