It goes without saying that the pet food recall has grown again.  More brands and more products have been added to the list.  Be sure you’re checking the FDA’s page regularly.

Yet that’s not the most troubling aspect of this.  And neither is the obvious spread of the tainted products into the human food supply, and some of that on a large scale of already consumed meats.

No, what’s frightening is this report about the latest scientific findings.  And it’s something I’ve alluded to before.  To wit:

The prime suspect for the killer ingredient is an industrial chemical called melamine, an organic base usually found in plastics and resins. The FDA has examined 210 samples of pet food and various ingredients in six field laboratories. Of those, 130 have tested positive for melamine, either in the food itself or in the wheat gluten used to thicken the gravy accompanying it. Researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have found melamine crystals in urine and kidney tissue taken from some of the dead cats.

[. . .]

Some of the melamine detected by the FDA could be a breakdown product of another contaminant. Cyromazine is a commonly used pesticide that is chemically similar to melamine and can be converted into melamine when fed to animals. This has led to suggestions that cyromazine residues on the wheat and rice products are responsible for the poisoning. That does not, however, explain the melamine already in the wheat and protein products sent from China.

A third suspect is cyanuric acid, a chemical that is added to swimming pools to stop light destroying chlorine too quickly and which has also been identified by the FDA in some of the pet food samples. One possibility is that the cyanuric acid was created by bacteria in the rice and wheat consignments. Klebsiella bacteria are known to be able to convert melamine into cyanuric acid, while other bacteria create it by breaking down the widely used herbicide atrazine, which could have been sprayed on wheat and rice crops grown in China. The problem with this theory is that while cyanuric acid can cause cancer in animals exposed to it long-term, swallowing a few doses should cause nothing more serious than an irritation of the gut.

So we’re up to three contaminants, and not one of them or a combination of them explains the deaths and illnesses.  That leaves us with this:

A literature search shows that the only ill effect of melamine so far identified is its ability to cause bladder cancer in animals given large doses over long periods. What’s more, this has only been observed in rats (Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, vol 5, p 294), and occurs indirectly, as crystals of the chemical seed the growth of bladder stones that then trigger the growth of tumours. Melamine has never been shown to produce the kidney damage seen in most of the affected pets in the US. For now, it seems, the cat and dog killer remains at large.

And since that’s the case, the FDA and USDA announcing that the tainted human foods were/are safe for consumption is a blatant lie and a deceptive tactic that endangers the lives of more than the animals we’re supposed to be providing for.  Now, don’t get me wrong; we can do with a lot fewer people, but not knowing what the real culprit is means we should have decisively halted all Chinese imports at least a month ago, and we should be performing rigorous testing on all pet foods—not to mention any of those products that are being used to feed animals going into the human food supply.

I don’t know about you folks, but this is one huge and frightening mess.  This will only go downhill from here, and it’s possible it’ll go way downhill.

Festival of the Trees #11 offers a cornucopia of arboreal treats.  Climb on over there and root around a bit.

I and the Bird # 48 has all the birding goodies you could ask for.  And doesn’t that blog theme look familiar?

Speaking of which, I’m already thinking about changing the theme again.  Have I mentioned I’m capricious?

This really pisses me off: “Malta’s spring bird hunt is in full swing for what could be the last time before the country is taken to court accused of violating the EU Birds Directive. [. . .] Malta is the only country in the EU that allows bird hunting in spring. And according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, some hunters fire at any bird that flies past, not just the two species the government permits.”  There’s more news and even a handful of photos showing the terrible devastation this hunt causes.  It’s disheartening and not for the timid.

It looks like FARK.com still wants to own everything posted to their site regardless of copyright and ownership.  So I’ll reiterate what I said before: I’m not adding support for FARK back to my site until they get their heads out of their asses.  My content is my content.  Period.  If it’s posted to FARK, it’s there to be shared only on that site and only in the manner I say.  To add insult to injury, they now claim the right to make money on anything posted, and the right to sublicense, sell, or otherwise make money from anything they can get their hands on.  What a bunch of thieves.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Congress is pursuing an update to federal hate crimes protections.  They want to extend the law to cover sexual orientation and gender.  Dubya, on the other hand, already has said he will veto the bill if that is included.  He’s such a hater, along with the rest of his morally dysfunctional, intolerant, bigoted kind.

Few intelligent Christians can still hold to the idea that the Bible is an infallible Book, that it contains no linguistic errors, no historical discrepancies, no antiquated scientific assumptions, not even bad ethical standards. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages. The existence of thousands of variations of texts makes it impossible to hold the doctrine of a book verbally infallible. Some might claim for the original copies of the Bible an infallible character, but this view only begs the question and makes such Christian apologetics more ridiculous in the eyes of the sincere man.

— Elmer Homrighausen, former Dean of Princeton Theological Seminary

Pardon my silence yesterday.  It was not of my own doing.

We yet again were visited by severe weather.  I lost power little more than thirty minutes after I arrived home from work, and it didn’t come back on until early this morning.  I didn’t wait up for it.  Oh, and it went out just a few minutes before the tornado sirens bellowed their terrifying warning into the air… again.

Packing winds of at least 100 mph (161 kph), small hail, torrential flooding rains, a respectable lightning show, and possibly some tornadoes, this marked the fourth week in a row for North Texas to get its collective butt kicked by Mother Nature.  This time, however, she was quite serious.

As of this morning, more than 300,000 people were still without power, more than a dozen regional electric towers had been blown down, everything not bolted to the ground became a projectile weapon, and some areas looked like war zones.  In fact, I was surprised to see that six or seven trees had been blown over in the parking lot at work.  When I arrived there, some were still where the winds had left them, while others had already been moved to safer locations and out of the way of traffic.

Although I’d like to claim I secreted off to some exciting destination for the evening, or that a debonair Prince Charming had swept me off my feet for a passionate and memorable evening, neither would be truthful.

So I was knocked off the intertubes by nothing more exhilarating than severe weather.

And for those I’ve heard saying this repetitive beating we’ve received in the last month is nothing short of extremely unusual weather, all I can say is they’ve obviously not been in Texas for more than three minutes.  I’ve lived here for decades and find nothing out of the ordinary about all of this.  Dallas is in Tornado Alley, is it not?  And severe weather is the reason we have civil defense sirens that respond to weather warnings, right?  And the cliché is that anyone who doesn’t like the weather in Texas should wait five minutes, eh?

No, poppets, this rash of tornadic and destructive weather we’ve had these past weeks is, in my mind, nothing to blink at.  It seems to me that we’re seeing a bit of our usual spring weather and nothing more.  Remember, last year we didn’t see measurable rain all spring, and that was extraordinary.  This year, on the other hand, we appear to have found our normal footing… at least so far.