Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Returning today from my daily walk, one timed to take advantage of a bit of dry weather, I came upon a neighbor standing on the sidewalk engaged in wistful contemplation of his next door neighbors’ house.

Said house having recently been put up for sale, this man was doing what most on the street now do, which would be hoping the new owners won’t be idiots.

It’s about a 50-50 gamble these days.

This once sedate neighborhood populated by mostly well-mannered families, has declined noticeably.

Now, this elderly couple has opted for apartment life elsewhere, leaving their house to be bought by someone new.

On the upside, if their asking price is met, the sale will put yet another boost into property values.

On the downside, if yet more out-of-control neighbors move in, it will quickly erase that gain.

The neighbor musing on the vacant house lives to the immediate right of it, and on the corner of the block. I told him he could just buy this neighboring house, rent it out to normal people, and thereby have a buffer.

I don’t have the option of relative isolation living three houses down to the left. This has been a peaceful week with my irritating neighbors to my right on vacation all week. But they will return soon, I’m sure.

Even worse, my neighbor to the left is contemplating selling her house, with all the uncertainty that would produce.

I spoke briefly about the neighborhood decline with this pensive neighbor, reciting chapter and verse about problems. I, and many like me, moved to neighborhoods such as ours in the Johnstown suburbs to escape the horrors of the Greater Johnstown School District for our children.

Understand I graduated once upon a time from Johnstown High School, have a son who teaches there, and have had considerable contact with students from recent years. I wouldn’t want to send a child of mine to that school district.

I paid the economic price to escape in the form of a higher purchase price and property taxes. That was supposed to provide an economic moat of sorts. But now I find through various governmental subsidies and programs, the troublemakers have had the way paid for them to follow me.

My neighbor was unaware that just this morning, within a stone’s throw of his house, a report on the police scanner had told of a passing driver’s concern that a man was prone in a yard.

Police investigated and discovered the downed man was laid low by a drug overdose, while he was in charge of not one, or two, but three young children.

The police activity continued for some time at that house.

Meanwhile, up the street and on the other side, a group of people (I hesitate to use the term family) moved in late last year, prompting the erection of two massive fences by neighbors on either side of them.

We still have people who think our street is a dragstrip. Often these are not residents but instead just people who feel the need to race through a residential area to bypass the never-ending sewer, gas line, water line, whatever construction on nearby Goucher Street.

As a side note, my rental garage a block away is a strip of such storage spots associated with a small apartment building that of late has taken on a Section 8 tenancy.

This affects me because their supposed economic hardships don’t seem to prevent them from owning cars. Lines have been painted on the pavement to help them park those cars correctly parallel to the building, leaving space for garage owners to exit their stalls.

A couple of tenants don’t seem to understand what those lines mean, parking well outside them, and even at a 45-degree angle to the building.

I tracked down one offender and noted she really needed to do a better job of parking. To her credit, she was apologetic and, for the most part, has parked correctly since.

But her scofflaw role has been taken by another poor parker. And I’m left to decide how to communicate to these people the need to park closer to the building.

I’ve gone so far as to contemplate renting a three-car garage miles away, presuming that might reduce my problems with access.

I’ve also contemplated moving to a house with more of what used to be called elbow room in terms of surrounding land. Skyrocketing house prices – thank you Biden Regime inflation – have put that on hold while I await the virtually inevitable rapid decline in housing prices that an economic recession and financial contraction bring.

Similarly, any plans to acquire yet another hobby car – although I’m a Mustang guy I’ve been researching C-4 Corvettes – have been sidetracked by unrealistic price rises.

Life for me has become a bit of a waiting game, spiced with observing our unfortunate case of neighborhood limbo – how low can things go?

Democrats think most of us are outright idiots. Are they correct?

The fact that Clueless Joe Biden sometimes bumbles into the Oval Office in an official capacity is a point for the Democrats’ belief in mass lunacy of the population, although admittedly that outcome came only with a big assist from the worker bees who made the vote totals come out right.

Still, Democratic control of the House of Representatives, and de facto control of the Senate also argue that Democrats are right and we’re mostly morons.

Emboldened by this apparent state of affairs, Democrats of all stripe have taken to outright fabrication of facts wherever and whenever, daring anyone to correct them.

I have written here in the past about the delusional Democrat I know who would not admit that Trump rallies outdrew Biden rallies. That’s how far the other side has slipped into their alternate reality.

Biden often gets a pass on his outrageous bastardization of the truth due to his obvious decline in cognitive function.

But is that contagious? Must be. How else to explain why just about every Democratic Donkey feels the need to lie blatantly?

Consider Biden energy advisor Amos Hochstein, who went on Fox at mid-week insisting that it is “just factually not true” to say gasoline prices in these United States were rising before Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine.

This is as ridiculous as Biden regime attempts to redefine what constitutes a recession, flying in the face of their own past statements, when it was politically convenient to label two consecutive quarters of GDP decline as a recession if only because Republicans were in charge.

One story on Hochstein playing fast and loose with the truth quoted the gasoline price (presumably national average for regular unleaded) at $2.39 a gallon on Jan. 21, 2021, Biden’s first day on the job. The price on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia’s first day in Ukraine, $3.54.

Those figures were from a tweet by RNC Research, so let’s presume bias. I checked prices myself, on the U.S. Energy Information Administration web site. That’s a government site, hence the .gov extension on the URL (https://www.eia.gov).

That government site, no doubt maintained by bureaucracy members who lean hard left because their unions tell them to do so, had a monthly average price for January 2021 of $2.334 per gallon. The monthly average price for February 2022, $3.517 a gallon.

That looks to me like a rise of $1.18 a gallon, give or take, which is quite an increase BEFORE PUTIN INVADED UKRAINE!!!

I guess this is one reason why crazed leftist Democrats want math declared racist, so that they no longer need be hindered by it.

History and statistics in general similarly are terra incognito to Democrats.

A certain state senator from San Francisco, named (I kid you not) Wiener, is demanding a Monkeypox state of emergency be declared in California.

The number of confirmed Monkeypox cases in California is 346, with 222 in San Francisco. California’s population in the 2020 census was 39.35 million people. San Francisco’s population in that same census was 874,784, which almost sounds made up.

Regardless, 222 out of 874,784 or 346 out of 39.35 million is not typically thought of as state of emergency stuff.

Again, racist math. In this case, since Monkeypox is mostly spread within the gay community, it’s homophobic math.

Or maybe, just maybe, it is perspective. Democrats might want to book passage en masse to a quaint location we on the right like to call reality.

Democrats should love the fact that the borders are open there. One just need to bring evidence of possession of common sense and a tendency to tell the truth and you will be welcomed to reality, which is a nice place to live, work and raise your family.

Will Nancy Pelosi be the face that launches a thousand missiles, destined to live on in history – if the world endures – as Nancy of Taiwan?

We should soon know.

It was Helen of Troy whose mythical beauty caused her to be christened after the fact as the woman with the face that launched a thousand ships.

Those thousand vessels carried Greek warriors to Troy, where a 10-year struggle ensued to retrieve Helen from her Trojan kidnappers and return Helen to her cuckolded husband Menelaus, who’d been keeping the home fires burning in Sparta.

Pelosi, who previously has prompted comparisons to Marie Antoinette for the tone-deafness both have shown when it comes to anyone below elite class, now has the chance to become a latter day Helen.

There are differences, of course. It is doubtful Helen went through Botox by the 55-gallon drum, or required a COVID-closed beauty shop to be opened clandestinely to touch up her hair.

It can be said with absolute certainly that Helen didn’t indulge herself with $14-a-pint ice cream, stored in a $25,000 freezer

But both could be the cause of wars.

Joe Biden, seeming to act at the behest of his Chinese friends, has tried to keep Pelosi from visiting Taiwan on her far east swing, lest she offend the Chi-Coms.

God knows, we can’t offend our Chinese masters. Just ask any Biden family member, or LeBron James for that matter.

Having apparently driven her husband to drink judging by arrest records, Pelosi has seemed to look to do the same to the Bidens and James by possibly ignoring the protestations to bow to Chinese wishes.

The Chinese have told Biden that playing with fire, as in Pelosi stopping off in Taiwan, could lead to being burned.

The U.S. has dispatched a carrier group – not a thousand ships, but a group packing much more punch than the thousand Greek boats.

The official Pelosi itinerary, released Sunday, noted stops in Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. People who parse such things saw no mention of a refueling stop in Taiwan, but also did not see such a stop ruled out explicitly.

And so we wait.

There was a curious bi-partisan agreement that Pelosi should visit Taiwan, composed of members of both major political parties who do not seem to be – yet – on the Chi-Com payroll.

I shall lay my head down tonight fully expecting to awaken Monday morning to something better than a nuclear wasteland, with Pelosi having blinked on her Taiwan plans, thereby allowing the world to remain safe for Chinese aggression.

If I’m wrong and Pelosi ignites World War III, there is yet another historic comparison to be made. She will be a latter-day Joan of Arc, roasting herself and the world on a nuclear bonfire.

I’ve had an epiphany, a solution to many problems both foreign and domestic – let’s trade Joe Biden.

Forget offering the Russians an international arms dealer in exchange for the freedom of Brittney Griner and the other guy.

Instead, offer Putin Clueless Joe and maybe Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

That’s a win, win, win, win for all involved.

As an editorial aside, we know the other Russian prisoner is Paul Whelan and meant no disrespect to him by calling him the other guy. We were just following the lead of the Biden regime, which turned Secretary of State Antony Blinken into Monty Hall of Let’s Make A Deal fame to free Griner.

Whelan is a white male and so not worthy of any effort, no matter that he’s a former U.S. Marine who insisted he was being wrongfully detained and eventually convicted on trumped up spying charges. While Whelan has been held in Russia for years, only now that Griner is in custody is the Biden regime interested.

Griner is a lesbian woman of color who will not salute the flag and retreats to isolation to avoid hearing our national anthem, so she demands action. Never mind that she admitted guilt to possessing drugs illegal in Russia.

Make no mistake, Griner is the prime motive for this proposed deal and Whelan is merely the player to be named later, to borrow a sports reference.

So far, Russians might be balking, which some opine is why Blinken went public with the offer.

Again, the U.S. ought to take a page from the dealmakers in sports. Do not limit yourself to one trading partner.

Why not offer Biden and Yellen to the Chinese in exchange for no more virus releasing, or spying in our country?

In a case of dueling phone call news releases, the Biden team spoke of being candid with Chinese Xi Jinping about Taiwan and other issues during a two-hour exchange.

The Chinese report on the phone call has Xi warning Biden over Taiwan, saying “Play with fire and you will get burned.”

It should not surprise us that a Biden version of events has just a passing acquaintance with reality. Biden has fudged his academic credentials, has plagiarized the work of others, has told and retold a questionable story about facing down a gang leader and, more recently, has given reports of interactions with Putin that differ greatly from Putin’s versions.

Currently the Biden regime is trying to redefine what constitutes an economic recession after the U.S. has suffered two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, which heretofore had been the classic definition of a recession.

An ally in the spin has been Yellen, whose credibility on things economic should be viewed in the context of her time as head of the Federal Reserve, during which she repeatedly asserted inflation was not a concern despite rapid expansion of the money supply.

Yellen has since been forced to admit she got it totally wrong on inflation, a major concession when that was a prime focus in her prior job.

It’s a natural progression that Yellen would build on that legacy of error by trying to insist the U.S. is not in an economic recession.

Trading Biden and Yellen to someone, anyone, can’t hurt and could help.

Let us borrow from the reasoning of former Pirates general manager Branch Rickey, who ended up trading away Ralph Kiner, the National League’s top home run hitter in 1952, during the 1953 season.

Rickey told Kiner during bitter contract negotiations “We finished in last place with you. We can finish in last place without you.”

The United States can struggle terribly with or without Biden and Yellen, but just maybe replacements might do better.

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell did a lot of tap dancing today, not easy for man standing at a lectern.

It brought to mind the best efforts of Gene Kelly (who once taught dance at a Main Street studio right here in Johnstown) and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

While Kelly and Robinson were tap dancers in a literal sense, Powell’s terpsichore was of the metaphorical variety, a verbal refusal to be pinned down, particularly on the topic of recessions.

What we henceforth will refer to as the R-word, because Democrats and their useful idiots insist the word cannot be uttered where voters might hear it, is a hot topic.

Janet Yellen, current Treasury Secretary and the woman who formerly had Powell’s job and helped get us into this inflationary mess with her loose-money policies, was on a Sunday talk show trying to change the definition of the R-word.

Generally speaking, and you can confirm this with a quick internet search, the technical definition of a recession is a decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in two consecutive quarters.

We had a decline in Quarter 1 this year and the reports are due out for Quarter 2, which ended with the final day of June.

The Atlanta Fed’s GDP Now model, as of the time Powell was hemming and hawing, was predicting that Quarter 2 saw a GDP decline of 1.2 percent.

Acknowledging the oft-cited two-quarter decline definition for the R-word, Yellen argued that it wouldn’t be accurate in this case.

What Yellen meant is not really clear. What is clear in hindsight is that Yellen was preparing the field, so to speak, for Powell to ramble and contradict himself today during his press conference that follows Fed interest rate pronouncements, in this case yet another rise of three-quarters of a percentage point.

Many a questioner tried to get a straight comment on the R-word from Powell. They only succeeded in having him play both sides against the middle.

At one point, Powell indicated he did not think we currently are in an R-word. But not much later he said it was not the Fed’s job either to define an R-word, or to determine if we were currently suffering one.

Huh?

If it’s not your job, why feel the need to share an opinion on the R-word? A positive spin opinion it was, too.

This all falls under the category of narrative. Massage reality until it fits your message and refuse to change no matter the facts.

Markets interpreted Powell’s word salad as meaning perhaps he really does believe we’re in an R-word, or at least a rapidly slowing economy, and so the pace of further interest rate increases will slow. This caused major rises in the broad stock market averages, as well as with precious metals.

Powell also noted – correctly – that initial economic figures such as GDP reports are merely guesses and subject to re-stating down the line. So, he said, they are to be taken “with a grain of salt.”

Keep that grain-of-salt line in mind if the official government report Thursday morning shows no decline in GDP for Quarter 2 and the Biden regime rushes to every available microphone and social media site to trumpet that modest success.

I’m surprised no government flack has trotted out the old R-word definitional bromide: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job.

It’s better than the nonsensical pap being spewed by the likes of Yellen or Powell.

In the bad, old days of the Great Depression, before government welfare programs existed, the lament of the impoverished was the topic of a song, “Brother, can you spare a dime?”

People begged for money, or sold apples or pencils on street corners to get some money because they had to do so. There was no free lunch, either literally or figuratively, for the down and out, at least as far as the government was concerned.

Keynesian patron saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became President and introduced programs like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, in which the government created jobs to do public works projects and paid the workers.

Roosevelt had this naive idea, long discarded by our modern leftists, that people would prefer work to a handout because it gave them self-respect.

Now, only unsympathetic Republicans have the temerity to suggest that many on the public dole ought to do something, anything, to earn their handouts.

An added complication these days is the government is both eager to create economic hardship with ridiculous legislation and regulation, then quick to try to attempt to cure the self-inflicted damage with handouts.

We’re due for an update of the old song. Call the 2022 version, “Brother can you buy my vote?”

The Biden regime isn’t alone in blame for our current stagflation malaise. The seeds have been sown through this and multiple prior regimes in both government and the Federal Reserve.

Decades of rampant spending, geometric money creation and below-market interest rates have created mountains of debt that cannot, will not, be repaid.

The generic term for such excesses is bubbles. All that is needed is the metaphorical pin and the whole thing collapses.

The Federal Reserve, which just a year ago was praying for inflation, now is raising interest rates in an attempt to strangle consumers and, by extension, the economy to cure rampant inflation. The Fed will announce more rate increases Thursday, likely three-quarters of a percentage point.

Think of the Fed as one huge, pointy pin.

This is bad news if you happen to control the government as Democrats, led by the Biden Gang, do.

Sure, things you voters need cost more, if you can find them. Yes, your wages are not keeping pace with price increases.

And, OK, there is more crime and general insanity afoot.

Polls already indicate your widespread unhappiness with Joe and the gang. But will that be communicated in mid-term elections, with the usual suspects again counting the votes?

Biden and friends don’t seem to be willing to think that they can rerun the 2020 election “ miracle” comeback.

Time to buy some insurance.

They announced just today the sale of 20 million more barrels of oil from the misnamed Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That will happen, by chance, in September and October, just ahead of those mid-term elections.

It will bring the draining of the SPR to 200 million barrels overall and ostensibly allow the Biden mouthpieces to crow about gasoline prices being below $5 a gallon – at least in some precincts.

How curious that when prices were rising it was all Putin’s fault, even though prices rose long before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Now that prices are down about 50 cents, a small part of the meteoric rise by the way, Biden and his sycophants want to take a bow.

Biden’s operatives also have leaked word that a student loan debt repayment moratorium, and some outright debt forgiveness is being planned for – wait for it – just before mid-term elections.

Biden is not alone. Senator Pocahontas Warren is shrieking to pour more gasoline on the inflation fire with more government freebies.

This sort of thinking regrettably is a winner in a nation populated mostly by economic illiterates, whose frame of reference ends at their front door. They just can’t grasp how those $2,000 stimulus payments increased the prices for virtually everything they buy and while the handouts have stopped, for now, the high prices remain.

But buying votes is all Biden and friends know, and I would be reluctant to bet against it all working for them in the mid-term elections.

Let the giveaways begin.

Brother, you can buy a lot of votes.

Behold, the electric vehicle, the answer to all our energy problems, or so you would believe by listening to the ramblings of energy illiterates ranging from Clueless Joe Biden on down.

When the facts don’t support them, these unrepentant blowhards just massage those facts.

Clueless Joe’s equally clueless Transportation Secretary Pete Butt(whatever) was at his statistical misdirection best when testifying before the House of Representatives. Secretary Pete was asked about suggesting people upset with high gasoline prices just switch to electric vehicles and if he stood by those remarks.

Not surprisingly, he did, despite it being noted that the average electric vehicle costs more than its traditional internal combustion engine counterpart.

Secretary Pete responded by citing some MSRPs for electric vehicles, including $26,595 for a Chevrolet Bolt and $39,974 for a Ford F-150 Lightning. Just today, July 22, and too late for inclusion on Pete’s list, Cadillac announced a new electric car, the Celestiq, slated to cost $300,000 OR MORE, when it debuts next year.

Let’s start with the Bolt, the hatchback econobox of electric vehicles, which according to reviewers has all the cheap feel you would expect from that term.

Add in that similar cars with conventional engines cost many thousands less.

There also is the unpleasant fact that Bolt production was halted for eight months last year and early this due to a recall to fix batteries in 2017-22 models that posed a fire risk.

So, the Bolt might be relatively affordable among electric cars, if you can find one, or want one considering their checkered reputation.

As for the Ford pickup, the electric version of America’s top-selling truck for 46 years, two important points on that $39,974 starting price.

First, according to the Ford web site, you can’t order one due to demand. Second, the vehicle shown on the company’s web page has a list price of $67,474, an upcharge of more than $27,000 from the base.

At a recent car show I chatted with an acquaintance who has had occasion to drive one of these electric Ford trucks ( a fleet delivery to a government organization) and he said acceleration was impressive. This, coming from a guy who has a 1967 Chevelle 396 as a hobby car, was a good endorsement.

But then he moved on to cost and scarceness. Suffice it to say, he’s not rushing out to buy one of the trucks.

Electric vehicles are pitched as saving owners massively on fuel costs. That depends in large part on where one lives and the varying costs of electricity. And the fact that the government offers tax rebates in order to lure in purchasers speaks to some degree of manipulating economic reality.

There was a cautionary tale on Yahoo and various other web sites in recent days about the experience of a Florida teenager buying a used 2014 Ford Focus electric vehicle.

Her parents paid $11,000 for the car, which had about 60,000 miles on it when purchased, and she drove it without incident for about six months. But now the car isn’t working and she’s been told it needs a new battery.

The father had passed away with cancer since the purchase, so the grandfather offered to help financially.

That would-be benefactor and the entire family were stunned to find it would cost $14,000, plus labor for a new battery. But no problem with the high cost, the batteries no longer are available because Ford stopped manufacturing the car.

Even when things are “working” J.D. Power reports electric vehicles average 39 percent more problems when the vehicles are new than what owners of conventional new vehicles suffer.

To sum up, the electric vehicles cost more initially, and have more problems, but you save a few bucks on gas!

Other problems with electric vehicles, in no particular order, are:

Here in the north, their advertised ranges decrease dramatically in cold weather. Our Florida girl’s battery pack likely would have failed years ago in colder climes.

Even rapid charging takes half an hour or more, much longer than the few minutes it takes to pump gasoline. Charging at home could take all night.

Our national electric grid, already creaking and threatening to fail during periods of high demand, cannot possibly handle the increased load if everyone drove electric cars and recharged them at night.

Electric vehicles might be a viable option if you never want to venture far from home. But if you do, good luck finding charging stations when you need them. The Wall Street Journal recently reported the horror story of a staff writer encountering major recharge problems with an electric car on a trip from New Orleans to Chicago and back. The writer also shared anecdotal negative feedback from other electric car travelers during lengthy waits for their vehicles to be filled up with voltage.

You’d think environmentalist wacko types would be concerned about the carnage inflicted on the Earth from mining for the minerals needed for batteries, the damage when all those used up batteries are dumped into landfills, or the pollution from the burning of the fossil fuels that more than likely will power the recharging of that electric vehicle.

But still GM and Ford, among others, rush headlong to convert their production to electric vehicles, chasing the fool’s gold of government monetary incentives and political approval.

If people really want to save the environment, try walking, riding a bicycle or a motorcycle.

Consider switching to compact cars instead of 7-passenger SUVs or pickup trucks the size of semis, both often driven by lone 100-pound women, wearing COVID-protection masks in the isolation of their massive vehicles.

This sort of person never will buy a Bolt, but might spend $70,000 on the truck. Just think of all the gas savings!

The news that Joe Biden has COVID-19 came out today, which in a realistic country would signal the end to the great COVID hysteria.

Here’s why.

Presumably Biden will come through this OK, despite his age of 79. But the fact that Biden, fully vaccinated and twice boosted, came down with the disease flies in the face of Biden’s own words from a July 2021 town hall on CNN in which Biden declared flatly that those getting the vaccine would not get the disease.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

This is not like Biden saying incorrectly yesterday that he has cancer, prompting verbal cleanup on aisle two from his usual apologists.

Biden’s CNN vaccine misinformation was “The Big Guy” telling the populace to take the jab and live worry free when it came to COVID-19. Whether he was flat-out lying, or just exaggerating, it speaks to the Biden credibility problem.

On this front, Biden has company, with Faustian Dr. Fauci having himself come down with COVID despite taking the needles and lecturing others to do the same.

It has become obvious with high-profile cases such as Biden and Fauci that the vaccines do not do as promised in preventing the infection. Now those boastful promises have been watered down to the virtually unprovable assertion that they lessen symptoms.

Similarly, many studies have found that masks do not have a measurable beneficial impact when it comes to COVID transmission. Those masks do, however, have detrimental side effects both physical and emotional.

But, as you have read here in the past, COVID hysteria is all about control.

Your elite masters, already seeing that the public is departing from sheep-like subservience on matters such as vaccines, masks and lockdowns, are moving to climate alarmism in their scaremongering campaigns.

Yet another of those hidden camera exposes, which so often seem to rely on useful idiots from CNN, found a technical director pontificating how climate scare is next on their agenda to terrify the slow-witted among the populace.

A leader of substance, which Biden is not, would take advantage of this coming-down-with-COVID opportunity to rethink our anti-COVID measures. He would call for an end to mandatory vaccines for workers under the threat of job loss.

Give individuals a choice whether or not to take the ineffective vaccines and suffer the risks.

Such a leader would warn against the mindless mask mandates already being re-instituted in California.

He would stop immediately the push to vaccinate children against COVID, which poses virtually no risk to them.

But vaccines do have risks to those who take them. If not, why are the manufacturers still operating under blanket immunity from lawsuits due to adverse reactions?

Evidence, both anecdotal and that gotten through rigorous study, is indicating heart and reproductive risks, among others, from the vaccines.

I have a friend who recently suffered a stroke for which doctors can find no reason. He’s starting to wonder if it’s a side effect from him having been jabbed with the COVID “preventer.”

Whether he is such a vaccine victim or not cannot be determined fully.

What can be determined, and is further documented with each passing day, is that COVID vaccines overpromised and underdelivered. It is high time that reality is conceded.

Biden can lead that movement, from personal experience.

I’m a huge fan of Ayn Rand, in particular her greatest work “Atlas Shrugged.”

But I’d never read her first major success, “The Fountainhead.” Still haven’t.

Instead, I cheated Saturday evening and watched the 1949 movie version of “The Fountainhead,” starring Gary Cooper as the iconoclastic architect protagonist Howard Roark.

It was time well-spent, particularly since the movie aired on the Turner Classic channel and was uninterrupted by commercials.

This was typical Rand fodder, a tale of the individualist succeeding against the collectivist society.

Roark’s court experience in the movie, and successful outlasting of a system arrayed against him on every level, was a precursor to the John Galt character of “Atlas Shrugged.”

Rand’s heroes were men who did not compromise their standards for the sake of expediency. They clung to beliefs even as those about them turned a blind eye to the ridiculous injustices of the societies in which these men lived – not indefinitely in the case of Galt.

Rand was an optimist, or perhaps more likely a wishful thinker, in writing and seemingly believing that rights of the individual would and should prevail in the long run over bastardized visions of socialists.

It is likely in 2022 that we could solve our energy crisis if only positive and negative poles could be attached to Rand’s coffin in order to generate electricity as she spins in her grave.

Each day evidence pours in that the collectivists, those who would sacrifice the rights of individuals on the altar of big governments and corporate control, are winning.

Consider:

Dutch farmers protesting arbitrary limits on nitrogen and animal herds by environmental extremists in the European bureaucracy have gotten company in the form of farmers in Italy, Spain and Poland taking to the streets. The message of Italian farmers is “We are not slaves, we are farmers!” But bet on those greenie bureaucrats in the long run, despite their obvious insanity.

Clueless Joe Biden went to Saudi Arabia, neatly forgetting his vow to make that kingdom a pariah state. Joe was there to exchange first bumps and plea for greater oil production, hoping desperately to lower energy costs and stem a mid-term election wipeout for his fellow leftists. The Saudis will pump more oil. Can you say strange bedfellows?

Nancy Pelosi has another conflict of interest. Even as the Speaker of the House pushes legislation, $50 billion for computer chip manufacturers, she just happened to purchase $8 million of Nvidia stock. What does Nvidia manufacture? Computer chips. Hmmmmm.

Other examples are numerous.

Oil sales from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese firm with former ties to Hunter Biden have been reported.

Despite ongoing insistence that all COVID-19 vaccines are safe, an online source maintained by the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control has more than 1.3 million reports of vaccine complications and 29,000 deaths.

Governmental scaremongers are desperately trying to drum up panic over new COVID strains, not to mention Monkeypox. Lockdowns, here we come.

It all has the stench of collectivists trying to break down individual freedoms and choice while manipulating public opinion.

Roark and Galt would have resisted. Will enough Americans follow their lead to make a difference? Doubtful.

I got back from an early evening cruise in the Mustang convertible to read that AOC, the left’s favorite bartender turned Congresswoman, is outraged yet again and has rushed to social media – megaphone for morons — to express that.

AOC, you may recall, is the person who claimed trauma and fear for her life due to enduring the Jan. 6 protests, even though she was not present in the Capitol building at the time.

More recently, earlier this very month, AOC showed up on social media to revel in pro-abortion protesters driving Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh from a Washington, D.C., restaurant.

Like many of her fellow leftist loonies, AOC thinks conservatives, or anyone who doesn’t toe the socialist party line, must be harassed in public or at their homes by protesters, just because. Acts of violence by these “protesters” hasn’t exactly been discouraged by the leftist agitators.

Fast-forward to yesterday, when AOC trotted out the victim trope in social media posts about a “deeply disgusting incident.”

What was this incident? Glad you asked. A conservative comedian videotaped AOC walking up Capitol steps, praised her for being his favorite “big booty Latina,” and noted that even though she wants to kill babies, she is beautiful.

AOC’s response was to walk toward the guy, who was standing on the other side of the broad steps. In video of the “deeply disgusting incident” AOC takes a few strides toward the guy, flashes him the peace sign and says something unintelligible – the last being pretty much standard operating procedure for her.

After the fact, AOC shared on social media that she was “walking over to deck him,” ostensibly because Capitol police didn’t do so, or maybe because they didn’t shoot this unarmed protester as they had Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6, 2021.

I think of AOC and I am reminded of a line by former Washington Capitals’ coach Jim Schoenfeld following a 1996 Stanley Cup playoff game with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Penguins coach Eddie Johnston was complaining afterward about rough play, as Penguins coaches had a habit of doing, accusing Schoenfeld of sending goons onto the ice to instigate trouble near game’s end.

Schoenfeld pointed out that he had three of his star players on the ice, a fact that flew in the face of Johnston’s charge. Then Schoenfeld said: “I don’t know what color the moon is on Eddie’s planet.”

Schoenfeld and his moon line come to mind often as leftist Democrats spew hypocritical propaganda with little shame and absolutely no regard for the facts. Intellectual honesty is a foreign concept to them.

Indeed, what color is the moon on AOC’s planet?