Hey Folks! Stay Tuned As We Find...America's Next Genius...

With your host, the genial, child-murdering, civilian-bombing war-criminal, everybody's favorite shitty pilot, let's hear it for BOMBING JOHN MCCAIN!!!

McCain will inspire "the ingenuity and resolve of the American people by offering a $300 million prize for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars."

Arthur Silber riffs on this whole concept with unrestrained delight over on his blog. Arthur Silber is in a league of his own when it comes to this kinda stuff:

This is brilliant. With regard to the most dauntingly complex issues involving our dependence on fossil fuel and the fabric and operation of our entire economy and culture, which are made up of hundreds of thousands of interconnected elements that all affect each other in a dizzying multitude of ways, issues that require experts to study the relevant facts, economic and political theory and history, etc., etc., blah blah and blah for decades, after all of which most of these same experts ponderously announce, "Well, huh. Who the hell knows? This is complicated, man," all our problems will now be solved. All we need to do is make the Murkin peepul think they're playing the greatest teevee game show of all time!

And if you win, you get a really, really big prize!

Arthur's a bit sheltered, you can see. He lives very close to the bone, and so I doubt he avails himself of cable/satellite tv (in fact, he lives only on the proceeds he can promote from his writing; the link's here...) and so he might thereby have missed a (trivial) distinction, between a "game" show and a reality show. Game shows showcase trivial skills and/or shallow mastery of trivial, arcane knowledges. "Reality" shows are more or less the lebenswelt equivalent of professional wrestling: there at least seems to be 'real' consequences at stake. America's Next Chef/Model/Band/Vocalist/Hairdresser/Couturier/Cowboy/Poker star. C'mon, you cheetoh-stained, basement-dwelling, acne-spotted, virginal geniuses! Show us your star turn, save the planet, bring back cheap gas, and All This Can Be YOURS!!!!!

Which should not deflect significantly from the rest of his analysis. Arthur understands things...