“If I don’t act fast enough to save your life, prevent you from getting septic, I could be liable for civil cases … malpractice. But if I act too quickly and I’m not 100% certain that the patient is going to die from the complication she’s sustaining, then I could be guilty of a felony.”

… [Idaho] allows certain family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000 if the procedure breaks the abortion law.

Doctors in those cases also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges and even prison time.

Beyond that, Idaho’s governor also signed a law that says anyone helping a minor travel out of state to terminate a pregnancy – without parental consent – is guilty of a crime.

… [F]ive of the nine remaining full-time maternal-fetal medicine physicians in the state will have left by the end of this year.

… Jim Souza, the chief physician executive at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Boise, told CNN: “We’re at the beginning of the collapse of an entire system of care.”

… And because there are no ob-gyn residencies in Idaho, finding doctors willing to relocate given the abortion laws on the books is a real challenge.

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But God never closes a door without opening a window! Idaho will soon be America’s ground zero for diploma mill grads! Recent graduates of the Lake Natron School of Medicine will flock to the state, where desperate hospitals will snap them up. And all will be well.

 It’s happening in all the let ’em die states:

[W]omen’s health specialists from states where abortion is criminalized are beginning to relocate to places like Washington state, which has strong abortion rights laws.

 “[W]e are legally unable now,” explains an exiting Idaho doc, “to prevent harm to patients.”

Another: “This isn’t a safe place to practice medicine anymore.”

Not safe. Which has UD thinking along the following lines: With the removal of virtually all gun laws in some of these same states, we begin to see emerging what I guess these states have always wanted: The return of frontier life. Ain’t got no docs out here. Don’t need no docs. You’re on your own.

These same states tend to be, you know, also our big anti-vax states, our big anti-science states (schools should teach creationism, not evolution), our big anti-gay and (Idaho certainly!) our big anti-Jew/anti-black states, our big secession states… Obviously these attitudes aren’t out there everywhere in all of these places, but you can just see many maternal-death-before-abortion legislatures determined to rid their states of anything at all, say, associated with the Enlightenment.

It’s really queer, if I can transfer that term from gay provenance to, uh, the provinces. Radically queer.

One of the country’s safest locations suffers a mysterious bloody mass killing of four college students in their shared off campus house. Quite a few days later, with the community so afraid that many students are fleeing the school, the local police have still released extremely little information. What we do now know (assuming the information they’ve allowed out is correct) is hard to make sense of.

We are told that in the wee hours of the morning, with two other students asleep (?) in the house through the entire insanely violent attack, four students were knifed to death with an enormous “Rambo-style” knife. Only hours later the next day did someone call 911. Huh?

On the face of it, this is nuts. How can we possibly make sense of it? How can the surviving students not have awakened; how can they have waited hours (assuming they made the 911 call) to report the massacre? Did the killer tell them he’d come back and kill them too if they told anyone anything?

Okay, let’s assume sheer paralyzing terror plus drunk out of their minds? I mean, I’m digging deep here to find a mental condition that would allow them to be passed out through the thing, or motionless for a long time (who knows when the attacker(s) left?) in an attempt to save themselves. Could their paralytic terror have lasted into the next afternoon? No use of their cell phones? Why did neither of them, assuming a window anywhere near, hurl themself out of a window and run?

The killings were “targeted,” we’re told; which stands to reason. This sort of homicide is, as they say, personal. Robbery makes zero sense. At the same time, the word “grudge” seems absurdly inadequate.

Let’s say the killer wanted to kill only one of the four, but the others tried to defend him/her. Okay.

But then the question is how did one person with a knife (was there more than one?) overpower and destroy three other able bodied people? You would expect one or two to escape, screaming their lungs out and alerting the neighborhood. If the killer controlled the students by tying them up, why aren’t we being told they were tied up? UD understands that police withhold information for perfectly good reasons during the course of an investigation, but this seems strange nonetheless.

One way to go is to imagine that one or both of the surviving students did all this. They controlled the situation by quietly, methodically moving from room to room, taking on one student (or maybe two) at a time. But we know from the coroner’s report (she’s being very uncommunicative, but I think this is confirmed information) that bruises indicate one of the students fought like hell.

Since this sounds rather unpremeditated (rather, because the killer might have planned it for a very short time – let’s say hours), and viciously impassioned, I’m going to assume an abundance of forensic material. The killer, for instance, must also have bled somewhat, and must have (have had; he’s had plenty of time to shower) blood all over himself, bloody clothes, etc. Blood spatter must also be on walls and other surfaces. If there were sexual assaults, that might be another source of leads.

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Here’s one possibility.

All of the murdered students spent the night on the town – parties, bars, other social spots. During the course of this activity, one or two of the four got into a drunken nasty encounter with some random but dangerous/crazy other drunk person. Did some guy hit on a girlfriend and did that provoke one of the Idaho students? Something like that.

Let’s say the guy’s a member of one of Idaho’s many biker gangs. No sissy university student’s gonna humiliate him in front of his friends, he thinks, fingering the Rambo 9410 in his pocket… He follows them home and waits outside until they’re asleep.

UVa remains sheltered in place; a football recruit killed three and injured two. UD will go ahead and guess that this was some sort of weekend party/drunken fight that got crazy, but it’s of course too soon to know much.

[Update: The shooting took place in an on-campus parking garage, so the motive might have been a dispute between drivers. Road rage…?]

The Idaho details suggest the shooter (if this was about shooting; it certainly sounds like it, though a different weapon might have been used) is dead at the scene. (The Virginia killer is at large and since he’s heavily armed, with his photo in every paper, and everyone in the world is looking for him, UD’s gonna guess he’ll kill himself.) This one sounds more personal – a nutty vindictive ex-lover? – but we’ll see. Someone reported seeing an unconscious person and called the police, which maybe means at least one of the bodies was outside the off-campus house. Trying to flee? Or the body of the killer?

Both events could be as simple as someone turned away from a party, pissed about it, and returning with one of his big ol’ guns.

My blog post title comes from NPR‘s coverage. It’s America, so we have to bundle these stories.

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UPDATE: He killed this UVa football player.

UPDATE: He also killed Lavel Davis, Jr., another player.

UPDATE: The third person killed, Devin Chandler, was also a football player.

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Virginia shooter is in custody. Could his motive have been resentment? He’s apparently never been an active player; he killed three active players.

Sounds as though some sort of fight broke out, or words were exchanged, on a bus returning to campus from a class field trip to DC to see a play.

Timed to coincide with the president’s American Fascists speech, gun-toting cultists just showed up en masse at an Idaho public library demanding hundreds of books be removed or they’ll blow everyone’s brains out In Jesus’ Name Amen. The head of the library has already quit and run away, not wanting her brains blown out. “They start showing up at your house with guns on their hips and Bible tracts in their hands.”

Take a gander. And she’s the lieutenant governor.

Now what worries me about Janice is not that she’s ’bout as close to a card-carrying fascist as I reckon you can get. You get to be what you want to be in this country. Go for it, babe.

UD‘s concerned about driver safety out there. What is the lieutenant governor modeling in this picture? She’s got a huge
American flag obscuring one of her van windows. Looks like she’s doing hands-free driving, what with her right hand holding a gun and her left holding a Bible.

Is she wearing a seat belt? I’m gonna bet Janice considers seat belts, like masks during a pandemic, or the concept of protected federal land, an abomination straight outta hell. So YEEHAH here’s Janice bombin down I 86 to Pocatello juggling guns, Bibles, and flags and lord knows what else (Confederate flag, blood drop cross, apple pie…), and I’m thinking she’s just askin’ for a taskin’.

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UPDATE: Janice drops a few more rungs on the mental illness ladder.

… stay for the anti-vaxxers!

Comment from ISU’s interim AD:

“Our community has demonstrated that they love their Bengal athletics. There’s just no question. I can see that from a mile away …”

… and very few doctors. This fact, reported by the Spokesman-Review, inspires some speculation in the comment thread – as to why.

Even if we build a medical school, why would those doctors want to stay in Idaho? We won’t adequately fund K-12 or college education for those doctors’ children, we won’t provide the kind of social services they can find in other states, and we’ve got religious and political zealots running the state government. What “cream of the crop” doctor would want to run a practice in Idaho?

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You know, you’re right. In fact, I’m surprised ANYONE can stand living in Idaho, when it’s full of inbred, toothless fascists running around, burning books, stealing from the poor and looting the environment so the entire state looks like a barren moonscape. This really is the worst place on Earth. If Obama only accomplishes one more thing during his term, maybe he could revoke Idaho’s statehood.

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Doctors move to cities for the economics and the lifestyle. Given the choice of 9-5 in a burb treating nice people vs pulling buckshot out of an Aryan’s bum at midnight, which would you choose?

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Buckshot out of an Aryan’s bum at midnight. There’s poetry in that.

The University of Idaho is paying a Minnesota consultant who spends less than two weeks a month on the Moscow campus $112,500 to serve as its “chief inspiration officer,” according to public records.

This one takes UD‘s breath away. Read the whole thing.

The only precedent she can find is from her favorite university, Southern Illinois Carbondale. Remember?

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Update: Chronicle of Wasted Time. And Money. DO NOT READ if you are currently on any form of depression medication.

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Update: Google Image, Chief Inspiration Officer.

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Gotcha.

Idaho is mainly in the news lately for the collapse of its statewide ob/gyn facilities; but the Western Theocratic Territory commands attention for many other reasons. Heerespfarrer Yenor, for instance, inspires that state’s Christian nationalists from his academic appointment at Boise State, an actual university (though largely a jockshop), and this startles the Guardian newspaper.

I mean, the Guardian‘s startled that a respectable academic institition lends its reputation to a man whose howls about liberty, women, free thought, and other abominations I will not share here because obscenity laws forbid it.

Nobody’s startled by the bad boys hiding out in the brush outside of Boise, but, well, a professor.

Gun laws and regulations are among the most impactful policy factors [in college choice], with 80 percent of students saying these are at least somewhat important in their college choices, and 84 percent of those said they prefer campuses that restrict firearms… Reproductive healthcare policies are [also] a significant consideration, with 71 percent of students citing its importance to their college choice. Of this group, eight in 10 prefer states with fewer restrictions on reproductive healthcare. 

It’ll be interesting to watch enrollment trends in, for instance, Idaho, with utterly unrestricted gun laws and utterly restricted abortion laws. Ob/gyns are fleeing the state as fast as their specula can carry them. Let’s see how many female applicants find that attractive.

‘I love when fans are loud, I love when fans are emotional. But I think me being German and not really proud of that history, it’s not really a great thing to do and I think him sitting in one of the front rows, I think a lot of people heard it. So if I just don’t react, I think it’s bad from my side.’ 

A German tennis player at the US Open deftly handles an asshole. The stadium applauded when guards threw a man out for singing the Nazi anthem as the player was serving.

People want to know who the guy is, but rumor has it he’s gone to ground in Northern Idaho.

… this article.

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The doctors cannot treat you if you’re dying

So all the doctors up and disappeared

Maternal deaths are secret – no fair prying – 

In Idaho!

Non-viable?  You’ll carry it to full-term

We’ll pray with you throughout it, never fear

Together we will honor all divine sperm

In Idaho!

I know it sounds a bit bizarre

It sounds a bit bizarre

But in Idaho

That’s how conditions are!

No pregnancy may end no matter danger

The zygote is a person through and through
In short, you’ll never know
A more pernicious foe

Than zealot evangelicals
Right here in Idaho

Idaho!  Idaho!
I know it gives a person pause,
But in Idaho
Those are the legal laws.

The soul-searching natalists of Ohio could do worse than keep UD‘s little ditty up there in mind as they survey the hulking ruins of their best-laid anti-abortion plans.

Here’s the deal: The US is really strongly distinctly not a theocracy, but it sure looks as though the activist core of the No Abortion Even For Nine Year Old Rape/Incest Victims Or For Any Other Human Atrocity You Can Think Of movement is composed of theocrats.

Now, a few anti-abortion people are not theocrats and they are looking directly away from the ruins of Ohio toward the land o’ compromise. But they can forget it. When you’re taking orders from God, you’re in no mood to fuck with compromise. Compromise will compromise you right out of heaven, and you’re not going to miss your salvation.

In a perfect world, the theocrats would shut up and content themselves with mini-theocracies like Idaho, where they can pursue a heaven-bound life unmolested by rapidly secularizing Americans. But their faith makes that impossible; they must always pursue the impossible dream of absolutely no reproductive rights up and down this great land of ours. Good luck with that.

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LOOSE WOMEN

“Republicans spent half a century working to overturn Roe, yet they weren’t prepared for the democratic policy debate when that finally happened in Dobbs last year. Now they’re seeing abortion regimes as loose as Roe, or potentially looser, imposed by voters even in conservative states. This political liability will persist until the GOP finds an abortion message that most voters can accept.”

[A]bortion-rights groups may yet encounter an electorate that they cannot sway. But for now and for the foreseeable future, the energy and democratic will is on their side. Americans in general have been fairly clear for years that they did not support overturning Roe v. Wade. Roe’s demise strengthened that position instead of diminishing it.