By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I am now going to take a nap. Enjoy!
Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, Theodore Roosevelt National Park – Upper Talkington Trail, Billings, North Dakota, United States.
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In Case You Might Miss…
Trump’s pivotto the Northern Hemisphere.
LA Palisades Fire: This is fine.
Photos: Workers working.
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“FBI Is Still Hiding Details of Russiagate”: Aaron Maté.
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
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Trump Transition
“Scoop: Trump’s 100 executive orders” [Axios]. “President-elect Trump and top advisers previewed ambitious plans for 100 executive orders during a meeting with Senate Republicans on Wednesday night, Axios has learned. While Congress debates the next moves on their own aggressive legislative plans, Trump let them know he is ready to roll — especially on immigration. Senators were given previews of some of what they were told would be 100 executive orders, two sources who were in the room told Axios. Stephen Miller, Trump’s longtime immigration adviser, dove into how they intend to use executive power to address the border and immigration starting Day 1. It’s unclear if all will be technical executive orders, or more broadly executive actions taken by Trump or federal agencies.” • “A preview,” “100.” Pure marketing! The difference between 2016 and 2020 is night and day.
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“Elon Musk says DOGE probably won’t find $2 trillion in federal budget cuts” [NBC News]. “Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a ‘best-case outcome’ and that he thought there was only a ‘good shot’ at cutting half that. ” So a “good shot” to Mars would be getting halfway there? More: “Musk’s lowered estimate is a significant downgrade from his earlier view. At a rally for Trump at Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 27, Musk said he’d be able to cut the federal budget by ‘at least $2 trillion.’…. Musk, along with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, is co-leading the DOGE budget-slashing effort, which Trump named in reference to an internet meme. The advisory panel has no official authority and is expected to make recommendations to the White House after Trump is sworn in for a second term. Experts have said Musk and Ramaswamy would need to propose cuts to mandatory programs such as Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, to achieve significant savings. Musk himself has warned that cuts could mean ‘hardship’ for some.” • But nobody who is anybody!
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“Kremlin, on Trump remarks on Greenland and Canada, says Russia has Arctic interests” [Reuters]. “When asked about Trump’s comments about Greenland and Canada, the Kremlin said that Russia, which has the largest Arctic coastline, was closely watching the ‘dramatic development’ of the situation. ‘The Arctic is a zone of our national interests, our strategic interests,’ Peskov said. ‘We are interested in preserving the atmosphere of peace and stability in the Arctic zone.’ ‘We are watching the rather dramatic development of the situation very closely, but so far, thank God, at the level of statements.’”
“Danish officials fear Trump is much more serious about acquiring Greenland than in first term” [CNN]. “When President-elect Donald Trump mused about buying Greenland from Denmark during his first administration, the Danish prime minister called the idea “absurd” and rebuffed him outright. Now, Danish officials are being warned by Trump allies and advisers that he is serious, multiple Danish officials told CNN. And they’re carefully weighing how to respond without sparking a major rupture with a close ally and fellow NATO member…. Trump said on Tuesday that ‘we need Greenland for national security purposes.’ ‘People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up, because we need it for national security,’ he said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago.” • “We need it.”
“Canadian leaders say Trump’s talk about Canada becoming the 51st state isn’t funny anymore” [Associated Press]. “Dominic LeBlanc, the country’s point person for U.S-Canada relations, said Trump was smiling when he first made the comment during a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in late November. ‘The joke is over,’ said LeBlanc. ‘It’s a way for him, I think, to sow confusion, to agitate people, to create chaos knowing this will never happen.’ Trump keeps floating the idea that Canada should join the United States as the 51st state, saying Tuesday he would not use military force to invade the country, which is home to more than 40 million people and is a founding NATO partner. Instead, Trump said he would rely on ‘economic force’ as he erroneously cast the U.S. trade deficit with Canada — a natural resource-rich nation that provides the U.S. with commodities like oil — as a subsidy.”
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“Hawaii Gov: RFK Jr.’s Anti-Vax Misinformation Left Dozens Of Kids Dead In Samoa” [HuffPo]. I wish RFK was straightening out the food supply; that is what I hoped MAHA would do, and it’s worth doing. But there we are: “[Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D)] traveled to Washington this week specifically to meet with Republican and Democratic senators to urge them to oppose Kennedy’s nomination — the same week Kennedy is on Capitol Hill making his case to Democratic senators about why they should support him. He’s offering his perspective on a well-known ‘tragedy’ that took place in Samoa in 2019, after two children died due to human error on the part of nurses administering their vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella. The mistake led to some people losing confidence in vaccines, and right around this time, Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccination activist, visited the Pacific island state and campaigned against vaccines on social media…. As Kennedy pushed his anti-vaccination campaign… the inoculation rate plummeted to 31% and the measles virus spread. Samoan leaders asked the Hawaii governor for help, so he went to their island with dozens of health care providers to help vaccinate as many people as possible. By this time, there were approximately 5,000 confirmed cases of measles, Green said, and the outbreak would lead to more than 80 deaths, most of them among children…. Ultimately, Green and other medical professionals helped vaccinate 37,000 people throughout the country. They staved off more deaths, but he said thousands of people suffered and countless others likely developed encephalopathy, a condition that can cause inflammation in the nervous system that can lead to hearing loss, blindness or intellectual disability. At the time, Kennedy blamed the dozens of measles deaths on the vaccine itself. There was no evidence for his claim…. Green urged President-elect Donald Trump to rethink Kennedy’s nomination and instead consider him for a different post. ‘There may be a very good place for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,’ he said. ‘This is not partisan. This is not political. This is medical.’” • But–
“Watchdog group accuses RFK Jr. of voter fraud” [Politico]. “A complaint filed by the left-leaning watchdog group Accountable.US on Wednesday morning and shared exclusively with POLITICO, alleged that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. committed felony election fraud when he voted in the 2024 election…. The complaint states that Kennedy voted by mail and his ballot was received by the Westchester County board of elections on Nov. 2. The primary residence listed on the ballot was to a home in Katonah — an address about 45 miles outside of New York City that has been central to previous court challenges from Democratic-leaning groups arguing Kennedy did not actually live there and should not be eligible to be on the ballot in the state when he ran as an independent candidate.” In a previous case “Kennedy had argued he’d been renting a room from a childhood friend in Katonah, but that friend’s spouse testified that Kennedy had only spent one night at the residence.” • More lawfare, though. Seems to me this undercuts Green’s effort, which is far more important.
Lawfare
“Trump is laying out his legal takeover this week — before he even takes office” [LawDork]. “On Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to extend ‘a sitting President’s complete immunity from criminal prosecution’ to the ‘Presidential transition’ period or, at the least, to stop the sentencing while appeals continue. And, in another matter now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, they asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday to block the current Justice Department from issuing any final report from Special Counsel Jack Smith because it would ‘interfer[e] with President Trump’s transition efforts and harm[] the institution of the Presidency, all to the detriment of the American people.’”
The Wizard of Kalorama™
Sharing a laugh with Hitler:
We need to get Jackie G to do some lip reading here.
What did Trump say to make Obama laugh. pic.twitter.com/lKRGgd36rt
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 9, 2025
Democrats en déshabillé
“With Bass abroad, even Democrats are slamming LA mayor over wildfires” [Politico]. “[M]oderate Democrat Rick Caruso, a real estate mogul who lost his mayoral bid to Bass in 2022, spent the morning making local TV appearances blasting Bass for traveling to Ghana, despite reports as early as last week about an impending wind storm…. Bass’ decision to not return from Ghana sooner drew criticism Wednesday from even the left flank of political media…. Bass is still flying back to Los Angeles, and her spokespeople didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about her current location.” • Oopsie.
Republican Funhouse
“Falsehoods around the L.A. fires are proliferating on the right” [Philip Bump, WaPo]. “We should begin by noting that most of the criticisms — about the hydrants or water diversion or the LAFD itself — have nothing to do with why the fires erupted and spread so quickly. Instead, hurricane-force Santa Ana winds quickly spread small fires across areas that were unusually dry. Wildfires have long been a challenge in California; what’s unfolding in Los Angeles is an overlap of factors that increase the risks of wildfires spreading… It’s 2020 election denialism wearing a different outfit.” • I think Bump has the politics wrong, or at least not completely right. California is a one-party state, run by Democrats. On the Democrat side, that leads to corruption, backscratching, and whatever the political party equivalent of inbreeding is. As for the Republicans, they’re desperate to regain power. Everything gets viewed through that lens, and hence the extreme display of “any stick to beat a dog” on display this week. For example:
NEW: The Los Angeles Fire Department has resorted to using handbags to throw water on the fires.
Los Angeles is the 2nd largest city in the wealthiest country in the world and their fire department is fighting fires with women’s purses.
Wild.pic.twitter.com/nUxcgCal2o
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 9, 2025
I like Rugg well enough, but this is wrong and worse, lazy. Plus “handbag” is obvious feminization, designed to induce… Well, I’m having a hard time integrating “knee-jerk” and “knuckle-dragging” into the same sentence, so I will just move along. This whole California Republican discourse forgets, or represses, that Los Angeles was built on a desert, so you expect dry tinder filling the canyons, water problems, wind…
Realignment and Legitimacy
“The Luigi Mangione effect may supercharge the need for security guards, which just made LinkedIn’s fastest-growing jobs list for the first time” [Fortune]. “LinkedIn’s 2025 Jobs on the Rise report details the fastest-growing positions in the U.S. over the past three years. As expected with the A.I. boom, advanced technology roles were the most popular. But surprisingly, security guards have ranked as the tenth fast-growing job in the U.S. right now…. Andrew Seaman, news editor for jobs and career development at LinkedIn, tells Fortune this could reflect reduced police forces, the cannabis industry’s need for guards, and a rise of in-person activities…. ‘We’re getting calls from everybody,’ Glen Kucera, president of enhanced protection services at Allied Universal, told Fortune last month. ‘Demand for the security business follows events. If there’s a specific incident, then companies say, ‘I need to protect my executives. I need to protect my employees from this happening again.’”
“Exclusive: Young Americans sympathize more with CEO shooting suspect than victim” [Axios]. “When asked with whom they sympathize more, 45% of respondents chose suspect Luigi Mangione, 17% chose Thompson, and 37% said neither. 48% said they view the killing as totally or somewhat justified. Those findings chime with an Emerson College poll which found that 41% of voters under 30 found the killing ‘acceptable,’ far more than in any other age group.” • Hmm.
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
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Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
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TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
Wastewater
This week[1] CDC December 30
Last week[2] CDC (until next week):
Variants [3] CDC December 21
Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC December 28
Hospitalization
★ New York[5] New York State, data January 8:
National [6] CDC Janurary 2, 2005:
Positivity
National[7] Walgreens January 6:
Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic January 4:
Travelers Data
Positivity[9] CDC December 16:
Variants[10] CDC December 16
Deaths
Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC November 20:
Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC November 20:
LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (CDC) Seeing more red and more orange, but nothing new at major hubs.
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.
[4] (ED) A little uptick.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped.
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.
[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.
[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.
[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.
[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.
[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.
Stats Watch
Employment Situation: “United States Challenger Job Cuts” [Trading Economics]. “US employers announced 38,792 job cuts in December 2024, the least in five months.”
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Manufacturing: “Boeing 747 Wing Panel Was Found At Heathrow Months After Falling Off” [Simple Flying]. “A wing panel that fell off a Boeing 747 freighter upon landing was discovered in a grass area next to the runway at London Heathrow Airport (LHR). After inquiries were made, it was discovered that the panel had been there for over two months, having detached from a One Air 747-400 freighter that landed in early January 2024. London Heathrow has a sophisticated FOD radar detection system that is capable of picking up debris as small as a screw. However, this system only scans the hard runway surface, not the grass areas surrounding the runways, which explains why this piece was missed for two months. LHR’s operator, Heathrow Airport Holdings, added that because it was winter, the grass areas were not mown as frequently, but if they had been, then the missing part would have been discovered sooner.” • Makes you wonder how many other aircraft parts there are, scattered about.
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Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 32 Fear (previous close: 32 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 26 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jan 8 at 8:59:48 PM ET.
Poetry Nook
“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (facsimile) [Richard Brautigan] (1967):
But that’s not going to happen, is it? It’s the very last thing that would happen…
Photo Book
“The Honorable Parts” [Scope of Work]. “[Christopher Payne] will apparently return to the same factory dozens of times, waiting for the moment when a production run lines up just right, or the material being processed is just the right color, or — I don’t know — his subject finally lifts their hand in a particularly elegant way. Payne is an artist, and his art documents, explains, and valorizes manufacturing, fabrication, and maintenance work. Aspects of Payne’s work might be categorized as genre art. He captures moments in everyday time; he captures human intention and effort; he captures the infrastructure required to make stuff. His subjects are often highly engineered (he has photographed ASML’s EUV machines, Boeing’s 787 assembly line, and NASA’s Space Launch System), but just as often they’re highly soulful (Payne published a book about Steinway pianos; he has also photographed Martin’s guitar factory and Zildjian’s cymbal production process). Regardless of what he’s shooting, Payne’s photographs often feel just as carefully assembled as the objects in them.” • I don’t like all of it, but some of it I really like (Image courtesy of Christopher Payne):
Gallery
“The Uses and Abuses of Manet’s Olympia” [nonsite.org]. Review of Darcy Grigsby’s new book, Creole: Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century (2022). On Laure, the Black maid (model) in Manet’s Olympia: “As Grigsby declares, the ‘‘freedom’ [of black women] to earn money as models inevitably, insidiously, connoted slavery and their incapacity to do so; their modernity was recast as a sham.’ According to this New Jim Crow-type account, slavery was prohibited in name only. Thus, we reach Grigsby’s extraordinary thesis, that the singular ‘value of Manet’s picture reside[s] in its refusal to sentimentalize the inequities of modernity, including the subordinate status of the black working-class woman to her white counterpart.’ Olympia, in other words, is both an instance of, and a commentary on, white privilege: ‘one model was more vulnerable and subject to violence; one was more likely to be treated as yet another object, as if slavery lingered. One woman connoted such dehumanization and dispossession—the black woman whom many art historians failed to see.’ In Grigsby’s world, the real battle is not between capital and labor, but between white and black workers. This is the ideal scenario for capital: divide and conquer, worker against worker.”
Zeitgeist Watch
“Historic Los Angeles wildfires are anything but ‘unprecedented’” [Wildfire Today]. “These fires may well be the most destructive for L.A., but are only considered unprecedented by those who have forgotten the past history of fire in the area – or forgotten the precedents of the Camp Fire of 2018 or the Australian Black Summer Fires of 2019-20 or Greece of 2023, and others. The wildfire risks for these parts of L.A. have been well documented over many years, and a similar conflagration happened in the city less than two decades earlier. One of the most read articles on Wildfire Today this week – possibly mistakenly due to their similarities – is a round-up of the 2019 fires around L.A.” And: “Apart from the ‘perfect storm’ scenarios of the Palisades and Sayre, experts have known for decades that much of California’s land is dependent on fire. Nearly 10 years ago, researchers concluded that weather (mostly the Santa Ana winds) and the spatial distribution of built property were the key determinants of risk in the southern California landscape: ‘adequate planning of the changes in the built environment…is going to be vital for managing risk from fire under future climates.’ Almost 20 years ago, experts drew on studies from the early 1970s on ways to specifically stop conflagrations from burning in Southern California, saying ‘Through strategic fuel management planning, we could influence the total number and size of the (conflagration) occurrences as well as their geographic distribution and thereby mitigate the impacts of too much of the ‘wrong kind of fire.’” • Well, yeah, but that woiuld interfere with real estate development, and who wants that? (See also Are the Canadian Wildfires Really “Natural” Disasters? and Are the Californian Wildfires Really “Natural” Disasters? at NC.
“Anatomy of L.A. fire catastrophe: Embers that traveled for miles, ‘chaotic’ winds and terrible timing” [MSN]. “Santa Ana winds are infamous for driving fast-moving fires in Southern California, pushing embers well beyond a blaze’s boundary and into neighborhoods and across major roadways. But officials say the winds that fueled devastating fires in three parts of Los Angeles County were much more erratic and unpredictable than a typical dry offshore wind pattern — and struck areas unaccustomed to such events. The life-threatening windstorm that prompted several days of dire warnings exploded into a crisis even worse than firefighters predicted, with embers flying an estimated two to three miles ahead of the established fire and in every direction. The extraordinary winds have created extreme fire behavior almost impossible to anticipate, confounding efforts to establish secure containment lines or utilize firefighting aircraft. They have also led to major structure losses, widespread evacuations and ongoing destruction. ‘Normally, under a sustained Santa Ana condition, we have fires that are long and narrow,’ said Anthony Marrone, Los Angeles County Fire Chief. ‘However, with these erratic winds and this PDS, or particularly dangerous situation, the winds were constantly changing.’” • PDF = particularly dangerous situation. What a great acronym!
“Firefighters continue to battle blazes as L.A. braces for more days of fire weather” [Los Angeles Times]. “Wind speeds weakened across the Los Angeles region Thursday morning, with isolated gusts reaching 35 miles per hour in the Malibu area and 58 miles per hour in the San Gabriel Mountains, said Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s office in Oxnard. But after a lull throughout the day, winds are expected to strengthen Thursday night.”
News of the Wired
“Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep” [Science]. “Scientists think sleep is the brain’s rinse cycle, when fluid percolating through the organ flushes out chemical waste that accumulated while we were awake. But what propels this circulation has been uncertain. A study of mice, reported today in Cell, suggests regular contractions of blood vessels in the brain, stimulated by the periodic release of a chemical cousin of adrenaline, push the fluid along.” • Not that kind of brainwashing!
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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, lichen, 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 JG:
JG writes: “Here’s a photo of our little Japanese Maple. It’s difficult to capture the luminosity and sometimes looks nearly magenta with the sun shining through it. Wonder why the tips of the leaves are white? Luckily the deer haven’t been rubbing their antlers on it as they have some of our other maples.” Normally I prefer pictures that are minimum of 600px wide, but this photo is so very very red!
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This entry was posted in Guest Post, Water Cooler on January 9, 2025.
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