TV News LIES

Here is a story about the present and the future.  It is a story about energy.  Now, it is a story about fracking.  And, not to repeat myself, it is a tale about unbridled madness.  Later, the story could be about something else.

For now, there are plenty of deep and scarring errors in this saga, but no redemption -- maybe in time, but not right now.  Right now, there is only an equally deep, dank, and abiding feeling the world is no longer under any obligation to make sense, that some elemental bargain has been voided, that some vital bank of dead man's switches has been locked out and they no longer work.

Field studies conducted by the U.S. Government have revealed that hydrofracking fluids are responsible for the deaths of four field workers since 2010.

The report, recently released by the National Institute for Occupational Safety, suggests that workers could be exposed to hazardous levels of toxic volatile hydrocarbons found in waste fracking fluids.

While a plurality of Americans overall still believe in creationism, a majority of young adults believe in evolution.

Gallup regularly polls Americans on their beliefs about how human beings came to be. Overall opinions have stayed remarkably stable over time, with a plurality believing that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

The GOP talking points in response to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in a trade for five former officials of the 1990s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) focused on a few basic premises. !. You don’t negotiate with terrorists; 2. such a swap would encourage terrorists to capture Americans; 3. these officials are the worst the worst.

Tagging movements as “terrorist” and then refusing to deal with them is frankly stupid. The Taliban in Afghanistan are not a small terrorist group like, say, the Italian Red Brigades of the 1970s and 1980s. They are guerrillas belonging to a movement that at one point had captured the state and run it. The Taliban are now a guerrilla group, holding territory.

More than 77,000 foreign banks have agreed to share information about U.S. account holders as part of a crackdown on offshore tax evasion, the Treasury Department said Monday.

The list includes 515 Russian financial institutions. Russian banks had to apply directly to the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service because the U.S. broke off negotiations with Russia over an information-sharing agreement after Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

There is a new class of planet out there that astronomers are calling the "mega-Earth". It is an object with a hard surface like our own world but much, much bigger.

The necessity for the new designation follows the discovery of a planet which has a mass some 17 times that of Earth.

Known as Kepler-10c, it orbits a star about 560 light-years away. Scientists described its properties at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston.

They confess it is something of a head-scratcher.

Government agents seized control of two computer networks that are used by hackers to steal banking information and lock files on infected computers, officials in the United States and Europe said Monday, disrupting the circulation of two of the world’s most pernicious viruses, which have infected millions of computers worldwide.

The coordinated strike targeted malware known as GameOver Zeus, which is known to steal bank information and send it to overseas hackers, and CryptoLocker, which burrows into computers and encrypts personal data. The hackers then demand a ransom to unlock the files.

When the Obama administration unveils its much-anticipated proposal to curb power plant emissions, this cornerstone of the president's climate change policy - the most significant environmental regulation of his term - will not be declared in a sun-bathed Rose Garden news conference or from behind the lectern in a major speech.

It will not be announced by the president at all, but instead by his head of the Environmental Protection Agency, while President Barack Obama adds his comments in on an off-camera conference call with health advocates.