By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Stock Dove, Wieswald, Freising, Bayern, Germany.
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
“Biden convenes his Cabinet on the heels of debt ceiling resolution” [CNN]. “The Cabinet last met on January 5.” • It’s almost like Biden doesn’t want to be seen in private.
2024
I guess it’s time for the Countdown Clock!
* * * “Karl Rove on Trump-DeSantis feud: We learn a lot about candidates by ‘how they trade blows'” [The Hill]. It’s not a feud ffs. They’re competing to win a primary! “‘We learn a lot about the candidates by how we see how they trade blows,’ Rove said on Fox News. ‘We get a sense of their character, we get a sense of their thought process, we get a sense of their inner strength. We decide whether they like them or not. And it’s a helpful process.'” More, DeSantis: “Hell, his whole family moved to Florida under my governorship.” • Ouch! This is good, but a lot would depend on how DeSantis delivered the line.
“A psychic peeks inside the mind of Chris Christie” [NJ.com]. Another son of the Garden State throws his hat in the ring. This is really funny, well worth a read. “So, what is Christie thinking? His people all say he’s serious, that he sees a path to victory that no one else can see, that American politics is full of surprises. If you believe that, there’s nothing I can do for you.” And: “So, let’s game this out. Maybe I damage Trump enough so that he loses the primary to someone else, and the eventual Republican nominee feels enough gratitude to make me Attorney General, the cabinet job I’ve always wanted. Maybe I have no impact on the race at all, but I win some hearts and minds, raise my profile, and even my speaking fees. What do I have to lose?”
“We’re Sure There’s a Totally Innocent Reason the Mar-a-Lago Surveillance Footage Room Flooded Amidst the DOJ’s Trump Investigation” [Vanity Fair]. • Great headline. Nothing at all like Clinton having her lawyers “wipe” her server disks — the ones she had, one point, whirring away in her bathroom in Chautauqua — before she handed them over to the FBI. I suppose it’s the crudity, the sheer brazenness, that gets liberal Democrats so worked up.
* * * The horror, the horror:
1. @jack, the co-founder of Twitter, has endorsed @RobertKennedyJr for President@elonmusk, Twitter's current owner, featured RFK Jr in a Twitter space yesterday
And RFK Jr has been showered with positive coverage on Fox News
But lets look at what RFK Jr ACTUALLY BELIEVES
🧵
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 6, 2023
This is a long thread and Legum means me to be outraged by every horror in the parade. But for example: “RFK Jr. argues that John Kerry, not George Bush, won the 2004 election.” We are, of course, meant to think, or rather react, “ZOMG Trump!” But I stayed up that night blogging, in a coffee shop in Philly, and I well remember many oddities that night (besides the long lines and the voting machines bought and sold by networks of Republican cronies). I forget the county — it’s been 2023 — 2004 = 19 years, and Google is what it is — but when the building in which the votes were being counted was locked down due to a bomb threat, putatively from the Feds, and then nobody could trace the call… Well, you had to wonder. Of course, what I really remember was that Kerry actually fundraised on challenging election results, a result of election 2000, and so I went to bed expecting to cover that story the next morning…. Only to wake up to find that Kerry had rolled, and conceded. So President Wakefield has a point.
Republican Funhouse
“GOP push to prevent gas stove ban is scuttled by Freedom Caucus members discontent with McCarthy” [ABC]. • Ho hum. McCarthy won. The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.
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.
* * *
Our Famously Free Press
“CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht is out after a brief and tumultuous tenure” [CNN]. “Licht, who became network chief last May after most recently leading “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” to much success, saw his tenure dogged by fierce criticism in the press, often the result of leaks from employees around him who never fully trusted his leadership skills or editorial vision.” • Really? Licht was responsible for Colbert, and that wasn’t enough?!
“CNN Is Tanking After Its Unforgivable Trump Town Hall” [The New Republic]. • Unforgivable? Really? Who do these clowns think they are? Priests? The Pope? (Of course, the real issue was the liberal Democrats hated the idea of losing control of any more media properties, and so — led by Bush-era war criminal-abettor, now liberal icon, David Frum, who initiated the dogpile that lead to Licht’s removal — sent a message to all the other media executives about what happens if you step out of line. Well done, all.
“CNN Interviews Comey on Every Alleged Violation of the Rule of Law . . . Except His Own” [The Hill]. “[Anderson] Cooper also did not ask Comey about the blistering report of Special Counsel John Durham on the repeated failure of his own leadership in pushing an investigation without sufficient evidence. Under his leadership, the FBI took a false Russian collusion theory pushed by the Clinton campaign and continued the investigation despite early refutation of the underlying sources and claims. That included warnings from American intelligence that the agency was using suspected Russian disinformation funneled through the Clinton campaign.” • For more on the Durham Report, see NC here. Licht serviced Comey, but that wasn’t enough; he has to abhor Trump, too.
Realignment and Legitimacy
Sigh….
VIDEO THREAD: "Protect our children!" Today a Muslim-led coalition rallied outside the Montgomery County Maryland School Board against the removal of an "opt-out" option from human sexuality related material.
Pro-LGBT activists counter-protested, chanting "secular schools!" pic.twitter.com/48qpRDJzyM
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) June 6, 2023
There are lots of things we don’t teach in school, mostly things we do in the privacy of our own homes, for fun. In general, we don’t have curricula for model railroading, or knitting, or stamp collecting, or brewing. These are all hobbies. So why don’t we — hear me out — collectively classify sex (hence, gender) as a hobby, and stop teaching it altogether in the public schools? This would have the additional advantage of blowing away an entire layer of administration — along with plenty of expense for consultants — at literally no educational cost. If parents want to have their children taught about sex, let them hire a tutor.
#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.
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
“Request for NIH to Retract RECOVER Study Regarding 12 Symptom PASC Score For Long Covid” [Covid Action Network]. • They’ve blown past their goal of 25,000 letters sent with 29,896. “Only 21,304 more until our goal of 51,200.” For more on the RECOVER study, see NC here.
Covid Is Airborne
“US CDC announces indoor air guidance for COVID-19 after 3 years” [The Lancet]. To be fair, that’s only six months in CDC time. More: “A day after the US Government formally lifted the COVID-19 public health emergency order on May 11—and 3 years into the pandemic—the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced long-awaited new ventilation guidance aimed at reducing indoor transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The announcement calls for indoor air to be completely replaced at least five times every hour and cleaned with minimum efficiency reporting value (MERV)-13 air filters… This guidance was released less than 2 weeks after Rochelle Walensky stepped down as Director of the CDC…. The absence of specific indoor air ventilation and filtration guidance early in the COVID-19 pandemic most likely cost lives.” • And yes, meeting those standards would cost money (see NC here) — no doubt why CDC waited to announce this until after Walensky was gone, and there was no incentive to do anything, the emergency being over. So the recommendation will gather dust. Along with our lungs.
Vaccines
“COVID Vaccine Hesitancy and Risk of a Traffic Crash” [The American Journal of Medicine]. Ontario. From the results section: “A total of 11,270,763 individuals were included, of whom 16% had not received a COVID vaccine and 84% had received a COVID vaccine. The cohort accounted for 6682 traffic crashes during follow-up. Unvaccinated individuals accounted for 1682 traffic crashes (25%), equal to a 72% increased relative risk compared with those vaccinated (95% confidence interval, 63-82; P < 0.001). The increased traffic risks among unvaccinated individuals extended to diverse subgroups, was similar to the relative risk associated with sleep apnea, and was equal to a 48% increase after adjustment for age, sex, home location, socioeconomic status, and medical diagnoses (95% confidence interval, 40-57; P < 0.001). The increased risks extended across the spectrum of crash severity, appeared similar for Pfizer, Moderna, or other vaccines, and were validated in supplementary analyses of crossover cases, propensity scores, and additional controls." • Handy table:
Surely lots of confounders?
Variants
“Narrow transmission bottlenecks and limited within-host viral diversity during a SARS-CoV-2 outbreak on a fishing boat” [Virus Evolution]. n = 13. From the Abstract: “Here, we use deep sequencing to investigate the transmission of viral genetic variation among individuals during a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak that infected the vast majority of crew members on a fishing boat. We deep-sequenced nasal swabs to characterize the within-host viral population of infected crew members, using experimental duplicates and strict computational filters to ensure accurate variant calling. We find that within-host viral diversity is low in infected crew members. The mutations that did fix in some crew members during the outbreak are not observed at detectable frequencies in any of the sampled crew members in which they are not fixed, suggesting that viral evolution involves occasional fixation of low-frequency mutations during transmission rather than persistent maintenance of within-host viral diversity. Overall, our results show that strong transmission bottlenecks dominate viral evolution even during a superspreading event with a very high attack rate.” And from the Conclusion: “Even superspreading events in poorly ventilated, close-quarters environments appear insufficient to alter the dominant role of transmission bottlenecks in shaping the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.” • Were any of the crew members immunocompromised? Or did any have Covid previously?
Scientific Communication
At some point, doesn’t the denial and the coping have to fail?
In a mommy group someone asked how many days their kids missed this year. Answers were 12-90 days, lots of sickness, therapy appointments and suspensions. this is nuts anyone finds this normal. Some states parents get in trouble for truancy.
— doggolover 🐾 (@beckymucha274) June 7, 2023
Especially when one’s own children are involved?
Elite Maleficence
“Did you have evidence?”
For an insight into why Tasmania has the highest SARS-Cov 2 transmission rate in the nation, here’s our part time Health Minister trying to explain why he led the National Cabinet charge with Perrottet to remove mandatory 5 day isolation #politas https://t.co/eTE7jKq17S
— Cassy O'Connor 🪲 (@CassyOConnorMP) June 7, 2023
“The CDC wants people to stop eating raw cookie dough. But it’s so tasty’ [WaPo]. • Priorities!
The Jackpot
Covid’s not all that’s airborne:
Good time to close windows, stay indoors as much as possible and run HEPA (or MERV13) filters to protect against this.
Yes — those are the same systems recommended to filter viruses from the air. If you got them for the pandemic, you also have a protective layer against smoke. https://t.co/KFUohULhr2
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) June 7, 2023
And speaking of smoke (I apologize for the long graphic, but I can’t cut the original thread):
More on the experiment. Psychology mavens, feel free to comment!
Case Data
NOT UPDATED From BioBot wastewater data from June 5:
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.
• It would be irresponsible not to speculate:
Somehow, despite their mutational advantage on paper, we've slowed transmission of XBBs in people. And nobody seems to have a clue why, or even reslise it tbh. The only explanation i have is that it might not replicate well in the upper respiratory tract. @GuptaR_lab @jbloom
— Ted Brautigan (@T_Brautigan) June 5, 2023
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
From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, from June 3:
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
NOT UDPATED From Walgreens, June 5:
0.4%. Frequency down to once a week.
Deaths
NOT UPDATED Death rate (Our World in Data), from May 31:
Lambert here: I’m happy the numbers are down, but zero they cannot be. Looks like some administrative minimizer at WHO put the worst intern in charge of the project. And 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: 1,166,160 – 1,166,043 = 117 (117 * 365 = 42,705 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 June 4:
Lambert here: Actually some encouragement!
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
The Economy: “United States Used Car Prices YoY” [Trading Economics]. “The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index, which tracks prices of used vehicles sold at its US wholesale auctions decreased 7.6% year-on-year in May of 2023, the biggest annual drop in four months. However, “the rate of decline might slow over the next several months as we encounter the lower prices seen at auction from May through November last year. Two consecutive reads in either measure do not a trend make, as used retail inventory is still below last year, and that tends to keep buyers at the auction, supporting prices”, said Chris Frey, senior manager of Economic and Industry insights for Cox Automotive.”
Tech: “Is AI Killing the Stock Industry? A Data Perspective” [Stock Performer]. “Looking at all Adobe Stock files since 2022, we get a sell-through rate of 13%. Or, put another way, 87% of all Adobe Stock files created since 2022 have not made a sale yet. (The STR for all non-AI images is the same, 13%.) How does this compare to AI-generated images? The sell-through rate for AI-generated images is somewhat lower, at 9%. So at this point, more AI-generated images don’t sell on average. To many contributors, this may not be a problem because it is much more cost-effective to produce large volumes of images than it is with traditional photography. It is also worth noting that the difference is not that big and over time, this value will likely approach Adobe Stock’s average as in general, sales for files take some time to pick up. We can say that AI-generated images are definitely being bought. Although text-to-image tools are available to everyone now, many buyers still appear to resort to stock agencies to get the images they need. This is not surprising because prompt engineering is a skill just like photography is and for many buyers, it is easier to buy AI-generated images off-the-shelf rather than to create them themselves. More important than STR for contributors, however, is RPI/m, which is short for “revenue per image per month”. This metric answers the following question: For each file you produce, how much money can you expect to make on average per month? Adobe Stock’s RPI/m for any file is 3.75 cents. Compare that to AI-generated images at Adobe Stock, for which the RPI/m is 17 cents. That is quite good. Given that the STR is lower, this means that each AI sale earns more money than other files. The RPD, short for “revenue per download”, confirms this: Overall it is $1.22 for Adobe Stock vs. $1.94 for AI-generated images on Adobe Stock. Over time, we expect this number to go down as more AI-generated images enter the market and there is more competition. Rumours are Adobe Stock is getting so many AI image submissions, they are falling way behind with inspections. Looks like we’re seeing some kind of AI gold rush at the moment.” • Ugh. “Images capturing the style of the top sellers”:
I have never seen an AI-generated image that I wasn’t repelled by, and these images confirm me in my priors. Who but a psycho would buy that stuff? Wait, don’t answer that.
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 74 Greed (previous close: 73 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 66 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jun 6 at 1:39 PM ET.
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CNN is imploding all on its own. I have seen Warner Discovery CEO Zaslav tout the journalism quality of the channel’s employees, but I have my doubts. Oh well, I didn’t watch CNN anymore for good reasons.
Contrast that with the much touted demise of Twitter, to offer a counter angle.
With the proper neoliberal leadership they can surely challenge their competitors to grab 0.3% of the country’s citizens vs the 0.1% they have today.
At some point sanity may breakout and history is going to notice that CNN had been on a pretty steep downward trajectory long before Licht was brought in. The Zucker years were not kind (hiring Zucker pretty much guarantees that). But blaming Licht and the Trump town hall suits too many people in the meanwhile
Tangential to CNN, I quickly scanned through the summary of the “interview” of Comey by Anderson Cooper. Performative theater I guess, but it’s not for me. It’s the Redemption 2023 tour by your favorite, James Comey ! Vomit worthy, albeit thus far I have not eaten much at all.
Too early to drink? Trump is a “threat” to the “rule of law”. Hunter Biden on the other hand, he is just a private citizen seeking gainful employment. How dare we impugn the young whipper snapper. ( \sarc )
Exceptional conversation hosted by Alexander Mercurial with Glenn Diesen and Clare Daly.
https://youtu.be/M5gY0SFXQho
Re: RFK
So simply stating that you cannot know conclusively who won an election, but believe the fellow who came out ahead in the vote-counting process won, is now supposed to evoke outrage?
Sounds an awful lot like ideological purity tests are back.
It would have gotten him kicked off DailyKos. That was strictly enforced to counteract any undermining in confidence in the election process, especially after ’00, because mo betta was the route to utopia.
Quite a few of the techniques we see increasingly deployed were commonplace around DK going back to that ’04 election. Those likes, dislikes, bojos, etc. gave somebody a lot of data about what kinds of censorship evoked a strong reaction,
My opinion of RFK Jr was set around 20 years ago when I heard him on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. The Bush admin had been talking up the “hydrogen economy,” and RFK Jr was assailing said Bush admin for planning to make hydrogen gas from natural gas or other fossil fuels. He said something like, “Why are they planning to make hydrogen from fossil fuels when there’s plenty of hydrogen in water?!?” Anyone who recalled from high school chem the difference between endothermic and exothermic reactions would know the answer, but he was on there spouting off outrage to gin up political opportunity without being the slightest bit informed about the subject. I have not paid much attention to him since, but nothing I’ve run into about him makes me think he’s changed much.
And lest anyone think I’m against making hydrogen from water, I think it would be great if we could cheaply make hydrogen gas from water as a way to store intermittent renewable energy, but I’m not sure that’s ready even 20 years later.
“… but he was on there spouting off outrage to gin up political opportunity without being the slightest bit informed about the subject.”
Boy, we are sure lucky that there aren’t any other politicians who do this!
Actually, I get your point and pretty much agree with it. But I’m afraid this standard rules out any possible candidate I can think of for at least one issue or another, and often many issues. I count 11 statements about Kennedy’s “beliefs” here. Some I disagree with. Some I can’t tell (what are the “conspiracy theories and misinformation about life-saving COVID vaccines” to which the author refers?). Some I definitely agree with. Interestingly the tweeter leaves out foreign policy: his stance on Ukraine is better than *any* other candidates, in my opinion; his stance on Israel is strange and somewhat worrying to me.
So is he worse than the others? Why? Guess it depends on our most important issues.
Did RFK Jr show in that interview that he did not know that you need energy to make the electricity to electrolize the water to get Hydrogen? Is there any reason to think he did not know that at the time and just mistakenly assumed that it ” went without saying”?
There certainly was no mention, either by RFK Jr or by Gross, about the energetics underlying hydrogen gas production. He just expressed indignation about using fossil fuels instead of water and made it sound like one could just as well use one as the other. I’d guess that, since I understood the difference, if he had had the tone of “it goes without saying,” then I wouldn’t have thought much of it.
If he gives an interview, someone should really ask him about that.
(Almost) Daily Derailment(s)
Looks like a day off, but there’s this– check-out the map:
New Map Shows Hazardous Train Derailments Pose an Urgent Threat to Communities
This week, the National League of Cities (NLC) launched an interactive map showing the alarming number of train derailments across the country as the bipartisan Railway Safety Act awaits a vote before the U.S. Senate.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2023/6/new-map-shows-hazardous-train-derailments-pose-an-urgent-threat-to-communities
Good info!
Sex may be practiced as a hobby but it’s fundamental to human existence in a way that the other example hobbies are not. Failing to teach kids about sex in school results in higher rates of STIs, unintended pregnancies, and mental health issues (shame and fear are not good for the psyche.) Not to mention that sex education undermines authoritarian tendencies by providing people with the knowledge needed to understand and control their own bodies, instead of being controlled by others. The struggle for reproductive rights is a class struggle, and sex education is closely entwined with that.
That said, I say this as a general observation not being familiar with the particulars of this controversy. There might very well be something unnecessary, but that’s a line to be found of “how much” not “none”.
Strong agree. Sex Ed taught at school is extremely important. Sex Ed in school also has the additional benefit of contextualizing healthy, consensual sexual contact and bodily function, thereby alerting students to (sadly) their own sexual abuse or that of others. Another also, most parents, even the most sexually liberal, simply will not teach their children about healthy sexual functioning because it’s either too “weird” or “difficult”. Sex Ed has a very important social function in our society (see Tanya from the Trillbillies Sexy Sex Ed course that she started but got chased into the ground by reactionaries).
Not for nothin, I attended Montgomery County Public Schools and was the recipient of a very comprehensive sex Ed in 5th grade, then middle school, then high school again. Invaluable knowledge for when I left home. I’d be willing to bet that Mark Ruffo (or whatever that guy’s name is) and his lot used the contemporary gender wars to get the MoCo parents riled up over some bullshit because an election year is around the corner. I grew up and went to school with lots of Muslim children in MoCo and their sex Ed attendance wasn’t a problem back in the day.
Yep. And there is not a whole “layer of bureaucracy” around sex ed. it’s one of a ton of key topics covered in K-12 health curriculum. There should be an opt-out clause, however.
My child was shown explicit child birth videos in Middle School. I laughed when she told me about it. I say the more truth at a young age the better, within reason. I don’t advocate war stuff, but human sexual/birth stuff for sure. Like down on the farm.
We were shown a live birth in the 8Th grade. Then the school nurse explained how big the female human cervix needed to expand for the baby to be born. I didn’t sleep for two days.
I sometimes think that if you need ‘sex education classes’ it might be a cultural problem.
I remember the fishing boat study from a while back. It seemed to me their conclusions were at odds with a Chinese clinical report I saw early in the pandemic. It’s one of many SARS – related things I never followed up on, and now I can’t recall the title or author of the Chinese paper. It made quite an impression on me at the time.
Absent any contradictory data I still have a quibble: Do nasal swabs actually allow one to characterize in-host diversity? Host-output diversity for sure, but that might be different, no?
Speaking of AI generated images on Adobe Stock…
I run marketing for a local nonprofit and was going through Adobe Stock just this morning. I was searching for images of “people with their mouths open” and a few of the images were AI generated.
I clicked on them out of curiosity and to my shock and horror….the mouths on these AI generated images had WAYYY to many teeth, like to the point of being the only thing I ended up noticing about them. Some of the teeth were “out of place” as in they had canine teeth further back than they should have been.
Does AI not know how many teeth a human has?!
No, it’s a collage compositor, not a meaning generator.
“Hallucinatory Valley,” like a horror show. And apparently no QA from Adobe, either.
Sounds like your AI images were picked up here:
https://www.bauersmiles.com/2013/06/fake-hyperdontia-photo.html/
I remember seeing the one with the palate full of teeth (that has since been discredited) a few years ago. Yeah, those are creepy.
Nope, and the same problem exists with fingers and toes. Not just a little problem, but a rather serious one.
It does not know what teeth are or anything like that.
All it does it put certain color pixels on certain locations within the canvas based on statistics correlated with the user query.
I would include a few other supposedly private activities that might be considered hobbies but are basic life skills that should be taught – basic kitchen skills, light plumbing, mending, map reading…
But hey, I also think phones and computers should be banned in all k-12 educational institutions except for very specific classes and then they should be school owned and operated tech devices. Largely because I also think reading and being able to add and subtract on your own are abilities people should have. We have become a society that has crippled itself because we overestimate technology.
I would also teach those kids where their water, food, electricity, clothing, etc. come from so that they know that it just does not magically appear. real world studies I suppose you can say.
For over an hour starting around one, my area of Manhattan be came increasing dark and what light there was became very orange. It has since lightened up so to speak, but I do admit to finding it very freaky even as I remembered seeing milder versions living near wildfire areas while I was growing up.
Here in SW Vermont this morning as well. Atmosphere like pea soup with a distinct smokey smell. It’s lightened some now, and my headache has eased off the throttle.
Any idea what it is like in northwestern Maine around Moosehead Lake? There is no information.
Having a HEPA air filtration system, and sealing up the house make a big difference as is recommend above.
We’ve gone through this more than a couple times where I am in the PNW, and it is not good, not fun at all. I was raised in California in the 60/70’s back when smog was a real, visible, stinky thing, and I never remembered anything as bad as this smoke can get. This stuff is way worse.
I’m also in NYC. From my office on the west side, at one point I couldn’t see New Jersey (so maybe this isn’t all bad :) ).
Airnow.gov, your “one-stop source for air quality data” currently shows air quality in NYC at 392 (“Hazardous”) on a 500-point scale, and nearly as bad all the way down to Philadelphia, up to New Haven, and across most of central New York.
Did it look anything like this: video? The news is increasingly looking like a dystopian sci-fi thriller.
I think some kind of human biology course should be required in schools – how else are students to protect themselves from the public health goons? Just the basics, but details can be assigned to parents to teach, giving resources to parents as they request them.
Indiana has mandated a “financial literacy” course for high school students; biological literacy could include drug education, public and personal health, but some elements would need to be covered before high school.
As I recall, back in the 1970s we had a “health” class that included a small percentage of sex ed. My dad had told me that his mom forbid him from brushing his teeth because it wears them out, and from wearing colored socks because the dye gives you blood poisoning. So health class in the public school was probably an improvement on that, but I can’t say it was harmless.
One day in health class the teacher gave a pop quiz. After everybody turned in their papers he tore them up. He said “a quiz that doesn’t count is called a quizzie. Does anybody know what a test that doesn’t count is called?” A young lady in the back yelled out “testes!” The she put her head down on the desk when she realized what she said.
The young lady got pregnant a little while later and missed quite a bit of school, so I guess that proves that trauma experienced in a sex ed class has a reverse knowledge effect (N=1).
COVID Vaccine Hesitancy and Risk of a Traffic Crash.
Now perform the exact same analysis for each of the long covid symptoms and ascribed morbidities, and you’d genuinely have something. Something other than what you already have: Something useful. Something to dry up all external funding for the rest of your knee-bending, ankle-biting career.
One of my son’s teachers has been out recently. Just got an email from her that her husband was just diagnosed with plasma cell leukemia, a very aggressive blood cancer. Another anecdote for the pile. She is young (30s) and I imagine her husband is as well. Of course, I view this anecdote through the knowledge of Covid immune disregulation. Wasn’t there discussion awhile back here from physician and scientist posters about what seemed to be an increase in blood cancers in the last couple of years?
Was he vaccinated? There have been multiple reports of aggressive cancers post mRNA vaccination.
Can you provide a link for one of those reports? My search only turned up results like this:
https://www.healthline.com/health/leukemia/leukemia-after-covid
Links, plural, please.
I put up three links but they’ve gone to link purgatory.
Plausible mechanism here.
“Increased IgG4 synthesis due to repeated mRNA vaccination with high antigen concentrations may also cause autoimmune diseases, and promote cancer growth and autoimmune myocarditis in susceptible individuals.”
Paper at Vaccine.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/11/5/991
Repeated vaxxing causes Immunoglobulin class change from useful IgG3 to mostly useless IgG4 (IgG4 is what your allergenist is hoping for when she repeatedly challenges you with an antigen, hoping to reduce your response) Obviously this isn’t what you want for control of cancer cells or Covid spike.
Jessica Rose goes into it at length here.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGsmqxlpfFXGvDJDWMPvVRkDFDz
This also explains the Cleveland hospital study that showed that the more vaxed you were, the more likely you were to be infected.
Yes, both my Sister and I have been diagnosed with an uncommon blood cancer, Waldstrom’s disease.
We are in our early 70’s and both vaxxed, she has had Covid once, I have not.
I hope you were just joking about sex-ed in schools. I remember actually learning quite a bit in 4th and 5th grade health back in the 80’s. They aren’t teaching kids HOW to have sex. They are teaching kids how their bodies work and how to be safe. We had opt-outs back then, but it was typically only a handful of super-religious families that wouldn’t let their kids participate.
We also used to teach “hobbies” like wood working, creative writing, auto repair, music, cooking, etc. that have actually had a fundamental impact on my life. School should teach kids many different things and their own personal biology is a big one.
We could start a series of for profit centers and call them the Zoolander Center for Kids who Want to Learn Stuff. And in 20 years we can sell them to the highest bidding private equity firm. Sadly this is not sarcasm.
I went to a fairly rigid, and quite small baptist church based school. There was ultimately a Biology course but I don’t think the study included the topic of human procreation. Some of my peers managed to find out on their own, naturally, within a short time after high school ended. And as of today, my current home in South Carolina the state runs an apprenticeship program which I believe partners with many of the school districts. Pairs with BMW and their suppliers, of course, plus there are more manufacturing plants opening here along the EV battery business.
On the fishing boat outbreak: “Of note, only three crew members had neutralizing antibodies before the ship’s departure, and none of these individuals met the case definition for infection.” In other words the three fishermen who had had covid previously were protected from infection. Knowing how physically demanding deep sea commercial fishing is, most all of the crew had to have been physically fit.
Not according to David Gorski of SBM, see here https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/natural-immunity-and-super-immunity/ and here https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/natural-immunity-covid-19/
Seems according to him the vaccine is superior to naturally acquired immunity. He even makes the claim that the vaccine provides equal protection to a natural infection
“ Moreover, vaccine-induced immunity is every bit as “natural” as post-infection immunity (the more appropriate term to describe immunity after an infection), with the added huge advantage of not having to suffer through the disease and risk its potential complications, up to and including death, to acquire immunity.” It seems even though the vaccine only primes the immune system with the spike protein it is the same as your immune system overcoming the whole virus. His words not mine.
This logically just doesnt make sense. The vaccines impart immunity against one specific part of covid–the spike protein. Natural immunity also does that, but not only that–you aquire immunity against all parts of the virus.
When you are sourcing your claims its best to link to the original source documents, not someone claiming what those source documents say. None of Mr. Gorski’s sources actually seem to claim what he stated they do.. which isnt surprising given the logic described above and just how hard these vaccines have been crammed down our throats. I took the liberty of linking to the actual sources Mr Gorski notes and what claims he they say–which they do not
More than a third of COVID-19 infections result in zero protective antibodies link: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042_article
“Natural immunity” fades faster than vaccine immunity, particularly after mild infection link: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6947a2.htm
“Natural immunity alone” is only half as effective as natural immunity plus vaccination link: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm7032e1_w
You’re doing Jurassic Park style counting there. The three with detectable neutralizing antibodies are not necessarily the only people on board with previous infections.
This was very early in the pandemic (pre-vaccines) and neutralizing antibodies were the best (and most reasonable) proxy for prior infection. Tests for neutralizing antibodies to non-spike Sars Cov2 proteins is still the best test for prior infections though titres tend to wane over time. 80% of the crew showed signs of infection w. PCR. Did you expect it to be 100%? Infections don’t work that way for any disease. I don’t see what’s is Jurassic Park about it. No dinosaurs or film stars were hurt in the process of the study.
‘Best’ and ‘most reasonable’ are bs-ification when it’s known that it provides a bad count. Moreover it means natural immunity’s failures get automatically excluded. And we knew very early on that there were high rates of non- seroconversion, so ‘early in the pandemic’ doesn’t float either, even if it were germane, which it isn’t.
Yeesh
Also, I’m not the one doing the counting-it’s the authors of the study. Check out their reasoning in the attached paper and references.
“It’s their count not mine.” How does that support your claims? If their methodolgy bears you out then point me to the relevant passages in the article.
“Biden convenes his Cabinet on the heels of debt ceiling resolution” [CNN]. “The Cabinet last met on January 5.” • It’s almost like Biden doesn’t want to be seen in private.
That’s beyond the pale. Macron meets with the entire government every Wednesday without fail.
Who’s running things over there? I really have no freaking idea at this point.
It may be, per chance, that meeting less as a full Cabinet is a net positive. Bear with me, but perhaps they do less damage the less they are all together?
It’s sorta on auto pilot anyway. The pandemic has ended, Covid is no more and life is evergreen and things will only look up! America in 2023. Pay no heed to our reckless rail operators like Norfolk Southern or BNSF! ( \sarc )
It has been embarrassing for years that US Presidents don’t have to make regular appearances at things where they have NO control over the questions and are expected to be able to have enough working knowledge to be able to respond to whatever comes up. I am pretty damn sure at least four maybe even five of the Presidents in my lifetime would never have been able to do it in a manner that even remotely resembles competence on matters of importance.
Along with whether he can keep it together, which we will never know, I really want to know if everyone will have to have negative tests and what the ventilation set up is. We won’t get to know that either.
On the evolving rationale for who bombed the Nordstream pipelines, I see a new point that I have never seen before:
“The alleged plan is said to have been identified by the security service of one of Washington’s European allies and was shared with the CIA last June. That communication was reportedly part of the tranche of classified intelligence shared on social media platform Discord by Jack Teixeira, a member of the U.S. Air National Guard who is now facing espionage charges.”*
It strikes me that if the Texiera leaks had said anything about some foreign government trying to sabotage that pipeline we would have heard about it already. It sounds a little post hoc to me. Reported by whom? Were that the case, why not provide a link to all of the stories written up about it at the time? It is not like they didn’t link to every other point they attempted to make.
They appear to have reached the point where they realize they cannot dazzle us with their brilliance, and so have determined to baffle us with BS.
* https://www.politico.eu/article/zelenskyy-denies-ukraine-involvement-in-nord-stream-pipeline-blasts/
I was watching Alex C covering this issue today. He was reading from the WaPo article. There was something really strange that caught my eye. A statement that this Nordstream bombing was done in such a way so that Zelensky did not know about it and therefore was not culpable. Instead Zhaluzny (sp?) WAS PUT IN CHARGE. Zhaluzny is the head of UA military. Zelensky is head of the nation.
Then my question is- WHO PUT ZHALUZNY in charge of this project? Is this an admission that the US is running the entire show? Who would rank high enough to put him in charge, give him orders, but not need to inform Zelensky that a plan had been hatched that would one of the greatest terrorist attacks on critical infrastructure that is owned by 49% European interests?
Indeed, who died and made Zaluzhny boss?
Also, too, seems like that was right about the time that Zaluzhny was saying that they needed to conserve their resources and hunker down in the face of the onslaught they already had. And then there is the point about how he could have pulled off something like that a few thousand miles away while lacking the infrastructure to pull it off; I don’t remember the Ukrainian navy being in the Baltic.
The key is that he is prolly dead right now. You cannot interview someone at the bottom of a shaft in a bombed out building, or who has died on the Kherson front. That just seems overly convenient.
Just now listening to that video myself. I guess that they want to try to make Zhaluzny the bunny now and pin the blame for the NS2 attack on him. Guess that he is way out of favour now with Kiev so perhaps when he went missing for those weeks, that he wasn’t wounded but maybe he had been arrested and imprisoned.
>>“The CDC wants people to stop eating raw cookie dough
The obvious solution is vegan cookie dough, but the Cowspiracy doesn’t want you to know that.
In central NY State, long-stay hotels have evicted dozens of families of otherwise homeless US citizens to accommodate immigrants bussed from NYC.
New York City sues Central New York counties over migrant bans
Send the migrants to DC. Free trade, US sponsored wars and coups, drug wars create the problem. Let the DC elites solve it.
Adams also wanted to lessen the rules so that migrants could be housed in private residences with little or no waiting period. The city would pay the owners less than the hotels but more than the foster care program for children.
The Post asked about Gracie Mansion, but I wanted four or five families sent to Chuck Schumer’s place in Park Slope and as many as possible sent to Goldman’s, AOC’s and Jerry Nadler’s.
And I’ve been suggesting regular buses to the White House and Blair House in DC as well.
And on behalf of the migrants, the city is so desperate at this point I doubt there will be much of a screening process for those private residences. This could be another kind of nightmare solution on both sides.
Nice to see two groups of vulnerable, homeless, and extremely desperate individuals including families are being pitted against each other and used for political virtue signaling by both factions of the Uniparty and their minions.
I am against having the undocumented here, but the American regime running our country has spent at least a century destroying the economy and governments of almost all countries south of the Rio Grande and much of the Caribbean; they have also been destroying the economy and government of the United States for at least fifty years; maybe, we could chuck the members of the national and local regimes across the Rio Grande instead while keeping the most desperate undocumented people instead? It might be a poor trade for Latin America, though.
Well I’m all for making the elite homeless, since I think they are behind most of the decisions that the politicians make. I will also say that immigration is not local, nor are most of the decisions that affected our neighbors. And we have had an immigration crisis on our southern border for almost two decades and four presidents. It has been virtue signaling for at least that long.
A part of me is more than happy to have posers like Adams having to cope with federal inaction on a federal issue. And for there to be more regular national media coverage. But there are mostly losers in all this. At least some here finally get that a whole bunch of the complaints about this aren’t just because of xenophobia. A whole lot of it is because there are no easy answers for national politicians, so they just fundraise on it, keep their donors happy with cheap vulnerable labor, and pretend that each other is blocking the winning strategy….Like so much else.
Ominously, there is growing sentiment “on the street” here in the North American Deep South to simply turn the newly arrived “illegal immigrants” into compost.
Remember that what is initially uttered in jest can eventually become “common knowledge” and the New Normal.
Terran humans have a long and sordid history of setting strangers up as “outsiders” and then demonizing them. The next step is the elimination of those “outsiders,” just like Biblical Scapegoats.
I’m working on my ‘Grey Man’ skills.
If parents want to have their children taught about sex, let them hire a tutor.
Maybe the Gates Foundation can provide scholarships and grants for this purpose?
“Mr. Epstein, Mr. Epstein! The plane, the plane!”
Trump is coming hot out of the gates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IOk4VyWC5U
This is going to be a fascinating political season.
That’s funny. Those left villians are that left. Biden looks brutally sick and pathetic. Spot on on the political prosecution.
He certainly did hit that political persecution part on the nail, but as for the rest….I am so old that their “far left” looks a lot more like the Reagan Revolutionaries of my youth. One used to have to be a Black Panther, or something, to get that kind of designation, but I am pretty sure that a Malcolm X would have them all cowering under their desks rather than just sneering about things they know not of
And the part about his having drained the swamp, past tense, is just laughable, but they are going to eat that up. Biden is not going to know what hit him.
I have a different take. I think the overall feel of the commercial comes across as trying too hard, which is very un-Trump like. And Trump himself quite clearly appears older and not the same as when he left office over three years ago, let alone when he began this run back in 2015.
This isn’t going to change a Trump voter’s opinion, I know. But it’s how it appeared to me.
The Vaccines prevent traffic crashes too? one more reason to go get booster #7
‘For an insight into why Tasmania has the highest SARS-Cov 2 transmission rate in the nation, here’s our part time Health Minister trying to explain why he led the National Cabinet charge with Perrottet to remove mandatory 5 day isolation’
Thanks for that tweet link. She really hammered him and he tried to get out of it by saying it was everybody’s fault but his. And he is a typical Premier in that he only follows political advice rather than medical advice. It is ironic that transmission rates for Tasmania are so high. Australia is an island continent which is what it had initial success with quarantine. But Tasmania is an island State to the south which means that it could do a better quarantine lockdown than the rest of the country. Just listening to that video now and she says he ignored airborne transmission and just last week he told people to wash their hands, This is a real damning video.
What about Pence and Biden? These people are shameless and deranged.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/us/politics/trump-documents-florida-grand-jury.html
Cop City update:
AJC is finally starting to do some reporting critical of the state’s attempts to crush dissent. It turns out a lot of arrest warrants were issued falsely claiming DHS had classified the activist group as domestic terrorists.
https://www.ajc.com/politics/arrest-of-activists-references-homeland-security-flag-that-doesnt-exist/3P3DA7SM4FA77FTU6HLRRHD22Y/
Also interesting:
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/06/cop-city-atlanta-funding-vote/
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/cop-city-arrests-atlanta-repression/
All in with Chris Hayes clip showing some footage of the SWAT raid on the bail fund organizers:
https://twitter.com/allinwithchris/status/1666608447133974528#m
Re: Karl Rove on Trump-DeSantis feud …
Since Karl Rove is back in the news, I continue to wonder about something I heard back in the “Shrub Era”, i.e., when W. Bush was POTUS in 2000-2004, and people were still puzzling over shenanigans in the 2000 election, such as hanging chads and such.
At that time, there was a right-wing political consultant — maybe Rove, though maybe not — who was said to have argued that disputes over social issues such as abortion, gay rights, etc. were endless and therefore perfect for keeping liberals at each others’ throats.
Was it Rove… ? Somebody else… ?
I’m curious about this, if anybody recalls.
More detail on the sports business headlines this week, behind the PGA Tour and LIV Tour reaching a detente of sorts and resolving this with buckets of money. This isn’t my wheel house to write up a lengthy history of golf as sport and also as business, but this is going to change the landscape for younger aspiring golfers perhaps. Added thought, if it appears I’m passionate about this sport and these headlines it is that playing golf on simple 9 hole courses was a key way of spending quality time with my late father. As I grew semi successful as a functional adult the golf courses improved but never a whiff of Augusta or Pebble Beach.
https://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/37805785/pga-tour-liv-golf-dp-world-tour-announce-merger
Added commentary for anchor and frequent hosting the major tournaments for ESPN, Scott Van Pelt made his remarks pretty clear. PS just ignore the video, nothing about golf.
https://nesn.com/2023/06/espns-scott-van-pelt-rips-pga-tour-after-merger-with-liv-golf/
whirring away in her bathroom in Chautauqua … Hillary’s servers were whirring away in her bathroom on Church Lane in Chappaqua. C’mon Vanity Fair … get a proof reader.
Re: Covid Vaccines and Risk of Traffic Crash
From the Methods section:
This definition reflected incidents sending a patient to an emergency department as a driver, passenger, or pedestrian (codes V00-V69).
So, they are claiming that unvaccinated passengers and pedestrians cause traffic accidents.
I seem to recall Igor Chudov shredded this study when it first came out, but i don’t have a link handy.
uh, hear me out. sex is a vital part of life, not a hobby, and something nearly everyone will experience at some point. it is a lot harder to take advantage of an informed person than someone who is not informed. knowledge about how the reproductive organs work and the basics of sex and being protected from diseases and pregnancy as well as the emotional aspects of it are important enough lesson to be taught that one should not merely be reliant on the parents for that to be a well functioning society. kids who grow up in the dark on these topics are more likely to be abused and taken advantage of. factual information of how bodies work shouldnt be controversial at all, but here’s americas puritan bullshit history shining through. ridiculous. my heart aches for all the girls out there who are going to be going through their changes without any information, and at a vulnerable time where creepy older men will take advantage of them, impregnate them and force them to marry to save face. next theyll be teaching that the earth is flat and jesus rode on dinosaurs so the sensitive religious snowflakes dont get offended.