By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Readers, I have already levied demands on your patience twice this week, and I must do so again today. I have undertaken a massive assault on CDC’s HICPAC, and I ran about two hours late, owing to a complicated cascade of domestic disasters (no permanent harm done). So, I must ask you to talk amongst yourselves again! –lambert P.S. I have included the bird song, since people really do seem to like them, and a plant. P.P.S. But do give the HICPAC post a read.
Bird Song of the Day
Bobolink, Kellys Slough NWR, Grand Forks, North Dakota, United States. This one has some background noise, as the person fiddles with his recording device, but it sounds very summery, and the extra noise adds authenticity, like scars in fine leather.
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 TF:
TF writes: “Ponderosa pine (I think) @ Bryce Canyon National Park. How does it survive with its roots exposed like that?” Wow! I think I was muttering something about “depth of field” in the recent past.
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!
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Kevin McCarthy has a bill to save the sequoias, but some environmental groups aren’t into it
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-08-17/kevin-mccarthy-sequoias-environmental-groups-opposition
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My Kevin (since ’07) has tried to pass this bill twice and in between Feinstein in the Senate had a crack at it and did nothing, not that Kev has done much.
It’s a big step up from renaming post offices in Bakersfield and a dam on the Tule River for the legislator in charge of the gavel…
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/well/live/covid-reinfection.html
How Bad Is a Second (or Third or Fourth) Case of Covid?
Reinfections are becoming more common. Experts are still unsure about how damaging they can be.
How do I get re-assigned to the “takes precautions” half of this experiment? If it helps, I’ll pay my own way to the inter-dimensional portal.
“for most people”, i.e., for those who follow what media + authority says?
Which experts are these? AJ Leonardi has consistently maintained that infection is bad, and that it leads to t-cell exhaustion. He’s also been right consistently since 2020.
https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/1692168533235683618
Also, there’s a confirmed 4th sighting of a new VoI:
https://twitter.com/BNOFeed/status/1692209369125945855
(bold me)
LOL, thanks Biden!
https://zenodo.org/record/8216373
Implication is that the Omicron variant was man made. But why? Tis another mystery.
That is very strange. It certainly seems to be the work of credible researchers. It is not a comforting thing to read.
I ran this by GM, who watches variants like a hawk and was onto the big Omicron wave literally after 4 cases had been sequenced. His remark:
YouTube digressions:
If you’re into heavy metal this video I was the editor for just dropped:
https://youtu.be/PY3zem7Fd5s
Band includes: Troy McLawhorn and Will Hunt (Evanescence), Chuck Garric (LA Guns, Alice Cooper, Dio), and Terry Leroi (Granny 4 Barrel).
Nice, reminds me of AC/DC.
Great lighting effects: never seen that kind of horizontal ‘window shade’ strobing done in B&W before, dramatic.
I lost touch with Aphex Twin around Drukqs and I’m glad to see he’s still kicking out interesting progressive techno that doesn’t suck. Thanks for this!
RE: Scientists call for Brits to wear masks again due to startling new Covid variant Mirror. Our GM is e-mailing us about a lot of new, highly mutated variants in recent days, not yet clear which will also have serious reproductive advantage. But the heavy mutations suggest they have very good odds of evading prior infection and vaccination.
It doesn’t even matter where or when. If these new variants are any good at infecting people, we’ll all get hit with them soon enough.
I am seeing far more “I just caught covid for the first time” posts on reddit covid/positive than I’ve seen in the past. Admittedly I was not checking there during the Omicron surge. But still, it seems that a lot of people who were never before infected, are catching it now. The ones I’m seeing are all people who gave up precautions, either mostly or entirely. They are all vaccinated, but unvaccinated people might not be inclined to post there.
The highly divergent SARS-2 strain detected in Israel and Denmark has been designated ‘BA.2.86’ and a fourth example found in Michigan.
Michigan of course is in the Midwest region, whose Biobot wastewater graph has suddenly headed north.
Checking Michigan treatment plants on SCAN I do see that the Warren facility’s graph has gone vertical, but not much else. It would seem that whatever’s happening in the midwest might be just now coming to Michigan.
Oh, just checked the Biobot site and now the whole country looks more or less like the midwest.
Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s mild.
“It’s just like the flu, the 1918 flu.”
If 1918 kept going into 1922.
Yellowknife is evacuating.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yellowknife-canada-wildfire-evacuation-order-far-north/
Eris in Syracuse NY prompts return to face masks:
https://www.syracuse.com/health/2023/08/both-upstate-medical-hospitals-to-require-masks-again-as-covid-cases-tick-up.html
Another stop on Taylor Swift’s Eris tour?
isnt Eris the Goddess of Discord….she of the Golden Apple, and all?
Hmmm… A slam dunk publicity “stunt” for the tour. Hand out Taylor Swift themed face masks at the door for concert goers. Make them good quality masks and see continuing marketing as attendees later wear them to school and work as “Visible Signs of Grace.”
I’m certain the Taylor Swift Conglomerate can ‘source’ these masks dirt cheap from somewhere. Then Lambert’s much desired “Masks as Fashion Accoutrements” will become manifest on the physical plane.
Stay safe, stay on brand, or be square.
I will file a complaint with Water Cooler management about this blatant dereliction of duty! /s
read this and think about me, instead of pestering our hosts,lol
https://tpwmagazine.com/archive/2012/jul/LLL_dustdevils/
i was just in one of these things.
formed rapidly over the north side of the cabin across the road, got at least 60 feet high, and prolly 20 feet in diameter, and came right towards the Wilderness Bar, where i’m out here chillin…having laboured enough by far for Thursday.
it came into the Bar…all blowing dust and tiny twigs…lifted a few beer cans out of the bins…and petered out rapidly.
i suspect that running sprinklers on the pocket gardens in the Bar Environs and the resulting cool air at the surface(Bar A/C), are what dissipated it.
whole thing lasted maybe a minute.
3rd one this week ive been caught in.(other 2 were in the Falcon, out in the pasture.)
we really need some rain.
Here at the western end of Lake Ontario we’ve had so much rain this summer that the grass is still green and must be cut every four or five days — usually it’s browned by early July …
When I was a kid in Sacramento, a teeny dust devil picked up a piece of paper on the ground of front of me, spun it about a zone maybe 2 feet wide, floated it lazily up about 20 feet in the air, and spat it out the side of the devil. Or maybe it was the top of the twister? One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
Heh, it’s summer! Although Lambert is pretty much always working on a post when this happens and they pretty much always take longer than estimated.
Are you feeling lucky?
https://modernsurvivalblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/effects-of-full-scale-nuclear-exchange-on-united-states.jpg
On this one, rather important, issue alone, I would vote for Trump.
A simple letter switch reveals their real campaign leitmotif.
Read it out loud:
Hiden/Barris2024
Me too since we live just 12 miles north of the only military target in Mississippi. The map says major wildfires, well, it is a heavily wooded area, and medium to minimal fallout, which really depends on the prevailing winds at time of detonation.
Stennis Federal Reserve down below us on the Gulf Coast is not considered a strike zone. Funny that since the place houses the Naval Meteorology Department’s main offices plus the Navy Seal Riverine training facility. The Navy Met Office does the weather reports for all Naval vessels, including submarines. A natural target if one wanted to ‘discommode’ the opponent’s naval forces.
The other Mississippi target is the Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Station. That would be a part of a ‘full court press’ by the Red Team.
I sometimes despair of Terran humans. They are so self destructive.
the fema map i saved, long ago(and which i now cant find, save on survivalist/CT sites) says we’re in a Good Place, here.
Ft Bliss is directly to our west, but almost 500 miles away.
Pantex, in Amarillo…if its still a thing…is 400 something miles to our north-north-west, and would be an issue in winter, perhaps.
Goodfellow AFB is a good hunnerd miles NW…but its tiny, and not of strategic importance…but sometimes crucial for disaster relief(Russians appear to have scruples, based on the last year and a half)
so fallout aint a thing, here…unless Our Betters go full monty.
(i’m reminded of the early days of the Panic Phase of the Pandemic, when the rich and powerful ran off to their bunkers…and the web was filled with memes about backing cement mixers up to the holes and filling them in….would have been perhaps a cheap remedy compared to what we face, today)
That’s a very fortunate place to have and care for as you do. You’ve shared much of your living priorities here and the skill/knowledge with which you till your homestead!
I’m just14 miles from CentCom – MacDill AFB in Tampa, Fl… hopefully it will be quick and painless…
That map may be misleading in terms in fall out. Back in ’86 Chernobyl blew and a week later I read that they were dumping milk in Milwaukee. They were also banning agricultural products from places like Turkiye. Back then a ship load of Turkish figs arrived in Sydney but was found to be too radioactive. The Federal government said it would be fine if mixed with regular figs to lower the concentration of radioactivity (hot spots anyone?) but the State government at the time said forget it.
I have been reading commentary that investors are hounding Lahaina residents about selling their burned out property. I also see Tulsi Gabbard complaining about Biden’s lack of response. I heard he actually said ‘no comment’ to a question about the Maui fire. Really?
I wouldn’t be surprised if his administration is withholding aid to force people to sell. That is the level of my cynicism.
That’s not cynicism.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
Cynicism? As of now, one hundred and eleven dead with roughly one thousand missing, plus after nine blasted days there still problems for whatever reason and within forty miles of a large military base of getting aid to the area. Add the blocking of attempts to bring food, water, and medicine in an area that no longer had any of that?
F*** it. My cynicism is growing by leaps and bounds. Leaps and bounds.
I have lived my entire life within an hour, maybe two, of the San Andreas Fault all the while awaiting the Big One; I use to think that the state government and the feds while not perfect would have the goal of saving the collective posteriors of the thirty nine million Californians after it. Ask me if I think that they care about anything, but managing the visuals, if even that much like with East Palestine and Lahaina. Maybe, when San Francisco, San Jose, or Los Angeles burns there will be changes. I doubt it.
It might be something of a cliché, but what a crushing realization that me, my family, and my neighbors ain’t nothing but grist for that disaster mill to be ground into their money.
One wonders if this response will end up being Biden’s “Katrina response”.
> Never let a crisis go to waste
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Salton sea thingy ….
Ryan Grim of “The Intercept” Identified “Patient Zero” of this Pandemic as Brian Hu of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in an article published in mid June this year.
The Bat lady’s fair haired boy and a brilliant virologist…
And perhaps just a tad obsessive and arrogant.
As far as the “Infection Control” people, they are openly trying to kill us.
It has been THREE YEARS since we learned that Covid is an airborne Pathogen, there is no way in hell these murderous assholes don’t know what they are doing.,
They are sowing the wind.
One of the studies cited as important by Baude and Paulsen is “Amnesty and Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment”, by Gerard N. Magliocca (Constitutional Commentary, University of Minnesota Law School, Spring 2021), Magliocca writes that the Joint Committee on Reconstruction cited this reason for Section Three:
Let me change one word, so that this excerpt now reads”
“Capitalism, by building up a ruling and dominant class, had produced a spirit of oligarchy adverse to republican institutions, which finally inaugurated civil war. The tendency of continuing the domination of such the capitalist class, by leaving it in the exclusive possession of political power, would be to encourage the same spirit, and lead to a similar result.”
Now note that the Confederates had “exclusive possession of political power” in only some of the recently defeated Confederate states, not in the entire nation. So, the northern Congressmen and Senators were clearly intent on eliminating, or at least blocking, the political power of former Confederate factions in specific states. Which raises the question, does the Congress have the power to intervene politically in the internal affairs of a state of the Union? Magliocca addresses this directly on pages 98-99. After being readmitted to the Union,
Magliocca mentions the Guarantee Clause of Article IV (“[T]he United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government . . . .”) as one basis for the federal government intervening in the internal affairs of a state. (See Arthur E. Bonfield, “The Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4: A Study in Constitutional Desuetude” (pdf), 46 Minnesota Law Review 513 (May, 1961) ).
Tellingly, Baude and Paulsen do not mention the Guarantee Clause. This makes sense, because Baude and Paulsen are conservatives affiliated with the Cato Institute, and my argument is that conservatives are engaged in tearing down the spirit of republicanism so as to provide as much freedom as possible to the capitalist class.
This, of course, brings up a question most Americans will ask: Well, isn’t the United States supposed to be capitalist? Isn’t that what the Constitution is all about? The answer will surprise most people, and shock many: actually, there is nothing in the Constitution that specifies the national economy be organized on capitalist lines. In fact, almost all mention of economic issues in the Constitution is to create powers for the national government to intervene in and even direct economic affairs.
The best expression of this is Alexander Hamilton’s major papers on the constitutionality of a national bank, and the subject of manufactures. The response of conservatives has been the same as the slave-holders, to argue the exact opposite: that the powers for the national government are strictly limited to those “enumerated” explicitly in the Constitution. This is, of course, the issue of Hamilton’s “implied powers” versus the conservatives’ and slave-holders’ “enumerated powers.” (See The Original Meaning of Enumerated Powers (pdf), by Andrew Coan and David S. Schwartz [Legal Theory Blog]
Just as surprising is that the most direct consideration of this question was undertaken by the conservative American Enterprise Institute in 1982, in a forum and book entitled How Capitalistic Is the Constitution? (pdf), Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra, editors (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C., 1982).
In the chapter entitled “The Constitution and Hamiltonian Capitalism” Forrest McDonald wrote,
I have been, for years, putting forward the argument that in fact, the Constitution is more amenable to socialism than it is to capitalism. I have also been arguing that “the left” is committing a major strategic blunder in dismissing the relevance and importance of the Constitution and these Constitutional issues. This blunder flows from belief on “the left” that the Constitution was irretrievably flawed from the beginning because of slavery and lack of universal suffrage. This ideology blinds those on “the left” to the essential character of all American history as a struggle between a faction desiring to build a civic republic, and a faction wanting to build something other than a civic republic. The strategic error of “the left” is not wondering, let alone not investigating, how the United States lost its fundamental hostility to economic inequality.
This essential character of all American history is well captured by Forrest A. Nabors, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, Columbia, Mo., University of Missouri Press, 2017. Nabors wrote because “Marxists tend to conflate superior wealth with rule, their analysis did not isolate and politicaly distinguish the wealthy Southern planters from wealthy Northern industrialists. Both industrialists and planters were oligarchs in their view. This obscured the different character of the South.” (pp. 19-20.)
Nabors quotes the Republicans senators and representatives debating the legislation to enact Reconstruction after the Civil War, who had to grapple with the slaveholding oligarchy that had arisen on the economic inequality of the South. including describing how the disposition, nature, and behavior of slaveholders became ever more despotic and tyrannical over time. In a section entitled “How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Effect on the Personal Character of Masters,” Nabors excerpts and paraphrases from Senator Charles Sumner’s dramatic speech upon his return to the Senate in 1860 (after more than three years recuperating and rehabilitating from the attack by South Carolina Congressmen Preston Brooks in 1856).
So, to state it again, the central issue was that “Slavery, by building up a ruling and dominant class, had produced a spirit of oligarchy adverse to republican institutions…”
Many commenters here have correctly pointed out the severe political consequences of using Article 3 to bar Trump from the November 2024 ballots. The issue they – and everyone else – has yet to address is how Trump, Trump’s supporters, and conservatives in general, have (to paraphrase) “produced a political spirit adverse to republican institutions.” Their beliefs are genuine. But so were the beliefs of the slaveholders. What we have yet to grasp is that the “spirit of republicanism” and its fundamental principles – Justice, and deliberate care to promote the General Welfare – basically require the creation and maintenance of a welfare state. And a welfare state, of course, is the bête noir of conservatives. As such, conservatives will always have to be considered enemies of the republic. No matter how many decades they – and their think tanks, conferences, and noise machine – are allowed to assail the principles of Justice, and the General Welfare. The rest of us must wake up to the importance of these underlying Constitutional issues of philosophy of government.
(For a monumental statement on what a republic ought to be, see the speech by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, “The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government. Speech in the Senate, on the proposed Amendment of the Constitution fixing the Basis of Representation, February 5 and 6, 1866.”)
Tony, thanks for this detailed comment and the links within!
On bicycle tour made it to a mushroom foray and learned from a budding entomologist that we have a native species of leaf cutter ants that farm fungi.
I don’t have that 12 year olds knowledge but did find a couple of articles-
An excerpt from one:
They began farming an estimated 50-65 million years ago. Certain types of ants use ant-fungus mutualism. This is a process where ants will actually cultivate fungus the way we grow crops for food. Leafcutter ants are one of the species that actively farms fungus. They will take leaf matter and bring it back to their “fungus gardens” to cultivate the fungus they use as food (I bet that vegetable garden of yours doesn’t seem as fancy as it used to).
The other:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natural-history/2021/05/13/how-fungus-farming-ants-fertilize-climate-research/
And of course one of my friends said maybe it’s the mushrooms growing the ants.
Of course they are, the fungi are controlling the ants with hunger just as so many crops do that with us. Cunning critters they be.
the leafcutter ants around here(dont remember the binomial) also keep aphids…kidnap them from plants, cart them to special chambers…there, the ants grow a fungus that the aphids like, and the ants milk the aphids for honeydew….an aphid skin secretion.
it is likely that the numerous such ant holes on my side of the place(5 acres, give or take) are all one “mound”.
same with all the holes on mom’s house and environs(3 acres)
and same with the 6 acre back pasture.
idk if these 3 systems are related…perhaps they trade!…
i suspise that the activities of these particular farmer-rancher ants have a great effect on the subsoil environment.
ive read that the “mounds” can be as much as 30 foots deep…but since none our houses and outbuildings have been swallowed by the earth(yet), i guess these ants are pretty good at engineering, too.
Hey, Amf. Have you ever seen that video of the time that they dug up an ant’s nest in Africa I think that it was? Impressive does not even begin to cover it-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFg21x2sj-M (3:15 mins)
when i was studying how to deploy the Beauvarina Bassiana(entophageous fungi, nonspecific) into the Imported Fire Ant Mounds to best effect, and most efficiently(company i got that stuff from,Rincon Vita, suggested growing it on white rice, and putting the ensporated rice out as bait,lol)….i came across a guy in north texas somewhere who had poured dental metal down into mounds, killing the ants…then digging them up and piecing them back together somehow into these, often enormous, sculptures.
the ones for Imported Fire Ants(Solenopsis Invictus) were instructive.
screw the bait,lol.
i taped a funnel to a 6 foot section of 3/4″ pvc, coated the pipe with vaseline, and jammed it down to where the queen was likely to be, and then poured a little of the diluted fungal solution down the pipe.
every mound on our place…and for 400 feet outside of it.
we didnt have importeds for 15 years.(they mate at thousands of feet up, and make nests wherever they fall)
all the native ants quickly returned.
Thank you, fascinating stuff! So much I don’t know about, fun to learn.
Some people also reveal the structure of underground ant nests by pouring molten aluminum down them, waiting for it to cool, and then digging the patterned aluminum casting up and out.
Here is a video by someone claiming they were nice enough to wait for the ant nest to be abandoned before pouring down the molten aluminum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04kgN7El7TE
Now, if one wanted to create a deep-reaching zone of plant-friendly nutrition over which to then plant a plant of desire, could one pour down the abandoned ant-nest a aqueous mixture of fish emulsion, soluble seaweed powder, dissolved molasses, and maybe some other such things?
How Is It Possible For A Single Argentine Ant Supercolony To Span 560 Miles From San Diego To San Francisco?
And then of course there is from 1954, the movie Them!
Them! A much under-rated film. The scriptwriters from them could hold a master class for today’s so-called scriptwriters. Here is an example set around one of the characters and imagine that in a darkened theater-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lur5-8v4T34 (2:40 mins)
Not a ponderosa pine. I know, we had two of them growing through our deck when I lived in the Sierra foothills. PPs have broad scaly plates of bark and the needles are longer–6-8 inches in length.
Bristlecone Pine probably. Oldest living plant species.
save for Pando, and that sea grass off the east side of Gibraltar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posidonia_oceanica
along with Sequoias and Redwoods, my bucket list contains me sitting with such creatures for a time.
It’s getting unsettling. Huge column of APU marches on Kherson
…in addition to a whole brigade of manpower, American M777 howitzers and Hyacinth self-propelled guns were seen in the column of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It is obvious that the APU will try to expand the bridgehead for infantry on the left bank of the Dnieper. And they will support it with artillery from the right bank.
…
The invasion of the enemy continues in Zaporozhye. British tanks and German infantry fighting vehicles appeared in the area of Rabochino. Forbes columnist David Ex notes that the 82nd Airborne Assault Brigade has begun to act in this direction. At the same time, the author notes that the 82nd and 46th brigades were the last forces in the reserve of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
https://kherson-news.ru/society/2023/08/18/183515.html