I have watched the video of an elderly protester being shoved by police in Buffalo at least a dozen times. After being shoved, the man struck his head and was rather obviously seriously injured. I want to offer some observations in bullet form.

• The use of force by the police was excessive.
• The first rule of self-defense is to avoid situations in which you may need to defend yourself.
• Revolution is a young man’s game.
• When you obstruct or impede police officers, you are no longer merely demonstrating. You are engaging in civil disobedience. One of the key aspects of Gandhian civil disobedience, long forgotten or ignored, is that it also requires that you be prepared for the consequences of that disobedience and willing to accept them.
• When police approach you keep your hands in plain sight. Absolutely, positively do nothing that the police officers may construe as reaching for their belts. All police training of which I have ever heard trains police officers to consider that a deadly threat.

In reaction to the Buffalo shove the police officers were suspended and charged with assault. In solidarity the entire 57 officer membership of Buffalo’s Emergency Response Team resigned.

Were they right or wrong?

There are some people who are predicting confidently that the Minneapolis City Council will vote to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department.

Here’s my question. Minneapolis tort law allows individuals to sue Minnesota public officials for damages due to either actions or omissions in the performance of their official duties. There is no sovereign immunity there. Would abolishing the Minneapolis Police Department expose members of the Minneapolis City Council to suit if citizens or businesses in Minneapolis are injured by lawbreakers?

Update

NBC reports that a majority of the Minneapolis City Council has agreed (whatever that means) to disband the Minneapolis Police Department:

A majority of the Minneapolis City Council agreed Sunday to dismantle the city’s police department after the in-custody killing of George Floyd, a council member said.

In a tweet, Alondra Cano, who represents the city’s ninth ward, said the department isn’t “reformable.”

“We’re dismantling our police department,” Councilman Jeremiah Ellison said.

Speaking during a community meeting earlier, council President Lisa Bender called the city’s relationship with the department “toxic” and vowed to “recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”

“Our efforts at incremental reform have failed — period,” she said. “Our commitment is to do what’s necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth that Minneapolis police are not doing that.”

Nine of the city’s 12 council members have agreed to the move, NBC affiliate KARE reported. Cano said the majority is veto-proof.

I’m sure this will work out well. Let’s hope for the best.

I look at old movies with a very different eye than most. For example, I am always deeply interested in the set decoration and costuming and I know what I’m looking at.

But another little practice or pastime I exercise is that whenever I watch a movie made in the 1930s, I look for my cousin, particularly in party or nightclub scenes. Any scene in which people are dancing in fancy dress. You see, between 1930 and 1937 he was in almost 200 movies as an extra, generally in scenes like the ones I described, before he got his first named part. That is a heckuva long apprenticeship.

The movies he appeared in as an extra included Top Hat, Swing Time, The Great Ziegfield, A Star Is Born, Captains Courageous, and Saratoga, just to name a few. Going on from that to become a pretty big star in movies of the 40s and 50s as well as early television is kind of a remarkable development.

Sadly, I look very little like him although two of my siblings do a bit. I’m not tall, rangy, I don’t have reddish-blonde hair, and I don’t look nearly as good in a tux. Ah well, perhaps in another life.

STAT has convened a panel of experts on infectious disease, epidemiology, and pandemic preparedness to solicit their views on how, looking forward, we might “avoid the mistakes, poor decisions, and incompetence of this spring”. Here are their recommendations, summarized from the link above:

• Prioritize early warnings
• Pay attention to small numbers
• Act fast
• Act fast strategically
• Do a way better job in minority and high-poverty communities

Rather than fisking that list, I would only challenge them to do one thing. In advance produce a cast-iron method of distinguishing between statistical anomalies and the earliest phases of exponential growth. I can imagine the vague outlines of a realtime reporting system fed organically from data that providers actually have incentives to produce on a timely basis but only the vaguest outlines. Otherwise I have no idea of how that might be done.

I found Chris Wallace’s interview of master bond trader Mohammed El-Erian on Fox News Sunday (the only thing I watch routinely on Fox News) quite interesting. I’ll publish a link should one become available.

I found his reaction to the good employment numbers in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Employment Situation Report, released last Friday, about right. It’s too early to tell whether the bounce was a sign of a quick economic recovery, a fluke, or cooking the books. I don’t believe that last.

He also expressed concern that the good news would stymie additional economic stimulus. He expressed particular interest in a package that included retraining for those whose jobs have vanished as a consequence of the lockdowns. Intrigued, I waited in vain for his plan for retraining the millions of cooks, waiters, and busboys in the restaurant industry as bond traders.

There was an excellent point in his remarks, however, which deserve more explicit expression. The next few months present an opportunity, without parallel in our lifetimes, for influencing what the post-lockdown economy will look like. I’ve already said what I think it should look like. I think that the federal government should do everything in its power to shorten supply chains to make our economy more resilient in the face of crises like the one we’ve experienced for the last three months. U. S. companies need fewer suppliers in China or who depend on other suppliers in China and a lot more in Mexico, Canada, and, yes, the United States. Carefully crafted subsidies will help that happen. Continuing income subsidies on the other hand will encourage a return to a reliance on China.

I wish that Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi would put aside partisan and ideological objectives in favor of a quickly designed plan for shaping the post-lockdown economy in a way that would benefit all Americans and particularly American workers rather than favored constituencies. I’m under no illusion that’s likely to happen. I wish that Mr. El-Erian had expressed himself on which he thought was better: a rancorous partisan battle over whose constituents would receive handouts from a bigger, better “stimulus” package or no stimulus package at all but I wait for that in vain as well.

I’m sorry to say that I found the Atlantic Council’s Ian Brzezinski’s thoughts on the role of NATO in China strategy mostly pabulum. I had hoped for more. In summary his main bullet points are:

• The Alliance should offer to establish a NATO-China Council.
• Second, NATO should deepen its engagement with its Pacific partners, Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Mongolia.
• Third, the Alliance should establish in the Indo-Pacific, perhaps in one of the region’s partner countries, a Center of Excellence (COE) and integrate officers and NCOs from selected partners into the Alliance’s Command Structure.
• The Alliance should also establish a small military headquarters element in the Indo-Pacific region

Do you see what I mean? Conspicuous by their absence are any recognition that the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by NATO or that the establishing of the “no-fly zone” in Libya that led to Moammar Qaddafi’s ouster, resulting in a decade of chaos in that country, was a NATO operation. Under the circumstances wouldn’t China inevitably see Mr. Brzezinski’s proposals as nakedly hostile?

My own prescription would simultaneously be more and less. I don’t think that NATO as such should have any posture with respect to China. That’s beyond its scope unless China has established a military presence on the Atlantic while I wasn’t looking.

I wish the members of the European Union that, at least as long as the country is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, China’s goals will be hostile to theirs. They should heed the advice that who sups with the devil should use a long spoon, keeping a discreet distance from China in all things and most especially trade.

What I think they will do is that while European leaders recognize the threat that China presents to them and their interests, they will be glad to cozy up to China, hoping that when push comes to shove the U. S. will protect them, even while condemning the U. S. for its truculent attitude.

Remember that much-publicized and clucked about party at Lake of the Ozarks. The Post-Dispatch reports that despite the dire prediction it does not seem to have produced additional cases of COVID-19:

ST. LOUIS — The large crowds of people at the Lake of the Ozarks over Memorial Day weekend have not led to any more reported cases of COVID-19, Missouri’s top health official health department said Wednesday.

“The answer, to our knowledge, is no,” Dr. Randall Williams, director of the Department of Health and Senior Services, said when asked whether more cases have come from the gatherings, photos of which showed throngs of people close together without wearing masks.

Williams answered questions during a daily news briefing in Jefferson City hosted by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to address civil unrest and efforts to contain the coronavirus.

Pictures and videos of the lake crowds had prompted concern among the public and health officials.

One person, a Boone County resident, tested positive last week and likely was infectious while among the crowds. That is according to the Camden County Health Department, which has jurisdiction over much of the Lake of the Ozarks region.

These results are consistent with those following the, again, highly publicized and clucked about spring break parties in Florida. It seems to me that the simplest explanation is that SARS-CoV-2 just isn’t transmitted out-of-doors very easily.

The statewide percentage of SARS-CoV-2 tests with positive results is 6.5%, probably more a consequence of increased testing than of anything else. Over the last month the statewide hospitalizations for COVID-19 have decreased by 40%. I don’t know whether that’s a consequence of fewer serious cases, changing standards for hospital admission for COVID-19, an increased reluctance to seek medical assistance for COVID-19, something else, or all of the above.

At Bloomberg Adam Minter points out the grave inequality between blacks and whites in Minneapolis:

Just after dawn last Wednesday, the smell of smoke lingered over the intersection of Lake Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. It’s a major commercial thoroughfare, home to dozens of black-owned businesses. It’s also eight blocks from where George Floyd suffocated beneath a police officer’s knee and died on May 25. During the chaos that followed, dozens of Lake Street’s buildings and businesses burned.

It was a serious blow to a community that’s struggled for decades to achieve economic equality. In 2018, the median income for black households in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area was $38,200; for whites, it was $82,500. That’s a wider gap than for the U.S. as a whole, despite the area’s progressive reputation, a corporate community that’s renowned for its civic-mindedness, and a robust regional economy.

I’m certainly open to suggestion on how to remedy that situation, something lacking from Mr. Minter’s article. Something he might consider is demographics. Minneapolis has a population of 450,000 of which 20% are black, 90,000 in round numbers. 74,000 Somalis live in Minneapolis. As is the case in much of the Upper Midwest, a large percentage of Minneapolis’s adult white population has a college education. Probably 70% or more.

What could possibly explain the income disparity between blacks and white in Minneapolis? Racism is probably a factor but somehow I doubt it’s the only factor.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the reduction in mortality rate due to COVID-19:

Doctors have observed that the coronavirus case-fatality rate seems to have decreased considerably since the early days of the pandemic. But a pre-publication study from Italian universities and local public-health authorities comparing the case-fatality rates in two provinces (Ferrara and Pescara) during March and April is the first to show this might be true.

After adjusting for age and comorbidities, the study found the overall death rate declined by some 40% from March to April with huge reductions in those over age 80 (from 36.3% to 16.1%), and subjects with hypertension (23% to 12.1%), diabetes (30.3% to 8.4%), cardiovascular disease (31.5% to 12.1%), COPD (29.7% to 11.4%) and renal disease (32.3% to 11.5%).

The study’s findings need to be confirmed by more studies of fatality rates over time in other places. But the researchers note that the decline in death rates is unlikely to be due to less crowded hospitals since infection rates were low in the two provinces and never exceeded the intensive care unit capacity. Hospital utilization could confound results in other hot spots.

and

We now know, for instance, that deaths among severely ill patients often result from an overreactive immune response known as “cytokine storms” as well as systemic blood clots. The Food and Drug Administration this week approved a new blood test by Roche that measures levels of the inflammatory-causing protein interleukin-6 and can help predict patients at risk for cytokine storms. Using drugs to break up blood clots and calm down the immune system earlier can prevent severe cases from turning deadly.

Doctors have also observed that some patients with fatally low oxygen levels aren’t gasping for air or losing consciousness and their symptoms resemble altitude sickness—dizziness, nausea and headaches—more than pneumonia or acute respiratory distress. As a result they are using less intensive ventilation such as nasal cannulas and sleep-apnea machines.

Mechanical ventilators can cause long-term brain and respiratory damage as well as secondary infections. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that a shockingly high 80% of those between ages 18 and 65 who were placed on ventilators in New York City died while just 2.4% were discharged alive during the study period. More targeted therapeutics can reduce the need for ventilators.

As experience in dealing with COVID-19 is gained, facility in treating the disease is likely to improve. The implication of this is that sharing of information and better communication among physicians treating the disease may be as or more important than a scientific breakthrough in treatment or a vaccine in coping with COVID-19. Those are “Hail Marys”. Gradual improvement based on experience is the way the best medicine works.