By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

European Starling, Devínske jazero – chatová oblasť, Bratislavský kraj, Slovakia. A steam train whistle in the background, I swear!

* * *

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

2024

“Trump to appear at CNN town hall in New Hampshire” [CNN]. “Former President Donald Trump will participate in a CNN presidential town hall next week in New Hampshire, the network announced Monday. ‘CNN This Morning’ anchor Kaitlan Collins will moderate the event at St. Anselm College, which will air at 8 p.m. ET on May 10 and will feature the former president taking questions from New Hampshire Republicans and undeclared voters who plan to vote in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.”

“Trump Likely to Sit Out One or Both of First Two G.O.P. Debates” [New York Times]. “In private comments to aides and confidants, Donald J. Trump has indicated he does not want to breathe life into his Republican challengers by sharing a debate stage with them.”

“Biden vs. Trump in 2024? Don’t Be So Sure” [Wall Street Journal]. “But here is the real point of this column. If it starts to seem clear that America is once again locked into a Trump-Biden race, I think the electorate is going to get frisky. I don’t see people just accepting it. I see pushback and little rebellions. Two examples: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced last week, this week hit 19% support among Democratic voters. That’s a lot! Especially for a guy who’s been labeled a bit of a nut. (He has been a leader of the idea that childhood vaccines are connected to autism.) But his larger general message would appeal to the edges of left and right, and blends into the general populist mood: Corporations and the government are lying to you, playing you for a fool… I say watch him. He is going to be a force this year. Second, watch a third-party bid. The centrist group No Labels says it’s provisionally attempting to get on the ballot in all 50 states. We’ll see how that works. But a third party, if it comes, could have real and surprising power in this cycle. I am the only person I know who thinks this but, again, look at people’s faces when you say it will be Trump or Biden. Independents now outnumber members of each party. No hunger for a third-party effort is discernible in the polls. So the effort would have to blow people out of their comfortable trenches and make them want to go over the top to seize new ground…. If you think the country is in trouble and needs another slate of candidates, do it. No ambivalence, no guilt about spoiling it for the lesser of evils. If you’re serious, go for it. Look at the other two guys as spoilers.” • Whatever the No Labels folks are doing, it won’t be going “over the top” and seizing “new ground.”

Republican Funhouse

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.

* * *

Realignment and Legitimacy

“She grew up believing she was White. It was a lie” [WaPo]. “Soon after I was filling out a form for school and saw the word “Caucasian.” I didn’t know what it meant, so I brought the form to my father. He said to mark myself Caucasian, which meant White. That seemed logical, judging by my skin color, which at the height of summer was no darker than caramel. And, my father was clearly White himself. In high school the bullying continued. Kids stuck pencils in my hair, called me rat’s nest, and said I had pubic hair growing out of my head. I was basically undateable. More and more, my classmates asked me, ‘What are you?’ So I went to my father again, sensing that people were not satisfied with my answer that I was White. ‘Well, Mom is actually part Cherokee,’ he said this time. ‘That’s where she got her skin tone … but don’t ask her about that, okay?’ I nodded. That made sense to me. I already understood that race was a sensitive subject, like sex or money. Not polite conversation. During my sophomore year of college, after dozens of more people had plunged their hands into my hair and called me Don King, I suspected my father wasn’t telling me the whole truth. People even asked me point-blank if I was Black.” • Sounds like she needs race-affirming care*. See Adolph Reed here, if you have not. NOTE * To spell out the irony: Sex is far more imbricated in biological realities than race is, if indeed race has any biological reality at all, and yet the first is treated as fluid and mutable, and the second is treated as permanent and immutable. It’s very odd.

#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).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. We are now up to 50/50 states (100%). This is really great! (It occurs to me that there are uses to which this data might be put, beyond helping people with “personal risk assessments” appropriate to their state. For example, thinking pessimistically, we might maintain the list and see which states go dark and when. We might also tabulate the properties of each site and look for differences and commonalities, for example the use of GIS (an exercise in Federalism). I do not that CA remains a little sketchy; it feels a little odd that there’s no statewide site, but I’ve never been able to find one. Also, my working assumption was that each state would have one site. That’s turned out not to be true; see e.g. ID. Trivially, it means I need to punctuate this list properly. Less trivially, there may be more local sites that should be added. NY city in NY state springs to mind, but I’m sure there are others. FL also springs to mind as a special case, because DeSantis will most probably be a Presidental candidate, and IIRC there was some foofra about their state dashboard. Thanks again!

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 (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

MT wusses out (RM):

Biden ending the Covid Public Health Emergency is the driver; no doubt other states will drop out too….

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 (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (9), 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).

* * *

Look for the Helpers

“Our Covid Data Project Is Over, but the Need for Timely Data Is Not” [New York Times]. “The authors helped lead the effort to build the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.” More: “The four of us spent the last three years immersed in collecting and reporting data on Covid-19 from every corner of the world, building one of the most trusted sources of information on cases and deaths available anywhere. But we stopped in March, not because the pandemic is over (it isn’t), but because much of the vital public health information we need is no longer available.” • Watching the data sources go dark is breaking my heart. And yet another essential piece of infrastructure with a fragile institutional base (see here).

“Find mental health support that’s sensitive to the realities of living through COVID-19” [COVID-Conscious Therapist Directory]. • United States, Canada, International. Once again, we need a “Green Book” where all this material is aggregated.

Maskstravaganza

Report from the field:

Very interesting:

Can readers confirm?

Once again, whatever demonic force got ineffective masks into the ClipArt representations of masks richly deserves whatever they were paid:

Literally every Covid poster or graphic I have seen uses masks with earloops, not headstraps. That’s the message being sent: Wear a mask that fails fit tests easily. Then we say: “Masks don’t work!”

Good question:

Testing

More evidence for the Hague Tribunal:

Bring on the lawyers!

It would be nice to see an organization as militant as ACT-UP appear (or militant until Fauci defanged them). Heaven knows there’s provocation enough. It’s also occurred to me that hospital administrative offices would be a worthy site for direct action, though I’ve been unable to think of a harmless substance to make aerosol spread vivid and concrete. Obviously not spray paint. Flour? Fog machines?

Scientific Communication

No creepier than living on the stupidest timeline:

Sequelae

“Multiomic characterisation of the long-term sequelae of SARS survivors: a clinical observational study” [eClinical Medicine]. SARS, mind you, not SARS-CoV-2. N = 14. Nevertheless: “Fatigue was the most common symptom in SARS survivors 18 years after discharge, with osteoporosis and necrosis of the femoral head being the main sequelae. The respiratory function and hip function scores of the SARS survivors were significantly lower than those of the controls. Physical and social functioning at 18 years was improved compared to that after 12 years but still worse than the controls. Emotional and mental health were fully recovered. Lung lesions on CT scans remained consistent at 18 years, especially in the right upper lobe and left lower lobe lesions. Plasma multiomics analysis indicated an abnormal metabolism of amino acids and lipids, promoted host defense immune responses to bacteria and external stimuli, B-cell activation, and enhanced cytotoxicity of CD8+ T cells but impaired antigen presentation capacity of CD4+ T cells.” • It’s just like the flu!

Elite Maleficence

So CDC holds a crowded event for top epidemiopistological brain geniuses in a closed, crowded space with people in close contact who are not masking. Some of the brain geniuses then get Covid. But why??????? Commentary:

Always remember, however, that the Newton School system — where both Jha and Walensky’s children go — spent a million bucks on ventilation against Covid starting on September 20, 2020. The elite knows the score, and knew it early. #CovidIsAirborne! But what will the MMWR will say?!??!?

The first thing we do is, let’s talk nicely to all the school administrators:


* * *

“In Support of Universal Admission Testing for SARS-CoV-2 During Significant Community Transmission” [Open Science Framework Preprints].

“Many hospitals have stopped or are considering stopping universal admission testing for SARS-CoV-2. We discuss reasons why admission testing should still be part of a layered system to prevent hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections during times of significant community transmission. These include the morbidity of SARS-CoV-2 in vulnerable patients, the predominant contribution of presymptomatic and asymptomatic people to transmission, the high rate of transmission between patients in shared rooms, and the data suggesting surveillance testing is associated with fewer nosocomial infections. Preferences of diverse patient populations, particularly the hardest hit communities, should be surveyed and used to inform prevention measures. Hospitals’ ethical responsibility to protect patients from serious infections should predominate over concerns about costs, labor, and inconvenience. We call for more rigorous data on the incidence and morbidity of nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 infections and more research to help determine when to start, stop, and restart universal admission testing and other prevention measures.”

The authors are all from Boston: Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital. Walensky was from Mass General. So this article should get Walensky’s attention, if she has a shred of integrity. Oh, wait…. NOTE I disagree with the theory behind the article. Even the saner factions in the public health establishment are trying to turn the knobs for masking up and down, based here on community transmission (not “levels,” fortunately). It’s like they think they’re the Fed with teh money supply. I think these guys would have to be a lot smarter about messaging and a lot more trusted for that to work. In my view, the effort should be to make masking a cultural norm. If not for Covid, then for flu. If not for flu, then for PM2.5. If not for PM2.5, then for wildfire smoke. If not for any of those, then for the next airborne pathogen.

“pamphlet.pdf” [UAE Exotic FaIconry & Finance]. A write-up with which I don’t agree in every detail (Section VIII, on Paxlovid) but which is admirably concise. (The account is brilliant parody — “We provide large capital commercial entities, Sovereign funds, and falcon owners with falcons and falcon related derivative financial products” — with a Covid side hustle.

* * *

Lambert here: I’m getting the feeling that the “Something Awful” might be a sawtooth pattern — variant after variant — that averages out to a permanently high plateau. Lots of exceptionally nasty sequelae, most likely deriving from immune dysregulation (says this layperson).

Case Data

NOT UPDATED From BioBot wastewater data from May 1:

Lambert here: Unless the United States is completely, er, exceptional, we should be seeing an increase here soon. UPDATE Indeed, a slight uptick. Let’s wait and see. A chart of past peaks:

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.

Variants

NOT UPDATED From CDC, April 29, 2023. Here we go again:

Lambert here: Looks like XBB.1.16 is rolling right along. Though XBB 1.9.1 is in the race as well.

Covid Emergency Room Visits

From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, from April 29:

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

A kind reader discovered that Walgreens had reduced its frequency to once a week. No updates, however, since April 11.

Deaths

NOT UPDATED Death rate (Our World in Data):

Lambert here: WHO turned off the feed? Odd that Walgreen’s positivity shut down on April 11, and the WHO death count on April 12. Was there a memo I didn’t get?

Total: 1,161,387 – 1,161,164 = 223 (223 * 365 = 81,395 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 Excess deaths (The Economist), published April 23:

Lambert here: Based on a machine-learning model. (The CDC has an excess estimate too, but since it ran forever with a massive typo in the Legend, I figured nobody was really looking at it, so I got rid it. )

Stats Watch

* * *

Commodities: “Copper Mine Flashes Warning of ‘Huge Crisis’ for World Supply” [Bloomberg]. “Oyu Tolgoi, in southern Mongolia just north of the Chinese border, is key to Rio’s efforts to move beyond its dependence on iron ore and expand in copper, the metal that underpins the clean energy transition. It’s also a vast deposit whose corporate, political and technical vicissitudes offer a glimpse of the red metal’s troubled future. As demand for copper surges, supply is increasingly likely to come from mines like this one on the arid steppe: expensive, technically complex, outside traditional copper jurisdictions and operating under the eye of governments jealously guarding their natural resources…. Analysts at Wood Mackenzie estimate a greener world will be short about six million tons of copper by next decade, meaning 12 new Oyu Tolgois need to come online within that period. But they aren’t — there are simply not enough new mines, much less enough large ones. The result is a gap: BloombergNEF estimates appetite for refined copper will grow by 53% by 2040, but mine supply will climb only 16%. The world’s largest miners aren’t standing idly by. After more than a decade of repenting for the excess that followed the China-led boom in demand in the 2000s, deals are back, with green metals in buyers’ sights.” • Yes, but talking their books? Can readers comment? Handy chart:

Commodities: “Copper industry warns of looming supply gap without more mines” [Reuters]. “The world’s appetite for copper to build most electronic devices will exceed supply over the next decade and imperil climate targets unless dozens of new mines are built, executives and analysts said this week at a key industry conference. The forecast lays bare the growing tension over where and how the world can procure metals for the green energy transition, including copper, one of the best electrical-conducting metals that is widely used in motors, batteries and wiring…. ‘There is no way for the world to meet the terms of the Paris climate agreement if we don’t have an increase in the supply of copper and other metals,” Joshua Meyer of mining equipment maker FLSmidth (FLS.CO), referring to the climate accord that aims to limit greenhouse gas emissions by keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) this century. Regulatory approval for new copper mines has fallen to the lowest in a decade, according to Goldman Sachs (GS.N), an ominous harbinger as mines often take 10 to 20 years to permit and build. Goldman expects surging copper demand to push prices to $15,000 a tonne by 2025, 67% above current levels. Much of the new demand is expected to come from electric vehicles, which are built with far more copper than internal combustion engines. But without enough copper, EV manufacturers could use less than expected or even turn to aluminum, analysts warned.” • Dr. Copper, heal thyself! (It’s interesting that the “green energy transition” requires massive expansion of perhaps the world’s ugliest industry: Mining.

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 53 Neutral (previous close: 61 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 54 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated May 2 at 1:53 PM ET.

Guillotine Watch

“Jeffrey Epstein Documents, Part 2: Dinners With Lawrence Summers and Movie Screenings With Woody Allen” [Wall Street Journal]. Oddly, I can’t find an article for “Part 1.” More:

Among the new details:

  • Mr. Summers continued to meet with Epstein and seek his help years after Harvard decided it would no longer accept his donations.
  • Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist and LinkedIn co-founder, visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean and was scheduled to stay over at his Manhattan townhouse in 2014.
  • Woody Allen, the Oscar-winning movie director, attended dozens of dinners with his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, at Epstein’s mansion and invited Epstein to film screenings.
  • Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, visited Epstein dozens of times and accepted flights on Epstein’s private jet while visiting Epstein’s mansions in Florida and New York.
  • Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of private-equity giant Apollo Global Management, scheduled more than 100 meetings with Epstein from 2013 to 2017.

Normally, I want relationships specified and typed, not just pointed to. However, Epstein was so odiferous, it’s hard to see how many meeting with him at all could be untainted. And if those who met with him didn’t see that, well….

Class Warfare

“One-third of US nurses plan to quit profession: report” [Reuters]. “The survey of over 18,000 nurses, conducted by AMN Healthcare Services Inc in January, showed on Monday that 30% of the participants are looking to quit their career, up 7 percentage points over 2021, when the pandemic-triggered wave of resignations began. The survey also showed that 36% of the nurses plan to continue working in the sector but may change workplaces. ‘This really underscores the continued mental health and well-being challenges the nursing workforce experiences post [sic] pandemic,’ AMN Healthcare CEO Cary Grace told Reuters in an interview.” • A staffing company. But whatever. We’ve got AI and robots!

“Q&A with Albert Phelps: The rise of the ‘prompt engineer’ and why it matters” [World Economic Forum]. Albert Phelps is a “prompt engineer”:

How does AI augment the work you do?

It’s very much a human-in-the-loop design. It’s a dialogue that you have between yourself and the LLM as you’re trying to test it and give it suggestions.

There are different techniques for prompting, so I would start off with a “zero-shot prompt”. That is essentially me distilling the task into a series of instructions that the model is then supposed to follow, without examples. Then we’ll have a look and say, “Well, it was good at this part of the task, but it wasn’t so good at this part of the task”. So then you might give the model an example of that task being performed. Many of my use cases have been in financial services and banking because that’s my background.

I know more than the LLM about a topic or at least have knowledge parity, which is important because you need to be able to spot where the model is getting the answers right and where it’s getting them incorrect. Once you’ve written the prompts and incorporated that within an application, and the model’s consistently following it, I would still want a human in the loop as that is going into production because this is a new technology with associated risks.

Mr. Phelps seems not to understand that we live under capitalism. Capital will remove the human from the loop as fast as possible, not least because these humans command high wages. In any case, the “right” answers are the profitable answers. That’s always been the tendency, but there have been countervailing forces and centers of relative of autonomy (professional guilds, for example, which are dead in the AI crosshairs). We have never generated bullshit at scale, and Phelps and his ilk will not be able to prevent that from happening.

News of the Wired

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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 RM:

RM writes: “I really enjoyed the texture of this wisteria and the density of the display.”

* * *

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