Evan Barker’s podcast on the NYC win by Mamdani accidentally creates a 400 year resonance. One of her guests is smoking the modern vape version of an old Dutch long pipe.
Strange as it Seems was the best of the 1930s human interest podcasts. My favorite episode dramatizes New Amsterdam’s governor Willem Keeft, a petty tyrant who banned smoking in NYC and made war with the nearby tribes. The locals rebelled, mobbed Keeft and blew smoke at him until he partly relented. His partial backoff required workers to smoke short pipes that wouldn’t interfere with work, while allowing the leisurely rich to continue with long pipes.
Before 1990, banning tobacco was a bizarre and unthinkable notion. Now, thanks to decades of Deepstate tyranny by thousands of monsters who are millions of times loonier than Keeft, smoking tobacco has been banned for 40 years in all the crazy places. Marijuana is NOT banned, and pot stores were considered “essential” when the modern supertyrants banned breathing in 2020.
Anything that helps to make people sane and social is banned. Craziness is essential.
The long pipe in the podcast thinks that Mamdani is a faker like Trump, pretending to represent the working short pipes but really with the leisurely long pipes. I don’t know anything about NYC politics. He lives there, so I’m inclined to trust his judgment.
I should have applied the same standard in 2016. Back then I often listened to ‘financial talk’ radio for background noise. One of their hosts was a NYC real estate investor who had negotiated with Trump several times. He warned us that Trump was a fraudster who always broke promises. I didn’t listen then, so now I make a special point of trusting LOCAL experience.
Polistra's Mill 