MET officers to declare if they are Freemasons

'Two thirds of officers and staff surveyed agree that this policy is needed. We think the majority of the public would also agree,' says Metropolitan Police

WATCHING TO MANY JACK THE RIPPER MOVIES

Burak Bir |30.12.2025 - 




LONDON

The London police vowed to robustly defend its decision requiring staff and police officers to declare their Freemasonry membership, according to a statement on Monday.

The Metropolitan Police (Met) statement came in response to the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) seeking an injunction blocking implementation of the new policy.

The lodge, representing the secretive group in England, Wales, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands, has pushed back against plans, announced earlier this month, to make Freemasonry membership a "declarable" association.

The Freemasons filed papers in London last week claiming the policy amounts to "religious discrimination" against Freemasons who are also police officers, The Guardian reported.

On Dec. 17, the lodge said in a statement that the Met decision cast an "aura of mistrust" over the entire organization.

The group also said it was "extremely disappointed" that the police had reached this decision without a "fair consultation process, or any direct engagement with it."

However, the Met said that the majority of British people agree with the new policy, stressing that they must prioritize the maintenance of vital trust and confidence over any organization’s desire to maintain secrecy.

"Two thirds of officers and staff surveyed agree that this policy is needed. We think the majority of the public would also agree," said the Met in response to the lodge’s injunction.

The Met statement also cited a recommendation in a 2021 report saying police membership in the Freemasons had been "a source of recurring suspicion and mistrust."

"We strongly believe that failing to act on these calls would further damage trust not only among the public but also other officers and staff," said the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report.

The panel examined the force’s handling of the unsolved 1987 murder of private detective Daniel Morgan, a father of two who was killed with an axe in a London parking lot.

"Victims should be able to know that when they report allegations to us, the officers investigating have been transparent about any potential conflicts of interest," added the statement.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for FREEMASONS

  

 

 

The Gallery of Ghouls of Last Stage US Empire

From the Zionist lobby’s media buyouts, to Christian-nationalism’s grudge match with Christian-Zionism, to Mamdani-envoked moral panic to “the Mar-a-Lago face.”

by Phil Rockstroh / November 17th, 2025

The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event:

The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems of the era.

Pictured: “The Mar-a-Lago face” i.e., human beings transformed by Spiritus Mundi into (inadvertent) supernumeraries of a Gogolian theatre of the (cringe-inducing) grotesque.

In contrast, the type of image above brings me solace, because, now, when I gaze upon my aging face, it seems as if its time-touched features are being drawn by the very hand of a redemptive force.

*****

More mingling amid confederacies of ghouls and galleries of grotesques:

Pro-Zionist billionaires are among the High Dollar donors — thus are among the ownership class — that dictate the agendas of the US political class. Said billionaires have, as of late gone, on a buying spree of corporate media properties. Their gambit being, to enforce narratives that are a litany of pro-Israel lies e.g., foremost among them prevarication e.g., the denial of genocide perpetrated on the people of Gaza.

With vast resources at their disposal their employ media operatives to intimidate and cancel critics, even for the most mild criticism of Israel. As a consequence, there has been a noxious return of antisemitic tropes regarding Jews as a whole e.g., as hidden, scheming controllers of the world.

Are the vast majority of anti-Zionists antisemites? No. Are Nick Fuentes’ and his knuckle-dragging Groypers antisemitists? You can bet your jackboots they are.

The greatest threat to power-devoid Jews such as myself in the coming years: the conflation of Zionism and Judaism by Israeli propagandists.

Regarding Israel: A schism among the religious right:

At present, we are witnessing a power struggle among death cultist Christian rightists between Christian-nationalists nativism-gripped xenophobes and Christian-Zionist End Timer zealots. The former’s ranks are comprised of young, online, Groyper types who are possessed by a Brown Shirt mindset while the latter are (far) older Jesus fetishist fantasists — who believe every Israeli transgression against humanity, from ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, to perpetual war on its neighbors, to prison guard rape gangs bring the sin-reeking earth closer to their humanity-loathing fantasy of End Times wrought salvation.

To what extreme degree does one have to hate and fear life in order to long for the entire earth to be destroyed in the name of the divine and perfect love by their Lord and Savior? From the life-loathing worldview of Christian fundamentalists, like an incorrigible child, the entire world must be whipped and punished until he displays a god-wrought purity thereby becoming deserving of the love of their demanding rage-prone Sky Father.

Outright and florid insanity, right? These fanatics cannot even prevent their own denominations from (perpetual) sectarian schisms: Constantinople and Rome split; the Protestant Reformation true believers split from Papal autocrats; in the North American colonies, there unfolded constant strife and acrimony among the various Protestant sects, so much so that if the Founders had not intervened and proclaimed the fledgling nation to be a dominion of secularism, Puritan Massachusetts would have marched on and perpetuated ethnic cleansing on Quaker Rhode Island.

The dismal trend continues right up to the present in which the Episcopal church has split into estranged sects between their liberal and conservative congregants and Southern Baptists have split between conservatives and conservative extremists.

Unspoken in all the right’s Charlie Kirk ceremonies of beatification: Groypers trolled Charlie Kirk for years because they insisted his pro-Zionist proclivities translated into an impurity of faith with Christian-nationalist ideology.

Example of Nick Fuentes’ legion of Groypers’ shitposting rampage against Charlie Kirk.

In essence, these spree killers in the name of The Lord have not changed their (blood-drench, intolerant) vestal garments of the mind. The split between Christian Zionists and Groypers anti-Zionists displays, once again, the propensity to schism.

Conversely and in brief, the mind of a god capable of omniscience over all of Creation would be infinite thus unknowable. Poets, humbled by the vastness of it all, speak of inspiration as a psychical force bestowing “miraculous influence.”

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. 
— excerpt from Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour — Wallace Stevens

Regarding the proclivity of the Christian fundamentalist’s worldview for dividing into warring factions: The only miracle here is: the seemly infinitesimal number of pieces that such small minds are capable of being split into.

Of minuscule minds and massive authoritarian longings:

Remarking on the obsequious, servile mannerisms of Chinese president’s Xi Jinping staff, MAGA Dear Leader Donald Trump proclaimed, “I want my cabinet to behave like Xi Jinping’s staff. I’m demanding that. I want them sitting up like that, just nice and straight.”

He continued, “I never saw posture like that. I’ve never seen men so scared in their lives.”

Yet MAGA-Reich soreheads wax psychotic about Zohran Mamdani’s coming reign of woke jihadist’s imposition of commie Sharia Law tyranny, all the while acting as Trump’s ambulatory testicle cozies due to their florid terror of drawing the petty-minded tyrant’s scorn.

Forget the “great” part: Their true creed: Make Americans Graze Ass.

With Trump’s poll numbers in free-fall we can expect the hyper-authoritarian compulsions of the US right to approach peak hysteria. In combination with Zohran Mamdani’s rise, for the first time in decades, the Zionist lobby and the oligarchic class have been subjected to profound and sustained, public pushback. Young people and the working class refused to be taken in by million dollar plus campaigns fomenting fear and slinging slander.

Of course, the oligarchs and their press corp operatives are not done. Far from it. Power, in particular power structures that have managed to remain all but unaccountable, do not concede control with grace. In fact, they, as a general rule, will attempt to destroy what they cannot dominate. Thousands of Palestinian corpses stippled beneath the rubble in Gaza testify to the tragic truth of the matter.

Not that there will come to pass ethnic cleansing and a genocidal campaign on the streets of New York City. But we will witness a full-spectrum campaign by the kleptocracy waged to undermine, paralyze, and generally render feckless Mayor Mamdani’s efforts at reform.

The ink-stained General Jack D. Ripper[s] of New York Post promulgated this (risible) augury of what is to come:

​Yet by sustained resistance we can do more than hope that The City’s mayor elect’s resolve endures: Mamdani to the demagogic fear mongers and retailers in fear and slander:

“We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”

Whether authoritarianism imposes itself as capitalism’s dictatorship of money or as Zionism’s ethno-nationalism or Christian-nationalism, we can gain resolved in the knowledge the seekers of absolute power, by their mania to control what is beyond control – i.e., the vastness and intricacies of life itself – are ripe with the seeds of their own undoing.

The thoughts of the heart cannot be controlled nor dominated by their noxious will; moreover, the soul of the world is an indomitable order that will defeat all would-be conquerors.

Emblems of last stage empire: Sleepy Joe meet the Narcoleptic Don.

​Still amateur stuff, Donnie. You have surpassed Sleepy Joe but at this rate you will never make the fascist Big Leagues. Take note:

“I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.” — Adolf Hitler​

Out of the jaws of victory…well, we are talking about the Democratic Party:

The shutdown ends. Dems, per always, collapse into their own corruption. The Democrats only talent: a knack for capitulation and betrayal of their base.

The emerging storyline had been: Trump is in decline; the Democratic Party is entering into the initial stages of ascendancy. Yet Democrats, true to form, and in rapid order, put an end to the possibility.

The takeaway: Republicans, accurately, regard their base as imbeciles and psychos. And Democrats do not regard their base at all. Caveat: There is a base to whose agendas they heed with absolute felicity: the economic elite and the Zionist lobby.

And what of Dear Leader Trump (whose rise was enabled by corrupt Democrats)?

Here the Democrats are consistent: On every occasion that Trump begins to collapse into his exponentially increasing brain rot — the dismal Dems leap into a political abyss of their own making and reveal to the world how the art of self-undermining is performed by experts.

There is the Mar-a-Lago face then there is the Democrats’ countenance of perpetual capitulation.

Chuck Schumer, despite the glasses — emblematic of the Party’s elite — remains willfully myopic — yet Zohran Mamdani’s campaign presented a seminar insofar as the Democratic Party’s path forward.

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet.  Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.

The wheels are falling off the system

By Dave Holmes

Published 29 July, 2025

First published at Arguing for Socialism.

Under intense pressure from the Trump administration, at its June 25 meeting NATO agreed to massively boost “defence” (I.e., military) spending. Along with the turn to war, an intense Russophobia has gripped the European political elite. To justify its existence NATO needs enemies and Russia fits the bill. Fear and loathing of Russia is both cause and consequence of the NATO countries’ plans to dramatically increase military budgets. The failure of the West’s proxy war in Ukraine has stoked anti-Russia sentiment to unprecedented levels.

However, the arms build-up will have dire consequences for the wellbeing of the mass of ordinary people of Europe as they face fast onrushing climate change. Instead of an all-out emergency mobilisation of society to deal with the consequences of global warming (the need for sustainable energy production, healthcare, public housing, ensuring food production, and so on), the NATO countries (with a few exceptions) are committed to a huge boost in military spending.

NATO to massively boost military spending

A recent Age article reported:

That means each member of the alliance has committed to spending 5% of their GDP on defence, up from a current target of 2%. An analysis of NATO’s published figures suggests that would mean an extra $2.52 trillion a year, up from the $1.85 trillion a year that its member states – including the US – spend now.

That amount is roughly equal to the entire GDP of Spain, a member of the alliance that is known for spending little on defence and refusing the target.

Of that target, 3.5% will be dedicated to core defence spending and 1.5% to broader resilience and security. However, only 22 of NATO’s 32 members have met the current 2% target, raising questions about whether the bloc will reach the new threshold.

The Age provided a dramatic (albeit hypothetical) list illustrating the new equipment this increased spending could buy: 19,842 F-35A fighter jets ($127 million each); 812 B-2 bombers ($3.1 billion each); 34,520 Black Hawk helicopters ($73 million each); 65,116 M1A2 Abrams tanks ($38.7 million each) and 590,163,923 EF88 Austeyr rifles ($4270 each).

This gigantic projected increase in military spending will give a big boost to arms manufacturers like Germany’s Rheinmetall but from the standpoint of human society it is batshit crazy.

UK spending priorities

The UK has its own militarisation agenda including £15 billion for modernising the nuclear warheads carried by Trident submarines, 12 new nuclear-powered attack subs, 7000 long-range weapons including missiles and drones, and £1.5 billion on new factories for military production.

It’s also worth noting that Britain has so far sent £18.3 billion in military and other aid to Ukraine to further the West’s war against Russia. Furthermore, UK military and security services have played an outsized role in planing and executing Ukrainian attacks on Crimea and deep into Russia.

The UK’s military plans are alarming but there is a big question mark over them. Can they actually be achieved?

One hopeful sign is that the Starmer government was recently forced to largely abandon its harsh assault on welfare in the face of a massive revolt by its own MPs. Clearly any plan to put “guns before butter” will face intense popular opposition.

Another heartening indicator is that young people in Britain are decidedly unenthusiastic about joining the military. A September 2024 YouGov survey of 18-27 year-olds found that only 11% would fight for their country if called on to do so. A further 37% would fight only if they agreed with the reasons for the conflict. 44% said they would not fight under any circumstances they could think of.

Russophobia

An April 4 ABC News article captures the Russophobic madness gripping European political circles:

Poland is planning to train every adult male for war, Norway is restoring old military bunkers, and Germany has unlocked billions for a historic boost to defence spending.

As fears grow about the reliability of the United States as an ally, countries across the EU are scrambling to prepare for a possible war with Russia.

Danish and German intelligence have warned that NATO should brace for a potential attack in as little as five years.

Many countries are already telling citizens to prepare survival kits in case of a major crisis.

But the increased Russia threat was brewing long before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump's return to the White House, according to analysts.

The article goes on:

Europe is taking the security shift seriously.

Norway is bringing back a requirement for all new buildings over a certain size to include bomb shelters, in a practice halted in 1998.

And Cold War military bunkers, sitting inside a mountain, that have been deactivated for 40 years are reportedly being restored.

Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia last month announced they were withdrawing from the Ottawa convention banning anti-personnel landmines.

The countries, which all border Russia, said they were planning to start stockpiling and using landmines again, arguing it was “paramount” to give their troops “flexibility and freedom of choice” to defend NATO's eastern flank.

Poland, Lithuania and Latvia also share borders with Moscow's ally Belarus.

Poland, which spent almost two centuries as a colony of Moscow, is preparing citizens for combat.

The country of 38 million people has started work to ensure all men undergo military training, with the aim to boost its army to 500,000 troops.

Reading this stuff and the various Russophobic “experts” cited brings to mind such characters as Dr Strangelove and General Jack D. Ripper in the celebrated 1964 antiwar movie Dr Stangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

A Russian invasion of Western Europe?

However, claims that Russia may or will invade Western Europe are without any factual basis. Furthermore, they are politically illogical.

1. Russia does not even want to occupy all of Ukraine. It aims there have always been clear: A neutral, demilitarised, non-NATO Ukraine; a purging of the far right from their strongholds in the power ministries (army and security services); and respect for the Russian language and culture (the Russian Orthodox Church, for instance, has been banned). Now it also wants recognition of its annexation of the Russia-oriented provinces in the south.

2. Confronting Ukrainian forces that have been preparing for war since 2014 and backed to the hilt by the West, Russian progress has been slow and costly in both human and material terms. Russia is clearly winning the conflict but to suggest that it has the capacity — let alone the desire — to launch an invasion of Europe is simply crazy.

3. The Russophobic madness actually inverts reality. In actual fact, Russia has never threatened Europe. Whatever one thinks of them, the few wars Russia has fought since the breakup of the old Soviet Union have all been connected with its “near abroad”. Rather than threatening the NATO countries, Russia has itself been threatened by the remorseless eastward expansion of NATO.

And in 2014 the US organised a regime change operation in Ukraine, bringing to power anti-Russia, pro-West forces backed by the far right. Ukraine's military was built up by the West and the country became a de facto member of NATO. The regime waged an eight-year long civil war against ethnic Russians in the Donbas region. NATO technology and personnel have been behind the military strikes deep into Russia.

What does the West want here? It wants to crush Russia, to dominate it, to break it up into smaller pieces. Like China, Russia is capitalist but it values its independence and is thus a threat to Western hegemony. Ukraine is just a means — a proxy — in the West's war against Russia. Ukraine is being destroyed in this war but that is of no consequence to its US-NATO masters.

That is the reality. To obscure this reality we have political leaders, the media and all sorts of pundits screaming non-stop about the Russian threat to Europe …

4. A corollary of the West's Russophobia is Putinophobia. Vladimir Putin is routinely portrayed as a Hitleresque figure, a veritable devil, someone uniquely evil. We have no desire to polish Putin's image. He is the political leader of Russia's capitalist oligarchy. He presides over an authoritarian, undemocratic system. But is he really any worse, morally or politically, than imperialist politicians like Trump, Starmer, Merz or Macron? I think that would be a very hard claim to substantiate.

Austerity: 1.1 million preventable deaths

A June 30 article by the EU news service Eurostat contains some startling data about the health situation across the EU.

In 2022, 1.1 million deaths among people under the age of 75 in the EU … were considered avoidable by early treatment or prevention of diseases. This figure includes 386,710 deaths from diseases that are treatable, which could have been avoided through high-quality healthcare, as well as 725,625 deaths from diseases that are preventable, which could have been avoided through effective public health interventions …

The most common cause of death from treatable diseases and conditions was ischaemic heart disease with 77,704 deaths … followed by colorectal cancer with 57,476 and breast cancer in women with 40,970 deaths.

For preventable diseases, the most common causes of death were lung cancer with 136,199, ischaemic heart disease with 77,704 deaths … and COVID-19 with 71,919 deaths …

Of course, some countries do better than others. But overall we are talking about Europe here, not Africa, Asia or Latin America. There is also a huge shortage of healthcare workers. According to a November 2024 OECD report:

The European health workforce faces a severe crisis. Twenty EU countries reported a shortage of doctors in 2022 and 2023, while 15 countries reported a shortage of nurses. Based on minimum staffing thresholds for universal health coverage, EU countries had an estimated shortage of approximately 1.2 million doctors, nurses and midwives in 2022.

Instead of spending astronomical sums on militarism, EU countries should spend it instead on healthcare, dealing with climate change, public housing and so on — as well as serious aid to the Third World.

Climate change

Climate change resulting from global warming is the existential challenge facing the human race. But the way our imperialist political leaders are going we are likely to be facing war against Russia and China — while the cyclones howl, the bushfires rage, the floods inundate, heatwaves scorch us and rising sea levels swallow up coastal areas.

In early July Europe was gripped by an unprecedented heat wave. Soaring temperatures led to wildfires in many places. A Lancet study cited by the Guardian put the yearly death toll from heat and cold in Europe at 407,000! This is an enormous figure but it is just a portent of what is to come; it will only get worse.

And in the United States, home of Trump and MAGA, just this year we have seen the Los Angeles mega fire and the recent Texas floods (which killed some 200 people). And the Colorado River basin, on which so many states depend, is drying up as the snow melt reduces and cities in the area keep growing. Furthermore, extremely destructive cyclones are now a regular occurrence.

Change the system

Clearly we can’t go on like this. The wheels are falling off the world capitalist system. If we don’t effect a drastic change of direction, the human race faces decimation if not complete annihilation.

The Israeli-US genocide in Palestine and the refusal of Western governments to decisively break with Israel has shown millions of people around the world the utter depravity of our political leaders.

We need to resist the imperialist war drive against Russia and China. Military expenditure needs to be cut to the bone.

We also need drastic and urgent action on climate change. People are resisting but it is clear that there can be no solution under capitalism. To save our world and its people we need public ownership and control of all the key elements of the economy. We cannot move forward while the huge corporations control the means of production, distribution and exchange upon which we all depend. They must be removed as economic (and political) actors.

What warped the minds of America's serial killers? New book argues it's not what you think

LEAD POISONING 

Kate Yoderand
Grist.org

June 16, 2025 | 

When Ted Bundy was a child in the 1950s, he hunted for frogs in the nearby swamps in Tacoma, Washington. The young Gary Ridgway, the future Green River Killer, grew up just a short drive north. Both men went on to become prolific serial killers, raping and mutilating dozens of women, starting in the 1970s and ’80s. These types of sociopaths are exceedingly rare, representing less than a tenth of 1 percent of all murderers by some accounts. Yet in Tacoma, they were surprisingly common — and there were more than just Bundy and Ridgway.

In her new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser maps the rise of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest to the proliferation of pollution. In this case, the lead- and arsenic-poisoned plume that flowed from Asarco’s metal smelter northwest of Tacoma, which operated for almost a century and polluted more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound area, the source of the famous “aroma of Tacoma.”

Fraser grew up in the 1970s on Mercer Island, connected to Seattle by a floating bridge with a deadly design, not far from a terrifying lineup of serial killers. George Waterfield Russell Jr., who went on to murder three women, lived just down the street, a few years ahead of Fraser at Mercer Island High School. (No surprise, his family once lived in Tacoma.) She had always thought the idea that the Pacific Northwest was a breeding ground for serial killers was “some kind of urban legend,” she told Grist.

But after much time spent staring at pollution maps, and looking up the former addresses of serial killers, she came up with an irresistible hypothesis: What if lead exposure was warping the minds of the country’s most harrowing murderers? In Murderland, Fraser makes a convincing case that these killers were exposed to heavy metal pollution in their youth, often from nearby smelters and the leaded gasoline that was once burned on every road in the country.

Studies have shown that childhood lead exposure is connected to rising crime rates, aggression, and psychopathy. In children, it can lead to behavior that’s been described as cruel, impulsive, and “crazy-like”; by adulthood, it’s been linked to a loss of brain volume, particularly for men. Fraser doesn’t pin sociopathy solely on exposure to lead, though she suggests that it’s a key ingredient.

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps deliveries, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect,” Fraser writes. “Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma?”

Fraser is a fan of true crime, but when writing the book, she tried to correct for what she sees as the genre’s problems, she said. Biographers often zoom in on a killer in isolation, like Ted Bundy or the Zodiac killer, and he comes off as some kind of mastermind. In Fraser’s telling, with all their deprived murders placed side-by-side, these killers seem patterned, almost predictable. “It was also revealing to see that they’re not only not as smart as we may have thought they were after Hollywood got through with them, but that their behavior is so similar,” she said. “Like, they’re almost kind of automatons, where their behavior’s very robotlike.”

Fraser draws a parallel between murderers as we normally understand them and more indirect killers, the book’s true arch-villain: smelting companies and the people profiting off them, like the famous Guggenheim family that acquired Asarco. In 1974, officials at Asarco’s Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg, Idaho, did a back-of-the-napkin estimate and found that poisoning 500 children with lead had a legal liability of merely $6-7 million, compared to the $10-11 million they’d make by increasing lead production. So the choice was easy.

“The behavior of the people who built these smelters, invested in them, ran them, continued to emit tons of lead and arsenic into the air in populated cities — I mean, it’s beyond astonishing, what they did,” she said. Take Dr. Sherman Pinto, the medical director at the Tacoma smelter, who claimed that the lung cancer deaths among workers were simply because of pneumonia. “It just struck me how much their behavior is comparable to that of serial killers, because they’re constantly lying,” Fraser said.

Beyond the Pacific Northwest, the book follows the depraved behavior of Dennis Rader in Kansas in the 1970s and 1980s, and Richard Ramirez in California in the 1980s — both of whom also grew up near smelting. Even London’s famous Jack the Ripper was probably poisoned by the lead smelting boom in the 19th century, driven by demand for paint. Yet Murderland focuses on Washington state for a reason. When Fraser looked at the Washington Department of Ecology’s map of lead and arsenic contamination, she saw four plumes: The fallout from Asarco’s Tacoma smelter, another smelter plume in Everett, former orchard lands in central Washington that were sprayed with lead arsenate as a pesticide, and a cleanup site on the upper Columbia River.

“Every one of those plumes, including the most remote and least populated site on the Columbia, has hosted the activities of one or more serial rapists or murderers,” Fraser notes. (Israel Keyes, the serial killer and necrophiliac, grew up downriver from the Trail smelter in British Columbia.)

Leaded gas was fully phased out in the United States by 1996, and metal smelters have largely been decommissioned for financial reasons. But the legacy of lead remains with us. A recent experiment found that about 90 percent of toothpastes tested contained lead; a few weeks ago, the supermarket chain Publix recalled baby food pouches after product testing detected lead contamination. Last year, the Biden administration issued a regulation requiring drinking water systems across the country to replace lead pipes within 10 years, but the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress are trying to roll back these protections.

“Regardless of whether you agree with my connection between lead exposure and serial killers, I do think people really need to be aware that that was a huge part of our history, and it’s still out there,” Fraser said. “I hope that this book does something to help people make connections between where they live, and what they might be exposed to, and what that might mean.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/murderland-caroline-fraser-serial-killers-pacific-northwest-lead-pollution/.


Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

PARAPSYCHOLOGY

Is the London Underground haunted? TfL reveals recent 'ghost' sighting on the Tube

Ross Lydall
Sat 25 January 2025 



Are there any ghosts on the Tube?

It may seem an improbable question, but a recent sighting has been reported on the Metropolitan line.

Transport for London has been searching its records for sightings of ghosts, spirits, ghouls, poltergeists and banshees on the London Underground – in fact anything that may qualify as part of the “paranormal”.

It follows one of the most unusual freedom of information requests received by TfL.

One unnamed person asked TfL to publish “any reports of paranormal activity at Tube, DLR, London Overground, Elizabeth Line and Tram locations made to TfL since January 1, 2022”.
ADVERTISEMENT


The request, which was submitted on January 2, also requested the name of the station nearest to any sightings – and “a copy of any internal staff logbooks/documents for ghost sightings at the Aldgate East station”.

Aldgate East station, which is served by the Hammersmith and City and District lines, opened on October 6, 1884 – eight years after nearby Aldgate station.

Aldgate East was moved a short distance in 1938 to solve signalling problems associated with the track curving sharply as it approached the station.

The reason for the interest in Aldgate East could be its close proximity to the area where the five “Jack the Ripper” murders took place in the East End, four years after the station’s opening.

In her reply to the request, Gemma Jacob, TfL’s senior FOI case officer, said: “I can confirm that we hold some of the information you require.
ADVERTISEMENT


“We have carried out a keyword search of all London Underground incident reports over the requested timeframe using the following words: ghost, paranormal, spirit, apparition, ghoul, phantom, poltergeist, banshee.

Aldwych station is one of the London Underground's fabled ‘ghost stations’

“The search returned 156 results, but only one of them related to paranormal activity.

“This related to a distressed 15-year-old boy at King’s Cross on the Metropolitan line in December 2023, who also mentioned that he had seen ghosts.

“The remainder of results were records talking about being in ‘good spirits’ (typically a customer or train driver after an incident) or spirit as in alcohol (customers who were intoxicated/carrying a bottle of spirit).”

During the construction of the lines and tunnels that form the modern-day Underground it is known that cemeteries and plague pits were disrupted.

Many construction workers and passengers have died on the Tube – adding to suspicions that it is haunted.

There are a number of “ghost stations” on the Tube network.

These include Down Street, which is located in Mayfair on the Piccadilly line between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner.

It closed in 1932, after just 25 years of use, and was used during the Second World War as a secret bunker for Winston Churchill and the War Cabinet.

The British Museum station, on the Central line, closed in 1933 when Holborn station was expanded.

But construction workers have reported seeing the ghost of Amen-Ra, or Amun-Ra, an ancient Egyptian princess, who is said to wander the tunnels at night wearing a loin cloth and headdress.

Other “ghost” stations include Aldwych, which closed in 1994, and Dover Street, which has been incorporated into Green Park station.

At Aldgate, “paranormal activity” has reportedly been traced back more than 100 years. This includes the ghosts of three young girls from the Sullivan family who died in fire while at home in Aldgate in 1896.

More recently, a track worker who survived being electrocuted in 2000 was said by a colleague to have been comforted by the ghost of an elderly women as he lay injured.

As part of its response to the FoI request, TfL also searched its customer contact centre database and found an average of 30 results per month - meaning there are likely to be more than 1,000 cases that would need to be reviewed to check whether they contain anything relevant.

“From previous similar searches it is likely that the majority of these will relate to reports of phantom/ghost Oyster card charges,” Ms Jacob said.

She said that such a search would exceed the £450 FoI limit on how much TfL is permitted to spend answering a FoI request.

She added: “We do not have any reports of paranormal activity on our Trams, Elizabeth line, DLR, or London Overground services.”

Ms Jacobs said that TfL did not have internal staff logbooks/documents of “ghost sightings” at Aldgate East.

Trump’s Victory Is a Despicable Reflection of the American Character

More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster.

Dan Dinello
Nov 21, 2024

Informed Comment

Reelecting the Insurrectionist who provoked the January 6 attack is a monumental dereliction of civic duty by the American people. Donald Trump was provided a plurality mandate—enough of a match for him to burn America down.

The electorate affirmed that the worst human being to hold the presidency deserves a second turn in the job. Despite Trump being eight years older and obviously losing his mind; despite the fact that he ran a corrosive campaign on naked malevolence; and despite his having promised to mass arrest, cage, and deport immigrants, Americans rewarded him with ultimate power.

Toward the end of the 2024 election, the candidates made their closing arguments. Trump painted the United States as a dark, terrifying and infested place, festering with pet-eating immigrants, violent criminals, and deviant trans people. America was a savage hellscape where good, “normal” Americans were forgotten as their white, heterosexual world was reshaped by Democrats into something alien and repulsive.

In 2020, we believed that we had broken with history, with the Trump era; in 2024, it is apparent that history has broken some part of us.

Trump stoked conspiracy theories and promised vengeance. He mused about reporters being shot, mimed oral sex with a microphone, spewed racist lies, and threatened to order the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself. None of this prevented his popularity from expanding in multiple electorates across the country; it may have even facilitated his success.

Vice President Kamala Harris articulated a hopeful future. Positioning herself as a moderate, Harris expressed a willingness to work with her political opponents. She embraced diversity and promised to better the lives of all Americans. The electorate was offered a choice between a mainstream Democrat and a candidate running the most openly fascist campaign ever undertaken by a major-party nominee for president. They chose the latter.

Voters who cast their ballots for Trump engaged in contemptible behavior, turning amoral, unserious about governing, and proving themselves undeserving of our constitutional legacy. More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster.

Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be minimized as the result of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the successful con of 100,000 voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters decisively chose Trump. The autocrat, who has grown more belligerent and maniacal over the years, is now is a maniac with a mandate.

Time and again, we hear the wild lies Trump‘s voters believe, such as babies being aborted after birth. We act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. The media often portrays this gullible crowd as woefully misunderstood: If only Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. That’s a myth no one should believe. They are not congenitally ignorant. They chose to close their eyes to reality.

Autocracies thrive on befuddled, ill-informed populations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant, a liar. If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was terrible, then Harris was the right candidate. With a long career as a prosecutor, she’s taken on perpetrators of all kinds: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “I know Donald Trump’s type.” She was the prosecutor who would defeat the felon. The voters heard her case, and they found for the defendant. America knew his type, too, and liked it.

Many thought women would rise up in defense of bodily autonomy. And they did, but not enough. Abortion was less of a key issue than expected. Harris did win the support of 54% of women, lower than President Joe Biden’s 57% in 2020. No group of voters was more loyal to Trump than white men. He managed to drive up what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base. Male voters—terrified or resentful of women—bought into Trump’s regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright.

Despite enthusiastic crowds and the endorsement of high profile celebrities, antagonism or apathy undermined Harris: Over 7 million Biden voters did not vote for her. Trump likely won as a result. Currently, Harris has received 74 million votes, while Biden obtained over 81 million votes. Some may have even voted for Trump, who increased his 2020 vote total by over 2 million, up to 76 million. The anti-Trump coalition failed to sustain their 2020 outrage. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Julia Roberts lost to Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Joe Rogan.

Voting in 2020 was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Though Joe Biden provoked little passion, his campaign felt like the culmination of a liberation movement. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, was blunted for Harris. In a 2016 essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” Masha Gessen wrote, “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock and outrage,” otherwise apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the weather.

Defusing Trump outrage and hanging over the election was the festering political wound that was Democratic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The slaughter and starvation of Palestinians—funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media—has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction, some voted for Jill Stein, many stayed home.

Harris loyally lined up behind the despicable and unpopular blank-check policy of Biden, which demoralized the party’s base and threatened its chances in Michigan. As the carnage continued and expanded, furious Arab American and Muslim voters determined to punish the party by making it lose. It appears to have worked: Trump captured Michigan partly thanks to a shocking, winning margin in Dearborn, the largest majority Arab-American city.

Trump will not improve the lives of Palestinians, nor those of most Americans. It’s no secret that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported Trump over Kamala Harris. He held off on any cease-fire deal that might help Harris. Trump supported Israel’s brutal bombing campaigns in both Lebanon and Gaza and told his buddy Netanyahu ”do what you have to do.” As a “gift” to the incoming Trump administration, Netanyahu is preparing a cease-fire plan regarding its bombing of Lebanon.

Along with recriminations about Harris’s failure to at least express more remorse about the suffering in Gaza, a profusion of Democratic self-flagellation began immediately after the brutal loss. The party was too woke. Harris—the candidate who had been a magnet for joyful enthusiasm—was disparaged. She was too centrist, too un-primaried, too female, and laughed too often. She leaned too much on reproductive freedom, or gave fatally little attention to concerns about immigration.

Democrats whined further: If only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw, or if only he hadn’t mumbled something about “garbage.” Pundits opined furiously and confusingly: The campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps particularly Black men, or Latino men—or was it women? Also, Harris failed to talk enough about the kitchen-table economy and failed to address the many grievances of the working class, who are not getting their share and fear “urban” crime.

Maybe there’s a little truth in some of that, but none of it explains the magnitude of what’s happened. Despite being the best-fed, richest, and most lethally defended humans in the history of planet Earth, Americans are afraid. Despite being coddled with too much of everything: more cars, more good roads, more personal gadgets, more guns, and more freedom than any country in the world, it’s not enough. Americans are annoyed. The price of eggs went up. Gas doesn’t cost what it cost in 1989. Did America elect a dictator because Cheerios—available in about 20 flavors—hit $5.29 at the grocery store?

Americans reelected a Bigot who promotes hatred and division and who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public. They chose a man described by his own former advisers as a fascist. Voters witnessed his abuse of presidential power toward fascist ends and understood that returning him to office will immunize him legally for those abuses. Their votes affirm that conspiring to disenfranchise Americans by overturning a national election does not make someone unfit for national office—even if that someone is already plotting to do it again. There’s no way to rationalize an outright Trump victory except as a despicable reflection of the American character.

As president, Trump will likely issue shock and awe executive orders that will activate some form of Trump’s MAGA-pleasing deportation threat. The logistics of a nationwide mass kidnapping of millions of “illegals,” who are “poisoning the blood” of America are unclear. Trump confirmed last Monday that his plan for mass deportations will involve a national emergency declaration and the military. If street protests are mobilized, the regime—with a bloated strongman twitching for a reason to invoke the Insurrection Act—will deploy troops. The worst-case scenarios, including razor-wired concentration camps in the desert, are beyond horrifying.

Our country has been deliberately set on fire by fellow Americans. Aside from mass deportations and contempt for climate change, human rights, and gun control, Trump will appoint a more reactionary federal judiciary and assault the press. On day one, Trump will pardon the J6ers, creating a paramilitary force answerable to him. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium and include a federal government stocked with fools and jesters whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader.

Trump has already initiated a cabinet reminiscent of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German Expressionist film about an evil hypnotist who brainwashes automatons to commit murders for him. Trump’s lackeys and loyalists include a propagandist for Russia—Tulsi Gabbard—as director of national intelligence, a Fox News host and subject of sexual assault charges—Pete Hegseth—as secretary of defense, an End Times Christian Zionist—Mike Huckabee—as ambassador to Israel, and an accused statutory rapist—Matt Gaetz—as attorney general.

Somehow topping all these MAGA freaks is the anti-vaxxer—Robert F. Kennedy—nominated to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy recently commented that on its first day in power, the Trump regime will ban fluoride in water. Fluoridated water has been a favorite target of paranoid anti-communist conspiracists dating to the 1950s. In Stanley Kubrick’s vicious satireDr. Strangelove, General Jack D. Ripper explains that he avoids fluoridated water because it’s a communist plot that will sap his “precious bodily fluids.”

Trump’s nominations are meant to bolster his effort to lay waste to the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or purse strings. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt. Trump’s cabinet offers a deliberate negation or mockery of the government functions they’re supposed to administer. They are his shock troops.

Trump wants to force Senate Republicans to humiliate themselves by confirming these unqualified toadies. Republicans will not try to stop this Trump travesty or any other. On the contrary, they’ll say—and are already saying it—that they owe it to Americans to give them every stupid, destructive thing they voted for.

Having lived through the circus of Trump 1.0, the voters also affirm that they’d prefer to plunge the country back into that embarrassing prior horror: blatant corruption, blathering of state secrets, the turbo-obnoxious Trump family, freak-show personnel choices, blue-state retribution, government-by-impulse, and policy-by-tweet. Trump 2.0 will likely involve more overt and impeachable crises, like flouting court orders or the Constitution. Trump’s voters are plainly willing to run the risk. Knowing now what a Trump show-presidency looks like, they’ve voted for a sequel.

The public has chosen malevolent leadership. The only consolation for the enemies within is clarity—the moral clarity of the voter’s decision is crystalline: Trump will regard his slim plurality vote margin as a “mandate” to do his worst. We hope that many of the ideas on Trump’s demented wish list will not actually come to fruition and that our democracy can once more withstand this sociopath and the lunatics who surround him. But that is just desperate, wishful thinking. As of yet, there is nothing that will break the iron grip Trump has over his cult, now joined by a plurality of Americans.

Over the past decade, opinion polls have shown Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. The United States will become a different kind of country. The lesson of this election is that the American people aren’t worthy of their Constitution. They elected a president who has never read it and who, by his behavior, holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, in contempt. Like the counter-culture hippies and anti-Vietnam radicals of the 1960s, the enemies within are rebels—strangers in a strange land, exiled inside a country many of us no longer feel fully part of.

In the midst of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Richard Nixon won a huge and depressing landslide reelection in 1972. In a stunning shift, this dark history was overturned with Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Change is always possible, but we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. In 2020, we believed that we had broken with history, with the Trump era; in 2024, it is apparent that history has broken some part of us. Acknowledging this is not surrender but a realization that the fights ahead will be formidable, but that anything is possible.




© 2023 Juan Cole

Dan Dinello is the author of Children of Men, a critical analysis of Alfonso Cuarón's visionary dystopian science fiction film masterpiece. His other books include Finding Fela: My Strange Journey to Meet the AfroBeat King—a memoir of his 1983 trip to Lagos, Nigeria, to film African musical legend Fela Kuti—and Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Dan has also contributed chapters to books about Avatar, Westworld, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Ridley Scott, and Star Trek among others.
Full Bio >