Behold the hypocrisy of left-wing politicians and their lapdog media members as they react to a pair of mass shootings in recent weeks.

Both of these pathetically flawed groups rushed to highlight that the man identified as the Atlanta shooter was white and a Southern Baptist, and obviously hated Asians.

Robert Aaron Long, the alleged Georgia killer, is reported to have told police he is addicted to sex and killed to remove temptation. The man appears to be mentally troubled.

Yet those pushing an agenda kept hammering on his race, his religion, and the fact his victims were mostly Asians and/or women.

In Colorado earlier this week, 10 people were killed and information on the alleged shooter has been slow to leak out. But that didn’t prevent an all-star cast of bigots from rushing to social media outlets to proclaim it was yet more violence from an angry white man.

Among that group was the niece of Kamala Harris, our de facto president as Joe Biden totters toward complete incoherence.

“Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat in our country,” read a tweet from the Harris niece, as reported in the New York Post and elsewhere.

But wait, according to court records the man charged with the Colorado mass killing is Syrian-born, and named Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa.

Whoops. Not white.

Meena Harris, the misinformed niece whose previous claim to fame was helping spearhead the movement to get Dr. Seuss books canceled for alleged racism, did the only right thing and deleted her erroneous tweet, then gave a half-baked, doubly lame rationalization.

Meena (Mean?) “made an assumption” she said, because the man was taken alive and the majority of mass shootings in the U.S. are by white men. You read it right, he could only be a mass shooter and alive because he’s white.

No need to wait for the facts when some good, old race baiting and virtue signaling can be put out to the masses, right Meena?

Politicians predictably rushed to the nearest microphone to proclaim the need for more stringent gun laws. The problem is, according to various relatives of the Colorado shooter, interviewed by various organizations, the man had serious mental problems.

Maybe we should tighten up those commitment laws. Just a thought here.

And the alleged shooter had been convicted of misdemeanor assault in high school. Nothing to see here. Keep moving.

Even more insidious than the politicians capitalizing on yet another tragedy to push an anti-constitutional agenda, is the way the news media acted in concert to ignore vital facts that were deemed essential in the reporting of the Georgia shooting.

The Colorado shooter had posted on social media about his hatred for President Trump. Guess that makes the guy a Biden supporter, but that has not been mentioned prominently by what passes for most mainstream media. Or maybe he felt the Bern.

Similarly, judging from reports of social media posts, the guy appears to be a follower of Islam. Again, no need to point out that religious tidbit. It’s not like he’s a Southern Baptist, after all.

And I think of George W. Bush, in the wake of Islamists piloting planes into the World Trade Center and The Pentagon, with his cloying repetition of his pet phrase “Islam is the religion of peace.”

Maybe Biden should get his handlers to include “Southern Baptist is the religion of peace” in his next thousand or so speeches.

Or maybe some of the biggest offenders in terms of politicizing and pontificating should get a grip on their emotions and have a quick re-introduction with facts.

Start with this basic truth: About two-thirds of the gun deaths annually in the United States are suicides. People don’t kill themselves with “assault rifles.”

Even if there were no guns, people would continue to commit suicide unless we outlawed tall buildings, bridges, potentially lethal prescription drugs, ropes and even the combination of water and electrical appliances.

The 32 dead in the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shooting, at the hands of a man of South Korean descent by the way, similarly wouldn’t have benefited from a ban on “assault weapons.” That shooter used two semi-automatic handguns.

Cars and trucks have been driven into crowds to kill masses. Don’t forget flying airplanes into buildings (having taken over those planes using box cutters as weapons) or packing explosives into a vehicle to take down buildings.

Banning cars, trucks, fertilizer, box cutters and diesel oil won’t address the problem.

What we have in this country is an insanity crisis. It is a crisis not just among those who would commit such atrocities, but also among those who would seek to use the tragedies in the most cynical way possible to advance their assaults on our rights.

Welcome to the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the tulip bulbs of the digital age.

You are to be forgiven if you’ve not heard of NFTs, a creation of recent times that stretches the bounds of reality, which could be the point.

Allow me to provide a parallel. Tales of speculative excesses often focus on the Tulip Mania, in which residents of Holland, inexplicably enamored by tulips, bid bulbs of the plant to ridiculous levels.

This happened in the 1636-37 time range most agree, when wealthy Hollanders had plenty of money made by trading the world and were looking to spend it.

That seems to me to be analogous to 2021, with the Federal Reserve leveraging the money supply as never before, the federal government handing out stimulus money at unprecedented levels, and people embracing debt at historic rates.

The degree of the Holland tulip bubble – a bubble being an example of speculative or investing excess – has been debated in recent years. But even if we take the toned down version of events from one doubter, this skeptic does admit that some bulbs traded for as much as 5,000 Guilders, enough to purchase a nice house at the time.

Many expensive bulbs saw prices increase 12-fold during the mania.

This supposed bubble-popping researcher found “only” 37 examples of a bulb selling for 300 Guilders. But, for perspective, 300 Guilders was roughly the annual salary of a skilled craftsman at the time.

When a plant’s bulb sells for a year’s salary, even once let alone 37 times, I’m calling it a bubble.

It’s a real-life counterpart to the distorted reality of The Emperor’s Clothes.

Fast-forward to 2021 and we have NFTs, in which blockchain technology, the process that has given us Bitcoin, is used to produce verifiable ownership of an art object. There is no hard copy – it’s all digital.

The use of “fungible” has nothing to do with fungus and simply means something that can be substituted for another just like it, as, for example, one penny for another penny.

Since the tokens are “non-fungible” they are supposed to be one of a kind.

Think of the Mona Lisa on a hard drive. I’d argue it’s not necessarily the same as the actual painting, but then again I didn’t grow up avoiding reality by playing video games as so many younger people have.

You know these people, often failures in school or life, who find comfort in being lords of some imaginary land accessed through their computer or a game console.

On a larger scale, there also are the philosophical navel-gazers who argue our entire existence is merely a computer simulation being run by aliens, or Gods, or some other omnipotent entities.

Earlier this month, Christie’s auction house sold an NFT of a digital collage for $69.3 million. What the buyer got was digital proof of “ownership” of the digital original.

Try hanging that on the wall and impressing visitors.

This strikes me as a takeoff on Bitcoin and other digital cryptocurrencies. They have worth only because people think they do. There is nothing tangible about it.

The symbol for Bitcoin, by the way, looks a lot like a gold coin with a letter B on it with two lines through it – think of the dollar sign ($). To repeat, there is no actual physical Bitcoin, only a digital entry that gobbles up massive amounts of electricity annually to keep the system running.

Bitcoin supposedly has worth due to scarcity. Theoretically there are a limited number of Bitcoin, but there is no limit to the number of similar digital currencies that can be created.

The price of Bitcoin admittedly has skyrocketed. But is that indicative of worth? Or is it more a case of a tulip bulb/NFT-style mania destined to end badly?

I doubt that anyone in Holland can buy a house for one tulip bulb these days.

Some in the conspiracy theory camp see digital exercises like NFTs or Bitcoin as the elites trying to get the masses in a position to speculate wildly and eventually to lose their net worth, making them that much more dependent on government handouts and the strings of control that come with them.

I’m not sure that is the case. What I am reasonably sure of is that down the line historians are going to chronicle this likely ephemeral phenomenon of valuing digital assets over the real thing and question the collective sanity of the masses.

They will add NFTs to the Tulip Mania; just the latest chapter in the book of testimony to mass gullibility.

Andrew Cuomo, embattled Democratic New York Governor and former darling of the left-wing media, provides an interesting study in selective outrage.

Calls continue to be heard for Cuomo’s resignation due to accusations from a growing number of women that he did everything from making them uncomfortable with his comments, to actually reaching under the blouse of one.

In a classic example of piling on and virtue signaling, the list of fellow prominent Democrats calling for Cuomo’s resignation has grown steadily for weeks, reaching all the way to the top. Joe Biden – you know, running mate of President Kamala Harris and significant other of DR. JILL BIDEN!!!!!! – took a break from his comedic stumbling up the steps to Air Force One to proclaim that Cuomo should resign if investigations confirm the women’s allegations.

But Sleepy Joe Biden didn’t seem to feel as strongly about the FBI’s investigation into the suspicion that Cuomo and/or his aides intentionally under-reported nursing home deaths due to COVID-19 in an attempt to shield Cuomo from criticism because he had ordered such facilities in his state to admit or re-admit infected elderly.

Critics contend that this policy escalated New York’s nursing home death toll and the fact that it’s being investigated to determine if the totals were massaged downward suggests further suspicion is warranted that people in charge realized it was a mistake.

Despite it all, Cuomo has refused to resign and continues to go about playing the petty dictator in his state.

It’s more than a touch ironic that Cuomo hurriedly was awarded an Emmy for his virus press conferences.

Also ironic is a soundbite from one of those insipid gloat-fests he had on CNN with younger brother Chris, AKA Fredo. In what passed for journalism, Chris Cuomo asked Andrew last May about being “single and ready to mingle?”

Apparently, if that long list of accusers is to be believed, Cuomo has been looking to do more than mingle for some time.

If the FBI does as well on this Cuomo investigation as it did looking into the persecution of President Trump – by the FBI among others – expect nothing more substantial than a Cuomo underling or two being slapped on the wrist.

As for the accusations of sexual harassment, Cuomo has proven to be resilient, so short of him being imprisoned, I’d be surprised to see him leave his office ahead of schedule.

We are yet to hear any claims that Cuomo’s leers or roving hands killed anyone. Critics of Cuomo’s nursing home policy argue people did die owing to his bad policy.

Yet you are much more likely to hear or read about Cuomo’s unacceptable conduct with women than to hear criticism of his nursing home policy, or the alleged falsification of the records.

And that speaks to continuing decay of our society’s moral compass. I can’t imagine anyone being able to make a rational defense of those who see sexual harassment, as abhorrent as it is, as being much worse than a governmental policy that possibly inflated death totals, then under-reported them.

But that is exactly the case trying to be made.

March is just a bit more Mad this year as the NCAA men’s basketball tournament returns after a one-year, virus-induced hiatus.

This annual Betting Bacchanalia, spiced with a bit of Wrong Way Corrigan Day (July 17, you can look it up!) is a moment of rampant shared enthusiasm. After a year of going cold turkey without a tournament, one can feel the fervor for this year’s triumphant return.

This brings the sort of unity so many politicians profess to desire, but do not promote with their actions.

Unlike what those hypocrites actually achieve, filling out brackets for betting pools consumes and unites people of every race, creed, sex or religion. Many of the people you know will have a bracket they follow slavishly to track their prowess at picking winners.

Forget that the men’s basketball tournament generates almost all the betting interest and the women’s tournament slogs along in veritable seclusion. Even social justice warriors are willing to ignore that and put their cause on hold for a shot at bracket nirvana.

In many ways this is like the Super Bowl in that it lures in novices who ordinarily would not consider betting on sports, but somehow think they now can compete with the sharks based on the sheer numbers of the uninitiated participating.

A word of advice: If you are a serious gambler, open an online account at one of the betting sites and pick individual games, or even do some parlays or future bets.

In that way your expertise might be rewarded.

Picking entire brackets correctly tends to be an inverse function of in-depth knowledge.

I’ve won a couple of small bracket contests in the past at work, but more often than not I’ve merely donated my money.

Here is what I’ve learned along the way.

No matter how much you think you know about college men’s basketball, your bracket is likely to be won by someone making their picks based on the color of the team uniforms, the school mascot, or the name of the school, particularly ones such as Gonzaga or Creighton, Baylor or Duke that give no clue to geographic location, as opposed to Alabama, Michigan, Illinois and the like.

Don’t pick No. 16 seeds to upset No. 1 seeds in the first round. Yes, it’s happened once, UMBC over Virginia in 2018, thereby wrecking my brackets and millions of others. But the overall edge for No. 1 seeds is about 140-1. You don’t want to buck those odds.

If you can’t help yourself, pick a No 15 seed to upset a No. 2 seed. That has happened eight times in tournament history, which means while such picks remain incredible longshots, they still have eight times the historical chance of happening as No. 16 upsetting No. 1.

The darling upset pick, the one that will get a knowing nod of approval from bracketologists, is to pick one or more No. 12 seeds to take out a No. 5 seed in the first round. At least here you have a reasonable chance at success. Five times in the past 40 years at least three No. 12 seeds have won in the same tournament year. Over that same 40-year span, there have been just five years when there wasn’t a No. 12 upset of a No. 5 seed.

Taking favored Gonzaga to win the NCAA championship is an even greater longshot than picking a No. 12-No. 5 upset or two. The Zags are 26-0 coming into the tournament, seeking to become the first unbeaten champion since Indiana went 32-0 in 1975-76. Be doubly scared because so many in the college hoops cognoscenti, ranging from Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim to ESPN guru Dick Vitale, are taking Gonzaga to win it all.

Bonus reason not to take Gonzaga in these cancel culture, anti-establishment times: It is a private Catholic school in Spokane, Washington, whose colors are red, white and blue!

Our society is enduring a breakdown of logic, reliability and trust that is omnipresent if you just care to look.

Consider some personal examples from recent days.

Begin with the order of hats and a T-shirt mentioned previously here in an ode to the power of popup ads. The order eventually shipped from Avenel, New Jersey, where it had spent parts of two days. A recent update had the package moving to Urbancrest, Ohio, where it also has sojourned for parts of two days.

This means my package was transported from hundreds of miles to the east of my hometown, right past me and hundreds of miles to the west before, presumably, doing a U-turn and heading back to arrive on my doorstep, by 9 p.m. tomorrow if the promised delivery time is met.

Not that it will be met, or should I have any reasonable expectation of same.

What used to be taken for granted in this country, things like courteous and efficient customer service, promises kept and quality delivered either in terms of goods or services, and general honesty, no longer can be presumed.

Another example: I received an email recently from my bank that they were going to be charging for future hard copies of statements. I have three such statements I receive monthly and went online where I opted out of the first two, but kept my checking statement.

With my computer printer on the fritz still – and me too cheap to replace it – it’s easier to have a hard copy in the event of a problem.

Formerly, I had been told that since I had the old peoples’ fee-free checking account I needn’t worry about such things.

But I called customer service this morning just to make sure. After some time spent in phone tree hell, where I kept being shuttled around to listen to more and more prompts, I ended up on hold.

The estimated time given by them was 10 minutes. I’d like to have these people work for me at an hourly rate because they sure can’t tell time.

At one point, maybe 8-10 minutes into my hold time I was updated to 6-8 minutes to go. Five minutes later, it was 4-6 estimated additional hold time minutes.

Do the math. In five minutes, my estimate range reduced two minutes. I wrote down the information at the time because that’s who I am.

Eventually I got a live voice on the phone and, yes, if I wanted hard mailings in the future it would cost me $3.95. Per month? Per year? Forever? He didn’t specify, so I asked.

The answer was $3.95 a month, or about $48 a year. If this were an interest rate, the bank would be challenging usury regulations.

While on hold, I was catching up on my email and got a disturbing communique from my brother.

Our mother is in a nursing home. Formerly we each visited daily to help her with meals, etc. Since the virus over-reaction, no in-room visits have been allowed. There was a brief period of lobby meetings, limited to two visitors and with social distancing regulations strictly enforced, not to mention masks required.

But those lobby visits gave way to our dictatorial governor’s mandates to cease such things.

By the way, despite all this, our 84-year-old mother tested positive for COVID-19, but thankfully survived with no real problems.

Now we have teleconferences weekly with her, which are an adventure for numerous reasons.

Also, there are periodic conference calls with staff and supervisory personnel to discuss my mother’s situation. During our most recent call, just last week, my brother made a point to note my mother disliked being put in a wheelchair and left there for hours on end.

We got a staff member to say the wheelchair time was not necessary, that my mother could and should just say no and this supervisor would make sure the staff understood this.

Yesterday, we got a communication from a staff member who visits our mother that mom was quite unhappy about being left in the wheelchair yet again. She got help to put her back in bed.

And today my brother talked with our mother and she said that once again she’d been plopped in the wheelchair and specifically was told when she protested that the family had requested it.

I know, it sounds absurd. But it’s true.

Equally absurd was how when we still were allowed into her room that my mother’s food often showed up not pureed, as mandated, or her food trays arrived missing multiple items. At least one time there was not a single drink item on the tray, which I would characterize as an egregious omission.

This pattern of systemic breakdown goes well beyond my personal experiences. Life is becoming surreal.

We have a president that on any given day is less than a 50-50 bet to remember his name, the names of his cabinet members, or the name of important governmental divisions, such as the Department of Defense.

Former media darling, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo remains in office despite botching virus measure and, more recently, being ensnared in an increasing number of claims of sexual harassment.

Yet a Kansas football coach is forced to resign on the spot for sexual harassment allegations.

And finally, also referring to something posted here, I noted previously that it is curious how government officials pick and choose the statistics they want to cite.

For example, people in the Federal Reserve or Department of the Treasury claim the government’s unemployment figures are understated, and they use that presumption to justify their increasing money creation and overspending.

Yet these same people insist that government inflation numbers, which a large group of economists contend are understated, are just fine. This also allows the Feds to justify money creation and spending.

Signs abound that the threads that hold our society together are fraying. When they pop entirely, you would be well advised to have ample supplies of the three precious metals – gold, silver, and lead.

Classical economists, those who did not worship the misunderstood tenets of the Keynesian method, realized that the so-called “free lunch” is a sleight of hand.

Legendary economist Milton Friedman even wrote a 1975 book titled “There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.”

You ought to be interested in this because the basic point is someone pays for said lunch. Just look in the mirror. The single largest provider of metaphorical free lunches on this planet is the United States government.

The Friedman book should be mandatory reading for anyone in government, be they right-wing conservative or left-wing socialist. The message applies to both ends of the political spectrum and also to all those in between.

Who’s paying for all those free lunches? Taxpayers, anyone purchasing U.S. debt, future generations who will have their prospects reduced by the burgeoning federal indebtedness, and many others are, or will, pay for the freebies.

If you find prices on many of your essential purchases rising, that’s another way that you are paying for the free lunches of others via inflation touched off by the excess governmental spending.

Sometimes there even is opportunity cost for the person consuming the free offering. Maybe they are content to collect enhanced unemployment benefits rather than seek a new job. When the government assistance ends, they are left in desperate times.

This is not a theoretical discussion. In the early days of the COVID-19 unemployment premiums, workers displaced by the virus, or by overreactions to it, found their traditional unemployment benefits supplemented by an additional $600 a week. That’s $31,200 for a year, ON TOP OF UNEMPLOYMENT, which in my state of Pennsylvania is 50 percent of working income up to a maximum of $573 a week.

There were more than a few stories of employers getting federal payroll assistance loans/grants to call workers back to their jobs and said workers, who were making as much or more staying home, being angry at the employer.

Yes, the unemployment benefits theoretically don’t extend past 26 weeks. But even if they didn’t, the unemployed worker could be collecting the equivalent of more than $60,000 annualized.

And these things have a way of being available well beyond stated limits. An acquaintance of mine milked extended unemployment benefits for more than two years during the 2008-09 economic meltdown and after a brief rough patch, rode that right into a career on Social Security disability, one of the few growth industries in this country.

He got his free lunch; many of them. Anyone on the tax rolls paid for that – after this individual’s contributions to unemployment and Social Security are deducted, as well as those of his employers.

It’s safe to say that guy is a net beneficiary of the system.

Multiply him by millions and you get an idea of the extent of the problem.

Even proposals that seem benign on the surface bear costs. To someone theoretically benefiting from the free lunch of an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, there are potential drawbacks such as reduced hours or complete elimination of the job.

Raise the labor cost high enough and automation – computerized order systems at fast-food joints, for example – become cost-effective.

Companies will not absorb the higher minimum wage, so consumers will pay higher prices for good and services.

Pushback from the few in government who understand economics has resulted in the minimum-wage surge being held up, stimulus checks being marked down from $2,000 a head to $1,400, and the weekly unemployment supplement being negotiated down to $300 extra per week.

That is the current status, but such things are fluid. And, rest assured, millions more “free lunches” are being prepared for the flood of illegal immigrants about to be accorded residency here.

For all of you not yet on the gravy train, better hop onboard quickly. To all those currently partaking of the so-called “free lunches,” enjoy them while they last, because they cannot go on indefinitely.

What is economically impossible cannot continue forever. That’s one law that even woke, cancel culture, or social justice warrior types cannot repeal.

If you ever have wondered why there are so many popup ads encountered while surfing the internet, it’s for a simple reason: They work.

Consider my example from today, when such an ad introduced me to some items I desperately needed, but I just didn’t realize it until that magic moment in the ether.

The day already had been productive, with a couple of quick stock trades designed to take advantage of downward pressure on precious metals and mining stocks. Buy low and sell high actually works, if you can buy when things look bleak and sell into euphoria.

Also, the two granddaughters got picked up early for doctor’s appointments, so it was time to catch up on the world’s absurdity with a quick browse of zerohedge.com.

While reading one article, perhaps on the cancel culture’s condemnation of Dr. Seuss as a racist, or maybe it was Andrew Cuomo’s nonapology apology for manhandling women, up popped an ad for a hat. I chuckled out loud.

Said hat is red and looks like those MAGA hats that Trump supporters wear and by so doing seem to trigger morons on the left.

This hat addressed that very issue, reading across its front “Relax Idiots-It’s Just A Hat.”

Had to have one. Make that two, just in case one gets old and tattered through use.

So I created my account on rightwinggear.com and started shopping.

Not only did I need two of the red hats, I discovered I needed a couple of Second Amendment hats. In this case the hat is black with a white numeral 2 and a pair of conjoined AR-style weapons making an A on the other side of the hat, their magazine wells creating the crossbar of the A.

But wait, there’s more. Spend at least $60 and the shipping’s free. Time to keep looking.

There was a come-on for a mystery hat for the paltry price of $7. You buy the hat and get a surprise when it arrives. I’m thinking the surprise won’t be that it’s a Black Lives Matter or Antifa hat.

Sure, put me down for one surprise hat.

Well, that bumped the total, but we’re still short of $60. Everything on the site seems to be on sale.

Wait, look at that black 2020 election T-shirt with a map of the nation on its front. The counties that voted for Donald Trump are colored red and described in the key as the United States of America.

The Biden outposts, colored blue, are correctly labeled Democraticstan.

Won’t that go well with my new hats?

More good news; I’m now over the magic $60 threshold. Free shipping isn’t a government stimulus check, but it’s close.

Enter the credit card information. Confirm all important details. Hit enter and get the confirmation email.

All that’s left is for the delivery people to drop the package at the doorstep.

Now, let’s surf the web some more and find out what else I need, but didn’t know it.

February has melted into March. Different month; same old stuff from the powers that be.

Hypocrisy continues to abound.

Democrats, and liberals of all stripes decry walls for the purpose of protecting our southern border and keeping out illegal immigrants. But have you seen pictures lately of the U.S. Capitol building? It is ringed with Pelosi’s wall, designed to keep out legal citizens who are unhappy with the state of politics.

Speaking of illegal immigrants, critics pilloried President Trump for “Kids in cages” neatly forgetting it was Barack Obama who built the cages. Now Joe Biden has opened a migrant facility for children, housing them in what look like shipping containers with bars on the windows. Kids in cages, anyone?

In Berkeley, Calif., the head of the teachers’ union, who has been very vocal about how unsafe it is for students and teachers to resume in-person instruction, was videotaped dropping off his daughter for in-person preschool. Of course he’s outraged that his hypocrisy was publicized. So predictable.

Members of the Democrats’ so-called “squad,” the catchall term for radical progressives long on rhetoric and short on intellectual depth, are throwing a hissy fit over the fact that the Senate parliamentarian noted – correctly – that including a $15 minimum wage in a reconciliation bill violated Senate rules. After bending, changing or just flat-out ignoring rules in the last national election, Democrats can be forgiven for being shocked and outraged to find rules being enforced.

When Democrat New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was mishandling his state’s COVID-19 response, including demanding infected elderly be allowed into nursing homes, with predictable results, his shortcomings were ignored and he even won an award for his press conferences. But now that Cuomo is being accused of being too hands-on with females he encounters, calls are out to have his head on a pike.

Joe Biden, who spent his presidential campaign hiding from the public and the press, continues that tactic in office, including producing no State of the Union Address. And the lamestream media, which was so quick to assault President Trump on matters real or imagined, sees nothing here worth mentioning.

God knows New Orleans and Seattle have little to be proud of when it comes to their crime/riot problems. Yet somehow New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and Seattle counterpart Jenny Durkan have prioritized the case of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, getting into a social media battle over whether or not Wilson should be enticed to come play for the New Orleans Saints.

Also on the topic of mixing politics and athletics, soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic riled LeBron James when he was quoted saying the basketball star should stick to his sport and stop being a social justice warrior. James, who embraces semi-blasphemous nicknames for himself such as “King James” and “The Chosen One,” predictably noted that his ego would not permit him to stop using his athletic celebrity to promote his political agenda.

Left-wing rioters continue to terrorize Portland, unhappy now with Joe Biden’s lack of action on their list of demands. You will see little coverage of this in the national media, and that thankfully spares us the discord of video of flaming vehicles and buildings with the “largely peaceful protests” script at the bottom of the screen.

And now yet another sign Armageddon is near. Megyn Kelly, the largely irrelevant former Fox and NBC eye candy, appeared on the typically left-leaning Bill Maher’s “Real Time” and drew applause from the studio audience when she and the host agreed leftist-run schools are going too far with their indoctrination of young children into their radical social causes.

Prepare to be shocked. Too much money, or water, can be hazardous to your health and that of society in general.

While money and water seemingly are two unrelated subjects, consider the strange terminology interplay between the two.

Having money to spend is called being liquid or having liquidity. Sounds a lot like water.

Spending that money is said to create cash flow in the economy. Ditto.

A company or individual that has a reliable way of making money is said to have a cash stream. Ditto again.

Channels to distribute either money or water are referred to as conduits. More of same.

Those whose debts greatly exceed assets are said to be under water, or drowning in debt. That was the last example.

To restate our starting point, too much water and too much money are potential problems

As incredible as it would seem, with water being the basis of all life as we know it, a person actually can die from drinking too much and suffering water poisoning.

The brain malfunctions when electrolytes are tipped outside of normal levels of balance due to having too much water in the body. Death can follow.

Central banks around the world seem intent on finding out if they can poison the global economy by injecting too much liquidity – excess money supply created by their concerted quantitative easing in the hope of propping up things.

Already this excess liquidity has interfered with the brain function of the economy and markets.

How else to explain the radical upward price movements of Bitcoin above an intrinsic value most learned economists put at zero?

Similarly, can we really justify stock markets near all-time highs in the United States while the economy is on life support?

A company such as Tesla, darling of the green crowd, can have its share price soar to the stratosphere despite making money not by selling electric cars, but due to the carbon credits it gets for doing so and can peddle to companies not as favorably viewed through the green prism.

Oil demand supposedly is declining rapidly with people not working or traveling as much and general economies being slowed, yet oil prices are moving upward at a rapid pace.

In my Pennsylvania county, an area whose demographics of aging population and very modest household income would suggest limited vitality in the real estate market, houses are going up for sale and just as quickly being grabbed off the market by eager buyers.

Wild government overspending in forms such as stimulus payments, guaranteed basic income, an increasing percentage of the population nationally depending for the government for all or a large portion of its income, or any of the other examples of federal government largesse, is not the recipe for long-term economic health.

Financial liquidity, as with water, flows rapidly to where it is least resisted, creating price distortions when the flow is money, or floods when the flow is water.

Either way, the aftermath is not pretty.

Investment bubbles (another water analogy, sorry) burst, leaving rich and poor alike soaked.

Some day, perhaps not too far in the future, we’re going to see that.

Excess monetary liquidity has blinded the markets to what is or isn’t a fair price. It already is beginning to produce price inflation, a process that gathers speed slowly, like a rocket launch, but quickly gains momentum.

From author Ray Bradbury writing in his book The Illustrated Man (“Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone”) to Psychology Today magazine in February 2013 (“Too much of anything is bad for you”) to Mahatma Buddha (“Everything which in your life you have in excess than you actually require is poison . . .”), negative consequences of excesses in even things perceived to be positive long have been noted.

So it is with water, and governments’ bloated money supplies.

There is a plague spreading throughout the populace that wearing any number of masks cannot slow down. We speak of the pandemic of general insanity.

It affects rich and poor alike, black and white, men and women, old and young, Republican and Democrat.

Admittedly, it seems to be worse among those on the political left, but they have no monopoly on the malady.

While the world is tying itself in knots to combat a virus that is largely an inconvenience unless you are in a tiny subset of the population that either is elderly, has overwhelming numbers of preconditions, or a little of both, we in the United States seem unable to recognize the outbreak of brain cramps sweeping the nation.

Labored thinking runs rampant with nary a word about reining in that pandemic.

Just today we read that carjackings are up 135 percent in Chicago, so one Illinois lawmaker – yes, a Democrat – proposes banning video games such as “Grand Theft Auto.”

He might want to revisit how strict gun control laws in Chicago and Illinois haven’t put much of a dent in the Chicago shooting rate.

Meanwhile, the proposed governmental actions to help those adversely affected financially by COVID-19 – and the government’s heavy-handed shutdowns of businesses – as usual are being exposed as pork dispensing in the guise of addressing a worthy cause.

The $1.9 trillion plan that passed the U.S. House of Representatives is estimated by The Wall Street Journal to have only $825 billion directed to COVID relief and more than $1 trillion designed as handouts to favorite wards of the liberals, including $270 million to the National Endowment of the Arts and the Humanities and $200 million to the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

How those help John Q. Public pay his mortgage, or Sally Q. Public buy groceries is unclear.

Workers are OK, however, if they are federal bureaucrats, because the bill proposes $570 million in family leave to pay those who opt to stay home from their jobs to care for children not in school due to the virus.

Those of you in the private sector, tough luck.

Common sense, already on life support, continues to absorb blows from the cognitively impaired.

This lack of ability to prioritize is astounding. Most would agree our nation is in a tough spot economically and socially, yet the San Francisco school board’s priority is to rename 44 schools to appease social justice warrior snowflakes.

In a stunning re-visiting of reality, that plan has been put on hold due to an admittedly half-baked process used to identify those schools that needed new names to stop them from honoring such flawed dudes as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

When someone added Malcolm X to the list of those whose name should be removed from an academy there due to his early career as a pimp, meaning he had subjugated women, X was proposed to be given a pass due to redeeming actions later in life.

But Washington once owned slaves, so there’s no coming back for him, never mind all of that Father Of Our Country claptrap.

In a similar move, members of the black student union at the University of Washington, in the state of Washington (you can’t make up this stuff), are demanding a statue of George Washington be removed from campus because it “perpetuates white supremacy and preserves its historical imposition.”

But why settle for removing a statue? Let’s just ban math because Bill and Melinda Gates are funneling some of their considerable fortune into bankrolling a group of activists who believe math is racist.

Please note the nomenclature. When you’re a liberal seeking major change as a triumph of style over substance, you’re an activist. When you’re a conservative attempting to get election fraud addressed, you’re just part of an unruly mob.

Over the years I have come across some who read the satirical web site The Onion and take it literally. Make no mistake, none of the above is sarcastic exaggeration designed to amuse, but rather a sad, small sampling of what’s going on out there among the navel-gazers.

I was a bit stunned earlier this evening, watching a rerun of the old Maverick television series, to find it rated TV-14 due to AC (adult content), MV (mild violence) and OC (outdated cultural depiction).

The DVR was paused to drink in this idiocy. The last warning really should be OCD, for obvious reasons of abbreviation and the ironic commentary on the state of mind of those who drum up these labels.

But, to borrow from the late radio broadcaster Gabriel “There’s good news tonight” Heatter, a number of Democrats from the U.S. House have written to President Joe Biden asking him to relinquish sole authority to use nuclear weapons.

Of course they should have sent the letter to DR. JILL BIDEN!!!!!!!!!, the Edgar Bergen to her husband’s Charlie McCarthy, if they expect action.

Yet, it’s the thought that counts — when there is some rational thought given to a matter, a rare occurrence these days.