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While it is true that when someone writes of macroeconomics most people stop reading, I’m thinking this might be a good time to change that.

I’m going to write. You decide whether or not to read.

Many wonder why they should care about the economy and investing markets.

Well . . . if you have a job that might be jeopardized by a weak economy, you should care.

If you are collecting Social Security and/or a pension, or plan to do so, you should care.

If you have an IRA or 401k retirement account, you should care.

If you own whole life insurance with cash value, you should care.

If you like to be able to travel the country without an armed escort, you should care.

There are many other reasons, but that’s enough for now.

People whose job it is to notice such things are seeing warning signs everywhere that the world’s economic system, including our own United States example, is showing signs of distress that could lead to collapse.

Never happen, you say? It almost did in 2008. And the bloated money supply, overall debt both public and private, and leverage in investments is much greater now than it was in 2008.

The Dow Jones Industrial index was down 1,000 or so points at its worst today and closed off 876 and change. The tech-heavy NASDAQ lost even more on a percentage basis.

But what really has investment pros worried is the wild gyrations in the bond markets. Customarily these markets move at a glacier-like pace. There is plenty of time to identify a trend and either get on board or get out of the way.

Understand that the monetary value of global debt markets dwarfs the stock market capitalizations. Bonds are supposed to be the safe money, the bedrock of stability in tough times.

But that changes when inflation is clipping along at 8.6 percent for May on a year-over-year basis, and our panicky Federal Reserve floats a trial balloon in the Wall Street Journal that, where last meeting 75-basis-point interest rate increases were taken off the table by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, now they are back on the table.

This spelled chaos in the bond market Monday, with the unlikely result that 2-year, 5-year, 10-year and 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds all closed with yields in the low 3-percent range. Even worse, the 2-year yield was slightly higher than that of the 10-year or 30-year.

Such instances of inversion of the interest rate curve, where traditionally long rates are higher than shorter term rates to account for inflation risk, virtually always mean an economic recession looms or already is upon us.

This comes as 30-year fixed mortgage rates climbed over 6 percent, where in January of this year they were just over 3 percent.

This sort of thing craters the housing market, never a good thing.

But the Federal Reserve Board, a group of unelected people who run the nation’s money supply – check the bills in your wallet, they’re Federal Reserve notes – has amassed a $9 trillion balance sheet in buying bonds and mortgage backed securities in recent years to boost the economy and keep interest rates low.

By way of comparison, the 2022 U.S. federal budget is about $6 trillion.

Should those purchased bonds or mortgage backed securities ever need to be marked to market at greatly reduced values, as would be possible in the case of a surge in interest rates, the Fed would be bust.

What happens then is a question no one can answer.

This nation faced even higher inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker helped rein it in, but only by increasing the Fed Funds rate (the interest rates at which banks can borrow from the Fed) to 20 percent in June 1981.

This cooled borrowing demand, put the economy into recession and cured the problem – with plenty of economic pain.

But even if our Fed goes 75 basis points at its Wednesday meeting announcement that would put the Federal Funds rate at just 1.75 percent.

Powell would need a total of 10 raises of 75 basis points just to get that Fed interest rate on level with the current admitted inflation rate (many believe the government is understating that inflation number).

Before that happens, the U.S. economy and by extension that of the world, will be in shambles.

As strange as it might sound, you could find yourself in the not-too-distant future longing for the good, old days of $5-a-gallon gasoline.

If you’re counting on the Fed’s Jerome Powell, or Clueless Joe Biden and his regime to get us through this crisis, you’re whistling past the graveyard.

My wife has become a player in the neighborhood pastime of Parking Grab. Even better, she’s merged the game with elements of Survivor as far as building alliances.

By way of background, I live on a residential street notable for the primal need of some residents to take up multiple on-street parking spots, whether they require them or not.

No matter that they have garages that have gone years without hosting a car. No matter that they have driveways and/or pulloff areas that get light use.

They measure their self-esteem by dominating on-street parking, particularly in front of their house or the houses of others close by. A few weeks back my wife returned from shopping and, lacking a spot to park in front of our house, parked in front of a neighbor’s house.

This brought a swift verbal rebuke from the neighbor’s wife. My wife now has joined my son in getting grief from these people for the unforgivable sin of parking on a public street. So far they haven’t had the temerity to yell at me, which probably is a good thing.

I called the local gendarmes on the matter and the officer assured me we had as much right to park on this public street as any other drivers do, as long as we were not blocking a driveway or other such things. We were not.

These neighbors are not the only offenders. We have others on our block who have joined the party.

There also seems to be a particularly ardent contest underway on the next block, with one proponent upping the ante by getting a handicapped parking sign installed. The handicapped parking tag seems to be passed around from vehicle to vehicle and, as an added bonus, the users are playing the Parking Grab variation of controlling extra spots with careful positioning of each vehicle.

To do this, the “handicapped” vehicle uses the handicapped parking sign as a bisecting point and parks with the front of the vehicle ahead of the sign and close enough to the next driveway up the street that only something like a 106-inch total length Smart Car — less than the wheelbase of my Kia Sorento — might park between the vehicle and the driveway.

Their aggrieved neighbors from across the street – we’ve heard past calls on the police scanner – retaliated with a handicapped parking tag of their own in the family vehicle and camped on the spot for a time, positioning the SUV to grab the extra half-space up front.

But she must have had to go somewhere, so now one of the many “handicapped” vehicles of that area has replaced her, leaving the half space open in front and having a confederate parked half a space or so distant in the rear. This way they control 2 1/2 to 3 spots.

How ingenious of them.

There is a similar tactic being employed in front of my house by several neighbors and their visitors or paramours, parking between a driveway and another parked car with about half a car length in front and in back.

As my wife prepared to leave today for grocery shopping, I told her to expect to have the parking spots taken by the time she got back.

But I found out later that the wife had a plan. She enlisted a neighbor to put a vehicle in the taking-multiple-spots position to await the return of my wife.

Meanwhile, I took one of my Mustangs out for a cruise – blissfully it is parked in a nearby rented garage and parking grabbers haven’t been brazen enough to force the lock and park in the garage when I’m out.

When I got back, I was bemused to see the SUV taking up multiple spaces, but didn’t realize it all had been preplanned.

I mowed our grass and shortly thereafter my wife pulled up and the neighbor placeholder moved the car to make room for my wife to park – with her notably leaving a space for someone else, too. This happened just as a visitor to a neighbor swooped in hoping to grab the whole multi-car spot – needing it due to lacking the ability to parallel park.

We unloaded the car and I laughed out loud when my wife filled me in on her pre-planning. I congratulated her for joining the fray and adding to it with alliance building.

I eagerly await any response from the neighbors, who just hate it when others play their silly game better than they do.

You may have noticed of late that headlines scream about someone throwing someone else under the bus.

It’s a colorful metaphor which means avoiding blame by identifying someone else as the culprit and distancing oneself from said person, a common albeit reprehensible act that has come to be labeled as throwing someone under the bus.

People who trace the history of such things see a link to a 1960s philosophical thought experiment in which people debate throwing an innocent fat man from a trolley and under the wheels to stop its runaway travel and save remaining lives.

Today’s throwing people under the bus is more a political exercise as the weak, often cognitively dysfunctional leadership looks to avoid responsibility for unpleasant developments.

In a curious turn of late, sometimes the person thrown under said bus emerges with enough strength to return the favor.

Consider the ongoing inflation we are experiencing, 8.6 percent in May which is the highest since 1981. The monthly numbers were announced Friday. The whispers among the investing community had been to expect a lower number.

Peak inflation was their working hypothesis, although that’s not necessarily a good thing. Say inflation had checked in at 7 percent, that would have been much lower than the previous month, which could have been identified as a “peak.”

But should you be comfortable with 7-percent inflation, which cuts in half your purchasing power every 10 years?

You are not supposed to consider such things of course. You would have been told inflation had peaked and you should have been all warm and fuzzy, just the like the morons were when Obama prattled on about hope and change.

I can hope bad things happen to you and if they do, say you go from being healthy to sick, then both hope and change have come to pass, but neither is very desirable from your perspective.

But back to our metaphorical bus. The creatures of the Biden regime got the word days early on the inflation report and began leaking to expect bad news.

This was happening even as in the previous week Biden and his Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took turns throwing each other under the bus.

Yellen, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose low interest rates and buying of government debt also contributed to inflation, finally got around to admitting publicly that she got it wrong in predicting no inflation threat from such programs, as well as those $2,000-a-head stimulus bribes (payments).

But in excerpts from an advance copy of a Yellen book due out this fall, Yellen threw Clueless Joe under the Greyhound by saying she’d argued to have his $1.9 trillion stimulus plan cut by a third.

Meanwhile, Biden emerged from a meeting with current Fed Chair Jerome Powell and squarely put the blame for inflation on the Fed, which was running down the inflation tracks under Yellen, too,

This is a slight wrinkle for Clueless Biden, who most often blames Russia’s Putin for inflation and anything else going bad in these United States.

That whole Putin premise is ridiculous. Even economic neophytes knew that the Federal Reserve, with decades of keeping interest rates historically low, while at the same time allowing record growth in the money supply, were setting the stage for big price inflation.

All it needed was a spark to set afire all that tinder. That spark was the over-reaction to COVID-19, which simultaneously hampered supply lines, crimped manufacturing, then artificially goosed demand with the stimulus handouts.

Biden is giving Putin a break from duty under the bus. He even took a swipe at the formerly deified Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy, criticizing the golden boy for failing to heed warnings of a Russian invasion.

“There was no doubt,” said the clueless one at a fund-raising event. “And Zelenskyy didn’t want to hear it.”

Don’t worry about Zelenskyy, those tire marks acquired under the bus will rub off quickly.

If only we could anticipate such a quick end to inflation, no matter whom one wants to throw under the bus in blame for it.

Scary, amusing, disgusting, these are but a few adjectives to describe the headlines this morning as the economic and moral decline of this nation and the world continues.

On the economic front, retail chain Target (pronounced Tar-Jay by those who think making it sound French is amusing) cut its profit outlook for the second time in three weeks and the company’s stock price is down 7 percent or so to greet the news.

WalMart had similarly disappointing performance in its most recent profit commentary and its stock price did the swan dive, too.

The Biden Regime, as is the wont of political propaganda operations, loves to point to jobs created as indicative of economic strength, neatly failing to factor that the “gains” are only the economy trying to get back to where it was before draconian COVID lockdowns shut down the economy and turned workers into homebodies eager to sit in front of the television and collect stimulus payments without the need to work and produce.

Those freebies managed to light a fire under inflation by creating a supply-demand mismatch, so all that handout buying power is being sucked out of the hands of consumers by rising prices.

Demand for products is down and mammoth retailers like Target and WalMart are only confirming that with their disappointing guidance, never mind the job giddiness.

Also from the Biden smoke and mirrors department comes the announcement that the regime will invoke the Defense Production Act in an attempt to accelerate domestic production of things such as solar energy technology

This is in response to the skyrocketing fuel prices that Biden created with his restrictive fossil fuel policies, but he is trying to blame on Putin. While out driving the other day I saw regular gasoline priced on the far side of $5 a gallon and premium topping $6 at one station.

The world is not prepared to continue to function without fossil fuels – imagine a car or airplane relying on solar panels and what happens when it’s cloudy. Similarly, much-touted windmills rely on Mother Nature to provide never-ending breezes, which simply doesn’t happen.

Electric cars still need to have powerplants to feed their need for recharging and, again, those massive plants can’t provide consistent supply while running on solar or wind.

File this latest Biden Regime initiative under the don’t-just-stand-there-do-something category, similar to hyping releasing a few days of consumption from the strategic petroleum reserve.

I wonder how the Biden Regime will blame Putin for food shortages likely to result from plans of California legislators to “buy” water rights due to an ongoing drought and deny that water to farmers so that city dwellers can water their lawns and wash their cars with impunity?

Energy, while a problem here, is worse in Europe, where climate alarmists in the bureaucracy have rammed through all manner of restrictive legislation..

That includes the city of Krakow, Poland, which in 2019 put on a ban against burning wood or coal. Now, with energy prices through the roof, reality intrudes and the government is encouraging Poles to forage the forests for downed trees and limbs that they might burn them for fuel.

Of course the bureaucrats can’t let go totally. Each would-be wood scavenger first must undergo training (this is an ax, you swing it thusly to chop up the tree, then you load the logs being careful to keep your back straight . . . ) and official permission.

Oh, and eight shiploads of coal – 700,000 tons give or wake – are on their way to Poland to alleviate energy shortfalls.

Screaming Greta must be locked in a soundproof room in Sweden. How else to explain her silence on all this?

But even amidst declining economies, skyrocketing prices, and fuel and food shortages, the politically correct police continue to wallow in their sense of self-importance.

A Norwegian feminist is being investigated, and could face up to three years in prison.

Her crimes? Saying on social media and television interviews that biological men cannot be either lesbians or mothers.

Gun-control zealots are taking a shotgun approach – pun intended – toward reaching their goal of disarming the citizenry.

Their plan is to use every high-profile incident as a pretense to fire random, multi-pellet rounds and hope that something registers.

If the shooter is white, as in Buffalo, it’s clearly racism running rampant among white males.

If the shooter is Hispanic, with hints of various fetishes, as in the Texas school shooting, it’s about saving the children.

If the shooter is black, as in Tulsa, and his primary target is a black doctor, the cry is the all-purpose taking guns out of the hands of the masses.

If the shooter is black and elderly, and manages to get off 23 shots while wounding just 10 (13 more were injured by inhaling smoke bombs or getting caught up in the panic rush to exit) as in New York’s subway shooting, the incident is pretty much shoved aside due to lack of agenda usefulness.

By way of comparison, you probably heard relatively little about the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, in which nine people were killed and more than 50 were shot, according to a report from a Chicago NBC affiliate TV station. This was in a number of separate incidents, but still you’d think it wouldn’t be accepted as the unfortunate business as usual that it is.

One song being sung by the anti-gun choir of late is to raise age limits to purchase a gun, noting that 18-year-olds aren’t mature enough to handle the responsibility.

OK, then 18-year-olds certainly aren’t old enough to join the armed forces and handle various weaponry. It follows that age 18 certainly is not old enough to be drafted into the armed forces against one’s will should this again become necessary.

While we’re at it, let’s repeal the 26^th Amendment, which gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. Obviously they are not mentally equipped on the maturity front to make such vital decisions.

How about making 21 the mandatory driving age? And why allow 18-year-olds to enter into legally binding contracts?

Why allow “children” much younger than 18 to get abortions, sexual-gender reassignment counseling, or drug counseling without parents being informed?

On the topic of driving, online figures indicate 2,738 deaths of those between the ages of 13 and 19 in motor vehicle crashes in 2020. Obviously all those weren’t driving, but I think many if not most were.

Indisputable is the fact that younger drivers are more dangerous to themselves and to others. This same online article noted that the fatal crash rate per mile driven for those ages 16 to 19 is three times the rate for drivers 20 and over.

When’s the last time you heard outrage over teen driving deaths, or calls to raise the age limit to drive or buy cars?

Blaming guns is the simplistic solution, one easily made without giving the matter deep consideration and instead opting to go for cheap politicization. It’s the triumph of emotionalism over rational thought.

The collapse of parenting in this country (as in the case of the Tulsa shooter), the failure of our legal system to identify and incarcerate criminals (as in the case of numerous mass shootings) and the ineptitude of our mental health system, which tends to look the other way when tough decisions need to be made, all share responsibility.

How many times must we read of deranged mass shooters pontificating on social media about their plans before the fact? How many times must we read of them being reported to various authorities, with no action taken?

To repeat from an earlier post here, if you make it difficult or impossible for average law-abiding citizens to own guns, you guarantee that they will be unarmed if and when a criminal not following those laws uses a gun to attack or rob them.

Clueless Joe Biden is scheduled go on the air later tonight to bumble his way through an address on gun violence.

While you listen, remember this is the brain donor who once said a double-barrelled shotgun is all a homeowner needs for defense. The Clueless one said that antiquated weapon provided the opportunity for a warning shot and one defensive shot.

Good luck with that plan, Clueless Joe. Do your Secret Service agents carry double-barrelled shotguns? Just asking.

More recently, Joe went on a half-baked tirade against 9-millimeter guns claiming they are “high-caliber” and 9mm bullets “blow the lung out of the body.”

Those who know about guns, frequently question the stopping power of a 9mm. You want to talk “high-caliber” talk .45 acp, a gun designed for the military, with upgraded stopping power from the previously standard .38-caliber sidearm.

Then there are guns such as .44 magnums, made famous by the Clint Eastwood “Dirty Harry” movie. That gun and its round would blow a lung of the victim out of the body.

While a 9mm is not overly powerful, it is the most popular handgun for self-defense, so if you can outlaw 9mm weapons, you have effectively given criminals freedom to rape and pillage without having to fear being shot, albeit not having their “lung blown out of their body.”

Were Biden to get his way, we’d be reduced to owning BB guns — if he could get past the rantings of his handlers about us shooting our eyes out.

Johnstown’s Showcase for Commerce gave a true representation of the area tonight when the whole thing ground to a halt as the power went off at about 8 p.m. and remained off as I type this – thankfully not in an affected area – at 10-ish.

If those Afghan refugees had made it here as planned by the Lack of Vision 2025 behind-the-curtain elites, they’d have felt right at home.

My brother often would say, as he and my mother sat awaiting the return of power in Lorain Borough over the past 10 years or so, that he knew what it was like to live in Kabul or Baghdad (Iraq).

Tonight he’s living downtown, still in the dark.

There had been reports on the police scanner (my wife loves to listen) in recent days about manhole lids blowing off and smoke emanating from the uncapped holes in downtown Johnstown. Early reports are that this outage is an underground phenomenon.

Guess no one took those flying manhole lids seriously.

Yes, other localities in Pennsylvania, and other states such as California and Texas, have creaky electrical grids as the nation’s infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

But here in Johnstown we have an embarrassment of failures on the infrastructure front.

Our roads look like some of the main highways in Ukraine now that the Russians have bombed them into uselessness.

Definition of a Johnstown optimist: Someone who bothers to get a front-end alignment for their cars, which on our roads has the life expectancy of the mayfly.

Those very same roads, particularly within Johnstown’s city limits, are a treat in winter. The plan for snow removal is waiting for the stuff to melt and run into the rivers.

This makes parking, traveling the roads, and even trying to walk the sidewalks an adventure.

Point Stadium has been upgraded through the years, but somehow they forgot to deal with the lights, which could be counted on to fail for major events such as the AAABA Tournament. There are rumors the system was personally designed by Edison, whose autograph might be seen deep within the stadium’s bowels.

Now, at long last, supposedly the lights have been updated. We shall see.

The ongoing, seemingly never-ending example of Greater Johnstown’s infrastructure problems is the sewer work.

The sewer authority looked the other way for years if not decades, then got hit square between the eyes with a federal mandate to deal with overflows during rain storms that dumped untreated waste water into the Conemaugh River.

In the intervening years, homeowners in some municipalities have had to shell out thousands of dollars to make their systems airtight in the attempts to eliminate rainwater inflows.

Some, like Southmont Borough in which I reside, thought just upgrading laterals to near the foundation of each home would cut the mustard. We would pay higher rates, of course, to fund this, but now apparently we are not meeting standards so some of my neighbors are having to have their basements torn up and airtight piping installed, along with paying the higher rates!

Some lucky people now have sewer backups where before they had none, sort of like winning the Murphy’s Law lottery.

I like this area, and have lived here all my life, but you’d have to be blind not to see how things have gone downhill dramatically in the past decade or so.

And I haven’t even mentioned the violent crime, which may have gotten a boost without lighting in the downtown for these past several hours.

In the strictest sense, Memorial Day is a time to pause and reflect on those who have died in service to the country, although generations of school kids and young adults have been reduced to seeing it as an excuse to take a day away from their duties.

In a broader sense, Memorial Day also is a time to honor those who served and survived, and perhaps to think of metaphorical deaths such as the demise of common sense and fairness.

The last is a worldwide phenomenon as indicated by news of recent days.

Begin with the absurd scene from Paris of a man dressed as an old woman in a wheelchair, leaping from the conveyance and smearing a cake on the case which is there to protect the famed Mona Lisa painting from such idiocy.

The cross-dresser reportedly was a climate change protester, screaming incoherent messages about protecting the earth. Considering that the painting’s protective case is designed to stop bullets, the cake was a symbolic weapon, perhaps a geographical and historical attempt at referencing Marie Antoinette’s purported “let them eat cake” line.

That didn’t end so well for Marie Antoinette, as she lost her head – literally – afterward as a penalty for having lost her head figuratively in allegedly issuing the disdainful remark to the starving poor.

Another modern day Marie Antoinette, house speaker Nancy Pelosi, is a rich noble similarly out of touch with the common folk. Recall her showing off her $24,000 freezer and $13-a-pint designer ice cream during COVID lockdowns to illustrate how she was dealing with the inconvenience of it all.

It’s well to remember on this Memorial Day that Pelosi also went to a beauty salon maskless during the purported COVID crisis even as she demanded the public be compelled to wear face diapers.

This seems to be a Democratic woman thing. Recall Chicago Mayor “Lightweight” Lori Lightfoot being outed for a trip to the beauty salon even as members of the public were ordered to stay at home. Lightweight also ignored the mask and social distancing dictates, as revealed by photos posted by the hairdresser, a typical Facebook braggart.

Pelosi and her husband Paul, better known as Nancy’s Husband, also have an uncanny ability to profit in the stock market.

But Paul should have stuck to the overpriced ice cream to celebrate. He was arrested for DUI over the holiday weekend in California. Nancy’s office told the media she would not be commenting on this “private” matter.

Let them (the public) eat . . . ice cream, right, Nancy?

As far as we know Hillary Clinton didn’t make tone-deaf trips to hairdressers during COVID lockdowns, not that it would have helped her. Come to think of it, that didn’t stop Lightfoot or Pelosi, but we digress.

Hillary has been outed in court over taking to the social media megaphone for morons platform to push false information regarding Donald Trump and Russian connections.

We’re still waiting for Hillary’s lifetime ban for spreading disinformation.

Playing loose with the facts seems to run in the family. Recall Mr. Hillary’s assertion that he didn’t have sex with that woman. Which one? You pick.

Also of late, many faithful left-wing lapdog media outlets have been dragged to the reality that Russia is winning the fighting in Ukraine.

No less a source than the deified Ukrainian president Zelenskyy gave a dire assessment of the prospects for success regarding the fighting in the Donbas region.

Maybe Zelenskyy and the Pelosi couple can commiserate while eating some overpriced ice cream. The Mona Lisa guy can bring the cake.

Late last night, which turned into early this morning, I wrote and posted here that the people thinking more gun laws would solve problems with mass shootings, or shootings in general, were seriously naive and totally mistaken.

Among my points was that such onerous regulations largely only punish the law-abiding because criminals don’t obey laws.

No sooner had I checked zerohedge.com on my computer this morning than I had evidence to back up my assertions. Word came of a legal gun owner stopping a potential mass shooting.

This happened in Charleston, W.Va., Wednesday night. The reports tell us there was a graduation party at an apartment complex when a man was chided for speeding through the area.

Said man, reportedly a convicted felon, returned with a semi-automatic weapon. Police reports indicate he opened fire on party-goers, fortunately without hitting anyone.

Unlike in Texas, where law enforcement types holed up for a very long time to plan their moves to deal with that school shooter, in the West Virginia example a woman with a concealed carry permit shot and killed the would-be mass murderer.

A local TV report quoted a chief of detectives noting “Instead of running from the threat, she engaged with the threat and saved several lives.”

The dead man had given ample previous evidence of his criminal bent. As noted in various reports, he was a convicted felon, had outstanding warrants for receiving stolen goods and had 20 or so arrests for what were described as “local charges.” Yet he was free to wonder the streets.

As a felon, he was not allowed to possess firearms. But he did have one. So, an existing gun law didn’t work. Color me stunned. Or not.

Would the man have been deterred by additional laws? Seriously?

To repeat, the heroic woman who intervened had a weapon, but had it with her only because she had gone through the legal process to obtain the permit.

Without her, who knows how many people might have been killed in Charleston.

But, if the crazed anti-gun opportunists have their way, she may not have had a weapon or the right to carry it concealed.

Emotional, half-baked proposed solutions to problems – think COVID maskholes and CovIdiot lockdowns – have wide-ranging and often greater unintended consequences than the problems presented.

In our deteriorating, violent society of the moment, having a gun to deal with problems when the police are unable or unwilling to intervene, makes sense.

The West Virginia incident is just further proof of this — proof that won’t get wide play on the LameStream national media because it doesn’t fit their narrative of guns bad; criminals merely frustrated victims of the system.

Just as sad and predictable as mass shooting are, so are the obligatory rushes to politicize them, from the usual actors.

Most recently in Texas, 19 students and two teachers were killed by a gunman identified as Salvador Ramos who, fittingly was killed inside the school.

Former president Obama rushed to social media to weigh in. At least this time he didn’t remark that if he’d have had a son, he probably would have looked like Ramos.

But the cry is on to arbitrarily suspend the Second Amendment of the Constitution in the quest to avoid such mass killings of innocents in the future. Earth to the hysterical opportunists, banning guns won’t prevent such tragedies.

I know that math now is considered racist, but it does apply to life. And one BBC report quoted an estimate of 390 million guns in the hands of Americans. Even if you never sold another gun, there’s plenty to go around.

Moreover, this same story was eager to quote the number of gun deaths annually in the United States, citing the year 2020 as a record total of more than 45,000.

The article conceded, well down the page, that the majority of those gun deaths – 24,292 according to the CDC – were suicides.

That is the case most years and do you really think if guns were stripped from all hands, suicides would end? Pills, illegal drugs, knives, ropes, tall buildings or bridges, all are common alternative suicide methods.

Gun control advocates would do themselves a service by excluding the suicide numbers from their totals.

They also might want to weed out the numbers for single killings, sometimes legally justified and often not. And accidental shooting deaths shouldn’t really count as justification for gun legislation any more than drowning deaths should lead to banning swimming pools or bathtubs.

This leaves us with mass shootings as a small percentage of annual gun deaths.

Putting into force draconian gun laws would fail to stop mass killings for two reasons.

First off, criminals by definition don’t follow the laws. They would not be deterred by stricter gun regulations. California, with the strictest gun control laws in the country, had a mass shooting in Sacramento two months back that left six dead and 12 wounded.

Second, the knee-jerk response to cry for more gun legislation ignores any other factors such as mental illness, or eagerness to return criminals to the streets that might contribute to the problem.

In general, one is naive in the extreme to think that violent people might not carry out mass attacks with bombs, knives, or even airplanes as in the 9/11 terror attacks, even if somehow guns could be made unavailable.

Sick, crazed, anti-social types are the problem, not their weapons of choice.

What stricter gun laws would guarantee is that fewer honest citizens were able to purchase guns for protection, which they increasingly seem to need.

The law enforcement officials didn’t exactly distinguish themselves in their response to the Texas incident, delaying action before dealing with the shooter.

Reports indicate the gunman gained access via a door propped open – against the rules – by a teacher.

The school resource officer reportedly was not on-site at the time of the shooting.

In other instances, perpetrators had lengthy criminal records, or were reported to authorities prior to the assaults for dangerous behavior but ignored. Many have been able to post screeds on social media, which went unpunished, perhaps because the censors were too busy banning Trump.

Often these mass killers have documented mental issues, yet they are left to roam free among us.

Even when police do succeed in removing some of these threats from the general population, left-wing judicial activists eagerly return them to streets after mere months behind bars.

Making it tougher for honest, law-abiding citizens to purchase guns isn’t going to cure the long list of failings and raw statistics I’ve noted here.

Chicago, which is up to its armpits in gun laws, had 49 homicides in April. The fact that they didn’t happen in one incident means this doesn’t get as much attention. It does, however, make the point that adding layer upon layer of gun laws doesn’t solve the problem.

I’m thinking that monkeypox has the politically correct crowd at a loss when it comes to determining how to politicize and propagandize this alleged health crisis.

And the navel-gazers certainly need something to over-dramatize now that the population in general is tired of masking, vaxxing and all the other COVID blather.

On the face of it, monkeypox seems to be a logical successor to COVID. It’s worst effects have been reported to be primarily on the young, while COVID was largely an elderly phenomenon when it came to serious consequences.

You can almost hear the leftys, kneeling bedside (if they did pray) and saying something like “Thank you, infectious disease gods, for giving us something that we might use to scare the bejesus out of youngsters and their parents.”

Ah, but there’s a fly in the monkeypox ointment, that being often it is young gay men spreading the disease during sex, in part due to genital lesions or saliva exchange.

No less an authority than WHO (World Health Organization, not the rock band) invoked the homosexual men narrative, which was dutifully seconded by the BBC.

More specifically, two non-family oriented events have been identified as “super spreaders.” The first was a “pride” festival in the Canary Islands, the pride word not referring to a group of lions.

The second was a “fetish festival” in Antwerp, Belgium. We can only imagine what went on there.

Can’t wait for the public service announcements pushing vaccines, and masks, the latter to be worn somewhere on the body.

Does don’t ask, don’t tell apply to determining whether or not genitals are masked?

Also on the topic of masks, apparently chickens just won’t keep those life-saving face diapers on their little beaks, leading to an outbreak of avian flu.

You should worry if you happen to like eggs, or chicken products. There have been 37 million birds across 34 U.S. states identified as infected, with many being sacrificed to prevent the spread of the disease.

And you thought the COVID Nazis were tough!

This chicken genocide has resulted in a seven-year low in egg production in these United States. This leads to . . . cue the excuse making from Biden flunkies … higher prices. The reported price increase for eggs nationally in April was 23 percent.

With gasoline and diesel at all-time highs, with natural gas poised for a rapid ascent, with electric utilities across the nation hiking rates, and with food prices in general spiraling ever higher, the last thing we needed was a double whammy of monkeypox and avian flu.

I think I can speak for Biden and his delusional followers by stressing this all is due to that damn Putin and his Ukraine invasion! Or not.