Einstein's Amygdala Part One: The Baby Rabbit Rescue

January 2022, first blog of the new year. And I can tell this is going to be a multi-parter.

One day in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when I was a teenager in the 1970s, my adored and adorable white mutt persian cat - Samantha - came to the door with a baby cottontail rabbit. As I recall, she was clutching the baby rabbit by the scruff of its neck, as Samantha did with countless litters of her own kittens over the years. But I knew she was a hunter, she'd likely eat the baby bunny, and I reacted quickly to save it.

Samantha gave up the baby rabbit to me with what seemed a minor fuss as compared to times I'd tried to get back a prized bird or mouse. I rushed to show the baby rabbit to my little brother and sister, who cooed and said how cute it was, and I started to tell them about a wild cottontail my great aunt and my mom and I raised successfully when I was 3 years old, and the memories of...

... Wham. Samantha was back, with a second baby cottontail rabbit. We were so occupied with the first, stupidly in hindsight. Bunnies are born in litters of five or six. The eyes were not quite open, so this was a nest of bunnies, and Samantha hadn't fought to keep the first, either because she was on a fire-fighter rescue mission to save all the other bunnies, or she knew there was plenty of lamb hasenpfeffer where that came from.

So I gave the first and second baby rabbits to my siblings, and followed Samantha this time, out into the side yard of our brown split level home on the corner, down the hill toward the small park across the street. Samantha went on with her mission, and this time I was tracking her. She entered some leafy ivy covered portion of the yard, and quickly emerged with Peter Rabbit #3. I grabbed both the cat (now growling) and kitten still in her mouth and carried them both back to the front door, where our mom was now preparing a box for the involuntary kitten-bunnies. We got the third baby rabbit out of Samantha's mouth, and then shut the cat in the lower floor of the house to keep her from returning, whether as Terminator 1 or Terminator 2 - this fluffy white Schwartzenegger was in the penalty box.

But how long, realistically, could we expect to keep our "free range" cat, who'd been free to live her life indoors or out for 15 years? Some moral blue district suburban PETA subscriber today would tell me to keep all cats indoors, and never remove their claws, accept the collateral damage to the wallpaper and furniture. And today no doubt the population of humans is doubled, and the standard of living of humans now supports far more cats and far larger home spaces. But this was Arkansas in the 1970s, and I came from a family of Ozark farm dwellers. Rabbits have as many litters as they do each year because they have evolved to be food. If not for the owls, bobcats, foxes, falcons, coyotes and wolves, rabbits would suffer a mass overpopulatoin, disease and starvation. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution left us with rabbits facing far fewer pumas and grey wolves, and if some farmers grandkids cats caught and ate a few, it was merciful violent mitigation of the dearth of carnivores humans had created over just the past few centuries. 

My 1978 Pentax K1000 pointed at my sister stirs amygdala counter-threat

Short Post: Smelters and Financial Assurance.

Want to try something new.  Brief brilliant posts. Easy to read.

I've got totally bogged down by BAN.org and MIT. I have pages and pages of unposted blogs defending me and my clients.  

Totally quick brilliant blog post starts now.
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Primary copper, zinc and lead smelters can use CRT cullet instead of feldspar, galena, angelsite.
See my article on why they don't (Time out of Mined)
If the smelters are making a rational decision not to use the CRT cullet as fluxing agent (because of the multimillion, even billion dollar fines history with EPA over Superfund sites), then they need smaller secondary smelters, like NuLife, to manage it.
NuLife and other micro-smelters, which turn CRT glass into lead feedstock, need affordable closure plans.
So the primary smelters - Doe Run, Teck Cominco, Glencore, Southern Copper, Penoles, etc. - which individually could accept 200 tons per day of CRT glass but don't want to - should offer to take NuLife material under a closure plan.  A one time clean out situation, they take 60 days of recycled cullet.
EPA would never bother them, they'd be bailing EPA out of an undesirable closure situation.
The smelters would be paid for the "insurance" value.  They get say $20,000 per year just to SAY they WOULD take it if the closure was invoked.

The NuLife micro-smelter can make a significant contribution to USA's e-waste problem.  This is totally a smidge compared to the mining and primary smelting business, but EPA and environmentalists are obsessed with it.
To find out why, you have to read some of the 1,867 older longer blogs.  It's guilt, liability, psychology stuff.


BAN can free my genius to create more solutions if they stop being absolute pricks to people like Joe Benson, EcoPark, Net Peripheral, and my clients in Boston.  

Lesson in CRT Cullet and Sintering: Size Matters

The EPA vs. American Mining Congress case in the early 90s resulted in the "remanded smelter slag" rule.  The mining industry convinced the court, and even EPA, that treating slag piles as "waste" with 365 day storage ("speculative accumulation") under RCRA statute, did more harm than good.   Today, it's an industrial mineral, and can be kept under basically the same conditions  as mined angelsite or other leaded silicate, because treating it otherwise is anti-recycling.

Anti-recycling means that the identical chemical solid is governed more strictly if it's recovered from waste instead of mined from the ground.