New York State is upside down and backwards high taxes and low performance. The New York State government was at one time a national model. Now unfortunately it's a national disgrace. Sometimes the corruption in Albany could even make Boss Tweed blush.

We have become a society that can't self-correct that can't address its obvious problems that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from.