2:00PM Water Cooler 8/13/2024 | naked capitalism

[TRUMP:] Well, first of all, he had something called the Inflation Reduction Act, which wasn’t the right name. It increased inflation and not decreased.

/

Not wrong, is he? More on Big Tech:

[TRUMP:] I think they’re having a huge negative impact on especially young people. I think that they have become too big, too powerful. They control our elections. You saw what happened with the elections, they controlled our elections. We can’t have that. I respect them greatly. You know, if you take a look, TikTok is very powerful.

Interesting to compare Trump’s flood of verbiage with the bite-sized memes we’re getting out of the Kamala campaign. Maybe Trump’s approach codes old-fashioned, and Kamala’s codes modern; I don’t know.

Trump (R): “Oops! Elon Musk and Donald Trump interview is hit with “massive DDOS attack” [Update: Interview finally starts and Trump sounds weird]” [Boing Boing] “The interview audio is now up and live. But why does Trump sound like he’s got a swollen tongue? Perhaps he forgot to take out his nightguard? Weird.” • Better reporting and less glees, please:

Trump isn’t slurring his words, I’ve also had that weird thing happen on Spaces where it sounds like I have a comically outrageous lisp

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 13, 2024

* * *

Trump (R): “Trump’s Crucial Power Has Been Neutralized” [Jeff Greenfield, Politico]. “But this time, the sudden elevation of Kamala Harris, along with the identity and character of her opponent, has — for now at least — made her the candidate who embodies change, no matter how little her policies differ from the current president. That this happened by accident rather than design does not make it any less potent as a political asset. And worst of all for Donald Trump, it deprives him of one his greatest powers. Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 on a promise to smash the status quo. Now he faces credible charges that he represents the past — and there’s a telegenic, younger contender eager to make that case.” • I think this is an idea, rather than a reality, at least for those not already committed to Team Blue

* * *

Kamala:

Kamala (D): Personnel is policy:

In the coming days, Harris plans on releasing a policy platform “focused on lifting up the middle class.” Two of her advisors are former BlackRock investors. A third is a Ford lobbyist who served as a legislative dir. for Rahm Emanuel.https://t.co/pbCjU78SkQ

— Indigo Olivier (@IndigoOlivier) August 12, 2024

Kamala (D): “Harris is using Trump’s tactics against him — but will it work?” [Keith Naughton, The Hill]. “There is a difference between Team Harris and Team Trump, and it is that Harris has a competent campaign crew, lets them do their jobs and has the discipline to stick to what’s on the Teleprompter. Trump, in contrast, can’t get out of his own way. While Harris was trying to spin her way out of criticism for not picking Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, the former president decided to post another unhinged rant. Surprising his campaign staff, Trump called a sudden press conference where he managed to waffle on his pro-life position (the worst thing you can do), keep his inane feud with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp going, cave on the ABC debate, bristle at questions and generally ignore the major issues voters care about in favor of minutiae. But at least he got some free advertising for his Mar-a-Lago club.” • Ouch! I’m not so sure about Kamala and the staff; she’s had staff problems consistently as VP. We’ll have to see what happens when the honeymoon ends. Of course, with 100 days, practically the entire campaign is a honeymoon. Which I’m sure she’s counting on.

Kamala (D): “Harris energy evokes Obama campaign for Democrats” [The Hill]. “Democrats say this surge of enthusiasm for Harris hasn’t been seen since the Obama campaign, which prompted organic support from Democrats and independent voters. Obama went on to a landslide victory, an outcome Harris and Democrats would be happy to repeat but are not anticipating. They expect the election will be razor-tight and come down to a half-dozen swing states. They also suspect Harris’s extended honeymoon period will likely end. But they are increasingly bullish as polls move in her direction and her hot streak continues…. Democratic strategist Joel Payne, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 bid, agreed with Cutter’s assessment. ‘It’s the first pure presidential campaign on the Democratic side in quite some time,’ Payne said. ‘The surge in energy feels like the closest thing we have experienced since Obama ’08.’” • Of course, Obama 2008 turned out to be a debacle, at least for the working class (and many others) as Obama rebooted the financial system after the Crash. Anyhow, memes, vibes, joy… One hates to be curmudgeonly, but it’s just like photos of CEOs and celebrities: If these people are smiling, watch out! And speaking of joy:

There are countless large media outlets in the last 5 days alone who have all published large pieces calling Kamala’s campaign THE POLITICS OF JOY.

Not happiness, not glee, not delight, not jubilation. They all have to use the same word. One more, from The Atlantic, of course. pic.twitter.com/0i5GNXvC8L

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 9, 2024

All the players got the blast fax at the same time, I suppose….

PA: “These Pennsylvania voters illustrate Harris’ suburban challenge” [CNN]. “[Carol] Carty is part of a CNN project, All Over the Map, to track the 2024 campaign through the eyes and experiences of voters who are members of key voting blocs and who live in critical areas within the battleground states. Her views are telling, all the more so because they were shared by other supporters of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Reagan Republicans in our group. Harris’ ascendance on the Democratic ticket is shaking up the race in the pivotal suburbs. But the belief that she is to the left of Biden creates a quandary for Republicans who do not want Trump back in the White House but have policy and personal doubts about Harris.”

PA: “Pennsylvania’s I’m-Not-Weird Voters” [Compact Magazine]. “Pennsylvania is the most important battleground in this year’s election. A former manufacturing powerhouse that has played a pivotal part in the development of American democracy since the colonial era, the Keystone State is today a laboratory for the biggest trends redefining politics: above all, working- and lower-middle-class voters’ shift from the Democratic Party of their forebears to the GOP. Not to the generic Republican Party—to Donald Trump’s party. Summarized briefly, the worldview of this crucial voting bloc goes something like this: The Biden-Harris economy is battering my finances, no matter what the government statistics say; illegal immigration and crime are a big problem; the public-health response to Covid abridged my traditional liberties in intolerable ways; Trump might be an insufferable asshole, but he often has a point. And I’m not weird for feeling or voicing any of this. And therein lies the risk in the rhetorical strategy—denounced by Sen. Bernie Sanders but eagerly embraced by Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz—in framing the nominees on the other side of the national divide as ‘weird.’” • Note the complete collapse of trust in the public health establishment, which will cost many lives in years to come. Thanks, Rochelle. Thanks, Mandy.

Our Famously Free Press

“The Media’s Double Standard Favors Donald Trump, Not Kamala Harris Conservative complaints about bias miss the point” [Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine]. “The reason isn’t that reporters like Trump or want him to win. The reason is that they haven’t figured out a structural solution to the problem of a candidate whose misconduct, dishonesty, bigotry, and general pathological behavior lie so far beyond the norm. Trump is a yearslong out-of-sample event that blows up every instrument used to measure him. The media have tried, and failed, to capture his abnormality, but no workable solution has presented itself.” • Tuquoque, but: This, from the party of RussiaGate, the party of the censorship industrial complex, the party that vociferously and universally denied Biden’s cognitive issues until the moment they all turned on a dime, and decided that Biden wasn’t fit to run for President, but was fit to run the country? What, pray tell, is the “structural solution” to a party with a track record like that?

<– Spook Country

–>

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!

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

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

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Stay safe out there!

Maskstravaganza

Conference masking:

The wastewater people know their sh…,,,

— 💜Martha Young- JD, MBA, N95-clean the air: (@mryoung151) August 13, 2024

Vaccines

“Regarding Prof. Vinay Prasad: An Open Letter to the Administration, Faculty, and Students of University of California San Francisco” [Pandemic Accountability Index]. “One of the very basic facts that any freshman medical student must first internalize is that vaccines are the medical world’s greatest contribution to the public’s health. Many, many years of human life have been wasted, going back to the 1800s, fighting to undermine them and their potential – and we see this sentiment stronger than ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with the regulatory authority of public health, modern medicine has been able to greatly reduce overall mortality and extend the average human lifespan. Yet, we all see those who openly campaign to crush these gains, and personally profit from doing so via social media revenue and speaking engagement fees.” • Vinay in action:

Creepy pro-viral harassment by @UCSFMedicine professor Vinay Prasad against Black doctor Jerome Adams. A clear violation of @ucsf Faculty Code of Conduct. pic.twitter.com/9CCU63Tlui

— Pandemic 𓅃 Index (@pan_accindex) August 12, 2024

Elite Maleficence

We gave NIH billions for Long Covid research and they lit it on fire and threw it in the air. Now this:

NIH has announced it will be shutting down its COVID-19 treatment guidelines website for special populations on August 16 😲 so LCAP has archived all of the PDFs (including each special populations section) for public use 😎 https://t.co/e3sIioHRRD

P.S. this is not ok @NIH

— LCAP (Long Covid Action Project) (@LongCovidAP) August 12, 2024

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

[10] (Travelers: Variants) It’s rumored that there’s a new variant in China, XDV.1, but it’s not showing up here.

[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.

[12] Deaths low, ED up.

Stats Watch

Small Business Optimism: “United States NFIB Business Optimism Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index in the US rose to 93.7 in July of 2024 from 91.5 in the previous month, the highest since February of 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered commodity supply shocks and inflationary pressures across major global economies. Still, it marked the 31st consecutive reading below the 50-year average of 98.”

Inflation: “United States Producer Prices” [Trading Economics]. “Producer Prices in the United States increased to 144.67 points in July from 144.53 points in June of 2024. Producer Prices in the United States averaged 117.22 points from 2009 until 2024, reaching an all time high of 144.67 points in July of 2024….”

Tech: “Inside Worldcoin’s Orb Factory, Audacious and Absurd Defender of Humanity” [Bloomberg]. “[Alex Blania is] the chief executive officer of Tools for Humanity Corp., which uses the Orb as part of an identity verification and cryptocurrency system called Worldcoin. His company, based in San Francisco and Erlangen, Germany, is the ne plus ultra object of Silicon Valley yearning. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who started Tools for Humanity and recruited Blania, is a major financial backer, along with Tiger Global Management, Fifty Years, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and dozens of other investors who’ve contributed more than $250 million to, as the company’s website says, ‘ensure a more just economic system.’ To achieve that not-so-modest goal, Tools for Humanity wants to create a global identity system for humans… [T]his is where Orb comes in. It takes images of people’s irises under the supervision of a human Orb associate and grants them a unique World ID, which certifies that a real person belongs to a string of characters the machine generates.” • It’s all fun and games until Tools for Humanity’s servers get hacked, and I have to go out on the secondary market for a new iris. It would be Altman.

Tech: “Federal Appeals Court Finds Geofence Warrants Are ‘Categorically’ Unconstitutional” [Electronic Frontier Foundation]. “In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are ‘categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.’ Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of ‘general, exploratory rummaging’ that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw. EFF applauds this decision because it is essential that every person feels like they can simply take their cell phone out into the world without the fear that they might end up a criminal suspect because their location data was swept up in open-ended digital dragnet.”

Manufacturing: “Boeing Is the Canary in the Trickle-Down Coal Mines” [Civic Skunk Works]. From April, still germane: “The most tragic thing about all of this is that Boeing had more than enough money to invest in a strong union workforce that hewed to the multiple safety redundancies that the company used to bake into its manufacturing process. It could have spent enough money to ensure that every plane with the Boeing name printed on its side was perfectly safe — the same way Boeing had ensured that rock-solid safety record for 70 years before the company began cutting corners — and still turned a profit. How do I know this? Because over just the last ten years, Boeing has returned some $59 billion dollars in profit to shareholders, in the form of $20 billion in dividends and the rest in stock buybacks. That’s tens of billions of dollars that used to go to wages, benefits, and safety precautions that the company instead chose to hand off to investors with no strings attached. All Boeing got in return for those offloaded profits was an artificially high stock price that didn’t reflect the increasingly poor quality of the product the company was selling.” • G good round-up. The author locates the problem in neoliberalism. I’m unsure but it seems to me the problem is capitalism proper (perhaps neoliberalism has simply removed a veil from our eyes).

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 24 Exreme Fear (previous close: 23 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 23 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 13 at 1:21:45 PM ET.

Class Warfare

“Making earthly paradise” [Times Literary Supplement]. This caught my eye: “Morriss was born into a prosperous family, its wealth derived from his father’s holding of valuable mining shares.” But: “Morris fell helplessly in love with Jane Burden, the teenage daughter of an Oxford ostler, whom he met at a theatre. This was more than a matter of picking up a pretty girl and enjoying a brief fling, common enough among young men of Morris’s class and generation. Jane was a young woman of haunting beauty and considerable intelligence. Morris’s commitment turned out to be lifelong; Jane’s less so. They married in 1859 (no member of his disapproving family attended the wedding) and set about making a life together. The choices available to the young couple were not altogether straightforward. Although Jane was resolute in leaving her working-class roots behind, she embarked on her marriage with little serious education or social experience, and was clearly not equipped to become a conventional middle-class wife. A novel way of living must be constructed, which could only be managed in a radically new house. Morris had apprenticed himself to G. E. Street, a gothic revivalist architect then based in Oxford, where he met Philip Webb, who shared his medievalist ambitions. Morris, who quickly abandoned the idea of becoming an architect, commissioned a house from Webb with a view to designing the decoration himself. It was a turning point. ‘Red House’, near Bexleyheath in Kent, was to become a ‘Palace of Art’ (the phrase came from Tennyson) – a unified design where furniture and decoration would combine with architectural details to forge a new paradigm for daily life. Morris was not greatly interested in decorating grand public buildings, though he would make an exception for churches. Throughout his career he focused on household settings.” • Hence the wallpaper:

Makes me think of the British riots….

Zeitgeist Watch

“The 376 Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” [The Splintered Mind]. From the entry: ” Lewis held that the best theory of modality posited concrete possible worlds. A proposition is possible if and only if it is true at one of these worlds. Lewis defended this view in his most significant book, On the Plurality of Worlds.” • I would swear there was a David Lewis episode from the In Our Time podcast — or at least an episode of a “many worlds hypothesis” philosopher 00 but I scrolled back to 2018 and couldn’t find it.

“Jack Karlson, man behind iconic ‘succulent Chinese meal’ meme, dies aged 82” [Independent]. • Quite a character. But imagine being remembered for a meme!

Class Warfare

“Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy” [Nature]. The Abstract: “Researchers have argued that wealthy nations rely on a large net appropriation of labour and resources from the rest of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. Here we assess this empirically by measuring flows of embodied labour in the world economy from 1995–2021, accounting for skill levels, sectors and wages. We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.” • Interesting to see this calculated in terms of labor power (time).

Sage advice:

News of the Wired

“Is Running a More Efficient Way to Travel Than Walking?” [JoeHX Blog]. “Conclusion? Slow walks are the most efficient. But if you have to run, about a 7 minute mile is the most efficient.” •¨Good. I like to amble.

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 Carla:

Carla writes: “Re: the peony discussion on 7/16/24, here’s a bloom from my Japanese tree peony, 35 years old & still hanging in there. The petals look like a cross between tissue paper and silk, and the fragrance is heavenly!”

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