By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

Wood Thrush, Sleepy Creek WMA, Sleepy Creek road 0.5 miles west of ranger station, Berkeley, West Virginia, United States. “An adult male Wood Thrush singing in the distance from a perch in the lower canopy of the forest.”

* * *

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

Biden Administration

“White House disbanding its covid-19 team in May” [WaPo]. “But Deborah Birx, who served as the nation’s first coronavirus coordinator, suggested that too few anti-pandemic mechanisms have been put in place to justify winding down the team. She said the administration has missed opportunities to improve the monitoring of virus data, invest in the development of more durable vaccines and take other steps that Biden vowed to accomplish in his sweeping covid plan. ‘It’s not too early [to disband] if we had used the last two years to build all of these systems that we needed — but we haven’t,’ Birx said. She also lamented the public’s reduced attention to covid’s risks, noting that the virus’s evolution has allowed it to evade some treatments and left immunocompromised Americans with fewer protections. ‘No one is even talking about that vulnerable Americans are more vulnerable today than they were a year ago,’ Birx said.” • Of course, creatures like Wachter also have their say, higher up in the text.

2024

Interesting sequence here: Daily Mail from Spectator from FOX, which FOX being most precise:

“‘They tell us to be peaceful!’: Trump issues ANOTHER threat and tells ‘Soros-backed animal’ Alvin Bragg to drop the Stormy Daniels case – as grand jury is canceled for the rest of the week and questions grow about looming indictment” [Daily Mail]. “It remains unclear why the grand jury is not reconvening for the rest of the week amid reports that the panel needs to hear from a final witness before levying a judgment. One source told DailyMail.com: ‘They are having trouble convincing the jury to swallow the case. It’s a weak case and has caused divisions in the DA’s office.’ … [B]ombshell new documents obtained by DailyMail.com show that Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen claimed in a 2018 letter that he was not reimbursed by his client or his businesses for the hush money payments to Daniels. The letter to federal authorities could throw a wrench in the works for prosecutors looking to pursue criminal charges against Trump for the payment.” • More on the Cohen letter–

“Has Alvin Bragg bungled his case against Trump?” [The Spectator]. “[W]hen a prosecutor conceals exculpatory evidence from a Grand Jury or defense attorneys he is guilty of prosecutorial abuse. He is said to have concealed ‘Brady material,’ after the landmark 1963 Supreme Court (aren’t they all ‘landmark’?) Brady v. Maryland which stipulates that prosecutors must hand over such material. In his eagerness to Get Trump (the popular new reality TV show), Bragg appears to have kept back material from the Grand Jury from which he was attempting to wrest an indictment of the former president. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, had testified that the payment he made to porn blip (no star, surely) ‘Stormy Daniels’ was really a campaign contribution because it was intended to save Trump and his campaign from embarrassment. Earlier, he had testified that, no, it shouldn’t count as a campaign contribution because it was intended to save Melania, Trump’s wife, from embarrassment over a false accusation. Cohen’s own former lawyer, Robert Costello threw a wrench into Cohen’s new testimony. ‘While testifying for over two hours, Costello said he realized that Bragg had been hiding from the grand jury nearly all of the files he had previously turned over to the DA that corroborated Cohen’s original story,’ Fox News’s Gregg Jarrett writes.”

“The sudden turn of events that could derail Trump’s indictment” [Gregg Jarrett, FOX]. Marked “Opinion.” “The indictment appears to hinge on the DA’s argument that a 2016 payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels was intended to help Trump’s presidential bid and should have been accounted for as a campaign contribution, not legal fees, when he reimbursed his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, who paid Daniels to keep her mouth shut about a purported 2006 affair that Trump vigorously denies…. The flaw in Bragg’s tortured logic is two-fold. First, non-disclosure agreements in exchange for money are perfectly legal. Second, Cohen long ago stated that the payment had nothing to do with the campaign but was made to protect Melania Trump from an embarrassing, albeit false, accusation. As such, it is not an illegal campaign donation under the law. Hence there is no crime. It appears that Bragg’s star witness is none other than Cohen who has performed an astonishing pirouette by recanting his earlier statements. …. In a sudden turn of events, Cohen’s former attorney Robert Costello — no longer bound by the attorney-client privilege that was waived by his ex-client — testified before the grand jury on Monday. According to Costello, in April 2018, Cohen repeatedly stated that the Daniels payment was intended to protect the candidate’s wife, not the campaign. Moreover, Cohen insisted that he acted all on his own and not at the behest of Trump. While testifying for over two hours, Costello said he realized that Bragg had been hiding from the grand jury nearly all of the files he had previously turned over to the DA that corroborated Cohen’s original story. Concealing exculpatory evidence from a grand jury is reprehensible conduct.” • Finally, some clear exposition. And from FOX….

“Trump can run for president from prison. Just ask Eugene Debs” [Vox]. “Debs ran for president five times for the Socialist Party in the early 20th century, and was a dedicated union leader who helped organize his fellow railway workers into the first major railroad union in the United States. (It was eventually crushed, and he was jailed in the aftermath of the Pullman Strike of 1894.) Debs also was a dedicated opponent of US entry into World War I, convicted of sedition in 1918 and jailed for speaking out against the war. And, from the Atlanta federal prison, he ran for president in 1920 and received over 3 percent of the national vote, with almost a million votes cast for him as Convict No. 9653. Debs has long been the most prominent American to run for president from prison. But if New York prosecutors have their way, former President Donald Trump may soon follow in Debs’s footsteps, and finally give the ideologically committed socialist and the politically transactional real estate mogul something in common. The unlikely comparison between Trump and Debs shows how unprecedented Trump’s indictment is in American politics.”

* * *

“The Next U.S. Presidential Election will be a Battle Over Pandemic Memory” [Time]. “As we enter a new phase of the pandemic, one centered on how to remember, we might look towards the past. Reeling from World War I and the devastating impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Ohio’s Republican Senator Warren G. Harding spoke before the Home Market Club of Boston on May 14th, 1920, in what became a hallmark speech, ‘Back to Normal.’ His speech is credited as helping him win a convincing victory in the Presidential Election in November 1920 over Democratic candidate James Cox (Harding won 60% of the popular vote). ‘Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been wracked, and fever has rendered men irrational,’ Harding began. ‘America’s present need,; he urged, ‘is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity.’ Taking aim squarely at former president Woodrow Wilson’s progressive foreign and domestic policies, and set against the context of race riots in Chicago, strikes in the steel and meat packing industries, and controversial attempts by local authorities to ban public gatherings and institute mask mandates to curb the flu pandemic, Harding jabbed that ‘the world needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation.’ ‘Let’s get out of the fevered delirium,’ Harding concluded, and head towards the ‘normal forward stride of the American people.’” • Interesting 1918 context, indeed (and Wilson was a horrid President; see on Eugene Debs above). Still, whatever DeSantis may be, he can’t deliver Harding’s “Morning again in America”-type “normalcy” speech. Nor can Trump. Maybe Youngkin, who isn’t as sharp-edged, with proper coaching from an excellent staff. But if anyone can, it’s….. Biden (and certainly not Buttigieg, Pritzker, Adams, Warnock, Newsome. None of them have the gravitas),

Democrats en Déshabillé

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

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

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

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

* * *

“Sinema Trashes Dems: ‘Old Dudes Eating Jell-O’” [Politico]. • And though Sinema is wrong, wrong, wrong in so many ways, she’s not wrong about that, is she?

Realignment and Legitimacy

Classes are not aggregates:

“From Georgetown to Langley: The Controversial Connection Between a Prestigious University and the CIA” [Mint Press]. “f you have ever wondered, ‘where do America’s spies come from?’ the answer is quite possibly the Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University. It is only a modestly-seized institution, yet the school provides the backbone for the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, State Department, and other organs of the national security state…. [W]ith more than two dozen ex-CIA officials among its teaching staff, the school tailors its courses towards producing the next generation of analysts, assassins, coup-plotters and economic hitmen, fast-tracking graduates into the upper echelons of the national security state. The CIA has also quietly funded the SFS, as journalist Will Sommer revealed. The agency, based in Langley, VA, secretly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the department’s work, despite Georgetown insisting on its website that this money came from anonymous donations from individuals.” • That’s quite a lead. Good to know.

#COVID19

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

Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data).

• Readers, thanks for the push. We are now up to 47/50 states (94%). I have helpfully added “______” to the states still missing data. We should list states that do not have Covid resources, or have stopped updating their sites, so others do not look fruitlessly. Could those of you in states not listed help out by either with dashboard/wastewater links, or ruling your state out definitively? Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin); 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 (______); NE (______); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (______); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

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

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

Hat tips to helpful readers: Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (1), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (6), JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, otisyves, Petal (5), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Utah, Bob White (3). (Readers, if you leave your link in comments, I credit you by your handle. If you send it to me via email, I use your initials (in the absence of a handle. I am not putting your handle next to your contribution because I hope and expect the list will be long, and I want it to be easy for readers to scan.)

• More like this, please! Total: 1 6 11 18 20 22 26 27 28 38 39 43 47/50 (94% of US states).

* * *

Look for the Helpers

Simpler than Wachter’s algorithm, that’s for sure (23 steps, was it?):


* * *

“Introducing: The Covid Underground” [Covid Underground]. The deck: “Welcome to The Covid Underground, a newsletter for the Covid-free movement and all of those who continue to avoid infection.” More: “True health is the ability to change. About 10-30% of the U.S. population has changed their lives in the light of the freeing revelations of 2020, and we keep changing. We are dynamically, creatively faithful to what was— briefly— plain to all: normal is a dangerous illusion.” • Worth a read.

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

Finding like-minded people on (sorry) Facebook:

Scientific Communication

This strikes me as a useful takedown of “hybrid immnunity”:

And:

However, this does involve what looks to me like statistical reasoning, so if readers would be good enough to check?

Sequelae

“‘I can’t cope with multiple inputs’: a qualitative study of the lived experience of ‘brain fog’ after COVID-19” [BMJ]. 50 participants, 42 female, 32 white British. “This study focused on patients’ lived experiences with no objective examination. However, their descriptions often related to specific domains of cognitive function—particularly, executive function, attention, memory and language, with most describing difficulties across all of these domains. Participants described problems with planning, decision-making, flexibility and working memory, which concorded with executive function cognitive processes (quote 2), while impairments in complex attention included difficulties with selective, sustained attention, divided attention and processing speed (quote 3), and long-term memory impairments were experienced with free recall, cued recall and procedural memory (quote 4). Language deficits varied between individuals, including difficulties with word finding and fluency, syntax, reading comprehension and writing (quote 5).” • From 2022, still germane.

“Kashyap Patel, MD, Sees Link Between COVID-19 and Cancer Progression, Calls for More Biomarker Testing” [American Journal of Managed Care]. “Kashyap Patel, MD, CEO of Carolina Blood and Cancer Care Associates, sees something different in his practice since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—not just with cancer care, but with cancer itself. Since March 2020, the longtime community oncologist has seen multiple patients in his Rock Hill, South Carolina, based-clinic with cholangiocarcinoma, and these patients are developing the rare cancer 20 to 30 years earlier than the typical age at presentation, which is usually 65 years or older.1 In the past year alone, physicians in Patel’s practice saw 7 patients with this cancer, and 3 have died…. ‘The trend is getting more and more alarming,’ Patel emphasized. ‘We are noticing trends in hematological malignancies, breast cancer, colorectal carcinoma, and pancreatic cancer.’ … With COVID-19 added to the mix, Patel now fears a ‘perfect storm; of factors will trigger inflammatory responses in some patients, causing cancer to arrive years earlier than normal and making it deadlier once it is diagnosed. ‘If you go back and look at the post–COVID[-19] recovery phase—we are coming out of almost like a hibernation—a lot of people don’t know how to deal with the stress,’ Patel said. ‘Combined with the obesity pandemic, people didn’t exercise a lot with the fear of going out in the pandemic, and the alcohol intake has increased. All of this descends down on inflammation, and I think it’s creating a perfect storm between [these] risk factors, and we need to learn how to deal with that.’” • Hmm. I grant this is anecdotal. But I’ve heard similar anecdotes elsewhere. Of course, if your goal is profit, cancer — and, in fact, inflammation generally (hmmm) — is A Good Thing.

Science Is Popping

“Lingering SARS-CoV-2 in Gastric and Gallbladder Tissues of Patients with Previous COVID-19 Infection Undergoing Bariatric Surgery” [Obesity Surgery]. n = 80. From the Abstract: “Gastric and gallbladder tissues can retain SARS-CoV-2 particles for a long time after COVID-19 infection, handling stomach specimens from patients during an operation must be done with care, as we usually do, but now with the knowledge that in 1/3 of patients they can be present.” • So if SARS-CoV-2 lingers in the tissues… What about transplants? Does this matter? Is anybody checking?

“SARS-CoV-2 infects human adult donor eyes and hESC-derived ocular epithelium” [Cell]. • The headline says it. Again, what about SARS-CoV-2 and transplants?

Elite Malfeasance

“The Times Switches to C.D.C. Covid Data, Ending Daily Collection” [New York Times]. “Since nearly the beginning of the pandemic, The Times has been collecting and standardizing Covid data from hundreds of state and local sources. The C.D.C. now has a similar process: The agency collects data from hospitals, counties and states, and then it standardizes and reports the data to the public. [ho hum], the data from state and local sources is reported less frequently and less reliably. The comprehensive real-time reporting that The Times has prioritized is no longer possible.” • Doesn’t this argue that CDC will soon be shut down too? And guess what our newspaper of record decided to use for country data? Community level or transmission? That’s right:

Community Level (“the Green Map”). As I wrote in “New Biden BA.5 “Plan” Openly Abandons Metrics for Preventing Infection, Butchers Mask and Ventilation Policy“:

[T]he Administration is recommending CDC’s Community Levels metric. Community Levels combines a leading indicator (cases) with a lagging one (hospitalization). The lag between infection and hospitalization can be as much as two weeks. Therefore, by the time Community Levels kicks in, infection in the community could already be high (important given that Covid exhibits doubling behavior. The CDC does have a map of transmission only (and explictly discourages dull normals like you from using it). That map has been solid red (dangerous) for a long, long time. However, CDC’s Community levels map, gamed as it is, has been green (safe) also for a long, long time. Eric Topol described CDC’s game-playing with metrics back in May, 2022

[INTERVIEWER: ] But you look at the CDC’s [Community Levels] map, it shows the country where there’s a few hot spots, the orange up in New York and some yellow up in Minnesota and Michigan, but the rest of the country looks green, as if it — there isn’t a problem with this virus. What is the disconnect there?

[TOPOL: ] Well, I have called it .

That is, the CDC is — frankly, it’s . I mean, it’s starting to approach that of what we saw with the Omicron wave. And it’s continued — it’s rising quickly.

So this is really irresponsible of the CDC to give us this impression that things are copacetic, when they couldn’t be — that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In other words, if you follow the CDC’s Community Levels metric, you could be masking up two weeks too late. Don’t use it. Use the map of transmission only, the one that shows the real danger to you (scroll down to the red map with the “Community Transmission” dropdowns for Data Type and Map Metric. Ignore the CDC’s hectoring, immediately above the map, that “Community Transmission levels are provided for healthcare facility use only.”

Hard to know whether the editors who made this judgment are fools, authoritarian followers, or sociopathic eugenicists who are trying to keep the body count high. All three could be true, of course. Don’t make your “personal risk assessment” off Community Levels, even if the Times implies you should. Community Levels are a Torment Nexus.

“The failure to recognise the ongoing severity of COVID-19 is creating a reality gap that is being filled by groups peddling misinformation” [The John Snow Project]. “[T]he failure to recognise the ongoing severity of COVID-19 is creating a reality gap that is being filled by groups peddling misinformation. A recent film viewed by millions of people around the world falsely claims vaccines are causing the excess mortality and sudden deaths. Rather than recognising and educating the population about the well documented role of COVID-19 in cardiac and neurological damage50-53 as a consequence of vascular damage or auto-immune dysregulation, governments and policymakers have remained silent, thus allowing misinformation and disinformation to flourish. The end result, predictable and indeed predicted since almost the start of the pandemic, is that trust in vaccination as a whole is eroding, undermining the foundation of public health, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“The Banality of VAERS” [Josh Guetzkow, Jackanapes Junction]. “In December I wrote about some FOIA’d contracts between the CDC and private contractors it hired to process the anticipated deluge of COVID-19 VAERS reports. Recall they were expecting an increase from 1,000 reports a week to 1,000 reports a day, and even that turned out to be a colossal underestimate…. Just how colossal? The same anonymous source who obtained those contracts sent me FOIA’d reports from the main contractor, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), to the CDC’s immunization safety office. General Dynamics is a major defense contractor, and these monthly reports read like a casualty report from a battlefield or a way to keep track of the body count.” • Hmm. I’ve always loathed VAERS. Submissions are not qualified. The coding is rotten.

* * *

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

Case Data

NOT UPDATED BioBot wastewater data from March 20:

Lambert here: Note that if we look at “the area under the curve,” more people have died after Biden declared that “Covid is over” than before.

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

Covid Emergency Room Visits

NOT UPDATED From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, from March 18:

NOTE “Charts and data provided by CDC, updates Wednesday by 8am. For the past year, using a rolling 52-week period.” So not the entire pandemic, FFS (the implicit message here being that Covid is “just like the flu,” which is why the seasonal “rolling 52-week period” is appropriate for bothMR SUBLIMINAL I hate these people so much. Anyhow, I added a grey “Fauci line” just to show that Covid wasn’t “over” when they started saying it was, and it’s not over now. Notice also that this chart shows, at least for its time period, that Covid is not seasonal, even though CDC is trying to get us to believe that it is, presumably so they can piggyback on the existing institutional apparatus for injections.

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, published March 23:

-1.6%. Still high, but we’ve now reached a point lower than the low point of the last valley.

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Total: 1,152,525 – 1,151,882 – 1,151,778 = 643 (643 * 365 = 234,695 deaths per year, today’s YouGenicist™ number for “living with” Covid (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the YouGenicist™ metric keeps chugging along like this, I may just have to decide this is what the powers-that-be consider “mission accomplished” for this particular tranche of death and disease).

Excess Deaths

NOT UPDATED (but updating). Excess deaths (The Economist), published March 7:

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

• One more statistic to shut down or game, I suppose:

After all, what country is more about normalizing wretched excess than the United States?

Stats Watch

Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell by 1,000 from the prior week to 191,000 on the week ending March 18th, compared to expectations of 197,000. The result provided further evidence of a stubbornly tight labor market, in line with the hot payroll figures for February and the Federal Reserve’s outlook of low unemployment.” • The Fed keeps trying to turn that rubber thumbscrew….

Manufacturing: “United States Kansas Fed Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Kansas City Fed’s Manufacturing Production index increased to 3 in March of 2023 from -9 in the previous month. It was the highest reading since last July.”

The Economy: “United States Chicago Fed National Activity Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Chicago Fed National Activity Index declined to -0.19 in February 2023 from +0.23 in January. All four broad categories of indicators used to construct the index made negative contributions, and three categories deteriorated from January.”

* * *

Sanctions:

Hmm. Does Huawei own any towers? Could we blow them up?

Media: “Frequent TV Series Cancellations Altering Viewer Behavior, Survey Shows” [Variety]. “Frequent TV show cancellations are starting to change how U.S. viewers decide what to watch. In fact, whether or not the show has concluded has a significant impact on whether people sample it, according to a survey from YouGov. A quarter of U.S. adults wait for streaming originals’ finale before starting, citing fears over the show’s potential cancellation with an unresolved ending (27%) or because they do not want to wait for the next season after a cliffhanger (24%). Nearly half (48%) of the participants who said they prefer to wait until the series ends before starting it cited a preference for binge-watching shows.”

The Bezzle: “Coinbase Tumbles Amid SEC Storm Clouds. What It Means for Robinhood and Crypto” [Barron’s]. “Coinbase (ticker: COIN) stock fell 13% in U.S. premarket trading on Thursday following a disclosure Wednesday that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had sent the group a “Wells Notice.” This means the regulatory agency’s staff has decided to recommend an enforcement action, with Coinbase saying it believed this would target its core trading operations as well as an interest-bearing service, institutional trading solution, and custody business…. , and American investors are likely to look offshore should their opportunities to trade digital assets be limited in the U.S. This may only further concentrate market risk in the likes of Binance—by far the world’s largest crypto exchange—which is based offshore and not as well-regulated. The SEC and others concerned about financial stability should pick their poison.” • Yes, there will always be a marketplace for fraud.

The Bezzle: “Crypto price: Market fears crackdown amid ‘legal threats’ to Coinbase” [Independent]. “SEC Chair Gary Gensler has claimed that cryptocurrency exchanges in the US like Coinbase are operating unregistered securities exchanges and should therefore take action to register with the SEC or face legal action. ‘Although we don’t take this development lightly, we are very confident in the way we run our business – the same business we presented to the SEC in order for us to become a public company in 2021,’ Coinbase’s blog post stated. ‘We continue to think rulemaking and legislation are better tools for defining the law for our industry than enforcement actions. But if necessary, we welcome the opportunity for Coinbase and the broader crypto community to get clarity in court.’” •

The Bezzle: “The venture capitalist’s dilemma” [Molly White]. Worth a read, but this caught my eye: “But it was not the tech industry as a whole, its employees, or consumers and small businesses who were on the receiving end of the broad disdain that we saw throughout the SVB collapse. It was the financiers. We are coming to a point, I think, where the shine is wearing off. People are realizing that despite the hundreds of billions of dollars being deployed each year by venture capital firms in pursuit of “innovation”, the world doesn’t really feel hundreds of billions of dollars better off for it. For all the talk of unbridled innovation, venture capital services only very specific types of innovation: those that stand to produce large exits for investors, and with relatively low risk, regardless of whether the business itself holds much promise or provides any societal benefit.” • Yep. Why are these easily panicked herd animals in charge of capital allocation, a social function?

The Bezzle: “The Incredible Tantrum Venture Capitalists Threw Over Silicon Valley Bank” [Slate]. ” The industry is overconcetrated—enmeshed, as Geri Kirilova at venture capital firm Laconia Group puts it—and structurally drives capital into a few well-connected hands who pile it into larger funds, cut it into larger checks, and hand it off to a tightly knit network of entrepreneurs and startups. This overreliance on established actors or social networks may seem like a shortcut when you’re risk-averse or unable (and unwilling) to vet every single prospective investment, but it has at times left venture capitalists unable to weed out well-connected or charismatic charlatans. In a comprehensive case study of the VC industry, UC Davis law professor Peter Lee argues that these are structural deficits that fundamentally undercut venture capital’s ability to actually provide social utility…. To put it more plainly, for the past 10 years venture capitalists have had near-perfect laboratory conditions to create a lot of money and make the world a much better place. And yet, some of their proudest accomplishments that have attracted some of the most eye-watering sums have been: 1) chasing the dream of zeroing out labor costs while monopolizing a sector to charge the highest price possible (A.I. and the gig economy); 2) creating infrastructure for speculating on digital assets that will be used to commodify more and more of our daily lives (cryptocurrency and the metaverse); and 3) militarizing public space, or helping bolster police and military operations….. You would be hard-pressed to find another parasite that has so thoroughly wrecked the body and environment of its host, all while trying to convince the host that it is deserving of praise and further accommodation.”

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 37 Fear (previous close: 36 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 24 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Mar 23 at 2:01 PM ET.

Our Famously Free Press

“Negative words in news headlines generate more clicks — but sad words are more effective than angry or scary ones” [Nieman Lab]. “News publishers, as rational economic actors, want to maximize the audience for everything they do, and there’s something about the negative lens on reality that draws eyeballs to copy. Those suspecting that last culprit find support in a new study just published in the journal Nature Human Behavio(u)r. The title says it all: ‘Negativity drives online news consumption.’… So: Add a negative word to your headline — words like harm, heartbroken, ugly, troubling, angry — and get 2.3% more clicks, on average. And adding a positive word — like benefit, laughed, pretty, favorite, kind — does the opposite and keeps people from clicking…. As Baumeister et al. put it in an oft-cited paper 20 years ago: Bad is stronger than good. … In the context of media research, this concept is often called surveillance, a term popularized by Harold Lasswell. (Not in the CIA/FBI/NSA sense of the term.) People consume news media to learn of any new threats — and to be at least somewhat comforted that the absence of alarming headlines meant the world is moving along as planned….. Perhaps the most surprising finding to me was a breakdown of the effects of different kinds of positive and negative words… Headline words associated with sadness increased clicks. Headline words associated with joy and fear reduced clicks. And headline words associated with anger had no statistically significant effect. That’s fascinating, and unexpected — both for me and for the authors, who expected anger, fear, and sadness to all increase clicks….” • Certainly worth a read. The sample is from Upworthy. And my sense is that there aren’t a lot of sad headlines around — despite the many reasons one might have thought there would be.

Zeitgeist Watch

“Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases” [Perspectives on Psychological Science]. From the Abstract: “By now, a number of different biases have been identified and empirically demonstrated. Unfortunately, however, these biases have often been examined in separate lines of research, thereby precluding the recognition of shared principles. Here we argue that several—so far mostly unrelated—biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward belief-consistent information processing. What varies between different biases is essentially the specific belief that guides information processing. More importantly, we propose that different biases even share the same underlying belief and differ only in the specific outcome of information processing that is assessed (i.e., the dependent variable), thus tapping into different manifestations of the same latent information processing. In other words, we propose for discussion a model that suffices to explain several different biases. We thereby suggest a more parsimonious approach compared with current theoretical explanations of these biases.” • Handy chart:

This works for the first three, at least:

Class Warfare

“Update from CEO Andy Jassy on role eliminations” [Amazon]. From January, still germane. What a horrid example of corporate ooze: “As I back in November, as part of our annual planning process for 2023, leaders [oh] across the company have been working with their teams [another word I have to look at] and looking at their workforce levels, investments they want to make in the future, and prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses. This year’s review has been more difficult given the uncertain economy and that we’ve hired rapidly over the last several years [which, thanks to Elon’s good work at Twitter, we now know was a mistake]. In November, we communicated the hard decision to eliminate a number of positions across our Devices and Books businesses, and also announced a voluntary reduction offer for some employees in our People, Experience, and Technology (PXT) organization. I also that we weren’t done with our annual planning process and that I expected there would be more role reductions in early 2023.” • There certainly is a lot of “sharing” going on at Amazon (13 usages in 576 words).

Who knew that employment listings were a poor proxy for the labor market:

News of the Wired

“Permanent Daylight Saving Time Bill Just Made Clock Change More Annoying” [New York Magazine]. “Last year, a bold group of lawmakers blew up everything I knew about time. They informed the public that the mandatory biannual hour shift was only around 100 years old, and that we had the power to stop it. The Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent, was unanimously approved by the Senate in March 2022. People were shocked and elated. If they could just get the bill through the House, then convince President Biden to sign it, March 12, 2023, would be the last ‘spring forward.’ Well, that’s Sunday, and there’s no sign that the same old temporal malarkey will come to an end anytime soon. The bill expired at the end of the last Congress without ever getting a vote in the House.” • I hate the time change with the hatred of a million burning suns, because I photograph at the golden hour. That time is fixed, I have to rearrange everything else around it, and I don’t handle schedule changes well. Idiosyncratic motives, I know!

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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 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 Jody Curley:

Yahara Flowage, January. What subtle colors. I bet this would look even more lovely wall-sized.

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