8.31 US life expectancy dropped for the second consecutive year in 2021, falling by nearly a year. In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated American lifespan has shortened by nearly three years. The last comparable decrease happened in the early 1940s, during the height of World War II. Life expectancy 78 years, 10 months in 2019. In 2020, it fell to 77 years. Last year, to 76 years, 1 month. The last time it was that low was 1996.
8.31 Quartz stats: 108,988,552,251: Number of people who have died since the beginning of time; 150,000: Number of people who die every day; 120: Age that some researchers expect people will live to in the future; 30: Seconds before and after death during which unique brainwaves replay your life.
| 8.30 Justice Department filing: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former president’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”
8.30 Mikhail Gorbachev dies at 91. 8.30 Biden in Scranton: “Let me say this to my MAGA Republican friends in Congress: Don’t tell me you support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on the 6th. Don’t tell me. Can’t do it. For God’s sake, whose side are you on? Whose side are you on? Look, you’re either on the side of a mob or the side of the police. You can’t be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection. You can’t be a party of law and order and call the people who attacked the police on January 6th “patriots.” You can’t do it.’ |
8.28 Lindsey Graham on Fox News’ “Sunday Night in America”: “If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the [Hillary] Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”
8.28 Cathy Young in the NY Daily News: “As a due process advocate, I think Cuomo’s assessment of his past role is too self-exculpatory. But that doesn’t lessen the failures of fact-finding and fairness in his case. Those facts deserve, if nothing else, a thorough new review.’’
8.27 Seneca Falls NY
8.26 Auburn NY
8.27 A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card, an SGC Mint+ 9.5, fetched $12.6 million at auction. That clears the $7.25 million paid earlier this month for an SGC 2-graded T206 Honus Wagner produced by American Tobacco Co. between 1909-11. They’re considered the holy grails of baseball trading cards. The Mantle card originally sold for $50,000 in 1991 when famed collector Alan “Mr. Mint” Rosen sold it to an anonymous buyer. There are reportedly only three known better-graded Mantle cards.
8.24 Axios: California is poised to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035 in a massive push toward EV adoption, an announcement already being heralded as a major win in the fight against climate change.
8.23 25-year-old gun-control advocate and Uber driver Maxwell Frost wins the Democratic primary to represent the area surrounding Orlando in Congress. He is likely to become the first member of Generation Z to be elected to the House. Somewhere Christopher Jones is smiling.
8.17 After signing a two-year, $97.1 million contract extension with the Los Angeles Lakers, Lebron James becomes the highest-paid NBA player in history, with $532 million in career guaranteed money.
8.15 Liz Cheney is beaten in the Wyoming Republican primary
8.14 The Wild Center in Tupper Lake
8.12 Wendy, RIP
8.10 Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillman read at the 
Northern Spy Reading Series at the Left Bank Ciders Taproom in Catskill.
8.10 Trump takes the Fifth 440+ times under questioning from NY AG Tish James.
8.8 Kevin McCarthy: “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department. Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”
8.8 National Review said: “[T]he idea that a law enforcement organization under a sitting president would raid the home of his predecessor, opponent in the previous election, and potential opponent in the next election, has no close parallel in American history.”
8.8 The FBI raids Mar-a-Lago. Trump in a statement: “They even broke into my safe!”
8.8 Olivia Newton-John dies at 73.
8.8 David McCullough dies at 89.
8.6 We visit the Helderberg Escarpment, a 2200 foot mountain 11 miles west of Albany that the weather people like to refer to (“It’s partly cloudy over the Helderberg Escarpment. . .”) We learned a lot! Part of the Appalachia Orogeny, it contains Becraft, New Scotland and Helderberg limestones (the sidewalks outside your door may have been quarried in the Helderbergs), According to a sign, the 
escarpment was the key to understanding the geological history of North America. That might be local boosterism, but it is quite a hill. Turns out the whole thing was once owned by Stephen van Renssalaer, a Revolutionary War-era landowner, businessman, militia officer, politician, brother in law to Hamilton, and currently the 22nd richest person who ever lived. We visited Thatcher State Park, where you can see the escarpment and the valley all the way to Vermont, at least when it isn’t raining, which it was. We also saw the waterfall in the little town of Renssalaerville, which is one of the things you own when your manor–called Renssalearwyck–covers nearly everything in two counties.
8.2 In a repudiation to the Supreme Court, a massive turnout of voters in Kansas voted overwhelmingly to maintain the state constitution’s right to choice.
8.1 Richard Seymour in the New York Times: “What even is Britain? The historian David Edgerton argues that the British nation existed only for a few decades after World War II. Until then, British identity was global, pinned to its empire. It became a nation only in the postwar years, when capitalism was organized by the state and citizens were offered “cradle to grave” welfare. Since then, as national industries were sold off and the City of London took center stage, Britain has become merely a hub for multinational corporations, denuded of any wider social or civic resonance. It was the dormant British nation of the postwar era — or at least the nostalgic memory of it — that Brexit was supposed to revive. The exit of Mr. Johnson, Brexit’s most charmed cheerleader, marks the demise of that fantasy. In its place, unmistakable and unstinting, comes crisis.’’
8.1 Katherine Miller in the Times: “Over the last decade, some conservative Trump critics have tended to be of the more-in-sadness-than-in-anger style, and often a little at a loss about how to deal with Mr. Trump and everything MAGA entails, in policy and style. Ms. Cheney, however, isn’t like that, or hasn’t been for the last 18 months. There is no emotion; if those guys run hot, she runs cold, “as emotional as algebra,” as one Republican lawmaker said last year; there is no personal anecdote about how life has become more difficult for her; there is very little ornamentation; there is nothing but this granite singularity. She is apparently willing to continually give up power without it appearing like much of a sacrifice, so much so that you can almost forget it’s happening.”
8.1 A US drone strike kills Ayman al-Zawahiri.