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By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Affected person readers, varied types of administrivia saved interrupting my preparations for Water Cooler, so it is a bit scattered. –lambert
Hen Tune of the Day
American Goldfinch, Spherical Valley Recreation Space, Hunterdon, New Jersey, United States.
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In Case You Would possibly Miss…
(1) Shanahan on the border.
(2) H5N1 testing wants enchancment.
(3) Warrantless surveillance FTW.
(4) FDR’s hearth chats.
Politics
“So most of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in truth a rational administration of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
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2024
Lower than a 12 months to go!
RCP Ballot Averages, April 5
★ Right here this Friday’s RCP ballot. Trump remains to be up in all of the Swing States (extra right here), main with one exception: PA. I’ve highlighted it once more, (1) as a result of BIden is now up there, and (2) it’s an outlier, has been for weeks. Why isn’t Trump doing properly there? (I’ll work out a greater means to do that, however for now: Blue dot = transfer towards Biden; pink dot = transfer towards Trump. No dot = no change (presumably as a result of state polls will not be that quite a few so removed from election day).
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Trump (R): “America is bored of Trump. He received’t win the election” [Isaac Schorr, The Telegraph]. ” Trump could have a bonus on substance, however it’s a certainty that he lacks the self-discipline essential to capitalise totally on that benefit and fairly attainable that he’s missing sufficient in that division to blow it fully. Worst of all for the presumptive Republican nominee, he’s not some new determine voters can venture their hopes onto whereas hand-waving away the lunacy. His antics are now not a bizarrely refreshing style of one thing new, they’ve turn into part of America’s stale political tradition.” • I dunno. Trump can learn a room and he’s extremely adaptive. I say extra Chick-Fil-A visits! (The East Palestine go to, allow us to keep in mind, was not simply good media, it signaled a turnaround. So what you’ll about Trump’s marketing campaign crew in 2016, he was on the market, assembly folks, practising his riffs, doing his A/B testing. If Trump’s present skilled crew isn’t scheduling that sort of factor for him, it ought to.)
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Kennedy (I): Shanahan visits the border (i.e., one of many gadgets in Harris’s portfolio):
Final week, I used to be down in Yuma on the Arizona-Mexico Border. In 2021, below 94 govt orders, our authorities has enabled the migration of an estimated 10M to cross our borders with out papers.
With no steerage from the federal authorities, the border cities have been (and nonetheless are)… pic.twitter.com/dVbxWORtKJ
— Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) April 12, 2024
She’s not carrying Nina McLemor. Alternatively, she’s not carrying Nina McLemor.
Kennedy (I):
“Election spoiler? How President Biden’s allies hope to cease Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” [USA Today]. “Kennedy’s present double-digit standing is greater than sufficient to swing outcomes in battleground states…. ‘If I have been a Democrat, I’d vote for RFK Jr. each single time over Biden as a result of he’s frankly extra in step with Democrats,’ Trump mentioned in a video launched by his marketing campaign Thursday. ‘I do imagine that RFK Jr. will do very properly, and I do imagine he’s going to take plenty of votes away from crooked Joe Biden.’” • Hmm.
Kennedy (I): Hotez throws down the gauntlet:
1/n Each RFK Jr and Nicole Shanahan are unsuitable. Within the e-book about my daughter I element the proof exhibiting vaccines don’t trigger autism and the way autism begins in early fetal mind improvement means earlier than kids obtain their first vaccine. pic.twitter.com/kg8I80QIZO
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) April 4, 2024
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Spook Nation
“A Terrorist Warning From the FBI” [Wall Street Journal]. • What a shock.
“Home lastly passes surveillance invoice after three stumbles” [Politico]. “One other dramatic flip got here simply forward of the invoice’s closing passage, with a proposal to require warrants when looking out international knowledge collected by the surveillance program for data associated to Individuals failed on 212-212 tie. The Biden administration and members of the Intelligence Committee waged an intense lobbying effort forward of the vote; Legal professional Normal Merrick Garland was calling members on Friday to induce their help, in accordance with an individual acquainted with the conversations who was granted anonymity to talk candidly.” At all times good to see liberal Democrats prolong the fitting hand of excellent fellowship to Republicans when the item is gutting the Fouth Modification. Extra: “In a bid to get his holdouts on board, Johnson shortened the reauthorization interval for this system from 5 years to 2 years — which induced heartburn in some corners of the Biden administration and would put the subsequent wiretapping combat in a possible second Trump time period, if the GOP’s standard-bearer wins in November…. Johnson, a former member of the Judiciary Committee, has defended his swap, saying he’s had entry to extra intelligence data since changing into speaker late final 12 months.” • Yeah, that’s how they suck you in.
Democrats en Déshabillé
I discovered this transcript of one in all FDR’s “Fireplace Chats” (i.e, radio, then a brand new mass medium). From September 6, 1936:
I’ve been on a journey of husbandry…. I noticed drought devastation in 9 states.
I talked with households who had misplaced their wheat crop, misplaced their corn crop, misplaced their livestock, misplaced the water of their properly, misplaced their backyard and are available by to the top of the summer season with out one greenback of money sources, going through a winter with out feed or meals—going through a planting season with out seed to place within the floor.
I shall always remember the fields of wheat so blasted by warmth that they can’t be harvested. I shall always remember subject after subject of corn stunted, earless and stripped of leaves, for what the solar left the grasshoppers took. I noticed brown pastures which might not hold a cow on fifty acres.
However on the finish he empowers his listeners:
Within the drought space persons are not afraid to make use of new strategies to fulfill modifications in Nature, and to right errors of the previous. If overgrazing has injured vary lands, they’re prepared to scale back the grazing. If sure wheat lands needs to be returned to pasture they’re prepared to cooperate. If timber needs to be planted as windbreaks or to cease erosion they’ll work with us. If terracing or summer season fallowing or crop rotation known as for, they’ll carry them out. They stand prepared to suit, and to not combat, the methods of Nature.
That is so lucid, humane, and — dare I say — empathetic (with not a hint of schmaltz. He understands their scenario). It’s exhausting to think about a politician of ant celebration delivering a sequence of speeches like this in the present day — and having folks imagine them; certainly, stay up for them, and hear avidly.
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Why No Labels Didn’t Stick” [Slate]. “No Labels was merely the newest iteration of a Beltway parlor trick that’s as previous as time. In 2012 it was known as Individuals Elect, and in 2008 it was Unity08. The core is a sort of institutional McCainism: the concept Democrats and Republicans are too excessive and that what the nation wants is a 3rd celebration that represents centrism, bipartisanship, and compromise. And on a sure degree you possibly can perceive the pondering; Individuals proceed to precise summary help for bipartisanship even because the nation has descended into elite-driven gridlock and resentment. … A protracted-running Gallup survey [shows] that almost all of Individuals would favor that politicians compromise moderately than ‘sticking to their beliefs.’…. The difficulty with these sorts of survey outcomes is that they’re extraordinarily tender and sometimes don’t survive contact with real-world conditions. Telling a pollster that you just help compromise within the summary is simple, however most voters don’t need it to be their very own facet doing the giving. The precise demand facet of the equation for institutional bipartisanship is subsequently fairly small. The opposite downside with the No Labels operation is that there already is a reasonable, bipartisanship-minded political faction in the US. It’s known as the Democratic Get together. For higher or for worse, that celebration continues to be the house of almost all the remaining ‘institutionalists’ in U.S. politics, and celebration management has repeatedly, over the previous decade, handed up alternatives to interact in retaliatory procedural maneuvering in response to GOP constitutional hardball, preferring as a substitute to face up for a long-vanished consensus politics that has nearly no help on the opposite facet of the aisle. President Joe Biden not solely leads that institutionalist celebration, however he’s additionally its most vocal and profitable backer of bipartisanship as a governing and political philosophy.”
Pandemics
“I’m in earnest — I can’t equivocate — I can’t excuse — I can’t retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
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Covid Assets, United States (Nationwide): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; consists of many counties; Wastewater Scan, consists of drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, however nationwide knowledge). “An infection Management, Emergency Administration, Security, and Normal Ideas” (particularly on hospitalization by metropolis).
Lambert right here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To replace any entry, do be at liberty to contact me on the tackle given with the crops. Please put “COVID” within the topic line. Thanks!
Assets, United States (Native): 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 studies); 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).
Assets, Canada (Nationwide): Wastewater (Authorities of Canada).
Assets, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tricks to useful 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, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, sq. coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Keep secure on the market!
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Airborne Transmission: Covid
“Air flow throughout COVID-19 in a faculty for college kids with mental and developmental disabilities” [PLOS One]. From the Summary: “There was a statistically vital correlation between the whole time of room CO2 concentrations ≥1,000 and SARS-CoV-2 circumstances in an IDD college. Merv-13 filters seem to lower the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 an infection.” • Good to have CO2 focus strengthened as a proxy for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 as properly.
Testing and TrackingL H5N1
Hopefully the assessments no less than work:
The testing protocol is simply too difficult. It additionally solely permits testing in cows that meet a selected profile. It solely gives for restricted variety of assessments per premises. 2/x
— Tom Inglesby, MD (@T_Inglesby) April 12, 2024
From the identical thread:
Since CDC hasn’t realized any classes from Covid besides how one can evade duty and stonewall aerosol science, it could be unreasonable to count on APHIS to be taught something from them; in any case HHS and USDA may as properly be on totally different continents! Nonetheless, “sentinel surveillance” jogs my memory of airport testing, so clearly we must always do it. Additionally, asymptomatic an infection doens’t essentially imply asymptomatic an infection, however we must always act as if it does. And sure, the USDA map is awful.
Transmission: H5N1
Carrying fomite transmission a little bit too far:
Chopping down timber to cease Avian Flu.
Possibly we may simply construct extra scarecrows as a substitute.
“U.S. dairy farmers to ban guests, chop timber.”https://t.co/f8tq17j5Vf
— Jammer🦈 (@AcrossTheMersey) April 11, 2024
Why chop timber down when you could possibly simply wash them?
“States start to limit cattle imports from these with influenza circumstances” [American Veterinary Medical Association]. “In an effort to forestall home cattle from being uncovered to extremely pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI, extra particularly avian influenza Kind A H5N1), 17 states have restricted cattle importations from states the place the virus is understood to have contaminated dairy cows: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. The U.S. Division of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Well being Inspection Service (APHIS) won’t be issuing federal quarantine orders presently, neither is the company recommending any state quarantines or official maintain orders on cattle, the company introduced April 2. ‘Nevertheless, we strongly suggest minimizing motion of cattle as a lot as attainable, with particular consideration to evaluating danger and factoring that danger into motion choices. Don’t transfer sick or uncovered animals.’”
“Is the Cattle Complicated Able to Transfer Previous the Influenza A Scare?” [Progressive Farmer]. “Proper when the market was in the course of what gave the impression to be a robust early spring rally, worry and nervousness stole the cattle advanced’s thunder despite the fact that no beef cattle have the sickness, no dairy cows have died from being affected by the sickness, and no dairy herds have been depopulated. … However, fortunately, given the market’s closes early this week, it appears as if merchants are able to put their worry relating to the flu behind them. I might hate to jinx our luck and see the market flip decrease once more this week, but it surely does appear as if the market has turned a brand new web page and it’s able to refocus on its fundamentals.”
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TABLE 1: Each day Covid Charts
LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new in the present day; all others will not be up to date.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution picture, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Home windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open picture in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (Biobot) Our curve has now flattened out at a degree far above valleys below Trump. Not an excellent victory. Word additionally the world “below the curve,” apart from taking a look at peaks. That space is bigger below Biden than below Trump, and it appears to be rising steadily if inconsistently.
[2] (Biobot) No backward revisons….
[3] (CDC Variants) As of Might 11, genomic surveillance knowledge might be reported biweekly, primarily based on the supply of optimistic take a look at specimens.” “Biweeekly: 1. occurring each two weeks. 2. occurring twice every week; semiweekly.” Seems to be like CDC has chosen sense #1. In essence, they’re telling us variants are nothing to fret about. Time will inform.
[4] (ER) CDC appears to have killed this off, because the hyperlink is damaged, I feel in favor of this factor. I’ll attempt to verify. UPDATE Sure, go away it to CDC to kill a web page, after which announce it was archived a day later. And heaven forfend CDC ought to clarify the place to go to get equal knowledge, if any. I appreciated the ER knowledge, as a result of it appeared actually exhausting to recreation.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Seems to be like a really gradual leveling off to a non-zero baseline, to me. I suppose to a tame epidemiologist it appears like “endemicity,” however to me it appears like one other tranche of lethality.
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC) Nonetheless down. “Maps, charts, and knowledge supplied by CDC, updates weekly for the earlier MMWR week (Sunday-Saturday) on Thursdays (Deaths, Emergency Division Visits, Take a look at Positivity) and weekly the next Mondays (Hospitalizations) by 8 pm ET†”.
[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.
[8] (Cleveland) Flattening.
[9] (Vacationers: Posivitity) Now up, albeit within the rear view mirror.
[10] (Vacationers: Variants) JN.1 dominates totally.
[11] Seems to be just like the Occasions isn’t reporting demise knowledge any extra? Possibly I would like to return to The Economist….
Stats Watch
There aren’t any official statistics of curiosity in the present day.
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Tech: “Why I Misplaced Religion in Kagi” [d-shoot]. “Between absolutely the blase angle in direction of privateness, the 100% dedication to AI being the way forward for search, and the utterly misguided use of the corporate’s restricted funds, I truthfully can’t see Kagi as one thing I may ever suggest to folks. Is the search good? I imply…it’s probably not significantly better than some other search, it closely leverages Bing like DDG and the opposite indie search platforms do, the one actual killer characteristic it has to me is the flexibility to dam domains out of your outcomes, which I can at the moment solely do in different serps by way of a person script that doesn’t assist me on cell. However what good is filtering out all the AI generated spamblogs on a search platform that desires to spit extra AI generated bullshit at me immediately?” • Fairly a rant, however I can’t consider someway. Readers?
Tech: “Google drafts search engine to ‘floor’ AI leads to fact” [Axios]. “The tendency of enormous language fashions to hallucinate, or make issues up, is a key hurdle to broader enterprise adoption of generative AI.” Yeah, whoops, how come that wasn’t within the deck. Extra: “Google says that by integrating Google search into Vertex, its AI providing for companies, it may give customers entry to newer data and citations indicating the sources for key knowledge.” • I don’t see how this works. How is the quotation linked to the textual content? The LLM can’t do it, it’s obtained hullabaloocinations. However all search can do is bolt on a search end result to the LLM’s output; it’s fully parallel to what the LLM does. Anyhow, utilizing a crapified instrument to straighten out a bullshit machines hallucinations looks as if a doomed endeavor.
At this time’s Concern & Greed Index: 46 Impartial (earlier shut: 58 Greed) [CNN]. One week in the past: 62 (Greed). (0 is Excessive Concern; 100 is Excessive Greed). Final up to date Apr 12 at 1:48:00 PM ET.
Our Famously Free Press
Their template obtained away from them!
LOL, obtained an NYT e mail titled “The 100 finest eating places in New York Metropolis, ranked by @pete_wells,” however this was the physique of the e-mail once I clicked: “Wirecutter headline (or some model of it) goes right here…Attempt to make use of curiosity hole and never give away an excessive amount of within the inbox” pic.twitter.com/o70Y14GjVs
— ☀️dr thrasher is recovering from the totality🌘 (@thrasherxy) April 4, 2024
This even occurs to the nice ones….
Information of the Wired
“First languages of North America traced again to 2 very totally different language teams from Siberia” [PNAS]. “Nichols’ methods contain using linguistic typology, a subject that includes evaluating languages and organizing them primarily based on shared standards. To be taught extra about early North American languages, she compiled lists of language traits and utilized them to all recognized languages. She then scored every of the languages primarily based on the revealed qualities. This allowed her to match the languages as a strategy to discover resemblances amongst them and spot patterns. Nichols discovered that she may hint the languages spoken in early North America again to simply two lineages, each of which originated in Siberia. They got here, she notes, with the individuals who made their means throughout land bridges throughout Ice Age glaciation occasions. These two primary teams she discovered advanced into totally different languages as folks moved to totally different areas—she centered most particularly on 60 of them. She discovered that a lot of these languages have been additionally impacted by a number of waves of Siberians arriving in North America. She concludes that a few of the traits of the unique languages have been retained by the years and are actually within the present linguistic inhabitants.”
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Contact data for crops: Readers, be at liberty to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) learn the way to ship me a verify in case you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to learn the way to ship me photographs of crops. Greens are advantageous! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary crops! If you need your deal with to seem as a credit score, please place it initially of your mail in parentheses: (thus). In any other case, I’ll anonymize through the use of your initials. See the earlier Water Cooler (with plant) right here. From TH:
TH writes: “This Bodhi tree lives on the Sherman Library and Gardens (Corona Del Mar/Newport Seashore, California).”
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