READ IT. CURSE AND WEEP. THEN FIGHT: The State Department’s Fact Sheet: Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Aw heck, I’m just gonna post The Whole Damned Thing:

For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin, choosing instead to devote enormous resources to deceit and disinformation. Nearly two million people have died. Their families deserve to know the truth. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one.

The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection. Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure.

The CCP’s deadly obsession with secrecy and control comes at the expense of public health in China and around the world. The previously undisclosed information in this fact sheet, combined with open-source reporting, highlights three elements about COVID-19’s origin that deserve greater scrutiny:

Illnesses inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV):

The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.

Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.

The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.

Research at the WIV:

Starting in at least 2016 – and with no indication of a stop prior to the COVID-19 outbreak – WIV researchers conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar). The WIV became a focal point for international coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak and has since studied animals including mice, bats, and pangolins.
The WIV has a published record of conducting “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including “RaTG13,” which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.
WHO investigators must have access to the records of the WIV’s work on bat and other coronaviruses before the COVID-19 outbreak. As part of a thorough inquiry, they must have a full accounting of why the WIV altered and then removed online records of its work with RaTG13 and other viruses.

Secret military activity at the WIV:

Secrecy and non-disclosure are standard practice for Beijing. For many years the United States has publicly raised concerns about China’s past biological weapons work, which Beijing has neither documented nor demonstrably eliminated, despite its clear obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.
Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

The United States and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.

Today’s revelations just scratch the surface of what is still hidden about COVID-19’s origin in China. Any credible investigation into the origin of COVID-19 demands complete, transparent access to the research labs in Wuhan, including their facilities, samples, personnel, and records.

As the world continues to battle this pandemic – and as WHO investigators begin their work, after more than a year of delays – the virus’s origin remains uncertain. The United States will continue to do everything it can to support a credible and thorough investigation, including by continuing to demand transparency on the part of Chinese authorities.

But go ahead, though it’s posted here, click the link and read the whole damned thing. (RTWDT)

VERY RELATED: Chinese commies lied, millions of human beings died.

NO AGITATORS/PROVOCATEURS JANUARY 6? He saw four distinct groups of them and J. Michael Waller knows professional agitators when he sees them, having been trained to be one and observing hundreds of demonstrations and protests since the 1970s. Just a sample:

“Then, from the north, a column of uniformed, agile younger men walked briskly, single-file, toward the inaugural stand. They came within two feet of me. Their camouflage uniforms were clean, neat, and with a pattern I couldn’t identify.

“Some had helmets and GoPro cameras. Some uniforms bore subdued insignia, including the Punisher skull. These were the disciplined, uniformed column of attackers. I had seen them in groups of two or three among the marchers on Connecticut Avenue from the Ellipse.

“Now there were a good three dozen of them, moving in a single, snakelike formation. They were organized. They were disciplined. They were prepared. ‘We’re taking the Capitol!’ the first or second announced.”

A MESSAGE FROM A FORMER STUDENT:

I was appointed to three DUI cases involving the same arresting officer earlier this year and noticed several alarming patterns. The officer tended to move the defendants just off camera for the allegedly damning bits and he tended to provoke the defendants into blind rages by the time they were arrested, which got them to refuse a blood draw. Anyways, I got together with some local attorneys and they checked their videos and saw the same issues. The local bar decided to fight all his stops. We lost the first two, but put the judge and the DA on notice about these patterns and we won the next four in a row. Last week, my remaining cases with this officer were all quietly dismissed. So were all his cases. I’ve been asking with attorneys in surrounding counties who are now noticing the same issues and setting all his cases for trial. Looks like we may have successfully blackballed him.

I’m counting that my good deed for the year.

Notwithstanding the jokes, lawyers do a lot of good. I mean, it’s not as if the police will police the police.

THE EXODUS IS HERE: New Yorkers Are Abandoning the Big Apple in Droves Despite Cheaper Rent, Report Shows. I’d like for this to be true: “Perhaps one reason Democrats failed to pick up a single state legislature this year is due to this migration pattern: Americans are escaping blue state policies (which include stricter lockdowns) and they aren’t about to vote for them to take control in their new red-state homes.”

But I think we need to get going on my Welcome Wagon Project.

ASTROTURF: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris Got a Big Social Media Boost from Indian Troll Farms. “A close examination has revealed unusual patterns. A large number of Twitter accounts that followed Biden’s appear to have been created exclusively for that purpose. And a large number of the users are located in small towns in rural India—in places where English-speakers are rare, and from handles run by people who don’t speak English as their first language, nor appear to be genuinely invested in American politics.”

He’s big in Japan Iran!

MICHAEL BARONE: The Normalcy of Trump’s Republican Party: His unusual personality obscures the GOP’s basic continuity and gradual pace of change.

But when you look away from the public figures and toward the voters, you don’t see such a sharp break with the past. Mr. Trump has won over some voters who never supported a Republican before and repelled others who previously never voted Democratic. But not in enormous numbers: You see much greater oscillations in party percentages nationally and in particular states and demographic groups in the 1960s and 1970s than you do when you compare the 2016 numbers with those of 2012 or 2008 or 2004.

As for the question of whether the Republicans will return to normal, it’s based on a mistaken premise. What’s normal for the major American political parties is change—adjusting issue positions and emphases to changed situations and challenges, attracting new demographic constituencies while losing ground among old ones, adapting to the cues and clatter in a competitive political marketplace while maintaining their basic character. . . .

The emergence of Mr. Trump is the latest example of this pattern. It is widely asserted that he executed a hostile takeover of the party, winning less than a majority of primary and caucus votes (45%, compared with John McCain’s 47% in 2008), insulting his opponents and previous Republican presidents. He took sharply different positions from those of Republican nominees (as well as Democratic ones) over the past half-century on trade and immigration—positions popular with blue-collar voters who had reason to believe Chinese competition had closed down American factories and that low-skill immigrants, especially from Mexico, tend to drive down native-born Americans’ wages. He decried the toll of military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Naturally these stands antagonized some Republican leaders and pundits who supported these policies and some Republican voters who defended them. Even so, the president has enjoyed the near-unanimous support of self-identified Republicans, with percentages rivaling or exceeding those supporting Presidents Reagan and Eisenhower in their times.

Trump Republicans’ downscale strength in 2016 was an amplification of a decadeslong trend. The core constituency of the Republican Party has been moving downscale for decades, first in response to cultural issues like abortion. The state of Pennsylvania provides examples. Metro Pittsburgh, with its steel-and-coal economy, never warmed to Ronald Reagan; George H.W. Bush, running to succeed him, won only 40% there in 1988. But by 2004 the younger George Bush raised the Republican percentage there to 48%, and Donald Trump carried it with 50%. The Republican percentage in Pennsylvania beyond its two big metropolitan areas remained static, at 58% in 1988, 57% in 2004 and 59% in 2016.

As Newton’s third law says that there is in nature for every action an equal and opposite reaction, so in American politics, for every demographic group trending toward one party, there is usually another with opposite views trending toward the other. In Pennsylvania, the four affluent suburban counties around Philadelphia voted 61% for Bush 41 in 1988, 46% for Bush 43 in 2004 and 41% for Donald Trump in 2016.

The increasingly downscale Republican and increasingly upscale Democratic constituencies are increasingly reflected in policy. While Mr. Trump orders a payroll-tax suspension, with dollars benefits flowing mostly to modest earners, Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats demand increased deductions for state and local taxes, which would mainly favor those with income of more than $650,000.

Fatcats.

THE RISE OF PRIVATE MILITIAS IS NOT USUALLY SEEN AS EVIDENCE OF ADVANCING CIVILIZATION: In Minneapolis, Armed Residents Set Up Patrols Amid Calls to Defund the Police: The city council approves its first permanent cuts to the police budget; crime has surged in the past two months.

Minneapolis residents in some areas still recovering from rioting and unrest are forming community watch and security groups, some bearing firearms, to fight a surge of crime in the wake of the George Floyd killing in May. At least one neighborhood has put up barricades to keep away outsiders.

The moves come as the city council on Friday approved its first permanent cuts to the police budget, amid calls to defund the department and generally lower tax revenue due to the economic strain caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The $193 million police budget will be cut by $10 million, including making permanent some temporary spending measures—including a hiring freeze—put in place in June. Around $1 million from the police budget is being shifted to a program called Cure Violence that tries to prevent things such as retaliatory shootings through community engagement. . . .

Police say the increase in crime follows a pattern seen in Ferguson, Mo., and other places where there have been high-profile officer-involved deaths and protests. Police say that, while some in the city seem to believe police have given up, officers remain on patrol throughout the city.

As riots played out across the city in late May and early June, a group of Black gun owners responded to a call from the local NAACP and patrolled the mostly African-American West Broadway business district for 10 nights, keeping the area free of looting or arson without firing a shot, said Jamil Jackson, a leader of the group called the Minnesota Freedom Fighters, which advocates for Black gun ownership. . . .

Council member Linea Palmisano said armed neighborhood patrols, or even efforts to just keep unfamiliar people out of a neighborhood, opens a Pandora’s box.

“We are lurching for solutions,” she said, noting she doesn’t support the idea of doing away with the police department but supports the idea of letting residents vote on it.

With the neighborhood patrols, “you could very easily create the same things we rally against,” she said.

In late June, residents near a commercial strip that had been looted, and the 3rd Precinct station that was abandoned and burned, were seeing a surge of shooting and drug-related crime on their block.

“It got to the point where crime had no consequences,” said Tania Rivera, 30, who runs a child-care center with her mother. “It was being done deliberately out in the open. Drive-through drug dealing, drive-through prostitution, everything from gunshots to assaults to sex out in the public. Everything you didn’t want your neighborhood to look like.”

So after a number of community meetings, neighbors began constructing a barrier to close off two blocks of their street, first with trash cans, then debris. For a while, a boat on a trailer protected one intersection. Eventually, a nearby iron maker constructed a permanent gate. Police gave their approval as long as emergency responders could get through if requested by the neighborhood.

Neighborhood men also began an armed patrol, kicking out anyone who didn’t belong on the block after dark.

Kicking out people who “don’t belong.” When the dawn patrol’s got to tell you twice, they’re gonna do it with a shotgun. Well, laboratories of democracy and all that.

YEAR OF THE JACKPOT: Mathematician predicted violent upheaval in 2020 all the way back in 2012. “In his 2012 article, published in the Journal of Peace Research, he analyzed political violence, including riots, lynchings and terrorism, in the United States between 1780 and 2010. He found two patterns: First, a long trend of peace followed by rising violence that seems to span about 200 or 300 years, marked in this case by relative peace in the early 1800s, major upheaval in the mid- to late-1800s, and then peace again in the mid-1900s. Superimposed upon this long-term curve were oscillations that seemed to repeat approximately every 50 years. Violence peaked around 1870, 1920 and 1970. Extrapolate another 50 years and you land right smack on 2020.”

No, his name isn’t Potiphar Breen.

SO, WHAT’S THE OVER/UNDER ON GETTING THORAZINE IN THE DRINKING WATER?  ABC News exec Barbara Fedida on leave amid conduct probe.

Fedida* also joked at a company lunch following mass-shooting incidents, asking the attendees which ABC News employee would be most likely to be an active shooter, sources told the Huffington Post.

Her pattern of bad behavior includes racist comments to underlings, according to the sources.

Fedida, who oversees hiring and diversity programs for the network, has reportedly been in the crosshairs of more than a dozen human resources complaints. ABC News even hired an executive coach for her after she was at the center of an HR probe in 2016, according to the report.

*The teen at the back of my mind is giggling that in Portuguese slang her name might be read as “Smelly.”

SO FRIENDS IN NYC TELL ME that the lockdown is beginning to fail. People in their neighborhood — even old people — who were wearing masks a few days ago now aren’t. Long lines at soup kitchens and food pantries and check-cashing places. A generally more sad and more aggressive attitude. This is bad because NYC needs it more than anywhere else, but a month or so is really about as long as most people will comply, or even self-isolate on their own. (This is a reason for the classic two-hump pattern in epidemics). I don’t know what should be done about this, if there’s anything to do. NYC is really serious, even if you think the pandemic is overplayed elsewhere in the US. But people are people, and your public health strategy has to account for their limits.

Related: Nothing About New York’s Outbreak Was Inevitable: Politicians and pundits are acting like the city was destined for a tragedy. They’re wrong.

New York City is sick, and journalists, pundits, and politicians have made a diagnosis: The city’s exceptional density is the problem. That is certainly the self-serving conclusion of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It’s a convenient bit of fatalism for a man presiding over a catastrophe. . . .

Like any misdiagnosis, this one will make it harder to find the cure.

A cursory look at a map shows that New York City’s coronavirus cases aren’t correlated with neighborhood density at all. Staten Island, the city’s least crowded borough, has the highest positive test rate of the five boroughs. Manhattan, the city’s densest borough, has its lowest.

Nor are deaths correlated with public transit use. The epidemic began in the city’s northern suburbs. The city’s per capita fatalities are identical to those in neighboring Nassau County, home of Levittown, a typical suburban county with a household income twice that of New York City.

True, New York City apartments are crowded. The share of housing units with more than one occupant per room is almost 10 percent. But that number is 13 percent in the city of Los Angeles. As a metro area, New York isn’t even in the top 15 U.S. cities for overcrowding. It’s not even the American city with the most apartments per capita (Miami) or immigrants (also Miami), to take two other characteristics that critics say might be associated with coronavirus infections.

New York City has a lot of restaurants per capita, places where people gather with strangers every night. But not as many as San Francisco, which, though it ranks second in the U.S. for both residential density and transit use, had just 20 COVID-19 deaths as of Friday.

If you expand your comparison internationally, New York City looks less exceptional still. It is not as dense or transit-dependent as, say, Paris (which has less than half of New York’s fatality rate) or Seoul, South Korea, where the pandemic has been all but controlled.

So what is it about New York City that made it a hot spot? Right now, it looks like the most exceptional thing about New York is its leaders’ belief that the city is unique. This presumption served first as a reassurance that New York would not follow Lombardy’s example, and later as the reason why it had. . . . Tragically, what seems to have put New York on such a different trajectory from San Francisco was that its leaders were so late to shut down public life.

Well, with De Blasio as mayor and Cuomo as governor, New York’s leadership is uniquely bad, so there’s that. In fact, I’d say that the disaster did become inevitable when they were elected.

THIS IS YAHOO NEWS, NOT SOME FRINGE WEBSITE: Suspected SARS virus and flu samples found in luggage: FBI report describes China’s ‘biosecurity risk.’

In late November 2018, just over a year before the first coronavirus case was identified in Wuhan, China, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at Detroit Metro Airport stopped a Chinese biologist with three vials labeled “Antibodies” in his luggage.

The biologist told the agents that a colleague in China had asked him to deliver the vials to a researcher at a U.S. institute. After examining the vials, however, customs agents came to an alarming conclusion.

“Inspection of the writing on the vials and the stated recipient led inspection personnel to believe the materials contained within the vials may be viable Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials,” says an unclassified FBI tactical intelligence report obtained by Yahoo News.

The report, written by the Chemical and Biological Intelligence Unit of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD), does not give the name of the Chinese scientist carrying the suspected SARS and MERS samples, or the intended recipient in the U.S. But the FBI concluded that the incident, and two other cases cited in the report, were part of an alarming pattern.

Isolate China.

THIS ISN’T GOOD: New Report on 138 Coronavirus Cases Reveals Disturbing Details: A highly contagious patient, virus transmission inside a hospital and unexpected turns for the worse have emerged as part of the epidemic in China. “The incident was a chilling reminder of the ‘super-spreaders’ in outbreaks of other coronavirus diseases, SARS and MERS — patients who infected huge numbers of other people, sometimes dozens. The phenomenon is poorly understood and unpredictable, an epidemiologist’s nightmare. Super-spreaders led to considerable transmission of MERS and SARS inside hospitals.”

Plus: “Another cause for concern was that some patients who at first appeared mildly or moderately ill then took a turn for the worse several days or even a week into their illness. The median time from their first symptoms to when they became short of breath was five days; to hospitalization, seven days; and to severe breathing trouble, eight days. Experts say that pattern means patients must be carefully monitored, and it is not safe to assume that someone who seems to be doing well early on is out of the woods.”

Also: “For this series of patients, the death rate was 4.3 percent, which is higher than the estimates coming from other parts of China. The reason is not known, and the figures may change as more information is gathered.”

And it’s not just old or sick people: “It can take a young, healthy person and make them sick.”

Here’s the JAMA Article.

ASK THE GOVERNOR OF PUERTO RICO: Is Trump Playing 3D Chess?

Trump beat the odds of getting elected in the first place. It confounded nearly all the pundits and prognosticators. He either did it through luck, chance, or skill; at the time it wasn’t obvious which it was (and it could have been a combination).

But a pattern began, and then that pattern kept repeating over time. One can only describe it this way: Trump does something that his enemies—and even some people who support him—criticize. There’s a big furor. The media reported that now he’s put his foot in his mouth and now he’s sunk himself for real. And yet, when the dust settles (and sometimes it settles rather quickly), we usually find that one or some or all of the following have occurred.

Trump didn’t say what they said he said.
His opponents do something in response to what he said that makes them look like the fools.
The public, in general responds by agreeing with Trump, which causes his polls to go up.

Strange, isn’t it, if he’s such a fool, that these things keep happening over and over and over? Can anyone have that much good luck?

Strange, indeed.

WHEN TURKEY DESTROYED ITS CHRISTIANS:

Between 1894 and 1924, the number of Christians in Asia Minor fell from some 3-4 million to just tens of thousands—from 20% of the area’s population to under 2%. Turkey has long attributed this decline to wars and the general chaos of the period, which claimed many Muslim lives as well. But the descendants of Turkey’s Christians, many of them dispersed around the world since the 1920s, maintain that the Turks murdered about half of their forebears and expelled the rest.

The Christians are correct. Our research verifies their claims: Turkey’s Armenian, Greek and Assyrian (or Syriac) communities disappeared as a result of a staggered campaign of genocide beginning in 1894, perpetrated against them by their Muslim neighbors. By 1924, the Christian communities of Turkey and its adjacent territories had been destroyed.

Over the past decade, we have sifted through the Turkish, U.S., British and French archives, as well as some Greek materials and the papers of the German and Austro-Hungarian foreign ministries. This research has made it possible to document a strikingly consistent pattern of ethno-religious atrocity over three decades, perpetrated by the Turkish government, army, police and populace.

The concentrated slaughter of Turkey’s Armenians in 1915-16, commonly known as the Armenian genocide, is well documented and acknowledged (outside of Turkey, which still bitterly objects to the charge). But the Armenian genocide was only a part, albeit the centerpiece, of a larger span of elimination that lasted some 30 years. Our work provides the first detailed description and analysis of the 1894-96 massacres and the destruction of the region’s Greek and remaining Armenian communities in 1919-24 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic.

The bloodshed was importantly fueled throughout by religious animus. Muslim Turks—aided by fellow Muslims, including Kurds, Circassians, Chechens and Arabs—murdered about two million Christians in bouts of slaughter immediately before, during and after World War I. These massacres were organized by three successive governments, those of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Young Turks and, finally, Atatürk. These governments also expelled between 1.5 and 2 million Christians, mostly to Greece.

The book is The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924.

SO I NOTICE THAT ALL OF A SUDDEN, IT SEEMS EVERY OTHER AD I’M SEEING ON TV IS FOR MESOTHELIOMA ATTORNEYS. Is there something going on with that? I thought that most of the exposure was long ago and would expect claims to be aging out.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire explains: There are new frontiers in mesothelioma! “I haven’t seen the ads (my sports viewing has made me an expert on pick-up trucks, erectile dysfunction, beer and male pattern baldness) but a new category of plaintiffs has been in the news: users of talcum powder. So they moved past legacy factory workers.”

I figured something was going on.

DAVID CATRON: Pelosi Outsmarted Herself on the SOTU.

By the time he entered the House chamber, it was already obvious that the national audience would very likely exceed last year’s larger-than-usual viewership for such speeches. This is not typical for the SOTU address. The normal pattern is a reasonably large audience for a president’s first address, followed by a gradual decline in public interest each year thereafter. This was certainly true for Trump’s predecessor. Tuesday evening’s speech, however, drew a larger audience than did the President’s 2018 address. According to a report in the Hill, broadcast TV numbers from Nielsen show the audience share was 10 percent over last year’s speech:

The four major broadcast outlets — CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox — combined for a 16.3 overnight rating during the address Tuesday night, which could result in total viewership of approximately 49 million when final numbers, to include the cable news networks and other outlets, are in later Wednesday.

Moreover, CBS and CNN conducted polls of public reaction to Trump’s words and the vast majority of viewers liked what they heard. The CBS/YouGov poll found that 76 percent of the public approved of the address, including 97 percent of Republicans and a whopping 82 percent of Independents. And a majority of viewers agreed that the President accomplished one of his primary goals for the address — improving national unity. According to CBS, “Fifty-six percent of Americans who watched tonight feel the president’s speech will do more to unite the country.” On specific issues, an unambiguous majority of viewers agreed with the President.

It isn’t just that Trump had the stronger arguments (although he did), or that the Democrats behaved badly (although they did). Almost just as important — and as subtext, probably the most important element — is that Trump looked like he was having fun up there.

That’s no small thing, especially after eight years of Obama, who never looked like he enjoyed these things (because he admittedly didn’t), and eight years of Bush, who wasn’t often very good at them.

SURE, BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, AFTER DOING THAT WASHINGTON USED ENDING SEGREGATION AS AN EXCUSE TO GRAB MORE POWER FOR ITSELF: Washington Forced Segregation on the Nation.

In 1940, the federal government required a Detroit builder to construct a six-foot-high, half-mile-long, north-south concrete wall. The express purpose was to separate an all-white housing development he was constructing from an African-American neighborhood to its east. The builder would be approved for a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan guarantee he needed only if he complied with the government’s demand. . . .

During the Depression, to provide lodging for lower-middle-class white families, the New Deal created America’s first civilian public housing. Some projects were built for black families as well, but these were almost always separate from the white projects. At the time, many urban areas were sites of considerable diversity, with black and white workers living within walking distance of downtown factories and other workplaces. Communities near train stations were often integrated, for example, because railroads would hire only African Americans as baggage handlers or Pullman car porters.

When Franklin Roosevelt became president, the nation was facing a desperate housing shortage. Many black and white working families lived in neighborhoods that, while integrated, could rightly be described as slums. To improve the quality of housing, as well as to provide jobs for construction workers, one of the first New Deal agencies, the Public Works Administration (PWA), demolished housing in many such integrated neighborhoods and built explicitly segregated housing instead. The policy created racial boundaries where they had not previously existed or reinforced them where they had taken root, giving segregation new government sanction. In Atlanta’s “Flats,” the government demolished a neighborhood that was about half white and half black to build a public housing project for whites only, with a separate project for African Americans farther away. In St. Louis’ DeSoto-Carr neighborhood, housing in a similarly mixed neighborhood was demolished to build a project for African Americans only, with a separate project for whites built in a different part of the city.

This, it should be emphasized, was not primarily a program for the South or border states. In Northern and Midwestern states, the federal government’s New Deal programs and local housing agencies worked together to create segregated patterns that have persisted for generations. . . .

In Boston, the federally financed Mission Hill project was for whites, while the Mission Hill Extension across the road was for African Americans. In Chicago, the Julia C. Lathrop and Trumbull Park Homes were built in white neighborhoods for whites only; the Ida B. Wells Homes were built in an African-American area for blacks only. This government housing program exacerbated existing racial patterns; had the projects been integrated, Chicago would not now be one of the most segregated cities in the nation.

During World War II, whites and African Americans flocked to jobs in war plants, sometimes in communities that had no tradition of segregated living. Yet the government built separate projects for blacks and whites, determining future residential boundaries. Richmond, California, a suburb of Berkeley, was one of the nation’s largest shipbuilding centers. It had few African Americans before the war; by its end, thousands were living in public housing along the railroad tracks, while white workers were assigned to housing in more established residential areas. Along the Pacific coast, racial segregation in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles has its roots in federal war housing.

Postwar, veterans desperately needed lodging, so President Harry Truman proposed even more housing projects. Congressional conservatives, deeming public housing socialistic, resolved to defeat Truman’s 1949 legislation. They introduced a “poison pill” amendment banning racial discrimination in public housing, which they expected Northern liberals to support, ensuring its passage. Then they planned to ally with Southern Democrats to defeat the amended legislation.

Instead, the liberals mobilized against the integration amendment. . . .

At about the same time, industry began to leave urban centers. Automakers, for example, closed many downtown assembly plants and relocated to rural and suburban areas to which African-American workers had less access. Good urban jobs became scarcer and public housing residents became poorer. A program that originally addressed a middle-class housing shortage became a way to warehouse the poor.

Why did white-designated projects develop vacancies while black-designated ones faced more demand than supply? The disparity largely resulted from an FHA program that guaranteed loans to builders of working-class suburban subdivisions—with explicit requirements that black families be excluded and that house deeds prohibit resale to them.

This was not an act of rogue bureaucrats. It was written policy, in blatant violation of the Fifth, 13th, and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Federal Housing Administration published a manual used by real estate appraisers nationwide, specifying that loans for suburban development could not be federally subsidized if an “inharmonious racial group” would be present or was already nearby. Suburbs like Levittown (east of New York City), Lakewood (south of Los Angeles), San Lorenzo (across the Bay from San Francisco), and hundreds of others were created in this way, ensuring their racial homogeneity and isolation.

Read the whole thing.

ASHE SCHOW: Emails Reveal Media Outlet Ran With Non-Story Designed To Hurt NRA. That Outlet Is Now Repeating Its Mistakes.

Way back in March of 2018, McClatchy ran a story with the headline “NRA lawyer said to have had concerns about group’s ties to Russia.” The premise of the story was that Cleta Mitchell allegedly told someone, at some point, that she had concerns about the National Rifle Association’s potential involvement in helping Russia steal the election for President Donald Trump in 2016.

The original article, published March 15, 2018, claimed “two sources familiar with the matter” had said this, but the sources were anonymous and not listed as anyone from the NRA or in Mitchell’s current circles. In the fourth paragraph, McClatchy quotes Mitchell saying the entire story was a “complete fabrication.” The article goes on to continue claiming Mitchell said this and what the consequences for the NRA might be if it was actually tied to Russia and if Trump actually colluded with the country to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. The article mentioned Mitchell was on a list of people House Democrats wanted to talk to regarding alleged Russian collusion.

The whole story appeared to be a Fusion GPS smear. Fusion GPS is an opposition research firm associated with the Russia-collusion theory. The McClatchy story follows a basic pattern that indicates involvement from Fusion GPS,

Full details at the link, but first I have to ask: Is it a mistake if it’s done on purpose?

ROGER KIMBALL: The Pathetic Crusade of Mitt Romney. “Many commentators noted that Romney was happy to have Trump’s endorsement when he ran for President in 2012 and, just a few months ago, when he ran for the Senate. As Tennessee State Senator Frank Nicely put it on Twitter, ‘Mitt Romney has always been there when he needs you. The American people sensed that and he lost.’ . . . Mitt Romney thinks that Donald Trump has not risen to the ‘mantle’ of the presidency. But that mantle has been denied to Trump by an establishment that refuses to countenance his legitimacy and, moreover, by implication refuses to countenance the legitimacy of those who elected him.”

Like so many of Trump’s critics, Mitt is a coward masquerading as a brave truth-teller. Mitt could have won in 2012 if he’d shown 1/10 of Trump’s ability to punch back. But he was afraid of being called a racist for going after Obama and he lost. (And they called him a racist, and Hitler, and homophobic, and everything else anyway.) And worse, Romney seems to have learned nothing from his own experience. A sad start to his Senate career.

Plus:

Donald Trump campaigned and was elected on rolling back the regulatory state. He has made a good start on that Herculean project. He campaigned and was elected on taming illegal immigration. He is hard at work attempting to achieve that. He campaigned and was elected on cutting taxes. He managed that last year. He campaigned and was elected on rolling back political correctness. He has done that through Betsy DeVos’s department of education and in other ways. He campaigned and was elected on populating the judiciary with judges who were Constitutionalists after the pattern of Antonin Scalia. He has made astonishing progress in doing just that. He campaigned and was elected on rebuilding the United States military and, with a military budget of some $716 billion, he is well on the way to accomplishing that. He campaigned and was elected on making America energy independent. We are now the world’s largest energy producer. He campaigned and was elected on helping black and hispanic minorities, who now enjoy the lowest unemployment in history. He campaigned and was elected on a promise to challenge the spread of radical Islamic terrorism. During his first year in office, he obliterated ISIS as a fighting force. He campaigned and was elected on challenging North Korea’s nuclear program and has made historic progress on that front. He campaigned and was elected on reversing China’s unfair trade practices and expansionist policies. He has made significant progress on that front as well. He campaigned and was elected on moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. He did it.

Mitt Romney thinks that Donald Trump has not risen to the ‘mantle of the office.’ I’d say, on the contrary, that he has lifted the bar and then vaulted over it.

I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. Doubtless he is a nice man. Possibly, Donald Trump is not as nice. But he won in 2016, as Mitt Romney failed to do in 2012. And his tenure has been a litany of achievement in the light of which Mitt Romney’s complaints appear not just churlish and beside the point but slightly rancid and pathetic, not unlike the establishment he embodies.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Seen on Facebook:

BAMN, BAMN, BAMN–THE ROOTS OF THE ANTIFA: I mentioned earlier today that the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was approved by voters on this day in 2006, a decade after the almost-identical Proposition 209 in California. In both campaigns, major opposition came from a Trotskyite group (and I don’t use the word “Trotskyite” lightly here) called the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary. Its members go by the acronym “BAMN,” and they are apparently an offshoot of the Revolutionary Workers Party. Knock me over with a feather if these guys aren’t wearing Antifa masks these days.

During the California campaign, we mostly laughed BAMN off. But in Michigan (and later in Arizona) there started to be real reason to fear for the safety of the initiative’s supporters, including its signature gatherers:

Just one among dozens of examples of [BAMN’s] willingness to use “any means necessary” was its attempt to intimidate the Michigan Board of Canvassers into refusing to certify MCRI for the ballot.  BAMN brought in busloads of protesters who shouted down officials, jumped on chairs, and stomped their feet, flipping over a table in the process.  As the director of elections for the Michigan Secretary of State put it, “Never before have I seen such absolutely incredible and unprofessional behavior from lawyers urging this disruption.”

BAMN’s co-chair and attorney saw things differently:  “We cannot allow our opponents to determine what our tactics should be,” she said.  “Our tactics win.  That’s the bottom line.”  They did not, however, win before the Board of Canvassers.  Board members voted to certify the initiative for the ballot as the law required them to do.  The following November, the voters approved it 58% to 42%.

I wasn’t there at the Board of Canvassers meeting, but I’ve seen the video.  Alas, I couldn’t find it today (though I confess I didn’t look that hard).   But I did find a more recent video of BAMN storming a meeting of the University of Michigan Board of Regents. Finding the second video is even better, since it vividly shows that the Board of Canvassers meeting was part of a pattern.

Oh yeah, and they filed the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court too.  BAMN is well funded.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Academia Is A Cult:

I “blew out” of the cult — to use its own lingo for leaving — after my senior year to attend a Catholic university 20 miles away. I still read the Apostle Paul, but Jane Austen and James Joyce, too. Then I earned a PhD in English at the University of Minnesota, where I rehearsed Marx’s and Freud’s critiques of religion. Simmering with smug resentment, I was certain that I, an intellectual, was on the right side of history, a sworn opponent of the oppressive ideologies I ascribed to organized religion.

But I had to climb only so far up the ivory tower to recognize patterns of abuse that I thought — in my new, secular life — I had left behind. Because academia, I slowly realized, is also a cult.

Cults are systems of social control. They are insular but often evangelical organizations whose aims (be they money, power, sex or something else) are rooted in submission to a dogma manifested by an authority figure: a charismatic preacher or, say, a tenured professor. The relationship between shepherd and sheep is couched in unwavering commitment to a supposedly noble, transcendent cause. For the Living Word Fellowship, that meant “the Lordship of Jesus Christ”; for academia, “the production of knowledge.” In both cases, though, faith ultimately amounts to mastering the rules of the leaders, whose infallibility — whether by divine right or endowed chair — excuses all else.

Looking back, the evidence was everywhere: I’d seen needless tears in the eyes of classmates, harangued in office hours for having the gall to request a letter of recommendation from an adviser. Others’ lives were put on hold for months or sometimes years by dissertation committee members’ refusal to schedule an exam or respond to an email. I met the wives and girlfriends of senior faculty members, often former and sometimes current advisees, and heard rumors of famed scholars whisked abroad to sister institutions in the wake of grad student affairs gone awry. I’d first come in contact with such unchecked power dynamics as a child, in the context of church. In adulthood, as both a student and an employee of a university, I found myself subject to them once again. . . . The Ronell scandal should alert us to the broader ways in which the 21st-century university is an absolutist institution, a promoter of sycophancy and an enemy of dissent.

Yep.

BYRON YORK: Finally, a day of reckoning for Michael Avenatti?

Of course, it wasn’t true. Still, Avenatti’s allegation poured fuel on an already raging partisan fire over the Kavanaugh nomination. First there was the Christine Ford allegation. Then came the Ramirez accusation, which, coming after Ford, gave Kavanaugh’s opponents the occasion to claim a “pattern” of Kavanaugh’s alleged abuse of women. Then Avenatti’s allegation — gang rape — sent it into another dimension.

Avenatti’s client was identified as Julie Swetnick, who had lived in the Washington area during Kavanaugh’s high school years. Avenatti sent the committee an affidavit in which Swetnick made her claims. Beyond that, he provided no other evidence to support the allegation — beyond the promise of “multiple witnesses.” Nevertheless, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee took it very seriously.

Putting aside the question of why NBC waited to report the woman’s statement until after the Kavanaugh vote was over. The entire Avenatti episode left Grassley angry that the publicity-seeking lawyer had hijacked the committee’s time and energy at a critical time with claims that were obviously untrue. So on Oct. 25, Grassley formally referred Avenatti (and Swetnick) to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation into their conduct.

“It is illegal to knowingly and willfully make materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements to congressional investigators,” Grassley wrote in the referral. “When charlatans make false claims to the committee — claims that may earn them short-term media exposure and financial gain, but which hinder the committee’s ability to do its job — there should be consequences.”

With Avenatti, there have so far been no consequences, beyond the loss of whatever credibility some cable TV news organizations conferred on him in repeated appearances over the last several months. Now, with the Grassley referral, that could finally change.

Consequences, for a change.

IT SURE LOOKS THAT WAY: Did Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, and Michael Avenatti give Trump his biggest victory yet?

The Avenatti-Swetnick story represented the moment when the anti-Kavanaugh forces jumped the shark. The allegation was off-the-scale serious: Who knew Brett Kavanaugh was a high-school Bill Cosby? But Swetnick produced no witnesses to the events she alleged, nor could she produce witnesses who confirmed even that such events occurred, nor could she produce witnesses who confirmed her presence at any such events, and, she was not even part of Kavanaugh’s social circle at the time (Swetnick was older than the others and from a more distant suburb of Washington and attended public school there, outside the tight-knit group of private school students with whom Kavanaugh hung out).

In short, Avenatti and Swetnick had nothing beyond an incendiary accusation. Nevertheless, some Democrats embraced the story to push the notion that there was an accumulating weight of sexual misconduct accusations against Kavanaugh.

“We already have three credible reports of sexual misconduct by Judge Kavanaugh,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, referring to Ford, Ramirez, and Swetnick. Pressing for an FBI investigation, Hirono said it “certainly should cover the three credible reports that have come forward.”

“We now have three credible accusers of sexual assault,” said Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued a press release headlined: “Senate Democrats: FBI Must Investigate All Three Credible Allegations of Sexual Assault Against Judge Brett Kavanaugh.” Other Democrats on the committee sent out the same release.

The talking point got some pickup in the press. ABC News asked President Trump: “Mr. President, there are now three women accusing Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. Are you saying that all three of these women are liars?”

Democrats had their pattern. They demanded Trump order the FBI to interview people who might have knowledge about all three accusations.

Releasing the FBI report might make for an excellent October Surprise.

HMM: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease Draws Fresh Interest.

It’s an idea that just a few years ago would’ve seemed to many an easy way to drain your research budget on bunk science. Money has poured into Alzheimer’s research for years, but until very recently not much of it went toward investigating infection in causing dementia.

But this “germ theory” of Alzheimer’s, as Norins calls it, has been fermenting in the literature for decades. Even early 20th century Czech physician Oskar Fischer — who, along with his German contemporary Dr. Alois Alzheimer, was integral in first describing the condition –noted a possible connection between the newly identified dementia and tuberculosis.

If the germ theory gets traction, even in some Alzheimer’s patients, it could trigger a seismic shift in how doctors and understand and treat the disease.

For instance, would we see a day when dementia is prevented with a vaccine, or treated with antibiotics and antiviral medications? Norins thinks it’s worth looking into.

Norins received his medical degree from Duke in the early 1960s, and after a stint at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention he fell into a lucrative career in medical publishing. He eventually settled in an admittedly aged community in Naples, Florida, where he took an interest in dementia and began reading up on the condition.

After scouring the medical literature he noticed a pattern.

“It appeared that many of the reported characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease were compatible with an infectious process,” Norins tells NPR. “I thought for sure this must have already been investigated, because millions and millions of dollars have been spent on Alzheimer’s research.”

But aside from scattered interest through the decades, this wasn’t the case.

Very interesting.

MICHAEL BARONE: Still Not Clear Which Party Will Lose The House.

Another way to put it: Republicans got the worst showings of both of their last two nominees, losing even further ground among college-graduate-whites, while failing to duplicate Trump’s gains among non-college-whites.

That pattern was discernible in earlier special elections and makes it easy to see how Democrats could win a House majority. It’s widely attributed to Trump’s combative and provocative style.

There’s something to that, of course, but not everything. The voter shifts from Romney 2012 to Trump 2016 by historic standards were actually small, and the variations of Republican and Democratic percentages in the two-plus decades since 1994 have been historically small, with a steady increase in straight-ticket voting until 2016.

What we’ve also seen in congressional elections since the middle 1990s is a resistance to one-party control. With close presidential elections, only a few voters need defect in the off-year to produce this result and, except for the election just after 9/11, enough voters have done just that.

Former President Bill Clinton faced Republican Houses and Senates for six of his eight years in office. Former President George W. Bush’s Republicans gained seats in 2002, but he faced a Democratic House for two years and a Democratic Senate for three-and-a-half. Former President Barack Obama faced a Republican House for six of eight years and a Republican Senate for two.

You can ascribe the losses of each president’s party as the predictable result of some combination of extremist overreach, legislative fecklessness, personal scandals and suspicion of insiders. But for one reason or another, they keep happening and could again this year, when Republicans could lose their majority in the House and might conceivably, despite their advantage in seats up for re-election, in the Senate too.

But there’s reason to be cautious about predictions. Republicans’ big gains weren’t visible at this point in the 1994 cycle (I wrote the first article predicting they might win a majority, in July of that year), nor were Democrats’ big gains in 2006 or Republicans’ sweep of Senate seats in 2014.

Nor are polls this far out always a reliable guide to November.

Nope. Just pick a candidate you like who needs help and help them.