#564 Poisoned China

Parents. Hold your kids’ ears or push the button and change the channel for two minutes. We’re about to talk about a delicate subject.
Execution.
A subject I personally find far more offensive than, oh, I don’t know, the military using tax dollars to develop a gay bomb.
The execution in question was by China and it was of their former head of quality control for food and stuff.
You may recall there have been a number of scares lately. There was pet food tainted with melamine. Melamine? Didn’t they used to make dishware out of that?
There was diethylene glycol used in toothpaste—which by the way, is legal in China in small amounts. They say there’s no proof that small amounts are harmful.
And since diethylene glycol is normally used as antifreeze you don’t have to worry about your mouth boiling over.
There have been reports of people dying in Panama because diethylene glycol was used in medicines and passed off as harmless glycerin. And there have been other scares of toxic fish, juice containing unsafe amounts of additives, and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint.
They’re so much more chewable that way.
Basically, there has been little or no control of safety, and the guy in charge of it was convicted of taking massive bribes to ignore any controls they did have.
So they executed him.
China has a different notion of white-collar crime.
See, because it wasn’t just bribes and lies. It was bribes and lies that caused other people to die.
And, not incidentally, make China look bad in the eyes of the world marketplace.
But as I read about all this I said to myself, I can’t believe anybody would eat food that came all the way from China anyhow. I mean, I eat Chinese food all the time, but it’s manufactured in a place I trust. Milwaukee.
Then I chanced to read the plastic wrapper on the Smarties bubblegum I was currently chewing. They were made in, guess what, China.
Smarties? Little tart innocent Smarties?
Hmm. You know, diethylene glycol is kind of sweet and melamine is a little sour…
America ya gotta love it