A very interesting day. We got about a foot of snow and the wind has been pretty wild so I decided to wait until Tuesday to move the white stuff. Wednesday I’ve got to bring Camera Girl’s car to a new mechanic and then go to work so it’ll be a quiet day on the site. The price reduction on the e-book of “The Sniper” is starting to have an effect. I reached 500 on the techno-thriller list and got below 100,000 on the Amazon overall book sales list. I know it’s not something to write home about but it was a big jump.
Hans G. Schantz, a science fiction author I correspond with kindly reposted my announcement on X about the e-book price drop on his X feed. And since he has orders of magnitude more readers that I do I got hundreds of people looking in and one fellow not only reposted but also bought a copy of the book. So that was fun.
I was looking around on YouTube and my feed included a video from someone called Sophia Miller entitled “Mayor Mamdani ERUPTS After BlackRock OFFICIALLY Exits New York For Good!” Well, I watched that video and then I watched one about Chicago and then one about Illinois and two about California.
And you know, it occurred to me that the blue states are getting ready to either implode financially or confiscate the value of the homes of their citizens to pay off the public sector pension plans they’ve underfunded.
That’s a remarkable situation. The blue states have driven away all of the corporations that used to pay the taxes that allowed them to buy the votes of municipal and state employees who now are ready to retire on gold-plated pension plans. Things are about to get very, very ugly. Chicago doubled the property taxes on some working-class Chicagoans. Mamdani is talking about raiding the New York City workers pension plans and raising property taxes by 10%. But along with that increase will come extremely frightening revaluations of homes. Couple this with the flight out of the city of many of the Wall Street banks and financial companies like Black Rock and JP Morgan and what is coming up is a New York City budget gap in the billions of dollars. And that will begin the death spiral for New York as the financial capitol of the world. Without Wall Street, New York is a basket case with eight million people living in a crime ridden environment that suffers from expensive, crumbling infrastructure that it can no longer afford to maintain.
Well, maybe that’s why Mamdani is mayor. Maybe they needed a stooge to absorb the punishment. This will be an awful crash for the people living there and horrible for the people who didn’t vote for this idiot. But it has to be done. My only worry is that Trump will try to step in and save the idiots from themselves. This needs to be allowed to play out to the final iteration. Because the sinking of New York City will also sink New York State, Kathy Hochul needs to be destroyed in this disaster too. All of them deserve it and their downfall will provide a powerful lesson for idiots all across the country. Stupid kills.
I’d think that the Founders strategy of, rather than creating one homogeneous country, instead created 13 (now 50) semi independent “laboratories” is working as planned.
I’m worried that the culture of the red states that allowed the relative success is going to be overwhelmed and destroyed by a tsunami of refugees from the failed blue. And, no, I don’t expect the refugees to understand en masse to not attempt to import the politics of failure.
Leftism is a horrible virus destroying all it infects.
Humans have never managed to find a type of government that didn’t devolve over time into some kind of racket. Maybe there can’t be.
Back in the mid-1960’s, I think Mao Zedong was onto something with the Great Cultural Revolution in China. The theory was that thought was getting too stratified and government too corrupted and a great reset was needed to renew and refresh and leave the corruption behind. Good thought I suspect but the execution (pun intended) killed millions while throwing the country into a decade long chaos. One of the reasons we age is the cumulative corruption of errors in our DNA erodes our bodies mechanisms and processes. I also believe that a direct equivalence inside a government, decades, centuries of… Read more »
I see what you mean about cumulative corruption. The system is so rigged against the little guy that many people have just given up. Maybe a debt jubilee would help.
“Mamdani is talking about raiding the New York City workers pension plans and raising property taxes by 10%.”
No! You were supposed to take their money! Not mine!
In some senses the whole thing is hilarious. But it’s also horrific because of the scale of the destruction that is imminent.