Somebody asked Bush why gas prices are high, and he said that demand is outstripping supply. I assume he's either lying outright, or he learned about some "supply and demand" thing in sixth grade before he started doing cocaine, and that's the extent of his economic understanding and the only answer he can give. Except it's wrong. The crashing value of the dollar (Bush's fault, in concert with Greenspan and Bernanke) along with general global destabilization (Bush's fault) piled onto fears about the future of oil and the climate (both of which Bush has refused to address) have led to investment/speculation in commodities, as people realize that rice will hold its value better than dollars.

Pour a forty out on the curb for Albert Hofmann, dead at 102 after a long and apparently happy life as the man who synthesized LSD. It's such a part of our culture now that it's difficult to imagine what it was like to have an experience that no human being, in all our thousands and millions of years, had ever had before. But he did, and despite the somewhat mixed experience, he realized that this was ultimately an interesting and worthwhile thing, and continued to study hallucinogens for the rest of his life. (It's no small thing that he accepted his experience: he took 250 micrograms, when a normal dose in recent decades is 50-150 micrograms.) Well done, sir.