We will be taking callers during this show.

SHOW AUDIO:

Houston Mayor Annise Parker [L] with Mike (Dec. 14, 2015)

Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 9-10 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineer is Bob Gartner.

Listen live on the radio or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

POSSIBLE TOPICS:

SIGNOFF QUOTE: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” ~ Adam Savage, on an episode of Mythbusters.

• TEXAS:
  • REGISTER TO VOTE FOR THE GENERAL ELECTION
  • Labor Dept. finally closes a loophole favoring union-busters — after 57 years, By Michael Hiltzik Contact Reporter [LA Times], 3-23-2016
    • . The Dept. of Labor finally has moved to close one loophole, created way back in 1959. This is the ability to hire anti-union consultants, familiarly known as “persuaders,” without reporting the arrangements. The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, otherwise known as the Landrum-Griffin Act, required these deals to be reported only if the consultants were speaking directly with employees, but not if their influence reached the workplace floor indirectly, via intermediaries.
    • Thanks to the new Labor Dept. rule, that dodge ends as of July 1. The goal is to make sure that when employees interested in organizing with a union are confronted with scripted arguments from supervisors or fellow employees, they know who wrote the script.
    • “Workers often don’t know that their employer hired a consultant to manage its message in union organizing campaigns, including by scripting speeches by managers, talking points, letters, and other documents,” the Labor Dept. says in an explanatory note. “Consultants may also direct supervisors to express specific viewpoints that don’t match those supervisors’ actual views as individuals — something workers may find relevant in assessing the information they receive from their supervisors.”
    • Typically, a company facing a union organizing drive arranges captive audience meetings characterized as “information sessions”…
    • According to a 2009 survey of union elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, “workers were forced to attend anti-union one-on-one sessions with a supervisor at least weekly in two-thirds of elections, … employers used supervisor one-on-one meetings to interrogate workers about who they or other workers supported, and in 54% used such sessions to threaten workers.”
    • “Employers threatened to close the plant in 57% of elections, discharged workers in 34%, and threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47% of elections. “After executing this strategy on every government program except the military and corporate welfare, is it now the turn of the Supreme Court?
    • Shrinking from 9 to 8 Justices.
  • Congress and the Supreme Court: “I simply want to reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. … ~ Grover Norquist – Wikiquote https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist
    • Is the GOP now applying this practice to the Supreme Court by ‘shrinking’ the number of Justices?
  • FBI unlocks San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, drops Apple legal fight, by Joel Rubin [LA Times] 3-28-2016: The move comes a week after officials announced a “third party” had come forward to help investigators unlock the phone without help from the computer giant. It’s unclear what the FBI found on the phone.
• Secret Service says ‘no’ to guns at Republican convention, By Doina Chiacu (Reuters) Mon Mar 28, 2016 6:10pm EDT
  • The U.S. Secret Service will not allow people to carry guns into the July Republican National Convention in Cleveland, quashing the hopes of more than 45,000 people who have signed a petition saying attendees should be allowed to bring firearms
  • The Secret Service said on Monday it has the authority to preclude guns from sites visited by the people it protects such as U.S. presidential candidates, presidents and former presidents.
• The Next Step in Animal Welfare? Breed a Better Chicken, by Maryn McKenna, (nationalgeographic.com) March 24, 2016
  • A … program … announced last week by the Global Animal Partnership, a nonprofit that works with farmers and retailers to improve animal welfare, asks chicken farmers to change the breeds of the birds they are raising to a more hardy, slower-growing breed. …
  • So what the new GAP standard asks producers and retailers to do is to switch to broilers that have been bred to grow more slowly and in a more balanced manner: gaining no more than 50 grams of weight per day, which translates to a bird that lives 56-62 days instead of 35-42.
  • To investigate whether the change was feasible, GAP commissioned a working group of major chicken producers… , and involved Whole Foods, which evaluates all its meat purchases using the 5-step GAP scale. “All of our suppliers were interested…’” [said] Theo Weening, Whole Foods’ global meat buyer… “Some of them had long histories in the chicken industry, and they remembered when chickens were slower-growing and had more flavor. So when GAP came up with the standard, I went back to the suppliers, and they said, let’s work together, instead of having one guy make it to the finish line first.”
• What Are Cats Trying to Tell Us? Science Will Explain, By Carrie Arnold [National Geographic] PUBLISHED March 28, 2016
  • The Science of Meow: Study to Look at How Cats Talk: A new project is underway to decode kitty communication—and figure out if cats really like all that baby talk.
  • Nearly all New York State pet owners talk to their pets like they’re fellow humans, according to a recent poll.  Many believe their dogs and cats can respond with barks or meows that communicate hunger, fear, or simply the need to pee.  But do the animals tawk back in a Brooklyn accent? That’s the sort of thing Swedish cat lover and phonetics researcher Suzanne Schötz is working to find out
• THE TRUMP REPORT
  • Kerry says Republican campaign rhetoric an ‘embarrassment’ to U.S., by Ros Krasny Bloomberg (Salt Lake Tribune) 3-28-2016
• Has BART’s cutting-edge 1972 technology design come back to haunt it?, By Matthias Gafni, mgafni@bayareanewsgroup.com Posted: 03/26/16, 8:01 AM PDT
• Done by 2100 CE? “Fukushima Keeps Fighting Radioactive Tide 5 Years After Disaster” http://nyti.ms/1QQuxbn 
  • Fukushima is out of the news media but stil very much an ongoing disaster.
  • Filtered water with reduced radioactivity is still being dumped into the sea.
  • Cleanup is estimated to take 50-100 years
• The Republican Party should have disavowed Trump long ago.
  • The biggest joke – except it’s not funny – is the number of Republicans who say that they don’t like what Trump stands for but they’ll support him if he’s the nominee.

 SOURCES WHICH MAY BE RELEVANT TO OTHER DISCUSSION:

======================================================

• The dos and don’ts of open carry, By Robert Arnold – Investigative Reporter (click2houston.com) Posted: 9:37 AM, December 31, 2015 Updated: 10:04 AM, December 31, 2015
• TERMINOLOGIES: Words Matter
  • The term “Conservative” is so inaccurate as currently used by the Media, the Media and all of us really need to rethink their classifications and terminology.
  • There are Liberals/Progressives and there are Conservatives. Both of those ae fine and serve a useful purpose in civil opposition to each other.
  • Today’s “Conservatives” are conservative in name only
• How much influence does the media really have over elections? Digging into the data: “My sense is that what we have here is a feedback loop. Does media attention increase a candidate’s standing in the polls? Yes. Does a candidate’s standing in the polls increase media attention? Also yes.”By Jonathan Stray @jonathanstray [www.niemanlab.org] Jan. 11, 2016, 2:49 p.m
• Poll: Whites and Republicans Rank as Angriest Americans, by Andrew Rafferty (Meet the Press) Jan 3 2016, 11:54 am ET
• Obama’s team says the GOP earned Donald Trump: Loyalists say that after two terms of obstruction, Republicans are getting the anger candidate their rhetoric created. By Edward-Isaac Dovere, 12/27/15 (com, 07:45 AM EST) Updated 12/27/16 11:17 AM EST
  • “’It’s not that the country has changed, it’s that a narrow band of mostly white, low- and middle-income Americans are supporting a candidate who is speaking to their anxiety about being left behind in this economy,’ said Bill Burton, a former deputy White House press secretary.”
  • “Blue collar anxiety” is a real thing with real causes. That’s why so-called “Post-industrial Economies” are a fraud perpetrated against semi-skilled workers, and why industry needs to be re-invigorated in this country. We NEED blue collar jobs. Not everyone is cut out for ‘service’ work.
• Houston Toll Road Authority (HTRA) is slowly going all-electronic. What does this mean to you?
  • Rates – Sam Houston Tollway Counter-Clockwise
• Study: Presidents die younger than unelected candidates, By Julia Belluz 1 day ago (com)
• 40 Percent Of Ford Models To Be Electrified By 2020, by Sarah Shelton December 21, 2015 (http://www.hybridcars.com): By 2020, Ford wants 40 percent of its global lineup to be offered as a plug-in or hybrid variant.
  • To reach this goal, Ford will be investing $4.5 billion and adding 13 electrified models to its lineup, calling [this] the “largest-ever electrified vehicle investment in a five-year period” for the company.
• Hillary Clinton targets corporate inversion with new ‘exit tax’ plan: Tax is part of Democratic presidential frontrunner’s strategy to ‘rein in Wall Street’ on the heels of Pfizer’s plan to merge with Allergan and move to Ireland. The proposals are part of Clinton’s larger economic agenda, which includes boosting infrastructure spending by $275bn. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP

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