Waiter, more perchlorate salad dressing, please!

 ”A laboratory test of 22 types of lettuce purchased at Northern California supermarkets found that four were contaminated with perchlorate, a toxic rocket-fuel ingredient that has polluted the Colorado River, the source of the water used to grow most of the nation’s winter vegetables.”

Well that’s just great… However, “Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif, introduced legislation Tuesday in the Senate guaranteeing a community’s “right to know” about the use of perchlorate by companies.”

“If passed, the Perchlorate Community Right-to-Know Act would require anyone who has stored or transported more than 375 pounds of perchlorate since Jan. 1, 1950, to report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency no later than June 1, 2005. It also would require anyone who discharged perchlorate into the water to report volumes, method and remedial actions to the EPA by the same date.”

Perchlorate contamination has been found in 400 water sources in 20 counties statewide.”

Why isn’t discharging perc into water utterly and completely against the law?

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Hey!

Wasn’t Iraq supposed to have weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? Wasn’t that why we invaded?? So, why haven’t we found any?

Rather than answers, there is only chaos:

“Sources inside the Bush administration described the hunt for weapons as beset by infighting and potentially disastrous delays, and suggested that stocks of chemical and biological agents themselves might never be found.”

“Everybody realises that it’s gotten off to a rocky start,” one official closely involved in the weapons search told the Los Angeles Times. “Frankly, the whole situation is very confusing at the moment.”

Why would there be infighting about finding WMD’s? And why wouldn’t finding them be a top priority?

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Argentina’s occupied factories

Brukman is a factory in Argentina that has been occupied and successfully run by workers after owners abandoned it. The government is forcibly trying to take it back for the owners. There has been major violence, and thousands have demonstrated against the government. In a truly chilling phrase, the federal judge who wrote the eviction order said: “Life and physical integrity have no supremacy over economic interests”. What a guy…

Naomi Klein explains more in The Guardian:

“Last Monday, the Brukman factory was the site of the worst repression Buenos Aires has seen in almost a year. Police had evicted the workers in the middle of the night and turned the entire block into a military zone guarded by machine guns and attack dogs.

Brukman isn’t just any factory, it’s a fabrica ocupada, one of almost 200 factories across the country that have been taken over and run by their workers over the past year and a half. For many, the factories, employing more than 10,000 nationwide and producing everything from tractors to ice cream, are seen not just as an economic alternative, but as a political one as well.

In Brukman, for instance, the means of production weren’t seized, they were simply picked up after they had been abandoned by their legal owners. The factory had been in decline for several years, debts to utility companies were piling up, and, over a period of five months, the seamstresses had seen their salaries slashed from 100 pesos a week to a mere two pesos - not enough for the bus fare.

These factories have become a major political issue in Argentina. Their new President will have to tread quite carefully. The economy is shattered, unemployment is massive, and workers aren’t about to leave. ”When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose”.

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Stupid cat tricks

Miss Monica reports on a Sunset magazine letters to editor:

“I saw your tip about using a pan of beer to kill slugs (”Let Snails Die Happy,” January, page 12).  This has worked great for us over the years, except recently we found our new neighbor’s cat drank it.  We worried about the effect of a half-cup of brew on this relatively small cat.  He became visibly intoxicated and also began anticipating the pan’s refills, rushing over to lap it up…”

I have two cats. Joey can handle his catnip. Suzy can not. Joey sniffs it a few times, has a little fun, then walks away. Suzy, tragically, rolls wantonly in the catnip, then after a bit and without fail, gets up, walks over to Joey, and starts a fight. Clearly, Suzy can not handle her catnip.

Happily, she has been catnip free for some months now and amuses herself primarily by knocking over wastebaskets, rooting around for a piece of paper, which she picks up in her mouth and brings to me. I am now required to roll the paper into a wad and toss it across the room so she and Joey can play soccer with it. Eventually one of them picks it up in their mouth, brings it to me, dropping it at my feet so we can play more. Aren’t they JUST ADORABLE!

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Bush may be a write-in on more than one state ballot

“The GOP’s unusually late nominating convention — it does not begin until Aug. 30 — is the problem. Bush is not scheduled to accept his party’s nomination until Sept. 2, 2004. That falls after the deadline for certifying presidential candidates not only in Alabama, but also in California, the District of Columbia and West Virginia.”

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