By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I am sorry this is a more than a little light, initially; I had extended household matters to deal with. –lambert
Bird Song of the Day
Killdeer, Waterview Retention Pond & Wetlands, Fort Bend, Texas, United States. Wetlands noises!
In Case You Might Miss…
(1) Biden’s interview with Time.
(2) Carbon dioxide, viruses, and climate.
(3) Nabokov’s Pale Fire
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) (People vs. Trump): “Bragg’s thrill kill in Manhattan could prove short-lived on appeal” (The Hill). “The problem was not the jury, but the prosecutors and the judge…. Acting Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan was handpicked for this case rather than randomly selected. … A leading threshold issue will be the decision to allow Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to effectively try Trump for violations of federal law (campaign violations and tax)…. Judge Merchan allowed a torrent of immaterial and prejudicial evidence to be introduced into the trial by the prosecution… Merchan allowed the jury to find that the secondary offense was any of the three vaguely defined options. Even on the jury form, they did not have to specify which of the crimes were found. Under Merchan’s instruction, the jury could have split 4-4-4 on what occurred in the case. They could have seen a conspiracy to conceal a federal election violation, falsification of business records or taxation violations. We will never know. Worse yet, Trump will never know. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that the requirement of unanimity in criminal convictions is sacrosanct in our system. While there was unanimity that the business records were falsified to hide or further a second crime, there was no express finding of what that crime may have been. In some ways, Trump may have been fortunate by Merchan’s cavalier approach. Given that the jury convicted Trump across the board, they might have found all of three secondary crimes. The verdict form never asked for such specificity…. These are just a few of the appellate issues. There are other challenges, including but not limited to due process violations on the lack of specificity in the indictment, vagueness of the underlying state law and the lack of evidentiary foundation for key defenses like ‘the legitimate press function.’ They are the reason why many of us view this case is likely to be reversed in either the state or federal systems. None of that is likely to dampen the thrill in this kill in Manhattan. But if Biden wins the election before this conviction is overturned, history’s judgment will be deafening.” • Indeed.
Biden (D): “Read the Full Transcript of President Joe Biden’s Interview With TIME” (transcript) (Time). Starts off with a bang:
Thank you for doing this, Mr. President. We appreciate your time. Busy moment. I’ll dive right in. You’re traveling next week to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day to commemorate a turning point in America’s leadership with the free world. But the anniversary comes at a time when the US under your leadership has been unable to deter crises. First in Afghanistan, then Ukraine, Israel, and mounting tensions in the Far East. Is America still able to play the role of world power that it played in World War Two, and in the Cold War?
Biden: Yes, we’re planning even more. We are, we are the world power.
(Fap fap fap fap fap).
* * *
Realignment and Legitimacy
“How a Drop in Small-Dollar Donations Is Shaking Up Both Parties” (Notus). “In a stark reversal from recent political history, both parties have seen a significant decline this election cycle in the small-dollar contributions they harvest via text and email, largely from rank-and-file voters of modest means. Gone are the days when any candidate could expect to rake in small donations, according to Republican and Democratic digital strategists. Instead, only the smartest campaigns — and the perennial guests on Fox News — see the type of cash influx that was routine five years ago. ‘We have squeezed every last penny in a period of time when the pennies are harder to come by,’ said John Hall, a GOP digital strategist. For Republicans, the downturn started in the 2022 midterm election. But Democrats say they are also seeing small donations decrease this election cycle across a range of candidates and liberal organizations. ‘I’ve seen it. I’ve heard it,’ said Stephanie Schriock, former president of the Democratic group EMILYs List. ‘It’s definitely been a slowdown this election cycle on small-dollar gifts.’ The change has rocked fundraising for the Republican National Committee, which has seen small-dollar donations — generally seen as contributions of less than $200 — plummet from $39 million at this point in 2020 to $14 million so far this year. But smaller declines are taking place across the country. Strategists attribute the slowdown to a combination of inflation, widespread exhaustion over the state of politics and poor donor maintenance from both parties. The change is remaking budgets, forcing campaigns to refocus on wealthy donors and confront the possibility that they simply might not have as much cash to spend as they expected. ‘It’s been really frustrating because for a couple of cycles, clients were getting really used to large sums of money coming in from online,’ said Amanda Elliott, a GOP digital strategist. ‘It was great for a while, and now it’s been tapering off.’” • Heaven knows what horrific tactics Mothership Strategies will devise now….
“Why is a group of billionaires working to re-elect Trump?” (Robert Reich, Guardian). “Billionaire money is now gushing into the 2024 election. Just 50 families have already injected more than $600m into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of this is going to the Trump Republican party…. If we want to guard what’s left of our freedom, we must meet the anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from oligarchs like Musk and Thiel and neo-fascists like Trump.” • Sounds great. If only there were a party that was that “bold” (a tell).
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
“A new discovery about carbon dioxide is challenging decades-old ventilation doctrine” (STAT). “No sensor can monitor how many infectious aerosols are swirling around us in real time. But carbon dioxide, or CO2, can act as a convenient proxy. People exhale it when they breathe, and in spaces that aren’t well ventilated, the gas accumulates. High CO2 concentrations can provide a warning sign that a lot of the air you’re inhaling is coming out of other people’s respiratory tracts. For decades, that’s how aerosol scientists and ventilation engineers have mostly thought about CO2 — as a sort of indicator for the health of indoor environments. But over the last three years, researchers in the U.K. working with next-generation bioaerosol technologies have discovered that CO2 is more than a useful bystander. In fact, it plays a critical role in determining how long viruses can stay alive in the air: The more CO2 there is, the more virus-friendly the air becomes. It’s a revelation that is already transforming the way scientists study airborne pathogens. But on a planet where burning fossil fuels and other industrial activities inject 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, it could also have huge implications for human health. ‘,’ said Allen Haddrell, an environmental chemist at the University of Bristol Aerosol Research Center, who led the new work. ‘It’s fascinating, but it’s also horrifying.’” • Now that’s a syndemic and a half! (I posted the original of this study already, but the global implications had escaped me. Yikes!)
Maskstravaganza
Amazing how deep the propaganda and the social norming go:
I could never have imagined a time where people would be so freaked out by respiratory protection 😂.
Imagine people angered by hard hats, irate at steel toecap boots, irked by ear defenders, infuriated by gloves, enraged at goggles or incensed by overalls.
Strange times 😷 😁
— Pete 😷 #COVIDisAirborne (@PeteUK7) June 4, 2024
Immune Dysregulation
“Plane evacuated by specialist infectious diseases teams” (Metro UK). “Passengers were removed from a flight after it was forced to land due to ‘cases of suspected infectious diseases’ today.” • This does seem to keep happening. The disease was not mentioned, and an unruly — why? — passenger was also removed from the plane.
Censorship and Propaganda
“Effects of Post-COVID-19 Syndrome on Quality of Life Among Airline Crew” (Workplace Health Safety). From the Abstract: “The physical domain (quality of life (QoL)) was significantly higher in the cockpit crews than that in the cabin crews. Significant differences were found in psychological and overall QoL depending on years of continuous service. Social domain and environmental QoL were lower in those who had no symptoms after being diagnosed with COVID-19 than in those who were symptomatic. Among the participants, 4.2% had post-COVID-19 syndrome, indicating significant differences in the physical domain, depending on whether they exhibit post-COVID-19 syndrome. Conclusion: It is urgent to develop measures to increase the QoL of airline crews, investigate post-COVID-19 syndrome before returning to work, and develop strategies to manage it.” • Hmm.
Sequelae: Covid
Celebrity Watch
Surprise, outdoor spaces are so much safer:
Swifties kindly share their CO2 measures at @taylorswift13 shows. This allows us to make comparisons on the quality of indoor air renewal in several venues: Paris and Las Vegas (indoor arenas), Madrid (retractable roof stadium) and Sydney (open-air stadium). More venues to come. https://t.co/eU7m9UAS6O pic.twitter.com/8qF9si7Y9o
— LET’S AIR / NOUS AÉRONS (@nousaerons) June 4, 2024
How unfortunate that Swift doesn’t confine herself to them. Or sell Swift-branded respirators as merch. Why not?
Elite Maleficence
Amusingly, Ashish Jha clambers onto the aerosol bandwagon while nimbly rewriting history, a neat trick. Helpfully annotated:
(1) No, it comes from 60 years of bad public health ideology (“droplet dogma”), not just the CDC.
(2) No, it isn’t:
Flu spreads vis airborne aerosols predominantly. Stop with droplet misinformation @ashishkjha
We have an H5N1 flu pandemic on our doorstep. Enough. https://t.co/zYRUcvyUDb@kprather88 pic.twitter.com/DsJALpEsUP— Alex (@mocoband) June 4, 2024
(3) At last! I suppose on the bright side, Jha has given others license to say the same.
(4) “Once we knew” is doing a lot of work. The Newton Public Schools, where both Jha and (bless her heart) Walensky both sent their kids, was spending millions on ventilation in September 2020, while CDC was still fighting aerosol transmission tooth and nail. So what “we” “knew” in private was quite different from what “we” said in public.
(5) lol no.
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) Slight leveling out? (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 then 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) 4.3%; big jump. (Because there is data in “current view” tab, I think white states here have experienced “no change,” as opposed to have no data.)
(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
Employment Situation: “United States Job Quits” (Trading Economics). “The number of job quits in the US edged up to 3.5 million in April 2024 from an upwardly revised 3.4 million in April. The quits rate, a metric that measures voluntary job leavers as a proportion of total employment, was 2.2% for the sixth month in a row. The number of quits decreased in professional and business services (-131,000), but increased in other services (+67,000), durable goods manufacturing (+39,000), and state and local government education (+32,000).” • Attaboy PMC!
Manufacturing: “United States Factory Orders” (Trading Economics). “New orders for US manufactured goods rose by 0.7% from the previous month to $588.2 billion in April of 2024, the same as in March, and marginally above market expectations of a 0.6% increase.”
Supply Chain: “United States LMI Logistics Managers Index” (Trading Economics). “The Logistics Manager’s Index in the US jumped to 55.6 in May 2024, from a four-month low of 52.9 in April. With this reading, the index has now expanded in 9 of the last 10 months and for the last six months in a row. The biggest change was recorded for the transportation prices which soared to the highest level since June 2022 (57.8 vs 44.1), due to higher demand and as diesel fuel prices dropped again in the last week of May. Transportation prices are now slightly higher than transportation capacity (57.3 vs 61.4).
Manufacturing: “Jury finds Boeing stole technology from electric airplane startup Zunum” (Seattle Times). “A federal court jury in Seattle on Thursday ruled against Boeing in a lawsuit brought by failed electric airplane startup Zunum and awarded $81 million in damages — which the judge has the option to triple. Zunum alleged that Boeing, while ostensibly investing seed money to get the startup off the ground, stole Zunum’s technology and actively undermined its attempts to build a business. It accused Boeing of “a targeted and coordinated campaign” to gain access to its ‘business plan, market and technological analysis, and other trade secrets and proprietary information,’ then using that to develop its own hybrid-electric plane design. Zunum also accused Boeing of sabotaging its efforts to attract funding from aerospace suppliers Safran and United Technologies.” • Wowers, Boeing just can’t catch a break. I wonder if the executives who carried out this scheme earned big bonuses?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 40 Fear (previous close: 51 Neutral) (CNN). One week ago: 54 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jun 4 at 1:31:28 PM ET. Sudden swing to fear. Biden’s interview?
Book Nook
“Don’t be terrified of Pale Fire Nabokov’s masterpiece has a complex but huge heart” (Unherd). “When I first read (Pale Fire) I was an ignorant 24-year-old with a barely adequate undergraduate education. Because I had not majored in English (I was concerned about what kind of job I might get after graduating and an English degree did not look promising), I had not taken many literature courses. I had read very little poetry and almost no Shakespeare. I recognised the names of the poets mentioned in Pale Fire but I could not possibly register the more subtle meanings evoked by the adjacent language because I didn’t know their work in any depth or really at all. That didn’t matter. I loved Pale Fire. I could feel its intellectual power in the intense perceptual contrasts of its characters, in the descriptions of faces and objects and, for example, the swift evocation of an alternate world in John Shade’s image of himself reflected in the window glass, ‘above the grass’ with his furniture and an apple on a plate. I could feel it in the patterning I saw and sensed, viscerally, as if I was not only seeing a griffin landing before me but feeling the vibration of its wings come up through the ground into the soles of my feet.” • Me too, but my reaction was to the “meta”, the apparatus (indexes, notes, annotation, criticism) reather than to perception. But then I only 14….
Zeitgeist Watch
“Emputation”:
I’m leery of generalizations about “people” (or, using our indoor words, “at the population level”), at least for cultural/socio-political matters, even though I’m guilty of using them myself; I’m sure they’r not true for everybody. Nevertheless, I think the poster has put their finger on a real phenomenon. Readers, have you experienced similar?
Class Warfare
“Poets’ Odd Jobs” (Poets.org). “”There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either,” Robert Graves famously said. While there have certainly been numerous poets throughout history who have been “professional poets” (poets supported by patrons or sponsors in classical times or poets whose main income comes from their books, readings, etc., in more contemporary times), still larger is the number of poets who had surprising or unorthodox occupations outside of their literary careers. Read this list of famous poets and their odd or unique jobs….. At just sixteen, (Maya) Angelou made history with her first job: She was the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. When she first applied for the job, the office wouldn’t give her an application, but she protested until she got the job.” • Quite a list!
“Hacking Away at the Counter-culture” (Andrew Ross , Postmodern Culture (September 1990)). “What happens, then, in the process by which information, gathered up by data scavenging in the transactional sphere, is systematically converted into intelligence? A surplus value is created for use elsewhere. This surplus information value is more than is needed for public surveillance; it is often information, or intelligence, culled from consumer polling or statistical analysis of tran sactional behavior, that has no immediate use in the process of routine public surveillance. Indeed, it is this surplus, bureaucratic capital that is used for the purpose of forecasting social futures, and consequently applied to the task of managing the behavior of mass or aggregate units within those social futures. This surplus intelligence becomes the basis of a whole new industry of futures research which relies upon computer technology to simulate and forecast the shape, activity, and behavior of complex social systems. The result is a possible system of social management that far transcends the questions about surveillance that have been at the discursive center of the privacy debate.” • 1990!
“Seeing Like a Data Structure” (Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier, Belfer Center). “Engineers are transforming data about the world around us into data structures, at massive scale…. People are already working to exploit the data structures and algorithms that govern our world. Amazon drivers hang smartphones in trees to trick the system. Songwriters put their catchy choruses near the beginning to exploit Spotify’s algorithms. And podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as ‘engagement’ to the algorithms. These hacks are fundamentally about the breakdown of “the system.” (We’re not suggesting that there’s a single system that governs society but rather a mess of systems that interact and overlap in our lives and are more or less relevant in particular contexts.) Systems work according to rules, either ones made consciously by people or, increasingly, automatically determined by data structures and algorithms. But systems of rules are, by their nature, trying to create a map for a messy territory, and rules will always have loopholes that can be taken advantage of.” • Stimulating; worth a read, especially in conjunction with the snippet just above. Less systematic, I think, than it seems, although the play on James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is really clever.
“The Moral Economy of the Shire” (Nathan Goldwag). ” The implication in both books and movies is that most Hobbits spent their time either farming or enjoying leisure time, but this makes little sense, when one considers what we know about premodern agriculture and what little of life and culture in the Shire. This could describe a pure subsistence economy, based around producing just enough food to ensure survival, and some of the text seems to suggest that, but it’s clear that that can’t be true. The Shire has a well-developed economy, with mills, full-time craftsmen, inns, and the large-scale cultivation of luxury crops, despite having almost no foreign trade (Southfarthing pipe-weed being found as far away as Isengard is taken as proof of Saruman’s meddling) or industry. Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat, and there’s rarely much left over. How does this jibe with the leisurely lives of simple pleasure that our Hobbit heroes seem to enjoy? There’s actually a very obvious answer, which is that our protagonists aren’t typical Hobbits. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are all very clearly members of the landed gentry, the landowning class that controls most means of economic production and maintains social dominance over the Shire. This isn’t really extrapolation or interpretation, it’s more-or-less text, and I suspect the only reason it’s not spelled out is because Tolkien assumed any reader would understand that intuitively. Bilbo and Frodo are both gentlemen of leisure because the Baggins family is independently wealthy, and that wealth almost has to come from land ownership, because there isn’t enough industry or trade to sustain it. They can afford to go on adventures and study Elven poetry because they draw their income from tenant farmers renting their land. Merry and Pippin are from an even higher social tier; both are the heirs to powerful families that hold quasi-feudal offices (the Master of Buckland, for the Brandybucks, and the Thain, for the Tooks).” • Rarely stated so clearly!
News of the Wired
“New theory suggests time is an illusion created by quantum entanglement” (BGR). • Maybe some physics maven can disentangle this, because I sure can’t.
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