As with Volume I, we shall start easy.

We'll begin with a truth so forehead-smackingly obvious you might worry that its very presence will cause you some sort of concussion o' blatancy. Which is, ironically, just about right ...

1) Your semi-rhetorical question du jour: What do basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey, lumberjacking and "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" all have in common? That's right, none of them causes nearly as much brain damage as America's most beloved sport-of-thugs: football. It is, without doubt, the most violent and sadistic gladiator game we have ever invented for giant, vaguely homoerotic males who weigh more than 250 pounds. Except for boxing.

Witness Malcolm Gladwell's half-stunning, half-obvious piece in a recent New Yorker, summed up thusly: nearly every football player in America, from high school on up through the NFL -- especially there -- will suffer some level of brain damage and head trauma, from moderate to severe to early-onset dementia, even after just a year or two of play, even if he never turns pro at all. Turns out the human skull simply cannot endure that many blows and concussions and not have the brain ripped, torn, bounced, pounded into a damaged lump of spasm and drooling and memory loss. The game is just that brutal.

2) Gladwell goes on to talk about Michael Vick, and suggests football has a direct parallel with the morally nauseating "sport" of dogfighting. It's a tenuous analogy, I thought, until the end when he talks about the scene at your average dogfight: the bloodthirsty crowd, the intense passion of the dog owners, the wholehearted willingness of the dogs themselves to fight to the death for your entertainment. Good luck making a distinction.

3) Are you aware that many desperate media honchos think the savior of fast-dying newspapers, magazines, even book publishing might just lie in the next must-have gizmo, like the Kindle? Well they do. Then again, until about 2005, most of them thought the Internet was run by tiny astronauts and magic rubber bands. But never mind that now.

Here stumbles Barnes & Noble, not exactly a bastion of tech innovation or cultural relevance, actually releasing a decent eBook device of its very own, called the Nook, to compete directly with Amazon's clunky, hideously ugly Kindle. The amazing thing: They improved upon it. Not difficult, I realize. But still. Barnes & Noble?

Translation: If even B&N can make a decent slab, the bar is set very low indeed. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling. Again.

4) Here's an astonishing fact: China just surpassed the United States as the world's largest automobile market. Are you surprised? What's more, they will easily outsell the U.S. this year in sheer units moved, upwards of 13 million cars (the U.S. will move about 11 million).

But that's not the amazing part. It's this: They say that in a mere five or six years that number will almost double, to about 20 million cars per year, a simply staggering amount the wimpy little U.S., once the car capital of the world, has never, ever matched, and never will. And the Earth went, groan.

5) Wait, it gets better -- and scarier. Behold, the single most stunning China-related stat I've read in ages: "China is expected to build more square feet of real estate in the next 15 years than the United States has built in its entire history, and it has no green building codes or green building experience," says everbleak Foreign Policy mag. Yes, everything we have built in more than 200 years, surpassed by China by the time your newborn hits high school. Amazing. Disorienting. Oddly disturbing.

6) Upshot: America is done. Our once-great empire is cooked. Not only is China (and India, fast behind) about to stomp all over everyone in economic power and resource abuse, they already own a huge chunk of our debt, manufacture most of our holidays and build almost everything we like to buy. And that includes the device you are reading this on right now. Oh well. We'll always have football.

7) Not frightening enough? Here, let these appalling photos of China's rampant pollution drive it all home. More masochism? Suck on Canada's nauseating oilsands. Still more? Fine, How about this: A new poll suggests the number of Americans who believe global warming is a real and dangerous phenomenon brought on by pollutive human activity is actually decreasing.

It's true. My guess is that many clumsily educated Americans have been fully expecting some sort of wacky Hollywood-style apocalypse scenario as a result of all those dire prognostications, and are now feeling a little ripped off. "Where is my wrathful hurricane?" they demand in response to all the dire-but-boring scientific info about, say, melting ice caps and severe weather conditions in places most of them don't actually live.

"Where are the screaming frogs? Where is the tidal wave crashing over the Himalayas with John Cusack yelling in panic? I still have to wear a jacket in December! Global warming, my meat-loving American ass!"

8) Mmm, meat. Did you know upwards of 50 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come not from SUVs, factories or all of the various chemicals injected into the "Real Housewives," but from livestock at the world's massive industrial feedlots, in the form of methane gas the very unhappy cows pump out like small factories, along with feed growin' and transport? True.

In other words, at the heart of the climate change crisis that fewer people actually think we're responsible for, lies our gluttonous desire for cheap, inhumane, hormone-injected, chemical-blasted meat. Translation: You really want to help the planet? Eat better. And shut down all the McDonalds.

9) Attention, confused, unwed, undereducated American teen girl! Want to assure you get pregnant and contribute nicely to the dire teen pregnancy stats the fundamentalists and moral crusaders are always trotting out as evidence of humanity's debauched downfall?

That's easy: Just live in a state where fundamentalist religion dominates! Turns out your odds of getting knocked up in one of America's sanctimonious, sexually uninformed flyover states are much higher than, say, in an educated, godless liberal city, presumably because a higher percentage of folk who live there shun birth control, have god-awful/nonexistent sex education and are generally terrified of their bodies, sex, sticky slippery things that go bump in the night. Isn't irony fun?

10) But in the end, none of that really matters, because God gave us the Earth to burn, chop, consume, pollute as much as we damn well please. Have you heard? To hell with reverence and integrity and treading lightly. He supplied us with all these bountiful riches because He wanted us to gobble it all up as fast as possible. I mean, obviously.

You have but to ask any high-ranking Republican -- like, say, effeminate sea slug Lindsay Graham from South Carolina, who, when asked about energy policy, will tell you flat out, "We must use the coal God gave us."

Isn't that touching? Make you proud to be a human? It's still the mindset of millions. Do not cherish or conserve or sit in humble awe. Instead merely drill, nuke and devour. Hey, it's what Jesus wanted. Unless it wasn't. Didn't you already suspect as much?

Mark Morford's latest book is 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism'. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com. For his yoga classes, workshops and retreats, click markmorfordyoga.com.

Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.

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