By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I’m sorry to be a little late. I got wrapped around the axle on NIH’s Long Covid study, and belatedly realized the topic really needed to be in a post. So I had to scramble. –lambert
Bird Song of the Day
European Turtle-Dove, Kelling Heath, Norfolk, England, United Kingdom.
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
Biden Administration
“New Details in Debt Limit Deal: Where $136 Billion in Cuts Will Come From” [New York Times]. “According to an administration official, the deal leaves intact funding for two key Covid programs: Project NextGen, which aims to develop the next generation of coronavirus vaccines and treatments, and an initiative to offer free coronavirus shots to the uninsured… The agreement only sets parameters for the next two years of spending. Congress must fill them in by passing a raft of spending bills later this year. Large fights loom in the details of those bills, raising the possibility that lawmakers will not agree to spending plans in time and the government will shut down.” • I’m glad Project NextGen, which seems to be our only way forward for potentially sterilizing nasal vaccines, absent foreign travel, didn’t get axed. But there’s plenty of opportunity still for Pfizer and Modern to have a word with the appropriators….
“Debt ceiling deal’s next steps — getting it through Congress” [CBS]. “The House released the 99-page legislative text Sunday evening…. Both Republicans and Democrats are expected to lose some votes, and leaders on both sides have been telling the rank and file that neither side won everything it wanted, as they strive to ensure that the deal has the support to pass both chambers. The president has urged both the House and Senate “to pass the agreement right away.” Top White House Cabinet officials and aides including chief of staff Jeff Zients, counselor to the president Steve Richetti, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young and several others have been phoning and briefing lawmakers and fielding technical questions from congressional staff, according to a White House official. They have called over 60 House Democrats and briefed House and Senate Democrats, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus, with more specific briefings to come Tuesday. Under House rules, lawmakers must have 72 hours to read the bill, and since they received it on Sunday, Wednesday would be the earliest day the House can vote. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer indicated Tuesday the House will vote on the bill Wednesday night.” • Commentary:
and then settled on Republican terms. I cannot belong to a party that is so passive, unwilling to fight for what it believes, and has such thoroughly inept leaders. I'll vote for them because there is no alternative, but I doubt I will ever call myself a Democrat.
— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) May 27, 2023
2024
I guess it’s time for the Countdown Clock!
* * * The Democrats are going to regret this if they can’t keep Biden juiced up (or if Ukraine goes pear-shaped (or Covid roars back)):
Democratic Primary, 60 Days In:
Bernie: I will never say a negative word about my good friends Joe Biden or Liz Warren
Republican Primary, 60 Hours In:
Donald Trump: I am running on opening a gate to Hell and sending DeSanctimoniois straight there
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) May 28, 2023
“Ron DeSantis raises $8.2 million in first 24 hours after launching presidential campaign” [CBS]. ” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has raised a record $8.2 million in the first 24 hours after announcing his 2024 presidential campaign, as he barrels toward an expensive and combative primary led by former President Donald Trump. The sum includes online donations and money raised by fundraisers at a gathering in Miami to dial for contributions, DeSantis’ campaign confirmed. The breakdown of how much each method raised is unclear. DeSantis’ $8.2 million haul surpasses President Biden’s first day fundraising of $6.3 million on day one of his 2020 campaign launch, and outpaces the $9.5 million Trump raised in the first six months of his 2024 campaign. Only South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who had over $22 million in his Senate reelection account when he transferred it to his presidential campaign, began his White House bid with more ‘hard’ dollars — or money raised under federal fundraising limits.” • Interesting on Scott.
“Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya joins Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign kickoff” [Stanford Daily News]. “Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced his 2024 presidential campaign bid through Twitter earlier today on May 24, garnering more than 1.3 million views on his 2-hour Twitter Space live. Stanford professor of health policy Jayanta Bhattacharya A.M, A.B ’90, MD ’97, Ph.D. ’00, was featured as a speaker on the live stream alongside figures like Twitter CEO Elon Musk and PayPal founding COO David Sacks. Bhattacharya and DeSantis have worked together in the past on COVID-related issues, with both figures having historically supported the easing of pandemic restrictions. At Stanford, Bhattacharya is the director of the Center on Demography and Economics of Health and Aging and a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, among other appointments. During the live broadcast, Bhattacharya said it was “an absolute honor” to work with Desantis and praised what he described as DeSantis’ abilities to make decisions on COVID-19-related issues despite criticism. He expressed support for DeSantis’ rolling back certain pandemic-induced restrictions, including school closures, saying, “Governor, you did the right thing when you opened the schools.'” • So, the Overtown Window on Covid has the openly eugenicist GBD on the right, and the stochastic eugenicism of Biden’s policy of mass infection without mitigaton on the left.
“Ron DeSantis Thinks His Wife, Casey, Should ‘Be on Every Fashion Magazine'” [Jezebel]. “The thing is, fashion magazines famously care about fashion, and Casey is not fashionable so much as she is trying way too hard to sartorially perform the role of FLOTUS. This is a woman who wore to a daytime event at the Florida capitol a hot pink off-the shoulder dress with roses, white gloves, and white pumps. A woman who wore a tacky gold one-shoulder pageant dress to Ron’s election night party. A woman who tried so, so hard to conjure Jackie O comparisons with her inauguration cape look. Ron could have merely said Casey deserved to be on the cover of ‘women’s magazines,’ but conservatives are still reeling over the fact that (actually stylish) Michelle Obama was a fashion world darling, while the same publications mostly ignored Melania Trump. Times fashion columnist Vanessa Friedman wrote that the couple is trying to project ‘Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago,’ and Casey is using her body in this effort to make Ron look the part. The capes and gloves are an attempt to project royalty. ‘She understands the image game and how to play it,’ Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist, told Friedman. But does she? She’s constantly overdressing at events where she’s photographed next to other people who aren’t doing that, and it looks comical. As House of Cards costume designer Tom Broecker told the Times, Casey is ‘dressing to be either princess of the world or first lady.'” • Meow!
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.
* * * 2023 – 2016 = 7 years later, and Trump is still living rent-free in their heads:
A cartoon from The New Yorker https://t.co/XWaSM9OU4Y pic.twitter.com/R9QUGE2Yjn
— Caris Davis (@cd123) May 27, 2023
#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), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (5), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Look for the Helpers
Optimism:
Signs are all around of the message getting through.
We think clean air in schools will provide some of the best value for money in the history of public health.#CleanTheAirWeShare#CleanAirRevolutionhttps://t.co/R15fUc9uzd
— The Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation (@CRBoxFoundation) May 28, 2023
I am actually with the The Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation on this; I have a sense, however unmotivated by actual data, that we’ve hit bottom on opposition to non-pharmaceutical interventions, just because so many dull normals at ground-level weren’t having it.
Maskstravaganza
“Assessing the Fit of N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirators Fitted with an Ear Loop Strap System: A Pilot Study” [Annals of Work Exposure and Health]. N = 16. ” Three models of cup-shaped N95 [filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs)] were tested in three versions: the standard version with manufacturer’s strap system, the [ear loop straps system (ELSS)]-converted, and the ELSS-converted version modified by adding the [novel faceseal (NFS)]. [Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)-approved quantitative fit testing (QNFT)] demonstrated that the fit of an N95 FFR featuring the traditional/standard headbands strap system is negatively impacted when this system is converted to an ELSS. The fit of an ELSS-converted respirator can be significantly improved by the addition of the NFS.” On the NFS: “The key element of this technology is an ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) foam that is secured to the inner perimeter of the respirator, enhancing its fit to the user’s face.” • Bottom line is don’t turn your straps into earloops, and maybe better face seal tech is on the way (one of the authors has a patent on the NFS).
Lysistratic Non-Action by implication?
My mask doesn’t keep me from antiquing OR looking hot #HotMaskSummer bay bee https://t.co/pGtbMPO2zB pic.twitter.com/4cqKORyOGQ
— #StopCopCity (@lunaxstorta) May 27, 2023
“Something Awful”
SARS-CoV-2 optimizing the social conditions for its reproduction by causing brain damage:
I mean, it explains SO MUCH…https://t.co/2w6Brg8Zh8
— CZEdwards (@CZEdwards) May 9, 2023
I’m leery of this claim as a trope because it’s so close to Democrats saying “Republicans are stupid.” And I’m also leery of medicalizing and psychologizing as methods. Nevertheless, there does seem to be some science here (and lots of anecdotes, too, which, when suitably aggregated, are one of our few reliable sources of…. data). Perhaps readers can talk me off the ledge on this one, because it’s uncomfortably close to a The Last of Us scenario. Oh, and:
It’s not denial. It’s not a sensory-specific or hemispheric issue. It’s not an amnesia, or an inability to form a new memory (though it may be related).
It does make regular family relationships difficult — it’s often the underlying problem when it’s time to take the car keys.— CZEdwards (@CZEdwards) May 10, 2023
Word of the day: anosognosia. Rings true!
Elite Maleficence
On “personal risk assessment” (1):
I work with statistics and probability professionally and I can't do meaningful "personal risk assessment" with available data. If I can't do it, I'm damn sure no one else can do it either, and anyone who says we have to do it is either ignorant or deliberately gaslighting. https://t.co/Hh9TAvEdv2
— Tom Radcliffe (@tjradcliffe) May 28, 2023
On “personal risk assessement” (2):
This is what the corrosive social pressure for “normalcy” gets us.
There’s no way the attendees at THIS conference didn’t know what was likely to happen. If “personal risk assessment” didn’t work here, it won’t work (at scale) anywhere. https://t.co/1aAXIOjzEC
— Alan J. Card (@AlanJCard) May 27, 2023
“THIS conference” was the CDC conference of “infection detective” brain geniuses who managed to create a superspreader event.
And speaking of the CDC:
“CDC Meeting Turns COVID Super Spreader” [Prevue Meetings and Incentives]. “A week after CDC held its three-day, 2,000-attendee 2023 Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Conference in Atlanta, about three dozen attendees [now 181] reported they had contracted COVID. As reported in the Washington Post, ‘Attendees said many people at the gathering did not mask, socially distance or take other precautions that the CDC had recommended earlier in the pandemic.’ As Alanis Morissette would say, isn’t it ironic? More to the point, isn’t it a reminder that, as sick of the expense and hassle of COVID precautions as most meeting organizers and their attendees are — and despite U.S. reported cases of the virus falling to their lowest levels in two years — COVID still is on track to be one of the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. this year? … While many event organizers, at least anecdotally, have dropped all COVID-related precautions, business is still brisk for Attend Safe, which provides an array of virtual verification and on-site COVID-related risk-mitigation services, says CEO Amanda Schleede. ‘I would say about half are saying it’s over, or it’s just the flu’ she says, citing the recent CDC meeting and another recent 35,000-attendee healthcare-related convention that had no COVID-related protocols in place.” • Fascinating than an event organizing trade journal has more insight into how Covid spreads than Hospital Infection Control — and Attend Safe spotted a business opportunity. Love the Alanis Morisette reference. Cheeky!
* * * Our famously free press:
As far as I know there are no dedicated covid reporters. Bizarre. It just killed 7-25 million people. It's still killing, still causing economic and social ripple effects, and there's a good chance of an omicron-level mutation soon. Does no one want to be ahead of this story?
— Nate Bear (@NateB_Panic) May 26, 2023
Worse than labor reporting!
“”We Want Them Infected:” A Review of the Push for Herd Immunity” [Psychology Today]. “Before the federal agency he represented could say with certainty when vaccines would be available—before any serious reckoning with the precautionary principle, a bedrock to U.S. public health policy since the 1970s—Alexander advocated openly for the mass infection of infants, children, young adults, and the middle-aged ‘with no conditions, etc.,’ on the assumption that doing so would hasten population immunity without mass sickness or mass death. As readers of COVID news will already know, and Howard’s book documents with much-needed rigor and tenacity, it did neither. More than 850,000 people have since died from the virus in the U.S. alone. Alexander, we now learn, was supported by several high-profile epidemiologists, health economists, and even a radiologist whose early, error-strewn talking points—widely publicized by conservative and libertarian think tanks—helped set COVID policy at the federal level. With their shared emphasis on intentional mass infection of the unvaccinated documented unflinchingly in this book, it is much easier to grasp why, of necessity, that policy came to include vehement opposition to almost all previously accepted public health measures—targeted local lockdowns and social distancing, testing and contact-tracing, masking and indoor air changes, and eventually, cross-generational vaccination.” • Policies that remained constant across two administrations, given Biden’s policy of mass infection without mitigation.
The Jackpot
COVID-19 was just the warm-up act” [Peter J. Hotez, Houston Chronicle]. The deck: “Catastrophic pandemics may become our new normal.” More: “SARS, SARS-2 and MERS all came from wild bat populations before they jumped to humans, either directly or through other animal species. This happened because of accelerated human and animal migrations due to climate change, deforestation and urbanization. New coronaviruses are currently jumping from bats to people hundreds or even thousands of times daily. Every few years one catches fire and causes a pandemic. We should expect yet another major and entirely new coronavirus pandemic to strike us before 2030. … We are entering a reality in which catastrophic pandemics could become our new normal. …. To respond at the national level, the U.S. government has implemented some measures, but they may not be sufficient. The CDC has improved since it missed the entry of the SARS-2 virus from southern Europe into New York and failed to implement diagnostic testing in 2020, but it is still not ready for the next big one. That will still take time. Next, the Biden administration has proposed a Project NextGen initiative to stimulate investments in universal coronavirus vaccines and other countermeasures, but it remains unclear if those funds will be mobilized.” • See under Biden Administration for Project NextGen.
“Immunologist Akiko Iwasaki: ‘We are not done with Covid, not even close'” [Guardian]. Iwasaki: “I understand why the emergency declaration had to be ended, because of the economic impact and other things. But at the same time, we are not done with Covid, not even close. The virus is here to stay with us and that’s why we do need to think about future booster vaccines that match with the circulating variants, as well as the potential of new variants that further evade our existing immunity. I get that people want to move on from the pandemic, but the virus is still out there, people are getting infected, and there’s the possibility of developing long Covid. I’m still wearing masks and following preventive practices as much as possible.” • Iwasaki is at least on the side of the angels with nasal vaccines, but notice how she advocates for non-pharmaceutical interventions at the personal level, but not the systemic level.
Lambert here: I’m getting the feeling that the “Something Awful” might be a sawtooth pattern — variant after variant — that averages out to a permanently high plateau. Lots of exceptionally nasty sequelae, most likely deriving from immune dysregulation (says this layperson). To which we might add brain damage, including personality changes therefrom.
Case Data
NOT UPDATED From BioBot wastewater data from May 25:
Lambert here: Unless the United States is completely, er, exceptional, we should be seeing an increase here soon. UPDATE Still on the high plateau. Are we are the point in the global pandemic where national experiences really diverge?
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.
Variants
NOT UPDATED From CDC, May 27, 2023:
Lambert here: XBB.1.16 and XBB.1.9.1 still on the way up, eating into XBB.1.5. I sure hope the volunteers doing Pangolin, on which this chart depends, don’t all move on the green fields and pastures new (or have their access to facilities cut by administrators of ill intent).
CDC: “As of May 11, genomic surveillance data will be reported biweekly, based on the availability of positive test specimens.” “Biweeekly: 1. occurring every two weeks. 2. occurring twice a week; semiweekly.” Looks like CDC has chosen sense #1. In essence, they’re telling us variants are nothing to worry about. Time will tell. Looks like the Walgreens variants page isn’t updating.
Covid Emergency Room Visits
NOT UPDATED From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, from May 20:
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. 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
From Walgreens, May 30:
-1.8%. Frequency down to once a week.
Deaths
NOT UPDATED Death rate (Our World in Data), from May 24:
Lambert here: Zero deaths, for three days in a row. Not possible. Thanks, Johns Hopkins of the $9.32 billion endowment, for abandoning this data feed and passing responsibility on to the clown car at WHO.
Total: 1,165,281 – 1,164,934 = 347 (347 * 365 = 126,655 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).
Excess Deaths
NOT UPDATED Excess deaths (The Economist), published May 21:
Lambert here: Based on a machine-learning model. (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 Dallas Fed Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ general business activity index for manufacturing in Texas sank by 5.7 points from the previous month to -29.1 in May of 2023, the lowest since the pandemic-induced crash in the second quarter of 2020.”
The Bezzle: “Bitcoin Ordinals Are The Next Big Thing In Crypto” [Forbes]. “The hot new thing in crypto are ordinals. In a nutshell, an ordinal is a piece of information written to the bitcoin blockchain and referenced by a unique address also held in the blockchain data structure. Sounds similar to an non-fungible token (NFT), but an NFT is a token that references a piece of data somewhere else on the internet like IPFS (inter-planetary file system), which is the actual data. It might be somewhere else, but the trouble is, if the file or its storage goes away then the NFT data is gone, only leaving the token pointing to nothing. An ordinal is actually stored in a bitcoin block so while bitcoin or any of its forks live, the data is there.” • So now they’re just hyping…. digits? Like latlon coordinates except unrelated to a map?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 64 Greed (previous close: 67 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 65 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated May 30 at 1:47 PM ET.
Rapture Index: Closes down one on Earthquakes. “The lack of negative activity has downgraded this category’ [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 184. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) NOTE on #42 Plagues: “The coronavirus pandemic has maxed out this category.” More honest than most!
The Conservatory
I realize this is 2023 – 2006 = 17 years old, but I’m only just now getting around to it:
I don’t know if I like the music much, but I do like the refrain (lyrics).
Guillotine Watch
“Elizabeth Holmes enters Texas prison to begin 11-year sentence for notorious blood-testing hoax” [Associated Press]. “Holmes, 39, on Tuesday entered a federal women’s prison camp located in Bryan, Texas — where the federal judge who sentenced Holmes in November recommended she be incarcerated. The minimum-security facility is about 95 miles northwest of Houston, where Holmes grew up aspiring to become a technology visionary along the lines of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. As she begins her sentence, Holmes is leaving behind two young children — a son born in July 2021 a few weeks before the start of her trial and a 3-month old daughter who was conceived after a jury convicted her on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022.” • Not even a good start.
Class Warfare
“‘What’s More Tragic is Capitalism’: BLM Faces Bankruptcy as Founder Cullors is Cut By Warner Bros.” [Jonathan Turley]. “Two years ago, I wrote columns about companies pouring money into Black Lives Matter to establish their bona fides as ‘antiracist’ corporations. The money continued to flow despite serious questions raised about BLM’s management and accounting. Democratic prosecutors like New York Attorney General Letitia James showed little interest in these allegations even as James sought to disband the National Rifle Association (NRA) over similar allegations. At the same time, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors cashed in with companies like Warner Bros. eager to give her massive contracts to signal their own reformed status. It now appears that BLM is facing bankruptcy after burning through tens of millions and Warner Bros. cut ties with Cullors after the contract produced no — zero — new programming. Some states belatedly investigated BLM as founders like Cullors seemed to scatter to the winds. Gone are tens of millions of dollars, including millions spent on luxury mansions and windfalls for close associates of BLM leaders. The usual suspects gathered around the activists like former Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias, who later removed himself from his ‘key role’ as the scandals grew.”
IIRC, those GBD loons are for child labor, too. Not their children, I am sure:
If you've been disabled by SARS because you were forced back to unsafe workplaces and are now unable to work and facing years of disability denials and poverty thanks to Bidens courageous leadership you can soon send your children out to earn a living and feed the family 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/Ak3ljVNLMJ
— The fed up Chef (@TheChefsGardens) May 28, 2023
“The History of Nepo Babies Is the History of Humanity” [The New Yorker]. “What if world history more resembles a family tree, its vectors hard to trace through cascading tiers, multiplying branches, and an ever-expanding jumble of names? This is the model, heavier on masters than on plot, suggested by Simon Sebag Montefiore’s ‘The World: A Family History of Humanity’ (Knopf), a new synthesis that, as the title suggests, approaches the sweep of world history through the family—or, to be more precise, through families in power. In the course of some thirteen hundred pages, “The World” offers a monumental survey of dynastic rule: how to get it, how to keep it, how to squander it.” • That would certainly be how elites think of the world, yes; see here.
“The people in charge”:
The Obama/Netflix series is breaking my fucking brain. I've replayed this part of his narration 20 times, transcribed it, read it. As the Folksy God Narrator of Neoliberal Reality, it's fascinating to hear him say this in a tone of soothing matter-of-factness, not horror or anger pic.twitter.com/wCSyvifWYD
— Maximillian Alvarez (@maximillian_alv) May 26, 2023
News of the Wired
“Day 20: Sigils are an underappreciated programming technology” [Raku Advent Calendar]. “Every time a programmer @ s someone on GitHub – for that matter, every time someone describes themselves as #blessed or tags a post as #nofilter – they’re using a sigil…. The symbolic nature of sigils is key to their power: because they encode an entire phrase’s worth of information into a single glyph, they have a much higher semantic density. Put differently, they let you say more, with less.” • Hmm. Not sure I can think of an example of a sigil in the wild. At least in English, punctation comes at the end…..
Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From JZ:
JZ writes: “The magnolias are beginning to bloom.”
Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So if you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:
Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated:
If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you!
70 comments
Comments are closed.
Ooops — No Water Cooler! A Plantidote (thank you!) and bird song, but no Water Cooler…
Missed it by that much!
Hey kids, ever hear the one about coal miners going underground? yeah it sounds pretty bad, but guess what you can work and stay safely above ground while you do it ! Go stand by that deep fryer filled with french fries and boiling oil, and we’ll send you allowance money every two weeks! \sarc
The cynicism is strong with this one, yes. Fearful of the dark side.
SEPTA, the Philadelphia public transportation system has started forbidding masks on vehicles due to too many crimes committed by perps wearing ski masks. Seems to be open season for shooting passengers, this year!
I just looked at that The fed up Chef tweet and I can’t stop laughing. Is that CNN headline for real? And I seem to be stuck in italics.
Refresh your browser. The italics are fixed.
Adding, yes, of course the headline is real. What kind of timeline do you think we live on? (Here is the prose version, from CNN.)
Heh heh. Peak humanity sure is strange.
I try to encourage anyone I see wearing a mask, when I encounter a female clerk wearing one at the checkout I remark that the mask adds an air of mystery to her beauty.
I smile with my eyes while saying it and have yet to have anything but a positive response.
> I smile with my eyes
It does work!
I tried the “smiling with my eyes” trick once and the cashier called Security. There’s ;smiling’ and there is “smiling.”
Lifted from the comments section of the item internally linked to as support for the contention the Great Barrington Declaration is openly eugenicist (not “secretly” “actually”, “covertly”, etc., mind you, but “OPENLY” — which should make it straightforwardly simple to verify by reference to the text itself, one might suppose.) And yet…
So when confronted with abundant, direct, documentary refutation of his point, the author persists in hand waving — “I have made my point. So have you. We disagree.”
I’m struck by how much of the criticism of the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors is of this sort. One begins to wonder, if it’s as bad as some claim (“right wing”, “openly eugenicist”), why are there not more good faith, coherent critiques of it?
The defense of the elderly’s civil rights is interesting one. Somehow their civil rights would have been less impinged upon, the claim appears to be, if the entirety of society (necessarily including them) had been locked down, relative to their having been compelled, not by government diktat but by an enlightened evaluation of self-interest, to sequester themselves?
Up is down and down is up.
Sorry, the Great Barrington Declaration types are peddling snake oil and that should be obvious by now.
There is no such thing as herd immunity to a coronavirus. Wash your mouth out for suggesting the idea. It’s misinformation.
Omicron looks milder because it has less affinity for the ACE2 receptor, so Covid no longer attacks primarily the lungs and turns them into goo. But the decline in lifespans all around the world ex China during its zero Covid period shows that Covid has a mortality cost beyond directly getting sick and dying of it. That was shown in a VERY large scale study using VA data, and was stratified by age, major variant, etc. The more often you got Covid, the more likely you were to die in the next six months. Similarly, see our many links to articles on impact on the brain.
Yes! Currently there is no such thing as long term immunity to any of the common cold or flu viruses, without which there can be no herd immunity. It’s one of the reasons older variants of flu strains are kept in the flu shots. If I remember correctly, it’s been decades, they don’t give new immunity, but they serve to stimulate the innate immune* system. That’s one reason I was extremely suspect of the first claims for the new “science” for the C-19 shots, claims which now have degraded to come into alignment with my expectations.
*Some people have a stronger innate immune system naturally, so they get infected, can spread but don’t get ill.
LONG term immunity is moving the goalposts.
From what I’ve gathered, natural immunity typically persists for six months to a year or more. For purposes of disrupting a pandemic, presumably it would be sufficient if enough people were immune at any given point in time that the virus lacked enough new susceptible hosts to continue to spread.
There was an Israeli study done about two years ago where protection post infection was found to be only for about two months. Before too long, we were getting down to only one month’s protection. This made herd immunity nothing more than a bad joke and yet I am still hearing public health officials talk on about it even today. In the end, it was all about saving disruptions to the economy and not public health or even saving lives. And we were not even allowed to question the vaccines-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PM67hjv4iM (2:59 mins)
Feel free to cite it and prove me wrong, but I suspect you’re conflating vaccine-induced immunity with immunity from prior infection.
https://www.cureus.com/articles/72074-e#!/ (suggesting natural immunity >8 mos)
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2101.full (suggesting >8 mos)
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/75/1/e185/6448857 (suggesting up to 13 mos)
etc.etc.
If natural immunity holds for so long while induced immunity only holds for only a month or so, then there can be no justification for those vaccines then, especially when you consider how many people are being damaged by them. Call me cynical but you would think that after three and a half years of this Pandemic, this would all be settled science by now.
Yeah, news flash: the vaccines are no great shakes.
That’s not meant to be a retort to me, I hope.
No, not at all. I guess that this is what happens when you follow The Science instead of science. Still find it hard to believe that the medical authorities in so many countries threw their own populations under the bus in defence of The Economy.
I didn’t say life-time, but 6 months won’t hack it for a world wide pandemic.
I wrote nothing about herd immunity so I’ll take a pass on the mouth wash. (But you might want a word with the authors of the thousand-ish or so papers just in PubMed addressing herd immunity in the context of coronaviruses who evidently do think it’s “a thing”.)
Nor did I address Great Barrington Declaration TYPES. I would be unsurprised to find such a subjective term capable of encompassing whatever you might like it to include.
I’m addressing myself to the document itself, which has the advantage (or, for certain sorts of critics evidently, the disadvantage) of being concrete, and relatively clear, and to the gloss upon it which its authors have made in their public comments. I’ve found nothing eugenecist (openly or otherwise). As I take their central arguments, it’s that the cost of lockdowns would exceed their benefit, and that given the unequal risk-stratefication by age, obesity (and as subsequent events have since seemed notably to suggest, Vitamin D levels) and other factors, that the public health response should be tailored likewise.
Since their proposal did not generally carry the day, insofar as public health policy is concerned, the argument at this point is necessarily over counterfactuals and the bottom line is that there is no real way to know with much confidence what WOULD have happened, although there are some data points which might be instructive. Such as Sweden’s example, and the relatively open-society model they pursued. Their excess deaths numbers stack up well: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-deaths-a-look-at-the-data/
The entire section you hoisted was an argument about herd immunity, so it is completely and utterly intellectually dishonest for you to disclaim having introduced it as a topic by using others’ words to do so.
And a mere six months of immunity is worse than useless, when as the big VA study on Covid cases shows, EVERY repeat case of Covid markedly increases the near term death rate and therefore decreaeses expected lifespan. Getting Covid has a marked and cumulative health cost. We are getting sicker and stupider. But you manage to blow that off.
Then we’ve failed to communicate.
The intended point of quoting the section was nothing to do with the particulars or relative merits of herd immunity, per se, but that Murphy was making the audacious, insupportable claim that no such term even exists, insofar as the literature on human health is concerned. And when confronted with direct evidence to the contrary, which could not have taken the first refuting commenter more than three seconds to find, Murphy steadfastly refused to acknowledge the error.
No, sorry, this is yet more bad faith argumentation, as in shifting the grounds of your argument by trying to recant what you clearly wrote.
You EXPLICITLY cited that argument over herd immunity to defend Great Barrington Declaration types, who tout herd immunity as the answer for Covid.
And since when do we cite or defend Murphy, or deny herd immunity in other contexts? So you are trying to tag us as defending him, when you and ONLY you dragged him into this discussion. Yet more bad faith via straw manning.
You’ve engaged in persistent violations of our written site Policies.
I trust you will find your happiness on the Internet. Elsewhere.
“The defense of the elderly’s civil rights is interesting one. Somehow their civil rights would have been less impinged upon, the claim appears to be”
I’m still waiting to hear about how your “calibrated approach” does anything to protect the elderly or immunocompromised. How do your finely tuned calibrations protect the elderly who live with family, including children you want attending school maskless? Is it some sort of emanations from calibrations that protect a person undergoing cancer treatment who has to work for a living when you want them in the office without masks? How do you set the calibrations to protect the elderly in nursing homes when you want their caretakers to be infected?
You’ve picked a minor point from Murphy so you can avoid the points about the limited nature of immunity to coronaviruses and the ability of this virus to mutate rapidly to avoid human immune systems. Since you are an avid reader of this site, you also avoid all the evidence that Covid leaves our immune systems less effective rather than more.
The GBD signatories are no better than the bought “scientists” who told us tobacco was no problem and climate change is a hoax. I don’t think there are a lot of people who read this site who are falling for such an obvious effort to do the billionaires’ bidding.
Lol. “Sequester themselves” eh?
You’d prefer what we got — having it imposed upon you?
I’d prefer you honestly address this topic. The GBD’sters are unfairly maligned? Cough up some evidence of them advocating for actual protection of the vulnerable.
I’ll sit back and watch while your interlocuters bury you under examples of them campaigning against any and all mitigations.
You have to know that will happen. Such an odd tangent you’re off on. I wonder why?
You seem gleeful at the prospect. Is that your idea of a productive exchange? Dogpile on the person stating a different point of view?
Here’s advocacy from co-signer Martin Kulldorff in favor of maintaining the J&J vaccine on the market, because, notwithstanding clotting concerns, the risk/benefit of it was still favorable for the elderly and other high risk people: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/548817-the-dangers-of-pausing-the-jj-vaccine/
For being too pro-vaccine, he was relieved of his CDC duties.
Gonna give me some special pleading shuck and jive now that I’ve given you a direct answer to a direct question?
Hmmm, looks like you’ve gotten the boot. If you’re still reading, endorsing a vaccine scarcely qualifies as advocating for the vulnerable.
As for me being gleeful about the response you were bound to get, honestly that stuff’s for kids. Watching you engage in an exercise both odious and futile simply left me wondering why you’d use your time in such a way.
(Almost) Daily Derailment(s)
Pleasant, clean campgrounds and usually pretty chill, I used to stop here on my way from Chicago enroute to the Northwoods– the Turkey Vultures are prolific and a hell of a sight; they are a very-unpleasant looking bird…
DNR: No public safety concerns after train derails near Devil’s Lake State Park
BARABOO, Wis. (WMTV) – Wisconsin & Southern Railroad is working on a cleanup plan after three train cars derailed in Devil’s Lake State Park over the weekend.
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Conservation Warden Supervisor Sean Neverman said the train derailed around 8 p.m. Sunday, just south of S. Lake Road, within park boundaries…
https://www.wsaw.com/2023/05/30/dnr-no-public-safety-concerns-after-train-derails-near-devils-lake-state-park/
Devil’s Lake is a beautiful state park. Spent plenty of time up there as a kid and teenager. The water was very clean back in the day. Good campground too. Saw my first hippies there!
“Saw my first hippies there!”
Lucky you! They are very hard to find today.
I remember reading the chapter on Hippies in Ivan T Sanderson’s book, “Cryptids of North America,” way back in the 1960s when they were a lot more plentiful.
Oh man, that hits too close to home for me. We camped there about 8 years ago, and we also have the luxury of a few days a year at a cabin on Lake Wisconsin. Humans suck.
I’d agree there’s often truth to that, that the masks can accentuate the feminine– a similar effect as a well-worn veil, something long-overdue and deserving of a comeback in fashion.
Me, I’d prefer a Darth Vader in coal-black, something more Sci-Fi or steampunk than my duck-bill N95s…
San Francisco’s Fentanyl ad campaign…
Today’s Fentanyl dealers are Honduran ‘migrants’ who jealously guard their wholesale and retail sales territory. They probably feel emboldened because of the Soros funded district attornies and lax local law enforcement. Also, they have friends in high places.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
“An effort by San Francisco (D.A. Kamala Harris) to shield eight young Honduran crack dealers from federal immigration officials backfired when the youths escaped from Southern California group homes within days of their arrival, officials said Monday.
The walkaways are the latest in a string of embarrassments for city officials who are protecting illegal-immigrant drug dealers from federal authorities and possible deportation because of San Francisco’s 1989 declaration that the city is a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.
Until recently, San Francisco flew juvenile illegal immigrants convicted of drug crimes to their home countries rather than cooperate with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a practice that drew national attention when The Chronicle reported it Sunday.”
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/8-crack-dealers-shielded-by-S-F-walk-away-3278392.php
The most well ‘travelled’ sigils I can think of are the religious symbols. Items such as the Christian “Cross,” the Hebrew “Seal of Solomon,” the Daoist “Yin Yang,” the Buddhist “Om,” etc. etc. Even so far as the Ancient Egyptian “Eye of Ra.”
Om: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om
Eye of Ra: https://jakadatoursegypt.com/the-eye-of-ra/
Seal of Solomon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_Solomon (As used on the Israeli flag.)
Yin Yang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang
Christian Cross: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_cross_variants
Then there is that since vilified variation of the “Hakenkreuz,” once used extensively by a certain purportedly National Socialist organization, ie. the swastika.
Their main opponents, the Soviets, used the Hammer and Sickle as their sigil.
Let us not even get into advertising symbology and signage.
Hmm, those are just logos. And the examples the article cites are just symbols or glyphs:
This is not a definition I’m familiar with, and I’m a programmer. I think a sigil is a magical design constructed from existing or original symbols with meaning for the practitioner. A kind of spell in graphical form. I’m not convinced hijacking it to replace ‘modifier’ or ‘prefix’ is useful.
Am I a bad person for being happy Elizabeth Holmes is reporting to jail? I wonder how many of her besties will visit?
Her ‘besties’ all reside inside her mind(s).
She’s a legend in her own mind!
Reminds me of the homage the Late Moody Blooze wrote about her:
“Elizabeth Holmes is dead,”
“No, no, she’s Inside, doing time.”
“Elizabeth Holmes is dead,”
“No, no, she’s Inside, doing time.”
Christopher something or other the owner of TED and the TED conference participants
I’m waiting with baited breath for her to start a prison diary blog. She’s got such a gift for spinning tales. You just know she’s working angles 24/7.
she could get together with the woman in Utah who (allegedly) murdered her husband and then wrote a book about her grieving process for children. it sold well, too.
Meanwhile appeals court ruled Sacklers can keep murder money. They do a lot more damage than this woman. They all should be in jail. Maybe if she’d killed on a large scale she’d be rich and free.
I think of it this way.
The Sackler family has maimed and murdered millions. They have blown up the balance sheets of governments from cities and counties to states. Their victims have mostly been blue collar schlubs, the disabled, and the vulnerable.
Holmes’ victims were a Whos who of the billionaire class. A bunch of stupid old rich men who did not do their homework. I am not a fluid dynamic physicist by any stretch, but I knew enough when I first heard her idiocy to laugh out loud. Yet, they gave her billions.
Who do you think is going to get punished in this society? Those who have injured millions of middle and lower class folks? Or she who conned a few dozen squillionaires?
She had those two babies between arrest and sentencing.
Kind of thing that could help at parole.
Will she even do 5 of the total years?
Tucker Carson Today, 6 mo ago, interviewing El Salvador’s President Bukele. utube. ~1hour. In English. Pretty interesting, imo.
Entrevista del Presidente Nayib Bukele en Tucker Carlson Today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9SCM432tJs
“COVID-19 was just the warm-up act” Peter J. Hotez
and he would know!
No Covid reporting?
Off the top of my head I immediately think of NC, Jimmy Dore, FLCCC, Dr John Campbell, Kennedy, and others.
Not that you may agree with many or all of them. But there has been tremendous amount of ink spilled on the subject. Just not by the MSM.
Those are not reporters! But Ed Yong won a Pulitzer for his truly excellent coverage in the Atlantic. Unfortunately they also published articles written by Emily Oster…
I have a fair amount of personal experience of anosognisia as a result of my stroke. My attempts at explaining my subjective reality since my ich often seem to fall flat, but here goes.
I would draw your attention to what happens when your attention wanders from something you were focusing on. Even before the stroke the moment of wandering would rarely register in my conscioushess. If you can imagine that as a semi-continuous ongoing process, then perhaps you can envision how a sense of a lapse of in attention or perception can be completely absent even as a severe deficit is manifesting?
I think it must be that cognitive functioning and its monitoring often use the same resources, and thus fail simultaneously.
“The History of Nepo Babies Is the History of Humanity”
I suppose that King Charles is the ultimate nepo baby but regardless, this goes on all the time. In a video, Alex Christoforou was talking about the mayor of Athens. He then started listing all the members of his family who were also, you guessed it, the mayor of Athens by coincidence. If the nepo babies were at least as qualified as their parents, then there might be a reason to retain this idea but historically they have proven worse if for no other reason that all obstacles were cleared from their path which means that they never had to really struggle or be tested. Come to think of it, the Roman empire had to struggle with nepo babies as Emperors sought to have their children succeed them which ended up in destabilizing power struggles which ended up weakening the Empire.
I think most if not all modern forms of government are unstable. There are too many people, too much wealth, and not enough real work being done to occupy the mind.
‘The Obama/Netflix series is breaking my f****** brain. I’ve replayed this part of his narration 20 times, transcribed it, read it. As the Folksy God Narrator of Neoliberal Reality, it’s fascinating to hear him say this in a tone of soothing matter-of-factness, not horror or anger’
I guess that this is Obama being Obama and showing who he really is loyal to. Of course he never would mention that it was these very same business leaders who shaped the response to the present pandemic leading to a catastrophic death toll and mounting problems that will not go away. I really do believe that historians will regard him as the catalyst for so many of the ills of present day America whether it be the Ukrainian war, homelessness on a massive scale, the destabilization of the American economy by his saving Wall Street unscathed while throwing Americans under the bus. In the same way we read about how so many of America’s ills can be traced back to Bill Clinton’s legislations, in twenty years time Obama will be thought of in the same way.
He threw us all under the bus, but especially black people. He also crossed the picket line like the sniveling weasel that he is.
Bill Gates TerraPower and DOE want to “experiment” with bomb grade Uranium for molten salt reactors. This guy is totally malevolent…
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-urged-not-use-bomb-grade-uranium-nuclear-power-experiment-2023-05-30/
600kg is enough for roughly 300 bombs. Does the DoE have that much just lying around? I can’t imagine anyone else does.
Parsing more carefully the phrase “1,322 pounds (600 kg) of fuel containing 93% enriched uranium” I guess that’s salt + uranium enriched to 93%, so probably mostly salt with a few kgs of uranium.
What?
Just why does Bill Gates want and need bomb grade uranium? Encouraging anyone to use it is really unwise; most any country has the capability to build a nuclear bomb as the knowledge of how to do so is out there, but it is the control of the uranium by a relative handful of countries that prevents any determined, moderately organized group of randos from building one.
I can just see Ukraine somehow making a few bombs after some of the uranium for the experiment got misplaced. This would be a great way to get the Kremlin to really freak out and really get dangerous themselves, which might make the grifters running the Ukrainian side of the war really happy.
I certainly wouldn’t want Bill Gates to have the bomb, but this is an experiment not a product ready for export. Maybe they will learn something useful and build something which can be exported.
On the generative AI front, this NLR article by artist Hito Steyerl is pretty good:
Mean Images
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii140/articles/hito-steyerl-mean-images
Like Ted Chiang’s recent articles (to which Steyerl gives a shout-out), it gets more into the political economy of generative AI, and how some so-called “AI” powered apps actually involve a lot of exploited human labor, in the form of microworkers, ghostworkers, etc.
Meanwhile, and just for grins, this past weekend I tried asking ChatGPT for a short bibliography on a topic that I’ve been studying.
The results were shockingly bad. I expected some BS, but it was far worse than I could have imagined. More than half of its suggestions don’t even exist. Some suggestions were really random, only tangentially relevant.
The bot claimed an article was written by particular author, and when I asked if this was correct — knowing that it in fact wasn’t —, ChatGPT doubled down on “yes”, adding a bogus original publication date. Asking for a summary gave me some vague text that has seemingly little to do with the work of the attributed author.
When I asked for a citation, it gave me a book that existed (actually, I have a copy, with matching year and edition), but bogus page numbers inside the book. As support, the bot confabulated a bogus original publication date and bogus title in the author’s native language.
When I asked for quotations and page numbers, the bot obliged, giving me totally fabricated text with bogus page numbers. The quotations the bot offered don’t exist anywhere in the cited book, or in any other book I can find. I.e., the bot offers “quotations” that are just totally made-up.
Sadly, there will be dishonest/lazy/desperate college students who clue into this ‘feature’, and try to use generative AI to evade plagiarism detection software like Turnitin. Smh.
Meanwhile, my Twitter TL is lately filling up with all sorts of AI hype, generally the lowest order of click-bait-y text, along the lines of “Use these 3 weird tricks to get ChatGPT/Bard/Bing AI to write your next college essay!” Unreal. It’s like these people can’t wait to bring on a “grey goo” disinformation dystopia.
Some of the AI-hype appearing in my TL suggests that Bard is much better than ChatGPT, but I wonder if it’s really worth investigating any further.
I guess this makes sense. It’s a large language prediction model. Citations are either right or wrong in their entirety.
I had it coding up some Go for me. It’s seems to be doing well actually. There’s only one canonical way to write go, so that undoubtedly helps.
I wouldn’t ask it for citations or math. It only knows the next word. Or research for that matter.
You’ve had better luck than I.
As a test of its ability to generate code, I specifed the exact target programming language and version, and asked ChatGPT to write code to parse a CSV-encoded string into an Array of strings.
Should be pretty simple, right?
It gave me code, but using a bogus function that didn’t exist. I told it the function didn’t exist, and asked it to try again. The bot apologized, and proceeded to spit out a slight variation of the code, but with another function that didn’t exist. I then noted that wouldn’t work, asked it to try again, and gave it a reminder of the specific language and version. After that, it apologized yet again, and gave me code with two bogus functions.
So, just as it makes up citations that don’t exist, it also makes up functions that don’t exist.
People will say: “well, you’ve got to give it the right prompt….” — which, to me, sort of sounds like somebody saying: “you gotta jiggle it a bit” to get their broken toilet to stop leaking water.
Re loosening up on child labor: kids will actually make lousy bartenders because they usually can’t reach the tops of the beer taps. The place where they can really help out is as chimney sweeps, since they are small enough to climb up the flue, and we know from their immunity to covid that they won’t get respiratory diseases from the soot. Plus they love eating gruel! It’s all we can do to get them to stop asking for more! Finally, as large amounts don’t grow on trees, they can be trained as pickpockets to bring cash back to their hedge fund overlords…
Big if true: Groundbreaking nasal spray protects against all SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Original source (open access)
Cool! Looks like, as usual, “in mice” only so far, but sounds promising. And yet another game changing “Big if true” paper showed up today:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-experimental-decoy-sars-cov-infection.html
Article has links to open access paper.
Explanatory quote from paper:
”
Significance
Monoclonal antibody therapy has been sidelined by the rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2 variants that escape monoclonal antibody neutralization. Receptor decoys are a new approach that avoids this problem. While the viral spike protein may mutate to escape antibody neutralization, the virus needs to conserve affinity for its receptor and therefore cannot easily escape neutralization by a receptor- based decoy. In this report, decoy-expressing viral vectors were found to be effective in mouse models, both to prevent and treat SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
Thanks for the link.
I know Lambert has done several articles on the state-of-play for nasal vaccines, but I wonder if any more of them have since been released for general use. India’s Bharat Biotech launched iNcovacc in January, I believe, but I haven’t heard much about it since.
. . . ” So, the Overtown Window on Covid has the openly eugenicist GBD on the right, and the stochastic eugenicism of Biden’s policy of mass infection without mitigaton on the left. ” . . .
Well then, every mask worn loud and proud in public, every Corsi box, every personal boycott of a ” no-masks-freedom” event or venue or place of business, every other personal display of personal reality-based covid-caution knowledge, is a brick thrown through the Overton Window.
What happens when enough millions of people throw enough millions of bricks through the Overton Window?
I recall Jayanta Bhattacharya saying protect the vulnerable was the way to go. Myself, at 68, I recall that sitting in the pub, just before lockdown, saying, “we will now see a law saying no one over 60 allowed in bars” and even though it affects me I kinda agree with it. That’s the cohort at risk. Giv en the risk / reward…. but then I said the guys making the laws are old geezers so nope we won’t get that solution.