Surveillance camera footage shows one of the officers letting go of Rayshard Brooks in order to get out his Taser.Atlanta Police Department

This is, obviously, not as important as the fact that a police officer shot and killed a fleeing man who was accused only of being drunk, but a reader emails to note something else in the video footage of the arrest of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. Brooks started to fight when officers tried to handcuff him, but it was two against one and the police had the upper hand. That is, they had the upper hand until one of them let go of Brooks so he could get to his Taser. At that point, it become one against one and Brooks began fighting to get hold of the Taser. Eventually he got free and began to run, firing the Taser as he ran. That’s when Officer Garrett Rolfe shot and killed him.

If not for the Taser, probably none of this would have happened. The two officers would have overpowered Brooks and eventually cuffed him, and that would have been that. So does this suggest that police departments should stop using Tasers? Not really. Here is the conclusion of a Department of Justice Report released under the Obama administration:

The study’s most significant finding is that, while results were not uniform across all agencies, the use of pep­per spray and CEDs [i.e., Taser-like devices] can significantly reduce injuries to suspects and the use of CEDs can decrease injuries to officers.

This is consistent with other research. On the whole, use of Tasers leads to fewer injuries to both suspects and officers.

There’s more to Taser use than this, of course, and obviously it played an outsize role in the Rayshard Brooks case. But it wasn’t the main role. The main role was played by a police officer who simply didn’t take human life seriously enough. It’s one thing to use deadly force when there’s a suspect shooting at you, but it’s quite another to use deadly force merely to avoid the (slim) possibility of being tased. Until that attitude changes, police killings like this one will never stop.

Artur Widak/NurPhoto via ZUMA

Every morning I wake up hoping for some good news. And every morning I’m disappointed: Donald Trump is still debasing the country, white cops are still killing Black men, and COVID-19 is still spreading. Today, however, finally brings something new:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that existing federal law forbids job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and transgender status….In decisions on two separate cases, the court said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate because of a person’s sex, among other factors, also covers sexual orientation and transgender status.

….They conceded that sexual orientation was not on the minds of anyone in Congress when the civil rights law was passed. But they said when an employer fires a male employee for dating men, but not a female employee who dates men, that violates the law.

How close was the decision?

Two of the court’s Republican appointees, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts, joined the court’s Democratic appointees to deliver the surprising, 6-3 victory to LGBT advocates. Writing for the court’s majority, Gorsuch accepted arguments that the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s prohibition on sex discrimination in employment also effectively banned bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity, even though few if any members of Congress thought they were doing that at the time.

Because I can see a cloud behind every silver lining, I should mention that I have a theory about John Roberts: namely that he votes with the liberals occasionally on topics he considers unimportant so that he can join the conservatives on all the rest of the rulings. This allows him to keep his reputation as a fairminded umpire without sacrificing much.

But that’s probably just cynical of me. I’m sure he doesn’t really do that.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 14. The United States reported fewer than 300 deaths on Sunday. I don’t know if this is some kind of weird weekend glitch, but it’s the lowest death toll in more than two months.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 13. Nothing special to report.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 12. The “reopening” began in the United States around mid-May and seemed like it was fully in gear by the end of the month. If we assume a 2-3 week lag between loosening restrictions and starting to see the death toll pick up, we should start to see deaths increasing next week or the week after at the latest. If that doesn’t happen, it means . . . something. In any case, we are about to enter a very important couple of weeks.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

This looks like a violation of several of the Geneva Conventions, but I assure you that it was entirely voluntary on Hilbert’s part. The funny thing is that every minute or so he’d kind of shimmy around trying to find the perfect position and end up rotating about 10 degrees. Half an hour after I took this picture his head was down in the lower left corner.

This is all part of Project Hilbert, an effort to get myself back into his good graces. For some reason, over the past year he’s become completely enamored with Marian and no longer gives me the time of day. So I’ve been luring him closer to me bit by bit, sometimes with a promise of being brushed, other times with a bit of catnip. And it’s working! He curled up on my feet a few days ago, the first time he’s done that in a long time. Soon we will be old friends again.

Welcome to my home:

A mask rebellion is underway in some parts of the state, with residents pushing back on mandatory face-covering rules even with coronavirus cases on the rise and as more businesses open their doors and some people yearn to return to old routines. The potency of mask politics became clear this week in Orange County, where the health officer resigned after weeks of attacks — and a death threat — over her mandatory mask rules. Her replacement on Thursday rescinded the rules amid intense pressure from the Board of Supervisors.

This might make some sense if Orange County were showing a solid decline in COVID-19 cases. Let’s check in and find out:

Reports of new COVID-19 cases are not going down. They have not even plateaued. They are going up, up, up. Nonetheless, my fellow OC residents are revolting against the single easiest and most effective way of reining in the spread of the virus. I live among idiots.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 11. Canada’s downturn is starting to look real and Mexico is recovering a bit from its spike of a few days ago. Aside from Argentina and Mexico, everyone else continues to drift toward zero.

NOTE: The Argentina chart has been incorrect for the past few days. When I swapped in Argentina I forgot to update the population figure, so the deaths per million was artificially low. It’s now been corrected. Thanks to reader RJ for pointing this out.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

This picture conveys an appealing sense of isolation that I like. It was taken in the early morning as the sky was lightening but before the sun came up. For locals, this is the Yale pedestrian bridge over the San Diego Freeway.

I was browsing over at Vox this morning and came across a piece by Rebecca Jennings about the “racial reckoning” in women’s media:

Black former employees at Refinery29 and Man Repeller are speaking out about the hypocrisy of feminist fashion websites.

The focus of the piece, obviously, is on race, but what really struck me was something simpler: the folks who run these companies are just assholes. I’ve seen this over and over in stories about hip new companies that appeal to millennials: regardless of how woke they may be when it comes to racial hiring and diversity, the one thing they seem to have in common is a CEO and an executive staff who are arrogant, cliquey, and nasty. To the outside world they project an image of lifestyle chic, but internally they pay young workers practically nothing and routinely demand 60 hour weeks or more—of which two or three hours seem to be spent being yelled at.

What’s up with this? Do I just notice it a lot because the occasional examples all get written up? Or are these companies really the hellscapes they’re made out to be?