The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
The Onion‘s satire captures the mindset of police and ICE and CBP and how they work in the aftermath of committing an atrocity.
I follow sporting events only cursorily, just checking the headlines as they appear on the front pages of various news sites. When it comes to the Olympics, for the summer games I check out just the track and field events. For the winter Olympics, I follow them even less but if anyone asks me what my favorite event is, I have no hesitation is answering ‘curling’.
I know almost nothing about this sport other than that one has to send something known as a ‘stone’ down the ice to get as close as possible to a target, with teammates using brooms to help guide the stone to its destination. In addition to looking quaintly weird, what I like most about it is its reputation for having very high standards of sportsmanship, something I value highly.
So I was upset to read that the current games have had a major curling controversy, involving people being accused of cheating by subtly touching the stone with their fingers, which is a major no-no apparently.
You can read the whole complicated controversy here.
Well hell’s bells, who knew the ice could get so hot? The Olympic curling community is still all in a twist about everything that’s gone on in the sport since a row broke out between the Sweden and Canada sides on Friday. “The whole spirit of curling is dead,” Canada’s Marc Kennedy said on Monday night after his team’s 8-2 victory against Czech Republic, which felt like a bold take coming from the man who started this entire farrago by repeatedly telling his Swedish opponent Oskar Eriksson to “fuck off” after Eriksson accused him of making an illegal double‑touch.
…The row has turned out to be the biggest thing to happen to it since it was brought back into the Olympic programme in 1998. The slow-motion footage of Kennedy brushing the stone with his forefinger has gone viral, and the internet is overflowing with sloppy AI skits of Kennedy nudging ice hockey pucks and knocking over figure skaters at the ice rink.
Is nothing sacred anymore?
He has started a new season of shows with an examination of ICE and DHS, starting with a summary of the atrocities committed by ICE and the heroic actions of ordinary Minnesotans who came out in their thousands to protest against ICE actions.
The head of the operation Tom Homan has announced that the ICE actions have ended in Minnesota. Since these people are such liars, we’ll have to wait and see if they actually leave.
One of the popular conspiracies of the right such as by QAnon is that the world is run by a secretive cabal of elites, a subset of whom traffic in girls and young women. What the Epstein files reveal is that while not on such a grand scale, there does seem to have been a cabal consisting of billionaires, tech bros, and intellectuals, almost all of whom are men, who used their dominance in the public sphere to propagate eugenics and master-race science. I want to highlight a link that commenter Dunc provided to an article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science”. The article is well worth reading in full and names names.
Heffernan used to have John Brockman, literary agent to many major writers, as her own agent and for a while he included her in the mailing list for a group known as Edge that comprised these people and this gave her an insight into this group. She describes what she discovered.
It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His mass emails evidently copied in Epstein and a dozen such email blasts made their way to the latest dump of hazmat.
Brockman, my former agent for tech writing, told me Edge was an intellectual salon. Edge.org is indeed intriguingly sprawling, jammed with scholarly idols whose bios have “Booker” and “Nobel” in them. Members of Edge participated in conferences and symposia, and promoted each other’s work. Who was I to say no? Among Edge’s prodigious ranks were Ian McEwan, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.
But if I’d read the member list more closely, I might have hesitated. Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky.
Turns out I didn’t have to worry about meeting these people. Brockman kept me at a distance. As the latest Epstein files reveal, the token female members of Edge were actively excluded from schmoozing and conferences, especially the glittering events known as the Billionaires’ Dinners.
Good policy. Otherwise, we might have struck up conversations with the anxious-looking teenage girls kept out of the photos. We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.
There is a small community of men who, for some reason, seem to want to sire as many children as possible, like the 13th century Genghis Khan who reportedly had so many children that now 16 million men have some of his DNA. Ten other men also reportedly have a huge number of descendants.
Ava Kofman writes about some men who seem to be envious of old Genghis and have started what are essentially baby factories, using surrogates to carry the babies they sire, and taking advantage of the few restrictions on the practice in the US. One of them had over twenty children, the majority of them under three years of age, who were found to show signs of neglect and lack of medical treatment, resulting in him being accused of child trafficking.
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In an interview where guests were expected to give quick responses, Barack Obama said something that sent believers in extraterrestrial into a frenzy.
In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a speed round of questioning where the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with brief answers.
After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”
He went on: “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Later, because of the uproar, he issued a statement clarifying what he meant.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
This is eminently reasonable and is what I also think. He would probably have been better served if he had said “They’re possible” rather than “They’re real” but sometimes when speaking off the cuff, one’s choice of words is not always the best.
But you can expect the tin-foil conspiracy theorists to go into overdrive.
I have often railed about the fact that a car is recognized as a dangerous item in the hands of anyone and hence we require an age requirement, training, and certification before people are allowed to use one. And yet people in the US can just walk into some places and with little or no checks can buy a gun, which is equally if not more lethal than a car, with hardly any effort made to ensure that they are competent to use it.
That can result in tragedies like this one.
A Cheshire woman who was shot dead by her “reckless” father while visiting him in the US after a row about Donald Trump was unlawfully killed, a coroner has ruled.
Lucy Harrison, 23, who lived in Warrington and worked as a fashion buyer for Boohoo, was shot in the chest with a semi-automatic handgun by Kris Harrison while staying at his home in Prosper, Texas, on 10 January last year.
Kris Harrison, an alcoholic who had been drinking earlier in the day, pointed the gun at his daughter and pulled the trigger, senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish ruled.
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… prime minister Keir Starmer is fighting to keep his job. One trade union has even called for Angela Rayner to replace him as prime minister. The leader of the Scottish Labout party Anas Sarwar has also said he has no confidence in Starmer. If the party loses the Gorton and Denton byelection later this month and fares badly in local elections in May, the pressure on Starmer to quit will increase.
It is not only his appointment of Peter Mandelson to be ambassador to the US despite knowing of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that is causing him problems, it is that he has shown himself to be a leader without any real leadership qualities, and this has resulted in a rapid turnover of people in his administration. The personal gifts of clothes and other items from wealthy people to Starmer, Rayner and other top Labour party officials has led to a sense that they are just like the Tories who were thrown out.
“We came into office promising to be different from the Tories. Keir always took the moral high ground in opposition,” says one Labour MP. “The public expected us to be squeaky clean. Yes, it’s a higher bar than the other lot, but we set it. Now they think we’re all the same.”
The optics of freebiegate were particularly damaging because the row erupted just weeks after the chancellor had announced winter fuel duty would be cut for all but the poorest pensioners.
MPs, already under siege from angry constituents over that decision, were now forced to defend senior ministers from charges of hypocrisy. “It was awful,” says one MP. “They were very publicly enjoying the trappings of power at just the same time they were taking away support from some really vulnerable people.”
Luke Tryl, the executive director of the research organisation More in Common, says the scandal caused a rocky start to the Labour government.
“It played into the public’s frustration at the pervasive sense of ‘one rule for them’ and that politicians are only looking for what they can get out of the job, contradicting Starmer’s mantra of politics [as] service,” he says. “People felt they were electing this government to bring an end to the seeming perma-scandal that marked the end of the last Tory government – and we’ve had people in focus groups saying: ‘Oh, it’s just more of the same.’”
Just yesterday it was announced that Starmer had forced out his cabinet secretary in an apparent effort to repair the image that he is directionless. Antonia Romeo, the person strongly rumored to succeed to the position, has a reputation of being a dynamic person who could upend the staid civil service role but herself has a troubled past when she served as consul-general in the New York office. She too seems to enjoy receiving gifts from wealthy donors and even seeking them out.
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I do not watch the Super Bowl because I don’t care for it. I also never watch the half-time shows either during or after. But since the MAGA world seemed to have lost their collective minds over this year’s half-time show by Bad Bunny, I felt I must watch it and did.
Here’s the full show.
So why the freakout? Because almost the entire show was in Spanish, except for a brief song by Lady Gaga. The MAGA world was deeply offended by the absence of English, seeing that as a deliberate insult aimed at the ‘true Americans’ who are of course white, English-speaking, and Christian, and even seemed to think that Puerto Ricans like Bad Bunny were not Americans. They may have been temporarily mollified by him ending by saying ‘God Bless America’ only to be immediately rocked back on their heels by him then listing the names of all the countries in the Americas. How dare those people of inferior nations think of themselves as Americans!
Jon Stewart had a ton of fun with the freakout and the alternative MAGA show featuring a bunch of nobodies but ends with a strong point, that these people, for all their tough talk and sneering at liberals who talk of safe safe spaces and the need respect the sensibilities of others, are hyper-sensitive weenies who get offended by even the slightest things.
I have written before about the possible connection between the presence of lead in the environment and violent crime by young men. Much of the evidence is correlational but nonetheless suggestive. What researchers such as Rick Nevin found was that the amount of lead in things like gasoline and paint was phased out at different times in different parts of the world (and in different states in the US) and that crime started to drop about two decades after the drop in blood lead content.
This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. The relationship is characterized by best-fit lags (highest R2 and t-value for blood lead) consistent with neurobehavioral damage in the first year of life and the peak age of offending for index crime, burglary, and violent crime. The impact of blood lead is also evident in age-specific arrest and incarceration trends. Regression analysis of average 1985-1994 murder rates across USA cities suggests that murder could be especially associated with more severe cases of childhood lead poisoning.
Now a new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser takes a look at whether exposure to lead in childhood resulted in the creation of serial killers. Fraser notes that notorious serial killers Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway all grew up in the same neighborhood near Tacoma, WA around the same time as her, a location with high lead content, which she uses as a springboard for her support of the lead -crime hypothesis.
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