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2:00PM Water Cooler 9/12/2022 | naked capitalism

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By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Common Loon, Hamilton, New York, United States. Not to editorialize. “Wail calls from a single individual.”

* * *

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“You can’t really dust for vomit.” Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap

Biden Administration

“‘You Believe This S–t?’ Biden’s Complicated Friendship With Obama” [Politico]. “Obama figured that if Biden’s campaign failed, the former VP’s legacy and ultimately his memory would be painted by that embarrassment — as would Obama’s. Wouldn’t he want to go out on top, with the public’s final memory of him more “Medal of Freedom” than “1 percent in Iowa”? The problem, as Obama saw it, was that he couldn’t say anything like this to Biden himself, not after the way 2016 had ended. Biden hadn’t forgotten their searing 2015 White House chat about how Biden wanted to spend the rest of his life, though Obama didn’t resurface it. Surely Obama couldn’t bring the topic back up, he felt. He could tell Biden was still sure that he could have saved the country from Trump had his personal circumstances been different that year — and had Obama, and his political advisers, just gotten out of the way.” • Biden thought that? Sleepy Joe? Wow.

2022

* * *

* * *

GA: “Stacey Abrams Announces That With A Heavy Heart She Will Succeed Elizabeth II As Queen” [Babylon Bee]. • It’s funny because it’s true.

OH: “Ohio shows signs of becoming swing state again for Democrats” [The Hill]. “Ohio has been a perennial swing state, and former President Obama won it twice in 2008 and 2012. But Ohio has mostly delivered bad news for Democrats ever since, as Democrats have lost various statewide races, and former President Trump took the state in 2016 and 2020 relatively easily. Since President Biden’s loss in 2020, political observers have increasingly seen the Buckeye State as Trump territory, with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) being a notable holdout. Ryan’s strong candidacy is changing that. Polls show him in a tight race with Vance, the ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author who Trump backed in the GOP primary. Various Democratic House candidates are also showing strength — most notably Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who looked like she’d be in trouble after redistricting made her district more Republican. Kaptur is now in a toss-up race with Republican J.R. Majewski, who has come under scrutiny because he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. ‘When you look at all of the major cities across the state of Ohio, they’re all Democrat. Ohio was a swing state for a long time. I’m not convinced that it’s not a swing state at this point,’ said Derrick Clay, a former Midwest political director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ‘I know that Tim Ryan has across this state, and that’s something that I believe is the reason why he has advanced so well in his current campaign for Senate.’” • Not knowing what you said, you said it.

PA: Fetterman rally:

TX: Beto, what do you think you’re doing?

The New Yorker? Really?

2024

“DOJ will appeal judge’s decision to grant Trump’s special master request to review seized docs” [ABC]. “‘The Court hereby authorizes the appointment of a special master to review the seized property for personal items and documents and potentially privileged material subject to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege,’ [Judge Aileen Cannon] wrote.” • The press always focuses on executive privilege, never on attorney-client privilege. And the FBI Hoovered up documents covered by attorney-client privilege (and its a million-to-one they read and copied them). Why would anybody give control over a case’s documents to the people who did that?

“DOJ appeals special master ruling in Trump Mar-a-Lago probe” [Politico]. “[P]rosecutors indicated the intelligence community had halted its review of the seized materials altogether — including an assessment of whether they, or any sources and methods, had been compromised — due to ‘uncertainty’ around Cannon’s ruling.” • Somebody call a w-h-a-a-a-mbulance!

“Trump Is Caught in a Double Bind” [The Atlantic]. “Though it seems fair to say that Trump is complicating Republican midterm efforts, isolating his role in the final result in November will be impossible. But his continued hints—if anything so blunt can be called a hint—that he intends to run for president again in 2024 mean that we’ll get another chance to observe the trend. That election may not work the same way, though. Trump and his allies have already shown that they have a workaround for the broad public antipathy toward him: They’re planning to make sure he goes back to the White House, even if it means rigging the election.” • I keep going back to the notion of scale. If the Republicans run anybody else — DeSantis, Abbott — they will be running a smaller man, literally and figuratively. A man who, whatever other virtues he may have, cannot command the national stage as Trump could. No wonder the Democrats are so desperate to get rid of him.

Democrats en Déshabillé

I have moved my standing remarks on the Democrat Party (“the Democrat Party is a rotting corpse that can’t bury itself”) to a separate, back-dated post, to which I will periodically add material, summarizing the addition here in a “live” Water Cooler. (Hopefully, some Bourdieu.) It turns out that defining the Democrat Party is, in fact, a hard problem. I do think the paragraph that follows is on point all the way back to 2016, if not before:

The Democrat Party is the political expression of the class power of PMC, their base (lucidly explained by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!). ; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. . (“PMC” modulo “class expatriates,” of course.) Second, all the working parts of the Party reinforce each other. Leave aside characterizing the relationships between elements of the Party (ka-ching, but not entirely) those elements comprise a network — a Flex Net? An iron octagon? — of funders, vendors, apparatchiks, electeds, NGOs, and miscellaneous mercenaries, with assets in the press and the intelligence community.

Note, of course, that the class power of the PMC both expresses and is limited by other classes; oligarchs and American gentry (see ‘industrial model’ of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Jie) and the working class spring to mind. Suck up, kick down.

* * *

“Democratic Party spent $44 million to promote pro-Trump fascists in Republican primaries” [WSWS]. “According to the campaign finance tracker Open Secrets, Democratic Party-aligned political action committees (PACs), political groups and nonprofits have spent at least $44 million on political ads designed to boost Trump-endorsed promoters of the ex-president’s ‘stolen election’ lie and fascist politics in primary contests across the country for the US House and Senate, as well as for top positions in state governments. In a number of cases, the Democratic Party has spent significantly more on ads for these candidates than the candidates themselves. Typically, the ads present the candidates as ‘too close to Trump,’ an ostensible criticism that is actually intended to make them more attractive to Republican primary voters. The cynical calculation behind this strategy is that in the targeted states, Trump clones will be easier to beat in the November general election than less extreme Republican primary contestants. Much of the money has come from PACs like the House Majority PAC, which has close ties to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Its distribution for Republican primary Congressional races has been sanctioned and coordinated by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Many of the Republican candidates aided by the Democratic ads have long histories of extreme far-right views, while their more traditional Republican rivals have included the few incumbents who either voted to impeach Trump or supported investigations into the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Among the Republicans boosted by the Democratic ads are known coup plotters, including a number of candidates who were present at the January 6 coup attempt.” • Doubling down on the “Pied Piper” strategy…. I wonder if the DNC gives money to Putin? The same logic would seem to apply. And a profile in courage from Harris:

And speaking of moralizing:

“Socialist Kristen Gonzalez: We Defeated the Democratic Machine” [Jacobin]. “n an election year that has been a mixed bag for democratic socialists in the city and the state, Kristen Gonzalez defeated Queens Democratic Party–backed Elizabeth Crowley by more than twenty-five percentage points in the race for New York State Senate District 59. Gonzalez’s win, despite being outspent four to one by her opponent, with real estate special interests pouring additional millions into negative ad campaigns, testifies to Democratic Socialist of America (DSA)’s formidable presence in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria as well as in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Gonzalez’s victory also attests to the importance of rent control and climate infrastructure development as she joins State Senators Julia Salazar and Jabari Brisport in their efforts to pass pending legislations such as Good Cause Eviction and Build Public Renewables in Albany.”

Republican Funhouse

At least there’s a mission:

I think, in fact, that Lenin would approve. Except for the $295 fee; making party members pay for their own accoutrements is, well, more of a Nazi thing, frankly. (OTOH, Cohn considers Ukrainian operative and DNC oppo researcher Andrea Chalupa worth quote-tweeting, so take with a truckload of salts.)

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Video emerges showing Georgia Republican Party officials giving Trump-operatives access to voting machines” [WSWS]. “Notably, a week before Latham allowed the Trump-campaign hired operatives into the building, Latham testified before the Georgia Senate alongside Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. In her testimony, she claimed that ‘QR codes’ had been manipulated in order to alter vote totals and state Republican officials, including Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, were not doing enough to address ‘inadequacies’ in the vote.” • What I find tooth-grindingly frustrating in all of this is that the Latham et al., are 100% correct to focus on QR codes; they are a real weakness in the system, as I show in this post on VSAP, the Los Angeles QR code-based system of electronic voting machines. This handy diagram shows the weak points, which are inherent to the system:

The printout that the voter gets is a mere receipt. The QR code that is scanned, which is machine-readable but not human readable, is the actual ballot; that which is tabulated. So hacked software could change the ballot at any point along the voting process, and the voter would never know. However, the “election deniers” need to show more than the possiblity; they need to show the reality, the actual hack. And so far as I know, they never have. If somebody who knows the Republican fever swamp better than I do knows differently, please share. (This is why a competent Trump lawyer would have demanded to see the code the machines ran.)

#COVID19

[pounds head on desk] (1):

Granted, “could be.” Nevertheless!

[pounds head on desk] (2):

Yes, and then imagine the President who had the vaccines developed at “lightning speed” was Trump, and the person that squandered that advantage was Biden. I mean, no wonder they hate Trump.

* * *

A “historic moment”?

I wish it were. I mean, look at this potential photo op:

Not to denigrate in any way the efforts of Prather et al., which are genuinely heroic, but where’s Jill Biden? Heck, why didn’t Joe come sniffing around? How about that fossil Tony Fauci, now that he’s got some time on his hands? Their absence speaks volumes. (I think Alondra Nelson at the White House Office of Science and Technology is on the side of the angels, but for that very reason she has no influence.)

* * *

On anecdotes:


* * *

“One of Long COVID’s Worst Symptoms Is Also Its Most Misunderstood” [Ed Yong, The Atlantic]. “And despite its nebulous name, brain fog is not an umbrella term for every possible mental problem. At its core, Hellmuth said, it is almost always a disorder of “executive function”—the set of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions. These skills are so foundational that when they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses. Anything involving concentration, multitasking, and planning—that is, almost everything important—becomes absurdly arduous. “It raises what are unconscious processes for healthy people to the level of conscious decision making,” Fiona Robertson, a writer based in Aberdeen, Scotland, told me…. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated.” • As I have pointed out, this “loss of executive function” is what a significant portion of our elite will suffer as they continue to attend superspreader events. Their staff will cover for them. and the press won’t report it.

* * *

If you missed it, here’s a post on my queasiness with CDC numbers, especially case count, which I (still) consider most important, despite what Walensky’s psychos at CDC who invented “community levels” think. But these are the numbers we have.

* * *

Case Count

Case count for the United States:

Cases are undercounted, one source saying by a factor of six, Gottlieb thinking we only pick up one in seven or eight.) Hence, I take the nominal case count and multiply it by six to approximate the real level of cases, and draw the DNC-blue “Biden Line” at that point. The previous count was ~65,170. Today, it’s ~72,500 and 72,500 * 6 = a Biden line at 435,000. (Remember these data points are weekly averages, so daily fluctuations are smoothed out.) The black “Fauci Line” is a counter to triumphalism, since it compares current levels to past crises. If you look at the Fauci line, you will see that despite the bleating and yammering about Covid being “over,” we have only just recently reached the (nominal) case level of November 1, 2021, and we are very far from that of July 1, 2021. And the real level is much worse.

Lambert here: The fall in case count looks impressive enough. What the Fauci Line shows, however, is that we have at last achieved the level of the initial peak, when New York was storing the bodies in refrigerator trucks. So the endzone celebrations are, to my mind, premature. Not that anyone will throw a flag. Of course, the real story is in the charts for California and the South. See below.

Regional case count for four weeks:

Modest uptick.

The South:

The South (minus Texas and Florida):

Doing pretty well!

The West:

Wastewater

Wastewater data (CDC), September 6:

As a check, here’s national Biodata. All regions except for the West are up:

And MWRA data, ditto:

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, September 9:

1.4%.

Transmission

NOTE: I shall most certainly not be using the CDC’s new “Community Level” metric. Because CDC has combined a leading indicator (cases) with a lagging one (hospitalization) their new metric is a poor warning sign of a surge, and a poor way to assess personal risk. In addition, Covid is a disease you don’t want to get. Even if you are not hospitalized, you can suffer from Long Covid, vascular issues, and neurological issues. For these reasons, case counts — known to be underestimated, due to home test kits — deserve to stand alone as a number to be tracked, no matter how much the political operatives in CDC leadership would like to obfuscate it. That the “green map” (which Topol calls a “capitulation” and a “deception”) is still up and being taken seriously verges on the criminal. Use the community transmission immediately below.

Here is CDC’s interactive map by county set to community transmission. (This is the map CDC wants only hospitals to look at, not you.)

NOT UPDATED Rapid Riser data, by county (CDC), September 9:

I suppose that if case counts are indeed level, it’s likely there would be few rapid risers.

Previous Rapid Riser data:

NOT UPDATED Hospitalization data, by state (CDC), September 9:

First time in a long time I’ve seen only green. I do wonder if there’s a Labor Day effect, though; not just on the data side, but people thinking “I’m not gonna miss the family barbecue for a little ol’ cough.” So let’s see if this persists.

NOTE: Rapid Riser and Hospitalization data are updated Wednesdays and Fridays.

Variants

Lambert here: It’s beyond frustrating how slow the variant data is. I looked for more charts: California doesn’t to a BA.4/BA.5 breakdown. New York does but it, too, is on a molasses-like two-week cycle. Does nobody in the public health establishment get a promotion for tracking variants? Are there no grants? Is there a single lab that does this work, and everybody gets the results from them? Additional sources from readers welcome [grinds teeth, bangs head on desk].

NOT UPDATED Variant data, national (Walgreens), August 27:

Still no sign of BA.2.75 at Walgreens, despite its success in India and presence in Bay Area wastewater.

Variant data, national (CDC), August 20 (Nowcast off):

Still no sign of BA.2.75. I looked at all the regions, too.

BA.2.75 in Ontario and Quebec, Canada:

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Lambert here: We are seeing a drop in the death count. That suggests to me that a drop in the case count is real. (I don’t say “the” case count, because the cases we count are a fraction of the real number. It is interesting, though, that the deaths per 100,000 curve — with its curious recent flattening — has more or less the same shape as the case curve, suggesting that a “Biden Curve” would have more or less the same shape as the case count curve, as opposed to the straight line I am drawing for the current level.)

Total: 1,074,787 – 1,074,171 = 616 (616 * 365 = 224,840, which is today’s LivingWith™* number (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, thought they can talk themselves into anything. Fluctuates quite a bit, but even the low numbers are bad). I have added an anti-triumphalist black Fauci Line.

It’s nice that for deaths I have a simple, daily chart that just keeps chugging along, unlike everything else CDC and the White House are screwing up or letting go dark, good job.

Stats Watch

There are no official statistics of interest today.

* * *

The Bezzle:

Yeah, where are the web3 bros? It’s gone quiet suddenly.

The Bezzle: “‘Scary easy. Sketchy as hell.’: How startups are pushing Adderall on TikTok” [Vox]. • Ugh, but hard to get excited about TikTok after what Big Pharma and the school systems have alread done.

Tech: “Google’s ‘Rest and Vest’ Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says the CEO. It’s a Brilliant Idea” [Inc.]. “With looming recessions and inflationary pressures, there’s growing concern of slower growth and fiercer competition. At the conference, Pichai talked about TikTok and other entrants in the Chinese market. Things that they didn’t have to think about two years ago are suddenly becoming real issues for the big guns. There will be a number of solutions put in place to find efficiencies and weather this economic downtown. One of the approaches just may be a concerted effort in uncovering the resters-and-vesters and calling them out. Or getting rid of them altogether.” • If you think Google sucks now, just wait ’til the coders don’t get free lunches and massages any more.

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 48 Neutral (previous close: 44 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 42 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Sep 12 at 1:28 PM EDT. Whatever else Ukraine’s Kharkiv offensive moved, Mr. Market was not one of them.

Rapture Index: Closes down one on Civil Rights. “The lack of negative activity has downgraded this category” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 188. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.). Finally, climate. I like “maxium,” because it menas a human is reallly doing this.

The 420

“Inside Europe’s largest cannabis manufacturing facility” [Sifted]. “As the biggest manufacturing facility on the continent, and a first mover, Sassano says that Somai will be generating €7m in sales in 2023, with that figure doubling in 2024 and climbing to €35m in 2025. He says that profitability should be achievable for the company by the end of next year. The company’s already raised €22m in funding from a mix of private equity funds, family offices and angel investors, and Sassano says that he’ll be looking for banking partnerships to fund things like clinical trials and product registrations in different markets.” • Not without any power, though.

Book Nook

Wow, this is great!

The Gallery

I’m having a flashback:

A more relaxing stimulant:

An even more relaxing stimulant:

Our Famously Free Press

Errors that would be shocking in an undergraduate paper:

And correct:

Zeitgeist Watch

“A Theory of Vibe” [Glass Bead]. “What gives a vibe ‘authenticity’ is its ability to evoke—using a small number of disparate elements—a certain time, place and milieu; a certain nexus of historic, geographic and cultural forces.” • Well, at least “vibe shift” has a notionally theoretical substrate.

Police State Watch

Not to hard to spot, a thread:

Just doing their jobs:

Class Warfare

“Nurses go on strike at Twin Cities, Duluth area hospitals” [Star-Tribune]. “Picket signs and strike chants raised precisely at 7 a.m. outside 15 Twin Cities and Duluth area hospitals on Monday, where as many as 15,000 nurses walked off their jobs for three days in protest over pay and staffing levels…. Striking nurses said it was frustrating in the buildup to the strike last week to see break rooms decorated with flowers and motivational signs, and stocked with drinks and snacks for the replacements — little niceties they hadn’t received.” • Yeah, those hospital administrators are really on the ball, aren’t they?

Another win:

“Exclusive: Leaked Memo Reveals Kroger Executives Knew for Years That Most Workers Live in Poverty” [More Perfect Union]. “An explosive new document obtained by More Perfect Union reveals that supermarket giant Kroger has long been aware that its workers can’t afford basic necessities and struggle to survive. The internal presentation, titled ‘State of the Associate‘ and marked ‘confidential,’ warned Kroger executives in 2018 that hundreds of thousands of employees live in poverty and rely on food stamps and other public aid as a result of the company’s low pay. ‘Most employees are considered to be living in poverty and need State Aid as in food stamps, free school lunch, etc. just to get by,’ one slide warned. The presentation is peppered with quotes from unnamed employees that foretell the internal labor uprising that would come a few years later.”

“Meet the union leaders powering a wave of organizing at Amazon, Starbucks, Target, and more” [Business Insider]. • I just hope they don’t follow the path laid out by Black Lives Matter. Focusing on “leaders” (dread word) will do that.

News of the Wired

The Man from U.N.C.I.A.L.–


* * *

Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From MK:

MK writes: “Backyard rose bush, mid-Willamette Valley (Oregon). Early July. Misumena vatia. Common name: goldenrod crab spider or goldenrod flower spider (they can be white or golden in color). These spiders don’t spin webs, they hunt in flowers by lying in wait. They are called crab spiders because they can skitter side-to-side as well as forwards and backwards. In the infra-red spectrum the markings on their sides mimic flower parts that help guide pollinators–so ultimate symbol manipulators, no?” Indeed!

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