Previously, the Heir had admiration for Eric Adams with his tough-on-crime approach of not sparing the rod and not spoiling the child. But now with Mandate-Gate and Scanner-Gate, that admiration has all but evaporated, and the Heir implores Mayor Adams to do damage control on both to regain the political capital he needs to ensure public safety by protecting the moral health of young people. You've already heard about Mandate-Gate by which pro athletes who incidentally play for teams the Heir follows being told they don't have to get vaccinated, but that city workers still -do- have to get vaccinated. The Heir agrees with that one health expert he heard on analog radio first thing in the morning that this sends the wrong message that pro-athletes apparently don't have to follow the rules if they think they can beat the system. But there's also Scanner-Gate where Eric Adams says he wants to get body scanners into schools to scan for weapons. The Heir sees this as what a former manager of his at the Bland Barns Catering Counter would term as "taking a problem here and making a problem there." Sure you might be able to find more weapons, but the Heir sees the risk of those moonlighter security workers at the monitors uploading images to the dark web for profit, where predators will consume the imagery. You're preventing crime by allowing other crimes to take place. No-one's talked about that, and the Heir doesn't want the scanners to go in there and for us to find out 6 months to 2 years down the road that maybe 2-3 moonlighters uploaded images to the dark web accordingly. That the Heir thinks would dwarf Mandate-Gate 10 times over, and will prompt a political blood-smelling Ed Snowden challenger in the next mayoral primary. While the Heir's sure Eric Adams will defeat that challenger, he will go into his second term with far less political capital than he had in his first two months, and not only will fail to get things done, but will break the promise of there being a more principled city.

So, here's where it's at how the Heir's seeing the war in Ukraine. He sees it as a proxy war between principle and personal corruption, and I the (Happy Bachelor) Mentor may follow suit with a consensus coming from Tropical Soul And Principle itself. But that's why the Heir's skeptical about these so-called "negotiations," because he knows the Kremlin knows they wouldn't be happening if the Kremlin didn't invade. The Kremlin already has a leg-up in the negotiations through the invasion, so we hear in Tropical Soul wonder, what exactly is there to "negotiate?" That is, besides a complete Kremlin withdrawal from Ukraine and atonement in exchange for the easing of most sanctions. Nothing short of that we could ever find acceptable, because everything the Kremlin has ever had to offer were non-starters. They seem to think they can invade any country now, get a leg-up in negotiations, and then basically "own" that country as a result. What we've learned about personal corruption is that the Kremlin will not stop. It'll just keep going and going and going until it owns the entire solar system itself. The Heir also doesn't think that mental illness necessarily "made" that one guy attack those museum workers, because he observes that most people who struggle with mental illness don't act out and attack people. He sees it as a Because I Could situation, that if your privileges are revoked for anything at all, that somehow becomes grounds for retaliation even if the revocation was because you're a retaliatory person. The Heir's seen these self-justified types all too often at the Bland Barns Catering Counter, and he doesn't buy that there was anything that "made" them do anything in particular. Nine times out of ten he sees people acting out on their own volition, regardless of whether they're struggling with mental illness.

The Heir has words of caution for people. It may be heartening to watch worldwide demonstrations online, or grandmas throw Molotov cocktails in the grease tracks of lines of tanks, but the Heir doesn't believe the real struggle for Ukraine has begun. For one thing, Putin still has China on his side, and the Heir is skeptical of China's supposed "unease" about the invasion of Ukraine. He doesn't think China's worried about taking the wrong moral position as much as not getting caught up in a military screwup on Russia's part. The Heir believes China wants Putin to have a better strategy before they help him out in some way, whether that's through secret military funding or trying to secretly defeat Western sanctions. Putin knows that China essentially owns roughly 90% of the world's technology, and at any time China can come back and tell the West, "Well? What are you going to do about it?" The Heir's also concerned with the lack of PR out of Homeland Security regarding highly localized incidents of active measures, and I the Mentor think we went into some detail in a previous base share. But thankfully, we found out that problems that Marco's Grandmother had in her neighbor's online connection, and hence Marco's Grandmother's connection were *not* due to active measures. It was a guy who screwed up at the cable company, and not connected with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But you can't get too complacent. As the old saying goes, if you see something say something.