By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Bird Song of the Day
I looked for another species of songbird that mimics, and came up with the Thrasher.
Brown Thrasher, Langford Creek Road, Tompkins, New York, United States.
In Case You Might Miss…
- Kamala campaign’s tendency to lie
- Trump’s suit.
- Covid and the schools; nothing has been learned.
- Enormous Social Security hack.
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 one hundred days to go!
Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:
More Blue on the map. Trump still leads nationally, but some swing states moving toward Kamala. In particular, I’m no insider, but if I were on Team Trump, Georgia’s drop from +3.6 to this week’s +0.6 might cause me to chew my hands. Georgia? Really? Atlanta burbs no longer sitting it out? Can any readers from Georgia clarify?
“The Fight To Redefine the 2024 Race for President” [Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report]. “A new Cook Political Report Swing State Project Survey conducted by BSG and GS Strategy Group shows Vice President Kamala Harris leading or tied with former President Donald Trump in all but one of the seven battleground states. Overall, she holds a narrow lead of 48% to 47% in those states in the head-to-head. Harris has closed the gap with Trump since the last Swing State Project survey in May, when Trump led President Joe Biden by three points overall, and was ahead or tied in every one of the seven swing states.” Handy chart:
I’m sure directionally Cook Political Report is correct. But that 4-8% swing in Pennsylvania? I’m dubious (because I’ve seen no anecdotes to support it, though readers may supply some).
* * * Kamala (D): “Harris campaign’s Google ads rewrite news headlines” [Axios]. “The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found. It’s a common practice in the commercial advertising world that doesn’t violate Google’s policies, but the ads mimic real news results from Search closely enough that they have news outlets caught off guard…. The mainstream media industry is already fighting assertions of bias. These ads, even though they comply with Google’s rules, could leave media outlets further vulnerable to charges of partisanship.” • It’s unclear to me whether Axios broke the story, but here are some examples:
We researched and found many examples of the Harris campaign using this misleading tactic of rewriting headlines in Google search results to falsely imply support for her campaign.
We found no evidence of the Trump or Kennedy teams using similar tactics. pic.twitter.com/8VSqKd7aMG
— AllSides (@AllSidesNow) August 14, 2024
Back to Axios:
I was shocked yesterday when I saw Axios publish an investigation reflecting negatively on Kamala's campaign.
But soon as the reporter, @sarafischer, was attacked for doing it, she immediately denigrated her own scoop, saying it was no big deal and Kamala did nothing wrong. pic.twitter.com/DQS03k2rpJ
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 14, 2024
Collective self-censorship by the PMC, exactly as with Biden’s cognitive decline. (As for the Harris campaign, exactly as with the Vance couch, if you believe the “joy”/”honeymoon” narrative, they don’t have to do this. But they do it anyhow.)
Kamala (D): “Behind the Curtain: The Harris plan to redefine herself” [Axios]. “A big and fair question is: What does Harris really believe? Her bet: whatever she says in the small, three-month window of her snap campaign will be what sticks. Harris knows most people know little about her. So she believes she can define herself, even if it includes flip-flops and co-opts. ‘She can’t break the glass ceiling with a weak foundation,’ Donna Brazile, a former Democratic National Committee chairwoman who has known Harris since the vice president was an up-and-coming D.A. in San Francisco. ‘She knows she has to be tough.'” • But she won’t give Lina Khan a hug….
Kamala (D): “Kamala’s Marxist Roots” [Issues & Insights]. “In a mixed system such as ours, which loses ground almost every day to communist theory, Marxism ideology, no matter how it’s dressed up, rejects property rights; chokes economic growth; divides people instead of producing a classless society; corrupts institutions; creates, rather than abolishes, and empowers a debased ruling class; and goads its adherents to “democratize” – that is, to take over, seize in the name of the people – business and industry. In practice, and in every case, the principles of Marxism undermine the only organizational structure that has allowed the masses to escape grinding poverty – capitalism.” • Wait. These guys want a “classless society”? How’s that working out?
Trump (R): Derek Guy is one of my guilty pleasures:
Trump (R): “Will Trump End Elections? Anatomy of a Failed Hoax” [RealClearPolitics]. Interesting summary of Alinsky, a bugbear for conservatives (but I’ve got to admit there’s something to this take). But for me this is the key part: “Two weeks ago, Democrats and the mainstream media were caught red-handed as they tried to jump-start a new hoax that suggested Trump would cancel future elections if he were elected this year…. The part of Trump’s speech that was played or quoted ad infinitum by mainstream media for those three days was this: ‘Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians … In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.’ A real journalist would look for answers before running with a hugely damaging and potentially slanderous story. But this episode demonstrates conclusively that there are very few real journalists left in America.” Readers know that you should always check the transcript when the press quotes Trump. From the transcript:
And by the way, Christians have to vote. You know, I don’t want to scold you, but do you know Christians do not vote proportionately, they don’t vote like they should. They’re not big voters … They have to vote. If they don’t vote, we’re not going to win the election. If you do vote, we’re going to win in a landslide. Too big to rig. We’re gonna win in a landslide. … You know, you have tremendous power, but you just don’t know that. But you have to use that power. Christians are a group that’s known not to vote very much. You have to go out at least this election, just get us into that beautiful White House. Vote for your congressmen and women. Vote for your senators. We will change this country for the better. This country will be great again like never before. You gotta vote. … This election will be the most important election in the history of our country. We’re going to save our country with this election.
The author misfires a bit by not including the complete transcript; this looks like a lead-in to the “You won’t have to do it anymore” passage, which in context looks a lot more like “Please do it just his once for me.” Again, Democrats are so, well, weird. Gawd knows there are enough legitimate quotes to ding Trump on; see yesterday’s Trump/Musk transcript (hat tip, marym). So why make sh*t up? They don’t even have to do it, so why do they do it?
Kennedy (I): “New York State Trial Court Removes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., From the Ballot” [Balllot Access News]. The decision. “On August 12, a New York state trial court judge in Albany removed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., from the ballot, on the grounds that his address on his declaration of candidacy was not accurate. Cartwright v Kennedy, 906349-24, Albany Co. Supreme Court…. The judge had refused to let Kennedy make arguments about the constitutionality of the law. He will appeal. The decision does not mention Trump v Anderson, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that said Article Two implicitly bars letting states reject presidential candidates from the ballot, thus creating a “patchwork.” Nor does the decision deal with the point that the true candidates in a presidential election in November are the candidates for presidential elector. This is only the second time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate has been removed from a general election ballot on the basis that a residence address on an election document is not accurate.” By contrast, OR and WV just approved Kennedy’s signatures. “Our Democracy”! UPDATE The judge in the case lost their jobs due to “ethical missteps.” New York Democrats can sure pick ’em MR SUBLIMINAL *** cough *** Judge Engoron *** cough ***!
Kennedy (I): “WA Democratic Party pushing to keep Robert Kennedy Jr. off the ballot” [Washington State Standard]. “The state Democratic Party wants presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. kept off ballots in Washington this November. It contends the 4,181 signatures submitted by We the People in support of Kennedy’s nomination were not collected at a party convention as required by state law, making him ineligible to be one of voters’ choices. Kennedy’s campaign website listed various events and locations, like the Olympia Farmers Market, where registered voters could sign nomination petitions but that doesn’t comport with the law’s requirement, Democratic Party lawyers argued in an Aug. 9 letter to Secretary of State Steve Hobbs…. ‘Simply gathering signatures does not constitute a convention,’ they wrote.” • Ballot Access News comments: “The procedure that Kennedy used has been normal in Washington state for over 30 years. Although the state law talks about attendees at a nominating convention, that has long been interpreted to mean an outdoor meeting, with passersby signing, is permitted.”
* * * MN: “‘Squad’ Rep. IIhan Omar wins primary against repeat challenger” [Axios]. “U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) defeated repeat challenger Don Samuels in Tuesday’s Democratic Primary, the AP reports. Omar’s victory in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District is a win for the progressive ‘Squad,’ which lost two other members in primaries this year following heavy spending by groups affiliated with the pro-Israel AIPAC. Samuels, a former Minneapolis City Council member, came within 2 percentage points of defeating Omar in 2022 after a late infusion of cash to boost his bid. Omar significantly outraised her opponent this time, and the rematch failed to attract the same levels of outside spending that it did in 2022.” • IOW, AIPAC sat this one out.
“AIPAC had some recent wins but it isn’t invincible” [Responsible Statecraft]. “The electoral victories of Reps. Massie, Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez should offer some hope to lawmakers who, for example, do not believe that the U.S. should continue providing billions of dollars in aid to Israel without conditions. Perhaps AIPAC isn’t so invincible after all.” • Yeah, but on the other hand, who wants $7 million dumped into your opponent’s campaign coffers… I don’t think “AIPAC isn’t so invincible after all” is a straw man, exactly, but they can tilt any race in their direction whenever they want.
Our Famously Free Press
“News outlets were leaked insider material from the Trump campaign. They chose not to print it” [Associated Press]. “At least three news outlets were leaked confidential material from inside the Donald Trump campaign, including its report vetting JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what they received. Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post have written about a potential hack of the campaign and described what they had in broad terms…. Politico wrote over the weekend about receiving emails starting July 22 from a person identified as ‘Robert’ that included a 271-page campaign document about Vance and a partial vetting report on Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also considered as a potential vice president. Both Politico and the Post said that two people had independently confirmed that the documents were authentic.” Pretty sloppy. Was there internal evidence? Anything forensic? More: “What’s unclear is who provided the material. Politico said it did not know who ‘Robert’ was and that when it spoke to the supposed leaker, he said, “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from.'” • Oddly, nobody’s suggesting that the documents came from the Democrats, even though they have form (the Steele Dossier). So perhaps the news outlets know that’s the story and are worried about getting into it.
Realignment and Legitimacy
“‘Neoliberal capitalism’ has contributed to the rise of fascism, says Nobel laureate” [ABC Australia]. About Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, “The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.” More: “He spends a lot of time talking about the economic freedoms that are required for the majority of people to flourish. He talks about the importance of someone’s ‘opportunity set‘ — the set of options available to someone during their life, given the resources at their disposal — and how it determines their freedom to act, and what can be gained by good economic and social systems that provide someone with the freedom to live up to their potential. ‘People who are barely surviving have extremely limited freedom,’ he writes. ‘All their time and energy go into earning enough money to pay for groceries, shelter, and transportation to jobs … a good society would do something about the deprivations, or reductions in freedom, for people with low incomes. It is not surprising that people who live in the poorest countries emphasise economic rights, the right to medical care, housing, education, and freedom from hunger. They are concerned about the loss of freedom not just from an oppressive government but also from economic, social, and political systems that have left large portions of the population destitute.” “‘When you understand economic freedom as freedom to act, it immediately reframes many of the central issues surrounding economic policy and freedom,’ he says.”
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!
Airborne Transmission: Covid
“Relationship between Exhaled Aerosol and Carbon Dioxide Emission Across Respiratory Activities” [Environmental Science and Technology]. “Exhaled CO2 is strongly correlated with mean particle number (r = 0.81) and mass (r = 0.84) emission rates for the nonvocalized exercise activities. However, exhaled CO2 is poorly correlated with mean particle number (r = 0.34) and mass (r = 0.12) emission rates during activities requiring vocalization. These results demonstrate that in most real-world environments vocalization loudness is the main factor controlling respiratory particle emission and exhaled CO2 is a poor surrogate measure for estimating particle emission during vocalization. Although measurements of indoor CO2 concentrations provide valuable information about room ventilation, such measurements are poor indicators of respiratory particle concentrations and may significantly underestimate respiratory particle concentrations and disease transmission risk.” • So yes, the CO2 meter is good to assess how bad the air in the plane is. But if you’ve got a loud talker in the next seat, look out MR SUBLIMINAL Extroverts are gonna kill us all. One reason never to allow cellphones on planes. NOTE You know what would be great, if the data could be gathered? Covid infection among Quiet Car passengers on Amtrak vs. regular passengers.
Transmission: H5N1
CDC fighthing airborne transmission tooth and nail again, this time with H5N1:
It’s fair season, so before you and your family head to an agricultural fair, learn the actions you can take to keep everyone healthy and protected against #H5N1 #birdflu.
More here: https://t.co/K4XI5Fi7df pic.twitter.com/dCY6GxcgZ5
— CDC Flu (@CDCFlu) August 13, 2024
Note that a milking operation, which I presume state fairs will have, may spread H5N1 via aerosolized milk, so even in an extremely conservative scenario, one should mask (or “should consider,” as we say these days).
Testing and Tracking: Wastewater
I suppose this is good news, even at this late date:
An update on @CDCgov's plans to roll out H5-specific wastewater testing@nirav_uscdc told reporters today, at briefing discussing H5N1 response, that agency is now
"working to roll out more widespread H5 specific wastewater testing"https://t.co/wBhbkl8ZJG https://t.co/PBNU46xkCU pic.twitter.com/PDoL6HnmN6
— Alexander Tin (@Alexander_Tin) August 13, 2024
However, given the way CDC butchered Covid wastewater testing, perhaps not.
Transmission: Covid
“COVID transmission on the rise as students head back to class” [ABC30]. “‘Right now, we are seeing high levels of COVID circulating in our community, so we want parents to take precautions for their children as they start the school year,’ said Dr. Trinidad Solis, Fresno County’s Deputy Public Health Officer. Dr. Solis says those precautions include getting the flu and COVID vaccines when they come out this fall and also practicing good hygiene. ‘It’s important to teach our kids to wash their hands regularly and practice good respiratory hygiene, meaning that if they’re coughing or sneezing, they can do so in their sleeve instead of their hands,’ said Dr. Solis.” • [pounds head on desk]. After four years. What a catastrophic failure of public health (if failure it be). Could be a bumpy ride, given that levels are already high…
“As students head back to class, are schools ready to handle COVID-19?” [ABC7]. “[Kim Baumann, the lead nurse in Gwinnett County] said one of the ways officials are preparing for the new school year is to send reminders through schools’ newsletters, websites and other media about best practices to stay safe, including ‘Good hand washing, (and) using respiratory hygiene, as far as covering your coughs and sneezes.’ Baumann also said there is a team of custodians who make sure schools, particularly in high-touch areas, are cleaned and sanitized throughout the day, especially during peak season of respiratory viruses.” • [sigh]. Not a word on ventilation:
One would think the “school closures were the end of Western Civilization”-crowd would be pushing for ventilation and masking with equal vehemence, but n-o-o-o-o-o….
“Mid-South elementary school shuts down due to COVID cases” [FOX13] “HUMBOLDT, Tenn. – Just days into the new school year, one Mid-South elementary school has already had to shut down due to an uptick in COVID cases. Students at Stigall Primary School in Humboldt, Tenn., about 90 miles northeast of Memphis, started school on August 1. Parents told FOX13 that they got a letter on Monday night from the district telling them that students needed to stay home Tuesday as the district works to sanitize the building. ‘Everyone’s like, ‘COVID is back, COVID is back,’ Jessica Williamson, a parent of a first grader at Stigall Primary, said. ‘I just feel like it didn’t really go anywhere.'” You feel that way because it is that way. More: “It’s the second full week of school for Stigall Primary School students, but instead of math class and recess, Williamson’s daughter and her classmates are at home. ‘Those are little kids. They’re the most prone to put things in their mouths, to touch each other, to just share germs,’ Willamson said.” Fomite transmission is not a thing. More: “Yesterday, after all the students left the school, there was a deep clean done, disinfecting every surface,’ Ginger Carver, the communications director for the school district, said. ‘This way, the school is dormant today with no one in it.'” • Fomites are not a thing, so deep cleaning is useless. Four years in, and we don’t understand transmission. We haven’t even made the effort to understand transmission, even to protect our children…. What a mess.
Sequelae: Covid
“Long COVID is a $1 trillion problem with no cure. Experts plead for governments to wake up” [Fortune]. “‘I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist,’ says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System and lead author of the review. ‘It is much more pleasant to pretend as if emergency department visits and hospitalizations haven’t been rising sharply this summer.’… In a Nature Medicine review this week, Al-Aly and several other top researchers lay out a difficult truth: Long COVID has already affected an estimated 400 million people worldwide, a number the authors say is likely conservative, at an economic cost of about $1 trillion annually—equivalent to 1% of the global economy. Moreover, the risk of a person being hit with long COVID rises with repeated infections of the virus itself, and recent COVID activity has experts watching closely. As review co-author Eric Topol noted in a recent blog post, the current COVID incursion is ramping up quickly, with one modeler estimating 900,000 new infections per day in the U.S. alone.” • A million per day? That’s a lot. And “incursion” is a new word. I rather like it. At least it implies an enemy to be fought; one doesn’t “live with” incursions.
“Long COVID’s brain fog doesn’t lift for years” [Crain’s Chicago Business]. N = 100. Columbia. “Neurological symptoms can linger even two or three years following a COVID-19 infection for more than 60% of those who contract the disease, scientists at Northwestern Medicine and the School of Medicine at CES University and CES Clinic in Colombia have found.
Their study found the symptoms of brain fog — cognitive dysfunction — was experienced by 60% of patients and fatigue was experienced by 74%. The two symptoms, along with depression, most affected long COVID patient’s whether their symptoms were severe or more mild, Northwestern said in a press release.”
Elite Maleficence
CDC’s bogus wastewater map:
CDC Wastewater Map pic.twitter.com/kGk46t5GjA
— PACO (@PacoOnPause) August 13, 2024
Give whoever made the design decision for this Covid wastewater colorway a big bonus, because it’s a fine example of stochastic eugencis. The colors are going to lead X number of people to conclude Covid is no problem — “It’s blue!” — and X percent of those people will take no precautions, infect themselves or others, and X percent of them will sicken or die, adding another tranche to America’s quasi-geological layering of mortality. I hope the yoga on the lawn makes up for it all:
Morning yoga on the lawn at CDC’s Atlanta campus! 🧘💪 pic.twitter.com/LvwWQMB2Ze
— Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) June 5, 2024
Upcoming HICPAC meeting:
CDC's committee meets on Aug 22 to discuss foundational guidelines on airborne infection control in nursing homes, hospitals & other health facilities. Will it update w/new science?
Many fear it won't, allowing employers to put profits before protection. https://t.co/Gz6GNE7qIG
— Amy Maxmen, PhD (@amymaxmen) August 13, 2024
WHO still pushing “Baggy Blues.” After four years:
Going home from work?
Take care and #WearAMask when in crowded transportation. Help keep yourself and everyone safe from COVID-19, flu and other respiratory illnesses. #StaySafe pic.twitter.com/SCCeKvVI37
— World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific (@WHOWPRO) August 14, 2024
Couldn’t they at least signal one respirator by using white?
Lambert here: Worth noting that national Emergency Room admissions are as high as they were in the first wave, in 2020.
| Wastewater | ||
| This week[1] CDC August 5: | Last Week[2] CDC July 22 (until next week): | |
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| Variants [3] CDC August 3 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC August 3 | |
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| Hospitalization | ||
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data August 13: | National [6] CDC July 20: | |
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| Positivity | ||
| National[7] Walgreens August 13: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic August 3: | |
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| Travelers Data | ||
| Positivity[9] CDC July 22: | Variants[10] CDC July 22: | |
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| Deaths | ||
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11]CDC July 27: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12]CDC July 27: | |
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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) Going down. Doesn’t need to be a permanent thing, of course. (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) Fiddling and diddling.
[8] (Cleveland) Jumping.
[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 range. 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) It’s rumored that there’s a new variant in China, XDV.1, but it’s not showing up here.
[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.
[12] Deaths low, ED up.
Stats Watch
Inflation: “United States Consumer Price Index (CPII)” [Trading Economics]. “Consumer Price Index CPI in the United States increased to 314.54 points in July from 314.18 points in June of 2024.”
Inflation: “United States Core Inflation Rate” [Trading Economics]. “Consumer Price Index CPI in the United States increased to 314.54 points in July from 314.18 points in June of 2024.”
Retail: “Apartments, hockey rinks and Amazon warehouses: Macy’s closures will set off a wave of change at shopping malls” [CNBC]. “Macy’s decision to close nearly a third of its stores will spark change in malls and communities across the U.S. Some of those transformations may catch shoppers by surprise. The retailer said in late February that it plans to close about 150 of its namesake locations by early 2027. Macy’s has not yet revealed which stores it will shutter…. Yet the closures will be the latest catalyst that pressures malls to evolve to changing consumer tastes. Macy’s is shuttering stores as the growth of online shopping and demographic shifts mean some small towns or regions can no longer support a bustling shopping center. Macy’s closures will ultimately be a good thing for many malls and customers, said Chris Wimmer, senior director at Fitch Ratings who tracks real estate investment trusts. The department store’s exit will accelerate the inevitable demise of ‘low quality malls that really don’t need to exist anymore,’ Wimmer said. The closures will give the owners of healthier malls a chance to breathe new life and relevance into a shopping center.”
Retail: “Big Lots is closing hundreds of stores after warning it could go out of business” [CNN]. “Big Lots is closing more than 300 locations across the United States, or roughly a quarter of its stores, following an earlier warning that its future was in ‘substantial doubt’ amid ongoing financial troubles. The discount retailer previously said it planned to close as many as 40 stores during its most recent earnings report in June, when it recorded a 10% decrease in sales and a $205 million loss for the quarter because customers are cutting back on spending. In a recent regulatory filing, Big Lots said it would increase the number of closures to 315 stores, part of an updated loan agreement to secure its finances.”
Tech: “Hackers may have stolen the Social Security numbers of every American. Here’s how to protect yourself” [Los Angeles Times]. “According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking group USDoD claimed in April to have stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, which offers personal information to employers, private investigators, staffing agencies and others doing background checks. The group offered in a forum for hackers to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million, a cybersecurity expert said in a post on X…. The information consists of about 2.7 billion records, each of which includes a person’s full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and phone number, along with alternate names and birth dates, Felice claimed.” And this: “Oddly enough, [new] accounts are especially vulnerable to identity thieves if you haven’t signed up for online access to them, Murray said — that’s because it’s easier for thieves to create a login and password while pretending to be you than it is for them to crack your existing login and password.” • Onward to digital currency!
Tech: “Entangled Photons Maintained under New York Streets” [Physics]. “Large-scale networks that distribute information among quantum processors or that use quantum encryption for the security of a large number of systems will require many pairs of quantum mechanically entangled photons per second. Sending these photons reliably through existing commercial fiber-optic communication lines is a challenge, given the fragility of entanglement. Now researchers have sent 20,000 such photons per second down a 34-km-long section of a New York fiber-optic network with a fidelity of 99% [1]. They sent these photons continuously for two weeks without the frequent recalibrations needed in previous systems with lower photon rates. The researchers say that their results are an important step toward the commercialization of quantum networks…. A team led by Mehdi Namazi, cofounder of New York-based start-up Qunnect, set out to produce a high-throughput, high-fidelity system using polarization entanglement. Qunnect’s GothamQ test bed is a 34-km loop of leased commercial fiber buried beneath the streets of New York City. Like any commercial fiber-optic network, GothamQ had sources of stress on the fibers that were impossible to identify, let alone isolate and mitigate. So the researchers had to devise a way to compensate for them.” • New York because New York is a financial center? “Photon arbitrage”?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 26 Exreme Fear (previous close: 24 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 19 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 14 at 3:14:22 PM ET.
Photo Book
“In a Tribute to Ever-Changing Rural America, Brendon Burton Collects a Decade of Photographs in ‘Epitaph'” [This is Colossal]. “From the wheat fields of the northern Great Plains to misty days in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, Brendon Burton (previously) captures a side of America many of us rarely have the opportunity to explore in depth. Despite the vast square mileage of the nation’s rural areas, hundreds of counties see declining numbers of residents each year.” • All the photos are great, but I like this one the best because I had to look twice to see our enormous impact on the land:
“The Curse of Knowledge” [Ness Labs]. “It’s a cognitive bias that occurs when someone incorrectly assumes that others have enough background to understand…. One of the most famous illustrations of the curse of knowledge is a 1990 experiment which was conducted at Stanford by a graduate student named Elizabeth Newton. In this study, she asked a group of participants to ‘tap out’ famous songs with their fingers, while another group tried to name the melodies. When the ‘tappers’ were asked to predict how many of the songs would be recognised by the listeners, they would always overestimate. The ‘tappers’ were so familiar with what they were tapping, they assumed listeners would easily recognize the melody. These findings have interesting implications. For example, research suggests that sales people who are better informed about their product may be at a disadvantage compared to less-informed sales people. This is because the better-informed sales people fail to adjust their pitch to the level of knowledge of their prospects. Since the knowledge gap is smaller, lesser-informed sales people also find it easier to align on a pricing that both parties deem acceptable.” • Hmm.
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 Alpha Blob:
Alpha Blob writes: “Pitcher plant from Maine.”
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On the same day, all major media outlets got the Fax, and all gushed how Kamala is running a “campaign of Joy”. So, new lyrics for the wonderful Blind Faith song, “Sea of Joy” (live performance link below)
Following the shadows in the skies
Not aware they’re seeing a disguise
And they’re feeling close to how the race is run
Ready to cast votes, to anoint
She of Joy
Media all raising her aloft
She’s cotton candy that they canonize
Putting blindfolds over children’s eyes
Who swoon in ecstasy as they hail
She of Joy
Policy will not be coming through
Handlers keep her history from view
“Vibes”, her only avenue
Oh, putting blindfolds over children’s eyes
Who swoon in ecstasy as they hail
She of Joy
She of Joy
She of Joy
Substance-free
She of Joy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOZ5VcQIiFc
‘Joy of Arc’
Got a match?
They have 83 days to make it seem as if the empress is wearing new clothes-the latest fashions.
No need. If someone points out that she’s naked, the media will flower her with praise about her courage for being naked.
The Trump campaign seems to be run by idiots. They should have been running heavy oppo ads for the last 2 weeks. They left a vacuum, and the Harris campaign has filled it with beautiful fluff – and it’s working.
AND they will attack whoever that pointed out she’s naked for spreading Russian disinformation–even while praising Harris for being naked. ‘Cause they have the right to have the cake and eat it, too.
The US Presidential election, now more than ever, fits the definition of a pseudo-event.
See “The Society of the Spectacle.”
‘Gluten-free’
I think I will start calling Harris “Serena Joy.” Serena Joy and Herr Stamer …
“The Future Belongs to Us?”
Another perennial favourite from that Meme Fest: “Money Makes the World Go Boom!”
We open with the Interlocutor of the Tik Tok App cavorting about with a big dollar sign.
Hilarity, and a little radioactive fallout, ensues.
USS Turner Joy was involved in Gulf of Tonkin Incident…just sayin. But, if something does happen, only Joe Biden is responsible because everyone knows that VPs are just window dressing that don’t do nothing…
Wow, a pitcher plantidote in its natural Maine habitat. Somehow I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of carnivorous plants.
https://www.carnivorousplants.org/cp/carnivory/what
https://www.thespruce.com/carnivorous-plant-varieties-4159595
Taken from my kayak while passing through a boggy area. Luckily I made it out alive ;)
That one was taken near my house and it was the only one I saw. But if anyone is in Maine and wants to see some carnivorous plants, I highly recommend the bogwalk near Orono – https://umaine.edu/oronobogwalk/ That place is full of pitcher plants – can’t miss them – and a great way to spend the afternoon.
I’ve seen them disappear in recent years from the bogs and wetlands of the northern Adirondacks. I always took them as a definitive marker that you were in the North.
Beautiful picture!
Thank you so much. Wonderful plantidote!
When the due date for accessing my Social Security annuity was approaching, went to the SS office in Visalia and they arranged to have a SS agent call me on a given day a month hence, and when she called, got some very difficult questions that I think only I could have answered, and thankfully she didn’t ask who the catcher was on my 1973 little league team, I might’ve been out the money.
You get the idea that SS fraud is really common, one of the Dartful Codgers waited until he was 65 to get the money, and when he inquired with SS, they told him he’d been getting it since he was 62, that is somebody else impersonating him.
“… somebody else impersonating him.”
That’s what you get for outsourcing much of the verification process for a supposedly Public program.
(Social Security uses the major identity verification private company, ID.me to do just that, to ‘verify’ your identity online. That should be a hacker’s dream.)
I forgot to add, ID.me.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID.me#:~:text=ID.me%20is%20an%20American%20online%20identity%20network%20company,retailers.%20The%20company%20is%20based%20in%20McLean%2C%20Virginia.
It says that ID.me is based in McLain, Virginia. What else is based there? Hmmm…..
They wanted me to give my biometrics this year and scan my face because fraud or whatever for the first time ever when I did my taxes early this year.
I called my congressman (Scalise) and they hooked me up with some agency where I didn’t have to do any of that nonsense.
I’m like fraud is MORE likely if I give you my biometrics. What a sh-t show!
Bidens Filthy Ceasefire Lies
(Melody from “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E07s5ZYygMg
Build more cemeteries
On a summer evening
And it sounds just like Genocide
Give ’em more weapons
Spread that killin’ feeling
Add confusion on the side
Feed the press
Hide the truth
Can we even get through one day without?
I’m just thinking out loud
Can we even get through one day without?
Another round of ceasefire lies!
Chorus:
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
(Another round of genocide)
Cemeteries
More room they’ll be needin’
Maybe build some on the moon
Warpigs starve bellies
With that killin’ feeling
Blood washed away in June
Feed the press
Hide the truth
Can we even get through one day without?
Another round of ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies
I just want an end to, yet another round of, Bibi’s awful genocide
(Another round of genocide)
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies
These criminals must think we’re high!
Dumb youtube question for the commentariat. I used to be able to go the the homepage of the channel I want and see all the most recent videos listed, organized from newest to oldest. In the last week or two though, something is different. I’ve noticed on Napolitano’s and Nima’s channels that now when I go to their channel homepage, I can’t find the most recent videos listed. For example, right now Nima’s channel is listing a Scott Ritter video from 3 days ago as the most recent. But if I go to the youtube homepage, it will recommend today’s new videos from both of those channels to me, even though I can’t find them listed on the channels’ own homepages. I do not have a youtube login.
Is this a function of me not having a login? Something to do with how the channels choose to organize their homepages? Crapification of the youtube algorithm? Something else? As far as I can tell, I’m not doing anything differently myself, but getting different results than before.
Check out the “Live” pages on DW and JF. They post the live recordings there and that is what you are seeing in the recommendations. Those are the pages I bookmark.
Aha! I hadn’t clicked that tab before. Everything is there now when I do, thank you!
It’s up to the channel owner how they organize their homepage. It’s not a you thing.
Judge Napolitano’s you tube channel ahs been suspended for a week preventing him from uploading new videos. I have no reason why, specifically, but he does have many guests who question the Western Narrative.
Masking at markets and other public indoor venues making a comeback in my island town off the coast of Oakland, CA. At my doctor’s office today patients and staff all masked but almost exclusively with baggy blues. My tried, true, and trusty Elipse P-100 gets second looks. Mask envy, perhaps?
On the other hand, I dropped Offspring off at the main entrance of Prestigious Medical Center today for an infusion. Offspring was The. Only. One. wearing a mask of any sort at all. The infusion center is a warren of little rooms full of people with suppressed immune systems and the providers who minister to them. And while they will don a baggy blue if requested, Offspring is shy and does not want to cause trouble.
Visiting my daughter in New Jersey and went yesterday for my once-every-ten-year manicure/pedicure. All the staff were masked.
Complete contrast to the cardiologist office last month, full of people with failing hearts and no one was masked.
I wonder if it is a ‘class thing.’ The more affluent classes don’t want the lowly nail shop workers breathing on them.
re: T’s suit jacket shoulder pads.
Oh, fer gawd’s sake. Mens’ suit jackets have always, at least since the 1940’s had shoulder pads to square the upper body line. You can go at T for a lot of reasons, but going at him for a sartorial dress that every man has worn in suits for the last 80 years? no words. Well, one word: “numbskull.” /heh
adding: you should’a seen the shoulder pads that were out-to-there in women’s dress business suits back in the 1980’s when women were expected to dress like jr. men when employed in non-traditional (for women) jobs like law and engineering and architecture. / oy
Yes.
Any rerun of LA Law demonstrates this perfectly.
Suit fitters will also tell you that many men have one shoulder higher than the other, so differential padding is part of the alteration equation.
A kid wearing a backpack slung over one shoulder is on the early route to that.
> Oh, fer gawd’s sake. Mens’ suit jackets have always
Today, we have “slim fit.” Now, not so much.
Maybe showing my age, but today’s “slim fit” mens’ style looks to me like hand-me-down clothing that doesn’t fit well. I suppose the sellers of the “slim fit” style save money on material costs. More profits. / heh
adding: our Tv network area has some young men, weather guys who wear the “slim fit” style. They are very slim, obviously. They also have suits that fit them properly through the shoulders. A square shoulder line.
I was spared the slim fit suit nonsense, having undergone that retiree wardrobe shift after years of casual office attire. The slim suits seemed like a gimmick to get men to overspend and become slaves to fickle trends.
Well, one can chose just how padded one wants his shoulders with the more conservative or old fashioned being well padded, but Trump is seventy-nine. Looking at JD Vance’s jackets, I think that his padding is light or that he has a better tailor than Trump. Trump’s padding is overdone, but I think the critique of his shoulder pads comes from people trying far too hard to attack him. It speaks more to the low-mindedness of his attackers than anything negative about him.
I have to wonder if this dumb criticism is because people rarely dress up anymore. Perhaps the original tweeter has never worn a suit jacket.
That was my thought, too.
ive never worn a suit jacket…and only worn a tie twice.
wife’s iron is probably still around here, somewhere…
and aside from a handful of light weight long sleeve button down work shirts(could not find 100% cotton to save my life)…and 3 pairs of jeans that will likely last the rest of my days…i havent actually purchased clothing for about as long as i can remember.
i pick through the stuff my boys throw away…so i got shorts for the rest of my days, as well.
brother the PMC is forever dropping off boxes of rather nice clothes…most of which ends up wrapping faucets and pipes….as well as experimenting with for insulation purposes,etc…just out of curiosity, and because its there.
got a pair of moderately faded jeans, and 2 sorta nice shirts and suspenders that i never wear on the farm, for when i hafta dress up for some reason.
i am Wrinkle, embodied…and dare anyone,lol.
of course, i do not have to “look good”, so theres that…but even during my cookin/cheffin days, i wore the same old ratty shorts and cotton long sleeves every day.
only thing i buy regular like…as in every year or two…is woolen socks for winter.
and, to be sure…and as ive said…from march through october, i wear mostly nothing at all doin my work on the farm…unless Deet counts…but keep a towel around in case i hafta cross the road, or someone shows up unexpectedly.
Some days the stupid burns a little more than usual….and this level of stupid is dare I say so, “en fuego”.
For any older vintage ESPN watchers…when Keith Olbermann was still funny and not yet a flaming “bucket of hate and venom”….and Dan Patrick was becoming the best thing about ESPN. Alas the times must, and have indeed changed.
Without this discussion, I would have interpreted the lift and curve of that “pad” as suggesting a light-weight bullet proof insert in the suit. An expert (not me) would have to see a bunch of photos of the same suit on the same day to make a real guess at that though. One picture proves nothing, and maybe my notion that such a thing might be likely is off-key anyway.
Think for yourself, mate. / ;)
I thought Deutsche Bank was Trump’s line backer, not Donald the linebacker.
I have to share this one from Gothamist. Felony assaults rising in NYC even as other violent crime drops, report finds. Hmmmm, the lede, As most violent crime rates continue to drop in New York City, a new report shows that serious assaults are on the rise — and researchers behind the findings aren’t exactly sure why. Mysterious. The first sentence, The report, which was compiled from NYPD data by the nonprofit Vital City, shows a persistent increase in felony assaults citywide since 2020.
Covid is so pointedly ignored that the article begins to read like a Monty Python skit. The lass para, Glazer said more research needs to be done to bring crime in the city back to pre-pandemic levels.
“I think it is worth a deeper dive into where these incidents occur, what time they occur,” she said. “How different is that from past years?” heh heh heh
RE: Fortune “Long COVID is a $1 trillion problem with no cure. Experts plead for governments to wake up”
“As review co-author Eric Topol noted in a recent blog post, the current COVID incursion is ramping up quickly, with one modeler estimating 900,000 new infections per day in the U.S. alone.”
Hoerger’s model puts the US at 1.3 million per day/
https://x.com/michael_hoerger/status/1822859755687149679
What a stupid, stupid timeline.
I don’t think that, given that we don’t really do any testing at this point, certainly not in any systematic way, that any model is anything more than a rough estimate. I think both 1 million and 1.3 million are “in the ballpark” and that’s all we can ask for.
I haven’t had a chance to read through Hoerger’s model, which he does document, nor have I seen a critique of it. However, CDC’s model’s of transmission have been quite bad. I followed one quite religiously for some time, then pounced when it turned out to be grossly wrong.
“Neoliberal capitalism’ has contributed to the rise of fascism, says Nobel laureate” [ABC Australia].
“‘When you understand economic freedom as freedom to act, it immediately reframes many of the central issues surrounding economic policy and freedom,’ he says.”
People that free may actually try to hold authorities accountable for mistakes. They can’t have that.
Everytime I hear about the US and associates about to make some big mistake or catastrophic mistake, I think the warnings do no good. As long as those actually responsible will not be held accountable, catastrophe upon catastrophe can pile up as far as the establishment is concerned
““‘I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist,’ says Ziyad Al-Aly…”
https://x.com/brownecfm/status/1823431127064789305
Biden’s Filthy Ceasefire Lies
Sung to the tune of, “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles
Melody
Build more cemeteries
On a summer evening
And it sounds just like Genocide
Give ’em more weapons
Spread that killin’ feeling
Add confusion on the side
Feed the press
Hide the truth
Can we even get through one day without?
I’m just thinking out loud
Can we even get through one day without?
Another round of ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
(Biden’s filthy ceasefire)
Cemeteries
More room they’ll be needin’
Maybe build some on the moon
Warpigs starve bellies
With that killin’ feeling
Blood washed away in June
Feed the press
Hide the truth
Can we even get through one day without?
Another round of ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
I just want an end to, yet another round of, Bibi’s awful genocide
(WIth Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies)
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies!
Biden’s filthy ceasefire lies! 2x
Democrats are stupid. People can’t afford stuff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/business/inflation-biden-harris-democrats.html
If you read Wolf Richter’s analysis, inflation actually went UP month-to-month.
The headline is number calculated based on a series going back 12 months and a particularly hot month dropped off the series. Wolf explains it here:
https://wolfstreet.com
The inflation rate is meaningless. Prices matter.
Especially prices relative to average wages. Kamala Harris is clueless. Watch her video where she is asked what she will do about inflation. She goes on to define it.
She’s had 3 and a half years to affect the economy. Now she’s going to fix the problems she voted for, often the senate tie breakers? example; her vote funded the new IRS agents who will go after the Little People like Servers. Now she’s stealing Trumps “No Tax on Tips” promise. The Kamaleon changes her colors and policies to fit the times and the mood.
The nesslabs article made me laugh. It’s got to the point whereby how many people think they can publish some amazing seeming nothingburger?
My response is always the same: Yatchew, A. & Griliches Z.. 1985. “Specification Error in Probit Models.” Review of Economics and Statistics 67 (1): 134–9.
People have different variances in how they respond to discrete tasks (like tapping a tune or interpreting the taps). People who “know” the song will tap more consistently and over-estimate how many taps are needed to recognise it, unless they KNOW the unseen person is a moron. This has been known since the late 1980s – look up Louviere, Woodworth, McFadden (who got a “pseudo” Nobel for utilising it but he got the answer right so we can’t criticise him for it being a pseudo), Hensher and others from 1987 papers onwards.
TL;DR People who know more or are more cognitively “with it” are more consistent, with probabilities that skew towards the true ones; people without these skills skew towards 1/n where n is the number of options. So in pairwise choices the people with fewer skill (or in this case info as to the true song) go towards 50/50 on A/B compared to the experts (song tapper).
This. Is. Not. New. It LITERALLY caused the BART in SF to work from day 1 based on knowing how “sure” different people were. Siloisation in academia causes this rubbish to still be published in 2024, over 50 years later. Sheesh.
The (more insulting) TL;DR re discrete choice models: If you don’t understand the likelihood function (printed at the end of the chapter of logit/probit models of all reputable texts for Stata/SPSS/SAS/etc) then don’t publish such garbage. You just look silly. And I shouldn’t have to show my working for something that is THERE in the literature and textbooks and has been taught since the late 1980s.
I know NC publishes links to things they don’t agree with so this ain’t an attack on them. We are here to discuss. But I just provide the source links on why a study like this is wrong. It should make everyone instantly discount the source/journal in future.
Dude. What the heck is a “probit model”?
I just saw a useful heuristic, a way for people to avoid being stupid in an everyday interaction. Academia is big, and there’s plenty of background I don’t know.
Also, how did BART apply this principle? That sounds interesting!
something from the world of damned lies and statistics, i think…but i cant vouch for the actual probability of that being True, since after the last of 3 college classes in that subject, i immediately set about purging it all from my consciousness(via a serviceable shroomfield we found, that included zen master cows)
i did recently have a sort of memory recovery epiphany lately, wherein i scrawled Baye’s Theorem on the Wilderness Bar…youngest noticed and marveled that it was in my chicken scratch, obviously,lol
Probit is basically the normal distribution. We don’t “like” it because there’s no closed form (writable) version in multidimensional space. The logit DOES have a closed form and we use it because for practically all examples is virtually indistinguishable from Probit: my late collaborator Tony Marley did the legwork to prove how the logit works for ranked choice (used in political polls in certain US States – Maine? I might have that wrong).
A heuristic for discrete choice is the following: if the observed frequencies are less skewed in a group that is less knowledgeable or has potential cognitive impairment (the elderly is first group I stratified out) then the underlying views may be the same…. They just aren’t as “consistent”.
McFadden used a mixture of revealed preferences (REAL choices – what had SF people actually done in terms of public transport options and ride shares etc) and stated preferences (“would you pay 2 bucks to park and ride at a station *here* in Walnut Creek to allow you to BART into SF in 30 mins?”). By marrying the two sets of data he solved the fundamental problem of probit/logit models: they have one equation with two unknowns. He got the SECOND equation (the REAL choices) so solved the confound and told the authorities exactly where to build the stations, how much to charge, the ideal ride frequency etc. He deserved that pseudo-Nobel and in his speech he acknowledged my collaborator Tony who had also solved the problem but in math psych which had no “Nobel”.
So the economists got the glory as usual when they technically weren’t the first to solve the problem….. But there’s no glamour in math psych and people like Tony didn’t think in terms of “real world problems like how to solve the SF access crisis in the 1960s”.
PS the irony is that Tony was the son of a British Devon farmer who turned down a scholarship to Oxford/Cambridge because he felt intimidated and got his BSc from Birmingham. UPenn came knocking in early 60s and grabbed a load of British geniuses like him.
Tony’s cohort were supervised in their PhDs by a bunch of people who were VERY senior in the Manhattan project.
Tony even revealed to me (and I only reveal this now he’s dead) that when he was called down to Whitehall around 1960 after the yanks came knocking, a senior downing st civil servant told him “go with the yanks…. We can’t do anything for you”.
Terry, one of the few regrets in my life is not learning the higher math…so i could understand more fully the physics, and people like you.
i admire you for what youve done.
Thanks Amfortas. Really admire what you’ve done. I got incredibly lucky in my previous career, having got in with a literal genius and all my work is me merely standing on the shoulders of giants.
Tony told me some wild stuff: the man was very humble and self-effacing, and remained the “farmer’s son” to his death. Yet he quietly gossiped to me about some VERY famous figures, which really made me laugh.
The mathematics equivalent of “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon” is the Erdős number. Tony is upper echelons with a value of 2. So I’m 3. That’s the median value for mathematicians who won the freakin Fields medal! Sometimes academia is wild in a good way.
In a way, the point Terry is raising is pointing straight at the problem in how stats are taught nowadays. (Of which I admit to being guilty of myself).
Typically, when we teach students logit or probit, we’ll just define the problem: people choose between two choices and we want to know what goes into the choice made. Then we show them the formula and the associated parameters and pretend that the rest basically work by magic, whereas there’s a lot of stuff going on underneath the math–which is where Terry is getting at and demand that we get at what’s going on (the article, superficially, does not have much to do with stats, for instance.)
This is something we err a lot about “political ideology”–we asdumd that the left and the right exist and the rest are sonewhere in the middle, and as such, they are somehow “moderate.” This is hardly ever true: the supposed moderate does not exist. The reason they are neither left or right is because they hold a mixture of views (and other characteristics) that don’t fit neatly into either camp. Many of their views may in fact be very extreme–but they might be pointing in opposite directions. So it’s not uncommon for alleged right wing extremists to be also left wing extremists–on different issues, yet show up as a “moderate” in aggregate. I think this is a critical point to consider when we look at political polls and think about which way “uncertain” voters might be heading. Many people don’t fit neatly in either GOP or Dem camps. Something “weird” can draw them in or away. Any one of these groups may not be big enough to be decisive, but big enough pile of different stuff and they might add up.
This is one reason I’m curious about the shifts in poll numbers and what might be driving it. They are almost certainly being driven by “fickle” voters, who do not care much for either choice and would have been less likely to turn out. It’s also worth noting that several polls had found that Biden had big advantage among “likely” voters before, who would not have been responsive to a change in “style,” while Trump was doing well among the less likrlt voters.
Wow. I think I should subcontract you to translate my gobbledegook for future posts!
I’ve tried in my posts elsewhere to “have a second go” at unpicking these voting anomalies you refer to, since these are the kind of “real world issues” that are most likely to get traction in the general population. I now instinctively think about how “hard” or “soft” the vote may be for these famous candidates in opinion polls and how “inconsistency” on the part of voters might make us totally misinterpret the opinion polls. This happened dramatically when HRC lost to Trump. Things are very very fluid again now.
Thanks again.
Your comment is much appreciated! I wish the people in my old line of work were as receptive! ;) (A lot of poli sci ppl are devoted to the idea of spatial analogy to the idea of “political ideology.” Poli psych ppl are different, but most of them don’t have a framework for expanding what insights they have to the big picture, other than saying that people are “weird and irrational.”
Thanks so much for the very interesting discussion. NC is the best!
I’ve often thought that statistics, especially when applied to human behaviour, is a classic example of a subject where a little knowledge can cause a lot of damage. The force of Dunning Kruger is strong with people who have done a basic stats course but don’t understand the underlying complexities. And that includes pretty much all economists and a frightening number of otherwise highly qualified people.
Thanks yet again for “getting” what these issues are and for bringing up an issue I perhaps haven’t so much harped on about.
You know the thing that has really bothered me in the last 15 years? I had already known that my “original home field” of economics was misusing statistics….but when I gradually moved, via health economics and medical statistics, into the orbit of some very clever people in choice modelling (whether “theory types” in math psych or “applied types” in academic marketing) I began to get exposed to a load of other fields that claimed to be more objective and “not conceal their model assumptions”.
Turns out they are just as bad as the economists, but it’s worse because at least the people round here KNOW that we should assume the average economist is assuming something weird. These other fields have been getting a free pass for too long.
It kinda came home to me when Sabine the German “hard scientist” decided everything had gone to pot. /nihilistic rant
As noted many times on NC.
How To Lie With Statistics – by Darrell Huff – 1954
https://archive.org/details/HowToLieWithStatistics_201608
Sorta like how Hudson’s Super Imperialism went from required reading to dust bin … eh …
Thanks. The trouble is the “statistics lies” are now so obscure that we are getting into quantum mechanics type land, with the infamous “if you think you understand it then you definitely don’t” kinda thing.
This is infuriating because there are industries built on “black box solutions” that are very very rich but who definitely don’t understand this stuff. I freely admit that on every single project I worked on 2001-2019 I relied heavily on a load of “lifetime experience” from some applied person (80% of the time twas a medical doc since health was my core field) because otherwise I simply had one equation with two unknowns and no possible way to intuit the true values of the unknowns. The experience of the applied practitioners helped me reduce the number of solutions down from infinity to 3-5. I then used tricks and my own experience to guess the right one.
I did occasionally get it wrong. But my biggest claim to fame was knowing that Theresa May was (contrary to the polling organisations) about to lose her overall majority in 2017. Purely because I happened by chance to have a political national survey in field when she called a surprise general election. YouGov piloted an “alternative” model which also called it right. THAT model is now the new norm in UK polling, though IMNSHO they still haven’t ironed out the wrinkles.
Been there and done that Terry as someone that came from more of a natural history and royal science background, albeit I had grown up around a dinner table of Comp Sci, Medical, Accounting, as a kid.
Concur that Stats/Models can assist in reaching conclusions +/- less than 6% fail, but, totally dependent on historical data w/a side as you note accomplished people providing granular details in real time[tm].
Per se today … just had a chat with a geneticist [accomplished] doing a MBA just too – firstly – understand and then be able to support an economic argument whilst seeking funding. Heck it only took less than 5 min till I saw that look come over her face and desisted. I have texted her mother and linked Yves post on the topic of funding.
But hay mate … I am just the guy sorting out all the low quality painting on the outside moms huge old house built 35 yrs ago … lmmaso …
Thanks. I frequently feel like I must be insane, given how often I read something and think “WTAF?”
But this site “grounds me” and whilst it doesn’t give artificial happiness, it does teach me that I’m not mad and there’s a lot of crap out there.
Yes … we ground each other mate.
In my experience, the ‘hard’ scientists and tech people (engineers in particular) can be among the worst at interpreting many kinds of data. When you are daily used to dealing with models that give you 0.00001% precision, it takes a very big conceptual leap to understand that most of the universe doesn’t work that way.
Many years ago, my not-very-good MSc thesis was on scientific uncertainty – or to be more precise, on how to interpret uncertain scientific data (or conflict) into robust decision making. It opened my eyes to just how bad a lot of supposedly ‘science based’ analysis really can be. Economists with their cost-benefit models were undoubtedly the worst offenders, but the siloing of much scientific knowledge has led to a lot of unnecessary bad policy.
Isaiah Berlin’s ‘hedgehog and fox’ analogy is something I keep coming back to – if you don’t get the balance between them right, your ‘scientific’ analysis can be worse than a random guess as inherent biases have a habit of reinforcing themselves among supposedly very smart people (health policy in a post covid world being an all too obvious example).
Lee Smolin and The Trouble with Physics was, in many ways, an eye opener to me (despite it being a bit personal with some of my former teachers being criticized openly–then again, I hadn’t touched physics much after my undergrad years and if you are a lowly undergrad, famous physicists do look like gods.).
It is indeed an eye opening book, its my go-to for winning arguments against the hard scientists in my wider family.
Thanks. I used to hate teaching “bone fide” statisticians because they’d internalised the logit and probit functions and refused to see the problem in the likelihood function – twas “something we will deal with later” but later never came due to late stage capitalism and lack of funding.
Regarding polls, in 2016 there was a fellow who did a model based strictly on state polls and got the probability of a Clinton win to 99%. The remaining percentage was mostly the risk of structural flaws common to the polls which he estimated at about one percent. He was wrong, and ate a bug on TV.
But another way to look at it was that there was probably common, structural flaws. So I had an eye out when a couple of years later a study was done that looked at polls in the week leading up to a US election (on all levels) and concluded that despite claiming 95 percent probability of the result being within the margins of error, only 60 percent of the election results were within the margins of error. To get 95 percent they had to double the margins of error.
One can go into the reasons for that (cell phones and unwanted spam calls, I suspect) but this comment is long-winded enough.
I think you are right in that the underlying movement in the population is among fickle voters, but I think a lot of movement in polls are noise.
That noise is then spun into narratives which in turn can have an effect on voter intention. I have had reasons to talk to voters after elections, and one who has stuck with me was a young guy who said he liked X but voted for Y, because Y was going to win. That kind of voter who wants to be on the winning team can’t be understood from policy preferences.
Yep. First lesson I learnt in survey design: the respondents are not “passive” people we get data from….they actively interact with the survey design and it is your job as the survey designer to minimise their opportunities to “want to do it” and “be able to do it”.
The vast majority of opinion polls fail on both criteria. Humans “game” surveys. ALWAYS. The trick is designing the survey so that you can spot when they’re doing it, to what extent they’re doing it, and why they might be doing it. If you know these, you might be able to predict better. (Might because unless you have your “second dataset” you MUST use art and not science to get a solution.)
My first experience of election nerdism was growing up as a teenager in Ireland and reading through election results – as Ireland uses proportional representation, you can see how people transfer down lists, and its all too rarely on ideological grounds. Multiple times you see transfers which make no sense in conventional political terms but presumably makes perfect sense to the person in the ballot box.
Even with the last European election, a few colleagues of mine were commenting on a particularly high transfer from left wing Sinn Fein candidate to a particularly right wing FGer. It didn’t seem to make much sense until you looked at the other transfers and even just ‘eyeballing’ the figures you could see a pattern – people transferring from their favoured candidate to younger female candidates of any party or ideology. The political parties here are obviously well aware of this – they usually try run younger females as the ‘junior’ partner to a constituency candidate to boost overall transfers. A Chinese friend when looking at election posters hanging on every lampost actually asked me if there was some sort of law in Ireland that you had to run a blonde woman in every constituency.
I am reminded of an iconic quote from rebooted Battlestar Galactica: “the mark one eyeball”. I have lost count of how many datasets I have just “looked at” in Excel and sorted by something and “eyeballed” and what is really going on stands out.
I’m gonna sound like the archetypal old man here but the younger people don’t LOOK at their data. It is amazing what you can spot when just putting it into Excel and sorting on each of a number of variables. I typically dealt with 8-24 key variables so a standard widescreen monitor allowed me to “see” everything and only have to scroll down, not also across. I spotted sooooooo many things that ended up in the textbook that way.
I was constantly asked by “young’uns” at courses “but what test did you run to find that segment?” And you sense their frustration and/or lack of comprehension when you say “eyeballing plus experience”. Because these days nobody wants to put in 15 years of work to understand a dataset. I shudder to think what AI is doing to choice modelling these days. But not my problem any longer.
My dad called it the ‘Intraocular Trauma Test.’
That’s cool! And the sad thing is I could have “sold it” as a valid academic technique if I’d used that term rather than one cribbed from a sci-fi TV series.
Ha! I knew about the gamesmanship for “downvote” transfers (is there an official name for this?) but I didn’t know about the blonde woman candidate trick! What always drove me up the wall about Irish election data was that I could never actually figure out, in the official data, how the votes got transferred to tertiary, quaternary, and quintenary candidates (and it would have been almost impossible to properly tabulate anyways), knowing that these things can potentially tip the results! (Ireland was always my go-to-example to the anti-FPTP advocates who thought being able to transfer votes was wonderful, as “auditing” the results and figuring out how exactly candidates won would have been next to impossible in some/many cases….)
The published figures are always totals for the constituency ward, but the tally men count box by box by eye as they are opened. This, along with ‘on the ground’ door to door canvassing (its more than just getting people to vote, its also about getting a feel for who is voting for whom) was always a very powerful way for the main Irish parties to work out transfers. This is important when you are trying to get your supporters to transfer in a particular direction in order to maximise your seats from a given number of first preferences.
I suspect that nowadays a more mobile and mixed population makes this very difficult, especially in urban areas, but in pre-computer days the ability of local tallymen to work out almost exactly who was voting down the list was legendary.
I should add that interpreting Irish votes is particularly difficult simply because nobody knows how many people actually vote strategically rather than voting by simple preference. Most politically aware people know that voting no.1 for a favourite to win is more than likely to be a wasted vote (it won’t get transferred), so they will instead go for someone they like who is either going to be eliminated early or someone who is likely to be in the race for the last seat. The Green Party is always particularly hungry for first preferences because they transfer well as the ‘least hated’ party, but they struggle to stay high up in the early voting to avoid elimination.
Incidentally, as a counter to the ‘blonde female’ vote, it noticeably doesn’t always happen between left wing females. Clare Daly, the strong anti-war MEP lost her seat in June primarily because of very poor transfers from the other prominent left wing female candidate. They openly despised each other, and it seems their voters got the message. So neither got elected despite a relatively strong vote for the left.
Fascinating anecdotes! Thanks!!!!
Well said and I agree with hk regarding appreciation of how “people do weird stuff”.
I freely admit I get triggered by the most vociferous proponents of proportional representation. People INTERACT with the voting system (as I said above). Arrow showed it is impossible to get everything we want. We need to debate what we are willing to compromise on, then use a voting system that best achieves this.
> This is something we err a lot about “political ideology”–we asdumd that the left and the right exist and the rest are sonewhere in the middle, and as such, they are somehow “moderate.” This is hardly ever true: the supposed moderate does not exist. The reason they are neither left or right is because they hold a mixture of views (and other characteristics) that don’t fit neatly into either camp. Many of their views may in fact be very extreme–but they might be pointing in opposite directions. So it’s not uncommon for alleged right wing extremists to be also left wing extremists–on different issues, yet show up as a “moderate” in aggregate.
This I can understand, and I agree 100%.
I totally hold my hand up to not explaining this well but yes, that’s a MAJOR part of the issue. When you deal with politics that has gone from a one dimensional “left-right” scale to multidimensional world then it becomes really really difficult to explain in an intuitive way why a blogger or a polling organisation might be very very wrong.
Thanks for giving time to us who “raise the red flags”. Since a time in the very early days of NC when Yves had the time to explain to me how the “system” could let through/moderate/delete a message I’ve become a lot more relaxed about whether a comment of mine gets published with the 5 minute edit time, gets “instanta publish” (which is always a pleasant surprise), or never sees the light of day (and I generally know why this is so), I’m more and more appreciative of this site.
TL;DR: Terry can be a knob, but can also sometimes be OK thanks to having worked with some real geniuses :)
this is why qualified immunity must be done away with. four coppers over a bike infraction, you will notice one copper gets the gloves on, ready to beat the person till a auditor shows up.
four cops milking the tax payers to death with wages, over time and lost lawsuits because of unconstitutional crimes against the people, whilst real crimes solved are being way under counted and not solved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERX6m4q-248
This reminds me of something I observed in Seattle about 6 years back. I was at walking through a large park in Capital Hill district and saw about 30 to 40 cops in a small area. In checking what was going down it seemed there was about 6 guys were exercising there rights to engage in free speech. This being a liberal part of the city word got that these dudes were doing. There was the all black clothing dudes, about 30 of them who were following them and shouting shit at them. So the cops were the peacekeepers (?). Lots of OT was being handed out. Seattle has a very strong police union and loves to exercise their power. It’s a cluster f*ck.
there is no money in solving crime.
so cops are not working people, do not serve us nor protect us nor have real unions.
someday the corrupts courts, district attorneys and politicians may find out they no longer control the cops.
Ah, look at all the undecided people
Ah, look at all the undecided people
Kamala Harris
Picks up the mantle in the oval office
Where the weeding out has been-lives in a dream
Waits at the window of opportunity
Wearing the face that she keeps in
A jar by the door-who is it for?
All the undecided people
Where do they all come from?
All the undecided people
Where do they all belong?
Donald Trump
Writing the words of a sermon
That no one will hеar-no one comes near
Look at him working
Darning his tweets in the night
When there’s nobody there-what does he care?
All the undecided people
Where do they all come from?
All the undecided people
Where do they all belong?
All the undecided people (All the undecided people)
All the undecided people (All the undecided people)
All the undecided people (All the undecided people)
Kamala Harris died in the polls and was
Buried along with her name-nobody came
Donald Trump
Wiping the dirt from his hands as
He walks from the grave no one was saved
All the undecided people all the undecided people
(Ah, look at all the undecided people)
(Ah, look at all the undecided people)
(Ah, look at all the undecided people)
(Ah, look at all the undecided people)
(Ah, look at all the undecided people)
(Ah, look at all the undecided people)
(Ah, look at all the undecided people)
(Ah, look at all the undecided people)
Eleanor Rigby, by the Beatles
Undecided people are weirdos. Just sayin’.
Maybe because they have not been given any choices that they like.
I can see it now. A poster of Harris and Trump facing off over lecterns with the caption: “We are the Hollow Memes.”
Cool. Now there’s a new song running through my head:
“We…all…live…in a Yellow Hollow Meme”
Dammit, now it is stuck in mine.
aye! “headpiece filled with straw, alas!”.
along with Camus’ work on Absurdity, this is the sort of thing thats been rumbling along in the background on mind track 3 or 4 for some time, now.
snippets, like:
“behaving as the wind behaves”…as ah stagger and lurch across the dirt road of an evening to put up the now juvenile muscovies.
or,”in the hour when we are trembling with tenderness, lips form prayers to broken stone”…like every damned 4am coffee and splif down at the graveyard with the late Tamster.
ive apparently absorbed a lot of Eliot,lol.
when in company, i can spontaneously and extemporaneously access a whole lot of a more varied poetry library..Jeffers, Ginsberg, Whitman.
but by myself…its usually Eliot.
Ooh you’re a Hollow Meme
Such a Hollow Meme
Ooh you’re a Hollow Meme
Such a Hollow Meme
It’s something I think’s worthwhile
If Kamala makes you smile
If not then you’re throwing stones
Throwing stones, throwing stones
Holiday, Bee Gees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDJ5qqiQDto
Speaking of socio-economic ballads:
Meme river, wider than a smile,
Fake you out in style, someday
Oh dream maker, you heartbreaker
Whatever you’re sellin’, I’m goin’ to pay
Two Parties, off to rule the world
There’s such a lot of world to seize
We’re chasin’ some bright rainbow’s end,
Driven ’round the bend,
By neo-liberal friends
Meme river’s a key.
With apologies to Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini. “Moonriver.”
> Meme river, wider than a smile
Ha ha!
Bludgeoning people with “Let Me See You Smile” has made me permanently suspicious of the smile as such, at least the public smile in the West. CEOs, politicians, doctors, administrators — a smile is a sign that at best they’re up to no good, at worse predators. Why are they smiling? The answer is never the public good, or compassion, or important value. Maybe this makes me a WASP curmudgeon. Or perhaps I’m displaying adaptability.
Kamala, needless to say, smiles rather a lot.
I still can’t figure out how AllSides figured out the Harris campaign was rewriting headlines. As our hosts point out frequently, story headlines and the stories themselves change. Did AllSides monitor these news stories or somehow audit editorial changes?
Having said that, rewriting headlines is 1000% consistent with all the “narrative” crappola we’ve been put through. Also consistent with how Walz’s staff finessed the language in his bio.
This is a legit marketing strategy but not for legit products like soap or canned goods. This is how you market when your product is not essential. Harris-Walz could be swapped out with Newsom-Whitmer and the only chatter would be how come he’s on top?
I’m getting a weird vibe that Harris-Walz might not make it through the convention. No clue how they would pull that off but folks who strategically slash their opponents’ Secret Service details are capable of pretty much anything.
> Did AllSides monitor these news stories or somehow audit editorial changes?
It wouldn’t be hard to detect initial examples if your head is in the news flow; and it wouldn’t be hard to track down the real headline with Internet Archive and like tools.
> This is how you market when your product is not essential.
That’s a good point, akin to my question: “Why do they lie when they don’t even have to?” Find a good headline, ffs!
You don’t even need to do that, you can pay for something like Ahrefs where you have access to the history of Google Ads run for given keywords. It’ll show you the exact Google Ad text. The amount of SEO data available is staggering, and quite a bit comes from feeds from Google that sites pay for, while others comes from spyware on people’s phones that reports back keywords used and sites visited. Fun stuff. Sort of like Google Chrome!
Could this presage the Return of the Wicked Witch of the Mid West?
Maybe the only things Kamala is wearing at present are the Ruby Slippers. (How brave and progressive of Her!)
i skimmed that for the gist….and i dont grok a lot of the geekspeak…but isnt this, like, exactly the central thing in 1984?
i mean the description of Winston’s workday?
memoryhole, and all that?
but now, its apparently mostly automated,lol…so “Progress(tm)”
the bigger story, perhaps, is that the woman who reported it was all but forced to minimise her own story…and did, without so much as an ironic cough.
More signs that it’s all just a pseudo-event .
I have added orts and scraps. Slow news day, as we wait for the explosions:
Auden’s poem is perfect for the suicide watch in West Asia. The one in East Europe too.:-(
One of my favorites. Thanks, Lambert
I’ve been thinking of it often these dark days.
I read this tweet just before the Minnesota primary. Without mentioning AIPAC it certainly makes it clear that someone was pumping anti-Omar money into the CD through out-of-state Republicans.
Her opponent Don Samuelson has been to the well too many times and had little to offer. At the same time, Royce White won the Republican primary for U.S. Senator and is way more entertaining than Samuelson. He’s running against Amy Klobuchar.
I probably should have voted but people get very indignant when you laugh out loud while casting your ballot.
I have seen the argument that neither Bush nor Bowman had strong ties to the party establishment; Bush because she “came out of left field” and Bowman because of the fire alarm incident. So AIPAC picked off the laggard members of the herd, as it were. But left those in the herd (Ilhan, AOC, Jayapal) alone.
Covid-19
Fomite transmission obsession in an airborne transmission world
The stuff of heads banging on desks indeed … on a flight with really bad WiFi … can someone check and tell me if the WHO tweet saying COVID is not airborne is still up? I suspect it is.
Kamala The Marxist
LOL
Wot a family blog joke!
I had to go look into who was writing for the site … aaahhh yes, essentially a fork off of Investor’s Business Daily (via investors.com).
Ambassadors for Mr. Market abound.
yeah,lol.
im having difficulty finishing it.
it may elicit an email, even(perhaps after a few more beers,lol)…so silly and bereft of a connection to who these people actually are….i mean, Bill Clinton COMPLETED the Reagan Revolution, FFS!
this whole 100 year anticommie hysteria is just so totally full of shite…and so easily refuted…except that everybody who believes it(which is most people i know IRL) is so totally invested in that mythos that they would rather burn me at the stake than listen for a minute,lol.
AIPAC
AIPAC trying not to run up the score too much … should set off bells in the ears of those listening for proof that in some quarters, there is still fear that a Muslim American boycott of the vote and/or “Vraiment-Gauche” Left support for a third party can leave Harris/Walz a bit too uncomfortably exposed.
One interesting potential demographic shift is that of the young: there were quite a few stories that Biden was leading strongly among the old white people, while Trump was doing unexpectedly among the young nonwhites (while leading by a big margin among the less likely voters generally). Now, non-college whites probably make up lion’s share of the “less likely voters,” but I imagine not having Biden on the Dem ticket would have made the “young nonwhite” component of the Trump’s potential coalition much less tenable. It would be interesting to see if there’s anything informative on that dimension in the polls. Who’s leading or trailing in the big picture sense seems not particularly useful at this stage.
Interesting point. I would guess that for many ‘low information’ voters (to use that horrible term), Kamala seems far more appealing than Biden or Trump or any other older guy. But as you suggest, they may answer opinion polls, but they rarely vote. The main parties put a lot more groundwork focus on retirement homes than nightclubs for a reason.
I suspect the lie that “Covid is over” will “No longer be operative” by January 20th.
Largely because America’s schoolchildren will be so obviously damaged by repeated Covid infections that the issue can not be ignored.
There are already too many with damaged organs and way too many with damaged immune systems, this can has been kicked down the road as far as it can…the worms are leaking out.
But how to deploy the blame cannons when both parties are so thoroughly implicated? I don’t think blame the Chinese will do the trick — partly because Trump pre-empted it, partly because that doesn’t explain the subsequent public health debacle — and I don’t think blame the vax has quite enough traction. If only airborne transmission would break through (and as we know from PMC schooling behavior, once it’s OK to do it, they’ll all do it).
The interesting thing is that there really is a “Heroic Scientist” narrative with the aerosol people, there for the taking, but the press as a whole has never picked up on it as anything more than an individual story; it’s not part of the narrative.
You’d need the cover of “new events/information” so that they can memory-hole the previous malfeasance. Similar to how so many were “shocked” to find out Biden was incompetent recently. A “mega-variant” might work.
Perhaps more challenging is the donors. How would they ever believe people taking COVID seriously fits with their goals? I just can’t see it. If the donors don’t want it, how can it happen?
Additionally, I think many many people have been happy to (one could say dying to) live in delusion about COVID. Anecdotally, I’ve seen this since day 1. It’s not just a top-down insanity. Future historians may find this a rich area to analyse.
I would like to see a documentary.
> I suspect the lie that “Covid is over” will “No longer be operative” by January 20th.
I would love for this to be true, but it isn’t going to happen.
Watch the movie “Inception” …
There are so many great scenes in that flick, but one I keep going back to is when they are in the Parisian warehouse formulating how they’re going to convince a wealthy heir to dismantle his father’s empire. What they decide to leverage is tension in the relationship between the father and his son.
In the case of COVID, the relationship that is exploited is between us and our work-driven lives, which are in turn falsely valued by how much we can give to the sacred economy. When people say they want they want to be free to live their lives, they are not talking about real freedom – they are instead talking about freedom to work and consume. The topsy turvy nature of the relationship we have with the government is also another weakness to be exploited. The masses ultimately do not understand that it is the government who has a fiduciary responsibility to the populace – to ensure our safety first … not the safety of Mr. Market. So the COVID pandemic is being run with the same playbook as the global financial crisis, where Obama basically defends Wall St and lets homeowners take the hit, but yay, he saved the economy! Wash, rinse and repeat – the ruling class doesn’t care about children who are effectively gonna lead shortened lives because of severely compromised organs and immune systems. In the end, it is the economy that will be saved.
It is only if the pain becomes unescapable – and look, 1 in 36 positivity rate ain’t doing it, sadly. We’ll need to get back to refrigeration trucks sold as proxies for death or something that bad. Ultimately, I think it will be people going broke from having to take care of sick families that will move the needle. But by then, it’s going to be too late. There’ll be a chorus of “no one could have foreseen” from the guilty parties, and a populace groomed for goldfish-brained civility will remember nothing of the articles from 2020 foretelling exactly this, and they will do nothing.
I hope the French can lead the way, like they did with the attempt of Macron’s government to raise pensions last year … I’d hazard a guess that if French citizens started getting really sick from COVID sequelae, you’d see a couple banks go up in flames and perhaps a couple politician’s/health-official’s mansions.
#HashtagInshallah
I basically agree with this. I think there are better than even odds that the narrative can be maintained for at least another two to four years. The pervasiveness of individual actions (“you do you ” on masks), and the metaphorical frogs not feeling the water as boiling personally, makes it really hard for me to see widespread change in the USA without something like a major increase in direct fatalities. The diffuse (seeming, at least) nature of organ failure and immune system dysfunction is perfect for FUD operations.
BUT, I sincerely hope that the veil is lifted by Jan 20, without a spike in deaths. As Lambert says, there is a good narrative thread to follow, and movement could be overnight if the PMC goes that way.
Yep. I agree with this. People aren’t turning blue and exploding. People are mostly going about their lives, maybe with the occasional “summer flu” or whatever. But it doesn’t appear that the context of our lives has significantly shifted, even though it has. For most people, risk analysis is: everyone else is doing it and looks okay. Me too!
It will be interesting to watch the metric “age-adjusted premature mortality”.
FRED has this at county level and there is, unsurprisingly, a spike in 2020 in every plot I looked at. The time series seems to be updated only years after the fact, though (which perhaps will allow the baseline to be adjusted to make future data trends look less alarming).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults/?st=median%20age%20at%20death
Nice. Thx for sharing!
Thanks, this is very good. I should really master FRED. One more thing to do!
> There’ll be a chorus of “no one could have foreseen” from the guilty parties,
I would think that there must be a gigantic career opportunity for brave journalists to buck the trend now and write about what was already known, prior to 2020, by public health authorities about the danger of coronavirus pandemics, and the extent to which the CV-19 pandemic fulfilled or deviated from prior expectations.
“What did they know and when did they know it?”
We compete to consume rather than cooperate to conserve. And while it’s all wrapped in obeisance to The Great Invisible Hand, what that really means is that all must be sacrificed to preserve and even augment return on capital of our ruling billionaires.
If you’re interested in a perspective on Hoerger’s Covid numbers approach I found this useful
https://buttondown.com/abbycartus/archive/how-to-read-the-pandemic-mitigation-collaborative/
As he says “I’m just trying to show you how to read the model. “
rummaged around in the margins of scott alexander:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
and i love that guy,lol.
been reading him for what?…25 years?
still makes me laugh out loud….and Think!
“As students head back to class, are schools ready to handle COVID-19?”
The funny thing about kids going back to school is that even from the very first days in 2020 it became an ideological thing in the same way that wearing masks did. Not only here in Oz but in the UK and the US as well. The – unspoken – idea back then was that kids had to go to school so that they could catch Covid and go home to spread it to their families and neighbours, thus helping ensure “herd immunity.” But four years later when the herd keeps on getting sick again and again? Maybe it is so that there is a semblance of normality or maybe it is to ensure that their parents have no excuse not to go to work. But you can guarantee that it will never be done on actual medical grounds but only on pseudo medical grounds of the sort that the WHO and the CDC use.
From Hackers may have stolen the Social Security numbers of every American. Here’s how to protect yourself
So, a freeze is probably not enough:
Experian’s Credit Freeze Security is Still a Joke (2021 update)
So you need to actually create an alert, which is distinct from a freeze. With a 1 year alert, which congrats you need to re-do every single year for the rest of your life, encourages a financial institution making a credit decision to contact you, before issuing credit. So far, this has saved me a dozen fraudulent attempts at opening accounts in my name since one theft or another screwed me back in 2014.
You can freeze or not; it’s free now. I never have. I’ve never had a problem. You probably have to get an account at each of the degenerate credit agencies, and they absolutely will try to upsell you on garbage credit protection services, and enhanced freeze garbage. Don’t do it. You don’t need it. What a scam. Never let a crisis go to waste, neh?
Your milage may vary, of course. And stuff that used to “instant work” for credit apps might no longer work, you might have to go into banks to open accounts now, not online, or getting a card will be declined and you’ll have to call and confirm your identity.
But this is the cost of the additional security that the credit alert adds to your files. (The freeze auto-rejects this stuff anyway, so either way there’s more work involved if you want some protection.)
Good luck!
In a functional country, this hack would lead to immediate legislation outlawing “social security number”-based security. Even today, a bank will ask me for my date of birth and SSN, as if everyone on the planet earth does not have this. Lol. yes.
Actually, I’m starting to see places send an SMS code to your phone, but if you don’t have SMS, you’re screwed. And SMS number port attacks are relatively easy to pull off.
(it’s the hap-happiest time of the year~)
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kamala
Everywhere you go
Take a look at the state of Joe, he’s uttering malarkey once again
With Jill as his cane and health suspicions that grow
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kamala
Veep story no more
But the pettiest sight to see is the word salad that will be
A daily bore
Syntax jumbled about and a mouth that shoots
Is the wish of Kam & Doug
A doll that’ll talk and will not get mocked
Is the hope of the Donkey Show
And Mom and Dad can hardly wait for election talk to start again
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kamala
Everywhere you go
There’s hope in the grand scheme, her administration will go well
She’s the sturdy kind that doesn’t mind the show
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kamala
Soon her administration will start
And the thing that’ll make ’em zing is the vocabulary that you bring
Right within her vocal chords
It’s beginning to look a lot like Kamala
Goy story, some say a bore
But the scariest sight to see is the ‘I’m With Her’ campaign poster that will be
On your own front door
Sure, it’s Hillary once more
They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why.
Another mysterious public health failure; the 20 minute read mostly details the sandbagging and denial of the provincial government on this. Towards the end, we discover this, however.
But:
What context would be needed in general, though? No one should have high levels of glyphosate in their body. Related or not, this is a scandal. Perhaps that’s why environmental contaminant testing was nixed by the provincial government, any testing at all, in fact?
marx and engels knew what the police really are. the real reason why cops have immunity, is because they are there to terrorize, intimidate and cow the population.
https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2002-03-01/friend-or-foe-marxism-and-the-police
“It is not the creation of a particular class but evolves from the absolute necessity that class society has of dealing with the class oppositions that divide it. For most people, the concept of State is associated with legislatures and politicians. This is a very partial view of its content. Besides these institutions must be added the bureaucracy, the judicial apparatus, the clergy, the media, the army, and… the police. The police are the first line of the “bodies of armed men” (4) that are intended to defend the interest of the ruling class. If their real function was to stop crime, they would arrest every capitalist on the planet, as these are the true criminals and their regime the real source of all crime.
Unlike the worker whose interest is to get rid of the boss’s rule, the existence of the police is directly tied to the maintenance of the State and capitalist property relations. In this sense, in no way can cops or prison guards be seen as members of the working class as the trade unions would want us to believe. (5) Unfortunately, the trade unions are not the sole promoters of this misconception.”
…
but i think the government has now lost control of them.
For those interested in England, I found this article by an American worth the read, particularly in light of the dystopian behaviour of the little voted for Führer Starmer.
“Alan Turing, whatever injustice done him, was dispensable to the survival of civilization, but the mores he transgressed were not.”
I stopped reading at that point. YMMV.
Re: “Kamala’s Marxist Roots”
I looked at Issues & Insights, and clicked through to their “about” page.
A couple decades ago, my brother gifted me an sub to Investor’s Business Daily. IBD occasionally had a good article on some company or industry, but mostly it was a compilation of the day’s financial statistics for stocks, bonds, futures, options, currencies and more. But… the editorial page … OH. MY. GOD. What a bunch of reactionary cry babies!
Issues & Insights even has pictures and profiles of the jerks who write this swill. It was entertaining to finally see the faces of these shitheads.
> I looked at Issues & Insights,
They don’t know their enemy….
“When you understand economic freedom as freedom to act, it immediately reframes many of the central issues surrounding economic policy and freedom”.
If Stiglitz had taken the effort to read Marx …
One of the first cases under the UK’s new Online Safety Act comes to court:
“A rapper who posted a video online accusing Tommy Robinson of calling on people to attack mosques has appeared in court.
Omar Abdirizak, 30, is charged with conveying information which was known to be false, intending at the time of sending to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience – an offence under Section 179 of the new Online Safety Act 2023”
—
Here is said offending video. [Strong language. UK readers please only view from within a Faraday cage]
It’s not the greed, it’s the sadism.