2:00PM Water Cooler 5/31/2024 | naked capitalism

Less than a half a year to go!

RCP Poll Averages, May 24:

A mixed bag for Team Trump, this week with some Swing States (more here) Brownian-motioning themselves back toward him, including Pennsylvania. Not, however, Michigan, to which Trump paid a visit. Of course, it goes without saying that these are all state polls, therefore bad, and most of the results are within the margin of error. If will be interesting to see whether the verdict in Judge Merchan’s court affects the polling, and if so, how.

Trump (R) (Bragg/Merchan): “Queens man convicted” (Queens Daily Eagle). “Former Jamaica Estates resident Donald Trump was convicted by a Manhattan jury on Thursday of 34 counts of falsifying business records in an effort to cover up a sex scandal he feared would ruin his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election. The jury’s verdict, which came after only two days of deliberations, makes Trump the first president from Queens – or anywhere in the United States, for that matter – to become a felon. The conviction puts an end to the trial in Manhattan Criminal Court that began a month and a half ago, and brought hundreds of journalists and spectators of all stripes to the aging courthouse at 100 Centre Street. The trial was overseen by another man from the World’s Borough, Justice Juan Merchan, who was raised in Jackson Heights.” • Commentary:

Correct, the conviction of Trump is both legitimate and political retribution. When elite lawlessness is rampant, that’s what implementing the rule of law means. https://t.co/stlxslQDoR

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) May 31, 2024

A “criminogenic environment,” as Bill Black used to say.

Trump (R): “Prosecutors Got Trump — But They Contorted the Law” (Ellie Honig, New York Magazine). Worth reading carefully and in full. “Both of these things can be true at once: The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess. Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right…. The district attorney’s press office and its flaks often proclaim that falsification of business records charges are ‘commonplace‘…. But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever…. So, to inflate the charges up to the lowest-level felony (Class E, on a scale of Class A through E) — and to electroshock them back to life within the longer felony statute of limitations — the DA alleged that the falsification of business records was committed ‘with intent to commit another crime.’ Here, according to prosecutors, the ‘another crime’ is a New York State election-law violation, which in turn incorporates three separate ‘unlawful means’: federal campaign crimes, tax crimes, and falsification of still more documents. — and the judge declined(1) to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments. (This, folks, is what indictments are for.)” As I have been muttering for some time. More: “In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren’t just unusual. They’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else.” That would be called a bill of attainder(2). • Again, well worth a read. NOTES (1) Merchan and Bragg worked “in concert.” (2) I’ve been thinking hard about the case architecture and concluding that was expertly constructed to bring about this result; the concealment of the “object offense” in the charges, for example, confused coverage throughout and, as Honig points out, denied the defendant the chance to prepare a defense. I muttered today to Yves about “crafted,” though I don’t think I used that work. But an entire liberal Democrat flex-net, very much including Bragg and almost certainly Merchan, worked on this; they did well.

Trump (R): “Article 390 – NY Criminal Procedure Law, PRE-SENTENCE REPORTS” (The Law Firm of Andrew M. Stengel). “S 390.30 Scope of pre-sentence investigation and report…. 2. Physical and mental examinations. Whenever information is available with respect to the defendant’s physical and mental condition, the pre-sentence investigation must include the gathering of such information. In the case of a felony or a class A misdemeanor, or in any case where a person under the age of twenty-one is convicted of a crime, .” • Hmm. At least for the “New York State Health Service Corps“: “(c) Designated facility or agency shall mean a facility or institution designated by the Commissioner of Health, in consultation with the State Health Service Corps advisory committee that is: (1) operated by: …. (iii) the Department of Correctional Services…,” among other entities. It would be nice if the office of the practitioner doing the examination were not a patronage gift (i.e., controlled by the Democrat Party), but who can say?

Trump (R): Editors everywhere wrote exactly the same headline (with a few variations way lower in the thread):

Let’s do this. As I’ve said in the past, nothing makes a statement on important news close to the newspaper front page. Across America, almost every editor went with the simple fact, “Guilty.”
Let’s start with the biggest circulation. /1 pic.twitter.com/7i2Ab6daW4

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) May 31, 2024

The thread concludes:

That’s the end of my tour. Of course, I work exclusively on the future of news and entertainment and these are newspapers but always like to lay out the importance of our local markets, a plural press and how we record history across them. /20

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) May 31, 2024

“The importance of our local markets, a plural press”… without a shred of irony! Looks more like PMC schooling behavior to me.

* * *

Trump (R): “Trump campaign hauls in $35M, says it broke fundraising record after conviction” (Axios). “Former President Trump’s campaign said Friday that it had a $34.8 million windfall after he was convicted of 34 felonies in his New York hush money trial. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s campaign said the haul was ‘nearly double’ its previous single-day fundraising record on the WinRed platform for Republican donors.” • Woo hoo!

Syndemics

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

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

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, 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!

Censorship and Propaganda

I don’t know how Trump’s Surgeon General became one of the few sane voices around, but here we are:

Adams is also 100% correct on the bleach myth; I’m too time-pressed to look it up, but I checked the transcript, and Trump didn’t say it. Pelosi said he said it, and the press ran with it. When is Adams going to run for President so I can vote for him?

Infection

“Hawaii sees rise in COVID-19 positivity amid variant spread” (Star Advertiser). “The Hawaii Department of Health has tracked consecutive increases in COVID-19 positivity rates over the past five weeks as new variants take hold in the islands. Health officials today reported an average positivity rate of 10.5%, up from 8.5% the previous week. On May 1, the average positivity rate was at 4.3%. he FLiRT variants — named after the technical names for their mutations — are descendants of JN.1, which was dominant in the U.S. earlier this year. The mutations potentially make the variants more immune-evasive by improving their binding ability to cells, and could possibly drive a wave of new COVID cases this summer, according to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. State health officials, meanwhile, are warning that COVID activity is on the rise, based on DOH’s new respiratory disease activity dashboard.” • Fortunately, Hawaii doesn’t have a major international airport, with a lot of passangers travelling to and from… Oh, wait…

Elite Maleficence

They knew:

Recently I saw some Risk assessment documents from CDC on covid from Jan & Feb 2020. They are interesting to say the least.

So what is a Risk Assessment (RA)?

RA is a formal process of analyzing a situation & understanding the hazards of what are you dealing with.
1/x

— Dr James Morris (@James___Morris) May 30, 2024

Alert reader DD threw the entire RA form over the transom:

Does make you wonder where the CDC whistleblowers were. Is there a culture of feat at CDC? If so, it’s exceptional.

Lambert here: Patient readers, I’m going to have to rethink this beautifully formatted table. Biobot data is gone, CDC variant data functions, ER visits are dead, CDC stopped mandatory hospital data collection, New York Times death data has stopped. (Note that the two metrics the hospital-centric CDC cared about, hospitalization and deaths, have both gone dark). Ideally I would replace hospitalization and death data, but I’m not sure how. I might also expand the wastewater section to include (yech) Verily data, H5N1 if I can get it. Suggestions and sources welcome. UPDATE I replaced the Times death data with CDC data. Amusingly, the URL doesn’t include parameters to construct the tables; one must reconstruct then manually each time. Caltrops abound.

TABLE 1: Daily 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) (Biobot) Dead.

(2) (Biobot) Dead.

(3) (CDC Variants) FWIW, given that the model completely missed KP.2.

(4) (ER) This is the best I can do for now. At least data for the entire pandemic is presented.

(5) (Hospitalization: NY) Still going up, though fortunately no sign of geometric increase. The New York city area has form; in 2020, as the home of two international airports (JFK and EWR) it was an important entry point for the virus into the country (and from thence up the Hudson River valley, as the rich sought to escape, and around the country through air travel)

(6) (Hospitalization: CDC). This is the best I can do for now. Note the assumption that Covid is seasonal is built into the presentation. At least data for the entire pandemic is presented.

(7) (Walgreens) Going up.

(8) (Cleveland) Going up.

(9) (Travelers: Positivity) Flattening.

(10) (Travelers: Variants) KP.2 enters the chat, as does B.1.1.529.

(11) Deaths low, but positivity up.

(12) Deaths low, ED not up.

Stats Watch

Personal Income: “United States Personal Income” (Trading Economics). “US personal income rose by 0.3% from the previous month to $23.234 trillion in April of 2024, slowing from a 0.5% increase in the prior month, in line with market forecasts. Compensation of employees rose by 0.2%, a slight ease from the 0.6% gain the previous month, driven by slower increases in both wages and salaries (0.2% vs 0.6% in March) and supplements to wages and salaries (0.3% vs 0.4%).” • You say “ease” like that’s a good thing.

Manufacturing: “United States Chicago PMI” (Trading Economics). “The Chicago Business Barometer, also known as the Chicago PMI, dropped to 35.4 in May of 2024 from 37.9 in the prior month, sharply missing market forecasts that ranged from 41 to 42.”

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 42 Neutral (previous close: 45 Neutral) (CNN). One week ago: 51 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated May 31 at 1:32:37 PM ET.

News of the Wired

I am not feeling wired today.

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 DW:

DW writes: “A Star Magnolia (magnolia stellata) reflecting light from the kitchen window, and blooming about two weeks earlier than last year. The birds using the feeder are a tad nonplussed by the blossoms, but are quickly adjusting to them. Coos County, Oregon.” I’m not sure this challenging photo is a complete success, but it’s a neat idea and I include it in the hopes that others will be inspired to experiment with the technique.

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