By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Northern Mockingbird, Granville Schools Land Lab, Licking, Ohio, United States. “Song.”
In Case You Might Miss…
- Deploy the Blame Cannons!
- Boeing avoids liability for Ethiopian MCAS crash in settlement, restarts production but with layoffs.
- Elite maleficence at ASHRAE, hospitals, and Infection Prevention and Control.
- More money does buy more happiness.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
Trump Transition
“Axelrod: Second Trump administration has ‘wholly different feel'” [The Hill]. “‘Say what you will about the direction he wants to take the country but this is a wholly different feel from 2016. Trump is stocking his admin with seasoned loyalists who will not guide, but rather BE guided, by HIM,’ Axelrod posted to the social platform X. ‘People wanted to shake up Washington. For better or worse, they’re [going] to get what they asked for,’ he said.” • The difficulty that administrations have is that they have to administer, and to do that, they need administrators. How many heterodox policy experts are there who actually know where the levers of power are? Commentary:
Tucker's very public campaign to get Trump to hire heterodox people seems to be losing to Trump's very public desire for the GOP to like him, a lot of safe picks, so far no wildcards.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 12, 2024
2024 Post Mortem
From a Republican pollster, but AP Votecast data:
The rundown of which groups swung right & didn't looks like an intersectional layercake of oppression. 😂
Old, white, married, educated people hold steady, young, nonwhite, single, and non-college educated people zoom right. pic.twitter.com/MU1u0RPDEj
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) November 12, 2024
So, a change election after all.
“Exit Right” [Gabriel Winant, Dissent]. “Just as in 2016, Harris supporters have fallen back on the racism and sexism of American society as an explanation for defeat. No doubt these are hulking obstacles, but they don’t suffice as omnibus explanation…. [But] these are not static phenomena. Trump mobilizes these forces; the task of his opponent is to countermobilize and defeat them. A successful campaign draws on the material of the existing society and assembles it into a portrait of the present and a vision of the future: it does not simply reflect frozen facts of public opinion and common sense but reorganizes them and ultimately produces new forms.” And: “The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters.” And finally: “The demobilization of the Democratic electorate is thus the product of the party’s contradictory character at more than one level. The accountability of the Democrats to antagonistic constituencies produces both rhetorical incoherence—what does this party stand for?—and programmatic self-cancellation. Champions of the domestic rule of law and the rules-based international order, they engaged in a spectacular series of violations of domestic and international law. Promising a new New Deal, they admonished voters to be grateful for how well they were already doing economically. Each step taken by the party’s policymakers in pursuit of one goal imposes a limit in another direction. It is by this dynamic that a decade of (appropriate) anti-Trump hysteria led first to the adoption of parts of Trump’s program by the Democrats, and then finally his reinstallation as president at new heights of public opinion favorability. Nothing better than the real thing.” • With “globalized neoliberal capitalism,” Winant focuses on ideology, not class (i.e., the Democrat base in the PMC). Still, worth reading in full.
* * * Lambert here: In general, the lastest barrages of blame cannonry are better written than the previous hot take emisisons, not sure why. More to come!
“Kamala Fell to the Same Cabal That Destroyed University Presidents” [Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect]. “Time was you had Democrat billionaires, Republican billionaires, and opportunistic bipartisan billionaires. Republicans had the resource extraction guys and the Waltons and anyone who employed enough workers that they needed to bust unions; Democrats had Hollywood and Big Tech; both parties had joint custody of Wall Street. And the billionaires got what they wanted 99.9 percent of the time. This election was different. For all the venal raves the media bestowed upon Kamala Harris’s fundraising prowess, the whales near-universally lined up behind Trump. Of the top ten mega-donors, only the bottom two gave to Democrats; Trump’s haul from his own top ten donors—none of whom boasts the surname Koch or Thiel—amounted to about $945 million; Harris’s topped out at $254 million. (Harris ended up raising more money, thanks to Resistance giving, but Trump got to spend much less time raising it, and with Musk, he had the algorithms on his side.)” And: “At its heart, the billionaire revolt was the expression of a broader dissatisfaction with Joe Biden that was most surely rooted in the real, substantial, and (in the post–Cold War neoliberal era) unprecedented things his administration was quietly (too quietly!) doing for working people, small-business owners, and the proliferating subsistence entrepreneur class that falls somewhere in the middle. It sued Amazon for squeezing sellers to the bone while manipulating prices ever higher, Albertsons and Kroger for conspiring to gouge shoppers by littering the country with dead strip centers where supermarkets once stood, Live Nation for indenturing a generation of young musicians and turning tickets to concerts and sports events into luxury goods, Welsh Carson (the most powerful private equity firm in health care) for gouging hospital patients and suppressing the wages of anesthesiologists in multiple states, and more. It even got a court to label Google a monopolist. This stuff was extremely popular, and Democratic leaders never talked about it, likely because it pissed off the donor class—which is of course the very reason they should have been talking about nothing else.” And: “In any event, though, the billionaires weaponized toxic wokeness to make themselves seem more receptive and in touch with Normal Dudes than the Democrats, who unbeknownst to most Normal Dudes had actually been working tirelessly on behalf of the common man while Joe Biden was preoccupied wringing his hands over why Bibi was being so mean to him.” • I like this piece a lot, but I’m not sure how much I buy “working tirelessly on behalf of the common man,” since I think it proceeds from the very, very low baseline set by Obama. I would never trash the efforts of the Lina Khan and the anti-trusters; they are tireless, but the Democrat Party as a whole? The successful deep-sixing of a million disproportionately working class deaths from Covid tells the tale.
“Kamala Harris ran the Fyre Festival of campaigns” [The Spectator]. “As the finger-pointing begins, and the autopsy of the Kamala Harris campaign continues, financial details are being released on how the Harris campaign managed to blow more than $1 billion in war-chest funds — and not only lose, but get wiped off the electoral map by Donald Trump, who ended his campaign with roughly $488 million. That’s not a Dr. Evil typo: Kamala Harris not only blew a billion dollars, but actually ended up $20 million in debt. Where did the money all go? To celebrities mostly, and elaborate sets and stages. As it turns out, not all of those celebrity “activists” appeared with Kamala Harris because they believed in her or were doing their civic duty by getting engaged. They charged fees — and some were astronomical. Harris made elaborate promises to her crowds about celebrity performances. Crowds were brought in with the promise of seeing Beyoncé perform, only to leave disappointed. It was all a financial ruse, much like the infamous Fyre Festival of 2017… the Harris campaign spent upwards of six figures to build a custom set for her appearance on the Call Me Daddy podcast, which only netted about 800,000 downloads. Meanwhile, Donald Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast — and his interview has got more than 47 million views on YouTube. There were seven swing-state concerts that involved high-priced performers — Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jon Bon Jovi, Ricky Martin and more — who seemingly ended up costing the Harris campaign more than $20 million on event production alone, and reportedly even more on paying the celebrities to appear. Even Oprah Winfrey charged the campaign $1 million to show up. The campaign went so far into debt that the campaign was reportedly forced to scrap Canadian Nineties indie-pop singer Alanis Morissette to save money. The pop concert campaign strategy is said to have been the brainchild of former Obama advisors on the campaign.” • Ironic [chortles]. “Is said to have been” by whom?
* * * “Why Was There a Broad Drop-Off in Democratic Turnout in 2024?” [New York Times]. “Mr. Trump won the White House not only because he turned out his supporters and persuaded skeptics, but also because many Democrats sat this election out, presumably turned off by both candidates. Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden. The nation’s most Republican-heavy counties turned out an additional 1.2 million votes for Mr. Trump this year, according to the analysis of the 47 states where the vote count is largely complete. The drop-off spanned demographics and economics. It was clear in counties with the highest job growth rates, counties with the most job losses and counties with the highest percentage of college-educated voters. Turnout was down, too, across groups that are traditionally strong for Democrats — including areas with large numbers of Black Christians and Jewish voters. The decline in key cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, made it exceptionally difficult for Ms. Harris to win the battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania.” And:
In Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize on the battleground map, Mr. Trump’s victory received an outsize boost from an unlikely place — the five counties with the highest percentage of registered Democrats: Allegheny, Delaware, Lackawanna, Montgomery and Philadelphia. Ms. Harris won these counties, but not by the margins needed to overcome Republican-heavy areas of the state. Total turnout was down from 2020 in all five Democratic strongholds, which could partly explain how Ms. Harris received 78,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes to his total in these same counties.
Holy moley! And it’s the same story in other swing states. What a debacle.
“The common national experience that explains Trump’s 2024 gains” [Ronald Brownstein, CNN]. “But the scale of Trump’s advance this year points toward a common national experience in all regions of the country — a shared disappointment in the results generated by President Joe Biden’s administration…. But since then, [UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavrec] said, the similarly uniform shift away from Trump in 2020 — and then back toward him in 2024 — points toward voter assessments of performance, rather than big further ideological shifts, as the main driver of the results. Just as Trump, as the incumbent, suffered from a negative verdict on his performance in 2020, Harris, as the quasi-incumbent successor to Biden, suffered from a negative verdict on the president’s performance four years later.” • Throw the bums out!
“In the Race for the Presidency, GOP Turnout Declined, Democratic Turnout Collapsed” [Daily Yonder]. “Donald Trump won the popular vote and the presidency by getting nearly as many votes this year as he did in 2020, while Democratic turnout – especially in major cities – collapsed, a Daily Yonder analysis of preliminary election returns shows. Kamala Harris got 12 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020, a decline of 15%, according to a preliminary analysis of 46 states. Trump, meanwhile, lost only 1 million votes, compared to his 2020 returns, a decline of less than 2%.” • Handy chart, broken down by county type:
* * * “Even Fox News Saw a Close 2024 Election. Then the Voting Data Came In” [Variety]. “‘At 5 p.m., the most likely outcome was a very close election,’ says Arnon Mishkin, who has directed Fox News’ decision desk for years. ‘Different people looked at the data and said this could tilt Trump and this could tilt Harris.’ Within hours, however, a different story was unspooling — and viewers of Fox News were early to hear it being told. Fox News was able to call many states earlier than many of its competitors, including a critical loss by the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania in the wee hours of the morning that largely decided the race in favor of Trump.How so? The company made a big investment in new voter technology last decade that relies less on exit polls, and more on on-the-ground data from each state.” • I ran into a similar problem in my own (not to be pompous) methodology; I didn’t prepare readers for the scope of Trump’s victory, e.g. winning all swing states. I wrote that up yesterday, but started with a metaphor about the death of Saruman, which I butchered, out of haste. I have since corrected it, and readers who were justifibly confused can read what I meant to say here (which I feel is important or I wouldn’t be harping on it).
* * * “Judge delays Trump immunity decision in NY hush money case” [The Hill]. “A New York judge delayed a Tuesday decision on whether President-elect Trump’s conviction can withstand the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, following his election victory last week. Judge Juan Merchan agreed to freeze the case until Nov. 19, newly public court records show, enabling prosecutors to respond to Trump’s demand the case be dismissed entirely now that he is president-elect. Trump’s sentencing, which would be the first of any former president, is scheduled for Nov. 26. He was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment made to porn actor Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election to conceal an affair, which he denies. Trump’s attorneys believe his election as president compels the dismissal of his criminal prosecutions. ‘The stay, and dismissal, are necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern,’ Trump attorney Emil Bove wrote in an email to the judge.” • Maybe Trump could make a short jail stay work for him, carrying on the stellar work he did at McDonald’s and driving the garbage truck. Merchan could send him to jail for a day, to underline respect for the process blah blah blah, and Trump would enter Rikers — in an orange jumpsuit, naturally — to a cheering throng of inmates and guards, and then Merchan could put him on probation, and everybody could stand down and forget about this farrago of bad law and political prosecution.
Democrats en Déshabillé
“The model exactly predicted the most likely election map” [Nate Silver]. But that’s not the interesting part. In a footnote: “I essentially got to perform a randomized control trial on how partisans in both camps reacted to good and bad news. And there was an asymmetry. Republicans are generally happy when you agree with them partway or half the time. Admittedly, the sorts of Republicans who encounter our work are not a representative sample, probably being on the moderate side — though you can find plenty of Trump supporters in the Silver Bulletin comments section. Democrats, however — and here, I’m not referring so much to Silver Bulletin subscribers but in the broader universe online — often get angry with you when you only halfway agree with them. And I really think this difference in personality profiles tells you a little something about why Trump won: Trump was happy to take on all comers, whereas with Democrats, disagreement on any hot-button topic (say, COVID school closures or Biden’s age) will have you cast out as a heretic. That’s not a good way to build a majority, and now Democrats no longer have one.” • Democrats, as we would expect, are doubling down on this behavior: There’s a concerted effort to move high(er)-traffic accounts off Twitter onto Blue Sky, as if the world needed more Democrat embubblement than it already has. Further, for all its many faults, Elon Musk’s hell-site still has a very functional Covid-conscious community, which these trolls would end up splitting, not that such a thing would matter to them. Brunch at Blue Sky!
“The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself.” [Pete Davis, The Nation]. The deck: “The party should jettison its consultant class and move toward a local-membership model that would help to rejuvenate civic life across the country.” More: “Here’s one sketch of how we could begin to turn this around: The 4 Ms of party membership, each symbolic of a necessary mindset shift. First, Membership Cards. When you join the Labour Party in Britain, you get mailed a welcome packet, complete with a membership card and information about how to get more involved. The Democratic Party could learn from this: It should mean something to join the Democrats. … Second, Maps. There should be an accountable Democratic captain for every neighborhood in the country…. Third, Meeting Halls. Monthly meetings should be designed with utmost care. Best practices for making meetings, working groups, and annual calendars warm and engaging should be gathered and disseminated. Formal rules and procedures should not be fetishized at the expense of engaging new members. … Finally, Mutual Aid. The party should directly care for members and for the broader community. Democrats should do disaster relief, take on homeless-shelter shifts, cook food when members have a baby, welcome new immigrants to town, and host block parties throughout the year. … This is all easier dreamed than realized. Fostering a culture of membership is a long-haul project—more like the planting of acorns than the planting of sunflower seeds.” • Dude. When Labour UK becmae a membership organization, they got Jeremy Corbyn, and who wants that?
Syndemics
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Airborne Transmission: H5N1
“Dependence of aerosol-borne influenza A virus infectivity on relative humidity and aerosol composition” [Frontiers in Microbiology]. They have a fancy new machine: “We describe a novel biosafety aerosol chamber equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation for bubble-bursting aerosol generation, size distribution measurement, and condensation-growth collection to minimize sampling artifacts when measuring virus infectivity in aerosol particles.” Interestingly: “Despite decades of research, there remains great difficulty in identifying and understanding the factors that control the spread of influenza epidemics, which occur each year in both hemispheres. In this study, we aimed to simulate exhalation, airborne residence, and re-inhalation of IAV-containing particles as accurately as possible. As an initial step, we specifically used purely saline aerosol particles to avoid the complexity of natural matrices. We revealed large discrepancies between aerosol-borne viruses and previous microliter droplet experiments performed with similar matrices. The discrepancies between aerosol and deposited droplet experiments need to be explained in order to obtain a reliable model for aerosol transmission.” • Thanks, droplet dogmatists.
Smile Nazis in music:
There should be only music spreading in the air, not Covid.
— Adam Wong (@Engineer_Wong) November 8, 2024
Testing and Tracking: H5N1
“Bird flu infections in farmworkers are going undetected, study shows” [STAT]. “[CDC] findings, published Thursday, suggest that a small but not insignificant number of H5N1 infections are going undetected among people who work with dairy cows. Blood samples taken from 115 farm workers in Michigan and Colorado over the summer found evidence of a recent infection in eight individuals — half of whom recalled being ill around the same time the cows were sick. The other half could not recall having any symptoms.” Serological surveys. More: “In response to the new data, the CDC is now recommending that any farm workers who were exposed to infected animals be tested for H5N1, whether or not they have symptoms. Previously, the agency advised that only individuals who had been exposed and had symptoms be tested. The purpose of this expansion is to intensify case-finding efforts, so that even workers with mild or unnoticeable infections can be offered treatment and isolation. The CDC is also recommending that Tamiflu be offered to any individuals on a farm with infected animals who’ve had a high-risk exposure — like being splashed with milk from a dairy cow or participating in a culling operation on a poultry farm — without adequate personal protective equipment. The CDC’s study found that all eight people with H5N1 antibodies had reported cleaning milking parlors, and most reported milking cows. None of them reported wearing respiratory protection and fewer than half wore eye protection.”
Elite Maleficence
“ASHRAE Standard 62: tobacco industry’s influence over national ventilation standards” [Tobacco Control]. BMJ 2002 (!). From the Abstract: ” The tobacco industry has been involved in the development of ventilation standards for over 20 years. It has successfully influenced the standard and continues to attempt to change the standard from a smoke-free framework into an “accommodation” framework. The industry acts directly and through consultants and allies. The major health groups have been largely absent and the health interests have been poorly represented in standard development. While concentrated in the USA, ASHRAE standards are adopted worldwide.” • Commentary:
“Learned and Unlearned Lessons in Quality and Safety From Hospitals’ COVID-19 Burdens” (Invited Commentary) [JAMA]. “[S]till absent from the peer-reviewed literature is a discussion of the importance of hospital quality performance reporting and benchmarking in times of crisis as a mechanism to ensure safety. Hospitals in the US were effectively relieved of their obligations to provide high-quality pandemic-era care when pay-for-performance programs, rankings, and ratings excluded months of pandemic-era data from their method. Though ostensibly made with benign intent, these decisions to exclude pandemic-era quality-reporting data were not patient centered and may not have been methodologically necessary. The findings of Metersky et al demonstrate that quality and safety data are needed more than ever during times of crisis. This would allow patients and payers to understand which hospitals have resilient systems in order to make informed decisions about where they choose to receive and fund health care.” Fortunately: “With hospital-specific COVID-19 admissions data from HHS coupled with patient-level Medicare or other electronic health record or claims data, it is still possible to recreate the unreported pandemic-era quality outcomes benchmarks to identify resilient hospitals, systems, and processes during surge capacity. In fact, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ FY 2025 Inpatient Prospective Payment System Proposed Rule will extend the COVID-19 admissions data to include data for all respiratory illnesses.”
IPC = Infection Prevention and Control. I apologize for the length, but it occurred to me that if any readers end up in hospital, the highlighted methods of infection provide a really good checklist:
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC November 4 | Last Week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC November 9 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC November 2 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| New York[5] New York State, data November 8: | National [6] CDC November 8: |
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| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens November 11: | ★ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic November 9: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC October 21: | Variants[10] CDC October 21: |
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| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC November 2: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC November 2: |
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LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (CDC) Good news!
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) KP.* still popular. XEC has entered the chat. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.
[4] (ED) Down.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Steadily down.
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Actually improved; it’s now one of the few charts to show the entire course of the pandemic to the present day.
[7] (Walgreens) Down.
[8] (Cleveland) Down.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Down.
[10] (Travelers: Variants). Now XEC.
[11] Deaths low, positivity down.
[12] Deaths low, ED down.
Stats Watch
There are no official statistics of interest today.
Antitrust: “How Albertsons Kills Rural Grocers with Land Use Restrictions” [Matt Stoller, BIG]. “[S]upermarket executives see rural markets as particularly easy to monopolize, because there is often just one store. They even have a name, “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zones,” according to one executive on the stand. Of course that makes sense, we’d expect firms to maximize profits where they can. One might be tempted to say, well, there are some towns that can’t support more than one store. And that might be true, except that there are several examples of supermarket chains using tactics in such towns to thwart the opening of competition. How? Well, they find a way to dominate the existing plots of land and buildings suitable for such a store. In June, for instance, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who is also litigating against the merger, fined Albertsons $25,000 for imposing a land use restriction on a store it sold in 2018 in a low-income section of Bellingham, Washington. As part of the sale, the supermarket giant put a requirement on the deed that no grocery store could open there until 2038. Ferguson found this provision was a violation of the state antitrust law. These kinds of land use restrictions are likely common. A few months ago, I got an email from an economist focused on rural areas, who explained how Albertsons abuses its market power in a series of small skiing towns in rural California using a similar strategy.”
Manufacturing: “Boeing reaches settlement to avert civil trial in 2019 Max crash” [Straits Times]. “The crash of the Ethiopian Airlines plane killed 157 people. The trial was set to begin on Nov 12 in Chicago. It originally involved six plaintiffs but until now all but one had settled, according to a source familiar with the case. The hearing on Nov 12 will take place to inform Judge Jorge Alonso of the settlement, who must approve the deal for it to be officially settled, the source said. ‘It is a damage-only trial, meaning no evidence regarding the liability of Boeing will be presented,’ the source told AFP.” • Too bad.
Manufacturing: “Boeing Got The Easy Part Done. Now Comes The Tougher, Existential Problems” [Seattle Medium]. “Boeing is America’s largest exporter, and therefore very exposed to any trade war. China is the largest global market for new aircraft purchases, with Boeing forecasting that China’s fleet of commercial jets will double in the next 20 years. The aircraft maker has been down this road before. The company’s sales to China ground to a near-halt in 2017 as trade tensions between the two countries escalated during Trump’s first term. Orders from Chinese buyers fell from 64 in 2016 to 51 in 2017 to zero in both 2018 and 2019. A similar drop could occur if a new trade war breaks out. ‘We really don’t know what Trump will do with Chinese tariffs,’ said Richard Aboulafia, managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, an industry consultant. ‘But if he slaps 60% tariffs on all Chinese goods, the quickest way for China to retaliate is to switch to (Boeing rival) Airbus for 100% of its needs.’ Boeing has seen a modest resumption of sales and deliveries to China recently, with 20 orders in 2021 and 15 in 2023. So far this year it has 53 deliveries to China, up from 35 in the four previous years combined.”
Manufacturing: “Employees across Boeing face sweeping layoffs this week” [Seattle Times]. “Boeing employees will learn Wednesday who will lose their jobs in mid-January in the round of layoffs Boeing announced last month. The cuts will be broadly spread across the company and, despite some expectations earlier, engineers and production workers won’t be exempt…. But a Boeing senior engineering manager in St. Louis said the cuts in the works target a roughly 10% reduction across the engineers supporting military programs, including the F-15 and F/A-18 jet fighters and the Navy’s P-8 submarine hunter, which is built in Renton with military systems installed in Seattle. Those engineering organizations will shrink, said the manager, who asked not to be identified to protect his job. “If the idea in Kelly’s mind is cutting overhead and programs will not be impacted, that’s not what’s happening.’…. Still, it’s clear non-front-line positions will suffer bigger losses. And white-collar staff working remotely may be particularly targeted as Ortberg tries to get the workforce connected and aligned with his new direction. A manager of a small team of about 15 people, all working remotely — and ironically focused on ways to improve efficiency in program management — told one employee to expect a 30% cut in his team. ‘If we are not holding a wrench, if we’re considered overhead, it’s about 30%,’ said the employee, who also asked not to be identified to protect his job. The reduction for ‘people working on planes might be less than 5%.'”
Manufacturing: “Boeing delivers fewest planes since 2020, warns factory restart after strike will take weeks” [CNBC]. “As the workers return, Boeing has to assess potential hazards, restate machinist duties and safety requirements, and ensure that all training qualifications are current, a spokesman said. ‘It’s much harder to turn this on than it is to turn it off,’ CEO Kelly Ortberg said during the company’s quarterly call last month. ‘So it’s absolutely critical that we do this right.'”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 69 Greed (previous close: 67 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 47 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 12 at 1:49:44 PM ET.
Photo Book
“Leaving and Waving” [Deanna Dikeman]. “For 27 years, I took photographs as I waved good-bye and drove away from visiting my parents at their home in Sioux City, Iowa. I started in 1991 with a quick snapshot, and I continued taking photographs with each departure. I never set out to make this series. I just took these photographs as a way to deal with the sadness of leaving. It gradually turned into our good-bye ritual. And it seemed natural to keep the camera busy, because I had been taking pictures every day while I was there. These photographs are part of a larger body of work I call Relative Moments, which has chronicled the lives of my parents and other relatives since 1986. When I discovered the series of accumulated “leaving and waving” photographs, I found a story about family, aging, and the sorrow of saying good-bye. In 2009, there is a photograph where my father is no longer there. He passed away a few days after his 91st birthday. My mother continued to wave good-bye to me. Her face became more forlorn with my departures. In 2017, my mother had to move to assisted living. For a few months, I photographed the good-byes from her apartment door. In October of 2017 she passed away. When I left after her funeral, I took one more photograph, of the empty driveway. For the first time in my life, no one was waving back at me.”
“Why Close Reading is An Essential Part of Literary Translation” [Literary Hub]. “Reading—’this fruitful miracle of communication in the bosom of solitude,’ as Proust called it in a translator’s preface— is miraculously and mysteriously neither objective nor subjective, neither purely taking something in nor purely revealing or expressing what’s inside oneself. It is a complex interplay of the self and the world, analogous to perception—we see what’s really there in the world, but we see it, and it’s there in our world, the environment we move in and care about, which is different from the environment of any other person or animal in the same physical space.” • Take that, influencers!
“The ‘Happiness Plateau’ Doesn’t Exist” [Bloomberg]. “[T]he latest academic work chips away at the idea that there is a plateau, just as previous academic work chipped away at the idea of happy peasants and miserable bourgeois. Matthew Killingsworth, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, has amassed a sample of more than one million real-time reports of experienced well-being in the US (compiled by getting people to report their day-to-day well-being on their smartphones). In a 2021 paper he studied 33,000 people who provided such real-time evidence and discovered three things: that there is no evidence of a divergence between evaluative and real-time well-being; that real-time well-being rises linearly with income and, third, that the slope is just as steep above $80,000 a year as below. The idea of a happiness plateau is for the birds: Higher incomes are clearly associated with both feeling better on a day-to-day basis and being more satisfied with your life overall. What about people who earn well above $80,000? In a new paper Killingsworth compares the reported life-satisfaction of his sample of 33,000 Americans with a wide variety of incomes with the reported life-satisfaction of two groups of ultra-wealthy individuals: millionaires from around the world and members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. His conclusions are well-summarized in the title of his study: ‘Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence against Satiation.’ Truly wealthy people are significantly happier than the highest earners in the ordinary income group if you take ‘life satisfaction’ as a meaningful measure of happiness. Moreover, the happiness gap between truly wealthy people and middle-income earners is three times as large as the happiness gap between middle and low-income groups. We not only get happier as we move from the middle-income herd to the Succession crowd, but we get a lot happier. Killingsworth’s study is not perfect: There is such a shortage of evidence about the well-being of the truly wealthy that one of the studies he relies on, of the Forbes 400, dates from 1985 (the other is from 2018). But never has the phrase ‘more research is required’ sounded more attractive.” • If there were in fact a happiness plateau, would there not also tend to be a capital accumulation plateau for capitalist owners? There doesn’t seem to be.
Alert reader JM forwards this sugarpack from Spain:
JM writes: “Reading the discussion about Angus Deaton in today’s (11/11/24) Water Cooler, I thought of a photo I snapped on a recent trip to Spain. Interesting to order a coffee and find this on my sugar packet….”
Ooops:
It just now occurred to me that, if there ever fully was, there's not going to be any way to have healthy controls for studies anymore. Almost everyone's body will have been damaged from covid.
— TheDisabilityEnthusiast (@twitchyspoonie) November 4, 2024
That’s not gonna make peer review any easier:
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 MR:
MR writes: “A photo of an ‘offering’ that I and a few friends made on September 29 as part of a birthday ritual for me. Note the cupcakes, which we eventually ate.”
Kind readers, thanks to those who instantly responded! However, my queue for plant images is still short, and that always makes me queasy. Do you have an images to send in, especially of autumn produce or winter projects? Thank you!
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Remember the last week – and the FEMA employee directing the Milton response team to avoid Florida homes that got overlooked.
Things just got a lot more interesting…….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5SP0jIZPs0
The fired employee is refusing to go under the bus calmly. I would possibly call her a whistleblower. It appears she was following orders from headquarters – and this was also happening in NC and other places. Hoo Boy! All those silent Trump voters lying to pollsters and the dearth of Trump signs in yards – the MAGA crowd may have more IQ than the PMC think.
Again, who am I going to believe – the employee under the bus OR yet another branch of this Administration and the lapdog national media who seem to lie about almost everything.
Thanks very much for the link Doc. It gives good information about the FEMA process. This whole program is 2 1/2 hours but the interview starts at 10 minutes in.
The phrase or term “hostile work environment” seems overly broad, much like claims of “micro aggressions” have been used in the past as a weapon against others. Granted, if someone is pointing a gun at you, that is a reason to leave, but abandoning neighborhoods merely because some people are acting emotionally after a natural disaster is bad.
And there is a question I really want the answer to…..
Did all of these celebrities like Bon Jovi and Springsteen and Oprah charge the Obama campaign and the Biden campaign the same millions or is this something new?
Because if they did not, it appears to me that the Kamala campaign may have been one of the largest money-laundering schemes in history.
This really needs to be investigated. Is it against the law for celebrities like Oprah to appear and say nothing publicly about it being paid, and then take what seems to be obscene amounts under the table?
It’s OK when they do it.
That is another aspect of campaign spending that sorely needs to be addressed: any entity getting more than (picking a random reasonable number) $10,000 has to list all of its owners, unless it’s a publicly traded company. No more hiding behind LLCs.
Someone(s) in the consultant class are sobbing all the way back home while counting their cash—-while I imagine some small-time bakery gets stiffed and becomes one of the creditors holding the Harris campaign’s $20 million bag.
> No more hiding behind
I still insist that in 2020, after being stabbed in the back by the Democrats, Sanders should have pivoted to riding the wave of labor organizing that was rising at the same time the pandemic was. I think he could have made the case to his base, and his base would have accepted it, particularly with a focus on protecting the working class from the ravages of Covid in the workplace.
As it is… I won’t say that the well for a Sanders-style campaign based entirely on small donations has been poisoned irretrievably, given how horrid the current system is, but honestly, what did people get? (Perhaps the small donor concept should be redirected to an institution, more or less permanent, as opposed to a campaign, temporary by definition).
I have trouble seeing why that’d be against any law. If Obama can charge millions in speaking fees for showing up at corporate and other hubbubs, why not? (I have to imagine Obama had to go bona fide for political campaigns, but that’s sort of his job as a Dem insider, but talking politics is not Oprah’s or Beyonce’s job.
Um, maybe you missed this, but this is from when Stephen Colbert was a “better” comedian. In this clip he starts a super PAC, and can take any and all amounts of money from corporations:
Comedy Central’s “Colbert Super PAC”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijxvjL7KJlk
The lawyer helping him is pretty much the guy that wrote the law.
Later on, Stephen signs a few more forms with the same lawyer (after the election) and all the remaining super PAC money becomes his money (there might be a few shell corporations in this). All entirely legal, has been for years. (I’m looking for that clip – I think it’s been scrubbed out of existence.)
Haven’t you ever wondered where all the money goes AFTER the election, or why elections seem to cost more and more?
Here’s the shell corporation:
Comedy Central’s “Colbert Super PAC”: Stephen’s Shell Corporation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXOeChlhbhg
And here’s the whole saga. Now what they gloss over in this by saying “he donated the money to charity” is that it was HIS MONEY TO GIVE at the end:
Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC Lessons | Long Story Short | NBC News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy7TUtlPmqk
I still cannot find the clips where he signed a couple forms and the money was his – I should have save that.
For all we know, the first time Trump ran it was just for the PR, and the MONEY. I’m not sure he expected to win.
Just a little coda – because I’m not trying to belittle Trump – like him or not, he is now a giant in American politics, and good for him.
I think Trump’s 2016 election was about an American public that was thoroughly disgusted with the corruption that Colbert demonstrated in both parties (the uniparty). The American public is not dumb, and they are very tired of getting screwed, so Trump, who was pretty straight forward about calling out the corruption, won.
i agree with all you said….i remember trump at 3am or whatever(2016) with a real, authentic* ‘i caught the car’ look.
he wanted his narcissistic supply, and got it…but then was expected to govern?
pure dying empire mode,lol.
(* you could tell it was authentic because, altho i never paid him much mind, he was ubiquitous, and was never, in my mind, to be associated with that word…i could almost see the cartoon thoughtbubble:”oh shit”)
If you look at presidential elections over the past 30 years the winners oscillate between Democrats and Republicans. The electorate keeps hoping against hope that things will change, but they never do. Trump will prove to be a disappointment and so a Democrat will likely be elected POTUS in 2028. And the beat goes on.
> Trump, who was pretty straight forward about calling out the corruption, won.
This from Dave Chappelle is a hardy perennial, and not wrong:
Won’t you come and join the Party
Commentary on “Not Like Us” (a “Diss Track”).
Drake is bad
Is that bad good or bad bad?
I’d like to know this too. I thought I was cynical enough and informed enough that nothing would surprise me. But hearing celebs were paid to endorse Harris actually has me a little surprised. I could see if it was pay for a performance, but Beyonce getting $10mil to come out and say “vote for Kamala” is nuts! I can’t believe there isn’t a disclosure requirement. Well, this is ‘Merica…I guess I can.
Also, great to see the numbers. I remember all the crowing about how much they were raising. Didn’t do squat for ’em. Just like Hillary 2016. Heh.
Never heard of paying celebrity endorsers but I’m too old to understand modern politics. This is strongly suggestive of Hollywood having a business relationship with, if not the Democrats then with the people the Democrats report to.
When I worked with the Kennedy in ’80 campaign it was a no-brainer to give the “driving Sally Field” gig to one of our female union stewards that we’d been trying to talk into joining our local’s COPE committee. That was 1980 and the use of celebrity surrogates was somewhat edgy but Norma Rae was a popular movie and Field was on board. To the absolute best of my knowledge Field did this at her own expense and our driver did not get paid by the union or the factory although Field probably thought that was the case.
Everyone always assumed you were getting paid if you took time off work for a campaign. Can’t cite the rules but that was a no-no. Not only do high level volunteers do so without pay, they usually do so at significant personal cost to themselves. If they have money, they donate both time and money to the campaign. And they don’t talk about that because no one needs to know those things. When you’re not being paid, it empowers you to, well, take my word for it — it empowers you.
The current “everyone must get paid” bull excrement was put in place as part of a manufacturered higher wages for campaign workers movement that’s less than a decade old and which was created to push volunteers (witnesses) out of campaign spaces. Raising pay made the jobs more valuable and instead of selectively recruiting staff from existing experienced former staff/volunteers, the party and the various campaigns started doing crony hires.
If I have a problem with 2020 vote tallies, it’s because I know for a fact that the Democrat party lacked the qualified staff to pull off a massive ballot harvest. My guess would be that countless NGOs used staff interfacing with poors to provide contracted for services plus help with filling out and casting ballots. It’s all — in my opinion — crooked as hell but when you don’t know how to win elections, cheating probably seems like the best option.
> If I have a problem with 2020 vote tallies, it’s because I know for a fact that the Democrat party lacked the qualified staff to pull off a massive ballot harvest. My guess would be that countless NGOs used staff interfacing with poors to provide contracted for services plus help with filling out and casting ballots. It’s all — in my opinion — crooked as hell but when you don’t know how to win elections, cheating probably seems like the best option.
Interesting hypothesis (and akin to the role NGOs play in placing migrants, as contractors, entirely under the radar). And not, naturally, covered at all, the NGOsphere being a pillar of the Democrat Party, not to mention Little Madison’s workplace after Oberlin.
This is an evolving story. Unsurprisingly it is being picked up on all right wing news and related websites and they may be stretching things quite a bit. Still, even the Washington Examiner is quoting FEC filings reporting that the Harris campaign gave $1 million to Harpo Productions (Oprah’s company). Oprah has publicly stated that doesn’t mean she was paid $1 million. Right. Of course not. Regular people understand how someone paying the company you own and profit from doesn’t mean you were paid…
Of the amounts people are pulling from FEC filings appears to be production related expenses for various Ms. Harris’ appearance. For example, on the Call Her Daddy podcast. Those expenses are allegedly related to a $6 million payment for a mediocre looking set. Donors have every right to be furious about this. $6 million spent to help down ballot candidates could have dramatically altered a lot of contests.
Pretty sure Trump didn’t have to pay the Podcasters he visited to speak on their shows. Pretty sure all of the celebrities Harris worked with were wealthy enough to donate time and production assistance if they come to. Pretty sure Harris is an idiot and she deserves people calling her out on this grift. I hope all her post election fundraising fails and she has to pay the bill for her failure.
Stopping Hitler and saving democracy is important, but you’re not expecting me to do it for free, are you?
Not for nothing, but Oprah still has an entire production company. I can think of nothing done for Harris that should have cost a million. Especially as Winfrey could have provided everything at cost, if not fronted it herself. (The one set cost I saw cited would bankrupt most film and television if every set cost that. and even if it wasn’t necessarily from Harpo.)
Someday, when the deluded Harris supporters finally recover, Oprah’s reputation may finally be toast. One of the richest women around not only foisted a losing idea on the public, she had to be richly paid to do it. I would think they will finally go Dr. Oz, Dr Phil, liquid diets, Harris…why did we ever think she knew diddly. Cripes she was GOOP before Paltrow.
I’ll bet she does know Diddy though.
Could have at one time, but the people who knew how to actually GOTV were run out of the Democrat party years ago. The institutional memory, the skills, the techniques — all gone. The Democrats have outsourced their GOTV operations to phony hacks with no clue how to organize voters.
Sure, the celebrity campaign was a boondoggle — the spectacle of a Hollywood billionaire, the richest person in the entertainment industry shaking down a political candidate for a pittance she could spend on lunch, was particularly skeevy. And you can multiply that many times over, as the article so fascinatingly does by listing all the has-beens and never-weres that the campaign thought would win them the election. It’s pathetic and indicative of their out-of-touchness that in the end they couldn’t secure an appearance by Alannis Morrisette. Don’t tell me — Hootie and the Blowfish and Courtney Love weren’t available?
But the celebrity campaign is really just the bright shiny example, it doesn’t tell the whole story. All the money that Democrats *do* put into the mechanics of campaigns is stupidly spent. They spend it on “data science”. On “new” methods and techniques. On “things and tools” as Harris so eloquently formulated it: databases, targeted ads, shrill fundraising emails, phone calls, text messages. On occasion, they actually knock on doors. But now they only allow “professionals” to do that, and no matter what town you’re in, despite all the “data” they’re armed with, those professionals don’t know anything about you, or your neighborhood, or your town, or what’s important to you. And on the rare occasions that someone opens the door, the “professionals” make it obvious that they don’t care about any of that, either. They’re just about putting you in a box, like “5S” so they can congratulate themselves like a helicopter parent does a toddler (“good job”) before moving on to the next door, where probably no one will answer and they’ll just leave another door hanger.
That’s Democrat “voter outreach” now. That’s “engagement”. Show your support for our campaign by “liking” us on BookFace. Get involved with our campaign by buying the merch. Granted, annoying text messages are small-bore compared to genocide, COVID shot mandates, inflation, rigged politics, censorship, saber-rattling, corruption, child poverty, union bashing, hippie punching, and a Dick Cheney endorsement. With such a longass list, any one of those Darwin Award moves could have done in the Democrats by itself. But all those expensive, “innovative”, forward-looking “tools” can’t make up for a cruel, boneheaded, tone-deaf politics.
And that’s where Democrat money goes. Another $6 million wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference with these bozos. They would have gotten better use of all that money by burning it to heat their offices.
> All the money that Democrats *do* put into the mechanics of campaigns is stupidly spent. They spend it on “data science”. On “new” methods and techniques. On “things and tools” as Harris so eloquently formulated it: databases, targeted ads, shrill fundraising emails, phone calls, text messages.
Apparently, Democrats now believe that politics is not local; fitting for a globalist party.
This tallies with not giving the Democrat capo in Philly walking around money. No walking around money? In Philly? Really? And sure enough, they did badly.
It also fits with a mindset that equates large donations with effectiveness, both as a candidate and a legislator. Now with the payments to celebrities, and probably donor owned tech companies and probably donor run NGOs,
I am reminded of an Ourbourus, Every thing circles the donations. The donor class gives the candidate money which they use to beg donations from small donors, so they can hire consultants and producers and NGOs for the campaign giving much of the money back to the donor class. But without an “honest liar” as a candidate it is just a snake eating its own tail. Everyone gets their cut, except the small donors, as millions and now billions are spent to elect no one. Or even if they do get elected, their time is spent setting up the next circle.
Just in case. The sugar packet cites. “First step to solve economic and financial crises would be to abolish the Noble prize in Economics- Nassib Nicholas Taleb”
Funny that. I would like to know the company doing the packets.
—–
On the measures to prevent disease, #15 squared in red. Indeed. By far, the most frequent infectious diseases are…?
Respiratory diseases!- well done!
Why it is so?
Because we don’t wash our hands frequently enough— Err
Because these are almost certainly in most cases transmitted airborne.– well done!
“Funny that. I would like to know the company doing the packets.”
In the spirit of researching small, good things, I poked around a bit and found this personal blog site: https://havepaprikawilltravel.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/sugar-quotes/
The packets pictured with various words of wisdom are from https://www.azucarlutor.com/
Ignacio: I believe the sugar packet had a coffee brand on the other side, but I failed to note it. The coffee was served in Restaurant El Forcat, C. Roteros 12 in Valencia (sigh, I was there about 1 week before the terrible flooding). Wonder what other slogans they have on their packets?
If Lee above is right is a company from Granada. Doesn’t surprise me.
“Even Oprah Winfrey charged the campaign $1 million to show up.”
Trump might be Hitler-adjacent and a danger to democracy but in neoliberal hell-world the bag must still be secured.
(…with apologies to Sally Field)
You like me {hands over a million bucks} you really like me!
Oprah claims that she was not paid a dime by the Harris campaign.
…on the grounds that it went not to her, but to her production company.
I remember reading somewhere that when a major corporation is on the edge of death and every officer knows it, there is a better chance of a woman being appointed to be the captain who either rescues the ship or goes down with it. To paraphrase Bugs Bunny from a cartoon I remember . . . ” If its the Captain’s Mess, let her clean it up”. Or go down with it.
I wonder if deeply secret private polling showed the Democratic Strategerists that ” this sucker is going down”, in the deathless words of Dubya Bush. And if the sucker is going down, why not let Kamala Harris be the Captain, since she wants it so bad.
One thing for sure, in the widest scope, Kamala did not create and fill the sewage lagoon she ended up drowning in. 4 decades of New Yuppie Scumocrats and Clintobamacrats did that, step by careful step.
Strangely, or not, I feel no sadness that Kamala drowned in the sewage lagoon. I am sad that she was not joined in that fate by so many deserving Democrats and Democrat parasites.
Well, I feel no personal sadness for her, to be sure. She knew the risks and she took her chances.
I feel sad for us in that her defeat means TrumpenVance’s victory , and people who thought things couldn’t get worse will feel just how much worse things can get. That’s why I voted for Harris.
As Morpheus told Neo in that “Matrix” movie . . . ” There is no bottom.”
> There is no bottom
“[T]he worst is not So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.'” — William Shakespeare, King Lear
breaktimes all day today, ive been trolling through x( i take numerous short breaks while doing this kind of work)…just came across this while waiting for WC:
https://x.com/ljmontello/status/1856183302383907004
saw this morning that team blue was freaking that this was the cages guy and the separate the kids guy…but he’s also their guy, too.
and, just in case yer blood pressure is too low, for some reason:
https://x.com/NobleQAli/status/1854604563384614915
its gonna be a long 4 years.
It’s interesting to see the anti-evil people finding it really easy to become the pro-evil people when they do not get what they want, which is everything, apparently.
> young, nonwhite, single, and non-college educated people zoom right.
False attribution. Type 1 Error.
Taking no prisoners on this. Conversation yesterday, friends friend went no-contact with her & a third over not voting the one way. Suggested not waiting til Friday to go make contact, in person, with the third. Sooner is better. The viciousness of the sect, selling out their downline, means that not making assumptions follows the precautionary principle.
To make such a statement based on presidential outcomes, when progressive measures outperformed the presidential by ten to fifteen percent, is disingenuous at best, and veers toward depraved in this environment.
> Taking no prisoners on this.
Pardon my ambiguity. By this I mean such statements need to be directly and factually challenged, rather than Socratically coaxed to the conclusion. To be clear. Best thing for everyone.
“Best thing for everyone.” Hmmm…. This sounds a bit too close to G–less Communism to we members of the “Committee For the Suppression of Choice.” (Your contributions not tax deductible.)
It’s a conflict resolution variant.
i agree. the ballot measures tell a much larger tale than we’ve heard, so far.
like the Pew findings over the years that even most gop voters want universal healthcare.
we remain unrepresented.
and all this yelling about how the country failed kamalamadingdong sure as hell aint helping.
at least we havent gotten to the russian interference stage(tm).
i find that part particularly tiring.
and the Gabriel Winant thing in Dissent is really good…really long, but really good…especially where he starts quoting Stuart Hall and Brecht.
The Winant thing:
> The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect.
> It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class.
Silly me, I was thinking they didn’t have an ideology, just targets. But I was paying attention to their words. I agree with Lambert, with the caveat that ‘globalized neoliberal capitalism’ is that which Must Not Be Spoke. Because class is implicit, and it’s the opposite of ‘local workers’.
back when i was politically active locally…2001 til around 2009 or 10(whenever obamacare turned into what it became)…i was quite the starchild among the local dems(and libertarians and what i call, variously, the front porch/small-c/russel kirk/wendell berry conservatives(such egalitarianism/ecumenicism was unknown to each group, and is in itself pretty remarkable. i’m proud of it))…wrote a lot of letters to the editor of the local brochure, which were printed…influenced, thereby, a few local policy things…and was courted by the local dems to help them with their efforts…back when they had efforts,lol.
but when obama got in, the fight was declared over(it wasnt)…i continued advocating in the paper for universal healthcare, or at least a step towards it…
but then i and my MIL got invited to obama’s secong inauguration party, at the hilltop manse of a local rich guy(we were the 2 token po folks).waterfall in the foyer, gigantic picture window overlooking the barrio where i then lived, easily ignored if one simply refrained from looking down.
and we sat around with the beautiful people, all of them well off and educated, and talked about who had went where to campaign for O…ohio, several other “battleground states”…fine wine, finer scotch, and even a few keystones for us rabble representatives.
the talking stick, as it were, finally…and reluctantly…came to me…”joe, what do you think?”
and i went to the big window, pointed to my barrio, and said, “i think we need to get the hell off this hill, get down there to the barrio with cabrito and a few kegs of beer, and register people to vote”….utter silence…shoegazing…shuffling of feet…a tiny almost choke on a half swallowed nip of scotch…and then they moved on, as if nothing had been said to upset their reverie…and then it was time to watch Obama speak on the gigantic tv thing…and MIL and i left.
i was never called again…my emails were never answered again…the phone was never picked up.
i put in the next paper a call for dems to meet me at the cop shop to become deputy voter registrars…and a friend, apolitical, showed up…merely to support me.
i registered one person, and gave up on politics.
that’s who the democrats are, now…and who they will remain, until the spell is broken, and the current regime crashes and burns utterly.
i came down from the hills for Bernie in 2016, but not with the demparty…as an independent force.
and went right back to the hills when the dems stole it from him.
thats the perspective i’ve watched all this from, ever since.
again, Fie!
demparty cannot be saved, because they’ve poisoned it since at least clintontimes.
they embody covert narcissism, it turns out…something of which i have become an expert, due to my mother(boomer dem wannabe pmc with all the pretensions and assumed superiority we see evidenced on msnbc at any given time).
let them go into the wilds with all our sins at long last, and wither away.
that is th only way to “reform” them.
let them become dust.
yes very good and accurate account, this is how it works as soon as PMC-types and educated folks are involved and PR is part of the game – not just politics but any area
> i agree. the ballot measures tell a much larger tale than we’ve heard, so far.
100%. Missouri is a fine example.
Damion Searls and the philosophy of translation. I have translated from French and Italian into English, from poetry, prose, and theatrical pieces. For some time, I was a member of an association of literary translators.
Whenever translators starting talking about translation, they go on endlessly, as if they have to justify the idea of translation — as if translators and interpreters haven’t been around for thousands of years. Translation “theory” is even more deadly boring, although not quite as untethered to reality as queer theory and gender theory.
Searls: “As writers go, a translator operates under an especially strong constraint: to produce a text that’s a translation of the original, not some random new thing.”
This is “theory”? A long time ago, I read somewhere, or figured out the kernel of the problem myself — a translation of a work of art in the original language has to be a work of art in the target language.
This has meant that some drafts of poems that I was trying to translate are still drafts — I can’t seem to get them into English. An Italian poet, whose work I was working on (some of which are those drafts in limbo), himself a noted translator of Proust into Italian, told me that at a certain point in translating, one must just give up. A translation can be beautiful, but usually, it is mainly adequate.
This is why I love Moncrieff’s Proust translation. It’s a work of art in and of itself, the language inspired in ways that transcend merely paraphrasing those dense volumes into English (from a rather error ridden French edition, to be sure; Kilmartin did wonderful work availing himself of the corrected later editions to revise the Moncrieff translation).
Yes!
Big question is will this art survive pattern-based AI translations?
Will people understand, see the difference?
A.I. has no consciousness which is why prose translation doesn´t work yet.
But when data is huge and calculating power enhances eventually you will get a translation of a novel that – and this is the very point – merely resembles the original more or less. (But who cares?)
Is it possible the industry actually destroys the art of translation?
And this is a very serious cultural issue if these moneyed interests are not checked in time with full force.
>>>The Security Gap: Less Secure Group Swing Right
IMO, yet again another patronizing take from the journalism class—and “white savior”-adjacent to boot.
How about this take: people who don’t push electrons for a living, and people who spend more of their after-tax income on non-discretionary things, moved right.
And your take is different from the tweet how?
chris christie says trump to deschedule mary jane.
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cannabis/24/11/41910180/exclusive-chris-christie-says-trump-will-remove-federal-restrictions-on-marijuana-find-sweet-spot-for-crypto-regulation
i mean, its that guy, and all…err those guys,lol…but if it happens, it sure as heck wasnt on my bingo card.
Iowa Governor Harold Hughes was a reformed alcoholic who legalized liquor-by-the-drink in Iowa by enforcing existing laws which were widely disregarded. In no time at all the legislature passed liquor-by-the-drink and state liquor stores lost their monopolies but it did take decades to get ‘strong’ beer into Iowa. All accomplished by a 12-stepper (not a dry drunk, btw) who modernized Iowa liquor laws simply by enforcing them.
Teetotaler Trump is exactly the POTUS I’d expect to normalize drug relations. Very glad he’s not doing this Harold Hughes style which would be to restart the war on drugs in the most disruptive and annoying manner possible to force Congress to take action.
This will mark 12 steps, er years of having a non-drinker as President, and I’m ready for round 2 of teetotalitarian leader, barkeep please pour me a glass of Malbec and keep ’em coming when you see them nearing empty or me getting tipsy.
Now having a toketolerant leader, I did not see that coming~
When Hughes was elected governor for the first time in 1962, the legislative session didn’t begin until mid-year. Hughes deputized the state police and made them shut down the “key clubs”, which were a loophole in the law.
By the time the legislature convened, they were all jonesing for a drink and passed the reform quickly.
Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying “the best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly”. He was correct, of course, but the strategy wouldn’t work in this case.
::musical interlude:: (via YouTube) :)
I doubt that Trump will deschedule mary jane. There is way too much money at stake in keeping it scheduled. As Putin has said, presidents get elected and some have ideas, but then the men in dark suits carrying briefcases show up and suddenly the president has a change of heart. Haven’t we seen this play out over and over again?
Here is an item from whitepeopletwitter noting that Trump’s pick for SecState, Marco Rubio, has said he would NOT call for a Gaza Ceasefire. It is titled ” Congratulations Dipsh!ts”. Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1gplwwb/congratulations_dipshits/
But there are always tradeoffs in life, and maybe this is an acceptable price to pay for imposing peace on Ukraine. And to those who say it is not, I can only say ” Don’t blame me, I voted for Harris.”
Actual quote from Trump today, after nominating Mike Huckabee to be the new ambassador to Israel:
That’s the exact same language that Joe used when referencing his team (Blinken, Burns.)
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Excuse me while I now go pet an emotional support animal. And do not blame me, I voted for Jill Stein.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-nominates-mike-huckabee-us-ambassador-israel?msockid=2d204d3eb7166bef256e59a3b6406ab1
A guinea pig would be most appropriate for an emotional support animal…
Gawd, when I first read that about Huckabee, I thought it must be from The Onion.
Reality is getting worse by the moment. It’s going to take more than an emotional support animal to get through this.
And don’t blame me, l didn’t vote for Trump.
Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase “Oval Office OJ.” That was a bit of a hyperbolic reference to Bill Clinton after he got caught with that woman. But it rings true here. Neither party is interested in peace, or stopping the killing, just pretending like they didn’t commit the crime. Or in our case act as an accessory to murder.
Best of wishes. The Lou Reed song comes to mind: Busload of faith to get by
I like the “emotional support aminal” that Big Gretch fed in that infamous Pet Care video.
It gets better. Trump seems to have just nominated a Fox newscaster, Pete Hegseth, for defense secretary. I was hoping for Tulsi. Not a good sign.
I googled Pete Hegseth, and he is a serious war crime enthusiast. Makes Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men look like a shrinking violet.
Methinks we are going to get our war-mongering straight up, not on the rocks.
To modify your meme a bit, the Ship of State is now steering right for the rocks.
What is funny about this is that Trump may well subconsciously be playing the part of America’s Nemesis.
“You’ve been causing trouble for me for the last eight years. Now I’m going to show you what real trouble looks like.”
Fellow Chris, I have no doubt Mr. Huckabee is capable of supporting that goal.
Graveyards are quite peaceful. No children laughing. No people arguing. No traffic noise. No messy moral conflicts. No ethical concerns. No claims of “just war”. No hostages.
Just peaceful dirt blowing through empty ruins filled with the dead. Mostly women and children. It will be peace the likes of which the world hasn’t known for millenia. I hope the stifling quiet drives whoever lives there completely mad.
Gaza has the bones of a real supernatural horror story.
The lurking shadows at the end of the hall in the sparkling new beachside condo in Gaza. The faintly heard cries of playing children out on the beach in the middle of the night during the full moon. But when you go out to look, nothing is there. Then you stub your toe on a half-buried child’s baby doll. But the beach commission is supposed to have cleaned up the beaches already! What’s that? It gleams dully in the moonlight. You go closer and see a land mine freshly washed up by the tide. You turn to go back and find yourself surrounded by mines. How did this happen? The condo by the sea idea is slowly but surely losing its allure. Suddenly you see a pattern in the mines laying around you. They are in a hopscotch pattern! Did some children put them there? What children? This is an Elder Condo, no children allowed except to visit. Something is wrong.
Ets. etc.
Stay safe. Watch where you step.
I did not vote for Harris or Trump because their support for Israel is support for genocide.
You passed the test, congratulations!
Me three. I cannot imagine how Trump can bring peace to the Middle East but it is theoretically possible. I could envision no path to peace with Team Harris (or Biden).
From my reading I have gathered that the road to peace in the Middle East goes through the grave.
And to underline the point, it’s not clear that we’re getting peace in Ukraine out of this either.
https://reason.com/2024/11/12/trumps-reported-national-security-advisor-supports-bombing-russia-and-afghanistan/
Poor guy thinks that it is still the 1990s. Boy, isn’t he in for a surprise. Most of those countries on his hate list can now shoot back.
As I understand it, by the time Trump is in office most of NATO’s member countries will be in violation of the 2% of GDP rule agreed upon in the Wales Summit Declaration (NATO) (Article 14) in 2014. Here (also NATO) is a handy graph (#2).
If my memory serves me here, Trump makes a lot of noise about member countries being deadbeats. There will be meat on that bone this time around.
I see a lot of gloating going on among Democrats and others about Trump’s neocon picks. (No, I don’t see too much of it here because I think people here are much better informed.)
What I do have to say is I have always been very impressed with how responsive the Republican party is to it’s voters – it’s much more responsive than the Democrats who routinely $hit on their supporters, and Trump’s supporters did get Pompeo removed. That is an achievement. Trump responds to public pressure!
I mean we’re talking about war here. And we don’t want war. So how about we support them in their efforts? How about instead of don’t blame me we say I don’t want war, what can I do?
I mean I didn’t vote for the guy, but I certainly want what’s best for my country, and we are where we are.
I get a kick out of the bookends on the ap votecast bar chart
Well OK, let me re-phrase this in a way that could motivate more voters…
Tired of how the Democrats blow you off? Tired of having a rich ex-President lecture you on how to vote?
Pile in on that X effort to convince Trump to dump the neocons. Attach a video about how you are working with your fellow citizens to help shape Trump’s Presidency because he listens to the voters, and he listens to the citizens that didn’t even vote for him. So rather than having an ex-President lecturing YOU on how to VOTE, he’s listening to US on how to run AMERICA.
I mean, imagine being Clinton or Obama and watching THAT. That’s like slipping the dagger in, giving it a good twist, and snapping it off at the hilt. Rhetorically speaking of course.
I have added orts and scraps. The quality of the blame cannonry and the post-election analysis is improving, which is a mercy/
LOL wrt the Spanish sugar packet! :D
Grover Cleveland’s 2nd term started with a financial panic where money was really scarce, silver coins dated from 1893 to 1895 being the most valuable years of all, as few were minted.
What if ‘Trump 2-the Sequel’ started similarly?
“Return of the Creature From the DC Swamp?”
Oh, be still my beating heart! Trump as the “Swamp Thing.” (I don’t see him as the Toxic Avenger. You know that character. The long-lost evil twin brother of the Hulk.)
My Elliotician says the odds favor a massive move upward in the barbarous relic, with silver headed to test the long-term high in the 40’s. It won’t happen likely in time for Christmas, but February is a distinct possibility.
Confetti money drives out the good, and once the moneyed classes figure out that their 401k is a 201k factoring in inflation, it’s Katy bar the door!
I’m thinking more along the lines of something that matters to everybody, the current value of their abodes not abiding and in fact free falling, as inflation gathers steam in everything else they purchase.
To coin an old phrase, a financial panic.
The problem with confetti money will become apparent when and if the masses have a divine revelation, sort of like Moses when he saw the burning bush. All that funny-money being printed up is really quite worthless when you get down to it. At least a Kennedy quarter had some silver in it. Tricky Dick really fooled us good in 1971, and here we are almost 54 years later still swallowing the trickwitchery.
We’re a ways away from that, but maybe all the reckless talk of tax cuts, guns, and butter will do the trick.
I need boundless and unfettered fiat money to keep going for at least another couple decades, as its all I know, as well as pretty much all of my fellow citizenry.
It’d be tantamount to removing all the lane dividers on the 405 @ rush hour were the fiat lady to sing, kinda bad.
What possible financial wrecks have we cataloged for 2025 on NC so far? Last I checked it looked like we were going to have:
(1) a collapse in home prices, (2) a complete collapse of the commercial real estate market, (3) market contagion from any banks exposed to either of those via MBS or CMBS, (4) shenanigans from inflation revving back up with the rate cuts, (5) possible supply side shocks from China restricting key inputs, (6) further labor issues from strikes, (7) possible price shocks from tarrifs being put in place prior to industrial policy, (8) huge swings in public sector workforce due to St. Musk pulling a Twitter on the federal government employee population, (9) labor related issues from possible mass deportation or the implied threat of mass deportation, (10) increasing risk of HPAI breakout in US. Oh, and, (11) weird weather causing grid failures this winter.
Let me know if I’m forgetting anything.
The Aliens are wondering why the Terries won’t eat the terryfood any more.
1.) not likely 2.)bailout 3.)see 2 4.)who cares, my inflation is wall streets payday 5.)what’s the difference between sanctions and tariffs 6.) who cares 7.) see 5 8.) see 6 9.) the beatings will continue until morale improves, plus 6 and 8 10.)unforeseen calamity for the win 11.) bonus points but both 10 and 11 allow cover for more fiscal stimulus to the corpulents
Beyond hope and fear is a zen state, or something, stock up on water and canned goods I guess. As a release I recommend finding a med industry mba and be short tempered and mean and when they ponder the dire state of the dem party suggest firmly that the fact that 9 out of 10 med industry mba’s are dems is the problem.
apologies to yves for being too broad, let’s say nine out of ten pharma industry mba’s and their private equity brethren instead…
Why can’t Democrats just accept Harris was a shitty candidate?
In 2019, Sanders was so good I switched voter registration from Republican to Democrat just to be able to cast my vote for him when the circus rolled into town. Unfortunately, when it did, the smoke filled room had already anointed Biden in SC.
So amidst a pandemic, I presented myself in person and cast my vote for Sanders anyway. Come November I vote for DJT for the same reason I voted for him in 2016, Joe Biden was the same corrupt piece of crap as Hillary Clinton (saying a lot because HRC is the queen of corrupt alongside Rep Pelosi).
However, had Senator Sanders been the nominee in 2020, I would have voted for him (and he would have won). Come this election, a) it probably wouldn’t have included DJT, but b) if it had I would have voted for Sanders again.
I’m your basic Republican trending toward middle of the road voter. Democrats just need to run someone good. And their line up for 2028 doesn’t have anyone good in my opinion. Pritzker, Newsome, Whitmer, Butigeig, Kahana, et al? The whole lot can go to Hell. Notice I don’t even mention Harris . . . she’ll never run again, and if she’s stupid enough to try, she drops out before the first primary just like last time because she’s a shit candidate.
Both of her Presidential runs set a lot of donor money on fire. No one will want to look stupid and so won’t back her again.
Unfortunately hers may be the only one whose future career options took a hit. Not even her husband and brother in law will get blackballed much less the top Obama and Clinton retreads that were part of the campaign.
To be fair, the Dem platform also sucked – basically it was “Joe Biden did everything perfectly.” Bernie could not have won on that platform.
re Oprah-gate–Oprah says she was not personally paid a million dollars but turns out her production company was paid a million to stage one of the Harris rallies.
https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/oprah-winfrey-never-paid-million-kamala-harris-campaign-1236207187/
Which doesn’t answer the question of why the mega rich Winfrey didn’t volunteer her company’s services for free as well.
Tis a mystery. Company policy? Simple greed? If you are that good, charge for it?
Lots of people got Oprah’s number when she had to be barred bringing in her film crew into a relief center in Maui in order to publicize herself.
I have a longer comment in moderation about how none of it adds up. (And I even went for providing service at cost versus gratis.)
But yeah, Winfrey has a long record of bad recommendations. I do believe that a majority of the deluded Harris supporters will get that she was a terrible candidate who had nothing to offer, and Oprah knew it but took the money anyway. May both fade into the mists of time.
Who knew that Pol Ticketron is the best place to procure ‘sold-out’ acts.
Who sold out?
Don’t be surprised to discover a close bond between American political Parties and procurers. For example, Epstein-Bare Virus, which is, naturally, an STD.
I was never particularly optimistic -shocking I know- but Trump’s appointments seem characteristically bad. Oh well. It’s gonna be a fun four years.
We’ve got a collision course with Trumpflation as well if he succeeds with tariffs and deportations.
Oh, it could be a mess. Trying to cut interest rates and taxes with inflation going up.
How does it usually go? Prices will be going up and stats will say it’s just “vibes”.
Trump is going to do a lot of things any sane person will despise:
Bully Jay Powell into cutting interest rates back to zero;
Nominate warmongers;
Fire Lina Khan, the best public servant we’ve had in years.
You cannot vote your way out of what is coming. Maybe Trump will bring it faster.
I never see anybody obsessed with money doing the kind of things I like to do, which invariably cost nothing more than gas & food money, even though we can obtain a similar scale of exclusivity that Illionaires crave in living their sheltered pampered lives, but perhaps not having a price tag on my experiences lessens its allure, dramatically.
Bike Snob NYC’s latest column about the rise in pedestrian deaths.
Feeling Bloated
https://bikesnobnyc.com/2024/11/12/feeling-bloated/
I guess they are saying that the party should go back to the future? I mean the party had been organized and run right down to the neighborhood level up until the 1980s. And the Republicans, while never as community oriented, had also been far more organically involved at the county and city levels decades ago. Both are far more brittle than they look.
not brittle where it really counts, like ballot access, media access, debate access, funding, etc.
they both seem pretty strong in those areas, still….but legitimacy crises rolls and tumbles right along, under the floors, and will not be denied.
ive seen allusions to…but no hard data(no time, these weeds hafta be pulled right now) the idea that overall voter turnout was down quite a bit…i expect that to continue and get much much worse, much quicker than anybody expects.
i voted this time around by staying home.
so did many others, mostly on the dem side.
shunning the entire crooked and evil mess.
Fie!
It wasn’t that long ago that they went to court and showed that they were like a club that did not have to listen to their members – and they won. The Republicans would be somewhat similar. Here in Oz over thirty years ago one of the main parties had a major ‘reform.’ Up til then, local branches would choose who would stand for them in their seat and if they won, represent them in Parliament. Afterwards, that party was free to parachute all manner of people into those seats that did not live there or know the people. The other party was doing the same and was even parachuting in ‘celebrity’ candidates which never worked at all.
How will community organizing work when all they have is contempt for anybody not already in the cult?
Well, Howard Dean had some success trying to reinvigorate the Democratic grassroots, and the party elites couldn’t wait to throw him and all his efforts in the trash. So this is what we’ve ended up with: a rootless party with crappy candidates, supported by billionaires and celebrities, pushing militarism and foreign slaughters with an asphyxiatingly heavy dose of identity politics layered on top of that, a combination that will never appeal to a plurality of voters. And they don’t even seem to have any insight, self-awareness, or–let’s face it–brains. Just big egos and big delusions. People like Dean, Al Gore, Gary Hart, and some of the others from that era may have had bad positions on some of the issues, but you at least felt like they were intelligent and able to adapt to reality not matching their expectations.
Howard Dean had some success trying to reinvigorate…
Howard Dean in recent years has been a fierce neo-conservative, and severely undermined Bernie Sanders especially in concert with Neera Tanden (now of the Biden administration). Dean and Tanden worked to drive Representative Tulsi Gabbard from the Democratic Party for standing against military strikes on Syria.
https://twitter.com/govhowarddean/status/850895059771957248
Howard Dean ✔@GovHowardDean
This is a disgrace. Tulsi Gabbard should not be in Congress.
https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/850491598517481474 …
10:16 PM – 8 Apr 2017
https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/850491598517481474
Neera Tanden ✔@neeratanden
People of Hawaii’s 2nd district – was it not enough for you that your
representative met with a murderous dictator? Will this move you?
https://twitter.com/cnn/status/850477149895131136 …
CNN ✔@CNN
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: “Yes, I’m skeptical” of claim Assad regime is
behind chemical weapons attack
7:32 PM – 7 Apr 2017
John Ratcliffe is Trump’s nominee as Director of the CIA.
Another (former) Republican Congressman, who served as Director of National Intelligence in the last year of the Trump administration. The main controversies back then were his challenges to the Russiagate narrative.
I just read the Wikipedia article on Ratcliffe. It is pretty amazing, in that it still asserts a number of Russiagate claims as true that have been proven false, and vice versa. Hard to tell where this guy would fall on the “warmonger” scale. But he did give the Establishment fits on Russiagate, which is a plus in my book.
Here’s his Wikipedia page. Pretty entertaining:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_(American_politician)
thanks 4 info
On the other hand what´s your problem?
German legacy daily SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG today has a big interview about Trump up-close and personal with none other than:
CHRISTOPHER FUCKING STEELE!
Even without the paywall you get this magnificent picture of Putin holding baby Trump (NOT baby Yoda!):
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/trump-putin-steele-dossier-wahlbeeinflussung-lux.VHXwZ2yC2maewnZ5z54YGn?reduced=true
“”Trump is a vengeful man”
“Christopher Steele unwittingly rose to fame in 2017 with the dossier that investigated Donald Trump’s involvement with Russia. How does the British ex-agent now view his re-election?”
Gosh this guy must be a real hero!
p.s. Well, you have to grant Ratcliffe that he has no Wikispooks entry to his name, yet.
Rubio does:
FWIW
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Marco_Rubio
I love those Ratcliffe eyebrows.
They remind me of the eyebrows of a certain American president who too came from Texas. A beautiful human being.
Must be a hell of a place with countless remarkable American patriotic men.
BUT, one has to indeed admit, Wikipedia says Ratcliffe was providing DISINFORMATION! How cool is that.
“(…)
Thirty-five days before the November 2020 election, Ratcliffe declassified 2016 Russian disinformation that asserted Hillary Clinton had personally approved a scheme to associate Trump with Vladimir Putin and Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Ratcliffe provided the disinformation to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, who publicly released it. The allegation had been previously rejected as baseless by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee. Ratcliffe acknowledged in a letter to Graham that the intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”[82] The intelligence community opposed the release of the information.[83] According to the New York Times, Ratcliffe’s disclosure “appeared to be a bid to help Mr. Trump politically.”
(…)”
Yes, Wimpypedia is “entertaining”, it is not a source for truth.
“Leaving and Waving”
Saw something similar with this English couple. They took a picture of themselves in their backyard with their house behind them. Did it every year like clockwork but then one year there was only the husband and a few years later, nobody. But the saddest photo of that ‘Leaving and Waving’ series was the last one where it was just the house. For the person taking that photo, it would have been probably a good bye to the house they grew up with with their parents and all the memories.
i couldnt bring myself to look at all that…still too near, 2 1/2 years later.
“her absence is like the sky, spread over everything” -C.S. Lewis
Yes. That is a wonderful book about loss. Lewis was a versatile writer. (He went through the same loss himself.)
I have something similar. Every year before traveling home from our Christmas gathering, we took a few pictures of my family and my parents. Nothing planned, it just turned out we were in roughly the same spot. The kids (and some times the adults) grumbled, but we got a few pictures every year, missing a handful of years because weather kept us apart. 2023, both parents passed. This year the house was sold so the tradition ends… but we have +20 years. From youngsters to college age. Maybe I will put them in an album. Makes me appreciate my wife’s perseverance in this task despite the rest of us moaning about it.
I try and tell our children that with each passing, a bit of up close and personal history disappears. Try and preserve as much as you can. Alas, they are still too young (40s) to understand.
Bloomborg price is a riot, so his survey was given to like 5 squillionaires vs 30000 normal people and that’s “science”
These sociologists…
But obviously happiness still increases after 75k a year…unless that’s 75k in interest!
If you are a millionaire , would you answer you are unhappy with your life ?. Bloomberg/WSJ study will says more money more happiness. Minimalist magazine would says the opposite. These studies are not worth the piece of paper they are written on
These sociologists are writing what they are paid to, in order to increase their own personal happines. Their end goal is probably to get on depicted Vessel of happiness and sail directly to the Epstein Island, where The ‘Happiness Plateau’ Doesn’t Exist.
Yep. I spent a lot of my academic career pointing out what mathematical properties “happiness scores” must possess in order to make all these statements like “this group does better by achieving x” or “this country is happier”. Basically if you state “4” then you must have twice as must utility as when you state “2”….difference between 6 and 4 must be same as between 3 and 1….and then this must hold ACROSS people. RATIO scales. Otherwise you can’t do mathematical operators.
There is not a single study in world history that confirms this. It is “not even wrong”. Plus there are a multitude of studies showing that happiness or life satisfaction scores for retired people are absolutely inconsistent with younger people. I won’t bore people again but they are out there in plain sight. NC even in links showcased a study within the last year suggesting that young people had changed their internal reference scale to give happiness scores.
If you see a rating scale then you are probably safe to assume it is garbage. If you want justification, e-mail the authors to ask “do your rating scale numbers satisfy ratio scale properties, as accepted by neuro-scientists?” Betcha they won’t reply. I won’t even start on the “quirks” people have re certain numbers…..I have a NSFW posting about what traditional Chinese people do with certain numbers. It involves soft and hard. Go figure.
Tkacik, “and the proliferating subsistence entrepreneur class”.
There, they’ve done it, the Democrats have re-created the “peasant” or “serf”, now neoliberally ennobled!
I’ve had recent experience with “subsistence entrepreneurs”. The ones I know are excellent people, and I mean that, they are genuinely good, well intentioned people, mostly female immigrants who’s small scale and very publicly spirited enterprises live off grants from various Democrat controlled State development and re-development agencies. Shall we refer to the bureaucrats with sinecures in these agencies as “the entitled tax farmers”? At least at the state D level in New York, it is the political distribution of tax receipts through these “entitled tax farmers” that commands the fealty of the “subsistence entrepreneur class”. I suppose they were supposed to be the future of the Democrat party, but their significant others voted differently (that “it’s okay to lie to your spouse” thing appears to have backfired).
It is kind of shocking how incompetent the Democrat party is, that they’ve been pursuing Trump for 8 endless years now. And completely failed. Totally. The full weight of the Establishment media, national security state, judicial system, and he evaded them all. They’ve failed so completely even the putative resistance hasn’t materialized this time. Wowzers. Functionally inept bankrupt party. That stands for nothing but gifting. How’d that billion dollars work out for you?
On the other hand. As a rearguard action against the left, a success again. So the Democrat party is doing it’s job. And moving Overton Window to the far right.
yes to this, thanks…
The reason why there could be no primary is to not allow real issues to surface, and kamala had strict instructions to not give an inch…tax credits? Don’t make me barf…and now newly resurgent working class bernie makes it plain imo.
here, chew on this,lol:https://apnews.com/article/trump-staff-picks-stefanik-wiles-stephen-miller-tom-homan-243d73610b03a3ee18c4d5f68756af7c?taid=6733fbca0264b50001628290
i laughed all the way through reading it.
we’re well into idiocracy territory, here, and its well deserved.
woe to all us firemonkeys, fucking in the mud…and abandon our pretensions to anything above that status.
collapse of empire, here we come.
embrace it.
Someone on MoA said it well – we’re on autopilot and the new crew doesn’t know how to fly.
> we’re on autopilot and the new crew doesn’t know how to fly
Let’s just hope there’s no MCAS.
a real estate guy as special envoy to middle east(ie: israel)
i mean….is it trolling?
jeez.
to live in such times…..
From my travels I see a large effort to move from X to Blue Sky. Embubblement is right. Can’t deal with anything outside of that. Not that I’m defending X. They hate Trump, Musk, Putin – the axis of evil. Only to get more wild with the latest news.
Trump taps Musk to lead a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ with Ramaswamy From NPR. Can be found all over.
More hair catching on fire.
The dream of drowning government in a bathtub really is at hand. Thanks Obama!
> Trump taps Musk to lead a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ with Ramaswamy
I think Warren’s snark doesn’t quite hit the mark:
It’s not a matter of efficiency; it’s a matter of “What kind of chain of command is this?” (To be fair, there were two Roman Consuls).
Further, if you think government should be run like a business (it shouldn’t be) Musk did succeed in massively reducing headcount at Twitter while that very large platform continued to perform. So, efficiency. But since Musk never did figure out how to run a paint booth (heck, QA) at Tesla, I would attribute that more to Silicon Valley bloat than anything else (and other Silicon Valley moguls followed his lead). It would be the same at Boeing: Massive headcount reductions would hit people with wrenches pretty fast.
So is government more like Twitter (massive bloat) or Boeing (muscle close to the skin)? My instinct, as a quondam liberal, is to say the latter, but today I am either more cynical or realistic. NOAA muscle and DOE fat* would be my guess; CDC/NIH almost entirely fat at the administrative level, muscle at the science level. USDA I bet is fat all the way down to the inspectors. Social Security is all muscle. And so forth.
Whether Musk/Ramaswamy will swing the axe out of ideology or actual merit remains to be seen.
Oh, and Trump pairing Ramaswamy with Musk is an enormous mark of favor.
Man, some of those Swedes really need take take a chill pill. So a Russian Orthodox Church was built on the outskirts of the Swedish town of Västerås. Suddenly there are accusations that it is a national security threat and it could be used as cover for future intelligence or sabotage operations-
https://www.politico.eu/article/new-russian-orthodox-church-suspicion-sweden-town-vasteras/
Maybe those same people should check under their beds, You know, just in case.
“Kamala Fell to the Same Cabal That Destroyed University Presidents” [Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect]. For me the killer quote line from the article was the following:
It reminded me so much of the TV series “Snowpiercer”. The Mr. Wilford character in that series is the boss of all that’s left of humanity remaining on a train making revolutions around the globe. You want to be in the good graces of Mr. Wilford lest ye not be chosen to stay on the train. Not only stay in the good graces but demonstrate your value/worth. Not all that different than needing to stay in the good graces of and prove your value to the boss at work lest ye lose your job.
Getting back to the article, Trump is of the “boss class”; Trump doesn’t need to stay in the good graces of anybody. Kamala has the disadvantage of obviously not being of the “boss class” or at least not the same “boss class”. That said, Kamala had options. One option was to portray herself as a member of the “boss class” that has claimed virtuous authority – the authority at war with deplorables and irredeemables. Another option was to portray herself as a member of the “boss class” that comes from exercizing governmental authority. Biden could have done Kamala a solid if he had just resigned mid term and let Kamala have the reins. Or Kamala could have embraced “servant class” membership as a servant of the people. Instead we got Kamala as member of the “servant class” to the “boss class”, as per the article a member in good standing and making sure to stay in good standing by being obedient. Which any intuitive voter could sniff out.
Anyways, highly recommend “Snowpiercer”. I think the readers here would find it right up their alley as a study in particular of the “boss class” and fascism and democracy and where does power come from. But at the end of the day it’s just good story telling and a rollicking one at that (pun intended). Sean Bean does a wonderful job playing the Mr. Wilford character as if his Ned Stark character in Game of Thrones had gone-to-the-“survival of the fittest”-side, a charismatic of the “boss class”. He’s not the only charismatic, not the only fascist in the story, but unlike the others embraces it. Plenty of parallels to personalities in the US.
I’ve had contacts who are highly observant but not in academia intuit and observe the sort of behavior you highlighted in the Moe Tkacik quote at the top. I can’t exactly replicate some of the colorful phrase-making, but “Revenge of HR ladies” comes close. And that particular rendering comes from a woman, a pretty high profile and top professional in her field, who finds herself somewhat hostage to that type at her company, and regularly and loudly say that allowing women into leadership roles was a mistake. I do not buy that conclusion at all, but I think there is a case to be made that women were given important posts far out of proportion to the ones who had the skills and temperament to be very good at it.
> making sure to stay in good standing by being obedient
PMC through and through.
My (executive) late mother’s advice was ‘go along to get along.’ Some of us bristle at that. I became day-job self-employed.
Trump builds out national security team with picks of Hegseth for Pentagon, Noem for DHS AP
Fresh faces… Entertainingly, one of the largest Covid outbreaks in the US came at a meatpacking plant in South Dakota on Noem’s watch, good job. Much is being made of Hegseth’s stint at Gitmo, but then if Obama had shut Gitmo down, as he promised…. Anyhow, Hegseth went to Princeton and then got a masters Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, so presumably he meets at least some sort of baseline, the same as the other usual suspects.
Anyhow, giving new meaning to the phrase “political appointees,” they not being appointed for their expertise. Presumably if the civil service beneath them retains some functionality, that will help them.
“Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard”?
Oh no…
p.s. John Krasinski “Sexiest Man Alive”!
How much did he pay them?
His goofy face is what you usually get when you want a stereotype for your modern-day understanding father figure in a Pixar movie about a precocious girl that intends to fly to Mars and who has “mother-issues”. Did I forget ticking a box?
Gosh, I miss those days when watching a Disney movie you could sense the abuse all over the story…
re: CHINA US EU
German BERLINER ZEITUNG, Engl.
China relies on Trump: “Biden’s industrial policy was a stab in the back for Europe”
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is putting US-Chinese relations to the test. Europe will also be challenged.
A guest article.
by Gao Jian
https://archive.is/WFBFm
About the author:
Professor Gao Jian is Director of the Centre for European Studies at Shanghai International Studies University and an expert at the China Forum of the Chinese think tank Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University (CISS). He writes columns for several international media outlets.
For those who are acquainted with the German CORRECTIV “controversy”:
the CEO of the “NGO” is now campaigning for Robert Habeck, Jeannette Gusko.
BERLINER ZEITUNG brief report
“Switch to the Greens: Correctiv leadership now campaigns for Robert Habeck
The Greens are bringing the co-director of the media company Correctiv into their election campaign team. Correctiv has not revealed exactly what role Jeannette Gusko will take on.”
https://archive.is/MLR7n
I never took CORRECTIV seriously for a second since the moment they were founded some 10 years ago.
(Their name gave them away – think “PRAVDA”?)
Just as past year German JACOBIN´s senior editor Ines Schwerdtner switched to THE LEFT.
There is no difference to the German state media which have been doing this for decades.
Many spokespeople for the chancellor originated with German state media.
So that´s that.
Re: Proposals to reform the Democratic Party: ” Maps. There should be an accountable Democratic captain for every neighborhood in the country.”
We moved to a suburb of Denver in 2007 and I became immersed in Colorado politics, including dedicating a large part of my life to Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008. I received a call from a local political activist and party official (I thought), asking me to be a precinct captain. There was, apparently, an existing precinct captain, who was an employee in the pro-abortion lobbying group then known as NARAL, but her existence was hand-waved out of mind. So, I got my list, knocked on doors, talked to people, tried to get to know ‘my’ precinct and do some organizing.
After the election, I talked with local party officials about getting precinct meetings going, in preparation for the next elections. I was informed that I was not really the ‘official’ precinct captain, that my name had never been submitted to party leadership, and thus never ratified. So, I was, politely, being told to ‘bug off.’
I tried again prior to the next presidential election, at a breakfast meeting with local and county Dem officials. I talked with the Dem county head about the importance of having precinct captains working at grass roots level, knowing their constituency, organizing precinct meetings, gathering ideas and information and having that flow upwards. Hah! I was met with a blank stare and told in no uncertain terms, that the ideas and information and direction would come from the top.
Well, after another real estate crisis or decade of cutting public sector or no potable tab water they will re-think.
As I said for Germany: Too many are too rich still for anything to happen big time. Especially those liaison between locals and top-brass on national level. The arrogance you describe gives them their pride.
I assume it´s not that different from Germany where most people who start out in local politics with great expectations as newbie organizers or activists turn away quickly due to the arrogance they encounter. Parties on the parliamentary level give a damn. It appears to be different with AfD because it was in part nurtured from the “bottom” up (no misunderstanding, AfD did not originate with poverty-struck people!) But they took traction when the German establishment went all DNC on those. And BSW is too young and too small to add them here.
And now what are they doing – again attempting to ban a party, AfD – and among the ones agreeing to this, German LEFT PARTY. How can they dare with the tradition of Communist parties in Germany being banned and harassed since 1945.
p.s. have they come back to you begging for support yet?
Slime Emily Oster emerges from the depths
There’s a Better Way to Talk About Fluoride, Vaccines and Raw Milk
Lol. Like kids can’t get COVID. What an evil person. Trump winning brought out Wen again as well. Fun times. Trusted voices lol