Ground acquisition.
And that’s what football is, football’s a ground acquisition game.
You knock the crap out of eleven guys and take their land away from them.
Of course, we only do it ten yards at a time.
That’s the way we did it with the Indians — we won it little by little.
First down in Ohio — Midwest to go!
– George Carlin

(Illustration found here).

Genocide of US native peoples was/is no game.
And today, the accumulation of such a media frenzy creates a shame there’s no real merit or even worth in the entire enterprise — this has got to be one of the most-dumbest days of the year, created for a way-low common denominator amongst dumb-ass Americans.
Of course, for my liquor store Superbowl Sunday is a financial way-uptick in the down-days of winter — in fact, this weekend will be the best we’ll see until Spring Break, or until the weather gets warmer, which ever comes first — plus the event comes on the heels of ‘the first,’ when not-only poor peoples, but all financial/situational peoples get ‘checks,’ either from state/federal governments, or insurance companies, pension funds, a dozen other institutions.
If the 49ers had made the game, sales would really have gone out the roof, but…

And, of course, when I express my total disregard for the “Big Game,” and don’t even know the teams involved, I’m viewed as a freak — people are put on a momentary pause, and you can actually see confusion wash across their faces as they cannot comprehend such crazy talk.
A ‘secular high holy day‘ as the ABC news guy says this morning — freaks, dude, nothing but freaks.
And I ain’t the only one — this from Gawker for other things to do on Stupid Bowl Sunday:

The great thing about the Super Bowl is that 100 million heathens are placed on their fat asses on their couches with a beer in one hand, the remote in the other, tortilla chip crumbs all over their shirt, and a stain from some taco dip on their upper lip.
Yes, everyone I hate is watching the Stupid Bowl, that means it’s my time to play.

One would surely hope that’s a cultural caricature, a TV sit-com image of the Super Bowl watcher, not reality, but alas, most-likely not far off the mark — as shown by store patrons before, during and after the game.
Not a pretty sight.

The Gawker post also listed other shit to do during the big game, especially like going to the movies and or taking in a popular restaurant, where there’d be almost no lines or other patrons (100-million fat-ass heathens on the couch at home, remember), or read a book.
Or maybe just take time to be alone — a way-shitload of people have a lot of trouble spending time alone with themselves — and what better time to do it when millions of other people will be joined at the ass for one giant bowel movement.

And apparently based on the so-called favorable employment report released Friday, U.S. sweet crude increased by $1.48 to end the week at $97.84 per barrel, while Brent picked up $2.51 to finish at $114.58 per barrel.
Gas-pump prices appear erratic, depending where ye be: Statewide average in California is $3.73 a gallon for regular, up 3.7 cents in a week, but meanwhile, a good friend of mine residing less than two hours south of me recently paid $4.19 a gallon — Sup with that?

(Illustration found here).

Maybe we should take the plunge already and go Eurozone — $10-a-gallon gas would force stiff-necked US peoples to alter lifestyles and move on before the whole thing becomes reality.
New fuel for old vehicles — there’s about 240.5 million cars and light trucks cruising US highways and the average age of those vehicles rose to 10.8 years last year from 10.4 in the year before, due mainly to bad times in Detroit and the economy.
Apparently from indications beyond a recession, US peoples have been easing off the private vehicle for awhile now.
Via AlterNet  two years ago:

Among the trends that are keeping sales well below the annual figure of 15-17 million that prevailed from 1994 through 2007 are market saturation, ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people.
Market saturation may be the dominant contributor to the peaking of the U.S. fleet.
The United States now has 246 million registered motor vehicles and 209 million licensed drivers — nearly 5 vehicles for every 4 drivers.

Kids and cars:

Perhaps the most fundamental social trend affecting the future of the automobile is the declining interest in cars among young people.
For those who grew up a half-century ago in a country that was still heavily rural, getting a driver’s license and a car or a pickup was a rite of passage.
Getting other teenagers into a car and driving around was a popular pastime.
In contrast, many of today’s young people living in a more urban society learn to live without cars.
They socialize on the Internet and on smart phones, not in cars.
Many do not even bother to get a driver’s license.
This helps explain why, despite the largest U.S. teenage population ever, the number of teenagers with licenses, which peaked at 12 million in 1978, is now under 10 million.
If this trend continues, the number of potential young car-buyers will continue to decline.

Plus these kids now are also faced with an incredible financial burden, not only with a humongous student-loan debt, but a bleak employment picture (despite Friday’s numbers) — unless one is an oil/gas person (corporations are people).

Maybe a bit of inequality right there: Exxon’s $41.1 billion in 2011 profit translates into nearly $5 million in profit every hour, or more than $1,300 every second. The annual profit comes near the record revenues of $46.23 billion in 2008…Between 2008-2010, Exxon Mobil registered an average 17.6 percent federal effective corporate tax rate, while the average American paid a higher rate of 20.4 percent.

Maybe venture into the ugly-oddness of fuel:

Gasoline prices are higher at the beginning of 2012 than at the beginning of any previous year ever — even at the beginning of 2008, a year when the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline reached a record $4.114 on July 7.
In its Daily Fuel Gauge Report, AAA Texas noted Friday a national average of $3.467 for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline — up from $3.455 a day ago, $3.389 a week ago, $3.288 a month ago and $3.116 a year ago.
“We’re seeing the highest gasoline prices that we’ve seen,” Sarah Schimmer of AAA Texas said Friday.
“2011 was a record year, and in 2012 we’re definitely seeing higher prices.”

And all this for mobility, not only just for driving my Jeep around town, but oil/gas framed within the way-big picture of how the existence of an entire civilization depends on the black, bubbly shit — no way yesteryear can continue into the nowadays.
In reality, peak oil is actually the end of easy oil, low prices at the pump and so forth, and this peak supposedly occurred worldwide in about 2005 — so we’re already on the downside.
One interesting look at future possibilities comes from “Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse,” a collection of essays from economists, environmental scientists, a couple of architects and even a corporate lawyer on the premise of how close we are to being totally f*cked.
From a review by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall of Fleeing Vesuvius and posted Friday at DissidentVoice:

The title refers to the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, specifically the large number of residents who failed to save themselves, despite weeks of earthquakes, gaseous clouds and other obvious signs that an eruption was imminent.
For more than a decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the planet is on the verge of economic and ecological collapse.
Yet the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing to prepare for the stark conditions ahead.
…
All (the essay writers) are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.
In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years.
He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible — an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it.
By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further.
Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.

And Ms Bramhall also reveals a brightness from the essays, not all doom-n-gloom: The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle.
Inspiration needs to have already been popped — too much pie-in-the-sky without actual political reality.
One updated  sample chapter of Fleeing Vesuvius can be found at The Oil Drum.
And another review of the essay collection can be found here.

A major snag in the optimism — the above-mentioned political reality.
So says Kumi Naidoo, head of the environmental group Greenpeace, who spoke Friday at the big-wig, pow-wow Munich Security Conference, and chimed a loud alarm.
Via Raw Story:

“The moment of history we are in can be described as a boiling point or a perfect storm,” he told the assembled gathering of world leaders, ministers, top brass and defence policy experts at the annual Munich gathering.
“We are seeing a convergence of multiple crises happening at the same time. A food crisis, climate crisis, poverty crisis … and then of course the financial crisis and a demographic crisis and a global governance democratic crisis,” he added.
“The bottom line is that too many of our leaders … are sleepwalking us into a crisis of epic proportion,” he claimed.

One of those doing the sleepwalking is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who’s also in Munich, Germany, this weekend for the conference, but her schedule has no room for end-of-life-as-we-know-it antics fostered by environmental activists — Clinton will most-likely reminisce about “…what a key partner Europe is in the global security, economic, democracy promotion agenda that we have.”

Just wake ‘em later.

Part of an e-mail yesterday from my youngest daughter, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota: Oh yeah, It’s like 50 degrees and sunny today. crazyness, right? I was sweating like crazy riding my bike to work this morning. Global warming man…
The kid’s got some sense — just talkin’ ’bout the weather.

(Illustration found here).

A warm winter, duh!
From Climate Central:

This week, it’s likely that warm temperature records will be broken throughout the eastern U.S., with forecast highs in New York City approaching 60°F on Tuesday and Wednesday, and reaching the mid-60s in Washington, D.C. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), record highs may also be set today in Islip, N.Y., and Bridgeport, CT.
It has also been unusually warm in the mid-section of the country.
As Paul Douglas wrote for the Minneapolist Star-Tribune, the Twin Cities missed setting a record high by just four degrees on Monday, topping out at 44°F, about 20°F above average for the date.
Douglas wrote that there have been just three subzero nights so far this winter in Minneapolis-St. Paul, down from the average of 19 to date.
“It’s been one of the mildest winters on record; at the rate we’re going this will easily be a “Top 10 Warmest Winter” in the Twin Cities,” Douglas wrote.

And it’s only gonna get worse — Dr. Jeff Masters at Wunderblog: But it strains the bounds of credulity that all of the extreme weather events — some of them 1-in-1000-year type events — could have occurred without a signicant change to the base climate state. Mother Nature is now able to hit the ball out of the park more often, and with much more power, thanks to the extra energy global warming has put into the atmosphere.
No one seems to be much concerned, however.

Despite all the warming, the US MSM still doesn’t connect the dots, or put two-and-two together, or use any other glib phrase to describe how Americans are walking around in January bundled up in a Slayer t-shirt seemingly without a care in the boiling world.
These warm countrywide temperatures ain’t no flash in the pan.
Joe Romm at Climate Progress:

Our science-based institutions, like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, have no difficulty straightforwardly explaining the connection between human-caused global warming and these monster heatwaves.
If only our news-based institutions could do the same.
Now as I’ve said many times, every story about extreme weather does not need to mention global warming.
But if you are writing about a heatwave that is so uniquely extensive in space and time — just the kind of heat wave climate scientists have warned would become increasingly likely — and you are devoting an entire science article to explaining why it’s been so warm, then, yes, it is incumbent on you to at least mention global warming.

And political irony from Craig Ferguson: “It was so hot in Washington that Congress had to install a fan on the debt ceiling.”

Beyond just talkin’ about the weather, we should be screaming, crying about it.

Some overriding health issues have caused me to have not a good night, thus, creating less-ability to compose coherent thoughts, and way-harder to transfer to blog lines (was about to write paper, but that’s so 1970s).
There’s plenty out yonder in the big, wide world to write about, but there’s a small imprint in the brain that wants to scream ‘Who Gives A Shit!’ except for those under barrage of that particular shit found in all corners of the globe.

Ugly unrest is on the peppered lips of today — the Occupy protests are getting not pretty, from the mess in Oakland, to a drive-in plunge in London, to more stun-gun episodes in Washington, DC.
People are only going to get even-more pissed.

(Illustration: “Extrangement of Vision — Edgar Allan Poe’s Optics” via M.C. Escher’s ‘Hand with Reflecting Sphere‘ found here).

One item did catch my blurred, Poed eyeball — in one of those Internet video “hangouts” yesterday on Google’s social network, Google+, also streamed live on YouTube, President Obama talked about a rare subject — the drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Via the BBC:

Asked about the use of drone strikes, which have increased in intensity during his presidency, he said “a lot of these strikes have been in the Fata”, or Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
The strikes target “al-Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr Obama added.
“For us to be able to get them in another way would involve probably a lot more intrusive military action than the ones we’re already engaging in.”

A shitload of innocent people have been killed and wounded during these strikes, and folks in Pakistan are pretty-much getting pissed about the whole operation.
Obama, though, bypassed some important questions:

In a previous town hall-style event hosted by Facebook, the White House was criticised for ignoring one of most popular questions: Mr Obama’s stance on legalising marijuana.
He did not answer questions on drug policy in Monday’s event.

Dude, what’s the deal?

Poe knew.

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Poem found here.

Including this horror show in Florida — and I don’t mean  the upcoming GOP primary:

“As it was happening on the northbound side, it was happening on the southbound side as well,” he said.
“There was nowhere to go. It was just cars hitting cars and cars.”
He called the scene “horrendous.”
“Everybody was crying,” he said. “You still can’t see anything.”
Some motorists were stuck in their vehicles, he said, calling it “mass chaos.”

Mankind should take another look at how we move ourselves around on this earth.

(Illustration found here).

Even as more than 300 people have been arrested in Oakland in an Occupy throw-down, the problem of inequality is been seen as worldwide, an in vestment in a trouble future and if ignored problems will keep popping up everywhere.

A UN report — “Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing” — displays the growing trouble of cash flow.
From the BBC:

Ms Halonen (co-chair of the report, Finnish President Tarja Halonen) emphasised the theme of equality that runs through the report, in terms of gender and redressing the burgeoning gap between people on high and low incomes.
“Eradication of poverty and improving equity must remain priorities for the world community,” she said.
…
“We undertook this report during a period of global volatility and uncertainty,” it says.
“Economies are teetering. Inequality is growing. And global temperatures continue to rise.
“We are testing the capacity of the planet to sustain us.”
To turn this around, it says: “We need to change dramatically, beginning with how we think about our relationship to each other, to future generations, and to the ecosystems that support us.”

Even as the US turns skeptic, just north of us is calling bogus:

Some of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s newly-appointed senators are emerging as global-warming skeptics in the wake of aggressive government positions to abandon the Kyoto Protocol, slam environmentalists and downplay potential damage caused by Canadian oil and gas exploration.
“I felt like it is kind of an insult to be a denier for a long time,” said Sen. Bert Brown, last month at a parliamentary committee studying energy policies.
“It feels pretty good this morning.”

Laugh at the tomorrow, cry for the future.

On this amazing time to be alive motif, one can also include the weather, which in reality covers a lot of shit, and one in particular, ‘energy,’  a build-in, self-generating climate-change-creating piece of literal machinery.
We couldn’t have one without the other — the influence of ‘energy‘ has been the fatal factor on the weather.
The most-likely-insurmountable problem facing mankind right now is what I call the ‘Double-Bitch-Bang‘ — climate change and “peak oil,” or its overall equivalent, “resource depletion” — and the rub of the matter is there’s no real big scream to do something.
Ironic humanity: Civilization requires more and more energy, and with that comes more and more climate change, and thusly, bad weather.

In reality, the weather is indeed a throwback, but not from any known time frame.
The brainiacs pose it better — from NASA:

The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time.
Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time.
When we talk about climate change, we talk about changes in long-term averages of daily weather.

And that’s the entire point of climate change — it’s not about some far off place, but right outside everybody’s front door.

Odd how some folks have known for some time about global warming.
From USATODAY last week on a new government map and the abrupt-subtly of a warming planet:

“It is a good thing the government has updated the map,” says Woodrow Nelson, director of marketing communications for the Arbor Day Foundation.
“Our members have been noticing these climate changes for years and have been successfully growing new kinds of trees in places they wouldn’t grow before.”

And the people who deny climate change are just dumb, or belong to the Republican party, or in most denier cases, are both — from LiveScience: Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
So not only does humanity have this enormous problem with actual survival, but there’s this entire cross-section of society that’s hindering any solutions — we be f*cked.
And in an age of a long-list of bad shit happening all at once, humanity is in for a rough ride.

And all this bubbling shit is intertwined — from the abstract of ‘Oil supply limits and the continuing financial crisis‘ (pdf):

Since 2005, (1) world oil supply has not increased, and (2) the world has undergone its most severe economic crisis since the Depression…
The expected impact of reduced oil supply combined with this reduced leverage is similar to the actual impact of the 2008–2009 recession in OECD countries…
If this should happen, based on these findings we can expect a continuing financial crisis similar to the 2008–2009 recession including significant debt defaults. The financial crisis may eventually worsen, to resemble a collapse situation as described by Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1990) or an adverse decline situation similar to adverse scenarios foreseen by Donella Meadows in Limits to Growth (1972).

And how are people going to respond when the time comes.
What to do? — RT took to the streets of New York to find out:

Global warming is not only wearing out our planet’s environment, but also the minds of global leaders trying to find solutions.
Legislators are introducing more and more bills to help curb the effects of climate change.
RT’s Lori Harfenist found out on the streets of the Big Apple that ordinary Americans are ready to give up something to fight global warming — but certainly not everything.
Things like quitting hairdryers and walking distances less than two miles instead of driving actually meet no resistance, but as for drying clothes on the line instead of using a spin-dryer and taking a shower for less than a minute — these things met with much less understanding.
One woman even told Lori that people “are cold and selfish”.
She said “they do not care about the planet unless it affects them personally”.
“Unfortunately that is the world we are living in”, the woman said.
Changing personal habits of energy consumption can clearly seem depressing — but might become obligatory, if global warming really does continue to affect our planet.

We all have our thoughts on those in the playground.

(Illustration found here).

Obama even had the flag carried by the US Navy SEAL team that assassinated Osama last year: “Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation room…All that mattered that day was the mission. No-one thought about politics…”

And he pounded it home:

“Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes.
No-one built this country on their own,” Obama said.
“This nation is great because we built it together.
This nation is great because we worked as a team.
This nation is great because we get each others’ backs.
And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great, no mission too hard.”

In this he laid the groundwork for the next eleven months — the real man-up ruler of the US can only be the guy that got Osama bin Laden, and it will surely not work if anyone else takes the reins of power, so vote for me!
And boxed in between the warmongering, Obama slapped at income inequality and the Republicans who have produced the situation — the president proposed big shifts with the US tax system, like for instance, a minimum 30 per cent effective rate on millionaires.
Which prompted Mitch Daniels in response to whine: “No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favour with some Americans by castigating others,” Daniels said, according to excerpts of his speech.
In other words — leave the rich alone.

And this tweet via Aljazeera English: “RT @theonlyadult: Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. #obama2012 #sotu”

And as if on cue, early this morning U.S. Navy SEALs popped into Somalia to grab two kidnapped aid workers — an American and a Dane — in a daring helicopter raid reminiscent of the Osama attack.

Before news broke of the rescue, Obama told Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, “Leon, good job tonight. Good job tonight,” at the State of the Union address.

Election 2012 is gonna be a dandy, action-packed pile of hollerin’ bullshit.

Don’t blame me — let’s just move on.

(Illustration found here).

And on Tuesday night, President Obama makes his annual state-of-the-union speech, his third, with the same feel as fumbler Williams — mistakes have been made, but don’t blame me and let’s just move forward.
According to Bloomberg, Obama’s big punch will be against the current Congress (a group considered the worse in US history):

“The speech will merge what he wants to say in the campaign with what he wants to do.
He’s going to be, as Truman did, attacking Congress as the ‘do nothing Congress,’ and certainly it’s total dysfunctional,” said James Thurber, presidential historian at American University in Washington.
House Speaker John Boehner signaled Sunday that he’s ready for the fight.
“If that’s what the president is going to talk about Tuesday night, I think it’s pathetic,” the Ohio Republican said yesterday on Fox News Sunday.

The Boner should be afraid of anything pathetic.

In polling last month, this particular Congress is disliked by an average of about 85 percent of US peoples — there is most-likely not another group of people as useless as this particular group of shitheads.
And it could get worse.

The US state of the union in 2012 ain’t pretty.

This morning just about everything I read/look at is pure shit.
If the Republicans have one more debate I might blow chunks all over my laptop — the blow-hole event last night was enough to make anyone sick to their inner-most bowels with such empty, vain-glory bluster that anyone not of this earth might go WTF!
Who/what are these people?

Newt’s vile reproach against the media was a wonder — beyond the debate audience, does anyone out there really think these people could be president?
And Newt’s ex-wife is still waiting: “He could say he’s sorry, but he never has,” Marianne Gingrich said on ‘Nightline.’

An August 2010 interview in Esquire magazine with Marianne Gingrich:

He thinks of himself as president, you tell her.
He wants to run for president.
She gives a jaundiced look.
“There’s no way,” she says.
She thinks he made a choice long ago between doing the right thing and getting rich, and when you make those choices, you foreclose other ones.
“He could have been president. But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way.”
She stops, ashes her cigarette, exhales, searching for the right way to express what she’s about to say.
“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” she says.
“If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president.”

And from an Esquire update from yesterday (Thursday):

This is the real story, which is almost the opposite of the one that’s hitting the media now.
…
The real story isn’t that Gingrich committed adultery — an act every bit as offensive as sodomy to the actual Bible, if not to modern Christians — over and over and over again.
The real story is that Newt Gingrich is so deeply conflicted and strange, so erratic and unreliable, so scheming and secretive, that he’s way too much like a character out of Dostoevsky than a politician should ever be.

But wait, isn’t that what US peoples are inheriting with an allowance of dick-headness — Republican Rep. Peter King, an absolute-asshole in his own right, had this to say about Newt: “The House is on the line this year,” Mr. King said. “I believe we can take back the Senate. We have to win the presidency. Having Newt at the top puts all of that in danger. And then, if he were elected president, to me the whole country would be in danger.”

So far, 2012 is shaping up to be one freak year — and the news slop keeps coming.

Way-rich trash, however: Reportedly, Romney spent $17 million since January a year ago to try and win the White House — no matter how one looks at it, that’s a shitload of cash.
And although the 99 percent work their asses off, the 1 percent has all the cash, and has it here in the good-old-most-equal US of A.

(Illustration found here).

Wealth is way unequal and US peoples, even the lowest of the low, are rich compared to the rest of the spinning globe.
From CNNMoney:

So where do these lucky rich people live? As of 2005 — the most recent data available — about half of them, or 29 million lived in the United States, according to calculations by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic in his book “The Haves and the Have-Nots”.
…
“It doesn’t seem right to define as middle class, people who would be on food stamps in the United States,” Milanovic said.
…
The true global middle class, falls far short of owning a home, having a car in a driveway, saving for retirement and sending their kids to college.
In fact, people at the world’s true middle — as defined by median income — live on just $1,225 a year. (And, yes, Milanovic’s numbers are adjusted to account for different costs of living across the globe.)
In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5 percent of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world.

In the US, though, poverty is way-more closer to home: A record 15.4 million suburban residents lived below the poverty line last year, up 11.5% from the year before, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census data released Thursday. That’s one-third of the nation’s poor.
And the problem will never go away due to the nasty fact the US is one of the most-unequal countries in the world — the rich play at politics: Income inequality is more severe in the U.S. than it is in nearly all of West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and Asia. We’re on par with some of the world’s most troubled countries, and not far from the perpetual conflict zones of Latin American and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our income gap is also getting worse, having widened both in absolute and relative terms since the 1980s. It’s not a problem that the “Buffett rule” would solve on its own, but at least the U.S. political system is starting to acknowledge how serious things have become.

And the rich assholes elected to national office, what do they do?
Make life harder for the rest of us dumb-asses: Due to Congressional inaction during last month’s tax deliberations, the new year ushered in a tax increase to public transit riders. Currently, commuters who use public transit, commuter buses and van pools may see their annual commuting costs increase by more than $550 based on a bias in the tax code that benefits driving over taking public transit. In addition, the failure to extend the benefit has resulted in a tax liability increase for companies offering the benefit.

And I’d like to close with this from the comments section of the semi-daily, must-read Drumbeat (@ The Oil Drum) that eloquently displays just how f*cked we all are:

The human brain, encased in bone and thoroughly nourished with blood, is the interpreter between itself and all else.
Images and sensations go in and slowly an analog world is built, and possibly with some effort an intellect is born.
The human system cannot truly be separated from its environment from where it derives its building blocks and returns its waste.
It is a product of the environment, the flow of energy and matter.
We have not evolved a tongue that can taste the cesium, strontium, lead and mercury in the air and water, nor olfaction that can sense the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
Instead we have designed and created technological sensors that can extend our perception.
Unfortunately the results these sensors display are not wired into our limbic systems so as to elicit a panicked response.
We have alarming data, but the alarms are not sounding, we do nothing, because we have no motivation.
There is no pain, no primate fear-invoking stimuli like growling predators, snakes, spiders, and so on.
So we sit and slowly euthanize ourselves and our children in front of our faux reality televisions.
As long as there are no shocks that arouse our evolved fear circuits our civilization will slip quietly into a coma, helped along by little dribbles of propagandist’s morphine, just enough to blunt any perception of our near terminal situation.

So whatever happens in South Carolina won’t make much difference.