Imagine, if you will, a four-passenger small car that got 32 mpg and could withstand a 50 mph impact -- front or side -- with only minimal injuries to passengers. Pretty cool, huh? A great counter-argument to bozos who claim that only massive gas-guzzlers can be safe.

Now imagine that such a car was built in the 1970s. By federal government contractors.

Jalopnik has the story of Minicar's Research Safety Vehicles, advanced prototypes that the Carter administration's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration created to demonstrate to automakers what was possible in auto safety and build the car of the future -- 1985. They "looked like an AMC Pacer worked over by the set designers of Battlestar Galactica" (original series, obviously) and featured run-flat tires, anti-lock brakes with crash-sensing radar, and dual-stage airbags. These were build by 1979, let me repeat.

With coming of the stupid ages -- a.k.a. the Reagan era -- the RSV's went the way of the solar panels on the White House roof, and our auto industry was set from from government meddling and pressure to make products that would get fewer of us killed:

Like other American inventions such as the VCR, the lithium-ion battery and David Hasselhoff, many of the RSV's technologies only prospered overseas. Anti-lock brakes and air bags were standard on European cars first; Japanese automakers put the first crash-sensing brake system on the market in 2003, nearly 25 years after the RSV sported it. Yet those five-star ratings from NHTSA that have become standard for front crash safety in U.S. cars come from tests at 35 mph, still 15 mph shy of the RSV bar.

Last year, traffic deaths fell to their lowest level since 1961 at 33,963, after remaining stuck at roughly 40,000 for decades, in part because a modern car has more in common with the RSVs than ever before. With smaller cars, tougher fuel rules and bigger worries about oil on the horizon, that 1985 target date for the program may have been set about 30 years too early.

The Bush I era NHTSB eventually destroyed the RSV prototypes -- to "destroy[] the evidence that you could do much better," suggests Minicars's project manager Don Friedman. Turns out, though, that they didn't succeed; two of the prototypes were still in Minicars' possession.

Two interesting "undercover" videos came my way today. The first is from activist group Mercy For Animals, and shows workers at an Ohio dairy farm abusing cows and young calves, including stabbing cows in the face, legs and stomach with pitchforks, and kicking injured "downed" cows -- abuse carried out and encouraged by the farm's owner.

Does this represent every dairy farm? Of course not. Most make at least some effort to be humane.

(Though there's a sharp limit on how humane you can be in the production of milk in industrial quantities, since you have to keep the dairy cows giving birth to keep the milk flowing; those calves mostly end up as beef and veal, and there's no retirement plan for old dairy cows once they are no longer economically viable milk producers. The natural life span of a cow is 15 to 20 years, but a typical dairy cow (conventional or organic) only lives four to six years before she's slaughtered and ends up as sausages and pet food. Still, I believe the level of cruelty seen in this video would sicken most dairy farmers.)

Not everyone likes the fact that cruelties like this get exposed. Some in the industries that profit from animal abuse would like to "shoot the messenger". Thus, the second animal-abuse related video -- or, supposed animal-abuse related video -- that came my way today: a claimed exposé of the Humane Society of the United States's (HSUS) Duchess Horse Sanctuary, by a group called the Center for Consumer Freedom.

Now, I've sent money to HSUS before, so I was anxious to see if my donations were being misused. What did I see in this exposé? Horses being beaten? Starving, diseased animals? No. I saw some horses in a muddy field, with captions that suggest that this is the entirety of the sanctuary. I've camped out in fields that were almost as bad after enough rain. (Squishwood!)

In point of fact, the Duchess Sanctuary is an 1,120-acre facillity; a video that shows that that an area of perhaps a half an acre is muddy on some day in February (a fairly rainy month in the Eugene, Oregon area, is not exactly damning.

So, I asked myself, what's up with this "Center for Consumer Freedom"? And with a little Google-fu, I had my unsurprising answer: shills. The "Center for Consumer Freedom", the group behind this video, is an front group for the restaurant, meat, alcohol, and tobacco industries, who's primary strategy is to "shoot the messenger" and attempt to discredit any groups -- such as the HSUS -- that criticize these industries.

According to SourceWatch:

This week's Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem based on one of these random sentences, from http://watchout4snakes.com/CreativityTools/ :

Why can't the garble vanish?
The song squashes a building horizon past the wreck.
The grain invalidates the matrix.
How can the settled shape accept on top of the firework?
The cap burns the inside ax.

Feel free to combine two of them or alter them.

the grain invalidates the matrix

the seed cancels the environment
it speaks of new possibilities heretofore unknown

Like many cities and states across the U.S., Los Angeles is threatening an economic boycott of Arizona over its recently passed immigration law -- a law which can only have an effect if Arizona cops engage in racial profiling.

In response, Gary Pierce, a commissioner of the state's public-utility-regulating "Arizona Corporation", threatened the mayor of LA, "If an economic boycott is truly what you desire, I will be happy to encourage Arizona utilities to renegotiate your power agreements so Los Angeles no longer receives any power from Arizona-based generation."

Mayor Villaraigosa stood up to the threat and said he would "not respond to threats from a state which has isolated itself from the America that values freedom, liberty and basic civil rights". But the threat turned out to be toothless: not only does the Corporation not have the authority to cut off the power supply, it turns out that that California owns several of Arizona's power plants.

Whoops.

Maybe California should turn out Arizona's power until the lights get dim enough that brown and white and black people all look the same.

href="http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2529#">Some words of wisdom on animated "splash" intro pages for websites, from Jared Spool, of Macromedia' User Interface Engineering group. Yes, this article is old enough to mention Macromedia, not Adobe; and yet some people still haven't got the message:

Jared said, "When we have clients who are thinking about Flash
splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and
bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the
supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little
show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket
and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on
sale today.

"Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how
many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how
many people punch the mime out.

"That should give you a good idea as to how well their splash
page will be received. That's the crux of it."

The Daily Mail reports that British police secretly investigated the backgrounds of 47,000 flyers last year, people who were singled out for attention by a 1.2 billion pound "terrorist detector" system. The system has never led to the arrest of a terrorist, and is now used to target "sex offenders and football hooligans". One of its red flags for potential terrorists: ordering a vegetarian meal.

The Times of India reports on a Brookings Institution analysis of 2000-2008 census data, which shows a trend of suburban populations becoming more poor and ethnically minority; while younger, educated white folks are moving to cities for jobs. Sure, suburbs still are mostly white, but now there are more Asian, Hispanic, and African Americans outside of cities than inside them.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis is a science fiction classic, a dystopian story of the conflict between the working classes and the owning classes. But American and European audiences have not been able to see the full film in decades -- it was severely cut down for American release. But a full-length version ended up in the private collection of Argentine film critic Manuel Peña Rodríguez, and from there made its way to Argentina's Museo del Cine; and with some help from digital restoration techniques, the (nearly) complete version is back in circulation.

The New York Times profiles champion ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, who runs on the order of 140 miles a week training for races that are often 100 miles or more, sometimes through deserts or frozen wastelands or up and down mountains. Jurek is a vegan, consuming 5,000 to 8,000 calories of plant-based nutrition a day.

And Jurek is not alone as an elite vegan endurance athlete. There's Rich Roll, one of Men’s Fitness Magazine's 2009 “25 Fittest Guys in the World”, is a top Ultraman competitor. Ultraman is a "double Ironman" three day triathlon, with a 6.2 mile ocean swim followed by a 90 mile cross-country cycling race, a 170 mile cycling race, and then on the final day a 52 mile double marathon.

Or there's Brendan Brazier, a professional Ironman triathlete and two-time Canadian 50km Ultra Marathon Champion.

Or Ruth Heidrich, vegan for 24 years, holder of three world fitness records in her age group, six-time Ironman triathlon finisher, and holder of more than 900 gold medals for distances ranging from 100 meters dashes to ultramarathons, who credits going vegan with sending her breast cancer into remission. (This is certainly a controversial claim, and I am not suggesting that anyone discontinue medical treatment.)

If you think that a vegan diet can't give you the energy you need, I suggest you talk to these folks -- if you can catch them!

The Associated Press reports on the 40th anniversary of the "War on Drugs", first declared by Nixon in 1970.

Nixon's initial WoD budget was $100 million; today's is $15.1 billion -- in inflation-adjusted terms, 31 times Nixon's amount. Over those 40 years, we've spent over $570 billion -- that $570,000,000,000, or over $1,800 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. -- just to arrest and imprison over 37 million nonviolent drug offenders. We've also spent billions on foreign interdiction, border enforcement, and anti-drug propaganda.

And according to Justice Department estimate, the consequences of our failed drug policy -- "an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction" -- cost us $215 billion each and every year. Says Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron, "Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use, but it's costing the public a fortune."

The global trade in illegal drugs is $320 billion annually -- 1 percent of the global economy. Ten percent of Mexico's economy is built on drug proceeds, which ought to explain why the country is in, and will remain in, utter chaos.

Think Obama -- who has admitted to cannabis and cocaine use, and who at one point said he favored eliminating criminal penalties for cannabis use or possession -- will change things? Nope. He is requesting a record $15.5 billion for the drug war for 2011, and according to Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance, "President Obama's newly released drug war budget is essentially the same as Bush's, with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as to treatment and prevention...despite Obama's statements on the campaign trail that drug use should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue."

Drug prohibition is an utter and complete failure, and its end cannot come swiftly enough.