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Monday, April 21, 2003
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Anything into Oil. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.
Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that. [Discover Magazine]
9:03:42 PM 
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War in Iraq a reason for shame. Anguish and guilt are what at least some of the soldiers in the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which has borne the brunt of the fighting in Iraq, are now experiencing. They have found themselves fighting a grossly outmatched opponent. The Christian Science Monitor quoted one 3rd Infantry Division soldier saying, "For lack of a better word, I feel almost guilty about the massacre. We wasted a lot of people. It makes you wonder how many were innocent. It takes away some of the pride. We won, but at what cost?" [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]
Unfortunately the people who put those soldiers in that situation aren't likely to be sympathetic. The Crusaders write and speak (from the safety of their civilian jobs far from Iraq) like a bunch of raving bloodthirsty maniacs. I expect that actual soldiers expressing remorse for the people they killed will be labeled "anti-American traitors" or some such.
11:45:18 AM
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Liberate America First. Freedom is a very simple concept. It means doing what you wish with what is yours. It takes years of post-graduate study under PhD's to unlearn what freedom means. Freedom means that when you wake up in the morning, your life, liberty and property are yours to do with them what you will. Of course, that means that no one else's life, liberty, or property is yours. That's freedom. It's real simple. It's also a state of being I have never experienced. And I have no reason to believe that any Iraqi under American rule will ever experience it either.
Let me give the post-graduately brain-washed an example. I recently sent New York State $1,000 to satisfy one of the fifty or so taxes I have to pay every year to avoid being dragged out of my home and thrown into a dungeon. At the same time, I was asked to contribute to a very local charitable cause which I will not identify lest anyone's privacy be violated. I contributed $50. I wanted to give more, but alas, I had just been the victim of a robbery by the state (technically, an extortion, for you lawyers). Freedom is being able to do what you will with your own. I am not free and none of my fellow-citizens is free either. For one thing, we are compelled to pay for America's global and growing military empire even though it makes us sick. [LewRockwell.com]
9:33:04 AM
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Adventures in Security. Latest threat to go nuts, grab some tweezers, and hijack a plane to Cuba? Why none other than White House spin-czar Ari Fleischer, one of the best known faces on the planet. Flying commercial landed Fleischer in the aptly named "random" search cue. [Hit & Run]
As a high-ranking employee of the Federal government, Fleischer is probably the only terrorist given one of those searches. The article doesn't say anything about him being kept off the plane, though, so the search apparently didn't do any good.
6:34:36 AM
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Ann Morgan at The Libertarian Enterprise -
A Comparison Between Us and the Iraqis - physician heal thyself,
says Ms. Morgan. Indeed! [tle] [End the War on Freedom]
I can't help but wonder what the reaction of the patriotic flag wavers who are so in favor of this war with Iraq would be if some aliens from the Andromeda galaxy, who had a society organized on more Libertarian type principles than ours is invaded the US tomorrow and proceeded to destroy the pentagon, whitehouse, the capitols of all 50 states, and hunt down every government official above the level of sewer commisioner, in order to 'Liberate' us. A few people would applaud this action, yet I can't help but think that the majority of the same people who approve of what we are doing in Iraq would denounce such a thing being done to us as an 'atrocity'. And after the aliens left they would probably do their best to rebuild an even more oppresive regime than we had before. Too many people like wearing chains, so long as they are their chains, and they are used to them.
6:17:19 AM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/15/2006; 1:53:35 PM.
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