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!

Donnie Darko (2001) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Continuing my review of a list of “best Science fiction movies” from YouTube, the next installment is a movie from 2001 that I have heard spoken of as a “forgotten gem;” Donnie Darko.  I will attempt to disavow my audience of that idea.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

I would compare this movie to some mash-up of “The Breakfast Club” with a cheapo time travel/horror movie.  The movie is stewed in teenage angst in an upscale California town where Donnie Darko (played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal) is undergoing psychotherapy to find out why he is hallucinating about a man in a dog mask who seems to be telling him to do dangerous and harmful things like smashing a water main to flood out his high school and burn down the house of a motivational speaker who is appearing at the school’s Health classes.

While staying out all night at the urging of Frank (the dog guy) Donnie escapes death when an airliner engine falls out of the sky and destroys his bedroom.  It turns out that the FAA can’t locate a plane that lost an engine that day.  Meanwhile his science teacher answers questions about time travel by using Stephen Hawking’s theories about wormholes to justify Donnie’s belief that his psychosis is really messages being sent to him from time travelers.  And when he finds out that an old woman who lives up in the hills was a teacher at his school who wrote a book about time-travel he becomes convinced that he will be involved in a time travel event.

It all comes to a head around Halloween so the fact that some of the kids in the movie are wearing masks becomes less inexplicable but no less annoying.  By the end of the movie several people have been killed violently which appears to include his mother and younger sister who are aboard a jet airliner that coincidently has lost an engine over his town before landing.

At that point, Donnie goes up to the mountains to await the time-traveling storm that’s about to strike.  The end of the movie returns back a month before all the trouble started and this time Donnie is in the room when the engine strikes.  So apparently, he’s sacrificed himself to prevent the deaths of his mother and sister and his girlfriend and the guy who ran her over and was then shot to death by Donnie.  The end.

I hated this movie so much I can’t state it enough.  I despised everyone in it.  That includes Donnie, his English teacher (played by Drew Barrymore), his mother (played by the actress who was the president’s wife in Independence Day), the motivational speaker who turned out to be a kiddie porn purveyor (played by Patrick Swayze), and basically everyone else in the movie.  Everything about this movie was annoying or depressing.  And calling it science fiction is absurd.  There’s absolutely no justification given for any of the events or hallucinations that Donnie experienced.  But honestly, he was such an unlikeable character that all I felt at the end of the movie was annoyance that I had sat through this ridiculous movie.  I don’t recommend this movie to any fans of science fiction.