Everyday Erinyes #230

 Posted by at 9:00 am  Politics
Aug 292020
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

There are many aspects of life that one doesn’t find out about until one is, for want of a better word, exposed to them If this is true of life in general, how mush more is it true of a pandemic. Lona sent me a link to an article on the use of solitary confinement in ICE immigration detention centers, thinking the Furies might be interested. And they are. I see three issues here – first, prisons in general – the prison systems, the state of prison facilities, the conditions for those who work in prisons as well as those who are living there, for whatever reason, for whatever length of time. Second is the whole issue of solitary confinement within prisons, how it affects those who are kept in it, and especially for long periods of time, what it is like to be in it as opposed to outside of it but still in the prison – all of that. Third is the pandemic itself. Prisons, be they correctional or immigration prisons, are charged with the duty of keeping their inmates safe, including from the coronavirus. They do not always succeed in that duty (As we know from other horror stories, some don’t try very hard.)

The article begins with a story from Carlos Hernandez Corbacho. Mr. Hernandez Corbacho, and his wife Maydel Curbelo Perez, fled Cuba on account of the attention they were receiving from police on account of their open and vocal criticism of government. They came to the US by a route including Nicaragua and moving up through Central America to Nogales, Mexico, which borders Arizona. They presented themselves to CBP for political asylum, a perfectly legal thing for them to do. This happened about last November, after a roughly five-month journey. Curbelo Perez won asylum in March. then came CoViD, and Hernandez Corbacho’s court dates kept getting postponed. He won asylum August 19, but not until having been stranded in ICE detention for about five months.

He felt his first symptom in June. “But he said he was afraid to say anything. He’d heard rumors of officials locking detainees with COVID-19 symptoms in solitary, and wanted to put it off as long as possible.” One can hardly blame him. And that’s part of the problem. “Placing COVID-19 patients in solitary confinement, experts say, is inhumane and jeopardizes the overall population by deterring detainees from reporting symptoms. (emphasis mine)“

Solitary confinement was never intended to be used for quarantine. However, I don’t know what other facilities an ICE detention center might have or have access to. At any rate, that’s what was used, and the experience was terrible.

I cannot embed, but I can link to, a statement by Mr.Hernandez Corbacho, in a video format, in Spanish, but woth CC in English.

“In an emailed statement, ICE said that its quarantine practices are not a punitive measure and are conducted in accordance with the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control guidelines.” Well, that can be true, and still have absolutely nothing to do with what it feels like to an asylum seeker – or anyone else in that position. Even if not filthy, as it sadly often is, it can be very hard on people. One thing which does not occur to people who have never been near such a thing, and trying to imagine it, is that it is generally incredibly noisy. That alone can feel like being beaten. Mr. Hernandez Corbacho alludes to this. So did Colorado’s head correctional officer, who voluntarily spent 24 hours in solitary confinement soon after he took the position, in order to have the experience. I’m an introvert, but the noise level and quality they describe would drive me up a wall very fast.

And yet, dear Furies, I am going to give the low level employees, aorking in these conditions, many of them just trying to do a job they see as necessary while at the same time doing their best to support their family – I am going to give them a pass. They are not what is wrong. What is wrong is our as a society massive failure to address any of these massive ills – prison, ICE, and CoViD – until they all hit at the same time.

Instead, I am going to ask your help at this point to get guilty and incompetent Republicans out of government and replace them with innocent and competent Democrats, and THEN we can tackle all of these problems. Perhaps Alecto would like to take prisons, Megaera would consider auditing ICE, and Tisiphone would tackle the pandemic,along with our preparedness – or the lack of it – for another one or more.

Before I sign off, I would like to give one example of credit where credit is due. This article looks at numerous prisons in numerous places, and in the process they spoke with CoreCivic.

CoreCivic — which contracts with ICE to run La Palma and a number of other detention centers — denies that their facilities use solitary confinement.

“The claim that solitary confinement is used in our facilities is patently false,” CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin said. “Like most public and private secure facilities during this pandemic, we use separate housing units within our facilities to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 when someone is confirmed positive for the virus.”

As a corporation I would not trust CoreCivic as far as I could throw one of their facilities, barbed wire and all. However, as the spouse of an inmate in a CoreCivic facility, who regularly speaks with him on the phone, I can testify almost first hand that “separate housing units within our facilities” is exactly what they are using there, and that it has kept and is keeping him virus free. (The inmates do have masks and are encouraged to use them and to practice social distance also, within the housing units.) I probably should add this is not the only CoreCivic facility he has been in, and that this one is run in a way noticeably superior to the other. So this may in fact the only one of their facilities which is keeping that promise – but at least this one is.  He would not be any safer if he were at home, and in fact he would almost certainly be less safe here.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #229

 Posted by at 10:00 am  Politics
Aug 222020
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Like TC, and others, this time of action for racial justice is not my first rodeo. And I know, because I remember, that we made mistakes last time around. Most, maybe all, under the umbrella that we assumed that winning was winning (at least we “wypipo” assumed that. I don’t think black or brown people were ever really fooled.)

Now is a time when we are seeing a light at the end of a tunnel (and we hope it won’t be a train). We won’t know for a while what kind of light it is, but in the hope that it will be the blessed light of day, I welcome advice on how to avoid previous mistakes (which are still being made, actually) and find ways to truly advance.
================================================================

Diversity pledges alone won’t change corporate workplaces – here’s what will

Words alone won’t make corporate America more diverse. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

Kimberly A. Houser, University of North Texas

Dozen of companies, from Apple to Zappos, have reacted to George Floyd’s killing and the protests that followed by pledging to make their workforces more diverse.

While commendable, to me it feels a bit like deja vu. Back in 2014, a host of tech companies made similar commitments to diversify their ranks. Their latest reports – which they release annually – show they’ve made little progress.

Why have their efforts largely failed? Were they just empty promises?

As a gender diversity scholar, I explored these questions in my recent paper published in the Stanford Technology Law Review. The problem is not a lack of commitment but what social scientists call “unconscious bias.”

Big tech, little progress

Today’s efforts to promote diversity are certainly more specific than the tech industry’s vague promises in 2014.

In 2020, sports apparel maker Adidas pledged to fill at least 30% of all open positions with Black or Latino candidates. Cosmetics company Estée Lauder promised to make sure the share of Black people it employs mirrors their percentage of the U.S. population within five years. And Facebook vowed to double its number of Black and Latino employees within three years.

Companies have also committed at least US$1 billion in money and resources to fight the broader societal scourge of racism and support Black Americans and people of color more broadly.

Unfortunately, if past experience is any indication, good intentions and public pledges will not be enough to tackle the problem of the underrepresentation of women and people of color in most companies.

In 2014, Google, Facebook, Apple and other tech companies began publishing diversity reports after software engineer Tracy Chao, investor Ellen Pao and others called attention to Silicon Valley’s white male-dominated, misogynistic culture. The numbers weren’t pretty, and so one by one, they all made public commitments to diversity with promises of money, partnerships, training and mentorship programs.

Yet, half a decade later, their latest reports reveal, in embarrassing detail, how little things have changed, especially for underrepresented minorities. For example, at Apple, the share of women in tech jobs rose from 20% in 2014 to 23% in 2018, while the percentage of Black workers in those roles remained flat at 6%. Google managed to increase the share of women in such jobs to 24% in 2020 from 17% in 2014, yet only 2.4% of these tech roles are filled by Black workers, up from 1.5% in 2014. Even companies that have made more progress, such as Twitter, still have far to go to achieve meaningful representation.

I believe one of the reasons for the lack of progress is that two of their main methods, diversity training and mentoring, were flawed. Training can actually harm workplace relationships, while mentoring places the burden of changing the system on those disadvantaged by it and with the least influence over it.

More importantly, however, you can not solve the problem of diversity – no matter how much money you throw at it – without a thorough understanding of its source: faulty human decision-making.

A problem of bias

My research, which relies on the behavioral work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, explains that because humans are unaware of their unconscious biases, most underestimate their impact on the decisions they make.

People tend to believe they make hiring or other business decisions based on facts or merit alone, despite loads of evidence showing that decisions tend to be subjective, inconsistent and subject to mental shortcuts, known to psychologists as heuristics.

Male-dominated industries, such as tech, finance and engineering, tend to keep hiring the same types of employees and promoting the same types of workers due to their preference for applicants who match the stereotype of who belongs in these roles – a phenomenon known as representative bias. This perpetuates the status quo that keeps men in prime positions and prevents women and underrepresented minorities from gaining a foothold.

This problem is amplified by confirmation bias and the validity illusion, which lead us to be overconfident in our predictions and decisions – despite ample research demonstrating how poorly humans are at forecasting events.

By failing to make objective decisions in the hiring process, the system just repeats itself over and over.

How AI can overcome bias

Advances in artificial intelligence, however, offer a way to overcome these biases by making hiring decisions more objective and consistent.

One way is by anonymizing the interview process.

Studies have found that simply replacing female names with male names on resumes results in improving the odds of a woman being hired by 61%. AI could help ensure an applicant isn’t culled early in the vetting process due to gender or race in a number of ways. For example, code could be written that removes certain identifying features from resumes. Or a company could use neuroscience games – which help match candidate skills and cognitive traits to the needs of jobs – as an unbiased gatekeeper.

Another roadblock is job descriptions, which can be worded in a way that results in fewer applicants from diverse backgrounds. AI is able to identify and remove biased language before the ad is even posted.

Some companies have already made strides hiring women and underrepresented minorities this way. For example, Unilever has had fantastic success improving the diversity of its workforce by employing a number of AI technologies in the recruitment process, including using a chatbot to carry on automated “conversations” with applicants. Earlier this year, the maker of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Vaseline jelly said it achieved perfect parity between women and men in management positions, up from 38% a decade earlier.

Accenture, which ranked number one in 2019 among more than 7,000 companies around the world on an index of diversity and inclusion, utilizes AI in its online assessments of job applicants. Women now make up 38% of its U.S. workforce, up from 36% in 2015, while African Americans rose to 9.3% from 7.6%.

Garbage in, garbage out

Of course, AI is only as good as the data and design that go into it.

We know that biases can be introduced in the choices programmers make when creating an algorithm, how information is labeled and even in the very data sets that AI relies upon. A 2018 study found that a poorly designed facial recognition algorithm had an error rate as high as 34% for identifying darker-skinned women, compared with 1% for light-skinned men.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Fortunately, bias in AI can be mitigated – and remedied when problems are discovered – through its responsible use, which requires balanced and inclusive data sets, the ability to peer inside its “black box” and the recruitment of a diverse group of programmers to build these programs. Additionally, algorithmic outcomes can be monitored and audited for bias and accuracy.

But that really is the point. You can take the bias out of AI – but you can’t remove it from humans.The Conversation

Kimberly A. Houser, Assistant Clinical Professor, Business and Tech Law, University of North Texas

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, “you can take the bias out of AI – but you can’t remove it from humans.” So true. Many of us are worried that technology – including but not limited to AI – will dehumanize us. But with creativity, and good will, there is no reason we can’t use it to make ourselves more human – in the good senses of compassionate and creative, not in the negative senses of flawed and unpredictable.

Gary Larson – whom you will remember as the creator of The Far Side – and who has been terribly missed since he retired – credits his return to active cartooning entirely to the discovery that drawing digitally is fun. So that cartooning for him is now fun again. I hope we can learn something from that as we pursue greater fairness and diversity as well.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #228

 Posted by at 9:00 am  Politics
Aug 152020
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Back to history this week. It has been obvious for a long time that the Versailles Treaty got the world into World War II. I learned that in school. But it’s less obvious how much of a factor it was in getting us into the mess we are in today. Let’s look.
================================================================

How the failures of the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty set the stage for today’s anti-racist uprisings

On May 27, 1919, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, Italian President Vittorio Orlando, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and American President Woodrow Wilson met May 27, 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference. Lee Jackson/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

Elizabeth Thompson, American University School of International Service

The racism that is now the target of protest across the globe is rooted in the tragic choices of leaders seeking to roll back change a century ago.

Nearly all historians now agree that at the end of World War I, the choice to return to an imperialist world order by the victorious Allied, or Entente, powers – France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and the United States – was a historic error. It not only prepared the ground for the rise of fascism in Europe, but also sparked decades of political violence in Asia and Africa by people denied their rights and humanity.

As World War I ended in November 1918, the Spanish Flu pandemic swept across the globe, killing more than 50 million people. Most vulnerable were soldiers living in crowded barracks and their families back home, where hunger weakened immunity.

Like today, the effect of pandemic was aggravated by economic recession and unemployment. Worse, the people of the defeated German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires suffered chaos under political collapse.

Amid these multiple crises, the Paris Peace Conference opened in January 1919. American President Woodrow Wilson personally traveled to Paris to ensure that the conference would make the world “safe for democracy.”

Wilson had promised a new era of peace and justice in his famous Fourteen Points statement of war aims, which included an end to secret treaties, the curtailment of colonial empires, the right of all people to choose their own government and a League of Nations to adjudicate international conflicts.

In 1920, like 2020, race became the pivot of a historic turning point. In both moments, world leaders faced a choice: to restore the previous status quo that had produced the crisis – or to embrace the need for a new world order.

The European members of the Entente powers at Paris – Britain, France, and Italy – ignored Wilson’s call for world order based on law and rights. With the implementation of the Treaty of Versailles in January 1920, they chose to restore a racial hierarchy across the globe, extending their colonial rule over territories once held by the defeated German and Ottoman empires in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The treaty, which included establishment of the League of Nations, betrayed not only Wilson’s ideals, but also the Entente’s nonwhite allies and the colonial soldiers who fought in the “war to end all wars.” The racial injustice of the 1919-20 peace settlement sparked decades of political violence – not only in the colonized Middle East, Africa and Asia, but also in the United States.

Portrait of NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois
NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois went to Paris to try to ensure that racist laws like the U.S. had would not be imposed in Africa to the detriment of African rights. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Journey to Paris

In January 1919, activists from around the world traveled to Paris despite risks to their health. They embraced Wilson’s Fourteen Points as a chance to remake a broken world system of imperial rivalry that had led to World War I and the deaths of 10 million soldiers and 50 million civilians.

Among those activists was NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois, who had fought against the spread of racist, segregationist Jim Crow laws from southern states to the North. He now feared that a similar legal double standard might be imposed in international law, to the detriment of African rights.

Du Bois asked to join the American delegation at Paris, but the Wilson administration refused him. Wilson feared that Du Bois’ call for racial equality might spoil his negotiations with the other conference leaders – prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy – who ruled most of Africa as colonies.

Claiming rights

Undeterred, Du Bois organized a Pan African Congress to defend Africans’ rights. He understood, as others did in Paris, that racial inequality was the foundation of the old imperial world order.

Like Du Bois and his African allies, Arabs and Egyptians claimed their right to sovereignty. But they found that the Entente leaders also considered Arab Muslims a lower species of human, unfit for self-rule.

Prince Faisal of Mecca gained entry to the conference because his Arab army had fought against the Ottoman Turks alongside Britain, with the understanding that Arabs would gain an independent state. But the British broke their promise and denied independence to Faisal’s Syrian Arab Kingdom. They instead joined French colonialists to divide Arab lands between them.

Asians, too, were regarded as an inferior race. Japan had fought alongside the victorious Allies and had won a leading role at the conference.

But when the Japanese delegation proposed a racial equality clause for the Covenant of the new League of Nations, the conference’s white leaders rejected it.

The five members of the Japanese delegation to the Paris peace conference.
The Japanese delegation, shown here, proposed a racial equality clause for the charter of the new League of Nations. The leading powers rejected it. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Racial inequality codified

The Covenant of the League of Nations, drafted by those same leaders at Paris in 1919, codified the inequality of races in international law. Article 22 denied independence to Arabs, Africans and Pacific Islanders once ruled by the Ottomans and Germans.

In the condescending language of moral uplift, the article designated them as “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Therefore, they would be placed under temporary European rule as “a sacred trust of civilisation.”

In other words, the League of Nations would administer temporary colonies, called mandates, to tutor uncivilized (nonwhite) people in politics. Racial inequality was enshrined in the very institution, the League of Nations, that was to ensure the governance of international law.

The mandates were imposed by gunpoint, with no pretense to respect self-determination. In July 1920, the French army occupied Damascus, destroyed the Syrian Arab Kingdom and sent Faisal into exile. Likewise, the British battled mass opposition to claim its mandates in Iraq and Palestine. Meanwhile, South Africa imposed a brutal racist regime upon southwest Africa.

Racial exclusion from the club of so-called civilized nations provoked anti-colonial movements for the rest of the 20th century.

The president of the Syrian Arab Kingdom’s Congress, Sheikh Rashid Rida, foresaw violent consequences in his 1921 appeal to the League of Nations.

“It does not befit the honor of this League, which President Wilson proposed to include all civilized nations for the good of all human beings,” he wrote, “for it to be used as a tool by two colonial states. These states seek to use this Assembly to guarantee … the subjugation of peoples.”

Prince Faisal of Mecca with his delegation at the Peace Conference.
Prince Faisal of Mecca with his delegation at the Peace Conference. Wikipedia

Rida prophetically warned that “Syria, Palestine, and other Arab countries will ignite the fires of war in both the West and the East.” The bitter sheikh turned against European liberalism and inspired the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.

In the later 20th century, this racial exclusion of Arab Muslims inspired the violent Islamist movements that drew the United States into seeming endless conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Jim Crow stays

In the United States, racial hierarchy was similarly reimposed by violence. Black veterans returned from Europe to confront lynching and race riots.

[The Conversation’s newsletter explains what’s going on with the coronavirus pandemic. Subscribe now.]

The link between the American racial order and the new world order was made explicit by President Wilson’s adviser, Colonel Edward M. House. He advised Wilson that racial equality would cost him votes in the South and California. Worse, such a clause could empower the League of Nations to intervene in the United States against Jim Crow laws.

In March 1920, the U.S. Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations precisely because clauses on transnational law enforcement and collective security threatened U.S. sovereignty.

It is no accident that the current crisis in the U.S. has come to focus on racial injustice. Among its several sources are the decisions made 100 years ago by white men from powerful countries who believed maintaining their dominance was more important than seeking peace through justice.The Conversation

Elizabeth Thompson, Professor and Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace, American University School of International Service

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, Wilson (a racist himself) probably did not envision what we would envision today as a “world order based on law and rights.” That’s nothing new. When the Magna Carta was signed, the barons who forced it did not envision a world in which anyone other than the nobility would have the rights it prescribes. When the Constitution was written and adopted, our founding fathers almost certainly did not envision a world without slavery. Even after we abolished slavery, few envisioned a eorld in which women had rights. Historically, freedom has a tendency to spread and to embrace groups those writing the rules never considered. It would be most interesting if we were able to follow the history of a parallel world which did rally behind Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and see what would have been different.

On the other hand, I was looking at some numbers – I cannot call what I did crunching because I wasn’t rigorous, and made adjustments based on guesses. I took as a starting point the premise that 30% of Americans still support Trump. I made an assumption that, while we all know that black racists, and female misogynists, and Jewish anti-Semites exist, their actual numbers would be small enough to disregard. I looked up the percentage of non-Hispanic whites in America, and learned it was a little under two-thirds. Well, 30% is almost one-third. I concluded that, as a very rough estimate, half of all the whites in the United States are racist. And we will be stuck with them long after Trump* is gone. And they vote, and they reproduce. On the bright side, without doing any math, I feel strongly that 50% is a lower percentage of racists among whites than it was in the fifties So I think there is hope. Dear Furies, help us build it better.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #227

 Posted by at 9:00 am  Politics
Aug 082020
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Once again, in connection with CoViD-19, the word “epithelial” comes up, and it is associated with something scary every time that it does. This is no exception. I doubt I could be more motivated to avoid getting CoViD myself than I already am. But I see a threat here beyond my own health which worries me.
================================================================

How COVID-19 might increase risk of memory loss and cognitive decline

More and more studies are revealing the cognitive effects of COVID-19. Amornrat Phuchom / Getty Images

Natalie C. Tronson, University of Michigan

Of all frightening ways that the SARS-COV-2 virus affects the body, one of the more insidious is the effect of COVID-19 on the brain.

It is now clear that many patients suffering from COVID-19 exhibit neurological symptoms, from loss of smell, to delirium, to an increased risk of stroke. There are also longer-lasting consequences for the brain, including myalgic encephalomyelitis /chronic fatigue syndrome and Guillain-Barre syndrome.

These effects may be caused by direct viral infection of brain tissue. But growing evidence suggests additional indirect actions triggered via the virus’s infection of epithelial cells and the cardiovascular system, or through the immune system and inflammation, contribute to lasting neurological changes after COVID-19.

I am a neuroscientist specializing in how memories are formed, the role of immune cells in the brain and how memory is persistently disrupted after illness and immune activation. As I survey the emerging scientific literature, my question is: Will there be a COVID-19-related wave of memory deficits, cognitive decline and dementia cases in the future?

The immune system and the brain

Many of the symptoms we attribute to an infection are really due to the protective responses of the immune system. A runny nose during a cold is not a direct effect of the virus, but a result of the immune system’s response to the cold virus. This is also true when it comes to feeling sick. The general malaise, tiredness, fever and social withdrawal are caused by activation of specialized immune cells in the brain, called neuroimmune cells, and signals in the brain.

These changes in brain and behavior, although annoying for our everyday lives, are highly adaptive and immensely beneficial. By resting, you allow the energy-demanding immune response to do its thing. A fever makes the body less hospitable to viruses and increases the efficiency of the immune system. Social withdrawal may help decrease spread of the virus.

In addition to changing behavior and regulating physiological responses during illness, the specialized immune system in the brain also plays a number of other roles. It has recently become clear that the neuroimmune cells that sit at the connections between brain cells (synapses), which provide energy and minute quantities of inflammatory signals, are essential for normal memory formation.

Unfortunately, this also provides a way in which illnesses like COVID-19 can cause both acute neurological symptoms and long-lasting issues in the brain.

Microglia are specialized immune cells in the brain. In healthy states, they use their arms to test the environment. During an immune response, microglia change shape to engulf pathogens. But they can also damage neurons and their connections that store memory. JUAN GAERTNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty Images

During illness and inflammation, the specialized immune cells in the brain become activated, spewing vast quantities of inflammatory signals, and modifying how they communicate with neurons. For one type of cell, microglia, this means changing shape, withdrawing the spindly arms and becoming blobby, mobile cells that envelop potential pathogens or cell debris in their path. But, in doing so, they also destroy and eat the neuronal connections that are so important for memory storage.

Another type of neuroimmune cell called an astrocyte, typically wraps around the connection between neurons during illness-evoked activation and dumps inflammatory signals on these junctions, effectively preventing the changes in connections between neurons that store memories.

Because COVID-19 involves a massive release of inflammatory signals, the impact of this disease on memory is particularly interesting to me. That is because there are both short-term effects on cognition (delirium), and the potential for long-lasting changes in memory, attention and cognition. There is also an increased risk for cognitive decline and dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, during aging.

How does inflammation exert long-lasting effects on memory?

If activation of neuroimmune cells is limited to the duration of the illness, then how can inflammation cause long-lasting memory deficits or increase the risk of cognitive decline?

Both the brain and the immune system have specifically evolved to change as a consequence of experience, in order to neutralize danger and maximize survival. In the brain, changes in connections between neurons allows us to store memories and rapidly change behavior to escape threat, or seek food or social opportunities. The immune system has evolved to fine-tune the inflammatory response and antibody production against previously encountered pathogens.

Yet long-lasting changes in the brain after illness are also closely linked to increased risk for age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. The disruptive and destructive actions of neuroimmune cells and inflammatory signaling can permanently impair memory. This can occur through permanent damage to the neuronal connections or neurons themselves and also via more subtle changes in how neurons function.

The potential connection between COVID-19 and persistent effects on memory are based on observations of other illnesses. For example, many patients who recover from heart attack or bypass surgery report lasting cognitive deficits that become exaggerated during aging.

Another major illness with a similar cognitive complications is sepsis – multi-organ dysfunction triggered by inflammation. In animal models of these diseases, we also see impairments of memory, and changes in neuroimmune and neuronal function that persist weeks and months after illness.

[You’re too busy to read everything. We get it. That’s why we’ve got a weekly newsletter. Sign up for good Sunday reading. ]

Even mild inflammation, including chronic stress, are now recognized as risk factors for dementias and cognitive decline during aging.

In my own laboratory, I and my colleagues have also observed that even without bacterial or viral infection, triggering inflammatory signaling over a short-term period results in long-lasting changes in neuronal function in memory-related brain regions and memory impairments.

Does COVID-19 increase risk for cognitive decline?

It will be many years before we know whether the COVID-19 infection causes an increased risk for cognitive decline or Alzheimer’s disease. But this risk may be decreased or mitigated through prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

Prevention and treatment both rely on the ability to decrease the severity and duration of illness and inflammation. Intriguingly, very new research suggests that common vaccines, including the flu shot and pneumonia vaccines, may reduce risk for Alzheimer’s.

Additionally, several emerging treatments for COVID-19 are drugs that suppress excessive immune activation and inflammatory state. Potentially, these treatments will also reduce the impact of inflammation on the brain, and decrease the impact on long-term brain health.

COVID-19 will continue to impact health and well-being long after the pandemic is over. As such, it will be critical to continue to assess the effects of COVID-19 illness in vulnerability to later cognitive decline and dementias.

In doing so, researchers will likely gain critical new insight into the role of inflammation across the life-span in age-related cognitive decline. This will aid in the development of more effective strategies for prevention and treatment of these debilitating illnesses.The Conversation

Natalie C. Tronson, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, it was stupid and willfully ignorant voter who got us into the mess we are in. And in many cases it’s those same stupid and willfully ignorant voters who are daring the virus to infect them – and then going around infecting others, including some who are not stupid or willfully ignorant, but get into their path. If the virus can manage to get into patients’ brains, it will cause even more stupidity, as well as ignorance (through memory loss) which may not be willful, but is still damaging. How on earth are we going to deal with that? We need you. Desperately.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #226

 Posted by at 9:00 am  Politics
Aug 012020
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I had read about this, and you probably have too. But just a sentence or two, noting how clearly unconstitutional it is. So I welcomed the opportunity to learn more details.

(Note on copyright:  ProPublica does not include copyrighted pictures under Creative Commons.  But Court Orders are matters of public record, so I have reporoduced those, circling the “new” iformation.)
================================================================

“Defendant Shall Not Attend Protests”: In Portland, Getting Out of Jail Requires Relinquishing Constitutional Rights

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Federal authorities are using a new tactic in their battle against protesters in Portland, Oregon: arrest them on offenses as minor as “failing to obey” an order to get off a sidewalk on federal property — and then tell them they can’t protest anymore as a condition for release from jail.

Legal experts describe the move as a blatant violation of the constitutional right to free assembly, but at least 12 protesters arrested in recent weeks have been specifically barred from attending protests or demonstrations as they await trials on federal misdemeanor charges.

“Defendant may not attend any other protests, rallies, assemblies or public gathering in the state of Oregon,” states one “Order Setting Conditions of Release” for an accused protester, alongside other conditions such as appearing for court dates. The orders are signed by federal magistrate judges.

For other defendants, the restricted area is limited to Portland, where clashes between protesters and federal troops have grown increasingly violent in recent weeks. In at least two cases, there are no geographic restrictions; one release document instructs, “Do not participate in any protests, demonstrations, rallies, assemblies while this case is pending.”

Protesters who have agreed to stay away from further demonstrations say they felt forced to accept those terms to get out of jail.

 

“Those terms were given to me after being in a holding cell after 14 hours,” Bailey Dreibelbis, who was charged July 24 with “failing to obey a lawful order,” told ProPublica. “It was pretty cut-and-dried, just, ‘These are your conditions for [getting out] of here.’

“If I didn’t take it, I would still be in holding. It wasn’t really an option, in my eyes.”

It could not be learned who drafted the orders barring the protesters from joining further demonstrations. The documents reviewed by ProPublica were signed by a federal magistrate in Portland. Magistrates have broad authority to set the terms of release for anyone accused of a crime. They typically receive recommendations from U.S. Pretrial Services, an arm of the U.S. Courts, which can gather input from prosecutors and others involved in the case. ProPublica identified several instances in which the protest ban was added to the conditions of release document when it was drafted, before it was given to the judge. It remained unclear whether the limits on protesting were initiated by Justice Department officials or the magistrates hearing the cases.

Constitutional lawyers said conditioning release from jail on a promise to stop joining protests were overly broad and almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment right to free assembly.

“The government has a very heavy burden when it comes to restrictions on protest rights and on assembly,” noted Jameel Jaffer of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute. “It’s much easier for the government to meet that burden where it has individualized information about a threat. So for example, they know that a particular person is planning to carry out some unlawful activity at a particular protest.”

 

Over the past week, the federal government has sharply increased the number of protesters it’s charging with federal crimes — often for petty offenses that are classified as federal misdemeanors only because they occur on federal property. Court documents reviewed by ProPublica show that over a third of the protesters are charged with “failing to obey a lawful order,” which 14 protesters were charged with between July 21 and July 24 alone.

The office of the U.S. attorney for Oregon, Billy J. Williams, did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about who was making charging decisions. In a recent interview with The Oregonian, Williams urged local citizens to demand that “violent extremists” who have attempted to break through the fence outside the federal courthouse leave. “Until that happens, we’re going to do what we need to do to protect federal property.”

Craig Gabriel, an assistant U.S. attorney who works for Williams, insisted the office understood and respected the right to protest racial injustice. “People are angry. Very large crowds are gathering, expressing deep and legitimate anger with police and the justice system,” Gabriel told The Oregonian. “We wholeheartedly support the community’s constitutionally protected rights to assemble together in large, even rowdy protests and engage in peaceful and civil disobedience.”

Gabriel did not mention the written restrictions against protest that have been made a condition of release for some of those arrested.

Several protesters who were let go on July 23 had bans against demonstrating added by hand on their release documents by Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta, who signed off on them, a review by ProPublica found. Acosta’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

For those released on July 24, the restriction was added to the original typed document, also signed by Acosta. One protester arrested and released earlier in the month had his conditions of release modified at his arraignment on July 24. The modified order, signed by Acosta, added a protest ban not previously included.

Three of the 15 protesters charged on July 27, in orders signed by Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo, also had explicit protest restrictions added to their release terms. (One release order has not yet been posted to the federal courts database.) Russo’s office did not reply to ProPublica’s questions.

“I don’t see that as constitutionally defensible,” Jaffer said. And I find it difficult to believe that any judge would uphold it.”

The ACLU’s Somil Trivedi said, “Release conditions should be related to public safety or flight” — in other words, the risk that the defendant will abscond. “This is neither.” He described the handwritten addition of a protest ban to a release document as “sort of hilariously unconstitutional.”

Publicly, the Trump administration has claimed that it has no problem with the protests that erupted in Portland and other American cities in response to the May 25 death of George Floyd, a Black man, in police custody in Minneapolis. The administration said it launched Operation Diligent Valor in July with a massive deployment of federal officers merely to protect federal property from “violent extremists.”

Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School said that imposing a protest ban as a release condition undermines the distinction between protected protest and criminal activity. “Even if they’re right that these people did, in fact, step beyond the bounds of the First Amendment and do something illegal, that doesn’t mean you can then restrict their First Amendment right.”

In many cases, the charges leveled at Portland protesters are closely tied to their presence at the protest — and not to any violent acts.

Eighteen of the 50 protesters charged in Portland are accused only of minor offenses under Title 40, Section 1315, of the U.S. Code. That law criminalizes certain behavior (like “failure to obey a lawful order,” as well as “disorderly conduct”) when it happens on federal property or against people who are located on that property. In other words, it describes behavior that wouldn’t otherwise be a matter for a federal court.

Dreibelbis, like other protesters to whom ProPublica has spoken, said he was arrested for being on the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse. Because the federal government owns the land under the sidewalk, another protester (who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid influencing his upcoming trial) told ProPublica it’s “common knowledge” among protesters that the sidewalk is a no-go zone, and setting foot on it risks federal prosecution.

Dreibelbis told ProPublica he roller-skated into the protest, expecting to attend only briefly. He said he knelt on the sidewalk and was arrested by officers. (The charging document filed against Dreibelbis offers no arrest details.)

Section 1315 is the same law the Trump administration is using to justify initiating the federal show of force in Portland, which the administration has said it intends to employ in other cities where protests have raged since Floyd’s death.

The law allows the secretary of homeland security to supplement the Federal Protective Service, the relatively small agency partly responsible for federal building security, with law enforcement agents from the department’s other agencies (such as Customs and Border Protection).

Both President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, have invoked that part of the law in the past. But the use of that same law to file criminal charges appears to be novel. The Obama administration sent a “surge force” of 400 FPS agents, and a dozen CBP agents, to Baltimore in 2015, when the police killing of Freddie Gray sparked broad unrest, but no charges were filed under Section 1315 itself in that response.

In Portland, the federal government has relied on the FPS and U.S. Marshals to write affidavits used to charge protesters in federal court. But it has detailed other agencies on the protest front lines: DHS agencies cited in court complaints include CBP, through its BORTAC tactical unit; Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigations unit; DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, in addition to FPS. Complaints also cite the U.S. Marshals and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which are Justice Department entities.

In the first weeks of the operation, the most common charge against protesters was assault of a federal officer — which, in some cases, counted as a crime on federal property because protesters on the streets were shining lasers at officers inside the courthouse. (DHS has claimed that some officers may permanently lose their vision, but as of July 24, the most serious injury detailed in federal charging documents was an agent who reported seeing spots in his eyes for 15 minutes after the laser attack.)

Over July 23 and 24, however, 10 of the 13 cases opened were charges only of “failing to obey a lawful order.” (One other defendant was charged with assaulting a U.S. Marshal while detained inside the courthouse — where she had been taken after an arrest for “failing to obey a lawful order.”)

Since then, almost all cases have accused protesters of assaulting a federal officer (generally a misdemeanor charge).

In many of the assault cases, files are thin and no details of the allegations have been posted, even for protesters charged as early as July 6. No case files identify an alleged victim — either by name or by the “unique identifier” on their uniforms. (DHS officials have claimed it’s unfair to describe the federal agents in Portland as “unidentified” because they clearly show identification.)

 

Some assault accusations charge protesters with throwing unidentified objects at officers in body armor, who were unharmed.

Even those defendants who aren’t explicitly barred from attending protests are unable to return to the epicenter of Portland’s unrest as a condition of their release. They are placed under a curfew (either from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. or 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.) and told not to go within five blocks of the courthouse grounds except for court hearings.

Experts said that while restrictions of that sort are common, they’re still questionably constitutional. “Though ‘stay away’ orders from a place where a potential crime has been committed are generally standard,” the ACLU’s Trivedi said, “‘stay away’ orders from public places that are part of the public square are more questionable.” But he and others conceded that the government could make an argument that it was necessary to prevent further wrongdoing.

They saw no legitimate rationale for a blanket ban on protests.

“I suppose the government could argue, ‘You disobeyed a law enforcement officer at a protest, and we don’t trust you to not do it again,’” Trivedi said. But the release documents already instruct defendants that they are not allowed to break any laws while awaiting trial.

“If they want to say ‘don’t break a law again,’ they’ve already said that,” Trivedi told ProPublica. “Beyond that, the only part that’s left would be not letting you exercise your First Amendment right.”

Driebelbis, for his part, must now watch the protests proceed without him. “I work across the water from the protests, and I can see it every” night, he told ProPublica. “I’m protesting from this side.”

He hastened to clarify that he didn’t mean he was attending a protest in violation of the court order. “Not protesting! There’s no protesting going on in the party of one. But I am there in spirit.”

 

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, as Masha Gessen (and others) have said, we cannot trust to institutions to save us – not even the Constitution. That’s why public servants of all kinds swear to defend it, rather than the other way around. (No expiration date on that oath, BTW.)

The Furies and I will be back.

UPDATE: “Grace” has been released from detention.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #225

 Posted by at 9:40 am  Politics
Jul 252020
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Most of us have probably seen the story about the Michigan teenager (14 IIRC – oh, wait, 15, at least now) who was placed into juvenile detention because she failed to complete her virtual homework. That was in mid-May. Most of us also probably thought that was an over-reaction – and possibly an over-reach – on the part of the courts. I certainly feel it was an over-reaction. But it was not an over-reach. And it was not because of skin color alone, though that was a factor. The key word in all the stories is “probation.” She was on probation. Most people have heard of it but are not familiar with the details of how it works.

At some point in time, the young lady was convicted of some offense which resulted in her being put on probation. Note that I do not claim that she did it (it’s briefly described in the article), nor do I claim that a “white” child in the same circumstances would have been convicted – that is where the skin color comes in. But the result was to put her into probational status.

All societies, including ours, have a social contract – there are things which are “done” and things which are “not done.” None of these things are in any statute books – it’s purely a matter of people agreeing. Of course, people don’t always agree – and it can get comical – but there’s no reason for a court of law to get involved. Failure to do homework would ordinarily be in social contract territory.

But if a person is on probation, there are behaviors normally covered by the social contract which can now come under the territory of probation, and which can therefore violate not just the social contract, but also the conditions of probation. And not all of those actions and inactions are always written down in the terms of probation. The courts have leeway to determine what constitutes a violation of probation. And a violation of probation can put a probationer right (back) into detention. Regardless of skin color, gender, or other social status. And that is what happened to “Grace.”

The young lady has petitioned to be released from detention, and that is what this story is about. I present it without further comment.
================================================================

Judge Won’t Free Michigan Teenager Sent to Juvenile Detention After Not Doing Online Schoolwork

ProPublica Illinois is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. Sign up for The ProPublica Illinois newsletter for weekly updates.

PONTIAC, Mich. — A Michigan family court judge on Monday denied a motion to release a teenager who has been held at a juvenile facility since mid-May for violating probation after not doing her online schoolwork, saying the girl will benefit from ongoing treatment there.

“I think you are exactly where you are supposed to be,” the presiding judge of the Oakland County Family Court Division, Mary Ellen Brennan, told the 15-year-old. “You are blooming there, but there is more work to be done.”

The decision came despite an argument from the attorneys of the teenager, Grace*, that the therapy and educational support she receives at the facility are inadequate and a statement by the prosecutor that his office supported her release. Caseworkers for the court and Children’s Village, where she is being held, testified she should be kept at the facility until she completes the monthslong program.

 

After the hearing, Grace and her mother, Charisse, embraced for more than a minute, the first time they have had physical contact since May 14 because of COVID-19 restrictions. They sobbed audibly through their masks before leaving the courtroom separately.

During the two-hour hearing at the Oakland County court, Brennan also mounted a defense of her initial decision in May to place Grace in detention for the probation violation, devoting about 45 minutes to recounting the troubled relationship between the girl and her mother.

Brennan began by speaking directly to the girl, saying she wanted to ensure the information was on the record: “This morning for you, respectfully, it is going to get worse before it gets better. Because I am about to go over all the crap, all the negative, all the prior attempts at helping. I am going through it all.”

The case, which has drawn national scrutiny, was detailed in a ProPublica Illinois investigation co-published last week with the Detroit Free Press and Bridge Magazine. It has sparked several protests outside the courthouse, and members of Congress, state lawmakers and Birmingham Public Schools board members have called for Grace’s release. The Michigan Supreme Court’s oversight agency has opened a review of the procedures in the cases.

Monday’s hearing came after Grace’s new attorney, Jonathan Biernat, filed a motion Thursday asking the court to review the case and send her home.

Brennan limited discussion to Grace’s “progress and engagement” in the treatment program. She denied Grace’s attorneys’ attempts to discuss her original decision to detain the teenager for the probation violation and would not allow testimony from Grace’s special education teacher.

The prosecutor’s office has until Friday to respond to Biernat’s motion to reconsider the ruling on the probation violation, and Brennan said she will then issue a written opinion.

Grace was a high school sophomore in Birmingham Public Schools when she was charged with assault and theft last year, for incidents in which she bit her mother’s finger and pulled her hair and stole another student’s cellphone.

 

She was placed on probation in mid-April and, among other requirements, was to complete her schoolwork. Grace, who has ADHD and receives special education services, struggled with the transition to online learning and fell behind when Groves High School stopped in-person learning because of COVID-19. Her probation officer filed a violation against her on May 5, two weeks into the probation.

On May 14, Brennan found Grace guilty of violating probation for “failure to submit any schoolwork and getting up for school.” She ordered her detained, concluding Grace was a “threat to (the) community” based on the prior charges of assault and theft. Grace was placed in secure detention at Children’s Village, in suburban Detroit, for about three weeks and then transferred to a residential treatment program within the facility.

The decision to detain Grace came while the state was operating under an order from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to eliminate any form of detention or residential placement unless a young person posed a “substantial and immediate safety risk to others.”

At Monday’s hearing, Grace’s case coordinator at Children’s Village and the judge, reading from the caseworker’s report, said the girl has behaved well and has been engaged with the treatment program. She has met all the goals, was the “star resident” one week this month and is currently at the second of five stages in the program. Each stage takes about a month to complete, the case coordinator said, and she recommended that Grace complete the program. That would take another three and a half months, she said.

The court caseworker also recommended that Grace stay in the program. “They have made significant progress,” the caseworker, Ashley Bishop, said. “In speaking with mom, she reports they have been able to communicate much better, (Grace) is more self-aware, she is more serious, she is more thoughtful.”

“When I read this report, this is as good as it gets. … This is excellent. She is on point, she is doing well, she is engaged,” Brennan said. She later said, “The worst thing I can do is say you are doing great, now let’s get you home and watch the whole thing blow up.”

But Grace, speaking to the judge, said her good behavior indicated she was ready to go home. “I know I can control myself. … That altercation should not be defining who I should be now,” she said, adding: “I can be respectful. I can be obedient. I feel like that is being completely disregarded, no offense.”

She and her attorney argued she has been “deprived” of education and therapy. She has between 30 and 60 minutes of individual therapy twice a month and has had three joint sessions with her mother. Before being detained, she was meeting with a therapist twice weekly in addition to family therapy and academic tutoring, Grace and her mother have said.

“I believe placement in my home with the same, consistent therapy that I was getting beforehand, and love and support that will always be around me, will be a benefit for myself, my mom, my family and my community,” Grace said.

For school, Grace has been provided packets of material from the local district, which she said have been inadequate. “I am getting behind in my actual schooling while here. The schooling here is beneath my level of education,” she said. “And I know you may not seem to think this is a punishment, but in my heart, I feel the aching and the loss as if it were a punishment.”

 

For the first segment of the hearing, Brennan detailed Grace’s contentious relationship with her mother, during what she referred to as “the crazy years,” citing police records and child welfare reports mostly from 2017 and 2018. The reports describe Grace yelling, pushing, punching and biting her mother, and her mother’s inability to control her daughter, the judge said. She also mentioned Grace’s mental health treatment and troubles at school, including her theft of school technology, as well as social services support to help resolve conflicts between the mother and daughter.

The ProPublica investigation cited the police reports and other records about Grace’s behavior, including that she entered a court diversion program in 2018, at her mother’s request, for “incorrigibility.” At that time, Grace agreed to participate in counseling and not use electronic devices.

However, in filing the probation violation, the probation officer, who did not appear in court Monday, only cited incomplete schoolwork. She said Charisse reported that her daughter was not doing work, though the mother has said she spoke out of frustration. Charisse subsequently has said her daughter needed time to adjust to remote learning.

Brennan, who is running for reelection, said on Monday she had not felt it was safe to send Grace home after the probation violation because of the “numerous incidents of domestic violence,” and she didn’t want to put them in a “hot box” together when families generally were staying at home during the pandemic.

“She was not detained because she didn’t turn her homework in,” Brennan said at one point during the hearing, taking a long pause to look out at the courtroom. “She was detained because I found her to be a threat of harm to her mother based on everything I knew.”

At the original probation violation hearing in May, Grace’s mother testified that her daughter had not caused her any physical harm during the probation period. Grace said at Monday’s hearing that there had been no physical altercations between the two after the original assault charge in November and there is no police record of any.

In issuing the decision, Brennan said she wanted the girl to succeed, urging her to “give yourself a chance to follow through and finish something.”

She also cited the teenager’s work with a program at Children’s Village to prepare shelter dogs for adoption. “I want you to finish. The dogs want you to finish. Truly,” she said.

Biernat, Grace’s attorney, said after the hearing that he plans to appeal the decision. “We want her back at home with her mother,” he said.

As Grace and her mother hugged before saying goodbye, Charisse told her to “stay strong.”

With her head on her mother’s shoulder, Grace replied: “I can’t.”

ProPublica is using middle names for the teenager and her mother to protect their identities.

 

================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I promised no further comment, and I’ll stick to that. I’ll just say anything you can do to lead this story toward a happy ending will be appreciated deeply.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share

Everyday Erinyes #224

 Posted by at 9:00 am  Politics
Jul 182020
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I was looking around for what to address this week, and then Nameless kind of made up my mind for me. It’s scary. And there’s not much a single activist can do about it. But at the very least it may help us be more understanding of people working in the medical field – all of whom at this point are people overworking in the medical field. No one who is being served by them, or in contact with them in any way, needs to do or say anything to add to their stress.
================================================================

Hospitals Are Suddenly Short of Young Doctors — Because of Trump’s Visa Ban

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

As hospitals across the United States brace for a difficult six months — with the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic still raging and concerns about a second wave in the fall — some are acutely short-staffed because of an ill-timed change to immigration policy and its inconsistent implementation.

A proclamation issued by President Donald Trump on June 22, barring the entry of most immigrants on work visas, came right as hospitals were expecting a new class of medical residents. Hundreds of young doctors were unable to start their residencies on time.

Trump’s order included the H1-B visa for highly skilled workers, which is used by some practicing doctors abroad who get U.S. residency slots. The proclamation stated that doctors “involved with the provision of medical care to individuals who have contracted COVID-19 and are currently hospitalized” should be exempt from the ban, but it delegated the issuing of guidance to the departments of State and Homeland Security. That guidance has been slow and inconsistent.

 

Many consulates started approving doctors’ visas on Thursday, after ProPublica asked the State Department about the delay. Others say they’re still awaiting guidance.

At hospitals where many incoming residents are visa holders, even a delay of a few weeks in arriving in the U.S. creates a staffing crisis. Doctors and administrators are afraid that the repercussions will last for the rest of the year — leaving them overworked and ill-prepared even before a second wave of the virus hits.

ProPublica has heard from 10 would-be medical residents stuck abroad because of H1-B visa issues. Six of them had gotten emergency consulate appointments for visa approval, but when they arrived for meetings they were told their visas could not be approved. Three were still waiting on DHS approval for their visas, a necessary step before a visa gets a consulate stamp. One resident had application approval but was denied an emergency consulate interview appointment because of the ban. All were destined for hospital positions treating COVID-19 patients.

The State Department told ProPublica on Tuesday that it, “in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and interagency partners, is establishing and implementing procedures” for the visa ban, and that it “has communicated and will continue to communicate implementation procedures” to consulates abroad.

On Thursday, the State Department’swebsite posted guidance, spelling out that doctors treating COVID-19 patients were exempt from the ban. On that day, many of the residents ProPublica spoke to said they had suddenly received visa approvals. “A quite remarkable turnaround, given that I received a rejection email three days ago,” one said. In at least five countries, however, consulates were still not processing doctors’ visas.

The Committee of Interns and Residents, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, has heard from over 250 interns stuck abroad. Over 150 of them are on H-1B visas.. (The others are on visas that weren’t covered in Trump’s ban, but can’t get approval because their consulates are still closed due to the pandemic.) Union president Jessica Edwards pointed out to ProPublica that while that number may sound small, each intern is responsible for the care of thousands of patients.

As of 2017, there were 2,532 medical residents on H1-B visas, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association — though the Trump administration’s continued restrictions to legal immigration may have made it less appealing for hospitals to sponsor visas in the last few years. But the impact on hospitals is highly concentrated in the less-prestigious hospitals that tend to rely on residents from overseas.

At one New York City hospital serving low-income residents, nearly half the incoming class is still stuck abroad, multiple sources confirmed to ProPublica. One hospital in a large Midwestern city told ProPublica that “roughly half” of its first-year doctors started on time. In the Deep South, a region now overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, a doctor who was set to start told ProPublica he was among 10 residents still awaiting visa approval as of early July. All hospitals and doctors spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity because they worried about jeopardizing their visa applications.

ProPublica has also spoken to more-experienced doctors facing the same issue — including an infectious-disease specialist blocked from starting a job in an area of the Western U.S. where COVID-19 cases are rising.

 

When there aren’t enough incoming residents to replace departing third-year residents, staffing crunches result.

At the New York City hospital, a doctor told ProPublica that after only 10 days of short-staffing, one resident had called in sick from exhaustion. The doctor recounted a recent shift in which there had only been two junior residents on call, compared with the typical six. Even by having residents work individually instead of in teams of two, they couldn’t keep up with new patient admissions.

“The patients had to just stay there waiting in the (emergency department) for the residents to finish their first admission, in order to see them,” the doctor said. “When the shift was over, I logged into the computer and I would see notes written at 10 p.m., 11 p.m. And these residents are expected to go home and then come back again at 6:30 a.m.”

Even at hospitals with decreasing COVID-19 caseloads, short-staffing is a bigger problem than it was in pre-pandemic times. Some hospitals are seeing a “surge of non-COVID patients” who were unable to get care for chronic conditions like heart disease during lockdown and are now deteriorating, a doctor at a short-staffed hospital told ProPublica. And because protocols prevent doctors from switching back and forth between COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients, the hospital needs to keep more doctors on-call to maintain staffing levels in both wards.

“If someone is getting acutely ill, who will see them?” a hospital administrator told ProPublica. “I’ve got my poor residents running around trying to make sure everyone is seen in a timely manner. And residents are great, but they can only be in one place at one time.”

Some of these problems will be fixed as residents receive delayed visa approvals and are able to come. But it will take weeks, if not months, to successfully onboard them. The Midwestern hospital anticipates that arriving residents may not be able to start until mid-August. In the meantime, they’re understaffing services and using fourth-year medical students in place of residents.

Hospitals are used to a summertime efficiency gap, as new interns learn the ropes. This year, it could persist into fall — when a second wave of coronavirus infections is expected.

“I’m really worried that in three months,” said the medical administrator, “we’re going to have a bunch of residents who are just exhausted and just getting into the worst part of the fall, flu and COVID season.”

These doctors already had to push themselves through the first wave of COVID-19 this spring. Furthermore, at hospitals hardest hit by the visa ban, the residents picking up the slack are often themselves H1-B visa holders whose futures are now uncertain. Trump’s ban didn’t revoke visas for anyone currently in the U.S., but if they leave the country — which they will have to do if they change jobs — their ability to return is unclear. Some of the doctors interviewed by ProPublica were living in the U.S. before the pandemic and returned home partly to get visa approval for their new jobs. One doctor ended up stuck in India while her husband was unable to travel there from the U.S.

 

Another doctor from India, now working in the U.S., told ProPublica: “My parents, they’re (in India) by themselves, and both of them are about 70. At some point, probably, they will catch the infection.” If that happens, the doctor plans to leave the U.S. to care for them — “and if I don’t come back, I don’t come back. At this point, I really don’t care.”

The feeling that the U.S. doesn’t value them is compounded among residents who’ve already lived through the first wave of COVID-19 and who are now facing overwork and visa uncertainty. Some said other countries are making it easier for doctors to immigrate, while the U.S. leaves them in limbo.

“We feel underappreciated for what we’re doing,” the New York City resident said. “And what else can you do, more than sacrificing your life?”

Tightly regimented residency schedules can be tricky for H1-B visa holders even in the best cases. Doctors find out in mid-March if they are “matched” with a U.S. hospital, where they’ll be expected to start at the beginning of July. DHS often takes longer than that to approve H1-B applications. Employers can pay for expedited processing to guarantee a decision within five days — but DHS shut down its expedited processing on March 22 because of COVID-19 and didn’t reopen it until June 8.

Shortly afterward, Trump issued his proclamation banning entries on many visa types, including the H1-B.

Most people coming to the U.S. for residencies arrive on a different kind of visa, the J-1, and aren’t covered by Trump’s ban, though some have had issues getting consulate appointments because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But doctors do identical work regardless of their visa types. If anything, doctors with H1-Bs are more qualified than those with J-1s, since they’re required to have completed all three phases of the taxing U.S. Medical Licensing Exam before starting residencies. Residents with H1-B visas were practicing doctors in their home countries, working alongside new medical-school grads from the U.S.

An earlier immigration ban targeting permanent immigrants, which passed in March, contained a broad medical worker exemption. When rumors of a work-visa ban started swirling in late spring, immigration lawyers and hospitals expected it would include the same language. Instead, the June proclamation mentioned only doctors working with hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

 

Every resident who spoke with ProPublica had provided evidence to the U.S. government that they met that description. Some were told by consular officers that they were probably exempt. But until they received State Department guidance, they had to place their visas in “administrative processing” — an indefinite holding pattern.

ProPublica saw an image of a form given to one visa applicant informing them of a hold. The form is typically used to request more information from the applicant. In this case, though, a consular officer had modified the form to say that processing would not begin until “implementation procedures” for the visa-ban exemption had been provided.

Doctors in limbo have formed WhatsApp groups to share information and support, but the dialogue has shown inconsistencies in the ban’s implementation. Some consulates, such as those in Serbia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, have approved doctors’ H1-B visas as exempt. Asked about the discrepancy, the State Department told ProPublica: “Applicants who believe they qualify for an exemption from Presidential Proclamation 10052 should check the website of the closest U.S. Embassy or Consulate regarding the current status of services. How appointment systems are managed can vary depending on the consular section.”

One applicant who reached out to the State Department for assistance received an email reply from an employee on July 10. The employee said that as far as they knew, the Office for Consular Affairs had given guidance to consulates and embassies to process visas that were exempt from the ban. (The agency declined to comment on that email.)

On Thursday, that applicant received a second email from the same employee. Guidance had been slow in coming, the employee admitted, but it had finally come through.

But some countries still haven’t changed their practices. One doctor stuck abroad told ProPublica they’d sent a follow-up email to the consulate on Thursday morning. “He gave me the same reply,” the doctor said, “that they are still waiting for guidance from Department of State.”

 

================================================================
 Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, as hard as it is to get people who really don’t care to do the right thing. I hope you can light soe fires at the State Department.  A shortage of doctors is never good, but at a time like now, it is unthinkable.

And it’s it’s easy to be thoughtlessly exasperated.  It happened to me just yesterday morning.  I had four calls withing a half hour from the same clinic in Pueblo (about 30-35 miles to the south).  The last one I picked up, and it was a fax tone (I can’t get faxes on the line I use for voice calls but have a separate fax number.)  I went to their website and used a contact form to tell them this, and added “I want it to stop.  Now.”  After reading Nameless’s article, I realized I could have been gentler.  Even just leaving off the “Now.” would have been better.  Please put on your Eumenides hats and help us all to think just a lttle more before we speak – or even email.  Thanks.

The Furies and I will be back.
================================================================

Share

Everyday Erinyes #223

 Posted by at 9:00 am  Politics
Jul 112020
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

This story has not been getting a lot of attention, and I can see why. It’s about one state, not a terribly populous one, and, within that state, a very small and quite specialized population, one which most people frankly don’t care about. I’ve been following liberal sites, blogs, and comments in particular to get a pretty good idea that even among liberals, maybe especially among liberals, these are not people high on our list for fighting injustice.

But exactly for that reason – this story is the point at which push comes to shove. A moment of truth. This when we find out whether we truly have compassion for every human being, or just for some human beings.

No one said it would be easy.
================================================================

Massive COVID-19 outbreak at a southern NM prison hits just one type of inmates — sex offenders. That’s by design.


By Jeff Proctor, New Mexico In Depth | June 27, 2020

As the coronavirus established a foothold in southern New Mexico’s Otero County Prison Facility in mid-May, state officials quietly moved 39 inmates out of the massive complex near the Texas border to another prison near Santa Fe.

The inmates shared something in common: None was a sex offender.

In the days before the 39 departed the massive correctional complex where New Mexico’s only sex offender treatment program is housed, officials were still transferring sex offenders from other state prisons into Otero. It was a routine practice they had yet to stop, even though more than a dozen COVID-19 cases had already emerged elsewhere in the prison.

Six weeks later, 434 inmates — or 80% — have the virus, within a prison population that’s now entirely composed of people who, at one time or another, were convicted of a state sex offense.

Three have died. Eight more lie ill at University Hospital in El Paso.

One of New Mexico’s most crowded prisons, Otero is the only state lockup with more than one COVID-19 case. And yet no prisoner from the facility has been released early under an executive order issued by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on April 6 because sex offenders are not eligible.

Prisoners from the state’s 10 other facilities have gotten out, however, documents New Mexico In Depth obtained through a public records request show.

The revelations come through more than a week of reporting by New Mexico In Depth, and confirmation from Corrections Department spokesman Eric Harrison.

The timeline of inmate transfers as the virus crept into the prison is “really concerning,” said Lalita Moskowitz, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico.

“It indicates that Corrections knew that there was likely to be an outbreak or that there was some danger or risk to people housed in that facility,” Moskowitz said. “And they made a very clear decision about who in that facility was worth saving during a pandemic, and did so earlier than they were showing any sort of concern to the public.”

State officials didn’t seek to create a sex-offender-only prison purposely by sending the 39 inmates to Santa Fe, Harrison said. Rather, they did it “for COVID reasons,” he said, adding that they had been housed in a separate area of the Otero prison, away from the sex offenders.

“It wasn’t a specific policy change or big decision to make Otero the only sex-offender-only prison,” he said. “After that first inmate tested positive, we needed space to create a quarantine unit.”

As of Thursday, there had been no discussion in the Lujan Grisham administration about revisiting the criteria in the executive order on early release, including the provision excluding sex offenders, Harrison told NMID.

That’s despite the outbreak in Otero County.

“As the state continues to battle COVID, I’m sure that will be something that comes up,” Harrison added.

In the other wing of the Otero County Prison Facility, where federal inmates are detained by agencies including the U.S. Marshals Service and the Department of Homeland Security, 275 prisoners have contracted the virus.

Most are locked up on drug-related charges, officials revealed this week.

Next door at the Otero County Processing Center, where Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detains hundreds of migrants, 146 people have tested positive for the potentially deadly virus.

It is not clear what percentage of the federal prison populations at the Otero facilities are infected because the total number of inmates locked up at the processing center and the federal wing of the prison facility are unknown. Management and Training Corp. (MTC), a private prison company, operates both prisons under contracts with the state and the feds.

Neither MTC nor federal agencies would disclose the total numbers of their detainees in either prison or processing center.

But as of Friday the state held 539 people in its half of the prison facility, when New Mexico officials reported that 434 of them had contracted the virus.

Driving the numbers

For now, grim numbers from Otero roll in each afternoon from the governor’s office, driving not just the rate of infection for incarcerated people, but the state as a whole.

June 5: 129 positive test results for inmates at the Otero County prisons. That was 39% of the state’s 331 new infections announced that day.

June 20: 37% of new virus cases announced were behind the walls near the Texas border.

June 21: 41 more incarcerated people in Otero County had the virus — 30% of the day’s new total.

Already held up in the national press as a state whose approach has saved lives and kept infections relatively low, New Mexico might look even better nationally were it not for the Otero County Processing Center and the Otero County Prison Facility.

At the end of the week 855 people locked up in the two prisons have tested positive for the potentially deadly virus since early May, officials say — nearly 8% of New Mexico’s overall total stretching back to March 11.

An experimental prison

It’s by design that Otero is home to such a large number of incarcerated sex offenders. Sidebar

New Mexico Corrections Department officials first contracted with MTC to manage a wing of the Otero County Prison Facility in 2013, under then-Gov. Susana Martinez. The plan was to create a sex-offender-only prison and offer treatment to an initial group of inmates, then constantly reevaluate.

Sex offenses, under New Mexico law, range from violent rapes to child exploitation to aggravated indecent exposure.

“There’s a sort of perception that we have in society about who’s a sex offender,” Moskowitz of the ACLU said. “Of course, there are the really serious, violent and child abuse cases. But a lot of people get labeled as a sex offender and required to register who we wouldn’t think of in that way.”

The Otero experiment has produced mixed results and reviews through the years, though corrections officials have continued to feature it as the state’s only prison where the Sex Offender Treatment Program (SOTP) is available.

Steadily, the population has grown to over 500, partly as corrections officials have identified sex offenders in other New Mexico prisons as candidates for the SOTP.

Transfers from around the state to Otero have been a regular feature for years, Harrison, the corrections spokesman, said. They slowed as the pandemic landed in New Mexico in early March, but continued after the outbreak began on the federal side of the building.

“In March, across the board, we really looked at all the facilities and said, ‘Let’s limit inter-facility transfers unless it’s really an as-need basis,” he said. “Once we got that first inmate positive on the state side … once that outbreak hit, that’s when it really came to a halt there at Otero.”

Corrections officials have maintained that there’s a bright line between the state and federal wings of the Otero prison.

“There is never a time where inmates or staff from the state and federal side will cross paths or use shared spaces,” Harrison wrote to NMID in May. “That was not practice previously, and is not practice now.”

Harrison did not say how many inmates had been transferred into Otero in the week between when cases emerged in the federal and state wings of the prison.

It is not at all clear when the COVID-19 outbreak actually began in Otero County — because MTC and the feds have remained tight-lipped about their testing regimens, and state officials did not begin scouring for the virus until at least two months after the pandemic reached New Mexico.

Since 2013, the Corrections Department has maintained a little-known, seldom-discussed 44-bed section for non-sex offenders in the prison.

It sits apart from the main area, but the two sections are laid out the same: “dormitory-style,” with cots for sleeping spaced no more than three feet apart.

State corrections and health officials on Wednesday acknowledged that the close proximity has made containing virus spread in the prison nearly impossible.

Although the 39 non-sex offenders are no longer in that area in Otero, these days the 44-bed unit is being used to quarantine inmates.

The Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Valencia County features a similar design. But there are some differences in the two prisons: Fourteen inmates have been released early from Central, which is at about 69% of its design capacity and has reported one COVID-19 case for an inmate.

Otero, where no inmates have been released early, was 83% full as of Thursday with 434 infections. (That’s also higher than the current statewide population, which is at about 80% overall capacity.)

*The person is not a sex offender’

On Wednesday during a virtual news conference, state Corrections and Health department officials addressed the Otero outbreak and acknowledged the transfer of the 39 inmates. They did not elaborate.

Harrison, however, confirmed that the 39 inmates transferred out of Otero last month had been tested before leaving, again once they arrived at the Penitentiary of Santa Fe and again after a 14-day quarantine in Santa Fe. All have tested negative.

The Penitentiary has recorded one COVID-19 case.

Another issue that did not come up at the news conference: No inmates have been released from Otero prior to the end of their sentence under Lujan Grisham’s April 6 executive order, which acknowledges that “social distancing measures” are “the most effective way to prevent the spread of COVID 19.”

The order continues: “The early release of incarcerated individuals who are near their release date and meet certain criteria will help to protect public health without a concomitant risk to public safety.”

To date, 71 of roughly 6,200 inmates have been released under the order statewide — a miniscule figure compared to other states that have sought to reduce prison populations. The low figure has drawn heavy criticism from justice system reformers and civil rights advocates.

The order is far more restrictive than what’s allowed for early release under state law, as New Mexico In Depth has reported previously.

Inmates have been released from each of the state’s other 10 prisons except Otero, the records obtained by NMID show.

Just three of those prisons — in Cibola, Santa Fe and Valencia counties — have seen coronavirus infections, with one case at each of those prisons.

Corrections officials have continued to scan their prison population for people who can be released early, as required by the executive order, Harrison said.

“Every inmate goes through the same review process, and we are conducting those reviews to identify eligible inmates on a regular basis,” he said. “We have released everyone who has been identified. Sex offenders obviously are ineligible.”

The order lists seven criteria for early release: that inmates be within 30 days of the end of their sentence; they must have a parole plan in place; and they must not be serving sentences for domestic abuse, felony DWI, assaulting a police officer or any crime with an added firearm enhancement; and that “the person is not a sex offender.”

There’s a key difference for sex offenders: Anyone who has one of those convictions on their record — even if they’re serving time now for a completely different crime — is excluded from early release under the order.

“It’s interesting to exempt an entire classification of people, not based on the sentence they’re currently serving, but based on a designation that lives with people their whole lives,” Moskowitz of the ACLU said. “It indicates all of the perceptions and ideas and stigmas are carrying into this action that the governor is taking with the idea of saving people’s health and lives.”

Harrison acknowledged that there are inmates at Otero who have past sex offenses, but are incarcerated for something else now.

“Whatever we have decided as a society to do to punish people, regardless of whether we think all of those things are justified or make sense, we as a society have not sentenced people to suffer in a disease-ridden cage,” Moskowitz said.
================================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I understand the need to handle sex offenders in ways which protect the public. I understand that sex offenders are wired differently than most other kinds of offenders. I have no problem with mandatory registration, including life long. But that does not mean that sex offenders are not human beings. It does not excuse society, including corrections facilities, from treating them as human beings. Considering the number of current active cases, it would appear that that damage has been done. It should not have been done, and it should not ever be done again.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share
 Older Entries  Newer Entries