According to a recovering “wealth addict” in a column in the Sunday NY Times — he's a young man who at 25 was making a few million a year (but it wasn’t nearly enough) — the mania to accumulate more and more wealth beyond what anyone could possibly need or spend is a disease the very rich fall prey to. They might suffer some psychological trauma, poor babies, but it’s everyone else who pays, literally, for their drug of choice.

The growing accumulation of wealth in a few hands bends economic and political power in the direction of the rich, as the column makes clear. Income inequality is about concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people and the growing number of others living at or near the poverty level, but it also poses a serious threat to the health of our democracy.

Back to the NY Times column in a minute. First, some stats.

Four hundred billionaires have a net worth equal to that of the country’s 14 million-plus African Americans. So writes Bob Lord on my old home at Blog for Arizona in a chillling Martin Luther King Day note.

The net worth of just 400 billionaires, a group that could fit into a high school gym, is on par with the collective wealth of our more than 14 million African- American households. Both groups possess some $2 trillion, about three percent of our national net worth of $77 trillion.

Today’s Star has a McClatchy article with a similar statistic, this time on a global scale.

The world’s richest 85 people control the same amount of wealth as half the world’s population, according to a report issued Monday by the British-based anti-poverty charity Oxfam.

Who benefited most from the 2008 housing bust and worldwide financial downturn according to the article? No surprise here.

The report also said that while the recent financial crisis was an enormous burden on the world’s poor, it ended up being a huge benefit to the rich elite. The very wealthiest people on Earth collected 95 percent of the post-crisis growth, the report said.

The growth in income inequality is a worldwide phenomenon, but “the trend is more pronounced in the United States than in other nations.”

It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day and while some folks volunteered or marched, some must be shopping, judging from all the MLK Day deals we've noticed at Weekly World Central. Yep, seems MLK Day is now a good excuse to offer a deal, a special, that all-American excuse to have a sale. But the latest sighting will provide you with your very own WTF moment.

The Global Village store in Duluth, Minn., announced on its Facebook page that it was having an annual MLK Day Black Sale—everything black in the store is 25 percent off.

The comments bring home some sanity into this tasteless consumer moment:

Today’s NY Times has a story, Arizona Hopes New Charter Schools Can Lift Poor Phoenix Area. I haven’t read about this in Arizona media or seen some kind of press release. I don't expect to learn what's going on in Arizona education in the Times.

The story begins by saying Arizona’s charter school movement has been aimed at middle class families and is now looking to serve low income students “starting, in effect, an experiment in urban education.”

Bad beginning.

Charters have been experimenting in urban education for years, with questionable results. True, the conservative “education reform” folks love to trumpet the successes of BASIS charters, ignoring the fact that most of their success can be attributed to their selective student body. (After laying the BASIS groundwork, they'll add in stories about a few other charters whose students would do well pretty much anywhere they went to school to add heft to the “charters are better than ‘government schools’” mythology.) The charter PR machine tends to ignore the urban and suburban schools that trade mainly in low income students, because those places generally end up with low scores on high stakes tests, just like the "failing government schools” they love to criticize. In fact, according to a recent national study, Arizona’s charter school students score significantly lower than similar students in school district schools, a fact pointed out later in the NY Times article.

The plan is “to open 25 high-performing schools over five years within the 220 square miles of the Phoenix Union High School District.” It’s the brain child of the Arizona Charter School Association, a private charter school promotion organization heavily funded by pro-privatization money. “We believe we know what works,” says ACSA president Eileen Sigmund, ignoring the fact that, so far, Arizona charter schools could take a few pointers from district schools on how to get their test scores up.

It's still a little rough out there in the job market (thanks, Obama!), but as a public service to the un- and underemployed, the Weekly is happy to point out notable online job listings when we stumble upon them.

Today, it's the President and Publisher gig at the Arizona Daily Star, conveniently posted on Craigslist in the Business/Management section, right next to an offer to "HELP OUR ORGANIC BRAND BECOME FAMOUS" and a Spanish language ad promising the "FREEDOM TO BE IN BUSINESS FOR YOURSELF."

Unfortunately, whoever is posting high-level executive positions for the Star on den-of-scams/place-to-get-a-slightly-stained-couch Craigslist did not adopt the site's standard ALL-CAPS style, but you have to give them this, there's no shortage of detail (and, of course, business world buzzwords) in the post, from the hopeful applicant's ability to "effective transformational change management" to a desire for someone who has a "demonstrated track record in recruiting a World-Class leadership team."

Possibly worth noting, they're looking for some with "experience driving a successful turnaround or transformation," so draw your own conclusions on what that says about the current state of things over at Park and Irvington.

If you happen to be interested in the gig vacated by the Wisconsin-bound John M. Humenik, have a Bachelor's degree and at least five years in a top leadership role, feel free to apply now. Based on recent trends, I imagine the eventual successful applicant will be determined by a bracket of some sort and voting on Facebook.

2012 Republican presidential Mitt Romney showed he was pretty fly for a 66-year-old white guy when he attempted to dance alongside Mormon musician Alex Boye while the band covered Psy's "Gangnam Style" at the Arizona All LDS Young Single Adults Conference this past weekend.

This is my first post on The Range after writing for six years over at Blog for Arizona. Dan Gibson asked me to make the move — next door, you could say, since both blogs are Tucson based — and I said, "Yes."

So, an introduction.

I taught high school — English, photography, yearbook advisor — for 30+ years in the Portland, Oregon, area, then moved here ten years ago. I've immersed myself in the politics and education of the state, which are inextricably mixed — more so with each passing year. Arizona is a stalking horse for the conservative "education reform" movement, so what happens here is likely to be adopted in other conservative-led states. We're very much on the national radar. Our charter schools are setting up branches elsewhere, our backdoor vouchers are expanding in unique directions and our meager state education budgets continue to set the bar for how low per-student funding can go. TUSD made national news when the Mexican American Studies controversy was raging (we even made The Daily Show), and it continues to be referred to in newspapers and ed journals.

Big time Hollywood director Michael Bay was invited to Samsung's Consumer Electronics Show to promote some of their products on Monday, but something went horribly awry. Bay started answering simple questions about his work, but stage fright set in when his teleprompter shuts off less than a minute into the interview. You can see the Transformers director was getting anxious, so he just left the stage.

So, maybe you missed this recent Reddit AMA "I am the guy with two penises,", DoubleDickDude. It could have been an internet freak show, OK maybe it was just a little, but going through the questions and answers, it was as educational and informative as the internets were saying.

My favorite comment that gets to the heart of the entire back and forth:

Just to summarize what we've learnt.

He's bisexual. He's attractive. He's lives in a threesome. He likes fisting others and being fisted. He likes putting things down his urethra. He casually mentions the time six people had sex with him simultaneously. He shoots 12 times when he cums. Straight men magically turn bicurious around him.

And on top of that, he has two (penises).

• (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, David Kadlubowski)
• "A wildfire burns homes in Yarnell, AZ, on June 30, 2013."

It's been six months since 19 brave firefighters were taken in the horrific wildfire in Yarnell Hill.

The Weather Channel® and weather.com published an original documentary and long-form article called “America Burning: The Yarnell Hill Tragedy and the Nation’s Wildfire Crisis. They hope to continue the dialogue and address the growing concern and the contributing factors such as climate change, property development, drought and other problems that go widely ignored.

Watch this extensive and in-depth documentary by Weather Films below:

America Burning: The Yarnell Hill Fire Tragedy and the Nation's Wildfire Crisis from Weather Films on Vimeo.

On June 30, 2013, 19 firefighters from the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed battling a wildfire near Yarnell, Arizona. Huge questions remain about the last moments of their lives. Why did they move out of a safe area in their final minutes of life? Why did the fire move so quickly? Could their deaths have been prevented?
The tragedy also raises a crucial environmental issue: Has the very act of fighting wildfires made our forests more dangerous?

Everyone knows Doug Stanhope for his offensive comedy, history of drug abuse and medical problems. But underneath all that is a man with a gold heart that gets off on pissing off Christians. Stanhope was inspired to raise money for Rebecca Vitsmun after confessing she was an atheist during her interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer while they were standing in front of her demolished home that was taken by a tornado.

Stanhope admired Vitsmn's courage to openly admitting her lack of faith in a bible belt state on national television. "Saying 'I'm an atheist' in Oklahoma is like screaming 'Jihad' at airport security," Stanhope said in the clip Charlie Brooker's 2013 Wipe he posted Sunday. The outlandish Bisbee comedian started a IndieGogo campaign called "Atheist Unite." After two months, Stanhope crowdfunded $125,760 for Oklahoman.

"I did it simply to be a prick to her Okie-Christian neighbors, hoping that they were still eating off of FEMA trucks when someone drove up and presented Rebecca with a giant cardboard check."