By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Bird Song of the Day
Northern Mockingbird, Bear Island Wildlife Management Area, Charleston, South Carolina, United States. “Song from telephone wire in residential area.”
In Case You Might Miss…
(1) Who engineered the bait and switch?.
(2) Kamala and Lina Khan.
(3) Abolish your lawn!
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:
First poll with Harris at the top of the Democrat ticket; Trump’s position deteriorates (and any advantage he gained from the assassination attempt has been wiped away. Nevertheless, he still leads, albeit within the margin of error. NOTE RCP used to have two pages of swing states; I always used the first one. Now there is only one, which I take as an indicator that Harris v. Trump polling is not all that widespread.
Vibe shift:
Unbelievable vibe shift in the US with Kamala Harris https://t.co/LAZoglUMHW pic.twitter.com/rrMisGHLbu
— Albert Pinto (@70sBachchan) July 26, 2024
* * * “Who Engineered the Political Coup Against Biden?” [Frank Miehle, RealClearPolitics]. “Remarkably, despite the horrific debate performance and the non-stop media narrative that said he was the political equivalent of a dead man walking, Biden remained within the margin of error in national polls. He had barely dropped at all since ‘The Debate.’ He had the delegates, and he had the nomination unless he willingly surrendered it. But something happened. About the same time Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and raised his fist in defiance, Democrats seemed to have concluded that Biden could not win in November. The four days of what is widely believed to be a successful Republican convention only hardened that belief. And whether it is Sy Hersh or some young gun of journalism ready to make his or her name, someone needs to tell the truth about the 10 days that shook the nation, from the moment Trump took a would-be assassin’s bullet on July 13 to the afternoon Biden inexplicably dropped his reelection bid and Kamala Harris was coronated. And the first question that needs to be answered, and which no one in the mainstream media is asking, is ‘Who convinced Joe Biden that debating Trump on June 27, nearly two months before the Democratic convention, was a good idea?’ This was unprecedented.” Good question (personally, I think Biden was arrogant enough to think he could beat Trump. That was one reason he was so angry throughout the debate; he had this stunned look in his eyes, like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. And the date for the beginning of the bait and switch operation: “I would not be surprised if the scheme to unseat Biden was hatched in February when Hur declined to prosecute the president for classified documents violations on the grounds that a jury would clear Biden because they would see him as a ‘sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’ With that declaration, the cat was out of the bag. Maybe Biden’s handlers initially thought he could survive that humiliation, but when the president gave a press conference to declare himself vindicated, he mistakenly identified Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi as the president of Mexico. The wheels may have started turning to jettison Biden in order to preserve the Democratic Party.” • Good argument.
Lambert here: Normally, I use last (family) names. Clinton (not “Hillary”); Sanders (not “Bernie”); Carlson (not “Tucker”). After all, I’m not good buddies with any of these people. However, with Kamala (not “Harris”) I have shifted to what Frank Herbert’s Fremen call “the insultingly familiar form,” for reasons I assume will become increasingly obvious.
“I Do Not Need to Defend Myself for Believing That Political Candidates Should Be Chosen Democratically” [Freddie deBoer]. “I remain disgusted but not surprised by the Democratic party and its machinations, where not even the smallest fig leaf of democratic process survived Harris’s blitzkrieg approach to the nomination. (That is, having it handed to her by her friends in elite Democratic circles.) And I think Democrats are essentially rerunning 2016, where their loyalty to the Clintonite center-right political machine compelled them to nominate an incredibly flawed candidate in a race in which any generic Democratic governor or senator almost certainly would have won. The party never learns. And so we have the confluence of strategic idiocy and rank elitist control. Well: I decline to obediently get onboard the way that (for example) the entire New York Times Opinion section has.” • Fun stuff, well worth a read.
* * * * * * Kamala (D): “The Kamala Harris Surprise” [Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal]. Now to the hundred-day race. I had long thought Kamala Harris couldn’t beat Donald Trump. That’s wrong. She can. We’re a 50/50 country, each side gets 40 going in, you fight for the rest but it can always go either way. As people who speak the technical language of politics say, Mr. Trump has a high floor but a low ceiling. But beyond that, something’s happening.” I’m not sure how I feel to be singing from the same page of the hymnal as Nooners, but it’s been a strange year. More: “Ms. Harris has not, in five years on the national stage, shown competence. She is showing it now, and that is big news. Her rollout this week demonstrated talent and hinted she may be a real political athlete. Her past and famous verbal embarrassments, which shaped her public reputation, almost all took place in interviews and ad libbed arias. They obscured a real proficiency. ?She was striking and strong in this week’s speeches in Milwaukee and Houston. She knows how to act a speech. When she is scripted she is good. That isn’t all put-down. She knows what a good speech is. She can judge it, recognize good material. Not all candidates can. Most can’t. It is its own talent. Milwaukee especially had power. Its theme: ‘We’re not going back.'” Certainly not to FDR. And this very, very curious warning: ” On an average day key figures in our government—the secretaries of state and defense, heads of intelligence and domestic agencies—are on the road, in the conference in Prague and the meeting in Seoul. Right now, with the aged president and the volatile politics, they should stop, stay close to home, be in their offices in Washington. Be there, not on planes and in hotel rooms. The look of solidity is almost as good as the real thing.” • Volatility!
Kamala (D): “Can Harris Pull Off a Victory in Three Months? Three Top Strategists Lay Out How” [Politico]. Patti Solis Doyle: “The last 72 hours have been unbelievable in terms of rollout. She locked up the nomination. Within 36 hours, she got the delegates. She got the endorsements from Congress. She got the money. And her first events have been through the roof.
I think she’s doing it.” Robby Mook: “One advantage she really has that we didn’t have on the Clinton campaign, and I don’t think Joe Biden really had, is the internet is a really safe space for her right now. It’s a great safe space for people to express support for her. So that’s great.” Stuart Stevens: “I think the model for this in a lot of ways is the Obama campaign in ’08. They did a magnificent job in setting it up so that when you voted for Barack Obama, it said something about who you were and what you wanted the country to be, not just who you wanted to be president. And I think that’s the challenge that Harris should run right into.” • And we all know how Obama turned out!
* * * Kamala (D): Tech Lords share views on regulation:
Most Democrats think that we need to save the republic and then we can advocate against bad policy. It doesn’t work that way. An oligarch just told our candidate what to do. That’s the republic ending right there. Silence is complicity. https://t.co/D1TGn8QDxB
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) July 25, 2024
Kamala (D): Tech Lords share views on Lina Khan:
.@andrewrsorkin asks IAC Chairman Barry Diller if he would lobby Vice President @KamalaHarris to drop @LinaKhanFTC:
"Yeah, I would. I think she's a dope," said Diller. pic.twitter.com/JFWrsurhhh
— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) July 26, 2024
Kamala (D): “Silicon Valley Steps Up for Native Kamala Harris in Trump Showdown” [Wall Street Journal]. “Kamala Harris’s strong ties to her native Silicon Valley, dating back to the start of her political career, give her a solid base of financial support that she is tapping for her battle with Donald Trump…. Tech executives are hopeful that Harris’s Silicon Valley ties, combined with her grasp of the impacts of legal regulation—owing to her law-enforcement background—will position her to be open-minded about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, which the Biden administration has at times been hard on. The industry is also hoping it might get an ally in the White House after years of criticism and mounting antitrust enforcement. While Biden has taken an aggressive stance toward antitrust enforcement, selecting Amazon critic Lina Khan to chair the Federal Trade Commission, Harris hasn’t been focused on technology for much of her time as vice president. The Biden campaign had earlier invited donors to a July fundraiser in Piedmont, Calif., hosted by a longtime supporter of Harris. The event is being rescheduled, a campaign spokesman said. ” • That event would be a wonderful opportunity for Kamala to invite Lina Khan and give her a bear-hug (as Zephyr Teachout suggested). But maybe not–
Kamala (D): “Harris Works to Build Bridges to the Business World” [New York Times]. “[Kamala] has expressed skepticism of Ms. Khan’s expansive view of antitrust powers, according to a donor who has spoken privately with the vice president.” • Oh well. More optimistic commentary:
On the other hand… That's one donor is telling that to NYT. Warren, who is pretty much responsible for Khan's appointment, has been making the rounds to pump up Kamala on cable news all week. Perhaps that's her end game, we will see
— Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) July 25, 2024
Kamala (D): “Behind the Democrats’ Fight Over Lina Khan’s Future” [New York Times]. “One wrinkle: Donald Trump’s own running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, has praised Khan as part of his anti-Big Tech stance…. Khan has given no indication that she plans to step down. She has shown a desire to permanently reshape U.S. antitrust law, dating to her law school days. When DealBook asked an F.T.C. spokesman if Khan would consider serving as chair in a Harris administration, he said, ‘Yes.’ The debate underscores Democrats’ anxiety over how Harris would govern. Khan’s appointment arose in part out of Biden’s effort to shore up progressive support in 2020 by giving Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts significant sway over economic regulatory agencies. “Warren, to an extraordinary degree, was the gatekeeper for the administration about appointments,” William Kovacic, a former F.T.C. chair, told DealBook.” • Hmm.
* * * “More than 160,000 people join white women for Kamala Harris Zoom call” [Reuters]. “More than 160,000 people joined a Zoom call on Thursday night to build support for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris among white women, a voter demographic that has supported Republican nominee Donald Trump in the past two elections. Organized by Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group with about 10 million members, the video call included activists, podcasters, the singer Pink and regular voters, several who said they regretted not doing enough before the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House.” • One alert NC reader attended, and threw this over the transom. Lightly edited:
The White Women webinar format zoom call last night? Oiy!
Tapped out after 30 minutes. Not verbatim, but essentially, too much along the lines of ‘We KNOW we’re white women of privilege and comfort and satisfaction while our black sisters are left hurting. Suburban white women handed the WH to tRUMP and now it’s time for us to step up.’ Heavy group identity guilt politics statements by every white woman speaker that I hear, that said, Shannon Watts was pretty good as a speaker. More women kept coming on, technical glitches, knocked off the call several times due the massive audience. Not sure about total listeners and total raised. FFS, Glennon Doyle? Pink. So, for a younger audience. Ok, sigh. You need Taylor Swift for that.
Look, I don’t have life units to waste. Maybe there was some hard data and charts later, but they lost me fast…..
You know who did this stuff well? Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio and the PAC they joined to get it done. I Zoomed into their effort to get abortion in the Ohio constitution. Every meeting was tight, solid, lots of information, charts, activity reporting-out on overall state stats, counties to focus on. Charts galore, bullet points about next steps. etc. Done in exactly an hour. Screens and screens of women watching. Tossed in bigly to a super focused razor sharp effort. Why? They showed me very clearly they were a wise investment in a larger team.
Anyway, one has a short window to get donors engaged on a Zoom. All the identity politics centered remarks were just tiresome and I clicked off. Billionaires and identity politics fans can fund it.
This is a fair reaction:
I could be wrong or just ignorant because white women have never been my focus.
But I don’t remember a “white women: answer the call” equivalent for Hillary. And there definitely wasn’t one with over 100K participants that raised over a million dollars.
Things are different. pic.twitter.com/0necTpgjlN
— April (@ReignOfApril) July 26, 2024
OTOH, if this is all #ImWithHer/#Resistance types….
Another reaction:
It's all fun and games now, but a lot of the rhetoric on that call was about how white women needed to support Kamala as an act of self-actualisation for….white women. If she veers from their expectations for even one second, they will call her "ungrateful." (Just like RBG said… pic.twitter.com/tJa1cgw7xc
— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) July 26, 2024
* * * Kamala (D): “Project Coconut is a go” [FWIW]. “And as of yesterday, the Vice President now has a personal account on TikTok, @KamalaHarris, which has already gained 1.4+ million followers and 2.1+ million likes at the time of writing. The DNC is also getting in on the online momentum and doing some brat-branding on new fundraising ads as well. Overall, the Harris campaign’s social accounts have gained a huge influx of followers – for example, data from InsTrack shows the Instagram account @KamalaHQ gaining 48,000+ since President Biden stepped aside last Sunday. Pro-Harris content also flooded TikTok. Politically attuned users across Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok began using the coconut emoji en masse, a reference to the most viral meme about the VP. “PROJECT COCONUT IS A GO,” commented one excited TikTok user. “WE RIDE AT DAWN, COCONUTS!” remarked another.” • Of course, social media numbers are never gamed. “WE RIDE AT DAWN, COCONUTS” is so Obama 2008 (“Fired up! Ready to go!”). But this is not 2008.
Kamala (D): “What’s fueling Kamala Harris’ TikTok surge” [Politico]. “There’s a vibe shift brewing on TikTok: The platform, which had been dominated by pro-Trump content, has been exploding with Kamala Harris memes, many of which favorably highlight her quirky demeanor and tie her to the trendiest cool girl anthems. Even before President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race on Sunday, Harris memes created by TikTokers had dominated social media, flooding mostly young people’s feeds with video edits of her viral phrases, quirky tangents and “girl boss” moments — like this video of Harris laughing away, with a hint of the signature Gen-Z irony in the caption, which reads “Why did I make this.” These memes paint Harris, who has rarely been in the spotlight during the Biden administration, as a chill auntie — someone who could dish out advice that is both a little silly yet serious at the same time…. Harris’ campaign hasn’t wasted a moment in jumping on the meme momentum, and their efforts have paid off.” • Then of course–
Kamala (D): “TikTok’s Survival Is at Stake in All-Out Fight Against US Ban” [Bloomberg]. “The Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok is battling a potential US ban with the signature tools of American democracy — lawyers, lobbyists and money. TikTok has deployed Washington power brokers and $1,500-an-hour attorneys to fend off a new law barring the app unless its Beijing-based parent, ByteDance Ltd., divests. With a $4.8 million ad campaign, a full-court press on Capitol Hill and the US Constitution, TikTok is in a multifront fight for its survival.” • So TikTok has every reason to be nice to the current administration, and Kamala. Not that I’m suggesting that the Tiktok recommendation algorithm is a black box that can be gamed, of course.
* * * Kamala (D): “Family, Friends and Longtime Aides Dominate Harris’s Inner Circle” [Wall Street Journal]. “[T]he expected Democratic presidential nominee has kept her inner circle tight. She has relied on her family members, close friends and longest serving aides to help navigate her career and policy decisions. Unlike President Biden, Harris, who was elected to the Senate from California in 2016, remains relatively new to Washington and is still building her political brain trust…. Harris’s family members have been her closest advisers. All of them, like her, have a legal background. Harris’s only sibling—her younger sister, Maya Harris—was chairwoman of her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, which was seen as dysfunctional and with some blaming her. Maya Harris didn’t have a formal role at the White House and previously served as policy adviser to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 White House bid. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was previously an associate attorney general during the Obama administration. West has traveled in recent days with the vice president to events, including a fundraiser on Saturday. West is chief legal officer for Uber. Harris also has a close relationship with her niece, Meena Harris, a lawyer and an author. Two days before Biden dropped out of the race, Harris visited the model Tyra Banks’s new ice cream shop in D.C. with Meena’s two daughters. Since their marriage in 2014, Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, an entertainment lawyer, has been her biggest public supporter.” • Other names: Rohini Kosoglu, Josh Hsu, Kristine Lucius, Ike Irby, Lorraine Volz, and Julie Chavez Rodriguez.
Kamala (D): “Team Kamala: the people behind Harris’s White House run” [FInancial Times]. Wall Street: “Wall Street funds are pouring into Harris’s campaign. Jon Henes, a top corporate bankruptcy adviser, formerly of Kirkland & Ellis, and longtime Harris ally in finance, has been co-ordinating fundraising. Other leading Wall Street figures rushing to help include Ray McGuire, the Lazard banker and former Citigroup executive, and Brad Karp*, chair of corporate law firm Paul Weiss. Blair Effron, the veteran dealmaker at Centerview Partners and a fixture of Democratic fundraising, is also on board. So are Blackstone president Jonathan Gray, Evercore co-founder Roger Altman, and Marc Lasry, the hedge fund investor and former co-owner of NBA team the Milwaukee Bucks.
‘Many in Wall Street have been extremely supportive of Kamala for years,’ said a Democratic fundraiser. ‘Blair and Brad backed her hugely in the 2020 presidential primaries . . . they aren’t last minute supporters.'” Tech: “Reed Hastings, the chair of Netflix, had been among the Democratic donors openly pushing Biden to quit the race. He immediately pumped $7mn into Harris’s campaign after the president dropped out. Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist who co-founded LinkedIn, also swiftly backed her bid for the White House.
Republicans have made inroads among Silicon Valley donors in recent years — but Harris has kept her allies. They include Brad Smith of Microsoft, who hosted a fundraiser for the Biden campaign at his Seattle home last year. Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer at Meta, is another prominent supporter.” NOTE * Brad Karp gave Alvin Bragg $1000.
* * * Trump (R): “Trump campaign plays defense amid Harris honeymoon” [Axios]. “Vice President Kamala Harris is reveling in record fundraising, an early bump in the polls, and a growing grassroots army. It’s a “honeymoon” of epic proportions — but one the Trump campaign is betting won’t last.” Because -gasms don’t last, by definition. Here’s a great example: “‘It was the first time we’ve had an Obama-like moment, a feeling where it was pure and it was good, and people were doing things bigger than themselves,’ Silicon Valley fundraiser Steve Spinner told the New York Times.” • I would like to see more defense of Vance, who after giving an economic populist speech at the Republican National Convention, has been drowning in a wave of snark (at least on my Twitter feed). Commentary:
Trump is so lost and weakened right now. He sounds like Bob Dole in 1996, except mean. Very normie GOP. Really missing Steve Bannon's populist strategies.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) July 26, 2024
Does Trump in fact look “lost and weakened”? Can readers comment?
Trump (R): “Unpacking JD Vance’s Labor Record” [On Labor]. “Despite his claimed support for workers’ right to organize, Vance’s voting record on labor issues has rarely been supportive of worker power or voice. Instead of backing popular pro-worker bills and nominees, Vance has advanced watered-down legislation that could weaken labor protections. Vance told Politico that he is not in favor of the PRO Act, which would outlaw the right-to-work laws Vance claims to oppose. His opposition to this legislation is rooted in his belief that it would serve only to empower ‘current union leadership… that’s completely in bed with the Democratic Party.’ Vance has instead supported other labor law reforms that are decidedly less popular within the labor movement. Vance partnered with Republican senator Marco Rubio on the Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act of 2024 (TEAM Act), which claims to improve worker voice by relaxing the NLRA’s ban on company unions and promoting ’employee involvement organizations.’ Unlike unions, these organizations may be funded and dissolved unilaterally by employers. The TEAM Act draws heavily on recommendations by American Compass, run by former Mitt Romney advisor Oren Cass. American Compass advocates for the TEAM Act and worker-management councils, which Cass claims could strengthen ‘worker-management trust,’ while unions like the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers have decried the bill as promoting ‘company unions’ and allowing new avenues for employers to hold off unionization.
Trump (R): “Speculation Swirls About What Hit Trump. An Analysis Suggests It was a Bullet” [New York Times]. “[A] detailed analysis of bullet trajectories, footage, photos and audio by The New York Times strongly suggests Mr. Trump was grazed by the first of eight bullets fired by the gunman… A key piece of evidence in The Times’s analysis is a live video feed that captures Mr. Trump’s reaction as the first three gunshots are fired. The crack of the bullets are heard as they pass the microphone that Mr. Trump speaks into. Almost a second elapses between the first and second shots. During this brief interim, Mr. Trump starts reaching toward his ear, according to footage and audio of the event analyzed by The Times and Rob Maher, an audio forensics expert at Montana State University. ‘He flinches, and his right hand already starts reaching for his right ear during that time between the first audible shot and the second audible shot,’ Mr. Maher said.
Mr. Trump’s fingers are bloodied as soon as he touches his ear, as seen in a picture taken by Doug Mills, a veteran Times photographer.” • Notice the lack of agency in “speculation swirls.”
* * * “Forget the Hype: It’s Still a Working-Class Election” [Ruy Teixiera, The Liberal Patriot]. “Who can blame Democrats for being a bit slap happy? They were staring into the abyss and now have a reprieve. They have a younger candidate and a more enthusiastic, unified party. Those are important and positive differences. But there are also similarities to their previous situation that are highly negative and can’t be wished away…. These double digit Democratic deficits among the working class have been a regular feature of this election cycle. These deficits have been driven by worsening performance among the white working class…. Can she do it? Sure, anything’s possible. But Democrats would be well-advised to be clear-eyed about the challenge. What Harris has to overcome is illustrated by an early July Pew poll that had a large enough sample size (N=over 9,400) to allow blacks and Hispanics to be broken down by working-class vs. college-educated. Both racial groups show strong educational polarization that is much larger than what was observed in 2020. Hispanic working-class voters in this poll preferred Trump by 3 points over Biden, compared to a 22 point margin for Biden over Trump in 2020. Among black working-class voters, Biden was leading by 47 points over Trump, compared to an 82 point lead for Biden in 2020. A working class-oriented campaign would appear to be in order. But so far there is little indication that is what the Harris campaign has in mind. A widely-circulated memo from the campaign sees Harris’ candidacy as building on the “Biden-Harris coalition of voters” and mentions black voters, Latino voters, AANHPI voters, women voters and young voters. Working-class voters are conspicuous by their absence.” • If this is a working class election, then the Democrats cannot win — unless (I hope this is clear) the Republicans lose if for them. Hence the online assault on Vance.
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!
Social Norming
“Pandemic disbelief identified as key factor in vaccine hesitancy” [Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy]. N = 290. “A new study among Hispanic people in the United States suggests that an initial disbelief in the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to vaccine hesitancy among that population, especially among parents making vaccine decisions for their children. The study is published in PLOS One. … Overall, there was high vaccine uptake in the sample, with 88% of parents and 80% of youth receiving at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Most notable, however, was the role of youth pandemic disbelief (belief the pandemic was a conspiracy or not real) in vaccine hesitancy: In addition to youths’ pandemic disbelief predicting their own vaccine hesitancy, the authors wrote, it also predicted their parents’ vaccine hesitancy. ‘Parents are often thought of as the key decision maker for children under the age of 18, and although the final decision may rest with them, our findings suggest that their child’s perspective, particularly around disbelief, may be part of this decision-making process,’ the authors concluded.” • Perhaps the children read English-language media?
Lambert here: New York Hospitalization leveling out for two days, and Cleveland Clinic positivity slowing is the first good news I’ve seen in some time.
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 25: | ★ National [6] CDC July 6: | |
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| Positivity | ||
| National[7] Walgreens July 22: | ★ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic July 20: | |
 |
 |
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| Travelers Data | ||
| Positivity[9] CDC July 1: | Variants[10] CDC July 1: | |
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 |
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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) Slowing
[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
Inflation: “United States PCE Price Index Annual Change” [Trading Economics]. “The annual PCE inflation rate in the US decreased to 2.5% in June 2024 from 2.6% in May, in line with market forecasts.”
Tech: “There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent” [The Verge]. “On Monday, it initially seemed like the beginning of the end for Intel’s desktop CPU instability woes — the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the ‘root cause’ of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won’t fix it. Citing unnamed sources, Tom’s Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked. Intel is ‘confident’ the patch will keep it from happening in the first place. (As another preventative measure, you should update your motherboard BIOS ASAP.) But if your defective CPU has been damaged, your best option is to replace it instead of tweaking BIOS settings to try and alleviate the problems…. This raises lots of questions. Will Intel recall these chips? Extend their warranty? Replace them no questions asked? Pause sales like AMD just did with its Ryzen 9000? Identify faulty batches with the manufacturing defect? We asked Intel these questions, and I’m not sure you’re going to like the answers. Why are these still on sale without so much as an extended warranty? Intel has not halted sales or clawed back any inventory. It will not do a recall, period. The company is not currently commenting on whether or how it might extend its warranty. It would not share estimates with The Verge of how many chips are likely to be irreversibly impacted, and it did not explain why it’s continuing to sell these chips ahead of any fix.” • First Boeing, now Intel.
Tech: “OopsGPT” [The Atlantic]. “[AI scammers companies] tend not to point out that generative-AI models are prone to providing incorrect, and at times fully made-up, information—and yet it keeps happening. Early this afternoon, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a prototype AI tool that can search the web and answer questions, fittingly called SearchGPT… In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29 and will have its final concert on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)” • in the demo. Are these people high?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 46 Neutral (previous close: 39 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 49 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jul 26 at 1:51:49 PM ET.
Permaculture
This doesn’t solve the world’s problems. But solves problems for these insects, and for you:
Dig up your lawns! I removed 25 sq m of lawn two months ago. Dug out 10cm of topsoil, replaced with low nutrient soil (90% sand) to prevent weed growth and laid wildflower turf. This is the result with an explosion of butterflies, bees, moths and tiny wasps. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/pCCsyAIjCa
— Anthony Costello (@globalhlthtwit) July 26, 2024
Health
“Age and familiarity effects on musical memory” [PLOS One]. “This study explored the effects of age, familiarity on a recognition memory task for new music in a live concert and lab setting. Overall, we find no main effect of age when tasked with recognizing a theme in a piece of music, nor any significant interaction of age with familiarity, setting or musical training…. This study further supports the use of music in particular as a medium for cognitive maintenance and training in older adults by offering evidence that recognition memory is not affected by age in a realistic listening situation. Accordingly, music recognition could be considered a strength, onto which other aspects of memory could be scaffolded in a rehabilitation setting. For example, it may be easier to remember something if you pair a melody with it. In fact, this idea is not new. Throughout history songs have been used to transmit information orally between generations.” • Hmmm.
The Gallery
Arrangement in pink, gold, and black:
Woman with a Cat https://t.co/uMdBjQjmDj pic.twitter.com/z6gDREpFCu
— Edouard Manet (@artistmanet) July 21, 2024
Zeitgeist Watch
“The Origin & Evolution of Italian Stuffed Pasta Shapes” [Kottke.org]. “Our results showed that, with the exception of the Sardinian Culurgiones, all the other pasta ripiena from Italy likely had a single origin in the northern parts of the country. Based on the proposed evolutionary hypothesis, the Italian pasta are divided into two main clades: a ravioli clade mainly characterized by a more or less flat shape, and a tortellini clade mainly characterized by a three-dimensional shape.” • Handy diagram of the pasta clades:
News of the Wired
“Lewis H. Lapham” [Harper’s]. “In 1984, Lapham introduced the iconic Harper’s Index, Readings, and the Annotation, journalistic forms that recognized the time constraints modern readers faced amid the flood of information in the electronic age. This redesign remains the foundation of the magazine to this day, and Lapham’s editorial sensibility continues to guide our work.” • Even though Lapham’s name isn’t on any of these forms, nonetheless they will live on. Editors forever!
“Bible Study And The Oxford Comma” [Future Lawyer]. “Another Oxford Comma fail. Educate your children about the Bible; but do it properly.”
Dad.
Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From TH:
TH writes: “I struggle with telling the difference between a wild sunflower and a black-eyed susan, so I looked it up. I’m sure you already know, so feel free to call this whatever you like, but I’m pretty sure, based on the leaves, mostly, that this is a black-eyed susan.” Readers? I think it is too, but are there signs to look for?
Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So if you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for three or four days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:
Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated:
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The Bible example isn’t one where an Oxford comma would be present…it doesn’t go in lists with only two items. The meme is just an amusing example of homophones.
I stand corrected. That comma needs to be there, though.
Actually it’s a conjunction of two verbs, not two independent clauses, so it’s not a candidate for a comma…
Washington Post Live held a session on long COVID.
The looming public health challenge of long covid
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcyzaV12bsg
Transcript:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/transcript-long-covid-where-things-stand/ar-BB1qD0K2
“Coronated”. Genuine question here. When did that become a widely accepted word? If memory serves me the USA used to use the UK English term “crowned” (even though it obviously doesn’t fit the US model of government – it was used in a metaphorical not literal sense).
Just curious cause it grates on my ear but maybe that’s just me.
When? 1623. (Merriam-Webster)
Coronated”. Genuine question here. When did that become a widely accepted word? If memory serves me the USA used to use the UK English term “crowned” (even though it obviously doesn’t fit the US model of government – it was used in a metaphorical not literal sense).
Just curious cause it grates on my ear but maybe that’s just me.
It is not just you.
The best I can come up with is that the word “coronation” evokes images of coronas, penumbras and halos. You will notice that the word is never used for men, but can clearly be inferred in the apotheosis of Hillary Clinton by her crowd of PUMA’s.
We used to just elect people, now we have to canonize them so that they can become the elect.*
* https://www.bibleref.com/Romans/8/Romans-8-33.html#:~:text=This%20is%20Paul's%20first%20use,God%20through%20faith%20in%20Christ.
Thanks. Thought I’d been vulnerable to a Mandela Effect!
Musical interlude: The warm-up band for Kamala’s next fundraiser in the Hamptons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9FaoRJAgII
So beautiful! Careful! might induce me to vote for her.
The British monarch ascends to the throne immediately upon the death of the previous monarch. If I understand the process correctly, this is called “accession”. The “coronation” is the official ceremony, which takes place later. William Walton composed Coronation Marches in 1936 and 1953. Of the two, I prefer the one from 1936.
I think ‘coronated’ is one of those words coined by a snarky grammarian which got parroted unironically by idiots who know no grammar nor snark. Like ‘burglarized’. In this case though, I believe I do detect a smidgeon of snark.
I also noticed the piling on of Vance on X but I think there’s a simple reason for that: no one cares about veeps.
The Vance mentions trend negative because the side that’s behind often tries beating up the other side’s veep candidate (a loser strategy with a history of being a loser strategy). The side that’s ahead will usually take the high road rather than get into the mud over something most people don’t care about.
Once Harris names someone, the R’s will smear that person for a while.
Strife goes on.
“gasms don’t last”….. I am the last guy to wax lyrical on this but I’ve met a few women who say they can do *ahem*
yeah…ahem…there’s a talent to it,lol.
sadly, one cannot put it on a resume.
aside from exhaustion….as well as certain priors, like body image issues, attitudes regarding sex and the like…i see no physiological limit to the female orgasm.
i studied this extensively in my first college library experience….and ever since.(together 26 years!)
men, however…are like a sneeze.
(altho not all sneezes are alike,lol)
jeez…
File under Psychopath Watch
Bonnie Henry declares victory: B.C.’s top doctor ends four-year COVID-19 public health emergency
“She acknowledged the decision would make some people anxious …”
See summary map of wastewater monitoring data.
Schlutzkrapfen, a pasta desperately in need of a diminutive!
About the FTC, could Diller be saying that Kamala is a dope? That would reinforce those betting market lines running 3:1 against her electability.
Currently around 2.5 to 1 on polymarket (crypto oriented though), up from 2.8 or so to 1 yesterday.
https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024/will-kamala-harris-win-the-2024-us-presidential-election?tid=1722020359818
Biden sent a rep to the BTC conference, lol (it wasn’t Gensler)!
Billionaire’s telling me someone is bad for business, or telling me how to manage my measly thousands of retirement, 2 things I can ignore
My “lawn” in Texas was about 4 acres of woods, another 2 acres of meadows and what’s less was a poorly maintained lawn. Parts of it looked nice, most of it was kind of a mess. I liked it.
> kind of a mess
“Birds love a mess” is an axiom I was taught some time ago.
That can be quite an unfortunate saying in the UK that has been the archetype of multiple (generally bad) sitcoms & dramas :(
That makes me feel better about my “mess.” I do have a large patch of spearmint, and it was a pollinator attracter that outdid bee balm or echinacea this year. Bumble bees, mud daubers and lots of little thingies flocked to it for a week. Our granddaughter was delighted by them.
aye! this american pmc love of order…manifested as “Lawns” and monocropped fields of grain, etc….is entirely contrary to nature.
as the crabgrass, et alia keep trying to tell us.
my front pasture looks like a big meadow…complete with a bunch of mesquite trees(that i planted, from seed, at 4am,lol)…much to mom’s distress.
i even spread some prickly pear pads at random out there, for to create habitat and protection for oaks and such(so the sheeps/deer dont eat them)
mom wants a Lawn as pasture…but that absolutely requires copious amounts of herbicide, as well as broadcast irrigation…neither of which i will do(i’ll do drip lines for trees)
in the front pasture…there are still sticker burrs…which is an indicator of low fertility…specifically low nitrogen.
so those areas are targeted for the deployment of the bano barrels(from the composting toilet)…and the next spring, as if by magic…the sticker burrs fail to germinate,lol.
earlier this year…and right before a giant rain event…neighbor rancher sprigged the 2 fields that surround the long axis of my part of the place with coastal bermuda…for permanent pasture and haymaking.
it greened up real quick…and mom was in love with it,lol….”i want to do that”….i said, just wait,lol…because all that uniform growth was not bermuda, but “careless weed”, and endemic amaranth that thrives on low fertility(also esp. low N) soils…and sure enough, its 5 foot tall now.
making trillions of seeds that will spill into her place in the next few years(unlikely to invade my side, because of the high NPK i have made happen)
cows and sheep and goats and geese eat the amaranth seedheads…as well as the young vegetative growth…but the rest is too prickly.
this collective and fetishistic love of the uniform in supposedly natural spaces is contra-Mother Nature.
My life took a pronounced turn for the better, the day I decided to consider the green part of our yard to be pasture as opposed to a lawn.
Doesn’t this love for order far predate the rise of any self-aware PMC? Someone should do a history of the lawn in America. Maybe somebody already has.
I wonder how much of this love of order might be German and Scandinavian culture-derived? Large parts of America were heavily settled by Germans and lesserly by Scandinavians. I have read that America was a bilingual country ( English and German) before the Evil President Wilson unleashed his wave of antiGermanitic persecution all over America. Do the zones of neatest lawns/ highest yard order correlate with zones of heavy German ancestry? Or not?
The guy who dug up his lawn . . . what did he do with that 10cm deep layer of grass-roots and soil that he dug up?
I live in a co-op with too tiny a yard to do grand experiments like this and too many rules about what we can and can’t do. But if I had a front yard big enough to raise the question . . . how to grow some pollinator-friendlies here, I might do it that way … leave as much lawn as I wanted for lawn uses and purposes, and the part I was going to turn into a pollinator paradise I would first spend a couple years testing it to know what minerals it was defficient and/or excess in and then add those minerals in the form of ground-up rock and mineral powders. Then begin a process of deep digging and mixing, planting soil-improving bioactivity-boosting cover crops, mix those in, etc.
When I had a several-foot-deep layer of pretty good top-ish soil, I would then plant mixes of different heavy nectar and/or pollen producers coming into production at different times so as to keep pollinators attracted and fed throughout the season.
A sort of semiawaki pollinator paradise.
I don’t see the love for order as represented by lawns as so much a PMC thing as a (Xtian) religious thing, the concept of “wild” being heathen, and not productive. Not that lawns produce much of anything, but it keeps the wild and unkempt at bay, for some. I grew up in the woods, and when a friend raised his two young daughters there, his wife insisted they move to town, as she was afraid they were getting feral.
I particularly appreciate your NC name. My friend who’d had to move (as below) was by one day, and had to go back to his (new) home in the middle of Nyack. He dolefully said “I have to go from a thousand trees and no lights, to a thousand lights and no trees”.
At which point I reminded him he’d had his chance to buy it, and refused.
Thank you for the kind words. It was inspired by the phrase ” Thousand points of light” from President Senior Bush’s speech about volunteering and volunteerism.
Sometimes I see hopeful little bits of green-tech or garden-tech or practice or whatever and offer them here as a “point of green”.
” If a thousand million hundred people all did this little green thing, how much Little Green Thingery would be achieved overall?”
“German and Scandinavian culture”
Damn Lutherans! ;)
My explanation is that we picture ourselves as English lords and ladies with sheared grass and boxwood.
Actually, if we bring religion into it, old Ezra and his scribes probably had it right in the second Genesis story. All that order comes from our desire to be in control, i.e. to be as gods.
nah. all this pathology derives from the scots irish and lesser sons of english gentlemen….and criminals derived therefrom.
lots of Calvin in there, too.
corralling Nature, and all, as what god wants, somehow…and by some kind of logic.
again…pathology.
let Nature, herself, show the way.
Hey! Here in Lutheran central, gotta say I don’t think religion is to blame. The primary factor is more age. Boomers tend to be traditional lawn focused (scrawny old dudes spraying weeds in the cracks, though friendly) vs the relatively few Millenial homeowners who are planting neat patches of native flowers. As the genx weirdo pushing the edge of municipal sanction for a front yard of 8 foot tall flowers on the curb line.
The Boomers were children once, and young. They were raised in houses with lawns out front, lawns put there by their Greatest Generation parents. So the Lawn predates the Boomer.
Leaving the question still standing . . . where did Lawnism come from. And I don’t just mean “lawns”. I mean Lawnism . . . sometimes Militant Lawnism. The kind of Lawnism which seeks zero dandelions per whole subdivision. Where did that come from?
IDK. Every one of my friends with German ancestry was/is (ex-)Catholic. I don’t think I ever met an actual German Lutheran, although I’m told they exist (the only sort of exception is a friend’s cousin’s father-in-law, a former Lutheran pastor who became a married Catholic priest.)
I don’t see the love for order as represented by lawns as so much a PMC thing as a (Xtian) religious thing, the concept of “wild” being heathen, and not productive. Not that lawns produce much of anything, but it keeps the wild and unkempt at bay, for some. I grew up in the woods, and when a friend raised his two young daughters there, his wife insisted they move to town, as she was afraid they were getting feral.
PS- I wrote the above just as TPoG’s post came up. He’s quite correct. Have you ever lived in Germany? “Order” is a very important concept there in oh so many ways. Home rentals have what’s called “ordnung”, which is exactly what it sounds like. Every resident takes turns cleaning the common areas of the residence, including waxing the stairs, etc.
My sister had a German boyfriend in ’70s NYC, and I studied with a German silversmith in Philly, and then Nuremberg. I thought I’d love being there, but then realized there was a reason they were in the US; they had trouble conforming. As did I (and my wife as well, whose father was a Lutheran of German descent, whose 1920 rural Illinois birth, sorry, baptismal, certificate was in German), even in the dear old US of A.
“…the concept of “wild” being heathen…”
yes…see Camille Paglia.
those folks are terrified of the Cthonic, generative aspects, of Nature.
and the Chaos that it necessarily entails.
so, yeah…goes to way before our current pmc ninnies.
hence the same recurring themes: inquisitions,excommunications,pogroms…. soon, i’m sure, auto da fe, etc.(see: bushnell, et alia)
if she could be certain that the authorities would take her side, i’m sure my mom would burn me at the stake in a heartbeat…and all her sins with me.
thats just who they are.
ironic that they never use those mirrored bubble walls for introspection…
What was the deal back in 2019 with Kamala? Iirc the Dem power brokers wanted to anoint her as the nominee even at the very beginning of the primary season, but Tulsi Gabbard destroyed her in about 15 seconds in the first debate and Kamala had to drop out early after dismal showings in polls. The Dems then rotated through Buttegieg, Bloomberg, and a few others, in their efforts to stop Sanders. Biden wasn’t a real choice of theirs. He just happened to be the last one sitting down when the music stopped. Do I have that about right?
Almost. If you search back a little ways on NC you’ll find what Lambert describes as the Democratic “Night of the Long Knives” — Obama made a phone call; Clyburn endorsed Biden, and the other candidates dropped out like they’d been threatened by the mafia that morning. (Sanders was additionally dealing with the fallout of being stabbed in the back by Warren just before this all happened, which is likely an early indication that something was up.) Biden wasn’t “a real choice,” he was the only choice. That’s how they do things.
And also, Warren was the only candidate that did not drop out, conveniently, as she took votes from Sanders, not Biden.
Tulsi Gabbard also stayed in, but was then denied a place in the debates, despite having delegates.
Regarding Warren, I find it interesting that we now find out that she was the power behind the appointment of Lina Khan. Was that the price for playing her part in the primary?
That was my first thought as well, actually! Perhaps. I’m always surprised that any of these people might keep their word though. But the Bidens are said to favor loyalty.
I was upset with Sanders for not demanding that Gabbard be included in subsequent debates, as per the rules. It was a failing on Sanders’s part.
I think it was a little bit that, but mostly the DemParty supporting a primary challenger against Gabbard, which led her over time to leave the DemParty which doublecrossed and betrayed her.
She is still auditioning for a place in Republican politics. She is not Trump’s VP nominee. I predicted she would not be and I was right. But was I good or was I just lucky?
The thing I will always remember about the night of the Long knives was that it was immediately before super Tuesday.
Therefore, it disenfranchised a substantial proportion of the national Total primary voters, I think it was about 20%. It was so undemocratic:
don’t wait one day later and announce it after super tuesday. No! That wouldn’t be the style of the (un)Democrat party!!!
Even electeds among the Ds now admit this.
Let’s not try to sanitize history to make it more PMC-palitable. It wasn’t that she had “bad polling” or that she was “running 5th or 6th”. The truth is that Kamala Harris had to ditch the 2020 campaign on the very eve of the California primary, when it became clear she was about to lose a primary, in her own state, by a historic margin, to Bernie Sanders. Her career in politics would have been over had she stayed in that race. The utter irony of the entire affair is that the California primary had always been in June, and in 2020 they decided to move it up to March, to help Kamala lock it down early. So when Freddie deBoer writes of Democrat elites soiling the bed when it comes to picking winners and losers, that’s just one of the aspects of failure that he’s talking about.
Yes, she barely registered in CA polling. I attribute that to voter familiarity with her.
amen, brother.
Well . . . she immunised and impunified Steve Mnuchin for his High Financial Crimes when she was California Attorney General. Wall Street Incorporated took that as a good sign and felt she would be the best Obamaform President to let them get away with it when they triggered their next planned collapse in her Presidency.
Maybe they still hope so.
“I would like to see more defense of Vance, who after giving an economic populist speech at the Republican National Convention, has been drowning in a wave of snark (at least on my Twitter feed).”
JD Vance deserves to drown in a wave of snark. He’s a weird little gremlin who will put on a facade of economic populism when convenient, but at his core he is a dead-eyed striver who will knife anyone in his way to attaining power. Nothing he says should be given an ounce of credulity, nor should any attempt be made to associate his name with any sort of economic populism policy, for fear of poisoning the well.
Not giving credibility to politicians is a good general policy, not just for Vance. Professional liars, much like CEOs.
Seeing the initial campaign stuff for Harris, I kind of get the rah rah rah she’s so awesome stuff as being a variant on commercial ads touting their brand as the fastest growing toothpaste. But it also strikes me as a little too similar to Hillary’s approach, making it about her. She’s already going to win the dem base, how does this help her win over people in swing states?
Sounds like the entire Democrat party
Sounds like he learned everything he knows about politics from the Democrats.
“JD Vance deserves…”
Senator Vance deserves my respect and admiration for the positions long taken on domestic and foreign policy matters. Evidently, Ohioans feel just this way about Senator Vance, and I respect such feeling.
I am not about to be dictated to about how to regard with disdain a person I have come to admire. The name-calling and “shoulds” strike me as sadly offensive.
Forget it, CA. It’s the internet.
(Movie reference, not advice)
Also, considering CAs evident ‘cultural affiliations,’ a quite subtle pun as well.
“Also, considering — evident ‘cultural affiliations’ ”
Evident “cultural affiliations” need be considered.
Please, when possible, explain what “evident cultural affiliations” are impermissible, so I can apologize for any such affiliations or at least try out a mask to hide them.
You take me too seriously CA. My reference was to what appears to the reader to be your “associations,” as revealed through the emphasis put on certain world cultural connections. This is straight up neutral. No overt judgements involved. “Hidden” cultural biases on my part are to be deplored, but considered as integral to my world view. We all come from somewhere, and that fact places limits to our perceptions and abilities of observation.
I, for example, can be viewed as an amalgam of working class English and lower middle class American influences. As such, I am programmed to make certain connections and assumptions based upon prior experience. One such program embedded in my character, (as much as I can be said to possess character,) is a love for puns, verbal and conceptual. This impetus can become imperative.
When “cultural affiliations” become items of social and political currency, the meaning becomes fungible. To that extent, one’s “cultural affiliation” must remain solely within your purview. Defend it vigourously. It forms a large part of yourself.
Be of good cheer. I meant no harm.
“You take me too seriously…”
Ambrit, thank you so much for explaining. You are a gem, and I was foolishly sensitive and did not understand. You are completely correct, and always properly sensitive and helpful.
Good to restore proper balance.
You are too gracious. I can come off a bit “rough” around the edges.
Stay safe.
“Forget it, –. It’s the internet.”
Thank you, I really should understand.
That’s a reference to the famous concluding line to the movie Chinatown, an attempt by me at humor. The movie is set in a period when LA’s chinatown was a center for corrupt dealings. The protagonist, Jake is looking to seek revenge for the shooting of his love interest. His friend tells him it is hopeless, saying “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Captures my thoughts on disagreements on the web.
https://rushkoff.medium.com/im-done-with-climate-doom-2bed1a21cae0
Like tearing up the lawn but on a bigger scale…in Portugal !
I murdered my lawn some years ago. But Bermuda grass fights back, and my dirt remains contested terrain these last several years.
A favored tactic out here is to till the whole space and then airdrop in some clover. It pulls double duty holding down the soil and crowding out the surviving grass. As a bonus, it looks marvelous as it waves in the breeze.
i like vetch for that purpose…plant heavy in fall, and it’ll grow quietly through winter, then burst forth with a tangled mess of vegetative matter in spring…choking out everything(this is in west central texas/northern texas hill country).
i plant tomato plants, etc directly into that mass…clearing a 1-2′ hole in it, and sticking the tom right there, with some oak leaves to keep the vetch in check til the tom is established.
also, geese absolutely love bermuda grass corms(the parts that are underground, like lil taters.)
but it needs to be soaked for them…they’ll stick their heads into the ground to get at them.
end up with geese with mud on their heads.
which is also pretty cool…as they are rather fastidious,lol.
The geese around here are confined to our municipal parks. OTOH, we’ve had wild turkeys wandering our suburb for a number of years now. They do love to rip up the vegetation and dirt to get at what lies below, which annoys some. It’s quite a treat and a bit worrying watching them stop traffic while crossing busy streets. Remarkably, they always seem to use crosswalks. Smarter than their domestic cousins, I figure. Didn’t Ben Franklin favor them over the bald eagle to become our national bird?
domestic turkeys are dumb…the more domestic the breed, the worse they are.
grandma’s adage:”they’ll look at the rain and drown”…which ive actually observed, but it was runoff from the chickenhouse roof…big breasted bronzes.
i buy narragansetts….they are closer to the original wild-type than any of the others…and nobody raises the Texas Wild Turkey for sale, save to the state wildlife folks.
still dumb as rocks…but with a wiley sort of elan,lol.
brain smaller than a chicken.
creatures of habit and instinctual drives…which is what is lacking from the big meat birds.
this very reason, btw, is why i introduced “Red Jungle Fowl” to my chicken flock’s dna….every one of them eventually decided to make a go of it in the wild, and were eaten,lol…but the motherly instinct combines with that of the bantams…and the flock ends up a bit more wily and capable.
the 2 actually mexican barrios in town are full of wild jungle hen type chickens.
fewer coons, etc.
and cats are scared of them.
wild turkeys out here are perfectly suited to their world.
I wonder how close to wild the old village turkeys of Mexico still are.
Thanks, I’ll definitely look into that. Currently, oxalis, which I never planted, takes over for a time in spring and effectively shades out the Bermuda grass. But when I clear it to plant desirables, up comes the BG.
I have lately planted the native ground cover lippia repens, with the odd common name of turkey tangle foot or frog fruit, which is holding its own in a life and death struggle with BG. Lippia has an interesting history, as it was a favored ground cover in the U.S. prior to grass lawns becoming popular.
Thank you! We have a similar looking ground cover in the front (Marin Co., Ca. suburbia). We don’t water much besides flowers and fruit trees; after the rains stop the grass dries and dies back, but there’s this ground cover with similar leaves and little pink blooms, that stay green and bring the bees. It even survived the soda blasting I did one year (vintage Italian aluminum car parts). Killed the grass for a few years. Sodium Bicarbonate, gee, that was dense of me…
Not quite identical to what google shows. Next spring we’ll use googleflower or whatever to figure out exactly what it is.
yall might be talking about wood sorrel…oxalis spp.
leaf looks like a 3 leaf clover…taste one!…if its sour, may be.
mine have little yellow flowers…and they are good soil builders and other- weed excluders…ie: i tolerate them…also seem to remember they may fix N, but dont quote me on that.
i also love spiderworts for the same reasons…i let them tangle up in my beans and toms and whatnot.
edible, as well…so at least i aint poisoning folks if some of it sneaks in to the mix.
spinach is another oxalic acid containing thing…and you want to limit yer consumption of oxalic acid, as a general rule.
same with malabar spinach, which i have growing wild around here, now…good for thickening sauces, and such.
And another bonus in my zone Clover germinates in Spring before the dang Bermuda does!
But I’m definitely going to look into Vetch.
bermuda is a perennial.
hides in the roots/corms when dormant….barring ready application of geese, one can pour full strength vinegar on that patch, and it will kill everything.
might take a few applications, as bermuda is very frelling hardy,lol.
vinegar breaks down readily, unlike almost all chemherbicides.
and if youve got a limestone derived soil(alkaline), yer beans, etc will do better for it.
vinegar is cheap….i get the “cleaning” vinegar for this…forget the percentage/strength.
hafta make sure i dont use that for bbq sauce,lol.
wish i could get it by the barrel, as its an awesome weed killer…and/or reset button for a given bed/patch.
for perennial thorns in ones side like that.
I stopped reading at this, “Could something like homeopathy or acupuncture work on a global level? “
TWiV 1133: Gain of function makes us safer
For those so inclined there is an hour and ten minute discussion, starting at minute 39, of the utility of gain of function research, focusing on a paper in the journal Immunity, Deep mutational scanning reveals functional constraints and antibody-escape potential of Lassa virus glycoprotein complex.
While very much of the conversation involving methods, techniques, and vocabulary are way far away from anything I know much about, the depth of human knowledge displayed regarding the complexities of molecular biology was dazzling.
From: OopsGPT
Key para from SearchGPT:
So these things are never going to reason; they can’t. It is all marketing.
I added orts and scraps.
Psychopath watch:
Bonnie Henry declares victory, ends four-year COVID-19 public health emergency.
“She acknowledged the decision would make some people anxious …”
See wastewater monitoring summary.
Thank you for posting this. In our household we believe her ghoulish announcement has everything to do with the upcoming BC provincial election. Lifelong NDP voters, we will be voting Green. The current NDP government’s public health response to the ongoing Covid pandemic has been a continuous criminal failure.
My, how kind of her to notice.
Intel has been noticeably degrading for years, their transition to 7nm was a cluster and resulted in years of delays. Their launch of the Xe line of graphics process was a mess, with software that wasn’t even close to ready.
This is just a new level that they’re sinking to. If they don’t do something proactive, and toot suite, I don’t see how they can avoid a class action lawsuit. There were reports of ~50% failure rates on servers, though some could be brought back; and immense coverage of OEMs and the like.
Some links:
A Verge article talking about the 7nm mess from 2021 – https://www.theverge.com/22597713/intel-7nm-delay-summer-2020-apple-arm-switch-roadmap-gelsinger-ceo
Gamers Nexus video on Intel’s statement – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVdmK1UGzGs; especially interesting was the interesting way they disclosed things
My current laptop has an Intel EVO chip with no number affiliated. The laptop has a SSD. I hadn’t heard of the chip before. Does it have a track record?
I can’t say for sure, but it seems like they think lower-power chips like those on laptops shouldn’t be affected. Though that doesn’t gel with what they’ve said about the manufacturing problem. I haven’t heard at all clear timelines, but if your laptop has a chip from before October 2022 you should be safe.
You can check to see if you’re impacted using this test: https://youtu.be/wkrOYfmXhIc?si=XzCym6UjLcF3_yW2&t=497
“…if your laptop has a chip from before October 2022 you should be safe….”
thats exactly what i was fixin to ask,lol…having read the verge thing, as well as the toms hardware thing, and understood so very little of it.
NC commentariat is the best commentariat.
It’s worth mentioning that some paranoid types have pointed out that Intel will be even more loathe to fix laptops, since their processors are directly soldered to motherboards, rather than being socketed like desktops.
So admitting fault for the soldered-in processors very likely might only happen when Intel is faced with the speartip of a truly massive class action lawsuit.
Having read through the latest Verge article, all I can say if oof! Intel seems to be executing a controlled flight into terrain. I expect that they’ll be forced to walk some of this back, but are hoping this will be enough to keep their stock prices from crashing.
If you’re looking to build or buy a new pc anytime soon you should really consider an AMD processor, and check for the most thorough of reviews you can find. Though they won’t catch insidious things like oxidation that takes months to year(s) to fully reveal themselves.
Wow, this is like watching the door plug fly away on a Boeing MAX. Is there any evidence that this is also occurring in the server product line? Because if this starts happening there – it will be very bad for Intel. As it is, this looks like it will gob smack smaller system integrators buying tray packs of CPUs because Intel is going to force the SIs to make good on bad CPUs.
Gee, Detroit cannot make a competitive EV (or ICE vehicle), Boeing cannot make a reliable airplane, Intel cannot make a competitive CPU, and Windows/CrowdStrike cannot make a reliable OS.
The trend here is not good unless America can figure out how to inflict BRICS with the same high quality CEOs, C suite, and board members as America.(Let’s face it, you think the American government is bad? They are only emulating their owners, corporate America! But I’m sure we can dump billions of government funding at it, and pretend it’s fixed ala Obamacare/CHIPS/etc!)
Let’s all chant “Greed Is Good”, buy back shares, and get those stocks going up again! Living the American Dream as in yes, it’s a [family blogging] dream, not reality anymore.
Server is the first area where I hard about this issue, that’s where the 50% initial failure rate was from (supposedly about half of those could be brought back). I didn’t watch it, but the YT channel level1techs broke the story, it was just some rumors before their video.
That’s mostly why Intel’s response is so shocking. They’re big, but their server customers are too, and there are more of them. You can get away with screwing over the average person nowadays, but the other corpos don’t take kindly to that.
This might be it – Wendell is digging in:
Intel has a Pretty Big Problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y
You’re right, there’s going to be some very pissed server folks – a huge hit to Intel. Everybody talks about the eventual end of the x86, and the rise of ARM. This could put the spurs to that.
Sorry if this is old news, but TASS is reporting that the Obamas (not just BHO himself) have endorsed Kamala. Maybe this was capitulation in the face of apparent political momentum/force, maybe there was never any real objection, maybe this is part of some incredible double bait-and-switch.
My operating hunch is that Biden will resign at some point not long after the convention under whatever circumstances, and thus KH can be showcased directly in the role to demonstrate her mettle/timber, perhaps being tasked with some major presidential decision.
Please note that this is just a hunch.
> the Obamas
In Links. IIRC Obama wanted Mark Kelly, apparently a former astronaut, also anti-union (it figures).
Turns out Obama is a less powerful figure than Pelosi? Quite possibly.
Pelosi is the heart and soul of the modern Donkeys. I’ll never forget how she shepherded the Bush tax cuts through a hostile Congress in 2010. She could have killed them and brought back revenue for Medicare for all, but she flew her neoliberal freak flag high and proud that day.
She also prevented even the holding of Impeachment Articles Hearings in the House of Representatives.
She was a Cheney-Bushite who wanted to keep Cheney-Bush in power as well as in office till the very last day.
Former Presidents wield exceptional political power within their respective parties, if they know how to use it. There are only two presidential factions in the Democrat Party — the Clinton faction and the Obama faction. Obama the candidate defeated Clinton the candidate in 2008 but nevertheless had to offer her a prominent appointment, if only to avoid offending the competing faction and destroying his own chances in the general election. As a matter of tradition, practicality, and political necessity, Obama also had to bring in plenty of Clinton people to his Adminstrations.
The Night of the Long Knives was an Obama operation, and he installed his vice-president. My guess is that the sop to the Clinton faction was Harris’ nomination as vice-president; even though Obama mused early on Harris’ potential, I have the sense that he cooled to her as he saw what a retail political trainwreck she is. (The King interview on CNN was noteworthy.) The installation of Biden as the choice didn’t work out too well, and that fact probably decreased Obama’s influence over the situation this year. But more to the point, “possession is 9/10ths of the law”, and with Harris in the VP position, dislodging her from getting the nomination would have required complicated maneuvering. By endorsing Harris immediately, the Clintons took the initiative.
I’ve been considering about what to say to any “Blue no matter who” acquaintances I run into about Harris…
And I decided that I should mention that she scored twice as many delegates in this election cycle than she did in the 2020 Primaries.
Which is true, 2X0=0.
If I say it with enthusiasm I will almost certainly get happy agreement followed is some cases by
“Oh, Wait”.
“Blue no matter who” folks better do something about food prices. NOW. Kamala, are you listening? Fat chance…
The Park Fire near Chico now has Zero containment and it is at 164K acres and growing, there’s a cooling trend starting tomorrow which will help.
With luck they will hold it to 250K acres when all is said and done, but that will take some good luck.
I can only assume that the association of coconuts with Kamala Harris is purely ironic, because no one would mistake the “viral meme” of her “coconut tree” speech for the racist insult, right? Ouch.
The age being proxy for memory thing was questioned years ago….partly by yours truly.
We found that it was utility of the objects being evaluated (e.g. how “nice and familiar the music sounds” on this kind of context) almost perfectly predicted response speeds in pressing the mouse as to what you liked.
Age had bugger all to do with it. Research as another example of people being siloed in academic containers. I get bored of pointing this out – not bored of NC, they SHOULD report on these, but the standards of academia are going down the drain.
The truly groundbreaking thing WE found was that stated preferences ARE highly correlated with revealed preferences (What you ACTUALLY DO IN REAL LIFE) if we measure response times using web based stuff that knows how many milliseconds it took you to choose one from four. And if you are worried about what companies like Facebook can get from such data YOU SHOULD BE.
If DJT finds the ground shifting against him, he could change the “conversation” back to his favor by resurrecting his idea to eliminate Obamacare: “Why don’t we just enroll everyone in Medicare?”
That would be a genuinely populist move. The insurance industry, and profit-driven provider corporations, and Big Pharma, would surely scream bloody murd3r, but there’s a great answer to that, too: “I welcome their hatred!”
I doubt he would do that. That’s not the kind of ” Eliminate Obamacare” that either he or the Heritage Foundation has in mind.
Agreed that it seems exceedingly unlikely.
The thing that catches my attention about that 2018 story is that DJT does have a habit of blurting out unwelcome truths (though, given his reputation for BS, perhaps some of this can be thought of as “random BS happens to correspond to what is true (or what would make good policy) a certain fraction of the time.” But it seems to me that the question “why can’t Medicare cover everyone?” is unlikely to have been BS; it was a good question, and still is.)
I have the impression that DJT wants to be regarded in future as having been a “great” President. He wants to make an enduring mark (“MAGA” might not just be a campaign slogan; it might reflect a measure of genuine aspiration). The choice of JDV as his political successor suggests that he hopes to make changes in US politics that will outlast himself (a more conventional pick would, I imagine, have signaled a truce with the “deep state” and an uneventful 2nd term of bog-standard R policy).
Expansion of Medicare to a larger proportion of the population would be an historic accomplishment. The Rs might ride this to power for a generation.
Brownian BS motion.
Imo the election would have to be in doubt or in Kamala’s favor for him to consider such an against class move. Otoh, given that situation… he really wants to win…
Re the many Kamalas upstairs–so Noonan is having a gasm because Harris is making the trains run on time? Didn’t they say that about Mussolini?
Meanwhile back in the quaint land of the “norms” like here
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-july-26-2024-the
there’s wonder regarding this entire bizarre week. In a normal world shouldn’t Harris be saying things like “I am grateful for the support of President Biden [not “Joe”] and await the judgment of the convention?” Kirn says this government by committee approach of the Dem elite smacks of something else (he doesn’t come right out and say the Politburo). Of course authenticity has been in short supply for a long time and you can’t really say billionaire Trump has much greater claim to it. But I agree with Taibbi and Kirn that Kamala and Hillary’s(?) coup is something we should be afraid of rather than celebrating. But then Noonan did once want to kiss Reagan’s foot.
None of the above is looking better all the time. My state will go for Trump in any case.
The MSM’s current job is called cooling out the marks — marks are the people conned by the scammers. In this case the marks are the Dem base voters who voted in the last 3 “primaries”, trying to convince said marks it’s not sot bad, everything is fine, and you don’t really want to complain. Complaining would be bad. Just accept it and move on. / ;)
“Politburo” is the right word. / ;)
They also talk about how “Washingtonology” is now a thing (playing off the old “Kremlinology”).
I think Washingtonology is a better word.
Anyone remember the K Hive? The supposedly massive internet presence which supported Harris until she dropped out of the race, and then vanished? Could it possibly be that her MSM-reported massive surge of internet support is another K Hive?
Asking for a friend.
That’s a good Freddie de Boer. Thanks for the link.
Here’s suggestting that when cooler heads have a chance to stop and think about what has happened with the Dems this year it will have an impact. Not everyone in America is as desperate to stop Trump as they are.
Agreed, he’s on fire and on point. I disagree with him on his assessment of the overall climate for Democrats, however. When the right track/wrong track numbers are this bad, when groceries are this expensive, and when your party depends on placating both sides in Gaza — your incumbency hangs by a thread.
Those are the structural reasons for my opinion. In terms of more retail politics, I don’t believe that even 100 days is too short a time for Kamala Harris to say something blitheringly stupid that repels large numbers of Midwestern voters.
Groceries. Thanks.
Wow, Robby Mook pokes his head out. I guess since the Clintons got their preferred candidate this time over Obama, it’s safe for him to go public again. “The internet is a safe space for [Harris]”. When the censors and propagandists are on your side, of course it’s a “safe space” — for you, anyway.
Are ordinary people generally aware of how phony the internet is these days?
The internet is a big place. Perhaps it should be viewed as a sprinkling of Islands of Sincerity in a big Ocean of Phony. So look for the Islands.
As Elon Donne famously put it:
No blog is an Island,
Entire of itself;
Every blog is a piece of content,
A part of the Mainframe.
If a clod be washed away out of the cloud,
Civilization is the less,
As well if an Influencer were:
As well as if a meme of thy friend’s,
Or of thine own were.
Any blog’s suppression diminishes me,
Because I am involved in the internet.
And therefore never send to know for whom Homeland Security comes,
It comes for thee.
Thank you for the chuckle, ambrit.
Here , for example, is an example of one of the little Islands of Internet Sincerity in the Ocean of Internet Phoniness. They are there and can be found if one knows how to look.
https://www.cultivariable.com/instructions/potatoes/how-to-grow-wild-potatoes/solanum-jamesii/
Intel had an early start with the Pentium FDIV bug in 1994.
Re. ” Brad Karp gave Alvin Bragg $1000.”
Was there a “glory hole” involved?
Just occurred to me that the same folks who went full prude when Al Franken was revealed to have pretended to fondle a sleeping B-movie actors breasts, seem to be the same folks now telling us to mind our own business regarding Kamala Harris’ career advancement strategies.
As I mentioned a day or so ago, Hypocrisy is a core skill set for any aspiring Politico.
I remember reading that since that was a USO show, that part of the joke was that the sleeping B-movie actress would have been wearing body armor and that all Franken would have been fondling would have been body armor. Military people would have been expected to get the joke.
Civilian image-assassins would have been expected to disinterpret that joke and weaponize the disinterpretation. And so they did.
Shame on the Democratic Senators for pruding out so cowardishly on Franken. And I am very disappointed that Franken didn’t go Full Metal Menendez on his fellow Senators.
From the interview with him years later, Fraken didn’t take it well. Seemed to damage him. Mission accomplished I guess.
I don’t think it was prudery on the part of Gillebrand and the others. It was just politics and they saw a way to get rid of him.
Always remember and never forget there is a reason Cuomo appointed her. Gillibrand may not be a major player but she is a loyal political foot soldier. Election years may cause an anomaly, but otherwise political manipulation is usually behind any major action she takes.
re: RCP thing abt who pushed biden out:
this confuses me:
“Democrats worried that the president would be unable to prevent the reelection of Trump, whom they accused of being the greatest danger to democracy since the French Revolution.”
i mean, what an ahistorical rendering!
makes me not want to read the rest.
Now, if ‘they’ had said; “…the greatest threat to democracy since Louis Napoleon,” I could have settled down to some historical schadenfreude.
Seriously now, the present political drama unfolding in America shows distinct overtones of “The Return of the Ancien Regime.”
Lina Khan responds to call for her to be fired: https://www.levernews.com/ftc-chair-lina-khan-responds-to-calls-for-her-firing/?utm_source=newsletter-email&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=newsletter-article
that settles it! she’s goin on the wall of the Wilderness Bar, right next to FDR.
Two things:
First, that Manet composition in pink is a classic triangle. The vertices forge ahead.
Second, that Bible Study quip is not so much Dad as Patriarch.
Delving into Thirds, we have a truncated North American Deep South Zeitgeist Report.
Got an oldie but goodie phone text scam the other day. A number, from another state no less, claiming to be the local United States Postal Service requested that I engage with them for “address verification” so as to free up a package for us that had hung up in the back rooms of the Post Office. For the telephonically challenged, a handy website address was supplied to smooth the way. Being desirous of knobbling these frauds if possible, I googled the USPS scam department, a part of the Postal Inspectors Office. Bing Search, (how I ended up there I’ll never know,) gave me an incorrect web address for the Department. Finally resolved that issue, and so far, no response. I get the feeling that nowadays, no one gives a D— about their job. Either that or the system itself is self-destructing.
On a similar front, I had to return a bulky object Phyl had bought “on approval.” The object in question was a new-fangled wheelchair. Unfortunately, it did not do the trick, so, back it went. I shopped around and settled on UPS for the job. A severe case of sticker shock ensued. A 2’X2’X2′ box weighing 42 pounds cost $210 USD to ship from Mississippi to California. That was the cheapest price. Considering how much the Super Wheelchair cost, (I am embarrassed enough to not divulge the retail price,) the $210 USD was worth the ‘investment.’
Anyway, that’s all for now. Back to tightening up a screed I promised someone.
Stay safe.
Manet: Look at all those diagonals and little triangular shapes that echo the big triangle. And the woman has something on her mind. The cat is still which contradicts all the agitation in the rest of the painting.
Sorry about the big shipping cost! Some years ago, probably pre-Covid, there were at least one or two weeks when mail was being delivered after 9PM, if at all. I saw on-line neighborhood complaints in other parts of the city. Those people hadn’t been getting any mail for a week or more at a time. My call to our U.S. Senator’s office must have been acted on because the head of local PO phoned me and bitched me out for calling the Senator. The couriers might be courageous but I thought it was rich that management literally called me out because they were doing a sh*tty job.
That is really choice about management offloading their failures on the person who complains about them. Where are the IWW ‘liquidation’ squads when we need them?
I mentioned earlier about having spoken to the mail carrier a week ago about the late delivery of the mail, especially on Saturdays. His response was to mention that a third of the carriers were out sick. Also, management had cut labour staffing and demanded that the remaining labour “take one for the Team.” Biden not replacing DeJoy with a Labour friendly top dog is yet another one of “Creepy” Joe’s transgressions. Every Democrat Party President since at least Clintoon has been a DINO. Time for them to go extinct.
Full agreement about all of the diagonals in the Manet. All of those diagonal brush strokes in the dress! The colour composition fits an “uneasy” theme as well.
I know what the Harris coconut meme is about, but I keep thinking: brown on the outside, white on the inside.
Yeah the last time I knew, it was an epithet. Guess I am not up on things.
thats what Tam always meant by it….a mexican/lanino who behaved as a white person…forgot where they come from, etc…ie: goin by Eli, instead of Elais.
maybe like a bubbleuniverse version of black gangsta rappers owning the n-word.
and doing it with maximum cringe , as is their wont.
Amfortas, yep, the first time I heard it, an Indian friend was telling me they had been called it and it surely was not a good thing.
Yes. At UC Santa Cruz around 1990 south asian kids were having an identity crisis, part of which was calling those who did not have an encyclopedic grasp of thier parents culture ‘coconuts’, meaning brown on the outside, white on the inside. It was a pejorative term. Northern asian kids were calling each other ‘bananas’. So I was very confused by the meme.
It’s also used sometimes as a derogatory term for Pacific Islanders or those of Pacific Island descent. You won’t get many of them calling themselves coconuts in solidarity.
Risk Harris’ Tiktok hype hews too closely to the pro-Palestine Tiktok hype – good for pulling in young voters but potentially leads to conflict/blow-back on the other side.
About the 2.8% GDP…so okay the economy is robust, even strong by that metric alone…however on the other hand opinions are raging “now” is the time for Federal Reserve rate cuts ?
2 + 2 = 5…the strong GDP reflects the continued spend by the government ( federal , state, local ) and an intense spending plan on IT equipment as mega cap corporations like an Alphabet are upfront about their investment plans in the current calendar year. FFS this is economics not rocket science.
The federal largesse will at some point subside, possibly by Q4 I’ll suggest if funding for Ukraine begins to wax and wane again…and maybe those in power / leadership recognize a lost cause in that regard . Eh, a person can wish for redirected attention to issues closer to our United States.
I will continue to disagree that the consumer is broadly speaking, in a strong position. The elite are comfortable, sure and so are the merely wealthy.
Odd nugget, anyone seen this? Somebody trying to sabotage the olympics
https://apnews.com/article/olympics-2024-malicious-act-trains-opening-ceremony-40159c5b49c44088960b61e944597b07
> Paris Olympics
France has/had a no fly zone around Paris, so sabotaging rail networks has much bigger impact than normal.
Blessings to the NCer who took one for the team by watching that white women for Harris zoom. Good grief. I see it as to white-guilt people into voting for her. There’s a lot of that pressure around here, with the white PMC women falling over themselves to show who feels the most white guilt. It’s like a competition. I was hoping it was deflating, but apparently it isn’t.
The DM had an article at the top of the page earlier today about Harris’s extremely high employee turnover while in office(s).
im so pleased that i dont hafta deal with such things,lol.
hang in there, Petal.
James Carville engineered a single presidential victory 32 years ago and reached his sell-by date almost immediately thereafter. Certainly the Democrats have lots and lots of problems that are even worse, but he’s not wrong about the “preachy females”. Here we see the results of grifters like Robin Deangelo, who made a killing “monetizing” white women’s guilt.
I’m sorry you have that environment, it shouldn’t be happening.
Something to remember about guilt is that it is one of those grating emotions that people often revolt about, especially if there is outside pressure using it. And when there is a simple way to do it on the sly…If Harris continues true to form she will reveal her nature sooner rather than later. Not everything can be scripted anymore than Joe being able to campaign from his basement forever. There are going to be more than one of those women who will continue to outwardly profess allegiance to her who will ditch her in the voting booth. It doesn’t have to be Trump, it could be a third party vote, a write in or just leaving the Presidential line blank.
Thanks for the Lapham link. I hadn’t realized he passed away a few days ago We was a great journalist and I really looked forward to his editorial every month when he was at Harper’s. RIP.
Re: Harris “Vibe shift”
A.k.a Bernays sauce
RE: JD Vance
I’m seeing lots of references to Vance having grown up in a nice ‘suburb’ of Cincinnati. This makes me laugh, having spent part of my childhood in the same county where Vance was raised. No way is Middletown, Ohio a ‘suburb’ of anyplace. It’s an old steel town that has been dying for decades. It’s about a 45 minute drive to Cincinnati.
Vance may not have been born (or “borned” as my Daddy would have said) in Appalachia but his family was. It’s the culture he was raised in. Why risk questioning that or his childhood poverty and trauma? Imo, it’s a big mistake that will backfire on the Harris campaign.
If Harris chooses Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear as her VP, expect an interesting contrast between Beshear and Vance. Beshear can rightly claim Appalachia as his birthplace but he was definitely born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Beshear’s father is a former governor of Kentucky and a prominent attorney who spent his early career working on Wall Street.
On Morning Joe the other day, Beshear ridiculed Vance by saying JD “ain’t from here” meaning Kentucky. You can bet Beshear didn’t grow up using the word “ain’t” at home and doesn’t use it now except when he’s talking down to the little people.
Beshear, a graduate of Vanderbilt and University of Virginia Law School, also showed his elitist side when he made fun of people who drink Diet Mountain Dew. He had to apologize for that one.
Note to Beshear: You’uns don’t come between people and their Dew. Just sayin’. I kinda like Beshear but Andy’s a young’un with a lot to learn on the public stage.
One more thing about Vance, then I’ll shut up about him because I’m not one of his fans. I doubt we see eye to eye on much of anything political.
When I read “Hillbilly Elegy”, I could identify with many aspects of Vance’s childhood since I grew up poor in an area of the country that Vance writes about. However, I don’t agree with most of the conclusions he drew from his childhood experiences.
At the time the book was published, it was praised by a lot of critics. Now it’s being described as “poverty porn” by critics. This angers me. It’s pretty rare for a white person who grew up poor to write a best selling autobiography these days. Best selling books about growing up poor and nonwhite are insightful and important but writing about white poverty is “porn” and somehow unacceptable. It’s also probably “weird”.
White poor have been the Democrats “villains” for at least two decades. It is part of the bait and switch. Obama’s description might have been more veiled than Clinton’s deplorables eight years later, but it is how it is.
Now in this most important of all elections when you have nothing of substance to offer voters you need all the lesser evil bonafides you can get. Even if the worst pejorative you’ve got is “weird”.
I will say it once again the best thing Americans could do is to turn up, vote third party and write in, and relegate Trump/Vance and whatever the Democratic ticket is to “also running” less than ten percent totals. The Democrats absolutely need to be burned to the ground and have their “grave” salted, but so should the Republicans who are only a smidgen better in that they actually held primaries.
I think you are making some highly important points here. Someone like Vance,now suddenly thrust into a national limelight will receive the glare and stare from major media sources. I am only somewhat familiar with his story; I recall seeing glowing reviews after the book published, and his popularity began taking off.
Once you’re on the Republican ticket, now the gloves come off and no one is gonna play nice (okay, likely at Fox or from the Newsmax the coverage stays lighter on the confrontation than say, MSNBC). I know less about Beshear honestly, Kentucky has the reputation as a somewhat poorer state and a notable lackluster state pension management. Jokes about the Diet Mt Dew aside, letting major party politicians punch down on the poor or downtrodden is something both the D and the R parties respectively do often and with little consideration…
Added. I wouldn’t say or suggest we grew up in poverty but we certainly did without. As the youngest in a big family, the hand me down strategy of clothing and toys was definitely a feature. Plenty of Kool aid since the little pouches were plenty cheap. Or I could summarize it thusly, we was broke but we didn’t know otherwise and didn’t care. Bought what could be afforded in cash, outside of replacement of a family car.
“I’m seeing lots of references to Vance having grown up in a nice ‘suburb’ of Cincinnati. This makes me laugh, having spent part of my childhood in the same county where Vance was raised. No way is Middletown, Ohio a ‘suburb’ of anyplace. It’s an old steel town that has been dying for decades. It’s about a 45 minute drive to Cincinnati.”
Lena, you are always wonderfully incisive.
To belittle JD Vance for telling of the roots of family and struggling from poverty, especially when so many have been and are being engulfed by the poverty, is simply awful. I identify with Vance and know just what Vance accomplished. The meanness directed to the Vance family struggles belittles all of us.
Yesterday’s news, but seems significant. Canada Revenue Agency will revoke charity status of Jewish National Fund. The JNF, rather than denying they funnel donations to the IOF, has chosen to challenge the CRA on “changes to the rules”. In other words, JNF thinks as a charity it *should* be able to divert donations to the Israeli military.
https://nationalpost.com/news/cra-jewish-national-fund-charitable-status
A while ago I had stopped donating to United Way because it tends to support Jewish Community Centers, which in itself is a good thing, but unfortunately JCC’s then redirect their proceeds to JNF. Hopefully this development will allow me to support UW and JCC’s again. The things you learn in reviewing charity financials…
For all the media hype there’s no bump to Harris’ approval ratings. If anything they’re getting worse. Doesn’t matter how much coke the Democrat leadership snort – their confidence isn’t going to change reality that Harris comes with a ‘guilty by association’ & ‘same old same old’ perception problem that’s going to be hard to shake.
This. I’m going to just add a comment Jake made here last week, that sums it up well:
surely the wordsalad and cackling plays some part in her less than stellar polls.
jeeze…ive even looked for cspan versions of her utterances…from whence all the x mashups are sourced…and nope, its literally all just like that,lol.
hard to follow what shes on about at any given moment.
just, as scalia said, “argle bargle”.
and again, she’d be in her element out here at the bar, i’m sure,lol.
but not in any way in the damned white house.
She sounds coherent in the $-raising ads with which YouTube is now afflicting me. Those are scripted, of course.
Perhaps “avoiding unscripted speaking opportunities” will be the KDH version of the 2020 JRB “campaign from the basement”.
~ 100 days to the election. That’s a significant amount of time to pass, but we won’t know what it’s significance actually is until after it has passed.
re: the YouTube adverts, they sound “coherent”, but also “condescending”. I think that “word salad condescending” is actually a less disagreeable listen.
Yes. The entire national Dem party apparatus has been doing a big con on the American people for months, probablyyears, and the whole thing just blew up in their face merely a couple of weeks ago, and they are trying to address this by engaging in an even more transparent con. I don’t think too many people will buy this and the big blowback will likely be fundamental discrediting of the Dem Party as an institution, possibly for good (along with the rest of US, unfortunately.) On top of these, as you and others note, Harris is the last person they’d want to build their con around: she’s the famblogging VP, for chrissakes, someone who’s been at the center of the whole thing.
The only rationale behind this is that Dem leadership believes that the American people are idiots. If they actually succeed, well then, maybe we are idiots and we truly deserve to be cast into the dustbin of history.
I see the olympics are off to a good start.
Meta-comment about NC:
Twitter/X embeds are absolutely killing the user experience reading Naked capitalism. On the latest WC page, Twitter alone is blocking the main thread for over 10 secs. Page loads seem to be getting slower and slower. 15 seconds or more to refresh for comments is just too slow.
I tried a PageSpeed analysis for WC, and NC fails the “Core Web Vitals Assessment” (see below), with CLS (I.e., the page jumping around constantly during loading) into the red zone.
https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-www-nakedcapitalism-com-2024-07-200pm-water-cooler-7-26-2024-html/u9qkaarn91?form_factor=mobile
Idk what to suggest specifically but there are evidently things that can be done on the server side to drastically improve performance, e.g.:
https://www.builder.io/blog/how-to-embed-tweets-without-a-performance-penalty
It’s not Twitter, it’s the ads on the right rail + the comments. I have this happen any time I make a comment even on no-images-at-all posts. I will bring this up with our tech guy nevertheless.
We can’t fix the comments. This is a WP feature, not much used, which we had to modify to get comments nesting.
Yves,
Thanks for your message. However, I have an ad blocker (sorry), so they are not impacting the UX for me.
Nor is it the comments, as there are rarely Twitter embeds in comments (I’ve seen Lambert do this, but only once in a while).
Did you look at the PageSpeed report? Twitter is very clearly implicated as the main cause of the terrible UX.
Look at “Reduce the impact of third-party code” under “Diagnostics” and you’ll find Twitter is killing page load times.
Ads are way down the list — less than 250 ms for Google Ads versus well over 10,000 ms for Twitter, I.e., 40x difference — and to me ads thus appear mostly irrelevant for this issue.
Twitter embeds are a known issue on the web, but there are solutions, e.g. the builder dot io article.
Can more knowledgeable people than me say if this is theater or might lead to something?
Biden to announce plans to reform US supreme court (Guardian)
To my ear, it sounds like a combination of 1) another thing that the D Party can claim to be “fighting for” while not ever actually achieving (court packing would require Senate cooperation, likewise any constitutional amendment) and 2) something that sounds important that JRB can use as a justification for the recent decision to drop out of the 2024 race but remain in office for the remainder of his term.
If this were a serious proposal, it would have been on the agenda in 2021 as a response to the 6:3 R:D-appointments ratio on the Court that JRB inherited from his predecessor. That it moves forward only in the context of an election year that looks iffy for the Ds suggests, IMO, that it’s electioneering, not actual policy.
“Weird”. It appears that Democratic PTB have given their troops marching orders to describe Republicans as “weird”. I’m seeing that word used repeatedly: “Trump is wearing a Kotex on his ear! He’s just so weird.” “Did you know JD had sex with a couch? How weird is that?”
It has replaced the word “decent” to automatically apply to everything Biden, as in “He’s braindead and genocidal but at least he’s decent.”
I see that, too. I think “weird” is still a lot more generous than “murderous,” “criminal,” and other appellants that maga/gop sling at the demmies (and dems try to bat back at them).
“Weird” is still othering, not saying it isn’t, but it’s got more of an off-ramp to it. If people want to bandy on about “unity,” they can’t be taken seriously if they’re not thinking about how to climb off of their more cutting and aggressive rhetoric.
Politico says it’s all Tim Walz’s idea.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook/2024/07/26/how-tim-walz-has-already-changed-the-campaign-00171462
I transcribed a little of a recent Walz interview with J. Pasaki:
https://x.com/davidhogg111/status/1816817112909832399
Regarding the INTEL CPU issues, the problem will cause *physical damage* to 13th-gen chips as the high voltages produced by the flawed microcode literally burn up some of the chip’s tiny resistors. There’s no fixing that short of cpu replacement.
But the problem manifests specifically at maximum processing utilization (customizing UEFI/BIOS configurations to raise the CPU voltage will contribute, too). In stonewalling a billion-dollar recall or replacement course, INTEL may be figuring that *most* users won’t *significantly observe* this issue until their CPU is old enough that replacement is already predestined.
Here’s an explainer, cued up to the above detail:
https://youtu.be/1GGPwckQ2zE?si=KplGRcIj5mvdnYkQ&t=256
But wait! There’s more disaster in the hardware domain (this one is on motherboards tho)… https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/secure-boot-is-completely-compromised-on-200-models-from-5-big-device-makers/