These people exist.

Imagine Typhoid Karen here, and others like her, undermining every effort to contain the spread of a disease by intentionally moving from area to area, finding the places with the most lax enforcement of standards, and dispersing the infection as much as she can. She’s pretty intelligent, for a virus.

Any sick people in Idaho can blame their governor and people like her.

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Here’s another one: Kelly Anne Wolfe in Toronto. She has 13 degrees in psychology and is a member of MENSA, so you’ll never be as smart as her…and she’s handing out fake mask exemption cards to passers-by.

Man, I’m such a failure. I only have 2 degrees, a bachelor’s and a Ph.D. She’s like 6.5 times smarter than me!

Sure, this is a little problem for a plan to open schools in Utah. They have to prepare to inform people if anyone dies.

I can fix it, though! Just delete that bullet point. Poof, gone, no worries, at least, not until it actually happens.

My university has a plan, too. It’s called the Return to Campus plan. They seem to be instinctively following my advice and not mentioning the awkwardnesses that would follow if the plan doesn’t work. There’s a lot of questions there that they answer neatly, but the ones I want to ask aren’t there. See, if the question doesn’t exist, you don’t have to have an answer to the problem! So, I wonder:

Will tests be available on campus? What do students & staff have to do to get one? How often will testing be done? Are there conditions for mandatory testing?

What about contact tracing? If a student, for instance, is diagnosed with COVID-19, will we trace and test and isolate anyone they were in contact with? Or do we just shut the whole campus down?

How will the success of the opening plan be evaluated? Are there criteria in place for re-establishing a lockdown? Is there a number of cases or deaths that will make the administration reverse course? Do we only abandon the plan if we get 1% student deaths?

I notice that, in the plan, there is a vague mention of our study abroad programs. Is anyone aware that most countries have closed their borders to US travel? Even Canada!

Has there been any consideration of our liabilities? With all the fiscal concerns, are we prepared for lawsuits?

Speaking of money, do the faculty get hazard pay? Oops, how silly, We’re getting pay cuts instead.

Returning to the original point, who at the university has been assigned the job of writing the casualty letters? My son, the one who is serving in the army, has been periodically put on death duty — one week periods in which he is responsible for traveling to families to inform them of military deaths in his unit. It sounds like a horrible job, and it is. Who is taking that responsibility here?

I know, discussing these possibilities just makes the whole plan look half-assed. Never mind, just pretend I didn’t ask.

…you need to read this article about their legal history. I said “holy shit” more than once reading about all the legal games those two litigious assholes have engaged in. It’s all they do! Sue people! Steal land by suing people! Threaten people with lawsuits! Their neighbors hate them! Their family, what’s left of it, hates them!

My favorite part was where McCloskey’s father sent him a birthday card and a bag of dirt promising him ownership of a 240 acre farm, but didn’t actually bother to get a legal transfer of ownership. Later, Mark McCloskey was written out of his father’s will — I guess a lifetime of being an asshole to everyone around you has that kind of consequence — so what does he do? Guess! He sues everyone!

In March 2013, in Phelps County, Mark McCloskey sued his father and his father’s trust over the gift. The birthday card and earth, he claimed, were sufficient title because they met the legal definition of “livery of seisin,” a ceremony performed in medieval England for the conveyance of land.

In 2016, a special judge ruled against him, writing that “Exhibit 1 attached to the petition is a birthday card, not a deed” and that it was too late to claim ownership of part of the farm. The archaic legal claim, the judge ruled “does not operate as a matter of law to transfer title to real property.”

Mark McCloskey filed a defamation case against his father and sister in 2011, dismissed it in 2012, and refiled it in 2013. By the time of the final filing, Bruce McCloskey was living in a memory care unit in Ballwin; he died in 2014.

McCloskey now claims his life was ruined by the notorious photo of the happy couple threatening protesters passing by with guns. I don’t think that’s what ruined it. I hope the two of them face a bitter, lonely, hate-filled life together from now on, they’ve earned it.

I have a special, deep antipathy to litigious assholes, I must confess.

And now for something different. I wanted to experiment with this streaming thing all the cool kids do, so I’m trying out OBS and playing around with YouTube, and the easiest thing to do is to fire up Minecraft and see if I can put it online. Watch! I’ll probably screw up some settings! If it works, you can count on me to die multiple times! You can yell at me over chat!

I don’t know how long I’ll play, since I’m mainly interested in figuring out the mechanics, but if you encourage me to do some stupid thing, I might keep plodding along from disaster to disaster. That’ll be fun, right?

(If you’re wondering about details, this is under Linux, using a Logitech webcam, a Yeti microphone, and OBS software. It should work, with the only question being the competence of the bozo setting it up.)

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Hey, that went surprisingly well. All the software worked, I didn’t die in Minecraft, I found a good location to build a house. What could be better? Well, the audio. I was getting an annoying hiss throught, and it would crackle and break up if I spoke too loudly. Maybe I’ll try it again next week, after I hammer out some of the sound problems.

Have you seen this thing, this whiny open letter published in Harper’s? Never have I been so disappointed in people I thought were smart. The collection of signatories includes Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Katha Politt, and Gloria Steinem, but it also includes JK Rowling, Jesse Singal, David Brooks, Bari Weiss, Jonathan Haidt, and, of course, Steven Pinker. Why, I don’t know. It doesn’t say anything, doesn’t propose anything, and avoids saying anything at all specific. It’s bad writing.

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Shorter Harper’s letter: We elites deplore the fact that people use the internet to criticize us. It’s clear that whoever wrote this had some specific incidents in mind, but chose to remove any details in that second paragraph to prevent anyone from thinking, “wait, that was a fair response to writing stupid ideas.” And the “threat of reprisal” they are concerned about is that people might use the privilege of free speech to disagree with them. The “ideological conformity” they’re concerned about is the growing realization that modern conservatism has poisoned our civilization, is a rotten idea, and maybe, just maybe, rotten ideas ought not to dominate our government.

It all boils down to yet another paean to Free Speech being used to silence anyone who might criticize the status quo. How dare you recoil in disgust at my thinly-veiled call for eugenics, or my distortion of biology to decree that there are only two sexes, or my concern that uppity Blacks should calm down and wait for justice to gently lap against your toes? We have bills to pay, and if you make our conformity to the conservative establishment less bankable, we might have to struggle to pay off the house in the Hamptons!

Has David Brooks ever paid any price for his conservative inanity? Have any of the signers of that letter ever suffered for their ideas in any material way? I can at least appreciate the spiritual anguish of realizing that a huge chunk of the American public think they’re spoiled, pampered assholes, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to complain — in fact, complaining just confirms everyone’s opinions of them — and it’s reduced to silly absurdity by the fact that they say nothing about what’s to be done to end “this stifling atmosphere.” Maybe because what they actually want is to shut everyone else up.

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I agree with this take.

This entire spectacle of a letter, published in one of America’s most prestigious magazines, signed by dozens and dozens of famous writers and journalists and academics, declaring breathlessly that “We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other,” is almost intolerably exasperating. Its very existence is a devastating counterargument to its central point. Would it be rude to point out to these esteemed thinkers that the fact that they were considered prestigious enough to be invited to sign this letter is proof that they are not, in fact, being silenced? That, rather, this collective wallowing in self-pity over “censoriousness” by a group of people employed by Harvard and Princeton and M.I.T. and the Brookings Institution and The Atlantic and The New York Times and a host of other elite institutions is evidence that perhaps they doth protest too much? If being a billionaire best-selling author like J.K. Rowling or the dean of Columbia Journalism School like Nick Lemann is somehow indicative of being particularly at risk for “public shaming and ostracism,” I would like to humbly volunteer to trade places with them. They may find a position of lesser power, money, and influence more to their liking.

What a nuisance. We’ve concluded that our local grocery store is not safe — it’s jaw-dropping to walk in there and see absolutely no precautions taken to prevent the spread of disease, with few workers wearing masks, and less than 10% of the customers doing so, and blatant disregard for social distancing. We aim to outlive this pandemic, and with the threat of the university re-opening in August, we’re starting to really buckle down on shunning other human beings as much as possible. So…Willie’s has lost our business. That’s their loss.

Unfortunately for us, we don’t have nearby alternatives. So we’re going to have to drive 45 minutes away to shop and stock up on groceries, and that’s our mission this morning. There goes a big chunk of my day.

Of course, that still leaves Willie’s fountaining viruses into the community. I guess I need to just run away from all Morris residents.

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Yep, we’re all going to die. The Aldi in Alexandria is only slightly better than the Willie’s in Morris. Most of the workers were wearing masks, and most of the customers were wearing masks. There is no enforced policy in place. One woman came in with two squalling kids who were yelling non-stop. No face masks. Come on, leave the kids at home or in the car, and wear a mask — show some respect for other people.

I don’t understand how anyone could look at the rising numbers in the data and not realize that the time to put in some effort at prevention is long before the pandemic reaches crisis levels, and then won’t take the simplest, easiest, most painless steps to survive. We’re going to deserve the epitaph that says, “Humanity: they had all the tools and foresight to cope, but they were too stupid to use them.”

Oh well. A hundred years from now, the bison and prairie chickens and wolves will be frolicking on the grasslands thriving on the nitrogen and phosphorus from our corpses, so someone will come out ahead.