They say that when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In the pandemic era, governments have hammers and their only answer lies in coercive measures that wield power over the one thing they control.

They don’t control the virus, but they do control people.

And so another lockdown arrives, in different blue areas at different times. LA’s lockdown titled Safer at Home or Cower Under Your Beds Peons arrives this week. Like most of its ilk, it’s a goulash of self-contradictory regulations that accomplish nothing except creating the illusion of meaningful activity. 

The lockdowns are accompanied by the usual boilerplate “following the science” nonsense even when it’s coming from Barbara Ferrer, who has the same relationship to and expertise in science that I do in and to the King of Siam, and the assertions that curfews somehow prevent the virus, followed by rapidly exempting Hollywood from those same curfews (being classified means being essential to the regime and its special interests, not to society) while urging everyone to cooperate.

But if Thanksgiving showed anything, it’s that Irish Democracy has set in.

Yes, there’s the woman who, passing me on the other side of the street, with a good 20 feet of distance, primly declared, “Please, wear your mask”, but the general public has been tired of this since the summer.

And we’re well past the summer now.

Even the new lockdown includes concessions to the new reality, exempting houses of worship and protests since they are constitutional rights. It’s nice of our unelected political leaders to have realized that the constitution still applies.

And there’s a good deal of hesitation in targeting schools. 

School shutdowns have become toxic even among Democrats. Parents have had enough, regardless of their politics, and are refusing to put up with it.