The First Fruits of Mamdani

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Less than a week after New York City elected Zohran Mamdani mayor, his first reality check surfaces.  New York State Governess Kathy Hochul declared that she has no intention of funding free busses in New York City.

https://x.com/libbyemmons/status/1987532950284451991?s=20

While herself running for reelection and under pressure to avoid any new taxes the laundry list of freebies that Mamdani has promised represents a death sentence for her chances to win the election.

So, let’s think of how all of this will play out.  Well, one thing, I’m pretty sure of is that Zohran will be a one term mayor.  When Albany refuses to pay for all of his gimmees and the middle class flees his sabotage of the public schools and destruction of the police and emptying of the prisons I can see some really bad things going down in the “Big Apple.”

What I’m not sure of is what will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  If I were to guess I think it’ll be the city-owned grocery stores.  I think however he gets involved in that ridiculous idea it’s going to create actual chaos.  And that includes the scenario where he does nothing at all.  Just claiming that he’s working on it will cause enormous anger in the indigent population when it never occurs.  Probably he’ll open up a couple of storefronts where homeless people will be handed free food and riots will break out when the supply of food runs out.  After that the cold hard truth will become clear even to an idealistic moron such as himself.

I’ve heard that a substantial portion of the New York Police Department is planning to retire once Zohran is sworn in.  I think this will accelerate the breakdown in law and order and that will increase the white flight from the city.  How quickly all of this will spiral out of control is hard to say.  But I’m pretty confident that four years is not the amount of time it will take.  I’m guessing next summer is going to be a hot one in New York and bad things will begin to happen then.

But then again maybe I’m just indulging in some early schadenfreude at Zohran’s expense.  Maybe when it becomes apparent that all the things he promised are ridiculous impossibilities he’ll snap out of his adolescent fantasy and turn into a brilliant realistic urban leader ushering New York City into a new golden age with rich and poor coming together into a united coalition that provides inclusion, equity and diversity for all New Yorkers and without any necessity for jails, SAT exams, police or ICE agents.  And this will catapult Zohran Mamdani into the spotlight in a way that will galvanize the American people into amending the Constitution to allow a foreign-born president and this will allow him to win the Democratic nomination for president of the United States and bring him to the White House as our first Muslim, immigrant, communist president.

Yeah right.  If you believe all that then I have a bridge that goes to Brooklyn that I’d like to you to take a look at.

So, Bring It On

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Ever since humans began to practice an agricultural lifestyle, we have become entwined in a larger social structure than the family or tribe.  The much greater population density made possible by agriculture guarantees that independent existence disappears.  You live in a town or a district along with other farmers and tradesmen and the employees of the government that guarantee that the king (or duke or headman) gets his piece of the pie from your harvest.  And then there’s the Temple of the Gods and their priests who also need to be paid.

But in exchange for this taxation, you are protected by the king’s soldiers.  And the priests pray to the gods for you.  And living in this society you have access to coinage which simplifies the process of buying and selling the things you have and want.  And in this society, there are doctors (sort of) and craftsmen of all kinds producing products made of wood, stone, glass, clay, copper, bronze, iron and all the other materials that men work.  And if you happen to live in a really enlightened place you might get to watch a dramatic, poetry or music performance.  And if you are among the elite, you might even become a scholar and learn to read.

And over the centuries, the advantages of living in a civilized state have grown increasingly valuable.  If you live in an advanced society like ours, you will have access to cutting edge healthcare that has the potential to extend your lifetime to close to a century.  You can board an airplane and fly to a country halfway around the Earth within the same day.  You can learn science that explains the secrets of the universe.

But you can never be free.  You can never be independent.  You are tied to this society with ten thousand threads that bind you to the gigantic machine that is our civilization.  No single man.  No grouping of men can ignore the rules and the requirements of our human world.  Not even someone like Elon Musk can just do what he wants.  We all exist in the matrix of this human construct that carries us all along in a direction that we don’t control and can’t even predict.  We’re like cells in a collective organism.  We think of ourselves as independent entities.  But we are pulled along by the collective and must live in its shadow and survive its actions.

But how does it get better?  Well, human society is only something less than ten thousand years old.  So, this new multicellular organism is in its infancy.  It hasn’t had a chance to evolve very much yet.  And that is the hope.  That we will evolve this organism into an efficient and healthy creature that keeps all of its component cells healthy (and mentally happy).  It’s possible democracy is a mutation that will improve the self-regulation feedback loops that keep the organism healthy.  Or maybe not.  Maybe it will be replaced by something else.  From inside the beast, it’s hard to tell whether any progress is being made.  Mostly it feels like chaos.  But after all, the whole thing’s a miracle to start with.  So, bring it on.

Sort of a Personal Butterfly Effect

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When I was about ten, I got my hands on a box full of books that came from the library of a New Jersey Catholic High School in the Philadelphia area.  It had a lot of stuff I wasn’t interested in but it did have a few items that I was.  There were copies of two books by C.S. Lewis; “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “The Screwtape Letters.”  The first book whetted my appetite for fantasy and the latter was an oddity that combined a comedic take on the devil with theology that didn’t currently interest me.

But a third book that was in that box was a book on astronomy.  It was called “Neighbors of the Earth.”  It was a collection of articles from the astronomy magazine “Sky and Telescope” that concerned the planets and other bodies that travelled around our star and made up the solar system.  For a young boy many of these articles were somewhat opaque because spectrographs were beyond my level of scientific accomplishment.  But there was plenty of things I could understand that changed a lot of the “facts” I had about the planets that I had begun to accumulate from science fiction stories.  The statement that, “the atmosphere of Venus consists largely of carbon dioxide” seemed to put the kibosh on my idea of a planet colonized by humans working on farms raising tobacco and coffee.  Later on, the surface temperature being 600 degrees Fahrenheit sealed any hopes of Venusians of any kind.  Then, the article, “Is There Vegetation on Mars?” provided the death blow to my thoughts about Martians.

But the book had many thought-provoking and for me enjoyable articles.  An article called, “Internal Structure of Jupiter and Saturn” introduced me to the concept of “metallic solid hydrogen.”  The idea that a gas could be turned into a solid metal was so exotic to my juvenile understanding of science that it probably sparked my first wishes to understand the mysteries of chemistry.

But looking at the book recently, I noticed that I never was very interested in the mysteries that surrounded the relatively recently discovered planet Pluto.  Even back then, the fact that Pluto seemed much too small to account for the perturbations in the orbit of Neptune was very disturbing to the astronomical community.  So, theories to explain this included either trying to convince themselves that Pluto’s diameter was much larger than observed or that its density was enormously higher than any other body in the solar system.  There was an “experiment” with metal balls of different materials and coated with materials of differing reflectivity to show how “specular reflection” could make a larger object look much smaller.  I’ll have to say it wasn’t very convincing.  And this made me think of all the current theories using dark matter and dark energy that are being used to explain measurements that defy the current models of how the universe works.  And this reminds me that our knowledge is always incremental and that we will never have all the answers.

But it’s interesting to see how that one box of unwanted books seems to have informed many of my intellectual leanings.  Sort of a personal butterfly effect.