…lapses into self-parody.

And then there’s this:

JON STEWART:
We’re talking with Senator John Kerry. Let’s talk energy. Oil. Is — is oil gonna turn out to be America’s kryptonite? What — (LAUGHTER) you know, we — we have this substance. It’s clearly finite. It’s clearly in someone else’s country. What — what are we gonna — (LAUGHTER) are we gonna have to take over the whole damn region?

…

JOHN KERRY:
The — it’s the most extraordinary thing in the world. United States has three percent of the world’s oil reserves. We import 61 percent of our oil. There is no possible way for us to drill our way out this crisis. We have to invent our way out of it.

We have to invent our way out of it by moving to alternatives, to renewables, to fuel efficient vehicles. To biomass…

Now, I’ll give John Kerry this: Oil dependence is, to say the least, problematic.

But 3% of the world’s oil supply is nothing at which to sneeze. That 3% — more than 30 billion barrels — could fuel America’s economy for four years solid.

But, of course, we would never actually have to produce every drop of our own oil (nor could we without a lot more drilling and refining). Oil is traded on a global market. The worst Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC can do is make prices go up substantially. That’s no small thing, but it’s made a lot worse by, say, keeping the oil reserves in Alaska off the table and making it so that we have nothing to use to offset OPEC.

But, let’s just take the question of “invent[ing] our way out of it.”

Politicians love to propose to invent things. There’s nothing they love more — save raising taxes on cigarettes.

We’re going to cure cancer, AIDS, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, social-anxiety disorder and the heebeegeebies just by giving waving the federal government’s magic wand — or so politicians tell us in every campaign and/or State of the Union Address.

Well, sorry, but no. Same with the electric car and fuel cells.

Progress is only going to occur in proportion to the extent that high oil prices create a demand for alternative fuels. Earlier this year, reports started to come in that hybrid gas-electric cars were seeing a modest boost in sales because of higher gas prices (see here and here).

Kerry’s response, of course, was not to let the market take its course and to let people feel the effects of oil dependence so that they might modify their behavior — as they will, when the time is right, in a free market.

No, Kerry’s response was to propose that President Bush crack open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to artificially lower prices.

Like a good little planner, Kerry wants to subsidize low oil prices now (promoting energy dependence) and give away money at the same time (to promote energy independence).

There really is no underestimating the power of bad ideas.

[P.S. For perspective: Milk still costs a dollar more per gallon than gas, on average.]

This article from Slate delves into the topic of what the author, Clive Thompson, calls “grass-roots industrial design,” meaning consumers designing their own household products — like computers, cars, stamps, coffee mugs and the like.

In no small part he is — admittedly — piggybacking off of Virginia Postrel’s excellent book, The Substance of Style.

He writes:

Today, rapid-prototyping technology — that is, 3-D printers that can instantly crank out a physical copy of anything you design on a computer — is available only to elite design firms. It’ll get cheaper within years. Meanwhile, “original design manufacturing” companies overseas are becoming expert at quickly and cheaply cranking out MP3 players and laptops to specs set by brand-name firms like Virgin or Sony. Put those trends together, and it’s easy to envision an offshore service that will take my personal design for a music player and crank out 10 copies. Presto: the Clive brand MP3 player! Think of it as vanity electronics — casemodding on a superfast, global scale.

Yet more proof that our rapidly developing and expanding consumer culture is not a homogenizing force, but quite the opposite.

Even if not everyone wants to design their own products from an aesthetic point of view — which plenty of people won’t want to do — you can already order things like computers and cars with a remarkable degree of customization. With computers, on a dell.com or apple.com, and I’m sure plenty of other places, you can simply click ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on scores of features to create a product tailored exactly to your requirements — and then have it delivered to your door.

It’s easy to forget the revolutionary technologies that became commonplace just in the last few years. And someday we’ll take self-designed MP3-player/ATM-card/cell-phone/self-defense-tasers for granted, too.