China: Adding yet another dimension to Halloween

I happen to think that mankind was never intended to eat refined sugar, and that sugar is probably the single most harmful thing that we shove into our bodies. But let's put that aside for now.

And the child psychology of Halloween is "Gee, it's a wonderful treat to run around and collect tons of sugar and junk food". Sugar and junk food is good, it's a reward, it's a treat, it's special!

The psychology of this annual event, imprinted on vulnerable children, damages them for the rest of their lives, but it enormously enriches many corporations. But let's put that aside too.

Kids in the Philippines have been made ill by candies from China, and in the context of hundreds of defective toy recalls, perhaps parents should keep an eye on what candies the kids are eating this year.

Perhaps the danger is very slight. But is it zero? Suppose a bag of candy is labeled as coming from, say, Mexico. Good. But does that mean that the factory in Mexico doesn't import drums of sweetener syrup from China. And we know that China has used antifreeze to make their syrups go a little farther. Kind of like a heroin dealer cuts his product with something cheaper before it hits the streets.

If the product doesn't say, "Made in China", can we be sure that the product doesn't contain one or more ingredients from China?

Caveat emptor, folks.

China: Who owns who?

American companies have invested heavily in China, and told their workers at home to get lost. Now China is starting to call the tune. Mattel apologized profusely to China for causing bad publicity with the recent recall.

No word yet over whether China apologized for making toys that are dangerous to American children.

China: Offshore bonanza?

Yet another recall for Mattel. Third one. The bankers will be crying in their martinis. Looks good on them. They sold out their own country for the cheap labor of China, and now it's biting them in the ass. That's justice; still, it doesn't make up for all the thousands of lost jobs.

But there's an even more serious question. Are these news items just the tip of the iceberg? When you use a hair spray, what chemicals are in there, courtesy of China, and are now floating around for you to breathe in? You can't tell from the label, can you? You can only read what's supposed to be in there. And you can't tell where the ingredients came from--in other words, how likely is it that the ingredients really are what they say they are.

How big is the iceberg, below the waterline? When you eat a can of soup, is there anything in there that came from China? How about when you paint a room in your house?

When will the next story break? How many stories are being covered up?

From China: Metal shavings in aspartame

Gee, what a surprise. I guess a machinist in some factory thought it wasn't worth the trouble to be careful where the swarf went, because, hey, what the heck, it's only stuff that's being sent to America anyway.

A company is seeking damages; assuming you get a judgement against a company in China, then what?

China Imports: Don't ban, just let us choose

Here's an example of exercising choice: The owner of the Ear Inn, the second-oldest tavern in New York, quickly asked his fish purveyor to "get them from anywhere but China." Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that some Chinese seafood tested positive for banned substances.

Informed choice--simple, right?

China to USA: $30M of substandard food

China exported 30.4 million dollars of substandard food to the USA in 2006. Wow, that's a lot of crappy food!

This information was proudly provided by China.

According to an article in the China Daily, in 2006 "the sale of Chinese food reached 3.8 billion dollars." Yep, that's a lot of food!

In a Reuters article, China whines about unfair criticism because "99.2 percent of whose food exports to the United States in 2006 met quality standards." But doesn't that mean that .8 percent was substandard?

Sort of like the disgruntled wife who prepared a nice breakfast for her husband for 4 months, but one day in the fifth month, she slips arsenic into his cereal. As he lies choking and gasping on the floor, she might say, "But dear, 99.2% of your breakfasts were fine!" Sounds nice when you put it that way, but I still don't think he would be too happy about it.

Here's one more fact you might want to consider, from USA Today: Imported food is rarely inspected. Only 1.3% of food into the USA is inpected.

How about that. Food for thought. The way things are today, this might be the only food you're likely to get that is guaranteed safe for human consumption.

Country of Origin Labels: 92 percent want them

Here's an interesting article about food labeling.

According to Consumer Reports, "U.S. consumers overwhelmingly support stricter food labeling laws, with 92 percent of Americans wanting to know which country produced the food they are buying".

The article also quotes Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York: “It is increased oversight and serious inspections (that) will move us in the right direction”.

A typical politician's response; I'll look after you, I'll take care of everything, just as long as you gimme more inspectors, more money, more, more, more.

Personally, I'm never going to trust any inspection system to catch every problem in the enormous tidal wave of Chinese products! The answer is much more simple. Tell me what's in the products I buy. I'll take it from there.

Global Warming: Follow the money

It's like the story of Chicken Little's sister, who was named Chicken Small.

You know who Chicken Little was, don't you? Everybody has heard of Chicken Little. Chicken Little is famous!

While Chicken Little was running around shouting, "The sky is falling," her sister, whose name was Chicken Small, was calmly saying, "No it isn't. My crazy sister simply got hit in the head by a falling acorn."

Well, anyway, that's how it was.

And Chicken Little got to be famous.

And you never heard of Chicken Small, did you?

Now we switch a different topic (well, slightly different).
For scientists, and also for "scientists", writing successful grant proposals is the difference between "getting by" and doing very well. Sometimes doing VERY, VERY well. Building your little empire of assistants, getting healthy raises in pay...it all depends on success in raising money for research projects. Not to mention ripple-through benefits, like having your articles published in the best journals, being asked to sit on boards, and on and on.

Ok fair enough. Now, let's ask ourselves...which thesis below lends itself best to a striking and successful grant proposal.

• Devastating hurricanes, and Washington, DC sinking into the ocean, are imminent dangers, but can be avoided.

• Global warming will reverse in 50 years; it's just ups and downs of solar activity and there's nothing we can do about it.

The reason that there are sooooo many scientists who have climbed aboard the committed and closed-minded gravy train, is for the money.

And I think Al Gore agrees with me. As he says in his movie:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it." He even puts that up on his huge backdrop display.

Of course, the corollary is that "it's easy to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him understanding it."

And, indeed, suddenly there is an entire discipline, a brand new vast sea of careers, thousands of careers, in fact hundreds of thousands of careers, crying out for people who "understand". The UN alone is a wonderful placement agency for those who "understand".

If you don't "understand", well, sorry, but keep trying.

Follow the money.

Chinese Toothpaste: More interesting details

A recent NY Times article says that now China has "banned manufacturers from making toothpaste with diethylene glycol". Oh, good. But the same article, a bit further down tells us that "presence of diethylene glycol in Chinese toothpaste was first discovered two months ago in Panama, where at least 100 people died from using cold medicine laced with diethylene glycol." So should we still watch out for cold medicine? And what else? I bet there are 100 types of products we should watch out for.

Apparently the Chinese think we are a bunch of whiners, because according to the article, "toothpaste is meant to be spit out". But some of the Chinese brands are for children, with flavors like bubblegum and strawberry. This picture doesn't add up.

Nothing here changes my mind:

• I don't trust the Chinese suppliers
• nor can I totally rely on incoming inspection

The burden has to fall on the importers of the products. Not that we can totally trust our big corporations either, but at least they are within reach of our laws if they transgress. Furthermore, I don't think we want to regulate what they can and can't import. The answer is simple: Label the ingredients AND their country of origin.

Chinese Ingredients: Are we confident yet?

As consumers, we can't always tell what is going into the products we buy. Our trust is based on one of two elements (or both): our confidence in the manufacturer, and our confidence in our government watchdogs (regulators and inspectors). This article doesn't do very much to inspire my confidence on either level. Does it do anything for you?

Chinese Toothpaste: Problem Fixed?

In China they grabbed a regulator who was supposed to be overseeing the safety of food and medicine and executed him. They say he was taking bribes.

This is supposed "to show that it [China] is serious about improving the safety of Chinese products."

Heck, I feel better about things now. Don't you? Maybe if they murdered 10, or 50, administrators, we could really feel good. Problem solved.

Well, maybe not. It still boils down to an issue of trust. Each consumer in North America should be able to make up their own mind if they trust Chinese products, and act accordingly.

Does murdering executives inspire an increased level of trust in Chinese products? Well, it doesn't quite do it for me.

I want the products that I buy to be marked, "contains ingredients imported from China", and then I can make up my own mind about buying.

Consumers shouldn't have to worry about going blind from using tainted eye-drops, or worry about having their baby scream with pain because the baby shampoo has some kind of acid in it. My trust level is still very low. How about you?

Global Warming: Al Gore and Convenient Lies?

How does one promote An Inconvenient Truth? Maybe by using the occasional Convenient Lie.

It is fascinating to watch a master demagogue in action. In Al Gore's movie, there's a point where he claims that there are NO scientists who disagree with his views on global warming (including causes). NONE! And he gives you the proof!

I'll give you the exact, word for word, transcript, right here, right now. You can decide what to call it: snow job, misrepresentation, spin, or outright lying. I figure, if a guy graduated from Harvard, and he's studied this subject matter for decades, as he claims, then the nonsense statements below are as close to lying as damn is to swearing. But you be the judge.

Al Gore: "There are three misconceptions in particular that bedevil our thinking.

"First, isn't there disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not? Actually, not really!

"There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer-reviewed journal written on global warming for the last ten years, and they took a big sample of ten percent--928 articles, and you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we're causing global warming [my emphasis] and that it's a serious problem--out of the 928, zero!

"The misconception that there's disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small group of people. One of their internal memos leaked, and here's what it said according to the press:

Their objective is to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.

"This has happened before...."

And now Al Gore goes into the tobacco company propaganda of the mid 1900s. He shows a poster "More doctors smoke Camels". He quotes from 40 years ago: Doubt is our best product since it is the best means of creating controversy in the public's mind.

Anyway, the monologue above has enough material to fertilize ten tobacco farms. For now, I'll pick the one item that definitely should be included in the next edition of The Demagogue's Handbook of Bullshit Techniques.

He talks of a relatively small group of people, but who are they? Libertarians? New Yorkers? Weight-watchers? Who? He doesn't say. Not even a hint.

One of "their" memos got leaked. Oooooo, this sounds like hot stuff.

Who wrote the memo? He doesn't say.

What actually is in the memo? He doesn't say. The best we get is Al saying what a member of the press says it said.

Which member of the press? He doesn't say.

Ok, he does tell us what the member of the press (who also doesn't quote the actual memo) reports. With all the facts that Al has to pick from, here's what he chose as the most terrible, evil, ugly, words, to share with us:

Their objective is to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.

And he puts that right up there on the big screen!

Wow, doesn't that shake you right to the bones!? Somebody ("they") out there thinks that we should discuss the global warming theory, rather than accept every detail as fact. Shocking. Sounds dangerously scientific; collect data, develop hypotheses, formulate theory, discuss and test... We need to find "they" and burn them at the stake!

To actually THINK?! To challenge ideas? To discuss? WHO ARE THESE EVIL PEOPLE?! We know they aren't scientists, because Al has already told us there aren't any who disagree with him.

Watch the movie carefully and see the demagogue massage the audience with this total crap. They eat it up, and snicker on cue.

Watch him start with one (evil) concept: discussion of theory. Then he smoothly links that to the tobacco companies trying to convince people that smoking was ok, 40 years ago.

Right, discussing climate change is the same as killing people with tobacco smoke.

And this all proves that there are no scientists who disagree with Al about global warming.

Chinese Toothpaste: Danger Escalates

I see from a Reuters article that danger from bogus Chinese toothpaste continues to increase. Apparently it contains even more harmful bacteria than originally suspected.

Colgate-Palmolive put out a statement that "it does not use, nor has ever used, diethylene glycol as an ingredient in its toothpaste". Whew, what a relief! That puts all my fears to rest--how about you? Now if we can only get Campbell's Soup to assure us that they don't use arsenic in their soup, all will be right with the world.

Guess what--I don't want Colgate to tell me that they don't use anti-freeze in their toothpaste. What I want them to tell me is that they don't use any Chinese ingredients. But we probably aren't going to hear that from them, because they can't make that statement--at least, that's my guess.

Why do I care about this? What does this mean? Well, over in China, there's some guy who owns a factory that makes goop to be dispensed into toothpaste, or hair shampoo, or whatever. His kid needs braces, and his car needs a new carburetor.

He could fix his car, and his kid's teeth, if he improves his profits by adulterating the mix of his product a bit. Hmmmm....

Seem like the only thing standing between his kid's braces, and me brushing my teeth with poison, is his sense of ethics and love of America. And he loves his North American pals, right? We are his trading partners, his amigos, right?

Well, maybe not. His country spends the equivalent of about $400,000,000,000 per year on their military, and a good chunk of that goes towards building missiles to point at North America. Self defense? Hard to imagine a scenario where we would attack the country that makes all our tv sets, dvd players, and just about everything else. Nope, self defense doesn't quite fit. You figure it out.

If we don't want to rely on Chinese ethics and love, then our government should require that North American companies who use Chinese ingredients in products that we eat, or put in our mouths, or on our skin, should label them so, and let us choose if we want to use them.

Global Warming: Judging the messengers

(continued from Global Warming: Asking the questions)

Admittedly, judging the messengers is absolutely the worst way of getting at the truth, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

On the one hand, there are a whole bunch of scientists and professors, folks who have drilled ice cores from the antarctic glaciers and chased weather balloons for years, who are saying that much of the CO2 greenhouse gas panic is bunk.

Another group who raises their collective voice in a loud chorus is the celebrity crowd: singers and actors.

A third group are the politicians, led in the chorus of panic by Al Gore.

Finally, there are the "scientists", primarily under the umbrella of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ringing the alarm bell. But they don't shout about the sky falling quite as vociferously as the politicians and singers. I'll explain why that is, in a later post.

The two groups who have the greatest following are the celebrities and the politicians.

Hmmmm....

Well, of course, if you're looking for information about climate change, surely you would believe a great singer, or an oscar-winning actor, before you would listen to some geeky, pipe-smoking, stuffy old professor who has spent the last ten years charting 100,000 year old ice core samples.

Right?

Sure. Hell, you betcha, "Two-squares-of-toilet-paper" Sheryl Crow is the one I'm gonna believe, every time!

Crow calls for limit on loo paper

Moving on, to consider another of the messengers. Try an experiment: go down the main street of your home town and ask everybody you meet if they think politicians tell lies. Just about every person that isn't a politician, thinks politicians always lie. How can you tell when they're lying: when their lips move, right? I'm not saying this is fair, nor am I saying it's true, but just about every person old enough to vote seems to have this opinion.

And yet, go figger(!), Al Gore (a politician, remember?) jets around giving speeches at more than $100,000 a crack, and everybody takes each word as gospel. People who wouldn't trust a politician to give them the right time of day, all of a sudden think that the boring old professor of climatology is just an idiot, doesn't know what he's talking about--but those politicians sure do! And they're so honest and forthright, too!

Any mixed motives possible?

Sorry, but the stuffy old underpaid professors and lab-coated scientists naturally LOSE on the credibility issue! Show biz folks and politicians are much more intelligent and believable.

But make up your own mind. One note of caution: remember the two questions:

a) Are we in the middle of long-term global warming?

b) Is mankind responsible, and can we reasonably make a difference?

Keep the questions firmly in mind, and listen (or read) every word, because one of the tactics used by those who want to snow you is to hop back and forth and treat the two questions as one and the same. They're not. It's quite reasonable to believe that one is a yes and the other is a no. But watch out for the messengers who deliberately use false logic to make their case.

(Next, let's follow the money)

Chinese Toothpaste Is Wakeup Call

Recently we had hundreds of our cats and dogs dying from contaminated pet food.

And now we have millions of tubes of toothpaste containing, basically, antifreeze. Officially, it's diethylene glycol, also called DEG. Other toothpaste has been found to be full of harmful bacteria.

Thanks, China.

Some reports about the poisoned toothpaste said "trace amounts were found...."

Bullshit. The PR whores are spinning us. "Trace amounts" are what you get when you clean an industrial vat without rinsing adequately. Of if you washed your cooking pot and forgot to rinse it. Your next batch of spaghetti might have a soap taste. We're talking fraction of a percent. But tests on this toothpaste have shown levels as high as 13 percent!

WAKE UP, this is nothing new! In recent weeks, Chinese toothpaste carrying various different brands, containing diethylene glycol, was found in Panama, the Dominican Republic and Australia.

Get the picture? This is no accident. Thirteen percent is no "trace amount". Nobody forgot to clean the tube-filling machine. It's simple--diethylene glycol has a sweet taste, and they deliberately use it to sweeten and blend the mix, because it's cheap, and they probably had lots of it on hand.

Ask yourself: If somebody is willing to deliberately use a poisonous substance as a sweetener, what else are they willing to do? Would it be possible that they make up the "toothpaste" using nice silt from the mouth of the Yangtze river? Maybe it's nice gritty stuff. Add some bleach, to whiten it.

But don't stop there. If somebody is willing to add poison to your toothpaste, and to your cat food, what else would they do?

Consider:

a) we don't know what crap is being added to imported products. It's impossible to test everything.

b) Obviously there are people who are happy to risk the lives of customers when it suits them. Morals or ethics or scruples do not come into play.

What to do?

First, it would be nice if governments in USA and Canada would require labeling like "this product contains ingredients from China". Or, tame it down a bit: "this product contains one or more imported ingredients".

But that's not going to happen.

So what can YOU do? Use the power of email. Once upon a time you had to find paper, and a pen, and an envelope, and buy a stamp... Now you type and click--it's soooo easy. Grab your bottle of shampoo, or toothpaste, or mouthwash, or whatever (things that you either ingest, or put onto your body), and email the company whose name is predominant on the label. Try this:

Dear sir: I am using your (product name) which has a UPC code of (xxxxx). Please let me know if this product contains ANY ingredients which originated in China.

First of all, you protect yourself with some knowledge about whatever you're ingesting, and secondly, you are putting corporations on notice that you care, and you're watching.

Global Warming:Asking the questions

The basic questions:

a) Are we in the middle of long-term global warming?

b) Is mankind responsible, and can we reasonably make a difference?

And there's one more consideration, before we tackle the hard questions. It's frightening, alarming, scary, how such a high percentage of the population thinks these questions are slam-dunk simple: "Yep, we gotta step up and fix the planet. Let's get to it. We only got a few years or we're screwed. Yep. No doubt about it."

These people have already stopped thinking--they're in reaction mode. It hasn't occurred to them that they are jumping into major sacrifices in their lifestyle, and dollars are going to come directly out of their wallets.

I suggest to anybody who is still thinking, these questions aren't slam-dunk--they're hard! Complicated! Tough! Experts who have studied these questions for years can't agree.

So let the questioning and critical thinking continue!

Normally, I'm a firm believer in judging an issue by the clear, hard facts. Always look to the facts. Even if you have nothing but contempt for a columnist or politician, you should look past your feelings and judge the facts. People we hate can actually be right, you know.

But the questions posed above are so complex, I just can't evaluate solely on the scientific, unvarnished facts. I haven't studied climatology for years, or written papers on core samples extracted from the ocean floor. Unless I take the next ten years to do nothing but study climatology and graphs...

All right, if we can't make a judgment based totally on facts of the issue, what's left? Consider these things:

1. Judge the messengers (you should never, never, never, never decide issues in this way...except maybe now)

2. Follow the money.

3. Try a little common sense.

4. Look at the science (as best we can).

Logical thinking, and feet on terra firma...

(next, Judging the messengers)