Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-01

Lambert here: So many threads to pick up again!

Birdsong of the Day

Readers, IIRC you liked mimidae. Here is a duet:

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) BRICS handles Trump.

(2) Brainless human clones.

(3) Long Covid.

Look for the Helpers

TikTok’s algo has decided to feed me videos like this (I use a Singapore VPN address):

@fiuga_1 专家骑摩托车登山 #videoaventuras #incredibles #campo #china ♬ မူရင်းအသံ - KoKo

This TikTok is actually an example of a genre: There is a mountain and a mountain road, with a drainage ditch alongside. One or two people (generally women) stand on the roadside, with eight or ten pieces of luggage, bags of rice, pallets of bricks, large rainwater storage jugs, refrigeration units… A motorcyclist appears and they flag him down. Everybody then points up the mountain (“Up there?” [all point] “Really?” [all point]). The rider then dismounts, puts chains on the rear wheel, and everybody ties the goods onto the motorcycle’s rear rack with bungee cords. The woman climbs onto the pillion, and the driver guns the motorcycle over the ditch and up an absurdly muddy, rutted, and dangerous mountain switchback (sometimes arriving safely, but generally the video cuts out before that).

The feed I am getting is from China, but the same genre also exists (or is rebranded) for Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Korea). Obviously, at least to this Westerner, these TikToks are government propaganda of some sort, if only because they are funded, and I don’t see a busines model. (There is an variant genre where a motorcycle gets stuck trying to cross the drainage ditch. A car then appears, and the car driver heaves the motorcyle out of the ditch onto the mountain track, and off and up the motorcycle goes. The car driver then contemplates the situation, looks about, and drags a large flat rock across the drainage ditch, so the next people trying to cross have a bridge. The reveal here is that in this variant, there is always a second car stationary in the background — for the camera crew — and very coincidentally a nice big flat rock is always ready to hand.)

But the moral of these stories is very simple: Helping people (and especially people who can afford cars helping people who can only afford motorcycles). I’ve never seen money change hands. Is that sort of propaganda so very wrong?

My email address is down by the plant; please put “Helpers” in the subject line and send a link there (in our increasingly desperate and fragile neoliberal society, everyday normal incidents and stories of “the communism of everyday life” are what I am looking for).

Politics

Democrats en Déshabillé

“Indivisible’s Ezra Levin On No Kings, Letting Go, And Building A Mass Pro-Democracy Movement In America” [Hopium Chronicles]. “If you haven’t found a No Kings event near you head here. Here’s their latest map of events on March 28th. Thousands and thousands events across the country. So remarkable…..”

• Wow, the only map I can recall that solid was the map of Sanders’ donors in 2016. Oh well. Anyhow, what’s truly “remarkable”: The Clinton-adjacent Indivisible “movement” managed to get millions to come out under the most analytically vacuous political slogan imaginable. Is Trump a hereditary head of state? Is Barron next in the line of succession? No? Then take a seat. Sheesh.

“Congressional Progressives Ready To Shower Us With Reasonable Policies That Make Life More Affordable” [Wonkette]. “On Wednesday, the [Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC)] released the New Affordability Agenda, an exciting (really!) new plan to make life more manageable for those Americans who spend slightly less time in tuxedos and evening gowns. The proposal includes a slate of recently introduced and soon-to-be introduced pieces of legislation aimed at lowering the cost of groceries, utilities, housing, and prescription drugs as well as taking on the special interests that are making everything so expensive. Not only are they good policies that will help people, they are also extremely popular policies that people actually want… [M]aking prescription drugs affordable…. [B]ringing down the cost of groceries…. [A]ffordable housing and a soon-to-be introduced bill from Maxine Waters that will provide first-time homeowners with $20,000 in down payments…. Utilities… Affordable childcare…. Affordable gas… Ban AI price gouging and wage fixing… [V]acation time…. [O]vertime wages are twice one’s regular wage… [L]mit the amount that people and corporations are allowed to contribute to Super PACs to $5000 a year.” And Wonkette concludes: “And that’s how we win. Well, that and opposing this stupid ass war, this stupid ass ballroom and all the other stupid ass things that no one wants.” • Oh, right, forgot about that. Penny ante stuff that will never pass, because the people who own the party won’t let it pass. I mean, prescription drug prices as opposed to single payer (itself a compromise)? Really?

Realignment and Legitimacy

“FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson Issues Warning Letters to CEOs of PayPal, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard About Debanking American Consumers” [(Press Release) Federal Trade Commission (March 26, 2026)]. “The letters issued to the CEOs of PayPal, Stripe, Visa[,] and Mastercard raise concerns about publicly reported examples of financial services companies denying their customers access to services due to their political or religious views. ‘Full participation in commerce and public life necessarily requires that law-abiding individuals can access, and freely participate in, our financial system,’ Chairman Ferguson wrote. ‘It is inconsistent with American values to deny law-abiding individuals the ability to run their legitimate businesses and feed their families because they attracted the ire of rogue American officials, overzealous activists, or, more worryingly, foreign governments seeking to control public discourse,” he continued. ‘That is why President Trump’s August 7, 2025, Executive Order on debanking makes clear that it is unacceptable to debank law-abiding citizens due to ‘political affiliations, religious beliefs, or lawful business activities.’” • When the Canadian government debanked those truckers, that was wrong. Similarly here. Good to see the Democrats on board with this. Oh, wait…

Geopolitics

BRICS handles The Empire:

“Trump’s Gulf War” [Alexander Zevin, New Left Review]. Magisterial. A few samples: “One aspect of this superstructural element of decay—what Bourne described as the ‘oligarchic features hidden behind a smokescreen of democratic principles’—is captured by the outsized role that Israel has played at each stage of the conflict. The outsourcing to Tel Aviv of the decision for war, as outlined by the us Secretary of State, and the adoption of Israeli tactics to fight it, are evidence not only of the ‘oligarchic features’ of the American state, of which the enormous firepower of the Israel lobby in Congress, the media and higher education is but one instance. They also signal the US state’s diminished intellectual capacity: Iran experts critical of the White House approach have been dismissed from the State Department. Of course Witkoff and Kushner are unversed in nuclear science; but that is the point, ensuring the Israeli line is followed.” And: “Since the emergence of fiscal-military states in the early modern era, wars have generally been waged and won by soldiers, industrialists and bureaucrats, not by real-estate developers, streamers, venture capitalists or Bitcoin farmers.” Ouch! And: “Here it is worth recalling something Giovanni Arrighi used to say, that a declining hegemon will always, by dint of its status, have multiple options; but that each option will turn out to have a downside, which will serve to hasten its decline. The downside of Trump’s war for regime change was to trigger the Hormuz shutdown, a move that earlier Washington planners had tended to judge too risky for Tehran to undertake—too destructive of its position in the region. … The decline in American diplomatic niceties and international support between 1991 and 2026, and the alteration in Israel’s role—from embarrassing accoutrement to initiator and co-belligerent—need no underlining. The main lesson of these historical precedents—‘signal crises’, in Arrighi’s vocabulary—is their unintended duration. Trump may call off this phase, or launch a new escalation; but the us–Israeli war on Iran that he began in June 2025 is unlikely to be ending any time soon.” • Well worth reading in full (though to be fair, Trump has wriggled, Houdini-like, out of impossible situations before).

#COVID19

Stay safe out there!

Elite Maleficence

“Trump admin revives COVID origins debate with indictment” [Axios]. “The Justice Department charged David Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with conspiracy and other charges related to tampering with federal records. Morens allegedly hid records related to COVID-19 and research on the origins of the virus by deleting emails on his government account and directing communications to his personal account instead…. Morens’ activity was brought to light in a 2024 congressional investigation that made public emails in which he discussed ways to evade the Freedom of Information Act requests for federal documents and official communications. ‘The best way to avoid FOIA hassles is to delete all emails when you learn a subject is getting sensitive,’ he wrote on June 28, 2021.” • Dude should have used Signal, like DOGE.

Long Covid

“mctuscan heaven” [McMansion Hell (Mar 1, 2026)]. “Not to be over-exuberant, but I genuinely think this is the best McMansion exterior of all time.” Indeed, but the crucial sentence is this: “Howdy folks, I have some good news, which is that, after seven months, I’ve finally recovered from Long Covid. This is not something I particularly want to talk about in depth but it was the worst thing that ever happened to me! Anyway, sorry for the long period without posting that much, but I hope this amazing house (both laudatory/derogatory, that’s dialectics, baby) will make up for the three months I went AWOL.” • Covid is still very much with us, through now completely normalized. Just another tranche of lethality!

“Eclectic door knobs feature in guerrilla Milan design week exhibition” [dezeen]. “A Bunch of Knobs showcased 50 conceptual door knobs attached to a single white door that moved from district to district as a protest against the exorbitant venue fees charged during Milan’s annual design festival…. Designer Alex Lock created a “post-Covid door knob” made from soap that washes the user’s hand as they turn it.” • That handwashing and Covid are still associated in the public mind bespeaks the utter collapse of the public health establishment. Fomite brain damage remains undefeated.

Stats Watch

“United States GDP Growth Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The US economy expanded at an annualized rate of 2.0% in Q1 2026, up from 0.5% in the previous quarter but below market expectations of 2.3%, according to a preliminary estimate. Government spending rebounded by 4.4%, recovering from a 5.6% contraction in Q4 2025, as activity resumed following the end of the government shutdown. Gross private domestic investment increased by 8.7%, compared to 2.3% in the previous quarter, with business investment in equipment and structures surging 10.4%, the fastest in nearly three years, driven in part by rapid spending on artificial intelligence technologies.”

“United States Personal Income” [Trading Economics]. “US personal income rose by 0.6% month-over-month in March 2026, exceeding market expectations of a 0.3% increase, after showing no growth in February. This marked the biggest monthly gain since July 2025, driven primarily by a $64.3 billion rise in compensation, including a $56.1 billion increase in wages and salaries.”

“United States Initial Jobless Claims” [Trading Economics]. “Initial Jobless Claims sank by 26,000 from the previous week to 189,000 on the period ending April 25th, well below market expectations of 215,000, to mark the lowest since 1969. Meanwhile, continuing claims, which are seen as a proxy for outstanding unemployment in the US, fell by 23,000 to 1,785,000 on the previous week, the lowest in two years. New filings remained low despite announcements of job cuts by large companies such as Meta and Nike. The data consolidated recent signals of a robust labor market in the US despite momentary signs of stress earlier in the year.”

“United States Chicago PMI” [Trading Economics]. “The Chicago Business Barometer fell to 49.2 in April 2026 from 52.8 in March, missing market expectations of 53 and signaling a contraction in business activity. The decline reflected the impact of rising energy costs due to the Middle East conflict, with drops in order backlogs, new orders, supplier deliveries, and production.”

Banking: “Banking beyond the law” [Aeon]. “The global financial system is a colossal factory containing an endless web of information assembly lines. Every time you tap your card on a payment terminal, whether it’s for a coffee on the way to work or a new vacuum cleaner, you are sending a new informational signal to that factory. Like raw material, that signal is then loaded on a conveyor belt where it is checked and modified by your bank, the seller’s bank, a payment processor, card network, and other intermediaries as it proceeds.” This process is called “contact-less.” More: “The assembly line may be relatively short for cups of coffee. For more complicated purchases, however, like mortgages and stocks, the transactional chain can become remarkably complex. But not all transactions take place in this factory. There are, in fact, entirely separate payment networks that operate outside the confines of state-regulated information assembly lines. The Chinese refer to them as feiqian (‘flying money’). Arabic speakers prefer the term hawala, whereas the Indian diaspora operates through a practice called hundi. In English, we have developed an ominous phrase to capture these various informal networks: underground banking.” And: “Nobody knows the true scale of this ‘hidden’ financial system. But there is reason to believe that it can be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That volume is primarily driven by those using underground banks to send remittances. Officially recorded remittances from immigrants to their home countries exceeded US $650 billion in 2023. That number does not include the informal money transfers facilitated by underground banks. These networks are not a new phenomenon. They have existed for thousands of years and can be traced back to the ancient Silk Road, where they emerged as a solution to the risks of long-distance trade. Through a trust-based system of credit, Silk Road brokers facilitated advanced payment by issuing such notes, as well as bills of exchange and other instruments. This obviated the need to carry physical coins across long distances.” • The West’s slave traders did exactly the same thing. They didn’t carry chests of old onto the beaches of the Gold Coast; the money moved back in Liverpool. Also, is there a “Flying Money” app?

Tech: “Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones” [MIT Technology Review]. “After operating in secrecy for years, a startup company called R3 Bio, in Richmond, California, suddenly shared details about its work last week—saying it had raised money to create nonsentient monkey ‘organ sacks’ [(!!)] as an alternative to animal testing.” • Yes, that’s how it starts.

Tech: “AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they’re faster, study finds” [The Register]. N=16. “Computer scientists with Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR), a non-profit research group, have published a study showing that AI coding tools made software developers slower, despite expectations to the contrary. Not only did the use of AI tools hinder developers, but it led them to hallucinate, much like the AIs have a tendency to do themselves. The developers predicted a 24 percent speedup, but even after the study concluded, they believed AI had helped them complete tasks 20 percent faster when it had actually delayed their work by about that percentage.” After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20 percent,” the study says. “Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19 percent — AI tooling slowed developers down.” The study involved 16 experienced developers who work on large, open source projects. The developers provided a list of real issues (e.g. bug fixes, new features, etc.) they needed to address – 246 in total – and then forecast how long they expected those tasks would take. The issues were randomly assigned to allow or disallow AI tool usage.” • “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.”

Tech: “When Google’s slop meets webslop, search stops” [Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic]. “[Google AI Overviews] are very, very bad.” Lots of horrifying detail, and this paragraph isn’t even the crescendo:

[T]he existence of [Overviews] citations allowed [HouseFresh’s proprietor, Giselle] Navarro to compile statistics about the sources that Google relies on most heavily for information about [air purifier] product quality:

43.1% of these statements come from product manufacturers’ marketing materials;

19.5% of these statements are sourced from pages that contain no information about the product. Much of the remainder comes from the same “site reputation abuse” that Google said it would stop prioritizing two years ago. An alarming amount of this material is also AI generated: this is the “coprophagic AI” problem in which an AI ingests another AI’s output, producing ever-more nonsensical results.

For me, the enraging thing about this is that clean shared air saves lives, so by polluting the air purifier review space, Google is making our environment more lethal. The whole article is great, and for those who play the ponies, Doctorow’s crescendo is the logic that Google is hellbent on AI “innovation” to keep its price-to-earnings (PE) ratio at 20:1, “growth stock” territory. “Companies with high PE ratios can use their stock in place of money” and “Google’s status as a growth stock has allowed it to buy its way to dominance.”

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 66 Greed (previous close: 66 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 66 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Apr 30 at 8:00:00 PM ET

Rapture Index: Closes up one on Famine. “The fighting in the Middle East is harming food production” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 183. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • I’d never checked the FAQ for this site. It’s everything I expected, and more.

The Gallery

“Bonnard and Escapism” [Julian Bell, non-site.org] [musical interlude]. “ ‘The museums are full of uprooted pictures,’ Pierre Bonnard once said. The artist was anxious for his pictorial seedlings. They might be thrust out into galleries in which they would struggle for survival among alien life forms and in which the climate might prove too chill—above all, the light too bleak. In the light of the South of France, he said, everything is sharp and your painting shimmers. Take it to Paris and the blues turn to grey. And therefore, you can never paint violently enough. You must be violent with your colour; you must heighten the tones in order to counteract this problem of pictures dwindling away in their impact as they are transposed from one place to the other.” • I remember a Bonnard in the Phillips Collection that seemed to shimmer in front of the wall it was hung on. Perhaps this one:

Yellow advances, after all. Bell casts his eye over this one:

About the paint:

The more or less two-foot-square object in question has an irregular surface that in places is thinly scuffed and stained, with the off-white of the canvas primer raw to the eye, and that in others is thick, ruckled, and bumpy, with blobby conglomerations of cadmium yellows and reds.

Climate

“Thirsty Mayor Drinks Town’s Entire Water Supply” [The Onion]. “ ‘I apologize that my actions today have left all of you without water, and I will do everything in my power to make sure we have water tomorrow,’ a visibly bloated [Mayor Earl] Moore told reporters.” • The data center subject is pretty obvious.

“A More Troubling Picture of Sea Level Rise Comes Into View” [Undark]. “[A] groundbreaking Dutch analysis of actual sea levels as measured by tidal gauges has found that almost the entire scientific literature has dramatically underestimated current sea levels. Katharina Seeger and Philip Minderhoud, geographers at Wageningen University & Research, in the Netherlands, say seas are on average almost 1 foot higher than standard estimates, which are based on global models that assume calm seas and ignore ocean currents and the effect of winds. Sea levels are not rising faster than thought, but the baseline for future rise is considerably higher in most places…. The other new study focused on the world’s river deltas. It has long been known that many deltas are sinking under the influence of groundwater pumping…. That data comes from Leonard Ohenhen, an earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who used satellite-mounted radar to produce 3D maps of subsidence on 40 of the world’s biggest and most populous river deltas. He has found that subsidence afflicts more than half those deltas. Most startlingly, in 18 cases subsidence rates exceed those of rising tides — hence, more than doubling the effective yearly rise in local sea levels, and in some cases multiplying it tenfold. This again puts tens of millions of people once thought safe from rising tides this century in imminent harm’s way, including those living on the deltas of the Nile in Egypt, the Mekong in Vietnam, the Mahanadi in India, and the Yellow River in China. If the current rate of subsidence persists, these areas will be flooded much sooner than thought.” • We’re on loam…

Public Health

“Trump Administration Appoints Big Medicine Shill as Healthcare Affordability Czar” [American Economic Liberties Project]. “”Despite promises to lower Americans’ healthcare costs by holding private health insurance conglomerates and their affiliated pharmacy benefit managers accountable, the Trump administration continues to do the opposite, including by appointing Casey Mulligan as healthcare affordability czar,’ said Emma Freer, Senior Policy Analyst for Health Care at Economic Liberties. ‘Mulligan has accepted research funding from the PBM lobby, which touts his findings on its website. He should not be trusted to put the best interests of American families, healthcare providers, employers, and taxpayers above those of his Big Medicine backers.’ Mulligan’s appointment is only the latest example of the Trump administration’s corruption on healthcare.” • I admire AELP (and Stoller). They’re in there punching.

Zeitgeist Watch

“Hundreds of millionaires are trying to escape the US” [SFGate]. “But given the current state of the world, it’s impossible to separate the links between New Zealand, the ultrawealthy and their deep anxieties about the future. Over the last several years, the super-rich have set their sights on the island country as a place to build elaborate bunkers and opulent estates in anticipation of societal collapse. In 2017, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker that buying property there was basically “apocalypse insurance.” But it’s also us, the commoners, that Silicon Valley executives plan on escaping from. Long before the rise of ChatGPT and proliferation of data centers, executives reportedly expressed concern about facing “backlash” once AI began to rob humans of their livelihoods.”

“State Department slashes fee to renounce US citizenship by 80% to $450” [Associated Press]. “After years of legal battles with several groups representing Americans wanting to give up their citizenship, the department on Friday published a final rule in the Federal Register that reduces the cost from $2,350 to $450. The new fee, effective April 13, had been promised in 2023 but had never been implemented. The cost is now the same as it was when the State Department first started charging Americans to formally renounce their citizenship in 2010. Renouncing U.S. citizenship can be an intensive and lengthy process. Applicants must repeatedly confirm in multiple written and verbal attestations to a State Department consular officer that they understand the implications of the step before being allowed to take a formal oath of renunciation. It must then be reviewed by the department.” • Where, oh where, is Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong?

“NASA scientist backs evidence of non-human intelligence in Earth’s skies” [Daily Mail]. “Ivo Busko, a retired NASA developer who worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute, published a pre-print paper this week that independently confirmed mysterious transient flashes first identified by astronomer Dr Beatriz Villarroel and her VASCO research team. Their October 2025 study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports. Villarroel, from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden, identified a possible connection between nuclear tests conducted between 1949 and 1957 and an increase in mysterious bright spots known as ‘transients’ appearing in the sky. These transients have proven difficult to explain using known natural phenomena, with Villarroel noting that some appeared highly reflective, similar to mirrors, and showed signs consistent with rotating objects.” • Checking to see if the quarantine should be lifted. I’m guessing no.

Class Warfare

“Family dynasties often do well from wartime economies – today is no different” [Family Capital (“From the world of family capital)”]. “Now, here’s a funny thing. You may have thought war would immensely damage economic activity, as well as the wealth of stock market investors.” • And that’s all I can read. Maybe some day I’ll splurge on a subscription. This seems like a good window into whatever it is that the American gentry are really up to.

News of the Wired

“It’s Time for an RSS Revival” [s (2018)]. “The difference between getting news from an RSS reader and getting it from Facebook or Twitter or Nuzzel or Apple News is a bit like the difference between a Vegas buffet and an a la carte menu. In either case, you decide what you actually want to consume. But the buffet gives you a whole world of options you otherwise might never have seen. “There are multiple approaches to connecting to news. Social felt pretty interesting at first, but when you mix social and algorithmic, you can easily get into these noise bubbles, or areas where you don’t necessarily feel 100 percent in control of the algorithm,’ says Edwin Khodabakchian, cofounder and CEO of popular RSS reader Feedly.” • What an understatement. And the difference isn’t like a Vegas buffet and an a carte menu; the difference is like going into a crackhouse, and visiting an enormous library or museum, where you are totally free to read or contemplate whatever you like.

Plant of the Day

From TH. Day’s eyes:

Readers, your pictures of plants are a real enjoyment for all of us. If you want to send some to this blog, I have a new address: lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. Looking forward! Also, Happy No Mow May!