THE DAY BASKETBALL ENDED.

A year ago, there were no Cold Spring Shops posts because it was time to get the layout ready for visitors attending the March Meet, which might have been one of the final social events of the spring in Illinois.  The plan was to finish tidying up the layout with coverage of the Mid-American conference basketball tournament as background entertainment.  But just before I expected that coverage to begin, the radio reported that the tournament had been cancelled, and the disaster that began as fifteen days to slow the spread of Wuhan coronavirus was under way.  A Northern Star reporter who was in Cleveland for the tournament has published a reminiscence of what he describes as "the day sports stopped."

Professional sports finished their seasons during the summer, and the collegiate tournaments are back, with limited spectators.  Life in these United States more generally is not so good.

What did those fifteen days turn into?  Was it a shift in public health goals, from protecting the hospitals from being overwhelmed, which parts of New York City seemed close to being, to doing whatever it took to conquer the virus, which seems to be the focus of the vaccines?  Or, as I fear, was it a shift in policy goals, from containing contagion to doing whatever it took to turn the yeomanry into paupers?  I had my doubts about the lockdown regimes by late in March, and over the past year I came to see the second goal as the purpose, with Our Rulers having us mask up, shut up, and wait for the welfare checks.

A year into the shutdowns, it is time to recognize others who saw the tyranny for what it was, and said so.  We'll start with cartoonist Henry Payne.

That cartoon came out when petty-bourgeois elements were objecting to the destruction of their businesses by executive order.  It was OK for those businesses to be destroyed by lumpenproletarians of color.  That, though, is for another day.  Today we focus on Derek Hunter's Trenchant Observation, "It was a complete and total failure by the bureaucratic state."  His fear is that the failure might have been for naught.

Maybe enough data will have been gathered that some sense can be made of it, but it’s doubtful. Given how lockdowns didn’t work, yet persist, and masks haven’t worked, but mandates persist, no one in any position to take responsibility seems to have any interest in doing so. They’re just committed to what hasn’t worked until they’re not, then they act like it never happened as they move on to the next thing.

I hope somewhere out there useful, usable data exists in spite of the bureaucratic incompetence that has been captaining this ship for the last 12 months. Otherwise, we really would have gone through all of this and learned nothing.

I'll leave the heavy empirical research to others, but concentrate, below the jump, on documenting the case that the lockdown regime is about turning the yeomanry into paupers.

We start with a set of principles for harm mitigation noted by Daniel Herriges.

1. Prioritize damage control.
2. Invert the rules of engagement.  Those at the top are to serve, not lead.
3. Directly tie emergency relief to systemic fixes.

An anecdote about Australians importing toads to control invasive beetles in sugar cane fields might not seem immediately relevant, but the general principles are.  Once it became clear that the lockdowns were causing stress to other parts of the human organism, the public health boffins ought to have recognized as much.  Once it became clear that the infections were of different virulence to different populations and at different times, national officials and state governors ought to have backed off.  Finally, bailing out the jurisdictions that handled the Wuhan coronavirus most badly is the best way to avoid making those systemic fixes.  "By insulating the system itself from the consequences of failure, we risk rewarding bad actors and perpetuating bad incentives. Delaying a necessary reckoning with something that is fundamentally broken usually just means a bigger, more painful reckoning down the line."  The Gods of the Copybook Headings will come for Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi.

It's not that we weren't warned.  Julie Kelly was uneasy about the house arrests early on. “This is what the Left wants. They want people stripped of wealth, isolated, and terrified. They want sources of joy—church, sporting events, vacations, large social gatherings—eliminated. This is how they get control. And it’s far scarier than any virus.”  That might have been premature, projecting political ideology onto public health when people could reasonably be uncertain about how scary that virus was.  But she turned out to have been right.

The only upside to the lockdown catastrophe is that the depravity of our ruling class has been fully exposed. Their crimes against Americans won’t be litigated in any courtroom, unfortunately, but we can hope the untold number of surviving victims will have the final word in the next election.

One year ago, the overwhelming majority of Americans acted in good faith to do what we were told was in the best interest of our country. That faith has been abused and squandered by people who didn’t deserve it in the first place.
This must never happen again.

Her post also noted the way in which many colleges and universities have reopened might be making students more willing to go along with petty tyranny.

The situation isn’t much better for college students, who live in a quasi-state of solitary confinement. COVID is the center of campus life; nonstop testing, insane restrictions on gatherings, shuttered bars and restaurants, little to no in-person learning. My niece recently spent nine nights alone in an “isolation dorm” after testing positive for COVID yet displaying not one symptom. Nonetheless, she was cut off from any human contact and could not even leave her room to take a walk outside.

It was tyranny, and Neo calls it as much.  "I did not foresee the extremes to which Democrats would go to keep us locked up for such a long time, and how meekly so many people would acquiesce to it, driven by fear."

A writer called Voxpost, not to be confused with the soy-boys and their explainers, is harsher.

We have become but cannon fodder to be expended in the hubristic war on covid.

A virus with a high survival rate has not been the cause of millions of people losing their jobs in pubs, theatres, or airlines. This virus has not been the cause of family businesses closing and livelihoods destroyed. Government policies have. Crippling restrictions which have inflicted maximum damage on these businesses have been the cause.

When we look back from a time in the future, we will see that assisting the government in their hubristic policies has been the mainstream media who have been the architects of hysteria and fear.  They blame covid for the economic and social fallout we are facing, rather than blame the politicians and themselves who enabled it.

It is on those of us who are aware of these things to make them available, in order that future researchers will be able to weigh the evidence and make those conclusions, if those conclusions are indeed warranted.

If we can so readily submit to the loss of our moral guidance and our liberty we can look forward to a dark future; an eco-fascist, dystopia where humans will be reduced to a herd of animals to be constantly tracked, traced, and medicated. Make no mistake, the freedoms that have been taken from us already will be hard to reclaim. For a large part of the public this warning will come too late; they have been successfully broken by the state and may never recover completely. As for the rest of us, seeking to restore our morality must now become paramount.

We need to regain the freedoms society has willingly conceded under the influence of coercive propaganda and psychological manipulation. The first step to achieving this goal is to stop and breathe. Take a deep breath, reassess where we are and where we are heading and reset our moral compass.

At the end of a fisking of the coot's speech last night, Victory Girl Amanda Green also suggests it's about turning the yeomanry into paupers.

We’ve spent the last year being told that once you were vaccinated, you could start returning to normal. Once the majority of the country was vaccinated, we’d see life returning to what it once was. If that’s the case they why are we going to be told what we can and cannot do once vaccinated? Why especially if every adult will be eligible for the vaccination after May?

The answer is easy and extremely troubling. They aren’t planning on letting us return to normal. That doesn’t fit their plans. They want to break us, break our spirits and break what the United States of America stands for.

What, then, is to be done?

First, we recognize that if the policy goal was to abolish the risk of coronavirus infections before the ukases can be lifted, we're likely to achieve neither.  "Stop Trying To Create a Zero-Risk Society."  Second, we recognize that it is precisely during times of emergency that the safeguards of separated, enumerated, and limited powers are most valuable.  "Abuses of power have been propelled by a presumption that government officials are entitled to all the power they claim to need to keep people safe."  Those abuses of power did not turn out so well.  "We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation."  Third, it is time to speak up.

Why do the people who keep telling you if we just follow their simple instructions life will return to normal, then yank normal away like Charlie Brown’s football just as we reach their stated goal and we land flat on our locked-down backs all over again? The answer is not hard to understand. Fear is a useful tool for those who love control.

Chris Stigall concludes, "It’s been a year. That’s enough. It’s time to reclaim normal from those who have no intention of allowing normal’s return."  Exactly.