[Infowarrior] - WTF....Students Aren't Allowed To Touch Real Rocks

[Richard Forno]

Mrs. Lovejoy is on line 3.......  -rick

Students Aren't Allowed To Touch Real Rocks
Lenore Skenazy, 07.21.10, 7:00 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/21/consumer-product-safety-hazard-opinions-columnist-lenore-skenazy_print.html

Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products in Fort Collins, Colo., had his shipment all ready: A school's worth of small bags, each one filled with an igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock. Then the school canceled its order. Says Warring, "They apparently decided rocks could be harmful to children."

After all, who knows exactly what is in a piece of Mother Nature? There could be a speck of lead!

The children will study a poster of rocks instead.

And so it goes in the unbrave new world, where nothing is safe enough. It's a world brought to us by the once sane, now danger-hallucinating Consumer Product Safety Commission.

When the Commission was born in 1972, it seemed like a godsend. We'd just discovered GM execs knew their Corvair spun out of control, but hadn't done anything about it. We'd just learned that tobacco execs knew their cigarettes could cause cancer, but hadn't bothered to tell us. We were beginning to suspect every corporate suite harbored a horrible secret. A new government body would seek these out? Fantastic!

Fast forward 30-something years of ever-increasing safety. What are some of the products the CPSC is warning us about today? Well, there's the Graco Harmony High Chair. The commission warns parents to "stop using product immediately." Yikes! Scary! Is it ejecting kids? Spontaneously combusting?

Not quite. Of the 1,200,000 units sold, the CPSC received "24 reports of injuries, including bumps and bruises to the head, a hairline fracture to the arm, and cuts, bumps, bruises and scratches to the body." In other words: For every 50,000 chairs sold, a single child has suffered a bruise, bump or--once--a hairline fracture. Now look: Nobody likes to see a sweetheart suffer. But the Harmony high chair does not exactly sound like baby's first Pinto.

Then there's the Little Tykes workbench. Last year the CPSC recalled that product's toy nails after an 11-month-old boy almost choked on one. Those nails are made out of plastic. They're 3 1/4 inches high and 1 1/4 inches wide. They've been sold with the workbench since 1994. And the boy who almost choked is fine. So we're talking about a product that has been on the market for 15 years and sold 1,600,000 units. It is popular, safe and time-tested. To me that's an exemplary toy.

To the CPSC it is a killer on the loose.