Quick hits as we march into March.

• There is hope for Chicago, as evidenced by Lori “Lightweight” Lightfoot becoming the first incumbent mayor there to lose a re-election bid since 1983. Lightfoot finished THIRD in the runoff race. Chicagoans were voting against crime in the streets and general stagnation. Johnstown, take note.

• LIV, the Saudi-funded alternative to the PGA, drew about one-tenth the television viewership of the PGA in its first golf event of the season. For perspective, LIV was outdrawn in the ratings by an edition of cable TV’s “World’s Funniest Animals.”

• For those singing the song that Ukraine is winning the war that it is fighting with Russia as a proxy for the U.S. and the rest of NATO, understand that a former U.S. Marine fighting alongside the Ukraine army reports that the average Ukraine soldier reporting to the front lines at Bakhmut survives four hours, give or take. Time to call out celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz for another Vogue cover shoot of Zelenskyy and wife as a distraction.

• The U.S. Department of Transportation is about to have its internal watchdog examine the private plane usage of Secretary Pete Butt (whatever) while in office. Reportedly, the former Mayor Pete had at least 18 trips on private jets at taxpayers expense from the time he took office through mid-December of last year. No wonder he’s never around to do his job, like dealing directly with the train wreck in Ohio.

• For those of you keeping score at home regarding COVID mania: Various government agencies have been forced to concede the virus likely escaped from a Chinese lab, there was gain-of-function research going on there perhaps partially funded by the U.S., natural immunity from being infected by COVID is superior to anything obtained via vaccine. Oh, and masks are relatively useless. Stay tuned.

• The Biden regime can’t protect our borders, can’t respond in timely fashion to domestic disasters, can’t do much of anything well, but the department of energy is proposing efficiency standards for gas stoves that would rule out about one-half of current products on the market. They are coming for your stove to appease the environmentalist zealot branch of the Democrat (Socialist) Party. But keep Pete flying around on those private jets at government expense.

• If the economy and consumer are resilient and strong, as trumpeted by the Biden regime and its favorite economic advisers, why are large bankruptcy filings (more than $50 million in claims) coming at the highest rate since 2009? Why are house prices falling and credit card debt climbing to all-time highs? Why are so many of those job openings being trumpeted by Biden lackeys part-time, low-paying, seasonal, or some combination of the three?

• Elon Musk, who has turned Twitter into a more fair space for non-Woke opinions during his ownership, is rumored to be taking on the artificial intelligence offerings of others, that have displayed a clear left-wing, Woke agenda in their early interactions with the public. What people constantly forget when computers are involved is that some human set up the programming, the parameters, and thereby can skew the computer’s results just like poor parents can raise dysfunctional kids who turn into dysfunctional adults.

We’re done, for now.

Johnstown is not alone in facing rising crime rates and increased gun violence. It is instructive to look at the issues with an open mind.

For example, the default position of the anti-gun types around the United States is to seize on gun violence as an opportunity and excuse to disarm legal gun owners, despite protections specified in the Constitution.

These anti-gun types love to cite statistics, but selectively. For example, go to gunviolencearchive.org and you will see 6,703 gun deaths in the United States so far in 2023.

That’s the kind of number you will see quoted by the “guns bad” types. But if you take the time to delve deeper on the site, you will find that 3,828 of those gun deaths were suicides.

Repeat, a tick over 57 percent of the gun deaths were self-inflicted, not random violence by some gun-wielding thug. If you took away all legal rights to own guns, there still would be illegal guns a person contemplating suicide likely could acquire.

Even without guns, someone intent on committing suicide will find a way. As my late, terribly politically incorrect father used to observe: There is no such thing as attempted suicide. Either you want to do it, or you want attention.

Regardless, I personally know of people who have killed themselves using wet blankets and an electrical cord, or by jumping off a high bridge. It’s not pretty, but it is the reality.

For them, and others like them, it’s no guns, no problem. They’ll get it done.

Pills, ropes for hanging, jumping in front of moving vehicles, bodies of water for non-swimmers, knives, all are suicide alternatives to guns.

This is more a mental health issue than a gun issue and increasingly mental health advocates don’t seem to see the need for strong intervention regarding those with serious mental issues.

When you are more into protecting so-called rights than demanding responsibility, this sort of thing happens.

The mentally ill also often are on the trigger-pulling end of a gun when innocents are killed or hurt. Again, it’s a breakdown of our mental health and legal system that disarming the law-abiding citizenry won’t fix.

More thoughts on gun deaths: Some are legitimate use of deadly force by law enforcement. Some are accidental shootings. All of these ameliorate the harshness of the total.

Also, consider that in 2021 (statistics tend to lag in timeliness) 42,915 people in the U.S. died as a result of motor vehicle accidents. That’s drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Yet the default solution is not to ban cars, trucks or motorcycles.

Another story I saw recently dealt with Omaha, Neb., halving gun violence.

That’s been accomplished through police and community interaction under the name Omaha 360, with regular meetings to address current problems and head off future incidents.

Nowhere in the story was disarming the law-abiding populace cited as contributing to the decline.

If we want to get serious about reducing crime, there also is the time-tested solution – prisons.

The tiny Central American nation of El Salvador had the highest homicide rate in the world in 2015. Fast-forward to today and that rate is down 97 percent.

This was accomplished because President Nayib Bukele built big prisons and put criminals in them, without quick paroles.

Just last week, Bukele posted a video of 2,000 or so gang members being rounded up and put behind bars. In the post, Bukele noted this is “where they will live for decades, mixed up, unable to do any more harm to the population.”

Our liberals in charge never would tolerate long-term incarceration for criminals, or confinement for the dangerously mentally ill. They’d rather trample the rights of the law-abiding instead under the guise of addressing the problem.

.

Kyle Busch, my favorite NASCAR driver, took a record-setting win today and I couldn’t even be bothered to watch the race. Such is my distaste for the Woke mess that is NASCAR.

It must really grate on NASCAR’s higher-ups that the outspoken Busch, clearly not one of their favorites, won in California Sunday and in so doing claimed the all-time title of at least one win in 19 consecutive seasons of Cup racing.

Maybe you’ve heard of the guy whose record of 18 consecutive seasons with a Cup win Busch surpassed. That would be Richard Petty, The King!

I’ve had the great fortune to meet and speak with Petty on several occasions while covering NASCAR’s preseason media events in Charlotte, or a handful of NASCAR races. Petty is the real deal, an all-time talent with a down-home approach, and he’s secure enough with his legacy that he isn’t drinking NASCAR’s Woke Kool-Aid.

Asked a few years back if Danica Patrick, then NASCAR’s diversity cover girl, could win a race, Petty told reporters “(only) if everybody else stayed home.” Petty doubled down saying that if Patrick was a male, no one would even take notice of her.

For the record, Patrick retired and despite all the hypes and hopes, never did win a Cup race, going 0-for-191 in seven Cup seasons.

Contrast that to Busch, who has won two season championships and 61 races. Yet he rarely shows up in NASCAR promos. Prominent these days is Bubba Wallace, he of the two career wins. But he’s black and that’s what NASCAR is pushing.

The NASCAR guys similarly did metaphorical backflips when Mexican driver Daniel Suarez won a road race last year. That’s one win in 221 starts and counting.

Wallace has two wins in 185 races started.

The whole presentation of NASCAR Cup races is long on Woke messaging and short on traditional racing, which isn’t playing well with the fan base.

TV ratings for the flagship Daytona 500 race earlier this month were down, making it the third least-watched Daytona 500 ever in terms of television. I passed on it, completing my trifecta of ignoring the Super Bowl, the State of The Union Address and the Daytona 500, all formerly must-see TV for me.

NASCAR rules changes have turned Daytona into a luckfest. The latest evidence is this year’s winner, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. It was just his third career Cup win and snapped a winless streak for him that had spanned 199 races over a period of 2,060 days.

It was like the Cleveland Browns lucking into winning the Super Bowl.

Although there is unclear reporting of general NASCAR attendance, I can tell you the two races at Bristol used to have waiting lists to buy tickets and now are run before acres of empty seats.

But back to Busch. He’s running for a new team this year, Richard Childress Racing (RCR). Kyle got a less-than-wholehearted effort to re-sign him by his former employer Joe Gibbs Racing. That would be the team headed by the former Hall of Fame NFL coach, that prays publicly in pit lane after events and has been caught cheating more than a time or two.

But Gibbs has a dominant team and RCR has been something less. RCR hasn’t won a Cup title since 1994 and during Busch’s career has won 20 fewer races than Busch has by himself.

To see Busch win so quickly at RCR is further testament to his talent and shoves it right back in the faces of the Gibbs gang.

Busch may not win another race this season – NASCAR would like that – but just for today he is enjoying a moment in the sun that all the social justice warrior pandering can’t take away.

The town’s daily newspaper put forth its annual ode to the local economy today, which, to say it metaphorically, is like trying to put a spit shine on a turd. But give them points for trying.

This effort goes under the banner of “Vision 2023,” which might be a Freudian homage to the elitist Vision (Myopia) 2025 effort with which the newspaper has had something of an incestuous relationship in recent years, not limited to the former newspaper publisher moving on to a paying role with the Myopia folks.

This business/industry roundup had been the “Industrial” edition when I first worked at the newspaper in the mid-1970s and somewhere along the line had become “Progress.” Maybe there have been other labels along the way before “Vision,” but I cannot recall them.

The execution of this Vision edition was poor graphically, with the cover page looking like a ransom note of clipped letters. We think it was supposed to read “What We Make.”

Allow me to confess that I did not pay the $3 tariff for the product, nor do I subscribe since the circulation department long ago ceased to be able to deliver daily without incident. A copy arrives at our house on publication dates courtesy of a neighbor, a friend of my wife’s, who subscribes out of habit and is quick to share it after scanning it quickly, hoping that someone else can get some value from it.

Today, while conversing with the wife on another topic, this woman neighbor offered as an aside that there was a section in the newspaper indicating all the positives happening in Johnstown, but she can’t really see these improvements.

She should not feel alone,

In this very same copy of the newspaper, regular portion, there was a front-page headline “Foul play in bar owner’s death?” That man, Lance Ross (no relation that I know of), apparently was beaten to death early in the week. Originally his demise had been blamed on a fall. An autopsy indicated a beating.

Yet another unsolved murder in what used to be nicknamed the “Friendly City.”

We should dismiss that, just as Philadelphia should ditch “City of Brotherly Love.” Truth in advertising and all that.

Move inside today’s Johnstown Tribune-Democrat to the A section and one finds on A3 the headline “DA: Johnstown drug warrant sweep arrests nine adults” and also a separate story headlined “Detective: Man supplied fentanyl in fatal overdose.”

As written here before, Johnstown’s growth industries are crime, poverty and nonprofit organizations often designed to enrich management and friends.

Browsing quickly through the Vision section produced no concession of this reality, just some familiar optimism that is short on basis.

The statistics to be found outside the Vision PR effort continue to paint Johnstown as an area of high crime, low income and a degree of stagnation that is difficult if not impossible to surmount.

So, save the $3 and keep your eyes open as you travel around the area. Check out the streets in various stages of disrepair, the abandoned and decrepit buildings, the empty storefronts, the lines at the soup kitchen, the hordes who descend on stores around the first of the month when government money is direct-deposited into accounts.

That’s the true Johnstown Vision 2023.

Because this blog, during its relatively brief lifespan of several years, has noted the decline of Greater Johnstown, people might think I believe our area was all sunshine and lollipops decades back. Not in the least.

Having lived here for the entirety of my 67-plus years, I am all too familiar with things that have been less than ideal over that stretch.

It’s just that the negatives seem more pervasive now. But that doesn’t mean we lacked scandal and bad actors back in the day.

In the early 1970s, it came to light via a federal indictment that the mayor and two councilmen had accepted $15,000 in bribes to provide Teleprompter a 10-year cable television franchise for the city in 1966.

In 1989, Judge Joseph O’Kicki, a Johnstowner serving in county court, was convicted of several felonies, including official oppression, criminal coercion and bribery. Some of the payoffs were reported to be laughably small at $500 each.

O’Kicki was acquitted on such charges as asking secretaries into his office while he was in his underwear, or seeking a bribe from a strip mining company.

Through the years we’ve had a boom and bust economy, for a long time riding the economic tides with Bethlehem Steel, which was oft-accused of keeping competing industry out of the area in order to preserve its labor pool. I’ve known people who moved to California, or other areas during the slack times in the steel industry, looking for jobs. Often they moved back. Sometimes they didn’t.

During my two decades of working for the Johnstown newspaper (1974 to 1994) mostly in sports, I got to hear of the seamier side of the area from news reporters, and saw enough myself up close and personal.

We had a considerable mob presence in Johnstown during my very early years of life, dabbling in mob-like things such as illegal gambling and prostitution, and based in a “cigar store” located within spitting distance of City Hall.

There was just one high-profile murder with mob implications back then, that of bookie Pippy DiFalco in 1960.

Contrast that to the regular reports of drug-related shootings now, or just general mayhem being visited upon our area by the criminal element. As I type this, there are reports of a woman being stabbed (not fatally) at an Ebensburg senior center, and a Johnstown businessman having been beaten to death in recent days.

Beyond these anecdotal observations, take the time to do a quick Internet search on Johnstown crime and you will encounter statistical evidence of our high rate of crime, particularly bad when compared with areas of similar population.

Economically, we’ve replaced boom and bust with flat-lining at a very low median income level. But the nonprofit organizations continue to prosper and reward their management extraordinarily handsomely.

We have governmental, quasi-governmental and veritable secret societies holding secret meetings, with Facebook watchdog John DeBartola having announced just today on his Revitalize Johnstown page about ferreting out yet another example.

To put it bluntly, you now are more at risk living in Greater Johnstown and surrounding areas, in terms of personal safety and economic opportunity, than when mob influence was at its peak, city officials were taking bribes, a county judge was operating like some feudal lord, and Bethlehem Steel was the economic lifeblood.

It was not perfect many years back; not even close. It was, however, much better.

You would be right to wonder what Clueless Joe Biden is doing flitting about Europe while residents of Ohio are dealing with an unintentional chemical war caused by a train derailment.

As has been par for the course for this Biden regime, the horror on the home front that is the Ohio problem is being swept under the rug; given precious little attention. When there is commentary from the likes of Transportation Secretary Pete Butt (whatever) on the situation, his answer is to blame Donald Trump.

If that fails, expect to hear it’s the Russians’ fault.

Speaking of Russians, you may have heard they are losing their war in Ukraine. But many pundits, most recently Martin Armstrong, claim Ukraine is losing big time and already has suffered upwards of 250,000 deaths among its military.

Yet, Clueless Joe, showing he’s tone deaf as well as cognitively impaired, was promising money and weapons to Ukraine begging boy Zelenskyy to keep the war going.

You might have seen or heard reports of weapon shortages being suffered by the U.S. military, and not just because we needed to fire a couple of $400,000 missiles to bring down a $12 balloon.

Serving as the world’s arsenal has put a dent in our supplies.

And our flagging economic situation accentuates the problem. The federal government is cash poor, or should we say borrowing constricted, having bumped up against the debt ceiling. There are extraordinary measures being taken now to keep things running, something like the average overleveraged household hitting credit cards, or retirement savings to meet expenses, or conducting a monthly lottery to decide which bills will get paid and which will not.

Our national debt stands at $36.5 trillion, give or take, up about $3.5 trillion since Clueless Joe took over the reins. This is a problem, regardless of the successful public relations effort by administrations of both political parties to downplay it.

Trump’s years as president added almost $8 trillion to our national debt.

We’re spending money we don’t have, and sending big chunks of it to places like Ukraine for no reason other than to fight a proxy war with the Russians.

This is a dangerous game when the adversary has the nuclear arsenal that Russia possesses. If things really do go bad for the Russians, what’s to prevent them from starting World War III with the big bombs? Nothing to lose and all that.

Don’t forget our tense standoff with China over Taiwan, or China’s increasingly close ties with Russia.

And so, Biden is spewing cash into Ukraine at a rate not seen since Hunter did some dealing there, and making promises about defending Taiwan.

Trump, showing his political savvy, made a stop in East Palestine, Ohio, today to address the forgotten residents there. Reports indicate he was warmly received and more than a few natives expressed dismay over Biden’s continued absence.

Maybe Clueless Joe heard “Palestine” and thought it was somewhere in the Middle East, an area of the world where he is reluctant to go and face the chaos he has helped create there with his anti-Israel policy, the ill-fated Afghanistan pullout, and the fact that Iran is reported to be on the verge of joining the nuclear bomb club.

Trump’s America First policies sure sounded good to the aggrieved people in Ohio and nearby states. Perhaps Trump’s greatest accomplishment while in office was refusing to get the U.S. entangled in any additional foreign conflicts.

Clueless Joe and his warmongers seem almost overeager to escalate conflict. And a cynic might wonder if they intentionally want wars in order to distract the populace from the deteriorating situation domestically – both socially and economically.

Back in the day, when I worked for the Johnstown newspaper, an editor controlling the operation took it upon himself to cheer up the populace by ordering layout people to insert “Good News” graphics into some stories.

One such effort by a guy putting together the sports section met with a strong rebuke the next day from said editor. The Good News graphic had been inserted, as I recall, into a story about a track meet. Noted the editor, sure, the winning side thought it was good news, but what about the losers?

Life is all about perspective, a truth brought home by a recent story that appeared in San Francisco’s Chronicle newspaper and that was picked up by the zerohedge.com web site.

It told the story of a teenage Ukrainian girl brought to supposed safety in San Francisco who, after a short time experiencing life in public schools there, longed to return to her old school in war-torn Ukraine.

This girl was horrified to witness San Francisco students interrupting classes, jumping on desks, cursing at teachers. The girl was astonished when there was no punishment for these students; it was just standard operating procedure.

The girl also was harassed, had her cell phone stolen, and generally she was bullied, with little done by the administration to address the problem.

Returning to Ukraine for her was an attractive option to the living hell that is the reality of too many public schools in the good old U.S.A. How about that, all you ivory tower education liberals!

In a similar tale, a story was told of a Ukrainian woman “rescued” to a fresh start in a lesser neighborhood in Birmingham, England. The woman’s unhappiness with her new locale was attributed to her inability to cope with the diversity there.

But this woman’s visit to the local police web site, rife with statistics on various crimes, showed the problem was not her. She was just observing – correctly – the outlaws in control of an inner city, not all that different than being in a Ukrainian war zone.

It is beyond doubt statistically that major U.S. cities, almost all of them deep blue as in Democrat-controlled, have a quality of life that worsens with each passing day when you consider crime, ineffective schools, poor public services, high taxes and mammoth cost of living.

Yet we are to ignore the evidence. We need to adopt a perspective that accentuates the positive.

Yes, the cities are in collapse, but don’t those night television shots from blimps covering sporting events make it look all placid and lovely?

It all seems better from 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 feet. This ignores the reality that on the ground, it’s all different.

I recall infantry types who had fought in Vietnam offering the opinion that the people who spent the war on ships or flying jets over the rice paddies got a sanitized view of it all. It was different up close and personal.

Fast-forward to 2023 and a report tells us a teenage Ukrainian girl, confronted with the cesspool of a San Francisco public school, longs to return to her homeland, never mind the war.

We would do well to consider what we should learn about the world from this girl’s perspective.

The Biden regime, and Democrats in general, are well on their way to elevating the practice of pandering to identity politics to its logical extreme, that being the complete breakdown of meritocracy.

First, allow us to define terms. When we write of identity politics, we speak of the whole “looks like America” rubric in that any group must accurately reflect in terms of its numbers the racial, sexual, cultural breakdown of this land, or else be considered unacceptable.

Funny how the most strident advocates of this mandate have no problem with an NFL or NBA whose player rosters are not “looking like America.” Instead, they carp about coaches or front office positions not being representative.

Even Major League Baseball, oft-criticized for being “too white,” has Hispanics and Blacks over-represented as players compared to their percentage of the United States population.

Perhaps they are there because they have the talent, which would be a meritocracy. That is the formerly common goal and practice, in government and private industry, of putting the most qualified person available into a position, regardless of racial, sexual, or cultural breakdowns.

Identity politics and meritocracy cannot co-exist.

It is sadly amusing how those who honor identity politics as their first commandment are willing to waive it when it benefits them.

That’s how Clueless Joe got the job in the first place. He was the great compromise. The far-left types who of late control the Democratic Party, wanted wild-eyed socialist Bernie Sanders, but they realized, in an uncommonly sentient moment (something that is a rare occurrence for Clueless Joe) that Bernie could not win the election.

Never mind that the Clueless One was just another old white guy. He could win and keep the levers of powers in the hands of the left.

Similarly, the identity politics people were willing to check at the door their crusade to get a woman in general, and even better, a woman of color, a seat in the Oval Office. Kamala Harris, who would have trouble winning a race for dog catcher in a non-partisan precinct, could be slotted on the ticket as Biden’s vice president to throw a bone to progressives.

And, considering Biden’s advanced age and increasing mental frailties, should he fail completely, Harris could be slipped into the post without ever having to have won election to that office.

Alas, identity politics does not exist in a vacuum. When you put people of questionable qualification into jobs they appear unable to handle, there are unfortunate consequences.

Harris is a cackling, ill-informed gaffe machine almost any time she gets within spitting distance of a microphone. It’s chilling to think of her as president.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who seemingly got his post mostly due to being Hispanic (born in Havana, Cuba), is presiding over a continuing crisis at the border with Mexico, one that now has grown to include problems at the Canadian border under his slumber.

Secretary of Transportation, Pete Butt (something) is widely considered to have gotten his job mostly on the basis of him being openly gay and thereby filling a quota as the first person of that description to hold a cabinet post.

Pete’s been AWOL when weather crippled the nation’s air travel in December of last year and, more recently, a deer in the headlights, blaming Donald Trump for a toxic train derailment in Ohio and the painfully slow response from Pete’s people.

Although not technically a Biden pick, our U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, is a prime example of meritocracy being kicked to the curb. Fetterman suffered a stroke during his campaign and was kept under wraps to keep the public from realizing the extent of his impairment.

When he was forced to emerge for a debate with opponent Dr. Oz., Fetterman fumbled, bumbled and outright fabricated things like his past stance on fracking.

And still he was elected. Since then, Fetterman has checked into a hospital for ‘light-headedness” and more recently, for clinical depression, which a spokesman said he has suffered from in the past. Funny, I can’t recall that being shared pre-election, either.

Those bold enough to suggest Fetterman is not up to the challenge of serving in the Senate are mocked as “ableists,” another of those made-up labels which seems to mean one thinks a person without mental or physical disabilities might be able to do a better job. Imagine that!

Here’s a simple thought experiment that should help clarify the problem in general.

You are about to go into surgery for a life-threatening condition. Do you want the surgeon and assorted staff to be the best qualified people, regardless of race, creed, nationality, sexual orientation or other politically correct consideration, or do you want the operating room to look like America?

Example two: You are getting on an airplane for a lengthy journey. You peek into the cockpit. Do you want a pilot and co-pilot who are qualified and competent, or people put into those seats to fill a superficial quota that is defined by matters of race, nationality, sexual orientation or some other random litmus test?

You make the call.

To give up or to keep fighting? That is the question for the populace unhappy with the way things are transpiring in the nation in general, and in Greater Johnstown specifically.

My brother, a recent convert to the voting world, is about to give up already due to a feeling it really doesn’t matter. There are many like him, those thinking the system is set up to ignore the wants and needs of the common people and instead follow the lead of the elites who seem to control it all.

Others keep fighting the uphill battle, and for that they deserve some praise.

Two of these men, John DeBartola and Joseph Taranto, were in my neighborhood Saturday collecting signatures on a petition to secure a place on the ballot for elected office (I will allow you to contemplate which one).

You may have heard of these two in connection with their Revitalize Johnstown efforts, with a huge Facebook presence. Think of them as Batman and Robin for the underserved.

It was the Gotham City establishment that requested help from Batman and Robin of comic book fame. DeBartola and Taranto, our two “Capped Crusaders,” each of whom wore a knit pullover cap while on their search for signatures today, instead are hated by those in control.

The main reason for that is DeBartola and Taranto look to hold accountable all people in a position of power. They wield freedom of information requests like a skilled surgeon uses a scalpel.

They attend meetings. They ask difficult questions. They are more than willing to speak out publicly when things are just not right.

As I told both of them today, they are doing the public service job that the media used to perform, but for some reason — both nationally and locally — no longer has the stomach to do.

Just the past week it appears the noise they raised over unhealthy conditions in Johnstown public housing led to complaints being addressed.

They are equal opportunity in that if someone approaches them with a problem – a legitimate complaint – they will attempt to help.

DeBartola has become a go-to-source to publicize violence in the Greater Johnstown School District, being provided videos of the many altercations and posting them online.

They are critics of our nonprofit culture in Johnstown and how that has become a private club of sorts for the movers and shakers, often with excessive salaries paid.

Because these two are so high-profile, they are being deluged with tips of wrongdoings around the area. Some they can address. Some they cannot.

But the most important thing is that instead of sitting in their living rooms in front of a television set, or lamenting life while nursing a beer at the local bar, they are actively trying to do something.

Their candidacies have and will be opposed by the ruling class. They will be mammoth underdogs in any political race they enter.

They realize this. They are not naive. But they are fighting the good fight, a noteworthy thing in troubled times.

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals and our banks destroy the economy.” Chris Hedges

I came across this quote, plopped totally out of context on the landing page of a web site I frequent for precious metals investment information, and thought it’s the kind of thing I might have written.

Yours truly and this Hedges guy, whoever he is, are kindred spirits, or so I speculated. As it turns out, we’re not even close to that.

I did some research, the sort of thing journalists used to do routinely back in the day, before agendas replaced facts in reporting of “the news.”

Admittedly, I took the shortcut of using a Wikipedia hit that came up after searching the Chris Hedges name. But I believe it’s fair to trust the left-leaning content at Wikipedia in the case of Hedges, a self-described socialist and anarchist.

This guy has all the credentials a far-left sort would need to impress fellow travelers in these troubled times. He and the wife even are hard-core vegans, saving the environment one cow fart at a time.

Hedges also was arrested during Occupy Wall Street, worked for such notable leftist publications as The New York Times and Truthdig, and generally crosses all the t’s and dots all the i’s of the progressive litmus tests.

OK, so he did a stint hosting a cable television show on the Russian-government owned RT America before it was closed down, but no one’s perfect.

What I find instructive is that both Hedges and I separately have come to the conclusion that most institutions in these United States are rotten to the core. We just got there from vastly different points of view.

Doctors destroy health? You bet. Consider the COVID vaccine push, maskholes, and various other bastardizations of our healthcare system in which doctors can be compensated based on keeping you from demanding too much care, to be paid by your insurers.

Lawyers destroying justice? Have you witnessed the proliferation of ambulance chasers ramping up the cost to product goods, or even to provide medical care in this country? Are you aware of how far too many prominent politicians used a law degree as a steppingstone?

Universities destroying knowledge? Censorship and identity politics-based discrimination uphold that charge.

Governments warring against freedom, press destroying information, religion destroying morals and banks destroying the economy. It’s hard to argue with any of those observations.

Likely, Hedges would complain that doctors are not draconian enough in mask and vaccine pushes, that lawyers are not doing enough pro bono work for social justice warriors causes. He presumably thinks universities are too open to opposing views, governments allow too much freedom to conservatives, Christianity must go but all other religions are fine and dandy, and banks are bad mainly in that they have the temerity to demand to know in advance how their loans might be repaid by the borrowers.

To repeat, Hedges and I no doubt disagree on the particulars. But we agree on the dysfunctional nature of our current society, with so many of the basic foundations having been turned 180 degrees away from what they formerly were based upon and now are being used to further political agendas at the expense of what is fair and just.

You don’t need Spidey senses to recognize all is far from well, and to continue on the current path is to seal the eventual date for the complete breakdown of the so-called “system.”

I see it. Hedges sees it. Maybe you’d see it, too, if you only took the time to notice.