By Lambert Strether of Corrente
More in the Politics section; I got wrapped round the axle looking at Ellsworth Kelly pictures. –lambert
Bird Song of the Day
Beautiful Nuthatch, Arunachal Pradesh, India
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
“National Security Strategy” (PDF) [WhiteHouse.gov].
The range of nations that supports our vision of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world is broad and powerful. It includes our democratic allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific as well as key democratic partners around the world that share much of our vision for regional and international order even if they do not agree with us on all issues, and countries that do not embrace democratic institutions but nevertheless depend upon and support a rules-based international system.
Americans will support universal human rights and stand in solidarity with those beyond our shores who seek freedom and dignity, just as we continue the critical work of ensuring equity and equal treatment under law at home. We will work to strengthen democracy around the world because democratic governance consistently outperforms authoritarianism in protecting human dignity, leads to more prosperous and resilient societies, creates stronger and more reliable economic and security partners for the United States, and encourages a peaceful world order. In particular, we will take steps to show that democracies deliver—not only by ensuring the United States and its democratic partners lead on the hardest challenges of our time, but by working with other democratic governments and the private sector to help emerging democracies show tangible benefits to their own populations. We do not, however, believe that governments and societies everywhere must be remade in America’s image for us to be secure.
The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy
I’d say it was piffle, until I got to the last sentence, which is a recipe for a new Cold War. It will be interesting to see how “revisionist” filters out via the Blobs various noodly appendages. Make no mistake: Multipolarity is revisionist.
2022
* * * “Why Jan. 6 is mostly absent from the midterms” [Politico]. The deck: “Most House Republicans voted for Trump-backed election challenges after a violent riot. Less than 2 percent of broadcast TV spending this cycle has focused on it.” Note that even Politico says “riot,” not “insurrection.” More: “‘If you thought it really moved the needle, don’t you think you would see it in a six-point race or a five-point race somewhere? I mean, you have plenty of target-rich environments,’ said Armstrong, who was among the minority of House Republicans to oppose GOP election challenges.” • So on the one hand, you’ve got Biden’s claim that at least MAGA Republicans are “semi-fascist.” On the other hand, if you believe that, you probably also believe that the Capitol riot was the purest expression of that fascism. But that’s not an election issue. My head… My head is spinning!
GA: “Georgia Senate race unchanged after Walker abortion report: poll” [The Hill]. • Priced in, probably.
PA: “Fetterman’s use of captions is common in stroke recovery, experts say” [WaPo]. “During his first on-camera interview since having a stroke, Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman stumbled over words and used closed captioning to read interview questions, prompting Republicans to raise new questions about his health. Disability advocates, however, say that response shows a lack of understanding about accommodations that are often made after a major health event such as a stroke. ‘I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear,’ Fetterman told NBC News, in an interview Friday, which was aired Tuesday. ‘So I use captioning, so I’m able to see what you’re saying on the captioning.’ While neurological experts said they could not offer a specific diagnosis about Fetterman’s health, they noted that closed captions are a common tool for people with auditory processing or hearing issues, conditions which have nothing to do with overall intelligence. ‘This is not an issue of intelligence, it’s not an issue of cognition, but unfortunately how we get information in and out tends to impact how people perceive that,’ said Brooke Hatfield, an associate director for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.”
VA: Mothership Strategies is still at it:
Since the mail was already heavily highlighted in yellow, I put red boxes around the kneejerk appeals. I guess the targeting is very precise: A Democrat who (1) knows who Nate Silver is, and (2) has a yen for nuclear engineers. (The “DIRECTLY” is nod to the fact that people are tired of giving these bloodsuckers a cut, and so prefer to donate directly to campaigns. I didn’t click through, so I don’t know if the mail is lying.)
2024
“Trump Threatened to Out Confidential Sources From Russia Investigation” [Rolling Stone]. “In the days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot [note again: not “insurrection”], the then-president, sometimes while brandishing pieces of paper, would loudly complain that none of the identifying facts in the highly sensitive Russia documents should be blacked-out. Trump would insist, the source says, that it should “all be out there” so that the American people could see the truth of who “did it” to the president. Ultimately, top intelligence officials and other Trump lieutenants talked him out of publicizing the sources’ identities before he left the White House, the sources say. Instead, Trump’s team bargained him down to vetting a series of heavily redacted reports that they argued would help safeguard the work and safety of Russia-related informants. But a third source familiar with the situation says that this obsession with outing the confidential sources is ongoing. The former president, the source says, still sporadically talks about the need to get “the names” out into the public record. A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.” • I’ve got a theory about those “Russian sources”….
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.
* * * “AOC Gets WRECKED By Her Own Constituents Over Ukraine War Funding” [YouTube (ZagoNostra)]. • Not sure how much the crowd supports this, but:
Readers may have noticed that I’ve managed to curb my enthusiasm about the midterms, that great pageant of all that is human. I think the best outcome would be for the Republicans to win both houses, since the possibility exists that the Democrat leadership would be purged as a result. That the only opposition to Biden’s excellent Ukraine adventure comes from Republicans is a stain on the already deeply besmirched and self-bespattered Democrats. However, the appropriate heuristic is to seek the stupidest outcome, since this is the stupidest timeline. Hence, I think the Democrats will retain the Senate. In the House, the best we can hope for is, I think, Steny Hoyer. So it goes. (Meanwhile, none of the major issues of “our democracy” — the Covid pandemic, war with a nuclear power, rising unions, and, if you’re a liberal Democrat, fascism — are part of the “national conversation” at all. So what is all the fuss about?)
Realignment and Legitimacy
“College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics” [The Atlantic]. The kind of people who hang on Nate Silver’s every percentage point. “Unlike organizers such as Matias, the political hobbyists are disproportionately college-educated white men. They learn about and talk about big important things. Their style of politics is a parlor game in which they debate the issues on their abstract merits. Media commentators and good-government reform groups have generally regarded this as a cleaner, more evolved, less self-interested version of politics compared with the kind of politics that Matias practices.”
“Targeting two Americas” [Axios]. “In paid posts on the world’s largest social media platform, the country’s two political parties are speaking to two separate and distinct Americas. Detailed targeting data from social media giant Meta offer a glimpse into America’s deep political divide — and how political operatives are working to exploit and adapt to. Axios analyzed more than 93,000 Facebook and Instagram ad targeting inputs from 25 campaigns, party committees and independent political spenders that have run paid posts on the platforms since July… Republican advertisers know which grocery shoppers they don’t want to reach: dozens of their ads filtered out people interested in Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Market. Instead, they targeted people who eat at Chick-fil-A and Cracker Barrel and shop at outdoors stores like Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops. Democrats excluded Bass Pro Shops fans from hundreds of ads, and instead targeted people who shop at Nordstrom, Lululemon and Zara, and get groceries delivered by HelloFresh and Blue Apron. Both parties also targeted people — and, among the sample Axios examined, neither excluded people — interested in Walmart.”
#COVID19
• A conversation with a Corsi-Rosenthal box skeptic:
🧵 A typical #corsirosenthalboxes conversation:
Objector: Your DIY air filter looks cobbled together
Me: Well it may appear so but it has been tested by many engineers & functions brilliantly
O: Yeah but it's dangerous
Me: In what way?
O: It looks like it will catch fire— Pete 😷 #COVIDisAirborne (@PeteUK7) October 13, 2022
Patience! (It’s interesting that nobody’s commerialized at least CR box kits….)
• ”An Evaluation of DIY Air Filtration” (PDF) [Underwriters Laboratories]. “Household use of portable air cleaners has increased in the face of recent wildland fire activity and in response to COVID-19. Some local agencies have begun recommending Do-It-Yourself (DIY) air cleaners (i.e., furnace air filter attached to electric box fans) during smoke events as DIYs offer an affordable and accessible alternative to commercially available air cleaners, which frequently sell out during smoke events. However, there are concerns regarding the safety of DIY air cleaners as these consumer fans are not being used as intended by the manufacturers and have not been evaluated by safety certification processes.” Bottom line is that the CR boxes were nowhere near catching on fire, or having electrical problems: “Temperatures at the guard, switch, and output air were near or lower than ambient room air temperature for all test scenario except for the two-sided obstruction tests where temperatures increased at all three locations. Even with the temperature increase,
the parts remained below temperature thresholds that may pose a burn hazard.” See Section 1.4, “Key Observations.” • Something for your handout to the School Board.
• ”How one higher education conference prioritized pandemic safety” [Higher Ed Dive]. Not to prejudice you, but:
When the North American Victorian Studies Association is better at public health than the American Public Health Association. https://t.co/QL9zoc4z58
— Seth J. Prins (@s_j_prins) October 13, 2022
From the article:
At this year’s North American Victorian Studies Association conference, participants were just as likely to pass portable air purifiers and N95 mask giveaways as they were to bump into Brontë and Dickens scholars.
The NAVSA conference, hosted earlier this month by Lehigh University, heavily emphasized COVID-19 mitigation efforts for the group’s first in-person conference since 2019, according to organizers.
On site, organizers calculated the ventilation capacity of each venue and measured carbon dioxide and relative humidity levels, according to Servitje. Each room had handmade portable air purifiers, known as Corsi-Rosenthal boxes.
And:
[Lorenzo Servitje, co-organizer of the conference and a literature and medicine professor at Lehigh} requested additional event funding for COVID relief efforts from Lehigh’s Arts and Sciences College, which allocated $3,000 to the cause. In addition to masks and tests, the conference set aside money for refunds to people who had to cancel due to illness, as well as for attendees who got sick during the conference and had to extend their hotel stays.
$3,000 is probably a lot of money for a humanities major. This is a really good idea (and note the interdisciplinary co-operation):
One undergraduate engineering student who helped build the Corsi-Rosenthal boxes had the idea to add a QR code to the top of each one, Servitje said. The code, captioned “What Am I Doing Here?,” connected attendees to a website explaining the boxes’ purpose and how they worked.
I found Servitje’s CV; nothing on Engels (see below). Too bad!
• “Nearly Half of Covid Patients Haven’t Fully Recovered Months Later, Study Finds” [New York Times]. “A study of tens of thousands of people in Scotland found that one in 20 people who had been sick with Covid reported not recovering at all, and another four in 10 said they had not fully recovered from their infections many months later. The authors of the study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications, tried to home in on the long-term risks of Covid by comparing the frequency of symptoms in people with and without previous Covid diagnoses. People with previous symptomatic Covid infections reported certain persistent symptoms, such as breathlessness, palpitations and confusion or difficulty concentrating, at a rate roughly three times as high as uninfected people in surveys from six to 18 months later, the study found. Those patients also experienced elevated risks of more than 20 other symptoms relating to the heart, respiratory health, muscle aches, mental health and the sensory system. The findings strengthened calls from scientists for more expansive care options for long Covid patients in the United States and elsewhere, while also offering some good news The study did not identify greater risks of long-term problems in people with asymptomatic coronavirus infections. It also found, in a much more limited subset of participants who had been given at least one dose of Covid vaccine before their infections, that vaccination appeared to help reduce if not eliminate the risk of some long Covid symptoms.”
• ”How COVID-19 headaches are different from others—and how to manage them” [National Geographic], “In a recent review of the research, approximately half of all people with an acute COVID infection developed a headache, and it was the first symptom in about a quarter of people. Despite COVID’s classification as a respiratory disease, about one in five patients with moderate to severe COVID report that it was the neurological symptoms—including headache, brain fog, and loss of taste and smell—that bothered them the most. Those percentages are likely an underestimate. ‘The reporting of headache varies depending on whether it’s assessed inpatient or outpatient,’ says Mia Tova Minen, chief of headache research and a neurologist at New York University Langone Health. ‘It’s likely underreported by hospitalized patients in part because there’s so many other symptoms that might be the focus of those patients.'” And treatment: “Acetaminophen is one of the most common treatments doctors offer, as well as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, metamizole, triptans, or a combination of these, but only a quarter of people report complete relief; only half reported getting any relief from these medications. Minen says headache specialists will often treat tension-type headaches or persistent daily headaches with gabapentin, a medication that’s also used to treat seizures and nerve pain…. Those with post-COVID headaches tend to respond well to the migraine medications amitriptyline and nortriptyline, [Jennifer Frontera, a neurologist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine] says.”
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
NOT UPDATED Wastewater data (CDC), September 24:
Lambert here: Note the dates, which moved backward from October 4 to September 24. Some sort of backward revision? In any case, we are now 18 19 days behind on wastewater data. Good job with the leading indicator, CDC. Adding: Looks like we’ve moved to once a week, here? If so, then this wording in the page header needs to be corrected: “Maps, charts, and data provided by CDC, updates Mon-Fri by 8pm ET†.” And the note: “†Data will update Monday through Friday as soon as they are reviewed and verified, oftentimes before 8 pm ET. Updates will occur the following day when reporting coincides with a federal holiday. Note: Daily updates (Mon-Fri) might be delayed due to delays in reporting.” Oh.
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):
• “Omicron Covid-19: First case of new subvariant BQ.1.1 in New Zealand confirmed” [New Zealand Herald]. “New Zealand has recorded its first case of a new Covid-19 subvariant, the Ministry of Health has confirmed. ESR confirmed it has sequenced the country’s first case of the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1 in a person who tested positive for Covid. BQ1.1 was also detected in Te Waipounamu (South Island) wastewater samples. The ministry said the list of new subvariants appearing within New Zealand is ‘lengthy and growing’. ‘Many of these new subvariants are identified by their mutations, many of which are shared across several subvariants, but it can take weeks or months to determine whether these mutations will allow a subvariant to out-compete others circulating in the community.’ ‘At the early stage of a new variant being identified in New Zealand, it is difficult to predict whether and when it will become established in the community.’ So far, most Omicron variants had not demonstrated a change in the severity of the disease.” • I don’t want to go scariant chasing, but since I mentioned BQ.1.1 yesterday….
Deaths
Death rate (Our World in Data):
Total: 1,089,385 – 1,088,471 – 1,087,976 = 914 (914 * 365 = 333,610, 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
“United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose by 9,000 to a six-week high of 228,000 in the week ending October 8th, extending the jump from the five-month low hit two weeks prior and surpassing expectations of 225,000, suggesting some loosening in labor market conditions.”
Inflation: “United States Consumer Price Index (CPI)” [Trading Economics]. “The consumer price inflation in the US eased for a third straight month to 8.2 percent year-on-year in September 2022, the lowest since February but above market expectations of 8.1 percent. Also, the annual rate remained well above the US Federal Reserve’s target of 2%, suggesting policymakers will maintain their hawkish rhetoric and keep raising interest rates at a quick pace.”
The Bezzle: “OnlyFans lawyers accidentally reveal which Meta execs allegedly took bribes” [Ars Technica]. “When adult entertainers initially filed a lawsuit alleging that OnlyFans bribed Meta to block competitors on Instagram by flagging their content as terrorism, it was not clear who at Meta was being accused of accepting bribes. That changed this week when lawyers for OnlyFans’ owner Fenix International Limited accidentally filed a court document that mistakenly failed to redact the names of Meta employees allegedly connected to the global conspiracy. Because of the misstep, it has been revealed that adult entertainers have specifically accused two Meta executives of taking bribes. The employees are Nick Clegg (Meta’s vice president of global policy), Nicola Mendelsohn (vice president of the global business team), and Cristian Perrella (whom Yahoo Finance reported is Meta’s European safety director).” • Nick Clegg? Surely not. Why, he’s a (UK) Liberal Democrat!
Tech: “TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging” [BBC]. “Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found. Children are livestreaming on the social media app for hours, pleading for digital gifts with a cash value. The BBC saw streams earning up to $1,000 (£900) an hour, but found the people in the camps received only a tiny fraction of that. TikTok said it would take prompt action against ‘exploitative begging.’ The company said this type of content was not allowed on its platform, and it said its commission from digital gifts was significantly less than 70%. But it declined to confirm the exact amount. Earlier this year, TikTok users saw their feeds fill with livestreams of families in Syrian camps, drawing support from some viewers and concerns about scams from others.” • Odd that the Ukrainians haven’t tried this. Or maybe they have?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 23 Extreme Fear (previous close: 18 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 28 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Oct 13 at 1:39 PM EDT.
The Gallery
Trying to order these:
Ellsworth Kelly, Red Yellow Blue, 2000 #artsmia #minneapolisinstituteofart https://t.co/9DvAt7drs7 pic.twitter.com/umRvykDo71
— Ellsworth Kelly (@artist_e_kelly) October 13, 2022
I think the blue (sky) is in the back, the yellow (wall) is in the front, and the red (door) is in the middle. What do readers think?
The Screening Room
More Angela Lansbury:
She even knew how to turn an exit into an event 💜💜 pic.twitter.com/Glnpw4OFsO
— OleHeliumHeelz410 (@heelz410) October 11, 2022
“Angela Lansbury Was a Brilliant Actor and a Comrade” [Jacobin]. “[Lansbury] was a comrade via her illustrious lineage: her father was Edgar Lansbury, the British socialist politician, and her grandfather was George Lansbury, the pacifist, socialist, and leader of the British Labour Party from 1932 to 1935. Her mother was Irish actor Moyna Macgill, and they were fleeing the Nazi bombings of England during the London Blitz when they arrived in New York City in 1940 seeking access to the entertainment industry. They gradually wound their way to Hollywood in 1942, where teenage Angela Lansbury’s astonishing career really began.” • Interestingly, the article makes no connection whatever between Lansbury’s background, her socialist commitments, and her work as an artist.
Class Warfare
“Social Determinants of Health (Unlocked)” (podcast) [Death Panel]. Oooh, there’s a transcript:
[T]he social determinants framework really grows out of a much older framework that is more commonly referred to as “social medicine.” This is the history of social medicine is the thing that gets kind of cyclically, you know, forgotten and rediscovered, with each successive generation of, you know, grad students in public health and whoever else. Social medicine really has its origins in industrial revolution Europe. Engels is one of the first, which I mean is interesting, because I don’t think Engels focused too much on health specifically, throughout his career, but Engels really wrote kind of the foundational text in social medicine with “On the Condition of the Working Classes in England.” He was one of the first, maybe the first person to I mean, we could do a whole podcast episode just about black lung, but he was one of the first people to identify black lung as an occupational disease among coal miners.
Also lots of interesting material on the role of the World Bank in creating what today we know as “personal risk assessment” (decades ago; I found it too hard to excerpt, so you’ll just have to listen :-).
“Who Pays for Inflation?” (interview) [J. W. Mason, Phenomenal World]. “It’s a bit puzzling when you listen to Larry Summers, Jason Furman, and others on that side of the debate. They talk as if the only thing that has happened over the past three years is that the federal government suddenly started spending more money. And that’s true, it did. But something else happened too. It was called the global pandemic, and it was kind of important. Auto prices, to take one example, have increased dramatically not because people are buying more cars than they were a few years ago—they are not—but because at the onset of the pandemic manufacturers didn’t think they’d be able to sell any cars and stopped ordering semiconductors. Once you’ve halted demand for these specialized electronics it’s difficult to turn them back up again. So auto production collapsed and imported cars from the rest of the world could not fill the gap. Which is why, when people turned out to want to buy cars after all, prices went up. You can tell similar stories with other goods, it’s not so mysterious….. That said, we shouldn’t deny that, given the pandemic, if we had had less spending in the economy, we probably would have had less inflation. But that doesn’t mean it would have been a better outcome. If we think back to the sense of economic doom that characterized the early part of 2020, we should also be grateful that we seem to have avoided the predicted economic catastrophe, even if it was at the cost of somewhat higher inflation.”
News of the Wired
“Kodak is Hiring Film Technicians: ‘We Cannot Keep Up with Demand’” [PetaPixel]. “Eastman Kodak is hiring and the company says its tactic of being the “last color film manufacturer standing” has paid off as interest in analog photography continues to surge…. ‘Our retailers are constantly telling us they can’t keep these films on the shelves and they want more.'” • There’s no way I would be photographing today with film; I can maintain a computer, but I can’t maintain a dark room for black and white, let alone color, which I would want (and the process of sending the film out to be developed does not appeal). Nevertheless, I think this is a great thing, because the “feel” of analog is different. I miss, for example, grain. Pixels are not the same!
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Back in the day color processing was very complicated and expensive and I never got past Ektachrome (Kodachrome could only be processed at a Kodak approved lab). And while I’m a great fan of Ansel Adams, it’s hard too see anyone other than hard core aesthetes wanting to jump in the wayback machine.
But that’s just me. I will say that some of the natural light films from France in the sixties are visually exquisite
And Larry Johnson does a take down of Biden’s lyin’ NSS
https://sonar21.com/can-the-flood-of-lies-about-ukraine-and-russia-be-staunched/
These days GPUs can apply faux grain, as so often abused in games.
Really, the gaming industry have a very nasty case of film envy. Oh so much effort these days is spent on recreating film, from lighting effects to camera angles to just about everything else. Some games ends up being trilogy length films with minigames between the scenes.
Is that faux grain just a big old shader? I’m a bit surprised some wag hasn’t released an applet that puts film grain over one’s virtual desktop, if so.
Everything is a shader these days…
As someone who uses those film grain filters often (FilmConvert is my favorite for photos and video) it isn’t even close to the same as the organic nature of real film. And, film is much more than grain. It’s the subtle gradient of highlights, the rich texture of shadows, the nuanced color palette. For some projects I end up spending so much time trying to recreate the look of film (often using vintage lenses as well) that I wish film for motion pictures was easy to find vendors for processing, development, and transfer as they used to be.
Also, on the grain subject, my buddy who was the cinematographer on The Northman chose Super 35 over 65mm because the grain was actually much less noticeable and when exposed the way he did it’s barely perceivable. Funny enough, I’ve seen “debates” in film dork forums where people refuse to believe that movie was shot on film because there’s no grain in the image. I’ll sometimes share photos I have of him at the camera framed by the huge magazines holding the thousands of feet of film needed for some of those long takes. Usually ends the debate. :)
At least they’ve moved on from their sepia firefight phase.
I think think* Ellsworth Kelly was anticipating the Ukraine dust-up, 20 years in advance. The blue and yellow look and awful lot like the shades used in the Ukrainian flag. The meaning of the red block…
* I don’t really think that.
When I saw the order of the colors I immediately thought of Russian forces trapped by Ukrainian forces.
Gee, I dunno—it could just as easily be a wall with a rectangular opening in front (blue), a hallway in the midground (yellow), and a far doorway or wall (red).
That said, I didn’t attribute any three-dimensionality at first—I just saw it as three colorful rectilinear shapes. (I tend to not view abstract art as looking “like” anything—I kind of see it as just form and color that evokes some feeling.)
I looked at it and thought, “wait, this is art?”
> wait, this is art?
Don’t make me post more Lawrence Alma-Tadema!
Oh, come on Lambert. Secretly, you love the French Salon painters. If you want something a tad less onerous than Alma-Tadema, try some Maxfield Parrish or N C Wyeth.
Full Disclosure: I like Robert W Chambers and James Branch Cabell too. I also got to read many issues of Weird Tales when I was young. Go figure. {Everyone should have ‘access’ to a full catalogue of Weird Tales magazine. Something for everyone, or everything.]
Same.
No offense but this art suckssss
I’ll play – the yellow inflated life-raft rim is in the foreground, the red plastic base of the raft and the blue ocean are both at the same distance.
Like Jeff, I see the formal composition in three (nearly) primary hues without likening it to any other object. The proportions of the shapes and colors are perfect together. It’s dynamic.
Hmmm… Post Dynamism.
>>>There’s no way I would be photographing today with film; I can maintain a computer, but I can’t maintain a dark room for black and white, let alone color, which I would want (and the process of sending the film out to be developed does not appeal). Nevertheless, I think this is a great thing, because the “feel” of analog is different. I miss, for example, grain. Pixels are not the same!
It is a hassle, and it’s been a few decades (my, how time just flies) since I have developed any film, but if you have a single room, even a large walk in closet, that you can completely blackout, you can develop pictures. If I got the desire, I could see myself doing so although it would be some real work. I assume a film company could easily do more than a walk in closet!
> but if you have a single room, even a large walk in closet, that you can completely blackout, you can develop pictures.
I have done that in the past, but for black and white. I had the trays, the chemicals, and a big old Beseler enlarger (looked like this one. $1838 today, but [breaks out online calculator] ~$449.58 in 1979 or so, which I could have afforded then, even though poor). But today I don’t have the time or the space for that.
And today I do color. And color development is way beyond any sort of facility I could set up.
But I’m glad people are doing it!
Actually, color development isn’t that much different from b&w if you want to get into it. You can get an enlarger with built in filters and the new lamps are much more forgiving than the old ones. I miss it so badly but I developed (no pun intended) an allergy to the stop bath and that was it for me.
Channel check: A post industrial mid size city in my area has a huge film shop. They’ve been open for about a year and a half and every time I go by there are people in there. Go figure, I love that people are doing this.
RE: CPI print
I was watching the futures and then the market open today. It was a very wild ride. I don’t think a 170 point move in the S&P in 2 hours is a “normal” market. I imagine some got the gold mine and some got the shaft.
Yeah, that looked like a small short squeeze to me, but as a small short I hodled tight. I don’t see any indication that this rally has legs, nor any good news on the horizon.
The divergence in the Weekly RSI and MACD say your wrong. I hope your short position was small for you.
This CPI print is another nail in the coffin for Dems at the midterms.
There’s no way I would be photographing today with film; I can maintain a computer, but I can’t maintain a dark room for black and white
You don’t need a full darkroom. Just a changing bag, developing tank and chemicals. I just scan the negatives. A full dark room would be nice I suppose but scanning the negatives is much easier. If you were to send them out for development places like Darkroom.com will scan them for you and mail back the negatives. You can down load the scans and see which ones you would want to run a hi-res scan on at home…. or just have them run a hi-res scan for some extra $$ after development.
> You don’t need a full darkroom. Just a changing bag, developing tank and chemicals. I just scan the negatives. A full dark room would be nice I suppose but scanning the negatives is much easier.
Not liking the workflow. Today, I come back from an expedition, sit down at my computer, put the memory card in the slot, fire up Lightroom (sorry), and sort, classify, and “develop” the keepers in an hour or so. I hate to be an apostle of convenience, since that is a very destructive attitude, but in this case, I am. I do not feel limited as [lambert blushes modestly] as an artist by the digital environment in any way, or else I might have trouble with it. No chemical smell, no spills, no cleanup, no materials to purchase, no accidents with light leaks, etc.
I liked the process of developing negatives and printing black and white photos very much. But that was then. I moved later to color slides, but then I was in Cambridge, so I could get them developed in Harvard Square in a couple of hours as a walk-in (at a seller of Fuji film apparently now gone). That was good, too, but I wouldn’t want a feedback loop lasting days now.
And you definitely do not want to be developing color film at home. Those chemicals are nasty. The camera store I used to work at got put out of business, largely because of the shift to digital, so I do have some nostalgia for the good old days, working at the one hour photo, getting to peak into everyone’s private lives…but I have to admit that for 90% of cases digital is far superior to film (especially if you have a decent photo printer).
Agreed. Unless one is an expert with film there’s no question digital is better. Most fashion photographers do digital now (often because clients demand to see immediate results) and only know a few photographers and one cinematographer who exclusively do film only (and have the clout to do so).
Looking at old home photos beside prints of iPhone photos is jarring. The clarity, detail, and dynamics of digital photos for the masses is light years better than the old instamatics. And even a lot of prosumer to pro work has innovated and done things with digital that just weren’t possible before.
That said, when someone really knows how to work with film the images they create are unbeatable.
As a good friend said (quoting someone I can’t remember), “What takes time, time respects.”
Right. And arguably the same is true in professional photography. When we are nostalgic for film grain we are nostalgic for something that once was considered a flaw.
Personally I think photography is and always was about putting something worth looking at in front of the lens, not “the medium is the message.” On one of those film cult series Stanley Donen tried to explain this and said ‘the camera is just a pen”–a device for capturing, in his case, Fred Astaire or Audrey Hepburn or Cary Grant. It is an art to do that well but it’s not about the technology.
Re-learning photography digitally late in life allowed me to become a better and more serious photographer than I ever imagined I would be. The learning curve with digital is way cheaper and therefore (for those of us of modest means) much faster. Fetishizing analog doesn’t seem to have much to do with art; I’d much sooner spend time with an original and interesting image than evaluate one technically. Photographers are kind of the guitar players of the visual arts, with some showing off their proficiency and others intent on making music. And don’t overlook the easy availability of image-processing software from any number of, uh, unauthorized online sources. Paying rent for software is for suckers.
Right to this too. Photography in the old days was an expensive hobby. For some of us schools would help out by lending equipment.
With regard to the Nate Silver article and polls and college-educated citizens being a problem……..
I am not only college-educated, I have a doctoral degree and post-doctoral training. And unfortunately for Mr. Silver and whatever other pollsters are out there and up to, I am able to pay very close attention to everything going on around me – including very slight details. That is part of my job as a physician but it has helped me well in so many other ways in my life.
Forget campaign yard signs and bumper stickers which are just strangely non-existent right now. I see and hear things constantly which give me the idea that the Dems are headed for a very bad time. I have stated this before months ago – and it is only getting much much worse.
I can assure everyone, as for myself, this life long Dem in the working class “FDR” section of the party – will not even think about voting for them again – until there is radical change. I am sick and tired of it all. I cannot see a bit of difference these days between them and the GOP – they may be actually much worse. Biden and the current crop of losers lost me completely with the vaccine mandates – and nothing has happened since to change my mind.
Just this AM on the way to work, while paying for gas, there were THREE instances of young Latino men in the gas station line muttering under their breath or actually mouthing off to the cashier about the huge cost of their breakfast sandwiches, intermixed with FJB or variations thereof. This has become common anytime I am in a store.
There are now 4 restaurants in town who have posted big signs in the front describing in detail the huge cost increases in their raw materials. FYI – it is more like 50-100% in the past 2 years – not the 9% we are hearing about today. At the bottom of each sign, is some kind of statement – THANK YOU BIDEN.
There are patients and their spouses galore who are most definitely in the “HRC deplorable” caste, who are repeatedly affirming to me over and over every day that they intend to vote for the first time in their life. These are often 30-40 year olds. And trust me, it will not be for the Dems. I really do not think they are even being counted in Mr. Silver’s polls. Many of them do not have a phone or internet service. Kinda hard to poll people who use the library computers for their internet service.
One stressed out young professional person after the other, who has never bothered to vote before, but most certainly will be this time. They will not be voting for Dems. I would have never thought this possible, but it appears the Dems may be well on their way to alienating an entire generation of younger people. GOOD JOB DEMS – THAT TOOK LOTS OF HARD WORK – BUT YOU DID IT.
Repeatedly, on every gas pump and newspaper stand in town ( blue as it can be) stickers of FJB or Let’s Go Brandon showing up. When ripped off – they are right back the next day.
And interestingly, I have two acquaintances in the past month who have expressed to me that they have been contacted by pollsters and have just lied to them stating they will be voting for Dems when they most certainly will not be. “You see what these people are capable of doing on Facebook to those they do not like – I do not want to be on their radar.”
It really is the economy stupid.
Again – I am loathe to mention politics in any way to my patients. I avoid it like the plague. But these people constantly are bringing this up to me every day unsolicited. I would guess about 90% are anti-Dem. Not really pro-GOP but absolutely anti DEM. To me, this need for patients to bring this up with their physician is itself a very ominous sign.
And after Mr. Silver’s performance and that of his colleagues the past decade or so – it is clear to me that for whatever reason, the pre-election polls seem to be slanted at least 5% or so for the Dems. I think it may be even worse this year. Therefore, I think it is incumbent upon us all when talking about these polls to make those calculations ourselves.
Even Psaki said that it the election is about Biden the Dems will get shelled. You’d think his handlers would tell him to shut up already.
We aren’t just strongly recommended to vote for the Democrats, we are obligated as young-ish people. We owe them our votes. The party can’t fail, only be failed. It was our fault for Trump. We also apparently were naive for trying to elect Bernie. Now shut-up you entitled millennial and write a check for Ukraine.
I’ll vote for a communist at this point.
Hell Yeah!
Communists are cool people*!
*when not mired in the idpol quagmire
“…this life long Dem in the working class “FDR” section of the party – will not even think about voting for them again – until there is radical change.”
What Doc said, but I would change “FDR” to “Walter Reuther.” And “life-long” for me stopped for good with the 2012 election. My PMC peeps just look at me and shake their heads, sadly, that I don’t understand all these threats to “Our Democracy.” I’ve stopped asking them, “What democracy would that be?”
And let us not forget Harry Hopkins:
There is a proven prototype.
Is there a “like” button on nakedcapitalism, or is Lambert picking on me?
This reminds me of the Landon landslide predicted by the Literary Digest in 1936.
Voting against implies voting and there ain’t no one to vote for.
Landslide is a rather ambiguous term these days.
A real life correction to lingering instability, with dire consequences to those dependent on that assumed stability.
Minsky moments.
From your notes I can see how it will go down election day. I was working the polls back in ’07 in Oz and people had had a gutful of the ruling government by that time. For the first time ever, I saw a long line of people ready to vote as we opened up the polling booths and you could see that all those people were ready to vote. You could mentally picture them carrying bats, bike-chains & clubs such was the mood.
My neighbors and neighborhood is different, too PMC and Dem. Unfortunately as buses get more crowded, the riders get quieter, so I don’t get the same insight into what others are thinking. But what I do see is a palpable lack of enthusiasm for this election. There are no signs, no stickers, nothing in windows, no buttons on bags and now jackets.
I will not be surprised if this area of my state has seriously low turnout, with few exceptions. Some of this will be because most consider the result a done deal, but I have no doubt that people see no point. AND Biden is lucky he isn’t running. Even among my deeply blue highly loyal Democratic friends, no one is buying he is the best President ever, even if they do despise Joe Manchin. They may not be saying it out loud, but the grumbling about this disaster or that problem never includes praise for the plans and excuses for the lack of follow through for Joe. Those that aren’t already holding their nose about him, are close to getting there. When everything disappoints you about a politician, it is only a short hop onto the not ever voting for them again.
I’m on the boomer/gen x cusp and had a younger FB friend comment on a cartoon I had posted about Biden reneging on his promises with:
“American Democracy is hanging on by the *thinnest* of threads, and will soon be replaced by authoritarian White Christian Nationalism if Democrats do not win at the local, state, and national levels next month.
“Memes like the one above advance the tactics and strategy of the enemies of what you clam [sic] to stand for. STOP POSTING THEM. THIS ISN’T HELPING.”
I wouldn’t engage after that and only told him to not tell me what to do. But this is the almost crazed mindset that many people I know have.
I saw my first ‘Let’s Go Brandon/FJB’ bumper sticker a couple weeks ago, on Melbourne’s Nepean Highway. It was on a Tesla, which I thought was curious.
I am shocked,shocked that nikolai kleggski, loyal coat holder of david cameron, would stoop to taking a bribe.
Maybe wages aren’t all they could be at META.
Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
Take care of your workers, META, or they will have to take care of themselves.
I fully expect a minion led SWAT raid on Kleggski’s fairytale metaverse castle.
Yes. I’m shocked, too. Certainly there’s some sort of reasonable explanation.
because democratic governance consistently outperforms authoritarianism in protecting human dignity
https://caufsociety.com/list-of-tent-cities-in-america/
Adding, it’s pretty funny (not) to hear the people who are persecuting snowden and assange decry authoritarianism.
As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it, ” but I am horrified to hear this level of disconnection as the effort to not see this must be great; it makes me wonder what I am not seeing. What are the mental blocks that make me miss what should be obvious to me?
By “dignity” they mean the dignified, dignification, all that distinction from mere “type”, that distinction of which the PMC and other elites are constructed.
Democrats are totalitarian, Republicans are authoritarian. “Choose” your poison.
Remembering Angela Lansbury, my sister shared this story from our mother’s long ago: “Mom had a friend who was a Canadian who moved with her family to California. She became an actress with an English accent. She couldn’t get the parts, because… Angela.”
I think this was not long after Gaslight.
A number of years ago I worked in a natural foods store where Angela Lansbury shopped on a regular basis. She carried herself with a certain dignity, I thought. Nice to know about her background. She was a talent.
Has no one mentioned the manchurian candidate yet?
A chilling, rodham clinton level, performance and all the more so with her son’s involvement with the manson family.
I hope cabot cove does not exist, 28 murders a season would do little for tourism.
Unless they had a ‘Jaws’ mayor, routinely cited by de pfell johnson as a lighthouse of liberty.
Americans will support universal human rights and stand in solidarity with those beyond our shores who seek freedom and dignity, just as we continue the critical work of ensuring equity and equal treatment under law at home. We will work to strengthen democracy around the world because democratic governance consistently outperforms authoritarianism in protecting human dignity, leads to more prosperous and resilient societies, creates stronger and more reliable economic and security partners for the United States, and encourages a peaceful world order.
Global Crusade without limits! Apostates and Infidels, convert to universal human rights and democracy or face the sword of Brandon.
He would have much more credibility had he just fixed the damn plumbing in Flint. US “democracy” and five bucks will get you a cup of Joe at Starbucks, and with a deal like that no one need listen to the Scranton variant bloviating on about democracy.
“Dude, we went shopping. What more do you expect of us?”
They have forgotten about the plumbing haven’t they? The country is falling apart, literally falling apart as in lots of stuff does not work reliably, but we must support universal human rights. Universalism in whatever guise is a prime mover of misery and death. If your way is they only way, the heretics must be converted or crushed.
There is virtue in tending your own garden, but that requires work and not rhetoric.
Absolutely!
To see how they waste perfectly good pills to keep that guy upright and talking about other people while the US burns is just a sin. I know I spend too much time zeroing in on Joe Biden, but he is just the perfect microcosm of a whole rotten business model that just needs to go away. They could not have found a better avatar than they did in The Senator from MBNA, and for that I congratulate them.
Yet more evidence that the US public health establishment is actually philosophically opposed to the concept of public health.
I don’t think that the release of the very senior executives who took bribes from OnlyFans was accidental.
I think that OnlyFans wants to claim that it was not bribery by them, but extortion by senior executives from the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™.
Lambert’s comment on noone selling Corsi Rosenthal box kits sent me looking for them and Tex-Air Filters, a Texas-based company, sells them for US based customers for $40 a pop. These are small 10″ boxes, I assume intended for residential customers. Just ordered one myself. They also sell larger 20″ filter kits without fans.
That would be Mr. Rosenthal’s company!
The new Russian General is now in ukraine. I followed Syria very closely and Tiger forces trained Russian troops that came there. Their General is the elite of the military.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2022/10/13/general-armageddon-enters-the-ring/
Gee, does that mean that cell phones, water, gas, electricity and mail will stop working in Ukraine?
Always wondered why those “brutal Russia invaders” forgot to shut those down?
I. Hope. That. Russia. Wins. Rapidly. And. Peace. Is. Declared.
Sick of looking at my parents and wondering if I will never see them again after nuclear war starts.
apropos of nothing in particular:
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
“So we cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid justice, and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.” – Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Isn’t it interesting that the national organs of state mediated media are dusting off the playbook used on Sanders for Fetterman? It is like deja vu all over again.
Sorry maybe I’m stupid but what does “revisionist” even *mean* in the context of a nations geopolitical policy?
If I was going to take a guess, I’d say it means “anyone who doesn’t enforce the status quo even at their own expense” but surely they’re not being explicit about that now.
I took it to mean a thinly veiled reference to their usual patter about Russia wanting an empire and now cloaking its’ “aggression” under ethnic and multi-polar rhetoric. The problem with that is, what about Russia having been in Eastern and Southern Ukraine for the past thousand years do they not get?
Russia started in places like Kiev, that is why they called them the Kievan Rus. The only people who seek to “revise” that history appear to be grifters like Joe, former viceroy of Ukraine, who has been around since the Bronze Age when the Slavs first broke up.
So… We’re going with it’s just another pseudo-intellectual sounding term that is used to mean “anyone we don’t currently like”, with no regard for its actual meaning?
That would fit with the usual blob tactics.
When I was a kid my (John Birch Society) Dad used to go on about Russian and Chinese encyclopedias that attributed everything worth inventing to either Russians or Chinese. I have no clue if that was true, prolly not, but it does seem strange that we seem to be spending a lot of time revising history to make us look good.
…………….innovative idea……………….
Maybe they should come out with a new set of encyclopedias as part of their campaign merch that they could sell while out canvassing? I can think of nothing more alluring than a set of fifty books with
Mao’sJoe Biden’s face on them.You could be on to a winner. Just make sure the spines match and look good and expensive, don’t need to worry about the contents, no-one reads anymore.
Thor’s hammer was busy a couple nights ago here in Sequoia NP, the fires being no biggie, it would appear.
The bark beetles are really doing a number on the forest for the trees in the Sierra Nevada, here’s a slice of the action.
I was talking to the professional tree faller most everybody employs in my neck of the woods, in order to topple lofty empires which have collapsed internally and are in need of the coup d’saw~
He related that my neighbor across the way wanted one dead tree from bark beetles cut down that he requested this fallers assistance on, and said faller went and took a look at it, but had no time that day to take ‘R down, and when he came back 3 weeks later, 5 more pine trees around his lot were rigor mortis in concert with the beetles, very huge toes up.
You lost that livin’ feelin’
Whoa, that livin’ feelin’
You lost that livin’ feelin’
Now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa-oh
Now there’s no welcome look in my eyes when I look up at you
And now you’re starting to threaten little things I do
It makes me just feel like crying
‘Cause baby, something beautiful’s dyin’
You lost that livin’ feelin’
Whoa, that livin’ feelin’
You lost that livin’ feelin’
Now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa-oh
Man, 1 tree to 5 trees in only three weeks? Those beetles work fast. Any word on what sort of tree could get planted in their place that those beetles won’t go after?
The beetles have been practically demolishing all kinds of pine they pined for, a feeding frenzy of a thing where a small regiment of ant sized nothings, take down a 100-200 year old tree, thank you very much, may I have another, Sir?
Unfortunately slow growing trees have no chance against incredibly quick growing groundcover, the tree being the tortoise in this contest.
I have whitethorn on my property that was cut way back by the fire dept in preparation for pyrotechnics that never came, which grew 2 feet in a year, spreading their tendrils to and fro.
The catch-all word for this ho hum terra firma is chaparral, and nothing about it is inviting for it spreads like wildfire and provides no shade in an almost always sunny Sierra Nevada summer day.
Its also primed to burn as opposed to the trees, which used to hog all the stored energy from the Sun, until they died and left no progeny in their place.
Its gonna be hell on the great hammockracy, of which I am a member in good standing, er laying.
Don’t suppose that racehorse trees would be beetle-resistant if tried. They grow fast and gives lots of shade. Check out the six images on this page to get an idea of what they are like-
https://www.gardensonline.com.au/gardenshed/plantfinder/show_2887.aspx
Do those beetles go after camphor trees as well?
They’d never plant non natives in the National Parks, so that’s a no go. That said, lotsa camphor trees in the Big Smokes~
After California planted all those Eucalyptus trees, I can understand that.
Which I can’t understand. The local Redwoods are weeds in their native environment and the native oaks while not as fast growing are also fire resistant, also live for centuries, and are very difficult to kill. The only reason why the planters could possibly prefer non-native Eucalyptus that are not as fire resistant, are shorter lived, and not as good as lumber is because they grow faster than the native trees, which is very short term thinking.
True Anglela Lansbury story. Back in the late sixties her young daughter got into serious drugs. This young, charismatic young guy would pick her up at school and would take her out to steal food and money. And she wasn’t the only one as this guy had other girls. Seeing which way that it could go finally, Lansbury took the entire family and moved to Ireland where the daughter was able to clean her act up. And the name of that charismatic young guy? Charles Manson-
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/angela-lansbury-saved-daughter-charles-manson-1235400889/
Much late and probably not of any interest to modern readers:
Pace Angela Lansbury.
Her first widely seen film role as “the maid” in the 1944 version of “GasLight” was wonderful for what was no doubt then cast as a ‘small part’. Her acting in this role was imo keenly understated with her brief eye looks and eyebrow emphasis and her at point sighs noting her character’s hopes, was absolutely wonderful as a sketch of a working class girl hoping to “improve” her situation. Gosh, so then, start with the movie Gaslight and go forward to Mame and etc. Wonderful acting.
She got an AA nom a year later for The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hard to recognize that young and innocent Angela in the evil and perverse Angela character of The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Her own actorly transition to Dorian Gray? Clearly she could do it all.
Murder She Wrote is still hugely popular on OTA.
Still be best dorian gray, the staging and nuance in that film is haunting.
Who remembers Hurd Hatfield?
From the personal life section:
You would not get away with those things today, without a daddy.
Re AOC
That guy after all was only following her advice and was raising a ruckus-
https://twitter.com/bxcommie/status/1580565941494030336
But then-
‘Comrade Misty is Putin’s Buddy 🍀
@SarcasmStardust
Turns out the guy who called AOC out got put in Twitter jail. Remember when she used her email list to call on her stans to mass report people who were mean to her? I remember.’
https://twitter.com/SarcasmStardust/status/1580624567391092736
On the late great Angela Lansbury, it was well known that Murder She Wrote supported actors, that it was where older actors made that last little bit so they got to keep their health insurance. And that was because Angela Lansbury insisted. I first heard about it because Madelyn Rhue talked about her MS and how MSW even wrote in her wheelchair so that she could work.
The last of the mensch group of TV crime solvers*
The thread also includes references to the diversity on MSW for its time.
I think Bull is missing Dick Van Dyke in this, but it is harder to get through Diagnosis Murder to realize how often the show pointed out problems with our medical and insurance system that have just gotten worse in the following decades.
Thanks for this link. I have a much, much younger relative who’s connected with the screen and theater actors’ guilds (guilds being another word for unions). I didn’t realize how much of actors’ working benefits was dependent on their working with in a specific time frame to maintain their health and retirement benefits. (adding: the great Myrna Loy in the 1930’s (The Thin Man series) could not depend on her box office 1930’s draw alone to fund her 1970s-80’s retirement. It was her membership in the screen actors guild that financed her decent retirement. She’s one of the ones we know of. Think of all the secondary actors we barely remember.)
There’s a Myrna Loy Theatre in Helena, MT. I wonder if that’s where she retired.
October 13, 2022 – SEQUOIA AND KINGS CANYON NATIONAL PARKS, Calif. –
Beginning Friday, Oct. 14, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks will initiate emergency actions to protect giant sequoias
from the threats posed by high-intensity wildfire. Park staff will remove and reduce dense vegetation and other potential fire fuel sources in and around 11 giant sequoia groves that are especially at risk. The work will include manual thinning by hand, and later burning piles of cut vegetation and dead wood, and later using prescribed fire in areas that were initially thinned by hand. Most of these groves are in remote locations.
Between 2020 and 2021, 13% to 19% of the world’s population of large giant sequoias were killed by three large wildfires (the Castle, Windy, and KNP Complex Fires), including several thousand trees in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. While giant sequoias require frequent low- to moderate-intensity fire for healthy growth and regeneration, these fires burned so intensely that they overwhelmed even these great survivors’ natural defenses. Some areas were so affected that no mature living trees remained to reseed the ground. Most of these catastrophically burned areas had not experienced fire in recent years, and because of that, carried heavy fuel loads that caused fires to burn more intensely.
“In the midst of a new era of extreme fire behavior fueled by climate change, this work is an important step towards ensuring the long term viability of the ancient giant sequoias and protecting them from future losses,” said Chuck Sams, director of the National Park Service. “We have the tools to protect this iconic species and will deploy them as needed.” “The fires of 2020 and 2021 underscored the importance of deploying all tools at our disposal to protect sequoia trees,” said Clay Jordan, superintendent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “Park managers are assessing the appropriate fuels reduction tools for each grove on a case-by-case basis.”
Most of the work this fall will include manual thinning of excess vegetation. The trimmings from thinning will be burned on site in piles, or as part of a prescribed burn, or a combination of the two. As the project continues, park staff will provide more details for individual components of the project, including when smoke impacts are anticipated. Additional work may include possible replanting of six sequoia groves that burned at high severity in 2020 or 2021 and have been determined to be at risk for total failure of natural regeneration. Assessments of these areas are currently underway. The earliest this work might begin is fall of 2023.
https://goldrushcam.com/sierrasuntimes/index.php/news/local-news/41357-sequoia-and-kings-canyon-national-parks-taking-emergency-action-to-protect-giant-sequoias
Tex-Air Filters sells two sizes of Corsi Box kits.
I’m happy enough with the full size kit that I bought one for my daughter.
Heterologous booster with inhaled adenovirus vector vaccine expected to be an effective strategy in preventing Omicron variant BA.5: research
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1277116.shtml
Gee, I guess that the pandemic is over for Sydney-
‘live: Sydney news: Five day self-isolation requirement for COVID-19 officially over’
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-14/sydney-news-covid-isolation-rules-no-longer-in-place/101533914
Meanwhile. ‘One in 10 Australians who got COVID-19 were still suffering symptoms more than three months later, according to a new study.’
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/tracy-didnt-believe-in-long-covid-then-karma-came-back-to-bite-her/i95g0aqkp
I see the sequenced variant wastewater data at the WA Department of Health once every two weeks (we have a bi-weekly epidemiology meeting), and it is always at least a week behind the current date. I suppose that makes sense, the researchers have to collect their samples, sequence them, and check them for accuracy, and odds are they have an array of other jobs to do as well.
Next Friday I’ll bring some pictures of the strain dominance graph. The state shares it with Local Health Jurisdictions and community partners so it shouldn’t be an issue to share it
You get the feeling a major bank is going to go down, with the dominowe factor taking down others, in what will be termed in the future…
‘Findemic’
Not ‘Bandemic’? Somehow I am reminded of this scene from “The Big Short”-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUM59Eh6vTw (2:25 mins)
#COVID #BQ
Well … surprising absolutely familyblog no one, Eric Feigl-Ding is asserting that CDC is sitting on BQ Variant data that’s baaaaad. Excerpt:
“The new highly evasive #BQ1 & #BQ11 sub variants are surging over 11%—but CDC has not shared it yet! “ (via Twitter)
#AOC
… we have a new “left”! LOL
#TheNATOLeft (via Twitter)
Sadly one of the truest things said about the US political “left” is that it is largely composed of “imperialists who want free healthcare”.
Be better, “squad” …
I will have to go back to checking Feigl-Ding on nitter. I had dropped him since although appreciate his pandemic posts his political posts get annoying. Thank you for this.
There’s no need to panic right? After all there’s the vaccine!!! Bestest thing eva ..