2:00PM Water Cooler 8/6/2024 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Readers have been so happy with the mockingbirds I’m going to keep doing them. Now entering Day Two of Week Three!

Long-tailed Mockingbird, Quebrada El Limón (Valqui E4.2), Piura, Peru.

In Case You Might Miss…

1. Best Olympic story.
2. Walz is Kamala’s VP choice.
3. Climate tipping points unpredictable.
4. Andy Warhol’s lost Amiga Art.

Look for the Helpers

Less than one hundred days to go!

Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:

Drops for Trump across the board, including a 2.5% drop nationally (almost outside the margin of error, ha ha), and a blue triangle on the mao for the first time.

* * *

The Campaign Trail:

The VP choice:

Kamala (D): “Tim Walz. Hell yeah.” [Dave Karpf, Now and Then]. “Walz’s biography reads like a character ripped from the Aaron Sorkin extended universe. Small town boy from Nebraska, couple decades of military service, high school history teacher, part-time high school football coach who took the team to the state championship… went on to serve five terms in Congress as a Democrat in a conservative district, then became Governor and, with a small Democratic majority in the statehouse, signed a huge slate of progressive initiatives into law. But he doesn’t talk like a safe, scripted centrist. The guy has spent the past few weeks pitching a comms perfect-game. Every media interview has been clipped and shared on social media. He rolled out the ‘Trump and Vance are just plain weird‘ attack line. Listen to the guy on Ezra Klein’s podcast: he manufactures aww shucks midwestern-dad energy and converts it into body blows against his opponents. This is one of the interesting points about social media this election cycle. Twitter and Facebook aren’t anything like they once were. TikTok is mostly for young people, but the other social networks are still trying to emulate TikTok. Which means, effectively, that .” • I must confess that the video where Walz allowed his daughter to inveigle him into going on a heartstopping ride at the State Fair (or whichever fair) made me sit up and take notice. Very fresh. And then along came the school lunches, and getting that done with a one-vote (?) majority (quite in contrast to national Democrat whinging). A clip:

If he’s picked he should do clips like this every day for America. pic.twitter.com/A0wrt2qqSk

— Albie🩸🦷🤝🥥🌴 (@AlbieBrian) August 5, 2024

Kamala (D):

In one of the most improbable runs in recent political history, Tim Walz is the VP nominee. I wrote about why he was selected. I don’t think it was just “weird”; his legislative record in 2023 in Minnesota mirrors what Kamala Harris wants to get done:https://t.co/2pAJoY0IS8

— David Dayen (@ddayen) August 6, 2024

I don’t agree with this at all. First, we don’t know what Kamala wants to get done:

Kamala Harris’s campaign page has no policy positions. There’s nothing about the first 100 days. It’s just PR fluff pieces on her and Waltz, and the many ways to donate. I’ve never seen a presidential campaign like this. How are you running for president with no platform? pic.twitter.com/iARlP2kLzy

— AshleyStevens (@The_Acumen) August 6, 2024

(Of course, even if there were a platform, Kamala could be lying, as Democrats did continuously over Biden’s cognitive deterioration).

Second, making the assumption that Walz is a progressive instead of just another liberal (see here), Democrats have a long history of embracing progressives just before stabbing them in the back (see under the Biden Transition Team).

Third, personnel is policy. And Kamala has a lot of people in her circle who would look askance at, say, free school lunches without complex eligibility requirements. Picking one of many examples:

Charles Phillips is also an advisor to NYC mayor Eric Adams and ran his mayoral tech transition. Nightmare. https://t.co/mR6Z7ybGVY

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) August 6, 2024

Finally — and I don’t hate Walz — if he’s everything we’re being told he is, why in the name of all that is holy isn’t he at the top of the ticket? Maybe if the Democrats hadn’t wired the primaries for Biden [sorry, that name again?] he would be.

Kamala (D): “Walz’s handling of BLM riots, strict COVID rules under microscope after Harris VP pick” [FOX]. “Vice President Kamala Harris’ pick of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a running mate will put the Democratic governor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread riots in the state back in the national spotlight. ‘[H]e’s been a disaster for Minnesota and is by far the most partisan governor that I can remember having,’ Minnesota GOP Chairman David Hann told Fox News Digital last week. ‘Going back to 2020, certainly – he did nothing to try to stop the riots going on in Minneapolis. I think he was fearful of alienating his ‘progressive’ base, who were supporting the riots. Kamala Harris was raising money for the rioters.” And: “Meanwhile, critics point to Walz’s memorandum mandating indoor masking during the coronavirus pandemic, which he enacted in 2020 and ended in 2021. The Upper Midwest Law Center sued, calling the mandate unconstitutional, but an appellate court ultimately sided with Walz.” • Different framing:

Walz is absolutely unafraid to govern. https://t.co/9b3ZQrBvdR

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) August 6, 2024

“Unafraid to govern” (sounds like Stoller).

Kamala (D): “Kamala Harris chooses Tim Walz as running mate in US presidential election” [Financial Times]. Walz after a clip from 2021 went viral, in which Vance warned the US was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies”: “‘My God, they went after cat people — good luck with that. Turn on the internet and see what cat people do when you go after ‘em. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad,’ Walz said in one MSNBC appearance.” • Walz can stick the shiv in. I like that.

* * *

Walz and Covid:

Kamala (D): “‘Buckle it up’: Walz orders MN to ‘stay at home’ to curb virus spread” [MPR News] (March 25, 2020 5:30 AM). “Gov. Tim Walz has ordered Minnesotans to stay at home for two weeks, at least, as part of the state’s ongoing efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus and COVID-19 disease. The order isn’t a complete lockdown and it allows essential activities and services to continue, Walz said. People will be allowed to exercise outdoors and visit the grocery store, for example, with proper social distancing. ‘Buckle it up for a few more weeks,’ the governor said. The order takes effect Saturday and lasts through April 10. Walz said it’s impossible to lessen the number of Minnesotans who will become infected with COVID-19, but the stay-home order is intended to push out the time of peak infections so there are intensive care unit beds available for those who need it. ‘The thing that Minnesota is going to do is ensure if you need an ICU, it’s there,’ Walz told the state in a livestreamed address Wednesday.” • Ah yes. “Flatten the curve.” We all did that, and then the PMC discovered they could work from home and have servants bring them stuff, at which point they threw the working class under the bus. Not Walz’s fault, but…

Kamala (D): “As cases fall and vaccination ramps up, Gov. Walz adjusts COVID-19 mitigation measures” [mpls downtown council] (March 12, 2021). “‘Minnesotans should continue to take simple steps to protect the progress we’ve made, but the data shows that we are beating COVID-19,’ said Governor Walz. ‘Our vaccine rollout is leading the nation, the most vulnerable Minnesotans are getting the shot, and it is becoming increasingly more safe to return to our daily lives. The sun is shining brighter.’ As vaccines have an impact, life is slowly returning to normal. In February, Governor Walz announced a plan to return more students to the classroom, and 90 percent of schools now offer in-person learning, while 60 percent of teachers have been vaccinated. Minnesota is weeks ahead of schedule on vaccinations. Nearly 1.2 million Minnesotans and more than 70 percent of seniors have gotten a shot. ‘There are more good days now than bad days,’ said Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan.” • Handy chart (and I love the file name: reanimation_guidelines_210312.png):

Shows a prime difficulty of lockdowns: They were organized by lines of business (churches, bars, etc.) instead of by ventilation (and surely a regulatory formula could have been worked out, even in 2020). Of course, in 2021, as today, the public health establishment was dug in against airborne transmission, so that wasn’t “politically feasible” as we say.

Kamala (D): “Walz: Jensen’s COVID-19 stance is ‘killing people’” [Minnesota Reformer] (August 10, 2022). “‘Putting out false information around COVID, yourself not being vaccinated and telling others (not) to — it’s killing people,’ Walz told MPR News editor Mike Mulcahy. ‘I think giving a platform for that … that’s not who we are.’ … .In the early days of the pandemic, [his gubernatorial opponent Scott Jensen] called COVID-19 a “mild four-day respiratory illness which poses little risk to more than 95% of people.’” • Rhetorically, that’s the stuff to give the troops.

Lambert here: Maybe Covid will finally enter the political arena through the back door. From my distinctly minority perspective, neither party has a record they can coherently defend. Trump instituted Operation Warp Speed (OWS), which if it had included sterilizing nasal vaccines, would have been seen as a moonshot, instead of the technical triumph it was. Unfortunately, Trump’s base is disportionately anti-vax, so he can’t take credit for vax, and the Democrats won’t give it to him. Further, Trump modeled masking by denigrating it. Meanwhile, Biden took the great gift that Trump gave him, and squandered it (which their base prevents the Republicans from saying): Rather than pursue a layered strategy that included vax, with a second OWS for mitigation, Biden bet the farm on vax, most especially with vaccine mandates. Unfortunately, the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, safety studies were hardly optimal, and we ended up with wave after wave of mass infection while CDC continued Trump’s work by simultaneously ruining non-pharmaceutical interventions. Across-the-board elite denial that Covid was even a problem, combined with social norming has worked for awhile, but reality does seem to be breaking through (give it a couple more years). How is Biden’s strategy defensible? At least the Republican messaging about freedom — vax bad, no mandates, no masking — is coherent. What do Democrats have in response? “We did our best”? They didn’t!

* * *

Kamala (D): “Kamala Harris earns majority of Democratic roll call votes, achieving historic presidential nominatio” [ABC]. • Historic in that Harris is the first candidate ever to run for President whle never winning a single primary running for President.

* * *

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!

Celebrity Watch

We’ll always have Paris:

Indeed.https://t.co/hdEGCouIFr

— Arturo Portnoy (@portna) August 5, 2024

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

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

Logistics: “United States LMI Logistics Managers Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Logistics Manager’s Index in the US increased to 56.5 in July 2024, the highest in four months, compared to 55.3 in June, and marking eight consecutive months of expansion in the logistics sector. Transportation continued its recovery, as Transportation Prices went up (+2.8 to 63.8, the highest since May of 2022) and Transportation Capacity expanded slightly (+0.9 to 50.9). It is the 3rd consecutive month the prices have exceeded capacity due to excess capacity contraction and increasing demand. Respondents are predicting that these dynamics will hold, suggesting that the freight recession is potentially ending. Warehousing also remained strong….”

“The consumer may be preparing to leave the party.” [Logistics Report, Wall Street Journal]. “From McDonald’s to Mercedes-Benz, executives say that many consumers in China and the U.S. are pulling back on spending. …[T]he countries are under different stresses, with U.S. consumers increasingly showing signs of weariness after a run of high inflation while Chinese households focus more on saving than spending. If consumers in the U.S. do falter, it would mean a double whammy for multinational companies, which have been facing weak demand in China. PepsiCo sounded an early alarm on consumer spending in both the U.S. and China, and reported a 4% drop in North American sales volume in the latest quarter. Many American importers have been rushing in goods early ahead of the traditional peak season to get ahead of shipping disruptions. A pullback by consumers would leave them with another inventory overhang.” • Not the same as what economist Alfred Kahn memorable called “a banana,” but nevertheless a sign of weekness. And that early shipping data point is interesting.

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 21 Exreme Fear (previous close: 19 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 47 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 6 at 11:51:12 AM ET. I turn my back for one minute…..

Rapture Index: Closes unchanged [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 183. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • Hard to believe the Rapture Index is going down. Where are there people getting their news?!

Book Nook

“Uncovered Euripides fragments are ‘kind of a big deal’” (press release) [University of Colorado Boulder]. “Working together, Trnka-Amrhein and renowned classics Professor John Gibert embarked on many months of grueling work, meticulously poring over a high-resolution photo of the 10.5-square-inch papyrus. They made out words and ensured that the words they thought they were seeing fit the norms of tragic style and meter. Eventually, they became confident that they were working with new material from two fragmentary Euripides plays, Polyidus and Ino.” And: “Polyidus retells an ancient Cretan myth in which King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë demand that the eponymous seer resurrect their son Glaucus after he drowns in a vat of honey.” • What.

Zeitgeist Watch

“‘No Salt’” [Jake Seliger, The Story’s Story]. “So I opted for something simple: a shakshuka. Tomatoes, vegetables, sauce, and mild flavorings, topped with feta cheese, eggs, and basil. I reached for the salt, and found the bottle empty. I’m not sure why, but I started weeping. No salt. No salt means that he’s not cooking. He’ll never cook again.”

“Is The Collapse Of Civilization Boring To You?” [Nate Bear, ¡Do Not Panic!]. “[A] bunch of environmental groups came out in support of Kamala Harris just two days after she renounced her previous anti-fracking position. She did this because she wants to win pro-fracking votes in Pennsylvania. Maybe no one has told her that there probably won’t be an entity called Pennsylvania at some point in the next few decades if fracking continues. Or that Trump has a lock on the pro-fracking bloc and no one she wants to convince of her new anti-fracking stance will believe her. Fracking, of course, has seen the US surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest oil producer. Fracking initiated by Obama[1] and continued by Trump, then by Biden and will continue under Harris or Trump 2.0. How thin the politics. How meagre the demands of some activists have become.” And relevant to yesterday’s post: “I was thinking about this when I sat outside every evening for four nights on an island in southern Europe, on a well-lit patio at the end of quiet, carless street expecting to see moths swarming the lights. I know well the trouble insects are in, but I still expected to see moths. I saw one. Moths are critical night-time pollinators, an essential part of the ecology that supports our food chain. In Australia, a type of moth that you could find by the tens of thousands in individual caves suddenly disappeared in the space of a few months. How quickly things can collapse.” • Thinking of this post, and the comments to yesterday’s post on an insect apocalypse, it occurs to me that this “Silent Summer” on a grand scale might be something that everybody can be brought to see and to understand. That hasn’t been easy to do with climate change. NOTE [1] The best starting point for the fracking timeline is Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force (and the “Halliburton Loophole”) under Bush the Younger, not Obama. It’s bipartisan!

Climate

“Uncertainties too large to predict tipping times of major Earth system components from historical data” [Science]. “One way to warn of forthcoming critical transitions in Earth system components is using observations to detect declining system stability. It has also been suggested to extrapolate such stability changes into the future and predict tipping times. Here, we argue that the involved uncertainties are too high to robustly predict tipping times. We raise concerns regarding (i) the modeling assumptions underlying any extrapolation of historical results into the future, (ii) the representativeness of individual Earth system component time series, and (iii) the impact of uncertainties and preprocessing of used observational datasets, with focus on nonstationary observational coverage and gap filling. We explore these uncertainties in general and specifically for the example of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. We argue that even under the assumption that a given Earth system component has an approaching tipping point, the uncertainties are too large to reliably estimate tipping times by extrapolating historical information.” • Oh.

The Gallery

“Andy Warhol’s lost Amiga art found” [The Silicon UnderGround]. “To a casual viewer, they look like low resolution images with a very limited number of colors, and it’s not completely unfair to say they bear some resemblance to something my kids would have created in Microsoft Paint when they were little. But when I showed the images to my wife, a former high school art teacher, the first thing she noticed was his choice of colors. He deliberately chose colors that contrasted with each other, and the other colors he used were colors you would get from mixing two or more of the other colors he used. Rule number one of painting, she said, is to never use black or brown, but make your own from the other colors you’re using. Warhol’s images contain odd shades that result from mixing other colors in the image together. When you look at Andy Warhol paintings, his style suited these specific tools. He often worked from photographs, creating stark images containing bold flood fills with only a few colors. Sometimes he would cut up photographs, or have someone else cut up the photographs, then he would arrange the pieces and then paint what he saw. With the Amiga, he could do all of this digitally. So the choice of Andy Warhol to demonstrate how to use the machine was a brilliant idea. This computer with advanced graphics capabilities for its time, and the ability to multitask and switch between different tools so he could cut up and resize images and then paste the result into the image he was working on couldn’t have suited him any better if he’d designed it himself. Problem was, he didn’t know how to use a computer.” • Worth a read!

Turner as Geiger?!

News of the Wired

I am not yet feeling wired today.

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 KW:

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