Anti-masker conservative Caleb Wallace took nutraceuticals in place of bona fide COVID-19 treatments:

Jessica Wallace told the newspaper that her husband initially refused to be tested and took unproven home remedies for the virus, including high doses of Vitamin C, zinc, aspirin, and ivermectin — a deworming treatment commonly given to livestock. Poison control centers are being swamped with calls from people suffering ill effects from ivermectin, and the Food and Drug Administration has issued alerts against ingesting the drug.

As I observed before, the alternative to evil big Pharma who wants to sell you poison is someone who is selling you snake oil.

Texas Anti-Mask ‘Freedom Defender’ Caleb Wallace Dies Of COVID-19

Anand Pandian, writing about an acquaintance on the libertarian side of the mask debate, for the Guardian:

For masks and vaccines acknowledge something he won’t: the truth of our vulnerability, our capacity to wound and be wounded by others. I don’t know when Frank and I will talk again. But we remain exposed to each other’s whims and disdains. One way or another, we’ll have to figure out what to do with each other’s company.

What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-masker

The benefit of a commute to work:

Broadly, boundary theory holds that however much Facebook encourages employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work, we have multiple selves, all of them authentic. Crossing between one role and another isn’t easy; it’s called boundary work. And the commute, as Arizona State University’s Blake Ashforth and two collaborators wrote in a seminal paper on the topic, “is actually a relatively efficient way of simultaneously facilitating a physical and psychological shift between roles.”

This dips into role theory in social psychology, which is perhaps the most fascinating speciality of psychology you can study:

Role theory posits that the roles that people occupy provide contexts that shape behavior.

Additional note: the average commute seems to remain constant, at about 30 minutes, from the era of the horse-drawn carriage to the Tesla.

The Psychological Benefits of Commuting to Work

Names Given to Computers is chock full of great idea. Consider:

• Muppets
• Star Trek
• Beers
• Dune
• Astronomical Objects
• Bodies of Water
• Star Wars
• Trains

There are so many more. I realized I’ve been keeping a list of coveted guitars that would work nicely:

• DoubleJet
• Crestwood
• Sparrowhoawk
• Telecaster
• s100
• Mockingbird
• Sensei
• Revstar
• SG

Merlin Mann, some time back, linked to a geeky screed about naming your computers. I realized that despite a brief period naming my hard drives on my pre-OS X Macs, I hadn’t been doing much creatively with this.

Andy Ihnatko, I knew, kept the moniker Lillith in rotation for his main production machine. Clever enough.

I thought about the most obvious scheme–songs. But who would you have song titles that were, importantly, one-word titles, but which conveyed both seriousness of purpose with a touch of whimsy?

Rush, you say?

I concur.

Behold this list of possibilities:

• Anthem
• Bytor
• Snowdog
• Rivendell
• BastilleDay
• LakesidePark
• Necromancer
• Xanadu
• CygnusX-1
• CinderellaMan
• VillaStrangiato
• Freewill
• JacobsLadder
• NaturalScience
• TomSawyer
• RedBarchetta
• YYZ
• Limelight
• CameraEye
• Witchunt
• VitalSigns
• BroonsBane
• Subdivisions
• AnalogKid
• Chemistry
• DigitalMan
• TheWeapon
• NewWorldMan
• Countdown
• Afterimage
• RedSectorA
• BodyElectric
• KidGloves
• BigMoney
• Force10
• PrimeMover
• Presto

I CamelCased where appropriate. That’s a long list of names. You could feasibly name all of your devices Cygnus-Xx, where x is the variable, and call it a life.

But no.

The 16″ MacBook Pro I use at work is BigMoney. BigMoney is my least favorite name, so I got it over with, and it fit the model: I wouldn’t buy that much computer myself, although I am glad to have both the size and horsepower.

But my home Mac Mini? It’s Anthem. I get goosebumps when my watch unlocks it or it pops up in the AirDrop share sheet.

Arnold on Terminating Your Whacked Out Sense of Entitlement:

“I think people should know there is a virus here, it kills people. And the only way we prevent it is we get vaccinated, we wear masks, we do social distancing, washing your hands all of the time, and not just to think about, ‘Well, my freedom is being kind of disturbed here.’ No, screw your freedom. Because with freedom comes obligations and responsibilities. You cannot just say, ‘I have the right to do x, y, and z,’ when you affect other people. That is when it gets serious. It’s like, no different than a traffic light. They put the traffic light in the intersection so someone doesn’t kill someone else by accident. You cannot say, ‘No one is going to tell me that I’m going to stop here, I’m going to go right through it.’

Schwarzenegger, an immigrant and conservative, gets it.

“You’re a Schmuck”: Arnold Schwarzenegger Tells People Refusing to Get Vaccinated and Mask Up to Go F–k Themselves

I’m glad to see “Dr” Mercola getting the attention he deserves for his anti-vaccine stance.

The thing that gets me about hucksters, mountebanks, and bounders of Mercola’s ilk is that they are, in fact, selling an alternative. In Mercola’s case, he suggests that you can fight COVID-19 with simple vitamins:

He also began promoting vitamin supplements as a way to ward off the coronavirus. In a warning letter on Feb. 18, the F.D.A. said Dr. Mercola had “misleadingly represented” what were “unapproved and misbranded products” on Mercola.com as established Covid-19 treatments.

HIs “Liposomal Vitamin C” tablets will cost you $37, for example, for 180 pills.

A friend, many years ago, suggested I read Vaccine Epidemic, mistaking me for someone without a scientific bent or who is suspicious of public health. I am neither.

I concluded of that book that the anti-vaccine movement is cynical at its heart. A crucial issue is the degree to which the prime movers are hucksters:

For a group of people who are suspicious of substances being introduced into their children’s bodies by vaccines, they are curiously eager to offer their children up for experimentation, or to attempt all kinds of “natural” or “homeopathic” cures into them, without anything close to the oversight and study exacted on vaccines.

The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online

Benjamin Dreyer begins his book, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, with the following invocation:

Here’s your first challenge: Go a week without writing

• very
• rather
• really
• quite
• in fact

I happen to use iA Writer when composing anything longer than a quick email (although sometimes BBEdit is the choice), and iA offers to check your writing style. In practice, if you check off the Fillers, Clichés, and Redundancies options, it will unceremoniously render word choices, such as those Dryer excoriates, with a strikethrough.

Take that, Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers¹.