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Just to follow up on my whinging from yesterday: My second laptop’s screen is now repaired, so I am once again doubly redundant in production facilities for NC. And I ran a search on clogged filters for espresso machines; second from the top was a video from a very distinguished-looking Italian gentleman standing in front of a vast enamelled and gleaming espresso-emitting apparatus. His advice, delivered about three minutes in, was that most espresso machines come with two filters, so if one filter becomes clogged — follow me closely, here — you can use the other one. He was right! Yes, I’m using the double filter instead of the single one, but perhaps that’s not so bad? Sometimes I think I’m not in my right mind. Then it passes over, and I’m as lucid as before!
Patient readers, right now this reads more like a post than Water Cooler, because I got wrapped around the axle doing thermometers and such. However, CDC’s latest maleficence had to be dealt with, and it turned out to be even worse than I had thought. I will add more shortly. –lambert
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By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
“Chiffchaff male singing.” No location. What kind of schema are they using?!
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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
2024
Time for the Countdown Clock!
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Obama Legacy
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!). It follows that the Democrat Party is as “unreformable” as the PMC is unreformable; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. If the Democrat Party fails to govern, that’s because the PMC lacks the capability to govern. (“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.
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Realignment and Legitimacy
#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; 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, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: 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, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
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Covid is Airborne
Variants
Sequelae
“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.
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Elite Maleficence
I suppose I should be grateful Mandy deigned to butcher a PR event wearing a mask:
It’s that time of year — I got my flu shot! Get yours to #FightFlu 💉🦠 pic.twitter.com/ooZRB0DgUW
— Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) September 6, 2023
Butchered because: (1) The mask uses ear-loops, not head-straps, so the fit is likely to be bad; (2) the mask is not NIOSH-approved — CDC’s own agency! — since there’s no label, so the CDC’s crack staff of PR people just handed her any old mask; it’s not like she’s modeling behavior or anything; (3) either (a) it’s not necessary for medical personnel to mask, or heck, even be in uniform, or (b) the photo is staged, or (c) both; and (4) the cream of the jest, she’s wearing a mask to get putatively vaccinated for the flu. Of course, Covid is just ike the flu, so it doesn’t matter.
The CDC updated its main Covid page on August 26, 2023, so let’s look in on our old friends. Here is the landing page:
As you can see, CDC’s designers have rigorously reflected CDC’s Covid policies. [1] Vaccines are prioritized; they get pride of place. [2] Prevention (“protect yourself and others” through non-pharmaceutical interventions are de-emphasized; they require a click-through. Most people won’t click through. [3] There is, as it were, a “treatment pipeline”: symptoms, testing, treatment and medications. Never mind asymptomatic transmission, which also causes neurological and vascular damage, and Long Covid; [4] Grouping Covid-19, RSV, and the flu together suggest that Covid is like the flu; it’s not; [5] County hospitalization is a lagging indicator, so you could encounter a lot of infected people before masking up or taking other precautions,
I clicked through to the “How to Protect Yourself” page. Here again, CDC’s designers make a really strong statement:
CDC is telling you that masks and ventilation are not their priorities, nor should they be yours.
Here is the mask section above at a readable size:
Note again that [1] “as needed” is determined by hospital admission levels, a lagging indicator. (If CDC were doing flood management for New Orleans, they would close the floodgates only after the floodwaters were rushing through.) CDC’s artful and repeated “droplets and particles” verbiage (a) reproduced droplet dogma and (b) does not convey the essential: The Covid, being airborne, moves like smoke. [4] “Crowded” is but one of the Japanese 3C’s: Closed, Crowded, Close Contact. For example, in a closed but uncrowded space, Covid could still linger for hours.
Finally, I ran the County Check recommended on the landing page. It was sure hard to find a county whose level rated high — see the Biobot chart for how insane this is — because CDC is still using its infamous “Green Map” for the levels. In any case, I did. Lauderdake County, MS:
Once again, we see at [1] that a lagging indicator, hospital admissions, drives the masking recommendation. (It’s as if I was working a paint booth, and CDC would only recommend that I wear a mask only after the spray had fogged my glasses completely. Instead of just putting one on at the start of the process, ffs).
I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH: If you follow CDC’s advice, you are not minimizing your chances of becoming infected with Covid, or infecting others. CDC’s advice seems designed to ensure that a proportion of the population is infected. My advice is to adopt a strategy of layered protection*, as advocated many times and many ways at NC, and to carry it out in a disciplined manner, without waiting for CDC’s lagging indicators to kick in. NOTE * Mine is masking, avoiding 3C areas, plus various nasal sprays daily. I also follow case data as best I can. Other readers may have additional layers.
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Case Data
NOT UPDATED From BioBot wastewater data, September 5:
Back to a steady upward climb.
Regional data:
The Midwest now movint upward as well. I’m not sure what the downward swoop was all about. Interestingly, the upswing begins before July 4, which neither accelerates nor retards it.
Variants
NOT UPDATED From CDC, September 2:
Lambert here: Top of the leaderboard: EG.5 (“Eris“). No BA.2.86 here, not even in the note, but see below at Positivity.
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.
Covid Emergency Room Visits
NOT UPDATED From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, September 2:
Lambert here: Another Labor Day weekend drop, like Walgreens? Typically, three-day weekends don’t coincide with peak infection!
Lambert here: I changed this ER chart to a Covid-only chart broken down by age. Note the highlighting.
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.
Hospitalization
Bellwether New York City, data as of September 7:
Moving up. I hate this metric because the lag makes it deceptive.
NOT UPDATED Here’s a different CDC visualization on hospitalization, nationwide, not by state, but with a date, at least. August 26, 2023:
At least now we now that hospitalization tracks positivity, which is nice. Even if we don’t know how many cases there are. And positivity as high as it’s been at any time, except for Omicron.
Positivity
NOT UPDATED From Walgreens, September 4:
-2.7% Big drop, probably due to Labor Day travel, though the absolute numbers are still very small relative to June 2022, say. Interestingly, these do not correlate with the regional figures for wastewater. (It would be interesting to survey this population generally; these are people who, despite a tsunami of official propaganda and enormous peer pressure, went and got tested anyhow.)
NOT UPDATED From CDC, traveler’s data, August 14:
Lambert here: This is the CDC’s “Traveler-Based Genomic Surveillance” data. And the variant data:
Deaths
Iowa COVID-19 Tracker, September 6:
Lambert here: The WHO data is worthless, so I replaced it with the Iowa Covid Data Tracker. Their method: “These data have been sourced, via the API from the CDC: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Conditions-Contributing-to-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Stat/hk9y-quqm. This visualization updates on Wednesday evenings. Data are provisional and are adjusted weekly by the CDC.” I can’t seem to get a pop-up that shows a total of the three causes (top right). Readers?
Total: 1,174,467 – 1,174,291 = 176 (176 * 365 = 64,240 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
The Economist, September 7:
Lambert here: This is now being updated daily. Odd. 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
Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell by 13,000 to 216,000 on the week ending September 2nd, well below market expectations of 234,000, marking the lowest level since February.”
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Cash: Alert reader Petal writes:
The War on Cash continues: [My university] installed laundry machines that do not take cash. You have to download an app to your smartphone and link it to your credit or debit card. You can’t turn the machine on unless you do this. Since I refuse to do this, I am back to washing all of my clothing in the bathroom sink and air-drying in the tub. Fun times. I hate these jerks. I wish the economic conditions allowed me to get out of here.
It will be amusing when some 14-year-old hacker in a Mongolian yurt works out a way to brick every cellphone in the world.
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Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 52 Neutral (previous close: 56 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 52 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Sep 6 at 1:26 PM ET.
The Conservatory
“TikTok has transformed the concert experience” [Vox]. “It started with simple nostalgia. In the wake of the pandemic, Craig Powers, a 38-year-old researcher from Tacoma, rediscovered his love for his favorite bands and albums. But as Powers dove deeper and deeper into the music world, he found himself not only returning to beloved artists, but discovering new music and albums. This was largely thanks to TikTok, which constantly served him concert clips of stylistically adjacent musicians via his feed, a broad swath of emo, metalcore, and post-punk artists. At the peak of this new/old obsession, however, Powers realized a grim truth about social media: Watching bands on TikTok didn’t put money in those artists’ pockets, and streaming residuals are so paltry that listening to albums on Spotify or YouTube wasn’t enough. If Powers wanted to support all the new bands he was into, he couldn’t just watch concert clips on his feed: He needed to go to the concerts themselves. So Powers, who tells me he never does ‘anything half-assed,’ started out 2023 with a goal of seeing 30 concerts before the end of the year. The journey he embarked on led him to recapture his love of live music, discover even more bands, and hit his goal far earlier than he expected: He took in concert number 30, Weezer, last month. And of course, he documented it all on TikTok, where it all began.” • I dunno. Part of me rebels at the need to use yet another social media app. Still, it seems to me that TikTok is not as malevolent as Facebook. Readers?
“The Rolling Stones debut ‘Angry’ new single, video starring Sydney Sweeney” [New York Post]. • I listened to it; after all, “High Tide and Green Grass” was the first album — remember “albums”? — I ever bought. I don’t know what Jagger has to be angry about; maybe he’s old enough to impart some wisdom? Why not? No emotional complexity to find in this song; if I want that, I can dig out something appropriate in K-Pop (not kidding).
News of the Wired
“Study finds influence of smaller jersey numbers on perception” [ESPN]. Not like a “Jersey Barrier”; like a football jersey. “A peer-reviewed study by UCLA researchers found that perception can be influenced by the associations made between numbers and size through the brain’s cognitive process. The study, which will be published this week in the journal PLOS One, exposed subjects to images of different football jersey numbers to measure their perception of the person wearing it. The smaller the number, the more likely the subject was to perceive a slimmer player.” • Hmm. I guess Robert Parish (“00”) was pretty slim…
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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 TH:
TH writes: “While one is tempted to think this image is all about a pool with a central fountain, my thinking is that this nursery knows how to showcase all their lovely plants, yes? I suspect I will be thinking about this setting all summer.” Sadly, I’ve never managed to create a water feature successfully. Pumps, maintenance….
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