On the heels of me trying to educate the gullible on the dark side of government (including the IRS) comes a report by The New York Post, quoting from a watchdog group OpenTheBooks, that the IRS spent $5 million in 2021 alone to arm its agents.

And you thought all that these IRS types needed to perform their duties were green eyeshades and a calculator to audit you. Only, of course, if you avoided paying your fair share of taxes.

Think again.

The IRS, as pointed out here before, has a political side to it and $80 billion in new funding is going to allow the IRS to add a reported 87,000 additional agents and arm them to the teeth.

That Post report cited 2021 spending of $2.3 for ammunition, $1.2 million in ballistic shields and more than another $1 million in rifles, shotguns and body armor.

This was to add to an arsenal that prior to 2020 amounted to 5 million rounds of ammunition for 2,159 special agents.

The job descriptions for proposed additional IRS agent hires includes “must be willing to use force up to and including the use of deadly force.”

I guess this is the sort of coercion the left fears it will need if and when it gets tax rates up the confiscatory 90 percent or so rate that would be necessary to fund all their socialist and green initiatives.

Maybe IRS agents can be co-opted to aid in the confiscation of those offending gas cooking stoves.

It seems that the the new-look IRS is going to be so well-armed that Zelenskyy will be envious.

Nothing to worry about here.

My English teacher the senior year of high school was a fine woman named Olive Katter, who got into trouble with administrators for speaking out about a tough principal being replaced by a milquetoast type. She was demoted from her post of department chair as punishment.

Many of her students set out with petitions calling for her reinstatement. I remember one long night canvassing Moxham. Back then, one could roam freely in Moxham after dark without regard for personal safety. It was, after all, 50 years or so in the past.

The lessons from this exercise were many, including, but not limited to, the realization that those in control cared little about the on-the-ground impact of their petty vindictiveness.

Miss Katter can thank her lucky stars she doesn’t teach in this period of out-of-control Wokeism. One day, while the class was reading some bit of classic literature, the word “gay” was part of the story, eliciting snickers from the students.

These days, the class would be sent straight to some Diversity, Equity, Inclusion indoctrination. And Miss Katter would have been right there with us because her response to our reaction was to lament that one of her favorite words had been co-opted to refer to sexual orientation instead of a state of being happy and carefree.

This all came to mind as I woke this morning – old meaning of having arisen from sleep, not becoming a ridiculous navel-gazer – and was greeted with the two granddaughters watching some PBS kids cartoon programming.

First there was some manner of Caribbean ethnicity family. Next up, a Filipino family. My tax money at work on PBS, which of course has no political agenda. Wink. Wink.

The first white faces to be seen were on the third show, which came after a channel change They were all animals with painfully white fur accented with black trim.

Take some time to view children’s programming, on various outlets, and you will be stunned at the messaging attempts from the Woke crowd.

I was curious to see if others were picking up on this. Apparently so. One story from 2021 on Idahofreedom.org, noted the folly of spending tax dollars to have Daniel Tiger teach kids about transgenderism, or PBS Kids insisting that three-month-old babies exhibit “white privilege.”

I’m not sure beloved Fred Rogers, he being a white male, could have passed the PBS gatekeepers these days. Rogers was a registered Republican – ick – but is well-chronicled to have been more in line with liberal ideals, so maybe he would have gotten a pass.

Next, I did some quick computer searching and made the mistake of reading a story from The New Yorker on those poor striking writers in Hollywood.

These are the Woke types who make it their life’s work to over-represent minorities of all stripe in their work.

One writer quoted recalled the good, old days of 2008 when she was happy to work in a writers’ room that was “half queer, majority female.” While she didn’t cite current numbers, it’s probably more so on both counts these days.

Funny how the stock Doesn’t Look Like America rubric of the Woke types doesn’t matter in cases such as this.

Having scored diversity over-representation, writers are on strike for, wait for it, MORE MONEY!

Let’s be clear here. People absolutely should not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or any other arbitrary determinant. But that should work both ways, and it doesn’t.

The Woke types never seem to be satisfied until they have dominated any situation, to the exclusion of opposing opinion and representation, be it racial, sexual, or matters of faith.

Even worse, they must re-educate those who do not buy their claptrap hook, line and sinker.

And they are everywhere, from government and public schools, to the boardrooms of beer producers. They play a large role in the decline of this nation as they succeed in changing it from a meritocracy to a pathetic Potemkin village celebrating the visual facade over legitimate qualification and achievement.

Bill Maher, heretofore a predictable proponent of all things political left, has had (pardon the pun) an awakening regarding Wokeism and has come to recognize it as the absurd caricature of liberalism that it has become.

Along a similar line, former leftist hero and current villain Elon Musk speaks of the “Woke mind virus” and its detrimental effects.

If you are content with this all-Woke-all-the-time state of affairs, continue to stay quiet and accept. If not, muster the courage to speak out and risk the wrath of the Woke warriors.

It’s been told to me that a member of the sheeple class questions my questioning of Clueless Joe Biden’s intent to hire brigades of extra IRS agents and arm them to the teeth as part of his effort to use governmental agencies as his own secret police effort.

If one pays their taxes, more IRS agents are no problem, or so the naive one posited.

Along that line, law-abiding citizens should not worry about the FBI. Oh, wait, the FBI falsified information to get warrants to spy illegally on Trump aide Carter Page.

FBI agents and administrative types have been found to have been lacking on ethical or legal grounds many times through the years, including often when the goal was to persecute one Donald Trump, or giving a free pass to Hillary Clinton for her email server problem.

Lack of political impartiality was cited specifically by Inspector General Michael Horowitz in his report on the Clinton matter, and he named then FBI director James Comey.

But, again, no need to fear governmental agencies if one is not doing anything wrong. Yeah, right.

I repeat, no need to worry about any government agency, certainly one sworn to uphold the law, because such agencies never would bastardize the law for political purposes.

Specifically regarding the IRS, two words, Lois Lerner. It was under Lerner’s watch that the IRS took it upon itself to give a hard time to conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status.

A governmental investigation maintained both conservative and liberal groups were given extra scrutiny. Yet a lawsuit filed by more than 400 conservative organizations was settled. I find no mention of a similar settlement with aggrieved liberal organizations.

Using the why-fear-more-IRS-agents-unless-you-are-a-tax-cheat logic, why settle a lawsuit if you are innocent?

The federal government – any government for that matter – is not inherently benign. That is particularly true these days when career bureaucrats are predominantly left-wing and all too eager to use their posts to impose their political philosophy.

The evidence is there if one dares to follow the news. But better to keep one’s eyes closed and continue voting a straight Democratic ticket.

Look how far that’s gotten our area as well as the country.

From the department of truth is stranger than fiction, locals celebrated over the weekend the emergence of Johnstown from financially distressed Act 47 status, which was followed up quickly on Monday by the United States moving ahead its timetable for potential debt-ceiling-induced default to early June.

To repeat, Johnstown, which has spent the past three decades and change living a Blanche DuBois existence — depending on the kindness of strangers — is supposed to be back in good fiscal health.

Never mind that a couple of sidebar stories to this Act 47 exit are that Johnstown ranks 194 of 206 small metropolitan areas nationally in terms of economic output and 341 of all 357 U.S. metropolitan areas in that economic category. Also, please disregard a $1 million anticipated loss in tax revenue as a result of add-on taxes, allowed to be charged by Act 47 municipalities that now must go away.

Johnstown looks more like an economic cadaver than a vital life form. But we’re no longer on the Act 47 shame list. And, of course, the tourism wave hasn’t kicked in fully yet.

Meanwhile, the aptly named Janet “Yellin’” Yellen told Congress Monday that despite the ongoing fiscal sleights of hand being practiced, the date for the federal government running out of money to pay obligations looms as early as June 1.

Yellen, our Mother Hubbard of monetary and fiscal policy, formerly served as chair of the Federal Reserve, which manages the nation’s money supply. These days, she cashes a check as Treasury Secretary, where her job is to make sure all of Clueless Joe Biden’s green initiatives and handouts to Ukraine are funded, not to mention such niggling details as paying Social Security benefits and interest on the burgeoning national debt, currently at roughly $31.5 trillion.

Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.

It is ironic that Yellen presided over loose monetary policies and artificially depressed interest rates as Fed chair, which helped get us into this fiscal mess. Now, she’s being forced to deal with the crisis she had a large hand in creating.

Too bad Act 47 status isn’t an option for the U.S., in which we’d expect the rest of the world to spend the next 30 years, give or take, bailing us out for our mismanagement.

House Republicans have passed a plan to increase the debt limit, but with accompanying demands for cuts in funding for Biden’s pet left-wing agenda items such as canceling student loan debt, giving blank checks to environmental crazies and turning the IRS into an armed branch of the secret police.

Biden’s handlers have vowed to paint the Republican plan as cutting veterans benefits and slicing border enforcement. It’s ridiculous but, considering the general idiocy of the electorate, it might work.

This federal debt problem has ripple effects for states and various municipalities in that it puts a crimp in handouts from Uncle Sam, said handouts being generally counted on to plug fiscal holes, sort of like individuals borrowing from the in-laws.

Based on past shortages of will, we would expect the U.S. debt ceiling to be booted upward with a last-minute deal. The over-under for that probably is Memorial Day.

Then we can begin counting the days until Johnstown once again slips beneath the fiscal waves and returns to the Davey Jones’s locker of Act 47. But the rules have changed, and three-plus decade stays there no longer are tolerated.

No sweat. By then, the raging success of Myopia 2025’s revitalization plan for the area should make any distressed status short-lived. Or not.

As I readied for a doctor’s appointment the past Thursday, I was in the midst of getting together the items I would need: Wallet, car keys, face mask.

But the wife, seeing the mask, clued me in on a combined Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence freedom moment. Wielding a copy of the local Daily Planet, she showed me a story that Conemaugh Health System – at long last – had backed off the mask mandate for staff, patients and visitors.

Welcome back to reality after a three-year absence.

Make no mistake, much of the COVID hype (including mask mandates) was a social experiment to see just how far the public could be pushed in terms of abdicating freedoms before pushing back. No dictate was too draconian, no limitation was subject to debate, as these petty dictators rode the wave of fear they had created.

Travel was restricted. Visitation to aging parents in nursing homes, or patients in hospitals, was suspended. Gatherings ranging from family holiday celebrations, to weekly church services, public school classes and athletic events, were to cease if we knew what was good for us.

And masks. One is good. Two would be better. Three is an improvement on two.

You laugh. I’m serious. Do an internet search for “wearing two, three mask absurdity” and you will be directed to a November 2020 story posted on NPR.org quoting an expert saying exactly that – the more (masks) the merrier.

If one had the temerity to question this overkill, they were decried as “deniers” who didn’t believe in “science.”

And the vaccines. Only selfish morons didn’t get repeated COVID vaccines, despite mounting evidence then and now that they were not nearly as effective as promised, that the disease was not that deadly on a statistical basis, and there were and are adverse side effects from vaccines, including sudden death due to heart events among otherwise healthy young people.

I had a heated exchange with my primary care physician (now they are back to being family doctors) about this. Using probability, I told him I saw the risk of me dying from COVID (about four-tenths of one percent) as less a threat than what dangers I would be exposed to by taking some unproven vaccine rushed through without typical studies and a government that gave the manufacturers total immunity from any legal action should their vaccines prove harmful.

I would go on to contract COVID – twice. I’m still here. Point made.

Yes, I know people who have died of COVID. I grieve for them. I also know people who died in car accidents, yet I am not afraid to drive a car. I know people who have succumbed to heart attacks, but I still walk for exercise.

I’m still waiting for my doctor to apologize for his vaccine rants.

Evidence continues to mount regarding problems with COVID vaccines and the ineffectiveness of such things as masks.

A new study from Finland, published in a public health journal there, found mask mandates for children did not reduce the incidence of COVID infection. Repeat, masks did NOTHING favorable for the kids.

But wearing masks may have done harm to the children for reasons both physical and psychological. And closing down schools did incalculable harm.

Where are all the MASKHOLES now? SCIENCE is proving them wrong.

At least Conemaugh has, for now, bowed to reality.

Understand, though, that we’re only one ginned up, overhyped pandemic away from being ordered back into the bunkers because you, dear people, proved you will buy their scare tactics.

In the spirit of if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, perhaps it is time to overdose on blue pills from “The Matrix,” the better to accept the assertion of tourism being the savior for Johnstown’s downtrodden economy.

For those unfamiliar with the movie, taking the blue pill keeps one in a state of blissful ignorance to reality; fitting since blue is the defining color of the Democratic Party.

And Democrats are in the forefront of insisting that the Johnstown area can be Disney World, Cancun and Hawaii all rolled into one when it comes to attracting tourist dollars. Why, we have miles and miles of trails, not to mention streams and rivers and mountains.

It is fair to note that Ukraine can make the same claim, yet not many tourists are headed there these days. But I digress.

If we are to become a tourist mecca, flush with money-is-no-object free spenders visiting us, we’re going to need to appeal to more than hikers and kayakers. Dare I suggest we play to our strengths, those being violence, drugs, decaying infrastructure, blighted neighborhoods and elitist nepotism.

Imagine the demand for Moxham Ninja Tours, held only after dark, during which tourists are outfitted with portable police scanners and set out with the goal of being first on the scene of those radio reports of crimes – perhaps beating the police there.

I can see the ads now, dramatic chase images played against the soundtrack of the William Tell Overture (Lone Ranger theme song) showing tourists racing about darkened streets in the pursuit of criminal activity.

Forget video games or virtual reality experiences, this would be reality unfiltered. What a rush! Zip-lining through the Amazon is kid’s stuff compared to this.

Our tourists would tend to be explorers, so offer them the chance to don helmets and other safety items and allow them to roam at their leisure through our abundance of abandoned buildings and residences. They’d have to sign waivers in advance, of course, just in case.

Another angle might be themed scavenger hunts – residents excluded because of their home-field advantage. We could have hunts to find expended ammo casings, discarded drug paraphernalia, or specific types of litter such as as outdated political campaign signs or posters for previous Johnstown tourism events.

Bus tours could be mounted so that tourists could ride around on our washboard streets, many still in disrepair due to our never-ending sewer upgrade project, or subpar repairs to the roads performed after the sewer work was done there.

Ads would need to stress the bus ride angle. No tourists in their right mind would want to drive their daily transportation on these streets.

More sedate entertainment for tourists might be an educational angle, with seminars to show our visitors family trees demonstrating the generally incestuous nature of local governance, both nominal and shadow.

If you’ve ever visited San Antonio, Texas, you no doubt are familiar with the River Walk there. Restaurants, cafes, watering holes of all description line the canals that snake through the downtown, those canals being traversed by small passenger boats.

Access is as easy as walking down a flight of stairs from street level. Our tourists would need to settle for bars and restaurants being up top. But those wishing to partake of the boat rides would have the added experience of needing to rappel down our steeply sloped flood control walls, which would only add to the experience.

Final point: In a nod to the Myopia 2025 partisans, we could bring in planeloads of Afghan refugees to man those low-paying, seasonal, part-time tourism jobs our locals never would accept.

Talk about a win-win situation!

We’ve long argued in favor of stiffer penalties for criminals in general, and a reassessment of the free passes given juveniles committing serious crimes.

You are just as injured or dead if a 16-year-old does the shooting, stabbing or pummeling as if it had been done by someone 18 and older, the legal cutoff point for adulthood as it pertains to crime.

The recent run of school threats in this area comes to mind as examples where juveniles seem to be emboldened by the relative light punishment. While no one was harmed – yet – these are serious offenses meriting serious punishment.

Along this line of thought, it was encouraging to read a story today from The Tribune-Democrat that a pair of alleged shooters in Moxham will be charged as adults.

Many shots were fired. One person reportedly was hit, although not injured seriously. One alleged shooter was listed as 15 years of age and the other, 17. Both are under the customary 18-year-old cutoff, but can be charged as adults due to the severity of their crimes.

Congratulations to District Attorney Greg Neugebauer for exercising that option.

The names of those being charged were reported as Deion Alex Sanders and Rahmeen Green. It will be interesting to see in follow-up reports whether the pair are domestic or imported.

According to the story, both are in jail having failed to post bond.

No doubt, soon we will hear appeals for leniency based on unfortunate home lives, traumatic experiences, societal failures and the like. These should be ignored considering the severity of the actions these two are alleged to have taken, which reportedly are supported by surveillance camera video.

Again, well done to those who chose to charge the pair as adults.

While teenage violence has become more widespread than in the past, it is not an entirely recent phenomenon.

Biblical scholars cited on Christianity.com have calculated that David was 15, maybe 13, when he killed Goliath. Yet only David among the Israelite warriors was brave enough to confront the giant Philistine.

And he used only a sling and stone. David might have preferred a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, the weapon of choice for many present-day assaults. But, in another calculation, this by ballistics types, the stone as hurled using the sling was thought to have the stopping power of a modern .45-caliber handgun.

Take one of those between the eyes and it can ruin your entire day.

Most consider David’s act righteous. But it also was violent. And he was far from being an adult.

For yet another example, consider the American Wild West period and the aptly named Billy “The Kid.” Billy (William Bonney was his alias; given name Henry McCarty) killed his first man when he was just short of 18 years of age and was said to have killed 21 before reaching the age of 21, when he himself was gunned down.

The law wasn’t treating Billy as a juvenile. He was caught once and sentenced to hang, but escaped, killing two deputies in the process.

When Billy was encountered again, he was killed by sheriff Pat Garrett, thereby avoiding any further escape problems.

Punishing criminals severely once worked in this country. It can work again, given the will to do so.

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.