By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I am sorry this is a more than a little light, initially; I had extended household matters to deal with. –lambert
Bird Song of the Day
Killdeer, Waterview Retention Pond & Wetlands, Fort Bend, Texas, United States. Wetlands noises!
In Case You Might Miss…
(1) Biden’s interview with Time.
(2) Carbon dioxide, viruses, and climate.
(3) Nabokov’s Pale Fire
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
2024
Less than a half a year to go!
A mixed bag for Team Trump, this week with some Swing States (more here) Brownian-motioning themselves back toward him, including Pennsylvania. Not, however, Michigan, to which Trump paid a visit. 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. If will be interesting to see whether the verdict in Judge Merchan’s court affects the polling, and if so, how.
* * * Trump (R) (People vs. Trump): “Bragg’s thrill kill in Manhattan could prove short-lived on appeal” [The Hill]. “The problem was not the jury, but the prosecutors and the judge…. Acting Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan was handpicked for this case rather than randomly selected. … A leading threshold issue will be the decision to allow Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to effectively try Trump for violations of federal law [campaign violations and tax]…. Judge Merchan allowed a torrent of immaterial and prejudicial evidence to be introduced into the trial by the prosecution… Merchan allowed the jury to find that the secondary offense was any of the three vaguely defined options. Even on the jury form, they did not have to specify which of the crimes were found. Under Merchan’s instruction, the jury could have split 4-4-4 on what occurred in the case. They could have seen a conspiracy to conceal a federal election violation, falsification of business records or taxation violations. We will never know. Worse yet, Trump will never know. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that the requirement of unanimity in criminal convictions is sacrosanct in our system. While there was unanimity that the business records were falsified to hide or further a second crime, there was no express finding of what that crime may have been. In some ways, Trump may have been fortunate by Merchan’s cavalier approach. Given that the jury convicted Trump across the board, they might have found all of three secondary crimes. The verdict form never asked for such specificity…. These are just a few of the appellate issues. There are other challenges, including but not limited to due process violations on the lack of specificity in the indictment, vagueness of the underlying state law and the lack of evidentiary foundation for key defenses like ‘the legitimate press function.’ They are the reason why many of us view this case is likely to be reversed in either the state or federal systems. None of that is likely to dampen the thrill in this kill in Manhattan. But if Biden wins the election before this conviction is overturned, history’s judgment will be deafening.” • Indeed.
Biden (D): “Read the Full Transcript of President Joe Biden’s Interview With TIME” (transcript) [Time]. Starts off with a bang:
Thank you for doing this, Mr. President. We appreciate your time. Busy moment. I’ll dive right in. You’re traveling next week to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day to commemorate a turning point in America’s leadership with the free world. But the anniversary comes at a time when the US under your leadership has been unable to deter crises. First in Afghanistan, then Ukraine, Israel, and mounting tensions in the Far East. Is America still able to play the role of world power that it played in World War Two, and in the Cold War?
Biden: Yes, we’re planning even more. We are, we are the world power.
[Fap fap fap fap fap].
* * *
Realignment and Legitimacy
“How a Drop in Small-Dollar Donations Is Shaking Up Both Parties” [Notus]. “In a stark reversal from recent political history, both parties have seen a significant decline this election cycle in the small-dollar contributions they harvest via text and email, largely from rank-and-file voters of modest means. Gone are the days when any candidate could expect to rake in small donations, according to Republican and Democratic digital strategists. Instead, only the smartest campaigns — and the perennial guests on Fox News — see the type of cash influx that was routine five years ago. ‘We have squeezed every last penny in a period of time when the pennies are harder to come by,’ said John Hall, a GOP digital strategist. For Republicans, the downturn started in the 2022 midterm election. But Democrats say they are also seeing small donations decrease this election cycle across a range of candidates and liberal organizations. ‘I’ve seen it. I’ve heard it,’ said Stephanie Schriock, former president of the Democratic group EMILYs List. ‘It’s definitely been a slowdown this election cycle on small-dollar gifts.’ The change has rocked fundraising for the Republican National Committee, which has seen small-dollar donations — generally seen as contributions of less than $200 — plummet from $39 million at this point in 2020 to $14 million so far this year. But smaller declines are taking place across the country. Strategists attribute the slowdown to a combination of inflation, widespread exhaustion over the state of politics and poor donor maintenance from both parties. The change is remaking budgets, forcing campaigns to refocus on wealthy donors and confront the possibility that they simply might not have as much cash to spend as they expected. ‘It’s been really frustrating because for a couple of cycles, clients were getting really used to large sums of money coming in from online,’ said Amanda Elliott, a GOP digital strategist. ‘It was great for a while, and now it’s been tapering off.'” • Heaven knows what horrific tactics Mothership Strategies will devise now….
“Why is a group of billionaires working to re-elect Trump?” [Robert Reich, Guardian]. “Billionaire money is now gushing into the 2024 election. Just 50 families have already injected more than $600m into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of this is going to the Trump Republican party…. If we want to guard what’s left of our freedom, we must meet the anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from oligarchs like Musk and Thiel and neo-fascists like Trump.” • Sounds great. If only there were a party that was that “bold” (a tell).
Syndemics
“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
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!
Airborne Transmission
“A new discovery about carbon dioxide is challenging decades-old ventilation doctrine” [STAT]. “No sensor can monitor how many infectious aerosols are swirling around us in real time. But carbon dioxide, or CO2, can act as a convenient proxy. People exhale it when they breathe, and in spaces that aren’t well ventilated, the gas accumulates. High CO2 concentrations can provide a warning sign that a lot of the air you’re inhaling is coming out of other people’s respiratory tracts. For decades, that’s how aerosol scientists and ventilation engineers have mostly thought about CO2 — as a sort of indicator for the health of indoor environments. But over the last three years, researchers in the U.K. working with next-generation bioaerosol technologies have discovered that CO2 is more than a useful bystander. In fact, it plays a critical role in determining how long viruses can stay alive in the air: The more CO2 there is, the more virus-friendly the air becomes. It’s a revelation that is already transforming the way scientists study airborne pathogens. But on a planet where burning fossil fuels and other industrial activities inject 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, it could also have huge implications for human health. ‘By increasing the CO2 in the air, we’re getting rid of a natural means by which viruses become inactivated,’ said Allen Haddrell, an environmental chemist at the University of Bristol Aerosol Research Center, who led the new work. ‘It’s fascinating, but it’s also horrifying.'” • Now that’s a syndemic and a half! (I posted the original of this study already, but the global implications had escaped me. Yikes!)
Maskstravaganza
Amazing how deep the propaganda and the social norming go:
I could never have imagined a time where people would be so freaked out by respiratory protection 😂.
Imagine people angered by hard hats, irate at steel toecap boots, irked by ear defenders, infuriated by gloves, enraged at goggles or incensed by overalls.
Strange times 😷 😁
— Pete 😷 #COVIDisAirborne (@PeteUK7) June 4, 2024
Immune Dysregulation
“Plane evacuated by specialist infectious diseases teams” [Metro UK]. “Passengers were removed from a flight after it was forced to land due to ‘cases of suspected infectious diseases’ today.” • This does seem to keep happening. The disease was not mentioned, and an unruly — why? — passenger was also removed from the plane.
Censorship and Propaganda
“Effects of Post-COVID-19 Syndrome on Quality of Life Among Airline Crew” [Workplace Health Safety]. From the Abstract: “The physical domain [quality of life (QoL)] was significantly higher in the cockpit crews than that in the cabin crews. Significant differences were found in psychological and overall QoL depending on years of continuous service. Social domain and environmental QoL were lower in those who had no symptoms after being diagnosed with COVID-19 than in those who were symptomatic. Among the participants, 4.2% had post-COVID-19 syndrome, indicating significant differences in the physical domain, depending on whether they exhibit post-COVID-19 syndrome. Conclusion: It is urgent to develop measures to increase the QoL of airline crews, investigate post-COVID-19 syndrome before returning to work, and develop strategies to manage it.” • Hmm.
Sequelae: Covid
Celebrity Watch
Surprise, outdoor spaces are so much safer:
Swifties kindly share their CO2 measures at @taylorswift13 shows. This allows us to make comparisons on the quality of indoor air renewal in several venues: Paris and Las Vegas (indoor arenas), Madrid (retractable roof stadium) and Sydney (open-air stadium). More venues to come. https://t.co/eU7m9UAS6O pic.twitter.com/8qF9si7Y9o
— LET'S AIR / NOUS AÉRONS (@nousaerons) June 4, 2024
How unfortunate that Swift doesn’t confine herself to them. Or sell Swift-branded respirators as merch. Why not?
Elite Maleficence
Amusingly, Ashish Jha clambers onto the aerosol bandwagon while nimbly rewriting history, a neat trick. Helpfully annotated:
[1] No, it comes from 60 years of bad public health ideology (“droplet dogma”), not just the CDC.
[2] No, it isn’t:
Flu spreads vis airborne aerosols predominantly. Stop with droplet misinformation @ashishkjha
We have an H5N1 flu pandemic on our doorstep. Enough. https://t.co/zYRUcvyUDb@kprather88 pic.twitter.com/DsJALpEsUP— Alex (@mocoband) June 4, 2024
[3] At last! I suppose on the bright side, Jha has given others license to say the same.
[4] “Once we knew” is doing a lot of work. The Newton Public Schools, where both Jha and (bless her heart) Walensky both sent their kids, was spending millions on ventilation in September 2020, while CDC was still fighting aerosol transmission tooth and nail. So what “we” “knew” in private was quite different from what “we” said in public.
[5] lol no.
Lambert here: Patient readers, I’m going to have to rethink this beautifully formatted table. Biobot data is gone, CDC variant data functions, ER visits are dead, CDC stopped mandatory hospital data collection, New York Times death data has stopped. (Note that the two metrics the hospital-centric CDC cared about, hospitalization and deaths, have both gone dark). 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. UPDATE I replaced the Times death data with CDC data. Amusingly, the URL doesn’t include parameters to construct the tables; one must reconstruct then manually each time. Caltrops abound.
TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
| Cases | |
| ❌ National[1] Biobot May 13: | ❌ Regional[2] Biobot May 13: |
 |
 |
| Variants[3] CDC May 25 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC May 18 |
 |
< |
| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data June 3: | National [6] CDC May 11: |
 |
 |
| Positivity | |
| ★ National[7] Walgreens May 28: | ‘ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic June 1: |
 |
 |
| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC May 13: | Variants[10] CDC May 13: |
 |
 |
| Deaths | |
| ‘ Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11]CDC May 18: | ‘ Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12]CDC May 18: |
 |
|
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) Dead.
[2] (Biobot) Dead.
[3] (CDC Variants) FWIW, given that the model completely missed KP.2.
[4] (ER) This is the best I can do for now. At least data for the entire pandemic is presented.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Slight leveling out? (The New York city area has form; in 2020, as the home of two international airports (JFK and EWR) it was an important entry point for the virus into the country (and from thence up the Hudson River valley, as the rich sought to escape, and then around the country through air travel.)
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). This is the best I can do for now. Note the assumption that Covid is seasonal is built into the presentation. At least data for the entire pandemic is presented.
[7] (Walgreens) 4.3%; big jump. (Because there is data in “current view” tab, I think white states here have experienced “no change,” as opposed to have no data.)
[8] (Cleveland) Going up.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Flattening.
[10] (Travelers: Variants) KP.2 enters the chat, as does B.1.1.529.
[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.
[12] Deaths low, ED not up.
Stats Watch
Employment Situation: “United States Job Quits” [Trading Economics]. “The number of job quits in the US edged up to 3.5 million in April 2024 from an upwardly revised 3.4 million in April. The quits rate, a metric that measures voluntary job leavers as a proportion of total employment, was 2.2% for the sixth month in a row. The number of quits decreased in professional and business services (-131,000), but increased in other services (+67,000), durable goods manufacturing (+39,000), and state and local government education (+32,000).” • Attaboy PMC!
Manufacturing: “United States Factory Orders” [Trading Economics]. “New orders for US manufactured goods rose by 0.7% from the previous month to $588.2 billion in April of 2024, the same as in March, and marginally above market expectations of a 0.6% increase.”
Supply Chain: “United States LMI Logistics Managers Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Logistics Manager’s Index in the US jumped to 55.6 in May 2024, from a four-month low of 52.9 in April. With this reading, the index has now expanded in 9 of the last 10 months and for the last six months in a row. The biggest change was recorded for the transportation prices which soared to the highest level since June 2022 (57.8 vs 44.1), due to higher demand and as diesel fuel prices dropped again in the last week of May. Transportation prices are now slightly higher than transportation capacity (57.3 vs 61.4).
Manufacturing: “Jury finds Boeing stole technology from electric airplane startup Zunum” [Seattle Times]. “A federal court jury in Seattle on Thursday ruled against Boeing in a lawsuit brought by failed electric airplane startup Zunum and awarded $81 million in damages — which the judge has the option to triple. Zunum alleged that Boeing, while ostensibly investing seed money to get the startup off the ground, stole Zunum’s technology and actively undermined its attempts to build a business. It accused Boeing of “a targeted and coordinated campaign” to gain access to its ‘business plan, market and technological analysis, and other trade secrets and proprietary information,’ then using that to develop its own hybrid-electric plane design. Zunum also accused Boeing of sabotaging its efforts to attract funding from aerospace suppliers Safran and United Technologies.” • Wowers, Boeing just can’t catch a break. I wonder if the executives who carried out this scheme earned big bonuses?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 40 Fear (previous close: 51 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 54 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jun 4 at 1:31:28 PM ET. Sudden swing to fear. Biden’s interview?
Book Nook
“Don’t be terrified of Pale Fire Nabokov’s masterpiece has a complex but huge heart” [Unherd]. “When I first read [Pale Fire] I was an ignorant 24-year-old with a barely adequate undergraduate education. Because I had not majored in English (I was concerned about what kind of job I might get after graduating and an English degree did not look promising), I had not taken many literature courses. I had read very little poetry and almost no Shakespeare. I recognised the names of the poets mentioned in Pale Fire but I could not possibly register the more subtle meanings evoked by the adjacent language because I didn’t know their work in any depth or really at all. That didn’t matter. I loved Pale Fire. I could feel its intellectual power in the intense perceptual contrasts of its characters, in the descriptions of faces and objects and, for example, the swift evocation of an alternate world in John Shade’s image of himself reflected in the window glass, ‘above the grass’ with his furniture and an apple on a plate. I could feel it in the patterning I saw and sensed, viscerally, as if I was not only seeing a griffin landing before me but feeling the vibration of its wings come up through the ground into the soles of my feet.” • Me too, but my reaction was to the “meta”, the apparatus (indexes, notes, annotation, criticism) reather than to perception. But then I only 14….
Zeitgeist Watch
“Emputation”:
I’m leery of generalizations about “people” (or, using our indoor words, “at the population level”), at least for cultural/socio-political matters, even though I’m guilty of using them myself; I’m sure they’r not true for everybody. Nevertheless, I think the poster has put their finger on a real phenomenon. Readers, have you experienced similar?
Class Warfare
“Poets’ Odd Jobs” [Poets.org]. “”There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either,” Robert Graves famously said. While there have certainly been numerous poets throughout history who have been “professional poets” (poets supported by patrons or sponsors in classical times or poets whose main income comes from their books, readings, etc., in more contemporary times), still larger is the number of poets who had surprising or unorthodox occupations outside of their literary careers. Read this list of famous poets and their odd or unique jobs….. At just sixteen, [Maya] Angelou made history with her first job: She was the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. When she first applied for the job, the office wouldn’t give her an application, but she protested until she got the job.” • Quite a list!
“Hacking Away at the Counter-culture” [Andrew Ross , Postmodern Culture (September 1990)]. “What happens, then, in the process by which information, gathered up by data scavenging in the transactional sphere, is systematically converted into intelligence? A surplus value is created for use elsewhere. This surplus information value is more than is needed for public surveillance; it is often information, or intelligence, culled from consumer polling or statistical analysis of tran sactional behavior, that has no immediate use in the process of routine public surveillance. Indeed, it is this surplus, bureaucratic capital that is used for the purpose of forecasting social futures, and consequently applied to the task of managing the behavior of mass or aggregate units within those social futures. This surplus intelligence becomes the basis of a whole new industry of futures research which relies upon computer technology to simulate and forecast the shape, activity, and behavior of complex social systems. The result is a possible system of social management that far transcends the questions about surveillance that have been at the discursive center of the privacy debate.” • 1990!
“Seeing Like a Data Structure” [Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier, Belfer Center]. “Engineers are transforming data about the world around us into data structures, at massive scale…. People are already working to exploit the data structures and algorithms that govern our world. Amazon drivers hang smartphones in trees to trick the system. Songwriters put their catchy choruses near the beginning to exploit Spotify’s algorithms. And podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as ‘engagement’ to the algorithms. These hacks are fundamentally about the breakdown of “the system.” (We’re not suggesting that there’s a single system that governs society but rather a mess of systems that interact and overlap in our lives and are more or less relevant in particular contexts.) Systems work according to rules, either ones made consciously by people or, increasingly, automatically determined by data structures and algorithms. But systems of rules are, by their nature, trying to create a map for a messy territory, and rules will always have loopholes that can be taken advantage of.” • Stimulating; worth a read, especially in conjunction with the snippet just above. Less systematic, I think, than it seems, although the play on James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is really clever.
“The Moral Economy of the Shire” [Nathan Goldwag]. ” The implication in both books and movies is that most Hobbits spent their time either farming or enjoying leisure time, but this makes little sense, when one considers what we know about premodern agriculture and what little of life and culture in the Shire. This could describe a pure subsistence economy, based around producing just enough food to ensure survival, and some of the text seems to suggest that, but it’s clear that that can’t be true. The Shire has a well-developed economy, with mills, full-time craftsmen, inns, and the large-scale cultivation of luxury crops, despite having almost no foreign trade (Southfarthing pipe-weed being found as far away as Isengard is taken as proof of Saruman’s meddling) or industry. Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat, and there’s rarely much left over. How does this jibe with the leisurely lives of simple pleasure that our Hobbit heroes seem to enjoy? There’s actually a very obvious answer, which is that our protagonists aren’t typical Hobbits. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are all very clearly members of the landed gentry, the landowning class that controls most means of economic production and maintains social dominance over the Shire. This isn’t really extrapolation or interpretation, it’s more-or-less text, and I suspect the only reason it’s not spelled out is because Tolkien assumed any reader would understand that intuitively. Bilbo and Frodo are both gentlemen of leisure because the Baggins family is independently wealthy, and that wealth almost has to come from land ownership, because there isn’t enough industry or trade to sustain it. They can afford to go on adventures and study Elven poetry because they draw their income from tenant farmers renting their land. Merry and Pippin are from an even higher social tier; both are the heirs to powerful families that hold quasi-feudal offices (the Master of Buckland, for the Brandybucks, and the Thain, for the Tooks).” • Rarely stated so clearly!
News of the Wired
“New theory suggests time is an illusion created by quantum entanglement” [BGR]. • Maybe some physics maven can disentangle this, because I sure can’t.
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Biden: Yes, we’re planning even more. We are, we are the world power.
He;s adopted cartoon supervillain speech patterns.
Bidenostalgia.
Biden: ” Keep America Great Again”
Trump: ” Make America Great Again”
stealing from Wukchumni: “Four More Wars!”
Update:
‘Five More Wars!’
Biden strikes me as a degenerate gambler who craves on being in action in the green felt jungle.
Strange answer. They’re planning even more what? Crises? Tension in the middle east? It seems like his answer revealed more than he intended.
> We’re planning even more
“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” –Herbert Stein
Um there’s no link there. Here’s a working one
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/president-joe-biden-2024-time-interview-transcript-read/ar-BB1nBzUG
He’s completely incoherent. He reads off a Putin speech that actually disproves the point he seems to be trying to make. Also admits to meddling in Ukraine. Makes false statements about what is happening on the ground. Lies and forgets about what he’s said he’s doing with Israel. This is a disaster to anyone who can actually read.
Thanks for the transcript link, Bugs.
Yeah. Stream-of-incoherence. Man he’s scarcely intelligible. It’s almost self-parody. How on earth is this guy gonna campaign? Debate? If ever one needed proof that America’s political system desperately requires root-and-branch, bottom-up, top-down, burn-it-to-the-ground-and-bury-what’s-left-at-sea reform, Biden is Exhibit One.
I am posting this here as the post needs to be read by everyone – a must read. I also posted it in comments in Links today.
We here in the West (USA) hear nothing about the situation on the Russian side of the line with Ukraine.
Here is the two part article by Guy Mettan in the Floutist Substack about the other side of the front line, ie the Russian side. Guy Mettan “is an independent journalist in Geneva and a member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva. He has previously worked at the Journal de Genève, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, and Le Nouveau Quotidien. He subsequently served as director and editor-in-chief of Tribune de Genève. In 1996, Mettan founded Le Club suisse de la presse, of which he was president and later director from 1998 to 2019. ”
Part 1:
https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/report-from-donbas
Part 2:
https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/in-ukraine-a-war-for-memory
These articles are written in a style that all war correspondents should emulate. Lots of information in them that I haven’t seen written about anywhere else concerning the return to life as “normal” before the Maiden coup. Amazing what Russia is doing already to rebuild.
I haven’t finished, but what’s most interesting is the investment Russia is providing in the formerly Ukrainian areas; contrast this with say Flint, Michigan, which still doesn’t have clean water. America is a broken country. Instead we’re sending endless money to level targets and people in the Ukraine, because Russia. And Biden getting his gun off.
The EPA says lead in Flint’s water is at acceptable levels. Residents still have concerns about its safety.
Just because United States spent ungodly amounts of resources building a world class water and sewage system for over a century starting when it was still a second tier power, but has spent the past half century destroying it, it is a problem?
Water is even more important than food for a functional anything, and like with food our ruling class is destroying it. Good sewage treatment or at least removal is almost as important because diseases like cholera were normal without it.
thanks!
ive been waiting for the second installment.
So , rising aerial CO2 levels make the air more virus friendly?
” Holy Jackpot, Batman!” . . . as Robin used to say.
I think the Masters of Davos must be rubbing their little hands in glee at this news, as they stroke their White Long-Haired Persian cat. They can’t believe their luck that things are working out so well for the Davos Agenda Plan.
Re emputation, cutting off of empathy, I’m finding myself less spontaneously empathic but I’m capable of mobilizing if, after considering the object of empathy and the situation, it seems warranted. Lots of reasons for my shift that I won’t go into, but I wonder if that might be going on with the mannikin and that we shouldn’t start worrying about a generational dearth. Maybe they’ve just given their all to kitty vids. Hope so.
(This smells a little like the reflection-proof cognitive dissonance thing we discussed here recently. I doubt we’re surrounded by dopes, or by psychopaths.)
Maybe we’re surrounded by people who understand (gasp!!!) it’s just a mannequin.
Another thought is that while people internally feel the same kind of empathy, society may no longer expect (demand) overt displays of it.
Or that they’ve had their emotions gamed so consistently by digital interfaces for so long they’ve learned to withhold emotional responses until their certain any trust involved won’t be exploited/monetized to their own detriment.
Yes, I think I’m seeing this, too. We’ve become more pragmatic, but in some ways that can strengthen our better natures.
I’ve seen a gradual but unmistakable change in my staunchly Republican, though anti-Trump, landlord. Once relentlessly unsympathetic to the homeless that sometimes try to camp out in the back alley, he would run barbed wires and tend thorny hedges there.
In the last couple of years, his attitude has shifted. I wouldn’t say he’s more tolerant, exactly. But instead of calling them lazy trash not worth the county and city resources spent to aid them (rarely much and never enough, but more recently), yesterday he waxed effusive about such programs. “They deserve a chance.” He’s taken in more Section 8 tenants, and discretely tends to them, and tells me stories of their challenges and successes.
Actually, I think Trump’s influence on the GOP has been a factor, it’s flushed out the greedy self-promoters and the demagogues, and heightened the contrast with the more rational civic-minded ones like himself. He’s a man who used to pull weeds, then discovered that many were flowering, and ended up cultivating them, transforming his yard with a new and gentle beauty.
People aren’t as polite. Don’t know if they aren’t as nice, as displaying isn’t feeling. Yet manners are civility and how we have gotten along in large social groups. So I am concerned.
My anecdata?
Back to back conversations, primary care physician switching to urgent care to get away from ongoing patient relationships. Direct quote ‘and people have just gotten mean!’
Next up, an insurance clerk with visible disability gets cursed by wife in person and husband over the phone for their insurance not approving the prior authorization she spent 45 minutes working.
I’ve been working in healthcare for 28 years and used to hear complaints about patient misconduct maybe quarterly.
This tweet was interesting because I recently completed this very course. I did imagine the dummies as stand-ins for potential, real, human beings, my body did have a bit of a visceral reaction to that thought, and I did still treat the dummies delicately. I didn’t spontaneously empathize with anything in the training or say “aww” though, but then again, I’m not an emotive dude except around a very select few people.
And as a millennial, I’ll actually second the tweeter’s idea that there might be something generational. We’re not psychopaths, but I don’t think we spontaneously care about other human beings as much, or even the idea / appearance of one. And sort of like jsn said, we’ve simply had it trained out of us, though I don’t think it’s about digital interactions (which I agree have effects but in other ways). I’ll maybe go a bit further too and say, being totally honest, a lot of us probably do have a bit of a conditional malevolent streak too.
I could go into a whole essay on it, but I think there’s a relatively crisp transition around the millennials, where even most cynical older people are still humanists deep-down. Many younger people OTOH have just become natural Schmitt-ians, even if they don’t recognize it consciously. Seeing “humanity” as a single, universal thing you emotionally invest in will just get you killed nowadays. Instead you have some known enemies, a vast ambivalent majority of people (Schrodinger’s frenemies?), and the people you actually support & sympathize with: friends, family, comrades, even co-victims / your enemies’ enemies.
In CPR training there’s a reason dollies are used, rather than real-life volunteers: it’s gonna hurt! So, if empathy is your motivation to supply the needs of another in a way that other prefers, instead of the way you prefer, it will actually get in the way of effective CPR. Assuming that distinction is sound, then CPR requires sympathy, not empathy. But I always have difficulty getting my head around the working definition of empathy – there are so many ‘buts ..’ that it feels bottomless.
Just to round off – I recently did the training on an adult male dolly, and the females in my group said, ‘Ooh – Bob’s a bit of a looker!’ We then spent 10 minutes popping the cotton ball out of Bob’s throat by pumping our fists into the bit between his navel and solar plexus. Bob’s expression never changed.
Starting with the notes in the “Elite Maleficence” section, all the text on this page, including the comments, appears to be in italics. I am on Firefox. It could just be a “me” issue and if so I apologize.
Oh noes, someone forgot to close a tag ?
They did! Fixed! It happened with Ashish Jha, I think because I was grinding my teeth.
Wait, what? Did people not know this?
I must confess to considering the economic and political situation when reading books, ect, irrespective of what the author might directly relate. And this seem patently obvious.
Would it be any different with various TV series such as Friends, where nobody seemed to be earning a living, but lived well?
Somebody looked at “Friends” and “Seinfeld” in terms of the New York floor space that they had and the furniture that was in those apartments and said that that would only be possible if they were fairly wealthy indeed. Actually, quite wealthy.
TV is funny, never ever will you see anybody watching it on any TV show, nor does anybody ever go to the bathroom
The model for Kramer, was a real life person named Kenny Kramer. Kenny Kramer lived in subsidized artist housing. Thirty or forty years ago rent control was quite effective. So a moderately successful liked the character Seinfield could live in a moderately nice apartment. I have friends in their late 70s who live in rent controlled apartments. Their rent is way below market price. But these are the kind of places that in the old day finance types would not think of living in.
Americans are pretty much always overhoused in TV and film relative to their social status, which some notable exceptions like the old All in the Family.
You need big rooms to take indoor shots.
The big apartment in Friends was rent-controlled, and one of the story-lines involved sweetening up the building manager so he wouldn’t report the characters for breach of condition. The small apartment had a floor plan similar to a place I lived in in Little Italy in the late ’80s; in that case the character with the corporate job covered the rent for the resting actor.
Two months ago a meme passing around on Twitter regarded the aristocracy being responsible for going first to war. I can’t remember the term but the German lower aristocrats paid for their prosperity with the blood of their sons. Andrei Martyanov on his blog has also posted about aristocrats paying for their position by being at the front in Medieval times. And there are other examples. Merry and Pippin obviously were at the front. Bilbo and Frodo paid a price.
Actually the Shire had a proletarian revolution a few decades before where their overlords & the clergy were driven out of the Shire which means that all the people in the Shire were able to enjoy the produce of their land without having a large chunk of it seized by Church or State. It’s a worker’s paradise. :)
Let’s remember that Bilbo came back from his “foreign wars” adventure with a whole lot of Smaug’s treasure. Just like the effing ruling class of the heartland of imperial Britain, “this sceptered isle,” that Tolkien was evoking with his description of the Shire.
And who knows what Gandalf may have inserted into the genes of food crops for the benefit of his beloved yeoman hobbits. Sam Gamgee came home with a pouch of magic elf dust to enrich the environs of the Shire, after all was said and temporarily done.
Of course, the orcs and goblins and werewolves were not instantly destroyed with the fall of Sauron and the defeat of a thoroughly perverted landscape in Mordor, likely to grow a new crop of evil as the wheel turns. And now there’s sequels and prequels aplenty, to perpetuate the saga…
hey can afford to go on adventures and study Elven poetry because they draw their income from tenant farmers renting their land.
Resistance is feudal.
From How a Drop in Small-Dollar Donations Is Shaking Up Both Parties
Well, small dollar contributors are the dups. They’re the mark. Politicians get elected, and then as was conclusively demonstrated for those in Congress, voting is overwhelmingly in favor of donors’ positions, not that of the working class. Why keep being a dup? Democrats get into positions of power, and the situation only deteriorates. Why keep giving? I’m so glad I have a filter that effectively blocks all liberal Democrat emails. I don’t look forward to the incessantly text messaging that is likely to start, which I can’t block in any meaningful way.
It’s just possible people now believe that a small dollar donation will help someone on GoFundMe, more than it will help America if given to our two major parties.
I clicked on a utube last night and the opening ad was Kamala asking for small-dollar donations. I muted and shut my eyes until I could Skip.
Haha. That was how i felt when at Best Buy in 2021 on the demo TVs as Obama, Clinton, and W urged us as to get the shot. a who’s who of war criminals.
I still maintain that both parties get their important funding from wealthy donors and corporations. And that the true purpose of those small dollar contributions is to make sure that they do not go to third parties and independents. Sort of draining the electorate.
What is a democracy without rich people with political influence?
Happy?
Well, everything political has been paywalled….. got to pay for everything…donate, donate donate so that the people can feel like they are participating and have a vig in the corrupted political process – because the political process is all about raising cash – the more cash you have than your opponent means you will win office. You also have to pay networks to air adds – if you don’t – you have to make something up that will catch the news….which means it’s got to be catchy and extreme, the more cruel or conspiratorial…the more likely it is picked up and propagated.
None of the candidates talk of any sort of way to get the corrupting influence of huge cash out of running for and maintaining elected office – it’s all just pushed as accepted that cash is free-speech or proffesional politics. Being a politician under the Dems or the Repubs in the senate or house requires the raising of cash which only happens if you gin up some (controversy, fear-monger, extremism, —-baiting, red herring , tantrum, vilify your opponent, pretend persecution, claim existential threats, pretend to be your only hope…. etc.) to gain news time to ultimatly raise cash to pay sit on different committees and legislate for your biggest donors.
Follow what both parties agree in fact, what they agree in fact to make controversies upon and what they agree in fact to not talk about
Look at Trump – a very good con-artist with a lifetime of promotion skills and shills
Look at Biden – a very good con-artist with a lifetime of promotion skills and shills
They both agree with project Ukraine (it’s not about defending democracy – it’s about neoliberalism)
They both agree to enabling genocide ( it’s not about being the shining light of liberty and all people having inalienable rights)
So it’s all about the cash
RE: Juan Merchan was handpicked for this case rather than randomly selected.
Does anybody know where Turley is getting this? I’ve seen others mention it recently too without providing any back up.
I was speaking to some TDS sufferers last week when the verdict against Trump was announced and I was told that one of the reasons this was definitely NOT a witch hunt by partisans out to get Trump was because the judge was chosen at random.
What I have seen is the assumption that Merchan was hand picked rather than randomly selected as he should have been because this is the 3rd Trump case Merchan has been on the bench for, and the odds of that happening at random are very high. But without knowing how many judges there are to choose from, it’s hard to tell whether that’s true either.
Via Stefanik urges that Merchan ending up on three Trump cases in a row can’t be random.
“New theory suggests time is an illusion created by quantum entanglement”
It’s not that hard. If no particle is entangled with the ticking clock (or however else the direction of time is measured), then the observer would see only a static image of all matter.
Elegant hypothesis. They’re going to do an experiment to see if it pans out.
I don’t really get it. From the article and linked abstract it seemed they set out to define time by saying, “first, assume a clock”
Point very well taken.
Since presently I work less by the clock, I now more often tell time by the position of the sun, the feel of the air, the rise and diminution of car traffic by my house, when the birds start chirping or when they stop, and other such cues. Even so, I check clock time regularly as most I know still regulate themselves by it and I have promises to them to keep.
re: “I have promises to them to keep”
Frost?
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep“
> miles to go
Clever conversion of space to time…
From the article: “As such, anyone observing the universe externally would see it as completely static and unchanging.”
I’m not sure Parmenides would agree that this theory is “new”. But he isn’t around any more to raise an objection. Time got him.
Blake proposes that “Eternity is in love with the productions of Time.” And regarding “love” Shakespeare offers this: “…love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds.”
If one credits such non-scientists with credible insights one might not be completely off base in concluding that time and timelessness are locked in an intimate embrace that is at once both static and dynamic or, in other words, entangled,
And then there’s this musical commentary on time: The Chambers Brothers – Time Has Come Today (Audio)
RE: Time is an illusion
I’m hard pressed to explain it well, but if you have time for some books on the subject, there’s Lee Smolin who thinks that time is fundamental, and then Julian Barbour, who like the physicists in today’s link, thinks it is an illusion.
Read all of Smolin’s book and started Barbour’s about four times without being able to finish. Can’t say I really grokked Barbour (or Smolin for that matter) but he is a very interesting character and a captivating writer.
ive got a special edition of scientific american from a few years ago regarding Time.
sadly, i currently have no time to think about such things,lol.
thats one of my favorite tropes in scifi….the later star treks did good treatment(esp Voyager)…and the show “Fringe” had time travelling Observers throughout.
difficult to get ones non-mathified head around, to say the least.
The true purpose of time is to make sure that everything does not happen at once but flows in a sort of procession.
Barbour’s book was quite thought-provoking. To the extent that I understood it (and am now accurately recalling it; both are perhaps doubtful), he argued that “dynamics” is more fundamental than “time.” Physics conventionally takes the dynamical description of a system and predicts positions and velocities as a function of time — time is the independent variable. Barbour turned that around, computing the elapsed time from the trajectory of the system through position and velocity phase space.
It fits nicely with the “slab” vision of 4-D time/space reality, that everything, past/present/future, is always there (a timeless God-like point of view). If that is right, it does seem a bit of a puzzle that we only experience at any moment a single 3-D spatial slice of this, with the sense of elapsed time as the successive slices of the dynamical are presented to our senses.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but cogito ergo sum refuted pure skepticism. Thoughts aren’t static, hence time flows.
The trouble with the cogito, Samuel Jonson wise, is that it presupposes that we cannot be mistaken about the fact that we are thinking, but, in not uncommon circumstances, I have the natural thought (I think) “But they think they are thinking when they’re not thinking at all!”
> cogito ergo sum
Or cōgitā́mus sumus, since with a dollop of Bernay’s sauce, others think through is (as social norming during Covid is horridly showing).
> It fits nicely with the “slab” vision of 4-D time/space reality, that everything, past/present/future, is always there (a timeless God-like point of view).
I am a fan of Hugh Everett’s “Many Words” hypothesis which I would swear was covered at some point by “In Our Time” (ha) but I can’t find it:
I have a vague memory that Everett proceeded from the premise that there was no other way for the subjunctive mood to make sese (ha ha).
So when I say, “I hate this timeline” I’m not koking all that hard….
Anyone hear anything about Moon of AL? They are still MIA…
I think his extended timeline after consultations was that he hoped to return by June 6, although the way he stated it was somewhat ambiguous.
> Anyone hear anything about Moon of AL?
“June 6 or so.”
If there were any honor among the thieves in Boeing’s exec suite, there would be big shots jumping out windows by now.
What if the Golden Parachute lines get tangled en route?
More probably, there are “M&M Enterprises” stock certificates instead of parachutes in those backpacks. Thus, Hubris is being chased by its own shadow, off of a cliff.
Heard its a 737 foot drop from said cliff.
> M&M Enterprises
Milo Minderbinder’s firm; I had to look it up! Perhaps I should reread Catch 22 one of these days, with a (more) adult eye….
Boeing got cozy with Bombardier in the late 2000s and then pulled out after getting access to CS100 airliner design information. Boeing did it again with Embraer in the mid/late 2010s. Totally scummy moves.
Boeing could no longer do the engineering themselves, so they stole it? Financialization….
Another word for “emputation” might be “empathectomy”.
> Another word for “emputation” might be “empathectomy”.
Kudos. That’s better, because “emputation” is next door to “imputation” as well as “amputation” (and could easily be confused with the latter in some “bloody dee-a-lects.” “-ectomy” however makes the “surgically removed” aspects quite clear.
Well! . . . thank you for the kind words. This makes me feel all warm and validated.
If you or anyone else wants to take the word “empathectomy” and try introducing it into the wild and into the language, I won’t jump up out of the weeds suddenly demanding credit. I will just take some quiet satisfaction at ” having an impact” on the culture . . . if indeed someone(s) really can viralize the word “empathectomy”.
re: time is an illusion.
No it’s not. Not according to my face and bod. / ;)
Nor according to watching the children grow up. Ah, theory. / ;)
But lunchtime is doubly so.
Re: Univ. of Bristol Aerosol Research
This is good stuff, thanks. Yesterday, Lambert linked to the X post and commented:
I first assumed this was a “safe” level of CO2 in ppm, but scanning the article, I didn’t spot it, and ambient CO2 is 420-something, so that would mean pretty much an outdoor environment. Perhaps I’m off-track, perhaps not :p
> an outdoor environment
Windows open, fan blasting!
The Parmenidean view is that there is a single great Sphere of Being. Naturally, such a sphere is absolute, timeless, and eternal. And, it might be straightforward to believe that everything in it is quantum entangled.
However, in this view, the universe is seen from the outside. A problem is that such an “outside” viewpoint, in order to exist, must also be within the great Sphere of Being, indeed any viewpoint must be, and so you have “viewpoints all the way down.” Can there ever be an outside view? Can anyone ever be “above the fray”?
So there is the problem of location, of scale.
Life forms, on the other hand, are very, very small, and our engagement with the universe is metabolic. The smaller we are, the faster our hearts beat, the more time dilates or passes more slowly. Seen from this direction, you have “viewpoints all the way up.”
Vibrationally, we are somewhere in the middle, between large and small, macrocosm and microcosm. Could Time be the living, conscious mind’s sensation of this paradox?
> Could Time be the living, conscious mind’s sensation of this paradox?
If that’s true, then wage labor (paying for labor power by amount of time) is even more perverse than I ever imagined.