Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Today’s topic is transliteration. No, it’s not a discussion of people fudging on their sex as assigned at birth.

Instead, transliteration helps explain why one sees the last name of the Ukrainian president spelled Zelensky by some and Zelenskyy by others. This happens when words or names from one language are translated into another language, which has a completely different alphabet.

Russians and Ukrainians, for example, use versions of the Cyrillic alphabet. English uses a Latin alphabet.

And so we get Zelensky or Zelenskyy, because when the translation is from one alphabet to another, it becomes an exercise in phonetic spelling.

This helps explain why the Ukrainian capital formerly was widely recognized as Kiev, but now most often is referred to as Kyiv. Same city. Different spelling. Same name – sort of.

Transliteration explains how China’s capital, formerly known as Peking, became Beijing after 1979, when a new method for translating Mandarin alphabet names into Roman/Latin alphabet names became the norm.

Not all city name changes are matters of transliteration. India’s Bombay became Mumbai in 1995 because the name Bombay was seen as a vestige of British colonialism.

Russia’s St. Petersburg has made a roundtrip, with stops at being called Petrograd and Leningrad before reverting to St. Petersburg, all for political reasons.

Similarly, the Russian city of Stalingrad, sight of a monstrously deadly World War II battle, got rechristened to Volgograd as a political consideration.

My first brush with transliteration came when Johnstown hosted an international amateur baseball tournament, with a team from South Korea. Korea’s alphabet is Hangul, with 24 characters.

This meant that sometimes Korean players had multiple spellings of their names appearing on rosters, lineups, etc. As a newspaper type schooled in the basic tenet that nothing upsets people more than getting their name wrong, I tried to get the names clarified.

It turns out there was no correct spelling. The names could be spelled phonetically, any way one wanted, because of transliteration.

As an aside, I was told Ka Boo was the Korean term for a curveball. Spell it any way you’d like.

It was transliteration that explained why the hated former Libyan strongman was called Qaddafi, Gaddafi, Kadafi and any number of other spellings in print. Again, it was an exercise in phonetics when translating from the Tifinagh alphabet to Latin.

Bringing this all home, it has become obvious that an amazingly high number of present-day Americans routinely spell phonetically. But that is a function of ignorance, not transliteration.

Nice try, though.

Occasionally I feel moved to note goings-on in my neighborhood as a microcosm of the nation’s larger problems.

Today the update is on the hypothetical side. Unlike liberals and members of the shilling LameStream media, I’m going to admit that I’m just theorizing about this.

I DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE! But I’m fairly confident I’m on the right track.

It has to do with American Dream, my neighbor who earned that nickname when he told a neighbor he’s living the American dream having moved into the neighborhood.

He did so in what appears to be a house converted to Section 8 – government subsidized. At the time, he had no job, but did have a mate and a couple of kids, even a dog and cat. Life was great for him, as he told the neighbor, who then told me — with more than a trace of disgust.

For a brief time late last year, American Dream seemed to have joined the work force. Here and there someone would pick him up and subsequently drop him off. Dream was attired with one of those vests that workers at an international superstore chain that rhymes with Ball Smart tend to wear.

Those comings and goings seem to have stopped.

In their place is a veritable flood of deliveries. We’re not talking about the predictable increase of such visitations at the beginning of each month, one we suspect coincides with government benefits showing up in the household accounts.

This was a noticeable spike beyond that level. The wife observed seven separate deliveries just the other day and she probably missed some. They ranged from what seemed to be prepared food, to groceries and other assorted merchandise.

What gives? she asked.

EITC, said I.

To borrow from a Michael Jackson song: E-I-T-C, it’s easy as A-B-C; Feds send all your dough to me; And I spend it with great glee; A-B-C, just minimal work by me!

A cynic, and I qualify as one, would postulate that American Dream got a job and worked for a time in 2021 simply to quality for EITC, also known as Earned Income Tax Credit.

If you worked at all, not necessarily full-time or year-round, come tax time you can claim credits. Credits in taxspeak mean you can get back amounts well beyond what you actually paid in taxes.

Generally speaking, the less you earn, the more EITC you get.

A single person with no children, earning less than $21,430 for the year, can get up to $1,502 in earned income tax credits. Marriage and kids make that pot swell to the point at which a married couple with three or more kids, earning less than $57,414 in combined income, can get back up to $6,728 in EITC.

Makes those $2,000 COVID stimulus handouts seem like chump change.

Were a possible EITC recipient diligent, filing taxes as soon as the IRS would permit, he or she should have their EITC by now. Found money. Let’s order some stuff!

Multiply this by millions of taxpayers nationwide and you are talking a lot of money and a lot of excess demand in an already strained supply chain.

According to a table on IRS.gov, my state of Pennsylvania saw 843,000 taxpayers claim EITC for the 2020 tax year, resulting in $1.9 billion in payments. The average payment was $2,257.

California residents claimed $6.1 billion in EITC in 2020.

Even at that, this would just be redistribution of income in the best socialist tradition if the federal government didn’t come up short annually in terms of balancing tax revenue with expenditures.

But we do fall short in a huge way annually.

Despite what Bumbling Joe Biden and Marie Antoinette Pelosi have been barfing out in talking points – that government spending doesn’t cause inflation but actually lessens it – any time the government spends a lot more than it takes in, that is a problem.

When the government monetizes that debt by selling more treasury bonds and bills, or by just snapping its fingers and creating money for things like stimulus payments out of thin air, it increases demand for goods without increasing supply. That leads to price inflation, and blaming the Russians is just a diversion.

The bottom line is, American Dream and the millions like him, along with all those stimulus recipients, are aiding the rise in inflation as much as, or more than, Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine incursion.

That’s reality. We just are supposed to ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. I can’t, and I won’t.

Back in my days as a sportswriter I had an executive editor of one newspaper who never understood the attraction of sports to the masses.

Why, he would ask in bemused fashion, do so many people care so much about something that means so little?

At the time I tended to agree with him more than a bit, having begun the process of losing my interest in covering sports because of what it had become through my decades of writing about it. That is one of the reasons why I ran out the door to early retirement at the ripe old age of 53.

Fast-forward to today and I’m with that former editor 100 percent as far as being stunned at the degree of fanaticism shown for sports. I actually feel sorry for people who live and die with the success or failure of the sports teams they follow.

I’ve taken to ignoring sports to a large degree and the process had been liberating. There is more time for other pursuits. There is less wasted emotion. There is less frustration.

One particularly unappetizing aspect of sports these days is the constant politicization of it and the social justice warrior messaging we must endure if we try to watch a game.

The Winter Olympics came and went without me seeing a single second of coverage. Judging by the ratings, I was in good company.

I used to love the NHL. This season, I have yet to watch an entire game; only short stretches of a handful of contests.

NASCAR? It’s on ignore, too, having become a virtue-signalling joke both on the track and in the broadcast booth.

I watch the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, but little of the regular season.

Major League Baseball is in the midst of a labor problem that has taken a chunk out of spring training and threatens parts of the regular season.

Once upon a time, when an uncle who was a radio engineer would call to alert me to spring training broadcasts of Pirates game, I lived for the start of the baseball season. Now I wouldn’t miss it if the entire season was a no-go.

This week used to be a highlight of my sports viewing calendar with the chance to watch so many conference championship basketball tournaments. I’ve tried to watch some this week, including tonight.

But I just wasn’t into it. So much has changed, and not for the better.

Athletes, even pros back in the day, were a lot like the common folk, only they had uncommon athletic skills. They were yet to have those skills produce mega-million dollar contracts, so it was not unusual for pros to have offseason jobs.

College athletes were not in school just for a season or so until they could get drafted.

Even the high school athletes were a more unspoiled crowd playing for the love of the game, not the chance to show up on some recruiting web site or social media highlight reels.

The Big East championship game tonight, contested by Creighton and Villanova, was a basketball abortion.

The teams had combined to hit about three percent of their three-point shot attempts in the first half, but came out after intermission jacking up more three-point misses. This meant the game was tied at 21-21, three minutes into the second half!

After several more hurried, ill-advised, three-point clangers, the announce team (both black men lest this lament be labeled a racist diatribe) decried the ruination of basketball with the over-reliance on three-pointers.

That game had both teams scoring under 40 points with six minutes to play, so they must have continued firing with abandon, and missing.

I gave up, but before coming downstairs to write this, I checked on the Big 12 title game between Kansas and Texas Tech.

During that brief viewing, Texas Tech stripped the ball from Kansas in the defensive zone. But instead of grabbing the basketball, a Tech player tried to pick it up with a dribble, no doubt to rush down to the other end of the court and throw up a three-point try.

Alas, he bobbled it, Kansas secured the loose ball, and Tech had to foul to prevent a Kansas dunk attempt.

The analyst noted that players are taught since junior high not to try to dribble a loose ball. Guess this player slept through that advice.

If you are a basketball purist, the games are simply terrible in terms of fundamentals. Decision making stinks, too. Sure, often the scores are close, usually only because both teams can’t manage to do the right thing with any consistency.

It was nice to hear the announcers deviating from their propaganda scripts to note such poor play. Remember, these are teams contending for championships, not bumbling through losing seasons.

If this is the best, I don’t really want to see the worst.

I will dutifully fill out an NCAA Tournament bracket or two and try to watch some of those games. But I’m not optimistic about my staying power.

Should the games be poorly played, as most likely they will be, I’m sure I can find something else to do. Maybe you should, too.

Even many of his critics consider Russian leader Vladimir Putin a brilliant strategist, an assessment that is being proven incorrect with each passing day.

A brilliant player of the geopolitical game would not have allowed the United States and its NATO allies to goad him into an invasion of Ukraine.

A brilliant strategist would not have handed a reeling Joe Biden the lifeline to halt his plunge in approval ratings by getting him past the haunting Afghan withdrawal failure, raging inflation, and lingering COVID regulation overkill that was souring the mood among the voting public here in America.

But Putin blew it. He took the bait, moved into Ukraine and in so doing gave bumbling Joe and his handlers some desperately needed ink for their propaganda printer that they are working overtime to use.

They are selling the same hysteria that paid off so well when it was unleashed under the Black Lives Matter and COVID banners.

Get the ignorant and uninformed acting rashly on misguided emotion while their brains remain in neutral. For those who dare to bring up facts instead of emotions, beat them back with charges of racism, Russian sympathizing, or whatever false incendiary claim of the moment that throws red meat to the mindless masses.

You are paying higher prices for gasoline. Blame the Russians. Never mind that gasoline prices were rising long before Putin launched his Ukraine invasion. The rises were due to Biden’s anti-fossil fuels policy, a payback to what the late Rush Limbaugh would call the environmental wackos who voted for Biden.

Biden has killed the Keystone pipeline and limited drilling and exploration for oil and natural gas. Now the hypocrite Biden has the cajones to rip shale operations for not producing more of the stuff to make up for Russian production going offline.

Inflation here rose 7.9 percent in February, highest in 40 years. Blame the Russians. Sure, right, it is Putin who is making the cost of gasoline, groceries and shelter rise. Tell me again how Putin affects the cost of corn, or meat or eggs, or housing, or new and used cars.

Quick answer: Biden and overspending politicians in general have more to do with the inflation we are suffering. I have written in the past that the government handouts issued during the contrived COVID emergency were going to come home to roost in the form of higher inflation.

It didn’t take Nostradamus to make the prediction. It is Economics 101. Artificially increase demand by giving away purchasing power in the form of stimulus checks or suspended payment obligations like rents or mortgages or student loans, then do not increase production (in the case of the COVID shutdowns, decrease it) and you get the textbook recipe for inflation.

As one panelist on CNBC’s Fast Money noted Wednesday night, before the official inflation report was released Thursday morning, the actual inflation rate as measured by traditional means is more like 14 percent.

You can blame Putin and the Russians, or you can look at the facts.

Social media, megaphone for morons, is full of newly minted Ukraine experts whose mantra is Russians evil, Ukrainians saints.

They forget that in 2016, then vice president Biden held up $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine until a prosecutor was fired, ostensibly for not pursuing corruption in the country. Cynics thought it had more to do with him investigating a company with which Hunter Biden had a business relationship, but that angle was shot down by the usual liberal lapdog media outlets.

Ukraine president Zelenskyy has benefited politically from the Russians coming to call. In mid-February, 2 ½ years after his election, Zelenskyy’s approval ratings were worse than Biden’s. Only 30 percent of Ukrainians wanted Zelenskyy to run for re-election and only 23 percent said they would vote for him if he did.

Now Zelenskyy’s briefings are inspiring awestruck praise on par with that formerly reserved for since-discredited New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Emmy Award-winning COVID briefings. Hope it ends better for Zelenskyy than it did for Cuomo.

If Putin were a relief pitcher in Major League Baseball, he’d get credit for two saves for bailing out – at least temporarily – both Biden and Zelenskyy.

Plus, Putin provided a convenient one-size-fits-all scapegoat for anything not going well down the line here in Bidenville. When in doubt, blame the Russians.

It would be laughable were the distortions not being consumed so eagerly by the brain donors among us.

Spare me the confused musings of the uninformed who somehow are equating paying higher prices for gasoline with helping the Ukrainians and punishing the marauding Russians.

Just how they can be so deluded escapes me, other than the very strong possibility that those espousing the sentiment are drinking too heavily from the administration’s propaganda Kool-Aid.

Begin with the fact that the Biden regime has yet to get around to banning the U.S. purchase of Russian crude oil.

And this means that by paying the higher prices, you not only aren’t helping the Ukrainians, you could be indirectly helping the Russians.

You want to give tangible help to the Ukrainians, grab a rifle and book passage to the front. Judging from the pictures of women and a motley crew of men with weapons in hand already fighting the Russians, such assistance would be welcomed much more than patting yourself on the back and citing your willingness to pay higher gasoline prices.

The downside to visiting the hostilities is you might stop a bullet with your forehead, a considerably greater problem than feeling some pain in the wallet.

I’m reminded of the Gen. George S. Patton speech, immortalized on film by the actor George C. Scott.

Unlike a lot of what you see coming out of Hollywood then, and now, Patton actually gave the speech as shown in the movie many times in real life.

The salient point Patton made to his troops ran like this: “Remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

Patton would have been a most unhappy camper in this era of symbolic gestures, empty platitudes, and political correctness.

The warmongers screaming for U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine might want to revisit the Patton speech. They also would be wise to understand that before a nation goes to war, its population has to accept that plenty of mistakes will be made and they will be measured in lives lost.

In addition, it is not just members of the armed forces that will be killed. Multitudes of otherwise innocent civilians will join them.

We won World War II because an estimated 9 million German and Japanese soldiers were killed in the fields or on the seas. Add to that total 3 million civilians who died in those countries.

It’s not that we were wrong to take out civilians. Both those nations’ leadership had killed and tortured more than their share of civilians in the lead-up to and execution of their war plans.

We were meeting those enemies on their level. It’s the harsh reality of such conflict and part of the reason that this country hasn’t really won a war since then.

Declaring victory and going home, leaving the problems to recur quickly, isn’t winning.

Note that neither Germany nor Japan has been adventurous in a military sense since the end of World War II. They got the message.

Can we say the same for North Korea or various Mideast countries in which the U.S. fought, but stopped short of total victory?

The Russians are finding out that, unlike Afghans, Ukrainians will fight for their homeland. The citizens will gladly take up donated armaments and use them to face up to the heavily favored opposition, not lay down those weapons and run away.

The Ukrainian effort is inspirational. Thinking you are participating in the cause vicariously by paying more for gasoline is an absurd slap in the faces of those fighters.

I got gasoline Friday, at a price of $3.99.9 per gallon of unleaded regular. And that was the good news.

The next day, the price was $4.19.9.

Thanks, Joe Biden.

As usual, Democrats, leftists and liberals will blame it all on Russia. And there is a component to rising oil prices from the Russian incursion into Ukraine.

But oil and gasoline prices in this nation had been rising long before that, caused in large part by Biden’s anti-oil policies which include nixing pipelines (unless they are Russian) and limiting drilling and exploration here.

Clueless Joe has dropped the United States from energy independence under Donald Trump to its familiar previous status of net importer, from places like Russia!

It’s not just oil that is skyrocketing in price. The wife came home from grocery shopping Saturday, lamenting having spent a lot more than at any time in recent memory.

Houses in our little, economically depressed Greater Johnstown are selling briskly, even with bidding wars that heretofore were limited to places with booming economies and housing markets. It’s part legitimate demand from people afraid the houses will cost more, and mortgage interest rates will be higher if they wait to buy.

There also seems to be a burgeoning industry here of buying houses now to re-sell down the line, often without even having lived in the dwelling in the interim.

This is behavior of the sort we used to read about having happened in Weimar Germany, in the midst of the hyperinflation in the wake of World War I that ran into the 1930s and brought a guy named Hitler to power.

You’ve seen the pictures of people burning the depreciated Weimar currency to keep warm because it was cheaper than buying wood. Perhaps you’ve read of German people rushing to stores after being paid to buy goods that would assuredly cost more tomorrow, even the next hour.

Commodity prices overall in the U.S. have seen their strongest start to a year in terms of rising prices since 1915. Lumber, gold, silver, copper, oil, natural gas, wheat, beef, chicken. You name it, it costs more than it did to start 2022.

Fertilizer prices are rising at a parabolic rate, which guarantees even higher prices for grains and meats that come from creatures who are fed grains.

Workers will demand more money to account for their increased costs, which will force companies to raise prices.

It’s called a wage-price inflationary spiral and we all lose, especially those who have saved money to carry themselves through retirement.

Genius Joe Biden finally is becoming aware of inflation and wants companies not to raise prices; just eat the losses they are incurring from higher commodity costs.

You can hear the rumble of cries for price controls, in which companies are forbidden by the government from raising prices. This leads to less production, further shortages and . . . more inflation.

Such controls didn’t work for Richard Nixon in 1971 and they won’t work for Biden in 2022.

I can only hope the moronic crowd who overlooked candidate Biden’s demonstrable shortcomings and voted for him if only to get rid of Trump, are suffering big economically now that THEIR guy is in office.

Unfortunately, many innocents are suffering, too. That suffering is virtually guaranteed to worsen.

No, a cessation of Russian-Ukrainian hostilities won’t solve the problem, other than a possible short-term relief hiatus. There is, at this point, no obvious long-term solution short of an economic miracle.

Nations around the world have spent too much money that they do not have, incurring onerous debt burdens. They have legislated businesses into fiscal straitjackets, as with Biden’s anti-carbon fuels handiwork.

They have punished the economic producers and rewarded those who would take a free ride on the efforts of those producers.

Now they are reaping what they have sowed. And all of us are just along for the unpleasant ride.

It was pathetic irony that even as Joe Biden bumbled through his state of the union address Tuesday night Russians were bombarding Ukraine cities and oil prices were skyrocketing to $110 a barrel.

It’s been said before, but bears repeating: Biden is Jimmy Carter II — without the basic decency that Carter possessed.

Both have shown themselves to be weak Democrats overmatched by the challenges of the Oval Office.

Both relied on staffs long on posturing and ideology and short on results.

Both just happened to have Russians invading foreign countries on their watch, emboldened by the weak-kneed policies of both.

Both saw inflation soar, in part based on skyrocketing oil prices. Carter was mostly an unwitting bystander to it all. But Biden is aiding and abetting the oil dilemma by hamstringing U.S. production with a misguided cocktail of nixing pipelines and drilling, all to appease the far-left environmental crowd that thinks carbon fuels have no place in society.

Both Democratic presidents, separated by 40-plus years, made sure U.S. prestige was neutered by their incoherent policies.

Carter was fortunate. He left a smoking wreck of a country that his successor, Republican Ronald Reagan, was able to resurrect and thereby spare Carter the ignominy of having turned America into a third-world hovel.

Reagan had a secret weapon, and it was not his Star Wars missile defense plan. The man who made it work for Reagan was Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

It was Volcker, a Carter appointee re-appointed by Reagan, who rooted out inflation by allowing interest rates to skyrocket. A prime interest rate of 21.5 percent and a 10 percent unemployment rate were the strong medicine it took to choke off inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Current Fed chair Jerome Powell cannot, will not, be a Volcker repeat. First off, Powell doesn’t have the guts.

More important, Powell doesn’t have the basic economic strength and relatively low national debt that Volcker had to give him cover for the interest rate rises.

Democrats will blame inflation on the Russians, just like they do everything else wrong with this country.

But the truth is politicians of both parties have enabled a spending orgy that has this country in a position that would equate to bankruptcy for a private individual unable to create money out of thin air.

If this country is going to pull out of this nosedive, it’s going to be on Biden to man up and make some calls that are both tough and brilliant.

You say you aren’t confident he can do it. Neither am I.

I do know that releasing the equivalent of three days of oil usage from the strategic reserve is going to do squat.

Furthering political divides won’t help. Defunding police and enabling illegal immigrants won’t help.

In an all too familiar Biden moment, he concluded his speech with the cry “Go get him!”

Who or what he meant was unclear. What was clear is that Biden has maneuvered this nation into rough waters and he’s not the guy you want at the wheel to steer it to safety.

The local NBC affiliate continues to amuse with its newscasts.

Sunday night was just the latest example, a laughable moment I caught only at the behest of my wife, who was watching for the weather.

I keep telling her just jump on the computer and call up weather.com, or accuweather.com and get their take on things. They’re more accurate and don’t deal in weather porn. Our local people have predicted about 80 of the last three major snowstorms.

But the wife is a traditionalist, who for her efforts gets such bon mots as the local weather babe horrifying us a few weeks back with predictions of minus-25 degree temperatures. Not windchill, but actual temperatures, she stressed.

I wrote of this at the time, noting it would have been record cold and, not surprisingly, we came nowhere close.

Back to Sunday night: A fire had burned a house or houses in Johnstown and a report was given.

The anchor, who prides himself on being a hometown product according to his various internet presences, apparently never paid attention while driving through the Kernville section of Johnstown. I think I’m safe in presuming he never resided in that neighborhood.

Regardless, my wife watched the fire report and asked me if I’d ever heard of Dilbert Street in Johnstown.

Well, I told her, there is a Gilbert Street in Brownstown.

No, that couldn’t be it, she said, because the fire was in Johnstown and video seemed to show the elevated Rt. 56 expressway in the background.

Through the magic of satellite television, she was able to rewind so I could watch. Yes, the guy said Dilbert, as in the comic strip, which the local newspaper runs.

No, the fire wasn’t on Dilbert Street.

But where was it? I watched the report, walked to my desktop computer and did some quick research – something our journalist anchor didn’t have time to do, obviously.

You’d think a guy who had grown up here might have thought to himself, Dilbert Street, never heard of it.

I’m another homegrown guy, one who went the extra mile and determined it was Dibert Street.

No big deal, you might say.

I’d say you are wrong.

If you can’t trust media to get basic, indisputable facts correct, it’s a problem. It’s an even bigger problem if media members need to exercise judgment in weeding out the truth and presenting you with accurate information.

If they just repeat what they’re told or read on a teleprompter with their brain in neutral, it’s a problem.

If they have no sense of journalistic curiosity, if they don’t double-check facts, again it’s a problem.

This sort of laziness is part of the reason a Reuters Institute report in June of 2021 found that just 29 percent of the American public trusts the media, a low among 46 countries surveyed worldwide.

I found that statistic by doing a brief internet search, something our “Dilbert” anchor might try sometime.

Barack Obama was the master of sleight-of-hand branding, a tactic being borrowed from heavily by the folks attempting to make Johnstown New Afghanistan.

Recall Obama promised Hope and Change, and too many took those concepts as inherently positive. They weren’t and aren’t.

If people hope to lie, cheat or steal, it’s not a good thing.

If they hope to sow social divisiveness, it’s not a good thing. If they hope to convert our nation to communism or socialism, again, not good.

On an individual basis, should you go from a comfortable middle class lifestyle to the edge of poverty, that’s change, but not in a positive way.

Say you are seemingly healthy, but wake up tomorrow on your death bed. Change? Yes. Progress? Not really.

Obama didn’t invent the tactic of flowery labels. Politicians of both stripes tend to give proposed legislation grandiose, over-promising tags like Build Back Better. As long as you don’t look at the details, it sounds like something anyone could get behind.

And so it is that in our sleepy little Johnstown, some hypesters have gathered under the banner of Vision Together 2025.

A more accurate name might be Myopic Exclusion 2025.

The details keep changing with the goal unclear (myopia) and the gameplan has been to keep the public and even elected officials representing those people in the dark (exclusion).

In theory, Afghan refugees would be courted to resettle here and fill jobs not desired by the locals. The number of those Afghans keeps changing. Maybe 1. Maybe 1,000. Maybe more.

Of course, the Afghans would be settled in Johnstown proper, saving the surrounding suburbs from having to deal with any or all of the problems arising from the influx.

Already people taking public service jobs with the City of Johnstown have refused to move into the city and have gotten existing rules changed to allow that.

Presumably some of their reluctance has to do with the already troubled Greater Johnstown School District, which likely would not improve based on being tasked with trying to educate the latest immigrants.

There are problems both practical and philosophical with the concept of bringing in immigrants to take jobs, beginning with the stark reality that the Vision Together 2025 people don’t really have faith in what they’re proposing or they would be more welcome to the disinfectant of sunshine – public discussion of their plans.

Afghans don’t necessarily speak English, nor are they necessarily even literate in any of their country’s mishmash of languages.

They aren’t necessarily highly skilled. And, judging by how quickly the Afghan army quit when defense vs. the Taliban no longer was being handled by American armed forces, they aren’t necessarily willing to go to the wall for themselves.

But Vision tries to play the shame game by recalling this is an area once notable for its immigrants. It also was notable for immigrants who came here to blend in to the American dream, not to set up isolated enclaves with the hope of changing our communities to more closely reflect what had been left behind in the homeland.

There are vague promises that any Afghans settling here will be literate and skilled and therefore able to get and hold jobs. Details, as usual, are lacking.

There also have been, in keeping with a longstanding trend here, attempts to get the federal government to fund it all through the willing conduit of various local nonprofit, not-for-profit, or similarly described organizations that seem to exist mostly to keep an elite class well-compensated for being no more than middle men — or women — in redistributing tax money.

We wrote here in December that Johnstown has been downgraded from a once prosperous blue collar town to a place where crime and poverty are the growth industries.

Vision Together 25 would add Afghan immigration to that list of growth industries. And there is no guarantee their open-arms recruiting policy would be a positive for the town.

There was a time when I had great trust in our government, elections, the judiciary, and financial markets.

These days, not so much.

Events of the past 24 hours have cemented the realization that financial markets are anything but on the up and up.

Last night (Wednesday) before going to bed I checked the gold price. It was up more than $37 an ounce due to Russian efforts in Ukraine. Silver was up 46 cents an ounce. Both were big moves.

I got up late this morning and re-checked to see how much money I was making. Surprise! Not much, and eventually I’d be down for the day. Gold and silver had been hacked back to small gains and would be plunged into losing territory before the day ended

Gold had been up more than $70 an ounce overnight and silver had been up more than $1. But from about 6 a.m. onward, when the U.S. “marketeers” were hitting their computer terminals to begin the day’s massaging, gold and silver began to drop as the U.S. dollar began to rip upward.

That would be an American dollar that is the currency for a country which is the world’s biggest all-time debtor, whose economy is roiled by inflation (which reduces the purchasing power of —– dollars!) and a nation that is being led by a senile gent who has trouble forming coherent sentences yet is expected to lead us through a rough patch internationally with Russia, not to mention the dilemma he will face if and when his Chinese buddies opt to seize Taiwan.

Against that backdrop, of course the dollar would rally and traditional safe-haven assets such as gold and silver would go from huge gains to losses on the day. A cynic might suggest that behind-the-scene governmental operatives were at work, injecting money into the dollar via the foreign exchange currency markets and/or the various options exchanges.

But the miracles weren’t limited to the precious metals, which were shanked mid-rally as if they’d wandered into the wrong dark alley.

Stock indexes were tanking throughout much of the day as war worries led to concerns about profits and economic vitality.

The Dow Jones Industrial average was down as much as 800 points before rallying, inexplicably, to close up about 100 points. The NASDAQ, weighted heavily toward tech stocks, went from a couple of hundred points down to up more than 400 points.

What else would one expect on such a tumultuous day? The Plunge Protection Team’s fingerprints are all over this one, no matter how much the CNBC hypesters threw around words like “stunning” and tried to credit Biden’s afternoon press conference with rallying the markets.

There is no plausible explanation for what happened today, other than heavy market intervention.

Such interventions work, until they don’t. When they fail, they fail spectacularly.

Whether we are close to such a meltdown is difficult to determine considering each additional success these behind-the-scenes types manage to achieve.

But it’s virtually certain we’re closer to the end than to the beginning. Forewarned is forearmed.