By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Lark Bunting, Pawnee National Grasslands, Weld, Colorado, United States. Adult male flight song. A lot going on in the grasslands!
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
Capitol Seizure
“Jan. 6 transcripts reveal new details on how Pa. Republicans tried to help Trump stay in the White House” [Philadephia Inquirer]. • As I’ve said, I think contacts with state election officials is likely to be the most fruitful line of enquiry, whether in PA or GA. A President can’t be calling them up and asking to “find” votes for him! He should have people for that!* That said, “tried”? We’re not charging Trump with attempted insurrection, right? NOTE * It was occurred to me that whatever Trump was up to during the Capitol Seizure was not a SCAD, because the “S” component — the State — was really missing or wholly inadequate. (For example, it’s difficult to stage a coup without a military faction on your side). And that was really Trump’s problem all along, wasn’t it? (For example, he gave orders for a troop withdrawal from Syria, his prerogative as Commander-in-Chief. But The Blob simply ignored him.)
Biden Administration
Moar eugenics:
The FY2023 omnibus bill has $0 for COVID. This is the *fourth* time Biden has failed to secure emergency pandemic relief this year. A timeline: https://t.co/XI5NIku94h pic.twitter.com/VR0luzlAlL
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) December 20, 2022
2024
“Kamala Harris, A Very Turbulent Year in America, and the Challenge of Being First” (interview) [Vanity Fair]. “This idea of public-private partnerships is something Harris’s team is particularly committed to. During our meeting [Harris] told me about time spent working on community banks and banks focused on the problems in developing areas. Still the root causes of migration aren’t going to be solved with a few billion dollars in investments. Harris told me, ‘. That’s about food insecurity, and if you can’t eat where you live, you leave.” • I don’t think the underlined text is actually a sentence. Meanwhile, the best thing you could do for Mexico in terms of food security would be to stop overwhelming their farmers with cheap, bad corn.
“2023 Will Be the Year for Republicans to Decide How Hard They’re Willing to Fight Trump” [Morning Consult]. “According to the Dec. 10-14 survey, DeSantis leads Trump, 45% to 44%, in a hypothetical head-to-head primary matchup, with another 11% undecided. The governor of a state with one of the highest percentages of residents older than 65 gets his strongest backing from America’s oldest voters, a core GOP constituency, along with majority support among Christians and — most notably given the party’s recent losses — suburbanites. Trump is strongest among the potential Republican primary voters with the lowest levels of educational attainment, a constant throughout his time on the political stage, while the two Republican candidates are polling even among base voters who backed Trump in 2020.”
“”We Will Get Destroyed”: Evangelicals Are Quietly Ditching Donald Trump’s 2024 Bid” [Vanity Fair]. “‘There’s a lot of people who share a lot of our similar thoughts but don’t want to go on record,’ Bob Vander Plaats, one of America’s top evangelical thought leaders, who hesitantly backed Trump in 2016, tells me. ‘You can see that it’s almost a silent majority right now,’ he says. Everett Piper, a Washington Times columnist and the former president of an evangelical university, published a post-midterm polemic last month arguing that Trump is ‘hurting…not helping’ American evangelicals. ‘The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go,’ Piper added. ‘If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.’ Earlier this month, televangelist James Robison, who served as a spiritual adviser to Trump, likened the former president to a ‘little elementary schoolchild’ while addressing the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. Another major evangelical leader, who requested anonymity, tells me there’s ‘no doubt’ that if Trump wins the primary, Republicans will ‘get crushed in the general.’” • (Hegemonic) PMCs hate Trump. Even conservative ones. (Actually, “hate” is probably too strong a word; these evangelicals are calculating their odds of retaining power. They haven’t lost their minds, like liberal PMCs.)
“McConnell calls out ‘diminished’ Trump, vows not to bow to his candidates in 2024” [NBC]. “Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell deferred to former President Donald Trump’s handpicked candidates in competitive midterm races, culminating in jarring defeats and a larger Democratic majority that bucked the odds. He promises not to let that happen again, insisting he will “actively look for quality candidates” to promote in the 2024 primaries. In a rare and pointed criticism of the former president, who’s seeking a comeback in two years, McConnell said Trump’s power is on the wane and called on him to back off Senate primaries. ‘Here’s what I think has changed: I think the former president’s political clout has diminished,’ McConnell told NBC News on Wednesday in a wide-ranging interview in his Capitol Hill office.” • McConnell isn’t saying this in the hopes his words will come true if he simply says them; I don’t view McConnell as the slightest bit performative. So, interesting.
2022
Odd:
House Republicans now have three odd voter registration stories:
1) Rep.-Elect George Santos R-NY doesn’t seem to live where he’s registered to vote
2) Rep. Drew Ferguson R-GA doesn’t live where he voted
3) Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks R-IA doesn’t live where she’s registered. pic.twitter.com/wKCaXrCEtO— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) December 21, 2022
Odd, because typically oppo is done before an election not, as here, after. Are Democrats now experimenting with removing electeds from office?
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.
* * * Well, well. Look at the Democrats in SBF’s cuddle puddle:
Yep– that was one of the big Hakeem Jeffries’ moves; he got Bankman-Fried ($1 million), DMFI ($3 million), AIPAC ($282K), Third Way ($500K), Reid Hoffman ($151K), Mark Pocan ($104K) to all gang up against @NinaTurner. I’m sure you can guess why the bad guys fear her https://t.co/CDGvu5oo6D
— Howie Klein (@downwithtyranny) December 22, 2022
“Three notes on Sean McElwee’s campaign finance scandal” [Carl Beijer]. “Sean had a small network of loyalists and a larger audience of sympathizers among mainstream Democrats, but among rank-and-file activists and organizers, in left media and academia, from the lowliest dirtbag left Twitter posters to staffers in the House and Senate, Sean has long been regarded as an ambitious opportunist. This is not a story of the left being hoodwinked and watching their hero crash and burn; this is a story of journalists believing his hype for years and the left saying ‘we told you so.’”
IA: “Iowa Democrats ‘looking into’ $250,000 donation from former FTX cryptocurrency executive” [Des Moines Register]. “A former executive of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX appears to have made a one-time $250,000 donation to the Iowa Democratic Party — a contribution that is likely to come under scrutiny as investigations into the company and its leaders intensifies. Nishad Singh, a former director of engineering for the embattled FTX, made the donation to the Iowa Democratic Party June 17, according to finance records filed with the state. The party reported raising nearly $4.6 million between January and October 2022.” • That’s a lot!
Realignment and Legitimacy
Nah. Science fiction stuff!
what if our representatives were a tax-financed public service rather than our having to buy them?
— @interfluidity@fosstodon.org (@interfluidity) December 20, 2022
“Churchgoing and belief in God stand at historic lows, despite a megachurch surge” [The Hill]. “Church membership, church attendance and belief in God all declined during the pandemic years, survey data suggest, accelerating decades long trends away from organized worship. In-person church attendance plummeted by 45 percent in the pandemic, according to an ABC News analysis. At least one-fifth of Americans today embrace no religion at all…. The lone, striking countertrend is a steep rise in nondenominational Protestants, who attend churches outside the “mainline” denominations — the once-ubiquitous Baptists, Methodists and Lutherans. Nondenominational Protestants — “nons” — became a majority in 2021, signaling a new era of churches and clergies untethered from religious tradition.” • Interesting….
#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 acceleration or doubling in cases that I would expect to see based on past surges. There is also the TripleDemic aspect, which I don’t know enough about.
I am calling a “Something Awful.” It’s gonna be bad, in some new way, and we don’t know how, yet. Wastewater has taken off in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, right on time, two weeks after Thanksgiving. Those are not only in themselves large cities, they are all the sites of international airports (reminiscent of the initial surge in spring 2020, which emanated, via air travel, from New York). Wastewater is a leading indicator for cases, which in turn lead hospitalization (and death). In addition, positivity has begun to increase again (Walgreens), and BQ.1* has taken over. Finally, I’m hearing a ton of anecdotes (and do add yours in comments).
Stay safe out there! If you are planning to travel on Xmas, do consider your plans carefully.
–>
• Metrics are important!
I’m begging public health experts to help set a point of reference for officials and journalists other than “better or worse” than last winter, when over 150,000 Americans died of covid in a three month period. This framing is an outrageous normalization of mass death.
— wsbgnl (@wsbgnl) November 23, 2022
• Maskstravaganza: “Why mask mandates aren’t coming back even though covid is” [WaPo]. “‘You didn’t see a lot of people walking around with masks in a bad flu season pre-pandemic, and as you know, not everyone is amenable to wearing a mask,’ CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently told The Washington Post.” • Not everybody is amenable to wearing a seatbelt. Or not smoking in public. Amazing the Post doesn’t call this quote out in any way.
• A good question of “immunity debt” goons:
If hand washing is an effective cold and flu prevention behavior then why hasn’t it caused immunity debt? 🤔
— Thomas Finch, MD, MBA (@FinchTH) December 22, 2022
• “Transmission Route of Rhinovirus – the causative agent for common cold. A systematic review”
Transmission
Here is CDC’s interactive map by county set to community transmission (the “red map”). (This is the map CDC wants only hospitals to look at, not you.) The map updates Monday-Friday by 8 pm:
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 December 22:
1.3%. Increase. NOTE: Of course, it’s an open question how good a proxy Walgreen’s self-selected subjects are for the general population, especially because they didn’t go the home-testing route, but we go with the data we have.
Wastewater
Wastewater data (CDC), December 19:
Too much red (especially with Ohio back online). JFK/LGA (Queens County, NY), ORD (Cook County, IL), SFO (San Francisco, CA), LAX (Los Angeles), and ATL (Cobb County, GA) are all red.
December 18:
NOT UPDATED And MWRA data, December 20:
Lambert here: Up in the North, down in the South, but the trend is still clear. Presumably we’ll see a drop when the students leave town.
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.
NOT UPDATED Variant data, national (Walgreens), December 11:
Lambert here: BQ.1* dominates, XBB coming up fast on the outside. Not sure why this data is coming out before CDC’s, since in the past they both got it from Pango on Fridays.
Variant data, national (CDC), December 3 (Nowcast off):
BQ.1* takes first place. Note the appearance of XBB. Here is Region 2, the Northeast, where both BQ.1* and XBB are said to higher, and are:
• As a check, since New York is a BQ.1* hotbed, New York hospitalization, updated December 22:
Resuming the upward climb after a short plateau.
• Hospitalization data for Queens, updated December 19:
We’ll see what is hospitalization is like about two weeks into January, after holiday travel has ended.
Deaths
Death rate (Our World in Data):
I don’t know why this chart has turned red. Perhaps they’re holding a masque?
Total: 1,115,748 – 1,114,931 = 817 (817 * 365 = 298,205 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.
Stats Watch
Manufacturing: “United States Durable Goods Orders” [Trading Economics]. “Durable goods orders in the US, which measure the cost of orders received by manufacturers of goods meant to last at least three years, fell by 2.1% month-over-month in November 2022. It was the sharpest decrease since April 2020 and well above market forecasts of a 0.6% decline.”
Housing: “United States Building Permits” [Trading Economics]. “Building permits in the United States tumbled 10.6 percent from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.351 million in November 2022, the lowest level since June 2020 and compared to a preliminary estimate of 1.342 million, revised data showed. Permits, a proxy for future construction, have been falling as soaring prices and rising mortgage rates hit demand and activity.”
Income: “United States Personal Income” [Trading Economics]. “Personal income in the United States increased 0.4 percent from a month earlier in November of 2022, following a 0.7 percent rise in October and above market expectations of a 0.3 percent gain. The increase primarily reflected increases in compensation and personal income receipts on assets.”
Tech: “Silicon Valley is coming for your gut biome” [NBC]. • Rent-A-Biome™. No.
Tech: “Meta and Alphabet lose dominance over US digital ads market” [Financial Times]. “Meta and Alphabet have lost their dominance over the digital advertising market they have ruled for years, as the duopoly is hit by fast-growing competition from rivals Amazon, TikTok, Microsoft and Apple. The share of US ad revenues held by Facebook’s parent Meta and Google owner Alphabet is projected to fall by 2.5 percentage points to 48.4 per cent this year, the first time the two groups will not hold a majority share of the market since 2014, according to research group Insider Intelligence. This will mark the fifth consecutive annual decline for the duopoly, whose share of the market has fallen from a peak of 54.7 per cent in 2017 and is forecast to decline to 43.9 per cent by 2024. Worldwide, Meta and ‘Four years ago, you wouldn’t be talking about either [TikTok or Amazon] in advertising,’ said [Jerry Dischler, head of ads at Google]. ‘So it’s really telling that more and more people are acknowledging that advertising is a great and scalable business model.’” • Oh good. More doomscrolling, clickbait, and virality.
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 38 Fear (previous close: 35 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 43 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Dec 23 at 12:20 PM EST.
Xmas Pregame Festivities
The real meaning (making some assumptions about history, here) of Christ’s birth, as expressed by Mary, his mother. A thread:
Justin Welby, as Archbishop of Canterbury, was pontificating on Twitter yesterday. I noted he said he said ‘The Magnificat turns the world upside down’. I agree, it does. So trust me, this is all about economics, and why the Church is failing on this key issue. A thread….
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) December 23, 2022
And:
Justin Welby, as Archbishop of Canterbury, was pontificating on Twitter yesterday. I noted he said he said ‘The Magnificat turns the world upside down’. I agree, it does. So trust me, this is all about economics, and why the Church is failing on this key issue. A thread….
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) December 23, 2022
Quoting the third of the Magnificat’s four parts:
This is radical stuff. It is Mary’s summary of what she thinks the mission of Jesus will be about said before he is born. Now, of course you can doubt that, but the point is that this is right there at the start of the Christian story. It is what Luke thought it was about.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) December 23, 2022
And:
And to reiterate the point, Luke returns to the theme when discussing what Jesus said he thought his own ministry would be about when giving his first ever public ministry in the synagogue in Nazareth. In Luke 4: 18-19 he said (next tweet):
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) December 23, 2022
Luke 4: 18-19:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) December 23, 2022
And:
Jesus was clear in the original language: as the Magnificat foretold his mission was to declare radical economic transformation by liberating poor people from debt.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) December 23, 2022
A Magnificat:
The 420
“Have a safe trip: Oregon trains magic mushroom facilitators” [Associated Press]. “[30 men and women] are among the first crop of students being trained how to accompany patients tripping on psilocybin, as Oregon prepares to become the first U.S. state to offer controlled use of the psychedelic mushroom to the public. Expected to be available to the public in mid- or late-2023, the program is charting a potential course for other states. Oregon voters approved Ballot Measure 109 on psilocybin by an 11% margin in 2020. In November, Colorado voters also passed a ballot measure allowing regulated use of ‘magic mushrooms’ starting in 2024. On Dec. 16, California state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco introduced a bill to legalize psilocybin and other psychedelic substances.” • Maybe I should have filed this under “Xmas Pregame Festivities”? Maybe not–
“A Bad Trip With The Toad Shaman” [Texas Observer]. “[Brooke] Tarrer, leader of a group she calls the Universal Shamans of the New Tomorrow, holds a lighter under a glass vial at the end of a pipe. The white, dried toad poison inside begins to smoke, and the man inhales it deeply. She helps him lie down, extends his legs and brushes a fan made of condor feathers along his body. For about 20 minutes, the man remains nearly motionless, as he undergoes an intense psychedelic experience. Meanwhile, Tarrer and four facilitators also dressed in white with red sashes, serve the powerful ‘sacrament’ to three other people. One woman sobs uncontrollably for a few minutes. Another man writhes, heaves and drools in the sand for nearly half an hour. All emerge from their trance with hypnotic, euphoric smiles. Then, suddenly, the ritual takes an unnerving turn as Tarrer shifts her attention to me….” • Oh.
Our Famously Free Press
Somehow I don’t think Seymour Hersh would get the same treatment:
Today closes a remarkable career for @CNN‘s @barbarastarrcnn, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps. Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this Nation closer to its military. She will forever be missed. pic.twitter.com/iAyFWJmqwR
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) December 20, 2022
“Twitter changed science — what happens now it’s in turmoil?” [Nature]. “For hundreds of thousands of scientists, Twitter is a sounding board, megaphone and common room: a place to broadcast research findings, debate issues in academia and interact with people who they wouldn’t normally meet up with. ‘I would never be able to know so many scientists without it,’ says Oded Rechavi, who works on transgenerational inheritance at Tel Aviv University in Israel. ‘It increases democracy in science and gives you more opportunities, no matter where you are.’ Since the site’s founding in 2006, Twitter executives have often asserted that it aims to be nothing less than a ‘public town square’ of communication; it now claims almost 250 million daily users. At that scale, abuse, misinformation and bots have been ever-present, but for many researchers, the advantages of rapid, widespread communication to each other and an engaged public outweighed these problems. The threat of Twitter changing radically under its new management, or perhaps disappearing altogether, has raised concerns and questions for researchers. How well has this vast social-media platform benefited science, and to what extent has it harmed it? If it disappears, would researchers want to recreate it elsewhere?” • Let me know how recreating Twitter elsewhere scales….
Zeitgeist Watch
“How to Keep a Christmas Tree Alive and Fresh” [Good Housekeeping]. From the final paragraph: “When you’re officially done with your tree, you have a couple options: You can start a new compost pile with it, recycle it or turn it into mulch yourself.” • Filing this here because I don’t think these suggestions would have appeared twenty or perhaps even ten years ago. Progress!
Groves of Academe
“Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” [Stanford University]. “The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) is a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford. EHLI is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group in December 2020. The goal of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is to eliminate* many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased (e.g., disability bias, ethnic bias, ethnic slurs, gender bias, implicit bias, sexual bias) language in Stanford websites and code.” • For example:
No, it very doesn’t:
Anyhow, nice work if you can get it.
“3 Princeton DEI staff members resign, alleging lack of support” [Daily Princetonian]. “‘Folks like myself are treated like we’re on an assembly line,’ [Jordan “JT” Turner, former Associate Director of Athletics for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)] said. ‘You hire us, you fire us, and you bring someone else in, and people will just stay in their roles of leadership and get away with it.’” Yes, that’s how the modern university works. More : “[Dr. Jim Scholl] explained that the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity hosted periodic meetings and luncheons for ‘DEI practitioners’ on campus. As one of the staff members considered to be a ‘DEI practitioner,’ they said that these luncheons and other meetings of the group, as well as the label itself, often felt performative.” “Considered to be” by whom? I don’t want to go all credentialist — well, maybe I do, this is a university — but what the heck is a DEI “practioner”? More: “[University Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss] emphasized that there are 15 departments at the University engaged in DEI learning paths, which will include University-wide learning and guided resources, as well as facilitated workshops and self-directed study.” • I suppose that DEI practioners do “learning paths” (different from courses or workshops, apparently.). dunno. I shouldn’t react so badly to exciting new vocabularies, I suppose. To me, this all boils down to academic politics being a rough game. But that’s why they pay you the big bucks. (Also, and I hate even to bring this up, but the topic of the article is the three people who resigned: Turner, Scholl, and Ross (I only mentioned Scholl). That makes using the “they” pronoun a stumbling block for the reader who is pressed temporally; it’s impossible to know whether “they” refers to one, two, or all three, so one must constantly refer back to check.)
“Wendell Berry: UK’s plans for Memorial Hall dishonor art, artists, history and ‘honest thought.’” [Wendell Berry, Lexington Herald-Leader]. “The university’s allegation against the fresco is that “it depicts in distorted fashion the way enslaved people and other marginalized peoples were treated in Kentucky.” If this statement were to be made in a freshman theme, or in a court of law, it would need to be supported by some sort of authority. Surely in this case we need the testimony of historians who know the history of central Kentucky. If any members of the university’s history department are familiar with the history in question, their silence about it is an embarrassment to them and to the university. In its official disesteem for her work, the university has offered not even a polite regard to Ann O’Hanlon, who was still in her twenties when she painted the fresco, already a remarkably gifted and accomplished young artist. She was also a graduate of the University of Kentucky, which has paid little attention to her and her work until now, when it has allowed to fall upon her, with no effort to limit its damage, the implication that she was a racist. So much for the university’s interest in justice to women. Tanya and I know very well that Ann O’Hanlon was not a racist, as we think is shown by the character of her attention to black people in her fresco. If only to validate their intelligence, President Capilouto and his supporters ought to ask themselves a question that to us is obvious: What would they think of the fresco if there were no black people in it? If only to vindicate their reputation as critics and patrons of the arts, the president and his supporters need to remember that they paid the artist Karyn Olivier to make a second prominent work of art in Memorial Hall that would respond to the O’Hanlon fresco from the point of view of a black person. But now they appear to have abandoned any interest in her or her work, as well as her appeal to keep the fresco in place.” • Obviously, the University of Kentucky’s administrators are greatly overpaid.” • Here’s the mural again (a portion of it):
Class Warfare
Not “surreal” if you listen to the Fed. Or maybe it is:
It’s surreal to watch financial news talk about regular people having money to spend and job security as a negative thing. If you ever needed convincing that the health of “the economy” is a conspiracy against working people, watch this clip from CNBC that just aired. pic.twitter.com/MDwsqj6tdu
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) December 22, 2022
News of the Wired
“The Etymology of Unobtanium” [Smithsonian]. “The silly-sounding name of the material provided a ready punchline at the time, and even 13 years later, some still haven’t figured out unobtanium is a real thing. Not an actual, corporeal substance like copper or tin or sour grapes, but a concept in engineering dating back at least as far as the 1950s. James R. Hansen’s space history Engineer in Charge: A History of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, 1917-1958 documents the term’s usage in an October 1957 meeting lamenting ‘the lack of a superior high-temperature material (which the Langley structures people dubbed ‘unobtanium’).’ The word became a sort of placeholder for an unknown material that would have the properties designers required of it, like plugging X into an equation.”
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