Thick ground fog and a deep quiet this early Thursday morning on California’s north coast — an obscuring haze seemingly covering the whole, wide world.

Especially in DC.
President Obama’s so-called “charm offensive” with House Republicans lost its glitter on the likes of John ‘The Boner’ Boehner, who blubbered all kinds of negatives after meeting with the president: “But having said that, today was a good start, and I hope that these kinds of discussions can continue.”
Two-faced bullshit.

(Illustration found here).

All this haggling and the on-going ‘sequester’ has hit Obama in the popular stakes — in the last month, Americans have lower expectations: Mr. Obama’s job approval has taken a hit as a result – 50 percent of respondents approve of how he is handling his job, down from 54 percent in December. Still, he handily bests congressional Republicans, whose job approval stands at a meager 24 percent.
Yet these same ‘meager’ assholes still have a big enough mouth to keep the baying loud and harsh. The problem is reality and words have two separate perceptions. While the fiddlers fiddle, the people cry.

Even as these self-centered and wealthy DC assholes attempt to ‘govern,’ real, flesh-and-blood Americans are drowning in the reality of life in the US (and the world, really) and how the Great American Dream is just as George Carlin says, ‘you have to be asleep to believe it.’
Underneath the flower of an American fable lies the real ugly, though, after years and years of riding to the top, the near-to-touch bottom is way-deep.
From the UK’s Market Oracle:

And for a prolonged time – characterized by plentiful and cheap energy, accelerating globalization, technical innovation, and the financialization of the economy – it seemed like this assumption was a certain bet.
But these wonderful tailwinds that America has been enjoying for so many decades are sputtering out.
The forces of resource scarcity, debt saturation, price inflation, and physical limits will impact our way of life dramatically more going forward than living generations have experienced to date.
And Americans, who had the luxury of abandoning savings and sacrifice for consumerism and credit financing, are on a collision course with that reality.
Like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, they have partied away the fair seasons and winter is now on the way, which they are not prepared for.
…
And the truth is: The three adult generations in the U.S. are suffering, and their burdens are likely to increase with time.
Each is experiencing a squeeze that is making it harder to create value, save capital, and pursue happiness than at any point since WWII.
At that point, we were a creditor nation with an economy exploding into dominance on the world stage.
Now, however, the U.S. is the largest debtor nation and our economic hegemony is increasingly at siege across a number of fronts.
A continuation of the status quo is a decision to sleepwalk face-first into the constraints hurtling towards us.
…
In the late 1970s, the 401k emerged as a new retirement vehicle.
Among its touted benefits was the ability of the individual to save as much as s/he thought prudent for his/her financial future.
Companies loved the new private savings plans because they gave them a way out of putting aside mandatory savings for worker pensions.
For a long time, everyone thought this was a big step forward.
Three decades later, what we’re realizing is that this shift from dedicated-contribution pension plans to voluntary private savings was a grand experiment with no assurances.
Corporations definitely benefited, as they could redeploy capital to expansion or bottom line profits.
But employees?
The data certainly seems to show that the experiment did not take human nature into account enough – specifically, the fact that just because people have the option to save money for later use doesn’t mean that they actually will.

Or they just don’t got it any more.

Not only is it just the fiscal — the problem is also the physical. A huge, a big chunk of the US is becoming no more, leaving many rural areas a near-empty space of just old folks and abandoned buildings.

A record number of U.S. counties — more than 1 in 3 — are now dying off, hit by an aging population and weakened local economies that are spurring young adults to seek jobs and build families elsewhere.
New 2012 census estimates released Thursday highlight the population shifts as the U.S. encounters its most sluggish growth levels since the Great Depression.
The findings also reflect the increasing economic importance of foreign-born residents as the U.S. ponders an overhaul of a major 1965 federal immigration law.
Without new immigrants, many metropolitan areas such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh and St. Louis would have posted flat or negative population growth in the last year.
…
Census data show that 1,135 of the nation’s 3,143 counties are now experiencing “natural decrease,” where deaths exceed births.
That’s up from roughly 880 U.S. counties, or 1 in 4, in 2009.
Already apparent in Japan and many European nations, natural decrease is now increasingly evident in large swaths of the U.S., much of it rural.

Finally, nothing is final — and nothing is included in the afterlife, even like with love, ‘it’s complicated.’
From the Chicago Tribune:

The government had said it planned to embalm Chavez’s remains “for eternity” in much the same way as was done with the remains of Soviet leaders Lenin and Stalin and communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong after they died.
“Russian and German scientists have arrived to embalm Chavez and they tell us it’s very difficult because the process should have started earlier … Maybe we can’t do it,” acting President Nicolas Maduro said in televised comments on Wednesday.
“We are in the middle of the process.
It’s complicated, it’s my duty to inform you.”

Dream on sleepwalkers.