QuoteDidn't K-Dog keep the CO2 levels posted on the main page?

December 2025      427.49 ppm
December 2024      425.40 ppm
Annual change:  +0.49%

Every year is another nail in the coffin.

In this story imagine suburbia survives until 2052.  It won't, but considering an extreme case brings clarity.

Quote"What is it now?" he asked the houses, noticing his wrist watch. "Eight-thirty pm? Time for a dozen assorted murders? A  quiz? A revue? A comedian falling off the stage?"

Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicoloured lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.

Was that a murmur of laughter from within the moon-white house? He hesitated, but went on when nothing happened. He stumbled over a particularly uneven section of sidewalk. The cement was vanishing under flowers and grass. In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time.

America homogenized by banality.  Plastic like American cheese.  No character.  Currently walking late at night unplugged is not a crime.  Yet authoritarian America with its tombs, ill-lit by television light has the same Kraft cheese sameness. 

Quote"Your hands up! Or we'll shoot!" The police, of course, but what a rare, incredible thing; in a city of three million, there was only one police car left, wasn't that correct? Ever since a year ago, 2052, the election year, the force had been cut down from three cars to one. Crime was ebbing; there was no need now for the police, save for this one lone car wandering and wandering the empty streets.

The back door of the police car sprang wide. "Get in."
"Wait a minute, I haven't done anything!"
"Get in."
"I protest!"
"Mr. Mead."
He walked like a man suddenly drunk. As he passed the front window of the car he looked in. As he had expected, there was no one in the front seat, no one in the car at all.
"Get in."
He put his hand to the door and peered into the back seat, which was a little cell, a little black jail with bars. It smelled of riveted steel. It smelled of harsh antiseptic; it smelled too clean and hard and metallic. There was nothing soft there. 

"Where are you taking me?"
"To the Psychiatric Centre for Research on Regressive Tendencies."

America became a land of cosplay, everyone is chasing a manufactured fantasy.  Few want to manufacture their own.  Once there was more of a need to find your own.  But consumption of someone else's fantasy became easy, seductive and patriotic.  Fantasy is monetized, and refined.  Real life itself became a fantasy.  The end result of advanced consumerism.  The experience of living itself becomes a commodity to buy.  The act of breathing by necessity needs to be a side gig.

Consumers do no think, they only make choices and America has entered an intellectual dark age.  Not only that, the choices narrow.