By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Northern Mockingbird, 350 South Madison Avenue, Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, United States.
In Case You Might Miss…
- Blame cannons thunder after Kamala campaign team podcast.
- Investigation into attempts to assassinate Trump seem curiously silent.
- Boeing delivery, layoff woes.
Generally I avoid transparently feel-good stories, but since it’s the holidays:
London please help. I’m praying for a miracle, I’ve just got into the office and noticed my mums locket (in all these photos) that I wear every day has fallen off my neck on my walk in. My mum died when I was seven and her jewellery is most of what I have of her. I’m devastated pic.twitter.com/DRNWly3sx1
— Katharine Horgan (@katharinehorgan) November 26, 2024
And:
Update: I’ve found the locket, and the chain can be easily replaced. Thank you, everyone. I’m so touched by your responses and beyond relieved to have found it—it’s hard to put into words. 🤍 https://t.co/P0beVjOQuf
— Katharine Horgan (@katharinehorgan) November 26, 2024
A fine example of Graeber’s “the communism of everyday life.”
My email address is down by the plant; please send examples of there (“Helpers” in the subject line). In our increasingly desperate and fragile neoliberal society, everyday normal incidents and stories of “the communism of everyday life” are what I am looking for (and not, say, the Red Cross in Hawaii, or even the UNWRA in Gaza).
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
Trump Assassination Attempts (Plural)
I’d sure like links for all this, but nevertheless accumulation of detail is impressive:
Makes me wonder if the Trump transition team’s reluctance to have the FBI do background checks for incoming administration officials and nominees is related to, well, all this. And the Crooks investigation seems to be moving awfully slowly.
2024 Post Mortem
Who did this:
Vice President @KamalaHarris‘ message to supporters. pic.twitter.com/x5xMUGTtkz
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) November 26, 2024
Sound up, definitely. This frame:
As readers know, I oppose remote diagnosis. But I’ve gotta say… If I were in a bar, and caught a glimpse of that face across the room, I’d think the bartender hadn’t been keeping track. Commentary:
The Kamala Harris video is pulled from a grassroots event she did – I’m not sure amplifying it is the right move. Some messages are just for your supporters.
— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) November 27, 2024
Andrew Yang seems like a nice person, but if the idea was to make sure Kamala never rean again, amplifying this video was exactly the right move.
Four days earlier:
Thank you, @KamalaHarris.
📸: @EBONY pic.twitter.com/0Oo4hWQDZX
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) November 22, 2024
Oh yeah.
“Downfall of The Democrats | The Truth About The 2024 Election” (video) ShoeOnHead, YouTube]. Several readers have posted on this “Demödämmerung”*-themed video, so here it is. NOTE * I like these umlauts, so I’m keeping them, pedants begöne).
Fine use of anaphora!
* * * “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong” (transcript) [Pod Save America, Crooked Media]. “In this candid [oh yeah] interview, the leaders of the Harris-Walz Campaign speak for the first time about the challenges they faced and why they made the decisions they did. Dan sits down with Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter to talk about the campaign’s roadmap, their approach to nontraditional media outlets like Joe Rogan, the voters they most needed to win over, why they fell short in the end, and what Democrats should do differently next time.” There’s a lot to dislike, but this caught my eye in the transcript:
[PLOUFFE] I just thought at the end of the day, particularly because Trump did not close well, I thought, and I thought Kamala Harris closed well, Trump was reminding people some of the things they don’t like about him.
Trump closed great. First, McDonalds, then the garbage truck. What’s wrong with these people?
Learned nothing, forgotten nothing:
If you have 90 minutes and want to learn about the DC swamp scumbags who run campaigns, watch this PodSave interview with the top 4 Kamala consultants.
All self-congratulatory. Not one admission of error. Endless excuses for their $1 billion failure:https://t.co/PbLsZcsjIw
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 27, 2024
Commentary:
So the Harris campaign was The Producers irl. They knew they were blowing through $1.5 billion in 15 weeks with no chance of winning, and to make sure they lost they brought the Cheneys and Richie Torres on stage. The point was to wash as much stupid money as fast as possible. https://t.co/oCfucY6e1O
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) November 27, 2024
But surely it would have been better to launder all the stupid money, but also to win?
Commentary:
The mistake here is to think American politics divides along conservative/moderate/liberal lines. The more salient spectrum is prosystem/antisystem. Trump dominated with antisystem voters, gaining hard with people who also liked & voted for Tlaib, AOC, RFK Jr. & Gabbard. Unless… https://t.co/uaecbukdxH
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 26, 2024
Heer’s “system/anti-system” binary seems like a more precise, on-point version of “Change vs. More of the Same” (assuming that “change’ is not necessarily systemic, a dubious assumption at this point).
* * * TikTok in the campaign. From a campaign staffer, so cum grano salis. Nevertheless:
Kamala advisor Stephanie Cutter: "I can't tell you how many friends of mine or nieces and nephews would say to me 'you know I'm getting these things from Trump all the time on TikTok.'"
I was one of the two guys who ran the @TeamTrump TikTok account. Keep in mind that Kamala… pic.twitter.com/klIKpegcu3
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 26, 2024
“The Resistance goes quiet” [Axios]. “The Resistance, a political movement to protest Trumpism online and in the streets. There’s still plenty of resistance to Trump across the country, but little mass mobilization…. An event scheduled for January — dubbed ‘The People’s March’ — will inevitably be compared to the massive Women’s March eight years earlier, which garnered hundreds of thousands of participants and spurred nationwide sister marches… “The exhaustion is real” among those who organized against Trump during his first term, only to see him elected again, [Tamika Middleton, managing director at Women’s March] says. ‘Part of what is beautiful about what mobilization offers inside of these moments, is that they activate and bring in new people who have new energy.'” • We’ll see. Personally, I think the scope of Trump’s victory — a win in the popular vote, all seven swing states — removed a lot of the rationale for resistance initially. We’ll see what January brings (besides lawfare and oppo).
Not “resistance” per se, but the same people using the same tactics:
“The Democrats’ Dirty Tricks Playbook?” [Matt Taibbi, Racket News]. “The newly released court docs bear out the fact that there was deep concern within the blue activist world about the third-party run. A memo sent from political strategist Lucy Caldwell to Dmitri Mehlhorn, aide to billionaire donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, described No Labels as a ‘looming forest fire’ that would be a ‘nuclear grade threat’ if it nominated a candidate and reached a ‘live campaign environment.’ To prevent that, Caldwell proposed a protracted campaign of ‘brand destruction,’ using ‘controlled burns’ to put the fire out long before the election. As Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson put it less subtly in a tweeted video last April, No Labels needed to be ‘burned to the fucking ground politically.'” And after an 80-minute conference call between Democratic Party-aligned activist groups, “former Emily’s List chief Emily Kane, now of Third Way, wrote a letter after the discussion reported on by Semafor, summing up the conclusions of what she called, in the subject line, the ‘Anti-No-Labels Coalition meeting.’ Notably acknowledging they were indeed ‘working together as a broad coalition’ to ‘fight the anti-democratic operation that is No Labels,; it added without irony that this fight for democracy should also include ‘deterring other third party presidential efforts.'” • Politics ain’t beanbag. But just don’t call yourselves Democrats, uppercase or lowercase D.
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!
Elite Maleficence
Everything’s going according to plan:
Lambert here: Even though the Covid numbers seem low, please remember that the data is not nearly as good as it once was, that it lags, and that the downside risks of catching Covid are considerable. For those who have developed their own personal protocols, I wouldn’t relax them. Maybe next year.
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC November 18 | Last Week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC November 23 | center Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC November 16 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| New York[5] New York State, data November 25: | National [6] CDC November 21: |
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| Positivity | |
| center National[7] Walgreens November 25: | ★ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic November 23: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC November 4: | Variants[10] CDC November 4: |
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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
GDP: “United States GDP Growth Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The US economy expanded an annualized 2.8% in Q3 2024, the same as in the advance estimate, compared to 3% in Q2. Personal spending increased at the fastest pace since Q1 2023 although it was revised slightly lower from the advance estimate (3.5% vs 3.7%). It was boosted by a 5.6% surge in consumption of goods (vs 6% in the advance estimate) and a robust spending on services (2.6%, the same as in the advance estimate). Government consumption growth was unrevised at 5%.”
Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “US initial jobless claims held steady at 213,000 for the week ending November 23rd, below market expectations of 216,000. The results extended the view that the US labor market remains at historically strong levels despite the aggressive tightening cycle by the Federal Reserve in the last quarters, adding leeway for the central bank to slow the pace of monetary loosening should inflation remain stubbornly high.”
Manufacturing: “United States Durable Goods Orders” [Trading Economics]. “New orders for manufactured durable goods in the US rose by 0.2% over a month to $286.561 billion in October 2024, following a revised 0.4% decrease in the prior month and missing market forecasts of a 0.5% growth.”
Manufacturing: “United States Chicago PMI” [Trading Economics]. “The Chicago Business Barometer, also known as the Chicago PMI, slid to 40.2 in November 2024, down from 41.6 in September and falling short of market expectations of 44. This left the index 2.7 points below the year-to-date average. The latest reading signaled that Chicago’s economic activity contracted for the 12th consecutive month, and at a notably sharp pace, marking the steepest decline since May.”
Manufacturing: “‘Expansionist’ Emirates unveils first A350 and waits on arrival of longer-range version” [FlightGlobal]. “Philippe Mhun, Airbus executive vice-president for programmes and services, declines to say how many A350s it will hand over to Emirates next year, but says the carrier will account for a “large part” of 2025’s output – somewhere in the region of 25-30%…. Clark says the carrier remains ‘expansionist’ but requires additional capacity to meet its goals. ‘We are a frustrated entity because we need airplanes and we need them tomorrow.’ Had Boeing managed to keep to the original timeline for the 777X ‘we would have had 85 777Xs by now’, says [Emirates president Sir Tim Clark]. Boeing’s latest forecast is for 777X deliveries to start in 2026, although with Emirates third in line to receive the twinjet, its deliveries are likely to be towards the back end of the year at best.”
Manufacturing: “Laid-off Boeing workers worry for themselves, and the company that cut them” [Seattle Times]. “Layoff notices came in the form of phone calls, 10-minute calendar holds and scripted conversations with managers. One worker left with a gifted bottle of whiskey. Another wasn’t even allowed to keep the cardboard box they had used to collect their belongings. Some workers had prepared for the news; Boeing executives had spent weeks talking about reducing inefficiencies and focusing on the core parts of the struggling business. Others were blindsided, relying on years of positive reviews and, in some cases, assurances their jobs were safe…. [The Everett-based worker] said he can’t help but feel that ‘there’s not much runway’ left for the company. ‘There’s a level of care and a level of knowledge that just won’t be there.'”
Manufacturing: “FAA Says No Immediate Fix Needed For Boeing 737 MAX Engine Smoke In Cabin After Bird Strike Incidents” [Simple Flying]. “The FAA’s Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention recommended software changes to the engine’s bleed air system’s response to a bird strike. The office’s recommendation read that the required design change would detect the immediate impulse of a bird strike or fan blade loss event and automatically close the affected engine’s Pressure Regulated Shutoff Valves (PRSOV) or trip the associated air conditioning pack.” • More on the leaked memo here.
Manufacturing: “Life is better without Boeing, airline executive says” [Quartz]. “Boeing’s ongoing struggles have disrupted airlines racing to replace aging fleets worldwide, but easyJet has avoided both those troubles and the engine issues plaguing some Airbus operators. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Chief Executive Johan Lundgren expressed thanks that he had Airbus planes with CFM International engines…. [Some] airline executives, like United Airlines Chief Executive Scott Kirby, have publicly called for a new competitor to displace the global Airbus-Boeing planemaking duopoly.” • Too bad about Bombardier. Embraer? China?
Tech: “Drake takes Kendrick Lamar rap feud to US courts” [Yahoo News]. “Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which accused Drake of having relationships with underage girls, enjoyed huge commercial and critical acclaim, exceeding 900 million plays on streaming platform Spotify and earning multiple Grammy nominations, including song of the year. But in the first of two court filings this week, Drake on Monday accused Universal Music Group (UMG), which distributed the song, of charging Spotify unusually low prices to license the track, in return for the streamer widely recommending the track to its subscribers. According to a court document filed in New York, Drake also accused UMG of using automated computer ‘bots’ to artificially inflate the supposed number of times the song has been streamed on Spotify.”
Statistics: Speaking of GDP:
This is a great example of why GDP per capita is not a good measurement of quality of life.
The standard of living in Mississippi is much worse than that of France.
US GDP is absurdly exaggerated, not only because the dollar is the global reserve currency, but also due to the… https://t.co/J6OWZJqyjf pic.twitter.com/2ZmWqdA1lp
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 23, 2024
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 64 Greed (previous close: 64 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 49 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 27 at 2:10:45 PM ET.
Gallery
Winter (1):
Claude Monet "The Road in front of Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter", 1867. Oil on canvas. pic.twitter.com/mrPtuvtdyd
— Paul (@_pgb__) June 5, 2023
Winter (2):
Winter in Broughton https://t.co/bOGC3DQa2L pic.twitter.com/wXMtrmt7Mo
— L. S. Lowry (@lowryartist) November 27, 2024
I love the concept of a “pamphlet launch”:
Event flyer for my pamphlet launch in Brooklyn. Come by, say hi, get offline. See you soon! pic.twitter.com/j09KqZ6WKX
— August Lamm (@AugustLamm) November 11, 2024
No wonder she left the country:
Happy birthday, P Diddy, Puff Daddy, Sean Combs, or as I call him, Cuddle McSnugglestuff. You don’t need to know why. @iamdiddy
— The Ellen Show (@EllenDeGeneres) November 4, 2016
Something big coming down the pike?
“Scale-invariant topology and bursty branching of evolutionary trees emerge from niche construction” [PNAS]. You’ll like this, if this is the sort of thing you like. The closing paragraph: “Our results show that niche construction is more than a feedback between evolutionary and ecological processes arising when their timescales are not widely separated. Niche construction not only leads to a perturbation in the evolutionary trajectories of all components of an ecosystem, but also creates an indelible footprint on the evolutionary process that cannot be eliminated, even for very long times. These memory effects manifest themselves through the anomalous scaling laws that characterize observed phylogenetic trees.” • What intrigued me was a sentence in the Abstract: “Phylogenetic trees describe both the evolutionary process and community diversity,” but apparently “community” is not used in a sociological sense.
Dad.
— No Context Brits (@NoContextBrits) November 26, 2024
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Nothing against Umlaute, but Demö makes no sense, because it’s Demokraten in german, and not Demökräten.
If English can have entire boroughs of strings of silent letters that exist only for decoration, it can have pointless silent umlauts, too.
It’s the heavy metal umlaut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut
Love this idea, signed: Lünker Wälleye
TIL Spinal Tap has an umlaut over the n. No idea how to type that on my phone’s keyboard.
You don̈’t. Unicode magic is required, namely, U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS after the n.
And if you want to talk about letters for decoration, let’s talk Welsh orthography.
> U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS
Sounds like a “see your doctor” condition to me….
For those, leather outfit and/or lambchop sideburns are required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Motorhead-04.jpg
hahahah!
I love it…to that I say:
“Smultronstället”!
One of my favourite Bergman films.
Much better than Surströmming.
About that Harris video, someone was helping out with the so-called messaging.
For conspiracy fans, recall that Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
> Scale-invariant topology and bursty branching of evolutionary trees emerge from niche construction” [PNAS]
I’ll be chewing on this all through Thanksgiving. And still end up on the couch feeling stupid.
I can’t but think there’s benefit to concrete material ecotopes. And the brief overview of the banquet already yields some tasty treats:
>> Niche construction in evolutionary theory: The construction of an academic niche? J. Genet. 96, 491–504 (2017).
> I’ll be chewing on this all through Thanksgiving.
Something to cut through the tryptophan haze! We will be interested to hear your thoughts.
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s work ponders niche construction. See his latest:
https://archive.ph/J8zRu
https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2024/09/19/book-review-living-on-earth-life-consciousness-and-the-making-of-the-natural-world/#more-28749
> niche construction
Super-interesting, thanks.
Regarding the casual acceptance of infection, it was much more gradual than just the hideous response to Covid. We have spent years where children were sent to school ill, people went to work ill and it was just accepted as the way it was. Covid was different because it was the first time in a long time that people thought they could die from an infectious disease. (It was always possible, but was so rare it was not a consideration.)
What I deeply regret was the political take over of our public health structures has made them something to be distrusted for even the PMC crowd. They wave off Covid warnings as much as the no mask/no vaccine crowd they insulted and wanted to die at the height of Covid. That the deplorables wrote them off earlier is not entirely the fault of our bureaucrats who wanted everyone to go back to work regardless of the safety. Some of it was the mindset of the people running them. They had become as much about making money in the process as the investor/donor set.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think the world would be better off today if the Democrats had thought they had to keep Biden in the White House basement rather than just not worry about people catching odd glimpses of doddering Joe on state approved media. We would be. They might have had to keep up the pretense that certain precautions were necessary…even with a vaccine. But no they could fully embrace the second part of Lambert’s two part plan description. ‘Go Die’ (even if you have to get severely disabled first).
The release of part one of the Covid response inquiry here (New Zealand) is due today, with the chair giving a preliminary interview. He noted that they had engaged with the anti-vax groups, and while he obviously wasn’t going to agree with everything they said, it was ‘respectful’ and ‘illuminating’ and they ‘got a lot out of it’. Examples were accounts of the impact of vaccine mandates on the minority that were strongly opposed, and the need to keep public policy flexible and responsive to the science (viz., the absurdity of excluding unvaccinated people from society even when the vaccines don’t actually protect much against the mutation currently in the wild).
Hopefully the fact that the inquiry listened non-judgmentally to the anti-vaxxers, and even conceded points where they made sense, will help to heal the breach of social license and make them feel more included in society again. Needless to say it’s hard to imagine the same kind of conversation happening in the US.
I thought New Zealand’s approach was laudatory. They decided to quarantine until the vaccines were ready and the homeland could be vaxxed. It never dawned on them that the vaccines wouldn’t prevent the disease, and after two years of holding out for them, they had no choice but to relent and let COVID in.
I’m still going with the idea that it was decided to trash the idea of ‘public health’ so that the economy would not suffer. Nothing could be permitted to hinder the economy and you had doctors talk about this on TV which led people to mistrust doctors themselves. I lost trust in my own doctor when I tried to tell him about a bad, negative effect of the Astrazeneca vaccine on me and he would not hear of it and almost turned hostile. This is the same vaccine which they have now stopped producing because of such effects. To a large extent, how we have been handling the pandemic has been an experience in gaslighting such as when old Joe said the pandemic was over and now that a new one is coming down the pike, we are going to be screwed.
Not quite Dad, but my friend and I saw a sign at a gas station for a Free Coleman Lantern, and we both raised our fists and started chanting.
Like me when I clear a highway construction zone here in Michigan and see a sign saying, “END ROAD WORK”. . . .
“But I’ve gotta say… If I were in a bar, and caught a glimpse of that face across the room, I’d think the bartender hadn’t been keeping track”.
same here, although my thought was it was like viewing a “Cops” traffic stop video when the driver is trying to explain why she can’t perform dui check exercises without an attorney present.
As a former bartender, yeah, it rhymes– I’d say she’s pretty loose and feeling no pain.
I think she just figured out she was, all along, the mark.
should we ask AOC her opinion?
Who does AOC ask as to what her opinion is ‘supposed’ to be? We should ask them. Cut out the middle-droid.
And just in time for your Thanksgiving Dinner, this shows up.
I heard about this sort of thing in a conference a few months ago. I have to admit, I truly thought they were kidding.
But no, it appears, at least in China, that we have already started primate trials of using mRNA technology to introduce genes into the genome that would then permanently make the individual make ozempic like drugs. The family of compounds is called GLP-1.
Oh my. I really think we have reached the point now where our technology has long since outstripped our morality and ethics and intellect to handle it correctly. We are entering some really scary times, I am afraid. With the COVID vaccines, they originally told us that cell penetration was temporary and was just local to the arm. Notice how that is not being said anymore. It was known to be untrue from the beginning. What happens if this type of thing somehow gets picked up into the germ lines? It is just like gain of function research – these scientists, companies and government agencies are doing stuff like this without an apparent care in the world. I just really get concerned with this type of thing.
There may come a time when people who don’t believe in permanent mRNA-mediated modifications to the genome, especially given the risk that these modifications could become heritable and pass-downable, will want to subject any potential partner to extreme genetic vetting to be sure the potential partner bears exactly zero such Xenogenes so as to assure the co-fabrication of Xenogene-free offspring units.
Gain Of Function or The Third Great Age of Evolution? You decide!
Nope. Nopety Nope.
The Chinese experiment to which IM Doc alludes has nothing whatever to do with gain of function, if we assume gain of function implies serial passage. So this comment is entirely off point.
“Gain of function” seems to be one of those phrases — and there seem to be rather a lot of them about, lately — that, like “herd immunity” seems capable of shutting down all critical thinking. (“Taxpayer dollars” is a hardy perennial of this kind.) Note that IM Doc says “like gain of function.” But your comment leaves out the “like.” See comment above.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202405/09/WS663c2625a31082fc043c615d.html
May 9, 2024
Breakthrough by Shanghai doctors uses stem cells to cure diabetes
By Zhou Wenting
Shanghai – Doctors in Shanghai have, for the first time in the world, cured a patient’s diabetes through the transplantation of pancreatic cells derived from stem cells.
The 59-year-old man, who had Type 2 diabetes for 25 years, has been completely weaned off insulin for 33 months, Shanghai Changzheng Hospital announced on Tuesday.
A paper * about the medical breakthrough, achieved after more than a decade of endeavor by a team of doctors at the hospital, was published on the website of the journal Cell Discovery on April 30.
It is the first reported instance in the world of a case of diabetes with severely impaired pancreatic islet function being cured via stem cell-derived autologous, regenerative islet transplantation, the hospital said. The most common pancreatic islet cells produce insulin.
Diabetes poses a serious threat to human health. Medical experts said that poor blood sugar control over a long period can lead to severe complications, including blindness, kidney failure, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular complications, and amputation. Life-threatening situations may also occur due to hypoglycemic coma, and ketoacidosis, which happens when the body begins breaking down fat too quickly…
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3
April 30, 2024
Treating a type 2 diabetic patient with impaired pancreatic islet function by personalized endoderm stem cell-derived islet tissue
By Jiaying Wu, Tuo Li, Meng Guo, Junsong Ji, Xiaoxi Meng, Tianlong Fu, Tengfei Nie, Tongkun Wei, Ying Zhou, Weihua Dong, Ming Zhang, Yongquan Shi, Xin Cheng, Hao Yin, et al.
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) typically starts with insulin resistance in peripheral tissues and proceeds with gradual loss of islet function due to the reduction in β-cell mass or dedifferentiation of β cells. More than 30% of T2D patients eventually rely on exogenous insulin treatment. Cadaveric islet transplantation is an effective treatment for insulin-dependent diabetes. Notably, improved metabolic control after islet transplantation is associated with better kidney allograft function and long-term survival. However, the application of islet transplantation is severely hampered due to the critical shortage of donor organs…
> permanent mRNA-mediated modifications to the genome
I don’t think heritability is on offer in the “trials” that IM Doc describes. (“China” and “mRNA” are both trigger words, and the combination seems prone to creating kneejerk responses, among which I would not include your response).
It’s interesting to imagine our class of wealthy overlords seeking immortality, super-intelligence, hour-long orgasms, etc., through (corporate) genetic modification, while the underclass keeps breeding wildly away. I know which gene pool I’d go long on.
“…while the underclass keeps breeding wildly away. I know which gene pool I’d go long on.”
I am not so sanguine about this. One of the significant “side effects” of the Coronavirus-19 debacle is the reduction in fertility of the infected. Extend this trend out until you reach either a stasis or extinction.
Per the above; I did some googling about the internet trying to find an unbiased study concerning this subject. What I found was a continual barrage of the “Official Narrative.” “Usual Suspects” such as the BBC, the NIH, the CDC, and other “captured” MSMs all parroted the same tropes and pushed for “vaccination” for one and all. Special emphasis seemed to be made on pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers “getting the shot.” One interesting twist to this subject was the almost exclusive emphasis on male fertility. Is this because female fertility is more difficult to measure? It was quite funny to see “articles” from the CDC and the NIH being labelled as “Sponsored Content” by the Bing platform. That’s saying the “quiet part out loud” at it’s best. It would be interesting to find out who these “sponsors” are.
Dr. Pretorius was entirely correct in telling Herr Doctor Frankenstein that, “There are some things that Man was not meant to know.”
Consider how much “imaginings” of the “creative class” have prefigured today’s enormities.
We were warned.
>Oh my. I really think we have reached the point now where our technology has long since outstripped our morality and ethics and intellect to handle it correctly. We are entering some really scary times,
I wonder if that applies to AI as well. Seems to be a pattern in mankind that something new is developed, something that should be so useful for good for the human race but no, some a**hole has to turn it into something destructive.
Happy Holidays all
We are going to have to think of a new term to describe such “tampered gene” organisms.
May I suggest: Crisper Critters?
‘Ben Norton
@BenjaminNorton
This is a great example of why GDP per capita is not a good measurement of quality of life.’
An excellent tweet by Ben Norton and if you are still wondering how Trump managed to get a lot of support from so many different groups, the answer is in that tweet.
Composition of GDP matters — economic rents are not equivalent to productive activity.
It’s almost like you can’t measure everything with money.
L.S. Lowry:
“Lowry holds the record for rejecting British honours—five, including a knighthood (1968). A collection of his work is on display in The Lowry, a purpose-built art gallery on Salford Quays. On 26 June 2013, a major retrospective opened at the Tate Britain in London, his first at the gallery; in 2014 his first solo exhibition outside the UK was held in Nanjing, China.” Wikipedia
Monet: Did I walk by that in the Louvre and not even notice it?
Lowry was tutored by French Impressionist Adolphe Valette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Adolphe_Valette
“Blame cannons thunder” — As well they should. The Democrats have been “keeping their powder dry” for decades.
Yeah, the real material benefits powder is locked up underground and the donors have the key.
Their only hope is the reps find somebody bad enough that their awful candidate can beat him/her. Truly awful trump wasn’t awful enough.
The only kind of “awful” which would work for this purpose would be a revival of the familiar old stale awful that the Republicans put up against Trump in Primary Season 2016.
If the Inner Establishment finds a Democrat that it really truly wants to annoint President, the Inner Establishment could engineer the re-nomination all over again of Jebbie “Please Clap” Bush as the Republican Nominee for President in Twenty WhenEver. ( With maybe Lynn Cheney for Vice Prez).
Now, that would be offal. And could well get the DemPrez nominee elected.
It’s interesting to compare how Obama treated Biden when he was VP to how Biden treated Harris.
Biden got the China and Ukraine portfolios which were both high profile and lucrative for the Biden Family while Harris got the Border.
Kicking 15,000,000 Americans off of medicaid this spring cost more than a few votes, it’s not something a party that wanted to win would do, nor is trying to keep an obviously mentally unfit candidate on the Ballot.
So the Dems gave us Harris, who blew through $10, 000,000 a day running the most tone deaf campaign I have seen in my 71 years.
Even worse than HRC in 2016, which took serious effort.
Whoever takes office Jan 20 will have a lot to deal with, I give Trump’s odds of living that long 2/3 and surviving 4 years as Prez less than 50%.
Yep. Ending the Pandemic declaration was multifold.
Well, Vance is young, tanned, rested and ready to go.
. . . ” NOTE * I like this umlauts, so I’m keeping them, pedants begöne).”
You like ” this” umlauts? “This”? Is that part of what you would like pedants to begöne about?
No, that’s a typo; I got so excited about making a joke I lost focus. Fixed.
Everyone’s favorite hack is back to agree with a eugenics supporter
Trump’s Pick to Lead the N.I.H. Gets Some Things Right
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/opinion/nih-director-trump-jay-bhattacharya.html
What the heck happened to Zeynep Tufecki? She was sound on aerosols….
Her op-ed doesn’t even make sense. She outlines all the disastrously wrong conclusions Bhattacharya jumped to and championed, follows that with a couple of weak paragraphs making excuses for him that basically amount to “but nobody knew what they were doing, so who can blame the poor guy” and finally a pathetic “let’s hope he’ll do better” conclusion.
Indeed, Lambert, what happened to Zeynep?
Who put the horse’s head
in Zey Tufecki’s bed?
When a prominent physician discards science and gives disastrous health advice for a country of 1.4 billion, that physician becomes impossibly suspect:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1BNOk
January 15, 2018
Life Expectancy at Birth for China and India, 2000-2022
“What the heck happened to ——- ——-?”
Look back, and find the writer asserting research validity in what were only guesses. But, the writer was using a scholar’s title as though calling on scholarly research.
headline from German weekly FREITAG interview this week:
Gregor Gysi: “Every argument with Strack-Zimmermann costs me six weeks of my life”
Maybe he should stop arguing with her. She doesn’t care anyway what he’s saying, and pretending that she does is just playing along in this stupid farce.
Re: Demödämmerung
BTW, here’s the previous ShoeOnHead video, in which she anticpated the DemParty’s loss:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSw04BwQy4M
Cuddle McSungglestuff?!? And we don’t need to know why?!? The hell we don’t.
One of the hundred-odd comments on the Newsweek article about her departure for the UK laughs about a possible P. Diddy angle, while the other 99.99% are merely elated that she’s leaving the US.
Re the Jeet Heer tweet: Jonathan Hopkin wrote a whole book about this:
Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anti-system-politics-9780190699765?cc=ca&lang=en&
Shared with me, from April of this year:
Liberals joined conservatives to mainstream anti-vax beliefs about viruses and public health
It talks about how many of the anti-vax beliefs and behaviors that were so reviled by liberals were later adopted by them during the Covid-minimizing phase that’s currently ongoing.
I did a quick search and couldn’t find it linked here, but might have missed it.
Re. Harris video:
Kamala’s entire career since college and before has been a constant, steady rise through the political system without the slightest shred of talent or aptitude or accomplishment, and with no enthusiasm from the public.
Her electoral loss to The Donald, of all people, marks a sudden and noteworthy end to this. Doubtless from here on out, she will quickly fade into the political wilderness. Imagine if you will how shattering this must be for her, as it would be for spiderman if he woke up one day and could no longer run really fast or shoot webs. She must be completely bewildered since from her perspective, she had just applied her winning formula one more time.
US politics is pretty damn entertaining from a certain perspective.
Re: Ongoing NC discussion of “fascism” in the present.
An excerpt from Robert Stolz’s introduction to the recent translation of Tosaka Jun’s The Japanese Ideology:
And: