Tuesday News...Day...

Read away.

H2 drivers are really lame
But their suped up little SUV is even lamer.

Honestly, these morons think that because they take a standard SUV frame and put a big, boxy set of body panels on it that it has suddenly become a military asset. They deserve to be fleeced. It's just a pity that they get to ruin our atmosphere by actually driving the damn things afterward.

Never Let Reason Get in the Way of Your Superstition
Caste discrimination continues in India. Truly ugly stuff. Even the local government is siding with the bigots who want to drive an 'untouchable' out of her job because she cooks food for their kids.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Nothing good ever comes from any interaction between religion and government. Ever.

Source: The Independent

Hooray for Compact Fluorescents
Looks like the big Energy bill that's about to be passed will contain a provision to phase out traditional incandescent light bulbs in favor of CFs. This is definitely a step in the right direction, albeit a small one.

To all those who are worried about mercury emissions from CF bulbs, remember two things. One: the mercury in a CF is sealed inside the glass. It's not going to jump out and bite you. Two: Most power in the United States is generated by coal. Burning coal releases enormous amounts of mercury directly into the air and water supply. Even if CF bulbs aren't recycled, merely by reducing the amount of energy that has to be generated by coal, they force a net reduction in the amount of mercury in the water we all have to drink.

Here, have a chart.

So, yeah. Still better off.

Eta Carinae Has a New Rival for My Affection

NASA has released a swath of images showing one galaxy blasting the living daylights out of another using radiation from its supermassive black hole core. Very nice.

Any Earth-like planets in the path would be quickly rendered sterile and uninhabitable by living things, unless they're very deep underground. Again, very nice.

Source: Space.com

Shawshank Reenactment Society, First Chapter
So two inmates actually pulled off an escape from a 'high-security' prison by using the trick from The Shawshank Redemption and covering the hole they had made in the wall with girly pictures.

Seriously. Not making this up.

Source: CNN.com

Huckabee is Very, Very Creepy
So is his family. Apparently his demented son and a friend, when at a Scout retreat, strung up a stray dog and tortured it to death. Huckabee then used his position as governor to keep them out of jail.

He even canned a guy for not looking the other way strenuously enough.

Source: Correntwire

The CIA Is a Real Piece of Work
Thanks to various lawsuits, information has emerged on exactly how the CIA tortures people we illegally spirit away in the dead of night, around the world, in violation of common sense and international law.

It's an ugly story indeed, showing that we've learned a lot from our various client states in Latin America and further afield about how to inflict inhuman suffering. Everything's here, from sleep deprivation to temporal disorientation, isolation, confinement, plus we've got the new tricks where we use medical professionals to prevent the inmates from killing themselves, starving themselves, and once they've been completely snapped like twigs, we use psychotropic drugs to force them back to sanity for another round of torture!

Thanks a lot, various American doctors, for going along with this scheme.

Source: Salon.com

These People Need to Get Out More
Honestly, when you start talking about the future like it's going to come out of a Cory Doctorow novel, you really need to touch base with reality. Computers and virtual spaces are all well and good, but as long as you can't actually plug into the Matrix, there are limits to how much they're going to change society. And no matter how much you might want your information-drenched, 'everything at your fingertips' society to work perfectly, nothing ever does. A world where you're never lost because you have your own personal HUD is a world where you're never alone because someone is watching your feed, even if that 'someone' is just an NSA spybot program. A world where you can find any service you want, from pizza to a lawyer, is a world where you'll be bombarded ceaselessly with advertisements FOR pizza, for lawyers. And a world where everybody can produce their own goods from their own energy is a world ready made for religious extremists and bombmakers, a paradise for your Montana wingnut crowd who can finally make their very own brand of Semtex.

So please, enough with the blue-sky blagospheric world-view. It's more than a little exhausting.

Source: Firedoglake