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2:00PM Water Cooler 11/27/2024

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By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

Northern Mockingbird, 350 South Madison Avenue, Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, United States.

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In Case You Might Miss…

  1. Blame cannons thunder after Kamala campaign team podcast.
  2. Investigation into attempts to assassinate Trump seem curiously silent.
  3. Boeing delivery, layoff woes.

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Look for the Helpers

Generally I avoid transparently feel-good stories, but since it’s the holidays:

And:

A fine example of Graeber’s “the communism of everyday life.”

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My email address is down by the plant; please send examples of there (“Helpers” in the subject line). In our increasingly desperate and fragile neoliberal society, everyday normal incidents and stories of “the communism of everyday life” are what I am looking for (and not, say, the Red Cross in Hawaii, or even the UNWRA in Gaza).

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

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Trump Assassination Attempts (Plural)

I’d sure like links for all this, but nevertheless accumulation of detail is impressive:

Makes me wonder if the Trump transition team’s reluctance to have the FBI do background checks for incoming administration officials and nominees is related to, well, all this. And the Crooks investigation seems to be moving awfully slowly.

2024 Post Mortem

Who did this:

Sound up, definitely. This frame:

As readers know, I oppose remote diagnosis. But I’ve gotta say… If I were in a bar, and caught a glimpse of that face across the room, I’d think the bartender hadn’t been keeping track. Commentary:

Andrew Yang seems like a nice person, but if the idea was to make sure Kamala never rean again, amplifying this video was exactly the right move.

Four days earlier:

Oh yeah.

Deploy the Blame Cannons!

“Downfall of The Democrats | The Truth About The 2024 Election” (video) ShoeOnHead, YouTube]. Several readers have posted on this “Demödämmerung”*-themed video, so here it is. NOTE * I like this umlauts, so I’m keeping them, pedants begöne).

Fine use of anaphora!

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“Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong” (transcript) [Pod Save America, Crooked Media]. “In this candid [oh yeah] interview, the leaders of the Harris-Walz Campaign speak for the first time about the challenges they faced and why they made the decisions they did. Dan sits down with Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter to talk about the campaign’s roadmap, their approach to nontraditional media outlets like Joe Rogan, the voters they most needed to win over, why they fell short in the end, and what Democrats should do differently next time.” There’s a lot to dislike, but this caught my eye in the transcript:

[PLOUFFE] I just thought at the end of the day, particularly because Trump did not close well, I thought, and I thought Kamala Harris closed well, Trump was reminding people some of the things they don’t like about him.

Trump closed great. First, McDonalds, then the garbage truck. What’s wrong with these people?

Learned nothing, forgotten nothing:

Commentary:

But surely it would have been better to launder all the stupid money, but also to win?

Commentary:

Heer’s “system/anti-system” binary seems like a more precise, on-point version of “Change vs. More of the Same” (assuming that “change’ is not necessarily systemic, a dubious assumption at this point).

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TikTok in the campaign. From a campaign staffer, so cum grano salis. Nevertheless:

The #Resistance

“The Resistance goes quiet” [Axios]. “The Resistance, a political movement to protest Trumpism online and in the streets. There’s still plenty of resistance to Trump across the country, but little mass mobilization…. An event scheduled for January — dubbed ‘The People’s March’ — will inevitably be compared to the massive Women’s March eight years earlier, which garnered hundreds of thousands of participants and spurred nationwide sister marches… “The exhaustion is real” among those who organized against Trump during his first term, only to see him elected again, [Tamika Middleton, managing director at Women’s March] says. ‘Part of what is beautiful about what mobilization offers inside of these moments, is that they activate and bring in new people who have new energy.'” • We’ll see. Personally, I think the scope of Trump’s victory — a win in the popular vote, all seven swing states — removed a lot of the rationale for resistance initially. We’ll see what January brings (besides lawfare and oppo).

Not “resistance” per se, but the same people using the same tactics:

“The Democrats’ Dirty Tricks Playbook?” [Matt Taibbi, Racket News]. “The newly released court docs bear out the fact that there was deep concern within the blue activist world about the third-party run. A memo sent from political strategist Lucy Caldwell to Dmitri Mehlhorn, aide to billionaire donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, described No Labels as a ‘looming forest fire’ that would be a ‘nuclear grade threat’ if it nominated a candidate and reached a ‘live campaign environment.’ To prevent that, Caldwell proposed a protracted campaign of ‘brand destruction,’ using ‘controlled burns’ to put the fire out long before the election. As Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson put it less subtly in a tweeted video last April, No Labels needed to be ‘burned to the fucking ground politically.'” And after an 80-minute conference call between Democratic Party-aligned activist groups, “former Emily’s List chief Emily Kane, now of Third Way, wrote a letter after the discussion reported on by Semafor, summing up the conclusions of what she called, in the subject line, the ‘Anti-No-Labels Coalition meeting.’ Notably acknowledging they were indeed ‘working together as a broad coalition’ to ‘fight the anti-democratic operation that is No Labels,; it added without irony that this fight for democracy should also include ‘deterring other third party presidential efforts.'” • Politics ain’t beanbag. But just don’t call yourselves Democrats, uppercase or lowercase D.

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

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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 (wastewater); 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, KidDoc, 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!

Elite Maleficence

Everything’s going according to plan:

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TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

Lambert here: Even though the Covid numbers seem low, please remember that the data is not nearly as good as it once was, that it lags, and that the downside risks of catching Covid are considerable. For those who have developed their own personal protocols, I wouldn’t relax them. Maybe next year.

Wastewater
This week[1] CDC November 18 Last Week[2] CDC (until next week):

Variants [3] CDC November 23 center Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC November 16

Hospitalization
New York[5] New York State, data November 25: National [6] CDC November 21:

Positivity
center National[7] Walgreens November 25: ★ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic November 23:

Travelers Data
Positivity[9] CDC November 4: Variants[10] CDC November 4:

Deaths
Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC November 2: Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC November 2:

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) Good news!

[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.

[3] (CDC Variants) KP.* still popular. XEC has entered the chat. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.

[4] (ED) Down.

[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Steadily down.

[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Actually improved; it’s now one of the few charts to show the entire course of the pandemic to the present day.

[7] (Walgreens) Down.

[8] (Cleveland) Down.

[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Down.

[10] (Travelers: Variants). Now XEC.

[11] Deaths low, positivity down.

[12] Deaths low, ED down.

Stats Watch

GDP: “United States GDP Growth Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The US economy expanded an annualized 2.8% in Q3 2024, the same as in the advance estimate, compared to 3% in Q2. Personal spending increased at the fastest pace since Q1 2023 although it was revised slightly lower from the advance estimate (3.5% vs 3.7%). It was boosted by a 5.6% surge in consumption of goods (vs 6% in the advance estimate) and a robust spending on services (2.6%, the same as in the advance estimate). Government consumption growth was unrevised at 5%.”

Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “US initial jobless claims held steady at 213,000 for the week ending November 23rd, below market expectations of 216,000. The results extended the view that the US labor market remains at historically strong levels despite the aggressive tightening cycle by the Federal Reserve in the last quarters, adding leeway for the central bank to slow the pace of monetary loosening should inflation remain stubbornly high.”

Manufacturing: “United States Durable Goods Orders” [Trading Economics]. “New orders for manufactured durable goods in the US rose by 0.2% over a month to $286.561 billion in October 2024, following a revised 0.4% decrease in the prior month and missing market forecasts of a 0.5% growth.”

Manufacturing: “United States Chicago PMI” [Trading Economics]. “The Chicago Business Barometer, also known as the Chicago PMI, slid to 40.2 in November 2024, down from 41.6 in September and falling short of market expectations of 44. This left the index 2.7 points below the year-to-date average. The latest reading signaled that Chicago’s economic activity contracted for the 12th consecutive month, and at a notably sharp pace, marking the steepest decline since May.”

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Manufacturing: “‘Expansionist’ Emirates unveils first A350 and waits on arrival of longer-range version” [FlightGlobal]. “Philippe Mhun, Airbus executive vice-president for programmes and services, declines to say how many A350s it will hand over to Emirates next year, but says the carrier will account for a “large part” of 2025’s output – somewhere in the region of 25-30%…. Clark says the carrier remains ‘expansionist’ but requires additional capacity to meet its goals. ‘We are a frustrated entity because we need airplanes and we need them tomorrow.’ Had Boeing managed to keep to the original timeline for the 777X ‘we would have had 85 777Xs by now’, says [Emirates president Sir Tim Clark]. Boeing’s latest forecast is for 777X deliveries to start in 2026, although with Emirates third in line to receive the twinjet, its deliveries are likely to be towards the back end of the year at best.”

Manufacturing: “Laid-off Boeing workers worry for themselves, and the company that cut them” [Seattle Times]. “Layoff notices came in the form of phone calls, 10-minute calendar holds and scripted conversations with managers. One worker left with a gifted bottle of whiskey. Another wasn’t even allowed to keep the cardboard box they had used to collect their belongings. Some workers had prepared for the news; Boeing executives had spent weeks talking about reducing inefficiencies and focusing on the core parts of the struggling business. Others were blindsided, relying on years of positive reviews and, in some cases, assurances their jobs were safe…. [The Everett-based worker] said he can’t help but feel that ‘there’s not much runway’ left for the company. ‘There’s a level of care and a level of knowledge that just won’t be there.'”

Manufacturing: “FAA Says No Immediate Fix Needed For Boeing 737 MAX Engine Smoke In Cabin After Bird Strike Incidents” [Simple Flying]. “The FAA’s Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention recommended software changes to the engine’s bleed air system’s response to a bird strike. The office’s recommendation read that the required design change would detect the immediate impulse of a bird strike or fan blade loss event and automatically close the affected engine’s Pressure Regulated Shutoff Valves (PRSOV) or trip the associated air conditioning pack.” • More on the leaked memo here.

Manufacturing: “Life is better without Boeing, airline executive says” [Quartz]. “Boeing’s ongoing struggles have disrupted airlines racing to replace aging fleets worldwide, but easyJet has avoided both those troubles and the engine issues plaguing some Airbus operators. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Chief Executive Johan Lundgren expressed thanks that he had Airbus planes with CFM International engines…. [Some] airline executives, like United Airlines Chief Executive Scott Kirby, have publicly called for a new competitor to displace the global Airbus-Boeing planemaking duopoly.” • Too bad about Bombardier. Embraer? China?

Tech: “Drake takes Kendrick Lamar rap feud to US courts” [Yahoo News]. “Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which accused Drake of having relationships with underage girls, enjoyed huge commercial and critical acclaim, exceeding 900 million plays on streaming platform Spotify and earning multiple Grammy nominations, including song of the year. But in the first of two court filings this week, Drake on Monday accused Universal Music Group (UMG), which distributed the song, of charging Spotify unusually low prices to license the track, in return for the streamer widely recommending the track to its subscribers. According to a court document filed in New York, Drake also accused UMG of using automated computer ‘bots’ to artificially inflate the supposed number of times the song has been streamed on Spotify.”

Statistics: Speaking of GDP:

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Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 64 Greed (previous close: 64 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 49 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 27 at 2:10:45 PM ET.

Gallery

Winter (1):

Winter (2):

Zeitgeist Watch

I love the concept of a “pamphlet launch”:

Class Warfare

No wonder she left the country:

Something big coming down the pike?

News of the Wired

“Scale-invariant topology and bursty branching of evolutionary trees emerge from niche construction” [PNAS]. You’ll like this, if this is the sort of thing you like. The closing paragraph: “Our results show that niche construction is more than a feedback between evolutionary and ecological processes arising when their timescales are not widely separated. Niche construction not only leads to a perturbation in the evolutionary trajectories of all components of an ecosystem, but also creates an indelible footprint on the evolutionary process that cannot be eliminated, even for very long times. These memory effects manifest themselves through the anomalous scaling laws that characterize observed phylogenetic trees.” • What intrigued me was a sentence in the Abstract: “Phylogenetic trees describe both the evolutionary process and community diversity,” but apparently “community” is not used in a sociological sense.

Dad.

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Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From NYT_Memes:

NYT_Memes writes: “Found this after rain last week. Sudden explosion of mushrooms.” Fungi are honorary plants.

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

Subscribe to Post Comments
8 comments

    1. Joe Well

      If English can have entire boroughs of strings of silent letters that exist only for decoration, it can have pointless silent umlauts, too.

      Reply ↓
  2. Neutrino

    About that Harris video, someone was helping out with the so-called messaging.
    For conspiracy fans, recall that Humpty Dumpty was pushed.

    Reply ↓
  3. Steve H.

    > Scale-invariant topology and bursty branching of evolutionary trees emerge from niche construction” [PNAS]

    I’ll be chewing on this all through Thanksgiving. And still end up on the couch feeling stupid.

    I can’t but think there’s benefit to concrete material ecotopes. And the brief overview of the banquet already yields some tasty treats:

    >> Niche construction in evolutionary theory: The construction of an academic niche? J. Genet. 96, 491–504 (2017).

    Reply ↓
  4. Pat

    Regarding the casual acceptance of infection, it was much more gradual than just the hideous response to Covid. We have spent years where children were sent to school ill, people went to work ill and it was just accepted as the way it was. Covid was different because it was the first time in a long time that people thought they could die from an infectious disease. (It was always possible, but was so rare it was not a consideration.)

    What I deeply regret was the political take over of our public health structures has made them something to be distrusted for even the PMC crowd. They wave off Covid warnings as much as the no mask/no vaccine crowd they insulted and wanted to die at the height of Covid. That the deplorables wrote them off earlier is not entirely the fault of our bureaucrats who wanted everyone to go back to work regardless of the safety. Some of it was the mindset of the people running them. They had become as much about making money in the process as the investor/donor set.

    That doesn’t mean I don’t think the world would be better off today if the Democrats had thought they had to keep Biden in the White House basement rather than just not worry about people catching odd glimpses of doddering Joe on state approved media. We would be. They might have had to keep up the pretense that certain precautions were necessary…even with a vaccine. But no they could fully embrace the second part of Lambert’s two part plan description. ‘Go Die’ (even if you have to get severely disabled first).

    Reply ↓
  5. Late Introvert

    Not quite Dad, but my friend and I saw a sign at a gas station for a Free Coleman Lantern, and we both raised our fists and started chanting.

    Reply ↓
  6. Felix

    “But I’ve gotta say… If I were in a bar, and caught a glimpse of that face across the room, I’d think the bartender hadn’t been keeping track”.

    same here, although my thought was it was like viewing a “Cops” traffic stop video when the driver is trying to explain why she can’t perform dui check exercises without an attorney present.

    Reply ↓

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