While making my daily Facebook perusal (using my son’s account since I have none personally) I happened on spirited give and take today between John DeBartola and Scott Hunt, two candidates for Cambria County Commissioner.

Having previously written here of my plans to vote for DeBartola and Joseph Taranto in the upcoming primary election, I was mildly interested and amused.

It took me back to my days playing online poker – when it was legal – and experiences with the chat function on those sites. Some players used the chat opportunity to offer the obligatory congratulation NH (nice hand) or to chit-chat between actions.

Others used it as a tool to get under the skins of opposing players, to get them off their game. And some were just random fools eager to argue anything and everything.

Often, I’d minimize the chat window to avoid distraction. But sometimes, when I was feeling puckish (a reference to being playfully mischievous, not feeling like a hockey disc) I would spar verbally.

I once had a stupid fellow go all-in preflop with 7-2, the absolute worst starting hand in Texas hold’em poker. I had pocket aces (the best hand), went all-in myself, and eventually lost when he ended up with two pair, 7s and 2’s.

I was about 87 percent to win preflop, but lost. It happens. But the moron used chat to chastise me for a bad call, saying he had more outs, the three remaining 7’s and three 2’s in the deck vs. my two remaining aces.

It didn’t register with this guy that I already was way ahead and he needed to hit two of those six possible outs to win, and so was a massive underdog when the money went into the pot.

His response, symptomatic of such chat warriors, was “Your a moron.”

My reply was that since he’d written the possessive “Your a moron” instead of the proper contraction “You’re (as in you are) a moron” this indicated which of us truly was the moron.

Back to Facebook, and the exchange of candidate countercharges, ranging from backroom dealings and “non truth” to sexual orientation: At one point Hunt signed off with “I’ve spoke my peace. Have a great day, John.”

I’m not sure about which allegations are true. I am sure it should have been “spoken” as in present perfect tense and piece, not peace.

As you were, guys.

While growing up in Johnstown, the stock line used to be that we were 10 years or so behind the times on most societal issues.

This was not necessarily a bad thing when the issues were burgeoning crime rates, violent protests or the cost of living– particularly real estate prices.

But it could be argued that Johnstown circa 2023 is the tip of the spear, a microcosm of how the begging bowl economy must end badly both on a local and national level.

To paraphrase the Margaret Thatcher quote, socialism works only until you run out of somebody else’s money to spend.

The City of Johnstown, and our area in general, has been a quintessential example of spending other people’s money– seldom wisely. Government handouts from the federal and state levels came to be an integral part of the economy.

The recent death of former Congressman Bud Shuster was a reminder of how it could have been done better here. Shuster used his influence in the U.S. House of Representatives to bring upgraded roads to Blair, Bedford and Centre Counties and helped turn Altoona into a transportation hub.

So what? So this. It’s a reason Amazon is locating a new warehouse delivery center in Altoona, not in Johnstown, which still relies on cowpaths to main interstates.

All the area tourism proponents might consider how better access to the area might help that cause.

As Shuster was leaving permanent infrastructure as his legacy, Johnstown’s pork brought home by the late Congressman John Murtha went largely to bringing in government operations that have left, or are leaving, now that he’s gone. Anyone recall the Drug Intelligence Center, among others?

But Shuster’s roads stayed open for travel even after he departed and provided critical infrastructure to spur economic development.

If only Johnstown had back all the money wasted thought the years on empowerment and raising awareness programs, money that produced nothing of permanence.

And the handout money is in the process of disappearing. When Johnstown shakes the begging bowl, it finds itself competing with the likes of Zelenskyy, always seeking more money to fight NATO’s proxy war with Russia.

Somehow, despite the U.S. bumping against the federal borrowing limit, billions can be found to funnel to Zelenskyy with little if any oversight. This lack of control somehow fails to recognize Ukraine’s well-earned reputation for corruption.

The U.S. has admitted debt of $31.4 trillion, which ignores future obligations to Social Security and Medicare. According to the Peterson Foundation, we spend more than $1.3 billion A DAY to pay interest on this debt.

If the $31.4-trillion debt was stacks of one dollar bills, it would be nearly equivalent to eight copies of the 110-story Willis Tower of Chicago.

The COVID stimulus payments gave consumers temporary liquidity reprieves even as it added to the national debt, big-time. That stimulus money, coupled with many being stuck at home and unable to spend, led to a historic bump in savings.

Those savings now are all but exhausted, leaving a demand-fueled price inflation that lasts long after the money has been spent. Despite depleted savings, consumers continue to spend at their accelerated rate. That has led to a rise in credit card borrowing and an explosion in separate buy now, pay later programs from retailers.

A Bloomberg report cited 70 percent of consumers in some degree of financial stress. That’s significant since the consumer is roughly 70 percent of the domestic economy.

Cracks in the economy are becoming evident.

We had some bank failures last month, due to poor management in dealing with rising interest rates.

Bankruptcy rates are rising throughout the economy.

Layoffs are mounting and commercial real estate, hit by the double whammy of less demand due to stay-at-home workers and rising costs due to higher interest rates, is in dire straits.

Tax revenue is falling and so debt must increase to fund spending. It’s a fatal fiscal Catch-22.

And when the Feds and state governments have less money on hand, there is less to dispense to the Begging Bowl economies such as Johnstown’s.

We’re not necessarily at the end of this bastardized economic system, but you can see the end from here.

The mounting behavioral ills of Johnstown, and of this nation writ large, can be explained by the Broken Windows Theory.

Said theory, the brainchild of social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling that was put forth in an 1982 article, observed that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder (broken windows on buildings for example) prompt more behavior of an undesirable kind.

Similarly, when bad behavior in general is tolerated and not punished, it serves as a catalyst for more bad behavior.

Ride herd on the small stuff and you get less of that, not to mention less big crime.

Just this week, a Cambria County vehicle, one of the silver ones with blue lettering, opted to park on the side of my street that is clearly marked as no parking. There was space available in the driveway where the car had stopped. There were legal parking spaces available on the other side of the street. This is not downtown New York City! The driver just opted to be a scofflaw.

Within moments, another car sped up the street, pulled a U-turn, and parked on the illegal side, too. The woman got out of her car, lugged a case of bottled water out of the back seat, and deposited it on the front porch of a neighbor, finishing by taking the obligatory cell phone picture showing the goods had been delivered.

I had just returned home from picking up a granddaughter from preschool, and parked – imagine this – legally. But cars coming down the street, first a resident and then the mail delivery guy, both had to swerve around the illegally parked cars and near the side of my car from which I was trying to get my granddaughter

I waited for the traffic to pass and then gave my granddaughter an object lesson on how rude, self-centered boors make life a little more difficult for the rest of us. At four years of age, she’d better get used to this sort of existence, which is very much unlike what I had experienced growing up.

It’s not like things were perfect when I was young. It’s just that the legal system, schools, parents, did their best to keep a lid on things.

As a 1973 graduate of Greater Johnstown High School, and a product of that school district with stops at various elementary schools and Cochran Junior High, I encountered lot of bad actors along the way; just domestically produced, not imported on the Section 8 railway.

Acquaintances from the old neighborhood who fell into the ne’er-do-well category were generically labeled by me as the Neighborhood Hoods. I knew a guy who later killed a man in Florida. My brother, who tended to run with a rougher crowd, had a close acquaintance who killed a cab driver in Woodvale — blew his head off with a shotgun, allegedly by accident in a robbery gone bad.

I knew plenty of people who ended up in jail for drug or burglary charges, maybe both. We had one fellow student shot to death within the river walls in the Eighth Ward after unsuccessfully trying to burglarize a car dealership.

An older brother of some friends did hard time for helping rob the old Riverside Market (where Team Kia is currently in Richland) back when that store did big business cashing paychecks for customers.

Another fellow student, with the stereotypical creepy look enhanced by Coke bottle lenses in his glasses, was an arsonist. Yet another got thrown out of Johnstown Vo-Tech for having dynamite, was returned to Johnstown High School, and for a time had a locker next to mine.

And kids these days think people making snarky comments about them on social media is tough duty!

The point is, these people were punished and kept in line, often in the good old-fashioned physical way.

They tended to save most of their disruptive behavior for outside of school and often went away for lengthy stretches courtesy of the state as a consequence.

I don’t recall area schools being closed a single day due to a threat of violence when I was younger. But, I also don’t recall states such as California telling would-be shoplifters to keep their theft total under $950 and no big deal.

Fast-forward to today and entire states have taken it upon themselves to de-criminalize criminal behavior and – COLOR ME SHOCKED – find themselves struck by waves of mounting crime.

Urban centers like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City are becoming virtually unlivable for the law-abiding. But it goes beyond that. The U.S. Department of Justice has just shared that of the 22 most populous states, Colorado is number one in violent crime.

Colorado has decriminalized drug infractions, creating a climate of tolerance, along with a welcome sign for drug dealers and a rise in consequent crime such as burglaries, robberies and car thefts by addicts to fund drug habits.

When they talk about Mile-High Denver, it’s just not about the altitude any longer.

We have an overabundance of broken windows – metaphorically and literally – in this nation and a glaring shortage of people willing to do anything about it. And that means expect further societal decline until the general population announces in dramatic fashion that it has had enough.

For those who would decry the alleged lack of modern day miracles, let us reconsider the tale of the Biblical strongman Samson, who it is written used the jawbone of an ass to slay 1,000 Philistines.

The modern day equivalent is how a variety of asses, with their jawbones still attached to the host creatures, can slay the truth, investors, the economy, justice and world peace while wielding said jawbones to spread asinine information around Johnstown, not to mention Pennsylvania, the United States and the world.

The body count for all these offenses would be measured in millions if not billions, not a mere 1,000. Now, that is miraculous.

Begin with our Johnstown area, a business backwater that hasn’t been roaring economically since the steel mills and coal mines were rendered virtually insignificant by environmental concerns and cheaper producers elsewhere.

Area jawbones, including those of Myopia 2025 members and their surrogates, have a two-pronged answer – tourism and immigrants.

No, the immigrants are not the tourists. There was a recent media attempt to paint the immigrant argument in a positive light by noting successful immigrants here in the health field.

Now, anyone who has gone to Johnstown’s major hospital in the past several decades likely has dealt with immigrant health professionals. It’s as evident as the nose on the face of a pre-rhinoplasty patient that Johnstown long has been dipping into the immigrant pool to fill health-care needs.

The hope of the jawboners is that you will read of these relatively few examples and make the mistake of extrapolating from this that all immigrants to the area will be productive professionals.

It’s a statistical trick on par with things such as average income. Take one millionaire and nine other individuals making $0 per year and the average income for these 10 people is $100,000 a year. Technically correct, but is it a representative number?

Myopia 2025 types just want to get the immigrants here – and presumably living in their Section 8 or other public housing units – and worry about jawboning about positive impact later, sort of like the ongoing Philadelphia invasion.

How many Philly types now living here are doctors or nurses? Just asking.

As far as tourism being our economic salvation in Johnstown, understand that tourism jobs tend to be low-paying, seasonal and/or part-time.

Don’t take my word for it. Perhaps you’ve heard that tourism is a huge industry in Florida, which, according to a 2019 study by Florida State University, has an $86 billion annual impact in the state and supports 1.5 million jobs.

Said study, admittedly a few years old but still relevant, flags tourism (nationally not just in Florida) as the absolute worst paying labor sector.

Around our state, there is an ongoing effort to kill Marcellus Shale as an economic engine, while funneling ever greater amounts of taxpayer money into Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. No doubt they are pitching tourism as a viable job creator, too.

On a national level, daily, it seems, one Federal Reserve jawboner or another is out with scare stories of ever higher interest rates, hammering investors in stocks, bonds and commodities. Talk about equal opportunity.

Recent leaks have revealed that our national intelligence types are spying on friends and foes alike, to the detriment of harmony and peaceful coexistence. Again, talk about equal opportunity.

They now wag their jawbones to note how harmful that this reality has become public, not to apologize for it. How instructive.

Gaslighting, the proven psychological ploy of sowing confusion and self-doubt, is being practiced locally, nationally and internationally. From Johnstown immigration and tourism, to throwing money at a corrupt Ukrainian regime, facts can’t be allowed to get in the way of a good psy-op.

It takes only modest effort to see through the manipulation of the truth. The next step is to use your jawbones to fight back against the asses.

The NHL Stanley Cup playoffs start today, lacking your Pittsburgh Penguins after a 16-year run of appearances, and thoughts turn to the future.

If you were paying close attention, the Penguins have been leaking oil in terms of being a contender for several years. Yes, they had been able to keep that playoff appearance streak intact, but they also had lost in the first round of the postseason the past four years.

Those three Stanley Cup wins, in 2009, 2016 and 2017, are fleeting memories. In some ways, it is better that the Penguins whiffed on the playoffs entirely this season, if only to bring into focus this is a roster in need of a shakeup if there is to be another Cup run anytime soon.

There are some glaring parallels to the Steelers, who have missed the playoffs three of the past five seasons and haven’t won a playoff game since the 2016 campaign.

Further back in Steelers history, those great rosters of the 1970s were kept intact too long in the search for one for the thumb, as in Super Bowl rings.

Only after the roster was completely reshaped and some rough seasons had transpired, did the Steelers ever return to Super Bowls.

This Penguins team was shockingly streaky, alternating stretches of good hockey with runs of putrid play. It is somehow appropriate that the playoff absence was all but locked in when the Penguins suffered an explicable loss to a struggling, bad Chicago team, a home game for the Penguins that was played with all the chips on the table.

The season-ending loss to another bad team, Columbus, was a mere exclamation point.

The Penguins are top-heavy, with the stars producing and precious few others sharing the load. Defensively, the Penguins are sloppy. Teams legitimately contending for the Stanley Cup have lots of quality depth and consistent defense.

Although the front office members have been scapegoated and fired, there is no simple solution for the Penguins. For a model of how long it can take, Penguins fans can look at the Detroit Red Wings. The Red Wings were a playoff rival of the Penguins when they played in back-to-back Cup Finals in 2008 and 2009, with Detroit winning the first and the Penguins, the second.

Those Red Wings teams were late in a run of 25 consecutive playoff appearances during which time they won the Cup four times.

Their playoff run ended with an appearance following the 2015-16 season and the Red Wings now have missed the playoff six consecutive seasons.

The Detroit franchise flirted with wild-card contention for a time this season, but lost some key games and management was a seller at trade deadline time, realizing the team wasn’t really that close.

Penguins fans would do well to contemplate the possibility that this playoff miss might be more than a one-season stay in purgatory.

There is news of social breakdown from around the United States and the world, so why should my ‘Hood be any different? Quick answer, it isn’t.

Let’s start with bad doings elsewhere. Today I read that hippy-dippy Whole Foods is closing its flagship San Francisco store due to street crime and drug issues making it unsafe for workers. Repeat after me: Defund the police!

This is in San Francisco, which has had several prominent types attacked or murdered in recent months, including the hammer attack on Mr. Nancy Pelosi last October.

Other stores are fleeing Woke cities, and their defund-the-police policies, a trend amplified by those cities decriminalizing things such as shoplifting and drug use, which tend to affect negatively stores trying to turn a profit there.

Move across the country to Baltimore, where chaos reigned in the city’s showplace Inner Harbor area with shooting and fighting over the weekend. The mayor will institute a curfew. Sure, that will fix things.

Miami Beach was a war zone during spring break

Los Angeles finally got around to ending the COVID “crisis” and replaced it by declaring a homeless crisis.

In France, workers are in the streets protesting increased age to collect pensions even as their leader Macron is too busy kissing up to the Chinese to notice.

Back in the USA, news comes that our soiled FBI still is looking to paint with a criminal brush anyone on the political right, sentencing them to watchlists for using words such as “based,” “Chad,” or “Stacy.” These conservatives ought to just begin stealing up to $1,000 a shopping trip in California because that’s no problem.

Don’t you feel safer now?

My ‘Hood had been relatively quiet until a couple of weeks back when guys in windbreakers and, eventually, the police showed up on the street.

The wife’s phone rang then and since, seeking details because she is an oft-time listener of the police scanner. Alas, not this time.

In intervening days, speculation and rumors flew. Confirmation of sorts came via social media. While doing my routine searching for cars I came across a 47-minute video posted by some people who dedicate their lives to trying to ferret out underage sex talk, or worse, on the internet and, to use their words “hold accountable” those adults participating. They were the guys in the windbreakers

My front porch, brightly illuminated as it is nightly, can be seen in the background of the video as they shot their video from an upstreet angle. According to the video, these people had 75 pages or so of interaction via computer between this middle-aged guy, married and father of two, and a supposed girl who identified herself as being 15 years of age despite a profile listing her as 18.

It was painful to watch the video, especially when the guy’s wife came home.

Was there a crime here? Sounds like it.

Not that it matters, but this is the home of a government employee and high-profile supporter of Democrats. The yard and/or house, for months if not years, sported Biden and Fetterman campaign signs along with Black Lives Matter and various rainbow gender commentary.

All seem to be gone now

Since this happened, I’ve heard of an incident on the street alleging that a visitor had, while parking, backed into someone’s car repeatedly. This act supposedly was witnessed by someone in the family of the car owner, but denied by people in the parking car and by a third-party witness.

Discussion ensued.

These are the highlights (lowlights?) although the usual symphony of loud vehicle exhausts, loud home and vehicle stereos and barking dogs has been a consistent backdrop.

This is the sort of thing I had hoped to escape by moving to this small borough.

I have experience with Johnstown neighborhoods, both seemingly idyllic and noticeably checkered. My early years were spent in Oakland. Since then I’d lived in Walnut Grove, Hornerstown and Oakhurst before landing in Southmont.

Hopefully, things will calm down to the sort of neighborhood we had when I first moved here 30-plus years back. But, given societal trends, I’m not optimistic.

You could have knocked me over with a sledgehammer when I read that the Cambria County Republican Party had ended a years-long practice of not endorsing primary candidates and chose to pick two candidates not named John DeBartola or Joseph Taranto to push for county commissioner.

Seriously. This was as stunning as the sun rising each morning and setting each evening, the ongoing veils of secrecy that cloak the behind-the-scenes dealings of Johnstown power brokers, as well as the certainty of death and taxes.

I jest, of course. Going against populists is nothing new for the Republican establishment.

Recall how hard they worked to make sure Donald Trump did not secure the nomination for president in 2016. And, when he did, the party didn’t go full-on to support him. He wasn’t “electable” they said.

Trump won despite that. I stand by my statement at the time that nonpartisan historians will record it as the greatest triumph in American politics because Trump not only had to beat the opposition Democrats to prevail, he also had to overcome his own party, the Republicans.

I also stand by my assessment, made shortly after the Trump win, that he would not win again. The Democrats got caught with their pants down – figuratively this time – presuming Hillary’s coronation was a done deal. They didn’t pull out all their “vote enhancement” tricks and Hillary suffered a defeat she still will not accept.

Of course that’s fine because Hillary is a leftist Democrat and the likes of her and serial Georgia loser Stacey Abrams can deny the legitimacy of elections until they grow hoarse – sadly they never seem to lose their screechy voices – and there are no repercussions for their denials.

But give Democrats credit, they didn’t repeat their Hillary error and were able to drag comatose Clueless Joe Biden over the finish line to alleged victory. They did this by using tried and true devices like scanning cases full of ballots after observers had been sent home, harvesting ballots from the citizenry (some dead and some illegal aliens) and generally making sure their governmental agents at the state level kept all their machinations supposedly within the bounds of legality.

We are to believe that Biden, with all the charisma and cognitive function of a cucumber, garnered the most votes in U.S. history.

Yeah, sure.

The Republican Party also gave us Dr. Oz as a Senate candidate, who managed to lose to another vegetable, this one named John Fetterman.

It was Biden redux. Fetterman’s claim to fame was being mayor of a community as crime-ridden and economically downtrodden as Johnstown. He ascended to the role of Lieutenant Governor, where he did a good job of looking homeless in shorts and a hooded sweatshirt.

With a wife who is a former illegal immigrant, Fetterman was a leftist’s wet dream candidate.

Just to add to it all, he suffered a stroke during the campaign and went into a Biden-like bunker. When he emerged, he gave a ridiculous performance in the only debate, contradicting his past statements on such things as fracking and generally looking like he was lost.

If the Republicans had put up a legitimate candidate instead of carpetbagging Dr. Oz, it should have been a win.

Instead, Fetterman “won” the election and since then has been checked into the hospital for issues both physical and mental.

Way to go, Republican Party.

We can’t have people like DeBartola and Taranto, a couple of rabble-rousers who expose dirty dealing, refuse to kiss the butts of the elites and generally exhibit a strong ethical compass, running for county commissioner with the Republican blessing. Not electable, eh?

If there is any electoral justice, DeBartola and Taranto will pull a Trump, defying the preferences of their party and win not only in the primary, but also the general election.

We can dream, can’t we?

There is a perhaps apocryphal story about a visitor to New York City admiring the yachts of the all the brokers and bankers and naively inquiring, “Where are all the customers’ yachts?”

A variation of this is the gambler in Las Vegas taking in the splendor and being reminded that the casinos weren’t built on allowing gamblers to win.

Always in life you are playing against a “house” so to speak. Sometimes it’s readily admitted and often it is not.

In Johnstown, the “house” is all the governmental and quasi-governmental agencies who trample on the right to know of the citizenry.

Nationally, it’s entrenched left wing bureaucrats, judges and various members of misnamed “justice” departments who make it their life’s work to persecute conservatives

In investing, you are up against a “house” of people who have access to better information than you, get better deals than you due to the size of their accounts, and the odd example of outright fraud, witness recent cryptocurrency problems.

The inspiration for today’s post was a segment on CNBC’s Fast Money show, noting (in more like Slow Money fashion) recent price action in gold and silver.

In case you’ve not been keeping tabs, gold as I write this trades at $2,020 an ounce on the spot market, within spitting distance of an all-time high after rising sharply in recent weeks.

Silver trades at $24.90 an ounce, also up big in terms of percentages in recent weeks, but still under one-half of its all-time high price.

The host, supposedly a brilliant sort who too often comes off as a ditz, was playing the ditz role on this topic. Unfortunately, there are regular panel members who mirror her.

An example from today: Two distaff members of the four-person panel were asked to opine on gold in view of this run to higher prices. Both are money managers. Both displayed a facial expression as if they’d just stepped in some dog residue deposited on the sidewalk.

Ooooh! All right, they didn’t say ooooh. They did point out that they like investments with cash flow, and they never understood gold. Yet one said she owns bitcoin. No cash flow there. Not even a there, there.

As one noted commodity analyst used to say, he likes things that hurt if you drop them on your foot, like a bar of gold. A bitcoin is just a few electrons in the ether. They use a coin-like object with a B and lines through it as in a dollar sign to represent Bitcoin, but there is no physical bitcoin, only a computer entry.

A third panel member, a tool who doesn’t like anything except his loser picks, believes gold has gone too far, too fast and should be avoided.

And then there was the fourth panelist, Guy Adami (the only original panelist left). He’s been pushing gold as an investment to counteract governmental economic idiocy for some time.

Adami still likes gold at this elevated price, and its poor cousin, silver.

Thank God for the guest analyst in this segment, Carter Worth, a genius in the use of price charts to divine trend, what is called technical analysis.

Worth came on and classified the investing world into three types of people, those who never would own gold, those who always own lots of gold, and those who sometimes partake to catch rallies.

The thing about Worth is, unlike most liberals, progressives and general climate loonies, Worth brings evidence to back up his assertions. My favorite from this visit was him illustrating via charts that since 1996, a long time in the world of investing, gold has equaled the return of investing in the S&P 500 stocks. That’s including re-investing stock dividends – take that, cash flow wench!

Said wench then was called upon to comment and she tried to be cute, indicating this would make the gold bugs sad because they’d only met stock returns.

But Worth came back that he’d think people who spend their lives analyzing stocks and pitching them to clients of their firms, might be sad that they couldn’t beat simply buying gold.

It was also noted during this show that central banks around the world are buying gold to hedge their moronic policies that have created entrenched inflation and economic malaise. They aren’t concerned about cash flow, but more about having money that isn’t dependent on the promise of others, such as a bank to cover your deposits.

Here’s why most investment gurus – the house – don’t push gold. It’s one decision. Buy it and watch the price appreciate long-term.

Much better to generate commissions buying, selling, re-buying, re-selling stocks, or by selling subscriptions to newsletters pitching stocks.

And when you compare gold to the return of a stock index, that neatly ignores that the stocks in those indexes change. When a company goes bankrupt, it is replaced by another for index purposes. But, if you’d bought that bankrupt stock, you don’t get the replacement for free.

The bottom line to all this is we live in troubled times, both socially and economically. Having gold and silver in your possession will help get you through those times.

But remember the third precious metal – lead – in order to protect your gold and silver.

There is no better microcosm of American society than Facebook marketplace, which includes a select group of good people and a lot of not-so-good types.

Careful readers will recall I do not have a Facebook account, so what gives? Answer: I use my son’s account to search for, and attempt to buy cars on Facebook marketplace. This identity contradiction is communicated to all sellers.

I’m not dealing, flipping, or otherwise trying to make money with this pursuit. I simply acquire vehicles for personal use, to date that being a pair of Mustangs as hobby cars and my wife’s daily driver. I also located an SUV that my son ended up buying on marketplace. If he hadn’t wanted it, I’d have bought it.

This used to be the sort of thing one could do on Craigslist, although that site now has been overrun with scammers and morons. Facebook marketplace is headed in that direction, unfortunately.

The Facebook marketplace experience reminds me of the old saw about fairy tale princesses seeking princes – you’ve got to kiss a lot of toads.

The best deals on cars go quickly, so if you don’t make it a habit to scan the offerings many times a day and message these sellers quickly to get in line, so to speak, you are hardpressed to score a deal.

A case in point was my first purchase, a 2005 Mustang convertible. I’d done a scan or two on a Sunday and had moved on to watching some Fox animation television. My son called to note a recent post, just after my last search.

I immediately logged in, contacted the woman and got in line ahead of what she and her husband estimated to be 50 or more respondents.

Arrangements were made to check out the car, which was advertised at a very low 48,000 miles. When I arrived I was told that mileage figure had been a mistake. Oh, oh. But, wait, it was lower, 41,800. After a test drive, I gave a down payment and ended up purchasing the car.

Just yesterday the convertible was freed from its winter hibernation and taken for several rides, including one with two granddaughters along.

As an editorial aside, convertibles are the next best thing to riding motorcycles, which I used to do, but with considerably less risk.

The people I dealt with, in the Richland area, regarding this car were excellent.

The guy I bought my 2004 Mustang GT from in Monroeville was a bit more difficult, but only because of his schedule. He, too, was a good guy.

And my wife’s car, a 2004 Pontiac Grand Prix GT scored with 14,000 miles was another pleasant experience, this with a woman living near Raystown Lake.

Of late, my tastes have turned to acquiring a C4 Corvette, a generation of the plastic fantastic sports car that ran from 1984 through 1996.

Two recent experiences summarize the frustration. One Corvette, ostensibly posted by a woman, had no inspection sticker. But she insisted none was needed to make it legal for the road due to it having classic registration.

Whether this was a scam, a dense seller, or both, is unclear. What is clear is only antique registrations do not require annual safety inspection. After several attempts to clarify this with the woman, whose typical response was something like “I’ve posted more pictures,” I gave up.

The car also has had its status yoyo back and forth between sold and available, another warning flag.

Moving on, I tried to set up a meeting with a guy selling a Corvette with a listing in Cranberry Township, north of Pittsburgh.

It was like dealing with the CIA. Responses were vague and brief. Trying to get a phone number (I provided mine several times) an address, or a time for a proposed Sunday meeting, went unanswered.

When I finally gave up and told the guy as much, the messaging went downhill quickly. He was busy, he said, a familiar lament for him and others. So, why list a car for sale if you can’t give the process any attention?

And this guy, so busy that a simple message could not be written, now had ample time to respond almost immediately to my messages because I’d hit a nerve.

He was losing the message battle, so he told me to Fu (space) xx (I substituted x’s for his letters) off. You get the message. I noted his quick descent in tone and he was gone. Perhaps he has blocked me (my son). I can only wish.

Be warned, this is the sort of stuff one finds on Facebook marketplace. Variations are the person posting an ad with something along the line that they are “in no hurry to sell, but just seeing what’s out there.” or people who know the value of their item (usually they really don’t) and won’t accept a penny less.

There are posts and pictures that don’t agree (listing the car as one model year when the images clearly are another year), or listings claiming perfect condition, then listing seven or eight items that need addressed.

My search continues for a C4 Corvette, but I’m thinking I will need to content myself with enjoying my Mustangs this summer, if only to avoid the source of frustration that the Facebook marketplace has become.

Donald Trump reportedly has been indicted by a grand jury convened to explore absurd overreach by a George Soros puppet district attorney in Manhattan, and outrage is being expressed by the political right.

Duly noted, but it shouldn’t be surprising. This is merely more of the same.

There is an ongoing, curious contradiction among far left types, who want to allow shoplifters to run rampant in California (as long as they keep their take under $950 per trip it’s no big deal), yet want to throw conservatives into prison for jaywalking.

The left wants to defund police, but spare no expense manipulating the legal system to persecute conservatives.

The left sees no problem with the FBI fabricating evidence, altering interview reports and generally acting like the stereotypical secret police of tyrannical regimes, but demands it cannot be questioned for overstepping both the letter and spirit of laws because they are “protecting Democracy.”

If this is Democracy, give me Putin.

Meanwhile, nary a Biden needs fear a date with justice for their many alleged wrongdoings.

I’m not sure I buy the over-the-top proclamations that this political prosecution of Trump guarantees his nomination and strengthens his candidacy to return as president.

What I do buy is it dramatically deepens the existing political chasm in this country, heading us yet further down the path to what the economic types who debate hard vs. soft landings would call a hard split.

The City of Johnstown and our County of Cambria are ongoing evidence that long-term leftist control does not produce affluence or fairness.

Our nation is similarly rotten to the core with entrenched leftists in bureaucracy, “justice” departments and other aspects of the federal government, no matter what political party occupies the Oval Office or holds the majority in the branches of Congress.

The oft-noted weaponization of our intelligence agencies, law enforcement, courts and regulatory operations for political gain, is evidence the ship of equality long since has sailed.

Trump’s reported indictment is but the latest example.

I have read opinions by legal experts, including nonpartisan ones, who see the Trump “crime” as deeply troubling, a modern day example of the quote attributed to former Joseph Stalin head of secret police: “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

It’s pretty easy to charge and convict people when the statutes can be manipulated, evidence can be fabricated and politically motivated juries and judges can be counted upon to come up with the correct verdicts.

But is this healthy for a nation? I would argue it is not and eventually this once-great nation will realize that.