The Political Page, T+235 -- September 12, 2017

All talk, no hat, or is it, all hat, no cattle: somehow Mitch McConnell's hubris rings false. The headline says one thing, his comments suggest something entirely different. This reminds me of Aesop's fable, the fox and the grapes.

Why forecasters missed on Irma? Nice article for the archives. From Bloomberg.

The credit goes to the Bermuda High, which acts like a sort of traffic cop for the tropical North Atlantic Ocean. The circular system hovering over Bermuda jostled Irma onto northern Cuba Saturday, where being over land sapped it of some power, and then around the tip of the Florida peninsula, cutting down on storm surge damage on both coasts of the state.

“The Bermuda High is finite and it has an edge, which was right over Key West,” Masters said. Irma caught the edge and turned north.

For 10 days, computer-forecast models had struggled with how the high was going to push Irma around and when it was going to stop, said Peter Sousounis, director of meteorology at AIR Worldwide. “I have never watched a forecast more carefully than Irma. I was very surprised not by how one model was going back and forth -- but by how all the models were going back and forth.”

There was no "Bermuda High" to stop / slow Hurricane Harvey. Without a contravening high, Hurricane Harvey lingered for days over Texas and Louisiana. 

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The Royal Family

From this week's The London Review of Books, "Puffed Up, Slapped Down," by Rosemary Hill, a very, very sad Prince Charles:

His twenties were probably the most successful decade in terms of public perception.

Young, good-looking and rich in his own right with the income from the Duchy of Cornwall, he could, from a certain point of view, be seen as a prince for the swinging 1960s. After that the biographies chronicle a succession of increasingly difficult milestones.

As he faced his 30th birthday he addressed the Cambridge Union in hair-raisingly ingenuous terms: ‘My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is.’ None of the journalists he complained about could have said anything more undermining.

By forty he had entered the phase that his godmother Patricia Mountbatten described as ‘desperately sad’. At his birthday party Diana barely spoke to him.

By his fiftieth she was dead and Charles felt he was being tortured by the public over his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. The birthday party she gave for him was boycotted by his family.

Meanwhile his mother sailed on from jubilee to jubilee, silver, gold and diamond, overtaking Victoria as the longest reigning British monarch and dragging Charles along in her wake as he broke Edward VII’s record as the longest-serving prince of Wales.

If he becomes king, he will break William IV’s record as the oldest person to succeed to the throne. There were successes during these years. His book based on the 1989 television film A Vision of Britain sold well, his views on architecture attracted attention, but he was resentful of the wife who overshadowed him and still does.