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Politico’s Susan Glasser did a podcast last week with Max Boot and Eliot Cohen, both of whom are Republican foreign policy hawks deeply disturbed by the election of Donald Trump. But Boot is clear-eyed enough to see that the biggest damage Trump is doing probably isn’t in the foreign arena:

I think, in many ways, the damage he’s doing at home is even worse, where he’s undermining the rule of law. He’s actively obstructing justice. He’s backing—he’s lending the support of the presidency to monsters like Roy Moore. He is exacerbating race relations. He is engaging in the most blatant xenophobia, racism, and general bigotry that we have seen from the White House.

….I think the ascendancy of Trump…reveals something about the Republican grassroots…there is a lot of prejudice, racism, homophobia, all sorts of dark impulses out there, that I think were largely kept cloaked when you had leaders of the party like Mitt Romney and John McCain, who were fine individuals who did not appeal to the dark side of human nature. But Donald Trump is not a fine individual and he appeals to that dark side, and he has shown how much of the support for Republican candidates around the country is based on some of these dark impulses. And frankly, to me, it’s been unnerving. It’s been deeply disturbing as somebody who was a life-long Republican, because what I see happening is that a lot of the criticisms the Democrats have made about Republicans—and which I resisted for years—have actually been vindicated.

Policywise, Trump is mostly a standard-issue Republican. That’s never been the big reason to fear him any more than any other conservative in the White House. The two big reasons have always been:

• The chance that he’ll touch off a nuclear war, either deliberately or by accident. The odds of this are probably low: maybe around 1-2 percent. But that’s 1-2 percent higher than it would be with anyone else.
• In Boot’s words, his blatant xenophobia, racism, and general bigotry.

Boot is disgusted by Trump’s public bigotry, and finally can’t deny any longer that both Trump and the Republican Party are actively exploiting this for political gain. The sad thing here is not that it took a toxic buffoon like Trump to make this clear, but that Boot is still in a tiny minority in his own party. Most Republicans continue to deny that bigotry has anything to do with anything, despite the overwhelming evidence of two years of Trump. I wonder what it would take to get them to open their eyes?

Donald Trump denied that he would be golfing this week:

America sees you, sir pic.twitter.com/hDwNfBF01e

— Sulome Anderson (@SulomeAnderson) December 27, 2017

It’s trivial in the scheme of things, but the president pretending he’s not golfing WHEN EVERYONE CAN SEE HE’S GOLFING is representative of so much.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 26, 2017

This is hilarious, of course, but I think it’s mainly an example of who Trump is addressing when he speaks. He’s not really speaking to the press, or to you and me, or to anyone on Capitol Hill. He’s speaking to his fans. They won’t see him golfing, and newspapers won’t splash it on the front page, and Fox News won’t cover it. So tomorrow or the next day Trump will tweet about how the lying media says he was golfing, and his fans will believe him.

But what about the rest of us? That’s the funny thing. I suspect that Trump likes the fact that we all know he’s lying. He wants us to know that he can say anything he wants and there’s nothing we can do about it. To him, that’s a sort of power that he enjoys showing off.

This is a fountain at Trafalgar Square. I took this picture with a moderately long shutter speed (1/4 of a second), which provides a little bit of velvet but with enough detail to still see the water spouts clearly. I took both longer and shorter exposures, and this was the one I liked best. Maybe someday I’ll put them all up in a gallery and you can decide which look you prefer.

Yesterday’s big social media event was a series of tweets from supermodel Chrissy Teigen, who was on board an ANA flight to Tokyo when it suddenly turned around and headed back to Los Angeles. The reason, it turned out, was a manifest problem: the plane had two passengers who shouldn’t have been on board. One was supposed to be on a United flight and the other on a different ANA flight.

They keep saying the person had a United ticket. We are on ANA. So basically the boarding pass scanner is just a beedoop machine that makes beedoop noises that register to nowhere

— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) December 27, 2017

Quite so, except that this applies to both passengers. If the boarding passes were scanned, they should have immediately flagged the passengers. So what happened?

Also, what seats did they sit in? Did their assigned seats on the other flights just happen to be open on this flight? Did they get into an argument with anyone about whose seat was whose? Shouldn’t that have tipped someone off?

I don’t really care that much about the celebrity tweets, but I am curious about how this happened. Between the scanner, the boarding pass check at the airplane door, and the likelihood of a seat conflict, it sure seems like this shouldn’t be able to happen even once, let alone twice. The explanation, when we eventually get it, should be fascinating.

Guess what? There’s another lead-crime study out! You can feel the excitement, can’t you?

But this time there’s a twist: it’s a prospective study of data from Dunedin, New Zealand’s fourth-largest city, and the accompanying press release says bluntly, “We found no clear indication that lead was related to crime.” Now, this is not something to get immediately exercised about. Crime has lots of causes and the data is noisy, and there’s no guarantee that every study of every country at every time will produce strong correlations. Unfortunately, that blunt statement in the press release seems to be taking the place of reading and understanding what the study actually says. As it turns out, I think it supports the lead-crime hypothesis fairly well. Unfortunately, as you might expect, it will take me a while to explain. So settle in.

As preface, take a look at the two charts below from Rick Nevin. The black lines show the trend of blood lead levels in young children for both New Zealand and the United States:

The main thing to note is that BLLs peaked at around 15 in New Zealand.¹ By contrast, BLLs were above 15 for nearly 30 years in America, peaking at about 23. This suggests that lead levels were relatively low in New Zealand, and therefore the correlation with crime rates is likely to be weaker than it is here.

However, the importance of this isn’t so much in the average BLLs, but in the tails of the distribution. The most likely future criminals, after all, are the small percentage with the highest BLLs. Here’s the distribution in Dunedin:

This is for a cohort of kids born in 1973. Of the 553 children in the study, 15 percent had BLLs above 15 and about 5 percent were above 20. By comparison, in the late 70s—which is roughly the same birth cohort—the federally-sponsored NHANES study showed that about 65 percent of American preschoolers had BLLs above 15 and 25 percent were above 20. In other words, five times as many American kids had extremely high BLLs as Dunedin kids.² Since most crime is committed by a fairly small number of people at the most antisocial end of the bell curve, this is a critical comparison. And what it says is that crime in Dunedin will be less affected by lead than crime in the United States.

With that out of the way, what do the authors of the Dunedin study find? Their primary analysis compares BLLs with later convictions for criminal offenses. Here’s their conclusion (with some ellipses that I’ll get to later):

Criminal conviction was more prevalent and more frequent at higher BLLs: 8 of 33 participants (24.2%) with a BLL of 5 µg/dl or less had a criminal conviction compared with 24 of 82 participants (29.3%) with a BLL above 15 µg/dl….Logistic regression models supported the positive association between BLL and conviction….Specifically, each 5-µg/dl-higher BLL was significantly associated with a 1.29 increase in the odds of criminal conviction….When comparing offenders who recidivated with nonoffenders, each 5-µg/dl-higher BLL was significantly associated with a 1.28 increase in the odds of being a recidivating offender.

The study also includes data from interviews in which the kids were asked about criminal offenses. Here’s a chart of their basic results:

The children in the study were interviewed at various ages and asked if they committed any offenses in the previous year. For every age from 15-26 (the prime years for crime commission), the kids with higher BLLs reported committing more crimes. In some cases the trendline is fairly steep (age 15) and in others it’s fairly flat (age 21), but it always goes up.

In other words, everything came out the way you’d expect. Both conviction and self-reported crime rose with higher BLLs, and in almost all cases the association was statistically significant. So what’s the problem?

Just this: the authors also chose to report results “adjusted for male sex.” This is unusual, so I asked lead author Amber Beckley about it. “We did this because males tended to have higher average blood lead levels than females,” she told me, which suggests something might be a little skewed with the sample. (You can see the sex difference in one of the charts above.) In any case, when they made this adjustment, the associations weakened slightly and, more importantly, they lost statistical significance at the usual p < 5 percent level. But this says more about the tyranny of p values than it does about lead. In one case, for example, they report a p of 4.6 percent, and that’s statistically significant. In another case, they report a p of exactly 5 percent and that’s not statistically significant. This is correct in a hypertechnical way, but in the real-world there’s little difference between the two. If you report a correlation of lead with crime at the 5 percent level—and they do—there’s really no reason to pretend that the effect has suddenly gone away. For practical purposes, then, here’s what the study concludes:

1. Using the unadjusted figures, there’s a clear association of lead levels with both self-reported offenses and criminal convictions later in life. Both are statistically significant.
2. Using the adjusted figures, there’s a clear association of lead levels with later criminal convictions, and the association is effectively statistically significant. The size of the association (1.29 increase per 5-µg/dl-higher BLL) isn’t huge, but it’s plenty clear. I don’t think it’s too far off the results of the famous Cincinnati prospective study, especially when you account for Dunedin’s generally lower lead levels and generally higher socioeconomic levels.
3. Using the adjusted figures, there’s a clear association of lead levels with self-reported offenses, but the statistical significance is poor.

The only weak result is the third one, and it doesn’t suggest that the lead-crime hypothesis is wrong. In fact, it suggests it’s right. It’s just not very sure of itself. The bottom line, as near as I can tell, is that the Dunedin study mostly supports the lead-crime hypothesis, but at a modest level that’s consistent with New Zealand’s fairly low lead poisoning levels.

Finally, a note about one oddly intriguing finding in the study: the authors find a strong correlation of lead with nonviolent crime but not with violent crime. This is the opposite of what most other studies have found, and it’s a little hard to explain. I suppose it’s possible that small increases in lead produce more property crime but it takes bigger increases to produce more violent crime. That’s just rank speculation, though. Alternatively, given the smallish sample size, it might be nothing more than one of those weird effects you sometimes get. I just don’t know.

Generally speaking, though, I’d say the study provides modest evidence of an association between lead and crime, and that’s about what I’d expect. Despite what the press release says, there’s not much here for me to complain about.

¹As always, blood lead levels are measured in micrograms per deciliter, or µg/dl.

²This is actually a difficult comparison to make. The NHANES study took blood samples of preschoolers, which is the best methodology since that’s the age when kids are most susceptible to lead poisoning. The Dunedin study relies on a single blood sample at age 11, so it’s not clear how high BLLs were at at preschool age. I think it’s safe to say that high BLLs were much more prevalent in America, but whether it’s really 3x or 4x or 5x is a bit of a guess.

Sebastian Willnow/DPA via ZUMA

The LA Times reports that nursing homes are cesspools of infection:

A Kaiser Health News analysis of four years of federal inspection records shows 74% of nursing homes have been cited for lapses in infection control — more than for any other type of health violation. In California, health inspectors have cited all but 133 of the state’s 1,251 homes. Although repeat citations are common, disciplinary action such as fines is rare: Nationwide, only 1 of 75 homes found deficient in those four years has received a high-level citation that can result in a financial penalty, the analysis found.

So what are we doing about it?

The Trump administration is scaling back the use of fines against nursing homes that harm residents or place them in grave risk of injury, part of a broader relaxation of regulations under the president. The shift in the Medicare program’s penalty protocols was requested by the nursing home industry. The American Health Care Association, the industry’s main trade group, has complained that under President Barack Obama, federal inspectors focused excessively on catching wrongdoing rather than helping nursing homes improve.

The nursing home lobby says that reducing regulations will free up loads of time to provide better care for patients. Please raise your hand if you are gullible enough to believe this.

I was puttering around this morning looking at the latest price for bitcoin, and I happened to switch over from a chart of closing prices to a box-and-whisker plot. Here’s what it looks like:

Two things jump out at me. First, trading this week—and for the past month—has been wildly variable. Over the course of just a few days, bitcoin trades have ranged from $10,000 to $16,000. That’s a huge range, and suggests quite a bit of trading friction.

Second, for four straight weeks the low trade has been at precisely $10,000. What’s up with that? Does it have something to do with the start of futures trading on December 10?

Last week’s “California Christmas” theme was kind of a bust. It was way too much work for too little payoff. Live and learn, I guess

So let’s go back to Europe for this picture of a holly bush in Kew Gardens. I figure I’d better use it now before the holiday season is over for good. Otherwise I’ll have to wait another 12 months, and there’s no telling what can happen in 12 months, is there?

Jonah Goldberg:

Contrary to what many predicted, President Trump’s end-of-year accomplishment list isn’t that skimpy. That’s an analytical observation. For many, particularly liberals and Democrats, Trump’s first year hasn’t been merely bad. It’s a great evil, a grievous wound to the American body politic. But even that is a kind of partisan tribute to what’s been accomplished on his watch: A record number of judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice, the defeat of Islamic State, repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate, tax reform and major rollbacks of various regulations, from arctic drilling to Net Neutrality.

This has become a standard meme on the right, but Goldberg argues that most of Trump’s accomplishments are really just Republican Party accomplishments, and I think that’s the right way to judge him. Has Trump accomplished any more than any other Republican with control of Congress would have? First, let’s make some lists:

Trump Accomplishments:

• Regulatory rollbacks
• Paris treaty
• Judges
• Tax bill
• Individual mandate
• Moving American embassy to Jerusalem

Trump Failures (so far, at least):

• The wall
• Repealing Obamacare
• Immigration order
• Infrastructure
• Deficit reduction
• Blue-collar jobs
• NAFTA

No Trump Influence:

• Economy
• War against ISIS

This covers most of the concrete, big-ticket items. Of Trump’s accomplishments, any Republican president would have done most of them. However, President Cruz might not have withdrawn from the Paris Treaty and probably wouldn’t have moved the embassy, so I’d give Trump points for those.

On the failures, most Republicans wouldn’t even have bothered with most of them. However, it’s quite possible that a less chaotic White House could have provided the leadership needed to repeal Obamacare. This is a guess, but I think President Cruz might very well have succeeded.

Finally, both the economy and the war against ISIS have followed the course set over the past couple of years. Trump has neither helped nor hindered either one.

So from a conservative point of view, you have two symbolic victories from Trump (Paris and Jerusalem) and one big concrete loss (Obamacare). Policywise, Trump is obviously better than Hillary, but he’s probably worse than any other Republican would have been.

But what about the less concrete side of Trump? After all, his policies were never all that different from any other Republican. He just talked a lot more shit than the rest of them. So how has that worked out?

Badly, I’d say. Trump has alienated Europe and NATO. His public acts of racism have probably tarred the party for years. His tweets have gotten tiresome even to a lot of his supporters. His administration is facing a major corruption and collusion investigation that started four months after he was inaugurated. He’s been rather obviously played by China’s president. The middle class is going to figure out pretty quickly that his tax bill doesn’t do much for them. He’s doing his best to undermine the FBI, something that’s eventually going to rebound against him and his enablers in the party. His inner circle plainly doesn’t trust him with nuclear weapons. He’s made your demographic problems even worse than they used to be. His job approval rating is at a historic low for a first-year president. Republicans are facing a potentially huge wave against them in the 2018 midterms.

So to Republicans I’d say: you haven’t gotten anything that any other Republican president wouldn’t have delivered—maybe less, in fact—and you’ve taken on an enormous amount of baggage in the meantime. Trump has been a pretty obvious loser for your party.

And to Democrats I’d say: As bleak as things seem, you really shouldn’t buy the spin that Trump’s accomplishments have been world-historically terrible. He hasn’t rolled back all that many regulations so far (mostly just ones that passed in the final year of Obama’s presidency and hadn’t even gone into effect yet). Tax cuts don’t do much harm and can be changed pretty easily down the road. The Paris Treaty was nonbinding and mostly symbolic. The repeal of the individual mandate hurts, but probably less than CBO thinks. The embassy move is unlikely to have much effect since there hasn’t been any peace process to damage for the past two decades. ANWR isn’t as big a deal as a lot of liberals make it out to be. Ditto for Keystone XL. Relations with Europe can be repaired.

At a policy level, that leaves judges. That’s a big deal, and it could become an even bigger deal if Trump gets to replace a liberal Supreme Court justice. But really, that’s about it—aside from Trump turning America into a laughingstock, of course, and making open racism and xenophobia acceptable once again. But those can be repaired too.

And on the bright side, Trump hasn’t gotten America involved in a massive, pointless land war in the Middle East like the last Republican president. So far, anyway.

The Wall Street Journal reports that holiday retail sales were up:

Fueled by high consumer confidence and a robust job market, U.S. retail sales in the holiday period rose at their best pace since 2011, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which tracks both online and in-store spending. Sales, excluding automobiles, rose 4.9% from Nov. 1 through Christmas Eve, compared with a 3.7% gain in the same period last year, according to the Mastercard Inc. unit, which tracks all forms of payment.

….“It started with a bang in the week leading up to Black Friday,” said Sarah Quinlan, a senior vice president of marketing insights at Mastercard….“Overall, this year was a big win for retail,” Ms. Quinlan said.

Let’s find out how we really did. Adjusted for inflation, holiday sales are up 2.7 percent compared to 2 percent last year. That’s a little less impressive than the nominal numbers. Here’s how that compares to sales growth during the first ten months of the year:

So retail sales in 2017 were up 2.6 percent through October and 2.7 percent during the holiday season. In other words, the holiday season was nothing special.  However, the full-year figures are very impressive: growth of about 2.6 percent compared to about 0.5 percent last year. If you’re looking for some Christmas cheer, that’s the comparison to look at.

Now to find out how much of this was just a runup in credit card debt. We won’t have figures on that until next year.