2:00PM Water Cooler 1/23/2025

Bird Song of the Day

Brown Thrasher, Finger Lakes National Forest; Dunn Road, Tompkins, New York, United States.

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In Case You Might Miss…

1. Trump wants nuclear reduction talks with China, Russia.
2. Trump readies Schedule F assault.
3. Energy in the executive.
4. George R.R. Martin back in print.

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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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Capitol Seizure

“Trump freed a Jan. 6 defendant charged with assaulting police. DOJ had him arrested again on a gun charge” [Politico]. “A Jan. 6 defendant whose felony assault charges were dismissed a day earlier was arrested Wednesday on federal gun charges that have been pending for nearly two years in Florida…. But Ball’s charges for being a felon in possession of a firearm remained pending and unconnected to his Jan. 6 case. According to that indictment, Ball has previously been convicted of domestic violence battery by strangulation in June 2017, resisting law enforcement with violence and battery of a law enforcement officer in October 2021. It’s unclear if U.S. marshals executed the arrest warrant on Ball prior to his release on the Jan. 6 charges. However, it’s the first docketed federal criminal case in Washington since Trump’s inauguration.” • Amusing!

Biden Administration

“Joe Biden Clearly Thinks Donald Trump Isn’t Bluffing” [Slate]. “Biden issued a second round of preemptive pardons, as stunning as the first. They were granted to five members of his immediate family. The recipients are his brothers and sister, James Biden, Frank Biden, and Valerie Biden Owens, and their spouses, John Owens and Sara Biden. None of them is well known to the public. None has been a prominent critic of Trump. That he would feel the need to protect them tells us how deeply fearful Biden is about the lengths to which Trump will go to punish any member of what Trump and his allies label the ‘Biden Crime Family’.” • Or they were all wetting their beaks.

Trump Administration

This just in:

“Trump wants nuclear reduction talks with China, Russia” [The Hill]. “President Trump while addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday said that he wants to hold talks with Russia and China about reducing nuclear weapon stockpiles. Trump during his first term failed to bring China into negotiations to extend a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, called New START, which places key limits on deployed nuclear weapons and expires February 2026. U.S. and Russian participation in the treaty effectively froze during the Biden administration, as Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to impose costs on Washington for supporting Ukraine militarily. Putin has also threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine to try to deter U.S. and European military support for Kyiv. Addressing the global forum, Trump recounted talks with Putin ahead of the 2020 U.S. election about denuclearization talks and how ‘China would have come along.’ ‘We want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible,’ Trump said. ‘And I can tell you that President Putin wanted to do it, he and I wanted to do it. We had a good conversation with China, they would have been involved, and that would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet.'” • Good, but now do climate.

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“Trump wants nuclear reduction talks with China, Russia :

“President Trump, Crypto Billionaire” [Wall Street Journal]. “Donald Trump doesn’t always separate his personal interests from his public obligations, and a howling example is his sudden new status as a crypto billionaire. The President is inviting trouble with what looks like remarkably poor judgment. Crypto markets have boomed since Mr. Trump’s election in part on expectations of friendlier regulation. And so be it. Animal spirits have been rising all around. But Mr. Trump and his family have tried to cash in on the mania by minting Trump-branded coins…. Unlike Trump-stamped tumblers ($42) and pickleball paddles ($180), crypto tokens are vehicles for speculation. Like other cryptocurrencies, their price is volatile. After surging roughly 10-fold after its launch, $TRUMP’s price has since fallen by half…. All of this creates flashing-red political risks and ethical conflicts. Start with who may be buying the tokens. A business or foreign official with interests before the federal government might seek to curry favor with Mr. Trump by announcing plans to buy millions of his token to pump up the price. Or, worse, whispering to Mr. Trump that he’s made the purchases, since crypto holdings aren’t disclosed. If Mr. Trump’s regulators then act in a way that aids crypto or the person seeking the favor, he’ll be accused of aiding the buyer in service of presidential self-dealing. The President might claim immunity by saying the regulation is part of his official duties, but that won’t remove the political taint. That also won’t stop civil lawsuits if (and probably when) there’s a crypto crash. A President isn’t immune from lawsuits for actions taken before becoming President under the Supreme Court’s Clinton v. Jones (1997) ruling. Mr. Trump has created a regulatory nightmare for Paul Atkins, his highly qualified nominee to run the SEC. Mr. Atkins was crypto-friendly long before his nomination, but now any regulatory move he takes that the industry supports will be attacked as helping Mr. Trump’s business. If the token’s price drops, buyers who lose money could argue that Mr. Trump failed to make required securities disclosures about the risks. Democratic state Attorneys General could seek restitution for investors.” And importantly: “No careful President would get anywhere near this kind of political risk, and we can’t recall any President who has. Where are Mr. Trump’s lawyers? … The crypto caper is a worrisome sign that Mr. Trump’s current advisers don’t understand the difference any better than he does, or that they are too cowed to speak up.”• Again I ask whether Susie Wiles knew about this, or whether the first she heard was what she read in the papers.

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“Trump hires fed-firing mastermind” [Politico]. “President-elect Donald Trump is bringing back a senior White House official who led his first-term push to make it easier to fire civil servants. James Sherk, who served as a special assistant on domestic policy during Trump’s first term, will return to serve in the White House Domestic Policy Council, Trump announced Saturday. Sherk has worked at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute during the Biden administration. Sherk was central to the Trump administration’s efforts to make it easier to fire some federal employees using a classification called Schedule F. That effort generated an outcry from civil servants, and the Biden administration moved quickly to reverse course. The incoming Trump administration has made it clear that it plans to pursue drastic reforms to the federal workforce, and Sherk is poised to be central to those efforts. Trump has vowed to “shatter the deep state” and make it easier to fire ‘rogue bureaucrats.'”

The dude wouldn’t know a Communist if [insert joke here]:

Everything Donald Trump is dismantling will be parked at a bunch of communist 501c3’s until the next Democrat President, when it will be quickly restored to government.

The Trump admin MUST go after the left wing non profits to secure long term victories. Break them. Strike.

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) January 22, 2025

Nevertheless, institutionally he’s quite right; that’s what the NGOs will do.

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“Gabbard’s nomination on shaky ground” [Semafor]. “Tulsi Gabbard’s bid to become Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence is on shaky ground, with Republican lawmakers raising private concerns and the president urging her to get aggressive. Republicans are particularly hesitant about her past statements that some have read as too warm toward Vladimir Putin and former Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad, whom Gabbard met with in 2017. She’s also questioned some intelligence-gathering tools, though she recently endorsed a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows warrantless surveillance of foreign targets and has the power to sweep up domestic US communications.” • Gabbard shifted position on Section 702 to appease national security goons, and then a Federal District Court struck it down, as we saw yesterday. If Gabbard gives these people the vapors, she’s the right person for the job.

“Senate panel sets hearing on Tulsi Gabbard nomination” [The Hill]. “The Senate Intelligence Committee has scheduled a hearing to review the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence. The Jan. 30 hearing comes after Democrats resisted the scheduling of an earlier hearing, saying they still didn’t have the full slate of background checks, ethics disclosures and paperwork on a candidate whose overall qualifications have sparked their concern. She has also been seeking to explain her past support of Snowden, saying she didn’t feel the intelligence community had sufficient channels for raising concerns. That explanation has not rested well with all Intelligence Committee lawmakers, however, who have called the National Security Agency leaker a traitor.” • Would have been helpful if Trump pardoned Snowden immediately. That would put the cat among the pigeons. (Of course, the real reason Gabbard is a “traitor” in these people’s minds is that she left the Democrat Party.)

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Energy in the executive:

“Doocy: Biden Staff Would Be In Such A Hurry To Get Us Out, ‘Trump Seemed Willing To Talk About Anything'” [RealClearPolitics] “Anytime that we would go into the Oval Office, for example, like I was for almost an hour last night with President Biden, the staff would be in such a hurry to get us out. And President Biden would just smile, and there were people yelling [(!!)]. They didn’t want him off script. They wanted him telling us whatever was on a note card that they had printed for him. Whereas last night, President Trump seemed willing to talk about anything. You could have asked him stuff from the news page, the gossip page, the sports page. He wants to put his fingerprints on everything, and his staff seemed like they were happy just to sit back and let it happen?” • People yelling?! Like “No Joe! Don’t go there!”?

“Trump warns he’ll adjourn Congress to make recess appointments. How would that work?” [CBS]. “President Trump is threatening to use his powers to adjourn Congress so he can make recess appointments for at least some of his top Cabinet nominees and their deputies, enabling them to begin running the largest federal departments. Mr. Trump most recently raised the prospect of plunging the executive and legislative branches into uncharted constitutional territory during his White House meeting Tuesday with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson, mulling the option if Democrats opt to slow-walk or delay his top national security and public health nominees, according to two people familiar with the meetings. ‘This remains a significant possibility in the eyes of the White House,’ one of the people familiar with the meetings said, emphasizing this is not expected to happen this week, but remains under active consideration.” Article II, Section 3: “And in Case of Disagreement between [both Houses], with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, [the President] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” Amusingly, since the Republicans control both Houses, it would be easy for Johnson and Thune to engineer a disagreement! But: “It is unclear how long Mr. Trump would recess Congress, given that a possible government shutdown looms in mid-March and Republican leaders have set an April goal of passing massive economic, tax and immigration legislation that would authorize Mr. Trump’s plans to cut inflation and taxes and dramatically overhaul border security policy.” • Trump would adjourn Congress for as it took to make the recess appointments. They would then reconvene. Of course, this would “make a mockery,” etc. etc. but here we are!

“Trump’s Rush List for Security Clearances Poses Risks, and Congress Will Have No Oversight” [NOTUS]. “In an unprecedented move experts say could present a major national security risk, Donald Trump is handing out temporary top secret security clearances to White House staff without any of the usual background checks. ‘It seems unnecessary given that interim clearances can go through the normal procedure and be done in just a few days,’ especially with a White House request for expedited processing, the president of the Federal Clearance Assistance Service, William Henderson, told NOTUS. ‘If you’re the clearance authority and somebody gives you a name and says, ‘Give this person a clearance,’ you don’t know if his brother is working for the Mossad. You don’t know anything about it,’ Henderson added. Republican Senators either ceded trust to President Trump or deflected questions about security concerns — ranging from Sen. Rick Scott’s, ‘I believe the president’s going to do the right thing to keep our country safe,’ to Sen. Thom Tillis’ ‘I haven’t looked at it, I think due diligence is pretty important.’ Democrats pointed to a more nefarious reason than pure convenience: Trump could be slipping people into top positions that wouldn’t otherwise pass security muster.” • Russians, no doubt.

“The Memo: Trump 2.0 comes into focus” [The Hill]. “Trump has been delivering on the “shock and awe” approach that his allies promised…. Beyond the pardons, the new president’s first days back at the White House have offered a bracing reminder of the chaotic showmanship in which he revels…. In total, Trump’s actions have elicited a mix of shock and familiarity among the president’s fans and foes alike… The bottom line is that the opposition party is bracing for four more years like the past three days. For Democrats, it’s a bleak prospect.” • One thing I don’t understand is that word “chaos,” often used by Democrats as the ultimate indictment of Trump’s style of governance. What’s more “chaotic” than a genocide and a proxy war with a nuclear power?

“Trump’s blizzard of orders gets pushback, questions from GOP lawmakers” [The Hill]. “President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders during the first few days of his presidency has sent Republican lawmakers scrambling to make sense of what impact they’ll have on the country, and some GOP senators are already raising questions and concerns. Republicans were surprised by Trump’s order to immediately pause the disbursement of funds under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which they fear would stop funding to key projects in their home states. ‘Some of it is not helpful,’ said a senior Republican aide who noted Trump’s team would have been wise to provide more detail about the scope of the orders or could have waited until some of his nominees cleared Senate committees before taking actions that were likely to prompt legislative pushback.” • Hmm.

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“RFK Jr. plans to keep a financial stake in lawsuits against the drugmaker Merck” [NPR]. “Even if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as the next Health and Human Services secretary, he still plans to collect fees from Wisner Baum, a law firm suing Merck over claims that the pharmaceutical company failed to properly warn consumers about risks from its HPV vaccine, Gardasil, according to new filings with the Office of Government Ethics. Kennedy will only collect the fees if Wisner Baum wins, and only for cases that aren’t against the United States or in which the United States isn’t a party and doesn’t have ‘a direct or substantial interest,’ according to the filings. ‘Pursuant to the referral agreement, I am entitled to receive 10% of fees awarded in contingency fee cases referred to the firm,’ Kennedy wrote in his signed ethics agreement. ‘I am not trying these cases, I am not an attorney of record for the cases, and I will not provide representational services in connection with the cases during my appointment to the position of Secretary.'”

DOGE

“Maybe We Do Need DOGE” (interview) [Jennifer Pahlka, The Atlantic]. Interesting example of the hiring process, but too long to quote. Search on “we say we’re going to hire on the basis of merit.” Worth a read.

Our Famously Free Press

“Three Disturbing Signs of Fourth Estate Failure” [Bill Scher, Washington Monthly]. The first: “David Marchese, co-host of The New York Times’s podcast The Interview, conducted a friendly chat with a pro-dictatorship political theorist, Curtis Yarvin, whom Vice President J.D. Vance once cited to argue in favor of a purge of civil servants. Marchese asked, ‘Why is democracy so bad, and why would having a dictator solve the problem?’ Yarvin replied by arguing Franklin D. Roosevelt operated as a dictator: ‘Just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, in which he essentially says: ‘Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway.’ So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did.’ The problem with Yarvin’s response is that Roosevelt, upon becoming president in the depths of the Great Depression, did not ‘essentially’ take power against the will of Congress or threaten as much. He merely raised the possibility of asking Congress to give him emergency powers if the legislative process ran aground. • Scher then cites to the speech, and is correct (although my recollection is that Yarbin is not “pro-dictatorship” but monarchist (!!), which is supported by Wikipedia). Pretty amazing to watch the Times allow the chief spokeshole of the “neo-reactionary movement” throw FDR under the bus!

Democrats en déshabillé

“Progressives focus their ire on US ‘oligarchy'” [The Hill]. “Progressives are focusing their messaging on being anti-oligarchy, training their sights not just on Republicans but also on Democrats they argue are too beholden to corporate interests…. But they aren’t just looking at Trump. Liberals are also forcing a conversation about their own party’s money-in-politics problem, hoping to redirect the focus ahead of the midterms. Justice Democrats is now recruiting dozens of new candidates, while Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) former 2020 campaign manager is now running to chair the Democratic National Committee. Meanwhile, strategists are working to protect members of the Squad from defeats. ‘November’s election is a mandate for the Democratic Party to clean up shop,’ said Usamah Andrabi, communications director of Justice Democrats, the most prominent group in charge of nurturing new progressive candidates for the House and Senate…. For many on the left, the re-brand is long overdue. For nearly a decade, ever since Sanders angered establishment figures in Hillary Clinton’s inner circle with a primary bid, moderate Democrats have relied on similar corporate influences as Republicans to various degrees. Many operatives still haven’t fully denounced corporate money funding elections, with many watching the donor-first approach work effectively for the GOP. Trump’s recent success has amplified that. By surrounding himself with the top 1 percent of the 1 percent, progressives say the president has created a prime backdrop for Democrats to create a contrast on campaign finance, their agreed-upon top issue for their party this year.” • “Their agreed-upon top issue.” Oh, is that it?

Realignment and Legitimacy

Those who made Sanders impossible made Trump inevitable:

wild to be on the front page of Reddit pic.twitter.com/gWSqXsBO4x

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 23, 2025

“The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers” [Bloomberg]. “As Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th US President on Monday, he was surrounded by his family, donors and wealthy tech executives. Just a few feet farther away stood a political newcomer who’s been credited with encouraging lots of votes: Joe Rogan. The fact that Rogan, the host of the world’s most popular podcast, watched from the Capitol Rotunda as Republican luminaries like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were confined to overflow speaks volumes about the new dynamics at play in Washington and the media writ large. Over the past two years, a set of massively popular podcasters and streamers cemented themselves as the new mainstream source of information for millions of young men, and, according to a new Bloomberg analysis, used their perch to rally these constituents in support of Trump and the political right.” Handy guest chart:

And: “Yet even as the podcasts have tried to brand themselves uniquely, similar themes and characters appear across the network. Bloomberg’s analysis of 2,002 episodes across the shows reveals how closely interconnected the podcasters’ relationships are, and how much the shows’ talking points overlap. Over the past two years, 152 guests made an appearance on at least two of the shows. Recurring characters are common, not just as guests, but as “friends of the shows,” including the UFC CEO White and comedian Shane Gillis. The effect gives viewers a sense of being inducted into a virtual, close-knit friend group from home.” • So, if I have this right, politics were being practiced?

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, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

Vaccines: Covid

“INQ000474703 – Report from Professor Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, titled Covid-19 Vaccines: risks, benefits and how to prepare for the next pandemic, dated September 2024” (PDF) [UK Covid-19 Inquiry]. Page 70: “6.2 Regarding the monitoring of effectiveness, the MHRA and public health agencies like the UKHSA and Public Health Scotland generated very rapid data on the impact of Covid-19 variants on vaccine effectiveness, sometimes being the first in the world to generate such evidence. This was only possible due to the existence of world-leading virus genomic testing capacity linked to unique expertise and rich NHS data. These mechanisms should continue to exist, and national agencies should continue to be provided with the resources to obtain and deliver the necessary knowledge at speed and with enough quality. 6.3. Finally, the early vaccination rollout campaign resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths being averted, making the UK the country with the highest number of lives saved during the pandemic due to Covid-19 vaccines in the whole WHO-Europe region. However, certain population groups had a lower uptake of vaccines, including groups at high risk of severe outcomes such as ethnic minority groups and pregnant women.” • “Very rapid data.” What a concept.

Vaccines: H5N1

“Egg shortages, higher prices spike as bird flu grows” [Axios]. “Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would give Moderna approximately $590 million to accelerate bird flu vaccine trials.” • Remember that we need eggs to make killed virus vaccines, so we’re in an, er, chicken or egg situation here. I can’t resist:

Sequelae: Covid

“Disseminated Coccidioidomycosis Following Travel to an Endemic Region and COVID-19 infection: Case Report and Case-based Literature Review” [Medical Reports]. “Coccidioidomycosis, also known as valley fever, is a fungal infection caused by inhalation of soilborne spores. It primarily affects the respiratory system and presents with symptoms ranging from mild flu-like illness to severe pneumonia. Here we report a case of a 68-year-old male with fevers, worsening fatigue, and rash following a recent COVID-19 diagnosis. The patient had traveled to Florida, Arizona, Mexico, and Nevada within a month prior to symptom onset. Imaging revealed a lung nodule with associated mediastinal lymphadenopathy. Biopsy confirmed disseminated coccidioidomycosis. This case emphasizes the necessity of including coccidioidomycosis in the differential diagnosis for patients with respiratory symptoms and rashes, particularly those with recent travel to endemic regions.” • NOTE “In people with HIV, disseminated (extrapulmonary) coccidioidomycosis is an AIDS-defining condition.” HIV/AIDS Glossary.

Elite Maleficence

Yes, whatever Trump is doing with reporting is bad, but we’re used to bad:

I’m laughing at all the people who said NOTHING—absolutely NOTHING—when the previous administration got rid of all our Covid data & ended the public health emergency amid record Covid, & they didn’t say a thing when Americans died prematurely in record numbers for 4 years, & they…

— Laura Miers (@LauraMiers) January 22, 2025

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TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

Lambert here: I don’t like a lot of this week’s charts. In wastewater, too many red dots concentrated in the Midwest and the Atlantic coast, so I started circling areas in red, again. New York’s weirdly persistent higher hospitalization rate continues. Traveler positivity is up, and worse, the dominant traveler variants are JN* and KP*, which, while present in the national variants, are very low. And in the two death charts, the projected deaths seem to have leveled out, when in the past they decreased. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does make me queasy, and it’s well after the holiday bump.

Wastewater
This week[1] CDC January 10	Last week[2] CDC (until next week):
Variants [3] CDC January 18	Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC January 11
Hospitalization
New York[5] New York State, data January 16:	National [6] CDC Janurary 16:
Positivity
National[7] Walgreens January 13:	Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic January 4:
Travelers Data
Positivity[9] CDC December 30:	Variants[10] CDC December 30
Deaths
Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC January 11:	Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC January 11:

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) Seeing more red and more orange, but nothing new at major hubs.

[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.

[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.

[4] (ED) A little uptick.

[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped.

[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.

[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.

[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.

[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.

[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.

[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.

[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.

Stats Watch

Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “Initial jobless claims in the US rose by 6,000 from the previous week to 223,000 in the period ending January 18th, slightly ahead of market expectations of 220,000, to mark the sharpest rise in six weeks.”

Manufacturing: “United States Kansas Fed Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Kansas City Fed’s Manufacturing Production Index fell by three points from the previous month to -9 in January 2025, the lowest level since September 2024. The latest data revealed a modest contraction in regional factory activity, marking the third consecutive month of decline.”

* * *

Manufacturing: “Trump DOT secretary pick pledges to maintain Boeing 737 MAX production cap” [Aerotime]. “[Sean Duffy,] nominated by President Donald Trump to head the US Department of Transportation (DOT) has pledged to maintain a cap on Boeing 737 MAX production that was put in place following the Alaska Airlines incident last year when a door plug separated from a plane midflight.” And: “‘The cap will be maintained and will be lifted when I, in consultation with the career safety experts at FAA and the Administrator, have confidence that a production increase will not reduce the quality of the aircraft being produced,’ wrote Duffy.”

Manufacturing: “Union investigates claims that Boeing is sending work to non-union locations” [Reuters]. “Boeing’s engineering union is formally investigating claims from its members that the company is moving work to non-union locations in the United States and overseas.

The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) formally began investigating the allegations in December, when it requested relevant information from Boeing, the union’s Director of Strategic Development Rich Plunkett said Wednesday…. In October, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said the company would cut roughly 10% of its workforce, or 17,000 jobs… In November and December, Boeing issued layoff notices to more than 4,000 U.S. workers, including 660 to SPEEA members, according to publicly-available state employment records and the union. Soon after the first round of notices went out, SPEEA officials started hearing from members that ‘at least some of the work that was being performed by those subject to layoffs is now being sent to other Boeing locations,’ Plunkett said.” • Boeing management just can’t help itself, can it?

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 46 Neutral (previous close: 43 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 34 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jan 23 at 1:51:17 PM ET.

Gallery

Berries:

"Winter Fruits" by Yu Chengyou pic.twitter.com/VW1tGvpQ5j

— Marysia (@marysia_cc) January 11, 2025

Zeitgeist Watch

“Touchscreen dashboards have finally taken over and ruined driving” [The Telegraph]. “An S&P Global Mobility survey of car owners found that 97 per cent of new cars released after 2023 contain at least one touchscreen…. Chris Longmore, from the automotive design consultancy Drive, believes the touchscreen takeover is largely cost-driven. He said: ‘Tesla showed the way. By having everything on the screen, you can reduce the tooling needed to make switches and maybe going forwards do away with centre consoles altogether and [the cost of] making the panels you need for them.'” And: ‘One glimmer on the horizon is that safety ratings body Euro Ncap has said that any car that doesn’t have easy-to-use tactile controls such as stalks or buttons for controls such as wipers, indicators and hazard lights won’t be able to achieve the top five stars. William Porter, the policy manager for safety charity IAM Roadsmart, added: ‘While we welcome Euro Ncap’s approach, we’ll have to wait to see if the car makers take heed or if cost and aesthetics win out. We know distracted driving kills a lot of people, but there are no figures to say exactly how many and what the distraction was. Touchscreens are a relatively new technology and we’d like to see some more in-depth research into them and the effect they have on driving.” • Well, the “Let’s wait ’til the bodies pile up” is certainly working for pandemics….

Class Warfare

“Trump’s Immigration Threats Are Already Wrecking the Food Industry” [The New Republic]. “Bakersfield, California, saw a massive drop off in the number of field workers showing up for work last week after Border Patrol agents in unmarked Chevy Suburbans rounded up and detained immigrants in the area, profiling individuals they believed to be field workers, reported CalMatters. The end result: acres of unpicked oranges roasting in the California sun at the height of the season. Bakersfield makes up a small portion of California’s Central Valley, which produces approximately a quarter of the nation’s food. Kern County, where Bakersfield is located, has ranked within the top three agricultural counties in the nation for the last several years, largely off the backs of undocumented laborers, who are estimated to comprise more than half of the county’s workforce, according to CalMatters. Losing the bulk of America’s agricultural workforce overnight is a recipe for ‘absolute economic devastation,’ according to Richard S. Gearhart, an associate professor of economics at Cal State-Bakersfield, who spoke with the nonprofit news outlet. ‘You are talking about a recession-level event if this is the new long-term norm,’ Gearhart said, arguing that the end result of Trump’s policies will be felt in the grocery store check-out lines across America. The 47th president has effectively promised a full-throttle immigration crackdown for the next four years…”

“‘World Economic Forum’ Panel: Trump Has Defeated Us, The Professional Managerial Class Who Believed History Was Over” [RealClearPolitics]. “Yale University Professor Walter Reed adds: ‘I think we need to also factor in not only who has won (Trump) but also who has lost, which is to say us.’ ‘By ‘us,’ I mean the general intellectual, professional, managerial people who believed history was over, and we were merely administering and managing things according to clear and known rules,’ he explained. ‘Something new, not necessarily better, but new, is moving into the center.'” • Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man came out in 1992. Are we really saying the PMC believed it, collectively, since then?

News of the Wired

“George R.R. Martin has co-authored a physics paper” [Ars Technica]. “bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he co-authored. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing…. [Author] Tregillis acknowledges that this might not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, given that it involves multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students might not fully comprehend. Nor does he suggest adding it to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.” • Anything to avoid finishing Game of Thrones. (Wild Cards, however, seems on point.)

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