By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Pine Siskin, Cathedral Rock Trailhead to Deep Lake, Kittitas, Washington, United States. “Natural song at 11:15am including mimicry of Northern Flicker call note.”
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
Capitol Seizure
“House Jan. 6 Committee deleted more than 100 encrypted files days before GOP took majority: sources” [FOX]. “The former House Select Committee on Jan. 6 deleted more than 100 encrypted files from its probe just days before Republicans took over the majority in the House of Representatives, Fox News Digital has learned…. Sources familiar with [House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee Chair Barry Loudermilk’s] investigation told Fox News Digital that, per House rules, the former select committee, which was chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., was required to turn over all documents from its investigation to the new, GOP-led panel, after Republicans secured the majority of the House of Representatives following the 2022 midterm elections…. Sources told Fox News Digital that Thompson had told Loudermilk that the select committee would turn over four terabytes of archived data, but that the new committee only received approximately two terabytes of data. Fox News Digital has learned that Loudermilk’s committee hired a digital forensics team to scrape hard drives to determine what information they were not given. The forensics team, according to sources familiar with their search, determined that 117 files were both deleted and encrypted. Sources said those files were deleted on Jan. 1, 2023 – just days before Thompson’s team was required to transfer the data to the new committee. Fox News Digital has learned the forensics team has recovered all 117 deleted and encrypted files. Now, Loudermilk is demanding answers and passwords to access the data.” • Hmm. Maybe these were more files about Chelsea’s wedding?
2024
Less than a year to go!
Trump (R): “Trump Defeats Haley in New Hampshire in March Toward Nomination” [Bloomberg]. “The Associated Press called the contest for Trump at 8 p.m. Tuesday. He was leading Haley by about 9.6 percentage points with about 50% of the vote counted. This is the second consecutive time the AP has made a quick call in favor of the Republican frontrunner. ‘If we do not win, I think our country is finished,’ Trump said in a victory speech, calling it a ‘bad night’ for Haley and predicting an easy win for his campaign in South Carolina, the next major contest in the GOP presidential primary…. Scores of voters came out to vote creating long lines at some polling places. The number has the potential to break the 322,000 predicted by the New Hampshire Secretary of State, which would be a record for a Republican presidential primary.” • I think “our country” er, trumps “our democracy” (and yes, “our” in both phrases).
Trump (R): “New Hampshire primary: Trump defeats Nikki Haley in second show of 2024 dominance” [Washington Examiner]. “The former president crushed his rivals by at least 30% during the Iowa caucuses. And the win in New Hampshire, the first time a Republican candidate has won both Iowa and New Hampshire in nearly 50 years, will likely see more of the GOP united behind Trump. The last time a Republican won both early states was Gerald Ford in 1976.”
Trump (R): “Losers, Quitters and the Only One Who Wins” [In These Times]. “Trump has so deeply put his personal stamp on U.S. politics that, even if he were removed from every ballot by a rigorous application of the 14th Amendment, or wound up in jail, or withdrew from the race betting that a pardon from his last remaining rival was a safer way to avoid imprisonment, he would still have won control of his party.” • Not only that, but he’s so gotten into the heads of liberal Democrats that they dream about him. The Man is pure “Achievement Unlocked”!
Trump (R): “NBC News exit poll: Majority of New Hampshire GOP voters say they are not part of the ‘MAGA’ movement” [NBC News]. “Nearly two-thirds (64%) of New Hampshire Republican primary voters said they do not consider themselves part of Trump’s ‘MAGA’ movement, according to early NBC News exit poll results. Among Trump voters, 59% said they consider themselves part of the MAGA movement, while 36% said they do not. Last week’s Iowa entrance poll found that 46% of GOP caucusgoers said they were part of the MAGA movement.”
Trump (R): “The 2024 Republican Choice” [Wall Street Journal]. “The better question in our view is whether Mr. Trump can deliver the policy and political victories that GOP voters want. There are many reasons to think he can’t. Start with the fact that Mr. Trump would be an immediate lame duck. He can’t serve more than one more term, and if he does win it will be narrowly with little political capital. He has never reached an approval rating above 50%, and his rolling seven-week RealClearPolitics average favorability is 41.5%. If there’s a strong third-party ticket, he might win with the smallest plurality since 1912. Mr. Trump would lack the most potent presidential power—the ability to persuade.” • This is why my take on Iowa was not that Trump would find it (all that) difficult to win, but that his (MAGA) base was too narrow to govern (a “funhouse mirror” version of the Democrat problem with its narrow base in the PMC (funny to think of both MAGA and the PMC as symbol manipulators in their own separate realms, but maybe there’s something to it)).
Trump (R): “Teflon Don shows his durability” [New York Post]. “Yet while Haley lives to fight Donald Trump another day, the road only gets harder from here. She had the endorsement of the Granite State’s popular governor, Republican Chris Sununu, and feasted on the votes of non-Republicans, advantages that will be almost impossible to repeat. Still, she did well enough to forestall the media ritual of an autopsy of why and where it all went wrong. The insiders who can be counted on to spill gossipy details about how the once-promising effort lost its way will be put on hold… Haley will get some of that second-guessing after losing in New Hampshire because this was a state widely seen as her last, best chance to stop Trump. And while she promises to soldier on, the results so far suggest that neither she, DeSantis, nor a half-dozen other Republicans who sought the nomination ever had a good chance of success. Instead, it appears to me more likely that Trump would have won no matter who challenged him, how much money they raised or how well they ran their campaigns.” And: “The upshot is that rather than searching for the whys of the other candidates’ defeats, we should instead come to grips with why Trump could prove to be unbeatable in the primaries and why he has a real chance of winning the White House a second time. The short answer is that we are witnessing a durable political movement unlike any seen in modern America. The part of the electorate that hates Trump really, really hates him, yet it is matched in size and intensity by those who see him as the last, best hope.” • The stans abide.
Haley (R): “Nikki Haley Says She’s Only Just Begun to Fight, But She Is Wrong” [Slate]. “Former South Carolina governor and Trump-era U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley started her presidential campaign last February as a second- or third-tier candidate. She was most similar to fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott—both relatively polished, TV-ready Republicans with solid resumés who seemed like they should run for president at some point even if there wasn’t much of a case for why they should be doing it now. Donald Trump was leading the race by a wide margin, and Haley (like Scott, who dropped out in November) made the decision not to attack him directly, hoping that voters would get tired of the ‘chaos’ around Trump on their own. This didn’t happen—chaos is a good thing, apparently, to voters who are mad enough. But Haley did better than the other non-Trump candidates, finding a niche at primary debates as the one person who would at least attempt to sell Republican policies (on abortion, in particular) to a general audience. She got a decent poll bump from this, and attracted financial support from conservatives in the business and finance donor community, most notably the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity organization. The state she was always set up to do the best in was New Hampshire, which has a local fetish for moderate politicians and rules which allow independent voters to swing on over to whichever primary they feel like voting in. (Centrist Democrats Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar did well there in 2020, although the contest was still won by a leftist from the adjacent state of Vermont.)…. And …. in this context, Haley lost—and by enough that the Associated Press called the race ten minutes after the last polls in the state closed at 8 p.m. ET. She can now look forward to voting in South Carolina, where she trails Trump by 30, and then to … a bunch of other states where Trump leads by more than that.” • Hence the immediate descent into the gutter, aided and eagerly abetted by the scorps (“press corps”).
DeSantis (R): “13 reasons why Ron DeSantis didn’t become the Republican nominee” [Semafor]. A good old-fashioned beating. This caught my eye: “Trump did real damage early. Trump, angered by the idea that a ‘disloyal’ DeSantis would ‘betray’ him after his early support and equally frustrated with the praise he was receiving within the Republican party, attacked the Florida governor early — and hard. For months, DeSantis sustained name-calling, rambling statements dismissing his accomplishments, sexual innuendo, and efforts to cut down his support before it even really began. And for a long time, DeSantis let the attacks land, opting not to reply while also remaining cagey about his 2024 intentions. With Trump weakened, the high-road approach may have looked like a sign of confidence to DeSantis. But it wasn’t long before at least some of Trump’s attacks started to chip at his armor. One memorable ad by Trump’s top allied super PAC combined a Daily Beast story about DeSantis eating pudding with his fingers with his history of support for changes to Social Security benefits in Congress. Combined with DeSantis’ own self-imposed wounds, the attacks began to eat away at one of the Florida governor’s biggest assets: His claim that he was more electable than Trump. It was, as Trump ally Michael Caputo put it at the time, “a textbook crib kill scenario.’” • We often forget that Trump can run, or delegate the running of, a very effective campaign. “Chaotic” a “textbook crib kill scenario” is not. (Which is why I remain puzzled that Trump’s challenge to the 2020 result was such a fiasco, legally and in every other way. Rudy? Really? Wouldn’t raising the issue of the 50+ intelligence officers signing onto a very well-publicized letter that the Hunter laptop was Russian disinformation have been a slam-dunk? “Not because it is easy, but because it is hard”… Not necessarily words to live by in politics.
DeSantis (R): “The Emasculation of Ron DeSantis by the Bully Donald Trump” [New York Time]. • Spare me. I’m so, so tired of the liberal trope that reduces disfavored or unpleasant all power relations to “bullying” (even in international relations, a ginormous category error; [you know who] is a “bully,” of course). It’s infantile. Is the world a daycare center, and liberals the finger-wagging schoolmarms? Wait, don’t answer that.
Biden (D): “Biden wins a New Hampshire write-in campaign” [Politico]. Handy chart:
On “unprocessed write-ins”: “When the Democratic ballots get counted, they will initially be counted as an ‘unprocessed write-in vote.’ As election night goes on, those ‘unprocessed’ ballots will be divided into two categories: ‘Biden write-ins’ and ‘other write-ins.’” • So “I hate them all” gets tossed into the “unprocessed write-in” bucket. 18.4% unprocessed write-ins is hardly a good sign for Biden.
Biden (D): “A Top Biden Aide Is Taking the Reins of His Re-election Campaign” [New York Times]. “President Biden has approved a shake-up of the leadership of his campaign, and will dispatch a top White House aide to take over functional control of his re-election effort just as former President Donald J. Trump appears to be seizing control of the Republican primary contest to oppose him. The aide, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who was the campaign manager for Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign and has served as a deputy chief of staff in the White House since he became president, will move to the Biden 2024 headquarters in Wilmington, Del., and direct the campaign’s efforts, according to five people familiar with the discussions.”
Biden (D): “Joe Biden is getting the opponent he wants. Is he wrong?” [Financial Times]. “Joe Biden’s campaign has been trying for months to convince anyone who will listen that the Republican primaries are a side show and that the American electorate needs to steel itself for another year of Trumpian chaos…. It may sound naive to appeal to morality in our age of bare-knuckle partisanship, but I’m going to risk it: holding up Trump as a threat to American democracy and then hoping he wins the Republican nomination is, even for those hardened pragmatists who populate the political classes, incredibly cynical. One either fears for the future of democracy, or one doesn’t. Fearing for the future of democracy — and then aspiring to use its potential demise as a campaign talking point reeks of hypocrisy. It also undermines the high ground team Biden wants to occupy.” Shut up. You’re talking to liberal Democrats, and they’re smarter than you. More: “National elections in the US are generally won in one of two ways: by energising your base so that they turn out in greater numbers than your opponent’s, or peeling off “swing” voters with your centrist appeal. Doing both is exceedingly difficult, because the hot-button issues that rile the base tend to turn off those in the centre. In post-Ronald Reagan political history, only Barack Obama in 2008 (winning nominally Republican states such as Florida, North Carolina and Ohio) and George HW Bush in 1988 (who won Democratic strongholds including California, Illinois and New Jersey) managed the feat. By elevating Trump as a threat to democratic norms, the Biden team appears to be aiming for option one — a turnout victory. That makes sense, given how energised Democrats flocked to the polls in 2020 to vote Trump out of office, and did the same in the 2022 midterms to register their anger about the loss of abortion rights. But 2024 is shaping up to be very different. Voters are not enthused by a rematch of two senior citizens. Turnout was exceedingly low in Iowa (though not in New Hampshire), and ratings for cable news coverage of the campaign have been disappointing.” • If only Kamala Harris were, like, eighteen years old. Chronologically, I mean.
Biden (D): “The Problems With Biden” [Harold Mayerson, The American Prospect]. “The presidential campaigns of leftists Cornel West and Jill Stein, the conspiracy-addled Robert Kennedy Jr., and, should No Labels anoint him, Joe Manchin, all effectively deny that a re-elected Donald Trump poses a fundamental threat to American democracy that isn’t remotely comparable to the presumed imperfections of a Biden second term. Yet resurrecting the “logic” that (mis)informed the communists of the early 1930s, they proclaim that Biden is every bit as insupportable as Trump. Should Trump win the election, historians will surely view them as just as dangerously deranged as the communists who focused their ire on social democrats rather than on Hitler.” • Hmm.
Phillips (D): “Phillips campaign rules out ‘No Labels’ run” [The Hill]. “Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), the long shot challenging President Biden for the White House, will not run as a candidate with No Labels. Phillips’s leading campaign adviser Jeff Weaver confirmed to The Hill that the congressman and insurgent candidate does not intend to seek a third-party or independent bid with the group, despite the candidate’s apparent flirtation with the idea over the weekend.” • Wait. Jeff Weaver? That Jeff Weaver?
“Opinion: Panicking over polls showing Donald Trump ahead of President Biden? Please stop” [Los Angeles Times]. “The trouble is that horse race numbers can drive almost any narrative that politicians or journalists find expedient regardless of whether it’s accurate; see the great ‘red wave’ media frenzy of the 2022 midterm elections, which of course proved to be the opposite of the truth. The mainstream media’s coverage of campaigns from such a standpoint is not only mistaken but also irresponsible. Such coverage is doing to politics what modern cooking shows have done to gastronomy: turning it into something like a sporting competition in which much of the substance that could serve the viewer — such as how to cook anything — is lost in covering dramatic culinary contests. Likewise, instead of helping voters make informed decisions based on the differences between candidates, pundits (including me) spend a great deal of time making the case for or against a candidate based not on their policy positions but on their polling position. What’s lost is what the different records, beliefs and policy positions of the candidates might mean for voters’ everyday lives.”
The Wizard of Kalorama™
“The Inside Story Of Barack Obama’s 2024 Campaign Calculations” [Talking Points Memo]. “Facing a country flirting with authoritarianism, Obama is particularly focused on Democrats’ need to maintain the support of young Americans — a key constituency that at this moment seems to be slipping from the party’s grasp. A spate of worrying recent polls for Democrats show the young voters that helped deliver Biden’s victory in 2020 expressing severe discontent with the president, citing reasons ranging from the war in Gaza, to the cost of living, and climate change. Some even contend that, given the choice between the two 2020 candidates, they will this time vote for Trump. While he stops short of any express criticism of Biden, who served as his vice president, or other Democrats, Obama is unmistakably of the opinion that they’ve got a lot of political work to do. ‘The truth is we don’t just need young people to vote in November,’ said the source, who requested anonymity to discuss Obama’s thinking. ‘We need them to work hard and stand in line and call their friends and throw everything they have at this. And so I think it’s fair to say that young people will be the ball game, as they were in 2020.’” • 2008’s 18-year-olds are now [alllow me to break out my calculator: 2024 – 2008 = 16] 34 years old, laden with debt, can’t get a mortgage, amd not everyone can be an influemcer. So let me know how today’s youth vote works out. Those that didn’t die suddenly, I mean.
#COVID19
“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
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!
Covid is Airborne
“Excessively farting passenger forces American Airlines flight to turn around” [New York Post]. • But infecting other passengers with an asymptomatic, airborne Level Three Biohazard because you won’t wear a mask? Go right ahead!
Maskstravaganza
“‘Full-Blown Crisis:’ Mass General Out Of Hospital Beds” [Patch]. “In addition to capacity problems in the hospitals, health officials attribute crowding to workforce shortages and seasonal upticks in viral infections.” • Ah, “seasonal upticks.” Good thing HICPAC‘s “Infection
ControlTeam,” in the person of HICPAC member Erica Shenoy, has implemented universal mandatory respirator use throughout the facility! Oh, wait…
Sequelae
“Young-onset dementia growing in Canada. What’s behind this rise?” [Global News]. • ‘Tis a mystery!
Elite Maleficence
“Disturbing Details Of Fauci’s Testimony Leave No Option But To Frogmarch Him Down Memory Lane” [The Federalist]. Quoting The Federalist makes my skin crawl, because I actually admire The Federalist Papers. But here we are: “According to lawmakers who were there, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and former chief medical adviser to the president — the man who once equated himself with science itself — offered a stunning concession that the six-foot social distancing edict ‘sort of just appeared’ out of nowhere and was likely not based on scientific data.” • I don’t love Fauci, but: This is so [family blogging] vacuous, even for the knuckle-draggers hip deep in the conservative fever swamp. As is well known to those who have done the reading, the six-foot figure is a corollary to droplet dogma: Since droplets are ballistic, they fall within a given radius when coughed out, a radius that, in the dogma, is six feet. Stay outside that radius, and you won’t be infected, or so goes the story. Hence, social distancing. But as readers know, the dominant mode of Covid transmission is not “hacking” out loogies; Covid transmits via aerosols from breathing, talking, shouting, singing. Summarizing, from this incredibly intricate forensic history of science in Wired:
According to the medical canon, nearly all respiratory infections transmit through coughs or sneezes: Whenever a sick person hacks, bacteria and viruses spray out like bullets from a gun, quickly falling and sticking to any surface within a blast radius of 3 to 6 feet. If these droplets alight on a nose or mouth (or on a hand that then touches the face), they can cause an infection.
So, when The Federalist writes “In the U.S., the six-foot rule officially emerged between early and mid-March” they’re simply wrong; the documents they do cite reproduce a rule that’s been “canon” for years. (The pseuds at the Federalist also write. ludicrously, of “the folklore of asymptomatic spread,” providing in one article a fascinating seamless transition from wrong and bad to outright eugenicist. The level of asymptomatic spread may be at issue, but a cursory search of the literature, as my connectivity fails, shows asymptomatic spread is not “folklore”: here, here, here, and here; meta-analysis; and in the vulgate here and here). It’s a good thing I started a little early, because now I need to go take a bath.)
TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated. No stars, no updates.
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] Even after a decline, we’re still higher than any of the surges under Trump.
[2] Steep decline in the Northeast!
[3] “As of May 11, genomic surveillance data will be reported biweekly, based on the availability of positive test specimens.” “Biweeekly: 1. occurring every two weeks. 2. occurring twice a week; semiweekly.” Looks like CDC has chosen sense #1. In essence, they’re telling us variants are nothing to worry about. Time will tell.
[4] “Charts and data provided by CDC, updates Wednesday by 8am. For the past year, using a rolling 52-week period.” So not the entire pandemic, FFS (the implicit message here being that Covid is “just like the flu,” which is why the seasonal “rolling 52-week period” is appropriate for bothMR SUBLIMINAL I hate these people so much. Notice also that this chart shows, at least for its time period, that Covid is not seasonal, even though CDC is trying to get us to believe that it is, presumably so they can piggyback on the existing institutional apparatus for injections. And of course, we’re not even getting into the quality of the wastewater sites that we have as a proxy for Covid infection overall.
[5] Decrease for the city aligns with wastewater data.
[6] “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] -0.7%. (It would be interesting to survey this population generally; these are people who, despite a tsunami of official propaganda and enormous peer pressure, went and got tested anyhow.)
[8] Lambert here: Percentage and absolute numbers down.
[9] Up, albeit in the rear view mirror.
Stats Watch
There are no official statistics of interest today.
Manufactuing: “Boeing, not Spirit, mis-installed piece that blew off Alaska MAX 9 jet, industry source says” [Dominic Gates. Seattle Times]. “The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line… Last week, an anonymous whistleblower — who appears to have access to Boeing’s manufacturing records of the work done assembling the specific Alaska Airlines jet that suffered the blowout — on an aviation website separately provided many additional details about how the door plug came to be removed and then mis-installed. ‘The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records,’ the whistleblower wrote. ‘It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.’ The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, ‘were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.’ the whistleblower stated. ‘Our own records reflect this.’ NTSB investigators already publicly raised the possibility that the bolts had not been installed. The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton. The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector. It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished. Boeing’s 737 production system is described as ‘a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.’” • Hoo boy. A little discussion needed on which pencil-necked MBA supplied the rationaliztion to the bonus-driven greedhead executives who who in management decided that the 737 airframe had not reached the end of its useful life.
Manufacturing: “‘We have a problem:’ Boeing 757 loses wheel while taxiing” [Reuters]. “The nose wheel of a Boeing 757 passenger jet operated by Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab popped off and rolled away as the plane was lining up for takeoff over the weekend from Atlanta’s international airport, according to the airline and regulators. A Federal Aviation Administration notice filed on Monday said the aircraft was lining up and waiting for takeoff at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport when the ‘nose wheel came off and rolled down the hill.’” • Down the hill, just like Boeing.
Manufacturing: “At United and Alaska airlines, frustration with Boeing’s manufacturing problems is boiling over” [Associated Press]. “The leaders of United Airlines and Alaska Airlines took turns Tuesday blasting Boeing over manufacturing problems that have led to the grounding of more than 140 of their planes, with United’s CEO saying his airline will consider alternatives to buying a future, larger version of the Boeing 737 Max…. Boeing said workers at its 737 factory would stop work on Thursday to hold a special session to focus on quality.” • Oh. A “special session.” Is that like a “sternly worded letter”?
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 77 Extreme Greed (previous close: 73 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 61 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jan 24 at 1:21:37 PM ET.
Zeitgeist Watch
“Polyamory: Lots of Sex, Even More Scheduling” [Wall Street Journal]. “It’s expensive: restaurants, hotels, cute outfits and even condoms add up. … Twenty-two percent of Americans say they have engaged in consensual non-monogamy, which is also sometimes called ethical non-monogamy, at some point in their life, according to a nationally representative study by researchers at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. That’s almost the same percentage—23%—as people living in the U.S. who have a bachelor’s degree as their highest degree.” • So, the Venn Diagram is a circle? And if know my PMC, it’s the scheduling that really floats their boats….
“Florida anger management specialist accused of fatally shooting homeless man” [NBC]. • Oh.
Class Warfare
“Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down in U.S. [Gallup]. Handy chart:
News of the Wired
“HP CEO evokes James Bond-style hack via ink cartridges” [Ars Technica]. The deck: “Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription.” • No.
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