After federal health officials discovered last month that tainted Chinese toothpaste had entered the United States, they warned that it would most likely be found in discount stores.

In fact, the toothpaste has been distributed much more widely. Roughly 900,000 tubes containing a poison used in some antifreeze products have turned up in hospitals for the mentally ill, prisons, juvenile detention centers and even some hospitals serving the general population.

Isn’t that special? 900,000 tubes of poisonous toothpaste at large in America! Oh, but it’s just the insane, the criminal, and the “general population” … which I would read as the poor. I’m pretty sure the finest hospitals in Austin aren’t buying any Chinese-made toothpaste. But then, you never know, do you?

But wait! The spokesman for the FDA says that “No Chinese toothpaste has come into the country since the end of May.” And how the hell would they know that? The latest figures I have seen for what percent of imports from anywhere on the planet was a less than 1% … I mean … 0.59%. So how exactly do they know no Chinese-made toothpaste has entered the country since May? I distinctly recall reading news stories about how they run across crates that say they are one thing, and they turn out to be something else. Or, you know, in all probability, as long as the paperwork seems to be in order, it never gets looked at at all. Pardon me if I don’t take the FDA’s word for it that there isn’t still Chinese-made toothpaste entering the country, as well as all manner of other potentially harmful products and items … like children’s toys that contain lead … or tires that rip themselves apart.

But here are the dual punchlines from the last linked story:

Chinese products now account for 60 percent of all products recalled in the U.S.

Wow. Only 60%?! I’d think it could be a little higher, considering that every freaking thing in the USA seems to be made in China! If I wanted to live my life without ever buying anything from China, I would have to revert to the life of an early American settler with a covered wagon and mule cooking over a camp-fire. Do you remember the last time you saw a label that said Made in America? I can’t, and that’s sad, because I look for them.

60% of all recalled products. Holy sh*t.

And…

“…we’re trying to help them understand that we have outstanding standards in the U.S. for our products and those standards save lives.”

No. No … if we had outstanding standards for anything at all, this foreign-made crap wouldn’t be sitting on our store shelves. We, as a country, wouldn’t be allowing it in until it proven to match our outstanding standards of quality. No, we don’t have such outstanding standards, unless getting goods as cheaply as possible is a high standard to achieve. Our standards are no better than the standards of the worst country we buy goods from, and right now … that’s China. We even have our very own American companies that put out the same kind of adulterated crap as the Chinese ones.

Tembec BTLSR Inc. - a resin manufacturer based in Toledo, Ohio - has been told by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to stop using the industrial chemical melamine to make binding agents that end up in feed for farmed fish, shrimp and livestock.

Oh, but it’s OK. The melamine tainted fish feed “was not intended to be used domestically, but for foreign markets.” Yeah, great. In the endless cycle of crap being shipped back and forth across the seas, here we have a company in the USA making fish feed with melamine and selling it to foreign sources … which is then fed to fish and shrimp that are sold right back at us. You do realize that 80% of the fish and seafood eaten in the USA is imported from foreign countries don’t you, and that the vast majority of it is farm raised? Well, if you didn’t know, now you do. Sorry.

And here’s some more trivia for you. Anybody want to guess how many refrigerated trucks there are in all of China? Come on. Guess. Lin guessed a million. Ha! The USA doesn’t even have a million of them. We only have 280,000. Surely China has at least that many! Right?

Not! There are 30,000 refrigerated trucks in all of China.

With all of that said, I think I better go to bed. I got it off my chest, but I certainly don’t feel better about it. Humans, across the globe, are poisoning both each other and the environment. A planet-killing asteroid would almost be a godsend at this point, because I don’t think I want to see where this ride takes us.

My personal [humorous] theory is that it’s the poisons and chemicals in our foods and environment that end up forcing us to evolve into the creatures known as the Greys, who then build space-time machines to travel back to this era to kidnap trailer-dwellers in an attempt to discover at what point in history the point-of-no-return was passed causing the evolution … because they’d like to stop it from happening. Being a Grey isn’t really so fun, you see.

Yup. Time for bed.