Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Schools across the area and around the state were locked down today due to false reports of active shooters, a disgusting followup to the school shooting earlier this week in Nashville.

If this sort of thing surprises you, it’s most likely because you are not paying close enough attention.

As a society, we have given free passes to members of protected groups, to slackers, to children in general, to ineffective parents, to governments of all levels.

Accountability, and meaningful punishment for bad actors, for incompetent stewards, for people simply unable or unwilling to conform to societal norms, is nowhere to be found. Instead, there are rewards, often monetary as bestowed by governments intent on robbing the bedrock members of society to have more to give to the strange agents.

Instead of calling for meaningful action, we have psycho-babble designed to cloud the issue and deflect blame.

Consider the outright morons posting on various social media platforms who are upset about the pronouns being used to describe the Nashville school shooter, and making dire predictions about retaliatory violence against transsexuals. The shooter, born a woman and identifying as man, is alleged to have killed six people at the school, three adults and three children.

Mercifully, the Nashville police, instead of cowering outside as happened in a Texas school shooting, tracked down the gender-confused individual and dispatched it, with appropriate malice and followthrough.

Repeat: Six innocents killed and social media morons are upset by pronouns used to describe the shooter, or seek to justify the violence based on perceived violence against transsexuals before or after this incident.

I knew something was unusual about this shooting when, in the immediacy of the moment, there was not a flood of “another angry white man” commentary.

Shooting from the lip is a social media sickness. Why wait for the facts when posting emotional garbage is so easy?

Predictably, the usual suspects have seized on this tragedy to lobby for the banning of guns. I submit that if a few teachers in that school had been armed, there could have been zero loss of life. I’ve read reports that the shooter considered other sites, but thought them to be too well-protected and so opted for the soft target of a school.

Do we ban gasoline, flammable objects such as homes, barns and vehicles, or the ability to purchase same when an arsonist is about?

Do we ban cars because teenagers might drive them and they are statistically the most likely demographic to have an accident and/or die while driving?

Do we have breathless reports after every teen auto fatality that the car was LEGALLY PURCHASED as happens with gun incidents?

Can we ask some hard questions of the parents of this Nashville shooter, 28 years old and still living at home and possessing guns despite being treated for emotional problems?

Permissive parenting, a legal system intent on providing scofflaws — be they adults or juveniles — countless chances despite their criminal records, school systems turning out functional illiterates long on experience avoiding learning and long on manipulating the system for special accommodations, all contribute to the mess that is society circa 2023.

From the history repeats category, this is nothing new. More than six centuries back (that’s more than 600 years for all who now attend or recently graduated a public school) as Constantinopile was in the process of falling to Ottomans, the elites of Constantinopile were consumed by the debate over the gender of angels.

If this sounds too much like the navel-gazing that dominates this nation, you are correct.

Things will continue to worsen until such time as accountability and punishment are once again accepted, spoken of, and practiced in polite company.

Long before that might happen, it is most likely we will endure more school shootings, more bastardizations of the truth in the name of carving out advantages for protected groups, more playing fast and loose with the facts of a given situation in order to further ridiculous political and social agendas.

Our society is failing. The evidence is pervasive.

You say jails are too full? I’ll pay more taxes so that more can be built.

You say people with mental illness cannot be treated differently than the sane? I say, fine, let all the mental health professionals who proclaim a disturbed individual is no threat to society, be held accountable for any and all crimes said individuals commit.

You say I’m overly harsh? I say six dead people at a school because some mentally ill, gender-confused individual had a grudge is even more harsh.

For the misguided counting on artificial intelligence to save us from ourselves, think again.

Stories are widely circulating about one AI chatbot concluding that uttering a racial slur aloud, even if it would prevent a nuclear holocaust, cannot be done because racial slurs are totally unacceptable. Millions, if not billions dead is OK, though.

Remember, AI is but the product of Woke programmers, inflicting their biases on the computer’s function.

Buckle up, people, This insanity not only will continue, it will almost assuredly worsen, until the rational people finally decide they have had enough and fight back.

Were I a political spin doctor, I’d proudly report today that my CBS Sports NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket has improved nearly 400,000 places since last I wrote about it here.

It would be true, but, alas, not terribly significant. That improvement brought me from 684,657 in the rankings to 285,460.

A quick recap is in order.

While I anticipated only Alabama of the four No. 1 regional seeds making it to the Final Four, even that proved to be overly optimistic as Alabama crashed and burned in a loss to San Diego State. There are zero No. 1 seeds alive in the Elite Eight, an historic failure of the teams, the seeding, or both.

Many are celebrating the ouster of Alabama due to the program having players associated with a recent deadly shooting. Charges have been filed against one player.

San Diego State has been a massive bracket thorn to me. I had the Aztecs losing in the first round after having backed their underperforming selves in previous years’ brackets, only to be disappointed. Now that I’ve given up on them, they decided they can play in March!

I have exactly zero picks alive from my South Region portion of the NCAA bracket, which has been winnowed to San Diego State and Creighton meeting Sunday for one Final Four berth.

I am similarly batting zero in the East region, having picked Duke and Marquette only to have Florida Atlantic and Kansas State advance to a regional final that tips in just over an hour.

My West region picks were better. I had Gonzaga getting this far, projected to meet Arkansas. But UConn ousted Arkansas last round, a close miss for me.

Best of my selections was the Midwest, where I correctly picked Texas and Miami to square off in the regional final. I also had correctly identified their previous round opponents, with Texas beating Xavier and Miami beating Houston.

But I have only Gonzaga and Texas advancing from here, with Gonzaga tabbed to best Texas and advance to the final game, winning there, too.

My lack of faith in the Big Ten and Pac-12 has proved to be correct. Their over-abundance of tournament entries all have been eliminated.

The Southeastern Conference, another of the so-called power conferences, also is experiencing an Elite Eight blackout.

Meanwhile, of the eight teams still alive entering play Saturday night, Creighton and UConn are representing the Big East; Texas and Kansas State (Big 12); Miami (Atlantic Coast); Florida Atlantic (Conference USA), Gonzaga (West Coast) and San Diego State (Mountain West).

Maybe next year the tournament committee can look in the mirror, give less respect to underperforming big name conferences and show more love to the conferences that don’t get all the headlines, just tournament results.

Call this A Tale of Two Johnstowns, subtitled The Good, The Bad And The Ugly of this area.

First, the good – just one small example. The wife wanted to try a Friday seafood buffet at the Dugout Cafe in Woodvale and we did. It was excellent.

A father and two daughters were doing most of the work. Food was great. Price was very reasonable. We went early and that was a good thing because it was getting crowded by the time we left. This helps explain the inquiry, which surprised us when we entered, asking if we had reservations.

As far as I know, without doing a lot of research, this business operates without needing the input of lots of public cash to keep it open. I doubt there were any secret meetings, or behind-the-scenes political contributions, or grants to out-of-town consulting firms to try to revitalize the Maple Avenue corridor on which the business sits.

I’m thinking Dugout Cafe does not fall into the burgeoning nonprofit/not-for-profit category so dominant in the area, a segment which always seems able to pay huge salaries to administrators first, last and always.

Admittedly, there is a relatively new CamTran Taj Mahal that has been built near Dugout Cafe with taxpayers funds, which may benefit Dugout Cafe, but I am comfortable doubting that was a consideration.

It is safe to presume there are other positive stories in the area – I’m aware of many – but the bad and ugly is so pervasive it is disgusting.

Kudos to John DeBartola and Joseph Taranto of the Revitalize Johnstown Facebook page, who continue to fight to pull back the curtain on all the secrecy that pervades in what should be public dealings.

The pair had an entertaining video covering a lot of this posted on YouTube recently, with a link to it on the Revitalize Johnstown Facebook page.

Meetings that should be public, but aren’t, is a common theme. So is the supposed opportunity to speak at meetings that actually are held in public, but that opportunity is truncated inexplicably.

DeBartola showed a sheaf of paperwork regarding one such legal action in which he is involved.

DeBartola and Taranto are running for the office of Cambria County Commissioner. They are running on transparency, accountability, and using political office to benefit constituents, not themselves.

They are on-point regarding our misguidedly overwhelming emphasis on tourism, and spending millions of dollars toward that end, while ignoring real community problems that might be better addressed with those funds.

It was mentioned in the video that so much of the money seems to get stuck in downtown projects, and trails, with modest benefits, while blighted areas such as Walnut Grove, Oakhurst, Moxham and the like are virtually ignored.

It’s a safe supposition that this is repeated throughout the county.

DeBartola and Taranto (or maybe Taranto and DeBartola since it was pointed out in the video Taranto is listed earlier on the ballot) are offering a new approach.

I’m not sure they can deliver because, like Donald Trump as president, they will be fighting against entrenched bureaucracy that prefers our inefficient, secretive, politically incestuous ways.

Unless something changes dramatically between now and the election, I will vote for DeBartola and Taranto. And I would encourage others at least to consider the possibility that, in view of the all-too-evident decline of the area, it’s time for the different approach that they promise to provide.

The World Baseball Classic has ended, but not without providing a glimpse into the troubles and contradictions of the United States. How fitting that this illustration should be provided by the game known as our national pastime.

Despite various reports celebrating the attendance and TV ratings for the Classic, it’s notable that the championship game Tuesday night between the United States and Japan was relegated to Fox Sports 1, a cable sports channel, not the main Fox over-the-air network channel.

You want to tell me how popular this Classic was, get back to me if Fox, or any other network, limits a future Super Bowl broadcast to a cable sports offshoot.

The Japan-United States championship game, won 3-2 by Japan, was expected to be the most-watched game in baseball history. But that was largely on the expectation that Japan, which had more than 60 million viewers back home for previous games in the knockout stage of the tournament, would deliver similar, if not larger ratings numbers.

Along that line, attendance numbers for the Classic were bolstered by huge turnouts for games played in Taiwan and Japan.

Back home, TV viewers were treated to the United States playing games in Phoenix and Miami and seeming to be the visiting team based on crowd noise.

This is a phenomenon with which the United States men’s soccer team has become familiar any time it plays Mexico in our country and the stands are packed with supporters of Mexico, many of them no doubt here illegally and perhaps using government handout money provided by legal residents/taxpayers to pay admission to the games to root against the “home” team.

Perhaps you were surprised to see Los Angeles Dodgers catcher Austin Barnes playing for Mexico or St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Lars Nootbaar playing for Japan. I was.

Barnes was born in Riverside, Calif., and Nootbaar was born in El Segundo, Calif. Sounds to me like they’re Americans. But they were able to opt to play for other nation’s teams based on the ethnicity of their mothers.

Even more striking is the refusal of so many top United States-born players to perform for the home team.

Begin with New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge, he of the 62 homers last season. Judge signed a nine-year, $360-million deal with the Yankees during the offseason and was named team captain, so he’s at spring training, citing priorities.

Having been born in Sacramento, Calif, and adopted when he was one-day old, by American parents, Judge didn’t have the option to play for another nation.

Notably, three of Judge’s Yankees teammates played for various teams in the World Baseball Classic.

You think Judge’s power might have helped in that 3-2 title loss? Just maybe.

Even more glaring is the absence of so many top pitchers from the US roster, including Gerrit Cole, Max Fried, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer. Although there were pitch counts to protect pitchers in the tournament (think Little League) fear of injury was cited as a reason not to participate.

And no one ever got hurt throwing in spring training?

But Japan didn’t have this problem, providing a roster packed with talented pitchers, many of them used to win the title. That includes arguably the best player in the world, Shohei Ohtani, who was both a designated hitter and closing bullpen pitcher in the championship win over the United States.

Guess he can’t get hurt in these games, but our homegrown stars can?

It’s a fact as old as the game of baseball, good pitching beats good hitting. Our U.S. roster was strong offensively, but challenged on the mound. U.S. manager Mark DeRosa referred to how “difficult” it was to put together the roster, which one would not think would be the case for a national team.

It wasn’t a problem for Japan, which is why that team won the championship.

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament has been winnowed down to its so-called Sweet 16 round, and my bracket is looking decidedly sour.

I did a quick check on the CBS Sports web site to quantify the damage and found I sit in 684,657^th place. Cue the video from the movie “Dumb And Dumber:” “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.”

In that video, the girl had just told the Jim Carrey character there was only one chance in a million they’d end up together.

My bracket is only about two-thirds as much of a longshot.

Let us begin by accentuating the positive. I still have three of my Final Four picks alive – Alabama, Texas and Gonzaga.

The Final Four team I don’t have, the one I had winning in the semifinals over Alabama and then losing to Gonzaga in the title game, is Duke,

Inexplicably, the NCAA hired football officials for the Duke-Tennessee game, allowing the Volunteers to win an extremely physical game that saw Duke’s 7-foot center Kyle Filipowski floored twice early on fouls that were called, and not much later elbowed to the ground on a “basketball play” that saw the Tennessee rebounder open a deep cut below Filipowski’s left eye.

Too bad Tennessee’s football team couldn’t muster this level of physicality when it needed it against Georgia.

More positives. I correctly identified Purdue as the team most likely to underperform and the Boilermakers even surprised me, managing somehow to lose to Fairleigh Dickinson. Do an internet search on “Purdue” and “choke” and you will find Sports Illustrated and USA Today both taking the Boilermakers to task for needing a team Heimlich maneuver.

Kansas also lived down to my expectations, saving ailing coach Bill Self the need to recover from a heart procedure and return to the stress of coaching in the tournament.

I did not see Princeton winning twice to make the Sweet 16, nor did most sane people.

I did correctly have Furman to upset Virginia in round one, though.

My mistakes were in giving the likes of Baylor, Memphis, Marquette and Kentucky way too much credit.

In a perverse way, I also blew it on Purdue, thinking there was no way it could lose to Fairleigh Dickinson, a team that didn’t even win the Northeast Conference (the haunt of St. Francis), a conference that never before had won a round-of-64 game.

There will be more bracket disappointments for me. After seeing Gonzaga struggle to get this far, I’m not optimistic about my choice of these serial tournament disappointers to rewrite their history.

The saving grace is I lost no money on this exercise, just a bit of pride.

Call it the GoFundMe Syndrome, depending on others to carry the financial ball for you.

It’s a sentiment that long before the digital age had been expressed poignantly by the character Blanche DuBois in the play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” when she said “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

This whole GoFundMe thing, which exists under the label of crowdfunding, seemed like a good idea on the surface when first it was dreamed up, but the devil is in the details.

Too often, it is the triumph of a good sob story over acting responsibly, like an example relayed to me about a couple who spent $50,000 or so on restoring a Volkswagen bus, then went the GoFundMe route to pay for some medical expenses for their dog.

Selling the vehicle to pay for the dog’s care never entered into the calculus of the situation, either by the grateful shakers of the GoFundMe begging bowl, or the donors who shelled out the bucks to help Fido, including the 2.9-percent, plus .30 transaction fee the GoFundMe people skim off each donation to pay for their efforts.

The GoFundMe web page notes right out of the box that the person setting up the account (the beggar) incurs no costs.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner. This is freewill socialism at its best, as opposed to the brand of socialism practiced by governments, who take wealth from one party (willing or not) and give to another – often extracting their “fees” along the way, too.

This sort of GoFundMe lifestyle was presaged more than 100 years ago in an 1891 Sherlock Holmes short story “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” Spoiler alert: The outwardly successful businessman actually makes his living as a London beggar, finding out almost by accident that begging “paid” better than his job.

GoFundMe-like behavior is practiced by various municipalities and political sub-divisions. Our own Greater Johnstown area has elevated the practice to an art form, collecting huge funding from state and federal sources, often funneling it through various nonprofit, not-for-profit or similar operations, with considerable amounts of the gifts left behind in the way of large executive salaries or doled out via contracts with favored providers.

This all comes to mind as various agents of the federal government are attempting to do what they do best, paper over a banking crisis with the unlimited money available to those who run the metaphorical printing press.

Our Federal Reserve Bank, the bankers’ bank responsible for the nation’s money supply (extract currency from your wallet and you will read “Federal Reserve Note” printed proudly at the top margin) created economic distortions for years by suppressing interest rates and injecting copious amounts of money into the system, so-called quantitative easing.

When that practice created inflation, topping out (so far) at about 9 percent last year, the brakes were applied in terms of higher interest rates and sucking money out of the system — quantitative tightening.

The problem is, a lot of banks got caught thinking interest rates would stay low forever. They bought long-term bonds at ultra-low interest rates. Now that interest rates are up, the value of those bonds is reduced in present value, a so-called marking to market of the securities.

If the bond purchasers can hold to maturity they will be made whole nominally. But the dollars they get then will have been eroded in purchasing power by inflation. If they sell now, they get back less than face value in the way of principal.

Having to mark to market these various holdings has left some banks underwater in terms of meeting requirements of assets to liabilities, which in the quaint world of the banks, are deposits. Those depositors, learning of problems, rushed to withdraw their money and the Federal Reserve threw dollars at the problem, adding $448 billion to its balance sheet just last week, bringing the Fed’s total exposure to $8.6 trillion.

Before you ask, yes, if the Fed had to mark to market all the bonds and other securities it bought at lower interest rate yields, it would be underwater, too. Bank analyst Dick Bove last week estimated that Fed loss would be about $1.1 trillion.

But when you create the money, no problem. There actually has been serious mention in some circles of borrowing that trick and creating a trillion dollar gimmick coin, to be borrowed upon, despite its lack of actual worth, to solve our current debt-limit crisis at the federal government level.

The Fed bankers, not similarly constrained by such things as debt ceilings, are meeting Tuesday and Wednesday, announcing any action on interest rates the second day. It is somehow fitting that an arguably insolvent institution is presiding over the attempt to mask the insolvency of the United States and the world.

GoFundMe can’t solve this crisis. There is no begging bowl large enough.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament begins in earnest today, with me not risking any money in a bracket pool. Talk about feeling isolated.

Everyone, it seems, fashions themselves something of an expert on college hoops come tournament time, and is willing to back that sentiment with a few bucks, just to have a rooting interest.

I’ve actually won a bracket pool or two through the years, but usually I’m relegated to also-ran status after two rounds, particularly in recent seasons when upsets have been plentiful.

Don’t you just hate those stories about people picking winners based on school colors, uniforms, or mascots and winning a bracket pool?

Just for fun, I filled out a free bracket on the cbssports web site, going long on upsets, the soup of the day.

My Final Four has just one top seed, that being Alabama, ranked first among all seeds as the tournament begins.

My other selections for the Final Four are No. 5 seed Duke, No. 2 Texas and No. 3 Gonzaga.

I’m taking Duke and Gonzaga to win in the semis and Gonzaga over Duke in the title game.

I do this because Gonzaga has been such a serial disappointer in past tournaments, having gone in with higher seeds and expectations, I’m thinking that this year, with a veteran team but less pressure, the Zags just might finally get it done.

Just being a contrarian here.

Duke has come on strong late in the season, which explains me picking them to go far.

My overall themes in filling out my bracket were many.

First of all, my belief is the Big Ten is typically over-rated, despite not having won this thing since Michigan State in 2000.

Purdue, the conference’s top team all season, is inconsistent from the perimeter and the Boilermaker guards have been exposed in the Big Ten Tournament as being totally unable to deal with fullcourt pressure.

Purdue nearly coughed up a 17-point lead vs. Penn State in the title game due to its turnover fest under duress.

Such teams do not win national titles. Indiana, Michigan State, Northwestern, Iowa, Penn State, et al , all have flaws that will prevent them from making serious NCAA Tournament runs.

I think the Big 12 Conference is strong from top to bottom this season, but even though Kansas got a top seed in its region, the Jayhawks don’t seem to have the total package this year. I’ve got Kansas succumbing in the second round to Arkansas,

Still, I’m picking Texas to make the Final Four from the Big 12.

Generally speaking, the ACC was average this year, yet I’m taking Duke to make a long run and Miami to go three rounds. It’s Virginia, North Carolina State and Pitt I have departing in the round of 64.

The Pac-12 doesn’t impress. UCLA will be the standard-bearer, winning twice before falling to Gonzaga.

Marquette and Creighton of the Big East have some strong backers in the bracket prognostication game. This conference has won four of the past 11 tournaments, the last being Villanova in 2018. I’ve got Marquette losing to Duke in the regional final. But I only have Creighton going two rounds.

Good luck to any and all who have actual cash money on this. Try to enjoy.

There is something odd, somewhat inexplicable actually, about the Greater Johnstown housing market.

We speak not of subsidized public housing here, the ongoing Philadelphia story that has gotten such wide play in recent months, nor even the more recent forced relocation of residents of Prospect public housing, their 30-day notice to get out that is being described as NOT an eviction notice. Nice semantics.

The focus of this blog entry is the backbone of real-estate, the single-family dwelling. It is here that Greater Johnstown seems to be able to defy the laws of economics.

It was not all that long ago that housing listings proliferated in our area. I know because over the past 10 years or so I have spent countless hours on various real estate internet sites, most often realtor.com. First, it was because my son was looking to return to the area and so was house hunting.

Since then, it has been shared duty as we both seek options that provide more land and thereby more buffer zone between ourselves and neighbors who believe the Earth revolves around them and therefore are not bound by codes of common courtesy.

There was a time not all the long back, when options were many, with nearly 400 listings in the 15905 zip code alone. Hop on realtor.com as I write this Wednesday evening, and the site claims just 68 homes listed in 15905.

Observations I made through years of combing through listings include the reality that houses in the Westmont Hilltop School District (15905 extends beyond that to Greater Johnstown and Conemaugh Township schools) had to be marked down in price to account for exorbitant tax rates. After all, eventually one pays off the mortgage on the house – presuming it was not a cash purchase – while the taxes go on forever.

But there have been periods when such things were ignored. On my street, I’ve witnessed influxes of out-of-towners from high-cost areas, many of them military types reassigned here as part of the political pork game, who didn’t blink at high asking prices. The houses here were deemed extremely inexpensive due to comparative costs in San Diego, or suburban Washington, D.C. and the like.

They arrived flush with funds from their equity in overpriced real estate there and paid up gladly.

The problem came when they were assigned elsewhere, to provide pork for some other influential member of Congress, and tried to sell their Johnstown holdings. They couldn’t take them with them!

A member of the military down the street never could manage to sell in timely fashion, instead resigning himself to renting. And that experience provided problems for him in the way of less-than-stellar tenants.

But things apparently have changed. A house three doors down went up for sale recently and sold quickly for a relatively large price. Similar results have been observed in recent months and years on this and other nearby streets.

Just this week, a house on our block with which I am somewhat familiar, was listed at a $129,900 asking price. Earlier in our tenure on our street, this house was owned and inhabited by an elderly neighbor, someone my wife would look in on periodically, drive her to appointments and the like.

After that woman died, the house was bought and renovated by a man looking to move his mother into the area, from Pittsburgh I believe. This went back and forth for some time and she never did move into the house.

There were renters along the way, allegedly with unfavorable results. I know one renter had the police beating a path to her door, either check-on-the-welfare calls, or domestic violence. A little internet sleuthing produced some drug history. They, thankfully, are long-gone.

But here’s the dollars and sense point of this particular house. It was sold in 2001 for $66,000. It was listed – but not sold – in 2018 for $74,900. About three years ago, March 18, 2020, it sold for $64,900.

It again is on the market, for two-plus days, with the aforementioned asking price of $129,900. A double in three years, now that’s investing!

I would suspect it soon will have a “pending” or “contingent” listing on realtor.com, to be followed by it being moved to the sold category.

And I wonder, who is buying these houses in this area of a slack economy, at a time of mortgage rates that have about doubled to the high 6-percent range for traditional 30-year fixed rate examples?

Yes, there are job openings in the area, but not a lot that offer the kind of salaries that comfortably would carry a mortgage of $100,000-plus, even if both members of a couple were working.

If we’re getting a steady inflow of relatively high-paying pork-related jobs, I’m unaware of this.

Sure, some low-priced homes in need of work, get sold to flesh out the portfolios of Section 8 housing gurus.

But what about all these other houses that are being sold? In Moxham, where “shots fired” is the police scanner motto, houses that formerly had to be all but given away, are selling now, for higher prices than just a few years back.

It’s true in other areas with less-than-desirable reputations, too.

I understand houses selling briskly in the Richland School District. The crime rate there is relatively low. The tax rate is absolutely low. You are close to centers of commerce and entertainment there. Highways are handy.

How to explain brisk sales elsewhere, like Oakhurst, Hornerstown, Walnut Grove, or the land of confiscatory real estate tax levels that is the Westmont school district?

I would suspect, in the event of the sort of economic calamity that current banking system distress hints is in our nation’s future, this real estate market is going to end in tears, putting a lot more people on the streets than just those displaced Prospect residents.

It is time, alas, to realize that the many delusional members of the ideological left ever can be rehabilitated and reacquainted with reality, no matter how many facts are presented to them.

They have been sucked into a metaphorical black hole of talking points, outright propaganda, trumped up crusades and general incoherence that possesses such gravitational pull, not even light can escape.

The evidence of the left-wing delusion, and its negative effect on truth telling, mounts daily.

Clueless Joe Biden was on the airwaves bright and early – for him apparently – Monday to address the nation’s banking crisis.

Former White House press mouthpiece DisinJENuous Psaki, who now fittingly collects a paycheck from left-wing cable news outlet MSNBC, was spreading the progressive gospel in the wake of Biden’s appearance, but with a curious angle.

This showed Biden is serious about the banking crisis, Psaki noted, because he “does nothing at 9 a.m.”

Psaki’s indication that Biden prefers to stay up late and sleep in contrasts directly with early narratives from other left-wing propaganda machines that Biden as president was an early-to-bed type.

But why bother with the truth when you’re trying to put some emphasis on Joe losing sleep to appear concerned and assure the nation? After his five minutes of work, which included the obligatory blaming of Donald Trump for the problem, Joe was off on a West Coast swing. Hope the time zone change doesn’t mess with his late-night lifestyle.

Barney Frank, a Democratic blast from the past, has showed up in the news again as a board member of Signature Bank, which was shut down Sunday by regulators due to solvency issues.

Frank was shocked by the closure, according to the New York Times.

Frank is the very same person given title co-credit in the Dodd-Frank Act that rewrote banking regulation and was passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. A former regulator going to work for the formerly regulated. Hmmmmm.

The last time Frank was this shocked was in the mid-1980s, when a male lover went public with sordid details of their relationship. Frank since has come out of the closet as gay. The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to censure Frank back then, but only for using his office to fix 33 parking tickets for his lover, and providing false information about the guy’s criminal probation record.

Frank was cleared of knowing the man was operating a male escort service out of an apartment Frank rented.

If you want to join Frank in the shocked tank, check out the Twitter exchange between owner Elon Musk and fringe celebrity Keith Olbermann, best known for back in the day doing his utmost to turn sports into a political diatribe nightly on ESPN.

Musk tweeted that it’s absurd, in light of videos released from the Jan. 6 Capitol protest, to paint the so-called “QAnon Shaman” as a violent criminal and insurrectionist.

Olbermann tweeted in response requesting Musk be punished for posting a tweet denying a violent event.

Musk, as is his wont, couldn’t let it pass, replying, “Have you ever considered a career in comedy?”

Olbermann’s retort was weak, a touch below “your mom” as one conversationalist observed. Said Olbermann to Musk: “Have you considered a career in business?”

This, to the richest man in the world, indeed is 98-pound weakling stuff. Or maybe Olbermann is further around the bend than we had realized.

There is an overabundance of this sort of nonsensical stuff from the left, but time and space are limited, so we conclude with a note on Climate Queen Greta Thunberg.

Because of the left’s mutual infatuation with and influence upon Hollywood, Thunberg made the perfect mouthpiece for climate hysteria, a cinematic crossover. Owing to the reality that Thunberg suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, is obsessive-compulsive and once went three years without speaking to anyone outside her family, she could be a real-life counterpart to the title character in the 1988 movie “Rain Man.”

Rain Woman? It is about climate, after all.

In the movie, Dustin Hoffman plays the autistic savant older brother of Tom Cruise. Cruise’s character is in money trouble and discovers after his father’s death that the bulk of the estate was left to an institutionalized brother he never knew.

The Cruise character tries to gain custody of Hoffman, and the estate. As time passes, Cruise becomes aware of Hoffman’s special talents when a waitress spills toothpicks and older brother Raymond instantly calculates the number as 246.

The pair end up in Las Vegas with Hoffman counting cards at the blackjack table for the duo’s benefit. They win money, get found out, but depart with some cash.

In the heartwarming finale, Cruise’s character turns down a monetary offer from a doctor at the institution just to walk away from Raymond.

Hoffman’s Raymond was an engaging innocent. Thunberg? Not so much.

Being a climate warrior means never having to say you were wrong, or are sorry.

Along that line, a Thunberg tweet from 2018, replete with an image of barren, cracked earth, quoted a “scientist” that climate change would “wipe out all of humanity” unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.

Here we sit in 2023, admittedly early in the year, but it is the fifth year. Fossil fuels continue to be used widely and humanity has not disappeared. What has disappeared is the Thunberg tweet, at least that’s likely what was hoped would be the case as it has been deleted. But some prescient folks thought to preserve it, just for the record.

Damn, another inconvenient truth for climate alarmists.

I awoke today with thoughts about Wokeism.

Before going to bed Sunday night, I found myself staying up too late watching yet again the movie “The Longest Day,” a cinematic chronicling of the D-Day invasion of Normandy that marked the beginning of the Allies’ march to Berlin and victory in World War II.

It occurred to me it is just possible, probably very likely, that we no longer have enough tough-minded individuals willing to storm a beach with the high likelihood of death trying to win freedom for others.

This becomes notable if all the saber-rattlers in the Clueless Joe regime succeed in getting us into a direct shooting war with Russia, China, or a combination of those two nations.

Oh, we have plenty of people who purport to be fighting the good fight for ideals. But those ideals now are socialism, racial politics and transgenderism.

These people love to protest and destroy property when there is little threat of pushback from authorities. I wonder how many would be willing to scale cliffs under withering machine gun fire, as happened on D-Day?

Some are suggesting – hoping? – we have hit peak Wokeism. But such thoughts have been about for years, with no overwhelming evidence to support the premise.

First, a definition. Woke apologists define the term as something honorable and benign, a sensitivity to systemic injustices and prejudices.

The problem is the Wokesters have just one tool in their box and it reminds one of the aphorism, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Wokesters see injustice everywhere, whether it exists or not.

Critics paint Woke types as being so self-aware and socially-aware that they are blinded to the big picture. These navel-gazers have limited perspective, if any.

Problems crop up when Woke meets reality.

Example: Silicon Valley Bank has collapsed for many reasons, prompting a nervous weekend of putting together bailouts for the bank’s uninsured depositors.

Those poking through ashes of the Silicon Valley Bank failure have noted the bank operated WITHOUT a chief risk officer for parts of 10 months in 2022, presumably when having someone on the job would have been helpful.

Meanwhile, a risk management executive still on the job, a self-described “queer person of color” was distracted by dabbling in “LGBTQ+” causes on company time.

And the bank, even as it had no one in charge of risk management, boasted of having a diversity, equity and inclusion director on staff.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, DEI, is a cornerstone of Wokeism. All these goals are desirable, except when taken to extremes, as in the Woke playbook.

Predictably, Silicon Valley Bank donated a lot of money to climate activists, another Woke cause that exists without need for justification.

Somehow, none of these hyper-aware, all-knowing Woke types at Silicon Valley Bank saw the bank was in danger of failing due to out-of-control risk.

Anti-Woke optimists view the large numbers of layoffs in the tech industry, a Woke incubator and funder, as encouraging. They see the failure of Silicon Valley Bank as another positive in that regard.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, turning that from a left-wing echo chamber into an area of open exchange of ideas, also is viewed positively.

But the battle against Wokeism is far from won and likely will not be for a long time, if ever. This is our social equivalent of World War II, a battle to decide if traditional values can prevail, or whether the world will fall even further into this Woke nightmare.