On The Internet, Everybody’s An Expert.

The great appeal of the internet is that it allows every moron on the planet to have their say, as opposed to the olden days when an editor — or a group of them — looked over what was submitted to them long and hard before approving material for publishing. The goal of these internet writers, like other trolls, is to provoke rather than to instruct.
Recently DETAILS magazine's site ran with a piece by one of their experts-in-everything titled “The 5 Exercise Machines You Should Never Use at the Gym,” which of course features 5 classic workhorse machines everyone should be using. To make it worse, the link to this farce on the DETAILS site was found on MEN’S HEALTH website, making it doubly crazy.
Also, on MUSCLE & FITNESS (and to be fair, other bodybuilding sites as well) the put-down of those who caution against deep squats has reared its crazy head again. I’d like these macho-inspired deep-squat aficianados to produce a selection of deep-squatters over the age of 50 — no, let’s make it 40 —  who still have their real knees and can get up from their easy chair without screaming. You know, to prove their point of how safe and beneficial deep squatting is. Yeah, I thought so.
Deep ass-to-the-grass squatting has no extra physical benefits but does provide a host of dangers to knees and lower back.

Trust Food From China? Read The Label.

Remember back in the 80s and 90s when JAPAN was touted as the new world economic leader, and the media was crying about the decline of the US, and how we’re “falling behind”, or worse, that we as a nation were already has-beens, only to see Japan implode and all the emotional stories and hand-wringing just evaporate into thin air?
That’s CHINA today.
The first rule of being a happy healthy person is not to believe the media. The second rule is READ FOOD LABELS, especially with the sly and ever-increasing incursion of Chinese foodstuffs into our supermarkets.
The scandals that have rocked China over the years concerning tainted/poisoned/diseased/filthy food are epitomized in the 2008 baby formula scandal that killed 11 babies due to melamine “contaminated” milk powder and ruined the health of hundreds if not thousands more infants.  “Contaminated” is in quotes because there was nothing accidental or neglectful about the addition of the poison to the baby food. It was intentionally added. All because the idiots who instigated this scandal thought adding poison to baby formula would give the illusion of increasing its protein content. Don’t ask me to explain such a ludicrous concept, because the “logic” here is so horrific as to defy all that is humanly decent.
I don’t trust the Chinese to raise or grow or package my food. TARGET sells frozen fish of various types that is marked “product of China” in a tiny font.  You have to look hard to see it. WalMart sells all kinds of mainstream imported food from China that is not ethnically Asian, and that you might not even suspect originates in China, such as frozen chicken breasts. Pet food and pet treats are manufactured in China, and have their own scandal, so there’s no way on earth I’d ever feed these to my best buddy.
The original baby formula scandal didn’t teach anybody in China a lesson, as the scandal was repeated again in late 2008 when baby formula manufacturers watered down their product resulting in malnutrition deaths — babies who drank their product starved to death.
Wikipedia has a comprehensive history of this scandal, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. China has poisoned 16% of its own farmland and recent photos of Bejing’s “air” quality tell a tale of national indifference to life and health.
Trying to save a buck by buying food originating in China is crazy.