SHOW AUDIO: Link is usually posted within about 72 hours of show broadcast. We take callers during this show at 713-526-5738.

Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 2-3 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineers are Don, Leti, and Nibu.

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.)

Please take a moment to visit Pledge.KPFT.org and choose THINKWING RADIO from the drop-down list when you donate.

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.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker [L] with Mike, just before the show. (Dec. 7, 2015)

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]:

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” ~ Frederick Douglass (Part of a speech given by Douglass in 1886 on the 24th anniversary of emancipation in Washington, DC)

______________________________________________________________________

1. PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT, if you bought a Mega Millions lottery ticket in Simpsonville, South Carolina or know someone who might have:
   1. As the year ends, the winner of a $1.5 billion jackpot is still a mystery – One ticket sold in South Carolina matched all six numbers in the Oct. 23 Mega Millions lottery drawing for a total jackpot of $1.537 billion. (Reuters), By Michael Brice-Saddler | [WASHINGTON POST | December 23 at 5:08 PM
      1. A small town in South Carolina was overjoyed in October after learning that a Mega Millions ticket worth $1.5 billion had been sold from a local convenience store. …
      2. … As the year draws to a close, however, that excitement is slowly transforming into anxiety. As of late last week, the winner of the largest single payout in U.S. history still hasn’t claimed the prize, The State newspaper reported, and it’s not clear whether that will happen.
      3. “This is unusual, considering that it’s $1.5 billion,” Holli Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the state lottery, told The State.
      4. The winning numbers were announced Oct. 23, and the owner of the ticket has 180 days — or until late April — to collect the prize. If the ticket is not redeemed, according to the Mega Millions website, “each participating state in the Mega Millions game will get back all the money that state contributed to the unclaimed jackpot.” …

2. Israel headed to elections as Netanyahu’s coalition dissolves parliament – The coalition of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dissolved parliament on Dec. 24 and called for a general election to take place as soon as April. (Associated Press), By Ruth Eglash | COM | December 24 at 10:55 AM
   1. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition announced Monday plans to dissolve the country’s parliament and hold a snap general election in April, after his government was significantly weakened more than a month ago when a key coalition partner resigned. …
   2. …On Monday, it was an attempt to pass controversial legislation aimed at drafting ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military that ultimately prompted the 61-member coalition to agree unanimously that this government could no longer survive under the current circumstances. …
   3. The decision Monday to disband the government appeared to be directly linked to an announcement from Yair Lapid, head of the opposition Yesh Atid party and Netanyahu’s main challenger, that his faction would not support legislation aimed at drafting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the army. 
   4. While all Jewish Israelis are required to serve in the military at the age of 18, those who study the Torah in recognized yeshivas, or religious schools, have traditionally received an exemption. However, manpower shortages in recent years and growing demands for equality have forced the government to reevaluate the matter and craft new legislation that would exempt only the top religious students — a move that the ultra-Orthodox have resisted.
3. Beijing eyes two-child policy U-turn, but ‘lonely generation’ has moved on – After decades of draconian restrictions around family planning, China is now encouraging couples to have more kids as a matter of patriotic urgency. By Dawn Liu and Petra Cahill | NBCNEWS.COM | 24, 2018 / 1:38 AM CST
   1. BEIJING — For nearly 40 years, the Chinese government harshly restricted childbearing through the one-child rule in order to control population growth. That may soon change.
   2. Beijing appears to be on the cusp of abolishing all of its family planning rules — and is even encouraging young couples to have more children as a matter of patriotic urgency.
   3. But attitudes toward parenthood have changed. Even though there is a two-child policy in place now, many Chinese still don’t want to have more than one child — or any at all. …
   4. … Beijing claims that 400 million births were prevented as a result of the policy from 1980 to 2005. …
   5. … The policy clearly skewed the population structure in many ways,” said Cai Yong, a professor who focuses on Chinese demographics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The Chinese population is aging very fast, and China has a distorted sex ratio.”
   6. Data shows that in 1980, people 65 and older accounted for just 4.7 percent of the Chinese population. That percentage grew to 10 percent in 2015, and is projected to surge to 33 percent by 2050, according to United Nations figures.
   7. China’s average birth rate fell to a record low of 1.04 in 2015, among the lowest in the world. In contrast, the U.S. birth rate in the U.S. was 1.80 last year, according to the World Bank.
   8. Beijing fears that the aging population will have an adverse effect on the economy as the number of young workers shrinks and the government has to shoulder pension costs for the elderly. …
   9. …However, the decades of restrictions have changed how many Chinese people feel about having children.
   10. “The one-child policy for the past few decades completely changed people’s birth concept. From kindergarten, they think one child is very normal,” said Yi Fuxian, a population expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Now it’s hard to restore the family value and respect for life.”…
4. The Juul© Fad Is Far Bigger Than I Ever Would Have Guessed, By Kevin Drum | COM |December 18, 2018 5:57 PM 
   1. The University of Michigan’s adolescent drug survey announced some dramatic results today:
   2. Increases in adolescent vaping from 2017 to 2018 were the largest ever recorded in the past 43 years for any adolescent substance use outcome in the U.S.
   3. [Article writer Kevin Drum] had two immediate reactions:
      1. In just a few years, vaping has wiped out two decades of work getting teens to quit (or never start) cigarette smoking. In 1997, the survey recorded that 36 percent of 12th graders had smoked in the past 30 days. This year, the combination of vaping and cigarette use hit 34 percent.
      2. Can this really be true? After three years of relative stability at around 15 percent, vaping suddenly skyrocketed to 27 percent in a single year?
   4. Nearly all of the increase comes from an increase in vaping nicotine
   5. , … [so] the answer appears to be yes, this really can be true. Vaping in general, and Juul in particular, have wiped out years of hard work to get teens off of cigarettes. And since most of the increase is in vaping nicotine, it means we’re raising yet another generation of addicts, sucked in by the same kind of marketing that was originally used to suck them into cigarette smoking. …
5. Trump, Angry Over Mattis’s Rebuke, Removes Him 2 Months Early, By Helene Cooper and Katie Rogers | NY TIMES | Dec. 23, 2018
   1. WASHINGTON — Less than two hours after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis went to the White House on Thursday to hand a resignation letter to President Trump, the president stood in the Oval Office and dictated a glowing tweet announcing that Mr. Mattis was retiring “with distinction” at the end of February.
   2. But Mr. Trump had not read the letter. As became apparent to the president only after days of news coverage, a senior administration official said, Mr. Mattis had issued a stinging rebuke of Mr. Trump over his neglect of allies and tolerance of authoritarians. The president grew increasingly angry as he watched a parade of defense analysts go on television to extol Mr. Mattis’s bravery, another aide said, until he decided on Sunday that he had had enough.
   3. In a tweet later that morning, the president announced that he was removing Mr. Mattis from his post by Jan. 1, two months before the defense secretary had planned to depart. Mr. Trump said that Patrick M. Shanahan, Mr. Mattis’s deputy and a former Boeing executive, would serve as the acting defense secretary, praising him as “very talented” and adding that “he will be great!”
   4. Trump’s sudden announcement that he was firing a man who had already quit was the exclamation point to a tumultuous week at the Pentagon, where officials have been reeling from day after day of presidential tweets announcing changes in American military policy.
6. Inside Bernie-world’s war on Beto O’Rourke – As the Texas congressman’s star rises, Sanders supporters turn up the heat: “Reading Karl Marx is cool. Doing a livestream while you’re doing your laundry is a gimmick.” By Jonathan Allen and Alex Seitz-Wald | COM | Dec. 23, 2018 / 10:27 AM CST / Updated Dec. 23, 2018 / 7:15 PM CST
   1. Forces loyal to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are waging an increasingly public war against Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the new darling of Democratic activists, as the two men weigh whether to seek the party’s presidential nomination in 2020.
   2. The main line of attack against O’Rourke is that he isn’t progressive enough — that he’s been too close to Republicans in Congress, too close to corporate donors and not willing enough to use his star power to help fellow Democrats — and it is being pushed almost exclusively by Sanders supporters online and in print.
   3. It’s been the first flashpoint in what promises to be a politically bloody primary — one that has drawn responses from foot soldiers in the Obama and Clinton wings of the party — as Democrats begin to focus on who has the best chance to deny President Donald Trump a second term in the Oval Office. …
   4. … For many Democrats, the nascent fight is counterproductive, because it distracts from the positive messages of potential candidates, including Sanders, O’Rourke and Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Cory Booker, D-N.J.
   5. “I don’t think there’s much appetite among Democratic voters to re-live some of the dumb Twitter fights that we saw in the 2016 primary,” said Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama. “There are plenty of progressives who might run — from Beto and Bernie to Kamala and Booker and others — and I think it’s more productive to focus our time and energy talking about why we support the candidates who inspire us.”
   6. But O’Rourke’s ability to connect with younger and progressive white voters — Sanders’ source of strength in his losing 2016 primary against Hillary Clinton — puts him in direct competition with the Vermont senator.
   7. A Quinnipiac University poll released Dec. 19 showed that 57 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 34 have a favorable view of Sanders, while his unfavorable ratings are higher than his favorables with voters 35 and older.
   8. … [W]hile the vast majority of Democrats have an opinion about Sanders, that’s not true of O’Rourke yet, with 51 percent reporting they don’t have enough information to form an opinion. That explains the rush to define him in negative terms. …
   9. … It started with David Sirota, a liberal activist and journalist who worked for Sanders many years ago. In a long tweetstorm, Sirota noted that O’Rourke had received more donations from the oil and gas industry than any candidate in the 2018 cycle other than Cruz.
      1. [TWEET] Something I didn’t know: Beto O’Rourke is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress https://t.co/i5z3zHR03u pic.twitter.com/YYLJpg4uFG — David Sirota (@davidsirota) December 2, 2018
   10. The missing context: O’Rourke didn’t take money from corporate political action committees, and the donations attributed to the oil and gas business include both a handful from executives and many others from lower-level employees of his home state’s flagship industry. Altogether, they still account for a little more than half of one percent of all of the money he raised for the election. …
   11. … “There are going to be two ways for candidates to run their primary campaigns — one is to sharpen the contrast against Trump without cannibalizing the other Democratic candidates, and the other is to run a scorched-earth campaign against the other Democrats claiming you’re the only true progressive in the field,” said Ben LaBolt, who was a White House and campaign aide to Obama. “Democrats should be wary to keep their eye on the prize and avoid fueling the next Jill Stein boomlet or otherwise depressing Democratic turnout in the general election.”
7. Israeli army razes home of prominent Palestinian activist – At least 56 Palestinians have been injured in the protests against the demolition, ALJAZEERA.COM | 15 Dec 2018
   1. The Israeli army has demolished a residential building owned by a prominent Palestinian activist, whose six sons have been imprisoned by Israel.
   2. The building, owned by Latifa Abu Hmeid, is located in the Amari refugee camp near the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
   3. According to an Anadolu news agency reporter based in the area, Israeli soldiers raided the camp early Saturday, surrounding the building before bringing it down in a controlled demolition.
   4. Before razing the four-storey structure, the army evicted dozens of journalists and solidarity activists who had been inside the building in a bid to prevent its destruction.
   5. Israel accused one of Abu Hmeid’s sons of killing an Israeli soldier in May. 
   6. Protesters called the destruction a form of collective punishment. 
8. 3D-printed heads let hackers – and cops – unlock your phone, By Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker)/ COM /DEC 16, 2018 / 12 hours ago
   1. …You can …3D print a life-size replica of a human head — and not just for Hollywood. Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster commissioned a 3D printed model of his own head to test the face unlocking systems on a range of phones — four Android models and an iPhone X.
   2. Bad news if you’re an Android user: only the iPhone X defended against the attack.
   3. … [B]iometrics — your fingerprints and your face — aren’t protected under the Fifth Amendment. That means police can’t compel you to give up your passcode, but they can forcibly depress your fingerprint to unlock your phone, or hold it to your face while you’re looking at it. And the police know it — it happens more often than you might realize.
   4. But there’s also little in the way of stopping police from 3D printing or replicating a set of biometrics to break into a phone.
   5. “Legally, it’s no different from using fingerprints to unlock a device,” said Orin Kerr, professor at USC Gould School of Law, in an email. “The government needs to get the biometric unlocking information somehow,” by either the finger pattern shape or the head shape, he said.
   6. Although a warrant “wouldn’t necessarily be a requirement” to get the biometric data, one would be needed to use the data to unlock a device, he said.
   7. Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project On Government Oversight, said it was doable but isn’t the most practical or cost-effective way for cops to get access to phone data.
   8. … Those cheering on the “death of the password” might want to think again. They’re still the only thing that’s keeping your data safe from the law.
9. California commission finds PG&E falsified records for years, By Christina Maxouris | CNN | Updated 3:10 PM ET, Sat December 15, 2018
   1. (CNN)The California Public Utilities Commission may penalize one of the country’s largest utility providers after an investigation found it had been falsifying records for five years.
   2. The commission, tasked with regulating privately owned public utilities in the state, claims Pacific Gas & Electric Co. violated California law by failing to locate and mark their natural gas pipelines in a timely manner.
   3. The commission’s safety and enforcement division found PG&E pressured supervisors and other workers to falsify data so that the locating and marking work would not appear as late. The investigation also found the company did not have enough employees to regularly locate and mark natural gas pipelines.
   4. “Excavators, including construction crews, rely on PG&E to inform them exactly where PG&E underground natural gas infrastructure is located,” CPUC stated. “If PG&E fails to meet its legally imposed responsibilities to locate and mark the required deadline of the excavating contractor’s request, a contractor may simply commence digging despite the danger.” …

__________________________________________________________________

KPFT is a 501(c)3 non-profit, and it can always use your tax-deductible support.  Most of the folks who work and broadcast at KPFT are volunteers, but it still has fixed and variable expenses, and it still costs $150/hour, 24/7/365 to keep KPFT on the air.