20200509 - Corona Virus Part 8

Welcome back and greetings from our tin can by the sea. Wendy and I are in good health while spending time in isolation and practicing "social distancing" from other folks. Florida is opening up more and more each week. Restaurants had inside seating this week at 25% capacity. The latest decree from the governor is that hair salons and barber shops will be open for business this coming Monday. Even though the western beaches are supposed to be for walking or biking, many locals are setting up camp for the afternoon on them. Initially, deputy sheriffs were handing out citations, but I think they have stopped that for the most part. The local Publix is still having a hard time keeping things in stock. No toilet paper this week, and meat products are minimal. There's been a breakdown in the supply chain for meats - many of the meat processing centers have people stationed elbow-to-elbow, and there were a few plants that had COVID-19 related deaths. So, the companies shut them down, only to be ordered to start them back up by the federal government. The latest player to enter this fray is the United Food and Meat Workers union, who wants better safety for their members. I smell a suit about to occur, and it will be interesting: does the president have the right to order someone to die, or at least increase their chances of death, if the person is unwilling to do so. Stay tuned...

I will chime in on the death of Ahmaud Arbery. This man lived near Satilla Shores, Georgia, just south of Brunswick. The incident occurred in February. He was jogging at the time when he encountered a white pickup parked along the double yellow lines in the center of the road. A man was by the driver's door and another was in the bed of the truck. An altercation ensued and the man originally in the truck bed shot Ahmaun Arbery at point blank range three times with a shotgun. That man was Travis McMichael. The man by the driver's side door was his father, Gregory McMichael. The man who took the video was William Bryan. In a letter to Captain Tom Jump of the Glynn County Police Department,  George Barnhill, the DA for the Waycross circuit, said that "It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William were following, in pursuit burglary suspect with solid first hand probable cause, in their neighborhood, and asking/telling him to stop." At this point, I had to ask, "why does William Bryan start recording the incident? What triggered him to press the record button?" According to Barnhill's letter, the three were acting in concert. Bryan knew that the two McMichael's were set up for a confrontation in the middle of the road. He knew the target was going to be this black man jogging down the road. This is first degree murder. They may not have planned it against Ahmaud Arbery, but it would have happened to the next black man coming down that road. That brings me to "justice." Ahmaud's family is calling out for justice for their son. I see a lot of this as a plea for revenge. If we wish to serve justice, then these three need to be taken off the street into cells, and Barnhill, plus the other DAs in Georgia need to be charged with complicity. You see, they set the environment that allows cases like this to get swept under the rug. This could be further taken to the Georgia Bar Association, which should be policing its own members more diligently than it apparently has been. As with Trayvon Martin, these cases will cause sensation, but little change. White men with guns will continue in the south - as will dead black men. We need to prosecute the right people to change that.

Numbers, numbers, numbers... Worldwide: 4,062,583 cases with 278,147 deaths; US: 1,322,171 cases with 78,617 deaths; Florida: 40,001 case and 1,715 deaths; Pinellas county: 828 cases with 59 deaths. I am certain that the numbers for the United States, the individual states, and the counties are being "gamed." Comments by federal officials show that they realize that the higher the numbers are, the worse it looks on them (see Goodhart's Law). So, I'm certain that all of these numbers are low balls. The one thing that won't go away are the deaths. They may ascribe the cause of death to some other bin, but the officials will have to live with the deaths being incurred through their choices and management. The policy now has become an acknowledgement that they can't beat the Corona Virus, so on to something else... like the economy. As a result, as states are opening up, more and more people are becoming infected, and this will begin to show over the next few weeks, maybe not in the COVID-19 statistics, but they will impact the reported mortality rate. Last week, we passed the milestone of the dead from COVID-19 - more killed by the virus than were killed in all of the Vietnam war. I recall the days of the Vietnam war - you knew someone who had died in the war, or you lived very near them. This virus isn't like that, it is stealthier. It picks pockets of people and kills many in that pocket - like birds of a feather, those susceptible to COVID-19 tend to reside and interact together. Take Florida, for instance. Many oldsters with various lung, heart, and intestinal ailments - should be prime opportunity; but Florida shows up as #8 on the number of cases and #10 on the number of deaths. I think those grim statistics will change once flights start again.

More numbers! A gallon of gas is holding at $1.67/gal, with a few stations showing and increase to $1.71/gal. So, there is more movement of people getting out and about. The DJIA has been up from a Monday morning open of 24108 and a Friday close of 24305. The big news this past week has been the unemployment rate. It came in at 14.7%, with 20.4 million people loosing their job during April. Many other stats are due in over the next week, and none are expected to be good. The worst part of the layoffs is that the jobs aren't coming back. Companies are using this as an opportunity to reorganize their operations and cut some employees (or S&A, as finance guys so graciously put it). I have many friends that are contractors, and they have been let go by their firms. Now they bounce between employers, working multiple freelance gigs to keep the money coming in. Remember that the numbers for unemployment are from the week with the 12th in it. Well, that's next week.

We'll be fighting in the streets

With our children at our feet

And the morals that they worship will be gone

And the men who spurred us on

Sit in judgment of all wrong

They decide and the shotgun sings the song

- Pete Townshend, The Who, "Won't get fooled again", Who's Next, 1971