Thursday, April 18, 2013

Have a friend who's a nurse in Waco,

less than ten miles from West; let's say she's had a very busy past day.

Why I said the vote was a victory, not the end:
“We’re just not taking no for an answer,” she vowed.
Think about that: she doesn't care what the people actually think; she only cares what she and her  nasty little statist friends demand.


Ignore anything else, what kind of idiot goes into the wilds of Idaho in March to live off the land?


Ok, this mess with the Saudi national gets even more screwy.  If this thing isn't fully and publicly cleared up, the Obamites are going to screw trust even more.  Which is something they really don't want to do.
Assuming they care, of course.


The squirrel with the insurance fetish?  Is insisting that there is not and never has been any real effort to ban any guns, that's all the NRA lying and screwing with the democratic process.  How the hell do you even attempt to get through to someone like that?

2 comments:

Keith said...

It's a bugger that fertilizer plants still explode, and even more that people get hurt when they do.

It was the fertilizer (with wax anti caking coating and leaked fuel oil) on a ship exploding in Texas City port, that lead to the development of ammonium nitrate - fuel oil as a commercial explosive.

There'd already been a couple of big explosions in German fertilizer plants, one where someone tried to use dynamite to loosen up a stockpile (with wax anti caking agent) which had caked...

It says something about the way different people's minds work

- in Germany, the lesson learned was, don't use explosive to break up heaps of caked ammonium nitrate...

- In America, the lesson learned was, sheeeeeeyyyyyiiiitttt! that stuff goes well! and ammonium nitrate and fuel oil are far cheaper, safer to transport (seperately), mix and handle than nitroglycerine - I wonder...

closer to me, we had a delivery of fertilizer a good 20 years back, which was very late (long before mobile phones - so the driver couldn't ring to tell us).

He'd used a road tunnel under a river.

The tunnel folks, "following procedures" had held all of the hazardous loads back, and stopped the cars to send the hazardous loads through together

so the 25 ton load of fertilizer went through in the middle of a convoy of fuel tankers.

More recently, the stuff's been so expensive we've been exploring all sorts of "alternatives" some of which have the neighbours up in arms about the smell (they chose to live in a farming area - I didn't force them to move here).

markm said...

Keith: (NH4)(NO3) is an explosive all by itself - if heated, one half releases hydrogen and the other half releases oxygen, with plenty of energy suddenly released from burning hydrogen to water:

(NH4)(NO3) --> N2O + 2 H2O

N2O (nitrous oxide) is unstable compared to N2 (nitrogen), so adding fuel to burn with that extra oxygen increases the energy - and the right added fuel will spread the detonation faster for a bigger bang. And it's cheap compared to other explosives.

But ammonium nitrate is dangerous enough all by itself. In a way it's the ideal nitrogen fertilizer (as concentrated as fixed nitrogen can be), but it generally makes more sense to dilute the fixed nitrogen with inert substances so your fertilizer can't blow you up.