Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

At the age of 65, pushing 66, it has become evident to me that life is a series of epiphanies — if you are willing to accept them.

Example: After spending most of my career covering sports, I have come to realize it is, as a former news editor once observed, a lot of people obsessing over something that means nothing in the big picture.

Along that line, I’m writing this as the television is paused and muted on the broadcast of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. Once I’d have been glued to the coverage. But only a few minutes of pregame blather tonight convinced me I’m not sure I want to watch.

Maybe I’ll fast-forward through it later. Maybe not.

This is a far cry from my youth, or even young adulthood. I recall a colleague and I even went to a downtown bar on our lunch break during the 1977 All-Star Game to catch a few innings. Johnstown residents might recall that was the evening of our last major flood in this so-called Flood City.

We eventually decided not to continue to wait for it to stop raining before we headed back to the office.

It was a good call since it didn’t stop raining until the downtown was covered by about seven feet of water.

My latest epiphany, even as social media and other digital operations increasingly are intent on controlling us in part by determining what information gets to the public and how it is slanted, is that we’re living Revenge Of The Nerds.

The Revenge Of The Nerds franchise was a series of movies in the 1980s and 1990s in which put-upon nerds find ways to exact revenge on their tormentors.

Would any of you have trouble picturing Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey starring in a remake of that series?

I imagine all four of those as school children being beaten up and having their lunch money stolen with regularity during recess. But, in the evenings as they tinkered in their family basements or garages on all their high-tech toys, they also likely were making plans on how they would get even with all the regular kids.

We’ve hit 2021 and their revenge is before you.

Gates came up with software that operates the majority of computers. Using that power base, he’s dipped his hand into such things as pushing vaccines and generally aiding in the surveillance of people.

Zuckerberg and Dorsey are big on censorship, political activism and, tracking people, the last in the interest of efficient commerce.

Bezos is just another seemingly vengeful nerd gathering information and attempting to mold opinion, only he’s come out in the open more than the others by acquiring The Washington Post and remaking a once-great newspaper into a house organ for leftist causes.

At the root of the Revenge Of The Nerds movies, we as the audience were expected to cheer for the underdogs striking back at their oppressors. Their ultimate success was supposed to make us feel good and optimistic about our futures.

But our modern day Four Nerd Horsemen are not underdogs. They are the oppressors and you are the victim as long as you willingly cede information in order to participate on their various platforms.

As many observers have noted regarding Facebook specifically, you (and your information) are the product they are selling.

Don’t let them do it. Stand up to the nerds.

If you are reading this, congratulations. You are one of a handful who make their way to this site and partake of the writings offered.

It occurs to me, based on recent personal interactions and other feedback from recent days and weeks, that few have bothered to read the initial post from September 2020 explaining what this is all about.

For that, and some other reasons, allow me to repeat myself.

The blog was birthed as an egocentric exercise. I write because I want to be on the record regarding our declining society, politics and sports. I used to write for newspapers, even doing some freelance work after my retirement. But that grew tiresome for many reasons.

And so, following the lead of my brother the serial blogger, a guy who apparently has found his life’s work chronicling college women’s softball, I leaned on him to set up my blog.

The ground rules were simple, beginning with no provision being made for you to comment here on what I write. If you want to do so publicly, spend the money and set up your own blog. Rip me or praise me on social media.

But you are going to have to provide your own soap box.

Otherwise, read or don’t read; visit or don’t visit.

Allow me to repeat that: I don’t care about the numbers. I’m not trying to sell ads. I am not trying to charge fees to view. I refer you again to paragraph four in this piece.

The local rag has some regular “columnists” who write frequently but poorly and are paid nothing for their efforts. Chock it up to vanity.

I’m long past that. When I did freelance work, I expected to be paid. Seeing my name in print has lost its appeal. When I wrote for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and its affiliated publications, at the high point in combined circulation (and multiplying by the standard 2.5 average household size) I had a potential audience of at least quarter million readers.

This blog has viewership that could be counted on fingers – maybe adding toes, or fingers and toes of some close friends on a high-volume day — and I am OK with that.

I don’t promote the blog’s web address via ads, posts on social media or other venues. I have told close friends and associates about the blog. Yet I continue to have people come up to me or my wife and say they miss my writing in the newspaper.

For the umpteenth time, it’s easy to find the blog since it’s my name with a dot-com stuck on the end. Hi, Ron, if you finally have found me. Hi, Barb, if you bothered to look. Hi, the rest of you.

Welcome.

The blogging experience has led me to the conclusion that someone looking to cobble up their own witness protection program should just start a blog bearing their name.

Think of it as hiding in plain sight.

As for me specifically, the use of the potentially confusing suffix – samrossjr. — owes to the fact that both sides of the family were not exactly creative in the naming process.

I was named after my father, but never really considered naming my son Sam Ross III, for reasons including the fact we don’t have nearly enough family wealth for such pretense. My brother was named after our paternal grandfather and never really got over it.

Meanwhile, my mother’s side of the family had four guys named Joe Gorden, sprinkled across three generations. But two of those Joes, both cousins of mine, were in the same generation, adding to the confusion.

Bringing home this post/rant, please remember a few things:

There is no facility for you to comment here and there isn’t going to be.

If you really, truly miss my writing (and statements to that effect aren’t merely a variation of the “let’s do lunch” throwaway line) here is a free smorgasbord, if you can find it. Of course, posting the invitation here is the digital equivalent of putting Braille instructions on drive-through ATMs.

Finally, if someone really was missing me and was only mildly computer savvy, they might call up Google, put Sam Ross Jr. between opening and closing quotation marks, and one of search items returned would be a reference to this blog.

Admittedly it was the fifth such item in the search I just performed as an experiment, following a couple of links to freelance columns I’d written, a proclamation that Sam Ross Jr. is on Facebook (not me), and a reference to my past newspaper columns as compiled on muckrack.com.

That is all, for now.

Behold the knee, a key joint in your leg that allows walking, running, jumping and all manner of symbolic kneeling.

The religious faithful show their respect and adoration by kneeling, or more correctly, genuflecting.

Subjects of royalty show their deference and servility by kneeling.

Men traditionally take a knee when proposing marriage to a woman. Perhaps men proposing to men and women proposing to women do the same.

To kneecap someone is to shoot them in the knee in order to inflict great pain and cause long-term mobility problems. Hammers or, in the case of ice skater Nancy Kerrigan, a collapsible baton, can be used instead of a gun.

A knee to the groin is, both in the literal and figurative senses, a popular way to lay low a male of the species.

Fast-forward to 2021 and the knee, specifically taking one symbolically, has become the universal standard of protest before athletic events.

These athletes turned social justice warriors seem to be clearing their collective consciences and virtue signaling at the same time by performing this empty gesture before the captive audiences in sporting venues and those whose opt to watch on television.

I guess donating 75 percent of their massive salaries to charity never occurred to them as a more meaningful way to address the world’s ills, be they real or imagined.

Regardless, my tactic is to tune in athletic events and then delay the feed, allowing me later to rush past these exercises in hollow gesturing and get on with the competition free of political posturing.

But I made an exception to watch the beginning of today’s European Soccer Cup final between kneeling England and follow-the-leader Italy.

This particular England team was attempting to win the country’s first championship in international soccer play since about the time of King George III.

But that hadn’t stopped them from adapting a rather smug and arrogant slogan “Bring it home,” a rallying cry mocked by a Danish player who wasn’t sure it, as in a major championship trophy, ever had been in England.

He can be forgiven for not knowing that England did win the World Cup in 1966, which in sporting terms is eons ago.

In the best tradition of schadenfreude, a German term for enjoying seeing the misfortune of others, I was hoping the kneeling Englanders would end up figuratively kneeling on each other’s necks, as in choking, a favorite sporting term for those athletes who do not perform in the clutch.

Some teams in the Euro Cup have been kneeling pregame and others have not. Italy, as befits a nation that’s been losing military conflicts since the fall of Rome, has been taking a stab at neutrality in this tournament by doing what the opposition does. They kneel, we kneel. They don’t kneel, we don’t kneel.

But, as Italian player captain Giorgio Chiellini was quick to explain, his team kneels “Not for the (Black Lives Matter) campaign itself, which we don’t share.” Instead, the Italians are showing respect for the opposing players choosing to kneel.

Because I was DVRing the soccer game and my satellite service was suffering weather-related outages as I tried to watch the NASCAR race, I switched over to the England-Italy game, which was in extra time, to see if it was available.

I discovered that England had scored in the first two minutes, then chose to play “safe” defensive football (soccer) and ended up conceding the game-tying goal with about 23 minutes left in regulation.

Eventually, the game went to overtime and then to penalty kicks, which was about the time the satellite signal crapped out again. It came back very late, allowing me to see the end of the penalty kicks and a fatal failure on the last England attempt.

This sent the English fans and the attending members of the royal family into fits of despair. Meanwhile, one person in the tiny assemblage of Italy fans allowed into England on a 12-hour pass for the game, captured the spirit of the thing with a sign reading, “Oops, it’s coming back to Rome.”

But it’s not all negative. Now that the tournament is over, it leaves the English players a lot of free time to work on their genuflection technique, and maybe on honing their penalty kicks while they’re at it.

On the latter, they were about as effective with their penalty kicks as they would have been taking those attempts from one knee.

Day by day this illegitimate regime overplays its hand and I’m reminded of the online poker idiocy I have witnessed.

One classic, which came a few years back while I was playing Texas hold’em, had me possessing a pair of aces in my two-card starting hand, the absolute best beginning. I bet it hard. My moron opponent re-raised me and we got all-in.

For those unfamiliar with the game, after the initial betting round, three cards are flopped face up on the table. A fourth card is turned over and, then a fifth. Each player makes his or her best five-card hand using any combination of their two hole cards and common cards face up on the table.

It turns out my idiot opponent had 2-7, generally considered the absolute worst starting hand. Luck being the fickle thing that it is, this moron flopped a 2 and a 7 for two pair and held up to win.

Afterward, the chucklehead actually rationalized the play noting the 2-7 hand had six outs to improve (the three remaining 2 cards in the deck and three remaining 7s), while I had only two remaining aces.

This rationale neatly ignores that I didn’t necessarily need to hit of my outs since I’m already light years ahead and the 2-7 hand needs to hit at least two out of its six outs to win.

Back to politics, you have to wonder why the Sleepy Joe crowd felt moved to claim grateful Americans should celebrate a supposed savings of 16 cents on a July 4 barbecue over the previous year, when the hated Donald Trump was in office.

Even if that was the case, and judging by rocketing food prices, I find it doubtful, it neatly ignores inflation in housing, energy, healthcare, education, etc., etc., etc., any one of which more than wipes out that alleged 16-cent savings.

Why call attention to such things, unless you are confident your constituency is composed of morons?

The overplaying of a hand is readily apparent in the browbeating to get people to take those COVID-19 vaccines, the ones provided by drug companies who rushed to put them out and as a reward received immunity from legal action should they end up killing people.

Between recent Biden delusional ramblings, such as asking a greeting line what he was doing there, our puppet president takes every opportunity to stress getting jabbed is the most patriotic thing an American can do.

Imagine how this will be portrayed down the line, when the Woke crowd has erased true American heroism such as storming the beaches of France on D-Day and turning the tide in World War II. That used to be widely regarded as our greatest generation, but in the not-too-distant future, showing papers that you were a good little sheep and got the jab will mark you was a hero.

Speaking of papers, promises by Biden and his mouthpieces that in the near future the government will be coming door-to-door to deal with those who are not vaccinated conjures up images of thugs wearing armbands and jackboots demanding our (vaccination) papers.

But maybe there is hope. Biden went on the internet to preach the need to be vaccinated and a not-so-grand total of fewer than 20,000 joined the livestream. This from a guy alleged to have polled more than 81 million votes.

Meanwhile, Trump, the man supposedly beaten in that election by Biden, drew more than twice that number at a live rally in Florida, even as an additional 375,000 watched the event online.

This all makes sense only if you’re drinking the liberal-socialist Kool-Aid. Otherwise, it’s about as rational as getting all-in preflop with 2-7 and hoping to get lucky.

Even in an era when hype, propaganda and outright lies are the norm in our society, the electric car acolytes merit special mention for their exaggerations.

You’ve likely heard, seen or read that electric cars are going to save the planet from climate-change Armageddon. Too many buy these outlandish promises without bothering to crunch some numbers.

Even if you are too lazy to do some math, a bit of critical reasoning would put you head and shoulders above the cult-like crowd who worship electric cars, Tesla, Elon Musk, etc.

First of all, battery technology is, for all the hype, stuck in the mud. I watched a recent episode of Everyday Driver in which the hosts tested three electric vehicles in a locale that was cold and had snow on the ground in many of the shots.

I tell you this because all three vehicles had reduced range on full charges due to the cold, which was duly noted by the test drivers.

Ever notice how the battery that starts your conventional vehicle often craps out when temperatures go below zero?

Batteries that provide the motivational power for electric cars are not immune to the negative effects of cold weather, or even overly hot weather for that matter.

Speaking of batteries, what an environmental disaster it is going to be when those battery packs have taken their last charge and must be sent to the landfills. I know, I know, by then we will have better recycling. Or not.

Even forgetting the battery problem, the zinc, nickel, lithium, copper and all other metals necessary to make electric cars go whir require vast amounts of mining to retrieve them from the ground. That translates to energy used to power large machinery – think large carbon footprint – not to mention gouging unsightly holes into the landscape and polluting the surrounding land.

Then there is the matter of recharging the electric cars. California is mandating that by 2035 all new cars sold in the state will be zero-emission (read electric) vehicles. Aside from creating a boom in auto sales in neighboring states such as Nevada or Arizona, where conventional internal combustion cars presumably will be available, California is writing a check it can’t cash.

Already, with relatively paltry electric car penetration of the market, California is asking drivers to charge their vehicles in off-peak hours because the electrical grid isn’t up to the challenge.

Although many brain donors among the general populace think electricity somehow is magically generated in the walls of houses and apartments and readily extracted by plugging into those three-pronged outlets, the truth is electricity must be generated elsewhere and sent by wire to your house.

That electricity most often comes from plants burning those hated fossil fuels such as coal, oil or natural gas. Windmills and solar power remain nice add-ons, but are nowhere near ready to handle the main load.

Nuclear power just might be pulled from the doghouse to make up the shortfall, which should put a lot of green panties in a bunch even as the wearers brag about saving the environment by driving an electric appliance.

Finally, infrastructure to recharge electric cars is sparse and decidedly unfriendly to the environment. I saw a tweet reposted on an investment thread I follow that made some huge claims. Specifically, it showed what it said was a 350 kw diesel-powered generator recharging a car, a process it said would take three hours to get a 200-mile range.

Here’s the capper: The generator burns 12 gallons of diesel per hour, so that breaks down to 36 gallons for the charge. Divide the 200-mile range by that and you get 5.55 miles per gallon! Better just to buy and drive a semi-trailer truck.

It seemed incredible, so I did some internet research of my own and, yes, that level of generator burns a lot of diesel – some even use more than the claimed 12 gallons an hour for the pictured unit.

Electric vehicles continue to be a case of over-promising and under-delivering. There’s a reason Tesla makes a profit solely on the basis of selling carbon credits to other manufacturers and, more lately, trading crypto currencies such as Bitcoin.

Simply put, electric vehicles are not ready for prime time usage across this country; not as the primary means of transportation. They pollute more if you look at the total picture, put strains on electric generation capacity, and their performance claims do not hold up in extreme weather.

This doesn’t even consider those Tesla vehicles bursting into flames while parked or being driven, or the tendency of the batteries to fuel incineration of passengers in the event of accidents.

If you want to save the environment, forget the electric car and begin walking, or taking public transportation. And spare us the calls to worship at the feet of Musk and his ilk.

As a lifelong resident of Pennsylvania I find it strange that on this Independence Day I am beginning to entertain thoughts of voting with my feet as a way of escaping our increasingly socialist-leaning state government.

My state always has had the problem of the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh axis controlling its politics. Living in the middle of the state meant limited representation. But in the past even those concentrations of Democrat voters in the two major cities weren’t doing things like stealing elections. Now? Well, you make the call.

It’s not to say the state was nirvana back in the day. Pennsylvania has a strong track record as a state that has been regressive in the way it treats its citizenry, particularly on the topic of taxes. I recall as a young man novelty license plates cropping up when Pennsylvania instituted the state personal income tax in 1971 christening our state as the “Land of Taxes.”

Between the current income tax rate of 3.07 percent and a sales tax of six percent, seven percent in some counties, Pennsylvania is helping itself to a considerable chunk of residents’ money at least in the case of those who work and earn income.

Keep looking and the picture gets even worse. Every time you buy a gallon of gasoline, there is 58.7 cents of Pennsylvania tax in the price, second in the United States only to California’s 62.47 cents a gallon.

Our current governor, Tom “The Big Bad” Wolf, when he gets a spare moment to consider something other than imposing more ridiculous COVID-19 restrictions, has floated a trial balloon on getting rid of the gas tax. Before you stand up and cheer, understand that there will be an even more ridiculously high tax applied on something else to make up for the shortfall.

Since food purchased in a grocery store is not currently taxed, I’m thinking Governor Taxalot will look at that. Similarly, retirement income such as Social Security and pensions are not now subject to state income tax in Pennsylvania, but don’t be surprised if that should change under a plea for more money and an accompanying generational warfare approach calling for fairness.

Meanwhile, some Wolf acolytes in the Pennsylvania state house, Democrats of course, have proposed a 5 cent per bullet tax and ways to track purchasers and owners of ammunition.

This ridiculous bit of virtue-signaling legislation is a non-starter for now due to Republican control of the state legislature. But be afraid for the future.

Meanwhile, West Virginia legislators are going in the opposite direction, having passed a law effective July 1 that eliminates sales tax on guns and ammunition purchased in the state.

I’m beginning to understand why the highway signs as one enters West Virginia welcome you to “Almost Heaven.”

The bill’s authors were seeking economic revitalization and have offered tax credits to manufacturers of guns and ammunition who locate there, with one taker already.

It goes beyond this latest bit of enlightened legislation in West Virginia. The state has a U.S. Senator, Joe Manchin, who although he is a Democrat, thinks more like a traditional Republican. He’s the only Democrat holding statewide office in West Virginia.

The governor is a Republican named – you can’t make this stuff up – Jim Justice.

Elitists like to look down on West Virginia due to the relatively low level of higher education. And the economy continues to be stressed due to its reliance on mining coal, an industry under a nonstop campaign to kill it and its workers.

West Virginia is phasing out its taxation of Social Security income and generally has low property taxes, two more items in its favor.

Ideally, I’d move to a state like Montana. But West Virginia is a lot closer, and less expensive due to it not having been “discovered” by limousine liberals fleeing the carnage of the big cities.

I’m keeping an eye on West Virginia, and on the cretins in our state capital of Harrisburg. If both keep moving on current paths, it might be time to check into U-Haul availability.

The older I get, the more I realize how much that investing maxims about thinking for oneself and not following the crowd apply so well to life in general.

Not being caught up in crowd wisdom is a long-term winner. But the art of contrarian thinking is knowing when to be in the minority.

An example from our current investment situation: The stock markets are dramatically overvalued by all traditional measures, and the government is undermining investments for the long term by artificially restraining interest rates while at the same time exploding the money supply, much of which is flowing into stocks and aiding the unsustainable price ascent.

This sort of thing always has ended badly in the past, examples being the Mississippi Bubble, the South Sea Bubble, the Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania, The Roaring Twenties in the U.S., and more recently, the collapse of the Japanese Stock Market Bubble, and the U.S. Dot.com bust.

But betting against any of those runaway trends too early was the recipe for a trip to the poorhouse. Yes, I know poorhouse is an anachronistic term for what once happened to the penniless. Now they live in Section 8 housing across the street, eat 2 or 3 meals a day delivered by one of those ubiquitous online services, and generally live a middle class lifestyle complete with family and dog.

So, if you are comfortable with life on the dole, feel free to bet it all on Bitcoin and go Section 8 if it ends badly.

For the rest of us, the ability to provide for the wants and needs of ourselves and our families engenders a certain sense of pride.

If you fall into that latter group, the responsible ones, it is time to contemplate how much longer you will accept the tyranny of the minorities.

An example is how we are being bombarded by race and sexual orientation messages nightly via television advertising.

Our flaky president – Biden, not Harris – has cited such multi-racial or gay families in advertising as evidence of great progress in society. Many dismissed this as just another Biden verbal headscratcher. But sometimes the flighty Joe speaks the inner truth of his party.

Just as surely as students are indoctrinated with anti-American teachings in our public schools, television is being used to create a false impression of this country. And it is working.

Judging by representations of race in television commercials, you’d think blacks make up about 50 percent of the country’s population. Not according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which puts that number at 13.4 percent give or take. That’s about 1 out of every 7.5 people.

That’s not the commercial breakdown, or even the cast breakdown in television shows, especially if we include in our calculus cable outlets with black in their title, such as black entertainment or black news networks.

But it’s even worse regarding same-sex couples. A recent Gallup poll indicated the average adult believes gays make up about 24 percent of the U.S. Population. Meanwhile, a 2017 Gallup study that relied on respondents self-identifying, put the actual gay population number at 4.5 percent.

Why are so many people so high in their estimates of gays?

Consider a Credit Karma commercial you likely have seen. The car alarm continually goes off at random, but due to poor credit scores, the couple can’t afford a new vehicle. That couple is two guys, one white and one black. And just to make sure you got it, the commercial ends with them in the same bed for the night.

They have kids, of course, a black boy and what seems to be a white girl.

Just to pile on, the black man is the smart one, telling the dumb white guy how Credit Karma can help fix that credit rating problem. It all ends with the lights being turned off and one man telling the other that he loves him.

This commercial gets a lot of play, as do others like it.

The sheeple among the population – and they are many having been spawned as the desired outcome of the dumbing-down process of our failing public schools – presume it’s on TV so it has to be accurate and representative. Therefore, there most certainly are a lot of gay couples and blacks whose exposure must be magnified to illustrate that.

And this gives opportunist operations such as Black Lives Matters or any number of the alphabet soup gay rights activist groups, a foundation to press forward with demands for accommodations, be they legitimate or ridiculous.

In this way statistical reality is flipped on its head. Whether due to idiocy of the general population, or intimidation that silences those who do see through the propaganda campaigns, we’re living in a period of tyranny of the minorities.

If you question the legitimacy of this nonstop effort to over-represent minorities and bombard you into submission to their wants and demands, welcome to the contrarian group. You obviously are early, but you are not wrong.

Today we play the What If? Game.

It’s one of my favorites, but former Steelers coach Bill Cowher hated it. Back in the day, when I was a sports columnist, it amused me to ask Cowher what if? questions and get his stock reply: “ I don’t play the what if? game.”

Now that I write only for my amusement, it occurs to me that ongoing events dictate it is time for a lively round of what if? I don’t expect any answers. This is just an exercise to prompt any who read this to consider the possibility that the right questions are being asked.

To begin, what if the political left nurtured conditions to increase violence so as to use that as a premise to grab guns and gut the Second Amendment?

Forget Joe Biden’s confused references to the populace not having F-15 jets or nuclear weapons to go toe-to-toe with oppressive government, the impetus for taking away guns from honest, law-abiding citizens will be the increasing rate of violent crime.

The parabolic rate of increase in such crimes owes in large part to the hamstringing of police forces, either through early retirements in which officers seek to get away from the insanity, or de-funding movements to limit personnel and equipment.

Take away both numbers of police and incentive to do the job, endorse lawlessness on the streets as legitimate social protest, decriminalize criminal behavior such as drug use and shoplifting, and you get a spike in crimes, often violent ones.

What if the whole COVID-19 pandemic, whether man-made or otherwise, was bastardized into a real-time experiment by the One World Order types to see just how much the worldwide citizenry would comply with ridiculous restraints in the name of public safety?

Increasingly, it looks like the virus was a lab production, but that doesn’t matter here. Regardless of origin, it has turned into a case of crisis used as opportunity, a playbook mouthed by the likes of control freaks from Machiavelli to Rahm Emanuel.

The sheeple are rebelling, as evidenced by a recent freedom rally in London that seemed to have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of marchers.

We can only hope those in control have overplayed their hand in the selling of fear regarding the virus and the draconian measures implemented as supposed responses to keep all safe.

Along a similar line, what if the overreaction that included shutdowns of the economy was designed to get people addicted to socialism?

Take away the means of self-support for the working percentage of the population and those people eagerly will accept governmental control of their lives via the purse strings. Already a disturbingly large percentage of the United States was addicted to government handouts.

That number has swelled and the lifestyle has been warmly embraced, as evidenced by continuing reports of workers who just want to stay home indefinitely, but still get payments from the government to fund their new, slug-like lifestyle.

Along the line of the government and economy, we have the final question. What if the intentional crippling of the economy and addicting workers to the act of refusing to take open jobs was designed to create an artificial worker shortage and force up wages through bastardizing supply and demand?

It seems we are on a march toward a de facto $15 minimum wage because so many jobs are going begging for workers due to those potential workers sitting at home collecting government handouts.

Simply put, in this economy, some jobs in some areas simply do not merit $15 an hour compensation. But if that becomes the norm – and it seems to be well on that path – be prepared for increases in the price of almost everything you purchase.

It doesn’t stop at the bottom of the wage scale. When minimum wage becomes $15, the workers who already were making $15 an hour are going to want $25, or more going forward.

This is the stuff of wage-price inflation spirals and your government has placed its meaty hand on the scale to make sure that is where we are headed.

It’s time for another installment of news and views, in which we recap a week’s worth of notable, often ridiculous, developments in our rapidly devolving society.

NEWS: Vox reports that preliminary FBI data indicates murders in the United States surged by 25 percent or more in 2020 compared with 2019, but experts interviewed weren’t sure why.

VIEWS: Let me take a stab (unfortunately violent metaphor) at that. Anyone else think that perhaps defund-the-police movements, as well as growing tolerance of mob violence and autonomous zones in Democrat-controlled major cities has anything to do with that jump?

NEWS: Joe Biden noted to supporters of the Second Amendment that they don’t need to keep their guns because they wouldn’t stand a chance against an oppressive government such as his that has F-15s and nuclear weapons.

VIEWS: And yet Democrats have been hyperbolic in saying the takeover of the U.S. Capitol in January by unarmed citizens threatened democracy here. As the U.S. found in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. fighter jets and nuclear weapons are pretty much ineffective against armed populaces, which is why the assault on the Second Amendment is so beloved by socialists.

NEWS: IRS statistics for 2018 – yes, years old but the latest we have since the IRS spends so much time harassing conservatives – the hated top 1 percent, those individual returns showing earnings of $540,000 a year or higher, paid a whopping 40.1 percent of this nation’s total individual taxes. Expand that to the top 5 percent ($218,000 or higher) and the total paid is 60.3 percent. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent paid less than 3 percent of total individual taxes.

VIEWS: That lower 50 percent is almost exclusively the Democrat voter base, which is why the liberals are so keen to push their taxes to zero and give them even more freebies to guarantee their future support. Along with looking to grab guns, Biden and his handlers want to grab more taxes from the people who actually work hard for a living and look to be upwardly mobile. If you think the tax increases won’t affect the entire top 50 percent before this is all said and done, you are one gullible individual.

NEWS: My town is hosting its annual motorcycle rally, Thunder in the Valley, after a one-year virus-enforced hiatus.

VIEWS: If you can get past the noise, it’s a fun few days with plenty of free music and interesting people-watching opportunities. One of the drawbacks is that so many of the organizers and event help race around on sidewalks in four-wheeled vehicles, apparently having forgotten how to walk around our fairly compact downtown . One such woman backed over a trash can in a crowded Central Park and found it amusing as judged by her giggling.

NEWS: The Olympic Games, which from 1968 through 1998 tested some alleged female athletes to guarantee they were not males masquerading as the fairer sex, or females using drugs to simulate male strength, now welcome transgender athletes, including a former male weightlifter.

VIEWS: In this case, we’re being asked to ignore THE SCIENCE. And that science, according to The British Journal of Sports Medicine, reaffirms that in general men are stronger, run faster, jump higher, and throw objects farther than women. Even after the suggested one year of testosterone-suppressing drugs, trans women still had a 9 percent higher mean running speed than biological females. Also, as noted by developmental biologist Dr. Emma Hilton, 9,000 males have run faster 100-meter times than the current world-record time by a woman. An under-15 boys soccer team beat the mighty U.S. women’s national team in a scrimmage. The reigning Olympic women’s 100-meter champion is slower than the current 14-year-old boy record for the race. So, to recap, we’re supposed to slavishly accept FLAWED SCIENCE when it comes to viruses, but we must ignore DOCUMENTED SCIENCE when it comes to the Olympics and transgenders.

Once upon a time Father’s Day was pretty much a straightforward holiday. Not any more.

As yet another day to honor dad winds to a close, I find myself thinking of all the confusion there must have been across this land in view of the changing – not necessarily for the better – makeup of the typical family unit.

Our Father’s Day was fairly typical. My wife hosted a cookout, attended by my brother, my son and his wife, their two daughters, and me. Gifts were presented. The little girls played in a small wading pool and ran under a sprinkler that looked like an inflated watermelon.

But think of how Father’s Day might be celebrated in a same-sex household, say with two males and an adopted kid or kids. Even more complicated, how about a case in which one of the dudes donated sperm to be used on a surrogate mother?

Is one guy daddy and he gets the gifts today and the other man gets feted on Mother’s Day?

The questions are similar with same-sex couples of two women and an adopted child or children, or more of our aforementioned sperm donation producing a child, this time perhaps from an anonymous source. Who’s daddy and who’s mommy?

Do we just ignore such traditional holidays in those instances? More to the point, does the woke crowd campaign that such celebrations make the statistical outliers that are same-sex couples feel excluded or stigmatized and so the holidays must be outlawed?

Father’s Day also figures to be particularly difficult in this era of so many-hit-and-run fathers. If the guy was in the picture at one time, and remains in close contact, no problem.

But consider the multitude of instances in which an all-points-bulletin would be necessary to find dad.

And, if daytime trash television shows such as those of Jerry Springer or Maury Povich are to be believed, there are plenty of indiscriminate women who bear children without the benefit of knowing which guy actually fathered the child.

Cue the DNA results and screaming morons in the studio audience.

We certainly can extrapolate that the loose women who show up on such TV shows are not the only examples of their type. And so, in a nation with our considerable population, a day such as today might cause more than one illegitimate child to ask mommy “Who’s My Daddy?”