Here’s a crazy thought.

The problem with email is not the underlying protocols used to transmit messages, nor is it the software apps used to send and receive those messages.

The problem with email is how people use it and manage it. If you have 4000 messages in your inbox, no app is going to fix that or make that go away.

As much as I love reading stuff that confirms what I already know and believe, the time for John Bolton to speak up was months ago.

He didn’t speak up then because he is a lying, angry, self-promoting ghoul. Like everyone else that has clustered around Trump to lick his elevator-heeled shoes over the last four years, Bolton is covered in blood and should be booted from the public discourse. Actually, Bolton should have been booted from the public discourse long before he came creeping around Trump’s orbit.

He’s not saying anything about Trump now that we could not all have guessed, and the heavy-breathing by the Beltway press about his self-serving book is an embarrassment.

I have a long-standing rule about assholes, which is that they ruin everything.

Today, I am announcing a change to this rule. It will henceforth be “Assholes try to ruin everything, and they will if we let them.”

There is, however, no change to the rule that raisins ruin everything.

Because short essays divided up across 57 tweets in a row wasn’t bad enough already, we now have people taking screenshots of each individual tweet in these threads, posting them as collections of photos on Facebook, and saying "You’ve got to read this!"

No, I goddamned well don’t have to read it.

The modern web is terrible, and social media platforms are a cancer on public discourse.

I am few pages into Ben Lerner’s 10:04, and I am unconvinced.

Monday afternoon at Satchems Head, Greenfield, MA

From this morning’s New York Times:

Leading infectious disease experts in the United States are warning that the coronavirus will be making life difficult for the foreseeable future.

And as strict social distancing wanes, some leaders in New York and Texas are threatening renewed lockdowns in an effort to get people to take the persistent threat of the virus seriously.

"This virus is not going to rest” until it infects about 60 percent to 70 percent of the population, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

The virus has not gone away. There is no vaccine. We are nowhere near the number necessary to achieve herd immunity (and I am pretty sure that most of the people tossing that phrase around have no idea what it actually means). Every single credible public health and infectious disease expert has said we should expect ongoing waves and spikes, even under the realistic best-case scenarios.

Every day, I hear people saying "Now that everything is opening back up…" or "Now that we flattened the curve…" and then discussing plans to go back about normal activities.

This is crazy. Nothing has changed. The only goddamned reason the number of new cases is going down in some states is the lockdown measures that everyone is now so excited to be done with.

It’s not done. Infection rates are shooting up across the southern US, and the same thing will happen elsewhere as everyone rushes to get back to normal.

Yeah—I want to be able to hang out with my friends too, but this all seems like magical, wishful thinking that is going to kill a bunch more people.

On the way up to High Ledges above Shelburne Falls

I guess that, at some point, the part of my brain that automatically calculates “ten years ago” as being sometime in the 1990s will just stop working.