There was a time that when I walked I listened to investment podcasts on my MP3 player, but no longer do I do that.

I’ve given myself over to enjoying the strolls without attempting to multi-task. Alas, I’ve found that the brain cannot be put into neutral.

And so as I walk, I observe the absurdities of life.

Just today, I came across a one-block section of nearby Queen Street shut down by “Road Closed” signs and a scattering of orange cones so that a replacement electric pole could be installed.

To accomplish this relatively mundane task required a small army – albeit much smaller than the number of FBI raiders it took to serve a search warrant on Donald Trump.

Let us count. There were two “guards” standing at each end of the block should some idiot be unable to read or observe the cones, not to mention multiple large vehicles parked on the street, and attempt to venture onto Queen.

I’m presuming they were not Penelec employees, but the independent contractors who make quite the living in construction-infested Johnstown these days.

But the rest ostensibly were Penelec employees, being well-compensated by definition, and perhaps even more so on this Saturday (weekend) shift.

I saw two men working, manipulating what looked like a large manual post-hole digger.

But that wasn’t all on hand. There was a knot of three men standing idly by one bucket truck. There were three more standing in a pack chatting.

The second trio was close enough that its members could have heard the heavy breathing of the two people working. The idlers’ only risk of heavy breathing would have been had they been viewing porn on their cell phones.

This is no exception, Pass any road construction site and do a quick count to determine those actually working and those merely observing the few who actually are doing something.

I was bemused by the Penelec manpower situation, but it was not the only absurdity witnessed on a walk of 2.5 miles or so, lasting about 45 minutes.

For a change of pace, I ventured toward a wooded area. Just before I reached the trail entrance, I came upon a man and a woman and a pack of dogs. Two of those dogs were on leashes, although the man had to strain mightily to keep them from banging into me.

The third dog, Dexter as I recall them calling out, ran loose. Now, here’s the bitter irony. The people’s puke green Kia Soul was parked with its windshield facing a sign commanding people to keep pets on leashes at all times in that area.

I have found that such scofflaws, aware of their infraction, attempt to mask it all with small talk. The guy muttered some greeting to me, for example.

I resisted the urge to ask if Dexter was a son, daughter, brother, sister, father or mother? He couldn’t have been a pet since he wasn’t on a leash.

But in the interest of avoiding further irritation, I just ignored the guy and continued on my walk, saying silent thanks that I hadn’t encountered them on the trail, when likely all three dogs would have been running loose and I would not have been able to avoid comment.

I can’t be sure, but I’d be willing to make a small wager that the dog walkers vote Democrat. Same with the Queen Street gang.

Lightly productive workers and self-indulgent morons are everywhere, and they like their freedom from responsibility. That’s why I’m not optimistic about coming mid-term elections, or the future course of this country.

I don’t do social media, due to preferring not to enrich Zuck and the Woke Twits at Twitter, so when I want to indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation and narcissism that is the backbone of the digital bragging platforms, this blog becomes my tool.

Today I’m here to pat myself and the wife on the back for 42 years of marriage. Hooray for us.

More than four decades back, we piled into my 1967 Mustang fastback good-weather hobby vehicle, the same car I would use to bring son Anthony home from the hospital nearly two years later, and drove to Maryland to get married.

Afterward, we motored back to Johnstown and I went to work that night, just as I worked the evening that my son was born. The Gen X, Y, Z and Millennial types who can’t bring themselves to report to work – period – might want to consider that.

We have become a nation of the gutless, self-absorbed, oh-woe-is-me types whose preferred method of greeting adversity or unpleasant reality is to curl up in the fetal position and begin sucking thumbs vigorously.

Along that line, marriages have become disposable items of limited shelf life. How often we hear about couples breaking up because one member isn’t happy or needs to find themselves. They apparently enter marriage expecting a nonstop tour of Disney World and when the joy goes on hiatus, they want to, as one of my former sports editors used to say, split the blankets. Cut and run is another apt term.

Instead of I’m not happy, their excuse should be I’m not an adult.

Only children demand constant, instant gratification. They grow out of that, at least they used to do so, before the era of permissive parenting and outright enabling, coupled with societal programs to shield children from ever having to deal with unhappy reality, created never maturing progeny, with little of the benefit and all of the drawback.

How does one get to 42 years of marriage? One day at a time. It ain’t always Disney World, nor should it be.

There needs to be compatibility, not necessarily clone-like similarity, but common ground on the big issues – like spending money, fidelity, wanting children and grandchildren, belief in God.

This compatibility can be on display in curious ways. Today, for example, despite it being our anniversary, was pretty much an average day.

My wife took the two granddaughters we watch daily out to appliance shop and then to a playground. I went to mow my son’s lawn and on the way back, made a stop at a donut shop to get my wife some of her favored chocolate examples with chocolate icing.

In part as an homage to our wedding day, I broke out a Mustang – the ’67 fastback long ago was sold but this time it was my 2005 convertible – to make my rounds.

The granddaughters were eating lunch when I got back home. After they’d finished, the donuts were offered and cards were exchanged.

For at least the second time in the past three years, my wife and I had independently selected exactly the same card for each other.

This year it was a couple of dark blue and gold examples. On the front were champagne glasses with the words “Still do. Always will.”

We laughed and the granddaughters chuckled, too. They got an impromptu speech, the sort Poppy is fond of giving, telling them it all started on this date. Without the marriage, there would have been no daddy for them.

Without their daddy, they wouldn’t be here. They were more interested in flipping a penny and having it come up tails an inordinate number of times.

Come to think of it, that was a metaphor for the relative rarity of a 42-year marriage.

OK, this brag session is finished. Thanks for your indulgence.

Not since Al Gore has a prominent Democratic politician reached such absurd levels of claiming credit as Clueless Joe Biden.

Biden’s Taking Credit tour hit Detroit Wednesday, where he claimed to be the reason for domestic auto manufacturers making progress in producing and offering electric vehicles.

It doesn’t matter to the Clueless One and his handlers that Detroit has plunging headlong into manufacturing EVs while boastful Biden still was playing second banana to that Obama guy.

Lamestream Media will not bother to correct Clueless Joe’s boastful claim, and so it goes.

Even today, Gore apologists defend him by saying his claim to have invented the Internet is just mean-spirited critics falsifying the record.

You make the call. What Gore is widely quoted as saying is “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

So, yes, he didn’t say he invented the whole worldwide web thing. He did claim a great degree of responsibility for it and he did use “creating,” indicating some degree of credit claiming.

Gore seems to fashion himself some techno-God, borrowing from the Bible’s Book of Genesis – “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

So, Gore thinks he created the Internet. Talk about being full of oneself.

Hypocrisy is a constant with Gore, who has predicted our coastal areas would be under water by now due to global warming and melting ice caps. That’s the same climate emergency Gore promoted, and then profited from, his net worth growing from a reported $700,000 in 2000 to $177.5 million in 2015, largely on the back of marketing carbon credits.

Carbon credits are a widely used financial mea culpa, sort of like some religions requiring huge donations from divorcing members to offset violating restrictions against such marital breakups in the religion’s teachings. Pony up enough cash and all is forgiven.

Clueless Biden never saw a positive development for which he would not claim credit.

His monstrous ego, exceeded only by his monstrous ineptitude, gave rise to those Biden “I did that” stickers, with rickety Joe wagging his finger. They appear often on gasoline pumps, a guerilla program combining Biden’s penchant for credit claiming with a reality he doesn’t want to own.

When those gasoline prices skyrocketed, Biden blamed Putin’s Ukraine raid – or maybe he was just serving a warrant. Now that the prices are coming down, based largely on worldwide economic stagnation and and in some small part Biden draining our strategic petroleum reserve to calm prices, Biden wants to take the credit.

This neatly ignores that gasoline prices are still far above where they were when Clueless Joe slinked into the Oval Office.

Biden is taking credit for inflation being under control, quite the dubious claim when we are running at 40-plus year highs in inflation rate.

What Biden rightly could take credit for is widening the domestic political divide, weakening our military, emboldening China, turning our southern border into a revolving door, worsening our crime and drug problems, and turning our justice and intelligence agencies into his own secret police units to harass political enemies.

But I don’t expect Clueless Joe to mount a podium to claim credit for these negative developments.

It’s left for voters to pin that tail on the lead donkey by voting out first his fellow party members and, if given the chance in 2024 (which seems unlikely) sending the head donkey packing.

The world suffers from an overabundance of Pollyannas. Their eventual return to reality, likely a forced one, is going to be rancorous.

While many eagerly buy the propaganda being crammed down their gullets by the unholy alliance of lamestream media outlets, social media, and political/intelligence operatives, sometimes the truth cannot be suppressed.

A case in point is today’s inflation report. It showed an increase in prices of 8.3 percent vs. last year at this time. There was even a small rise month over month, which might (emphasize might) spare us the repeat of Clueless Joe Biden rushing to the microphones again to proclaim no inflation.

Even the core inflation measure, favored by elites because it strips out “volatile” food and energy sectors – you know, the stuff no-one buys or needs! – was up 6.3 percent vs. last year and up .6 percent month over month.

Stock averages plummeted, with the Dow down nearly 900 points as I type this at 11:27 a.m. Tuesday.

There is a phenomenon of inflation that the longer it persists, the tougher it is to get it back under control. That is because wages rise as workers feel poorer and demand to be kept whole, so to speak.

The raises come easily for government employees, being as they are not bound by economic reality but rather by the taxing power of their employers.

When private sector employees get raises, prices almost always increase, making all feel yet more poor and keeping the cycle going.

Already there are those calculating a Social Security cost of living increase (COLA) for next year of 8.7 percent or more.

There are a lot of people on Social Security, with an endangered trust fund to support them. Increasing the payouts by nearly 9 percent only hastens the time when serious action will need to be taken to shore up that program financially, either by reducing benefits, increasing wage taxes, infusing money from more government borrowing, or maybe a combination of all three.

The world in general, both public and private, is awash in debt with declining economies meaning that debt gets tougher and tougher to repay.

Pollyannas are optimistic that Ukraine is routing Russia. Stay tuned for a better read on that.

China continues to make threatening gestures toward Taiwan and the smart money is on the ChiComs to make a move to reclaim that island nation within the next year or two.

At home we have a porous southern border, despite the witless assertion by Clueless Joe’s token veep that all is well on that front.

This affects you as illegal drugs and crime, magnified by that loose border, flood into cities and towns near you.

Back to the global picture, we see Iran on the verge of becoming a nuclear problem. We see Europe one cold snap away from having to break up the furniture to burn for warmth.

We see Great Britain’s new prime minister talking openly of using atomic weapons.

Domestically, intelligence and justice assets continue to be used like Biden’s personal Gestapo to punish political enemies. Voters are being bought off with loan forgiveness and misguided stimulus handouts, the very things that helped get us into this inflation maelstrom.

Efforts continue to demonize half of the nation’s population for the high crime of refusing to kiss the hem of Clueless Joe’s robe.

Things are almost certain to get very real for the Pollyannas in the near future, and it’s doubtful they are up to the challenge, either physically or emotionally.

Back when Johnstown’s Myopia 2025 was in its Afghan refugee period, operating behind the scenes in an attempt to flood the area with displaced Afghans, we noted in this space several potential downsides to the plan, beyond it being an attempt at operating in secrecy

Among those concerns was that although the Myopia gang was assuring all that any Afghans landing here would be fully vetted to eliminate criminals, terrorists and otherwise undesirable people being planted in our area, could we really trust those doing the vetting?

Our intelligence agencies haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory in the past few decades. They were asleep at the controls as Saudis trained here to execute the 9/11 attacks.

More recently, we were assured pulling out of Afghanistan would not lead to a quick collapse of that country’s government.

On a more domestic note, we have continuing efforts by government “justice” types to harass and convict Donald Trump on their cause of the moment.

Similarly, Trump loyalists have been harassed, frequently on ridiculous allegations and specious information, some of which has shown itself to be entirely false.

Yet these are the people Myopia 2025 was convinced could weed out any problems among an Afghan influx.

A report posted on zerohedge.com yesterday notes that the vetting has been a disaster.

According to no less a source than the office of the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, the vetting has been slipshod

There reportedly were nearly 80,000 Afghans brought here from July 2021 to January 2022. Nearly 89,000 evacuee records were checked (obviously more than one for some) and 11,110 had their date of birth listed as Jan. 1.

This is sort of like the vote counting in the last election; theoretically possible but extremely unlikely. More than 44,000 other documents used to check out immigrants were flawed in some way or another.

The bottom line is, again according to various government sources, nearly 400 individuals who are either terrorists, suspected terrorists, or people raising security concerns, floated in on the wave of Afghan refugees.

The number of outright criminals or otherwise undesirable people has to be much greater than that.

Some of those could have been right here in our little crime-ridden city, where already this week there have been two incidents of gunfire, one a standoff with the police, had Myopia 2025 gotten its way.

No need to congratulate me for doubting Myopia 2025’s assurances that all Afghans coming to the United States or Johnstown would be good Afghans.

Chalk this up as yet another unfortunate incident in which propaganda fails when facts are introduced.

It is hard to find a greater disconnect between propaganda and reality than in the example of electric vehicles.

The attraction of electric vehicles rests on a three-legged stool of supposedly cheaper operating costs, environmental feel-goodism, and government subsidies to make the initial vehicle purchase more palatable.

In a case of handout irony, college students whine that $10,000 in forgiven debt is nothing, but buyers of electric vehicles gladly grab onto the $7,500 tax credit.

But that three-legged stool of support for electric vehicles is having reality turn the whole operation into an unwieldy balancing act.

With skyrocketing electrical costs in Europe (coming soon to a plug near you?), the operating cost advantage is disappearing radically. When one adds in the inconvenience of finding recharge stations during any kind of lengthy trip, the attraction fades.

Also, the reality that battery packs need to replaced during the car’s life expectancy, with costs of $10,000 and up, it’s kind of like having to replace the engine in your filthy, gasoline-burning car every 5-10 years.

The Clueless Joe people have used the so-called inflation reduction nonsense legislation to shore up those $7,500 tax credits for EV purchases. But soon the rest of the population (read voters) will begin to clamor for fair treatment by our government overlords, and the tax credits just might be reduced substantially, if not disappear completely.

As far as owners of EVs being able to strut around and brag about saving the environment, they might want to do some research. The various minerals and materials used to build an EV require a considerable carbon footprint to mine or manufacture.

There also are some ugly images of mining operations such as for lithium – vital to the batteries – leaving huge scars on the land. One post I saw compared this to an oil sands operation, which was much smaller and less intrusive.

Even the patron saint of the EV crowd, Tesla’s Elon Musk, has gone on record recently noting the need for fossil fuels for energy production and automobiles will continue well into the foreseeable future.

Contrast that reality, from a guy who should know, to the delusional California and other states looking to mandate the end to sales of new cars with traditional internal combustion engines in the near future.

This is happening even as power grids groan under existing load and blackouts are threatened. Imagine what it would be like if 100 percent of the car-driving populace needed to plug in their vehicles each night for a recharge.

Reality is a female dog and the EV crowd is beginning to feel its bite.

If only to amuse myself, I took some $1 coins to Dollar Tree today to use in purchasing large envelopes.

I anticipated an interesting experience and I wasn’t disappointed.

Dollar Tree has, of course, kept the name, but relented to inflation in that not a lot of items in the store still are $1. My package of four large envelopes was among the victims of inflation, coming in at $1.25, plus tax.

When the cashier gave me my total, I handed him two $1 coins, one a Susan B. Anthony relic and the other a more recent Sacagawea example. I had accumulated some of these $1 coins and was eager to rid myself of them.

Anticipating confusion on the part of the cashier, I said something along the lines of “Here are two of the hated $1 coins.”

“These coins are dollars?” he asked with notable surprise.

He carefully manipulated them in his fingers, looking for evidence that I’d doctored some quarters or the like, the better to scam them.

I pointed out that if he looked closely, each has stamped on it that they are $1 coins.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why suspect that anyone would go to all that effort to try to chisel a business out of a buck and change by faking coinage?

Exactly.

But such common sense didn’t factor into his calculus. Also, apparently absent, was any previous experience with dollar coins of any kind, which speaks to the colossal failure this government experiment in manipulation of the public was/is.

There was an uncomfortable pause, a shake of the cashier’s head, and finally he seemed to be willing to accept that these were, indeed, legal $1 coins and should be accepted as such for payment.

Maybe it was an accident, maybe an intentional act, but he dropped one of the coins. I waited patiently while he fished for it among the rack of plastic bags.

Eventually he found it, rang up the sale, and I left the store with my purchases and one overriding thought.

This guy likely votes, which helps explain why Clueless Joe Biden is our president. That and some creative vote counting, but you already knew that.

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.