By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Patient readers, there is a lot of political material to process today, some of which* I still need to sit and think about, so please check back. –lambert
Bird Song of the Day
Northern Mockingbird, Santa Fe Dam Rec. Area, Los Angeles, California, United States. Only forty seconds but there’s a lot going on!
=In Case You Might Miss…
(1) Biden’s post-defenestration speech.
(2) Litmus tests for Kamala (Palestine, anti-trust).
(3) Kamala’s campaign, includiing the donor-gasm, the 100 days, and the bait and switch.
(4) Trad wives.
(5) Employee ownership.
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 four months to go!
Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:
Virginia and North Carolina added to the list. NC was never going for
BidenHarris, but Virginia? Yikes!* * * “Transcript: Biden’s speech explaining why he withdrew from the 2024 presidential race” [Associated Press]. Biden: “You know, in recent weeks it’s become clear to me that I needed to unite my party in this critical endeavor. I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term, but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy, and that includes personal ambition. So I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. That’s the best way to unite our nation. I know there is a time and a place for long years of experience in public life, but there’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices, and that time and place is now.” • So this is all the explanation we’re going to get. “Recent weeks” contradicts the narrative that Biden’s decision was made quickly over the weekend when aides Ricchetti and Donilon showed him polling data. Given that Biden’s defenestration was carried out by Tweet without informing staff, I’m not buying “in recent weeks.” I think Biden’s decision was made quickly under pressure. Oh, and Kamala is younger only notionally; she doesn’t code as 59, surely. And she’s neither a new nor fresh voice. Assuming one leaves the sound up.
“July 24, 2024” [Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American]. I’ve never been able to bring myself to read Richardson, and now I see why. Endless exposition of Biden’s words without value add, but concluding piously but “without evidence,” as we say: “Like [Washington and Adams], Biden gave up the pursuit of power for himself in order to demonstrate the importance of democracy.” And a teensy bit if reporting, albeit unsourced: “After the speech, the White House served ice cream to the Bidens and hundreds of White House staffers in the Rose Garden.” • I wonder if the ice cream came from Pelosi’s fridge.
* * * “How Kamala Harris Took Command of the Democratic Party in 48 Hours” [Shane Goldmacher, New York Times]. “The story of how Ms. Harris so efficiently and effectively locked down the nomination — ‘a perfect 48 hours,’ Robby Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, has called it — was told through interviews with more than two dozen people who are supporting Ms. Harris, involved with her campaign or who interacted with it. Many of those people requested anonymity to speak candidly about matters they were not authorized to discuss.” Shorter: “The Inner Party: This is their story.” This caught my eye: “Within 48 hours, Ms. Harris had functionally cleared the Democratic field of every serious rival, clinched the support of more delegates than needed to secure the party nomination, raised more than $100 million and delivered a crisper message against former President Donald J. Trump than Mr. Biden had mustered in months.
It amounted to a remarkable display of early dominance for Ms. Harris and an organic outpouring of enthusiasm.” • Using the experience-based heuristic — expanded on below — that anything a Democrat says is a lie until proven otherwise, we naturally ask what was “organic” about the “outpouring.” Clicking through to the link, we find the answer: fundraising (as one might expect). “More than $100 million” is vague — and if we were scholars, we’d wait for the reports to the FEC, but Harris campaign claims (“without evidence,” as we say) “888,000 donors had contributed in her first day,” and ActBlue says they took in $90 million in the same 24-hour period.
Call me cynical, but I find it very hard to believe that there was a pent-up demand amounting to 880,000 people, randomly distributed across the Democrat electorate, just waiting to donate to Kamala; the polls certainly haven’t shown that, for example; nor have any anecdotes I have seen. Nor has Kamala’s performance in any other campaign. So how “organic” was the donor-gasm, really? Speculating very freely, I can think of two reasons it might not be, one more or less legitimate, the other not legitimate at all.
Taking the legitimate explanation first: Kamala is a valued member of AKA (Alpha Kappa Alpha), “the first intercollegiate historically African American sorority.” “The AKAs will not officially endorse any political candidate, but along with fellow Black Greek-letter organizations — known as the ‘Divine Nine’ — they have launched a massive voter mobilization campaign.” An actual political advocacy group, “Win With Black Women,” organized a 40,000 member virtual call that raised $1.5 million, so these institutions have form. (Note that I am not entirely in sympathy with this important identity vertical in the Democrat Party, since they gave us Obama, Clinton, and Biden, and nobbled Sanders. Obama was a disaster for the working class, and Biden even worse, since he slaughtered around 700,000 people, disproportionately working class, through his policy of Covid infection without mitigation. The destruction and erasure of the possibilities that Sanders opened was another disaster for the working class. The AKAs are also about as PMC as you can get.) AKA has 360,000 members. So you can see how a totally unofficial and entirely spontaneous outpouring of support from AKA would go a long way towards 880,000. But not entirely. Leading us to–
The illegitimate explanation: A squillionaire “smurf.” From Investopedia, “What Is a Smurf and How Does Smurfing Work“: “A smurf is a colloquial term for a money launderer who seeks to evade scrutiny from government agencies by breaking up large transactions into a set of smaller transactions that are each below the reporting threshold.” In this case, the squillionaire would take a very large sum and distribute it through a large number of small donor accounts through, say, ActBlue, conveniently online. (As of 2023: “Unlike nearly every other individual political campaign and political action committee, ActBlue does not require a card verification value (CVV) number as a requirement for donating.”) A discussion of the 2012 election, when Obama was on the ballot, contains the following intriguing passage: “The major sources of data on political money are the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. . . . both agencies routinely accept seriously incomplete reports and obviously inaccurate or misleading reports. . . . As a result, the true influence that large donors wield in American elections is chronically underestimated. . . . Existing data management tools that try to match these up commonly fail to recognize multitudes of contributions coming from the same sources [i.e., smurfing] In turn that nourishes illusions that small donors play bigger roles in campaigns than they really do. Especially where Democrats are concerned, the myth of small donors is a powerful instrument of miseducation.” Akerlof and Shiller’s notion of phishing equilibria lends credence to this speculation. In my paraphrase: “If a system enables fraud, fraud will already have happened,” the fraud in this case being smurfing. (I ran into the smurfing concept in right-wing Twitter, but the whole discussion was a rats’ nest of self-reference and didn’t seem well-evidenced,
888,000 = legitimate (AKA) + illegitimate (smurfing) is perfectly possible, too.
As I note, patient readers, these are both speculations, albeit intriguing and plausble ones. If you have evidence to confirm or disconfirm either explanation, please leave your thoughts (and links) in comments.
I think “coup” isn’t the proper descriptive, so I’ll use “bait and switch” until we can come up with a better term.
The timeline that led to Kamala’s coronation is interesting in that it’s not really clear when it began (alert reader Rolf began an interesting discussion here, with contributions from readers Acacia, Sam, and Tom). To a Martian looking down on the whole process over time and from 30,000 feet, Kamala’s coronation looks like an enormous bait and switch operation. [More to come].
July 23, 2024 at 9:42 pm
Acacia, Sam, and Tom, than
* * * * * * The Hundred Days. As you can see, Kamala has 100 days (well, 103) to win the Presidency (note again the dominance of the calendar). Does this help her, or hurt her?
“Could a short campaign be exactly what Kamala Harris needs?” [Vox]. “Vice President Kamala Harris has 103 days to convince the American public to vote for her for president. It’s not a lot of time — especially considering former President Donald Trump launched his campaign in November 2022 — but it’s a timeline not too different from that of other countries, many of which have short campaign cycles…. Harris may, to an extent, have the best of both worlds: She already has the benefit of being in national leadership positions. She has the Democratic machinery behind her, including Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and she will have access to Biden’s fundraising dollars. But voters haven’t been seeing her campaigning everywhere for months now, which means she’ll seem new…. However, the shorter campaign cycle may mean less opportunity for errors like the debate performance that ultimately caused Biden to step down. And there will be less time for Trump and the Republican Party to create damaging narratives about Harris that overshadow her policy and performance — provided she creates a narrative about herself first.”
“James Carville Warns of ‘Realism’ Facing Kamala Harris Campaign: ‘Tough Sledding Ahead'” [Mediaite]. Carville: “[T]hey’re having to put a campaign together right away. They were obviously thinking about this ahead of time, but they got they got to accomplish between now and the convention, they got accomplish what most campaigns have eight months to do.” And: ” It’s going to be very close, and I understand that people are feeling a lot better and excited. But that excitement has got to be tempered with realism, and the realism is she has a tough campaign on, and as you say, she’s got several things she’s got to accomplish at the same time. But having said that, there’s been real growth in Vice President Harris. I mean, you can just see the difference. And she just looked so confident to me yesterday. I didn’t put the sound on. I just left the video, and I liked what I saw, I’ll be honest with you.” • I personally also recommend watching Kamala with the sound off, but not, I think, for the same reasons Carville does.
“Kamala Harris’s Michael Dukakis moment” [The New Criterion]. “Americans over the age of fifty may remember the 1988 presidential election campaign, when Governor Michael Dukakis surged to a seventeen-point lead over Vice President George H. W. Bush following the Democratic National Convention in mid-July. … Kamala Harris is now enjoying this kind of moment as she racks up endorsements in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention in August. Democrats and media allies are busy portraying her as a fresh face (she is not) and a youthful candidate (also doubtful) who will electrify the nation, galvanize women and minority voters, and trounce Donald Trump in the fall campaign. Some polls show her running more or less even with Trump, though, in truth, Biden was not doing all that badly in the same polls when he decided to drop out. Harris’s honeymoon will continue until and through the Democratic convention, at which time delegates will put on a show of unity and strength, thereby covering up the large cracks in their coalition that Trump will soon exploit. She and her running mate may come out of the convention even with, or perhaps even slightly ahead of, the Trump-Vance ticket. The honeymoon will not last very long.” • The honeymoon will, however, consume an appreciably larger percentage of the campaign than it usually does.
* * * Harris (D), litmus test: Palestine:
Read my full statement on the protests in Washington, D.C. yesterday. pic.twitter.com/zJpZvdQDt9
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) July 25, 2024
Harris (D), litmus test: Anti-trust:
Donor or owner? LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman thinks he owns Kamala Harris. Imagine giving $7 million and then publicly demanding a total reversal of tough on corporate crime policies. Harris took the money, she needs to repudiate this. https://t.co/dqPldxMH4R
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) July 25, 2024
I don’t say Harris can’t be bought, but I don’t think Hoffman quite understands where the decimal point would need to be.
More:
One hopes, anyhow!
— Basel Musharbash (@musharbash_b) July 25, 2024
Indeed one does.
Our Famously Free Press
“AP Declares That ‘JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With A Couch’ In Fact Check” [HuffPost]. “At one point, the AP appeared to have another headline ― ‘Posts spread baseless rumors about GOP vice presidential pick JD Vance having sex with a couch’ ― but all versions of the article were scrubbed from the internet less than 24 hours after publication. Why waste all that journalistic effort? According to Mediate, the AP did a PDF search of the book that yielded 10 mentions of ‘couch’ or ‘couches,’ but none of them described Vance performing the act in question. The words ‘sofa’ and ‘glove’ did not appear anywhere in the memoir, AP wrote. The Cut did its own investigation and reported that the pages supposedly recounting Vance’s alleged furniture tryst actually mention no such thing.” • Same heuristic: Assume any public-facing Democrat is lying until proven otherwise.
“The Associated Press removes a fact-check claiming JD Vance has not had sex with a couch” [The Verge]. The Associated Press has apparently retracted a fact-check published yesterday with the headline, ‘No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.’ As of Thursday morning, the article page displayed a ‘page unavailable’ error message. The fact-check references a few joke social media posts that have been circulating that claim the Republican vice presidential nominee wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy about having sex with a couch…. ‘The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened,’ AP spokesperson Nicole Meir told The Verge in an email. News reports (and fact-checks specifically) are often worded in a way that carefully threads a needle — there’s a difference between saying something definitively didn’t happen versus saying there’s no evidence of it. My guess is that the AP headline was the problem here because it claims to debunk something that is unknowable. A headline like, ‘No, JD Vance didn’t write about fucking a couch’ perhaps would have been more accurate.” • That’s a silly argument; you fix the headline, you don’t take the page down. Sounds to me like AP got whipped into line. The Snopes debunking is still online.
Democrats en Déshabillé
“Newsom To Order Dismantling Of CA Homeless Encampments” [Banning-Beaumont Patch]. “Gov. Gavin Newsom will order state officials on Thursday to dismantle homeless encampments with a sweeping executive order, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, the New York Times reported. The order comes in response to the June Supreme Court ruling allowing cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public spaces…. According to the Times, the executive order represents the nation’s most sweeping response to the ruling. Roughly 180,000 people are unhoused in California…. LA County is the nation’s most populous, with about 10 million people. More than 1 in 5 of all homeless people in the U.S. live in the county, according to The Associated Press.” • You can bet Newsom checked with Kamala first, too. Cleaning up California’s image, and all.
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, KF, 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!
Celebrity Watch
Tedros sends Olympians to illness and death:
No, @DrTedros, these @WHO recommendations will NOT “make sure these Games are healthy and safe for everyone involved”.
They will not prevent superspreading events, as measures against airborne transmission (ventilation, respirators) are only recommended for people with symptoms. https://t.co/OOaWPhtQMm pic.twitter.com/eMyCeHHdjs
— Maarten De Cock (@mdc_martinus) July 25, 2024
Masking and ventilation recommended only after symptoms appear. But handwashing is always appropriate!
Lambert here: Looks like the holiday travel dumped accelerant on the pre-existing surge; see especially the growth in wastewater “hot spots.” Stay safe out there!
TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
| Wastewater | ||
| This week[1] CDC July 15: | Last Week[2] CDC July 8 (until next week): | |
|
| |
| Variants [3] CDC July 20 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC July 13 | |
|
|
|
| Hospitalization | ||
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data July 24: | National [6] CDC June 29: | |
|
|
|
|
| Positivity | ||
| National[7] Walgreens July 22: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic July 13: | |
 |
 |
|
| Travelers Data | ||
| Positivity[9] CDC July 1: | Variants[10] CDC July 1: | |
|
 |
|
| Deaths | ||
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11]CDC July 13: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12]CDC July 13: | |
|
 |
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] (CDC) This week’s wastewater map, with hot spots annotated. Keeps spreading.
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) KP.* very popular.
[4] (ER) Worth noting Emergency Department use is now on a par with the first wave, in 2020.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Could by leveling off. (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). The visualization suppresses what is, in percentage terms, a significant increase.
[7] (Walgreens) An optimist would see a peak.
[8] (Cleveland) Still going up!
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Up. Those sh*theads at CDC have changed the chart so that it doesn’t even run back to 1/21/23, as it used to, but now starts 1/1/24. There’s also no way to adjust the time rasnge. CDC really doesn’t want you to be able to take a historical view of the pandemic, or compare one surge to another. In an any case, that’s why the shape of the curve has changed.
[10] (Travelers: Variants) Same deal. Those sh*theads.
[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.
[12] Deaths low, ED up.
Stats Watch
Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of people claiming unemployment benefits in the US fell by 10,000 to 235,000 on the period ending July 20th, below market expectations of 238,000. Despite this decline, the claim count remained significantly above this year’s average, indicating that although the US labor market is still historically tight, it has softened since its post-pandemic [sic] peak.”
GDP: “United States GDP Growth Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The US economy expanded an annualized 2.8% in Q2, up from 1.4% in Q1, and above forecasts of 2%, the advance estimate showed.”
Manufacturing: “United States Durable Goods Orders” [Trading Economics]. “New orders for manufactured durable goods in the US slumped 6.6% month-over-month in June 2024, after four consecutive monthly increases and missing market expectations of a 0.3% increase.”
Tech: “Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions” [Wall Street Journal]. “Amazon.com’s Echo speakers are the type of business success companies don’t want: a widely purchased product that is also a giant money loser. Chief Executive Andy Jassy is trying to plug that hole—and move away from the Amazon accounting tactic that helped create it. When Amazon launched the Echo smart home devices with its Alexa voice assistant in 2014, it pulled a page from shaving giant Gillette’s classic playbook: sell the razors for a pittance in the hope of making heaps of money on purchases of the refill blades. A decade later, the payoff for Echo hasn’t arrived. While hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa-enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn’t take off. Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. ‘We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,’ said a former senior employee. As a result, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business, which includes Echos and other products such as Kindles, Fire TV Sticks and video doorbells, according to internal documents and people familiar with the business. Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25 billion in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.” • That’s a damn shame.
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 45 Neutral (previous close: 41 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 53 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jul 24 at 12:37:17 PM ET.
Zeitgeist Watch
“Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)” [The Times]. “Trad wives are an internet phenomenon; women who have rejected modern gender roles for the more traditional existence of wife, mother and homemaker — and who then promote that life online, some to millions of followers. Their lifestyle is often, though not always, bound to Christianity. They film themselves cooking mad things from scratch (chewing gum from corn syrup, waffles from a sourdough starter), their faces glowing in beams of sunlight, their voices soft and breathy, their children free range.” • Worth reading in full.
“Fossil Hints That Jurassic Mammals Lived Slow and Died Old” [New York Times]. “The extended time frame for tooth replacement, along with the older Krusatodon’s age, led the team to conclude that these ancient mammals enjoyed surprisingly long life spans. This most likely extended their growth period. Most modern mammals experience rapid growth early in life before plateauing as they approach adult size. Krusatodon and other early Mesozoic mammals may have slowly grown throughout their long lives…. Determining when the mammalian growth process sped up is difficult. Dr. Panciroli thinks development was most likely turbocharged as mammals’ metabolism increased, and as they became warm-blooded. These traits would emerge later in the Mesozoic Era and help early mammals adopt more energetically demanding lifestyles that included swimming and gliding.” • Sounds like I’d prefer to be a Jurassic Mammal; I don’t glide, and the closest I’ve gotten to swimming is buying a bathing suit (and maybe I should reconsider).
Class Warfare
The Elysian]. “There are 47 millionaires working for Central States Manufacturing, and they’re not all in the C-Suite. Many of them are drivers or machinists—blue-collar workers for the company. How? The company is owned by its employees. Every worker gets a salary but also a percentage of their salary in stock ownership. When the company does well, so do the employees—all of them, not just the ones at the top. And the company is doing well. ‘When we sat down eight years ago, we said we want to be a billion-dollar company and have 1,500 people, we are on track to be both of those this year,’ Tim Ruger, president of Central States, tells me. That’s right, this manufacturing company will become a unicorn this year—one of only 6,000 companies in the world earning more than $1 billion in revenue. But unlike Walmart, Amazon, and Apple, it’s not just the executives getting paid out. ‘It’s not like 80 percent of the company is owned by management and the rest is owned by employees, it’s really well spread across all functions,’ Ruger tells me. ‘We’ve got a number of people that have been here 15, 20 years and they have $1 million plus balances, which is really cool for a person that came out of high school and runs our rollformer. You can’t do that everywhere.'” • Do we have any readers who are familiar with Central States Manufacturing? The name sounds so generic, like “The Great Lakes Paperclip Company”:
“Microsoft’s ‘World of Warcraft’ Gaming Staff Votes to Unionize” [Bloomberg].
“It turns out a lot of return-to-office mandates were meant to make workers quit” [Quartz]. “A quarter of bosses admitted that they hoped return-to-office (RTO) mandates would lead to employees quitting, according to a new survey…. That expectation isn’t totally unfounded. Twenty-eight percent of remote employees said they’d consider quitting their jobs if RTO policies occurred at their companies. But it appears fewer quit than the bosses wanted. Some executives even blamed layoffs on employees who didn’t quit after RTO policies were put in place, Bamboo said. Almost two in five (37%) of managers, directors, and executives said their companies had layoffs in the last 12 months because they anticipated that more employees would quit after enacting RTO policies.”
News of the Wired
“Scientists Recreate Neanderthal Cooking Methods and the Results Are Eye-Opening” [ZME Science]. “To learn more about how our extinct relatives prepared bird-based meals, researchers in Spain tried cooking like Neanderthals using only tools and methods that would have been available in prehistoric times…. ‘Using a flint flake for butchering required significant precision and effort, which we had not fully valued before this experiment,’ said Mariana Nabais of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain, lead author of the new study. ‘The flakes were sharper than we initially thought, requiring careful handling to make precise cuts without injuring our own fingers. These hands-on experiments emphasized the practical challenges involved in Neanderthal food processing and cooking, providing a tangible connection to their daily life and survival strategies.'”
Yum:
Chicago sushi pic.twitter.com/GOmMU5CWBh
— Ms. Dive Diva 🖤 (@chicagodivediva) June 23, 2024
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Does Kamala Harris hate hate? Would that be hateful?
It will be a cold day in Hell when I take moral direction from her.
Sounds suspiciously like the Itchy and Scratchy theme song.
unpatriotic
brutal
terrorists
It is Scoundrel Time, and the new Girl Boss / Scoundrel wants you to know who is in charge.
Dunno, but someone might want to remind her flag burning is protected free speech (for now, anyway.) Personally, I find supporting genocide a much greater desecration of our highest ideals and promises of American than burning a piece of cloth, but guess that’s just me.
Free speech, sure. Viable tactic, no. You lose issue focus faster than smearing glasses with vaseline. In the US the smell of a burning flag is the smell of useful idiot, or an agent provocateur.
Burning a flag used to be something liberals did to annoy conservatives. Now it’s something you do to annoy liberals and conservatives.
You have company. I would not, cannot, and will not support in any way any person,any organization, any party that gives countenance to genocide.
It’s a Bill Clinton move, first memed with Sister Soulja during his 1992 campaign: move right by showing the world that you aren’t afraid to throw your inconvenient constituents under the bus.
The question now is what Harris will say to constituents who don’t assume that opposing genocide and apartheid in Palestine is the same as supporting Hamas.
While the MSM wants to distract me with the correct way to pronounce her name, (emphasizing the wrong syllable is apparently hateful), Jimmy Dore digs into her record. utube, 9+ minutes.
Black Activist SHREDS Kamala Harris & Refuses To Vote For Her!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh0oA5P26x4
I find the trad wives YouTubers boring but they have an audience so I wonder how many of the audience watch for the comedy. More than those seeking role models or confirmation, I’d wager.
Remember, there is no such a thing as bad publicity. Any and all viewership brings in the ad revenue.
Think they’re doing all the promotion and the rearing of a 6- to 10-person household on their own? If grandma or a local nanny or a soc med specialist or three are involved, I hope they get a Tok or two occasionally.
Looking at that Chicago sushi, am I the only one who immediately thought of “Dibblers Sausage Inna Bun?”
Now I’m thinking of pigs in a blanket, or Lil Smokies and some dipping sauce.
Delicious! Maybe not quite nutritious…
Oh! Mom used to sometimes make Pigs in a Blanket. She would give me a serious glare whenever I would glop some Heinz 57 Sauce on breakfast.
Funny which early memories spring back to life.
Originally yes you are the only one.
But after remembering “Night Watch” I now cannot unsee what can be in there.
I thought, “I wish I was in Oak Park at Pete’s Red Hots reaching for my Number One”.(Chicago Dog , fries and a small coke.)
“over by there?”
Roosevelt Road. Is “over by there” Pete’s slogan?
Richardson. She is smart and well educated. But yes, it feels like reading the Truest Blue believing that exists in online form, and that is a definite high bar to clear. She’d fit in well at the Atlantic, I can’t quickly recall her bio or CV.
Unfortunately a near friend frequently posts her screeds online on social media. I avert mine eyes lest they hurt or become further impaired…not joking, I had the wonders of modern cataract surgery two years ago.
There are others of course, equivalent in their adoration of humble Joe from Scranton. Lot of stuff showing up on their noses from the adoring and fawning. Brown nosing, it’s not just for Republicans!
Brown nosing is all fine and good. However, to be a True Blue Believer, one must also be able to state, from the results of one’s ‘brown nosing,’ what Fearless Leader had for breakfast the day before.
Heather Cox Richardson delenda est.
Yet her purpose seems to be cater to an upper-middle, predominantly female readership, that wants to be “in the room.”
And Heather Cox Richardson doesn’t disappoint. I dipped into her 23 July column, in which she regurgitates CIA talking points.
This is a historian? In fact, Kamala Harris doesn’t have much foreign-policy experience, having been a junior senator and then vice president. This is the same sort of tripe that was slung about when discussing Hillary Clinton’s qualifications.
Also: FacetoBk sighting. Someone indeed has posted the slogan, I’m with Her.
Don’t these people ever learn? Or is it all resentments all the time?
Lambert mentioned in the 7/23 Water Cooler that Kamala’s “official” rapid response page was “horrid green” and had a “horrid font”.
You can see the graphic at https://x.com/KamalaHQ
It’s some sort of social media trend explained here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/what-is-kamala-harris-s-brat-rebrand-all-about/ar-BB1qq0wj
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/what-is-kamala-harris-s-brat-rebrand-all-about/ar-BB1qq0wj
What is Kamala Harris’s ‘brat’ rebrand all about?
(Sorry if this info has been posted.)
re–“quite understands where the decimal point would need to be”
Or, to quote a widely used Churchill anecdote, “now we are just haggling about the price?”
A new Michael Tracey takes on Kamala
https://www.mtracey.net/p/kamala-harris-has-shockingly-little
But as it turned out with the Kamala alternative
Meanwhile Trump had his first post convention rally up the road in Charlotte and he lit into both Biden and “Laughing Kamala.” He’s going to make it all about personalities and the real question is whether she has enough of one to defend herself. Or is she the proverbial “horse created by a committee”*?
*the camel
DJT will make it about personalities? I am shocked, shocked to hear that. Does he ever do it any other way? So the democratic party does not at this juncture want to be embodied by an “old white guy.” How would you characterize the party’s “predominant media/activist types?” Who is Michael Tracy and why ought one care what he thinks? In 2019, Harris Warren, Buttigieg? These were the persons favored by the “elites?” Why? What do any of the three bring to the total job of being president? For god’s sake Mayor Pete’s political experience is on the city level. His stint as Transportation Secretary has not inspired confidence. I say all this as an “old white guy” so you may feel free to disregard it.
Since you asked.
“Over the years I have contributed to a wide range of publications across the political spectrum, from The Nation to The American Conservative, the New York Daily News to the New York Post, and many more. A substantial portion of recent columns can be found at the website Unherd. From 2017 to 2018, I was a correspondent for The Young Turks, which was a peculiar adventure; prior to that I was a columnist for VICE. Since 2019”
https://www.mtracey.net/about
And you seem to be mixing up Tracey (or me?) with the views of the Dems he claims to have observed in 2020. I don’t find this claim to be a stretch. In fact even her few statements so far hint at a patronizing attitude by Kamala herself toward “Joe.”
Not that I’m claiming any particular insight into our little seen vice president. I merely offer the above as info and opinion from someone who has seen a lot more of her.
Cookery of the Neanderthals.
I am surprised that a group of Catalans, who are usually savvy about cookery, couldn’t figure out how to cook a bird.
One wraps them in mud and lays the bundle in a fire. Then, when the clay / mud hardens, you crack the shell and pull away the baked clay, which will have adhered to the feathers.
This bird-in-clay cookery is still used by a few places in Italy. Ignacio can tell us if the technique is still used in Spain–I think that it is. The technique now has evolved more toward sealed terra cotta pots.
This Neanderthal recipe is described by Patience Gray in her timeless book of cookery, Honey from a Weed.
Little birds? Pluck ’em. Put them on the braise. Eat them whole, head and all.
My father told me that he and his friends would catch fish in the many creeks and rivers in southern Illinois and wrap the fish in mud to cook them over hot coals for their lunch. They didn’t have to go home until dinnertime and they got hungry out running around.
Funny that little kids would think of this. These days they would want sushi.
I’ve barely read past Lamberts intro yet, but I must mention how much we have been enjoying the bird calls (except perhaps the Cockatoos). It also reminds us of one Mockingbird that sang outside our old residence in San Anselmo, Ca., that performed an imitation of one of our Siamese cats’ “let me in!” meow, good enough that at first we had to look to see if she was in or out before we went to the door.
Every time I hear a mockingbird I am taken back to my walks across the campus of the small college at which I was teaching in the 1990s. A mocking bird in the same tree each morning singing, it seemed to me, for the sheer joy of it.
Wow, why would Amazon be willing to lose that much money for that many years just to build a huge surveillance network. Head scratcher there.
“• Sounds like I’d prefer to be a Jurassic Mammal; I don’t glide, and the closest I’ve gotten to swimming is buying a bathing suit (and maybe I should reconsider).”
Yeah, but then your brain with it’s high energy demand would be smaller and less active. As to whether that would be a good or bad thing evolutionarily is an open question.
Re: litmus test 1:
Why say anything, unless your handlers see some benefit to posturing, manipulating, or setting it up? Two word-salad mutterings in 9 months, now this. Can’t slide a shhet of onionskin between her positions and the Blob’s on anything ever. Complete and utter servant of the status quo, just like HRC.
But maybe we should just concede the IDpol climax one time so the duopoly doesn’t have it in its quiver anymore, and we just call a tool a tool again.
Gad, I cannot believe that I am going to do this, but HRC does have some deeply held positions. They are hateful and nothing to be proud of, but she does have them. If you follow her votes and term as SOS, you will discover someone who is anti labor, rarely met a war she didn’t like and a complete believer in American exceptionalism, and in forcing American’s interest in other countries. Not ever stated outright is her other deeply held belief that the public should have no say in what she does and absolutely no rights to information and oversight beyond what she chooses them to have.
I cannot say the same for Harris, she is totally owned, a true handmaiden of the donor class. I will be totally shocked if she bites Hoffman’s hand, and if I am surprised it will only happen because other powerful donors place a higher bid.
I think Harris just lost Michigan with that tweet. Thus, the election.
Alexander Mercouris’s analysis today of Biden’s speech (Youtube link) is a thorough and, if you listen carefully, a chilling tour de force. He goes on to discuss Netenyahu’s speech as well, then returns to Biden and the neo-cons for just a moment, all before he begins to talk at all about the war in Ukraine. Mercouris at his best.
Guessing Biden agreed to say that because it means he’s still competent, but magnanimous passing the torch.
Frequent handwashing IS critical, once the blood dries it is much harder to get off.
Similar to the climate change activist idiots who splash paint on paintings, the pro Palestinian protesters, or some of them, also took action in a manner that would alienate much of the public. The “supportive” graffiti including profanity on the Union Station Liberty Bell replica and on various buildings in DC just defaced things and didn’t actually present their case.
I don’t think the protesters’ point was to educate, but to make a fiasco out of Netanyahu’s speech and draw clearer lines between their friends and enemies. In this regard they have been wildly successful.
The Park fire is now at 71K acres and 3% containment.
Because it is early in the season plenty of resources are being allocated and they may be able to keep it under 200K acres if things go well.
It is going to be a hellish fire season with no rains due until early October.
Much farther north, Jasper is mostly gone : (
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/wildfire-that-roared-into-jasper-was-a-wall-of-fast-moving-flame-says-fire-official-1.7274825
I call bullshit on that Alexa article. Its clear that Amazon just wants to control every aspect of our lives. I dont think they care that they lost 25 billion on all that nonsense. Dont they also more or less lose money on all the stuff they sell as well. I thought AWS was the only thing that made money. I dont see how trying to get people to buy more with a voice assistant really improves the bottom line.
Patient readers, I have added some orts and scraps, mostly in the form of mini-essays, the first on the donor-gasm (is it “organic”?), the second on Kamala’s “Hundred Days” (is a short campaign good for her, or not?), and the third (to be finished shortly) on the “bait and switch” (I prefer that term, for now, to “coup”) that put Kamala at the top of the ticket. Thoughts more than welcome. Enjoy!
From Due Dissidence, utube, ~13+ minutes.
Disneyland Workers AUTHORIZE STRIKE, Citing UNFAIR Labor Practices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzj10GiYVrA
I can’t find it, but when Amazon’s extraordinary losses with Alexa were first announced it was pointed out that Prime Video is also part of that division. If true there would be many millions of dollars of losses that have nothing to do with Alexa and everything to do with their original programming. You have to remember that Prime includes other perks, not just access to their video streaming, so unlike the subscription base of other streaming services, it would be difficult to categorize the breakdown of the subscription. While some of their “originals are really licensed, not produced by them, others are fully funded by Amazon. And streamers, not just Amazon, agreed to massive budgets that were never going to be recouped for too many shows for more than a few years. Netflix may never see a profit for more than a few of their shows as well .
That doesn’t entirely mitigate the choice to sell the devices at a loss. There was little reason to believe they would provide an ongoing revenue stream.