By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Northern Mockingbird, Fountain Creek–S Circle Dr to S Academy Blvd, El Paso, Colorado, United States. With barking dog. At least I think that’s not “mockery.”
In Case You Might Miss…
- Deploy the Blame Cannons!
- First head rolls at Boeing, breakup rumors.
- Angus Deaon on economics and economists.
- Sentinel intelligence.
Look for the Helpers
I don’t know if this is “helping” per se, but it’s certainly sweet:
Also, the creativity is going child → tech, not tech → child. As it should.
My email address is down by the plant; please send examples of there (“Helpers” in the subject line). In our increasingly desperate and fragile neoliberal society, everyday normal incidents and stories of “the communism of everyday life” are what I am looking for (and not, say, the Red Cross in Hawaii, or even the UNWRA in Gaza).
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
Trump Transition
“House Fast-Tracks Bill That Would Give Trump Power to Target Nonprofits” [Rolling Stone]. “The House is set to vote this week on a bill that would grant the Treasury Department authority to revoke tax-exempt status from any nonprofit it declares to be a ‘terrorist-supporting organization,’ giving the agency broad latitude to determine what that means. The legislation, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act (H.R. 9495), was originally drafted to prevent the IRS from issuing fines and tax penalties to Americans held hostage by international terrorist groups as well as citizens unjustly incarcerated abroad. By putting these two measures together under one bill, Republicans are trying to make it more difficult to oppose. ‘They attached it to a super popular bill that everyone likes because they want to make it hard for people to vote ‘no,” Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told The Intercept. ‘The reality is that if they really wanted the hostage thing to become law, they’d pass that by itself.’ Hamadanchy said that this bill is ‘about stifling dissent and to chill advocacy, because people are going to avoid certain things and take certain positions in order to avoid this designation.’ The bill would allow the Treasury secretary to notify targeted nonprofits that their tax-exempt status is at risk, giving the organization 90 days to appeal before losing its 501(c)(3) status. The vague language in the bill could be used against nonprofits that support Palestinian rights, reproductive rights, and environmental protections.” • When I finally discovered that NGOs were the entity responsible for placing migrants in, e.g., Springfield, OH, and that the process was entirely opaque, it became obvious to me that the NGOs were riding for a fall (just like the NGOs in, say, Georgia), being as they are a vast and unelected part — if blobby entities can be said to have parts — of the Democrat Party (where they also serve as an enormous sink to suck down energy and personnel from the (a) left, properly conceived. And it would sure be nice the Republicans didn’t act like Democrats and amp up the “terrorism” foofra. Just write and pass the bill on its own merits.
2024 Post Mortem
“Harris fundraising page says a portion of donations will be directed to recount effort” [USA Today]. “A portion of donations made to the Harris Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee authorized by the Harris campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties, will be directed towards a recount effort, according to its fundraising page. It doesn’t include additional details on when the recount effort will take place and who will lead the effort. Harris officially conceded the race to Trump in a speech she gave at Howard University the day after Election Day, saying that the nation must accept the election results.” • So was Kamala lying?
“Former Harris aide calls for Biden to resign so she can be president briefly” [The Hill]. Oh. And: “‘We are out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fueling MAGA,’ Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Sunday in a thread on the social platform X. ‘We refuse to pick big fights. Our tent is too small.’” • So, has Murphy challenged Schumer yet? No?
Deploy the Blame Cannons!
“How Francis Fukuyama and “The Big Lebowski” Explain Trump’s Victory” [David Masciotra, Washington Monthly]. “The voice that speaks for America belongs to one of the nihilists who threatens to castrate The Dude, the Jeff Bridges character in The Big Lebowsk [(ITBL)]. After confronting the Dude who is taking a bath, the three nihilists inform him that if he doesn’t pay the money that they believe they’re owed, they ‘will come back and cut off your Johnson.’ ‘You think we are kidding,’ one of the men adds, ‘We are nihilists. We believe in nothing.’ Donald Trump’s resounding victory over Kamala Harris is the triumph of nihilism. It confronts those who still honor liberal democracy, multiculturalism, pluralism, and a ‘nation of laws’ with the grim possibility that many Americans believe in nothing.” • To quote Walter Sobchak from TBL: “Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” Or, to update for the Biden Administration: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Liberal Democrats, Dude, at least genocide is an ethos.” Later on, Masciotra yammers on about a Trumpian Death Cult. Well, if Gazan genocide, the Ukrainian meatgrinder, and 700,000+ deaths from Covid don’t look like a Death Cult to Masciotra, I don’t know how to help him,
“What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?” [Timothy Snyder, The New Yorker]. Snyder is a Central and Eastern European professor at Yale. You’ve got to read this because it’s, well, unhinged (and if you want to read a historian, read Richard Evans, and not this fool). I can’t even summarize it, it’s so diffuse and poorly reasoned. Sample sentence: “When the Soviets called their enemies ‘fascists,’ they turned the word into a meaningless insult.” • So wait. Last I checked, Stalin was a “Soviet.” Is Snyder really saying that when Stalin called Hitler a “fascist” — on the way to winning World War II, I might add — that was a “meaningless insult”?
“Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” [Michael Tomasky, The New Republic]. “I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is ‘the envy of the world.’ But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless.” • Commentary:
Interviewed thousands of folks across Pennsylvania as well as North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan & Wisconsin. Working suburban & rural voters. Across-the-board it was inflation. Many times they knew exactly how much something had gone up from food to gas to car/home insurance. https://t.co/YcEfjZ3Oep
— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) November 11, 2024
“One striking pattern hidden in the election results” [VOX]. “But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there’s a striking pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or, put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than Trump…. My suspicion is that Harris’s electoral struggles were more about Biden’s unpopularity and her association with his administration than any newfound love of the American public for the Republican Party generally. (This is also reflected in the House of Representatives contest currently looking somewhat close and in Democratic success at the state level in places like North Carolina.) Call them the ‘I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump’ voters. Biden lost them, and Harris failed to get them back.” • Note that control of the House is not yet decided.
“The U.S. Can Take a Tough Election” [Peggy Noonan]. “I close with my immediate hope, that the outcome of the election, however close, is also clear. That the battleground states won’t be won with 0.008 margins but a few points this direction or that. I hope whoever wins the presidency, at least one house of Congress is of the other party. A Democratic House or Senate will tamp down Trumpian excitements and hem in enthusiasms. A Republican House or Senate will be a coolant on Democratic attempts at court packing or doing away with the filibuster. You say this is a recipe for ‘nothing gets done.’ Those three words are, occasionally, balm to the conservative soul. A situation in which neither Matt Gaetz nor AOC can destabilize anything isn’t a bad situation. But also, no: Divided government will mean anything that gets done will involve winning over the opposition. Good. We’ve got to get back to persuasion, to politics as the art of the possible. That’s an old tradition too. Meantime onward, do what you think right, feel appropriate anxiety but no crippling fear. Shoulders back. We’re the U.S.-blinkin’-A., baby, and we make our way through.” • I repeat that control of the House is not yet decided. And meanwhile—
“Against Panic: A Survival Kit” [Margaret Renkl, New York Times]. “Donald Trump is not a blip or an aberration. That should have been clear long since. From the moment the carnival barker in chief came down a golden escalator, through his first outrageous campaign of lies, through the nightmare of his first snake-oil presidency, through his murderous silence during the assault on the Capitol, through the hearings and the trials that only shored up the support of his base, the MAGA fever dream was never even close to breaking.” I don’t begrudge this nice liberal Democrat lady her house, the woods behind her house, her books, her lunches, her restaurant meals, or her position as a contributing Opinion writer at the New York Times. I have been very lucky in my life, and I have ended up with most of those things too (though I don’t work at the Times MR SUBLIMINAL Thank God. I come from Renkl’s milieu — English teaching — in the PMC. But Renkl needs to understand some things. First, most working class Americans do not have the security she has (and not, I hasten to add, because they are in any way morally inferior beings, or stupid). Second, the Democrat Party to which Renkl give every indication of being a fully paid-up member, has failed Renkl in literally every respect. It has not stopped Trump. More to the point, it does not “have the back” of the working class. And what Renkl and her ilk will end up doing is doubling down on fail. As she says: “To fight the calamities that are coming, we will need to find what gives us joy even amid the fight, and we will need to find a way to rest when the fight is too much to bear. To allow the braying winners to turn us into desolate, impotent shadows with stones forever lodged in our throats would be to let them win even more surely than they won at the ballot box last week.” • What does that even mean? What is there that is actionanble?! Like Snyder, Masciotra, and Tomasky, Renkl’s writing seems pre-political; the words are the words of highly sophisticated adults, but driven by the feelings of a disappointed and enraged six-year-old (hence the pre-adult quality of the writing).
Lambert here: The day after the election, I explained my methodology for covering election 2024, concluding that “potential paths to victory for the ultimate winner were always clear. I’m also happy to have kept drawing that red box around Pennsylvania, where the Blue Wall first cracked.” After a day or so, I came to feel that further explanation was warranted. This quotation from “The Scouring of the Shire,” Lord of the Rings, Volume Three, came into my mind as I was trying to clarify my thoughts:
To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing. Frodo looked down at the body with pity and horror, for as he looked it seemed that long years of death were suddenly revealed in it, and it shrank, and the shrivelled face became rags of skin upon a hideous skull. Lifting up the skirt of the dirty cloak that sprawled beside it, he covered it over, and turned away.
The event for which I did not prepare you, dear readers, was the nature of Trump’s victory; the margin was always going to be small, but that Trump would win all the swing states, or that nearly all counties would undergo a Red Shift didn’t enter my mind. Now, part of the issue was that I tend to operate from a heuristic of scarcity: Not what will there be, but will there be enough? So, as here, I tend to be good with outcomes and directionality, but not so good with degrees. But I think my real issue was sourcing. If my reading is correct, an enormous amount of mass communication — not just campaign advertising, but mass communication — on the conservative side over election 2024 took place in video, on TikTok especially, but also long-form on YouTube. The prose sources I tend to look at still have enough value, discounted though it must be, to get me to outcomes, but I would have needed much better video sourcing to understand why Trump’s victory was as dominating as it was. The issue here is that video, in general, has a very low bit-rate, and everything must be taken on authority, because there are no links. The medium is uncongenial to me, pressed temporally as I am, and in any case I don’t want to amplify evidence-free garbage takes to readers. How to adjust my methodology for a new and much less literate polity is an open question for me.
Oh, and the “grey mist” that was Saruman is clearly the “old,” mainstream media, in which I am still enmeshed, a high bit-rate, newsroom-created, prose-based medium that at point performed a valuable social function, but whose power in this election proved illusory (the “hideous skull” being having become a squillionaire-adjacent Democrat asset with “access” to spooks — “spook scoop” kinda sums up the last four years of stenography). And now it’s blown away. “Sad.”
Democrats en Déshabillé
“Who will lead Democrats in 2028? Meet the leaders positioning themselves to make moves” [Politico]. Ah, “rising stars.” “As she watched Shapiro glad-hand in a Concord bookshop one late October morning after stumping for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Joyce Craig, local Democratic activist Maura Willing marveled about the party’s deep bench.” Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, JB Pritzker, Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, John Fetterman, Wes Moore, Ro Khanna, Tim Walz (no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, probably not; I think Walz got a raw deal from Kamala’s goons).
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Arizona attorney general says she has ‘no intention’ of dropping fake electors case” [NBC]. “A state grand jury in April charged over a dozen allies of Trump for allegedly attempting to send a slate of alternate electors to the Electoral College in 2020. Joe Biden won the state by several thousand votes that year, leading the state to certify a slate of electors for him. Those charged include big names like former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.” • Again, the contingent (“alternate”) electors were civilians, who shouldn’t have been sucked into the gang warfare.
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 (wastewater); 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, KidDoc, 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
“I’ve had a realisation about one of the sliding doors moments in the pandemic” [@1goodtern, Threadreader]. This is really excellent and worth reading in full. “I had a chat with a consultant anaesthetist a couple of months ago when he asked me why I wore an ffp3 mask, and a couple of things he said in reply didn’t make sense. His words had been bouncing round in the back of my head all this time, then I saw something today that made complete sense of them. He had been talking about the distinction between droplets and aerosols and how he had had training and briefings at which he had seen studies that had *proven* that most transmission in healthcare settings was *at close range*… Based on that, he thought that surgical masks (‘fluid resistant/repellant surgical masks’, frsm) were adequate to stop transmission. In his mind, ‘close range’ and ‘short range’ meant *droplets*.” • But “close range” means aerosols, too! (Ask yourself where the smell of cigarette smoke is strongest; near the smoker, of course, at close range. But the smell doesn’t come from droplets.) I didn’t get the physics of it early on myself, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. The thread is also very much worth reading for the culture of medical professionals.
Transmission: Covid
Bad news from California:
BREAKING: California’s COVID report states 46% of wastewater sites are increasing, up from 25% last week.
Positivity increased for the 2nd week in a row to 3.5%. pic.twitter.com/vEXy8G7vmX
— CyFi (@CyFi10) November 8, 2024
Not what CDC says, though the timing could be different.
Transmission: H5N1
More bad news from California:
Vaccines: Covid
“Woman Fired For Refusing Covid Vaccine Wins Record $12 Million” [Newsweek]. “federal jury in Detroit awarded more than $12 million Friday to a former Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) employee who was terminated after declining to get a COVID-19 vaccination, citing religious discrimination.” • I’m so sick of privileging the religious in discrimination and “conscience clause” cases when it’s really all politics. You can bet that if anybody cited “Christian values” when they brought a case before the NLRB they’d be laughed at and shot down (even though there’s plenty of Catholic thought in that area). In any case, public health only and as usual got it 180° wrong, as I’ve muttered on several occasions. We should never have mandated vaccines, and we should have mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions. And so public health managed to destroy the credibility of both, good job.
TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
| Wastewater | |
| ★ This week[1] CDC November 4 | Last Week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| ★ Variants [3] CDC November 9 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC November 2 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| New York[5] New York State, data November 7: | ★ National [6] CDC November 8: |
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| Positivity | |
| ★ National[7] Walgreens November 11: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic November 2: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC October 21: | Variants[10] CDC October 21: |
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| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC November 2: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC November 2: |
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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] (CDC) Good news! [2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map. [3] (CDC Variants) KP.* still popular. XEC has entered the chat. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection. [4] (ED) Down. [5] (Hospitalization: NY) Steadily down. [6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Actually improved; it’s now one of the few charts to show the entire course of the pandemic to the present day. [7] (Walgreens) Down. [8] (Cleveland) Down. [9] (Travelers: Positivity) Down. [10] (Travelers: Variants). Now XEC. [11] Deaths low, positivity down. [12] Deaths low, ED down. Stats Watch Sentiment: “United States NFIB Business Optimism Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index in the US increased to 91.5 in September 2024 from 91.2 in August, missing forecasts of 91.7. This was the 33rd consecutive month below the 50-year average of 98.” Manufacturing: “Boeing Shows Why Squeezing Workers Is Reckless” [Boeing]. “A shocking percentage of full-time workers don’t earn enough to raise a family, and that was true even before the recent spike in inflation made everything a lot more expensive. As much as two-thirds of full-time workers age 25 and older can’t cover the basic necessities for a family of four with one parent working, according to wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and living wage estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s this reality that has injected fresh vigor into labor action in recent years. Unions have scored first-time organizing wins at companies across industries including at Starbucks Corp., Apple Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Amazon.com Inc., while picketing workers have won record pay increases in some cases. Boeing’s is the latest victory, and expect more to follow as more workers refuse to show up for work that doesn’t allow them to pay the bills. In the Seattle area, where Boeing produces most of its aircraft, a living wage is roughly $50 an hour for a family of four with one adult working, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, or about $104,000 a year based on a 40-hour work week. It’s probably no coincidence then that Boeing’s labor deal will raise the average machinist’s annual wage to $119,000 over four years. Assuming 3% annual inflation, a living wage for a family of four will be closer to $117,000 in four years, very nearly matching what Boeing’s workers agreed to. The substantial wage increase shows the degree to which Boeing’s workers fall short of a living wage. It’s a harsh truth that Boeing could easily hide from investors because public companies — even the biggest, most vital among them — are not required to disclose how much they pay workers, a hole in their financial statements that regulators should plug.” • Hmm. Social reproduction theory? Manufacturing: “Boeing’s head of quality for commercial planes, Elizabeth Lund, is retiring” [Seattle Times]. “Elizabeth Lund, senior vice president of quality at Boeing Commercial Airplanes and one of the company’s most prominent female executives, will retire next month, the company said Monday… Lund had risen over a long career to senior vice president and general manager of all airplane programs. A month after the fuselage blowout on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in January, Lund was given the task of leading the quality organization and coming up with a plan to restore the confidence of both the public and the Federal Aviation Administration in Boeing’s management of its product quality. However in June, Lund was rebuked by the National Transportation Safety Board for breaking strict disclosure rules about ongoing accident investigations when she publicly commented on details about how the Alaska Airlines incident had occurred. As a result, Boeing’s access to the NTSB’s investigative information on the incident was withdrawn.” • Oopsie. Manufacturing: “Where Will Boeing Be In 3 Years?” [The Motley Fool]. “Over the last 12 months, Boeing’s net loss totals $8 billion — its worst loss ever since the first year of the pandemic. Admittedly, a big chunk of Boeing’s loss is attributable to a one-time event, the company’s fourth-longest-ever labor strike, which contributed about $4 billion to losses in Q3.” • I don’t play the ponies, or read balance sheets (any more), but the cost of the new machinist’s contract over four years looks like ~$1.5 billion. So Boeing spent $4 billion (and raised another $25 billion or so in stock and debt) to save $1.5 billion. Make it make sense. Manufacturing: “Fixing Boeing Could Mean Breaking It Up” [Barron’s]. “‘Breaking apart Boeing’s divisions….could be a calculated action to release latent value and give stockholders a clearer road toward long-term success,’ wrote The Edge founder Jim Osman in a Sunday article for Forbes…. Commercial airplanes and defense aren’t profitable segments currently. The services segment has continued to make money despite Boeing’s recent problems, which include poor quality, lower production, and cost inflation…. ‘Separating these divisions would enable Boeing to let every division focus on resources and leadership more precisely toward its goals,’ added Osman, who owns Boeing stock. Recent problems have called for investor confidence to be restored, so this can offer a more open view of Boeing’s operations and value and help to rebuild it.’” • Ah, “confidence.” Tech: Good question:
Possible answer:
Makes sense because real books are easier and more pleasurable to read than digital ones (and more memorable). Also, Google wants to keep people ignorant, as does Silicon Valley generally. Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 68 Greed (previous close: 60 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 41 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 11 at 2:15:59 PM ET. Rapture Index: Closes unchanged [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 182. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • Hard to believe the Rapture Index is going down. Do these people know something we don’t? Gallery Snow, sigh: Zeitgeist Watch “You’re Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence” [Jessica, The Sentinel Intelligence]. “Sentinel intelligence refers to a special cognitive ability that allows someone to detect threats before anyone else. Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy talk about this trait in their book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. They review a number of natural and economic disasters throughout history. As they write, ‘in each instance a Cassandra was pounding the table and warning us precisely about the disasters that came as promised.’ Not only were they ignored, but ‘the people with the power to respond often put more effort into discounting the Cassandra than saving lives and resources.’ It just keeps happening. If you have sentinel intelligence, your brain can aggregate and sift through extraordinary amounts of information in a very short period of time, especially when it comes to seeing latent or hidden dangers. You don’t get stymied by what Clarke and Eddy call the ‘magnitude of overload.’ In some ways, it’s a superpower. Research on sensitive individuals confirms how sentinels and Cassandras think. Social psychologist Tsachi Ein-Dor writes that some of us ‘are chronically hypervigilant and constantly alert to potential threats and dangers. Other individuals, once alerted to a threat, are self-reliant and likely to take protective actions rapidly and effectively.’ In other words, we’re hardwired alarm systems. Groups are more likely to survive when they have a mix of people who are skilled at detecting, communicating, and acting on threats to their survival. Some of us can identify threats just by knowing that something’s off. One study in Nature Scientific Reports describes this ability as scene gist. As they explain, ‘Scene gist extracted rapidly from the environment may help people detect threats.’ The shapes and contours of a landscape can trigger our threat brains even before we know the details of what we’re looking at.” • “Scene gist,” hmm. “11.0- Welcome to the Martian Revolution” (podcast) [Mike Duncan, Revolutions]. • Mike Duncan has returned! Musical Interlude Sound sytems — trucks stacked with speakers and a power source — are ubiquitous outside the West. You might think of them as musical technicals: “Metal Box” was great, but (and) round: [embedded content] This is square. (“Haile Unlikely” is probably the best Rastafarian-adjacent song-title ever.) Guillotine Watch “Ultra-wealthy Democrats race to buy London boltholes after Trump win” [Class Warfare “Rethinking My Economics” [Angus Deaton, News of the Wired “The massed-spaced learning effect in non-neural human cells” [ JB writes: “Conks of Phellinus fungus proliferating on a dead tree . . . life persists!” Also, life persists in a different way; during the election coverage, I had suggested that readers might like to send in pictures of comfort food. Alert reader Petal did:
Petal wrote: “Macaroni and cheese (with ham) from scratch.” And it looks as good now as it did then! Kind readers, my queue for plant images is growing a bit short, and that always makes me queasy. Do you have an images to send in, especially of autumn produce or winter projects? Thank you! Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. Material here is Lambert’s, and does not express the views of the Naked Capitalism site. If you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for three or four days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals: Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated:
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