From Newsgroup: rec.bicycles.tech

https://ktla.com/news/orange-county/close-to-1000-vehicles-surrendered- at-orange-county-e-bike-buyback-event/

Nearly 1,000 vehicles, including e-bikes and e-motorcycles, were
surrendered at a buyback event in Orange County on Sunday.

A spokesperson with the Orange County District AttorneyAs Office told
KTLA on Monday morning that officials were still counting, but she
believed the number of e-bikes surrendered was oclose to 1,000.o

oWe had nine full truckloads of 26-foot U-Haul trucks,o the spokesperson
said.

The event was the O.C. District AttorneyAs office first E-Bike and E-
Moto Buy Back Program, which took place Sunday at Angel Stadium. Those
who brought their vehicles were offered up to $1,000 in gift cards and
tickets to an Angels game; surrendered vehicles included e-bikes, pocket bikes, e-Scooters, mopeds, and electric motorcycles.

The OCDA spokesperson on Monday morning said that, even after officials
ran out of gift cards, people still surrendered their vehicles.

According to a media release issued by the DAAs Office over the weekend,
the first participant in the program was Jesse Hayes, who suffered
traumatic injuries in an October 2024 e-bike crash.

He and his mother Kasey have become oardent safety advocateso in the
wake of the crash, which left him on life support for three months,
according to the DAAs Office release.

On Sunday, the 20-year-old surrendered the e-bike that he was riding
when he crashed to start the buyback event. Hundreds ended up attending.

The event came amid a rise in e-bike injuries and deaths across Southern California, many of which involve young riders. Just yesterday, a person
on an e-bike was killed in an overnight crash in Los AngelesA Arleta neighborhood.

oIAm throwing every option that I have at this very, very serious public policy issue,o Orange County District Attorney told KTLA on Sunday. oWe
donAt know whatAs going to stick, whether itAs going to be education or enforcement or buybacks, but weAre trying everything we can to address
the issue.o
--
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024
Obama / Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
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From Newsgroup: rec.bicycles.tech

Another Trump era failure. And so it goes.

We should burn rightists for energy. It will give them purpose in life.

Start with the fat ones. Lots of those ones, they're the low hanging
fruit.


The oil in Arabia is dribbling dry. As ever, the alternatives fail to
excite us. Fracking taints water and jolts the Richter scale. In the ash chutes of coal mines, death comes early in the form of black lung. Fission made a crass menagerie of Chernobyl, where irradiated animals scurry on odd-numbered legs; and in Japan history has repeated itself. Windmills
cause insomnia and hypertension, say hysterics in tinfoil hats. Much worse, they depend on whatever way the breeze blows. And solar panels are fair- weather workers, calling in sick on rainy days. So we cling to our crude, despite the petering wells, and soon the lights will dim and the heaters sputter and the radios crackle with white noise, leaving us to chain the
doors and crowd around fires in trash cans as we count the weeks until Ragnaro?k.

The people of Oregon have found another way. In the state whose slogan is
"We Love Dreamers, " America's imagineers have discovered a source of
energy that's all upshot. On April 23, 2014, the State of Oregon admitted
to burning fetuses for fuel.

The news had broken two days before. On April 21, a startling claim came to light in the BC Catholic, Vancouver's godliest gazette, a paper not
renowned for its penny dreadfuls. "The remains of British Columbia's
aborted and miscarried children are ending up in an Oregon waste-to-power plant, " the article read. The body parts are "likely mixed with everyday trash, incinerated to provide electricity to the people of Marion County.
" That's a strident complaint for any newspaper, especially a Canadian one.

But grand indictments demand a grand amount of proof, and the bullhorns of
the pro-life crusade have a yen for elaborate yarns. The BC Catholic delivered, with some testimony from the top. According to British
Columbia's health ministry, "biomedical waste" is "disposed of" through "appropriate" "contracted providers" that routinely ship it to Oregon, all
for profit. There, factories torch "fetal tissue" along with tumors and "amputated limbs, " helping power the homes of the Pacific Northwest. Waste not, want not.

A wave of terror rippled across the Web. In forums, on blogs, fear and loathing played their plaintive notes. Fists in mouths, bug-eyed with
panic, Canucks fretted that Yankees were raking Canadian babies on coals.
They worried that we Americans, with our high-octane lives full of
smartphones and flat-screens, laptops and subwoofers, microwaves and electrical wheelchairs, ten apiece per household, were running on an
economy of literal baby oil.

It seemed a stretch. To those against abortion as much as those in favor of it, consuming human remains for power appeared an uncivilized undertaking.
The tale sounded too Swiftian, like a page ripped out of "A Modest
Proposal. " (That story, in which Swift suggests a society reap its
unwanted offspring for food, is a satire, not an instruction manual. )

But America was doing just that. In an emergency press conference on April
23, Sam Brentano and Janet Carlson, commissioners for Oregon's Marion
County, confirmed the rumors. The corpses were not a canard. According to
USA Today, Brentano and Carlson were "shocked by reports in the Canadian
media that aborted fetuses from Vancouver, British Columbia, were being
sent to [an energy] facility in Brooks, Oregon. "

Carlson told the National Post they "did not know this practice was
occurring until today, " even though Brentano admitted, in USA Today, to
being aware that "county ordinances didn't specifically exclude fetuses
from materials that could be burned at the facility. " Yet there the truth was, as rank as barbecued flesh. The state was shoveling cadavers into the furnaces of the Covanta Marion plant. The plant has been open since 1987.

They wrung their hands and mumbled their mea culpas. They shook their heads and reiterated their ignorance. "We are outraged and disgusted, " Carlson
told CBS News. In the same interview, however, Brentano offered a defense:
"We provide an important service to the people of this state, and it would
be a travesty if this program is jeopardized due to this find. " Indeed, Covanta Marion, which lies 10 minutes from the state capital of Salem and
less than an hour from Portland, supplies power to hundreds of thousands of homes. So they halted the reception of "medical waste" to allow for an inquiry. All the while, the smokestacks wisp away.

* * *

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we're clods of carbon from womb to tomb. We
roam the earth until we don't again, the same before as after. It's the way
of all flesh.

"Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life, " wrote Nietzsche. "The living being is only a species of the dead. " In the screw
and the spasm, the birth and the cradle, the days and the acts, the fall
and the croak and the casket, we sprint headlong to what we always were: a feast for worms and toadstools. Nothing begets nothing, with a short breath
of air between.

To some the backlash against the smokehouses is madness. Some greet the
bone stoves of Oregon, the corpse steam and the embryo engines, with a
shrug and a yawn. Creasing their foreheads in the way of maligned progressives, they cite the fact that what's dead is done. The earth will grind them to muck anyway; we're only speeding it along. Nothing lost, something gained.

Their argument compels, but it does not compel many. Not in America, that safehouse of antique morals, and not in Europe, that vanguard of
revisionist ideas. In March, a report revealed that British hospitals were burning fetuses for heat. "Aborted babies [were] incinerated to heat UK hospitals, " a piece in the Telegraph proclaimed. "At least 15,500 fetal remains were incinerated by 27 [hospitals] over the last two years alone.
" Outrage rankled the limey land. The papers dripped with venom, and
Channel 4 ran an irate special. Dowdy-hattted dames across the Isles, green with horror, spewed their crumpets during teatime. Amid all the hubbub, the state intervened. The British minister of health, Dan Poulter, called the practice "totally unacceptable. " He told the hospitals to abort it immediately.

Yet it is not clear why. Put aside the fact that the law doesn't consider fetuses human. For the sake of argument, say that they are. Raise the
wager. Say that not only "amputated limbs" but the intact corpses of adult humans entered the mix in Britain and Marion County. It seems that nothing changes.

Rites of repose do not please the dead. They comfort only the living. A
mark of our humanity, burial has dogged our morals since the age of Neanderthals. So it should. Mourning takes time, requires a body to make
sense of the incomprehensible. But when the body is discarded, when the relatives wish it away, we might as well make the most of it.

One reason for the anger in Britain was that hospital workers had cooked
some miscarriages without parents' permission. The parents might have hoped
to dispose of their dead babies in style, burying them in shoebox coffins.
But that was a small quirk in the trend, a freak feature, a thrill for the tabloid rags. It was not at all the case in Oregon.

Oregon traded taboo for treasure. In America, the land of promise and land
of plenty, the hallowed foundry of Ford and Edison, we augured again the future of industry. Our superfluous corpses cared not a whit for
formaldehyde infusions and requiems with frankincense. Funerals are for families. Convert the rest to coal. As Jefferson, that firebrand of
American ingenuity, once wrote, "I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living. "

* * *

According to Covanta Marion's website, the plant "processes approximately
550 tons of garbage each day" and generates "13.1 megawatts of electricity each hour, " enough to power a small city. Among all that trash, amid dumpsters of rotting food and vats of industrial sewage, the plant roasts
some 1,900 tons of "medical waste" each year u a fuming mountain of chucked organs, severed hands, and fetal remains that weighs more than ten blue whales.

Marion County boasts of this modern wonder on its website, recording the
daily scene in an encomium of doting detail. "Each day, about 130 loaded refuse trucks arrive at the facility, " the report begins, cinematically,
as though the lede in a high-gloss brochure from the Convention and
Visitors' Bureau. "Once there, they are weighed by truck scales, " to
assure the county it is getting the full amount of fuel it has paid for.
"The truck then proceeds to the tippling floor, where the garbage is dumped into a 34-foot-deep pit. Nearly 3,000 tons of refuse can be held in the pit
at a time. An overhead crane mixes the garbage in the pit, " whisking it
into a uniform mousse to be "burned at temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, " a process whose steam "drives turbines which generate
electrical power. " Weekend vacationists will want to premeditate their enthusiasm, the county warns: "Public tours are held by appointment only. "

An ambitious franchise, Covanta has exported its methods beyond the state's borders. Covanta now operates "over 40 energy-from-waste facilities" throughout North America. Soon the fog of cadaver kilns may fill the air of all 50 states.



The possibilities astound the imagination.

* * *

While a certain logic prevails, the stomach fails, and the fumes of Covanta Marion can make a man sick. At times the belly knows what the brain
discounts, and a man should make like the ancients and read the entrails. Revulsion can reveal un-obvious truths, here as elsewhere. As the ethicist Leon Kass writes, there is wisdom in repugnance.

To some, the affair reeks of Slough Crematorium, the plant in Huxley's
novel "Brave New World" where the dead are converted into fertilizer.
Slough evokes a capitalist state at its nauseous extreme u a society that reduces every person, or thing, to a resource. As economics supplant
ethics, whatever was, whoever was, ultimately whoever is, fades to a figure
on the bottom line. Left unchecked, the machine of consumerism hollows everything into the shell of a commodity.

The dead may no longer be human, but it is inextricably human to think of
them as such. And if we defile our fly-eaten kin as a matter of course,
we're bound to corrupt the way we think of our peers with a pulse. Society arose from the dignified removal of the decaying. The habit is dyed in the fabric of every national flag, from Sumer to the States. Graves kept us in
a single place and laid the fundament for sedentary society. In binding us
to our past, reverence for the dead u not only for deceased individuals but for the departed as a class and a category u gave us a past. In so doing,
it formed the basis of cultural memory and civilization. Trashing the passed-on means junking the past. Do that, and you repackage a society's history as its detritus. A society that constantly recycles itself u here
in the most literal, the most vulgar way possible u is ultimately unaccountable to moral commitments across time. It is a society without values, answering to appetite alone u what Wyndham Lewis calls a "moronic inferno. "

This is the domain of late-stage capitalism. It is a society that eats everything u including, as is the case in Marion County, its own excrement.

Look on our dynamos of stiffs, with their tinder tots and amputation
embers, and you'll get a vision of a hellhole. The scene is a live-action Hieronymus Bosch through a filter of red, white and blue. What's worse is
its picture of the future. When the next one arises, hope they'll pull the plug and cool the fires. Mind the dead. The dead will haunt the living.
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