You mentioned a tranny in my circle of young motorheads and you meant a car’s transmission.

These days we’d need a new slang term for the gearbox.

Along that line, a headline writer on Friday risked adverse reaction noting that “trannies” were taking a beating. It referred to publicly traded stock shares of transportation companies, which were down in price on the day.

Wonder if the author is being sought out for punishment due to the insensitive choice of words?

A meaning change similar to tranny was underway even as tranny still meant transmission. I recall a high school English teacher reading a passage with the word gay in it, denoting happy and light-spirited. We kids snickered and the teacher relayed to us how she just hated that one of her favorite words had been appropriated for a totally different meaning.

Perhaps you have seen or heard that certain European precincts these days are in a war against the letter Z because it supposedly connotes support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Can’t display a Z publicly in two German states without facing prosecution which could lead to a fine or up to three years in jail.

Welcome to 1984, 2022 variation. There isn’t even a letter Z in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, but Russians were said to be marking their military equipment with painted Zs to differentiate them from Ukraine weaponry.

This had to mean that a Z portrayed anywhere was a public declaration of support for the Russians and a variation of hate speech, the ridiculous concept that invalidates the basic reality lesson preached by parents to kids once upon a time: Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.

We’ve devolved into a society so intent on policing any verbal slights, real or imagined, that we’ve created a whole class of opportunists eager to claim they’ve been offended and thus caused to assume the fetal position and suck their thumbs all due to a spoken or written word.

And you wonder what these people would do if confronted with an actual problem like a gun being pointed in their face, or a family member dying, or their hyper-sensitive selves losing their job.

This sort of navel gazing came to mind while watching an episode of The Rockford Files the other night, in which lead character Jim Rockford mentioned to a mafia type that the man’s son might be a homosexual, a condition the father found scandalous.

Note that Rockford didn’t say fag or queer, derogatory slang at the time (mid-1970s) for gay folk. He used a perfectly acceptable, if clinical sounding word. At least it was acceptable then for a prime-time TV series.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the word homosexual used in awhile, so I did some research to be sure, unlike our “Dilbert Street” news anchor on the local NBC affiliate.

Yep, homosexual now is offensive. It’s an interesting transition because one New York Times story explaining the offensiveness was illustrated by a picture of a man holding a protest sign reading “Homosexual Love Is Beautiful.”

That shot had been snapped in 1971, showing a stereotypical image of a guy with peace sign ear ring and matching pendant, wearing dress pants and shirt while those around him were wearing shorts and casual summer clothing.

The story, written in 2014, noted the man who obviously was protesting for the cause, might want to word his sign differently today.

But why?

Because taking offense now is the national pastime and when you run short on actual crimes such as assault, you come up with something else to claim victimhood. Think Jussie Smollett.

If you can claim offense over both race and sexual orientation, that is the daily double.

Spoiler alert: When the mafia son would not agree to go “straight” – sexually, not in terms of criminal behavior — the father gave the word to an associate to take care of the problem and the son was shot dead.

Acceptable slang at the time for that outcome could have been that he had him rubbed out, blown away, whacked, popped, snuffed or smoked.

These days those slang terms likely also would be deemed offensive, not because they describe humans killing other humans, but because they might hurt someone’s feelings with perceived gay innuendo

And that clearly is the much greater offense.

It was a rite of spring — and maybe it still is — that often some April Fool in the media would celebrate today’s occasion by giving a radio or television report, or writing a newspaper story that was untrue, outrageous and sometimes downright scary, then at the very end attempt to negate the impact by proclaiming it all an April Fools’ exercise.

Frequently these Fools found themselves on the unemployment line as a result of bosses and/or a public that didn’t appreciate their lame attempt at humor.

These days the news is full of reports that should be no more than misguided April Fools’ pranks but, unfortunately, are all too true.

Begin with Hunter Biden’s laptop, the device full of revelations and porn. The New York Post broke the story way back when and found itself put in social media jail. Other media outlets were quick to try to knock down the story and a group of 50 or so supposedly intelligence agency alumni branded it all as Russian disinformation.

Fast forward to today, safely post-election in terms of installing Clueless Joe Biden as president, and all of a sudden media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN are reporting that, alas, the Hunter Biden laptop story was and is legitimate.

The cynic in me sees two reasons for this conversion. First, you can only deny truth for so long before even your sycophantic followers begin to have doubts about your sanity.

Second, the idea now is to isolate Joe Biden, AKA The Big Guy, from any blowback, either legal or ethical. Sure, maybe Hunter was dirty, but Joe was clean as a whistle.

It’s the media equivalent of an army retreating and then attempting to reform its line after strategically ceding territory.

Sadly, for the bulk of our brain-dead electorate, it probably will work.

More reality that reads like an April Fools’ Day prank are the plans to combat energy problems.

Prices are high and it’s all been blamed on the Russians. But oil and gas prices were rising before any Russian invasion, that inflation having been stoked by Biden’s anti-fossil fuels agenda.

Now the Biden gang, fearing a mid-term thrashing in this fall’s elections, are looking at ways to buy votes.

How about another of those government handout checks for all, this time to help offset the high gasoline and heating oil prices Biden has brought to us?

Biden also proposes letting the tap open on our strategic petroleum reserve, allowing a trickle of oil onto the market. It’s the equivalent of trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose.

But Biden and Company are hoping you give them points for trying.

While the Biden regime is at it, it’s about to start issuing passports of X gender, as in no need to limit oneself to male or female status. So much for the usefulness of a passport for ID purposes.

White House mouthpiece DisinJENous Psaki, our distaff version of Iraq’s Baghdad Bob (or maybe she’s an X gender?), reportedly is in talks to take a lot of coin from MSNBC in order for that left-wing cable outlet to secure her propaganda services.

Before we leave, Tony Fauci is back scare-mongering about potential additional COVID-19 outbreaks and more prerequisite draconian measures to be visited on the public to combat them.

One enterprising sort looked up a Fauci interview with C-Span, back before the topic of natural immunity was stricken from the SCIENCE of infectious diseases.

Said Fauci back then: “The most potent vaccine is getting infected yourself.”

No Foolin’!

Here we are, the day after Will Smith fired the slap heard ’round the world, and the social media universe as well as cable news is aflame with commentary.

This is quite understandable in a world as tranquil as ours that the diversion of a mild physical altercation at the Oscars should dominate social discourse.

It’s not like we have Russians invading other countries. OK, so we do.

It’s not like we have ongoing war between governments and terrorists and/or rebels in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Ethiopia, Yemen, Haiti, Myanmar, Mali, Burkina Faso, etc., etc., etc.

OK, we have that, too.

But at least we have political and economic stability in this country. Our president is popular, dynamic, thoughtful and effective. Or not.

Our prices are stable, debt is low and confidence is high. Or not.

We certainly are not facing worldwide crises ranging from food shortages, to energy shortages, to ongoing viral outbreaks. Right, we are.

A cynic might suggest Smith was urged by Joe Biden operatives to do something, anything, to take the spotlight off their bumbling figurehead president who spent recent days embarrassing himself and our nation in a European tour.

It was an ongoing gaffe-fest in which delusional Joe uttered things like urging regime change in Russia and his cleanup crew got out the shovels to note that while Joe did say it, he didn’t actually mean it.

Like a latter-day Lee Harvey Oswald, can it be Smith is but a government stooge, charged with diverting public attention and armed with an open hand instead of the oft-mentioned Mannlicher-Carcano rifle?

Even at that, the likes of Muhammad Ali, whom Smith once portrayed on film, must be spinning in the grave over the meager Smith effort.

A slap? Really? Isn’t that the sort of effort rap singers lay on their ‘hos?

Video replays (of course I didn’t watch this virtue-signalling event live) show Smith purposefully striding toward Rock, who was onstage having joked about Smith’s wife. Smith unloads an open right hand that barely interrupts Rock’s chatter.

Smith seems to have invoked Ali’s memory, but got his wires crossed. Where Ali floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, Smith hit like a butterfly and buzzed like a bee afterward.

Reports indicate Rock will not be filing assault charges. But considering that the assault took place on national television, and has played endlessly since, it is my understanding that someone, perhaps the LA district attorney, could file the charge.

Don’t hold your breath on that one owing to the reality that left-wing DA’s in California and elsewhere don’t think it is worth prosecuting drug dealers, shoplifters or muggers, all of which rank above celebrity slappers.

I’m OK with Smith taking umbrage at Rock and delivering a physical message, pathetically executed as it was.

But I’d like the same freedom should anyone insult my family or otherwise cause me upset.

I’m thinking I could do a better job of expressing the outrage, but I don’t expect that I’d get the Smith free pass.

Imagine if you bought a stock and at the end of the day, after it had accelerated wildly in price, the exchange canceled all of the day’s trades.

Sorry, no profits for you.

Sounds incredible, right? Yet this is precisely the sort of thing that is happening on the London Metal Exchange, where twice in recent weeks all the day’s trading in nickel has been voided because of price action.

Add in shutdowns and trading halts and the picture is bleak.

And, according to a Bloomberg story, traders are fleeing the exchange, looking for more viable alternatives and thereby leaving volume and liquidity problematic. Price discovery is a mess.

Why should you be concerned? Two reasons.

First of all, nickel is used in a lot of everyday items such as batteries, stainless steel and other steel alloys. Toasters, electric ovens, even desalination plants (which take salt out of water) use nickel.

When it costs a lot more, you pay more.

The second point is that if markets cannot be trusted to determine fair prices, the entire world economy cannot function. And this LME debacle seems to indicate we’re closer to that than one might have thought as recently as a month ago.

Holders of precious metals (gold and silver) long have looked at the LME with a jaundiced eye, suspecting pricing gamesmanship.

Separately, U.S. firms have been found guilty and fined due to trading shenanigans with those two shiny metals.

That the LME is holding trading sessions, then acting like they never happened, is a stunning development, even to the skeptical crowd.

Russian and Chinese stocks have suffered through market closures and bizarre trading.

Imagine this all coming home to the good, old New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ.

Can’t happen?

Why not?

Ponder the run on the entire financial and banking system if the exchanges did close, or nullify trades ex post facto.

Already Joe Biden, aka The Big Guy, is out and about telling us to expect food shortages.

Joe and many of his fellow Economics 101 dropouts here and abroad also are proposing sending direct payments to citizens to help them cope with rising energy prices.

This is economic madness. You don’t create more demand for a product thought to be in short supply by increasing purchasing power without looking at increasing supply.

Price’s function is to diminish demand by rising until supply can increase to meet higher demand.

As much as Russians are being blamed for inflation, that genie was out of the bottle well before the Ukraine invasion. Inflation was fueled in part by those stimulus checks given to all, along with shutting down the economy — therefore bottle-necking supply lines – and declaring a war on fossil fuels when there is no viable alternative on a worldwide scale.

There is talk yet again about another infusion from the strategic oil reserve, which last time it happened was a bust because it is like trying to fill a swimming pool with a garden hose.

Times are tough and about to get tougher. Market breakdowns and runaway inflation are the in-your-face indicators.

There is debate over whether the great physicist Albert Einstein ever actually defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly, but expecting different outcomes.

There is no doubt that the definition is correct, no matter the source.

Consider the evidence that mounts daily.

We have a society, both in public and private concerns, overwhelmed with pandering to identity politics. Race, gender, religion, social background and social class have to be considered rather than mere merit.

And that has given us a Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, picked as much on the facts that she is black and a woman, as for any particularly distinguished legal scholarship.

To the contrary, Brown has astounded the sensible among us with her penchant for treating child pornography offenders with kid gloves, explaining that in this internet age, they have more ability to consume and distribute things such as child pornography, so the punishment should be lessened.

Replied one wag: So, in an era of dating apps for smartphones and computers, that would mean we should lessen penalties for rape since there now is more opportunity to meet people and commit the misdeed.

Brown also doesn’t think it is fair to brand child pornographers as sex offenders because it ostracizes them from society. This just in, Brown Jackson – that is the idea.

Predictably for a black woman, Brown is all for the bastardized teachings that fall under the umbrella of critical race theory.

And soon she will have a lifetime seat on the court of last resort.

Scary? You bet!

On another front, it was encouraging to see that podcast king Joe Rogan has gotten around to pointing out the hypocrisy and general insanity regarding Ukrainian government.

We’ve made that point in this very space. Not that long ago, Ukraine was held up as an undesirable model of corruption, headed by a would-be strongman with dangerous extremist right-wing ties.

But Russian tanks cross the border and now all those atrocities committed by Ukrainians against ethnic Russians in Ukraine are forgotten. Similarly dismissed is all the corruption talk.

And T-shirt boy president Zelenskyy (I insist on using the two y’s at the end, which is as correct as one y) now is a heroic freedom fighter, not a despot in need of removal.

Don’t forget the insanity of our bumbling executive branch, headed by the Dysfunctional Duo of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Bumbling Joe, addressing the Business Roundtable earlier this week, confirmed what deniers have panned as crackpot conspiracy theory.

Said Joe: “There’s gonna be a new world order out there and we’ve got lead it.”

Others have been saying such things publicly about resets and new world orders, but still anyone suggesting elites worldwide are managing emergencies – real or imagined – in looking to establish control, are dismissed as crackpots.

No doubt Biden apologists will be out soon with one of those “he said it, but didn’t mean it that way” excuses. They can’t have it both ways. Either the guy is completely off the rails mentally and should be thrown out of office, or it’s just sometimes they forget to turn on his filter and he blurts out the truth.

Before we leave, let us consider that should Biden be ousted in mid-term, that would leave us with the equally suspect intellect of Harris to succeed him.

During a recent speech on jobs, Harris said: “The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time . . . there is such great significance to the passage of time.”

What?

Speaking of time, they say time heals all wounds. We can only hope that time also wounds all heels, such as those who voted for these two knuckleheads and/or made sure the vote came out in their favor.

I realize I’m basically preaching to the choir here on matters such as the strange path to acceptance of Hunter Biden’s laptop legitimacy, but I can’t help myself.

As I tell friends and family, I like being on the record, both before and when these revelations occur, to remind all for posterity that it wasn’t really that hard to figure out the situation. More specifically, it is easy if your brain is in gear and not disengaged due to partisan blindness.

White House press mouthpiece DisinJENuous Psaki was asked the other day about the New York Times certifying, well after the fact, that Hunter’s damning laptop was legit and not a product of Russian disinformation.

Psaki had been quick before to scream “disinformation, disinformation.” Now she had no comment, because Hunter isn’t on the government payroll.

It’s a distinction without a difference considering how often Hunter has ridden daddy Joe’s coattails to jobs and other monetarily beneficial situations.

The original laptop story, broken by the New York Post and feverishly discredited by LameSteam media and leftist social media, spoke of incriminating evidence and the odd porno pictures of Hunter.

Now the truth can be told because it was suppressed long enough to allow the sheep among the voting populace, not to mention highly motivated vote counters, to ease Joe Biden, aka “The Big Guy,” into the Oval Office where he is succeeding in mucking up all he touches.

Will anyone be held accountable. CNN? The New York Times? MSNBC? Twitter? Facebook? Surely you jest.

A lawyer for the mother of Hunter’s illegitimate daughter said his client has testified before a grand jury and both he and the client have been interviewed by government officials investigating potential tax fraud by Hunter.

That lawyer expects Hunter to be indicted, but don’t hold your breath.

And even if Hunter is indicted, there’s still a trial for media and bureaucratic operatives to scuttle.

Meanwhile, perhaps Hunter ought to avoid D.C. parks or airplanes. More on that later.

Media slight of hand to protect the left is nothing new; it just is being taken to a much higher level.

Remember the “suicide” in July 1993 of then deputy counsel to the White House Vince Foster, who was up to his armpits in Whitewater scandal investigations.

After Foster’s death, questions were raised about an allegedly forged suicide note found in a briefcase that previously had been searched and found to be empty. There also were raised eyebrows over reports of a lack of blood at the “suicide” scene, rug fibers found on the body, a suicide gun alleged to possess multiple serial numbers, and other oddities.

At the time, a Zogby poll reportedly found 70 percent of the populace didn’t buy the suicide story. These sorts of widespread doubts didn’t matter then and don’t matter now.

Similarly, Ron Brown’s death in an April 1996 plane crash had many suspicious aspects. Brown was Clinton’s commerce secretary and a former head of the Democratic National Committee who would be investigated for allegedly misusing his cabinet post to sell access to Clinton.

It was reported widely at the time that Brown had a .45-caliber hole in his skull that was observed after the plane crash but pretty much ignored and later dismissed entirely.

There were unconfirmed reports that one crash survivor died not from injuries she suffered there, but from a slit throat on the way to the hospital hours after the crash.

More recently, on August 2019, you have alleged sexual predator and prominent liberal money man Jeffrey Epstein hanging himself in his jail cell despite supposedly being monitored on a suicide watch.

Perhaps I misunderstood, but I didn’t think suicide watch was supposed to mean watch the guy commit suicide.

A poll taken by Insider in November 2019 and reported by Yahoo found just 16 percent of respondents believed the suicide story. A full 45 percent thought Epstein had been murdered, likely to keep him from implicating prominent liberals. And then there were the 39 percent who were not sure what happened. Biden voters, no doubt.

The Epstein matter was squelched, along with so many instances of what could be characterized by borrowing Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth mantra.

Entrenched bureaucrats, lapdogs in LameStream and social media, and behind-the-scenes elitists have a vested interest in keeping this whole corrupt charade going.

As has been evidenced through recent decades, it’s foolish – even harmful to your health – to bet against them.

Self-appointed, unelected elites think they know what’s good for us peons, so they work behind the scenes to steer us in what they claim is the right direction.

It happens internationally, nationally, statewide and locally.

That’s the first red flag — that these all-knowing types need to operate in secrecy lest the rest of us get wind of their plans and attempt to have a say in things, which one would think might be fitting considering this is supposed to be a democracy rather than a socialist/fascist Frankenstein of a government.

Repeat, it’s supposed to be so.

It’s a basic rule of life that I was taught as a child: If you don’t want people to know that you are doing something, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

I’m not talking planning surprise parties or the like in terms of harmless activity. This basic rule applies to doing things that might affect other people negatively, from breaking their windows to importing immigrants secretly to their already troubled community.

Our crime-ridden, economically underachieving, educationally deficient Johnstown has elites operating behind the scenes to flood the area with immigrants, first from Afghanistan and more recently from Ukraine, all ostensibly in the interest of filling jobs and revitalizing the area.

The main problem is these supposedly altruistic and benevolent elite types have only a passing acquaintance with full disclosure.

To its credit, the local liberal house organ newspaper has decided to commit journalism on the matter and publish some lengthy stories.

To its discredit, this seems to have happened only after a citizen activist had railed long and loud on social media about the secret agenda and, through a right-to-know request, had obtained documents that proved there had been information withheld from the public.

A cynic might speculate that the paper had gotten onboard late to spare itself further credibility damage.

The City of Johnstown recently hired a city manager who not only refused to move to Johnstown, he won’t even be living in Cambria County. Now there is a vote of confidence.

If residents of Greater Johnstown are concerned about the downside of a possible influx of newcomers, perhaps it has to do with daily crime reports listing perpetrators formerly from Philadelphia, Florida, Baltimore and other far-flung regions.

We are told to trust the government in vetting the immigrants. Is that the same government that so badly botched the Afghan pullout and guaranteed us the country would not fall quickly to the Taliban?

Is it the same governmental intelligence bureaucracy asleep at the switch when non-U.S. Citizens were hatching and enacting the 9-11 terror plots on our soil?

Sure, they might say, we dropped the ball badly in the past, but this time . . .

I say, fine, bring in the immigrants. And, should any of them be convicted of criminal activity while here, their behind-the-scenes elite enablers should serve the same amount of jail time, maybe even in the same cell.

Do you think they would agree to that? I don’t, which means these elites aren’t as confident in it all being positive as their words would imply.

An already troubled Greater Johnstown School District doesn’t need to deal with an influx of students who might not speak English, might be behind in terms of education, and likely would leave school each day to return to homes where English is not spoken very well if at all.

This brings us back to the beginning point of this post. Beware of people who think they know, better than you, what is in your best interest. Be on additionally high alert when they feel the need to keep their machinations secret.

Today’s topic is transliteration. No, it’s not a discussion of people fudging on their sex as assigned at birth.

Instead, transliteration helps explain why one sees the last name of the Ukrainian president spelled Zelensky by some and Zelenskyy by others. This happens when words or names from one language are translated into another language, which has a completely different alphabet.

Russians and Ukrainians, for example, use versions of the Cyrillic alphabet. English uses a Latin alphabet.

And so we get Zelensky or Zelenskyy, because when the translation is from one alphabet to another, it becomes an exercise in phonetic spelling.

This helps explain why the Ukrainian capital formerly was widely recognized as Kiev, but now most often is referred to as Kyiv. Same city. Different spelling. Same name – sort of.

Transliteration explains how China’s capital, formerly known as Peking, became Beijing after 1979, when a new method for translating Mandarin alphabet names into Roman/Latin alphabet names became the norm.

Not all city name changes are matters of transliteration. India’s Bombay became Mumbai in 1995 because the name Bombay was seen as a vestige of British colonialism.

Russia’s St. Petersburg has made a roundtrip, with stops at being called Petrograd and Leningrad before reverting to St. Petersburg, all for political reasons.

Similarly, the Russian city of Stalingrad, sight of a monstrously deadly World War II battle, got rechristened to Volgograd as a political consideration.

My first brush with transliteration came when Johnstown hosted an international amateur baseball tournament, with a team from South Korea. Korea’s alphabet is Hangul, with 24 characters.

This meant that sometimes Korean players had multiple spellings of their names appearing on rosters, lineups, etc. As a newspaper type schooled in the basic tenet that nothing upsets people more than getting their name wrong, I tried to get the names clarified.

It turns out there was no correct spelling. The names could be spelled phonetically, any way one wanted, because of transliteration.

As an aside, I was told Ka Boo was the Korean term for a curveball. Spell it any way you’d like.

It was transliteration that explained why the hated former Libyan strongman was called Qaddafi, Gaddafi, Kadafi and any number of other spellings in print. Again, it was an exercise in phonetics when translating from the Tifinagh alphabet to Latin.

Bringing this all home, it has become obvious that an amazingly high number of present-day Americans routinely spell phonetically. But that is a function of ignorance, not transliteration.

Nice try, though.

Occasionally I feel moved to note goings-on in my neighborhood as a microcosm of the nation’s larger problems.

Today the update is on the hypothetical side. Unlike liberals and members of the shilling LameStream media, I’m going to admit that I’m just theorizing about this.

I DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE! But I’m fairly confident I’m on the right track.

It has to do with American Dream, my neighbor who earned that nickname when he told a neighbor he’s living the American dream having moved into the neighborhood.

He did so in what appears to be a house converted to Section 8 – government subsidized. At the time, he had no job, but did have a mate and a couple of kids, even a dog and cat. Life was great for him, as he told the neighbor, who then told me — with more than a trace of disgust.

For a brief time late last year, American Dream seemed to have joined the work force. Here and there someone would pick him up and subsequently drop him off. Dream was attired with one of those vests that workers at an international superstore chain that rhymes with Ball Smart tend to wear.

Those comings and goings seem to have stopped.

In their place is a veritable flood of deliveries. We’re not talking about the predictable increase of such visitations at the beginning of each month, one we suspect coincides with government benefits showing up in the household accounts.

This was a noticeable spike beyond that level. The wife observed seven separate deliveries just the other day and she probably missed some. They ranged from what seemed to be prepared food, to groceries and other assorted merchandise.

What gives? she asked.

EITC, said I.

To borrow from a Michael Jackson song: E-I-T-C, it’s easy as A-B-C; Feds send all your dough to me; And I spend it with great glee; A-B-C, just minimal work by me!

A cynic, and I qualify as one, would postulate that American Dream got a job and worked for a time in 2021 simply to quality for EITC, also known as Earned Income Tax Credit.

If you worked at all, not necessarily full-time or year-round, come tax time you can claim credits. Credits in taxspeak mean you can get back amounts well beyond what you actually paid in taxes.

Generally speaking, the less you earn, the more EITC you get.

A single person with no children, earning less than $21,430 for the year, can get up to $1,502 in earned income tax credits. Marriage and kids make that pot swell to the point at which a married couple with three or more kids, earning less than $57,414 in combined income, can get back up to $6,728 in EITC.

Makes those $2,000 COVID stimulus handouts seem like chump change.

Were a possible EITC recipient diligent, filing taxes as soon as the IRS would permit, he or she should have their EITC by now. Found money. Let’s order some stuff!

Multiply this by millions of taxpayers nationwide and you are talking a lot of money and a lot of excess demand in an already strained supply chain.

According to a table on IRS.gov, my state of Pennsylvania saw 843,000 taxpayers claim EITC for the 2020 tax year, resulting in $1.9 billion in payments. The average payment was $2,257.

California residents claimed $6.1 billion in EITC in 2020.

Even at that, this would just be redistribution of income in the best socialist tradition if the federal government didn’t come up short annually in terms of balancing tax revenue with expenditures.

But we do fall short in a huge way annually.

Despite what Bumbling Joe Biden and Marie Antoinette Pelosi have been barfing out in talking points – that government spending doesn’t cause inflation but actually lessens it – any time the government spends a lot more than it takes in, that is a problem.

When the government monetizes that debt by selling more treasury bonds and bills, or by just snapping its fingers and creating money for things like stimulus payments out of thin air, it increases demand for goods without increasing supply. That leads to price inflation, and blaming the Russians is just a diversion.

The bottom line is, American Dream and the millions like him, along with all those stimulus recipients, are aiding the rise in inflation as much as, or more than, Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine incursion.

That’s reality. We just are supposed to ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. I can’t, and I won’t.

Back in my days as a sportswriter I had an executive editor of one newspaper who never understood the attraction of sports to the masses.

Why, he would ask in bemused fashion, do so many people care so much about something that means so little?

At the time I tended to agree with him more than a bit, having begun the process of losing my interest in covering sports because of what it had become through my decades of writing about it. That is one of the reasons why I ran out the door to early retirement at the ripe old age of 53.

Fast-forward to today and I’m with that former editor 100 percent as far as being stunned at the degree of fanaticism shown for sports. I actually feel sorry for people who live and die with the success or failure of the sports teams they follow.

I’ve taken to ignoring sports to a large degree and the process had been liberating. There is more time for other pursuits. There is less wasted emotion. There is less frustration.

One particularly unappetizing aspect of sports these days is the constant politicization of it and the social justice warrior messaging we must endure if we try to watch a game.

The Winter Olympics came and went without me seeing a single second of coverage. Judging by the ratings, I was in good company.

I used to love the NHL. This season, I have yet to watch an entire game; only short stretches of a handful of contests.

NASCAR? It’s on ignore, too, having become a virtue-signalling joke both on the track and in the broadcast booth.

I watch the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, but little of the regular season.

Major League Baseball is in the midst of a labor problem that has taken a chunk out of spring training and threatens parts of the regular season.

Once upon a time, when an uncle who was a radio engineer would call to alert me to spring training broadcasts of Pirates game, I lived for the start of the baseball season. Now I wouldn’t miss it if the entire season was a no-go.

This week used to be a highlight of my sports viewing calendar with the chance to watch so many conference championship basketball tournaments. I’ve tried to watch some this week, including tonight.

But I just wasn’t into it. So much has changed, and not for the better.

Athletes, even pros back in the day, were a lot like the common folk, only they had uncommon athletic skills. They were yet to have those skills produce mega-million dollar contracts, so it was not unusual for pros to have offseason jobs.

College athletes were not in school just for a season or so until they could get drafted.

Even the high school athletes were a more unspoiled crowd playing for the love of the game, not the chance to show up on some recruiting web site or social media highlight reels.

The Big East championship game tonight, contested by Creighton and Villanova, was a basketball abortion.

The teams had combined to hit about three percent of their three-point shot attempts in the first half, but came out after intermission jacking up more three-point misses. This meant the game was tied at 21-21, three minutes into the second half!

After several more hurried, ill-advised, three-point clangers, the announce team (both black men lest this lament be labeled a racist diatribe) decried the ruination of basketball with the over-reliance on three-pointers.

That game had both teams scoring under 40 points with six minutes to play, so they must have continued firing with abandon, and missing.

I gave up, but before coming downstairs to write this, I checked on the Big 12 title game between Kansas and Texas Tech.

During that brief viewing, Texas Tech stripped the ball from Kansas in the defensive zone. But instead of grabbing the basketball, a Tech player tried to pick it up with a dribble, no doubt to rush down to the other end of the court and throw up a three-point try.

Alas, he bobbled it, Kansas secured the loose ball, and Tech had to foul to prevent a Kansas dunk attempt.

The analyst noted that players are taught since junior high not to try to dribble a loose ball. Guess this player slept through that advice.

If you are a basketball purist, the games are simply terrible in terms of fundamentals. Decision making stinks, too. Sure, often the scores are close, usually only because both teams can’t manage to do the right thing with any consistency.

It was nice to hear the announcers deviating from their propaganda scripts to note such poor play. Remember, these are teams contending for championships, not bumbling through losing seasons.

If this is the best, I don’t really want to see the worst.

I will dutifully fill out an NCAA Tournament bracket or two and try to watch some of those games. But I’m not optimistic about my staying power.

Should the games be poorly played, as most likely they will be, I’m sure I can find something else to do. Maybe you should, too.