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I stole this heading from Andrew Sullivan’s piece from New York Magazine, but I think it speaks for everbody in lockdown around the world:

All of that should make me a prime candidate to hang in, take this period as a disciplinary exercise, and generally be a good citizen. And I have been — I haven’t had any physical human contact for two months now, I wear a mask everywhere, I use rubber disposable gloves for groceries, I keep my six-feet distance so far as I can…

A cooperative citizen: the joy of governments everywhere.

But I can recognize signs of psychological and physical stress, and I’m beginning to lose it. This week, for some reason, Wednesday was a bad day. Or at least I think it was Wednesday. What day is it again?
…
And here’s the thing: I can’t see much on the horizon.

He does list the positives. First there’s the famous flattened curve that means hospitals were not overwhelmed, even in his NYC, where emergency backups like the Javits Centre and the USN Hospital ship saw hardly any victims of Chinese Lung Rot. Then there is the fact that the worst has not happened across the rest of the USA, irrespective of whether states were locked down or not.
But he cautions, as an AIDS survivor, on the prospects for both a vaccine and treatments. And he points out that this virus cannot be “wiped out”, that it will spread as society returns to normal, and that immunity is not a certainty here, given that other coronaviruses that cause the common cold, lead to a very weak immune response, so people can catch the same bug multiple times. But he’s now more worried about the economy:

Just because Trump has argued that the cure could be worse than the disease doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially true. The previously unimaginable levels of unemployment and the massive debt-fueled outlays to lessen the blow simply cannot continue indefinitely. We have already, in just two months, wiped out all the job gains since the Great Recession. In six months? The wreckage boggles the mind.

I do have to chuckle about the TDS folks like Andrew, who have to grind their teeth everytime Trump says something that they can’t deny. But moving on:

It is why protests against our total shutdown, while puny now, will doubtless grow. The psychological damage — not counting the physical toll — caused by this deeply unnatural way of life is going to intensify. We remain human beings, a quintessentially social mammal, and we orient ourselves in time, looking forward to the future. When that future has been suspended, humans come undone.
…
But I learned something from the AIDS years: Sometimes it is a catastrophe. And sometimes the only way past something is through it.

To that end I looked at the old home town of Chicago and found that the State of Illinois has extended its lockdown until the end of May, FFS!
Illinois Governor Pritzker
At the start of the lockdown, Governor Pritzker, a billionaire, promptly packed his wife and family off in a private jet down to Florida where they could shelter in place in greater warmth!
What’s noteworthy is the local MSM – even supporting Democrats as always in such a Deep Blue state – found out about this and questioned him hard on the matter, to which he responded in the angry and haughty manner of a Master who is not to be challenged by the serfs. He must envy our PM.
The Chicago mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has followed in his footsteps in both ways. Early on in the lockdown she toddled outside to get her hair done, a little subterfuge that fell apart when the hairdresser proudly put it up on Facebook. And as with Pitzker this has shamed Lightfoot not one bit as she has continued to walk around the streets haranguing citizens as they try to play and laugh and live at least a partially normal life.
Chicagoans being who they are, have not taken these edicts lying down. At one playground the kids – all Black – absolutely roasted Lightfoot on camera, which promptly went viral on Twitter and TickTok:“Y’all need to find a cure, you’re talking about go home. You go home.“
 
And what was funny was that this came just days after news emerged about a massive House Party in Glenwood (just down the street from two of our friends: fairly tony area), plus several others that went viral on Social Media at the same time  – one of them led by the son of a Chicago Fire Department Chief (HA!).

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was outraged on Saturday that people in Chicago are going to large parties during the stay-at-home order and the coronavirus pandemic.

“We will arrest you and we will take you to jail. Don’t make us treat you like a criminal. If you refuse to do what is necessary to save lives, we will take you to jail. Period. We’re not playing games. We mean business,” Lightfoot said.

Sounds like Mike Bush with his little “visit to our place“. You have to laugh. As one Chicago cop pointed out:

Jail….and then what? An I-bond from the District, a dismissal at Court, and a Civil Right attorney knocking at the door with a proposition for a lottery win.

An I-bond is basically an IOU for a bond: you don’t pay cash/cheque or anything and get sprung from jail anyhow. A ton of guys with assault charges, even with guns, have been using it to walk from Chicago jails, all of it with the enthusiastic approval of the likes of Lori Lightfoot. And of course that brings in this other point the cop raises:

Lightfoot and her ilk have spent their lives cultivating disrespect for the Rule of Law in general and police specifically. Now they act surprised when residents don’t want to follow a legally questionable “mandate.” They’re extra surprised when cops object to being thrown into a situation that endangers their physical and financial well-being after years of being painted as the bad guys.

And of course when she got her personal chance to grab those playground kids, with her bodyguards, the “merit” white shirts and some huge prick from Streets and Sanitation in yellow, with the MSM there to record her righteous zeal…. she pussied out:

This was your moment! You bragged about breaking up an underage drinking party the other day, scaring everyone out of an alley, but there were no witnesses to that one. Plus it was a reasonably quiet neighborhood. This was Ground Zero right there, the epicenter of homicides and mayhem for all of Chicago.

No one laid hands on this kid? No one chased him out of sight? No one had a robot armed with a tear gas grenade or something?

Oh, but you’re going to send the police in to “break up” house parties across the city and arrest everyone in sight?

Chicago Mayor, Lori Lightfoot
Sounds like what happens with the NZ Police Force and Honi’s roadblocks doesn’t it? Incidently when it comes to respect for the law, Chicago Alderman have objected to Lori taking on almost sole authority over city spending decisions. Now normally that would be something to respect but since Chicago Alderman are among the most corrupt creatures on the face of the earth you can be certain that it’s about the fear that they may be missing their cut of the action.
Meantime, back at the State level, Pritzker’s latest executive order extending the lockdown has been challenged in court by one of those pesky people who have spent their lives cultivating disrespect for the Rule of Law, State Representative Darren Bailey, and the challenge won:

To his eternal credit, Judge Michael McHaney found the extended lockdown order unlawful, issuing a restraining order that blocks enforcement of the order against Bailey.  Addressing lawyers for the governor’s office, Judge McHaney said, “Every second this Executive Order is in existence, it violates the Constitution and shreds the Bill of Rights.”

As with Lightfoot, Prtizker’s response lacked any sense of shame or self-awareness – and the pyschological projection was total:

Pritzker suggested that Bailey is playing politics with a crisis, “devoted to ideology and the pursuit of personal celebrity.” Pritzker seems not to realize that it is he who is blinded by ideology, a totalizing authoritarian ideology that can imagine only top-down, command-and-control solutions to problems.

Meh! That solution has increasingly led Chicago and Illinois astray. Just the other day in the Tribune, one of the only honest and fair Liberal reporters that remain there, John Kass, unloaded on Pritzker’s great plan to get out of lockdown:

Before Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker came out with his five-phase plan to reopen a state he shut down for the coronavirus pandemic — he forgot something. He forgot to seek input from the business that employs more workers than any other in the state: restaurants and bars.

That’s 500,000 workers to be precise. What genius. But what do those plebs know: if they had any business sense they’d be billionaires like Pritzker. I did laugh at the following piece of Kass snark after a quote from Illinois Restaurant Association President Sam Toia, where he pointed out that:

“Chicago is an independent restaurant town. That’s what makes it such a great restaurant city. But independents need cash flow, and the governments want their taxes paid. But if something doesn’t change, we’ll lose at least 25% of our businesses, some say it could be 50%. And then what?”

To which Kass responds:

Then Chicago will look like DeKalb, or Bloomington, or most any other Midwest town off the interstate: with a Walgreens on one corner, a Chili’s on the next, and don’t forget that Asian crunch salad at Applebee’s, or is that TGI Fridays?

Hey! DeKalb and Bloomington are nice. Boring but nice. But there is a larger point there and it’s one we run into repeatedly in discussing the impact of this virus on business; that small and mediums ones will be hit harder than franchise operations and large businesses. And then there’s taxes:

While homeowners and businesses are hurting, you know who hasn’t felt the pinch? Government. Government hasn’t laid off anyone. Pritzker hasn’t, and neither have Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot nor Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. But they want those taxes paid.

How exactly are those going to be paid by businesses that are not running and property owners without jobs? Kass points out that although Pritzker has granted himself immense state emergency powers (just like Lori’s city powers in Chicago), he hasn’t demanded the Illinois General Assembly meet and act, and the state tax code is written largely by the legislature.
But I think the state reps have an answer to this, which would also just happen to solve the problems they’ve created over the last two decades with things like underfunded schools and pension funds. They’re going to get the great Federal sugar daddy to cover their debts.

State senator Don Harmon of Illinois, who was recently elevated to president of that body, wrote a letter to Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) in Washington.  Harmon suggested some of the things Illinois needs in the next phase of spending.  The quantified amounts come to $41.6 billion.  That does not include payments to hospitals or increasing the matching funds by the federal government for their Medicaid program.

More than half the monetized amount ($25 billion) is simply amazing.  Harmon wants a $15 billion “block grant” to Illinois and another $10 billion for pension relief, “directly for the state’s retirement systems.”  That is $15 billion in “free,” unrestricted money for whatever the Democrats that control Illinois wish to use it for.

Unfortunately for Illinois the Federal Senate has states that are far better run, and there is no way in god’s green earth that they’re going to approve of a scam like that.
In the meantime ordinary people will continue to suffer worse under these lockdowns, which was well exemplified by this series of tweets the other day from some nobody called Bethany S. Mandel, from which I’ll leave you with just two that apply to New Zealand as well: