Most of the people who stop by here will be familiar with the Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451, a future in which books are banned and burned if found. The title is a reference to the temperature at which paper ignites.

Ammonium nitrate is widely used by farmers as a fertilizer, but it also has a secondary use as a low-grade explosive. While it is generally safe, you don’t want it anywhere that might reach 410° Fahrenheit because that is its flashpoint when it becomes explosive.

Having a fire at a fertilizer plant is almost guaranteed to result in an explosion like this:

Emergency services are searching for survivors after a blast at a fertiliser plant in the US state of Texas killed between five and 15 people.

More than 160 people were injured and dozens of buildings destroyed in the town of West, near Waco.

You don’t fight fires at fertilizer plants, you evacuate people and wait for the explosion. fertilizer plants should have automated fire suppression systems, foam for preference, because of the risk.

Timothy McVeigh added fuel oil to a load of ammonium nitrate and blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. The fuel oil increases the power of the explosion, and the mixture is widely used in mining.

Putting a fertilizer plant in a town is just guaranteeing a disaster at some point.

Why does anyone bother with the Democratic Party? With the Presidency and Congress in their hands for two years, they produced nothing that mattered to Democratic voters. The major output of Zero’s first two years in office with a Democratic Congress was a block of excuses.

The ‘Democratic’ President has consistently advocated cutting Social Security and Medicare – the Party’s biggest achievement.

The Senate Democrats refused to reform the rules that would have ended the Republican obstructionism, and so laws supported by 9 out of 10 Americans can’t even get a vote. Why bother having control of the Senate if the Democrats won’t do anything?

If they aren’t going to represent you, why do you vote for them?

UPDATE: The new system seems to be working at 9:45PM CDT – wonders never cease.

I will be installing an update tonight, so this place will disappear for a while, but hopefully be back up for Cat Blogging.

The status reports will be at my other place, Why Now annex, which is bare and dusty at the moment.

Unfortunately this upgrade is one of those that ‘prunes’ the code, so I can’t simply copy over the existing files, I have to delete them first to avoid a lot of useless code being left in the directories.

If things go as planned [yeah, right, like that ever happens] things will only be down for about 15 minutes, but it will probably take longer based on past experience.

I would prefer to do this on the Weekend, but my ISP has a nasty habit of taking their system down for maintenance on the weekend without warning anyone. It isn’t down for long, usually, but it certainly disrupts file transfers.