Ridiculous Stuff

This is what our friends in China have done lately:

In an indication of Beijing's determination to improve product safety, the government in July 2007 executed the disgraced chief of China's food and drug agency, who was convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for letting fake medicine into the domestic market.

A string of recalls involving tainted toothpaste, faulty tires, contaminated seafood and in March 2007, pet food containing melamine that was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats in the United States.

And now this:

Nearly 53,000 Children Sickened by Milk

BEIJING - The head of China's food safety watchdog resigned Monday for failing to stop the widespread contamination of baby formula as the number of children sickened in the scandal soared to nearly 53,000, including four infants who died.

The shake-up came as investigators revealed that China's biggest producer of powdered milk, Sanlu Group Co., had received complaints as early as December 2007 linking its infant formula to illnesses in babies.

Months later, tests revealed the milk was tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, which causes kidney stones and can lead to kidney failure.

Can someone out there please tell me why we don't ban all imports from China?

Oh but by their account, the important thing to remember is what a success the Beijing Olympics were and that makes it all OK.



Space shuttle moved to launch pad as rescue ship

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -In an unprecedented step, a space shuttle was moved to the launch pad Friday for a trip NASA hopes it will never make — a rescue mission.

The shuttle Endeavour is on standby in case the seven astronauts who go up on Atlantis next month need a safer ride home.

Atlantis and its crew are headed into space for one last repair job on the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.

It's a venture that was canceled when first proposed a few years ago because it was considered too dangerous.

A new NASA regime reversed that decision, once space shuttles were flying safely again and repair methods became available to orbiting astronauts.

The risk is this: If Atlantis suffers serious damage during launch or in flight, the astronauts will not be at the international space station, where they could take refuge for weeks while awaiting a ride home.

They would be stranded on their spacecraft at the Hubble, where NASA estimates they could stay alive for 25 days. Air would be the first to go.

The rescue craft would fly to Atlantis and use a 50-foot robot arm to grab the damaged shuttle.

The Atlantis astronauts would put on spacesuits and float, a few at a time, to Endeavour over the course of three spacewalks. Endeavour would return home with all 11 astronauts.

First off, the Hubble has been up 18 years and if in that 18 years we have not received all the information we wanted then the mission is a failure anyway.

Second, if NASA insists on sending a craft to the Hubble and they know there could be issues, why not give them more air and supplies to last longer in case the rescue craft has problems with launch?

Third, it is time to end our space program as it has become a bottomless money pit.

Unless we are putting up the star wars space and missile defense program, the rest of the space program has had ample time to see if bugs will live in a weightless atmosphere.

How responsible is the program anyway since they lost the moon rocks brought back from Nevada, I mean the moon.