By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, Powhatan State Park, Powhatan, Virginia, United States. “This bird was singing from the same perch at 7:00 when I arrived; this recording was made at 10:00. It was still singing when I left.”
In Case You Might Miss…
- LA Palisades Fire: This is fine.
- Trump’s pivot to the Northern Hemisphere.
- More weirdness with the Vegas Tesla explosion.
This has happened to me:
My wife said some unidentified rando paid for her order at Starbucks (didn’t see the person).
Her: I love when that happens!
Me: ⁇
Her: It happens sometimes
Me: No it does not, at least not to me or anyone I know
Her: It’s a random good deed thingChat is this real? Do people…
— Jon Stokes (@jonst0kes) January 7, 2025
And then I paid it forward as well. Readers?
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 Transition
“Trump Imagines New Sphere of U.S. Influence Stretching From Panama to Greenland” [Wall Street Journal]. Trump’s presser: “President-elect Donald Trump’s calls to take control of Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal reflect his fascination with a 21st-century version of an old idea—that great powers should carve out spheres of influence and defend their economic and security interests by imposing their will on smaller neighbors. In a press conference Tuesday, Trump outlined a second-term foreign policy agenda that rests not on global alliances and free trade but on economic coercion and unilateral military might, even against allies. With the Panama Canal and Greenland, he suggested he could use force to take them over. With Canada, he suggested he would hit the U.S.’s northern neighbor with extreme tariffs, leaving it no choice but to submit to annexation. ‘Canada and the United States, that would really be something,’ Trump said. ‘You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like and it would also be much better for national security.’ Taking control of Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal through military or economic force would be a dramatic departure from decades of U.S. foreign policy as pursued by presidents of both parties.” • This leaves out Mexico, oddly. I’ll have more in a bit, but at first glance, I would speculate that Trump knows he’s got to feed his rabid dog — the national security establishment — some meat. Otherwise, he will be its meat. Where is the meat to be found? Europe? Clearly not; Ukraine is lost. The Middle East? Letting them kill each other is one thing; boots on the ground are another. The pivot to Asia? With what? That leaves — and this would make James Monroe very happy — the north American hemisphere. Also, it may even be that Trump doesn’t like to get people killed, and (modulo Mexico), seizing one vassal’s territory (Greenland), invading Panama (we’ve done it once), and working on splitting the Canadian Federation looks a lot less gruesome than a war on the Pacific Rim, say. Who knows? Could be just a headfake, though Trump did mention Greenland in 2020. Commentary:
[TRUMP, thinking]: “McFaul says “destroy NATO like that’s a bad thing. They don’t pay their bills, do they?”] If you wanted to destroy NATO, the most successful alliance in human history , threatening to invade 2 of your allies would be a good way to start.
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) January 8, 2025
“To Avoid Fighting Large Conflicts Trump Is Creating Smaller Ones” [Moon of Alabama]. Trump’s presser: “Trump has thereby rejected the three potential conflicts, with Russia, China and Iran, that were long leading the headlines. He likely perceives that there is nothing to win in these. But as he has to provide some fodder for the media as well as for his MAGA followers he is instead coming up with new conflicts which might even turn out to be winnable.” See above; I agree that the media and MAGA need “fodder,” but I think the national security establishment — The Blob — needs “fodder” most of all. More: “It reminds of Ronald Reagan who created minor conflicts, like in Grenada, to be free to make deals with the Soviet ‘evil empire’ Union…. Trump wants to avoid the larger potential conflicts as they are too difficult to manage and win. He is instead creating his own small conflicts right next to the U.S. backyard. It is a nice trick and it may even see some success.” • I don’t love Trump, and I didn’t like Reagan either. But at least Reagan didn’t get into a proxy war with a nuclear power.
Handy map:
Welcome to The Gulf Of America 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/FVLo03SHJL
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 7, 2025
To be fair, neither I nor b give an account of where an invasion of Mexico fits into this picture (see Nick’s useful post here). Here, I would speculate that Trump has to “big stick” somebody for credibility’s sake, and Mexican Drug Lords are an unsympathetic target. A proper invasion of Mexico would look like the Philippine-American War of 1898. Or Vietnam. No doubt there are plenty of Blobbists who would enjoy that, but I don’t think Trump needs to throw them meat…
“Fetterman compares Trump’s Greenland talk to Louisiana Purchase” [The Hill]. “‘There’s a lot of talk about Greenland, for example, and … there’s a lot of freak-outs and of course, I would never support taking it by force,’ Fetterman said. He continued, noting it would be a ‘responsible conversation’ to discuss acquisition, including ‘just buying it out.’ ‘If anyone thinks that’s bonkers, it’s like, well, remember the Louisiana Purchase?’ Fetterman said.” • Is he wrong?
The tech bro angle:
2/ This is a reply to Dryden’s post (above). Note Dryden’s response. pic.twitter.com/0Fo5P8J9Mq
— JennyCohn ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) January 8, 2025
* * * O Canada! I shouldn’t really post this…
— Jared (@Nsfwacct739014) January 7, 2025
… but frame 4 made me laugh out loud (though is there some local color I should be aware of here? Canadian readers?)
* * * “Donald Trump shares video of Jeffrey Sachs accusing Benjamin Netanyahu of warmongering” [JFeed]. Certainly not on my Bingo card! And: “Trump’s decision to post this video, assuming he listening to the video rather than just reading the text, which makes no mention of Netanyahu, points to some possibly serious tensions between Israel and the incoming administration regarding whether or not to use military force against Iran for fear it would lead to a general war.” • Or maybe it’s simpler. Perhaps “Never sh*t a sh*tter” is a motto Trump knows and believes. Anyhow, here’s Trump’s post from Truth Social:
Trump just reposted a video explaining that the wars in Iraq and Syria were manufactured by Netanyahu and had nothing to do with democracy.
“Netanyahu is still trying to get us to fight Iran to this day. He is a deep dark son of a bitch because he’s gotten us into endless wars” pic.twitter.com/VfiI2UPD8p— Talha Ahmad (@talhaahmad967) January 8, 2025
Haaretz, though later, has the better headline–
“‘A Deep, Dark Son of a Bitch’: Trump Posts Video of Historian Criticizing Netanyahu” [Haaretz]. ” U.S. President-elect Donald Trump shared a video of contentious economics professor Jeffrey Sachs describing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a deep, dark son of a bitch” responsible for orchestrating U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Trump’s sharing of the video on Truth Social highlights the President-elect’s questionable sources of information on policy matters and his role in amplifying contentious historical interpretations via his unprecedented platform.” • What an idiotic comment by Haaretz, throwing Jeffrey Sachs into the “questionable sources of information” bucket, code for anti-semitic, though Haaretz leave it to others to unpack the code: “Sachs, an outspoken critic of the Israeli government, recently earned criticism from senior Israeli officials like Diaspora Affairs Minister, Amichai Chikli, following his appearance on the Tucker Carlson Show. Chikli implied that Sachs was part of a guest roster including ‘fringe Holocaust deniers, conspiracy theorists, and blood libel enthusiasts who oppose the State of Israel.’” Chikli is a real piece of work.
Lawfare
“Justice Department says it plans to release only part of special counsel’s Trump report for now” [Associated Press]. “The Justice Department said Wednesday that it intends to release special counsel Jack Smith’s findings on Donald Trump’s efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election but will keep under wraps for now the rest of the report focused on the president-elect’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate… The announcement lessens the likelihood that the report on the classified documents investigation, which of all inquiries against Trump had once seemed to carry the greatest legal threat, would ever be released given that the Trump Justice Department almost certainly will not make the document public even after the case against Nauta and De Oliveira is resolved.” And the norms: “Smith’s team abandoned both cases in November after Trump’s presidential victory, citing Justice Department policy that prohibits the federal prosecutions of sitting presidents. Justice Department regulations call for special counsels appointed by the attorney general to submit a confidential report at the conclusion of their investigations. It’s then up to the attorney general to decide what to make public.”
Democrats en déshabillé
One more reason to hate the Democrats:
It’s increasingly difficult to claim that the Democratic Party is merely incompetent and not actively malevolent. pic.twitter.com/0G4YvkNfN1
— Holding Dems Accountable (From the Left!) (@PushBidenLeft) January 7, 2025
Khanna is wrong, absurdly wrong. This is in no sense an “unforced error” by Democrats (who, as Thomas Frank reminds us in Listen, Liberal!, hate the working class). Instead, it is elegant and successful maneuvering to evade accountability, rather like ObamaCare writ small. Sirota comments:
So…Kamala Harris coulda broken the tie on the NLRB vote, but she wasn’t there to cast the vote, and her brother-in-law is the chief counsel of Uber, which has tangled with the NLRB. https://t.co/CwYJlnedeo
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 8, 2025
Realignment and Legitimacy
About Shawn Ryan, the “whistleblower” who released Livelsberger’s email manifesto:
Shot:
The only fraud here is you @SebGorka
FBI has confirmed the email sent to my podcast was from Matthew Livelsberger.Ladies and Gentleman I present you with your new “Director of Counter Terrorism” who seems to lack discernment. https://t.co/LIdmcEfOgn pic.twitter.com/96AiIcjnes
— Shawn Ryan (@ShawnRyan762) January 7, 2025
Chaser:
Shawn Ryan is a cia contractor pic.twitter.com/ByGonJ05Yd
— Dr.Ahmed A.,MD,ABPsych (@Ah_Magus) January 8, 2025
Saying “the FBI confirmed…” is a lot like saying “A Ukrainian spokesman confirmed….”
* * * “Nation’s anger at insurance ‘injustice’” [China Daily]. “[Rosemary:] “‘My generation has discussed about not just what violence looks like when somebody comes up at you with a gun and shoots you, but more about economic violence. If you’re dying at the hands of somebody else according to a company policy, that doesn’t make it any less violent,’ she said.” • Interestingly, I can’t find the “Rosemary” quote anywhere.
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, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC December 30 | Last week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC December 21 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC December 28 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data January 7: | National [6] CDC Janurary 2, 2005: |
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| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens January 6: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic January 4: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC December 16: | Variants[10] CDC December 16 |
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| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC November 20: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC November 20: |
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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) Seeing more red and more orange, but nothing new at major hubs. [2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map. [3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection. [4] (ED) A little uptick. [5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped. [6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out. [7] (Walgreens) Leveling out. [8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving. [9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out. [10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released. [11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out. [12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.Stats Watch
Employment situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “Initial jobless claims in the US decreased by 10,000 from the previous week to 201,000 in the week ending January 4, the lowest in eleven months and contrasting with the expected increase to 218,000.”
Vehicle Sales: “United States Total Vehicle Sales” [Trading Economics]. “Total Vehicle Sales in the United States increased to 16.80 Million in December from 16.65 Million in November of 2024.”
Manufacturing: “Checks find no issues with Boeing 737-800 jets in S’pore after fatal Jeju Air crash” [Straits Times]. “Checks by the Singapore authorities in the wake of the deadly Jeju Air crash in December have found no anomalies or reliability issues in the fleet of Boeing 737-800 aircraft here, said Transport Minister Chee Hong Tat on Jan 8. This is the same aircraft model as the plane that smashed into a concrete structure housing navigational equipment at the end of a runway at Muan International Airport in South Korea, on Dec 29, 2024, killing 179 people on board.”
Manufacturing: “Problematic parts discovered in several Boeing passenger planes” [KING5]. “On Wednesday, internal Boeing sources told KING 5 there was a slowdown in Renton’s 737-MAX assembly line because of defective electrical junction boxes. Executive Director of Boeing’s engineering union Ray Goforth confirmed in a statement that there was a problem with the junction boxes and it slowed or stopped production. However, he was unaware of how significant the slowdown was. The MAX passenger plane has miles of electrical wiring and while it’s unclear which junction box is impacted, Aviation Expert John Nance said fixing the problem is imperative. ‘If it is a generic situation with a number of these boxes being found to be less than they should then it has to be addressed, there’s no question about it,’ said Nance. Boeing describes the items as non-conforming components and said despite this problem, production continues in the Renton factory.”
Tech: “The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble” [Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic]. “As [Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW] says, we’ve made ‘machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.’ One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace ‘AI’ with ‘SALAMI’ (‘Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences’). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, ‘Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?’ Bender’s most famous contribution is the ‘stochastic parrot,’ a construct that ‘just probabilistically spits out words.’ AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings. At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: ‘I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!’” • This is long, and fun, and worth a read, but I don’t think it lives up to the headline.
Tech: Khan is so fearless:
FTC Chair Khan discussing Meta’s rollback on fact-checking: Calls out the problem with a “single company or single executive” making decisions about everyone’s speech as a market issue and warns of “sweetheart deals” by execs w/ Trump, especially ahead of Meta’s antitrust case pic.twitter.com/LXKQt1OWYN
— Zamaan Qureshi (@zamaan_qureshi) January 7, 2025
No doubt the Democrats will find a way to bury her.
Tech: Enshittification proceeds apace:
It is utterly insane to me that waivers of the right to a jury trial and the right to participate in a class action have not been banned already. https://t.co/DBg1KmLWEF
— Basel Musharbash (@musharbash_b) January 7, 2025
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 33 Fear (previous close: 35 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 27 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed).
Gallery
I wonder why the front page does not have the look of print:
Desire Dehau Reading a Newspaper in the Garden #artbots #lautrec pic.twitter.com/cUB37XRBZN
— Toulouse-Lautrec (@artistlautrec) January 4, 2025
Every so often I purchase a (paper) Financial Times and luxuriate in reading it. The experience is far, far superior to anything online, and the layout of the pages — something we’ve had centuries of experience doing, after all — moves the eye to serendipitous encounters in a way that the web does not.
Yikes (1):
Palisades Fire from a flight arriving at LAX.
Credit: Mark Viniello pic.twitter.com/tN31WP5CFI
— Nahel Belgherze (@WxNB_) January 8, 2025
Yikes (2):
INFERNO: Terrifying new footage shows two men and a dog trapped in their home, as massive flames surround them.#PalisadeFire pic.twitter.com/N2VomUGURY
— Frum TikTok (@FrumTikTok) January 8, 2025
If the fire makes it down off the mountain:
When homes are densely packed in alignment with the direction of strong fire-season winds, it is nearly almost impossible to cut enough brush to make the homes defensible. Fire burns from house to house, no longer a ‘brush fire’.
A neighborhood in the path of #PallisadesFire. 1/4 pic.twitter.com/FrATUA37eH— Zeke Lunder ~ The Lookout (@wildland_zko) January 7, 2025
Not a parking lot:
LAFD is using a BULLDOZER to clear abandoned cars off Palisades Drive. Unreal. #PalisadesFire pic.twitter.com/sM93Zud3q9
— Scott Murphy (@ScottMurphyInLA) January 7, 2025
My first thought is that people took their car keys with them, so their cars couldn’t be moved, hence the bulldozer; but maybe there are no car keys anymore, just plastic fobs that would melt in the heat. Readers? (Shows you how much I drive, or am driven.)
The sharing economy does its part:
To clarify, I called Airbnb to request help with rebooking accommodations farther from the danger zone. As always, their policies failed to account for context. The fires keep getting worse, and unfortunately, many others are probably stuck explaining bushfires to someone in…
— Ana Mostarac (@anammostarac) January 8, 2025
Class warfare:
Thinking of the hundreds of incarcerated firefighters putting their bodies on the front lines of this Palisades fire and getting paid around $5 a day. pic.twitter.com/WvFwFXQhGq
— Zara Rahim (@ZaraRahim) January 8, 2025
Blast from the past:
Kamala Harris herself argued against releasing low-risk people from prison because, she said, it would reduce the firefighter workforce. (The only people eligible are basically people who are so low-risk they should be going home.) https://t.co/AO1MobbFGy
— Jessica Pishko (@JessPish) November 18, 2024
Just in case anybody thinks Democrats don’t hate the working class.
“Ski patrollers reach deal to end strike at Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort” [Associated Press]. “Ski patrollers at the biggest U.S. ski resort have reached a deal with Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort to end a strike that put a wrench in operations during the busy holiday season and into the new year. A joint statement released by the executive board of the ski patrollers’ union said a vote was scheduled for Wednesday on an agreement ‘that addresses both parties’ interests and will end the current strike. Everyone looks forward to restoring normal resort operations and moving forward together as one team,’ it said. The deal would run through April 2027. No other details about it were released. About 200 ski patrollers went on strike on Dec. 27 over wages they said were too low for high living costs.”
“The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Network” [Bumblebee Labs]. From the Abstract: “The Evaporative Cooling Effect describes the phenomenon that high value contributors leave a community because they cannot gain something from it, which leads to the decrease of the quality of the community. Since the people most likely to join a community are those whose quality is below the average quality of the community, these newcomers are very likely to harm the quality of the community. With the expansion of community, it is very hard to maintain the quality of the community.” • Hmm.
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