By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
California Towhee, Rice’s Crossing Road, Nevada, California, United States.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
Capitol Seizure
“Romance novel cover model who dragged Capitol officer on Jan. 6 sentenced to 3 years in prison” [NBC]. “A former bodybuilder and romance novel cover model who dragged a police officer down the stairs of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was sentenced in federal court to three years in prison Thursday. Logan Barnhart, 42, of Michigan, was identified by online sleuths who used facial recognition to turn up images of him at bodybuilding competitions. He was arrested in August 2021.” • The “nation of snitches” part perhaps not so humorous.
Biden Administration
“Biden to nominate two Latina judges to appeals courts” [NBC]. “[Biden] will pick Irma Carrillo Ramirez to serve on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. She currently serves as a magistrate judge in Texas and is expected to receive bipartisan support in the Senate, a source involved with the nomination said. If confirmed, she’d be the first Latina to serve on the famously conservative appeals court. The president also intends to pick Ana Isabel de Alba to serve on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is currently a federal district court judge in California. The selections represent an attempt by Biden to build on what the White House touts as the most diverse slate of judicial nominees in U.S. history.” • Feinstein is getting in the way here, because if she’s absent, the Democrats need Republican votes to advance them to a confirmation. All I can say is that I hope that, identities aside, these two judges do whatever the Chamber of Commerce wants.
2024
“Mike Pence Tells Fox News, ‘I Just Trust Republican Primary Voters’ to Choose Someone Other Than Trump in 2024” [Mediaite]. Pence: “Look, it’s early in this process. I do think we’ll have better choices. I think nobody could have defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 other than Donald Trump. But I think come 2024, our party will choose the right standard bearer to meet this moment, to strengthen America at home and abroad. And my family and I continue to reflect on what role we might play in that. And I promise to keep you informed of any decisions we make.”
“Ron DeSantis receives warm welcome in Trump-friendly Ohio” [NBC]. “‘This is a person that we can adopt here in Ohio as our own,’ said Summit County GOP Chairman Bryan Williams, noting DeSantis’ family roots in nearby Youngstown while introducing him before an audience of several hundred at the county’s Lincoln Day breakfast. The event — one of two GOP functions DeSantis was scheduled to headline Thursday in the Buckeye State — is part of the governor’s national tour to promote a book and expand his profile beyond Florida. DeSantis has not yet launched a campaign for president, but polls show him as Trump’s closest Republican competitor, and he is expected to enter the race in May or June.”
“Loudoun schools explore replacing boys and girls bathrooms with all-gender, single stalls” [WJLA]. Youngkin not in the headline, oddly. More: “In 2021, the school board passed policy 8040, which allows students to use bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice despite their biological sex at birth. And now, LCPS said it’s working to redesign school bathrooms to comply with the Virginia Department of Education’s Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools, a policy that was crafted under former Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Northam. But the model policy is currently being rewritten by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration. ‘We received 71,000 comments and we are working through all of them. The sad thing is that tens of thousands of them were actually submitted by bots based on our initial assessment, and so we’re making sure that we address those comments that are real,’ Youngkin said. ‘It’s an obligation for us, as Virginians, to put parents back in charge of their children’s lives and together with caring teachers and counselors, and parents, we can support our children. This is what our model policies are all about. And as soon as we finished getting through all of these comments, we’ll be ready to get ready to deliver them.’ Despite the state policy being potentially revised, LCPS is still moving forward with its $11 million pilot program.”
“Trump deposition: Former president answers questions for 7 hours in New York fraud lawsuit” [ABC]. A test of endurance! More: “Former President Donald Trump answered questions for nearly seven hours Thursday during his second deposition in a legal battle with New York’s attorney general over his company’s business practices, reversing an earlier decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and remain silent. The Republican met all day with lawyers for Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump last year. Her lawsuit claims Trump and his family misled banks and business associates by giving them false information about his net worth and the value of assets such as hotels and golf courses. Shortly after Trump entered the Manhattan skyscraper that houses James’ offices, his attorney, Alina Habba, said he was ‘not only willing but also eager to testify.'” • N
Republican Funhouse
“Sources: GOP senators preparing for McConnell retirement” [The Spectator]. “Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has been out of the public eye for weeks, following a serious fall that hospitalized him. Now multiple sources confirm that Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota are actively reaching out to fellow Republican senators in efforts to prepare for an anticipated leadership vote — a vote that would occur upon announcement that McConnell would be retiring from his duties as leader, and presumably the Senate itself. One source says that Cornyn has been particularly active in his preparations, taking fellow senators with whom he has little in common to lunch in attempts to court them. Requests are being targeted at a plethora of conservative senators, including the sixteen who voted to delay the leadership election earlier this year, a proxy for opposition to McConnell’s leadership.”
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.
* * * “US Democratic National Committee, lawyer Elias part ways” [Reuters]. “The Democratic National Committee will no longer be represented by longtime Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, spokespeople for his law firm and the DNC confirmed on Wednesday…. Elias in 2021 left U.S. law firm Perkins Coie with other lawyers who specialize in election law to start his current firm. He said on Twitter on Tuesday that his team is currently working on 45 ‘pro-democracy’ lawsuits in 18 states.” • Huh.
“DNC Parts Ways with Top Election Lawyer Marc Elias” [National Review]. “On Tuesday, multiple sources told Punchbowl News that the DNC and Elias had a number of strategic disagreements. The lawyer, who has represented the DNC since 2009 and will continue to represent other arms like the DCCC, has been criticized for hypocritically claiming to fight voter suppression while doing his utmost to make sure Democrats prevail in elections.” Come come. The DNC worried about charges of hypocrisy? Yet that is the only motive suggested, and Reuters has nothing. So, handle the little matter of the Steele Dossier for Hills, and then get kicked to the curb. Why, the ingratitude!
“James Carville warns Democrats of danger looming with sinking Black turnout in 2024: ‘Abysmally low’ in 2022” [FOX]. “‘The biggest story in my mind out of 2022 is abysmally low Black turnout,’ Carville told [Charles] Blow. ‘It’s a problem with younger Black voters,’ he continued….. Republicans have made inroads with Black and Hispanic voters in recent years. In 2020, Trump increased his share of the Black vote from 6 to 8 percent compared to 2016. Similarly, Trump increased his share of the Hispanic vote from 28 percent to 35 percent. Republicans made similar gains in the 2022 midterm elections, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis being the first Republican to win Miami-Dade County in 40 years.”
“Democrats praise, grumble over decision for Chicago to host 2024 convention” [ABC]. “The DNC announced on Tuesday that the Windy City will hold the nominating convention, the party’s first full event since 2016, after the coronavirus pandemic rendered its 2020 bash, originally slated to be held in Milwaukee, a largely online affair. Chicago beat out Atlanta and New York City to win the confab, letting Illinois lawmakers take a victory lap due to the city’s progressive politics and strategic location in the hot regional battleground of the Midwest. Biden and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker are largely aligned, and the state has adopted Democratic orthodoxy on both economic and hot-button social issues like abortion [and sex]. The city also has a strong union presence in its hotels, something lacking in Atlanta. And to top it all off, Pritzker, himself wildly wealthy with a deep fundraising network, personally assured national Democrats that they wouldn’t go into debt if they hosted the convention in Chicago.” • I thought the Democrats would pick Atlanta (see above). But I guess Pritzker’s billions outweighed race.
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Lawmakers consider requiring voting machines for all in-person voting” [Nevada Independent]. From Jon Ralston. Nevertheless: “After multiple rural counties attempted to eliminate or consider eliminating the use of mechanical voting machines last year, Nevada lawmakers are considering a bill that would require such machines to be used for in-person voting. The change would primarily affect Nye County, where county officials last year transitioned away from the use of electronic voting machines amid the spread of election fraud conspiracy theories that targeted Dominion Voting Systems, a major manufacturer and provider of voting equipment nationally and in Nevada. AB242, which comes from the Joint Interim Standing Committee on Legislative Operations and Elections, would prohibit the use of paper ballots for in-person voting, instead requiring the use of voting machines for in-person voting. Voting machines used in Nevada include the Dominion electronic voting machines used in 15 counties, including Clark and Washoe counties, and mechanical ballot marking devices used in Carson City and Lander County. Assemblywoman Tracy Brown-May (D-Las Vegas) presented the bill and said the measure was intended to ‘address the inadequacies in accessibility for people with disabilities to be able to cast their votes.'” • As if. If they say it’s about the disabled, it’s not about the disabled, exactly as with “the children.”
“America’s first dark money ballot line” [The Lever]. “Right now, all the public knows is that No Labels is leading a $70 million campaign to lay the groundwork for a potential 2024 “unity” ticket — which would feature one Democrat and one Republican. Democrats and media outlets have been raising alarms that the move could undermine President Joe Biden and help elect a Republican. Compared to moneyed groups’ previous failed efforts to field alternate candidates, the No Labels initiative is more ambitious, secretive, and corrupt: Under the guise of bipartisan consensus, the corporate influence machine is buying its own national ballot line, funded by ultra-wealthy, anonymous donors. Thanks to a 2010 court ruling, No Labels doesn’t have to disclose anything about who’s funding its campaign. It’s also planning to employ a top-down candidate selection process: No Labels has indicated that candidates would be chosen by a group of people handpicked by the organization, which has close ties to corporate lawmakers like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ind.-Ariz.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Now, as No Labels pursues its own nationwide ballot line, experts say the group will likely never have to reveal to the public who’s financing the effort — not even if the organization does decide to field a presidential ticket.” Oh. A “government of national unity.” That should do the trick. Interesting because the one distinctive competence an American political party is controlling the ballot. Worth looking into.
“Gender Pronouns & Their Use in Workplace Communications” [Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office, National Institutes of Health]. ” Another important mistake to avoid is using the word ‘preferred’ or ‘chosen’ in the context of gender pronouns. Using either word suggests that gender identity is a preference or a choice, when it is neither.” • Wait. Harvard says gender fluidity is a thing. NIH says it isn’t. Who’s right?
#COVID19
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. We are now up to 50/50 states (100%). This is really great! (It occurs to me that there are uses to which this data might be put, beyond helping people with “personal risk assessments” appropriate to their state. For example, thinking pessimistically, we might maintain the list and see which states go dark and when. We might also tabulate the properties of each site and look for differences and commonalities, for example the use of GIS (an exercise in Federalism). I do not that CA remains a little sketchy; it feels a little odd that there’s no statewide site, but I’ve never been able to find one. Also, my working assumption was that each state would have one site. That’s turned out not to be true; see e.g. ID. Trivially, it means I need to punctuate this list properly. Less trivially, there may be more local sites that should be added. NY city in NY state springs to mind, but I’m sure there are others. FL also springs to mind as a special case, because DeSantis will most probably be a Presidental candidate, and IIRC there was some foofra about their state dashboard. Thanks again!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (9), JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, otisyves, Petal (5), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Utah, Bob White (3).
Look for the Helpers
We few, we happy few:
Most people increase everyone's risk when they enter some space or facility.
A few people keep risk the same (usually by wearing a respirator).
And fewer still decrease risk by making changes to the environment around them (using HEPA filters, measuring CO2, opening windows)
— Socrates (@apmalong) April 14, 2023
Let’s save some lives!
Covid Is Airborne
“Testing the Efficacy of the ‘Corsi-Rosenthal’ Box Fan Filter in an Active Classroom Environment” [ChemRxiv]. “We collected measurements of coarse (particles with diameters > 2.5μm) and fine (particles with diameters 0.5μm – 2.5 μm) particle number concentrations and PM2.5 (particles with diameter < 2.5μm) mass concentrations. Specifically, we compared measurements in occupied classrooms before and after we turned the C-R Boxes on. In our testing, C-R Boxes reduced fine particle number concentrations by 56-91% and PM2.5 mass concentrations by over 70% after we turn on the C-R Boxes." • Still looking for a simple DIY way to measure efficacy.
Maskstravaganza
Masks should not have the look and feel of medical appliances:
Michael Jordan’s 1998 NBA Finals Game 2 Air Jordan 13s fetched a record $2.2 million at auction, making them the most valuable sneakers ever sold https://t.co/GP6PLxjijg pic.twitter.com/yD7i9gU1zI
— Reuters (@Reuters) April 12, 2023
Masks/respirators should be marketed like sneakers.
A very useful thread on how to make your ear-loopy mask safer, if you must wear one:
I've seen a lot of this sort of mask wearing in the selfie trend.
Does the bridge of your nose have a corner? NO!
When you leave that crease in, you're leaving a gap that COVID can enter! See it in the profile?
But it's the shape, right? What can you do?
Here's an easy fix.🧵 pic.twitter.com/dRB257yOSi
— Sharyn Blum (@sleepyknave) April 13, 2023
Also, the replies are great. There really a lot of maskers out there, and they study up.
Where are the lawsuits:
Two weeks ago the nursing home my 86-year-old grandmother lives at celebrated dropping their masking requirement (don't worry, they now have free mints!)
Now multiple residents have COVID, including my grandmother.
What the fuck are we doing? pic.twitter.com/qinmXQ6D6q
— Matt Karolian (@mkarolian) April 14, 2023
Or, for that matter, the die-ins.
Variants
“The COVID virus has mutated so much since 2019 that some experts say it should be renamed SARS-CoV-3” [Salon]. “‘We continually call on member states to maintain strong testing and sequencing in order to identify new variants but also to understand the level of SARS-CoV-2 transmission going on in their populations,’ [Dr. Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO)] continued. ‘This virus remains unstable — it has not settled into a predictable pattern [but see below], which means surveillance systems need to be sensitive to pick up the early signs of another surge.’… According to the latest CDC variant tracking data, the only other variants really circulating in the U.S. are XBB.1.5’s offspring: XBB.1.9 and XBB.1.5.1. Meanwhile, XBB.1.16 is spreading rapidly in India and could eventually make its way to North America. Notably, XBB was first detected in Singapore before its offspring made the jump across the Pacific, though XBB.1.5 was first detected in the U.S. and likely originated in the Northeast. All these names may sound like gobbledygook to most non-experts — and there is a reason it’s so confusing. When variants of the virus mutated and evolved into new strains with significant advantages over old lineages, the WHO began giving these ‘variants of concern‘ names from the Greek alphabet. Hence, variants like delta and gamma made headlines when they emerged and began to spread — but the WHO has yet to assign any variants a new Greek name since omicron surged in late 2021. Instead, we have this alphabet soup of named variants, all of which are technically different sub-strains of omicron. Even a minor variation in a virus’ genetics can equate to a huge difference in how well immunity from vaccines and previous infections can stop them. If the virus evolves some kind of advantage — as viruses are prone to do and just as SARS-CoV-2 has done many times throughout the pandemic — another surge is not out of the question.”
“The virological characteristics of XBB.1.16” (preprint) [News Medical Life Sciences]. “The SARS-CoV-2 XBB.1.16 variant is associated with a 1.27- and 1.17-fold higher effective reproductive number (Re) as compared to the XBB.1 and XBB.1.5 subvariants, respectively, thus indicating the ability of this novel Omicron variant to disseminate quickly… Overall, the current extensive exploratory analyses uncovered that the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron XBB.1.16 subvariant has immense potential to disseminate and infect people worldwide to a greater extent than XBB.1 and XBB.1.5 subvariants. Furthermore, XBB.1.16 exhibits a higher immune-evasion potential that is similar to that of XBB.1 and XBB.1.5.” • The original.
Elite Malfeasance
The circle of life:
Your Government's plan for YOU:
Go round and round the reinfection cycle, and eventually fall into the middle. pic.twitter.com/GJViE46Ige
— Marvin (@MarvinH2_G2) April 14, 2023
This makes sense to me intuitively; every transition in the cycle is a torment nexus/chance for profit (like M-C-M’ transactions connected in circle); and the end product is eugenicist. The whole thread is worth a read, but it has italics and Greek letters in it, so I can’t make sense of it. If I get the gist, the writer has given an account of a sort of sawtooth pattern in Covid cases that will persist indefinitely. Readers?
Hospital Infection Control is at it again:
I am at a loss. There is removal of mitigations in hospitals with a nosocomial acquisition of 30%.
The C of Practice says – all nosocomial infections should be prevented…
Q: what is the goal with regard to the prevention of nosocomial of SARS2?https://t.co/UFw6T30Skl
— Dr Evonne T Curran NursD 💙🇺🇦 (@EvonneTCurran) April 11, 2023
“Study notes high rate of COVID-infected healthcare workers still caring for patients” [Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy]. “Half of all healthcare workers (HCWs) with symptomatic COVID-19 continued to go to work, even if they were involved with direct patient care, according to the results of a study yesterday on presenteeism among HCWs in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. Working while ill contributes to nosocomial transmission of respiratory viruses. Previous studies on HCWs with symptomatic influenza showed that a significant proportion—14% to 68%—still worked while sick. The new observational cohort study included all HCWs at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection from December 1, 2020, to September 30, 2021.” • Yo, Hospital Infection Control! Is it too much to ask that our hospitals not be death traps? (Also, where are the lawsuits? Are patients being made to sign away their rights?)
Looks like “leveling off to a high plateau” across the board. (I still think “Something Awful” is coming, however. I mean, besides what we already know about.) Stay safe out there!
Case Data
BioBot wastewater data from April 13:
For now, I’m going to use this national wastewater data as the best proxy for case data (ignoring the clinical case data portion of this chart, which in my view “goes bad” after March 2022, for reasons as yet unexplained). At least we can spot trends, and compare current levels to equivalent past levels.
Covid Emergency Room Visits
NOT UPDATED From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, from April 8:
NOTE “Charts and data provided by CDC, updates Wednesday by 8am. For the past year, using a rolling 52-week period.” So not the entire pandemic, FFS (the implicit message here being that Covid is “just like the flu,” which is why the seasonal “rolling 52-week period” is appropriate for bothMR SUBLIMINAL I hate these people so much. Anyhow, I added a grey “Fauci line” just to show that Covid wasn’t “over” when they started saying it was, and it’s not over now. Notice also that this chart shows, at least for its time period, that Covid is not seasonal, even though CDC is trying to get us to believe that it is, presumably so they can piggyback on the existing institutional apparatus for injections.
Positivity
*** AND STILL *** NOT UPDATED From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, published April 11:
-1.8%. Below the low point of the previous valley.
Lambert here: Walgreens always updates. If they’re shutting it down, I’ll be disappointed… UPDATE Walgreens still offers testing, according to their website. Can any readers confirm?
Deaths
NOT UPDATED Death rate (Our World in Data):
Total: 1,158,017 – 1,157,4628 = 555 (555 * 365 = 202,575 deaths per year, today’s YouGenicist™ number for “living with” Covid (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the YouGenicist™ metric keeps chugging along like this, I may just have to decide this is what the powers-that-be consider “mission accomplished” for this particular tranche of death and disease).
Lambert here: WHO turned off the feed?
• From Salon, quoted elsewhere on this page:
Yet while cases and hospitalizations are trending down, roughly 1700 Americans died from COVID the week ending April 5. Those death rates are only slightly lower than they were in July 2021. Given this, how much progress have we actually made?
Very little? To be fair, some might consider the successful creation of a death cult progress. It’s a funny old world.
Excess Deaths
NOT UPDATED Excess deaths (The Economist), published April 2:
Lambert here: Big jump from the last reading in the “Central Estimate.”
Lambert here: Based on a machine-learning model. Looks like a data issue, to me. I”m not sure how often this updates, and if it doesn’t, I’ll remove it. (The CDC has an excess estimate too, but since it ran forever with a massive typo in the Legend, I figured nobody was really looking at it, so I got rid it.
Stats Watch
Manufacturing: “United States Industrial Production MoM” [Trading Economics]. “Industrial production in the United States rose 0.4% mom in March 2023, beating market expectations of a 0.2% increase and after an upwardly revised 0.2% gain in February. The index for utilities jumped 8.4%, with advances for both electric and natural gas utilities, as the return to more seasonal weather after a mild February boosted the demand for heating. On the other hand, manufacturing output decreased 0.5%, more than forecasts of a 0.1% decrease.”
Manufacturing: “United States Manufacturing Production” [Trading Economics]. “Manufacturing production in the United States fell 0.5 percent in March 2023, more than market expectations of a 0.1 percent decrease.”
Capacity: “United States Capacity Utilization” [Trading Economics]. “Capacity utilization in the United States increased to a four-month high of 79.8% in March of 2023, from 79.6% in February and beating market forecasts of 79%.”
Retail: “U.S. Retail Sales” [Trading Economics]. “Retail sales in the US sank 1% month-over-month in March of 2023, following a downwardly revised 0.2% fall in February, and way more than market forecasts of a 0.4% drop, in a sign cost pressures and rising interest rates are weighing on consumers’ willingness to spend. Biggest declines were seen in sales at gasoline stations (-5.5%), mostly driven by lower prices…”
Tech: “Jailbreaking AI Chatbots Is Tech’s New Pastime” [Bloomberg]. “Albert has become a prolific creator of the intricately phrased AI prompts known as “jailbreaks.” It’s a way around the litany of restrictions artificial intelligence programs have built in, stopping them from being used in harmful ways, abetting crimes or espousing hate speech. Jailbreak prompts have the ability to push powerful chatbots such as ChatGPT to sidestep the human-built guardrails governing what the bots can and can’t say.” • So, bullshit at scale is apparently a non-problem, perhaps even a feature. Alrighty then! (Also., “guardrails” is one of those dead metaphors that I think is problematic, though I’m not sure why.)
Finance: “Tupperware could go out of business, here’s why” [ABC]. “Hitha Herzog, chief research analyst at H Squared Research, told ‘Good Morning America’ it’s not surprising that Tupperware is struggling. ‘The company has many layers of issues ranging from the way they sell their food storage products via direct sales force and branding issues where they have failed to relate to younger customers,’ she said. ‘But at the company’s core, the structure of its loans are shaky. The company has had to renegotiate the loan agreements three times since 2022. Higher interest rates along with falling sales and revenue is a recipe for financial disaster.'”
Banks: “JPMorgan Chase profits jump 52% amid banking turmoil” [Associated Press]. “JPMorgan Chase & Co. posted a 52% jump in its first-quarter profits, helped by higher interest rates, which allowed the bank to charge customers more for loans. The bank saw deposits grow noticeably, as business and customers flocked to the banking titan after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank last month. With JPMorgan’s strong results, as well as solid results from Citigroup and Wells Fargo on Friday, there seem to be few signs of potential trouble in the banking system — at least among the nation’s biggest, most complex financial institutions.” • Wowers, thanks Jay! All things work together for good!
Tech: “Streaming services urged to clamp down on AI-generated music” [Financial Times]. “Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times. UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists. AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests ‘left and right’, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.” • Yes, it’s always possible to make things worse, even worse than a repellent and rapacious parasite like UMG.
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 67 Greed (previous close: 65 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 58 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Apr 14 at 11:47 AM ET.
The Screening Room
“Plenipotentiary” [New Left Review]. “Now, after a fifteen-year hiatus, [Todd] Field has assured lasting notoriety with Tár: the story of a star classical music conductor – Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett – who is working on a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic until she is felled by a spectacular MeToo scandal.” This passage caught my eye: “Tár is, above all, a guide to these twenty-first-century symptoms. For Lydia, their antithesis is the great American conductor Leonard Bernstein. Towards the end ofthe film, she watches one of his performances on an old VCR recording in the house where she grew up, her face covered in tears. When she was a child, it was Bernstein who inspired her to embark on the musical career that lifted her out of her modest circumstances. At that time, the subaltern classes could still look up to the most ennobling elements in Western culture. Highbrow composers were writing popular musicals and introducing TV-viewers to Wagner. Harold Rosenberg famously derided Bernstein as an embodiment of the kitsch implicit in all pop culture – yet, in a typically contemporary reversal, the kitsch of 1958 has morphed into the haute culture of 2022. Today’s bourgeoisie has not only shut its gates but dynamited the fortress itself. The students in Lydia’s Julliard class represent a ruling caste that grew up watching Marvel movies and Disney Plus: a cohort that can no longer honour the supposed ideals of their social stratum. To them, Beethoven is a dead white man; Bach a misogynist. In this new conjuncture, Bernstein represents a lost world – a fusion of high and low that was fleetingly possible in the post-war period and has now vanished forever.” • I listened to the The Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts, sponsored by Texaco, when I was quite young. Texaco, of course, has not vanished.
The Gallery
“How to Look at Art and Understand What You See” [JSTOR Daily]. “If you are comfortable looking at art but wish to more deeply interrogate works and your response to them, an intuitive approach might feel more grounded. If, on the other hand, you do not consider yourself someone to whom probing a work of art comes easily, a form-first approach may give you the structure and confidence to confront art head-on.” • I confess to being — I think! — a formalist. A useful piece for anybody who didn’t take Art History, as I never did.
Zeitgeist Watch
I saw this ad in Model Railroader:
For a moment, my heart lifted, because I thought this was an American tool company; but Proxxon is German. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to see in model railroading, which INMSNHO has swung a little bit to far in the direction of sticking everything together with a Martha Stewart hot glue gun.
“Who Is Nima Momeni—Suspect Arrested In Killing Of Cash App Founder Bob Lee” [Forbes]. “Police in San Francisco arrested a tech executive suspected of fatally stabbing Cash App founder and cryptocurrency firm executive Bob Lee earlier this month.” • Of course, all the tech bros — including the Tech Bro di Tutti Tech Bros, Elon Musk — were whinging and carrying on about “crime’ (i.e., the homeless). Turns out the killer suspect was one of their own. Now they’ve all gone silent.
News of the Wired
“Spanish climber emerges after 500 days in cave” [CBC]. “A 50-year-old Spanish extreme athlete who spent 500 days living 70 metres deep in a cave outside Granada with no contact with the outside world has told how the time flew by, and said she did not want to come out… [Beatriz Flamini] described her experience as ‘excellent, unbeatable,’ and said that time had flown by. ‘When they came in to get me, I was asleep. I thought something had happened. I said: ‘Already? Surely not.’ I hadn’t finished my book.’ Asked if she ever thought about pressing her panic button or leaving the cave, she replied: ‘Never. In fact I didn’t want to come out.’ Flamini spent her time underground doing exercises, painting and drawing, and knitting woolly hats. She took two GoPro cameras to document her time, and got through 60 books and 1,000 litres of water, according to her support team.”
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“Streaming services urged to clamp down on AI-generated music” [Financial Times].
AI generated music is mostly going to be used like a tweaked version of a sampler (that then mixes samples)…so makes sense.
IDK, it can’t be much worse than all that neo-country garbage I hear when I occasionally turn on my local FM station.
Anything with neo as a prefix, kill it with fire.
This is where I’m torn on the AI debate. As an artist I like to think the human touch of a well crafted work of art matters. But, as so much of our mainstream culture reminds me every day it does not matter to most.
If an AI were to write a sitcom or a franchise movie, would any of us know the difference? If it were to write the music and lyrics for a pop song on the radio would we notice? If anything the give away would be that it was too well written!
So much of our lowest-common-denominator media feels like cynical data crunching on trending tastes manifested through the mediums of video or music that any human touch or individual voice is buried under so much focus grouped retooling and advertiser friendly neutering that it no longer resembles anything even remotely crafted but instead has all the personality of a robot assembly line manufactured product. And audiences gobble it up like free candy! They cannot get enough. Meanwhile, real art flickers on the fringes trying to be noticed but lacks the shiny gloss and razzle dazzle audiences crave so the interest in producing real art gets weaker by the day.
Read an essay years ago with its thesis being “Great art is made by great audiences” and it stuck with me. It stated that great audiences seek out and support art and this allow great art to flourish. But, when those audiences go away so too will great art. The artists will still be there and try to make great art but will struggle to due to lack of outlets, resources, and need for other avenues to support their lives. And it will be the manufacturers of art-like products (entertainment) that will go on.
And if all people want is entertainment then let the AI give it to them. Art is about exposing an audience to something they didn’t know they wanted, which is not AI’s skill set, whereas entertainment is just giving audiences what they already want, and this is exactly what AI is best suited toward. Tell it you like country music and rap, want songs about beer and babes, and let it give you a full playlist of generic trash to pass the time. Or you like superheroes and car chases and watch what it renders for you. Never need to be challenged or exposed to something you aren’t already interested in again!
The word for the system you are looking for is “autocoprophagous.”
As more and more AI-generated material is fed into the AI training sets, I would expect the quality of the output to degrade, like a copy of a copy of a copy….
Of course, degradation sells, which is why we still have Star Wars product releases, so no problem there.
Thanks! That’s a great (though tough to pronounce) word!
Makes me think of analogue copies whether xerox or vhs where with each copy there would be a degradation until it was no longer legible by the fourth or fifth generation.
On this topic: “Studios in China have reportedly begun replacing artists with AI image tools, putting seasoned professionals out of work.”
https://www.cbr.com/ai-stealing-artist-jobs-china/?utm_content=buffer0ed86&utm_medium=Social-Distribution&utm_source=CBR-TW&utm_campaign=CBR-TW
I wish it was just that. Know a few musicians who have already taken to using AI to generate rhythms and beats and even conjure up melodies and other aspects of the writing process.
Seems many of the artists in my social circles (designers, illustrators, writers, etc) have given up on the dreaded “coming up with ideas” part of the artistic process and have chosen to mainly be technicians while the machines feed them inspiration. It’s al becoming “paint by numbers” while they train the AI how to do this without them.
I’m guilty of that, about 10-15 years ago I was really into using AI for songwriting. It was never push-button music though, it was just a way to search through new ideas that was more refined then generating a random pile of notes and quantizing them to a scale. My favorite tool was this program called JUMP, that was pretty basic but it’s algos were scary good ( as seemed to me at the time when compared with other available tools.). There was always a nagging suspicion that some kind of shinanagins were going on. The program, and the guy who wrote and sold it went “poof!” one day leaving little trace of themselves online. Which sucked cause I only found out after a computer upgrade and I needed to transfer my license to my new computer, requiring me to contact the company.
If the big labels issues take down notices for what they (or their AI?) claims is AI, I suspect that a lot of independent artists are going to get taken down. And then forced to jump through hoops to avoid automatic decline of their appeal. If this goes on, essentially artists must be represented by muscular labels to be allowed on platforms.
So much potential for things to get worse.
So, the real question is, what sort of cheating strategy will the DNC cook up to push out Marianne Williamson and drag Biden’s senile presence across the finish line?
Will the DNC just say that they are not even going to hold primaries at all, everybody go home?
At this point, I really do not care if Trump gets reelected or not, as Biden continued much of Trump’s policies and is actually more hawkish on foreign policy than Trump was. I am under no illusion that Trump was any better than Biden, but I would not say he was much worse, and if we do get Trump again, he would be a lame duck so the Washington establishment would not have to worry about him ever again at the end of his term.
Biden is so visibly senile at this point, I would be worried about what his handlers would have him rubberstamp to push through, knowing that Biden is too far gone mentally to even know what is going on half of the time.
If we had even a halfway-functional political system, Biden would have been removed under the 25th Amendment long ago for his obvious cognitive decline.
“So, the real question is, what sort of cheating strategy will the DNC cook up…”
Probably just use the same playbook that worked so well against Bernie in 2016 & 2020. I think RFK Jr will be more of a nuisance to the DNC than Marianne Williamson. And if Bobby gets to close to the securing the levers of power, then there is always the JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X solutions.
Watch them pretend RFKjr does not exist. / heh
I followed a California t-shirt salesmans attempt at challenging Bush in the 2004 republican primary by running as a peace republican. Apart from New Hampshire and Idaho, most primaries were cancelled because there was no opponent, and there was no way to register as an opponent as the primary was cancelled.
Before a single vote was cast, Bush had already won. Yet the media treated it as though nothing was amiss.
Proxxon is pretty popular with Euro modelers. Here in the US its mainly Dremel, which is now owned by Bosch, which is itself %94 owned by the Robert Bosch Stiftung which is a charitable research group… which is odd but interesting.
Does Dremel make milling machines per se, or are people making do with handheld rotary tools and flex shafts? It just isn’t the same.
Sherline is the only US-based mini machine tool maker I’ve heard of in the past 20 years.
They do have a drill press adapter, used to make a lathe (the moto lathe) and there are a ton of 3rd party adapters for milling tables. I have no idea on the quality of the latter tough
If you are feeling too cheerful I’d like to remind you that at any given moment every Human being is doing the best they can with what they have.
And Covid is making us collectively stupider every day.
Thank God for chocolate.
Wait… are you saying chocolate has medicinal properties? Over the counter? I’m in! / ;)
Chocolate, at least for me, has most marvelous pleasing properties that overcome, many of the affronts afflicting a less than pleasing day. I believe chocolate is a medical miracle whose medicinal properties far surpass the medicinal properties of many drugs recently approved by the FDA. Its sole drawback is the weight gains I fear from overindulgence.
Chocolate is said to reduce cortisol and perceived stress (in women). I would say watch out for the sugar, though.
Small-scale studies, and I take all nutritional studies, indeed the entire field of nutrition, with a boatload of salt. Nevertheless….
Just make sure that it is great, new and improved Himalayan Pink Archaeo Salt consumer!
Of all the conductor choices, I can’t see breaking down in tears over Bernstein, although I have met various people enraptured by him. In my concert going days – back in the sixties – the live performances in Carnegie Hall by Leopold Stokowski impressed me far more. In the late sixties, Gennady Rozhdestvensky was in Carnegie Hall for three concerts that also impressed me deeply. These days, thanks to covid-19, for which I hardly go out anywhere and I’m limited to CDs, Evgeny Mravinsky is quite amazing.
I was very snobbish about Bernstein as a young adolescent. I didn’t like all his television emoting. It was embarrassing. But then in high school we were taken to a rehearsal of the St Matthew Passion in Carnegie Hall, front row seats. I was floored. It was incredible. (His recording of Handel’s Ode to St Cecilia is great, too). So I decided he was a true genuine musical genius — as a conductor, at any rate. But one with questionable judgement about some things. (Such as that Broadway musicals were going to replace opera). But I agree, crying over Bernstein? I think I’ll give it a miss.
What the otherwise good Sidecar piece overlooks, that most of the (mostly totally disposable) newspaper reviews missed too, is that Tár is very, very funny. From the start (how Field and his producers roped Gopnik in to rip the piss out of himself, and the tedious and obsequious Q&A medium is wonderful; Gopnik’s earnest delivery of (paraphrasing) “during lockdown you did something that I thought was amazing; you played music for free” is deathless irony) to its punchline. The classical music scenester stuff. Her ridiculous house. Her ridiculous car. Her ridiculous name. Her Richard III-esque comically evil conniving. Even the sexual harassment plot pays homage – deliberately , I reckon – to a classic 90s Simpsons episode. It’s so much fun. Not that it’s unserious; it’s a superb, rich and generous movie – uncommonly so – that will easily weather all the mostly inert and boring journalistic criticism of it and stand the test of time. But it’s true that thoughtful ambiguity defines it, and many viewers really seem to struggle with that as the piece points out. This results in some fairly tortured and dull readings (talk about your hermeneutic of suspicion!)
But one of the suggestions of the Bernstein-tapes-in-Linda-Tar’s-attic scene that the Sidecar piece misses is another possible morsel of her lifelong psychopathy: in the amusingly exhaustive bio/wikipedia entry of her life/career that opens the film written by her young assistant that lays out her formidable professional reputation, it is claimed that Tár “studied under” Bernstein. This scene suggests that her “study” under Lenny B was actually just her devouring his taped TV appearances, with maybe one or two real-life encounters later on.
That New Left link doesn’t work for me but will say that Bernstein’s children’s concerts were part of an era where broadcasters felt some license obligation toward culture and seriousness. They also made space for serious television plays and documentaries to go with Milton Berle and I Love Lucy. I took the Bernstein references in Tar to be merely a hook to Mahler, his specialty, and scene setting for the conductor story. The movie is only fair IMO but seemed more about how power corrupts with the lesbian angle there to freshen up the theme. It was attacked for this of course.
I sat before our small black and white TV absolutely enthralled by Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts!
“Spanish climber emerges after 500 days in cave” [CBC]. “A 50-year-old Spanish extreme athlete who spent 500 days living 70 metres deep in a cave outside Granada with no contact with the outside world has told how the time flew by, and said she did not want to come out…
================================================
It seems to me that being underground in a cave with no American news, no internet, and no cell phone, would be….idyllic.
Really, being informed when the world is sooooo f*cked up is not good for me. I really would be better off ignoring the world.
Now that Beatriz Flamini is out of the cave, I wonder if they’re taking reservations?
Cut the data feeds, limit worldly interactions to that of food deliveries, and one can almost experience the same in one’s own home.
I believe “being informed when the world is sooooo f*cked up” is crucial to knowing when to duck my head and when to hide. The question whether to be informed or hole-up in a cave is very like the ancient conundrum about knowledge and happiness — refer to Voltaire’s “The Good Brahmin”.
Looks like Marvin’s having a proper crack at the sort of thing I’d be trying if it weren’t for that pesky spongiosis in my parietal lobe.
I’m taking it as a reading assignment, and will report back. Can’t promise I’m up to the job though.
Okay, did a first scan. Short and dirty version: Marvin says the High Plateau is the endpoint steady state.
Where Marvin might be wrong (also short and dirty): First and foremost, seroconversion could restart the clock. Secondly, the steady state may well be a superposition of waves corresponding to independent but interacting evolutionary processes. Like at the beach, ‘sneaker’ waves (or possibly breaks from infection) could be possible and potentially have highly disruptive effects.
I absolutely entreat comments and corrections. It was an easier read than I expected, but I think my brain has had it for the day, so I may be slow to respond. Cheers.
Readers, more comments?
Thank you, this is a very useful take.
If true, the high plateau itself would be the “something awful.”
I think that’s right – with the caveat that it’s not hard to come up with plausible scenarios in which the system could jump out of a seeming endstate.
Also, some days on the plateau might be a lot harder than others, as GM has often pointed out.
Tupperware is going straight into the dustbin. Shame and all, I had honestly thought they were part and parcel of another big giant monolith. I recall fond memories of chilled servings at various church functions and picnics. Usually that would mean this standby below, might be different depending on what portion of the US one hails from. Pairs well with a pig cooking on an open half-barrel, but others mileage may vary.
https://www.southernliving.com/watergate-salad-7107331
Venture Capital ala Bain striped and tore apart , repurchased, then resold, then repurchased, then resold, ad nauseum the various brands that Tupperware was owned by under various conglomerates. Along the way they sold off the assets, leased the essential assets back, stripped the Nixonian corporate retirement funds, then loaded everything up with debt, and send all the money out, as bonuses, unlisted stock dividends, sweetheart deals, etc. That’s why the debt is crushing, it’s suppose to be. Someone on the inside will buy up the IP and what ever miniscule goodwill remains at pennies on the millions. A perfect Ron/Rand Paul libertardian storm.
If you ever get the time, I can recommend the 2004 PBS documentary on Tupperware. The social changes that they show for women are remarkable-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIC26Vvv6B0 (1:02:16 mins)
“Loudoun schools explore replacing boys and girls bathrooms with all-gender, single stalls.” As a retired architect, I believe this to be a rational approach to an age-old problem. The International Building Code specifies separate gender restrooms; The table for calculating fixtures has no basis in reality. Secure individual stalls with shared lavatory areas tends to reduce overall fixture counts and is more efficient. The St. Paul, MN public schools have been doing this for a dozen years or more, and it works.
Yep. It is mainly a code issue. The regs say you need mens and women’s facilities. Depending on the AHJ you’re working with and the type of building, you may get away with more or less. Of all the things people are complaining about these days this particular issue is the most mystifying to me. Because speaking as a man who has raised daughters, man it would have been convenient to have more unisex bathrooms when they were little.
It won’t be the all-gender bathrooms that will be the problem but any all-gender showers.
I dont understand how this applies to locker rooms. Where will children change and take showers for gym class/sports activities.
Also, as a guy–guys are discusting. I feel sorry for all the women forced to use a stall that has at the very least urine all over the seat, and sometimes much worse. I hate having to use the toilet in a mens bathroom. Its to be avoided as much as possible
Many men are the same at home–ask any woman–and would neve clean a bathroom themselves, of course! The problem with unisex bathrooms is this: what if your period overflows and you need to clean up at a sink? In front
of males? Really? And, bathrooms are often in remote places, down a basement hall, perhaps. I won’t use use a shared bathroom or changing room and I bet most women won’t.
Ahhh…no. Years of experience handling plumbing issues, having maintenance responsibilities at places like sorority houses, and responding to various issues at camps, women’s facilities are the worst. Men’s stuff you can handle with a power washer. Women’s rooms require every tool you have.
All the more reason not to share. Men don’t want it, women don’t want it. Let’s face it–neither sex needs to know every disgusting habit of the other.
I believe disgust is part of the neo-liberal order of things. The Ontario primary school where my son attended had 4 single stall/unisex student’s toilet rooms for a whole primary school. I asked my son how that could possibly work. His reply was you had to be extremely desperate to use them, and no one drank water if at all possible. He always came home for lunch and a bathroom break.
I hesitate to disagree, but the mixing of female and males in a bathroom, especially at the teen age years is just asking for sexual abuse. Teenage boys still have porous boundaries as far as sexually associated matters are concerned. Plus, there is just about nothing more vulnerable than being in the state of excreting.
I’m wondering if this is not a very subtle way of destroying public education. Make public schools not safe for females and you will see a mas exodus of said females from public schools. Lower attendance levels equals lower funding levels, equals the eventual full privatization of the formerly “public” educational system. Once that is accomplished, one can begin to fully implement a two or even three tier society, based on basic educational levels. In the Days of Yore, there were the educated ones, usually aristocrats and the clergy, the semi-educated, as in the bourgeois class, and the uneducated classes, as in the labourers and small artisans. Ah ha! You never suspected that the Jackpot was also a social ‘rectification’ program, did you?
You are onto something! Before women managed to win the fight to female only spaces, they were limited as to where they could go. And all this for a tiny minority.
My impression is that public education came into place because industry needed workers that could understand written instruction and do basic arithmetic when mixing up batches for production.
Now most of those tasks have been automated to the point that one can shove whole pallets of raw materials in one end and get finished goods out the other.
As such, schools have become more like extended kindergartens so that the adults can all be at work for 12+ hours (doing what exactly is unknown given the above).
The current situation makes even Keynes old joke about jars of notes in old coal mines seem like pure genius.
Nobody, and i do mean nobody, seem to be thinking beyond the quarterly growth stats, at least in the west.
I believe that same county is where a claimed transgender bio male raped a female student and the school administration covered it up. I think unisex bathrooms are a terrible idea.
RE: “How to Look at Art and Understand What You See“:
The writers and critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Thomas Hesse, along with some artists (Robert Motherwell comes to mind) brought formalist methods to those trying to understand the then-new abstract expressionist painting movement, and showed that those traditional methods worked for abstract and non-objective works as well. Some of the reading can be heavy going, but it was significant in setting the standard for critical analysis of works from that period (and movements since).
Formalist methods are highly recommended!
Two of my favorite quotes:
‘It is that which you see before you– begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.’
– Huang Po, 9th Century CE
‘Art and education are terrible bedfellows. They don’t even like each other. Their congress makes for bad sex in the head.’
-Peter Schjeldahl
And an off-topic favorite: ‘Painting is more important than art.’
-Willem de Kooning
Greenberg and others, and the painters of abstract expressionism, were partly sponsored/elevated by the CIA to avoid money/fame/favor going to more political artists (can you think of anyhting less political than a Pollack?). The Cold War culture warriors even founded/ran a creative writing program that (surprise) produced/promoted less political writing, many of those authors became famous as well.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/15/assassins-of-the-image-the-cia-as-cultural-gatekeeper/
https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
When even the New Yorker admits it (while pretending it wasn’t as severe or significant as it was), it’s pretty clear. The emphasis on formalism is used to elevate form above content, and excise content entirely if possible to remove even the possible trace of a politics that might be left wing.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front
Then there was Peter Mathiessen, a co-founder of The Paris Review, who also logged some time with The Company.
Good art (or true art, as one of my profs explained) transcends the artist, and the CIA:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/separate-art-from-artist-cancel-culture-monsters-book/673497/
Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’
Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War
The CIA Has Always Understood the Power of Graphic Design
Throughout the CIA’s 74 year history, the agency has used popular artists or avant-garde culture to serve its aims and exercise American “soft power.” The CIA’s psychological operations—or “Psy-Ops”—have routinely used popular culture covertly for propaganda purposes abroad while hiding its own financial or logistical involvement behind front-organizations and plausible deniability.
The artists did not know this, though. Anyway, the movement lasted a short time before it was superseded by pop art, which was more agreeable to capitalist ideology, and the abstract expressionists were left out in the cold.
Spanish climber emerges after 500 days in cave
Being able to exit capitalism does sound deeply, profoundly inviting. Imagine getting up every day, and doing whatever you want? Granted, food and water and shelter must be provided, so if everyone could do this we’d truly have a utopia, until tech bros nuke it for everyone.
Re: Louden Schools
In the expression ‘biological sex at birth’ what does ‘at birth’ add? I am aware of no process at this time which is capable of altering one’s biological sex.
I think the vocabulary around sex and gender is in flux and will remain so for some time, with interested parties pushing and pulling at it from several directions. Speaking for myself, I find “biological” hopelessly ambiguous. I think when people say that, they usually mean “anatomical,” or perhaps “chromosomal”. Even “genetic” doesn’t quite work, because clearly there are some people whose unalterable self-perception is at odds with their sex chromosomes. But is that self-perception itself genetic in some way? I don’t think we know.
Origen of Alexandria, a Christian theologian in the 3rd century, perhaps influenced by Plato, argued for the pre-existence of souls. These souls remained in a kind of limbo–we might call it storage–until ensoulment at birth.
So according to Origen’s way of thinking, an “unalterable self-perception” would result from some kind of logistical screw-up in God’s warehouse of souls.
Wasn’t Origen also kind of crazy? Didn’t he think the devil was talking to him through his penis, so he cut it off?
He took the admonition to “pluck out” an offending eye but applied it to the organ between his legs.
I didn’t call him a Church Father because he got excommunicated at one point.
As for talking to the devil and vice versa, Luther had quite a running debate with the devil, most of which was conducted while the perennially anal retentive Luther was on the toilet.
At times i wonder what impact, if any, verbal bullying has on all this.
Discourse may be in flux, but each human produces sperm, ova, or neither. The people who produce ova carry children to term. Give it a name, but those are the facts whatever semantic games one wants to play.
Using biological as an essentialist term to describe social arrangements, minds, emotions, hormones, chromosomes, and a variety of other factors both embodied and situational which compose a person and people’s relationships with one another like some sort of talisman to ward off The Other is bad science and bad categorization.
Once again (and again and again) begging readers to read, meet or correspond with an actual trans person or at the very least read a textbook on sexuality before spinning out prejudiced and uninformed opinions that will become an abject embarrassment to this site and its reputation.
Fellow Chris, I live close to these BlueAnon weirdoes and I have no idea why they say what they say, do what they do, or mean what they mean. Abigail Shrier apparently thinks this is all a new form of religion, in which case the constant disagreement and holier than thou take on everything amounts to public displays of piety I guess? Perhaps constantly reaffirming the language of gender and sharing this information is the new Nicene creed?
“We believe in many genders, because there is no God, except the ones that we have created for ourselves. We believe in many baptisms, in whatever fluids you desire, so that anyone can be made clean and new according to their own identity. We acknowledge no truth, except that we decide what is true. We pray for the death of the deplorable and hope to have no debts in the world to come. Amen…”
Perhaps it’s all a solution in search of a problem but in any case I don’t think education majors should be delving into the realm of mental health. That’s not what they are trained for even if they “took a class.”
But then we live in an era where low information is no barrier to fanatical certainty. All higher education should include classes in Humility 101.
https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/ looks better than nothing. It measures CO2 and PM2.5. Really you want to measure PM0.5 but PM2.5 tells you something, especially if you know the filtration rating of your CR box filters. You want MERV 13 are higher if possible.
Note that the filters don’t have to be as good as masks. Air circulates through the purifier multiple times, so if the filter takes out 80% of the virus on the first pass, and 80% of what is left on the second pass, etc., then after a few passes it is at 99%+. But a mask has to take out 99%+ the first time.
“Democrats praise, grumble over decision for Chicago to host 2024 convention’
Is that wise? Suppose that protests are organized around the Obama “Presidential Library?” That may not be a good look that – though the main stream media would look the other way and refuse to report it.
I would think that the problem would be nostalgic memories of Barack, and the rather pathetic comparisons with “Slow Joe” (clearly an inadequate speaker although unparalleled in the ability to “really f$&k things up.”
Perhaps President Obama could give the keynote and acknowledge that Joe has exceeded even that high bar.
It might not be a good look for Obama if all those people being displaced through his “edifice” show up as a group and start protesting this happening. Or all those unhappy that a chunk of public park land was gifted to him over their objections. Especially in the middle of an election year.
I haven’t been following that story, but, yeah. That’s a bad look.
(My comment above should have read:
“Perhaps President Obama could give the keynote and acknowledge that Joe has exceeded in that department”)
I thought people have already been fighting this “library” (since I’m not sure it is any kind of library) since it’s destroying part of a public park.
It seems similar to an Egyptian pyramid.
A complete waste of space built for someone who thinks they are a king.
Like him or not, Friedman has a fifteen minute opinion column on his visit to China: America, China and a Crisis of Trust
Interesting article, even if it is from The Mustache of Understanding. Hilariously, “guardrails,” the trope I find puzzlingly problematic, pops up at a crucial turn in the argument.
It was interesting that Friedman didn’t think the trust issues emanated from US actions, but rather by untrustworthy behavior by China. Even though the United States is demonstrably not agreement capable and acts in bad faith, with no regard for the rules-based international order it professes to support. So there’s probably kernels of truth in what he writes, but of course he has a particular blindspot.
A late night ditty about a French President who seems to be “triangulating.” Not sure if Blinken has a strong baritone.
Emmanuel
(Sung to the melody of “Sundown” by Gordon Lightfoot.)
I can see him standing there
In a room that’s red
Playing footsie with Jinping, while my texts go unread
Emmanuel, you’d better take care
If I find you’ve been creeping’ round that rotten bear
Emmanuel, you’d better take care
If I find you’ve been creeping round that bad bear
He’s been talking like De Gaulle in a Frenchman’s dream
And he don’t always say what he really means
Emmanuel, it would be such a shame
If they found you and Brigitte were on Epstein’s plane
Emmanuel, it would be such a shame
If you slipped in the shower after ditching Ukraine
I can picture every move a diplomat would make
Getting trapped in a land war is your first mistake
Emmanuel, it would be such a shame
If they found you and Brigitte were on Epstein’s plane
Emmanuel, I think it’s a sin
If they find there’s some strychnine in your stewed lapin
I can see him looking past Putins evil schemes
He’s a silver-tongued Frenchman,
Got me feeling mean
Emmanuel, it would be such a shame
If they found you and Brigitte were on Epstein’s plane
Emmanuel, it would be such a shame
If we sent you a reaper drone to greet Marseilles
Emmanuel, you’d better take care,
If I find you’ve been creeping round that Russkie bear . . .
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kv8zyBi4ZXk&pp=ygUYZ29yZG9uIGxpZ2h0Zm9vdCBzdW5kb3du
“Lawmakers consider requiring voting machines for all in-person voting”
Revealing that they are actually trying to force people not to use pencil and paper but go for high-tech expensive options instead and that this is coming from a Democrat because won’t somebody think of the disabled? As for Assemblywoman Tracy Brown-May (D) saying the measure was intended to ‘address the inadequacies in accessibility for people with disabilities to be able to cast their votes’ is an actual lie. Here in Oz they send people to collect people’s votes in old age homes and hospitals (compulsory voting here) and if a person is driven to a voting station but are too frail or injured to vote, voting officers go out to the car to get her vote. I have seen that being done. You can trust computerized voting like a hole in your head.
Here in SC we used to have the old mechanical tabulators where you click little levers to vote pull a lever to open the curtain. Seemed like that was a good system to me.
I wonder what America would be like with universal voting.
I loved those machines. NYC had them until quite late.