Downer with schools

"Why this interest in history? Why this wish to reawaken the past?"

This question was asked on Fox News this morning. Now, of all people, I of course know that journalists fare well to ask the seemingly stupid question. It forces subjects to explain and articulate and it avoids presumptions.

But this question is revelatory.
It explains something of the contemporary attitude towards history - of closing doors on it and moving relentlessly, mindlessly forward. History is barely taught in schools these days. Somewhere along the line it was decided the history was hard, it was dry, and students could be alienated if they had to remember dates.

It was one of the victims of the dumbing down of education.

There was a spelling test recently which was spectacularly failed by Australian teachers. Why? Because they don't read.

That is ironic in this time when text has been given vigorous rebirth on this medium.

One may blame the spoon-feeding of television for the declines in basic education.

But the real culprit is, of all things, education and gender equality.
Teaching no longer the only career for many intelligent women. They can do whatever they want - and they do. Given the choices, however, the brilliant women who once dominated school education now take careers in the subjects they once taught. They are historians rather than history teachers, mathematicians rather than maths teachers...

Cultural progress has resulted in cultural decline.

Non-smoker mania

It is now 15 weeks since “C-Day” – the day I stopped smoking cigarettes.
Why don’t I feel good?
If I dare to complain about the almost primal cravings which continue to grip me, I am told by my “supportive” friends and family that I should be over it.
No one has ever taken so long, my husband said. It should be right out of your body now.

Well, I have no idea about anyone else and I had no idea I was on some sort of clock.

Then again, I know I am no longer allowed to wear the patches because the time of patches has run out.
I am not sure how helpful they were, anyway. The cravings were there with the patches and without the patches.
I am still not just craving but suffering these deep thirst-like sensations.
I have no social trigger. I don’t want a cigarette because someone else is smoking. I don’t want a cigarette because I have had a meal or I am on the phone or I am having a glass of wine. The problem I suffer is disassociated from activities.
It comes from within my body. It is a physical thing, not an issue of habit or emotional crutch.
Then again, my emotional wellbeing is, well, not well.
I continue to be on some sort of razor’s edge. There is an undercurrent of deep anger running through me. Odd things tip me right over the edge. I feel as if I am surrounded by extremely stupid people. An example.
I was at a formal function – an elegant brunch. We were about ten to the table with platters propped aloft in the centres of each table – one loaded with pastries and the other with fruit. The food just stayed there as the people settled in, as the speeches took place, as the entertainments were presented…It stayed until I made a move. When scones were delivered to the table, well the waitress was an idiot in that she put the two platters of scones together on one side of the table – the furthest, so far as I was concerned. And, of course, none of the women would touch them. The sat there pretending there were no fresh scones right in front of them. I waited for someone over there to make a move. But they sat about like idiot dumplings. I looked at them and, yes, it was dumplings they resembled. Big blobs of dough. Poor socially inept women awed by the occasion. And I knew it was up to me again to get that bloody food moving around the table. Despite the fact that I was absolutely furthest away from it. And I hated those poor, pretentious women. I hated them!!! I roiled and boiled with my fury. I am still pissed off with them, whoever they were.
This just ain’t like me!
It feels weird. Uncomfortable. Exhausting.
There is this whole emotional burden going on – a manic current.
Prod me and I erupt. Niggle me and I pop. And is that me talking, talking, talking? Why am I talking so bloody much? I want me to shut up. Why do I have to talk so much? Why do people keep asking me things and wanting more than I can give?

Oddly, I can do rather well on my own. Walking alone through the city, I am overcome by the loveliness of things and people around me. There are feelings that it is all just so beautiful. It is almost euphoria.
And I can ride waves of love for those I love – or even strangers.
I can be contented with my own thoughts…

Then some idiot sets me off, then that draining craving discomfort surges up through my body – that thirst-like thing.
And I’m nutty again.
This is all very disturbing.
My whole being is out of kilter.

Nice chat, by George.

George Oates, one of the founders of Flickr, came to the office for a chat today. What a treat.
George is an Adelaide girl – home visiting her decidedly arty parents before going off to give important speeches on international web development in Sydney and then Spain.
Ours was the classic meeting of netizens.
She waved to me as she came in the newspaper’s revolving doors. I knew instantly who she was but wondered how she recognised me. I knew her because I had researched her online. I had visited her Flickr pages and her blog and assorted articles about her. What I had not anticipated was that she would do the same to me. So there we were, strangers confidently waving in recognition.
Photographer Mark Brake bought us both coffees and we sat in the purple plush chairs of in the grand atrium foyer of Sir Keith Murdoch House here and, well, chatted. I tried to “interview” George. But it is an odd thing. If one takes to one’s subject, it becomes more chat than interrogation. And, anyway, George turned out to be quite guarded on any half controversial issue regarding Flickr. It did not matter from a news point of view because whichever really important issue we may have plumbed – content filters and net neutrality, for example – would have taken more words to articulate than there is space provided in the news pages. News stories are short and tight. They are no place for extrapolation.


But I learned a number of interesting things about George Oates.
She is the classic unspoiled Aussie. She may have been part of the receiving end of a $35 million corporate buy from Yahoo, but there is not a ticket on her. She said yes, she had a few shares in the company and of course, the shares were bought out. I t was just “jam”. Plain good luck. She spends her life pinching herself at the wonder of it all, she said.
And having the same sort of fun she always had.
The great expression of her new-found affluence in the cultured high life of San Francisco would seem to be bacon parties. She explained the concept of wrapping bacon around all manner of foods and cooking the resulting bundle on her fancy BBQ, or as the Americans call it, “grill”. Anyone who had been once to one of her bacon parties was committed to come to the next one. That was the only rule of George’s bacon parties.
There ya go. Is that eccentric geek or what?

What I did not know about George Oates was that, after dropping out of two universities because she is “not the studying kind”, she turned up as a “red shirt” at Ngapartji Multimedia Centre in 1996. I gave speeches at Ngapartji. I was on the board at Ngapartji. I remember the red shirts well, but I do not recall George in particular. I wish I did. What a dividend she turns out to be of that now-defunct brave enterprise. It did not give her the training she now uses but it did give her the connections and enough HTML to springboard out into more serious software and onwards through the game that didn't to the photo sharing application that did.


The de rigeur question of the day was her take on the backward nature of Australia's broadband. It is one of the slowest in the world - definitely the slowest in the developed world. She made the right noises of disdain. And we talked some of censorship and how one defines porn and offensive material. George laughs at the misconception of so many that the admins of Flickr are sitting about waiting to pounce on unacceptable material. "We're not arbiters. We're stweards," she said. She was ready to give the concept of "unacceptable" a bit of dissection. It's all deeply moot. But the revelation was that the Flickr community was the decisive factor in judging Flickr content. "They sort things out," said George.

And the old Flickr rule of "don't be creepy" remained surprisingly effective.

The Flickr International issues were another kettle of fish, one that George really didn't want to explore for the mainstream media. She gave it a cautious shot, explaining that different countries had different laws and different filtering systems. One country may not necessarily be able to see content available to another country.
Different laws on content and copyright in different countries may be a headache on one hand but an advantage, perhaps, in the long run - when it came to keeping the liberty of the net alive. After all, said George, people can store data in different places and they can move date. The up side of this website mobility was the difficulty of over-regulating the net and perhaps it would be the net's salvation. We can only hope.

On YouTube George was generous spirited. She said she saw it as a vehicle for people to talk to and see each other. It expressed the voyeur in all of us. YouTube may be burdened with copyright issues from Disney and its ilk but, at the same time it was demonstrated a shift of content away from Disney and its ilk - the people producing their own content.

There are all sorts of new things afoot at Flickr. It continues to evolve and George sees immense promise in metadata - and is keen to play with time sliders. The way in which in just four years Flickr has shown itself to be such a brilliant recorder of history has rather fired her. Indeed, she is keen to know what the academics are finding interesting about Flickr and what they are studying. Some people already are doing their PhDs on the photo sharing phenomenon.

There are so many facets. George pointed out the "life cycle" she had observed among Flickr users. After posting humble first pix of family or friends, their subsequent photos would show greater effort with light, fancy backlit pictures, then they would have gone out and bought a Canon and started shooting macros and doing fashion shots - and the next thing you know they were working as wedding photographers.

There were myriad other facets of Flickr I'd have liked to explore but we were in the usual newspaper rush. The 'tog had to get his pix in - for which he wanted to walk George out in the city streets.




So I produced my camera to get my Flickr pic of George and she produced her camera to get her Flickr pic of me.

And, heavens above, the queen of digital photo sharing uses an old-fashioned film camera.

The obscene power of tradesmen

The rich think they hold the power.
Once it was so.
These days, it is the tradesmen who hold the power.
It does not matter how rich you are, if a tradesman refuses to come and install your airconditioner or hot water service, then you have to go without. Until they are ready to give you some of their time, you are at their mercy.
Tradesmen can decide if you are to be cool in the heatwave or if you are going to have mud instead of cement in the drive, if your leaky roof keeps dripping, if your dishwasher is fixable, if you are going to get sharp TV reception, a floor polished or a carpet laid, a window repaired or replaced, a door fitted...
It is all done on their time, not yours.
Forget waiting for a doctor's appointment.
Doctors are a joy of accessibility compared to tradesmen.

How did this all come about. How did the tables turn so that tradesmen are the most powerful members of society?

Once upon a time, they were something of a lowly class -"blue collar" or "working class".
The management classes and professionals were the smug middle with the dynastic wealth and highly educated scoring "upper". Of course, these classes still were dependent upon the tradesmen. But, if one recalls the past of one's youth, not to mention the past as recorded in literature, they were a cap-tipping deferential class which sought to please those who employed them.

This has changed.
They could not give a damn whether you are pleased or not. They are indifferent as to how long they keep you waiting. They treat those who seek to use their services with sublime contempt - sometimes not bothering to turn up at all.
Certainly they are indifferent to returning phone calls.
What they are calling is the tune.

Why is this?
Perhaps because tradesmen are now in short supply.
The old apprentice traditions fizzled somewhere along the way. Meanwhile, families in the trades wanted something better for their children - university educations.

Even in trade schools, the traditional trades are out of fashion. Kids would rather study computer programming than plumbing.
Who leaves school saying they want to follow their dad into plumbing? In a world where the class system has disintegrated, there is no longer a sense of fraternity in the trades.

The sort of people entering the trades are doing so perhaps grudgingly.
Hence their resentment of the people for whom they are then to work. Well, contempt really.
Tradesmen can name their price. On top of this, they can choose simply not to turn up to do the job.
They don't have to worry about losing business because they know that they are as rare as hen's teeth and they will never run out of work. There is a world of poeple prepared to pay whatever they ask, prepared to beg them to do a job, prepared to wait on their convenience...

Why am I pondering all this?
Well, I may have moved house over a month ago had it not been for the tradesmen who have not turned up, who have put off jobs, who have not been accountable...
I am still waiting. I am not moved.

Oh yes, instead of being angry, I am just a grovelling supplicant, like everyone else.
One can't afford to be impatient with a tradesman let alone rude. They are in control. They are masters of our destiny. They might not be the upper class but they have the upper hand.

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.

Oh, Google, you let me down.

How to lose faith in Google.
Just try popping in on its Mountain View HQ in California. If you loved Google before, you will have the old blood running cold afterwards.
I guess I was just naive to think I could swing past the Google building and take a couple of photos.
Well, I'd seen the stunning Yahoo building towering triumphantly out there in Silicon Valley and I had taken a zillion photos of the Oracle building - probably the most elegant and superior high tech establishment in the country, if you ask me. Its sleek blue cylindrical glass towers reach around a lake where a fountain plays in cheerful circles. It is a huge complex and, if there is security, it is pretty low-key.
Google, on the other hand, is the great paranoia security hell.
You can't even drive up the driveway. Security guards stop you and tell you that you will be trespassing if you cross the line into the staff carpark."The campus is private land", one told me when I asked if I could pop in and take some photos of the building.

Yes, we're talking a building here. Just a couple of exterior shots.
I wasn't asking for a the latest search secrets or even a guided tour. I was not trying to find the "Visitor Lobby" marked on the exterior signpost or to see if I could purchase a Google cap, although, had things worked out that way, certainly would have left the place wearing a Google cap, if there is such a thing.
But, as it happened, I was asking just to take a quick snap of the entrance to the building.

I was simply told that I was not permitted to take photographs anywhere on the property.
"You can go to the public field and take a photo from there," he said. "That is public".
Oddly, the field had a sign in the middle of it saying "Closed for Repairs". This had struck me as the funniest sign I had ever seen in a field. Not that it would have stopped me, had there been a way to get to the field.
The problem was that there was no where to park. Even to get to the neighbouring field.

You can't stop here,' the security guard insisted.
"But the whole parking lane right down the road has banned parking," I said.
It was not the security man's problem. All he had to do was to make absolutely sure that people like me did not go anywhere near the Google building. Even if we have identified ourselves and explained our humble mission.

It was an odd thing, the parking ban in the street. Amphitheatre Drive has only a few buildings on it - large outfits on huge chunks of real estate. They are on one side of the road only. Opposite is wasteland with a spectacular view of the mountains.
There is what looks like a parking lane along one side of the street - but it was entirely roped off and dotted with witches hats and signs insisting that there would be no parking. This covered the road for hundreds of yards both before and after the Google property. Half a mile or more. There was even a police car stationed at one point. This was serious no parking.
Apparently, some way further down is an Amphitheatre - for which parking is discouraged on the road to protect the businesses...the one or two of them on their vast acreages.

It surprised me that Google had no visitor parking lot....in fact, a lot of things were surprising me.

What happened was that I suddenly felt my faith in and loyalty towards Google shrivelling within me.
Suddenly the negative comments about the wicked Google empire started to make sense.
Only a world with something to hide would hide.
Paranoia belongs to people with agendas.


I felt like a complete idiot.
A few months ago I had written a vast weekend magazine spread on Google - its wonderful rise and the fair and emancipated way it treated its employees and kept the spirits up. How Google had ethics as well as the best staff conditions in the world.
My boss read my piece and said that he did not believe Google was wonderful at all, that I had been conned by Google propaganda.
I was furious. Google has had a few problems - but, as one who hooked straight into the search engine when it evolved, as one who was thrilled to be an early starter with Gmail, as one who looks for the changes in the home page and touts the brilliance of the search algorithm, I was confident in my judgements. I could mention legal issues on the Google record, I told the boss, but I simply would not turn my article into any form of Google-bashing. I genuinely admired Google and I wanted the article to reflect this. It went to print - and it did.

Now I feel two inches tall.
The boss was right.
Google is not quite what we have assumed. Google has a friendly homepage but an unfriendly interface.

Google will not let its fans take a photograph.
Not just a fan, but a card-carrying visiting journalist from overseas. I had mentioned to the guard that I was an Internet writer from Australia - "just want to take a picture".

But the guards were there with rules to follow. Keep everyone out except employees.

OK Google. I got the message. I got more than the message.
I am as offended and alienated as you intended me to be.

I now will not laugh at those who say that you are moving towards becoming the new Microsoft, the evil empire.
Perhaps you now are too powerful.
Perhaps we do need to be concerned.

Beware the media beatup

A few months in the USA and I am not sure if I am quaking in neurotic psychosomatics or I am simply shivering with resentment.

Day in and and day out, the US media warns us of things which are just about to do us lethal damage. There are new poisons in common foods, terrible perils in simple activities, what was good for us yesterday is dangerous today...

Let's see. What's new this week? Tomatoes that were good for you are now not good for you? Sunscreen that was safe is now hazardous. Sun that was hazardous is now life-giving. Soda drinks are bad for your heart...

The American consumer market dies a zillion little deaths every day - thanks to the mass media.

Truth is that most of these health scare stories are insubstantial with only a slim margin of truth. They are the beat ups of the desperate news media. Media sets itself rules. It will have a health story every day - whether or not there is a valid health story around.

The constant browbeating of the trusting and not profoundly informed masses empowers the media - and also its important supporters, the pharmaceultial companies.

The pharmaceutial companies bombard the public with ads for drugs while the news media bombards the people with illnesses.

Is there a pattern here?

Sure thing.

NowPublic

Tags: consumer | drugs | food | Health | Media | medicine | news | Pharmaceuticals | sunscreen

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.

American abuse of 9/11

Because of 9/11, I am no longer allowed to have a "Welcome" mat at the door.

I was informed of this yesterday by the apartment complex manager after an unwelcome note was dropped on the "Welcome" mat requesting that said mat be removed as a safety measure. It has sat there safely for nearly nine years.

How is 9/11 a reason for people not to have Welcome mats?
Good question.

The answer is that 9/11 has become the obstructionist excuse for anything and everything in the USA. The idea is that there is no come-back if 9/11 is in the equation - even if it is not in the equation. 9/11 was such an appalling atrocity that it holds a position of high reverence, the most sacred of all cows...it cannot be challenged.

So I have removed my beautiful "Welcome" mat because of 9/11.
The great post-9/11 doormat ban of 2007 will make the world a safer place.

Who could have imagined that those acts of terrorism in 2001 would produce such ugly and bizarre dividends? Terrorists don't have to move a finger to castrate American culture. Americans are doing it in their name. Wouldn't Osama Bin Laden be amazed?

Put the words 9/11 behind it, and you can demand anything.

So it comes to pass that, after nine years, my slimline traditional American "Welcome" mat is a threat.

I am not an American so I dared to challenge the apartment complex manager when he made this claim. He said it was as an upshot of 9/11 that firemen needed clear, doormat-less access regulations. I don't remember hearing anything about doormats providing obstructions to rescue workers in the Twin Towers. This was the first time I had heard door mats and 9/11 mentioned in the same sentence. I simply did not believe him. Perhaps standard fire regulations are being toughened up, but not as a consequence of 9/11. They had fire regulations long before 9/11.

The apartment complex manager had quite a handful with this Aussie who simply would not take 9/11 as a rationale for the banning of the delightful American welcome tradition. I felt almost sorry for him. Then again, I am keen to discourage people for this sort of gratuitous exploitation of the 9/11. It is cheap and disrespectful.

The saddest part in this context is that it is gutting the country of that which is most sweetly and endearingly American.

Dainty yet hardy "Welcome" mats are a big American tradition, along with floral door wreaths and American flags. When first I came here, I was charmed by the warm, friendly spirit of these domestic statements. I was not quite ready for the door wreath or the flag, but I loved the vivid and welcoming "Welcome" mats and went off to reciprocate the good spirit with a mat of my own.

Nine years later, the apartment complex population has changed. There are fewer mature Americans here and more student sharers and foreigners. So one no longer sees these mats at every door. In fact mine is one of the last in our building. Well, it was. There are none now. A delightful American tradition is dying - perhaps in the name of fire safety but certainly not in the name of 9/11.

Punishments of non-smoking

For those who so kindly ask how the non-smoking is going, I will now share.
It is not good.
What is with these nicotine patches which are supposed to help?
Is there any nicotine in them? At no stage have they released me from the clutches of the cravings. All they have done is give me ugly red rashes surrounded by glue frames which are the devil to wash off. Perhaps the itching of the patch spots is supposed to distract one from the urge to smoke? One is so busy scratching one does not have a hand for a fag?
I have gone without cigarettes for five weeks now.
It is strictly one-day-at-a-time - still!
It seems to get harder rather than easier.
I am at the stage of thinking that the whole thing is just plain stupid and I should really just relax and have a cigarette. Oh, what a relief that would be.
My husband was tender and supportive for the first week or two. But I suspect that he thinks that five weeks without cigarettes means that his wife is now a non-smoker and out of the woods. To be requiring special considerations over a month later reeks of exploitation. Surely it is not logical that she is in deeper water now that she was in the first few weeks?
Well, she is. She is tired of trying. She is tired of this clawing, wrenching, draining need endlessly welling up through her body. She is tired of being gung ho about it. She is frightened of compensatory eating - which does not work, anyway. It just keeps one distracted. It does not take away the cravings. It triggers another one - for a post-snack cigarette.

Stress levels could not be greater. We are moving. Upheaval - not just now, but for a very long time. Now is the time of sorting and counting the accumulations of nine years living in the USA, writing an inventory for the insurance and shippers and getting our world ready to be packed up and freighted off to Australia. We have to defend ourselves against the prospect of Australian duty people who will want us to prove that we have owned our stuff for more than six months. Why did I not keep receipts for everything? Does anyone actually do that? What of the family stuff which my husband inherited? What of gifts? Should friends give receipts with their wedding, Christmas and birthday gifts just in case the recipient moves country?
Of course, I would be one of those people who has difficulty throwing things out. If I have a pair of jeans which proved a bit coarse on the skin, a bit tight or a bit loose, I put them away "in case". It is a guilt and remorse thing for having managed to leave a shop with something less than perfection, to have been fooled by the retailer, to have failed as a shopper....The items may grow to be years old, but they sit there pristine and loathed but relentlessly kept as an act of embarrassment offset by the eternal hope of "you never know, they may come in handy".

The recognition of this syndrome, the unraveling of the cupboards and wardrobes, is simply making me grouchy. The prospect of travel is doing much the same. There is no looking forward to anything - since there are no cigarettes in the plans.
Did I mention that this is the pits?

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!!!

Media screws the message

One thing I find deeply irritating in my beloved America is the media's preoccupation with health scares. The old control-by-fear policy seems aggressively ubiquitous in this country. There are fresh scares every day - and endless marketing of drugs to either deal with or add to the scares.

Today a research finding on antidepressants and pregnancy has hit the media - with absurd results.

From the Los Angeles Times we get reportage headlined "Study shows antidepressants increase birth defects" with a story whipping up worry about pregnancy and depression treatment.
From the Associated Press comes a report headlined "Antidepressants pose low birth defect risk".

As one who reads two papers in the mornings, I reeled when I found these conflicting treatments of the same report. The AP report was carried in the Boston Globe, the other in the Nashua Telegaph. AP's was a much shorter report and it avoided the hysteria-raising of the Californian counterpart. How could this be?

Editorial sensationalist policy versus dispassionate reportage?
You can bet your bottom dollar on it.

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!