2:00PM Water Cooler 12/1/2023

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

Horned Screamer, Táchira, Venezuela. Short but sweet!

* * *

Politicsd

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

Capitol Seizure

“Rep. Loudermilk confirms all videotapes from Jan. 6 Committee depositions are gone” [Just the News]. “”All of the videotapes of all depositions are gone,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., chairman of the House Administration oversight subcommittee, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show Thursday night. Loudermilk said he believes under the House rules the videotapes qualified as congressional evidence because some clips were aired at hearings, and all the tapes should have been preserved by the now-defunct J6 committee and its chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss…. Loudermilk also revealed another tantalizing twist in the J6 committee evidence: the Democrat-led House committee sent certain evidence such as transcripts to the Biden White House and Homeland Security Department and now the transcripts have been returned to Loudermilk’s GOP-led subcommittee nearly fully redacted so their contents can’t be read. House Republicans have no records of who the witnesses were, what they said, or why it is being used by the federal prosecutor in their case against Trump, Loudermilk said. The documents ‘belong to the House. They should have never been sent. And second of all, do not send them back to me this heavily redacted. Those are our documents,’ the chairman said. ‘But my question is, why was it okay for a Democrat-run House of Representatives to have unredacted documents but not when there’s a Republican committee that’s looking into this. What is it that the committee and or the White House is trying to hide?'” • And that’s a good question to ask, isn’t it? (And if these depositions are being used as evidence by the Prosecution in any of Trump’s trials, well….)

Biden Administration

2024

Less than a year to go!

Lambert here: 340 days is a long time in politics. In the formulation of stability vs. volatility — that is, the view that the race is a “regular order” of Trump v. Biden, vs. the view that it is by no means certain that Trump and/or Biden will nominated, elected, and allowed to assume office, and further, that the means by which the parties will select their candidates is unknown, and even the nature of victory is unknown — I am firmly on the side of volatility. Hence my grimly detailed and methodical pointillist method; we need to know as much about all the players and fields as we possibly can, because we cannot know who will emerge from the pack, or even, at this point, why. The powers that be can rig the election all they want, but if the dogs won’t eat the rigging, what then? And if they will, what then? So strap yourselves in.

* * *

“The RNC’s rules for the 2024 convention don’t address what would happen if Donald Trump is convicted” [Associated Press]. “The Republican National Committee’s rules for next year’s nominating contest and convention were released this week without addressing a question the GOP could well face next summer: Can the party’s delegates vote for a different candidate if the presumptive nominee is convicted of a felony?” Well, we can always make up the rules as we go along! More: “At next year’s convention, which starts July 15 in Milwaukee, there will be opportunities to tweak the rules when they are adopted or to suspend them, which can require two-thirds of delegates to approve on a vote. ‘It’s a parliamentary body,’ said Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer. ‘It can always work its will if it wants to one way or another.’ Such last-minute maneuvers are difficult to organize and there are few current signs that delegates might look for another option even with Trump’s criminal cases looming.”

“My Father, My Faith, And Donald Trump” [The Atlantic]. At his Father’s funeral: “Now the crowd swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the lobby and adjacent hallways, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers too. None of us had slept much that week. So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—”a guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked people for coming to the visitation. They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Limbaugh and Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking about how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.” • Worth reading in full.

“What Would a Trump Administration Mean for the War in Ukraine?” [Russia Matters]. “It is of course a long time until the next U.S. presidential election, and much may happen in that time both in the U.S. and Ukraine, but, at present, opinion polls suggest both that Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential candidate and that he stands a good chance of beating Joe Biden. A second Trump presidency seems likely to mean greatly reduced support for Ukraine, possibly combined with a U.S. push for a peace settlement. Without very high levels of U.S. military aid ($61.4 billion to date), it will be impossible for Ukraine to continue the fight. A second Trump administration is a prospect that European governments dread, but that they cannot influence. Nor do they have the ability, unity or will either to initiate negotiations themselves, or to substitute for U.S. military aid to Ukraine. They are therefore also in waiting mode. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian establishment is in a state of great confusion and division. Awareness is dawning that the chances of complete victory are slight, and time is not on Ukraine’s side; but the government has declared so often and so publicly that a compromise peace is unacceptable (especially concerning even a temporary territorial compromise during a ceasefire) that it will be extremely difficult for them to agree to talks, unless they come under massive public pressure from Washington or suffer a severe military defeat. As for the Russian government, it senses that time is on its side, and also appears willing to wait in the hope that Russia’s far greater reserves of manpower and ammunition combined with Western and Ukrainian war weariness will eventually force Ukraine to accept Russian terms (albeit ones that would probably be far less than Moscow hoped for when it launched the war). Vladimir Putin—who is poised to run for reelection in the spring—also hopes that a Trump administration would promote such a settlement.”

* * *

“Florida GOP Chair, Whose Wife Co-Founded Moms for Liberty, Accused of Sexual Assault amid Ménage à Trois Scandal” [People]. “Christian Ziegler, the head of Florida’s Republican Party, is under criminal investigation following an allegation of sexual battery, the Sarasota County Police Department confirms to PEOPLE. His accuser claims that she’d been in a consenting three-way sexual relationship with Christian and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, for some time leading up to the incident, according to the Florida Center for Government Accountability. While Christian chairs the Florida GOP, Bridget sits on Sarasota County’s school board and co-founded the far-right group Moms for Liberty, an organization that advocates against any mention of LGBTQ rights, race, ethnicity, critical race theory, or discrimination in school curriculum. Though no longer with Moms for Liberty, Bridget was one of the driving forces behind Florida’s divisive ‘Don’t Say Gay’ legislation. A heavily redacted report provided by the Sarasota PD reveals that an anonymous person accused Christian — whose name is concealed on the document — of sexual battery on Oct. 4 at a home in Sarasota. The word ‘raped’ is included in the report, though its context is also redacted.” • And to think I thought the Florida Republican Party was a well-oiled machine….

* * *

“DeSantis’ Campaign May Have Flunked Its Final Test After Newsom Debate” [Daily Beast]. “Newsom often seemed bewildered at just how clumsy the DeSantis performance turned out, and took every opportunity to hammer home his top gripes with the governor. He also went out of his way to defend President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris throughout the nearly two-hour affair…. Both Newsom and Hannity grew weary of DeSantis’ constant interjections, with the California governor telling him to ‘relax,’ while Hannity asserted he wasn’t ‘a potted plant’ and asked DeSantis to let Newsom speak on a few occasions. ‘Let each other breathe,’ a surprisingly Zen version of Hannity said early on in the debate, to no avail. Beyond the endless crosstalk that ensued, the governors re-litigated their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and even spent almost 10 minutes on the difference between progressive income taxes and flat sales taxes.”

“Top takeaways, real winner of DeSantis, Newsom debate” [FOX]. “Against all expectations, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis absolutely destroyed California’s Gavin Newsom in Thursday night’s Red State-Blue State debate moderated by Sean Hannity on Fox News. Yes, the governor of Florida had a stronger hand – his state has seen a massive inflow of residents attracted to the better quality of life offered by the Sunshine State, while people have been fleeing California. On issue after issue raised by Hannity, DeSantis could roll out statistics that prove the success of the conservative common-sense policies he has implemented in Florida. But the surprise was in his strong and persuasive presentation. DeSantis is generally perceived to be a wooden speaker and campaigner; maybe his run for president has made him more effective. Newsom, on the other hand, is reputed to be the Democrat’s smooth-talking, politically clever president-in-waiting, the likely successor to Joe Biden should the president drop out of the 2024 race. ”

“In debate with Newsom, how could DeSantis lose? Hannity pitched him nothing but softballs” [Miami Herald]. “As for winners and losers? Hard to tell. Newsom, though vulnerable on a few issues, was in there punching and landed some good lines. “Using human beings as pawns is disqualifying to be president,” he said about DeSantis’ migrant flights. Again, the host and the audience — if they stuck around — were ready-made for DeSantis, and he stood to benefit from the uneven playing field. How could he lose? He didn’t have to try very hard. He got all his campaign talking points in without being challenged by Hannity. But it wasn’t fair; with all the raucous interrupting and overtalk, it wasn’t even a debate. No, it was a circus.”

“Republican DeSantis, Democrat Newsom clash in acrimonious debate” [Reuters]. “DeSantis held his own and had a strong showing against Newsom, a skilled debater, but it was likely insufficient to revive his stuttering campaign.” • Although oppo researchers are poring over the tapes right now….

* * *

“Kamala Harris reveals she would ‘of course’ inform the American public if there was a ‘problem’ with Biden” [FOX]. “CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Harris if she would ever reveal to the American public if there was a problem with Biden. ‘Do you think in your role, that you’re in a position to do that?” he asked during an interview with Harris at The New York Times Dealbook Summit. ‘Of course, if necessary, but there’s no need for that. I don’t, there is a political argument that is being made. That is not based on substance, and you’re asking me to hypothesize around what are my duties to the American people, as vice president of the United States, that are based on ethics and morals and the law. I will always follow those rules, but I am suggesting to you that it is important we not be seduced into one of the only arguments that that side of the aisle has right now,’ she said.” • So Harris appoints herself gatekeeper. Swell. (Also, Harris’s language is like uncanny valley; she’s slightly off, constantly (“hypothesize around what are my duties”). It’s like she’s not a native speaker, though she is.)

“Why Democrats are starting to panic over Biden’s poll numbers” [Washington Times]. “The frightened Democrats are worried that rather than premature predictions of electoral failure, they are seeing early warning signs that Biden is too weak to win. If these numbers don’t soon improve before the polls have better predictive power, it will be too late for a course correction. Given the filing deadlines in many primary states as well as the dual challenges of getting both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to step aside, it may already be too late.”

Republican Funhouse

“Behind the Curtain — Scoop: The Trump job applications revealed” [Axios]. “We told you in a ‘Behind the Curtain‘ column last month that Trump allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential appointees and employees in case he wins back the White House. Now we have copies of the exact questionnaires Trump allies are using — and that then-President Trump used himself during his final days in office…. Trump insiders are planning a far more targeted and sophisticated sequel to his haphazard first term, when internal feuding deterred policy wins or permanent changes to government…. The 2020 questionnaire — paired with the application the Heritage Foundation is currently collecting from job prospects for a future administration — points to a top-down government-in-waiting that would be driven more by ideology than by policy expertise or innovation.” • Another way of putting that: The ideology is the innnovation. I wonder if BoJo did something similar?

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.

* * *

“The Rural Challenge for Democrats” [The Liberal Patriot]. “The Democratic Party’s decade-plus-long collapse in rural and micropolitan America stands as one of the great obstacles to strengthening the nation’s democracy. Owing to institutional constraints that limit simple majoritarian rule—the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate in particular—rural regions exert a disproportionate influence on elections, the geographic distribution of political power, and the strength of party coalitions. Gerrymandering by Republican-controlled state legislatures compounds this dynamic by either clustering liberal-leaning voters in a few districts or splitting them across boundaries that favor conservatives. But rather than identify their weakness in nonmetro areas as a problem to be solved through traditional party-building efforts, too many of today’s Democrats regard rural America with a mixture of resignation, denial, and disdain. Beset with a rural reputation frequently described as ‘toxic,’ the party’s inept approach is reflected in maps of partisan control. With the exception of a handful of seats, congressional Democrats draw power from the coasts and large cities (at 40 seats, the California delegation alone makes up nearly 20 percent of the 212-strong House Democratic caucus). Office-holding at the state level similarly tracks the party’s overreliance on the Northeastern seaboard and West coast in presidential elections. Were it not for concerted efforts by local Democrats in Minnesota and Michigan during the 2022 midterms, Illinois would be the only state legislature controlled by Democrats in the Midwest; unsurprisingly, they control none in the South.”

“Cuomo attorneys contend texts undermine Trooper 1’s allegations” [Times-Union (Bob)]. Way down in the story: “Cuomo’s attorneys also allege in the court filing that the female investigator should not have disclosed information to Nevins about her belief that Cuomo had lied about the reason that members of his family had received priority COVID-19 testing in the early stages of the pandemic, when access to tests for the virus was difficult. She also told Nevins that the FBI should investigate the secretive testing program, which involved high-ranking state Health Department officials who facilitated obtaining expedited test results for Cuomo’s family members. Cuomo’s legal team contends the female investigator ‘revealed confidential information to Nevins about Governor Cuomo’s contact with his family members’ when she told him that Cuomo lied when he said his family members, including his mother, sister and brother, had received the priority testing because they had been around him.” • Oh. You can bet Cuomo wasn’t the only one.

Realignment and Legitimacy

“CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show” [Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi, Public]. I Linked to this a few days ago, but I’m linking to it again, because generates insight in the “realignment and legitimacy frame. The subject is the birth (or, if you prefer, Ground Zero) of the Censorship Industrial Complex: “Now, a large trove of new documents, including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages, reveal that, in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne ‘SJ’ Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework. These contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in the spring of 2020. In truth, the building of the Censorship Industrial Complex began even earlier — in 2018. Internal [Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) Slack messages show Terp, her colleagues, and officials from DHS and Facebook all working closely together in the censorship process. The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.” Gramsci urges, somewhere, that state and civil society can be separated only as objects of study. That is, we cannot think of the State as a single entity, a la the “Deep State.” Both are aspects of the same governing class of people, all playing their roles (sometimes multiple roles) in parallel and intersecting fields. As for example: “According to the whistleblower, roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA. “For a while, they had their agency seals — FBI, CISA, whatever — next to your name,” on the Slack messaging service, said the whistleblower.” • Janine Wedel’s model of networked “Flexians” (The Shadow Elites) is far better framework to approach understanding these developments; I should really review it one day. Anyhow, here is Taibbi’s accompanying video:

“Who Are Ready to Rouse Up Leviathan?” [Ed Simon, The Baffler]. “TWO YEARS AGO, in the last year of an ill-fated period of living in Washington, D.C., and pretending that I was interested in what lanyards had to say, I gave a talk about religion and journalism at one of those political magazines with an anodyne name. Founded by a philosopher whom you’ve all heard of (Google “end of history”), the assembled were broadly “centrists,” presumably an assortment of neoliberal Never Bernie Democrats and neoconservative Never Trump Republicans, all of whom I assumed were much further to the right than myself. Despite our obvious policy differences, I found the participants—Zoomed into the little squares arranged like the opening credits of The Brady Bunch on my laptop—to be unflaggingly polite, thoughtful, and intelligent. After all, we were all fundamentally liberals, even if I may define myself as a left-liberal (which is to say that between barbarism and socialism, I’m probably going to opt for the latter). Yet regardless of their commitments to the “free” market that is at best a chimera and at worst a fraud, we had a consensus on principles that can be traced back to the eighteenth-century, which is to say a belief in the dignity of individuals, the equality of all people, and the universality of these beliefs (that last one is more of a useful construct in my mind). The only tenet of liberalism on which we meaningfully differed was in their faith in the inevitability of reason to collectively improve the human condition. For me, that’s a quixotic faith with no empirical backing.” • Ulp! And in a not-unrelated post–

“Eugenics as an ideology” [Chloe Humbert]. “Some of the denial surrounding the eugenics-like decisions in the pandemic has relied upon a narrow unipolar understanding of eugenics. The historically most recognizable concept of eugenics is where active intervention is done to choose the winners and losers, such as forced breeding, sterilization, deprivation, and murderous executions, by the active will and openly admitted choices of the people in power over the scheme, asserting their authority to do so…. The possibly more prevalent, and somewhat more insidious version of eugenics ideology, that has flown under the radar in our modern world, is the variety that spawned grotesque and wholly unscientific ideas like ‘natural herd immunity’ in the pandemic, as pushed by Scott Atlas and The Great Barrington Declaration adherents. To withhold prevention of suffering from those vulnerable. he proponents of this type of eugenics claim that they are leaving it up to ‘nature’ or, alternately, specifically a divine power, depending on their religious or secular orientation. The point is to stop any intervention that would save people they think are ‘weak’ or ‘undeserving’ in some way as inappropriately countering the superior ‘nature’ to do its thing. This includes resistance to all public health measures like masks, vaccines, food assistance, healthcare equity, or even disaster relief and universal education in public schools. Never mind that interventions are natural too, because humans do them, the same way birds build nests, but clearly people draw the line on “natural” wherever it’s convenient to their purpose.” • In practice, “nature” doesn’t do its thing at all, but institutions, differentiallly applied or, in the vulgate, “the luck of the draw.” That’s why I use the term “stochastic eugenicism,” since the happy outcome at the population level may seem random at the individual level.

“Julianna Margulies Says Black Palestine Supporters Have Been ‘Brainwashed to Hate Jews'” [Rolling Stone]. “Discussing the Civil Rights Movement, Margulies noted that ‘the Jews were the ones that walked side by side with the Blacks to fight for their rights. And now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying ‘We stand with you the way you stood with us’? Jews died for their cause. Where’s the history lesson in that? Who’s teaching these kids? Because the fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says they don’t know, or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews.” • There is, of course, an enormous dogpile going on right now over this. To me, Margulies’s comment reflects the vacuity of Identity Politics. Certainly “not all Jews” “walked side by side” with “the Blacks”; and going unmentioned is the fact that many of those who did, in the 1930s, were — [gasp] — Communists. Adding to the hilarity are coments to the effect that crediting “the Jews” for this makes them “white saviors,” piling a Pelion of idiocy upon the Ossa of a fallacy of composition. We don’t even have to get to, er, identifying all Jews with the state of Israel to see how confused this entire line of thinking is.

#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; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); 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: anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

* * *

Immune Dysregulation

On mycoplasma pneumonia (“walking pneumonia”), or whatever it is, reasoning by analogy, I wrote:

I don’t think the case is iron-clad, but it sure seems that way, vs. alternative explanations like seasonality and so-called immunity debt. I think the precise mechanism is under discussion, but IMNSHO “immunue dysregulation” is the right idea at a high level. FWIW!

People who were close to the AIDS crisis may correct this blue sky speculation, but IIRC, AIDS symptons were originally “mild” [***cough***] and only over time did the “ID” (Immune Deficiency”) aspect become clear, what with Kaposi sarcoma, thrush, etc. /p>

So far, SARS-CoV-2’s trajectory is unnervingly similar to AIDS, even aside from the sudden eruption of mysterious diseases. Culturally, condoms = masks; “safe sex” = ventilation. In terms of response, CDC and the political class are now what they were then. I am hawkish on this, and I believe that in a year, “Airborne AIDS” will start reaching the mainstream, and rightly. In effect, we’re collectively opening a market for expensive pharmaceuticals at least an order of magnitude greater than those for AIDS. Silver lining!

Laying down a bit of a marker, here. Now you know my priors!

“Now MASSACHUSETTS says it’s being hit by wave of pneumonia in children as Ohio county issues “white lung” warning – after China and Europe saw surge in cases and hospitalizations” [Daily Mail]. “Doctors in parts of Massachusetts and Ohio are reporting a spike in child pneumonia cases similar to the outbreak spreading in China and parts of Europe. In Warren County, just 30 miles outside Cincinnati, there have been 142 pediatric cases of the condition — dubbed ‘white lung syndrome’ — since August, a figure health officials there described as ‘extremely high’. ‘Not only is this above the county average, it also meets the Ohio Department of Health definition of an outbreak,’ the county’s health department said Wednesday. Meanwhile, in western Massachusetts, physicians are seeing ‘a whole lot’ of walking pneumonia, a milder form of the lung condition, which is being caused by a mixture of bacterial and viral infections. Neither outbreak is being caused by a novel pathogen and not all of the pneumonia cases are being caused by the same infection. Experts say a mixture of several seasonal bacterial and viral bugs are hitting at once, putting pressure on hospitals. It has raised fears that the outbreak that has overwhelmed hospitals China could hit the US this winter. Several European countries are battling similar crises.” • Why now? Why children? Why such a rapid spread? ‘Tis a mystery! This is not directly pertinent, but–

Testing and Tracking

Think “artisanal wastewater”:

Some folks are finding that they test neg on the RATs but when they swabbed their poo, it tested positive. Might be instructive.

— ShastaMystic (@ShastaMystic) December 1, 2023

Directions:

To do this, I think one can just stick the swab into dirty toilet water before mixing the swab with the test liquid (it is critical that you do the mixing, you can’t just put toilet water on the strip).
10/

— Marc Johnson (@SolidEvidence) July 6, 2023

This is a very new idea, so even though Marc Johnson is an excellent account, I don’t know if this technique is canon. Readers?

Scientific Communication

Strategies of denial:

Each strategy being a complete failure of scientific communication by the public health establishment.

Infection

“COVID-19 ramping up in the Quad Cities, hospital officials say” [KWQC]. ” Hospitalizations for COVID-19 are on the rise in the Quad-Cities, and health experts are again reminding people to take precautions as we head into the holidays. As people move indoors and gather for holidays, a spokesperson for UnityPoint Health-Trinity said there are precautions people can take to stay safe, including regularly washing your hands and staying home when sick.” • [lambert bangs head on desk]. At some point, we have to rule out ignorance as an explanation.

“Something Awful”

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.

* * *

Elite Maleficence

Happy Anniversary (1):

4 years ago today: A man in Wuhan, China starts feeling ill, becoming the first confirmed case of COVID-19. At least 7 million people have since died, with estimates as high as 27 million

— BNO News (@BNOFeed) November 30, 2023

Happy Anniversary (2):

Did we get…

Better rapid tests? – nope

Improved indoor air quality? – lmao no

Guaranteed sick leave in the U.S.? – Hahaha show up or lose *everything*

Accelerated development of second gen / intranasal vaccines? – We waited until 2023 to think about funding that. No rush. 🤡

— Decorum Disassembly – mas.to/@decorummanager (@DecorumManager) December 1, 2023

The Biden Administration’s policy of malign neglect (“stochastic eugenicism”) is clearly visible in this, our stupid timeline.

* * *

Case Data

NOT UPDATED From BioBot wastewater data, November 27:

Lambert here: Case counts moving smartly upward (and tinfoil hat time: This is the, er, inflection point CDC was trying to conceal when they gave the contract to Verily and didn’t ensure a seamless transition).

Regional data:

That Midwest near-vertical curve is concerning, although as ever with Biobot you have to watch for backward revisions.

Variants

NOT UPDATED From CDC, November25:

Lambert here: Top of the leaderboard: HV.1, EG.5 a strong second, but BA.2.86 coming up fast on the outside.

From CDC, November 11:

Lambert here: 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.

Covid Emergency Room Visits

NOT UPDATED From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, November 25:

Lambert here: Slight increases in some age groups, conforming to wastewater data. Only a week’s lag, so this may be our best current nationwide, current indicator.

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 both_{MR 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. And of course, we’re not even getting into the quality of the wastewater sites that we have as a proxy for Covid infection overall.

Hospitalization

Bellwether New York City, data as of December 1:

Steadily up. New York state as a whole looks more like a spike. (I hate this metric because the lag makes it deceptive, although the hospital-centric public health establishment loves it, hospitalization and deaths being the only metrics that matter [snort]).

NOT UPDATED Here’s a different CDC visualization on hospitalization, nationwide, not by state, but with a date, at least. November 18:

Lambert here: “Maps, charts, and data provided by CDC, updates weekly for the previous MMWR week (Sunday-Saturday) on Thursdays (Deaths, Emergency Department Visits, Test Positivity) and weekly the following Mondays (Hospitalizations) by 8 pm ET†”. So where the heck is the update, CDC?

Positivity

NOT UPDATED From Walgreens, November 27:

0.4%. Up. (It would be interesting to survey this population generally; these are people who, despite a tsunami of official propaganda and enormous peer pressure, went and got tested anyhow.)

NOT UPDATED From Cleveland Clinic, November 25:

Lambert here: Increase (with backward revision; guess they thought it was over). I know this is just Ohio, but the Cleveland Clinic is good*, and we’re starved for data, so…. NOTE * Even if hospital infection control is trying to kill patients by eliminating universal masking with N95s.

NOT UPDATED From CDC, traveler’s data, November 6:

Down, albeit in the rear view mirror. And here are the variants for travelers, November 6:

BA.2.86 coming along nicely.

Deaths

Total: 1,183,754 – 1,183,664 = 90 (209 * 90 = 18,810 deaths per year, today’s YouGenicist™ number for “living with” Covid (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the YouGenicist™ metric keeps chugging along like this, I may just have to decide this is what the powers-that-be consider “mission accomplished” for this particular tranche of death and disease). 

Lambert here: This number is too small no matter what. Iowa Covid19 Tracker hasn’t been updated since September 27, 2023. I may have to revert to CDC data. Yech.

Excess Deaths

NOT UPDATED The Economist, November 18:

Lambert here: Gonna have to whack this, too. How does an automated model not update? Based on a machine-learning model.

Stats Watch

Manufacturing: “United States ISM Purchasing Managers Index (PMI)” [Trading Economics]. “The ISM Manufacturing PMI was unchanged at 46.7 in November 2023, the same as in October, and below forecasts of 47.6, continuing to point to contraction in the manufacturing sector. Companies are still managing outputs appropriately as order softness continues.”

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The Fed: “Fed’s Interest Rate Hikes Are Probably Over, but Officials Are Reluctant to Say So” [Wall Street Journal]. “Monetary policy is at its most economically restrictive setting in 25 years, and it will need to stay tight ‘for quite some time,’ New York Fed President John Williams said at a conference on Thursday. ‘We need to watch,’ Williams told reporters after a speech. ‘I have to assess, ‘OK, how is this playing out?'”

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Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 67 Greed (previous close: 66 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 66 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Dec 1 at 1:28:17 PM ET.

Class Warfare

“Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS” [Financial Times]. “‘The heirs to billionaires are gaining prominence,’ said Benjamin Cavalli, UBS’s head of global wealth management strategic clients. ‘New billionaires minted during this year’s study period accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship. That’s a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 to 30 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated $5.2tn to their children.'” • Best, I think, to think of capitalal as being owned by families/clans. Not individuals (so “Every billioniare is a policy failure” is not quite right). Seems like a campaign issue…

News of the Wired

“Who Makes the Most Reliable New Cars?” [Consumer Reports]. • American manufacturing prowess (U.S. firms highlighted):

I’m a little amazed to see Tesla ahead of Cadillac. I mean, last I checked, Elon still couldn’t run a paint booth, so Cadillac must be really bad.

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