Say what you will about Barack Obama, the brother keeps in touch.

I gave his campaign $50 shortly after it achieved inevitability in the spring of 2008, not long after I’d been laid off from my last secure, well, my last well-paying job — and about a year before the money ran out.

He’s kept me posted ever since.  

Last month I think he sent me, like, four emails inviting me to come have dinner with just him and three other Americans — just like me.

And right at the end there, he sent me one raising the bar, saying Joe Biden wanted in on the meal, too!

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The Internet and technology continue to - in the immortal words of the great Muhammad Ali - stun and amaze ya, don’t they?

National Geographic has what, to the naked eye, appears to be a gorgeous, if somewhat pedestrian photo of the Grand Canyon on its website. It’s the photo you see pictured above.

What may cause your head to explode is what you’ll find by clicking in the yellow frame (which can be moved to any place on the photo) — it’s an infinite photograph, with seemingly every pixel being comprised of hundreds of other photographs, all submitted by users to the Geographic site, MyShot.

Wow. Just, wow.

The chart above tells you just about everything you need to know about where we’ve been and where we’re going - as far as the U.S. economy is concerned, anyway.

The red line depicts American workers’ share of the national income pie, dating all the way back to 1947. As the boom and bust (or growth and retraction, if you must) nature of our capitalist economy worked its rhythmic gyrations over the years, Labor’s piece of the American Pie grew larger in good times, smaller in bad ones - but for the most part tended to recover to a baseline high of around 109 once the economy was good and cranking.

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retrogasm:

I want to know who all the over 30 tumblr’s are (like me) so I can follow you…

*I am following all who reblog this… it’s kind of nice to have some company from the over 30 crowd…

Looking for some Over 30 mojo to rekindle my fascination with Tumblr.

California defendants face new federal charges after state’s illegal search and seizure.

SAN FRANCISCO — When it comes to Celebrity Justice, the name Scott Feil doesn’t have quite the cachet of Barry Bonds or Lindsay Lohan, but anyone interested in learning how justice is served today would do well to follow Mr. Feil’s fortunes along a tortured path in the country that famously promises “liberty and justice for all.”

Mr. Feil was the Executive Director of a southern California medical marijuana dispensary called United Medical Caregivers Clinic (UMCC) when the Los Angeles Police Department raided his business in 2005, using a search warrant that was ultimately determined to have been issued illegally.

Years of legal wrangling resulted in a 2009 ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which found LAPD’s actions in the case unconstitutional and returned to Mr. Feil and UMCC nearly $200,000 that had been seized by the police and turned over to federal prosecutors.

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From the What’s It Worth? Department - big news in the world of finance today:  the great minds at Goldman Sachs have conjured up a way for wealthy investors to get a piece of the Facebook action without actually having to take the company public.

Plunking down $450 million of its own money for a share of Facebook common stock which values the Internet equivalent of a high school lunchroom at $50 billion, Goldman won the right to create a “special purpose vehicle” whereby a select list of its own wealthiest clients can pony up an additional $1.5 billion to fund Facebook’s operations and, presumably, reward its founders and directors for being brilliant, savvy players in the post-Crash era.

Hey, well, bully for them all around.  Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em, as the old saying used to go.

Just for kicks, though, I thought I’d poke around and see what $50 billion looks like in today’s world. While it won’t buy what it used to back in the day (ie: the entire gross debt of the United States was about $50 billion in 1940; it is over $1.3 trillion today ), you can still take down some pretty rad gear for that kinda dough.

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Jayzus H. Christ, I go away from the Internet for a while and all hell breaks loose.  

Having shimmied back down the rabbit hole in the last couple of days, my eyes are now bleeding from reading all the sturm und drang over supposed terrorist/sex criminal Julian Assange and his pariah website, WikiLeaks.

OK, they’re not bleeding but my eyes are tearing up and I wish my head didn’t hurt the way it does from trying to piece together the cognitive disconnect over so many people not caring that the US has been waging multiple illegal wars and torturing innocent people for going on a decade, and now are suddenly turning into a rabid mob over the revelation that many things thinking people have long suspected of modern government S.O.P. turn out to be true.

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Dan Edstrom gets paid to audit securitization transactions for a company called DTC-Systems, so he might have thought it fun to spend over a year reverse engineering the mortgage on the Edstrom family home into the handy flow chart depicted above (Click the image for a full-size view).  

For those of us with a less erudite sense of how to get our jollies, or who might be among the millions of Americans facing foreclosure and — in some cases — the well-heeled mendacity of the nation’s bankers, this chart is graphic evidence of just how byzantine our financial reality has become.

If it took Dan Edstrom over a year to do this for his own mortgage, how long do you suppose it will take Barney Frank and Eric Holder to sort things out for the nation as a whole?

(Source: zerohedge.com)