You could have knocked me over with a sledgehammer when, late last week, it came to light from a Congressional deposition that wayward Biden son Hunter had confirmed that Papa Joe was, indeed, “The Big Guy” mentioned in some compromising communication alleging potential payoffs.

Previously Hunter and associates had denied long and loud that Joe was The Big Guy. Deny. Deny. Deny.

Sort of like Russians, Russians, Russians in the category of one-size-fits-all propaganda.

Deny, Deny, Deny has, we would hope, now been debunked, much like Russians, Russians, Russians. But do not think Deny, Deny, Deny is dead. Certainly Russians, Russians, Russians has not been relegated to the pile of ridiculous rationalizations never again to be used among polite company.

Now that Hunter has fessed up regarding The Big Guy’s identity, the whole thing has been dismissed as a “pie in the sky” idea that Joe might get a percentage of any deals.

Nothing to see here. Move along. Laptop? What laptop?

But The Big Guy looms large. This would be the same Big Guy who has claimed on many occasions to have had no knowledge of son Hunter’s business dealings. This despite numerous reports that The Big Guy either was part of meetings or phone calls in which his presence and name magically moved along Hunter’s prospects of remuneration.

Ordinarily, this might cause some pause that The Big Guy also is our reigning president and has at best a failing mental facility, or at worst is less than truthful.

These are not major problems in the brave, new world of 2024 – at least not to Democrats desperately trying to prop up The Big Guy for another term at the helm.

And yet, they might fear other stunning admissions could be forthcoming from Hunter as he does his best tap dance to flit among legal raindrops.

I can only imagine the day when Hunter admits:

• A fresh Associated Press poll finding 6 in 10 Americans doubt the mental acuity of The Big Guy is optimistic. Hunter thinks 10 of 10 should have doubts. Can you imagine trying to work a business deal with this guy?

• The Big Guy really knows that son Beau didn’t die in Iraq during the hostilities there, where he served as a National Guard lawyer, but rather back home six years later from brain cancer. The fib just sounds better when trying to comfort family members who did lose a soldier in combat.

• The Big Guy actually didn’t have a clue as to the classified documents he and “his staff” left in various unsecured locations throughout the years. Says Hunter, “We don’t even trust The Big Guy to read a classified ad without assistance.”

• Despite previous protestations to the contrary, Hunter finally admits his art is something you might find in a kindergarten trash can, but has some curious value to people who just happen to be big Democratic political donors.

• You think you are worried about four more years of The Big Guy, Hunter is scared that The Big Guy might not last that long, requiring Hunter to get busy and make hay while the sun shines, lest he might be required to get – sigh – a job on his own somewhere down the line.

It has been reported yet again that the penny is on its way out as U.S. coinage, the victim of inflation on several fronts.

The penny has been produced in various metal iterations through its history in this country, beginning with 100 percent copper in the late 1700s and returning to 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc from 1962-1982. In between, nickel, bronze and steel were used at times.

Those copper-zinc ratios flipped to 97.5 percent zinc, 2.5 percent copper in October 1982 and continue to the present. The move away from copper was due to the rising cost of that metal.

But, in early 2024, the value of the zinc content of a penny is roughly 3 cents, making the coin again an economic outlier.

And the calls are heard to do away with the penny. Prices, say those suggesting the abolition of the penny, could be quoted in five-cent increments – $9.95 instead of $9.99. I’m thinking that might be $10 or $10.05 instead of $9.99 based on current and historic price trends. More on that later.

But that does not include the effect of such things as sales taxes, currently 6 percent in most of Pennsylvania, but 7 percent in select counties. Buying a $1 product (if you can find such a thing) in Pennsylvania leads to a $1.06 or $1.07 final price – pennies required.

I’m sure that can be rounded up, too, for the betterment of taxing bodies, to $1.10.

The penny will pass into the dustbin of history with little notice by the younger crowd. But it will evoke waves of nostalgia from the Baby Boomers like me.

Penny candy was a staple of my youth. For various reasons, the family often was poor. My maternal grandmother lived in a hovel on Sunday Street in the Walnut Grove section of Johnstown.

At that time, 16-ounce glass bottles required a two-cent deposit upon purchase, that would be refunded once empties were returned.

We enterprising kids searched high and low for bottles and carted them to nearby small stores like Pebley’s, Carpenter Brothers or Jordan’s for the refunds. A green glass quart 7-Up bottle was quite the score, bringing 5 cents!

Back then, a child’s ticket to the Dale Theater was 35 cents and they had a candy bar of questionable pedigree there that sold for 3 cents. If you wanted to splurge, a soda machine dispensed a cup of the stuff for 10 cents.

Back then a penny had some buying power. Penny candy was the prime example.

O’Shea’s Candies had a store along Solomon Street near my grandmother’s. We would hike there, pennies in hand, to buy some low-end treats.

We couldn’t afford – or chose not to – the higher priced chocolate candy offerings, instead limiting ourselves to the penny candy.

For that penny, one could get wax shaped like a soda bottle with liquid inside, small packs of candy cigarettes, various other hard and soft candy offerings, and a seemingly unending assortment of additional cheap selections.

The booty, once pointed out by us and selected by the woman behind the glass counter, was placed in small paper bags and handed to the kids to carry home.

Another popular item of the time was the penny loafer – slip-on shoes with a strap and slot on top of the instep into which younger types inserted pennies.

The lore on this varies. Either the pennies were for good luck, or a reference to an earlier time when two cents bought a call from a phone booth and so gave wearers the option of always having the price of a call handy.

Regardless, these days inflation means you’d need bigger shoe slots for quarters – or maybe those unpopular dollar coins. Good luck finding a pay phone.

Soon, it seems, the penny will join unbiased media, limited genders, quality public education and honest elections as mere memories of a better past. Pause a moment to salute the passing of all those things we used to take for granted.

February’s bonus Leap Day was sunny albeit a bit chilly, but not enough so to discourage a walk in the woods.

That walk was a brief escape from the world’s daily dose of insanity. But now I’m back inside and it’s time to wade into the craziness.

NEWS: A gold web site I frequent posted a clip yesterday of a news article headlined “U.N. Predicts Disaster If Global Warming Not Checked.” The body of the story led with the possibility that global warming would cause rising ocean levels and wipe entire nations from the face of the Earth in little more than decade.

VIEWS: Pretty standard climate crazy alarmism, I grant you. I found it interesting, however, that the Associated Press story was dated June 29, 1989, and predicted the carnage occurring by 2000! I will concede that our area tends to have milder winters than those I recall from my youth. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Witness that I was able to break out my Mustang convertible and go for a top-down cruise Monday, Feb. 26. Great periods in history have coincided with warmer climate. On the flip side, we’ve had cold periods long before human created carbon emissions were a thing. The Little Ice Age (1440-1920) is blamed by some in part on a drop in solar activity known as the Maunder minimum. The point is, climate is fluid and dynamic, but it’s a reach to think humans are affecting it greatly. And going back to eating bugs and living in caves, as elites suggest for us serfs, is unlikely to change climate’s trajectory.

NEWS: Aaron Bushnell, a member of the U.S. Air Force, doused himself with flammable liquid Sunday and set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., shouting, according to reports, “Free Palestine.” Now come followup reports from various news operations that Bushnell was outraged that the U.S. supposedly has soldiers fighting alongside Israeli counterparts in Gaza.

VIEWS: First, I’m glad Bushnell didn’t fly a multi-million dollar fighter jet or other bit of costly weaponry into oblivion to make his point. Second, it’s a bit disturbing that Bushnell was working in Air Force intelligence, yet displayed what most rational individuals would concede was irrational behavior including supposedly sharing that classified information with friends, not to mention committing suicide in showy fashion. Third, some social media types apparently used the term “rest in power” to commend Bushnell’s act and were instantly chastised that the phrase cannot be used to salute a white guy, but is reserved for blacks. And there you have in one bizarre incident and its aftermath a microcosm of what is wrong with this country.

NEWS: Kellogg’s CEO Gary Pilnick went on CNBC earlier this week to offer advice to cash-strapped consumers – eat cereal for dinner.

VIEWS: Holy Marie Antoinette. This comes as U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that in 2022 (it’s government data, hence the lag) the average American family spent 11.3 percent of disposable income on food, the highest figure in more than 33 years. Worse, those in the lowest quintile of income spent 31.2 percent of their income on food. But Bidenomics is great, just ask Joe.

NEWS: Wendy’s is walking back plans to introduce so-called surge pricing, charging customers more at peak demand periods.

VIEWS: To even consider trying to gouge customers a bit extra to buy fast food smacks of terminal tone-deafness. To retrench after the plan became public is an admission of same.

NEWS: The government’s statistic dispensers were out with another revision of Gross Domestic Product for the fourth quarter of 2023, pegging it at an increase of 3.2 percent — $334.5 billion give or take.

VIEWS: The never-ending massaging of government numbers is a joke, as are the unemployment and inflation reports. But the most telling number is that U.S. debt increased by $834.2 billion in the same quarter. That means the government spent about $2.50 to get every $1 of economic growth. This reminds me of the company losing money on every unit it sold, but planning to make it up on volume.

Whether it be academic laziness or just plain ignorance, too many people use a litmus test of sorts for any given topic and can’t be bothered to consider nuance.

This is particularly true when the masses have been conditioned to equate certain words with bad things.

Russian equals bad, even though, for example, removing Russian goaltenders from the NHL would strip the league of most of its top netminders.

Chinese equals bad, even though most of our economy relies on cheap Chinese products.

Donald Trump could walk on water and it would be bad because he’d just be proving he can’t swim.

Forget redeeming values, there are no shades of gray when it’s a litmus test, applied with animus. Bad is bad.

And so it is when we move to the economic front that deflation is bad, no doubt about it.

Not so fast, demand curve breath.

Let us begin with basic definitions. Inflation is an increasing money supply and credit. Deflation is a decreasing money supply and credit.

The symptoms of these things have come to be synonymous with the situations, as in inflation of the money supply often gooses demand and leads to supply shortages, in turn producing rising prices.

So, to many, inflation is rising prices, not the symptom of an underlying cause. Think of it in a health sense. A person has a fever because they have the flu, but the fever is but a symptom of the actual illness.

Similarly, while deflation is a decline in money supply and credit, it tends to produce falling prices and this price phenomenon has come to be taken as the definition of the term by too many.

Part of the deflation-is-bad mantra stems from the reality that our financial overlords, those wizards behind the curtain charged with keeping a complex, debt-ridden economy functioning, have no levers to pull to cure it.

Inflation is a boon to debtors, allowing them to pay back those debts with money that is worth less with each passing day.

But debtors get crushed in a deflation. The difficulty earning or borrowing money makes existing debts all the more onerous.

This nation’s so-called Great Depression of the 1930s was a deflationary event, which defied the best efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to spend us back to prosperity with various government programs.

It can be argued that only the onset of World War II, and the inflationary trends that produced as nations spent beyond their means to win at all costs, brought the depression to an end.

The current crop of movers and shakers doesn’t want to rely on World War III to cure economic malaise, for obvious reasons, so their response to any economic difficulty is to flood the system with money. Inflate or die.

It happened in 2008, on a huge scale, and again during the COVID idiocy.

Eventually we will be called to pay the piper for that fiscal insanity, but not yet.

The thing about deflation is that not all should fear it. If you end up paying less and less for food as time rolls by, it would be a good thing.

The same is true if housing, automotive or energy costs suddenly did an abrupt 180-degree pivot and began going down month after month, year after year.

Consumers should embrace deflation. But our masters say deflation is bad, so the mantra from the masses is to parrot that.

Repeat after me: Deflation bad!

Life in these United States circa 2024 means being asked on an almost daily basis to believe incredible claims, such as Fani and Nathan were chaste, Hunter and James never talked to Joe about family business, and there is absolutely nothing wrong or harmful with having individuals or an entire nation living far beyond their means.

In keeping with truth and reality having become fluid concepts in the eyes of too many, we also are asked to accept there is no difference between male and female athletes, which flies in the face of biology as well as athletic history.

But, reality be damned! As long as someone with male sexual equipment identifies as a female, he/she/it is free to compete against female athletes.

Not surprisingly, these gender-confused gents are grabbing headlines for success and, in a recent example, the carnage they are able to inflict on athletes of what used to be called the fair sex.

Earlier this month there was a girls’ high school basketball game between a couple of Massachusetts teams in which a transgender player on one team injured three opponents in a half’s work, leading to that affected team forfeiting the game.

Discussion in the wake of this lined up in predictable fashion, with the trans enablers speaking of vague concepts of equal opportunity and those decrying trans participants in women’s sports relying on the basic physical facts of life.

At this point, I am moved to ask a pertinent question, that being how come it’s always guys who identify as girls wanting to compete against girls, and never girls identifying as men wanting to play against guys?

There have been an abundance of alpha lesbian women athletes throughout the years, always seemingly content to play vs. women.

Think of Brittney Griner, most famous to some, perhaps, for being a prisoner in Russia for a time. Griner is a basketball player, a big one at that, standing a reported 6-foot-9.

Did Griner, a self-described lesbian, insist on playing with the big boys in the NBA. Well, while there was talk for some time of an NBA tryout (perhaps more hype than reality) as far as I can tell, Griner was content to play the women’s game.

There is at least one story of another heralded women’s basketball player from the past trying out with an NBA team (that also widely regarded as a publicity stunt) and she was overwhelmed physically.

That’s the point. The video I saw of the Massachusetts trans player injuring one of three opponents did not seem to be malicious, but rather an example of an athletically superior person throwing around a smaller opponent like a rag doll.

Should this sort of thing be allowed? No.

Why is it allowed? See my cultural war installment from yesterday.

Anybody in their right mind knows boys shouldn’t be competing regularly with girls past a certain age, say 12 years at most.

It has been widely reported that our formerly all-conquering women’s national soccer team managed to lose a scrimmage, by a 5-2 score which in soccer is decidedly one-sided, to an under-15 Dallas boys team. Repeat, a team of mid-teens-and-under boys took down our best adult women’s soccer players – easily.

While it’s fair for my 6-year-old granddaughter to play on a mixed sex kiddie basketball team, it is noteworthy that her struggling team had an apparently male player magically show up a few games back and contribute significantly to some wins.

You look at world records in easily measurable sports as such as swimming or track and field, and you will find the men’s records always surpass women’s marks.

This is not bias, it’s athletic reality.

And, while the social justice warriors are pressing so hard the trans case for equal opportunity, how about the opportunity they are taking away from females who are happy to remain females and would rather not be competing with someone on the verge of needing a daily shave to deter beard growth?

Many people spend significant chunks of their waking hours desperately seeking updates on the hostilities in Ukraine, that news coming from social media, the internet, or various lamestream media outlets.

Others are similarly engaged regarding events in the Middle East and Israel fighting back against the terrorist outfit that is Hamas.

There are even some who – correctly – monitor closely China’s intentions toward Taiwan for indications that the Wuhan is about to hit the fan there. But this is much less common.

I’m interested in all the above, but my focus these days is on dispatches from the frontlines of the cultural war being fought domestically. You should be paying attention, too, because the outcome of this conflict will directly affect your way of life more than whether or not puppet Zelenskyy continues to collect handouts, whether Israel is successful in exterminating a terrorist group, or whether one day China decides to grab Taiwan and dare the critically compromised U.S. military to do anything about it.

Leftists have been waging this battle to undermine this country for decades, borrowing heavily from the fictional playbook “1984” as authored by George Orwell.

It was Orwell’s intent in writing the book to warn free societies – particularly those of Great Britain and the United States – how quickly totalitarianism can arise. He’d witnessed takeovers by Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia and feared such a future for us.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” is a widely cited government slogan from the book, illustrating how governments toy with the citizenry using nonsensical, contradictory pronouncements and dare any to dispute the propaganda publicly.

The underlying theme was that these totalitarianism regimes constantly foment wars to unite the populace against a common enemy.

Leftists have torn apart the family structure in the U.S., bastardized the education system into a WOKE indoctrination program, delegitimized justice enforcement from the federal level on down, sought to end democracy by silencing opponents in order supposedly to preserve democracy (now that’s 1984), and thrown open the borders to allow in an estimated 10 million illegals since Joe Biden was installed as the cadaver figurehead atop the executive branch of the government.

The absurd over-reach of leftists is evident daily.

Just today, zerohedge.com had headlines including the New York City mayor will give illegals preloaded debit cards with up to $10,000, Google’s Gemini AI is accused of eliminating white people from image searches, and a survey has been released with an overwhelming number of respondents from the military decrying the ridiculous DEI training they must endure.

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Planes are falling apart in the skies almost daily. Nancy Pelosi continues to scream “Russians, Russians. Russians” to impugn Donald Trump despite the reality of her party having fabricated the Russian trash as a campaign ploy.

Speaking of Trump and Russia, it is notable that the U.S. embarked on no new conflicts during Trump’s years in office and the Russians were not being adventurous in, say, Ukraine.

Only after Biden was propped up and sworn in, did the U.S. resume participating – overtly or covertly – in various armed conflicts and Russia got brave again.

Trump truly is an outsider, refusing to rely on war to unite the country. Even some of Trump’s so-called challengers for the Republican nomination (Nimarata ‘Nikki’ Randhawa Haley) are big promoters of war and the merchants who benefit from same.

This is why so many residents of what Trump refers to as The Swamp are aligned to eliminate his voice. They censor him, spy on him, persecute him with never-ending lawsuits by prosecutors who ran for office on a Get Trump platform, attack him incessantly in the media and paint any Trump supporters as dangerous domestic terrorists.

They toy with election rules and execution, giving a new meaning to the disparaging term “mailing it in.”

They also seek to isolate Trump by coming after his supporters by any means, be they legitimate or not in order to intimidate them into silence.

Ah, but sometimes despotic governments can push too far, especially against an armed populace. It is not mere coincidence that the average citizen in the “1984” book was not armed.

This nation began when the armed citizens pushed back against Great Britain’s King George, for perceived offenses less oppressive than those under which we currently exist.

Biden taunts occasionally that we would need “F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons” to take on the federal government.

If this is true, you would be forgiven in wondering why the leftists are so intent on disarming the populace of our semiautomatic weapons, shotguns and various handguns.

We are in a cultural war and the left is winning. The good news is the right doesn’t need jets and nukes to express its displeasure.

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy is beginning to remind me of the feral cats who roam our neighborhood — always looking for handouts.

There are notable differences, including the cats seem to be taller in stature (literally and figuratively) than Zelenskyy and they don’t make time for Vogue photo shoots with their mates (many mates in the case of those feral felines).

And yet Zelenskyy, like the cats, is anywhere and anytime looking for charity, mostly from the United States.

Some neighbors have discovered the dangers of trying to satisfy the wants of the feral cats. Once you start, you are expected to continue until you, or the cats, cease to exist. Money is no object, at least not to the cats.

One neighbor actually has heated shelters set up on her porch for the cats and feeds them regularly, complaining on more than one occasion to my wife about the costs. She also, for a time, had a penchant for feeding hot dogs to crows, but that’s another story.

It is likely that the feral cats will be around after Zelenskyy is but a memory. The way the Ukraine struggle with Russia is going, Zelenskyy’s future is anything but secure. It would end his unlikely rise from comedian playing a fictional president of Ukraine in a sitcom (2015-19) to actually playing the role in real life.

An imaginary parallel of sorts would be Jerry Seinfeld as our next president. No, scratch that (cat pun intended). Likely Seinfeld would do a better job than Zelenskyy, as would anyone not prone to excessive narcissism and mooching.

Zelenskyy comes off more as Seinfeld’s wacky TV neighbor Cosmo Kramer. Sure, the Kramer character was much taller than Zelenskyy, as are most adults either male, female or gender-confused. What was extremely similar was the penchant of Kramer to raid Seinfeld’s apartment for food, clothes and the use of things like the telephone, stereo, television, or even the bathroom.

I recall with humor some episodes in which an ungrateful Kramer harangued Seinfeld for not having the right food, clothes, cable television to satisfy Kramer’s wants.

Also, there was an episode in which Kramer, for a time, kept a running tab of what he was using at Seinfeld’s expense. We still can’t get Zelenskyy and his cohorts to give an accurate accounting of where all the Ukraine aid is going.

Along that line, Zelenskyy recently was whining about Congress not readily forking over billions more in foreign aid to Zelenskyy-ville, a rapidly shrinking European country also known as Ukraine. No strings attached, you understand.

Congress has been on hiatus and Zelenskyy is feeling abandoned. There is a war going on, he reminded. This is something he seems to forget when he traipses around the globe, although admittedly wearing clothing suggesting he’s ready for combat at any time.

I’d like to know the last time Zelenskyy actually needed that type of clothing, or a weapon for that matter, because he was battling Russians at the front.

But the little guy is a lot indignant that Uncle Sam has been late with this month’s handout/grift.

‘Tis time to tell Zelenskyy that we’re washing our hands of providing aid and comfort to him. He should be grateful that we didn’t pay to have him neutered, as was the fate for some of those feral cats.

Perhaps the Russians will perform that service.

Imagine the entire world invoking the Joe Biden, I-can’t-remember and I’m-an-old-man, defense whenever required. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.

Begin with Atlanta Fulton County DA and Trump persecutor Fani Willis, now being called to account for alleged improprieties in her public and private lives. She would have done well to plead dumb and ignorant.

Instead, Willis has been, in words of one observer, using the snarling badger defense, being combative and belligerent with accusers.

Willis also had played the race and gender cards previously, at a church no less, suggesting this all would not have happened had she not been a black woman.

If only Eve, a person the Bible definitely indicates was a woman (gender confused was not yet a thing) and now some sociologists suggest was black, would have thought to claim misogyny and racial bias when God cast her and Adam from the Garden of Eden.

Eve could have remained while Adam, a male and perhaps white, was forced from his domicile.

But God, in his infinite wisdom, had seen fit not yet to have created courts of the legal or public opinion sort, or social media, so Eve was left to deal with her lot — with Adam — beyond the bounds of Eden.

Back to the Biden defense, Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce, AKA Mr. Taylor Swift, might have professed amazement when clips were shown of him screaming at his head coach Andy Reid and shoving the portly, elderly gentleman.

That Kelce did this on the sidelines of the most recent Super Bowl, only the most watched television program in history of the boob tube, would only heighten the validity of the defense.

Think of Biden in countless press conferences and other public appearances fluffing names, dates, shaking hands with imaginary people, tripping, falling, and needing to be led off stages by helpful stooges.

All these actually strengthen Biden’s defense, as in no rational individual would so consistently make a fool of himself if he was aware of what he was doing. Obviously, Kelce was distraught over being embarrassed in front of his gal pal by not having made a greater contribution to that point of the game, and even having been on the sideline during one crucial play.

Kelce could have the best of both sides, claiming temporary insanity/amnesia/mental imcompetence, but then having recovered sufficiently to serve as a cultural icon.

A surprising supporter of Biden has arisen in the form of much-hated Russian strong guy Vlad Putin. During a recent lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson, speaking on the subject of Biden mental shortcomings, Putin referred to a meeting with Biden in 2021 of which Putin recalled, “I did not see anything of this sort.”

Faced with this unexpected — perhaps damning — endorsement of his mental acuity, expect Biden soon to say that he doesn’t remember the meeting, or instead that he was speaking with Czar Nicholas II (who died in 1918).

The subject was a nuclear arms deal – or a job for Hunter.

On Valentine’s Day we are programmed to express love via cards, flowers, chocolates and various other gifts.

The commercialized celebration ranks with Christmas in terms of providing sales volume to merchants.

The historical roots of Valentine’s Day are vague, with some tracing it to the festival of Lupercalia celebrated in ancient Rome. Others allude to martyrdom of saints named Valentine, one or more of whom met tragic ends.

The holiday is said to have taken off toward its present form in the U.S. and the United Kingdom as early as the 1840s.

Regardless of the historical details, I hope you and yours are enjoying today, with appropriate expressions of love.

Contemplation of this holiday has me thinking not of material gifts, but rather things I’d love to see transpire.

Here is one man’s list of things he would positively love to see occur:

• Joe Biden acting as if he were aware of important realities, like which day of the week this is.

• Politicians of all stripes putting the country above party.

• Johnstown spending federal and state handout money for actual economic development, not merely putting spats on a pig and enriching the nonprofit elites.

• The end to the obvious politicization of our justice and legal systems.

• All the Soros-backed Marxist district attorneys and judges cast from office in a wave of electoral righteous indignation.

• Media outlets rediscovering that journalism is reporting the facts and is not propagandizing and indoctrinating.

• Public schools and institutions of higher learning returning to educating and not propagandizing and indoctrinating.

• Financial markets return to some form of fundamental sanity, escaping the algo-driven excess that saw shares of Lyft soar 60 percent and then crash Tuesday when a company earnings release contained a typo proclaiming a margin increase of 500 basis points (5 percent) as opposed to 50 basis points (.5 percent).

• Someone, anyone, plugging the sieves that are our southern – and northern – borders.

• A legitimate election and appropriately fair vote counting this fall.

I was stunned, stunned I tell you, to awaken today to green grass, clear sidewalks and streets, and nothing approaching the weather Armageddon scene predicted by the local weather types.

When is the last time this happened? Are you kidding me? The weather overkill forecast trend is reminiscent of the old yarn about the stock market being a leading economic indicator, having predicted eight of the last two recessions.

It was only yesterday, while driving granddaughter No. 2 to our house following getting her off the school bus at her house, that she eagerly spoke of a day off school Tuesday, or at least a two-hour delay.

Apparently she’d gotten wind, likely through her teacher or other kids, of the apocalyptic weather forecast for Monday night into Tuesday morning.

I tried to assure the child these things tend to be overblown, although I did not use my favorite term for the phenomenon – weather porn – since she is but six years or age.

“No, Poppy,” she argued, “the weather people are always right.”

Ah, the innocence of youth. She still probably believes there are boys and girls and she can easily tell the difference, that white people are not the devil incarnate and children with two mommies are not the norm.

I told her we would wait and see what the next day provided.

It was evident by early evening Monday that schools were falling into line, one-by-one, in bowing to the wishes of the weather porn purveyors, calling for two-hour delays, outright canceling classes, or calling for the students to work from home.

Allow me to add as an aside that I was out Monday putting gasoline in various cars, not because I was terrified I could not do so today (one is, after all, a four-wheel drive Jeep Cherokee and one other is an all-wheel drive Kia SUV).

I just needed gasoline and bought same, being distressed along the way that the regular unleaded gasoline was 11 cents cheaper per gallon at Giant Eagle Get/Go than it had been at Sheetz, even with the 3-cent discount for using my Sheetz card. I’d only gone to Get/Go due to having $11 in gasoline credit accumulated, this having been relayed to me by the wife.

While pumping gas, after a woman had raced ahead of me to grab a pump on one side of the building, forcing me to move to the other side of the building, another woman engaged me in conversation as the gasoline flowed into our vehicles.

Said woman professed surprise the stores were not more crowded, what with the bad storm coming and all that.

She alluded to the predictable rush to stores for bread, milk and toilet paper once the weather porn types overhype an approaching storm, or “event” as they seem to prefer.

Well, this event was nowhere near as bad as predicted. And yet my wife still was eager to get the latest misinformation from the local NBC outlet’s noon report.

To get to the weather, we had to sit through an anchor for whom English seems to be her second language. She spoke of a Central Pennsylvania contractor Leonard S. Fiore, only she pronounced it LEE-ON-HARD where most would say LEN-ARD.

Later, there was a story of an “18th-month-old” child. Most I know would say 18-month-old, but why quibble?

At last it was weather time. There were no apologies for having blown the call, no promises to do better moving forward.

Instead, the rain/snow event was glossed over, as in it had “cleared out” and we were in store for a “nice” afternoon and tomorrow.

“Quiet weather” was another term tossed around — presumably birds would be silent, as would be children and otherwise noisy constituencies.

The quiet weather actually had begun much earlier than they had predicted in their noise of yesterday, which is how it goes in the weather porn game. To paraphrase the catch phrase from the movie “Love Story,” weather means you never have to say you’re sorry.