2:00PM Water Cooler 11/26/2024 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Hen Tune of the Day

Northern Mockingbird, Antietam Nationwide Battlefield, Washington, Maryland, United States. “Male Northern Mockingbird singing from roadside Jap Purple Cedar. This birds plumage was brownish fairly than black — due to this fact the age will not be recognized for sure. Looks as if a fairly completed singing for a HY hen.” 12 minutes of mockingbird track! A great begin to the week. Seize a cup of espresso! HY = Hatching Yr.

“Study to tune into birdsong – respite and fascination await” [David Logue, Psyche (AL)]. “On a typical day, I’m within the tropical forest lengthy earlier than daybreak. I stand close to a tree with a microphone, ready for the hen that lives there to get up and sing. When it lastly does, I whisper ‘hen’ into the microphone. It’s a message to my future self that the hen on the recording is the one I meant to document. Because the daybreak refrain ramps up, I focus ever extra on the sound of that hen. I whisper ‘hen’ after every of its songs, like a monk reciting his mantra. All of my consideration is on the Adelaide’s warbler, singing from the highest of the tamarind tree; there may be none left for extraneous thought. I really feel like I belong within the current second, with no want to be or do anything. That feeling stays with me lengthy after I go away the sector website… Listening deeply to birdsong – that’s, listening mindfully, with open consideration – combines the advantages of mindfulness follow and people of listening to hen sounds. Right here’s the best way to get began.” • “A tree” and “the hen” implies that each tree has its hen. Can that be true?

In Case You May Miss…

1. “Pleasure” at Bluesky.
2. Trump crew drags toes on signing ethics and transparency agreements.
3. “Everyone seems to be taking their skim” (of Democrat campaigns).
4. Boeing 737 DHL aircraft crashes in Lithuania.

Politics

“So most of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are actually a rational administration of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

Trump Assassination Makes an attempt (Plural)

An instance of “pleasure” at Bluesky:

In the future, like a miracle. ☕️

[image or embed]

— 𝑀𝒶𝓎𝓇𝒶°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･🫧🦋 (@lepapillonblue.bsky.social) November 24, 2024 at 10:06 AM

The comments are adorable.

“Trump team barred from agencies amid legal standoff” [Politico]. “Advisers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reached out to the Health and Human Services Department multiple times after Donald Trump tapped him to lead the massive agency, hoping to jumpstart coordination before his takeover in late January. They were rebuffed. Kennedy’s inability to communicate with the agency he may soon manage, confirmed by an administration official with knowledge of the episodes granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations, is just one consequence of the president-elect’s continued foot-dragging on signing the standard trio of ethics and transparency agreements with the federal government — something his team pledged to do shortly after the election. … Both the Trump transition and the White House confirmed to POLITICO that negotiations on the agreements are still underway…. Watchdog groups, ethics experts and former government officials say the delay in coordination with federal agencies, which typically begins by mid-November, means the new administration won’t be up to speed on the state of the career workforce and budget and what headaches may await them when Trump takes the oath of office on Jan. 20. The failure thus far to sign the memorandums has also troubled Biden officials, who are particularly concerned about the potential national security implications. Without the agreements in place, Trump’s team can’t access any non-public government data — depriving it of a full view of efforts the White House and federal agencies are taking to safeguard against a range of threats.” • Part of me says that working only from public data would be a great idea, since otherwise you’re owned by the people who own the secrets.

“Trump Locks Bathroom Door So Elon Musk Can’t Follow Him In” [The Onion]. • The headline is better than the text. Nevertheless.

* * *

“Sexual-Misconduct Allegations Sank One Trump Nominee and Loom Over Kennedy” [Wall Street Journal]. “Kennedy, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, has been accused of sexual assault in the late 1990s by a woman who is willing to testify before the Senate. Kennedy has said he is ‘not a church boy.’” And: “‘It seemed like he thought I was somebody else or wasn’t paying attention,’ she wrote in her diary at the time, which she showed to the Journal. ‘Like he would come to every once in a while and snap out of it or I would move away.’ Later in the journal entry she speculated whether he was ‘testing’ her.” • So, contemporaneous evidence (though in full “Smiley’s People” mode, I would want to authenticate that diary, down to the ink and paper, given the money, the stakes, and the players involved).

Deploy the Blame Cannons!

“‘Everyone is taking their skim’: How Democratic consultants cashed in on Harris’ losing campaign” [Salon]. A must-read. “While most political strategists agree that some spending on paid media is necessary to win a campaign in 2024, Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told Salon that the Harris campaign’s spending profile is indicative of a structural issue with how the Democratic Party approaches paid media and political strategy. According to Shakir, Democratic strategists often see cutting a new 30-second ad as a sort of cure-all to a campaign’s problems and a way for campaigns to address a weakness without re-evaluating the message or stances they’ve taken. “There’s no room you walk into in which saying we should run an ad sounds like bad advice,” he said…. ‘The opportunity to make money off of the firm that has created 30-second ads and the person who has placed the ads is ripe for abuse because there are hundreds of millions of dollars going into it and everyone is taking their skim,’ Shakir said. ‘There’s a huge escalation every step of the way because of a skim at every level.’” Of the rentiers, by the rentiers, for the rentiers. More: “” Oh. More: “Reviewing the ad spending from the Harris campaign, it’s clear that the bulk of the money was funneled through firms run or owned by Democratic Party insiders…. Many of the FEC filings documenting payments from the Harris campaign to Media Buying and Analytics lump together media production and buying, meaning it’s impossible to distinguish how much the firm is being paid to create media for the campaign versus how much it is spending on air time and what sort of commission the firm is making on those ad buys.” And: “The core issue, as Shakir puts it, is that the party political operations are a closed loop with well-off consultants, politicians and donors all taking advice from each other with little outside input. ‘We have a working-class problem in the Democratic Party and when you have wealthy consultants talking to wealthy donors who are all living in an elite bubble, it can become detached from what messages will resonate with people who aren’t in the elite bubble.’” • Remember the Unity Reform Commission in 2016? Nothing has changed since this famous clip from Sanders supporter Nomiki Konst:

“This smells.” It did eight years ago, and then stench is worse today. The difference that nobody back then was willing to name names, which this time around Shakir names the consultants; read the article. And how good it is to see a Sanders supporter putting the boot in. More like this, please.

“Mega-donor: Democratic overspending disqualifies Harris ‘forever’” [The Hill]. “[Political mega-donor John Morgan] added that the reported $1.5 billion spent in four months is proof that Harris shouldn’t run again. ‘I think this disqualifies her forever,’ Morgan said. ‘If you can’t run a campaign, you can’t run America.’ ‘The same thing is going to follow Harris for the rest of her career. She cannot be trusted with the money, and the donors are going to be, like, ‘Where is this money?” he added.”

* * *

“One Election Takeaway: Voters Hate Temporary Safety Nets” [Nathan Tankus, Notes on the Crises]. “One theme I regularly took up was the fact that congress responded to the Coronavirus pandemic with a series of economic measures which were powerful, but time limited. These covered the gamut, but the most important were the expansions and extensions to unemployment insurance —the direct economic payments (‘checks’) and the extensions to Medicaid. These programs were important not because they provided ‘fiscal stimulus’, but because they underpinned households’ livelihoods at a difficult time and facilitated ‘social distancing’. My worry then was that having such large programs on a time limited basis created what I called ‘fiscal cliffication’. That means politics would increasingly revolve around large fights over what to do as big programs approached their expiration dates.” And: “[T]he pandemic greatly impacted the volatility of labor market income and, at the same time, the expansions of the social safety net — particularly unemployment insurance — greatly reduced the volatility of overall income. This is especially the case for the bottom 50% of households, who always have far more volatile incomes than the top 50% of households…. The reason that households’ financial wellbeing improved significantly between 2019 and 2021 despite such a dramatically regressive depression is purely because of the pandemic safety net.” Concluding: “The last minute switchover to Harris was likely too short to dramatically change messages, or gain credibility as a ‘change’ candidate in a ‘change’ election In fact, it’s that Harris didn’t even really try. This is understandable given the unusual circumstances, but it was electoral poison given that .” • This is a very interesting paper and well worth a read (coffee cup in hand). The thesis in the headline, though intuitively obvious, is not really proven by the paper, but that should be the easy part, considering the work that Tankus already did.

* * *

“Democrats should stop mocking Trump’s ground game and start learning from it” [Astra Taylor, Guardian]. “Trump succeeded, at least in part, because he is a man who will say anything and do anything to win. And of course he was boosted by conservative media – by Fox News talkshows, conspiratorial podcasts, manosphere influencers, deceptive deepfakes, targeted ads, and “First Buddy” Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X. But he also won because he had a strong ground game, even if it occasionally blundered and often looked different from what observers and experts expected from a get-out-the vote drive, including its use of ‘untraditional’ and ‘micro-targeted’ strategies aimed at reaching low- and mid-propensity voters who didn’t fit the usual Republican profile, including Latinos, Black men, and Asian and Arab Americans…. When Democrats insist that Trump had no ground game, they ignore the right wing’s investment and presence in spaces that are not purely electoral and that engage people year-round, including groups like Libre, along with the evangelical churches and student groups that increasingly function as social clubs recruiting people to the Maga cause. As Tiffany Dena Loftin details in the new issue of the Black leftist magazine Hammer & Hope, the right wing has spent decades systematically attacking and defunding progressive student unions and networks and building up their conservative counterparts.” And: “The Trump campaign built on this model, providing its base with community and purpose and organizing them, in turn, to mobilize others to turn out and vote. Before joining Trump’s team as campaign co-chair, Susie Wiles spent years working to lock down Florida for Republicans (she’s since been named Trump’s incoming chief of staff). Her tactics make people feel like an essential part of a group with a clear goal. Wiles piloted the ’10 for Trump’ Iowa caucus program, which gave a subset of 2,000 volunteers the title of ‘captain’, a limited-edition gold-embroidered hat, and the goal of motivating 10 people in their precincts to turn out.” • Susie Wiles is simply re-inventing the Precinct Captain, an age-old Democrat structure alert reader DCblogger often spoke of. And surprise, it works!

* * *

Please, no:

Unburdened by what came before pic.twitter.com/KKCnF22vIe

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) November 25, 2024

On what grounds would Kamala run once more?

The #Resistance

“That is the brand new progressive technique for warring with Trump” [Politico]. “Progressive Democrats wrestling with how to navigate a second Donald Trump presidency are settling on a new approach: Take his populist, working-class proposals at his word — or at least pretend to. If he succeeds, they can take some credit for bringing him to the table.” Lol. No they can’t. More: ” If he doesn’t, they can bash him for it. It’s a change in strategy, emerging in private conversations among some liberal elected officials and operatives, that comes after years of resisting Trump ended with him returning to the White House.” And finally: “Progressives are clear-eyed that with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, many, if not most, of Trump’s populist campaign promises will not happen — if he were ever serious about them to begin with. But they believe that his voters want him to follow through. They also lack any power in Congress and are desperate for even an outside chance to influence policy.” • Not with a bang but a whimper. Hey, I’m so old I remember when Trump was a fascist!

“People who wear ties”:

Bill Clinton: “in demonizing all establishments and all people who wear a tie like you and me to work and have a good education, we are breaking down the legitimacy of…people who actually know things that are very important for us today and very important for our continued… pic.twitter.com/0OfAJOa6yV

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) November 24, 2024

“Individuals who really know issues.”

Democrats en déshabillé

Centrist dipshits, as Atrios calls them:

Democratic pundits berated Bernie’s coalition as “Bernie Bros” and likewise informed folks they have been ingrates for not higher appreciating the economic system.

Now they’re fusing these 2 threads collectively, asserting that Bernie supporters are mentally in poor health & lazy & *selecting* to be poor. pic.twitter.com/6vpKWFOMIE

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) November 25, 2024

Syndemics

“I’m in earnest — I can’t equivocate — I can’t excuse — I can’t retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

Covid Assets, United States (Nationwide): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; consists of many counties; Wastewater Scan, consists of drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, however nationwide information). “An infection Management, Emergency Administration, Security, and Common Ideas” (particularly on hospitalization by metropolis).

Lambert right here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To replace any entry, do be happy to contact me on the handle given with the crops. Please put “COVID” within the topic line. Thanks!

Assets, United States (Native): 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 studies); 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).

Assets, Canada (Nationwide): Wastewater (Authorities of Canada).

Assets, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tricks to useful 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, sq. coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Keep secure on the market!

Search for the Helpers

Masks Venture:

It is a nice crowd sourcing mission to measure how properly varied N95s/KN95s and so on match all kinds of individuals.

The information will drive an app to assist folks choose the masks most certainly to offer them good particular person match and safety. https://t.co/WBSJrMlivv

— Gerard Hughes ( @[email protected] ) (@ghhughes) November 24, 2024

“I Ran Operation Warp Velocity. I’m Involved About Hen Flu” [David A. Kessler, New York Times]. “As Donald Trump will get able to return to the White Home on Jan. 20, he have to be ready to deal with one difficulty instantly: the chance that the spreading avian flu would possibly mutate to allow human-to-human transmission….. I’ve been monitoring the unfold of hen flu, also called H5N1, and discussing the state of affairs with colleagues across the nation. My concern is rising…. With out necessary testing, hen flu will proceed circulating at farms throughout the nation, which considerably will increase the chance that the virus mutates and evolves to permit a human-to-human transmission that might be onerous to cease…. Nobody is aware of what number of mutations might be required to set off human-to- human respiratory unfold. That might require many mutations and will by no means occur. However we may be simply two or three mutations away. If the virus begins to transmit effectively amongst people, it will likely be very tough to include, based on the Johns Hopkins evaluation, and ‘the probability of a pandemic may be very excessive.’ The incoming Trump administration must be ready.” • I hope uncooked milk stans don’t have inordinate affect….

Vaccines

Though Adams had a place within the final Trump Adminisration, sadly he doesn’t within the present one:

Listed here are the highest and backside nations based on life expectancy globally- together with their respective measles vaccination charges. U.S. can also be listed. Discover something? 🤔

Prime 4 nations by life expectancy:
1. Japan
– Life Expectancy: 84.5 years
– Measles Vaccination…

— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) November 25, 2024

Private Threat Evaluation

Admirable dedication to the bit:

He most likely should not have “caught COVID on objective.” There’s principally no lasting immunity from COVID both through an infection or vaccine, and the harm even a light case does to your physique can kill you down the highway. https://t.co/KZusgAngsu pic.twitter.com/QvksLdvMsq

— L., MA (@leslieleeiii) November 24, 2024

FAFO….

Elite Maleficence

I suppose the one answer is to place our belief within the billionaires, particularly the tech bros:

The shameless denial of science & dearth of care & consideration exhibited for folks in the course of the pandemic so far has ended the credibility of:

WHO

CDC

PHAC

HICPAC

APIC

SHEA

IPAC

PHO

PICNET

COCHRANE

NHE

CELL IPC

Public Well being

Medical group

Political leaders https://t.co/T6GQXyYk3p

— Barry Hunt ————————– Novavax 4 Me (@BarryHunt008) November 24, 2024

TABLE 1: Each day Covid Charts

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

Manufacturing: “United States Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The composite manufacturing index in the US Fifth District was unchanged… The reading showed that activity remained sluggish.”

Housing: “United States FHFA House Price Index” [Trading Economics]. “Housing Index in the United States decreased to 0.70 points in September from 427 points in August of 2024. Housing Index in the United States averaged 200.20 points from 1991 until 2024, reaching an all time high of 427.00 points in August of 2024 and a record low of 0.70 points in September of 2024” • What?

Manufacturing: “Chilling cockpit audio from doomed Boeing 737 DHL plane just before it crashed in fireball is revealed – along with recording of air traffic control scrambling to deal with aftermath: ‘We just got a crash’” [Daily Mail]. “The cause of the crash remains a mystery as Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre deployed experts to investigate… The incident follows reports in recent months that mysterious explosions had occurred at DHL warehouses in Leipzig and Birmingham amid fears of a Russian covert sabotage operation intended to explode aircraft flying in the West.” • Lithuania. Oh.

Zeitgeist Watch

“‘What many people really feel’: why ‘enshittification’ is Macquarie Dictionary’s phrase of the yr” [Guardian]. “But enshittification not only won their vote, it took out the people’s choice award. ‘This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment,’ the [dictionary] committee said. Doctorow himself is surprisingly optimistic about where this could all end up. Action on competition to prevent market dominance, regulation on things such as digital privacy, more power for users to decide how they use platforms, and tackling the exploitation of workers could reverse the process, he wrote, because ‘everyone has a stake in disenshittification.’ Big tech can’t be fixed, he argues, but maybe it can be destroyed. He adds a fourth stage to the tech platforms’ scatological journey from being good to users, to abusing them in favour of their customers, to abusing their customers to serve themselves. ‘Then they die,’ he wrote.” •

“Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too)” [Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic]. “You can get into a lot of trouble by assuming that rich people know what they’re doing. For example, might assume that ad-tech works – bypassing peoples’ critical faculties, reaching inside their minds and brainwashing them with Big Data insights, because if that’s not what’s happening, then why would rich people pour billions into those ads? You might assume that private equity looters make their investors rich, because otherwise, why would rich people hand over trillions for them to play with? The truth is, rich people are suckers like the rest of us. If anything, succeeding once or twice makes you an even bigger mark, with a sense of your own infallibility that inflates to fill the bubble your yes-men seal you inside of. But though rich people can fall for scams the same way you and I do, the way those scams play out is very different when the marks are wealthy. As Keynes had it, “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” When the marks are rich (or worse, super-rich), they can be played for much longer before they go bust, creating the appearance of solidity.” • Followed by a discussion of Keynes and the concept of “the bezzle.”

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 a friend of Bob or Janet: