black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             
Turning Chicken Feathers Into Car Fuel

Chicken consumption in the US creates over six billion pounds of feathers each year. Researchers at University of Delaware, have developed a new hydrogen storage method — carbonized chicken feather fibers — that can hold vast amounts of hydrogen, a promising but difficult to corral fuel source, and do it at a far lower cost than other hydrogen storage systems under consideration.

Genius.

Washington and the Iran Protests: Would they be Allowed in the US?

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul, 250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, ‘protest zones’ were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested.

I applaud the Iranian public’s protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a ‘Homeland Security’ national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word ‘terrorist’ around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort. - Juan Cole

The Fiat-ization of the American male

Can a nation of dudes whose sexual self-image was built on macho Jeeps survive the rise of the Little Mouse?

Ever since the first American car clanked off an assembly line, American males have been programmed to associate virility with large, overpowered steel-and-chrome automobiles, preferably adorned with tumescent hood ornaments and protruding, D-cup-size bumper boobs. Buffeted by divorce, feminism, potbellies, a useless repertoire of lame pickup lines and the thousand other natural shocks that flesh is heir to, the long-suffering American male has always known he could find solace in the long, rigid-chassis object reposing in his garage. Indeed, only their function as a kind of auxiliary national phallus can explain why Detroit’s gas-guzzling dinosaurs have survived as long as they have.

But with one rash, emasculating decision, the Supreme Court has drained the oil out of our national crankcase. The merger of Fiat and Chrysler means that the all-American era of he-man Jeeps, phallocentric Chargers and randy Rams has yielded to humiliating automotive domination by a country whose most famous building cannot even attain full verticality.

The consequences of Fiat’s victory for the male American psyche could be devastating. Confused and belittled, American men will shrivel behind the wheels of their dinky cars. Millions of dates will end with a dry, perfunctory peck on the cheek, punctuated by the disillusioned slamming of a tinny, Platonic door. Misery will blight America’s bedrooms. The sale of “If this van’s rockin’, don’t come a knockin’” bumper stickers will plummet. Long-neglected American women will fall like ripe fruit into the hands of lecherous central-planning bureaucrats from Brussels.

Gary Kamiya

Right-Wing Extremism "Fed By The Conservative Media"

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by DHS warning that current conditions resemble those in the early ’90s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. There is, however, one important thing that the report didn’t say: today, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment. They have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House. At this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.

Paul Krugman

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