The technology takes any carbon based waste, and I do mean any carbon based waste and turns it into high quality oil, water and some minerals at 85% energy efficiency. 15% of the output supplies enough energy to run the process. It’s not hype and vu-graphs either. They’ve got a real pilot plant going up beside the Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri. Oil from turkey offal.
Color me skeptical. While this isn’t a perpetual motion machine (there’s no theoretical reason that this can’t work), there are some tricky implementation details. I live in hope but not expectation.
On a side note, this process would actually be evidence for the Deep, Hot Biosphere theory by Thomas Gold, which claims that oil is produced on a regular basis by microbiological life deep in the Earth’s crust rather than in a one time event during / after the Age of the Dinosaurs.
Gun-toting police burst into a South Carolina high school, ordering students to lie down in hall ways as they searched for drugs. […]
The school’s principal defends the dramatic sweep, caught on the school’s surveillance tape. Police came into the school with guns at the ready, ordered all students to lie on the floor and then handcuffed anyone who apparently didn’t comply quickly enough. […]
Police didn’t find any criminals in the armed sweep, but they say K-9 dogs smelled drugs on a dozen backpacks. Goose Creek police and school administrators defend the draconian measures as necessary for crime prevention. […]
The paper quoted Lt. Dave Aarons of the Goose Creek Police Department as saying that the suspected drug dealers appeared to be knowledgeable about where the school surveillance cameras were. […]
“They know where the cameras are. If they stand directly under them, the camera’s don’t look directly down,” Aarons told the paper.
Obviously the only solution to the druggies being insufficiently stoned to not notice the cameras is a full live weapon commando raid. A cynic might suggest an extra camera or two that removed the blind spots or maybe some investigative work or actual hard evidence of drug use, but clearly our drug warriors didn’t listen to such naysayers before endangering school children.
The Palestinian Authority, headed by Yasser Arafat, is paying members of a Palestinian militant organisation which has been responsible for carrying out suicide attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, a BBC investigation has found.
A total of up to $50,000 a month is being sent to members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed group that emerged shortly after the outbreak of the current Palestinian intifada, a BBC Correspondent programme reveals.
A former minister in the government led by ex-Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) says that the money is an attempt to wean the gunmen away from suicide bombings. He says the policy of paying the money was not instigated by Mr Arafat but has been carried out with his knowledge and agreement.
Yeah, reducing their “dependency” on murder and suicide, that’s the ticket!
[source]
Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for an end to Iraq’s military occupation, but to its economic colonisation as well. That means reversing the shock therapy reforms that US occupation chief Paul Bremer has fraudulently passed off as “reconstruction”, and cancelling all privatisation contracts that are flowing from these reforms.
How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? Easy: by showing that Bremer’s reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly violate the international convention governing the behaviour of occupying forces, the Hague regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva conventions, both ratified by the United States), as well as the US army’s own code of war.
The Hague regulations state that an occupying power must respect “unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country”. The coalition provisional authority has shredded that simple rule with gleeful defiance. Iraq’s constitution outlaws the privatisation of key state assets, and it bars foreigners from owning Iraqi firms. No plausible argument can be made that the CPA was “absolutely prevented” from respecting those laws, and yet two months ago, the CPA overturned them unilaterally.
Didn’t Iraq’s ‘laws’ allow arbitary arrest, torture and execution by the state? Maybe Bremer should be doing some of that.
— Amos
Well, from what I can tell Klien does find privitization to be more objectionable than brutal repression. After all, the former tends to prevent universal health care.