Cheap Chinese basketball players fall apart after a couple of years

HOUSTON—Reports from several NBA teams indicate that cheap, flimsy Chinese basketball players frequently break down and fall apart when faced with the normal wear-and-tear of an NBA season. “We got one a couple years ago, but the foot broke,” said Rockets GM Carroll Dawson about Chinese center Yao Ming. “Now it just sits there. We don’t even use it anymore.”

The Onion 

US’ only toy tester retires

Washington Post

In the midst of last year’s toy recalls, Hundemer, an engineering technician with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, became known as the nation’s sole full-time toy tester, referred to in speeches and news accounts only by his first name, “Bob.”

Hundemer decided that, at age 61, it was time to move on. He leaves behind an agency less than half the size it was when he started in 1980 and a testing facility in Gaithersburg that once was spacious but now is cramped and run down, infested with rodents and plagued by rotted window frames.

Hillary Clinton: scaremongering in the best GOP tradition

Bob Ceska: 

When I wrote my endorsement of Senator Obama last month, I noted Senator Clinton’s penchant for being a little too Cheney-ish to receive my primary season support. This week, she proved me accurate when she made with the Cheney-ish fearmongering just in time to scare the White-Mountain-sized-cockadoody out of New Hampshire voters.

“I don’t think it was by accident that al-Qaeda decided to test the new prime minister. They watch our elections as closely as we do, maybe more closely than some of our fellows citizens do. Let’s not forget you’re hiring a president not just to do what a candidate says during the election, you want a president to be there when the chips are down.”

In other words, the terrorists will surely attack us if a “less experienced” president is elected. So vote for Senator Obama if you want the evildoers to kill us all.

We’ve heard this line before:

“If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again — that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” -Vice President Dick Cheney, 9/07/04

Lead testing shows MANY toys may be toxic; check the list.

Americans need protection, not crazy counter-productive bankrupting wars.

sfgate:

….interest was high at the square where, adjacent to the Christmas tree, the San Francisco Department of the Environment and the Center for Environmental Health tested toys that people brought with them – some of them a dozen or more, others with only one.

“It’s a huge discussion among parents,” said Lasden, a San Francisco public school teacher on a sabbatical. “My father e-mails me every other day, telling me to get rid of this or that.”

The toy examination – testers are looking for lead, arsenic, cadmium or other toxic compounds – will be repeated Tuesday and next Thursday at the Department of the Environment, 11 Grove St., from 10 a.m. to noon.

As the free testing was under way at Union Square, a Michigan nonprofit group, the Ecology Center, announced that it, along with other groups around the country, had tested 1,268 toys and found that 35 percent contain lead, which can lead to irreversible damage to the developmental and nervous systems in children.

The results and more information are posted on a Web site, www.healthytoys.org, which was overwhelmed by visitors on Wednesday.

“The government is not testing for toxic chemicals in toys, and too many manufacturers are not self-regulating, so we created the nation’s first toy database to help inform and empower consumers,” said Tracey Easthope, director of the center’s Environmental Health Project, in Ann Arbor.

Chuck Norris: litmus test for Americans

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Here’s a Chuck Norris fact you may not know. If Chuck Norris endorses you and appears in one of your campaign’s TV ads, you take the lead in an Iowa poll and your Web server crashes. That’s what happened to Mike Huckabee, the shrewder-than-you-realize former Arkansas governor (sound familiar?) who has become a major player in the tight Republican presidential race. The ad opens with Huckabee deadpanning: “My plan to secure the border? Two words: Chuck Norris.” The camera moves back to reveal the Man Himself, who praises Huckabee as a solid, gun-loving, IRS-loathing conservative. Huckabee adds a twist at the end. “I approved this message … So did Chuck.” The ad, which ran in Iowa on cable for a week, has generated an astonishing 1.5 million YouTube views and clogged the campaign’s Web site. Huckabee was rising in Iowa even before the ad, but he took the lead with Chuck as Huckster.

Yes, Chuck Norris, a coveted endorsement for GOP candidates. Perfect. I think that pretty much sums it up. Americans could just choose sides based on whether or not they see Chuck Norris as a guiding light.

Of course, Mike Huckabee doesn’t believe in evolution. Not to say that Chuck Norris hasn’t evolved as much as the rest of us……

This is the kind of shit you get when you cede the country to a bunch of profiteers who are all about trying to sell you fear, cheap TV shows and toxic shit from China while they work on the real business of grabbing your pension.

More toxic toys from China: our government sucks

Our taxes are supposed to be used to do things for us; to protect us from toxic products, for example.  The US Consumer Product Safety Commission might as well not even exist any more.  State governments are having to pick up the pieces, with little in the way of resources.

More than 500,000 pieces of children’s jewelry are being recalled for excessive levels of lead paint after a dozen retailers, including Michaels Stores, Big Lots and Family Dollar Stores, agreed to a settlement with the New York state Attorney General’s Office, federal and state officials said Wednesday.

Michaels does not have to pay a fine, through some of the others retailers will, including Big Lots, which agreed to pay a $1,000 penalty under the settlement.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recall includes 29 jewelry items, including a total of 200,000 pieces sold at 950 Michaels Stores. The items, such as butterfly charms and toggle bracelets, were supplied by Pure Allure in Oceanside, Calif.

Despite recent recalls of millions of hazardous and lead-contaminated children’s jewelry and toys, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and national consumer groups urge parents to be diligent over the holiday season because unsafe items remain on store shelves. Lead can be toxic and can cause developmental problems in children.

Bush and GOP congress spent record amounts of money, there have been record deficits, the national debt is ballooning, people are wondering about Social Security….  yet we get no meaningful service from our government.
Where did the money go?

Herbal male enhancement products are often unregulated Viagra or similar

Somehow I have seen these ads and just assumed they were scams; but if that were the case, why would they stay on the air? Now, it seems, they do work, in some sense; many contain Viagra -like drugs, and the doses may be dangerous to some:
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For men on common heart and blood-pressure drugs, popping one could lead to a stroke, or even death.
“All-natural” products with names like Stamina-RX and Vigor-25 promise an apothecary’s delight of rare Asian ingredients, but many work because they contain unregulated versions of the very pharmaceuticals they are supposed to replace.

That dirty secret represents a special danger for the millions of men who take nitrates – drugs prescribed to lower blood pressure and regulate heart disease. When mixed, nitrates and impotency pharmaceuticals can slow blood flow catastrophically, leading to a heart attack or stroke.

An Associated Press investigation shows that spiked herbal impotency pills are emerging as a major public health concern that officials haven’t figured out how to track, much less tame.

Emergency rooms and poison control hot lines are starting to log more incidents of the long-ignored phenomenon. Sales of “natural sexual enhancers” are booming – rising to nearly $400 million last year. And dangerous knockoffs abound.

Coast Guard fiddles, stonewalls, whitewashes, impedes volunteeers

Once again, if it doesn’t involve terrorism, the US is not interested in dealing with disasters. Sen. Feinstein decided to get in front of the cameras, just to act indignant. The feeble Coast Guard response to the San Francisco Bay oil spill is typical. The beaches have zero workers from the government, which is also trying to keep volunteers from doing what they can. As a result, the oil slick is going to disrupt the ecosystem for years to come. And our federal government gives not a shit.

What is so hard about figuring out that we will have oil spills, and having a federal response team available? like the smoke jumpers? geez….

And Sen. Feinstein, thanks for the talk…., why don’t you DO something? Oh, I forgot, your pal Bush has our National Guard over in Iraq….

Updated:Don’t make your own yogurt without that ‘Made in China’ appliance

Our “MiC” yogurt maker died last year, of unknown causes. Probably just as well, as the alternative was probably that it would catch fire or be found to contain arsenic.

It turns out that yogurt makers are not very popular items these days. Don’t know why. But you can’t just walk into Sears or most of the big box stores and buy one. I have located some on ‘the miracle that is the internet,’ but I also found this story:

I was going to buy this yogurt maker, but after I read a review that said there was no thermostat in this machine, despite what the manufacturer claims (someone actually took it apart and looked!) – I decided to do further research. What I found was that I already had everything I needed to make my own yogurt – my oven. My oven has better temperature control and it doesn’t take up counter space.

Making yogurt basically involves mixing milk with a “starter” (usually plain, unpasteurized yogurt) and keeping it at a temperature where the “good” bacteria will multiply and turn the rest of the milk into yogurt. Everything needs to be really clean so you don’t introduce “bad” bacteria into the mix. Other methods I had heard about involved scalding the milk and sterilizing the containers and everything else — sounded like a pain. But I found a method that works really well for lazy people like me, with no scalding and no sterilization, and no special equipment:

Get a quart-size carton of milk and some yogurt, both at room temperature. Open the milk carton, pour some out to make room in the carton, and add 1/2 c. of plain yogurt with live cultures (like Straus Creamery or Dannon plain yogurt). Close up the carton again, clip shut, and shake it gently to mix up the milk and yogurt. As for the milk you poured out (you saved it right?), that’s going to be your starter for the next batch, so add a couple teaspoons of yogurt to that, give it a good stir, and cover tightly. Get an old (but clean!) bath towel and wrap both in it. Place on a cookie sheet and place in 110 degree F oven. “Bake” at 110 degrees overnight – around 12 hours – remove from oven and refrigerate. Perfect European-style yogurt! (For the thicker American style, add powdered milk along with your yogurt “starter.”) Best of all, there’s no need to pre-heat/scald the milk (not necessary if you use pasteurized milk) and no cleaning (since you make the yogurt right in the paper milk carton straight from the store). Any size milk carton will work — just adjust the amount of starter accordingly.

We go through 4 quarts of yogurt a week, so I make 2 big milk cartons’ worth each time. If I used the Salton, I would have to run it four times to get the same amount of yogurt.

I’m on board !! Let’s see how well this works!

Update: this method is not without problems:

our oven won’t go this low, and certainly the control isn’t accurate; putting a paper carton and a towel in the oven???.

getting the ingredients to mix is not that simple.

its messy.

how do you get solid yogurt out of the milk carton?

ah, pass the water please?

By 2050 or so, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life.

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