He Ain't Coming Back

Happy Good Friday! 

And also to you.  I was just about to restart my computer to apply some updates.  You caught me in time.  My wife kept talking about Easter and people kept taking time off at work and the public school I pass each day on the way to the metro was closed this week. And I saw an ad for Marshmallow Peeps yesterday (slogan: Jesus died so you could have Marshmallow Peeps!).  And I remember that the last full moon came just before the vernal equinox this year, and I noticed the moonlight was hitting the floor of the sun porch quite fully last night.  And yet I still was somehow surprised by your greeting.  Interesting.  

I learned that it was Pesach just this morning watching a segment about Gilbert Gottfried on the David Feldman Show.  I recommend the segment—it’s between Feldman and a frequent guest of his, Mark Breslin, owner of a chain of comedy clubs throughout Canada and a very lovable chap. Breslin is he from whom I learned about Klyph Nesteroff’s book about First Nation comedians that I read about a year ago, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem.  Anyhoo, the segment is here if you’re interested.   

I’m pretty depressed.  I lost Octordle (Wordle x 8) again for the 4th or 5th time in a row this morning.  It’s the only one of the Wordle*  variants that seems to give me that level of trouble.  That might have set me off, but honestly I’m feeling beaten down by the ownership class again.  Before I even got out of bed come to think of it, I was wondering if resignation to my lot might not be the smartest way to go in light of the overwhelming obstacles to getting a world anyone but the owners could possibly want.  Come to think of it, Stephen Colbert’s monologue about Ukraine was already depressing me before I even got into bed last night.  It's bad enough to get nothing but propaganda for the war machine on the news, but we've got to put up with it in late night monologues now too?  What a frickin’ tool.

Staff Appreciation Week is coming up at work in a couple of weeks.  My inbox has already been peppered with invitations to events for the week.  Staff Appreciation Fondue Feast.  Staff Appreciation 70s Dance Party.  Staff Appreciation Skits and Karaoke.  That's not appreciation, that's torture.  We'll probably also get an Amazon gift card. If this is appreciation, please give me your customary indifference.  

I’m not resigned by the way. I just don’t believe it’s ever going to get better for anyone it's not already better for.  Which is kind of a defeated attitude for a not resigned person to have.  But if you're wondering why I'm not 100% resigned it's because all evidence of the current doomed trajectory of human history aside, I cannot in my heart of hearts let go of my anger at the neglect of the obvious truth that merely 45% of the planet have appropriated 98% of the wealth (nearly half of it lying in the hands of merely 1.1%, and a full 84% of it split roughly in half between the top 1% and the next 11%) and that the engine of this disparity is the primary cause of human and planetary misery. Misery ignored by our leadership, our military-industrial complex and our media who thanks to the mechanics of their own over-compensation prefer to keep us lathered up into a state of pointless perpetual war with a series of conveniently trumped up foes.  And it is misery which could be appeased by equitable redistribution of the booty. The circumstantially privileged rich who are motivated by plunder and not by basic human decency will never give up their spoils willingly, and the rest of us continue for the moment to be too busy individually grabbing merely as close to enough of the dregs for those we love as we have been allowed to get our hands on to rise up as one.  Stupid of me to not be resigned, I know. But I'm not aiming for a mensa membership.  I'm just trying to get a good night's sleep.

From: Visual Capitalist, (Source: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2021) Sept 20, 2021.  Each of the 100 figures in the grid on the right represents about 53 million adults-- a population between that of Colombia and Myanmar. Six and a quarter are roughly the entire population of the US (adult and children).  The top of the graph is top-heavy with individuals mostly of the northern and western hemispheres (but probably not you). If 100 people selected proportionately from each of the 4 buckets were to split $10,000.00 according to their class, the single person in the top bracket would get $4,580.00; the 11 in second bracket would each get $355.45; the 33 in the third bracket would each receive $41.51 while the 55 in the poorest bracket would get $2.36 apiece. †

Chag Sameach!  Ramadan Mubarak!  Blessed be Eostre!

~~~~~

* You know, Wordle.  It's that rip off of Word Master Mind which I already loved as a kid before someone figured out how to capitalize on it in my old age.  The bastards.

† Using a November 2021 report from McKinsey & Company as a guide, the actual wealth of the planet by the end of 2020 was $1,540 trillion in assets and $510 trillion in personal worth for a total of $2,050 trillion, making the actual pie for our 100 representative adults in the chart $38,679,245.28.  Substituting this amount for the $10,000 in our example,  the proportional "shares" for each of our 4 buckets are $17,715,094.34 for the single person in the top bracket; $1,374,871.36 for each of the 11 in the second highest bracket; $160,577.47 for each of the 33 in the next bracket; and for the 55 in the lowest bracket, $9,142.37.  Nine thousand may sound like more than peanuts, but setting aside the obvious fact that that share is in actuality wildly unevenly distributed among the poorest to the extent that the bloat at the very top is actually fueled by negative wealth for far too many in the lower brackets, recall that wealth includes not just access to cash for emergencies and day-to-day living but also possessions and property.   And while the gentleman in the top bracket's share is 45.8 times more than the $386,792.45 that each of the 100 would get if the pie were distributed evenly (and more than 35 times the entire half million dollars that is the combined share of the bottom 55), the $9,142.37 of each member of the bottom bracket is barely more than 2% of it.  As impressive as our representative 1%-er's wealth is in comparison to the 99 others in the sample, his $17 million is barely .006% (that's six thousandths of a percent)  of the wealth of the world's actual reputed wealthiest person, Elon Musk, whose worth in April 2022 has been estimated by Forbes to be $273 Billion.  The discrepancies at the top are comical; the imbalance at the bottom is deadly.