We need to have a page where we can put these kinds of articles up and people can take potshots at them. RBers can vote for the best comments and we can see which comments win at the end of the day.
So without further adieu, I present the following:
Liposuctioning unwanted blubber out of pampered Los Angelenos may not seem like a dream job, but it has its perks. Free fuel is one of them.
For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator.
Love handles can power a car? Frighteningly, yes. Fat--whether animal or vegetable--contains triglycerides that can be extracted and turned into diesel. Poultry companies such as Tyson are looking into powering their trucks on chicken schmaltz, and biofuel start-ups such as Nova Biosource are mixing beef tallow and pig lard with more palatable sources such as soybean oil. Mike Shook of Agri Process Innovations, a builder of biodiesel plants, says this year's batch of U.S. biodiesel was likely more than half animal-derived since the price of soybeans soared.
A gallon of grease will get you about a gallon of fuel, and drivers can get about the same amount of mileage from fat fuel as they do from regular diesel, according to Jenna Higgins of the National Biodiesel Board. Animal fats need to undergo an additional step to get rid of free fatty acids not present in vegetable oils, but otherwise, there's no difference, she says.
Greenies like the fact that waste, such as coffee grounds and french-fry grease, can be turned into power. "The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat for fuel--and I have more fat than I can use," Bittner wrote on lipodiesel.com. "Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly but they get to take part in saving the Earth." Bittner's lipodiesel Web site is no longer online.
Using fat to fuel cars might be environmentally friendly, but it's definitely illegal in California to use human medical waste to power vehicles, and Bittner is being investigated by the state's public health department.
Although it's unclear when Bittner started and stopped making fat fuel or how he made it, his activities came to light after recent lawsuits filed by patients that allege he allowed his assistant and his girlfriend to perform surgeries without a medical license.
Attorney Andrew Besser, who represents three patients, says the assistant and girlfriend removed too much fat from clients and left them disfigured. Dozens of other patients have complained to the state medical board, Besser says. The board is investigating Bittner but declined to comment.
The investigations, however, might go nowhere: Bittner closed his practice, Beverly Hills Liposculpture, in November and moved to South America to do volunteer work at a clinic, according to a note on his Web site. Besser says Bittner likely fled the country because of the investigations. Bittner's lawyer didn't return calls seeking comment.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/25/2008 14:23 Comments ||
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#6
I second Barbara's comment.
In Douglas Coupland's Generation X there's a brief description of what happens when dogs start nosing in the trash cans behind the local liposuction clinic. I have to stop now, or I won't be able to eat Christmas dinner.
#4
I got Lance in My Pants.
On another note, Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs, did a special last Sunday on wht people are doing to go Green. He did quite a few cuts of ordinary people who have carved a niche for themselves and their workers doing Dirty Jobs that recycle and reclaim things. At the end he said these people do more for the Environment than ant high-paid consultant, Hollywood Star, or Green Activist. This is the road the Government should be taking. Encourage Small Business generation. Reward inovative ideas. I know that's not gonna happen but I can dream.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
12/25/2008 17:15 Comments ||
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#5
Notice How Bankruptcy doesn't actually destroy ANYTHING physical?
The west needs a wave of bankruptcy to remove mal-investments. The government could do a great deal to help AFTER bankruptcy, but before bankruptcy it does a great deal of harm to the wider economy.
Saudi Arabia's grand mufti has objected to women working in lingerie shops, despite the Labour Ministry's approval and rising complaints from female customers about male-only staff, papers said on Wednesday. "Women are entrusted to us, we should not involve them in matters far from their nature," mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said. The mufti's disapproval came after the powerful religious police, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, announced on Tuesday that it does not oppose women sales personnel in lingerie stores as long as they worked in malls restricted to women and did not come in contact with men. Saudi women have long complained that they feel uncomfortable having to buy lingerie from men and would prefer female sales assistants. But the kingdom's ultra-conservative religious leaders have opposed allowing saleswomen in shops where men are allowed on the grounds that it would violate restrictions on contacts between opposite sexes not from the same family.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/25/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
First it's lingerie. Then it's makeup. And then it's the miniskirt. Lingerie is the flame, makeup is the fuse, and the miniskirt is the bomb!
In the first instance of cyber attack on Indian government websites, the attack on Eastern Railways site on Wednesday popped open vulnerability of government websites in the country.
While Eastern Railway took almost two and half hours to restore the site to normalcy, visitors to the site continued to be attacked by Trojan virus. ER officials could only primarily trace the roots to Toronto in Canada after repeated top-brass meetings all through the day.
As spotted by FE in the morning, the official site of the Eastern Railway-www.eastern railway.gov., was hacked on Wednesday. When opened, the scroll on the site -- which normally consists of official announcements -- had unusual notes. The first note read: "Cyber war has been declared on Indian cyberspace by Whackerz- Pakistan (24 Dec-2008)." This was followed by two other notes: "Indians hit hard by Zaid Hamid" and "We are f**ked up Indians. You are hacked."
When clicked, the scroll opened into a new window which claimed that 'Mianwalian of Whackerz" has hacked the site in response to the air violation of Pakistan. It also claimed that it will continue to hack more Indian military and government sites. The threat note also claimed that servers of Indian financial institutions will also be hacked with the help of the group's members working in computer departments of "foreign companies". Data belonging to "Indian nationals (only Hindus)" will be destroyed eventually, it added.
Another threat note asked the visitors of the website to watch the real Indian conspiracy in Mumbai attacks on the website-www.brasstacks.pk. Brasstacks claims to be "a unique Pakistani think tank devoted to the study of regional and global political events and their implications for Pakistan's security and interests." The note ended with the slogan "Long live Pakistan".
The third note, which showed the hackers' apathy towards India, Israel and USA, challenged Indians to save their 'motherland' from turning into pieces.
When contacted, ER officials seemed unaware of the entire incident and the site remained as it is for almost an hour, till 11.40am, after which ER blocked it. The website resumed to normalcy after 12, when the threat notes in the scroll as well as in the news and events section were removed.
"Our sites have cyber security certificate from US-based Thawte," said an ER official. "We have informed the service provider and will get a detailed response from them only after 24 hours," he added.
According to a cyber security expert, similar attacks can be done through SQL injection method. In case of a SQL injection attack, webpages with active content like feedback forms are used. Attackers can write malicious commands in the forms through a rich text format and get control over the database of the target site.
Posted by: john frum ||
12/25/2008 10:14 ||
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#1
Is there any such thing as a casus belli in the modern world?
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/25/2008 13:50 Comments ||
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Steve,
Between nuclear-armed rivals that bar is one set rather high, for obvious reasons. My guess is that if there is another Indo-Pak war, Pak will launch their nukes because they'll feel they've nothing to lose since they're going down anyway.
India will retaliate in kind and the worst mistake in the history of the British Empire will finally have borne its last crop of poisoned fruit.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
