By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

California Thrasher, Coal Creek OSP, San Mateo, California, United States.

* * *

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

“President Biden’s current health summary” (memo) [Whitehouse.gov]. On Biden’s gait:

But what does “an extremely detailed neurologic exam” mean? What tests were done? NYU lists these “Common Neurological Tests”: Cerebral Angiogram, CT Myelogram, CT Scans, Nerve Conduction Studies, Nerve Conduction Velocity, Lumbar Puncture, MRI Scans, and a 5-part Neurological Examination, involving “mental status, cranial nerves, motor function, sensory function, and reflexes.” Were any of these tests performed on Biden? In particular, Biden has had Covid. We know that Covid, and especially Long Covid, has neurological effects. Has he been tested for them?

Not knowing what he said, he said it:

Paragraph one: Biden “inherited” a pandemic. Paragraph two: Pandemic erased, good job.

“Trans model Rose Montoya goes topless during White House Pride party after meeting Biden” [New York Post]. There is a photo, which I will not include. I like to think I’m not a prude, but this maxim applies: “I really don’t mind what people do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” Horses still getting their nerves under control, I think.

2024

I guess it’s time for the Countdown Clock!

“Poll: Eight in 10 Democratic primary voters want Joe Biden to debate” [USA Today]. “Eight in 10 Democratic primary voters say in a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll they would like to see a series of Democratic debates during the 2024 campaign. That includes an overwhelming 72% of those supporting President Joe Biden. But the odds of that actually happening are as close to zero as you can get in politics. Biden has expressed no interest in participating and the Democratic National Committee says it won’t sponsor any. History is on their side. ‘As you know, no incumbent R [Republican] or D [Democrat] have done debates,’ Kevin Munoz, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, said in an email. Incumbents generally see no advantage to risking a misstep or to giving their challenger such a significant platform. Biden’s claim to the nomination hasn’t been seriously threatened, but the findings underscore his need to consolidate and energize the Democratic base. In the poll, 58% of Democrats support Biden for the nomination while 15% back Kennedy and 6% back Marianne Williamson; 21% are undecided.” • Pretty amazing stat for Williamson, given she gets almost no coverage.

* * *

“What to know about Trump’s court appearance” [CNN]. “Donald Trump will appear in a federal courthouse in Miami Tuesday afternoon for an unprecedented and historic court appearance as the first former president to face federal charges in US history. Trump is expected to be taken into custody and placed under arrest by US Marshals and arraigned during a 3 p.m. ET court hearing before a magistrate judge. He’s expected to plead not guilty to the charges. Special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump in a 37-count indictment last week, alleging that the former president mishandled classified documents brought to his Mar-a-Lago resort and engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Trump’s aide, Walt Nauta, was also charged in the indictment and is expected to appear in court alongside the former president.” • 37 charges because there’s one charge per document ffs.

“Inside the Implosion of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Legal Team” [Rolling Stone]. “Despite all the tumult, [Boris] Epshteyn remains at Trump’s side as other names fall by the wayside. Since last year, numerous lawyers and others close to Trump have urged him to sideline Epshteyn, if not dump the counselor altogether. “Trump has put a lot of trust in Boris [in his post-presidency],” says one source close to the ex-president. ‘People trying to convince the [former] president to get rid of Boris has very often had the opposite intended effect.’ … Amid the departures, Trump and his close advisers have been hunting for seasoned attorneys, in and also outside of Florida, to join his defense in the classified documents case, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation. But the dream team has yet to materialize. Multiple well-known Florida lawyers have recently been approached, though several promptly refused the chance to rep Trump in this particular case.” • You’d think there’s be some lawyer out there willing to take an Espionage Act case to the Supreme Court — this Supreme Court — and win.

On the pearl-clutching about secret information:

Quite right. Secrets — keeping them, access to them — is social capital everywhere in the Beltway.

* * *

“‘First of its kind’ Illinois law will penalize libraries that ban books” [Associated Press]. “Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Monday signed into law a bill that he says will make Illinois the first state in the nation to outlaw book bans. Illinois public libraries that restrict or ban materials because of ‘partisan or doctrinal’ disapproval will be ineligible for state funding as of Jan. 1, 2024, when the new law goes into effect. ‘We are not saying that every book should be in every single library,’ said Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who is also the state librarian and was the driving force behind the legislation. ‘What this law does is it says, let’s trust our experience and education of our librarians to decide what books should be in circulation.’” • Pritzker and his apparatus seem adept at hopping on board the controversy du jour (not that I disagree with the legislation). I think if Biden throws a cog, Pritzker would — after a decent interval — throw his gut hat in the ring.

“Pritzker delivers ‘The Office’-themed Northwestern commencement address — with Steve Carell in audience” [Chicago Sun-Times]. “Just after receiving an honorary degree from his alma mater, Pritzker offered up a 23-minute address full of personal stories about parenting and governing. He paired his tips with quotes from the popular sitcom, like the character Jim Halpert on being a dad of two: “Having a baby is exhausting. Having two babies — now that’s just mean.’” • Puff piece. Is there anything here I missed?!

“Jack Dorsey: the reason I’m backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” [Unherd]. “Speaking on the Breaking Points podcast, Dorsey argued that Kennedy was ‘focused on peace and ending all these wars’ as well as being committed to ending ‘regulatory capture and the military industrial complex.’ Dorsey explained that he was impressed by the Democratic challenger’s ‘intimate knowledge’ of these issues, which Kennedy addressed with curiosity and a ‘deep sense of humanity.’ RFK Jr.s position on vaccines was not raised directly, but Dorsey noted that he had an ‘edge.’ ‘He has no fear in exploring topics that are a little bit controversial and in the future,’ the tech entrepreneur added.”

“Spasmodic dysphonia: What RFK Jr.’s voice condition means for his campaign” [Washington Examiner]. “Spasmodic dysphonia is exceedingly rare, affecting one in 100,000, according to Cleveland Clinic estimates. The disorder affects the muscles in the larynx, colloquially known as the voice box, by preventing the vocal cords from vibrating in a way that produces a normal speech pattern…. ‘Spasmodic dysphonia causes voice breaks during speaking and can make the voice sound tight, strained, or breathy,’ according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. ‘In more severe cases, spasms may occur on every word, making a person’s speech very difficult to understand.’… A candidate’s voice is a key indicator of success on the campaign trail. While some analysts point to the high-pitched voices of females as a reason for their underrepresentation in elected office, vocal tonality has been found to affect the viability of both male and female candidates. An article published in Political Psychology in 2015 found that male and female voters have a greater preference for lower-pitched voices in both controlled scientific environments and real-world elections….. Of those who have signaled their support for RFK Jr.’s bid, 20% support him because of the Kennedy family name, hoping that he will carry on the legacy of his father and uncle. Only 12% of would-be Kennedy voters say they support his policy opinions, according to the CNN poll.”

“Marianne Williamson: Democrats Need a “Genuine Economic Alternative” to Beat the GOP in 2024″ [Jacobin]. Williamson: “The Democratic electorate has become deeply codependent in its relationship to the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and the Democratic leadership in a way that, number one, you don’t see on the Republican side, and number two, wasn’t true when I was growing up. When Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy said they were going to primary Lyndon Johnson, nobody said they shouldn’t or couldn’t or even thought it was odd. Even when Teddy Kennedy said he was going to primary Jimmy Carter. Nobody thought, ‘Oh, how dare he?’ That narrative hadn’t been created yet. It’s really a reversion to a time one hundred years ago when a bunch of men sat around a table smoking their cigars, thinking that they had the right — that they were entitled — to determine who the candidate should be, which to me is particularly outrageous because the presumption there is, ‘They got this.’ And if anything has been proven over the last few decades, it’s that they don’t got this. The idea that they know better, the idea that we should go, ‘Oh, they know better,’ is particularly absurd in today’s world.” • And yesterday:

“Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President” [Woan Jalsh, The Nation]. “[A] weird animus seemed to drive his attacks on our first Black president.” Our? “West tried to frame his opposition as a universalist defense of poor and working-class people. They didn’t get enough help from Obama’s Wall Street–adjacent administration, I admit. But calling the president “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats” was awful.’” • “Awful” in what sense? Like an awful truth? Pearl-clutching played at the professional level.

* * *

“Opinion This blue-state election compact could create a constitutional crisis” [WaPo]. “Without fanfare, Minnesota’s governor signed legislation last month that . The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact purports to take effect once states carrying 270 electoral votes (the minimum needed to win the presidency) have agreed to its terms. The aim is to replace the electoral college with an improvised popular-vote system for electing presidents without amending the Constitution. Minnesota’s move means that 16 states and D.C., controlling 205 electoral votes, are now parties to the compact. Michigan’s Democratic-controlled legislature is also set to vote on the compact. If the Great Lakes State becomes the 17th to approve it, compact member states will control 220 electoral votes, bringing them more than 80 percent of the way to 270.” Yikes. And: “No states that have joined the compact to date have exited it. But as the compact presses into more competitive states like Michigan, it could face defections if there is partisan turnover in the state legislature. That means the U.S. system for choosing presidents could swing back and forth based on elections in one or two states.”

“White House press secretary violated Hatch Act, government watchdog says” [NBC]. “White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre violated a law intended to prevent federal employees from using their offices to influence elections when she repeatedly referred to ‘mega MAGA Republicans’ in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, a government watchdog agency said. In a letter first shared with NBC News, the Office of Special Counsel determined that Jean-Pierre’s choice of words in referring to Republican candidates violated the Hatch Act. ‘Because Ms. Jean‐Pierre made the statements while acting in her official capacity, she violated the Hatch Act prohibition against using her official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election,’ Ana Galindo‐Marrone, who leads the agency’s Hatch Act Unit, wrote in a letter Wednesday…. Despite having found Jean-Pierre in violation of the law, [because of course] Galindo‐Marrone wrote in last week’s letter to Protect the Public’s Trust, noting that the White House counsel’s office ‘did not at the time believe that Ms. Jean‐Pierre’s remarks were prohibited.’ ‘We have decided not to pursue disciplinary action and have instead issued Ms. Jean‐Pierre a warning letter,’ Galindo‐Marrone wrote.” • To be fair, Kelly Anne Conway, Trump’s White House counsellor, also violated the Hatch Act.

Trump Legacy

“Newsom offers surprising response to Trump indictment” [FOX]. “Hannity asked what his relationship was like with Trump when he was in the White House. Newsom said the two engaged in a politically-unique cooperation during the coronavirus pandemic, with the-top Democratic governor praising Trump. ‘I didn’t have a closed fist, I had an open hand. We actually had an incredible relationship during COVID’ Newsom said. ‘He was incredible – he played no politics during COVID with California – none whatsoever. It’s a fact.’ The governor said that some in his own party criticized him for declining to attack Trump during the pandemic.”

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.

* * *

#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.

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).

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), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (5), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

* * *

Look for the Helpers

Not Covid-related, but a reminder that some doctors remain humane. The whole thread is worth reading in full:

And:

“‘My silence is not for sale’: Bellingham doctor fired for COVID concerns refuses $2 million settlement” [KING5]. “In March of 2020, Lin posted a video critical of PeaceHealth administrators for not having proper protective gear or protocols in place to keep patients and staff safe. Shortly thereafter, he was fired. ‘It was kind of humiliating, in a way. You feel like an outcast,’ he said. Lin filed a lawsuit claiming wrongful termination, saying the hospital accused him of ‘posting misinformation’ and creating a ‘toxic environment.’ Three years later his lawyers told him he should settle the suit for $2 million, but Lin refused. He believes the hospital should publicly admit wrongdoing, especially since, he says, it eventually ended up instituting much of what Lin requested. ‘It’s like a bully out there terrorizing people. Unless the bully acknowledges what he did wrong, you never solve the problem,’ says Lin. PeaceHealth spokesperson Beverly Mayhew tells KING 5 the hospital ‘can’t comment specifically on active litigation, however, it’s important to emphasize that patient and caregiver safety is and always has been, our top priority. This commitment drives all clinical decision-making at PeaceHealth.’ For Lin, walking away from $2 million is just the next step in his march toward justice. ‘Taking the money would just say that it’s OK for corporations to just pay people off to be silent,’ Lin said. ‘My silence is not for sale.’ Lin’s attorneys dropped him, so he is currently seeking new representation.”

* * *

Names matter:

I don’t know why the third thing that one might, er, “identify as” needs to be “secret,” but I do agree that “Because I’m Covid cautious” isn’t the best answer to “Why are you wearing a mask?” “Because I’m a member of The Order Of Spun Woven Fabric” isn’t all that great either. Perhaps there’s an alternative. Readers?

* * *

I file this here with some hesitation:

Some hesitation here too:

Maskstravaganza

We’ve regressed:

We also gave a corrupt and despicable public health system jurisdiction over an engineering problem, already solved in industry. And speaking of corrupt and despicable, I present the Brownnose Institute–

“Forest fires and n95 masking” [Vinay Prasad’s Observations and Thoughts]. The deck: “Masking without evidence is an untreated mental illness plaguing public health.” Commentary:

I love the part where Prasad says breathing in wildfire smoke is “a choice.” You gotta admire his commitment to the bit! Methodologically, however, Prasad just volunteered to be the control in a parachute RCT! And his article is a fine example of epistemic tresspass:

Masking is an engineering problem (including social engineering). Doctors should never have been involved at all (unless in cooperation with aerosol scientists).

Covid is Airborne

“Viral emissions into the air and environment after SARS-CoV-2 human challenge: a phase 1, open label, first-in-human study” [The Lancet]. A challenge study of pre-alpha wild-type SARS-CoV-2. From the Summary: “We aimed to correlate viral emissions, viral load in the upper respiratory tract, and symptoms, longitudinally, in participants who were experimentally infected with SARS-CoV-2…. Two individuals emitted 86% of airborne virus, and the majority of airborne virus collected was released on 3 days. Individuals who reported the highest total symptom scores were not those who emitted most virus. Very few emissions occurred before the first reported symptom (7%) and hardly any before the first positive lateral flow antigen test (2%)…. We observed that a minority of participants were high airborne virus emitters, giving support to the notion of superspreading individuals or events. Our data implicates the nose as the most important source of emissions.” • Hmm. I wish I could say that Omicron was the same, but I don’t see how that can be done. Readers?

“Covid moves like smoke”:

If only Covid were visible… That would be a good use case for Apple’s VR headset.

On “diffused responsibility”:

Note, however, “they.”

“Building a PC Fan Corsi-Rosenthal Box” [Joey Fox, It’s Airborne]. “The Box Fan Corsi-Rosenthal box was the original DIY air cleaner, known for its cost-effectiveness and effectiveness in cleaning the air. However, it may not be suitable for all environments. To address this limitation, the Clean Air Brigade on Twitter introduced an innovative solution using a parallel array of PC fans. These fans operate quietly and, although a single fan alone may not provide substantial air purification, when combined in parallel, they offer the most effective method for achieving a high clean air delivery rate while maintaining a low noise profile. The main issue with the PC Fan CR boxes is that they are much more difficult to build and require more parts to purchase. Here’s how I did it.” • I could file this under “Look for the Helpers” too! (I’m too lazy to look for it now, but I believe Rosenthal compared Classical CR boxes to PC CR boxes, and concluded their efficacy was comparable.)

Censorship and Propaganda

“White House sends guidance mandating face masks, social distancing for unvaccinated at ‘College Athlete Day’” [FOX]. The email was sent out by mistake. However, FOX includes this quote: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop,” Tom Jefferson, the study’s lead author, said in an interview. When asked specifically about fitted N95 masks in health care settings, Jefferson said: ‘It makes no difference – none of it.’” • “The study” is, of course, the infamous Cochraine “fool’s gold” standard study, debunked. Cochrane itself had to rebuke Jefferson for tendentiously distorting the conclusions of his own study, specifically this quote.

Variants

“The Rise of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Omicron Subvariant Pathogenicity” [Cureus]. From the Abstract: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, variants of the Betacoronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the etiologic agent of COVID-19 disease, progressively decreased in pathogenicity up to the Omicron strain. However, the case fatality rate has increased from Omicron through each major Omicron subvariant (BA.2/BA.4, BA.5, XBB.1.5) in the United States of America. World data also mirror this trend. We show that the rise of Omicron pathogenicity is exponential, and we have modeled the case fatality rate of the next major subvariant as 0.0413, 2.5 times that of the Alpha strain and 60% of the original Wuhan strain which caused the greatest morbidity and mortality during the pandemic.”

Sequelae

“The emergence of multi-drug-resistant bacteria causing healthcare-associated infections in COVID-19 patients: a retrospective multi-centre study” [Journal of Hospital Infection]. “Our results reveal a striking association between healthcare-associated bacterial infections as an important complication of COVID-19 and fatal outcomes.” • Sometime I have to put on my yellow waders and look at nosocomial infection. It seems to me that people with an awful lot of power over healthcare policy — big hospitals — are doing a pretty bad job at a task that should be central-to-mission.

Treatment

“Something Awful”

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). To which we might add brain damage, including personality changes therefrom.

* * *

Elite Maleficence

They know:

They just don’t want you to know. Hence the enormous propaganda effort, in which the hegemonic factions of the PMC gleefully participate, having engineered it. So committed to the bit they don’t wear masks at their conferences, and create superspreading events!

Hospital Infection Control preparing to whack more patients. From Canada:

The mask — a “Baggy Blue,” naturally naturellement — is hanging off the “E” in “FUTURE,” at right.

* * *

Case Data

NOT UPDATED From BioBot wastewater data from June 5:

Lambert: Oh no….

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, June 10:

Lambert here: Looks to like XBB.1.16 and now XBB.1.16 are outcompeting XBB.1.9, but XBB.1.5 has really staying power. I sure hope the volunteers doing Pangolin, on which this chart depends, don’t all move on the green fields and pastures new (or have their access to facilities cut by administrators of ill intent).

CDC: “As of May 11, genomic surveillance data will be reported biweekly, based on the availability of positive test specimens.” “Biweeekly: 1. occurring every two weeks. 2. occurring twice a week; semiweekly.” Looks like CDC has chosen sense #1. In essence, they’re telling us variants are nothing to worry about. Time will tell. Looks like the Walgreens variants page isn’t updating.

Covid Emergency Room Visits

NOT UPDATED From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, from June 3:

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. 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 Walgreens, June 12:

0.1%.

Deaths

NOT UPDATED Death rate (Our World in Data), from June 7:

Lambert here: Theatre of the absurd. I can believe that deaths are low; I cannot believe they are zero, and I cannot even believe that all doctors signing death certificates have agreed to make it so. Looks to me like some administrative minimizer at WHO put the worst intern in charge of the project. And thanks, Johns Hopkins of the $9.32 billion endowment, for abandoning this data feed and passing responsibility on to the clown car at WHO.

Total: 1,166,713 – 1,166,663 = 50 (50 * 365 = 18,250 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

Excess deaths (The Economist), published June 13:

Lambert here: Still some encouragement!

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. )

• Changing the baseline in Europe:

• What could be the cause?

‘Tis a mystery!

Stats Watch

Inflation: “United States Core Inflation Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The annual core consumer price inflation rate in the United States, which excludes volatile items such as food and energy, eased to a 1-1/2-year low of 5.3% in May 2023, as expected, from 5.5% in the prior month.”

Small Business Optimism: “United States NFIB Business Optimism Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index in the United States slightly increased to 89.4 in May 2023 compared to the previous month’s reading of 89.0, surpassing market expectations of 88.5. Still, the index remained below its 49-year average of 98 for the past 17 months, indicating ongoing concerns among small business owners regarding future business conditions.”

* * *

Retail: “Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills beloved beer” [SGATE]. “In an interview with SFGATE, Anchor Brewing spokesperson Sam Singer explained that the company is focusing on the California market because it accounts for 70% of its sales. Still, Singer said it was a difficult decision based on challenging economic realities the company has faced for years. ‘The inflationary impact of product costs in San Francisco is one factor,’ Singer said. ‘Couple that with a highly competitive craft beer market and a historically costly steam brewing technique. [They’ve] probably been mulling over this decision for a year. It’s not something they take lightly.’ Another big change: Anchor Brewing will no longer make its iconic holiday beer, Christmas Ale. The spice-laden winter warmer has been a brewing tradition since 1975 and something that Northern California beer lovers look forward to every November. Singer said costly brewing and packaging requirements led to the change. It’s also a time-intensive brewing process, he said.”

The Bezzle: “‘But the SEC let us go public’ and other flawed arguments in Coinbase’s defense” [Molly White]. A takedown of Coinbase talking points. or example: “‘There is no path to compliance.’ I’ll give it to them, they might be right on this one. Coinbase thinks this is an issue with the securities laws. The SEC thinks this is an issue with Coinbase. If a company went to the FDA and said ‘hello, we’d like to start selling heroin to the public for recreational use’, and the FDA said ‘no, you can’t do that’, the company could loudly complain that the FDA was not giving them a path to compliance. People would probably laugh at them.”

Tech: “Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit — and why users revolted” [The Verge]. “The short version of a long history goes like this: in April, Reddit announced new terms for its API, the tool through which developers of third-party apps access Reddit’s data. Every time you post a comment, refresh a page, search for something, or take just about any other action in an app like Apollo, the app pings an API to get the data you need. Reddit’s API has been free for many years, leading to a flourishing community of third-party tools. But Reddit finally decided it was time to charge for access, both to recoup the costs of running the API and to help the company become more profitable ahead of its planned IPO. The logic made sense to Selig; the price didn’t. Ultimately, he calculated he would have to pay Reddit $20 million a year just to keep Apollo running, which he couldn’t afford. Other developers building Reddit apps came to the same conclusion and said they would be forced to shut down. Many users decided this wasn’t a fair business deal — this was a plot to crush third-party Reddit apps. So in response, Reddit users decided to push back. The battle reached its current peak when thousands of subreddits went dark on Monday, protesting Reddit’s new API policies and how they affected everything from app developers to the on-platform tools many users rely on. Reddit’s response? It’s just business. ‘We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,’ CEO Steve Huffman wrote during an AMA session over the weekend. ‘Unlike some of the [third-party] apps, we are not profitable.’” • Until?

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 80 Extreme Greed (previous close: 78 Extreme Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 75 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jun 13 at 1:47 PM ET.

The Gallery

“White Noise by Kathy Anne Lim” [Drawlights]. “The body of work by photographer Kathy Anne Lim focuses on themes of memory and displacement—contents of which mix absolute certainty and misty ephemerality. Her series White Noise ties in with this topic in a certain way, if you don’t know what the white mist in her photographs actually is, you might find the creeping mist mysterious and romantic. In fact it’s not, it is fumigating to repel insects in various parts of Singapore.” • A sample:

Class Warfare

“Let Them Eat Plague!” [Red Clarion]. A must-read (I missed it in January). Grab a cup of coffee. Here is the key section, from the second part of the article

Actually solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the U.S. and the rest of the capitalist world. It would have necessitated deep international cooperation, massive investment in clean air infrastructure, a persistent information campaign (and censoring of hazardous misinformation), efforts to build public trust in government, guaranteed paid leave, nationalization of key industries, and more. Basically, it would involve massively undercutting the philosophy of free market capitalism.

Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.

There are three main ways this hegemonic narrative around COVID has been propagated to the public: official rhetoric, public policy, and media framing. These three facets of idea propagation feed into each other, and all three are maneuvered in various ways by the interests of capital. The process by which a hegemonic narrative is crafted in the capitalist sphere is not quite as straightforward as one might expect. It’s not a simple matter of a state propaganda department deciding on a central doctrine, issuing scripts to paid actors, and imprisoning all who dissent. There is no party line for the capitalists, no single convocation of business elites, and relatively few shadowy backroom deals. Explicit planning meetings are held — independently — among the leadership of different ruling class parties and distinct business interests, and their similar class interests lead them to similar priorities. But the way narrative unity of this sort is achieved is not through an all-powerful conspiracy. Instead, the “decision” for how to frame events arises organically from the interplay of the many individual sectors that comprise the ruling class propaganda machine.

The tone struck by what we think of as official sources sets the stage for the broader social response. This rhetoric comes from a variety of places — heads of state, government agencies, individual experts, think tanks, and other entities imbued with a sense of authority. These are voices that we are socialized to pay attention to. When they speak, they easily garner media attention. A news outlet that ignores or disputes these sources loses access to them and invites flak, thereby harming their ability to sell more news. These voices are generally in the room when policies are crafted — or crafting the policies themselves. What “the experts” say matters, and the particular experts being promoted by governments and corporations have steadily coalesced around rhetoric that minimizes the public health threat of the virus.

The first part of the article is a long popularization of Covid medical information. I could quarrel with some detail if I dug in, but it’s useful too. So what happens when the sleepers wake, coughing, one too many times? Will they wake?

“How Striking Writers Are Disrupting Hollywood Shoots” [Wall Street Journal]. “The WGA’s strike, aimed at extracting contract demands from Hollywood studios including better pay, higher residual payments and protections against artificial intelligence’s encroachment on the movie industry, has entered its guerrilla tactics phase. In the six weeks since Hollywood writers’ rooms closed, the union has interrupted or halted shoots from Los Angeles to New York representing truck drivers, makeup artists and actors. The cat-and-mouse game between strikers and studios will determine how many films and TV shows reach living rooms and theaters across America in coming months.” • If all the supply chain unions ever got together….

News of the Wired

“In praise of blowing up your life” [Sasha’s ‘Newsletter‘]. “Generally, I think blowing up your life is a good idea. Sure, not for Cocaine Bob, who is on his fifth marriage and tenth DUI. But for the relatively sane, by the time you’re mostly ready to leave a job, or a city, or a relationship, you probably have good reason to. Status quo bias is utterly pervasive. Most people are tremendously resistant to change, capable of coming up with countless ingenious stories about why something different will be worse than what we have. We will stick with familiar pain over variance, even if we are financially and socially secure enough that we will remain safe and fed after walking away. At any given time, your motion is being constrained by an agglomeration of previous decisions made by a previous you, decisions that might have little to do with your current wants. Maybe you spent years forming habits that you just don’t enjoy anymore, or you’ve carefully curated an environment that now feels stale. All of these factors, collectively, present a bulwark against change. It’s possible to modify your life while mired in this mass of ongoing circumstance, but it’s difficult. The human default is sleepwalking. However, in a dramatically new situation, you have no choice but to act your way into being someone else. That someone might be only slightly different in the end. But, on the other hand, that someone might be much more aligned with your real and present desires and potentials. My existence really started getting good when I started blowing up my life more regularly, with a substantial eruption every couple of years.”

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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 wol:

wol writes: “Daffodils.”

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Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So if you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:

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