Thick ground fog and a deep quiet this early Wednesday on California’s north coast, normal for this time of year, and pretty-much the look of the place all the time.
Gray mist, then sunshine about noon, or so.

Is America going to shit in a wire basket? George Jr. once blubbered, “We don’t torture.” Yet John McCain, that tortured soul of ancient times, begs to differ — on the “emotional” spat between the Senate and CIA on a lopsided torture report, McCain had this to say: “When you torture someone they will say anything you want to hear to make the pain stop. So I never, ever believed this bologna that, well, because of waterboarding they got information…

(Illustration found here).

Jackboot McCain continued: “There’s a couple stories [in the report] that are so chilling that I can’t repeat them right now…The message came back, ‘Waterboard him some more.’ That is unconscionable.”
Yes, indeed — but America ain’t what we think. And never has been.

And what’s really, really ‘unconscionable‘ is how the US sucks in relation to the rest of the world. Yes, we don’t torture, but we do, and although we’ve the highest payroll, we’re in the shit-house for living.
Despite the political bullshit, we are in a bad place, heading for a worse place.
In the right-around-the-corner future, America is on a downward spiral — and for where we stand, it’s really pathetic.
On a Social Progress Index, we suck. Via AlterNet:

While the U.S. enjoys the second highest per capita GDP of $45,336, it ranks in an underperforming 16th place overall.
It gets worse.
The U.S. ranks 70th in health, 69th in ecosystem sustainability, 39th in basic education, 34th in access to water and sanitation and 31st in personal safety.
More surprising is the fact that despite being the home country of global tech heavyweights Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, and so on, the U.S. ranks a disappointing 23rd in access to the Internet.
“It’s astonishing that for a country that has Silicon Valley, lack of access to information is a red flag,” notes Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress Imperative, which oversees the index.
If this index is an affront to your jingoistic sensibilities, the U.S. remains in first place for the number of incarcerated citizens per capita, adult onset diabetes and for believing in angels.
…
So, what of the U.S? In terms of happiness, we rank 17th, trailing neighboring Mexico.
…
America’s rapid descent into impoverished nation status is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism.
By every measure, we look like a broken banana republic.
Not a single U.S. city is included in the world’s top 10 most livable cities.
Only one U.S. airport makes the list of the top 100 in the world. Our roads, schools and bridges are falling apart, and our trains — none of them high-speed — are running off their tracks.
With 95 percent of all economic gains funneled to the richest 1 percent over the course of the last decade, and a tax code that has starved the federal government of revenues to invest in public infrastructure, America will be a country divided by those who have and those who have not.
In The World As It Is, Chris Hedges writes, “Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods, and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty.”

No wonder there’s problems galore — the real-big question is what to do about this contradiction in living.
And most-likely the answer — nothing.