Unkillable

     It’s been said innumerable times that “you can’t kill an idea.” It’s true, even if the notion of “killing” is only metaphorically applicable to something nonliving. Ideas cannot be quenched once and for all. It doesn’t even matter whether an idea has any advocates. If it has ever existed in the mind of even one man now deceased, it could rise again.

     The world is in a flutter over the American operation to capture Nicolas Maduro and his wife and extract them from Venezuela to face trial here. Good thing? Bad thing? American overreach? Violation of “international law?” Venezuelans worldwide don’t care. They approve of President Trump’s decision to send Delta Force to collect the miscreant. I find myself in agreement with them.

     Maduro, you may recall, “inherited” the office of Maximum Leader from the late Hugo Chavez. Chavez, Venezuela’s first openly socialist president, swiftly dismantled the country upon accession to the presidency. He seized, nationalized, and suppressed. He ignored Venezuela’s constitution, took total control of the machinery of election, and essentially prohibited organized political opposition. He took the richest and most successful nation in South America and transformed it into a violent, poverty-stricken hellhole.

     Maduro took Chavez’s position and intensified his policies. Whether he did so because he sincerely held socialist convictions or because he just liked wielding power is unknown. Venezuelans starved, stole, cannibalized, and fled. Maduro never relented, no matter how severe the poverty and squalor became. But now he’s gone, and ordinary Venezuelans are openly rejoicing.

     But some people can’t – or won’t – learn from others’ bad experiences. New York City has just elected a Muslim Communist as its mayor.

     The consequences are already coming:

     New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed Cea Weaver as the Director of the City Office to Protect Tenants. Presumably, a position intended to stand behind the rights of housing tenants against the property owner. However, Ms. Weaver has some remarkable views on private property and home ownership.
     In this video clip below you will notice Ms. Weaver outline how homeowners will need to modify their view on their property ownership to reflect a new municipal perspective that considers all individually owned property to be part of a new collective property viewpoint as controlled by city government.

NYC Mayor Mamdani's Tenant Director, Cea Weaver:

"We'll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good. Whites especially will be impacted." pic.twitter.com/RZSdCs8oEa

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 5, 2026

     Thought that apartment building was yours, Big Apple resident? Thought that condominium was yours? Thought that brownstone was yours? Nope. There’s no longer any private property in the Five Boroughs of New York. It’s all part of a “collective good” that will be administered by the city government.

     Watch your ass, especially if you’re white. Heap Big Tenant Protector Cea Weaver has given you notice.

     The remarkable thing about this is how unabashed Mamdani and his cohort are about it all. They’re right out front about their convictions and their policies. Are they sincere, are they playing for power, or are they just cat’s-paws for a larger, shadowy network of power-mongers? Does it matter? The consequences won’t vary with how earnest they are. New York City is about to become Pyongyang on the Hudson.

     If Nicolas Maduro is allowed to read a newspaper, he must be laughing his slats off at this development.

     I used to believe that the seductions of socialism required that its target population be ignorant of its record in power. I can’t believe that any longer. New Yorkers may be foolishly attached to the Democrat Party, but as a rule they’re neither ignorant nor stupid.

     The Russians deposed their Soviet masters. The Warsaw Pact nations did the same. At least one of them – Romania – executed its former ruler. The sole remaining bastions of Communism are Cuba and North Korea.

     And New York City.

     The events of the late Twentieth Century killed several socialist / Communist regimes. It did not kill the Communist ideology. But the Communist ideology may be about to kill New York, at one time regarded as the greatest city in the world.

A Consumer, Not A Creator

     C’est moi, when it comes to what are currently called memes. However, I enjoy the clever ones, and am always happy to come upon one that expresses an important truth in a memorable fashion. The following is a case in point:

     Bravo! Visually arresting and evocative. But let’s “unpack” it a bit. There are more layers to it than a mere chortle would do it justice.

     Socialism and Communism – the former is actually just the latter before the show trials, gulags, and executions get revved up – are animated by the same emotion: envy. I use the term here in its maximally intensified sense: the hatred of those who have something the envious one does not.

     I have a lot of quotes about envy in my database. Here are some of the pithier ones:

     The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better. (Folk saying)
     There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. (Erich Fromm)
     Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death. (Heinrich Heine)
     Envy is ineluctable, implacable and irreconcilable, is irritated by the slightest differences, is independent of the degree inequality, appears in its worst form in social proximity among near relatives, provides the dynamic for every revolution yet cannot of itself produce any kind of coherent revolutionary program. (Helmut Schoeck)
     No one admits publicly, and hence public opinion does not admit, that ingratitude is the norm. It is astounding that countless benefactors allow themselves to be persuaded over and over that ingratitude with the resultant hatred is a rare and special case. (Helmut Schoeck)
     There is one state that no society can live in for any length time, accepting it as official doctrine, and that is mutual envy. (Helmut Schoeck)

     (Allow me, once more with feeling, to urge upon you, Gentle Reader, Helmut Schoeck’s blockbuster book Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour. I can think of no volume more relevant to our current age. You will come away from it with new and better eyes. Best of all, it’s now available for the Kindle.)

     But concerning great beauty and the possession of an eye-catching rack, let it be noted that even in the Soviet Union of old, a few women had them. Who were they? Why, they were women who could acquire the necessities: the sweethearts of the politically powerful, of course! If your husband or lover was high enough in the nomenklatura, you could eat well, dress well, get high-quality cosmetics, have access to fitness-maintenance facilities, and maintain a beautiful appearance. Indeed, those things were essential to maintaining your status as the main squeeze of a high muckety-muck. Stint the use of them, and you’d soon be out of favor...or worse.

     And what delusion is prevalent among those who favor collectivist political systems? Why, they all expect to be commissars in the New Order! Remember that coal-heaver from 1848 France:

     The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: “Yes, madam, everything’s going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you’ll carry coal.”

     As an illustration of the sort of “equality” left-leaning types truly cherish, this one is unparalleled. Nor will they allow themselves to think that the outcome might be otherwise – that it might result in them doing thankless, mind-numbing work to stay alive, living in a one-room apartment, and waiting for hours on long lines to purchase potatoes and beets...when they’re available.

     With the prospect of a socialist executive administration looming ever nearer, this is the sort of subject that should be aggressively promoted in the national discourse. Is anyone troubling himself to mention it where others can hear?

     Just a quick thought before I go out to spread more E-Z-Melt on the driveway.

How Could I Have Missed This?

     March 5, 1953 was the day Josef Stalin finally bit the big one! And while one mustn’t wish eternal damnation on anyone, Stalin’s record in life doesn’t seem to entitle him to better:

     Before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, researchers who attempted to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million. [source]

     In “honor” whereof...okay, one day late...I present the following Al Stewart lyric from his album Between The Wars:

Now I've got my payment
For the service that I gave
They've given me my ticket
To this place beyond the grave
I suppose it's kind of funny
I suppose it's kind of sad
Thinking back on all the times we had

But it's kind of hot and smoky
In this ante-room to Hell
And I won't make up a story
'Cause you know the truth so well
It's much too late to worry
That we never had a chance
And when Joe the Georgian gets here
We will dance, dance, dance
When Joe the Georgian gets here
We will dance

We all set off together
On this sorry ship of state
When the captain took the fever
We were hijacked by the mate
And he steered us through the shadows
Upon an angry tide
And cast us one by one over the side

But it's kind of hot and smoky
In this ante-room to Hell
And I won't make up a story
'Cause you know the truth so well
It's much too late to worry
That we never had a chance
And when Joe the Georgian gets here
We will dance, dance, dance
When Joe the Georgian gets here
We will dance

There's Kamenev, Zinoviev
Bukharin and the rest
We're sharpening our pitchforks
And we're heating up the ends
We've got a few surprises
For the mate when he appears
I hope he likes the next few million years

And it's kind of hot and smoky
In this anteroom to Hell
And I won't make up a story
'Cause you know the truth so well
It's much too late to worry
That we never had a chance
And when Joe the Georgian gets here
We will dance, dance, dance
When Joe the Georgian gets here
We will dance

     Sing it to your friendly local “socialists.”

The Communist Cadet

I'd seen some of his more juvenile antics/pictures on Facebook. I'd assumed that he was a dolt, but no more.

This is worse - MUCH worse. Read what a Lt. Colonel put ON REPORT about him and his actions while still at West Point.

UPDATE: I'm adding the picture of a Tweet I made a few days ago.