Maybe you’ve noticed gold and silver prices rising the past week and change, but likely you have not.

These two precious metals, with silver also being an extremely widely used industrial metal, operate in an investment netherworld as far as the general public and conventional business/financial cable networks are concerned.

When gold or silver are mentioned on these cable venues, it’s often in a snarky way. This happened twice already this week on CNBC’s daily wrapup show Fast Money.

There was a guest host sitting in one day, this being a day on which gold and silver had risen notably. So, the show deigned to slip in a segment on gold. The regular host returned a day later and did the same reluctant acknowledgement of positive gold price action.

In the guest host example, one of the regular panelists noted early on that he knows she “hates” gold, which she did not deny.

What followed was the usual litany of trite laments about gold not having a dividend, not producing earnings, and being reliant as an investment merely on price appreciation, or depreciation of a competing asset in the form of national currencies.

Of course most of the same things can be said for your house, in spades, yet these investment shows regularly devote copious amounts of time to real estate. The family home is hailed positively as the cornerstone of the average family’s net worth.

Still, just like gold, your personal residence does not produce income if you live in it, does not pay a dividend, actually costs you money to use it in the form of real estate taxes, homeowners insurance and even utility payments.

It was ironic that Mrs. I Hate Gold was displaying her disdain for the precious metal shortly after the show had run a segment on Bitcoin, the crypto currency that has no yield, no earnings and relies on price appreciation to reward investors. But no such snarkiness existed on that segment.

Bitcoin is sexy and attracts viewership despite the fact it trades just a little above half of its all-time high of $68,798 per “coin.” Bitcoin is not a coin, but instead a digital entry on a computer. Repeat, there is no tangible coin, although the symbol for Bitcoin often is a gold coin with a B and dollar-sign-like vertical lines running through it.

Allow me to emphasize that this all transpired on CNBC, which is a font of investment misinformation.

A key dispenser of same is Jim Cramer, whose show follows Fast Money on week nights. Cramer is often wrong, but never in doubt.

His most infamous boner of advice came on March 8, 2008, in the midst of what now is known as the Great Financial Crisis. Cramer went on a rant – his favorite shtick along with sound effects – to lecture viewership that financial company Bear Stearns was solid.

A viewer had written asking this sage’s advice on the whether or not he should be concerned about Bear Stearns and withdraw his money.

Responded Cramer, according to transcripts you still can find easily on the internet: “No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine. Do not take your money out.”

The rant continued and ended with Cramer advising the guy not to be “silly” by withdrawing his money.

Bear Stearns stock at the time traded at $62 a share. It was bailed out just five days later by the financial firm JP Morgan Chase for, wait for it, $2 a share.

Bear Stearns was anything but fine.

Gold had traded early on March 8, 2011, at $1425 an ounce. As I write this sentence, 8:02 a.m. Thursday Nov. 30, 2023, it’s trading at $2,038.30, down 4.30 in overnight trading.

Clearly, buying gold then would have been better than Bear Stearns stock, but you’d have been unlikely to get that message on CNBC.

CNBC worships at the feet of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, the later having died yesterday. They are/were investment legends, that CNBC loves in part because of their shared hatred of gold, branding it a pet rock and something one might need to sew in their garments if they were Jews during the holocaust, but clearly not an investment.

Yet Central Banks, the national concerns such as our own Federal Reserve, hold large amounts of gold and have been adding to it at record rates in these troubled financial times.

That number was 800 tons of gold purchased through the first nine months of this year, up 14 percent year-over-year according to the World Gold Council.

Gold is financial insurance, an asset that is not dependent on the financial health of some third party such as bonds and shares of stock rely on the strength of the issuing company (Bear Stearns!) or a currency, which relies on the stability of the issuing nation.

Gold has been wealth for thousands of years. China and Russia, among others, are buying gold to isolate themselves from being under the thumb of the U.S. dollar, the current world reserve currency.

There are many in the financial community (ones unlikely to show up on CNBC) who predict a dire future for the U.S. dollar due to our nation’s fiscal overreach and, by consequence, a good future for gold.

This also would be good for silver, gold’s poor cousin. The argument is made that silver would provide even more upside leverage, considering it now trades at around $25 an ounce, roughly half of all-time highs of approximately $50 previously hit in 1980 and 2011.

Declining interest rates, as the Fed tries to keep the economy going in 2024, should lead to a lower dollar and higher gold and silver.

That’s the way I’m betting. But I’m no financial expert, so you shouldn’t attempt to mirror me.

Better to wait for Cramer’s next Bear Stearns moment.

Throughout many of my working years I’ve been part of unions — for better or worse — and I’ve too often seen that union workers have about as much to fear from their union sisters and brothers as from the company.

It matters not whether it’s USW (steelworkers), UAW (autoworkers), CWA (communications workers), NEA (teachers), AFGE (government employees), or any of the other alphabet soup acronyms for unions, all are part of a governing group IGMFU (I got mine, f – – – you).

Companies sometimes use this union infighting to their advantage in negotiations. The two-tier pay scale is a familiar tactic, offering existing employees a raise and the opportunity to remain on the existing scale, but with the agreement that any additional employees come onboard on a lower rate of pay scale – permanently.

Too often current membership, with dollar signs in their eyes, take the money. Down the line, however, when newer employees on the lower scale outnumber those on the higher scale, companies love to propose a mammoth raise for those oppressed “new” employees if only they could get rid of the higher scale for the oldsters.

Traditionally these offers are accepted in a heartbeat. IGMFU, or karma is a female dog.

Seniority is a mainstay of unions, basically dictating long-term people have more job security in the event of layoffs than the recently hired. Nothing wrong with that.

However, seniority also very often is a cudgel used by me-first union types to get all they can at the expense and inconvenience of fellow members. A person hired literally one day before you can use seniority for preferred shifts, days off, holidays off, vacations, job descriptions, assignments, etc.

Ability, personal need, are not a part of this union calculus.

My union experience began early while at the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. The business writer thought the newsroom should be union, as the composing room and press room were at that time. He began organizing, working with the USW since Johnstown still was a steelmaking town.

At the time, management gave the newsroom staff the same wages and benefits that the union types had negotiated, but there was no guarantee this would continue forever.

Customarily, newspaper editorial employees back then were represented by the Newspaper Guild, which since has been folded into the CWA (Communication Workers of America).

The International Typographical Union (ITU, also since merged with CWA), which represented composing room employees at the Tribune-Democrat, cried foul and demanded a chance to represent the newsroom since that union already was in the building.

The vote outcome, ironically, came down to me. I always was confident in my abilities and felt comfortable succeeding or failing on my merits. But union organizers lobbied me hard and, in the end, I felt although it might not necessarily benefit me, I’d vote yes for the good of all.

Not that long afterward, when the newspaper underwent its first sale to chain ownership (read: cutting costs to the bone, product be damned) I was glad I’d voted union, thereby avoiding arbitrary firings, pay cuts, and benefit losses.

We were protected by our existing contract. That’s held true through many, many ownership changes and contracts at the paper since I left in 1994.

And, in the end, that’s why unions were created in the first place, to give the employees the opportunity to negotiate on a united front for fair pay, benefits and working conditions.

But, too often unions are highjacked. Government employees and teachers unions increasingly are politics-first, dependent on the bottomless public purse to provide comparatively good pay and benefits, not to mention virtual lifelong job security.

By comparison, private companies – a good local example would be defunct Bethlehem Steel – must pay the economic piper eventually when they provide union employees with overly lucrative pay and benefits for the jobs performed. They can, and do, go bankrupt.

Governments and school systems do not have that economic reality weighing on them, which is why when I was younger there were not unions for public employees. The thinking was that the workers might make a bit less money than those in the private sector, but they more than made up for it in terms of generous benefits and job security.

President John F. Kennedy changed that with an executive order in 1962, beginning an inexorable, state-by-state march to our current politicized public employees unions, allowing these union members essentially the right to hold the taxpaying public hostage.

These public employees now tend to make more money than comparable private sector employees, have better benefits and better job security, all of which they can insure with their political activism, almost 100 percent for Democrats.

This is good for them, but bad for the rest of us. It also helps explain why overall union membership as a percentage of the workforce is in decline, falling to an overall 10.1 percent in 2022 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Also from the BLS, 33.1 percent of public sector employees are union, while just 6 percent of private-sector workers are in a union.

Karma is a female dog.

Even an activity as seemingly innocuous as a neighborhood walk can turn into an exercise bracketed by buffoonery.

Allow me to explain.

The wife was back from her walk Sunday. The granddaughters were planning on watching a Christmas movie with their daddy. I needed to get in a few miles myself.

So, I left my house at about 4:43 p.m. and couldn’t even get off the block before encountering the first bit of annoyance. A group of late-teen boys (at least I think they were boys, but I apologize in advance if some of them were gender-confused girls) turned onto the street and dispersed in the kind of spread-across-the-sidewalk pattern favored by would-be toughs.

Think of it as a game of pedestrian chicken, to see who will veer out of the way and avoid contact.

All were at least as tall as me, but also considerably thinner. Visions of bowling pins filled my brain as I kept walking. When they realized I wasn’t deferring to them and shuffling onto the grass, two of them yielded to their right, falling in behind the others.

Just before I got to them, one uttered “Good evening,” to which I replied, “Hello.”

They continued walking, as did I. But, while still within earshot, one offered, likely for my benefit, “We oughta rob that guy.”

Replied I: “Go for it, baby!”

No takers.

And so it goes.

The years have taught me attitude is important. If you act scared, you embolden people to press you.

Allow me to share one incident.

I was new to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in November 1994 when I covered a Steelers game with the Los Angeles Raiders in the L.A. Coliseum.

After the game, I had ridden down the press box elevator and begun walking to meet a cab that I had called when two security guys in yellow windbreakers said they would walk me to my car.

“It’s going to be a long walk,” I told them. “My car is parked at the Pittsburgh airport.”

They decided they’d guard me while I awaited the cab. But, when we got to the street separating the Coliseum from the LA Sports Arena (a basketball arena since torn down) there was a California Highway Patrol car parked in front of the arena with its motor idling.

The security guys felt I’d be OK as long as he was there, but they left with the warning “If someone jumps you, try to make a lot of noise, knock over garbage cans or something, so we’ll hear you.”

Within minutes, a guy hit me up for $5 for a deposit to borrow jumper cables from a garage.

I told him no way, and shortly thereafter another guy wanted to borrow $5 to make a long distance phone call. Remember, this was 1994 so there still were phone booths and the like. He would return my money once his ride arrived following the call.

Feeling a bit mischievous, I told him that I’d called a cab and didn’t know from which direction it would come. I asked him if he was a betting kind of guy, then offered to give him first pick. If he was right, I’d give him the $5. If I was right, he’d owe me $5.

I still recalled the baffled look on his face, which remained until the cab driver pulled up (from my right for those of you keeping score at home) with his driver’s door in front of me, reached behind to open the rear door and ordered me in — immediately if not sooner.

As we sped away, he scolded me. He said I was an idiot to be standing around in that neighborhood when I clearly didn’t belong.

I told him something along the line of I didn’t suspect he could get his cab up the elevator, so I didn’t have much choice

There are other walking/standing tales in my memory banks, but we’re running long here so I’ll save them for another time.

The punctuation on tonight was more more typical neighborhood fare. As I bent over on my front steps to unlace my shoes at walk’s end, one of the youthful neighbors arrived home and perhaps spotted me lingering. In the past he has been an annoyance due to he and his friends mistakenly thinking they have fast vehicles simply because they can deposit a bit of rubber on the street.

Perhaps for my benefit, he power-braked his pickup truck to a pathetically brief driveway burnout before giving up on it all.

I kind of felt sorry for the guy.

Thanksgiving Day 2023 dawned sunny and chilly in Johnstown.

The traditional turkey has given way to lasagna in the Ross household this year, for reasons both curious and tortured. But family will gather nonetheless and enjoy part of the holiday together.

No doubt many of you will perform similar rites today – with turkey, not lasagna, as the centerpiece.

Here’s one man’s list of the many blessings for which residents of the Greater Johnstown area might wish to give thanks today.

We ought to be grateful to State Rep. Frank Burns and others who exposed the secretive plans of Myopia 2025 before we were knee-deep in unvetted Afghan refugees to add to our ongoing Philly problem.

Perhaps the attention of Burns kept the Myopia people from casting their net to pull in similar mystery people from Ukraine or the Gaza Strip with a “trust us, we will check to make sure they won’t be undesirables” disclaimer.

Southmont residents can give thanks that the Dahlia Street trailer infestation has been eliminated.

Steelers fans in this area — and they are legion — might pause to thank the NFL gods for gifting their team with a pathetically easy schedule, made even more so by the reality they now twice will play a Cincinnati team soldiering on without star quarterback Joe Burrow due to his season-ending wrist injury. NFL legend Tom Brady was talking the other day about NFL mediocrity and the poster team for that is the Steelers, who easily could finish 12-5 and dash (not far) into the playoffs with an offense that thinks hitting double digits in scoring is a watershed event.

Along that line, Steelers fans can be grateful that the organization bid adieu to offensive coordinator Matt Canada.

Penn State fans can be grateful their guys won’t have to lose again to Ohio State and Michigan – until next season.

Pitt fans can rejoice in the reality that only one more game – and potential loss – remains in what already is a miserable 3-8 season.

Fans of Johnstown’s Central Park supposedly should be grateful about the latest plan at revitalizing downtown, that being to pave over most of the green space, throw out traditional statues and monuments, and string a few thousand more lights in the futile pursuit of retail re-invigoration.

People wanting to flee the area should celebrate their opportunity to sell out at unrealistically high real estate prices that continue to levitate despite mortgage interest rates that have more than doubled in the past year and change.

Most of all, we can celebrate that despite the efforts of our elite masters to worsen the place, this still is a relatively good area in which to live, just not nearly as good as it was, say, 40 or 50 years back.

Argentina has elected a Trump-like personage as its president, leaving political pundits to wonder what it all means.

The new Argentinian president is Javier Milei, a showman who ran with a chainsaw as a prop, symbolizing that he’d cut government spending.

Milei considers the current Pope a “filthy leftist,” thinks redistributing wealth is a violent act, decries climate change rhetoric as a “lie of socialists,” and won’t deal with China because he doesn’t cut deals with Communists.

Milei also is anti-abortion and wants to end Central Banks, the unelected, all-powerful bodies that run monetary policy in many nations, including our own United States.

A guy such as Milei can come to power because the Woke policies of his many predecessors have turned a formerly successful country into a basket case.

Only Libya has posted more years of negative economic growth since 1951 (29) than has Argentina (25).

This is Argentina, with an abundance of natural resources and a formerly productive population – until the leftists dismantled the economy. Sound familiar?

Our home-grown leftists have been on a multi-decade hate America campaign. They’ve come to dominate education, government bureaucracy, courts and other aspects of this nation that once upon a time could be counted on to enforce the rule of law and stress its importance.

Instead, today we have blatant bias in the justice system. We have Woke dominance in education. We have bureaucrats who believe it is their duty to resist a ruling, duly elected political party with whom they do not agree philosophically.

The current strategy of the Democratic Party regarding Donald Trump is to persecute him in the courts and if that doesn’t work, simply legislate him away by denying him the opportunity to run again for President.

This is what happens when polls indicate the cold bowl of mush you have as an incumbent president losing in key battleground states, as well as on generic nationwide ballot polls.

Democrats, when they take a break from hyperventilating about saving democracy, are actively seeking to destroy it.

It chills them to the soles of their tapdancing feet when a populist such as Milei wins a national election and reminds them how the Trump message just might produce a similar result here – unless enough suitcases full of ballots can be ginned up and run through scanners after poll observers have been sent home for the night.

In the heighth of arrogance, Biden and his handlers have embarked on a campaign to proclaim the greatness of Bidenonomics and brand those who might disagree with its success as just being too stupid to realize how well they are doing.

It is this kind of elitism – think Marie-Antoinette inviting hungry French peasants to eat cake – that leads to major upheavals.

It happened this week in Argentina, prompting radical leftists to worry it might happen here, too.

Opposing public demonstrations regarding the ongoing Hamas-Israel strife provide a revealing window into not only the supporters of each side, but also how the media cover these events.

Hamas supporters tend to be destructive, belligerent, offensive. Witness handprints in red paint placed at places including the White House, to symbolize blood on the hands of Israel and its supporters. Public places and memorials similarly were defaced by pro-Hamas types. The call, either outright or implied for the extermination of Jews is a staple of these events

Just Wednesday, the headquarters of the DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE in Washington, D.C. came under siege by a mob of pro-Hamas types, requiring an evacuation of the area and police intervention in what an account of the event described as “chaotic.”

That turnout was estimated at 150 by NBCnews.com, citing U.S. Capitol Police.

Contrast that with the scene earlier in the week, when a pro-Israel rally brought mammoth crowds (more on this later) to Washington D.C., to support the Israeli cause.

No violence. No arrests. No damage to public property. The people showed up, many draped in Israeli or American Flags, or both. They listened to speakers, which included both Republicans and Democrats. They cheered. They waved signs.

I saw footage of the crowd and was impressed by the size.

Some news organizations, perhaps with an agenda to push, didn’t seem willing to cite specifics of crowd size.

A report from APnews.com headlined “tens of thousands of supporters.”

On CBSnews.com, the headline was “huge crowd” and the first words of the story were “A large crowd.”

Perhaps CBS, knowing full well video of the rally would be available, chose to use vague terms that could be interpreted however the reader chose and thereby refrain from pinning itself down with misleading terminology.

When it came to using numbers, the CBS story deferred to figures from “organizers.” Those “organizers” reportedly had estimated beforehand that 60,000 might attend but, after witnessing the actual turnout, estimated in all 290,000 had participated.

I’m not an expert, but based on footage I’ve seen, it was closer to 290,000 than to 60,000. Remember, in events such as this, people come and go, so a peak attendance at any particular time doesn’t necessarily reflect total participation.

Technically, AP was correct. There were tens of thousands present. But 20,000 is tens of thousands. So is one million. Which description more accurately captures the scene?

Back to the original premise of this post, those who protest for Hamas reveal themselves as having questionable awareness, warped judgment and a general inability to control themselves so as to act in a civilized fashion, sort of like the people they support.

This a significant reality that should be included in any calculus regarding the relative merits of opposing positions of this conflict.

Today we write of cycles, both the sort easily observed and those of longer duration that aren’t readily noted, but are obvious if you care to look closely.

The transition from fall to winter is unfolding in these parts, part of the annual cyclical rotation most of us are aware of and accept as inevitable. I was discussing this the other day with granddaughter No. 3, calling to her attention the difference between official dates for the start of seasons and the practical approximate timing of things such as the arrival of cold and snow in November, or warmth and better weather in April.

But, there are longer term cycles that play out over varying time frames, regarding bigger issues. Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev was part of the Soviet government in the 1920s, doing research that was supposed to prove that capitalist societies must ultimately fail. By extension, communism would be eternal.

When Kondratiev instead identified long-term cycles in free-market economies lasting anywhere from 40 to 60 years that showed capitalism successively going from expansion, to stagnation, to recession, and back to expansion, he was identifying capitalism as being self-cleansing and therefore not doomed to failure.

These cycles were named Kondratiev Waves in his honor.

While Kondratiev was renowned outside Russian, his socialist bosses didn’t approve of his message. He was arrested and eventually executed.

Investors often use waves in their technical analysis of when to buy or sell. A favorite tool for them are Elliott Waves, the creation of R.N. Elliott. This work replies on so-called fractals, patterns of similar appearance, but of varying degree.

A large component of Elliott Wave analysis is the use of Fibonacci ratios. These are derived from Fibonacci sequences in which each succeeding number is the sum of the previous two. Example: 0-1-1-2-3-5-8.

Social scientists also have their cyclical analysis, identifying repetitive ebbs and flows of the public mood based on generations. Perhaps you have heard of the generational turning work of Strauss and Howe.

They identify recurring patterns of The High, The Awakening, The Unraveling and The Crisis, each of a duration approximating 20 years. The timing is based on the average life expectancy of humans and how we behave differently at varying stages of our lives. At any given time, one generation is dominant and sets the tone.

Proponents of this methodology believe we are currently in a crisis turning period, similar to that endured from the Great Depression of the late 1920s through the post-World War II period of the late 1940s.

These people cite wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the great financial crisis of 2008 and the unsteadiness since, general social tension around the world and our domestic tension in which basic concepts of good and evil are diametrically opposite depending on political affiliation.

Zerohedge posted a story yesterday that began by identifying a time of such strife, breakdown of political, religious and social institutions and a general sense of despair over rapid change, not necessarily for the better.

The story quoted from was written in 1974.

History does repeat, both good and bad. The story went on to highlight the work of another social scientist, Peter Turchin, whose 50-year cycles begin with people finding ways to agree and cooperate and devolve into them being unable to find consensus on almost anything.

Sound familiar?

The hope to be found in cyclical work is that better times eventually return. But, at a certain point, the matter becomes whether one will be around long enough to welcome them.

We come to praise Penn State coach James Franklin, not to bury him.

Give the guy credit for taking the mystery out of the PSU football seasons. You know before the first kickoff that Penn State will beat the riffraff of the Big Ten, dispose of nondescript nonconference opponents (this year West Virginia, Delaware and UMass), and then be beaten by Ohio State and Michigan.

The only mystery is how demoralizing and emphatic those losses to the Buckeyes and Wolverines will be.

Saturday’s 24-15 Michigan win at Beaver Stadium was a particularly telling example of the Franklin shortcomings, which prompted booing of him during the game and some heated commentary directed at him as he left the field that was captured and relayed on social media.

The Big Ten tried to gift wrap this one for Penn State, sneakily deciding to suspend Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh Friday.

Anyone in the media knows these late Friday afternoon news dumps are specifically designed to minimize coverage. In this case, as alleged by Michigan hierarchy, it also was timed to leave little legal recourse since it was a court holiday.

For those living under the proverbial rock, Michigan has been accused of illegally scouting opponents before games to steal their play signals. I have read stories that Harbaugh is said to have been cleared by the NCAA of knowing about this act, which supposedly was performed by a rogue staffer.

Said staffer has quit and the NCAA investigation continues. But the Big Ten, appearing to bow to whining from the conference masses, decided to frontrun the NCAA and suspend Harbaugh from coaching games for the remainder of the regular season.

Many neutral observers felt this action was heavy-handed at best. That included college football analyst Booger McFarland.

Speaking on the halftime show of a Clemson-Georgia Tech game, being broadcast at the same time as Michigan was running Penn State into the turf, McFarland said, “It sure seems like they are coming down really harsh on Michigan right now, especially timing a Friday news dump, late on Friday, the team has already flown to Happy Valley, on a holiday, knowing the court system quote-unquote can’t get involved, just seems like they’re kind of out to get Michigan.”

You think?

As one social media wag noted, Franklin was outcoached by a team without a coach. Actually, Michigan did have an acting head coach, Sherrone Moore.

Moore presided over a Michigan offense that didn’t have an official pass attempt in the second half (one pass try resulted in interference by Penn State, which negated the attempt statistically).

Michigan became the first Big Ten team to go an entire half without a pass attempt since 2013.

The Wolverines didn’t need to pass. All the they did was torch the Penn State run defense, which had been ranked first nationally, for 227 yards and three touchdowns in the game.

Maybe PSU defensive coordinator Manny Diaz should have been toughening up his guys instead of taking to social media to post a video of him using hand signals telling fans to show up and be loud, an obvious dig at Michigan’s alleged signal stealing.

During the game, at least one PSU defender was seen feigning using binoculars and then writing down something on an imaginary notepad.

Again, maybe that effort would have been better put to use manning up in the second half and not allowing Michigan to run the ball down the throats and out the rectums of Penn State’s defenders.

In the final analysis, Franklin lived down to his coaching reputation. No surprise there. His Penn State teams are 4-16 combined vs. Ohio State and Michigan, have lost 13 of their past 14 games vs. AP Top 10 teams, are 3-17 vs. such opposition in his career at Penn State and are just a puny 2-8 in those games when his Penn State teams also were in the Top 10.

Someday, Franklin, who seems to have a lifetime job guarantee, will again coach Penn State to victory against either Ohio State or Michigan and the chrome dome can be counted on to celebrate madly. All he would need to do after that would be win 11 more consecutive matchups with them and he’d be back to .500 vs. the Big Ten powers!

I voted today, the latest installment of hope triumphing over experience.

There were no national races; little on a statewide basis, either. But there were local contests and some state judiciary positions that merited attention.

The weather was good. The people milling around outside the polling place boosting their candidates were pleasant. Interestingly, more than one person I spoke with referred to voting despite the general feeling of helplessness to do anything to stop the rapid decline of the nation.

Again, no options on my ballot would address national issues. But this general feeling of voting out of habit, without expecting positive change, speaks to despair among the masses, specifically conservatives.

Here in tiny Southmont Borough, there were several contests for borough council, a thankless task on many levels, including the verbal abuse received at monthly meetings.

Most of the candidates were familiar faces. One newcomer joined the fray, a neighbor of mine. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for him since he goes by one last name on things like ballots, and another on social media.

I asked him about this several weeks back and got what I considered a non-answer.

I went with the incumbents and it wasn’t merely because the leaf collectors were out and about today after a hiatus due to broken equipment. That equipment, a glorified vacuum cleaner for leaves, still is said to be broken. This left collection to be done with rakes, shovels, a backhoe and a truck.

Incumbents also largely got my vote for Westmont Hilltop School Board positions.

Once again, I voted for Tom Chernisky for Cambria County Commissioner, and not because you can’t read a newspaper, watch a TV broadcast, or try to look up car ads on social media without seeing his smiling face.

Chernisky is a Democrat and I’m a Republican, but unlike most Democrats I know, I am willing to vote for someone in the other party if they are the best option.

I didn’t vote for Chernisky’s running mate, nor for the incumbent Republican. We could use some legitimate political diversity, not just someone identifying as a Republican while voting Democratic.

Along that line, it is disappointing that so many candidates have cross-filed and carry both Republican and Democrat credentials.

The choice for Cambria County District Attorney was simple. Incumbent Greg Neugebauer, having both the Republican and Democratic nods, was the only choice, other than writing in someone. But I think Neugebauer is doing a good job, so it was easy to pick him.

Ads for Neugebauer pop up almost anywhere I go on the Internet, even today. Greg, you could have saved some money and still won – that’s presuming you are going to win.

Court positions, once not a high-profile part of the ballot, have become so due to radical far-left judges beginning to take it upon themselves to turn their courtrooms into political operations.

It’s happening nationally and in many states. I don’t want it happening in Cambria County, so I voted for conservative picks here.

As for state-wide posts, I voted to install or keep conservative judges and oust a left-winger.

While departing the polling place, I stopped outside and signed a petition calling for less gerrymandering, the political setup of voting districts specifically to favor one party or another.

Upon coming home, I did some more research. I’ve seen some give and take on the group, Fair Districts Pa. Having gone to its web site, a red flag went up when they acknowledged a significant out-of-state contribution from the Ben and Jerry’s Employee Foundation. The ice cream gurus are somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders on the political spectrum, and have the same state, Vermont, as their home base.

If Ben and Jerry and Bernie are associated with it, run the other way.

I’m confident my signature on the petition won’t do much harm. I’d certainly never vote for any of their progressive claptrap mislabeled as nonpartisan.

I can only imagine what election day is going to be like next year. Will Clueless Joe survive his own party’s plans to dump him? Will Donald Trump be stuck in legal purgatory and unable to run?

Will Republican election observers be barred from proceedings, and/or sent home only to have massive suitcases full of ballots pulled from under tables and run through scanners? Will there be another manufactured scare to mandate voting by mail?

Most of all, will people accept the outcome of our next major election? Spoiler alert: No.

One local television station used to have a ridiculous format for its news intro that went something like this: Nuclear war breaks out, Johnstown decimated by fire, but the big news tonight is the annual Centre County Grange Fair opens tomorrow.

It was a quintessential example of pushing narrative and misplacing emphasis.

Along that line, as I write this, there are Queers for Palestine signs showing up at pro-Hamas protests even though Hamas would kill all queers, Kamala Harris has a stepdaughter who has helped raise $8 million for Hamas, police have debunked a claim that a person draped in an Israeli flag attacked a Muslim student of the University of North Carolina, and Secretary of State Antony Blinked reportedly is urging Israel to use “smaller bombs.”

But the big news is Clueless Joe Biden is pitching war in Ukraine and the Middle East as good for the U.S. economy because we make so many of the weapons being expended there. He specifically cited Pennsylvania for making artillery shells.

I hold Biden blameless for this latest shilling. It’s become clear, as he inadvertently reads out loud instructions to him on his teleprompter, or needs to refer to cheat sheets to identify friendly media members to call upon for questions, that Biden is a hollow shell.

But this pitching of war as economic development is a new low for his handlers.

Like most leftist proposals, it makes sense only if you don’t bother to think about it.

In their particular case, Biden’s ghost writers are invoking a falsehood familiar to anyone who has taken an Economics 101 course, that being the broken window fallacy.

The construct is attributed to a 19^th century French economist, Frederic Bastiat, who created the story of a boy breaking a window of his father’s. In thinking that will ring true with typical leftists – the same people who believe borrowing trillions to waste on handouts is productive economics – gullible townspeople decide the kid was merely stimulating the economy by breaking the window.

They argue that a repair person would need to be paid to fix the window. Said person then would have more income to spend on other activities. And so on and so forth. The money would ripple through the local economy, with a multiplier effect. That’s how our local spinmeisters used to be able to gin up a $20 million estimate of the economic impact from Thunder in the Valley.

The fallacy of the breakage-for-economic-growth thinking, as pointed out by Bastiat, is that one also must consider other costs. The father would need to spend money on the window that he might have spent on other, more productive things. Also, the father incurred a time cost, needing to attend to the matter of arranging the window repair instead of working or being otherwise productive.

Further, replacing an existing window merely balanced out the value of the building and the town’s true value. It was a maintenance cost, which should be considered as such, not economic growth.

Biden’s puppeteers are not the first to invoke this broken window fallacy to justify armed conflict, nor will they be the last.

But it does smack of desperation, on par with the plaintive pleas from Zelenskyy not to forget Ukraine in this fresh emphasis on Israel.

As long as the U.S. is borrowing money at a ridiculous rate, Zelenskyy figures he, too, should be getting a huge slice of the handouts, until the money spigot is closed. You want broken windows? He will break millions of them.

Here’s a simple question for all these people pushing broken windows/or wars, as beneficial economically. If breaking one window, or supplying munitions for one war, is good, does it not follow that breaking all windows and having the world devolve into World War III would be even better?

That’s one question I’d love to hear answered.