[conspire] Strange 'phone calls, redux

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> Oh my.  Of all the times to be pushing his Berkeley Global TIP - which
> of course would be at least mostly, if not entirely, done with/via
> telecommunications, and would probably not require any gatherings of
> 2 or more people physically together, uhm, yeah, now might be the
> time to be pushing Berkeley Global TIP more - if he were gonna
> presently be pushing further any more of his (half/totally?) baked ideas.

It would be _simultaneously_ insane, potentially homicidal, and outright
illegal.  Every county in the Bay Area currently is under an isolation
order like this one.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/12.3.20-Stay-at-Home-Order-ICU-Scenario.pdf

   The key bit is provision 2(a):

   All gatherings with members of other households arep rohibited in the
   Region except as expressly permitted herein.

The exceptions are the predictable First Amendment rights, outdoor
recreation, necessary infrastructure activity, schools, medical/dental
care, child-care/pre-K, and necessary retail.  There's no exception for
'JR is bored and wants other people to risk illness and death for the
sake of his entertainment.

I'm not completely sure whether to be annoyed by JR's pathetic
suggestions that I ought to prove my testicular sufficiency by so doing.
I'm thinking 'Yes, but don't spend much time on it.'

> Yeah, unfortunately there are those that "just don't get it" and/or
> just don't care.  Either way, about as dangerous.  The percentage of
> folks that can and do go for total untrue goop and conspiracy theories
> and cesspools of lies - and believe all or most all of it ... it's
> friggin' scary.  And individually and/or aggregate behaviors from them
> and/or others, it's more than enough to keep pandemic in exponential
> growth range - and headed yet more towards megadeaths, rather than
> exponential decay, where this huge deadly mess would instead be much
> smaller nuisance that would be much more manageable.

The divorcing of action from consequence is a big problem, here.  People
revert to habit and hold December social gatherings because it's what
they've always done and because compliance is on the honour system, germ
exchange ensues, and asymptomatically infected people go around for
weeks creating exploding trees of further infection, typically not even 
knowing they were key links in the subsequent chain of disaster.

Getting back to an earlier thread briefly, this is why I felt it was a 
win to construct washable cloth masks for my family that are both
comfortable and tested to do 87% filtering (almost reaching the N95
spec) with nothing more than inexpensive shop towel material purchasable
in bulk at hardware and car-supply stores.  These seem to greatly raise
protection for my family, on occasions when we must be around others, 
not knowing who may be shedding virus.

Noted without comment:  The President-Eject has had about 20 in-person,
indoor, no-face-covering parties at the Executive Mansion this month,
many of which have been proven to have been superspreader events, and
he's reportedly holding another of them tonight.

The usual black-tie New Year's Eve party will also be going ahead at
Mar-a-Lago, with about 500 reservations confirmed and entrance costing
thousands of dollars per head, but the Toddler-in-Chief and his
catalogue bride will be spreading the love and pathogens in Washington,
instead.