China contaminating our children. Again.

The cadmium jewelry for kids. Available at WalMart.
Don't buy Chinese & don't go to WalMart.
It's that simple, to be patriotic.
And safe.

OK, the Independence day holiday came and went. Hope you enjoyed your cookouts and 4th of July fireworks.

The just-say-no-to-Chinese boycott is technically over, but you don't have to stop. Every time you put that Chinese product back on the shelf, you proclaim your independence. Keep it up, please.

China gets Hummer

Fiendishly well-suited to each other. Reminds me of the bride of Frankenstein.
Except Elsa Lanchester was sorta cute.
Hummers are not.

Check out comments to Mike Thompson's excellent cartoon at Detroit Free Press.

We see way too many Hummers on the road here, where the west begins and fantasies persist. I remember seeing my first stretch hummer coming out of a hockey game in Dallas several years ago. Yeah, wretched excess is redefined.

Back home in El Paso a couple years ago I saw no Hummers on the road (as a POV--that's Personally Owned Vehicle in army-speak). Maybe that's because the real HumVees are at Ft Bliss. It would be so embarrassing to be a civilian driving a Hummer and playing your army fantasies in El Paso, when the real and deadly serious army lives there, too.

Well, you'd think.

We DO import wind turbine blades

Last night at a dinner party a friend--whose uncle used to be harbormaster for the Port of Galveston--said he sees the blades stacked on the wharf often on visits to Galveston. Yes, huge.
And then a blade gets on a truck and heads up I-45. A few loads of those really snarls traffic.

photo by tigone

"Bulker [bulk freighter] CATHRIN OLDENDORFF with a deck cargo of wind turbine blades, estimated to be 33m (108 feet) each in length. Galveston, Texas, January 27, 2007."

I'd estimate I agree with the length. Because they were longer than two rail cars, which are 40ft [to accommodate a 40'container] when I saw them on Saturday.

My f/Friend Fred tells me that the world-beater wind farm project T. Boone Pickens is building up by Pampa features blades from a Danish company that sources the manufacturing in Vietnam. Good money, Vietnam!

So I went looking to see where these things are made. Answer: everywhere! Whoa, talk about helping the developing world. That's good. What could be easier? Got breeze? Got power!

Thank goodness people like T. Boone got money to put the wind farms on the grid.

Wind-turbine blades are huge

See the train in the trestle in this pic? Today I drove under it and there was a parked train full of blades for wind-turbine electric generators. One blade spanned the street. It's a 6-lane divided street. It was about 2 1/2 miles of train with those blades, which are apparently twice as long as a standard rail car.


View Larger Map

The blades could have been as big as this prototype of a huge one. Maybe even bigger.

The website* describes it as:
GE Wind Energy's 3.6 megawatt wind turbine is one of the largest prototypes ever erected. Larger wind turbines are more efficient and cost effective.

These were NOT made in China. Trust me, they are waaaaaay too big to fit in a container.


* http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/wind_how.html

My WWWW bracelet

Last weekend I made a bracelet with black beads and four white ones with the letter "W" on them. No, I didn't make a typo with the beads; it's not a WWJD bracelet. But it kinda looks like one.

A bag of all "W" beads at Hobby Lobby was cheap. I proudly wear my WWWW bracelet now. Wore it to court and made sure it was visible, just in case it might be mistaken for a WWJD model.

What does it mean? Quakers will get this one. It stands for What Would Woolman Wear.

John Woolman had a revelation that slavery was wrong, and henceforward he sought to eliminate products that involved the use of slave labor from anything he purchased. That meant foregoing clothing dyed with indigo grown by slaves in the Carribbean. With off-white clothing he stood out in a crowd. Part of his witness against slavery. He had more than that, but the clothing was his hallmark.

Don't buy Chinese. Really.
What my WWWW bracelet means to me is a reminder to look to the conditions that produce the goods I consume. For years I've been careful to NOT purchase anything made in China. Selfishly because China's slave-like wages put my Indian-import company out of business ten years ago. Then it put my start-up company with a made-in-the-USA product out of business a few years later. Altruistically because our dollars flowing to China only help keep people enslaved there.

Sometimes it isn't possible to avoid buying Chinese. Look at the labels when you go shoe shopping (everyday sensible footwear).

I can throw a really good fit over this situation. More later.