Tag: hit&run

A month ago, The New York Times published an internal Trump administration document that predicted the United States would be seeing 3,000 COVID-19 fatalities per day by June 1, raising the national death toll above 200,000. The document also projected that the daily number of new confirmed cases would exceed 200,000 by then—i.e., by now.

“The numbers underscore a sobering reality,” the Times reported. “The United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks to try slowing the spread of the virus, but reopening the economy will make matters worse.” It said “the projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways.”

The projections that supposedly confirmed that fear were widely cited by people who argued that states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas were inviting a public health disaster by lifting their lockdowns too soon. But the projections turned out to be wildly off, predicting more than three times as many daily deaths as we have seen so far in June, nearly twice as many total deaths as of June 1, and nine times as many daily new cases.

Lockdown supporters have since moved on from those obviously erroneous predictions. But the way they were loudly touted and then quietly abandoned illustrates the perils of confirmation bias for people on both sides of the overheated debate about COVID-19 control measures.

The White House immediately disavowed the alarming projections highlighted by the Times, saying the document did not reflect the views of the administration’s coronavirus task force. The projections “should not be taken as a forecast,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany cautioned. “This ‘study’ considered zero mitigation, meaning it was conducted as though no federal guidelines were in place, no contact tracing, no expansion of testing, while removing all shelter in place protocols laid out in the phased approach of the Opening Up America Again guidelines for individuals with co-morbidities.”

For critics who believed the president and like-minded governors were bent on reopening the economy, no matter the cost in human lives, those reassurances carried little weight. But according to the epidemiologist who produced the projections, they were a work in progress based on one possible scenario that he did not necessarily view as likely.

The document leaked to the Times is identified as the work of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Some of the pages also carry the logo of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is part of HHS. While the White House and some press accounts described the projections as the CDC’s work, they were actually produced by Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, under a contract with FEMA.

The day after the Times story appeared, NPR interviewed Lessler, who described the projections as “preliminary work” that was “always intended to be shown to people who were fully aware that this was work in progress, not a final result.” NPR noted that the projections reported by the Times were “based on only about one-third of the scenarios that Lessler will be including in the final projections.” It explained that “the incomplete projection published in The New York Times of more than 200,000 new cases and more than 3,000 new deaths per day by June 1 is just one of many possible scenarios.”

How much confidence did Lessler have in that particular projection, which has since been decisively contradicted by reality? “I do not know if it is likely,” he said.

Lessler told NPR he did not know who created the graphs in the leaked document or for whom they were intended. “To see an incomplete version of his work disseminated and discussed so publicly was all the more unnerving,” NPR reported, because “it’s obvious from the graph that the simulations he’s run thus far are not that robust—since they fail to predict the actual number of deaths to date.” That’s a detail the Times might have noticed if it hadn’t been so eager to present the document as evidence of recklessness.

By now the Times, an enthusiastic advocate of lockdowns in its news reporting as well as its editorials, has consigned this embarrassing episode to the memory hole. But it provides a lesson for all of us, regardless of what we think about the merits of sweeping restrictions on movement and economic activity as a response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Human beings have a strong tendency to latch onto evidence, no matter how dubious, that reinforces what they already believe. There is no hope of eliminating that cognitive bias. The best we can do is try to keep it in mind.

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… at least judging by federal background check data—the blue line is for 2020, and the others are for 2016 (green), 2017 (orange), 2018 (grey), and 2019 (yellow).

Of course, this doesn’t include illegal gun sales, and gun sales by non-firearms-dealers in those states that don’t require background checks in such situations.

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An interesting short article by Charles C.W. Cooke, editor of the National Review (though of course, as he notes, there are plenty of good arguments for being able to effectively defend yourself even if the cops aren’t racist and will kill you).

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Like our fellow Americans, we at FIRE have been gripped by the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and the subsequent protests and disturbances in our cities. Those engaged in peaceful protest are exercising one of our nation’s bedrock civil liberties, with people around the country gathering to protest Floyd’s killing and discuss police brutality, racial inequality, and other important issues.

America’s colleges are playing host to these same discussions. As a nonpartisan civil liberties organization committed to defending the free speech rights of college students and faculty members, FIRE is here to hold universities accountable to their moral and constitutional obligations, which in times of crisis are at their most, not least, important. Yet during this volatile time, FIRE has already seen a troubling number of institutions abandon these obligations, choosing to investigate and punish controversial speech.

Public universities are government agencies, legally required to uphold the First Amendment rights of students and faculty. While private institutions are usually not similarly bound by law, the vast majority of them promise free expression to students and faculty, and are therefore bound morally and contractually to honor those promises. These guarantees mean nothing, nor will they long endure or be respected, if they protect only those whose opinions happen to be in favor on a particular campus.

George Floyd’s death and the subsequent reaction has provoked a wide variety of responses in college communities, including some that many find deeply offensive or that involve the use of racial slurs. But while the level of passion with which these issues have been argued in recent days may have changed, the underlying First Amendment principles have not. The overwhelming majority of such expression, whether it supports or criticizes peaceful protests, police tactics, or violent disturbances, is protected — either by the First Amendment, by universities’ own promises of free expression, or both. FIRE will continue to defend speakers’ right to exercise their expressive rights regardless of viewpoint. Universities committed to free expression must do so as well.

While college restrictions on speech appear thus far to be broadly aimed at silencing racially offensive or insensitive expression online, views falling on all sides of the current national debate, in a wide variety of situations, have been impacted. Temple University has flatly said it will punish “[s]tudents who share messages of hate.” The University of Delaware, Clemson University, Valdosta State University, and Framingham State University have all announced (in some cases multiple) investigations into racially offensive student social media posts. Northwestern University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham are facing calls to punish or fire professors for their seeming support of rioting or property damage. This list is hardly exhaustive.

Already this week, FIRE has written to the Ohio State University condemning the Columbus Division of Police’s use of pepper spray on student journalists covering protests adjoining campus, and to Weber State University in Utah for placing a tenured professor on leave over tweets endorsing violence against protestors and a journalist. The rights of students and faculty members to express their opinions regardless of viewpoint must continue to be preserved, and we call on others to join us in holding colleges and universities to account when they fail in their responsibility to do so.

During the political and social upheaval of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Supreme Court firmly protected students’ First Amendment rights. In Healy v. James, the court noted the “climate of unrest” that “prevailed on many college campuses in this country,” including “widespread civil disobedience” and “the seizure of buildings, vandalism, and arson,” leading some colleges to “shut down altogether, while at others files were looted and manuscripts destroyed.” Notwithstanding the “acknowledged need for order,” the Supreme Court explained that the First Amendment applied with no “less force on college campuses than in the community at large.” That obligation continues today.

Even amidst the unprecedented destruction of World War II, when the West Virginia State Board of Education mandated that schoolchildren salute the American flag in an effort to encourage patriotism amidst the war effort, the Supreme Court struck it down. Why? Justice Robert H. Jackson explained on behalf of the court in the landmark decision of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. His words remain as relevant to our response to today’s crises as they were to that of the time:

[F]reedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order… If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

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A drug task force in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is missing roughly $150,000 in seized cash in what “appears in every aspect to be an internal theft,” the local district attorney said Monday.

Lancaster County District Heather Adams announced at a press conference that an audit of the Lancaster County Drug Task Force revealed that someone has stolen up to $150,000 from the task force’s asset forfeiture fund. 

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police and prosecutors can seize property—cash, cars, houses—suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner isn’t charged or convicted of a crime. Law enforcement groups say asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime. However, civil liberties groups say that it creates perverse profit incentives for police.

“One has to wonder whether that $150,000 discrepancy contributed to the former DA’s unwillingness to comply with [local news outlet] LNP‘s requests for the task force’s detailed forfeiture records,” says Jennifer McDonald, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Justice. “Behavior like this is exactly why forfeiture transparency practices are so important.”

LNP and the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm that has challenged forfeiture laws in several states, fought a public records lawsuit against former Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman after his office refused to turn over asset forfeiture records.

Stedman was caught using asset forfeiture revenues intended for drug enforcement to lease a 2016 Toyota Highlander.

In July 2019, LNP reported that undercover drug task force officers paid for sex acts during prostitution investigations. 

Adams, the current district attorney, took office in January after running on a platform that included increasing transparency around the county’s asset forfeiture practices. McDonald says most of the records the Institute for Justice and LNP sought have been turned over, but they are still in litigation over certain other records involving forfeiture auctions.

(A 2018 WHYY investigation of auctions of Philadelphia houses seized through asset forfeiture found that several were sold to Philadelphia police officers.)

Lancaster County’s mysteriously missing $150,000 is not the first time that large amounts of forfeiture funds have disappeared or have been used as a slush fund for local law enforcement.

This March, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that her office was charging Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith and three other county officials with a “litany” of felony crimes for embezzling and misusing funds seized through asset forfeiture.

The charges followed a successful public records lawsuit that revealed more than $100,000 in questionable expenditures from Macomb County’s asset forfeiture fund. Authorities now estimate the Smith and other officials embezzled roughly $600,000 since 2012.

The Georgia Department of Revenue returned $2.1 million to the state treasury this May after an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 Action News revealed that the department spent millions of dollars in forfeiture funds “on engraved firearms, pricey gym equipment, clothing, personal items, even $130 sunglasses.”

In Illinois, former La Salle County State’s Attorney Brian Towne faced criminal charges for misconduct and misappropriating public funds after he allegedly spent asset forfeiture funds on an SUV, WiFi for his home, and local youth sports programs. Town created his own highway interdiction unit and asset forfeiture fund for his office—a move the Illinois Supreme Court later ruled was illegal. The case against Towne was dismissed last year after a judge ruled his right to a speedy trial had been violated.

A 2016 Department of Justice Office of Inspector General audit found that an Illinois police department spent more than $20,000 in equitable sharing funds on accessories for two lightly used motorcycles, including after-market exhaust pipes, decorative chrome, and heated handgrips.

Adams said she has referred the case to the Pennsylvania Attorney General for investigation.

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In theory, the mass protests following the alleged murder of George Floyd put public health officials who have ceaselessly inveighed against mass gatherings in a difficult position. They have called for a moratorium on most types of public activities, but particularly gathering in large crowds where increased aerosolization from loud talking and yelling could spread the COVID-19 virus to massive groups.

But when it comes to the protests against police brutality, many medical experts think there should be an exemption to the COVID-19 lockdown logic.

More than a thousand public health experts signed an open letter specifically stating that “we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.”

The letter conceded that mass protests carried the risk of spreading coronavirus, and offered some good—if naive—advice for people who are going out anyway: wear masks, stay home if sick, attempt to maintain six feet of distance from other protesters. Many protesters are wearing masks, but others are not. And while we can blame the police for forcefully corralling people into close quarters, it’s a bit rich for public health experts to endorse protesting under conditions that they know are impossible for protesters to meet.

Indeed, for the purposes of offering health care advice, the only thing that should matter to doctors is whether their harm-reduction recommendations are being followed: how big is the event, is it outdoors, are masks being worn, etc. However, the letter distinguishes police violence protesters from “white protesters resisting stay-home orders,” as if the virus could distinguish between the two types of events. While I am not a doctor, my understanding is that it cannot.

The letter led a Slate writer to claim that “Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue.” The argument here is that coronavirus is more deadly for black people because of systemic racism and that protesting systemic racism is a sort of medical intervention.

“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” the letter continues.

There is much truth to this! Black people in America do have worse health outcomes, but so do low-income people of every race and ethnicity. Is it medically acceptable for a poor person to protest against lockdown-induced economic insecurity? For people who live paycheck to paycheck to protest looming evictions and foreclosures? What about people experiencing loneliness, depression, and bereavement? Again, my understanding is that the virus does not think and thus does not choose to infect us based on what we’re protesting.

Many people all over the country were prevented from properly mourning lost loved ones because policymakers and health officials limited public funerals to just 10 people. For months, public health officials urged people to stay inside and avoid gathering in large groups; at their behest, governments closed American businesses, discouraged non-essential travel, and demanded that we resist the basic human instinct to seek out companionship, all because COVID-19 could hurt us even if we were being careful, even if we were going to a funeral rather than a nightclub. All of us were asked to suffer a great deal of second-order misery for the greater good, and many of us complied with these orders because we were told that failing to slow the spread of COVID-19 would be far worse than whatever economic impact we would suffer as a result of bringing life to a complete standstill.

People who failed to follow social distancing orders have faced harsh criticism and even formal sanction for violating these public health guidelines. To take just one extreme example, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to use law enforcement to break up a Jewish funeral.

After saying no to so many things, a significant number of public health experts have determined that massive protests of police brutality are an exception to the rules of COVID-19 mitigation. Yes, these protests are outdoors, and yes, these experts have encouraged protesters to wear masks and observe six feet of social distance. But if you watch actual footage of protests—even the ones where cops are behaving badly themselves—you will see crowds that are larger and more densely packed than the public beaches and parks that many mayors and governors have heavily restricted. Every signatory to the letter above may not have called for those restrictions, but they also didn’t take to a public forum to declare them relatively safe under certain conditions.

“For many public health experts who have spent weeks advising policymakers and the public on how to reduce their risk of getting or inadvertently spreading the coronavirus, the mass demonstrations have forced a shift in perspective,” The New York Times tells us.

But they could have easily kept the same perspective: Going out is dangerous, here’s how to best protect yourself. The added well, this cause is important, though, makes the previous guidance look rather suspect. It also makes it seem like the righteousness of the cause is somehow a mitigating factor for spreading the disease.

Examples of this new framing abound. The Times interviewed Tiffany Rodriguez, an epidemiologist “who has rarely left her home since mid-March,” but felt compelled to attend a protest in Boston because “police brutality is a public health epidemic.” NPR joined in with a headline warning readers not to consider the two crises—racism and coronavirus—separately. Another recent New York Times article began: “They are parallel plagues ravaging America: The coronavirus. And police killings of black men and women.”

Police violence, white supremacy, and systemic racism are very serious problems. They produce disparate harms for marginalized communities: politically, economically, and also from a medical standpoint. They exacerbate health inequities. But they are not epidemics in the same way that the coronavirus is an epidemic, and it’s an abuse of the English language to pretend otherwise. Police violence is a metaphorical plague. COVID-19 is a literal plague.

These differences matter. You cannot contract racism if someone coughs on you. You cannot unknowingly spread racism to a grandparent or roommate with an underlying health condition, threatening their very lives. Protesting is not a prescription for combatting police violence in the same way that penicillin is a prescription for a bacterial infection. Doctors know what sorts of treatments cure various sicknesses. They don’t know what sorts of protests, policy responses, or social phenomena will necessarily produce a less racist society, and they shouldn’t leverage their expertise in a manner that suggests they know the answers.

It’s clear that we’ve come to the point where people can no longer be expected to stay at home no matter what. Individuals should feel empowered to make choices about which activities are important enough to incur some exposure to COVID-19 and possibly spreading it to someone else, whether that activity is reopening a business, going back to work, socializing with friends, or joining a protest against police brutality. Health experts can help inform these choices. But they can’t declare there’s just one activity that’s worth the risk.

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Militarized cops and Trump photo op are too much for former Marine general. Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis—the first of four people to occupy that position under Trump, if you count acting heads—is strongly condemning the president’s response to the last week of Black Lives Matter protests.

“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis wrote in a Wednesday statement that harshly condemned the government’s militarized response to the protests and accused Trump of trying “to divide us.”

Some will wave off the former general’s condemnations as sour grapes stemming from his time in the administration. But Mattis has hardly been a Trump critic in the 15 months since he left his position. In fact, Mattis “had refrained from publicly criticizing his former boss since resigning,” notes Axios.

In his new statement, provided to The Atlantic, Mattis stuck up for protesters coming out to condemn the killing of George Floyd and the pattern of police brutality in America.

Protesters are “rightly demanding” a country that commits to “equal justice under the law,” wrote Mattis, who urged people not to be distracted by “a small number of lawbreakers” compared to the “tens of thousands of people of conscience” making this “wholesome and unifying demand.”

Fundamentally, these protests are about “insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation,” said Mattis. He goes on:

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.'” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.

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PROTEST UPDATES

Apparently the crowd periodically chants “peaceful protest!” to shame someone who gets rowdy and distinguish them from the group.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) June 4, 2020

Protests and memorials went down peacefully in Washington, D.C., and many other parts of the country last night.

The Foundry Methodist Church on 16th and I St at 9p tonight. As protesters pass, associate pastor Will Green rings church bell in support. Says his church has been handing out water, supplies since yesterday. Trumps photo opp galvanized religious support for #WashingtonDCProtest pic.twitter.com/51N735lFdX

— Daniella Cheslow (@Dacheslow) June 4, 2020

Surreal, beautiful, peaceful scene outside the White House as a man sings “Lean On Me” and thousands and thousands of protesters raise lighted cellphones and join their voices with his. pic.twitter.com/iAr0WWYc3u

— Hannah Natanson (@hannah_natanson) June 4, 2020

Seattle police chief has *cancelled* the planned 9pm curfew at the urging of protestors — chief Carmen Best believes that her department can balance public safety and ensure peaceful protests tonight, per the mayor.

— Jo Ling Kent (@jolingkent) June 4, 2020

Seattle’s Capitol Hill tonight. pic.twitter.com/7XwljE2xqM

— Ted Land (@TedLandK5) June 4, 2020

Protest outside #Oakland City Hall now well over 1000 people. Amazing to see it have grown tenfold before our eyes. Now 15 minutes past curfew. We haven’t seen a single uniformed police officer. pic.twitter.com/QuM3Z9wPDj

— Jacob Ward (@byjacobward) June 4, 2020

Just came back from THREE different protests in Minneapolis: 1st the media protest at WCCO, Star Tribune, and 4th precinct, 2nd the memorial/party at 38th & Chicago, 3rd Fire Kroll protest by home at Police "union" hall 18th & University. pic.twitter.com/LurEiTh8oW

— Adam Zielie (@DjChimp) June 4, 2020

Night 6 of protests in response to the death of #GeorgeFloyd remained peaceful in Cincinnati. Curfew has been pushed back to 11 p.m. https://t.co/VdwsnbqTKo

— Jenna Cisneros (@JennaCisnerosTV) June 4, 2020

From the protest today – officers walk with protesters down East Baltimore street @wjz #baltimore pic.twitter.com/URsViWxEie

— Kelsey Kushner (@KelseyKushnerTV) June 4, 2020

Philadelphia saw its fifth day of protests Wednesday. The city was under curfew starting at 6 p.m., and some protesters continued beyond that. But demonstrations mostly ended when a brief storm and tornado warning swept through the city. Full coverage: https://t.co/xldASKUolu pic.twitter.com/es66A89JkY

— The Philadelphia Inquirer (@PhillyInquirer) June 4, 2020

But protesters (and medics) in New York City were once again greeted with arrests and physical abuse by the NYPD.

Protesters are arrested for violating curfew beside the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street, Wednesday, June 3, 2020, in Manhattan. That was surreal. It was so casual how the arrests began. Even the NYPD seemed to move in slow motion. ????/me @AP #GeorgeFloyd pic.twitter.com/AaJy9bpmxD

— john minchillo (@johnminchillo) June 4, 2020

People stuck in traffic are witnessing NYPD beat up folks on their way home. pic.twitter.com/AkUGPQQOIf

— Josh Fox BlackLivesMatter (@joshfoxfilm) June 4, 2020

More later, but this is a moment after cops, unprompted as far as I can tell, charged protestors, including a sheltered group of nurses and medics trying to tend to bleeding, injured people who got struck by batons. They had just called an ambulance. pic.twitter.com/fQRBnWBPGT

— Ali Watkins (@AliWatkins) June 4, 2020

More than 10,000 people nationwide have now been arrested during the protests, the Associated Press reports.

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FREE MINDS

Suspended for tweeting like Trump:

This man started an account where he tweets exactly what the president tweets. He just got suspended. https://t.co/KPd9Od1zTE

— Dylan Marron (@dylanmarron) June 3, 2020

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FREE MARKETS

No more “interracial” porn. A lot of brands have been working overtime to try and position themselves on the right side of conflicts around police brutality and U.S. racism—and the changes have even hit hookup apps and pornography. Adult Video News (AVN) announced this week that it would end news and awards categories for “interracial” porn:

Adult Video News says it will change:

AVN will be eliminating the terms IR and Interracial from its news coverage. “These are terms that should have been jettisoned long ago.”

AVN will be eliminating all “interracial” and “ethnic” categories from the AVN Awards. https://t.co/x6QC1f3JUk

— tony pierce (@busblog) June 3, 2020

Meanwhile, gay dating and hookup app Grindr announced that it will stop letting users sort potential partners by ethnicity.

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QUICK HITS

• The latest in unemployment claims: 1.9 million new claims filed last week. “The jobless claims figure, reported each week, comes ahead of Friday’s release of the unemployment rate for May,” notes Politico. “Economists expect that figure will show nearly one in five Americans were out of work in the middle of last month.”

• Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) is co-sponsoring a proposal (with Michigan Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash) to end qualified immunity.

Excited to announce that @RepPressley will co-lead the bill to end qualified immunity. We’ll work relentlessly to build support within Congress for this critical legislation. Police must be held accountable when they violate people’s rights. pic.twitter.com/xgwULKmDqR

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) June 4, 2020

• A new study on COVID-19 susceptibility finds that “variations at two spots in the human genome are associated with an increased risk of respiratory failure in patients with Covid-19,” reports The New York Times. “Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator, according to the new study.”

• Actor Zachary Levi spent the day on Twitter yesterday defending libertarianism and third-party voting.

• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing Minneapolis police.

• “Drug enforcement agents should not be conducting covert surveillance of protests and First Amendment protected speech,” said Hugh Handeyside, a senior attorney for the ACLU. And yet…

• Even the National Inquirer wouldn’t run with Trump’s Joe Scarborough conspiracy.

• Aerosolized chemical agents like pepper spray could spread COVID-19 at protests, health experts warn.

• People are very, very unhappy about The New York Times publishing this op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that calls for using the U.S. military against American protesters.

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A reminder yesterday from Judge James S. Gwin (N.D. Ohio) in Doe v. Doe, a slander lawsuit stemming from allegations of sexual abuse at Oberlin College—the plaintiff is seeking to litigate the case under a pseudonym, but that requires court permission, and requires the plaintiff to clear a fairly high bar:

On March 12, 2020, Plaintiff John Doe sued Defendant Jane Doe in the Lorain
County Court of Common Pleas. On May 8, 2020, Defendant removed the case to this
Court.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 10 requires complaints to state the parties’ names. {Fed. R. Civ. P. 10(a); see Doe v. Porter, 370 F.3d 558, 560 (6th Cir. 2004) (“As a general matter, a complaint must state the names of all parties.”).}

Only in limited circumstances may a court permit the parties to proceed pseudonymously. Id.

Unless the parties seek this permission, however, federal courts lack jurisdiction over the unnamed parties. Nat’l Commodity & Barter Ass’n, Nat’l Commodity Exch. v. Gibbs, 886 F.2d 1240, 1245 (10th Cir. 1989); see also Citizens for a Strong Ohio v. Marsh, 123 F. App’x 630, 637 (6th Cir. 2005) (citing Nat’l Commodity, 866 F.2d at 1245). Here, neither party has requested permission to proceed under pseudonyms.

The Court hereby ORDERS both parties to file briefing on whether they can proceed
anonymously. Both parties’ briefs are due within seven calendar days.

Whether the plaintiff can succeed in litigating the case pseudonymously is an interesting question: Courts have generally been open to allowing sealing by plaintiffs who allege sexual assault, and by plaintiffs who sue universities alleging wrongful expulsion based on third parties’ allegations of sexual assault; but I haven’t seen much discussion of whether libel plaintiffs could sue their accusers pseudonymously, whether over accusations of sexual assault or of other serious misconduct. In any event, though, the court is right that this can’t be done as a matter of course, but requires the court’s permission.

There are often anonymous Doe defendants, simply because the plaintiff doesn’t know their identities (but is often busily trying to discover them).  That, though, raises a separate set of questions.

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6/4/1923: Meyer v. Nebraska decided.

 

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On March 23, Kat Henry was working the cash register at the Kansas City Hobby Lobby, where she’s a department manager. It was the last day before the store shut down to avoid spreading COVID-19, and customers were stocking up on fabric and sewing supplies—getting ready, she assumed, to do some quilting while hunkered down at home. “We tend to see that when it’s going to snow,” she says. “People kind of rush in and buy all the supplies.”

Overhearing customers’ conversation, she soon realized she was wrong. The cloth wasn’t for quilts but for protective masks. One customer’s sister was a nurse who needed covers to wear over the single virus-filtering N95 mask she had to make last all day. Two others were hospice nurses who couldn’t get ordinary surgical masks anymore. Volunteering to help them out, Henry herself became part of an international grassroots movement that is filling in the gaps in the pandemic supply chain.

Driving that effort is, first and foremost, the personal threat: friends and loved ones who lack the protection they need. “You suddenly have these waves of public understanding all over the world where people are like, oh, this is bad,” says Gui Cavalcanti, founder of Open Source Medical Supplies (OSMS). “They may not be aware of the larger issues at play in the supply chain, but they certainly know that their spouse is going to work without safety equipment.”

Making masks, face shields, and other protective equipment is the COVID-19 version of rolling bandages or knitting socks for the troops. But there is a major difference. No long-established agency like the Red Cross is coordinating today’s efforts. They are completely bottom-up. Contrary to social critics nostalgic for the bowling leagues and civic clubs of the 1950s, Americans have lost neither the ability nor the inclination to band together to help their communities. We just have new tools for coordinating and sharing information. And the self-help has gone global.

In Baltimore, the Open Works makerspace is using its laser cutters to create face shields and has enlisted 260 libraries, military bases, and individuals with 3D printers to make the visors that hold them. Volunteers download the plans and drop off the parts at Open Works, which assembles the shields into packs for local hospitals. The design comes from the website of a Czech company called Prusa Research. “In three days,” Prusa says, “we went through dozens of prototypes and two verifications with the Czech Ministry of Health.” Open Works has supplied more than 8,000 shields to local health care workers.

In the Philippines, the Manila Protective Gear Sewing Club took apart existing protective suits to create open-source patterns and instructions that anyone can download as a Google doc. The group started with a one-piece version for men, then added a two-piece version that makes it easier for women to use the bathroom. Designed to be made of Tyvek 1433R, a material widely available in hardware stores, the outfits aren’t as impermeable as medical-grade bunny suits for high-risk situations, but they protect staff who don’t come in direct contact with COVID-19 patients.

In the San Fernando Valley, a group called the Face Mask Fairies meets twice a week on Zoom to divvy up jobs, share resources, identify needs, and coordinate pickups and deliveries. They track everything on a shared Google doc and divide up the labor, with some volunteers simply ironing fabric, others cutting, some sewing, and others picking up and delivering completed masks. By the end of April, they’d given more than 1,500 to hospitals, animal shelters, day care centers, and supermarkets.

All the local efforts add up, especially as volunteers share information. Facebook, in particular, has proven an invaluable tool for finding out who needs what, who can make it, what works, and what doesn’t.

In early March, Cavalcanti started the Open Source COVID 19 Medical Supplies group on Facebook. It now has 73,000 members and has translated its medical supply guides into 40 languages. From March 28 to April 20, members produced 2.3 million items in 45 countries, led by the U.S. and India.

Cavalcanti spotted the supply problem early on, when China’s coronavirus shutdown made it impossible to get crucial parts for his robotics company. “What I was really worried about—and have only seen more confirmation of—is that centralized manufacturing and centralized logistical chains get disrupted,” he says. “It just takes one plane to not fly to not have several million masks that you were going to order.”

Now operating beyond Facebook as Open Source Medical Supplies, the group emphasizes local resilience and good information. It has 160 local chapters and 660 volunteers who coordinate via the computer application Slack. “The things that need to be centralized are data—high quality vetted information,” he says. “Distributed information is subject to misinformation attacks. It’s subject to scope creep, as people get excited about certain things.” Engineers like him, he cautions, are prone to “fixate on the shiniest problem” rather than applying what already works.

OSMS has assembled medical experts to check materials and designs, such as the Manila bunny suit. “Our job is to find the things other people are doing and make sure they’re not harmful and then amplify them,” Cavalcanti says. “We’re not here to solve the problem all over again.”

Through the Facebook group, hobbyists who otherwise wouldn’t communicate have found ways to help each other. For people sewing face masks, making the bias-tape ties that hold the masks on is the most time-consuming part of the job. When 3D printing enthusiasts learned of the problem, several devised designs for tools for folding the tape, significantly speeding up production. Others came up with jigs for pleating masks. “You started to see infrastructure being one of the things that people want,” Cavalcanti says.

Just as the Face Mask Fairies have re-created the division of labor, OSMS volunteers have rediscovered economies of scale as 3D printers prove unable to meet demand. When a hospital needs hundreds of thousands of visors a month, the technology that was great for making one-off prototypes suddenly seems way too slow. “We’ve now seen probably 10 different groups say, ‘This is dumb. We’re injection molding now,'” says Cavalcanti. With machine shops largely idle, it isn’t hard to get one interested in making molds to supply the local hospital, either pro bono or to bring in much-needed cash. But it does take communication.

Instead of DIY makers, then, chapter volunteers serve as ambassadors and translators. “Connecting that machine shop to that hospital and communicating needs in a way that makes sense is the job of a local organizer that understands how to both speak to the hospital and to the machine shop,” says Cavalcanti. “And that’s a very specific skill set.”

The attractions of this work don’t lie in the products themselves. They come from solving immediate, scary problems—and, equally important, from finding purpose and community while much of the world is shut down. “This endeavor has not only filled an area of need for our community but given us a productive purpose,” says Michelle Gannes, one of the Face Mask Fairies. “I can’t wait to meet in person some of the people on the group as we have developed a virtual camaraderie and hope we’ll get to embrace each other after this is all over.”

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