As Black Friday Goes...

from the site Pepper Spraying Cop

Who would have thought the hot product for Black Friday would be pepper spray?  Cops spraying customers and customers each other, plus tasering and a couple of shootings--all part of the ritual apparently. Can't wait for Buy Small Saturday and Cyber Monday.

Actually the fashionable use of pepper spray since the despicable incident at U.C. Davis, in heavy video rotation on the Internet and cable news, was already being satirized at the collective site Pepper Spraying Cop, which included this fake-comes-true image:

Check Wikipedia and see that this instance of Black Friday is the only one that isn't overtly (as opposed to ironically) a catastrophe. Our society's dependence on consumption is at least as dangerous as its dependence on fossil fuel, and of course the two are intimately related.  Yet it is dependence in every sense of the word.  And so this Black Friday is both different from the others and exactly the same.

Black Friday follows Gluttony Thursday, and Think Progress has two instructive notes on that: the fact that hunger in the U.S. is increasing both statistically and in plain sight, and that the cost of the traditional Thanksgiving feast is increasing--clearly related to, and as clear evidence of the Climate Crisis.

Speaking of which there is a provocative new study that suggests it may take a little longer for civilization to destroy itself, which would be good news if there seems any likelihood that the requisite action will be taken to use the time to stop it from getting worse.(Which some claim is simpler --at least in part--than generally feared.)
Meanwhile, new evidence of the oppression of the 99%: the average Bush tax savings for the 1% is greater than the average annual income for the 99%:  about $66 thousand versus $58.5.

And what's keeping things from being even worse for the 99%?  The Obama federal stimulus and its millions of jobs, the federal tax cut for the 99% and unemployment insurance, both set to expire unless this Tuesday-to-Thursday workweek Congress prevents it.  And such Obama federal initiatives as the evil health care law--evil in the rhetoric of candidate Cowboy Rick, but a great boon to Governor Cowboy Rick who has been way less than shy about claiming as much of that money for Texas as he possibly can, I reckon.