2:00PM Water Cooler 7/23/2024 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Northern Mockingbird, Wellington, Ontario, Canada. “Singing up a storm on both sides of the road by 71 Maltby Road. Long tailed grey bird with white outer tail feathers and white wing bars.”

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Pelosi and the Twenty Fifth Amendment.

(2) Kamala’s rollout.

(3) Establishment voices at the Atlantic.

(4) Boeing cluster continues.

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

The Constitutional Order (Twenty-Fifth Amendment)

“Top Dems threatened to forcibly remove Biden from office unless he dropped out, set him up to fail at Trump debate: sources” [New York Post (Turley)]. Note this is single-sourced. “As calls for him to bow out mounted, Biden insisted he would continue, but . The amendment allows for the vice president and members of the cabinet to declare the president is unfit to serve and force him to step down, the source added. The White House and representatives from the Democratic National Committee did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment.” • Could it be this is Pelosi’s “hard way“? Here in relevant part is the Twenty Fifth Amendment; Section 4:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

So Kamala would have had to initiate the process (which is cumbersome and of uncertain outcome. Nevertheless, I can hear Pelosi saying “Kamala’s going to start making calls.” That would truly be “the hard way.” Other explanations involve yet more leaks. But “the hard way” implies to me a change of state. A Twenty Fifth amendment invocation is that; more leaks are not). However, if this story is confirmed, it implies that the Inner Party is prepared to threaten Constitutional means to get their preferred candidate on the ballot, but if the threat works, they’ll leave a cognitively impaired President in office. Party before country!

Trump Assassination Attempt

“Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle resigns after shocking failures led to Trump assassination attempt” [New York Post]. One more detail: “Crooks was also allowed to enter the rally despite being stopped at the entrance with a rangefinder — a type of eyepiece often used by hunters or golfers to determine far-off distances on the fly.” • Yikes!

2024

Less than four months to go!

Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:

Virginia and North Carolina added to the list. NC was never going for Biden Harris, but Virginia? Yikes!

* * *

Biden Defenestration:

“Biden to address nation tomorrow on decision to drop out of campaign” [New York Post]. “President Biden will address the nation at 8 p.m. Wednesday about his decision to abandon his campaign for a second term amid mounting questions about his mental acuity. ‘Tomorrow evening at 8 PM ET, I will address the nation from the Oval Office on what lies ahead, and how I will finish the job for the American people,’ Biden, 81, tweeted Tuesday. The president hasn’t been seen in public since last Wednesday when he traveled to his Delaware vacation home to recuperate from COVID-19 and is expected to return to the White House Tuesday afternoon.”

“It’s over! How Dem elites locked in Harris” [Axios]. “Harris’ rollout was as well-choreographed as it was stunning, involving hundreds of phone calls by Harris’ team to senators, House members and governors.” • I’m not sure about that. If we look at Kamala’s Twitter presence, the rollout was a hot mess. When I heard Biden was out, I went immediately to his site. This is what I found:

The Biden site redirects not to a Kamala site with a fresh new identity, but to ActBlue, for an immediate donation. I think that’s a little crass. It also suggests that the process was not entirely gamed out. Here is the ActBlue page, updated with a quote from the letter Biden signed and a picture of Kamala:

Here for reference is an archived version of the Biden site:

I went to the DNC. There’s no link to Kamala’s site, but there’s a ginormous pop-up for DNC fundraising:

‘

“The Party will undertake a transparent and orderly process” is rich; apparently the DNC thought they were going to play a significant role in the transition. No such luck! And here is Kamala’s main Twitter page as of press time:

Amateurish. And Kamala’s “official” rapid response page, also at press time:

The horrid green! The horrid font! And why two different sites in different trade dress? All to day that some aspects of Kamala’s rollout were indeed well-choreographed — as the puff piece in Axios reflexively shows — but certainly not all.

* * *

The Campaign Trail:

Harris (D):

Tonight, I am proud to have earned the support needed to become our party’s nominee.

Over the next few months, I’ll be traveling across the country talking to Americans about everything on the line. I fully intend to unite our party and our nation, and defeat Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/Bsq3N6pMAi

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 23, 2024

Typically, in any system resembling a democracy, “support” is “earned” by facing the voters in elections. Apparently, that’s no longer important to the Democrat Party or their candidate.

Harris (D): “Harris earns $231 million in donations on first day of presidential campaign” [New York Daily News]. “Vice President Kamala Harris claimed a stunning $231 million[1] from small and big donors in the first 24 hours since she launched her presidential campaign. In a huge vote of confidence for her still-nascent campaign, Harris won $81 million[2] in small-dollar donations and reportedly scored an additional $150 million[3] “money bomb” from big donors in what amounted to the biggest one-day haul of the 2024 election cycle.” • [1] The story at NBC has $46.7 million at ActBlue, which is good, but 46.7 is not equal to 231. [2] Harris campaign press release, not sure whether this includes ActBlue or not. [3] Nothing in this article indicates “$150 million” has been scored. Normally, I wouldn’t get into the minutiae of campaign finances, but after our collective experience with Democrat’s years-long denial of Biden’s obvious cognative issues, we know that they’ll lie about literally anything. So here we are!

Harris (D): “Scoop: Biden doubted Harris’ election chances” [Axios]. “Harris’ time as vice president has been occasionally rocky, defined in part by large staff turnover, retreating from politically risky responsibilities, and mocking from some Beltway insiders. Much of Harris’ staff has turned over in the past 3½ years.About half of the vice president’s staff is paid by the Senate, which requires regular disclosures. Of the 47 Harris staffers listed in 2021, only five still worked for her as of this spring, according to the disclosures. Her full staff list is not publicly disclosed.

During Obama’s first term, then-Vice President Biden had far more staff stability, as 17 of 38 of his aides stayed with him over a similar period, according to the disclosures for staff paid by the Senate. Former Harris aides told Axios the high turnover is partly because of how the vice president treats her staff. Some former aides said Harris had high standards that some did not want to keep up with, but others felt that she frequently grilled them the way she grilled Trump officials, such as then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, when she represented California in the U.S. Senate. Former aides often refer to it as Harris’ ‘prosecuting the staff.’ During the 2020 campaign, Biden aides recall watching Harris interrogate her then-chief of staff Karine Jean-Pierre to the point that it made others uncomfortable. After the election, Jean-Pierre moved to the White House’s press team.” • To the press team’s detriment. That said, Biden’s reciprocal loyalty to staff served him well.

* * *

Straight down the yellow stripe in the middle of the road:

“Suddenly Trump Looks Older and More Deranged” [Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic]. • Consider the source; Applebaum is signaling Kamala is more likely to continue the war in Ukraine than Trump.

“Can Harris Reassemble Obama’s Coalition?” [Ron Brownstein, The Atlantic]. • No, because all the Obots are now eight years older, are saddled with college debt, and can’t afford to buy houses. And no, because there was never an “Obama coalition” in the first place. But Brownstein has been writing this piece for years, and so he writes it again.

“The Harris Gamble” [David Frum, The Atlantic]. “Earlier this month, Trump posted on Truth Social an advance warning of the campaign he’ll run against Harris: ‘Also, respects to our potentially new Democrat Challenger, Laffin’ Kamala Harris. She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.’ In case you missed Trump’s hint, he’s referencing an old internet smear that Harris slept her way to political success.” • The Harris team had better scrub Kamala’s Wikipedia page, then, or explain Brown’s truly remarkable act of selfless generosity to, as it turns out, his girlfriend:

In 1994, Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, who was then dating Harris, . Harris took a six-month leave of absence in 1994 from her duties, then afterward resumed working as prosecutor during the years she sat on the boards. Harris’s connection to Brown was noted in media reportage as

And it does seem that getting appointed as a ‘friends and loyal political soldier’ hasn’t been a happy event for Harris only one time. Come on. Are we little children of six?

“Democrats Are Making a Huge Mistake” [Graeme Wood, The Atlantic]. “The error is not the choice of Kamala Harris. It is the sudden rallying behind her, the torrent of endorsements, right after Biden’s self-removal. Biden’s senescence was only part of the party’s crisis. The other part was the impression that Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning. For 27 minutes, between the time Biden announced his withdrawal and the time he broke the seal on Harris endorsements by bestowing his, the contest felt thrillingly, bracingly wide-open.” • It felt that way because it was that way.

* * *

My timeline is a sordid mess (1):

Kamala is going to win in a landslide and we are going to take back the House and Senate🌊🔥 pic.twitter.com/hcTcXEZ2LG

— ꪖꪀᧁꫀꪶꪶꫀ꠸ᧁꫝ🪷✨🌌💫 (@angel_leigh) July 23, 2024

My timeline is a sordid mess (2):

YES WE KAM pic.twitter.com/gZnu59tlU2

— Kat 4 Obama (@Kat4Obama) July 23, 2024

My timeline is a sordid mess (3):

Harris has a whole series of cooking videos on her YouTube and one thing I’ve learned so far is that she’s got the one-handed egg crack down. pic.twitter.com/oNzjeKIztY

— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) July 22, 2024

* * *

Democrats en Déshabillé

“A Historian of the Democratic Party Sees Crisis and Opportunity” [Politico]. “But Democrats will first have to address the reasons why so many people with working-class backgrounds voted twice for Donald Trump and seem ready to do so again. That’s not just members of the white working class who have departed the party in droves in recent decades; polls have shown Trump poised to scoop up working-class Black and Latino voters in potentially historic proportions. Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have eagerly embraced the populist mantle and sought to co-opt some progressive critiques of the free market, even if they’d surely govern in service of plutocrats. Too often, Democrats have failed to articulate a coherent vision of where to take the nation, apart from tolerating cultural differences and moving toward a greener economy, and neither goal speaks to those who have struggled to make ends meet. With Kamala Harris as their candidate, they have an opportunity to begin to change that image. The danger is that they may believe that the crisis they have gone through can be resolved by shifting candidates without addressing the discontents that roil the nation.” • The difficulty, as Thomas Frank shows, is that the Democrat PMC base hates the working class. The only way that will change is if the Democrats lose in 2024, badly. And again in 2028, because they always double down on failure. That’s a long time to wait. Commentary:

Joe Biden started an incredible restoration of democracy with his trustbusting administration.

And made some enemies that anyone should be proud of.

Harris would win so much support if she just came out swinging. The sooner she gives Lina Khan a bear hug the better.

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) July 22, 2024

Would anyone like to make book on Kamala giving Lina Khan a bear hug?

Syndemics

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

Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (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 (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

Maskstravaganza

Because many N95s have a metal nosewire:

FYI, Vitacore makes masks that can be worn in CT and MRI.https://t.co/kyHaoJFw1U

— AndiH (she/her) (@AndiH72) July 22, 2024

Lambert here: Looks like the holiday travel dumped accelerant on the pre-existing surge; see especially the growth in wastewater “hot spots.” Stay safe out there!

Manufacturing: “United States Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The composite manufacturing index in the US Fifth District declined for a second consecutive month to -17 in July 2024, the lowest level since May 2020.”

Manufacturing: “Boss of biggest 777X customer wants Boeing fixed — with union help” [Seattle Times]. “Tim Clark, who runs Gulf carrier Emirates and is an essential and exacting customer of both Airbus and Boeing, is waiting for delivery of more than 200 giant 777Xs with both optimism and worry. He doesn’t expect to get the first ones until mid-2026, he said in an interview at the Farnborough Air Show. He knows Boeing has a difficult time ahead to fix its manufacturing problems. And he believes Boeing management needs the company’s front-line workers and their union on its side to get the job done. ‘The guys on the shop floor, the engineers, the machinists, they know what to do,’ said Clark. ‘They can get it sorted.’ ‘Don’t forget the workforce. Make sure they get a good deal. Make sure that you look after them,’ he added. ‘Make sure you recognize the criticality of what they do.’ If that makes Clark sound like a socialist, he’s not. A 74-year-old Englishman, he runs one of the richest airlines in the world from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. He does believe in Boeing’s legacy of engineering and manufacturing prowess, and he wants it restored because he needs it for his business. Emirates has a giant fleet of 271 big commercial jets, including 118 Airbus superjumbo A380s, and more than 140 Boeing 777s. The A380 is discontinued after it failed to make money for Airbus. So Clark needs the 777X to renew his fleet. He has placed almost half the total orders for the jet. He described the Puget Sound region as ‘the cradle, the crucible,’ of Boeing and the workers there as capable of pulling the company from the pit it has fallen into. ‘It’s fixable, very fixable,’ Clark said.” • But what about the executive’s bonuses?

Manufacturing: “Boeing Boss Still Hasn’t Met with Whistleblowers to Talk Safety, Lawyer Says” [Newsweek]. “Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson asked [Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun] whether it would be ‘a good idea’ for him to meet and speak with any of the whistleblowers that had voiced their concerns over the company’s safety practices. Calhoun responded: ‘Yeh, I think it would.’ Brian Knowles, an attorney who represents over a dozen current and former employees of Boeing, said that he has yet to hear from Calhoun or the company. [Knowls client sam] Mohawk is a quality assurance inspector at Boeing’s production facility in Renton, Washington. In a complaint shared by Senator Richard Blumenthal of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, Mohawk alleged that the company had failed to document or correctly store damaged aircraft components, which were then likely used in the assembly of Boeing planes. Knowles also told Newsweek that Mohawk had observed thousands of parts being left ‘in the elements’ outside of the Renton facility, leading to corrosion of the components. When asked whether his clients would be willing to meet with Calhoun or the Boeing board, Knowles said: ‘I think they need to.’” • Calhoun wouldn’t soil his hands, would he.

Tech: “Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all” [The Register]. “Google will soon make its own contribution to the problem of link rot by shutting down the Google URL Shortener service in 2025. The Google URL Shortener was launched in 2009 as an attempt to make lengthy links manageable by feeding them into Google’s shortener, which spat out shorter ones in the form of https://goog.gl/*. Nine years later, Google decided to pull the service and direct users to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) instead. At the time, Google said, ‘All existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.’ However, as of August 25, 2025, any links built with the Google URL shortener in the form of https://goog.gl/* won’t return a response.” • Let that be a warning to you all!

Tech: Thank you, Silicon Valley:

Tech: “AI art has no anti-cooption immune system” [Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic]. “One thing Myspace had going for it: it was exuberantly ugly. The decision to let users with no design training loose on a highly customizable user-interface led to a proliferation of Myspace pages that vibrated with personality. The ugliness of Myspace wasn’t just exciting in a kind of outsider/folk-art way (though it was that). Myspace’s ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art-directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that. In this regard, Myspace was the heir to successive generations of ‘design democratization’ that gave amateur communities, especially countercultural ones, a space to operate in where authentic community members could be easily distinguished between parasitic commercializers. The immediate predecessors to Myspace’s ugliness-as-a-feature were the web, and desktop publishing. Between the img tag, imagemaps, the blink tag, animated GIFs, and the million ways that you could weird a page with tables and padding, the early web was positively bursting with individual personality.”

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 59 Greed (previous close: 55 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 60 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jul 22 at 12:14:59 PM ET.

Zeitgeist Watch

“Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement – 22nd July 2024” (statement) [Glasgow2024]. “A large number of votes in 2024 were cast by accounts which fail to meet the criteria of being “natural persons”, with obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics. These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers. Many of these votes favoured one finalist in particular, who we will call Finalist A. This pattern of data is startlingly and obviously different from the votes for any other finalist in 2024, and indeed for any finalist in any of the previous years where any member of the current Hugo Subcommittee has been involved with administering the Hugo final ballot. In addition to patterns observable in the data, we received a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS [World Science Fiction Society] memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished. On the basis of the above evidence, we have concluded that at least 377 votes have been cast fraudulently, of a total of 3,813 final ballot votes that we received. We have therefore disqualified those 377 votes from the final vote tally…. We recognise that after the Hugo voting in 2023, many in the community will, understandably, have questions about this. Unfortunately, our ability to answer is very limited, due to our responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of the ballot and data protection regulations. There are proposals to institute a system of independent audit for Hugo votes. But at present such a system does not exist, therefore the raw 2024 voting data cannot and will not be shared outside the Glasgow 2024 Hugo team.”

“Sam Altman sues builder over $27M flooded, sewage-hit ‘lemon’ of a mega-mansion” [The Register]. “[R[aw sewage was even ejected onto the ground in a ‘hard to access area at the side of the residence’ due to a bathroom sewer line being unconnected. Contractor bags were also found jammed into a sewer line, ‘apparently by a disgruntled, unpaid subcontractor,’ Altman’s lawyers claim.”• Yes, that seems like the kind of mansion an OpenAI co-founder would own. Not that different from work!

News of the Wired

“The Elegance of the ASCII Table” [DanQ]. “The first printing character is space; it’s an invisible character, but it’s still one that has meaning to humans, so it’s not a control character (this sounds obvious today, but it was actually the source of some semantic argument when the ASCII standard was first being discussed). Putting it numerically before any other printing character was a very carefully-considered and deliberate choice. The reason: sorting. For a computer to sort a list (of files, strings, or whatever) it’s easiest if it can do so numerically, using the same character conversion table as it uses for all other purposes7. The space character must naturally come before other characters, or else John Smith won’t appear before Johnny Five in a computer-sorted list as you’d expect him to. Being the first printing character, space also enjoys a beautiful and memorable binary representation that a human can easily recognise: 0100000…. There’s a strange and subtle charm to ASCII. Given that we all use it (or things derived from it) literally all the time in our modern lives and our everyday devices, it’s easy to think of it as just some arbitrary encoding. But the choices made in deciding what streams of ones and zeroes would represent which characters expose a refined logic. It’s aesthetically pleasing, and littered with historical artefacts that teach us a hidden history of computing. And it’s built atop patterns that are sufficiently sophisticated to facilitate powerful processing while being coherent enough for a human to memorise, learn, and understand.”

“On This Blog as a Numbers Station” [Random Notes]. “I’d rather Random Notes be a numbers station, read intently by a few, than a bustling online property. That’s more satisfying on so many levels.” • Numbers station.

Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From Desert Dog:

Desert Dog writes: “The yuccas are just coming out now. The cows like to snack on them and the cowboys say that they have been eating the ‘soap weed’ because they foam at the mouth and look like they are rabid.”

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 three or four 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: