2:00PM Water Cooler 3/9/2023

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

American Robin, West Babylon, Suffolk, New York, United States. “American Robin singing from the top of a building before dawn.”

* * *

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

“Chuck Schumer Warns Buffalo Hat Guy Will Crawl Out Of Your TV And Kill You If You Watch Tucker’s Jan 6 Video” [Babylon Bee]. • All you really need to read is the headline….

Biden Administration

“FCC nominee Gigi Sohn withdraws after more than a year of fighting for post” [Politico]. “President Joe Biden’s long-stalled nominee for the Federal Communications Commission — Gigi Sohn — said on Tuesday she will withdraw her nomination to fill the fifth seat on the commission. Sohn’s withdrawal came shortly after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced he would vote no on her nomination. The withdrawal marks a blow for Biden and many Senate Democrats who have fought since October 2021 to advance Sohn. It also cements the current 2-2 partisan tie at the FCC for several additional months…. Sohn [was] a former counselor to Obama-era FCC Chair Tom Wheeler and an advocate for net neutrality.”

“Biden upends politics, precedent in pivot on DC crime law” [Associated Press]. “President Joe Biden’s support of a Republican resolution to block new District of Columbia crime laws has split members of his own party amid rising concerns about crime in the nation’s capital and other cities. The GOP-led disapproval resolution is expected to easily pass the Senate on Wednesday with ample Democratic support. But most House Democrats voted against it last month, arguing as they have for many years that the District of Columbia should be able to govern itself. The Democratic support for the resolution, which comes as murders have spiked over a number of years in D.C., is a shift for Biden and his party and could allow Congress to nullify the city’s laws through the disapproval process for the first time in more than three decades.” • Commentary:

Plus, Warnock owes me six hundred bucks.

“U.S. Justice Dept takes a hard line on sentencing reform” [Reuters]. “The U.S. Justice Department is opposing a bipartisan proposal to restrict judges’ ability to impose longer sentences based on alleged crimes even if a unanimous jury has acquitted the defendant of those very same allegations. The government’s arguments are unavailing and the position is simply an expression of the Biden administration’s pivot back to ineffectual ‘tough-on-crime’ politics. The practice of using acquitted crimes as a basis for imposing longer jail terms has elicited visceral public outrage, intermittently, for decades.”

“US House votes against resolution to pull American troops out of Syria” [Andalu Agency]. “The US House of Representatives voted Wednesday against a resolution directing the Biden administration to withdraw all US troops from Syria. The war powers resolution was submitted by Florida Republican Matt Gaetz and was rejected in a 103-321 vote, with 47 Republicans and 56 Democrats voting ‘Yes.’ The bill cited section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, directing President Joe Biden to remove US armed forces from Syria within 180 days after the adoption of the resolution.”

“Tracking regulatory changes in the Biden era” [Brookings Institution]. • A good round-up, including revisions to Title IX.

2024

“Casey DeSantis Is Clearly Auditioning to Be FLOTUS” [Jezebel]. “I feel deeply in my bones that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is running for president in 2024. … Another extremely obvious tell? His wife’s wardrobe lately. Casey DeSantis has been drenching herself in gold, bright American flag red, and so many capes…. Casey is a former TV anchor and producer whom Politico has described as ‘unquestionably the most important person influencing DeSantis’ policy and political operations…She is the governor’s closest confidant and has more sway than any other adviser.’ Some have even called her ‘co-governor‘ of the state, according to a profile published in Insider.” • To me, her wardrobe looks a little… provincial. Perhaps that will be an advantage, however.

“Youngkin fuels speculation that he might challenge Trump” [The Hill]. “Chatter is growing around the possibility of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) launching a 2024 presidential bid as he seeks to bolster his national profile. Youngkin has inserted himself into the national spotlight in recent weeks as other potential GOP contenders, including fellow Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Florida, journey outside of their states to test the presidential waters. Last week, Youngkin made an appearance on CNBC’s morning show ‘Squawk Box’ and will participate in a live town hall on CNN on education, a hot-button issue for the GOP primary base. The governor also met with donors in New York last week. The visits come as recent polling has shown good news for Youngkin on the presidential front. A Roanoke College poll released last week showed the governor with a 57 percent approval rating, while President Biden’s approval sits at 38 percent. Among Independent voters, Youngkin beats the president 54 percent to 35 percent. And Youngkin is touting what he says is his administration’s success in the blue-leaning swing state. ”

AZ: Eeeewwww:

I wonder which ballot line Sinema will run on.

Democrats en Déshabillé

Patient readers, it seems that people are actually reading the back-dated post! But I have not updated it, and there are many updates. So I will have to do that. –lambert

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

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

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

* * *

“Treason of the Science Journals” [The Tablet]. I could have filed this under Covid Origins, but the moral of the story is more general. “The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists. As a product of its own hype, the science media has been granted a kind of epistemological special status on science-related issues.” “Fiat information,” IOW, transformed into symbolic capital. “On matters related to science, the thinking among consumer journalists goes, surely the science writers will have more, and better, things to say. That might be true, but on issues where science, money, power and crisis collide, it almost certainly is not. And no issue brought together those four horsemen of enlightened corruption more dramatically than the COVID-19 pandemic.” • The article is also a good summary of the “Proximal Origins” debacle, and well worth a read.

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Does American Fascism Exist?” [The New Republic]. “Some insist that the similarities between contemporary American populism and fascism—their shared racism, reliance on the petit bourgeois, hypernationalism, and xenophobia—indicate that fascism, finally, has come to America. Others disagree, maintaining that the enabling structural conditions of classical European fascism—firsthand experience of total war, a powerful left, and a relatively weak state capable of being taken over—no longer exist, and that, whatever right-wing populism is, describing it as ‘fascist’ occludes more than it illuminates. Into this fray enters the intellectual historian Bruce Kuklick, whose Fascism Comes to America provides an entirely new perspective on a debate that’s become a bit exhausting. Unlike other pundits and thinkers, Kuklick is not interested in whether ‘fascism’ as such has arrived in the United States. Rather, he’s concerned with how the term itself has been used in the last century of American discourse. ‘Fascism,’ Kuklick’s exhaustive survey of U.S. politics and culture shows, has generally functioned as a so-called floating signifier. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who originated the phrase, a floating signifier is a term ‘void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning.’ At one point or another, every political perspective in the United States has been identified as fascist.” • Maybe the real fascists were the floating signifiers we met along the way.

“#StopWillow: Gen Z Organizes Millions Online to Pressure Biden to Stop Oil Project” [Teen Vogue]. “During the last week, the #StopWillow movement has taken over TikTok and spilled into the streets of Washington, DC. While the social media blitz may not halt President Joe Biden’s plans to implement the Willow Project, a proposed drilling venture on Alaska’s North Slope, some behind the viral TikTok campaign told Teen Vogue it wouldn’t end with whatever Biden’s decision would be. Gen Z for Change’s Elise Joshi, 20, and TikToker Alex Haraus, 25, two creators involved in the decentralized campaign, told Teen Vogue they estimate a combined 550 million views across platforms is lending a spotlight to concerned Alaskans and what they see as the broader interests of Gen Z.” • Creators. Swell.

#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); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data).

• Readers, thanks for the push. We are now up to 38/50 states (76%). Could those of you in states not listed help out by either with dashboard/wastewater links, or ruling your state out definitively? Thank you! (I think I have caught up with everybody I missed.)

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard), Marin; CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); 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, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, Joe, John, JM (6), JW, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, otisyves, Petal (5), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (4), tennesseewaltzer, Utah, Bob White (3). (Readers, if you leave your link in comments, I credit you by your handle. If you send it to me via email, I use your initials (in the absence of a handle. I am not putting your handle next to your contribution because I hope and expect the list will be long, and I want it to be easy for readers to scan.)

• More like this, please! Total: 1 6 11 18 20 22 26 27 28 38/50 (76% of US states). We should list states that do not have Covid resources, or have stopped updating their sites, so others do not look fruitlessly. Thank you!

* * *

Look for the Helpers

This is the sort of approach I rarely hear:

And much more. I quote this at length, again because it’s rare:

I agree. It’s not a mere question of numbers; it’s the fact that “we” are cut off from each other, not least because of the protective measures we take. I’m not sure what to do about this.

* * *

This is the sort of approach I find it hard to do well, because it’s hard for me to stay calm:

* * *

Finding like-minded people on (sorry) Facebook:

“Covid Meetups” [COVID MEETUPS (JM)]. “A free service to find individuals, families and local businesses/services who take COVID precautions in your area.” • I played around with it some. It seems to be Facebook-driven, sadly, but you can use the Directory without logging in. I get rational hits from the U.S., but not from London, UK, FWIW.

Maskstravaganza

“Don’t do like the others” (Google translation) [Ekstra Bladet]. “One by one the riders came running to be registered for the first stage. But when Jonas Vingegaard came rolling shortly before the first stage of Paris-Nice, something was different anyway. Of course, he is the defending Tour [de France] winner, but at the same time he was also the only one wearing a mask. – It’s to avoid getting sick. It is cold and there is still corona. I’d rather put the mask on now. – That is why you can still get sick. It’s not that. The less risk there is for that, the better, says Vingegaard.”

“I want to see your smile”:

Good for the principal!

This creep has gotten a lot of play in Australia recently:

Sequelae

Influencers and “I cough I can’t shake”:

Policy

“How to minimize COVID’s impacts once the federal emergency ‘ends'” [Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]. “Promising therapies and interventions exist. The question is whether there is the societal will to enact them…. New tools to enhance immunity could help reduce transmission. One of the most promising is the idea of nasal vaccines that elicit mucosal immunity. … Another way to reduce the burden of COVID-19 would be to improve air quality…. HEPA-filtered air, as provided in airplanes or hospitals, can dramatically improve air quality. Another approach—pending more safety and efficacy data –could be to disinfect the air with low wavelength far-UVC light, which cannot pass through the outermost layer of human skin but can readily inactivate airborne microbes. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed in November of 2021, could be one area for funding the necessary infrastructure improvements. The law provides financing for improving air quality in public places, but it will likely take a year or two for the money to filter down to communities… Another question is how to effectively continue activities with well-established public-health benefits, like masking indoors and in outdoor crowds. Despite how politically contentious masking has become, masks can be extremely effective. In universally masked settings, transmission was low even with reduced social distancing… Some strategies, like better medicines, will allow us to survive COVID. Others, like better vaccines and better air, could help quash outbreaks. Only time will tell if we will be able to ever rid ourselves of omicron and its subvariants. Others infectious disease threats could be looming, as well.”

“Covid backlash hobbles public health and future pandemic response” [WaPo]. “When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the president can force federal agencies to issue vaccination or testing mandates to thwart its march. Conservative and libertarian forces have defanged much of the nation’s public health system through legislation and litigation as the world staggers into the fourth year of covid. At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority, according to a Washington Post analysis of laws collected by Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press as well as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University.” • One hand washes the other: the Republicans destroyed public health at the state and local level, and Democrats did it at the Federal level (and in the media). Of course, even the worst Republican didn’t suggest mask-wearers were criminals, as did Democrat Eric Adams, mayor of the extremely Blue New York.

“Almost Half of All Public Health Workers Left Their Jobs Over the Past 5 Years” [MedPage Today]. “Nearly half of all public health workers in state and local agencies left their positions over the last half-decade, a new study found. Comparing public health agency staff lists from 2017 with those of 2021, researchers led by Jonathon P. Leider, PhD, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, discovered that 46% of workers were no longer present in 2021. Importantly, more than 100,000 workers — which amounts to half of the total governmental public health workforce — could leave by 2025 if current trends continue, the group detailed in Health Affairs. Their study tracked intent to leave as well as actual separations of 150,000 workers at close to 100 agencies participating in the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS) in 2017 and 2021. ‘Even though we’ve had so many people already leave, we still have 40% plus of the workforce saying, ‘I’m thinking about leaving,'” Leider told MedPage Today. ‘These are the people that are more educated in public health science than ever before, in pandemic crisis management than ever before. How do you replace people like that?'” • You don’t. That’s the plan.

Elite Malfeasance

“The latest sign the White House Covid operations are winding down? Its proposed budget” [Politico]. “President Joe Biden is not expected to seek significant new Covid funding as part of his forthcoming budget proposal, the latest sign that the White House is preparing to wind down its emergency response operation later this year. The move comes as Biden has insisted that the public health crisis is under control, and amid a broader administration shift toward new priorities aimed at bolstering the post-pandemic economy and lowering consumer costs. The White House proposal, which is scheduled for release Thursday, is expected to drop a call Biden made last year for tens of billions of dollars to fuel the ongoing crisis response, including purchasing more vaccines and treatments, three people familiar with the matter told POLITICO. The budget may also leave out the administration’s prior request for new funding to jumpstart research aimed at developing the next generation of Covid vaccines and therapeutics. Health officials are currently discussing whether there’s existing money that can be reallocated toward the project.” • So much for nasal vaccines, and even the possibility of sterilizing vaccines. To be fair, repeated injections of a privatized vaccine are far more profitable for Big Pharma, which is doubtless top-of-mind for the eugenicsts in the Biden Administration.

GM wrote:

Note once again that it is impossible to calculate VE once they let it rip and most of the population was infected.

It is now an extremely complex mix of different exposure histories in the population — vaccinations, bivalent boosters, WT, Delta, various Omicron strains — with most of the infections entirely undocumented.

So we are comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated but infected, or vaccinated with bivalent boosted with vaccinated with the original course but without the bivalent booster, and in all of these groups there is a tremendous amount of previous undocumented infection.

How do you actually separate whatever effect the bivalent booster might be having in such a situation?

You simply can’t.

Stupid Nazis. They numbered all their victims, and used state-of-the-art punch card technology from IBM to keep track of them. We don’t keep track of any data at all!

* * *

Looks like “leveling off to a high plateau” across the board. (I still think “Something Awful” is coming, however. I mean, besides what we already know about.) Stay safe out there!

Case Data

NOT UPDATED BioBot wastewater data from March 6:

For now, I’m going to use this national wastewater data as the best proxy for case data (ignoring the clinical case data portion of this chart, which in my view “goes bad” after March 2022, for reasons as yet unexplained). At least we can spot trends, and compare current levels to equivalent past levels.

Covid Emergency Room Visits

NOT UPDATED From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, from March 4:

NOTE “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. Anyhow, I added a grey “Fauci line” just to show that Covid wasn’t “over” when they started saying it was, and it’s not over now.

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, published March 9:

-2.9%. Still high, but at last a distinct downturn.

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Total: 1,148,090 – 1,147,217 = 873 (873 * 365 = 318,645 deaths per year, today’s YouGenicist™ number for “living with” Covid (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the YouGenicist™ metric keeps chugging along like this, I may just have to decide this is what the powers-that-be consider “mission accomplished” for this particular tranche of death and disease).

★ NEW ★ Excess Deaths

Excess deaths (The Economist), published February 26:

Lambert here: Based on a machine-learnning model. Again, we see a high plateau. I”m not sure how often this updates, and if it doesn’t, I’ll remove it. (The CDC has an excess estimate too, but since it ran forever with a massive typo in the Legend, I figured nobody was really looking at it, so I got rid it.

Stats Watch

Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of Americans filing unemployment benefits jumped by 21,000 from the previous week to 211,000 on the week ending March 4th, the most since December 2022 and well above market expectations of 195,000. The latest value was the first upside surprise in one month, diverging from a series of labor data that underscored a stubbornly tight job market and hinting that labor conditions could start to soften.”

Employment Situation: “United States Challenger Job Cuts” [Trading Economics]. “US-based employers announced 77.77K job cuts in February of 2023, the most for the month of February since 2009 and compared to 102.943K in January which was the highest reading since September of 2020. Job cuts occurred in all 30 industries, led by technology companies (21,387) and the health care/products space (9,749). So far this year, employers announced plans to cut 180,713 jobs, up 427% from the 34,309 cuts announced in the first two months of 2022 and the highest January-February total since 2009. The tech sector has announced 35% of all job cuts in 2023.” • Elon Musk leading the way? If so, remarkable class solidarity, rather like Uber taking one for the team to cripple public transport and create a whole new class of precarious workers. What’s a few billion dollars compared to that?

* * *

Energy: “U.S. Shale Boom Shows Signs of Peaking as Big Oil Wells Disappear” [Wall Street Journal]. “The boom in oil production that over the last decade made the U.S. the world’s largest producer is waning, suggesting the era of shale growth is nearing its peak. Frackers are hitting fewer big gushers in the Permian Basin, America’s busiest oil patch, the latest sign they have drained their catalog of good wells. Shale companies’ biggest and best wells are producing less oil, according to data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported last year companies would exhaust their best U.S. inventory in a handful of years if they resumed the breakneck drilling pace of prepandemic times. Now, recent results out of the Permian, spread across West Texas and New Mexico, are mimicking the onset of a production plateau that has taken place at other, more mature U.S. shale plays.” • I don’t think fracked wells “gush.”

Real Estate: “Investors are measuring return to office rates by how much employees are drinking at the water cooler as the remote work wars rage on” [Fortune]. “The amount of water dispensed in machines sold by Bevi — a Boston-based startup that provides Internet-connected coolers to more than 5,000 businesses across the US — mirrors the office occupancy rates tracked by security firm Kastle Systems throughout the pandemic. In 2021, when the delta and omicron variants of Covid-19 gripped the nation, Bevi’s machines were operating at 28% of pre-pandemic levels for the full year, in line with Kastle’s 30% return-to-office rate. Last year, as offices slowly reopened, the figures increased in tandem, to just over 40%. They’ve risen again so far this year, although Bevi’s delivery volumes are now about 5 percentage points ahead of Kastle’s index. That could be due to increased consumption from smaller companies, which don’t often occupy the large commercial office buildings that Kastle tracks, according to Sean Grundy, Bevi’s co-founder and chief executive officer. Grundy said he’s received inquiries from hedge funds and other investors who want to examine his company’s data for a window into office-occupancy trends.” • Neat proxy!’

Tech: “From marketing to design, brands adopt AI tools despite risk” [Associated Press]. “Mattel has put the AI image generator DALL-E to work by having it come up with ideas for new Hot Wheels toy cars. Used vehicle seller CarMax is summarizing thousands of customer reviews with the same ‘generative’ AI technology that powers the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Snapchat is bringing a chatbot to its messaging service. And the grocery delivery company Instacart is integrating ChatGPT to answer customers’ food questions. Coca-Cola plans to use generative AI to help create new marketing content. And while the company hasn’t detailed exactly how it plans to deploy the technology, the move reflects the growing pressure on businesses to harness tools that many of their employees and consumers are already trying on their own. ‘We must embrace the risks,’ said Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey in a recent video announcing a partnership with startup OpenAI — maker of both DALL-E and ChatGPT — through an alliance led by the consulting firm Bain. ‘We need to embrace those risks intelligently, experiment, build on those experiments, drive scale, but not taking those risks is a hopeless point of view to start from.'” • Since AI = BS, brands should do just fine with it.

Manufacturing: “US probes Tesla Autopilot, steering wheels that can come off” [Associated Press]. “U.S. safety regulators are turning up the heat on Tesla, announcing investigations into steering wheels coming off some SUVs and a fatal crash involving a Tesla suspected of using an automated driving system when it ran into a parked firetruck in California. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Wednesday it is launching a special crash-investigation team to probe the Feb. 18 crash involving a Tesla Model S and a ladder truck from the Contra Costa County fire department. The firetruck probe is part of a larger investigation by the agency into multiple instances of Teslas using the automaker’s Autopilot system crashing into parked emergency vehicles that are tending to other crashes. NHTSA has become more aggressive in pursuing safety problems with Teslas in the past year, announcing multiple recalls and investigations.”

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 43 Fear (previous close: 45 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 50 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Mar 9 at 1:14 PM ET.

The 420

“Mitch McConnell Is Hospitalized After Tripping at Washington Hotel” [New York Times]. • Blotter? Windowpane? Orange Sunshine?

“Oklahoma voters reject legalizing recreational marijuana” [Associated Press]. “On Tuesday’s legalization question, the “no” side was outspent more than 20-to-1, with supporters of the initiative spending more than $4.9 million, compared to about $219,000 against, last-minute campaign finance reports show…. The low barriers for entry into Oklahoma’s medical marijuana industry has led to a flood of growers, processors and dispensary operators competing for a limited number of customers. Supporters had hoped the state’s marijuana industry would be buoyed by a rush of out-of-state customers, particularly from Texas, which has close to 8 million people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area just a little more than an hour drive from the Oklahoma border. Michelle Tilley, campaign director for Yes on 820, said despite Tuesday’s result, full marijuana legalization was inevitable. She noted that almost 400,000 Oklahomans already use marijuana legally and ‘many thousands more’ use it illegally. ‘A two-tiered system, where one group of Oklahomans is free to use this product and the other is treated like criminals does not make logical sense,’ she said in a statement.”

Book Nook

“How the Ring Got Good” [Robin Sloan]. Fascinating. “The History of The Lord of the Rings sounds like it might be a nerdy diegetic reference work, something from Elrond’s library. Oh — it’s far nerdier than that. These books present J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at many stages of its development, from jotted notes to published text, with extensive commentary from Christopher Tolkien, the son who became THE great scholar of his father’s work. … Tolkien, for all his vaunted designs, only got to The Good Stuff when he was IN it, really working the text of the novels (or novel, if you consider The Lord of the Rings one big book). He could not worldbuild his way into a workable story; he had to muddle and discover and revise, just like the rest of us. Here is the example that took my breath away. Early in the published version of The Lord of the Rings (hereafter, LOTR) we learn about the inscription on the One Ring, which provides the whole engine of the plot…. In a single stroke, we get: a mythic backstory, a grand MacGuffin, a sense of language and history, the sublimely satisfying train of magic numbers — three … seven … nine … ONE! — plus something graphically weird and beautiful on the page. It’s all just tremendous — the perfect kernel of Tolkien’s appeal. And, guess what: Not only was the inscription missing from the early drafts of LOTR … the whole logic of the ring was missing, too. In its place was a mess. The ring possessed by Bilbo Baggins was one of thousands the Dark Lord manufactured, all basically equivalent: they made their wearers invisible, and eventually claimed their souls. They were like cursed candies scattered by Sauron across Middle-earth…. There are several revised approaches to “what’s the deal with the ring?” presented in The History of The Lord of the Rings, and, as you read through the drafts, the material just … slowly gets better! Bit by bit, the familiar angles emerge. There seems not to have been any magic moment: no electric thought in the bathtub, circa 1931, that sent Tolkien rushing to find a pen. It was just revision. I find this totally inspiring.” • Yes!!!

Healthcare

“Long Covid patients face medical debt after insurance denies claims” [NBC], “In order for the care a patient receives to be deemed medically necessary by an insurance provider, there has to be substantial research or evidence that shows that it works, she said. That’s ‘a key issue for long Covid,’ she said, because the illness is so new and still poorly understood. ‘Research, just like everything with Covid, is all new,’ she said. ‘Nobody really quite knows what works and nobody really understands why some people have it longer than others.’ To be sure, as of 2021, there are diagnostic codes for long Covid — key tools used by doctors to characterize medical diagnoses for insurance coverage, said Dr. Alan Kwan, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Those codes, however, don’t always cover the myriad health problems linked to long Covid, he said. Doctors may work hard to get a patient a formal diagnosis for long Covid to help with insurance, though there isn’t an official test for long Covid and the testing that is done may not be covered by insurance.” • First the killing, then the billing.

“Cost of COVID: New study says those with Long COVID pay thousands more for treatment” [9ABC]. “The symptoms that last for months or years after the initial infection, long COVID currently impacts 23 million Americans, or roughly 30% of COVID cases. A new study shows the condition comes with a hefty price tag. A Harvard study found those with Long COVID costs the U.S. economy $538 billion in medical expenses; and for each patient roughly $9,000 a year in medical costs.” • I’m surprised it’s that little.

“Responding to the crisis of care” (PDF) [BMJ]. “Healthcare is in crisis across most of the globe, and perhaps particularly in our two countries of the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which appear more disunited than ever by the greed and carelessness that drive socioeconomic and political polarisation, and the systematic degradation of our planet. There are two possible responses to this crisis. The first assumes that this is simply a crisis of organisation, efficiency, information, technology, and scale. It sees people as insufficiently studied biological machines, as sparsely detailed clouds of data, as inadequately monitored and regulated physiologies. The increasingly ruthless pipedream is that, if only the healthcare industry could access and use everyone’s biomedical and socioeconomic data, then their needs could be predicted, and a healthy future would be assured for all…. The second response assumes this is a crisis of care in and of itself. Care happens in the space between people, in an unhurried encounter. Only humans in interaction can care. It is in this interaction in which one notices a problem in the other and seeks to respond to the other’s predicament to improve their situation. In healthcare, this noticing goes beyond the biological to appreciate the biographical, and, fully aware that bodies are not machines and that emotions—both positive and negative—exert a powerful influence on every aspect of health. It goes beyond what makes living possible to consider what makes living meaningful. Care is not just the adherence to evidence-based guidelines to improve population-level metrics. The work of care discovers or invents ways forward. The effort of care fosters hope that the situation could be better in the future. It results in a way forward co-created with the intention of comforting always, while spanning from complex surgery to keeping company with the dying, from fixing to alleviating.” • Sure, but how to you monetize “the space between people” without a code + a transaction? Let’s be realistic here, people.

Zeitgeist Watch

UPDATE Indeed we are:

The Gallery

Just leaving this here because I may need it later:

And this because it makes me laugh:

Which I don’t do often for Cubist paintings!

Our Famously Free Press

“My Statement to Congress” [Matt Taibbi, Racket News]. “The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere. What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role….. In a free society we don’t mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy. This is why ‘anti-disinformation’ just doesn’t work. Any experienced journalist knows experts are often initially wrong, and sometimes they even lie. In fact, when elite opinion is too much in sync, this itself can be a red flag. We just saw this with the Covid lab-leak theory. Many of the institutions we’re now investigating initially labeled the idea that Covid came from a lab “disinformation” and conspiracy theory. Now apparently even the FBI takes it seriously. It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at. This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions.” • [applause].

Guillotine Watch

“Upper West Side votes against proposed rest stop for delivery workers at 72nd Street” [Gothamist]. “Upper West Side residents voted against transforming an empty newsstand at 72nd Street and Broadway into a new charging station for e-bike delivery workers on Tuesday night. More than 70 people showed up to the public meeting for Community Board 7. Ultimately, the group voted 27-8 against the resolution, with two members abstaining. Several Upper West Siders expressed concerns about the e-bikes’ lithium batteries, which have triggered deadly fires across the city. The most common concerns were about the hub’s location and the risks of placing a charging station so close to a heavily trafficked subway station.” • So long as they don’t call the manager when their food is late. But you know they do and will.

Class Warfare

“UAW tells Caterpillar workers it will not distribute full contract at informational meetings: ‘It was a propaganda show mixed with passive-aggressive bullying'” [WSWS]. “With the ratification vote on the tentative agreement reached between the United Auto Workers and Caterpillar rapidly approaching this weekend, the workers are being stonewalled by the UAW bureaucracy at so-called “informational meetings” this week to discuss the UAW-backed contract proposal. The UAW announced voting for the proposed contract would be held on Saturday and Sunday for workers at Peoria and Decatur, Illinois. Workers in Decatur have been split up into multiple meetings from Monday to Friday this week before they vote on Saturday and Sunday, preventing workers from voicing their concerns en masse. Workers in Peoria have had their informational meetings and voting times scheduled for the weekend, with virtually no time to discuss even the limited ‘highlights’ that have been handed to workers. Caterpillar workers who attended meetings in Decatur Tuesday reported that local UAW officials are refusing to distribute the full contract, claiming that it would be ‘leaked’ online. UAW officials told workers there was a copy of the full contract, which is over a hundred pages, at the union hall for individual workers to read, but that it would not be released digitally. In response, workers are demanding to know what the company and the union leadership have to hide as the information meetings consist of evasions and threats when workers ask questions.” • And “leaking” the contract online would be bad why? Whose contract is it, anyhow?

Prices rise because firms raise them:

“Chartism” (podcast) [In Our Time, BBC]. “On 21 May 1838 an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration. There they witnessed the launch of the People’s Charter, a list of demands for political reform. The changes they called for included voting by secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies and, most importantly, that all men should have the vote. The Chartists, as they came to be known, were the first national mass working-class movement. In the decade that followed, they collected six million signatures for their Petitions to Parliament: all were rejected, but their campaign had a significant and lasting impact.” • One of the most re-assuring things to me about “In Our Time” is that there is still excellent academic work being done. And communicated!

News of the Wired

Termination shock in reality?!

And:

I can’t assess this study. Can climate mavens comment?

“Celebrity sightings have a built-in contradiction” (press release) [NewsWise]. n = 52. “Their popularity makes celebrities easy to spot. Strangers, however, can also get mistaken for celebrities, resulting in cases of false “celebrity sightings.” In attempting to explain the contradiction, a University of California, Riverside, study reports that celebrity faces are remembered more precisely but less accurately. Precision, in this context, refers to how memories for a particular face resemble each other over repeated memory retrievals, which can be likened to the clustering of arrows on a target in archery. Accuracy measures how remembered faces resemble newly encountered faces — or the deviation from the target in archery. ‘What our findings say is that people might accept errors by misidentifying someone as a celebrity in the interest of securing a ‘celebrity sighting,’; said Weiwei Zhang, an associate professor of psychology, who led the study that appears in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. ‘Our study explains why people are good and bad at spotting celebrities and highlights the importance of assessing both memory imprecision and bias in memory performance.'”

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JL writes: “Small blue/violet Wishbone flower with a guest. The grasshopper is about 1cm from head to tail. Hope you can make out its long antennae.”

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

91 comments

    1. jo6pac

      Oh I would love to see this list so we can tell what meds both houses are on.

      Thanks flora

      1. Pat

        Put me down for wanting to know what insurance covers for them that would be denied average policy holders. How much out of pocket doesn’t exist for them etc. Not sure if that is contained in these records but I bet covered by insurance is.

    2. notabanker

      This would be delicious. Let them eat their own dog food.

      DC Health Link, which runs the exchange, said an unspecified number of customers were impacted and it was notifying them and working with law enforcement to quantify the damage. It said it was offering identity theft service to those affected and extending credit monitoring to all customers.

  1. mrsyk

    “Creators. Swell” That seems a bit harsh. I am all for stopping the Willow project. And while 550M views across platforms might be a slippery number, I’m still impressed. Sure, “creator” is a cunning industry term for people who post on social media, designed to make you feel like your doing something useful while you support their platforms, but that’s not really the point here.

    1. Lambert Strether Post author

      > am all for stopping the Willow project.

      I’m for it, sure. I just think it’s an effort that’s much too small for the problems we face, and there’s very little prospect for success through parasocial relations like influencing.

      1. mrsyk

        I must admit I know next to nothing of the mysteries of influencers and creators. I also believe that the era where protests and petitions had power is well behind us. But I’ve made a personal decision not to dump on anyone for making an effort. And if someone can make a little cash while promoting saving us from ourselves, I’m good with that too.

      1. Stephen V

        Yikes. Is that a James Forrestal reference? 1st US Sec Def and questioner of the birth process of a certain middle Eastern state…

        1. ambrit

          Or the Fort Dietrich chemical and biological weapons delivery specialist Frank Olson who, after being unwittingly dosed with LSD by his “superiors” ended up, several weeks later “jumping” out of a thirteenth story hotel window in New York in 1953?

          1. Stephen V

            Excellent documentary on this featuring Olson’s son! There’s also a book on Forrestal that I doubt many know about.

            1. ambrit

              Aaaaaargth!!! Link please. If it also mentions ‘Operation Highjump,’ I’ll definitely buy it.

                1. ambrit

                  Thank you. Checking deeper, I find only one copy of Simpson’s book “The Death of James Forrestal” available through Abe Books, and at $225 USD! Cannot find it elsewhere. (I always get hard copies if possible.)

              1. Wukchumni

                I pushed my oldest sister* out of the 2nd story window of our grandparents farm in Alberta in 1967, so I might just have some latent qualities left in me, being a Bohemian’s Bohemian.

                * she survived, but it set a trend for her not liking me much when we were growing up, all better now though and we enjoy each others company.

            1. R.S.

              Frankly, this “fallen out of a window” meme is getting a bit boring. It’s just relatively new (about five years or so) stupid media guidelines. Usually that means “unconfirmed suicide”. Lots of high-rise apartment complexes, much fewer guns around.

              1. ambrit

                I was wondering if “fallen out of a window” was the new “caught the Moscow flu?”
                Both seem to have uniformly unpleasant outcomes.
                Oh, and, alas, no more “Which way is the gas flowing in the Nordstream pipelines jokes.”

      1. griffen

        That commercial is a real classic. I kinda remember that advertisment being popular during my teenager numbskull years. Fox news (online anyway, but yeah) has a summary that not all are wishing well upon the concussed Senator of Kentucky.

        Somewhere locked away in his secret lair, I’m sure someone at the White House is thinking finally, am I catching a break? I could show pity upon this adversary, and dare I say even mercy to mine enemies. \sarc

    1. Acacia

      GOP, so it could have been some of that legendary microdot adorned with an image of Richard Nixon at the Pyramids of Giza.

    2. ambrit

      This bunch are so ‘out of touch’ with reality, how could we tell?
      To be “embubbled” suggests ‘Pocket universes’ are the order of the day. Since there is, so far, no “hard data” supporting easily entered ‘pocket universes,’ I wonder then, are the “embubbled” clinically diagnosable? If so, interventions are in order. That idea however would open up a whole ‘nother can of lobbyists.

  2. Tom Doak

    “Leaking” the Caterpillar contract online would be bad because it might give other workers ideas, duh.

  3. Mark Gisleson

    Fwiw, right about the time Taibbi began testifying before Congress, Twitter let me know my account was OK and could be reactivated without a phone number. One year and six days after they suspended me for suspicious account activity.

    I’d say I’d learned my lesson, but they never told me what I did that was wrong.

  4. Lambert Strether Post author

    I added some orts and scraps. I’m in a bit of a low energy state today, so I was a bit slow. The long thread under “Look for the helpers” is interesting, because so often nothing like it is said. “Utter incredulity” indeed. That’s why I ended up repeating the idea that “democidal elites are a parsimonious explanation.” Certainly it fits the fact set!

  5. Darius

    That New Republic excerpt confuses populism with demagoguery. Populism is egalitarian, not racist. It also is based in material concerns, a just distribution of resources. Populism without material demands is demagoguery . Which is why these so-called populists rely on culture war and division. They can never really speak for the working class because their politics is all about concentrating wealth in the oligarchy. They are all about dividing the working class to make them easy pickings for the oligarchs.

    1. JBird4049

      >>>That New Republic excerpt confuses populism with demagoguery.

      There are reasons why so many publications and writers confuse the two, just as they “confuse” populism with fascism. The confusion makes the suppression of actual populism easier and if it is fascism, people might think studying its history unimportant. Much like conflating unionism with communism and especially stalinism, makes understanding the history of, and the need for, unions unnecessary.

  6. Carolinian

    Re floating signifiers–floats like a signifier, stings like a bee? We do seem to be living in a “means what I want it to mean” era with concomitant decline in the number of English majors. Here’s some fusty conservative talking about the good old days.

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-english-departments-died/

    And I had just downloaded this latest In Our Time which I love despite my probably tiresome anti-academia propaganda around here. That said, not all the shows are quite up to the mark so it helps to download rather than stream.

    I think the value of the show is its very reliance on specialization rather than perfessers who want to opine on politics. Even we can do that.

    1. Harold

      In discussing Fascism, “Floating term” is not a useful concept, pace Levy-Strauss. Abstract terms, like religion, or democracy, say, can mean different things to different people, since you can’t point to a material thing — like a dog or rock. One scholar, Arthur. O. Lovejoy, identified and tried to trace connections between, 62 different definitions of the word “Nature”.

      So before a discussion can be had, you have to define and agree on what you mean when you use a term like Fascism. 


      I used to be a devoted follower of the BBC In Our Time podcast although since they have started having commercials have sort of stopped listening. In any case, they are usually very good, but less so if you already know something about the topic

      What I learned from the “In Our Time” episode on hybridization, however, was enlightening, at least to me, vis a vis defining movements such as Fascist ones . Though entitled “Hybridization” it was really about what constitutes a Species, since taxonomists have found recently that hybridization is much more common that they anticipated and species much more malleable. 


      According to the academic discussants, a species is a kind of prediction of what kind of traits you will find in a group. By analogy, i

t seems to me, that what makes a political movement a Fascist one is the presence or not of a grouping of factors, such as you would expect to find in it. And if political movements share say 50% of a certain grouping of factors, such as the cult of a leader, suppression of newspapers, lack of parliament, inclusion of working class, militarism and expansionism, and cult of the family, to name a few, then you can say they are Fascist. Otherwise you could only say such a group or groups have some fascistic traits but not all of them. The problem is to describe the essential factors.

      1. Carolinian

        The link is on my other computer but if you go to the In Our Time webpage you can download an mp3 that is several weeks behind the radio with commercial version which we Yanks cannot, I believe, get without a UK url.

        And I’d say that when the show is good it’s very good but after all these years they are perhaps straining for topics. At one point a couple of years back they asked the listeners to suggest some.

        And of course the meaning of words always depends on general usage even if this particular word had a particular origin. The problem is that Hitler still so dominates the public imagination that fascism has become little more than an epithet in some quarters and one designed to evoke the Nazi boogieman. It has appeal if rhetoric is what you want. Some of us prefer actual information rather than empty name calling.

        1. Harold

          A “floating signifier” on which anyone can project their imagination it is not. If refers to a number of real factors about a government. As far as having a secret police, the Hapsburg Empire had an extensive and very repressive secret police , and under the law of lèse-majesté you could go to prison if a stranger standing next to you overheard you muttering something disrespectful about the ruler (and you still can in some places). Yet this did not make it a Fascist regime, because it had a rule of law, among other institutions. It did not have the Fuhrer Pinzip, for example, and it did not have huge signs everywhere saying “The Emperor is Alway Right” in giant letters.
          The term may be popularly thrown about as an negative epithet. So are many other terms, but this doesn’t make it meaningless. It just means you have to define the way you are using it, hopefully in a way that other people — historians and political scientists and literate audiences –will accept.

  7. mrsyk

    Sulphur, shipping and climate. I don’t have the chops to check the math in those tweets, but I do know that sulphur cooling loss is a thing, one of the many horsemen of the climate apocalypse if you will. IMO the numbers are becoming meaningless, scribbles on the margins of the writing on the wall.
    More sad news on this front, one of the greats in climate science has passed. Will Steffen

  8. Jason Boxman

    ‘Extraordinary’ congressional health data breach could expose lawmakers and staff, House leaders say

    An email sent out by the office of the Chief Administrative Office of the House on behalf of McCarthy and Jeffries called the breach “egregious” and urged members to use credit and identity theft monitoring resources.

    LOL. Welcome to the life ordinary Americans live. I had my stuff hacked back in 2014. Got an identity theft affidavit signed by local law enforcement so I could get a 7 year alert on my credit file. Finally renewed it 16 months ago; The credit agencies make it hard enough to achieve. No clear way to renew, so I submitted a new request after mine expired. Two agencies ignored it sent registered mail. The last one accepted it, and supposedly this was propagated to the other two as it must be by law.

    I didn’t do the freeze. Krebs on Security showed that a hacker could effectively unlock it by hacking the API at at least one credit agency. Until recently, a freeze wasn’t free, either.

    What a screwed up country.

  9. JBird4049

    >>>Most important thing is not to have masked people looking after those in last year of life

    What the flying f—?

    1. mrsyk

      Dr Coatsworth sure has the “I’m not a real doctor, but I play one on tv” look. I guess that’s all that maters these days. Shameful.

    2. The Rev Kev

      What a lying sack of s***. When I have railed about the media and medical doctors pushing for acceptance of the Pandemic, this is exactly the sort of stuff that I mean. I’m sure I have seen him on TV before so did a quick background check and found that he is ‘infectious disease physician, a respiratory physician, a practitioner of disaster and humanitarian medicine’ so he has to know that what he says is a lie. Old people should depend on a fifth vaccination and don’t worry about their smiling staff?

      In the comments under that tweet the word ‘eugenics’ gets kicked around a bit. I did a quick check earlier this week and found that about only 912 had died before we opened up the country. Since then? About another eighteen and a half thousand more but that is OK. Just so long as the economy is doing well as that is what really matters.

  10. Earl Kirkman

    Today is a screen full of soviet america, from j. edgar stalin, to the wild west COVID playground, to the special police action. It is a damn shame we have come so far so fast.

  11. Adam

    Re: Covid and masking. Just returned from a driving vacation through Portugal and literally nobody was masking anywhere. The only place I saw many mask wearers was while waiting in line at O’Hare airport to get through customs and border control. Sad and scary given that large numbers of people were coughing everywhere we went. We brought a large number of 3M N95’s with us to keep ourselves safe.

  12. FreeMarketApologist

    Re: “Upper West Side votes against proposed rest stop”

    So typical of the now prevalent ethos on the UWS.

    I would so like to see the delivery people, or the companies they are working for, organize a boycott to addresses in the UWS until some concessions are made. 50 yrs ago, many UWS residents would have helped organize protests for the delivery people’s rights. Now, not so much.

    (My priors: I live on the East Side, and don’t use delivery services.)

  13. JBird4049

    >>>Stupid Nazis. They numbered all their victims, and used state-of-the-art punch card technology from IBM to keep track of them. We don’t keep track of any data at all!

    There is a good book on the subject of the use of IBM’s machines by the Nazis. However, both the United States’ government and the Nazis are/were using data in an intelligent way. The former to hide and, if you want to get tinfoilish, to enable Covid’s eugenical dance of death, while the latter was used to enable the Holocaust’s eugenical extermination machine. The management of information is used in both situations to kill people and as a means of control, gathering power, and extracting wealth from the dead and dying, including their families and friends.

    I think the Nazis were more honest with themselves whereas the current regime is busily manufacturing reasons why they are not the baddies. The plot of the movie The Third Man would be an example of one the methods they are using to BS themselves.

    It is interesting, maybe I should say horrifying, that the Nazis got all their ideas from the United States’ social movements like the Progressives, the governments especially the states (pretty much all of them had eugenicist programs or laws. I am sure there must be exceptions, but they are hard to find.), and the law both legislated and from judicial decisions including from the Supreme Court.

    Everything started in the United States once the British came up with the idea and word of eugenics. The only real differences between America and Germany was that the Americans both were more informal, even chaotic, in the implementation with some of the practices still being illegal even at the height, and they never quite commit to eugenics especially wholesale. In fairness, eugenics in America had a lot of pushback across class and race. However, the Germans systematized and pushed the reach of eugenics as practiced with the Holocaust being only the worst example.

    What I am trying to say in my long winded way is that much of what can be put under the label of eugenics in the United States both has never completely gone away, and the implementation was often done on the sly, many times using still very illegal methods. This is why I do not dismiss the idea of the pandemic as not only being due to surprise, mass incompetence and stupidity, but also a partially ideologically driven genocide, and a means of wealth extraction with the center being the United States in its clumsy, even chaotic, way. This makes discerning what is happening hard to do with finding the reasons even harder. Federal, state, and local governments, organizations, and cliques all interacting with each other makes it confusing.

    1. Carolinian

      Perhaps “worse than a crime, a mistake.” One problem with conspiracy theories is the assignment of Professor Moriarty style all seeing villainy to people who are in reality ill intentioned blunderers. After all if this is a pandemic to control the poors it has taken out some rich and famous as well. Meanwhile Hitler’s ideas didn’t work out well for him.

      We one time Baptists were told “honesty is the best policy.”:There is something to that even if current society seems to run on a different track.

    2. VietnamVet

      When society is disparaged and the only thing of value is money, the elite ruling clans/castes think and work only to help themselves. Long term safety and efficacy studies cost money and hinder marketing. During a pandemic in the neoliberal capitalism system, the precautionary principle will always be circumvented. Shortages allow monopolies to raise prices. Wars are profit centers. Governments are privatized. Corporations deregulated. Literally, it is everybody for themselves today.

      This century is the culmination of the flat earth contradictions. If the earth is a globe, everything is circular not infinitely flat. The world view – the system will only change to something that works if human survival, happiness, and reproduction are prioritized over the accumulation of money. The system of ever-expanding worker and resource exploitation and the resulting pollution – entropy – disorder will inevitably end human civilization on a finite earth. Regional civilizations have come and gone for this very reason, already, when resources became depleted.

  14. Will

    Sadly found myself shocked this report was even written let alone published. I should perhaps keep hope alive for a better future?

    Report Says Long COVID Could Impact Economy and Be Max Disabling Event in Canada

    Even more amazingly:

    In response, the federal government on Thursday announced $29 million in funding for the development of clinical guidelines and the creation of an online network where researchers and clinicians can share information about long COVID with each other and the public.

    Perhaps more money is warranted but beggars can’t be choosers.

    1. notabanker

      Yeah, that’s so they can means test who is not going to be eligible for disability. Sorry to break your bottle of hopium.

  15. Martin Oline

    The article about Casey DeSantis annoys me although I abhor her husband. “Casey DeSantis has been drenching herself in gold, bright American flag red, and so many capes…” She is a cancer survivor (2022) but whether it is breast cancer I cannot say. She could very well be insecure about her appearance. This is under the heading of Fashion at Jezebel so I am not surprised there is almost nothing to the article other than “she is trying to be Jackie O.” This annoys me because my wife is a cancer survivor and elected to forgo reconstructive surgery because the pain of the mastectomy was more than she bargained for. No need to repeat or prolong it for the sake of vanity. Perhaps Jezebel should rename their Fashion section to Vanity.

    1. notabanker

      Just like the NYT telling us about their sourcing on the Ukrainian pipeline sabotage?

    2. barefoot charley

      Thanks for the hell clip, Flora. I know how low my fellow Democrats can go, but the lady’s crazy salad of malice and ignorance still hurts. Glad the journalists retained their sense of humor.

        1. griffen

          I can confirm, that was pretty horrific. Calling a journalist with the bonafides that Matt sports a “so called journalist” was a hoot to watch, as Taibbi glided through it with a grin and a simple reply in regard to his efforts at being a writer.

          It can be hard to take these folks in Congress all that seriously. And poor Debbie…what a hack of a person.

      1. Lambert Strether Post author

        > Was it running fast or slow?

        Ha.

        No, I fixed one of those pesky dupe tweets. I think “cordyceps” is a better metaphor than “brain worms” because given the successful HBO series it’s accessible to more people (and describes more or less the same phenomenon).

        And now it’s been verbed!

        1. ambrit

          Kudos!
          “…it has been verbed.” A self referential meta pun.
          As for “dupe tweets,” well, it can be considered a form of psychological reinforcing. I’ll take a guess and imagine that ‘Mr. Subliminal’ would have something subtle to say about the subject.
          My problem with the HBO reference is that I am from the Plateau of Geezer and thus a bit “behind the times.” (Although meeting Nixon, or something claiming to be Nixon, at the microdot launch party by the pyramids was a trip.)

          1. lambert strether

            Here is the beginning of “The Last of Us,” which makes the premise clear:

            https://youtu.be/ffBoWoPuHSc

            Remind you of anything? I highly recommend it. It’s really not a zombie flick. It’s about a world gone very wrong, rather like our own.

            1. ambrit

              Thank you very much. Who could have guessed that a good teleplay could be managed from an online game?

  16. Acacia

    “long COVID currently impacts 23 million Americans, or roughly 30% of COVID cases”

    The current guesstimate I’ve seen is 65 million worldwide, but if anybody has more data on this or links to studies, I’m all ears. This number in particular could be very useful for dealing with COVID minimizers.

  17. The Rev Kev

    ‘My kids still mask at school. The YB photog asked my daughter to remove her mask, she refused, that’s My girl. He tried again! She still refused but then was upset as he told her how pretty should would be without. The principal contacted the company.’

    Good on that girl. She has already learned a valuable lesson about standing up for herself which I hope that she continues to do.

  18. Jeremy Grimm

    RE: “Treason of the Science Journals” and Gain of Function research

    This link and related speculations about the origins of the Corona flu mix and blur two very great concerns of mine. The first concern is the way Science and Scientific journals have fallen prey to Neoliberal predations. The second concern is that focus on the Corona virus detracts from a much larger concern I have about the too many labs engaged in gain of function research on viruses — like the Corona virus. This is not to say I am not extremely concerned by the notion that the Corona virus quietly depopulating this over populated planet may likely have come from a leak at the Wuhan lab.

    Neoliberal science is NOT Science. It undermines and severely cripples what I believe is one of the most outstanding accomplishments of our current Civilization. I cannot grasp what value gain-of-function research offers for controlling the threat viruses pose to Humankind and peripherally and potentially to — all fauna. I believe such research is insane — though perhaps fitting with the aims of Neoliberal science. The Corona flu and its handling in the u.s. is unspeakably horrible. If the Corona pandemic did indeed result from an accidental or … deliberate … “leak” — I regard that as abominable and an indictment of the u.s. CDC, Medical Industrial Complex and u.s. Power Elites.

    1. Michaelmas

      Jeremy Grimm: I cannot grasp what value gain-of-function research offers for controlling the threat viruses pose to Humankind and peripherally and potentially to — all fauna. I believe such research is insane — though perhaps fitting with the aims of Neoliberal science

      The line I got canonically and without fail from every microbiologist, pathologist, virologist, whatever, with only the exception of Richard Ebright —
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_H._Ebright

      — has always been some variation of in the real world ‘You can’t fight the bad bug, unless you have the bad bug.’

      Nowadays, I guess they can to some extent model the bad bug and its mutation space in silico without having it in vivo. Thus, forex, Moderna and others got the full genetic sequence of Wuhan classical COVID from China, before they then synthesized it for themselves in their lab to check their vaccine worked (to the extent it did). And they did that because the real pathogen is always likely to have surprises.

      So potential mutation space of bad bugs get investigated via gain-of-function research. Do you get flu shots every winter? If you do, that’s part of how they do them. They do some gain-of-function research in Russian and Chinese labs too(like, uh, in Wuhan), so it has nothing necessarily to do with Neoliberal Scinece.

      I grant you that that Neoliberal Science does worsen the grantsmanship and lacksadaisical risk-heightening potential in such research. Also, it increases the proliferation of bioweaponeering knowledge, which is what worries me the most about it.

      1. Lambert Strether Post author

        > You can’t fight the bad bug, unless you have the bad bug.’

        “Reality is more cunning than any theory,” as the Bearded One-adjacent ones say (hat tip alert reader Debug).

        It’s hard for me to believe that we can out-Nature Nature in a lab. Do we have any examples where GoF has worked according to this scenario? Where we engineered a bug, and then stopped the bug in its tracks when it appeared, by rapidly engineering a cure? (I just scanned the WikiPedia articles on GoF and directed evolution, and I see a lot of scientists doing science-y stuff, but I don’t see any success stories* at all. It seems to be that both fields have been going on long enough for success to be evident, it it exists. Is this fair?)

        GoF looks more like thinly disguised weapons research, to me. If not worse.

        NOTE * According to CDC’s description of the process, GoF/directed evolution is not part of selecting flu strains to vaccinate against. So when you write:

        So potential mutation space of bad bugs get investigated via gain-of-function research. Do you get flu shots every winter? If you do, that’s part of how they do them.

        I’m not sure where that comes from. Needs a link.

      2. Jeremy Grimm

        “Thus, forex, Moderna and others got the full genetic sequence of Wuhan classical COVID from China, before they then synthesized it for themselves in their lab to check their vaccine worked (to the extent it did). And they did that because the real pathogen is always likely to have surprises.” — I hope you are not suggesting developing the Corona vaccine required gain of function research. If the researchers were so knowledgeable about
        how the Corona virus might evolve then the spike protein, which seems to mutate rapidly, makes an odd choice for their vaccine.

        Your adage: ‘You can’t fight the bad bug, unless you have the bad bug.’ sounds like a peculiar rephrasing of the idea that a physician needs to identify the ‘bad bug’ causing an illness before prescribing treatment for it. There are plenty of ‘bad bugs’ in the wild to isolate, study, and develop treatments for without working with a known ‘bad bug’ in a lab to make it a worse bug. That worse bug might not exist if you did not create it. As for exploring the potential mutation space of bad bugs — which seems a very large space to explore — I am skeptical about the utility of such approach for any purpose other than military. Considering the Wiki reference you offered — whether the Corona virus originated in a lab, a bat, or pangolin or whatever — I am opposed to gain of function research as inherently dangerous and I believe unnecessary for other than the creation of bioweapons.

  19. flora

    From Forbes. Today’s House committee meeting, with Taibbi and Shellenberger. Full hearing. utube. 2+ hours.

    Jim Jordan Leads Hearing Targeting Govt Suppression Of Free Speech On Twitter Feat. Matt Taibbi

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMDjfP1gk60

    Lots of politicking from the pols. Taibbi and Shellenger held up well.

    1. Lambert Strether Post author

      > Taibbi and Shellenger held up well.

      My timeline is full of accounts yammering that the Democrats totally owned Taibbi. Tellingly, no quotes. One more transcript to read….

  20. Jeremy Grimm

    RE: Energy: “U.S. Shale Boom Shows Signs of Peaking …”

    As a consequence of the embargoes on USSR crude oil, we have experienced what happens when a source of fossil fuels is “removed” from the mix and suddenly reduces supplies of that crude. So, what happens when u.s. Shale crude and u.s. Shale natural gas peaks and begins rapidly decreasing? And — what happens when Russian crude and natural gas begins to play out? Saudi crude? Iranian crude, Iraqi crude … What is our plan B?

    Does anyone know where someone might buy a pedal operated pump for pumping liquids … like well water?

    1. Glen

      There are still companies making wind driven water pumps like from old Western movies. I’ll link when i get home.

      1. Jeremy Grimm

        Thanks! I did not think about the wind driven well pumps. I am glad someone still makes them. Maybe they could be converted for pedal power? One reason I was thinking of pedal powered pumps would be their portability and the readily available power source to drive them.

        1. Glen

          Sorry for the late post – I got home very late.

          These guys make the very old school windmill pump:

          The Aeromotor Windmill Company
          https://aermotorwindmill.com/

          These don’t look cheap, but I think if you have the wind, and the means, these last a very long time, and cost very little to maintain. I’m sure they have competitors, plus off grid solutions may have been pushing in-well DC driven pumps so those may be an option too:

          Simple Pump
          https://simplepump.com/

          These guys have options from hand powered to electric. If your water table supports it, those hand pump models are very easy to DIY. Look for videos on YT.

          1. Jeremy Grimm

            Thank you very much! I will check out the sites you pointed me to. I have a feeling it might be a good idea to have a low tech pump around in case the power drops out for longer than has been typical of the past.

  21. Jason Boxman

    Covid backlash hobbles public health and future pandemic response

    Vollmar said she is dismayed by the way the narrative of the pandemic has become distorted. The basic facts have been lost, she said; these public health measures were stopgaps to protect people’s lives before vaccines and treatment were available. A majority of Americans in 2021 said they supported mask mandates and social distancing in both red and blue states, according to a Monmouth University poll.
    What haunts her most, Vollmar said, is the more than 600 lives that have been lost to covid in Jefferson County. That despite her best efforts, even she could not protect her own mother from contracting the disease that killed her in December 2020. That even if she keeps her job after the April health board election, Americans are now at greater risk — not only for covid, but for whatever comes next.
    “The reality is public health has been silenced,” Vollmar said.

    But this country is a f**king disaster. It’s also public health, the face of public health, the CDC, that discredited masks. If you’re vaccinated, you don’t need to wear a respirator, remember? Scarlet mask! If you’re vaccinated, you cannot carry the virus, of course! You can exit quarantine without testing! Only 5 days is plenty! Businesses need workers, after all!

    Maybe if public health had distinguished itself, there’d be less of a fight here. But the lies and manipulation are demonstrable. You can’t defend a fortification built upon sand.

    1. Lambert Strether Post author

      > Maybe if public health had distinguished itself, there’d be less of a fight here. But the lies and manipulation are demonstrable.

      Public health has had issues with, well, instrumentalism for years; lots of “noble lies.” But they certainly came to the fore during Covid. Worth noting, as well, that the institutional forces chewing up and spitting out non-pharmaceutical — i.e., “public” — interventions were part of the “health care” system, and those voices are far more powerful than CDC: Hospitals, particularly infection control administrators (respirators are costly, and let’s not even get started on changing protocols, let alone reconfiguring facilities) and bent doctors.

  22. Jason Boxman

    Railroaded

    Before proceeding, we need to address the fact that there are many on social media who are convinced the government is somehow covering up the severity of this event – hence the hyperbolic and totally irresponsible references to Chernobyl. In our experience, the EPA would not look to minimize the severity of an industrial accident of this type. Quite the opposite. For the rest of this piece, we will take their reports, measurements, and commentary at face value. To do otherwise is to assume the EPA would fabricate complex technical data on the fly to deceive the public and protect the very corporate interests they otherwise infuriate with their harsh oversight on a daily basis.

    The most important document on the EPA’s website is the full accounting of each of the 52 derailed cars. The two-page PDF file details what was in each car and what happened to them during the accident. Twenty-seven cars suffered no major damage or significant leaks, and one is listed as having an unknown status. Let’s systematically walk through the other 24:

    I dunno, if you aren’t willing take what the EPA says with some degree of skepticism, particularly given that NS got to pick contractors to actually go in and do the testing, what is there to say? That’s what happens in a low trust society. We get to ask under what circumstances we’re going to trust any particular information provided by our own government. Great job, Establishment!

    There are many well-documented reasons to question communications issued from government agencies these days – and the widespread alarm over the incident lays bare the chronic stress such distrust lets simmer under the surface for much of the population. If we have earned any credibility with our readership over these last two years of publication, please take this to heart: residents of Mississippi need not stock up on bottled water, at least not because of this.

    That is not to say there isn’t a cause for nationwide upset here. As we will detail in a future piece, this incident demands a much-needed light be shined on the scandalous state of the US rail industry. That we even allow vinyl chloride to be shipped in this fashion is unnecessary and unacceptable. As few are aware, there are other, even more, dangerous materials on trains passing by residential neighborhoods every single day. It would take but a few simple rule changes to chemical industry regulation to alleviate much of this risk.

    Can’t disagree with that conclusion. But it can be truth that both the rest of the country isn’t in imminent danger and the dangers faced by the residents are not being accurately determined or reported. And that matters, because this could happen to any of our communities, has happened to others, and there should be a full, honest, and accurate accounting of what’s transpired and what the risks are, while it is still relevant, not from investigative reporting or court cases a decade from now.

  23. Michaelmas

    If stateside folks haven’t seen, this is one way to do it: French union cuts off power to Amazon —

    “…French trade union CGT cut the power to Amazon facility in Morlàas to protest Macron’s pension reform. “We have placed Amazon in energy sobriety, because we are looking for billions to finance pensions, and we believe that this money is there.”
    https://twitter.com/davidrkadler/status/1633857864245583879?cxt=HHwWjoCxvcXE0KwtAAAA

    https://www.bfmtv.com/economie/economie-social/social/en-direct-reforme-des-retraites-nouvelles-journee-de-mobilisation-et-de-greve-ce-mercredi-8-mars-journee-des-droits-des-femmes-le-senat-va-bientot-voter-l-article-7_LN-202303080047.html#article_176763

  24. Stephen Tynan

    The homeless shelters I work in are rife with RSV contagion.
    It’s hard to test for, no simple nasal swabs, but blood draws at the ED.

  25. LawnDart

    China’s trolling: not just for fishing-fleets any more.

    Chinese whole-process people’s democracy fully underscored at two sessions
    A high quality democracy helps resolve concrete problems, unlike election-focused Western-style democracy

    [Punchline] In some countries with so-called liberal democracy, democracy is often short-term and intermittent, and people only have the right to vote but lack daily channels to express their interests, Zhang noted.

    “Democracy is a common value for all mankind, but different countries have their own paths to realizing democracy. It’s time to get rid of the myth of Western-style democracy,” the expert said.

    https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202303/1287001.shtml

  26. griffen

    There are all manner of headlines early on CNBC this morning. All the looks, on the appearance and outside looking in, of a bank run. So it’s clear, this is nothing to do with crypto but may perhaps indicate an issue with managing duration / managing a high quality fixed income portfolio. And historically….higher interest rates are anathema to managing interest rate risk in most smaller to moderate sized financial institutions.

    https://www.axios.com/2023/03/09/silicon-valley-bank-svb-spooks-venture-capital

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