“You gotta see this pander!”
I had left the Republican debate during a commercial break to microwave some popcorn, and my cousin Ray Sixkiller was yelling at me. I was surprised. My Republican cousin has been frustrated with the crowd running for President, but both sides pander.
Hurrying back to the TV, I learned the price of not wearing my hearing aid. Ray had changed the channel and the image on the screen had changed from Homo politicus to Ailuropoda melanoleuca AKA giant pandas.
The National Zoo has a 24/7 Pandacam, but Ray was watching a news report of the newest panda, Bei Bei, taking his first steps. Time quoted the National Zoo Facebook page, “One small step for a panda, one adorably wobbly moment for all of us.”
Live Science reported that Bei Bei means “precious treasure.” Before opening his eyes, Bei Bei had a Twitter account, #PandaStory.
I thought Bei Bei was a girl’s name?
Turning back to pander, Stephen Colbert suggested that Marco Rubio is relating to the younger generation “by loitering outside a liquor store.” Rubio’s response to, “Who would you like to have a beer with?” was “Malala what’s-her-name.” Colbert pointed out that Malala Yousafzai is both a practicing Muslim and 18 years old.
Elsewhere in silly season, Dr. Ben Carson has been recycling this bon mot: “The Ark was made by amateurs; the Titanic was made by experts.” Cousin Ray was ROFL. “Words to live by—if you don’t care to live long!”
Politico, in an article titled “5 of the stupidest things said this campaign season,” limited Carson to one by this bit of scrunching: “That whole ‘Egyptian-pyramids-warehoused-grain-giving-German Jews-handguns-would-have-stopped-the-Holocaust-prison-makes-you-gay-no-Muslim-should-be-president’ thing.”
The doctor has no patience for reporters who read his writings as if they were factual. Politico reported Carson’s challenge:
So, you know, I would say to the people of America: Do you think I’m a pathological liar like CNN does, or do you think I’m an honest person? And I’m going to leave that up to the American people to make that decision.
Speaking of science denying politicians, 60 Minutes broadcast video of Peter Higgs, whose equations done with paper and pencil predicted the “God Particle,” attending the announcement that the particle had been isolated at the Super Collider that is in Switzerland because Congress pulled the plug and turned ours into the world’s most expensive mushroom farm. Higgs nabbed the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013 when the Super Collider we didn’t build created a miniaturized version of the Big Bang, which Congressman Paul Broun (R-Georgia) called, along with evolution and embryology, “lies from the pit of hell.”
Broun was at the time serving on the House Committee on Science and Technology. He was named by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) one of the most corrupt members of Congress, but he was not voted out. He ran for Senate and lost.
December is coming right up, so it must be time for the annual War on Christmas declaration by Fox News. U.S. businesses, the argument goes, do not understand that holiday goodwill is a zero sum game. Therefore, to admit the existence of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid-al-Adha, Diwali, or winter solstice festivals across countless cultures diminishes Christmas.
The self-appointed chaplain of those in the trenches to defend Christmas from businesses that serve non-Christians is Josh Feurstein, who advocates giving one’s name as “Merry Christmas” so the heathens in Starbucks will have to say the forbidden words when they call out your order. The Donald Trump, speaking at an Illinois rally that broke an attendance record held by Elton John, suggested a boycott of Starbucks.
What is the sin of the coffee joint? Their holiday cups are plain red. No Jesus. “My grandkids,” Cousin Ray joked, “would be more impressed by Santa—but they don’t drink much coffee.”
In the land of coffee, Seattle is risking tourist dollars by messing around with the gum wall, a landmark located near the Pike Place Market after which Starbucks named a very good coffee blend. Visitors have for 20 years parked their used chewing gum on a 115-year-old brick wall. The New York Times estimates there are—or were—about a million pieces of second hand chewing gum weighing 2,200 pounds in the second most unsanitary tourist attraction in the world, behind Ireland’s Blarney Stone.
Park Place Market expects tourists to start rebuilding what it calls “a crowdsourced piece of public art.” Cousin Ray said he thought Seattle was too high tech to build things out of gum, adding, “Can baling wire be far behind?” He then suggested that the artwork be named for “the horse that won the Triple Crown in 1977, Seattle Chew.”
After I finished groaning, I tried to interest my cousin in a real tech story. Digital Trends reported that a Silicon Valley start-up, Ubiquitous Energy, has developed a transparent solar panel.
How can that be? To be transparent, it has to let though visible light. Which it does. The electricity comes from the ultraviolet and infrared parts of the spectrum and the photovoltaic materials are in the edges of the glass. According to the report, the lab work is done and they are into scaling up production and licensing the technology. That’s a monster story if true, but Cousin Ray claimed he could see right through it.
The Cañon City Daily Record front-paged a “Cañon City sexting scandal,” and the accompanying story was mostly about how national media have descended on the small Colorado town. Reading on, we learn the number of smart phones in police custody: one.
The high school football team was forced to forfeit its last game of the season because “some” players “might” have been sexting. The police chief speculated that there are “hundreds of victims.” Reading on, it appears that a female middle school student was asked by a boy to text him a nude photo of herself, and when her irate mother called the school, she was told that “half of the school does this.”
This is a full-blown example of what sociologists call a “moral panic.” The local prosecutor pointed out that sexting while young is a felony that can get you on the Sex Offender Registry.
Cousin Ray was wondering whether it would be possible to start a national database called the Lacking Common Sense Registry? “Adults only,” he added.
History News Network ran an article by University of Washington Professor Daniel Chirot called “The Frightening Return of Religious Wars” that would have students of American Indian history sadly nodding. It’s the 21st century, when we would think superstition would be tamped down enough to avoid violence, but the sectarian war between Shi’a and Sunni Islam in not just violent, it’s spreading. The U.S has taken the side of the Sunnis.
Hindu fundamentalists are killing non-Hindus in India. Buddhists in the former Burma are killing Muslims. The tribal peoples of sub-Saharan Africa are caught between Muslim extremists and evangelical Christians in a contest to impose their respective values.
Culture wars are raging in both the U.S. and Russia, where Christians are trying to deploy governmental power against non-Christians.
Some of us hoped education would fend off this nonsense—until we saw video from the anti-racism protests at the University of Missouri.
No matter the cause for protest—and this was a good cause–the disorder always attracts a few unhinged people, so I did not go into shock when one of the protestors shoved a news photographer and, when he didn’t leave, shouted, “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”
Then I found out the call for “muscle” came from Melissa Click, Assistant Professor of Mass Media. An Assistant Professor is normally not tenured, so it remains to be seen whether Mizzou will tenure a media professor so oblivious to First Amendment values that she would teach by example it’s OK to stop a journalist from doing his job in a public space.
As shocking as a media scholar who does not value a free press, the Oklahoma government subsidiary of the oil business has become number one in the nation in producing earthquakes.
Quakes have spiked as Oklahoma politicians hopped on the oil business anti-science bandwagon to deny the link between injection wells multiplied by fracking and a rise in “seismic events.” Now, the state government has a website devoted to earthquake news.
Counting quakes is limited to those of a magnitude above three, the smallest that can be sensed by voters without seismographs. According to Oklahoma government, there were 109 quakes in 2013 and 585 in 2014.
I was wondering out loud if there is any way to settle these earthquakes down without inconveniencing the oil companies? “Sure,” Cousin Ray snickered. “Lower taxes and repeal all government regulations. That’ll fix anything.”
Oh yeah? Louisiana Senator David Vitter is running for governor, a Republican in a bright red state, but The Times-Picayune reported the latest polling has him losing the black vote to the Democrat, 95 percent to 5 percent.
So Vitter was at a political forum at historically black Southern University in Baton Rouge and people were complaining about an attack ad where Vitter accused his opponent of wanting to release “thugs” from prison. To the complaint that he was using “thug” like the N word in context, Vitter replied:
“Why don’t you go to the dictionary, look the word up, and see what the word means. There’s no racial connotation at all.”
Cousin Ray got excited. “That’s exactly what we keep telling Dan Snyder about the name of his football team! Maybe we could hire Vitter to lobby Snyder….since he looks about to be out of work”