• July 31, 2024


By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Blue Mockingbird, Presa Gutiérrez, Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. Lots of summery insects, too.

* * *

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Kamala’s idpol keeps rolling.

(3) Covid and class.

(2) Call any vegetable….

* * *

Politics

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

* * *

2024

Less than one hundred days to go!

Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:

First poll with Harris at the top of the Democrat ticket; Trump’s position deteriorates (and any advantage he gained from the assassination attempt has been wiped away. Nevertheless, he still leads, albeit within the margin of error. NOTE RCP used to have two pages of swing states; I always used the first one. Now there is only one, which I take as an indicator that Harris v. Trump polling is not all that widespread.

Vibe shift:

We’ll see what the averages say Friday, but:

Lots of Brownian motion here, still. More noteworthy is that Trump got no visible bounce from the assassination.

* * *

The Campaign Trail:

Kamala (D): “Kamala Harris Is Bringing Blue-State Politics to the Campaign Trail” [The Nation]. “[T]he central virtue of the newly launched Harris campaign [is] its straightforward, combative approach to defeating Trump and his decade-long takeover of right-wing politics. Harris’s brash (if not, strictly speaking, brat) offensive against the GOP is rooted in something broader and deeper than her own character, or her popcult appeal; It is, in large part, traceable to the California political scene that launched her career.” • California is, however, a one-party state; that’s not transferable to the country as a whole (and were the parties reversed, Kamala’s “dominance politics” would be instantly characterized by a million liberal pundits as “bullying” (or, for those who want the seventy-five cent word, “microaggression”).

Kamala (D): “Why Harris and Democrats keep calling Trump and Vance ‘weird’” [Associated Press]. “Democrats are applying the label with gusto in interviews and online, notably to Vance’s comments on abortion and his previous suggestion that political leaders who didn’t have biological children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country. The ‘weird’ message appears to have given Democrats a narrative advantage that they rarely had when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection. Trump’s campaign, which so often shapes political discussions with the former president’s pronouncements, has spent days trying to flip the script by highlighting things about Democrats it says are weird. ‘I don’t know who came up with the message, but I salute them,’ said David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University. Karpf said labeling Republican comments as ‘weird’ is the sort of concise take that resonates quickly with Harris supporters. Plus, Karpf noted, ‘it frustrates opponents, leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses.’” • Yes, “weird” take me back to High School bullying, so maybe the Harris campaign has perfect pitch, I don’t know. Clinton 2.0’s “weird” is certainly an upgrade over Clinton 1.0’s “deplorable.” And Professor Karpf is correct that Democrats love it — being, in so many, many ways, totally not weird themselves — but that’s irrelevant; they’d be falling over themselves for “peculiar.” Or “eldritch.” As for Democrat “opponents” being thrown “off-balance,” I haven’t seen any examples, and I do try to keep track. Finally, if Karpf is correctly summarized as saying that “weird” is directed at “Republican comments,” he’s wrong. It’s directed at Republicans, personally. Are ad hominem attacks not part of strategic communications. Perhaps “weird” will persuade those not yet persuaded, or those especially impressionable (TikTok youth?). We shall see.

Kamala (D): “Harris was expected to have fundraising trouble. Here’s why big donors are actually lining up in droves” [Politico]. “‘I’ve talked to more people who have been just in a general sense more reserved about President Biden, who are now very enthusiastic,’ said Mozelle Thompson, a former Federal Trade Commission commissioner and Democratic donor. ‘The enthusiasm gap, the excitement gap, has been erased. It’s still early days, but so far the stream of money has been so strong that one donor adviser has even cautioned some donors to slow down until the dynamics of the race make it clearer where money is most needed.” • This is all vibes. I wouldn’t, after the Scranton Joe’s Brain Reveal, trust the Democrats not to lie about whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted (they are, after all, fighting for “our democracy”). So on dollar figures, I’ll wait for reports. That said, I’m sure the Democrats got a cash injection of some sort. It will be interesting to see what Democrats buy, instead of speculating on how much they have. Same with volunteers. Are they opening new offices? And so forth.

Kamala (D): Yesterday, I noted the pecking order for Kamala’s idpol rollouts, which was: “First, Black Women. Second, White Women. Third, White Men. Fourth, Latino Men” and remarked ” I suppose the Asian verticals are yet come.” Here they are:

Next, LGBTQIA+? (I love AAHNPI food. Don’t you?)

Syndemics

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

* * *

Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

* * *

Transmission: H5N1

USDA statement:

“Not seeing.” Are you looking?

It tires you out, the lying and the ignorance. As it is designed to do, I suppose.

Vaccines

“Long Island hospital 1 of 3 in U.S. running nasal COVID vaccine trials” [Newsday]. “‘We get infected with COVID through our respiratory system,’ said Dr. Martín Bäcker, associate director of the vaccine center at NYU Langone Hospital-Long Island. ‘Having our immune system activated at the site of infection might lead to more sterilizing immunity, which might help prevent milder infections or [prevent] transmissions better than the currently available vaccines.’” Meanwhile, NIH rushes to protect Pfizer’s existing market: “‘While first-generation COVID-19 vaccines continue to be effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalizations, and death, they are less successful at preventing infection and milder forms of disease,’ Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a statement. ‘With the continual emergence of new virus variants, there is a critical need to develop next-generation COVID-19 vaccines, including nasal vaccines that could reduce SARS-CoV-2 infections and transmission.’” And: “About 60 people across all three sites will be enrolled in the study. The other locations are Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and The Hope Clinic of Emory University in Georgia. In order to be eligible, people need to have received at least three prior doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.” • Hmm.

Sequelae: Covid

Brain fog is brain damage, an anecdote:

Quality of Life Research]. “Higher symptom burden was associated with reporting more comorbidities; being unmarried, difficulty paying bills, being disabled from work, not having a college degree, younger age, higher body mass index, having had COVID multiple times, worse reported QOL, greater reported financial hardship and worry; maladaptive coping, and worse healthcare disruption, health/healthcare stress, racial-inequity stress, family-relationship problems, and social support…. Long-COVID symptom burden is associated with substantial, modifiable social and behavioral factors. Most notably, financial hardship was associated with more than three times the risk of high versus low Long-COVID symptom burden.” • A population cull of the working class, then?

Social Norming

“Grandiose narcissism, unfounded beliefs, and behavioral reactions during the COVID-19 pandemic” [Nature]. From the Abstract: “A theoretical perspective on grandiose narcissism suggests four forms of it (sanctity, admiration, heroism, rivalry) and states that these forms conduce to different ways of thinking and acting. Guided by this perspective, we examined in a multinational and multicultural study (61 countries; N = 15,039) how narcissism forms are linked to cognitions and behaviors prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.” From the Discussion: “[N]arcissists will not always act and think in an antisocial manner. Instead, narcissism can be a double-edged sword: sometimes it is linked to anti-social thoughts and actions, whereas other times it is linked to prosocial thoughts and actions. Whether the consequence is anti-social or pro-social depends on the joint action of the domain in which the narcissism exists (agentic vs. communal), the motives that underlie it (self-enhancement vs. self-protection), and the criterion variable that is being predicted by any of the four grandiose narcissism forms.” • Hmm.

* * *

Lambert here: New York hospitalization leveling out, and now WalGreens positivity down for two weeks, are the first positive signs I’ve seen in a long time. Wastewater still going strong, though!

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] (CDC) This week’s wastewater map, with hot spots annotated. Keeps spreading.

[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.

[3] (CDC Variants) KP.* very popular.

[4] (ER) Worth noting Emergency Department use is now on a par with the first wave, in 2020.

[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Leveling off. Doesn’t need to be a permanent thing, of course. (The New York city area has form; in 2020, as the home of two international airports (JFK and EWR) it was an important entry point for the virus into the country (and from thence up the Hudson River valley, as the rich sought to escape, and then around the country through air travel.)

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

[7] (Walgreens) An optimist would see a peak.

[8] (Cleveland) Slowing. Comment on the Cleveland Clinic:

Ka-ching.

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

[10] (Travelers: Variants) Same deal. Those sh*theads.

[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.

[12] Deaths low, ED up.

Stats Watch

Employment Situation: “United States ADP Employment Change” [Trading Economics]. “Private businesses in the US added 122K workers to their payrolls in July 2024, the least in six months, following an upwardly revised 155K in June and compared to forecasts of 150K. The figures showed job creation edged down as pay gains continued to slow.”

Manufacturing: “United States Chicago PMI” [Trading Economics]. “The Chicago Business Barometer, also known as the Chicago PMI, fell to 45.3 in July 2024 from a seven-month high of 47.4 in June, though slightly above market forecasts of 45. The latest reading still indicated a substantial contraction in Chicago’s economic activity for the eighth consecutive month.”

* * *

Antitrust: “CrowdSuck” [Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect]. The first two paragraphs provide a lot of food for thought, before we even get to antitrust: “On the ‘perfect phone call,’ then-President Donald Trump famously asked newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into a Republican conspiracy theory about the California cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The Democratic National Committee had hired CrowdStrike to respond to a security breach on its servers, but according to Trump, the company was secretly owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had instructed his employees to fabricate evidence that the intrusion was carried out by Russian government–linked hackers, to conceal the fact that the emails had been leaked by a low-level DNC voter outreach data manager named Seth Rich, who’d been mysteriously murdered two months after the breach. There was, as is often the case, a kernel of plausibility to one part of the theory. While no evidence surfaced to link Rich to the leaked emails, and Fox News had to pay a seven-figure settlement to Rich’s family for spreading the erroneous claim, CrowdStrike co-founder Dimitri Alperovitch would soon retire from the software industry to become a full-time professional neo–Cold Warrior, founding a think tank that predicted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and writing a book about the coming world war over Taiwan. But cybersecurity tends to attract the geopolitically paranoid, and CrowdStrike, whose seed funding had come from private equity firm Warburg Pincus and Google, had just gone public on the NASDAQ stock exchange and its ownership was public: Its largest single shareholder was the money management empire BlackRock.” • So that’s alright then. Anyhow, Tkacik is always worth a read.

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 41 Fear (previous close: 45 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 54 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jul 30 at 12:48:21 PM ET

Permaculture

“Wash those vegetables!” [Indignity]. “If I wanted to get my hands dirty, I would go live somewhere where I have to grow my own food. Or at least I would sign up for the community garden. When I’m in the galley kitchen of my Manhattan apartment, what I’m looking for from my vegetables is to get them cooked for dinner. Quickly… Organic produce is meant to appeal to people who don’t want the specter of the unnatural hanging over their food. I personally prefer not to eat pesticides, if I can help it, and I grew up seeing the Chesapeake Bay ravaged by nitrogen runoff from the overuse of synthetic fertilizer. As long as it’s not too bug-eaten or wildly overpriced, I’ll usually choose organic over conventional produce. And then I’ll find myself up to my forearms in grimy water in the sink, rubbing clinging dirt off a lettuce leaf that would have been pristine if it were conventionally produced, and I’ll wonder why I bothered. The thought of bug-killer on the produce may be upsetting, but dirt is dirt and time is money, on top of the money that was money that I already paid for organic vegetables. Nothing in organic certification says they can’t wash the vegetables better! It’s not industrial or artificial to get the dirt out of there.”

The Gallery

“Dutch Chemists Finally Work Out How Rembrandt Achieved the Golden Lustre in His ‘The Night Watch’ Painting” [ARTnews]. “Chemists from Holland’s University of Amsterdam (UvA) have finally worked out how Rembrandt managed to embellish his The Night Watch (1642) painting with striking golden detail. They used high-tech spectroscopic techniques to identify the presence of pararealgar [yellow] and semi-amorphous pararealgar [orange/red] pigments in minute detail in the famous artwork. The research team concluded that the Dutch artist intentionally mixed these particular arsenic sulfide pigments with other pigments to create the golden sheen.” • Arsenic!

Zeitgeist Watch

“It’s not just us: Other animals change their social habits in old age” [Knowable]. “A recent study by Albery and colleagues in Nature Ecology & Evolution  found that older deer reduce their contacts more than you’d expect if their shrinking range was the only cause. That suggests the behavior may have evolved for a reason — one that Albery prosaically summarizes as, ‘Deer shit where they eat.’ Gastrointestinal worms are rampant on the island. And though the deer do not get infected through direct contact with others, being at the same place at the same time probably does increase their risk of ingesting eggs or larvae in the still-warm droppings of one of their associates. ‘Younger animals need to put themselves out there to make friends, but perhaps when you’re older and you already have some, the risk of disease just isn’t worth it,’ says study coauthor Josh Firth, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oxford.” • And so with Covid?

News of the Wired

“Creativity Fundamentally Comes From Memorization” [Ashwin Mathews]. “By definition, you can’t even be certain of novelty without familiarity of existing works. Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art — they can see the connection or novelty because it’s all in their head. Therefore autonomy enables creativity, and a system helps achieve autonomy quicker.” • Hmm.

* * *

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 spent long enough watching this Snowy Egret wade through the duckweed to learn that its technique was to drag its feet across the bottom, stirring up edibles. I had to admire its ability to see what was dislodged through the thick cloud of green. I’m not sure what was happening here—it appears that it may have released that little gray [slimy?] thing.” Egrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention….

* * *

Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So 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:

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