JAMES LILEKS ON THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE COVID LOCKDOWNS:

Again, and again, variants and surges. I stopped worrying. I got it, twice. Or to put it another way: I got it, twice. I stopped worrying. Things came back in stages, yet each relaxation felt not like a step towards the old before times, but an ongoing redefinition of some emerging new paradigm. It did not feel as if restrictions were being removed, but new, tightly defined freedoms were being doled out.

The final stage of all this, I guess, was the NYT running a piece that said “Hey, turned out the authorities and media gatekeepers weren’t telling us the whole story.”

That, I suspect, is intended to be the end of the old conversation, not the start of a new one.

Some lingering effects we’ll never lose, and maybe we won’t notice or question, just as 24-year old people who weren’t alive in 2001 take their shoes off in the TSA line because well that’s what you do. If you ask them who Richard Reid was, they’d have no idea.

Read the whole thing.