Another high overcast morning on California’s north coast, but this being a Friday, there’s still joy in the air.
As of late, the sun will eventually burn off the moisture and life will be happy again.

Last night, I went to sleep with the sound of warfare outside my window — bottle rockets, cherry bombs and pop goes the dumb-ass until my mind couldn’t take it any more and somehow passed out. No sense of reality — eat a hot dog and fire up the explosions!

The US is most-likely the most self-indulgent, delusional country in history and are prone to place so-called ‘patriotism’ above reality of the truth.

(Illustration found here).

And most-likely, the vast wad of Americans don’t really understand history, or don’t give a shit, so they can consume mass amounts of foodstuffs, watch ball games and parades, and blow off explosives.
One word (among many) that describes America, and one which most US peoples would be abhorrent to attribute to this country — genocide: The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of an entire national, racial, religious, or ethnic group.
Coming to America, or not.

Reality summed up by a story of the Native American (Apache) and reluctant warrior, Geronimo, and his meeting with the just-inaugurated President Ted Roosevelt — via the Smithsonian:

After the parade, Geronimo met with Roosevelt in what the New York Tribune reported was a “pathetic appeal” to allow him to return to Arizona.
“Take the ropes from our hands,” Geronimo begged, with tears “running down his bullet-scarred cheeks.”
Through an interpreter, Roosevelt told Geronimo that the Indian had a “bad heart.”
“You killed many of my people; you burned villages…and were not good Indians.”
The president would have to wait a while “and see how you and your people act” on their reservation.
Geronimo gesticulated “wildly” and the meeting was cut short.
“The Great Father is very busy,” a staff member told him, ushering Roosevelt away and urging Geronimo to put his concerns in writing.
Roosevelt was told that the Apache warrior would be safer on the reservation in Oklahoma than in Arizona: “If he went back there he’d be very likely to find a rope awaiting him, for a great many people in the Territory are spoiling for a chance to kill him.”

And, of course, though, many would not believe it, TR Roosevelt blubbered out this just a few years before he met Geronimo:

“I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the western view of the Indian.
I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.
The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.
Take three hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are.
Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel, they rob and murder, not the ‘cowboys who can take care of themselves, but the defenseless, lone settlers of the plains.”

TR believed what he wanted to believe, despite the reality, as do most Americans.
And TR was a full-blown asshole: Roosevelt wrote in 1914: ‘Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them.’
This guy and three other like-minded fuck-heads are carved on that big mountain somewhere.
Roosevelt and others of his ilk did know — ‘I suppose I should be ashamed’ — but truly believe their whiteness makes them right, and can do whatever they choose to do.
So it came — “My country, right or wrong.” But altogether real as that little well-well-known phrase came via Stephen Decatur, an early US Navy innovator, in April 1816.
From the American Thinker:

‘Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.’

The way-big words: ‘may she always be in the right.’
Which nowadays is rare.

And how has the “great revolution” look today — 237 years later. Really, not so good.
Paul Pirie at the Washington Post looks at the balance:

As for the pursuit of happiness, Americans are free to do just that — provided that they aren’t rotting in jail.
But are they likely to find it?
Most Americans work longer hours and have fewer paid vacations and benefits — including health care — than their counterparts in most advanced countries.
Consider also that in the CIA World Factbook, the United States ranks 51st in life expectancy at birth.
Working oneself into an early grave does not do much for one’s happiness quotient.
This year the United States tied for 14th in “life satisfaction” on an annual quality-of-life study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
That puts the United States behind Canada (eighth) and Australia (12th).
A report co-authored last year by the economist Jeffrey Sachs ranked the United States 10th in the world for happiness — again behind Canada and Australia.
The Sachs study found that the United States has made “striking economic and technological progress over the past half century without gains in the self-reported happiness of the citizenry.
“Instead, uncertainties and anxieties are high, social and economic inequalities have widened considerably, social trust is in decline, and confidence in government is at an all-time low.”

And reality vs modern life.
The nefarious conclusion by Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic:

In all these ways, our contemporary politics is ignoring the simple truth that none of us are going away — not the cosmopolitan coasts, nor the evangelical South.
Our choices ultimately come down to bridging our differences or surrendering to endemic separation in the states and stalemate in Washington.
This week we celebrate the moment when the authors of the Declaration of Independence concluded they had no choice but “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”
It’s an excellent opportunity to consider how ominously our own “political bands” are fraying.

Fraying so bad we might miss the weekend.