I thought it was entirely appropriate. If Salon mods can't read Russian that's their problem.

We get it. Really we do.

Who drunkenly chases geese with a golf club. Then he gets tired of that and lights bags of shit on fire.

If they can clean that process up and make it better I'm all for it. Pets are not people.

I don't see fully built windmills dropping out of the sky and hooking themselves up to the grid, for free. Do you? I don't see massive factories churning out solar cells (which is quite polluting) to pop into vast solar electric combines.

What I do know is that everyone wants someone else to provide for them. Someone else, somewhere else to drill for oil and mine for coal and build those scary nuclear plants. But everyone else is somewhere else. And the Army Corps of Engineers has already stated that for the most part every significant source of hydroelectric power in the US has already been dammed. So unless Salonfranciscans plan on freezing in the dark, hungry with the rest of us, there is no someone else somewhere else to bear that burden so that middle class urban hipster types can blog at Starbucks about what filthy philistines the rest of us are for objecting.

Since everything so far is a horrible idea, and, the last time I checked, you can't plug your tofu hybrid car into Mother Gaia, I'd love to hear what other suggestions anyone actually has.

And if your objection is something about instant gratification then I suggest the problem is with you and not the rest of everyone else. It's pretty childish for a gaggle of seemingly educated people to object to anything new aka 'progress' just because Santa Che won't deliver it tomorrow on his Marxist sled full of slave free toys. Ok so it won't drop prices 'tomorrow'. Folding your arms and stamping your feet seems hardly a useful alternative.

Handmade vodka. All you have to do is buy it once and save the bottle. I promise none of the people you are trying to impress will ever know the difference.

Since the only reason that gasoline has a nonzero price at all is because of 19 fat white Republicans, while all oil untapped so far will take Eleventy Trillion million billion zillion dollars to develop and won't come online until 16 months after the sun implodes into a neutron star.

My idea would just be to burn hippies for fuel.

Their cross border friends in ZA's ANC and the ZACP are keeping Mugabe in power. Openly. From the President on down (including and especially Ronno "Einstein" Kasrils, dear readers), the official line is that Mugabe is a hero and Zimbabwe's problems are solely the fault of 'outside agitators'. It's not often clear what this is a code word for. Sometimes it's westerners, America, the CIA, Mossad, the usual suspects of tinpot cannibal kings everywhere.

The problem really is that 'elections' as such are rather meaningless and almost besides the point in Zimbabwe. Even if they held halfway transparent elections tomorrow, Mugabe has already stated he would use the Army to hold on to power at all costs "For the Revolution!" unquote. And that's not saying anything of their 80% unemployment, 100,000% inflation rate and an economy that crashed past free fall into anarchy long ago. And that's not saying anything about how Mugabe is using food itself as a terror weapon against his opponents. Famine is rife in Zimbabwe and western reporters, or even ZA reporters who attempt to cover it are threatened with arrest or death and then kicked out of the country.

Again though, someone should ask Mbeki and ANC head and next President Zuma why they're shipping weapons and money to Mugabe and refusing as many Zimbabwean refugees as they can catch. Even the ZA populace is getting fed up. Last month's xenophobic violence against mostly Zimbabwean refugees resulted in the deaths of about 200.

But there will always be Mugabe supporters in the west because people here are as deluded and stupid as people there.

Better we should leave it in the ground. The main Iraqi and Iranian fields which have been in constant production since 1938 are beginning to give out and the quality of oil that comes from them is lower quality. We should cap the wells and say screw it. The Iranian deposits of gas off the Straits of Hormuz will take 20-40 billion Euros to develop. Too long too much money. Forget it. Russian gas and oil is very hard to get at because it's under deep hard rock and has a very high sulfur content which makes the pumping and piping operation slow and expensive. Shut it down. Those Azerbijani fields newly discovered. To hell with them. Ditto Guinea (West Africa).

Clearly the officially blessed and scientifically researched position from Salon on High is to do nothing about everything forever. I concur.

This Month's official Samizdat to which all Salon columnists must strictly adhere contains the following points. You may pick two:

Race race racism race

Drilling for oil (or doing anything vis vis energy) is always bad

Whatever Obama does is divine

FISA

Lather rinse repeat until next month's memos are given to you. Thank you comrades for your free thinking.

That if it involves science, Salon is generally as opposed to it as the most blatant Christian fundamentalists are, but for different reasons.

Is that Obama may in fact have nothing to say. I'm don't know who that terrifies more; Obama or his followers. When your response to every barb isn't a response at all, but merely 1 million bloggers gnashing their teeth on behalf of you, maybe that speaks volumes.

This is Salon. It's not supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be earnest and precious. Every joke w/o a punchline is an implied insult at the audience. A gentle animal cruelty free Salon compliant barb to be sure, but an insult all the same. It's a scold at YOU not her son.