Ground fog and a little warm this way-too-early Thursday on California’s north coast as we cruise toward the weekend.
And tomorrow’s Friday, so we ain’t that far away.

Up this early, I down a cup of coffee before my eyes are even open. In the mid-1990s, the revelation of coffee-power changed my mornings and was powering down two/three cups a day — no longer as age sucked the juice right out of the caffeine. Now, I be aware: While that morning cup of coffee may bring good tidings, the American Chemical Society cautions that it’s best to keep your caffeine intake at about 400mgs, lest you end up with jitters and anxiety. That’s three eight-ounce coffees, five eight-ounce red bulls, or eight cups of black tea.
Blow-me way-gone.

(Illustration found here).

Coffee doesn’t help with schizophrenia, though, and living in America right now creates an highly-caffeinated witches combo of hallucinations, delusions, and extremely disordered thinking and behavior. A new report indicates this country is in the midst of a new Gilded Age and us folks at the bottom are gone johnson.
The study, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (pdf), describes a country that in the last three decades has gone upside down.
Via the UK’s Telegraph:

The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says:
“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
Researchers concluded that US government policies rarely align with the the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special interests and lobbying oragnisations:
“When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.”
The positions of powerful interest groups are “not substantially correlated with the preferences of average citizens”, but the politics of average Americans and affluent Americans sometimes does overlap.
This merely a coincidence, the report says, with the interests of the average American being served almost exclusively when it also serves those of the richest 10 per cent.

The study also added this on the delusion of the average American citizen:

The fly in the ointment is that none of this evidence allows for, or explicitly assesses, the impact of such variables as the preferences of wealthy individuals, or the preferences and actions of organized interest groups, which may independently influence public policy while perhaps being positively associated with public opinion – thereby producing a spurious statistical relationship between opinion and policy.

So, it’s ‘merely a coincidence‘ the 1 percent and myself prefer black coffee in the morning — it would be rude to suggest otherwise.
Oh, don’t be an asshole!