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Channahon vegetable oil fractionation plant being converted to EFTI 60-million gallon per year Bio-refinery.

TAMPA, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–EarthFirst Technologies, Incorporated (“EarthFirst” or “the Company”) (OTCBB:EFTI) today announced details of its plans to establish the United States’ first Bio-refinery. This facility will be capable of producing ASTM 6751 biodiesel, as well as other high value products from palm-based methyl esters produced during the biodiesel production process.

Similar projects exist in Singapore and Malaysia, but the facility located in Channahon, Illinois will be the first in the United States.

The key to the Company’s Bio-refinery is the use of palm oil based feedstock. The chemical composition and stability of palm oil make it suitable for refinement into numerous products.

To secure the continuous availability of palm oil feedstock, EarthFirst has entered into a 15-year Supply Agreement with LODERS CROKLAAN USA, LLC (“Loders”), a wholly owned subsidiary of the IOI Group. IOI has an existing supply chain for palm oil products from Malaysia to Channahon, Illinois which serves Loders’ specialty fats business supplying the requirements of the US food industry. The Company also has a 15-year Agreement with Loders to lease a currently unused vegetable oil fractionation facility, located on its own self-contained site, adjacent to Loders’ other operations in Channahon.

IOI Corporation Bhd (www.ioigroup.com) is a public company traded on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange and is one of Malaysia’s leading palm oil producers. By virtue of a recent acquisition, IOI has also just become the world’s largest supplier of fatty acids and related products. IOI is a founding member of the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil and is committed to its sustainable cultivation practices at its plantations.

The leased facility at Channahon will need only minor initial retrofitting to produce 45 million gallons per year of biodiesel, with a production goal of 60 millions gallons per year. Accordingly, the Company’s capital cost for biodiesel production at the Channahon facility will be dramatically less than an equivalent capacity green-field biodiesel development project.

EFTI selected a facility in the state of Illinois as its first Bio-refinery site because Illinois is the logistics center of seven Midwestern states that consume almost 90% of the biodiesel currently produced in the US and offers significant financial incentives for the production and sale of biodiesel in the state. EFTI also selected Loders’ Channahon, Illinois site because the site has exceptional river access and rail sidings and is a central location for oil and chemical product truck loading. It is also less than one-half mile from a major Exxon refinery and in the heart of an area which can use the other Bio-refinery products.

EFTI has employed one of the US leading biodiesel engineering firms, R.C. Costello and Associates to design the retrofit of the Channahon facility for biodiesel production. Costello has already delivered a complete front-end engineering package. Detailed construction drawings and ground-breaking are expected in the next three weeks. The retrofit is estimated to take five months, with production commencing in November, 2007.

EFTI CEO and Chairman, John Stanton commented, “We are very pleased to be working with the IOI Group. Soybeans have been carrying the biodiesel load thus far, but ultimately can only meet a fraction of US biodiesel needs. The US needs to use all available feedstocks if our nation hopes to produce and use billions of gallons of biodiesel to meet the twin goals of reducing CO2 emissions and minimizing carcinogenic particulates associated with petroleum diesel. Our Bio-refinery concept establishes a new and revolutionary economic model for biofuel production in the US.”

About EarthFirst Technologies, Incorporated

EarthFirst Technologies, www.earthfirsttech.com, is a specialized holding company engaged in researching, developing and commercializing technologies for the production of alternative fuel sources and the destruction and/or remediation of liquid and solid wastes, and in supplying electrical contracting services to commercial and government customers internationally. Through its subsidiary World Environmental Solutions Company (WESCO), EarthFirst markets solid waste remediation plants utilizing a proprietary Catalytic Activated Distillation (CAVD) process, which is a superior technology developed by EarthFirst to recycle rubber tires and other waste by heating the material without burning it. Through its subsidiary Electric Machinery Enterprises, Inc., www.e-m-e.com, the Company provides electrical contracting services both as a prime contractor and as a subcontractor, electrical support for industrial and commercial buildings, power generation stations, and water and sewage plants in the US and abroad. Through its subsidiary, SolarDiesel Corporation, the Company is primarily focused on facilitating commercial scale production and distribution of biofuels produced from palm oil.

Investors are cautioned that certain statements contained in this document as well as some statements in periodic press releases and some oral statement of EFTI officials are “Forward-Looking Statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the “Act”). Forward-looking statements include statements which are predictive in nature, which depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, which include words such as “believes,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “expects,” and similar expressions. In addition, any statements concerning future financial performance (including future revenues, earnings or growth rates), ongoing business strategies or prospects, and possible future EFTI actions, which may be provided by management, are also forward-looking statements as defined by the Act. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to materially differ from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and to vary significantly from reporting period to reporting period. Although management believes that the assumptions made and expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, there is no assurance that the underlying assumptions will, in fact, prove to be correct or that actual future results will not be different from the expectations expressed in this report. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and EFTI has no specific intention to update these statements.

Today Dennis Kucinich was in town and one of the stops was at Courside Grill right next to work. He was there a little after 4 pm and I stayed there until right before I had to go to work. I missed most of his q and a part, but it was really cool to be in the same room with him for a while. The place was pretty packed.

He talked about the lies that got us into Afganastan and Iraq and the lies that Bush is going to use to get us into Iran. We are there for oil but yet oil prices are going up and there are 21 trillian dollars worth of oil in Iraq that the oil companies want to get their greedy hands on. He talked about impeaching Cheney and Bush jr. as well.

More pictures here:

Attention police officers that work in Pinellas County Florida!

Please start ticketing people who run red lights. I am tired of almost being hit by these fucking bastards! Please actively go after these people and telling them they are dicks. If you work in Pinellas county expecially in the West Bay / Roosevelt / Ulmerton area, watch for people who run red lights and get them!

I will give you donuts!!!!

Yesterday night I was doing some maintenance on Carrot Juice and I was looking at my incoming links list and I saw a webpage I didn’t recognize so I went there and it was a pretty nifty site, and on the site was a link to a Rolling Stone article called Boss Hog about Smithfield Foods which is the largest pig killer in the world. The article talked about the massive amounts of shit the pigs produce and how much of a massive environmental impact this is causing killing huge amounts of fish and how there have been human deaths involved with this as well. It is a pretty good article.

The first page of the article:

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do — even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield’s business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

Article is continued here:

Anyway, I was really shocked to see this come from a mainstream magazine like Rolling Stone and at the same time I am happy that they published an article like this. Rolling Stone has millions of readers and I am sure that they open up a lot of eyes to the tortures and environmental impact that eating meat produces.

I personally am going to buy this issue and also write a letter to them thanking them for allowing such a piece to be published.

For the last 30+ hours I have been reading, replying to and posting comments here and here in the (livejournal business ) community. I need to stop. I need to make myself stop. After 70+ pages it is all pretty much the same.

For those of you in LJ land who didn’t read my last post, and those of you who are reading this in a blog from the outside world, what is going down is Livejournal is now actively putting ads in LJ calling them “sponsored communities. You are probably saying, so? There are ads everywhere. Well, you are right. Read on…

I have been a part of Livejournal for six years and three months, which is a lot of time and energy vested in something. I have several accounts with LJ, one an early adopter, a couple more through the invite system. I spend 80% of my computer time on LJ, Whoa! You say – computer time is not equal to internet time, you are correct, however I am also correct in saying that 80% of my computer time is on LJ, 90% of my online time is on LJ. Livejournal for me is my place to be on the internet. I have friends, family, and community there. Anything I need is there. My news, my information, and the comics I like to read. I can even find pr0n to masturbate to there if I want. All of this is ad free. Livejournal doesn’t give me popups, popovers, banners, or annoying beat the beaver and win prize bullshit. I admit, there are a very few syndicated feeds on my LJ that do serve me a banner. This didn’t come from LJ, it came from the feed it’s self, it stays in the feed, and it is something that LJ can not control, if I choose, I can remove the banner or the feed at anytime, I choose to live with it.

Livejournal has promised from day one to never serve us ads. The founder said that he was adamantly against ads in any way shape or form and he will keep it this way. He then sold his company to Six Apart. We as a community were in an uproar, we said that this is bad, they are going to kill LJ or even worse, serve us ads! Why Brad why?! SixApart then promised to us that they will keep with the standards and spirit of LJ and told us that they will give us no ads ever! So the angry mob calmed down and said OK, we trust you.

Livejournal saves me a lot of time, instead of going to 10+ websites a day to get my daily fix of information and dealing with their annoyances (see ads) I get it all in one place. Livejournal is one of the last islands out there where I am not bombarded with the increasingly annoying and hard to get rid of ads.

I do not want any kind of advertisements in LJ; not only for the above reasons, but it will also kill the spirit of community in Livejournal. When you ask for advice in a community, you trust the members to give you honest unbiased information. Now with these people creating user accounts and communities that LOOK like user accounts and communities, you will not be able to trust the people posting, are they being honest about a product? Are they a corporate monkey selling their wares to you? If you go to

( and start to read the comments, you will see the poorly disguised corporate worker bees trying to pose as lj users saying how much they love the movie. Their journals are newly created and/or never to very rarely posted in. It doesn’t take much for the average person to see through the deception. How do we know that they don’t go to other users and communities spreading their advertising?

This is going to kill something I love dearly: live journal, the spirit of Live journal and the community of live journal.

I am optimistically hopeful that the people at Six Apart will reconsider and renig on the contracts with the companies that they have lined up. I am hopeful that they will listen to the 3000+ comments telling that they DO NOT WANT. My paid account expires 11/17. I am trying to decide what I should do. Should I go to a free account? Should I abandon LJ all together? Yes I have my blog at Who Gives A Crap, but if I continue to blog there and shut of my live+press plug-in and abandon LJ, I will be abandoning a place that has been near and dear to me for six years.

If you are reading this and you are on LJ, then please, please, please go to one of the above links and tell them you do not want ads on LJ. I have posted this publicly and I have also cross posted this to the blogs at Carrot Juice and Blog Your News. I want people to google, yahoo, or otherwise search this and read this that are from Six Apart, Live Journal, or any other corporation who are considering doing business with them, I do not want ads in LJ. I will not buy your products. I will tell my friends, family, and co workers not to buy your products. I am a single male making enough money to live comfortably. I make buying decisions, and I will not buy any product that is advertised or sponsored on Livejournal.

When I went to get the coke for my rum and cokes I also picked up some Amy’s vegan enchaladas and some Tofutti Strawberry cheesecake “ice cream” and Tofutti Chocolate Supreme “ice cream”. I couldn’t decide between either one so I both. When it came time to eat desert I decided to also put both in the same bowl.

Let me tell you that the combination of these two were fucking orgasmic. Highly recomended.

See more content at http://whogivesacrap.net

For those vegetarians who still consume dairy and think that it does not hurt the animals…

Taken from Factoryfarming.com

Veal is a by-product of the dairy industry. In order for dairy cows to produce milk, they must be impregnated and give birth. Half of the calves born are female, and they are used to replace older cows in the milking herd. The other half are male, and because they are of no use to the dairy industry, most are used for beef or veal.

Within moments of birth, male calves born on dairies are taken away from their mothers and loaded onto trucks. Many are sold through auction rings where they are subjected to transportation and handling stresses. The fragile animals are shocked and kicked, and when they can no longer walk, they are dragged by their legs or even their ears.

Every year, approximately one million calves are confined in crates measuring just two feet wide. They are chained by the neck to restrict all movement, making it is impossible for them to turn around, stretch, or even lie down comfortably. This severe confinement makes the calves’ meat “tender” since the animals muscles cannot develop.

Published scientific research indicates that calves confined in crates experience “chronic stress” and require approximately five times more medication than calves living in more spacious conditions. It is not surprising then, that veal is among the most likely meat to contain illegal drug residues which pose a threat to human health.

Researchers have also reported that calves confined in crates exhibit abnormal coping behaviors associated with frustration. These include head tossing, head shaking, kicking, scratching, and stereotypical chewing behavior. Confined calves also experience leg and joint disorders and an impaired ability to walk.

In addition to restricting the animals’ movement, veal producers severely limit what their animals can eat. The calves are fed an all liquid milk-substitute which is purposely deficient in iron and fiber. It is intended to produce borderline anemia and the pale colored flesh fancied by ‘gourmets’. At approximately sixteen weeks of age, these weak animals are slaughtered and marketed as “white” veal (also known as “fancy”, “milk-fed”, “special fed”, and “formula fed” veal). Besides the expensive veal which comes from calves who are kept in small wooden crates, “bob” veal is the flesh of calves who may be slaughtered at just a few hours or days old. While these calves are spared intensive confinement, they are still subjected to inhumane transport, handling, and slaughter, and many die before reaching the slaughterhouse.

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