7.28 Dinner with Cathy and Tim at Water’s Edge Lighthouse restaurant in Glenville.
7.28 Kevin McCarthy: “Make no mistake — the threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.” Nancy Pelosi: “He’s such a moron.”
7.28 Last night, the odious Laura Ingraham presented invented “acting’’ awards to the courageous police officers who testified yesterday on Capitol Hill. Ingraham has long been a cruel and cynical ideologue, Limbaugh without Limbaugh’s flatulent wit, a master of the kind of twisted invective that draws audiences to her program like a firebug draws thrill seekers a bonfire. She and Tucker Carlson are domestic versions of Axis Sally and Lord Haw Haw, undermining their country for their own benefit. This was a new low. Ingraham’s mockery of those brave men has earned her every ounce of disgrace we can heap upon her. We should make it clear that we won’t associate with her, that we won’t do business with people who do business with her, that we will not support the companies who sponsor her, that we will not frequent establishments that show her program. We know how effective social distancing can be in fighting lethal contagions—let’s isolate this one.
7.27 The House Select Committee investigating the events of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol held its first hearing, featuring vivid and emotional testimony from four law-enforcement officers who fought back rioters and sought to defend the building. Officer Aquilino Gonell of the U.S. Capitol Police testified first, telling the panel that what officers experienced that day was like “a medieval battle” and that he heard fellow officers screaming in pain, including D.C. police officer Daniel Hodges, who was crushed by rioters in a doorway. “I too was being crushed by the rioters. I could feel myself losing oxygen and recall thinking to myself, This is how I’m going to die — defending this entrance,” Gonell said. “There are some who express outrage when someone kneels while calling for social justice. Where are those same people expressing the outrage to condemn the violent attack on law enforcement, the Capitol, and our American democracy?,” Gonell asked. “I’m still waiting for them.” Officer Michael Fanone of the Metropolitan Police Department described being dragged from a line of other officers by rioters who stole his badge, radio, and ammunition, and attempted to take his gun while beating him with metal objects and their fists. “I heard chanting from some in the crowd ‘Get his gun’ and ‘Kill him with his own gun.’ I was aware enough to recognize I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm. I was electrocuted again and again and again with a taser. I’m sure I was screaming, but I don’t think I could even hear my own voice,” Fanone said. Officer Daniel Hodges, also from D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, talked about trying to hold the line and prevent rioters from breaching the Capitol. He said one rioter shouted at him, “You will die on your knees.” Hodges described a moment that millions have seen from footage of that day: Hodges being wedged in a doorway, screaming in pain. “On my left was a man with a clear riot shield stolen during the assault. He slammed it against and, with the weight of all the bodies pushing behind him, trapped me. My arms were pinned and effectively useless, trapped against either the shield on my left or the doorframe on my right,” Hodges said. He said a man then pulled down his gas mask and used it to hit his head against the door. Hodges said his baton was also stolen and used to hit him in the face and head. “At this point, I knew I couldn’t sustain much more damage and remain upright. At best, I would collapse and be a liability to my colleagues. At worst, I would be dragged down into the crowd and lynched. Unable to move or otherwise signal the officers behind me that I needed to fall back, I did the only thing that I could do and screamed for help,” Hodges said. Officer Harry Dunn of the U.S. Capitol Police said he was “stunned” by what he saw: officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters on the Capitol’s west lawn and weapons being used against those officers.“Until then I had never seen anyone physically assault Capitol police or MPD, let alone witness mass assaults being perpetrated on law-enforcement officers,” Dunn said. Dunn described encountering rioters inside who refused to leave the building and said that Trump invited them, that Joe Biden wasn’t the president and that no one voted for him. When Dunn, who is black, told them that he had voted for Biden, he said the rioters began to hurl racial slurs at him. “One woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled, ‘You hear that, guys? This n—-r voted for Joe Biden.’ Then the crowd, perhaps around 20 people, joined in screaming “Boo. Fucking n—-r,’” Dunn recalled. He added, “No one had ever ever called me a n—-r while wearing the uniform as a Capitol police officer.” He relayed the stories of other black Capitol officers who also experienced racial abuse from the rioters. Dunn said one had never been called the N-word in his 40 years of life, but “that streak ended on January 6.”
7.27 Simone Biles withdraws from team competition.
7.26 Dr. Eric Topol, Scripps Research Institute, in New York: I think we’ve gotten numb here. We’ve gotten numb to the point that if we had done a much better job vaccinating, like any other vaccine in our history — like polio or many others where everybody got vaccinated — we wouldn’t be dealing with nearly as many deaths, hospitalizations, or the big burden of cases and on and on. I think if you just pick the upbeat side of this, it ignores that. There is a real downside here that we can’t ignore. When you have 35-year-old people — healthy people, perfectly healthy — who wind up in the hospital and are teetering on death, when you have that, you say, God, what are we doing here? We could have prevented this.
7.24 Tiffany Cross on MSNBC, taking on Megan Kelly: “It’s no coincidence that Snow White and the seven dumb takes she’s had recently overwhelmingly target Black women. The amazing luminary Nicole Hannah-Jones, whom Kelly went after over the 1619 Project. The Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, who Kelly said should stop whining about the treatment of baby Archie. Olympic Hammer thrower Gwen Berry, who Kelly suggested be removed from the Olympics due to her protest. . . .Kelly is really just trying to claw her way back into social relevance and into the hearts of Fox News viewers by regurgitating their favorite attacks, all while benefiting from the work that we do. . . .Stop punching above your weight. You keep asking for this smoke that you really don’t want. You want to act like a high school mean girl, then you’ll get treated that way. Sit down, be humble, while our left stroke keeps going viral. Let the grown women speak. You’re not invited to this table. You don’t have the range.”
7.24 Visited Grant Cottage on Mt. McGregor in Wilton. Among interesting artifacts: the floral arrangements present at his funeral, preserved in beeswax.
7.23 Axios: New York, San Francisco and L.A. are coming back strong after the pandemic, solidifying their economic dominance for the future. Why it matters: As the pandemic emptied downtowns and normalized telework, experts speculated that it would loosen superstar coastal cities’ grip on the economy. Actually, home sales are at their highest level in over a decade in Manhattan. San Francisco’s market remains hot, with homes consistently selling above asking price.Yes, Americans moved during the pandemic. But the vast majority of those moves were within metro areas, so the economic might of the big cities remains relatively unchanged. “The pandemic just stretched the bounds of metro areas,” says Richard Florida, an urbanist at the University of Toronto. Of the 1.4 million moves out of the New York metro area in 2020, just 37,000 of them were to the heartland or Mountain states, Brookings found in an analysis of Postal Service address change requests
7.21 Driven by covid deaths, U.S. life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years in 2020
7.21 Because of intense fires in the west, several major cities from the Mid-Atlantic to the Northeast under air-quality alerts
7.20 The Milwaukee Bucks defeat the Phoenix Suns 4-2 to win the NBA title. Giannis Antetokounmpo finished the game with one of the most impressive stat lines in NBA Finals history — 50 points, 14 rebounds, and five blocks. He is only the seventh player to score 50 points in a Finals game.
7.20 Greg Sargent in the Washington Post: It is not broadly understood just how big a set of achievements Democrats could have to run on in 2022 if they can pass the new package. It’s a constant snarky meme on Twitter that “LOL just a thought, but Dems should pass big, popular policies that help people and run on them.” But if this package passes, they will be doing exactly that. CNN’s Ron Brownstein puts this into historical perspective. As Brownstein notes, the new package — which would total more than $4 trillion, funded by corporate tax hikes — would put the federal government in the position of pumping more into public investment as a share of GDP than at just about any other time since World War II. Brownstein reports that Democrats will campaign in the midterms on these policies. But note how they’re preparing to do so:“If we go into this election cycle and our agenda is delivering tax cuts for middle-class parents, delivering jobs through investment in infrastructure and delivering lower health care costs,” says David Bergstein, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, “we have a package that appeals both to those swing voters, some voters who have more of a conservative bent and to our base as well.”
7.20 Anthony Fauci to Rand Paul: “Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially,”
7.20 Jeff Bezos goes on an 11 minute suborbital space flight. Among the three people wo joined him was 18 year old Oliver Daemen, the youngest person to go into space, and Wally Funk, who at 82 became the oldest. Funk trained to be an astronaut in the sixties, but was barred from space travel because of gender discrimination.
7.20 Michelle Goldberg in the Times: “[Reporter Michael C.] Bender’s description of these Trump superfans, who called themselves the “front-row Joes,” is sympathetic but not sentimental. Above all, he captures their pre-Trump loneliness. “Many were recently retired and had time on their hands and little to tie them to home,” writes Bender. “A handful never had children. Others were estranged from their families.” Throwing themselves into Trump’s movement, they found a community and a sense of purpose. “Saundra’s life had become bigger with Trump,” he says of a Michigan woman who did odd jobs on the road to fund her obsession. There are many causes for the overlapping dysfunctions that make contemporary American life feel so dystopian, but loneliness is a big one. Even before Covid, Americans were becoming more isolated. And as Damon Linker pointed out recently in The Week, citing Hannah Arendt, lonely people are drawn to totalitarian ideologies. “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,” Arendt concluded in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” describing those who gave themselves over to all-encompassing mass movements. A socially healthy society would probably never have elected Trump in the first place. As Daniel Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in FiveThirtyEight shortly after the 2020 election, the “share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise. And these voters disproportionately support Trump.” Polling data from A.E.I.’s Survey Center on American Life found that 17 percent of Americans said they had not a single person in their “core social network.” These “socially disconnected voters were far more likely to view Trump positively and support his re-election than those with more robust personal networks,” wrote Cox. It’s not just Trumpism that feeds on isolation. Consider QAnon, which has morphed from an internet message board hoax into a quasi-religion. In his book “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything,” the journalist Mike Rothschild shows how central a sense of digital community is to QAnon’s appeal. “It’s one of the reasons why baby boomers have fallen in with Q to such a surprising degree — many are empty nesters, on their own, or retired,” he writes.
7.18 Visited the Hummingbird Hills winery in Fultonville.
7.17 Washington Post: A 2018 study of 28 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development found that, on average, the top 10 percent of households owns 52 percent of wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owns 12 percent. But in the United States the top 10 percent held 79.5 percent and the bottom 60 percent held 2.4 percent.
7.17 Jonathan Chiat in New York: The right will complain about Democrats jamming through a huge expansion in government. But the source of their panic is not that the public rejects these proposals. Biden’s spending will “be popular with a large group of Americans,” complains an editor at the conservative Washington Times. His policies “will be politically impossible to reform or repeal,” predicts the Wall Street Journaleditorial page. Republicans are unnerved by Biden’s proposals precisely because they suspect Americans will like them. The beauty part of the deal, parts of which must be fully paid for under parliamentary rules, is that Democrats can finance all these goodies exclusively by raising taxes on the rich. This reflects a structural reality of American politics and the economy: Because the rich have gained so much wealth over the last generation, and because Republicans have worked so maniacally to reduce their taxes, there’s a ton of money waiting to be claimed simply by taxing them at reasonable levels. Biden campaigned on a plan to raise $4 trillion over the next decade by taxing corporations, heirs, and households earning $400,000 a year or more. Not only do serious center-left economists think he can do this without creating a significant economic drag, so do serious center-right economists. Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin calculates Biden’s tax hikes will shave a minuscule 0.2 percent off GDP over the long run. The American Enterprise Institute pegs the economic cost slightly lower. That is a tiny, almost imperceptible cost to growth when measured against the enormous social and economic benefits of the healthier, better-educated, and less-polluted economy it would finance. The political opportunity this presents Democrats is irresistible: They can shower benefits on 99 percent of the public and offload the cost onto one percent. The only catch is that the one percent hold disproportionate sway — not only with Republicans, who categorically refuse to raise their taxes a single dime for any reason, but to a degree among Democratic moderates, who have made fretful noises about the dangers of taxing corporations too heavily. Since every dollar in social spending has to be paid for with a dollar in new taxes on the rich, the size of the final Democratic bill will boil down to moderates listening to the economists and the pollsters and not the guy in the polo shirt who sidled up to them at their last fund-raiser to whine about the capital-gains tax.
7.16 Little Miss is a month old.
7.16 Dinner with Anne and Paul at Athos in Albany
7.16 Biden on Covid misinformation on Facebook: “They’re killing people. … Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.
7.15 In the Times: President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday used his first formal advisory to the United States to deliver a broadside against tech and social media companies, which he accused of not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous health misinformation — especially about Covid-19. The official, Dr. Vivek Murthy, declared such misinformation “an urgent threat to public health.” His pronouncement came just days after representatives from his office met with Twitter officials. . . .“Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment, with little accountability to their users,” Dr. Murthy said. “We expect more from our technology companies,” he added. “We’re asking them to operate with greater transparency and accountability. We’re asking them to monitor misinformation, more closely.”
7.14 Elena Domicoll, posting on Facebook: Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was only a few meters from the finish line, but got confused with the signs and stopped, thinking he had finished the race. BA Spanish man, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him and, realizing what was going on, started shouting to the Kenyan to keep running. Mutai did not know Spanish and did not understand.Realizing what was going on, Fernandez pushed Mutai to victory. A reporter asked Ivan, “Why did you do this?” Ivan replied, “My dream is that one day we can have some sort of community life where we push ourselves and also others to win.”The reporter insisted “But why did you let the Kenyan win?” Ivan replied, “I didn’t let him win, he was going to win. The race was his.”The reporter insisted and asked again, “But you could have won!” Ivan looked at him and replied: “But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor of this medal? What would my Mother think of it?”
7.13 Biden at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia: “There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are — who we are as Americans.”
7.11 An unopened copy of Super Mario 64, a 1996 game for Nintendo 64, sold at auction for a record $1.56 million.
7.11 Richard Branson, in his Virgin Galactic Rocket Plane, becomes the first billionaire in space. Yelena: “I doubt the God from space has to take an ibuprofen after a fight,”
7.10 Black Widow, with Ginny, Shawn and Molly. Comic book movie/spy movie/family dramedy. Very entertaining. Florence Pugh, David Harbour steal the show.
7.10 Yanks beat Astros 1-0, as Gerrit Cole throws 129 pitch complete game.
7.10 Adam Grant in the New York Times: Emotions are inherently social: They’re woven through our interactions. Research has found that people laugh five times as often when they’re with others as when they’re alone. Even exchanging pleasantries with a stranger on a train is enough to spark joy. That’s not to say you can’t find delight in watching a show on Netflix. The problem is that bingeing is an individual pastime. Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity. We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. It’s a concept coined in the early 20th century by the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Collective effervescence is the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field. And during this pandemic, it’s been largely absent from our lives. Collective effervescence happens when joie de vivre spreads through a group. Before Covid, research showed that more than three-quarters of people found collective effervescence at least once a week and almost a third experienced it at least once a day. They felt it when they sang in choruses and ran in races, and in quieter moments of connection at coffee shops and in yoga classes. But as lockdowns and social distancing became the norm, there were fewer and fewer of these moments. I started watching stand-up comedy specials, hoping to get a taste of collective effervescence while laughing along with the people in the room. It was fine, but it wasn’t the same. Instead, many of us found ourselves drawn into a dark cloud. Emotions are like contagious diseases: They can spread from person to person. “Emotional contagion is when we are literally infected with other people’s emotions,” Sigal Barsade, a Wharton management professor and a leading researcher on the topic, has explained. “In almost all of our studies, what we have found is that people don’t realize it’s happening.” When the pandemic began in 2020, the first negative emotion to spread was fear. Waves of panic crashed through communities, compelling people to purify packages and hoard hand sanitizer. As too many people lost loved ones, too many others lost jobs and everyone lost some semblance of normal life. The number of adults with symptoms of depression or anxiety spiked from one in 10 Americans to about four in 10. And there’s reason to believe these symptoms haven’t been caused only by the crisis itself — they’ve actually been transferred from person to person. Studies show that if your spouse, your family member or your roommate develops depression, you’re at heightened risk for it. And contagion isn’t limited to face-to-face interaction: Emotions can spread through social media posts and text messages, too.
7.7 For the second time in 282 days, the Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup, defeating the spirited underdog Montreal Canadiens 4 games to one In the clinching game in each of the four rounds, Tampa won via shutout, the last two by 1-0 scores.
7.4 Photo by Barbara Lippert
7.2 Midnight Ramble
7.2 Midnight Ramble. Many new faces, but another great show, with a lot of new faces and new songs. One new face particularly stood out: Courtney Marie Andrews
7.1 The Trump Organization, and one of its top executives, were indicted.
7.1 Lunch with Paul Grondahl at the Fort Orange Club,