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.

Always, it seems, there is spin being applied to reality as the elites attempt to condition the underlings to accept indignities from wearing face diapers and suffering lockdowns to coping with the rocketing cost of living and not kicking up a fuss when Clueless Joe claims zero inflation.

Sometimes the propagandizing, the massaging of the truth, rises to outright manipulation so egregious that even a questionable legal system is forced to concede this and prosecute.

Such is the case regarding precious metals – gold and silver, and other lesser-traded examples such as platinum and palladium.

As a long-time holder of gold and silver and related investments due to my belief that our economic system is a house of cards, I am acutely aware of mysterious price action in the metals. The metals tend to drop on cue, despite overnight rises in Asia and Europe, when COMEX trading opens at 8:20 a.m. Eastern.

There used to be curious price action consistently around the aptly called London Gold Fix, which was re-christened in 2015 but still twice daily announces a price for gold in U.S. dollars as decided by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). This is an opaque process in which price is decided, not determined by open market operations.

There is a precious metals analyst named Ted Butler who for years publicly has been accusing U.S. trading firms of outright fraud in precious metals trading and the guy never gets sued, which speaks volumes.

Through the years, there have been periodic legal judgments against these firms regarding trading irregularities. But last week came a dilly when the global head of J.P. Morgan’s precious metals trading (a former LBMA member, too) and a J.P. Morgan colleague of his in precious metals were convicted of multiple trading offenses by a U.S. federal court.

One of the techniques of manipulators in general is called “spoofing” in which false orders are put into the computerized system, trying to induce price movement, and then pulled before the common folk can act on the manipulators’ specific orders, which most often are sells.

This is made possible by the firms having super computers with intense speed, located physically close to exchanges to gain nanoseconds in the execution, allowing them to front run the public.

By flooding sell orders into the system, this can create a stampede that continues due to the spooked public. Think of the stereotypical scene from western movies in which one gun shot or lightning strike sends the cattle herd stampeding.

You need human examples? Think of yelling fire in a crowded theater, having a great Black Friday sales price on a big-screen TV, or giving away cheese at the corner food pantry.

In each instance, rationality gives way to mad impulse. By the time sanity is regained, in the case of precious metals trading, those short (betting on declining prices) can buy cheap, run up prices and set in motion another decline to benefit from the movement.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Silver is the poster child for manipulation. This is both a precious and industrial metal, whose uses are massive, ranging from solar panels to use in all those nifty electronics society can’t manage to live without.

And yet silver sits at $19.06 an ounce as I write this Sunday afternoon, having plunged 46 cents in Friday trading. Silver was $50 an ounce in 1980 and nearly touched that range again in 2011. You name me another such widely used commodity whose much greater all-time high was achieved 40-plus years ago.

Oil, for example, SPIKED to $35 a barrel back in 1980 when silver was topping out at $50 an ounce. Have you checked the price of oil lately?

It is encouraging that legal action is being taken here and there against this practice of precious metals manipulation, but it’s quickly forgotten and strange price action resumes.

What would really hearten me would be if the propping up of investment markets by the Plunge Protection Team, or the investment manipulation by gabby members of the Federal Reserve Open Markets Committee (often referred to by skeptics as the Open Mouth Committee) would be widely discussed and critiqued.

It would be nice if LameStream media and social media outlets would be held to task legally for one-sided presentation and censoring.

It would be encouraging if electoral integrity and border security were considered desirable and necessary to the future success of the country.

As my late, terribly politically incorrect father would have said, don’t hold your hand over your butt (he didn’t say butt) waiting for that to happen or you will die of constipation.

With any luck, by late tonight Liz Cheney will be a lame-duck Congresswoman.

Wyoming primary elections are being held today and Cheney is expected to lose, “big time ” to borrow a phrase favored by her father.

It was Cheney, the consummate RINO (Republican in name only), who has been utilized to give “credibility” to the Jan. 6 show hearings.

Cheney is, after all, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, from a prominent Republican family. Who better to go after Donald Trump and thereby provide the illusion of bi-partisanship?

She is the ultimate Quisling.

But polls showed Cheney trailing by upwards of 30 percentage points in her re-election run, despite campaign funding from the left and an anti-Trump ad featuring Liz’s daddy, Dick.

Goodbye Liz, we hardly knew ye.

To understand Liz Cheney, one must understand that Donald Trump gained his time as president despite the best efforts of the Democrats and Republicans alike. Make that despite the efforts of elite Republicans. Main Street Republicans loved the Trump message. Most still do.

Trump spoke of America going astray politically and economically, both in domestic and foreign issues. He vowed to drain the D.C. Swamp, populated as it is by operatives from both parties.

That’s why Republicans fought almost as hard as Democrats to keep Trump out of office.

It’s why Republicans in high office did little to stop ongoing intelligence agency coup attempts, or election misdeeds designed to make the Trump time in the Oval Office a short as possible.

It is unlikely Wyoming elected Cheney expecting her to make it a personal crusade to destroy Trump. After all, 70 percent of the state had voted for Trump in 2020.

But Cheney, likely at the bidding of her fellow Republican elitists, wants to bury Trump politically. It’s not enough that he left office due to a questionable election outcome. Democrats and elite Republicans fear he still is popular and could rise phoenix-like from the ashes to run – even win – again.

Cheney, like her many other party-confused Senate counterparts among the RINO wing, ought just to do the right thing and swap parties. Their allegiances clearly are not with Republicans.

Better to make a clean break and get onboard with people they agree with philosophically.

Better to clear the decks for legitimate candidates to run, leaving us to be spared down the line from being expected to hold our noses and vote for the likes of Dr. Oz, current “Republican” candidate for Senate.

It’s time for truth in labeling when it comes to political parties. Voting out Cheney is a start.

So long, Liz. Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on your way out.

We had a yard sale yesterday and today, trying to clear out a lot of the belongings of my late mother. In the process, we got an amusing slice of life.

Understand that Ebay, Craigslist, and the retreat of traditional auctions to the online format, have combined to put a crimp in the once huge customer base for these in-person sales.

Flea markets have been similarly impacted by this digital trend, not to mention the heavy handed COVID lockdowns and protocols.

Against this backdrop, we erected our canopies and deployed merchandise on tables and tarp, with limited expectations.

The event was advertised for free on Facebook and Craigslist. We made up some cardboard signs to post at nearby intersections and sat back waiting for the money to rush into our pockets – just kidding.

My wife used to frequent yard/garage sales, often dragging me along. She seldom goes to them these days.

I used to enjoy community events, such as one formerly held in Riverside, in which many of the houses in that residential section participated.

The smart residents there merely rolled out some coolers to their front yards, stocked them with ice, bottled water and soda, and made out like bandits. It’s a variation of the story of how Levi Strauss made his money in the California gold rush not by mining, but by selling goods, particularly jeans, to the miners.

Our yard sale strategy was to move stuff with ultra-low pricing. A welcome benefit was that we didn’t got a lot of “will you take x for it ?” dickering.

One of my favorite characters, to be polite, was an older woman who came late Friday and early Saturday.

She spent Friday wanting explanations and demonstrations of items, including having us remove a nativity set from a box maybe two feet by one feet. It still was in its original packing but she wanted a guarantee it all were there, for the princely sum of $1!

This woman didn’t buy that set, or any of the other items she pored over, settling instead for a small stuffed animal for which she paid 25 cents – and paid for it with a $5 bill!

When she returned Saturday, this discriminating woman shopper needed my wife to pull a lighted Christmas bell decoration out of its box and plug it in to demonstrate its functionality. The woman didn’t buy it, of course.

She did buy some 25-cent item, but this time managed to have a quarter to pay.

This woman also told us she had been late Friday because the woman she was riding with earlier wouldn’t stop because it wasn’t advertised in the newspaper. How anachronistic.

Through it all, we encountered both early birds and people who arrived after sales hours, either wanting to look at merchandise before we had gotten it out, or even as we were packing it back into a storage shed.

We had a lot of political commentary owing in part to me keeping a Trump campaign sign in my yard. Many liked that. If people didn’t like it, they didn’t bother to mention so.

One older couple came back both days and bought with both hands, remarking at the attractive pricing. They were even buying for other people.

What I’ve learned is pretty much what I already knew. Most of those you bump into are personable, friendly, and just generally good people.

An unfortunate minority are sullen, disrespectful and have only a passing acquaintance with societal standards of courtesy.

I was surprised to find there is value in gaudy costume jewelry.

I was similarly surprised to discover one could put out unused items, with original price stickers still intact, and find people thinking what once cost $4 now isn’t worth 50 cents.

I learned there always are opportunists and hustlers looking to steal in the figurative sense by paying much less than the worth of an item that an unsuspecting seller might have offered – in this case a cast iron skillet.

On the whole, though, it was enjoyable.

We sold many items. Admittedly if you broke it down, the proceeds by the hours it took my wife, son and I to set up and tear down each day, not to mention the countless hours my wife spent going through my mother’s old house and sorting items, the pay was probably about 5 cents an hour.

Still, the weather was clear and sunny, but was neither overly hot nor humid.

I wouldn’t want to do this every weekend, as some seem to do. But it was an interesting experience just this once.