Many fellow-grandmothers liked my article about Rubber Duckies in Taiwan yesterday. Today we cross the Taiwan Strait to the Mainland. There Fox News has sold its remaining stake in the Star network in China to the employees, maybe because of the divorce of Rupert and Wendi Murdoch.
The fox is not liked in China. Walmart got into unexpected trouble there for selling as donkey meat (a pick-me-up for winter chills) what turned out by DNA testing to be fox meat. Nobody from Arkansas would have tasted either one, I suspect.
Chinese people don’t eat wolf or fox, but they certainly like dog meat. When I first visited the Guangzhou municipal market in the early 1990s I was appalled at the sight of cute little wrinkled puppies in tiny cages being sold for food. I thereafter dined exclusively in Buddhist vegetarian restaurants while in China. Whether I was secretly fed some other cute creature disguised as mushrooms I know not
Recall Oscar Wilde’s definition of fox-hunting: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”
Walmart is building its grocery presence in Africa where there are many wild beasts. But don’t worry about the meat counters there. In African countries, wild animals may not be hunted, only poached, and they are eaten exclusively by rich foreign tourists in expensive game restaurants. Nairobi has one written up in the guidebooks, which I didn’t test. How to play food in Africa is discussed for paid subscribers below.
What follows is a political rant.
The US should stop worrying about Canada’s tar sands, which will be developed whether or not we allow a pipeline to cross our border. What we really need is pipelines (and storage facilities) at our shale oil sites. Then the operators would stop burning off the gas by-product, polluting the skies.
The myriad US tax breaks for oil exploration should require halting gas flaring by feeding the shale gas into pipelines. When I was a kid we converted our NYC kitchen stove to natural gas piped in to replace coal gas. The pipeline technology exists. The only obstacle is that natural gas is too cheap for them to pay off short-term.
So the US should use tax breaks to clean up. And get rid of other tax breaks to finance it. The US should encourage new energy limited partnerships so yield investors can join in the benefits or more gas pipelines.
Government policy moves LPs. Your editor owns Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, which operates pipelines, a US yield stock. Last week it bought 5 vessels from American Petroleum Tankers, controlled by several private equity funds. APT specializes in “Jones Act” ships, the only ones allowed to transport oil and its derivatives between US ports. The Jones Act was passed in 1920 to protect US inter-port shipping and US sailors from foreign competition. It is untouchable in Congress because it is backed by both unions and shipping companies.
