Fridays with Nicole Sandler, Going, Going, Gone Fishing Edition
Note: As I mentioned at the end of this … I’m going to be out of pocket next week. My goal is to do something I have not done for a decade: to take a week off posting.
Listen on spotify (transcripts available)
Listen on Apple (transcripts available)
That’s Fantastic, Marcy! ENJOY!
How do you spell that fornicating word? I’m a little hard of hearing.
Banjaxed: “is widely used in Ireland (and more rarely in the UK) to informally describe anything that’s beyond repair, from the government to the kettle”
https://irishenglishisms.home.blog/2020/10/07/banjaxed-from-india-with-love/
Here’s a good quote from the from Ball of thread 6/24, about Kate Starbird University of Washington writing about about the Minnesota shooter:
Now I see my previous question was answered later. But I have another question that maybe shouldn’t be asked: If goon squads of unidentified, masked men in black are grabbing people off the streets, should we all get concealed carry permits to defend ourselves from abduction? I pose this as a rhetorical question. It is only rhetorical because of my personal situation makes me an unlikely target.
When armed, masked, unidentified men show up anywhere, call 911. Even before they start kidnapping people or aiming guns at the locals.
Real law enforcement doesn’t wear masks. Even if they are allowed to. Get the police involved to verify that these cosplay cowboys are legitimate.
Real law enforcement has IDs they’ll show you. They shouldn’t start by beating on people. Or grabbing them off the street and throwing them in unmarked vehicles. Or jamming them at an intersection in unmarked vehicles. They should also have real judicial warrants, not administrative warrants, for actual crimes, not misdemeanors from years past (especially if those were erased).
From Southern California- the ICE impersonating has begun. https://ktla.com/news/local-news/l-a-man-arrested-in-huntington-park-for-possibly-impersonating-federal-agent/amp/
Could be too late.
Joe Orton, exactly. What if you are legal or illegal and what if they are unidentified ICE agents, defend yourself at great risk of being shot or take a chance you may not be sent somewhere you will not survive? At this point everyone is at risk. Some more than others. There are no rules.
That is exactly what happened at a car wash in Torrance, CA. A group of man showed up in unmarked cars and started taking the workers.
The woman filming this atrocity was calling the men bounty hunters.
I never considered that. But it makes sense that some Meal Team Six / MAGAt yahoos would start taking matters into their own hands and “assisting” immigration.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g8RlgorMfXw
Exactly. These masked and clearly lawless men, starting with ICE, are creating conditions for far more lawlessness. Anybody can buy a patch that says Police and sew it on their body armour outfit, which also is available to anybody.
In the sudden interactions, noone really knows who is what. Deliberately, from Trump and Bondi’s actions.
I wonder if there is a way to look up recent government contracts to Eric Prince’s private army company. I suspect his gangs are involved.
Erik Prince, the Proud Boys and their off-shoots, any number of neurotic, nosy, yahoos taking matters into their own hands.
What’s their legal justification…a “Citizen’s Arrest?” Then what?
These thugs transport the kidnapped to an ICE facility? ICE takes possession of them?
Then what?
ICE puts the kidnapped on a plane to Sudan and the kidnapped have not been in contact with their family?
Or, the thugs take the kidnapped to their dark, dank basement at home, where they brood and scheme, and “interrogate” the kidnapped? Waterboard them? Torture them? Set them free in the middle of the nowhere after the “interrogation?” Harm the kidnapped or possibly take their life?
This whole situation is just sick.
A fish rots from the head, down.
In our case, our 34-count convicted felon POTUS is rotting our country and affecting all of us, from him, down.
You call 911 and report them as kidnappers.
A word of (possible) warning to folks around EW.
One of the last times Marcy took extended time off, the long-awaited “will they or won’t they?” indictment of Scooter Libby was announced.
Kind of makes me wonder what big story will happen this time Marcy is taking a week off from posting.
Not to worry. Today not a day passes without something as big as or bigger than the Scooter Libby thing.
Marcy, wishing you well wherever you may be next week and whatever you may be doing.
March, sleep well for a week.
Marcy, hope you are taking a break and sleep well for a week.
Enjoy your time away from the digital universe. Hope whatever you do is restful, restorative and nourishing.
Thanks for all the light and insight you’ve shared over the years. Take good care.
Down Pat
Mitch got the pitch down Pat,
straight to and from their autocrat,
When Murkowski came to bat,
she pretended it wasn’t all that.
The coaches are all in on the scam,
Bad faith hits another grand slam,
They don’t care we know it’s a sham,
They say aloud they don’t give a damn.
The base’s loaded for another steal,
A grand bargain with a sunk deal,
Even the grifters called it surreal,
sitting next to the Presidential Seal.
Cheating just to walk a hall
that allegedly is owned by all,
The GOP’s written on the wall:
“We gladly cause our republic to fall.”
Turkish candy and Russian delights
mean more to them than our rights,
Republicans hide behind dirty fights:
Last to leave, turn off the lights.
1/31/20
I remember this one from its debut. Still thunders, and the thunder echoes long after the last line.
Great poetic screed, SL! Timely and timeless at the same time! If you’re wondering about my post in the thread directly below this one, read on:
In a weird twist, I had posted something in the same genre, a riff on a Dylan tune that isn’t a spoof on it, but an “update,” if you will. I asked Rayne to delete it from moderation because it looked like I was maybe trying to one-up you, whereas I hadn’t bothered reading your post before I posted my piece (which blew me away when I read it before moderation was done with mine); turns out we both had the same impulse to post a poetic/political slam/riff ~5 years ago, addressing (in different styles) what’s going on today — within a couple hours of each other, again you posting first.
That’s not a typo: both your Down Pat and my Watchtower Revisited were originally posted in 2020 (though you beat me by 11 months)! Yours was posted here on EW (I assume) and mine here:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/12/9/1999910/-Wherein-I-rip-off-both-Dylan-and-Shakespeare-in-the-service-of-a-tawdry-but-timely-weather-report
Thanks for the thought and skill and effort that went into Down Pat. It nails it today.
Thanks, Bruce. I’d like to read your poem/lyrics but, unfortunately, I can’t access DailyKos. Sounds interesting, though. Mine was motivated by the 1st impeachment hearing where Roberts presided and Bondi was one of the coaches. I’ve experienced some very interesting coincidences throughout my life, some that involved timing. Sounds like you may have too. I guess that’s why the word serendipity exists.
I can, so here it is:
Watchtower Revisited
(B. Cole, B. Dylan, B. Shakespeare)
{three voices, male and female with a narrator}
“Nobody knows the way outta here!”
Cried the Juggler to the Thief;
“We’re cornered by a cold collusion
In which there’s no belief:
Business* men, they taint my wine
While plowmen steal my soil
And none of them, who undertake their crime,
Would dare to quit their morbid toil…”
-—
“No need to get so excited,”
The Thief she finely spoke.
“Hell, there are those who hide among us
Who’d likely claim it’s all a joke.
But you and I, we won’t fake that —
We won’t be lightly played.
So let us both speak playingly now
For the hour is plainly late!”
-—
All around us spins The Watchtower
Where the pundits brake their news:
Where Truth is burned and Time is turned
As if that’s what we’d choose…
And the Outside…it’s not so distant any more
Where the Rabid Gambler prowls:
The rivals, they are approaching as
A wild Nor’easter howls!
* this word is to be spat, whether in recital or sung
Here it is:
Watchtower Revisited
(B. Cole, B. Dylan, B. Shakespeare)
{three voices, male and female with a narrator}
“Nobody knows the way outta here!”
Cried the Juggler to the Thief;
“We’re cornered by a cold collusion
In which there’s no belief:
Business* men, they taint my wine
While plowmen steal my soil
And none of them, who undertake their crime,
Would dare to quit their morbid toil…”
-—
“No need to get so excited,”
The Thief she finely spoke.
“Hell, there are those who hide among us
Who’d likely claim it’s all a joke.
But you and I, we won’t fake that —
We won’t be lightly played,
So let us both speak playingly now
For the hour is plainly late!”
-—
All around us spins The Watchtower
Where the pundits brake their news:
Where Truth is burned and Time is turned
As if that’s what we’d choose…
And the Outside…it’s not so distant any more
Where the Rabid Gambler prowls:
The Rivals, they are approaching as
A wild Nor’easter howls!
—-
* this word is to be spat, whether in recital or sung
It sings pretty well, when you get the cadence changes down.
SL: Mine was in the oven a few years prior to that post, but the posting of it was prompted by the early Stop the Steal shit.
As I think about it now, J6 was a screen test for Trump. At that point, folks like Theil and Musk and the P2025 guys clocked onto his utter depravity in the face of civilized norms and said to themselves and to each other: “Now here’s an agent of chaos who can both carry out water and conduct our Constitutional Demolition project. Let’s stroke his ego and use the black hole that is his moral core to implode this bothersome bureaucracy.”
Or something like that.
Thanks for sharing, Bruce (and PJ.) It’s always interesting and fun to see the results of creative labor.
Note to Rayne, I hadn’t read SL’s lyric just above mine, swear to god. Please take the post in moderation down, I’ll leave a comment with SL about her awesome, timely piece.
I’m not sure if it matters at all, but Nicole’s last name is misspelled in both the title and the link. Right now, in a search for “Nicole Sandler”, this one does not come up.
I’ve edited the title but I don’t think I can safely edit the link — if anyone has shared this post using the link, the edit will give them a 404.
Thanks, Rayne…It comes up in a search now, and that’s good!
The New Yorker and the Atlantic each in their own way attempt to belittle the compelling new book by a Pulitzer-Prize winning author Caroline Fraser. The New Yorker acknowledges the uniqueness and compelling evidence of the argument, but dislikes her disdain for the engineers that poisoned the world, while the Atlantic asks why men were the purveyors and women the victims.
It is clear that Sarah Weinman of the Atlantic and Gideon Lewis-Kraus have an agenda and it is to kill this discussion before the book hits a wider audience. For instance in the Atlantic article (gift link)† she posits the following
“If elevated lead levels caused the violence, why did it remain skewed along gender lines? (From 1900 to 2010, 88.6 percent of all serial killers, and more than 90 percent of those in the United States, were male; just over 51 percent of their victims, however, were female, though white women were the most likely group to be murdered.) She doesn’t fully pursue that question. Nor does she satisfactorily answer why, if industrial pollution was nationwide, there was a serial-killing cluster specifically in the Pacific Northwest.”
I can explain both questions, serial killer production was not limited to the Pacific Northwest and men worked in far more neurotoxin industries than women. While I have not read the book I know the material well enough to know what these two book reviews have in common. They are “hit pieces” on the environmental pollution angle to crime which in my opinion is an outrageous position to take, so one might ask what motivates another set of elitist publications to publish absolute drivel in my opinion?
I have ordered the book Murderland from my local Laramie book seller. Here is the New Yorker article which is not a gift.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/did-lead-poisoning-create-a-generation-of-serial-killers
PS When I understood what Charles F. Kettering did to the world I wanted to murder him so I well understand Caroline Frasier’s take if in fact that is what she implies.
† [Moderator’s note: this link was missing at time comment was published. /~Rayne]
I thought I had fixed the Atlantic link but I suspect it has a follow? link that is automatically filtered?
Here is the link again and maybe it will work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/06/murderland-fraser-serial-killers-lead-poisoning-smelters/683218/?gift=Bc3C7eRHSA-Z7gP4Uv6BJlL_H5jJDuA58wcG88WoT_c&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
[Thanks for the updated link. Your previous comment included the “a href” but there was no link inside the carets at all. Oops. /~Rayne]
I may be off the mark from what you’re writing, but there is belief that the reason crime killings have dropped since the 1990s is due to lead being removed from gasoline.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615
…and decreasing killings with congestion pricing in NYC keeping vehicles out of the City.
I have not read the book, but she may have focused on refineries, smelters or other foundries, which I have looked at in the past but I never took the deep dive. It is pretty easy to see how much Lead gets deposited in the inner cities through cars but harder to correlate that deposition with the historical weather that may have kept the material in the breathing zone for longer.
I do a great deal of work in the West and I have always found Butte, Montana a fascinating little town and would have loved to study the impact that the mining and smelting industry had on crime/erratic behavior. However, trying to figure out how much Lead and how far it went over what years from the Anaconda operations and whether that operation still impacts the citizens of Butte is harder to discern.
I really do think that there was probably more neurotoxin poisoning when cities like London had individual coal heating units as the amount of mercury and lead had to be very great. I would suspect that when coal burning to make electricity and heat became centralized the inner cities “got better” for a time until Kettering and Midgley came along.
My father worked for Dayton Power and Light (DP&L) and I recently discovered that Midgley used the DP&L automotive fleet to test Leaded gasoline in 1922. The letter back to Midgley was a “hoot” from my perspective.
I’m sure we all know, but it’s crazy that HEDGE FUNDS control pricing of whatever including of course hospitals and nursing homes, “The price of crude oil languishes,…and HEDGE FUNDS have rushed to make bearish bets on the near-term direction of crude prices.”
Will CDC let this get into the marketplace?
Moderna says experimental flu shot met goal in late-stage trial: Moderna Inc. said its experimental flu shot met its goal in a late-stage trial, clearing the path for its broader strategy of selling combination vaccines. The shot’s efficacy was 27 per cent higher than a licensed influenza vaccine in adults 50 years and older, the company said in a statement this morning. The trial enrolled more than 40,000 adults across 11 countries. The results set the stage for Moderna to offer a single shot that protects against Covid and flu. Moderna believes packaging the two immunizations together will lead to higher uptake of Covid vaccines.
A DoJ memo published on 11 June, calls on attorneys in the department to institute civil proceedings to revoke a person’s United States citizenship if an individual either “illegally procured” naturalization or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation”.
https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl
=========
The DoJ ought to start with “Einstein visa” holder, Melania Trump.
Yes, here’s more about that, from NPR:
DOJ announces plans to prioritize cases to revoke citizenship
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalization-trump-immigration-enforcement
June 30, 20255:00 AM ET
“Hans von Spakovsky, with the conservative Heritage Foundation, supports the DOJ’s denaturalization efforts. “I do not understand how anyone could possibly be opposed to the Justice Department taking such action to protect the nation from obvious predators, criminals…”
==========
Yet Hans is competley fine with a 34-count convicted felon as POTUS, apparently.
Someone who is in the process of deanturalization ought to challenge the DoJ’s hypocrisy of being denaturalized, while literal criminal Trump sits in the Oval Office.
It is evident that both Sarah Weinman and Gideon Lewis-Kraus are more interested in undermining Caroline Fraser’s work than engaging with its substance, each revealing a discomfort with the book’s bold critique.
Timothy Egan did a little better and he did mention Butte, but I really believe people think they cannot be poisoned and it influence their behavior. He cites Lead paint which most do, but clearly Lead from gasoline was far more of a problem due to small particles and the ubiquity of the product, especially post WWII.
It is also becoming clear that there is a genetic factor to Lead exposure. I would really love for someone to do a genome study of all the serial killers.
Here is a gift link to Egan’s NY Times review.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/books/review/murderland-caroline-fraser.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TE8.iBVZ.3ryeZkjdeAd_&smid=url-share
Another dot connecting study was done by Rand in 2006 when Jason Barnosky published “The Violent Years: Responses to Juvenile Violent Crime in the 1950s” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3877070)
Here is Barnosky’s punchline.
“Statistics at the time supported the concern. The FBI reported skyrocketing numbers of arrests of those under 18 years throughout the 1950s (total arrests grew dramatically as well). The agency’s semiannual Uniform Crime Reports offered a steady drumbeat of warnings throughout the decade, each year noting a percentage increase over the last. The 1959 report declared that juvenile court cases had increased 220% from 1941 to 1957. And this was not due to burgeoning baby boomers: “By directly comparing percentages of the rise in delinquency and the growth in the young population, we find that juvenile arrests’ have increased two and one-half times as fast.”
Mr. Barnosky never figures out why crime is exploding but it is clear that Leaded gas is one big factor.
Hello Rayne,
Was it my wording or the link?
The more I think about Timothy Egan’s lack of curiosity the more disappointed I get.
[Likely the link, could also be system has tightened security. Comment is released now. /~Rayne]