When we first moved onto our street 35-some years back, it was the sort of neighborhood in which there was a traditional singing of Christmas carols while walking behind the borough fire truck, and then refreshments were served in a two-car garage.

Neighbors visited and interacted throughout the year, beyond the passing nod. You actually knew names, and other details about the neighbors. Not any more.

These days, the ‘hood has devolved into something less social.

I’m not totally against that. Neighbors are an accident of geography. If you have similar tastes and philosophical leanings, you get along. If not, you avoid the neighbors.

My problem arises when the peculiarities of the neighbors infringe on my peace and happiness.

It seems there are more and more of these annoyances daily.

For a few years there has been a game played on the street I call simply “The Parking Grab,” in which many neighbors feel compelled to tie up as many on-street parking spaces as possible, leaving their garages and driveways unoccupied by their vehicles.

It’s poor manners, but perfectly legal. What isn’t perfectly legal is a deranged neighbor cursing out my son a couple of years back for having the temerity to park IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE, because said neighbor wanted that space for his wife.

The error of his position was pointed out to him and his wife, and punctuated afterward with a few no trespassing signs on my property to keep his progeny from treating my yard like a playground.

They now leave me alone and I ignore them. It’s bliss, if only they didn’t feel the need to acquire two dogs who bark each and every time they are put outside, which is about five times a day.

Many times in the past few years we’ve had drug dealers and drug users living in the ‘hood. Fortunately, they’ve moved on, to be replaced by better behaved residents in many, but not all, cases.

A relatively recent addition to the neighborhood apparently operates under the delusion that grass mows itself. It’s not that he seems to be too busy with anything like a job to find time to mow the grass.

In an amusing incident Mr. I Don’t Mow leaned out his second story window and yelled to a neighbor kid who was mowing grass the other day. My wife and I both saw it and thought he might be going to offer the kid a few bucks to take on his overgrown yard while he was at it.

Nope. The neighbor was telling the kid, for no apparent reason, that he had a lawnmower arriving the next day and would tackle his jungle soon. That was two days ago and counting.

What happened on the mower delivery front isn’t clear. What is clear is this guy, who lives with a woman and child, sure has time to scream maniacally as he plays video games at all hours. This is readily apparent because the windows are open, even in the winter.

Meanwhile, some people up the block are incensed because new arrivals on their end have little or no respect for property rights, feeling free to pile garbage on the land of others, not to mention taking the liberty to visit the neighbors’ yards without benefit of being invited to do so.

My wife, who makes periodic forays out to visit her friends in the ‘hood, reports that one neighbor of the newcomers found his construction of what used to be called a “spite” fence back in the day delayed due to the skyrocketing price of lumber and a shortage of funds.

The neighbors on the other side of the offending newcomers have the police number on speed dial, the better to report transgressions by the recent arrivals, as well as to call out a young driver from closer to my house who doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of stop signs, or speed limit signs,

Also close to me is a house whose teenage male has friends who keep mistaking our otherwise quiet residential block for the burnout box at a dragstrip.

I pointed out to the neighborhood kid a few months back – ironically while I was monitoring a guy who’d had too much to drink (he’s being charged by the DA) and took out a car and a neighbor’s small tree/bush as he careened down the street at about 9 a.m. – that if his friends wanted to prove how healthy their cars are, I could get out my Mustang GT, we could go to a grudge night at a dragstrip, and we could race for some cash.

So far, no takers. Regardless, they were advised to take their tire-melting antics somewhere where it doesn’t disturb the peace, lest the police need to be contacted.

Not that our police force would do anything. They make a point of ignoring a family that’s been driving a Jeep Cherokee sporting an inspection sticker that expired in May — 2019. No, it is not an antique exempt from inspection.

The police say they can’t watch vigilantly to catch the driver(s) in the act. I say since they are not exactly policing a hotbed of shootings, rapes, murders, robberies or other felonies, perhaps they should spend a little time trying to get a long-running scofflaw off the streets.

Just Saturday, while returning home from a pizza run, said vehicle pulled out of a side street behind me, so I got a quick video and am weighing asking the police whether they are willing to watch it and then to do something now. Probably not.

It occurs to me that if such a decline in behavior, social niceties and law-abiding behavior is evident in this formerly pleasant middle-class neighborhood, one wonders how bad things must be elsewhere. Probably I don’t want to know.

We promise some sports on this blog, an aspect sorely neglected of late, but here is a crossover entry.

Big-time sports operations, in an orgy of virtue signaling, have demanded vaccinations. Yet just last week news broke that no fewer than eight members of the New York Yankees – players and staff — had tested positive for COVID-19.

The knee-jerk reaction among the vaccine Nazis would be how selfish and disgusting these people are to have refused to take the jab. But, no, all eight had been fully vaccinated for more than 14 days prior to testing positive.

The question, asked here previously, why get vaccinated if it possibly does nothing for you?

Predictably, there has been a rush to obfuscate the situation. Seven of the eight had no symptoms, so the vaccine worked is one claim.

Well, I know unvaccinated people who have had COVID-19 and their symptoms were mild. I also know at least one person who got vaccinated after having “recovered” from the virus and found the post-vaccine symptoms worse than the disease had produced.

My favorite rationalization for the Yankees outbreak was they got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is not as effective as alternatives.

This Yankees news has come out against a continuing backdrop of COVID-19 mania despite conflicting facts.

A porky Wisconsin school teacher lectured an unmasked student, calling him a jerk in a scene that of course was captured on video and posted on social media. Said teacher is cooling her heels on administrative leave – no doubt with pay.

But wait, the student claimed to be fully vaccinated and the teacher didn’t care. The student still could infect others, she screeched.

Didn’t she listen when our figurehead president Joe Biden proclaimed that the vaccinated no longer had to wear face diapers, an act of contrition now reserved for those refusing to surrender to the jab?

There was an insert in the teacher story showing a social media post from a virtue signaling young twit noting that he wears a mask outside even though he’s been vaccinated just to be sure he’s not mistaken for – horrors – a conservative.

No problem, twit. Similarly, you never will be mistaken for an independent thinker or someone no longer needing mommy’s help wiping your butt.

The party line being preached is vaccines are great, and those who chose not to get the jabs are Neanderthals. Except, super bureaucrat Dr. Anthony Fauci, the guy who makes more in salary than any other federal government employee, including the president, had to admit to a dirty secret.

Testifying before the U.S. Senate, old One Mask Is Never Enough Fauci had to concede that about 40 percent of his staff at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had not been vaccinated. Similar percentages were reported for people at the Food and Drug Administration and the Marine Corps.

It is estimated that maybe one-third of the general population in the United States has been vaccinated. And yet, according to a report from the Human Mortality Database, deaths in the United States are down to pre-COVID levels.

An interesting side note to that report was that as much as one-third of the so-called “excess deaths” during the COVID-19 lockdowns were due to untreated medical conditions (owing largely to the lockdowns) as well as increased drug overdoses, suicides or murders.

This drop in the overall death total was not supposed to happen until 70 percent or more of the population had been vaccinated.

Could it be that cutting back on the lockdowns and forced isolation has helped as much as vaccines?

The message of this report will be lost on the must-vaccinate crowd, whose blind evangelism is scary to behold. They cannot be expected to let the facts get in the way of advancing their cult of control.

This doesn’t mean that you need to join them just to fit in.

Nazis on trial at Nuremberg after World War II often fell back on the “just following orders” rationalization, which has come to be called the Nuremberg defense in their honor, or dishonor as it were.

I mention this because I’ve had it up to here (imagine me holding my left hand about a foot or so above my head) with the quacks who have hamstrung our economy and society with draconian measures to combat COVID-19, all the time justifying it by saying they were “just following the science.”

First off, “science” is a dynamic pursuit that is rife with failed assumptions as well as those eventually proven correct. To take an early read on a situation and pronounce it settled science is akin to proclaiming the winner of a baseball game in the first inning.

At the very least the “just following science” evangelists ought to be willing to admit when they are proven to have been flat-out wrong; to have over-reacted and caused greater harm with their remedies than the disease itself would have produced.

Check out the surges in domestic assaults, suicides, drug overdoses and other categories that have occurred alongside of virus lockdowns.

My motivation for this screed comes from an acquaintance who went to the local hospital’s emergency room this week. He’d been feeling ill, ordered one of those home test kits and came up positive for COVID-19, putting himself in self-quarantine after the positive reading.

But, when his symptoms worsened after several days, he thought discretion was the better part of valor and he headed to the hospital. During his stay at the ER he was shuttled into treatment areas and back into the general waiting room numerous times.

He had arrived at the hospital wearing a mask and never was given a new example. And, as far as he was able to determine, he never was tested for the virus by the hospital. Instead, it seemed the people there were willing to accept the test he’d gotten online from WalMart.

And I ask, what happened to the science?

We were preached at incessantly through the early pandemic panic months that we should wear masks, but change them at least daily. More recently we’ve been told if wearing one mask is good, then having two, three or more swaddling your face simultaneously is even better.

We also were told that, once infected, we should quarantine ourselves and avoid common areas or close contact.

Hell, even the uninfected have been pummeled with warnings to employ social distancing, thus empowering a new class of petty dictators manning cash registers, fast-food counters or any other customer service interface.

We were lectured incessantly about personal hygiene, and having concern for the health of others.

To question any of this, or other drastic mandates, was to be branded a denier of science.

In view of all that, I’m struggling to understand how it’s a good thing to be sending a COVID-19 positive patient into a waiting area – repeatedly – to mingle with other customers (I guess I mean patients, but customers is more apt since this particular ER formerly and possibly presently, has a billing goal daily just like a salesman’s quota).

But, wait, today the New York Times, newly emboldened to be a teller of unpleasant truths because its favored regime team holds the nation’s executive office, came out with a story critiquing the Centers for Disease Control for disseminating the assertion that “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission occurs outdoors.

The newspaper, whose slogan through the years has gone from “All the news that’s fit to print,” to “All the news that fits our agenda we print,” noted the actual number of outdoor transmissions likely is less than one percent. So, while less than 10 percent technically is accurate, it’s sloppy statistical science, likely designed to scare the sheep among us.

Let’s face it, less than 10 percent sounds a whole lot worse than less than one percent.

The Times went so far as to assert there is not a single documented case worldwide of transmission of COVID-19 from casual outdoor contact such as walking past an individual or eating at a nearby table.

Using less than 10 percent where less than 1 percent is accurate sure sounds more like propaganda than science to me.

Surprisingly, the New York Times agrees.

More media supporters of those using this virus outbreak to seize control of our daily lives would do well to think twice before accepting half-baked presentations as settled science and pontificating to the masses based on the pseudo-science.

The public seems to be coming around to my way of thinking, too. Enough is enough with the inaccurate and hypocritical virtue signaling that is part and parcel of “just following the science.”

During web browsing today my eyes were assaulted yet again by the twin media propaganda efforts of dramatizing shootings without context and another favorite, promoting the campaign to hamstring law enforcement by pulling shut the purse strings.

In a perverse way, those who would seek to move forward their agendas based on these events love to cherry pick their examples.

Particularly clear on the subject of police defunding is the attempt to paint the issue as a racial demand, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Let us begin with gunfire. In recent days we’ve had extensive national coverage of shootings in New York City (Times Square) and Colorado Springs.

Three people, all reported bystanders, were shot in the New York City incident Saturday, including a four-year-old girl, but all are said to have non life-threatening injuries. The alleged shooter is black. He reportedly was trying to shoot his brother during an argument.

On Sunday, a man, his race yet to be reported widely, shot and killed six people at a birthday party in Colorado Springs, then killed himself. It’s unarguably tragic; a horrible addition to a weekend of violence.

But even as these incidents in New York City and Colorado Springs were occurring Saturday and Sunday, Chicago had yet another violent weekend that somehow slipped beneath the radar of the national news.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, five people were killed and 21 wounded in shootings across Chicago over the weekend. A search of CNN.com found no reference to those Chicago numbers.

But there were plenty of CNN stories from Colorado and even a wrapup of various mass shootings from around the nation this past weekend that didn’t even mention Chicago.

CNN’s explanation for this no doubt would be that the wrapup story was of mass shootings, an arbitrary statistic that requires a total of four people killed or injured in one incident. I’m thinking that five dead and 21 shot in a city in one weekend is notable, no matter your cutoff line.

A cynic might argue that a report of a child being wounded in New York City, or adults being killed in front of children at a birthday party, paints a much stronger psychological image when you’re trying to get guns taken away from the law-abiding masses, as CNN and others like it are.

But regardless of how you come down on the matter of gun confiscation, these reports of widespread violence and killings are not the stuff of a backdrop that suggests a need for less police presence.

And yet, right on cue, a column from The New Yorker showed up as a promo today with the headline: “The Emerging Movement For Police And Prison Abolition.”

Again, this is an issue long on alleged racism, as in blacks can’t trust police to be even-handed with them and so police should not exist and ostensibly we should be left to fend for ourselves.

Does anyone in their right mind think fewer police would result in less crime?

But the issue goes beyond that. An August 2020 Gallup poll found that 81 percent of black Americans questioned wanted as much (61 percent) or more (20 percent) police presence in their communities.

These often are the people who have to deal with neighborhood violence firsthand, not merely use it to make anarchistic, left-wing radical arguments. They’re black and they welcome police in their neighborhoods doing their jobs.

More recently, a March 2021 USA Today/Ipsos poll found that only 18 percent of the population at large supported the “defund the police” movement while just 28 percent of black respondents backed that plan.

So why do national media outlets, most notably cable news propaganda outlets, continue to treat this as though it is a popular solution, particularly among the black population?

And what can be done about that distortion?

First of all, people who don’t back defunding the police need to become more vocal, more visible, more in-your-face with those who do want law enforcement reduced or eliminated.

The police also could give the idiots among us a graphic lesson, merely by withholding services. To make it effective – to give all criminals ample notice to plan ahead for cop-less carnage – announce the dates in advance.

Nationwide, for one week, or more, all police could succumb to the blue flu and fail to show up for work. If it’s too hard to organize nationally – shouldn’t be the case in these days of electronic communities – make it by city, county or state.

I’m thinking that after that hellish week we might expect the passive supporters of the police to become much more high-profile, and those ridiculous morons who posit eliminating police as the answer to our societal ills just might be forced back into their caves.

What a wonderful sight that would be, on both counts.

As a young man I wondered what it would be like to live in what then was known as a third-world country and now is called an underdeveloped nation.

Well, I’ve gotten my wish without even needing to cross the border.

The United States circa 2021 is quickly devolving into third-world status.

Stay tuned for the effect that the cyber attack on the nation’s largest gasoline pipeline will have in coming days, possibly with higher prices, limited availability, or both. Yes, I made a special trip and filled the wife’s car today, at 3.09.9 a gallon.

Who knows how long gasoline will continue to be readily available?

By now we should be getting used to shortages in this former land of plenty.

Recall the run on toilet paper, paper towels, baby wipes, disposable diapers, disinfectant and some foods when the COVID-19 scare first reached critical mass.

Even now canned vegetables or soups are hard to find, or limited in quantity at area stores.

Hunters, or people who shoot targets for fun, have been experiencing across-the-board shortages of ammunition or weapons for about a year. A few years before, we got a preview when formerly ubiquitous .22 long rifle ammunition disappeared for a time.

The .22 LR boxes came back for a short while, but now ammo of all types is virtual unobtainium. Go to a gun store, or a sporting goods outlet and you will know the ammo section by its denuded shelves, sort of like the toilet paper aisle a few months back.

Automobiles, appliances, all manner of goods with even the slightest reliance on electronic brains, also are in limited supply due to a shortage of microchips.

Building supplies are hard to come by and cost multiples of their prices from a year back if you can find them.

We are being turned into modern day examples of the shoppers in the former Soviet-bloc countries, who rushed to stores and stood in massive lines when word got out that there might be meat in the freezers, or other staples available that we in this country used to take for granted.

These days, if I decide I need something, I rush to buy it when it is available lest it disappear with ammo and other items ranging from deodorant, to espresso makers and sofas. Sometimes I buy a spare, just in case.

This is the psychology that feeds frenzies and leads to shortages. But in classic game theory, you want to be the first to defect (panic) from an agreement, in this case the social agreement to buy only what you reasonably need for use in the near future.

While evidence of our country’s decline to backward levels is coming fast and furious these days, the signs have been there for years. My brother used to joke, sardonically, when his electricity would go out very often that he now knew what it was like to live in Baghdad.

Our electrical grid could be the next catastrophic failure, with the blame likely to be placed on a cyber attack. Our roads and bridges and various other infrastructure are in generally terrible shape, but hackers can’t be blamed for that sad state.

Inflation is rising well beyond what the government will admit, another third-world sign.

Unemployment is high, but we’re told all is well.

Our government, using COVID-19 for a rationale, is looking to restrict movements of people and track individuals.

The governmental intelligence agencies are spying without justification, or legal authority, on the domestic population.

Our election integrity is virtually non-existent.

Our supply chains are fragile and suffering disruptions.

It’s not all Joe Biden’s fault, but he’s accelerating the collapse with his feeble-minded agenda.

The stereotypical request of the Great Depression was “Brother, can you spare a dime?” Our update for these times might be: “Brother, can you spare a roll (toilet paper), a gallon (gasoline) or a bullet (any caliber)?”

I admit that I am not an economist, even though I did take a few economics courses in college.

More to the point, one needn’t be a credentialed economist, but merely a student of human nature, to understand the impact of incentives, and disincentives, on job seekers.

This was evident today as the the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with its monthly number of jobs created and it fell far short of optimistic expectations of two million jobs. The report also was well below the consensus number of one million, and below even conservative expectations of 800,000 (just two of 79 forecasters had predictions below that 800,000 estimate).

Instead, the BLS (an acronym that some cynics suggest could be shortened to BS) announced just 266,000 new jobs. It’s worse than that raw number would suggest.

The miss was the worst since 1998 and the total jobs gain can be credited to service/entertainment jobs such as waiters and card dealers.

So, what happened? Stimulus.

When you pay people not to work, many do just that. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was out today imploring the Harris-Biden regime to stop the handouts, which are incentivizing people not to work.

Even a Federal Reserve official Neel Kashkari, conceded that the generous unemployment handouts and other stimulus measures loosely linked to COVID-19 relief are keeping workers at home playing video games rather than reporting to the workplace.

But rest assured, the pay-not-to-work agenda will continue.

Kashkari, as might be expected, ignored the obvious as provided by the BLS numbers and instead rationalized that the government largess should and must continue because the economy is not humming away at pre-virus levels.

Anecdotal evidence that people are and have been willing to take the government money in lieu of working has been readily available in news media reports of various would-be employers begging workers to take jobs.

You probably know someone – family, friends, neighbors – sitting at home until the gravy train ends. Then, they presume, they still will be able to find work. But in the interim they will have enjoyed a months-long, if not longer, vacation.

I repeat what I’ve written previously. This is human nature and it is why socialist and communist experiments all die a slow, inevitable death. Given the choice of being productive, or merely benefiting from the fruits of the labor of others, too many citizens opt for the free ride.

Today’s BLS report confirms that economic reality, although it will be ignored, as usual.

The word of the day is shrinkflation, which has nothing to with a burgeoning supply of psychiatrists and everything to do with confirming your paranoia that prices are rising for many things you buy despite protestations to the contrary from those in charge of the economy.

Economist Pippa Malmgren generally is credited with coining the term shrinkflation more than a decade ago when she noticed packaging sleights of hand designed to disguise higher prices.

In general, shrinkflation is keeping costs virtually the same, but for less product. Often said product is disguised to look equivalent in packaging size to those from the recent past, but the units actually are smaller and contain less of the goods you purchased.

Half-gallons of ice cream used to be the standard in my area. Now the cartons tend to be one-third of a gallon or less.

I recall a few years back plumbing the depths of an apparently customary sized jar of peanut butter (making a sandwich for a granddaughter) only to find the bottom was domed upward, to make less room for peanut butter in what to a cursory glance would be a jar that could hold more.

This week it was reported that Costco is masking a price increase for paper towels by dropping the sheet count for a roll from 160 to 140. The price remained the same, but for less product. And, no, there were not claims of increased absorption.

The towel effectiveness is the same, there just are 20 fewer per roll.

But shrinkflation doesn’t work for everything. An eight-foot 2-by-4 or 4-by-8 sheet of plywood cannot be shrunk without throwing crimps into building plans. So lumber, unable to disguise price increases, is up 67 percent already for 2021 and 340 percent from a year ago.

That, my friends, is serious price inflation.

Food costs are up, too, as are energy expenses. Of course your federal government excludes rising prices for food and energy from inflation tabulations because they are “volatile.”

So, we are supposed to accept reports that the United States inflation rate for the 12 months ended in March 2021 is a mere 2.6 percent. That people can actually claim such figures with straight faces is astonishing.

One canary in the coal mines calling out such distortions is the traditional precious metal gold, once the basis of the world’s money systems. A more recent canary is cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The powers that be hate both of them because when their prices are skyrocketing, it implicitly means inflation is afoot and each dollar is worth that much less in terms of purchasing power, no matter what inflation numbers are reported.

You may have noticed economic bureaucrats and private citizen elites talking down Bitcoin and gold with great fervor recently.

Janet Yellen, whose name sounds like a statement (Janet yellin’) is our current Secretary of the Treasury and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Earlier this week, a day after gold and silver had skyrocketed and Bitcoin had interrupted its latest swoon with positive movement, Yellen acknowledged inflation in public comments.

Actually, Yellen said interest rates might need to rise to deal with an “overheat” in the economy, with is economic geekspeak for inflation pumping up prices and demand as people rush to buy now what could cost more tomorrow. The only accepted method to slow down the advance is to increase interest rates and thereby make money more expensive and demand lower.

The Federal Reserve, through many regimes, has been complicit in building the basis for rampant inflation by artificially limiting interest rates to historically low levels while also increasing the money supply geometrically.

Gold, silver and Bitcoin tanked on cue shortly after Yellen hinted at higher rates, but so, too, did the traditional stock markets. So yellin’ Yellen was quick to disavow her earlier remarks. Just kidding. No inflation. No rate hikes.

Make no mistake, success as measured by rising returns in the stock and bond markets is necessary for the government to maintain the illusion of prosperity. If either, or both, of these markets fail, this financial house of cards tumbles to the ground.

This sort of smoke and mirrors exercise works until it doesn’t. Then things can get out of hand rapidly and our current economic gurus are short on solutions other than ramping up the money supply, the one tool in their tool box and the reason we are in this tenuous position.

You can prepare any way you want, but you might want to pay heed to what the ultra rich are doing. Sam Zell, legendary billionaire real estate investor, was out with an interview May 4 revealing that he’s bought gold to protect his wealth against what he anticipates will be raging inflation at levels last seen in this nation in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I got my first mortgage in 1979, at 10.75 percent and felt fortunate. Inflation was running at 13.5 percent in 1980. Only the willingness of then-Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker to allow interest rates to increase rapidly, with the federal reserve interest rate peaking at 20 percent in June 1981, put the inflation genie back in the bottle.

Our current fed funds rate is .25 percent, that’s one-quarter of a percent, or 1/80th of the peak 1981 rate.

Today’s Federal Reserve Board won’t be willing to imitate Volcker to rein in inflation, but the markets may raise interest rates for it.

Meanwhile, get used to paying more, for virtually everything. Just don’t expect the government to admit there is any price inflation.

Word that Bill and Melinda Gates are divorcing proves anew that while money can buy control of computers, politics, vaccines and vast amounts of farmland, it can’t necessarily buy happiness.

At least we presume Bill and Melinda aren’t happy with each other – seriously not happy. If this were a minor disagreement, they’re wealthy enough to preserve a marriage without having to bother seeing each other on any kind of regular basis.

They could rule over separate fiefdoms. Melinda could retain the modest 66,000 square-foot Washington state testament to excess, planning her rebound relationships in the trampoline room.

Bill could play the role of gentleman farmer on some of the couple’s 242,000 acres of farmland, a total that makes them the largest private owners of such property in these United States.

Come to think of it, maybe this was the root of the domestic discord. Perhaps Bill had planned to sell the Washington shack and take up residence on a farm, sort of like Oliver Douglas in the old sitcom Green Acres.

Recall that the Oliver character’s wife, Lisa Douglas, preferred the city life, but bowed to Oliver’s wishes due to the marriage as told by the song’s theme song. “(Oliver) You are my wife. (Lisa) Goodbye city life. (Both) Green Acres we are there.”

In these enlightened times, women don’t follow the lead of their husbands, even if there are $130.5 billion reasons – the Forbes Magazine estimate of the collective Gates fortune.

This is a far cry from the old euphemism for divorce – splitting the blankets. Bill and Melinda will split the billions and billions and billions.

And the New York Times wondered in print what effect this would have on promised, but not yet made, donations to the Gates Foundation.

The couple’s (soon to be ex-couple’s) divorce statement that was posted to Twitter (where else?) alluded in vague terms to working on the relationship and concluding they no longer could grow together in the next phase of their lives.

Bill is 65 and Melinda is 56, so that next phase has geriatric written all over it.

But give the Gates duo credit for not inserting the traditional request for privacy in the statement – at least not in the reporting I’ve read.

When you rush to microphones almost at every opportunity to promote your agenda and lecture the inferiors among the populace, you can’t very well plead to be ignored when the topic turns to something you’d rather not share.

Even for all of Bill’s bought-and-paid-for goodwill from his eponymous foundation, Gates skeptics are many.

New Republic, in an April 12, 2021, posting that features artwork of a horned and bespectacled Gates, ran the headline: “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines.” The sub headline read: “Through his hallowed foundation, the world’s de facto public health czar has been a stalwart defender of monopoly medicine.”

Having scanned the story, it isn’t exactly an ode to the selflessness of Gates. Maybe Melinda read it and decided to get off the train now that the hero worship of the spouse was breaking down a tad.

Regardless, I’m sure Bill and Melinda will live out their respective dotage without ever having to fear they can’t afford prescriptions, food, or the latest Microsoft operating system update.

Maybe Bill can pal around with Jeff Bezos, a fellow mega-billionaire who also is at liberty after a divorce a few years back. Can a remake of The Odd Couple be on the horizon?

Scenes witnessed in recent days have re-enforced to me that ours is an economic world turned upside down as evidenced by what we’ll call the ratty car indicator.

Growing up in the 1960s, a stretch of time when I went from age 5 to 15, poor folk drove ratty cars – my family included. We shouldn’t have been poor – my dad worked steadily – but he always managed to spend more than he made, and on wasteful items.

And so it was common to see us motoring down the highway in some decrepit Ford Falcon, its bodywork heavily patched with aluminum panels that had been pop-riveted to whatever steel had not yet succumbed to rust.

Sometimes the old man had a truck, too, but they also were low-buck heaps held together with whatever was on hand, like wire coat hangers. Although zip ties were invented in 1958, they had yet to hit the public marketplace in as large numbers as the present.

If we’d have found ourselves lined up to get free food, a common occurrence these days in the USA but not an option for us back then, we’d have looked the part in whatever crumbling vehicle we drove to the distribution point.

But a few days back I saw yet again a line of vehicles at a food handout and there was nary a ratty ride among them. Instead, there mostly were high end, late model SUVs, pickup trucks, and other vehicles looking pristine and upscale.

This very point was addressed in a national story I saw recently, in which several people interviewed pointed out that lest onlookers judge them due to their rides, the truth was that a main reason they needed the free food was they had spent so much on their cars. To me, that sort of makes my point in Catch-22 fashion.

Completing my weekend, I went to a car show and a cruise at separate sites Sunday. At both of those there was an ample supply of cars gleaming like they were just out of the showroom, even though they might be 20, 30, 40 years old or older.

There were ratty cars, too, but mostly they were ratty by design.

A trend among hot rodders is to keep the rust, use mismatched, worn-out looking parts, and call it a rat rod.

Classic cars also have a branch that embraces what is called patina; what we’d have called faded, bad paint and rust. This often is preserved under a clear-coat layer of paint. If there is not enough natural patina, some can be added via rust-like paint, or even plastic wraps for the entire car designed to mimic natural patina.

These latter-day ratty vehicles can be expensive, somewhat ironic considering the look used to be the calling card of the people too short on funds to have a nice car. Now people pay extra for that look, sort of like the current trend to buy clothes with rips and tears already in them, at a higher cost of course.

It’s not just events from recent days that make the point of economic bastardization as measured by the ratty vehicle indicator. A Section 8 apartment complex near my home has the odd ratty car amidst a sea of late model vehicles in good to excellent condition, at least cosmetically. With the government paying the rent, that leaves more to spend on the car.

But is this right? Should people not working be driving better vehicles than many working people?

The point is moot for now. As long as the governmental agencies can keep doling out benefits, this can continue. But if and when it ends badly, as many economists have predicted, due to the federal government running out of borrowing runway, the system collapses dramatically.

You will recognize this when ratty cars become prevalent on the roads, and not merely as styling statements.

When you hear social justice warriors claiming math is racist, understand that they want to demean the science of counting in order to make it easier to cover up the incredible disconnect between hard numbers and alleged outcomes.

EXAMPLE: Nielsen on Thursday released TV ratings for Joe Biden’s first speech to Congress Wednesday night. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t bother to watch. According to Nielsen, Biden drew 26.9 million viewers.

CONTEXT: That total of 26.9 million is down 43.6 percent from the 47.7 million viewers who tuned in for Donald’s Trump first address to Congress as president. Trump’s lowest viewership for such a speech was 37.2 million in 2020 and he drew more than 45 million viewers each in 2018 and 2019.

WHAT IT MEANS: Biden is nowhere near as exciting or popular enough to have put up the record vote totals he is alleged to have drawn in the most recent presidential election. His rallies drew flies. His other appearances could have been contained in the average men’s room at a public facility.

And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden pulled in just under 81.3 million votes, easily eclipsing the previous record of 69.5 million for Obama in 2008. Trump, in a supposed losing 2020 effort, drew an admitted 74.2 million votes, also easily bettering Obama’s top total.

Biden won under 17 percent of the counties in the United States, a record low for a winning presidential candidate in this country.

I’m surprised no one got to Nielsen to fudge these television ratings upward, to make for better optics. Or maybe I’m not surprised because Biden’s in office now and it doesn’t matter that he’s obviously not very compelling and his vote totals continue to smell like month-old roadkill in July.

There will be no serious reporting of the pathetically small ratings numbers by lamestream media; no wondering aloud how this sort of recurring under-performance statistically could have produced a Biden election victory.

Instead they will tell you just to keep repeating to yourself: Math is racist.