It’s cold in New York City now, but I should emphasize, cold by recent city standards, not by comparison to Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis or anyplace where it actually gets cold, so I’m perfectly comfortable walking the streets of Manhattan in a relatively light puffer jacket that would be sudden death in any place truly cold. This isn’t a harsh blizzard where people stumble around and die walking down the streets, but it’s colder than usual (NYC winters have been light in past years) and the expanding population of junkies and mentally ill addicts hanging out on the street are at risk of going to sleep and never waking up again.

The current total is 16 dead.

Zohran Mamdani, who leveraged a predatory saturnine grin and the graphic arts squad to take over the city, has no idea of how to deal with it and is being lambasted by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams (who is running a better campaign out of office than Andrew Cuomo did while running for office) for dropping the policy of pushing homeless vagrants into shelters ahead of cold freezes instead of letting them stay in encampments.