This article is almost too stoopid for words...

If Everyone's Talking, Who Will Listen? (Washington Post)

The article starts off talking about how there's just so much freaking information out there...

But the implications for our democracy are troubling. To achieve their goals, political movements need to reach and influence tens of millions of citizens. Despite conventional thinking that the Internet helps spread information, such reach is actually impossible online...

The opportunity to educate [read: propagandize--ed.] millions of citizens, so essential to significant movements of the past, has dwindled. In the early New Deal era, the Roman Catholic "radio priest" Father Charles Coughlin promoted ideas for economic reform to a weekly audience estimated at 40 million, which helped pressure President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enact Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and other programs...

Plain english translation: "If there isn't any rationing of the media, of information, people might/will stop acting like sheeple. It'll be harder for us folks who know better than most people to manipulate them.

The madness doesn't stop:

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself...

Yeah, let's not take away people's computers. Folks might not stand for that.

perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans)...

Make the price so high they just stop using 'em.

It's possible that over time, an energy tax, by making some computers, Web sites, blogs and perhaps cable TV channels too costly to maintain, could reduce the supply of information. If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it? A reduced supply of information technology might at least gradually cause us to gravitate toward community-centered media such as local newspapers instead of the hyper-individualistic outlets we have now.

Plain english translation: tax stuff until people can only go to the few places the zombie who wrote this drivel likes for their information ration.

But why be surprised? Take a look at what this pompus airhead thinks is good news, and why:

This solution may sound radical and unlikely, but as an environmental analyst, I've spent long hours studying energy consumption. Two years ago, I wrote an article speculating that the real problem behind America's loss of manufacturing jobs was low energy costs that made shipping so cheap that employers had overwhelming incentive to send jobs overseas. My argument that higher energy prices could reverse 50 years of outsourcing was met with skepticism. Yet that's exactly what has begun to happen this year as the high cost of oil has brought some manufacturing jobs back to such cities as Bowling Green, Ky., and Danville, Va.

That's a "socially concious" way of saying that "high energy prices" is good news and "low energy prices" is bad.

Tell that to your wallet. Watch your wallet belly-laugh.

Dusty Horwitt is a lawyer who works for a nonprofit environmental group in Washington.

Really? There's a shocker.

What a fukkin dolt. As my brother says: "Gawd save me from people with a plan."

All of which ties in nicely with this.