Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-04

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Sitting in the catbird seat!

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Maine: Mills out, Platner in.

(2) AI as house slave.

(3) Authoritarian billionaires.

Politics

Democrats en Déshabillé

“Mills drops out of Maine Senate race, setting up Platner to face Collins” [Politico]. “Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign for Senate on Thursday, as her progressive challenger, oyster farmer Graham Platner, continued to lead in the polls and in fundraising. It’s a shocking fall off for the incumbent governor, who was once the preferred candidate of national Democrats in the race and remains the only member of her party to win statewide in Maine in nearly two decades. And it sets up a likely general election matchup between Platner and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a five-term incumbent with a formidable electoral track record who Democrats are nonetheless hopeful they can knock off amid backlash to Republicans and President Donald Trump. Her exit from the race is a major loss for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who recruited Mills and saw her as the most viable option to defeat Collins. On Thursday, Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) released a statement bashing Collins and promising to support Platner. ‘After years of allowing Trump’s abuses of power, Senator Collins has never been more vulnerable and we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat her,’ the pair said in a statement. It is a remarkable ascension for Platner, who was a complete unknown when he launched his campaign last August and has faced a myriad of scandals including offensive old Reddit posts and a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol that he later covered up. Platner has said the past comments don’t represent him, but they are likely to feature heavily in the general election matchup against Collins: A super PAC backing her, Pine Tree Results PAC, put millions this week behind ads highlighting the comment and the tattoo.” • Heck yeah. Trump doesn’t have any tatoos at all!

“Graham Platner’s triumph, explained by a Maine reporter” [Andrew Prokop, Vox]. “I spoke with Alex Seitz-Wald, a sort of Maine politics whisperer — a Maine-splainer — to national reporters”:

[SIETZ-WALD:] If I had to pick one thing that explains the Mills-Platner thing, she just ran a terrible campaign. I’ve seen dozens of Senate campaigns. I covered national politics for 15 years, and this is one of the most shockingly bad campaigns I’ve ever seen.

The question she never really put to bed, but that everyone had was: Did she really want to do this? She kind of dragged her feet on running, as Chuck Schumer and national Democrats were very publicly trying to encourage her to run. She ran this very lackluster campaign, not doing a lot of public events, not a lot of energy, a media strategy that felt very dated. And that was what she could control.

The stuff that she couldn’t control — her age was the biggest factor. She would have been 79 when she was sworn in. Last summer, when she got in was right off the whole Joe Biden fiasco, the loss of the presidency to [Donald] Trump.

As for Platner:

[SIETZ-WALD:] There’s his Maine-ness, if you will. He just looks like a lot of people. If we went down to town, like a couple miles from where I am right now, we could find like a half dozen dudes who look just like Graham Platner. They’re guys who work with their hands who shower after work instead of before work.

I think that resonates with people who are more working class — but also especially with Democratic progressive thought leaders who are more affluent, but who recognize the need for the party to reach those people more. He can do that kind of code switching because he went to GWU, because he comes from an upper-middle-class family, because he was a bartender at [the Washington, DC, bar] the Tune Inn. He can speak to the donors and thought leaders and he can also speak to the guys at the waterfront.

AOC was a bartender. #JustSaying. About the campaign:

[SIETZ-WALD:] Maine’s a small state, 1.3 million people. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody.

So the fact that he was just out there doing town halls that would get a couple hundred people, a thousand people, building this kind of sense of energy — no one’s ever seen anything like that here. And eventually, he reaches some kind of critical mass where he has directly met with or been in a room with a significant chunk of the Democratic voting base.

This is very similar to Fetterman’s brilliant “Every county, every vote” strategy. Of course, Fetterman turned out to be worse than a dud, but that doesn’t invalidate the strategy. As for Collins:

[SIETZ-WALD:] And a word of caution on the polling. In 2020, polls all had Collins down heading into election day. She had been outspent by her Democratic opponent two to one. And then she ended up winning by 9 percentage points. So it looks very anti-Collins out there — but I think behind the scenes, she has a lot more support than is obvious.

And speaking of Fetterman—

“Fetterman on Platner after Mills exits Maine Senate race: ‘Republicans f‑‑‑ing love him’ ” [The Hill]. “Fetterman called out Platner recently over statements the Marine and Army National Guard combat veteran made on Reddit years ago about a raid that Hamas militants carried out against Israeli soldiers. ‘From a strictly professional standpoint, this was a damn fine looking and successful raid against a superior opponent, I dig it,’ Platner wrote online in comments first reported by Jewish Insider. ‘You know, like Platner in Maine,’ Fetterman told video journalist Nicholas Ballasy. ‘You know, he said, ‘I dig it,’ you know, in a video where Hamas was beating and torturing Israeli soldiers to death. ‘I dig it.’” • Somehow, Fettermam erased “From a strictly professional standpoint….”. But it’s good to see Fetterman exhuming Democrat oppo and handing it over to the Collins campaign. Then again, they already have it, so I suppose Fetterman is betting against Platner and positioning himself to look smart when he loses. Lovely!

Protest

“The Buffalo Raiders” [Atavist]. This is a long read, in essence the story of working class Catholic resistance to the Vietnam war, which in Buffalo, NY took the form of destroying draft records (which, being in those days paper, could be destroyed. The “Raiders” are arrested, tried, and convicted. Then this happened at sentencing:

The courtroom was overflowing on Friday, May 19. [Judge John Thomas] Curtin began the proceedings with a lecture about the importance of acting within the law. “Concerning the action that you took, it was fortunate no one was injured,” he said to the convicted five. He advised them to get involved in electoral campaigns instead of illegal activities. He chastised them for unilaterally deciding that some property shouldn’t exist, pointing out that the same logic could be deployed to defend torching abortion clinics.

And then:

Curtin told them he wished more people had their courage. He complimented them on how they had conducted themselves in court and said that he admired their commitment to peace. “I don’t speak for myself here,” he said. “I speak for all of the people in the community.” Curtin sentenced them each to a year in prison—then suspended the sentences. The Buffalo were free.

“The room just erupted,” Jeremiah [Horrigan] recalled. “And we walked away.” The crowd applauded Curtin as he exited his courtroom. Once they were outside, people started singing “Here Comes the Sun.” For the first time in months, Jeremiah imagined a future outside of prison. “There was a whole new page,” he said. “I had to do something with my life.”

In the wake of the trial, Curtin publicly criticized the Vietnam War. At a commencement ceremony less than a month after letting the Buffalo go free, he implored a graduating class, “We must end the war in Vietnam before it ends us. This war has turned all our best ideals to dust.” The following summer, Curtin took a class on civil disobedience taught by Father Jim Mang, the priest who’d blared his horn outside the Old Post Office during the raid. Five years later, Curtin tried one of the most significant cases in Buffalo history, issuing a ruling that at long last desegregated the city’s public schools.

The raiders, meanwhile, took his words to heart and resolved to pursue their goals through legal means. For the most part.

Curtin was a Great Society liberal, but plenty of them were pro-war. It’s hard to imagine any such Damascene conversion happening today;.

“Activist remains perched atop DC bridge protesting Iran war, AI development: ‘The spirit moves me’ ” [FOX]. “An ongoing blockade at the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C., continues as an activist protesting the Iran war and artificial intelligence (AI) sits atop the Beltway thoroughfare. Guido Reichstadter, 45, a former jeweler and math and physics student, climbed the 168 feet up the bridge Friday night and plans on staying ‘until the war is ended,’ he told Fox News Digital. Reichstadter climbed the same bridge in 2022, that time protesting the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now he is protesting both the Iran war and the development of AI. ‘The situation with AI from my perspective, which I think is the shared perspective of many of the experts, it really couldn’t be more dire,’ he told Fox News Digital in a video interview while perched atop the bridge. Though his protest coincided with a wave of D.C. ‘May Day’ protests the day before, Reichstadter did not claim to be a part of that movement. ‘The goal of the frontier AI companies is not to build chatbots. It’s not to help you do your homework or make cute cat videos or something. The core mission of all of these companies is to create AI systems which vastly outperform human cognitive capabilities in every respect,’ he said.” • Or can be said to outperform.

“Was there Color at No Kings? Demonstrations and Demographics” [Labor Politics]. “In the aftermath of the “No Kings” demonstrations of March 28th, there has been renewed interest—and concern—that in many cities the participation of people of color generally, and Black people specifically, has been limited. To my knowledge, no one has done any study on this, so we are forced to rely on a combination of anecdotal information and historical analysis and patterns…. Within Black America, significant work was done by the Black Panther Party, SNCC and others to reach Black America in connection with the war, not to mention the impact of the oration of Dr. Martin Luther King during the final year of his life. The antiwar work among Black Americans also included organizing among enlisted personnel in the military. The Young Lords Party, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and other Puerto Rican radicals mobilized Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland in opposition to the war. There was nothing short of a ‘rainbow’ of opposition to US aggression and the growing Right led by then President Nixon. Today’s Black Left—indeed, all leftists of color—needs to make it their mission to replicate such an approach but under 21st century conditions.” • Leftists of color….

#COVID19

Stay safe out there!

Censorship and Propaganda

“Scientist who alleged COVID cover-up circulated a faked NIH email, agency says” [Retraction Watch]. “Last month, we reported on the upholding of a proposed 15-year debarment by a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services appeals judge against Argentine chemist Ariel Fernández for falsifying research while a professor at Rice University in Houston. Administrative law judge Margaret G. Brakebusch based that May 2025 decision on findings by Rice sent to the Office of Research Integrity in 2010 and conclusions from ORI’s independent review completed in 2022. Fernández denied the misconduct allegations and told us the findings were retaliation by the government for a 2021 paper he wrote supporting a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2. As evidence of the contention, Fernández showed us an email purportedly from National Institutes of Health researcher Joshua Cherry dated June 2021. The email, which appeared to be from Cherry’s NIH address, threatened to resurrect Fernández’s ORI case if he didn’t remove the paper. We could not independently verify the email’s authenticity at the time. Last week, an NIH spokesperson told us that, “following a thorough review,” the agency has no record of the email, which Fernández submitted to the HHS Office of Inspector General as part of a complaint about the alleged “attack” on his reputation. (See the submission here.) “Under federal records management requirements, any such correspondence would be retained in accordance with applicable laws and policies,” the spokesperson wrote in an April 7 email.” Oh. And: “Rice University leaders started investigating Fernández’s work in 2009 after a graduate student alerted them to a manuscript that included copy and pasted images from articles by different authors for unrelated experiments, according to the Brakebusch’s summary. A Rice investigation panel ultimately found Fernández acted intentionally to “fabricate, falsify and/or plagiarize research that he submitted for publication.” • Maybe political appointees will get involved?

Variants

“What to Know About Cicada, or BA.3.2, the Latest SARS-CoV-2 Variant Under Monitoring” [JAMA]. “However, the number of individuals testing for COVID-19 has declined, as has the number of specimens collected for sequencing. ‘It’s getting harder to say which variant is where,’ [T. Ryan] Gregory pointed out. ‘As clinical testing and sequencing decline, we are losing the power to monitor viral evolution with high precision,’ immunologist Yunlong Richard Cao, PhD, an assistant professor at the Peking University Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center, noted in an email. ‘Wastewater surveillance is an excellent early warning system, but it doesn’t always provide the high-resolution genomic data needed to understand exactly how the virus is adapting in real time.’” Oh well. More: “When a SARS-CoV-2 variant evolves in a chronically infected individual, the changes are random, as opposed to a result of natural selection, Gregory said. The alterations could just as easily put the virus at a disadvantage as they could benefit it, he explained.” And: “ ‘It is a classic example of a fitness trade-off,’ Cao said. ‘SARS-CoV-2 is under immense pressure from population-level immunity’ resulting from vaccines and prior infections, he explained. ‘In this environment, escaping an antibody is often more beneficial for viral survival than having a ‘perfect’ grip on a cell.” • Interesting. Thank heavens we never had to clean the air, what with population-level immunity doing the job.

Transmission

“Liminality & Festivities Facilitating Pandemic Fatigue : Songkran and the Third Wave of COVID-19 Outbreak in Thailand” [Journal of Urban Culture Research (2023)]. “Asian countries were outstanding performers in preventing COVID-19 initially, but many suffered from a new wave of the outbreak in mid-2020. These countries sealed off their borders from the possible spread of the virus from outside. For more than one year, social distancing restrictions were applied and successfully kept the infection rates at a low level. Drawing on the initial findings of Chang et al. (2020) on the spread of the infectious disease intracity and intercity during festivals, this paper examines the outbreaks, with a probe into the case of Songkran, or the Water Festival of Thailand. The author found that pandemic fatigue coincided with the festivities. The liminality of the festival means relaxation of norms which breaks social distancing measures. This article attempts to explain the liminality of festivals facilitating pandemic fatigue and intensifying the spread of the disease throughout the country.” • Of course, the United States was one giant festival for the entire pandemic, bless our hearts.

Zeitgeist Watch

“The creepy feeling in old buildings might have a surprising cause” [Science Daily]. “ ‘Infrasound is pervasive in everyday environments, appearing near ventilation systems, traffic, and industrial machinery,’ said Prof Rodney Schmaltz [(!)] of MacEwan University, senior author of the article in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. ‘Many people are exposed to it without knowing it. Our findings suggest that even a brief exposure may shift mood and raise cortisol, which highlights the importance of understanding how infrasound affects people in real-world settings. Consider visiting a supposedly haunted building. Your mood shifts, you feel agitated, but you can’t see or hear anything unusual. In an old building, there is a good chance that infrasound is present, particularly in basements where aging pipes and ventilation systems produce low-frequency vibrations. If you were told the building was haunted, you might attribute that agitation to something supernatural. In reality, you may simply have been exposed to infrasound.’” • And speaking of mysteries “in the air”—

“The air is full of DNA — here’s what scientists are using it for” [Nature]. “ ‘It is completely mind-blowing,’ says [Ryan] Kelly, who studies environmental DNA (eDNA) at the University of Washington in Seattle. ‘We are absolutely surrounded by information in the form of DNA and RNA, at all times.’ … Scientists have long pulled DNA from water and soil, but they have only just started to see the air as a source of genetic information… The technique promises to link “the whole [of] biodiversity, the whole world together with a single assay that’s really rapid and that can even be done in the field and analysed in the cloud”, says David Duffy, a researcher who specializes in wildlife disease genomics at the University of Florida in St Augustine.” … ‘Airborne animal DNA has always been there, it’s just that we’ve never looked for it,’ says Simon Creer, who studies molecular ecology at Bangor University, UK.” More: “For governments, companies, scientists and conservationists aiming to track the health of ecosystems, airborne DNA could provide a comprehensive, regular read-out of biodiversity on land.” • So #DNAisAirborne. I wonder if its running any updates on our systems? And suppose we wanted to reduce biodiversity?

Climate

“Physicists Discover the Most Complex Forms of Ice Yet” [Quanta Magazine]. “Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity…. In 2018, an international research group from Europe and Japan created an ambitious computer simulation(opens a new tab) of the dynamics of water molecules that aimed to predict undiscovered forms of ice. The result was a catalog of over 75,000 phases, each characterized by a slightly different way that the water molecules could fit together when subjected to a different combination of temperature and pressure.” More: “Water’s metastable states support a theory of phase transitions called Ostwald’s step rule, named for Wilhelm Ostwald, a German physical chemist and a peer of Albert Einstein…. Ostwald’s step rule suggests that systems transition to the closest and easiest-to-reach phase state rather than the most thermodynamically stable one — and that they sometimes then get stuck. ‘It’s a nicely paradoxical thing that sometimes the easiest [state] to form is the one that’s the least stable,’ Pickard said.” And: “We live on the planet of water, but we’re still learning what water can do. “The more we look and the better the experiment becomes, the more surprises we find,” Millot said.” • Indeed!

Class Warfare

“How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next” [The Authoritarian Stack]. “Under the banner of “patriotic tech”, this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack. It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules. Our investigation shows how these firms now operate as state-like powers—writing the rules, winning the tenders, and exporting their model to Europe, where it poses a direct challenge to democratic governance.” • This site has developed a network diagram (a graph of nodes and arcs) supporting its thesis. Here’s an example; I picked CDC on the master diagram because I’m familiar with it:

Normally, I deprecate network diagrams because they don’t give the type of relation between nodes on the graph; they assume a “connection” is analytically sufficient. It’s not. However, this graph does; see [1] and [2]. Also, the sidebar works well; I clicked on the Jim O’Neill node and the sidebar came up, showing O’Neill’s fealty to Thiel. Of course, to be truly authoritative, the sidebar should have sourcing. It doesn’t. Anyhow, readers, play around. See what horrors you find.

The funder: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Freidrich Ebert was the “moderate” who led the German Social Democrats in 1914 when they voted for war credits. Not that I’m bitter. With the level of effort I can invest now, I can’t determine who funds this funder.

“Thiel-backed AI project to block bad press looks like a bust” [Salon]. “There is a persistent belief in certain corners of the tech world that complex social problems can be eliminated through computation. Right now, there are plenty of aggrieved founders, venture capitalists and MAGA-adjacent influencers who feel that journalism is one of those messy problems. And so a group of powerful men in Silicon Valley with a demonstrated willingness to retaliate are trying, once again, to bend the Fourth Estate to their will…. The latest incarnation of this belief system arrives in the form of Objection AI, a project that presents itself as a kind of “truth tribunal” for journalism. The program is the brainchild of Aron D’Souza, an Australian lawyer whose most notable professional achievement remains his role in helping orchestrate entrepreneur and investment capitalist Peter Thiel’s legal strategy to secretly bankroll the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker. (After the outlet outed Thiel as gay in 2007, he backed former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan’s successful privacy lawsuit for publishing his sex tape.) The money behind Objection comes from that same ecosystem: investors like Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, a crypto evangelist and prediction-market enthusiast.” And: “Objection AI’s logistics are startling. For a starting fee of $2,000, anyone can file a complaint against a piece of journalism, even if they are not the subject of the article. It can be a competitor, a political ally or a stranger with a random grievance. Once the complaint is filed, a team of investigators — described by D’Souza as including former FBI, CIA and National Security Agency officials — assembles an evidence file. The journalist is invited to defend their reporting. Then the material is handed over to what Objection calls its ‘AI tribunal’: a collection of large language models from major AI companies, coordinated by a proprietary system.” And: “Without buy-in from the press, Objection AI becomes performative. Complaints can still be filed. Investigations can still be conducted. AI models can still generate verdicts. But those judgments have no binding force. They do not compel retractions. They do not impose damages. They do not alter the underlying reporting. The only output is a claim of vindication circulating in the same online ecosystems that already thrive on amplification and grievance. The point is the ask itself; the atmosphere it creates is an implicit signal that reporters who cover these men are already on notice. The potential chilling effect is the product. This is why, despite the money and the branding and the rhetoric, the project looks like a bust. Not because the technology doesn’t function, but because the premise does not hold. You cannot build a parallel system of journalistic accountability and expect it to matter if the people you are trying to regulate simply opt out.” • Imagine the frenzy when the first mark stumps up $2,000! And speaking of Peter Thiel, see above.

News of the Wired

“Humping Iron” [The Baffler]. “[M]en at each of [Christine Fetzer’s] stops—Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York; the list goes on—will pay hundreds of dollars an hour for the chance to wrestle a female bodybuilder. ‘It’s kind of an underground thing here, what I do,’ she says into the phone. ‘People don’t believe you actually wrestle men on beds in hotel rooms.’” • That’s just the first paragraph….

Plant of the Day

Via SV:

SV remarks: “[IT’S INSANELY GREAT TO HAVE YOU BACK!].” And it’s good to be back, thank you. I’m really touched that readers immediately sent me Plantidotes. You can do the same, by sending them as attachments to lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. And if you put “Plant” or “Plantidote” in the subject line, I’ll be less likely to lose it.