Month: February 2026

Sometimes There is No Winning

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I mentioned the other day that we were getting a foot of snow.  And in the current political environment, that means the state is shut down.  Even First Selectman Cthulhu shut down the Dunwich government and spent the day eating the road salt that the state provides for town road clearance.  He really likes salt even though it’s bad for his blood pressure.  His doctor told him to keep it below 10,000 atmospheres over 6,000.  But what can you do?  He loves him some salt.

Now I decided not to start clearing the snow until today (Tuesday) because they said the snow could continue until 7am.  And even though that turned out to be incorrect (it was a cloudless sky this morning) I was undismayed.  I had nowhere to go today (everything is closed) so I had all day to blow the snow off the top driveway.  I had a leisurely breakfast at 7am and by 9:30 am I sauntered out and started up the snowblower.  And it turned over like a champ and I put it in gear and moved it to where I wanted to start the clearing.  Then I turned the chute in the direction I wanted it and squeezed the trigger to start the auger.  And horrible noises proceeded from this possessed contraption.

Long story short; my snowblower is on the sidelines.  And so, what started as a leisurely day of snow removal became the Bataan Death March.  A foot of snow is kind of a lot when you have as much area as my driveways and other areas add up to.  In the words of every action hero that reaches that golden age, “I’m getting too old for this crap.”  I performed a mental triage of what did and didn’t have to be cleared to allow us to get out on Wednesday morning.  I cleared the area in front of the garage.  I cleared a path from Camera Girl’s car to the upper driveway and I cleared the whole upper driveway including the thirty inches of compacted snow and ice that the plough trucks sealed my driveway in with.  That last part was rough.  I abandoned the lower driveway altogether.  I left snow sitting close to the front door and I didn’t even clear the area around the shed (other than a path to get in and out of it).  And even with these omissions I didn’t get finished until an hour after sunset.

And now I ache in every joint and every muscle.  The piles of snow have gotten so high that I had to pitch each shovelful with all the force I could generate by rotating the shovel in a long arc.  If there were an Olympic event in snow tossing, I might have broken the world record.  So, I got in and there was a very nice dinner waiting for the “conquering hero.”  But then Camera Girl mentioned that the forecast had changed and now they’re talking about snow in the morning.  And more snow on Thursday.

Sometimes there is no winning.

Snow and Sales and the Death of Cities

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

O Canada!

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Alberta is taking a page from Quebec’s separatist campaign and the way things look there will be a referendum in October.  The exact wording of the referendum question will be “”Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?”  This wording was selected because it adheres to the phrasing in Canada’s federal Clarity Act.

Will the referendum succeed?  The polls I’ve seen say no.  Only about a third of voters want independence.  But then again, I remember how many polls said Hillary and Kamala were way ahead of Trump in their presidential races.  So, we’ll have to see.

But even if it fails this time I can see how a day will come when one or more of the western Canadian provinces will secede.  I was watching a video from a fellow in British Columbia who was of the opinion that if Alberta secedes, BC would not only secede but it would fragment into three separate parts.  I don’t pretend to know the details of provincial politics in Canada but I’ve heard that if Alberta leaves Saskatchewan and Manitoba are also very likely to follow suit.

Whether any seceding Canadian provinces decide to apply for American statehood is an interesting question.  I think there’s a good chance that they won’t.  They might feel their best option is combining with each other to form an alternative to Canada.  And that raises another question.  Without the western provinces would Quebec want to remain with rump Canada?  After all, Quebec decided not to secede because they know they receive much more from the federal government than they pay.  But that might no longer be the case when all that is left is Eastern Canada and the Arctic.  So pretty soon Canada becomes essentially Ontario and the Maritime provinces with the Yukon and Hudson Bay thrown in for ice fishing.  Now that is a different reality from the current situation.  But I think it’s a definite possibility in the next decade or so.

And why do I think all of this is important?  Because Canada is an extension of the same cultural and political environment that the United States inhabits.  Because of Quebec, Canada had to provide self-determination to their provinces to show that they weren’t ruling an empire.  Well, now it’s going to bite them on the butt.  And when Canada implodes, it is going to provide a spectacle for the Americans south of their border.

It’s funny how the Left always points at Canada as the template they approve of.  Well, maybe they would go along with adding a constitutional amendment allowing for secession referenda.  After all, if Canada does it, then it must be progressive and therefore good!  Well, anyway, it’s a thought.

The world is changing.  The globalist agenda has shaken things up and it will continue to change for the foreseeable future.  Where it ends up is anyone’s guess.  But I think it’s as likely to get better as it is to get worse.  So, I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and see where the opportunities open up.  O Canada!