Multiple news outlets are reporting the US Regime’s rush to setup and expand concentration camps, based on a hurried policy of enacting forced mass detention to scare people from coming to the US, has killed a girl through a painfully slow and tortured process that started with inadequate health care.

VICE

One week after arriving at Dilley, Mariee developed a cough, congestion, and a fever of over 104 degrees. During the next two weeks of her confinement, Yazmin felt powerless as her daughter got sicker, rebounded, and got sick again, battling a virus that started with a common cold.

[…]

But Mariee did ultimately die from an infection that was first detected at Dilley, which has a history of complaints of inadequate medical care for children. In July, two doctors contracted by the Department of Homeland Security released a review of care in facilities including Dilley over the last four years. The doctors found a host of problems and called the practice of family detention “an exploitation and an assault on the dignity and health of children and families.”

[…]

The administration is planning to expand its capacity to hold migrant families by constructing more facilities like Dilley. In June, ICE requested space to hold 15,000 more people in family detention, cementing the policy into the future.

…medical experts and advocates have long stressed that conditions in ICE facilities can be risky for sick children. Detention puts children at higher risk of contracting disease, and crowded, stressful conditions make it harder to recover.

“Those stresses are real; they affect the child’s abilities to fight an infection and illness and win,” said Brian Blaisch, a pediatrician in Oakland, California, who has experience working in immigrant detention centers.

AZ Central:

…medical staff at the Texas detention center failed to provide Mariee Juarez with adequate medical care after the healthy girl became sick inside the facility. As a result, the girl died after a treatable respiratory infection turned into pneumonia, according to the legal notice.

Mariee Juarez died on May 10, after “six agonizing weeks in hospitalization and extensive medical interventions,” the legal claim says.

NPR:

When Juárez raised concerns about her daughter’s deteriorating condition, [law firm] alleges, she wasn’t taken seriously. “The medical care that Mariee received in Dilley was neglectful and substandard”…

KRISTV:

At the detention facility, Mariee became sick with a severe respiratory infection that went “woefully under-treated for nearly a month,” according to the law firm. Juárez continually sought attention from medical staff but she was prescribed medications that did not improve the child’s condition and Mariee continued to get worse…

ABC

Mariee’s symptoms worsened over the coming days and Yazmin Juarez “sought medical attention for Mariee multiple times but was often left waiting for many hours, including at least two instances where she was turned away and told to wait for an appointment on a later day,” according to the claim.

By March 15, Mariee had lost 2 pounds — nearly 8 percent of her body weight — and her symptoms were worse, according to the claim. Mariee was examined at the detention facility’s clinic several more times as her symptoms worsened. Her fever remained high and she was unable to keep down medication or food, according to the claim.

[…]

Mariee died on May 10 after experiencing a catastrophic hemorrhage and “irreversible brain and organ damage with no hope of survival,” the claim states; her cause of death was bronchiectasis, pulmonitis, and a collapsed lung.

Time

The statement also included comments from Dr. Benard Dreyer, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician at New York University Langone Health, who reviewed Mariee’s medical records from her time at Dilley. He said it was clear ICE medical staff failed to meet the “basic standard of care” and that the medical staff engaged in “troubling practices,” including the use of unsupervised non-physicians to provide pediatric care over a long period of time.

“If signs of persistent and severe illness are present in a young child, the standard of care is to seek emergency care,” Dreyer said. “ICE staff did not seek emergency care for Mariee, nor did they arrange for intravenous antibiotics when Mariee was unable to keep oral antibiotics down. These are just a few of the alarming examples of how ICE medical staff failed to provide proper medical treatment to this little girl.”

All of this comes after US federal courts already clarified in 2014 “under the Flores settlement, families couldn’t be kept in detention for longer than 20 days”.

While I know this is a sad and tragic story, full stop, there also is an important broader national security subtext here. Being unprepared is the exact opposite of what the US needs to be doing with communicable diseases. And this story emphasizes that the camp conditions themselves dramatically increase likelihood of spreading disease not only because proximity, also because stress and anxiety factors lowering immunity.

The latest research is showing that the girl died because the concentration camp experience itself lowered her ability to survive disease present in the camp.

If the border is meant to process humans safely to enter, or even turn them around to leave for that matter, it has to maintain levels of preparedness to eliminate disease spreading.

Even if the defense in this lawsuit trots out an army of doctors to say they would have done nothing different and ignored symptoms until too late, this actually would demonstrate the US is unprepared and basic humanity of disease control is not being taken seriously. It reminds me of when huge companies went offline from NotPetya because they hadn’t cared enough to help patch/remedy one little machine inside huge global networks.

A new documentary has been released called “Bisbee ’17” about American life under President Wilson after his successful 1916 “America First” campaign. NPR gives us the synopsis of the Bisbee Deportation story:

The event itself has become known as the Bisbee Deportation. On July 12, 1917, roughly 1,200 copper miners, who’d been striking for better wages and safer working conditions, were rounded up at gunpoint, some by their own relatives, and sent via cattle car to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to die.

[…]

People to this day in the town believe that the deportation was correct and right. And they sympathize with the people who carried it out, particularly people who are descendants of people who had a hand in it.

[…]

When you go through that list of deputies, you see that there is one Slavic name. Everybody else is an Anglo-Saxon. So my conclusion – after all of this research, the deportation was not a response to a labor action. It was that to a limited extent, but it was also in the nature of an ethnic cleansing.

What the documentary, and NPR for that matter, do not reveal is why ethnic cleansing would be so topical in 1916. In short, Woodrow Wilson effectively restarted the KKK in 1915 after it had all but disappeared, and Bisbee is a reflection of that sentiment.

What caused the KKK decline and why did Wilson bring it back?

I will try to briefly explain. It starts with President Grant signing into law the creation of a Department of Justice (DoJ) in order to aid in the prosecution of white supremacists, since they were refusing after the Civil War to accept blacks as citizens. Grant wanted to use non-military measures to protect 13, 14 and 15 Amendments to the Constitution from domestic terror threats.

The DoJ itself buries these civil rights foundations of its origin in this rather bland retelling on their official website:

By 1870, after the end of the Civil War, the increase in the amount of litigation involving the United States had required the very expensive retention of a large number of private attorneys to handle the workload. A concerned Congress passed the Act to Establish the Department of Justice (ch. 150, 16 Stat. 162), creating “an executive department of the government of the United States” with the Attorney General as its head.

That “increase in the amount of litigation involving the United States” means white supremacists.

In other words, Grant greatly expanded the Attorney General role from Judiciary Act origins of 1789, basically a one-man advisory concept, to a systematic government arm to protect the Union against domestic threats. This new much broader departmental remit with branches was resourced to fight white supremacists nationally. President Grant basically pushed out a peace-time organization specifically to fight pro-slavery militants who continued to refuse to lay down their arms after he had forced their official surrender in war. This is what caused the KKK to decline.

Why was General Grant, now President Grant, faced with this problem?

Sadly in 1866 just a year after Lincoln’s assassination, President “this is a country for white men” Johnson was repeatedly trying to block blacks getting rights. Despite Johnson’s efforts the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1866 abolishing slavery, which pro-slavery militants considered an assault on their “economic freedom” to be a white supremacist:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction

The failure of Johnson to block civil rights legislation angered violent white supremacist militants and they rebelled again to prevent peace. Despite decisively losing the Civil War to General Grant, pro-slavery militants after the assassination of President Lincoln created the KKK under President Johnson to use veil of night and disguise to continue terror campaigns against Americans abolishing slavery. Within two years by 1868 the KKK was running numerous violent terror campaigns to prevent reconciliation, murder blacks and sabotage Thirteenth Amendment labor rights.

This is why President “Let Us Have Peace” Grant’s election in 1868, and his creation of the first real DoJ in America in July of 1870, were seminal moments in the fight against white supremacists. The candidate Grant ran against had a campaign slogan, like President Johnson’s reputation, of “This is a White Man’s Country. Let White Men Rule.”

Grant had won the war, now he won the Presidency and was about to take down the same people for the same reasons, this time with non-violent means. A month after DoJ was created, August of 1870, a Federal Grand Jury declared the KKK a terrorist organisation. President Grant then further established remedies for these domestic terrorists in 1871 by signing an Enforcement Act, which made it illegal for private conspiracies (e.g. KKK) to deny civil rights of others. He pursued in peace the same anti-American forces he already had decisively beaten in war, and again he brilliantly led the country away from its violently racist detractors.

Here’s testimony from an emancipated slave, who explains how the KKK immediately after Civil War ended began their domestic terror tactics like placing hidden traps on roads and killing American soldiers.

While it is tempting to frame the sad white supremacist chapters of American history entirely in terms of Civil War and enslavement of blacks, we can not overlook the broader picture of the late 1800s and how the KKK was a symptom of racism and wrongs more broadly found in American history:

• 1871 hundreds of armed whites entered “Negro Alley” to murder Los Angeles’ Chinese residents
• 1885 white supremacist “Knights of Labor” group fomented a Rock Springs massacre that left dozens of Chinese miners dead
• 1887 white “schoolboys” tortured and murdered thirty-four Chinese miners in Oregon
• 1897 Lattimer massacre saw Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German miners shot in the back and killed; the sheriff decided to end labor protests by murdering protesters

Grant’s focus on enforcing civil rights was meant as an end to slave labor that the white supremacists fought so hard to preserve. The story of white supremacists in American using terror tactics really has a broader topic of wage disputes and labor rights with non-whites. But the reason the KKK in particular is significant to the Bisbee story is Grant’s strong leadership meant the KKK made less of a name for itself over the subsequent decades until things changed in 1915.

That is when “the 20th Century KKK” was initiated, infamously associated with President Wilson’s screening of a white supremacist propaganda and isolationist views of the world/immigration. It is the timing of a second KKK that should be noted as backdrop to this movie.

While the original KKK formation under President Johnson had used domestic terror to undermine the Thirteenth Amendment and deny freed slaves their civil rights, this recast formation was a “labor-oriented” terror organization targeting immigrants and their religions, which is how the “America First” campaign of President Wilson brought back the KKK that President Grant had ended.

The Bisbee story thus is a clear reflection of the KKK second rise, a “reaction” to civil rights being granted to non-whites such as Irish, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, Catholics…. All of these groups were targeted under the guise of “labor-oriented” action by the KKK during President Wilson’s administration, just as blacks had been murdered by the KKK under President Johnson’s administration.

My presentation on machine learning security at the 2018 6th Annual Global Big Data Conference:

When: Wednesday, August 29, 15:30 – 16:15
Where: Santa Clara Convention Center
Event Link: Hidden Hot Battle Lessons Of Cold War: All Learning Models Have Flaws, Some Have Casualties

In a pursuit of realistic expectations for learning models can we better prepare for adversarial environments by examining failures in the field?

All models have flaws, given any usual menu of problems with learning; it is the rapidly increasing risk of a catastrophic-level failure that is making data /robustness/ a far more immediate concern.

This talk pulls forward surprising and obscured learning errors during the Cold War to give context to modern machine learning successes and how things quickly may fall apart in evolving domains with cyber conflict.

Copy of Presentation Slides: 2018-GBDC.daviottenheimer.pdf (4.4 MB)