Coal is wonderful stuff. You can burn it to make smoke, or break it down chemically to make roofing tar, plastics, and fertilizer. Not all of it, though. There’s always some gunk left over, called melamine. So how do you dispose of stuff that’s not even fit for tar and fertilizer?
You feed it to your cat.
It’s a venerable Chinese custom, now globalizing its way to Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and the U.S., where 60 million packages of pet food have been recalled.
In recent years, according to the Times, Chinese food safety scandals have included fake baby formula, soy sauce made from human hair, cuttlefish soaked in calligraphy ink, and eels fed contraceptive pills to make them long and slim. Hmm.
And now, melamine. So far it’s killed 16 pets in the U.S., made at least 14,000 of them sick, and gotten into the feed of 6,000 hogs you might have encountered as pork chops or bacon, except that they’ve been quarantined.
But why would Chinese companies use melamine in pet food ingredients? Because in tests it mimics super-nutritious, high-protein content. And it’s cheaper and harder to detect than urea, the previous contaminant of choice.
It’s just business. They’re saving money, as is our government, which keeps cutting the number of food inspectors at U.S. ports. They’re so understaffed that last year they tested only one in every 429 of the 8.9 million incoming food shipments.
When there’s a war on terror to be fought in Iraq, who has money for silly frills like protecting the nation’s food supply?
If you made over a billion dollars in 2006 (or if you hate numbers), skip to the last paragraph.
In 1895, in the run-up to the era of the Robber Barons, John D. Rockefeller declared $1.25 million of income on his tax return. That must have been enough to buy the Supreme Court, which the following year declared the income tax unconstitutional.
Back then, $1.25 million was 7,000 times the American average.
The next seven decades brought Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting, the rise of the labor movement, the Great Depression and the legislation it inspired, and the GI Bill following World War II. By the 1960s, the CEO of a typical Fortune 100 company was making 60 times the company’s average salary.
And now? Now the Robber Barons are back.
By 2005, the CEO was making over 500 times the average salary. Last year, one hedge fund manager “earned” $1.7 billion, as much as 38,000 average Americans – who, incidentally, work just as hard as a hedge fund manager.
The top 25 hedgers made $14 billion. That’s enough to provide health care for all of the 8 million American children who don’t have it.
To compound the irony, since 1970 your tax rates have risen while those of the richest .01 percent have been cut in half.
I like rich people, honest. Especially Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and a couple of my golfing buddies. But if I were one of them – and knew anything at all about history – I would want to restore some basic fairness to the system very soon. Say, before the mobs show up with axes and torches at the front gate.
(NOTE: These figures courtesy of Princeton economist Paul Krugman’s Op-Ed column in the Apr. 19 Times and some of his past writings.)
Julie Haller wants to know why they have an NFL draft. “With the salaries they pay those guys,” she says, “you would think they could get an all-volunteer army.”
The Federal Miscommunications Commission (FMCC) has issued a report asking Congress to begin regulating violence on television.
The special report has been three years in the making while the commission struggled to achieve a crony quorum.
“Exposure to violent programming can be harmful to children,” the report states, “causing them to grow up opposed to the Iraq war and reluctant to enlist in the National Guard.”
The commission said violence could be regulated without infringing on first amendment rights, by way of example citing re-runs of “Murder, She Wrote,” in which some hateful bastard is usually killed.
“Re-runs have no first amendment rights,” a spokesperson said.
The report says the purpose of the first amendment is to allow outlets like Fox News to air tirades in support of the second amendment. As to all the other amendments, “those are largely myths perpetuated by the left wing conspiracy,” the commission stated.
The FMCC is particularly anxious to outlaw TV news coverage that purports to show casualties in the emerging Iraqi democracy.
“Suggesting that violence in Iraq has killed or maimed 32,000 Americans and 665,000 Iraqis during the democratization process is cynical political pandering by defeatists who hate America and its heroes,” the report concluded.
Dick Dell is an author and editor who lives in Chicago and, at one time or another, has lived almost everywhere. When we told him about the butter fudge you can order from the Toffee Shop in Penrith, England (http://www.thetoffeeshop.co.uk/) and that Prince Phillip has shopped there, he thought we meant Prince Charles, and that got him started:
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“Prince Charles often held up the buildings on the Thames waterfront in Richmond, where we lived, as examples of what modern architects should design. And, of course, it was a very undistinguished group of buildings that could have been designed and built in the 1890s. The guy is a jerk, a snob, and an organic farmer who personally owns a 40,000 acre hunting preserve in north England. What more is there to say. I hope you don’t get ripped off buying ‘organic.’
“The Europeans may be ahead of us in their religious and social mores and laws, but their refusal to understand the benefits of genetically altered grains and other foods is mind boggling. Genetically altering rice and corn (maize to the rest of the world) saved India from massive starvation in the 50s and has increased grain production in this country tenfold.
“When I was teaching at EWU in Cheney, Washington, an area of immense grain ranches 700 to several thousand acres each, barley grew over two feet high and left an incredible volume of mulch after harvest. Same for wheat. Because of genetic engineering, barley plants now grow about half that high and produce at least 50% more than when they grew higher.
“That fact, however, does not make me support and sympathize for the outrageous subsidies those grain ranchers get from the US government that hurts the grain growers in the rest of the world and is simply welfare to a group of quite wealthy people. These guys pay $150,000 for their harvesters and spend their winters in Florida. And vote Republican, of course.”
From Matt Baldwin, at the always hilarious “Defective Yeti” blog:
After weeks of searching, The Bush Administration has finally found a candidate for the newly created position of War Czar. General Alexander Mullen accepted the offer earlier this morning, and immediately performed his one and only duty: accepted full responsibility for the bungled efforts in Iraq and offered his resignation. To the surprise of Rove, Cheney, and the others who had engineered the plan, Bush unexpectedly rejected Mullen’s resignation, and vowed to resist all calls to let the General go. “The Mullman has been doing a heck of a job in his three hours of Czaring,” the president said at an early afternoon press conference, “he’s a good American, and I stand by him.” Mullen–who was hastily given a cubicle, desk, and computer–is expected to play minesweeper until the troop pullout begins in January of 2009.
(From Richard Sheridan in Arizona, who attributes this analysis to Penny McElveen in Seattle)
People can’t understand how we came to have an energy shortage in this energy-rich country. It’s simple. Nobody bothered to check the oil. We just didn’t realize we were running low.
The reasons are geographical. Our oil is located in Alaska, California, coastal Florida, coastal Louisiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
Our dipsticks are located in Washington, DC.
From an article by George McGovern in the L.A. Times:
“It is my firm belief that the Cheney-Bush team has committed offenses that are worse than those that drove Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell from office after 1972. Indeed, as their repeated violations of the Constitution and federal statutes, as well as their repudiation of international law, come under increased consideration, I expect to see Cheney and Bush forced to resign their offices before 2008 is over.”
An outstanding column by Frank Rich in the “Week in Review” section of this Sunday’s Times, surveying the patterns of corruption in the Bush administration.
After alluding to the latest scandals (Gonzales and Wolfowitz), these are among his observations:
“Yet each man’s latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend.”
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“Like the CIA leak case, each new scandal is filling in a different piece of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up the lies that took us into Iraq and the failures that keep us mired there.
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“A government with values this sleazy couldn’t possibly win a war.”
The Economist this week in its “Lexington” column (on U.S. politics) tracks the slow-motion implosion of the neoconservatives. They tick off a few of the most conspicuous embarrassments (Libby, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, Cheney’s extreme unpopularity, Condolezza’s retreat to the “realist” camp), and go on from there. Excerpts:
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“… whom the gods would destroy they first make neocons.”
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“The ‘surge’ is a desperate response to failure. Many people see Messrs Kristol and Krauthammer as exhibits in a Ripley’s Believe it or Not exhibition: they marvel that they can ever have been so influential, rather than want to follow their advice again.”
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“The rising generation of policy intellectuals regards a reputation for neoconservatism as professional death.”
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“Gary Schmitt, a fellow neocon, complained of Mr. Feith that he ‘can’t manage anything and he doesn’t trust anyone else’s judgment.’ General Tommy Franks describes him as the ‘dumbest fucking guy on the planet’.”
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“The tragedy of neoconservatism is that the movement began as a critique of the arrogance of power…. The neocons have not only messed up American foreign policy by forgetting their founders’ insights. They may also have put a stake through the heart of heir own movement.”
