Can't speak. Too dumbfounded by dumbness.

Online poll on the execrable WABC site today:

Who do you think is to blame for high gas prices?

• Oil companies ?
  
• Gas stations ?
  
• China and India ?
  
• OPEC ?
  
• Environmentalists ?
  

Unsurprisingly, the plurality winner, at 47%, is environmentalists. Couldn't they have had another answer, like "God, for not endowing the Earth with enough petroleum"?

Also, what on earth causes people to listen to those AM talk-radio blowhards?

Department of Duh: withdrawal edition

Early Pullout Unlikely In Iraq, says WaPo. Oh, you mean all the hinting about pulling out was just so much Republican sweet-talking to get the American public back into bed with them? Nah, couldn't be.

Vandalism

weakens the rule of law and is not responsible direct action, but I still love this headline: Air Force Colonel Accused of Defacing Cars Bearing Pro-Bush Bumper Stickers

The courageous bits of mainstream anti-war material...

... seem to come from pop stars these days. Go to Green Day's website, go to Videos, then "Wake Me When September Ends." Very well done.

(Thanks to Rude Pundit)

Peak Oil Boy soils his trousers

Torture Girl's husband, Peak Oil Boy, here. I have been incessantly reading books about the upcoming nontemporary energy crisis (Roberts's End of Oil, Kunstler's The Long Emergency, Goodstein's Out of Gas, Heinberg's The Party's Over, et al.) We are so fucked. (By "we," I mean us humans.)

Whether the energy crunch comes in five or twenty years, we are in for a very nasty shock. Worst case: Massive die-out of most life on Earth (due to humans desperately trying to make up for lost oil by burning tons of coal, and damaging the Earth's atmosphere irreparably.) Best case: Massive deindustrialization and depopulation.

Though there are plenty of ancillary effects that I would welcome from a somewhat lower level of industrialization, I don't think any non-religious fanatics would celebrate famines, wars, and plagues on a scale heretofore unseen.

The question is: can we anticipate the end of oil better and make some sort of plans, so that the shocks are somewhat less traumatic? Unfortunately, I don't think we humans are particularly well equipped to do so.

Just go read Digby instead

Readers: I am engaged in learning how to make a passable loaf of bread. We biscuits are bread snobs, so this is not as easy as it might seem. I have been baking bread for many years, of course, but my skills are nothing special -- it's bread, wholesome enough, but unimpressive, and no substitute for the professional loaves of our local artisan bakery.

Anyway, this is time-consuming. Also, there's the two-year-old -- time-consuming.

Please go read Digby's last twenty posts in the meantime.

that is all.

Libertarian moran's

Seen on a brain-addled Libertarian site (freewillblog.com):

Global warming?
We'll grow oranges in Alaska.

Yeah, that's "funny."