Category: [Uncategorized]

At least Luigi didn’t miss him, I suppose

Someone posted this on Threads:

A somewhat… ungenerous thought, but it did remind me of her first statement after the shooting:

“Yes, there had been some threats basically I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details,” she told NBC News. “I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.”

Which I must say struck me at the time as at least slightly odd… I mean, your husband admits he’s been getting threats over his work and you don’t try to find out why? If a loved one of mine told me that, I’d be hammering them for all the information I could get out of them in order to, you know, start making sure those threats didn’t progress. Maybe she was in shock at the time and I’m being unkind here.

Or maybe not?

The slain UnitedHealthcare CEO had a criminal record for drunk driving and was secretly separated from his wife for years before he was shot dead in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to public records. Minnesota court filings show that in 2017 Brian Thompson was arrested and convicted on charges of fourth-degree driving while impaired, for which he received probation. In addition to legal troubles, the executive, who was gunned down in what NYPD has labeled a “premeditated, pre-planned, targeted attack,” also seems to have faced recent marital issues. Based on property records, voter registration forms, and reports from neighbors, Brian and Paulette Thompson had lived in different homes less than a mile apart in Maple Grove, Minnesota, for the past several years, The Wall Street Journal reported. In 2018, Thompson bought a five-bedroom second house for around $1 million, while his wife’s residence remained in another house nearby, also worth about $1 million, based on Zillow listings and public records.

Mr Voorhees above may not have been entirely wrong? I don’t know. Anyway, just another kind of grubby detail in this story…

Well that was quick

It appears they got the UHC shooter already.

New York prosecutors have filed murder and other charges against Luigi Nicholas Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, according to an online court docket.
The action brought an end to a tense five-day manhunt for the suspected killer.
Mr Mangione remained jailed in Pennsylvania, where he was charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm, forgery and providing false identification to police.
Police arrested him on Monday after he was spotted in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s by a customer who thought he looked like the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The 26-year-old was in possession of a gun, silencer, fake IDs, and a handwritten document suggesting he had “ill will towards corporate America”, police said. […]
On Monday, Mr Mangione was sitting in the rear of the McDonald’s, wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop computer, when he was arrested, court documents said.
A customer saw him and an employee called 911, said Kaz Daughtry, an NYPD deputy commissioner.
Altoona Police Officer Tyler Frye said he and his partner recognised the suspect immediately when he pulled down his mask.
“We just didn’t think twice about it. We knew that was our guy,” he said.

Wasn’t expecting that at all. I had a distinct feeling it would take a lot more time and effort than this. Also wasn’t expecting brother Luigi to be… well, a Unabomber-esque crank, or at any rate that’s the perception the media seems to be trying to push; this article goes so far as to note that the book study group he founded back in Hawai’i actually studied Kaczynski’s manifesto at one point (albeit as a “joke”?), and there’s a somewhat peculiar purported screenshot of his Twitter circulating at the moment in which he offers interesting solutions to the Japanese birth rate problem. Uncertain how authentic it is, but I’ve seen someone else post another screenshot of him linking to a Jash Dholani piece… so.

The oddest detail in all of this, of course, is that he was evidently carrying his own manifesto or whatever it is with him when he was caught. Which is a bit of a head-scratcher until you consider the speculation I’ve seen that he wanted to get caught, because he wants to go on trial and use that as a massive public platform for his beliefs and opinions. Doesn’t really make much sense otherwise, to be honest.

Logical… I suppose

Swiss Government Says Assisted Suicide Capsule Does Not Meet Safety Standards

I mean… if you want the most mirth-inducing headline of the day, this is almost certainly it, but the Swiss government isn’t laughing:

Killing yourself is not known to be a particularly safe or well-regulated practice but in Switzerland, it’s legal, under certain conditions. Unfortunately, people who want to end their lives via medically-induced suicide near the snowy Alps have to do it the right way. Creators of a euthanasia vessel learned that the hard way this week when the first known use of the device ended in multiple arrests and claims from government officials that it had violated government safety regulations.
The Sarco pod—a 3D-printed capsule that releases nitrous gas at the click of a button—is the creation of a group calling itself The Last Resort. The group, which claims to be made up of “a small international collective of human rights advocates (with a law, science, medicine and healthcare background),” says its mission is to “diversify (and improve) the assisted dying process in Switzerland.” The Sarco pod is designed to put its occupant to sleep in a matter of seconds via the nitrous gas. The gas then swiftly lowers the oxygen levels in the pod until the person expires. The whole process is said to take a matter of minutes. […]
The Sarco pod was originally given legal approval for public use in Switzerland way back in 2021, but since then controversy has dogged the device. It was used for the first time on Monday, when an American woman reportedly ended her own life in a rural area near the German border. The Last Resort announced the death in a short post on its website, and Nitschke said via social media that the woman’s death had been “an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss forest.”
While that may be true, the first use of the device seems to have been a total disaster for everybody else involved. As of Monday, multiple people have been arrested in connection to the woman’s death The Guardian reports, noting that a local prosecutor’s office had “opened an investigation into suspected incitement and aiding and abetting of suicide.” It isn’t yet totally clear who was arrested.

Slightly puzzled by the aiding and abetting bit if suicide is legal in die Schweiz, unless doing it this particular way is the problem. I don’t know. The safety regulations thing feels a bit odd too; if the whole purpose of the device is that it kills you, I’m not sure how you regulate it to be safe. How do you test if it’s unsafe? (And for that matter, how do you prove it works?) The thing that strikes me, though, is that Phil Nitschke invented this thing in 2017 but it’s taken until now for someone to actually use it. I don’t know what if anything that indicates, other than that people aren’t rushing to use it…