9.30 According to Molly Gill of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, quoted in The Washington Post, more than 11,000 prisoners were temporarily released to home confinement to avoid spreading covid-19 in prison facilities. Of those, according to the Bureau of Prisons, only 17 committed new crimes.
9.29 Dan Gartland on si.com: “It’s absurd he is hitting for power so much better than all his colleagues (only 19 players in the majors have even half as many homers as Judge this year) while also competing for a triple crown. He’s a 6’7″ center fielder who bats leadoff and has 16 stolen bases in 19 tries while also hitting more home runs than all but four men in history. You don’t have to compare him to Bonds to appreciate a remarkable combination of facts.’’
9.28 Aaron Judge hit his 61st home run in 2022, tying Roger Maris’ AL record of 61 home runs, set in 1961, 61 years ago.
9.23 Matt, Michelle and Megan visit. Moose festival!
9.22 Hilary Mantel dies at 70.
9.20 John Sterling, calling Aaron Judge’s 60th home run: “HE’S TIED THE BABE! It’s a JUDGIAN blast! His 60th home run of the year WOW!! All Rise! Here Comes the Judge!’’
9.13 Ken Starr dies at 76.
9.10 Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg: “One area where the poor will be further disadvantaged by AI is in job retraining. Thanks to AI, more jobs will require new skills. As better-educated people are more adept at learning, the increased importance of retraining will have some significant inegalitarian effects: Lesser-educated people may fall behind or be re-employed at lower wages. This — and not “the robots taking all our jobs” — is the real worry about AI.”
9.9 Andrew Sullivan: “You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy—but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery—two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger. . . .The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness.’’
9.9 A Washington Post analysis estimates more than 90 percent of the world’s population was born after Elizabeth’s coronation (June 2, 1953).
9.8 Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg: “The Queen’s genius was to understand that monarchy provides not distraction but a counterbalance to the imperatives of modern life. Clever courtiers like to emphasize the way she moved with the times and modernized the Firm, as she liked to call it. “Everything’s changed except the headscarf,” says one, leaving aside such little things as Windsor Castle and Balmoral. The Queen grasped Edmund Burke’s great dictum that, for a true conservative, the point of change is to stay the same, at least in the things that really matter. Monarchy is a restraint on modernity or it is nothing. The Queen’s most obvious achievement was to provide an element of continuity in a world that is in a fever of change. Liberal capitalism has taken the principle of creative destruction to the Nth degree — not only through the creation and destruction of companies but also through the constant reordering of daily life (whenever you think that you have learned how to use electronic banking, the rules change and you have to master a new system). Yet the populist alternatives to liberal capitalism are all exceedingly ugly, from the jingoism of the far right to the criminal kleptocracy of Vladimir Putin. The Queen embodied the civilizing power of tradition, which counterbalances change without resorting to the bloviation of outright reaction. Robert Hardman, perhaps the most perceptive of Britain’s strange tribe of royal watchers, puts it well: “She is the living incarnation of a set of values and a period of history. In Britain, she is Tower Bridge and a red double-decker bus on two legs, not to mention Big Ben, afternoon tea, village fetes and sheep-flecked hills in the pouring rain. In the wider world, she is the newsreel figure who just has carried on going into digital high definition.” . . . . The Queen lived a life of duty in an age when duty is going out of fashion. The meritocratic elite that has come to dominate the world since Elizabeth came to the throne is estranged from the world of duty and service. Believing that they owe their position to merit rather than luck, they think in terms of what the world owes them rather than what they owe the world. And living in the global economy, they don’t have any time for local ties and obligations. . . . . There will be much talk of the future of the monarchy in coming months as the first shock of the Queen’s death fades. This division of powers has surely become more, rather than less, important in recent years as the culture wars have raged and tempers have flared. America’s belief that the president is both a political actor and the head of state was profoundly tested by the Trump presidency. In Britain, it is possible to loathe Liz Truss or Keir Starmer but still happily participate in state functions. The Queen pulled off a remarkable trick in preserving a monarchy that was simultaneously majestic and apolitical. It is a measure of her achievement that the new monarch will be largely judged on his ability to pull off exactly the same trick.’’
9.8 After a 70 year reign, Queen Elizabeth II dies at 96.
9.6 Washington Post: Material on foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities seized at Mar-a-Lago.
9.5 Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary, will take over Tuesday as Prime Minister.
9.4 Tom Bonier, Democratic strategist, in the Times: “In my 28 years analyzing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed. . . .I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. . . .This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle.”