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Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.

For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason

That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.

With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.

The vote-stealing theory got its first exposure beyond the web the day before the election on Mr. Bannon’s show. Because of the Hammer, Mr. McInerney said, “it’s going to look good for President Trump, but they’re going to change it.” The Democrats, he alleged, were seeking to use the system to install Mr. Biden and bring the country to “a totalitarian state.”

with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.”

Yet as the suits failed in court after court across the country, leaving Mr. Trump without credible options to reverse his loss before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid.

As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.

Yet as the draft circulated among Republican attorneys general, several of their senior staff lawyers raised red flags. How could one state ask the Supreme Court to nullify another’s election results? Didn’t the Republican attorneys general consider themselves devoted federalists, champions of the way the Constitution delegates many powers — including crafting election laws — to each state, not the federal government?

In an interview, Mr. Kobach explained his group’s reasoning: The states that held illegitimate elections (which happened to be won by Mr. Biden) were violating the rights of voters in states that didn’t (which happened to be won by Mr. Trump).

The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.

One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”

The next day, Dec. 9, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line, “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.” The congressman was putting together an amicus brief in support of the Texas suit; Mr. Trump, he wrote, “specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join.” The president, he noted, was keeping score: “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”

Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from the president himself. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted. Privately, he asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to argue the case.

By the time the bus pulled into West Monroe, La., for a New Year’s Day stop to urge Senator John Kennedy to object to certification, Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone.

But talk at the rally was tilting toward what to do if they didn’t.“We need our president to be confirmed through the states on the 6th,” said Couy Griffin, the founder of Cowboys for Trump. “And right after that, we’re going to have to declare martial law.”

Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.

Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse.

But Mr. Cruz was working at cross-purposes, trying to conscript others to sign a letter laying out his circular logic: Because polling showed that Republicans’ “unprecedented allegations” of fraud had convinced two-thirds of their party that Mr. Biden had stolen the election, it was incumbent on Congress to at least delay certification and order a 10-day audit in the “disputed states.” Mr. Cruz, joined by 10 other objectors, released the letter on the Saturday after New Year’s.

The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association. Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” according to a recording obtained by the progressive investigative group Documented.

Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.

Defiantly, to a great roar from the plaza, Ms. Chafian cried, “I stand with the Proud Boys, because I’m tired of the lies,” and she praised other militant nationalist groups in the crowd, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.

Speakers including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Jones, Mr. Stone and the Tennessee pastor Mr. Locke spoke of Dominion machines switching votes and Biden ballots “falling from the sky,” of “enemies at the gate” and Washington’s troops on the Delaware in 1776, of a fight between “good and evil.”“Take it back,” the crowd chanted. “Stop the steal.”

“What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed President Trump in Congress and we get them out of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.”

the Great Smog of 1952, pollutants from factories and home fireplaces mixed with air condensation killed at least 4,000 people in London over the course of several days.

However, in 2007, almost half (46 percent) of all Americans resided in counties with unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution, according to the American Lung Association (ALA).

It irritates the respiratory tract and can lead to a number of health problems, including asthma attacks, chest pain and even death.

It causes many other health effects, premature births to serious respiratory disorders, even when the particle levels are very low. It makes asthma worse and causes wheezing, coughing and respiratory irritation in anyone with sensitive airways. It also triggers heart attacks, strokes, irregular heartbeat, and premature death.”

For centuries, humans unknowingly contaminated sources of drinking water with raw sewage, which led to diseases such as cholera and typhoid.

Water pollution intensified with the advent of the Industrial Revolution,

Over half the American population (including the majority of those living in rural areas) relies on groundwater for drinking water, according to The Groundwater Foundation

The disaster, which created a 3,000-square-mile oil slick, instantly killed hundreds of thousands of birds, fish and other wildlife and devastated the area for years afterward.

The day had started as one of triumph for Mr. Biden and his party, with Democrats coming off elections the day before that sealed control of the Senate by picking up two seats in Georgia and Congress scheduled to clear away the last formal Republican objections to his victory by certifying the Electoral College outcome.

Filling out his cabinet, Mr. Biden chose Judge Merrick B. Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination Republicans blocked in 2016, to be attorney general, placing the task of repairing a beleaguered Justice Department in the hands of a centrist judge.

The assault on the Capitol by pro-Trump demonstrators devolved into a physical confrontation that halted the process of certifying the Electoral College outcome

It’s not protest. It’s insurrection.

Other interest groups quickly seized on the Georgia results to ratchet up the pressure on Mr. Biden to make good on his campaign promises.

“The work of the moment and the work of the next four years must be the restoration of democracy, of decency, honor, respect, the rule of law,” he said, adding later: “We must step up

Mr. Biden’s advisers are deep into the process of developing policy proposals to deliver to Congress in the coming weeks, starting with another stimulus package

The Biden team is also drafting proposals to implement the president-elect’s “Build Back Better” campaign agenda, including new government spending on clean energy, infrastructure, health care and education, financed by tax increases on the rich and corporations.

The Democratic victories in Georgia put Mr. Biden’s party in control at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and reduced the risk of total partisan gridlock in Congress, at least for two years.

“With Schumer in control of the calendar, he’s got the opportunity to do some really substantial things.”

Shortly after, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter a one-minute video in which he empathized with the rioters because “we had an election that was stolen from us,” but then urged them to “go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.”

Mr. Biden’s allies in the Senate expressed optimism that, armed with committee chairmanships and control of the legislative calendar, they could advance the president-elect’s policy goals.

“We need to fix a lot of the damage Trump’s done, and then there’s pent-up demand for a whole lot of things — what do we do about climate and about racial inequality, about wealth inequality, about structural racism,” said Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is set to be the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Mr. Biden has also proposed the most ambitious climate agenda of any president in history, including $2 trillion in spending on green initiatives. A majority in the Senate gives Mr. Biden options to make some of that happen.

But Mr. Biden’s agenda will be constrained by the Democrats’ narrow advantages in the House and in the Senate, where moderate Democrats such as Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will wield vast power over which plans can pass.

Before the outbreak of violence on Capitol Hill, Mr. Biden signaled on Wednesday morning that despite the shift of Senate control to Democrats, he would still attempt to build legislative coalitions with Republicans on his top priorities

A high-profile business lobbying group that has long supported many Republicans, the National Association of Manufacturers, denounced Mr. Trump on Wednesday for inciting the violence and suggested it was time for his administration to invoke a constitutional provision to remove him

the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.

Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,”

Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”

The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”

Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.

a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school

Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.

even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”

“What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”

Many police officials and extremism experts said that they were more worried about the period after Nov. 3, especially if no clear winner emerges.

In Chicago, days off have been canceled and officers notified that their shifts might extend to 12 hours.

National Guard units were also being called out in various states, including New Jersey, Wisconsin and Texas. Officials in the first two said the dearth of poll-station volunteers amid the pandemic meant a few hundred troops in civilian clothing would be needed to help count absentee ballots and other poll activities.

But then he still raised doubts about counting votes beyond Election Day, even though in any election, it typically takes longer to count absentee ballots that by law count just the same as votes cast in person.

More of those ballots are being cast this year because of the pandemic.

Trump also suggested that voters should have mailed in their ballots well before the deadlines set by states, saying, "If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before [Election Day]. They could have put their ballots in a month ago.

Americans are breaking early voting records, with more than 93 million votes already cast. Of that, 59 million mail-in ballots have been returned, with 32 million ballots still waiting to be mailed back, according to the U.S. Elections Project.

If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electorals, somewhere in that range, and then they're going to try to steal it back after the election," Miller said.

But that's not the way voting in America works.

For starters, no state ever reports its final results on election night.

Delaware, in fact, is the only state that will certify its results within the same week as Election Day. Most states will certify their results in the last two weeks of November, with some states even extending until the second week of December.

"

Election experts predicted that there would be a large increase in mail-in ballots this cycle because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic. The increase in these absentee ballots may mean the count will take longer, particularly because election workers typically need to process each ballot by hand.

"The counties are staffing up, have a ton of equipment, best practices in place, and are planning, for the most part, to count 24/7 until it's done."

Mental health experts are worried about what the coming winter could hold as the pandemic stretches on, and socializing outdoors becomes impossible. For those with obsessive-compulsive disorder, COVID-19 brings extra challenges, but also some lessons about dealing with anxiety.

People with OCD often develop compulsions — those are rituals or repeated behaviors — that they use to soothe themselves when obsessions — or unwanted, repeated thoughts — pop into their brains.

Travis Osborne is a psychologist who specializes in OCD. When the pandemic started, he said, "It definitely made me feel really sad and concerned for some of my clients with OCD — because I just knew that, for some of them, this is going to create more work."

For people with OCD, their self-soothing rituals take time and interfere with their daily lives.

Multiple studies have shown that the pandemic is exacerbating the symptoms of some people with OCD.

Acknowledging anxiety and learning to live with it is a useful skill for everyone, especially during a pandemic.

Police will soon release 911 tapes, body camera footage

Community members gather in West Philly

A racially diverse crowd came together Tuesday evening at Malcolm X Park, not far from the West Philadelphia neighborhood where Wallace was killed.

"far too many comfortable white people here tonight."

"Stop this looting and stop and stop burning our city down," the elder Wallace told CNN.

"It's not going to solve anything," he said. "I don't want to leave a bad scar on my son and my family with this looting and chaos stuff." Wallace's killing was captured on cellphone video and posted to social media, where it went viral.

Family reportedly called for an ambulance, not police

Wallace's wife told the officers when they arrived that her husband had bipolar disorder and urged the officers to stand down.

They ordered Wallace to drop the weapon, saying that he "advanced towards officers."

Both officers fired their guns at Wallace. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

I’d add a few more: the conservative influence of John Paul II’s papacy for Generation-X Catholics

the seemingly positive trendlines on race relations (visible in polls of African-Americans as well as whites) from the 1990s through the early Obama years

By virtue of having “adulted” more successfully than millennials — marrying, homebuying and having kids earlier and in larger numbers — Generation X enjoys a certain bourgeois realism about what sustains human societies, what choices in your 20s will make you happiest in your 40s, that’s absent from the very-online progressivism of the young

the characteristic Gen X weakness on race is a complacent assumption that the Clinton-to-Obama period resolved issues like the wealth gap or police misconduct, instead of just tabling them

On economics, meanwhile, Gen X conservatives can be tempted into uncharity toward younger Americans, interpreting their struggles and sympathies for socialism as a moral failure, as opposed to a response to a more hostile economic landscape than we faced

Zombie Reaganism, sticking with a conservative policy agenda that’s lost much of its relevance, precisely because the Reagan agenda helped make the world in which we came of age.

and the effects of the Reagan and Clinton economic growth spurts, which enabled my generation to enter adulthood under more prosperous conditions than the Great Recession-era landscape that hobbled millennials

There is an emotivism and narcissism that millennial liberalism and boomer liberalism seem to share, and in strong doses it’s poison for institutions.

The ironic communitarianism of Gen-X conservatism probably isn’t the perfect antidote, but it may be all we’ve got.

To grow up in the ’70s or ’80s was to come of age just after liberalism’s last high tide, and to see evidence of its failures all around — from the urban blight and ugliness left by utopian renewal projects to the adult disarray and childhood misery sowed by the ideology of sexual liberation in its Hefnerian phase.

here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people

After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.”

don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”

The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time.

The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone.

In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder

As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.

She persuasively pushes the two notions together while addressing the internal wounds that, in America, have failed to clot.

A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.”

She observes that caste “is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”

Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans.

Each country “relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.”

What these pundits had not considered, Wilkerson writes, “was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.”

.She poses the question so many intellectuals and pundits on the left have posed, with increasing befuddlement: Why do the white working classes in America vote against their economic interests?

As if pulling from a deep reservoir, she always has a prime example at hand. It takes resolve and a strong stomach to stare at the particulars, rather than the generalities, of lives under slavery and Jim Crow and recent American experience

Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word “racism,” yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.

In its suggestion that we need something akin to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, her book points the way toward an alleviation of alienation. It’s a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will.

I thought often of a pair of sentences from Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad.” “The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map,” he wrote. “You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it for yourself.”

In her novel “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggested that “maybe it’s time to just scrap the word ‘racist.’ Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium and acute.”

“Caste” deepens our tragic sense of American history

"as of right now Secretary Esper is still Secretary Esper."

"Should the President lose faith, we will all learn about that in the future," she added.

A senior Republican source told CNN that there has been ongoing tension involving Esper and that Trump has no respect for his defense chief. Esper has had little influence and essentially takes his lead from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the source said, adding that this latest press conference will undoubtedly make things worse.

One White House official said aides there did not get a heads up about the content of Esper's remarks, most notably Esper's decision to publicly break with the President on the use of the military to address unrest in US cities.

As tear gas wafted through the air in Lafayette Park across from the White House, Trump announced from the Rose Garden that if state or city leaders refuse "to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents," he will invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows a president to deploy the US military to suppress civil disorder.

Esper also addressed the killing of Floyd, calling it a "horrible crime" and said "racism is real in America, and we must all do our very best to recognize it, to confront it, and to eradicate it.""The officers on the scene that day should be held accountable for his murder. It is a tragedy that we have seen repeat itself too many times. With great sympathy, I want to extend the deepest of condolences to the family and friends of George Floyd from me and the Department. Racism is real in America, and we must all do our very best to recognize it, to confront it, and to eradicate it," he said.

For months, the President and O'Brien have been losing faith in Esper's ability to lead the military and his tendency to avoid offering a full-throated defense of the President or his policies, according to multiple administration officials.

In December, Esper sat for an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum and when asked what it was like to work for Trump, he responded, "he is just another one of many bosses I've had and you've had your time that you learn to work with."

On Tuesday, White House officials scratched their head at an interview Esper gave to NBC News claiming he did not know he was walking to St. John's church on Monday with the President. Officials said the plans were clear inside the West Wing and that Esper's explanations made little sense. Esper clarified on Wednesday that while he knew they were going to the church, he did not know the movement would turn into a photo opportunity.

"I am concerned that in the current environment, it would be all too easy to put our men and women in uniform in the middle of a domestic political and cultural crisis. Discussions regarding the Insurrection Act could easily make them political pawns. The respect, trust, and support our troops have earned from their fellow citizens is the foundation of their strength and we must be careful not to erode that strength," he said in a statement.

We could be individualistic, anti-authority, daring and self-sufficient because on an elemental level we felt so damn safe.

Some nations grow up relatively spared from foreign invasion and the frequent devastation of infectious disease. Gelfand finds that these are loose nations: individualistic, creative but also disordered, uncoordinated and reckless.

Gelfand wrote a book called “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers.” We Americans have been rule-breakers, the classic loose nation.

Over the first two decades of the 21st century, America has lost its sense of safety, the calm confidence that the future is ours, that our institutions are sound or even minimally competent.

if there was any shred of existential safety left, surely the pandemic has taken it away

We’ve had threats before, a few foreign incursions like in 1812, even pandemics when America was less just than it is today. But we’ve never had them smack in the middle of a crisis of confidence, a crisis of authority, plus social and spiritual crises all at once.

this is the first invasion of America

Welcome to life in the rest of the world.

most of us have understood we need to suspend the old individualistic American creed. In the midst of a complex epidemiological disaster, to be anti-authority is to be ignorant. In the midst of a contagion, to act as if you are self-sufficient is just selfish.

If the old American creed grew up in an atmosphere of assumed security and liberty, the new one is growing up in an atmosphere of vulnerability and precariousness.

In this atmosphere, economic resilience will be more valued than maximized efficiency. We’ll spend more time minimizing downside risks than maximizing upside gains

The local and the rooted will be valued more than the distantly networked. We’ll value community over individualism, embeddedness over autonomy.

the American identity that grows up in the shadow of the plague can have the humanity of shared vulnerability, the humility that comes with an understanding of the precariousness of life and a fierce solidarity that emerges during a long struggle against an invading force.

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Trump wanted to bring down the hammer, but he couldn’t get his people to actually do it. To put it in terms the president would understand: Weak!

Much of this poor electoral performance stems from the reality that, as we argued back in March, Trump’s playbook is deeply ill-suited to the current crises: a virus that can’t be intimidated, economic fallout that won’t correct itself in response to Trump’s personality or bullying, and now protesters who don’t go away when he plays the strongman. So in addition to being a weak leader who can’t get his people to break the law or crack down on protesters, and in addition to being electorally weak, Trump now looks ineffectual, even ridiculous, in the face of circumstances that just aren’t cooperating and can’t be ordered around.

All of which makes this past week an important cautionary tale for the election itself if Trump does, in fact, lose. The authoritarian instinct will still be there, of course. So will the flailing weakness, we suspect, and the effort to get his administration to take wildly inappropriate, even illegal steps. His degree of panic will presumably be even higher then than it is now, as will the stakes—which will be nothing less than the peaceful transition of power.

We can only hope that, once again, the weakness will overwhelm the authoritarianism, the ineffectuality will triumph over the menace, and the president will emerge as a figure of contempt and ridicule, rather than of fear and consolidated power.

“For every death, there’s about 21 other infections,” she said modeling showed. So most of Philadelphia’s 50,000 people probably were infected. “They were either lucky that they didn’t develop disease or had mild disease compared to those that were unlucky and died.”Yellow fever is one of more than 200 known human viruses, according to the National Institutes of Health. They include those that cause HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rabies, the common cold and now the novel coronavirus.

In the late 1800s, scientists were just starting to realize that strange microbes smaller than bacteria were causing disorders in plants and animals. Bacteria, which had been discovered in the 1670s, had been associated with human illnesses such as typhoid fever, cholera and tuberculosis.

U.S. Army physician Walter Reed reported in 1900 that the leading suspect bacteria was not found in the blood of fever cases he studied in Cuba.There was an alien “parasite” at work, he believed.“At the time they didn’t even call it a virus,” Staples said. “They didn’t know really what a virus was.”

In 1900, Reed set up what he called an “experimental sanitary station” in Cuba, where yellow fever was prevalent. He named it Camp Lazear, for Jesse W. Lazear, a medical colleague who had died of the fever that year.

After extensive testing on volunteer patients who were infected, Reed confirmed that mosquitoes were the carrier and eliminated bacteria as a cause.

The yellow fever virus was isolated in 1927, and scientists soon came up with an effective vaccine, called 17D, a weakened form of the virus itself. It’s still in use, and a recent scholarly paper called it “one of the most outstanding human vaccines ever developed.”

But in Philadelphia in 1793, the only remedy would be something that killed mosquitoes.

The second is the preservation of constitutional order. Through epic acts of self-discipline, the nonviolent civil rights marchers in the 1960s forced their foes to reveal that if there were to be any violence and anarchy, it would come from the foes. That’s how the movement captured the moral high ground and won the mind of the nation.

The process of mobilizing for an accurate election outcome, before it is too late, would be a struggle to preserve the order of our civic structure against the myriad foes who talk blithely about tearing down systems, disorder and disruption. It may be how we rediscover our nation again.

It’s time to start thinking about what you would do.

The USSR crumbled — or so goes the lesson — because it became open, loosened its grip over politics and polity.

This idea has now received official stamp from the very top of Beijing’s leadership, and one can see it reverberating through the new wave of paranoia about foreign influence, reassertion of party power, and hostility to civil society

The Soviet fall, once seen at least in part as a result of the Communist Party’s own failings, has become reinterpreted as a deliberate US plot and a moral failure to hold the line against Western influence,” writes Palmer.

This paranoia guides and informs every step that Xi takes, be it the brutal repression of Uighur minority, the annihilation of their Muslim identity or the purge of his political opponents under the pretext of corruption.

Xi wrote in 2017: “As the world’s largest party, no external force can defeat us, and only we can defeat ourselves… We should stay alert to the ubiquitous factors that could weaken our Party’s pioneering nature and contaminate our Party’s purity… If we don’t take strict precautions and correct them in time… small problems will grow into big ones, minor slips will escalate into an irreversible landslide, probably even leading to a broader and subversive catastrophe.”

Xi and the CPC remain convinced that the US wants to balance and contain its rise, constrict it by fanning pro-democracy sentiments and challenge the ‘One China’ policy

Beijing’s actions are swayed by insecurity based on that fear. China blames the US for “influencing” the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, accuses Washington of instigating and sponsoring Taiwan’s defiance, and it has noted with concern American (mostly botched) efforts at regime change in post-second World War history

This has heightened Xi’s (and the party’s fears) to the extent that China believes a proactive, interventionist, in-your-face foreign policy — driven by a revanchist obsession with reassembling the Middle Kingdom’s imperial empire over the land and sea through military and non-military means — along with the relentless accumulation of economic and hard power are prerequisite to achieving the China Dream.

In keeping the party and the society focused on achieving that goal, fear (whether real or imagined) is a useful tool.

The CPC needs the west and its political system as the ‘other’ to operate in opposition to it, and paranoia remains the overwhelming driving force that binds the party, the state and society

in the last six months alone of the new decade — and amid a raging, global pandemic that originated in Wuhan — Xi’s China has undertaken a series of coercive steps and has gone into geopolitical jousting with almost all its neighbours and regional actors. The goal of a regional hegemon and a presumptive superpower should be creating conditions that aid its rise, not cause impediments in the path through abrasive overreach.

This naked bullying behaviour has consequences, even though China may like to believe that the ability of these regional actors in balancing against China is constrained by their economic dependence on Beijing. China has alienated regional players and given rise to a renewed push for Asian multilateralism underwritten by the US.

As former Indian ambassador to China Gautam Bambawale has said, for a minor tactical gain on the ground, China has “lost India” and forced New Delhi into fundamentally reassessing its China policy.

He retweeted tweets asserting that Nancy Pelosi might be planning “a coup” against him. He asserted that law enforcement was “watching” Nevada’s governor for potential voter fraud.

After the FBI thwarted a kidnap attempt by right-wing militia against Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, he labeled her “the lockup queen”—a reference to her life-saving public-safety directives to stave off the pandemic. He complained that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not yet released Hillary Clinton’s emails, exhuming his demented obsession from 2016.

All this in but a few hours.

Obviously, Trump has long since has become an unacceptable danger to the country he is sworn to protect—not only to our spirit, but to our safety, security, and the conduct of our democracy

Until now, only in feverish political potboilers do lunatic presidents propose to jail the opposing candidate. No man this unmoored should be permitted to hold—and abuse—such power.

But he does, and so we watch the spectacle of his unraveling

For his own sake, and that of others, a president possessed of minimal self-awareness and empathy would refrain from debating in person—or demanding the presence of others.

Not Trump. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young,” announced our ill-conditioned, 74-year-old president

That this man has already threatened the peaceful transition of power—and clearly means it—is reason enough to remove him from office.

So is the worry that Trump will abuse our military power—potentially provoking an incendiary geopolitical crisis—in a reckless attempt to reverse his failing electoral fortunes. This need not involve that terrifying conceit of apocalyptic political fiction: the unhinged president reaching for the nuclear button. But whatever dangers Trump may pose, one cannot dismiss the deranged verbiage he used yesterday with Rush Limbaugh to threaten Iran

The language itself shows a president who has exceeded his limited capacities for self-control, rhetorical and behavioral. “If you fuck around with us,” he informed the Iranians, “if you do something bad to us, we’re gonna do things to you that have never been done before.”

What might that be? One cannot help but remember that John F. Kennedy’s coolheaded judgment during the Cuban missile crisis helped save the Western hemisphere from a nuclear catastrophe. One simply cannot know, and America should not risk, what Trump may do when his psychic thermometer passes the boiling point.

He has a pre-existing condition which made him a danger to our country since his first day in office: an ineradicable personality disorder which fatally compromises the ability to perceive anything outside his own stunted inner landscape. The only reality he has grasped, in his frighteningly feral way, is that Joe Biden is going to beat him—and it is making him more dangerous than ever.

Johnson said that Wallace was suffering and in a doctor's care, and that he was receiving treatment for his mental health issues.

"It's emotionally taxing to think about how you can call for assistance and wind up with the people who you called killing you," he said.

What that index didn't take into account — and what has compounded months of governmental failures — is that even before COVID-19 arrived on its shores, the U.S. was an unusually sick country for its level of wealth and development.

High blood pressure, obesity and metabolic disorders are all on the rise in the U.S.

Healthy life expectancy — the number of years people can expect to live without disability — is 65.5 years in the U.S., more than two decades fewer than in Japan.

65,700 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2019, more than double the number in 2010. Those deaths account for more than half of all drug overdose fatalities worldwide and held down life expectancy in the U.S.

Mortality for mothers and children under 5 is 6.5 per 1,000 live births in the U.S., compared to 4.9 for other wealthy countries.

Context: Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton has called COVID-19 a "syndemic" — a synergistic epidemic of a new and deadly infectious disease and numerous underlying health problems. The U.S. is squarely in the heart of that syndemic.

A study published in August found cardiovascular disease can double a patient's risk of dying from COVID-19, while diabetics — who number more than 30 million in the U.S. — are 1.5 times more likely to die.

All in all, more than 40% of American adults have a pre-existing health condition that puts them at higher risk of severe COVID-19.

Those conditions are particularly prevalent in minority communities with unequal health care access that have disproportionately suffered from COVID-19.

A report from McKinsey earlier this month estimated that poor health costs the U.S. economy about $3.2 trillion a year

For every $1 invested in targeting population health, the U.S. stands to gain almost $4 in economic benefit, and altogether health improvements could add up to a 10% boost to U.S. GDP by 2040.

The bottom line: There is no excuse for the way the U.S. has mishandled COVID-19, but the seeds of this catastrophe were planted well before the novel coronavirus arrived on American shores.

2. How movement spread COVID-19

What's happening: Researchers in Germany studied the effect of entry bans and mandatory quarantines on COVID-19 mortality, and found the earlier such measures were implemented, the greater the effect they had on limiting deaths.

Of note: The study found mandatory quarantines for incoming travelers were more effective than outright entry bans, largely because such bans often exempted citizens and permanent residents, while quarantines usually applied to everyone.

The U.S. lost track of at least 1,600 people flying in from China in just the first few days after the ban went into effect, according to reporting from the AP.

Border controls are of little use if governments don't track and quarantine travelers coming from infected areas.

The bottom line: A virus only moves with its host. One lesson we should learn for future pandemics is that restricting that movement is key to controlling a new pathogen, even though the costs of such controls will only grow in a globalized world.