2:00PM Water Cooler 9/15/2022 | naked capitalism

Sep 16, 2022

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By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Red-throated Loon, Norðurland eystra, Iceland. Lots of birds, most very excited. I think ducks and gulls, besides the loons?

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“You can’t really dust for vomit.” Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap

Abortion

“The Perverse, Potentially Lethal Consequences of Lindsey Graham’s Federal Abortion Ban” [Slate]. “On Tuesday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham unveiled a bill that would impose a federal ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy with a few very narrow exceptions. The senator, reversing his prior position that abortion should be left to the states, now seeks to override blue states’ more liberal laws by establishing a nationwide cutoff. If enacted, Graham’s bill would criminalize abortion at the exact moment in pregnancy when dangerous fetal anomalies and maternal health problems come to light. It would force many patients with high-risk pregnancies and severe fetal defects to flee the United States in search of legal termination. It would condemn countless sexual assault victims, including children, to bear their rapist’s child. In short, Graham’s measure would spread the tragic, potentially deadly consequences of red state abortion bans to the entire country.” • Just when we all relaxed because abortion was going to be left to the states.

Biden Administration

The union mambers have to vote:

I know the railroads, the Administration, the press, and even the union leadership would like to make it about anything other than the workers, but the workers have the final say. For example, at John Deere:

And worker sentiment is not entirely favorable:

2022

OH: “China and the Lore of American Manufacturing” [The New Yorker]. Vance v. Ryan. Interesting local color. No notion whatever that Ohio’s deindustrialization might have a cause.

2024

“Why Buttigieg is sparking 2024 chatter” [The Hill]. • Because of the role he played in halting the railroad strike? No, silly. Because this is the stupidest timeline!

Democrats en Déshabillé

I have moved my standing remarks on the Democrat Party (“the Democrat Party is a rotting corpse that can’t bury itself”) to a separate, back-dated post, to which I will periodically add material, summarizing the addition here in a “live” Water Cooler. (Hopefully, some Bourdieu.) It turns out that defining the Democrat Party is, in fact, a hard problem. I do think the paragraph that follows is on point all the way back to 2016, if not before:

The Democrat Party is the political expression of the class power of PMC, their base (lucidly explained by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!). It follows that the Democrat Party is as “unreformable” as the PMC is unreformable; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. If the Democrat Party fails to govern, that’s because the PMC lacks the capability to govern. (“PMC” modulo “class expatriates,” of course.) Second, all the working parts of the Party reinforce each other. Leave aside characterizing the relationships between elements of the Party (ka-ching, but not entirely) those elements comprise a network — a Flex Net? An iron octagon? — of funders, vendors, apparatchiks, electeds, NGOs, and miscellaneous mercenaries, with assets in the press and the intelligence community.

Note, of course, that the class power of the PMC both expresses and is limited by other classes; oligarchs and American gentry (see ‘industrial model’ of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Jie) and the working class spring to mind. Suck up, kick down.

“The For-Profit D.C. Firm Staging America’s ‘Grassroots’ Movements” [The Tablet]. “Meet Arabella Advisors, the brainchild of ex-Clinton administration staffer Eric Kessler and the favorite tool of anonymous, billionaire donors on the progressive left. Since 2006, the Arabella hub has overseen a growing network of nonprofits—call them the “spokes”—that collected $2.4 billion in the 2019-20 election cycle, nearly twice as much as the Republican and Democratic national committees combined. These nonprofits in turn manage and supervise a vast array of “pop-up” groups—mainly political attack-dog websites, ad campaigns, and “spontaneous” demonstrations staffed by Arabella’s network of activist professionals who pose as members of independent activist organizations. These groups—such as Fix Our Senate, the Hub Project, and Floridians for a Fair Shake—typically emerge very suddenly in order to savage the political opposition on the policy or outrage of that particular day or week, then vanish just as quickly. The pop-ups do not file IRS disclosures or report their budgets, boards, or staff. In most cases, their connection to Arabella goes unreported. Many of them have offered sympathetic ordinary voters the opportunity to donate to whatever the “grassroots” cause happens to be, when in fact the money feeds back into Arabella’s enormous dark-money network. The relatively novel and innovative model of political activism perfected by Arabella, which was founded 2005, went more or less unnoticed until 2018, when I was reporting on the activist groups that attempted to prevent the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Among the sea of picket signs outside the court in July 2018 was the name of an unfamiliar group: Demand Justice. A search of the IRS nonprofit archives showed the name itself wasn’t listed. What did turn up in an online search was a downtown address on Connecticut Avenue shared by dozens of other organizations, including the Arabella “spoke” that appeared to be running Demand Justice, Sixteen Thirty Fund.” • Hmm. Seems almost like… a counter-intelligence operation.

Republican Funhouse

“Partisanship Over Policy at the Heritage Foundation” [The Dispatch]. “Interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees reveal how the think tank sidelines its scholars to score political points.” • Dear Lord. Somebody wants to change the brothel drapes from red velvet. What did these little children think the Heritage Foundation was for?

Realignment and Legitimacy

As usual on monopolies, Stoller nails it:

And:

“House members roll out bipartisan election bill aimed at preventing future coups” [The Hill]. “Both bills are aimed at preventing future coup attempts by clarifying the limited role of the vice president in counting Electoral College votes, raising the threshold for members of Congress to object to states’ presidential electors, beefing up laws around certifying elections for the rightful winner and promoting an orderly presidential transition.” • There’s something a little odd about outlawing a coup…..

“Posse Comitatus, Made Respectable” [John Ganz]. “I’ve come to two strong, but I feel unavoidable, conclusions about the Claremont Institute, the California-based right-wing think tank that supplies Trumpism with its intellectual cadre: One, that they are attempting the creation of a distinctly American form of fascism that studiously avoids references to European forebears, and two, they have become essentially a seditious conspiracy against the American people. I don’t use this rhetoric lightly; I realize it can sound a bit extreme, even fevered and crankish, but everything else reads like hedging or euphemism. Claremont has played an instigating and integral part in all of the most authoritarian and menacing elements of the Trump era: from the wild proposals to end birthright citizenship and abrogate the 14th Amendment, to the creation and dissemination of “Stop the Steal Propaganda,” to persistent outreach and legitimation of the extreme-right fringe, and then to providing the spurious legal architecture of the January 6 putsch attempt. But one of the Institute’s most concerning initiatives yet is their “Sheriff’s Fellowship,” a direct effort to bind law enforcement to their ideological program. Founded in 2021, the Sheriff’s Fellowship purpose is described in quite partisan but still mostly benign-sounding language on the Institute’s website as a high-minded course in political theory and history for the local police.” • What could go wrong…

blockquote>

#COVID19

• Maskstravaganza: Life’s little ironies:

This is funny. But, readers, is it true?

• Maskstravaganza: “Bill Hader Masks Up At Emmys And Fans Can’t Cover Up Their Approval” [HuffPo]. The deck: “‘We stan a safe king resisting peer pressure in the year 2022!’ one person tweeted about the “Barry” star.” • True, Hader is immuno-compromised. But I dare to hope some pushback from pro-maskers is having an effect.

• Maskstravaganza: “Experimental Assessment of Carbon Dioxide Content in Inhaled Air With or Without Face Masks in Healthy Children” [JAMA]. • RETRACTED (if you see anyone quoting it).

• A very interesting FOIA, albeit from Canada:

I believe we have alert reader antidlc is engaged in a similar effort; perhaps this will help.

“A Disturbing Preprint About Long COVID” [Mike the Mad Biologist]. “Even if we assume that most of the observed effect is either misreporting, ascertainment bias or background noise–and regarding the latter, do we really think fifteen percent of 25-34 year old adults suffer from long COVID like symptoms for some other reason?–it still would mean one to two percent of people suffer from fatigue, difficulty concentrating, or shortness of breath.” • Hmm.

If you missed it, here’s a post on my queasiness with CDC numbers, especially case count, which I (still) consider most important, despite what Walensky’s psychos at CDC who invented “community levels” think. But these are the numbers we have.

Case Count

Lambert here: I guess when Johns Hopkins takes these numbers away, I’m going to have to rethink this section.

Case count for the United States:

Cases are undercounted, one source saying by a factor of six, Gottlieb thinking we only pick up one in seven or eight.) Hence, I take the nominal case count and multiply it by six to approximate the real level of cases, and draw the DNC-blue “Biden Line” at that point. The previous count was ~73,400. Today, it’s ~70,000 and 70,000 * 6 = a Biden line at 420,000. (Remember these data points are weekly averages, so daily fluctuations are smoothed out.) The black “Fauci Line” is a counter to triumphalism, since it compares current levels to past crises. If you look at the Fauci line, you will see that despite the bleating and yammering about Covid being “over,” we have only just recently reached the (nominal) case level of November 1, 2021, and we are very far from that of July 1, 2021. And the real level is much worse.

Lambert here: The fall in case count looks impressive enough. What the Fauci Line shows, however, is that we have at last achieved the level of the initial peak, when New York was storing the bodies in refrigerator trucks. So the endzone celebrations are, to my mind, premature. Not that anyone will throw a flag. Of course, the real story is in the charts for California and the South. See below.

Regional case count for four weeks:

The South:

The South (minus Texas and Florida):

South Carolina seems to have halted processing until they can figure out what’s going on.

The West:

Wastewater

SITE DOWN Wastewater data (CDC), September 10:

For grins, September 9:

Lambert here: If the site doens’t load in five minutes, it’s not good for anything, is it?

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, September 9:

2.8%. Should be a leading indicator, if Walgreen’s customers are an adequate national proxy. Interesting who’s not (especially the grain belt) and who’s not.

Transmission

NOTE: I shall most certainly not be using the CDC’s new “Community Level” metric. Because CDC has combined a leading indicator (cases) with a lagging one (hospitalization) their new metric is a poor warning sign of a surge, and a poor way to assess personal risk. In addition, Covid is a disease you don’t want to get. Even if you are not hospitalized, you can suffer from Long Covid, vascular issues, and neurological issues. For these reasons, case counts — known to be underestimated, due to home test kits — deserve to stand alone as a number to be tracked, no matter how much the political operatives in CDC leadership would like to obfuscate it. That the “green map” (which Topol calls a “capitulation” and a “deception”) is still up and being taken seriously verges on the criminal. Use the community transmission immediately below.

Here is CDC’s interactive map by county set to community transmission. (This is the map CDC wants only hospitals to look at, not you.)

NOT UPDATED Rapid Riser data, by county (CDC), September 9:

I suppose that if case counts are indeed level, it’s likely there would be few rapid risers.

Previous Rapid Riser data:

NOT UPDATED Hospitalization data, by state (CDC), September 14:

Sea of green!

NOTE: Rapid Riser and Hospitalization data are updated Wednesdays and Fridays.

Variants

Lambert here: It’s beyond frustrating how slow the variant data is. I looked for more charts: California doesn’t to a BA.4/BA.5 breakdown. New York does but it, too, is on a molasses-like two-week cycle. Does nobody in the public health establishment get a promotion for tracking variants? Are there no grants? Is there a single lab that does this work, and everybody gets the results from them? Additional sources from readers welcome [grinds teeth, bangs head on desk].

Variant data, national (Walgreens), September 1:

Still no sign of BA.2.75 at Walgreens, despite its success in India and presence in Bay Area wastewater.

NOT UPDATED Variant data, national (CDC), August 20 (Nowcast off):

Still no sign of BA.2.75. I looked at all the regions, too.

BA.2.75 in Ontario and Quebec, Canada:

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Lambert here: It is interesting that the deaths per 100,000 curve — with its curious recent flattening — has more or less the same shape as the case curve, suggesting that a “Biden Curve” would have more or less the same shape as the case count curve, as opposed to the straight line I am drawing for the current level.

Total: 1,077,477 – 1,076,343 = 1134 (1134 * 365 = 413,910, which is today’s LivingWith™* number (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, thought they can talk themselves into anything. Fluctuates quite a bit, but even the low numbers are bad). I have added an anti-triumphalist black Fauci Line.

It’s nice that for deaths I have a simple, daily chart that just keeps chugging along, unlike everything else CDC and the White House are screwing up or letting go dark, good job.

Stats Watch

Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits decreased by 5 thousand to 213,000 in the week that ended September 10th, well below market expectations of 226,000. It was the lowest number of weekly jobless claims since the final week of May, highlighting a tight labor market and giving the Fed more space for aggressive interest rate hikes.”

Manufacturing: “United States Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index in the US fell to -9.9 in September of 2022 from 6.2 in August, missing market expectations of 2.8. The indicator for current activity returned to negative territory, the new orders index remained negative, and the shipments index also declined but remained positive.”

Manufacturing: “United States NY Empire State Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The New York Empire State Manufacturing Index climbed 30 points to -1.5 in August 2022, beating market expectations of -13. New orders increased, and shipments expanded significantly. Delivery times were steady while inventories picked up. Labor market indicators pointed to a modest increase in employment and no change in the average workweek.”

Manufacturing: “United States Industrial Production” [Trading Economics]. “Industrial Production in the United States increased 3.70 percent year-on-year in August of 2022. It is the smallest annual increase in seven months.”

The Bezzle:

Yeah, where are the web3 bros? It’s gone quiet suddenly.

The Bezzle: “‘Scary easy. Sketchy as hell.’: How startups are pushing Adderall on TikTok” [Vox]. • Ugh, but hard to get excited about TikTok after what Big Pharma and the school systems have alread done.

Tech: “Google’s ‘Rest and Vest’ Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says the CEO. It’s a Brilliant Idea” [Inc.]. “With looming recessions and inflationary pressures, there’s growing concern of slower growth and fiercer competition. At the conference, Pichai talked about TikTok and other entrants in the Chinese market. Things that they didn’t have to think about two years ago are suddenly becoming real issues for the big guns. There will be a number of solutions put in place to find efficiencies and weather this economic downtown. One of the approaches just may be a concerted effort in uncovering the resters-and-vesters and calling them out. Or getting rid of them altogether.” • If you think Google sucks now, just wait ’til the coders don’t get free lunches and massages any more.

The Bezzle:

And another:

My answer would have been: “Enough suckers.”

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 42 Fear (previous close: 41 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 41 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Sep 15 at 1:37 PM EDT.

Bible Corner

“Archaeologists Discover Red Pens Gospel Writers Used To Write Words Of Christ” [Babylon Bee]. “‘Bible scholars have been searching for this for centuries,’ said head archaeologist Dr. Max Macon. ‘We knew that if the New Testament record is trustworthy, then the red pens the gospel writers used to write the words of Christ had to be around here somewhere. And now we once again have the Bible’s account confirmed to be 100% reliable.’”

The 420

“How Weed Became the New OxyContin” [The Tablet]. “In the era of legalized weed, the drug you think of as ‘cannabis’ can hardly be called marijuana at all. The kinds of cannabis products that are sold online and at dispensaries contain no actual plant matter. They’re made by putting pulverized marijuana into a tube and running butane, propane, ethanol, or carbon dioxide through it, which separates the THC from the rest of the plant. The end product is a wax that can be 70% to 80% THC. That wax can then be put in a vacuum oven and further concentrated into oils that are as much as 95% or even 99% THC. Known as ‘dabs,’ this is what people put in their vape pens, and in states like California and Colorado it’s totally legal and easily available to children. ‘There are no caps on potency,’ said Stack. If you’re over 30 years old and you used to smoke weed when you were a teenager, the strongest you were smoking was probably 20% THC. Today, teenagers are ‘dabbing’ a product that’s three, four, or five times stronger, and are often doing so multiple times a day. At that level of potency, the impact of the drug on a user’s brain belongs to an entirely different category of risk than smoking a joint or taking a bong rip of even an intensively bred marijuana flower. It’s highly addictive, and over time, there’s a significant chance it can drive you insane.” • I’m not seeing any links in that last sentence, and the whole thing reads like “Reefer Madness” all over again:

[embedded content]

That said, it was predictable that corporatizing cannabis — certainly not the vision I had of “legalization,” back in the day — would bring ill effects. OxyContin level effects? I’d need to see more evidence. Readers, has anyone… heard about the effects of the new “products”?

Our Famously Free Press

Hmm:

The Gallery

The limit case of a queue:

Class Warfare

“Economic reflections on the Fall of Constantinople” [globalinequality]. “The reading of Eastern Mediterranean history is extremely instructive for a way in which we should think of trade. A benevolent approach, starting with Ricardo, always regarded trade as an activity freely undertaken by two parties with no extra-economic compulsion. No reader of history of the Eastern Roman Empire can share that view. Trade and military underpinning of it went hand-in-hand. This is at its most obvious not in large empires which anyway had to have armies but in trading city-states like Venice and Genoa. If you believe that trade is all about peace there would be no reason why these city-states had to maintain large naval fleets, fight battles, conquer islands, negotiate, under military threat, special rights to tariff-free imports and exports. Trade, debt and the army always moved together. No tourist to any Greek island today will fail to observe large Venetian and Genoan fortresses that could not have been built without money and labor but also without a naval presence that allowed the control or conquest of the islands in the first place.”

News of the Wired

“How to nurture a personal library” [Psyche]. “Many of us grow our collections on a book-by-book basis: a volume catches our interest in a bookstore, we buy and read it, stick it on a shelf, and repeat. Thinking like a librarian is about taking a step back to consider your collection as a whole, including what you add to it and why. A well-tended library is like a landscape, with its valley of crime novels, its peaks of reference texts, its shores of memoirs. Together, all those individual titles become part of something greater, form something with emergent properties, something totally unique to you.”

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 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: “This doesn’t look like quite like the Bird of Paradise I see all over California, including in my backyard, but that’s the name I’m going with. It’s in the greenhouse at the Sherman Library and Gardens in Newport Beach, California.”

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