The latter half of Viva Frei’s piece is similar to yours in theme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0utqIWwY6Ow

“Richard Aubrey, so your guest is terrified of the virus, but willing to put unused tableware touched by someone outside your household back into your kitchen drawers? How confused.” – Kate

AesopSpouse and I had dinner recently with family. We are a very casual clan, and generally share our restaurant orders, so everyone can have more variety.
They all came to the table masked (as did we, although they really think it protects them), but then they sampled the community dishes with the forks they had already started using.
I tactfully substituted unused serving utensils, but still….
Of course, they are all Democrats who don’t understand why we are Republicans.

Required reading: where did that “5 micron” line between droplets and aerosols come from? Nobody knew until this researcher started looking.
Bottom line: “settled science” is only settled because the scientists are too lazy to check their citations, once “everybody knows” something.

“It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.” – Reagan

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=earned

Great catch by a concerned scientist about her own field, but she still thinks wearing masks helps protect us from viral aerosols. SMH.

Shouldn’t have done that. Now Bezos is infinitesimally richer. Couldn’t help myself.

Seems that Laumer’s Retief fared better than his namesake:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Retief_Delegation_massacre

WRT my trip south: I asked one of the dipplemats (h/t Laumer) how long they’d figured out the Nicaraguans were about to revolt, how much warning. He said a couple of days…. I figured the jarhead security guys had a better feel for it by going into town for a few drinks.

The late Keith Laumer had an SF series about a character “Retief”, who was a James Bondish rogue who worked as a diplomat. He usually succeeded by being vastly smarter than pretty much all the idiots who WERE working as diplomats.

They tend to be silly fun, not taken all that seriously.

Laumer had a career working in diplomacy, so, pretty sure his experience indicates your assumption being spot-on, if his depiction of the profession is at all accurate, as one suspects it is.

If this seems of any interest:
https://www.librarything.com/nseries/13656/Retief

There is VERY strong evidence that Covid is not particularly transmissible via contact — its dispersal mode is almost entirely via aerosol. That’s why your otherwise reasonable germophobia didn’t help much with it… you avoided contact, which DOES work with the typical flu and cold virii, but it didn’t help much with CV.

I have noted in other places, Hogg is this decade’s Cindy Sheehan.

He’ll get disabused of his significance soon enough. He’s well past his sell-by date.

It has become a secular religion for so many of these people.

With any luck, it’ll replace AGW as a religion.

That would be a GOOD THING.

Yeah, the idiots would be somewhat debilitated. But I can get along with them paying that price for being stupid.