
Austin H
8.3K posts




So I did a thing today. I achieved 365 days in a row of hitting or exceeding my daily step goal. Averaged 12,000 steps a day. Lost 25 pounds to hit my healthy weight. Lost my stomach and I’m officially two pants sizes smaller. Dropped my A1C to 5.6 and for the first time in years, all my test results came back clean and green. I did it the old fashion way: I ate healthy and exercised daily for the last year.



Let me tell you about the greatest unintentional science experiment in the history of progressive governance. Zohran Mamdani — the brand-new mayor of New York City, population TEN MILLION — decided the city needed emergency snow shovelers. Simple enough. He went on TV, promoted it city-wide, and set up signup sheets at sanitation garages across all five boroughs. You know how many people showed up at the Manhattan location? ZERO. Brooklyn? ZERO. One Queens garage? Not a soul — and I quote a city worker there: "I haven't seen anybody sign up yet today. No one." One Brooklyn location managed to scrape together 35 volunteers before the snow even started falling. 35 people. One city. Ten million residents. Now, I teach biology, so I recognize a failed experiment when I see one. This is what happens when reality collides with ideology at highway speed. Here is the part that would be funny if 19 people had not died freezing on his streets during the PREVIOUS cold snap. Mamdani was asked about those 19 deaths — "unhoused" people, pardon me for the crime of using plain English — and his response was essentially: well, some of them died from drug overdoses, so... not all my fault? Remarkable crisis management. Truly. But back to the shoveling. This is the same man whose political identity is built on screaming "LIVING WAGES" until his voice gives out. The same movement that tells us $15 an hour is poverty and $20 is barely survivable in a major American city. So when an actual emergency hit his actual city, the very best he could offer was $19 an hour — in a place where a bagel costs $7. Naturally, nobody showed up. So in a full-on panic, he rushed out a new video bumping the pay to $30 an hour. Oh, and he required TWO forms of identification to participate. Let that sit for a second. The political party that has spent YEARS insisting that asking for ONE form of ID to vote is Jim Crow 2.0, segregation reborn, a fundamental assault on democracy — that party's mayor is now requiring TWO forms of ID to pick up a snow shovel for thirty bucks. I teach science. We call this a logical inconsistency. Other people call it something less polite. Quinn's Law #1 applies here like a surgical instrument: "Liberalism always generates the EXACT OPPOSITE of its stated intent." Champion of the working class cannot get working-class people to work. Advocate for living wages offers wages nobody will accept. Opponent of voter ID demands more ID than a polling place. And Quinn's Law #25 deserves a bow too: "Liberals are great at giving away other people's money." Notice it was $19 of TAXPAYER money, not Mamdani's own. The moment it was HIS administration's crisis to manage, suddenly the generosity of spirit evaporated faster than the budget surplus. Bernie Sanders ran a presidential campaign on $15 minimum wage while paying his own field organizers an average of $13 an hour for 60-hour weeks. Now Mamdani runs a city on "living wage" rhetoric while offering emergency pay that would not cover the subway fare to get there and back. Same energy. Different decade. Same results. What is next — Mamdani holds a press conference on income inequality... wait, I just heard he already scheduled one for Thursday. The man has been mayor for roughly two months. In that time: 19 unhoused people died on his watch, the city is heading into a historic blizzard with a QUARTER of the snow removal staff used in prior storms, and his great mobilization strategy produced 35 shovelers total. This is what you get when you elect someone whose entire qualification is performance. Everything is theater. Everything is a press release. Everything is racial grievance politics dressed up as governance. The moment the snow actually falls and the city needs someone who knows how to RUN something — you get an emergency video and a $30 plea. New York City has one of the largest municipal budgets on the planet. They could have rented equipment. They could have contracted crews. They could have activated protocols that actually existed BEFORE the blizzard radar showed up. Instead, the mayor's plan was to crowdsource manual labor from random citizens and pay them in wages that the mayor's own party calls "poverty level." Quinn's Law #5: "When liberalism conflicts with reality, reality must give way." Reality did not cooperate this time. But what do I know — I am only a science teacher who understands that experiments with a 35-out-of-10,000,000 participation rate are called FAILURES, not pilot programs.


We also need to honor Amy Slover. She has stood by Eric’s side through thick and thin. The pride in her eyes is evident. I’ve said on here before that Nightstalker wives are just built different. They endure, they support, and they do it all alone. When we leave we have the easy job. These ladies spend many nights alone, experience too many rapid departures. These ladies make us what we are. None of us would be where we are without them. Thank you Amy, you are an example to all. LNSDQ





















