Love & Blunder

The New York Times reports:

After weeks of insisting that food here is largely safe, regulators in China said Tuesday that they had recently closed 180 food plants and that inspectors had uncovered more than 23,000 food safety violations.

The story continues:

Regulators said 33,000 law enforcement officials combed the nation and turned up illegal food making dens, counterfeit bottled water, fake soy sauce, banned food additives and illegal meat processing plants.

“These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, director of the administration’s quality control and inspection department told the state-run media.

China Daily, the nation’s English language newspaper, said industrial chemicals, including dyes, mineral oils, paraffin wax, formaldehyde and malachite green, had been found in everything from candy, pickles and biscuits to seafood.

Hungry?

We had VBS this week, which sent me into a panic because I was the director. But, it was very fun for the girls, as well as the rest of the kiddos from our church.

We had the children sing a hymn and recite a poem that they learned this week before the service today. Olivia was just a smidge too young to get the idea of a “youth choir performance,” though she is not at all too young to get the idea of “performance.”

If I wasn’t so darn proud of her groove she might have embarassed me, shaking her little tooshie to midieval hymns in front of the whole congregation.

In the battle between solidarity and dislocation, conservatives should naturally be on the side of the former, and it should be conservatives who benefit from the public’s interest in “strong community” and even, yes, “a sense of togetherness.”  (For some reason, the latter sounds much less ridiculous when you call it solidarity.)  Conservatism’s “failure” has been that conservatives have defined themselves or allowed themselves to be defined as individualists and advocates for the interests of the self.

– From Eunomia, Good New for Conservatives