By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Northern Mockingbird, 350 South Madison Avenue, Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, United States.
In Case You Might Miss…
- Blame cannons thunder after Kamala campaign team podcast.
- Investigation into attempts to assassinate Trump seem curiously silent.
- Boeing delivery, layoff woes.
Generally I avoid transparently feel-good stories, but since it’s the holidays:
London please help. I’m praying for a miracle, I’ve just got into the office and noticed my mums locket (in all these photos) that I wear every day has fallen off my neck on my walk in. My mum died when I was seven and her jewellery is most of what I have of her. I’m devastated pic.twitter.com/DRNWly3sx1
— Katharine Horgan (@katharinehorgan) November 26, 2024
And:
Update: I’ve found the locket, and the chain can be easily replaced. Thank you, everyone. I’m so touched by your responses and beyond relieved to have found it—it’s hard to put into words. 🤍 https://t.co/P0beVjOQuf
— Katharine Horgan (@katharinehorgan) November 26, 2024
A fine example of Graeber’s “the communism of everyday life.”
My email address is down by the plant; please send examples of there (“Helpers” in the subject line). In our increasingly desperate and fragile neoliberal society, everyday normal incidents and stories of “the communism of everyday life” are what I am looking for (and not, say, the Red Cross in Hawaii, or even the UNWRA in Gaza).
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
Trump Assassination Attempts (Plural)
I’d sure like links for all this, but nevertheless accumulation of detail is impressive:
Makes me wonder if the Trump transition team’s reluctance to have the FBI do background checks for incoming administration officials and nominees is related to, well, all this. And the Crooks investigation seems to be moving awfully slowly.
2024 Post Mortem
Who did this:
Vice President @KamalaHarris‘ message to supporters. pic.twitter.com/x5xMUGTtkz
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) November 26, 2024
Sound up, definitely. This frame:
As readers know, I oppose remote diagnosis. But I’ve gotta say… If I were in a bar, and caught a glimpse of that face across the room, I’d think the bartender hadn’t been keeping track. Commentary:
The Kamala Harris video is pulled from a grassroots event she did – I’m not sure amplifying it is the right move. Some messages are just for your supporters.
— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) November 27, 2024
Andrew Yang seems like a nice person, but if the idea was to make sure Kamala never rean again, amplifying this video was exactly the right move.
Four days earlier:
Thank you, @KamalaHarris.
📸: @EBONY pic.twitter.com/0Oo4hWQDZX
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) November 22, 2024
Oh yeah.
“Downfall of The Democrats | The Truth About The 2024 Election” (video) ShoeOnHead, YouTube]. Several readers have posted on this “Demödämmerung”*-themed video, so here it is. NOTE * I like this umlauts, so I’m keeping them, pedants begöne).
Fine use of anaphora!
* * * “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong” (transcript) [Pod Save America, Crooked Media]. “In this candid [oh yeah] interview, the leaders of the Harris-Walz Campaign speak for the first time about the challenges they faced and why they made the decisions they did. Dan sits down with Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter to talk about the campaign’s roadmap, their approach to nontraditional media outlets like Joe Rogan, the voters they most needed to win over, why they fell short in the end, and what Democrats should do differently next time.” There’s a lot to dislike, but this caught my eye in the transcript:
[PLOUFFE] I just thought at the end of the day, particularly because Trump did not close well, I thought, and I thought Kamala Harris closed well, Trump was reminding people some of the things they don’t like about him.Trump closed great. First, McDonalds, then the garbage truck. What’s wrong with these people?
Learned nothing, forgotten nothing:
If you have 90 minutes and want to learn about the DC swamp scumbags who run campaigns, watch this PodSave interview with the top 4 Kamala consultants.
All self-congratulatory. Not one admission of error. Endless excuses for their $1 billion failure:https://t.co/PbLsZcsjIw
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 27, 2024
Commentary:
So the Harris campaign was The Producers irl. They knew they were blowing through $1.5 billion in 15 weeks with no chance of winning, and to make sure they lost they brought the Cheneys and Richie Torres on stage. The point was to wash as much stupid money as fast as possible. https://t.co/oCfucY6e1O
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) November 27, 2024
But surely it would have been better to launder all the stupid money, but also to win?
Commentary:
The mistake here is to think American politics divides along conservative/moderate/liberal lines. The more salient spectrum is prosystem/antisystem. Trump dominated with antisystem voters, gaining hard with people who also liked & voted for Tlaib, AOC, RFK Jr. & Gabbard. Unless… https://t.co/uaecbukdxH
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 26, 2024
Heer’s “system/anti-system” binary seems like a more precise, on-point version of “Change vs. More of the Same” (assuming that “change’ is not necessarily systemic, a dubious assumption at this point).
* * * TikTok in the campaign. From a campaign staffer, so cum grano salis. Nevertheless:
Kamala advisor Stephanie Cutter: “I can’t tell you how many friends of mine or nieces and nephews would say to me ‘you know I’m getting these things from Trump all the time on TikTok.'”
I was one of the two guys who ran the @TeamTrump TikTok account. Keep in mind that Kamala… pic.twitter.com/klIKpegcu3
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 26, 2024
“The Resistance goes quiet” [Axios]. “The Resistance, a political movement to protest Trumpism online and in the streets. There’s still plenty of resistance to Trump across the country, but little mass mobilization…. An event scheduled for January — dubbed ‘The People’s March’ — will inevitably be compared to the massive Women’s March eight years earlier, which garnered hundreds of thousands of participants and spurred nationwide sister marches… “The exhaustion is real” among those who organized against Trump during his first term, only to see him elected again, [Tamika Middleton, managing director at Women’s March] says. ‘Part of what is beautiful about what mobilization offers inside of these moments, is that they activate and bring in new people who have new energy.’” • We’ll see. Personally, I think the scope of Trump’s victory — a win in the popular vote, all seven swing states — removed a lot of the rationale for resistance initially. We’ll see what January brings (besides lawfare and oppo).
Not “resistance” per se, but the same people using the same tactics:
“The Democrats’ Dirty Tricks Playbook?” [Matt Taibbi, Racket News]. “The newly released court docs bear out the fact that there was deep concern within the blue activist world about the third-party run. A memo sent from political strategist Lucy Caldwell to Dmitri Mehlhorn, aide to billionaire donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, described No Labels as a ‘looming forest fire’ that would be a ‘nuclear grade threat’ if it nominated a candidate and reached a ‘live campaign environment.’ To prevent that, Caldwell proposed a protracted campaign of ‘brand destruction,’ using ‘controlled burns’ to put the fire out long before the election. As Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson put it less subtly in a tweeted video last April, No Labels needed to be ‘burned to the fucking ground politically.’” And after an 80-minute conference call between Democratic Party-aligned activist groups, “former Emily’s List chief Emily Kane, now of Third Way, wrote a letter after the discussion reported on by Semafor, summing up the conclusions of what she called, in the subject line, the ‘Anti-No-Labels Coalition meeting.’ Notably acknowledging they were indeed ‘working together as a broad coalition’ to ‘fight the anti-democratic operation that is No Labels,; it added without irony that this fight for democracy should also include ‘deterring other third party presidential efforts.’” • Politics ain’t beanbag. But just don’t call yourselves Democrats, uppercase or lowercase D.
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 (wastewater); 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, KidDoc, 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!
Elite Maleficence
Everything’s going according to plan:
Lambert here: Even though the Covid numbers seem low, please remember that the data is not nearly as good as it once was, that it lags, and that the downside risks of catching Covid are considerable. For those who have developed their own personal protocols, I wouldn’t relax them. Maybe next year.
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC November 18 | Last Week[2] CDC (until next week): |
|
|
|
| Variants [3] CDC November 23 | center Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC November 16 |
|
|
|
| Hospitalization | |
| New York[5] New York State, data November 25: | National [6] CDC November 21: |
|
|
|
| Positivity | |
| center National[7] Walgreens November 25: | ★ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic November 23: |
|
|
|
| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC November 4: | Variants[10] CDC November 4: |
|
|
|
| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC November 2: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC November 2: |
|
|
|
LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (CDC) Good news! [2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map. [3] (CDC Variants) KP.* still popular. XEC has entered the chat. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection. [4] (ED) Down. [5] (Hospitalization: NY) Steadily down. [6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Actually improved; it’s now one of the few charts to show the entire course of the pandemic to the present day. [7] (Walgreens) Down. [8] (Cleveland) Down. [9] (Travelers: Positivity) Down. [10] (Travelers: Variants). Now XEC. [11] Deaths low, positivity down. [12] Deaths low, ED down.Stats Watch
GDP: “United States GDP Growth Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The US economy expanded an annualized 2.8% in Q3 2024, the same as in the advance estimate, compared to 3% in Q2. Personal spending increased at the fastest pace since Q1 2023 although it was revised slightly lower from the advance estimate (3.5% vs 3.7%). It was boosted by a 5.6% surge in consumption of goods (vs 6% in the advance estimate) and a robust spending on services (2.6%, the same as in the advance estimate). Government consumption growth was unrevised at 5%.”
Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “US initial jobless claims held steady at 213,000 for the week ending November 23rd, below market expectations of 216,000. The results extended the view that the US labor market remains at historically strong levels despite the aggressive tightening cycle by the Federal Reserve in the last quarters, adding leeway for the central bank to slow the pace of monetary loosening should inflation remain stubbornly high.”
Manufacturing: “United States Durable Goods Orders” [Trading Economics]. “New orders for manufactured durable goods in the US rose by 0.2% over a month to $286.561 billion in October 2024, following a revised 0.4% decrease in the prior month and missing market forecasts of a 0.5% growth.”
Manufacturing: “United States Chicago PMI” [Trading Economics]. “The Chicago Business Barometer, also known as the Chicago PMI, slid to 40.2 in November 2024, down from 41.6 in September and falling short of market expectations of 44. This left the index 2.7 points below the year-to-date average. The latest reading signaled that Chicago’s economic activity contracted for the 12th consecutive month, and at a notably sharp pace, marking the steepest decline since May.”
Manufacturing: “‘Expansionist’ Emirates unveils first A350 and waits on arrival of longer-range version” [FlightGlobal]. “Philippe Mhun, Airbus executive vice-president for programmes and services, declines to say how many A350s it will hand over to Emirates next year, but says the carrier will account for a “large part” of 2025’s output – somewhere in the region of 25-30%…. Clark says the carrier remains ‘expansionist’ but requires additional capacity to meet its goals. ‘We are a frustrated entity because we need airplanes and we need them tomorrow.’ Had Boeing managed to keep to the original timeline for the 777X ‘we would have had 85 777Xs by now’, says [Emirates president Sir Tim Clark]. Boeing’s latest forecast is for 777X deliveries to start in 2026, although with Emirates third in line to receive the twinjet, its deliveries are likely to be towards the back end of the year at best.”
Manufacturing: “Laid-off Boeing workers worry for themselves, and the company that cut them” [Seattle Times]. “Layoff notices came in the form of phone calls, 10-minute calendar holds and scripted conversations with managers. One worker left with a gifted bottle of whiskey. Another wasn’t even allowed to keep the cardboard box they had used to collect their belongings. Some workers had prepared for the news; Boeing executives had spent weeks talking about reducing inefficiencies and focusing on the core parts of the struggling business. Others were blindsided, relying on years of positive reviews and, in some cases, assurances their jobs were safe…. [The Everett-based worker] said he can’t help but feel that ‘there’s not much runway’ left for the company. ‘There’s a level of care and a level of knowledge that just won’t be there.’”
Manufacturing: “FAA Says No Immediate Fix Needed For Boeing 737 MAX Engine Smoke In Cabin After Bird Strike Incidents” [Simple Flying]. “The FAA’s Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention recommended software changes to the engine’s bleed air system’s response to a bird strike. The office’s recommendation read that the required design change would detect the immediate impulse of a bird strike or fan blade loss event and automatically close the affected engine’s Pressure Regulated Shutoff Valves (PRSOV) or trip the associated air conditioning pack.” • More on the leaked memo here.
Manufacturing: “Life is better without Boeing, airline executive says” [Quartz]. “Boeing’s ongoing struggles have disrupted airlines racing to replace aging fleets worldwide, but easyJet has avoided both those troubles and the engine issues plaguing some Airbus operators. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Chief Executive Johan Lundgren expressed thanks that he had Airbus planes with CFM International engines…. [Some] airline executives, like United Airlines Chief Executive Scott Kirby, have publicly called for a new competitor to displace the global Airbus-Boeing planemaking duopoly.” • Too bad about Bombardier. Embraer? China?
Tech: “Drake takes Kendrick Lamar rap feud to US courts” [Yahoo News]. “Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which accused Drake of having relationships with underage girls, enjoyed huge commercial and critical acclaim, exceeding 900 million plays on streaming platform Spotify and earning multiple Grammy nominations, including song of the year. But in the first of two court filings this week, Drake on Monday accused Universal Music Group (UMG), which distributed the song, of charging Spotify unusually low prices to license the track, in return for the streamer widely recommending the track to its subscribers. According to a court document filed in New York, Drake also accused UMG of using automated computer ‘bots’ to artificially inflate the supposed number of times the song has been streamed on Spotify.”
Statistics: Speaking of GDP:
This is a great example of why GDP per capita is not a good measurement of quality of life.
The standard of living in Mississippi is much worse than that of France.
US GDP is absurdly exaggerated, not only because the dollar is the global reserve currency, but also due to the… https://t.co/J6OWZJqyjf pic.twitter.com/2ZmWqdA1lp
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 23, 2024
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 64 Greed (previous close: 64 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 49 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 27 at 2:10:45 PM ET.
Gallery
Winter (1):
Claude Monet “The Road in front of Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter”, 1867. Oil on canvas. pic.twitter.com/mrPtuvtdyd
— Paul (@_pgb__) June 5, 2023
Winter (2):
Winter in Broughton https://t.co/bOGC3DQa2L pic.twitter.com/wXMtrmt7Mo
— L. S. Lowry (@lowryartist) November 27, 2024
I love the concept of a “pamphlet launch”:
Event flyer for my pamphlet launch in Brooklyn. Come by, say hi, get offline. See you soon! pic.twitter.com/j09KqZ6WKX
— August Lamm (@AugustLamm) November 11, 2024
No wonder she left the country:
Happy birthday, P Diddy, Puff Daddy, Sean Combs, or as I call him, Cuddle McSnugglestuff. You don’t need to know why. @iamdiddy
— The Ellen Show (@EllenDeGeneres) November 4, 2016
Something big coming down the pike?
“Scale-invariant topology and bursty branching of evolutionary trees emerge from niche construction” [PNAS]. You’ll like this, if this is the sort of thing you like. The closing paragraph: “Our results show that niche construction is more than a feedback between evolutionary and ecological processes arising when their timescales are not widely separated. Niche construction not only leads to a perturbation in the evolutionary trajectories of all components of an ecosystem, but also creates an indelible footprint on the evolutionary process that cannot be eliminated, even for very long times. These memory effects manifest themselves through the anomalous scaling laws that characterize observed phylogenetic trees.” • What intrigued me was a sentence in the Abstract: “Phylogenetic trees describe both the evolutionary process and community diversity,” but apparently “community” is not used in a sociological sense.
Dad.
— No Context Brits (@NoContextBrits) November 26, 2024
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 NYT_Memes:
NYT_Memes writes: “Found this after rain last week. Sudden explosion of mushrooms.” Fungi are honorary plants.
Readers, if you haven’t sent in a plant photo to Water Cooler, why not try it? It’s easy, it’s fun, and you get some nice compliments! (If you need directions, see below.)
Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. Material here is Lambert’s, and does not express the views of the Naked Capitalism site. 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:
Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated:
If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you!
