Bios Optic

Rubbernecking at the intersection of cause and consequence.

[The Intercept @theintercept]

The report, which covers enforcement actions over a six-month period, highlights the obvious: Corporations — not small immigrant-oriented healthcare providers, or undocumented immigrants illegally taking benefits — are responsible for the vast majority of alleged fraud in the American health care system. Released earlier this month, the report highlights billions of dollars’ worth of healthcare fraud from corporate executives.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Director of Managed Migration for the European Union. Sit. I have twenty minutes before lunch, and I intend to spend them correcting you, because someone should, and it is plainly not going to be the people who raised you.

You called it an invasion. You called it a wave. You called it a flood. You reach for these words because they fit in one hand, and one hand is all you were given. We do not use words that fit in one hand. We use "irregular arrivals event." It requires both hands, a footnote, and a working group, and that is exactly the point. A word you can hold is a word you might act on. We have spent seventy years making certain there are none of those left.

I do not blame you. You were raised on nations. We outgrew nations. We are a directive with a flag.

Let me explain the desk slowly, in the register one reserves for the very young.

The fund is called AMIF. Nearly 10 billion euros, since topped toward 10.94. It carries four objectives, and I will ask you to hold two of them at once, though I keep my expectations low. One is asylum and integration. Another, same fund, same page, same auditor, is countering irregular migration and ensuring effective return. The euro that buys the blanket and the euro that buys the fence are drawn from the same column. When you ask which side I am on, you are asking me to prefer one of my own pockets. It is an Anglo-Saxon question. I forgive it.

You imagine the two sides fight. How charming. They reconcile, quarterly, over a very good lunch.

Your Prime Minister campaigns to keep them out. His opponents campaign to let them in. His opponents would do precisely as he does. Both instruct this desk. Both sign the same appropriation. In thirty years I have not once been asked to change the letterhead, only the tie of the man at the podium.

Now, the growth, which is the part I permit myself to enjoy. Frontex opened in 2005 on roughly the budget of a provincial parking authority. By 2024 it stood at 922 million euros. By 2025, about 1.12 billion. It is 187 times larger. Name me one institution that grew 187 times while never once being credited with ending the thing it manages. You cannot, because there is not one, and the Commission has proposed 11.2 billion more, because a desk that solves its file is a desk one closes, and we do not close desks. We are European. We retire them at 63 with a pension and a small ceremony.

You wanted us to solve it. Consider, for once, what you were asking. You were asking a man to defund his own lunch.

You brought numbers. You people worship a clean number. Very well.

In 2024 the official count on the route to the Spanish islands was 1,142 dead. A monitoring group put the Atlantic figure at 9,757 for the same year, roughly nine times higher, including, they say, some 1,538 children. Two methodologies. I keep the smaller book. I stamp the larger one unverified. Even the keepers of the small book write across the top that it is a floor, that most of the drowned are never recorded at all. I file the floor and present it as the ceiling. You would call that a lie. We call it methodology, and methodology is the oldest art on this continent. We were forging provenance while yours was still a rumour with a coastline.

We are exquisitely precise when precision flatters us. In 2021 the Libyan coast guard, which we train and equip, returned 32,425 people to Libya. Those we can count to the individual. Yet of 61.2 million euros earmarked for that programme, investigators traced barely 34 million. Some 27 million, about 44 percent, is simply nowhere. A machine that can number 32,425 human beings to the person cannot locate half of its own money. Sit with which of the two we chose to keep exact.

You will ask whether we watch what becomes of them. We do not. Our own leaked report concedes it: our staff may not set foot on Libyan soil, so we cannot monitor the coast guard we pay. We write the cheque and we admire the horizon. A United Nations mission found reasonable grounds to believe crimes against humanity, murder, torture, enslavement, were committed against migrants in those centres. A member of that mission said European support "aided and abetted" those crimes, and added, in the same breath, "we're not saying that the EU and its member states have committed these crimes." I live inside that comma. It is the most comfortable room in Brussels.

The rescuers, I concede, are the honest party. They pull people from the water. The case built to prove them smugglers collapsed in a Sicilian court in 2024, dismissed, no crime, because the people they saved had entered lawfully. I confess a small grief. An acquittal is nearly impossible to file in the threat column, and the threat column is where the money sleeps.

And your courts. You wave them at me like a diploma. The very human-rights court in Strasbourg that blessed the Melilla pushback on grounds of the migrant's "own culpable conduct" later condemned the identical practice at Evros. Same bench. Opposite verdicts. I cite whichever suits the morning. None of that is a defect. It is a menu, and Europe has always understood that civilisation is the art of the menu.

I will tell you where that court sits, since you enjoy the pageantry. It sits in Strasbourg. Once a month we relocate the entire European Parliament from Brussels to Strasbourg and back, at an expense no living person will defend, because a treaty said so and we do not reopen treaties. If you can grasp why we do that, you can grasp why the border works exactly as it does. If you cannot, you were never ready for the border, and I say that gently.

At Pylos a European surveillance plane spotted an overloaded trawler, filed its alert, and more than 600 people drowned inside a rescue zone while a coast-guard vessel watched for some fifteen hours. Seventeen officers now face prosecution, charged, I remind you, never convicted. In a leaked note from another operation someone wrote that the aircraft were withdrawn "so as not to be a witness." I do not defend the sentence. I admire its economy. The instinct to see less is the only instinct in this building that has ever come in under budget.

So do not call it a crisis. A crisis is unbudgeted, and unbudgeted is the one thing we are not. On the last night at the breakwater at least 57 people drowned at Tarajal, and some of them were children, and by morning I had entered each of them under interceptions, arrivals, and returns, the only three drawers I own.

It was not an invasion. It was not a wave.

It was a delivery. It was managed. And it was, if I may say so, exceptionally well documented.

You may go. The working group convenes in September.

[Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren]

BREAKING: Senate Republicans blocked Democrats' proposal to end Donald Trump's IRS sweetheart deal.

This deal gives him FULL IMMUNITY from audits on tax returns he's filed.

It's corruption on steroids.

[Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew]

Breaking with bipartisan precedent, Trump overruled his own agencies and denied sending disaster aid to four Democratic-led states this month, despite FEMA and NOAA's determination that those states met the thresholds for receiving aid.

https://t.co/Cux5wbjTU6

[Bios Optic @BiosOptic]

It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning
https://t.co/QrFYXXvkx2

[Bios Optic @BiosOptic]

@sarahkendzior Indeed.

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

If you want to see the most amazing photography from the ISS, Don is your guy.

[Lukas Ekwueme @ekwufinance]

Bessent is in panic mode... he intervened to support the yen.

To prevent Japan from selling even more US assets, he joined Japan in a massive coordinated intervention.

But instead of selling USD, the US sold EUR.

To keep this war going, the US has to bail out major holders of US assets to prevent them from selling... especially Treasuries.

The US simply can't afford this war, which is why it only escalates when markets are closed.

[Philip Obaji Jr. @PhilipObaji]

The world looks away while Russian forces commit unspeakable crimes across Africa: massacres, rape & massive exploitation. I am risking everything to document these atrocities. Please stand with me. Even a small donation can help expose the darkness.
https://t.co/BV0P2MY56Q

[Donald Trump Portfolio Tracker @TrumpsPortfolio]

The US has been at war with Iran since February 28th. Five months.

Congress has never authorized it. The War Powers Act gives the president 60 days. When that deadline hit, Trump wrote Congress a letter claiming the war had “terminated” because of a two-week ceasefire — while in the same letter warning the threat remained.

He then told reporters that asking Congress for authorization is “unconstitutional.”

The Senate has now voted on war powers resolutions thirteen times. Thirteen.

This week: Iran fired on US forces, Trump went on Fox News and said “we are going to beat the f—ing s— out of them,” and the US launched a heavy wave of strikes across southern Iran. The Senate killed the latest resolution 49–50. Three Republicans voted to rein him in. One Democrat voted not to.

American servicemembers are dead. Egypt has now been struck. Saudi forces are in it.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Trump says he doesn’t need it, and Congress keeps agreeing.

He campaigned as a peacemaker.

[Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien]

Just a reminder that since Laura Loomer announced her support for Ukraine, Trump has: 1) walked back a promise to let Ukraine build Patriots, 2) denied a ukrainian request for 300 PAC3s, 3) slow walked 400mil in congressionally approved aid for Ukraine.
But the vibes were good!

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

WHISTLEBLOWER CAUGHT THE FRAUD, THE NHS CAUGHT AMNESIA

Sharmila Chowdhury @sharmilaxx gave the NHS 30 years of clean service. Not one blemish. Then she did something apparently unforgivable.

She noticed two consultant radiologists at Ealing Hospital, run by London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust @LNWH_NHS, billing the NHS for shifts they were actually spending at a private hospital down the road.

Getting paid twice for the same hours is fraud everywhere on earth.

Everywhere except, apparently, inside an NHS complaints process.

She reported it.

To her line manager.
To the Medical Director.
To the HR Director.
To Counter Fraud.
To the Chief Executive.
To Number 10.
To the Treasury.

She built a paper trail so solid that ITV @itvnews later sent an undercover team into the same hospital years on and filmed the same consultants still taking cash from patients for private ultrasounds on NHS premises.

The Trust's response to all that diligence was to sack her, based on counter allegations later shown to be fabricated.

The man behind those allegations reportedly signed off an email too crude to print here.

He picked up a Top Mentor award from the Trust that same year. Nobody writes comedy this good on purpose.

Sharmila took it to tribunal and won. Won the appeal too.

A judge ordered the Trust to reinstate her. The Trust said no. She was then quietly blacklisted across the NHS.

One job offer was withdrawn the moment they worked out who she was. Legal costs hit £130,000.

Somewhere in the middle of it she developed breast and lung cancer, which her doctors link to years of sustained stress.

The two consultants kept their jobs.

George Osborne could not get involved.

Andrew Lansley could not get involved.

David Cameron could not get involved.

Every one of them filed it under employment matter, Whitehall for we would rather not know.

A proven fraud case, covered by ITV @itvnews, the Guardian, Daily Mail @DailyMail, Channel 4 News @Channel4News, the Independent @Independent, BBC News @BBCNews, the Times @thetimes and the Daily Mirror @DailyMirror.

The official position of Her Majesty's Government was still not our problem.

This is the reward system.

Report fraud, lose your career, lose your health, and watch the people you reported get promoted.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The summer firefly show is over or ending in most of the eastern US right now. Everything you do to your lawn between now and next spring decides what you'll see next July.

Almost every firefly that flashed this summer mated and laid eggs in your soil and leaf litter. Those eggs have hatched into larvae that will spend the next one to two years underground, hunting slugs and soft-bodied pests in the dark. The generation underground right now is next summer's light show.

Grub treatments applied in August, or any time of year, kill firefly larvae that can't get out of the way. The pesticide doesn't know the difference between a Japanese beetle grub and a firefly larva. Firefly populations take years to recover.

Insecticides do the same thing at larger scale. A single application can eliminate the firefly larvae across an entire treated area.

Raking and bagging all your leaf litter in fall removes the overwintering habitat firefly larvae depend on. They burrow into loose leaf litter to survive winter. A bare, tidy lawn in November is a hostile environment for the larvae underneath it.

The action items are mostly subtractions. Skip the grub treatment this fall. Leave the leaf litter. Turn the porch light off when you go to bed.

What you do in August and September is really a decision about what you see next June. Treat the lawn accordingly.

[julie k. brown @jkbjournalist]

Gift link to WSJ Story today. I can't believe it's not illegal to extort money from companies in exchange for access or favors from the President (like settling a lawsuit?) https://t.co/KmI3qpSGjf

[Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien]

If you cannot accept that what Trump has done over the last year and a half is starve Ukraine of air defense, and put off any new aid for as long as possible, so Putin can terrorize Ukraine from the air for as long as possible--you cannot accept reality.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Glyphosate is one of the most widely used herbicides on Earth. It's also what most people reach for when a dandelion pokes through a driveway crack. That's a significant chemical response to a very small problem, and there's a better one sitting on your stove.

Boiling water kills weeds on contact. The heat ruptures cell walls all the way down to the root, and unlike herbicide sprays, it leaves no chemical residue, produces no runoff into storm drains, and poses no risk to the soil biology around it.

Pour directly onto the weed and into the crack around its base. A kettle works better than a pot because you can direct the stream precisely. For established weeds with deep roots, a second application usually finishes the job. For new seedlings, once is typically enough.

Glyphosate applied to a driveway crack runs into the storm drain with the next rain. From there it goes directly to your local waterway with no treatment step.

The EPA classifies glyphosate as a possible carcinogen. The IARC classifies it as a probable one. Researchers continue to debate the exact risk level. What isn't debated is that it ends up in waterways.

The dandelion doesn't know the difference.

[Mary L Trump @MaryLTrump]

The Secretary of State is claiming it's the Attorney General's job to advance the president's agenda. That's terrifying.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

Donald Trump took America’s 250th birthday, handed it to a secretive operation run by his allies, and showered it with taxpayer money and private donations.

He created a shadow company called Freedom 250 and diverted $75 million of the $100 million meant for the official, bipartisan America250 Commission.

Then he placed Freedom 250 inside the National Park Foundation, an official charity that does not have to publicly disclose its donors.

In other words: millions of dollars can pour into Trump’s operation, and the public does not get to know who is writing the checks.

Now, after refusing to provide a full accounting of who paid or where the money went, Freedom 250 wants taxpayers to cough up another $10 million.

Absolutely not.

When I say this is the most corrupt administration in American history, I am not kidding.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

He doesn't care anymore. It's just non-stop, in-your-face corruption.

The latest? If you pay Trump $100,000 a month, he will give you advance White House announcements on economic and trade policy.

An insider trading subscription service.

People will go to jail for this.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

You have been given the same advice your whole life, and it is good advice. You cannot beat the market. Do not try. Buy a little of everything, hold it for 30 years, and do not flinch when it falls. It is true. It is also advice given, in part, by 535 people who quietly do not have to take it.

In the last week of February 2020, you were told to stay calm. The market was sliding, the virus was still a rumor with a foreign name, and every steady voice said hold the line and think long term. Most of us did. We watched the retirement accounts fall and we held, because holding was the discipline and the discipline was right.

That same week, senators of both parties who had sat in a closed briefing on the coming pandemic sold. Millions of dollars in stock, in the days before the drop. The Justice Department opened an investigation and closed it without a single charge. The rules held, because no one had broken them.

It was not one strange month six years ago. Last year, 140 members of Congress made more than 14,000 trades worth about $720 million. They do not trade at random. The members who sit on the committees that write the defense budget trade defense contractors. The members who write Medicare and Medicaid policy trade the health insurers who live on those programs. The firms whose fortunes they shape are the firms they own.

There is a law meant to stop this. It is called the STOCK Act, and when a member files a trade late, the penalty is $200. Not $200,000. $200, and even that is often waived. In all the years the law has existed, no member of Congress has ever been criminally prosecuted under it.

I am not saying this to make you hate them. Hatred is cheap and it fixes nothing. I am saying it because of what we are usually handed to be angry about instead. We are pointed at the neighbor with the stimulus check, the family in line with an EBT card, the student asking to have a loan forgiven. We are taught to look sideways and down, at people who have less than we do, and to believe they are the reason the arithmetic no longer works. The edge that actually moved the money was never standing beside you in that line. It sat in a room you were not allowed to enter.

Let me be careful, because this is the part that matters. There is nothing wrong with being rich. A person who starts a company, carries the risk, and builds and sells the thing is the country working as promised, and we should want more of them, not fewer. The objection here is narrow. It is a portfolio built out of a security clearance. An advantage that arrives with the seat instead of the work.

We know it can be fixed, because it has been. When two Federal Reserve officials were found trading through the same 2020 crisis they were managing, they were gone within weeks, and the Fed barred its officials from trading individual stocks at all. An institution decided its credibility was worth more than its portfolios.

Congress looked at the same conflict this month. The House passed a bill to ban the practice and gave it the name you wanted to hear. It lets every member keep the stock they already hold. It lets them keep buying more with the dividends. It exempts the presidency and the vice presidency. Half of Congress owns individual stock, and under this ban, half of Congress keeps it.

Meanwhile the one retirement plan they manage on your behalf, the one you pay into with every paycheck, is set to fall short in 2032, 6 years from now, and to cut benefits by about 22 percent when it does. They have known for 30 years. They have not agreed on a repair. They have been more attentive to their own.

They will hear the next briefing before you do. We can keep score of which party's list is longer. Or we can notice that both lists exist, and that the only person in this story who was told to hold was the one who could not afford to lose.

He held. He was told that was the honest thing to do. It was.