Rain will not dampen our Labor Day celebration, with the wife grilling merrily under a canopy and guests soon to arrive to meet, greet and eat.

While we await them, it’s a good time to reflect on current events.

Our hem-kissing, fist-bumping simpleton president thought he’d made a deal with the Saudis to increase oil production, the better to rein in rising gasoline prices and help get Democrats elected in the coming mid-term elections.

This act, coming as it did from a man who had blasted the Saudis in his campaign and since, rankled even his customary apologists in the media. Talk about convenient principles, Biden has them.

Today, the Saudi-driven OPEC-plus announced a small production DECREASE for oil. While you still were dreaming of hamburgers, hot dogs and corn on the cob, oil prices jumped three percent or so. Can gasoline be far behind?

When it comes to coping with such things, I’m reminded of a book by economist Andrew Tobias, published in the early 1980s, whimsically titled “Getting By On $100,000 Dollars A Year.”

Tobias realized the title was absurd. The advice inside was not. He pointed out that one needn’t be invested in stocks, bonds or futures to make economic hay.

A good investment might be finding canned tuna on sale at a great price and, instead of buying a can or two, buying a case. Do this often enough and the savings (investment return) add up quickly.

It was with a nod to Tobias that in recent days I filled the gas tanks of not one, not two, not three, but four of my cars. I was anticipating rising oil/gasoline prices and made an investment at 3.99.9 a gallon.

On a more traditional investment front, I’d scalped a trade in the exchange traded fund OIH, which holds companies that provide services to oil companies. I bought it on Thursday, a big down day for oil, and sold quickly Friday when oil jumped.

I didn’t want to hold it over this long holiday weekend, with no trading available today. I guess I should have waited to sell.

The Dow on Friday went from being up 370 points or so to closing down 337.98, a 700-plus point swing, when news broke that the Russians had closed down a natural gas pipeline to Europe for maintenance. Cynics noted this neatly coincided with yet more economic actions being taken against Russian energy.

No kidding!

As written previously here, it’s extremely naive to expect to punish a country economically and not have it punch back. Biden should have considered this when he thought all his past rhetoric would be forgotten when he went to visit the Saudis and beg for more oil.

The Biden propaganda team even tried to slip one past the Saudis by claiming that Biden had chastised their leaders verbally in private. The Saudis said no such thing happened.

This is a common Biden PR flack trick, used regarding Russia’s Vladimir Putin, too. The problem is these countries have their own propaganda operations and the means to get it out in the international media, thereby avoiding the filter of U.S. media, most of which sits squarely under the thumb of Biden and his fellow socialists.

Take a moment today to reflect on the schizophrenic behavior of Biden.

He shows up last week — in front of Independence Hall for historical irony — to give a hate speech regarding Trump voters. The lighting was blood red, suggestive of Hell, and a couple of Marines stood as sentinels, an implicit reminder that Biden can and will use force to cow his enemies.

Biden apologists immediately tried to walk back the image, which was as bad as anything you’ve ever seen in movies about dystopian futures ruled by dictators.

But Biden got to his cell phone and tweeted Sunday (who was supposed to be watching him?) that “MAGA proposals are a threat to the very soul of this country.”

MAGA, shorthand for Make American Great Again, is a threat to the country’s soul only as defined by Marxist, progressive, anti-American, anti-Constitution types who make up the Democratic party.

It’s going to require more than buying a couple of extra cases of tuna to prepare you for the coming carnage brought to you by Biden and his ilk.

Not that long ago, instead of sitting at my desktop composing this blog entry late Sunday afternoon, I’d have been immersed in the IndyCar race at Portland.

I’d also have been anticipating the start of the NASCAR playoffs later at Darlington, S.C., and possibly figuring how I’d slip in some viewership of tonight’s Florida State-LSU college football game.

But I’ve changed.

Already today, I’ve mowed my son’s grass, then got back home and took the Mustang convertible out for a ride under threatening skies.

I returned, cleaned up, and called a local outlet of a national sporting goods chain to make sure my online coupon would be good for the purchase of a ridiculously inexpensive 12-gauge shotgun. Told it was, I then prepared to leave to make said purchase.

Before I left, the wife wanted to know if I would like her to DVR the Indy race for me. No, I said, with a few expletives thrown in for emphasis.

Once, sports provided refuge from the sadness of everyday existence in this troubled world. These days, it merely mirrors society and that strips away a major attraction.

Consider IndyCar racing, in which the powers that be went from being just plain inept in managing races, to now throwing a cloud of suspicion as to their neutrality. It seems to me that certain drivers and certain teams get a lot of timely breaks/calls.

It’s a lot like how Democrats can run roughshod over the law and suffer little in the way of punishment, while Republicans can go to jail for blowing their noses in the wrong jurisdiction.

So it is with IndyCar, which is willing to overlook transgressions such as leaving the pit with equipment still attached, as long as it is a favored person doing so.

Similarly, the display of yellow flags too often seems to occur so as to benefit those chosen ones who have gone off-strategy in terms of pit stops to make up for poor qualifying or poor performance in the actual race to that point.

Throw in the ridiculous practice, shared by NASCAR, of randomly getting lapped cars back on the lead lap, where they might further interfere with drivers and cars having a legitimate chance at winning, and you have racing that is more like selection of a winner than a contest of speed.

NASCAR, in its not-so-infinite-wisdom, divides its races into stages, in which if a driver wants to win an early stage and pick up the points, he’s likely forfeiting the chance to win the race because all the smart teams come in a few laps before the end of the stage. That way, when the next stage begins and cars who stayed out need to pit, the cars who did this before the end of the previous stage are near the front.

NASCAR has screwed the pooch in other ways, and while today’s race is a reported sellout, many traditional NASCAR races – such as Bristol – are conducted before a sprinkling of fans where once there were waiting lists for tickets.

I’ve taken to watching Formula One racing because the best drivers and fastest cars tend to win, not disappear into a mishmash of caution periods for “debris on the track” and the like.

By the way, if you know who won today’s Formula One race don’t tell me. I’m watching a replay later.

I’m not alone in this disdain for domestic auto racing. Both a cousin and my brother can hardly stomach it any longer, where once they were devoted fans.

My solution is to avoid wasting my time watching it. I will check the results, just out of habit.

I still might tune in to watch a bit of that college football game later, although watching snippets of games in recent days indicates it’s more of the same in that sport, unfortunately.

The SEC will win another national championship. The best Pac-12 teams continue to play softer than tissue paper when they’re up against top teams. The Big Ten will continue to be over-rated. The Big 12 will continue to be a triumph of style over substance. The ACC? Nothing special now that Clemson has declined a bit.

The college game has been all but ruined by ongoing conference realignment, and the proliferation of transfers.

Oregon had transfer players filling most of the starting positions against Georgia. Considering the 49-3 pounding the Pac-12 Ducks absorbed from an SEC power, maybe they should have been 22-for-22 with transfers, throwing in a transfer punter and kicker to boot (pun intended).

Both Pitt and West Virginia had starting quarterbacks from elsewhere when the two former rivals finally got around to playing each other again last week, in what was a sloppy, sloppy game.

By the way, that is West Virginia of the Big 12 (think Great Plains), which makes almost as much sense as UCLA and USC joining the Big Ten down the line.

Bad as it has become, big-time college football still is preferable to the two main homegrown auto racing series. But that is damning college football with faint praise.

Holy Chiquita, readers, we’ve become a banana republic.

This politically incorrect term, no doubt soon to have its meaning manipulated in the manner of words like raid, transitory and fascism, was coined as a condescending term for small nations, particularly in Central America.

Specifically, it noted how the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) acquired so much power in the likes of Guatemala and Honduras that it basically ran the countries.

The term was broadened in meaning to denote countries in which government, politics and the legal system largely were corrupt and the common people were exploited by the elites.

Sound familiar?

Am I saying the United States now is a banana republic? Why yes, I am.

Let us enumerate how.

Led by Clueless Joe Biden and his Democratic predecessor in the Oval Office, our nation’s intelligence community has been turned into no more then secret service units whose purpose is to harass and imprison political opponents.

Our election system, once a world model for integrity, produced highly questionable vote counting in 2020, a trend likely to continue.

Our nation’s top justice officials have become political operatives, borrowing from the mantra of communist dictatorial regimes: Show me the man, and I’ll show you (make up) the crime.

Our court system below the Supreme level has devolved into a two-tiered operation, used to sentence harshly opponents and reward toadies with acquittals or watered-down sentences.

The buying of votes by way of governmental handouts has become rampant and, incredibly, widely accepted.

While the justice system investigators harass political opponents, misdeeds of political friendlies are largely ignored, or at most punished with the lightest slap on the wrist. Hunter Biden is the poster boy.

Truth, once an absolute concept, has been put into the propaganda blender and massaged, manipulated, and outright flipped on its head, all to serve the purposes of those in power.

Social media outlets, relative newcomers to the art of the banana republic, have been enlisted to squelch free speech, isolate those who would not accept blindly the prevailing propaganda, and to seek to punish economically any who dare to question. Consider Zuck’s Rogan podcast admission of same.

Those in power demonize those who vote for the opposition. From Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, to Clueless Joe’s “semi-fascists,” to the general derogatory terms such as terrorists and/or racists applied to Republicans and those on the political right, the rhetoric is over-the-top.

One oft-seen long-term result in so-called banana republics, as written into the history books regarding nations of the Caribbean, Central America and South America, is revolution.

Eventually, the aggrieved populace rebels and throws off the yoke of oppression. But it can be a long, painful wait.

Please consider twenty questions for Clueless Joe Biden and his sycophantic supporters.

1. If skyrocketing oil prices were caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, why are those prices declining now with Russian forces still fighting there?
2. If electric cars are our future and California has banned sales of new cars and light trucks with typical internal combustion cars in that state by 2035, why is there a current request by California for owner not to re-charge existing electric vehicles due to limits of the electrical grid?
3. Why is the push on for a cashless society with central bank digital currencies as the replacement?
4. Why the need to hire and arm so many new IRS agents?
5. If inflation is really lessening as noted in the Clueless One’s assertion it was zero in July, why the need for the inflation reduction act?
6. When did DR.JILL BIDEN find the time to take lessons in ventriloquism?
7. How can you forbid an unvaccinated tennis player from travelling here to play in the U.S. Open, but continue to allow unvaccinated illegal aliens to stroll across the southern border and remain here as permanent residents?
8. What are you going to do when tough guy rhetoric fails and the ChiComs actually invade Taiwan?
9. Along that line, what happens when the Ukraines finally concede they can’t fight the Russian bear on their own and request U.S. boots on the ground?
10. What’s the latest sweet gig you arranged for Hunter?
11. Did the fact that Mr. Nancy Pelosi already had sold his speculative shares of Nvidia and lost a reported $341,365 allow you to limit Nvidia chip sales to China?
12. Are you advising Pennsylvania senatorial candidate John Fetterman on his bunker campaign strategy, where no press conference, debate or personal appearance is a good one?
13. Are you the one responsible for Jimmy Hoffa’s long-running disappearing act?
14. Have you read reports that food bank traffic in some areas is even higher than two years back, in the midst of the self-induced COVID crisis?
15. Can you explain to the populace how the world’s largest debtor nation, the United States, is going to find the money to service those debts if the Federal Reserve follows through on its threats to increase interest rates higher than expected and keep them up for longer than expected?
16. When are you going to start to refill the strategic petroleum reserve, and push oil prices back up again due to that?
17. Where are you going on this weekend’s getwaway from D.C. after having spent two-thirds of your days out of the office in August?
18. Can you assure us we won’t be experiencing the exponential rise in energy costs currently being endured by Europeans?
19. When you look in the mirror do you see a reflection?
20. Are you still sticking with your story that the Trump raid was planned and executed unbenownst to you?

Bonus question: Why should we believe you, on any subject?

The joke around Johnstown used to be we were 10 years behind the times when compared to the more cutting edge portions of the country.

This was good in some ways, as in the rising crime rate was slow to reach us.

It was bad in other ways, such as our inability to wean ourselves from relying on steel mills and coal mines for employment, until both industries had declined severely, thus sentencing us to the never-ending economic problems we still endure.

In many ways, the United States has become Johnstown, years behind Europe and other parts of the world in many socio-economic and governmental areas – not always a bad thing. You want to see our dystopian future, look elsewhere.

Raging socialism, bureaucratic over-reach and general tyranny of the vocal Woke minorities have turned average European citizens into modern day serfs.

Today, there are reports of small businesses around the United Kingdom facing daunting utility bills, such as one small coffee shop getting a bill the equivalent of nearly $10,000 for two months’ of utility service.

Pubs and other small business have taken to social media to tell their tales of economic woe due to skyrocketing utility costs, and their likely closures due to them.

Residences are facing similar soaring utility costs, and are at a loss as to how to pay the bills.

Lest you feel insulated (energy pun intended), know that a recent report said more than 20 million U.S. families are behind in paying their utility bills and facing shutoffs.

Might we soon be reading tales similar to recent stories of people in Poland waiting days to get loads of coal?

Formerly, there were stories of the government encouraging Poles to forage for downed wood in the forests to burn for heat.

Europeans are being caught in a pincer movement, largely self-inflicted.

On the one hand, countries have abdicated energy policy to the screaming environmentalist waif from Sweden who rants challenges to authority, but offers no realistic solutions.

Add in the wild card of Russia reacting to increasing economic sanctions against it by refusing to move natural gas to help the enemies stay warm this coming winter.

Imagine that, under the direction of the United States, European countries try to bankrupt Russia, yet these same countries cry foul when Russia punches back by denying energy.

Europe is a mess of failed governments, raging inflation and economic malaise, and the United States is only too eager to follow that lead by electing increasingly socialistic leadership, not to mention having an increasingly large base of bureaucrats who pledge allegiance to Woke philosophy.

Amidst this insanity, a moron from, appropriately enough Germany’s Green Party, is calling for a tax on meat, the approved governmental solution to forcing behavior changes. This would be designed to reduce the need to have animals for food and somehow this would help the planet.

Recall some of Clueless Joe Biden’s socialists lauding higher gasoline costs, presuming they would stampede citizens into relying on electric vehicles.

But there are flickers of hope in Europe, as protests have broken out regarding governmental failures and ridiculous policies such as those in The Netherlands that would bankrupt farmers with arbitrary limits on animal population and fertilizer use.

And some members of Europe’s artificial continental government are making noises about ignoring dictates that punish Russia economically and produce Russian retribution.

Swiss politicians are petitioning for their country to keep nuclear power plants open, because there is no replacement for them.

But developments elsewhere are downright scary. In a societal foreshadowing, South Africa’s Supreme Court has ruled that a song “Kill the Boers,” which includes lyrics that Boers (whites) should be shot, does not constitute “hate speech” and so a left-wing party can continue to play the song at rallies and likely incite violence.

This is, of course, no problem for a country that already has massive problems with crime, particularly rape and murder.

Coming soon, to a town near you.

It’s becoming more and more evident that educators should try to find some time between encouraging gender change and rewriting history to eliminate contributions of white men, to teach the young ‘uns about money.

Specifically, students should be made to understand what money is, how when one borrows money one is obligated to repay it, and to the larger point, understand the general concept of the value of money.

It would be a tall task, no doubt, considering the financial illiteracy of the population in general, which would include many parents.

Just in recent days, Clueless Joe Biden has put forth forgiving $10,000 in student loans, for starters, and more for low-income types who already had qualified for Pell Grant giveaways.

This has been met largely with cries of it’s not enough. Social media is filled with aggrieved students posting their total educational indebtedness and lamenting how $10,000 is but a drop in the bucket.

This is variation of many fellow coworkers in the past, who felt the company was obligated to pay them an amount sufficient to subsidize their standard of living, no matter how self-indulgent that was. When I pointed out to them that they could cut back on spending for things such as vacations, cars, etc., or could increase their skills, their proficiency, their workload and argue for more money, they would look at me as if I had three heads.

The equivalent of these delusional people are those who think $10,000 is nothing.

My response is I’d gladly accept $10,000 from each of you, since it’s nothing at all. How about a rebate for me and others like me, who paid off the student loans of our progeny?

The good folks at Penn’s Wharton School of Business did some calculations and found the Biden handout could balloon to costing more than $1 trillion over the next decade, if one does not go with the optimistic scenario of Biden and his handlers.

Imagine, $1 trillion is NOTHING!

This total disregard for money applies all the way down the scale. Once, when I was doing telephone support for health insurance, our supervisors would try to incentivize us by handing out small rewards, like $5 gift cards.

I was doing this job post my career in journalism, as a seasonal temporary gig, and was not relying on it to pay my bills. Many of my co-workers could not say the same, yet they turned up their noses at a $5 gift card.

I gladly accepted whenever I won one, and eagerly offered to take the burden of spending the cards off the hands of my burdened colleagues. Surprisingly, $5 was meaningful to them if they were being asked to give it away.

A former neighbor, an elderly woman, had another neighbor work for her doing housework and the like, for an insanely low hourly rate. When said worker asked for a bit more per hour, the woman was outraged.

Then the elderly woman got a slap in the face in the form of reality. The neighbor quit working for her and the old woman who needed help then resorted to employing workers from housework provider businesses, and ended up playing at minimum two times as much per hour for a lot less work.

Finally, I live in a school district that leads the county in tax millage. The mock-Latin motto on its crest should be Spendibus Plentius.

Over recent months we’ve been treated to much chest-thumping over our new $7.5 million high school football stadium.

Then, horrors, it was heard that Friday night some of the seating had collapsed during the very first game.

The same media outlets who trumpeted the opening of the stadium, haven’t gotten around to reporting on the seating problem.

But, upon driving past the stadium today, I can report that at least one row in one section, and possibly more, have seats that are bent over at an angle not matching surrounding seating.

No big deal. As our people challenged in fiscal sense would say, it only cost $7.5 million.

Johnstown has run through many titles in its long existence.

We’ve been the Friendly City, based on the supposed near-universal goodwill of the masses here.

We’ve been the Flood City, as a nod to three massive natural disasters.

In a testimony to a getting-out-the-vote campaign that would make Democrats blush (you local vote magnifiers know who you are), Johnstown was elected the inaugural winner of the the Kraft Hockeyville title in 2015.

What some consider our greatest title came in 1972, when we were named an All-American City by the National Civic League, based on what the organization’s current web site lists as a hodgepodge of feel-good vagaries.

On this honor, allow me to note that the same web site identifies more than 500 communities having won the award since it all began in 1949, some as many as seven times.

Alas, Johnstown was one and done in 1972, joining many other Pennsylvania winners including such relatively nearby communities as Meyersdale, Clearfield and Lewistown.

Pittsburgh won twice, last in 1987. And Philadelphia (known on this site as Filthydelphia) was honored four times, last in 1994, which may speak volumes about the award’s prestige, or lack thereof.

Events of last week likely preclude Johnstown winning any positive notice in the near future. We may have to settle for something like the At Least We’re Not Chicago award.

But we’re gaining.

Just last week, individuals in two cars are said to have exchanged shots while traveling the city, including on busily traveled Broad Street (ironically the same name as a prominent Filthydelphia thoroughfare that traverses that city). In a display of uncharacteristic marksmanship, if reports from police and the like are accurate, the pair managed to mortally wound each other.

The amazing part of the story is that none of the other occupants of the vehicles, or innocents either on the streets or in passing cars, caught any of the fire.

The victims represented the yin and yang of local violence, one a homegrown sort with a long list of contact with the law. The other hailed from Delaware County, which while not Filthydelphia proper, is the next best thing, adjoining that city.

Officials took the occasion of a press conference to tell us these were the ninth and 10^th homicides this year in Johnstown, which seems to indicate we’re on target for two or three more before 2023 arrives.

I understand this equates to no more than a rough holiday weekend in Chicago. But, considering the population disparity of the two municipalities, we’re holding our own.

Two days after the shooting here, while the details of this incident still were being digested and detailed, social media erupted with reports of a fan brawl at a Greater Johnstown High School football game.

There were obligatory mentions of a gun being shown, but not discharged.

Media reports indicate five police officers joined school resource officers in breaking up the fight, reported to have included both juveniles and adults.

One eyewitness reported to my wife things were so crazy that she and a friend hid in the girls bathroom at the stadium.

Even before all this, there were unsubstantiated reports circulating in the community of some rooms at Johnstown’s middle school having been damaged days earlier in a separate incident involving district students, but not students of that specific school.

If all of this gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, you need help. If, instead, you are outraged by what is transpiring here, it is well past the time to demand accountability — and action.

Jerome “Jackson Hole” Powell has the same problem that many parents have, that being tough talk doesn’t get it done without painful follow-through.

And, more specifically, the lack of such firm action in the past weakens each successive round of tough talk.

No matter how many times mom threatens “wait until your father gets home” or takes matters into her own hands by vowing to take away privileges, allowances, or toys, if it doesn’t happen, or the time-frame gets shortened in response to tantrums, the kids know who’s in charge.

Hint: It isn’t mom or dad.

So it is with investment markets, which often have a been here, seen that take on all of Powell’s rhetoric about how tough he and his fellow central bankers will be in getting raging inflation under control..

Powell and his ilk are in Wyoming late this week. If you were hoping for good news similar to the crushing election defeat that turncoat Republican Liz Cheney suffered in Wyoming recently, you were disappointed.

Or maybe you weren’t. Borrowing from the murky language method of his predecessors, Powell’s public remarks were and are full of vague generalities and conflicting remarks that make them a verbal Rorschach test in which the message is open to interpretation of the viewer/listener. Just substitute words for inkblots.

What Powell seemed to say in his speech this morning was that the Federal Reserve is resolved to fighting inflation, even if that slows the economy, puts people out of work, and generally makes life difficult for you underlings. But it’s in your best interest.

Powell and his group have been raising interest rates, but the effect is a lagging one, with such “luxury” items as food, energy and housing slow to get the word that Powell is getting tough!

In the past, when the Fed has embarked on this mission, either by raising interest rates or slowing Fed purchases of assets such as mortgage-backed securities, investment markets have tanked – so-called temper tantrums – and the Fed quickly took it all back.

Powell was stressing today the Fed was going to err on the side of performing too much restrictive action, again in the name of inflation reduction.

Funny, just a year ago, at this same event, albeit a virtual one due to COVID hysteria, Powell was assuring us inflation was “transitory.”

It wasn’t and isn’t.

Investment markets were on pause ahead of Powell’s speech. They went down a bit as he spoke, recaptured those losses quickly and now, there’s a mixed message of stocks selling off but bonds, which should be affected adversely by rising interest rates, hanging at about even. All this at 10:30 a.m. or so. He’d begun speaking just before 10 a.m.

To restate, Powell gave us a Rorschach test, with listeners taking away from it exactly what they wanted to hear.

I tried to play this by buying in advance the DUST exchange traded fund, an inverse vehicle that rises when gold mining stocks fall. I bought yesterday at $22.09 a share and sold a few moments ago at $23.15.

That sell point was a revisit of a previous daily high, that had been hit while Powell spoke. The price retreated into the $22.20s as he continued to speak, but rallied hard when he ended and human analysis took over from computers punting around prices based on key words.

I got it right, sort of. The daily high now sits at $23.36, so I sold, too soon. Also, I didn’t have thousands of shares to make it a good payoff. But I made a few pennies and any profit is a good profit.

The perceived message of Powell, after initial market doubt, now seems to be weighted toward belief that this time he’s serious.

If he is serious, that’s good news long-term for the economy and inflation, but it’s going to be painful getting to that long term.

The foaming-at-the-mouth social justice warriors, poverty pimps and generally deranged members of the left have it wrong when they declare math as racist any time the numbers don’t support their hysterical insanity.

More accurate would be to borrow from pudgy Al Gore, the patron saint of climate change – and how to profit from misguided attempts to arrest it – and declare math An Inconvenient Truth.

The movie of that title, an ode to the genius of Gore, was long on hyperbole and emotionalism. I will confess never to having watched the exercise in out of control ego, but those who have held their noses and watched cite numerous stretches in presentation regarding temperature and sea level rise, ostensibly due to man-created climate change.

Gore is widely credited with “raising awareness” with his film, which is the term leftists use when spending vast amounts of money does not solve or ease an alleged problem, but instead makes it known that there are some who perceive a problem to exist.

They have no way to mathematically quantify, so they retreat to vague terms such as raising awareness.

Be similarly wary when some money-spending exercise is justified for “empowering” someone or some cause.

Alas, for those who would like to keep such things on a vague and intangible level, and others who seek in general to deny reality, there is math around to point out many failures.

I came across a particularly enlightening article about the long-running story of failure that is the Chicago public school system. It told the story by the numbers.

Offered a chance to go on television to interact with the author of a damning article posted on Wirepoints.org, a spokesman for the Chicago teachers union told a staff member of the TV station “Luck Wirepoint.” Actually, he said a word that rhymes with luck, but begins with an F.

Said spokesman told the TV guy the quote was on the record, and so it was.

The article in question points out – mathematically – a failure of a school system. Begin with Manley High School, with an enrollment capacity of 1,296, but an actual enrollment of 64 students! According to 2019 figures, perhaps the most recent available, just 2 percent of students at Manley were proficient in reading; just 1 percent in math.

And then, according to the story, there is Douglass High School, with a student capacity of 888, an actual enrollment of 44, and ZERO student proficiency in either reading or math.

Now those are inconvenient truths.

There are so many examples these days of math providing inconvenient truths.

Clueless Joe Biden has been responsible for releasing 257,000 illegal minors into the United States.

Today, Clueless Joe is expected to forgive $10,000 in student debt and extend moratoriums on repayment, thereby proving a lot of college students don’t have the academic chops to be there due to being unable to understand that loans are to be repaid.

Aside from trying to buy students’ votes, Wheeler Dealer Joe has presided over the release of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve in an attempt to buy votes with lower gasoline prices. This has left the SPR at the lowest level since 1985, at about 453.1 million barrels of oil. Good thing we’re not facing the possibility of war or supply cutoffs.

The United States is preparing $3 billion more in aid to Ukraine even as whistleblowers and a story from earlier this month on CBSnews.com concede much of the nearly $30 billion sent to Ukraine to date hasn’t gotten to the intended recipients.

But perhaps the most outrageous number in the news is 5, as in the number of days in jail Mr. Nancy Pelosi was supposed to serve after pleading guilty to DUI and causing injury. It gets worse when you know that Mr. Nancy was given credit for two days served, two days for something called “conduct”credits, and reportedly will slip in eight hours of work for the fifth day.

Mr. Nancy also is reported to have to pay $1,700 in restitution, which is about what Mrs. Nancy spends on one of her late-night ice cream gorging sessions.

No, math is not racist, but it does expose a lot of inconvenient truths.

These are curious, confused times in which we live.

Consider:

Lame Duck Liz Cheney thinks she’s Abraham Lincoln.

Clueless Joe Biden thinks he’s Napoleon.

T-shirt guy Zelenskyy thinks he’s Stanley Kowalski.

Nancy Pelosi thinks she’s Cinderella in need of an escort.

Pelosi’s husband thinks he’s Foster Brooks in need of a drink.

Anthony Fauci thinks he’s Albert Schweitzer, Jonas Salk and Florence Nightingale (on the last, ever see Fauci throw a baseball?) all rolled into one, but is willing to take a chance we will be able to struggle through without him once he stops collecting a bloated bureaucratic paycheck and moves to a bloated bureaucratic pension come December

Our Federal government thinks it’s a real life version of cartoon character Wimpy, he of the “I’ll gladly pay you Thursday for a hamburger today.”

Apple employees think they’re so many hermit crabs, eager to stay home despite the company’s orders for them to return to their offices now that the deadly COVID hysteria has passed.

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell thinks he’s Harry Houdini, able to escape from the inflation straitjacket without dislocating either his shoulders or the economy.

The Census Bureau employees think they belong in the Math Is Racist camp, all the better to explain recently admitting that the 2020 census overcounted populations in eight states and undercounted six. All but one overcounted state just happens to be Democratic dominated. All but one undercounted state miraculously is Republican dominated. And, yes, Clueless Joe Biden’s Delaware, where he spends more time these days than at the White House, led the overcount list with a 5.45-percent error in the way of extra people. This only affects federal aid, representation in Congress, electoral votes, etc. So, no big deal, right?

FBI director Christopher Wray thinks he’s actress Fay Wray of “King Kong” fame, eagerly awaiting the chance to hitch a ride on the latest Democratic ape and ascend a tall building to swat at Trump biplanes.

And last, DR. JILL BIDEN thinks she’s a latter-day Edgar Bergen, her hand rammed fully up Clueless Joe’s nether regions, the better to animate him a la Charlie McCarthy.