2:00PM Water Cooler 10/21/2022 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Dark-eyed Junco (Red-backed), Otero, New Mexico, United States. “Song at sunrise of a Red-backed Junco singing from the top of a dead conifer with its trunk cut off ca. 30′ up. Background includes: Warbling Vireo, Mountain Chickadee.”

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“The logic of the insult and the logic of scientific classification represent the two extreme poles of what a classification may be in the social world.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

Biden Administration

Debt ceiling trainwreck on the way:

To summarize:

1. If the GOP wins the House it can use the debt ceiling to force Dems to choose between an economic crash and massive program cuts

2. The GOP already did this in 2011, so we know they will

3. Democrats can unilaterally stop them, but are afraid of attack ads pic.twitter.com/YneSCmstBG

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) October 21, 2022

Why not kill off the debt ceiling in the lame duck session? More important than shoveling more money to Ukrainian black market arms dealers, surely.

Biden is correct:

BREAKING: President Biden SLAMS Kevin McCarthy for pledging to cut all aid to Ukraine- “These guys don’t get it; it’s a lot bigger than Ukraine. It’s Eastern Europe. It’s NATO. It’s real serious, serious consequential outcomes. They have no sense of American foreign policy.”

— Republicans against Trumpism (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 21, 2022

The consequential outcome is victory or defeat for The Blob (in my view, the real enemy). Now, how The Blob would react to defeat is an open question — presumably the defeat would need to be of “helicopters on the Embassy roof”-scale to avoid denial — but it’s a question that needs to be posed.

2022

* * *

“Peter Thiel’s venture capital-style political strategy yields low returns” [Financial Times]. “Thiel and his candidates — Blake Masters in Arizona and JD Vance in Ohio — have largely failed to muster support with the Republican establishment, raising questions about the Silicon Valley billionaire’s long-term relationship with the party’s gatekeepers, such as Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican. In interviews, Republican political strategists and longtime associates of the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor say his unconventional political giving is heavily influenced by his background as a venture capitalist. His strategy closely mirrors the industry from which he hails: make a few big, early and targeted bets on a couple of campaigns. Yet some of those people said they struggled to see the wisdom of this formula, especially in high-profile Senate races that are likely to determine which party effectively controls Washington for the next two years. ‘These [tech] guys make a lot of money and think they’re brilliant — because they are . . . But that doesn’t transfer to politics as seamlessly I think as they hope,’ said a Republican campaign consultant who, like other people who know Thiel, asked not to be named in order to speak about the billionaire more freely. A successful campaign was like a three-legged stool, the consultant said, with one leg being a good candidate; another being outside money; and the third being party support. ‘The kind of ‘donor-owner’ model really anticipates one [leg], which is their money,’ the consultant said. ‘They don’t think about candidate quality because they know them and they think they’re great guys and would be great senators, and that’s the only consideration.’”

“Thiel-Backed Candidates Struggle to Connect With Donors Not Named Peter Thiel” [Bloomberg]. “On the surface, Blake Masters and JD Vance would seem to have an important advantage as they head into the final weeks of their Senate races. Both have deep ties to Silicon Valley’s richest and wealthiest investors and years of experience raising huge sums of money to fund technology companies. Masters spent nearly a decade working closely with the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and co-wrote Thiel’s Zero to One, regarded by a generation of Silicon Valley billionaires as the definitive startup manual. Vance also worked for Thiel, and then later alongside AOL co-founder Steve Case, and Thiel was among the key backers of his venture capital fund, alongside former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen, who co-founded one of the Valley’s largest venture capital funds. But while the connections to Thiel paid off for both Vance and Masters in the primaries—each was buoyed by a $15 million super PAC contribution from their former boss—they haven’t been able to turn Thiel’s seed capital into sustained fundraising success.”

“Crypto Punk’d” [Slate]. “When Sam Bankman-Fried was asked during a podcast earlier this year how much money he might give to political candidates over upcoming election cycles, he offered an eye-popping ballpark number. The 30-year-old crypto titan guessed that, at a minimum, he would put down ‘north of $100 million,’ enough cash to make him one of the country’s most important donors. Pressed by the host on whether he might even spend up to $1 billion, he answered, ‘Yeah, I think that’s a decent thing to look at,’ adding that the number was ‘a sort of soft ceiling’ on his potential largesse. Even if that $1 billion figure sounded outlandishly unrealistic, the comments still seemed to promise a huge tailwind for largely Democratic candidates. After all, Bankman-Fried, who founded the global crypto exchange FTX and is currently worth about $15 billion according to Bloomberg, was one of Joe Biden’s top financial backers in 2020…. But now, as the general election nears, Democrats are starting to look like the victims of a political rug pull. With the party desperately low on cash in a number of House races, Politico reported last week that Bankman-Fried had ‘turned off the spigot’ and was walking back his promises to spend big in the future. ‘That was a dumb quote on my part,’ Bankman-Fried told the publication, regarding his suggestion that he might donate $1 billion. Elsewhere in the interview, he added that at ‘some point, when you’ve given your message to voters, there’s just not a whole lot more you can do.’ For Democratic groups facing a number of tightly contested races that could go either way, it must have felt like a twist of the knife.” • Whoops.

* * *

“‘A Category 2 or 3 Hurricane Headed Democrats’ Way’” (interview) [Dave Wasserman, New York Magazine]. “I think this is probably a Category 2 or 3 hurricane headed Democrats’ way, just not a Category 4 or 5…. We’re still in a similar place, where Republicans only need to win about one in every five tossups to win the majority, and Democrats would need to win more than four out of five. That’s a really tall order. It’s true that in most years, tossups break heavily in one direction or another. But I would also point out we have a bunch of races — 17 to be exact — in our Lean Democratic column, which means there are a lot of races teetering right on the edge, and we wouldn’t be shocked to see some of them fall to Republicans…. some of Democrats’ biggest struggles this year are in blue states where the threat to abortion access is not as potent a November voting issue as it is in midwestern battlegrounds, where there have been ferocious fights between Democratic governors and Republican legislatures over the issue.” • Well worth a read; Wasserman is a refreshingly sober analyst.

Handy chart:

I’m sorry everyone pic.twitter.com/WoICzo0oIK

— Kristen Soltis Anderson (@KSoltisAnderson) October 20, 2022

* * *

PA: “Dr. Oz made reputation as a surgeon, a fortune as a salesman” [Associated Press]. “Dr. Mehmet Oz rolled onstage inside of an inflatable orb, put on a hydrating face mask and proceeded to pitch a new line of skin care products to a convention of supplement distributors at Salt Lake City’s Vivint Arena in 2018. The crowd roared in applause. The celebrity surgeon’s appearance seemed like an extension of ‘The Dr. Oz Show’ on daytime TV. But his attendance was in service of the convention’s host, Usana Health Sciences, a Utah-based supplement manufacturer that has been investigated by federal authorities, sued by its own shareholders and accused of operating like a pyramid scheme. The company was also a top advertiser on Oz’s show, paying at least $50 million to be a ‘trusted partner and sponsor’ featured in regular segments that often blurred the line between medical advice and advertising, while also donating millions of dollars more to Oz’s charity, according to records reviewed by The Associated Press. Oz may have made his reputation as a surgeon. But he made a fortune as a salesman.” • To be fair, Usana, structured as a multilevel marketing firm, hasn’t been convicted of anything. But there is a strong aroma of regulatory action, fines, lawsuits, non-disclosure agreements, and so on. I assume Fetterman’s oppo people are going over this carefully.

Democrats en Déshabillé

Patient readers, it seems that people are actually reading the back-dated post! But I have not updated it, and there are many updates. So I will have to do that. –lambert

I have moved my standing remarks on the Democrat Party (“the Democrat Party is a rotting corpse that can’t bury itself”) to a separate, back-dated post, to which I will periodically add material, summarizing the addition here in a “live” Water Cooler. (Hopefully, some Bourdieu.) It turns out that defining the Democrat Party is, in fact, a hard problem. I do think the paragraph that follows is on point all the way back to 2016, if not before:

The Democrat Party is the political expression of the class power of PMC, their base (lucidly explained by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!). ; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. . (“PMC” modulo “class expatriates,” of course.) Second, all the working parts of the Party reinforce each other. Leave aside characterizing the relationships between elements of the Party (ka-ching, but not entirely) those elements comprise a network — a Flex Net? An iron octagon? — of funders, vendors, apparatchiks, electeds, NGOs, and miscellaneous mercenaries, with assets in the press and the intelligence community.

Note, of course, that the class power of the PMC both expresses and is limited by other classes; oligarchs and American gentry (see ‘industrial model’ of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Jie) and the working class spring to mind. Suck up, kick down.

* * *

Realignment and Legitimacy

“It’s been two years since 51 intelligence agents interfered with an election — they still won’t apologize” [New York Post]. “Exactly two years ago, on October 19, 2020, one of the dirtiest tricks in electoral history was played on the American people by 51 former intelligence officials, who used the false alarm of ‘Russian interference’ to stop Donald Trump winning a second term as president. Using the institutional weight of their former esteemed roles, they signed a dishonest letter to mislead voters 15 days before the election, claiming that material from Hunter Biden’s laptop published by the New York Post “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ In their expert opinion, ‘the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.’ … It was all a lie…. You would think since so many have been outed for their involvement in the (non-existent) weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence disaster that justified the Iraq war, not to mention secret prisons, torture, warrantless eavesdropping and the bulk collection of Americans’ data, they might have learned some humility.” • lol no. Nice to hear a conservative publication say this. Now how about a Presidential candidate?

“Foreign Funding and Public Trust in the Think Tank Sector” [Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft]. “Think tanks can serve as a crucial link between academia and the policy community, offering critically important research and ideas to solve the nation’s most pressing problems. But think tanks can also serve as de facto lobbyists and public relations mouthpieces for their funders, sometimes even doing work at the behest of foreign powers. As these conflicts of interest have become more apparent the public has expressed low levels of trust in think tanks, which has only been amplified by recent scandal — most notably the former President of Brookings facing allegations of working as an unregistered foreign agent.”

“Primary Occupation” [The Intercept]. “Two groups — Democratic Majority For Israel, or DMFI, and Mainstream Democrats PAC — began spending millions pummeling Turner on the airwaves. The two were effectively the same organization, operating out of the same office and employing the same consultants, though Mainstream Democrats claims a broader mission. Strategic and targeting decisions for both were made by pollster Mark Mellman, according to Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic operative and Silicon Valley executive who serves as the political adviser to LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, who funds the Mainstream Democrats PAC. DMFI has also funneled at least $500,000 to Mainstream Democrats PAC…. While DMFI is ostensibly organized around the politics of Israel, in practice, it has become a weapon wielded by the party’s centrist faction against its progressive wing. In fact, DMFI, Mainstream Democrats PAC, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have spent so much money that the question of Israel-Palestine now dominates Democratic primaries. Across the country, progressive candidates who a cycle earlier had been loudly vying for national attention with bold ideas to attract small donors were instead keeping their heads down, hoping to stay under the radar of DMFI and AIPAC.” • In no way could this be characterized as foreign interference, any more than Jeremy Corbyn’s defenestration could be. And of course, in the UK, the organs of state security were heavily involved, which couldn’t possibly happen here.

#COVID19

• Shot:

Chaser:

Qualifier:

This is pretty much where I am (including having lost patience with being nice, probably stupid, tactically). I don’t want to moralize (cf. John 7:8-9). But I’m not a nihilist, either. Unlike some:

I can understand why Wachter would feel this way. He is, after all, the man who chivvied his wife into attending a superspreading event, where they both got Covid (and his wife got Long Covid, IIRC). That wasn’t a “bad” choice. It was a bad choice, an obvious candidate for steps 4-10, not only for his wife, but for the public at large (and now, I suppose, I’m out here taking Wachter’s inventory. In my defense, he is presenting the actions driven by his method as a model for others to follow).

• ”Nominations for the Peste Magazine Public Health Disservice Awards, Hosted by Neoliberal John Snow” [Peste Magazine]. “We ask that you nominate individuals and groups who have, in public venues, sought to worsen public health in 2022.” • Perhaps readers have some ideas!

• There are many, many such loops, the entire PMC is made to function through a network of such loops:

It seems familiar, like:

Ironically, Tammany was the very political machines the progressives of the day were attacking. And here we are!

• More IDweek follies (“the joint annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA), the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS), and the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists (SIDP)):

Masking up with a poorly performing mask, and modeling unmasked behavior for the cameras… It’s really hard to outdo this. What do these infectious disease “scientists” think a mask is, anyhow? Some kinda scarlet letter?

• Holiday thoughts:

I think it still does….

• ”COVID Virus May Tunnel through Nanotubes from Nose to Brain” [Scientific American (semper loquitur)]. “How, in fact, does the pandemic virus that has so changed the world cross over into the brain after entering the respiratory system? An answer is important because neurological complaints are some of the most common in the constellation of symptoms called long COVID. The mystery centers around the fact that brain cells don’t display the receptors, or docking sites, that the virus uses to get into nasal and lung cells. SARS-CoV-2, though, may have come up with an ingenious work-around. It may completely do away with the molecular maneuverings needed to attach to and unlock a cell membrane. Instead it wields a blunt instrument in the form of nanotube “bridges”—cylinders constructed of the common protein actin that are no more than a few tens of nanometers in diameter. These tunneling nanotubes extend across cell-to-cell gaps to penetrate a neighbor and give viral particles a direct route into COVID-impervious tissue.” • A mild happy dance from lambert, who wrote on 8/12/2020: “All about “long Covid.” It’s those [family blogging] tentacles, I swear. Once you get bindweed in your garden….” Miild, because the Financial Times article to which I linked (“Coronavirus produces ‘sinister’ tentacles in infected cells“) seems to describe a different mechanism. Nevertheless — as with so much else — it’s the tentacles!

Transmission

Here is CDC’s interactive map by county set to community transmission. (This is the map CDC wants only hospitals to look at, not you.)

Lambert here: I have to say, I’m seeing more and more yellow and more blue, which continues to please. But is the pandemic “over”? Well….

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, October 18:

1.0%. This has been increasing steadily for the last few days.

Readers, please click through on this, if you have a minute. Since Walgreens did the right thing, let’s give this project some stats.

Wastewater

Wastewater data (CDC), October 17:

October 16:

Variants

Lambert here: It’s beyond frustrating how slow the variant data is. Does nobody in the public health establishment get a promotion for tracking variants? Are there no grants? Is there a single lab that does this work, and everybody gets the results from them? Additional sources from readers welcome [grinds teeth, bangs head on desk].

NEW Variant data, national (Walgreens), October 7:

Lambert here: BQ.1*, out of nowhere. So awesome.

Variant data, national (CDC), October 1 (Nowcast off):

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Total: 1,092,409 – 1,092,031 = 378 (378 * 365 = 137,970, which is today’s LivingWith™ number (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the LivingWith™ metric keeps chugging along like this, I may just have to decide this is what the powers-that-be consider “mission accomplished” for this particular tranche of death and disease.

It’s nice that for deaths I have a simple, daily chart that just keeps chugging along, unlike everything else CDC and the White House are screwing up or letting go dark, good job.

Groves of Academe

This is sad:

Healthcare

I’m sure there are many such stories:

And many such undergrounds, by diagnosis:

Zeitgeist Watch

No:

But this is not a new concept:

“Everyone Wants to Be a Hot, Anxious Girl on Twitter” [The Atlantic]. From the @itspureluv account: “Here’s a very popular tweet: ‘she’s a 10 but she cries on her birthday every year.’ … There’s a whole universe of big accounts that post content like this—little snippets of language with mass appeal. They often regurgitate the same messages…. I started noticing this phenomenon last year and followed about a dozen of these accounts out of a curiosity that felt kind of sick—they gave me a chill! They were so good at spitting out (or selecting and copying) sentences and fragments that hundreds of thousands of people related to, and they were doing it to no obvious end. They were shameless about retweeting themselves or tweeting several slightly different versions of a thought to see which one would hit biggest…. Other people on Twitter had noticed them as well and referred to them (usually with irritation) as “gradient accounts,” because many of their profile pictures are not of human faces or anything else, just color gradients…. The facelessness of the accounts is what gives them a strange, bordering-on-sinister allure. Who is posting all this stuff, and why?… ‘I want to set the record straight,’ Andrew Zaffina, the 25-year-old behind @itspureluv told me when I messaged him on Twitter and asked him to call me. “I’m so sick of people thinking we’re bots. I’m literally just a really relatable, chill, fun internet personality…. Zaffina uses his Twitter to drive attention to his other accounts and to his businesses—he is a spiritual medium, teaches online classes about spiritualism, and sells hoodies explaining different angel numbers. Relatable content is easy for him to come up with, he says, because he looks at Twitter all day, every day, and his brain has started to operate in the language of the site. And in 2022, the language of Twitter is the language of a hot, anxious girl.” • Hmm. I remember angels from a Jezebel article the other day. In any case, it’s sort of a reverse Turing test, isn’t it? Very odd. (I suppose, for example, you could characterize all the Ukronazi tweets on the Twitter as emanating from a “hot, anxious girl.” But I don’t think so. I do think the author has stumbled onto a phenomenon that’s deeper than they know. (I personally have never encountered a “gradient account.” But Twitter is a large and strange place.

Class Warfare

“The Federal Reserve Is Coming For Your Next Raise” [HuffPo]. “The central bank has been raising interest rates, making money more expensive to borrow, in a bid to slow down the whole economy so people don’t spend so much. That way, businesses will offer lower prices. Part of the solution involves what Fed Chair Jerome Powell calls ‘softening of labor market conditions.’ That softening, as Powell and his colleagues envision, will involve higher unemployment in the coming year. But Fed officials speak in abstractions, discussing supply and demand or the importance of righting imbalances between the two, while avoiding talk about the material consequences for workers. ‘The language that’s used to talk about monetary policy is almost designed to make it less clear what actually is at stake and what the real goals are,’ said J.W. Mason, an associate professor of economics at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Powell has acknowledged that there will be some ‘pain’ in the Fed’s campaign against inflation, maybe to the point of recession. But even workers who stay employed will feel the impact of increased interest rates. ‘The only way in which higher interest rates reduce inflation is by raising unemployment and thereby inducing workers to accept lower wages,’ Mason said.”

“Major U.S. freight railroads are powering right through labor concerns with profits intact… But the railroad’s $114 million charge in the quarter connected to tentative and ratified labor agreements is a reminder that the bigger concern remains labor relations” [Wall Street Journal]. “Two of the largest unions started to send ballots on their agreements to members this week.” • Neatly avoiding the midterms, a favor the Democrats will not return.

“Starbucks Corporate Workers Doubt Company Values in Internal Poll” [Bloomberg]. “Starbucks Corp. white-collar employees’ faith in the coffee chain’s ethics and social impact dropped to a historic low this year, according to an internal survey, with corporate staff voicing concern about the company’s response to the union campaign spreading through its cafes. In a survey of office-based US employees, only 52% said they ‘completely agree’ that Starbucks ‘behaves in an ethical and responsible manner,’ executives told staff at an Oct. 13 meeting, a video of which was viewed by Bloomberg News. Slightly fewer, 48%, said they completely agreed that they were ‘proud of the role Starbucks has in making a social impact.’” • I think those white collar workers need a union.

News of the Wired

“The process” [Labor Intensive Art]. The deck: “Sharing the tools, techniques, and stories of how I make my rugs.” And: “As a result, I’ve always shown the back side of my work as the front. It’s confused a lot of viewers over the years, so, just to clear the air: I am cheating. I am showing you the back.” • This is really neat! (Thinking back to Amfortas the Hippie’s examples of art that I, a hoity toity fine arts guy, would not consider “fine,” hence not art.) Lots and lots of tips!

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 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 Not Even Anonymized:

Not Even Anonymized writes: “Red maple last Autumn.”

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