By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Too-patient readers, I have encountered an unplanned major life event (don’t worry, not health- or mortality-related). I have no experience whatever in the matters at hand, and there is a lot of administrativia involved, so I’m going to have to spend hours on the phone and doing research. There is no slack in my daily schedule. Something has to give, which sadly will be researching and writing Water Cooler on the scale and to the depth you have become accustomed to. Given that life-saving and illness-preventing information is more important than material that is not neither, I’m going to cut back on political detail and focus on the pandemics. I anticipate this state of affairs will continue at least through Labor Day — that’s when things really pick up anyhow — but I shall certainly back in full spate by the time of the first debate on September 10 (assuming there is one). tl;dr: No orts and scraps. Perhaps a later start. Sorry, but there it is. Meanwhile, don’t feel shy about talking politics yourselves. Just be nice! –lambert
Bird Song of the Day
Catbirds are in the Mimidae specie, like mockingbird and thrashers. Readers have said they like the mimicry, so hopefully MacCaulay Library has enough recordings to keep us all satisfied, at least for a time.
Black Catbird, San Miguel; Isla Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico.
In Case You Might Miss…
- Democrat triumphalism out of control.
- Suit filed against Nassau County’s mask ban.
- Gustave Courbet, Berthe Morisot
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
“Why would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks remains an infuriating enigma weeks after shooting” [New York Post]. “When federal authorities raided his family’s modest home in the wake of the shooting, agents seized hardware including his laptop, two cellphones and multiple hard drives and flash drives. The large amount of data recovered (around 4.5 terabytes) is a potential technological treasure trove for forensics teams, but authorities said getting definitive answers has been slow going due to the sheer volume of information to sift through. However, it’s clear from congressional hearings — and the details that have emerged from FBI briefings with lawmakers — that investigators still have no satisfying answers for why Crooks targeted Trump…. Crooks’ internet presence, or lack thereof, is another layer of the mystery in a world where more than four-fifths of young adults use at least one social media platform. Despite the collective scrutiny of every law enforcement agency and investigative journalist in the country, no profiles definitively linked to Crooks have been unearthed. Investigators have homed in on several accounts believed to be linked to Crooks on foreign-based encrypted messaging services and social media platforms, but the FBI has yet to detail its findings so far.” • That’s really weird, because Crooks was technical.
LIHOP?
🚨🚨 NEW – Whistleblower says Secret Service HQ told agents working the Butler PA event NOT to request additional manpower resources for the rally & warned any such requests would be denied. Contradicts Director Rowe testimony, who said no resources were ever denied pic.twitter.com/85sHTAI82u
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) August 23, 2024
Biden Administration
“New Twitter Files raise question of how independent pre-Musk company was from Biden administration” [Just the News]. “Where did the Biden administration end and Twitter begin? The latest batch of the Twitter Files, reported by former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker from records turned over by the Elon Musk-owned company now called X, shows a curious timeline in the first couple months of Democratic President Joe Biden’s term. Within two weeks of the inauguration, the company covertly hired a ‘global strategic advisory and commercial diplomacy services’ firm cofounded and chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to seek State’s help dealing with censorship pressure from India. On the two-month anniversary of the Biden administration, Politico reported on a new ‘blob’ that had formed from alumni from the firm, Albright Stonebridge. At least 10 had taken top foreign-policy jobs including United Nations ambassador, deputy secretary of state, two undersecretaries of state, and deputy national assistant security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. Another became chief of staff to the now-Democratic nominee for president’s husband, first gentleman Doug Emhoff. The new tranche of internal emails ‘calls into sharp question claims by Democrats,’ including House Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee ranking member Delegate Stacey Plaskett, ‘and their allies in the media that Twitter did not collude with federal agencies and was free from Biden administration pressure to make its own censorship decisions,’ Thacker wrote.”
2024
Less than one hundred days to go!
Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:
Good news for Trump in that last week’s deterioration seems to have been slowed, although we shall have to see if Kamala gets a convention “bounce.” Remember, however, that all the fluctuations — in fact, all the leads — are within the margin of error. If you read most of the press, you’d think Kamala has this race in the bag. It’s not so. Do note, however, Trump’s deterioration in North Carolina: +2.4 last week to +0.9 this week, when OG pollster Sabato moved it to “toss-up” status from “lean Republican.” No wonder Trump held a rally there this week. NOTE With Kennedy, it would seem, about to drop out, I started tracking the national percentage as “Top Battlegrounds,” where Trump’s shrinking lead is +0.1 this week (as opposed to “5-Way RCP Average, where Harris led by +1.1 last week).
* * * Kamala (D): “Kamala Harris Isn’t Winning This Race Yet” [Freddie DeBoer]. Worth reading in full. This caught my eye: “Above is the latest polling breakdown from the New York Times. As you might notice, it does not currently project a Kamala Harris victory! She’s leading at the national level, but as everyone suddenly forgot in 2016, the United States does not have a national popular vote system. She’s leading in two of the three “blue wall” states, but the outcomes are within the margin of error, and most paths to victory require her to carry all three. She’s tied in Pennsylvania and Arizona. The only state here where a lead exceeds the margin of victory is Georgia, which favors Donald Trump. If Harris’s recent gains regress back to this state of affairs in the coming months, it’s a coinflip election where Trump could easily squeak out victory in Pennsylvania and Arizona and regain the White House. That’s not some wild hypothetical! It’s an entirely plausible state of affairs! Much more plausible than Trump winning in 2016, where it took Hillary’s wild unpopularity, Robby Mook’s incompetence, and decades-long indifference among Democrats towards the collapse of the Rust Belt. This election is very, very close. And yet this current state of affairs has produced some of the most wildly unrestrained football-spiking and expressions of certainty that I’ve seen in 24 years of following presidential elections.” • I agree. Most ginormous liberalgasm ever. I’m not sure that DeBoer’s “blue wall” — hate the term, states and regions are not “walls” — match Fridays’ RCP averages, but directionally DeBoer is surely correct, as readers know who’ve been watching them. (It will be interesting to see this Friday and next whether Kamala gets a convention “bounce”, or whether some combination of RFK’s announcement and the mysterious inner processes of voters responding the the Democrat National Convention eats the expected bounce up.)
Kamala (D): “Will the DNC shake up the polls in Harris’s favor?” [The Hill]. “Between July and August, there was an 11-point increase in voters under 40 years old saying they support the Democratic nominee, and a 4-point increase in the share of both Hispanic and Black voters saying the same. In that same vein, more than 6 in 10 (62 percent) Democrats said they were ‘strong’ Harris supporters, almost double the number who had said the same of Biden in previous polling conducted by ABC/Ipsos. That being said, despite the successful convention and a likely post-convention polling boost, it is an open question whether Harris did enough to overcome the vulnerabilities that were evident in pre-convention polling.” But: “Similarly, the aforementioned ABC poll suggests that while rallying traditionally Democratic voters, Harris has not yet improved on Biden’s 2020 margins with two key voting blocs. The vice president’s 5-point lead with suburban voters (50 percent to 45 percent) is roughly half of Biden’s 11-point advantage in 2020, and her 34 percent support among white non-college voters is virtually identical to Biden’s 33 percent four years ago, according to Pew Research. How opinions of the vice president change among these two groups of voters will be critical to watch, particularly after a successful DNC. If Harris can move the needle in her direction with these key groups, the vice president’s honeymoon period may, in fact, last through the 2024 election. ”
* * * “The Plague” does seem appropriate:
* * * Trump (R): “Lest we Forget the Horrors: a Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes” [McSweeney’s]. “Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. This election year, with the very real possibility of Trump returning to office, we know it’s important to be reminded of these horrors and to head to the polls in November to avoid experiencing new cruelties, collusions, corruption, and crimes.” • “One of Terry Pratchett’s more entertaining villains, Mr. Pin, has ‘Not a Nice Person at All’ done in pokerwork on his wallet. ‘I wonder kind of person would put that on a wallet?’ ‘Somebody who wasn’t a very nice person.'”
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!
Mask bans (1):
At a faculty senate meeting. A Columbia professor called Palestinian students reading the names of those murdered in Gaza "KKK members" for wearing masks.
— Layla 🪬 (@itslaylas) August 23, 2024
Mask bans (2): “Lawsuit challenging Nassau’s mask ban filed in federal court” [Newsday]. “Two Nassau residents have filed a federal class-action lawsuit alleging the county’s mask ban discriminates against people with disabilities by depriving them of equal access to public life, court records show. The complaint, filed in Eastern District Court in Central Islip on Thursday by the Albany area advocacy group Disability Rights New York, names Nassau County and Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman as defendants. It alleges the mask ban violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, and seeks for the court to declare the ban unconstitutional and order Nassau County to end it. ‘This mask ban poses a direct threat to public health and discriminates against people with disabilities,’ DRNY executive director Timothy A. Clune said in a statement. The organization, which is also seeking an injunction and temporary restraining order staying the ban, also says it will limit services available for people who wear masks in public due to a disability.” • Good.
Elite Maleficence
HICPAC* back in November, having accomplished nothing (For more on HICPAC at NC, see here, here, here, here, and here).
So a long working day for HICPAC- started late after 9:10 ended at 2:43, 1.5 hour lunch and a 1 hour “break” so just couldn’t get to updating guidance now that @WHO said back in November that COVID is AIRBORNE. They said they will discuss at their next meeting in NOVEMBER despite…
— 💜Martha Young- JD, MBA, N95-clean the air: (@mryoung151) August 22, 2024
Yes, but could the Committee members collect a per diem?
NOTE * “HICPAC is a federal advisory committee appointed to provide advice and guidance to DHHS and CDC regarding the practice of infection control and strategies for surveillance, prevention, and control of healthcare-associated infections, antimicrobial resistance and related events in United States healthcare settings.”
@Algorithmus22‘s transcript of Yaneer Bar-Yam’s testimony at the HICPAC meetings just passed. The screenshots overlap a bit:
No quorum?!?!
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 20: | Last Week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC August 17 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC August 10 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data August 23: | National [6] CDC July 27: |
|
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| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens August 20: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic August 17: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC July 29: | Variants[10] CDC July 29: |
|
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| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11]CDC August 10: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12]CDC August 10: |
|
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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. XDV.1 flat.
[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.)
Lambert here: Since things are bad out on the West Coast, I went looking for California hospitalization data to compare with New York’s, and found this: “Due to changes in reporting requirements for hospitals, CDPH is no longer including hospitalization data on the CDPH dashboard. CDPH remains committed to monitoring the severe outcomes of COVID-19 and influenza, including the impact on hospitals. CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) will remain open to accept data, and CDC and CDPH strongly encourage all facilities to continue reporting.” Thanks, Mandy!
[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) The new variant in China, XDV.1, is not showing up here.
[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.
[12] Deaths low, ED up.
Stats Watch
Manufacturing: “United States Durable Goods Orders” [Trading Economics]. “New orders for manufactured durable goods in the US surged by 9.9% from the previous month in July of 2024, making up for the downwardly revised 6.9% decline in the earlier period, the most since May 2020 and firmly above market expectations of a 5% expansion.”
Manufacturing: “United States Dallas Fed Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ general business activity index for manufacturing in Texas rose to -9.7 in August of 2024 from -17.5 in the previous month, marking the lowest contraction level since January 2023.”
Retail: “Complicated Starbucks Orders Is A Language I Don’t Speak None To Good” [Ordinary Times]. “Starbucks will be yet another case study in a brand shooting to the heights of success, but not knowing how to sustain itself when the mandate from the shareholders is more, more, more and the fundamental rule of investment is ‘trees don’t grow to the sky’ or the blunter ‘pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered.’ Starbucks the brand is transitioning from the hot, expanding, cool brand to a legacy brand that’s been around for generational business. Kids who grew up with their parents going are now the parents of their own kids, and so forth. If there was a defined line between being a well-known brand with almost universal recognition and folks getting tired of the brand, then far fewer businesses would fall off Mount Success… But the biggest problem Starbucks has might be generational. The shopping center I described is right across from the high school. Which is smart business, but over the past year has revealed something else Starbucks has to fight. You rarely ever see teenagers there. They don’t like to go into Starbucks. Too many old people on Facebook hanging around.” • I don’t play the ponies, so I don’t know the phrase “pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered.” Can some kind reader elucidate?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 55 Neutral (previous close: 52 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 46 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 26 at 1:32:02 PM ET.
Rapture Index: Closes unchanged [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 182. Current: 183. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • Hard to believe the Rapture Index is going down. Where are there people getting their news?
On the beach:
Gustave Courbet pic.twitter.com/k1S4AbIVZI
— Impressions (@impression_ists) August 22, 2024
“Berthe Morisot, Early Impressionist Criticism and the Aesthetics of the Plein-air Interior” [Nonesite]. From May, still germane. “Morisot dressed her models in her own clothes and accessories and placed them in her own home.98 While this was no doubt a pragmatic decision to create a sense of realism, it also allowed Morisot to be present in her artworks in a way that was less available to her male counterparts, and the intimate effect of these private scenes is therefore enhanced. It may be argued that in works such as Woman at her Toilette, the male gaze is thwarted via the careful orchestration of the personal objects of the artist and the use of paint. Instead, Morisot’s very personal self-expression, in its restraint and power, translated through the effects of light, color and skin, comes to the fore.” • Hmm. I think the male gaze takes a lot of thwarting. But the detail of the Morisot’s workflow is terrific. A Morisot:
'The Psyche Mirror.' (1876) Berthe Morisot was closely associated with French Impressionism and participated in all the group’s exhibitions. In this work, light is entering from the two windows either side of the mirror, something emphasised by the impressive range of whites. pic.twitter.com/iZ0AS9qwiS
— Richard Morris (@ahistoryinart) November 11, 2023
Sadly, there is no Morisot bot.
“Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean” [Phys.org]. “An international team of researchers led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs has found matching sets of Early Cretaceous dinosaur footprints on what are now two different continents. More than 260 footprints were discovered in Brazil and in Cameroon, showing where land-dwelling dinosaurs were last able to freely cross between South America and Africa millions of years ago before the two continents split apart. ‘We determined that in terms of age, these footprints were similar,’ Jacobs said. ‘In their geological and plate tectonic contexts, they were also similar. In terms of their shapes, they are almost identical.'”
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131 comments
Comments are closed.
If Hospital infection control departments were serious they would place Corsi Boxes in their emergency rooms, cafeterias and each nursing station and they would remove the filters weekly and test them to see what pathogens showed up.
They’re serious; the only question is about what.
I’m experiencing Covid symptoms. I haven’t had Covid before, but I have had a few tests in the past 4.5 years. Today I called my doctor’s office. Tests are now office visits inside the practice. I get there. Nobody is masked. (Except me.) I get called back, the medical assistant (of which there are actually 2) isn’t masked. They knew I was coming in for a Covid test. The only time the MA-in-training put on a mask was when she was swabbing me. In the tiny ventless 10ft by 6 ft room neither donned a mask until that point.
The doctor came in, masked. Told me that I could get paxlovid if I wanted. I chose no and asked if she was familiar with the metformin protocol. She was, and said she’d do it herself if she got Covid. Called me very smart, which felt a little condescending, but her MA’s weren’t in masks so I know who she’s working with.
Very strange experience overall.
Now I await results. I work in a school as the only person in a mask. I was bound to get something.
Good news, it’s not Covid, influenza a or b, or RSV. Just a cold.
You’re lucky that you didn’t get yourself infected at the doctor’s office. Lots of risky behaviour going on there.
Hmm. I’m on Metformin for diabetes and I recently caught Covid (first time, we’ve been free since the pandemic began – I didn’t mask and the room I was working in filled up with people unexpectedly.) My doc prescribed Paxlovid and my symptoms were a nasty cough and head cold. I kept working through out at home and tested negative in 5 days. Haven’t had a recurrence and I’m back to masking in any social situation. I hadn’t heard of a Metformin Protocol and thankfully didn’t pass Covid on to anyone else.
> aven’t had a recurrence and I’m back to masking in any social situation. I hadn’t heard of a Metformin Protocol and thankfully didn’t pass Covid on to anyone else.
Bullet almost dodged (and gun, as it were, not fired). And of course for some people the symptoms are indeed manageable, which is one reason public health, such as it is, has such a hard time handing Covid (which says nothing of the long-term sequelae of course). (It’s almost as if Covid, through adaptation, is exquisitely tuned to weaknesses in our social systems and sociality as a species. (We see and experience the symptom; we do not see or experience the transmission. If it were possible to see Covid virions swirling in the air on our cellphones, the pandemic would end within a month.)
It’s also important to remember that avoiding or postponing Covid is also a victory in itself. We all only have so many days allotted to us, and there’s no reason to lose those IQ points sooner rather than later.
> Good news, it’s not Covid,
Good! Thanks for keeping us posted.
re the polls–if Harris does start to decline how will they recover? They’ve made their whole pitch about Trump and after all the trials and impeachments what more is there to say? If this was Ukraine you’d have to say they are out of ammo.
Speaking of which the latest Alastair Crooke draws some comparisons between Kursk and our politics.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/08/26/the-western-way-of-war-owning-the-narrative-trumps-reality/
[Lambert – best wishes on dealing with your sudden life event. ]
I think things get dicey fast if Harris’ numbers start to decline.
One “event” that I thought of that could change the race would be if Russia were to suddenly start caring about red lines. Reading Helmer’s latest, it seems that Putin’s legalistic and risk-averse approach might be wearing thin on the generals in Russia. What if they either:
1) Give all the idiots clamoring for “regime change” in Russia a dose of nasty medicine, as in be careful what you wish for? A hardliner replacement.
2) To fend off the possibility of 1) Putin decides to change course and a few NATO bases in Romania and Poland go up in flames, or Western satellites turned into space junk.
Either way the mood of the electorate might turn sober awfully fast. A joyful giggler who makes them feel good about race and gender issues suddenly isn’t so great anymore.
Don’t nations typically rally around the present commander when their country is attacked? Many Americans still believe Russian aggression came out of nowhere. Given that, I would expect an increase in Kamala Harris polling if US bases were suddenly attacked.
Now, Ukraine losses continuing to mount, thats another story
Carolinian: re the polls–if Harris does start to decline how will they recover?
They’ll double down on the Narrative, obviously.
Just as Crooke describes them doing to fight a real war. They’ll rationalize that doubling-down by saying the Narrative will in the end win over any emergent unpleasant reality: either the requisite mass of sheeple will be convinced in enough numbers that everyone else believes the Narrative for the mass of sheeple to believe it too, or else if that doesn’t work they’ll fix things at the ballot box level to get the required results.
Nor are they out of ammo, as you metaphorically suggest.
> They’ll double down on the Narrative, obviously.
Or wheel in the spooks. The oppo on RFK is already off the charts (though to be fair, RFK needs a big chart. But is in in Epstein’s black book? No?).
Did you see the one about the dead whale head yet?
I did. Nice family.
That said, one reason I don’t get excited and chase down every piece of oppo as soon as it appears, let alone propagate it, is that my baseline, after the collective concealment of Biden’s cognitive issues, is that they’re lying all the time. Add to that the fact that to the partisan Democrat, the lies are fully justified because to them the threat of Trump is existential. So I have to pick my spots. A hermeneutic of suspicion is time-consuming. I’ll see if the whale story, unlike the whale, has legs.
The nice thing about the political schedule (as opposed to news cycle) is that you can take stories like this and let them accumulate. Before Labor Day is a terrible time to share. I’d wait for early voting to start to spread questionable character stories.
The catch is that the more you [a generic democratic party strategist] ding RFK Jr, the more people pay attention to him and he holds up well when scrutinized (interviews, speeches; online research a toss-up). His skills contrast well with the opposition’s. Kennedy can also go where Vance and Trump can’t (but he’d best visit the campuses fast before too much dirt leaks out).
His uncle survived Chappaquiddick even though it never went away and even though public sentiment was severe. Unless one of the skeletons in RFK Jr’s closet is a real skeleton, I don’t think he can be damaged in a way that would hurt Trump. Or him so far as that goes. His last name is magic and the Democrats were crazy not to exploit it.
I don’t see magic when I see RFK Jr. I see someone who works very hard for his causes. His ruined voice would shut most people up but he makes it work for him. I’m not a gym nut but I admire his fitness. As a candidate for President I think he’s incredibly flawed (as seemingly only a Kennedy can be) but as a potential Cabinet secretary I think he’s pretty exciting. More so even than Buttigieg.
I cannot think of a scandal to come that would hurt RFK Jr with any voters who don’t already have TDS. I can think of lots of folks in sensitive situations (govt jobs, blue no matter who families) that RFK Jr could bring aboard the Trump Express.
Not shilling, just sayin’*. However it plays out, it’s going to be a whale of a campaign season for stories.
*Still planning to vote for staying at home on election day. Nothing can make me want Trump to win, but fear of Harris could drive me to vote for Trump. Mostly I plan to wash my hands a lot (damn spot!) and keep the music turned up so I don’t hear any pesky doorknockers.
Hey, Boris Johnson allegedly made himself available to a pig’s chops, with pictures, and look where he is today!
How does one defeat people like that, cotton-wooled in their privilege?
I’d say the worst and best thing we mopes can do is laugh at these self-important Pooh-Bahs. Though their grim minions are increasingly showing a horrific, deathly resolve to remove all the real joie from life, release the Grundies, and sail ever closer to the edge of the end of the habitable world.
The one who dies with the most toys, no? And in the end of libertarian neoliberalism and Zionism in all its forms, there can be only one. Or so I’m told.
I thought it was Cameron with the pig, but it’s difficult to keep the Bullingdon Club crew straight.
Any mention of a British PM and a pig in the same sentence naturally evokes Series 1 Episode 1 of Black Mirror.
> if Harris does start to decline how will they recover
Double down.
Catbirds!
My favorite to watch in the backyard. Three clutches this year.
Thank you!
Agreed, glad Catbirds are back.
I’m sitting in the catbird seat!
Next, the catbus!
My Blue MAGA friends are 100% convinced that they have another Obama and a landslide in the making. I’m not so sure.
Obama is charismatic, a great campaigner, mostly likeable, and had the advantage of a summer long financial crisis that could be blamed entirely on the Republicans. Harris has none of these things.
Same here. They are just giddy with excitement. Going to be a landslide as you say. But then again, I truly think they let the media influence them too much, as well as ignore any news that doesn’t fit the narrative they want to hear. Explains why they think that way.
For example, Lambert posted above about the Twitter files. They don’t believe that ever happened. “Their” government would never censor anyone. Today they were making fun of some GOP guy who said something about Hunter and Burisma. Well, that didn’t happen either, it was all fake news.
Ukraine is winning the war, there is no genocide in Gaza, Hunter didn’t do anything wrong, Joe Biden is the greatest president in their lifetimes (clean as a whistle too), Kamala is just what we need and Tim Walz makes them cry with happiness.
But at the end of the day they might get their wish – Kamala to the throne. The very media who does such a great job of running cover for the dems, and tells them all the nice things they want to hear, will get them over the finish line, me thinks. And the fact Trump can’t keep his mouth shut.
I am not so sure the media can pull this off. I may be foggy on this, but I seem to recall the media REALLY liked Kamala in the run up to 2016. But as it got closer to voting, she had to bail because she wasn’t even going to win her home state.
The media may love her. The DNC and the PMC may love her. But she’s still untested on a national level and historically the more people know her, the less they like her. Lest we forget, it wasn’t that long ago the same media was reporting she had the lowest approval rating of any VP.
I may be way off the mark on this but I think the Dems may regret the way they rammed her through with no votes, unless they really have this sewed up behind the scenes.
I think the Dems may regret the way they rammed her through with no votes
There’s a theory — from Norman Finkelstein, among others — that it was Biden who picked Kamala as payback to shaft the Dems for shafting and defenestrating him.
We shall see.
I’ve had that thought too, especially given the length of time between Biden coming out for her and the powers of the party (ie Obama and Pelosi) officially anointing her. I could swear there was even an article posted here about some of the behind the scenes and Obama having his man in mind (name escapes me) and Kamala throwing a fit that she was getting passed over. It certainly would help to explain the obvious diss of Biden’s speaking slot at the DNC.
According to an article posted in the August 2 Water Cooler, the rumor was Obama wanted Mark Kelly.
I think you are spot on, she was, and it didn’t last.
But here we are…
This is like a bad dream.
But she gets space, AI and electric vehicle fuelling.
She is also a sadist bragging about how many livea she has destroyed for sending people to jail for smoking weed bit laughing when asked about her own smoking habits.
That’s the type of person that wins the US electorate’s hearts and minds.
re: “That’s the type of person that wins the US electorate’s hearts and minds”
I was under the impression that she was not selected as a candidate by the US electorate. How did I miss this?
Obama won against two weak Republican opponents. Trump on the other hand has a huge and devoted base. Worth noting that Axelrod, Obama’s political mastermind (and he did have one). says Harris is the underdog.
And while the great majority of the media march in lockstep there’s still Fox, which has much higher ratings than MSNBC, and highly influential internet personalities like Carlson. Whether or not Harris is short on ammo the Trumpies haven’t even started shooting.
re: Trumpies haven’t even started shooting.
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Hunter S. Thompson
I think Trump needs to come out of the locker room and show he’s still got game.
I don’t begrudge somebody who almost got whacked some downtime, but there’s a campaign on, champ.
Democratic exuberance regarding Kamala has a very deja vue feeling to it. We have been here before. The insiders may not be celebrating a victory early this time, but they are fanning unrealistic views. It is still, as Lambert would say, razor thin. Nobody should be opening the champagne yet.
Just remembering that even SNL had to use the triumphant certainty after the fact in 2016
> My Blue MAGA friends are 100% convinced that they have another Obama and a landslide in the making
This means that they, too, will not accept the election results (which means that the Republicans may come to regret — putting this as neutrally as possible — “tinkering with the election machiney” (especially in Georgia, where failed minor-league prospect Stacey Abrams excplictly did not accept her loss), given that the loss will be pinned on them (bonus points for late-breaking stories on Russian hacking of the counts or the voter rolls).
You mean like this?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/07/security_flaw_and_data_leak/
But Georgia has an election board! They’ll look out for us voters!
Oh, wait…
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/congresswoman-lucy-mcbath-others-call-removal-election-board-members
I already doubt anyone in Georgia is going to believe the election results.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-harris
Reflecting on the incredulity expressed in the RFK, Jr. announcement comments thread that there could be changes made in the US Food System that would have meaningful beneficial effects on public health, some thoughts:
* from farm (or even earlier, such as sellers of inputs to farms) to grocery store, the current system seems to work well for the actors within the System. These incumbents would surely strongly resist attempts to change the System in a top-down way.
* Consumers suffer medical harms at the end of this, but that is arguably their choice (though also, arguably, the formulators of the “food-like substances” (Michael Pollan’s description in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) produced and distributed in this System have found ways to make the products extremely appealing to the point that people seem to cheerfully consume them even knowing that this is harmful to them; RFK mentioned this in his remark about what he called the “addictive” character of many ultra-processed foods).
* As an aside, the thought occurs that many of these products should be thought more of as “entertainment” than as “nutrition.” Perhaps it would be possible to formally, legally, distinguish between “minimally-processed foods” (the things that tend to show up around the periphery in the product arrangement within a typical grocery), “convenience foods” (meals that are pre-prepared for the convenience of the user and require little additional action — “heat and serve”, for example — to make ready for consumption) and “entertainment foods”. Restaurant meals are taxed higher than groceries in some jurisdictions; perhaps “convenience foods” (assuming they fall under the classification of unhealthy “ultra processed foods”) could similarly be taxed. “Entertainment foods” (these are not hard to identify, there are entire aisles of sugary drinks, sweet snacks and salty snacks in every large grocery store) might be taxable at a higher rate than less-unhealthy “convenience foods”.
* To the extent that there are identifiable negative health outcomes from the consumption of ultra processed foods (I feel confident that this is not in doubt), I would like to think that there could be a legal basis for regulating them in ways calculated to reduce consumption and negative health impacts. That might be politically difficult, but the history of the fight against Big Tobacco may give some hope that change is possible.
* I wonder whether it might be possible to leverage public education. I recall, decades ago, public school lessons on the dangers of smoking and of STDs. 50 years ago, there were classes in my high school on “home economics”, which included lessons on how to prepare the lightly-processed foods that were a larger component of diet then than they are now.
There has been a significant shift in “food culture” in US over my lifetime. I doubt that the dial can be easily turned back, but I think it a good thing that attention is being drawn to the problem, even if the messenger is not the one that one might prefer to be making this case.
As a young man, I had the opportunity to study in Paris and take a class on Impressionism, in a city where the greater and lesser works were readily accessible in museums. Berthe Morisot became my favorite impressionist painter, perhaps for being a woman, but also because she was so much less known by the public … and I am if anything a contrarian at heart. Her work is as skilled as any of her better known peers.
The Wall St. expression as I’ve always heard it is, “Bulls make money. Bears make money. Hogs get slaughtered.”
I might add, I’ve always understood that expression to mean, take your profits when they present themselves and don’t get too greedy. Similar metaphorical expressions would be “overplaying your hand”, or “getting out over your skis”. I use the latter in my inner monologue when it turns out I was buying when I should have been selling …
How wonderful you were able to study in Paris. This is such a gorgeous painting by Morisot with its luscious, active paint strokes in so many white tints — seems to me that Berthe had a great love for and confidence in depicting fabric. The reflection of the young woman gazing at her apparel in the mirror is lovely — perhaps something only a woman artist could display with such a quiet, intimate feeling.
> > My Blue MAGA friends are 100% convinced that they have another Obama and a landslide in the making
This means that they, too, will not accept the election results (which means that the Republicans may come to regret — putting this as neutrally as possible — “tinkering with the election machiney” (especially in Georgia, where failed minor-league prospect Stacey Abrams excplictly did not accept her loss), given that the loss will be pinned on them (bonus points for late-breaking stories on Russian hacking of the counts or the voter rolls).
The expression Lambert is using is mangled.
It is “Little pigs get fed. Big pigs get slaughtered.” The origin is farming. The warning is you are being set up to be slaughtered. IMHO misapplied here but the idea is if you get too big you become someone’s meal.
This Norm MacDonald joke is a propos:
> As a young man, I had the opportunity to study in Paris and take a class on Impressionism, in a city where the greater and lesser works were readily accessible in museums
This is a wonderful thread; thank you all very much.
I accept the critique that “art” is, crudely put, an instrument of bourgeois hegemony (see Bourdieu on “taste”). “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships”*. To be fair, the impressionsists overthrew a highly reactionary, academic style of art (pompoir paintings, very large canvases to be hung in firehouses; this is why the sheer, material size of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe was a statement, quite aside from the shocking subject subject matter). In this way they really did present humanity with a new way of seeing Yet we can also see how a focus on “the impression” is individualistic in nature, hence bourgeois to the bone.
However, painting in general — all forms of material art, and as very much opposed to so-called “digital” “art” — is accessible to anyone who can go to a museum or a show, and made by anyone who can afford the material: brushes and paint (or in Banksy’s case, a spray can). I will die on the hill that “art” can and should be created by anyone of any class, because the creative impulse is part of what it means to be human*, and that our current social structures hold this back (see “art brut,” “outsider art”, various hobbies not dignified as art). The same goes for music.
Parasitical Silicon Valley innovators are of course attempting to exploit and destroy human creativity with the theivery and bullshit of AI slop. We’ll see how that goes (see under Chokepoints, Data Centers. Do be sure to join your local zoning or land use board).
NOTE Earlier Bearded One, catchphrase in context:
Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, painting by Edouard Manet
http://impressionist-art.com/artwork/manet/33.jpg
flora:
I saw some preliminary sketches of that painting by Edouard Manet in a show here in the Chocolate City mainly of sketches and other “nonpaintings” by Impressionists. Morisot was married to Eugène Manet, brother of Edouard.
As to “male gaze,” I find it a structure in the Anglosphere, which is a culture that doesn’t like to look. Show me your smile instead! The reason for the general unmasking of the Anglosphere is simple fear of looking at people — especially in the eye.
Yet in the Mediterranean world, and especially Italy, the way extraordinary painters like Titian, Sofonisba Anguissola, and Rosalba Carriera “gazed” at their subjects, and the way their subjects gazed back, is much different. Much more forceful. Italians look.
I also am reminded of my skepticism of “male gaze” when I recall the gallery in the Museu Nacional de Catalunya with a dozen or so seated Madonnas with Child, with a scepter or orb or pomegranate in one hand. No one can avoid succumbing to that gaze.
Nevertheless, Berthe Morisot is a great painter, and the more people become familiar with her the better off they will be for knowing her.
Maybe this has something to do with the soft, warm natural lighting in the southern European countries like Italy and Spain vs the harsher lighting in Germany and the colder, north atlantic lighting in England, the Netherlands, etc. English painters look, but in a different way, according to how the light works on features, imo. (Of course with electric lighting everywhere this might be changing. / ;)
adding: lucky you to be living amidst great art and architecture…and food. / ;)
“Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet” (trans. Jane Roberts). Daughter of Morrisot & Eugene Manet (Eduard’s brother)
available at LibGen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EsmE6SAPVc&ab_channel=NBCLA/
QR Code parking meter scam.
Bring that pocket change!!
Maybe it’s just me, but I think we are seeing more of this kind of stuff. A few weeks ago a close by grocery store had a device on the checkout machine stealing EBT and credit card numbers.
The EBT is an Ohio version of food stamps – except with a credit card. It was zeroing out the balance. That had to be awful for those who got scammed. I didn’t hear how or if they were made right, but there were quite a few who got hacked.
I frequent there and can’t for the life of me figure out how someone could put something on that machine without being noticed. Only three checkouts and all right in the front of the store with all kinds of people traffic. Inside job? No idea.
This is a scam for self-service gas pumps as well.
How to Protect Yourself Against Card Skimmers at Gas Stations
I guess people are learning from our betters that theft is okay.
I learned the hard way about card scanners. One stole the information from my card at a petrol station. After cancelling the old card, while waiting for the replacement to arrive in the mail, I redeveloped the habit of paying inside with cash for petrol. Now I only pay with cash at places I am not familiar with. If cards were not so seductively ‘convenient,’ I imagine that most of us would go back to all cash. For the poor there is also the problem of being structurally “unbanked.” Pre-paid cards charge use fees that add up quickly to victimize those who can afford it the least. Indeed, I am tempted to state that ‘Cards’ are a form of regressive taxation.
Stay safe.
I’m presuming it was the self-checkout machines.
Otherwise…inside job.
Not self checkouts, but only three lanes.
Heard, can’t confirm, the store accused the employees and they were not happy.
Who knows. I don’t know how they (card scammers) work. I would like to – but I’m sure as hell not going to look it up – big brother you know.
If I knew how they worked, maybe I would know what to look for.
I can’t remember the site, but it was an anti-tech site. It suggested using a sharpie and put a dot or two on each QR code you come across just to mess with the system and perhaps crash it. Pretty funny I thought. Years ago, I was whistling while being on hold. I’m an experienced whistler. An operator came on and asked me to be patient as I was not allowed to call London while on hold. Seems the whistling pitches were instigating interconnect switches.
Lamber, good luck with your situation.
I have the impression (in the ’10s I tried to implement QR for price label printing within Excel for a micro-enterprise; it was too hard and in the end I used more conventional 1-D barcoding, but I did learn a little) that QR codes are fault-tolerant and can be accurately read even if a significant fraction of the code is damaged or missing. If that is right, messing with codes by blackening a small number of the white squares may not impair the readability of the code.
Have had some experience with QR as well and that is what I remember.
I evaluated the QR technology (before it even had that name) as an investment for a Soros-affiliated VC in the early 1990s and recommended against it. It was clearly superior to QR codes. One case was scanning items going into a warehouse for inventory purposes. You could swipe from pretty much any angle and get a good reading, unlike a bar code.
However, everyone and their uncle had fairy recently invested in bar code technology and were not about to toss that to invest in QR code scanners and a new software back end. Grocery stores are a proof. Look at how they still use bar codes. A second proof was I didn’t see bar codes used in a very logical place (UPS/Fedex) until well into the 2000s.
It suggested using a sharpie and put a dot or two on each QR code you come across just to mess with the system and perhaps crash it.
In the past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and punched cards were used as payment slips, anti-tech people were suggesting to enlarge the holes in the cards to make them unprocessable by card-readers.
Similarly, there were also suggestions on how to sabotage questionnaires given as machine-readable forms: colour of the ink used to fill the form, making crosses or ticks too large or too small, etc.
Somehow, it is heartening to see that, in our age of rapid changes and constant disruptions, at least some old traditions are being kept alive.
Got notice today from my state credit union that they are allowing $2000 daily withdrawal from ATM, in one shot if needed. Was $500 before. Maybe drive people into lucrative overdraft penalties?
Probably so. Next monthly record of transactions you get, do look at the daily tallies and see if the bank is debiting your account before adding credits to the total. Tricks like that have been suggested in the past.
I know I am a Luddite but I have never trusted QR codes. Give me a damned URL and I will copy and paste it or type it.
> QR Code parking meter scam.
We spend enormous effort to get people to avoid clicking on unknown URLs in email, to avoid phishing scams. I’m not sure the message has penetrated everywhere, even after enormous effort.
We then turn around and propagate the QR code, which enables a URL format that is obfuscated and unreadable by humans, and now it’s everywhere.*
NOTE * Everywhere including voting machines (see NC here), which may also use obfuscated URLs in the form of QR codes. Given that where fraud can occur, it will already have occured (Akerlof, paraphrasing):
DIGITAL VOTING VENDOR TO VOTER: Let me just pull on this T-Shirt saying “Trust us.” Now, here, we’ll just pin this “Kick me” sign to your back.”
One of the first phrases I learned as a beginning tax practitioner was that “pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”
“Investigators have homed in on several accounts believed to be linked to Crooks on foreign-based encrypted messaging services and social media platforms, but the FBI has yet to detail its findings so far.”
And, conveniently, the owner of Telegram was arrested in Paris for not monitoring his boards. Garland Nixon and George Galloway did programs yesterday saying that Telegram was just the beginning, so this looks like it could tie into yet another “51 intelligence professionals polled say…” type thing for the next few years.
Something to look forward to./s
Interesting, thanks.
As Lambert said, this guy was really technical and no online footprint? I find that really hard to believe as well.
It isn’t believable, it’s a lie.
The fact that they find him not having a social media account strange is just a sign of the times. If you’re technically-minded, you don’t have an account, and you are very conscious of how easy it is to collect data on your activities. My favorite guru on this subject is Richard Stallman, who famously refuses to give people his data if he can avoid it.
“Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered.”
It means a little bit of profit-seeking behavior will be rewarded, but taking excessive risks to earn a lot of profits will result in significant loss.
It comes from the fact that when it’s time to choose one of your pigs to be dinner, you’ll probably look for the fattest to slaughter b/c they’ll be the best eatin’. At least that’s how I always understood it as a kid b/c we just used the word hog to describe the biggest pigs.
Welp, Tulsi puts in her endorsement for Trump.
It’s just more fuel for this dumpster fire of an election, chipping away at the Harris nomination surge.
I think Trump and his movement will become a new sort of “left.” The DP is now the US conservative party and Trump’s movement is turning the Republican. My definition of “left” is that it is in opposition and does not have to be liberal, or socialist though it attracts old leftists like me. Tulsi is an important addition and I believe the left-wing online presence whether it’s Jimmy Dore, Glen Greenwald, or Matt Taibbi will be in Trump’s corner since he is the only possibility for change. We have to remember that our political system thrives on deep corruption and that will always fail in the long run. Trump may put a dent in that though he did not do much in his first term but that was a result of literally everyone in Washington sabotaging him. To those who might remember Carter’s brief reign Washington also did everything it could to undermine and sabotage his presidency. I know this directly from insiders–they all hated Carter. This time, however, Trump will have the wind at his back as his base is rapidly expanding to take in the dissident community on the left and right.
I wonder if Tulsi would have come out so forcefully for Trump if she had been subjected to significant personal harassment from to extreme abuses of power by the administration.
Getting harassed and felt up by airport security probably being the last straw.
Both RFK and Tulsi firing rocket powered middle fingers at the Democrats.
Don’t forget that it was Tulsi that eviscerated “serious candidate” Harris in the 2015 primary debate. Lot of history there…
Edit to add I hope your life event has your desired outcome with minimal disruption, Lambert.
A few years ago I’d call you crazy but anything is possible. Not putting much hope in Trump but hey, that would be a nice direction for the US.
As for Carter, I’d believe it. I remember reading somewhere that Carter actually formally ordered a troop withdraw from the Korean peninsula and the US military just outright ignored Carter, nullifying his commander in chief status.
I always try to disabuse people about the power of the POTUS. Yes, he/she has quite a bit of power de jure but not de facto unless he or she established a whole series of deals sith power players. In short, you have to have a coalition not in Congress (which is just a place bribes are made) but in real power which includes all the obvious lobbies but also includes finance oligarchs, spooks, entertainment and “news” media and so on. The public is basically ignored other than to manufacture consent through various mind-control mechanisms that is modern propaganda.
That’s like what they did to Trump when he wanted to leave Syria. We’re still there by the way in the only region they have that produces oil and is their best farmland. Keep ’em poor and hungry.
Adds to the rank of potential cabinet appointees whp are not swamp creatures.
“Unplanned, major life-event”?
I really hope that you won the lottery.
Here’s to cope… cheers.
Musk gifted him a Cybertruck with a machine gun on top.
It’s to get him to Fredericton when the Purge begins.
Me thinks L would instantly return any such gift. / ;)
Talk about a ‘white elephant’!
I’m technical but not that kind of technical.
My wild guesses are that he suddenly became a parent or he has inherited a great fortune that is being contested. All guesses are at least as good or quite possibly better than mine.
Lambert: reach out to the commentariat; we are here to help.
Re “pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered.” I suspect this is derived from “some pigs are hogs,” a warning about being greedy.
That, and maybe… in the context of the fundamental rule of investment is ‘trees don’t grow to the sky’, an alternate reading could be pigs get fed to grow fat, when they’re as big as they’re going to get, they become bacon. Suggesting Starbucks as a growth opportunity is a stretch when they’re starting to resemble Denny’s or IHOP. (your grandpa’s coffee shop)
Useful feature of folk wisdom – they can mean so many things all at the same time.
IMO, Starbucks is going the way of Facebook. It’s for old people. My boys go to an all boys school adjacent to an all girls school. They go to a fancy grocery store near the schools to get iced teas and meet up and flirt. They all have store branded yeti cups and the drinks are $1. This is a long term marketing strategy. I think the Starbucks banned the girls for a while. No idea why, the boys are as easily identifiable.
What we’re seeing today: “Pigs grow to the sky.”
Why would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks remains an infuriating enigma weeks after shooting
We never found out about the Vegas shooter, either. And he killed scores of people, back in 2018. Sometimes no one knows.
RE: the Crooks enigma
I am not the most tech savvy person in the world by a long shot, and I’m going by memory of anecdotes, so I may be wildly off here. But seriously, WTF are the spooks supposedly doing here, and why the [family blog] should we believe them if they do ever uncover any “evidence” of Crooks’ online doings?
Maybe he didn’t have any social media accounts, which isn’t all that surprising – I’d wager many people who comment at NC don’t have them either. But no internet presence whatsoever? C’mon man, that is extremely difficult to believe. I seem to remember that back in the dark ages before social media, someone would commit a crime and regular people would dig up everything that person ever said on the interwebs and post it. Am I misremembering that?!!? And the spooks can request/demand info. Clearly Crooks had devices, and those must have been hooked up to some IP address. Can’t they contact the ISP to look at what went out from Crooks’ IP address? Can’t they contact his phone service provider to see who he called or texted? It seems like with the info the spooks supposedly have access to that we normies don’t, and with their ability to demand info that we normies can’t, they would have come up with something by now.
*shiny metallic headgear on*
The longer it takes to get any details here makes me think the spooks are not searching for evidence, but scrubbing it.
*shiny metallic headgear off*
> the spooks are not searching for evidence, but scrubbing it.
Somewhat plausible.
So we do have any baseline for how long scrubbing should take, in the normal course of events? It seems long to me. Hasn’t the NSA hoovered everything up? As you point out, they’ve got his phone, they’ve got his IP. Is there another device that we don’t know about?
MR SUBLIMINAL You know, like the burner he used to communicate with his handlers?What’s the hold-up? More to the point, a former President almost got whacked. How can there be a hold-up?
Agree. They claim to have impounded 4.5 terabytes of data but also that the dood had not significant Internet presence. So, where did the 4.5 TB hoard come from?
It should not take more than an hour or two to look at the HDD and answer some basic questions. Is the 4.5 TB mostly video? Was he a gamer who recorded everything? Movies? Is it mostly music? Mostly photos? Etc. etc.
Sounds like incompetence, obfuscation, or lies.
If they have his devices they should be able to access his history file. Then connect the dots.
This is fun: Trump and Harris Embody a Stark Partisan Divide on Fighting Poverty
Don’t forget, Biden resided over the largest increase in childhood poverty in recent history, when Biden and liberal Democrats, then controlling Congress, opted to allow the poverty reducing emergency pandemic benefits to expire, rather than making some or all of them permanent, a thing easily accomplished. (Someone on Twitter pointed out that Kamala could have overridden the Leader of our Republic^H^H Senate Parliamentarian on Federal minimum wage as well.)
If someone ever seriously interviewed Kamala in the press, this would be a real question to ask her about.
Anyway, back to NY Times on poverty.
And they try to have it both ways
So Biden expanded these.
But later they just expired. How did this happen? Under who? When?
And this zinger!
No. She does not.
I can’t even read anymore. NY Times readers will of course nod their heads vigorously that she supports $15 minimum wage, having forgotten she is the reason we do not have it, or at least didn’t get a vote on it.
What a joke.
And Democrats actually did nuke people on these programs. I’m not seeing much daylight between Trump and Biden/Harris here.
No, they would not. They did not. They let them expire. Full stop. They expired under Biden.
A critically thinking press really is dead in America.
Under Trump and the Pandemic aid, we halved childhood poverty. Democrats said no. What else is there to know? When in power, Democrats threw children to the wolves. Just like on COVID to this day.
https://nypost.com/2024/08/25/us-news/dnc-attendees-test-positive-for-covid-19-despite-mask-wearing/
Multiple attendees at Democratic National Convention test positive for COVID-19
Ooh, big surprise.
(Wishing you all the best, Lambert.)
Despite mask-wearing? Granted I have been doing my best to hide, but have there really been any pics from the convention showing widespread mask-wearing?
Perhaps you should take it as yet another attack against masking: “See: they got covid despite masks. Masks are useless! Why mask? After all, it is just a flu.”
And that is the nudge given by the URL. Because nothing in the article indicates that mask wearers were actually infected; it is just reported that “multiple attendees” got covid-19.
There are other contradictions in the article. A paragraph reads:
“Some of the convention goers were seen wearing face masks during the festivities by The Post — albeit a very small fraction of the total participants.”
And then a photo of the convention gets the caption:
“Numerous attendees were seen wearing face masks during the convention.”
It looks as if the downplaying covid and scorning masks does not fit with the facts, hence an internally inconsistent narrative.
an internally inconsistent narrative
Exactly. But pointing that out is doubleplusungood, and could result in accusations of being a Goldstein supporter.
Sometimes I wonder if all the Covid reinfections make it easier to sustain the official narrative. But then, I remember the whole Novichok episode and other fables in the Before Times…
> Despite mask-wearing?
That’s on the URL, not the headline. The URL being generated from the headline, that shows the original version was too much even for the New York Post.
No, I saw perhaps one tweet with a masked DNC attendee. And I did look for it. Certainly in the mass photos, nothing, nor on the dais.
James O’Keefe apparently circulated throughout the convention thanks to wearing a mask. I didn’t click that link to see what he was informing his fans about (I hate it most when he’s right) but did respect his chutzpah.
> James O’Keefe apparently circulated throughout the convention thanks to wearing a mask.
“Apparently” is going the work you don’t want to do. Stop being a tease. You’re setting a bad example for others. Either find the proof or debunk the rumor.
Apparently. Proves nothing but Citizens Press and other conservative outlets are linking to it.
> Multiple attendees at Democratic National Convention test positive for COVID-19
I have a good deal on that already, and I’ll put it together tomorrow.
Who knew, a superspreading event!
There was a tweet recently from the Convention where a CNN reporter was interviewing a person and saying that such an event not long ago would have been considered a superspreader event but now everything is great. Premier class gaslighting by CNN. I might even have linked to it in a comment at the time.
“The Joy of Superspreading” could be an Onion article. ;)
At least something amusing came out of that convention after all! A reality check for liberal Democrats? Probably not, heh.
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn live streaming again tonight.
ATW Live Tonight, 8 pm ET/7 pm CT: The Assault on Speech Goes Global
Walter Kirn and I discuss the detention of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and raids of figures like Dimitri Simes, which has leaders of independent platforms in a panic
Matt Taibbi
https://www.racket.news/p/atw-live-tonight-8-pm-et7-pm-ct-the
adding: Turley on the Pavel arrest.
“#FreePavel”: Telegram CEO Becomes Latest Target of European Censors
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/08/26/freepavel-telegram-ceo-becomes-latest-target-of-european-censors/
“Elon Musk put it simply: “#FreePavel.” For many, a hashtag of one billionaire calling for the release of another billionaire is hardly a compelling cause. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, 39, is neither a familiar nor sympathetic figure for most Americans. However, for free speech advocates, Durov’s arrest is a chilling escalation of global censors in using European laws to control speech on the Internet.”
from Jonathan Turley’s latest, you can find the post on his website. :
Social media is now the dominant form of communication between people. It surpasses telephones. There is, however, a major difference in how such communications are protected. There would be an outcry if AT&T broke into a telephone call to object to the views of the parties and cut off access to the telephone lines until they moderated their views.
The Europeans have been threatening to hold executives liable for how others use their sites. Imagine if a mobster used a telephone to do business and the FBI arrested the CEO of AT&T.
Adding from Celia Farber:
Pavel Durov, Founder Of Telegram, Arrested In France, After Refusing To Buckle To EU Censorship Demands: French Authorities Not Cooperating With Russian Embassy In Paris Seeking To Ensure His Rights
“Dangerous Times,” –Ed Dowd; “Literally No One On Our Side Gets It,” –Mike Benz; Vladimir Bukovsky: Told You So
https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/pavel-durov-founder-of-telegram-arrested
‘Tis a mystery!
Generation Call-In-Sick — Americans are taking a lot more sick days — and Gen Z is leading the charge.
For fans of Richard Wolff with time on their hands – 3+ hours, interviewed by Robinson Erhardt.
“Israel, Ukraine, China, and the End of the American Empire” :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQsIOcDemPc
Take care, Lambert.
+1 on this sentiment
I hope you won the good kind of lottery, Lambert.
Have flower pictures, a caterpillar picture, and pictures of 3 yard signs in a single yard signifying a massive case of campaign TDS a block over from my house. Very much KamalaLiberalgasm. Yuuuuge.
“Complicated Starbucks Orders Is A Language I Don’t Speak None To Good”
I would not bother going into a Starbucks myself and when they tried to enter the Aussie market, they almost died out due to local competition. In places like the US I read years ago that that was where the savvy people hung out with their laptops. It was the place to be. Could it be that a younger generation is coming along, does not need this social scene and notes that the coffee tastes like crap anyway. So maybe that is why you rarely ever see teenagers there.
“Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean’
Not surprising. Those brownstone buildings in New York? A lot of that material came from the UK as ballast in ships a century or more ago. Thing was, you had the same sort of sandstone locally. And the reason for that was because the US and that part of UK/Europe was once connected when there was no Atlantic. So the sandstone from both sides of the Atlantic were, once upon a time, part of the same formation until the tectonic plates broke apart and the Atlantic was formed in-between separating them – until that UK sandstone started to go home in a way.
#TrumpAssasinationAttempt
> LIHOP?
Maybe, but possibly MIHOP if you follow the “Shooter” (via IMDB) script … ;-)
We’ll probably never know, because if it was a setup, then the people who let or made it happen now have custody of the all the evidence (which probably has their fingerprints all over it).
. . . ” At a faculty senate meeting. A Columbia professor called Palestinian students reading the names of those murdered in Gaza “KKK members” for wearing masks. ” . . .
I hope another Columbia professor at that very meeting was quick witted enough to call that first professor
a ” Typhoid Mary covid-zombie plague-spreading leper ” for wanting those Palestinian students to spread covid.
If any of the Palestinian students referred to by that first professor are reading this comment, and if they have a way of finding out who that professor is, perhaps they can start calling him Professor Typhoid Mary Covid whenever they see him. And get all the other students to do the same.
There’s online speculation that it’s this guy:
And:
That account has been deleted. So I guess we’ll never know.
I wonder if McSweeney’s has catalogued Biden’s “head spinning number of misdeeds” from his administration. Somehow I doubt it.
Recently I burst out laughing when a friend wished the press would point out when Trump was lying. Besides telling her, and later doing it, I sent her a couple of articles about the debate and asking her to read them carefully, I told her about the history of Trump tells you to drink bleach. That Trump is so considered a liar and malicious incompetent that others statements about him are not only not fact checked but repeated. I got back to her about it later, and said did you notice there was little backing for the claims Trump repeatedly lied and that proven plagiarist Biden isn’t questioned or checked. That he never is or wasn’t until it became okay to question his cognitive ability so they did shade those statements. I finished by saying I had no trouble with Trump being fact checked and called out, but none of his opponents have been trustworthy either, and the same standard needs to apply to them.
And the same is true for Harris, starting with an accurate portrayal of her record in elected office, most certainly including when her actions as VP did not support the narrative of the Biden administration’s supposed goals and wishes especially if those actions do not match her stated goals for her presidency.
> I wonder if McSweeney’s has catalogued Biden’s “head spinning number of misdeeds” from his administration. Somehow I doubt it.
Trump is no angel [insert obligatory James Madison quote here].
That said, I have often taken the view that Trump — as befits his background in New York Real estate and show business — is a bullshit artist not a liar (see Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit on this point). Trump says whatever is needed to close the deal before him: Commercial puffery, pardonable exaggeration, flattery, false claims, etc. Understanding this, you don’t have to worry about what he says, only about what he does. That’s why “Trump voters take him seriously, but not literally” means. Bullshit artists don’t care about the truth at all. It doesn’t even enter into their calculations.
The Democrats, IMNSHO, are not bullshit arrists but liars. They know what the truth is, but tell lies (or obfuscate, or distract, or create vibes and means). The remaining goodwill that Democrats have on the collective voter balance sheet comes from the times when they could tell the truth, e.g. by delivering promised universal concrete material benefits. They were able to enact truthfully by performing for the public good. I would guess that goodwill has been used up, replaced by embubblement in the base, resigned perplexity in the undecideds, and perpetual outrage from partisans (some justified).
To me, being a liar is far more culpable than being a bullshit artist. With a bullshit artist, you can throw everything away. With a liar, at least a skilled one, you have to assess the lie on a case-by-case basis, which takes effort. A Gish Gallop is a better winning strategy for a liar than a bullshit artist. Or treat them, operationally, as bullshit artists, which they are in fact not.
The creation of lists (as Bourdieu shows) is a way of demonstrating the hegemony of the listmaker (it’s almost a ritual enactment of a liturgy by a priest). That is the first thing McSweeney’s List demonstrates (and as I argue in the paragraph above, that shows they don’t even know their enemy). But McSweeney’s List is also an enormous tell that Democrats actually know and care about the truth. Hence they are liars, and not bullshit artists. I too could make a list, starting with their handling of Biden’s cognitive decline.
Thank you. Having spread a fair amount of bull when I was a student might explain why Trump has never elicited the same response from me that the excuses regarding the Obama administrations inaction on mortgage fraud and the inadequacy of ACA or Biden and Harris declaring that the vaccines were all that were needed. The coordinated obsfucation regarding Biden’s cognitive decline continues to be a very big irritant.
Well that and the fact that I always knew Trump was a used car salesman type but at one point attributed some level integrity to the Democrats that they used and abused. That abuse of trust will probably come back to bite Democrats in the butt more than it already has (the rust belt is filled with former Democrats turned “deplorables”). It might not be soon enough for me, but they do seem determined to become an ex major party.
“Pigs get fed, Hogs get slaughtered”, is a statement meant to advise against greed. I.E. the pig who eats too much gets fat, and fat pigs get slaughtered.
Arresting Telegram’s Pavel Durov could be a smart move. Tech bosses care more about themselves than you (Guardian Opinion)
Zero surprise that Guardian has an opinion article praising Durov’s arrest. They remain one of the biggest cheerleaders of the disinfo-complex.
Not featured in the Guardian is Zuckerberg admitting he shouldn’t have censored the Hunter’s Laptop story (Twitter, confirmed by Taibbi). Funny that.