Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, Museum of Modern Art.

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street.
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat.
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman.

—The Beatles

The taxman is at his very worst in New York State, as Red State reports:

New York State recently passed a law requiring citizens to obtain a permit if they wish to gaze at the stars in public parks. No, really. You read that right. In New York, you must pay for a license to look at the freaking stars.

The Free Thought Project first reported on the story, explaining that “If citizens of the state wish to look up at the sky and view the stars at one of New York’s public parks, they will first have to obtain a ‘Stargazing permit.’” The site pointed out that pollution in the sky makes it more difficult for New Yorkers in “highly populated areas” to see the sky at night, so they travel to remote areas, many of which are located in state parks.

The state is charging residents $35 to become a fully-licensed stargazer allowed to view the stars between January and December of the year. If you are not lucky enough to be a New York resident and you are just visiting, you will have to fork over $60 for the privilege of admiring your favorite constellation in the night sky. We were not able to find out how much it costs to wish upon a star, but we can be sure that it ain’t cheap. Okay, that last part was a joke — hopefully.

USA Today spins its NRA lawsuit story so as to gladden liberal hearts at the thought of the NRA going broke.

The real gravamen of the news is, however, the use of the organs of government by the liberal gubernatorial administration of Andrew Cuomo in New York to intimidate insurance companies and banks into denying conventional business services to the National Rifle Association.

Obviously, if a national avocationally-oriented organization devoted to lobbying in its members’ interest cannot buy insurance, or potentially even have bank or brokerage accounts, it cannot handle money, receive dues, pay salaries, publish magazines, operate, or exist.

The gun lobbying group claims in its lawsuit, which targets Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Department of Financial Services and Maria Vullo, which heads the department, that the state has caused “irrecoverable loss and irreparable harm” to the organization. But, of course, the organization is making these claims in a lawsuit, which it hopes to win.

The Rolling Stone first obtained the lawsuit and published the 45-page complaint online Friday.

Over several months, the NRA has taken aim at the state of New York and its financial regulators after the state ruled the NRA’s insurance, “Carry Guard,” was illegal because it gave liability protection to gun owners for acts where there was “intentional wrongdoing.”

The NRA claims in its lawsuit that it has lost its insurance coverage, something it claims its carrier wouldn’t renew for “any price.” New York, the NRA says, has interfered with its business by coercing “insurance agencies, insurers, and banks into terminating business relationships with the NRA that were necessary to the survival of the NRA.”

“If the NRA is unable to collect donations from its members, safeguard the assets
endowed to it, apply its funds to cover media buys and other expenses integral to its political speech, and obtain basic corporate insurance coverage, it will be unable to exist as a not-for-profit or pursue its advocacy mission,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants seek to silence one of America’s oldest constitutional rights advocates. If their abuses are not enjoined, they will soon, substantially, succeed.”

If you lawfully defend yourself and/or others against criminal violence, you are very likely to be charged with a crime and forced to face a grand jury. Even if you never actually go to trial, the result will be considerable legal expenses.

Consequently, in recent years, as legal “concealed carry” has become increasingly common, gun owners have felt the need for “Carry Guard” Insurance, purchased via the NRA or through other vendors.

Governor Cuomo is trying to strike at your right to keep and bear arms and to defend yourself nationally, by using the power of New York State to scare insurance companies out of providing any such coverage via the NRA or anybody else anywhere.

From the viewpoint of the Left, the monopoly of force by the Leviathan state must be preserved at any cost.

Fossil tree stump, Gilboa, New York.

First, they came for the brachiopods…

In the New Yorker, Peter Brannan finds in Western New York State abundant evidence of Global Warming and planet-wide mass extinction having nothing whatsoever to do with human industrial production or the automobile.

[T]he Hudson Valley roughly marked land’s end, and, by now, I had pushed off this secret coastline to head west, and offshore. The red earth that earlier bracketed the highway—rumors of ancient rivers on land—now gave way to gray, banded rocks filled with seashells, where stacks of seafloor piled up, millennia-thick.

“The farther west you go in New York, it’s all marine fossils,” a paleontologist told me before I left. “New York would have been facing into a great continental sea. All the way out to Ohio, it’s all marine.”

This upstate ocean poked out from under farmland, and crumbled from rock walls behind gas stations. In the Devonian period—hundreds of millions of years ago—it was filled with sea lilies, sea scorpions, armor-plated monster fish, forests of glass sponges, and patch reefs of strange corals. At night, these reefs were cast in shimmering chiaroscuro, inviting moonlit patrols of sharks and coelacanths. Where the water met land in eastern New York, dawn revealed fish hauling ashore on nervous day trips—slimy, gasping astronauts under a withering sun.

In the ages since, the tropical inland sea drained away, the continents merged and rifted, and the seafloor turned to stone. As fish conquered the land at last, the ocean was buried and forgotten. …

The dramatic change roughly marks the Taghanic Event—a mass extinction that razed corals, brachiopods, and squid-like creatures stuffed in elegant shells all over the world. It was one of almost twenty global mass extinctions in the history of complex life, a list that includes five cataclysmic outliers, when the planet nearly died, and one that might someday include us. …

The great Devonian mass extinction remains something of a mystery. There were oxygen-starved oceans, fueled by an explosion of massive algae blooms—perhaps even driven by runoff from the land, as the emerging world of trees carried out their massive geoengineering project, greening the continents. Other research adds invasive species spread by surging seas, preposterous volcanoes and extreme climate change to the chaos for good measure. Whatever form this destroyer took, it laid waste to 99.99 per cent of the largest reef systems the world has ever known—the so-called “megareefs” of the Devonian, ten times more extensive than our own. Trilobites, tentacled drifters, fish wrapped in heavy armor—nothing was spared.

RTWT

I still have somewhere boxes full of unprocessed limestone rocks full of Devonian brachiopods I collected back when I was in high school.

The Washington Examiner admired the inadvertent irony.

He couldn’t wear a regular wristwatch. It had to be a Rolex. That’s just a little awkward for Brian Flynn.

The top Democrat running in New York’s 19th Congressional District took out a full page ad in the Albany Times Union slamming the “billionaires” and the “corporations” who “have rigged the system against us.” It is a pretty typical political ad. He looks stern with his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up on his blue dress shirt — literally a blue collar! And then, there’s the $8,950 timepiece on his wrist.

Connoisseurs looking at his social media will recognize the watch as the Rolex GMT Master-II. The choice of fighter pilots and frat boys with large trust funds, it makes a statement but not the kind a progressive politician might want to make. …

First introduced in 1955 for international aviators, the Rolex GMT Master-II can tell the time in three time zones simultaneously. And so, it was fitting that when English and French test pilots climbed aboard the Concord, they were wearing the Rolex GMT Master-II. To this day, the brochure advertises the watch as “supersonic luxury.”

Flynn looks like the kind of guy who can appreciate the finer qualities of the Rolex GMT Master-II. Before entering politics as a candidate, he worked as an executive at Citibank, and later, he went on to become president of a large medical manufacturing company.

No one should begrudge him his wealth, of course. No one can question his taste either (as we’ve established, the Rolex GMT Master-II is exquisite). The Rolex GMT Master-II definitely fits that aesthetic of Flynn the businessman. Unfortunately, it clashes with the style of Flynn the progressive warrior.

RTWT

HT: Glenn Reynolds.

Photo of ice-covered house forwarded on Facebook by John Kucko, an anchor at WROC in Rochester, NY.