2:00PM Water Cooler 5/20/2024 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Patient readers, this is a little truncated, for now, because I allowed my iPad, which is also my alarm clock, to run out of power, so I didn’t wake up on time. Nevertheless, there is already material of interest…. More soon! –lambert.

Bird Song of the Day

Eastern Meadowlark (Eastern), Rio Hondo; Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. “Courtship, display, or copulation.”

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!

RCP Poll Averages, May 10:

National results static, but most of the Swing States (more here) are incrementally, but steadily, moving Trump’s way. Pennsylvania leans more Trump this week than last. 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. Now, if either candidate starts breaking away in points, instead of tenths of a point…. NOTE I changed the notation: Up and down arrows for increases or decreases over last week, circles for no change. Red = Trump. Blue would be Biden if he were leading anywhere, but he isn’t.

* * *

Trump (R) (Bragg/Merchan): “Michael Cohen Cops to Stealing $30,000 From Trump” (Daily Beast). “The testimony from the Manhattan district attorney’s lead witness against Donald Trump took a dive Monday morning, when the ex-president’s former consigliere got cornered during cross-examination and forced to acknowledge that he overbilled the Trump Organization by $30,000. In a heated exchange, defense lawyer Todd Blanche flipped a switch and went back to his days as a federal prosecutor—grilling Cohen on the way he’d gotten away with a crime. ‘And you told multiple prosecutors in the district attorney’s office that story, right?’ Blanche asked. ‘Yes, sir,’ Cohen responded. ‘Did you ever have to plead guilty to larceny?’ Blanche continued. ‘No, sir.’ ‘Did you ever pay back the Trump Organization for the money you stole from them?’ ‘No, sir.’ In just a few minutes, Trump’s lead defense lawyer managed to show jurors that a trial about Trump’s alleged business fraud relies on the truthful testimony of a man who was engaged in fraud of his own.” • A convoluted story involving reimbursement (!) to an IT firm called Red Finch….

* * *

Trump (R): “Donald Trump slams teleprompter blunder in Minnesota speech plagued by issues” (Daily Express). “Donald Trump brutally mocked Joe Biden after a technical error at the start of his speech in Minnesota. The former President put his day off from his hush money trial to good use, attending son Barron’s high high school graduation in Florida before attending a Republican fundraiser. Trump headlined the state GOP’s annual Lincoln Reagan dinner in St. Paul, which coincides with the party’s state convention, in the traditionally Democratic state. After getting up on stage in Minnesota at 9pm EST, Trump confessed that there was a behind-the-scenes issue that could have caused chaos. ‘Before I got up the teleprompter fell down,’ he stated, before joking: ‘Well done fellas. Then they wanna knw why I don’t pay the bill.’ Trump then used the opportunity to mock Biden, who he will debate one-on-one next month, after his rival was led off stage at the White House on Monday after making ‘brief, incoherent marks’ following a speech on Monday. He continued: “Suppose that happened to Biden. He’d go like this – ‘bye’. He’d leave. ‘l’ll stay with you for an hour, we’ll have some fun.’… Later on, Trump pointed out that the stage kept tilting to the left, then shouted: ‘This place is falling apart. What a c—-y contractor.’ ‘This sucker is really tenuous. I’ve never had this before, that a podium is falling down.’” • Hmm. Anti-union subtext? (Nevertheless, hard to imagine another candidate riffing like that.) The “led off stage” part seems to be from Sky News; here’s the video, FWIW (I don’t think much).

Trump (R): “Trump agrees to third debate as NBC scrambles to catch up with rivals” (Semafor). “But on Friday, the former president announced on Truth Social that he had agreed to participate in an additional debate, this one hosted by NBC News and Spanish-language network Telemundo. The third proposed debate caught the Biden campaign by surprise, and was the result of behind-the-scenes discussions between the Trump campaign and NBC News without the Biden team’s participation.” • The League of Women Voters should give the Trump campaign a call. Trump could accept and put Biden in the position of turning them down!

* * *

Biden (D): “Biden Says He Was Still VP During COVID and Obama Sent Him to ‘Fix It’” (Daily Beast). “President Joe Biden erroneously claimed on Sunday he was still serving as vice president during the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking at a dinner for the NAACP in Detroit, Michigan, Biden went on a tangent proclaiming he was on the ground in the state to help out as the virus raged on, at the request of former President Barack Obama. ‘And when I was vice president, things were kind of bad during the pandemic,’ Biden said. ‘And what happened was, Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit, and help fix it.’ Well the poor mayor, he spent more time with me than he thought he was ever going to have to. God love you.’” • Wowers. Biden erases Omicron (although you’d never know it from CDC’s charts, see below).

Biden (D): “Biden Trips on Stage at Fallen Officer’s Event” (Newsweek). “President Joe Biden appeared to trip on stage on Wednesday while attending an event in Washington, D.C., to honor fallen officers. The video, taken from a distance, shows the president heading to the stage at the event commemorating National Peace Officers Memorial Day, which honors law enforcement officials who died in the line of duty, and slightly stumbling as he walks up one of the stairs. A photograph taken close to the stage as Biden walked up the stairs in front of the U.S. Capitol building appeared to show the stumble, as well.”

* * *
* * *

Pandemics

“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: Covid

Maskstravaganza

Vaccines

Testing and Tracking

“From Raw Data to Actionable Insights: Biobot’s Evolution of Public Data Sharing” (Biobot Analytics). “With the abundance of publicly available wastewater data and our shift to contextualized respiratory risk reports, we are sunsetting our public data visualization platform (www.biobot.io/data). This evolution represents Biobot’s commitment to maximizing the value of wastewater data. We believe that by adding context and expert analysis, we can empower individuals, communities, and public health officials to take proactive steps towards a healthier future.” • I understand the business decision, given CDC’s choice of Alphabet’s Verily as a preferred vendor, but it still hurts. Most unfortunate:

Check out this graphic Biobot added. It’s dead-on. They’re much better at normalizing data than the competition. My own analyses bear this out. This is why I have continued to use their data for year-over-year comparisons, and consequently forecasting.

CDC went with a… pic.twitter.com/fxTDPiPSi5

— Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA (@michael_hoerger) May 18, 2024

Biobot data was the only source of consistent data for the entire pandemic. Now we don’t have a baseline anymore (at least that’s what I’ll be looking for the in two alternatives below). Their chart was also very simple to use and easy to understand, unlike Verily’s abomination. Good work, CDC. The baseline:

Reminder that our baseline for “low” continues to rise. We have never returned to the “low” of 2020/2021.

Cases are already increasing, and our new “low” is on its way to 200,000 cases/day. pic.twitter.com/ULtmvJPHZt

— Covid Caution KP.2 / KP.3 Variant (@CovidCaution) May 18, 2024

Alternative visualizations (1):

Check out this graphic Biobot added. It’s dead-on. They’re much better at normalizing data than the competition. My own analyses bear this out. This is why I have continued to use their data for year-over-year comparisons, and consequently forecasting.

CDC went with a… pic.twitter.com/fxTDPiPSi5

— Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA (@michael_hoerger) May 18, 2024

Alternative visualizations (2):

My visualizations will not go offline, unlike Biobot. I will continue to update them regularly, post weekly update threads, and build out with as much as data as are available. https://t.co/YbZkdqzLva pic.twitter.com/FDD4cfC7Nx

— Sara Anne Willette ♿️🌈👩🏻‍💻𓅆 (@amethystarlight) May 19, 2024

Here is CDC’s miserably inadequate visualization:

Note that “All Results” begin in 2022, conveniently erasing Biden’s Omicron spike. Again, we have no baseline.

And CDC’s miserably inadequate map:

“High” levels compared to what? Again, we have no baseline, so it’s impossible to say. Also, Biobot had data down to the wasterwater plant (county) level, which was actually useful to people. If CDC does, this ain’t it.

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, New York hospitalization seems to be dead since 5/1 (No, it’s alive!), when CDC stopped mandatory hospital data collection, Walgreens functions, Cleveland Clinic functions, CDC traveler’s data functions, New York Times death data has stopped. (Note that the two metrics the hospital-centric CDC cared about, hospitalization and deaths, have both gone down). 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.

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) Slight upward movement, supported by yesterday’s Walgreen’s positivity.

(2) (Biobot) No backward revisons….

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

(4) (ER) CDC seems to have killed this off, since the link is broken, I think in favor of this thing. I will try to confirm. UPDATE Yes, leave it to CDC to kill a page, and then announce it was archived a day later. And heaven forfend CDC should explain where to go to get equivalent data, if any. I liked the ER data, because it seemed really hard to game.

(5) (Hospitalization: NY) Flat. The data is now updating again. I suppose to a tame epidemiologist it looks like “endemicity,” but to me it looks like another tranche of lethality.

(6) (Hospitalization: CDC) Still down. “Maps, charts, and data provided by CDC, updates weekly for the previous MMWR week (Sunday-Saturday) on Thursdays (Deaths, Emergency Department Visits, Test Positivity) and weekly the following Mondays (Hospitalizations) by 8 pm ET†”.

(7) (Walgreens) Slight uptick.

(8) (Cleveland) Leveling out.

(9) (Travelers: Posivitity) Up and down.

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

(11) Looks like the Times isn’t reporting death data any more? Maybe I need to go back to The Economist….

Stats Watch

There are not official statistics of interest today.

The Bezzle: “Craig Wright Lied About Creating Bitcoin And Faked Evidence, Judge Rules” (Wired). “A judge in the UK High Court has ruled that computer scientist Craig Wright lied ‘extensively and repeatedly,’ and committed forgery ‘on a grand scale’ in aid of a years-long quest to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. In a written judgment published on May 20, Justice James Mellor ruled that Wright forged reams of documents in service of his charade. ‘It is clear that Dr Wright engaged in the deliberate production of false documents to support false claims and use the Courts as a vehicle for fraud,’ he wrote. ‘I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.’ ‘Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person,’ Mellor added. ‘However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.’ The judgment—the culmination of a six-week trial held earlier in the year—marks the end of a civil lawsuit launched by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a nonprofit consortium of crypto companies, against Wright. The organization asked the court to declare that Wright is not the creator of Bitcoin, to prevent him from carrying forward multiple separate lawsuits against Bitcoin developers and other parties founded on the claim.” •

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 64 Greed (previous close: 64 Greed) (CNN). One week ago: 49 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated May 20 at 1:49:52 PM ET

Rapture Index: Closes unchanged (Rapture Ready). Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 188. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • Bird flu not a concern, apparently. And I hate even to go here, but the “Tribulation Temple” category is a mere 3. If Tribulation Temple = Third Temple = whatever temple it is that the Red Heifer loons want to build, then the Rapture Index made the right call, amazingly enough. It said: “Don’t worry about the Red Heifers.”

The Gallery

Not, I think, the typical Rousseau:

News of the Wired

“The myth of Medieval Small Beer” (Ian Visits). “There is a story repeated so often that it has become a truth — that medieval folk drank weak beer to avoid the perils of drinking water — but it’s a myth. A myth that I also for many years repeated unthinkingly, until I got thinking, about how accurate it is. The evidence is in fact, often in plain sight, but overlooked. The folk in olden times who could afford it would pay for good clean water. For example, the construction of the Great Conduit in 1237 carried spring water from Tyburn to the city, and on a larger scale, so did the New River, opened in 1613. Within the city, a waterwheel was once attached to London Bridge to pump Thames water around the city. So medieval folk not only drank water, but put in place the substantial infrastructure to supply it to the populace. There were also ‘masters of the conduits’ who looked after the pipes, and more importantly ensured those who used the water paid for what they took. The rich could have their own pipes, while most people bought buckets of water supplied by water carriers (cobs). Why do we think of people drinking small beer? Calories and hydration pure and simple. … If you are living at a time when most labour was manual and intensive, you needed to consume a lot of calories. A typical male working the fields in the summer months was burning an average of 3,000 calories per day. You also needed to replenish lost fluids from sweating. As it happens, small beer is really quite effective at delivering both calories and fluids. Small beer was also cheap, often being made from the third runnings of the mash from brewing ales, with the strong and common ales first, then the small beer last…. People didn’t drink small beer to stay healthy — they drank small beer to give them energy. As far as medieval man was concerned, there wasn’t anything wrong with plain water — small beer was, put simply, the Red Bull of its time.”

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 TH:

TH writes: “I love the symmetry of this huge agave and how it reminds me of an octopus. It is another image taken in the desert section of the Sherman Library and Gardens.”

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