Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-11

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Tempe Women’s Club Park, Maricopa, Arizona, United States. There’s a jet thundering about, presumably from Luke Air Force Base. Some listeners view such things as flaws, but I view them as faktura.

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Hormuz digital pressure point.

(2) AI: The invisible tollbooth.

(3) Word of the day: Egegore..

Politics

Trump Administration

“US revoking passports of parents who owe more than $2,500 in child support” [The Hill]. “Parents who owe more than $2,500 in child support payments are not eligible to receive U.S. passports. The government can also strip people of these documents under a 1996 law, which has rarely been enforced. ‘Any American with significant child support debt should arrange payment to the relevant state or states now to prevent passport revocation,’ the State Department said in a statement.” • Sounds like a pilot program. Next up, back taxes, student loans…. Social media posts….

“Trump administration officials call for federal environmental permitting reform” [Manufacturing Dive]. “ ‘For too long, investment has been stalled because of slow bureaucracy,’ said John Reiten, deputy executive director of the [National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC)].” Too Trumpian! And: “ ‘We want to see projects built cheaper, more efficiently and faster.’” • Stealing the abundance Democrats’ clothes, I see. And how easy it was!

Election 2026

“Is America happy with Trump? How the president rates in latest poll” [USA Today]. Marist: “Just 37% of respondents approve of the job Trump is doing overall, while 59% disapprove and 4% are unsure, according to the new survey, conducted in partnership with NPR and PBS. The ongoing war continues to grow more unpopular with six in 10 Americans disapproving how Trump is handling the conflict with Iran saying it ‘has done more harm than good,’ the poll found. The poll also found 62% of Americans − up from 57% in January − think the United States’ role on the world stage has been weakened because of the president’s decisions, while 38% say it has been strengthened.” • Interestingly, most of the geopolitical dissidents (Mearsheimer comes to mind) think Trump wants to get out Iran ASAP, but needs a fig leaf, or rather a trophy. Which is not forthcoming.

Democrats en Déshabillé

“The Democratic civil war is just getting started for Chuck Schumer” [Axios]. “ ‘If you spend any time on the ground in Iowa, in Michigan, in Minnesota … you will be absolutely floored with the intensity and the anger of Democratic primary voters,’ Bill Neidhardt, a Democratic strategist working to elect some of the anti-establishment Senate contenders, told Axios. Their fury is ‘not comprehended in the least by a lot of folks in D.C.,’ he said. But what does “fury” mean? Shaking your tiny fist at a No Kings rally?

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Assessment 015 | The Trade” [The Omission]. “Every announcement moved markets and every extension of a deadline crashed oil. Then escalation would push it back up and the cycle would repeat. This happened seven times in fifty-two days. The structure of it was identical each time. Escalated rhetoric from the president would push crude higher as traders priced in the risk of a supply disruption or a strike on Iranian energy infrastructure. Then a deadline was set. That deadline would be extended or a pause was announced. Oil would crash, equities surge, and the cycle reset and the rhetoric escalated again. Seven deadline cycles in fifty-two days, each producing a spike and a crash, and each producing a window in which the direction of the market was determined by a single variable that had nothing to do with supply or demand. The variable was a presidential announcement and the announcement was known to a finite number of people before it was known to the public. It wasn’t built for profit. It was built by the structure of the war itself, but once it existed it could be used.” • Far more crass, and arguably more evil, than Pelosi.

Geopolitics

“IRGC-linked media outlines plan to tax and control undersea internet cables in the Hormuz Strait — Iran’s mouthpiece calls for a cut of $10 trillion of transactions that pulse through the cables daily” [Tom’s Hardware]. “The oil and shipping choke point may also soon become a digital pressure point. That’s if Iranian leaders heed the IRGC‑affiliated Iranian news agency Tasnim (via Iran International), which has called for generating revenue by charging fees on the multitude of undersea internet cables that pass through the channel. Tasnim is regarded as an official mouthpiece for the IRGC (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). Those watching the situation in the Gulf may recall that the IRGC often speaks for the government regarding military policy. So Tansim’s ideas for extracting value from the $10 trillion of transactions estimated to be pulsing through these cables daily won’t merely be the musings of some journalist. The Tasnim article was headlined ‘Three practical steps for generating revenue from Strait of Hormuz internet cables.’ In the piece, the writer paints Iran as a nation deprived of any wealth creation from this key infrastructure in a waterway, which, before this conflict, wasn’t seen as Iran’s to rule.” • Wowsers. Big boost for hawala!

“Dawn of the Electric World Order” [Phenomenal World]. “What makes this shock different from the 1970s and 2022? As analysts at Ember put it: ‘this is the first energy shock with a superior alternative.’ In the more benign pre-shock landscape, mass electrification, solar and wind energy generation, and battery storage were already becoming competitive with fossil fuels…. Once a climate project, electrification is now a geopolitical insurance policy. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population lives in net fossil fuel importing countries and collectively spends $1.7 trillion a year importing fuels. Many of those governments facing a loss of confidence in global oil and gas markets are expanding clean energy and electrification projects…. The new option of a “superior alternative” in energy security exists largely due to China, whose industrial policy and manufacturing prowess have made electrification cheaper, better, and more abundant…. China’s electrification drive was never primarily a climate story. It was a strategic imperative driven by energy security and industrial ambition. Beijing was spooked by the oil risks exposed after the 2003 Iraq War.” • [musical interlude].

Rapture Index: Closes down one on Oil Supply/Price. “Despite all the fighting in the Middle East, oil prices have declined” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 182. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • I’d never checked the FAQ for this site. It’s everything I expected, and more.

NOTE

1 Quality Technology Services. “Never eat at a place called ‘Mom’s.”

Class Warfare

“My Own Personal Warp God” [Myles Mode]. Word of the day: Egregore. “Warhammer 40,000 invaded my mind on an overcast summer day in 2005…. Warhammer doesn’t officially have magic, but it does have the Warp: an uncontrollable parallel dimension of pure psychic energy…. The Warp’s apex predators are the four gods of chaos: sentient psychic storms fueled by the negative emotions of trillions of living souls…. In Western esotericism, entities like these are known as egregores. Every egregore works like this: when enough people invest enough effort in a shared symbolic system, that system will start to take on a life of its own and develop an internal logic that no single contributor can fully control. It will also begin to exert a pull beyond the efforts of those contributors, who may begin to find themselves defending and advocating for the system without consciously choosing to do so. The strongest systems outlive even their most influential individual adherents.” This reminds me strongly of Bourdieu’s concept of a field. More: “Because they rely on faith, attention, and emotion, successful real-world egregores tend to have systems for managing and controlling the energy of their believers—like shared rituals, priesthoods, and sacred texts….. While Warhammer has all the hallmarks of a successful egregore, it eludes most of the skepticism and cultural antibodies that similarly systematized egregores eventually encounter. Jesus has satanists and atheists, and capitalism has anticapitalists, but there’s no “anti-Warhammer”—possibly because it doesn’t have the same inescapable hegemony as Christianity or the Stock Market, and its adherents don’t have any designs on crowding out all competing systems.” And: “All of this comes back to my first day at the Toy Soldier—the moment when I started laying out the initial critical blocks of my Warhammer cosmology, one I’d go on to build out in endless wiki binges, wishlists and sketchbooks in the years to come. A more conventional reading would point to all of this as evidence of fandom. But in egregore terms, it’s evidence of labor I was performing on behalf of Warhammer without even knowing it.” • Do we have any gamers in the readership who can comment on this?

“The Four Networks Theory of Power: A Theoretical Home for Power Structure Research” [G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America?]. “According to sociologist Michael Mann’s theory — in my opinion, the theory that best suits power structure research — the power structures within Western civilization, and probably other civilizations, too, are best understood by determining the intertwinings and relative importance at any given time of the organizations based in four “overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power” (Mann, 1986, p. 1). These networks are ideological, economic, military, and political — “The IEMP model” for short.” More: “In focusing on these four networks, Mann’s concern is therefore with the “logistics” of power (1986, pp. 9-10, 518). In terms of human history, no one network comes first or is somehow more ‘basic’ than the others. That is, each one always has presupposed the existence of the others. However, that does not mean that the networks are usually equal in their importance. Generally speaking, one or two networks usually are more dominant than the others. For example, as I explain later in this document and elsewhere on this website, the economic network is predominant over the others in the United States, leading to class domination.” • Indeed!

“Why young and old men are leaving the labor force at record rates” [WaPo]. “Labor Department data released Friday showed that 1 in 3 American men were not working or looking for a job in April.” That seems like rather a lot. “The labor market has weakened since early 2025, with most job opportunities concentrated in areas typically dominated by women, including health care and private education. At the same time, several male-dominated industries, including manufacturing, transportation and mining have shed jobs, leaving a mismatch between typical skill sets and job opportunities for men. ‘It’s not all retirement and education. … There are guys just dropping off the planet. They’re not looking after their kids. They’re not in school. They’re not in the labor force,’ said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. ‘Across the board when we look at men, we see challenges that they face that leave too many men disconnected.’” • I’m not an accelerationist, so I don’t think this is good.

News of the Wired

“Scientists found the brain doesn’t start blank, it starts full” [Science Daily]. “Picture a completely empty sheet of paper. You begin writing on it, gradually filling it with information. This idea reflects the concept of tabula rasa, or the ‘blank slate.’ Now imagine a page that already has marks on it. Any new information must fit around or replace what is already there. This represents tabula plena, or the ‘full slate.’ This long-standing debate asks whether we begin life with everything prearranged or whether our experiences shape who we become. In biology, this question appears as the balance between genetic instructions and environmental influences that shape development. The research team at ISTA applied this idea to the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory and spatial awareness. They wanted to understand how its internal network changes after birth and whether it behaves more like a blank slate or a full one. The scientists focused [cells that] are critical for storing and retrieving memories. They rely on plasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt by strengthening or weakening connections or by altering structure… The findings revealed a surprising pattern. Early in development, the [internal] network is extremely dense, with connections that appear largely random. As the brain matures, this network becomes less crowded but more organized and efficient. ‘This discovery was quite surprising,’ says [Professor for Life Sciences Peter Jonas at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria]. ‘Intuitively, one might expect that a network grows and becomes denser over time. Here, we see the opposite. It follows what we call a pruning model: it starts out full, and then it becomes streamlined and optimized.’” • Less is more!

Plant of the Day

Via IM:

Dear readers, I still just a bit short on Plantidotes! Thanks to the readers who sent in Plantidotes! And it’s nice to know that I do have readers. (Old-time radio, before there were ratings agencies, would mention a piece of jewelry on the air. They then measured audience response by the number of inquiries they got about it!)

IM writes: “The red flowering currant in April morning sunshine.”

Send your plantidotes 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. Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast. Prep work is fine!