The Olympic torch debacle

The Olympic torch relay should be canned.
In the last two Olympics, I recall perceiving it as a jealously-rivalled elitist exercise, a lot of fuss enabling selected people to show off for a moment here or there.

This Olympics, no one knows or cares who are the people getting to show off with a little torch dash. It is all about the Chinese goon guards "protecting" the torch - and, of course, the people protesting China's treatment of Tibet.
What a mess.

China, why can't you let us love you? What on earth are you thinking with the global turnoff you are engendering by sending these highly-trained military thugs around the world in the name of peace and sport? Ugly, ugly, ugly.

If it teaches us one thing, it is that the torch relay was always a grotesque piece of nationalistic overkill.
Let it not be forgotten, it was introduced by none other than Adolf Hitler!


This cartoon, so apt in its glorious ironies, has been doing the email rounds. I think the signature attributes Garison of the Milwaukee Sentinel.

Fanks for the Formaldehyde

Here we go again.
As expected.
The perfidy of Chinese manufacturers hits the headlines, again, and endangers consumers, again.
Formaldehyde in clothing. In children's clothing. Children of the west seem seriously targeted by the Chinese.
Chinese labels lie. "Low flame" labels on children's garments turn out to be sheer folly. The clothes catch fire. Two New Zealand children have been burned, so far.
Then there are the rashes being suffered by children wearing clothes which are drenched in formaldehyde - 900 times the maximum level deemed tolerable.
They are embalmed clothes, for heaven's sake - soaked in embalming fluid.
Embalmed pyjamas. Embalmed trousers. It's all a bit surreal.
Formaldehyde might be good at providing a permanent press in fabrics but it is permanent stress in the living human body. Carcinogenic, even.
Meanwhile, Indonesia has been discovering formaldehyde-tainted confectionery from China. Sweets! Candy!
This all comes on top of the lead paint on toys causing the greatest toy recall in history, the poisons in cough syrup, petfood...
It is hard to see this as error, as the blunders of an emerging capitalist society. Give us a break. The Chinese are not stupid people.
No, looking at the expanding scale of insidious forms of mass poisoning, it is all starting to look like terrorism.

Organ donation, a soft tissue issue.

Being an enthusiastic supporter of the power of the Blogsphere to make a difference as the brilliant, international pressure group, I embarrass myself by discovering that I am a day late in raising the flag for organ donors.
It is a cause which merits global attention. The Australian style is simply to sign up on one's driver's license. One would imagine, therefore that there are lots of donors registered. Yet, Australia has one of the lowest rates of donors in the developed world. This turns out to be because the words "Organ Donor" on your driver's license don't actually mean a damned thing. It is a "statement of intent" but it will not make you an organ donor. It remains an issue for next of kin to decide.
If Australians want to be organ donors, they have to go to a bit more trouble. They have to put themselves on a special register and carry a separate card. Another piece of bloody plastic in the wallet - because the driver's license, which is good enough for most ID requirements and is generally deemed the most pivotal personal document after the passport, is not good enough to be an organ donor card. Huh?
Is your head spinning? Mine is.
Well, Australia celebrated a lovely organ donors' week earlier in the year. Lots of nice people signed up. There are almost a million donors, 924,387, when last I checked. In a country of 21 million, I guess that makes one donor for every 21. I would not have thought it was a bad rate. But, of course, the donors have to be dead to be useful.

Or not. There are some nasty, scary stories out there because of which some people carry Organ Retainer cards.
Just to be fair to the other side of the story.
The tales of black market in human organs may not be myths. Certainly, there are some alarming stories from China, yes, China again, about harvesting organs from Falun Gong prisoners. There are tales of donor bodies left stripped, an abandoned gutted carcas on the slab, while the medics rush around saving lives with the harvested organs and tissues.
Those stories are a bit sad.
It is not perfect business and nor is it a perfect world.

But those of us who choose to do a bit of good, to give a second chance to the sick by dedicating our used bits to their rebirth, should make our intention crystal clear - especially to our next of kin.

...the China saga again

The perfidious China saga goes on and on. At least the Government is clamping down, albeit on what may be a bottomless pit of cynical corruption. The latest lethal scandal is of polluted drugs prescribed to children with leukemia. Injections of Chinese methotrexate have caused pain and difficulty in walking in young leukemia patients - as if they are not suffering enough already!
Meanwhile, there are more recalls of dangerous Chinese goods - jewellery which could cause lead poisoning, magnetic toys which are choking hazards...
The shock and resulting pressure emerging from the West would seem to have rattled Chinese authorities - so much so that they punished their bribe-taking food and drug safety chief by killing him.
Now the push is on to show the West that everything is just A-OK, fine and dandy for the Olympics. As AP's Audra Ang reports:

Confidence in the safety of Chinese exports has severely waned internationally, as the list of products found tainted with dangerous levels of toxins and chemicals grows longer by the day.

China has taken significant steps in recent days to clean up its dubious product safety record, including executing the former head of its drug regulation agency for taking bribes and banning the use of a chemical found in antifreeze in the production of toothpaste.

In a report aired Wednesday night, China Central Television showed how a bun maker in a district in Beijing used cardboard picked off the street as filling for his product.

The undercover investigation report showed how squares of cardboard were first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda — a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap — then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning were stirred in and minutes later, steaming buns were shown on screen.

Yum. Won't the Olympic athletes love it.
Well, to its credit, the Chinese government has installed a panel to screen products and will ban offending manufacturers from production for three years. But is the problem already too big and out of control? This is more than a distinct possibility.

China is not our friend

If the people with extremely high IQs in China outnumber the population of the USA, how does it come that Chinese manufacturers are so damned stupid?

I am sickened by the endlessly unfolding saga of Chinese manufacturing corruption.
I am sick of writing about it - but I can't let go, since it is up to us in the Blogsphere to maintain the rage and propagate the message which is - boycott all things Chinese, including the bloody Olympics.

The Chinese must be made to realise that its corporate behavior has been internationally unacceptable.

OK, action is being taken in China. Factories are being closed down, they say.
BUT, the breadth of the criminal activity is only beginning to be uncovered.

Now we discover that people all over the world have been brushing their teeth with antifreeze.
Hundreds of thousands of people. Old folk in old folks' homes, for instance. All those in institutions wherein cheap generic products are supplied.. And, we are not sure who else and what else. Yet.

Now this, from today's Boston Herald.

Also Wednesday, Beijing police raided a village where live pigs were force-fed wastewater to boost their weight before slaughter, state media reported.
Plastic pipes had been forced down the pigs’ throats and villagers had pumped each 220-pound pig with 44 pounds of wastewater, the Beijing Morning Post reported Thursday.
Paperwork showed the pigs were headed for one of Beijing’s main slaughterhouses and stamps on their ears indicated that they already had been through quarantine and inspection, the paper said. Suspects escaped during the raid and no arrests were made, it said.
Earlier this week, inspectors announced they had closed 180 food factories in China in the first half of this year and seized tons of candy, pickles, crackers and seafood tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.
"These are not isolated cases," Han Yi, an official with Wei’s quality administration, was quoted as saying in Wednesday’s state-run China Daily newspaper.
Han’s admission was significant because the agency has said in the past that safety violations were the work of a few rogue operators _ a claim aimed at protecting China’s billions of dollars of food exports.


The blood runs cold.

Just pop onto the Made in China directory to see how deeply exposed we are to the vast range of products being manufactured and exported by that populous nation.

Then on this technology site which reports on tainted dietary supplements, fake Chinese medicines and, for heaven's sake, lipsticks containing the carcinogenic Sudan red dye.

I would say that we can trust nothing bearing the words "Made In China" but, terrifyingly, some of the cheat products don't even reveal their origin.
We are in trouble.

Shame, China, shame!!!

China Redux

Oh, no, it goes on. Now it is tyres or, for Americans, tires. Chinese manufacturers just happen to have left off a certain safety feature. Recall, recall!

The China problem escalates

I feel another burst of China-bashing coming on.
It has been building up for a week along with the reports of China providing the world with toys covered in lead-laced paint. Toxic Thomas the Tank Engine? This could be seen to imply a whole generation of brain-damaged boys.

For someone who has always loved the Chinese people, this growing saga of perfidy from China is as heartbreaking as it is enraging.

What are they thinking? Is it greed or expediency that has an era of Chinese companies sending poisons to the world?
It certainly is not stupidity. The Chinese are not stupid. Therefor it is the most wicked and duplicitous greed which is rampant in modern China - industries all over the country substituting cheap toxins for the proper ingredients in the goods they purport to manufacture.
Shame, China, shame!!

This phenomenon is out of control. It is ongoing, consciously masked by hierarchies of of Chinese businessmen as they pocket the profits.
The New York Times reported vividly on the obfuscations placed in front of the US Food & Drug Administration as it sought to find the source of the diethylene glycol which has been poisoning children in fever medicines - killing children, for heaven's sake!
The Chinese subsituted antifreeze for glycerine.

I have written about this before, of course.
I reiterate because of the new crisis with lead paints on children's toys. Yes, again the victims are children.
Thomas the Tank Engine has been painted lead red. Millions of Thomas the Tank Engines!! Toys children often put into their mouths. Everyone has known for decades that paint with lead content is ferociously dangerous to children. Don't tell me the Chinese never caught up on the news.

Of course the Western passion for economic rationalism bears responsibility here, too - and the West should not be off the hook just because China has been the culprit.

Bottom line is that it is all about outsourcing.
Everything is made in China these days - cheap products made, supposedly, to the specifications of the ordering companies.
Cheap goods from China are the secret to much wealth among Western companies, just as they are creating new wealth for Chinese companies.

It could be a comfortable arrangement but the Chinese are cheating. They are in a hurry to catch up with Western affluence and any short-cut will do.

Who knows what other short-cuts are being taken?
These crimes may be just the tip of an iceberg of manufacturing corruption.
Already, with the Chinese melamine which has been used in lethal animal food and the diethylene glycol used cough medicines and toothpaste are all over the world as bulk chemicals ready to be used for who knows what!

The Chinese have created a consumer mine field in the West and we must all now beware. We must see the words "Made in China" as an alarm, a danger signal. For our own wellbeing, we must not buy Chinese goods. And we must keep on and on and on making a fuss until we can force our own corporations to cancel orders and stand up for the West.
Even if it means we have to pay more for things.

More to fear from China

"Under Agriculture Department rules, countries cannot export meat and poultry products to the United States unless the USDA certifies that the slaughterhouses and processing plants have food-safety systems equivalent to those here. Much to its frustration, China is not certified to sell any meat to the United States because it has not met that requirement.

But that has not stopped Chinese meat exporters. In the past year, USDA teams have seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of prohibited poultry products from China and other Asian countries, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced in March. Some were shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower," "prune slices" and "vegetables," according to news reports. It is unclear how much of the illegal meat slipped in undetected.

Despite those violations, the Chinese government is on track to get permission to legally export its chickens to the United States -- a prospect that has raised concern not only because of fears of bacteria such as salmonella but also because Chinese chickens, if not properly processed, could be a source of avian flu, which public-health authorities fear may be poised to trigger a human pandemic."

Does this make your blood run cold? It does mine.

These words have been lifted from the very trusted source of the Washington Post, a Sunday, May 21 article by Rick Weiss, headed "Tainted Chinese imports common".
This is a deeply alarming piece which describes some of the 289 shipments the FDA has refused entry into the US because of contamination, toxic ingredients and pure fakery. As Weiss points out, the Chinese don't give up when refused entry for their goods. They try again and then again.

This is an epidemic.

Bravo to the Washington Post for running this deeply alarming piece. But the story needs more, more and more exposure than this. We face a dangerous scandal and it is going to take a massive public outrage to make governments confront the issue. They have to see it as an insidious form of terrorism. An attack on what we eat.

I am sure the Chinese people would be devastated to know what some of their manufacturers are doing. I am sure they don't know.
I am sure the Chinese Government will be embarrassed to realise how these exporters are shaming their country.

But the word needs to be spread. Chinese foods must be avoided and, as I have said before, countries affected by this sinister mode of attack should boycott the Olympics.

China out of control

We were eyeing off the price difference between farmed and wild scallops in the supermarket tonight. It has always been an ethical preference to buy farmed fish since they are a renewable resource, so to speak. The wild fish are twice the price - and rightly so. But we noticed that the farmed scallops came from China and immediately we recoiled in horror. Such is the impact spurred by the Chinese pollution of the food chain.

Their toxins now are in fish food - and young farmed fish fed with their cheating ingredients are suspected to have been liberated into the streams of America. Heaven alone knows what the Chinese are using as feed in their own fish farms. One can only imagine that yet more corners have been cut. One simply has no trust in the Chinese any more.

Now there are poor people with kidney failure from the antifreeze ingredient, diethylene glycol, the Chinese substituted for glycerine. People drank it in cough syrups - took it as medicine to make them well. What a grotesque irony.

Sick and dead people, sick and dead pets, polluted fish...
Where will it end?

I'm now boycotting all foods from China. Every thinking person should do so.
In fact, they should boycott the Olympics, too.

China and melamine

The poisonous petfood horror story gets bigger and bigger now the killer ingredient has been traced back to a massive Chinese scam of adding melamine to feed and fertiliser products to give them a false reading on protein content.
China turns out to have an industry devoted just to turning coal into melamine to enable Chinese companies to cheat their market. It is standard practice.

Wikipedia, as ever a brilliant resource, offers a succinct understanding of just what melamine is. It explains:
Melamine is used combined with formaldehyde to produce melamine resin, a very durable thermosetting plastic, and of melamine foam, a polymeric cleaning product. The end products include countertops, fabrics, glues and flame retardants. Melamine is one of major components in Pigment Yellow 150, a colorant in inks and plastics.
Melamine is also used to make fertilizers.

The awful issue here is that China, in the grip of capitalist frenzy, is employing any devious method of finding added profit that it can devise. Brilliant people with a brief for expediency will find some nasty shortcuts if there are no regulations to stop them.

The scam may now be exposed, but the problem remains, with melamine-containing feed and fertiliser products exported all over the world - and, alarmingly, some US pork products already out in the market before it was realised that the pigs had been fed melamine-containing swill.
Of course, it may yet come to pass that we discover that farm animals around the world have been eating it for years. After all, the idea behind the melamine con is that the foodstuff is rich in protein to help with the fast growth of animals.

One greed feeds another greed.
Again.

Not just a petfood scandal

Rat poison in wheat from China! This turns out to be behind the renal failure death of dogs throughout America.
How the wheat became contaminated is anyone's guess. A rat plague in the wheat storage facilities? Misuse of agricultural chemicals?
China has quite a history of the latter. It remains a very disturbing problem as Dune Lawrence points out in Bloomberg.
"Pesticide poisoning affects half a million Chinese a year, causing more than 500 fatalities"

For a long time Western bio-tech companies were dumping into the Third World markets products no longer saleable in their own arenas. This, notoriously, resulted in some serious pollution of food sources, especially in China, where farmers were making almost random chemical mixtures because they were unable to read the labels on the products. There was a time that Hong Kong put a ban on fresh foods from mainland China because of the toxic levels of pesticides etc.

My suspicion, therefore, is that we have here a tale of greed from two directions. Firstly, there are the agri-chem corporations which sacrifice ethics for profit in dumping discredited product on hapless poor countries. Secondly, we have the petfood people buying the cheapest ingredients to keep their shareholders' pockets lined. And, in a class of their own, there are the pet-owners who choose expediency as a way of nourishing their animals. Theirs is the crime of laziness.

It astonishes me that people who purport to love animals don't think about giving them more pleasure and better nutrition in their meals. Food is not only necessary, it is one of the fundamental sensual experiences of life. And yet, people who are prepared often to pay thousands for a pedigree animal will blithely fill its bowl with tinned or pellet food.

It truly is not hard to cook for the dog. We cook in three-day batches - ground chicken stewed with carrots, chard and parsley, bulked with pasta or rice and sprinkled with vitamins (plus, for our elderly doberman, Glucosomine). There are variations on this theme, of course. The dog loves the whole ritual of his food preparation, as he loves his food. He drools for handouts of carrot as the chopping goes on - his favourite treat, apart from blueberries. Cooking the petfood is as economic as it is wholesome - and it has provided a dividend of eliminating dog farts capable of asphyxiating a small nation.