Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

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.

The economic community is holding its collective breath, hoping that the jobs report early Friday morning is negative.

You read that right, the financial folks are hoping that job creation is low as measured in this federal government report because, in this bad news is good news world, that likely would mean the Federal Reserve would slow its pace of hiking interest rates in the pursuit of choking down the economy and taming inflation.

The hopes for a bad jobs report took on increased urgency when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in price Thursday based on its announced need to raise capital. The spillover was the collapse of major averages, with the Dow down 500-plus points.

“Stay calm” the Silicon Valley Bank CEO advised investors, who took that as further indication of the need to panic.

The stock, which had closed the previous day at $267.83 a share, ended the regular trading session Thursday at $106.04, down $161.79 on the day. That’s not a haircut, it’s a scalping.

Other regional banks, even the major money center banks, the so-called too-big-to-fail operations who are held to a higher standard of liquidity, fell in sympathy.

The Silicon Valley Bank panic didn’t stop with the 4 p.m. closing bell. The after-hours session saw advisers telling clients to pull money from the bank while they could, and shares dropped another $20-plus, being last quoted in the $82 range.

It was quite the event in a week of great volatility as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell spent two days testifying before Congress and markets swung wildly with his every word.

Basically, Powell warned that interest rates may have to be raised more than expected and remain high for longer than anticipated. Neither is good news for investors, or business owners, or consumers borrowing money.

I didn’t watch it all, just enough to see it for what it was, typical political posturing by both parties.

Too many of these politicians are pathetic self-promoters. They sounded like those pompous television sports announcers who make it a point to tell you how they spoke individually with the coach, manager, players, etc., and they were told (fill in the blank). Hey, people, those huge rights fees you pay for the games buy you that access. Get over yourselves.

So it was with too many politicians, taking their five minutes to tell everyone listening that they actually have spoken with Powell in private about various issues.

Beyond these exercises in self-promotion, the Democrats wanted Powell to absolve Clueless Joe Biden of any blame for raging inflation. He would not.

Republicans wanted Powell to pin the inflation tail squarely on the butt of the main donkey. He would not do that, either

You would be correct in guessing the ridiculous hectoring of Powell to appoint a Latino member to the Federal Reserve, to demand Republicans roll over on the matter of raising the debt ceiling, or to get more actively involved in climate warrior topics came from Democrats.

Similarly, you would be correct that those insisting climate was not the Federal Reserve’s purview (price stability and maximum employment are the two official mandates) were Republicans. The Republicans also tried to elicit from Powell that reckless governmental spending – fiscal policy – was making his inflation fighting all that more difficult and that raising the debt ceiling just enabled the freespenders on the other side of the aisle.

Powell wouldn’t take the bait.

Senator Pocahontas Warren played the populist card, badgering Powell that raising interest rates to slow the economy would put people out of work, maybe one or two million of them.

Powell’s response was classic. If he fails to rein in inflation, he noted, prices rise and everyone gets adversely affected by that.

Bringing this to a local basis, impoverished Johnstown has agreed to spend $1.6 million on an out-of-state consultant to spearhead yet another Main Street revitalization.

We’ve had several similar pushes already through the years and all have been about as successful as the war on poverty initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 State of the Union address.

A person posting on the Revitalize Johnstown Facebook group calculated that $111 million has been spent in the past two years by the City of Johnstown, money obtained from infrastructure sales, tax revenue and various government handouts.

Using faux binomial nomenclature a la the old roadrunner cartoons, Johnstown would be Spendibus Maximus.

But results? Littleus Minimus.

As long as federal or state governmental gooses keep producing golden egg handouts, Johnstown can spend merrily onward and upward.

However, should the nation decline into a depression-like economic morass, federal and state resources will need to be husbanded for things such as feeding and housing the unemployed masses, not for stringing a few more electric light bulbs across Main Street.

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Today we offer a peek at our town.

We refer not to the defunct weekly local newspaper “Our Town,” nor to the folksy, nostalgic 1938 play of that same name, which won a Pulitzer prize.

Instead, this is just a quick read of the front page and two inside pages of the local newspaper, a publication that hardly could be accused of trying to put a negative spin on our community, except when it comes to pandering to social justice warriors.

But, despite that lean, today’s edition is heavy with reports on all the warts that afflict us.

Begin with the horrific crime rate, often involving actors from outside the area. The banner headline on today’s A1 reads “Murder suspect waives extradition from Vegas.”

This would be a murder suspect whom you may recall from the surveillance video image showing him wearing a coat of many colors – not the Biblical sort – after allegedly gunning down a man in Moxham.

This young adult, identified by the newspaper as being from Pittsburgh (not Philadelphia, for a change), was nabbed in Las Vegas.

A local murder may have been solved. Now about all the rest . . .

Security problems at the Westmont Hilltop School District were the topic of another small front page headline. It referred to a review of security stemming from threat issues at the school district.

Tucked away low on the right side of the front page was a story with the headline “Feds: Drug probe stretched from Johnstown to Mexico.” The story didn’t have much in the way of details on the Johnstown connection, just a vague quote. But who would deny we have a major drug problem in our area?

At the bottom of the page is a tease for an inside story on A3, “Johnstown man arrested after shots, three-hour standoff.”

While turning inside to read that tale, one must pass A2, with the headline: “Police: ER patient jailed after assault of nurse.”

That happened at our largest local hospital.

Back to the shooting and standoff report on A3, it allegedly included messaging involving smoking crack.

Area apologists might observe that since the local newspaper doesn’t publish on Tuesdays, this was a two-day accumulation of crime news.

Point taken. Except, even if this is two day’s worth of crime, is it an acceptable level for a small town such as ours? I’d argue no on that one.

The decline of this area has been frequent fodder for this blog.

Today’s newspaper is but another example proving the point of how Our Town has gone bad.

There has been a considerable influx of fresh readership to this blog in recent weeks, due I would suspect to it being mentioned several times by John DeBartola, who has quite a Facebook presence with his Revitalize Johnstown group and other efforts.

And some of you might, understandably, be a bit curious, suspecting a quid pro quo or some other manner of clandestine arrangement, the sort that our local elites prefer for their dealings.

Because I am all about transparency, allow me to provide some background, first on this blog and me, then lastly on why DeBartola keeps pitching the blog.

Some of my resume is laid out, in brief, in an early blog post. A smattering of readers have been hitting that post of late, so they are partially up to speed.

Allow me to recap, and to expand. I’ve lived in the Johnstown area all my 67 years and counting. I worked for 20-plus years at the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat, in news and sports, having started in August 1974 and left in October 1994.

I moved on to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review as a sports columnist and eventual Penn State beat writer. Along the way I wrote some news columns for the Greensburg editions of that newspaper, basically because the news editors there liked my writing style.

I retired early in March 2009, taking a buyout because I could financially, and also because I was tired of what newspapers were becoming, even the Tribune-Review, which had a reputation as a right-leaning publication.

My plan had been for me to stop writing for money, period. But I got sucked back in when the Johnstown paper wanted to pay to use some profile stories I’d written as a member of the Cambria County Sports Hall of Fame committee, to be run in the event program, and the newspaper beforehand to publicize the event.

Because they wanted to pay me for the stories, and because I needed to go through the paperwork to become an independent contractor for that to happen, it was offered that going forward I could write weekly sports columns for Sundays and one news column monthly for the editorial page.

I did this for several years until it, too, became tiring mentally dealing with issues other than the writing.

But I still have a lot to say, and enjoy writing, so I came up with the idea of a blog. My brother is a prolific blogger, currently something of a college women’s softball guru. I had him set up this blog and, to his surprise, I insisted on no comment opportunity for the readers.

I don’t care to debate issues with the readership. If you want to get your opinion out there, start your own blog or go to social media, which I describe as the megaphone for morons. I say that not because everyone on social media is a moron, but because a disproportionate percentage of the population there are morons who no one would pay attention to in life, were it not for social media.

There is no registration, no fees, no ads on my blog. It costs me money to keep it up on the internet, but that is fine with me.

I have met John DeBartola exactly once, a few weeks back when he was on my street collecting signatures to get on the ballot for Cambria County commissioner. I’d signed for his fellow candidate and Facebook notable Joseph Taranto a few days earlier and had given him a card with my blog information that he might peruse it.

When I saw Taranto again walking the street a few days later, I motioned to him. We talked and DeBartola later was called upon to join us in my living room, where some others signed their petitions.

It was a relatively short interaction because my wife, my son and his family, along with a high school friend of my son’s who now is a military attorney, were about to start lunch.

I was aware of DeBartola before our meeting because of me often being on Facebook (using my son’s account) to monitor marketplace for interesting cars. I’ve bought two hobby Mustangs, my wife’s daily driver, and directed my son to his wife’s daily driver via marketplace.

I have no personal Facebook account because I will not dance to Zuckerberg’s tune.

DeBartola does excellent work holding accountable local politicians, governmental groups, and the people trying to run things from the shadows.

As a former journalist, I respect his initiative and always thought I’d tell him so if I ran into him. Given the chance, I did.

During my initial meeting with Taranto, I had spoken at some length with him about the area’s strengths and weaknesses.

The outgrowth of this interaction with DeBartola and Taranto was a blog post on the pair, one not written to curry favor with them, but to enlighten the blog readership that there are people out there trying to correct perceived wrongs.

That post, and several I’ve written since about Johnstown’s problems in general, have been referred to either by DeBartola or Taranto on Facebook, bringing new readership to the blog.

As radio announcer Paul Harvey used to say in his tag line, and now you know the rest of the story.

Beware stories that seek to quantify the economic benefit to an area of hosting an event. Too often they overstate the dollar amounts.

We speak of this because today’s Johnstown Woke Tribune headlines on Page A1 the “$2M windfall” to be realized by the area because Johnstown is hosting a kids wrestling tournament over the weekend.

Sounds good and it is good, but this good?

The story refers to an estimated 800 wrestlers who, combined with their families, will provide the “windfall.” Even without enlisting the aid of my son the math teacher, I divided $2 million by 800 and came up with $2,500 per family.

The number seems high to me.

For reference, the mayor of Glendale, Ariz., told ESPN that his city LOST $1 million hosting the Super Bowl in 2008.

Since then, the topic of economic windfalls from hosting Super Bowls, certainly the most high-profile event in domestic sports, has come under fire with economists debating just how much economic benefit is provided once costs of hosting are deducted and the NFL’s cut is factored into the calculations.

There also is what I will call the Orange Bowl factor to be considered regarding hosting events. Back in the early 1980s, when Florida State was becoming a national power in football, and when bowl games were not all aligned with conferences, the Orange Bowl people felt pressured to invite Florida State, and did for both the 1980 and 1981 games.

There is a famous anonymous quote from one of those Orange Bowl types, noting that the average Florida State fan arrives wearing a pair of jeans with a $5 bill in a pocket, and doesn’t change either during the time spent in Miami.

Translation: They weren’t big spenders from far away, jetting in to enjoy the sunshine and entertain themselves, price be damned.

I will guess that many of these Johnstown tournament wrestlers and their families who have descended upon the city are not from all that far away and so may just drive in each day, watching costs all the time. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re projecting $2,500 a family in economic benefit.

An accompanying story in the paper’s sports section today seems to bear out the local wrestler angle. It refers to 11 wrestlers from Bishop McCort Catholic in Johnstown. There’s even a quote about wrestlers being able to sleep in their own beds between days of the competition.

The story goes on to detail names of more than 70 other area participants from Cambria, Bedford, Indiana, Westmoreland and Somerset counties.

There likely are even more from nearby counties such as Clearfield, Centre and Fayette, all of whom might forego hotels, presumably the largest part of that $2,500 per family calculus.

I further will presume that many who do stay overnight are not looking to take rooms at high-end hotels and might be eating more fast food than partaking of fine, sitdown dining. Maybe they are subsisting on snack bar food at what I continue to call the Cambria County War Memorial Arena.

Some events attempting to determine economic impact actually survey participants before and after to determine spending. Was this done in the case of this wrestling tournament? If so, it was not mentioned in the story, which just sort of threw in that $2 million economic impact as having been “estimated” by the local tourism people.

Attributing a number to a source is a familiar journalistic method that presumably absolves the writer of blame should the information prove to be incorrect and also negates the need to research the calculation oneself.

Was this estimate based on the tourism peoples’ questioning of participants, or not? It is not clear.

A lot of this stuff is derived by formula, the kind of thing that gives us seasonal adjustments of more than 400,000 jobs in periodic government estimates, often to be walked back at a later date.

One of the basics of economic impact estimation is to factor in money velocity. The $10 I spend at a local restaurant, gets spent again to pay utilities, rent, or vendors to restock the food larder. That $10 gets respent again and again and if you count the same money at each turnover, a small total multiplies quickly into a large one.

If this the case with this “windfall” amount? Who knows? Details are lacking.

To sum up: I’m glad the lights are on at the War Memorial this weekend and paying customers are in town for an event.

But I’d love to be educated on how that adds up to a $2 million “windfall” for “Johnstown and the wider Cambria County region.”