2:00PM Water Cooler 2/9/2023 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Reader Query: Periodically we’ve posted threads of recommendations for vendors (doctors, dentists, restaurants, retail, gyms, performance venues) that are what I might call “airborne conscious,” that is, having proper ventilation (HEPA, CO2 meter, maybe Far UV), and masking. Am I right in thinking that there is no central repository for such vendors? Very infrequently I see a site float by, but nothing really seems to click. Thank you! –lambert P.S. There’s certainly nothing on Google Maps, in the sense that this information is a normal field like address and phone, which would indeed be very handy, though perhaps someone has built a Google map that does this.

Bird Song of the Day

Amazonian Grosbeak, ENE of Careiro do Castanho, Fazenda Toshiba. “Songs by a bird that was first heard calling, then singing, from very dense growth at the edge of tall terra firme forest along the road just beyond the second dip; the singing bird was about 6-8 meters away and 1-2 meters up when recorded; subsequent playback resulted in the bird approaching and giving calls; it was seen and clearly a male of this species, but a second bird was also heard calling; partly cloudy, mild breeze from the east, and in the upper 80s to low 90s.”

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

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

Biden Administration

“Did Biden give the order to destroy Putin’s Nord Stream pipeline after Ukraine invasion? Bombshell report claims Navy divers carried out mission to kill Russia’s gas stranglehold on Europe in audacious mission overseen by president” [Daily Mail]. “The sensational report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, published to his Substack, cites a source ‘with direct knowledge of the operational planning’ behind the alleged plot. The White House and the CIA flatly rejected the report on Wednesday, branding it ‘complete fiction’.” • So this story ought to be hopping the Atlantic pretty soon, or would, if wartime censorship were not in effect. A Republican reacts to it:

I’m troubled that I can’t immediately rule out the suggestion that the U.S. blew up Nord Stream. I checked with a bunch of Senate colleagues. Among those I’ve asked, none were ever briefed on this. If it turns out to be true, we’ve got a huge problem. https://t.co/DG0dYTByPI

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 8, 2023

Note that the Hersh story carefully explains how the spooks (and, I assume, Biden) were careful to avoid briefing Congress. More:

If you’re complaining about Sy Hersh’s one source for his Nord Stream scoop, let me introduce you to these false stories based on multiple sources.

I’ll take one source and one legendary, trusted journalist over multiple sources spinning the same lies to stenographers any day. pic.twitter.com/8ajF1bt7LQ

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 8, 2023

Fair enough, it’s a gotcha, but I expect Hersh to rise above a cesspit like the Times. He is, after all, a reporter, not a stenographer.

“IRS Names Advisors on Possible Government-Run Direct Filing System for Taxpayers” [Government Executive]. “Capitol Hill directed the IRS to look into the cost and feasibility of a government-owned direct e-filing system in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – legislation that also included $80 billion in 10-year funding for the tax agency for enforcement, to upgrade tech and enhance its workforce. The IRS announced on Wednesday that it is on track to deliver the report to lawmakers in May, as required by the law, and has also picked nonprofit New America and tax expert of Loyal Law School, Ariel Jurow-Kleiman, to help write the report. The law directs the IRS to report on the cost of developing and running a direct e-file tax system, as well as taxpayer opinions on such a system and the opinion of a third-party on the feasibility, cost, and IRS capacity to deliver such a system.” • Why don’t they just send me a bill?

2024

“Biden talks economy, China, political division in exclusive interview with Judy Woodruff” [PBS]. On his poor polling, Biden: “Because the polls don’t matter anymore. You got to make, what, 40, 50 calls and on a cell phone to get someone to answer a poll? Even the pollsters, you talk to them. Ask them what they think about this. Look.” • I don’t think he’s wrong.

“Democrats prop up Harris, Clinton for 2024 if Biden doesn’t run: poll” [The Hill]. “Harris’s position at the top of the survey — which was conducted between Feb. 3 and Feb. 6 by the polling firm Premise — comes as she faces approval ratings that are even lower than the president’s.” • Handy chart:

Who knows, but Clinton in second place is scary, even if Clinton leading Buttigeig is delicious.

* * *

“Turley Testifies on Censorship Before House Select Subcommittee” [Jonathan Turley]. Turley’s prepared testimony: “The Twitter Files raise serious questions of whether the United States government is now a partner in what may be the largest censorship system in our history. The involvement cuts across the Executive Branch, with confirmed coordination with agencies ranging from the CDC to the CIA. Even based on our limited knowledge, the size of this censorship system is breathtaking, and we only know of a fraction of its operations through the Twitter Files. Twitter has 450 million active users but it is still only ranked 15th in the number of users, after companies such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest. The assumption is that the government censorship program dovetailed with these other companies, which continue to refuse to share past communications or work with the government. Assuming that these efforts extended to these larger platforms, it is a government-supported censorship system that is unparalleled in history. Regardless of how one comes out on the constitutional ramifications of the government’s role in the censorship system, there should not be debate over the dangers that it presents to our democracy. The United States government may be outsourcing censorship, but the impact is still inimical to free speech values that define our country.”

“Ex-Twitter executives now say they forget key details of censoring Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop” [New York Post]. • There’s email, ffs. Are the Republicans going to butcher this?

“The Hunter Biden investigations, Act I” [Politico]. “Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, said clearly in her opening statement that it was a mistake to block the Post’s Twitter account for two weeks, which is what they did. She said that thinking back, she would have reinstated them immediately; that was new, I hadn’t heard that.” • The story broke three weeks before the 2020 election. Twitter suppressed it for two of those three weeks. Somehow that context got left out of Politico’s coverage….

“Hunter Biden’s legal team asks Bannon, Stone, Giuliani and others to preserve evidence for future lawsuits” [NBC News]. “Hunter Biden’s legal team sent letters to Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and 11 others on Wednesday asking them to preserve potential evidence for future lawsuits related to the alleged theft of personal data that may include information from his laptop, according to documents obtained by NBC News. The move is the latest in a new legal strategy by lawyers for President Joe Biden’s son, who plan to pursue a wide range of litigation against allies of Donald Trump and others involved in obtaining and disseminating data that they say is or may be the private property of their client.” • The only way forward is through. All the way through 2024….

* * *

“The GOP Is Starting to Plot Against Donald Trump” [Politico]. “‘It is,’ he said, ‘A five-alarm fire. And there is nobody coming to put it out.’ ‘It,’ in this case, is the possibility that once again Donald Trump will prevail over a splintered Republican field, getting the same 30-40 percent he received in the early primaries in 2016, enough to win the nomination. ‘He,’ is a Republican donor and bundler, a Wall Street financier who regularly hobnobs with senior Republican officials but who also was, uniquely for his tribe, an early and enthusiastic supporter of Trump. His request for anonymity speaks to the bizarreness of this political moment, where even one time staunch supporters of the former president are reluctant to say out-loud what they and their cohort all say privately: That should the former president win the primary again, he would be very likely to lose again to Joe Biden, even as some polls show him besting his 2020 rival.” • I don’t buy the “splintered field” theory for a minute. Does this bundler really believe that if the Republicans had coalesced early behind Jebbie (or Marco Rubio) that Trump wouldn’t have won anyhow? The real problem is that Trump was the better candidate. The same for the general, too.

Republican Funhouse

“James O’Keefe Is on Paid Leave From Project Veritas” [New York Magazine]. “O’Keefe is his organization’s guiding ideological force and onscreen face, but his status as its day-to-day manager has become uncertain amid reports of internal turmoil, lawsuits from former employees, leaks about its internal workings, and a federal investigation into its conduct in purchasing a diary stolen from Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter. [Executive Director Daniel] Strack’s internal message to employees made reference to what he called ‘a distracting time’ and said that a board meeting had been held to discuss ‘the health of the organization’ and that while ‘we have not come up with final solutions yet we have made a few immediate decisions.’ The message said two top Project Veritas executives, including the nonprofit’s chief financial officer, had been ‘reinstated.’ Multiple sources said that the pair had recently been fired by O’Keefe.” • Blue sky-ing here, totally, but one might wonder if Pfizer sponsored the hit?

“McCarthy brings in record haul at first fundraiser since becoming speaker” [Politico]. • That should help McCarthy. Mother’s milk.

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.

* * *

“Biden Aims to Win Back White Working-Class Voters Through Their Wallets” [New York Times]. Fascinatingly, the first Wayback Machine headline is “Biden Breaks Ground on a Huge Project: Winning Back the White Working Class.” Not the same. “With his call for a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America,” President Biden on Tuesday night acknowledged rhetorically what Democrats have been preparing for two years: a fierce campaign to win back white working-class voters through the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree… much of that path was already laid by the last Congress with the signing of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for low-emission energy to combat climate change. Whether or not Mr. Biden can persuade a divided Congress to act on his remaining plans, the money from those laws has just begun to flow, and a surge of hiring is coming. Many of those jobs will be in the industrial battlegrounds that Democrats either took back from Mr. Trump in 2020 or will need in 2024, when endangered senators like Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin face re-election. But Democrats will have to match those jobs against Republican appeals aimed at white grievances.” • It certainly is a novel project: Change the class composition of the country to your electoral base. We’ll see how it goes. $1.65 trillion, taking all the programs together, really isn’t very much when spread out over a decade.

“James Carville Attacks GOP, Marjorie Taylor Greene As ‘White Trash’” [HuffPo]. “Democratic political consultant James Carville on Wednesday described Republican lawmakers who heckled President Joe Biden during his State of the Union speech as ‘white trash.’ ‘I tell people I have the equivalent of a PhD in white trashology, and we saw real white trash on display,’ Carville told MSNBC anchor Ari Melber.” • Hmm.

“Fetterman in Washington hospital ‘for observation’ after feeling lightheaded” [CNN]. “‘Towards the end of the Senate Democratic retreat today, Senator John Fetterman began feeling lightheaded. He left and called his staff, who picked him up and drove him to The George Washington University Hospital. Initial tests did not show evidence of a new stroke, but doctors are running more tests and John is remaining overnight for observation,’ Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, said in the statement.” • A Senate Democrat retreat would make any dull normal light-headed. Nevertheless.

Realignment and Legitimacy

#COVID19

Lambert here: I am but a humble tapewatcher, but unlike Eric Topol, I’m not calling a surge, because the last peak was Biden’s Omicron debacle, and after an Everest like that, what’s left? Topol’s view is the establishment view: Hospital-centric. Mine is infection-centric. I do not see the universal acceleration or doubling in cases that I would expect to see based on past surges.

I am calling a “Something Awful.” It’s gonna be bad, in some new way, and we don’t know how, yet (but see here for immune system dysregulation, which is looking pretty awful).

Lambert here: Looks like “leveling off to a high plateau” across the board. Stay safe out there!

“CR Box Instructions” (PDF) [Google Drive]. English-, French-, German-language CR Box Instructions for download. The UK has an otherworldly electrical system, so here is theirs:

• Mastravaganza: “We Still Don’t Know What Works Best to Slow the Spread Of COVID-19” [Time]. Assuming that’s the goal of the Biden administration, which it isn’t. Mass infection without mitigation is the goal. That said: “Because of a lack of research on NPIs, we still can’t answer important questions like: which government measures had the greatest and the least impact? How did the sequencing and timing of these NPIs affect their effectiveness? Which measures caused more harm than benefit? We need answers to these questions so we can prepare for the next pandemic, armed with better knowledge.” • How odd such information was never collected. Well, I guess we’ll never know. On masks:

With all NPIs, when you start digging into the research evidence, the picture isn’t always clear cut. Take masks. From a basic science perspective, masks work—they filter the particles that we breathe. High filtration masks, like N95s, work better than surgical or cloth masks. Masking provides quite a bit of protection for the people wearing them against respiratory diseases, and can also help reduce transmission from an infected person to others.

In theory, then, if every person in the world had worn a high-quality mask 24/7 for a few weeks the COVID-19 pandemic would have been, if not over, then at least substantially slowed. But in practice, the intervention that we implemented was not some perfect ideal of mask-wearing, in which everyone consistently wore a well-fitting N95 in every situation. During surges, not everyone masked indoors, not everyone wore N95s, and those who did wear a mask may have worn them imperfectly (we’ve all seen people wearing masks with their noses uncovered, or even with their masks hanging around their necks).

I think the picture is quite “clear cut.” “We” ran a massive social experiment — much like we’ve done with vax — to see if we can degrade the basic physics of masks to a level of non-performance by having WHO and CDC initially discourage their use, then periodically and randomly shifting policy, never providing simple instructions for purchase or use, not having public figures model them, allowing a constant drumbeat of business-friendly punditry to discourage them, and ulimately by shaming and mocking mask-wearers. The experiment, obviously, was a massive success, and a template for future mitigations for climate change. Of course, we could simply have mailed them out to every American citizen, along with test kits, but that would be far too simple.

• Maskstravaganza: “How Liberals Killed Masking (Unlocked)” (podcast) [Death Panel]. “We look back at how such a basic intervention as masking during a pandemic became increasingly scrutinized, undermined, and ultimately stigmatized in mainstream discourse over the last three years.” • Good, but long and complex. It occurs to me that we’ve had two other long deliverables lately: The first being Jeff Gerth’s four-part demolition of RussiaGate in the Columbia Journalism Review; the second being Hersh’s 5000-word Nord Stream story. These two stories, and Death Panel’s podcast are all works of contemporary history; there seems to be a demand for a “usable past,” one at least not dominated by bullshit. These three pieces — by no means CT — are all, in their own way, examples of how to analyze a SCAD (“State Crime Against Democracy”), though the State has a different role to play in each sequence of events.

• Maskstravaganza:

At least Maddow could have mentioned the only masker was Sanders.

• “FDA nixes EUA ambitions for Eiger’s COVID treatment, proposes full approval pathway instead” [Fierce Pharma]. “In March, Eiger reported that peginterferon lambda reduced the risk of ER visits longer than six hours by 50% compared to placebo. A total of 84% of treated patients were at least partially vaccinated and the company said that the treatment was also found to be effective against the Omicron variant. Regardless, Eiger says the FDA relayed that an EUA was unlikely to be granted in the ‘current context of the pandemic.’ Instead, the agency suggested the company consider an additional pivotal trial so it could take the full approval route, unlikely to be the most tantalizing option given the cost of a new trial. The company said that as a result, it’s considering all options for peginterferon lambda, including emergency authorization outside of the U.S. and ‘strategic options for continued development’ of the therapy. ‘ • What the hell does the “current context of the pandemic” mean?

• Hospital Infection Control at it again:

• Ouch:

A toned-down version of the “birds aren’t real” CT, perhaps.

Case Data

NOT UPDATED BioBot wastewater data from February 6:

For now, I’m going to use this national wastewater data as the best proxy for case data (ignoring the clinical case data portion of this chart, which in my view “goes bad” after March 2022, for reasons as yet unexplained). At least we can spot trends, and compare current levels to equivalent past levels.

• “Is wastewater the answer for tracking all disease outbreaks?” [Jeremy Faust, Inside Medicine]. “The problem is that a neat correlation between detected levels of SARS-CoV-2 RNA and case counts has not been precisely worked out. Even if a good correlation can be worked out, the ratios may change with new variants and other factors. Still, qualitatively, it’s pretty clear that when SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels go up, reported Covid-19 case counts follow suit. That knowledge has been powerful. The CDC now has a national wastewater surveillance system online that anyone can browse.” • Yeah CDC has such a site, and users can indeed browse it. When it’s up. Or when the data from the treatment plant in your area isn’t greyed out. Or if you don’t live in the South, which is hardly participating in the program at all. Given CDC’s performance for everything else in the pandemic, I wouldn’t be surprised if they put some nimrod in charge, to sabotage the program with bad management.

Transmission

Here is CDC’s interactive map by county set to community transmission (the “red map,” which is the map CDC wants only hospitals to look at, not you.) The map is said to update Monday-Friday by 8 pm:

The previous map:

NOTE: I shall most certainly not be using the CDC’s new “Community Level” metric. Because CDC has combined a leading indicator (cases) with a lagging one (hospitalization) their new metric is a poor warning sign of a surge, and a poor way to assess personal risk. In addition, Covid is a disease you don’t want to get. Even if you are not hospitalized, you can suffer from Long Covid, vascular issues, and neurological issues. That the “green map” (which Topol calls a “capitulation” and a “deception”) is still up and being taken seriously verges on the criminal.

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, published February 9:

-0.6%. Still on the high plateau, equal to previous peaks.

• “Almost 1,000 people wait up to 13 hours for COVID-19 testing in Maryvale” [Arizona Central]. • Over, totally over.

Wastewater

SITE DOWN Wastewater data (CDC), February 4:

Less grey, though still too much; a lot less red.

February 3:

NOT UPDATED And MWRA data, February 4:

Minor uptick, north and south.

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? [grinds teeth, bangs head on desk]. UPDATE Yes. See NC here on Pango. Every Friday, a stately, academic pace utterly incompatible with protecting yourself against a variant exhibiting doubling behavior.

Variant data, national (Walgreens), January 30:

Lambert here: XBB overtakes BQ. CH down, reassuring, because a Tweet in Links, January 11 from GM drew attention to it (“displays such a high relative growth advantage”) and in Water Cooler, January 18, from Nature: “CH.1.1 and CA.3.1 variants were highly resistant to both monovalent and bivalent mRNA vaccinations.”

Lambert here: Wierdly, the screen shot about has been replaced today by data from “10/7/2022.” (It’s clearly not current data; BQ.1* and XBB do not dominate.

NOT UPDATED Variant data, national (CDC), January 14 (Weighted Estimates Only*):

BQ.1* takes first place. XBB coming up fast. (For BQ.1/XBB and vaccine escape, see here.) CH.* now appears, a week after Walgreens. Here is Region 2, the Northeast:

CH.1* appears, but slightly below the national average. XBB utterly dominates, making clear that Region 2 (New England) varies greatly from the national average.

Here are all the regions, in a series of uncaptioned, legend-free and confusing pie charts:

It almost looks like, with respect to variants at least, there several pandemics, not one. The Northeast, where XBB (blue) dominates, and the other regions, with different proportions of other variants, but XBB not dominating. Odd. (Yes, I know the colors are the same as on the bar chart above. However, there are two charts, one bar, one pie, and on a laptop one cannot see both at same time. Just another example of CDC blithering at the level of the smallest detail.)

NOTE * CDC used to have a “Nowcast Off” radio button, which I used because of my bad experience with CDC models like Nowcast. CDC explains (I think) the change in the following note:

Weighted estimates (provided for all weeks except the most recent three weeks) are variant proportions that are based on empirical (observed) genomic sequencing data. These estimates are not available for the most recent weeks because of the time it takes to generate the unweighted data, including sample collection, specimen treatment, shipping, analysis, and upload into public databases.

Sublineages with weighted estimates less than 1% of all circulating variants are combined with their parent lineage. When the weighted estimate of a sublineage crosses the 1% threshold and has substitutions in the spike protein that could affect vaccine efficacy, transmission, or severity, it may be separated from its parent lineage and displayed on its own in the variant proportions data.

Nowcast estimates (provided for the most recent three weeks when the “Nowcast on” option is selected below) are model-based projections of variant proportions for the most recent weeks to enable timely public health action. CDC uses the Nowcast to forecast variant proportions before the weighted estimates are available for a given week.

Someone who can interpret The Great Runes can look at this; but I don’t have time today.

As a check, since New York is a BQ.1* hotbed, New York hospitalization, updated February 8:

Hospitalization data for Queens, updated February 5:

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Total: 1,137,929 – 1,136,960 = 969 (969 * 365 = 353,685 deaths per year, today’s YouGenicist™ number for “living with” Covid (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the YouGenicist™ metric keeps chugging along like this, I may just have to decide this is what the powers-that-be consider “mission accomplished” for this particular tranche of death and disease).

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. (Though CDC may be jiggering the numbers soon. Lower, naturally.)

Stats Watch

Employment Situation: “United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits rose to 196 thousand in the week ending February 4th, from the previous week’s nine-month low of 183 thousand and above market expectations of 190 thousand. Still, the latest figure suggested the labor market remained tight, which could contribute further to inflationary pressure in the world’s largest economy.”

The Bezzle: “‘Sam? Are you there?!’ The bizarre and brutal final hours of FTX” [Financial Times]. Wild, wild stuff; I would imagine somebody’s pitching it in Hollywood right now. “‘Nobody had gone through a disaster before, so people were breaking psychologically,’ said someone close to them. ‘It was never more apparent to me how young all of them were than in the 72-hour period before bankruptcy.’”

The Bezzle: AI = BS:

The Bezzle: AI = BS:

The Bezzle: “Big Tech and Generative AI” [Tanay Jaipuria, Tanay’s Newsletter]. Author is a VC. “Today, I’ll discuss what the big tech companies – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple – had to say about their plans for Generative AI in their most recent earnings call last week.” In particular, Google: “[CEO Pichai] also hinted that their most powerful language models will come to search in some experimental formats. Language models like BERT and MUM have , enabling significant ranking improvements and multimodal search like Google Lens. Very soon, people will be able to interact directly with our newest, most powerful language models as a companion to Search in experimental and innovative ways. Stay tuned.” • Most would agree that over the last four years Google Search results have gone right down the crapper. Thanks, AI!

The Bezzle: “Google confirms AI-generated content isn’t against Search guidelines” [9to5 Google]. “In a new post to the Google Search Central blog, Google clarifies its stance on AI-generated content and how Search treats that content. The short version is that Google Search guidelines don’t directly ban AI-generated content. Rather, Google will reward ‘high-quality content, however it is produced.’ The company defines ‘high-quality content’ based on ‘expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness,’ or ‘E-E-A-T.’” Which explains why NC gets no Google hits, I suppose. More: “While Google won’t penalize AI-generated content directly, it does say that using AI to create content that carries the ‘primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results’ is still a violation of policy, but that not all use of automation is considered spam.” • Swell. Let the games begin. (Does make you wonder if Google plans to auto-generate mountains of AI-generated crap by itself, then search that, in a sort of closed loop. Certainly simpler and cheaper than crawling a bunch of stupid websites.

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 74 Greed (previous close: 74 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 79 (Extreme Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 9 at 1:41 PM EST.

Our Famously Free Press

Day One of the Hersh Watch:

Nothing from state media as of this writing:

“Why Substack?” [Seymour Hersh, Substack]. “Here, I have the kind of freedom I’ve always fought for. I’ve watched writer after writer on this platform as they’ve freed themselves from their publishers’ economic interests, run deep with stories without fear of word counts or column inches, and—most importantly—spoken directly to their readers. And that last point, for me, is the clincher. I’ve never been interested in socializing with pols or cozying up to money types at the self-important cocktail get togethers—the star-fucking parties, I always liked to call them. I’m at my best when I swig cheap bourbon with the servicemen, work over the first-year law firm associates for intel, or swap stories with the junior minister from a country most people can’t name. That’s always been my style. And as it turns out, it’s the ethos of this online community as well. What you’ll find here is, I hope, a reflection of that freedom. The story you will read today is the truth as I worked for three months to find, with no pressure from a publisher, editors or peers to make it hew to certain lines of thought—or pare it back to assuage their fears. Substack simply means reporting is back . . . unfiltered and unprogrammed—just the way I like it.” • OK, but now let’s have a second source.

“Twitter Kept Entire ‘Database’ of Republican Requests to Censor Posts” [Rolling Stone]. “The Trump administration and its allied Republicans in Congress routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to — the exact behavior that they’re claiming makes President Biden, the Democrats, and Twitter complicit in an anti-free speech conspiracy to muzzle conservatives online.” • Taibbi’s “Twitter Files” post argues that the Democrats made many more requests, were granted many more requests, were far more embedded in Twitter’s administration, and that tribalist Democrats dominated the moderation team. So, not “the exact same behavior.”

Class Warfare

“More Than 400 Writers Guild Members Call on MSNBC to Reach ‘Fair Contract’ With Union” [Hollywood Reporter]. “The Writers Guild of America East is putting some additional pressure on MSNBC to expedite contract negotiations. More than 400 members of the union — including star members Tina Fey, Lilly Wachowski and David Simon — are calling on the cable news brand to agree ‘to a fair contract that includes the pay and protections [MSNBC union members] deserve’ in a petition released on Wednesday. The WGA East’s bargaining unit at MSNBC, a group of more than 300 writers, producers, fact-checkers and others, has been negotiating with MSNBC and NBCUniversal management for over a year on their first contract since the union’s certification via a National Labor Relations Board election in August 2021.”

“The Big MOOP at Burning Man” [New York Magazine]. MOOP = “Matter Out of Place.” Interesting description of Burning Man: “MOOP of a different sort threatens the playa: a proposed geothermal exploration project about ten miles from the dry lake bed where tens of thousands of techno-utopianists and Silicon Valley executives in booty shorts gather each summer…. The festival began in 1986 with a small crowd watching as an eight-foot effigy (the “man” of Burning Man) was set ablaze on a San Francisco beach; today it’s a cultural institution not unlike Disney, if Disney Adults were into ethical non-monogamy and psilocybin. There are offshoot Burning Man festivals in Africa and Asia, regional “leadership summits” for Burners, a journal in which attendees ruminate on the festival’s “diaspora” and a massive economy of RV vendors and private-jet charters expressly affiliated with the Nevada event. In Black Rock City, no money exchanges hands and the tenets of radical self-reliance and decommodification reign supreme. A “gifting economy” encourages participants to bring supplies — sunscreen, egg sandwiches, back rubs — which are presented to and traded among revelers. But Burning Man the organization, which has expanded to become a de facto manager of the region as much as the producer of a yearly eight-day rave, exerts significant cash investment and political muscle to further its interests.”

“How To Be A Scab” 101:

News of the Wired

“I, too, have flown a giant balloon over North Carolina” [North Carolina Rabbit Hole]. “Today, stratospheric balloon flights are an incredibly common thing. Meteorologists around the world launch them twice a day from some 900 locations to make precise weather observations and forecasts. Detailed information on wind patterns make it possible to know where balloons will end up. Even so, flights can easily go awry. The Chinese government’s official excuse for their balloon’s walkabout over the United States was straight out of the Diplomatic Mission to Alderaan Playbook. China stated that its ‘research’ balloon had merely had drifted into this country’s airspace by mistake—a mistake that’s apparently occurred several times before. Even if this seems ludicrous, it is possible. I know this. Because nearly a decade ago, I too lost a stratospheric balloon over North Carolina.”

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 RM:

RM writes: “Ice fog last night at 8 above this morning.” We have seen this tree before, but this is lovely shot. I often return to the same site over and over again.

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