9.30 Stephanie Miner in Politico: “The reality of politics is it’s a forum for ambitious people who believe that they are correct, And we are going into an election cycle. But it doesn’t have to be an authoritarian, dictatorial model. My experience is that women are more collaborative,” she added. But that’s because of how few get to the executive level, and also because the way that women normally get there is after a crisis. We’ve seen that they have to figure out how to put the pieces back together and instill trust. One of the ways you do that is by listening to people and asking for people’s opinions.”
9.27 Patrick Wyman on America’s gentry in The Atlantic: Forget the skyscrapers and opulent country mansions, the elite family dynamics of Succession and the antics of the Kardashians and Kardashian-adjacent; look instead to the far more numerous multimillion-dollar planned golf-course communities and their controlling homeowners’ associations. Think about the informal property-development deals struck between sweating local grandees at the country-club bar in Odessa, Texas, or Knoxville, Tennessee. Power resides in gated communities and local philanthropic boards, in the ownership of staggering numbers of fast-food franchises, and in the smooth transmission of a large construction company’s assets to a new generation of small-yacht owners. Power can be found in group photos of half-soused, overweight men in ill-fitting polo shirts, and in the millionaires ready and willing to fly their private jets to Washington, D.C., in support of a certain would-be authoritarian. The yeoman developer of luxury condominiums, the single-digit-millionaire meatpacking-plant owner, the property-management entrepreneur: These were the people who, remembering or inventing their tradition of dominance over their towns and cities, flocked to Make America Great Again. As much as the United States loves to think of itself as an egalitarian paradise open to talent of any stripe, hierarchy and local power are no less the American way.
9.26 Justin Tucker of the Ravens kicks an NFL record 66 yard field goal as time expires, giving Baltimore a 19-17 victory over Detroit. Tucker to SI: “When you gotta have it, if that ball was spotted even a yard further away or a couple yards closer, it wouldn’t have mattered, we were gonna try to kick it anyways. But I’m not involved in those conversations. I just try to kinda stay out of it. I stay at my corner of the bench with Sam [Koch, the punter/holder] and [long-snapper] Nick [Moore], and just try to stay in the calm zone. That’s what we call it. As crazy as an NFL football game can be at times, all the ebbs and the flows and emotions that go into a given game, not being emotionally involved myself is something that we prioritize, something we actually work on.overly emotionally involved myself is something that we prioritize, something we actually work on.”
9.25 Moose Festival in Indian Lake NY.
9.23 Axios: FBI data is expected to show 2020 had the highest single-year spike in U.S. murders in at least 60 years. Experts attribute the surge to job losses, fears and other jolts to society at the start of COVID. The homicide rate would remain far lower than it was through much of the 1980s and 1990s — about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s,
9.22 Dutch Ruppersberg of Maryland, quoted in Axios: “Speaker Pelosi will get it done. You have to let her do her Baltimore thing.”
9.20 At the US-Mexico border, whip-cracking US Border Patrol agents on horseback chase Haitian migrants
9.17 Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
9.17 From Melik Kaylan on Facebook: Wonderful introduction to an old paperback of Greek historians I’m reading. Says that until Herodotus et al. nobody was writing history, they wrote religion: a chronicle of the Gods and their myths for fellow believers. “We too easily assume that history is a natural human activity etc.. natural that humans should be interested in the past of their community, people, nation etc..But such an interest is not the same as history. It can be satisfied entirely by myth. That is how most of mankind has customarily dealt with the past (and, in a very real sense, still does.)” By M.I.Finley.
9.15 First meeting with Gov. Hochul
9.15 Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post: “The [GOP] seems willing to do whatever it takes to win, with the exception of putting forward a set of palatable ideas that might make more people vote for Republicans
9.15 One in 500 Americans has died of covid
9.14 Jimmy Kimmel to Republicans: “Guys, I get it. You’re losers, and you’re embarrassed. It’s the same way I felt when I was still a virgin my senior year in high school. But trust me, lying about it doesn’t help. It just makes it worse.
9.14 Norm Macdonald dies at 61.
9.14 Max Boot in the Washington Post: We are also paying the price for a political system that was brilliantly designed for 1787 but has failed in 2021. In 1790, the largest state, Pennsylvania, had six times the population of the smallest, Rhode Island. Today, the largest state, California, has 68 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming. Yet California and Wyoming have the same number of U.S. senators. Imagine how differently our politics would look if the Senate were elected based on population regardless of state lines. California would have 12 senators, and Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana would all share one. That should make it much easier to enact policies such as universal medical care and a ban on assault rifles that are unthinkable today. The overrepresentation of rural, conservative interests in the Senate is stunning: The 50 Republican senators represent nearly 40 million fewer voters than the 50 Democrats. Ending the filibuster can ameliorate this inequity, but there is no way to end it when just 13 statescan block any constitutional amendment.
9.12 Madonna at VMA
9.11 Cara, Connor and Ivy came for a visit. We went to dinner at a restaurant on the shore of Saratoga Lake.
9.11 George W. Bush: “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. . . .It is our continuing duty to confront them.”
9.8 Virginia removes statue of Robert E. Lee
9.8 Howard Stern on Sirius XM: “When are we gonna stop putting up with the idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated? Fuck ’em. Fuck their freedom. I want my freedom to live.”
9.7 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: We can praise Cheney and Kinzinger for their candor, but what are they still doing in the GOP and seeking to secure the majority for the Jan. 6 enablers, cheerleaders and rationalizers? It boggles the mind that Cheney, who has repeatedly stated that McCarthy should not be speaker (and surely wouldn’t support other Trump pawns such as New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who replaced Cheney in the No. 3 spot in House leadership), will run under the GOP banner and certainly support other Republicans whose victories could secure the majority for the party that has embraced authoritarianism, lawlessness and nonstop lying.
9.6 Michael K. Williams dies at 54.
9.5 Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic: Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell. Yet despite the disputed nature of these cases, it has become both easy and useful for some people to put them into larger narratives. Partisans, especially on the right, now toss around the phrase cancel culture when they want to defend themselves from criticism, however legitimate. But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake. . . .the modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors.
9.4 Memorial service/party at Chris McGinley’s
9.3 Broke my toe
9.3 Paul Waldman in the Washington Post: We’re seeing what a profound difference there is in how Democrats and Republicans view power. When Democrats have it, they’re often apologetic, uncertain and hesitant to use it any way that anyone might object to. Republicans, on the other hand, will squeeze it and stretch it as far as they can. They aren’t reluctant, and they aren’t afraid of a backlash. Whatever they can do, they will do. Think of how the two parties react when presented with an obstacle to getting what they want. Democrats often issue statements of regret: We’d like to move forward, but what can we do? This is how democracy works. Republicans, on the other hand, react to obstacles by getting creative. They search for loopholes, they engineer procedural workarounds, they devise innovative ways to seize and wield control. When they come up with an idea and someone says, “That’s madness — no one has ever dared try something like that before,” they know they’re on the right track.
9.3 QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley–the bare-chested, face-painted insurrectionist in the bison hat at the Capitol riot–pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of an official proceeding. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he is likely to face between 41 and 51 months for his crime.
9.1 Frank Rich in New York: If the sentimental bromides Americans told each other in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were true, we would Never Forget what happened on 1/6. But if we’ve learned anything over these 20 years, it’s that we Always Forget and we don’t have a clue about what terror will strike our country next
9.1 Ida wallops NYC
9.1 In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court said it wouldn’t block Texas’ extreme law that criminalizes abortion after six weeks, a striking defeat for abortion rights advocates who say the ban is a direct assault on Roe v. Wade.
9.1 Cararact surgery