No More Rice-a-Roni

OK, I know I just delivered a big lecture on why we shouldn't go making premature pronouncements of doom on the American system -- much less the world. (See post, "The Many Deaths of America", April 8). But things are getting a bit scary. To start with, we have food riots going on all over the world, and the triggering mechanism for those seems to have been the Great Ethanol Scam. Hunger is settling back in across the globe. But are American liberals showing concern? No -- they are strangely silent. Because it has, in fact, dawned on them that their love affair with ethanol may be at the root of the problem -- but they are so heavily invested in the ethanol mystique that to just stop on a dime and say oops -- mistake! -- is unthinkable. So the specter of starvation rises again after having been nearly banished in much of the world, and it's all because American liberals' greedy little cars are gobbling up the food that those people might otherwise be eating. Or, at least, the ethanol hysteria has created a domino effect that has impacted the food that they do eat. One way or the other -- and once again, just like clockwork -- a liberal dream has turned into a nightmare. Not for them -- oh no! -- but for everyone else. The only law liberals seem to obey -- if unwittingly -- is the Law of Unintended Consequences. And this time it's a doozy.

But even that's not the scariest thing out there right now. You know what's _really_ scary? The fact that Sam's Club and Costco are rationing rice. RICE !! Years -- maybe decades -- from now, when the few remaining humans huddle around campfires nibbling on gopher steaks, a youngster is going to ask one of the grizzled elders, "When did you know that it was the beginning of the end?" And the answer is going to be, "When Sam's Club and Costco starting rationing rice."

We now return you to our regularly-scheduled program of trivial and inconsequential crises, already in progress.