Via Laura Leslie…
Monday: Smoking Ban Update — North Carolina Public Radio WUNC
Late-breaking news: According to Greensboro’s Mark Binker, all systems are NOT go for a vote tomorrow. It turns out proponents of the ban may have miscounted a nose or two. The bill is conspicuously absent from Tuesday’s House calendar. Too close to call? Yep. Read Mark’s update here.
Oh well, let’s see what happens…
Well, it has taken less than a decade (I am a pessimist), but looks like smoking in bars and restaurants may finally be over and done with in my old home state of NC.
Note that there is currently a HUGE loophole in the senate version of the bill, it permits smoking in “private clubs”. Many bars in NC designate themselves as “private clubs” to circumvent prohibition era (or thereabouts) laws that mandate liquor serving establishments to get a certain percentage of their revenue from food. So, my favourite Chapel Hill drinking establishment, The Dead Mule (no website, sorry!) is supposedly a “private club” – You supposedly pay a one time membership fee (usually less than 5 bucks), and are supposed to “sign in” any members and guests. This was all a farce anyway, and the Mule got extremely smoky, it was quite disgusting after a while.
One hopes that the final bill will make the ban universal. Bans like this work best when they don’t favour one group of establishments over the other for no real reason. The people who work at the Dead Mule are equally entitled to clean air.
1.5 cautious cheers, let’s see what happens in the end…
The state Senate voted Thursday to ban smoking in bars and restaurants in North Carolina. It set the stage for what would be a historic prohibition of a product that created thousands of jobs, built Duke and Wake Forest universities and has long been an integral part of the culture in the nation's top tobacco-producing state.
House members passed a tougher version last month, meaning that lawmakers will still have to work out a compromise, assuming the Senate passes the measure in a second vote on Monday. The bill passed Thursday by an eight-vote margin, 26-18, so that seems likely.
via State Senate OKs smoking ban – Politics – News & Observer.
Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China – New York Times
As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
Wow, apparently, this has been going for a while now, and is extremely widespread.
It is time to test everything protein supplement coming out of China for Melamine, not just wheat gluten as the FDA has been doing. More importantly, it is also time to investigate other possible “additives” that Chinese (or for that matter, any other country including the US) manufacturers may be using.
The tale is told from the pig’s viewpoint. Of course, as I have mentioned before, hog factories are evil and affect the people (mostly poor and black) who live around them in very many horrible ways.
Of the 60 million pigs in the United States, over 95 percent are continuously confined in metal buildings, including the almost five million sows in crates. In such setups, feed is automatically delivered to animals who are forced to urinate and defecate where they eat and sleep. Their waste festers in large pits a few feet below their hooves. Intense ammonia and hydrogen sulfide fumes from these pits fill pigs’ lungs and sensitive nostrils. No straw is provided to the animals because that would gum up the works (as it would if you tossed straw into your toilet).
In my work as an environmental lawyer, I’ve toured a dozen hog confinement operations and seen hundreds from the outside. My task was to evaluate their polluting potential, which was considerable. But what haunted me was the miserable creatures inside.
They were crowded into pens and cages, never allowed outdoors, and never even provided a soft place to lie down. Their tails had been cut off without anesthetic. Regardless of how well the operations are managed, the pigs subsist in inherently hostile settings. (Disclosure: my husband founded a network of farms that raise pigs using traditional, non-confinement methods.)
The stress, crowding and contamination inside confinement buildings foster disease, especially respiratory illnesses. In addition to toxic fumes, bacteria, yeast and molds have been recorded in swine buildings at a level more than 1,000 times higher than in normal air. To prevent disease outbreaks (and to stimulate faster growth), the hog industry adds more than 10 million pounds of antibiotics to its feed, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates. This mountain of drugs — a staggering three times more than all antibiotics used to treat human illnesses — is a grim yardstick of the wretchedness of these facilities.
The vote was 55-61, and one of the arguments advanced was by Representative Paul Stam (h/t N&O’s new political blog):
This is pushing smoke out of places where only adults are, but into places where children are. A person who’s addicted to tobacco and can’t smoke all day will get in that car and have to light up three or four or go home and do what they didn’t do during the day. That seems common sense to me.”
Yeah, and if you stop a murderer from killing in public, he will kill at home, so we should just let him shoot people randomly in public.
North Carolina General Assembly – House Bill 259 Information/History (2007-2008 Session)
Whatever, it does not matter, smoking in public will be history even in the South in a decade or less, just a few lawsuits away. I think we first need to overturn the laws against local government passing anti smoking legislation.
Dear state politicians, if you can’t lead, can you at least follow?? If you have not been following this issue, click here. North Carolina recently failed to pass a smoking ban in bars and restaurants.
newsobserver.com | Poll finds support for tobacco ban
More than two-thirds of North Carolina adults favor a statewide ban on smoking in public enclosed areas, such as restaurants, stadiums and shopping centers, according to a new poll by researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The FDA mentioned recently that the melamine suspected of poisoning many cats had gotten into pig feed in California, well, it gets worse…
Tuesday: Uh-Oh — North Carolina Public Radio WUNC
The FDA announced this afternoon that thousands of hogs in NC and four or five other states are now under quarantine because they were fed tainted rice gluten. Hogs here and in CA have tested positive for melamine. No one knows yet whether it poses any dangers to humans who ate the hogs, but the feds say they’re trying to find out.
At this point in time, I would consider any animal feed from China suspect. Way out of control, because we have no procedure for being proactive about these things…
It won’t amount to much because melamine apparently does not affect humans as much as it seems to affect cats, but it is the utter lack of control of ingredients and raw materials that scares me. What else can sneak through? What if the next one is actually deadly to humans?