By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Bird Song of the Day
Readers have been so happy with the mockingbirds I’m going to keep doing them. Now entering Day Five of Week Three! Do readers have another favorite bird? Or shall I continue with mockingbirds? The Macaulay Library does have rather a lot!
Long-tailed Mockingbird, Left bank Rio Bocapan (-3.7859,-80.7092), Tumbes, Peru. “Individual singing naturally on top of a tree 7 m from ground.”
In Case You Might Miss…
- Friday’s Covid wastewater (still bad) and polling charts (bad for Trump).
- Lambert lashes himself to the mast.
- Walz swiftboating: Nice try, no cigar.
- Boeing’s Starliner debacle. Again.
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
2024
Less than one hundred days to go!
Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:
More Blue on the map. Trump still leads nationally, but some swing states moving toward Kamala. In particular, I’m no insider, but if I were on Team Trump, Georgia’s drop from +3.6 to this week’s +0.6 might cause me to chew my hands. Georgia? Really? Atlanta burbs no longer sitting it out? Can any readers from Georgia clarify?
The Weeks That There
We might characterize the story arc of the last two weeks as “Battle of Vice Presidential Oppo” (oppo propagated by two teams of highly skilled professionals, I might add). First, Democrats smeared J.D. Vance for having documented carnal relations with a sofa in Hillbilly Elegy. This was entirely false, and yet — and therefore? — led to an enormous liberalgasm of snark and memage (which some bottom feeders are still stoking). Then, Republicans Swiftboated Tim Walz over his service record, which led to an enormous war dance of conservative frothing and stamping. This sorry episode is not perhaps quite over, but when the Wall Street Journal and Ed Kilgore both agree it’s a damp squib, though not completely fabricated, things aren’t looking good for Swift Boat Original Guy (2004) and Trump campaign co-manager (2024) Chris LaCivita. In neither case did Lambert the Cautious heed the Siren call of oppo, buy in, or join the dogpile. Like
Richard Nixon, who also third-personed himselfUlysses, he lashed himself to his ship’s mast so he could hear the Sirens, but not go overboard and join them:
And back in the day, believe me, I would gladly have joined the pack. Today, surtout, pas trop de zele, even leaving aside the lies, the bullshit, and the manipulation [lambert preens].
* * * Walz:
Kamala (D): “Is Tim Walz Guilty of ‘Stolen Valor’?” [Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal]. The deck: “His military record isn’t a good reason to oppose his candidacy.” And: “There are plenty of reasons to criticize Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, and we’ve told you about several. But the charges leveled so far about his military service look like ‘thin gruel,’ as our friends at the New York Sun put it.” • And from the other side of the aisle–
Kamala (D): “Why the Swiftboating of Tim Walz Won’t Work” [Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine]. Results of looking at the timeline: “Will this effort work as it did (to some extent) against John Kerry? Probably not. First of all, the facts underlying the LaCivita-Vance line of attack don’t appear to justify all the angry passion. No one is disputing that Walz served honorably in the Guard for 24 years. The first charge, and perhaps the most serious, is that Walz retired at the end of those 24 years (as he was fully eligible to do) in order to avoid deployment to Iraq. Two former Guard colleagues, apparently infuriated by Walz’s opposition to the Iraq War, first raised this charge as part of an earlier political attack on Walz when he ran for governor in 2018. But other colleagues documented that Walz had been talking for quite some time about retiring in order to run for Congress (which is precisely what he did) and that he had no way of knowing about the subsequent deployment when he retired. There’s really no more evidence of Walz’s alleged cowardice than an assertion by two dudes who clearly didn’t like his politics…. The second charge, which Vance dressed up with the lurid term of “stolen valor,” really just refers to a single ambiguous reference Walz made to carrying a gun “in war,” though others have pointed to a claim in a 2006 Walz press release that he served in “Operation Enduring Freedom” (the official name of the Afghanistan deployment). Whatever viewers of that press release thought, the claim is actually true since Walz and his unit were deployed to Europe in a support capacity for that war. Though Vance didn’t mention it, his conservative allies have also charged that Walz inflated his rank in descriptions of his service. This attack line is probably the flimsiest: Everyone concedes Walz achieved the rank of command sergeant major in the Guard, the highest rank attainable by an enlisted service member. But he didn’t complete some coursework required to retire at that rank. So are a few references on campaign websites to Walz as a “retired command sergeant major” some sort of “lie?” I don’t think so; he was retired, and he did achieve that rank. All in all, the attacks on Walz’s military record come across as pretty weak tea. Even the most serious — the claim that he dodged serving in Iraq — requires an asterisk: J.D. Vance’s running mate, Donald Trump, has endlessly described that war as a disastrous mistake. By the time he retired from the Guard, Walz shared that view. Should he have stuck around to see if he could be deployed there?” • Ah well. As FDR said: “Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try something.” Words both campaigns are living by, apparently.
* * * Kennedy (1): “Joe Rogan Supports Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President: ‘He’s the Only One That Makes Sense to Me’” [Variety]. “Mega-popular podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan said he supports Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president in this fall’s election. ‘He’s the only one that makes sense to me,’ Rogan said on Thursday’s episode of ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast. ‘He doesn’t attack people, he attacks actions and ideas, but he’s much more reasonable and intelligent. I mean, the guy was an environmental lawyer and he cleaned up the East River. He’s a legitimate guy.’ Rogan characterized Kennedy as a straight shooter, in contrast to the spin produced by Democrats and Republicans. ‘That’s politics. They do it on the left, they do it on the right,” Rogan said on the Aug. 8 podcast. “They gaslight you, they manipulate you, they promote narratives — and the only one who is not doing that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’” • Commentary and video:
📰BIG NEWS!📰
Did you hear? @joerogan has endorsed @RobertKennedyJr for President!! This is huge!
The Joe Rogan Experience is the most popular podcast in the WORLD, averaging about 11 million views per episode.
In this episode, he says about Kennedy:
“I am a fan. He’s the… pic.twitter.com/ToYDH2gV9c
— Moms for RFK Jr (@moms4rfkjr) August 9, 2024
I would have expected to see a formal endorsement on Rogan’s Twitter feed. Am I missing a more appropriate venue?
* * *
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!
Celebrity Watch
Of course none of the Olympic delegations shared information, so while we may “live with Covid’ (or not) we are not and cannot “learn to live with Covid”:
Would also be interesting to learn how many knowingly competed (and exposed others) and if they took any specific actions to protect themselves or others when they knew they were positive. This could’ve been (and still can be) a great learning opportunity on “living with Covid.”
— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) August 8, 2024
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) This week’s wastewater map, with hot spots annotated. Keeps spreading.
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) KP.* very popular.
[4] (ER) Worth noting Emergency Department use is now on a par with the first wave, in 2020.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Leveling off. Doesn’t need to be a permanent thing, of course. (The New York city area has form; in 2020, as the home of two international airports (JFK and EWR) it was an important entry point for the virus into the country (and from thence up the Hudson River valley, as the rich sought to escape, and then around the country through air travel.)
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). The visualization suppresses what is, in percentage terms, a significant increase.
[7] (Walgreens) An optimist would see a peak.
[8] (Cleveland) Slowing.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Up. Those sh*theads at CDC have changed the chart so that it doesn’t even run back to 1/21/23, as it used to, but now starts 1/1/24. There’s also no way to adjust the time range. CDC really doesn’t want you to be able to take a historical view of the pandemic, or compare one surge to another. In an any case, that’s why the shape of the curve has changed.
[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
There are no official statistics of interest today.
Manufacturing: Moe Tkacik whaling on Boeing again:
Boeing’s program, producing the upper stage of a rocket designed to send heavy cargo to the moon, is 4 years late & a basket case bc, NASA says, the company doesn’t have enough competent aerospace workers.
(I know what you’re thinking: They killed them all?)
Well, that and.. pic.twitter.com/VDSxyfRUBU— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) August 9, 2024
Yikes!
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 24 Exreme Fear (previous close: 24 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 27 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 9 at 1:17:45 PM ET.
The Conservatory
“Actually listening to 10cc” [Crooked Timber]. “Once you know my age my musical tastes as a teenager are very easy to guess…. But I love a lot of the music now in which I had no interest at all at the time. When I notice a band is playing nearby that I am curious about, and whose members I suspect might be on or near their last legs, I often go, usually taking at least one of my children with me. So last week it was the turn of my son to accompany me to see 10cc…. Seeing them, on their first US tour in 47 years, I discovered they are nothing like I thought. As presumably all of their fans and everyone else who was actually paying attention in the 70’s know, they’re basically an extremely sophisticated comic song band… Even their biggest hit [1], the one song that even I know by heart, sounded so different live. I’ve always assumed its at best a sad song about self-deception with a little cruelty thrown in, but live, in context, I got the feeling that not only does the subject know perfectly well that he’s in love but that she knows it too, and he knows that she knows it, both of them are happy about it, and the song is actually an exercise in elaborate Gricean implicature.”
• OK, OK. Gricean Implicature. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “”Implicature” denotes either (i) the act of meaning or implying one thing by saying something else, or (ii) the object of that act. Implicatures can be determined by sentence meaning or by conversational context, and can be conventional (in different senses) or unconventional. Figures of speech such as metaphor and irony provide familiar examples, as do loose use and damning with faint praise. Implicature serves a variety of goals: communication, maintaining good social relations, misleading without lying, style, and verbal efficiency. Knowledge of common forms of implicature is acquired along with one’s native language. Conversational implicatures have become one of the principal subjects of pragmatics.” And no wonder! More: “H. P. Grice developed an influential theory to explain and predict conversational implicatures, and describe how they arise and are understood…. Grice (1975: 26–30) postulated a general Cooperative Principle and four maxims specifying how to be cooperative. It is common knowledge, he asserted, that people generally follow these rules for efficient communication…. Grice viewed these not as arbitrary conventions, but as instances of general rules governing rational, cooperative behavior. For example, if Jane is helping Kelly build a house, she will hand Kelly a hammer rather than a tennis racket (relevance), more than one nail when several are needed (quantity), and straight nails rather than bent ones (quality); she will do all this quickly and efficiently (manner).” • See, e.g., Luke 11:10-12. Now consider oppo (or, as Democrats like to put it, “Join the conversation!”).
Zeitgeist Watch
“How to read a riot” [Financial Times]. “[S]ince the French gilets jaunes movement began attacking police and luxury stores in 2018, we have been in an era of leaderless crowds. Just as the internet cut out high-street travel agents, it is cutting politicians out of riots. Donald Trump did incite supporters to attack the Capitol in Washington on January 6 2021, ‘but he wasn’t the driving force behind the riots,’ says Julia Ebner, counter-extremism researcher at Oxford university. Nowadays, social media influencers do the driving. Ebner says these riots have united the usually ‘splintered’ online far right, from misogynist Andrew Tate through Islamophobe Tommy Robinson to the nationalist Patriotic Alternative. It’s as if the far-right internet has materialised on English high streets. Proud rioters posting videos of their exploits spread the contagion…. Another constant: riots peak in summer, when it’s nice to be outside at night…. And riots both require and build group identity. People tend to riot with people they feel connected to. … When people argue about the aims of riots, there are typically two rival theories, which are doing battle again this time. One theory is that rioters are mindless “riffraff” who must be punished. The other is that they are rational actors with grievances that must be addressed. The ‘riffraff’ and ‘rational actor’ theories are constant, but who espouses them depends on the nature of the riot. In 2011, when many British rioters were poor non-white people, conservatives called them riffraff while the left defended them. Now that white rioters are attacking Muslims, the roles of prosecutor and defender are reversed.” • What I noticed on the videos was a particular set to the body, leading forward as if eagerly, and a faster walk. No smiling. Numerous people headed in the same direction, all separate individuals, but all leaning forward at the same angle, walking at the same pace.
“The Indigenous Communities Preserving the Ancient Art of Roasting Agave” [Atlas Obscura]. “The roasting pit didn’t look like much yet: a pile of dirt, hiding the roasting agave beneath. Roy explained the roasting process to me. Traditionally, Cahuilla men set out in the spring to agave-harvesting grounds, and would dig and reuse a pit at the site of collection. The roasting was done at the collection site since the agave stands were often more than five miles away from a village. They’d roast 50 to 100 agave hearts at once. The pit was lined with rocks, tightly fitted together, and then a large fire—Roy’s team used oak—was built on top. According to the Malki publication Stalking the Wild Agave: A Southern California Food and Fiber Tradition by Deborah Dozier, the fire burned until ‘the hearthstones glowed red and a thick bed of hardwood coals had been created.’ The men would cover the coals with another layer of rock, followed by a layer of fresh agave leaves. Then agave hearts went in and were covered with more agave leaves. Historically, the pit was covered with fronds from native fan palms and then sand. Today, it’s covered with corrugated metal panels and old carpet under a top layer of a foot of dirt. ;The roasting tamed the agave so that it could be taken home, soft and submissive, calorically concentrated, wrapped in leaves and packed in agave-fiber nets, with the thorny tips, excess water, unusable fibers, and bitter leaves left behind,’ Dozier concludes.” • The Malki Museum on the Morongo Reservation (near Banning, CA) sounds like it would be worth a visit.
Revised London Tube map:
This is the correction thread.
Thanks for all who sent corrections, apologies if I missed anything, it’s a bit crazy down there. This is Version 2b of the map, with everything I am aware of fixed. If you find anything else, please comment here. Revisions will be posted here. pic.twitter.com/yoluJpAGMN
— Tube Map Central (@TubeMapCentral) August 8, 2024
Who knew London was radial?
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