2:00PM Water Cooler 8/28/2024 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Catbirds are in the Mimidae specie (!), like mockingbird and thrashers. Readers have said they like the mimicry, so hopefully MacCaulay Library has enough recordings to keep us all satisfied, at least for a time.

Black Catbird, Aguadas al Sureste de Cozumel, Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico. I think I’m hearing a frog in the background.

“As a Writer, You Can Never Collect Too Many Endings” (Literary Hub). “A few years ago, at dusk, I saw an owl swoop into a low branch and start poking its beak into a catbird’s nest. The catbirds inside made a terrible hissing-screeching-gargling sound—like a baby that’s been scalded—and after a moment the owl, for whatever reason, decided it was too much and flew off. After the danger passed, dusk shifted to dark. The night deepened. It struck me that the owl could come back at any moment, and that the catbirds, whose cheery songs I loved and had been listening to all afternoon, lived under perpetual threat. While I didn’t know what story from my life the moment might make a good ending for, I knew it was an ending because in the quiet of its resolution it kept gathering significance. It was factual and also metaphorical. I’ve been those screeching catbirds. I’ve been that owl.” • I didn’t search for this, I swear! It just randomly showed up in my RSS reader.

In Case You Might Miss…

1. The DNC was a superspreading event, and adopted a eugenicist masking policy
2. Boeing door plug debacle reveals shop floor fiasco
3. Vermeer’s tronie.

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 one hundred days to go!

Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:

Good news for Trump in that last week’s deterioration seems to have been slowed, although we shall have to see if Kamala gets a convention “bounce.” Remember, however, that all the fluctuations — in fact, all the leads — are within the margin of error. If you read most of the press, you’d think Kamala has this race in the bag. It’s not so. Do note, however, Trump’s deterioration in North Carolina: +2.4 last week to +0.9 this week, when OG pollster Sabato moved it to “toss-up” status from “lean Republican.” No wonder Trump held a rally there this week. NOTE With Kennedy, it would seem, about to drop out, I started tracking the national percentage as “Top Battlegrounds,” where Trump’s shrinking lead is +0.1 this week (as opposed to “5-Way RCP Average, where Harris led by +1.1 last week).

Clinton Legacy

“COVID-stricken Hillary Clinton drops out of Hamptons fundraiser, Bill Clinton steps in with Doug Emhoff: sources” (New York Post). “Hillary Clinton bowed out of a Hamptons fundraiser for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on Monday, we hear, after the former secretary of state came down with COVID-19…. The event was held at the home of mega art collectors Lisa and Richard Perry, who are known to house works by Frank Stella, Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd, among other blue-chip artists. Tickets at the highest tier went for a cool $100,000 each, and an invitation seen by Page Six said, ‘This is likely to be one of the last small events in the NY area before the election, so it is not to be missed.’” • “Today, Covid no longer controls our lives.” —Joe Biden, February 7, 2023.

Realignment and Legitimacy

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, KF, 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!

Elite Maleficence

The memo that started it all:

Here’s the memo that’s influencing the White House’s pandemic polices. It advises Biden to:

– Declare the crisis phase of COVID over and push for feeling and acting more normal

– Stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead

Source: https://t.co/KUiR8YtxYE #SOTU pic.twitter.com/FvkzxEa1kO

— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) March 1, 2022

Totally not a superspreader event:

“What is it like being in a room where four years ago this would have been a superspreader event?”

There is so much misinformation in this interview. The DNC convention is a superspreader and happening during the peak of one of the largest summer COVID surges of the pandemic. pic.twitter.com/PDE2Z44YzI

— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) August 23, 2024

Except it is a superspreader event, exactly like the Olympics (or a Taylor Swift Concert):

“COVID-19 also attended last week’s Democratic National Convention, infecting ‘too many’” (Chicago Sun-Times). The deck: “Health officials say they saw no sign of a COVID-19 uptick after the convention, while attendees grumble on social media about getting sick. One union official said he knows at least 14 people who tested positive since attending the convention.” The health officials “saw no sign” because the attendees flew home, bringing the virus with them. More: “How many people came down with COVID-19 after the convention? ‘Too many. I can’t even put a number on it,’ said Ronnie Reese, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s communications director…. Anthony Driver Jr., executive director of Service Employees International Union Illinois State Council, said he knows at least 14 people who tested positive for COVID-19 since attending the convention. . Many people diagnose themselves with at-home tests. With a virus incubation period of up to two weeks, many out-of-towners may just now be feeling symptoms.” • There no numbers and there won’t be because “Covid no longer controls our lives.” Except when it does:

Wait- didn’t they specifically say at the DNC that #Covid19 was no more? 🤔 https://t.co/05llvfY0Rv

— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) August 25, 2024

And:

The DNC and COVID: https://t.co/AU0IkKc9hk pic.twitter.com/0n4SdQmWIw

— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) August 25, 2024

And:

A friend who was at the DNC posted a positive test and said the surprise guest was, in fact, Covid.

— Read No Shortcuts (@JoshuaPHilll) August 24, 2024

Here are the views of a DNC attendee. The thread is a rich motherlode of PMC entitlement and denial, so I encourage you to click through, if you can. He keeps returning to the fray:

The DNC was in Chicago. The Uber driver, waiter, & worker is well aware of COVID risk. It’s an assumption to act as if they don’t & it’s irrational to place blame specifically on DNC attendees.

COVID doesn’t just spread at the DNC.

— Gabrien Gregory (@GabrienGregory) August 26, 2024

Classic! As if DNC attendee, who voluntarily attended the shindig in Chicago, is in the same class as the Uber Driver, who necessarily must ferry Gregory to and from the venue, to Starbucks, to brunch, because the working class must sell their labor to survive.

The venue was well-ventilated (if believe their literature) but it’s still a 3C’s space (closed, crowded, close-contact) and so a layered approach that included masks would have been the safest approach, had the heatlth of attendees and workers been the priority:

DNC mask policy:

The DNC adopted the Great Barrington Declaration’s eugenicist policy.

DNC masking policy vs. RNC masking policy:

RNC: Cloth, N95/KN95, surgical mask allowed to be used as PPE to avoid transmission of viral infection.

DNC: Mask allowed if necessary due to disability, may be asked to take off for security.

We are truly in the upside down. pic.twitter.com/x6pvSjWl2B

— Joaquín Beltrán Free Palestine (@joaquinlife) August 26, 2024

How is it that Democrats have a more vicious and reprehensible masking policy than Republicans?

Here is a DNC minder actually getting an attendee to remove their mask:

Watch the woman in the back holding the sign, masked. As they take her pic, I’m willing to bet she was told to take her mask off for a better pic. These are the things that make it on mainstream media, vs a pic of a woman protecting her health & sending phenomenal messaging. #DNC pic.twitter.com/iZ1loOXWma

— Karyn Bishof (@K_Bishof) August 26, 2024

Shortly after the convention, a Kamala operative posted this video to TikTok, from where it moved to Twitter. It shows a masked Kamala with cute children. Here is the Twitter version:

“I was waiting to talk to you!” pic.twitter.com/ZBpMOd6q0v

— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) August 26, 2024

Being of a suspicious nature, I looked for the provenance of the video. The Kamala operative did not give a date or time. However, alert reader marym exercised her mad detective skillz and found the source: A school in West Haven, CT, story published March 26, . But the vibes!

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

Lambert here: Since things are bad out on the West Coast, I went looking for California hospitalization data to compare with New York’s, and found this: “Due to changes in reporting requirements for hospitals, CDPH is no longer including hospitalization data on the CDPH dashboard. CDPH remains committed to monitoring the severe outcomes of COVID-19 and influenza, including the impact on hospitals. CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) will remain open to accept data, and CDC and CDPH strongly encourage all facilities to continue reporting.” Thanks, Mandy!

(6) (Hospitalization: CDC). The visualization suppresses what is, in percentage terms, a significant increase.

(7) (Walgreens) Fiddling and diddling.

(8) (Cleveland) Jumping.

(9) (Travelers: Positivity) Up. Those sh*theads at CDC have changed the chart so that it doesn’t even run back to 1/21/23, as it used to, but now starts 1/1/24. There’s also no way to adjust the time range. CDC really doesn’t want you to be able to take a historical view of the pandemic, or compare one surge to another. In an any case, that’s why the shape of the curve has changed.

(10) (Travelers: Variants) The new variant in China, XDV.1, is not showing up here.

(11) Deaths low, but positivity up.

(12) Deaths low, ED up.

Stats Watch

There are no officials statistics of interest today.

Manufacturing: “Inside Boeing’s factory lapses that led to the Alaska Air blowout” (Seattle Times (PI)). Deck is not, but should be: “Anatomy of a Clusterf*ck.” Do read in full for the horrid details; many of us, I am sure, have been on a similar shop floor. This caught my eye; when they first open the door plug (the one that fell off, later): ‘Filling in for the veteran mechanic on vacation, the Trainee was perhaps the least equipped to do this atypical job. He’d been at Boeing for about 17 months, his only previous jobs being at KFC and Taco Bell. ‘He’s just a young kid,’ the Door Master Lead said.”

Tech: “Tesla Drivers Say New Self-Driving Update Is Repeatedly Running Red Lights” (Futurism). “‘Thankfully I stopped it before it ran the light,’ wrote one Redditor user in a thread with several other Tesla drivers experiencing the same thing, ‘but hopefully Tesla is aware their software is at a very dangerous level right now.’… This is all happening as Musk pivots Tesla towards robotaxis, which have run into their own issues with crashes, glitches, and unpopularity with pedestrians. Will a software patch improve the red light issue? Perhaps. But there’s something that Musk can do that’s low cost and won’t hurt anybody: stop calling the Tesla auto assist software ‘Full Self-Driving’ until it really is.”

The Bezzle: “Super Micro: Fresh Evidence Of Accounting Manipulation, Sibling Self-Dealing And Sanctions Evasion At This AI High Flyer” (Hindenberg Research). “Super Micro Computer Inc. is a $35 billion server maker based in Silicon Valley, California that has ridden the wave of AI enthusiasm. Our 3-month investigation, which included interviews with former senior employees and industry experts as well as a review of litigation records, international corporate and customs records, found glaring accounting red flags, evidence of undisclosed related party transactions, sanctions and export control failures, and customer issues.” • The shorts have entered the AI chat. About time.

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 52 Neutral (previous close: 52 Neutral) (CNN). One week ago: 51 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 28 at 12:57:20 PM ET.

Gallery

“Masterful Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer rendered famous ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ during Golden Age” (FOX). “The painting depicts a woman, but it’s not a portrait, but rather a “tronie,” according to the Maurithshus museum, which is a painting of an imaginary figure.” • So, word of the day: tronie. Amazingly, this FOX story is straight-up informative, with no angle at all that I can see (at least not a FOX-level angle). Maybe I was ahead of the zeitgeist on this gen-u-wine, human-made art thing, and others have the same thirst.

News of the Wired

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 Carla:

Carla writes: “Perennial Hibiscus with dew on the leaves.” Lovely! (And I like the shadowy foreground with the bright background; the bright green reminds me of the bright summer afternoon lawns of my Midwestern childhood — regardless of my strictures upon lawns today!

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