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:  “It takes a real storm in the average person’s life to make him realize how much worrying he has done over the squalls.”  ― Bruce Barton (Bruce Fairchild Barton – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Bruce Fairchild Barton (August 5, 1886 – July 5, 1967) was an American author, advertising executive, and politician. He served in the U.S. Congress from 1937 to 1940 as a Republican from New York.

TEXAS: REGISTER TO VOTE FOR THE GENERAL ELECTION

• Random Thoughts
• If the opposite of a Liberal is a Conservative, then the opposite of a Progressive is a … Regressive?
  • The eleventh-hour bid by Ted Cruz and John Kasich to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination by dividing upcoming contests is bold — but likely doomed.Donald Trump blasts John Kasich and Ted Cruz’s alliance: ‘A horrible act of desperation’, Business Insider
  • “If the Republicans don’t lay off this man, I will never vote Republican,” said Tim Wiles, a Trump-leaning voter in Buffalo, New York, said before news of the Cruz-Kasich alliance emerged late Sunday.
  • Cruz-Kasich alliance: Will it work?, By MJ Lee and Gregory Krieg, [CNN] Updated 7:02 PM ET, Mon April 25, 2016

• Congress looks at re-starting the F-22 Raptor program, By Thom Patterson, [CNN] Updated 3:01 PM ET, Thu April 21, 2016

  • A week after Russian military aircraft buzzed dangerously close to U.S. Navy ships and Air Force spy planes, Congress is considering bringing back production of stealthy F-22 Raptor air-to-air fighter jets.
  • Lawmakers have tacked a provision onto a defense bill that will determine how much it would cost and how difficult it would be to ramp up production of the Air Force’s fifth generation dogfighter. They also want to know about possible options for exporting F-22s to allies. Currently, exporting Raptors is illegal.
  • American military rivals China and Russia are already moving forward, developing their own new fighters. And the Air Force has already started a fighter jet program designated “F-X”. It’s possible that Pentagon war planners may push back if Congress chooses to go retro and bring back the Raptor.
  • Skeptics say the F-22’s stealth technology and its other major systems are too old for it to be revived as a truly valuable weapons system.
• Closed Set: Sunday TV Talk Shows Overwhelmingly White, Male, By Stuart Miller On 4/24/16 at 9:01 AM (NEWSWEEK.com)
  • A Media Matters study shows that the Sunday morning television talk shows are overwhelmingly white, male and skew rightward. Creative Commons
    • Culture Media Matters TV Networks Fox News CBS NBC ABC
  • the guests tend to have a conservative bent out of step with a nation that has routinely given more overall votes to Democrats in presidential and even congressional elections.
  • Media Matters, a progressive watchdog group, recently issued its annual study showing that white men represented 31 percent of the general population in 2015 but comprised 59 percent of the faces and voices on the five Sunday shows: 63 percent on both Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday; 60 percent of the guests on ABC’s This Week; 56 percent of those on CNN’s State of the Union; and 53 percent on NBC’s Meet the Press. (Perhaps not surprisingly Fox News was the whitest of the bunch, with Face the Nation as the second worst in diversity.)
  • The numbers in 2015 were only slightly better than they were in previous years: in 2013 and 2014, men represented 75 percent of all guests, a total that dipped to just 73 percent in 2005; the number of white guests dropped from 82 percent to 79 percent within that span.
  • [T]here is no clear explanation for why Media Matters’ study shows that the programs’ guest lists also tilt to the right politically year after year.
  • NBC executives refused to speak on the record, though the Meet the Press publicist made repeated references to the show’s pride in featuring an all-female panel one Sunday in March. ABC issued a statement saying “We don’t comment on booking practices,” and a CBS spokesperson for Face the Nation said they would only talk if other shows did too. State of the Union and Fox News Sunday did not respond to repeated interview requests.
  • No one would be surprised to learn that 53 percent of Fox News Sunday’s guests leaned right and just 21 percent leaned left, with 26 percent classified as neutral, according to the study. But the other networks, while more balanced, also favored Republicans: CNN was 46 percent conservative to 33 percent liberal with 21 percent neutral; NBC split 34 to 23 percent (with 43 percent neutral) which was similar to CBS at 34 to 22 percent; ABC featured the best balance at 33 to 29 percent, with 39 percent neutral.
  • [Media Matters Executive Vice President Angelo Carusone] says Chuck Todd has been making noticeable changes at NBC’s Meet the Press since taking over from David Gregory but that the shows mostly fall into the habit of repeatedly bringing back guests with whom they are comfortable. This creates an echo chamber of conventional wisdom he argues, a “calcifying perspective” which helps explain why they missed out on the rise and staying power of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
• Nuclear Power: Not clean, not cheap, not renewable, and not safe.
  • The Tidal and Fukushima disaster occurred 5 years ago in March.
  • Fukushima cleanup may take till the end of the century
• At Chernobyl and Fukushima, Radioactivity Has Seriously Harmed Wildlife: Studies at Chernobyl and Fukushima show that radiation has harmed animals, birds and insects and reduced biodiversity at both nuclear sites, By by Timothy A. Mousseau, professor of biological sciences, University of South Carolina, for The Conversation | Contributor April 25, 2016, at 5:02 p.m.
  • Recently we have tested the validity of our Chernobyl studies by repeating them in Fukushima, Japan. The 2011 power loss and core meltdown at three nuclear reactors there released about one-tenth as much radioactive material as the Chernobyl disaster
  • There are currently more than 400 nuclear reactors in operation around the world, with 65 new ones under construction and another 165 on order or planned. All operating nuclear power plants are generating large quantities of nuclear waste that will need to be stored for thousands of years to come. Given this, and the probability of future accidents or nuclear terrorism, it is important that scientists learn as much as possible about the effects of these contaminants in the environment, both for remediation of the effects of future incidents and for evidenced-based risk assessment and energy policy development.
• U.S. watches as Fukushima continues to leak radiation, Robert Ferris | @RobertoFerris, Thursday, 10 Mar 2016 | 3:57 PM ET
  • Five years later, scientists have reason to assume radiation from the Fukushima disaster is still showing up on U.S. shores. And they will likely continue to leak and drift for decades to come.
  • [T]hese levels are extremely small. … [A] single dental X-ray would expose a person to 1,000 times more radiation than swimming in that water for an entire year.
  • [T]here about a thousand tanks full of “something on the order of 750 million tons of water that are far more radioactive than anything in the ocean.” There is also radioactive material in the groundwater, soil and in the buildings.
• Fukushima’s ground zero: No place for man or robot, By Aaron Sheldrick And Minami Funakoshi | Fri Mar 11, 2016 2:38am Est (Reuters)
  • The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima’s nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean “ice wall” around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site.
  • Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-meter high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods in the quake and tsunami.
  • Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods, weighing hundreds of tonnes. Five robots sent into the reactors have failed to return. … as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said.
  • Is TEPCO the nuclear industry’s BP Oil?
    • Tepco, which was fiercely criticized for its handling of the disaster, says conditions at the Fukushima power station … years ago, have improved dramatically. Radiation levels in many places at the site are now as low as those in Tokyo.
    • A cynic might ask what that says about Tokyo’s radiation levels.
• 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 still 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
• Medicaid, Food stamps are subsidies for low wages.
  • We must also consider subsidized housing and the earned income tax credit.

 SOURCES WHICH MAY BE RELEVANT TO OTHER DISCUSSION:

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• 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
  • 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. After executing this strategy on every government program except the military and corporate welfare, is it now the turn of the Supreme Court?
• 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.
  • What Are Cats Trying to Tell Us? Science Will Explain
    [National Geographic Society]:

• 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 are fine and serve a useful purpose in civil opposition to each other.
  • Today’s “Conservatives” are conservative in name only

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