By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Patient readers, it’s been a very long week in the real world and I’m tired. So, this Water Cooler isn’t exactly an Open Thread, but it is short. And now I’m going to find a cool breeze and shut my eyes. Talk amongst yourselves! –lambert
–lambert
Bird Song of the Day
I looked for another species of songbird that mimics, and came up with the Thrasher.
Brown Thrasher, Otsego, Michigan, United States. Plus insect sounds!
In Case You Might Miss…
- New RCP polling averages: No good news for Trump.
- Reticulum networking stack
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:
There is no good news here for Trump. The deterioration in both Pennsylvania and Georgia is especially marked. Remember, however, that all the fluctuations — in fact, all the leads — are within the margin of error. So the “joy” is based on, well, vibes.
“How Harris Has Completely Upended the Presidential Race, in 14 Maps” [New York Times]. “We are now back to the same electoral map that we had before Mr. Biden’s summertime polling collapse: Once again, the winner in November will come down to the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.” • 270toWin agrees with the magnitude of the shift, although they leave out North Carolina:
“Harris has opened up a second path to victory, according to The Post’s polling model” [WaPo]. “Our modeling shows that Harris has two paths to possible success: the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the Sun Belt states of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada as well as North Carolina (she could win in either region and still claim the White House). Meanwhile, Trump must win both the Rust Belt and Sun Belt to triumph.” • Hmm.
* * * Kamala (D): Kamala’s lying again:
Trump: I never got credit for COVID
(Over a million Americans died and he told us to inject bleach) pic.twitter.com/vww2MtJurW
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 14, 2024
First, Trump is not lying. The vaccines that Biden mandated were all developed by Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Second, of the million that died, most died on Biden’s watch. Third, “inject bleach” is a lie (on a par with the lie about Vance and his couch). Again, Democrats seem to prefer to lie. Even when they don’t have to. It’s weird.
Trump (R): “Trump Gambles on Outside Groups to Finance Voter Outreach Efforts” [New York Times]. “The Republican campaign for president is quietly being remade by new federal guidelines that empower big-money groups and threaten to undermine party control well beyond the 2024 election. Former President Donald J. Trump’s team has enlisted some of these groups to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors across the country — saving the campaign significant money in the process. But the Trump campaign is making a serious gamble in doing so, betting that these outside groups, which they do not directly control, can carry out their marching orders without accountability…. Senior Republican Party officials fear that the decision — and the Trump campaign’s efforts — will lead to the party losing considerable control over get-out-the-vote operations, much as they have in the world of television advertising, where the scripts and strategies are often crafted by super PACs with their own ambitions and ideas.” • Another imponderable…..
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!
Origins Debate
“Pentagon still funneling money to suspended EcoHealth Alliance, unable to access potential gain-of-function research data abroad” [New York Post]. “The Pentagon is still funneling money to the suspended grantee EcoHealth Alliance and is unable to fully access data on gain-of-function research it may be funding overseas — including in China, according to a letter exclusively obtained by The Post.” • Leaving aside gain-of-function, EcoHealth is an obvious NGO cesspit of dodgy accounting and sleazy contracting, as Vanity Fair showed in exhaustive detail back in 2022. It’s hard to see why they would have any ongoing contracts.
Policy
“The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic” [Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, Foreign Affairs]. The deck: “Governments Need to Invest Far More in New and Better Vaccines.” From the text:
Officials should make no mistake: there will be more influenza and coronavirus pandemics, and any one of them could prove far more catastrophic than the COVID-19 pandemic. Whenever it occurs, it will almost certainly be a virus, primarily transmitted from person to person via the airborne route, a “virus with wings,” meaning the viral particles can be suspended in the air for long periods and distances. When such an outbreak transpires, rapid global transmission will happen before anyone realizes the world is in the earliest days of a years-long pandemic. Governments cannot wait to prepare until a virus is already spreading around the world. As the last five years have shown, even a moderately deadly disease can have enormous health, economic, social, and political consequences.
And yet, no mention of non-pharmaceutical interventions at all — even though blocking the airborne route through ventilation and masking is the only way to, as it were, “clip the wings” of the virus before it spreads, whether the virus be Covid, H5N1, MonkeyPox, or even SmallPox. (Incidentally, re: “When such an outbreak transpires”, the word transpires derives from the Latin spirare, to breathe. It’s like the return of the repressed #CovidIsAirborne.)
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
Housing: “United States Housing Starts” [Trading Economics]. “Housing starts in the United States fell by 6.8% from the previous month to an annualized rate of 1.238 million in July of 2024, the sharpest decline since March to the lowest level since 2020, and contrasting with the downwardly revised 1.1% increase in the previous month.”
Tech: “Fortnite Maker Epic Games Challenges Apple’s Dominance With New iOS App Store” [Wired]. “Epic Games today officially launched a rival app store for iOS in the European Union, marking the first time Apple’s own App Store has had to face a serious rival. The Epic Games Store will initially offer Epic’s games, including Fortnite, for users to download onto their iPhones, with plans to start onboarding third-party developers’ games beginning in December…. Epic says its app store will take a maximum 12 percent commission on sales, undercutting Apple’s App Store, where fees can reach up to 30 percent… Epic is making use of a new EU regulation known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which forces tech giants to make changes to give rivals more access to their closely guarded communities of users. In Apple’s case, that means the company has to allow alternative app stores onto European devices.”
Tech: “Elon Musk’s financial woes at X have Tesla bulls fearing he will liquidate more stock” [Fortune]. “Musk’s repeated outbursts against advertisers have dried up the main source of revenue for the loss-making company formerly known as Twitter. A recent decision to sue them for heeding his own advice to not buy ads on the platform hasn’t helped. At some point, he will have to provide a fresh infusion of cash to salvage his $44 billion takeover. And that might mean Musk sells Tesla stock to raise the money—hurting anyone who holds the carmaker’s shares. ‘I would be expecting something between $1 and $2 billion in stock,’ said Bradford Ferguson, president and chief investment officer of asset manager Halter Ferguson Financial, in comments posted to YouTube on Wednesday. This alone could cause the stock to lose between 5% and 10% of its value. ‘It’s a massive hole they need to plug.'”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 36 Fear (previous close: 32 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 23 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 16 at 1:13:54 PM ET.
Poetry Nook
“POETS Day! Useful Lines and a Favorite from Pound [Ordinary Times]. “I use a line – overuse, my children might say – from Yeats whenever the opportunity pops up; ‘O saddest harp in all the world.’ … It’s a good line to deploy when a child gives you ‘But, I did my best!’ when even without bending down you can see piles of Legos pushed under the bed in a supposedly picked up room.” • POETS = Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Which I seem to have done!
“Cleaning up the aging brain: Scientists restore brain’s trash disposal system” [Science News]. No, this isn’t about electoral politics. “Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurological disorders can be seen as ‘dirty brain’ diseases, where the brain struggles to clear out harmful waste. Aging is a key risk factor because, as we grow older, our brain’s ability to remove toxic buildup slows down. However, new research in mice demonstrates that it’s possible to reverse age-related effects and restore the brain’s waste-clearing process. ‘This research shows that restoring cervical lymph vessel function can substantially rescue the slower removal of waste from the brain associated with age,’ said Douglas Kelley, PhD, a professor of Mechanical Engineering in the University of Rochester Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. ‘Moreover, this was accomplished with a drug already being used clinically, offering a potential treatment strategy.'” • Science is popping!
Private, Secure and Uncensorable Messaging Over a LoRa Mesh” [unsigned.io]. The deck: “Or: How to set up a completely private, independent and encrypted communication system in half an hour, using stuff you can buy for under $100.” • It looks like I might have install firmware on hardware I buy to get this Reticulum stack to work. Still, periodically, I’ve muttered about how I would like to send data over (say) radio, and not over the Internet, away from the Censorship Industrial Complex. Perhaps some networking maven can comment.
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114 comments
Comments are closed.
Nice photo. Swallowtails (assuming that’s what this one is; it looks like it may have lost its hindmost wing parts to predators) really seem to like Echinacea.
I wonder what is clipping the petals. This is happening on all of my coneflowers, too.
I see it’s not just my echinaceas/coneflowers that are getting eaten!
It was a mystery to me what was eating them for many years – never saw a bug on them but they’d slowly disappear. I’ve given up on them a few times now since they were constantly being chewed off, but then lose my mind when I go to the greenhouse and buy another one.
Turns out it’s earwigs. Couple years ago I went out at night to check and saw earwigs all over the coneflowers as well as a few other plants. Beetles might be getting some too, but the earwigs are the worst.
Once I found that out, I did a little research and saw that in general, earwigs don’t do much damage as long as there are only a few around – they won’t eat your whole plant in a night like some other pests. That looks like what might be happening in the plantidote. If you have a lot of them though, kiss your coneflowers goodbye – they will chew off every petal eventually.
I had been planting marigolds for years around my gardens since they are supposed to repel insects and animals too. And they probably do. But after a few years, I noticed my marigolds slowly being eaten away every single year. Turns out that marigolds are an earwig’s favorite food, so I had likely been inadvertently breeding them for many years. I discovered they also love bok choi and the first small leaves on bean plants.
If anyone knows how to get rid of earwigs other than by going outside at night with a flashlight and squashing them like a crazy person, well, I’m all ears.
Thanks for this. I have about a dozen vigorous plants and the blossoms are being damaged at a relatively low rate; they are fading faster than they are being eaten. But this is good to know.
Again, thanks!
when the soil is dry, diatomaceous earth at night…all around the bases of the plants, should do the trick to knock down the population.
this is a non-specific intervention, please note…..and DE is hardly environmentally friendly: stuff i get is from an open pit mine in Saskatchewan or Alberta or somewheres.(i can just imagine the incidence of silicosis downwind of such a place)
do not breathe it when applying…itll easily chew up yer lungs…but eating it…or licking yer hands, will take care of any intestinal worm problem you might be experiencing.
i wet it and mix it with the sheepfeed when we have a worm problem…they eat it right up, and its like a wire brush for the guts.
other than the mining and the inhaling issues, however, its otherwise quite safe…for you and the environment/soil…its just calcium carbonate, after all.
i use it for my ordinary, ground-based squash and zukes, too…when the squash bugs first show up(we have native curcurbits, so the bugs are endemic…and my go-to vine squashes, up in the trees, have no such problem anyways(ive got one more pumpkin, about 14 foot up in a pine tree that i have yet to figger out how to pick, due to the tight confines below it))
pedantic point, diatomaceous earth is silicate, the shells of deceased diatoms.
you see, I keep my silicates spread nearer the house, the carbonates farther out, toward the O-zones. so i must be particular.
my bad,lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth
still good stuff for the application.
I always thought that… Diatomaceous Earth!
Would have been a great name for a 60’s or 70’s rock band~
> toward the O-zones. so i must be particular.
Ha ha, I thought this was Permaculture Zone 0 (Zero), but no, it is a soil zone.
That is an excellent ambiguity.
For contouring, the red clay is the C-horizon, aglime is the B-horizon (contains nutrients but not critters), and the silicate sand is the E-horizon (washed out of nutrients). Right next to the house I use large gravel and perlite, covered with pavers, to move water away from the clay base and avoid shrink/swelling. It makes a mineral no-combustion barrier.
There are two particular flows I enjoy. Perlite is covered near the house but on the surface at the closer garden beds. It works well with soaking up red clay, and a hard rain washes it down like sea foam, so that it outlines where the puddles soaked into the ground.
I also sift aglime on the lower flats, and the finches do dust baths in them, a half-dozen at a time. The aglime is a nutrient, and as they flutter and swim through it, clouds disperse the dust on the nearby beds. The tomatoes are twelve feet high again.
Steve H.
“The tomatoes are twelve feet high again”
They were never that big in the B Movies, or are you just talking about the poisonous green bits?
Grasshoppers are hitting my flowers. Not a catastrophe but there’s some munching going on.
Nosema.
and the earlier the better.
its a biological…they eat it, it infects their gut, they die…and their buddies eat their corpses and spread it….good for sudden infestations, if caught early…so monitoring for the early instars is recommended.
what i do, in addition, when hoppers proliferate, is go out way, way early …pre-dawn…and snatch them off the trees and tall grass(helps to water in evening, since they’ll climb up to dry out overnight)…crush heads, and stick em in a jar(they can hop quite expertly with a crushed head)…and feed them to whatever chicks i have agrowin at the time…so as to raise em up right,lol.
Eaten Echinacea: Look for finches!
I have lots of small birds that pass through my small yard, and I occasionally watch the birds. Finches absolutely love large leaf, dark kale. The large leaves are strong enough for them to perch on top and snack before moving on. They also love sunflower leaves (my first year going sunflowers). Echinacea is placed where it is hard for me to see them eating but I know they land on the blooms. This is western Oregon, suburban Portland metro area.
I’ll give Trump some credit for dealing with Covid, at least in the beginning. Some of it was luck, because I have hard time believing he actually put much thought into it, and some of it was because he took the CDC’s advice. Then somewhere he went off. Maybe when he got injected with steroids? Also remember he put Pence in charge of it all.
Seems like Trump just did a lot of the stuff that a random person on the street would do. Provide supplemental income to the population, do a high-speed vaccine development program, and so on. For some reason the Biden Administration spent its time and energy defeating man on the street approaches, ensuring that many, many more would sicken and die.
We have apparently reached the point in this timeline that doing ordinary, sensible things is extremely rare and noteworthy.
The Familes First act was passed in 03/2020 in the House 363-40 (40R’s No, 1 R present and the Senate 90-8 (4 Republican N, 2 R’s not voting)
The CARES act was passed 03/2020 96-0 in the (Republican majority) Senate (4R’s not voting) and by voice vote in the (Dem majority) House.
The Paycheck Protection and Health Care act was passed in 04/2020 mostly by Democrats in the House 230-10 I(179 R’s N, 4D’s, 10R’s not voting) and by voice vote in the Senate.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/748/actions
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6201
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/266/actions
While Biden and the Democrats in Congress are responsible for the unraveling of this safety net, I don’t know one way or another what role Trump had in designing it and encouraging members of Congress to vote for it.
thats some necessary nuance, there, Marym.
trump runs on instinct…mostly about how The People regard him…so there was somebody whispering to him that this would be a coup, image-wise, to do these things, and he went with them…while yammering incoherantly, as he is wont.
but the post election biden admin dismantling of all that is deliberate and well thought out…and true to form, if one has been paying attention since at least Clintontimes.
took the box fan from Ben’s room and added it to the bar environs…and now the turkeys(Tom and Jerry) are just standing there, in the area behind the bar proper, enjoying the breeze(it’s 105, and about 30% humidity, and ive been running the big sprinklers all over my side of the place)
they are, however, terrible bartenders.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/22/trump-demands-congress-raise-second-stimulus-check-from-600-to-2000-under-new-covid-relief-bill.html
> While Biden and the Democrats in Congress are responsible for the unraveling of this safety net, I don’t know one way or another what role Trump had in designing it and encouraging members of Congress to vote for it.
That’s fair. At the same time, when a bill passes under an Administration (leaving veto fights aside), we generally give that Administration credit for it, simply because a determined Administration would probably be able to defeat any bill.
I would sum up my view on this under the rubric: “Trump doesn’t owe me six hundred bucks.”
Part of where Biden went to defeating man on the street approaches was putting Wall Street Jeff Zients in charge. Worse than even Pence, along with the stupidest people he could find for control of CDC. Then there was the mandates! This was the worst thing I can remember, an experimental shot with nothing to even qualify it to a vaccine! Nothing! Mandated! My brothers company made him get two shots and two boosters or else hits the bricks!
From “Kamala” above:
“First, Trump is not lying. The vaccines that Biden mandated were all developed by Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Second, of the million that died, most died on Biden’s watch.”
.
Most died on Biden’s watch from the side effects of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed vaccines. /s
The biggest killer was portraying them as a solution and not just one more tool in the box. Well that along with absolutely ignoring any problems with the vaccine and relying only on expensive pharmaceutical treatments when the preferred market winner vaccines failed jettisoning NPI solutions and refusing to improve ventilation. That was all the Biden administration. To be fair, Trump would probably have done the same thing but he wasn’t President.
> The biggest killer was portraying them as a solution and not just one more tool in the box.
Yep.
That is Making Shit Up and violation of our written site Policies. As much as the vaccines did produce side effects (and I say this as one who has one that continues, so I have no love for the vaccines), it is clear the Covid death account exceeds vaccine mortality levels.
I trust you will find your happiness on the Internet elsewhere.
Um, excuse me, Yves, but . . . isn’t that last thing in GF’s comment — at the end of the sentence that’s not quoting Lambert — an indicator that what GF was making in that comment was a sarcastic remark? Possibly suggesting how a sufferer of TDS might respond to Lambert’s points? That’s how I took it.
Fact checkers have a field day with the loquacious Trump, who is of all things a veritable quote giving machine nearly 24/7/365. Now I do anticipate some measure of fact checking as well of these varied claims to come about from the Harris / Walz ticket.
Vaccine mandates, for one. COVID was over as pronounced by Joe Biden mid 2023. Long COVID…yeah let’s head in this direction with the unwashed.
I can tell when politicians are lying, it’s usually correlated to moving their mouth. Clinton, Bush 43, and on it goes…let’s start a drinking game. Happy hour time!
Yeah, don’t hold your breath waiting for that Harris/Walz fact checking. Hell, they only started fact checking Biden when the word went out to get rid of him and even then, it was hardly the scrutiny Trump gets. (And I’m on Team “you can tell they’re lying when their mouths are moving” too. My beef is one side seems to be able to get away it and the other doesn’t. A functioning and objective media would nail both sides to the wall.)
“Fact checking” is mostly fraud, imo. Politifacts is the most egregious: using “carefully selective factoid stacking” and sophistry and “sweetly reasonable” erudition to achieve the “liberal narrative” result. Used to bang my head in frustration at the Machiavellian disingenuousness of it, and fire off angry, detailed counter-observations and demands for corrections, but that’s just punching a huge Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Doesn’t even leave a mark.
The vibe shift I’m seeing at least here with the Dems is they are going for a roll in the mud along with Trump instead of trying to be above it and at least for now the results are undeniable.
Clutch your pearls all you want but there is something to be said about fighting poison with poison. Terrible for the bigger picture but effictive in the short term which is what politics operates seemingly on these days.
Clinton, Clinton, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer are all notorious liars and have been for decades. The vibe change isn’t that they are getting down in the mud, they have been comfortable in it for at least half my lifetime, probably more. No the vibe change is that after Trump was elected and things didn’t go as the ownership class planned in 2016, the media just stopped even pretending to fact check any acceptable politician, Democrat or Republic unless pushed into a corner about.
Seriously, they actually they called no-one on their support and even went out and said themselves that Joe Biden was in great shape, both after the investigator into his illegal storage of classified material got him off using his deterioration, and when he decided to wander aimlessly at multiple international events. And Biden’s condition was obvious to most people paying attention. That is just the most obvious recent event that they whitewash, gaslight, refuse to do their job.
There is a reason DC is known as a swamp, and it was that poisonous long before Trump even considered running.
Excellent retort! Seconded.
Bill Clinton’s mud-soaked machinations of malign mendacity have done and will continue to do far more damage to our polity than ANYTHING Trump accompished of the GOP agenda. So too Biden’s 40+ years of corporate war-mongering and tax shielding, plagiarized rhetoric, while paddlin’ around most those years with his good buddy Strom and putting brown people in jail. He didn’t need Hunter to be revealed as a dangerous con-man and charlatan.
And now, Kamala Harris? I can not stop laughing…
@GooGoo… and who doesn’t operate in the short term these days?
I usually don’t, but now I’m thinkin’, Wellie, thanks to all the short-termers running business, finance, government, healthcare and military, it may very well be the short term’s all we’ve got.
Re Kamala’s lying again–so it’s going to be MSDNC all the way to November as her marketing team sells her like soap. And hey people buy lots of soap.
Since Trump marketed himself into power I guess he can’t complain too much but we the public can. This may be the worst election ever and the consequences may be far worse than we realize.
Arguably Trump himself is a product of the Dems (Hillary wanted him to be the candidate) and as long as the Repubs are serving the plutocrats’ needs (those Trump tax cuts) the plutocrats–Dem and Repub–are not going to complain too much. But there seems to be no way out of this two party trap. TINA doesn’t feel like democracy.
Trump getting out the vote, of concern to those GOP machine people.
He figured out that the GOP is not just stupid, but useless.
“worst election ever:” seems obvious at this point that it’s not an “election” at all. Just a “legitimizing” exercise the Owners let us mopes regale ourselves with periodically to discharge into Gehenna all the negative engrams built up as we shuffle from seeing our true situation through a glass darkly, but then face to face.
I continue to be amazed at all the educated, intelligent people I know who still are fully emotionally invested in this charade. And only mildly pleased at the “now I get it” awakenings of the few who do come to “get it,” after finally seeing the total disconnect between what they were taught in school and swallowed from being so gently drowned for decades in an enormous cauldron of Bernays sauce.
The Owners said it right out loud: “Nothing would fundamentally change (for the better, for the Owners, and for the mopes and muppets.)”
aye:”“legitimizing” exercise the Owners let us mopes regale ourselves with periodically to discharge into Gehenna all the negative engrams built up as we shuffle from seeing our true situation through a glass darkly, but then face to face. ”
like the revelation, to me at least, this morning…that the hooliganism that pretty much embodies euro-futbal(soccer) is allowed as a blow-off valve for frustrations…so that they dont turn into actual stormings of the various bastilles.
channel all that angst, ennui and disappointment and anger into some manageable retort.
so it exhausts itself, and doesnt spread to places that really matter.
its WWE all the way down
Time and Space and how the human mind perceives it in this hyper PR/Marketing immersive reality is really something to behold~~~~
For decades Trump was a solid Dem liberal and elbowed with the Dem elites. Then in a blink of an eye ran for President as a Rep, more so he attacked the legacy Republicans with wild abandon e.g. all the pre-staged Rep candidates were mocked right down to playground level manhood stuff. Then again his economic advisor picks were all top C-suite names, not that the Dems are any better that way.
Now I hear that he has Laffer curve Arthur [Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld posse] no less as a key economic advisor and seeking to go back a 100 yrs in economic policy, because* it worked out so well back then[tm].
Just blows me away watching it all … echos of listening to old Galbraith pointing out the fallacies of the Robber Barron’s whose egos left their minds open to self serving ideologies in the guise of functional economics …. when at the end of the day it was Egypt all over again.
In the face of all this is the nations which were previously seen as the destroyers of all personal property actually doing better than the entire collective West on just about every measure and gaining collective power via BRICKS. Worst part is watching the West destroy its Nuclear Family paradigm which it sold to everyone just for a quick buck and now losing the plot about demographics.
All that is left now is regardless of the Election, is to see how the West reacts when the Ukraine thingy goes full splat …
Covid zeitgeist watch:
Beginning yesterday, commercials for Paxlovid have been in heavy rotation on some of the over-the-air digital subchannels in the USA (what Yves often refers to as “Old People TV”).
Get back to me when ads for “I” start to show up. Then I’ll know ‘they’ are at last serious about Public Health.
It’s not that hard to get IVM. You just need to arrange to develop a helminth infestation first.
/s
Oh! That’s what the H— Mints are for! Silly me. I should have seen that earlier. “Another fine product from Jackpot Labs!”
With 1.2 million new infections per day, if Vitamin I cost over $1000 per treatment course like Paxlovid does now, I’m pretty sure we would be seeing plenty of Vitamin I commercials. :(
Unclear efficacy, high cost, and a long list of possible side effects they read on the commercial I saw. No matter, there’s Medicare funds t lunder!
I am getting ads for IVM in my ads here. $3 a pill. I paid about 25 cents each including shipping and hassle, from India. I used GST No. 24AASFC6934H1Z5.
Hmmm… Don’t let a good disaster go to waste. Greed has finally passed it’s “Use By” date.
Personal Paxlovid anecdote: wife attended daughter’s 8/2023 destination wedding in Italy, I stayed home with the pets. All 18 in the wedding party got Covid, she shared it with me. I was just a bit short of desperate enough to submit to ED attention, got an order from PCP for the med on day 3 of my symptoms. Improvement noted on days 5-8, then back to really bad on day 9. Sure seems to me that “rebound” is real as the med’s impact on replication lost effect. Was not feeling well enough through the process to “fight for” ivermectin. I should probably go rogue and get some. And try the full FLCCC protocols that seem to work for many. I am taking Vit D, zinc and melatonin. Considering metformin too, I’ve seen reports it can help.
Maybe not the worst and dumbest timeline ever, but right up there. .
i know i saved the info…to this here laptop…but i cannot find it(and whats google, at this point?)…about how to measure and calculate the animal version to human dosage.
i’ve got a lot of the sheep I-drug on hand at any given time(it keeps well in a cool dark place)
i know numerous folks who have done that out here(mostly with the cattle version of the I-drug) to great effect.
i hypothecise that since weve drenched the sheep now thrice in about the same time as the summer surge of covid…we may have(me and the boys), inadvertently inoculated ourselves…because you get it all over yer hands and arms when drenching ruminants…and have an itchy beard or whatever…
and i assume that it can soak into the skin, given its somewhat oily properties, and feel.
love to know if this is a thing.
@JTM — Re: metformin — recent report
https://med.umn.edu/news/u-m-study-finds-metformin-reduces-covid-19-viral-load-viral-rebound
The Kamala campaign momentum is certainly disturbing. The only good thing I see out of a Trump victory is a possible continuation of antitrust. With Harris, that’s gravely in doubt. ’tis a shame. Regardless, the ongoing Pandemic policy of stochastic eugenics will continue under either administration. And we can pick from Climate Denialism or Climate Minimalism, neither being sufficient to the task at hand.
At least we can all feel good vibes and joy if Kamala wins!
I don’t really think Harris is going to pull it off but the undisguised cynicism of the effort is depressing. At least Trump is a known quality and probably less dangerous.
The last thing we need right now is someone pushing the envelope of fake and spin and astroturf.
its only those wholly “informed” by msdnc and cnn, aint it…with a handful of balloon juice and Kos tossed in?
thats hardly a plurality, methinks.
what are their…ummm…nielson numbers, these days?
mostly aging boomers still in love with the clinton/obama cabal, i would say.
Re: “LoRa Mesh”
I’m not a networking maven, but I have flashed OpenWrt on several routers for what that’s worth. Yes, you would need to flash firmware onto hardware you obtained for it to work, but it seems like they have scripting to handle it as long as you have supported hardware. I have some questions about current installation since ‘pip’ is locked down on most Linux distributions now, so that may be more complicated.
I’m not a networking maven either, but there is always the option of using homing pigeons as defined in RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers)
and its subsequent revisions via RFC 2459 (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service) and RFC 6214 (Adaptation of RFC 1149 for IPv6).
Can get cheap routers with insecure firmware that isn’t going to be fixed… check that it’s supported by dd-wrt or openwrt before purchase and update them.
OpenWRT user here too. I’m not a networking maven by any means either, but I know a little bit about it.
Yes, sending data over radio is definitely possible. WiFi being the most obvious example, but there are less obvious uses, such as private building to building networks using rooftop dishes, and even amateur radio has what’s called “packet radio” which allows sending data over radio. Theoretically you could send data over a variety of radio frequencies as long as it doesn’t run afoul of any FCC regulations.
As to the privacy of doing so, that ultimately depends on what and who you connect to. If you create a WiFi network with your trusted neighbor and you both don’t connect that network to the internet you would be skipping snooping, unless someone decided to hack into your network specifically. As soon as you connect anything to the internet though, you’re subject to the same issues as any connection through the internet.
Having said all that, there are a ton of things that can be done to maximize privacy on the internet, but it requires a decent amount of thought and vigilance to do it right. Anyone interested in doing this would find the information in privacyguides.org to be a good starting point. I have no connection to them other than occasionally reading the site myself.
I was encouraged by the generality of the Reticulum stack, and by the site itself, which did not look bogus or underpowered. But man-o-man, if that post is “Your Own Personal Rnode 5 Easy Steps,’ the communications part needs work…
Not sure I really believe the Georgia poll numbers. Granted, I live in a very red county, but I have yet to see a single sign or bumper sticker for Harris (and did not see any previously for Biden). On the other hand, while he got off to a rather slow start this time around, I’ve seen quite a few new Trump and Trump/Vance signs and stickers crop up over the last couple of weeks, including one that reads “Jesus Christ is my Savior. Trump is my President.” Then there are the people who never took their old Trump signs down…
Going into work I saw a hospital employee with a Harris button on his bag the other day. When people advertise who they are…
Still haven’t seen any Heels Up yard signs yet in this bluest of blue PMC area. Maybe they are still being made.
Oh good heavens! That image cannot be unseen. (I’m sending you the bill for my Trauma Intervention, Psychiatric Services Service.) {The Code is PTSD 24. Post Traumatic Sign Disorder 2024 Edition.}
Petal, I didn’t see any along the main road to the hospital, but I saw my first Harris yard sign in the town just to the north a couple of days ago… PMC gotta PMC.
Funny thing that even the bluest of true blue yards didn’t have any Biden signs this year. They must have known.
“Heels Up”…
Wasn’t that Willie Brown’s idea of pillow talk?
Hawk Tuaharris?
I’m really getting into the camp of not believing my lying eyes…and following Nate Silver closely when I find the time to check his updated projection. And finding out as well where a seasoned pollster like Frank Luntz thinks the wind is blowing.
It is very close. I suspect we’re back in those moments of 2016 or 2020 where it’s just gonna be razor thin. Electoral college still matters the most, no amount of caterwauling about “the popular vote” has yet to change the facts post election. I think it’s Pennsylvania, Georgia, and then a few of the Midwest states making this election turn in either direction.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model
It will be close. I can envision election results dependent on the Arab and Muslim vote in swing states where they represent a small percentage of the population but large enough to matter. In Michigan, yes, but a few other states as well. They won’t vote for Trump, imo. They probably will not vote or will leave the top of the ticket blank. I also wonder about the Native American vote in swing states, especially in the Midwest. It was important to Biden in 2020. How do they feel about voting for genocide?
Is there a small, but slim, chance Hawaii and its 4 electoral votes flips red for the first time since 1984? I can’t imagine the residents being too pleased about voting for Kamala after the Biden administration’s failed response to the 2023 wildfires. There’s always lots of talk about the swing states but not a blip in the media about the forgotten citizens of Hawaii.
Update on the bumper sticker front.
Just got back from town, and we were following a huge pick up truck with a sticker that covered the entire tail gate. The sign had a picture of Biden with a caption that said ” Does this ass make my truck look too big?” No one else had any bumper stickers on their cars, but he kind of made up for them.
Just my fifty or sixty bumper stickers worth of observation.
From Georgia, no visible support for Harris. There is one “Biden-Harris” sign in a PMC front yard in the one mile between the house and work, been there for months. Trump signs and bumper stickers are not uncommon. The Cities of Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta, Athens, and Macon and a few really small (by population) counties will go for Biden. I cannot believe that will be enough.
RE: Epic Games Challenges Apple’s Dominance With New iOS App Store
I find this kid of ironic considering one of the most common complaints about the EPIC games store on PC is their forced exclusive deals that prevent studios from selling on competitor sites (e.g. Valve’s Steam store).
“It looks like I might have install firmware on hardware I buy to get this Reticulum stack to work.”
Why? From the Reticulum git: “No kernel modules or drivers are required. Reticulum runs completely in userland, and can run on practically any system that runs Python 3.”
https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum
In other words, Python is the executive engine and as long as it can speak to ports that pass through your firewall, you should be gtg. If not, lmk.
Oh, neat. IIRC the Mac is very finicky about which Python is the Python. But maybe I should be getting a cheap and clean PC laptop anyhow, slamming Linux on it, and running this thing.
Nevertheless, I insist the tech doc needs work. I am not frightened of tech, spent maybe 30-45 minutes reading the site, and still went wrong….
> slamming Linux on it
I am open to suggestions for the current linux distribution with the laziest and easiest installation, one that works immediately, ideally with a desktop that looks like a Mac, but in any case doesn’t s*ck.
Please promote to post as I am also interested in depriving apple of my attention…
I second Butch on the post idea. I would be interested in what you find is a good solution.
I went back to school in the ’90’s (Hi-Tech Electronics) and learned a lot that I never used career wise. Installed OS-2 on my first computer so I am used to doing things the hard way but no longer have the desire. I have been running Ubuntu for years and it is very easy but many use other versions of Linux because Ubuntu has been allowed to stagnate by the developer. Have watched many videos of a variety of systems but too lazy to change. If you opt for the extreme secure system (and many do) it requires a whole lot more knowledge. I do not know what tools you use for your work so would not dream of advising but always interested in learning more.
“Cleaning up the aging brain: Scientists restore brain’s trash disposal system” [Science News].
In other brain function related “science is popping” news:
Could Light And Sound Therapy Treat Alzheimer’s? Science Friday, (12 minute audio)
If memory serves, I first heard about this before within the last couple of years.
Regarding ‘cervical lymph drainage’ –this is fairly easy to do according to the Lymphedema massage therapist who worked on me, post breast cancer. Even missing a couple lymph nodes leads to problems, such as a painful swollen arm, lowered immunity, etc. The massage seemed sort of ‘Mickey Mouse’ to me, but harmless, so I tried it. (You can find many videos and charts.) I was taught to massage the cervical area first so the fluid pushed up from my arm, towards the heart, had a place to go. It’s a very light, feathery massage, that helps immediately! Amazing, if it could help brain function, too!
> a very light, feathery massage
Dr. Vodder’s manual lymph drainage : a practical guide
When I would pull up certain people I follow on Twitter using a browser, I just will not use the app, I used to get notifications from people I do not follow. I actually found them interesting whether I agreed or not. About a week ago in the last batch I received there was a conservative commentator whose handle I do not remember who posted a screen shot of voter registration as recorded in various states. I have no idea if it were true or not. But if it is true, Trump is getting his money’s worth. New Republican registrations in the states listed were much larger than New Democratic registrations. I don’t remember the exact figures but somewhere along ten times as many. Not all states were listed, NY was not there. But the major swing states were.
This might also support the notion that the GOP regulars are concerned that it is working and that is why we are now hearing about this. Although I’m not sure it would be about outside organizations or about more uppity demanding voters, unlike the Democrats there does seem to be some fear about their voters from Republicans.
I’m willing to bet that the Establishment Republican Party Majordomos remember well the original Tea Party movement. The fact that the Mega Donors saw fit to suborn that movement says it all. You don’t spend money like that unless you fear the results of not doing so.
I’ve always found it funny that the Tea Party was started by Rick John Santelli by one on air rant about home owners taking out too big of a loan and not having to lose it all due to bad personal financial choices. This coming from a guy that did a Bachelor of Science in economics in 1979.
Made more absurd as he was a commodity trader and order filler for Drexel Burnham Lambert; eventually became the Vice President of Interest Rate Futures and Options. Not that he should have known all RE in question was front run for MBS origination of which 25/30 yrs of risk is created and then sold off to various investors. This is then compounded by dynamics like VaR being abused for individual bonuses, party till you drop, rational agent model says its all good, totally wrong incentives in rating agencies, et al …
Yet the only developed economies in the world at the moment that are proactive in redressing such key fundamental economic aspects are the previous so called Commie nations. Blows me away to see per se Russia having a more capable military Mfg sector [shades of US in WWII BTW] than the for profit Western model which is more concerned about shareholders and individual wealth then bang on about national security ….
Don’t know about others but I get flash backs to the 80s Calif Bch and at a party where two girls lock themselves in the bathroom to do lines and never come out, in that modified state they just talk and talk and oblivious to everyone busting to get in and go to the toilet.
There are a bunch of tweets like that recently, but very few of them provide a link to actual data or identify the source of the data. Here’s one (via X), however, that provides a Newsweek article as the source. That article reveals Decision Desk as the source of the data for PA.
While the Walgreen’s positivity numbers have been fiddling and diddling, the number of tests reported has been going up steadily since May (3x) and is at it’s highest point since early March 2024. Still a low test number (11,000+) compared to 2022 (400K) but, at least the data quality must be improving.
Excellent point, as it shows consciousness. I should add that number the chart (more work [sigh]).
I’ve heard of people feeling sick but still going to work, shopping etc, no interest in being tested. Imo Living with it means forget about it.
Ben has left the Farm for Texas Tech
and there he went…and Eli and Rudy following after, some 400 miles north to Lubbock and Texas Tech.
And i’m left here, drinking beer at the Wilderness Bar…glancing reflexively at Tam’s pictures over there on the wall…and wishing she coulda been here to see this.
Because this is what she wanted to see more than anything else…but she died 2 years and 3 months too soon for it.
And I didnt go…both because someone needs to take care of all the critters…but also because I am no longer the roadwarrior I once was…as proven by Ben and i’s trip up there a month ago for orientation.
Took me a week…or more…still?…to recover from that ride.
It hurts me to go to fredericksburg and back, a mere 100 mile round trip, fer dogs sake…and the work ive been doing doesnt help with the recovery, either.
Ben and I did get the roof almost all the way done on the bar extension, ere he left…all thats left is the flashing…which I can prolly do myself.
And he did clean up…for the most part, and with much griping and cajoling from me…the middle bedroom that started out as his room.
I will miss his glacial procrastination.
And i’ll miss him being around here, in general…all his 18 years, he’s been underfoot.
But what i’m missing most keenly is my late wife to share and commiserate about it all with.
Amfortas, I can feel your loneliness and loss from this post. I’m sorry Tam isn’t there to witness the boys going off to college too. I hope your animals are a refuge.
Agreed. While it definitely cannot fill the void, please know that many of us in the commentariat are there, sitting next to you at the Wilderness Bar, in spirit.
It doesn’t seem like that long to me, Amfortas, and maybe not to you, either. I’m sorry.
Heartbreaking post. If you went with him for orientation, you and he both got the true flavor of the experience. Hugs to you, sir, and congratulations to Ben.
Lovely yellow black swallow tail butterfly. Very lovely . My personal fave is is blue black swallow tail butterfly.
just a taste:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240806131238.htm
This leads right to the doorstep of Randall Carlson. Whether or not you agree with his more esoteric musings, the evidence supporting the Younger Dryas impact theory keeps mounting. He appears to be right on that subject.
To paraphrase Max Planck: “Civilization advances one Catastrophe at a time.”
Don’t get too depressed at your separation anxiety. It happens to all families. You’ll survive.
An interesting new aspect to our glorious censorship dystopia – drowning out legitimate YT content with AI generated trash
“The Narrative Noise To Signal Ratio Is Deliberately Out Of Control” (Nate Wilcox)
Quote from Whitney Webb:
“Instead of blanket censorship, I am having YouTube bury all my actual interviews/content with videos that use short, out of context clips from interviews to promote things I would never and have never said. Below is what happens when you search my name on YouTube, every single one is a scammy video using my words and likeness to shill everything from sh*tcoins to insane predictions I’d never make. Collectively, they have gotten millions of views”
Commentary: “But if the only goal is to make it harder for Webb’s audience to find her work, it’s a nasty new wrinkle.”
Correction: I’m not sure it’s AI rather than human made slop
One wants to weep. The ‘droplet goons’ have done their work. A covid outbreak on the first day back to grammar school obviously means closing the school for one day for “deep cleaning” is the answer: https://www.wsmv.com/2024/08/14/tennessee-school-closed-1-day-due-positive-covid-tests/
Correlation between introduction of mRNA jab and huge wave of cancer / sudden cardiac arrest? What to make of that and other twittered observations from this source, since 2020…
https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/
Found via Josh Mitteldorf’s “Daily Inspiration” blog:
https://dailyinspirationblog.wordpress.com/2024/08/15/suprise/
The mRNA covid vaccine is crap. End of story.
Even jailbreakers should give links.
*Sigh*
Cancer diagnoses delayed due to Covid lockdowns and then big backlogs with treatment. So any claims about timing correlations are bullshit. Covid looks to deplete T-cells, and T-cells play a big role in containing cancer (you are growing cancers all the time but the body usually succeeds in stopping them early). So Covid is clearly an big perp in the rise in cancers, and anyone who tries to attribute it solely to the vax is a crank.
The crankdom of Ethical Skeptic is confirmed by him denying that Long Covid exists. Don’t pollute the site with such terrible sources.
Ditto cardiac arrests. Many studies show cardiovascular system damage from “mild” Covid cases.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/even-mild-covid-can-increase-the-risk-of-heart-problems/
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2024/01/16/how-covid-19-affects-your-heart-brain-and-other-organs
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/heart-problems-after-covid
Please do not put links like this up without sanity checking the claims first.
When I do a Covid link, I try to cite to the original source, and if that’s not possible due to paywalls and such, I try to link to reasonably trustworthy medical source (they exist). That is my policy because — follow me closely here — readers may actually take action, whether medical, political, or personal — based on what I write.
Needless to say, the mere mention of a Twitter account — looks like some kinda spook, from the bio — followed by a link putatively from that account to a blog post whose sole content, a single paragraph of quasi-philosophical musing from that same account, has nothing to do with mRNA, does not meet that standard.
Stop giving the 99% a bad name, and if you can’t control your tendencies, go find some board that will tolerate the level of bullshit you just emitted.
UPDATE And don’t even try to play games with “What to make of.” Do you think the moderators are stupid? Add some value by expressing a view.
Picture of a park bench in Australia, where the middle third of the seat has been cut away and a sign indicating this was to accommodate persons with disabilities. Actually to keep “unhoused” people from daring to lie down and be visible in public. Lovely humans…
https://t.me/European_dissident/58918
Here in the Rancid Underbelly of America, public benches now sport six inch high “dividers,” curved pieces of metal tube, in the middle of the seat part of the bench, similar to pot lid handles, that forestall any lying down at all.
It reminds me of Jack London’s work on the poor and destitute of London back around 1900: “The People of the Abyss.”
Punch down, kiss up.
Poverty harshes the neoliberal buzz … like masks to prevent infection does to freedom and liberties … stop stealing[tm] my personal joy~~~~~
> Picture of a park bench in Australia, where the middle third of the seat has been cut away
A whole critique of this under the heading of “hostile architecture.”
Is Harris the US equivalent of Liz Truss?
Truss had her chance. Harris has yet to ascend to the Parnassian heights of President. All of this Kamala Triumphalism is a bit artificial. Someone is trying very hard to make Her Election Inevitable. Does this sound a little familiar?
Harris is backed by the establishment. Truss was not. Truss was the choice of the small group that is Conservative party members and was immediately undermined by the institutional establishment. Pilkington has done a lot to illustrate that she didn’t crash the pound, but rather the BoE hung her out to dry.
Truss may even have some beliefs, be they unhinged. Harris appears to be an empty vessel.
I was thinking more from a markets perspective. If markets think she’s going to win, will there be a panic with US Treasuries/Debt like the UK?
(both are vacuous)
“Cleaning up the aging brain: Scientists restore brain’s trash disposal system”
So you are saying, there’s a chance for Biden to make a comeback and upstage Kamala? I say bring it on!!!
Harris vows to build ‘opportunity economy’ and attacks Trump on tax
(Grauniad)
Policy analysis is above my pay-grade. If these even qualify as policies.
Last line caught my eye:
Harris: “I think if you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for.”
I’m much more inclined to look at what they’ve done, who funds them, and who has power over them. But hey, I’m weird.
Democrats are so valiantly fighting for…any object or shiny new point of concern. See, the things I can’t do now or over these past few years is because Republicans are just mean and evil, a little weird too ….look at their decade long fumbling on key concerns like a federal minimum wage bump.
Saw an ad where she is seated beside Pelosi when Nancy was still Speaker of the House… Kamala is a West Coast political actor born from the halls of government in San Francisco. How does she translate this background and her experience as a lawyer, state AG to John Deere driving farmers and rural red state voters…so I suggest a Walz addition to be a reasonably wise choice.
I’m holding onto my wallet tightly regardless…. politicians aren’t truth tellers…
We’ll have to pry “fight for” from their cold, dead, focus-grouped hands, they’re so committed to the bit
If it’s any consolation Lambert I think of you every time I see the phrase
> “I think if you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for.”
This is the type of superficially safe sound bite she can get away with in a MSM-narrative driven world. Anyone paying attention, though, could stitch this back to Biden’s “nothing will fundamentally change”, and then ask the converse: who are you fighting against (besides #OrangeManBad)? Force them to identify the baddies. You’ll end up with a bipartisan big donor list …
Trump has said we should eliminate the tax on tips for tipped workers. That would be worth something more than the Democrats empty trolling.