By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Killdeer, Parc Michel-Chartrand, Longueuil, Quebec, Canada. I love the name “Charadrius vociferus.” Because it is!
In Case You Might Miss…
(1) Trump’s conviction continues to reverberate.
(2) Unions can defeat the right (in Europe).
(3) Happy Birthday Charlie Watts.
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
2024
Less than a half a year to go!
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): “Poll: 49% of Independents think Trump should drop out post-guilty verdict” (Axios). Headline is a bit less nuanced than reality: “54% of registered voters “strongly” or “somewhat” approve of the guilty verdict compared to 34% who “strongly or “somewhat” disapprove. 49% of Independents and 15% of Republicans said Trump should end his campaign because of the conviction. The polls found the race effectively tied nationally in a 1-on-1 with Biden at 45% and Trump at 44%. While they may agree with the guilty verdict, the poll found that more voters think Trump should get probation (49%) rather than go to prison (44%). 68% of registered voters said the punishment should be a fine. The poll also revealed some deep distrust of the criminal justice system. Three in four Republican voters said the verdict made them feel less confident in the system. And 77% of GOP voters, as well as 43% of independents, said they believed the conviction was driven by motivation to damage Trump’s political career.”
* * * Trump (R) (People v. Trump): “We Are Talking About the Manhattan Case Against Trump All Wrong” (New York Times). “the case is about preventing wealthy people from using their businesses to commit crimes and hide from accountability. Manhattan prosecutors have long considered it their province to ensure the integrity of the financial markets. As Robert Morgenthau, a former Manhattan district attorney, liked to say, ‘You cannot prosecute crime in the streets without prosecuting crime in the suites.’ Lawmakers in New York, the financial capital of the world, consider access to markets and industry in New York a privilege for businesspeople. It is a felony to abuse that privilege by doctoring records to commit or conceal crimes, even if the businessman never accomplishes the goal and even if the false records never see the light of day.” Isn’t it pretty to think so. How many financiers were prosecuted for accounting control fraud after the Great Financial Crash? More: “, but they can still conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that this was his intent.” • If Judge Merchan had wanted us to know, that is how he would have contructed the verdict sheet; with checkboxes for the object offenses. He didn’t. But if “our democracy” had been his first priority, he would have. Trump is running for office. Wouldn’t it make a difference to voters if his object offense was a Federal campaign finance violation, or a tax offense where the government made money?
Trump (R): “James Comey says a Trump incarceration is ‘obviously doable’” (The Hill). “Former FBI Director James Comey said Sunday he thinks imprisoning former President Trump is ‘obviously doable,’ despite some logistic hurdles. In an interview on ‘Inside with Jen Psaki’ on Sunday, Comey was asked about some of the public’s concerns about the logistical challenges that may arise if law enforcement institutions try to imprison Trump — who was convicted this past week on 34 felony counts of falsifying false business records to cover up a scheme to conceal potentially damaging information before the ‘They would just put him in a double wide, somewhere out near the fence, out in the grass. And he would eat there. He’d shower there, he’d exercise there, he’d be away, as Danya Perry said, from general population,’ Comey continued, citing the attorney of Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, who served time for related crimes. ‘But it’s obviously doable,’ Comey added. Trump will be sentenced on July 11 and is not detained until that time. After that point, Comey said he wasn’t sure whether Trump will have to wear an ankle bracelet or go to jail.”• Lovingly going over the detail; it’s almost like pr0n….
Trump (R) (People v. Trump): “Alvin Bragg Was Right, His Critics Were Wrong” (The American Prospect). “At New York, Jonathan Chait argued the case shouldn’t have been brought because only a political candidate could have committed it (which is true of all campaign finance laws, but I digress), saying it ‘is like getting Al Capone for paying off his mistress.’ At The Atlantic, David Frum made an incredulous-stare argument that it couldn’t possibly be a big enough crime to merit the first-ever prosecution of a president. At Slate, law professor Richard Hasen argued the case didn’t have legal merit. Yet it turned out that the Bragg case was solid. After just a couple days of deliberation, the jury delivered total victory: guilty on every one of 34 felony counts.” I think the lesson is that the Flex Net behind Bragg is very good at lawfare, and a combination the strategy of denying Trump his Sixth Amendment rights to defend himself by delaying revelation of the object crimes — the point of the two layer architecture that seemed so strange at the time — Merchan’s rulings, and (to be fair) excellent business records tracking by Bragg’s office enabled the prosecution to thread the needle to a conviction (and thanks to Merchan’s obfuscatory verdict sheet, we’ll never know what Trump was actually convicted of, or why). More: “And I suspect politics did play a role here. As legal analyst Michael Liroff pointed out on my Left Anchor podcast recently, it surely can’t be a coincidence that so many cases dating from such a wide span of dates all came to court at the same time.” • Oh.
Trump (R) (People v. Trump): Michael Tracey has been reading the transcripts, lucky guy:
Lack of discipline, Trump’s tragic flaw….
* * * Biden (D): “Some Democrats try to Biden-proof their 2024 campaigns” (Axios). “To some Democrats running in key congressional races, the 2024 election is about abortion rights, MAGA extremism, inflation, the border, local issues — anything except President Biden…. Democratic incumbents, candidates and operatives described to Axios a dynamic in which many in tight congressional races are maintaining their independence from Biden without publicly rejecting him…. The prospect of Biden visiting their districts is a sensitive topic for many Democratic candidates.” Then again: “Some Democrats are looking at the glass as half full — welcoming Biden to their districts and expressing hope his poll numbers improve.”
* * * Kennedy (I): Asking for my vote:
The Ukrainian military — with President Biden’s approval— is now firing US, British and German missiles onto civilian targets inside Russia including Beograd and other cities in an attempt to bring NATO into all-out war against Russia. The Washington Post is reporting that…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 1, 2024
Kennedy (I): “RFK Jr. Is Even Crazier Than You Might Think” (Mother Jones). A long and unexcerptable disquisition about Kennedy’s views on Event 201. “During his chat with Von, Kennedy remarked, “Any of your listeners who do not believe what I am saying can go and look up Event 201. It’s still on YouTube.” He was right about that. The video of Event 201 remains on YouTube—as does an entire website devoted to the exercise—and it in no way matches Kennedy’s description. Not even close.” The final paragraph: “Donald Trump has long pitched assorted conspiracy theories—most notably, the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Yet he does so as a carnival barker who will say whatever he needs to say whenever he needs to say it. Kennedy comes across as a true believer in the lunacy he peddles. And the depth of his battiness has not received the attention it warrants. Kennedy is not just a possible spoiler candidate; he is a crackpot candidate. The less that is covered, the greater his opportunity to spoil.” • I talked about Kennedy with a long-term fellow follower of politics, and they said (paraphrasing): “At least Kennedy is asking good questions.” He is. But the answers matter to (as do the methods Kennedy by implication recommends to arrive at those answers).
Republican Funhouse
TX: “Texas GOP divisions grow after fraught primaries” (The Hill). “In elections that saw unprecedented levels of outside spending, the party’s so-called business faction was left battered but still standing as some incumbents hung on, most notably Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan (R) and Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas). Their positions, however, are precarious. In Tuesday’s vote, conservative hard-liners in the state executive largely wiped the board of holdout members — largely those who had fought the rise of privatization in the state’s massive public school system, as well as a smaller group that had backed the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton (R). Tuesday’s results ‘were truly the most chaotic outcome,’ said Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. ‘You had most of the targeted Republicans losing, and yet the Speaker eking out a victory.’ As a result, the primaries have widened divisions within the state GOP as a whole — a body that has been widely criticized, Blank noted, for ‘prioritizing going after Republicans more than building out the state party.’ Now, he said, ‘it looks like the party is continuing in that direction.’”
TX: “Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office” (Texas Tribune). “Passed by delegates at the party’s biennial convention, the platform has traditionally been seen not as a definitive list of Republican stances, but a compromise document that represents the interests of the party’s various business, activist and social conservative factions. But in recent years — and amid a party civil war that’s pushed it further right — the platform has been increasingly used as a basis for censuring Republican officeholders who the party’s far right has attacked as insufficiently conservative, including Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, and U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzalez, R-San Antonio. … Perhaps the most consequential plank calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college. Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office. In 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott carried 235 counties, while Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried most of the urban, more populous counties and South Texas counties. Statewide, Abbott won 55% of the popular vote while O’Rourke carried 44%. However, some attorneys question whether such a proposal would be constitutional and conform with the Voting Rights Act because it would most likely limit the voting power of racial minorities, who are concentrated in a relatively small number of counties. (The party’s platform also reiterates its previous calls for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act).”
Democrats en Déshabillé
TX: “Houston Underdogs Beat Established Democrats in House, Senate Runoffs” (Texas Observer). “Both Lauren Ashley Simmons, who trounced four-term incumbent Shawn Thierry to win the House District 146 race by 29 percentage points, and Molly Cook, who narrowly beat House Representative Jarvis Johnson in the Senate District 15 race by 74 votes, drew upon the community they helped organize to turn out votes leading up to yesterday’s runoff election. It paid off. Both Simmons and Cook see their wins as blueprints for not only how progressive upstarts can beat established Democrats, but how Democrats can energize a broader and lethargic base to flip seats across the state…. Both seats are securely Democratic, guaranteeing Simmons and Cook a likely win in the general election.”
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Of Men and Myths” (James Howard Kunstler). “The mysterious cabal in power knows that they must ditch the old stumblebum pretending to run for president, and time is running out to get the dastardly deed done. They are staring down a month of dread days that lead to the proposed great debate between the major party candidates, which is doomed to play like a combo of the classic horror movie endings — the unmasking of the phantom with a wooden stake driven through his heart, with Donald Trump cast as Prof Van Helsing. Can our resourceful intel blob instead maybe find a way before that to make it look like the “president” passed away peacefully in his slumber? Or perhaps it would suffice to just leak the voice recording of his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur and allow people to compare what’s in it with the already-released printed transcript.” • Or perhaps New York’s penal system will decide that one particular felon is a pre-sentencing flight risk….
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!
Airborne Transmission
Yet another excellent reason to get a CO2 monitor:
Al Haddrell is awesome. ❤️👇
Watch this *brilliant* explainer of how higher CO2 levels aren’t just an indicator that there is more exhaled air in a room, but a boost to viral airborne longevity.
🔥🔥🧯🧯👇👇 https://t.co/owNVgaeEcb pic.twitter.com/n5srLbjtA5— tern (@1goodtern) June 3, 2024
475 if anyone’s asking.
Airborne Transmission: Covid
Hmm:
Have never seen this before: Flight from BKK to SFO on Philippine Airlines offering upgrades by purchasing empty seats adjacent to yours. pic.twitter.com/ngfSG2KUuw
— Justin Dunne (@justindunne) June 2, 2024
Dunno if this is Covid-consciousness or just an attempt to make cattle class less painful (for a price). Nevertheless….
Maskstravaganza
“Aerosol pandemic/Adjusters” (Appropdedia). • Tips to make baggy blues more protective.
Immune Dysregulation
“Syracuse University student diagnosed with tuberculosis” (Syracuse.com). “The student lives off-campus and has not been on-campus since their diagnosis, SU officials said Friday.” • So that’s alright then.
“United Airlines Forced to Remove Plane For Deep Cleaning After Up to 30 Passengers From Cruise Trip Fall Sick With Nausea and Vomiting” (Paddle Your Own Kanoe). “United Airlines has confirmed that it was forced to remove a plane from service for deep cleaning after up to 30 passengers fell sick during a four-hour flight from Vancouver, Canada (Hi, Bonnie!), to Houston on Friday afternoon. The sickened passengers were part of a larger group of 75 cruise line passengers who had just finished a trip in British Colombia and were returning to Texas. The cause of the sickness hasn’t yet been determined, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is tracking , including the Celebrity Summit which is sailing around Alaska and British Colombia.” • On the bright side, at least United is cleaning the plane, instead of forcing the passengers to do that.
Censorship and Propaganda
Transmission: H5N1
“Massive outbreak of Influenza A H5N1 in elephant seals at Peninsula Valdes, Argentina: increased evidence for mammal-to-mammal transmission” (preprint) (bioRxiv). From the Abstract: “In October 2023, following outbreaks in sea lions in Argentina, we recorded unprecedented mass mortality (~17,000 individuals) in southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) at Peninsula Valdes. …. (High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (HPAI)) H5N1 was confirmed in seals and terns. Moreover, genomic characterization showed viruses from pinnipeds and terns in Argentina form a distinct clade with marine mammal viruses from Peru, Chile and Brazil. These mammal-clade viruses share an identical set of mammalian adaptation mutations which are notably also found in the terns. . To our knowledge, this is the first multinational transmission of H5N1 viruses in mammals ever observed globally. The implication that could have global consequences for wildlife, humans, and/or livestock.” • Oh good.
More mammal-to-mammal transmission:
Them: but why is there such a high CFR among cats on dairy farms with H5N1 cases?
The cats: pic.twitter.com/grGTQ37aM7— Laurel Bristow, MSc (@Laurel_Bristow) June 1, 2024
Origins Debate
“Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points” (Alina Chan, New York Times). This is a horrid mobile-friendly page, and the top half won’t load for me, so if the five key points are there, they are invisible to me. From the text: “(A) laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.” That may be. It’s still the Watchmaker’s Hypothesis, beloved of anti-Evolution religionists (“Like a watch, the universe is so beautiful, complex, and functional that only a consciousness could have created it”). In any other scientific context, the Watchmaker’s Hypothesis would be rejected out of hand. As far as policy: “Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.” • I couldn’t agree with these policy recommendation more.
Policy
“We aren’t prepared for the next pandemic” (Understanding the Unseen). “It will probably start with a cluster of unusual symptoms. Some of the people with the disease will know each other, but won’t have been exposed to animals, suggesting the infection can spread between people. Then more cases will start appearing in other areas, maybe even in other countries. The next pandemic could take many forms, but a respiratory infection remains high on the list of probabilities. It could be a new flu virus, or a new coronavirus, or perhaps something else. It might emerge from a market, or a mink farm, or from another source. It may be years away, or months away – or it could be spreading now, yet to be detected. People often talk about ‘pandemic preparedness’, but increasingly I think this is an unhelpful term. Only in hindsight can we sort events into ‘pandemics’ or ‘outbreaks’ or ‘isolated cases’. In real-time, all these paths begin with a cluster of infections. So if we want to curb pandemics, we need to think about what the response to a small new outbreak will look like.” • Hopefully not like H5N1 looks now….
“World Health Assembly agreement reached on wide-ranging, decisive package of amendments to improve the International Health Regulations” (WHO). • It seems clear to me that there’s no other way to control pandemics than by governing governments, modifying what Mearsheimer calls anarchy between states; on the other hand, if the only option for implementation is WHO, it’s hard to imagine they’ll accomplish anything good, after their miserable performance on Covid. Not an ideal set of choices, here.
Celebrity Watch
Cognitive dysfunction on the tennis circuit:
Most people think cognitive dysfunction just means slowness, forgetfulness, and general thinking problems. But SARS-CoV-2 🧠damage can lead to loss of self-control and even violence. I’ve been ⚠️worried about this since the pandemic began, and if you look closely, you’ll see it…
— Dr. Sean Mullen (@drseanmullen) June 1, 2024
Elite Maleficence
Cochrane trashing its down brand:
They can’t even do hand sanitizer studies properly without having to retract them 😂😂
Cochrane has become such a joke pic.twitter.com/WMAv1mDxHl
— Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston’s translucent form (@jmcrookston) June 2, 2024
“In the pandemic, we were told to keep 6 feet apart. There’s no science to support that” (WaPo). “‘It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,’ Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the recommendation as ‘an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.’” • Fauci is lying in a particularly odd way. As readers know, social distancing as a non-pharmaceutical intervention, historically, is a consequence of droplet dogma (since the droplets were said to be driven by ballistics, the distance they would travel before falling could be calculated). Social distancing didn’t just “appear” as an “an empiric decision”; it was a consequence of sixty years of bad theory, deeply embedded in the public health establishment, as the rest of the article uncrisply shows (for some reason, the reporter pulled ventilation expert Joseph Allen out of his Rolodex, instead of aerosol scientists like Linsey Marr or Jose-Luis Jimenez).
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
Manufacturing: “United States ISM Manufacturing PMI” (Trading Economics). “The ISM Manufacturing PMI unexpectedly edged lower to 48.7 in May 2024 from 49.2 in April, below forecasts of 49.6. The reading showed another contraction for the manufacturing activity as demand was soft again, output was stable, and inputs stayed accommodative.”
The Bezzle: Well done!
That’s neat, a write-up I did of Equifax’s monopoly over income verification has turned into a class action antitrust suit by mortgage lenders against the credit bureau. https://t.co/Jdh5eNcB6L https://t.co/HKKXELMpI4 pic.twitter.com/sgXR3HvZAr
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) May 31, 2024
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 48 Neutral (previous close: 48 Neutral) (CNN). One week ago: 51 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jun 3 at 1:43:17 PM ET.
Rapture Index: Closes down one on Earthquakes. “The lack of activity has downgraded this category” (Rapture Ready). Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 188. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • Bird flu not a concern, apparently. Still flirting with the 189 ceiling….
The Conservatory
When I grow up, I want to be as cool as Charlie Watts:
Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones was born on this day in 1941. He was the engine of the band from 1963 until his death 3 years ago and is still missed. pic.twitter.com/rSAf4dna6D
— Eric Alper 🎧 (@ThatEricAlper) June 3, 2024
“Music as a Magical Language” (Ecosophia). This caught my eye: “The point to this exercise in unfamiliar music is to get past a certain pervasive bad habit in modern books on the occult dimensions of music: the notion that music—meaning our kind of music, post-eighteenth century Western music using an equally tempered scale—is a “universal language.” It’s not. When it was first introduced to people outside the Western countries, most of them thought it was as bizarre as you probably find gagaku. Many of them are used to it now, for the same reason that you can find someone who speaks English in a really remarkable range of countries all over the world, but there’s nothing inherently universal about our idiosyncratic Western music. Western music itself has gone through a whole series of convulsions in its history, driving and driven by sharp changes in what counted as music. The medieval church insisted that the only good music was theirs, and followed strict rules that forbade certain scales from being played—today’s major scale, the one that most people who aren’t musicians think of as the musical scale, was condemned as the modus lascivius or “lustful mode.” Come the Renaissance, the medieval modes got chopped up and replaced by seven planetary modes, in which the Ionian mode (our major scale) was quite sensibly assigned to Venus, and the Aeolian mode (our natural minor scale) was given to the Moon. The odd sad flavor of Appalachian folk music? That’s because the mountain folk preserved one of the others, the Mixolydian mode, which belongs to Saturn.” • Well worth a read. Just for grins, I went back to this Keith Richards interview to see if he said music is a universal language. He did not. He said: “Give me a tribe’s music, and I’ll tell you how they live, what they smell like, almost.” And: “There’s no lying when you’re playing music.” Interesting to juxtapose the two (and Richards, amazingly enough, is a scholar in his own way).
The Gallery
Silicon Valley has lost its mind over AI:
Adobe scolded for hosting ‘Ansel Adams-style’ images generated by AI https://t.co/U49gQcD1lY
— The Verge (@verge) June 3, 2024
Can’t anybody see how destructive to value — both senses — fakes like that are?
Zeitgeist Watch
“Scents and memories at the hospital” (Scope, Stanford Medicine). “For me (like Marcel Proust), involuntary memories are most triggered by scent. Olfaction can be considered an ancient sense — traced back to the chemoreceptors found on rudimentary bacteria. However, despite (or perhaps because of ) its antiquity, I find smell to be the most difficult sense to capture with words. Still, all of us can remember a moment in which a whiff transported us away to another time and place. In medicine, interesting smells are in no short supply. Every day, the first thing that I encounter when the hospital doors open is the omnipresent smell of antiseptic. To most people, this scent likely triggers involuntary memories of negative events — the illness of a loved one, for example. For me, the first wave of antiseptic reminds me of my previous hospital rotations and prompts me to be ready to work for my patients and for my team.” • I’m leaving out the “interesting” parts. I think there’s more here than the author realizes, but I’m not sure what….
Class Warfare
“Trade Unions Can Defeat Europe’s Far Right” (Project Syndicate). “Across Europe, from Ireland to Germany, trade unions act as a bulwark of democracy. They counter misinformation through digital-skills trainings, provide educational materials about the anti-social voting record of far-right parties, mobilize their members to vote, and organize demonstrations to rally the general public. The 2023 elections in Spain are a case in point. When Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called early elections after his Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party suffered heavy losses in local polls, the right-wing nationalist Vox party was polling at 15-16% – high enough to form a majority with the conservative Partido Popular. But Vox received only 12.4% of the vote, and Sánchez stayed in power, partly owing to a nationwide campaign launched by the major Spanish trade union federations Unión General de Trabajadores and Comisiones Obreras. They organized workplace assemblies and powerful digital campaigns to inform their members about Vox’s anti-worker policies and highlight the progressive government’s achievements: a significant increase in the minimum wage, a new labor code, and better protections for gig workers. If European leaders want to beat the far right, they need to abandon the failed neoliberal consensus that has disempowered workers.” • Apparently, the best way to defend nuestra democracia is not with constant ritual incantations, but with performance.
News of the Wired
I am not feeling wired today.
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