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2:00PM Water Cooler 10/12/2022

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By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Blue Nuthatch, Fraser’s Hill, Pahang, Malaysia. “Foraging or eating.” And loudly, too!

* * *

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

“The logic of the insult and the logic of scientific classification represent the two extreme poles of what a classification may be in the social world.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

Biden Administration

“Why Biden’s SEC chief is enraging Wall Street” [Politico]. “The rules that Gensler is spearheading would revamp the stock market’s plumbing, partly in response to the 2021 meme stock saga in which Robinhood and other brokerages attracted scrutiny after they were overwhelmed by trading in shares of companies such as GameStop and AMC. Gensler, who has held leading regulatory roles in the Biden and Obama administrations, has questioned whether investors are operating in an environment that is ‘as fair and competitive as possible.’ He is expected to crack down on the complex web of payments and fees that exchanges, brokerages and trading firms share when processing investors’ stock trades. While the proposals have yet to be released, industry executives have already begun talking about suing the SEC over the plans. And a growing number of Hill Democrats are urging Gensler to proceed with caution, signaling a potentially treacherous political road ahead even among members of his own party — one that will become even more fraught if Republican critics gain a majority in Congress. ‘We have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater,’ Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.” • Wow, shocking behavior from Democrats.

2022

* * *

“Democrats shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms. That’s a mistake” [Bernie Sanders, Guardian]. “But, as we enter the final weeks of the 2022 midterm elections, I am alarmed to hear the advice that many Democratic candidates are getting from establishment consultants and directors of well-funded Super Pacs that the closing argument of Democrats should focus only on abortion. Cut the 30-second abortion ads and coast to victory…. n poll after poll Republicans are more trusted than Democrats to handle the economy – the issue of most importance to people. I believe that if Democrats do not fight back on economic issues and present a strong pro-worker agenda, they could well be in the minority in both the House and the Senate next year…. None of what I am suggesting here is “radical”. It is, in fact, extremely popular. It is what the American people want. If we close this critical midterm campaign with a clear, unified vision to meet the needs of working families, to take on corporate greed, and protect a woman’s right to choose, we will begin to rebuild the trust between Democrats in Washington and the working families of this country. And we’ll win the election.”

“4 Weeks Out, Senate Control Hangs in the Balance in Tumultuous Midterms” [DNYUZ]. “Three states in particular — Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania — that are seen as the likeliest to change party hands have emerged as the epicenter of the Senate fight with an increasing volume of acrimony and advertising. In many ways, the two parties have been talking almost entirely past each other both on the campaign trail and on the airwaves — disagreeing less over particular policies than debating entirely different lists of challenges and threats facing the nation. Republicans have pounded voters with messages about the lackluster economy, frightening crime, rising inflation and an unpopular President Biden. Democrats have countered by warning about the stripping away of abortion rights and the specter of Donald J. Trump’s allies returning to power. Both parties are tailoring their messages to reach suburban voters, especially women, who are seen as the most prized and persuadable bloc in a polarized electorate.”

“Senate races reach new heights of nastiness in final campaign stretch” [The Hill]. “The battle for the Senate majority is turning nasty, especially in the three battle ground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, where candidates are facing a barrage of negative ads and social media attacks on their character and fitness for office. Democratic and Republican strategists as well as nonpartisan experts say the vitriol on the campaign trail has been remarkable, observing that while negative campaign tactics are nothing new, the 2022 battle for the Senate has taken it to a new level.” • All this when neither the response to a pandemic that killed a million people, or a proxy war with a nuclear power, are “centered” by “the national conversation.”

* * *

PA: Ouch!

PA: “NBC reporter sparks disability row after revealing Fetterman needed support in interview after stroke” [Independent]. And the deck: “Democrat is scheduled to debate rival Mehmet Oz on 25 October.” “A row has been sparked by NBC News after a reporter provided details about the support John Fetterman needed for a sit-down interview, as well as a comment suggesting the Democratic Senate candidate had trouble following their conversation without closed captioning. Mr Fetterman, the Democrat candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, has spent most of the summer recovering from a stroke and has only recently returned to in-person campaigning. While his campaign has made no secret of his ongoing trouble with communicating, NBC reporter Dasha Burns told viewers about the support Mr Fetterman needed for a new sit-down interview with Meet The Press, which was broadcast on Tuesday. ‘Because of that auditory processing, he still has a hard time understanding what people are saying,’ Ms Burns said, while explaining the use of closed caption technology for her interview. She added that ‘some of the conversations’ she had with the Democrat before his first sit-down interview post-stroke – which were without closed caption help – were a ‘challenge for a candidate’ and that ‘it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying’ without the use of captions. Axios’s senior political correspondent Josh Kraushaar was among those to tweet about the NBC interview with Mr Fetterman and said: ‘NBC News’ Dasha Burns: ‘In small talk before my interview [with Fetterman], it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying.'” • I’ve said that one important aspect of Fetterman’s brilliant social media campaign was to keep the press distracted; now they aren’t, and have pivoted into their familiar pull-the-wings-off-flies mode. Personally, I’d prefer a recovering stroke victim to a puppy-killing charlatan, but that’s just me. Commentary:

PA: Another view:

PA: And another:

That’s the key question. I hope Fetterman’s every-county strategy helps him, here. To the extent that voters see Fetterman as “one of us,” I think he should do OK, no matter what the weasels at the New York Times say.

PA: “Unpacking John Fetterman’s interview with NBC News” [Poynter Institute]. “Burns questioned Fetterman for not releasing his medical records. Fetterman said, “I feel like we have been very transparent in a lot of different ways. When our doctor has already given a letter saying that I’m able to serve and to be running. And then I think there’s — you can’t be any more transparent than standing up on a stage with 3,000 people and having a speech without a teleprompter and just being — and putting everything and yourself out there like that. I think that’s as transparent as everyone in Pennsylvania can see.'” • There’s no unpacking here at all; it’s just a compilation of quotes.

WI: “The Rise of Mandela Barnes” [The Nation]. “Like Fetterman, Barnes is a progressive who has broken the mold for Democrats running in the traditional battleground states of the Great Lakes region. Both candidates have made a point of fighting for votes in every county of their state, including those that backed Trump, and they are doing so with a firm embrace of working-class voters and the unions that represent them. There’s a logic to this approach. For Democrats to win in the Great Lakes battleground states, they need to run up their numbers in the big cities and college towns that are their partisan strongholds, keep their losses to a minimum in historically Republican rural areas, and renew their prospects in the midsize industrial cities and surrounding counties where Trump’s faux populism made inroads in 2016 and continues to attract support. ‘You need to make it clear to people in places like Kenosha and Racine and Oshkosh, who are worried about outsourcing and the loss of good union jobs, that the Republicans aren’t going to help them,’ says John Drew, former president of UAW Local 72 in Kenosha, where in 2010 Chrysler closed a sprawling engine plant that was once one of the state’s largest employers. ‘Mandela Barnes understands that.’ In Barnes’s case, Johnson has proved to be a perfect foil. While the Democratic challenger has emphasized his own working-class roots in his advocacy for the renewal of manufacturing, the wealthy incumbent has declared that he couldn’t care less about Wisconsin workers and their communities.”

Democrats en Déshabillé

Patient readers, it seems that people are actually reading the back-dated post! But I have not updated it, and there are many updates. So I will have to do that. –lambert

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!). It follows that the Democrat Party is as “unreformable” as the PMC is unreformable; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. If the Democrat Party fails to govern, that’s because the PMC lacks the capability to govern. (“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.

* * *

“My party left me”:

Extensive discussions of Gabbard in comments in yesterday’s Links and Water Cooler (search on “Gabbard”). I don’t have a lot to add, save that we can surely do better than “elitist cabal” as a focus for attention.

“Elvis Chan: Cyber Conduit Between FBI and Big Tech” [American Greatness]. “Democrats are once again colluding with Big Tech to censor ‘disinformation’ about the 2022 midterms. Of course, the definition of ‘disinformation’ is open to interpretation—content hostile to the regime, naturally—but the FBI’s point man on the topic recently told reporters the bureau is on the lookout for wrongthink. Elvis Chan, an assistant special agent in charge responsible for the cyber branch of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, met with reporters last week to explain the nature of potential hijinks in the November election. ‘People are trying to dispel the disinformation and misinformation that is going on; that there are things that are happening to the election. We don’t see any credible threats at this point,’ Chan told a San Francisco television reporter following an October 6 press briefing. ‘That’s not to say we aren’t monitoring them, we are.’ He should know about working with social media. According to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt against numerous government agencies and officials for conspiring with media companies to silence free speech, Chan was one of two FBI agents who urged Facebook officials to censor content related to Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election. ‘Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta [Facebook’s parent company] has identified—Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,’ Schmitt wrote. (The other agent was Laura Dehmlow, a section chief for the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, another politically-motivated operation created by FBI Director Christopher Wray in 2017.) Both Chan and Dehmlow are defendants in the lawsuit.” • I hate to quote American Greatness on anything, but since there’s radio silence on this story everywhere else…. Here we are!

Republican Funhouse

“The Origins of the G.O.P. Tactic of Sending Migrants to Blue States” [New York Times]. “In the fall of 2018, President Donald J. Trump was pushing aides on an idea he wanted to carry out on the border — transporting undocumented immigrants to so-called sanctuary cities…. The idea never advanced in the Trump administration, in part because of legal concerns. But four years later, three Republican governors have brought it to visceral life, busing and flying thousands of migrants — not just criminals — from the border and dropping them off in Martha’s Vineyard, New York City and other Democratic-leaning areas…. The former president’s influence on the Republican Party can be measured not only in the electoral victories and losses of the candidates he endorses but also in the nativism that has come to define the party’s immigration politics. The Republican governors of Arizona, Florida and Texas turned an abandoned Trumpian notion into action, inspired by his hard-line immigration policies as well as his taste for a combative style of political theater.” • I must confess that I don’t share the liberal Democrat aghastitude at this. You want to be a sanctuary state, be a sanctuary state! What’s the issue? (Yes, using people as political props is bad, and also a universal practice.)

Realignment and Legitimacy

“The Belligerent” [The Baffler]. “[Angelo] Codevilla was an idiosyncratic figure: a working-class immigrant son of Fort Lee, New Jersey; a professor, vintner, and rancher; a political theorist of the “West Coast Straussian” school; a Hill intelligence staffer and ultra-hawkish foreign policy analyst; an early adversary of what his allies would eventually call the “deep state”; a translator of Machiavelli; a prominent critic from the right of the Bush administration’s War on Terror; a late-life champion of populist class revolt. Yet despite this idiosyncrasy, there is a case to be made that he was the emblematic intellectual of the twenty-first-century American right—not the most famous or original intellectual, but the one whose individual trajectory most closely signaled that of the broader movement…. Angelo Codevilla, whose work prefigures the eventual populist revolt against conservative orthodoxy, gives us the story in microcosm. After 9/11, when nearly all conservative intellectuals (and many liberal ones) were rallying around the Bush administration, Codevilla was an influential and persistent critic of the administration’s waging of the War on Terror. In the wake of the Great Recession, he helped distill the critique of big government and liberal elitism into a language of class revolt in his essay-turned-book The Ruling Class, popularizing the rhetoric that today is fed nightly to viewers of Tucker Carlson’s show and other right-populist media. In 2016, he fatalistically embraced Trump before many other right-wing elites did, warning in his Claremont Review essay “After the Republic” that the old American regime was dead, leaving Trump as the only choice for conservatives to defend themselves in its aftermath.” • I found this helpful, because I didn’t come up as a conservative, and it’s hard to find a serious treatment of conservative factions — and, dare I sau, thinkers — in my milieu. Are any readers familiar with Codevilla’s work?

#COVID19

• Announcement for White House summit on indoor air quality:

How come the world’s finest public health organization isn’t running this, anyhow?

• Here is a live thread of the White House Summit:

• Here is a series of takes on the White House Summit:

Both these threads are worth reading in full.

• And the ventilation:

* * *

“Monkeypox response looks to long term” [Roll Call]. “The nation’s monkeypox response is shifting from crisis mode to a more long-term approach as the Biden administration acknowledges that it will be impossible to eradicate the virus from the country anytime soon…. The agency expects cases will likely decline and plateau over the coming weeks and months, but cautions that because cases are not declining all over the country right now, predicting long-term trends is difficult.” • Another way of putting this that CDC regards its response to Covid as a success, as evidenced by the fact that they’re doing the same thing again. And, no doubt, again, and again, and again, and again….

* * *

• Funny thing, public health announcements work:

So when CDC systematically undermines all non-pharmaceutical interventions, people listen and it works.

• A second take:

And CDC is still using the “green map.” Any fool can see how dumb it is to incorporate a lagging indicator into a metric that putatively warns of future events. If the thermostat in my house worked like this, it would have a heat gun pointed right at it. And yet CDC persists.

• Tools, indeed:

* * *

• “There’s a spike in respiratory illness among children — and it’s not just COVID” [NPR]. “The United States is seeing a significant spike in respiratory illness among children. Sick kids are crowding emergency rooms in various parts of the country, and some pediatric hospitals say they are running out of beds. But this uptick in illness has largely been due to viruses other than the coronavirus, like RSV, enteroviruses and rhinovirus. While respiratory infections typically surge in the winter months, experts say that this year the season has started much sooner, and that numbers are unusually high.”

* * *

* * *

Transmission

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.)

Lambert here: I have to say, I’m seeing more yellow and more blue, which continues to please. But is the pandemic “over”? Well….

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, October 8:

-0.9%.

Readers, please click through on this, if you have a minute. Since Walgreens did the right thing, let’s give this project some stats.

Wastewater

Wastewater data (CDC), September 24:

Lambert here: Note the dates. This is some sort of backward revision. We are now 18 days behind on wastewater data. Good job with the leading indicator, CDC.

October 4:

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].

Variant data, national (Walgreens), September 24:

First appearance of BA.2.75 at Walgreens, confirming CDC data below.

Variant data, national (CDC), September 17 (Nowcast off):

• Another variant to watch out for:

And:

Given the age of CDC (and Walgreen’s) data, the crossover in mid-October could already have occurred. Perhaps the Brain Trust would like to comment on BQ.1.1.

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Total: 1,088,471 – 1,087,976 = 495 (365 * 495 = 180,675, which is today’s LivingWith™* number (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though 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. NOTE I may need to configure this as well.

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

Inflation: “United States Producer Prices Final Demand Less Foods and Energy YoY” [Trading Economics]. “The producer price index for final demand less foods and energy in the United States rose by 7.2 percent from a year earlier in September of 2022, the same as in the prior month and below market expectations of 7.3 percent gain. It was the lowest reading since last October.”

* * *

Banking: “Ex-HSBC Trader Claims Bank Has ‘Epic’ Front-Running Problem” [Bloomberg]. “A former HSBC Holdings Plc trader sued the bank, claiming he was fired for warning management about its ‘epic’ front-running problem and confronting a colleague about trading ahead of an order for Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management. Stephen Callahan, who said he joined HSBC’s US rates trading desk as a director in 2021, claimed in a suit filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court that he witnessed ‘rampant front-running, including directives to junior traders to ‘always’ prioritize the bank’s proprietary account.'” • Epic!

The Bezzle: “Former Google ads boss launches ‘Web3’ search startup with backing from Coinbase, top VCs” [CNBC]. “Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising business from 2013 to 2018….” • Let me just stop there. Ramaswamy clearly has superior crapification skills, and so I’m sure his new venture will do very well.

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 20 Extreme Fear (previous close: 20 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 30 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Oct 6 at 12:59 PM EDT.

The Gallery

I guess that’s are wicker protective headgear… But spooky!

Groves of Academe

Stochastic eugenics:

The Screening Room

The title of Angela Lansbury’s first movie is a little too on-the-nose:

Class Warfare

“‘Dubious at best’: Railroad workers’ rejection of new contracts revives strike fears” [Politico]. “Fears of a disruptive rail strike are roaring back to life, less than a month after President Joe Biden took a highly visible victory lap for averting a pre-election economic meltdown. No strike will happen before the end of the so-called cooling-off period in late November — after the midterm elections — and negotiations are continuing between the freight railroad industry and a dozen unions. But one labor organization’s vote this week to reject a contract with the railroads threatens to undo the White House’s efforts to avert a strike — efforts that included a compromise the administration brokered Sept. 15.” • Unless there’s a wildcat strike, of course. Or sabotage.

The light bulb goes on:

Seems like Bloomberg realizes the leverage these workers have before the unions do….

“Hacked to Bits” [Eater]. “There have always been customers who asked for modifications to their orders. But contemporary hack culture — the kind where you modify your order from the get-go, not when you just take two different sandwiches and mash them together at home — oddly began proliferating because of workers. Across TikTok there are countless videos of baristas whipping up multicolored drinks with cutesy names; numerous Reddit threads chronicle tips and tricks from fast food employees. ‘I have a huge background in working in fast food and waiting tables. I waited at Denny’s, Applebee’s, Friendly’s and then fast-food places,” says JP Lambiase, co-founder of Hellthy Junk Food, a YouTube and TikTok brand that is publishing an e-book on food hacks. ‘When you work at a place you’re hacking there.'” Well, it would be nice to get paid for it. More: “But according to many workers, the proliferation of hacking culture has only made their lives harder, requiring them to know a second menu’s worth of drinks on top of the one they were actually trained on, taking up their time with more elaborate orders, and generally making things more complicated. ‘I would say about two-thirds of the drinks I would make would be a hack drink or a TikTok drink,’ says Jesse, who asked for his last name to be withheld. He has worked at Starbucks locations in Ohio and New York for just over a year, and says he’s seen the number of orders for these drinks increase while he’s been there, and that the drinks themselves have become more complicated over time. ‘I have begun to unironically dread seeing younger customers come into the store,’ he says.” • Anything that makes me wait in line while breathing other people’s air is bad. I hate these things. Just order your damn coffee and let the rest of us move along.

“Cash Is Never Neutral: A Conversation on the Politics of Money” [The Nation]. “Keynes was convinced that democratic opinion can be a powerful check on economic policies that were callous and insensitive to questions of social justice. In this role, he often stirred up public opinion in his newspaper columns and sought to direct it against the prevailing orthodoxy. But Keynes was simultaneously convinced that economic policy would have to be somehow shielded from popular opinion by at least one degree, and he questioned how deep the masses can really penetrate the finer points of economic theory. The great popular demystifier of money and economics was at the same time himself a great magician of public finance. Understanding Keynes requires one to appreciate that he was able to consciously hold on to positions that seemed to many of his friends to be in tension with one another.” • Very interesting, well worth a read, especiall as the central banksters strive to take cash away from us.

News of the Wired

“The computer errors from outer space” [BBC}. “When computers go wrong, we tend to assume it’s just some software hiccup, a bit of bad programming. But ionising radiation, including rays of protons blasted towards us by the sun, can also be the cause. These incidents, called single-event upsets, are rare and it can be impossible to be sure that cosmic rays were involved in a specific malfunction because they leave no trace behind them. And yet they have been singled out as the possible culprits behind numerous extraordinary cases of computer failure. From a vote-counting machine that added thousands of non-existent votes to a candidate’s tally, to a commercial airliner that suddenly dropped hundreds of feet mid-flight, injuring dozens of passengers.” • Oh, good.

* * *

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. Via, from dk:

dk writes: “Fruits of the forest: Blaeberry, Vaccinium myrtillus & Cowberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea”

* * *

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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76 comments

    2. nippersdad

      It really is. I would be interested in knowing how dk got all of the seasons of blueberry…ness into one picture.

      1. Expat2Uruguay

        Nippersdad, Are you thinking that the flowers in the bottom left are blueberry flowers? Because I don’t think so, they look like they’re growing on upright stalks, not dangling from blueberry bush branches

        1. nippersdad

          Those look like sprays of blueberry flowers to me. For example: logic dictates that if the flowers dangle from a stalk then the blueberries should as well. And where is the stalk from which they should be dangling? There is no room for leaves on those. They are all upright stalks, and that is not how (most?) blueberries grow.

          Also, too, an awful lot of Fall color in a picture in which blooming blueberries should have no leaves, and the blueberries, themselves, should have already been eaten by the birds. There are some blueberries that keep some of their leaves over the winter, but none bloom and fruit at the same time that those winter leaves would still be on there. Those drop just when the new leaves start to sprout after they have already bloomed.

          I may be wrong, they may be a groundcover lowbush of which I am not aware (in which case I want some for my collection!), but that looks like an arrangement to show the various seasons of blueberries, sans the time of year when they have no leaves. It is a beautiful picture, but if that is taken from nature then it is an image that has no resemblance to the blueberries we have here.

          2. tegnost

            madronas, mahonia, cranberries, blueberries, even manzanitas…
            It’s the Ericaceae family…
            I wandered all over the heath (well, the intertubes) trying to find the specific, only to see later that dk provided the id…
            I thought huckleberry at first, which sent me on the journey…

    4. LawnDart

      This may be too much work, but I would love to see wild edibles denoted as such. Up in the woods in July through August, I fed like a bear on the obvious berries, but realized I was missing so much more…

  2. Hepativore

    So, I have heard that the emergency railroad “agreement” that was touted so loudly by the media as it covered for Biden is going to blow up in his face. However, is it going to happen before the midterms or after?

    If it is the former, I am sure that more supply-chain issues are going to cause a lot of problems for the Democrats if they are not already losing control of both Congressional houses. If it is after the midterms, it would still hurt the Democrats in 2024.

    In any case, I am sure that Congress as well as Biden himself would quickly abandon the empty pro-Union rhetoric in the event of a railroad strike and order all the railroad unionists back to work after forcing a pro-corporate, one-sided contract down their throats. It would not matter if it is before or after the midterms, as it will probably be a broad, bipartisan consensus.

    A few Senators like Sanders might have misgivings, of course, but neither Congress nor the rest of the Democratic Party listens to or cares what its “progressive” members think. For all intents and purposes, Congressional detractors are usually shouting into the neoliberal void.

    2. Jason Boxman

      As Lambert pointed out when this ‘agreement’ was reached, no one bothered to show the workers. They were in the dark for at least days and days afterwards.

      I guess they finally got to see what they’d agreed to and didn’t like it.

      Telling the rapacious VC owned railroad firms to just give workers the time-off they asked for is apparently a bridge too far for the pro-worker Biden administration, eh?

    3. The Rev Kev

      Still 27 days til the elections. Can Biden keep kicking this can down the road that long? That’s an awful long time in politics.

  3. truly

    I like that the White House Clean Air tweet was “screen grabbed” when it had exactly 666 hearts. Nice work.

  5. Mikel

    “…But Keynes was simultaneously convinced that economic policy would have to be somehow shielded from popular opinion by at least one degree, and he questioned how deep the masses can really penetrate the finer points of economic theory…”

    Or he had suspicions that understanding how the sausage was made could be cause for revolution.

    Attributed to Einstein:
    “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

    1. skippy

      Sorry to be so pedantic Mikel, but, that attributed quote is used wildly out of context and usually to ascribe a false proposition. It was actually Feynman.

      Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Laureate in physics, was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin one-half particles obey Fermi Dirac statistics. Rising to the challenge, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he told the faculty member, “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”

      The quote is actually attributed to Richard Feynman and in full context means just the opposite. He said both, in different contexts. He was asked for a brief quote of what he won the Nobel for, and he said if it could be summarized in a sentence, it wouldn’t be worth the prize. But when asked to explain the spin-statistics theorem in an undergraduate lecture in the 1960s-1970s he said he couldn’t reduce it to the undergraduate level, so we don’t understand it well enough.

      This is on par with a recent link on NC LINKS ‘R** And The Funniest Thing You’ll Read All Week’ where the author states –

      “Let’s just say that the authors and I do not agree on how the world works. In fact, I am not sure anyone but a quant-heavy economist would recognize any of what is described as reality.”

      This is the reality of it all, you just can’t simplify reality and reduce it of all its complexity down so a six year old, never the less adults without stripping away critical details or aspects of it. The worst part about it is how some use miss-attribution to underpin their rhetorical thrust in shaping a narrative by interjecting a person on note to burnish it and give it a aura of truth to its audience.

      Even here at NC it has been noted that it is a post grad level blog because of the back drop required to follow some of the topics both from a learned and lived perspective. Per se you can’t learn economics or monetary systems without all the hours required to evaluate/verify it for yourself.

      On this Keynes could be called a Critical Realist that sought to dissuade elites for reasons of their own self interest away from their tendencies for driving society into a ditch – history is littered with it.

      1. Mikel

        Yep, that’s why I said “attributed’…it wasn’t sourced.

        “sought to dissuade elites for reasons of their own self interest away from their tendencies for driving society into a ditch…”

        Sounds like they didn’t understand it themselves.

        And I wouldn’t equate economics with physics. Should tread carefully there, Skippy.
        That’s a big enough problem as it is. They want it to be like physics and it’s not.

      2. Mikel

        Keynes could also be called a political appointee who understood that economics is a way of wielding power.

        1. skippy

          Huh …. I guess you have never delved into his past and the ethical stance he took considering the lay of the land on the day. Never the less he was just a human working in the construct of his time and full of quirks like personal grooming of finger nails. That tho does not have any bearing on his stance at the time, his ability to check his past environmental biases and move intellectually forward as evidence came to bare, or the desire to see a better future for all of mankind.

          Yes economics depending on the political power structure always and will be a form of power projection, hence why the political state system is more important than anything else as it proceeds everything else. Then again as some one pointed out just recently on NC about what Foucault said about neoliberalism being pro active in the political system.

          Under Neoliberalism politics is just a Market Place where Public Choice Theory rules the day because we are all just atomistic individualism binary traders and people with wealth are whales fighting for market share and how that advances their personal agendas with in it.

          I think at this juncture its incumbent on you to avail yourself of what where you are coming from and what ever construct it is that you are forwarding so we can have an honest civil chat …

          1. Mikel

            “Keynes could also be called a political appointee who understood that economics is a way of wielding power.”

            You’re the one reading into that a stance on his ethics.
            He advised politicians and understood power was a part of the equation.
            Hence, his expressing thoughts about “the masses.”

            “Yes economics depending on the political power structure always and will be a form of power projection, hence why the political state system is more important than anything else as it proceeds everything else.”
            Ah, you do know where I’m coming from.

            Now what’s your real issue? It’s not about economics…
            Not once have I disparaged you in any way or made any suggestions about what you should do. Very civil.

          2. skippy

            How have I been uncivil, please denote when and where I have beyond the suggestion of it from you.

            Firstly you suggested economics was a monolith, failed construct, made assertions about the applications of maths and physics without unpacking how that all occurred or why in historical context. How am I to interdependently evaluate anything it is you say, other than you said or inferred it.

            Yet to this point you have not made mention of what it is that you prefer or how you arrive at it let alone how you arrive at it.

            Then you seemingly take umbrage about Science being misapplied …. its a riddle mate … why do you pull your neck in so hard – ????

            1. Mikel

              “They” as in certain sects of economists that subscribe to a belief.”

              See below where I unpacked “they{.

              Sorry that you’re upset that I don’t think economics is like physics.
              Nothing I can do about that.

      3. skippy

        I would note that economics is just natural history with a side of political theory, what happened in the late 1800s [misapplied maths and physics in the Newtonian sense] and eventually was promoted as economic science is important to understand e.g. economics is not a monolith, its complex.

        I don’t agree with your opinion on “they” as that is not a logical argument. I said Keynes specifically, so there is no need to widen the scope to include others, but since you did I would note PKE being the group I affiliate with. The term economist is inclusive of many groups and with sub groups with in them so one has to be specific about it and not broad brush.

        BTW I don’t equate Economics as a whole with any Royal Science, anymore than I would engage in Scientism by applying Royal Science where it is not applicable.

        That said and you might not be aware, but, on NC just post the GFC it was acknowledged that whilst there was more than a few people that knew something was critically wrong in the financial markets, many were only seeing it from their own area of expertise because its so complex. Also that at that time there were only a hand full of people that actually had the knowledge and experience to understand the whole thing – all the moving parts and interrelationships.

        So yeah I would say you need to be very careful of what optics you are using and what your looking at when evaluating it. At the end of the day its a bit like a city built on top of an older city and then on another and so forth. Heck I’ve had to go back to the dawn of time, countless religions [see Hudson], metaphysics/philosophy, yes maths and physics, the whole kit and caboodle … and this is why I agree with the author of the link I attributed as I have read endless reams of economic white papers from orthodox economics authors till the point it is just like knowing the end of the movie just from the opening credits …. its hilarious!!!!!!!

        1. Mikel

          “They” as in certain sects of economists that subscribe to a belief. And “they” was in the short part where I veered off into a general statement about economics.
          There’s plenty of academic debate about how “natural” economics is or isn’t, however, it’s not a matter of debate, but a matter of experiences of people in their everyday (non-constant) lives how much economics has to do with power.

          1. skippy

            The Natural you speak of historically is the History component, how others took that for whatever reasons and then with a bit of magic helper via some deductive ex ante axioms created a narrative out of whole cloth is why one studies Economics – too inform ones self.

            This blog and its contributors have taken great pains to walk everyone not familiar with the territory to inform the readership of what has transpired during the neoliberal time line – with reflection to past history. That said, we are – here now – and have to contend with the system that is in place and how best to reform it without pulling the rug out from the unwashed. Just look at the U.K. right now and Lizzy advancing an ill informed economic agenda on a way past its used by date ideological preference that pays no mind in the differences in this present reality vs the old reality it was formed in.

            Let me put it another way Mikel …. I have always been a hard Science person, its my baseline on everything else no matter what I’m doing or where I’m at. Yet as you say –

            “but a matter of experiences of people in their everyday (non-constant) lives how much economics has to do with power.”

            I completely concur with that view and why regardless of my past education, status, life experiences, took it upon myself to study all the different schools of economics from their inception to what influences it has on peoples lives and why. I even got into the bear pit and wrangled with well know identities with in the economics field e.g. Milton’s son David was a hoot – total AnCap. So basically what I’m saying as I have experience in the topic and I think you need to be careful about suggesting all of economics is rubbish because some would really like it that way, too get their way, because then that tool would not be needed or subject to introspection – right back to decree land.

            As far as the power aspect goes NC has done the unpacking of that human agency post WWII and Corporatist gone wild with things like the Powell memo, Share Holder memo, money funneled into endless think tanks that ring D.C. like FEE and now WEF [see Hudson], non democratic NGOs as proxies, putting politics on a leash due to election funding or out right bribes with post politics perches like Petraeus et al, so here is the rub mate … “they” as you call it own[tm] the Bernays megaphone and the whole idea of this blog is to dispel the self serving for a few rubbish that comes out of it ….

            But yeah Economics …

            1. Mikel

              “I think you need to be careful about suggesting all of economics is rubbish”

              Where was that statement made here?

              1. skippy

                “Sounds like they didn’t understand it themselves.”

                ““Keynes could also be called a political appointee who understood that economics is a way of wielding power.””

                With all due respect Mikel please don’t go there or I’ll have to ask permission for YS to be an intellectual bully and your arguments are becoming circular without you taking any opposing position other than say you don’t like stuff and stuff you don’t like is rubbish.

                This is Naked Capitalism and the rules of conduct are explicit, have a care for others mate.

                1. Mikel

                  Keynes was a political appointee. The Treasury in Britain during WWI and then Versailles.
                  He better have understood how economics and power were intertwined. Don’t you think?

                  “sought to dissuade elites for reasons of their own self interest away from their tendencies for driving society into a ditch…”

                  “Sounds like they didn’t understand it themselves”….
                  The elites, Skippy, talking about the elites he was advising.

  6. Henry Moon Pie

    “The nation’s monkeypox response is shifting from crisis mode to a more long-term approach as the Biden administration acknowledges that it will be impossible to eradicate the virus from the country anytime soon”

    Am I detecting a pattern here? And it doesn’t just hold to deadly pathogens. Rampant mental health disease with abuse of dangerous drugs, suicides, murders moving higher and higher. Heat-driven storms kill more and more from Florida to the Kentucky hills. Fires fill the air with smoke all summer. No solutions. No real attempt at solutions. All creative energies are focused on, “How can we make some money off of this mess?”

    Bet the billionaires are building state-of-the-art labs in their bunkers. And as Rushkoff points out, they’re the biggest fools of all.

    1. Pelham

      Declare an emergency when a pathogen begins spreading. Then, when it’s thoroughly entrenched and completely out of hand, declare a return to normality. With well over a million Americans dead and many millions scarred for life by Long Covid, this policy prescription appears to be working like a charm.

      1. jsn

        COVID, Monkey Pox, homelessnesses, death by debt stress, it’s a lethal package normalized over the last 40 years.

        If workers die fast enough, the Fed can raise rates to Volker levels and not miss its “full employment” mandate.

        As best as I can tell, that’s a Democrat “pro worker” policy.

  7. Carolinian

    Lambert I’m beginning to suspect that you’re for Fetterman. On the other hand Oz couldn’t get me to watch his stupid television show even once. (Maybe it wasn’t stupid?)

    Me, I just want to see Hunter under the hot lights–House or Senate.

    1. LawnDart

      I think that Lambert respects Fetterman as a player in the game. And if Lambert were to state that he supports Fetterman because he will probably draw attention to things we should be discussing, bread-and-butter rather than idpol, I’d agree.

      With that said, I note that Bernie’s getting long-in-tooth, and the system needs to ready another safety-valve so that political pressures can be bled-off, another sheepdog like AOC to keep the lambs within the fold.

      Someone needs to kick the table over, send the cash and cards flying, call it for the corrupt game it is. And it ain’t going to be Fetterman.

      1. Carolinian

        I was just making a joke. Lambert already said he was for Fetterman and takes a special interest in his one time home turf.

  8. haywood

    Just want to say how much I enjoy these afternoon roundups, both the content and the format. It’s replacing Twitter as my go to for daily news and thank god for that.

    Keep up the great work!

    Also, I’m holding out hope for Biden’s intervention on the rail situation post-midterms. The executive branch has unique leverage over this industry, especially with regards to labor concerns, so hopefully the rail unions cut a deal for some significant assistance in upcoming negotiations for their massive favor to Biden kicking the can on this conflict past the midterms.

    1. nippersmom

      If I were a railroad union member, I would not hold out even a sliver of hope that Biden would follow through on any promises made ahead of the midterms. The man is a liar who has not kept any of his other promises to constituents of the non-corporate variety. If they think he will treat them any better than he’s treated people with student loan debt, minimum wage workers, migrants in detention centers, or the entire American populace (to whom he promised $2000 relief checks, and who are still fighting a pandemic that he refuses to acknowledge is still raging, or to make any meaningful effort to address), they are destined for disappointment.

      1. Suzy

        A wildcat strike next week would focus the attention of the corporations and the white house. Do it brothers! You’ll obtain huge concessions. If you wait until after the midterms, you’ll just be put on the back burner and will become as obsolete as the caboose.

  9. nippersdad

    Herschel Walker sighting here in my blood red town yesterday. Seen from the drive through at the bank, it was in a seemingly random parking lot that was nowhere near full of cars. The bus looked larger than the crowd, the reporters seemed to outnumber the supporters, and there was at least one heckler in the crowd.

    If it weren’t for the enormity, the redness and shininess of the bus there really would be nothing interesting to recount about it. The most exciting thing about that particular moment in time was the twenty I drove away with, and, with inflation what it is these days, one can only imagine how exciting that was.

    As the gas station was closed due to lack of help I am still in possession of copius amounts of Greenbacks, breathlessly awaiting the investment opportunities that will open up for me in the near future that its’ mere possession makes possible.

    But, anyway, it looked like Herschel’s rally was a dud. It needed more cheerleaders and twenties thrown to the…well…somebody. If that was an example of his work then circuses are in need of a new paradigm.

  11. nippersmom

    Are we supposed to be impressed that the White House has decided to have a summit on indoor air quality after doing less than nothing for nearly 21 months? Too little, way too late.

  12. Michael Ismoe

    Maybe Fetterman and DiFi can start a Congressional Mime Caucus where no one knows what they think because they don’t either. NOTE TO FETTERMAN: Just tell them that you have “a stutter.” It’s been working for Brandon for a while now.

    Looking forward to the next Congress. Sounds like a lotta dead wood – which we might need to keep us warm over the winter.

  13. kareninca

    I am in a quandary. A specialty nurse just told my 79 y.o. mother, “Oh, it is nice that your daughter worries about your health. But you should just be out singing and dancing.”

    My mother had covid several months ago, and before that she developed permanent medical problems (pancreatic insufficiency; microscopic colitis) that were likely caused by an earlier asymptomatic covid infection.

    My first thought was to report this “nurse” to the Connecticut Dept. of public health, or the licensing board. But if I did, my mother would never tell me anything about her medical visits in the future. And my mother has not taken any precautions whatsoever since Day 1 anyway, other than having had the pharma shots, despite my giving her detailed suggestions for ways to avoid infection risk (without cutting back much on her social life). I’m thinking that you can’t cure stupid, and this nurse and my mom are both stupid. Of course, they were lied to, too.

    1. Fiery Hunt

      Some things aren’t fixable.
      Try to enjoy (and let your mother enjoy) what’s left of her life.

      Living longer really isn’t better than living well.
      Sometimes I feel like we’ve forgotten that.

      My sympathies. I know it’s hard. As a caregiver for my Stage 4 SIL, I’m very careful.
      But as we talk, (sis-in-law, who’s dying) I’m constantly reminded that nothing is guaranteed, not tomorrow, not twenty minutes from now.

      Do the best we can and remember to be ALIVE when you can…

      1. kareninca

        I think we’ll just need to agree to disagree; we have very different ways of seeing things.

        I that hope your sister in law does not suffer and that she has a peaceful passage.

    2. Late Introvert

      Yes, they were lied to, especially by that decrepit ped0 in the White House. My parents also are taking too many risks these days. It’s not their fault, I don’t think they’re stupid. The lies are on full blast from all sides.

  14. Gulag

    Codevilla had some interesting things to say about himself and his perceptions and relationship with the intelligence community in his book “Informing StateCraft: Intelligence for a new century” (1992).

    Between 1977 and 1985 Codevilla was on the staff of the Senate Subcommittee on the Budget, He states that he had to scrutinize the two-foot high stack of justifications for all the U.S. intelligence agencies requests for money. “All too often the answer to my questions (what is the purpose of this activity?–Why do this rather than that?) was “we’ve always done it that way” and “how insulting of you to ask.”

    “In sum, mine is the perspective of an academic who has been so far “inside” as one can get, who is not part of the intelligence lobby but who, emphatically is no “insider.” And there is the rub. The reader will strictly note that the author is not in awe of U.S. intelligence nor of the people who run it.”

    When talking about the CIA and DIA Codevilla noted:
    “The first impression one receives after taking the George Washington Parkway from the CIA’s wooded domain overlooking the Potomac to the new Defense intelligence Agency building on the tidal flats of Anacostia, is that one has come down in class. Everything about the people seems lower, from rank and pay to pretenses. Clothing changes from wool or cotton to synthetics. When occasionally a DIA civilian, or a retiring military office, is offered a job at CIA, he is regarded as having made a major step up. DIA employees cherish good relations with the folks “up the river,” because the latter control who gets to sit on which interagency committee and my even grant the DIA employee the privilege of chairing one…Indeed until 1985 even senior employees of DIA could not aspire to the pay and status of the Senior Executive Service. It took an act of Congress to give them that.”

    Codevilla adds “What the CIA calls the parochialism of military intelligence, they argue, reflects that DIA must wrestle with real-world military problems conscious that its judgments may be tested in battle.”

    1. JBird4049

      >>>I found this helpful, because I didn’t come up as a conservative, and it’s hard to find a serious treatment of conservative factions — and, dare I sau, thinkers — in my milieu. Are any readers familiar with Codevilla’s work?

      I only know of Codevilla (and only by name) because I try to read conservative writers and like with leftist and liberal ones, actual conservatives writing conservative thought other than Koch funded Republican cowflop is hard to find. It is like with how most of the ostensibly liberal writers are really neoliberal propagandists.

      Just think of all the people who try to find leftist thought when much of it has been buried over the past five decades. How many people even know of classical liberalism when trying to study the approved neoliberalism? Same with conservative thought. They have really been thorough in purging the teachers and writers, including taking over schools and colleges, shutting down magazines and entire publishing houses that expose anything other than Money is God.

      Since most of Western thought including religion, philosophy, even (political) economics does not equate Money with God, it all must be gotten rid of. All into the memory hole. It does give a reason why everything is falling apart.

  15. Mark Gisleson

    re: Hacked to Bits, there really is a very simple and easy to implement solution: put all the flavorings in an open area just like a condiments bar in a burger joint. Let people ruin their coffee to their hearts content while the employees focus on steaming milk and committing all the other crimes against coffee these places exist to commit.

    Hacking exists because it gives customers a tiny taste of power by making another human being perform trivial tasks for them. Occasional pointed sarcasm from customer service would put an end to this but employers no longer seem to value insolent, gum-snapping wait staff.

    One of the greatest joys of moving to a small rural town is that all the cashiers give as good as they take. Imo, that’s what used to make America great.

  16. David B Harrison

    About the Joe Weisenthal unpaid labor tweet. I once sat in a tractor trailer cab in Bucksport, Maine for seven unpaid hours waiting to unload while eating the worst pizza I have ever tasted.

    1. LawnDart

      Hopefully the truck was unloaded before the pizza was… …many of us know how gas station pizza can be.

  17. The Rev Kev

    “There’s a spike in respiratory illness among children — and it’s not just COVID’

    Maybe it is. So what might be happening is that the majority of these kids had Covid at one stage or another over the past three years which could have not only weakened their immune system but opened up a vulnerability in their respiratory system as well. Having a respiratory illness would leave some sort of vulnerabilities.

    1. will rodgers horse

      Kids get URIs every year. they did not for 2 years. now they will . that is how nature works .reversion to the mean.

    2. Late Introvert

      Rev, my kid has NOT had COVID (that I know of) and she had a respiratory thing a few weeks back. First illness since 4/2020 and she still masks at school. She said everybody had it at her high school.

  18. wuzzy

    Went to the local Hospital for blood tests. New policy: you don’t need to wear a mask! My reply: “You got to be kidding.” Got a good laugh from the staff.

    In waiting room about 9 wearing masks. No. 10 without mask was overheard speaking loudly to phone: ” I’ll come by after I get my Covid test.”

  19. timotheus

    Re ionizing radiation. I read (or heard) that that is one explanation for the sudden malfunctioning of Musk’s Starlink satellite contraptions, suggesting that the Russians were responsible for it.

    1. rowlf

      Neutron single event upsets have been known to the aircraft manufacturers for thirty years. In most cases there are two or more computers doing parallel functions and the the computer that glitched was automatically or manually deselected. Later computer networked airplanes such as 777/A380 onward could tolerate the events even better due to better redundancy of systems and software programming to operate in that environment.

      If I remember correctly 757/767 Flight Management Computers were one of the first units to be recognized for having memory bit error due to NSEU, which was a big deal as the units cost $250k in the late 1980s and a removed unit needed a $7k return-to-service test in a shop to be placed back into stock as certified servicable. There was a strong push to not remove these units unless they were confirmed failed on the aircraft. There are also approved procedures for flying with one unit inop for ten days due to redundant systems.

  20. chris

    Sharing because a friend suggested I look at this article for evidence of Ukrainian anti-semitism. Kind of amazing to think these horrid claims were reported in 2009, in 2018 US liberals acknowledged the far right Nazi leanings of the Azov battalion, but now Zelenskiy is the hero we don’t deserve…

    1. Acacia

      Yeah, if you dig a little bit, there have been many articles published by the putatively liberal media, that have somehow all been “forgotten”. It really tells you something about the power of propaganda, as none of this has actually been memory-holed, as in yanked from servers. It’s all out there for anyone who bothers to look.

  21. Jason Boxman

    Lambert will love this. From the NC State Board of Elections Judicial Voter Guide 2022, 10 Facts about election security. Item 3: “Paper Ballots: Under state law, all 100 counties use paper ballots, producing a paper trail which can be easily audited and recounted. By federal law, ballot marking devices must be available at every polling place for any voter who needs or wishes to use one to mark a ballot.”

    For what that’s worth.

    Also Item 5: “No Internet or Modems: By state law, voting machines may not be connected to the Internet…”

    Also Item 8: “Post-election audits: After every election and before results are certified, the State and County Boards of Elections conduct multiple audits designed to detect irregularities, such as equipment tampering, ballot stuffing, and voting machine or tabulation errors…”

    1. tegnost

      George Bush. Liz Cheney. Why do Democrats love Republicans so much?

      because they’re totalitarians?

    2. Carolinian

      Dems didn’t used to like either–not at all. Maybe it’s like that thing where something happens under the ocean and the Earth’s magnetic field shifts poles.

      Kidding. Two wings, one bird.

      1. tegnost

        …and both of the wings are on one side, so it’s truly a marvel of nature!
        Kind of like a halibut…

      2. JBird4049

        >>>Two wings, one bird.

        Are we sure about those two wings? Seems like our bird is spiraling down…

    1. JBird4049

      The term does have a certain dark humor. Eugenics done on the sly using slanted opportunities for food, shelter, and medical care, often using money as a proxy, instead of the more direct methods like sterilizations, famines, bullets, or the gas chambers.

  24. Matthew G. Saroff

    Re: “The title of Angela Lansbury’s first movie is a little too on-the-nose”.

    The term Gaslighting came from this movie, or more accurately the play upon which this was based.

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