“Step out the front door like a ghost
into the fog where no one notices
the contrast of white on white.”
— Round Here, Counting Crows

(Illustration found here).

This morning for damn sure it’s the stupid economy, you complete dumb-ass.
While way-more than a shitload of US peoples will have their hearts, minds and souls invested in finding and buying all kinds of useless crap — maybe even crushing a few in numerous early-AM stampedes — the world continues to collapse right before their bargain-gorged eyes.
Indeed in many, many ways this is Black Friday — monsters are on the loose.

And now is time to remember the time — nine years, 50 days.

On Friday, the U.S.-led coalition will have been fighting in this South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state.
The two invasions had different goals — and dramatically different body counts — but whether they have significantly different outcomes remains to be seen.

And despite all those 130,000 NATO troops and the billions of dollars, there’s still some “eye-watering” violence to come, and even without any type of conclusions reached, or an end to a conflict that has racked the foundations of many an empire.

And while shoppers drool, the US continues it slog through a status of ‘permanent war:’

John Cioffi, a political science professor at University of California, Riverside, says the nation’s “increasingly unhinged ideological politics” makes it difficult for the country to extract itself from battles in Afghanistan, Iraq and Central Asia.
“The U.S. is not on the path to permanent war; it is in the midst of a permanent war,” Cioffi says.
Permanent war is made possible by massive defense spending that has been viewed as untouchable.
But that may change with the recent financial crisis and the decline of the nation’s industry, Cioffi says.
More ordinary Americans might conclude that they can’t have a vibrant domestic economy and unquestioned military spending, Cioffi says.
“All this points to a time in the future when the government will no longer have the resources or popular support to maintain what amounts to an imperial military presence around the world,” he says.

All this treasure and blood: 90 percent of US peoples aged 18 to 24 couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia even if they used both hands — from National Geographic: “Young Americans just don’t seem to have much interest in the world outside of the U.S.,” said David Rutherford, a specialist in geography education at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.

Oddly ironic, that failed interest must perk up sometime soon as these same young people will be the ones doing all the fighting in those ugly, wasted years to come.
Is anyone paying attention?

And again horribly ironic, this same age group will have the happy pleasure of living through the the worse of what climate change is bringing as most science groups warn 2010 will most-likely be considered the hottest year since records have been kept since 1850.
And in another nasty irony, while US shoppers cruise the bargain bins after gobbling up gravy-fied (such a word?) foodstuffs yesterday, poverty wordwide is outta sight: The number of very poor countries has doubled in the last 30 to 40 years, while the number of people living in extreme poverty has also grown two-fold, a UN think-tank warned Thursday.
Despite all the models and whatnot: “What happened is that in the past 30-40 years, the number of LDCs have doubled so it has actually deteriorated, the number of people living under the poverty line has doubled from the 1980s.”

ATTENTION SHOPPERS: Clean up in all aisles.