2:00PM Water Cooler 5/14/2024

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Patient readers, I got wrapped around the axle on the Bragg trial. More soon! –lambert

Bird Song of the Day

Baltimore Oriole, Lansing, Myers Point, north side of Salmon Creek, Tompkins, New York, United States. “Song and calls of second individual. 6-20m away, 6-10 m up, at times there were two males and a female in this area chasing each other about.” From 1998. Twelve minutes.

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In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Cohen’s testimony in the Bragg case.

(2) Surrealism.

(3) Cave art.

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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

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2024

Less than a half a year to go!

RCP Poll Averages, May 10:

National results now moving Trump’s way. All of the Swing States (more here) are now in Trump’s column, including Michigan and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania leans more Trump this week than last. Of course, it goes without saying that these are all state polls, therefore bad, and most of the results are within the margin of error. Now, if either candidate starts breaking away in points, instead of tenths of a point…. NOTE I changed the notation: Up and down arrows for increases or decreases over last week, circles for no change. Red = Trump. Blue would be Biden if he were leading anywhere, but he isn’t.

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Trump (R) (Bragg/Merchan): “Michael Cohen testifies in Trump hush money trial” [CNN]. From Cohen’s testimony: “Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg told Cohen he would be paid $420,000 for Daniel’s payment over 12 months. He testified that the payment series set up for future legal services was actually a reimbursement.” • I have yet to see, in the coverage, a citation to a statutory definition of “legal services” in New York (members of the New York Bar please chime in). This is unsurprising, since at the Federal level, in the “Legal Services Corporation Act,” “legal services” are not defined either. (Nor is “legal services” defined in the ethics FAQ of the New York City Bar, or in Rule 1.5, “Fees,” from the American Bar Association.) The common sense definition of “legal service” is “that which you pay a lawyer for”; Cambridge Dictionary: “work done by a lawyer for a client”; Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School: “[W]ork produced by an attorney for a client. These services include any advice, counsel, or assistance involving law-related matters that helps clients navigate the legal system and protect their rights. Specific examples of services are drafting documents, reviewing contracts, negotiating business arrangements, or representing clients in court.” Under these defintions, at least, Trump paid Cohen for legal services, there is no business records violation at all, and Bragg’s case falls to the ground. “Actually,” then, is doing a lot of work in CNN’s coverage.

Trump (R) (Bragg/Merchan): “Star witness Michael Cohen says Trump was intimately involved in all aspects of hush money scheme” [Associated Press]. “In hours of highly anticipated testimony, Cohen placed Trump at the center of the hush money plot, saying the then-candidate had promised to reimburse the lawyer for the money he fronted and was constantly updated about behind-the-scenes efforts to bury stories feared to be harmful to the campaign.” • Paying “hush money” is not a crime. Nor is “burying stories” “feared to be harmful to the campaign” (the campaign novel Primary Colors — a roman a clef about the Clinton — turns on a buried story. I grant this is hardly dispositive, but there’s not a hint of a legal dimension to the burial, and Klein was a political reporter).

Trump (R): “Michael Cohen testifies he secretly recorded Trump in lead-up to 2016 election” [FOX]. “The case revolves around the alleged falsification of business records. Prosecutors say Cohen paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to quiet her claims of the alleged extramarital sexual encounter with Trump. Prosecutors allege the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen and fraudulently logged the payments as legal expenses, and are working to prove that Trump falsified records with the intent to commit or conceal a second crime.” • Horrid reporting, and FOX is supposed to be Trump-friendly. On “business records,” see the first item in this section. On “a second crime,” FOX does not say, and should, that (1) only the “second crime” (the “object offense”) converts the business records misdemeanors into felonies, and (2) Bragg has not yet revealed the “second crime” (see NC here). Certainly if he had, FOX would have mentioned it?

Trump (R) (Bragg/Merchan): “Opinion: Michael Cohen propels prosecution of Trump past this critical threshold [Norman Eisen, CNN]. “Cohen was one of the first witnesses I interviewed as part of the first Trump impeachment, as I was investigating the 2016 alleged election interference now at issue in the former president’s hush money criminal trial…. Monday was the most important day yet because it was the day that the prosecution crossed the barrier of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Cohen’s testimony about Trump’s intentional participation at every critical juncture of the scheme achieved that milestone.” • First, Trump has not been charged with “election interference,” despite liberal Democrat bloviation; if he had been, Eisen surely would have named the statute. And at what level would Trump have been charged? In the state of New York, in a Federal election? What would FECA say about that?

Trump (R) (Bragg/Merchan): “The Michael Cohen who testified Monday was not the witness anyone expected” [Politico] “[T]he alleged reimbursement scheme — and [business[ records related to it — are at the crux of the 34 felony charges against Trump. Prosecutors say that Trump, while reimbursing Cohen, falsified the reimbursement as a series of legal expenses in violation of New York law. And Cohen’s description of the January 2017 Trump Tower meeting is the first piece of direct evidence to suggest that Trump personally green-lighted the scheme. But it is also a tricky piece of evidence for prosecutors, because the jury may need to rely solely on Cohen’s account of it. In Cohen’s telling, only three people attended the meeting: Cohen, Trump and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. Of those three, two — Cohen and Weisselberg — are convicted felons with a history of dishonesty. Weisselberg is currently serving jail time for perjury and appears unlikely to testify in the trial. Trump is under no obligation to testify in his own defense, which would open him up to cross-examination. And if he did testify, he would surely di\spute Cohen’s version of the meeting — or deny that it happened at all.” • And for whatever reason, the prosecution has not called Weisselberg (although IIRC Merchan instructed them to try to do so).

Trump (R) (Bragg/Merchan): “What to know about Trump fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen’s pivotal testimony in the hush money trial” [Associated Press]. “Cohen testified that Trump feared Daniels’ story would be a ‘disaster’ for his presidential campaign, which was already reeling at the time from the release of the infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women sexually without their permission. That testimony could be key for prosecutors, who are trying prove that Trump schemed to illegally influence the 2016 race by burying unflattering stories that could damage his campaign.” • Again, where is the statute for “illegal influence”? Are we really saying that the Trump campaign was the first campaign to bury an unflattering story?

Trump (R) (Bragg/Merchan): “Michael Cohen Finally Talks Back to the Boss As Trump touted the polls, his former fixer tried to put him away” [New York Magazine]. “The next morning, Cohen received a text message from Melania, who was helping to coordinate the response to the Access Hollywood tape. (She was the one who came up with the locution ‘locker-room talk,’ Cohen testified.)” • Interesting, if true.

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Trump (R): Blast from the past;

How much did Woody Guthrie loathe his racist landlord Fred Trump? Four exhibits at his museum. If you’d told me that one of this vast nation’s greatest singing poets would, 70 years prescient, foresee the *name* of our full fascism ascendent, I’d’ve said, “too on the nose.” pic.twitter.com/JSlqZ68Zu2

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) May 11, 2024

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Kennedy (I): “RFK Jr. is defying the odds — against getting on ballots around the country” [Politico]. “The campaign turned in more than twice the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot in Texas, which requires more than 100,000 signatures from registered voters. Kennedy and his rookie campaign team’s ability to reach the requirement is an organizational feat — one they’re repeating in state after state. ‘The pundits, who at the beginning of this campaign, were saying it would be impossible for us to get on the ballot, and we got on the ballot in Texas,’ Kennedy said at a rally in Austin, Texas, after delivering the petitions to the Secretary of State’s office. ‘And if we can get on in Texas, we can get on everywhere.’ Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, are now on the ballot in four states. They have finished signature gathering in nine more and are circulating petitions for 29 others. The campaign hopes to defy the odds and get on the ballot in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., — ensuring that his candidacy will affect the November election. ‘In the last two or three months, I’ve been very impressed with the Kennedy operation for being able to smartly maneuver and get on ballots that were expensive and difficult,’ said Michael Arno, whose ballot access firm worked with No Labels.” And No Labels did well, getting in the ballot. More: “It sounds like they’ve done very well in both Texas and New York, and that’s very impressive and a real feather in their cap.'” • California, too. It is impressive. Time for a fawning profile of Kennedy’s campaign team? Commentary:

https://t.co/7Yq9GT3PTh

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) May 13, 2024

I wish the Kennedy campaign would stop doing this. Saying you’ve collected enough signatures isn’t the same as having those signatures certified by the relevant election officials. (Incidentally, I assume that the Democrats are fighting all these ballot access cases tooth and nail, as they do with the Greens. If they are not — and if there’s coverate on this, I’ve missed it — that means Democrat internal polling says that Kennedy is taking more voters from Trump than Biden.)

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IN: “Banks breaks from the Senate GOP’s well-heeled candidate trend” [Politico]. Jim Banks: “The Indiana Republican fits a different profile as he seeks the Senate seat vacated by Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who is running for governor. We looked at his comparatively modest financial disclosures: He’s got a mortgage, some retirement funds and some savings — just like a lot of his constituents. ‘I don’t come from a rich or powerful family, I’m not a self-funder,’ Banks said in an interview this week after he coasted to the GOP nomination. ‘At this point, that’s a rare circumstance [in the Senate] to come from that kind of background.’ ‘I grew up in a trailer park. That’s where I came from. And what’s incredible about that, is that working-class background is the same background as most people from Indiana,’ Banks added. ‘I come from a place where I can represent the people who elected me to serve them and I think that’s a powerful asset to take to the Senate.’ Indeed, Banks is representative of a Republican Party that shifted toward working-class voters in the Trump era, even as the president’s rhetoric and some of the party’s positions turned off college-educated voters and those in the suburbs. In some ways, Indiana is one of the epicenters of Trump’s appeal: On Election Night in 2016, it was the first state results to roll in showing Trump exceeding expectations — in a place Barack Obama won in 2008 and former Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly won in 2012. Oh yeah, and Banks was elected that year too.”

MI: “The Simple Math That Could Swing the Election to Biden” [Mark Penn, New York Times]. “People usually assume that turning out so-called base voters in an election matters most, since swing voters are fewer in number. And it’s true that in today’s polarized environment, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump have about 40 percent of voters each and nothing will change those people’s minds. But in that remaining 20 percent of the electorate, voters have disproportionate power because of their potential to switch. It’s simple math: Take a race tied in the run-up 5 to 5. If one voter swings, the tally becomes 6 to 4. Two voters would then need to be turned out just to tie it up, and a third one would be needed to win…. I believe most of the 101,000 uncommitted votes that Mr. Biden lost in Michigan will come home in the end because they have nowhere else to go and the threat Mr. Trump poses will become clearer and scarier in the next six months. But regardless, there’s a much bigger opportunity for Mr. Biden if he looks in the other direction. Mr. Trump lost nearly 300,000 votes to Nikki Haley in the Michigan Republican primary. These people are in the moderate center, and many of them could be persuaded to vote for Mr. Biden if he fine-tuned his message to bring them in. And remember to multiply by two: Persuading those 300,000 Republicans to cross party lines would have the equivalent force of turning out 600,000 Democrats. The same math applies to other battleground states, like Pennsylvania, where 158,000 people voted for Ms. Haley instead of Mr. Trump in the Republican primary, even though she dropped out seven weeks earlier. Unfortunately, Mr. Biden is not reaching out to moderate voters with policy ideas or a strong campaign message.”

Democrats en Déshabillé

“Democrats Want to Limit Protests at the Chicago Convention. Activists Have Other Plans” [Time]. “More than 70 organizations have joined a coalition to ‘March on the DNC’ when Biden and others in his administration arrive in Chicago. Protest organizers predict it will be the largest protest for Palestinian rights in Chicago’s history, with tens of thousands of people showing up from across the country. ‘Our goal is to send a message to Biden that he and his party have been complicit in the genocide that he has had the power since October to stop by turning off the tap of money and weapons to Israel,’ says Hatem Abudayyeh, chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network and a spokesperson for the Coalition to March on the DNC. The group was denied a permit to hold protest marches within blocks of the DNC. Organizers say they plan to march near the convention site with or without a permit and have sued the city alleging First Amendment violations. They say the city’s proposed alternative location—four miles away from United Center—is unacceptable as it will mean they won’t be seen or heard by those attending the convention. Protest leaders hope to harness the energy that has powered pro-Palestinian protests on dozens of college campuses in recent weeks, most of which are expected to largely wind down as soon as the spring semester ends.”

Realignment and Legitimacy

AIPAC:

Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban wrote an email to Biden's aides Steve Ricchetti & Anita Dunn about Biden's decision to put on hold a weapons shipment to Israel: "Let's not forget there are more Jewish voters who care about Israel than Muslim voters who care about Hamas" pic.twitter.com/HdeI9iOL3W

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) May 9, 2024

“‘I don’t see any evidence of aliens.’ SpaceX’s Elon Musk says Starlink satellites have never dodged UFOs” [Space.com]. • So Elon is less prone to woo woo than the Congressional leadership. That’s reassuring.

AIPAC (NY): “The Most Endangered Democrat in America” [New York Magazine]. Jamaal Bowman: “[George] Latimer, the sitting Westchester County executive, has outraised [Bowman] in the primary, thanks in part to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — the conservative, ardently pro-Israel political powerhouse that is seeking to crush the pro-Palestinian movement and the left itself. ‘They do not want any critique, they do not want any accountability, and so what it looks like to people in my district and around the country is that Israel can do whatever it wants even though, to people on the outside looking in, it looks completely wrong and horrible,’ Bowman says of AIPAC. ‘One, it doesn’t represent all the Jews. It doesn’t represent all the Jews in Israel!’ ‘If Israel represents all the Jews,’ Bowman continues, revving up now, ‘and if Israel is doing bad things without accountability, some idiot in the street just makes the connection that, Oh, Jews must be bad because Israel is bad. That’s fucking — excuse my language — that’s effing scary, man, and dangerous. And as we fight antisemitism, that has to include accountability for Israel.’ There was a time, not very long ago, when no member of Congress would speak this way.”

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“How Originalism Ate the Law” [Dahlia Lithwick, Slate]. “Whatever the current flavor, originalism and its ever-growing progeny hold that judges and justices should ignore every interpretive methodology judges once used to understand a legal text in favor of free-floating feelings about history: What do we think the drafters of the text intended? What do we wish they had intended? What did the readers of contemporaneous public documents understand that text to mean? What did random dictionaries of the time reflect about … words?… Most Americans also know that holding us hostage to the dictates of the 18th century is an antidemocratic checkmate. They understand intuitively that while public opinion favors reproductive freedom and sensible gun regulations and the right to vote, the MAGA faction of the Supreme Court has found a doctrinal party trick to ensure that nobody can have any of those things because they weren’t protected at the founding or at the time of the Reconstruction Amendments, or whichever point of history the high court deems relevant (it varies). In the single most horrific case in the horrific term at the Supreme Court, gun rights zealots argued that a man who had lost the right to possess a firearm as the result of having beat up his girlfriend should be allowed to possess that firearm—because historically, domestic abusers were not disarmed.” • I don’t have any objection to starting with the text, in its historical context; where else would you start? (For example, “originalist” interpretation of the Second Amendment depends on ignorance of a grammatical constuct: The gerund.) But of course, one shouldn’t end at one’s starting point. I feel that Lithwick’s screed would be more useful if she laid a foundation for replacing originalism with methodologies she thinks are superior (and handwaving like “democratically vibrant” doesn’t cut it).

Pandemics

“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

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Covid 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 (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, 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, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

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Testing and Tracking

“Monitoring for Influenza in Wastewater” [CDC]. “Wastewater surveillance complements other existing human influenza surveillance systems to monitor influenza trends. CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) has more than 600 sites with a variety of partners reporting influenza A virus data to CDC. Current wastewater monitoring methods detect influenza A viruses but do not distinguish the subtype. This means that avian influenza A(H5N1) viruses are detected but cannot be distinguished from other influenza A virus subtypes. Wastewater data also cannot determine the source of the influenza A virus. It could come from a human or from an animal (like a bird) or an animal product (like milk from an infected cow). Efforts to monitor influenza A virus activity using wastewater data are likely to evolve as the methodologies and interpretation are evaluated and refined.” • CDC, utterly behind the curve as usual. Anyhow, handy map:

This does not seem to include the nine Texas cities linked to yesterday. Also, what is “minimal”?

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Lambert here: Patient readers, I’m going to have to rethink this beautifully formatted table. Looks like Biobot data still functions, CDC variant data functions, ER visits are dead, New York hospitalization seems to be dead since 5/1 [No, it’s alive!], when CDC stopped mandatory hospital data collection, Walgreens functions, Cleveland Clinic functions, CDC traveler’s data functions, New York Times death data has stopped. (Note that the two metrics the hospital-centric CDC cared about, hospitalization and deaths, have both gone down). Ideally I would replace hospitalization and death data, but I’m not sure how. I might also expand the wastewater section to include (yech) Verily data, H5N1 if I can get it. Suggestions and sources welcome.

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

Cases
★ National[1] Biobot★ May 13:	Regional[2] Biobot May 13:
Variants[3] CDC May 11	Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC March 23
Hospitalization
★ New York[5] New York State, data May 13:	★ National [6] CDC May 4:
Positivity
National[7] Walgreens May 13:	Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic May 4:
Travelers Data
★ Positivity[9] CDC April 22:	★ Variants[10] CDC April 22:
Deaths[11]
Weekly deaths New York Times March 16:	Percent of deaths due to Covid-19 New York Times March 16:

LEGEND

1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.

2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”

NOTES

[1] (Biobot) Slight upward movement, supported by yesterday’s Walgreen’s positivity.

[2] (Biobot) No backward revisons….

[3] (CDC Variants) FWIW, given that the model completely missed KP.2.

[4] (ER) CDC seems to have killed this off, since the link is broken, I think in favor of this thing. I will try to confirm. UPDATE Yes, leave it to CDC to kill a page, and then announce it was archived a day later. And heaven forfend CDC should explain where to go to get equivalent data, if any. I liked the ER data, because it seemed really hard to game.

[5] (Hospitalization: NY) The data is now updating again. I suppose to a tame epidemiologist it looks like “endemicity,” but to me it looks like another tranche of lethality.

[6] (Hospitalization: CDC) Still down. “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†”.

[7] (Walgreens) Slight uptick.

[8] (Cleveland) Leveling out.

[9] (Travelers: Posivitity) Flattens.

[10] (Travelers: Variants) JN.1 dominates utterly. Still no mention of KP.2

[11] Looks like the Times isn’t reporting death data any more? Maybe I need to go back to The Economist….

Stats Watch

Inflation: “United States Producer Prices” [Trading Economics]. “Producer Prices in the United States increased to 144.06 points in April from 143.32 points in March of 2024.”

Small Business Optimism: “United States Nfib Business Optimism Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index in the US rose to 89.7 in April 2024, slightly recovering from a more than 12-year low of 88.5 in March and beating forecasts of 88.1.”

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Commodities: Dr. Copper:

🇺🇸 People are cutting car charging cables to sell the copper!

Turns out you need to keep the society healthy to progress in technology… pic.twitter.com/Jnm9qSqyVz

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) May 14, 2024

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Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 50 Neutral (previous close: 47 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 47 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated May 13 at 12:21:57 PM ET.

Rapture Index: Closes up one on Earthquakes. “The strongest quake in 25 years hit Taiwan” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 188. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • Bird flu not a concern, apparently. And I hate even to go here, but the “Tribulation Temple” category is a mere 3. If Tribulation Temple = Third Temple = whatever temple it is that the Red Heifer loons want to build, then the Rapture Index made the right call, amazingly enough. It said: “Don’t worry about the Red Heifers.”

The Gallery

surr”Why make art in the dark?” [Aeon]. “What we do know is that during the Upper Palaeolithic (c45,000-15,000 years ago), our distant ancestors ventured deep underground to make these images. In these unfamiliar environments, they produced a rich display – from unusual abstract forms to highly detailed renderings of animals – under the dim glow of firelight cast by their lamps. Naturalistic animal outlines, rows of finger-dotted marks and splatter marks preserving the shadows of ancient hands remain frozen in time within the caves, representing tens of thousands of years of people returning to the darkness to engage in art-making…. Pareidolia – a visual phenomenon of seeing meaningful forms in random patterns – seems to be a product of this way in which our visual system selectively focuses on certain visual information and makes assumptions when ‘completing’ the image. Pareidolia is a universal experience; all of us have looked at clouds and recognised faces and animals, or perceived gnarled, twisting tree trunks in dim light as unusual creatures emerging from the darkness. While we might think of these visual images as a mistake – we know there isn’t a large face looming down at us from the clouds – it seems to have emerged as an evolutionary advantage. By assuming that a fragmentary outline is, in fact, a predator hiding in foliage, we can react quickly and avoid a grisly death, even if said predator turns out to be an illusion caused by merely branches and leaves…. If we imagine, however, that we lived in small groups within a sparsely populated landscape where our survival depended on the ability to identify, track and hunt animals, we might reasonably expect that our visual system would become attuned to certain animal forms instead. We would be visually trained to identify the partial outlines of animals hiding behind foliage or the distant, vague outlines of creatures far away in the landscape. We would even have an intimate knowledge of their behaviours, how they move through the landscape, the subtle cues of twitching ears or raised heads that indicate they might be alerted to our presence. Our Ice Age ancestors may have therefore experienced animal pareidolia to the same degree that we experience face pareidolia. Where we anthropomorphise and perceive faces, they would have zoomorphised and perceived animals. ‘Is that…?’ You begin to doubt your own eyes. A shadow flickers, drawing your attention to the movement. Cracks, fissures and undulating shapes of the cave wall start to blur in the darkness to form something familiar to your eyes. Under the firelight, it is difficult to distinguish it immediately. As it flickers in and out of view, you start to see horns formed by cracks, the subtle curvature of the wall as muscular features. A bison takes shape and emerges from the darkness.” • Hmm.

Book Nook

“Head boy of Surrealism” [Times Literary Supplement]. “Breton is a head boy, foppish and severe, enforcing the house rules. His instructions on how to be playful are inflexible. You must be completely open to everything – but only in the manner I proscribe. You must abandon all logic – according to this new checklist. To step outside conformity, follow my example. For a movement that was avowedly anti-clerical, it has a decided whiff of things pontifical. Newcomers to Surrealism may be mystified as to what it was Breton actually did, except pontificate. He talked a good game of mad desire, but it seemed to leave few traces on his own work. He had exquisite taste as a collector, but his drawings, such as ‘Cadavre exquis’ (‘Landscape’, 1933), seem a bit pro forma, while his various ‘poème objet’ collages look genteel placed against the similar experiments of Max Ernst. And for someone who claimed literary forebears such as the Comte de Lautréamont, Swift and de Sade, his poetry and prose are a bit moony and idealistic. His autobiographical novel Nadja (1928) features the infamous closing line ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all …’, but the narrator, ‘André’, doesn’t seem a convulsive kind of fellow. All the expected boxes are ticked: a chance encounter in backstreet Paris, woman as muse figure (‘mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering’), shout-outs to Surrealist pals. Breton invested a lot in the idea of ‘automatic writing’ to explore the subconscious. The results initially startle, but soon turn formulaic: ‘Stiff talk of Suzanne uselessness especially village of flavours with a lobster church.’ When everything is surreal, nothing is surreal. The poet Louis Aragon, for one, was unconvinced: ‘If you write deplorable twaddle using Surrealist techniques, it will still be deplorable twaddle.'” • Ouch!

News of the Wired

“It’s an age of marvels” [The Universe of Discourse]. “As I walk around Philadelphia I often converse with Benjamin Franklin, to see what he thinks about how things have changed since 1790. Sometimes he’s astounded, other times less so. The things that astound Franklin aren’t always what you might think at first. Electric streetlamps are a superb invention, and while I think Franklin would be very pleased to see them, I don’t think he would be surprised. Better street lighting was something everyone wanted in Franklin’s time, and this was something very much on Franklin’s mind. It was certainly clear that electricity could be turned into light. Franklin could have and might have thought up the basic mechanism of an incandescent bulb himself, although he wouldn’t have been able to make one…. The really interesting stuff is the everyday stuff that makes Franklin goggle. CAT scans, for example. Ordinary endoscopy will interest and perhaps impress Franklin, but it won’t boggle his mind…. So far though the most Franklin-astounding thing I’ve found has been GPS. The explanation starts with ‘well, first we put 32 artificial satellites in orbit around the Earth…’, which is already astounding, and can derail the conversation all by itself. But it just goes on from there getting more and more astounding: ‘…and each one has a clock on board, accurate to within 40 nanoseconds…’ ‘…and can communicate the exact time wirelessly to the entire half of the Earth that it can see…’ ‘… and because the GPS device also has a perfect clock, it can compute how far it is from the satellite by comparing the two times and multiplying by the speed of light…’ ‘… and because the satellite also tells the GPS device exactly where it is, the device can determine that it lies on the surface of a sphere with the satellite at the center, so with messages from three or four satellites the device can compute its exact location, up to the error in the clocks and other measurements…’ ‘…and it fits in my pocket.’ And that’s not even getting into the hair-raising complications introduced by general relativity. ‘It’s a bit fiddly because time isn’t passing at the same rate for the device as it is for the satellites, but we were able to work it out.’… Of course not all marvels are good ones. I sometimes explain to Franklin that we have gotten so good at fishing — too good — that we are in real danger of fishing out the oceans. A marvel, nevertheless.” • Philadelphians. Still blogging!

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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, lichen, 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 Frank Little:

Frank Little writes: “Montana Alpine. This photo contains Milkvetch (creamy, type unknown), Sedum (yellow, type unknown), Forget-Me-Not (blue, in the background), and lichen (orange) on limestone.”

Bonus plant:

Time-lapse of a pine tree in 300 days

📹 Box Lapse.pic.twitter.com/oaDsHmRQeY

— Learn Something (@cooltechtipz) January 6, 2024

I should pair this with a pine tree, but I don’t seem to have one in the queue….

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