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, including 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 public-facing 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, and so their priorities are not mine.) 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 and offering a solution that scales. (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, so I didn’t include the idea until I could do some work on it.)
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 could be said to have begun (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 might look like an enormous bait and switch operation. After all, the Inner Party cleared the primary ballots for Biden, Biden himself declared many times that he was “all in,” as we say, hundreds of millions were raised in Biden’s name (and it’s no good saying that it was the Biden/Harris ticket, everybody knows the Vice Presidency is the proverbial [container] of warm [subtance].) And suddenly, after about three weeks of Inner Party leaks and pressure, Biden was off the ticket, Kamala was in, and all the money was hers (and yes, Biden’s debate performance was horrid, but are we really to believe that Inner Party propaganda could not have minimized it, when it has minimized so much else? Or, more precisely, that they thought “This time, we can’t get away with it”?).
But if Kamala’s coronation was in fact a “bait and switch” operation — I’ve looked at Wikipedia’s “scam” entry, and can’t find anything else that matches the pattern; readers? — then when did it begin? In 2020, when she was put on the ballot for no apparent reason — granted, they loved her in the Hamptons and The Vineyard — and when Biden promised to serve a single term? In (say) 2022, when the “Red Wave” did not materialize, and many electeds beat Biden’s 2020 numbers? As late as George Clooney’s enormously successful fundraiser, the one where Obama led him gently off the stage? Or a little under a month later, after the debate? Did the Inner Party always have Biden’s defenestration in mind? Or did they defenestrate him only at the last possible minute, making as certain as they could that no alternative to Kamala would materialize?
I don’t think we know; and I don’t think we can know. That says something about how Democrats define “our democracy” operationally. Because we now have a candidate at the top of the ticket who never faced the voters and won a single primary, neither in 2020 nor in 2024; a candidate who took power only through a campaign of leaks orchestrated by a small group of Inner Party figures, in which neither voters nor Democrats at the precinct or even the State Party level had any say; a candidate installed on the ticket by a single person, her superior in the Executive branch, without discussion or advance notice of any kind; a candidate who swapped in her ActBlue donation’s page before she even had a campaign site of her own for the office she seeks; and a candidate who, in 48 hours of phone work, became the de facto nominee of the entire Party; and whose candidacy will shortly be ratified by Zoom call, rendering the actual, physical Convention mere window-dressing (“Democratic leaders say they’ll still have a ceremonial roll call at the Chicago convention the week of Aug. 19, and the delegates will vote in person on the party platform,” lol). Clearly, this is not a small-d democratic process, and it’s impossible to rid oneself of the suspicion that this is the Inner Party’s model for selecting candiates, going forward. Pesky voters!
Where the timeline begins matters, because it matters how long the Inner Party and its assets in the press have been lying to donors (and, to be fair, themselves) about Biden’s deteriorating cognitive abilities. Since 2020 is a long time (although issues were clearly visible at that time, as NC readers — and most dull normals — know). However, the universal and vehement dogpiling that occured when anyone suggested Biden might slip a cog easily predated George Clooney fundraiser and the debate. So it’s fair to say that the lying continued for a minimum of months, and a week is a long time in politics. And all this lying about the guy who controls the nuclear codes MR SUBLIMINAL One assumes! That suggests the heuristic that, going forward, any public-facing Democrat should be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise. It was possible, for awhile, to imagine that public-facing Democrats would lie for given operations or campaigns (RussiaGate; Ukraine). But, sadly, now we need to regard lying as their default setting. It’s the only way to be sure.
* * * 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): | |
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| Variants [3] CDC July 20 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC July 13 | |
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| Hospitalization | ||
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data July 24: | National [6] CDC June 29: | |
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| Positivity | ||
| National[7] Walgreens July 22: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic July 13: | |
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| Travelers Data | ||
| Positivity[9] CDC July 1: | Variants[10] CDC July 1: | |
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| Deaths | ||
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11]CDC July 13: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12]CDC July 13: | |
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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.
By the same token, you don’t bring up the issue in such a statement in the current environment.
Shows her, or her staffs, general lack of finesse.
This is going to be a wild ride.
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
Not a pretty picture. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve apparently experienced hate my entire life as my last name continues to be butchered by all appt desks’ receptionists calling me to the next level wait room.
Great clip, she clearly understands “what’s wrong with this picture?”.
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.
Well, some of them make their kids do a lot of the housework to help out. (That may be more a quiverfull thing than a regular tradwife thing.)
For heaven’s sake, his dad owns JetBlue, among other airlines. They’re not hurting for “help.” C’mon.
Modern life sucks for most people. Too much money stress, work stress, child care stress, relationship stress, decision stress… It’s nice to temporarily escape into a fantasy where you can spend a week fussing over the “tablescape” for the Fourth of July party. Where the husband is depicted as the pillar of the family and is not goofing off every night to play video games in the basement.
And the relationship dynamic between a pretty young middle class woman and the creepy controlling son of a billionaire would be the same even if it wasn’t “trad” in styling. So going “trad” seems a little more honest, I guess.
I expected the trad wives article to be icky, but I liked Hannah Neeleman more than I expected to. The interviewer talks about the difficulty of actually talking to her without being overruled by her husband or toddlers, but when she does speak, she’s quite candid. No, she doesn’t identify as a trad wife, that’s just a thing that happened. No, this wasn’t her life plan – she wanted to be a ballerina, and she was a good one – but she knew kids would change things. No, she doesn’t do pain relief for home births – never felt the need – except once when her husband wasn’t there she got an epidural (looks around for him, lowers her voice) and it was ‘kind of great’. Yes, she did the beauty pageant 12 days after giving birth, but it was her sister’s idea, not hers. Luckily she’d stopped bleeding. She married her husband after bonding when seated next to each other on a long haul flight, a charming twist of fate that he actually engineered behind the scenes (his father was the airline founder).
She’s doing quite well, but it’s not clear that she chose the life she leads – in fact, it feels like most of the key decisions in her life were made by other people. But it all happened, it’s not reversible (there’s no opt-out clause on motherhood) and she’s decided to be happy about it and adopt the necessary mental and psychological framing to accomplish that, as one does. She’s far better off than many people in that situation – they have a social media empire, and are a business employing nearly 50 people. I can’t begrudge her finding a way to be happy in the life she ended up with. I just found myself hoping that at least once in her life, she will get the chance to put her own needs and interests first – and that she won’t have forgotten how.
Mom worked in town, first as a Farm Bureau secretary and then as a school teacher so if Dad was in the fields or away when we got off the bus we were on our own. No other kids close by but my brothers had a quarter section of land to run amok in and I always had library books to read. And we all had chores to do.
Because I helped with grocery shopping, cooking, laundry and house cleaning, I left home with basic skills that served me well. I also gained a deeper appreciation for what mothers do and know that I’m not wired to take care of children. Yes I know how to run a house, but not a house with little kids in it. Recent family reunion and I still can’t tell you any of my grandnieces’/nephews/ names and am not entirely sure which of them belonged to who let alone what size clothes they wear, what they’re studying in school or what they’re interested in.
I don’t think only women can be good mothers but I do think your average cis-hetero male is absolutely unfit to raise children without lots of help. Exceptions I’m sure, and each worthy of their own sitcom.
P.S. Stay at home moms are some of the best volunteers ever and tend to produce the only kids who actually grow up to be good volunteers. Seeing families that think alike across generational lines is empowering however utterly alien to me as a stereotypical Boomer who fought with my parents over the Vietnam War and then Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies.
I never wanted children, and I thought I would be a terrible father. I came late to the game too, 42, but I think that was a good thing. Financially stable for the Midwest, we were able to buy a small house in a good school district. Wife and I not too ambitious, thrifty and fine to have 1 car and no luxuries, part-time and freelance gigs so the parental duties were manageable.
I can’t speak for others, but the minute I had a child everything changed, the focus was now her.
I do have to say there were several moments in the first 2 years where I would turn to wife and say how do single parents do this (the answer is badly)? And we just had the one child.
Best thing that ever happened to me. Brought me out of my introversion. I wasn’t the most importanct person anymore, she was. It was very difficult, but I learned to fake it. Spent my share of hours at the playground after school talking to mostly moms, all younger than me.
We are lucky. She is happy and healthy despite some Covid years setbacks and turning 19 this year doing well in college that we could never afford if she didn’t have scholarships.
Call-back to previous discussions on NC, we read to her every night until she was a teenager and it finally got awkward. She reads books on her own all the time now.
America is so hard these days, and nothing is perfect but for me being a father has worked out.
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?
It’s more of a Chicago Italian saying, like “Da Bears!” SNL..
“…where is it? It’s over by there!”
Duk’s was my go to in my Chicago dayz. You could also get a cold 6er of Old Style at the drive-thru at 3AM. Buns on the Run was insanely unhygienic but good. Also served breakfast on a foam plate. Doug’s was really good but now people are back to Wolfy’s up on Peterson. I was North Side, obviously.
THIS….is the real Chicago –
“Cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger. No Coke – Pepsi”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puJePACBoIo
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.
I was a reader of Richardson a few years back, back when she gave more perspective. I think it was her who made the perceptive comparison of Trump to Federalist John Adams. (As a confirmed anti-Federalist, I appreciated that.)
Now she says mostly what you can get anywhere else- and she’s praising Adams. (My unscientific list of worst presidents by party has Adams as the only one at the top of worst foreign policy, worst domestic policy, and most corrupt).
I still subscribe to her newsletter because she often, or at least she used to, includes refreshers on American history. But recently she has seemed to become a full-time Dem cheerleader.
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.)
> the Brat album cover
Ah. Generational!
Really going all in on the Zoomer Culture Wars.
Much gnashing of teeth on the reddits and faceborgs from the normies about the sudden influx of Harris posts and Trump posts.
It’s giving them social media emotional whiplash 😂
A lot of pushback coming in the form of Harris’s locking up weed smokers. The pro Harris faction is pushing out videos saying that she really only locked up 45 and not 1900 or whatever the number is.
That’s hilarious. Kamala the Cop should court Republicans.
Charli XCX is awesome and I highly recommend her. Some of the most inventive pop music over the past 10 years or so. Also very funny and gorgeous. She was on the quiz program Never Mind the Buzzcocks for a series.
Not so much the font or the green but I can’t see ” kamala hq ” without thinking I’m supposed to make a hacking sound in my throat after saying kamala, like I’m trying to speak Arabic. ” Kamala HQ” is formerly correct and instantly communicates while lending itself to all manner of KHQ font stylings.
This will be interesting because Harris’ core group (AKA super sisters) are more into Queens than Presidents. Watch for the tells especially when Harris speaks to friendly audiences. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me to see small runs of “Kamala 4 Queen” merch.
And no, I am never getting over that video clip of Harris enthusing over “my bus, I love my bus!”
Kamala HQ tuah?
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.
Used to follow Tracey but he’s a Covid denier and I just can’t get past that. He’s also very full of himself in the Greenwald mold.
He specializes in contrarian takes on things like the BLM protests and I guess Covid, although I haven’t read those.
In fact for some time now his Substack very irregularly updated although perhaps the election will pick up the pace.
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.
In Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) one of the dishes the father prepares is a fowl baked in mud. So this technique is present in Japanese cuisine.
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.
> how much we have been enjoying the bird calls
Thank you. People do seem to enjoy them (and since that section is at the top of the page, I begin each day by listening to bird calls, which is never not pleasant). I don’t think I’ll run out….
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.
They lost so much money due to creative accounting that, conicidentally, makes them not pay taxes because their business just can’t make profit.
I agree and with a little help from the pockets you & me by way of the cia.
“• 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.
Craig Murray
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/24/craig-murray-who-runs-america/
So there it is–six degrees of Hillary Clinton. Herself runs America /s
I think Harris just lost Michigan with that tweet. Thus, the election.
I wasn’t voting for her regardless but that is now a good reason I can give to others in my circle.
I just looked up 1st District Iowa, running against the vicious AIPAC Miller-Meeks is Christina Bohannan, a Dem who supports Palestine. So that’s fun, to have someone to actually vote for from that horrible Party.
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.
Time will tell how many of the flag desecrators were law enforcement embeds but that’s always my first thought when I see individuals in a larger group act out in this manner. It’s very important to the people in charge that the Republican base keeps thinking of Hamas supporters as evil and burning US flags helps with that.
I have burned flags. I would never burn a flag in a politically charged situation where the act itself almost certainly will not build support but is sure to strengthen the opposition to your cause.
Flag burning is a revolutionary act and is a blow against the King. If that’s all you got, why bother?
I didn’t see photos of the flag burning, but did see the writing on the bell and monument walls. It was obviously done by numerous people. I don’t expect protests to educate, but doing things that will actively alienate many people who are neutral or might be mildly sympathetic to your cause is stupid. And as you say it plays into your opponents hands.
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.
Amazon is a major government contractor which collects consumer behavior data. Selling Echos and doorbell cameras at a discount wouldn’t seem to me to be an oversight. Someone I know has a child with special needs, and in being connected to services, the first thing the government-subcontracted agency did was provide them with a camera on their door and an internet-connected microphone in their house, gratis. If it’s free, you’re the product, and all that.
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!
UPDATE Finished the “bait and switch” section!
I find all the headlines a bit startling…. grassroots fund raising, record amounts in just a few days. Varied channels run these headlines each day this week, it really picked up the steam by about Tuesday morning or mid-day ….
Head scratcher. I ain’t buying the swill being readily served, she just quashed large donor concerns and now is the Democratic presumptive nominee.
Just one topic, but I readily anticipate a major media network asking her position on the border crossing and the possible benefits granted to those coming into America by the millions. That will not work wonders in say, Illinois or New York, but I’m projecting on what those voters might value.
The additions are worthy of a post of their own. Nice work. And yeah, I ain’t buying any of this either. But im not sure how much it matters to the average voter who isn’t a political junkie. The read I’m getting from people around me is relief at not having to vote for Biden and desire to hear no evil/see no evil about Kamala. If she can manage to not do anything stupid in the next 103 days, they might just pull this off.
Donors got their way is how I see it. Joe out, Kamala in. I will report back later on wife and daughter, but I’m sure they are fine with it.
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.
https://www.today.com/health/coronavirus/states-with-highest-covid-rates-2024-rcna163403
Where is COVID-19 spreading? These states have the highest COVID rates
(emphasis mine)
YIKES!
“James Carville Warns of ‘Realism'”
Ya gotta love it when Carville leans into the Foghorn Leghorn bit for emphasis. There’s not many politicos that I take less seriously but every so often, he’s right on the money. Usually when he smells a weasel near his henhouse.
Re “smurf” and fake small contributions–that’s exactly what the Trump campaign yesterday accused her of doing.
Taibbi and Kirn were suggesting the speed of all of this smacks more of coup than “efficiency.” Did Joe really want to go?
I predict the fund raising will hit $1 billion quite possibly by the DNC convention….all in the name of “saving Democracy” and “Our Democracy”! By the bye and hey what can Reid Hoffman do for Democracy, again, asking for a friend…
An earlier headline about Musk committing as much $45 million per month over next 3 months, to a Trump campaign or related PAC. He refuted that amount yesterday, but the number had been in the news a few days.
> Re “smurf” and fake small contributions–that’s exactly what the Trump campaign yesterday accused her of doing.
Maybe there’s better stuff out there, then; but I do think that stuff from the “C” team bubbles up to the campaign more than it should; the stuff I say — and I did look — was just bad. (Note that I would hardly quote the campaign on this unless they nailed the case.)
With respect to “smurfing”, there may also be a “middle path”. I received a text from ActBlue (forward-blue.us, the name ActBlue was entirely omitted) within hours of the announcement of Biden’s withdrawal offering a 500% match (what I will call an “overmatch”) on donations to the Kamala Harris Turnout Fund, They sure got that together awfully quickly, no?
A genuine small donation is submitted by an individual, the overmatch is then channeled from a pool at ActBlue comprised disproportionately of large donations. That overmatch is reported as a separate small donation. Certainly highly automated. Smoke and mirrors.
I received a comparable text which upped that ante to a possible 700%…yes automated but also sent to a fictional voter who might support them. No idea what databases they use but that’s horrible. I am hardly defined as a Team Blue supporting individual…closer to a team purple, and who ruins the country’s prospects the least.
Reply with a stop and those texts are vanquished. Be gone demon, I cast you out !
My main point here was that this approach accomplishes two things: it greatly inflates the total donation amount, and (inorganically) doubles the number of small donations, making it appear that there was a huge surge from large number of contributors. Then they can play the enthusiasm card, credible path to victory, legitimate candidate, etc.
My number was likely registered with them due to Sanders contributions I made in 2020 [grumbling].
Hi, Black person who went to Howard here (where most of the D9 were founded!) to add a little context to Lambert’s back of the envelope math and speculation on smurfing.
My bullshit-o-meter immediately started going off when these eye watering sums were announced for Kamala so quickly, because there is literally no way all of this was fueled by small donors.
AKAs (and all D9 orgs) have funny math when it comes to who they count as members, generally. Whatever number is cited is a gross inflation of active and/or dues paying members. If they are publicly broadcasting a membership of 360,000, I’d estimate that only about 25% are active and/or dues paying (not scientific, but an educated guess based on the AKAs in my life). And add to this that most of the active/dues paying members in any D9 org are older folks, think 55+. And as a seasoned campaign staffer, older folks from all walks of life have a higher preference for campaign contributions via paper check (also, most campaign contributors skew older, across the board). So, there is NO WAY that a sum total of donations could be known so quickly.
Also, and this is some important nuance that I don’t expect Lambert to get: technically, on paper, Black fraternity and sorority members are PMC. But only technically. A looooot, across generational cohorts, have the exact same wage relation as someone you’d deem “working class.” So you figure that word gets out on a Sunday, on a week that is not a pay week, about Kamala and all this non-existent “extra” cash gets thrown her way? Please.
FWIW, I’m with Taibbi and Kirn on this one. It won’t be Kamala. And maybe the smurfing done to make her look like The Candidate ™ is what Obama et. al. will use against her. But those totals should not be believed.
>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.
The subreddit WayOfTheBern had a few posts about this topic – both postulated not legitimate sources
https://nitter.poast.org/JoeyMannarinoUS/status/1816063125789065493 – *warning* – posts a James O’Keefe video that suggests that elderly ActBlue enrollees were charged without their knowledge or permission.
Another post posited the squillionaire “smurf” theory with a specific name. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/funny-money-actblue-accused-massive-money-laundering-operation-trump-files-fec-complaint
I can’t speak as to the veracity of either of these particular stories. O’Keefe hasn’t exactly shown himself to be trustworthy in the past. I also can’t believe a woman who couldn’t win a primary in her own state would see such an outpouring of support. Underhanded donations to the Democratic machine wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Hadn’t heard it. Lewis Lapham died just the other day:
https://harpers.org/2024/07/remembering-lewis-lapham/
Thanks, I didn’t see that. May he rest peacefully, a great mind has left us. Started reading him around 35 years ago when I was still a kid.
After leaving Harper’s he put out Lampham’s Quarterly for a few years and then the issues just stopped coming. Very much worth reading front to back, all of them.
Huge loss. I never missed his intense and erudite essays in Harpers. Irreplaceable.
Regarding the large miss on US durable goods orders:
Um, that seems like rather a lot! Now I’ve never looked at this indicator before, but I clicked through and looked at the one year chart, which showed things have actually been going badly since November…
CNN Hyperventilating…
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/24/politics/norad-russian-chinese-bombers-alaska/index.html
Is it intercepting or just tracking? I like the part where officials mentioned that the bombers remained in int’l airspace and were not a threat.
Russia reported an interception near there of US bombers that it warned off a day or two ago. Not sure if this is the same incident reported from different perspectives or if some tit-for-tat activity is happening.
US durable good orders missed by rather a lot!!
Actually, I’ve never looked at this particular economic indicator before, but I clicked through and saw that those four months of consecutive increases were 0.7%, 0.6%, 0.2% and 0.1%; and they followed a decrease of 6.9% in December 2023. So there appears to be a downward trend here especially considering these are month over month data.
A previous version of this comment went into moderation, and I wanted to add more information that I had discovered by following the link but was unable to, so that is why I’ve put it in again. Sorry for the extra work for the moderator!
On a month to month basis, that index is perhaps more volatile due to the transportation aspect…one month Boeing delivers X for a great boost and next month it’s a dud if they miss their mark. Ford in their current earnings is taking a bad hit on their EV targets. Aside from that…washing machines and kitchen appliances maybe tied in to a slow housing market ? I’m rhetorical in saying so…so merely a suggestion.
The bigger number this week was Q2 GDP, which reports at 2.6%..but let’s wait too see next month revision for any alteration of that headline. Back to durable goods though and actually for GDP as well, Alphabet reported this week and their Cap Ex spending this year was a headline catching figure. Lot of spend and investment from most of those Magnificent 7… Nvidia likely a key beneficiary of the spend all else equal.
As per the “Central States Manufacturing” story.
Take it from someone that was burned in the AOL/TIME WARNER merger, as an employee. Also, at the same time, Enron, which was about as extreme of an example as you can find. It is very dangerous to be invested heavily in your company’s stock, because, when it hits the fan, you’re screwed. In the worst case, you lose your job and lose your savings. I didn’t have a choice, all 401k matching and profit sharing was company stock, and I couldn’t sell until I was 50. Things went south at age 48. 60% down, took a decade to come back. So, millionaire today, but, stuff happens tomorrow. And, betcha 100 bucks the “executives” have much more liberal sell policies. Watched the guys on the 47th floor cash in when the SEC filings came in, while the rest of us proles were stuck.
Yeah those two examples cited are plenty egregious…the hype of AOL + Time Warner was a definite tell of a high mark …time to sell stocks and possibly go short (!). Not that an average retail investor can pursue that strategy. The Enron executives served prison time…Andy Fastow was the CFO pulling a fast one using all the Special Purpose Entities to conceal their bullsnot financials.
Imagine that, then existed a functioning DOJ pursuing the bad corporate leaders and pushing them into prison. And so long we knew you well, Arthur Andersen!
Ah. Kamala Harris’ “Michael Dukakis moment” is not about a tank, after all.
…en route to the Gem Lakes in the eastern Sierra for a backpack trip with friends
On Hwy 99 from Visalia to Bakersfield-which is essentially Godzone, there were no Trump signs, and just a couple of anti-Joe efforts which seem horribly dated now.
Kiss of predictive death: Jim Cramer endorses Harris!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/mega-versus-maga-jim-cramer-comes-out-swinging-for-kamala-harris-6e37e77b
Somethiing diifferent: a grim tale of death on Half Dome.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-25/womans-fatal-fall-from-half-dome-renews-safety-concerns-at-yosemite
> “Bait and Switch”
will be interesting to see if Harris is the bait rather than Biden – set up as a late stage bait & switch for Clinton. I just can’t believe Clinton would so easily give up chance to be America’s first female president – especially to a lightweight like Harris. If Clinton gets VP or VP selection gets very drawn out, it may be game on..
something like 60 rachel maddow/lawerence o donnel episodes to air between now and the election.
They will have something to talk about, or they will make something to talk about….
Hillary’s getting on, running out of time to grab the ring. Kamala would be better off with Bernie, he’d be a great insurance plan, ss would know better than to let anything happen to her. Hillary, otoh…
I’ve wondered whether “insurance” (“poison pill”, as used in corporate contexts, also comes to mind) might be a valid framing of DJT’s selection of JDV as running mate. He is even less appealing to TPTB than DJT himself is. It was, reportedly, a last-minute decision, made after the attempt on DJT’s life in the context of serious mistakes on the part of SS. Better JDV as immediate successor than someone whom TPTB would be happy to have as next President.
New Construction Physics–The story of Levittown.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-levittown-didnt-revolutionize
Here are a couple of fascinating discussions by Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, first w/Katie Halper and then with two hosts from The Palestine Pod, on Zionism, Anti-zionism and anti-semitism. The main point he makes is that Zionism itself is antisemitic, that Israel, founded on Zionism not Judaism, has nothing to do with Jews but with Israelis, that the two are completely separate. Judaism is not a nationality, Zionism is.
“Katie debates Antizionism with Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_lAyXpJi6o
“How Zionism stole Jewish Identity”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eye3eOaBGrw
Some of us block Google and Youtube though.
Re bait and switch
“That suggests the heuristic that, going forward, any public-facing Democrat should be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise. It was possible, for awhile, to imagine that public-facing Democrats would lie for given operations or campaigns (RussiaGate; Ukraine). But, sadly, now we need to regard lying as their default setting. It’s the only way to be sure.”
Kirn said something similar although I think he may have been talking about the mainstream press along with politicians in general.
And it’s instructive to compare past eras when Nixon’s lying was touted as his greatest offense (“the coverup is worse than the crime”) and the Clinton impeachment which revolved around “I did not have sex with that woman.” Even earlier I think it was Ramparts magazine that had a cover of LBJ with the words “credibility gap” instead of his teeth. Indeed the lies of the Vietnam period may be the reason that politician lying became such a big issue.
It’s hard to think of an explanation for the seeming deterioration of truth, except to suggest that in a once more religious country Bible ethics made us more aspirationally honest if not very much more so in practice. Any such suggestion would of course trigger the Dem stalwarts to haul out, yet again, The Handmaid’s Tale (Krugman did today) as the roadmap of a Trump led America.. But even if the secular are convinced that religion is full of lies that doesn’t mean they get to create their own lies. Or it shouldn’t.
I may be a lapsed Baptist but I’m not a lapsed my parents. They never lied.
Democrats have become the English.
Bible ethics made us more aspirationally honest
I’ve been badgered for calling the bible a contract, but that’s what it is…
This adding is a bit on the side but religion related…
I asked an atheist friend why he supported the zionists who made claim to palestine from an interpretation of a religious text….all I know is there were a bunch of crickets out in the darkening night…
How Zionism Stole Jewish Identity – Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eye3eOaBGrw
Ice cream! First he gave everyone covid, and now bird flu? Say it ain’t so!