Frozen Cauliflower from China???

This afternoon my wife returned from food shopping, and mentioned that at the “Tops Friendly Supermarket” here in the Rochester, NY area, she had picked up a bag of frozen cauliflower,  looked at the country of origin, and was shocked, “shocked I say”, to see that it came from CHINA!

What the heck???

She had been expecting either the USA, or Mexico, or  possibly Central America, or maybe even the Philippines, but this was completely unexpected.

She put down the bag from China, and drove over to the nearby Wegman’s store and got a bag of frozen cauliflower – it came from Guatemala, and that was perfectly acceptable, as expected – and we had some for dinner tonight.

Mort baby, what were you thinking?

On this Bastille Day of all days, Mort Zuckerman had a piece printed in the Wall St. Journal that sounds way too much like real truth-telling:
        The Economy is Even Worse Than You Think!

He starts with the fact that the length of time the average person is unemployed is now longer than it has ever been, since measurements began in 1945, and he goes on to chronicle a laundry list of bad economic news items that have received little notice from Obama’s cheerleaders in the press corps and the TV nightly news programs.

Unfortunately, Mort takes a very different lesson from all of these carefully researched facts than I do. Mort thinks we need “STIMULUS PACKAGE II – THE RETURN OF THE WISE AND NOBLE CONGRESS!”

A Thoroughly Musical Ford

Check this out –
        Making a musical Ford

Kim Komando wrote about this in early March, 2009 – I don’t know where or
when this ad actually aired, but it is incredibly ingenious – and it had to take
a ton of time and money to put it all together.

First Ford refused bail-out money.
Second, they didn’t go bankrupt.
Third, they are increasing market share and maybe increasing production, in the
spirit of the original Henry Ford.
Fourth: They put out the bucks for an ad like that!

This is definitely the kind of spirit and thinking that once defined America – and we need to foster that attitude and encourage such enterprise again.
(btw – it appears the ad was made in London, England …)

We’ve been a mostly GM and Dodge family for the past 25 years, but now I’m starting to think that maybe Ford really does have a better idea …….

Here’s Kim’s original article:
        Kim Komando: Ode to a Ford

[Thanks to Tom for putting this in front of my eyes.]

Obama, the Smart Shopper!

Although various politicians have denigrated the citizens
who actively participated in the April 15th “Tea Party” protests
as fringe elements or an “unhinged mob”, the majority of
Americans supported the protests, while the mainstream media
outlets gave it sparse notice, and were often quite disparaging.

Not surprisingly, President Obama took notice, and in his first
full cabinet meeting, he announced that the government agencies and
departments were going to cut $100 million dollars in government
spending (from the $4 trillion planned for this year!!).

Here’s another way to look at it. If you had 40,000 piles of money,
each with enough hundred and thousand dollar bills to make a
pile of $100 million dollars, you would be looking at $4 trillion dollars
(and you could proudly say to everyone – put it on my tab!!!).

Rotten Eggs: Bad Drywall from China?

WAIT! No – don’t tell me….let me guess. Another basic, garden variety,
low-tech product made in China at an amazing low cost, by using
low wages, shoddy practices, and substandard or illegal materials.

But bad drywall??? What could possibly go wrong with plasterboard?
How about a constant rotten-egg sulfur smell – like hidden Easter eggs
that were not found for a few months.

This story appears similar to to previous stories where Chinese product defects
only came to light when:

• – children started dying (melamine in powdered milk)
• – children got sick (chemically tainted toothpaste, lead paint on toys)
• – people died in car crashes (tread separation on defective tires)

The list goes on and on. Western companies aided their own destruction
by investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new Chinese factories to take
advantage of the wage disparity. Unfortunately, it seems that the Chinese do
not as a whole share our traditions of trying to create the best product at the
lowest cost; the Chinese ethos seems to be “create the lowest cost product
regardless of the consequences.”

Europe Syndrome in America?

Last month Charles Murray gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute titled:
        “Europe Syndrome”

It’s a good speech, and I would have liked to hear him deliver it in person.

Many of you might remember Randy Pausch – the Carnegie Mellon professor who developed terminal cancer. He gave his last speech “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” to a packed hall filled with students and friends, and before dying he expanded it into a best-selling book “The Last Lecture.”

Charles Murray’s speech was equally compelling to me, but discusses the “meaning of life” concept from a different perspective.

The coming Global Cooling?

Much as I don’t want to focus on a single topic, I have had very little time to post recently, and an e-mail just arrived with some very interesting info. It was chain-forwarded, but appears to have originated with Mark Duchamp of the Iberica.org institute.

I’ll reproduce the e-mail in full – there are some links that provide additional info if you care to follow them up.

You be the judge – but the evidence seems to be mounting that man-made global warming is a myth that has achieved widespread acceptance as “conventional wisdom”, but is nonetheless a myth!

The e-mail is contained in full after the break.

Russia’s outloook on Global Warming

Even the Russians are starting to think that man-made global warming (AGW – antropogenic global warming) is not the threat that the media and Al Gore have made it out to be. (and James Hansen at NOAA as well).

Here’s an excerpt from today’s Pravda (Jan 11, 2009):

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Of course, you have to keep in mind that Pravda is the official mouthpiece of Vladamir Putin and his Russian government, but it is interesting to see this nonetheless.

Can’t help but wonder what this will do to all the European socialists, and those with similar leanings here in the USA, who will have to somehow reconcile two dissonant beliefs – that the Russians are our friends and are always right (while the USA is always wrong), versus the idea that Global Warming is occurring even though the Russians are saying the next Ice Age is almost upon us.

It will be interesting to see if their heads explode with this amazing set of contradictions!

Read the whole story for yourself here.

Was Global warming Disproved in 2008?

Recently I e-mailed some friends a link to a story in The Telegraph
(London, England) by a fellow named Christopher Booker:
Man-made Global Warming Disproved in 2008

One of my friends replied:

Utter nonsense. Christopher Booker has no scientific
credentials whatsoever:
Denialists scraping the bottom

Here is my response (with a few edits and corrections since I first sent it off). What do you think?

Fixing Global Warming?

From the British newspaper – The Times of London.
This article analyzes the potential effects (miniscule)
and costs (enormous) of the current world-wide
plans to reduce global warming.
Why cut .0003 degree in Global Warming?

(Bjorn Lomberg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.)