2:00PM Water Cooler 10/17/2022 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Bird Song of the Day

Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon), Marin, California, United States. “Singing Male, Calling Female, Juvenile begging calls.”

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“The logic of the insult and the logic of scientific classification represent the two extreme poles of what a classification may be in the social world.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

Biden Administration

“President addresses possibility of Hunter Biden prosecution” [Politico]. “‘I have great confidence in my son,’ Biden said in a pre-taped interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. ‘I love him and he’s on the straight and narrow, and he has been for a couple years now. And I’m just so proud of him.’” • And before?

2022

* * *

GA: Walker lands a punch:

Warnock on abortion: “A patient’s room is too narrow and small and cramped a space for a woman, her doctor and the United States government.”

Walker: “Did he not mention that there’s a baby in that room as well?”#GASenDebate #GAsen pic.twitter.com/kwdxl2patj

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) October 14, 2022

I don’t believe he’s right, but that’s hardly the point.

PA: “Do Voters Care About John Fetterman’s Stroke?” [The Atlantic]. “Even if his campaign could have been more forthcoming earlier about his condition, it is true that Fetterman has found a way of talking about it since he returned to the trail in late summer. Near the beginning of his stump speech, he asks: ‘How many of you have had your own personal health challenges?’ And every time, nearly every hand in the audience goes up. Last week, I traveled to Bristol to see Fetterman in action. ‘I’ve had a hemorrhagic stroke, which is worse,” Jeanette Miller from Bristol Township told me with a shrug when I asked her whether Fetterman’s stroke gave her pause. Rob Blatt, a retiree from Feasterville, looked at me blankly when I asked him the same. “I’ve beaten cancer and a whole bunch of other stuff,’ he said. ‘He’s one of us—a working man trying to do the right thing by his family, his community, and his country.’” • We’ll see.

PA: “John Fetterman is the best choice to represent Pennsylvania’s priorities in the U.S. Senate | Endorsement” [The Inquirer]. “Fetterman knows what his values are and is capable of communicating them. The same cannot be said for his opponent, Mehmet Oz, a puppy-killing charlatan man wholly unprepared to be Pennsylvania’s U.S. senator…. Oz’s resumé is also notably devoid of any significant record of public service. A celebrity doctor who once had his own television program, Oz spent much of his career touting miracle cures.”

PA: I am totally not curious about urine:

(Dr Mehmet Oz, Pennsylvania Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, recently revealed that he tasted urine in medical school. Which brings to mind this classic UL, https://t.co/W1p97rT8r9) https://t.co/RibViF5EGM

— It’s an Urban Legend (@ULTweets) October 17, 2022

I already have too many people telling me it’s rain.

PA: “Why Pennsylvania may not have election night results and why that’s OK” [ABC]. “Pennsylvania is unlikely to have results on election night this November, the state’s top election official said Tuesday, because of a law limiting when mail votes can be processed. That means voters may again have to wait to learn who wins key races in the battleground state, where the vote count in 2020’s presidential election lasted for days. ‘We must again ask for patience,’ Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, told reporters over Zoom. ‘Official results will be available within a few days,’ she said, predicting that unofficial results also wouldn’t be available on Nov. 8. ‘This delay does not mean anything nefarious is happening. It simply means that the process is working as it is designed to work in Pennsylvania and that election officials are doing their job to count every vote.’ Chapman attributed the expected delay to the state’s General Assembly deciding not to pass legislation allowing counties to begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day. As it stands, processing cannot begin until 7 a.m. that day.”

2024

“Why Kamala Harris is already among the most consequential vice presidents in history” [The Hill]. A low bar. Nevertheless: “On May 11, Vice President Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote in favor of Alvaro Bedoya’s nomination to serve on the Federal Trade Commission. This brought Harris to number three on the list of most tiebreaking votes by a vice president in American history. Since then, Harris has cast a six tiebreaking votes and is just five away from tying John C. Calhoun for the record. Yet Harris’s accomplishment also stands out for the fact that she has cast her tiebreaking votes at a faster rate than any of her predecessors. The magnitude of Harris’s record over less than two years in office is best appreciated when compared to now-President Biden’s zero tiebreaking votes during his eight years as vice president. Biden was the only two-term vice president in American history never to cast a tiebreaking vote.” • I’m not sure Calhoun would be at the top of my list of “consequential vice presidents,” at least if the consequences were to be good.

“As Democrats try to hold on in November, it’s Pete Buttigieg who’s in demand on the campaign trail” [CNN]. “And yet, it’s Buttigieg – whose only political experience before his failed presidential bid was serving as mayor of South Bend, Indiana – who has become the most requested surrogate on the campaign trail for Democratic candidates in the midterms, people familiar with the requests tell CNN. He’s so in demand that he’s getting more requests than Vice President Kamala Harris, those sources tell CNN – but still fewer than President Joe Biden – as Democrats look to defend their narrow congressional majorities and win governor’s races in November. With invitations flowing into the White House and the Democratic National Committee, a relatively low-ranking Cabinet secretary’s staff has to choose between Democratic candidates trying to chase him down. There’s no precedent for this. But there’s also no precedent for the winner of the Iowa caucuses becoming Transportation secretary and proving more agile on camera than the vice president and Biden.” • ”People familiar with the requests….”

“Trump Spent 91 Cents to Raise Each Dollar as Troubles Mounted” [Bloomberg]. “Former President Donald Trump raised $24 million in the third quarter, a 41% increase over the previous quarter, but he spent $22 million to do it…. It’s not the first time that Trump’s small-dollar fundraising operation has had low returns for its spending. In the third quarter of 2020, Trump Make America Great Again, the small-dollar donor arm of his re-election effort, spent 77 cents to raise each dollar. Still, the money he’s brought in is unprecedented for a former president. Since losing the 2020 election, Trump has raised $387 million and, despite the low rate of return in the third quarter, is flush with cash at a time when many of his party’s candidates are being outraised in the midterms.” • That’s a lot, especially since Trump is a frugal candidate.

2016 Post Mortem

An excellent, or at least lavish, yarn diagram for 2016:

The conspiracy was real…they all had agendas pic.twitter.com/NO3E3qk8FA

— Thankful4USA (@Thankful4Usa) October 15, 2022

From the Epoch Times, no less….

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!). ; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. . (“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.

* * *

Obama Legacy

Obama makes my shoulders sag:

I think you can get far in politics with a little light hippie-punching. https://t.co/uSoLNbvdDe

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 15, 2022

Realignment and Legitimacy

“The Decline of the City Upon a Hill” [Foreign Affairs]. “To regain that lost stature, American democracy must overcome the challenges of partisan politics, institutional gridlock, and instability. The U.S. government will need to prove that it is able to produce sustainable international policies that the United States’ friends and foes alike can count on. This job is too important to be left solely to those preoccupied with domestic issues. The foreign policy establishment needs to see the revival of American democracy as the cornerstone of future U.S. global leadership. This will require direct engagement with the American public, not unlike the concerted effort to promote the Marshall Plan to reluctant Americans in 1947 and 1948. It is not simply a sales job; policymakers must first listen to Americans to try to understand and alleviate their frustrations with their democracy in the interest of maintaining and strengthening U.S. influence in the world.” • The press and the intelligence community have seamlessly merged where all discussions of foreign policy and “our democracy” are concerned. How is that not “direct engagement with the public”? I think it’s unfortunate that we’ve made the “intelligence agencies the guarantors of ‘the institutional order of the Republic,” but here we are. And since when do policymakers “first listen to Americans”? Honestly, the last people who did that — in their very different ways — were Sanders and Trump, and look what happened to them. (Idea: Early in 2024, vat-grown McKinsey creepozoid Pete Buttigieg could take a page from Hillary’s playbook and do a “listening tour.”)

“Please Just Throw Me a Bone with the Wesleyan Argus Controversy” [Freddie DeBoer]. “You have to understand this to understand our media class: the number one priority in their entire lives, above and beyond literally any other, is to earn insider status with other people in media. That’s it. That is their lodestar, their true north. They want other people in media to see them as cool and smart and fuckable, and most of all they want to have the right opinions, the opinions that the group doesn’t laugh at. The mirror image of the desperation to be considered cool is the intense, all-consuming fear of being made fun of by cool people in media. Look at the way they write, report, communicate with each other; these people are absolutely terrified that someone’s going to take something they say and hold it up for mockery on Twitter. This seems to me to be pretty much exactly the opposite attitude you should want among writers and journalists, who literally can only perform their function when they are pissing most people off. But that’s the professional culture of media, a culture defined by the fear of being made fun of.” • Indeed. Worth reading in full. (DeBoer’s accurate skewering of the press is a bit tangential to the thrust of the piece.)

Greenwald is correct:

Ten straight minutes of leading Dems undermining faith in the integrity of our elections by insisting the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections (all which, coincidentally, they happened to lose) were illegitimate because the false outcome was due to cheating:https://t.co/HPdhPtO5xX

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 16, 2022

The Democrats have a strong case for the reality of election theft: Certainly 2020 2000, where Jebbie diddled the voter rolls so that brother W would win. Likely 2004, for anybody who followed the Ohio returns. But the Democrats aren’t making that case, and it shows difference in operational capability between the two parties: The Democrats are exuding aghastitude and relying on their friends in Big Tech to control the narrative (and potentially the intelligence community to dispute the results). The Republicans are going out and running candidates for office.

Term limits:

This. Term limits were created by the right, specifically to make sure another FDR presidency was impossible. https://t.co/x9tnemeYtB

— Lee 🖖 Carter (@carterforva) October 16, 2022

Quite right (though note that liberals can and do exactly the same as “the right does,” although they tend to use NGOs rather than talent agencies. Or the intelligence community). Also, in Maine we discovered that with term limits, the legislature had no institutional memory at all. The only people who knew what the laws meant were the lawyers who wrote them (and they had interests other than the voters’ in mind).

#COVID19

• Just in time for the Winter Surge (antidlc):

To be fair, this was always a lousy page, because as CDC says, they didn’t track inventory. Nevertheless, the “scientific communication” is excellent; the messaging is crystal clear, good job CDC.

• ”The World’s Best Airport Lounges Will Cost You. Are the Perks Worth It?” [Wall Street Journal]. • I read all this with a view to filing it under Guillotine Watch, but at the very end: “Some lounges offer the most basic cure for claustrophobia of all—fresh air. Take Delta Sky Clubs, many of which have outdoor Sky Decks, a combination patio and observation zone for plane spotting. At LAX, home to one of Delta’s newest and biggest spaces, the deck has a retractable roof and heaters so it can be enjoyed in any weather. At Swiss’s Zurich lounge, passengers can wait out layovers on a terrace with views of the Alps.” • So in other words, outdoor air — air that, presumably, you don’t need to use your CO2 meter to check — is available only to those with first-class tickets or elite status, or (sometimes) premium credit cards. Welcome to the future!

• WHO supports fomite transmission of Covid:

Greenhalgh: “Hand hygiene as “one of the most important measures to stop covid-19” NO. Never a shred of evidence.”

• WHO continues to deny airborne transmission of Covid:

Yes, this disgraceful tweet is still up. (If the world were the way the Hospital Infection Control community believes it to be, this would not be such lethal advice; handwashing is good, after all. But out in the world, where HIC lacks hegemony, handwashing doesn’t help against Covid at all, and #CovidIsAirborne. The scientific communication is again, excellent; the message is crystal clear. Many lies are.

• This is cute (really):

• This is important, because Swift has an enormous following in the Windows administrator community:

• I continue to be encouraged by the propagation of CR boxes. The karma always seems to be good; the attitude, unselfish. More good karma:

• The same good karma CO2 metering:

• Masks as fashion items (at last):

• On Ebola, a thread:

The tweets on asymptomatic and airborne transmission are especially interesting, although granted they chime with my priors.

Transmission

Here is CDC’s interactive map by county set to community transmission. (This is the map CDC wants only hospitals to look at, not you.)

Lambert here: I have to say, I’m seeing more and more yellow and more blue, which continues to please. But is the pandemic “over”? Well….

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, October 16:

0.5%.

Readers, please click through on this, if you have a minute. Since Walgreens did the right thing, let’s give this project some stats.

Wastewater

Wastewater data (CDC), October 11:

Lambert here: CDC seems to have gotten its wastewater act together, for the moment, which is good news. That said, what a bizarre map: Note that Ohio seems to be almost entirely shut down (grey dots = no data). Good news: New York (JFK; EWR) is in the system, and blue. Other entrepots like LAX and SFO also blue.

September 24:

Lambert here: Still unexplained is CDC’s detour to October 11 from October 4 via September 24.

Variants

Lambert here: It’s beyond frustrating how slow the variant data is. Does nobody in the public health establishment get a promotion for tracking variants? Are there no grants? Is there a single lab that does this work, and everybody gets the results from them? Additional sources from readers welcome [grinds teeth, bangs head on desk].

Variant data, national (Walgreens), October 1:

Variant data, national (CDC), September 24 (Nowcast off):

• Field guide to the variants of the week:

• BQ.1.* in New York City:

Time to head to the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley?

• Here is an excellent thread on CDC’s BQ.1.* butchery, where they allowed BQ.1.* to reach 12% (their forecast) without telling anybody about it:

CDC only broke the data out from the BA.5 lineage when it affected hospitals:

And CDC has been sitting on the data:

People could, perhaps, be making their “personal risk assessments” on vaccination or boostering while assuming that the current variants are not immune-evasive. But BQ,1.* is immune-evasive. Eric Topol: “‘It’s not going to wipe out vaccine efficacy, but it could but a dent in protection against hospitalizations and death,’ he said.” So the case for getting vaccinated — to prevent hospitalizations and death — is now weaker than it was. How do the data butchers at CDC expect us to make “personal risk assessments” while at the same time hiding the very data that would allow us to do that?

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Total: 1,090,536 – 1,089,916 = 620 (620 * 365 = 226,300, which is today’s LivingWith™ number (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the LivingWith™ 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.

It’s nice that for deaths I have a simple, daily chart that just keeps chugging along, unlike everything else CDC and the White House are screwing up or letting go dark, good job.

Stats Watch

Patient readers, I’d like to beef up this section again, having beefed down the Covid section (because the Centers for Disease doesn’t believe in data). This will take a bit of time, as I get back in form. –lambert

Manufacturing: “United States NY Empire State Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NY Empire State Manufacturing Index dropped 7.6 points to -9.1 in October 2022, compared with market expectations of -4.0 and suggesting business activity in the New York State declined for a third straight month. The new orders index was unchanged at 3.7, indicating a slight increase in orders, while the shipments index plunged 19.9 points to -0.3, pointing to a levelling off of shipments after they increased significantly last month. In addition, the unfilled orders index rose 3.8 points to -3.7, still pointing to a decline in the level of unfilled orders. Delivery times held steady, and inventories inched higher. Labor market indicators pointed to a small increase in employment and the average workweek.”

Supply Chain: “New supply chain chokepoints are forming along waterways vital to U.S. distribution of grain, oil and other commodities. Sections of the Mississippi River are approaching low water levels not seen in more than three decades… disrupting commercial traffic and threatening businesses that depend on the goods and the companies that transport them” [Wall Street Journal]. “The low water, caused by a lack of rain in the Ohio River Valley and the Upper Mississippi, has left barges grounded in unprecedented numbers. Many ports no longer have water deep enough for commercial boats to safely reach them. Authorities have started emergency dredging at various sites while farmers and factories rush to secure the shrinking number of passable spots or find alternate supply routes. Rail is one potential option, but it is usually costlier than river transport and railroads are coping with their own service constraints this year.” • “Service constraints” like a rail strike. I do hope the railroad unions understand the additional leverage they have here.

The Bezzle: “Stablecoin Mechanics 2: Tether-Celsius” [DataFinnovation]. “tl;dr: We found the Tether-Celsius loans, Tether’s equity investment into Celsius, and can therefore prove a lot about both defects in the Celsius business model and questionable conduct by Tether.”

Tech: “The big commercial purchasing that helped fuel electronics shipping over the past two years is on hold. Companies, governments and school districts that bulked up on computers during the pandemic are drastically scaling back. …. [T]he lull in purchasing has worsened throughout the year as high inflation, rising labor costs and recession fears have triggered a reassessment of procurement budgets” [Wall Street Journal]. “The decisions are behind a worldwide slump in demand for PCs that is hitting suppliers like Dell Technologies and HP and has started rolling across the airfreight sector. Global shipments of desktop and laptop computers fell in the third quarter by a record 18%, says market-research firm Canalys, with notebook shipments particularly hard hit. Overall U.S. consumer spending across the videogame business also fell 13% in the second quarter, suggesting the slump in demand for electronics goes beyond PCs.” • Well, no doubt the winter Covid surge will help out with this. It’s an ill virus…

Tech: “American Airlines is Trying to Stop a Popular iPhone App That’s Become a ‘Must Have’ For its Flight Attendants” [Paddle Your Own Canoe]. “American Airlines is using sophisticated ‘bot detection’ software to stop the developer of an iPhone app that has become popular amongst the airline’s flight attendants from accessing vital data that is needed to keep the app working. The ‘Sequence Decoder’ app has become a must-have tool for American Airlines flight attendants because it displays information required by crew members to manage their rosters and work lives in a single app. The app is particularly popular among the large number of ‘reserve’ flight attendants at American Airlines because it gives them more control over their schedules, and the app has other features such as a calculator to make sure crew are working to legal limits. American Airlines does not offer its own version of the app and has allegedly turned down requests from the app’s developer Jeff Reisberg to collaborate on the app. Instead, the Jeff’s self-developed app relies on bots to ‘scrape’ the data required to power it from AA’s computer systems. In fact, rather than working with Jeff, American Airlines has started to protect its websites with bot detection software that makes it ‘nearly impossible’ to collect data required to run Sequence Decoder.” • What did we bail these clowns our for (again)?

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 29 Fear (previous close: 21 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 20 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Oct 17 at 1:25 PM EDT. October, and no crash yet.

Photo Book

Normally, I don’t take portraits, or indeed create images of recognizable individuals, because I don’t buy the whole “Family of Man” concept to the slightest degree: “Steichen said the people ‘looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other.’” I don’t think that’s true, and I think it’s an offensive claim; I, as a rich Westener with an extremely fancy camera, have very different concerns from the working class I might exploit for the jouissance of a putative “recognition.” Everybody hates a tourist. The heart-tugging leads straight to the propaganda pictures from Syria and Ukraine. That said, these photos from India by Steve MacCurry are extraordinary:

And this:

I don’t “recognize” these people. I suppose I could be said to “encounter” them.

Zeitgeist Watch

Yes, a wonderful story:

And also an example of the penetration of “intelligence” into popular culture. After all, the sharing is wonderful, but what is shared is paranoia, is it not?

Class Warfare

“More workers say Starbucks retaliated for union efforts: ‘I lost everything when they fired me’” [Guardian]. “Dozens of workers have now filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB alleging they’ve experienced retaliation for union organising, including terminations. On 12 October, a NLRB judge ruled in favor of four other fired Starbucks workers in Kansas and Missouri, ordering their reinstatement as well. The board has issued 35 complaints against Starbucks, encompassing more than 800 allegations of federal labor law violations as about 250 Starbucks stores have voted to form unions over the past year.” • My view: The stars should get the bucks.

“Mobile port workers set to strike next week as contract talks stall” [AL.com]. “Next week, if an agreement isn’t reached by midnight on October 20, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 1410 will strike CSA Equipment Company, a stevedoring (unloading) provider at the port, after union membership voted not to accept CSA’s latest contract offer. Dock workers represented by Local 1410—about 800 people–will refuse to work with CSA, with very few exceptions. Though CSA is one of several stevedoring companies that are licensed to operate at the port, the strike is sure to have an impact on port operations, which continue to grow as the volume of containers that move through the port increase. ”

“You can only talk for so long” [London Review of Books]. An art heist on behalf of the IRA by one Rose Dugdale, an English heiress., This caught my eye: “The element of farce isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker. Dugdale ought still to be a compelling character. She really did steal all those paintings, in addition to making a bombing run over a police station, and according to interviews she gave to O’Driscoll, developing bomb-making techniques that were used in several IRA attacks in the 1980s. The real problem, for anyone who wants to take her seriously, is her own overpowering sense of herself as a heroic and rosy-cheeked footsoldier of the struggle, brave and true, scourge of the running dog and the capitalist pig, friend to the working man, thorn in the side of the establishment. Long before any journalist looked at her life and thought it might make a fantastic book, Dugdale herself was busily writing up the opening paragraphs: a thrillerish, minute-by-minute account of the robbery, so perfectly reimagined for maximum drama that it calls into question the authenticity of the entire scene.” • Reminds me of the Weathermen.

“The Proletariat in Search of a Class, by Gaither Stewart” [Dandelion Salad]. • Bracketed by despairing remarks on the state of the American working class, in the middle we have the story of Olive Tilford Dargan, who wrote on the Gastonia, NC cotton mill strikes. Hers seems to be a voice worth recovering/recuperating. Although perhaps on TikTok….

News of the Wired

“When Sarcastic Fringeheads Open Their Mouths, Watch Out” [New York Times]. • Someone at the Times can still write a headline, I see.

“Renowned Arecibo telescope won’t be rebuilt — and astronomers are heartbroken” [Nature]. “One major question is how the Arecibo site will draw students and teachers if there is little active research to participate in. ‘Yet the NSF calls for proposals for a world-class educational institution,’ says Anne Virkki, a planetary scientist at the University of Helsinki in Finland. ‘How does anyone do that without the world-class scientists, engineers, and instruments?’…. Arecibo Observatory has long been a powerhouse of STEM education in Puerto Rico because of its renowned telescope and place in astronomical history. Students trained there have gone on to become professional astronomers and planetary scientists in many countries.” • A shame.

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 wol:

wol writes: “There’s something about the outside of a tree that’s good for the inside of a human. Live Oaks, Maritime Forest, Bald Head Island, NC.” And thanks to alert readers, I know why “Live Oaks” are called live!

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