RSN: Garrison Keillor | What Was Done for Me Back in Minnesota
05 September 22
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04 September 22
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I was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, but of course it could’ve been one of dozens of hospitals. These angelic beings in blue are a widespread tribe and you may not be aware of their existence — I was not — unless you’re in extreme need. A bedridden old man in the thrall of dark visions is in deep need. “What can we do for you?” they asked; I said, “Make me a better person.”
I tried to pee into a small plastic urinal and peed inaccurately down my left leg and a woman cleaned it up. I apologized. “Happens all the time,” she said. After a series of bowel softeners I felt movement in my innards and pressed the Call button and pushed my walker toward the toilet and got tangled up in a couple IV tubes and left a path of shit across the floor and said I was sorry to the woman in blue and she laughed and said, “That’s what we’re here for.”
What astonishes me is the motivation of men. Back in my day, women went into nursing because they were good people, men wanted to be big shots and VIPs, maybe jerks. I wanted to be a bestselling author, be admired, get extravagant reviews in the Times. I’m over it now. I write because I want to tell you about these people who meant so much to me. I took a shower with the help of two women, a naked old man sitting on a bench under warm water, being scrubbed down, the tape removed from the incision, the scar gently patted down with liquid soap — there was nothing erotic about it, not a single dirty joke flashed to mind, only astonishment at these two. Nursing is the occupation that comes closest to what Jesus told His followers to do — heal the sick, whatsoever you do for the poor you do for me. Bathing the poor, feeding them, adjusting their pillows, making small talk to reassure them of their humanity.
The men and women nurses I met were so much of a type, solid, unfailingly polite, prepared to lift or scootch or straighten a tangle of wires, ready to explain medical science to me who knows nothing. You press the button, they’re there.
America is a Protestant country and we skipped the foot-washing, love-thy-neighbor aspects of the faith, preferring preaching, a performance art that lets you despise your neighbor and thereby raise yourself up. Our politics today is tortured by its Protestantism. The Sisters of St. Mary who founded this hospital may have inherited some dreadful theology but they took a better path, they lay hands on the suffering, they soothed the fevered brow, they lifted the fallen.
I preached this to a young man as he cleaned out my IV and he was amused to be considered saintly. He grew up on a farm and got a job in a nursing home. “I knew I could be good at this. I liked playing music but I wasn’t good enough. And I wanted to bring up my family in my hometown.” Still I feel there’s a new style of manhood forming, part of the vast kindness. I owe my life to these people and I am profoundly grateful. I’m jumping up and down and pissing in my pants, doing the urinal dance.
The Department of Veterans Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C. (photo: Graeme Sloan/AP)
The VA said Friday it considers access to medically necessary abortions “essential for preserving the life and health of veterans and VA beneficiaries.”
The VA previously did not provide abortion services, but it said in a news release that it considers access to medically necessary abortions "essential for preserving the life and health of veterans and VA beneficiaries." In light of recent state-level abortion bans around the country after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, it said it will preserve access by amending its regulations and providing abortions for beneficiaries "on a case-by-case basis."
The VA will also begin providing abortion counseling. Both changes also apply to eligible dependents enrolled in the agency's CHAMPVA program.
“This is a patient safety decision,” said Denis McDonough, secretary of veterans affairs. “Pregnant Veterans and VA beneficiaries deserve to have access to world-class reproductive care when they need it most. That’s what our nation owes them, and that’s what we at VA will deliver.”
The regulatory change will be effective as soon as the Federal Register publishes the change, which the VA submitted as an interim rule Thursday night. Once it is, the VA will "immediately prepare to provide these services in as many locations as possible," the agency said in a news release.
As federal employees, VA health care providers will be able to provide authorized services regardless of state restrictions, according to the agency.
Decisions about if a pregnant person's "life or health" are endangered by a pregnancy will be made on a case-by-case basis by VA health care providers in consultation with patients. The VA will consider self-reporting of rape or incest as sufficient evidence in those cases, the agency said.
These thresholds of medical necessity are "in accordance with generally accepted standards of medical practice," said Dr. Shereef Elnahal, VA’s undersecretary for health. "We came to this decision after listening to VA health care providers and veterans across the country, who sounded the alarm that abortion restrictions are creating a medical emergency for those we serve."
The VA excluded abortion coverage when it established its medical benefits package in 1999. While the agency did not provide an explanation for the exclusion, at the time, "VA was aware that veterans of reproductive age enrolled in its health care system could access abortion services in their communities," according to background information provided with the new interim rule. After the Dobbs decision in June, that was no longer the case nationwide, prompting the agency to create exemptions to its exclusion.
Once published, the interim rule will be available for public comment for 30 days. More information will be available on the VA's reproductive health website, under “Abortion Services.”
A Russian armored vehicle parked outside the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. (photo: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
Constant artillery fire has prompted fears of a radiation disaster the International Red Cross says would cause a major humanitarian catastrophe.
The Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest, had its last remaining main external power line cut off, although a reserve line continued supplying electricity to the grid, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Saturday.
Only one of the station’s six reactors remained in operation, the agency said in a statement.
The plant, seized by Russian troops shortly after their February 24 invasion, has become a focal point of the conflict, with each side blaming the other for nearby shelling.
Ukraine and the West accuse Russia of storing heavy weapons at the site to discourage Ukraine from firing on it. Russia, which denies the presence of any such weapons there, has resisted international calls to relocate troops and demilitarise the area.
Russia’s defence ministry on Saturday accused Ukrainian forces of mounting a failed attempt to capture the plant. Turkey has offered to facilitate the situation.
Constant artillery fire prompted fears of a radiation disaster that the International Red Cross has said would cause a major humanitarian catastrophe.
Shelling continued nearby in Kherson on Sunday as Ukrainian forces attempt to retake the city occupied by Russian troops for months. Ukraine forces destroyed a recreation facility where Russian soldiers were staying, local residents said.
Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from the capital Kyiv, said Kherson is a critical city in the battle for Ukraine, highlighting that a major counteroffensive was launched last week.
“The Ukrainians feel now they have to retake Kherson and what they are trying to do is basically trap the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers there,” he said.
“On this counteroffensive, they are not storming directly into the city. They are trying to encircle the Russians slowly and methodically and cut off supply lines, and as one military analyst said, ‘pinch the Russians off’.”
Taras Berezovets, a special forces officer from the Ukraine military, said the counterattack to retake the city will likely take months as equipment and logistics are readied.
“I would characterise our offensive as smooth but effective. Our armed forces are thinking first about the lives of our servicemen and the lives of our civilians. We’re not going to go any further if there is a serious risk,” Berezovets told Al Jazeera.
“Ukrainian forces are not only going to liberate the Kherson region but all occupied territories. It doesn’t matter how long it will take. The Russian soldiers are demoralised, they don’t know what they’re doing on Ukrainian soil.”
The counteroffensive in southern Ukraine aims to degrade Russian forces and logistics, rather than immediately recapturing swathes of territory, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych told the Wall Street Journal.
The goal is the “systemic grinding of Putin’s army and that Ukrainian troops are slowly and systematically uncovering and destroying Russia’s operational logistical supply system with artillery and precision weapon strikes”, he said
‘A battlefield’
According to the daily update by the Ukrainian military, more than 24 air strikes by the Russian army were registered within 24 hours. Both military and civilian sites were hit, the report said, without giving further details.
“Due to the lack of high-precision weapons, the enemy began to use outdated S-300 anti-aircraft guided missiles more often,” it said, adding more than 500 such missiles have been fired at targets in Ukraine during the course of the war.
People living alongside the Dnieper River near the besieged nuclear plant have been spending nights in tents or in cars, scared of the intensive shelling near their homes.
Nikopol, about 10km (six miles) downstream from the Zaporizhzhia plant, has been under attack for nearly two months.
Intensified artillery attacks that were usually at night are now taking place during the day, said Maiia Chernysh, 59, a mathematics professor and resident of Nikopol while assembling a tent together with her husband.
As many others do, the couple goes back to Nikopol every morning to check on their house. They leave the city to spend the night in a safer area in the Dnipropetrovsk region, not far from their hometown.
“We left just when Nikopol became a battlefield,” said Olena Kovalova, 32. “We are afraid for our lives.”
A standoff over Russian gas and oil exports ramped up last week as Moscow vowed to keep its main gas pipeline to Germany closed and G7 countries announced a planned price cap on Russian oil exports.
The energy fight is fallout from President Vladimir Putin’s six-month invasion of Ukraine, underscoring the deep rift between Moscow and Western nations as Europe steels itself for the cold months ahead.
“Russia is preparing a decisive energy blow on all Europeans for this winter,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Saturday, citing the Nord Stream 1 pipeline’s continued closure.
Zelenskyy has blamed Russian shelling for an August 25 cutoff, the first time Zaporizhzhia was severed from the national grid, which narrowly avoided a radiation leak. That shutdown prompted power cuts across Ukraine, although emergency generators kicked in for vital cooling processes.
Moscow has cited Western sanctions and technical issues for energy disruptions, while European countries have accused Russia of weaponising supplies as part of its military invasion.
Announcing it would not make a planned restart of gas shipments through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, one of Russia’s main supply lines to Europe, state-controlled energy giant Gazprom blamed a technical fault.
Gazprom said on Saturday that Germany’s Siemens Energy was ready to help repair broken equipment but that there was nowhere available to carry out the work. Siemens said it has not been commissioned to carry out maintenance work for the pipeline but it is available.
‘War of aggression’
The indefinite delay in restarting Nord Stream 1, which runs under the Baltic Sea to supply Germany and others, deepens Europe’s problems securing fuel for winter as energy prices lead a surge in living costs.
Finance ministers from the Group of Seven wealthy democracies – Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States – said on Friday the cap on the price of Russian oil aimed to reduce “Russia’s ability to fund its war of aggression whilst limiting the impact of Russia’s war on global energy prices.”
The Kremlin said it would stop selling oil to any countries that implemented the cap.
Russia calls its invasion of its neighbour “a special military operation“. Kyiv and the West say it is an unprovoked aggressive war against a former part of the Soviet Union.
The United States and other countries have pledged military aid for Kyiv to fight an invasion that has killed thousands of people and displaced millions.
A volunteer carries bottles of water at a water distribution site as the city of Jackson, Mississippi. (photo: Carlos Barría/Reuters)
Precariousness of water system remains before services are fully restored after infrastructure failure, Chokwe Antar Lumumba says
Speaking to ABC’s This Week, Chokwe Antar Lumumba said there had been improvements, with water pressure restored to a majority of residents.
But he said the state capital was “still in an emergency – will be in an emergency even as the water is restored to every home and even as the boil water notice is lifted because that is the fragile state of our water treatment facility”.
The crisis has been blamed on decades of neglect that came to a head last month, after torrential rains and flooding of the Pearl river exacerbated problems at one of two water treatment plants, leading to a drop in pressure throughout the city. Residents were already under a boil-water order after pumps failed.
Most Jackson residents, Lumumba said, remain under boil orders, unable to consume the water.
“That makes it difficult with just the quality of life and the daily tasks that we become accustomed to,” he said.
Lumumba also warned that “safe, drinkable, reliable, sustainable and an equitable water treatment facility is a much longer road ahead” and said the precariousness of the water system remained.
“Even when we are not under a boil water notice, it’s not a matter of if these systems will fail, but when these systems will fail,” he said.
The near-collapse of the Jackson water system prompted emergency declarations from Joe Biden and the Republican governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves.
Biden said: “We have offered every single thing available in Mississippi. The governor has to act. There’s money to deal with this problem. We have given him everything there is to offer.”
The crisis has become symbolic not only of the poor state of infrastructure in many US cities but of the effects of climate change. Lumumba said colder winters, hotter summers and heavier rains were “taking a toll”.
Bubbling beneath the surface of the crisis are disputes between a Democratic city government and the Republican governor and state legislature. Lumumba has accused Reeves of ignoring Jackson’s problems. The governor has said they stem from mismanagement at city level. In April, Lumumba called the state legislature “paternalistic and racist”.
That was two months after the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said Jackson’s system violated the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. A year earlier, a fire caused all five pumps at one treatment plant to be knocked out of service. Higher than acceptable lead levels have been found in Jackson’s water.
On Sunday, Lumumba said he was less focused on the causes of the crisis “and more focused on the immediate and near-term of resolving this challenge”.
“I don’t think that it profits me or the residents of Jackson for me to take jabs” at Reeves or the legislature, he said.
Residents rued the failure to address Jackson’s problems. In an interview with the Associated Press, one restaurant owner said he would opened in the Farish Street Historic District hoping to help usher in renewed prosperity. But business had dried up.
“The numbers are very low for lunch,” John Tierre said. Customers, he said, were “probably taking their business to the outskirts where they don’t have water woes”.
Bobbie Fairley, who owns Magic Hands Hair Design, said she lost appointments because she needs high water pressure to rinse clients’ hair.
“That’s a big burden,” she said. “I can’t afford that. I can’t afford that at all.”
Others pointed to a pattern of adversity stemming from natural disasters and policy decisions that led to the long-term flight of wealthier white residents.
“It’s punishment for Jackson because it was open to the idea that people should be able to attend public schools and that people should have access to public areas without abuse,” Maati Jone Primm, owner of Marshall’s Music and Bookstore, told the AP. “As a result of that, we have people who ran away to the suburbs. For decades this is a been a malignant attack, not benign.”
The water crisis has exacerbated tensions. Last week, it was claimed on social media that a water tanker outside the governor’s mansion was there to supply Reeves. The tanker was actually for the headquarters of Trustmark Bank. A spokesperson said it did not contain drinking water but was back up for sanitary needs.
On Sunday, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), Deanne Criswell, side-stepped political questions, saying her focus was on distributing bottled water and helping increase water pressure, so Jackson residents could at least flush toilets and use faucets.
“The longer-term and the midterm are about how long it’s going to take to actually make [the water] safe to drink,” Criswell told CNN’s State of the Union. “I think that we have a lot more to learn about what it’s going to take to get that plant up and running.”
Criswell said it would take time for Fema to understand the extent of the problem before they it could estimate how long it would take to fix.
“Everybody is focused on the right thing right now, and they’re focused on making sure that we are addressing the immediate needs and putting a plan in place for the long-term needs,” she said.
Criswell acknowledged that Jackson is one example of a larger crisis.
“We have a lot of issues with our infrastructure around the nation,” she said.
Catholic health care systems can limit access to birth control. (photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
It turned out the college had outsourced its student health services to a Catholic health agency – and like other Catholic health institutions, it follows religious directives that prohibit contraception to prevent pregnancy. They also prohibit gender-affirming care.
"I would characterize the student's reaction as outrage," says Remsen Welsh, a fourth-year Oberlin student and co-director of the student-run Sexual Information Center on campus. "A lot of people in my circles were sending [the news story] around like, what is happening?"
Although the college quickly came up with a new plan to offer reproductive health services to students on campus, the incident at Oberlin shows the wide reach of Catholic health care in the U.S., and how the rules these institutions follow can limit access to contraception.
Now that many states – including Ohio – have adopted restrictions or outright bans on abortion, that's also raised the stakes for contraception access.
Religious restrictions affect many health care settings
Issued by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the Ethical and Religious Directives that guide Catholic health care systems "prohibit a broad swath of reproductive care," including birth control pills, IUDs, tubal ligation and vasectomies, says Dr. Debra Stulberg, a professor of family medicine at the University of Chicago who has researched how these directives play out in health care.
Catholic hospitals have long been a mainstay of health care in America. And these days, the directives apply to a wide range of settings where people seek reproductive health care – including urgent care centers, doctors' offices and outpatient surgery centers that have been bought by or merged with Catholic health systems.
They can also apply when Catholic health agencies are hired to manage health care services for other institutions, which is what happened at Oberlin.
Four of the 10 largest health care systems in the country are Catholic, according to a 2020 report. In some counties, they dominate the market. In 52 communities, the report found, a Catholic hospital is the only one around within a 45-minute drive.
"After all this consolidation, this is where it shakes out, where we've got about 40% of reproductive age women living in areas with high or dominant Catholic hospital market share," says Marian Jarlenski, a health policy researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, who examined the data in 2020.
'Not transparent at all'
Patients often aren't aware that these restrictions might affect the care they get, says Lois Uttley, a senior advisor with the health advocacy group Community Catalyst. They may not realize their hospital or doctor's office has Catholic ties. For instance, Common Spirit Health, one of the nation's biggest health systems, is Catholic, but you wouldn't know it from its name. And Uttley says Catholic health institutions typically don't publicize these policies.
"They are not open and transparent about it at all," Uttley says. "We think it's only fair that a patient be warned ahead of time about what she may or may not be able to get at a local doctor's office or urgent care center or hospital."
In a campus bulletin posted on Tuesday, Oberlin's president, Carmen Twillie Ambar, said Oberlin had only recently learned that these restrictions would be enforced by Bon Secours, the large Catholic health system whose subsidiary was hired to run the college's health services. Bon Secours told the local Chronicle-Telegram that it would only offer birth control prescriptions for medical reasons – an exception allowed under the religious directives.
When workarounds are all you've got
In practice, many doctors who work for Catholic-owned or affiliated health providers routinely rely on "medical condition" exceptions as a way to get around religious restrictions on contraception, Stulberg's research has found.
For example, hormonal IUDs can be used to control heavy menstrual bleedings, so doctors will often say they're providing the IUD to treat this condition, even if the real goal is contraception.
Or doctors who aren't allowed to perform a tubal ligation might instead remove the tubes altogether — they'll just say it's to lower a patient's risk of ovarian cancer. Dr. Corinne McLeod, an OB/GYN at Albany Medical Center, says these kinds of workarounds were pretty common when she worked at a Catholic hospital in Albany, N.Y.
"That was basically a wink, wink, nudge, nudge," McLeod says, adding, "Everybody knew what was happening. That was just the way they got around [restrictions]." One problem with relying on such loopholes, she says, is that if religious higher-ups at institutions get wind of it, they might crack down.
In other cases, workarounds might include creating a separately funded and run wing within a Catholic hospital or health clinic to provide the full range of reproductive health services.
That's essentially what happened at Oberlin: The college partnered with a local family planning clinic to offer these services on campus three days a week, and said it would provide students with transportation to the clinic on other days. But the Catholic health provider will continue to offer other health services on campus.
Tiffany Yuen, a fourth-year Oberlin student who runs the Sexual Information Center with Welsh, said the solution was "a start. But it's not enough." In the past, about 40% of visits to the student health center were related to sexual health, according to Aimee Holmes, a certified nurse midwife who worked as a women's health specialist at Oberlin for many years until Bon Secours' subsidiary took over.
'In some cases, women truly have no other choices'
Research suggests that even with workarounds, Catholic directives can limit women's contraception choices. For example, one study found that while it was pretty easy for patients to book an appointment for hormonal birth control at clinics owned by Catholic hospitals, it was rarer to get one if you wanted a copper IUD, which is one of the most effective forms of long-acting reversible contraception.
I personally ran into these limitations eight years ago, when I gave birth to my second child. When I asked my doctor for a tubal ligation once I was on the delivery table, he informed me he couldn't do the procedure because we were at a Catholic hospital. A recent study suggests this experience is common: It found that women who deliver at a Catholic hospital are half as likely to get tubal ligation or removal as those who deliver at another type of hospital.
Stulberg has conducted surveys that find many people don't realize their choices will be limited because they don't know their health provider is governed by these rules. "And of the people that had some kind of a reproductive health refusal, the majority, it wasn't until either they were there or afterwards that they found out that they couldn't get what they wanted," she says.
In some cases, patients may simply be able to go to another health provider to get the contraception they need – but not always. "In some cases, women truly have no other choices," Stulberg says. "This hospital or this system is the only provider in town."
She says a patient's options may also be constrained depending on their health insurance and whether the providers covered under the plan are subject to religious directives.
Several experts said that these restrictions can often impact low-income patients disproportionately. Dr. Karishma Dara, a family medicine doctor in Seattle, says that when she worked as a resident at a Catholic hospital in Washington, D.C., that served many low-income people, patients who came in for IUD appointments were told they had to go to a different, non-Catholic clinic to get the devices inserted.
"Any time that you have to add another step to getting care or contraceptive care, it's like another point at which an unintended pregnancy can happen," Dara says.
In fact, Catholic directives can limit access to contraception long after a health care facility stops being Catholic, says Elizabeth Sepper, an expert on religious liberty and health law at the University of Texas at Austin. "There are lots of examples where a Catholic health system has purchased a hospital, just held it for a handful of years and then sold the hospital," she says. "But the purchase agreement then commits the next owner to continue the Catholic religious restrictions."
Reproductive rights advocates want to see laws that require hospital systems to be more transparent about what health services they do and don't offer. Legislators in New York have introduced such a law.
"You know, I'm not against Catholic health care, but I think that patients need to know what kind of services are available to them," says Jarlenski.
Cloudflare headquarters in San Francisco. (Michael Short/Bloomberg)
Company’s CEO says the firm had detected imminent threats and that law enforcement could not keep up with them
Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince, who this past week published a lengthy blog post justifying the company’s services defending websites such as Kiwi Farms, told The Washington Post he changed his mind not because of the pressure but a surge in credible violent threats stemming from the site.
“As Kiwi Farms has felt more threatened, they have reacted by being more threatening,” Prince said. “We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up.”
Prince said contributors to the forum were posting home addresses of those seen as enemies and calling for them to be shot.
After Cloudflare’s move, visitors to Kiwi Farms were greeted by this message: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.”
In a post on Telegram, Kiwi Farm’s founder, Josh Moon, said Cloudflare made its decision “without any discussion” and said he had not been contacted by law enforcement about threats on the site. “It’s early morning hours here,” the post said. “My thoughts will be articulated better in the morning.”
Kiwi Farms launched in 2013 and quickly grew into a popular internet forum for online harassment campaigns. At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum consider their goal to drive their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets.
Cloudflare has faced broad backlash in the past week as a campaign for it to drop the service gained steam and widened to pressure paying customers to drop Cloudflare if it held firm. The company says it provides some services, mostly for free, that protect nearly a fifth of all internet traffic.
On Aug. 24, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called for Kiwi Farms to be taken down after she was swatted by a person claiming to be affiliated with the site. “Isn’t it concerning that such a website exists?” Greene said in an interview with Newsmax. “That website needs to be taken down. There should be no business or any kind of service where you can target your enemy."
It was around then that the company stopped selling Kiwi Farms a $20 per month service to customize error messages shown to web users when its pages wouldn’t load. On Saturday, it withdrew the remaining free services, which fend off denial-of-service attacks and speed content delivery by making copies of the site in many locations.
Clara Sorrenti, a trans Canadian Twitch streamer known online as Keffals, launched the #DropKiwiFarms campaign after being targeted by Kiwi Farms posters for over half a year.
Forum users had repeatedly doxed Sorrenti and her family, posting addresses and more, and last month they called in false crime reports to draw police to her home in “swatting” attacks. Sorrenti fled to Northern Ireland late last month, and within 48 hours users of the forum had pinpointed her location and she began receiving threats.
On Saturday, she spoke with The Post just minutes after police had arrived at her residence after another swatting attempt.
“There are countless people suffering because of this website,” Sorrenti said. “Kiwi Farms isn’t about free speech, it’s about hate speech. The majority of the content on the site is threads used for targeted harassment against political targets.”
Sorrenti’s campaign against Cloudflare went viral in the past several days, with organizations and influencers joining in the call to ban Kiwi Farms from Cloudflare’s service. The Anti-Defamation League called Kiwi Farms an “extremist-friendly forum that has been the breeding ground for countless harassment campaigns.”
In the interview, Prince said he was uncomfortable dropping Kiwi Farms despite its content and would have preferred to have done so only in response to a court order.
But he said it was an easier call than his previous decisions to drop neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer and the 8chan website because those two were not hotbeds for specific violent plots.
In a post Wednesday, Prince and another executive had written that they saw providing basic security and caching services as infrastructure, like internet connectivity, and should not be held responsible for content without judicial proceedings. They contrasted that with website hosting, which they said should have increased responsibility and discretion.
Prince said Saturday he stands by that reasoning, and he wrote in a new post that dropping Kiwi Farms was a “dangerous” decision. He added in the interview that it might provoke forum users to escalate even more, and that the forum would likely reappear online with help from Cloudflare competitors.
“This may largely kick the problem down the road and worse, might even escalate as the posters at Kiwi Farms feel attacked,” Prince told The Post.
Some technology experts supported Cloudflare’s resistance to acting. Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, cited recent arm-twisting at Facebook by the current government of India over content from political opponents.
“The question is, which parts of the technical `stack’ of the internet are supposed to be neutral, which ones are supposed to moderate content, and is there some intermediate set of obligations that should apply to the middle layers?” Keller told The Post.
But a large swath of technologists disagreed with the previous stance. On Friday, Stanford University’s Alex Stamos wrote on Twitter that the position to keep serving Kiwi Farms was “not tenable.”
“Soon a doctor, activist or trans person is going to get doxxed and killed or a mass shooter is going to be inspired there. The investigation will show the killer’s links to the site, and Cloudflare’s enterprise base will evaporate,” Stamos wrote.
Prince said in the interview he couldn’t provide the number of new threats he had seen on Kiwi Farms, but he said they had escalated rapidly alongside the criticism of the forum. He said the company had shared specifics with the FBI and law enforcement in the United Kingdom and Australia, but that none of those agencies had asked him, even informally, to drop Kiwi Farms.
Broader concerns about violent organizing online have been climbing for years, accelerating after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Law enforcement and intelligence warnings have also pointed to potential violence around the November elections, or even sooner, as former president Donald Trump has compared the FBI and other institutions to organized crime.
Incitement by others online over gender issues has inspired recent threats against children’s hospitals.
Moon, Kiwi Farm founder, is a former administrator of 8chan, a forum popularized by followers of the QAnon extremist ideology. After hosting a video of the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019 that killed 51, New Zealand internet service providers blocked Kiwi Farms after Moon denied a police request for information on posts related to the shooting.
Last July, Kiwi Farms was booted from its domain registrar, DreamHost, following the suicide of a software developer called Near, who was a longtime target of the site’s user base.
“Like many trans people coming out as having been targeted by this site, I too was targeted by Kiwifarms,” Erin Reed, a trans activist and content creator, tweeted on Saturday. “They showed up at my local courthouse to grab my divorce files. They posted Google images of my house. They try to scare trans people into silence.”
But Chelsea Manning, a trans activist, offered a more nuanced opinion. “I don’t think long term the solution to this kind of dangerous speech is to ask hosting providers to have to take these things down," she told The Post. "We need a more balanced and measured long-term approach.”
The sun rises over Mt. Shasta and homes destroyed by the Mill Fire on Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022, in Weed, Calif. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
Their fears exploded to life again in recent days as California’s latest inferno burned homes and buildings and forced evacuations in the small community about 280 miles (451 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco.
Among the thousands of people displaced was Naomi Vogelsang. Her home destroyed, dog missing, and 10-year relationship with her boyfriend recently ended – all she could do on Saturday was sit outside a wildfire evacuation center with $20 in her pocket, waiting for a ride to the casino.
“It can’t be any worse,” she said.
The day before, flames raced from Roseburg Forest Products, which makes wood products, into Weed's Lincoln Heights neighborhood where a significant number of homes burned and residents had to flee for their lives. The blaze known as the Mill Fire had spread to more than 6.6 square miles (17 square kilometers) by Saturday evening and was 25% contained.
After fleeing the fire, 63-year-old Judy Christenson remembered a similar escape 40 years ago when, as a young parent, she had to rush her children out of a burning home. Last summer, a wildfire forced her to evacuate and leave her pets behind. Now, Christenson says she leaves harnesses on her pets all the time so she can grab them at a moment’s notice and leave.
“Whenever this happens, I get really bad,” Christenson said from the front seat of a car at an evacuation center in Yreka as Felix, her orange cat, napped in the backseat. “I can’t think straight.”
Nestled in the shadow of Mt. Shasta — a 14,000-foot (4,267-meter) volcano that is the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range — Weed is no stranger to wildfires.
Strong winds in the area that fan flames drew the town's founder for a very different reason. Abner Weed, a Civil War soldier who is said to have witnessed the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender before moving to California, chose to put a sawmill there because the wind would dry out the timber, according to Bob West, a lifelong resident who co-owns Ellie’s Espresso and Bakery, a coffee and sandwich shop that contains some historical items of the town’s past.
The winds make Weed and the surrounding area a perilous place for wildfires, whipping small flames into a frenzy. Weed has seen three major fires since 2014, a period of extreme drought that has prompted the largest and most destructive fires in California history.
That drought persists as California heads into what traditionally is the worst of the fire season. Scientists say climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.
Dominique Mathes, 37, said he’s had some close calls with wildfires since he has lived in Weed. But he’s not interested in leaving.
“It’s a beautiful place,” he said. “Everybody has risks everywhere, like Florida’s got hurricanes and floods, Louisiana has got tornadoes and all that stuff. So, it happens everywhere. Unfortunately here, it’s fires.”
Evacuation orders were quickly put in effect Friday for 7,500 people – including West, who is 53 and has lived in Weed since he was a 1-year-old. He had never had to evacuate for a fire, but now he’s had to do it twice.
“It’s way worse than it used to be,” he said. “It affects our community because people leave because they don’t want to rebuild.”
Cal Fire Siskiyou Unit Chief Phil Anzo said crews worked all day and night to protect structures in Weed and in a subdivision to the east known as Carrick Addition. He said about 100 structures were destroyed.
Two people were brought to Mercy Medical Center Mount Shasta. One was in stable condition and the other was transferred to UC Davis Medical Center, which has a burn unit.
“There’s a lot at stake on that Mill Fire,” Anzo said. “There’s a lot of communities, a lot of homes there.”
Evacuees and firefighters quickly filled up local hotels while others rushed to stay with family and friends outside of the evacuation zone.
Vogelsang was not as fortunate. She said she slept on a bench in Weed until she could get a ride to the evacuation center. She said she’s spent most of the time crying about Bella, her 10-year-old English bulldog who — despite her best efforts — would not follow her out of the fire and is lost.
“My dog was my everything,” she said. “I just feel like I lost everything that mattered.”
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