Today is May Day, a time for socialist rallies and communist celebrations.

This should not be confused with the international distress code word “mayday,” or maybe it should.

There is much distress about the land, an ever-widening rift between political right and left fueled by the left’s outright campaign to ignore facts and suppress dissent.

Liberals, socialists, progressives, whatever term you want to use, do not allow their arguments to be limited by truth. To the contrary, they are actively seeking to quash those who would speak the truth.

Admittedly, there are some on the right who play fast and loose with facts, but they tend to be called out legally as in the case of Alex Jones and his denial of the Sandy Hook school massacre. Why is this not the case when those doing the distortions are on the political left?

This Elon Musk bid for Twitter has exposed a lot of cockroaches. Begin with the company’s admission that for three years it overstated daily users.

Such errors are important because they are measures that affect the stock price, and advertising rates.

As a companion to this mea culpa from Twitter, there are the anecdotal cases showing conservatives’ numbers of followers mushrooming and totals of followers of liberals on the social media platform tanking.

Cynics have suggested that this indicates Twitter trying to get ahead of Musk’s prying eyes by freeing up conservative posters from censorship and shadow banning, while bringing liberal follower numbers back toward reality.

Twitter’s censorship czar is rumored to be about to lose her $17-million-a-year job which paid her for such successes as knocking down the New York Post for running the Hunter Biden laptop story, since conceded to be 100 percent true by traditional left-wing house organs such as the Washington Post and New York Times.

Said Twitter censor also banned any discussion of COVID being an escapee from a Wuhan lab, a supposition that not only won’t die, but gains strength as time passes.

Emboldened by actions of Twitter and Facebook, who line up squarely on the left and censor the right, the average leftist citizenry thinks it, too, can deny outright proven facts.

Consider the example recently encountered by me. During maybe a half-hour conversation, a guy who otherwise might be considered rational, refused to concede that Trump rallies outdrew Biden rallies.

His response to the matter of Hunter Biden and his alleged dirty dealings, was to maintain the entire Trump family was guilty of miscellaneous sins.

He cited former attorney general William Barr as protecting President Trump. If Barr refusing to look into election questions and giving Robert Mueller a free hand in his special investigator role looking for Russian collusion that found basically nothing on Trump is protection, who needs enemies?

The legal harassment of Trump and his family continues. But a Manhattan grand jury charged with looking into allegations of property price manipulation for purposes of securing financing or avoiding taxes reportedly is going to disband with NO CHARGES to be filed vs. Trump.

I guess the Biden justice department is protecting Trump, too, which would be a case of the strangest bedfellows.

Or maybe when it comes to producing evidence, the left has only the usual distortions of reality to offer and, thankfully, some individuals still decide such legal matters on facts not fantasy.

This leftist with whom I spoke eventually retreated to accusing me of thinking Trump was flawless. I responded as I have many times, that Trump is a flawed human being, with an overinflated ego and a mouth that moves often without the benefit of the brain being in gear.

That having been said, the Democrats ran two of the weakest candidates in history vs. Trump and so it was a no-brainer to vote for Trump.

The reality that he won even once is a monumental triumph, although these same leftists who argue an election could not be or was not stolen in 2020, maintain exactly the opposite was the case in 2016 when they lost.

To win, Trump not only had to beat the Democrats, he also had to vanquish his own gutless Republican party establishment.

Allow me to repeat, most Republican leadership is gutless in the extreme. But the grassroots segment of the party is strong and unbowed.

It’s time to become more strident and forget the “compassionate conservative” crap of George W. Bush and others.

If you think you can convince the raving leftists using facts, you are sadly mistaken. If you are counting on people like Bill Barr or current special counsel John Durham, charged with looking into Russiagate, to hold liberals’ feet to the legal fire, you are similarly mistaken.

If you think pandering to leftists will make them like and respect you, you are as delusional as they are.

Individuals need to demand truth and accountability regarding everything from social media and LameStream news, to local governments and school systems.

Until such time, the leftists will keep on winning and the country will continue swirling around the metaphorical toilet bowl.

Having never posted on Twitter or Facebook, I cobbled up this blog as my own private venting space. Commence the venting.

The wife sent me to the local hardware store today to pick up bird seed. She’d been there Sunday, but they were out. The woman said come back Tuesday when more would have arrived.

Do I need a raincheck? the wife asked.

No, said the employee. The price would be honored.

So, as I waited in line, with my two 20-pound sacks of bird seed propped against the counter, the gentleman ahead of me was having a similar discussion about — bird seed and pricing. This woman said the sale had ended. Instead of $19 plus tax for two bags, it now would come out to about $27 or $28 (tax included?)

He ponied up the extra money. I took my two bags back to the display and despite the offer from an older woman worker to put them back in place, I slung them up on the stack and left.

I try to patronize this local business, but they make it tough. Do an online product search and the item shows up as being on their shelves. Drive on over to the store and the items customarily are not in stock. Ask someone there and they say never to bother doing online search because it is extremely inaccurate.

Then why have it at all? Better yet, why not improve it so it is accurate and helpful?

I urged the wife to call the store and voice her complaint about the bird seed. She of course will not do so. So I rant here about wasting my time. I just might call when I get done venting.

On this very same excursion, I attempted to cash a cashier’s check from an area bank. I was trying to cash this at my bank branch and had, in fact, just cashed a personal check on my account in this very same visit.

But when I tried to leave with the money from the cashier’s check, I was told they would put a hold on my checking account for that amount, in excess of $4,000.

Otherwise, I could deposit it to my checking account and withdraw it tomorrow.

I was astounded. A cashiers check traditionally (and still is according to my internet search) considered much more safe due to such checks being guaranteed by the underwriting bank, not by the individual’s funds.

So, why this extra step? I was told I could show up bright and early tomorrow and pull the entire amount from my account.

“Cashier’s checks are the most common kind of fraud” replied the teller, sounding like every boilerplate-reading telephone representative with whom you’ve ever tried to address an inquiry.

And so I rant.

Ah, but there is a happy ending. I went to a local sub shop, where milk is, inexplicably, considerably lower in price than at the regional supermarket chain outlet less than half a mile away. The grandkids drink A LOT of milk.

The cashier was friendly. Another customer – a woman – who was entering held the door for me to exit.

If only this sub shop sold bird seed, or offered checking accounts.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter after all and the leftists who considered it their own virtue signalling platform are very predictably exhibiting Petulant Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s a thing, look it up.

For those too lazy to do their own research, PBPD is, according to americanaddictioncenters.org, a condition whose sufferers fluctuate between outbursts of explosive anger and feelings of being unworthy or unloved. They have a STRONG NEED TO MANIPULATE OTHERS (my emphasis added), and they become very possessive, which results in extreme dissatisfaction in their relationships. This leads to issues with substance abuse and other potentially damaging issues.

Curiously, Jeff Bezos is among those exhibiting symptoms. But he’s a clever sufferer. Bezos, Mr. Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, asked an open question whether Musk acquiring Twitter might give the Chinese undue “leverage” due to their dealings with Musk.

Apparently blowback was intense about Bezos and his hypocrisy, considering the fact that Amazon sells so many Chinese products and has blocked all but five-star reviews of a book by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and on, and on, and on.

So Bezos quickly added that he would answer his own question and say no, Musk was not likely to be leveraged by the Chinese.

Here Bezos has borrowed from the sleazy tabloid playbook. Ask a ridiculous question on the front page such as “Does hamburger cause cancer?” or “Is John Doe a child molester” with the answer to be found on D 10 or some such page buried in the edition.

Turn to page D 10 and the answer found there is no. But how many people bother to check? And if they do, how many people then immediately discount the initial question instead of leaving it to simmer in the dark recesses of their memories, only to be dredged up down the line as fact because they read it somewhere, sometime?

Maybe Bezos is feeling “leveraged” because Musk has surpassed him as the world’s richest person.

Maybe Twitter twits are feeling leveraged because for so long they had taken for granted they could rant with absolute freedom in that space as long as they were mouthing the far-left progressive platform.

And, should any right-thinking individuals have tried to inject facts and balance into the discussion, they would have been shut down by the radical Twitter censors, sort of like Amazon canceled anything but the most flattering reviews of Xi’s book.

Dare we dream that Musk will inject some balance into the Twitter equation?

Recently in this space I noted the decline in Johnstown’s quality of life, fueled in part by an influx of undesirables from Philadelphia (Filthydelphia).

Today’s edition of the Johnstown daily newspaper appeared with a story of four upstanding men from Filthydelphia busted on drug charges after raids on two Johnstown houses (to call them homes verges on blasphemy).

One big drug bust, two houses, four men from Filthydelphia nabbed.

What a coincidence.

Today, Altoona TV station WTAJ’s web site has a report on two people from – wait for it – Filthydelphia being arrested in Johnstown on drug and weapons charges.

The morons first attracted police attention for abusing a puppy in a car dealer’s lot. The female moron showed up apparently drunk to support her man and ended up being arrested.

When all was said and done, charges were filed against both due to illegal drugs and a 9 mm gun, which convicted felons, and both of these Filthydelphia lovelies reportedly were/are convicted felons, cannot have guns, not to mention the copious amounts of illegal drugs.

The criminal element in Johnstown isn’t always from Filthydelphia. We do have our share of homegrown hoods.

But how many felonies do you think were committed in Filthydelphia over the past two days by Johnstown residents? I’m betting none.

I’d love to see an honest accounting of how so many Filthydelphia thugs and criminals have ended up in Johnstown.

Even better, I’d love to see our civic leaders stop being so concerned about milking the federal government for grants and assorted handouts, or plotting secretly to swell the local population with various refugee groups, and begin both acknowledging and addressing what obviously is a problem Johnstown is experiencing with Filthydelphia refugees.

It’s nice that some of the Filthydelphia criminals are off the streets, for now. But does anybody actually know how many more Filthydelphia convicted felons, or would-be felons, remain at large in our once-fair city?

I did a lot of traveling during my days as a sportswriter, including prolonged stays in various parts of vacation meccas such as California (for a Super Bowl, NFL playoff games and a Rose Bowl), in Florida (Super Bowls, college bowl games, NHL Stanley Cup playoff games and Major League Baseball spring training), Louisiana (Sugar Bowl), Texas (Alamo Bowl) and Arizona (Super Bowl, Fiesta Bowl).

I made visits of shorter duration to almost every major city that had a pro baseball, hockey or pro or college football team.

I even worked for a Pittsburgh newspaper, but chose to commute and never moved from the Greater Johnstown area. My line at the time was that this was a nice place to live – if you had a job.

We had a low cost of living, from housing right on down. We had a relatively low crime rate. We had good schools — if you lived in the right area.

Traffic wasn’t a problem. We were close enough to Pittsburgh if your wants tended toward big city offerings.

But I wasn’t a Pollyanna regarding Johnstown, either. I’d lived here all my life and seen political corruption and hints of same first-hand.

Cambria County had a reputation as being extremely corrupt politically, although the local Democratic house organ that masquerades as a newspaper ran a series eight years back trying to knock down that assertion.

The usual dial-a-quote sources were consulted. That series aside, I’m still seeing Cambria County as long on corruption through the years.

Even when the conduct isn’t illegal, there’s an unhealthy trend for the crowned elites to wield power and influence in relative secrecy.

Remember, I worked for the local newspaper, when it still was a newspaper, for 20 years from 1974 to 1994. Although mostly I worked in sports, I had occasion to see first-hand how the sausage was made in various non-sports aspects, and to get first-hand insight from colleagues on the news side about the behind-the-scenes goings-on. Sometimes the best stuff never made print, for legal concerns.

Fast-forward to 2022 and the Johnstown I knew from my younger years, not a bad place despite the unseemly underbelly, is disappearing, replaced with a community lacking even the superficial niceties.

My wife spent part of last night listening to a police chase on the scanner. The object of the pursuit was said to have an outstanding warrant – from Philadelphia.

Crime reports, when the local left-wing house organ deems them fit to print, are heavy on misdeeds committed by people with Philadelphia connections, or from other areas that are less than Utopias.

During various trips to Philadelphia over the decades, I borrowed the term Filthydelphia, due to the garbage on the streets, and walking them.

Now the Filthydelphia element is strong in Johnstown. No one wants to claim ownership of this migration, but the migrants didn’t just stick a pin in a Pennsylvania map and found Johnstown.

Lately our myopic visionary operation, guided by behind-the-scene puppet masters, is looking to boost the area with all manner of come-ons to refugees from whatever foreign, war-torn or economically bereft land is oozing residents. No need to discuss any of this in public, of course.

Ironically, the refugees are being welcomed to move here even as the current Johnstown city manager won’t lower himself to move into the county.

There has been back-and-forth commentary between mouthpieces for the lack-of-vision people and public citizen watchdogs seeking to shine the light of publicity on their non-public background dealings.

I get to witness this on social media when I make my daily checks using my son’s account on Facebook marketplace looking for hobby car sales listings.

There are ad-hominem attacks on the watchdogs by elites who got their seat at the table not through their success, but the old-fashioned way, that being inherited wealth.

But they know better than you or I what’s good for the area, or maybe for them.

Our area is rife with non-profits and charities in which the people in management take home hefty pay. We have a cottage industry of people who specialize in shaking the begging bowl to get federal grants.

I have said it before, but it bears repeating: For all the money spent to attract business to the area, all the promises made over the decades, our growth industries remain crime and poverty.

That’s the reality and it is not likely to change until the public has more of a say in who’s wielding the power, and making some coin in the process.

Robert (Don’t Call Me Third) Reich, whose physical stature qualifies him to be an eighth dwarf (Lefty perhaps?) stands a mighty 4-foot-11.

This was good for him during the Vietnam War according to Reich’s bio on Wikipedia, because while Reich was drafted, he didn’t pass the physical due to being an inch short of the minimum height requirement.

So Reich instead passed his time palling around with Bill Clinton at Oxford and even dating the then Hillary Rodham, also all according to Wikipedia.

As leftists go, Reich is somewhere on the extreme left of Marx, Trotsky, Castro and Lenin.

The onetime Secretary of Labor under Clinton is a reliable mouthpiece for all causes left.

That means most recently Reich has opined wherever possible on what a terrible thing it would be for Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

Can’t have a billionaire, an “oligarch” (the latter term being chosen carefully by Reich to link Musk to all those nasty Russian rich guys) operating a media outlet, be it social or otherwise. Dangerous nonsense this, according to Reich.

Understand that Reich, with typical liberal hypocrisy, has no problem with leftist billionaires controlling media. Zuck and Facebook, with its highly partisan censorship policy, is no problem to Reich. A cynic might note that’s because the Zuck and his censors lean hard left.

Amazon guru Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Dangerous nonsense? No, because Bezos is a good rank-and-file progressive.

Twitter, whose censorship policy puts it in Reich leftist territory on the political spectrum, is fine just the way it is according to Reich. No dangerous nonsense here. Sure, co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey is a billionaire, but he made sure Twitter was as liberal as Abbie Hoffman, so having that billionaire reigning over a significant slice of internet discourse was neither dangerous nor nonsensical.

How are we to understand Reich? Back to his Wikipedia file. That refers to Reich being bullied as a child and vowing to stand up to bullies whenever and wherever possible.

Make that standing up to any conservatives Reich brands as bullies because they don’t worship at the feet of Chairman Mao.

If you are a socialist, leftist, progressive, so liberal-you-can’t-stand-up-straight, feel free to bully away.

This ideological blindness is a way for a height-challenged guy to be a big man, metaphorically speaking. No matter that actor Gary Burghoff, a 5-5 ½ specimen who played Radar O’Reilly on the TV sitcom MASH, presumably could post up Reich with impunity on a basketball court.

As long as Reich keeps spouting leftist slants on anything and everything he is a 7-foot Shaquille O’Neal to those fellow travelers. No need to be correct, just predictably doctrinaire.

Reich’s actions could be construed as a cry for help, for the sort of vaccine Fauci isn’t pushing – a cure for Napoleon’s Syndrome.

The blogger is dog-sitting at his son’s house, with the attendant limited television options and being reduced to using a laptop not conducive to ease of writing, so I’ve popped back home to make a quick-hits update on yet another crazy few days.

THE NEWS: Twitter employees are horrified that Elon Musk of Tesla fame wants to buy the company and, ostensibly, rectify its leftist lean.

THE VIEWS: Funny how these self-appointed censors and social engineers are curled up the fetal position sucking their thumbs over the prospect of someone policing their political censorship and their otherwise quashing of anything but the governmental left-wing narrative. Not so much fun when the shoe might be on the other foot, is it? And that is precisely the point of why censorship is bad, because you all-powerful censors someday could find your opposition silencing you.

THE NEWS: Border agents, accused of whipping Haitian immigrants from horseback, a false claim spread by a united front of Democrats and leftist social media (sound familiar) have been CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES!

THE VIEWS: It was a trumped-up allegation designed to take away coverage of Biden’s porous border policy. The Big Guy himself came out of his bunker days after the allegations surfaced to say the border agents “were going to pay.” Even as Biden played to the left-wing mob, it was known that the alleged “whips” were merely the reins of the horses that the riders were holding to control those very same horses. But Biden, his various official mouthpieces, and his unofficial media mouthpieces seem to have missed this story clearing the agents. You could knock me over with a sledgehammer I’m so surprised.

THE NEWS: Washington, D.C., got a special delivery Wednesday morning, a busload of illegal immigrants sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

THE VIEWS: Liberals, progressives, left-wing Democrats and probably most of the Twitter employees are outraged that Abbott would do such a thing to expose very publicly the ongoing border crisis. These things should not be seen or heard among polite company, don’t you know. The fact is we have a border crisis and The Big Guy Biden is only making it worse.

THE NEWS: The government admitted to an 8.5 percent inflation rate for March, the highest since December 1981, and The Big Guy Biden is blaming Putin.

THE VIEWS: Like most Big Guy utterances, truth is not necessarily present in the Putin charge. Prices of regular gasoline in the United States were up 70 percent from Biden’s election to the day Putin’s Russian troops invaded Ukraine. That’s because Big Guy Biden made it very public that he was out to crush the fossil fuel industry as a payoff to his radical left supporters. Just 30 percent of the gain in gasoline prices has come since the invasion. I know that blaming Russia and Putin is all the Democrats have these days, but it’s weak and anyone who believes this ludicrous stuff is extremely weak mentally.

THE NEWS: Few media outlets ( an exception being The New York Post, which scooped all about Hunter Biden’s laptop and endured much politically correct blowback before others belatedly admitted it all was true) have had the cajones to report that alleged Brooklyn subway shooter Frank R. James has been posting racist material for some time on Facebook.

THE VIEWS: And those very same Facebook censors had no problem with it until James was arrested. Then they cleared the posts. But others have screenshots of James with posts such as one imploring “black Jesus” to “please kill all the whiteys.” There is a very evident double standard in this country among news media and social media when reporting matters of race. Because James is black, apparently it was OK for him to post venom on Zuck’s outlet. Yet anyone hinting that Tony Fauci is anything less than a vaccination saint, gets punted to the Facebook penalty box. And let’s not forget our FBI. That once effective organization now spends so much time falsifying interview records, fibbing to the FISA court, investigating Trump supporters (just because), diligently looking into reports of nooses in NASCAR garages, and hounding anyone who happened to be in Washington, D.C., Jan. 6, 2021, and wearing a Trump hat, it has precious little time to stop a man who was very publicly evidencing racial hatred and violent measures on social media, the megaphone of morons. By the way, James apparently was a big fan of CNN, with his Facebook posts often featuring a television tuned to that leftist propaganda outlet masquerading as a cable news channel.

Consider the difficulties White House staffers might have had today trying to brief Joe Biden on the mass shooting and bombing scare in New York City.

It might go something like this.

Staff: Sir, there’s been a dramatic incident in Brooklyn.

Biden: Brooklyn? I can’t wait to get out again and see the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field.

Staff: Actually, sir, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958.

Biden: 1958? That’s the year those Russkies launched Sputnik so Vlad could spy on the world.

Staff: No, sir, that was 1957.

Biden: Speaking of 1957, how about those Chevy tailfins that year! You know, I once drove one of those in NASCAR, before I became a noted Corvette race driver.

Staff: Sir, back to the shooting.

Biden: Old Dick Cheney was at it again I guess. Did I ever tell you about the time he shot the guy while out quail hunting? Speaking of Hunter, maybe the New York cops could hire him as a special consultant to investigate today’s horrible incident. I mean, Hunter’s made a lot of dough consulting on things he knows little to nothing about. Did I ever tell you that he still refers to me as The Big Guy? What a kid. But he does have a habit of losing things, like laptop computers. Hey, laptops. Ever had a lap dance? I bet Hunter’s had a few of those, wink wink.

More Biden: And speaking of Wink, where’s my man Winken?

Staff: That’s Secretary of State BLINKEN, sir.

Biden: What about Nod? Anyone seen Nod? Come to think of it, anyone seen Kamala lately? I usually can keep track of her by that maniacal laugh.

Staff: Sir, we have put together a statement for you to read regarding the Brooklyn shooting and bombing attempt. It’s the usual boilerplate that all guns should be banned from private ownership, all people should be monitored 24 hours a day with tracking implants, no conservative ever can write or say anything that is considered negative about you or Democrats. And please, sir, just read the teleprompter. No ad libs.

Biden: Ad Libs? I once sang with them, backup on “The Boy From New York City.” New York City, isn’t that close to Brooklyn?

Staff: Actually, sir, Brooklyn is one of New York City’s five boroughs.

Biden: Burro? You know, some people say I’m a burro, but they use the nasty synonym, and I don’t mean donkey.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks at Chez Ross and that has caused me to ponder exactly how the snowflake Millennials and Gen Z types get through such harsher moments of life.

These two recent generations are easily offended and overly self-centered, convinced that the world exists for their amusement and when they are forced to confront unpleasant realities such as that they aren’t the best piano players, athletes or students, it too often causes them to curl up in the fetal position, thumb securely plunged into their mouth.

Often in recent days I’ve wondered how they would cope with what our family has had to face of late.

To begin, my mother was rushed to the hospital from her long-term care facility about three weeks back. At first it was suspected to be a stroke, with ongoing bleeding on the brain.

The ER doctor shepherded my brother and me into a side room for The Talk.

The Talk is an oft-used euphemism.

When young children want to know where babies come from, they get that version of The Talk.

When those kids have grown up and begin seeing members of the other sex (are we still allowed to break it down that simply?) they get an updated version of The Talk.

When one side of dating couple wants to move on, there is yet another variation of The Talk. Married couples deciding, as one former sports editor used to put it, to split the blankets as in divorce, have another example of The Talk.

The Talk from a doctor is a life-and-death chat, literally.

Our mother would go on to spend more than two weeks in the hospital ICU, during which time there would be an emotional roller coaster with more iterations of The Talk, now including my son. He’s a Millennial, but an outlier in terms of being emotionally tough and mature.

He also had power of attorney for my mother because in the pragmatic way my family thinks, we wanted to make sure we had someone who most likely would not predecease my mother.

My mother’s health problems from the past four or five years, predating her long-term care stay, and how she handled them, has reinforced in my mind her mental toughness.

She was born in 1936, amid the Great Depression to a family of modest economic circumstances. She raised my brother and I amid domestic discord. She survived several bouts of sepsis in recent years.

But this time, the accumulated problems were too much to overcome and so she passed away a week ago.

Fortunately, she had preplanned her funeral because people of her generation and her family, are big on formal funerals.

As is typically the case, I got to see relatives I had not seen in many years. There were stories exchanged, along with vows to stay in better touch, which are unlikely to be fulfilled.

The day of my mother’s funeral home visitation, my wife went to our basement to discover a backed-up sewer line.

This was a common problem on our street before all the government-mandated sewer updates, but never for us in about 35 years of living here.

It’s an even more common occurrence for those on the street and elsewhere since the sewer work has been performed. That’s what we call progress – at least for people who solve these government-created problems.

Of all the days, it had to be this day. But the good people at Roto Rooter had a person there within hours and my wife left the afternoon visitation to go home to allow him to handle the problem.

We were not about to collapse in a puddle of goo and commence thumb sucking.

The relatively new pastor at my mother’s church, a church she has been physically unable to visit for probably four or five years, was wonderful in performing the service the next day, both at the funeral home and the grave site.

I had emailed him some thoughts on my mother, including her generosity toward others. It was gratifying to hear from him that in talking with some church members, they had given him many specific examples backing up what I had told him.

The funeral home (Geisel) did an excellent job all around even though my three-year-old granddaughter provided an innocent moment of comic relief during the funeral service by saying “This is boring.”

For the most part, the people of the ICU were great.

I’ll end this with an anecdote relayed by my brother.

He was waiting in the lobby of his apartment building for me to pick up him and a friend when the friend went upstairs to allow a delivery man to put a package in that friend’s apartment.

The building manager came up and asked my brother if he was going somewhere.

“To my mom’s funeral,” my brother said.

“Great. Congratulations,” or words to that effect, said the manager.

My brother was puzzled at best.

“I’m going to my mom’s funeral,” he repeated.

As the manager stumbled through his explanation, it seems he somehow had misheard that it was a marriage.

My brother brushed it off and even suggested to me it might make an amusing note in the blog.

I can only imagine how this bit of unintentionally offensive conversation might have triggered a Millennial or Gen Z softy.

Perhaps you noticed an intra-day collapse of your brokerage or retirement accounts yesterday, a slide that continues today as I type this, and wondered what happened. Here is your answer: Lael Brainard.

Brainard, who resembles a female scarecrow with her flaxen, straw-like hair, is vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, more aptly labeled the Open Mouth Committee these days.

The Federal Reserve basically runs this nation’s money supply. Take a bill from your wallet and you will see “Federal Reserve Note” printed prominently across the top.

You probably never bothered to think about the ramifications of that. You really should.

The Federal Reserve basically is a bank of banks set up in 1913 to manage the money system.

Modern day Fed types, most notably former Fed president Ben Bernanke, openly admit the Fed blew it by tightening money supply into and during the Great Depression of 1929 through the 1930s.

Bernanke even coined the term “helicopter money” in promising such a mistake would not again be made by the Fed. If necessary, said Ben, they would print money and drop it from helicopters to the masses.

It was interesting symbolism, even though the majority of the money supply is not physical currency, but rather digital entries on the global accounting computers.

You need the actual physical currency to conduct day-to-day business, although the long-term goal is to get rid of paper money and coinage, the better to allow governments to monitor any of your spending or income.

One of the favorite Fed methods to increase the money supply is to buy government debt instruments, things like bonds and short-term bills.

The government creates them out of thin air, the Fed “creates” money to buy them and the liquidity sloshes through the system.

The holdings show up on the Federal Reserve balance sheet, which has ballooned to more than $8 trillion, up from $4 trillion in 2020.

This is actually the underlying reason you are paying more for food, housing, transportation, fuel and just about anything else. The Ukraine situation is merely inflaming an already existing inflation problem.

The Fed belatedly has come to the point of conceding inflation is about to get out of hand, it if already hasn’t done so.

When last this happened, in the 1979-80 range, then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker raised interest rates to nosebleed levels. The average mortgage rate in 1981 was 16.63 percent.

Volcker’s shock therapy worked. The inflation rate dipped from 15 percent in 1981 to a more typical 3-5 percent within a few years.

But modern Fed types can’t pull a Volcker due to their huge Fed balance sheet, which would be decimated by high interest rates because existing debt paying lower interest rates must fall in value of the principal to reflect that.

Also the government is a massive debtor, largest on the planet.

So, while the Fed vows it will raise interest rates .25 percent or .50 percent here and there, it would need about 16 of those .50-percent raises just to get the Fed Funds interest rate up to our current inflation rate of 8-9 percent.

What the Fed members do have is their mouths, and they run them ad nauseam.

Brainard heretofore a dove – Fedspeak for someone who wants to keep interest rates low and increase the money supply and the Fed balance sheet – was incredibly hawkish in comments Monday.

Brainard droned on about strings of .50-percent rate increases along with drastic dropping of the Fed balance sheet.

Higher interest rates will harm consumption and, in theory, crimp inflation. Selling Fed balance sheet obligations back into the market will decrease the money supply, also with a slowing effect on things.

As is apparent, this also will crater investment markets and the economy.

And so the Fed soon will face intense pressure from people like Clueless Joe Biden, once his handlers point out that an economy in or near to being in a recession likely will lead to a strong Republican showing in the mid-term elections this fall.

Brainard and other Fed blowhards know they can’t pull a Volcker, but if they can scare investors and consumers into pulling in their collective horns, they might take a bit of the edge off the rising inflation rate without having to hike interest rates into the teens.

They are all hat and no cattle at this point because of the corner into which they’ve painted themselves with decades of loose monetary policy.

But, in the short term, Brainard and her ilk can talk tough and scare markets. Meanwhile, inflation sits in the corner laughing at them.