Meanwhile, over in the UK …

… 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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The MAGA outrage over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show

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.

Lead and criminality

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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The Epstein scandal reveals extent of victimization of women by a cabal of privileged men

The unfolding Epstein story reveals how contemptibly women were treated by the wealthy and powerful men that Epstein drew into his orbit. The conspiracy theory that there is a secretive global cabal that runs things may not be true in its most extreme forms but seems to be somewhat true at least when it comes to men engaged in sex trafficking with young women.

The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.

What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.
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Israel lobby switches to using dark money channels

As Israel’s war crimes and other genocidal actions in Gaza and the Occupied Territories have generated widespread outrage, its lobby in the US, made up of organizations like AIPAC that used to show their muscle by openly funding pro-Israel candidates and trying to defeat those seen as not sufficiently deferential to that apartheid state, have realized that having candidates associated with it is actually harming them.

Hence, as David Dayen writes at Drop Site, they have shifted into a stealth mode, funneling their money through dark money PACs while their preferred candidates deny having any association with AIPAC.

With Israel’s reputation reaching record lows among Democrats, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is resorting to ever more sophisticated methods to support its preferred candidates while cloaking its own involvement.

The amount of money that the premier pro-Israel organization is able to spend in elections is extraordinarily valuable to candidates who would otherwise have little chance of winning. But it now comes with a catch: If voters know the money comes from an organization advocating on behalf of Israel, it can do more harm than good.

AIPAC road-tested its stealth approach in a 2024 House primary in Oregon that pitted Susheela Jayapal, the sister of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), against physician Maxine Dexter. Dexter raised relatively little money throughout much of her campaign, then saw a last-minute deluge organized by AIPAC coupled with outside spending through super PACs, which themselves turned out to be funded by AIPAC. The timing of the donations meant that there was no meaningful transparency before voters went to the polls, and Dexter expressed a mixture of ignorance and umbrage when her opponents suggested the money actually came from AIPAC.

The main super PAC in question (named 314 Action) explicitly denied that any funding came from AIPAC—a claim revealed as a flagrant lie once disclosure records finally became public. But by then, Dexter had triumphed and was on her way to Congress.

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MAGA warrior gets his ass kicked by teenagers

Chad Watts, a 45-year old MAGA nut, was driving past a bunch of students in Buda, Texas who were protesting ICE actions. So he did what any true, red-blooded, patriotic Merkin would do, he stopped his truck and confronted them. When he snatched the sign one of the girls was holding, she snatched his MAGA hat, and then he attacked the girl.

But things did not go quite as he might have expected. The girls’ friends quickly came to her defense and gave him a beating before allowing him to make a retreat. Although he shaved his mustache and hair after the altercation, that did not prevent him from being identified and charged with provoking the fight.

Chad Michael Watts was charged with two counts of assault causing bodily injury after police determined he was the “primary aggressor” in a confrontation with students from Johnson High School on Monday, reports KXAN. Video shows Watts getting out of his truck at an intersection, pushing past students, then singling out and exchanging punches with a teenage girl before pushing her to the ground.
…

About 500 students had walked out to protest recent ICE enforcement actions. Police had been monitoring the protest but left to respond to a 911 hang-up call at a nearby Sonic when the fight broke out.

Epstein fallout continues

The latest release from the Epstein files has ensnared a whole lot of people. While just having had contact with him does not mean that someone also indulged in his sex-obsessed pedophilic life, his brazenness about his sheer sleaziness means that no one had any contact with him emerges unscathed.

In the UK, prime minister Keir Starmer is in deep hot water over the fact that Peter Mandelson, the person he appointed as ambassador to the US, is a grifter who, while he was a cabinet minister, was willing to pass on secrets to Epstein and work with him against the very policies that his own government was pursuing. Mandelson had already been twice sacked from former Labour cabinets and yet Starmer seemed to think that he was a great pick, Today it was revealed that Starmer knew that Mandelson had been keeping in touch with Epstein after the latter’s conviction and appointed him anyway.

Keir Starmer has confirmed for the first time he knew about Peter Mandelson’s longer-term relationship with Jeffrey Epstein before appointing him US ambassador, saying the former peer had “lied repeatedly” about the extent of his contact with the child sex offender.

Questioned repeatedly at prime minister’s questions, Starmer said Mandelson had “betrayed our country” in his dealings with Epstein.

“He lied repeatedly to my team, when asked about his relationship with Epstein before and during his tenure as ambassador,” the prime minister said. “I regret appointing him. If I knew then what I know now, he would never been anywhere near government.”
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The disparagement of the achievements of indigenous peoples

Some time ago, I discussed a book Sea People that described the incredible navigational feats of the Polynesian people who were able to reach and populate all the tiny but habitable islands in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Westerners did not think that these ‘primitive’ people could do this and felt that the islands must have been populated by people traveling west from the Americas. Thor Heyerdahl was one of the key proponents of this idea and his balsa raft Kon Tiki experiment was aggressively promoted by him as showing that this was the case. That thesis is no longer considered tenable but that wrong idea still persists in the public mind.

This is not the only example of how western archaeologists and anthropologists, faced with what seemed like impressive achievements in countries that they deemed backward, discounted the possibility that indigenous people might have done them and instead created theories that gave the credit to others. In a review of a new book about the giant sculptures of faces known as moai found on the island of Rapa Nui (formerly called Easter Island), Margaret Talbot reviews some of the other examples of this tendency, the most extreme version being that of Erich von Daniken.
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Publicly exposing the ICE thugs

One feature of human nature is that if you give anyone unquestioned power over another human being, they will be strongly tempted to abuse it and become sadistic tormentors. This is true of parents, teachers, priests, nuns, boy scout leaders, military officers, you name it. The chances get even worse if the abusers have anonymity since the shame of exposure is removed, giving them an even greater sense freedom to exercise their vicious fantasies.

This is what we have been seeing with the ICE thugs. These people, many reportedly poorly-trained, poorly vetted, and ignorant, the kind of people who could not get proper jobs in regular life, have suddenly found themselves given powerful weaponry, allowed to wear masks and other disguises, cover themselves with body armor to prevent any harm to themselves, remove any identifying markers, and promised the full backing of the government so that they are free of fear of any repercussions for whatever they do. Is it any surprise that they have turned into roaming bands of goons who feel that they can harass and threaten ordinary people and even injure and kill them for little or no reason?

Since most people cannot fight back with equal levels of force, the public has resorted to the kind of resistance that is available to them, which is develop techniques using social media and even old-fashioned ones like whistles, to quickly gather en masse whenever and wherever ICE appears to document the abuses and to identify them. They also tag and follow their vehicles and create protests wherever they happen to be staying or eating, even preventing them from using gas-station restrooms. This has had the effect of turning much of public opinion against ICE
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Blog comments policy

I will periodically repost my comments policy for those who recently started visiting this site.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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