SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

THAT’S ONLY BECAUSE THEIR ADMINISTRATORS, AND COLLEAGUES, ARE MOSTLY GUTLESS: John McWhorter: Academics live in fear of the new campus Maoism.

THERE IT IS! Politico writer has a legal question after salon’s security camera records Nancy Pelosi’s rank hypocrisy:

And Jim Treacher spots the WaPo going with the Republicans pounce! angle for Pelosi’s clear violation of San Francisco’s laws:

As Treacher noted earlier:

WOW, HOW BAD MUST THEIR INTERNAL POLLS BE? Biden to Air Law-and-Order Ad Condemning Rioters and Looters. A friend on Facebook writes:

Two things must be happening for the Democratic nominee to cut ads against “rioters and looters.” It must be showing up in polling in negative ways; and it must be attributed mostly to the left. The last item is of course entirely correct: the overwhelming responsibility for the civic violence of the past several months is the left’s, as is the overwhelming responsibility for most of the civic violence of the past decade. There is a direct line from the Occupy violence (a leftist movement) to the first iteration of the Black Lives Matter violence (a leftist movement) to the violence in the early Trump administration (a more distributed leftist movement) to the latest iteration of the Black Lives Matter — and Antifa, depending on what sort of opaque analysis you adhere to — violence (again, the left). As has been noted in this very space time and again, in the context of the various left-wing city-center seizure exercises of the past few years — think back to the various mass marches and their expeditious nature — there is an apparatus that has been honed here, and it is willing to act.

There is also a cadre of veterans by now, from Manhattan to Ferguson to Portland to Kenosha, with a great deal of experience and understanding of how the system works, and how it breaks.

A few items on this:

1) The Democratic nominee, and the Democrats in general, will denounce specific acts — when compelled — but they aren’t going to denounce the ideological precursors to those acts. This matters a great deal, because the violence is not actually going to end until those ideologies lose their grip on the huge segments of the public psyche. The reality is that if you adhere to a certain set of propositions — for example, that policing in 2020 is morally indistinguishable from slave-catching in 1850, or that the American republic is fundamentally a white-supremacy superstructure, or that immorality is literally impossible for a person of color versus a white person — then violence is both inevitable and, by those premises, justified. There’s a direct line from the 1619 Project to Minneapolis and Portland wracked by unrest. If you are opposed to the existing insurrection on anything more than tactical grounds, you have to directly address this. They won’t.

2) The on-the-ground foot soldiers of the insurrection have no structural imperative to actually heed the Biden plea. They’re in control of the ideological narrative on the Democratic side — remember, this same Presidential campaign has literally been bailing some of them out of jail — and they don’t feel themselves under any particular constraint or pressure from the mostly Democratic city and prosecutorial officeholders in whose jurisdiction they operate. Ending violence means giving up the source of their own power, and no institution is going to do that. Furthermore, assuming for the sake of argument that their actions are in fact a boon to the President’s re-election, the smart radical might ask: so what? If you’re interested in accelerating a cycle of radicalization on the left-base, doesn’t that help?

3) The attempts on the right to mobilize counter-violence will be alternately stupid and doomed. (To be clear, I do not mean here Americans who defend their own property, lives, and livelihoods: but then, who can doubt that the famous 1992 rooftop Koreans would not today be jailed and prosecuted by aspiring Kamala Harrises in Democratic DA offices across the country?) Stupid because the way out of this is not bigger and better brawling street militias; and doomed because the left’s well-honed apparatus will beat them. The recent Portland incident, with a right-wing mob rolling into town with paint guns, and having one of their number literally executed by a left-wing mob with real guns, is the template. Anyone considering getting into the fight and taking on the bad guys, in a manner and place of the bad guys’ choosing, should stay home.

The last item begs the question: what is the way out of this? The proximate answer is simple: use the police, National Guard, and regular military available to nearly every chief executive at every level across the nation. Lawful authority, the sole actual voice of the American people, must assert itself. Every single mayor and governor presiding over a city in turmoil could do this immediately, and America could be at peace within a fortnight.

But they don’t.

Ask why.

Indeed. But once Biden comes out and condemns the rioters and looters, he won’t be able to complain when Trump starts arresting them.

Flashback: This Leftist Tantrum Is an Information Operation and Trump Is Winning It.

VICTORIA TAFT WITH AN EXCLUSIVE: Case of Portland Man Who Defended Himself Against Antifa Mob Heads to Supreme Court.

SCIENCE IS REAL: The Failed Experiment of Covid Lockdowns: New data suggest that social distancing and reopening haven’t determined the spread.

TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported cases of Covid-19 in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project. We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction. That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns. This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute into a “Social Distancing Index.”

Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.

It could be that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks. But the surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads. And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health or temperature. The only factor that seems to make a demonstrable difference is the intensity of mass-transit use.

We ran the experiment a second time to observe the effects on caseloads of the reopening that began in mid-April. We used the same methodology, but started from each state’s peak of lockdown and extended to July 31. Confirming the first experiment, there was a tendency (though fairly weak) for states that opened up the most to have the lightest caseloads. The states that had the big summer flare-ups in the so-called “Sunbelt second wave”—Arizona, California, Florida and Texas—are by no means the most opened up, politicized headlines notwithstanding.

The lesson is not that lockdowns made the spread of Covid-19 worse—although the raw evidence might suggest that—but that lockdowns probably didn’t help, and opening up didn’t hurt. This defies common sense. In theory, the spread of an infectious disease ought to be controllable by quarantine. Evidently not in practice, though we are aware of no researcher who understands why not.

We’re not the only researchers to have discovered this statistical relationship.

When people say “follow the science,” ask them what science they’re talking about.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Seattle Burns, Biden Spurns.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: When is cowardice the better part of valor?

Answer: When it involves a Democratic presidential nominee, silly.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

Seattle’s peaceful protestors peacefully attempt to burn cops to death.

Matt Yglesias is still the world’s worst and most desperate gaslighter.

Mr. Trump Goes to Kenosha (but Mr. Biden won’t).

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

ROGER SIMON: What If the First Woman President Is (Gasp!) a Republican?

NOT AN OVERSTATEMENT: Thank God for single-use plastic bags.

NO. ANYTHING ELSE? China tells US to stop building relationship with Taiwan after economic dialogue announcement.

MAKE THEM PAY: Student sues Florida State officials for removal from student government over Catholic beliefs.

WE HAD A STORY ABOUT APPALACHIAN STATE HERE, but a reader emailed me that there was a serious error so I’ve taken it down until we can figure things out.

TANSTAAFL: The UK’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme where the government paid half of restaurant-goers meal tickets has been a success by its own lights, coaxing people to go out to eat again and even – mirabile dictu – being the rare example of a temporary government program that actually ended and came in under budget. However, the bill now has to be paid and the government is contemplating doubling corporation tax. Matt Kilcoyne explains why the program worked and how There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

COME SEE THE ANTISEMITISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Tony Baltimore School Buckles to Anti-Semitic Demands of Black Lives Matter Activists. “Letter to historically Jewish school denounces ‘parasites,’ ‘wealth hoarding,’ and ‘Zionism.’

BAD IDEA. I THINK THE QUARANTINE HAS DEMONSTRATED THAT ACADEMICS AREN’T ESSENTIAL WORKERS: Ivy League prof floats idea of racial justice strike, hundreds of academics fall in line.

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INSTITUTIONAL CORPORATE ANTI-AMERICANISM IS A THING: Frontier Airlines criticized after reportedly telling air marshal to remove flag face mask. “The National Association of Police Organizations first flagged the incident at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Aug. 23, when the air marshal ‘was told to remove his American Flag face mask because other passengers would find it offensive.'”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Democrats Can’t Go 1 Full Day Without Being Completely Insane. “The notion that the ‘values’ that ‘DC residents hold dear’ are now even dancing in the vicinity of canceling George Washington is all you need to know about how far afield the woke American Democrats have gone.”

THIS SEEMS LIKELY:

THE USS NEWPORT NEWS COMES HOME: The attack submarine USS Newport News (SSN 750) arrives at Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, Conn. for a scheduled homeport shift. Photo taken August 31, 2020.

IT’S REALLY AMAZING HOW THE DEMOCRATS HAVE GONE OUT OF THEIR WAY TO HAND HIM THIS ISSUE: President Trump touts law and order during Kenosha visit.

FOR THE CHILDREN™: New York City delays start of school year amid pressure from teachers union.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Debate commission stacked against Trump.

The Washington Brahmans that run and advise the Commission on Presidential Debates appear to be stacked against President Trump, raising concerns about the fairness of the debates set to begin later this month.

While politically bipartisan, most of the Republicans on the commission are so-called Never Trumpers who have been sharply critical of the president or donated to opponents in the past.

The commission sets the agenda and stage for the debates and plays the leading role in picking the media questioners.

Is there a single “nonpartisan” institution in Washington that hasn’t been revealed as corrupt?